Search results for ""indiana university press""

Veils, Turbans, and Islamic Reform in Northern Nigeria tells the story of Islamic reform from the perspective of dress, textile production, trade, and pilgrimage over the past 200 years. As Islamic reformers have sought to address societal problems such as poverty, inequality, ignorance, unemployment, extravagance, and corruption, they have used textiles as a means to express their religious positions on these concerns. Home first to the early indigo trade and later to a thriving textile industry, northern Nigeria has been a center for Islamic practice as well as a place where everything from women's hijabs to turbans, buttons, zippers, short pants, and military uniforms offers a statement on Islam. Elisha P. Renne argues that awareness of material distinctions, religious ideology, and the political and economic contexts from which successive Islamic reform groups have emerged is important for understanding how people in northern Nigeria continue to seek a proper Islamic way of being in the world and how they imagine their futures—spiritually, economically, politically, and environmentally.

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Contemporary forms of living and dying in Swaziland cannot be understood apart from the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, according to anthropologist Casey Golomski. In Africa's last absolute monarchy, the story of 15 years of global collaboration in treatment and intervention is also one of ordinary people facing the work of caring for the sick and dying and burying the dead. Golomski's ethnography shows how AIDS posed challenging questions about the value of life, culture, and materiality to drive new forms and practices for funerals. Many of these forms and practicesnewly catered funeral feasts, an expanded market for life insurance, and the kingdom's first crematoriumare now conspicuous across the landscape and culturally disruptive in a highly traditionalist setting. This powerful and original account details how these new matters of death, dying, and funerals have become entrenched in peoples' everyday lives and become part of a quest to create dignity in the wake of a devastating epidemic.

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You know the names and the stories, but you've never seen them like this before! My Name Was Never Frankenstein: And Other Classic Adventure Tales Reanimated brings your favorite characters back to life in new and exciting escapades. In this inventive collection, a stellar cast of writers uses classic adventure tales as a launch pad for an eclectic mix of prequels, alternate universes, spin-offs, and total reboots. Imagine Ahab is shipwrecked on an island of cannibals, or Mr. Hyde tells his side of the story, or the scarecrow from Oz struggles with the mystery of his existence. By turns wry and haunting, My Name Was Never Frankenstein upends old territory and classic characters to reclaim them for a new generation.

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For over 125 years, Hoosier athletes and coaches have grabbed headlines with their accomplishments and accolades. Legendary performers and larger-than-life figures have called Bloomington home, and their stories have been passed down through generations. But for every classic tale about a Hoosier athlete, coach, or program, there's another that's been forgotten. Until now.After gaining unprecedented access to IU archives and longtime employees, authors John Decker, Pete DiPrimio, and Doug Wilson reveal events and images that were lost for decades. Filled with new and entertaining stories of the people who have made IU Athletics legendary, Unknown, Untold, and Unbelievable Stories of IU Sports is a must-have for any fan.Discover behind-the-scenes stories ofthe Olympic Trials featuring Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, and Steve Alford;the infamous 1997 black football jerseys;Ernie Pyle's outlandish automobile polo match to raise funds for the IU marching band;A. J. Moye's notorious block against Duke;the time Sam Bell won the bid for an NCAA track meet—without a facility or even bleachers;and many more incredible stories from the renowned IU Athletics program.

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The German lied, or art song, is considered one of the most intimate of all musical genres—often focused on the poetic speaker's inner world and best suited for private and semi-private performance in the home or salon. Yet, problematically, any sense of inwardness in lieder depends on outward expression through performance. With this paradox at its heart, Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century explores the relationships between early nineteenth-century theories of the inward self, the performance practices surrounding inward lyric poetry and song, and the larger conventions determining the place of intimate poetry and song in the public concert hall. Jennifer Ronyak studies the cultural practices surrounding lieder performances in northern and central Germany in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, demonstrating how presentations of lieder during the formative years of the genre put pressure on their sense of interiority. She examines how musicians responded to public concern that outward expression would leave the interiority of the poet, the song, or the performer unguarded and susceptible to danger. Through this rich performative paradox Ronyak reveals how a song maintains its powerful intimacy even during its inherently public performance.

