Search results for ""University of Washington Press""

Winner of the Association of Women in Slavic Studies Heldt Prize Winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society History and Humanities Book Award Honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) This groundbreaking work in women's history explores the lives of Uzbek women, in their own voices and words, before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Drawing upon their oral histories and writings, Marianne Kamp reexamines the Soviet Hujum, the 1927 campaign in Soviet Central Asia to encourage mass unveiling as a path to social and intellectual "liberation." This engaging examination of changing Uzbek ideas about women in the early twentieth century reveals the complexities of a volatile time: why some Uzbek women chose to unveil, why many were forcibly unveiled, why a campaign for unveiling triggered massive violence against women, and how the national memory of this pivotal event remains contested today.

Read more less

When Naser al-Din Shah, who ruled Iran from 1848 to 1896, claimed the title Shadow of God on Earth, his authority rested on premodern conceptions of sacred kingship. By 1941, when Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi came to power, his claim to authority as the Shah of Iran was infused with the language of modern nationalism. In short, between roughly 1870 and 1940, Iran's traditional monarchy was forged into a modern nation-state. In Nationalizing Iran, Afshin Marashi explores the changes that made possible this transformation of Iran into a social abstraction in which notions of state, society, and culture converged. He follows Naser al-Din Shah on a tour of Europe in 1873 that led to his importing a new public image of monarchy-an image based on the European late imperial model-relying heavily on the use of public ceremonies, rituals, and festivals to promote loyalty to the monarch. Meanwhile, Iranian intellectuals were reimagining ethnic history to reconcile “authentic” Iranian culture with the demands of modernity. From the reform of public education to the symbolism surrounding grand public ceremonies in honor of long-dead poets, Marashi shows how the state invented and promoted key features of the common culture binding state and society. The ideological thrust of that century would become the source of dramatic contestation in the late twentieth century. Marashi's study of the formative era of Iranian nationalism will be valuable to scholars and students of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, as well as journalists, policy makers, and other close observers of contemporary Iran.

Read more less

The Body in Time looks at two different genres in relation to the construction of femininity in late nineteenth-century France: Degas's representation of ballet dancers and the transforming tradition of female portraiture. Class, gender, power, and agency are at stake in both arenas, but they play themselves out in different ways via different pictorial languages. Degas's depictions of anonymous young female ballerinas at the Paris Opera reflect his fascination with the physical exertions and prosaic setting of the dancer's sexualized body. Unlike the standard Romantic depictions of the ballerina, Degas's dancers are anonymous spread-legged workers on public display. Female portraiture and self-portraiture, in contrast, depicted the unique and the distinctive: privileged women, self-assured individuals transgressing gender conventions. Focusing on Degas's representation of the dancer, Tamar Garb examines the development of Degas's oeuvre from its early Realist documentary ambitions to the abstracted Symbolist renderings of the feminine as cypher in his later works. She argues that despite the apparent depletion of social significance and specificity, Degas's later works remain deeply enmeshed in contemporary gendered ways of viewing and experiencing art and life. Garb also looks at the transformation in the genre of portraiture heralded by the “new woman,” examining the historical expectations of female portraiture and demonstrating how these expectations are challenged by new notions of female autonomy and interiority. Women artists such as Anna Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, and Anna Bilinska deployed the language of Realism in their own self-representation. The figure of femininity remained central to the personal, political, and pictorial imperatives of artists across the spectrum of modern aesthetics. Gender and genre intersect throughout this book to show how these categories mutually impact one another.

Read more less

Northwest artist Frances Blakemore had a lifelong love affair with Japan. She first went to Japan in 1935 and spent most of her adult life in Tokyo. Her experience with Japan encompassed the entire period from pre–World War II militarism to postwar modernization. Arriving in Tokyo in 1935 to teach art and English, she became fascinated with Japanese life and chronicled her experiences both in art and writing. She spent most of the war years in Honolulu, where she designed propaganda leaflets that were dropped by the millions on the Japanese islands. In 1954, she married American attorney Thomas Blakemore and achieved prominence as an artist and gallery owner in Tokyo. Illustrated with photographs and striking color reproductions of her work, this book introduces the adventures of a remarkable American artist and provides a new perspective on U.S.–Japanese cultural relations.

Read more less

"Sometimes I surprise myself. I am always looking for some mysterious in-between place where ideas and images come together to show me a new, exciting path to follow." -- Elizabeth Sandvig Much of Elizabeth Sandvig's work has dealt with the transitory and fragile qualities of nature. Using materials that include cast polyester resin, aluminum and polyester screen, nylon thread, and silicon gels, she has emphasized a sense of layered transparency, creating a shifting visual energy affected by light and position. Throughout her career Sandvig has painted her version of Edward Hick's nineteenth-century fantasy, The Peaceable Kingdom. The Hicks theme is, as she observed, "an excellent excuse to paint animals," but it is also an ordering principle, an opportunity to make marks that matter, amplified by orchestrated tones. Her animals owe allegiance only to the function their figures serve in fields of colored light. Born in Seattle, Elizabeth Sandvig is one of the Pacific Northwest's most respected artists. She has been artist-in-residence at the Pilschuck Glass School adn the Centrum Foundation, and she has taught generations how to make monoprints and woodcuts. She has been represented by the Francine Seders Gallery since 1966.

