Search results for ""University of Pennsylvania Press""

While spreading the gospel around the world through his signature crusades, internationally renowned evangelist Billy Graham maintained a visible and controversial presence in his native South, a region that underwent substantial political and economic change in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this period Graham was alternately a desegregating crusader in Alabama, Sunbelt booster in Atlanta, regional apologist in the national press, and southern strategist in the Nixon administration. Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South considers the critical but underappreciated role of the noted evangelist in the creation of the modern American South. The region experienced two significant related shifts away from its status as what observers and critics called the "Solid South": the end of legalized Jim Crow and the end of Democratic Party dominance. Author Steven P. Miller treats Graham as a serious actor and a powerful symbol in this transition—an evangelist first and foremost, but also a profoundly political figure. In his roles as the nation's most visible evangelist, adviser to political leaders, and a regional spokesperson, Graham influenced many of the developments that drove celebrants and detractors alike to place the South at the vanguard of political, religious, and cultural trends. He forged a path on which white southern moderates could retreat from Jim Crow, while his evangelical critique of white supremacy portended the emergence of "color blind" rhetoric within mainstream conservatism. Through his involvement in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, as well as his deep social ties in the South, the evangelist influenced the decades-long process of political realignment. Graham's public life sheds new light on recent southern history in all of its ambiguities, and his social and political ethics complicate conventional understandings of evangelical Christianity in postwar America. Miller's book seeks to reintroduce a familiar figure to the narrative of southern history and, in the process, examine the political and social transitions constitutive of the modern South.

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The most important illuminating source that survived from the two centuries termed "the dark ages of Byzantium" is the chronicle of the monk Theophanes (d. 817 or 818). In it Theophanes paints a vivid picture of the Empire's struggle in the seventh and eighth centuries both to withstand foreign invasions and to quell internal religious conflicts. Theophanes's carefully developed chronological scheme was mined extensively by later Byzantine and Western record keepers; his chronicle was used as a source of information as well as a stylistic model. It is the framework upon which all Byzantine chronology for this period must be based. Important topics covered by the Chronicle include: The Empire's struggle to repel explosive Arab expansionism and the Bulgar invasion. The iconoclastic controversy, which caused civil war within Byzantium and led to schism between the churches of Constantinople and Rome. The development of the Byzantine thematic system, the administrative and social structure that would bring the Empire to the height of its power and prosperity. Almost all the sources used by Theophanes have perished, leaving his chronicle as the most important historical literature from this period. Turledove's translation makes available in English this crucial primary text for the study of medieval Byzantine civilization.

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Secrecy and Esoteric Writing in Kabbalistic Literature examines the strategies of esoteric writing that Kabbalists have used to conceal secrets in their writings, such that casual readers will only understand the surface meaning of their texts while those with greater insight will grasp the internal meaning. In addition to a broad description of esoteric writing throughout the long literary history of Kabbalah, this work analyzes kabbalistic secrecy in light of contemporary theories of secrecy. It also presents case studies of esoteric writing in the work of four of the first kabbalistic authors—Abraham ben David, Isaac the Blind, Ezra ben Solomon, and Asher ben David—and thereby helps recast our understanding of the earliest stages of kabbalistic literary history. The book will interest scholars in Jewish mysticism and Jewish philosophy, as well as those working in medieval Jewish history. Throughout, Jonathan V. Dauber has endeavored to write an accessible work that does not require extensive prior knowledge of kabbalistic thought. Accordingly, it finds points of contact between scholars of various religious traditions.

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After a restrained 2017 term in which the Supreme Court muddled through most of its work with just eight justices, the court roared back to life with a momentous term in 2018. With Donald Trump's first appointment to the bench, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, finding his footing and swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy preparing for retirement at the close of the term, the Court took on a series of cases that touched on some of the most contentious issues in contemporary American life—and in almost every case gave Americans a glimpse of where the court is likely to keep shifting over the coming years: further to the right. In American Justice 2018, journalist Todd Ruger examines the most monumental of these controversial decisions—including those involving religious freedom and minority rights, partisan gerrymandering, President Trump's travel ban, privacy in the digital era, sales tax for online retailers, and apparent tensions between the First Amendment and the collection of union dues. Ruger deftly analyzes how each of these decisions fits into the history of the court—and what the opinions and dissents reveal about the shifting ideological configuration of the institution. Along the way, Ruger reflects on how the term's polarizing docket will shape the future of the Supreme Court and the legacy of individual justices.

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From Naked Juice® to nude yoga, contemporary society is steeped in language that draws a connection from nudity to nature, wellness, and liberation. This branding promotes a "free and natural" lifestyle to mostly white and middle-class Americans intent on protecting their own bodies—and those of society at large—from overwork, environmental toxins, illness, conformity to body standards, and the hyper-sexualization of the consumer economy. How did the naked body come to be associated with "naturalness," and how has this notion influenced American culture? Free and Natural explores the cultural history of nudity and its impact on ideas about the body and the environment from the early twentieth century to the present. Sarah Schrank traces the history of nudity, especially public nudity, across the unusual eras and locations where it thrived—including the California desert, Depression-era collectives, and 1950s suburban nudist communities—as well as the more predictable beaches and resorts. She also highlights the many tensions it produced. For example, the blurry line between wholesome nudity and sexuality became impossible to sustain when confronted by the cultural challenges of the sexual revolution. Many longtime free and natural lifestyle enthusiasts, fatigued by decades of legal battles, retreated to private homes and resorts while the politics of gay rights, sexual liberation, environmentalism, and racial equality of the 1970s inspired a new generation of radical advocates of public nudity. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Schrank demonstrates, a free and natural lifestyle that started with antimaterialist, back-to-the-land rural retreats had evolved into a billion-dollar wellness marketplace where "Naked™" sells endless products promising natural health, sexual fulfilment, organic food, and hip authenticity. Free and Natural provides an in-depth account of how our bodies have become tethered so closely to modern ideas about nature and identity and yet have been consistently subjected to the excesses of capitalism.

