University of Chicago Press: New Titles in History

University of Chicago Press: New Titles in History http://www.press.uchicago.edu/rss/newhistory.xml The latest new books in History en-us erg@press.uchicago.edu Soldier Field http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=4149986 Liam T. A. Ford <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><P>Sports fans nationwide know Soldier Field as the home of the Chicago Bears. For decades its signature columns provided an iconic backdrop for gridiron matches. But few realize that the stadium has been much more than that. <I>Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City</I> explores how this amphitheater evolved from a public war memorial into a majestic arena that helped define Chicago. </P><P> </P><P><I>Chicago Tribune</I> staff writer Liam Ford led the reporting on the stadium’s controversial 2003 renovation—and simultaneously found himself unearthing a dramatic history. As he tells it, the tale of Soldier Field truly is the story of Chicago, filled with political intrigue and civic pride. Designed by Holabird and Roche, Soldier Field arose through a serendipitous combination of local tax dollars, City Beautiful boosterism, and the machinations of Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson. The result was a stadium that stood at the center of Chicago’s political, cultural, and sporting life for nearly sixty years before the arrival of Walter Payton and William “The Refrigerator” Perry. </P><P> </P><P>Ford describes it all in the voice of a seasoned reporter: the high school football games, track and field contests, rodeos, and even NASCAR races. Photographs, including many from the Chicago Park District’s own collections, capture these remarkable scenes: the swelling crowds at ethnic festivals, Catholic masses, and political rallies. Few remember that Soldier Field hosted Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr., Judy Garland and Johnny Cash—as well as Grateful Dead’s final show.</P><P> </P><P>Now part of the city’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games, Chicago’s stadium on the lake continues to make dramatic history. <I>Soldier Field</I> captures this history in the making and will captivate armchair historians and sports fans alike.</P></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5387723 Lee Alan Dugatkin <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>In the years after the Revolutionary War, the fledgling republic of America was viewed by many Europeans as a degenerate backwater, populated by subspecies weak and feeble. Chief among these naysayers was the French Count and world-renowned naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, who wrote that the flora and fauna of America (humans included) were inferior to European specimens. </P><P>Thomas Jefferson—author of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. president, and ardent naturalist—spent years countering the French conception of American degeneracy. His <I>Notes on Virginia</I> systematically and scientifically dismantled Buffon’s case through a series of tables and equally compelling writing on the nature of his home state. But the book did little to counter the arrogance of the French and hardly satisfied Jefferson’s quest to demonstrate that his young nation was every bit the equal of a well-established Europe. Enter the giant moose.</P><P>The American moose, which Jefferson claimed was so enormous a European reindeer could walk under it, became the cornerstone of his defense. Convinced that the sight of such a magnificent beast would cause Buffon to revise his claims, Jefferson had the remains of a seven-foot ungulate shipped first class from New Hampshire to Paris. Unfortunately, Buffon died before he could make any revisions to his <I>Histoire Naturelle, </I>but the legend of the moose makes for a fascinating tale about Jefferson’s passion to prove that American nature deserved prestige.</P><P>In <I>Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose, </I>Lee Alan Dugatkin vividly recreates the origin and evolution of the debates about natural history in America and, in so doing, returns the prize moose to its rightful place in American history.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Hybrid http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5387732 Noel Kingsbury <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Disheartened by the shrink-wrapped, Styrofoam-packed state of contemporary supermarket fruits and vegetables, many shoppers hark back to a more innocent time, to visions of succulent red tomatoes plucked straight from the vine, gleaming orange carrots pulled from loamy brown soil, swirling heads of green lettuce basking in the sun. </P><P> </P><P>With <I>Hybrid</I>, Noel Kingsbury reveals that even those imaginary perfect foods are themselves far from anything that could properly be called natural; rather, they represent the end of a millennia-long history of selective breeding and hybridization. Starting his story at the birth of agriculture, Kingsbury traces the history of human attempts to make plants more reliable, productive, and nutritious—a story that owes as much to accident and error as to innovation and experiment. Drawing on historical and scientific accounts, as well as a rich trove of anecdotes, Kingsbury shows how scientists, amateur breeders, and countless anonymous farmers and gardeners slowly caused the evolutionary pressures of nature to be supplanted by those of human needs—and thus led us from sparse wild grasses to succulent corn cobs, and from mealy, white wild carrots to the juicy vegetables we enjoy today. At the same time, Kingsbury reminds us that contemporary controversies over the Green Revolution and genetically modified crops are not new; plant breeding has always had a political dimension.</P><P> </P><P>A powerful reminder of the complicated and ever-evolving relationship between humans and the natural world, <I>Hybrid</I> will give readers a thoughtful new perspective on—and a renewed appreciation of—the cereal crops, vegetables, fruits, and flowers that are central to our way of life.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Power Stronger Than Itself http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5504497 George E. Lewis <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><DIV><P>Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images.</P><P> </P><P>Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall’s kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, <I>A Power Stronger Than Itself</I> uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings to light a major piece of the history of avant-garde music and art.</P><P> </P><P>“An important book. . . . Mr. Lewis narrates [the AACM’s] development with exacting context and incisive analysis. . . . Because the book includes biographical portraits of so many participating musicians, it’s a swift, engrossing read.”—<I>New York Times</I></P><P> </P><P>“In bringing intellectual breadth and what Lester Bowie calls ‘good old country ass-kicking’ to bear on past and present indignities, Lewis has produced a fitting companion to the music he celebrates.”—<I>Nation</I></P></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> In Time of War http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5514391 Adam J. Berinsky <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>From World War II to the war in Iraq, periods of international conflict seem like unique moments in U.S. political history—but when it comes to public opinion, they are not. To make this groundbreaking revelation, <I>In Time of War</I> explodes conventional wisdom about American reactions to World War II, as well as the more recent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adam Berinsky argues that public response to these crises has been shaped less by their defining characteristics—such as what they cost in lives and resources—than by the same political interests and group affiliations that influence our ideas about domestic issues.</P><P> </P><P>With the help of World War II–era survey data that had gone virtually untouched for the past sixty years, Berinsky begins by disproving the myth of “the good war” that Americans all fell in line to support after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The attack, he reveals, did not significantly alter public opinion but merely punctuated interventionist sentiment that had already risen in response to the ways that political leaders at home had framed the fighting abroad. Weaving his findings into the first general theory of the factors that shape American wartime opinion, Berinsky also sheds new light on our reactions to other crises. He shows, for example, that our attitudes toward restricted civil liberties during Vietnam and after 9/11 stemmed from the same kinds of judgments we make during times of peace.</P><P> </P><P>With Iraq and Afghanistan now competing for attention with urgent issues within the United States, <I>In Time of War </I>offers a timely reminder of the full extent to which foreign and domestic politics profoundly influence—and ultimately illuminate—each other.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Medieval Dress and Fashion http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5530419 Margaret Scott <br><br><DIV><DIV>From Renaissance fairs to countless retellings of the legend of Robin Hood to the popular restaurant Medieval Times, people remain fascinated by the medieval era—and in particular the clothing of the time. The richly varied dress of medieval days meant more than just fashion and style, and Margaret Scott offers here an insightful chronicle of the layered meanings of the garb worn by queens, kings, courtiers, and peasants.<BR />            Scott draws upon the vibrant illuminated manuscripts of the era to analyze the beautiful design and functionality of medieval clothing. Fascinating changes mark the development of medieval fashion, such as the transition in men’s grooming from wearing beards and long hair to being clean-shaven with short hair; the rise in women’s fashion in the fourteenth century as a method of securing a husband; and the various types of jewelry, fabric, and subtle garment fittings that managed to convey the important distinctions between the upper class and the peasantry. Such distinctions, Scott reveals, were enforced by intricate and strict laws passed in countries throughout Europe that governed the color, styles, and number of a citizen’s garments according to their career, social class, and even the times of year. Political and religious history were also critical factors, <I>Medieval Dress and Fashion</I> shows, as the book draws from first-hand accounts to analyze how pivotal historical moments such as the Crusades and the fall of the Roman Empire resulted in an unexpected blending of cultures and clothing styles. <BR />            Whether their interest lies in class or corsets, readers curious about the costumes of the past will be charmed by Margaret Scott’s lively and engaging book.</DIV></DIV><br></div> Science and the Changing Environment in India 1780-1920 http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5667156 Richard Axelby and Savithri Preetha Nair <br><br><DIV><DIV>The India Office Records document the activities of the English East India Company and the British administration in India, and this guide offers an unusual historical perspective on environmental science in the British Empire. The result of a three-year research project, <I>Science and the Changing Environment in India, 1780–1920</I> makes a wealth of material from the records newly accessible—explaining their organization, providing the environmental and archival document contexts, and outlining the history of British scientific involvement in India during this rich and tumultuous period of cultural collision.  </DIV></DIV><br></div> Castles, Battles, and Bombs http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5721693 Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><DIV><P> </P><P><I>Castles, Battles, and Bombs</I> reconsiders key episodes of military history from the point of view of economics—with dramatically insightful results. For example, when looked at as a question of sheer cost, the building of castles in the High Middle Ages seems almost inevitable: though stunningly expensive, a strong castle was far cheaper to maintain than a standing army. The authors also reexamine the strategic bombing of Germany in World War II and provide new insights into France’s decision to develop nuclear weapons. Drawing on these examples and more, Brauer and Van Tuyll suggest lessons for today’s military, from counterterrorist strategy and military manpower planning to the use of private military companies in Afghanistan and Iraq.