Search results for ""Author Various"

A richly diverse collection of classical Indian terms for expressing the many moods and subtleties of emotional experienceWords for the Heart is a captivating treasury of emotion terms drawn from some of India’s earliest classical languages. Inspired by the traditional Indian genre of a “treasury”—a wordbook or anthology of short texts or poems—this collection features 177 jewellike entries evoking the kinds of phenomena English speakers have variously referred to as emotions, passions, sentiments, moods, affects, and dispositions. These entries serve as beautiful literary and philosophical vignettes that convey the delightful texture of Indian thought and the sheer multiplicity of conversations about emotions in Indian texts. An indispensable collection, Words for the Heart reveals how Indian ways of interpreting human experience can challenge our assumptions about emotions and enrich our lives. Brings to light a rich lexicon of emotion from ancient India Uses the Indian genre of a “treasury,” or wordbook, to explore the contours of classical Indian thought in three of the subcontinent’s earliest languages—Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit Features 177 alphabetical entries, from abhaya (“fearlessness”) to yoga (“the discipline of calm”) Draws on a wealth of literary, religious, and philosophical writings from classical India Includes synonyms, antonyms, related words, and suggestions for further reading Invites readers to engage in the cross-cultural study of emotions Reveals the many different ways of naming and interpreting human experience

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As Christian leaders in the first through fifth centuries embraced ascetic interpretations of the Bible and practices of sexual renunciation, sexual slander—such as the accusations Paul leveled against wayward Gentiles in the New Testament—played a pivotal role in the formation of early Christian identity. In particular, the imagined construct of the lascivious, literal-minded Jew served as a convenient foil to the chaste Christian ideal. Susanna Drake examines representations of Jewish sexuality in early Christian writings that use accusations of carnality, fleshliness, bestiality, and licentiousness as strategies to differentiate the "spiritual" Christian from the "carnal" Jew. Church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Hippolytus of Rome, Origen of Alexandria, and John Chrysostom portrayed Jewish men variously as dangerously hypersexual, at times literally seducing virtuous Christians into heresy, or as weak and effeminate, unable to control bodily impulses or govern their wives. As Drake shows, these carnal caricatures served not only to emphasize religious difference between Christians and Jews but also to justify increased legal constraints and violent acts against Jews as the interests of Christian leaders began to dovetail with the interests of the empire. Placing Christian representations of Jews at the root of the destruction of synagogues and mobbing of Jewish communities in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, Slandering the Jew casts new light on the intersections of sexuality, violence, representation, and religious identity.

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The astonishing story of the Sassoons, one of the nineteenth century's preeminent commercial families and 'the Rothschilds of the East'The Sassoons were one of the great business dynasties of the nineteenth century, as eminent as traders as the Rothschilds were bankers. This book reveals the secrets behind the family's phenomenal success: how a handful of Jewish exiles from Ottoman Baghdad forged a mercantile juggernaut from their new home in colonial Bombay, the vast network of agents, informants and politicians they built, and the way they came to bridge East and West, culturally as well as commercially. As one competitor remarked, 'silver and gold, silks, gums and spices, opium and cotton, wool and wheat - whatever moves over sea or land feels the hand or bears the mark of Sassoon & Co.'Drawing for the first time on the vast family archives, Joseph Sassoon brings vividly to life a succession of remarkable characters. From a single generation: Flora, the first woman to steer a major global business, Siegfried, the poet, and Victor, the tycoon who drew the stars of Hollywood's silent era to his skyscraper in Shanghai. Through the lives these ambitious figures built for themselves in London, Bombay and beyond, the reader is drawn into a captivating world of politics and power, innovation and intrigue, high society and empire.The Global Merchants is thus at once an intimate portrait of a single family and a panorama of the hundred and thirty years of their prominence: from the Opium Wars and opening of China to the American Civil War, the establishment of the British Raj to India's independence. Together these give a fresh perspective on the evolution of one of the defining forces of their age and the present: globalization. The Sassoons were variously its agents, advocates and casualties, and watching them moving through the world, we perceive the making of our own.

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In 1945, Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys - writers for the New Statesman and a National Trust administrator - purchased Long Crichel House, an old rectory with no electricity and an inadequate water supply. In this improbable place, the last English literary salon began. Quieter and less formal than the famed London literary salons, Long Crichel became an idiosyncratic experiment in communal living. Sackville-West, Shawe-Taylor and Knollys - later joined by the literary critic Raymond Mortimer - became members of one another's surrogate families and their companionship became a stimulus for writing, for them and their guests. Long Crichel's visitors' book reveals a Who's Who of the arts in post-war Britain - Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, Laurie Lee, Cyril Connolly, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Cecil Beaton, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson - who were attracted by the good food, generous quantities of drink and excellent conversation. For Frances Partridge and James Lees-Milne, two of the twentieth century's finest diarists, Long Crichel became a second home and their lives became bound up with the house.Yet there was to be more to the story of the house than what critics variously referred to as a group of 'hyphenated gentlemen-aesthetes' and a 'prose factory'. In later years the house and its inhabitants were to weather the aftershocks of the Crichel Down Affair, the Wolfenden Report and the AIDS crisis. The story of Long Crichel is also part of the development of the National Trust and other conservation movements. Through the lens of Long Crichel, archivist and writer Simon Fenwick tells a wider story of the great upheaval that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. Intimate and revealing, he brings to life Long Crichel's golden, gossipy years and, in doing so, unveils a missing link in English literary and cultural history.

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In 1945, Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys - writers for the New Statesman and a National Trust administrator - purchased Long Crichel House, an old rectory with no electricity and an inadequate water supply. In this improbable place, the last English literary salon began. Quieter and less formal than the famed London literary salons, Long Crichel became an idiosyncratic experiment in communal living. Sackville-West, Shawe-Taylor and Knollys - later joined by the literary critic Raymond Mortimer - became members of one another's surrogate families and their companionship became a stimulus for writing, for them and their guests. Long Crichel's visitors' book reveals a Who's Who of the arts in post-war Britain - Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, Laurie Lee, Cyril Connolly, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Cecil Beaton, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson - who were attracted by the good food, generous quantities of drink and excellent conversation. For Frances Partridge and James Lees-Milne, two of the twentieth century's finest diarists, Long Crichel became a second home and their lives became bound up with the house.Yet there was to be more to the story of the house than what critics variously referred to as a group of 'hyphenated gentlemen-aesthetes' and a 'prose factory'. In later years the house and its inhabitants were to weather the aftershocks of the Crichel Down Affair, the Wolfenden Report and the AIDS crisis. The story of Long Crichel is also part of the development of the National Trust and other conservation movements. Through the lens of Long Crichel, archivist and writer Simon Fenwick tells a wider story of the great upheaval that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. Intimate and revealing, he brings to life Long Crichel's golden, gossipy years and, in doing so, unveils a missing link in English literary and cultural history.

