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30072 books about History and 1707
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30072 books about History and 1707
30072 books about History
1707 start with R start with R
1707 start with R start with R
The Roar and the Silence
A History of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode
Ronald M. James
University of Nevada Press, 1998
Nevada’s Comstock Mining District has been the focus of legend since it first burst into international prominence in the late 1850s, and its principal settlement, Virginia City, endures in the popular mind as the West’s quintessential mining camp. But the authentic history of the Comstock is far more complex and interesting than its colorful image. Contrary to legend, Virginia City spent only its first few years as a ramshackle mining camp. The mining boom quickly turned it into a thriving urban center, at its peak one of the largest cities west of the Mississippi, replete with most of the amenities of any large city of its time.
The lure of the area’s fabulous wealth attracted a remarkably heterogenous population from around the world and offered employment to dozens of trades and thousands of people, both men and women, representing every one of the region’s diverse ethnic groups.
Ronald James’s brilliant account of the Comstock’s long and eventful history—the first comprehensive study of the subject in over a century—examines every aspect of the region and employs information gleaned from hundreds of written sources, interviews, archeological research, computer analysis, folklore, gender studies, physical geography, and architectural and art history, as well as over fifty rare photographs, many of them previously unpublished.
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The Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection
A History and Catalog
David Shields
University of Texas Press, 2022
The Rob Roy Kelly Wood Type Collection is a comprehensive collection of wood type manufactured and used for printing in nineteenth-century America. Comprising nearly 150 typefaces of various sizes and styles, it was amassed by noted design educator and historian Rob Roy Kelly starting in 1957 and is now held by the University of Texas. Although Kelly himself published a 1969 book on wood type and nineteenth-century typographic history, there has been little written about the creation of the wood type forms, the collection, or Kelly.
In this book, David Shields rigorously updates and expands upon Kelly’s historical information about the types, clarifying the collection’s exact composition and providing a better understanding of the stylistic development of wood type forms during the nineteenth century. Using rich materials from the period, Shields provides a stunning visual context that complements the textual history of each typeface. He also highlights the non-typographic material in the collection—such as borders, rules, ornaments, and image cuts—that have not been previously examined. Featuring over 300 color illustrations, this written history and catalog is bound to spark renewed interest in the collection and its broader typographic period.
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Robber Baron
The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes
John Franch
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Robber Baron is the first biography of the streetcar magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905), who stands alongside J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie as one of the most colorful and controversial public figures in Gilded Age America. John Franch draws upon every available source to tell the story of the man who was the mastermind behind Chicago’s Loop Elevated and the London Underground, the namesake of the University of Chicago’s observatory, and the inspiration for Frank Cowperwood, the ruthless protagonist of Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire: The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic. Despite various philanthropic efforts, Yerkes and his unscrupulous tactics were despised by the press and public, and he left Chicago a bitter man. While Yerkes’s enduring public works testify to his success and desire to leave a lasting impression on his world, Robber Baron also uncovers the cost of this boundless ambition.
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Robbers Roost Recollections
Pearl Baker
Utah State University Press, 1991
Robert Ashley
Kyle Gann
University of Illinois Press, 2012
This book explores the life and works of the pioneering opera composer Robert Ashley, one of the leading American composers of the post-Cage generation. Ashley's innovations began in the 1960s when he, along with Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman, formed the Sonic Arts Union, a group that turned conceptualism toward electronics. He was also instrumental in the influential ONCE Group, a theatrical ensemble that toured extensively in the 1960s.During his tenure as its director, the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor presented most of the decade's pioneers of the performing arts. Particularly known for his development of television operas beginning with Perfect Lives, Ashley spun a long series of similar text/music works, sometimes termed "performance novels." These massive pieces have been compared with Wagner's Ring Cycle for the vastness of their vision, though the materials are completely different, often incorporating noise backgrounds, vernacular music, and highly structured, even serialized, musical structures.
Drawing on extensive research into Ashley's early years in Ann Arbor and interviews with Ashley and his collaborators, Kyle Gann chronicles the life and work of this musical innovator and provides an overview of the avant-garde milieu of the 1960s and 1970s to which he was so central. Gann examines all nine of Ashley's major operas to date in detail, along with many minor works, revealing the fanatical structures that underlie Ashley's music as well as private references hidden in his opera librettos.
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Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City
The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer
Wendell E. Pritchett
University of Chicago Press, 2008
From his role as Franklin Roosevelt’s “negro advisor” to his appointment under Lyndon Johnson as the first secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert Clifton Weaver was one of the most influential domestic policy makers and civil rights advocates of the twentieth century. This volume, the first biography of the first African American to hold a cabinet position in the federal government, rescues from obscurity the story of a man whose legacy continues to affect American race relations and the cities in which they largely play out.
Tracing Weaver’s career through the creation, expansion, and contraction of New Deal liberalism, Wendell E. Pritchett illuminates his instrumental role in the birth of almost every urban initiative of the period, from public housing and urban renewal to affirmative action and rent control. Beyond these policy achievements, Weaver also founded racial liberalism, a new approach to race relations that propelled him through a series of high-level positions in public and private agencies working to promote racial cooperation in American cities. But Pritchett shows that despite Weaver’s efforts to make race irrelevant, white and black Americans continued to call on him to mediate between the races—a position that grew increasingly untenable as Weaver remained caught between the white power structure to which he pledged his allegiance and the African Americans whose lives he devoted his career to improving.
Tracing Weaver’s career through the creation, expansion, and contraction of New Deal liberalism, Wendell E. Pritchett illuminates his instrumental role in the birth of almost every urban initiative of the period, from public housing and urban renewal to affirmative action and rent control. Beyond these policy achievements, Weaver also founded racial liberalism, a new approach to race relations that propelled him through a series of high-level positions in public and private agencies working to promote racial cooperation in American cities. But Pritchett shows that despite Weaver’s efforts to make race irrelevant, white and black Americans continued to call on him to mediate between the races—a position that grew increasingly untenable as Weaver remained caught between the white power structure to which he pledged his allegiance and the African Americans whose lives he devoted his career to improving.
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Robert de Cotte and the Perfection of Architecture in Eighteenth-Century France
Robert Neuman
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Robert de Cotte (1656/7-1735), Principal Architect to the King of France, was among the most prominent European architects of his day. In a period that witnessed the ascendancy of Paris over Rome as the international center of fashion, princes and nobles in Germany, Italy, and Spain eagerly commissioned him to design buildings in the French court style. Robert Neuman provides the first comprehensive examination of fifty or so building projects by de Cotte, which include such extant works as the Hôtel d'Estrées, Paris; Schloss Poppelsdorf, Bonn; and his universally acknowledged masterpiece, the Palais Rohan, Strasbourg.
After describing de Cotte's training and the professional context in which he worked, Neuman offers a thorough survey of de Cotte's output. For each commission, he recreates the actual design process, showing how de Cotte manipulated an accepted vocabulary of architectural forms to meet the patron's specific requirements. De Cotte's own drawings, many reproduced here for the first time, and quotations from a wide variety of contemporary writings vividly supplement the case histories. Beautifully illustrated, Neuman's much-needed book reveals de Cotte as an innovative and strikingly modern architect.
After describing de Cotte's training and the professional context in which he worked, Neuman offers a thorough survey of de Cotte's output. For each commission, he recreates the actual design process, showing how de Cotte manipulated an accepted vocabulary of architectural forms to meet the patron's specific requirements. De Cotte's own drawings, many reproduced here for the first time, and quotations from a wide variety of contemporary writings vividly supplement the case histories. Beautifully illustrated, Neuman's much-needed book reveals de Cotte as an innovative and strikingly modern architect.
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Robert E. Sherwood
The Playwright in Peace and War
Harriet Hyman Alonso
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
One of the nation's first film critics, an acclaimed speechwriter on his own and for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a propagandist during World War II, and a leading producer on Broadway, Robert E. Sherwood scripted some of the most popular plays and films of his day, including Waterloo Bridge, The Best Years of Our Lives, Idiot's Delight, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and Rebecca. His work brought him four Pulitzer Prizes and an Oscar. In his personal life, however, he was driven by a deep conviction that war was a societal evil that must be eradicated and human rights a moral responsibility that all governments should protect. At times, his belief in pacifism and his commitment to defending freedom and justice came into conflict with each other, causing frustration and emotional trauma which found their way into his writings and actions.
In this book, Harriet Hyman Alonso unravels Sherwood's inner struggle and portrays his political journey. Relying largely on his letters, diaries, plays, films, essays, and biography of Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, she traces Sherwood's obsession with the world of politics and its effects on his life and art, from his experience as a soldier in World War I to the Cold War. She also describes his participation in the Algonquin Round Table, his friendships and working relationships with such notables as Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Edna Ferber, Spencer Tracy, Harry Hopkins, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, his two marriages and uneasy relationship with his daughter, and his leadership role in the Broadway community.
Alonso brings together history, theater and film studies, and peace studies in this interdisciplinary political biography. In the process, she illuminates major currents in U.S. foreign policy, society, and culture from 1896 to 1955—the years of the remarkable life of Robert E. Sherwood.
In this book, Harriet Hyman Alonso unravels Sherwood's inner struggle and portrays his political journey. Relying largely on his letters, diaries, plays, films, essays, and biography of Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, she traces Sherwood's obsession with the world of politics and its effects on his life and art, from his experience as a soldier in World War I to the Cold War. She also describes his participation in the Algonquin Round Table, his friendships and working relationships with such notables as Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Edna Ferber, Spencer Tracy, Harry Hopkins, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, his two marriages and uneasy relationship with his daughter, and his leadership role in the Broadway community.
Alonso brings together history, theater and film studies, and peace studies in this interdisciplinary political biography. In the process, she illuminates major currents in U.S. foreign policy, society, and culture from 1896 to 1955—the years of the remarkable life of Robert E. Sherwood.
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Robert Estienne's Influence on Lexicography
By DeWitt T. Starnes
University of Texas Press, 1963
Towering above printers of his time and their successors for many years afterward was the figure of Robert Estienne, the great French lexicographer of the sixteenth century, whose contribution to knowledge and its dissemination is the subject of this authoritative book. The span of Robert Estienne's life (1503–1559) encompassed the historical epochs and events which shaped his career: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the invention of printing by movable type. His keen interest in the revival of ancient literatures and languages and his training in the art of printing pointed the road he would travel, and the climate of opinion in the Reformation determined his destiny. Robert Estienne promoted classical learning by printing the works of good authors; to spread knowledge of ancient literature he compiled dictionaries and grammars which were adopted by most of the universities of Europe. His dictionary of proper names of Biblical and classical origin, the Dictionarium historicum ac poeticum, became one of the great source books for later compilers of dictionaries and for authors. His influence on English writers was pervasive. Ben Jonson showed familiarity with his texts; Spenser and Milton sometimes set trarislations of his phraseology directly into their poetry. Perpetuation of the few errors he made is one sure proof that his dictionaries were used and copied. An exemplar of learning in the classics and scripture, he searched in ancient manuscripts to avoid repeating the numerous errors that had crept into Bible translations over hundreds of years. For his efforts he was called a heretic by docteurs de theologie in the Sorbonne, but was protected by the royal favor of Francis I of France. Between attacks of theologians on the one side and the King's protection on the other, he became a "controversial" figure and after many years of calumny and persecution finally took refuge in Geneva. Estienne established a family tradition of printing correct and beautiful books, and the printing establishments which made the name of Estienne celebrated throughout the world continued for 162 years.
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Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin
Robert Faggen
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin gives us a new and compelling portrait of the poet-thinker as a modern Lucretius--moved to examine the questions raised by Darwin, and willing to challenge his readers with the emerging scientific notions of what it meant to be human.
Combining both intellectual history and detailed analysis of Frost's poems, Robert Faggen shows how Frost's reading of Darwin reflected the significance of science in American culture from Emerson and Thoreau, through James and pragmatism. He provides fresh and provocative readings of many of Frost's shorter lyrics and longer pastoral narratives as they illustrate the impact of Darwinian thought on the concept of nature, with particular exploration of man's relationship to other creatures, the conditions of human equality and racial conflict, the impact of gender and sexual differences, and the survival of religion.
