Search results for ""Yale University Press""

An introduction to the postmodern photographs of Allan Chasanoff, whose work interrogates and subverts the notion of photography as a truthful record of the real From the 1960s onward, Allan Chasanoff (1936–2020) maintained a daily photographic practice, producing tens of thousands of images that pushed the limits of the medium and questioned its reliability as a document of reality. Preferring to experiment away from the art world, Chasanoff rarely exhibited his photographs, his art remaining unknown to all but a select circle of friends and collaborators. This catalogue is the first to survey his beguiling work. Artist Mónika Sziládi, who worked as an archivist for Chasanoff, contributes an outline of Chasanoff’s life and practice, tracing the development of his art from his early experiments with light, shadow, and color in his lens-shot photographs to his late-career foray into 3D printing, which he viewed as the latest frontier of photography. Influenced by the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and Jacques Derrida, Chasanoff understood photographic images to be full of multivalent symbolism, and his art highlights the fluid nature of the medium. Using analog optical effects, such as blurring and other distortions, and on-screen tools to cut and layer digital images, Chasanoff created a wide range of pictures, some of which reference or appropriate the work of artists like Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, or Giorgio Morandi. With nearly 200 plates organized into 7 thematic sections, Seeing and Not Believing brings Chasanoff’s contribution to postmodern photography to a wider audience and underlines how the artist’s work challenges our assumptions about believing what we see. Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery

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A rich reappraisal of a key Black American modernist through a lens of cross-cultural engagement Sargent Claude Johnson (1888–1967) was the first Black modernist on the West Coast to gain national acclaim. His artistic practice, forged in California, drew from a range of international influences, including traditional and contemporary arts of Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, particularly Mexican modernism and Indigenous pottery techniques. Spanning the Black Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Johnson’s career was devoted to sensitive, ennobling portrayals of people of color. Though best known as a sculptor, he worked expertly in a broad range of media—from painting and printmaking to enamelwork and ceramics—each illuminating his multifaceted identity as an artist. In this catalogue, leading scholars examine Johnson’s artistic evolution and offer fresh perspectives on his work. From sculptures of underrepresented subjects to majestic architectural commissions—including a celebrated mural reproduced in lavish gatefold format—the book positions Johnson’s oeuvre within an expansive framework of global modernism. Distributed for the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens Exhibition Schedule: Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens (February 17–May 20, 2024)

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The first English collection of the late poetry and prose fragments of literary icon Charles Baudelaire “[A] handsome new book . . . all this inchoate material is given context by Sieburth’s learned, elegantly written commentary. He is the perfect guide.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post “[These] unfinished works written after 1861 . . . deliver what their titles seem to promise: a soul stripped of guises and illusions.”—Ange Mlinko, New York Review of Books While not as well known as his other works, Charles Baudelaire’s late poems, drafts of poems, and prose fragments are texts indispensable to the history of modern poetics. This volume brings together Baudelaire’s late fragmentary writings, aphoristic in form and radical in thought, into one edited collection for the first time. Substantial introductions to each work by Richard Sieburth combine the literary context with formal analysis and reception history to give readers a comprehensive picture of the genesis of these works and their subsequent fate. Baudelaire’s turn toward fragmentary writing involved not only a conscious renunciation of his aesthetics of perfection and unity, but a desertion of the harmonies of the traditional lyric in favor of the disjunctions of prose. These are daring works, often painful to read in their misanthropy and unconventional beauty.

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Birds, hormones, and extraordinary behavior: The story of the tiny but mighty golden-collared manakin of Panama This book is the story of a remarkable bird, the golden-collared manakin (Manacus vitellinus) of Panama. Males of this species perform one of the most elaborate, physically complex, and noisy courtship displays of any animal on the planet. Barney A. Schlinger delves into the specialized neurons, muscles, bones, and hormonal systems underlying the manakin’s unique courtship behavior, creating a rich life-history account that integrates field observations and evolutionary biology with behavioral ecology, anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, and general ornithology. The personal lives of investigators and the natural history of the Panamanian rainforest provide context for this account of the bird’s fascinating behavior. Schlinger clearly and approachably explains basic concepts in disciplines such as avian anatomy, endocrinology, sexual differentiation, and the neurobiology of song and aeroacoustics, offering readers a window into the biology of this exuberant bird.

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An absurdist comedy and fifteenth winner of the Yale Drama Prize, exploring family, religion, identity, desire, and beauty in Korean American culture In a fantastical fairy-tale world, two Korean American sisters are deemed too fat to fit in their family grave. Will the sisters’ close bond survive under the pressure of their community and fretful parents, who will spare no effort to make them tinier? Jar of Fat, the fifteenth winner of the Yale Drama Prize, is a phantasmagorical, absurdist Korean American tale about the allure and danger entangled within the quest for beauty and thinness. Both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply troubling, Seayoung Yim’s play burns through the accumulated rage that anti-fat bias produces to reclaim what it steals from us every day: grace, space, possibility, and breath.