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Gaming the System takes philosophical traditions out of the ivory tower and into the virtual worlds of video games. In this book, author David J. Gunkel explores how philosophical traditions—put forth by noted thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Žižek—can help us explore and conceptualize recent developments in video games, game studies, and virtual worlds. Furthermore, Gunkel interprets computer games as doing philosophy, arguing that the game world is a medium that provides opportunities to model and explore fundamental questions about the nature of reality, personal identity, social organization, and moral conduct. By using games to investigate and innovate in the area of philosophical thinking, Gunkel shows how areas such as game governance and manufacturers' terms of service agreements actually grapple with the social contract and produce new postmodern forms of social organization that challenge existing modernist notions of politics and the nation state. In this critically engaging study, Gunkel considers virtual worlds and video games as more than just "fun and games," presenting them as sites for new and original thinking about some of the deepest questions concerning the human experience.

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Behind the bars on her window, Rosa Maria dreams of sunshine, love, calm, and leaving the city where she lives with her family. She suffers her father's beatings, hides her femininity behind shapeless clothing, and pines for the beautiful Jason as she awaits her opportunity to flee. Meanwhile, her older brother is found dead in a nearby parking lot, and the neighborhood explodes in a riot against the police. Rosa Maria resolves to act before she is devoured by family intrigues and despair. Wilfried N'Sondé's powerful voice creates a palpable sense of the absence of hope and the social and racial isolation that pervade the Paris projects, even as he never abandons the expansive capacity of individuals to dream of better lives beyond a seemingly hopeless reality.

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New England is renowned for its quaint towns, beautiful landscapes, and busy ports. But it is also infamous as the setting for unexplained deaths, ghost stories, bizarre murders, and peculiar wills and epitaphs.In New England Nightmares: True Tales of the Strange and Gothic, author Keven McQueen explores the darker and stranger side of New England and the Mid-Atlantic. With shocking and unforgettable tales from the tip of Maine all the way to the New Jersey shore, this eerie collection explores our fascination with death and the unknown, including tales of medical students digging up bodies to dissect, of a murderer's bones being wired together after death, and of Dr. Timothy Clark Smith, who requested that he be buried with a breathing tube and glass window so he could see the outside world.An intriguing and frightful look into the odder side of the Northeast, New England Nightmares promises to send chills down your spine.

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There's always something happening at Crawdad Creek. That's what Lizzie and Michael call the stream that runs behind their house. Come pan for gold, hunt for fossils, find an arrowhead in the mud or a crayfish under a stone. Watch whirligig beetles and water striders skate across the water, teasing the fish below, and count the turtles sunning themselves on moss-covered logs. Follow tracks along the bank, then sit in quiet amazement as deer, raccoons, and other animals visit the creek. There's a wild and beautiful world here waiting to be discovered. Take the time to look!

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The beginning of a new era in Indiana University football starts with the arrival of head coach Tom Allen. After revolutionizing IU's defense, Allen has the opportunity to stage a Hoosier comeback. But can Allen make the most of this opportunity? And who are the compelling figures poised to make it happen?In The Quest for Indiana University Football Glory, veteran sports writer Pete DiPrimio showcases exclusive coverage of the meetings, practices, games, players, coaches, and gatherings that the public rarely sees. He also reveals the surprising story of how Allen, the son of a successful Indiana high school coach, became the head coach after delivering a quality defense—something no Hoosier defensive coordinator has done in a generation. He also shows Allen's connection to IU glory past, from Bill Mallory's record-setting run, to Lee Corso's Holiday Bowl surprise to the Rose Bowl opportunity no one expected. Focused on an in-depth look at the rookie season under Allen, The Quest for Indiana University Football Glory brings readers into the locker room during the rebirth of Hoosier football and highlights the struggles and successes as the coaches and players fight to rebuild the program and reinvent IU football.

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Roots of the New Arab Film deals with the generation of filmmakers from across North Africa and the Middle East who created an international awareness of Arab film from the mid-1980s onwards. These seminal filmmakers experienced the moment of national independence first-hand in their youth and retained a deep attachment to their homeland. Although these aspiring filmmakers had to seek their training abroad, they witnessed a time of filmic revival in Europe – Fellini and Antonioni in Italy, the French New Wave, and British Free Cinema.Returning home, these filmmakers brought a unique insider/outsider perspective to bear on local developments in society since independence, including the divide between urban and rural communities, the continuing power of traditional values and the status of women in a changing society. As they made their first films back home, the feelings of participation in a worldwide movement of new, independent filmmaking was palpable. Roots of the New Arab Film is a necessary and comprehensive resource for anyone interested in the foundations of Arab cinema.

