Search results for ""university of illinois press""

Venturing into Usefulness, the second volume of The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, documents the experience of this major American historical figure, intellectual, social activist, and author between June 1881, when at twenty-one she had just graduated from Rockford Female Seminary, and early 1889, when she was on the verge of founding the Hull-House settlement with Ellen Gates Starr. During these years she was developing into the social reformer and advocate of women's rights, socioeconomic justice, and world peace she would eventually become. She evolved from a high-minded but inexperienced graduate of a women's seminary into an educated woman and seasoned traveler well-exposed to elite culture and circles of philanthropy. Artfully annotated, The Selected Papers of Jane Addams offers an evocative choice of correspondence, photographs, and other primary documents, presenting a multi-layered narrative of Addams's personal and emerging professional life. Themes inaugurated in the previous volume are expanded here, including dilemmas of family relations and gender roles; the history of education; the dynamics of female friendship; religious belief and ethical development; changes in opportunities for women; and the evolution of philanthropy, social welfare, and reform ideas.

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As the most ecologically efficient and economical source of complete protein in human food, soy is gradually attracting more use in the American diet for its nutritional and financial value. Derived from soybean plants--the leading export crop of the United States and the world's most traded crop--soy produced for human consumption is part of a global enterprise affecting the likes of farmers, economists, dieticians, and grocery shoppers. An international group of expert food specialists--including an agricultural economist, an agricultural sociologist, a former Peace Corps development expert, and numerous food anthropologists and agricultural historians--discusses important issues central to soy production and consumption: genetically engineered soybeans, increasing soybean cultivation, soyfood marketing techniques, the use of soybeans as an important soil restorative, and the rendering of soybeans for human consumption.Contributors are Katarzyna Cwiertka, Christine M. Du Bois, H. T. Huang, Lawrence Kaplan, Jian-Hua Mao, Sidney W. Mintz, Akiko Moriya, Can Van Nguyen, Donald Z. Osborn, Erino Ozeki, Myra Sidharta, Ivan Sergio Freire de Sousa, Chee-Beng Tan, and Rita de Cássia Milagres Teixeira Vieira.

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From the union's formation in 1937 until the 1960s, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) was the largest and most influential teachers' union in the country. John F. Lyons examines the role of public schoolteachers and the CTU in shaping the policies and practices of public education in Chicago. Examining teachers' unions and public education from the bottom up, Lyons shows how the CTU and its members sought rigorous reforms. A combination of political action, public relations campaigns, and community alliances helped the CTU to achieve better salaries and benefits, increased school budgets, reformed curricula, and greater equality for women within the public education system. But its agenda was also constrained by internal divisions over race and gender and by ongoing external disputes with the school administration, politicians, and business and civic organizations. Detailed and informed by rich interviews, Teachers and Reform: Chicago Public Education, 1929-1970 tells the story of how committed union members effected changes to public education and to local politics that still benefit Chicago teachers, students, and the city today.

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Started by the National Life and Accident Insurance Company in 1925, WSM became one of the most influential and exceptional radio stations in the history of broadcasting and country music. WSM gave Nashville the moniker “Music City USA” as well as a rich tradition of music, news, and broad-based entertainment. With the rise of country music broadcasting and recording between the 1920s and ‘50s, WSM, Nashville, and country music became inseparable, stemming from WSM’s launch of the Grand Ole Opry, popular daily shows like Noontime Neighbors, and early morning artist-driven shows such as Hank Williams on Mother’s Best Flour. Sparked by public outcry following a proposal to pull country music and the Opry from WSM-AM in 2002, Craig Havighurst scoured new and existing sources to document the station’s profound effect on the character and self-image of Nashville. Introducing the reader to colorful artists and businessmen from the station’s history, including Owen Bradley, Minnie Pearl, Jim Denny, Edwin Craig, and Dinah Shore, the volume invites the reader to reflect on the status of Nashville, radio, and country music in American culture.

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Now available for the first time in English translation, this new edition of Gallus Dressler's Praecepta musicae poeticae corrects and expands upon earlier editions of one of the most important sixteenth-century treatments of musical theory and rhetoric. Robert Forgács’ detailed study of the Latin text reveals significant and original insights into the invention of fugues and the composition of opening, middle, and concluding sections. Forgács introduces the reader to Dressler's life and work and the design and sources of Praecepta musicae poeticae, places the treatise more fully in its humanist environment, presents additional classical sources for the text, and relates it to the work of Dressler’s contemporary music theorists. Copious annotations and indexes of words, names, and subjects place the treatise within the broader context of German theoretical discussion, the teaching and practice of music in the sixteenth century, and the musical life of the Lutheran Church.