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Given that Enlightenment rationality developed in Europe as European nations aggressively claimed other parts of the world for their own enrichment, scholars have made rationality the subject of postcolonial critique, questioning its universality and objectivity. In On Reason, the late philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze demonstrates that rationality, and by extension philosophy, need not be renounced as manifestations or tools of Western imperialism. Examining reason in connection to the politics of difference—the cluster of issues known variously as cultural diversity, political correctness, the culture wars, and identity politics—Eze expounds a rigorous argument that reason is produced through and because of difference. In so doing, he preserves reason as a human property while at the same time showing that it cannot be thought outside the realities of cultural diversity. Advocating rationality in a multicultural world, he proposes new ways of affirming both identity and difference.Eze draws on an extraordinary command of Western philosophical thought and a deep knowledge of African philosophy and cultural traditions. He explores models of rationality in the thought of philosophers from Aristotle, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes to Noam Chomsky, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jacques Derrida, and he considers portrayals of reason in the work of the African thinkers and novelists Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka. Eze reflects on contemporary thought about genetics, race, and postcolonial historiography as well as on the interplay between reason and unreason in the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He contends that while rationality may have a foundational formality, any understanding of its foundation and form is dynamic, always based in historical and cultural circumstances.

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The New York Editions borrows its title from The New York Edition, Henry James’s name for Scribner’s 1907-09 re-issue of his life-long output of novels and shorter fiction. If the homage of Snediker’s second book of poems to the Jamesian oeuvre seems self-evident or obscure, to conceive of this poetry as a translation of James’s prose somewhat misses the mark in terms of the former’s unfolding investment in the vision of a dreamlike field belonging to neither one nor the other, so much as the deep sea dive of language in between, in the throes. These mesmeric poems are experimental meditations on the limbo of lost-in-translation as a multi-axial bardo between multiples lives and texts and those that follow, which they might foreseeably become were these poems not so distinctly wed to a jewel-like present tense driven by no single aesthetic principle save the one it immanently navigates. The multiple voices that call to us from this place are ghostlike, to the extent that the force of their coiled abandon feels tethered to bodies in no familiar way. Even at their most seductively wry or pining, these semblances of speech wash over the landscapes they’re embedded in like a film’s post-production score or the heady excrescence of lilies calling one’s attention to an open window. At the same time, such lurid, queerly disembodied phenomena are richly studded, one might say, with a singular, uncanny material of their own, shot through with the tenacious, not-quite-phantom élan of desolation, remediating mirth and the renegade confusion of each with their respective, recollected forms. These are vigilant elegies, rough odes, songs of experience shy toward neither their own felt urgency nor the latter’s tendency to spoil: baroque trauerspiel meets ghost-story in reverse, moonlight gleaming with the otherworldly shine of James Bidgood’s lambent, mineral-oiled sea-bed. The New York Editions chronicles the effort of inhabiting while doing justice to the approximate wilderness of all those variously perceptible disturbances that set the world ajar just enough to feel the draught of an adjacent universe pouring in. “… and hope is the/ shells each morning small and cool// into which we hermits/ retract the startling// need of our/ claws.”

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How many otherwise well-educated readers know that the familiar orange carrot was once a novelty? It is a little more than 400 years old. Domesticated in Afghanistan in 900 AD, the purple carrot, in fact, was the dominant variety until Dutch gardeners bred the young upstart in the seventeenth century. After surveying paintings from this era in the Louvre and other museums, Dutch agronomist Otto Banga discovered this stunning transformation. The story of the carrot is just one of the hidden tales this book recounts. Through portraits of a wide range of foods we eat and love, from artichokes to strawberries, The Carrot Purple traces the path of foods from obscurity to familiarity. Joel Denker explores how these edible plants were, in diverse settings, invested with new meaning. They acquired not only culinary significance but also ceremonial, medicinal, and economic importance. Foods were variously savored, revered, and reviled. This entertaining history will enhance the reader’s appreciation of a wide array of foods we take for granted. From the carrot to the cabbage, from cinnamon to coffee, from the peanut to the pistachio, the plants, beans, nuts, and spices we eat have little-known stories that are unearthed and served here with relish.

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The events which unfolded south of Brussels on 18 June 1815 conferred instant immortality on those who took part in them. For the Duke of Wellington, Waterloo consummated victory in a long battle for what he considered to be his due recognition. Whilst he guarded that reputation jealously, he also jeopardised it by his decision to enter politics in what proved to be an especially partisan age. Even the outpouring of national grief which accompanied his death in 1852 could not totally obscure the ambivalence he had aroused in life. The memory of Waterloo, meanwhile, followed its own trajectory. Travellers initially flocked to the battlefield as if drawn by a magnet. What the triumph meant for Britain, and the wider world, moreover, became a battle in itself, one fought variously in the political, literary and artistic theatres of war. As the nineteenth century advanced, it was only Waterloo’s less-exalted participants who, relatively, faded from view – or were ignored. Drawing on many under-utilised sources to illuminate some less familiar themes, this timely study offers fresh perspectives on one of Britain’s best-known figures, as well as on the nature of heroism. The reader is also given pause for thought as to appropriate forms of commemoration and how national celebrations are prone to manipulation, for their own purposes, by those in government.

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"I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt's idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don't exist. That is, they appear in the text's absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading's supple snare, I feel love."Nilling is a sequence of 6 loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading. Lisa Robertson applies an acute eye to the subject of reading and writing—two elemental forces that, she suggests, cannot be separated.For Robertson, a book is an intimacy, and with keen and insightful language, Nilling's essays build into a lively yet close conversation with Robertson's "masters": past writers, philosophers, and idealists who have guided her reading (and writing) practice to this point.If "a reader is a beginner," then even regular readers of Robertson's kind of deep thinking will delight in the infinite folding together of concepts—the codex, pornography, melancholy, cities—that on their own may seem banal, but in their twisting intertextuality, make for a scintillating study of reading as a deep engagement.

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Established in 1917 to train Royal Flying Corps aircrew, during WWI Duxford was also the base for two United States Aero Squadrons, 137 and 159, and by the end was a mobilisation airfield for three DH9 day bomber squadrons. During the 1920s and 30s, expansion continued apace, with three fighter squadrons, 19, 29 and 111, and the presence of many illustrious names, including Harry Broadhurst, Johnny Kent and Frank Whittle. The first aerodrome in Fighter Command to receive the Spitfire (in August 1938), Duxford rose to supreme prominence during the early part of the Second World War. Part of 12 Group detailed to protect the industrial midlands and north east Britain, the base’s role during the Battle of Britain was mired in controversy due to the ‘Big Wing’ tactics of Douglas Bader and Trafford Leigh-Mallory. From October 1942 to the end of the war, Duxford was essentially an American base for, variously, the 8th Air Force, 350th and 78th Fighter Groups. Postwar the RAF operated jets from the station until 1961 when the future was put on hold. Managing to avoid the ignominy of becoming a prison or sports complex, the Imperial War Museum finally came to the rescue making Duxford into today’s premier international air museum. Richard Smith’s research has led him to numerous previously unpublished collections from which he has unearthed some marvellous images of historical significance. A must for the collector, historian or veteran of the times.