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In chronicling the life and career of Albert Gore, Sr., historian Anthony J. Badger seeks not just to explore the successes and failures of an important political figure who spent more than three decades in the national eye—and whose son would become Vice President of the United States—but also to explain the dramatic changes in the South that led to national political realignment. Born on a small farm in the hills of Tennessee, Gore served in Congress from 1938 to 1970, first in the House of Representatives and then in the Senate. During that time, the United States became a global superpower and the South a two party desegregated region. Gore, whom Badger describes as a policy-oriented liberal, saw the federal government as the answer to the South's problems. He held a resilient faith, according to Badger, in the federal government to regulate wages and prices in World War II, to further social welfare through the New Deal and the Great Society, and to promote economic growth and transform the infrastructure of the South. Gore worked to make Tennessee the "atomic capital" of the nation and to protect the Tennessee Valley Authority, while at the same time cosponsoring legislation to create the national highway system. He was more cautious in his approach to civil rights; though bolder than his moderate Southern peers, he struggled to adjust to the shifting political ground of the 1960s. His career was defined by his relationship with Lyndon Johnson, whose Vietnam policies Gore bitterly opposed. The injection of Christian perspectives into the state's politics ultimately distanced Gore's worldview from that of his constituents. Altogether, Gore's political rise and fall, Badger argues, illuminates the significance of race, religion, and class in the creation of the modern South.

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The earliest rabbinic commentary to the Book of Leviticus, the Sifra, is generally considered an exemplum of Rabbi Akiva's intensely scriptural school of interpretation. But, Azzan Yadin-Israel contends, the Sifra commentary exhibits two distinct layers of interpretation that bring dramatically different assumptions to bear on the biblical text: earlier interpretations accord with the hermeneutic principles associated with Rabbi Ishmael, the other major school of early rabbinic midrash, while later additions subtly alter hermeneutic terminology and formulas, resulting in an engagement with Scripture that is not interpretive at all. Rather, the midrashic terminology in the Sifra's anonymous passages is part of what Yadin-Israel calls "a hermeneutic of camouflage," aimed at presenting oral traditions as though they were Scripture-based injunctions. Scripture and Tradition offers a radical rereading of the Sifra and its authorship, with far-reaching ramifications for our understanding of rabbinic literature as a whole. Using this new understanding of the Sifra as his starting point, Yadin-Israel demonstrates a two fold break in the portrayal of Rabbi Akiva: hermeneutically, the sober midrashist who appeared in earlier rabbinic sources is transformed into an inspired, oracular interpreter of Scripture in the Babylonian Talmud; while the biographically unremarkable sage is recast as a youthful ignoramus who came to Torah study late in life. The dual transformations of Rabbi Akiva—like the Sifra's hermeneutic of camouflage—are motivated by an ideological shift toward a greater emphasis on scriptural authority and away from received traditions, an insight that sheds new light on the vexing question of midrash and oral tradition in rabbinic sources. Through this close examination of a notoriously difficult text, Scripture and Tradition recovers a vital piece of the history of Jewish thought.

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Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of "Protestant Supremacy," which excluded the majority of enslaved men and women from Christian communities. For slaveholders, Christianity was a sign of freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion. When Protestant missionaries arrived in the plantation colonies intending to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity in the 1670s, they were appalled that most slave owners rejected the prospect of slave conversion. Slaveholders regularly attacked missionaries, both verbally and physically, and blamed the evangelizing newcomers for slave rebellions. In response, Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries articulated a vision of "Christian Slavery," arguing that Christianity would make slaves hardworking and loyal. Over time, missionaries increasingly used the language of race to support their arguments for slave conversion. Enslaved Christians, meanwhile, developed an alternate vision of Protestantism that linked religious conversion to literacy and freedom. Christian Slavery shows how the contentions between slave owners, enslaved people, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic world.

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For Michael B. Katz, the term "welfare state" describes the intricate web of government programs, employer-provided benefits, and semiprivate organizations intended to promote economic security and to guarantee the basic necessities of life for all citizens: food, shelter, medical care, protection in childhood, and support in old age. In this updated edition of his seminal work The Price of Citizenship, Katz traces the evolution of the welfare state from colonial relief programs through the war on poverty and into our own age, marked by the "end of welfare as we know it." Katz argues that in the last decades, three great forces—a ferocious war on dependence, which has singled out the most vulnerable; the devolution of authority within both government and the private sector; and the application of market models to social policy—have permeated all aspects of the social contract. The Price of Citizenship shows how these changes have propelled America toward a future of increased inequality and decreased security as individuals compete for success in an open market with ever fewer protections against misfortune, power, and greed. A new chapter, written for this edition, explains how these trends continue in the post-9/11 era and how the response to Hurricane Katrina exposed the weaknesses of America's social safety net. Offering grounds for modest optimism, the new chapter also points to countervailing trends that may modify and even partially reverse the effects of recent welfare history.