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Yale French Studies 142 explores the contemporary relevance of an alternative strand of feminism as theorized by Monique Wittig This volume of Yale French Studies foregrounds Monique Wittig (1935–2003), a writer who left France to live and teach in the United States, in a diverse range of multidisciplinary conversations—in literary studies, history, and gender and sexuality studies—to demonstrate how Wittig’s theoretical and literary work remains an indispensable resource for thinking and creating in the twenty-first century. Editors Morgane Cadieu and Annabel L. Kim flip the “materialist lesbianism” that Wittig’s collection of essays, The Straight Mind, centers and describes as being the core of Wittig’s work to deal instead with “lesbian materialism,” thereby making "lesbian" the method and "materialism" the object and allowing Wittig’s work to realize its full range. The volume reinterrogates the official historiography of French materialist feminism; expands the intellectual framework within which Wittig’s work is usually considered; insists on the language-centric materialism that emerges from Wittig’s writing as a way of joining the political with the literary; and attends to the way this literary material inspires material responses and creations within the plastic arts. Underlying the entire volume is a keen sense of the materiality of Wittig’s archives, housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, as a site of lesbian thought in Wittig’s radical sense of the term: a fugitive positionality.

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The first book to chronicle how innovation in laboratory designs for botanical research energized the emergence of physiological plant ecology as a vibrant subdiscipline Laboratory innovation since the mid-twentieth century has powered advances in the study of plant adaptation, evolution, and ecosystem function. The phytotron, an integrated complex of controlled-environment greenhouse and laboratory spaces, invented by Frits W. Went in the 1950s, set off a worldwide laboratory movement and transformed the plant sciences. Sharon Kingsland explores this revolution through a comparative study of work in the United States, France, Australia, Israel, the USSR, and Hungary. These advances in botanical research energized physiological plant ecology. Case studies explore the development of phytotron spinoffs such as mobile laboratories, rhizotrons, and ecotrons. Scientific problems include the significance of plant emissions of volatile organic compounds, symbiosis between plants and soil fungi, and the discovery of new pathways for photosynthesis as an adaptation to hot, dry climates. The advancement of knowledge through synthesis is a running theme: linking disciplines, combining laboratory and field research, and moving across ecological scales from leaf to ecosystem. The book also charts the history of modern scientific responses to the emerging crisis of food insecurity in the era of global warming.

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The first publication on the Yorùbá master sculptor Moshood Olúṣọmọ BámigbóyèBámigbóyè: A Master Sculptor of the Yorùbá Tradition is the first monograph dedicated to the 50-year career of the Nigerian artist Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè (ca. 1885–1975). One of the most important Yorùbá sculptors of the twentieth century, Bámigbóyè is best known for the spectacular masks that he carved for religious festivals known locally as Ẹpa. Weighing up to 80 pounds and measuring over 4 feet tall, with intricate superstructures that could feature dozens of finely carved individual figures, these masks represent some of the most complex and elaborate works of Yorùbá art ever made. With 190 illustrations, this sumptuous volume presents masterpieces from Bámigbóyè’s workshop now housed in collections in America, Europe, and Nigeria. Essays situate Bámigbóyè’s work as part of Africa’s oldest and most dynamic art traditions and consider his sculpture in relation to contemporary Yorùbá art, culture, politics, and religion. With new and archival photographs and incorporating oral histories conducted with the artist’s family and community, this catalogue fills a critical void in African art-historical scholarship.Distributed for the Yale University Art GalleryExhibition Schedule:Yale University Art Gallery (September 9, 2022–January 8, 2023)

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This third volume of the catalogue raisonné of Ed Ruscha’s works on paper documents more than 1,000 works created between 1998 and 2018 The third volume of this extraordinary catalogue raisonné project compiles the unique works on paper that celebrated American artist Edward Ruscha (b. 1937) made between 1998 and 2018. There are 1,068 works documented, hundreds of which have rarely, or never, been exhibited or published. Drawing is the mode in which Ruscha is most prolific, poetic, and experimental. In this period, he further developed some of his iconic subjects, among them film titles, gasoline stations, mountains, and of course words and phrases. He also expanded into new thematic territory in palindrome drawings, map-like representations, and “swiped word” works that incisively reflect the contemporary moment. Included are pencil, dry pigment, pastel, and acrylic drawings on paper, board, and assorted unconventional supports; collages and photo-based works; and sketches and studies for various contemporaneous paintings, commissions, and miscellaneous projects. Each work is catalogued with a beautiful color reproduction, collection details, full chronological provenance, exhibition history, and bibliographic references.Distributed for Gagosian

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Winner of the Mark Lynton Prize in History—the story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history"A rich, roiling history that Thomas recounts with eloquence and skill. . . . The very existence of freedom suits assumed that slavery could only be circumscribed and local; what Thomas shows in his illuminating book is how this view was eventually turned upside down in decisions like Dred Scott. 'Freedom was local,' Thomas writes. 'Slavery was national.'"—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times"Gripping. . . . Profound and prodigiously researched."—Alison L. LaCroix, Washington Post For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation’s capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.