Read more less

During their thirteen years in power, Slobodan Milosevic and his cohorts plunged Yugoslavia into wars of ethnic cleansing, leading to the murder of thousands of civilians. The Milosevic regime also subverted the nation's culture, twisted the political mainstream into a virulent nationalist mold, sapped the economy through war and the criminalization of a free market, returned to gender relations of a bygone era, and left the state so dysfunctional that its peripheries--Kosovo, Vojvodina, and Montenegro--have been struggling to maximize their distance from Belgrade, through far-reaching autonomy or through outright independence. In this valuable collection of essays, Vjeran Pavlakovic, Reneo Lukic, and Obrad Kesic examine elements of continuity and discontinuity from the Milosevic era to the twenty-first century, the struggle at the center of power, and relations between Serbia and Montenegro. Contributions by Sabrina Ramet, James Gow, and Milena Michalski explore the role of Serbian wartime propaganda and the impact of the war on Serbian society. Essays by Eric Gordy, Maja Miljovic, Marko Hoare, and Kari Osland look at the legacy of Serbia's recent wars-issues of guilt and responsibility, the economy, and the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague. Sabrina Ramet and Biljana Bijelic address the themes of culture and values. Frances Trix, Emil Kerenji, and Dennis Reinhartz explore the peripheries in the politics of Kosovo/a, Vojvodina, and Serbia's Roma. Serbia Since 1989 reveals a Serbia that is still traumatized from Milosevic's rule and groping toward redefining its place in the world.

Read more less

Coming to Stay is the memoir of Mary Dodds Schlick, who in 1950 moved from the Midwest to the Colville Indian Reservation in north central Washington with her husband Bud, a forester for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. For over fifty years, she has maintained a close connection with the Native people of the Columbia River Plateau as a neighbor, journalist, teacher, and master basket maker on the Colville, Warm Springs, and Yakama reservations. These stories take place against a backdrop of change - from the uncertainty caused by federal efforts to terminate reservations in the 1950s through the growth of tribal self-determination that began in the 1970s. Schlick tells us about community and family, celebration and loss, and how she came to stay in the place she now calls home.

Read more less

In his engaging book Windshield Wilderness, David Louter explores the relationship between automobiles and national parks, and how together they have shaped our ideas of wilderness. National parks, he argues, did not develop as places set aside from the modern world, but rather came to be known and appreciated through technological progress in the form of cars and roads, leaving an enduring legacy of knowing nature through machines. With a lively style and striking illustrations, Louter traces the history of Washington State’s national parks -- Mount Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades -- to illustrate shifting ideas of wilderness as scenic, as roadless, and as ecological reserve. He reminds us that we cannot understand national parks without recognizing that cars have been central to how people experience and interpret their meaning, and especially how they perceive them as wild places. Windshield Wilderness explores what few histories of national parks address: what it means to view parks from the road and through a windshield. Building upon recent interpretations of wilderness as a cultural construct rather than as a pure state of nature, the story of autos in parks presents the preservation of wilderness as a dynamic and nuanced process.Windshield Wilderness illuminates the difficulty of separating human-modified landscapes from natural ones, encouraging us to recognize our connections with nature in national parks.

Read more less

Is modernity in non-Western societies always an “alternative” modernity, a derivative copy of an “original modernity” that began in the West? No, answer the contributors to this book, who then offer an absorbing set of case studies from modern China to make their point. By focusing on people’s ordinary routines of working, eating, going to school, and traveling, the authors examine the notion of modernity as it has been staged in the minute details of Chinese life. Essays explore people’s basic search for food, water, and lighting during the late-Qing -- early republican era; contradictory attitudes toward women and the violence of foot-binding; the role of Chinese scientists in promoting a shift to modern, nationalistic discourses; the growing popularity of savings banks among urban Chinese in the early twentieth century; the transnational and national identities of returned overseas Chinese in Xiamen, Fujian Province; and middle-class “Shanghai travelers” who imagined themselves as cosmopolitan consumers. Looking at the post-Mao reform era of the late twentieth century, contributors explore the theme of “revaluation” – that is, the way China’s move into global capitalism is commoditizing goods and services that previously were not for sale, from domestic labor to recycling and water resources, in an increasingly consumer-oriented society.

Read more less

This bilingual anthology of modern Chinese poetry from and about Taiwan is arranged in thematic sections that present contrasting views of life in Taiwan. The island's dramatic history has given modern Taiwan literature a wealth of conflicting cultural, linguistic, and ideological legacies that continue to shape it. Modern Taiwan poetry draws on the developing modernism of 1920s and 1930s China, the avant-garde movements of modern Europe, and Japan's "colonial modernism," which itself was inspired by Europe. By all standards, Taiwan has produced some of the best modern poetry in Chinese. The forty-eight poets presented here speak on a host of topics, including family and homeland, memory of war, social justice, and the natural world. Collectively, they paint a complex picture of the trauma, travails, and beauties of life in Taiwan. They represent different generations, display different styles, and express different views and positions. With its variety of poetic voices and facing pages of Chinese and English text, Sailing to Formosa will be enjoyed by readers of foreign literature in English translation and by students of Chinese literature and language.

Read more less

Since before Seattle voters decided in 1902 to build their own lighting plant, City Light has been a source of fierce civic pride for its independence from "foreign" corporations, its impressive public works projects, and its consistently low electricity rates. It has also been a headache for competitors, managers, and politicians. In the first years of the electric age, when Seattle was still a hard-scrable frontier town, power was supplied by a revolving cast of small private utilities remembered mostly for frequent mergers with rivals and mediocre service at high cost. The failure of the privately owned water company to deliver enough of its product to quell Seattle's Great Fire of 18889 got city officials and residents thinking about an alternative utility model--municipal ownership. Voters quickly approved a municipal wter system, and within a decade had laid the groundwork for an electric utility. City Light quickly began a campaign of dam construction that for most of the twentieth century provided Seattle with the cheapest electricity of any major city in the country. This brisk history traces the utility's origins to 1889 and follows its story through the national energy crisis of 2000-2001 up to the present. It is a quintissentially Northwest story.