The book shows that Frost was neither a pessimist lamenting the uncertainties of the Darwinian worldview, nor a humanist opposing its power. Faggen draws on Frost's unpublished notebooks to reveal a complex thinker who willingly engaged with the difficult moral and epistemological implications of natural science, and showed their consonance with myths and traditions stretching back to Milton, Lucretius, and the Old Testament. Frost emerges as a thinker for whom poetry was not only artistic expression, but also a forum for the trial of ideas and their impact on humanity.
Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin provides a deeper understanding not only of Frost and modern poetry, but of the meaning of Darwin in the modern world, the complex interrelations of literature and science, and the history of American thought.
"A forceful, appealing study of the Frost-Darwin relation, which has gone little noted by previous scholars, and a fresh explanation of Frost's ambivalent relation to modernism, which he scorned but also influenced" --William Howarth, Princeton University
Robert Faggen is Associate Professor of Literature, Claremont McKenna College and Adjunct Associate Professor, Claremont Graduate School.
Combining both intellectual history and detailed analysis of Frost's poems, Robert Faggen shows how Frost's reading of Darwin reflected the significance of science in American culture from Emerson and Thoreau, through James and pragmatism. He provides fresh and provocative readings of many of Frost's shorter lyrics and longer pastoral narratives as they illustrate the impact of Darwinian thought on the concept of nature, with particular exploration of man's relationship to other creatures, the conditions of human equality and racial conflict, the impact of gender and sexual differences, and the survival of religion.
The book shows that Frost was neither a pessimist lamenting the uncertainties of the Darwinian worldview, nor a humanist opposing its power. Faggen draws on Frost's unpublished notebooks to reveal a complex thinker who willingly engaged with the difficult moral and epistemological implications of natural science, and showed their consonance with myths and traditions stretching back to Milton, Lucretius, and the Old Testament. Frost emerges as a thinker for whom poetry was not only artistic expression, but also a forum for the trial of ideas and their impact on humanity.
Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin provides a deeper understanding not only of Frost and modern poetry, but of the meaning of Darwin in the modern world, the complex interrelations of literature and science, and the history of American thought.
"A forceful, appealing study of the Frost-Darwin relation, which has gone little noted by previous scholars, and a fresh explanation of Frost's ambivalent relation to modernism, which he scorned but also influenced" --William Howarth, Princeton University
Robert Faggen is Associate Professor of Literature, Claremont McKenna College and Adjunct Associate Professor, Claremont Graduate School.
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Robert H. Gardiner and the Reunification of Worldwide Christianity in the Progressive Era
John F. Woolverton
University of Missouri Press, 2005
In his time, Robert Hallowell Gardiner III (1855–1924) was the heart and soul of the Progressive Era’s movement to establish cooperation among all Christian churches. Gardiner’s legacy today is the World Council of Churches. From his home on the Kennebec River and from the Maine town that bears his family’s name, Gardiner carried on an extensive letter-writing campaign on behalf of the reunion of worldwide Christianity. John F. Woolverton incorporates Gardiner’s eleven thousand letters, as well as his published speeches and articles and family records, to present the first biography of a man who was a seminal figure in the early twentieth-century Christian ecumenical movement.
Gardiner was remarkable in that, as a layperson in the traditionally clergy-dominated, hierarchical Episcopal Church, he was able to bring along his own often reluctant denomination, as well as the Eastern and Russian Orthodox churches, major American and European Protestant bodies, and for a time the Roman Catholic Church itself. In addition, in the 1890s Gardiner was a leader in Boston’s famous Social Gospel, moving on to the Young Manhood Movement of the 1910s. He was an outspoken advocate for giving women a voice and vote in the church, as well as a leader in the major 1916 revision of Christian education in his denomination.
In his study, Woolverton analyzes Gardiner’s commitment as an internationalist to multilateral peace efforts on the threshold of World War I. He also discusses Gardiner’s relationships with well-known figures from that era: U.S. Senator George Wharton Pepper, Francis Stetson, John R. Mott, Newman Smyth, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, John J. Wynne, Cardinal James Gibbons, Episcopal Bishop Charles Henry Brent, and Vida D. Scudder.
Woolverton shows how, despite the ravages of war, Gardiner was able to build a vast network of cooperating political and religious leaders. American historians of the Progressive Era, church historians, and theological students will welcome this valuable addition to the historical literature on the social gospel.
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Robert Hart and China’s Early Modernization
His Journals, 1863–1866
Robert Hart, Richard J. Smith, John King Fairbank, and Katherine F. Bruner
Harvard University Press, 1991
As the Ch’ing government’s Inspector General of the Maritime Customs Service, Robert Hart was the most influential Westerner in China for half a century. These journal entries continue the sequence begun in Entering China’s Service and cover the years when Hart was setting up Customs procedures, establishing a modus operandi with the Ch’ing bureaucracy, and inspecting the treaty ports. They culminate in Hart’s return visit to Europe with the Pin-ch’un Mission and his marriage in Northern Ireland.
Richard Smith, John King Fairbank, and Katherine Bruner interleave the segments of Hart’s journals with lively narratives describing the contemporary Chinese scene and recounting Hart’s responses to the many challenges of establishing a Western-style organization within a Chinese milieu.
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Robert Hayden in Verse
New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Era
Derik Smith
University of Michigan Press, 2018
This book sheds new light on the work of Robert Hayden (1913–80) in response to changing literary scholarship. While Hayden’s poetry often reflected aspects of the African American experience, he resisted attempts to categorize his poetry in racial terms. This fresh appreciation of Hayden’s work recontextualizes his achievements against the backdrop of the Black Arts Movement and traces his influence on contemporary African American poets. Placing Hayden at the heart of a history of African American poetry and culture spanning the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip-Hop era, the book explains why Hayden is now a canonical figure in 20th-century American literature.
In deep readings that focus on Hayden’s religiousness, class consciousness, and historical vision, author Derik Smith inverts earlier scholarly accounts that figure Hayden as an outsider at odds with the militancy of the Black Arts movement. Robert Hayden in Verse offers detailed descriptions of the poet’s vigorous contributions to 1960s discourse about art, modernity, and blackness to show that the poet was, in fact, an earnest participant in Black Arts-era political and aesthetic debates.
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Robert Klein
A Meteor in Art History and Philosophy
Jérémie Koering, Alessandro Nova, and Alina Payne
Harvard University Press
Although Robert Klein (1918–1967), well known for his erudition and the originality of his research, was an important, even paradigmatic figure for the field of art history in the twentieth century, no sustained study has yet been dedicated to his work.
Klein undertook to rethink Renaissance art and its history from the Aristotelian notion of technē as early as the 1950s, long before anyone was interested in this other genealogy of Renaissance art. For him, the Mannerist work is intended to create awe and wonder, inviting the viewer to question the technical process, a combination of intelligence and manual skill, that made it possible to realize in this specific form.
As his newly discovered papers and unpublished manuscripts testify, technē and Mannerism are far from being Klein’s only preoccupations. Other concepts have been studied with great originality by Klein, such as mnemonic art, paragone, dream, and responsibility.
This book, proceeding from a conference organized by Villa I Tatti, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, and the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris, sheds light on Klein’s investigations as well as on the intellectual journey of an important art historian and philosopher of the past century.
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Robert Koehler’s The Strike
The Improbable Story of an Iconic 1886 Painting of Labor Protest
James M. Dennis
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011
Every work of art has a story behind it. In 1886 the German American artist Robert Koehler painted a dramatic wide-angle depiction of an imagined confrontation between factory workers and their employer. He called this oil painting The Strike. It has had a long and tumultuous international history as a symbol of class struggle and the cause of workers’ rights. First exhibited just days before the tragic Chicago Haymarket riot, The Strike became an inspiration for the labor movement. In the midst of the campaign for an eight-hour workday, it gained international attention at expositions in Paris, Munich, and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Though the painting fell into obscurity for decades in the early twentieth century, The Strike lived on in wood-engraved reproductions in labor publications. Its purchase, restoration, and exhibition by New Left activist Lee Baxandall in the early 1970s launched it to international fame once more, and collectors and galleries around the world scrambled to acquire it. It is now housed in the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, Germany.
Art historian James M. Dennis has crafted a compelling “biography” of Koehler’s painting: its exhibitions, acclaim, neglect, and rediscovery. He introduces its German-born creator and politically diverse audiences and traces the painting’s acceptance and rejection through the years, exploring how class and sociopolitical movements affected its reception. Dennis considers the significance of key figures in the painting, such as the woman asserting her presence in the center of action. He compellingly explains why The Strike has earned its identity as the iconic painting of the industrial labor movement.
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Robert M. Hutchins
Portrait of an Educator
Mary Ann Dzuback
University of Chicago Press, 1991
As president of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951, Robert Maynard Hutchins came to be one of the most prominent and controversial figures in American higher education. To this day, his vision of what the university should be has given shape to twentieth-century debates over the content and function of education in the United States. In her critical biography, the first to focus on Hutchins' University of Chicago decades, Mary Ann Dzuback gives a full and fascinating account of this complex man—his development, his achievements and failures, and finally, his legacy.
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Robert Mugabe
Sue Onslow
Ohio University Press, 2018
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe sharply divides opinion and embodies the contradictions of his country’s history and political culture. As a symbol of African liberation and a stalwart opponent of white rule, he was respected and revered by many. This heroic status contrasted sharply, in the eyes of his rivals and victims, with repeated cycles of gross human rights violations. Mugabe presided over the destruction of a vibrant society, capital flight, and mass emigration precipitated by the policies of his government, resulting in his demonic image in Western media.
This timely biography addresses the coup, led by some of Mugabe’s closest associates, that forced his resignation after thirty-seven years in power. Sue Onslow and Martin Plaut explain Mugabe’s formative experiences as a child and young man; his role as an admired Afro-nationalist leader in the struggle against white settler rule; and his evolution into a political manipulator and survivalist. They also address the emergence of political opposition to his leadership and the uneasy period of coalition government. Ultimately, they reveal the complexity of the man who stamped his personality on Zimbabwe’s first four decades of independence.
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Robert of Arbrissel
A Medieval Religious Life
Bruce L. Venarde
Catholic University of America Press, 2003
Robert of Arbrissel
Sex, Sin, and Salvation in the Middle Ages
Jacques Dalarun
Catholic University of America Press, 2006
This book tells the fascinating story of Robert of Arbrissel (ca. 1045-1116). Robert was a parish priest, longtime student, reformer, hermit, wandering preacher, and, most famously, founder of the abbey of Fontevraud
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Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema
Ian Christie
University of Chicago Press, 2019
The early years of film were dominated by competition between inventors in America and France, especially Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers . But while these have generally been considered the foremost pioneers of film, they were not the only crucial figures in its inception. Telling the story of the white-hot years of filmmaking in the 1890s, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema seeks to restore Robert Paul, Britain’s most important early innovator in film, to his rightful place.
From improving upon Edison’s Kinetoscope to cocreating the first movie camera in Britain to building England’s first film studio and launching the country’s motion-picture industry, Paul played a key part in the history of cinema worldwide. It’s not only Paul’s story, however, that historian Ian Christie tells here. Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema also details the race among inventors to develop lucrative technologies and the jumbled culture of patent-snatching, showmanship, and music halls that prevailed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Both an in-depth biography and a magnificent look at early cinema and fin-de-siècle Britain, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema is a first-rate cultural history of a fascinating era of global invention, and the revelation of one of its undervalued contributors.
From improving upon Edison’s Kinetoscope to cocreating the first movie camera in Britain to building England’s first film studio and launching the country’s motion-picture industry, Paul played a key part in the history of cinema worldwide. It’s not only Paul’s story, however, that historian Ian Christie tells here. Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema also details the race among inventors to develop lucrative technologies and the jumbled culture of patent-snatching, showmanship, and music halls that prevailed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Both an in-depth biography and a magnificent look at early cinema and fin-de-siècle Britain, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema is a first-rate cultural history of a fascinating era of global invention, and the revelation of one of its undervalued contributors.