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Whether tall office buildings, high-rise apartments, or lofty hotels, skyscrapers have been stars in American cinema since the silent era. Cinema’s tall buildings have been variously represented as unbridled aspiration, dens of iniquity and eroticism, beacons of democracy, and well-oiled corporate machines. Considering their intriguing diversity, Merrill Schleier establishes and explains the impact of actual skyscrapers on America’s ideologies about work, leisure, romance, sexual identity, and politics as seen in Hollywood movies. Schleier analyzes cinematic works in which skyscrapers are an integral component, interpreting the iconography and spatial practices in these often fictional modern buildings, especially on concepts of gender. Organized chronologically and thematically, she offers close readings of films including Safety Last, Skyscraper Souls, Wife vs. Secretary, Baby Face, The Fountainhead, and Desk Set. Opening with the humorous antics of Harold Lloyd, the premier skyscraper actor of the silent era, the book moves through the disillusionment of the Depression era, in which skyscrapers are employed as players in moralistic, class-conscious stories, to post–World War II and its reimagining of American political and economic values and ends with the complicated prosperity of the 1950s and the lives of white-collar workers and their spouses. Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, among works of other critical theorists, Schleier creates in this book a model for understanding architecture as a purveyor of desire and class values and, ultimately, contributes broadly to thinking on the rich intersection of the built environment, cinema, and gender.

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Emancipating Lincoln seeks a new approach to the Emancipation Proclamation, a foundational text of American liberty that in recent years has been subject to woeful misinterpretation. These seventeen hundred words are Lincoln’s most important piece of writing, responsible both for his being hailed as the Great Emancipator and for his being pilloried by those who consider his once-radical effort at emancipation insufficient and half-hearted.Harold Holzer, an award-winning Lincoln scholar, invites us to examine the impact of Lincoln’s momentous announcement at the moment of its creation, and then as its meaning has changed over time. Using neglected original sources, Holzer uncovers Lincoln’s very modern manipulation of the media—from his promulgation of disinformation to the ways he variously withheld, leaked, and promoted the Proclamation—in order to make his society-altering announcement palatable to America. Examining his agonizing revisions, we learn why a peerless prose writer executed what he regarded as his “greatest act” in leaden language. Turning from word to image, we see the complex responses in American sculpture, painting, and illustration across the past century and a half, as artists sought to criticize, lionize, and profit from Lincoln’s endeavor.Holzer shows the faults in applying our own standards to Lincoln’s efforts, but also demonstrates how Lincoln’s obfuscations made it nearly impossible to discern his true motives. As we approach the 150th anniversary of the Proclamation, this concise volume is a vivid depiction of the painfully slow march of all Americans—white and black, leaders and constituents—toward freedom.

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Richard II is one of the most enigmatic of English kings. Shakespeare depicted him as a tragic figure, an irresponsible, cruel monarch who nevertheless rose in stature as the substance of power slipped from him. By later writers he has been variously portrayed as a half-crazed autocrat or a conventional ruler whose principal errors were the mismanagement of his nobility and disregard for the political conventions of his age. This book—the first full-length biography of Richard in more than fifty years—offers a radical reinterpretation of the king.Nigel Saul paints a picture of Richard as a highly assertive and determined ruler, one whose key aim was to exalt and dignify the crown. In Richard's view, the crown was threatened by the factiousness of the nobility and the assertiveness of the common people. The king met these challenges by exacting obedience, encouraging lofty new forms of address, and constructing an elaborate system of rule by bonds and oaths. Saul traces the sources of Richard's political ideas and finds that he was influenced by a deeply felt orthodox piety and by the ideas of the civil lawyers. He shows that, although Richard's kingship resembled that of other rulers of the period, unlike theirs, his reign ended in failure because of tactical errors and contradictions in his policies. For all that he promoted the image of a distant, all-powerful monarch, Richard II's rule was in practice characterized by faction and feud. The king was obsessed by the search for personal security: in his subjects, however, he bred only insecurity and fear.A revealing portrait of a complex and fascinating figure, the book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the politics and culture of the English middle ages.

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A history of Kantian and post-Kantian thought and of a foundational stage of German orientalism. German orientalism has been understood, variously, as a form of latent colonialism, as a quest for academic hegemony in Europe, and as an effort to diagnose and treat the ills of modern Western culture. Nicholas Germana identifiesa different impetus for orientalism in German thought, seeing it as an effort to come to grips with the Other within German society at the turn of the nineteenth century and within the dynamics of subjectivity itself. Drawing largely on work by feminist scholars, the book uncovers an anxiety at the core of Kantian and post-Kantian thought, thus shedding light on its derogation (or elevation) of Oriental cultures. Kant's philosophy of freedom is a construction of modern, Western masculinity. Reason, which alone can make freedom possible, subverts and orders chaotic nature and protects the rational subject from the enervating influences of the senses and the imagination. The feminized, sexually charged Orient is a threat to the historical achievement of Western male rationality. Germana's book emphasizes aesthetics in the German orientalist discourse, a subject that has received little attention todate. In this tradition of German thought, aesthetics became a form of spiritual anthropology, ordering and classifying societies, races, and genders in terms of their ability to master the senses and the imagination, forces thatundermine rational autonomy, the very source of human (i.e., masculine) dignity. Nicholas A. Germana is Professor of History at Keene State College, New Hampshire.

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For long-time residents of Washington, D.C.'s Shaw/U Street, the neighborhood has become almost unrecognizable in recent years. Where the city's most infamous open-air drug market once stood, a farmers' market now sells grass-fed beef and homemade duck egg ravioli. On the corner where AM.PM carryout used to dish out soul food, a new establishment markets its $28 foie gras burger. Shaw is experiencing a dramatic transformation, from "ghetto" to "gilded ghetto," where white newcomers are rehabbing homes, developing dog parks, and paving the way for a third wave coffee shop on nearly every block.Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City is an in-depth ethnography of this gilded ghetto. Derek S. Hyra captures here a quickly gentrifying space in which long-time black residents are joined, and variously displaced, by an influx of young, white, relatively wealthy, and/or gay professionals who, in part as a result of global economic forces and the recent development of central business districts, have returned to the cities earlier generations fled decades ago. As a result, America is witnessing the emergence of what Hyra calls "cappuccino cities." A cappuccino has essentially the same ingredients as a cup of coffee with milk, but is considered upscale and double the price. In Hyra's cappuccino city, the black inner-city neighborhood undergoes enormous transformations and becomes racially "lighter" and more expensive by the year.

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A twentieth-anniversary edition of this tour de force in feminism and Indigenous studies, now with a new preface The twentieth anniversary of the original publication of this influential and prescient work is commemorated with a new edition of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman by Aileen Moreton-Robinson. In this bold book, of its time and ahead of its time, whiteness is made visible in power relations, presenting a dialogic of how white feminists represent Indigenous women in discourse and how Indigenous women self-present. Moreton-Robinson argues that white feminists benefit from colonization: they are overwhelmingly represented and disproportionately predominant, play the key roles, and constitute the norm, the ordinary, and the standard of womanhood. They do not self-present as white but rather represent themselves as variously classed, sexualized, aged, and abled. The disjuncture between representation and self-presentation of Indigenous women and white feminists illuminates different epistemologies and an incommensurability in the social construction of gender.Not so much a study of white womanhood, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman instead reveals an invisible racialized subject position represented and deployed in power relations with Indigenous women. The subject position occupied by middle-class white women is embedded in material and discursive conditions that shape the nature of power relations between white feminists and Indigenous women—and the unjust structural relationship between white society and Indigenous society.