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On the day following the guillotining of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange lamented the loss of the man commonly considered the father of modern chemistry. "It took them only an instant to cut off that head," he said, "but it is unlikely that a hundred years will suffice to reproduce a similar one." Although he lived only to the age of 51, Lavoisier revolutionized the field of chemistry. He created the first modern table of chemical elements, recognized the role oxygen plays in the rusting of metals, demonstrated that water—previously considered one of the four fundamental elements—is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, and asserted that the total weights of the products of a chemical reaction must equal the total weights of the reactants. Yet despite his remarkable importance to modern chemistry, Lavoisier's scientific work was more a hobby than a profession. In fact, because he made his living as a tax collector, his scientific work was relegated to early morning and after-dinner hours. Appropriately, the picture Poirier paints of Lavoisier is that of the whole man—not only a scientist but a successful financier, respected economist, and influential administrator as well.

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This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

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This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

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In 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct a systematic investigation of social conditions in the seventh ward of Philadelphia. The product of those studies was the first great empirical book on the Negro in American society. More than one hundred years after its original publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press, The Philadelphia Negro remains a classic work. It is the first, and perhaps still the finest, example of engaged sociological scholarship—the kind of work that, in contemplating social reality, helps to change it. In his introduction, Elijah Anderson examines how the neighborhood studied by Du Bois has changed over the years and compares the status of blacks today with their status when the book was initially published.

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Thinking Through Material Culture provides a new theoretical framework for understanding the pivotal role of material culture in human cognition, perception and action.

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Why would the sprawling thirteenth-century French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle have been attributed to Walter Map, a twelfth-century writer from the Anglo-Welsh borderlands known for his stinging satire, religious skepticism, ghost stories, and irrepressible wit? And why, though the attribution is spurious, is it not, in some ways, implausible?Joshua Byron Smith sets out to answer these and other questions in the first English-language monograph on Walter Map—and in so doing, he offers a new explanation for how narratives about the pre-Saxon inhabitants of Britain, including King Arthur and his knights, first circulated in England. Smith contends that it was inventive clerics like Walter, and not traveling minstrels or professional translators, who popularized these stories. Smith examines Walter''s only surviving work, the De nugis curialium, to demonstrate that it is not the disheveled text that scholars have imagined but rather five separate works in vario

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Throughout human history, the rate of world population growth overall has been outpaced by the rate of urban population growth. Right now, more the half the world's population lives in cities, and that proportion will only increase in the next fifty years. Rapid urban growth accelerates the exchange of ideas, the expansion of social networks, and the diversity of human interactions that accompany globalization. The present century is therefore the crucial phase, when the world's increasing interconnectedness may give rise to innovation and collaboration or intensify conflict and environmental disaster. Bringing together scholars of anthropology and social science as well as law and medicine, Globalization: The Crucial Phase presents a holistic and comprehensive understanding of the way the world is changing. The contributors reveal the changing scale of social, economic, and financial diversity, examine the impact of globalization on the environment, health, and nutrition; and consider the initiatives to address the social problems and opportunities that arise from global migration. Collectively, these diverse interdisciplinary perspectives provide an introduction to vital research and policy initiatives in a period that will bring great challenges but also great potential. Contributors: Nancy Biller, Christina Catanese, Robert J. Collins, Megan Doherty, Zhengxia Dou, Richard J. Estes, James Ferguson, David Galligan, Mauro Guillén, Cameron Hu, John D. Keenan, Alan Kelly, Janet M. Monge, Marjorie Muecke, Neal Nathanson, Sarah Paoletti, Adriana Petryna, Alan Ruby, Theodore G. Schurr, Brian Spooner, Joseph S. Sun, Zhiguo Wu, Huiquan Zhou.

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TR27A reports on goods used as markers of social status and goods used in ritual. It describes the splendid ornaments and insignia of jade, shell, pearls, and inscribed bone shown in representations on monuments and pottery vessels and recovered from the burials of Tikal's elites. Each artifact is described in the text, tabulated, and richly illustrated with drawings and photographs. An accompanying CD-ROM includes updated databases for all recovered objects, enabling the reader to discover detailed relationships between artifact, date, and context. It also includes William R. Coe's drafts of reconstructions of destroyed offerings and typologies for ceremonial lithics and shell "Charlie Chaplin" figurines. Content of the book's CD-ROM may be found online at this location: http://core.tdar.org/project/376586. University Museum Monograph, 127

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The Great Maya center of Tikal in Guatemala is famous for its well-preserved architecture. This book presents detailed descriptions of a selection of unexcavated standing structures in the forests around the site center that complement the Museum's Architectural Survey conducted from 1960 to 1970. The survey produced measured drawings—plans, sections, elevations, and details—supplemented by descriptive text and quantitative tables for each structure. All structures are vaulted, and some are major works. TR 23 A is the primary record of important parts of Tikal's urban landscape, with clear, precise, and usable architectural analyses for Mayanists, archaeologists, art historians, architectural historians, urbanists, and those interested in construction techniques and in uses of Maya buildings. University Museum Monograph, 114

