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30044 books about History and 2015
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30044 books about History and 2015
30044 books about History
2015 start with P start with P
2015 start with P start with P
Premodern Rulership and Contemporary Political Power
The King's Body Never Dies
Edited by Karolina Mroziewicz and Aleksander Sroczynski
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
In the medieval period, the monarch was seen as the embodiment of the community of his kingdom, the body politic. And while we've long since shed that view, it nonetheless continues to influence our understanding of contemporary politics. This book offers thirteen case studies from premodern and contemporary Europe that demonstrate the process through which political corporations-bodies politic-were and continue to be constructed and challenged. Drawing on history, archaeology, literary criticism, and art history, the contributors survey a wide geographical and chronological spectrum to offer a panoramic view of these dynamic political entities.
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The Prendergast Letters
Correspondence from Famine-Era Ireland, 1840–1850
Shelley Barber
University of Massachusetts Press, 2006
The Prendergast Letters Collection, one of the noteworthy manuscript collections at Boston College's John J. Burns Library, provides an account of the experiences of an ordinary family in County Kerry, Ireland, from 1840 to 1850. The letters include myriad details of the lives of family members and neighbors, reports of weather, agriculture, and local events and economy, along with commentary on matters of national importance such as politician Daniel O'Connell's movement for the Repeal of the Act of Union.
Most important, the letters offer a rare contemporary, firsthand account of Ireland's an Gorta Mor, the Great Famine that began with the failure of the potato crop in 1845. Letters written in the months and years following the announcement of the first crop failure provide insight into not only the sufferings of one family but also the response of the community and nation as this crisis transformed Ireland.
James and Elizabeth Prendergast were the parents of six children. Their letters from Milltown, County Kerry, dictated to a scrivener, were posted to sons Thomas and Jeffrey and daughter Julia Riordan and her husband Cornelius, all of whom had emigrated in search of employment to Boston, Massachusetts—a city that would itself be transformed by the famine-era influx of Irish immigrants.
In addition to transcriptions of the forty-eight letters in the collection, this volume includes contextual essays by historian Ruth-Ann Harris and genealogist Marie Daly. The evidence of the letters themselves, along with the contributions of Harris and Daly, demonstrate the ways in which the family of James Prendergast was at once exceptional and typical.
Most important, the letters offer a rare contemporary, firsthand account of Ireland's an Gorta Mor, the Great Famine that began with the failure of the potato crop in 1845. Letters written in the months and years following the announcement of the first crop failure provide insight into not only the sufferings of one family but also the response of the community and nation as this crisis transformed Ireland.
James and Elizabeth Prendergast were the parents of six children. Their letters from Milltown, County Kerry, dictated to a scrivener, were posted to sons Thomas and Jeffrey and daughter Julia Riordan and her husband Cornelius, all of whom had emigrated in search of employment to Boston, Massachusetts—a city that would itself be transformed by the famine-era influx of Irish immigrants.
In addition to transcriptions of the forty-eight letters in the collection, this volume includes contextual essays by historian Ruth-Ann Harris and genealogist Marie Daly. The evidence of the letters themselves, along with the contributions of Harris and Daly, demonstrate the ways in which the family of James Prendergast was at once exceptional and typical.
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The Pre-occupation of Postcolonial Studies
Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, eds.
Duke University Press, 2000
The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies contains essays by both leading figures and younger scholars engaged in the field of postcolonial studies. In this state-of-the-field reader, editors Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks have created a dynamic forum for contributors from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary vantage points to question both the limits and the limitations of postcolonial thought.
Since it burst on the academic scene as the “hot” new disciplinary field during the final decade of the twentieth century, postcolonial studies has faced criticism from those who question its “troubling” trajectories, its sometimes suspect epistemological and pedagogical methods, and its relatively narrow focus. With diverse essays that emerge from such disciplines as South Asian, Latin American, Arab, and Jewish studies, this volume responds to skeptics and adherers alike, addressing not only the broad theoretical issues at stake within the field but also the position of the field itself within the academy, as well as its relationship to modern, postmodern, and Marxist discourses. Contributors offer critiques on ahistorical and universalizing tendencies in postcolonial work and confront the need for scholars to attend to issues of class, ideology, and the effects of neocolonial practices. Seeking to broaden the field’s traditionally literary spectrum of methodologies, these essayists take up large thematic issues to examine specific sites of colonial activities with all of their historical, political, and cultural significance. Closing the volume is an insightful interview with Homi Bhabha, in which he discusses postcolonial studies in the context of contemporary cultural politics and theory.
The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies not only offers an overview of the discipline but also pushes and pulls at the edges of postcolonial studies, offering a comprehensive view of the field’s diversity of thought and envisioning clear pathways for its future.
Since it burst on the academic scene as the “hot” new disciplinary field during the final decade of the twentieth century, postcolonial studies has faced criticism from those who question its “troubling” trajectories, its sometimes suspect epistemological and pedagogical methods, and its relatively narrow focus. With diverse essays that emerge from such disciplines as South Asian, Latin American, Arab, and Jewish studies, this volume responds to skeptics and adherers alike, addressing not only the broad theoretical issues at stake within the field but also the position of the field itself within the academy, as well as its relationship to modern, postmodern, and Marxist discourses. Contributors offer critiques on ahistorical and universalizing tendencies in postcolonial work and confront the need for scholars to attend to issues of class, ideology, and the effects of neocolonial practices. Seeking to broaden the field’s traditionally literary spectrum of methodologies, these essayists take up large thematic issues to examine specific sites of colonial activities with all of their historical, political, and cultural significance. Closing the volume is an insightful interview with Homi Bhabha, in which he discusses postcolonial studies in the context of contemporary cultural politics and theory.
The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies not only offers an overview of the discipline but also pushes and pulls at the edges of postcolonial studies, offering a comprehensive view of the field’s diversity of thought and envisioning clear pathways for its future.
Contributors. Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Ali Behdad, Homi Bhabha, Daniel Boyarin, Neil Larsen, Saree Makdisi, Joseph Massad, Walter Mignolo, Hamid Naficy, Ngugi Wa Thingo, Timothy B. Powell, R. Radhakrishnan, Bruce Robbins, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Ella Shohat, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
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Preparing for War
The Emergence of the Modern U.S. Army, 1815–1917
J. P. Clark
Harvard University Press, 2017
The U.S. Army has always regarded preparing for war as its peacetime role, but how it fulfilled that duty has changed dramatically over time. J. P. Clark traces the evolution of the Army between the War of 1812 and World War I, showing how differing personal experiences of war and peace among successive generations of professional soldiers left their mark upon the Army and its ways.
Nineteenth-century officers believed that generalship and battlefield command were more a matter of innate ability than anything institutions could teach. They saw no benefit in conceptual preparation beyond mastering technical skills like engineering and gunnery. Thus, preparations for war were largely confined to maintaining equipment and fortifications and instilling discipline in the enlisted ranks through parade ground drill. By World War I, however, Progressive Era concepts of professionalism had infiltrated the Army. Younger officers took for granted that war’s complexity required them to be trained to think and act alike—a notion that would have offended earlier generations. Preparing for War concludes by demonstrating how these new notions set the conditions for many of the successes—and some of the failures—of General Pershing’s American Expeditionary Forces.
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Preparing North Korean Elites for Unification
Bruce W. Bennett
RAND Corporation, 2017
This report examines what could be done to convince North Korean elites that unification would be good for them. It describes five areas of concern that North Korean elites would likely have about the outcomes of unification and proposes policies that the Republic of Korea government could adopt that would give North Korean elites hope for an acceptable unification outcome.
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Preparing the Mothers of Tomorrow
Education and Islam in Mandate Palestine
By Ela Greenberg
University of Texas Press, 2009
From the late nineteenth century onward, men and women throughout the Middle East discussed, debated, and negotiated the roles of young girls and women in producing modern nations. In Palestine, girls' education was pivotal to discussions about motherhood. Their education was seen as having the potential to transform the family so that it could meet both modern and nationalist expectations.
Ela Greenberg offers the first study to examine the education of Muslim girls in Palestine from the end of the Ottoman administration through the British colonial rule. Relying upon extensive archival sources, official reports, the Palestinian Arabic press, and interviews, she describes the changes that took place in girls' education during this time. Greenberg describes how local Muslims, often portrayed as indifferent to girls' education, actually responded to the inadequacies of existing government education by sending their daughters to missionary schools despite religious tensions, or by creating their own private nationalist institutions.
Greenberg shows that members of all socioeconomic classes understood the triad of girls' education, modernity, and the nationalist struggle, as educated girls would become the "mothers of tomorrow" who would raise nationalist and modern children. While this was the aim of the various schools in Palestine, not all educated Muslim girls followed this path, as some used their education, even if it was elementary at best, to become teachers, nurses, and activists in women's organizations.
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Presbyterian Pluralism
Competition In A Protestant House
William J. Weston
University of Tennessee Press, 1997
Presbyterians in North Carolina
Race, Politics, and Religious Identity in Historical Perspective
Walter H. Conser
University of Tennessee Press, 2012
This volume is the first comprehensive overview of North Carolina Presbyterians to appear in more than a hundred years. Drawing on congregational and administrative histories, personal memoirs, and recent scholarship—while paying close attention to the relevant social, political, and religious contexts of the state and region—Walter Conser and Robert Cain go beyond older approaches to denominational history by focusing on the identity and meaning of the Presbyterian experience in the Old North State from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries.
Conser and Cain explore issues as diverse as institutional development and worship experience; the patterns and influence of race, ethnicity, and gender; and involvement in education and social justice campaigns. In part 1 of the book, “Beginnings,” they trace the entrance of Presbyterians—who were legally considered dissenters throughout the colonial period—into the eastern, central, and western sections of the state. The authors show how the Piedmont became the nexus of Presbyterian organizational development and examine the ways in which political movements, including campaigns for American independence, deeply engaged Presbyterians, as did the incandescence of revivalism and agitation for reform, which extended into the antebellum period.
The book’s second section, “Conflict, Renewal, and Reunion,” investigates the denominational tensions provoked by the slavery debate and the havoc of the Civil War, the soul searching that accompanied Confederate defeat, and the rebuilding efforts that came during the New South era. Such important factors as the changing roles of women in the church and the decline of Jim Crow helped pave the way for the eventual reunion of the northern and southern branches of mainline Presbyterianism. By the arrival of the new millennium, Presbyterians in North Carolina were prepared to meet future challenges with renewed confidence.
A model for modern denominational history, this book is an astute and sensitive portrayal of a prominent Protestant denomination in a southern context.
Walter H. Conser Jr. is professor of religion and professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. His books include A Coat of Many Colors: Religion and Society along the Cape Fear River of North Carolina and God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in the Natural World.
Before his retirement after thirty-two years of service, Robert J. Cain was head of the Colonial Records Branch at the North Carolina State Archives. He is the editor of The Colonial Records of North Carolina, second series.
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PRESCRIPTION FOR ADVERSITY
THE MORAL ART OF AMBROSE BIERCE
LAWRENCE BERKOVE
The Ohio State University Press, 2002
A Prescription for Adversity makes the revolutionary case that Ambrose Bierce, far from being a bitter misanthrope, was instead both a compassionate and moral author. Berkove, focusing on Bierce's short fiction, establishes the necessity of recognizing the pattern of his intellectual and literary development over the course of his career. The author shows that Bierce, probably the American author with the most extensive experience of the Civil War, turned to classical Stoicism and English and French Enlightenment literature in his postwar search for meaning. Bierce's fiction arose from his ultimately unsatisfying encounters with the philosophies those sources offered, but the moral commitment as well as the literary techniques of heir authors, particularly Jonathan Swift, inspired him. Dating Bierce's fiction, and introducing uncollected journalism, correspondence, and important new literary history and biographical information, Berkove brings new insights to a number of stories, including "A Son of the Gods" and "A Horseman in the Sky," but especially "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and presents compelling readings of the Parenticide Club tales and "Moxon's Master." A Prescription for Adversity substantiates how Bierce at his best is one of the few American authors who rises to the level of Mark Twain, and the only one who touches Jonathan Swift.
A work of both biography and literary criticism, this book rescues Ambrose Bierce and his literature from the neglect to which it has been assigned by "ill-founded, obtuse and unproductive approaches based on skewed notions of his personality and forced or facile readings of individual stories."
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A Prescription for Murder
The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream
Angus McLaren
University of Chicago Press, 1993
From 1877 to 1892, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream murdered seven women, all prostitutes or patients seeking abortions, in England and North America. A Prescription for Murder begins with Angus McLaren's vividly detailed story of the killings. Using press reports and police dossiers, McLaren investigates the links between crime and respectability to reveal a remarkable range of Victorian sexual tensions and fears. McLaren explores how the roles of murderer and victim were created, and how similar tensions might contribute to the onslaught of serial killing in today's society.
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Presence and Resistance
Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance
Philip Auslander
University of Michigan Press, 1994
Examines performance art in the 1980s and new modes of political art in a media-saturated culture
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The Present of the Future
Edited by Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier
Diaphanes, 2018
As the world teeters on the brink of crisis and potentially catastrophic change, outlooks for the future have come to be characterized by anxiety. The skepticism that meets utopian visions of the future has given rise to collective nostalgia for seemingly reliable ideas. But rather than stagnate in idealism, how can artists and scholars create the potential for real change?
The result of a lecture series held at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, The Present of the Future explores our current relationship to the future and considers strategies for artists and scholars to establish effective action for shaping alternative futures. Contributors to the book approach this problem from the perspective of diverse disciplines, including art, design, architecture, and philosophy.
The result of a lecture series held at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, The Present of the Future explores our current relationship to the future and considers strategies for artists and scholars to establish effective action for shaping alternative futures. Contributors to the book approach this problem from the perspective of diverse disciplines, including art, design, architecture, and philosophy.
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Present Past
Ava Kadishson Schieber
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Present Past is a collection of stories, artwork, and poetry by Ava Kadishson Schieber. Like her debut work, Soundless Roar, this multi-genre collection creates rich and varied pathways for readers to approach Schieber as well as the absorbing events and transformations in her life as a Holocaust survivor.
The focus of Present Past is her life after the Shoah. Rejecting stereotypes of survivors as traumatized or broken, Schieber is stark yet exuberant, formidable yet nuanced. The woman who emerges in Schieber’s Present Past is a multifaceted, heterogeneous figure—poet, artist, and survivor. In it, she plays the passionate observer who dispassionately curates the kaleidoscopic memories of her tumultuous personal and professional life in Belgrade, Prague, Tel Aviv, New York, and Chicago.
Organized into thirteen chapters, each a blend of images, poems, and narrative, this moving new work offers myriad points of entry to readers of these genres, those fascinated in the relationship between the Holocaust and art, as well as readers interested in memory and survivorship.
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Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece
Francis M. Dunn
University of Michigan Press, 2010
Francis M. Dunn's Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece examines the widespread social and cultural disorientation experienced by Athenians in a period that witnessed the revolution of 411 B.C.E. and the military misadventures in 413 and 404---a disturbance as powerful as that described in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. The late fifth century was a time of vast cultural and intellectual change, ultimately leading to a shift away from Athenians' traditional tendency to seek authority in the past toward a greater reliance on the authority of the present. At the same time, Dunn argues, writers and thinkers not only registered the shock but explored ways to adjust to living with this new sense of uncertainty. Using literary case studies from this period, Dunn shows how narrative techniques changed to focus on depicting a world in which events were no longer wholly predetermined by the past, impressing upon readers the rewards and challenges of struggling to find their own way forward.
Although Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece concentrates upon the late fifth century, this book's interdisciplinary approach will be of broad interest to scholars and students of ancient Greece, as well as anyone fascinated by the remarkably flexible human understanding of time.
Francis M. Dunn is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author of Tragedy's End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama (Oxford, 1996), and coeditor of Beginnings in Classical Literature (Cambridge, 1992) and Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature (Princeton, 1997).
"In this fascinating study, Francis Dunn argues that in late fifth-century Athens, life became focused on the present---that moving instant between past and future. Time itself changed: new clocks and calendars were developed, and narratives were full of suspense, accident, and uncertainty about things to come. Suddenly, future shock was now."
---David Konstan, John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and the Humanistic Tradition and Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University
"In this fascinating work, Dunn examines the ways in which the Greeks constructed time and then shows how these can shed new light on various philosophical, dramatic, historical, scientific and rhetorical texts of the late fifth century. An original and most interesting study."