</P><P><I></I> </P><P>"In bringing economics into assessments of military history, [the authors] also bring illumination. . . . [The authors] turn their interdisciplinary lens on the mercenary arrangements of Renaissance Italy; the wars of Marlborough, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon; Grant's campaigns in the Civil War; and the strategic bombings of World War II. The results are invariably stimulating."—Martin Walker, <I>Wilson Quarterly</I></P><P><I></I> </P><P>"This study is serious, creative, important. As an economist I am happy to see economics so professionally applied to illuminate major decisions in the history of warfare."—Thomas C. Schelling, Winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics</P></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Daring to Look http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5752575 Anne Whiston Spirn <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><P><EM>Daring to Look</EM> presents never-before-published photos and captions from Dorothea Lange’s fieldwork in California, the Pacific Northwest, and North Carolina during 1939. Lange’s images of squatter camps, benighted farmers, and stark landscapes are stunning, and her captions—which range from simple explanations of settings to historical notes and biographical sketches—add unexpected depth, bringing her subjects and their struggles unforgettably to life, often in their own words.</P><P>When Lange was dismissed from the Farm Security Administration at the end of 1939, these photos and field notes were consigned to archives, where they languished, rarely seen. With <EM>Daring to Look</EM>, Anne Whiston Spirn not only returns them to the public eye, but sets them in the context of Lange’s pioneering life, work, and struggle for critical recognition—firmly placing Lange in her rightful position at the forefront of American photography.</P><P>“A thoughtful and meticulously researched account of Lange’s career. . . . Spirn, a photographer herself, traces Lange’s path, visiting her locations and subjects in a fascinating series of ‘then and now’ shots.”—<EM>Publishers Weekly</EM></P><P>“Dorothea Lange has long been regarded as one of the most brilliant photographic witnesses we have ever had to the peoples and landscapes of America, but until now no one has fully appreciated the richness with which she wove images together with words to convey her insights about this nation. We are lucky indeed that Anne Whiston Spirn, herself a gifted photographer and writer, has now recovered Lange’s field notes and woven them into a rich tapestry of texts and images to help us reflect anew on Lange’s extraordinary body of work.”—William Cronon, author of <EM>Nature’s Metropolis</EM></P><P> </P></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Dawn of Green http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5764147 Harriet Ritvo <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Located in the heart of England’s Lake District, Thirlmere, with its placid sheen, surrounding evergreens, and apparent lack of pollution or development, seems to epitomize the unadulterated bucolic ideal. But under its calm surface lurks the enduring legacy of a nineteenth-century conflict that pitted industrial progress against natural conservation—and helped launch the environmental movement as we know it.</P><P> </P><P>Purchased by the city of Manchester in the 1870s, Thirlmere was dammed and converted into a reservoir, its water piped 100 miles south to the burgeoning industrial city and its workforce. This feat of civil engineering—and of natural resource diversion—inspired one of the first environmental struggle<B>s</B> of modern times. <I>The Dawn of Green </I>recreates the battle for Thirlmere and the clashes between conservationists who wished to preserve the lake and developers eager to supply the needs of industry and a growing urban population. Bringing to vivid life the colorful and strong-minded characters who populated both sides of the debate, noted historian Harriet Ritvo revisits notions of the natural promulgated by Romantic poets, recreationists, resource managers, and industrial developers to establish Thirlmere as the template for subsequent—and continuing—environmental struggles. </P><P> </P><P>A century after Thirlmere, the demand for water and the control of water rights are among the most pressing political<B>,</B> humanitarian<B>,</B> and environmental concerns of our time. By investigating Victorian ideas about industry, development, and technology, Ritvo shows how the lessons learned in the Lake District can inform and guide modern environmental and conservation campaigns. </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Building the Devil's Empire http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5806997 Shannon Lee Dawdy <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><P><I>Building the Devil’s Empire</I> is the first comprehensive history of New Orleans’s early years, tracing the town’s development from its origins in 1718 to its revolt against Spanish rule in 1768. Shannon Lee Dawdy’s picaresque account of New Orleans’s wild youth features a cast of strong-willed captives, thin-skinned nobles, sharp-tongued women, and carousing travelers. But she also widens her lens to reveal the port city’s global significance, examining its role in the French Empire and the Caribbean, and she concludes that by exemplifying a kind of rogue colonialism—where governments, outlaws, and capitalism become entwined—New Orleans should prompt us to reconsider our notions of how colonialism works.</P><P> </P><P>"[A] penetrating study of the colony's founding."—<I>Nation</I></P><P><I></I> </P><P>“A brilliant and spirited reinterpretation of the emergence of French New Orleans. Dawdy leads us deep into the daily life of the city, and along the many paths that connected it to France, the North American interior, and the Greater Caribbean. A major contribution to our understanding of the history of the Americas and of the French Atlantic, the work is also a model of interdisciplinary research and analysis, skillfully bringing together archival research, archaeology, and literary analysis.”—Laurent Dubois, Duke University</P></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Children's Literature http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5809646 Seth Lerer <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><DIV><DIV><P>Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children’s literature. <I>Children’s Literature </I>charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop’s fables to Mother Goose, from <I>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</I> to Peter Pan, from <I>Where the Wild Things Are </I>to Harry Potter.</P><P> </P><P>The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children’s literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beatrix Potter, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers. <I>Children’s Literature</I> is an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word. </P><P> </P><P>“Lerer has accomplished something magical. Unlike the many handbooks to children’s literature that synopsize, evaluate, or otherwise guide adults in the selection of materials for children, this work presents a true critical history of the genre. . . . Scholarly, erudite, and all but exhaustive, it is also entertaining and accessible. Lerer takes his subject seriously without making it dull.”—<I>Library Journal</I> (starred review)</P><P> </P><P>“Lerer’s history reminds us of the wealth of literature written during the past 2,600 years. . . . With his vast and multidimensional knowledge of literature, he underscores the vital role it plays in forming a child’s imagination. We are made, he suggests, by the books we read.”—<I>San Francisco Chronicle</I></P><P> </P><P>“There are dazzling chapters on John Locke and Empire, and nonsense, and Darwin, but Lerer’s most interesting chapter focuses on girls’ fiction. . . . A brilliant series of readings.”—Diane Purkiss, <I>Times Literary Supplement</I></P></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Gardens http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5815522 Robert Pogue Harrison <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.</P><P>With <I>Gardens</I>, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history.  The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur’an; Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt—all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power.</P><P> </P><P>Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, <I>Gardens</I> is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison’s earlier classics, <I>Forests</I> and <I>The Dominion of the Dead</I>. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility—and its enduring importance to humanity.</P><P> </P><P>"I find myself completely besotted by a new book titled <I>Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition</I>, by Robert Pogue Harrison. The author . . . is one of the very best cultural critics at work today. He is a man of deep learning, immense generosity of spirit, passionate curiosity and manifold rhetorical gifts."—Julia Keller, <I>Chicago</I><I> Tribune</I></P><P> </P><P>"This book is about gardens as a metaphor for the human condition. . . . Harrison draws freely and with brilliance from 5,000 years of Western literature and criticism, including works on philosophy and garden history. . . . He is a careful as well as an inspiring scholar."—Tom Turner, <I>Times Higher Education</I></P><P> </P><P>"When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight.  Having spent the subsequent 30 years in the febrile world of academic Lit. Crit. . . . I’m not sure that I’d sell my shirt for any living critic.  But if there had to be one, it would unquestionably be Robert Pogue Harrison, whose study <I>Forests: The Shadow of Civilization</I>, published in 1992, has the true quality of literature, not of criticism—it stays with you, like an amiable ghost, long after you read it.</P><P> </P><P>“Though more modest in scope, this new book is similarly destined to become a classic. It has two principal heroes: the ancient philosopher Epicurus . . . and the wonderfully witty Czech writer Karel Capek, apropos of whom it is remarked that, whereas most people believe gardening to be a subset of life, ‘gardeners, including Capek, understand that life is a subset of gardening.’”—Jonathan Bate, <I>The Spectator</I></P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Boxing http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5891265 Kasia Boddy <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><DIV><DIV>Boxing is one of the oldest and most exciting of sports: its bruising and bloody confrontations have permeated Western culture since 3000 BC. During that period, there has hardly been a time in which young men, and sometimes women, did not raise their gloved or naked fists to one other. Throughout this history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers and film-makers have been there to record and make sense of it all. </DIV><DIV> </DIV><DIV>In her encyclopaedic investigation, Kasia Boddy sheds new light on an elemental sports and struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. Boddy examines the shifting social, political and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, and shows how from Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Looking afresh at everything from neoclassical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, <EM>Boxing</EM> explores the way in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media, from cinema to radio to pay-per-view. The book also offers an intriguing new perspective on the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding, Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin, Philip Roth, James Joyce, Mae West, Bertolt Brecht, and Charles Dickens. </DIV><DIV> </DIV><DIV>An all-encompassing study, <EM>Boxing</EM> ultimately reveals to us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.