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Challenging received American history and forging a new path for Native American studies Addressing Native American Studies' past, present, and future, the essays in New Indians, Old Wars tackle the discipline head-on, presenting a radical revision of the popular view of the American West in the process. Instead of luxuriating in its past glories or accepting the widespread historians' view of the West as a shared place, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that it should be fundamentally understood as stolen. Firmly grounded in the reality of a painful past, Cook-Lynn understands the story of the American West as teaching the political language of land theft and tyranny. She argues that to remedy this situation, Native American studies must be considered and pursued as its own discipline, rather than as a subset of history or anthropology. She makes an impassioned claim that such a shift, not merely an institutional or theoretical change, could allow Native American studies to play an important role in defending the sovereignty of indigenous nations today.

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Inspired by their Progressive Era faith in social science solutions to society’s problems, the residents of Hull-House collaborated on this work of sociology based on their experiences as residents of Chicago’s Near West Side. The contributors to this book believed that an enlightened citizenry could be mobilized for reform, and that by publishing maps with explicit information about the wages and conditions of the working poor in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward they would educate the public and inspire reforms. In addition to Jane Addams’s own prefatory note and paper on the role of social settlements in the labor movement, contributors provided detailed, real-world analyses of the Chicago Jewish ghetto, garment workers and the sweatshops, child labor, immigrant neighborhoods in the vicinity of Hull-House, and local charities. This edition also contains eight color reproductions of the original Hull-House neighborhood maps. The year 2006 marks the one hundred and eleventh anniversary of the publication of Hull-House Maps and Papers, and the volume remains a dramatic statement about the residents’ shared values as well as a major influence on subsequent social surveys.

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The importance of the banquet in the late Renaissance is impossible to overlook. Banquets showcased a host’s wealth and power, provided an occasion for nobles from distant places to gather together, and even served as a form of political propaganda. But what was it really like to cater to the tastes and habits of high society at the banquets of nobles, royalty, and popes? What did they eat and how did they eat it? In The Banquet, Ken Albala covers the transitional period between the heavily spiced and colored cuisine of the Middle Ages and classical French haute cuisine. This development involved increasing use of dairy products, a move toward lighter meats such as veal and chicken, increasing identification of national food customs, more sweetness and aromatics, and a refined aesthetic sense, surprisingly in line with the late-Renaissance styles found in other arts.

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Described by New York Times critic John Rockwell as "one of the best non-famous composers this country has to offer," Ben Johnston reconceives familiar idioms--ranging from neoclassicism and serialism to jazz and southern hymnody--using just intonation. Johnston studied with Darius Milhaud, Harry Partch, and John Cage, and is best known for his String Quartet No. 4, a complex series of variations on Amazing Grace. This collection spans forty years and brings together forty-one of Johnston's most important writings, including many rare and several previously unpublished selections. They include position papers, theoretical treatises, program notes, historical reflections, lectures, excerpts from interviews, and letters, and they cover a broad spectrum of concerns--from the technical exegesis of microtonality to the personal and the broadly humanistic. A discography of commercially available recordings of Johnston's music closes out the collection.

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The popular notion of a lone scientist privately toiling long hours in a laboratory, striking upon a great discovery, and announcing it to the world is a romanticized fiction. Vincent Kiernan's Embargoed Science reveals the true process behind science news: an elite few scholarly journals control press coverage through a mechanism known as an embargo. The journals distribute advance copies of their articles to hundreds and sometimes thousands of journalists around the world, on the condition that journalists agree not to report their stories until a common time, several days later. When the embargo lifts, airwaves and newspaper pages are flooded with stories based on the journal's latest issue. In addition to divulging the realities behind this collusive practice, Kiernan offers an unprecedented exploration of the embargo's impact on public and academic knowledge of science and medical issues. He surveys twenty five daily U.S. newspapers and relates his in-depth interviews with reporters to examine the inner workings of the embargo and how it structures our understanding of news about science. Kiernan ultimately argues that this system fosters "pack journalism" and creates an unhealthy shield against journalistic competition. The result is the uncritical reporting of science and medical news according to the dictates of a few key sources.