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The untold history of America’s mid-twentieth-century program of hepatitis infection research, its scientists’ aspirations, and the damage the project caused human subjects “Sydney Halpern has written a compelling, if unsettling, history of hepatitis research during World War II and the Cold War. It will become a must-read for anyone interested in bioethics and medical history.”—Susan E. Lederer, author of Subjected to Science and Flesh and Blood From 1942 through 1972, American biomedical researchers deliberately infected people with hepatitis. Government-sponsored researchers were attempting to discover the basic features of the disease and the viruses causing it, and to develop interventions that would quell recurring outbreaks. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-person interviews, Sydney Halpern traces the hepatitis program from its origins in World War II through its expansion during the initial Cold War years, to its demise in the early 1970s amid an outcry over research abuse. The subjects in hepatitis studies were members of stigmatized groups—conscientious objectors, prison inmates, the mentally ill, and developmentally disabled adults and children. The book reveals how researchers invoked military and scientific imperatives and the rhetoric of a common good to win support for the experiments and access to recruits. Halpern examines the participants’ long-term health consequences and raises troubling questions about hazardous human experiments aimed at controlling today’s epidemic diseases.

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A lively and multi-faceted account of Evelyn and William De Morgan, exploring a unique artistic partnership that spanned several cultural circles including the Pre-Raphaelites and Arts and Crafts movement With a partnership spanning two centuries, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Evelyn (1855–1919) and Arts and Crafts potter and author William De Morgan (1839–1917) influenced several significant art movements in nineteenth-century Britain. Despite this, their impact has been relatively overlooked in comparison with their better-known contemporaries. Evelyn & William De Morgan is the first major publication devoted to the work of either artist and their unique relationship. It draws out each artist’s individuality while providing a comprehensive view of the expanded cultural milieu in which they functioned, not least with regard to new attitudes towards Victorian marriage as a working partnership. The fully illustrated publication features numerous contributions which explore the reach of the De Morgans’ partnership, their political and spiritual interests, and their immersion within several influential cultural circles of the day, including Pre-Raphaelite, Arts and Crafts, and Aesthetic Movement groups. The book presents a lively and multifaceted account of the De Morgans and their creative partnership. Published in association with Delaware Art MuseumExhibition Schedule:Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington October 22, 2022–January 29, 2023Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA September 17, 2023– January 7, 2024Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL January 27, 2024–May 2024

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Brings together a superb collection of over 650 detailed examples English furniture and needlework from 1600 to 1760 These volumes are dedicated to one of the finest collections of early English furniture and needlework, formed by Percival D. Griffiths (1861–1937). Together with the noted authority, Robert W. Symonds, Griffiths assembled a pioneering collection of early English decorative arts: furniture, domestic needlework and related objects all dating to the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries. The book illustrates nearly 700 pieces owned by Griffiths and includes images of his interiors, and biographical data on Griffiths. Catalogue entries provide color images, exhibition histories, references, and provenance. These volumes present a wealth of new information that will aid both the amateur and connoisseur alike.

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Amongst the Ruins explores the loss of ancient civilizations, the collapse of ruling elites, and the disappearance of more recent communities and their local traditions. Some of these are now sealed under 3,000-year-old peat, others lost to rising seas or sands, and the carcasses of twentieth-century buildings which serve as reminders of the destructive power of war. These compelling stories of fallen or lost places are brought together through themes of war, climate change, natural hazards, human self-destruction, and simple economics. From the ice of the Arctic fringe, through to the desert landscapes of North Africa, by way of South America’s high mountains and Southeast Asia’s urban sprawl, Amongst the Ruins charts the rise and fall of places and communities around the world, the fascinating characters associated with them, and the important events that punctuate their history. Exploring wide-ranging examples from prehistory to the present day, John Darlington challenges us to recognize past failures and identify what we need to do to protect the cultures of our current world.

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The first in a groundbreaking two-volume history of Henry III’s rule “Professor Carpenter is one of Britain’s foremost medievalists. . . . No one knows more about Henry, and a lifetime of scholarship is here poured out, elegantly and often humorously. This is a fine, judicious, illuminating work that should be the standard study of the reign for generations to come.”—Dan Jones, Sunday Times Nine years of age when he came to the throne in 1216, Henry III had to rule within the limits set by the establishment of Magna Carta and the emergence of parliament. Pacific, conciliatory, and deeply religious, Henry brought many years of peace to England and rebuilt Westminster Abbey in honor of his patron saint, Edward the Confessor. He poured money into embellishing his palaces and creating a magnificent court. Yet this investment in “soft power” did not prevent a great revolution in 1258, led by Simon de Montfort, ending Henry’s personal rule. Eminent historian David Carpenter brings to life Henry’s character and reign as never before. Using source material of unparalleled richness—material that makes it possible to get closer to Henry than any other medieval monarch—Carpenter stresses the king’s achievements as well as his failures while offering an entirely new perspective on the intimate connections between medieval politics and religion.

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A clear-eyed analysis of the role the United States should play in the world as it exists today The United States remains “the indispensable nation.” In this book, the distinguished international relations theorist and foreign policy specialist Robert Lieber argues that in a world full of revisionist powers, America’s role is more important than ever. No other country is capable of playing that role. America remains the essential pillar of the postwar liberal order. It is a center of both political and financial stability, and it promotes important values that the revisionist powers do not. Not beholden to any particular theory, this is a clear-eyed analysis of the role the United States should play in the world as it exists today.