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Dominique Janicaud once famously critiqued the work of French phenomenologists of the theological turn because their work was built on the seemingly corrupt basis of Heidegger's notion of the inapparent or inconspicuous. In this powerful reconsideration and extension of Heidegger's phenomenology of the inconspicuous, Jason W. Alvis deftly suggests that inconspicuousness characterizes something fully present and active, yet quickly overlooked. Alvis develops the idea of inconspicuousness through creative appraisals of key concepts of the thinkers of the French theological turn and then employs it to describe the paradoxes of religious experience.

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During the 1930s, Austrian film production companies developed a process to navigate the competing demands of audiences in Nazi Germany and those found in broader Western markets. In Screening Transcendence, film historian Robert Dassanowsky explores how Austrian filmmakers during the Austrofascist period (1933–1938) developed two overlapping industries: "Aryanized" films for distribution in Germany, its largest market, and "Emigrantenfilm," which employed émigré and Jewish talent that appealed to international audiences.Through detailed archival research in both Vienna and the United States, Dassanowsky reveals what was culturally, socially, and politically at stake in these two simultaneous and overlapping film industries. Influenced by French auteurism, admired by Italian cinephiles, and ardently remade by Hollywood, these period Austrian films demonstrate a distinctive regional style mixed with transnational influences.Combining brilliant close readings of individual films with thoroughly informed historical and cultural observations, Dassanowsky presents the story of a nation and an industry mired in politics, power, and intrigue on the brink of Nazi occupation.

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Drawing on testimonies, memoirs, and personal interviews of Holocaust survivors, Françoise S. Ouzan reveals how the experience of Nazi persecution impacted their personal reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reintegration into a free society. She sheds light on the life trajectories of various groups of Jews, including displaced persons, partisan fighters, hidden children, and refugees from Nazism. Ouzan shows that personal success is not only a unifying factor among these survivors but is part of an ethos that unified ideas of homeland, social justice, togetherness, and individual aspirations in the redemptive experience. Exploring how Holocaust survivors rebuilt their lives after World War II, Ouzan tells the story of how they coped with adversity and psychic trauma to contribute to the culture and society of their country of residence.

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Through his radio and film works, such as The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane, Orson Welles became a household name in the United States. Yet Welles's multifaceted career went beyond these classic titles and included lesser-known but nonetheless important contributions to television, theater, newspaper columns, and political activism. Orson Welles in Focus: Texts and Contexts examines neglected areas of Welles's work, shedding light on aspects of his art that have been eclipsed by a narrow focus on his films. By positioning Welles's work during a critical period of his activity (the mid-1930s through the 1950s) in its larger cultural, political, aesthetic, and industrial contexts, the contributors to this volume examine how he participated in and helped to shape modern media. This exploration of Welles in his totality illuminates and expands our perception of his contributions that continue to resonate today.

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The late 1930s and early 1940s were the peak of progressive education in the United States, and Elisabeth Irwin's Little Red School House in New York City was iconic in that movement. For the first time, stories and recollections from students who attended Little Red during this era have been collected by author Jane Roland Martin. Now in their late eighties, these classmates can still sing the songs they learned in elementary school and credit the progressive education they loved with shaping their outlooks and life trajectories. Martin frames these stories from the former students "tell it like it was" point of view with philosophical commentary, bringing to light the underpinnings of the kind of progressive education employed at Little Red and commenting critically on the endeavor. In a time when the role of the arts in education and public schooling itself are under attack in the United States, Martin makes a case for a different style of education designed for the defense of democracy and expresses hope that an education like hers can become an opportunity for all.

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The genocides of modern history–Rwanda, Armenia, Guatemala, the Holocaust, and countless others–and their effects have been well documented, but how do the experiences of female victims and perpetrators differ from those of men? In Women and Genocide, human rights advocates and scholars come together to argue that the memory of trauma is gendered and that women's voices and perspectives are key to our understanding of the dynamics that emerge in the context of genocidal violence. The contributors of this volume examine how women consistently are targets for the sexualized violence that serves as an instrument of ethnic cleansing, how female perpetrators take advantage of the new power structures, and how women are involved in the struggle for justice in post-genocidal contexts. By placing women at center stage, Women and Genocide helps us to better understand the nexus existing between misogyny and violence in societies where genocide erupts.