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Oceanography calls for a wide variety of mathematical andstatistical techniques, and this accessible treatment provides thebasics every oceanographer needs to know, including * Practical ways to deal with chemical, geological, and biologicaloceanographic data * Instructions on detecting the existence of patterns in whatappears to be noise * Numerous examples from the field that highlight the applicationof the methods presented Written by an oceanographer and based on his successful course atthe University of Hawaii, the volume is well suited to atwo-semester course at the graduate level. The book reviews thenecessary calculus, clarifies statistical concepts, and includesend-of-chapter problems that illustrate and expand the varioustopics. Tips on using MATLAB(r) software in matrix operationscomplement chapters that deal with the formulation of relationshipsin terms of matrices. The main body of the text covers the actual methods of dealing withdata--including least squares and linear regression, correlationfunctions and analysis of variance, means and error bounds,nonlinear techniques and weighted least squares, numericalintegration, and other modeling techniques. Unlike mostintroductory texts, Mathematical Methods for Oceanographersdiscusses regression methods in great detail, and includes ananalysis of why certain methods produce unbiased parameterestimates. Finally, the chapter on time series analysis covers anarea of particular interest to physical oceanographers. The numerous problems and solutions included in the book enablereaders to check their understanding of concepts and techniques aswell as their ability to apply what they have learned. A must-read for students of oceanography, this text/reference isalso useful for professionals in the field, as well as forfisheries scientists, biologists, and those in the environmentalsciences. A systematic introduction to the mathematics oceanographersneed Topics covered in Mathematical Methods for Oceanographers include: * A review of the necessary calculus * Model I linear regression * Correlation analysis * Model II linear regression * Polynomial curve fitting, linear multiple regression analysis,and nonlinear least squares * Numerical integration * Box models * Time series analysis

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You would as well look for blood in a corpse as for the least shred of decency in a man . . . Without help from their wives, men are just like unlit lamps . . . Just think of them as an unreliable clock that tells you it's ten o'clock when it's in fact barely two . . . A man without a woman is like a fly without a head . . . These are but a small selection of the quips bandied about at this lively gathering of women. The broad topic at hand is the relative pros and cons of men, and the cases in point range from pick-up artists to locker-room talk, and from double standards to fragile masculinity. Yet this dialogue unfolds not among ironically misandrist millenials venting at their local dive bar, but rather among sixteenth-century women--variously married, widowed, single, and betrothed--attending a respectable Venice garden party. Written in the early 1590s by Moderata Fonte, pseudonym of the Renaissance poet and writer Modesta Pozzo, this literary dialogue interrogates men and men's treatment of women, and explores by contrast the virtues of singledom and female friendship. As the women diverge from their theme--discussing everything from astrology to the curative powers of plants and minerals--a remarkable group portrait of wisdom, wit, and erudition emerges. A new introduction by translator Virginia Cox and foreword by Dacia Maraini situate The Merits of Women in its historical context, written as it was on the cusp of Shakespeare's heyday, and straddling the centuries between the feminist works of Christine de Pizan and Mary Wollstonecraft. Elegantly presented for a general audience, this is a must-read for baby feminists and "nasty women" alike, not to mention the perfect subtle gift for any mansplaining friend who needs a refresher on the merits of women . . . and their superiority to men.

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Jean Baudrillard was perhaps the most controversial of all social and cultural theorists. He has been variously vilified as a 'postmodernist', an 'overrated French theorist' and one of the 'intellectual imposters'. In his seventies he survived global fame and a name check in The Matrix; he also contracted cancer. His comments on 9/11, Abu Ghraib and Europe's suburban riots have been eagerly sought and digested. However, his translated publications since his first book in 1968 have left a trail of confusion and misinterpretation. Jean Baudrillard is a notorious figure but few have read many examples of his entire oeuvre. There is now though a chance to read Baudrillard's texts in an overall historical, social and political context and for a cool re-assessment to be made of his life and work, after his death. This book is a central part of that project. It concentrates on what Baudrillard has written over five decades and the order in which he wrote it. The Reader comprises extracts of Baudrillard's writings from the sixties to the noughties, with an editorial introduction and a concluding reading guide. Key Features *Arranged chronologically in order of first publication in French, the Reader illustrates the development and interconnectedness of Baudrillard's work since the 1960s. *Each section has an extract of one of Jean Baudrillard's writings translated into English, prefaced by a short bibliographical introduction setting the scene. *The Reader will be of interest to students and staff in a range of university courses across the globe and to those general readers interested in public intellectuals, media events and contemporary theory.

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Exploring the broad implications of evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis’s work, this collection brings together specialists across a range of disciplines, from paleontology, molecular biology, evolutionary theory, and geobiology to developmental systems theory, archaeology, history of science, cultural science studies, and literature and science. Addressing the multiple themes that animated Margulis’s science, the essays within take up, variously, astrobiology and the origin of life, ecology and symbiosis from the microbial to the planetary scale, the coupled interactions of earthly environments and evolving life in Gaia theory and earth system science, and the connections of these newer scientific ideas to cultural and creative productions. Dorion Sagan acquaints the reader with salient issues in Lynn Margulis’s scientific work, the controversies they raised, and the vocabulary necessary to follow the arguments. Sankar Chatterjee synthesizes several strands of current theory for the origin of life on earth. James Strick tells the intertwined origin stories of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and Margulis’s serial endosymbiosis theory. Jan Sapp explores the distinct phylogenetic visions of Margulis and Carl Woese. Susan Squier examines the epigenetics of embryologist and developmental biologist C. H. Waddington. Bruce Clarke studies the convergence of ecosystem ecology, systems theory, and science fiction between the 1960s and the 1980s. James Shapiro discusses the genome evolution that results not from random changes but rather from active cell processes. Susan Oyama shows how the concept of development balances an over-emphasis on genetic coding and other deterministic schemas. Christopher Witmore studies the ways in which a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, mixes up natural resources, animal lives, and human appetites. And Peter Westbroek brings the insights of earth system science toward a new worldview essential for a proper response to global change.

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In this compelling critique Rob Wilson explores the creation of the “Pacific Rim” in the American imagination and how the concept has been variously adapted and resisted in Hawai‘i, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. Reimagining the American Pacific ranges from the nineteenth century to the present and draws on theories of postmodernism, transnationality, and post-Marxist geography to contribute to the ongoing discussion of what constitutes “global” and “local.”Wilson begins by tracing the arrival of American commerce and culture in the Pacific through missionary and imperial forces in the nineteenth century and the parallel development of Asia/Pacific as an idea. Using an impressive range of texts—from works by Herman Melville, James Michener, Maori and Western Samoan novelists, and Bamboo Ridge poets to Baywatch, films and musicals such as South Pacific and Blue Hawaii, and native Hawaiian shark god poetry—Wilson illustrates what it means for a space to be “regionalized.” Claiming that such places become more open to transnational flows of information, labor, finance, media, and global commodities, he explains how they then become isolated, their borders simultaneously crossed and fixed. In the case of Hawai’i, Wilson argues that culturally innovative, risky forms of symbol making and a broader—more global—vision of local plight are needed to counterbalance the racism and increasing imbalance of cultural capital and goods in the emerging postplantation and tourist-centered economy.Reimagining the American Pacific leaves the reader with a new understanding of the complex interactions of global and local economies and cultures in a region that, since the 1970s, has been a leading trading partner of the United States. It is an engaging and provocative contribution to the fields of Asian and American studies, as well as those of cultural studies and theory, literary criticism, and popular culture.

