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Truth in Many Tongues: Religious Conversion and the Languages of the Early Spanish Empire
By Daniel I. Wasserman-Soler. 2020
Truth in Many Tongues examines how the Spanish monarchy managed an empire of unprecedented linguistic diversity. Considering policies and strategies…
exerted within the Iberian Peninsula and the New World during the sixteenth century, this book challenges the assumption that the pervasiveness of the Spanish language resulted from deliberate linguistic colonization.Daniel I. Wasserman-Soler investigates the subtle and surprising ways that Spanish monarchs and churchmen thought about language. Drawing from inquisition reports and letters; royal and ecclesiastical correspondence; records of church assemblies, councils, and synods; and printed books in a variety of genres and languages, he shows that Church and Crown officials had no single, unified policy either for Castilian or for other languages. They restricted Arabic in some contexts but not in others. They advocated using Amerindian languages, though not in all cases. And they thought about language in ways that modern categories cannot explain: they were neither liberal nor conservative, neither tolerant nor intolerant. In fact, Wasserman-Soler argues, they did not think predominantly in terms of accommodation or assimilation, categories that are common in contemporary scholarship on religious missions. Rather, their actions reveal a highly practical mentality, as they considered each context carefully before deciding what would bring more souls into the Catholic Church.Based upon original sources from more than thirty libraries and archives in Spain, Italy, the United States, England, and Mexico, Truth in Many Tongues will fascinate students and scholars who specialize in early modern Spain, colonial Latin America, Christian-Muslim relations, and early modern Catholicism.Once a vibrant part of religious life for many Pennsylvania Germans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Fraktur manuscripts today…
are primarily studied for their decorative qualities. The Word in the Wilderness takes a different view, probing these documents for what they tell us about the lived religious experiences of the Protestant communities that made and used them and opening avenues for reinterpretation of this well-known, if little understood, set of cultural artifacts.The resplendent illuminated religious manuscripts commonly known as Fraktur have captivated collectors and scholars for generations. Yet fundamental questions about their cultural origins, purpose, and historical significance remain. Alexander Lawrence Ames addresses these by placing Fraktur manuscripts within a “Pietist paradigm,” grounded in an understanding of how their makers viewed “the Word,” or scripture. His analysis combines a sweeping overview of Protestant Christian religious movements in Europe and early America with close analysis of key Pennsylvania devotional manuscripts, revealing novel insights into the religious utility of calligraphy, manuscript illumination, and devotional reading as Protestant spiritual enterprises. Situating the manuscripts in the context of transatlantic religious history, early American spirituality, material culture studies, and the history of book and manuscript production, Ames challenges long-held approaches to Pennsylvania German studies and urges scholars to engage with these texts and with their makers and users on their own terms. Featuring dozens of illustrations, this lively, engaging book will appeal to Fraktur scholars and enthusiasts, historians of early America, and anyone interested in the material culture and spiritual practices of the German-speaking residents of Pennsylvania.Dynamic Matter: Transforming Renaissance Objects (Cultural Inquiries in English Literature, 1400–1700)
By Jennifer Linhart Wood. 2022
Dynamic Matter investigates the life histories of Renaissance objects. Eschewing the critical tendency to study how objects relate to human…
needs and desires, this work foregrounds the objects themselves, demonstrating their potential to transform their environments as they travel across time and space.Integrating early modern material theories with recent critical approaches in Actor-Network Theory and object-oriented ontology, this volume extends Aristotle’s theory of dynameos—which conceptualizes matter as potentiality—and applies it to objects featured in early modern texts such as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Individual chapters explore the dynameos of matter by examining its manifestations in particular forms: combs are inscribed with words and brushed through human hair; feathers are incorporated into garments and artwork; Prince Rupert’s glasswork drops explode; a whale becomes animated by the power of a magical bracelet; and books are drowned. These case studies highlight the potentiality matter itself possesses and that which it activates in other matter. A theorization of objects grounded in Renaissance materialist thought, Dynamic Matter examines the richness of things themselves; the larger, multiple, and changing networks in which things circulate; and the networks created by these transformative objects.In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume include Anna Riehl Bertolet, Erika Mary Boeckeler, Naomi Howell, Emily E. F. Philbrick, Josie Schoel, Maria Shmygol, Edward McLean Test, Abbie Weinberg, and Sarah F. Williams.Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africa (Africana Religions #3)