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Robert Wise
Shadowlands
Wes D. Gehring
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2012
Born in Winchester, Indiana, Robert Wise spent much of his youth sitting in darkened movie theaters enthralled by the swashbuckling heroics of screen legend Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Through these viewings, Wise developed a passion for film—a passion he followed for the rest of his life, making movies in Hollywood. Nationally known film historian Wes D. Gehring explores Wise’s life from his days in the Hoosier State to the beginning of his movie career at RKO studios working as the editor of Orson Welles’s classic movie Citizen Kane. Wise is best known for producing and directing two of the most memorable movie musicals in cinema history, West Side Story (co-director Jerome Robbins) and The Sound of Music, for which he won four Academy Awards—two Best Picture and Best Directors Oscars. But, as Gehring notes, other than Howard Hawks, Wise was arguably Hollywood’s most versatile director of various celebrated genre films.
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Robinson Crusoe, USN
The Adventures of George R. Tweed Rm1c on Japanese-Held Guam
George R. Tweed
Westholme Publishing, 2010
An Inspiring Story of Survival and Friendship
At the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan captured American Guam. Given the choice of surrendering or being taken prisoner, George R. Tweed escaped into the countryside. Aided by Chamorro natives who risked their lives to keep him safe, Tweed survived for two and a half years until he was eventually rescued by the U.S. Navy. In Robinson Crusoe, USN, first published in 1945, Tweed recounts his remarkable experiences and the debt of gratitude he held for those who help keep him alive.
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Rock Climbing in Kentucky's Red River Gorge
An Oral History of Community, Resources, and Tourism
James N. Maples
West Virginia University Press, 2021
Tells the fascinating story of the Red’s climbing community through interviews with the people who lived that history and considers how sustainable ecotourism might contribute to the region economically.
Rock Climbing in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge documents, for the first time, fifty years of oral history from this famous climbing community. Through extensive interviews, Maples reconstructs the growth of rock climbing in the region—including a twice-failed dam project, mysterious first routes, unauthorized sport-route growth on public lands, and a controversial archaeological dig. The book details five decades of collaborations to secure ongoing access to some of the world’s most beautiful and technically demanding routes and the challenges along the way.
More than a recounting of the past, however, Rock Climbing in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge uses the region’s extraordinary history to argue that climbing has the potential to be a valuable source of sustainable economic activity in rural areas throughout Appalachia today and in the years to come. The book concludes by offering policy recommendations and lessons learned about building beneficial partnerships among climbers, local communities, and public land managers to encourage community development and ecotourism alongside preservation.
Rock Climbing in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge documents, for the first time, fifty years of oral history from this famous climbing community. Through extensive interviews, Maples reconstructs the growth of rock climbing in the region—including a twice-failed dam project, mysterious first routes, unauthorized sport-route growth on public lands, and a controversial archaeological dig. The book details five decades of collaborations to secure ongoing access to some of the world’s most beautiful and technically demanding routes and the challenges along the way.
More than a recounting of the past, however, Rock Climbing in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge uses the region’s extraordinary history to argue that climbing has the potential to be a valuable source of sustainable economic activity in rural areas throughout Appalachia today and in the years to come. The book concludes by offering policy recommendations and lessons learned about building beneficial partnerships among climbers, local communities, and public land managers to encourage community development and ecotourism alongside preservation.
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Rock 'n' Roll Movies
Sterritt, David
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Rock ‘n’ Roll Movies presents an eclectic look at the many manifestations of rock in motion pictures, from teen-oriented B-movies to Hollywood blockbusters to avant-garde meditations to reverent biopics to animated shorts to performance documentaries. Acclaimed film critic David Sterritt considers the diverse ways that filmmakers have regarded rock ‘n’ roll, some cynically cashing in on its popularity and others responding to the music as sincere fans, some depicting rock as harmless fun and others representing it as an open challenge to mainstream norms.
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The Rock, the Curse, and the Hub
A Random History of Boston Sports
Randy Roberts
Harvard University Press, 2005
When you hear the words "Boston sports," does your mind flash to a place or to a person? Do you think of a fly ball arching over the Green Monster, a Celtic breaking across the parquet at Boston Garden, rowers skimming along the Charles River in autumn, or runners tackling the grueling stretch of "Heartbreak Hill" during the Boston Marathon? Or do you conjure faces--a smiling Babe Ruth, a bearded Bill Russell, a determined Rocky Marciano, a boyish and nimble Bobby Orr, or a defiant Pedro Martinez? Most likely, it is impossible to separate the two, impossible to imagine Bob Cousy on any court other than the Garden or Ted Williams playing at any field other than Fenway. Certain people and places are as inseparable as heads and tails on a penny.
The Rock, the Curse, and the Hub is a collection of original essays about the people and places that live in the minds and memories of Bostonians and all Americans. From the Boston of the young Bambino and even younger Francis Ouimet to the glories and agonies of 1986 and the struggles to keep the Patriots in town, each chapter focuses on the games and the athletes, but also on which sports have defined Boston and Bostonians. In a city of deep ethnic and class divisions, sports have provided a common ground, an intense shared experience. Pursuing the legend and the lore, these essays celebrate the players, the games, and the arenas that are at the heart of the city of Boston.
[more]
The Rock-Art of Eastern North America
Capturing Images and Insight
Edited by Carol Diaz-Granados and James R. Duncan
University of Alabama Press, 2004
Showcases the wealth of new research on sacred imagery found in twelve states and four Canadian provinces
In archaeology, rock-art—any long-lasting marking made on a natural surface—is similar to material culture (pottery and tools) because it provides a record of human activity and ideology at that site. Petroglyphs, pictographs, and dendroglyphs (tree carvings) have been discovered and recorded throughout the eastern woodlands of North America on boulders, bluffs, and trees, in caves and in rock shelters. These cultural remnants scattered on the landscape can tell us much about the belief systems of the inhabitants that left them behind.
The Rock-Art of Eastern North America brings together 20 papers from recent research at sites in eastern North America, where humidity and the actions of weather, including acid rain, can be very damaging over time. Contributors to this volume range from professional archaeologists and art historians to avocational archaeologists, including a surgeon, a lawyer, two photographers, and an aerospace engineer. They present information, drawings, and photographs of sites ranging from the Seven Sacred Stones in Iowa to the Bald Friar Petroglyphs of Maryland and from the Lincoln Rise Site in Tennessee to the Nisula Site in Quebec.
Discussions of the significance of artist gender, the relationship of rock-art to mortuary caves, and the suggestive link to the peopling of the continent are particularly notable contributions. Discussions include the history, ethnography, recording methods, dating, and analysis of the subject sites and integrate these with the known archaeological data.
[more]
Rockin' in the Ivory Tower
Rock Music on Campus in the Sixties
James M. Carter
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Histories of American rock music and the 1960s counterculture typically focus on the same few places: Woodstock, Monterey, Altamont. Yet there was also a very active college circuit that brought edgy acts like the Jefferson Airplane and the Velvet Underground to different metropolitan regions and smaller towns all over the country. These campus concerts were often programmed, promoted, and reviewed by students themselves, and their diverse tastes challenged narrow definitions of rock music.
Rockin’ in the Ivory Tower takes a close look at two smaller universities, Drew in New Jersey and Stony Brook on Long Island, to see how the culture of rock music played an integral role in student life in the late 1960s. Analyzing campus archives and college newspapers, historian James Carter traces connections between rock fandom and the civil rights protests, free speech activism, radical ideas, lifestyle transformations, and anti-war movements that revolutionized universities in the 1960s. Furthermore, he finds that these progressive students refused to segregate genres like folk, R&B, hard rock, and pop. Rockin’ in the Ivory Tower gives readers a front-row seat to a dynamic time for the music industry, countercultural politics, and youth culture.
[more]
Rocking the Boat
Union Women's Voices, 1915-1975
O'Farrell, Brigid
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Rocking the Boat is a celebration of strong, committed women who helped to build the American labor movement. Through the stories of eleven women from a wide range of backgrounds, we experience the turmoil, hardships, and accomplishments of thousands of other union women activists through the period spanning the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the McCarthy era, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement. These women tell powerful stories that highlight and detail women's many roles as workers, trade unionists, and family members. They all faced difficulties in their personal lives, overcame challenges in their unions, and individually and collectively helped improve women's everyday working lives.
Maida Springer-Kemp came from New York City's Harlem, Local 22 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, to represent the AFL-CIO in Africa. In Chicago, Alice Peurala fought for her job in the steel mill and her place in the steel workers' union. Jessie De La Cruz organized farm workers in California. Esther Peterson, organizer, educator, and lobbyist, became an advisor to four U.S. presidents. In chapters based on oral history interviews, these women and others provide new perspectives and practical advice for today's working women. They share an idealistic and practical commitment to the labor movement. As Dorothy Haener of the United Auto Workers and a founding member of the National Organization of Women said, "You have to take a look at how to rock the boat. You don't want to spill yourself out if you can avoid it, but sometimes you have to rock the boat." From these women we, too, learn how to rock the boat.
[more]
Rocks, Ice and Dirty Stones
Diamond Histories
Marcia Pointon
Reaktion Books, 2017
The king of stones, valued since antiquity for their unrivalled hardness, diamonds today are both desired and deplored. Once faceted and polished they glitter on the fingers of brides-to-be and in the ornaments of the super-rich, but their extraction from some of the world’s poorest countries remains contentious. Immensely valuable for their size, diamonds can be easily hidden and transported, making them perfect contraband. Diamonds have been widely used in industry since the nineteenth century and have long been valued for their pharmaceutical and prophylactic properties.
This entertaining and richly illustrated book examines the history of the diamond trade through the centuries from India and Brazil to South Africa and Europe and investigates what happens to diamonds once they reach the cutters and polishers. Marcia Pointon takes the reader on a unique tour of the ways in which the quadrahedron diamond shape has inspired design, architecture, and painting, from the symbolism of medieval manuscripts to modern-day graffiti. She questions the etiquette of engagement rings, and she reminds us why and how lost, stolen, or cursed diamonds create suspense in so many classic novels and films. This compelling and fascinating account of the history of sparklers around the world will appeal to all who covet, as well as all who despise, the unparalleled brilliance and glitter of the diamond.
This entertaining and richly illustrated book examines the history of the diamond trade through the centuries from India and Brazil to South Africa and Europe and investigates what happens to diamonds once they reach the cutters and polishers. Marcia Pointon takes the reader on a unique tour of the ways in which the quadrahedron diamond shape has inspired design, architecture, and painting, from the symbolism of medieval manuscripts to modern-day graffiti. She questions the etiquette of engagement rings, and she reminds us why and how lost, stolen, or cursed diamonds create suspense in so many classic novels and films. This compelling and fascinating account of the history of sparklers around the world will appeal to all who covet, as well as all who despise, the unparalleled brilliance and glitter of the diamond.
[more]
Rocky Mountain Boom Town
A History of Durango, Colorado
Duane A. Smith
University Press of Colorado, 1992
Rocky Mountain Heartland
Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming in the Twentieth Century
Duane A. Smith
University of Arizona Press, 2008
This is a lively history of three Rocky Mountain states in the twentieth century. With the sure hand of an experienced writer and the engaging voice of a veteran storyteller, the well-known historian Duane A. Smith recounts the major social, political, and economic events of the period with verve and zest. Smith is thoroughly familiar with his subject and has a genuine enthusiasm for the history of the region. Written with the general reader in mind, Rocky Mountain Heartland will appeal to students, teachers, and “armchair historians” of all ages.
This is the colorful saga of how the Old West became the New West. Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and concluding after the turn of the twenty-first, Rocky Mountain Heartland explains how Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming evolved over the course of the century. Smith is mindful of all the factors that propelled the region: mining, agriculture, water, immigration, tourism, technology, and two world wars. And he points out how the three states responded in varying ways to each of these forces.
Although this is a regional story, Smith never loses sight of the national events that influenced events in the region. As Smith skillfully shows, the vast natural resources of the three states attracted optimistic, hopeful Americans intent on getting rich, enjoying the outdoors, or creating new lives for themselves and their families. How they resolved these often-conflicting goals is the modern story of the Rocky Mountain region.