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This is the first anthology ever devoted to early modern Japanese literature, spanning the period from 1600 to 1900, known variously as the Edo or the Tokugawa, one of the most creative epochs of Japanese culture. This anthology, which will be of vital interest to anyone involved in this era, includes not only fiction, poetry, and drama, but also essays, treatises, literary criticism, comic poetry, adaptations from Chinese, folk stories and other non-canonical works. Many of these texts have never been translated into English before, and several classics have been newly translated for this collection. Early Modern Japanese Literature introduces English readers to an unprecedented range of prose fiction genres, including dangibon (satiric sermons), kibyoshi (satiric and didactic picture books), sharebon (books of wit and fashion), yomihon (reading books), kokkeibon (books of humor), gokan (bound books), and ninjobon (books of romance and sentiment). The anthology also offers a rich array of poetry-waka, haiku, senryu, kyoka, kyoshi-and eleven plays, which range from contemporary domestic drama to historical plays and from early puppet theater to nineteenth century kabuki. Since much of early modern Japanese literature is highly allusive and often elliptical, this anthology features introductions and commentary that provide the critical context for appreciating this diverse and fascinating body of texts. One of the major characteristics of early modern Japanese literature is that almost all of the popular fiction was amply illustrated by wood-block prints, creating an extensive text-image phenomenon. In some genres such as kibyoshi and gokan the text in fact appeared inside the woodblock image. Woodblock prints of actors were also an important aspect of the culture of kabuki drama. A major feature of this anthology is the inclusion of over 200 woodblock prints that accompanied the original texts and drama.

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'Delightful' A HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR / BOOK OF THE WEEK, Daily Mail'Goodwood curator James Peill writes with a wonderfully light touch . . . The Goodwood story is extraordinary and rightly celebrated' Country LifeThe history of Goodwood, England's greatest sporting estateGoodwood has been the home of English sport for centuries. The story of how a small hunting lodge became the iconic location for the globally-renowned Festival of Speed, Glorious Goodwood and Goodwood Revival events is inextricably intertwined with the tale of the Dukes of Richmond. The Dukes were, variously, patrons of the arts, political influencers, royal confidantes, architectural innovators, horticultural enthusiasts and stewards of the community. Above all, they were passionate about the sports for which Goodwood is best known: horseracing, motor sports, foxhunting, cricket, shooting and golf. Drawing upon the wealth of the Goodwood archives, James Peill vividly captures the character of each Duke, some radical and others staunchly traditional, and the wide-ranging impact they had on the Goodwood of today.The broader context is a sweeping history of England, and one family's part in it. Beginning with Charles II and his mistress Louise de Keroualle, the parents of the first Duke, Glorious Goodwood takes the reader on a journey through time, from the seventeenth century to present day, via the Jacobite Rising, the Battle of Waterloo and the First and Second World Wars. There are cameo appearances from George Stubbs, Canaletto, Alexander, Emperor of Russia, Queen Victoria, Jackie Stewart and Edward VII, who famously hosted Privy Council meetings in the Tapestry Drawing Room during race week.Glorious Goodwood is a vivid and intimate portrait of a house and its inhabitants set against a dazzling, panoramic backdrop of English history. At the heart of this colourful and compelling story is a rich sense of the British heritage Goodwood embodies.

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Concerns about censorship have once again reached a fever pitch across the liberal West. In other historical periods, such concerns may have marked reactions to book bans and burnings. Often, they followed prosecutions and subsequent jailtime for things spoken or written. During the Red Scare, they were the hushed response to chilling state-sponsored watch-lists and employer-supported blacklists designed to ensure victory against communism. Against this history, complaints about the new censorship appear differently. With respect to the new censorship, there are no books burnings, no prosecutions, no laws or committees. Indeed, there is no coercive state involvement at all. With a few notable exceptions, complaints about censorship in the 21st-century West are complaints about the behavior of private parties: social groups, employers, media conglomerates, social media platforms, and search engines. To better understand the concerns surrounding nonstate interference with speech, Private Censorship offers an account of censorship, as well as an assessment of the ethical and political issues it raises across contexts. J.P. Messina asks and variously answers questions like: what should we think when employees get fired for things they say and how might patterns of such firings create a climate of fear inimical to free inquiry? When is it appropriate for social media firms to deplatform users, and what does it mean for our democracy that those in charge of such decisions are often wealthy Silicon Valley executives? Do search engines act as massive gatekeepers to information in troubling ways, and how might they be constrained, if they do? Along the way, Messina casts a critical eye on many popular proposals for responding to these complaints. Unlike these popular approaches, Private Censorship foregrounds the importance of rights to property, association, and free expression for thinking well about 21st-century censorship concerns.

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The Duke of Wellington described the Battle of Waterloo as ‘the most desperate business I ever was in. I was never so near being beat’. The courage of British troops that day has been rightly praised ever since, but the fact that one-third of the forces which gave him his narrow victory were subjects, not of George III, but of the King of the Netherlands, has been almost completely ignored. This book seeks to correct a grave injustice through the study of Dutch sources – both primary and secondary – the majority of which have never been used by English-speaking historians.The Dutch-Belgians have been variously described as inexperienced, incompetent and cowardly, a rogue element in the otherwise disciplined Allied Army. It is only now being tentatively acknowledged that they alone saved Wellington from disaster at Quatre Bras.He had committed a strategic error in that, as Napoleon advanced, his own troops were scattered over a hundred kilometres of southern Belgium. Outnumbered three to one, the Netherlanders gave him time to concentrate his forces, and save Brussels from French occupation. At Waterloo itself, on at least three occasions when the fate of the battle ‘hung upon the cusp’ their engagement with the enemy aided British recovery. Their commander – the Prince of Orange – is viciously described as an arrogant fool, ‘a disaster waiting to happen’ and even a dangerous lunatic. According to the assessment of the Duke himself, he was a reliable and courageous subordinate.The Dutch material in this book reveals a new dimension for familiar events in the Campaign, and includes many unseen illustrations. For the first time, a full assessment is made of the challenge which Willem I faced as King of a country hastily cobbled together by the Congress of Vienna, and of his achievement in assembling, equipping and training thirty thousand men from scratch in eighteen months. This is a timely reassessment in the two hundredth anniversary year of the battle of Waterloo. The veneration which the Duke of Wellington justifiably enjoyed after the Waterloo Campaign should not be allowed to forgive his lifelong lack of acknowledgment of the debt he owed the Netherlanders. As he once said himself, ‘there should be glory enough for all’, and it is high time that they are allowed to claim their share.