---Michael Gagarin, James R. Dougherty, Jr., Centennial Professor of Classics, the University of Texas at Austin
"Interesting, clear, and compelling, Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece analyzes attitudes toward time in ancient Greece, focusing in particular on what Dunn terms 'present shock,' in which rapid cultural change undermined the authority of the past and submerged individuals in a disorienting present in late fifth-century Athens. Dunn offers smart and lucid analyses of a variety of complex texts, including pre-Socratic and sophistic philosophy, Euripidean tragedy, Thucydides, and medical texts, making an important contribution to discussions about classical Athenian thought that will be widely read and cited by scholars working on Greek cultural history and historiography."
---Victoria Wohl, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, University of Toronto
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¡Presente!
The Politics of Presence
Diana Taylor
Duke University Press, 2020
In ¡Presente! Diana Taylor asks what it means to be physically and politically present in situations where it seems that nothing can be done. As much an act, a word, an attitude, a theoretical intervention, and a performance pedagogy, Taylor maps ¡presente! at work in scenarios ranging from conquest, through colonial enactments and resistance movements, to present moments of capitalist extractivism and forced migration in the Americas. ¡Presente!—present among, with, and to; a walking and talking with others; an ontological and epistemic reflection on presence and subjectivity as participatory and relational, founded on mutual recognition—requires rethinking and unlearning in ways that challenge colonial epistemologies. Showing how knowledge is not something to be harvested but a process of being, knowing, and acting with others, Taylor models a way for scholarship to be present in political struggles.
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Presenting the Past
Essays on History and the Public
Roy Rosenzweig
Temple University Press, 1986
Preservation of Affordable Rental Housing
Evaluation of the MacArthur Foundation's Window of Opportunity Initiative
Heather L. Schwartz
RAND Corporation, 2016
In 2000, the MacArthur Foundation began the Window of Opportunity, a 20-year, $187 million philanthropic initiative intended to help preserve privately owned affordable rental housing. The authors of this report assess whether the initiative achieved its goals and identify lessons learned about effective preservation practices, as well as about the implementation of large-scale philanthropic initiatives generally.
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Preserving Maritime America
A Cultural History of the Nation's Great Maritime Museums
James M. Lindgren
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
The United States has long been dependent on the seas, but Americans know little about their maritime history. While Britain and other countries have established national museums to nurture their seagoing traditions, America has left that responsibility to private institutions. In this first-of-its-kind history, James M. Lindgren focuses on a half-dozen of these great museums, ranging from Salem's East India Marine Society, founded in 1799, to San Francisco's Maritime Museum and New York's South Street Seaport Museum, which were established in recent decades.
Begun by activists with unique agendas—whether overseas empire, economic redevelopment, or cultural preservation—these museums have displayed the nation's complex interrelationship with the sea. Yet they all faced chronic shortfalls, as policymakers, corporations, and everyday citizens failed to appreciate the oceans' formative environment. Preserving Maritime America shows how these institutions shifted course to remain solvent and relevant and demonstrates how their stories tell of the nation's rise and decline as a commercial maritime power.
Begun by activists with unique agendas—whether overseas empire, economic redevelopment, or cultural preservation—these museums have displayed the nation's complex interrelationship with the sea. Yet they all faced chronic shortfalls, as policymakers, corporations, and everyday citizens failed to appreciate the oceans' formative environment. Preserving Maritime America shows how these institutions shifted course to remain solvent and relevant and demonstrates how their stories tell of the nation's rise and decline as a commercial maritime power.
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Preserving The Glory Days
Ghost Towns And Mining Camps Of Nye County, Nevada
Shawn Hall
University of Nevada Press, 1999
Nye County is Nevada’s largest and least populated county, but it is also the site of many of the state’s most colorful ghost towns and mining camps. The county’s economy throughout its history has been largely based on its mines--first, exploiting veins of gold and silver, and more recently deposits of raw materials for modern industry, such as molybdenum and barite. It was here that famous boomtowns like Tonopah and Rhyolite sprang up after the discovery of nearby lodes brought in rushes of prospectors and the merchants who supported them. But the county includes many smaller, shorter-lived camps and numerous abandoned stagecoach and railroad stops associated with defunct mining operations.This book offers a lively, informative record of Nevada’s isolated interior. Hall first published a guide to Nye County’s ghost towns in 1981. Since then, he has continued his research into the county’s past and has uncovered much new information and corrected some errors. To prepare this revised and greatly expanded edition, he revisited all 175 sites recorded earlier and has added more than 20 previously unlisted sites.
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Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840
Jonathan Lamb
University of Chicago Press, 2001
The violence, wonder, and nostalgia of voyaging are nowhere more vivid than in the literature of South Seas exploration. Preserving the Self in the South Seas charts the sensibilities of the lonely figures that encountered the new and exotic in terra incognita. Jonathan Lamb introduces us to the writings of South Seas explorers, and finds in them unexpected and poignant tales of selves alarmed and transformed.
Lamb contends that European exploration of the South Seas was less confident and mindful than we have assumed. It was, instead, conducted in moods of distraction and infatuation that were hard to make sense of and difficult to narrate, and it prompted reactions among indigenous peoples that were equally passionate and irregular. Preserving the Self in the South Seas also examines these common crises of exploration in the context of a metropolitan audience that eagerly consumed narratives of the Pacific while doubting their truth. Lamb considers why these halting and incredible journals were so popular with the reading public, and suggests that they dramatized anxieties and bafflements rankling at the heart of commercial society.
Lamb contends that European exploration of the South Seas was less confident and mindful than we have assumed. It was, instead, conducted in moods of distraction and infatuation that were hard to make sense of and difficult to narrate, and it prompted reactions among indigenous peoples that were equally passionate and irregular. Preserving the Self in the South Seas also examines these common crises of exploration in the context of a metropolitan audience that eagerly consumed narratives of the Pacific while doubting their truth. Lamb considers why these halting and incredible journals were so popular with the reading public, and suggests that they dramatized anxieties and bafflements rankling at the heart of commercial society.
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Preserving the Vanishing City
Historic Preservation amid Urban Decline in Cleveland, Ohio
Stephanie Ryberg-Webster
Temple University Press, 2023
Preserving the Vanishing City considers the unique challenges, conditions, and opportunities facing Cleveland’s historic preservation community during the 1970s and 1980s. While pro-preservationists argued for the economic and revitalization benefits stemming from saving and repurposing older buildings, population loss and economic contraction prompted decades of deterioration, underinvestment, vacancy, and abandonment.
Stephanie Ryberg-Webster uncovers the motivations, strategies, and constraints driving Cleveland’s historic preservation sector, led by the public-sector Cleveland Landmarks Commission, nonprofit Cleveland Restoration Society, and a cadre of advocates. She sheds light on the ways in which preservationists confronted severe, escalating, and sustained urban decline, which plagued Cleveland, a prototypical rust-belt industrial city.
Preserving the Vanishing City chronicles the rise of the historic preservation profession in Cleveland and provides six case studies about targeted projects and neighborhood efforts, including industrial heritage, housing preservation and restoration, commercial district revitalization, securing local historic district designations, as well as grassroots organizing, coalition building, and partnerships. Ryberg-Webster also addresses the complexities of historic preservation within the context of rapid racial change in Cleveland’s neighborhoods.
A comprehensive history of preservation within the context of one city’s urban decline, Preserving the Vanishing Cityrecounts the successes, failures, and creative strategies employed to save Cleveland’s built environment.
Stephanie Ryberg-Webster uncovers the motivations, strategies, and constraints driving Cleveland’s historic preservation sector, led by the public-sector Cleveland Landmarks Commission, nonprofit Cleveland Restoration Society, and a cadre of advocates. She sheds light on the ways in which preservationists confronted severe, escalating, and sustained urban decline, which plagued Cleveland, a prototypical rust-belt industrial city.
Preserving the Vanishing City chronicles the rise of the historic preservation profession in Cleveland and provides six case studies about targeted projects and neighborhood efforts, including industrial heritage, housing preservation and restoration, commercial district revitalization, securing local historic district designations, as well as grassroots organizing, coalition building, and partnerships. Ryberg-Webster also addresses the complexities of historic preservation within the context of rapid racial change in Cleveland’s neighborhoods.
A comprehensive history of preservation within the context of one city’s urban decline, Preserving the Vanishing Cityrecounts the successes, failures, and creative strategies employed to save Cleveland’s built environment.
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The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant
Preserving the Civil War's Legacy
Paul Kahan
Westholme Publishing, 2018
A Short History of the Politics of Reconstruction in a Changing America
On December 5, 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant transmitted his eighth and final message to Congress. In reviewing his tenure as president, Grant proclaimed, “Mistakes have been made,” though he assured Congress, his administration’s “failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.” Until recently, scholars have portrayed Grant as among the country’s worst chief executives. Though the scholarly consensus about Grant’s presidency is changing, the general public knows little, if anything, about his two terms, other than their outsized reputation for corruption. While scandals are undoubtedly part of the story, there is more to Grant’s presidency: Grant faced the Panic of 1873, the severest economic depression in U.S. history, defeated the powerful Senator Charles Sumner on the annexation of Cuba, and deftly avoided war with Spain while laying the groundwork for the “special relationship” between Great Britain and the United States. Grant’s efforts to ensure justice for African Americans and American Indians, however, were undercut by his own decisions and by the contradictory demands of the various constituencies that made up the Republican Party.
In The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant: Preserving the Civil War’s Legacy, historian Paul Kahan focuses on the unique political, economic, and cultural forces unleashed by the Civil War and how Grant addressed these issues during his tumultuous two terms as chief executive. A timely reassessment, The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant sheds new light on the business of politics in the decade after the Civil War and portrays an energetic and even progressive executive whose legacy has been overshadowed by both his wartime service and his administration’s many scandals.
On December 5, 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant transmitted his eighth and final message to Congress. In reviewing his tenure as president, Grant proclaimed, “Mistakes have been made,” though he assured Congress, his administration’s “failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.” Until recently, scholars have portrayed Grant as among the country’s worst chief executives. Though the scholarly consensus about Grant’s presidency is changing, the general public knows little, if anything, about his two terms, other than their outsized reputation for corruption. While scandals are undoubtedly part of the story, there is more to Grant’s presidency: Grant faced the Panic of 1873, the severest economic depression in U.S. history, defeated the powerful Senator Charles Sumner on the annexation of Cuba, and deftly avoided war with Spain while laying the groundwork for the “special relationship” between Great Britain and the United States. Grant’s efforts to ensure justice for African Americans and American Indians, however, were undercut by his own decisions and by the contradictory demands of the various constituencies that made up the Republican Party.
In The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant: Preserving the Civil War’s Legacy, historian Paul Kahan focuses on the unique political, economic, and cultural forces unleashed by the Civil War and how Grant addressed these issues during his tumultuous two terms as chief executive. A timely reassessment, The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant sheds new light on the business of politics in the decade after the Civil War and portrays an energetic and even progressive executive whose legacy has been overshadowed by both his wartime service and his administration’s many scandals.
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A President, a Church and Trails West
Competing Histories in Independence, Missouri
Jon E. Taylor
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Over the past century, three nationally significant histories have vied for space and place in Independence, Missouri. Independence was declared Zion by Joseph Smith, served as a gathering and provisioning point for trails west, and was called home by President Harry S. Truman for sixty-four years. Historian Jon E. Taylor has integrated research from newspapers, public documents, oral histories, and private papers to detail how the community has preserved and remembered these various legacies.
Truman’s legacy would appear to have been secured in Independence via three significant designations—his presidential library opened there in 1957, his neighborhood was designated a national historic landmark in 1972, and his home was declared a national historic site in 1982. However, Taylor argues that Truman’s seeming dominance in the community’s memory is in fact endangered by competition from the other aspects of the town’s historical heritage.
Taylor considers the role Mormon history has played in the city's history and chronicles how the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints returned to Independence to fulfill Joseph Smith's dream of creating Zion in the city, a situation that impacted neighborhoods near the Truman home. Taylor also examines the city's fascination with the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California trails, detailing how that history was lost and remembered and is now immortalized on the Independence square and in the National Frontier Trails Museum.
In the 1980s, the city council reduced the size of the Truman Heritage District, created to maintain Truman’s association with his neighborhood, after church opposition. At the same time, city officials pushed to make Independence a major tourist destination, a move largely dependent upon the city capitalizing on its association with Truman. These inconsistent policies and incongruous goals have led to innumerable changes in the landscape Truman enjoyed during his legendary morning walks.
A President, a Church, and Trails West chronicles one city’s struggle to preserve its history and the built environment. Taylor places the role of preservation in Independence not only within the larger context of preservation in the United States but also within the context of American environmental history. This volume is sure to appeal to anyone interested in public history, historic preservation, history and memory, and local history.
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The President in the Legislative Arena
Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In recent years, the executive branch's ability to maneuver legislation through Congress has become the measure of presidential success or failure. Although the victor of legislative battles is often readily discernible, debate is growing over how such victories are achieved.
In The President in the Legislative Arena, Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher depart dramatically from the concern with presidential influence that has dominated research on presidential-congressional relations for the past thirty years. Of the many possible factors involved in presidential success, those beyond presidential control have long been deemed unworthy of study. Bond and Fleisher disagree. Turning to democratic theory, they insist that it is vitally important to understand the conditions under which the executive brance prevails, regardless of the source of that success. Accordingly, they provide a thorough and unprecedented analysis of presidential success on congressional roll-call votes from 1953 through 1984. Their research demonstrates that the degree of cooperation between the two branches is much more systematically linked to the partisan and ideological makeup of Congress than to the president's bargaining ability and popularity. Thus the composition of Congress "inherited" by the president is the single most significant determinant of the success or failure of the executive branch.
In The President in the Legislative Arena, Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher depart dramatically from the concern with presidential influence that has dominated research on presidential-congressional relations for the past thirty years. Of the many possible factors involved in presidential success, those beyond presidential control have long been deemed unworthy of study. Bond and Fleisher disagree. Turning to democratic theory, they insist that it is vitally important to understand the conditions under which the executive brance prevails, regardless of the source of that success. Accordingly, they provide a thorough and unprecedented analysis of presidential success on congressional roll-call votes from 1953 through 1984. Their research demonstrates that the degree of cooperation between the two branches is much more systematically linked to the partisan and ideological makeup of Congress than to the president's bargaining ability and popularity. Thus the composition of Congress "inherited" by the president is the single most significant determinant of the success or failure of the executive branch.
[more]
President Johnson's War On Poverty
Rhetoric and History
David Zarefsky
University of Alabama Press, 1986
Illustrates the interweaving of rhetorical and historical forces in shaping public policy
In January 1964, in his first State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson announced a declaration of “unconditional war” on poverty. By the end of the year the Economic Opportunity Act became law.
The War on Poverty illustrates the interweaving of rhetorical and historical forces in shaping public policy. Zarefsky suggest that an important problem in the War on Poverty lay in its discourse. He assumes that language plays a central role in the formulation of social policy by shaping the context within which people view the social world. By terming the anti-poverty effort a war, President Johnson imparted significant symbolism to the effort: it called for total victory and gave confidence that the “war” was winnable. It influenced the definition of the enemy as an intergenerational cycle of poverty, rather than the shortcomings of the individual; and it led to the choice of community action, manpower programs, and prudent management as weapons and tactics. Each of these implications involves a choice of language and symbols, a decision about how to characterize and discuss the world. Zarefsky contends that each of these rhetorical choices was helpful to the Johnson administration in obtaining passage of the Economic Opportunity Ac of 1964, but that each choice invited redefinition or reinterpretation of a symbol in a way that threatened the program.
[more]
President of the Other America
Robert Kennedy and the Politics of Poverty
Edward R. Schmitt
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
Robert Kennedy's abbreviated run for the presidency in 1968 has assumed almost mythical proportions in American memory. His campaign has been romanticized because of its tragic end, but also because of the foreign and domestic crises that surrounded it. Yet while most media coverage initially focused on Kennedy's opposition to the Vietnam War as the catalyst of his candidacy, another issue commanded just as much of his attention. That issue was poverty. Stumping across the country, he repeated the same antipoverty themes before college students in Kansas and Indiana, loggers and women factory workers in Oregon, farmers in Nebraska, and business groups in New York. Although his calls to action sometimes met with apathy, he refused to modify his message. "If they don't care," he told one aide, "the hell with them."
As Edward R. Schmitt demonstrates, Kennedy's concern with the problem of poverty was not new. Although critics at the time accused him of opportunistically veering left in order to outflank an unpopular president, a closer look at the historical record reveals a steady evolution rather than a dramatic shift in his politics.
As Edward R. Schmitt demonstrates, Kennedy's concern with the problem of poverty was not new. Although critics at the time accused him of opportunistically veering left in order to outflank an unpopular president, a closer look at the historical record reveals a steady evolution rather than a dramatic shift in his politics.