By Adriaan Van Klinken. 2019
Popular narratives cite religion as the driving force behind homophobia in Africa, portraying Christianity and LGBT expression as incompatible. Without…
denying Christianity’s contribution to the stigma, discrimination, and exclusion of same-sex-attracted and gender-variant people on the continent, Adriaan van Klinken presents an alternative narrative, foregrounding the ways in which religion also appears as a critical site of LGBT activism.Taking up the notion of “arts of resistance,” Kenyan, Christian, Queer presents four case studies of grassroots LGBT activism through artistic and creative expressions—including the literary and cultural work of Binyavanga Wainaina, the “Same Love” music video produced by gay gospel musician George Barasa, the Stories of Our Lives anthology project, and the LGBT-affirming Cosmopolitan Affirming Church. Through these case studies, Van Klinken demonstrates how Kenyan traditions, black African identities, and Christian beliefs and practices are being navigated, appropriated, and transformed in order to allow for queer Kenyan Christian imaginations.Transdisciplinary in scope and poignantly intimate in tone, Kenyan, Christian, Queer opens up critical avenues for rethinking the nature and future of the relationship between Christianity and queer activism in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa.Passing to América: Antonio (Née María) Yta’s Transgressive, Transatlantic Life in the Twilight of the Spanish Empire
By Thomas A. Abercrombie. 2018
In 1803 in the colonial South American city of La Plata, Doña Martina Vilvado y Balverde presented herself to church…
and crown officials to denounce her husband of more than four years, Don Antonio Yta, as a “woman in disguise.” Forced to submit to a medical inspection that revealed a woman’s body, Don Antonio confessed to having been María Yta, but continued to assert his maleness and claimed to have a functional “member” that appeared, he said, when necessary.Passing to América is at once a historical biography and an in-depth examination of the sex/gender complex in an era before “gender” had been divorced from “sex.” The book presents readers with the original court docket, including Don Antonio’s extended confession, in which he tells his life story, and the equally extraordinary biographical sketch offered by Felipa Ybañez of her “son María,” both in English translation and the original Spanish. Thomas A. Abercrombie’s analysis not only grapples with how to understand the sex/gender system within the Spanish Atlantic empire at the turn of the nineteenth century but also explores what Antonio/María and contemporaries can teach us about the complexities of the relationship between sex and gender today.Passing to América brings to light a previously obscure case of gender transgression and puts Don Antonio’s life into its social and historical context in order to explore the meaning of “trans” identity in Spain and its American colonies. This accessible and intriguing study provides new insight into historical and contemporary gender construction that will interest students and scholars of gender studies and colonial Spanish literature and history.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of New York University. Learn more at the TOME website: openmonographs.org.The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
By Bettany Hughes. 2024
From SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING author Bettany Hughes'A wondrous wonderful achievement' Stephen Fry 'Fascinating' Observer 'Thrilling' GuardianTheir names still echo down…
the ages: The Great Pyramid at Giza. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Temple of Artemis. The statue of Zeus at Olympia. The mausoleum of Halikarnassos. The Colossus at Rhodes. The Lighthouse of Alexandria. The Seven Wonders of the World were staggeringly audacious impositions on our planet. They were also brilliant adventures of the mind, test cases for the reaches of human imagination. Now only the great pyramid remains fully standing, yet the scale and majesty of these seven wonders still enthral us today. In a thrilling, colourful narrative enriched with the latest archaeological discoveries, bestselling historian Bettany Hughes walks through the landscapes of both ancient and modern time. This is a journey whose purpose is to ask why we wonder, why we create, why we choose to remember the wonder of others. She explores traces of the Wonders themselves, and the traces they have left in history. A magisterial work of historical storytelling, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World reinforces the exciting and nourishing notion that humans can make the impossible happen.'A vastly entertaining tale, bursting with astonishing stories and extraordinary characters ... A fascinating read' Sunday Telegraph'Brilliant ... An amazing…