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The University Museum has been involved in Mesoamerican archaeology for more than a century. Its collections include material from northern Mexico to Costa Rica and represent all of the major cultures of the region. This guide allows the visitor to gain on-site understanding and the off-site reader to grasp how the Museum's collections fit into current archaeological theory. The text underscores some of the pan-Mesoamerican aspects of pre-Columbian peoples and the way each group interpreted underlying similarities to create individual customs and beliefs, burials and caches, beauty and adornment. The guide focuses on the unique aspects of the collection, much of it stemming from the Museum's own excavations, including eight large carved limestone monuments from its historic early excavations at Piedras Negras, Guatemala (1931-39) and Caracol, Belize (1951-53), the only group of original Maya monuments on display in an American museum. The inscriptions on these monuments are reproduced in detail, accompanied by translations and explanations drawing on the latest epigraphic research. Also included are important pieces from the Guatemala highlands; figurines and carvings collected in the early nineteenth century by the U.S. ambassador to Mexico; as well as significant material from Central America, including the famous carved alabaster vases from the Uloa Valley in Honduras.

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The University Museum has been involved in Mesoamerican archaeology for more than a century. Its collections include material from northern Mexico to Costa Rica and represent all of the major cultures of the region. This guide allows the visitor to gain on-site understanding and the off-site reader to grasp how the Museum's collections fit into current archaeological theory. The text underscores some of the pan-Mesoamerican aspects of pre-Columbian peoples and the way each group interpreted underlying similarities to create individual customs and beliefs, burials and caches, beauty and adornment. The guide focuses on the unique aspects of the collection, much of it stemming from the Museum's own excavations, including eight large carved limestone monuments from its historic early excavations at Piedras Negras, Guatemala (1931-39) and Caracol, Belize (1951-53), the only group of original Maya monuments on display in an American museum. The inscriptions on these monuments are reproduced in detail, accompanied by translations and explanations drawing on the latest epigraphic research. Also included are important pieces from the Guatemala highlands; figurines and carvings collected in the early nineteenth century by the U.S. ambassador to Mexico; as well as significant material from Central America, including the famous carved alabaster vases from the Uloa Valley in Honduras.

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In Sex Lives, Joseph Gamble draws from literature, art, and personal testimonies from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe to uncover how early moderns learned to have sex. In the early modern period, Gamble contends, everyone from pornographers to Shakespeare recognized that sex requires knowledge of both logistics (how to do it) and affect (how to feel about it). And knowledge, of course, takes practice. Gamble turns to a wide range of early modern texts and images from England, France, and Italy, ranging from personal accounts to closet dramas to visual art in order to excavate and analyze a variety of sexual practices in early modernity. Using an intersectional, phenomenological approach to bring historical light to the quotidian sexual experiences of early modern subjects, the book develops the critical concept of the “sex life”—a colloquialism that opens up methodological avenues for understanding daily lived experience in granular detail, both in the distant past and today. Through this lens, Gamble explores how sex organized and permeated everyday life and experiences of gender and race in early modernity. He shows how affects around sex structure the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, revealing the role of sexual feeling and sexual racism in early modern English drama. Sex Lives reshapes how we understand Renaissance literature, the history of sexuality, and the meaning of sex in both early modern Europe and our own moment.

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Raphaël Lemkin (1900-1959) coined the word "genocide" in the winter of 1942 and led a movement in the United Nations to outlaw the crime, setting his sights on reimagining human rights institutions and humanitarian law after World War II. After the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, Lemkin slipped into obscurity, and within a few short years many of the same governments that had agreed to outlaw genocide and draft a Universal Declaration of Human Rights tried to undermine these principles. This intellectual biography of one of the twentieth century's most influential theorists and human rights figures sheds new light on the origins of the concept and word "genocide," contextualizing Lemkin's intellectual development in interwar Poland and exploring the evolving connection between his philosophical writings, juridical works, and politics over the following decades. The book presents Lemkin's childhood experience of anti-Jewish violence in imperial Russia; his youthful arguments to expand the laws of war to protect people from their own governments; his early scholarship on Soviet criminal law and nationalities violence; his work in the 1930s to advance a rights-based approach to international law; his efforts in the 1940s to outlaw genocide; and his forays in the 1950s into a social-scientific and historical study of genocide, which he left unfinished. Revealing what the word "genocide" meant to people in the wake of World War II—as the USSR and Western powers sought to undermine the Genocide Convention at the UN, while delegations from small states and former colonies became the strongest supporters of Lemkin's law—Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide examines how the meaning of genocide changed over the decades and highlights the relevance of Lemkin's thought to our own time.

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Plain Style is an amusing and instructive guide to written English by the late Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism, The True and Only Heaven, and many other memorable works of American history and social criticism. Written for the benefit of the students at the University of Rochester, where Lasch taught from 1970 until his death in 1994, it quickly established itself in typescript as a local classic—a lively, witty, and historically minded alternative to the famous volume by William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style. Now available for the first time in published form, Plain Style is fundamentally a clear, readable, practical guide to the timeless principles of effective composition. At the same time, however, in ways that Stewart Weaver explains in his critical introduction, it is a distinctive and revealing addition to the published work of an eminent American thinker. No mere primer, Plain Style is an essay in cultural criticism, a political treatise even, by one for whom directness, clarity, and honesty of expression were essential to the living spirit of democracy. As the teachers and students who have for years benefited from its succinct wisdom will testify, Plain Style is an indispensable guide to writing and, indeed, Christopher Lasch's least-expected but perhaps most serviceable work.