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Lawrence Paterson's groundbreaking new book is a detailed account of the now legendary Operation Colossus, the first British airborne raid of the Second World War, which took place in Basilicata, Italy on 10 February 1941. Britain was one of the last major powers of the Second World War to establish an airborne arm of service. Formed by a collection of free-thinking army and air force officers, the fledgling British paratrooper unit, known as the SAS', deployed trial and error in terms of tactics and equipment, costing the lives of several volunteers before an elite few were selected to make the first British parachute raid of the war. Alongside the paratroopers were two veterans of the First World War: an Italian SOE agent, formerly a banqueting manager in London hotels, and an RAF reserve officer who held the Military Cross for bravery. Collectively known as X-Troop', these men were parachuted by specially selected bomber crews into the heart of enemy territory, where they successfully destroyed their target, the Tragino Aqueduct, before becoming the object of an exhaustive manhunt by Italian troops and civilians. Captured, they were variously interrogated, imprisoned, and the Italian SOE agent placed on trial for treason and executed. Given the distances that had to be covered, the logistical complications and the lack of any precedent, the raid was a remarkable feat. Its success or failure depended on a group of men using methods and equipment thus far untried by the British Army. They were truly guinea pigs' for those that would follow in their footsteps. Often overlooked in British military history, Paterson brings this extraordinary episode to light, drawing on verbatim testimony and interrogating the truth of previous accounts. From the formation of the unit and the build up to its first deployment, through Operation Colossus and its aftermath, to its ongoing legacy today, this is the fascinating story of the modern day British Parachute Regiment.

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From Mondrian's bold geometric forms to Kandinsky's use of symbols to Pollock's "dripped paintings," the richly diverse movement of abstract painting challenges anyone trying to make sense of either individual works or the phenomenon as a whole. Applying his insights as an art historian and a painter, John Golding offers a unique approach to understanding the evolution of abstractionism by looking at the personal artistic development of seven of its greatest practitioners. He re-creates the journey undertaken by each painter in his move from representational art to the abstract--a journey that in most cases began with cubism but led variously to symbolism, futurism, surrealism, theosophy, anthropology, Jungian analysis, and beyond. For each artist, spiritual quest and artistic experimentation became inseparable. And despite their different techniques and philosophies, these artists shared one goal: to break a path to a new, ultimate pictorial truth. The book first explores the works and concerns of three pioneering European abstract painters--Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky--and then those of their American successors--Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still. Golding shows how each painter sought to see the world and communicate his vision in the purest or most expressive form possible. For example, Mondrian found his way into abstraction through a spiritual response to the landscape of his native Holland, Malevich through his apprehension of the human body, Kandinsky through a blend of religious mysticism and symbolism. Line and color became the focus for many of their creative endeavors. In the 1940s and 50s, the Americans raised the level of pictorial innovation, beginning most notably with Pollock and his Jung-inspired concept of action.p>Golding makes a powerful case that at its best and most profound, abstract painting is heavily imbued with meaning and content. Through a blend of biography, art analysis, and cultural history, Paths to the Absolute offers remarkable insights into how a sense of purpose is achieved in painting, and how abstractionism engaged with the intellectual currents of its time.

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The story of the nude in art in our times, told by a popular art historian with a rare gift for sharing her passions and ideas. The representation of the nude in art remained for many centuries a victory of fiction over fact. Beautiful, handsome, flawless – its great success was to distance the unclothed body from any uncomfortably explicit taint of sexuality, eroticism or imperfection. In this newly updated study, Frances Borzello contrasts the civilized, sanitized, perfected nude of Kenneth Clark’s classic, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956), with today’s depictions: raw, uncomfortable, both disturbing and intriguing. Grittier and more subtle, depicting variously gendered bodies, the new nude asks awkward questions and behaves provocatively. It is a very naked nude, created to deal with the issues and contradictions that surround the body in our time. Borzello explores the role of the nude in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, looking at the work of a wide range of international artists creating contemporary nudes. Her fascinating text is complemented by a profusion of well-chosen, unusual and beautifully reproduced illustrations. The story begins with a tale of life, death and resurrection – an investigation into how and why the nude has survived and flourished in an art world that prematurely announced its demise. Subsequent chapters take a thematic approach, focusing in turn on Body art and Performance art, the new perspectives of women artists, the nude in painting, portraiture and sculpture and in its most extreme and graphic expressions that intentionally push the boundaries of both art and our comfort zone. The final chapter illustrates radical developments in art and culture over the last decade, focusing in particular on artworks by women, trans artists and artists of colour. Borzello links these works to their art-historical and political predecessors, demonstrating the continually unending capacity of the nude to disrupt traditional hierarchies and gender categories in life and art.

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Meet the new breed of student activists—uncompromising, focused, and connected.Activism is once again back on college campuses as students protest issues such as sexual assault, climate change, racial injustice, and student debt. It's perhaps unsurprising that the current political moment has triggered the rise of a new breed of student activist—uncompromising, focused, and connected. But many pundits have variously derided student activists as either "snowflakes," too fragile to encounter opinions that run contrary to their own, or as "social justice warriors" who aggressively fight against those who transgress the ever-changing bounds of political correctness. The New Student Activists moves beyond these simple stereotypes and convenient caricatures to examine the nuanced motives and complex experiences of real-life, present-day college student activists.Jerusha O. Conner offers insight into who these student activists are—the causes they care about, the strategies they deploy, the factors that motivate and sustain them, and the impact they have had on their campuses and beyond. Conner dubs today's student activists "neoactivists," who borrow from and build on the legacies of past generations of college student activists. Exploring when, how, and why this diverse group of students turned to activism, Conner examines the social and educational influences on their sociopolitical development. She also reveals the fraught but mutually transformative relationship between institutions of higher education and student activists in the contemporary moment. Written for anyone interested in better understanding the latest wave of student activism on campuses, The New Student Activists raises fascinating implications for developmental theory and higher education policy and practice.

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Whether in the form of Christmas trees in town squares or prayer in school, fierce disputes over the separation of church and state have long bedeviled this country. Both decried and celebrated, this principle is considered by many, for right or wrong, a defining aspect of American national identity. Nearly all discussions regarding the role of religion in American life build on two dominant assumptions: first, the separation of church and state is a constitutional principle that promotes democracy and equally protects the religious freedom of all Americans, especially religious outgroups; and second, this principle emerges as a uniquely American contribution to political theory. In Please Don't Wish Me a Merry Christmas, Stephen M. Feldman challenges both these assumptions. He argues that the separation of church and state primarily manifests and reinforces Christian domination in American society. Furthermore, Feldman reveals that the separation of church and state did not first arise in the United States. Rather, it has slowly evolved as a political and religious development through western history, beginning with the initial appearance of Christianity as it contentiously separated from Judaism.In tracing the historical roots of the separation of church and state within the Western world, Feldman begins with the Roman Empire and names Augustine as the first political theorist to suggest the idea. Feldman next examines how the roles of church and state variously merged and divided throughout history, during the Crusades, the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the British Civil War and Restoration, the early North American colonies, nineteenth-century America, and up to the present day. In challenging the dominant story of the separation of church and state, Feldman interprets the development of Christian social power vis--vis the state and religious minorities, particularly the prototypical religious outgroup, Jews.