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As cinema industries around the globe adjusted to the introduction of synch-sound technology, the Soviet Union was also shifting culturally, politically, and ideologically from the heterogeneous film industry of the 1920s to the centralized industry of the 1930s, and from the avant-garde to Socialist Realism. In The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1928–1935, Lilya Kaganovsky explores the history, practice, technology, ideology, aesthetics, and politics of the transition to sound within the context of larger issues in Soviet media history. Industrialization and centralization of the cinema industry greatly altered the way movies in the Soviet Union were made, while the introduction of sound radically altered the way these movies were received. Kaganovsky argues that the coming of sound changed the Soviet cinema industry by making audible, for the first time, the voice of State power, directly addressing the Soviet viewer. By exploring numerous examples of films from this transitional period, Kaganovsky demonstrates the importance of the new technology of sound in producing and imposing the "Soviet Voice."

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"See yourself in the movies!" Prior to the advent of the home movie camera and the ubiquitousness of the camera phone, there was the local film. This cultural phenomenon, produced across the country from the 1890s to the 1950s, gave ordinary people a chance to be on the silver screen without leaving their hometowns. Through these movies, residents could see themselves in the same theaters where they saw major Hollywood motion pictures. Traveling filmmakers plied their trade in small towns and cities, where these films were received by locals as being part of the larger cinema experience. With access to the rare film clips under discussion, Main Street Movies documents the diversity and longevity of local film production and examines how itinerant filmmakers responded to industry changes to keep sponsors and audiences satisfied. From town pride films in the 1910s to Hollywood knockoffs in the 1930s, local films captured not just images of local people and places but also ideas about the function and meaning of cinema that continue to resonate today.

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In the constant deluge of media coverage on Islam, Muslims are often portrayed as terrorists, refugees, radicals, or victims, depictions that erode human responses of concern, connection, or even a willingness to learn about Muslims. On Islam helps break this cycle with information and strategies to understand and report the modern Muslim experience. Journalists, activists, bloggers, and scholars offer insights into how Muslims are represented in the media today and offer tips for those covering Islam in the future. Interviews provide personal and often moving firsthand accounts of people confronting the challenges of modern life while maintaining their Muslim faith, and brief overviews provide a crash course on Muslim beliefs and practices. A concise and frank discussion of the Muslim experience, On Islam provides facts and perspective at a time when truth in journalism is more vital than ever.

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"Find your one true love and live happily ever after." The trials of love and desire provide perennial story material, from the Biblical Song of Songs to Disney's princesses, but perhaps most provocatively in the romance novel, a genre known for tales of fantasy and desire, sex and pleasure. Hailed on the one hand for its women-centered stories that can be sexually liberating, and criticized on the other for its emphasis on male/female coupling and mythical happy endings, romance fiction is a multi-million dollar publishing phenomenon, creating national and international societies of enthusiasts, practitioners, and scholars. Catherine M. Roach, alongside her romance-writer alter-ego, Catherine LaRoche, guides the reader deep into Romancelandia where the smart and the witty combine with the sexy and seductive to explore why this genre has such a grip on readers and what we can learn from the romance novel about the nature of happiness, love, sex, and desire in American popular culture.

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This inspiring tale of grit and determination sprinkled with humor, wit, and a taste of irony is the story of Winifred Bryan Horner's journey from a life of domesticity on the family farm after World War II to becoming an Endowed Professor. Her compelling story is one of a woman's fight for equal rights and her ultimate success at a time when women were openly deemed "less than" men in the professional world. Winifred, a professional writer and consummate storyteller known to friends and family as Win, always assumed she would write her own memoir. But after retiring from teaching, she found that she could never find the time or inspiration to sit down and record the pivotal stories of her remarkable 92 years of life. Colleague and mentee Elaine J. Lawless devised a plan to interview Win about her life and allow her to tell stories with the intention that Win would edit the transcriptions into her memoir. Over four months, Elaine visited Win on Wednesdays to interview her about her life. Sadly, just one week after the conclusion of the final interview, Win unexpectedly passed away, before Elaine could give her the final transcripts. With the support of Win's family, Elaine set out to finish this book on Win's behalf. Win's story is one that will inspire and resonate with women as they continue to work toward equality in the world.

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For nearly three decades, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), waged a violent revolutionary struggle against the apartheid state in South Africa. Stephen Davis works with extensive oral testimonies and the heroic myths that were constructed after 1994 to offer a new history of this armed movement. Davis deftly addresses the histories that reinforce the legitimacy of the ANC as a ruling party, its longstanding entanglement with the South African Communist Party, and efforts to consolidate a single narrative of struggle and renewal in concrete museums and memorials. Davis shows that the history of MK is more complicated and ambiguous than previous laudatory accounts would have us believe, and in doing so he discloses the contradictions of the liberation struggle as well as its political manifestations.