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H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was a literary lion throughout his career, publishing more than one hundred books, including classics such as "War of the Worlds", "The Invisible Man", and "The Time Machine". Though best remembered for his science fiction, Wells was also a prolific sketcher who frequently enlivened his correspondence and marginalia with cartoons. Those drawings made for his companion Amy Catherine Robbins, which he called "picshuas", allowed him a vehicle for his nuanced self-expression and satire. Gene K. Rinkel and Margaret E. Rinkel's "The Picshuas of H.G. Wells" interprets these highly original cartoons through an analysis of their peculiar content and style based on Wells' life and writings. The picshuas are perhaps the best demonstration of Wells' piquant sense of humor. They provide intriguing snapshots of Wells' robust private life and convey his opinions about other writers and public figures as well as himself, whose rotund cartoon figure he sometimes lampooned as "the Great Author". Using a narrative style of creative nonfiction, "The Picshuas of H.G. Wells" weaves facts from Wells' life with incidents reflected in the cartoons, episodes drawn from his novels, and scenes from other writings to provide glimpses into his moments of his personal and professional conflict and triumph. There emerges a fascinating and funny portrait of a complex literary personality and his complicated relationship with a devoted collaborator, his wife. Some forty picshuas were published in Wells' Experiment in Autobiography, but the wide range of the pichsuas throughout his correspondence and private papers has never been surveyed and published until now. As an ensemble, they provide close look at the Great Author in his most joyous and uninhibited moments, laughing at himself and the world.

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Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, female editors and journalists created a new genre of political journal they proclaimed to be both for and by women. Specialized periodicals like Women's Penny Paper and Shafts fostered the proliferation of diverse political agendas aimed at reimagining women's status in society. At the same time, the institutional infrastructure of the women's press provided women with job opportunities in a nontraditional field. Michelle Tusan tells two stories. First, she examines alternative print-based political cultures that women developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, she explores how British female subjects forged a wide range of new political identities through the pages of "their press." Tusan employs social and cultural historical analysis in the reading of popular printed texts, as well as rare and previously unpublished personal correspondence and business records from archives throughout Britain. Insightful and filled with fascinating detail, Women Making News uncovers how the relationship between print culture and gender politics provided a vehicle for women's mobilization in the political culture of modern Britain.

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Explaining the survival of Proto-Indo-European cultic spaces in Vedic India and ancient Rome

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In Democracy, Inc., David S. Allen exposes the vested interests behind the U.S. slide toward conflating corporate values with public and democratic values. He argues that rather than being institutional protectors of democratic principles, the press and law perversely contribute to the destruction of public discourse in the United States today. Allen utilizes historical, philosophical, sociological, and legal sources to trace America's gradual embrace of corporate values. He argues that such values, including winning, efficiency, and profitability actually limit democratic involvement by devaluing discursive principles, creating an informed yet inactive public. Through an examination of professionalization in both the press and the law, corporate free speech rights, and free speech as property, Democracy, Inc. demonstrates that today's democracy is more about trying to control and manage citizens than giving them the freedom to participate. Allen not only calls on institutions to reform the way they understand and promote citizenship but also asks citizens to adopt a new ethic of public discourse that values understanding rather than winning.

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To date, the pathbreaking medical contributions of the early Mesopotamians have been only vaguely understood. Due to the combined problems of an extinct language, gaps in the archeological record, the complexities of pharmacy and medicine, and the dispersion of ancient tablets throughout the museums of the world, it has been nearly impossible to get a clear and comprehensive view of what medicine was really like in ancient Mesopotamia. The collaboration of medical expert Burton R. Andersen and cuneiformist JoAnn Scurlock makes it finally possible to survey this collected corpus and discern magic from experimental medicine in Ashur, Babylon, and Nineveh. Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine is the first systematic study of all the available texts, which together reveal a level of medical knowledge not matched again until the nineteenth century A.D. Over the course of a millennium, these nations were able to develop tests, prepare drugs, and encourage public sanitation. Their careful observation and recording of data resulted in a description of symptoms so precise as to enable modern identification of numerous diseases and afflictions.

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In the spring of 1877 government officials forcibly removed members of the Ponca tribe from their homelands in the southeastern corner of Dakota territory, relocating them in the Indian Territory in Oklahoma. When Ponca Chief Standing Bear attempted to lead a group of his people home he was arrested, detained, and put on trial. In this book Valerie Sherer Mathes and Richard Lowitt examine how the national publicity surrounding the trial of Chief Standing Bear, as well as a speaking tour by the chief and others, brought the plight of his tribe, and of tribespeople across America, to the attention of the general public, serving as a catalyst for the nineteenth-century Indian reform movement. As the authors show, the eventual ramifications of the removal, flight, and trial of Standing Bear were extensive, and included the rise of an organized humanitarian reform movement, significant changes in the administration of Indian affairs, and the passage of the General Allotment Act in 1887. This is the first full-length study of the Standing Bear trial and its consequences, and Mathes and Lowitt draw on a vast array of manuscript, diary, and journalistic sources in order to chronicle the events of 1877, as well as the effect the trial had on broader American popular opinion, on the federal government, and finally on the Native American population as a whole.

