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Medicine, History, Health and aging, Science and technology
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Historian Jesse F. Ballenger traces the emergence of senility as a cultural category from the late nineteenth century to the…
1980s, a period in which Alzheimer's disease became increasingly associated with the terrifying prospect of losing one's self. Changes in American society and culture have complicated the notion of selfhood, Ballenger finds. No longer an ascribed status, selfhood must be carefully and willfully constructed. Thus, losing one's ability to sustain a coherent self-narrative is considered one of life's most dreadful losses. As Ballenger writes "senility haunts the landscape of the self-made man." Stereotypes of senility and Alzheimer's disease are related to anxiety about the coherence, stability, and agency of the self—stereotypes that are transforming perceptions of old age in modern America. Drawing on scientific, clinical, policy, and popular discourses on aging and dementia, Ballenger explores early twentieth-century concepts of aging and the emergence of gerontology to understand and distinguish normal aging from disease. In addition, he examines American psychiatry's approaches to the treatment of senility and scientific attempts to understand the brain pathology of dementia.Ballenger's work contributes to our understanding of the emergence and significance of dementia as a major health issue.
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History, Christianity, Customs and cultures
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Latin Americans make up the largest new immigrant population in the United States, and Latino Catholics are the fastest-growing sector…
of the Catholic Church in America. In this book, historian David A. Badillo offers a history of Latino Catholicism in the United States by looking at its growth in San Antonio, Chicago, New York, and Miami. Focusing on twentieth-century Latino urbanism, Badillo contrasts broad historic commonalities of Catholic religious tradition with variations of Latino ethnicity in various locales. He emphasizes the contours of day-to-day life as well as various aspects of institutional and lived Catholicism. The story of Catholicism goes beyond clergy and laity; it entails the entire urban experience of neighborhoods, downtown power seekers, archdiocesan movers and shakers, and a range of organizations and associations linked to parishes. Although parishes remain the key site for Latino efforts to build individual and cultural identities, Badillo argues that one must consider simultaneously the triad of parish, city, and ethnicity to fully comprehend the influence of various Latino populations on both Catholicism and the urban environment in the United States.By contrasting the development of three distinctive Latino communities—the Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans—Badillo challenges the popular concept of an overarching "Latino experience" and offers instead an integrative approach to understanding the scope, depth, and complexity of the Latino contribution to the character of America's urban landscapes.
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History, Science and technology
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Thinking with Objects offers a fresh view of the transformation that took place in mechanics during the 17th century. By…
giving center stage to objects—levers, inclined planes, beams, pendulums, springs, and falling and projected bodies—Domenico Bertoloni Meli provides a unique and comprehensive portrayal of mechanics as practitioners understood it at the time. Bertoloni Meli reexamines such major texts as Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, and Newton’s Principia, and in them finds a reliance on objects that has escaped proper understanding. From Pappus of Alexandria to Guidobaldo dal Monte, Bertoloni Meli sees significant developments in the history of mechanical experimentation, all of them crucial for understanding Galileo. Bertoloni Meli uses similarities and tensions between dal Monte and Galileo as a springboard for exploring the revolutionary nature of seventeenth-century mechanics. Examining objects helps us appreciate the shift from the study to the practice of mechanics and challenges artificial dichotomies among practical and conceptual pursuits, mathematics, and experiment.
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History, General non-fiction, Science and technology
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How technology shapes play in America—and vice versa.In this romp through the changing landscape of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American toys,…
games, hobbies, and amusements, senior historian of technology Carroll Pursell poses a simple but interesting question: What can we learn by studying the relationship between technology and play? From Playgrounds to PlayStation explores how play reflects and drives the evolution of American culture. Pursell engagingly examines the ways in which technology affects play and play shapes people. The objects that children (and adults) play with and play on, along with their games and the hobbies they pursue, can reinforce but also challenge gender roles and cultural norms. Inventors—who often talk about "playing" at their work, as if motivated by the pure fun of invention—have used new materials and technologies to reshape sports and gameplay, sometimes even crafting new, extreme forms of recreation, but always responding to popular demand.Drawing from a range of sources, including scholarly monographs, patent records, newspapers, and popular and technical journals, the book covers numerous modes and sites of play. Pursell touches on the safety-conscious playground reform movement, the dazzling mechanical innovations that gave rise to commercial amusement parks, and the media's colorful promotion of toys, pastimes, and sporting events. Along the way, he shows readers how technology enables the forms, equipment, and devices of play to evolve constantly, both reflecting consumer choices and driving innovators and manufacturers to promote toys that involve entirely new kinds of play—from LEGOs and skateboards to beading kits and videogames.