Read more less

William Cumming began as a self-taught artist who grew up in Tukwila, a small town outside Seattle. In 1937, at the age of twenty, he met Morris Graves, who was at that time working in Seattle for the Federal Art project of the Works Progress Administration. Through Graves he soon became part of the circle of friends who came to be known as the Northwest School of artists: Mark Tobey, then nearing fifty, the patriarchal leader of the group; Kenneth Callahan and his wife Margaret, a writer and critic who became Cumming's particular mentor; Guy Anderson, Lubin Petric, and others. He has taught for many years at the Art Institute of Seattle and Cornish College of the Arts.

Read more less

From wagon trails to interstate highways, this book retraces how the leaders and employees of the Washington State Department of Transportation and their predecessors helped to shape Washington’s transportation system during a century of technological revolution and dramatic transformation of its communities and landscapes. Washington’s transportation system includes one of the nation’s finest road networks, an internationally renowned ferry system, passenger and freight rail, statewide airports, bicycle and pedestrian facilities, and a myriad of other programs.

Read more less

In this comparative, interdisciplinary study based on extensive fieldwork as well as historical sources, Janet Sturgeon examines the different trajectories of landscape change and land use among communities who call themselves Akha (known as Hani in China) in contrasting political contexts. She shows how, over the last century, processes of state formation, construction of ethnic identity, and regional security concerns have contributed to very different outcomes for Akha and their forests in China and Thailand, with Chinese Akha functioning as citizens and grain producers, and Akha in Thailand being viewed as "non-Thai" forest destroyers. The modern nation-state grapples with local power hierarchies on the periphery of the nation, with varied outcomes. Citizenship in China helps Akha better protect a fluid set of livelihood practices that confer benefits on them and their landscape. Denied such citizenship in Thailand, Akha are helpless when forests and other resources are ruthlessly claimed by the state. Drawing on current anthropological debates on the state in Southeast Asia and more generally on debates on property theory, states and minorities, and political ecology, Sturgeon shows how people live in a continuous state of negotiated boundaries - political, social, and ecological. This pioneering comparison of resource access and land use among historically related peoples in two nation-states will be welcomed by scholars of political ecology, environmental anthropology, ethnicity, and politics of state formation in East and Southeast Asia.

Read more less

Likened to Proust, Gunter Grass, and Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) is one of the most important writers of our time, combining a wide readership with universal critical acclaim. Sebald's refracted and sometimes alienated views of both his native Germany and his adopted English homeland have had astonishing resonance in the German- and English-speaking worlds. In this first collection to appear in English, newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars offer interdisciplinary perspectives on Sebald's work, providing a thorough assessment of his achievement. Sebald's texts deal with issues that lie at the very heart of contemporary culture: memory, exile, identity, representation, history, the Holocaust. His texts are hybrid in nature, mixing fiction, biography, historiography, travel writing, and memoir, and incorporating numerous photographic images. In response to this, W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion focuses on the key areas of travel, intertextuality, nature, and memory. Introductory chapters situate Sebald's work within the European literary tradition and within contemporary critical discourse. Individual chapters then draw on approaches from cultural and literary studies, including ecocriticism, trauma theory, and text-image studies, in order to explore aspects of Sebald's dazzling oeuvre. A comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources rounds off the volume, which will satisfy a growing need for a high-quality and up-to-date guide to Sebald's work for an English-speaking readership. The interdisciplinary nature of the Companion means that it will appeal not only to students and critics working on Sebald, but to anyone interested in contemporary culture.

Read more less

More than fifty years after it ended, the Holocaust continues to leave survivors and their descendants, as well as historians, philosophers, and theologians, searching for words to convey the enormity of that event. Efforts to express its realities and its impact on successive generations often stretch language to the breaking point--or to the point of silence. Words whose meaning was contested before the Holocaust prove even more fragile in its wake. David Patterson and John K. Roth identify three such "after-words": forgiveness, reconciliation, and justice. These words, though forever altered by the Holocaust, are still spoken and heard. But how should the concepts they represent be understood? How can their integrity be restored within the framework of current philosophical and, especially, religious traditions? Writing in a format that creates the feel of dialogue, the nine contributors to After-Words tackle these and other difficult questions about the nature of memory and forgiveness after the Holocaust to encourage others to participate in similar inter- and intrafaith inquiries. The contributors to After-Words are members of the Pastora Goldner Holocaust Symposium. Led since its founding in 1996 by Leonard Grob and Henry Knight, the symposium’s Holocaust and genocide scholars--a group that is interfaith, international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational--meet biennially in Oxfordshire, England.