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A remarkable portrait of a web of artistic connections, traced outward from Jay DeFeo’s uniquely generative work of art Through deep archival research and nuanced analysis, Elizabeth Ferrell examines the creative exchange that developed with and around The Rose, a monumental painting on which the San Francisco artist Jay DeFeo (1929–1989) worked almost exclusively from 1958 to 1966. From its early state to its dramatic removal from DeFeo’s studio, the painting was a locus of activity among Fillmore District artists. Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, and Michael McClure each took up The Rose in their photographs, films, paintings, and poetry, which DeFeo then built upon in turn. The resulting works established a dialogue between artists rather than seamless cooperation. Illustrated with archival photographs and personal correspondence, in addition to the artworks, Ferrell’s book traces how The Rose became a stage for experimentation with authorship and community, defying traditional definitions of collaboration and creating alternatives to Cold War America’s political and artistic binaries.

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A nuanced look at how the Museum of Modern Art’s carefully curated treatment of Latin American architecture promoted U.S. political, economic, and cultural interests In the interwar period and immediately following World War II, the U.S. government promoted the vision of a modern, progressive, and democratic Latin America and worked to cast the region as a partner in the fight against fascism and communism. This effort was bolstered by the work and products of many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Using modern architecture to imagine a Latin America under postwar U.S. leadership, MoMA presented blockbuster shows, including Brazil Builds (1943) and Latin American Architecture since 1945 (1955), that deployed racially coded aesthetics and emphasized the confluence of “Americanness” and “modernity” in a globalizing world. Delving into the heated debates of the period and presenting never-before-published internal documents and photos from the museum and the Nelson A. Rockefeller archives, Patricio del Real is the first to fully address MoMA’s role in U.S. cultural imperialism and its consequences through its exhibitions on Latin American art and architecture.

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A defense of regulatory agencies’ efforts to combine public consultation with bureaucratic expertise to serve the interest of all citizens “This exceptional exploration of how four advanced democracies pursue legitimacy in the bureaucratic implementation of regulatory law makes an invaluable contribution.”—Peter M. Shane, author of Madison’s Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy The statutory delegation of rule-making authority to the executive has recently become a source of controversy. There are guiding models, but none, Susan Rose-Ackerman claims, is a good fit with the needs of regulating in the public interest. Using a cross-national comparison of public policy-making in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, she argues that public participation inside executive rule-making processes is necessary to preserve the legitimacy of regulatory policy-making.

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How succession in authoritarian regimes was less a competition of visions for the future and more a settling of scores “Joseph Torigian’s stellar research and personal interviews have produced a brilliant, meticulous study. It fundamentally undermines what political scientists have presumed to be the way Chinese Communist and Soviet politics operate.”—Dorothy J. Solinger, University of California, Irvine “[Torigian’s] work is absolutely outstanding.”—Stephen Kotkin, ChinaTalk The political successions in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao, respectively, are often explained as triumphs of inner-party democracy, leading to a victory of “reformers” over “conservatives” or “radicals.” In traditional thinking, Leninist institutions provide competitors a mechanism for debating policy and making promises, stipulate rules for leadership selection, and prevent the military and secret police from playing a coercive role. Here, Joseph Torigian argues that the post-cult of personality power struggles in history’s two greatest Leninist regimes were instead shaped by the politics of personal prestige, historical antagonisms, backhanded political maneuvering, and violence. Mining newly discovered material from Russia and China, Torigian challenges the established historiography and suggests a new way of thinking about the nature of power in authoritarian regimes.

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Volume Two of an award-winning professor's introduction to essential concepts of calculus and mathematical modeling for students in the biosciences This is the second of a two-part series exploring essential concepts of calculus in the context of biological systems. Building on the essential ideas and theories of basic calculus taught in Mathematical Models in the Biosciences I, this book focuses on epidemiological models, mathematical foundations of virus and antiviral dynamics, ion channel models and cardiac arrhythmias, vector calculus and applications, and evolutionary models of disease. It also develops differential equations and stochastic models of many biomedical processes, as well as virus dynamics, the Clancy-Rudy model to determine the genetic basis of cardiac arrhythmias, and a sketch of some systems biology. Based on the author’s calculus class at Yale, the book makes concepts of calculus less abstract and more relatable for science majors and premedical students.

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An ambitious introduction to the Apocrypha that encourages readers to reimagine what “canon” really means Challenging the way Christian and non-Christian readers think about the Apocrypha, this is an ambitious introduction to the deuterocanonical texts of the Christian Old Testaments. Lawrence Wills introduces these texts in their original Jewish environment while addressing the very different roles they had in various Christian canons. Though often relegated to a lesser role, a sort of “Bible-Lite,” these texts deserve renewed attention, and this book shows how they hold more interest for both ancient and contemporary communities than previously thought.