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While Anne Frank was in hiding during the German Occupation of the Netherlands, she wrote what has become the world's most famous diary. But how could an unknown Jewish girl from Amsterdam be transformed into an international icon? Renowned Dutch scholar David Barnouw investigates the facts and controversies that surround the global phenomenon of Anne Frank. Barnouw highlights the ways in which Frank's life and ultimate fate have been represented, interpreted, and exploited. He follows the evolution of her diary into a book (with translations into nearly 60 languages and editions that added previously unknown material), an American play, and a movie. As he asks, "Who owns Anne Frank?" Barnouw follows her emergence as a global phenomenon and what this means for her historical persona as well as for her legacy as a symbol of the Holocaust.

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Singing the same song is a central part of the worship practice for members for the Cherubim and Seraphim Christian Church in Lagos, Nigeria. Vicki L. Brennan reveals that by singing together, church members create one spiritual mind and become unified around a shared set of values. She follows parishioners as they attend choir rehearsals, use musical media—hymn books and cassette tapes—and perform the music and rituals that connect them through religious experience. Brennan asserts that church members believe that singing together makes them part of a larger imagined social collective, one that allows them to achieve health, joy, happiness, wealth, and success in an ethical way. Brennan discovers how this particular Yoruba church articulates and embodies the moral attitudes necessary to be a good Christian in Nigeria today.

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Merold Westphal is considered to be one of the preeminent Continental philosophers of religion. His articulation of faith as the task of a lifetime has become a touchstone in contemporary debates concerning faith's relationship to reason. As Justin Sands explores his philosophy, he illuminates how Westphal's concept of faith reveals the pastoral, theological intent behind his thinking. Sands sees Westphal's philosophy as a powerful articulation of Protestant theology, but one that is in ecumenical dialogue with questions concerning apologetics and faith's relationship to ethics and responsibility, a more Catholic point of view. By bringing out these features in Westphal's philosophy, Sands intends to find core philosophical methodologies as well as a passable bridge for philosophers to cross over into theological discourses.

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In The Contemplative Mind in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Patricia Owen-Smith considers how contemplative practices may find a place in higher education. By creating a bridge between contemplative practices and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), Owen-Smith brings awareness of contemplative pedagogy to a larger audience of college instructors, while also offering classroom models and outlining the ongoing challenges of both defining these practices and assessing their impact in education. Ultimately, Owen-Smith asserts that such practices have the potential to deepen a student's development and understanding of the self as a learner, knower, and citizen of the world.

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The sukkah, the symbolic ritual home built during the annual Jewish holiday of Sukkot, commemorates the temporary structures that sheltered the Israelites as they journeyed across the desert after the exodus from Egypt. Despite the simple Biblical prescription for its design, the remarkable variety of creative expression in the construction, decoration, and use of the sukkah, in both times of peace and national upheaval, reveals the cultural traditions, political convictions, philosophical ideals, and individual aspirations that the sukkah communicates for its builders and users today. In this ethnography of contemporary Sukkot observance, Gabrielle Anna Berlinger examines the powerful role of ritual and vernacular architecture in the formation of self and society in three sharply contrasting Jewish communities: Bloomington, Indiana; South Tel Aviv, Israel; and Brooklyn, New York. Through vivid description and in-depth interviews, she demonstrates how constructing and decorating the sukkah and performing the weeklong holiday's rituals of hospitality provide unique circumstances for creative expression, social interaction, and political struggle. Through an exploration of the intersections between the rituals of Sukkot and contemporary issues, such as the global Occupy movement, Berlinger finds that the sukkah becomes a tangible expression of the need for housing and economic justice, as well as a symbol of the longing for home.

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In The Contemplative Mind in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Patricia Owen-Smith considers how contemplative practices may find a place in higher education. By creating a bridge between contemplative practices and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), Owen-Smith brings awareness of contemplative pedagogy to a larger audience of college instructors, while also offering classroom models and outlining the ongoing challenges of both defining these practices and assessing their impact in education. Ultimately, Owen-Smith asserts that such practices have the potential to deepen a student's development and understanding of the self as a learner, knower, and citizen of the world.

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Motivated by Woody Allen's brief comedic transformation into a Hasidic Jew in Annie Hall, cultural historian Shaina Hammerman examines the effects of real and imagined representations of Hasidic Jews in film, television, theater, and photography. Although these depictions could easily be dismissed as slapstick comedies and sexy dramas about forbidden relationships, Hammerman uses this ethnic imagery to ask meaningful questions about how Jewish identity, multiculturalism, belonging, and relevance are constructed on the stage and silver screen.