Read more less

“What was the revolution of the 1990s for Russia?” writes Yegor Gaidar. “Was it a hard but salutary road toward the creation of a workable democracy with workable markets, a way for Russia to develop and survive in the twenty-first century? Or was it the prologue to another closed, stultified regime marching to the music of old myths and anthems?” Few are as well-equipped to consider this matter as Gaidar, noted Russian economist and prime minister during Boris Yeltsin’s early years as post-Soviet Russia’s leader. He is also a student of the socioeconomic history of his country, which he traces in the book with skill and insight. Both Eastern and Western influences are examined in light of Russia’s particular challenges and choices over the years and the kinds of institutions it developed as a result. The author focuses on comparing attitudes toward private property and the persistence of Eastern forms of landownership. He sees Marx’s concept of the “Asiatic mode of production” as unfortunately still reflecting Russian realities. Gaidar’s interesting analysis of Western development offers a perspective on private ownership of property in relation to government ownership that explains a lot about the evolution of socioeconomic and political systems East and West. “If our country begins yet another cycle of privatization of authority and office,” concludes the author, “it will shut itself off from the First World. If we can open up this socioeconomic space, if we can let liberal democratic evolution take its course, then Russia will have every chance in the world to take its rightful place among twenty-first-century civilizations.” State and Evolution was published in Russia in 1994. The English edition includes a new preface discussing the significance of events since that time.

Read more less

Wave after wave of political and economic refugees poured out of Vietnam beginning in the late 1970s, overwhelming the resources available to receive them. Squalid conditions prevailed in detention centers and camps in Hong Kong and throughout Southeast Asia, where many refugees spent years languishing in poverty, neglect, and abuse while supposedly being protected by an international consortium of caregivers. Voices from the Camps tells the story of the most vulnerable of these refugees: children alone, either orphaned or separated from their families. Combining anthropology and social work with advocacy for unaccompanied children everywhere, James M. Freeman and Nguyen Dinh Huu present the voices and experiences of Vietnamese refugee children neglected and abused by the system intended to help them. Authorities in countries of first asylum, faced with thousands upon thousands of increasingly frightened, despairing, and angry people, needed to determine on a case-by-case basis whether they should be sent back to Vietnam or be certified as legitimate refugees and allowed to proceed to countries of resettlement. The international community, led by UNHCR, devised a well-intentioned screening system. Unfortunately, as Freeman and Nguyen demonstrate, it failed unaccompanied children. The hardships these children endured are disturbing, but more disturbing is the story of how the governments and agencies that set out to care for them eventually became the children’s tormenters. When Vietnam, after years of refusing to readmit illegal emigrants, reversed its policy, the international community began doing everything it could to force them back to Vietnam. Cutting rations, closing schools, separating children from older relations and other caregivers, relocating them in order to destroy any sense of stability--the authorities employed coercion and effective abuse with distressing ease, all in the name of the “best interests” of the children. While some children eventually managed to construct a decent life in Vietnam or elsewhere, including the United States, all have been scarred by their refugee experience and most are still struggling with the legacy. Freeman and Nguyen’s presentation and analysis of this sobering chapter in recent history is a cautionary tale and a call to action.

Read more less

Anthropologist Rodney Frey culminates a decade of work with the Schitsu’umsh (the Coeur d’Alene Indians of Idaho) in this portrait of the unique bonds between a people and the landscape of their traditional homeland. The result of an intensive collaboration between investigator and Native people, the book includes many traditional stories that invite the reader’s participation in the world of the Schitsu’umsh. The Schitsu’umsh landscape of lake and mountains is described with a richness that emphasizes its essential material and spiritual qualities. The historical trauma of the Schitsu’umsh, stemming from their nineteenth-century contacts with Euro-American culture, is given dramatic weight. Nonetheless, examples of adaptation and continuity in traditional cultural expression, rather than destruction and discontinuity, are the most conspicuous features of this vivid ethnographic portrait. Drawing on pivotal oral traditions, Frey mirrors the Schitsu’umsh world view in his organization and presentation of ethnographic material. He uses first-person accounts by his Native consultants to convey crucial cultural perspectives and practices. Because of its unusual methodology, Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane is likely to become a model for future work with Native American peoples, within the Plateau region and beyond.

Read more less

Winner of the William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology The emergence of an Islamist movement and the startling buoyancy of Islamic political parties in Turkey--a model of secular modernization, a cosmopolitan frontier, and NATO ally--has puzzled Western observers. As the appeal of the Islamist Welfare Party spread through Turkish society, including the middle class, in the 1990s, the party won numerous local elections and became one of the largest parties represented in parliament, even holding the prime ministership in 1996 and 1997. Welfare was formally banned and closed in 1998, and its successor, Virtue, was banned in 2001, for allegedly posing a threat to the state, but the Islamist movement continues to grow in popularity. Jenny White has produced an ethnography of contemporary Istanbul that charts the success of Islamist mobilization through the eyes of ordinary people. Drawing on neighborhood interviews gathered over twenty years of fieldwork, she focuses intently on the genesis and continuing appeal of Islamic politics in the fabric of Turkish society and among mobilizing and mobilized elites, women, and educated populations. White shows how everyday concerns and interpersonal relations, rather than Islamic dogma, helped Welfare gain access to community networks, building on continuing face-to-face relationships by way of interactions with constituents through trusted neighbors. She argues that Islamic political networks are based on cultural understandings of relationships, duties, and trust. She also illustrates how Islamic activists have sustained cohesion despite contradictory agendas and beliefs, and how civic organizations, through local relationships, have ensured the autonomy of these networks from the national political organizations in whose service they appear to act. To illuminate the local culture of Istanbul, White has interviewed residents, activists, party officials, and municipal administrators and participated in their activities. She draws on rich experiences and research made possible by years of firsthand observation in the streets and homes of Umraniye, a large neighborhood that grew in tandem with Turkey’s modernization in the late 20th century. This book will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and analysts of Islamic and Middle Eastern politics.