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A provocative book from a highly original scholar, challenging much of what we know about early Christian manuscripts “[Nongbri] sets out to demystify the ‘discovery’ of ancient writings, advancing a more sober and realistic framework for assessing the breathless claims and counterclaims that appear in the media. . . . For those wanting to know something of the material basis for the world’s most published (and possibly, read) book, Nongbri’s own book is a gift.”—Luke Timothy Johnson, Commonweal In this bold and groundbreaking book, Brent Nongbri provides an up-to-date introduction to the major collections of early Christian manuscripts and demonstrates that much of what we thought we knew about these books and fragments is mistaken. While biblical scholars have expended much effort in their study of the texts contained within the earliest Christian manuscripts, there has been a surprising lack of interest in thinking about these books as material objects with individual, unique histories. We have too often ignored the ways that the antiquities market obscures our knowledge of the origins of these manuscripts. Through painstaking archival research and detailed studies of the most important collections of early Christian manuscripts, Nongbri vividly shows that the earliest Christian books are more than just carriers of texts or samples of handwriting. They are three-dimensional archaeological artifacts with fascinating stories to tell, if we’re willing to listen.

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How herbaria illuminate the past and future of plant science Collections of preserved plant specimens, known as herbaria, have existed for nearly five centuries. These pressed and labeled plants have been essential resources for scientists, allowing them to describe and differentiate species and to document and research plant changes and biodiversity over time—including changes related to climate. Maura C. Flannery tells the history of herbaria, from the earliest collections belonging to such advocates of the technique as sixteenth-century botanist Luca Ghini, to the collections of poets, politicians, and painters, and to the digitization of these precious specimens today. She charts the growth of herbaria during the Age of Exploration, the development of classification systems to organize the collections, and herbaria’s indispensable role in the tracking of climate change and molecular evolution. Herbaria also have historical, aesthetic, cultural, and ethnobotanical value—these preserved plants can be linked to the Indigenous peoples who used them, the collectors who sought them out, and the scientists who studied them. This book testifies to the central role of herbaria in the history of plant study and to their continued value, not only to biologists but to entirely new users as well: gardeners, artists, students, and citizen-scientists.

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An original study of late Enlightenment aesthetics, poetics, and environmental medicine as overlapping ways of comprehending the dislocations of historical existence lodged in the movements of bodies and minds This book studies later eighteenth-century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly concerned about the relationship between the geographical movements of persons displaced from home and the physiological or nervous “motions” within their bodies and minds. Looking beyond familiar narratives about medicine and art’s shared therapeutic and harmonizing ideals, this book explores Enlightenment and Romantic-era aesthetics and poetics in relation to a central but less well known area of eighteenth-century environmental medicine: pathology. No mere system of diagnosis or classification, philosophical pathology was an art of interpretation, offering sophisticated ways of reading the multiple conditions and causes of disease, however absent from perception, in their palpable, embodied effects. For medical, anthropological, environmental, and literary authors alike, it helped to locate the dislocations of modern mobility when a full view of their causes and conditions remained imperfectly understood or still unfolding. Goodman traces the surprising afterlife of the period’s exemplary but unexplained pathology of motion, medical nostalgia, within aesthetic theory and poetics, arguing that nostalgia persisted there not as a named condition but as a set of formal principles and practices, perturbing claims about the harmony, freedom, and free play of the mind.

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How to renew American leadership in a turbulent, polarized, and postdominant world “A worthy contribution to the public debate on America’s role in the world and a tonic for our times.”—John Kerry, Former U.S. Secretary of State“Imbrie mounts a well-informed examination of the country’s ills and offers a discerning perspective on its future paths . . . A thoughtful consideration of myriad challenges facing the U.S.” —Kirkus Reviews Is America fated to decline as a great power? Can it recover? With absorbing insight and fresh perspective, foreign policy expert Andrew Imbrie provides a road map for bolstering American leadership in an era of turbulence abroad and deepening polarization at home. This is a book about choices: the tough policy trade-offs that political leaders need to make to reinvigorate American money, might, and clout. In the conventional telling, the United States is either destined for continued dominance or doomed to irreversible decline. Imbrie argues instead that the United States must adapt to changing global dynamics and compete more wisely. Drawing on the author’s own experience as an adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry, as well as on interviews and comparative studies of the rise and fall of nations, this book offers a sharp look at American statecraft and the United States’ place in the world today.

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An exploration of how the Cryogenian Period, when our planet was covered in ice for millions of years, created today’s remarkable biodiversity More than half a billion years ago, our world was completely covered by glaciers, a “Snowball Earth” that persisted for millions of years. Incredibly, this unimaginable cold led to the remarkable diversification of life on earth known as the Cambrian explosion. With a geologist’s eye and a knack for storytelling, Graham Shields explores when and how such inhospitable conditions enabled animals to evolve, radiate, and diversify into our earliest ancestors. This journey navigates the wild swings between hot and cold climates, oxygenation and asphyxiation, biological radiations and extinctions, asking how such instability relates to grander forces that brought our planet to its modern state. Shields guides readers through evidence found in the Australian outback, Mongolia, Scotland, and other locales, revealing how geologists can trace glaciation, the atmosphere, oceans, mountain building, and more through the earth’s rocks, providing a comprehensive theory of how life evolved and diversified.