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In Introducing Pottery, international potter and teacher Dan Rhode shares more than twenty years of experience in a well-organized, fully illustrated volume. Rhode's comprehensive overview of the methods, techniques, equipment, and theory allows novice and more advanced clay artists to solve problems as they develop and to keep improving. Introducing Pottery begins with a brief history of world ceramics and a practical discussion of the fundamentals of clay chemistry and composition. The guide quickly moves into step-by-step instructions for working in clay. It covers throwing and handbuilding methods, and even shows how to set up a clay studio. Introducing Pottery includes an in-depth look at glaze making, formulation, and application that goes beyond mainstream glazes and allows artists to express their own aesthetic. Readers will learn about the differences between firing techniques, and how to use them in variety of kilns. Each method is illustrated with full color photographs of professional ceramicists at work in their studios. Easy-to-read tables and charts also complement the clearly written instructions. With 200 color illustrations and inspiring writing from a master ceramicist, Introducing Pottery belongs in every new clay worker's library. As potters gain experience, this guide will continue to be a valuable source of information, giving them the tools to evaluate and learn from their experience.

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According to the received history, the Cistercian order was founded in Cîteaux, France, in 1098 by a group of Benedictine monks who wished for a stricter community. They sought a monastic life that called for extreme asceticism, rejection of feudal revenues, and manual labor for monks. Their third leader, Stephen Harding, issued a constitution, the Carta Caritatis, that called for the uniformity of custom in all Cistercian monasteries and the establishment of an annual general chapter meeting at Cîteaux. The Cistercian order grew phenomenally in the mid-twelfth century, reaching beyond France to Portugal in the west, Sweden in the north, and the eastern Mediterranean, ostensibly through a process of apostolic gestation, whereby members of a motherhouse would go forth to establish a new house. The abbey at Clairvaux, founded by Bernard in 1115, was alone responsible for founding 68 of the 338 Cistercian abbeys in existence by 1153. But this well-established view of a centrally organized order whose founders envisioned the shape and form of a religious order at its prime is not borne out in the historical record. Through an investigation of early Cistercian documents, Constance Hoffman Berman proves that no reliable reference to Stephen's Carta Caritatis appears before the mid-twelfth century, and that the document is more likely to date from 1165 than from 1119. The implications of this fact are profound. Instead of being a charter by which more than 300 Cistercian houses were set up by a central authority, the document becomes a means of bringing under centralized administrative control a large number of loosely affiliated and already existing monastic houses of monks as well as nuns who shared Cistercian customs. The likely reason for this administrative structuring was to check the influence of the overdominant house of Clairvaux, which threatened the authority of Cîteaux through Bernard's highly successful creation of new monastic communities. For centuries the growth of the Cistercian order has been presented as a spontaneous spirituality that swept western Europe through the power of the first house at Cîteaux. Berman suggests instead that the creation of the religious order was a collaborative activity, less driven by centralized institutions; its formation was intended to solve practical problems about monastic administration. With the publication of The Cistercian Evolution, for the first time the mechanisms are revealed by which the monks of Cîteaux reshaped fact to build and administer one of the most powerful and influential religious orders of the Middle Ages.

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Best known as one of the most widely used industrial ceramic techniques, slipcasting has become increasingly attractive to individual artists and craftspersons. Slip, a water and clay solution, is poured into porous molds. As the mold absorbs water from the slip, a layer of clay forms a cast. The excess slip is removed from the mold and the cast is stiffened, removed, dried, and fired in a kiln. Since the molds can be based on anything from delicate sculpture to found objects, slipcasting frees artists from the constraints of other ceramic techniques while allowing them to create multiples of their works. Sasha Wardell's Slipcasting is a straightforward, practical guide for those interested in the boundless possibilities of the technique. The book contains more than one hundred color illustrations, diagrams, and slip formulas. An inspiring "Individual Approaches" chapter discusses the slipcast work of a variety of contemporary ceramicists from around the world.

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Anthropologists and ethnographers examine the global garment industry''s impact on workers'' well-beingThe 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-story garment factory in Savar, Bangladesh, killed over a thousand workers and injured hundreds more. This disaster exposed the brutal labor conditions of the global garment industry and revealed its failures as a competitive and self-regulating industry. Over the past thirty years, corporations have widely adopted labor codes on health and safety, yet too often in their working lives, garment workers across the globe encounter death, work-related injuries, and unhealthy factory environments. Disasters such as Rana Plaza notwithstanding, garment workers routinely work under conditions that not only escape public notice but also undermine workers'' long-term physical health, mental well-being, and the very sustainability of their employment.Unmaking the Global Sweatshop gathers the work of leading anthropologists an

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A journey into de facto state-building based on ethnographic and archival research in the Turkish Republic of Northern CyprusWhat is de facto about the de facto state? In Sovereignty Suspended, this question guides Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay through a journey into de facto state-building, or the process of constructing an entity that looks like a state and acts like a state but that much of the world says does not or should not exist. In international law, the de facto state is one that exists in reality but remains unrecognized by other states. Nevertheless, such entities provide health care and social security, issue identity cards and passports, and interact with international aid donors. De facto states hold elections, conduct censuses, control borders, and enact fiscal policies. Indeed, most maintain representative offices in sovereign states and are able to unofficially communicate with officials. Bryant and Hatay develop the concept of the aporetic stat