Read more less

Light, water, and woods have always inspired Seattle artists and poets, and their views at the end of our millennium are especially rich, complex, subtle, and often humorous. This title celebrates these individual visions in a commemorative book sponsored by the City of Seattle through the Seattle Arts Commission. Photographs by Marsha Burns, Michael Burns, Lee Friedlander, Natalie Fobes, Peter DeLory and poetry by Denise Levertov, Richard Hugo, Colleen J. McElroy, and others are brought together to create a handsome and thoughtful portrait of Seattle at the end of its defining century.

Read more less

Taiwan’s modern legal system--quite different from those of both traditional China and the People’s Republic--has evolved since the advent of Japanese rule in 1895. Japan has gradually adopted Western law during the 19th-century and when it occupied Taiwan--a frontier society composed of Han Chinese settlers--its codes were instituted for the purpose of rapidly assimilating the Taiwanese people into Japanese society. Tay-sheng Wang’s comprehensive study lays a solid foundation for future analyses of Taiwanese law. It documents how Western traditions influenced the formation of Taiwan’s modern legal structure through the conduit of Japanese colonial rule and demonstrates the extent to which legal concepts diverged from the Chinese legal tradition and moved toward Western law.

Read more less

This extraordinary book is based on more than fifty diaries of Jewish Holocaust victims of all ages, written while the events described were actually taking place. Many of the writers did not survive. Patterson’s book is unique not only in the number of diaries and original texts it examines but also in the questions it raises and in the approach it takes from within Jewish traditions and contexts. Patterson has organized his book around a series of themes that lead to a deeper understanding of the meaning of these works for both their writers and their readers, affirming the Holocaust diary as a form of spiritual resistance. Throughout, he draws upon his impressive knowledge of Jewish texts, ancient and modern—Torah, Talmud, Midrash, Zohar, the medieval commentators, the Hasidic masters, and modern Jewish philosophers and thinkers. In Along the Edge of Annihilation David Patterson illuminates the spiritual and physical devastation experienced by the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust, and shows how they chose life and the spirit of life in the midst of the Inferno.

Read more less

President of the University of Washington from 1958 to 1973, a time of tremendous change, Charles Odegaard has written an absorbing memoir of his personal and institutional background and his development as a scholar and university administrator. President Richard L. McCormick and Professor of Biomedical Ethics Keith R. Benson further discuss Odegaard’s lasting contributions to the University of Washington. Beginning with his own undergraduate experience, Odegaard came to recognize the importance of the humanities as the vital center of the university tradition. Throughout his career he emphasized that education concerned with the quality of life should be foremost in the minds of university administrators and faculty. After retirement he continued this mission in his book Dear Doctor: A Personal Letter to a Physician, focusing on the need to train physicians in the humanities in order to strengthen the doctor-patient relationship. Growing up in Chicago, Odegaard attended Dartmouth College and then Harvard University, where he studied medieval history and received his doctorate in 1937. He then joined the history department faculty at the University of Illinois. A four-year tour of duty as an officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II deeply influenced his comprehension of how people are motivated to work toward a common goal under difficult conditions. In 1948 he was persuaded to move to Washington, D.C., to head the American Council of Learned Societies. In 1952 he accepted the position of Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Michigan, and he moved to the presidency of the University of Washington in the fall of 1958. Under Odegaard’s strong leadership the University of Washington grew into a major institution of higher learning and research. Among his primary concerns were finding superior academic administrators, accommodating rapid growth in enrollment, encouraging interdisciplinary cooperation, fostering greater communication between students and faculty, working to establish a realistic system linking state universities and colleges, and dealing with student discontent during the Vietnam War years and the periods of minority student protests. In A Pilgrimage through Universities, Charles Odegaard conveys his perspective on the role a major university should play in the modern world.

Read more less

More than ten thousand public artworks have been created in the People’s Republic of China since its establishment in 1949. They range from the ubiquitous Chairman Mao statues, to immense monuments and murals commemorating revolutionary uprisings, to abstract pieces inspired by international artistic trends. Eighty-three of the most intriguing of these works are featured here by American sculptor John Young, who traveled to dozens of Chinese cities, photographing public artworks and interviewing artists and arts administrators. Comments gleaned from these interviews, along with information about subjects and settings, are woven into the text accompanying the color photographs. The artists, ranging in age from twenty to over seventy, discuss how they view their art, how it is commissioned, the conditions under which they work, and especially the collaborative efforts through which much of it has been created. Such sujects as art education, the influence of Western art, and the position of women artists in China are also touched on. Young introduces us to examples of portrait art featuring political figures, such as the famous collaborative marble carving of Mao Zedong in the Memorial Hall at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and others that depict anonymous subjects, such as Situ Zhaoguang’s playful sculpture--located on a Beijing traffic island amid busy streets--of a girl engrossed in reading a book, plugging her ears to the noise. China’s rich ethnic culture is eviden in works such as Yuan Yungsheng’s mural at the Beijing airport, portraynig the Dai people’s Water Splashing Festival (whose nude bather was censored until recently and covered over by plywood). Folklore serves as the inspiration for works such as the collaborative granite sculpture Five Rams in Guangzhou, while historical figures and events from imperial China are the subjects of many works, such as Silk Road, a massive sculpture by Ma Gaihu and others marking the Chinese end of the ancient trade route. Many public artworks illustrate China’s twentieth-century military struggles, including resistance to the Japanese invasion during World War II and the civil war betwen the Nationalists and Communists. Most of the artworks portrayed in John Young’s superb photographs have never before appeared in a Western publication. Contemporary Public Art in China will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in recent Chinese art or public art, as well as a fascinating guide for visitors to China.