This is the colorful saga of how the Old West became the New West. Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and concluding after the turn of the twenty-first, Rocky Mountain Heartland explains how Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming evolved over the course of the century. Smith is mindful of all the factors that propelled the region: mining, agriculture, water, immigration, tourism, technology, and two world wars. And he points out how the three states responded in varying ways to each of these forces.
Although this is a regional story, Smith never loses sight of the national events that influenced events in the region. As Smith skillfully shows, the vast natural resources of the three states attracted optimistic, hopeful Americans intent on getting rich, enjoying the outdoors, or creating new lives for themselves and their families. How they resolved these often-conflicting goals is the modern story of the Rocky Mountain region.
[more]
Rocky Mountain National Park
A History
C. W. Buchholtz
University Press of Colorado, 1983
Rocky Mountain National Park: A History is more than just the story of Rocky Mountain in its brief tenure as a national park. Its scope includes the earliest traces of human activity in the region and outlines the major events of exploration, settlement, and exploitation. Origins of the national park ideas are followed into the recent decades of the Park's overwhelming popularity. It is a story of change, of mountains reflecting the tenor of the times. From being a hunting ground to becoming ranchland, from being a region of resorts to becoming a national park, this small segment of the Rocky Mountains displays a record of human activities that helps explain the present and may guide us toward the future.
[more]
The Rocky Mountain National Park Reader
James H. Pickering
University of Utah Press, 2015
Writer Wallace Stegner once wrote that “No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered.” This collection celebrates one of America’s most loved places, Rocky Mountain National Park, which marks its 100th birthday in 2015. Engagement with place and the events that loom large in park history are the underlying themes that connect the thirty-three selections that make up this anthology.
Representative both in subject and approach, the selections reach back to Arapaho and pioneer times before the park was established and move forward to span its entire first century. The voices that speak to us are distinctive: among them are Irish sportsman Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, the Fourth Earl of Dunraven; British travel writer Isabella Bird; mountaineer Frederick Chapin; naturalist Enos Mills; iconic ranger Jack Moomaw and his fictional counterpart, Dorr Yeager’s Bob Flame; and contemporary nature writers Anne Zwinger and SueEllen Campbell—to mention but a few. Some tell us about the past, recalling moments of personal triumph and tragedy. Other voices are quieter; some are more polemic. All capture and share a part of the national treasure that is Rocky Mountain National Park.
The first of its kind, this original collection is a rich literary and historical compendium of the best that has been written about Rocky Mountain National Park. As such it provides an indispensable introduction to the nation’s twelfth national park.
Part of the National Park Reader series, edited by Lance Newman and David Stanley
Representative both in subject and approach, the selections reach back to Arapaho and pioneer times before the park was established and move forward to span its entire first century. The voices that speak to us are distinctive: among them are Irish sportsman Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, the Fourth Earl of Dunraven; British travel writer Isabella Bird; mountaineer Frederick Chapin; naturalist Enos Mills; iconic ranger Jack Moomaw and his fictional counterpart, Dorr Yeager’s Bob Flame; and contemporary nature writers Anne Zwinger and SueEllen Campbell—to mention but a few. Some tell us about the past, recalling moments of personal triumph and tragedy. Other voices are quieter; some are more polemic. All capture and share a part of the national treasure that is Rocky Mountain National Park.
The first of its kind, this original collection is a rich literary and historical compendium of the best that has been written about Rocky Mountain National Park. As such it provides an indispensable introduction to the nation’s twelfth national park.
Part of the National Park Reader series, edited by Lance Newman and David Stanley
[more]
Rodeo Cowboys In The North American Imagination
Michael Allen
University of Nevada Press, 1998
Rodeo is an enduring relic of America’s popular culture, drawing capacity audiences to all its venues, from small western cowtowns to Madison Square Garden. The rodeo cowboy, that figure of rugged independence and solitary courage, continues to evoke the spirit of a vanished frontier and the hardy pioneers who conquered it. In this study historian Michael Allen examines the image of the rodeo cowboy and the role this image has played in popular culture over the past century. He sees rodeo as a significant American folk festival and the rodeo cowboy as the avatar of a nearly extinct authentic figure, the “real cowboy,” who embodies the skills and values of traditional western rural culture. Allen’s analysis explores the evolution of the myth of the rodeo man and its subsequent institutionalization and acculturation into the media of popular culture. He also examines the impact on this myth of significant changes in the rodeo milieu—the commercialization of the event and the professionalization of rodeo performers; the arrival on the rodeo scene of performers from outside the white, male, western, rural origins of the traditional cowboy performers. He discovers that America’s—and indeed the world’s—fascination with the rodeo cowboy reflects feelings far deeper than a taste for exciting entertainment. Allen’s discussion of the archetypal figure of the rodeo cowboy will change forever our perception of rodeo, but it will also help us understand how the ancient tension between frontier and civilization continues to play a role in our national imagination.
[more]
A Roger Fry Reader
Roger Fry
University of Chicago Press, 1996
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the art critic Roger Fry introduced English-speaking audiences to modern French art and formalist aesthetic theory. A Roger Fry Reader, edited by Christopher Reed, brings together for the first time a comprehensive selection of Fry's essays. Most appear here for the first time since their original publication in scholarly journals and art magazines, while some have never been published before. Representing 40 years of engagement with the arts, the essays cover a broad spectrum of topics, from Fry's influential promotion of Post-Impressionism to art education, museums, architecture, decorative art, and the implications of literature and dance for the visual arts. Reed also provides valuable historical background and considers Fry's legacy for the present. A Roger Fry Reader affords an opportunity to examine both the foundations of modern art criticism from the point of view of one of its foremost practitioners and current debates about the nature ofart and aesthetic experience.
[more]
Roger Lamb's American Revolution
A British Soldier's Story
Don N. Hagist
Westholme Publishing, 2022
Of all the British soldiers who served in North America during the American Revolution, none wrote more about his experiences than Roger Lamb. He certainly had a lot to say: his service in two of the most important campaigns—the 1777 Saratoga campaign and the 1781 campaign through the Carolinas to Virginia—put him in the thick of some of the war’s most famous battles. Moreover, he was twice captured and twice escaped, making his way through hostile territory to rejoin the British army. Later in his life he wrote two books chronicling these experiences in great detail. Hundreds of British soldiers went through similar ordeals, sharing in the campaigns, the battles, the captivities, the escapes, but none recounted any aspect of these activities in the level of detail that Lamb did.
The first edition of this book, published in 2004, combined all of Roger Lamb’s first-hand recollections from his two books, An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences during the late American War, from its Commencement to the Year 1783 (Dublin, 1809) and Memoir of his Own Life (Dublin, 1811). Since that publication, two more important documents written by Lamb have come to light—an intelligence report written in 1782 recounting details of one of his escapes, and a “commonplace book” kept later in his life to record a vast range of memories, thoughts, and observations. Roger Lamb’s American Revolution: A British Soldier’s Story combines all of the material from these four sources pertaining to Lamb’s career as a soldier, from the time he joined the army to his departure from it, plus his recollections of childhood and post-military life. The result is the most comprehensive first-hand account by a British soldier in the American Revolution, an essential record for understanding the war in its totality.
The first edition of this book, published in 2004, combined all of Roger Lamb’s first-hand recollections from his two books, An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences during the late American War, from its Commencement to the Year 1783 (Dublin, 1809) and Memoir of his Own Life (Dublin, 1811). Since that publication, two more important documents written by Lamb have come to light—an intelligence report written in 1782 recounting details of one of his escapes, and a “commonplace book” kept later in his life to record a vast range of memories, thoughts, and observations. Roger Lamb’s American Revolution: A British Soldier’s Story combines all of the material from these four sources pertaining to Lamb’s career as a soldier, from the time he joined the army to his departure from it, plus his recollections of childhood and post-military life. The result is the most comprehensive first-hand account by a British soldier in the American Revolution, an essential record for understanding the war in its totality.
[more]
Rogue Empires
Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa
Steven Press
Harvard University Press, 2017
In the 1880s, Europeans descended on Africa and grabbed vast swaths of the continent, using documents, not guns, as their weapon of choice. Rogue Empires follows a paper trail of questionable contracts to discover the confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa. Many of them were would-be kings who sought to establish their own autonomous empires across the African continent—often at odds with traditional European governments which competed for control.
From 1882 to 1885, independent European businessmen and firms (many of doubtful legitimacy) produced hundreds of deeds purporting to buy political rights from indigenous African leaders whose understanding of these agreements was usually deemed irrelevant. A system of privately governed empires, some spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles, promptly sprang up in the heart of Africa. Steven Press traces the notion of empire by purchase to an unlikely place: the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, where the English adventurer James Brooke bought his own kingdom in the 1840s. Brooke’s example inspired imitators in Africa, as speculators exploited a loophole in international law in order to assert sovereignty and legal ownership of lands which they then plundered for profit.
The success of these experiments in governance attracted notice in European capitals. Press shows how the whole dubious enterprise came to a head at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when King Leopold of Belgium and the German Chancellor Bismarck embraced rogue empires as legal precedents for new colonial agendas in the Congo, Namibia, and Cameroon.
[more]
Rogue Scholar
The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff
Richard W. Bailey
University of Michigan Press, 2003
This is the tale of the insalubrious and utterly failed life of the notorious nineteenth-century thief, murderer, professional impostor, and would-be philologist Edward Rulloff, who was condemned to die and hanged for his crimes. The life of Rulloff is a sordid account of misguided genius and abysmal consequences. Those who loved him courted disaster, and, in every case, the courtship flowered into catastrophe.
Richard Bailey's narrative, calm and impartial yet spiked with wit and suspense, captures perfectly the slightly haunted and overwrought air of Victorian rural America, calling on newspaper accounts, interviews, and eyewitness reports of the day. Inevitably, the quiet accumulation of details builds to a story that transcends its individual events to touch on the universal themes of any age.
Rogue Scholar is about the evil of one man who lived a life of deception and crime. Yet in a larger sense it is also the portrait of a condemned soul in its final hours, an examination of the death penalty, and a reminder that media sensationalism is nothing new.
Richard Bailey's narrative, calm and impartial yet spiked with wit and suspense, captures perfectly the slightly haunted and overwrought air of Victorian rural America, calling on newspaper accounts, interviews, and eyewitness reports of the day. Inevitably, the quiet accumulation of details builds to a story that transcends its individual events to touch on the universal themes of any age.
Rogue Scholar is about the evil of one man who lived a life of deception and crime. Yet in a larger sense it is also the portrait of a condemned soul in its final hours, an examination of the death penalty, and a reminder that media sensationalism is nothing new.
[more]
Rogues and Early Modern English Culture
Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"Those at the periphery of society often figure obsessively for those at its center, and never more so than with the rogues of early modern England. Whether as social fact or literary fiction-or both, simultaneously-the marginal rogue became ideologically central and has remained so for historians, cultural critics, and literary critics alike. In this collection, early modern rogues represent the range, diversity, and tensions within early modern scholarship, making this quite simply the best overview of their significance then and now."
-Jonathan Dollimore, York University
"Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is an up-to-date and suggestive collection on a subject that all scholars of the early modern period have encountered but few have studied in the range and depth represented here."
-Lawrence Manley, Yale University
"A model of cross-disciplinary exchange, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture foregrounds the figure of the rogue in a nexus of early modern cultural inscriptions that reveals the provocation a seemingly marginal figure offers to authorities and various forms of authoritative understanding, then and now. The new and recent work gathered here is an exciting contribution to early modern studies, for both scholars and students."
-Alexandra W. Halasz, Dartmouth College
Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is a definitive collection of critical essays on the literary and cultural impact of the early modern rogue. Under various names-rogues, vagrants, molls, doxies, vagabonds, cony-catchers, masterless men, caterpillars of the commonwealth-this group of marginal figures, poor men and women with no clear social place or identity, exploded onto the scene in sixteenth-century English history and culture. Early modern representations of the rogue or moll in pamphlets, plays, poems, ballads, historical records, and the infamous Tudor Poor Laws treated these characters as harbingers of emerging social, economic, and cultural changes.