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The definitive history of the supernatural in Nazi Germany—the occult ideas, esoteric sciences, and pagan religions touted by the Third Reich in the service of power“[Kurlander] shows how swiftly irrational ideas can take hold, even in an age before social media.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post“A careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits.”—National Review The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler’s personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. In this eye-opening history, Eric Kurlander reveals how the Third Reich’s relationship to the supernatural was far from straightforward. Even as popular occultism and superstition were intermittently rooted out, suppressed, and outlawed, the Nazis drew upon a wide variety of occult practices and esoteric sciences to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire.

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A profound and genre-defying work of literature about love, death, and illness from one of Portugal’s most celebrated writers “One of the essential writers of our tormented times.”—Alberto Manguel, Times Literary Supplement “Little prepares one for this extraordinary book, in which each chapter, covering a single day, and lasting a single sentence, offers a teeming stream of consciousness. . . . Even pain is alive, and alive is the word for this book, alive and enduring.”— Michael Autrey, Booklist Incapacitated after the removal of a malignant tumor, the narrator, António, spends his days in a Lisbon hospital enduring the humiliations of severe illness. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he revisits fragments of his life and the people who passed through it. He recalls the village where he lived as a child near the Mondego River amid the eucalyptus and pines, his parents and grandparents and their tight-knit community of potato farmers and tungsten miners, and the woman he loved—an unexpected polyphony of voices and places sounding in sharp counterpoint to debilitating pain. By the Rivers of Babylon conjures the past and the present all at once, revealing the power of memory to embolden us in the face of extraordinary suffering. This is António Lobo Antunes’s homage to the beauty of a cherished life in its confrontation with imminent death.

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A vibrant, engaging, and effective workbook to help students learn the alphabet, numerals, and sounds of the Arabic language, now in its third edition This workbook, now in its third edition, helps students learn the alphabet, numerals, and sounds of the Arabic language, providing a foundation for the rest of the Ahlan wa Sahlan program.Ahlan wa Sahlan covers the first and second years of instruction in Modern Standard Arabic. It is a complete educational package, comprising a workbook, a beginner student textbook with accompanying Annotated Instructor’s Edition, an intermediate student textbook, video clips filmed in Syria, and audio.

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A history of modern Jewish literature that explores our enduring attachment to the book as an object With the rise of digital media, the “death of the book” has been widely discussed. But the physical object of the book persists. Here, through the lens of materiality and objects, Barbara E. Mann tells a history of modern Jewish literature, from novels and poetry to graphic novels and artists’ books. Bringing contemporary work on secularism and design in conversation with literary history, she offers a new and distinctive frame for understanding how literary genres emerge. The long twentieth century, a period of tremendous physical upheaval and geographic movement, witnessed the production of a multilingual canon of writing by Jewish authors. Literature’s objecthood is felt not only in the physical qualities of books—bindings, covers, typography, illustrations—but also through the ways in which materiality itself became a practical foundation for literary expression.

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Sonallah Ibrahim’s 2000 masterpiece offers readers a view of twentieth-century world events through the diary pages of his titular character 1950s Cairo: the intersection of conflicting dreams and political destinies. In this classic novel translated for the first time into English, idealistic reporter Rushdy encounters the enchanting Warda and her brother Yaarib at a clandestine leftist meeting. Their fates would be forever linked. Decades after Warda goes missing, Rushdy immerses himself in her diaries in a quest to uncover her whereabouts. The search takes him to the hills of Dhofar, Oman, where he discovers Warda’s guerrilla role in a regional uprising and secret involvement in revolutions with echoes around the globe. Piece by revelatory piece, Rushdy uncovers the truth about Warda—and the fiery commitment that drove her to choose the life she lived. Widely acknowledged as a masterpiece by one of Egypt’s most important novelists, this is an unforgettable story of intrigue, passion, and revolution.

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How to take advantage of technology, data, and the collective wisdom in our communities to design powerful solutions to contemporary problems “Bursting with sage, practical advice for public sector officials and civil society actors who want to engage citizens and give them more power.”—Glen Weyl and Henry Farrell, Boston Review The challenges societies face today, from inequality to climate change to systemic racism, cannot be solved with yesterday’s toolkit. Solving Public Problems shows how readers can take advantage of digital technology, data, and the collective wisdom of our communities to design and deliver powerful solutions to contemporary problems. Offering a radical rethinking of the role of the public servant and the skills of the public workforce, this book is about the vast gap between failing public institutions and the huge number of public entrepreneurs doing extraordinary things—and how to close that gap. Drawing on lessons learned from decades of advising global leaders and from original interviews and surveys of thousands of public problem solvers, Beth Simone Noveck provides a practical guide for public servants, community leaders, students, and activists to become more effective, equitable, and inclusive leaders and repair our troubled, twenty-first-century world.

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Now in a new, affordable edition with updated notes, a superbly readable translation of Kant’s classic work This work, one of the most important texts in the history of ethics, presents Immanuel Kant’s conception of moral self-government based on pure reason. It has been a source of controversy and an object of reinterpretation for over two centuries. This new edition of Kant’s work provides a fresh translation that is uniquely faithful to the German original and more fully annotated than any previous translation. The editor and translator, Allen Wood, has written a new introduction.