</DIV><DIV> </DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Tippecanoe and Tyler Too http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5896644 Jan R. Van Meter <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><DIV><P>“By necessity, by proclivity, by delight,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said in 1876, “we all quote.” But often the phrases that fall most readily from our collective lips—like “fire when ready,”  “speak softly and carry a big stick,” or “nice guys finish last”—are those whose origins and true meanings we have ceased to consider. Restoring three-dimensionality to more than fifty of these American sayings, <I>Tippecanoe and Tyler Too</I> turns clichés back into history by telling the life stories of the words that have served as our most powerful battle cries, rallying points, laments, and inspirations.</P><P> </P><P>In individual entries on slogans and catchphrases from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth century, Jan Van Meter reveals that each one is a living, malleable entity that has profoundly shaped and continues to influence our public culture. From John Winthrop’s “We shall be as a city upon a hill” and the 1840 Log Cabin Campaign’s “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” and Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” each of Van Meter’s selections emerges as a memory device for a larger political or cultural story. Taken together in Van Meter’s able hands, these famous slogans and catchphrases give voice to our common history even as we argue about where it should lead us.</P><P> </P><P>“As Van Meter argues, these are important ‘memory devices for a larger story.’ . . . The author has thoroughly researched all the catchphrases . . . . This book would make delightful in-flight reading or a nice gift for a trivia buff. Recommended.”—<I>Choice </I></P></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Venice http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=1624 William McNeill <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>In this magisterial history, National Book Award winner William H. McNeill chronicles the interactions and disputes between Latin Christians and the Orthodox communities of eastern Europe during the period 1081–1797. Concentrating on Venice as the hinge of European history in the late medieval and early modern period, McNeill explores the technological, economic, and political bases of Venetian power and wealth, and the city’s unique status at the frontier between the papal and Orthodox Christian worlds. He pays particular attention to Venetian influence upon southeastern Europe, and from such an angle of vision, the familiar pattern of European history changes shape.</P><P>“No other historian would have been capable of writing a book as direct, as well-informed and as little weighed down by purple prose as this one. Or as impartial. McNeill has succeeded admirably.”—Fernand Braudel, <I>Times Literary Supplement</I></P><P>“The book is serious, interesting, occasionally compelling, and always suggestive.”—Stanley Chojnacki, <I>American Historical Review</I></P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Remains of Ritual http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5997299 Steven M. Friedson <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><P><EM>Remains of Ritual</EM>, Steven M. Friedson’s second book on musical experience in African ritual, focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. Friedson presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country. Each chapter of this fascinating book considers a different aspect of ritual life, demonstrating throughout that none of them can be conceived of separately from their musicality—in the Brekete world, music functions as ritual and ritual as music. Dance and possession, chanted calls to prayer, animal sacrifice, the sounds and movements of wake keeping, the play of the drums all come under Friedson’s careful scrutiny, as does his own position and experience within this ritual-dominated society.</P></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Nature's Ghosts http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6043479 Mark V. Barrow, Jr. <br><br><DIV><P>The rapid growth of the American environmental movement in recent decades obscures the fact that long before the first Earth Day and the passage of the Endangered Species Act, naturalists and concerned citizens recognized—and worried about—the problem of human-caused extinction.</P><P> </P><P>As Mark V. Barrow reveals in <I>Nature’s Ghosts</I>, the threat of species loss has haunted Americans since the early days of the republic. From Thomas Jefferson’s day—when the fossil remains of such fantastic lost animals as the mastodon and the woolly mammoth were first reconstructed—through the pioneering conservation efforts of early naturalists like John James Audubon and John Muir, Barrow shows how Americans came to understand that it was not only <I>possible</I> for entire species to die out, but that humans themselves could be responsible for their extinction. With the destruction of the passenger pigeon and the precipitous decline of the bison, professional scientists and wildlife enthusiasts alike began to understand that even very common species were not safe from the juggernaut of modern, industrial society. That realization spawned public education and legislative campaigns that laid the foundation for the modern environmental movement and the preservation of such iconic creatures as the bald eagle, the California condor, and the whooping crane.</P><P> </P><P>A sweeping, beautifully illustrated historical narrative that unites the fascinating stories of endangered animals and the dedicated individuals who have studied and struggled to protect them, <I>Nature’s Ghosts</I> offers an unprecedented view of what we’ve lost—and a stark reminder of the hard work of preservation still ahead.</P><P> </P></DIV><br></div> Greek Tyranny http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6166460 Sian Lewis <br><br><DIV>As well as introducing the reader to individual Greek tyrants, <I>Greek Tyranny</I> situates the phenomenon of tyranny within Mediterranean society as a whole, rather than treating it as an isolated episode. The title ‘tyrant’ became gradually less acceptable in Greek politics and the book aims to trace the changing attitudes of the Greeks towards autocratic rule, and the place that it occupied in the political life of Greece. <BR /> <BR />The book covers the whole period between 750 and 250, treating tyrants from Cypselos and Phalaris to Agathocles and Hieron II. Its horizons are also broad; instead of concentrating on mainland Greece, the discussion draws examples and comparisons from Rome and Italy, Sicily, Asia Minor, Thessaly and the Black Sea.<BR /> <BR /></DIV><DIV>The book offers powerful new arguments on the subject of tyranny and Greek political life and redresses the usual overemphasis on fifth-century Athens and democracy by presenting some of the alternative forms of government prevalent in classical Greece. The inclusion of a very wide range of rulers (and the colourful traditions which surround them) make both a lively book and a well-contextualised study.</DIV><DIV> </DIV><br></div> Augustus, First Roman Emperor http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6305661 Matthew D. H. Clark <br><br><DIV><P>A key figure in Roman History, Augustus (63 BC–14 AD) was the adopted son of Julius Caesar and the first to lead the Roman Empire; so mighty was he that upon his death the month previously known as Sextilis was renamed in his honor. In this volume, author Matthew D. H. Clark presents a fascinating analysis of how Augustus was able to manipulate the mechanisms of political power and use the classical world’s conception of propaganda to his advantage. Through an examination of the emperor’s relationship with Maecenas, his political advisor, and Agrippa, his great commander, as well as a host of historical personages, including the poets Virgil and Ovid, <I>Augustus</I> helps us understand this remarkable figure’s rise to power, as well as his lasting legacy.</P></DIV><br></div> Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6609532 Judith A. Allen <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Famous for her short fiction—most notably “The Yellow Wallpaper”—Charlotte Perkins Gilman also produced a vast body of nonfiction in tandem with her work as a Progressive-era feminist reformer. Rooted in groundbreaking research on Gilman’s extensive correspondence, publications, and speeches, this keenly argued intellectual biography reconstructs her controversial output and the heady context in which she produced it.</P><P>            Judith Allen provides the first comprehensive assessment of Gilman’s complicated feminism by exploring the renowned writer’s theories of sexuality and evolutionary analyses of androcentric—or male-dominated—culture. These ideas, Allen shows, informed Gilman’s many contributions to the suffrage movement, the fight to abolish regulated prostitution, and efforts to legalize birth control. Restoring a previously overlooked public intellectual to her preeminent place in Progressive-era politics and the history of feminism at home and abroad, Allen’s landmark study provides the fullest account available of Gilman’s consequential life and profoundly influential work.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Bulletproof http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6676834 Jennifer Wenzel <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>In 1856 and 1857, in response to a prophet’s command, the Xhosa people of southern Africa killed their cattle and ceased planting crops; the resulting famine cost tens of thousands of lives. Much like other millenarian, anticolonial movements—such as the Ghost Dance in North America and the Birsa Munda uprising in India—these actions were meant to transform the world and liberate the Xhosa from oppression. Despite the movement’s momentous failure to achieve that goal, the event has continued to exert a powerful pull on the South African imagination ever since. It is these afterlives of the prophecy that Jennifer Wenzel explores in <I>Bulletproof</I>.</P><P>            Wenzel examines literary and historical texts to show how writers have manipulated images and ideas associated with the cattle killing—harvest, sacrifice, rebirth, devastation—to speak to their contemporary predicaments. Widening her lens, Wenzel also looks at how past failure can both inspire and constrain movements for justice in the present, and her brilliant insights into the cultural implications of prophecy will fascinate readers across a wide variety of disciplines.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Richard Owen http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6680337 Nicolaas Rupke <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>In the mid-1850s, no scientist in the British Empire was more visible than Richard Owen. Mentioned in the same breath as Isaac Newton and championed as Britain’s answer to France’s Georges Cuvier and Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt, Owen was, as the <I>Times</I> declared in 1856, the most “distinguished man of science in the country.” But, a century and a half later, Owen remains largely obscured by the shadow of the most famous Victorian naturalist of all, Charles Darwin. Publicly marginalized by his contemporaries for his critique of natural selection, Owen suffered personal attacks that undermined his credibility long after his name faded from history.</P><P> </P><P>With this innovative biography, Nicolaas Rupke resuscitates Owen’s reputation. Arguing that Owen should no longer be judged by the evolution dispute that figured in  only a minor part of his work, Rupke stresses context, emphasizing the importance of places and practices in the production and reception of scientific knowledge. Dovetailing with the recent resurgence of interest in Owen’s life and work, Rupke’s book brings the forgotten naturalist back into the canon of the history of science and demonstrates how much biology existed with, and without, Darwin</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Heroic City http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6683602 Rosemary Wakeman <br><br><DIV><DIV><P><I>The Heroic City</I> is a sparkling account of the fate of Paris’s public spaces in the years following Nazi occupation and joyful liberation. Countering the traditional narrative that Paris’s public landscape became sterile and dehumanized in the 1940s and ’50s, Rosemary Wakeman instead finds that the city’s streets overflowed with ritual, drama, and spectacle. With frequent strikes and protests, young people and students on parade, North Africans arriving in the capital of the French empire, and radio and television shows broadcast live from the streets, Paris continued to be vital terrain.