Images of the early modern rogue reflected historical developments but also created cultural icons for mobility, change, and social adaptation. The underclass rogue in many ways inverts the familiar image of the self-fashioned gentleman, traditionally seen as the literary focus and exemplar of the age, but the two characters have more in common than courtiers or humanists would have admitted. Both relied on linguistic prowess and social dexterity to manage their careers, whether exploiting the politics of privilege at court or surviving by their wits on urban streets.
Deftly edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, this anthology features essays from prominent and emerging critics in the field of Renaissance studies and promises to attract considerable attention from a broad range of readers and scholars in literary studies and social history.
-Jonathan Dollimore, York University
"Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is an up-to-date and suggestive collection on a subject that all scholars of the early modern period have encountered but few have studied in the range and depth represented here."
-Lawrence Manley, Yale University
"A model of cross-disciplinary exchange, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture foregrounds the figure of the rogue in a nexus of early modern cultural inscriptions that reveals the provocation a seemingly marginal figure offers to authorities and various forms of authoritative understanding, then and now. The new and recent work gathered here is an exciting contribution to early modern studies, for both scholars and students."
-Alexandra W. Halasz, Dartmouth College
Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is a definitive collection of critical essays on the literary and cultural impact of the early modern rogue. Under various names-rogues, vagrants, molls, doxies, vagabonds, cony-catchers, masterless men, caterpillars of the commonwealth-this group of marginal figures, poor men and women with no clear social place or identity, exploded onto the scene in sixteenth-century English history and culture. Early modern representations of the rogue or moll in pamphlets, plays, poems, ballads, historical records, and the infamous Tudor Poor Laws treated these characters as harbingers of emerging social, economic, and cultural changes.
Images of the early modern rogue reflected historical developments but also created cultural icons for mobility, change, and social adaptation. The underclass rogue in many ways inverts the familiar image of the self-fashioned gentleman, traditionally seen as the literary focus and exemplar of the age, but the two characters have more in common than courtiers or humanists would have admitted. Both relied on linguistic prowess and social dexterity to manage their careers, whether exploiting the politics of privilege at court or surviving by their wits on urban streets.
Deftly edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, this anthology features essays from prominent and emerging critics in the field of Renaissance studies and promises to attract considerable attention from a broad range of readers and scholars in literary studies and social history.
[more]
Rogues in the Postcolony
Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India
Stacey Balkan
West Virginia University Press, 2022
An environmental humanist’s study of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation in Indian fiction.
Rogues in the Postcolony is a study of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels that dramatize the impacts of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation on local communities in several Indian states. In this materialist history of development on the subcontinent, Stacey Balkan considers works by Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga that critique violent campaigns of enclosure and dispossession at the hands of corporate entities like the English East India Company and its many legatees. By foregrounding the intersections among landscape ideology, agricultural improvement, extractive capitalism, and aesthetic expression, Rogues in the Postcolony also attends to the complicity of popular aesthetic forms with political and economic policy, as well as the colonial and extractivist logics that often frame discussions around the so-called Anthropocene epoch.
Bringing together questions about settler-colonial practices and environmental injustice, Rogues in the Postcolony concludes with an investigation of new extractivist frontiers, including solar capitalism, and considers the possibility of imagining life after extraction on the Indian subcontinent and beyond.
[more]
A Rogue's Paradise
Crime and Punishment in Antebellum Florida, 1821-1861
James M. Denham
University of Alabama Press, 1997
A revealing portrait of law-breaking and law enforcement on the Florida frontier
The pervasive influence of the frontier is fundamental to an understanding of antebellum Florida. James M. Denham traces the growth and social development of this sparsely settled region through its experience with crime and punishment. He examines such issues as Florida's criminal code, its judicial and law enforcement officers, the accommodation of criminals in jails and courts, outlaw gangs, patterns of punishment, and the attitude of the public toward lawbreakers.
Using court records, government documents, newspapers, and personal papers, Denham explores how crime affected ordinary Floridians—whites and blacks, perpetrators, victims, and enforcers. He contends that although the frontier determined the enforcement and administration of the law, the ethic of honor dominated human relationships.
[more]
Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars
A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature Exposing the Lives, Times, and Cozening Tricks of the Elizabethan Underworld
Arthur F. Kinney
University of Massachusetts Press, 1990
The Elizabethan age was one of unbounded vitality and exuberance; nowhere is the color and action of life more vividly revealed than in the rogue books and cony-catching (confidence game) pamphlets of the sixteenth century. This book presents seven of the age's liveliest works: Walker's Manifest Detection of Dice Play; Awdeley's Fraternity of Vagabonds; Harman's Caveat for Common Cursitors Vulgarly Called Vagabonds; Greene's Notable Discovery of Cozenage and Black Book's Messenger; Dekker's Lantern and Candle-light; and Rid's Art of Juggling. From these pages spring the denizens of the Elizabethan underworld: cutpurses, hookers, palliards, jarkmen, doxies, counterfeit cranks, bawdy-baskets, walking morts, and priggers of prancers.
In his introduction, Arthur F. Kinney discusses the significance of these works as protonovels and their influence on such writers as Shakespeare. He also explores the social, political, and economic conditions of a time that spawned a community of renegades who conned their way to fame, fortune, and, occasionally, the rope at Tyburn.
In his introduction, Arthur F. Kinney discusses the significance of these works as protonovels and their influence on such writers as Shakespeare. He also explores the social, political, and economic conditions of a time that spawned a community of renegades who conned their way to fame, fortune, and, occasionally, the rope at Tyburn.
[more]
Rojava
Revolution, War and the Future of Syria's Kurds
Thomas Schmidinger
Pluto Press, 2018
The Kurdish territory of Rojava in Syria has in recent years become a watchword for radical democracy, communalism, and gender equality. This book, however, argues that much of how we see Rojava from the outside is a projection of the values of Western radicals whose understanding of the complexities of the situation are limited. Thomas Schmidinger has been working in Rojava for seventeen years, and here he gives us the clearest picture yet of the history, politics, and society of the region today. He sketches the historical background of the Kurds in Syria, then details the developments since the outbreak of war in 2011, including the establishment of the Kurdish para-state and ongoing conflicts between Kurdish parties about how it should be administered. Drawing on interviews with leaders from different parties, civil society activists, artists, fighters, and religious leaders, Schmidinger delivers an authentic, nuanced, unromanticized portrait of Rojava today.
[more]
Roll Away Saloon
Rowland W. Rider as told to Deirdre M. Paulsen
Utah State University Press, 1985
With his animated tales of Zane Grey, Butch Cassidy, and the Robbers Roost gang, Rider creates an engaging and believable picture of the joys and hardships of cowboy life.
[more]
Roll Over, Tchaikovsky!
Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality
Stephen Amico
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Centered on the musical experiences of homosexual men in St. Petersburg and Moscow, this ground-breaking study examines how post-Soviet popular music both informs and plays off of a corporeal understanding of Russian male homosexuality. Drawing upon ethnography, musical analysis, and phenomenological theory, Stephen Amico offers an expert technical analysis of Russian rock, pop, and estrada music, dovetailing into an illuminating discussion of homosexual men's physical and bodily perceptions of music. He also outlines how popular music performers use song lyrics, drag, physical movements, images of women, sexualized male bodies, and other tools and tropes to implicitly or explicitly express sexual orientation through performance. Finally, Amico uncovers how such performances help homosexual Russian men to create their own social spaces and selves, in meaningful relation to others with whom they share a "nontraditional orientation."
[more]
Roller Derby
The History of an American Sport
By Michella M. Marino
University of Texas Press, 2021
Since 1935, roller derby has thrilled fans and skaters with its constant action, hard hits, and edgy attitude. However, though its participants’ athleticism is undeniable, roller derby has never been accepted as a “real” sport. Michella M. Marino, herself a former skater, tackles the history of a sport that has long been a cultural mainstay for one reason both utterly simple and infinitely complex: roller derby has always been coed.
Richly illustrated and drawing on oral histories, archival materials, media coverage, and personal experiences, Roller Derby is the first comprehensive history of this cultural phenomenon, one enjoyed by millions yet spurned by mainstream gatekeepers. Amid the social constraints of the mid-twentieth century, roller derby’s emphasis on gender equality attracted male and female athletes alike, producing gender relations and gender politics unlike those of traditional sex-segregated sports. In an enlightening feminist critique, Marino considers how the promotion of pregnancy and motherhood by roller derby management has simultaneously challenged and conformed to social norms. Finally, Marino assesses the sport’s present and future after its resurgence in the 2000s.
[more]
Rolling Back the Islamic State
Seth G. Jones
RAND Corporation, 2017
The Islamic State has lost substantial amounts of territory but continues to conduct and inspire attacks around the world. This report assesses the threat the Islamic State poses to the United States and examines strategies to counter the group and prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State or other Salafi-jihadist groups.
[more]
Rolling on the River
The Best of Steve Neal
Steve Neal. Foreword by Paul Simon
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999
"There are few places where the game [of politics] is played with more intensity than in Chicago," notes Steve Neal, who has covered that city's politics since 1979.
The longtime political columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, Neal covered Jane M. Byrne's election in 1979 as the city's first woman mayor and Harold Washington's 1983 triumph as Chicago's first African American mayor. Even people who are not interested in politics are drawn to Neal's column because of his hard-hitting style and lucid insights. Rolling on the River is the first published collection of his work.
In these pages, you'll meet the state legislator who never met a special interest he did not like, an alderman groveling to a mob boss, and the prosecutor who gained notoriety as a publicity hound. Of a junketing congressman, Neal writes: "Instead of sending out a congressional newsletter, [he] ought to be sending his constituents 'Wish you were here' postcards of sandy beaches."
Neal's beat is politics, but his interests are rich and varied. He also writes about sports, music, literature, and film with a point of view that is fresh and original. Neal shows how Muhammad Ali became the heavyweight champion who transcended sports and how Sid Luckman changed football. He writes of Kenny Washington's importance in breaking professional football's color barrier and Steve Prefontaine's courage in taking on the little gray men of the sports establishment. Neal chronicles Paul Robeson's struggles: "His name became a great whisper. . . . The injustices against Paul Robeson have not been righted."
Nobel laureate Saul Bellow tells Neal that comedy is the bright hope of American fiction because it is too difficult for writers in this country to grasp the worst of the human condition. Neal tells why Frank Sinatra called Chicago his kind of town and also shows how the city inspires the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Neal, a former White House correspondent, shares his perspective as one of the few reporters to have interviewed Ronald Reagan in four different decades. He recalls spending an evening with Richard M. Nixon, defends Harry Truman's most controversial decision, and writes from Ireland of John F. Kennedy's enduring legacy in the nation of his ancestors. Neal portrays William Jefferson Clinton as the "world's oldest teenager."
With vivid imagery, Neal makes his subjects come alive. Mayor Richard M. Daley is likened to Forrest Gump, and the legendary boxing announcer Ben Bentley is hailed as the last of the Damon Runyon characters.
Tough but fair. Illuminating. Compassionate. That's the best of Steve Neal.
The longtime political columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, Neal covered Jane M. Byrne's election in 1979 as the city's first woman mayor and Harold Washington's 1983 triumph as Chicago's first African American mayor. Even people who are not interested in politics are drawn to Neal's column because of his hard-hitting style and lucid insights. Rolling on the River is the first published collection of his work.
In these pages, you'll meet the state legislator who never met a special interest he did not like, an alderman groveling to a mob boss, and the prosecutor who gained notoriety as a publicity hound. Of a junketing congressman, Neal writes: "Instead of sending out a congressional newsletter, [he] ought to be sending his constituents 'Wish you were here' postcards of sandy beaches."
Neal's beat is politics, but his interests are rich and varied. He also writes about sports, music, literature, and film with a point of view that is fresh and original. Neal shows how Muhammad Ali became the heavyweight champion who transcended sports and how Sid Luckman changed football. He writes of Kenny Washington's importance in breaking professional football's color barrier and Steve Prefontaine's courage in taking on the little gray men of the sports establishment. Neal chronicles Paul Robeson's struggles: "His name became a great whisper. . . . The injustices against Paul Robeson have not been righted."