[more]
A Presidential Civil Service
FDR's Liaison Office for Personnel Management
Mordecai Lee
University of Alabama Press, 2016
A Presidential Civil Service offers a comprehensive and definitive study of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Liaison Office for Personnel Management (LOPM). Established in 1939 following the release of Roosevelt’s Brownlow Committee report, LOPM became a key milestone in the evolution of the contemporary executive-focused civil service.
The Progressive Movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries comprised groups across the political spectrum with quite different. All, however, agreed on the need for a politically autonomous and independent federal Civil Service Commission (CSC) to eliminate patronage and political favoritism. In A Presidential Civil Service, public administration scholar Mordecai Lee explores two models open to later reformers: continuing a merit-based system isolated from politics or a management-based system subordinated to the executive and grounded in the growing field of managerial science.
Roosevelt’s 1937 Brownlow Committee, formally known as the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, has been widely studied including its recommendation to disband the CSC and replace it with a presidential personnel director. What has never been documented in detail was Roosevelt’s effort to implement that recommendation over the objections of Congress by establishing the LOPM as a nonstatutory agency.
The role and existence of LOPM from 1939 to 1945 has been largely dismissed in the history of public administration. Lee’s meticulously researched A Presidential Civil Service, however, persuasively shows that LOPM played a critical role in overseeing personnel policy. It was involved in every major HR initiative before and during World War II. Though small, the agency’s deft leadership almost always succeeded at impelling the CSC to follow its lead.
Roosevelt’s actions were in fact an artful and creative victory, a move finally vindicated when, in 1978, Congress abolished the CSC and replaced it with an Office of Personnel Management headed by a presidential appointee. A Presidential Civil Service offers a fascinating account and vital reassessment of the enduring legacy of Roosevelt’s LOPM.
The Progressive Movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries comprised groups across the political spectrum with quite different. All, however, agreed on the need for a politically autonomous and independent federal Civil Service Commission (CSC) to eliminate patronage and political favoritism. In A Presidential Civil Service, public administration scholar Mordecai Lee explores two models open to later reformers: continuing a merit-based system isolated from politics or a management-based system subordinated to the executive and grounded in the growing field of managerial science.
Roosevelt’s 1937 Brownlow Committee, formally known as the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, has been widely studied including its recommendation to disband the CSC and replace it with a presidential personnel director. What has never been documented in detail was Roosevelt’s effort to implement that recommendation over the objections of Congress by establishing the LOPM as a nonstatutory agency.
The role and existence of LOPM from 1939 to 1945 has been largely dismissed in the history of public administration. Lee’s meticulously researched A Presidential Civil Service, however, persuasively shows that LOPM played a critical role in overseeing personnel policy. It was involved in every major HR initiative before and during World War II. Though small, the agency’s deft leadership almost always succeeded at impelling the CSC to follow its lead.
Roosevelt’s actions were in fact an artful and creative victory, a move finally vindicated when, in 1978, Congress abolished the CSC and replaced it with an Office of Personnel Management headed by a presidential appointee. A Presidential Civil Service offers a fascinating account and vital reassessment of the enduring legacy of Roosevelt’s LOPM.
[more]
Presidential Constitutionalism in Perilous Times
Scott M. Matheson Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2009
From the Constitution’s adoption, presidents, Congress, judges, scholars, the press, and the public have debated the appropriate scope of presidential power during a crisis, especially when presidents see bending or breaking the rules as necessary to protect the country from serious, even irreparable, harm.
Presidential Constitutionalism in Perilous Times examines this quandary, from Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson’s enforcement of the Espionage Act of 1917 during World War I, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s evacuation and internment of West Coast Japanese during World War II, Harry S. Truman’s seizure of the steel mills during the Korean War to George W. Bush’s torture, surveillance, and detention programs following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Presidents have exercised extraordinary power to protect the nation in ways that raised serious constitutional concerns about individual liberties and separation of powers. By looking at these examples through different constitutional perspectives, Scott Matheson achieves a deeper understanding of wartime presidential power in general and of President Bush’s assertions of executive power in particular. America can function more effectively as a constitutional democracy in an unsafe world, he argues, if our leaders embrace an approach to presidential power that he calls executive constitutionalism.
[more]
Presidential Delegation of Authority in Wartime
Nathan Grundstein
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961
Administration in time of war has come to revolve around the President, and much of the administrative authority of the President is then delegated to extralegal agents. Grundstein's analysis of the experiences of World War I show that such delegation is inevitable: From the beginning of the war Congress delegated many powers to the Chief Executive, who, of necessity, named others to act for him in the prosecution of the war. Furthermore, Congress granted these administrative powers without formally establishing new administrative agencies with attendant Congressional oversight. Though constitutionally the President's powers are exclusively executive as distinguished from administrative, beginning with WWI, and increasing during WWII, the President has become in effect the administrator-in-chief.
Nathan Grundstein traces the evolution of a new body of administrative law delineating the unique patterns of wartime organization and administration that emerged during the twentieth century.
[more]
Presidential Elections, 1789-2008
County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data
Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman C. Puckett
University of Michigan Press, 2010
"Hanes Walton, Donald Deskins, and Sherman Puckett have produced a highly impressive collection and valuable contribution to the literature on American electoral politics. This work is indispensable for academic libraries, political scientists, historians, and serious students of American government."
---Immanuel Ness, Professor, Department of Political Science, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
"Massive amounts of information about presidential elections which are not readily available elsewhere. Unprecedented coverage in one volume of every single American presidential election."
---James Gimpel, Professor of Government, University of Maryland
"This is an extraordinary research endeavor; the most comprehensive set of aggregate election data ever assembled. Painstakingly researched, this color-coded volume presents data for every presidential election from 1789 to 2008. Unlike most, the wide ranging narrative for this atlas identifies racial patterns in the vote. Everyone who studies or is interested in presidential elections should have this impressive collection of statistical data in their libraries. A visual gem for the digital age."
---Robert Smith, Professor of Political Science, San Francisco State University
"Presidential Elections, 1789–2008 is a genuine tour de force that captures in an extremely accessible and comprehensive way the electoral geography of America's presidential elections, from Washington to Obama. An invaluable addition to the library of all those interested in presidential elections and U.S. politics."
---Marion Orr, Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science, Brown University
"This volume sets an extraordinarily high standard in scholarship, completeness, description, and explanation of our political process. It has been said that all politics are local, but never before has this been demonstrated with such clarity and panache, using the simple method of standardized tables summarizing voting, then showing state and county breakdowns of the numbers, greatly strengthened by beautiful full-color maps and cartograms. Every scholar of politics and democracy will benefit from the work laid out in this volume."
---Keith Clarke, Professor of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara
Presidential Elections is an almanac of the popular vote in every presidential election in American history, analyzed at the county level with histories of each campaign, graphs, and stunning four-color maps. Most Americans are familiar with the crude red state/blue state maps used by commentators and campaign strategists---and even, for want of an alternative, by many academics. In providing a higher-resolution view of voting behavior the authors of this new volume enable examination of local and regional political trends that are invisible in state-level aggregations.
Presidential Elections will enable scholars to more subtly analyze voting behavior, campaigns, and presidential politics; commentators will use it to analyze trends and trace the historical evolution of new coalitions and voting blocs; strategists will use it to plan campaigns and mobilize constituencies. Presidential Elections will become the standard almanac on the subject: a required resource for academic and public libraries, as well as for scholars, consultants, and pundits nationwide.
Donald R. Deskins, Jr., is a political geographer and Emeritus Professor of Sociology and a former Associate Dean of the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan.
Hanes Walton, Jr., is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He also holds positions as Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Political Studies and as a faculty member in the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies.
Sherman C. Puckett is a Ph.D. graduate of the University of Michigan in urban and regional planning. He was a mayoral appointee in the data processing department of the Coleman A. Young administration in the City of Detroit and recently retired from Wayne County government as manager of technology, geographic information systems, and development of maintenance management systems.
[more]
Presidential Leadership
From Woodrow Wilson to Harry S. Truman
Robert H. Ferrell
University of Missouri Press, 2005
Ever since the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, scholars have been in a quandary over how much they really know about our country’s presidents. Nixon, as is now understood, was unstable in personality. The signs appeared well before the discovery of the infamous Watergate tapes, an appalling example of what the presidency could come to. Many Americans have difficulty penetrating the public persona of their leaders. But to know the private side of such figures—the cores of their being—is important, because this side often governs what they do publicly.
In Presidential Leadership, Robert H. Ferrell examines four sometimes maligned, sometimes misunderstood presidents: Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry S. Truman. Along with these portraits, Ferrell incorporates comments on Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as well as key figures in each president’s administration. Also included in this volume is historian John A. Garraty’s interview with Ferrell on American foreign policy from 1919 to 1945.
As is his style, Ferrell draws from many sources previously untapped. In the case of Wilson, Ferrell relies on the diary of Colonel Edward M. House, who served under Wilson during his presidency. Ferrell uses White House physician Joel T. Boone’s diary to provide an insider’s look at Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. In dealing with these presidents, Ferrell debunks long-held myths and approaches the presidencies with fresh insights into what drove them to make the decisions they made.
Throughout the book, Ferrell emphasizes the personal styles of each president. He not only shows how they made their own determinations but also evaluates those whom they appointed to important positions. Scholars of American history will welcome this insightful look at the men who saw the United States through the first half of the twentieth century.
[more]
Presidential Libraries as Performance
Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush
Jodi Kanter
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
How do the funding, setting architecture, and exhibition of a presidential library shape our understanding of the president’s character? And how do diverse performances of the presidency create radically different opportunities for the practice of American citizenship? In Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush, Jodi Kanter analyzes presidential libraries as performances that encourage visitors to think in particular ways about executive leadership and about their own roles in public life.
Kanter considers the moments in the presidents’ lives the museums choose to interpret, and not to interpret, and how the libraries approach common subjects in the presidential museum narrative—the presidents’ early years in relation to cultural ideals, the libraries’ representations of presidential failures, personal and political, and the question of presidential legacy. Identifying the limited number of strategies the libraries currently use to represent the diversity of the American experience and American character, Kanter offers concrete suggestions for reinventing and reshaping the practices of museum professionals and visitors within the walls of these institutions.
Presidential museums can tell us important things about the relationships between performance and politics, entertainment and history, and leaders and the people they lead. Kanter demonstrates how the presidential libraries generate normative narratives about individual presidents, historical events, and what it means to be an American.
Kanter considers the moments in the presidents’ lives the museums choose to interpret, and not to interpret, and how the libraries approach common subjects in the presidential museum narrative—the presidents’ early years in relation to cultural ideals, the libraries’ representations of presidential failures, personal and political, and the question of presidential legacy. Identifying the limited number of strategies the libraries currently use to represent the diversity of the American experience and American character, Kanter offers concrete suggestions for reinventing and reshaping the practices of museum professionals and visitors within the walls of these institutions.
Presidential museums can tell us important things about the relationships between performance and politics, entertainment and history, and leaders and the people they lead. Kanter demonstrates how the presidential libraries generate normative narratives about individual presidents, historical events, and what it means to be an American.
[more]
Presidents and Parties in the Public Mind
Gary C. Jacobson
University of Chicago Press, 2019
How is Donald Trump’s presidency likely to affect the reputation and popular standing of the Republican Party? Profoundly, according to Gary C. Jacobson. From Harry S. Truman to Barack Obama, every postwar president has powerfully shaped Americans’ feelings, positive or negative, about their party. The effect is pervasive, influencing the parties’ reputations for competence, their perceived principles, and their appeal as objects of personal identification. It is also enduring, as presidents’ successes and failures continue to influence how we see their parties well beyond their time in office.
With Presidents and Parties in the Public Mind, Gary C. Jacobson draws on survey data from the past seven administrations to show that the expansion of the executive branch in the twentieth century that gave presidents a greater role in national government also gave them an enlarged public presence, magnifying their role as the parties’ public voice and face. As American politics has become increasingly nationalized and president-centered over the past few decades, the president’s responsibility for the party’s image and status has continued to increase dramatically. Jacobson concludes by looking at the most recent presidents’ effects on our growing partisan polarization, analyzing Obama’s contribution to this process and speculating about Trump’s potential for amplifying the widening demographic and cultural divide.
With Presidents and Parties in the Public Mind, Gary C. Jacobson draws on survey data from the past seven administrations to show that the expansion of the executive branch in the twentieth century that gave presidents a greater role in national government also gave them an enlarged public presence, magnifying their role as the parties’ public voice and face. As American politics has become increasingly nationalized and president-centered over the past few decades, the president’s responsibility for the party’s image and status has continued to increase dramatically. Jacobson concludes by looking at the most recent presidents’ effects on our growing partisan polarization, analyzing Obama’s contribution to this process and speculating about Trump’s potential for amplifying the widening demographic and cultural divide.
[more]
Presidents and Political Thought
David J. Siemers
University of Missouri Press, 2009
“What did the president know and when did he know it?” takes on a whole new meaning in Presidents and Political Thought. Though political philosophy is sometimes considered to be dry and abstract, many of our presidents have found usable ideas embedded within it. In this first comparative study of presidents and political theory, David Siemers examines how some of them have applied this specialized knowledge to their job.
Presidents and Political Thought explores the connection between philosophy and practical politics through a study of six American chief executives: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton. Writing at the intersection of politics, history, and philosophy, Siemers combines his extensive understanding of political philosophy with careful research and analysis of individual presidents to produce provocative and astute judgments about how their understanding of political theory affected their performance.
Each chapter examines a particular president’s attitude about political theory, the political theorists he read and admired, and the ways in which he applied theory in his activities as president. Viewing presidents through the lens of political theory enables Siemers to conclude that Madison and Adams have been significantly underrated. Wilson is thought to have abandoned his theoretical viewpoint as president, but actually, he just possessed an unorthodox interpretation of his favorite thinker, Edmund Burke. Often thought to be so pragmatic or opportunistic that they lacked any convictions, FDR and Clinton gained their orientations to politics from political theory. These and other insights suggest that we cannot understand these presidencies without being more aware of the ideas the presidents brought to the office.
Siemers’s study takes on special relevance as the United States experiences regime change and a possible party realignment because, as he notes, Barack Obama has read and learned from political theory, too.
Avoiding much of the jargon that often accompanies political theory, this book demonstrates the relevance of political theory in the real world, chronicling both the challenges and potentially rich payoffs when presidents conceive of politics not just as a way to reward friends and punish enemies, but as a means to realize principles.
[more]
Presidents and Protestors
Political Rhetoric in the 1960s
Theodore O. Windt
University of Alabama Press, 1990
An excellent and lucid introduction to the study of political rhetoric
The decade of the 1960s was a time of passionate politics and resounding rhetoric. The “resounding rhetoric,” from Kennedy’s celebrated inaugural address, to the outlandish antics of the Yippies, is the focus of this book. The importance of this volume is its consideration of both people in power (presidents) and people out of power (protesters), and its delineation of the different rhetorical bases that each had to work from in participating in the politics of the 1960s.
Presidents and Protesters places rhetorical acts within their specific political contexts, changing the direction of previous rhetorical studies from the sociological to the historical-political. Above all, this is an intellectual history of the 1960s as seen through the rhetoric of the participants, which ultimately shows that the major participants utilized every form of political discourse available and, consequently, exhausted not only themselves but the rhetorical forms as well.
The decade of the 1960s was a time of passionate politics and resounding rhetoric. The “resounding rhetoric,” from Kennedy’s celebrated inaugural address, to the outlandish antics of the Yippies, is the focus of this book. The importance of this volume is its consideration of both people in power (presidents) and people out of power (protesters), and its delineation of the different rhetorical bases that each had to work from in participating in the politics of the 1960s.
Presidents and Protesters places rhetorical acts within their specific political contexts, changing the direction of previous rhetorical studies from the sociological to the historical-political. Above all, this is an intellectual history of the 1960s as seen through the rhetoric of the participants, which ultimately shows that the major participants utilized every form of political discourse available and, consequently, exhausted not only themselves but the rhetorical forms as well.
[more]
Presidents and Their Generals
An American History of Command in War
Matthew Moten
Harvard University Press, 2014
Since World War II, the United States has been engaged in near-constant military conflict abroad, often with ill-defined objectives, ineffectual strategy, and uncertain benefits. In this era of limited congressional oversight and “wars of choice,” the executive and the armed services have shared the primary responsibility for making war. The negotiations between presidents and their generals thus grow ever more significant, and understanding them becomes essential.