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Explains how various Islamists have endorsed human rights, democracy, and justice to gain influence and mobilize supportersIslamist political parties and groups are on the rise throughout the Muslim world and in Muslim communities in the West. Owing largely to the threat of terrorism, political Islam is often portrayed as a monolithic movement embodying fundamentalism and theocracy, an image magnified by the rise of populism and xenophobia in the United States and Europe. Reality, however, is far more complicated. Political Islam has evolved considerably since its spectacular rise decades ago, and today it features divergent viewpoints and contributes to discrete but simultaneous developments worldwide. This is a new political Islam, more global in scope but increasingly local in action.Emmanuel Karagiannis offers a sophisticated analysis of the different manifestations of contemporary Islamism. In a context of global economic and social changes, he finds local ma

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Illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic worldBy the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered weapon of the weak while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events.In Poisoned Relations, Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one's relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational n

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José Ortega y Gasset (18831955) was a Spanish philosopher and essayist best known for The Revolt of the Masses, first translated into English in 1932. In it, Ortega critiques a populist deformation of democracy by the rise of a mass mentality characterized by selfishness, a lack of curiosity, and a general indifference to the opinions and attitudes of others. However, as Brendon Westler makes clear, we need to look beyond Ortega's arguments about populism and democracy in his most famous work to recover the philosopher's expansive political outlook and to identify his valuable contributions to the history and advancement of liberalism.Westler's book reconstructs Ortega's political theory, underscoring its distinctive historical origins as well as the ways in which it might be instructive to us today. Through an exploration of works less familiar to an English-speaking audience, such as Concord and Liberty, Vieja y nueva política, De Europa meditatio Quaedam, and

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In Proust's Songbook, Jennifer Rushworth analyzes and theorizes the presence and role of songs in Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Instead of focusing on instrumental music and large-scale forms such as symphonies and opera, as is common in Proust musical studies, Rushworth argues for the centrality of songs and lyrics in Proust's opus. Her work analyzes the ways in which the author inserted songs at key turning points in his novel and how he drew inspiration from contemporary composers and theorists of song. Rushworth presents detailed readings of five moments of song in À la recherche du temps perdu, highlighting the songs' significance by paying close attention to their lyrics, music, composers, and histories.Rushworth interprets these episodes through theoretical reflections on song and voice, drawing particularly from the works of Reynaldo Hahn and Roland Barthes. She argues that songs in Proust's no

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The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor from captive workers who had every reason to resist. In this system, enslaved Black drivers were tasked with supervising and punishing other enslaved laborers. In The Driver's Story, Randy M. Browne illuminates the predicament and harrowing struggles of these menand sometimes womenat the heart of the plantation world. What, Browne asks, did it mean to be trapped between the insatiable labor demands of white plantation authorities and the constant resistance of one's fellow enslaved laborers?In this insightful and unsettling account of slavery and racial capitalism, Browne shows that on plantations across the Americas, drivers were at the center of enslaved people's working lives, social relationships, and struggles against slavery. Drivers enforced labor discipline and con

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Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World offers a new interpretation of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippine islands. Drawing on the rich archives of Spain's Asian empire, Kristie Patricia Flannery reveals that Spanish colonial officials and Catholic missionaries forged alliances with Indigenous Filipinos and Chinese migrant settlers in the Southeast Asian archipelago to wage war against waves of pirates, including massive Chinese pirate fleets, Muslim pirates from the Sulu Zone, and even the British fleet that attacked at the height of the Seven Years' War. Anti-piracy alliances made Spanish colonial rule resilient to both external shocks and internal revolts that shook the colony to its core.This revisionist study complicates the assumption that empire was imposed on Filipinos with brute force alone. Rather, anti-piracy also shaped the politics of belonging in the colonial Philippines. Real and imagined pirate threats especially influenced the fate and fo

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In Precarious Lives, Shahram Khosravi attempts to reconcile the paradoxes of Iranians' everyday life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, multiple circumstances of precarity give rise to a sense of hopelessness, shared visions of a futureless tomorrow, widespread home(land)lessness, intense individualism, and a growth of incivilities. On the other, daydreaming and hope, as well as civility and solidarity in political protests, street carnivals, and social movements, continue to persist. Young Iranians describe themselves as being stuck in purposelessness and forced to endure endless waiting, and they are also aware that they are perceived as unproductive and a burden on their society. Despite the aspirations and inspiration they possess, they find themselves forced into petrifying social and spatial immobility. Uncertainty in the present, a seemingly futureless tomorrow: these are the circumstances that Khosravi explores in Precarious Lives. Creating an intricate and moving portrait of contemporary Iranian life, Khosravi weaves together individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis of art and literature to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope. Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Khosravi examines the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in Iran. Precarious Lives is a vital work of contemporary anthropology that serves as a testament to the shared hardship and hope of the Iranian people.