Read more less

Colorfully beaded handbags, superbly tanned and decorated deerskin shirts, finely woven baskets, exquisitely beaded and fringed horse trappings -- these distinctive Native arts of the Columbia River Plateau have been overshadowed in the public eye by the arts of the Northwest Coast, Great Plains, and American Southwest. But Indians in the region where present-day Washington, Oregon, and Idaho share boundaries have for centuries combined function and beauty in the items they made for even the most mundane of uses, and their traditional arts are still vital today. This book brings overdue recognition to the artistry and craftsmanship of the Plateau Indians by focusing on the remarkable collection amassed by the late Doris Swayze Bounds, a banker in Hermiston, Oregon, who grew up with and deeply loved Native people and their culture. She was loved in return, and many of the nearly 1,000 Plateau items in her collection came to her as gifts from her Indian friends, who expressed their respect and affection through the time-honored tradition of gift-giving. Exposed to Euro-Americans relatively late, the Plateau Indians managed to retain many of their traditional lifeways of fishing, hunting, and gathering, as well as a vigorous ethic of generosity and respect for others. The pieces in the Bounds collection, which date mainly from the 1870s to the 1960s, reflect all these aspects of Plateau culture. They range from sturdy baskets made to hold roots or berries to elaborately beaded elkhide “tail dresses” worn on festive occasions. In five essays, both Native and non-Native experts describe the art styles and the uses and cultural meanings of the items; two other recount Doris Bound’s life, collecting practices, and relationships with Native Americans. The essays are handsomely illustrated with items from the Bounds collection. This book offers and introduction to this visually stunning art tradition.

Read more less

In 1897 August Strindberg, almost fifty years old, embarked on one of the great comebacks in the history of literature. For six years he had lived as an exile in Germany, Austria, and France. Though more than twenty years earlier he had earned a place in Scandinavian literature, the general view in Sweden was that he was finished, his career over. Then, with the publication of Inferno, the novel that described some of the most harrowing experiences of his exile years, he returned swiftly to the center of Swedish literary life. In Out of Inferno Harry G. Carlson analyzes the reasons for Strindberg's collapse and subsequent reemergence as an influential modern writer. Strindberg's early success was as a realist, or Naturalist, writer in the 1870s and 1880s. Astute and politically conscious, Strindberg emphasized social relevance in his art. At the same time, however, he instinctively trusted his highly inventive "visions." The tensions and contradictions between realist and dreamer ultimately helped precipitate the collapse of his career in the Inferno years. Carlson explores Strindberg's struggle to redefine both his art and himself as an artist, and the influence on him of various intellectual trends in fin de siecle Berlin and Paris-occultism, alchemy, Orientalism, medievalism. After declaring himself finished with drama and fiction, Strindberg turned to an old love, painting, and sought out friends in avant-garde circles, among them Munch and Gauguin. His renewed interest in painting and in experiments in the powers of the visual imagination laid the groundwork for the radical experimentation of his later drama. In the extraordinary atmosphere of artistic ferment in Berlin and Paris, Strindberg's always sensitive visual imagination became recharged with energy, and the writer was inspired to return to work. The results in plays like To Damascus, A Dream Play, The Dance of Death, Erik XIV, and The Ghost Sonata amounted to a vision of drama that helped change the course of the modern theatre.

Read more less

Magnificent and haunting, the tall cedar sculptures called totem poles have become a distinctive symbol of the native people of the Northwest Coast. The powerful carvings of the vital and extraordinary beings such as Sea Bear, Thunderbird and Cedar Man are impressive and intriguing. Looking at Totem Poles is an indispensable guide to 110 poles in easily acessible outdoor locations in coastal British Columbia and Alaska. In clear and lively prose, Hilary Stewart describes the various types of poles, their purpose, and how they were carved and raised. She also identifies and explains frequently depicted figures and objects. Each pole, shown in a beautifully detailed drawing, is accompanied by a text that points out the crests, figures and objects carved on it. Historical and cultural background are given, legends are recounted and often the carver’s comments or anecdotes enrich the pole’s story. Photographs put some of the poles into context or show their carving and raising. This book is a companion volume to Hilary Stewart’s enormously successful Looking at Indian Art of the Northwest Coast.

Read more less

This book is an anthology of some of the greatest stories and storytellers of the American West. Through eight chapters and over 800 pages, 150 writers present scores of myths, stories, poems, essays, and journals that document Montana's significant literary tradition. The selections range from pre-white Indian days to the present, and, taken as a whole, they offer a powerful microcosm of the entire western experience. The chapters, each prefaced by an original essay, progress chronologically from myths and tales of the Indian people to accounts of exploration and the fur trade, followed by the mining and stockmen's frontiers, the agricultural and small town experience, as well as a special chapter on Butte--the richest hill on earth. Contemporary chapters take up the emergence of the modern West in the middle years of the twentieth century as well as the renaissance of western literature in contemporary fiction and poetry. These chapters include many authors who have earned national reputations in fiction, poetry, and criticism, but they also include many younger writers whose careers are just beginning.