</P><P>            Wakeman analyzes the public life of the city from a variety of perspectives. A reemergence of traditional customs led to the return of festivals, street dances, and fun fairs, while violent protests and political marches, the housing crisis, and the struggle over decolonization signaled the political realities of postwar France. The work of urban planners and architects, the output of filmmakers and intellectuals, and the day-to-day experiences of residents from all walks of life come together in this vibrant portrait of a flamboyant and transformative moment in the life of the City of Light.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6683606 Sarra Copia Sulam <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>The first Jewish woman to leave her mark as a writer and intellectual, Sarra Copia Sulam (1600?–41) was doubly tainted in the eyes of early modern society by her religion and her gender. This remarkable woman, who until now has been relatively neglected by modern scholarship, was a unique figure in Italian cultural life, opening her home, in the Venetian ghetto, to Jews and Christians alike as a literary salon. </P><P> </P><P>For this bilingual edition, Don Harrán has collected all of Sulam’s previously scattered writings—letters, sonnets, a <I>Manifesto</I>—into a single volume. Harrán has also assembled all extant correspondence and poetry that was addressed to Sulam, as well as all known contemporary references to her, making them available to Anglophone readers for the first time. Featuring rich biographical and historical notes that place Sulam in her cultural context, this volume will provide readers with insight into the thought and creativity of a woman who dared to express herself in the male-dominated, overwhelmingly Catholic Venice of her time.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Passage to Cosmos http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6732997 Laura Dassow Walls <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With <I>Cosmos</I>, the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of humans and nature as integrated halves of a single whole. In it, Humboldt espoused the idea that, while the universe of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty and order, the very <I>idea</I> of the whole it composes, are human achievements: cosmos comes into being in the dance of world and mind, subject and object, science and poetry.</P><P> </P><P>Humboldt’s science laid the foundations for ecology and inspired the theories of his most important scientific disciple, Charles Darwin. In the United States, his ideas shaped the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman. They helped spark the American environmental movement through followers like John Muir and George Perkins Marsh. And they even bolstered efforts to free the slaves and honor the rights of Indians.</P><P> </P><P>Laura Dassow Walls here traces Humboldt’s ideas for <I>Cosmos </I>to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world’s peoples—and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. In reclaiming Humboldt’s transcultural and transdisciplinary project, Walls situates America in a lively and contested field of ideas, actions, and interests, and reaches beyond to a new worldview that integrates the natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities.</P><P> </P><P>To the end of his life, Humboldt called himself “half an American,” but ironically his legacy has largely faded in the United States. <I>The Passage to Cosmos </I>will reintroduce this seminal thinker to a new audience and return America to its rightful place in the story of his life, work, and enduring legacy.</P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> From Mesopotamia to Iraq http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6740807 Hans J. Nissen and Peter Heine <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>The recent reopening of Iraq’s National Museum attracted worldwide attention, underscoring the country’s dual image as both the cradle of civilization and a contemporary geopolitical battleground. A sweeping account of the rich history that has played out between these chronological poles, <I>From Mesopotamia to Iraq </I>looks back through 10,000 years of the region’s deeply significant yet increasingly overshadowed past. </P><P> </P><P>Hans J. Nissen and Peter Heine begin by explaining how ancient Mesopotamian inventions—including urban society, a system of writing, and mathematical texts that anticipated Pythagoras—profoundly influenced the course of human history. These towering innovations, they go on to reveal, have sometimes obscured the major role Mesopotamia continued to play on the world stage. Alexander the Great, for example, was fascinated by Babylon and eventually died there. Seventh-century Muslim armies made the region one of their first conquests outside the Arabian peninsula. And the Arab caliphs who ruled for centuries after the invasion built the magnificent city of Baghdad, attracting legions of artists and scientists. Tracing the evolution of this vibrant country into a contested part of the Ottoman Empire, a twentieth-century British colony, a republic ruled by Saddam Hussein, and the democracy it has become, Nissen and Heine repair the fragmented image of Iraq that has come to dominate our collective imagination.</P><P> </P><P>In hardly any other continuously inhabited part of the globe can we chart such developments in politics, economy, and culture across so extended a period of time. By doing just that, the authors illuminate nothing less than the forces that have made the world what it is today.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6740814 Emilie Du Châtelet <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Though most historians remember her as the mistress of Voltaire, Emilie Du Châtelet (1706–49) was an accomplished writer in her own right, who published multiple editions of her scientific writings during her lifetime, as well as a translation of Newton’s <I>Principia Mathematica</I> that is still the standard edition of that work in French. Had she been a man, her reputation as a member of the eighteenth-century French intellectual elite would have been assured.</P><P> </P><P>In the 1970s, feminist historians of science began the slow work of recovering Du Châtelet’s writings and her contributions to history and philosophy. For this edition, Judith P. Zinsser has selected key sections from Du Châtelet’s published and unpublished works, as well as related correspondence, part of her little-known critique of the Old and New Testaments, and a treatise on happiness that is a refreshingly uncensored piece of autobiography—making all of them available for the first time in English. The resulting volume will recover Châtelet’s place in the pantheon of French letters and culture.  </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Making the Modern World http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6807117 Edited by Andrew Nahum <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><P>The Kodak camera, the brain scanner, the steam turbine, the telephone. Inventions like these not only changed the course of history, but also our understanding of what the human race could achieve. Since its publication in 1990, <I>Making the Modern World</I> has served as an exquisitely illustrated guide to this remarkable history of human innovation. The second edition of <I>Making the Modern World</I> takes its readers up to the present day, with insightful discussions of the new technologies we already take for granted—from IVF to the Internet.  </P><P> </P><P>Organized chronologically, the book begins with a look at the navigational tools that mapped the New World, such as the octant and the chronometer, before moving on to the steam-powered factory machines of the Industrial Revolution, the life-saving medicines of World War’s I and II, and the dynamically designed consumer goods of the 1950s and 60s. An essay about each invention is written by an expert in the field and includes a short history of its creation, use, and significance—and is accompanied by a specially commissioned color photograph as well as supplementary archive photographs in black and white. </P><P> </P><P>Edited by Andrew Nahum, curator of technology at London’s Science Museum, <I>Making the Modern World</I> will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in new developments in science and technology. Its colorful images and concise descriptive text, moreover, make this second edition an unrivaled reference for the budding engineers and scientists among us.</P></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Manly Love http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6817179 Axel Nissen <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>The modern idea of Victorians is that they were emotionless prudes, imprisoned by sexual repression and suffocating social constraints; they expressed love and affection only within the bounds of matrimony—if at all. And yet, a wealth of evidence contradicting this idea has been hiding in plain sight for close to a century. In <I>Manly Love</I>, Axel Nissen turns to the novels and short stories of Victorian America to uncover the widely overlooked phenomenon of passionate friendships between men.</P><P> </P><P>Nissen’s examination of the literature of the period brings to light a forgotten genre: the fiction of romantic friendship. Delving into works by Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and others, Nissen identifies the genre’s unique features and explores the connections between romantic friendships in literature and in real life. Situating love between men at the heart of Victorian culture, Nissen radically alters our understanding of the American literary canon. And with its deep insights into the emotional and intellectual life of the period, <I>Manly Love</I> also offers a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century America’s attitudes toward love, friendship, marriage, and sex. </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6853055 Edited by Michael Dietler and Carolina López-Ruiz <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>During the first millennium BCE, complex encounters of Phoenician and Greek colonists with natives of the Iberian Peninsula transformed the region and influenced the entire history of the Mediterranean. </P><P> </P><P>One of the first books on these encounters to appear in English, this volume brings together a multinational group of contributors to explore ancient Iberia’s colonies and indigenous societies, as well as the comparative study of colonialism. These scholars—from a range of disciplines including classics, history, anthropology, and archaeology—address such topics as trade and consumption, changing urban landscapes, cultural transformations, and the ways in which these issues played out in the Greek and Phoenician imaginations. Situating ancient Iberia within Mediterranean colonial history and establishing a theoretical framework for approaching encounters between colonists and natives, these studies exemplify the new intellectual vistas opened by the engagement of colonial studies with Iberian history.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Science for All http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6885673 Peter J. Bowler <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Recent scholarship has revealed that pioneering Victorian scientists endeavored through voluminous writing to raise public interest in science and its implications. But it has generally been assumed that once science became a profession around the turn of the century, this new generation of scientists turned its collective back on public outreach. <I>Science for All</I> debunks this apocryphal notion.