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What does a life with art offer that a life without art does not? Art and Freedom asserts that the fundamental point of the enterprise of art is the creation and delivery of values that are not singularly available in the nonart world. E. E. Sleinis discusses visual art, literature, music, theater, and other art forms, arguing that as art both liberates and provides new points of focus and awareness, the art enterprise depends on a positive freeing from the nonart world, rather than on mere addition to it. Art and Freedom introduces a novel classificatory system for representation, expression, and formalist theories of art. Sleinis argues that a characteristic defect of contemporary theories of art is their neglect of the issue of value. Challenging these reductive, formalist notions of art, he emphasizes the potential, and the need, for art to evolve and make progress in ways comparable to the sciences, albeit on a very different model. A smart blend of incisive commentary and illuminating philosophy, Art and Freedom provides a useful context for transforming a sometimes baffling medium into a means of fostering personal growth and creating and sharing values.

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Before William Carlos Williams was recognized as one of the most important innovators in American poetry, he commissioned a printer to publish 100 copies of Poems (1909), a small collection largely imitating the styles of the Romantics and the Victorians. This volume collects the self-published edition of Poems, Williams's foray into the world of letters, with previously unpublished notes he made after spending nearly a year in Europe rethinking poetry and how to write it. As Poems shows his first tentative steps into poetry, the notes show him as he prepares to make a giant transformation in his art. Shortly after Poems appeared, Williams went through a series of experiences that changed his life--a trip to Europe, a marriage to the sister of the woman he genuinely loved, and the establishment of his medical practice. In Europe he was introduced to a consideration of an unlikely trio: Heinrich Heine, Martin Luther, and Richard Wagner, resulting in an exposure that subsequently influenced his developing style. Williams looked back on Poems as apprentice work, calling them, "bad Keats, nothing else--oh well, bad Whitman too. But I sure loved them. . . . There is not one thing of the slightest value in the whole thin booklet--except the intent," and never republished the collection. Now that Williams's work is widely read and appreciated, his reputation secure, his development as a poet is a matter worth serious study, Poems can be seen as a point of departure, a clear record of where Williams began before his life and ideas about poetry made seismic shifts. Virginia M. Wright-Peterson's succinct introduction puts Poems in the context of his life and times, discusses the reception of the volume, his reconsideration of the poems, and what they reveal about his poetic ambitions.

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Setting aside the pastiche of bullfighters and flamenco dancers that has dominated the U.S. image of Spain for more than a century, this innovative volume uncovers the roots of Spanish studies to explain why the diversity, vitality, and complexity of Spanish history and culture have been reduced in U.S. accounts to the equivalent of a tourist brochure. Spurred by the complex colonial relations between the United States and Spain, the new field of Spanish studies offered a way for the young country to reflect a positive image of itself as a democracy, in contrast with perceived Spanish intolerance and closure. Spain in America investigates the political and historical forces behind this duality, surveying the work of the major nineteenth-century U.S. Hispanists in the fields of history, art history, literature, and music. A distinguished panel of contributors offers fresh examinations of the role of U.S. writers, especially Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in crafting a wildly romantic vision of Spain. They examine the views of such scholars as William H. Prescott and George Ticknor, who contrasted the "failure" of Spanish history with U.S. exceptionalism. Other essays explore how U.S. interests in Latin America consistently colored its vision of Spain and how musicology in the United States, dominated by German émigrés, relegated Spanish music to little more than a footnote. Also included are profiles of the philanthropist Archer Mitchell Huntington and the pioneering art historians Georgiana Goddard King and Arthur Kingsley Porter, who spearheaded U.S. interest in the architecture and sculpture of medieval Spain. Providing a much-needed look at the development and history of Hispanism, Spain in America opens the way toward confronting and modifying reductive views of Spain that are frozen in another time.

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Why is soccer the sport of choice in South America while baseball soared to popularity in the Caribbean? How did cricket become India's national sport? Why is China a stronghold of table tennis? Maarten Van Bottenburg asserts that a hidden competition of social and international relations, rather than the particular qualities of a given sport, explains who plays what sport and why. Looking at Britain, Germany, the United States, and Japan, Van Bottenburg discusses how individual sports developed, what institutions and groups spread them to other nations, and why certain sports and not others found an international audience. As he shows, the nature of the relationship between the country of origin and the adopting country help determine how successfully a sport takes hold and to what degree new practitioners modify it. Other key factors include which groups dominated and promoted the various sports in their countries of origin, which groups appropriated them elsewhere, and the latter's positions within their society's class structure.