Read more less

A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE On May 18, 1980, people all over the world watched with awe and horror as Mount St. Helens erupted. Fifty-seven people were killed and hundreds of square miles of what had been lush forests and wild rivers were to all appearances destroyed. Ecologists thought they would have to wait years, or even decades, for life to return to the mountain, but when forest scientist Jerry Franklin helicoptered into the blast area a couple of weeks after the eruption, he found small plants bursting through the ash and animals skittering over the ground. Stunned, he realized he and his colleagues had been thinking of the volcano in completely the wrong way. Rather than being a dead zone, the mountain was very much alive. Mount St. Helens has been surprising ecologists ever since, and in After the Blast Eric Wagner takes readers on a fascinating journey through the blast area and beyond. From fireweed to elk, the plants and animals Franklin saw would not just change how ecologists approached the eruption and its landscape, but also prompt them to think in new ways about how life responds in the face of seemingly total devastation.

Read more less

A compact, full-colour field guide to the growing number of invasive plant species spreading across coastal BC and the Pacific Northwest, highlighting their hazards and uses. The spread of invasive plant species is a growing concern across the coastal Pacific Northwest. Invasive plants compete for space with native plants, alter the natural habitat, and even interfere with the diet of local wildlife. Hundreds of these species are so commonly seen in our backyards, forests, and roadsides, that many people do not even realize that these plants are not native to this region. Designed for amateur naturalists, gardeners, and foragers, Invasive Flora of the West Coast is a clear, concise, full-colour guide to identifying and demystifying more than 200 invasive plant species in our midst, from Scotch broom to Evening Primrose. Featuring colour photography, origin and etymology, safety tips and warnings, as well as common uses, this book is practical, user-friendly, and portable for easy, on-the-go identification.

Read more less

Seasonal changes in nature are among the most readily observable clues to the biological effects of climate change. “It came to me,” writes acclaimed environment reporter Lynda Mapes, “You could tell the story of climate change—and more—through a single, beloved, living thing: a tree.” Mapes chronicles her yearlong quest to understand a wizened witness to our world: a red oak, over one hundred years old, in the Harvard Forest. A tree that has seen it all, from our changing relationship with nature in our industrialized and digitized lives to the altered clockwork of nature. Mapes evokes the wonder and joy of forests, and the poetics and botany of trees, living intimately with her oak through four seasons. She dives deeply into the world of self-described “tree geeks” and becomes one herself, exploring her tree from roots to crown. She also offers a clear-eyed assessment of what the tree tells us about climate change, from the heartwood at its core to the photosynthetic cycle deep in its leaves. Mixing storytelling, tree lore, and cutting-edge science, Mapes offers a new approach to thinking about how we might live together into the far future on a planet we have changed in ways we never intended—and how trees help show us the way.

Read more less

Rodeo is a dangerous and painful performance in which only the strongest and most skilled riders succeed. In the popular imagination, the western rodeo hero is often a stoic white man who embodies the toughness and independence of America’s frontier past. However, marginalized people have starred in rodeos since the very beginning. Cast out of popular western mythology and pushed to the fringes in everyday life, these cowboys and cowgirls found belonging and meaning at the rodeo, staking a claim to national inclusion. Outriders explores the histories of rodeoers at the margins of society, from female bronc-riders in the 1910s and 1920s and convict cowboys in Texas in the mid-twentieth century to all-black rodeos in the 1960s and 1970s and gay rodeoers in the late twentieth century. These rodeo riders not only widened the definition of the real American cowboy but also, at times, reinforced the persistent and exclusionary myth of an idealized western identity. In this nuanced study, Rebecca Scofield shares how these outsider communities courted authenticity as they put their lives on the line to connect with an imagined American West.

Read more less

In the early twentieth century China’s most famous commercial artists promoted new cultural and civic values through sketches of idealized modern women in journals, newspapers, and compendia called One Hundred Illustrated Beauties. This genre drew upon a centuries-old tradition of books featuring illustrations of women who embodied virtue, desirability, and Chinese cultural values, and changes in it reveal the foundational value shifts that would bring forth a democratic citizenry in the post-imperial era. The illustrations presented ordinary readers with tantalizing visions of the modern lifestyles that were imagined to accompany Republican China’s new civic consciousness. Citizens of Beauty is the first book to explore the One Hundred Illustrated Beauties in order to compare social ideals during China’s shift from imperial to Republican times. The book contextualizes the social and political significance of the aestheticized female body in a rapidly changing genre, showing how progressive commercial artists used images of women to promote a vision of Chinese modernity that was democratic, mobile, autonomous, and free from the crippling hierarchies and cultural norms of old China.

Read more less

Sima Qian (first century BCE), the author of Record of the Historian (Shiji), is China’s earliest and best-known historian, and his “Letter to Ren An” is the most famous letter in Chinese history. In the letter, Sima Qian explains his decision to finish his life’s work, the first comprehensive history of China, instead of honorably committing suicide following his castration for “deceiving the emperor.” In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some scholars have queried the authenticity of the letter. Is it a genuine piece of writing by Sima Qian or an early work of literary impersonation? The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian’s Legacy provides a full translation of the letter and uses different methods to explore issues in textual history. It also shows how ideas about friendship, loyalty, factionalism, and authorship encoded in the letter have far-reaching implications for the study of China.