</P><P>Peter J. Bowler surveys the books, serial works, magazines, and newspapers published between 1900 and the outbreak of World War II to show that practicing scientists were very active in writing about their work for a general readership. <I>Science for All</I> argues that the social environment of early twentieth-century Britain created a substantial market for science books and magazines aimed at those who had benefited from better secondary education but could not access higher learning. Scientists found it easy and profitable to write for this audience, Bowler reveals, and because their work was seen as educational, they faced no hostility from their peers. But when admission to colleges and universities became more accessible in the 1960s, this market diminished and professional scientists began to lose interest in writing at the nonspecialist level. </P><P>Eagerly anticipated by scholars of scientific engagement throughout the ages, <I>Science for All </I>sheds light on our own era and the continuing tension between science and public understanding. </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> French Atlantic http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6899475 Bill Marshall <br><br><DIV><P><I>The French Atlantic</I> is a compelling and timely contribution to ongoing debates about nationhood, culture, and “Frenchness” that have come to define France and its diaspora in light of the diplomatic fracas surrounding the Iraq war and other mass cultural events. With interdisciplinary navigation of fields nearly as diverse as the locations he explores, Bill Marshall considers the cultural history of seven different French Atlantic spaces—from Quebec to the southern Caribbean to North Atlantic territory and back to metropolitan France—in this groundbreaking study of the Atlantic world.</P></DIV><br></div> City and Cosmos http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6899758 Keith D. Lilley <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>In <I>City and Cosmos</I>, Keith D. Lilley argues that the medieval mind considered the city truly a microcosm: much more than a collection of houses, a city also represented a scaled-down version of the very order and organization of the cosmos. Drawing upon a wide variety of sources, including original accounts, visual art, science, literature, and architectural history, <I>City and Cosmos </I>offers an innovative interpretation of how medieval Christians infused their urban surroundings with meaning. </P><P>            Lilley combines both visual and textual evidence to demonstrate how the city carried Christian cosmological meaning and symbolism, sharing common spatial forms and functional ordering. <I> City and Cosmos</I> will not only appeal to a diverse range of scholars studying medieval history, archaeology, philosophy, and theology; but it will also find a broad audience in architecture, urban planning, and art history. With more of the world’s population inhabiting cities than ever before, this original perspective on urban order and culture will prove increasingly valuable to anyone wishing to better understand the role of the city in society. </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Old Yukon http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6899953 James Wickersham <br><br><DIV><P>In this humorous and upbeat memoir, James Wickersham describes his career as a pioneer judge and later as a congressional representative assigned to a vast, snow-covered district, extending over 300,000 square miles in the undeveloped Alaska Territory.  Wickersham’s many adventures include traveling by dogsled over hundreds of miles through snow-covered mountains; serving as judge for the trials of many famous outlaws in the midst of the gold strikes; and hunting, mining, and climbing in his local Alaska wilderness. Though he was instrumental in the early history of Alaska, and his legacy is evident throughout the state—for example, he named the city of Fairbanks—this is the first and only work to focus on Wickersham’s life during this pivotal time in Alaska’s history. </P></DIV><br></div> Artful Craft http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6921864 Edited by the Bodleian Library <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Despite the recent emergence of handheld electronic text readers, the physical book remains one of civilization’s most enduring cultural artifacts. The actual book itself can be a carefully crafted art object—one which can be appreciated on its own, apart from the text it contains. A new exhibition at the Bodleian Library celebrates the craft of artistry of bookbinding through the last millennium, and this accompanying exhibition catalog, <I>An Artful Craft</I><I>, </I>beautifully reproduces over 100 lavish bookbindings in full color. </P><P>            Featuring ancient, decorative, and unusual bindings, <I>An Artful Craft </I>was culled from the extensive collection held by the Bodleian Library, including the renowned Broxbourne collection. It also includes books from the Sir Paul Getty Library at Wormsley and from a private collection that have never before been exhibited. Arranged in thematic sections, such as East meets West and Artists and Craftsmen, the book is brilliantly designed and includes foldout sections to illustrate some full bindings. <I></I></P><P><I>            An Artful Craft</I> promises to be an important resource for all scholars of the book, as well as a collector’s item to be cherished by artists, writers, and booklovers alike. </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Libraries within the Library http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6921977 Edited by Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor <br><br><DIV><P>The earliest libraries belonged to temples and administrative bodies, resembled our modern archives, and were usually restricted to the aristocracy, nobility, theologians, and for the use of scholars. </P><DIV>Dispersed along the shelves of the British Library today are many volumes that once stood side by side in private libraries. This collection of original essays explores  some of the most important printed collections which have been brought together within the British Museum Library since its foundation in 1753, casting new light on the individuals whose personal interests and taste they reflect. Ranging from the library of Henry VIII to Sir Joseph Banks, and from Sir Hans Sloane to George III, this volume also acts as a handbook to provenance within the British Library collections, providing guidance on the interpretation of marks of ownership, stamps, shelfmarks and other forms of evidence to be found in particular copies. </DIV></DIV><br></div> Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553 - 2 vol set http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6925335 Edited and Translated by Richard Price <br><br><DIV><P>The Council of Constantinople of 553, often called Constantinople II or the Fifth Ecumenical Council, has been described as by far the most problematic of all of the church councils. The methods employed by the Council and the domineering emperor who controlled it included brutality towards opponents and the falsification of documents, among other charges. This timely and detailed translation by acclaimed ecclesiastical scholar Richard Price argues, however, that the theology of the council was both opportune and constructive and that its contributions to Christian unity was well-intentioned and not wholly unsuccessful, as he reevaluates material long neglected by historians of the period.</P></DIV><br></div> Terror of Natural Right http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6933689 Dan Edelstein <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. But during the French Revolution, this tradition was interpreted to justify the most repressive actions of the violent period known as the Terror.</P><P>In <I>The Terror of Natural Right</I>, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. But the significance of the natural right did not end with its legal application. Edelstein argues that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he argues that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre.</P><P>A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, <I>The Terror of Natural Right </I>challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Sojourners in a Strange Land http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6963841 Florence C. Hsia <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese. But the icon of the missionary-scientist is itself a complex myth. Masterfully correcting the standard story of China Jesuits as simple conduits for Western science, Florence C. Hsia shows how these missionary-scientists remade themselves as they negotiated the place of the profane sciences in a religious enterprise.</P><P> </P><P><I>Sojourners in a Strange Land</I> develops a genealogy of Jesuit conceptions of scientific life within the Chinese mission field from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Analyzing the printed record of their endeavors in natural philosophy and mathematics, Hsia identifies three models of the missionary man of science by their genres of writing: mission history, travelogue, and academic collection. Drawing on the history of early modern Europe’s scientific, religious, and print culture, she uses the elaboration and reception of these scientific personae to construct the first collective biography of the Jesuit missionary-scientist’s many incarnations in late imperial China.  </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Likeness of the King http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6966957 Stephen Perkinson <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Anyone who has strolled through the halls of a museum knows that portraits occupy a central place in the history of art. But did portraits, as such, exist in the medieval era? Stephen Perkinson’s <I>The Likeness of the King</I> challenges the canonical account of the invention of modern portrait practices, offering a case against the tendency of recent scholarship to identify likenesses of historical personages as “the first modern portraits.”</P><P> </P><P>Unwilling to accept the anachronistic nature of these claims, Perkinson both resists and complicates grand narratives of portraiture art that ignore historical context. Focusing on the Valois court of France, he argues that local practice prompted shifts in the late medieval understanding of how images could represent individuals and prompted artists and patrons to deploy likeness in a variety of ways. Through an examination of well-known images of the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century kings of France, as well as largely overlooked objects such as wax votive figures and royal seals, Perkinson demonstrates that the changes evident in these images do not constitute a revolutionary break with the past, but instead were continuous with late medieval representational traditions.</P><P> </P><DIV>“A lively, well-researched, and insightful work of scholarship on late-medieval portraiture and its cultural and intellectual context. <I>The Likeness of the King</I> provides a strong account of late-medieval aesthetics and specific, concrete examples of image-making and the often political needs it served. It offers smart handling of literary, philosophical, and archival sources; close and insightful reading of images; and a willingness to counter received ideas.”—Rebecca Zorach, University of Chicago </DIV><P> </P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Chicago http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=7877998 Dominic A. Pacyga <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Chicago has been called by many names. Nelson Algren declared it “A City on the Make.” Carl Sandburg dubbed it the “City of Big Shoulders.” Upton Sinclair christened it “The Jungle,” while New Yorkers, naturally, pronounced it “the Second City.”</P><P> </P><P>At last there is a book for all of us, whatever we choose to call Chicago. Here, historian Dominic Pacyga gives his hometown the magisterial biography it has long deserved. <I>Chicago</I><I> </I>traces the city’s storied past, from the explorations of Joliet and Marquette in 1673 to the new wave of urban pioneers today. The city’s great industrialists, reformers, and politicians—and, indeed, the many not-so-great and downright notorious—animate this book, from Al Capone and Jane Addams to Mayor Richard J. Daley and President Barack Obama.