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Volume 7 of the Posen Library captures unprecedented transformations of Jewish culture amid mass migration, global capitalism, nationalism, revolution, and the birth of the secular self Between 1880 and 1918, traditions and regimes collapsed around the world, migration and imperialism remade the lives of millions, nationalism and secularization transformed selves and collectives, utopias beckoned, and new kinds of social conflict threatened as never before. Few communities experienced the pressures and possibilities of the era more profoundly than the world’s Jews. This volume, seventh in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, recaptures the vibrant Jewish cultural creativity, political striving, social experimentation, and fractious religious and secular thought that burst forth in the face of these challenges. Editors Israel Bartal and Kenneth B. Moss capture the full range of Jewish expression in a centrifugal age—from mystical visions to unabashedly antitraditional Jewish political thought, from cookbooks to literary criticism, from modernist poetry to vaudeville. They also highlight the most remarkable dimension of the 1880–1918 era: an audacious effort by newly secular Jews to replace Judaism itself with a new kind of Jewish culture centering on this-worldly, aesthetic creativity by a posited “Jewish nation” and the secular, modern, and “free” individuals who composed it. This volume is an essential starting point for anyone who wishes to understand the divided Jewish present.

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Longlisted for the 2022 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, this authoritative new collection by one of China’s most lauded poets is “a thrill to read” (Drew Calvert, Asymptote) “Words as Grain offers Zen koan-like poems that call for rereading and contemplation. As the poet himself says in ‘Reading Great Poems,’ ‘let the dialogue between thought and silence continue.’ We are fortunate to be a party to this sustained and intense dialogue.”—John Bradley, Rain Taxi While keeping a cautious distance from literary trends and labeling, Duo Duo has emerged as one of the world’s preeminent poets. His poems respond to the Chinese political landscape from the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square tragedy and beyond. Some are written from the vantage point of exile abroad, others in his homeland, but all inscribe an ache for original expression, a sense of place, and the essence of language. In exacting renderings by award-winning translator Lucas Klein, this career-spanning anthology features Duo Duo’s entire oeuvre since his return to China in 2004, as well as a representative selection of his earlier poems, presenting nearly five decades of work. This collection traces the evolution, in a particular historical context and cultural tradition, of one of the most vibrant poets at work in the world today.

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An award‑winning environmental historian explores American history through wrenching, tragic, and sometimes humorous stories of getting lost"Fascinating. . . . Underlying . . . is a deep belief in the importance of collaboration and cooperation between humans and their environments, as well as between humans and other humans."—Robert Macfarlane, New York Review of Books The human species has a propensity for getting lost. The American people, inhabiting a mental landscape shaped by their attempts to plant roots and to break free, are no exception. In this engaging book, environmental historian Jon Coleman bypasses the trailblazers so often described in American history to follow instead the strays and drifters who went missing. From Hernando de Soto’s failed quest for riches in the American southeast to the recent trend of getting lost as a therapeutic escape from modernity, this book details a unique history of location and movement as well as the confrontations that occur when our physical and mental conceptions of space become disjointed. Whether we get lost in the woods, the plains, or the digital grid, Coleman argues that getting lost allows us to see wilderness anew and connect with generations across five centuries to discover a surprising and edgy American identity.

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In his last work, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century explores the pleasures of opera Bernard Williams, who died in 2003, was one of the most influential moral philosophers of his generation. A lifelong opera lover, his articles and essays, talks for the BBC, contributions to the Grove Dictionary of Opera, and program notes for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the English National Opera, generated a devoted following. This elegant volume brings together these widely scattered and largely unobtainable pieces, including two that have not been previously published. It covers an engaging range of topics from Mozart to Wagner, including sparkling essays on specific operas by those composers as well as Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, Debussy, Janacek, and Tippett. Reflecting Williams’s brilliance, passion, and clarity of mind, these essays engage with, and illustrate, the enduring appeal of opera as an art form.

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"David Blight has produced a fine edition of Douglass' second autobiography. This is an essential work in African-American and American history, and displays Douglass' developing strength as a writer and political leader."—Richard Slotkin, Wesleyan University Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Douglass escaped to freedom and became a passionate advocate for abolition and social change and the foremost spokesperson for the nation’s enslaved African American population in the years preceding the Civil War. My Bondage and My Freedom is Douglass’s masterful recounting of his remarkable life and a fiery condemnation of a political and social system that would reduce people to property and keep an entire race in chains. This classic is revisited with a new introduction and annotations by celebrated Douglass scholar David W. Blight. Blight situates the book within the politics of the 1850s and illuminates how My Bondage represents Douglass as a mature, confident, powerful writer who crafted some of the most unforgettable metaphors of slavery and freedom—indeed of basic human universal aspirations for freedom—anywhere in the English language.

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Through the poetry of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian authors, including Pushkin and Akhmatova, Poetry Reader for Russian Learners helps upper-beginner, intermediate, and advanced Russian students refine their language skills. Poems are coded by level of difficulty. The text facilitates students’ interaction with authentic texts by means of a complete set of learning tools, including biographical sketches of each poet, stress marks, annotations, exercises, questions for discussion, and a glossary. An ancillary Web site containing audio files for all poems can be found below.