Matthew Moten traces a sweeping history of the evolving roles of civilian and military leaders in conducting war, demonstrating how war strategy and national security policy shifted as political and military institutions developed, and how they were shaped by leaders’ personalities. Early presidents established the principle of military subordination to civil government, and from the Civil War to World War II the president’s role as commander-in-chief solidified, with an increasingly professionalized military offering its counsel. But General Douglas MacArthur’s insubordination to President Harry Truman during the Korean War put political-military tensions on public view. Subsequent presidents selected generals who would ally themselves with administration priorities. Military commanders in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan did just that—and the results were poorly conceived policy and badly executed strategy.
The most effective historical collaborations between presidents and their generals were built on mutual respect for military expertise and civilian authority, and a willingness to negotiate with candor and competence. Upon these foundations, future soldiers and statesmen can ensure effective decision-making in the event of war and bring us closer to the possibility of peace.
[more]
The President’s Call
Executive Leadership from FDR to George Bush
Judith E. Michaels
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997
Judith Michaels provides an in-depth examination of the Senate-confirmed presidential appointees of the Gorge H. W. Bush administration, and analyzes what these choices reveal about him, his administration, and the institution of political appointments itself. She compares this research to other administrations in the modern era. Particularly fascinating is how Bush's appointees compare with those of Ronald Reagan.
[more]
Presidents, Diplomats, and Other Mortals
Edited by J. Garry Clifford & Theodore A. Wilson
University of Missouri Press, 2007
From Abraham Lincoln’s stance on international slavery to George W. Bush’s incursions on the world stage, American presidents and other leaders have taken decisive actions to shape our country’s foreign policy. This new collection of essays provides analytical narratives of how and why policies were devised and implemented that would determine the place of the United States in the international arena from the 1860s to the present. Showing what individuals do—or choose not to do—is central to understanding diplomacy in peace and war.
These writings—by such prominent historians as Terry H. Anderson and Eugene P. Trani—examine presidents and other diplomats at their best and worst in the practice of statecraft. They take on issues ranging from America’s economic expansion abroad to the relations of democracies with authoritarian leaders and rogue nations to advocacy of such concepts as internationalism, unilateralism, nation building, and regime change. In so doing, they take readers on a virtual tour of American diplomatic history, tracing the ideas and actions of individuals in shaping our foreign policy, whether George F. Kennan as author of Soviet containment or Ronald Reagan as progenitor of “Star Wars.”
The essays range over a variety of scenarios to depict leaders coming to grips with real-world situations. They offer original views on such topics as American diplomacy toward Nicaragua, origins of U.S. attitudes toward Russia and the Soviet Union, FDR’s idiosyncratic approach to statecraft, and food diplomacy as practiced by LBJ and Richard Nixon. And in considering post–Cold War crises, they address Bill Clinton’s military interventions, George W. Bush’s war against Iraq, and the half-century background to the current nuclear standoff with Iran. Additional articles pay tribute to the outstanding career of Robert H. Ferrell as a scholar and teacher.
Throughout the volume, the authors seek to exemplify the scholarly standards of narrative diplomatic history espoused by Robert Ferrell—especially the notion that historians should attempt to explain fully the circumstances, opportunities, and pressures that influence foreign policy decisions while remembering that historical actors cannot with certainty predict the outcomes of their actions. Presidents, Diplomats, and Other Mortals is both a collection of compelling historical studies and an overarching case study of the role of individuals in foreign policy making and an insightful review of some of history’s most important moments. Taken together, these essays provide a fitting tribute to Ferrell, the trailblazing scholar in whose honor the book was written.
[more]
The President's Man
Leo Crowley and Franklin Roosevelt in Peace and War
Stuart L. Weiss
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996
Leo Crowley has been known only as the administrator condemned by President Truman for cutting off Soviet lend-lease after V-E Day. Stuart L. Weiss revises this view while exploring Crowley’s long, significant state and federal career, emphasizing his service as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s man for all seasons.
Weiss deals effectively with Crowley’s flaws and virtues as well as those of the administrations he served. Crowley was confirmed as chair of the FDIC in 1934 despite a charge, unknown to President Roosevelt, that Crowley had committed fraud as a banker in Wisconsin. Crowley then served with distinction for more than eleven years as the administration twice buried a 1935 Treasury Department report that, had it been handed to Wisconsin authorities, could have sent him to prison: Roosevelt valued Crowley’s political and administrative talents too highly to allow that to happen.
In 1939, Roosevelt, anxious to have business support for stopping the Axis powers, encouraged Crowley to take the chair of a holding company about to be prosecuted by the SEC. After Pearl Harbor, like priorities prompted the president first to name Crowley alien property custodian, then chair of the Board of Economic Warfare to supplant Roosevelt’s politically troublesome vice president, and, finally, foreign economic administrator, the person responsible for civilian lend-lease activity
In this vibrant biography, Weiss furnishes the reader with detailed portraits of a man faithful to his president even when he disagreed with him and of a president willing to do what he felt was necessary for the good of the country.
[more]
The Presidents We Imagine
Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online
Jeff Smith
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
In such popular television series as The West Wing and 24, in thrillers like Tom Clancy’s novels, and in recent films, plays, graphic novels, and internet cartoons, America has been led by an amazing variety of chief executives. Some of these are real presidents who have been fictionally reimagined. Others are “might-have-beens” like Philip Roth’s President Charles Lindbergh. Many more have never existed except in some storyteller’s mind.
In The Presidents We Imagine, Jeff Smith examines the presidency’s ever-changing place in the American imagination. Ranging across different media and analyzing works of many kinds, some familiar and some never before studied, he explores the evolution of presidential fictions, their central themes, the impact on them of new and emerging media, and their largely unexamined role in the nation’s real politics.
Smith traces fictions of the presidency from the plays and polemics of the eighteenth century—when the new office was born in what Alexander Hamilton called “the regions of fiction”—to the digital products of the twenty-first century, with their seemingly limitless user-defined ways of imagining the world’s most important political figure. Students of American culture and politics, as well as readers interested in political fiction and film, will find here a colorful, indispensable guide to the many surprising ways Americans have been “representing” presidents even as those presidents have represented them.
“Especially timely in an era when media image-mongering increasingly shapes presidential politics.”—Paul S. Boyer, series editor
“Smith's understanding of the sociopolitical realities of US history is impressive; likewise his interpretations of works of literature and popular culture. . . .In addition to presenting thoughtful analysis, the book is also fun. Readers will enjoy encounters with, for example, The Beggar's Opera, Duck Soup, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Philip Roth's Plot against America, the comedic campaigns of W. C. Fields for President and Pogo for President, and presidential fictions that continue up to the last President Bush. . . . His writing is fluid and conversational, but every page reveals deep understanding and focus. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.”—CHOICE
In The Presidents We Imagine, Jeff Smith examines the presidency’s ever-changing place in the American imagination. Ranging across different media and analyzing works of many kinds, some familiar and some never before studied, he explores the evolution of presidential fictions, their central themes, the impact on them of new and emerging media, and their largely unexamined role in the nation’s real politics.
Smith traces fictions of the presidency from the plays and polemics of the eighteenth century—when the new office was born in what Alexander Hamilton called “the regions of fiction”—to the digital products of the twenty-first century, with their seemingly limitless user-defined ways of imagining the world’s most important political figure. Students of American culture and politics, as well as readers interested in political fiction and film, will find here a colorful, indispensable guide to the many surprising ways Americans have been “representing” presidents even as those presidents have represented them.
“Especially timely in an era when media image-mongering increasingly shapes presidential politics.”—Paul S. Boyer, series editor
“Smith's understanding of the sociopolitical realities of US history is impressive; likewise his interpretations of works of literature and popular culture. . . .In addition to presenting thoughtful analysis, the book is also fun. Readers will enjoy encounters with, for example, The Beggar's Opera, Duck Soup, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Philip Roth's Plot against America, the comedic campaigns of W. C. Fields for President and Pogo for President, and presidential fictions that continue up to the last President Bush. . . . His writing is fluid and conversational, but every page reveals deep understanding and focus. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.”—CHOICE
[more]
The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain
A Documentary History, Volume I, 1570-1700
Thomas H. Naylor and Charles W. Polzer
University of Arizona Press, 1986
Reports, orders, journals, and letters of military officials trace frontier history through the Chicimeca War and Peace (1576-1606), early rebellions in the Sierra Madre (1601-1618), mid-century challenges and realignment (1640-1660), and northern rebellions and new presidios (1681-1695).
[more]
The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain
A Documentary History, Volume Two, Part One: The Californias and Sinaloa-Sonora, 1700-1765
Edited by Charles W. Polzer and Thomas E. Sheridan
University of Arizona Press, 1997
Acclaimed by readers and reviewers alike, the first volume of The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain was a landmark in the documentary study of seventeenth-century Spanish Colonial Mexico. Here, Charles W. Polzer and Thomas E. Sheridan bring the same incisive scholarship and careful editing to long-awaited Volume Two, covering the years 1700-1765.The two-part second volume looks at the Spanish expansion as occurring in four north-south corridors that carried the main components of social and political activity. Divided geographically, materials in this book (part 1) relate to the two westernmost corridors, while those in the projected book (part 2) will cover the corridors north to New Mexico and northeast into Texas. Documents in both books demonstrate the importance of regional hostilities rather than exterior threats in the establishment of presidios.Materials in this book relate to events and episodes in the Californias (the peninsula of Baja California) where the situation of the presidial forces was unique in New Spain. By bringing into focus the ways that civil-religious relations affected the military garrison there, these documents contribute immeasurably to a greater understanding of how California itself emerged in history. Also covering Sinaloa and Sonora, the mainland of the west coast of New Spain, records in the book reveal how the Sinaloa coastal forces differed from those in the interior and how they were depended upon for protection in the northern expansion, both civil and missionary.Because documents on the presidios in northern New Spain are vast in number and varied in content, these selections are meant to provide for the reader or researcher a framework around which more elaborate studies might be constructed. All of the records have been translated from the Spanish language into readable, modern English and are accompanied by transcribed versions of the originals.Valuable to both non-specialists and specialists, here is an unparalleled resource important not only for the careful selection, preparation, and presentation of documents, but also for the excellent background information that puts them into context and makes them come alive.
[more]
The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain
A Documentary History, Volume Two, Part Two: The Central Corridor and the Texas Corridor, 1700-1765
Edited by Diana Hadley, Thomas H. Naylor, and Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller
University of Arizona Press, 1997
Joining an acclaimed multivolume work funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission is a new volume of The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain. As the work of the Documentary Relations of the Southwest project, under the general editorship of Charles W. Polzer, S.J., the volumes stand alone in their translation and publication of a wide variety of documents that describe the Spanish exploration and conquest of what is now the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. The presidial system of northern New Spain's Central and Texas Corridor was an evolving institution used for exploration, military presence and defense against foreign powers, local militia duty, mission support, personal service, and penal obligations. The new volume, which covers parts of what is now Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico, includes letters, diaries, judicial papers, military reports, and interrogations. Difficult for researchers to access and sometimes to decipher, the records are presented in Spanish and in English translation, annotated and introduced by the volume editors.
[more]
Preso sin Nombre, Celda sin Numero
Jacobo Timerman; Con textos de Arthur Miller y Ariel Dorfman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
A classic of world literature back in print in a Spanish-language edition.
Wisconsin edition is for sale only in North America.
Wisconsin edition is for sale only in North America.
[more]
The Press and the Constitution, 1931-1947
J. Edward Gerald
University of Minnesota Press, 1948
The Press and the Constitution, 1931–1947 was first published in 1948. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Sixteen dramatic years—from the Minnesota gag law case in 1931 to the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. Sixteen years in which the American system of freedom developed new strength and conferred new benefits on the common man. In The Press and the Constitution J. Edward Gerald has told the story of these years as they have influenced the development of freedom of the press.
During this turbulent time American newspapers, in spite of their claims to protection under the First and Fourteenth amendments, have found themselves subjected to increasing legal restraints. The guarantee of freedom of the press affects the lives of a wide range of individuals—from publishers to pickets, from Big Business leaders to itinerant evangelists. To show this, Mr. Gerald includes in his discussion the anti-trust laws, newspaper taxes, wage and hour legislation, censorship, picketing, licensing, and the contempt power.
The book analyzes a series of cases decided by the United States Supreme Court from 1931 to 1947. Among the more celebrated are the Chicago Sun-Chicago Tribune antitrust case, the Esquire case, in which the powers of the Postmaster General were limited, and the Jehovah's Witnesses cases, in which the line between religion and commerce was defined.
The author concludes that American law definitely establishes—and carries out—the concept of the common welfare, even to the point of government intervention to increase freedom of the press for some while restricting it for others.
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Press Box Red
The Story Of Lester Rodney,
Irwin Silber
Temple University Press, 2003
Long before Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a Brooklyn Dodger contract in 1945, Lester Rodney, the newly hired and first sports editor of the Communist Daily Worker, launched the campaign that proved decisive in eventually breaking baseball's color line. But in the hostile anti-Communist climate of those years and for many years after, Rodney's story remained largely unknown. It therefore came as a surprise to many when Arnold Rampersad, in his authoritative 1997 biography of Jackie Robinson, wrote: "In the campaign to end Jim Crow in baseball, the most vigorous efforts came from the Communist press, most notably from Lester Rodney." Now Press Box Red tells the story of that remarkable 11-year campaign and of Rodney's unique career covering sports for the Daily Worker until he left the Communist Party in 1958. Press Box Red is packed with first-hand accounts of Rodney's challenges to the high muck-a-mucks of professional and collegiate sports, and contains frank and frequently humorous encounters with owners, managers, and coaches like Branch Rickey, Larry MacPhail, Bill Veeck, Leo Durocher, Casey Stengel, Nat Holman, Clair Bee and numerous athletes including Robinson, Roy Campanella, Joe DiMaggio, Satchel Paige, Peewee Reese, Joe Louis, Henry Armstrong, and many others. It's a story every fan will love.
[more]
Press Gallery
Congress and the Washington Correspondents
Donald Ritchie
Harvard University Press, 1991
Donald Ritchie examines the lives of early, self-styled congressional journalists such as Horace Greeley, Emily Briggs, Benjamin Perley Poore, Jane Grey Swisshelm, Horace White, James G. Blaine, and others who were positioned in the hub of government when the Civil War, the purchase of Alaska, the Crédit Mobilier scandal, and the Johnson impeachment hearings were making front-page news. Rich in anecdote, this lively book illuminates an important era of journalism and American history. The nascent issues of censorship, right to privacy, and conflict of interest that it describes are still very much with us.
[more]
Press, Platform, Pulpit
Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform
Teresa Zackodnik
University of Tennessee Press, 2011
Press, Platform, Pulpit examines how early black feminism goes public by sheding new light on some of the major figures of early black feminism as well as bringing forward some lesser-known individuals who helped shape various reform movements. With a perspective unlike many other studies of black feminism, Teresa Zackodnik considers these activists as central, rather than marginal, to the politics of their day, and argues that black feminism reached critical mass well before the club movement’s national federation at the turn into the twentieth century . Throughout, she shifts the way in which major figures of early black feminism have been understood.
The first three chapters trace the varied speaking styles and appeals of black women in the church, abolition, and women’s rights, highlighting audience and location as mediating factors in the public address and politics of figures such as Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Amanda Berry Smith, Ellen Craft, Sarah Parker Remond and Sojourner Truth. The next chapter focuses on Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching tours as working within “New Abolition” and influenced by black feminists before her. The final chapter examines feminist black nationalism as it developed in the periodical press by considering Maria Stewart’s social and feminist gospel; Mary Shadd Cary’s linking of abolition, emigration, and woman suffrage; and late-nineteenth-century black feminist journalism addressing black women’s migration and labor. Early black feminists working in reforms such as abolition and women’s rights opened new public arenas, such as the press, to the voices of black women. The book concludes by focusing on the 1891 National Council of Women, Frances Harper, and Anna Julia Cooper, which together mark a generational shift in black feminism, and by exploring the possibilities of taking black feminism public through forging coalitions among women of color.
Press, Platform, Pulpit goes far in deepening our understanding of early black feminism, its position in reform, and the varied publics it created for its politics. It not only moves historically from black feminist work in the church early in the nineteenth century to black feminism in the press at its close, but also explores the connections between black feminist politics across the century and specific reforms.
[more]
Pressed for Time
The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism
Judy Wajcman
University of Chicago Press, 2014
The technologically tethered, iPhone-addicted figure is an image we can easily conjure. Most of us complain that there aren't enough hours in the day and too many e-mails in our thumb-accessible inboxes. This widespread perception that life is faster than it used to be is now ingrained in our culture, and smartphones and the Internet are continually being blamed. But isn't the sole purpose of the smartphone to give us such quick access to people and information that we'll be free to do other things? Isn't technology supposed to make our lives easier?
In Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman explains why we immediately interpret our experiences with digital technology as inexorably accelerating everyday life. She argues that we are not mere hostages to communication devices, and the sense of always being rushed is the result of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set rather than the machines that help us set them. Indeed, being busy and having action-packed lives has become valorized by our productivity driven culture. Wajcman offers a bracing historical perspective, exploring the commodification of clock time, and how the speed of the industrial age became identified with progress. She also delves into the ways time-use differs for diverse groups in modern societies, showing how changes in work patterns, family arrangements, and parenting all affect time stress. Bringing together empirical research on time use and theoretical debates about dramatic digital developments, this accessible and engaging book will leave readers better versed in how to use technology to navigate life's fast lane.
In Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman explains why we immediately interpret our experiences with digital technology as inexorably accelerating everyday life. She argues that we are not mere hostages to communication devices, and the sense of always being rushed is the result of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set rather than the machines that help us set them. Indeed, being busy and having action-packed lives has become valorized by our productivity driven culture. Wajcman offers a bracing historical perspective, exploring the commodification of clock time, and how the speed of the industrial age became identified with progress. She also delves into the ways time-use differs for diverse groups in modern societies, showing how changes in work patterns, family arrangements, and parenting all affect time stress. Bringing together empirical research on time use and theoretical debates about dramatic digital developments, this accessible and engaging book will leave readers better versed in how to use technology to navigate life's fast lane.
[more]
Pressing the Fight
Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War
Greg Barnhisel
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Although often framed as an economic, military, and diplomatic confrontation, the Cold War was above all a conflict of ideas. In official pronouncements and publications as well as via radio broadcasts, television, and film, the United States and the Soviet Union both sought to extend their global reach as much through the power of persuasion as by the use of force. Yet of all the means each side employed to press its ideological case, none proved more reliable or successful than print.
In this volume, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the myriad ways print was used in the Cold War. Looking at materials ranging from textbooks and cookbooks to art catalogs, newspaper comics, and travel guides, they analyze not only the content of printed matter but also the material circumstances of its production, the people and institutions that disseminated it, and the audiences that consumed it. Among the topics discussed are the infiltration of book publishing by propagandists East and West; the distribution of pro-American printed matter in postwar Japan through libraries, schools, and consulates; and the collaboration of foundations, academia, and the government in the promotion of high culture as evidence of the superiority of Western values.
At the same time, many of the qualities that made print the preferred medium of official propaganda also made it an effective instrument for challenging Cold War orthodoxies at home and abroad. Because printed materials were relatively easy to transport, to copy, and to share, they could just as well be used to bridge differences among people and cultures as to exploit them. They also provided a vehicle for disseminating satire and other expressions of dissent.
In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Ed Brunner, Russell Cobb, Laura Jane Gifford, Patricia Hills, Christian Kanig, Scott Laderman, Amanda Laugesen, Martin Manning, Kristin Matthews, Hiromi Ochi, Amy Reddinger, and James Smith. Together their essays move beyond traditional Cold War narratives to gauge the role of a crucial cultural medium in the ideological battle between the superpowers and their surrogates.
In this volume, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the myriad ways print was used in the Cold War. Looking at materials ranging from textbooks and cookbooks to art catalogs, newspaper comics, and travel guides, they analyze not only the content of printed matter but also the material circumstances of its production, the people and institutions that disseminated it, and the audiences that consumed it. Among the topics discussed are the infiltration of book publishing by propagandists East and West; the distribution of pro-American printed matter in postwar Japan through libraries, schools, and consulates; and the collaboration of foundations, academia, and the government in the promotion of high culture as evidence of the superiority of Western values.
At the same time, many of the qualities that made print the preferred medium of official propaganda also made it an effective instrument for challenging Cold War orthodoxies at home and abroad. Because printed materials were relatively easy to transport, to copy, and to share, they could just as well be used to bridge differences among people and cultures as to exploit them. They also provided a vehicle for disseminating satire and other expressions of dissent.
In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Ed Brunner, Russell Cobb, Laura Jane Gifford, Patricia Hills, Christian Kanig, Scott Laderman, Amanda Laugesen, Martin Manning, Kristin Matthews, Hiromi Ochi, Amy Reddinger, and James Smith. Together their essays move beyond traditional Cold War narratives to gauge the role of a crucial cultural medium in the ideological battle between the superpowers and their surrogates.
[more]
Prestige Television
Cultural and Artistic Value in Twenty-First-Century America
Seth Friedman
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Prestige Television explores how a growing array of 21st century US programming is produced and received in ways that elevate select series above the competition in a saturated market. Contributing authors demonstrate that these shows are positioned and understood as comprising an increasingly recognizable genre characterized by familiar markers of distinction. In contrast to most accounts of elite categorizations of contemporary US television programming that center on HBO and its primary streaming rivals, these essays examine how efforts to imbue series with prestigious or elevated status now permeate the rest of the medium, including network as well as basic and undervalued premium cable channels. Case study chapters focusing on diverse series, ranging from widely recognized examples such as The Americans (2013-2018) and The Knick (2014-15) to contested examples like Queen of the South (2016-2021) and How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014), highlight how contributing authors extend conceptions of the genre beyond expected parameters.
[more]
Pretext for Mass Murder
The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup d'Etat in Indonesia
John Roosa
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
In the early morning hours of October 1, 1965, a group calling itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and executed six generals of the Indonesian army, including its highest commander. The group claimed that it was attempting to preempt a coup, but it was quickly defeated as the senior surviving general, Haji Mohammad Suharto, drove the movement’s partisans out of Jakarta. Riding the crest of mass violence, Suharto blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia for masterminding the movement and used the emergency as a pretext for gradually eroding President Sukarno’s powers and installing himself as a ruler. Imprisoning and killing hundreds of thousands of alleged communists over the next year, Suharto remade the events of October 1, 1965 into the central event of modern Indonesian history and the cornerstone of his thirty-two-year dictatorship.
Despite its importance as a trigger for one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of mass violence, the September 30th Movement has remained shrouded in uncertainty. Who actually masterminded it? What did they hope to achieve? Why did they fail so miserably? And what was the movement’s connection to international Cold War politics? In Pretext for Mass Murder, John Roosa draws on a wealth of new primary source material to suggest a solution to the mystery behind the movement and the enabling myth of Suharto’s repressive regime. His book is a remarkable feat of historical investigation.
Finalist, Social Sciences Book Award, the International Convention of Asian Scholars
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The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man
Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville
Kathleen B. Casey
University of Tennessee Press, 2015
"In this highly readable book, Kathleen Casey makes an important intervention into the study of early-twentieth-century American vaudeville and some of its most infamous stars. She pinpoints the blind spot in current scholarship by demonstrating how race as much as gender charges the meanings in vaudeville performance.”
—Linda Mizejewski, author of Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics and Ziegfeld Girl
From the 1890s through the 1920s, vaudeville reigned as one of the most popular entertainment forms in urban America. Through drama, humor, and satire, it invited its socially, economically, and ethnically diverse audiences to turn a self-conscious eye upon themselves and their culture, which was being rapidly transformed by such forces as immigration, racial discord, and new conceptions of gender roles. It was no coincidence that acts featuring cross-dressing performers and racial impersonators were among vaudeville’s biggest attractions.
In this lively and enlightening study, Kathleen B. Casey explores the ways in which the gender- and race-bending spectacles of vaudeville dramatized the economic, technological, social, and cultural upheaval that gripped the United States in the early twentieth century. She focuses on four key performers. Eva Tanguay, known as “The I Don’t Care Girl,” was loved for her defiance of Victorian decorum, linking white womanliness to animalistic savagery at a time when racial and gender ideologies were undergoing significant reconstruction. In contrast, Julian Eltinge, the era’s foremost female impersonator, used race to exaggerate notions of manliness
and femininity in a way that reinforced traditional norms more than it undermined them. Lillyn Brown, a biracial woman who portrayed a cosmopolitan black male dandy while singing about an antebellum southern past, offered her audiences, black and white, starkly different visual and aural messages about race and gender. Finally, Sophie Tucker, who often performed in blackface during the early years of her long and heralded career, strategically played with prevailing
ideologies by alternately portraying herself as white, Jewish, black, manly, and womanly, while managing, remarkably, to convince audiences that these identities could coexist within one body.
Analyzing a wide assortment of primary materials—advertisements, recordings, lyrics, sheet music, costumes, photographs, reviews, and press accounts from the era—Casey looks not only at gender and racial impersonation but also at how spectators reacted to these performances.
Kathleen B. Casey is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Wesleyan College.
—Linda Mizejewski, author of Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics and Ziegfeld Girl
From the 1890s through the 1920s, vaudeville reigned as one of the most popular entertainment forms in urban America. Through drama, humor, and satire, it invited its socially, economically, and ethnically diverse audiences to turn a self-conscious eye upon themselves and their culture, which was being rapidly transformed by such forces as immigration, racial discord, and new conceptions of gender roles. It was no coincidence that acts featuring cross-dressing performers and racial impersonators were among vaudeville’s biggest attractions.
In this lively and enlightening study, Kathleen B. Casey explores the ways in which the gender- and race-bending spectacles of vaudeville dramatized the economic, technological, social, and cultural upheaval that gripped the United States in the early twentieth century. She focuses on four key performers. Eva Tanguay, known as “The I Don’t Care Girl,” was loved for her defiance of Victorian decorum, linking white womanliness to animalistic savagery at a time when racial and gender ideologies were undergoing significant reconstruction. In contrast, Julian Eltinge, the era’s foremost female impersonator, used race to exaggerate notions of manliness
and femininity in a way that reinforced traditional norms more than it undermined them. Lillyn Brown, a biracial woman who portrayed a cosmopolitan black male dandy while singing about an antebellum southern past, offered her audiences, black and white, starkly different visual and aural messages about race and gender. Finally, Sophie Tucker, who often performed in blackface during the early years of her long and heralded career, strategically played with prevailing
ideologies by alternately portraying herself as white, Jewish, black, manly, and womanly, while managing, remarkably, to convince audiences that these identities could coexist within one body.
Analyzing a wide assortment of primary materials—advertisements, recordings, lyrics, sheet music, costumes, photographs, reviews, and press accounts from the era—Casey looks not only at gender and racial impersonation but also at how spectators reacted to these performances.
Kathleen B. Casey is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Wesleyan College.
[more]
Pretty Modern
Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil
Alexander Edmonds
Duke University Press, 2010
Pretty Modern is a riveting account of Brazil’s emergence as a global leader in plastic surgery. Intrigued by a Carnaval parade that mysteriously paid homage to a Rio de Janeiro plastic surgeon, anthropologist Alexander Edmonds conducted research that took him from Ipanema socialite circles to glitzy telenovela studios to the packed waiting rooms of public hospitals offering free cosmetic surgery. The result is provocative exploration of the erotic, commercial, and intimate aspects of beauty in a nation with extremes of wealth and poverty and a reputation for natural sensuality. Drawing on conversations with maids and their elite mistresses, divorced housewives, black celebrities, and favela residents aspiring to be fashion models, Edmonds analyzes what sexual desirability means and does for women in different social positions. He argues that beauty is a distinct realm of modern experience that does not simply reflect other inequalities. It mimics the ambiguous emancipatory potential of capital, challenging traditional hierarchies while luring consumers into a sexual culture that reduces the body to the brute biological criteria of attractiveness. Illustrated with color photographs, Pretty Modern offers a fresh theoretical perspective on the significance of female beauty in consumer capitalism.
[more]
Prevention
Gender, Sexuality, HIV, and the Media in Côte d'Ivoire
Christine Cynn
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
Approximately 70% of the global total of people living with HIV/AIDS in 2016 were in sub-Saharan Africa. After delayed governmental responses, the media has been consistently deployed as an essential tool for prevention. But HIV prevention campaigns reflect multiple conflicting and shifting agendas that encompass far more than the imparting of information about how to limit the spread of the virus. In Prevention: Gender, Sexuality, HIV, and the Media in Côte d’Ivoire, Christine Cynn draws from postcolonial, queer, and feminist film and media studies to critique global HIV prevention efforts and how they attempt to reshape gendered sexualities and notions of family in line with the rationality of neoliberalism.
More specifically, Cynn argues that through the bolstering of normative conceptions of gendered sexualities and families, HIV prevention media campaigns seek to actively create proper subjects, a goal corresponding with nation-building projects and reproducing their terms of belonging. During periods of increasingly virulent political and economic struggles in Côte d’Ivoire, such HIV prevention messages have lent support to lender- and state-mandated structural adjustment policies and to the exclusionary logic that casts some—such as those suffering from AIDS-related illnesses, those labeled as “homosexual,” sex workers, intravenous drug users, and the HIV-positive child—as implicitly unassimilable to the community and nation. Deeply interdisciplinary, Prevention brings to light new forms of exclusion and expands scholarship on gender and sexual normativities as it intersects with that on public health, neoliberalism, and film and media.
More specifically, Cynn argues that through the bolstering of normative conceptions of gendered sexualities and families, HIV prevention media campaigns seek to actively create proper subjects, a goal corresponding with nation-building projects and reproducing their terms of belonging. During periods of increasingly virulent political and economic struggles in Côte d’Ivoire, such HIV prevention messages have lent support to lender- and state-mandated structural adjustment policies and to the exclusionary logic that casts some—such as those suffering from AIDS-related illnesses, those labeled as “homosexual,” sex workers, intravenous drug users, and the HIV-positive child—as implicitly unassimilable to the community and nation. Deeply interdisciplinary, Prevention brings to light new forms of exclusion and expands scholarship on gender and sexual normativities as it intersects with that on public health, neoliberalism, and film and media.
[more]
A Price Below Rubies
Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals
Naomi Shepherd
Harvard University Press
Why, in the late nineteenth century, did Jewish women suddenly march en masse into the pages of radical history? A Price Below Rubies explores this question and introduces us to these women—particularly, Anna Kuliscioff, Rosa Luxemburg, Esther Frumkin, Manya Shochat, Bertha Pappenheim, Rose Pesotta, and Emma Goldman. Naomi Shepherd’s collective biography of these seven women and others tells the story of a revolution that began at home, in communities whose limits stirred women to rebel.
[more]
The Price of Aid
The Economic Cold War in India
David C. Engerman
Harvard University Press, 2018
“A superb, field-changing book…A true classic.”
—Sunil Amrith
“Makes a major contribution towards a necessary discussion of the politics of aid.”
—Times Higher Education
Debates over foreign aid are often strangely ahistorical. Economists argue about effectiveness—how to make aid work—while critics bemoan money wasted on corruption, ignoring the fundamentally political character of aid. The Price of Aid exposes the geopolitical calculus underpinning development assistance, and its costs.
India stood at the center of American and Soviet aid competition throughout the Cold War, as both superpowers saw developmental aid as a way of pursuing their geopolitical goals by economic means. Drawing on recently declassified files from seven countries, David Engerman shows how Indian leaders used Cold War competition to win battles at home, eroding the Indian state in the process. As China spends freely in Africa, the political stakes of foreign aid are rising once again.
“A magnificent book. Anyone who seeks to understand contemporary India and its development struggles will have to start here. Engerman’s work is not only enlightening, it turns much of what we thought we knew about India, foreign aid, and the Cold War in South Asia upside down.”
—O. A. Westad, author of The Cold War
“An outstanding history…Drawing on an unprecedented array of official and private archives in India, Russia, the United States, and Britain, Engerman offers a superb account—one that integrates the ideologies and policies of the superpowers with a sharp analysis of the push-and-pull of policymaking in India. This is a landmark study of independent India as well as the Cold War.”
—Srinath Raghavan, author of India’s War
[more]
The Price of Misfortune
Rights and Wrongs in Indebted America
Daniel Platt
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A history of the struggle for debtors’ rights from the Civil War to the Great Depression
What can be taken from someone who has borrowed money and cannot repay? What do the victims of misfortune owe to their lenders, and what can they keep for themselves? The answers to those questions, immensely important for debtors, creditors, and society at large, have changed over time. The Price of Misfortune examines the cause of debtors’ rights in the modern United States and the struggles of reformers who fought to establish financial freedoms in law.
Daniel Platt shows how, in the wake of the Civil War, a range of advocates drew potent analogies between slavery, imprisonment for debt, and the experiences of wage garnishment and property foreclosure. He traces the ways those analogies were used to campaign for bold new protections for debtors, keeping them secure in their labor, property, and personhood. Yet, as Platt demonstrates, those reforms tended to assume as their ideal borrower someone who was white, propertied, and male. In subsequent decades, the emancipatory promise of debtors’ rights would be tested as women, wage earners, and African Americans seized on their language to challenge other structural inequalities: the dependency of marriage, the exploitation of industrial capitalism, and the oppression of Jim Crow. By reconstructing these forgotten developments—and recovering the experiences of indebted farmwives, sharecroppers, and wage workers—The Price of Misfortune narrates a new history of inequality, coercion, and law amid the early financialization of American capitalism.