story, one I hadn't heard too much about' Dan SnowIT IS THE DEPTHS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR.The Germans like to boast that there is 'no escape' from the infamous fortress that is Colditz.The elite British officers imprisoned there are determined to prove the Nazis wrong and get back into the war.As the war heats up and the stakes are raised, the Gestapo plant a double-agent inside the prison in a bid to uncover the secrets of the British prisoners. Captain Julius Green of the Army Dental Corps and Sergeant John 'Busty' Brown must risk their lives in a bid to save the lives of hundreds of Allied servicemen and protect the secrets of MI9.Drawn from unseen records, The Traitor of Colditz brings to light an extraordinary, never-before-told story from the Second World War, an epic tale of how MI9 took on the Nazis and exposed the traitors in their midst.Poverty in the United Kingdom: A Survey of Househould Resources and Standards of Living
By Peter Townsend. 1979
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out…
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out…
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.The interwar period was marked in Europe by the rediscovery of corporatism as a possible solution to the crucial problems…
of modern mass society. This was the result of general changes across industrialised countries in the relationship between the state and social groups. In Italy, it took on a uniquely authoritarian shape. Fascist regime became the cradle of a new model of corporatism, a “third way” alternative to both capitalism and communism, destined to influence both political, juridical, and economic debate and similar legislative experiments undertaken by other countries, be they democratic or authoritarian.The book offers an overview of corporatism in Fascist Italy. It examines not only the ideology but also the acts and real activities of corporative institutions (corporazioni). It dwells upon internal debates, the political and institutional importance acquired by corporative institutions in the Fascist regime, and the behaviour of entrepreneurial organizations and labour unions.At the same time, the book highlights the role of Italy in the transnational circulation of the corporative ideal by reconstructing both the considerable influence of Mussolini’s regime in a range of different political and geographical contexts and the way in which the authorities in Rome turned to coeval international experiences.Dependency and Development in Latin America
By Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Enzo Faletto. 1979
At the end of World War II, several Latin American countries seemed to be ready for industrialization and self-sustaining economic…
growth. Instead, they found that they had exchanged old forms of political and economic dependence for a new kind of dependency on the international capitalism of multinational corporations. In the much-acclaimed original Spanish edition (Dependencia y Desarrollo en América Latina) and now in the expanded and revised English version, Cardoso and Faletto offer a sophisticated analysis of the economic development of Latin America.The economic dependency of Latin America stems not merely from the domination of the world market over internal national and "enclave" economies, but also from the much more complex interact ion of economic drives, political structures, social movements, and historically conditioned alliances. While heeding the unique histories of individual nations, the authors discern four general stages in Latin America's economic development: the early outward expansion of newly independent nations, the political emergence of the middle sector, the formation of internal markets in response to population growth, and the new dependence on international markets. In a postscript for this edition, Cardoso and Faletto examine the political, social and economic changes of the past ten years in light of their original hypotheses.Since its original appearance in 1949, Irving A. Leonard's pioneering Books of the Brave has endured as the classic account…
of the introduction of literary culture to the Spanish New World. Leonard's study documents the works of fiction that accompanied and followed the conquistadores to the Americas and argues that popular texts influenced these men and shaped the way they thought and wrote about their experiences. UC Press's 1992 edition combines Leonard's text with a selection of the documents that were his most valuable sources—nine lists of books destined for the Indies. Containing a wealth of information, these lists provide the documentary evidence for what is perhaps Leonard's greatest contribution: his demonstration that royal and inquisitorial prohibitions failed to control the circulation of books and ideas in colonial Spanish America. Rolena Adorno's introduction reaffirms the lasting value of Books of the Brave and chronicles developments in cultural-historical studies that have shed light on the role of books in Spanish American colonial culture. Adorno situates Leonard's work at the threshold between older, triumphalist views of Spanish conquest history and more recent perspectives engendered by studies of native American peoples. With its rich descriptions of the book trade in both Spain and America, Books of the Brave has much to offer historians as well as literary critics. Indeed, it is a highly readable and engaging book for anyone interested in the cultural life of the New World. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History
By Peter Brown. 2023
A beautifully written personal account of the discovery of late antiquity by one of the world’s most influential and distinguished…