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The United States is Israel's closest ally in the world. The fact is undeniable, and undeniably controversial, not least because it so often inspires conspiracy theorizing among those who refuse to believe that the special relationship serves America's strategic interests or places the United States on the side of Israel's enduring conflict with the Palestinians. Some point to the nefarious influence of a powerful "Israel lobby" within the halls of Congress. Others detect the hand of evangelical Protestants who fervently support Israel for their own theological reasons. The underlying assumption of all such accounts is that America's support for Israel must flow from a mixture of collusion, manipulation, and ideologically driven foolishness. Samuel Goldman proposes another explanation. The political culture of the United States, he argues, has been marked from the very beginning by a Christian theology that views the American nation as deeply implicated in the historical fate of biblical Israel. God's Country is the first book to tell the complete story of Christian Zionism in American political and religious thought from the Puritans to 9/11. It identifies three sources of American Christian support for a Jewish state: covenant, or the idea of an ongoing relationship between God and the Jewish people; prophecy, or biblical predictions of return to The Promised Land; and cultural affinity, based on shared values and similar institutions. Combining original research with insights from the work of historians of American religion, Goldman crafts a provocative narrative that chronicles Americans' attachment to the State of Israel.

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Since 2000, more than twenty countries around the world have held elections in which parties that espouse a political agenda based on an Islamic worldview have competed for legislative seats. Islamist Parties and Political Normalization in the Muslim World examines the impact these parties have had on the political process in two different areas of the world with large Muslim populations: the Middle East and Asia. The book's contributors examine major cases of Islamist party evolution and participation in democratic and semidemocratic systems in Turkey, Morocco, Yemen, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. Collectively they articulate a theoretical framework to understand the strategic behavior of Islamist parties, including the characteristics that distinguish them from other types of political parties, how they relate to other parties as potential competitors or collaborators, how ties to broader Islamist movements may affect party behavior in elections, and how participation in an electoral system can affect the behavior and ideology of an Islamist party over time. Through this framework, the contributors observe a general tendency in Islamist politics. Although Islamist parties represent diverse interests and behaviors that are tied to their particular domestic contexts, through repeated elections they often come to operate less as antiestablishment parties and more in line with the political norms of the regimes in which they compete. While a few parties have deliberately chosen to remain on the fringes of their political system, most have found significant political rewards in changing their messages and behavior to attract more centrist voters. As the impact of the Arab Spring continues to be felt, Islamist Parties and Political Normalization in the Muslim World offers a nuanced and timely perspective of Islamist politics in broader global context. Contributors: Wenling Chan, Julie Chernov Hwang, Joseph Chinyong Liow, Driss Maghraoui, Quinn Mecham, Ali Riaz, Murat Somer, Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Saloua Zerhouni.

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Since the global financial crisis of 2008, Greece has shouldered a heavy burden struggling with internal political and financial insecurity as well as hosting enormous numbers of migrants and asylum seekers who arrive by land and sea. In On the Doorstep of Europe, Heath Cabot presents an ethnographic study of the asylum system in Greece, tracing the ways asylum seekers, bureaucrats, and service providers attempt to navigate the dilemmas of governance, ethics, knowledge, and social relations that emerge through this legal process. Centering on the work of an asylum advocacy NGO in Athens, Cabot explores how workers and clients grapple with predicaments endemic to Europeanization and rights-based protection. Drawing inspiration from classical Greek tragedy to highlight both the transformative potential and violence of law, Cabot charts the structural violence effected through European governance, rights frameworks, and humanitarian intervention while also exploring how Greek society is being remade from the inside out. She shows how, in contemporary Greece, relationships between insiders and outsiders are radically reconfigured through legal, political, and economic crises. Now updated with a preface reflecting on the critical stakes of the book’s exploration of refuge in light of events that have transpired in and beyond Europe since its initial publication, On the Doorstep of Europe highlights how border crossers and residents in countries of arrival navigate legal and political violence. Cabot’s on-the-ground account of asylum and immigration in Europe’s borderlands, based on fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2011, shows how the difficulties encountered by asylum seekers in an earlier time remain relevant and revealing in the face of ongoing crises and challenges today.

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Beyond 1619 brings an Atlantic and hemispheric perspective to the year 1619 as a marker of American slavery’s origins and the beginnings of the Black experience in what would become the United States by situating the roots of racial slavery in a broader, comparative context. In recent years, an extensive public dialogue regarding the long shadow of racism in the United States has pushed Americans to confront the insidious history of race-based slavery and its aftermath, with 1619—the year that the first recorded enslaved persons of African descent arrived in British North America—taking center stage as its starting point. Yet this dialogue has inadvertently narrowed our understanding of slavery, race, and their repercussions to the U.S. context. Beyond 1619 showcases the fruitful results when scholars examine and put into conversation multiple empires, regions, peoples, and cultures to get a more complete view of the rise of racial slavery in the Americas. Painting racial slavery’s emergence on a hemispheric canvas, and in one compact volume, provides historical context beyond the 1619 moment for discussions of slavery, racism, antiracism, freedom, and lasting inequalities. In the process, this volume shines new light on these critical topics andillustrates the centrality of racial slavery, and contests over its rise, in nearly every corner of the early modern Atlantic World. Contributors: John N. Blanton, Jesse Cromwell, Erika Denise Edwards, Rebecca Anne Goetz, Rana Hogarth, Chloe L. Ireton, Marc H. Lerner, Paul J. Polgar, Brett Rushforth, Casey Schmitt, Jenny Shaw, James Sidbury.