</P><P> </P><P>But what distinguishes this book from the many others on the subject is its author’s uncommon ability to illuminate the lives of Chicago’s ordinary people. Born and raised in Back of the Yards on Chicago’s southwest side, Pacyga spent his college years working at the Union Stock Yards. <I>Chicago</I>, therefore, gives voice to the city’s steelyard workers and kill floor operators, mapping the neighborhoods distinguished not by Louis Sullivan masterworks, but by bungalows and corner taverns. And their stories come alive through an extensive selection of evocative illustrations culled from major institutional archives, local historical societies, and the author’s personal collection.</P><P> </P><P>Filled with the city’s one-of-a-kind characters and all of its defining moments, <I>Chicago: A Biography</I> is as big and boisterous as its namesake—and as ambitious as the men and women who built it.</P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Schooling Citizens http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=7878001 Hilary J. Moss <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>While white residents of antebellum Boston and New Haven forcefully opposed the education of black residents, their counterparts in slaveholding Baltimore did little to resist the establishment of African American schools. Such discrepancies, Hilary Moss argues, suggest that white opposition to black education was not a foregone conclusion. Through the comparative lenses of these three cities, she shows why opposition erupted where it did across the United States during the same period that gave rise to public education. </P><P> </P><P>As common schooling emerged in the 1830s, providing white children of all classes and ethnicities with the opportunity to become full-fledged citizens, it redefined citizenship as synonymous with whiteness. This link between school and American identity, Moss argues, increased white hostility to black education at the same time that it spurred African Americans to demand public schooling as a means of securing status as full and equal members of society. Shedding new light on the efforts of black Americans to learn independently in the face of white attempts to withhold opportunity, <I>Schooling Citizens</I> narrates a previously untold chapter in the thorny history of America’s educational inequality.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Sinister Yogis http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=7878005 David Gordon White <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old aged. Marketed as a clear path to self-realization, mind expansion, and taut abs, yoga is also perceived as an ancient and unchanging Indian tradition based on the revelations of benign and limber sages. But this modern conception of yoga derives from nineteenth-century European spirituality, <I>Sinister Yogis</I> reveals, and the true story of yoga’s origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and much more entertaining.</P><P> </P><P>To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on yoga’s practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asia’s vast and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilities—which can include raising the dead, possession, and levitation—to acquire power, money, and sexual gratification. As White shows, even those yogis who aren’t downright villainous bear little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. At turns rollicking and sophisticated, <I>Sinister Yogis</I> tears down the image of yogis as detached, contemplative teachers, finally placing them in their proper context.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8007256 Nancy S. Struever <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Since antiquity, philosophy and rhetoric have traditionally been cast as rivals, with the former often lauded as a search for logical truth and the latter usually disparaged as empty speech. But in this erudite intellectual history, Nancy S. Struever stakes out a claim for rhetoric as the more productive form of inquiry.</P><P> </P><P>Struever views rhetoric through the lens of modality, arguing that rhetoric’s guiding interest in what is possible—as opposed to philosophy’s concern with what is necessary—makes it an ideal tool for understanding politics. Innovative readings of Hobbes and Vico allow her to reexamine rhetoric’s role in the history of modernity and to make fascinating connections between thinkers from the classical, early modern, and modern periods. From there she turns to Walter Benjamin, reclaiming him as an exemplar of modernist rhetoric and a central figure in the long history of the form. Persuasive and perceptive, <I>Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity</I> is a novel rewriting of the history of rhetoric and a heady examination of the motives, issues, and flaws of contemporary inquiry.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Epidemic Invasions http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8056086 Mariola Espinosa <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>In the early fall of 1897, yellow fever shuttered businesses, paralyzed trade, and caused tens of thousand of people living in the southern United States to abandon their homes and flee for their lives. Originating in Cuba, the deadly plague inspired disease-control measures that not only protected U.S. trade interests but also justified the political and economic domination of the island nation from which the pestilence came. By focusing on yellow fever, <I>Epidemic Invasions</I> uncovers for the first time how the devastating power of this virus profoundly shaped the relationship between the two countries.  </P><P> </P><P>Yellow fever in Cuba, Mariola Espinosa demonstrates, motivated the United States to declare war against Spain in 1898, and, after the war was won and the disease eradicated, the United States demanded that Cuba pledge in its new constitution to maintain the sanitation standards established during the occupation. By situating the history of the fight against yellow fever within its political, military, and economic context, Espinosa reveals that the U.S. program of sanitation and disease control in Cuba was not a charitable endeavor. Instead, she shows that it was an exercise in colonial public health that served to eliminate threats to the continued expansion of U.S. influence in the world.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Giordano Bruno http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8167222 Ingrid D. Rowland <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland’s biography establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo—a thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours. </P><P> </P><P>Writing with great verve and erudition, Rowland traces Bruno’s wanderings through a sixteenth-century Europe where every certainty of religion and philosophy has been called into question, and reveals how he valiantly defended his ideas to the very end, when he was burned at the stake as a heretic on Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori. </P><P> </P><P>“A loving and thoughtful account of [Bruno’s] life and thought, satires and sonnets, dialogues and lesson plans, vagabond days and star-spangled nights. . . . Ingrid D. Rowland has her reasons for preferring Bruno to Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, even Galileo and Leonardo, and they’re good ones.”—John Leonard, <I>Harper’s</I></P><P> </P><P>“Whatever else Bruno was, he was wild-minded and extreme, and Rowland communicates this, together with a sense of the excitement that his ideas gave him. . . . It’s that feeling for the explosiveness of the period, and [Rowland’s] admiration of Bruno for participating in it—indeed, dying for it—that is the central and most cherishable quality of the biography.”—Joan Acocella, <I>New Yorker</I></P><P><I></I> </P><P>“Rowland tells this great story in moving, vivid prose, concentrating as much on Bruno’s thought as on his life. . . . His restless mind, as she makes clear, not only explored but transformed the heavens.”—Anthony Grafton, <I>New York Review of Books</I></P><P> </P><P>“[Bruno] seems to have been an unclassifiable mixture of foul-mouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, religious reformer, scholastic philosopher, and slightly wacky astronomer.”—Anthony Gottlieb, <I>New York Times Book Review</I></P><P> </P><P>“A marvelous feat of scholarship. . . . This is intellectual biography at its best.”—Peter N. Miller, <I>New Republic</I></P><P> </P><P>“An excellent starting point for anyone who wants to rediscover the historical figure concealed beneath the cowl on Campo de’ Fiori.”—Paula Findlen, <I>Nation</I></P><P><EM></EM> </P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Moon, Come to Earth http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8195836 Philip Graham <br><br><DIV><P>A dispatch from a foreign land, when crafted by an attentive and skilled writer, can be magical, transmitting pleasure, drama, and seductive strangeness.</P><P> </P><P>In <I>The Moon, Come to Earth,</I> Philip Graham offers an expanded edition of a popular series of dispatches originally published on <I>McSweeney’s</I>, an exuberant yet introspective account of a year’s sojourn in Lisbon with his wife and daughter. Casting his attentive gaze on scenes as broad as a citywide arts festival and as small as a single paving stone in a cobbled walk, Graham renders Lisbon from a perspective that varies between wide-eyed and knowing; though he’s unquestionably not a tourist, at the same time he knows he will never be a local. So his lyrical accounts reveal his struggles with (and love of) the Portuguese language, an awkward meeting with Nobel laureate José Saramago, being trapped in a budding soccer riot, and his daughter’s challenging transition to adolescence while attending a Portuguese school—but he also waxes loving about Portugal’s <I>saudade</I>-drenched music, its inventive cuisine, and its vibrant literary culture. And through his humorous, self-deprecating, and wistful explorations, we come to know Graham himself, and his wife and daughter, so that when an unexpected crisis hits his family, we can’t help but ache alongside them.</P><P> </P><P>A thoughtful, finely wrought celebration of the moment-to-moment excitement of diving deep into another culture and confronting one’s secret selves, <I>The Moon, Come to Earth</I> is literary travel writing of a rare intimacy and immediacy.</P></DIV><br></div> Imperial City http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8324786 Susan Vandiver Nicassio <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>In 1798, the armies of the French Revolution tried to transform Rome from the capital of the Papal States to a Jacobin Republic. For the next two decades, Rome was the subject of power struggles between the forces of the Empire and the Papacy, while Romans endured the unsuccessful efforts of Napoleon’s best and brightest to pull the ancient city into the modern world. Against this historical backdrop, Nicassio weaves together an absorbing social, cultural, and political history of Rome and its people. Based on primary sources and incorporating two centuries of Italian, French, and international research, her work reveals what life was like for Romans in the age of Napoleon.</P><P> </P><P>“A remarkable book that wonderfully vivifies an understudied era in the history of Rome. . . . This book will engage anyone interested in early modern cities, the relationship between religion and daily life, and the history of the city of Rome.”—<I>Journal of Modern History</I></P><P> </P><P>“An engaging account of Tosca’s Rome. . . . Nicassio provides a fluent introduction to her subject.”—<I>History Today</I></P><P> </P><P>“Meticulously researched, drawing on a host of original manuscripts, memoirs, personal letters, and secondary sources, enabling [Nicassio] to bring her story to life.”