Nobel laureate Saul Bellow tells Neal that comedy is the bright hope of American fiction because it is too difficult for writers in this country to grasp the worst of the human condition. Neal tells why Frank Sinatra called Chicago his kind of town and also shows how the city inspires the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Neal, a former White House correspondent, shares his perspective as one of the few reporters to have interviewed Ronald Reagan in four different decades. He recalls spending an evening with Richard M. Nixon, defends Harry Truman's most controversial decision, and writes from Ireland of John F. Kennedy's enduring legacy in the nation of his ancestors. Neal portrays William Jefferson Clinton as the "world's oldest teenager."
With vivid imagery, Neal makes his subjects come alive. Mayor Richard M. Daley is likened to Forrest Gump, and the legendary boxing announcer Ben Bentley is hailed as the last of the Damon Runyon characters.
Tough but fair. Illuminating. Compassionate. That's the best of Steve Neal.
[more]
Roman Antiquities
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Harvard University Press
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BCE and went to Italy before 29 BCE. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BCE. Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the 20 books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BCE) we have the first 9 complete; most of 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
[more]
Roman Antiquities
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Harvard University Press
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BCE and went to Italy before 29 BCE. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BCE. Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the 20 books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BCE) we have the first 9 complete; most of 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
[more]
Roman Antiquities
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Harvard University Press
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BCE and went to Italy before 29 BCE. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BCE. Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the 20 books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BCE) we have the first 9 complete; most of 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
[more]
Roman Antiquities
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Harvard University Press
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BCE and went to Italy before 29 BCE. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BCE. Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the 20 books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BCE) we have the first 9 complete; most of 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
[more]
Roman Antiquities
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Harvard University Press
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BCE and went to Italy before 29 BCE. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BCE. Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the 20 books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BCE) we have the first 9 complete; most of 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
[more]
Roman Antiquities
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Harvard University Press
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BCE and went to Italy before 29 BCE. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BCE. Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the 20 books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BCE) we have the first 9 complete; most of 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
[more]
Roman Antiquities
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Harvard University Press
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BCE and went to Italy before 29 BCE. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BCE. Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the 20 books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BCE) we have the first 9 complete; most of 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
[more]
Roman Arabia
G. W. Bowersock
Harvard University Press, 1983
The Roman province of Arabia occupied a crucial corner of the Mediterranean world, encompassing most of what is now Jordan, southern Syria, northwest Saudi Arabia, and the Negev. Mr. Bowersock's book is the first authoritative history of the region from the fourth century B.C. to the age of Constantine.The book opens with the arrival of the Nahataean Arabs in their magnificent capital at Petra and describes the growth of their hellenized culture based on trade in perfume and spices. It traces the transformation of the region from an Arab kingdom under Roman influence into an imperial province, one that played an increasingly important role in the Roman strategy for control of the Near East. While the primary emphasis is on the relations of the Arabs of the region with the Romans, their interactions with neighboring states, Jewish, Egyptian, and Syrian, are also stressed. The narrative concludes with the breakup of the Roman province at the start of the Byzantine age.
[more]
Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul
Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition
By Ralph W. Mathisen
University of Texas Press, 1992
Skin-clad barbarians ransacking Rome remains a popular image of the "decline and fall" of the Roman Empire, but why, when, and how the Empire actually fell are still matters of debate among students of classical history. In this pioneering study, Ralph W. Mathisen examines the "fall" in one part of the western Empire, Gaul, to better understand the shift from Roman to Germanic power that occurred in the region during the fifth century AD.
Mathisen uncovers two apparently contradictory trends. First, he finds that barbarian settlement did provoke significant changes in Gaul, including the disappearance of most secular offices under the Roman imperial administration, the appropriation of land and social influence by the barbarians, and a rise in the overall level of violence. Yet he also shows that the Roman aristocrats proved remarkably adept at retaining their rank and status. How did the aristocracy hold on?
Mathisen rejects traditional explanations and demonstrates that rather than simply opposing the barbarians, or passively accepting them, the Roman aristocrats directly responded to them in various ways. Some left Gaul. Others tried to ignore the changes wrought by the newcomers. Still others directly collaborated with the barbarians, looking to them as patrons and holding office in barbarian governments. Most significantly, however, many were willing to change the criteria that determined membership in the aristocracy. Two new characteristics of the Roman aristocracy in fifth-century Gaul were careers in the church and greater emphasis on classical literary culture.
These findings shed new light on an age in transition. Mathisen's theory that barbarian integration into Roman society was a collaborative process rather than a conquest is sure to provoke much thought and debate. All historians who study the process of power transfer from native to alien elites will want to consult this work.
[more]
The Roman Army in Jordan
David Kennedy
Council for British Research in the Levant, 2004
This is an updated and revised second edition of a handbook originally prepared for the XVIIIth International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies in Amman, Jordan in 2000 - a reflection of the growing importance of Roman studies in Jordan in recent years. In Part A, there are chapters on geography and environment, the Romans in Jordan and the Roman army there. In Part B there are 15 chapters surveying, region by region, the evidence for forts, towers, roads, literary texts, inscriptions and excavation around the entire country, ending with a chapter on the immediately adjacent parts of Roman Arabia that now lie in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. The book is profusely illustrated throughout and has many aerial views including 20 full-page photographs in colour.
[more]
Roman Art in the Private Sphere
New Perspectives on the Architecture and Decor of the Domus, Villa, and Insula
Elaine K. Gazda, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2010
"This is a stimulating book and should be compulsory reading for all students of Roman art."
---Classical Review
---Classical Review
"[A] model exploration into the ways private décor can be used to facilitate a larger understanding of Roman art and society."
---Classical World
---Classical World
Roman Art in the Private Sphere presents an impressive case for the social and art historical importance of the paintings, mosaics, and sculptures that filled the private houses of the Roman elite. The six essays in this volume range from the first century BCE to the fourth century CE, and from the Italian peninsula to the Eastern Empire and North African provinces, treating works of art that belonged to every major Roman housing type: the single-family atrium houses and the insula apartment blocks in Italian cities, the dramatically sited villas of the Campanian coast and countryside, and the palatial mansions of late antique provincial aristocrats. This new edition includes a fresh contribution by editor Elaine Gazda, tracing the developments in the treatment of private Roman art since the publication of the original edition of Roman Art in the Private Sphere.
Elaine K. Gazda is Professor of the History of Art and Curator of Hellenistic and Roman Antiquities at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan.
[more]
Roman Art in the Private Sphere
New Perspectives on the Architecture and Decor of the Domus, Villa, and Insula
Elaine K. Gazda, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1991
"This is a stimulating book and should be compulsory reading for all students of Roman art."
---Classical Review
"For all the authors, attention to the ensemble, a sense of the relation between the formal and the iconographic, and the desire to historicize their material contribute to making this anthology unusual in its rigorous and creative attention to the way that art and architecture participate in the construction of the image of the Roman elite."
---Art Bulletin
Roman Art in the Private Sphere presents an impressive case for the social and art historical importance of the paintings, mosaics, and sculptures that filled the private houses of the Roman elite. The six essays in this volume range from the first century B.C.E. to the fourth century C.E., and from the Italian peninsula to the Eastern Empire and North African provinces.
The essays treat works of art that belonged to every major Roman housing type: the single-family atrium houses and the insula apartment blocks in Italian cities, the dramatically sited villas of the Campanian coast and countryside, and the palatial mansions of late antique provincial aristocrats.
In a complementary fashion the essays consider domestic art in relation to questions of decorum, status, wealth, social privilege, and obligation. Patrons emerge as actively interested in the character of their surroundings; artists appear as responsive to the desire of their patrons. The evidence in private art of homosexual conduct in high society is also set forth.
Originality of subject matter, sophisticated appreciation of stylistic and compositional nuance, and philosophical perceptions of the relationship of humanity and nature are among the themes that the essays explore. Together they demonstrate that Roman domestic art must be viewed on its own terms.
Elaine K. Gazda is Professor of the History of Art and Curator of Hellenistic and Roman Antiquities at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan.
[more]
Roman Artists, Patrons, and Public Consumption
Familiar Works Reconsidered
Brenda Longfellow and Ellen E. Perry, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2018
In recent decades, the study of Roman art has shifted focus dramatically from issues of connoisseurship, typology, and chronology to analyses of objects within their contemporary contexts and local environments. Scholars challenge the notion, formerly taken for granted, that extant historical texts—the writings of Vitruvius, for example—can directly inform the study of architectural remains. Roman-era statues, paintings, and mosaics are no longer dismissed as perfunctory replicas of lost Greek or Hellenistic originals; they are worthy of study in their own right. Further, the scope of what constitutes Roman art has expanded to include the vast spectrum of objects used in civic, religious, funerary, and domestic contexts and from communities across the Roman Empire.
The work gathered in Roman Artists, Patrons, and Public Consumption displays the breadth and depth of scholarship in the field made possible by these fundamental changes. The first five essays approach individual objects and artistic tropes, as well as their cultural contexts and functions, from fresh and dynamic angles. The latter essays focus on case studies in Pompeii, demonstrating how close visual analysis firmly rooted in local and temporal contexts not only strengthens understanding of ancient interactions with monuments but also sparks a reconsideration of long-held assumptions reinforced by earlier scholarship.
These rigorous essays reflect and honor the groundbreaking scholarship of Elaine K. Gazda. In addition to volume editors Brenda Longfellow and Ellen E. Perry, contributors include Bettina Bergmann, Elise Friedland, Barbara Kellum, Diana Y. Ng, Jessica Powers, Melanie Grunow Sobocinski, Lea M. Stirling, Molly Swetnam-Burland, Elizabeth Wolfram Thill, and Jennifer Trimble.
The work gathered in Roman Artists, Patrons, and Public Consumption displays the breadth and depth of scholarship in the field made possible by these fundamental changes. The first five essays approach individual objects and artistic tropes, as well as their cultural contexts and functions, from fresh and dynamic angles. The latter essays focus on case studies in Pompeii, demonstrating how close visual analysis firmly rooted in local and temporal contexts not only strengthens understanding of ancient interactions with monuments but also sparks a reconsideration of long-held assumptions reinforced by earlier scholarship.
These rigorous essays reflect and honor the groundbreaking scholarship of Elaine K. Gazda. In addition to volume editors Brenda Longfellow and Ellen E. Perry, contributors include Bettina Bergmann, Elise Friedland, Barbara Kellum, Diana Y. Ng, Jessica Powers, Melanie Grunow Sobocinski, Lea M. Stirling, Molly Swetnam-Burland, Elizabeth Wolfram Thill, and Jennifer Trimble.
[more]
Roman Brick Stamps in the Kelsey Museum
John P. Bodel
University of Michigan Press, 1983
A catalogue of the largest known collection of brick stamps outside Italy
[more]
Roman Catholicism after Vatican II
Robert A. Burns, OP
Georgetown University Press, 2001
The second Vatican Council, which concluded in December 1965, inaugurated a reformation process in the Catholic Church that continues to this day. Grounding his discussion in the documents that came out of Vatican II, Robert Burns addresses four critical questions that face the Church largely as an outcome of this first truly global Church council.
First, Burns presents an overview of the evolving Roman Catholic understanding of Jesus Christ. He follows with an analysis of authority within the Church, a matter of some contention in today's democratic societies, and a discussion of Catholicism as a global church incorporating people and practices from many cultures. Finally, Burns examines the validity of other religions in relation to the Christian claim that salvation through Jesus is unique and final.
A readable introduction for all Catholics interested in learning more about their church, the book includes features such as chapter summaries and study questions that also make it an ideal textbook for undergraduates or parish study.
[more]
Roman Cities
G. Michael Woloch
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984
Roman Cities combines G. Michael Woloch’s translation of Les villes romaines, Pierre Grimal’s noted French work on Roman city planning, archeology, and urban history, with Woloch’s additional notes and descriptions of the cities mentioned by Grimal, as well as other important Roman cities. The book provides a brief history and description of more than a hundred Roman cities, an extensive master bibliography, and a comprehensive glossary. Roman Cities will interest both scholars and students of Roman history and archeology, city planning, urban geography, and the social sciences. The glossary and bibliography make the book of value to specialists pursuing a particular topic and to students, history buffs, and amateur archaeologists seeking to broaden their understanding of the Roman city planning methods that are such an integral part of our modern urban heritage.