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One of the most persistent, powerful, and dangerous notions in the history of the Jews in the diaspora is the prodigious talent attributed to them in all things economic. From the medieval Jewish usurer through the early-modern port-Jew and court-Jew to the grand financier of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and contemporary investors, Jews loom large in the economic imagination. For capitalists and Marxists, libertarians and radical reformers, Jews are intertwined with the economy. This association has become so natural that we often overlook the history behind the making and remaking of the complex cluster of perceptions about Jews and economy, which emerged within different historical contexts to meet a variety of personal and societal anxieties and needs. In An Economy of Strangers, Avinoam Yuval-Naeh historicizes this association by focusing on one specific time and place—the financial revolution that England underwent from the late seventeenth century that coincided with the reestablishment of the Jewish population there for the first time in almost four hundred years. European Christian societies had to that point shunned finance and constructed a normative system to avoid it, relying on the figure of the Jew as a foil. But as the economy modernized in the seventeenth century, finance became the hinge of national power. Finance’s rise in England provoked intense national debates. Could financial economy, based on lending money on interest, be accommodated within Christian state and society when it had previously been understood as a Jewish practice? By projecting the modern economy and the Jewish community onto each other, the Christian majority imbued them with interrelated meanings. This braiding together of parallel developments, Yuval-Naeh argues, reveals in a meaningful way how the contemporary and wide-ranging association of Jews with the modern economy could be created.

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As officials scrambled in 2020 to manage the spread of COVID, the reverberations of the crisis reached well beyond immediate public health concerns. The governance problems that emerged in the pandemic would be problems in other climate-related disasters, too. Many of these governance problems wound up in court. Businesses filed insurance claims for lost commerce; when the claims were denied, some companies sued. Defense attorneys tried to get inmates released from prison, citing dangerous living conditions. As state governments ordered closures and otherwise tried to adapt, interest organizations that had long sought to limit government authority challenged them in court. Political officials railed against litigation they argued would stop businesses from reopening. The United States, like other countries, governs partly through litigation, and litigation is one way of seeing the multiple governance failures during the pandemic. Drawing on databases of cases filed, news reports, and the websites of advocacy groups and law firms, Susan M. Sterett argues that governing during the pandemic, or in any disaster, must include the human institutions intertwined with the effects of the virus. Those institutions reveal problems well beyond the reach of technical expertise. Failures in private insurance as a way of governing risk, conflicts about the primacy of religion, government authority, and health, are problems that predated the pandemic and will persist in future disasters.

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The Violence of Recognition offers an unprecedented firsthand account of the operations of Hindu nationalists and their role in sparking the largest incident of anti-Christian violence in India’s history. Through vivid ethnographic storytelling, Pinky Hota explores the roots of ethnonationalist conflict between two historically marginalized groups—the Kandha, who are Adivasi (tribal people considered indigenous in India), and the Pana, a community of Christian Dalits (previously referred to as “untouchables”). Hota documents how Hindutva mobilization led to large-scale violence, culminating in attacks against many thousands of Pana Dalits in the district of Kandhamal in 2008. Bringing indigenous studies as well as race and ethnic studies into conversation with Dalit studies, Hota shows that, despite attempts to frame these ethnonationalist tensions as an indigenous population’s resistance against disenfranchisement, Kandha hostility against the Pana must be understood as anti-Christian, anti-Dalit violence animated by racial capitalism. Hota’s analysis of caste in relation to race and religion details how Hindu nationalists exploit the singular and exclusionary legal recognition of Adivasis and the putatively liberatory, anti-capitalist discourse of indigeneity in order to justify continued oppression of Dalits—particularly those such as the Pana. Because the Pana lost their legal protection as recognized minorities (Scheduled Caste) upon conversion to Christianity, they struggle for recognition within the Indian state’s classificatory scheme. Within the framework of recognition, Hota shows, indigeneity works as a political technology that reproduces the political, economic, and cultural exclusion of landless marginalized groups such as Dalits. The Violence of Recognition reveals the violent implications of minority recognition in creating and maintaining hierarchies of racial capitalism.

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Challenging the traditional conception of medieval Europe as insular and even xenophobic, Shirin A. Khanmohamadi's In Light of Another's Word looks to early ethnographic writers who were surprisingly aware of their own otherness, especially when faced with the far-flung peoples and cultures they meant to describe. These authors—William of Rubruck among the Mongols, "John Mandeville" cataloguing the world's diverse wonders, Geraldus Cambrensis describing the manners of the twelfth-century Welsh, and Jean de Joinville in his account of the various Saracens encountered on the Seventh Crusade—display an uncanny ability to see and understand from the perspective of the very strangers who are their subjects. Khanmohamadi elaborates on a distinctive late medieval ethnographic poetics marked by both a profound openness to alternative perspectives and voices and a sense of the formidable threat of such openness to Europe's governing religious and cultural orthodoxies. That we can hear the voices of medieval Europe's others in these narratives in spite of such orthodoxies allows us to take full measure of the productive forces of disorientation and destabilization at work on these early ethnographic writers. Poised at the intersection of medieval studies, anthropology, and visual culture, In Light of Another's Word is an innovative departure from each, extending existing studies of medieval travel writing into the realm of poetics, of ethnographic form into the premodern realm, and of early visual culture into the realm of ethnographic encounter.

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