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Popular music culture serves as an arena for debates on English and British national identity in this lively discussion of English popular music of the 1980s and 1990s. Against the background of his own upbringing as a Pakistani Brit, Nabeel Zuberi deftly combines a detailed account of the development of this music with a sophisticated assessment of its relation to the politics of cultural identity in Britain. Zuberi looks at how the sounds, images, and lyrics of English popular music generate and critique ideas of national belonging, recasting the social and even the physical landscapes of cities like Manchester and London. The Smiths and Morrissey play on romanticized notions of the (white) English working class, while the Pet Shop Boys map a "queer urban Britain" in the AIDS era. The techno-culture of raves and dance clubs incorporates both an anti-institutional do-it-yourself politics and emergent leisure practices, while the potent mix of technology and creativity in British black music includes local conditions as well as a sense of global diaspora. British Asian musicians, drawing on Afrodiasporic and South Asian traditions, seek a sense of place in Britain as commercial interests try to pin down an image of them to market. Sounds English shows how popular music complicates cherished notions of Englishness as it activates cultural outsiders and taps into a sense of not belonging. Alert and readable, Zuberi's wide-ranging discussion includes the performers Oasis, Blur, Tricky, Massive Attack, Goldie, A Guy Called Gerald, Roni Size, Bally Sagoo, Funˆdaˆmental, Echobelly, Cornershop, Talvin Singh, and others.

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Exploring the intersection of ideas about woman, subjectivity, and literary authority, Impressionist Subjects reveals the female subject as crucial in framing contradictions central to modernism, particularly the tension between modernism's claim to timeless art and its critique of historical conditions. Against the backdrop of the New Woman movement of the 1890s, Tamar Katz establishes literary impressionism as integral to modernist form and to the modernist project of investigating the nature and function of subjectivity. Focusing on a duality common to impressionism and contemporary ideas of feminine subjectivity, Katz shows how the New Woman reconciled the paradox of a subject at once immersed in the world and securely enclosed in a mysterious interiority. Book chapters feature discussion of modernists including Walter Pater, George Egerton, Sarah Grand, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf. Sophisticated and tightly argued, Impressionist Subjects is a substantial contribution to the reassessment and expansion of the modernist fiction canon.

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The minimum wage as a value of civic republicanism The minimum wage appears to be a standard economic regulatory measure, yet a politics of symbolism more than anything else defines the political contests that periodically erupt over it. Detractors abhor its corruption of market principles, while supporters see it as a measure of society's symbolic commitment to the poor. Tracing the history of the minimum wage and exposing its inherent contradictions as a political issue, Jerold Waltman proposes an alternative to the economic arguments that now dominate debates over it. Citing overwhelming public support for the minimum wage as evidence of an enduring civic consciousness and humanitarianism, Waltman advocates recasting the discussion in terms of a political economy of citizenship. Such a perspective would focus on the communal value of work, the need for citizens to have a stake in the community, and the effects of economic inequality on the bonds of common citizenship. Positioning the minimum wage as a fulcrum for the most basic conflict underlying America's unique combination of democracy and a market economy, The Politics of the Minimum Wage shows how a defense of the minimum wage built on a communal sense of responsibility rests on a strong tradition of civic republicanism and strengthens the hope for a truly democratic society.

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A look at the Jewish gangster between the wars (focusing on the Russian writer, Isaac Babel, and Americans Gold, Ornitz, and Fuchs but also taking into consideration cartoons, movies, and modernist painting), Rubin sees the "gangster" as a way Jewish writers could examine their place in world literature.

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Exploding the myth that the Bible was largely unknown to medieval lay folk, Book and Verse presents the first comprehensive catalog of Middle English biblical literature: a body of work that, because of its accessibility and familiarity, was the primary biblical resource of the English Middle Ages. The medieval Bible, much like the Bible today, consists in practical terms not of a set of texts within a canon but of those stories which, because of a combination of liturgical significance and picturesque qualities, form a provisional "Bible" in the popular imagination. As James Morey explains in his introduction, although the Latin Bible was not accessible to the average English-speaker, paraphrases— systematic appropriation and refashioning of biblical texts—served as a medium through which the Bible was promulgated in the vernacular. This explains why biblical allusions, models, and large-scale appropriations of biblical narrative pervade nearly every medieval genre. Book and Verse is an indispensable guide to the variety and extent of biblical literature in England, exclusive of drama and the Wycliffite Bible that appeared between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Entries provide detailed information on how much of what parts of the Bible appear in Middle English and where this biblical material can be found. Comprehensive indexing by name, keyword, and biblical verse allows a researcher to find, for example, all the occurrences of the Flood Story or of the encounter between Elijah and the Widow of Sarephta. An invaluable resource, Book and Verse provides the first easy access to the "popular Bible" assembled before and after John Wyclif's translation of the Vulgate into English.