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In West Africa, especially among Yoruba people, masquerades have the power to kill enemies, appoint kings, and grant fertility. John Thabiti Willis takes a close look at masquerade traditions in the Yoruba town of Otta, exploring transformations in performers, performances, and the institutional structures in which masquerade was used to reveal ongoing changes in notions of gender, kinship, and ethnic identity. As Willis focuses on performers and spectators, he reveals a history of masquerade that is rich and complex. His research offers a more nuanced understanding of performance practices in Africa and their role in forging alliances, consolidating state power, incorporating immigrants, executing criminals, and projecting individual and group power on both sides of the Afro-Atlantic world.

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A History of Rock Music: The Rock & Roll Era is a celebration of the roots of rock & roll and its emergence as the soundtrack to teenage rebellion and a liberatingly raucous, joyous and rebellious music for one especially fortunate generation. The book is a lovingly detailed examination of the pre-Beatles 1950's era of classic rock & roll, with special attention devoted to the music's varied musical influences, most notably the Blues, Country & Western, Gospel Music, Boogie-Woogie and Rhythm & Blues. It is both a detailed history and a musical appreciation of America's greatest artistic gift to the world.

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Even the most sensational and scandalous crimes can disappear into history, the spine-chilling tales forgotten by subsequent generations. Murders that Made Headlines reveals some of these extraordinary but forgotten true events that captured the public's attention in the course of the last 200 years. Jane Simon Ammeson recounts the astonishing and sometimes bizarre stories of arsenic murders, Ponzi schemes, prison escapes, perjury, and other shocking crimes that took place in the Hoosier state. When we think of bygone eras, we often imagine gentile women, respectable men, simpler times, mannerly interactions, and intimate acquaintances, but Murders that Made Headlines reveals the notorious true crimes lurking in our history.

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In an age of nuclear experimentation, military conflicts, and ISIS, the Middle East is unstable, and the Iranian nuclear deal is shrouded in controversy and mistrust. How will this agreement impact US relations and strengths, not only in the region, but around the world? Will the US be challenged for world leadership? In Volatile State: Iran in the Nuclear Age, global affairs analyst David Oualaalou explores the new geopolitical landscape and how it will allow a nuclear Iran to flex its military, economic, and ideological muscles with the assistance of Russia and China. Taking under consideration how other governments have reacted to the agreement, Oualaalou provides a fresh perspective on current and future relations among the US and its current allies and provides a compelling path forward for future strategies in the Middle East. Volatile State is a "must read" to help understand the implications and future with a nuclear deal with Iran.

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These twenty-one animal tales from the Colombian Caribbean coast represent a sampling of the traditional stories that are told during all-night funerary wakes. The tales are told in the semi-sacred space of the patio (backyard) of homes as part of the funerary ritual that includes other aesthetic and expressive practices such as jokes, song games, board games, and prayer. In this volume these stories are situated within their performance contexts and represent a highly ritualized corpus of oral knowledge that for centuries has been preserved and cultivated by African-descendant populations in the Americas. Ethnomusicologist George List collected these tales throughout his decades-long fieldwork amongst the rural costeños, a chiefly African-descendent population, in the mid-20th century and, with the help of a research team, transcribed and translated them into English before his death in 2008. In this volume, John Holmes McDowell and Juan Sebastián Rojas E. have worked to bring this previously unpublished manuscript to light, providing commentary on the transcriptions and translations, additional cultural context through a new introduction, and further typological and cultural analysis by Hasan M. El-Shamy. Supplementing the transcribed and translated texts are links to the original Spanish recordings of the stories, allowing readers to follow along and experience the traditional telling of the tales for themselves.

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When does becoming part of the team go too far? For decades, young men and women endured degrading and dangerous rituals in order to join sororities and fraternities while college administrators blindly accepted their consequences. In recent years, these practices have spilled over into the mainstream, polluting military organizations, sports teams, and even secondary schools. In Destroying Young Lives: Hazing in Schools and the Military, Hank Nuwer assembles an extraordinary cast of analysts to catalog the evolution of this dangerous practice, from the first hazing death at Cornell University in 1863 to present day tragedies. This hard-hitting compilation addresses the numerous, significant, and often overlooked impacts of hazing, including including sexual exploitation, mental distress, depression, and even suicide. Destroying Young Lives is a compelling look at how universities, the military, and other social groups can learn from past mistakes and protect their members going forward.