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Among maternal deities of the Greek pantheon, the Mother of the Gods was a paradox. She is variously described as a devoted mother, a chaste wife, an impassioned lover, and a virgin daughter; she is said to be both foreign and familiar to the Greeks. In this erudite and absorbing study, Mark Munn examines how the cult of Mother of the Gods came from Phrygia and Lydia, where she was the mother of tyrants, to Athens, where she protected the laws of the Athenian democracy. Analyzing the divergence of Greek and Asiatic culture at the beginning of the classical era, Munn describes how Kybebe, the Lydian goddess who signified fertility and sovereignty, assumed a different aspect to the Greeks when Lydia became part of the Persian empire. Conflict and resolution were played out symbolically, he shows, and the goddess of Lydian tyranny was eventually accepted by the Athenians as the Mother of the Gods, and as a symbol of their own sovereignty. This book elegantly illustrates how ancient divinities were not static types, but rather expressions of cultural systems that responded to historical change. Presenting a new perspective on the context in which the Homeric and Hesiodic epics were composed, Munn traces the transformation of the Asiatic deity who was the goddess of Sacred Marriage among the Assyrians and Babylonians, equivalent to Ishtar. Among the Lydians, she was the bride to tyrants and the mother of tyrants. To the Greeks, she was Aphrodite. An original and compelling consideration of the relations between the Greeks and the dominant powers of western Asia, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia is the first thorough examination of the way that religious cult practice and thought influenced political activities during and after the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.

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An in-depth look at how U.S. Latino advocacy groups are using ethnoracial demographic projections to bring about political change in the presentFor years, newspaper headlines, partisan speeches, academic research, and even comedy routines have communicated that the United States is undergoing a profound demographic transformation—one that will purportedly change the “face” of the country in a matter of decades. But the so-called browning of America, sociologist Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz contends, has less to do with the complexion of growing populations than with past and present struggles shaping how demographic trends are popularly imagined and experienced. Offering an original and timely window into these struggles, Figures of the Future explores the population politics of national Latino civil rights groups.Based on eight years of ethnographic and qualitative research, spanning both the Obama and Trump administrations, this book investigates how several of the most prominent of these organizations—including UnidosUS (formerly NCLR), the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Voto Latino—have mobilized demographic data about the Latino population in dogged pursuit of political recognition and influence. In census promotions, get-out-the-vote campaigns, and policy advocacy, this knowledge has been infused with meaning, variously serving as future-oriented sources of inspiration, emblems for identification, and weapons for contestation. At the same time, Rodríguez-Muñiz considers why these political actors have struggled to translate this demographic growth into tangible political gain and how concerns about white backlash have affected how they forecast demographic futures.Figures of the Future looks closely at the politics surrounding ethnoracial demographic changes and their rising influence in U.S. public debate and discourse.

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This is a book about what it's like being a birder in an age of natural decline. It is part autobiographical - tales of spell-binding birding encounters that left indelible memories - and it is part reflective. The travellers' tales of birding adventures are about places and events that were variously entertaining, amusing, captivating, inspiring, exciting and awesome, literally. They also feature the amazing, eccentric, dedicated, inspiring people in the birding community. Travels to Madagascar, Cambodia, India and many other places are recalled. There is birding in the Himalayas, in the Australian outback, on the Southern Oceans and in hotel gardens and city parks and there are tales of the 'big listers', 'big-lensers', professional guides, and local conservation workers who try to keep their habitats safe for us. There are lots of images to accompany these stories. Martin's experiences in becoming a birder late in life revealed some strange behaviour which he soon learnt to take for granted as a member of the birding community. Why tear off chasing the next tick when we were having such a good time in the forest we were already exploring? Why was seeing a rare parrot in a cage less significant than seeing a 'wild' one that was being hand-fed in a nature reserve? Why was he visiting all those rubbish tips and sewerage farms in search of birds when birding excursions to a forest or a natural wetland were so much more pleasing? There are chapters about all of these puzzles and oddities, and more - their origins and, in some cases, how they shape our behaviour in somewhat perverse ways - on 'authentic' birding, the origins and importance of the life list, on rarities and trophy birds, and why the idea of a 'species' is elusive yet so important. All these tales and reflections are shaped by birding during an extinction crisis and the growing biodiversity crisis. As he observed trashed habitats and vanishing bird populations during his travels, Martin's growing dismay and alarm about these issues coloured everything. So he came to ponder what birders are doing in response, whether it is for good or harm. There is the paradox of 'extinction birding' - it is not difficult today to see some vanishingly rare birds, because they are hanging on in reserved, fenced spaces, kept alive by artifices such as captive breeding. Because our visits to these places provide funds, we are also among these species' last hopes for survival. Is this the best we can do? More self-reflection among all birders is necessary. Faced with the growing crisis, we can all do better.

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The idea that there once existed a language which perfectly and unambiguously expressed the essence of all possible things and concepts has occupied the minds of philosophers, theologians, mystics and others for at least two millennia. This is an investigation into the history of that idea and of its profound influence on European thought, culture and history. From the early Dark Ages to the Renaissance it was widely believed that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was just such a language, and that all current languages were its decadent descendants from the catastrophe of the Fall and at Babel. The recovery of that language would, for theologians, express the nature of divinity, for cabbalists allow access to hidden knowledge and power, and for philosophers reveal the nature of truth. Versions of these ideas remained current in the Enlightenment, and have recently received fresh impetus in attempts to create a natural language for artificial intelligence. The story that Umberto Eco tells ranges widely from the writings of Augustine, Dante, Descartes and Rousseau, arcane treatises on cabbalism and magic, to the history of the study of language and its origins. He demonstrates the initimate relation between language and identity and describes, for example, how and why the Irish, English, Germans and Swedes - one of whom presented God talking in Swedish to Adam, who replied in Danish, while the serpent tempted Eve in French - have variously claimed their language as closest to the original. He also shows how the late eighteenth-century discovery of a proto-language (Indo-European) for the Aryan peoples was perverted to support notions of racial superiority. To this subtle exposition of a history of extraordinary complexity, Umberto Eco links the associated history of the manner in which the sounds of language and concepts have been written and symbolized. Lucidly and wittily written, the book is, in sum, a tour de force of scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European History. The paperback edition of this book is not available through Blackwell outside of North America.