historiansThe end of the ancient world was long regarded by historians as a time of decadence, decline, and fall. In his career-long engagement with this era, the widely acclaimed and pathbreaking historian Peter Brown has shown, however, that the “neglected half-millennium” now known as late antiquity was in fact crucial to the development of modern Europe and the Middle East. In Journeys of the Mind, Brown recounts his life and work, describing his efforts to recapture the spirit of an age. As he and other scholars opened up the history of the classical world in its last centuries to the wider world of Eurasia and northern Africa, they discovered previously overlooked areas of religious and cultural creativity as well as foundational institution-building. A respect for diversity and outreach to the non-European world, relatively recent concerns in other fields, have been a matter of course for decades among the leading scholars of late antiquity.Documenting both his own intellectual development and the emergence of a new and influential field of study, Brown describes his childhood and education in Ireland, his university and academic training in England, and his extensive travels, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. He discusses fruitful interactions with the work of scholars and colleagues that include the British anthropologist Mary Douglas and the French theorist Michel Foucault, and offers fascinating snapshots of such far-flung places as colonial Sudan, midcentury Oxford, and prerevolutionary Iran. With Journeys of the Mind, Brown offers an essential account of the “grand endeavor” to reimagine a decisive historical moment.Black Abolitionists in Ireland: Volume 2 (Routledge Studies in Modern European History)
By Christine Kinealy. 2024
Building on the narratives explored in volume one, this publication recovers the story of a further seven Black visitors to…
Ireland in the decades prior to the American Civil War.This volume examines each of these seven activists and artists, and how their unique and diverse talents contributed to the movement to abolish enslavement and to the demand for Black equality. In an era that witnessed the rise of minstrelsy, they provided a powerful counter argument to the lie of Black inferiority. Moreover, their interactions with Irish abolitionists helped to build a strong transatlantic movement that had a global reach and impact. The lives explored are: Ira Aldridge (the African Roscius), William Henry Lane (Master Juba), William P. Powell, Elizabeth Greenfield (the Black Swan), Reuben Nixon, James Watkins and William H. Day. Individually and collectively they demonstrated the agency and power of Black involvement in the search for social justice.This book will be of value to students and scholars alike interested in modern European history and social and cultural history.Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA (Politics and Society in Modern America #99)
By Benjamin C. Waterhouse. 2013
Lobbying America tells the story of the political mobilization of American business in the 1970s and 1980s. Benjamin Waterhouse traces…
the rise and ultimate fragmentation of a broad-based effort to unify the business community and promote a fiscally conservative, antiregulatory, and market-oriented policy agenda to Congress and the country at large. Arguing that business's political involvement was historically distinctive during this period, Waterhouse illustrates the changing power and goals of America's top corporate leaders. Examining the rise of the Business Roundtable and the revitalization of older business associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Waterhouse takes readers inside the mind-set of the powerful CEOs who responded to the crises of inflation, recession, and declining industrial productivity by organizing an effective and disciplined lobbying force. By the mid-1970s, that coalition transformed the economic power of the capitalist class into a broad-reaching political movement with real policy consequences. Ironically, the cohesion that characterized organized business failed to survive the ascent of conservative politics during the 1980s, and many of the coalition's top goals on regulatory and fiscal policies remained unfulfilled. The industrial CEOs who fancied themselves the "voice of business" found themselves one voice among many vying for influence in an increasingly turbulent and unsettled economic landscape. Complicating assumptions that wealthy business leaders naturally get their way in Washington, Lobbying America shows how economic and political powers interact in the American democratic system.A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World
By Erika Rappaport. 2018
How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerismTea has been one of the…
most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes—in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies—the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in depth historical look at how men and women—through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa—transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society.As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate—but never entirely control—the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy.An expansive and original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid and powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform
By Elisabeth G. Gleason. 2024
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out…
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993.The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us
By Keith Lowe. 2017
Bestselling historian Keith Lowe's The Fear and the Freedom looks at the astonishing innovations that sprang from WWII and how…
they changed the world.The Fear and the Freedom is Keith Lowe’s follow-up to Savage Continent. While that book painted a picture of Europe in all its horror as WWII was ending, The Fear and the Freedom looks at all that has happened since, focusing on the changes that were brought about because of WWII—simultaneously one of the most catastrophic and most innovative events in history. It killed millions and eradicated empires, creating the idea of human rights, and giving birth to the UN. It was because of the war that penicillin was first mass-produced, computers were developed, and rockets first sent to the edge of space. The war created new philosophies, new ways of living, new architecture: this was the era of Le Corbusier, Simone de Beauvoir and Chairman Mao. But amidst the waves of revolution and idealism there were also fears of globalization, a dread of the atom bomb, and an unexpressed longing for a past forever gone. All of these things and more came about as direct consequences of the war and continue to affect the world that we live in today. The Fear and the Freedom is the first book to look at all of the changes brought about because of WWII. Based on research from five continents, Keith Lowe’s The Fear and the Freedom tells the very human story of how the war not only transformed our world but also changed the very way we think about ourselves.Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
By Paul Mason. 2016
We know that our world is undergoing seismic change—but how can we emerge from the crisis a fairer, more equal…
society?Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone profound changes—economic cycles that veer from boom to bust—from which it has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism argues that we are on the brink of a change so big and so profound that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system within which entire societies function, will mutate into something wholly new. At the heart of this change is information technology, a revolution that is driven by capitalism but, with its tendency to push the value of much of what we make toward zero, has the potential to destroy an economy based on markets, wages, and private ownership. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Vast numbers of people are changing how they behave and live, in ways contrary to the current system of state-backed corporate capitalism. And as the terrain changes, new paths open. In this bold and prophetic book, Mason shows how, from the ashes of the crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable economy. Although the dangers ahead are profound, he argues that there is cause for hope. This is the first time in human history in which, equipped with an understanding of what is happening around us, we can predict and shape the future.How to Survive the Titanic: Or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay
By Frances Wilson. 2011
A brilliantly original and gripping new look at the sinking of the Titanic through the prism of the life and…
lost honor of J. Bruce Ismay, the ship’s ownerBooks have been written and films have been made, we have raised the Titanic and watched her go down again on numerous occasions, but out of the wreckage Frances Wilson spins a new epic: when the ship hit the iceberg on April 14, 1912, and one thousand men, lighting their last cigarettes, prepared to die, J. Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner and inheritor of the White Star fortune, jumped into a lifeboat filled with women and children and rowed away to safety.Accused of cowardice and of dictating the Titanic’s excessive speed, Ismay became, according to one headline, “The Most Talked-of Man in the World.” The first victim of a press hate campaign, he never recovered from the damage to his reputation, and while the other survivors pieced together their accounts of the night, Ismay never spoke of his beloved ship again.In the Titanic’s mail room was a manuscript by that great narrator of the sea, Joseph Conrad, the story of a man who impulsively betrays a code of honor and lives on under the strain of intolerable guilt. But it was Conrad’s great novel Lord Jim, in which a sailor abandons a sinking ship, leaving behind hundreds of passengers in his charge, that uncannily predicted Ismay’s fate. Conrad, the only major novelist to write about the Titanic, knew more than anyone what ships do to men, and it is with the help of his wisdom that Wilson unravels the reasons behind Ismay’s jump and the afterlives of his actions.Using never-before-seen letters written by Ismay to the beautiful Marion Thayer, a first-class passenger with whom he had fallen in love during the voyage, Frances Wilson explores Ismay’s desperate need to tell his story, to make sense of the horror of it all, and to find a way of living with the consciousness of lost honor. For those who survived the Titanic, the world was never the same. But as Wilson superbly demonstrates, we all have our own Titanics, and we all need to find ways of surviving them.