Roman Cities provides the first comprehensive study in English of major Roman cities, including an excellent coverage of the Roman legacy which was transmitted to medieval and modern trends in architecture and urban planning..
Roman Cities provides the first comprehensive study in English of major Roman cities, including an excellent coverage of the Roman legacy which was transmitted to medieval and modern trends in architecture and urban planning..
[more]
Roman Coins and Public Life under the Empire
E. Togo Salmon Papers II
George M. Paul and Michael Ierardi, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Roman coins often shed light on Roman public life and society through the legends, portraits, and images they bear. The papers collected in this volume were originally presented at the Second E. Togo Salmon Conference on Roman Studies. The eight contributors are specialists in Roman coins or Roman history and in the relations between them.
Coins are a unique source of information about the Roman world. In the case of the Roman Empire they were issued by or with the approval of the ruling power. The representations and legends they show therefore present an official view of contemporary affairs. The coins themselves, minted for official purposes such as paying the army, when studied carefully can help reconstruct official policies. They can also occasionally reveal what monuments now lost may have looked like.
It is not infrequent to come across pleas that the ancient historian should make more frequent use of numismatic evidence. These essays make clear that efforts are being made both by numismatists and by historians to bring the two disciplines together. At the same time the papers reveal that the task is by no means a straightforward one. The survival of Roman coins is variable, and so attempts to reconstruct the size and distribution of issues calls for skilled and experienced analysis. This collection of papers provides evidence for the kind of deductions that the historian may make from Roman coins as well as the illustrations of the pitfalls that await the unwary.
Those interested in Roman history, amateur coin collectors, and professional numismatists will all find much here to widen their knowledge of the public context of Roman coins.
George Paul is Professor of Classics, McMaster University. Michael Ierardi is Lecturer in Classics, McMaster University.
Coins are a unique source of information about the Roman world. In the case of the Roman Empire they were issued by or with the approval of the ruling power. The representations and legends they show therefore present an official view of contemporary affairs. The coins themselves, minted for official purposes such as paying the army, when studied carefully can help reconstruct official policies. They can also occasionally reveal what monuments now lost may have looked like.
It is not infrequent to come across pleas that the ancient historian should make more frequent use of numismatic evidence. These essays make clear that efforts are being made both by numismatists and by historians to bring the two disciplines together. At the same time the papers reveal that the task is by no means a straightforward one. The survival of Roman coins is variable, and so attempts to reconstruct the size and distribution of issues calls for skilled and experienced analysis. This collection of papers provides evidence for the kind of deductions that the historian may make from Roman coins as well as the illustrations of the pitfalls that await the unwary.
Those interested in Roman history, amateur coin collectors, and professional numismatists will all find much here to widen their knowledge of the public context of Roman coins.
George Paul is Professor of Classics, McMaster University. Michael Ierardi is Lecturer in Classics, McMaster University.
[more]
The Roman Community at Table during the Principate, New and Expanded Edition
John F. Donahue
University of Michigan Press, 2017
On its initial publication, The Roman Community at Table during the Principate broke new ground with its approach to the integral place of feasting in ancient Roman culture and the unique power of food to unite and to separate its recipients along class lines throughout the Empire. John F. Donahue’s comprehensive examination of areas such as festal terminology, the social roles of benefactors and beneficiaries, the kinds of foods offered at feasts, and the role of public venues in community banquets draws on over three hundred Latin honorary inscriptions to recreate the ancient Roman feast. Illustrations depicting these inscriptions, as well as the food supply trades and various festal venues, bring important evidence to the study of this vital and enduring social practice. A touchstone for scholars, the work remains fresh and relevant.
This expanded edition of Donahue’s work includes significant new material on current trends in food studies, including the archaeology and bioarchaeology of ancient food and drink; an additional collection of inscriptions on public banquets from the Roman West; and an extensive bibliography of scholarship produced in the last ten years. It will be of interest not only to classicists and historians of the ancient world, but also to anthropologists and sociologists interested in food and social group dynamics.
This expanded edition of Donahue’s work includes significant new material on current trends in food studies, including the archaeology and bioarchaeology of ancient food and drink; an additional collection of inscriptions on public banquets from the Roman West; and an extensive bibliography of scholarship produced in the last ten years. It will be of interest not only to classicists and historians of the ancient world, but also to anthropologists and sociologists interested in food and social group dynamics.
[more]
The Roman Empire
Paul Veyne
Harvard University Press
This compact book--which appeared earlier in the multivolume series A History of Private Life--is a history of the Roman Empire in pagan times. It is an interpretation setting forth in detail the universal civilization of the Romans—so much of it Hellenic—that later gave way to Christianity.
[more]
The Roman Empire
Roots of Imperialism
Neville Morley
Pluto Press, 2010
A millennium and a half after the end of the period of its unquestioned dominance, Rome remains a significant presence in western culture. This book explores what the empire meant to its subjects.
The idea of Rome has long outlived the physical empire that gave it form, and now holds sway over vastly more people and a far greater geographical area than the Romans ever ruled. It continues to shape our understanding of the nature of imperialism, and thus, however subtly, to influence the workings of the world. Unlike most works on Roman history, this book does not offer a simplistic narrative, with military triumph followed by decline and fall. Instead, it analyses the origins and nature of Roman imperialism, its economic, social and cultural impact on the regions it conquered, and its continuing influence in discussions and debates about modern imperialism.
[more]
The Roman Empire
Second Edition
Colin Wells
Harvard University Press, 1995
This sweeping history of the Roman Empire from 44 BC to AD 235 has three purposes: to describe what was happening in the central administration and in the entourage of the emperor; to indicate how life went on in Italy and the provinces, in the towns, in the countryside, and in the army camps; and to show how these two different worlds impinged on each other. Colin Wells’s vivid account is now available in an up-to-date second edition.
[more]
The Roman Forum
David Watkin
Harvard University Press, 2009
One of the most visited sites in Italy, the Roman Forum is also one of the best-known wonders of the Roman world. Though a highpoint on the tourist route around Rome, for many visitors the site can be a baffling disappointment. Several of the monuments turn out to be nineteenth- or twentieth-century reconstructions, while the rubble and the holes made by archaeologists have an unclear relationship to the standing remains, and, to all but the most skilled Romanists, the Forum is an unfortunate mess.
David Watkin sheds completely new light on the Forum, examining the roles of the ancient remains while revealing what exactly the standing structures embody—including the rarely studied medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque churches, as well as the nearby monuments that have important histories of their own. Watkin asks the reader to look through the veneer of archaeology to rediscover the site as it was famous for centuries. This involves offering a remarkable and engaging new vision of a well-visited, if often misunderstood, wonder. It will be enjoyed by readers at home and serve as a guide in the Forum.
[more]
Roman Historical Sources and Institutions
Edited by Henry A. Sanders
University of Michigan Press, 1904
This volume of papers presents studies by individual authors on topics relating to Roman history and historiography, such as the origin of the Tarpeian Rock, Dio Cassius on epigraphic sources, and centurions as alternate commanders for corps of auxiliary soldiers. This is the first in a series of volumes that will alternate between historical and philological topics.
[more]
Roman History
Appian
Harvard University Press, 2019
Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).
Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way.
Of the work’s original 24 books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.
This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and provides additional fragments, along with his letter to Fronto.
[more]
Roman History
Appian
Harvard University Press, 2019
Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).
Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way.
Of the work’s original 24 books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.
This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and provides additional fragments, along with his letter to Fronto.
[more]
Roman History
Appian
Harvard University Press, 2019
Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).
Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way.
Of the work’s original 24 books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.
This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and provides additional fragments, along with his letter to Fronto.
[more]
Roman History and Mythology
Edited by Henry A. Sanders
University of Michigan Press, 1910
This volume of papers presents studies by individual authors on topics relating to Roman history and mythology, such as the myths of Hercules, and the place of Roman law in ancient culture and society.
[more]
Roman History, Volume I
Books 1-11
Dio Cassius
Harvard University Press
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), ca. 150 235 CE, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors. He was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (222235 CE), we possess Books 3660 (36 and 5560 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BCE47 CE. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
[more]
Roman History, Volume II
Books 12-35
Dio Cassius
Harvard University Press
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), ca. 150 235 CE, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors. He was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (222235 CE), we possess Books 3660 (36 and 5560 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BCE47 CE. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
[more]
Roman History, Volume III
Books 36-40
Dio Cassius
Harvard University Press
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), ca. 150 235 CE, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors. He was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (222235 CE), we possess Books 3660 (36 and 5560 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BCE47 CE. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
[more]
Roman History, Volume IV
Books 41-45
Dio Cassius
Harvard University Press
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), ca. 150 235 CE, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors. He was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (222235 CE), we possess Books 3660 (36 and 5560 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BCE47 CE. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
[more]
Roman History, Volume IV
Civil Wars, Books 1–2
Appian
Harvard University Press, 2019
Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).
Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way.
Of the work’s original 24 books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.
This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and provides additional fragments, along with his letter to Fronto.
[more]
Roman History, Volume IX
Books 71-80
Dio Cassius
Harvard University Press
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), ca. 150 235 CE, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors. He was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (222235 CE), we possess Books 3660 (36 and 5560 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BCE47 CE. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
[more]
Roman History, Volume V
Books 46-50
Dio Cassius
Harvard University Press
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), ca. 150 235 CE, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors. He was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (222235 CE), we possess Books 3660 (36 and 5560 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BCE47 CE. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
[more]
Roman History, Volume V
Civil Wars, Books 3–4
Appian
Harvard University Press, 2019
Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).
Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way.
Of the work’s original 24 books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.
This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and provides additional fragments, along with his letter to Fronto.
[more]
Roman History, Volume VI
Books 51-55
Dio Cassius
Harvard University Press
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), ca. 150 235 CE, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors. He was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (222235 CE), we possess Books 3660 (36 and 5560 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BCE47 CE. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
[more]
Roman History, Volume VI
Civil Wars, Book 5. Fragments
Appian
Harvard University Press, 2019
Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).
Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way.
Of the work’s original 24 books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.
This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and provides additional fragments, along with his letter to Fronto.
[more]
Roman History, Volume VII
Books 56-60
Dio Cassius
Harvard University Press
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), ca. 150 235 CE, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors. He was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (222235 CE), we possess Books 3660 (36 and 5560 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BCE47 CE. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
[more]
Roman History, Volume VIII
Books 61-70
Dio Cassius
Harvard University Press
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), ca. 150 235 CE, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors. He was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (222235 CE), we possess Books 3660 (36 and 5560 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BCE47 CE. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
[more]
Roman Holidays
American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy
Robert K. Martin
University of Iowa Press, 2001
Featuring essays by twelve prominent American literature scholars, Roman Holidaysexplores the tradition of American travel to Italy and makes a significant contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century American encounters with Italian culture and, more specifically, with Rome.
The increase in American travel to Italy during the nineteenth century was partly a product of improved conditions of travel. As suggested in the title, Italy served nineteenth-century writers and artists as a kind of laboratory site for encountering Others and “other” kinds of experience. No doubt Italy offered a place of holiday—a momentary escape from the familiar—but the journey to Rome, a place urging upon the visitor a new and more complex sense of history, also forced a reexamination of oneself and one's identity. Writers and artists found their religious, political, and sexual assumptions challenged.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun has a prominent place in this collection: as Henry James commented in his study of Hawthorne, the book was “part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome.” The essayists also examine works by James, Fuller, Melville, Douglass, Howells, and other writers as well as such sculptors as Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story, and Harriet Hosmer.
Bringing contemporary concerns about gender, race, and class to bear upon nineteenth-century texts, Roman Holidays is an especially timely contribution to nineteenth-century American studies.
[more]
Roman Infrastructure in Early Medieval Britain
The Adaptations of the Past in Text and Stone
Mateusz Fafinski
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Early Medieval Britain is more Roman than we think. The Roman Empire left vast infrastructural resources on the island. These resources lay buried not only in dirt and soil, but also in texts, laws, chronicles - even charters, churches, and landscapes. This book uncovers them and shows how they shaped Early Medieval Britain. Infrastructure, material and symbolic, can work in ways that are not immediately obvious and exert an influence long after the builders have gone. Infrastructure can also rest dormant and be reactivated with a changed function, role and appearance. This is not a simple story of continuity and discontinuity: it is a story of transformation, of how the Roman infrastructural past was used and re-used, and also how it influenced the later societies of Britain.