—<I>History</I></P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Great Plains http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8324795 Michael Forsberg <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>The Great Plains were once among the greatest grasslands on the planet. But as the United States and Canada grew westward, the Plains were plowed up, fenced in, overgrazed, and otherwise degraded. Today, this fragmented landscape is the most endangered and least protected ecosystem in North America. But all is not lost on the prairie. Through lyrical photographs, essays, historical images, and maps, this beautifully illustrated book gets beneath the surface of the Plains, revealing the lingering wild that still survives and whose diverse natural communities, native creatures, migratory traditions, and natural systems together create one vast and extraordinary whole.</P><P> </P><P>Three broad geographic regions in <I>Great Plains</I> are covered in detail, evoked in the unforgettable and often haunting images taken by Michael Forsberg. Between the fall of 2005 and the winter of 2008, Forsberg traveled roughly 100,000 miles across 12 states and three provinces, from southern Canada to northern Mexico, to complete the photographic fieldwork for this project, underwritten by The Nature Conservancy. Complementing Forsberg’s images and firsthand accounts are essays by Great Plains scholar David Wishart and acclaimed writer Dan O’Brien. Each section of the book begins with a thorough overview by Wishart, while O’Brien—a wildlife biologist and rancher as well as a writer—uses his powerful literary voice to put the Great Plains into a human context, connecting their natural history with man’s uses and abuses.</P><P> </P><P>The Great Plains are a dynamic but often forgotten landscape—overlooked, undervalued, misunderstood, and in desperate need of conservation. This book helps lead the way forward, informing and inspiring readers to recognize the wild spirit and splendor of this irreplaceable part of the planet.</P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Secrets of the Universe http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8331033 Paul Murdin <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Discoveries in astronomy challenge our fundamental ideas about the universe. Where the astronomers of antiquity once spoke of fixed stars, we now speak of whirling galaxies and giant supernovae. Where we once thought Earth was the center of the universe, we now see it as a small planet among millions of other planetary systems, any number of which could also hold life. These dramatic shifts in our perspective hinge on thousands of individual discoveries: moments when it became clear to someone that some part of the universe—whether a planet or a supermassive black hole—was not as it once seemed.</P><P> </P><P><I>Secrets of the Universe</I> invites us to participate in these moments of revelation and wonder as scientists first experienced them. Renowned astronomer Paul Murdin here provides an ambitious and exciting overview of astronomy, conveying for newcomers and aficionados alike the most important discoveries of this science and introducing the many people who made them. Lavishly illustrated with more than 400 color images, the book outlines in seventy episodes what humankind has learned about the cosmos—and what scientists around the world are poised to learn in the coming decades. Arranged by types of discovery, it also provides an overarching narrative throughout that explains how the earliest ideas of the cosmos evolved into the cutting-edge astronomy we know today. Along the way, Murdin never forgets that science is a <I>human</I> endeavor, and that every discovery was the result of inspiration, hard work, or luck—usually all three.</P><P> </P><P>The first section of <I>Secrets</I> explores discoveries made before the advent of the telescope, from stars and constellations to the position of our own sun. The second considers discoveries made within our own solar system, from the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter to the comets and asteroids at its distant frontier. The next section delves into discoveries of the dynamic universe, like gravitation, relativity, pulsars, and black holes. A fourth examines discoveries made within our own galaxy, from interstellar nebulae and supernovae to Cepheid variable stars and extrasolar planets. Next Murdin turns to discoveries made within the deepest recesses of the universe, like quasars, supermassive black holes, and gamma ray bursters. In the end, Murdin unveils where astronomy still teeters on the edge of discovery, considering dark matter and alien life.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Arab-Israeli Conflict http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364270 Ian J. Bickerton <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Though more than sixty years have passed since the signing of the proclamation of the State of Israel, the impact of that epochal event continues to shape the political policies and public opinion of not only the Middle East but much of the world. The consequent conflict between Arabs and Israelis for sovereignty over the land of Palestine has been one of the most bloody, intractable, and drawn-out of modern times. It continues today in cycles of aggressive violence followed by temporary, tenuous ceasefires that are marked and complicated by resolute opinions and fractious religious ideologies. In this timely volume, noted military historian Ian J. Bickerton cuts through the complex perspectives in order to explain this struggle in objective detail, describing its history from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following World War I to the present day.</P><P> </P><P>In concise and clear prose, Bickerton argues that the present problem can be traced to the fact that each side is trapped by a conception of their past from which they seem unable to break free. This attachment and reaction to history has had a negative influence on the decision-making of Arabs and Israelis since 1948. Ultimately, Bickerton maintains that the use of armed force has not, and will not, resolve the issues that have divided Israelis and Arabs.</P><P> </P><P><I>The Arab-Israeli Conflic</I>t is a plea for reasoned diplomacy in a situation that has been dominated by extreme violence. This book will appeal to a wide general audience seeking a balanced understanding of this enduring struggle that still dominates headlines.</P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Great War and German Memory http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364368 Jason Crouthamel <br><br><DIV><P>In Weimar Germany and under the Third Reich, views on class, war, masculinity, and social deviance were shaped by debates about—but not with—the survivors of the World War I. This volume uses previously unexplored first-person accounts in order to focus on the traumatized German war veterans, following these vulnerable members of society forward in history and examining their marginalization within their own nation, as well as their authentic memory of the Great War. Crouthamel situates his exploration of the veterans’ words and world in the contemporary field of trauma studies, revealing a previously hidden vein of protest against the Nazi institutions and official memory of the time and exposing the universal problems faced by societies coping with war and the politics of the veterans’ long-term care.</P></DIV><br></div> Ramparts of Empire http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364375 Timothy Crick <br><br><DIV><P>In 1860, Palmerston’s parliament sanctioned the construction of the largest system of fortifications that the British Isles had ever seen, or would ever see again, in order to defend against a feared French invasion. William Jervois (1821–97), then a young major in the Royal Engineers, was appointed as “design leader” of this program, which later led to a career in fortress construction that spanned continents and empires. This volume is a detailed study of Jervois’s life and works, based on extensive use of extracts from his diary and illustrations of his most important fortresses, offering the reader a rounded picture of his glittering career, as well as the political and technical considerations involved in fort and armament construction.</P></DIV><br></div> Emperors' Needles http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364387 Susan Sorek <br><br><DIV><P>Obelisks—the ubiquitous, four-sided monuments with pyramid tops that dotted the landscapes of ancient Egypt—reached their heyday between 2000 and 1500 BC, when they transformed from emblems of the sun cult to everyday objects proclaiming the splendor of the pharaohs. Today, only twenty-seven Egyptian obelisks remain standing, long ago dispersed to various locales throughout the world; Rome, with thirteen—each of which is in a different corner of the Eternal City—possesses more than anywhere else, including Egypt. This fascinating volume is a comprehensive guide to these remarkable objects, as well as the history of their construction and transmission. </P><P> </P><P>Aimed both at the scholar and culturally interested traveler, <I>The Emperors’ Needles</I> links two of our greatest ancient civilizations, for the first time, through an in-depth account of their standing monuments. Tracing the interest of Roman emperors in the obelisk as an object of prestige and power, as well as discussing each monument in detail, the individual histories and remarkable accounts presented in this highly illustrated volume are not to be missed by any enthusiast of Roman or Egyptian culture.</P></DIV><br></div> Three Political Voices from the Age of Justinian http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364537 Translated with an Introduction and notes by Peter N. Bell <br><br><DIV><P>This one-volume translation, with commentary and introduction, brings together three important works—<I>Advice to the Emperor, Dialogue on Political Science,</I> and<I> Description of the Hagia Sophia</I>—which cast light on the generally neglected politics and ideology of early Byzantium. No complete modern English translation of any of these three works exists and they each highlight the clash of political and religious ideology of the period. </P></DIV><br></div> History and Hagiography from the Late-Antique Sinai http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364567 Translated with an Introduction and notes by Daniel Caner <br><br><DIV><P>This volume collects a number of important texts that have never before been translated into a modern language, each of which describes the late antique conditions and experiences on the Sinai peninsula. The texts in translation include Pseudo-Nilus’s <I>Narrationes</I>, Nilus of Ancyrus’s <I>Epistula</I>, and fifty tales attributed to Anastasius of Sinai. All remain important for late antique history, literature, and religion, as well as for their special focus on developments in the Sinai region prior to the Islamic period.</P></DIV><br></div> Titanic and Liverpool http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364605 Alan Scarth <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>On the fateful night of April 14, 1912, if you could have stood behind the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic as she went down in the frigid waters off of the Great Banks of Newfoundland, the last sight that would have flashed before your eyes as the great ship became lost to the sea would have been the word “Liverpool.” The loss of such a storied liner, a national and international tragedy, was also a tragedy for its home port—and this fascinating, first of its kind volume explores the history and myths surrounding the sinking in terms of the extraordinary stories that link Europe’s preeminent port city of Liverpool and its most famous maritime loss.</P><P> </P><DIV>Many of the ship's key officers and crew were either from Liverpool or had strong links with the port, and many of the most colorful tales emerging from the disaster relate to lower-class Liverpudlians who scurried to join the voyage. Using material from the archives of the White Star Line, the extensive holdings of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, rich newly discovered illustrations, and a variety of other topical historical sources, author Alan Scarth unearths the unbelievable back story of key characters, minor crewmen turned unsung heroes, and company officers who, though not on the ship, were intimately connected to the events of that infamous evening. We also find out what happened to the survivors when they went on with their lives following the ship’s sinking.