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Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like--or "should" look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as literary, scientific, and popular texts, enable her to demonstrate how new visual paradigms posed bodily appearance as an index to interior "essence." Ultimately we see how competing preoccupations over gender, class, race, and American identity were played out in the making of a wide range of popular and institutional photographs. Smith demonstrates that as the body was variously mapped and defined as the key to essentialized identities, the image of the white middle-class woman was often held up as the most complete American ideal. She begins by studying gendered images of middle-class domesticity to expose a transformation of feminine architectures of interiority into the "essences" of "blood," "character," and "race." She reads visual documents, as well as literary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pauline Hopkins, and Theodore Dreiser, as both indices of and forms of resistance to dominant images of gender, class, race, and national identity. Through this analysis Smith shows how the white male gaze that sought to define and constrain white women and people of color was contested and transformed over the course of the nineteenth century. Smith identifies nineteenth-century visual paradigms that continue to shape debates about the terms of American belonging today. American Archives contributes significantly to the growing field of American visual cultural studies, and it is unprecedented in explaining how practices of racialized looking and the parameters of "American looks" were established in the first place.

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Lord Derby, Lancashire's highest-ranked nobleman and its principal royalist, once offered the opinion that the English civil wars had been a 'general plague of madness'. Complex and bedevilling, the earl defied anyone to tell the complete story of 'so foolish, so wicked, so lasting a war'. Yet attempting to chronicle and to explain the events is both fascinating and hugely important. Nationally and at the county level the impact and significance of the wars can hardly be over-stated: the conflict involved our ancestors fighting one another, on and off, for a period of nine years; almost every part of Lancashire witnessed warfare of some kind at one time or another, and several towns in particular saw bloody sieges and at least one episode characterised as a massacre.Nationally the wars resulted in the execution of the king; in 1651 the Earl of Derby himself was executed in Bolton in large measure because he had taken a leading part in the so-called massacre in that town in 1644. In the early months of the civil wars many could barely distinguish what it was that divided people in 'this war without an enemy', as the royalist William Waller famously wrote; yet by the end of it parliament had abolished monarchy itself and created the only republic in over a millennium of England's history. Over the ensuing centuries this period has been described variously as a rebellion, as a series of civil wars, even as a revolution.Lancashire's role in these momentous events was quite distinctive, and relative to the size of its population particularly important. Lancashire lay right at the centre of the wars, for the conflict did not just encompass England but Ireland and Scotland too, and Lancashire's position on the coast facing Catholic, Royalist Ireland was seen as critical from the very first months. And being on the main route south from Scotland meant that the county witnessed a good deal of marching and marauding armies from the north. In this, the first full history of the Lancashire civil wars for almost a century, Stephen Bull makes extensive use of new discoveries to narrate and explain the exciting, terrible events which our ancestors witnessed in the cause either of king or parliament. From Furness to Liverpool, and from the Wyre estuary to Manchester and Warrington...civil war actions, battles, sieges and skirmishes took place in virtually every corner of Lancashire.

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For Finance and Treasury professionals to effectively pitch, sell,and comprehend the true appeal and relevance of a particularsecurity, there is nothing more important than knowing how thevalue of said security has been determined. While punching numbersinto a computer may provide the information needed, it isnevertheless essential to have a firm grasp of the valuationconcepts in order to make the best, most informed decisions.Offering a straightforward, accessible approach not found anywhereelse, this comprehensive new book provides a clear-cut road mapthrough the mathematical concepts associated with the investmentssector of Treasury management. Written by an expert in the field, Investment Mathematics forFinance and Treasury Professionals explains the principles andformulae used in the fixedincome cash markets. It presents anin-depth, yet practical look at the applications associated withthese money and capital markets instruments. The book also coverscalculations and applications in the foreign exchange and equitiesmarkets. The same in-depth coverage is applied to the variousfixed-income and foreign exchange derivatives markets used as bothspeculative and hedging tools. Spanning the spectrum fromprice/yield changes to risk/return, and packed with numerousexamples that illustrate key concepts, this exhaustive resourceincludes: * Yield spread analysis--methods of price/yield quotation, yieldspreads by maturity, off-the-run vs. on-the-run * Price/yield sensitivity--hedge ratios, basis point value, dollarduration, convexity * Term structure of interest rates different yield curvestructures, zero coupon yield curve, Treasury trading STRIPS * Foreign exchange--crossrates, spot rates, forward points, coveredinterest arbitrage * Options--plain vanilla vs. exotic options, over-the-counter vs.exchange-traded options, understanding option valuation models, andoption hedging and trading strategies * Interest rate swaps, swaptions, caps, floors, collars, inversefloaters * Risk/return--valuation theory, capital asset pricing model, valueat risk Complete with supporting appendixes that contain statisticalinformation on such essentials as historical interest ratepatterns, conversion factors for Treasury bond futures, thestandard normal distribution, and day count basis for differentbonds, Investment Mathematics for Finance and TreasuryProfessionals is an indispensable reference for anyone involvedwith corporate and municipal treasury functions. Providing Finance and Treasury professionals the fundamentalinformation necessary to understand the mathematical concepts andapplications used in investment decisions, this in-depth andaccessible resource explains and clarifies the concepts behindinvestment mathematics. With numerous examples and comprehensiveappendixes containing important statistical data, InvestmentMathematics for Finance and Treasury Professionals coverseverything from price/yield changes and yield spread analysis toterm structure of interest rates, derivatives, and risk/return.

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Our attachment to the tropical rain forest has grown over the past hundred years from a minority colonial pursuit to mainstream environmental obsession. The tropical rain forest has variously been assumed to be the world's most important repository of biological diversity and 'the lungs of the planet'. As Philip Stott shows in this magnificent monograph, neither claim has any basis in fact. The Northern environmentalist conception of the tropical rain forest is far removed from the ecological realities of the places it purports to denote. Most of the 'million year old forest' to which environmentalists sentimentally refer turns out to have existed for less than 20,000 years. During the last ice age the tropics were colder and drier than today and probably more closely resembled the savanna grasslands of East Africa. Most of the abundant plants and insects of the so-called tropical rain forest are equally novel, having co-evolved with the trees. Claims regarding the fragility of the ecosystems in tropical areas are similarly awry. Recent research suggests that a clear-cut area will return to forest with a similar level of biological diversity to the original within twenty years. Ironically, the mythical 'climax rain forest' would be a barren place: no new species would evolve because there would be no new environmental niches to be filled. The myth of the tropical rain forest suits the purposes of Northern environmentalists, who are able to justify demands for restrictions on the conversion of 'virgin forest' to other uses. Yet the history of the world has been one of evolutionary change. If we attempt to maintain stasis, we risk limiting our ability to adapt to change when it inevitably comes. Calls for the tropical rain forest to be preserved are founded on the implied presumption that the people living in tropical regions are merely there to protect a western construct. This denigrates their rights and dehumanises them. If people in developing countries are to escape from the mire of poverty in which so many continue to live, it is essential that they have secure rights of tenure and are free to do with their land what they will. Some may make mistakes, some may fail in their attempts to manage the land, but many will be successful and those successes will be emulated. Through a process of experimentation -- trial, error and emulation -- people will come to learn how best to manage the land. The environment will then be managed in ways that are best for humanity as a whole, not according to the whims of a minority of eco-imperialists. Giving rights to people, not to the environment, is not only best for the people, but is also best for the environment. Philip Stott, Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, provides an eloquent deconstruction of the ideas that have led to the mythical western idea of the tropical rain forest, which has constrained our ability to understand the environments of developing countries and has enabled the eco-imperialist vision to flourish.

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