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The founder of the American Nazi party and its leader until he was murdered in 1967,George Lincoln Rockwell was one of the most significant extremist strategists and ideologists of the postwar period. His influence has only increased since his death. A powerful catalyst and innovator, Rockwell broadened his constituency beyond the core Radical Right by articulating White Power politics in terms that were subsequently appropriated by the one-time klansman David Duke. He played a major role in developing Holocaust revisionism, now an orthodoxy of the Far Right. He also helped politicize Christian Identity, America's most influential right-wing religious movement, and welded together an international organization of neo-Nazis. All of these extremist movements continue to thrive today. Frederick Simonelli's biography of this powerful and enigmatic figure draws on primary sources of extraordinary depth, including declassified FBI files and manuscripts and other materials held by Rockwell's family and associates. The first objective assessment of the American Nazi party and an authoritative study of the roots of neo-nazism, neo-fascism, and White Power extremism in postwar America, American Fuehrer is shocking and absorbing reading.

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At a time when technology can sustain marginal life, it is ever more important to understand what constitutes a person. What are the medical, ethical, moral, mental, legal, and philosophical criteria that determine protectable human life? Following immediately on the publication of his highly praised book Choosing Who's to Live, James Walters addresses with depth and wisdom another ambitious and complicated matter: determining the nature of personhood. By providing a much-needed religious/philosophical context for the discussion--examining contemporary thinking on just what constitutes valuable life--Walters broadens his inquiry beyond the human to include other animals and deals with the phenomenon of anencephalic infants, those who are born without higher brains. Searching for a measurable and humane standard of personhood, Walters looks at the current definition of it and declares it inadequate--offering instead the idea of proximate personhood, with criteria for helping to determine which individuals possess a unique claim to life.

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"Davis writes with an authority derived from his own perceptive studies of Illinois during the Jackson period. His account is balanced and critical while at the same time recognizing the value of Ford's book." -- Robert W. Johannsen, J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Both cynical and self-serving, Illinois's seventh governor Thomas Ford also possessed an unrivaled sensitivity to the dynamics of frontier life. He reveals these and other qualities in his classic A History of Illinois, which covers the state's first thirty years. Ford writes with candor of the lengthy "Hancock County difficulties" and the ouster of Mormons from the state. His treatment of the Black Hawk War and his writings on the slavery controversy in the state, the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, and the larger issues of violence and vigilantism help show why this volume has been called the outstanding early survey of Illinois history. This reissue of Ford's book includes an introduction by Rodney O. Davis and a publication history by Terence Tanner.

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Brooks's theological and intellectual lineageThe Education of Phillips Brooks probes the formative years of one of the best-known figures of Victorian America's "Gilded Age". Rigorously researched, bringing as yet untapped archival material into play, John F. Woolverton's book is an extremely readable and fascinating look at a gifted, persuasive clergyman and public figure. The sermon Brooks delivered at his Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia while Abraham Lincoln's body lay in state overnight in Independence Hall was published, making him nationally famous overnight. He also is known for penning the lyrics to "O Little Town of Bethlehem". Although Brooks was not a major theologian, he was nurtured in an atmosphere of serious religious thought. In the crisis era of pre-Civil War America, he sought a religious and cultural ideal in the "perfect manhood" of Jesus Christ and consequently "won a name" for himself, as his slightly envious cousin, Henry Adams, once remarked. Woolverton places Brooks in his cultural context and shows how this religious leader was shaped psychologically and by his times and how those factors helped him forge a spiritual ideal for a troubled nation.

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A provocative study of major twentieth century African American writers and critics Sandra Adell looks at Black literature and criticism's relationship with the complex ensemble of Western literature, criticism, and philosophy. Adell begins with an analysis of the metaphysical foundations of W. E. B. Du Bois's famous formulation of double-consciousness and how Black writing bears the traces of such European philosophers as Kant, Hegel, and Marx. She then examines, in the double context of black literature and European philosophy, the writings of major authors and essayists like Richard Wright, Leopold Senghor, Maya Angelou, Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Henry Louis Gates Jr. and offers a thoughtful analysis of the "double bind" created by conflicting claims of Euro- and Afrocentrism in Black literature.

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This is the first complete account of the epic tale of the Icarians and their dream of creating a perfect society without money or property. Robert P. Sutton analyzes the origins of Icarianism in the milieu of French politics in the 1840s, discusses its founder Etienne Cabet, and traces the eventual creation of six communal societies in Illinois, Iowa, and California between 1848 and 1898. Les Icariens is a fascinating amalgam of biography, a history of French Socialism, and the story of one of the longest-lived secular communal experiments in America.

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A few weeks before his death in an auto accident, Milton Brown and his band the Musical Brownies recorded forty-nine songs in a single three-day session. That prolific output was a testament to Brown's enormous popularity not only on record but as head of the premier touring act in the Southwest. Cary Ginell draws on interviews and his own musical knowledge to chart Brown's too-short career. Ginell sees Brown as the first key figure to merge blues, jazz, and country into the genre that artists like Bob Wills and Spade Cooley later popularized as Western Swing. Following Brown from his early years to his rise via the Fort Worth dance hall scene, Ginell traces the evolution of the singer-bandleader's musical innovations like adding vocals to dance music and his band's adoption of a style heavy with rhythm and blues. In 1936, Brown and his band stood at the brink of national stardom when Brown's car hit a telephone pole. He died five days later.