</DIV><P> </P><P>Filled with previously unpublished source material and illustrations, <I>Titanic and Liverpool</I> will be compulsory reading for anyone interested not only in the fateful events of that unforgettable night.</P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364628 Robert Parthesius <br><br><DIV><P>During the closing years of the sixteenth century, the Dutch East India Company fast became a political and economic force in Asia, en route to becoming the leading private company in the world by 1660. This definitive volume explores perhaps the most important tool in the company’s trade: its ships. Robert Parthesius here reconstructs the complete shipping activities of the Company through a unique database that charts the movements of even previously ignored smaller vessels. Demonstrating that the wide range of types and sizes of vessels were indeed what gave the Company the ability to sail—and to continue its profitable trade—year after year, <I>Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters</I> combines the best of maritime history and archaeological research in order to change our understanding of the logistical dynamics behind one of the most important and successful businesses of this period.</P></DIV><br></div> Reframing Singapore http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364683 Edited by Derek Heng and Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied <br><br><DIV><P>Over the past two decades, Singapore has advanced rapidly towards becoming a both a global city-state and a key nodal point in the international economic sphere. These developments have caused us to reassess how we understand this changing nation, including its history, population, and geography, as well as its transregional and transnational experiences with the external world. This collection spans several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and draws on various theoretical approaches and methodologies in order to produce a more refined understanding of Singapore and to reconceptialize the challenges faced by the country and its peoples.</P></DIV><br></div> Responding to the West http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364703 Edited by Hans Hägerdal <br><br><DIV><P>The international contributors to this penetrating volume apply fresh perspectives and new methodologies to the Asian colonial experience, from the eighteenth century through the post World War II decolonization. Historiography, gender, military studies, finance, and issues of race and class all feature in this wide-ranging account of the diversity of human relationships forged by the colonial presence. For all of its features of structural oppression, colonialism was not a one-way communicative process, as this volume demonstrates through its analysis of the ever-shifting roles of colonizer and colonized.</P></DIV><br></div> Place of Belonging http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364742 Phyllis Demuth Movius <br><br><DIV><P>Alaska has always attracted people from varied backgrounds. In <I>A Place of Belonging</I>, Phyllis Movius introduces us to five women who settled in Fairbanks between 1903 and 1923 and who typify the disparate population that has long enriched Alaska. The women’s daily lives and personal stories are woven together in these biographical portraits, drawn from the women’s letters, memoirs, personal papers, club records, their own oral histories and published writings. Enriched by many never-before-published historical photos, Movius’s research gives us a unique inroad into life on the frontier.</P></DIV><br></div> Gendering Historiography http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364778 Edited by Angelika Epple and Angelika Schaser <br><br><DIV><P>Comparing various European and American historiographies from the past two hundred years, <I>Gendering Historiography</I> provides insights into the establishment and cultivation of gendered power relations in different societies and outlines the devastating effects that exclusionary practices can have on each national canon. This detailed and revealing book will change the face of history writing, bringing overlooked and previously excluded histories back into modern historiography.</P></DIV><br></div> Manhood http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364838 Mels van Driel <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>The ancient Greeks paraded enormous sculptural replicas in annual celebration . . . Freud theorized that women envied them . . . an undeniable, global symbol of power and virility since the beginning of humankind—the penis has been much discussed, gestured toward, and depicted, yet seldom understood outside folklore and popular culture’s uneasy mix of self-deprecation and aggrandizement. Despite the penis’s central role in human life or perhaps due to that role, nearly every man seems to suffer in isolation or silence from some perceived inadequacy or affliction. That’s where experienced urologist and sexologist Mels van Driel comes in. In <I>Manhood, </I>van Driel offers an unprecedented history of the penis—with answers to everything you wanted to know, and even some questions you’d never thought to ask.</P><P> </P><P>In<I> Manhood, </I>van Driel presents the history of the male sexual organ from medical, psychological, and cultural perspectives. Investigating the penis and its functions, from the scrotum to the glans, Van Driel’s work ranges from inguinal hernia to infertility, and from impotence to the speed of ejaculation. Psychological factors that have an impact on sexual experience, as well as contemporary phenomena, such as cyber sex, are given enlightening treatment along the way.</P><P> </P><P>With good humor and much insight, van Driel offers diverse and instructive examples. This informative guide is not just a book for men, but for women too—anyone curious to know the facts behind the many myths and stories of the penis.</P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Bullfighting http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364842 Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>“Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in <I>Death in the Afternoon. </I>Art? Ritual? Sport? Cruelty? Though opinions are divided, one thing is certain—bullfighting sparks passionate responses. Supporters argue that bullfighting is a culturally important tradition stretching back thousands of years; while animal rights groups argue that it is cruel and barbaric, causing unnecessary suffering to both bulls and horses. In <I>A History of Bullfighting </I>Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier brings clarity to this debate through an exploration of the long history of killing bulls as public spectacle.</P><P> </P><P><I>A History of Bullfighting </I>is the first cross-cultural study of bullfighting, covering Europe, North America, and Latin America. Hardouin-Fugier shows how each continent has its own unique style and tools of the trade. For example, in North America, the favored technique is grabbing the bull by the horns, and in Europe the bull is run through with a sword. In the late 1700s bullfights became mass leisure activities, with paying spectators packing into arenas—the classic bullfight of popular imagination. It was at this time that the bullfight became a big business and the bullfighter became a celebrity. In this vivid and comprehensive history, Hardouin-Fugier also explores the extensive influence of the bullfight on art, literature, and culture from the paintings of Goya to the writings of Georges Bataille. </P><P> </P><P>Enriched with many fascinating and sometimes disturbing illustrations, <I>A History of Bullfighting</I> presents a discerning and intelligent approach to a divisive practice.  Hardouin-Fugier’s informative history will enthrall anyone who has been curious about bullfighting—supporters and detractors alike.</P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> English Manuscript Studies, Volume 15 http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364927 Edited by A.S.G. Edwards <br><br><DIV><P>This volume’s publication marks the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession. Featuring articles that examine a broad range of Tudor manuscripts produced between 1485 and 1603, <I>Volume 15</I> includes: an examination of various forms of regional manuscript production, including those written in northern England and Scotland; a look at the differing texts emerging from London during this period, some complex and of an unusual kind; and studies of Thomas Wyatt’s poetical manuscripts and the circulations of those romances. Contributing scholars include Jason Powell, Joyce Boro, and Cathy Shrank.</P></DIV><br></div> Points of View http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364971 Edited by John Falconer and Louise Hide <br><br><DIV><P>From its earliest beginnings in the 1840s up to its democratization as a widespread leisure pursuit, photography was swept along by a tide of artistic and entrepreneurial activity that gathered pace throughout the nineteenth century. Both as an art form and a social document, the photograph quickly took on a critical role as the primary means of visual expression in the modern age.</P><P> </P><P><I>Points of View</I> brings together, for the first time, a selection of images from the British Library’s unique photography collections, examining the history, diversity, and influence of the medium from its invention and early years up until the coming of the twentieth century. Beginning with the work of William Henry Fox Talbot and including some of our most celebrated photographic pioneers—Francis Frith, Felix Teynard, Samuel Bourne, and Peter Henry Emerson among them—this volume focuses on the question <I>Who was taking the photograph and why?</I> Ultimately the answer is found in the rise of mass market interest, the increasing role of technology, and the emergence of this thrilling new discipline amid rapid scientific, social, and industrial progress. </P></DIV><br></div> Welsh in Iowa http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8388066 Cherilyn Walley <br><br><DIV><P><I>The Welsh in Iowa</I> is a history of the little-known Welsh immigrant communities that dot the Iowa countryside. Identifying the qualities that made the Welsh unique as immigrants, migrants, and settlers to North America, Cherilyn Walley analyzes documentary evidence, as well as community and oral histories, in order to examine Welsh culture as it was expressed in middle America by the farmers and coal miners who passed through the prairie state as it grew to maturity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. </P></DIV><br></div> History of the Czech Lands http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8388327 Edited by Jaroslav Pánek and Oldrich Tuma <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Born January 1, 1993 after it split with Slovakia, the Czech Republic is one of the youngest members of the European Union. Despite its youth as a nation, this land and the areas just outside its modern borders boasts an ancient and intricate past. With <I>A History of the Czech Lands</I>, editors Jaroslav Pánek and Oldrich Tuma—along with several scholars from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Charles University—provide one of the most complete historical accounts of this region to date.</P><P> </P><P>Pánek and Tuma’s history begins in the Neolithic era and follows the development of the state as it transformed into the Kingdom of Bohemia during the ninth century, into Czechoslovakia after World War I, and finally into the Czech Republic. Such a tumultuous political past arises in part from a fascinating native people, and <I>A History of the Czech Lands</I> profiles the Czechs in great detail, delving into past and present traditions and explaining how generation after generation adapted to a perpetually changing government and economy. In addition, Pánek and Tuma examine the many minorities that now call these lands home—Jews, Slovaks, Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and others—and how each group’s migration to the region has contributed to life in the Czech Republic today.</P><P> </P><P>The first study in English with this scope and ambition, <I>A History of the Czech Lands</I> is essential for scholars of Slavic, Central, and East European studies and a must-read for those who trace their ancestry to these lands.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div>