What can be taken from someone who has borrowed money and cannot repay? What do the victims of misfortune owe to their lenders, and what can they keep for themselves? The answers to those questions, immensely important for debtors, creditors, and society at large, have changed over time. The Price of Misfortune examines the cause of debtors’ rights in the modern United States and the struggles of reformers who fought to establish financial freedoms in law.
Daniel Platt shows how, in the wake of the Civil War, a range of advocates drew potent analogies between slavery, imprisonment for debt, and the experiences of wage garnishment and property foreclosure. He traces the ways those analogies were used to campaign for bold new protections for debtors, keeping them secure in their labor, property, and personhood. Yet, as Platt demonstrates, those reforms tended to assume as their ideal borrower someone who was white, propertied, and male. In subsequent decades, the emancipatory promise of debtors’ rights would be tested as women, wage earners, and African Americans seized on their language to challenge other structural inequalities: the dependency of marriage, the exploitation of industrial capitalism, and the oppression of Jim Crow. By reconstructing these forgotten developments—and recovering the experiences of indebted farmwives, sharecroppers, and wage workers—The Price of Misfortune narrates a new history of inequality, coercion, and law amid the early financialization of American capitalism.
[more]
The Price of Power
America Since 1945
Herbert Agar
University of Chicago Press, 1957
Once the sword of power has been drawn, it can never again be sheathed. That is the lesson the United States has been learning ever since she emerged from World War II as one of the great world powers. This central issue dominates Herbert Agar's exciting narrative history of the first twelve years of American world responsibility. He reviews the events and crises that have marked postwar history—the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, the Berlin airlift, the Eightieth Congress and Truman's election, the Hiss case, the collapse of Nationalist China, the McCarthy hearings, the atom and hydrogen bombs, McCarthy's "retirement," and Eisenhower's first election. In the great tradition of journalism and history, Mr. Agar has based his writings on close observation of recent world events and on his acquaintance with the people who have participated in them. He presents a vigorous and brilliant interpretation of the difficult years of America's coming of age in the field of international politics and diplomacy and a candid evaluation of the price America must pay as the world's most powerful nation.
[more]
The Price of Racial Reconciliation
Ronald W. Walters
University of Michigan Press, 2008
“In The Price of Racial Reconciliation, Ronald Walters offers an abundance of riches. This book provides an extraordinarily comprehensive and persuasive set of arguments for reparations, and will be the lens through which meaningful opportunities for reconciliation are viewed in the future. If this book does not lead to the success of the reparations movement, nothing will.”
—Charles J. Ogletree, Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
“The Price of Racial Reconciliation is a seminal study of comparative histories and race(ism) in the formation of state structures that prefigure(d) socioeconomic positions of Black peoples in South Africa and the United States. The scholarship is meticulous in brilliantly constructed analysis of the politics of memory, reparations as an immutable principle of justice, imperative for nonracial(ist) democracy, and a regime of racial reconciliation.”
—James Turner, Professor of African and African American Studies and Founder, Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University
“A fascinating and pathbreaking analysis of the attempt at racial reconciliation in South Africa which asks if that model is relevant to the contemporary American racial dilemma. An engaging multidisciplinary approach relevant to philosophy, sociology, history, and political science.”
—William Strickland, Associate Professor of Political Science, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst
The issue of reparations in America provokes a lot of interest, but the public debate usually occurs at the level of historical accounting: “Who owes what for slavery?” This book attempts to get past that question to address racial restitution within the framework of larger societal interests. For example, the answer to the “why reparations?” question is more than the moral of payment for an injustice done in the past. Ronald Walters suggests that, insofar as the impact of slavery is still very much with us today and has been reinforced by forms of postslavery oppression, the objective of racial harmony will be disrupted unless it is recognized with the solemnity and amelioration it deserves. The author concludes that the grand narrative of black oppression in the United States—which contains the past and present summary of the black experience—prevents racial reconciliation as long as some substantial form of racial restitution is not seriously considered. This is “the price” of reconciliation.
The method for achieving this finding is grounded in comparative politics, where the analyses of institutions and political behaviors are standard approaches. The author presents the conceptual difficulties involved in the project of racial reconciliation by comparing South African Truth and Reconciliation and the demand for reparations in the United States.
Ronald Walters is Distinguished Leadership Scholar and Director, African American Leadership Program and Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland.
[more]
Priceless Markets
The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660-1870
Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal
University of Chicago Press, 2000
This pathbreaking book shows how credit markets functioned in Paris, through the agency of notaries, during a critical period of French history. Its authors challenge the usual assumption that organized financial markets—and hence the opportunity for economic growth—did not emerge outside of England and the Netherlands until the nineteenth century. Drawing on innovative research, the authors show that as early as the Old Regime, financial intermediaries in France were mobilizing a great tide of capital and arranging thousands of loans between borrowers and lenders.
The implications for historians and economists are substantial. The role of notaries operating in Paris that Priceless Markets uncovers has never before been recognized. In the wake of this pathbreaking new study, historians will also have to rethink the origins of the French Revolution. As the authors show, the crisis of 1787-88 did not simply ignite revolt; it was intimately bound up in an economic struggle that reached far back into the eighteenth century, and continued well into the 1800s.
The implications for historians and economists are substantial. The role of notaries operating in Paris that Priceless Markets uncovers has never before been recognized. In the wake of this pathbreaking new study, historians will also have to rethink the origins of the French Revolution. As the authors show, the crisis of 1787-88 did not simply ignite revolt; it was intimately bound up in an economic struggle that reached far back into the eighteenth century, and continued well into the 1800s.
[more]
Price's Lost Campaign
The 1864 Invasion of Missouri
Mark A. Lause
University of Missouri Press, 2011
In the fall of 1864, during the last brutal months of the Civil War, the Confederates made one final, desperate attempt to rampage through the Shenandoah Valley, Tennessee, and Missouri. Price’s Raid was the common name for the Missouri campaign led by General Sterling Price. Involving tens of thousands of armed men, the 1864 Missouri campaign has too long remained unexamined by a book-length modern study, but now, Civil War scholar Mark A. Lause fills this long-standing gap in the literature, providing keen insights on the problems encountered during and the myths propagated about this campaign.
Price marched Confederate troops 1,500 miles into Missouri, five times as far as his Union counterparts who met him in the incursion. Along the way, he picked up additional troops; the most exaggerated estimates place Price’s troop numbers at 15,000. The Federal forces initially underestimated the numbers heading for Missouri and then called in troops from Illinois and Kansas, amassing 65,000 to 75,000 troops and militia members. The Union tried to downplay its underestimation of the Confederate buildup of troops by supplanting the term campaign with the impromptu raid.
This term was also used by Confederates to minimize their lack of military success. The Confederates, believing that Missourians wanted liberation from Union forces, had planned a two-phase campaign. They intended not only to disrupt the functioning government through seizure of St. Louis and the capital, Jefferson City, but also to restore the pro-secessionist government driven from the state three years before. The primary objective, however, was to change the outcome of the Federal elections that fall, encouraging votes against the Republicans who incorporated ending slavery into the Union war goals. What followed was widespread uncontrolled brutality in the form of guerrilla warfare, which drove support for the Federalists. Missouri joined Kansas in reelecting the Republicans and ensuring the end of slavery.
Lause’s account of the Missouri campaign of 1864 brings new understanding of the two distinct phases of the campaign, as based upon declared strategic goals. Additionally, as the author reveals the clear connection between the military campaign and the outcome of the election, he successfully tests the efforts of new military historians to integrate political, economic, social, and cultural history into the study of warfare. In showing how both sides during Price’s Raid used self-serving fictions to provide a rationale for their politically motivated brutality and were unwilling to risk defeat, Lause reveals the underlying nature of the American Civil War as a modern war.
[more]
The Pricing of Progress
Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life
Eli Cook
Harvard University Press, 2017
How did Americans come to quantify their society’s progress and well-being in units of money? In today’s GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth. The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values and valuations of capitalism as an indicator of human prosperity while losing sight of earlier social and moral metrics that did not put a price on everyday life.
Eli Cook roots the rise of economic indicators in the emergence of modern capitalism and the contested history of English enclosure, Caribbean slavery, American industrialization, economic thought, and corporate power. He explores how the maximization of market production became the chief objective of American economic and social policy. We see how distinctly capitalist quantification techniques used to manage or invest in railroad corporations, textile factories, real estate holdings, or cotton plantations escaped the confines of the business world and seeped into every nook and cranny of society. As economic elites quantified the nation as a for-profit, capitalized investment, the progress of its inhabitants, free or enslaved, came to be valued according to their moneymaking abilities.
Today as in the nineteenth century, political struggles rage over who gets to determine the statistical yardsticks used to gauge the “health” of our economy and nation. The Pricing of Progress helps us grasp the limits and dangers of entrusting economic indicators to measure social welfare and moral goals.
[more]
Pride, Not Prejudice
National Identity as a Pacifying Force in East Asia
Eunbin Chung
University of Michigan Press, 2022
As shown by China’s relationship to Japan, and Japan’s relationship to South Korea, even growing regional economic interdependencies are not enough to overcome bitter memories grounded in earlier wars, invasions, and periods of colonial domination. Although efforts to ease historical animosity have been made, few have proven to be successful in Northeast Asia. In previous research scholars anticipated an improvement in relations through thick economic interdependence or increased societal contact. In economic terms, however, Japan and China already trade heavily: Japan has emerged as China’s largest trading partner and China as second largest to Japan. Societal contact is already intense, as millions of Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese visit one another’s countries annually as students, tourists, and on business trips. But these developments have not alleviated international distrust and negative perception, or resolved disagreement on what constitutes “adequate reparation” regarding the countries’ painful history.
Noticing clashes of strong nationalisms around the world in areas like Northeast Asia, numerous studies have suggested that more peaceful relations are likely only if countries submerge or paper over existing national identities by promoting universalism. Pride, Not Prejudice argues, to the contrary, that affirmation of national identities may be a more effective way to build international cooperation. If each national population reflects on the values of their national identity, trust and positive perception can increase between countries. This idea is consistent with the theoretical foundation that those who have a clear, secure, and content sense of self, in turn, can be more open, evenhanded, and less defensive toward others. In addition, this reduced defensiveness also enhances guilt admission by past “inflictors” of conflict and colonialism. Eunbin Chung borrows the social psychological theory of self-affirmation and applies it to an international context to argue that affirmation of a national identity, or reflecting on what it means to be part of one’s country, can increase trust, guilt recognition, and positive perception between countries.
[more]
The Pride of Jacob
Essays on Jacob Katz and His Work
Jay M. Harris
Harvard University Press, 2002
Jacob Katz (1904–1998) was one of the greatest Jewish historians of the twentieth century. A pioneer of new foci and methods, Katz brought extraordinary insights to many aspects of Jewish life and its surrounding contexts.
With a keen eye for both “forests” and “trees,” Katz transformed our understanding of many areas of Jewish history, among them: Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages, the social-historical significance of Jewish law, the rise of Orthodoxy in Germany and Hungary, and the emergence of modern anti-Semitism. In this volume, ten leading scholars critically discuss Katz’s work with an appreciation for Katz’s importance in reshaping the way Jewish history is studied.
[more]
The Priest Who Put Europe Back Together
The Life of Rev. Fabian Flynn, CP
Sean Brennan
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
Philp Fabian Flynn led a remarkable life, bearing witness to some of the most pivotal events of the twentieth century. Flynn took part in the invasions of Sicily and Normandy, the Battle of Aachen, and the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest. He acted as confessor to Nazi War Criminals during the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, assisted Hungarian Revolutionaries on the streets of Budapest, and assisted the waves of refugees arriving in Austria feeling the effects of ethnic and political persecution during the Cold War. The Priest Who Put Europe Back Together tells the story of this fascinating life. From solidly middle-class beginnings in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Flynn interacted with and occasionally advised some of the major political, military, and religious leaders of his era. His legacy as a Passionist priest, a chaplain in the US Army, and an official in the Catholic Relief Services was both vast and enormously beneficial. His life and career symbolized the “coming of age” of the United States as a global superpower, and the corresponding growth of the American Catholic Church as an international institution. Both helped liberate half of Europe from Fascist rule, and then helped to rebuild its political, economic, and social foundations, which led to an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. His efforts on behalf of both his country and his Church to contain Communist influence, and to assist the refugees of its tyranny, contributed to its collapse. Flynn was one of the hundreds of Americans who put Europe back together after a period of horrendous self-destruction. In a twentieth century filled with villains and despots, Flynn played a heroic and vital role in extraordinary times.
[more]
Priests and Cults in the Book of the Twelve
Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer
SBL Press, 2016
Key essays that explore a range of attitudes toward clergy and ritual
This book discusses the depictions of the cult and its personnel in the twelve prophetic books commonly referred to as the Book of the Twelve or the Minor Prophets. The articles in the volume explore the following questions: How did these prophetic writers envision the priests and the Levites? What did they think about the ritual aspects of ancient Israelite faith, including not only the official temple cult in Jerusalem but also cultic expressions outside the capital? What, in their views, characterized a faithful priest and what should the relationship be between his cultic performance and the ways in which he lived his life? How does the message of each individual author fit in with the wider Israelite traditions? Finally, who were these prophetic authors, in which historical contexts did they live and work, and what stylistic tools did they use to communicate their message?
Features:
[more]
Primary Lessons
Sarah Bracey White
CavanKerry Press, 2013
Ripped from middle-class life in Philadelphia, and transplanted to a single-parent household in the segregated south, Sarah, a precocious black child struggles to be the master of her fate. She refuses to accept the segregation that tries to confine her—a system her mother accepts as the southern way of life. A brave memoir that testifies to the author’s fiery spirit and sense of self that sustained her through family, social and cultural upheavals.
[more]
Primary Medical Care in Chile
Accessibility under Military Rule
Joseph L. Scarpaci
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
Since Pinochet's regime assumed power in 1973, the Chilean public medical system has been incrementally disassembled in favor of private enterprise, modeled after U.S. HMOs. Scarpaci assembles data ranging from interviews with patients to income statements and balance sheets from the National Health Service System, National Health Fund, and National Statistics Institute to view the financial and cultural impediments imposed by the Pinochet system that have compromised and effectively limited health care accessibility for Chile's adult population.
[more]
Primary Sources on Monsters
Asa Simon Mittman
Arc Humanities Press, 2018
Companion volumes <i>Classic Readings on Monster Theory</i> and <i>Primary Sources on Monsters</i> gather a wide range of readings and sources to enable us to see and understand what monsters can show us about what it means to be human. The first volume introduces important modern theorists of the monstrous and aims to provide interpretive tools and strategies for students to use to grapple with the primary sources in the second volume, which brings together some of the most influential and indicative monster narratives from the West.
[more]
The Prime of Life
A History of Modern Adulthood
Steven Mintz
Harvard University Press, 2015
Adulthood today is undergoing profound transformations. Men and women wait until their thirties to marry, have children, and establish full-time careers, occupying a prolonged period in which they are no longer adolescents but still lack the traditional emblems of adult identity. People at midlife struggle to sustain relationships with friends and partners, to find employment and fulfilling careers, to raise their children successfully, and to resist the aging process.
The Prime of Life puts today’s challenges into new perspective by exploring how past generations navigated the passage to maturity, achieved intimacy and connection, raised children, sought meaning in work, and responded to loss. Coming of age has never been easy or predictable, Steven Mintz shows, and the process has always been shaped by gender and class. But whereas adulthood once meant culturally-prescribed roles and relationships, the social and economic convulsions of the last sixty years have transformed it fundamentally, tearing up these shared scripts and leaving adults to fashion meaning and coherence in an increasingly individualistic culture.
Mintz reconstructs the emotional interior of a life stage too often relegated to self-help books and domestic melodramas. Emphasizing adulthood’s joys and fulfillments as well as its frustrations and regrets, he shows how cultural and historical circumstances have consistently reshaped what it means to be a grown up in contemporary society. The Prime of Life urges us to confront adulthood’s realities with candor and determination and to value and embrace the responsibility, sensible judgment, wisdom, and compassionate understanding it can bring.