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In 2016, Britain stunned itself and the world by voting to pull out of the European Union, leaving financial markets reeling and global politicians and citizens in shock. But was Brexit really a surprise, or are there clues in Britain's history that pointed to this moment? In A History of Britain: 1945 to the Brexit, award-winning historian Jeremy Black reexamines modern British history, considering the social changes, economic strains, and cultural and political upheavals that brought Britain to Brexit. This sweeping and engaging book traces Britain's path through the destruction left behind by World War II, Thatcherism, the threats of the IRA, the Scottish referendum, and on to the impact of waves of immigration from the European Union. Black overturns many conventional interpretations of significant historical events, provides context for current developments, and encourages the reader to question why we think the way we do about Britain's past.

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What impact does 40 years of war, violence, and military intervention have on a country and its people? As the "global war on terror" now stretches into the 21st century with no clear end in sight, Identity and Politics in Modern Afghanistan collects the work of interdisciplinary scholars, aid workers, and citizens to assess the impact of this prolonged conflict on Afghanistan. Nearly all of the people in Afghan society have been affected by persistent violent conflict. Identity and Politics in Modern Afghanistan focuses on social and political dynamics, issues of gender, and the shifting relationships between tribal, sectarian, and regional communities. Contributors consider topics ranging from masculinity among the Afghan Pashtun to services offered for the disabled, and from Taliban extremism to the role of TV in the Afghan culture wars. Prioritizing the perspective and experiences of the people of Afghanistan, new insights are shared into the lives of those who are hoping to build a secure future on the rubble of a violent past.

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What is the most meaningful and rewarding path in life? Many assume we enrich ourselves only by accumulating more wealth, power, and fame, or by finding new and greater forms of pleasure. In reality, we are most enriched not in taking from others but in sharing the best we have to offer through a life of service. The legendary, real-life individuals and the famous literary characters in this inspiring book show us the way: Vincent Van Gogh exemplified service through art, Benjamin Franklin dedicated his life to service of community, and the career of coach John Wooden is apt testimony to the rewards of service through education. Gunderman persuasively argues that, far from draining away our vitality, service at its best actually brings us to life.

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Distinguished feminist philosophers consider the future of their field and chart its political and ethical course in this forward-looking volume. Engaging with themes such as the historical trajectory of feminist phenomenology, ways of perceiving and making sense of the contemporary world, and the feminist body in health and ethics, these essays affirm the base of the discipline as well as open new theoretical spaces for work that bridges bioethics, social identity, physical ability, and the very nature and boundaries of the female body. Entanglements with thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and Arendt are evident and reveal new directions for productive philosophical work. Grounded in the richness of the feminist philosophical tradition, this work represents a significant opening to the possible futures of feminist phenomenological research.

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Exploring the surprising presence of Christian Science in American literature at the turn of the 20th century, L. Ashley Squires reveals the rich and complex connections between religion and literature in American culture. Mary Baker Eddy's Church of Christ, Scientist was one of the fastest growing and most controversial religious movements in the United States, and it is no accident that its influence touched the lives and work of many American writers, including Frances Hodgson Burnett, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Mark Twain. Squires focuses on personal stories of sickness and healing—whether supportive or deeply critical of Christian Science's recommendations —penned in a moment when the struggle between religion and science framed debates about how the United States was to become a modern nation. As outsized personalities and outlandish rhetoric took to the stage, Squires examines how the poorly understood Christian Science movement contributed to popular narratives about how to heal the nation and advance the cause of human progress.

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When does becoming part of the team go too far? For decades, young men and women endured degrading and dangerous rituals in order to join sororities and fraternities while college administrators blindly accepted their consequences. In recent years, these practices have spilled over into the mainstream, polluting military organizations, sports teams, and even secondary schools. In Destroying Young Lives: Hazing in Schools and the Military, Hank Nuwer assembles an extraordinary cast of analysts to catalog the evolution of this dangerous practice, from the first hazing death at Cornell University in 1863 to present day tragedies. This hard-hitting compilation addresses the numerous, significant, and often overlooked impacts of hazing, including including sexual exploitation, mental distress, depression, and even suicide. Destroying Young Lives is a compelling look at how universities, the military, and other social groups can learn from past mistakes and protect their members going forward.