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Photomontage, the combining of two or more negatives, can be traced back to the 1850s. Scott Mutter is a modern master of the art. His subtle images have enthralled viewers in exhibitions and galleries for more than a decade. Although his work shares the recursive wit of Reneacute; Magritte an M. C. Escher, Mutter never relies simply upon ironic effects. With precision and authority his art explores the ideals and mythologies of our culture, history, language, and art, both lamenting and celebrating contemporary civilization.

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Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) was one of the most influential musicians and composers of the twentieth century. His wide-ranging musical interests and prodigious gifts connected him to music as varied as neoclassicism, the avant garde, and chamber pieces for unusual groupings of instruments. The uncertainties of life under the Nazi regime led Hindemith to move to the United States in 1940. There, he taught at Yale University and composed celebrated works like Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber. Concentrating upon the composer's first three US concert tours and his thirteen years at Yale, Luther Noss brings to life a observant, energetic, stubborn, and wry personality. Hindemith's journals offer detailed commentary on his experiences at Tanglewood while Noss draws on archives to describe the composer's groundbreaking Collegium concerts, classes, controversial plans to reorganize the School of Music, and other activities. Noss also delves into professional activity that included a huge number of commissions, writing four theory textbooks, an expansion of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, and numerous world premieres and other events.

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This volume is the first clear and comprehensive critical analysis of Jacques Lacan's thought for the English-speaking world. With Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of Psychoanalysis Ellie Ragland-Sullivan not only fills that gap but also provides the foundation upon which all future studies of Lacan must build. Working principally from the legendary but seldom-analyzed Seminars, Ragland-Sullivan clarifies and synthesizes Lacan's major concepts. Using empirical data as well as Lacan's texts, she demonstrates how Lacan's teachings constitute a new epistemology that goes far beyond conventional thinking in psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics.

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"Without fully and consciously realizing that they were doing so, the followers of Jesus established a new religious tradition. This book tells the story of yet another assembly of saints whose history, I believe, is in many respects analogous to the history of those early Christians who thought at first that they had found the only proper way to be Jews. Mormonism started to grow away from traditional Christianity almost immediately upon coming into existence. It began as a movement that understood itself as Christian, but. . . these nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints (as they came to be called) embarked on a path that led to developments that now distinguish their tradition from the Christian tradition as surely as early Christianity was distinguished from its Hebraic context."--From the preface

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"An excellent book that provides a systematic account of Rand's work as a philosopher.... The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand gathers contributions from professional philosophers (some of them quite renowned) to tackle the various components --- metaphysical/epistemological, ethical, and social/political --- of Rand's comprehensive system. All the contributors demonstrate the particular genius of current academic philosophy: the painstaking and meticulous analysis of assumptions with an eye toward the coherence and consistency of the conclusions derived therefrom.... Thorough and judicious, this book will provide the reader with the intellectual leverage necessary to understand an often confusing, always controversial, occasionally original, and perhaps curiously contemporary writer and thinker." -- Lloyd Lewis, Modern Fiction Studies

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The Nazi Olympics is the unsurpassed exposé of one of the most bizarre festivals in sport history. Not only does it provide incisive portraits of such key figures as Adolf Hitler, Jesse Owens, Leni Riefenstahl, Helen Stephens, Kee Chung Sohn, and Avery Brundage, it also vividly conveys the entire dazzling charade that reinforced and mobilized the hysterical patriotism of the German masses.

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From the preface: "Brigham Young was the supreme American paradox, not because he contained elements foreign to American soil but because he united them--the business genius of a Rockefeller with the spiritual sensitivities of an Emerson, the lusty enjoyments of the pleasures of good living with the tenderness of a Florence Nightingale. He was not merely an entrepreneur with a shared vision of America as the Promised Land; he was a prophet with visions of his own and he built beyond himself."

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Ministers of Reform vividly depicts the spiritual odyssey of an entire generation and shows how Protestant roots and a common "climate of creativity" nurtured a host of Progressive leaders from all walks of life. Crunden demonstrates that the same spirit of nnovation and moral rectitude so typical of the era's politics also characterized its artistic endeavors.

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Half Humankind is the first study to provide modernized and annotated editions of the key documents from the controversy about women in Renaissance England. The selections -- ten treatises debating the merits of womankind and six eulogies and condemnations depicting actual women -- range in style from careful logic and studied eloquence to ribald humor and witty parody. Illuminated by an extensive discussion tying the selections to Renaissance society and traditional literature, this volume is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of literature, history, and women's studies.