[more]
Primed for Violence
Murder, Antisemitism, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Poland
Paul Brykczynski
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
In 1922, voters in the newly created Republic of Poland democratically elected their first president, Gabriel Narutowicz. Because his supporters included a Jewish political party, an opposing faction of antisemites demanded his resignation. Within hours, bloody riots erupted in Warsaw, and within a week the president was assassinated. In the wake of these events, the radical right asserted that only "ethnic Poles" should rule the country, while the left silently capitulated to this demand.
As Paul Brykczynski tells this gripping story, he explores the complex role of antisemitism, nationalism, and violence in Polish politics between the two World Wars. Though focusing on Poland, the book sheds light on the rise of the antisemitic right in Europe and beyond, and on the impact of violence on political culture and discourse.
As Paul Brykczynski tells this gripping story, he explores the complex role of antisemitism, nationalism, and violence in Polish politics between the two World Wars. Though focusing on Poland, the book sheds light on the rise of the antisemitic right in Europe and beyond, and on the impact of violence on political culture and discourse.
[more]
A Primer for Teaching African History
Ten Design Principles
Trevor R. Getz
Duke University Press, 2018
A Primer for Teaching African History is a guide for college and high school teachers who are teaching African history for the first time, for experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their courses, for those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi, and for teachers who want to incorporate African history into their world history courses. Trevor R. Getz offers design principles aimed at facilitating a classroom experience that will help students navigate new knowledge, historical skills, ethical development, and worldviews. He foregrounds the importance of acknowledging and addressing student preconceptions about Africa, challenging chronological approaches to history, exploring identity and geography as ways to access historical African perspectives, and investigating the potential to engage in questions of ethics that studying African history provides. In his discussions of setting goals, pedagogy, assessment, and syllabus design, Getz draws readers into the process of thinking consciously and strategically about designing courses on African history that will challenge students to think critically about Africa and the discipline of history.
[more]
A Primer for Teaching Digital History
Ten Design Principles
Jennifer Guiliano
Duke University Press, 2022
A Primer for Teaching Digital History is a guide for college and high school teachers who are teaching digital history for the first time or for experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their pedagogy. It can also serve those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi, as well as teachers who want to incorporate digital history into their history courses. Offering design principles for approaching digital history that represent the possibilities that digital research and scholarship can take, Jennifer Guiliano outlines potential strategies and methods for building syllabi and curricula. Taking readers through the process of selecting data, identifying learning outcomes, and determining which tools students will use in the classroom, Guiliano outlines popular research methods including digital source criticism, text analysis, and visualization. She also discusses digital archives, exhibits, and collections as well as audiovisual and mixed-media narratives such as short documentaries, podcasts, and multimodal storytelling. Throughout, Guiliano illuminates how digital history can enhance understandings of not just what histories are told but how they are told and who has access to them.
[more]
A Primer for Teaching Environmental History
Ten Design Principles
Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry
Duke University Press, 2018
A Primer for Teaching Environmental History is a guide for college and high school teachers who are teaching environmental history for the first time, for experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their courses, for those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi, and for teachers who want to incorporate environmental history into their world history courses. Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry offer design principles for creating syllabi that will help students navigate a wide range of topics, from food, environmental justice, and natural resources to animal-human relations, senses of place, and climate change. In their discussions of learning objectives, assessment, project-based learning, using technology, and syllabus design, Wakild and Berry draw readers into the process of strategically designing courses on environmental history that will challenge students to think critically about one of the most urgent topics of study in the twenty-first century.
[more]
A Primer for Teaching Pacific Histories
Ten Design Principles
Matt K.Matsuda
Duke University Press, 2020
A Primer for Teaching Pacific Histories is a guide for college and high school teachers who are teaching Pacific histories for the first time or for experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their courses. It can also serve those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi, as well as teachers who want to incorporate Pacific histories into their world history courses. Matt K. Matsuda offers design principles for creating syllabi that will help students navigate a wide range of topics, from settler colonialism, national liberation, and warfare to tourism, popular culture, and identity. He also discusses practical pedagogical techniques and tips, project-based assignments, digital resources, and how Pacific approaches to teaching history differ from customary Western practices. Placing the Pacific Islands at the center of analysis, Matsuda draws readers into the process of strategically designing courses that will challenge students to think critically about the interconnected histories of East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas within a global framework.
[more]
A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History
Ten Design Principles
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks and Urmi Engineer Willoughby
Duke University Press, 2018
A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History is a guide for college and high school teachers who are teaching women, gender, and sexuality in history for the first time, for experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their courses, for those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi, and for teachers who want to incorporate these issues into their world history classes. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks and Urmi Engineer Willoughby present possible course topics, themes, concepts, and approaches while offering practical advice on materials and strategies helpful for teaching courses from a global perspective in today's teaching environment for today's students. In their discussions of pedagogy, syllabus organization, fostering students' historical empathy, and connecting students with their community, Wiesner-Hanks and Willoughby draw readers into the process of strategically designing courses that will enable students to analyze gender and sexuality in history, whether their students are new to this process or hold powerful and personal commitments to the issues it raises.
[more]
A Primer for Teaching World History
Ten Design Principles
Antoinette Burton
Duke University Press, 2012
A Primer for Teaching World History is a guide for college and high school teachers who are designing an introductory-level world history syllabus for the first time, for those who already teach world history and are seeking new ideas or approaches, and for those who train future teachers to prepare any history course with a global or transnational focus. Drawing on her own classroom practices, as well as her career as a historian, Antoinette Burton offers a set of principles to help instructors think about how to design their courses with specific goals in mind, whatever those may be. She encourages teachers to envision the world history syllabus as having an architecture: a fundamental, underlying structure or interpretive focus that runs throughout the course, shaping students' experiences, offering pathways in and out of "the global," and reflecting the teacher's convictions about the world and the work of history.
[more]
Primeval Kinship
How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society
Bernard Chapais
Harvard University Press, 2008
At some point in the course of evolution—from a primeval social organization of early hominids—all human societies, past and present, would emerge. In this account of the dawn of human society, Bernard Chapais shows that our knowledge about kinship and society in nonhuman primates supports, and informs, ideas first put forward by the distinguished social anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Chapais contends that only a few evolutionary steps were required to bridge the gap between the kinship structures of our closest relatives—chimpanzees and bonobos—and the human kinship configuration. The pivotal event, the author proposes, was the evolution of sexual alliances. Pair-bonding transformed a social organization loosely based on kinship into one exhibiting the strong hold of kinship and affinity. The implication is that the gap between chimpanzee societies and pre-linguistic hominid societies is narrower than we might think.
Many books on kinship have been written by social anthropologists, but Primeval Kinship is the first book dedicated to the evolutionary origins of human kinship. And perhaps equally important, it is the first book to suggest that the study of kinship and social organization can provide a link between social and biological anthropology.
[more]
The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage
An Enlightenment Problematic
Tony C. Brown
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Tony C. Brown examines “the inescapable yet infinitely troubling figure of the not-quite-nothing” in Enlightenment attempts to think about the aesthetic and the savage. The various texts Brown considers—including the writings of Addison, Rousseau, Kant, and Defoe—turn to exotic figures in order to delimit the aesthetic, and to aesthetics in order to comprehend the savage.
In his intriguing exploration Brown discovers that the primitive introduces into the aesthetic and the savage an element that proves necessary yet difficult to conceive. At its most profound, Brown explains, this element engenders a loss of confidence in one’s ability to understand the human’s relation to itself and to the world. That loss of confidence—what Brown refers to as a breach in anthropological security—traces to an inability to maintain a sense of self in the face of the New World. Demonstrating the impact of the primitive on the aesthetic and the savage, he shows how the eighteenth-century writers he focuses on struggle to define the human’s place in the world. As Brown explains, these authors go back again and again to “exotic” examples from the New World—such as Indian burial mounds and Maori tattooing practice—making them so ubiquitous that they come to underwrite, even produce, philosophy and aesthetics.
[more]
Primo Levi
An Identikit
Marco Belpoliti
Seagull Books, 2022
Drawing on twenty years of research, this is the definitive biography of Primo Levi.
Over the last seventy years, Primo Levi (1919–87) has been recognized as the foremost literary witness of the extermination of the European Jews. In Primo Levi: An Identikit, a product of twenty years of research, Marco Belpoliti explores Levi’s tormented life, his trajectory as a writer and intellectual, and, above all, his multifaceted and complex oeuvre.
Organized in a mosaic format, this volume devotes a different chapter to each of Levi’s books. In addition to tracing the history of each book’s composition, publication, and literary influences, Belpoliti explores their contents across the many worlds of Primo Levi: from chemistry to anthropology, biology to ethology, space flights to linguistics. If This Is a Man, his initially rejected masterpiece, is also reread with a fresh perspective. We learn of dreams, animals, and travel; of literary writing, comedy, and tragedy; of shame, memory, and the relationship with other writers such as Franz Kafka and Georges Perec, Jean Améry and Varlam Shalamov. Fundamental themes such as Judaism, the camp, and testimony innervate the book, which is complemented by photographs and letters found by the author in hitherto unexplored archives.
This will be the definitive book on Primo Levi, a treasure trove of stories and reflections that paint a rich, nuanced composite portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most unique and urgent voices.
Over the last seventy years, Primo Levi (1919–87) has been recognized as the foremost literary witness of the extermination of the European Jews. In Primo Levi: An Identikit, a product of twenty years of research, Marco Belpoliti explores Levi’s tormented life, his trajectory as a writer and intellectual, and, above all, his multifaceted and complex oeuvre.
Organized in a mosaic format, this volume devotes a different chapter to each of Levi’s books. In addition to tracing the history of each book’s composition, publication, and literary influences, Belpoliti explores their contents across the many worlds of Primo Levi: from chemistry to anthropology, biology to ethology, space flights to linguistics. If This Is a Man, his initially rejected masterpiece, is also reread with a fresh perspective. We learn of dreams, animals, and travel; of literary writing, comedy, and tragedy; of shame, memory, and the relationship with other writers such as Franz Kafka and Georges Perec, Jean Améry and Varlam Shalamov. Fundamental themes such as Judaism, the camp, and testimony innervate the book, which is complemented by photographs and letters found by the author in hitherto unexplored archives.
This will be the definitive book on Primo Levi, a treasure trove of stories and reflections that paint a rich, nuanced composite portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most unique and urgent voices.
[more]
Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival
Frederic D. Homer
University of Missouri Press, 2001
At the age of twenty-five, Primo Levi was sent to Hell. Levi, an Italian chemist from Turin, was one of many swept up in the Holocaust of World War II and sent to die in the German concentration camp in Auschwitz. Of the 650 people transported to the camp in his group, only 15 men and 9 women survived. After Soviet liberation of the camp in 1945, Levi wrote books, essays, short stories, poetry, and a novel, in which he painstakingly described the horrors of his experience at Auschwitz. He also spent the rest of his life struggling with the fact that he was not among those who were killed.
In Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival, Frederic D. Homer looks at Primo Levi's life but, more important, shows him to be a significant political philosopher. In the course of his writings, Levi asked and answered his most haunting question: can someone be brutalized by a terrifying experience and, upon return to "ordinary life," recover from the physical and moral destruction he has suffered? Levi used this question to develop a philosophy positing that although man is no match for life, he can become better prepared to contend with the tragedies in life.
According to Levi, the horrors of the world occur because of the strength of human tendencies, which make relationships between human beings exceedingly fragile. He believed that we are ill-constituted beings who have tendencies toward violence and domination, dividing ourselves into Us and Them, with very shallow loyalties. He also maintained that our only refuge is in education and responsibility, which may counter these tendencies. Homer calls Levi's philosophy "optimistic pessimism."
As Homer demonstrates, Levi took his past experiences into account to determine that goodwill and democratic institutions do not come easily to people. Liberal society is to be earned through discipline and responsibility toward our weaknesses. Levi's answer is "civilized liberalism." To achieve this we must counter some of our most stubborn tendencies.
Homer also explores the impact of Levi's death, an apparent suicide, on the way in which his work and theories have been perceived. While several critics discount Levi's work because of the nature of his death, Homer argues that his death is consistent with his philosophy. A book rich in brutally honest philosophy, Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival compels one to look at serious questions about life, tragedy, optimism, solidarity, violence, and human nature.
[more]
Prince Charoon et al
South East Asia
Andrew Dalby
Haus Publishing, 2010
Southeast Asia needs to be dealt with as a whole, because, although the one national delegation from the region (Siam) took a minor part, nationalist movements in several Southeast Asian countries reached an early climax - significant though inconclusive - in the years 1919-1920. The planned Peace Conference, Wilson's Fourteen Points, and the victory of Communism in Russia, all contributed to this activity, and in spite of national differences it needs to be seen as a whole. The focus of the book will be on developments around 1919; thus it will bring out for the first time the unexpected significance for South-east Asia of the 1919 milestone. It will also have a biographical bias - taking a special interest in the personalities of major figures in this important period, in order to show the influences and the patterns of thought that underlie their activities at the time of the Peace Conference. Following a brief introduction making the link between world events in 1919 and South-east Asia, the book sets the scene in the region. Succeeding chapters deal with the five countries - Siam, Vietnam, Burma, Indonesia, Philippines - in which the years 1919-21 were of special significance, as well as the impact of the peace conferences in relationships with their neighbours, the growth of international Communism and global politics in later years.
[more]
A Prince of Our Disorder
The Life of T. E. Lawrence
John E. Mack
Harvard University Press, 1998
When this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography first appeared in 1976, it rescued T. E. Lawrence from the mythologizing that had seemed to be his fate. In it, John Mack humanely and objectively explores the relationship between Lawrence's inner life and his historically significant actions.
Extensive interviews, far-flung correspondence, access to War Office dispatches and unpublished letters provide the basis for Mack's sensitive investigation of the psychiatric dimensions of Lawrence's personality. In addition, Mack examines the pertinent history, politics, and sociology of the time in order to weigh the real forces with which Lawrence contended and which impinged upon him.
[more]
Prince of Tricksters
The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook
Matt Houlbrook
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Meet Netley Lucas, Prince of Tricksters—royal biographer, best-selling crime writer, and gentleman crook. In the years after the Great War, Lucas becomes infamous for climbing the British social ladder by his expert trickery—his changing names and telling of tales. An impudent young playboy and a confessed confidence trickster, he finances his far-flung hedonism through fraud and false pretenses. After repeated spells in prison, Lucas transforms himself into a confessing “ex-crook,” turning his inside knowledge of the underworld into a lucrative career as freelance journalist and crime expert. But then he’s found out again—exposed and disgraced for faking an exclusive about a murder case. So he reinvents himself, taking a new name and embarking on a prolific, if short-lived, career as a royal biographer and publisher. Chased around the world by detectives and journalists after yet another sensational scandal, the gentleman crook dies as spectacularly as he lived—a washed-up alcoholic, asphyxiated in a fire of his own making.
The lives of Netley Lucas are as flamboyant as they are unlikely. In Prince of Tricksters, Matt Houlbrook picks up the threads of Lucas’s colorful lies and lives. Interweaving crime writing and court records, letters and life-writing, Houlbrook tells Lucas’s fascinating story and, in the process, provides a panoramic view of the 1920s and ’30s. In the restless times after the Great War, the gentlemanly trickster was an exemplary figure, whose tall tales and bogus biographies exposed the everyday difficulties of knowing who and what to trust. Tracing how Lucas both evoked and unsettled the world through which he moved, Houlbrook shows how he prompted a pervasive crisis of confidence that encompassed British society, culture, and politics.
Taking readers on a romp through Britain, North America, and eventually into Africa, Houlbrook confronts readers with the limits of our knowledge of the past and challenges us to think anew about what history is and how it might be made differently.
The lives of Netley Lucas are as flamboyant as they are unlikely. In Prince of Tricksters, Matt Houlbrook picks up the threads of Lucas’s colorful lies and lives. Interweaving crime writing and court records, letters and life-writing, Houlbrook tells Lucas’s fascinating story and, in the process, provides a panoramic view of the 1920s and ’30s. In the restless times after the Great War, the gentlemanly trickster was an exemplary figure, whose tall tales and bogus biographies exposed the everyday difficulties of knowing who and what to trust. Tracing how Lucas both evoked and unsettled the world through which he moved, Houlbrook shows how he prompted a pervasive crisis of confidence that encompassed British society, culture, and politics.
Taking readers on a romp through Britain, North America, and eventually into Africa, Houlbrook confronts readers with the limits of our knowledge of the past and challenges us to think anew about what history is and how it might be made differently.