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Was Israel's occupation of the West Bank inevitable? From 1949-1967, the West Bank was the center of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many Israelis hoped to conquer it and widen their narrow borders, while many Arabs hoped that it would serve as the core of a future Palestinian state. In The Limits of the Land, Avshalom Rubin presents a sophisticated new portrait of the Arab-Israeli struggle that goes beyond partisan narratives of the past. Drawing on new evidence from a wide variety of sources, many of them only recently declassified, Rubin argues that Israel's leaders indeed wanted to conquer the West Bank, but not at any cost. By 1967, they had abandoned hope of widening their borders and adopted an alternative strategy based on nuclear deterrence. In 1967, however, Israel's new strategy failed to prevent war, convincing its leaders that they needed to keep the territory they conquered. The result was a diplomatic stalemate that endures today.

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In Sonata Fragments, Andrew Davis argues that the Romantic sonata is firmly rooted, both formally and expressively, in its Classical forebears, using Classical conventions in order to convey a broad constellation of Romantic aesthetic values. This claim runs contrary to conventional theories of the Romantic sonata that place this nineteenth-century musical form squarely outside inherited Classical sonata procedures. Building on Sonata Theory, Davis examines moments of fracture and fragmentation that disrupt the cohesive and linear temporality in piano sonatas by Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann. These disruptions in the sonata form are a narrative technique that signify temporal shifts during which we move from the outer action to the inner thoughts of a musical agent, or we move from the story as it unfolds to a flashback or flash-forward. Through an interpretation of Romantic sonatas as temporally multi-dimensional works in which portions of the music in any given piece can lie inside or outside of what Sonata Theory would define as the sonata-space proper, Davis reads into these ruptures a narrative of expressive features that mark these sonatas as uniquely Romantic.

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Alabama endured warfare, slave trading, squatting, and speculating on its path to becoming America's 22nd state, and Daniel S. Dupre brings its captivating frontier history to life in Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South. Dupre's vivid narrative begins when Hernando de Soto first led hundreds of armed Europeans into the region during the fall of 1540. Although this early invasion was defeated, Spain, France, and England would each vie for control over the area's natural resources, struggling to conquer it with the same intensity and ferocity that the Native Americans showed in defending their homeland. Although early frontiersmen and Native Americans eventually established an uneasy truce, the region spiraled back into war in the nineteenth century, as the newly formed American nation demanded more and more land for settlers. Dupre captures the riveting saga of the forgotten struggles and savagery in Alabama's—and America's—frontier days.

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African women's history is a topic as vast as the continent itself, embracing an array of societies in over fifty countries with different geographies, social customs, religions, and historical situations. In African Women: Early History to the 21st Century, Kathleen Sheldon masterfully delivers a comprehensive study of this expansive story from before the time of records to the present day. She provides rich background on descent systems and the roles of women in matrilineal and patrilineal systems. Sheldon's work profiles elite women, as well as those in leadership roles, traders and market women, religious women, slave women, women in resistance movements, and women in politics and development. The rich case studies and biographies in this thorough survey establish a grand narrative about women's roles in the history of Africa.

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Most Americans are ill-prepared to engage thoughtfully in the increasingly serious debate about Israel, its place in the Middle East, and its relations with the United States. Essential Israel examines a wide variety of complex issues and current concerns in historical and contemporary contexts to provide readers with an intimate sense of the dynamic society and culture that is Israel today. The expert contributors to this volume address the Arab-Israeli conflict, the state of diplomatic efforts to bring about peace, Zionism and the impact of the Holocaust, the status of the Jewish state and Israeli democracy, foreign relations, immigration and Israeli identity, as well as literature, film, and the other arts. This unique and innovative volume provides solid grounding to understandings of Israel's history, politics, culture, and possibilities for the future.

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UFOs. Aliens. Strange crop circles. Giant figures scratched in the desert surface along the coast of Peru. The amazing alignment of the pyramids. Strange lines of clouds in the sky. The paranormal is alive and well in the American cultural landscape. In UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens, Donald R. Prothero and Tim Callahan explore why such demonstrably false beliefs thrive despite decades of education and scientific debunking. Employing the ground rules of science and the standards of scientific evidence, Prothero and Callahan discuss a wide range of topics including the reliability of eyewitness testimony, psychological research into why people want to believe in aliens and UFOs, and the role conspiratorial thinking plays in UFO culture. They examine a variety of UFO sightings and describe the standards of evidence used to determine whether UFOs are actual alien spacecraft. Finally, they consider our views of aliens and the strong cultural signals that provide the shapes and behaviors of these beings. While their approach is firmly based in science, Prothero and Callahan also share their personal experiences of Area 51, Roswell, and other legendary sites, creating a narrative that is sure to engross both skeptics and believers.

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