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Few American entertainers have had the explosive impact, wide-ranging appeal, and continuing popularity of country music superstar Hank Williams. Such Williams standards as "Your Cheatin' Heart," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Jambalaya," and "I Saw the Light" have entered the pantheon of great American song while Williams's very name remains synonymous with the genre he helped define. Sing a Sad Songs tells the story of Hank Williams's rise from impoverished Alabama roots, his coming of age during and after World War II, his meteoric climb to national acclaim and star status on the Grand Ole Opry, his star-crossed marriages and recurring health problems, the chronic bouts with alcoholism and the alienation it caused in those he loved and sang for, and finally his tragic death at twenty-nine and subsequent emergence as a folk hero.In addition, the book includes an essential discography compiled by Bob Pinson of the Country Music Foundation.

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The Girls' History and Culture Reader: The Nineteenth Century provides scholars, instructors, and students with the most influential essays that have defined the field of American girls' history and culture. A relatively new and energetic field of inquiry, girl-centered research is critical for a fuller understanding of women and gender, a deeper consideration of childhood and adolescence, and a greater acknowledgment of the significance of generation as a historical force in American culture and society. Bringing together work from top scholars of women and youth, The Girls' History and Culture Reader: The Nineteenth Century addresses topics ranging from diary writing and toys to prostitution and slavery. Covering girlhood and the relationships between girls and women, this pioneering volume tackles pivotal themes such as education, work, play, sexuality, consumption, and the body. The reader also illuminates broader nineteenth-century developments—including urbanization, industrialization, and immigration--through the often-overlooked vantage point of girls. As these essays collectively suggest, nineteenth-century girls wielded relatively little political or social power but carved out other spaces of self-expression. Contributors are Carol Devens, Miriam Forman-Brunell, Jane H. Hunter, Anya Jabour, Anne Scott MacLeod, Susan McCully, Mary Niall Mitchell, Leslie Paris, Barbara Sicherman, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Christine Stansell, Nancy M. Theriot, and Deborah Gray White.

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Soul food has played a critical role in preserving Black history, community, and culinary genius. It is also a response to--and marker of--centuries of food injustice. Given the harm that our food production system inflicts upon Black people, what should soul food look like today?Christopher Carter's answer to that question merges a history of Black American foodways with a Christian ethical response to food injustice. Carter reveals how racism and colonialism have long steered the development of US food policy. The very food we grow, distribute, and eat disproportionately harms Black people specifically and people of color among the global poor in general. Carter reflects on how people of color can eat in a way that reflects their cultural identities while remaining true to the principles of compassion, love, justice, and solidarity with the marginalized.Both a timely mediation and a call to action, The Spirit of Soul Food places today's Black foodways at the crossroads of food justice and Christian practice.

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Esteemed as a literary critic and poet, Edgar Allan Poe was most highly acclaimed for his tales and sketches. He transformed the short story from anecdote to art, virtually created the detective story, and perfected the psychological thriller. This volume is the first of two, edited by the consummate Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott, collecting all the tales of this master of the uncanny, the unnerving, and the terrifying. Poe's stories reflect his professed method of "writing as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished at the immensity of the wonders he related." Marrying grotesque inventiveness with superb plot construction, Poe's strikingly original tales often use only one main character and one main incident. In many of them, horror and suspense, revenge and torture, are laced with hilarious satire. Each volume is enriched with Mabbott's detailed and authoritative notes on sources, the history and collation of all known texts authorized by Poe, and variants of Poe's "final" version. Volume 1 includes Poe's earliest parodies, beginning in 1831, and gathers his gothic tales written through 1842. The stories collected in this volume include "Ms. Found in a Bottle," the horrific "Berenice," "Ligeia" (which Poe considered his finest tale), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and one of his most famous stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher." Promising spine-tingling delights and sleepless nights, this annotated edition of Tales and Sketches is a treasure trove for scholars and general readers alike, confirming Poe's status as one of literary art's "most brilliant but erratic stars."

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African American westerns have a rich cinematic history and visual culture. Mia Mask examines the African American western hero within the larger context of film history by considering how Black westerns evolved and approached wide-ranging goals. Woody Strode’s 1950s transformation from football star to actor was the harbinger of hard-edged western heroes later played by Jim Brown and Fred Williamson. Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher provided a narrative helmed by a groundbreaking African American director and offered unconventionally rich roles for women. Mask moves from these discussions to consider blaxploitation westerns and an analysis of Jeff Kanew’s hard-to-find 1972 documentary about an all-Black rodeo. The book addresses how these movies set the stage for modern-day westploitation films like Django Unchained.  A first-of-its kind survey, Black Rodeo illuminates the figure of the Black cowboy while examining the intersection of African American film history and the western.

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