[more]
Prince Saionji
Japan
Jonathan Clements
Haus Publishing, 2010
Prince Saionji Kinmochi (1849-1940). The Japanese delegation at the Paris Peace Conference did not have the Japanese prime or foreign ministers with them as they had only just been elected and had plenty to do back home. The delegation was instead led by Prince Saionji, the dashing 'kingmaker' of early 20th-century Japanese politics whose life spanned the arrival of Commodore Perry and his 'black ships', the Japanese civil war, the Meiji Restoration, the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles, and the rise of Japanese militarism. Unlike many of the conservatives of his day, Saionji was a man with experience of international diplomacy and admiration for European culture. Brought up in the days of the last Shogun, he became an active supporter of Japan's new ruling regime, after the Shogun was overthrown in a civil war, and a leading figure in the post-Restoration reform movement. In 1869 he founded the institution that would become the Ritsumeikan University - literally, 'The place to establish one's destiny'. He was sent to France for nine years to investigate Western technology and philosophy, and served for a decade as a Japanese ambassador in Europe. Returning to Japan, he served twice as Minister of Education and later became prime minister before resigning to become a revered elder statesman. Japan entered the First World War on the Allied side, seizing German possessions in China and the Pacific. In the closing days of the war, Japanese military forces participated in the Siberian Intervention - an American-led invasion of eastern Russia against Communist insurgents. At the Conference Saionji's presence was initially regarded by the Japanese as a sign that Japan had become a fully-fledged member of the international community and accepted on an equal footing with the Western Powers. His delegation introduced a controversial proposal to legally enshrine racial equality as one of the tenets of the League of Nations. The Japanese were also keen to grab colonies of their own, and went head-to-head with the Chinese delegation over the fate of the former German possession of Shandong. When Shandong was 'returned' not to China but to its Japanese occupiers, riots broke out in China. Despite Saionji's statesmanship and diplomacy, the Treaty of Versailles was regarded by many Japanese as a slap in the face. Saionji's influence weakened in his last years, while his party was dissolved and amalgamated with others.
[more]
Princes and Political Cultures
The New Tiberian Senatorial Decrees
Greg Rowe
University of Michigan Press, 2002
An investigation of the transformation of the Roman state from Republic to dynastic monarchy
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The Prince's Body
Vincenzo Gonzaga and Renaissance Medicine
Valeria Finucci
Harvard University Press, 2015
Defining the proper female body, seeking elective surgery for beauty, enjoying lavish spa treatments, and combating impotence might seem like today’s celebrity infatuations. However, these preoccupations were very much alive in the early modern period. Valeria Finucci recounts the story of a well-known patron of arts and music in Renaissance Italy, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua (1562–1612), to examine the culture, fears, and captivations of his times. Using four notorious moments in Vincenzo’s life, Finucci explores changing concepts of sexuality, reproduction, beauty, and aging.
The first was Vincenzo’s inability to consummate his earliest marriage and subsequent medical inquiry, which elucidates new concepts of female anatomy. Second, Vincenzo’s interactions with Bolognese doctor Gaspare Tagliacozzi, the “father of plastic surgery,” illuminate contemporary fascinations with elective procedures. Vincenzo’s use of thermal spas explores the proliferation of holistic, noninvasive therapies to manage pain, detoxify, and rehabilitate what the medicine of the time could not address. And finally, Vincenzo’s search for a cure for impotence later in life analyzes masculinity and aging.
By examining letters, doctors’ advice, reports, receipts, and travelogues, together with (and against) medical, herbal, theological, even legal publications of the period, Finucci describes an early modern cultural history of the pathology of human reproduction, the physiology of aging, and the science of rejuvenation as they affected a prince with a large ego and an even larger purse. In doing so, she deftly marries salacious tales with historical analysis to tell a broader story of Italian Renaissance cultural adjustments and obsessions.
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The Princess Nun
Bunchi, Buddhist Reform, and Gender in Early Edo Japan
Gina Cogan
Harvard University Press, 2014
The Princess Nun tells the story of Bunchi (1619-1697), daughter of Emperor Go-Mizunoo and founder of Enshōji. Bunchi advocated strict adherence to monastic precepts while devoting herself to the posthumous welfare of her family. As the first full-length biographical study of a premodern Japanese nun, this book incorporates issues of gender and social status into its discussion of Bunchi's ascetic practice and religious reforms to rewrite the history of Buddhist reform and Tokugawa religion.
Gina Cogan's approach moves beyond the dichotomy of oppression and liberation that dogs the study of non-Western and premodern women to show how Bunchi's aristocratic status enabled her to carry out reforms despite her gender, while simultaneously acknowledging how that same status contributed to their conservative nature. Cogan's analysis of how Bunchi used her prestigious position to further her goals places the book in conversation with other works on powerful religious women, like Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Avila. Through its illumination of the relationship between the court and the shogunate and its analysis of the practice of courtly Buddhism from a female perspective, this study brings historical depth and fresh theoretical insight into the role of gender and class in early Edo Buddhism.
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Princesses Mary and Elizabeth Tudor and the Gift Book Exchange
Valerie Schutte
Arc Humanities Press, 2021
This is the first book to offer a comparison of these two famous Tudor queens as princesses, suggesting that their early lives need to be more closely examined together. It offers a detailed case study of the four extant dedications that Elizabeth Tudor wrote to accompany manuscript translations that she gave to Henry VIII, his then wife, Katherine Parr, and to Elizabeth's brother Edward (VI of England) as New Year’s gifts from 1545 to 1548. Additionally, it seeks to compare Elizabeth with her sister Mary, beginning with pre-accession dedications given to each of them, exploring two of Mary's own translations, moving to their typical patterns of New Year's gift giving, and ending on the textual transmission of their translations that were later published in 1548. It argues that Elizabeth’s dedications to her family, while participating in the tradition of giving books, were unique and in the dedications she intended not only to represent her loyalty but also to stabilize her position within the royal family.
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Principles for Progress
Essays on Religion and Modernity by `Abdu'l-Bahá
Translated and with an Introduction by Sen McGlinn
Leiden University Press, 2018
This book presents three of the works of Abduʾl-Bahā, son of the founder of the Bahāʾi Faith, which deal with social and political issues.
In The Secret of Divine Civilization (1875) Abduʾl-Bahā supports the administrative and broader social reforms of Mirzā Hosayn Khān, but looks mainly for organic reform through the efforts of Iranian intellectuals to awaken and educate the masses. In this work, Abduʾl-Bahā gives virtuous and progressive Islamic clerics a leading role among these intellectuals—indeed most of his appeals are directed specifically to them. A Traveller’s Narrative (1889/90) is an authoritative statement of the overarching concepts of Bahā’i social and political thinking. The Art of Governance (1892/93) was written as Iran entered a prerevolutionary phase, and ideas that we recognize today as the precursors of political Islam were spreading. It sets out the principles underlying the ideal relationship between religion and politics and between the government and the people.
In addition to presenting the first parallel text translations of these works, the Persian texts incorporate notes on variants in the early published sources. An introduction outlines the intellectual and political landscape from which Abduʾl-Bahā wrote, and in which his readers lived.
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Print Culture in a Diverse America
Edited by James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand
University of Illinois Press, 1998
In the modern era, there arose a prolific and vibrant print culture—books, newspapers, and magazines issued by and for diverse, often marginalized, groups. This long-overdue collection offers a unique foray into the multicultural world of reading and readers in the United States.
The contributors to this award-winning collection pen interdisciplinary essays that examine the many ways print culture functions within different groups. The essays link gender, class, and ethnicity to the uses and goals of a wide variety of publications and also explore the role print materials play in constructing historical events like the Titanic disaster.
Contributors: Lynne M. Adrian, Steven Biel, James P. Danky, Elizabeth Davey, Michael Fultz, Jacqueline Goldsby, Norma Fay Green, Violet Johnson, Elizabeth McHenry, Christine Pawley, Yumei Sun, and Rudolph J. Vecoli
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PRINT MANUSCRIPT PERFORMANCE
THE CHANGING RELATIONS OF THE MEDIA IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
ARTHUR F. MAROTTI
The Ohio State University Press, 2000
The eleven essays in this volume explore the complex interactions in early modern England between a technologically advanced culture of the printed book and a still powerful traditional culture of the spoken word, spectacle, and manuscript. Scholars who work on manuscript culture, the history of printing, cultural history, historical bibliography, and the institutions of early modern drama and theater have been brought together to address such topics as the social character of texts, historical changes in notions of literary authority and intellectual property, the mutual influence and tensions between the different forms of “publication,” and the epistemological and social implications of various communications technologies.
Although canonical literary writers such as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Rochester are discussed, the field of writing examined is a broad one, embracing political speeches, coterie manuscript poetry, popular pamphlets, parochially targeted martyrdom accounts, and news reports. Setting writers, audiences, and texts in their specific historical context, the contributors focus on a period in early modern England, from the late sixteenth through the late seventeenth century, when the shift from orality and manuscript communication to print was part of large-scale cultural change. Arthur F. Marotti’s and Michael D. Bristol’s introduction analyzes some of the sociocultural issues implicit in the collection and relates the essays to contemporary work in textual studies, bibliography, and publication history.
Although canonical literary writers such as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Rochester are discussed, the field of writing examined is a broad one, embracing political speeches, coterie manuscript poetry, popular pamphlets, parochially targeted martyrdom accounts, and news reports. Setting writers, audiences, and texts in their specific historical context, the contributors focus on a period in early modern England, from the late sixteenth through the late seventeenth century, when the shift from orality and manuscript communication to print was part of large-scale cultural change. Arthur F. Marotti’s and Michael D. Bristol’s introduction analyzes some of the sociocultural issues implicit in the collection and relates the essays to contemporary work in textual studies, bibliography, and publication history.
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The Printed Reader
Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Amelia Dale
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Shortlisted for the 2021 BARS First Book Prize (British Association for Romantic Studies)
The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. Through intersecting readings of quixotic narratives, including work by Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, George Colman, Richard Graves, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Dale argues that literature was envisaged as imprinting—most crucially, in gendered terms—the reader’s mind, character, and body. The Printed Reader brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism. Tracing the meanings of quixotic readers’ bodies, The Printed Reader claims the social and political text that is the quixotic reader is structured by the experiential, affective, and sexual resonances of imprinting and impressions.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. Through intersecting readings of quixotic narratives, including work by Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, George Colman, Richard Graves, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Dale argues that literature was envisaged as imprinting—most crucially, in gendered terms—the reader’s mind, character, and body. The Printed Reader brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism. Tracing the meanings of quixotic readers’ bodies, The Printed Reader claims the social and political text that is the quixotic reader is structured by the experiential, affective, and sexual resonances of imprinting and impressions.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Printing a Mediterranean World
Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography
Sean Roberts
Harvard University Press, 2012
In 1482, the Florentine humanist and statesman Francesco Berlinghieri produced the Geographia, a book of over one hundred folio leaves describing the world in Italian verse, inspired by the ancient Greek geography of Ptolemy. The poem, divided into seven books (one for each day of the week the author “travels” the known world), is interleaved with lavishly engraved maps to accompany readers on this journey.
Sean Roberts demonstrates that the Geographia represents the moment of transition between printing and manuscript culture, while forming a critical base for the rise of modern cartography. Simultaneously, the use of the Geographia as a diplomatic gift from Florence to the Ottoman Empire tells another story. This exchange expands our understanding of Mediterranean politics, European perceptions of the Ottomans, and Ottoman interest in mapping and print. The envoy to the Sultan represented the aspirations of the Florentine state, which chose not to bestow some other highly valued good, such as the city’s renowned textiles, but instead the best example of what Florentine visual, material, and intellectual culture had to offer.
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Printing and Prophecy
Prognostication and Media Change 1450-1550
Jonathan Green
University of Michigan Press, 2011
Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change 1450-1550 examines prognostic traditions and late medieval prophetic texts in the first century of printing and their effect on the new medium of print. The many prophetic and prognostic works that followed Europe's earliest known printed book---not the Gutenberg Bible, but the Sibyl's Prophecy, printed by Gutenberg two years earlier and known today only from a single page---over the next century were perennial best sellers for many printers, and they provide the modern observer with a unique way to study the history and inner workings of the print medium. The very popularity of these works, often published as affordable booklets, raised fears of social unrest. Printers therefore had to meet customer demand while at the same time channeling readers' reactions along approved paths. Authors were packaged---and packaged themselves---in word and image to respond to the tension, while leading figures of early modern culture such as Paracelsus, Martin Luther, and Sebastian Brant used printed prophecies for their own purposes in a rapidly changing society.
Based on a wide reading of many sources, Printing and Prophecy contributes to the study of early modern literature, including how print changed the relationship among authors, readers, and texts. The prophetic and astrological texts the book examines document changes in early modern society that are particularly relevant to German studies and are key texts for understanding the development of science, religion, and popular culture in the early modern period. By combining the methods of cultural studies and book history, this volume brings a new perspective to the study of Gutenberg and later printers.
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Printing for Profit
The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th–17th Centuries)
Lucille Chia
Harvard University Press, 2002
From the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the publishers of Jianyang in Fujian province played a conspicuous role in the Chinese book trade. Unlike the products of government and educational presses, their publications were destined for the retail book market. These publishers survived by responding to consumer demands for dictionaries, histories, geographies, medical texts, encyclopedias, primers, how-to books, novels, and anthologies. Their publications reflect the varied needs of the full range of readers in late imperial China and allow us to study the reading habits, tastes, and literacy of different social groups. The publishers of Jianyang were also businessmen, and their efforts to produce books efficiently, meet the demands of the market, and distribute their publications provide a window on commerce and industry and the growth of regional and national markets.
The broad cultural, historical, and geographical scope of the Jianyang book trade makes it an ideal subject for the study of publishing in China. Based on an extensive study of Jianyang imprints, genealogies of the leading families of printers, local histories, documents, and annotated catalogs and bibliographies, Lucille Chia has written not only a history of commercial printing but also a wide-ranging study of the culture of the book in traditional China.
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Printing Landmarks
Popular Geography and Meisho Zue in Late Tokugawa Japan
Robert Goree
Harvard University Press
Printing Landmarks tells the story of the late Tokugawa period’s most distinctive form of popular geography: meisho zue. Beginning with the publication of Miyako meisho zue in 1780, these monumental books deployed lovingly detailed illustrations and informative prose to showcase famous places (meisho) in ways that transcended the limited scope, quality, and reliability of earlier guidebooks and gazetteers. Putting into spellbinding print countless landmarks of cultural significance, the makers of meisho zue created an opportunity for readers to experience places located all over the Japanese archipelago.
In this groundbreaking multidisciplinary study, Robert Goree draws on diverse archival and scholarly sources to explore why meisho zue enjoyed widespread and enduring popularity. Examining their readership, compilation practices, illustration techniques, cartographic properties, ideological import, and production networks, Goree finds that the appeal of the books, far from accidental, resulted from specific choices editors and illustrators made about form, content, and process. Spanning the fields of book history, travel literature, map history, and visual culture, Printing Landmarks provides a new perspective on Tokugawa-period culture by showing how meisho zue depicted inspiring geographies in which social harmony, economic prosperity, and natural stability made for a peaceful polity.
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Printing Types
Their History, Forms, and Use; A Study in Survivals
Daniel Berkeley Updike
Harvard University Press
In his comprehensive study of types from the earliest times to the twentieth century, Daniel Berkeley Updike, founder of the famous Merrymount Press of Boston, traces the sequence of development in typography and discusses the relative importance of each period and the lesson that it holds for the modern printer. The 367 illustrations reproduce carefully selected pages from rare and beautiful books. The text constitutes a running commentary on the historical and artistic significance of these specimens, which exemplify the best work of printers and type founders from Gutenberg to Bruce Rogers. The closing chapters on choice of type and on the industrial conditions of the past and their relationship to the problem of printers today are particularly valuable.
Printing Types is the master work of a master printer, collecting in two volumes a wealth of material once scattered through widely diverse sources. Everyone interested in the graphic arts will welcome the reissue of this classic on the art of printing.
[more]
Printing Types
Their History, Forms, and Use; A Study in Survivals
Daniel Berkeley Updike
Harvard University Press
In his comprehensive study of types from the earliest times to the twentieth century, Updike, founder of the famous Merrymount Press of Boston, traces the sequence of development in typography and discusses the relative importance of each period and the lesson that it holds for the modern printer. The 367 illustrations reproduce carefully selected pages from rare and beautiful books. The text constitutes a running commentary on the historical and artistic significance of these specimens, which exemplify the best work of printers and type founders from Gutenberg to Bruce Rogers. The closing chapters on choice of type and on the industrial conditions of the past and their relationship to the problem of printers today are particularly valuable.
Printing Types is the master work of a master printer, collecting in two volumes a wealth of material once scattered through widely diverse sources. Everyone interested in the graphic arts will welcome the reissue of this classic on the art of printing.
[more]
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