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A luxurious two-volume edition with the complete original plates, text, and commentary “Absolutely stunning.”—Felix Salmon, Reuters Josef Albers’s masterwork, Interaction of Color, is one of the most influential books on color ever published. Originally issued in 1963 as a limited-edition set of commentary and 150 silkscreened color plates, the book introduced generations of students, artists, designers, and collectors to Albers’s unique approach to complex principles. This beautiful edition brings Interaction back into classrooms and studios and onto bookshelves, where it will find an eager new audience. It replicates Albers’s revolutionary exercises, explaining concepts such as color relativity and vibrating and vanishing boundaries through the use of color, shape, die-cut forms, and movable flaps that illustrate his astonishing demonstrations of the changing and relative nature of color. Also included for the first time are studies from the Albers archive, produced by the artist’s students in the early 1960s. This celebration of Albers’s legendary achievements is an essential addition to any serious art library. Published in association with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

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A book of surpassing importance that should be required reading for leaders and policymakers throughout the world For thirty years Ben Kiernan has been deeply involved in the study of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has played a key role in unearthing confidential documentation of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. His writings have transformed our understanding not only of twentieth-century Cambodia but also of the historical phenomenon of genocide. This new book—the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times—is among his most important achievements. Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century, says Kiernan. He urges that we heed the rich historical evidence with its telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides.

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An intimate and candid account of our national parks detailing their strengths, vulnerabilities, and essential role in American life“Essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of America’s national parks.”—John Miles, National Parks Traveler Part memoir, part critique, and a paean to the value of national parks, American Covenant distills the experience and insights from two long careers in conservation. Michael A. Soukup and Gary E. Machlis show how the national parks are essential to maintaining the essence of our national heritage, and key to America’s future in a changing climate and political landscape. Sharing real-world examples of both victories and defeats in protecting national parks, this candid, thoughtful book reminds us that the national parks are a promise—a covenant—within and between generations of Americans. The book is also a call to revitalize, reconstitute, reconfigure, and reform the National Park Service, which the authors believe is governed too much by outdated management practices and politics instead of a foundation of expertise and science.

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The truth behind the Gospel accounts of the Nativity, updated to include the latest research--a classic by a renowned scholar, hailed as "masterly" and "definitive" in the original edition.

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Jacob Milgrom, a rabbi and Bible scholar, has devoted the bulk of his career to examining the laws of the Torah. His incisive commentary on Leviticus, which began with Leviticus 1-16, continues in this last volume of three. It provides an authoritative and comprehensive explanation of ethical values concealed in Israel's rituals. Although at first glance Leviticus seems far removed from the modern-day world, Milgrom's thoughtful and provocative comments and notes reveal its enduring relevance to contemporary society.Leviticus 23-27 brings us to the climactic end of the book and its revolutionary innovations, among which are the evolution of the festival calendar with its emphasis on folk traditions, and the jubilee, the priestly answer to the socio-economic problems of their time.With English translations that convey the nuance and power of the original Hebrew, this trilogy will take its place alongside the best of the Anchor Bible Commentaries.

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"This remarkable study, combining learning, realism, and literary adroitness, brings us close to Luther. Above all, it conveys Luther's power: the intensity of his faith, the coherence of his thought, the force of his personality."—New Yorker“A brilliant account of [Martin] Luther’s evolution as a man, a thinker, and a Christian. . . . Every person interested in Christianity should put this on his or her reading list.”—Lawrence Cunningham, CommonwealWritten by one of the world’s greatest authorities on Martin Luther, this is the definitive biography of the central figure of the Protestant Reformation. The book portrays the controversial reformer in the context of his own time, analyzing his state of mind and describing his world more closely than has ever been done before.

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Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641) is among the greatest portrait painters of all time. The 1990s opened and closed with major exhibitions devoted to his work, and now the long-awaited catalogue raisonné of his painted oeuvre is complete.A native of Antwerp, Van Dyck also lived and worked for long periods in Italy and England, where his brief, productive life ended. He is best known for his work at the court of Charles I. His full-length portraits of aristocrats in the Caroline court and in Genoa, Antwerp, Brussels, and The Hague influenced the history of Western portraiture into the twentieth century in the work of John Singer Sargent. Handsomely designed and illustrated, the volume includes a reproduction of every known authentic painting by the artist as well as the provenance and the significant facts and literature on each. This catalogue raisonné is, fittingly, the collaborative work of an international team devoted to the study of this major international artist. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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Yehuda Bauer, one of the world’s premier historians of the Holocaust, here presents an insightful overview and reconsideration of its history and meaning. Drawing on research he and other historians have done in recent years, he offers fresh opinions on such basic issues as how to define and explain the Holocaust; whether it can be compared with other genocides; how Jews reacted to the murder campaign against them; and what the relationship is between the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel.The Holocaust says something terribly important about humanity, says Bauer. He analyzes explanations of the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman, Jeffrey Herf, Goetz Aly, Daniel Goldhagen, John Weiss, and Saul Friedländer and then offers his own interpretation of how the Holocaust could occur. Providing fascinating narratives as examples, he deals with reactions of Jewish men and women during the Holocaust and tells of several attempts at rescue operations. He also explores Jewish theology of the Holocaust, arguing that our view of the Holocaust should not be clouded by mysticism: it was an action by humans against other humans and is therefore an explicable event that we can prevent from recurring.

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