Read more less

Renowned for its old-growth rain forest, wilderness coast, and glaciated peaks, Olympic National Park is a living laboratory for ecological renewal, especially as the historic Elwha River basin regenerates in the wake of dam removal. In this classic guide to the park, Tim McNulty invites us into the natural and human history of these nearly million acres, from remote headwaters to roadside waterfalls, from shipwreck sites to Native American historical settlements and contemporary resource stewardship, along the way detailing the park’s unique plant and animal life. McNulty reminds us that though “the mountains and rivers remain ‘timeless,’ our understanding of the lifeforms that inhabit them—and the effects our actions have on their future—is an ongoing, ever deepening story.” Color photographs Practical advice on how to make the most of your visit Handy flora and fauna species checklists Inspiring descriptions of endangered species recovery Detailed look at Elwha River restoration after dam removal

Read more less

While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, “Do you have a family history of illness?”—a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on additional meaning and spurred him to investigate his family’s medical past. In this deeply personal narrative, he constructs a history of his body to understand his diagnosis with a serious immunological disorder, weaving together his dying grandfather’s sneaking a cigarette in a shed on the family’s Montana farm, blood fractionation experiments in Europe during World War II, and nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks that ravaged small American towns as his ancestors were making their way west. A Family History of Illness is a gritty historical memoir that examines the body’s immune system and microbial composition as well as the biological and cultural origins of memory and history, offering a startling, fresh way to view the role of history in understanding our physical selves. In his own search, Walker soon realizes that this broader scope is more valuable than a strictly medical family history. He finds that family legacies shape us both physically and symbolically, forming the root of our identity and values, and he urges us to renew our interest in the past or risk misunderstanding ourselves and the world around us.

Read more less

On April 18, 1906, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the San Francisco region, igniting fires that burned half the city. The disaster in all its elements — earthquake, fires, and recovery — profoundly disrupted the urban order and challenged San Francisco’s perceived permanence. The crisis temporarily broke down spatial divisions of class and race and highlighted the contested terrain of urban nature in an era of widespread class conflict, simmering ethnic tensions, and controversial reform efforts. From a proposal to expel Chinatown from the city center to a vision of San Francisco paved with concrete in the name of sanitation, the process of reconstruction involved reenvisioning the places of both people and nature. In their zeal to restore their city, San Franciscans downplayed the role of the earthquake and persisted in choosing patterns of development that exacerbated risk. In this close study of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Joanna L. Dyl examines the decades leading up to the catastrophic event and the city’s recovery from it. Combining urban environmental history and disaster studies, Seismic City demonstrates how the crisis and subsequent rebuilding reflect the dynamic interplay of natural and human influences that have shaped San Francisco.

Read more less

To be a tourist in Libya during the period of Italian colonization was to experience a complex negotiation of cultures. Against a sturdy backdrop of indigenous culture and architecture, modern metropolitan culture brought its systems of transportation and accommodation, as well as new hierarchies of political and social control. Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya shows how Italian authorities used the contradictory forces of tradition and modernity to both legitimize their colonial enterprise and construct a vital tourist industry. Although most tourists sought to escape the trappings of the metropole in favor of experiencing "difference," that difference was almost always framed, contained, and even defined by Western culture. McLaren argues that the "modern" and the "traditional" were entirely constructed by colonial authorities, who balanced their need to project an image of a modern and efficient network of travel and accommodation with the necessity of preserving the characteristic qualities of the indigenous culture. What made the tourist experience in Libya distinct from that of other tourist destinations was the constant oscillation between modernizing and preservation tendencies. The movement between these forces is reflected in the structure of the book, which proceeds from the broadest level of inquiry into the Fascist colonial project in Libya to the tourist organization itself, and finally into the architecture of the tourist environment, offering a way of viewing state-driven modernization projects and notions of modernity from a historical and geographic perspective. This is an important book for architectural historians and for those interested in colonial and postcolonial studies, as well as Italian studies, African history, literature, and cultural studies more generally.

Read more less

Stephen G. Gilbert adds to his acclaimed series of dissection guides with Pictorial Anatomy of the Fetal Pig. Through his book on fetal pig anatomy, Stephen G. Gilbert begins to explain the important differences of warm and cold-blooded animals. He treats his guide as a tool to further understand explanations of fetal pig form and function; and how the internal environment (the biological systems inside the animal) interacts with the external environment. Gilbert uses this guide not only to teach anatomy, but also to give a sufficient vocabulary to students so they can use it to explain biological processes of the organism. In detailed, elaborate drawings of the various biological systems of the fetal pig, instructors are able to point out anatomical features that cannot be dissected in detail by the learning student. Nor is any student of pig anatomy left without a sufficient means to know and communicate the layers of fetal pig form.

Read more less

An eminently readable, complete summary of all the essentials of Buddhist teaching and practice, Buddhism Explained is useful both for those wanting an understandable introduction to the subject and experts wishing a comprehensive but brief reference. It covers topics as diverse as meditation methods, the daily life of Buddhist monks, and the meaning of profound concepts such as Nirvana. The use of Thai, Pali, and Sanskrit terms has been kept to a minimum, with clear explanations of those included.

Read more less

One of the premier sculptors of her generation in the Northwest, Hilda Morris (1911-1993) lived her artistic life in the center of the region's circle of avant-garde painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians. This is the first book to document her half-century-long career and presents Morris's highly individual abstract sculptures against the backdrop of artistic developments during the second half of the twentieth century. A part of the abstract expressionist movement, Morris's vigorous, gestural sculptures inspired by mythological and universal symbols were instrumental in introducing a rigorous, expansive thinking about abstraction to the Pacific Northwest community. As an account of her life and the first complete survey of her entire oeuvre - sculpture, painting, and drawing - this volume will be essential to an understanding of the period.

Read more less