[more]
Roman Military Law
By C. E. Brand
University of Texas Press, 1968
Rome was the law-giver for much of the modern world. She was also the greatest military power of antiquity, operating her military organization with remarkable efficiency and effectiveness throughout most of the then-known world. In view of the importance of both the legal and military aspects of the Roman Empire, an account of their combination in a system of disciplinary control for the Roman armies is of considerable significance to historians in both fields—and, in fact, to scholars in general. In Roman Military Law,C. E. Brand describes this system of control. Since a characterization of such a system can be made most meaningful only against a background of Roman constitutional government and in the light of ideologies current at the time, Brand follows his initial “Note on Sources” with a sketch of the contemporary Roman scene. This first section includes a discussion of the Roman constitution and an examination ofRoman criminal law. The history of Rome, as a republic, principate, and empire, extended over a period of a thousand years, so any attempt to represent a generalized picture must be essentially a matter of extraction and condensation from the voluminous literature of the whole era. Nevertheless, from the fantastic evolution that is the history of Rome, Brand has been able to construct a more or less static historical mosaic that may be considered typically“Roman.” This comes into sharpest focus during the period of the PunicWars, when the city and its people were most intensely Roman. The picture of the Roman armies is set into this basic framework, in chapters dealing with military organization, disciplinary organization, religion and discipline, and offenses and punishments. The final section of the book considers briefly the vast changes in Romaninstitutions that came about under the armies of the Empire, and then concludes with the Latin text and an English translation of the only knowncode of Roman military justice, promulgated sometime during the laterEmpire, preserved in Byzantine literature, and handed down to medieval times in Latin translations of Byzantine Greek law, which it has heretofore been confused.
[more]
Roman Mosaics in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Alexis Belis
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2016
The mosaics in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum span the second through the sixth centuries AD and reveal the diversity of compositions found throughout the Roman Empire during this period. Elaborate floors of stone and glass tesserae transformed private dwellings and public buildings alike into spectacular settings of vibrant color, figural imagery, and geometric design. Scenes from mythology, nature, daily life, and spectacles in the arena enlivened interior spaces and reflected the cultural ambitions of wealthy patrons. This online catalogue documents all of the mosaics in the Getty Museum’s collection, presenting their artistry in new color photography as well as the contexts of their discovery and excavation across Rome's expanding empire—from its center in Italy to provinces in southern Gaul, North Africa, and ancient Syria.
The free online edition of this open-access catalogue, available at www.getty.edu/publications/romanmosaics/, includes zoomable high-resolution photography, embedded glossary terms and additional comparative images, and interactive maps drawn from the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, CSV and JSON downloads of the object data from the catalogue, and JPG and PPT downloads of the main catalogue images.
[more]
The Roman Near East
31 BC–AD 337
Fergus Millar
Harvard University Press
From Augustus to Constantine, the Roman Empire in the Near East expanded step by step, southward to the Red Sea and eastward across the Euphrates to the Tigris. In a remarkable work of interpretive history, Fergus Millar shows us this world as it was forged into the Roman provinces of Syria, Judaea, Arabia, and Mesopotamia. His book conveys the magnificent sweep of history as well as the rich diversity of peoples, religions, and languages that intermingle in the Roman Near East. Against this complex backdrop, Millar explores questions of cultural and religious identity and ethnicity—as aspects of daily life in the classical world and as part of the larger issues they raise.
As Millar traces the advance of Roman control, he gives a lucid picture of Rome’s policies and governance over its far-flung empire. He introduces us to major regions of the area and their contrasting communities, bringing out the different strands of culture, communal identity, language, and religious belief in each. The Roman Near East makes it possible to see rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity, and eventually the origins of Islam against the matrix of societies in which they were formed. Millar’s evidence permits us to assess whether the Near East is best seen as a regional variant of Graeco-Roman culture or as in some true sense oriental.
A masterful treatment of a complex period and world, distilling a vast amount of literary, documentary, artistic, and archaeological evidence—always reflecting new findings—this book is sure to become the standard source for anyone interested in the Roman Empire or the history of the Near East.
[more]
Roman North Africa
Environment, Society and Medical Contribution
Louise Cilliers
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
This book examines the environment and society of North Africa during the late Roman period (fourth and fifth centuries CE) through the writings of Helvius Vindicianus, Theodorus Priscianus, Caelius Aurelianus, and Cassius Felix.These four medical writers, whose translation into Latin of precious Greek texts has been hailed as ‘the achievement of the millennium’ by one modern scholar, provide a unique opportunity to understand North Africa, the most prosperous region of the Roman World during Late Antiquity. Although focusing on medical knowledge and hygiene, their writings provide fresh insights on the environment, economy, population, language, and health facilities of the region.Roman North Africa: Environment, Society and Medical Contribution includes the first full discussion of the exceptional career of the physician Helvius Vindicianus, as well as a valuable reassessment of other writers whose works were read throughout the Middle Ages. It will therefore prove invaluable not only for scholars of Late Antiquity and North Africa, but also for those working on later periods.
[more]
The Roman Object Revolution
Objectscapes and Intra-Cultural Connectivity in Northwest Europe
Martin Pitts
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Archaeologists working in northwest Europe have long remarked on the sheer quantity and standardisation of objects unearthed from the Roman period, especially compared with earlier eras. What was the historical significance of this boom in standardised objects? With a wide and ever-changing spectrum of innovative objects and styles to choose from, to what extent did the choices made by people in the past really matter? To answer these questions, this book sheds new light on the make-up of late Iron Age and early Roman ‘objectscapes’, through an examination of the circulation and selections of thousands of standardised pots, brooches, and other objects, with emphasis on funerary repertoires, c. 100 bc-ad 100. Breaking with the national frameworks that inform artefact research in much ‘provincial’ Roman archaeology, the book tests the idea that marked increases in the movement of people and objects fostered pan-regional culture(s) and transformed societies. Using a rich database of cemeteries and settlements spanning a swathe of northwest Europe, including southern Britannia, Gallia Belgica, and Germania Inferior, the study extensively applies multivariate statistics (such as Correspondence Analysis) to examine the roles of objects in an ever-changing and richly complex cultural milieu.
[more]
Roman Period Statuettes in the Netherlands and beyond
Representation and Ritual Use in Context
Christel Veen
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
The subject of this study is a relatively rare category of artefacts, bronze and terracotta statuettes that represent deities, human figures and animals. They were introduced in the northwestern provinces by Roman troops from the end of the 1st century BCE onwards. The statuettes have been recovered from military and non-military settlements, the surrounding landscape and, to a far lesser extent, from sanctuaries and graves. Until now, their meaning and function have seldom been analysed in relation to their find-spots. Contrary to traditional studies, they have been examined as one separate category of artefacts, which offers new insights into the distribution pattern and iconographic representation of deities. When studying a group of artefacts, a large research area or a large dataset is required, as well as dateable artefacts and find-contexts. These conditions do not apply to the Netherlands and to the majority of statuettes that are central to this study. Moreover, although the changing appearance of statuettes suggest a transformation of cults, the identities of the owners of these statuettes remain invisible to us. Therefore, the issue of Romanization is not put central here. Instead, the focus is on a specific aspect of religion, known as lived religion, within the wider subject of its transformation in the Roman period: how people used statuettes in everyday life, in the context of their houses and settlements.
[more]
Roman Political Ideas and Practice
F. E. Adcock
University of Michigan Press, 1964
The story unfolds against a background of wars, financial tangles, shifting foreign policy, and personal rivalries. Sir Frank finds the secret of Roman power in the dignity of its great men and the liberty of the small. Though centuries have elapsed since the Caesars, we need not look far to discover in our own day the same conflicts between personal ambition and the dream of peace with dignity that consumed Rome. This book underscores the fragility of all political institutions, including our own.
[more]
Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy
Jeri Blair DeBrohun
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy presents an arresting new interpretation of the intricate and complex poetry of Propertius' final collection. Jeri Blair DeBrohun illuminates the manner in which the poet reinvents and revitalizes his elegy in Book 4 by broadening its lyrical promise and ideological horizons.
DeBrohun finds the most striking element of Book 4 to be the apparent polarity of the poems, whose themes are split between new, aetiological subjects of Roman national significance and amatory affairs that evoke the themes of Propertius' first three books. In her compelling reassessment of Propertius' aspirations in Book 4, DeBrohun identifies the conflict between his new ambitions to produce Roman aetiological elegy and his traditional, exclusive devotion to erotic concerns as the central dynamic of his collection. Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy reveals how the poet came to find in the subcodes of the elegiac genre a medium of interaction between the opposing values of the two themes.
Roman Propertius will interest not only scholars and students of Greek and Roman Poetry but also students of later traditions who are interested in the questions of genre and the relationship between poetry and wider cultural discourses.
Jeri Blair DeBrohun is Associate Professor of Classics, Brown University.
DeBrohun finds the most striking element of Book 4 to be the apparent polarity of the poems, whose themes are split between new, aetiological subjects of Roman national significance and amatory affairs that evoke the themes of Propertius' first three books. In her compelling reassessment of Propertius' aspirations in Book 4, DeBrohun identifies the conflict between his new ambitions to produce Roman aetiological elegy and his traditional, exclusive devotion to erotic concerns as the central dynamic of his collection. Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy reveals how the poet came to find in the subcodes of the elegiac genre a medium of interaction between the opposing values of the two themes.
Roman Propertius will interest not only scholars and students of Greek and Roman Poetry but also students of later traditions who are interested in the questions of genre and the relationship between poetry and wider cultural discourses.
Jeri Blair DeBrohun is Associate Professor of Classics, Brown University.
[more]
The Roman Republic in Political Thought
Fergus Millar
Brandeis University Press, 2002
It is a fact that the very long-lived Roman Republic has consistently played a surprisingly slight role in political theory and discussions about the nature of democracy, forms of government, and other matters, particularly when compared to the enormous attention paid to fifth-century BCE Athenian democracy. Fergus Millar re-opens the issue of how the Roman Republic was understood and used by political thinkers from the Ancient World to the present. Describing both the reality of the late Roman Republic and showing how its nature was distorted even by contemporary sources, he tracks its treatment (or absence) in political discourse from Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, and in debates surrounding the creation of the American constitution, particularly in the Federalist papers. In brief, clear prose, with quotations in English from important works, and economical use of endnotes, he reinforces his unconventional thesis about the significance of direct democracy in the late Roman Republic. In the process, he also provides an unprecedented tour through 2000 years of Western political theory from the point of view of the Roman Republic, in general, and theories of direct democracy and the balance of power, in particular.
[more]
The Roman Republic
Second Edition
Michael Crawford
Harvard University Press, 1993
Michael Crawford’s highly praised history is now expanded and revised to accommodate recent discoveries and current thinking.
[more]
Roman Siege Warfare
Josh Levithan
University of Michigan Press, 2013
Roman siege warfare had its own structure and customs, and expectations both by the besieged and by the attacking army. Sieges are typically sorted by the techniques and technologies that attackers used, but the more fruitful approach offered in Roman Siege Warfare examines the way a siege follows or diverges from typical narrative and operational plotlines. Author Josh Levithan emphasizes the human elements—morale and motivation—rather than the engineering, and he recaptures the sense of a siege as an event in progress that offers numerous attitudes, methods, and outcomes. Sieges involved a concentration of violent effort in space and the practical challenge posed by a high wall: unlike field battles they were sharply defined in time, in space, and in operational terms.
Chapters examine motivation and behavior during a siege and focus on examples from both the Roman Republic and the Empire: Polybius, Livy, Julius Caesar, Flavius Josephus, and Ammianus Marcellinus. Levithan examines the “gadgetary turn,” during which writers began to lavish attention on artillery and wall-damaging techniques, fetishizing technology and obscuring the centrality of the assault and of human behavior.
This volume speaks to classicists and historians of all stripes. All passages are translated, and references are accessible to nonspecialists. Military historians will also find much of interest in the volume, in its treatment both of Roman military conduct and of wider military practice.
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