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History, Criticism, General non-fiction
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From Daniel Defoe’s Family Instructor to William Godwin’s political novel Caleb Williams, literature written for and about servants tells a…
hitherto untold story about the development of sexual and gender ideologies in the early modern period. This original study explores the complicated relationships between domestic servants and their masters through close readings of such literary and nonliterary eighteenth-century texts. The early modern family was not biologically defined. It included domestic servants who often had strong emotional and intimate ties to their masters and mistresses. Kristina Straub argues that many modern assumptions about sexuality and gender identity have their roots in these affective relationships of the eighteenth-century family. By analyzing a range of popular and literary works—from plays and novels to newspapers and conduct manuals—Straub uncovers the economic, social, and erotic dynamics that influenced the development of these modern identities and ideologies.Highlighting themes important in eighteenth-century studies—gender and sexuality; class, labor, and markets; family relationships; and violence—Straub explores how the common aspects of human experience often intersected within the domestic sphere of master and servant. In examining the interpersonal relationships between the different classes, she offers new ways in which to understand sexuality and gender in the eighteenth century.
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History, General non-fiction, Lifestyle
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Are men truly predisposed to violence and aggression? Is it the biological fate of males to struggle for domination over…
women and vie against one another endlessly? These and related queries have long vexed philosophers, social scientists, and other students of human behavior. In Brutes in Suits, historian John Pettegrew examines theoretical writings and cultural traditions in the United States to find that, Darwinian arguments to the contrary, masculine aggression can be interpreted as a modern strategy for taking power. Drawing ideas from varied and at times seemingly contradictory sources, Pettegrew argues that traditionally held beliefs about masculinity developed largely through language and cultural habit—and that these same tools can be employed to break through the myth that brutishness is an inherently male trait.A major re-synthesis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century manhood, Brutes in Suits develops ambitious lines of research into the social science of sexual difference and professional history’s celebration of rugged individualism; the hunting-and-killing genre of popular men’s literature; that master text of hypermasculinity: college football; military culture, war making, and finding pleasure in killing; and patriarchy, sexual jealousy, and the law. This timely assessment of the evolution of masculine culture will be welcomed and debated by social and intellectual historians for years to come.
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General non-fiction, History
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Outstanding Academic Title for 2007, Choice MagazineThis history explores the nature of postwar advocacy for women's higher education, acknowledging its…
unique relationship to the expectations of the era and recognizing its particular type of adaptive activism. Linda Eisenmann illuminates the impact of this advocacy in the postwar era, identifying a link between women's activism during World War II and the women's movement of the late 1960s. Though the postwar period has been portrayed as an era of domestic retreat for women, Eisenmann finds otherwise as she explores areas of institution building and gender awareness. In an era uncomfortable with feminism, this generation advocated individual decision making rather than collective action by professional women, generally conceding their complicated responsibilities as wives and mothers.By redefining our understanding of activism and assessing women's efforts within the context of their milieu, this innovative work reclaims an era often denigrated for its lack of attention to women.
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Historical biography, European history, History
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In the late fifteenth century, many of the Jews expelled from Spain made their way to Morocco and established a…
dynamic community in Fez. A number of Jewish families became prominent in commerce and public life there. Among the Jews of Fez of Hispanic origin was Samuel Pallache, who served the Moroccan sultan as a commercial and diplomatic agent in Holland until Pallache's death in 1616. Before that, he had tried to return with his family to Spain, and to this end he tried to convert to Catholicism and worked as an informer, intermediary, and spy in Moroccan affairs for the Spanish court. Later he became a privateer against Spanish ships and was tried in London for that reason. His religious identity proved to be as mutable as his political allegiances: when in Amsterdam, he was devoutly Jewish; when in Spain, a loyal converso (a baptized Jew).In A Man of Three Worlds, Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers view Samuel Pallache's world as a microcosm of early modern society, one far more interconnected, cosmopolitan, and fluid than is often portrayed. Pallache's missions and misadventures took him from Islamic Fez and Catholic Spain to Protestant England and Holland. Through these travels, the authors explore the workings of the Moroccan sultanate and the Spanish court, the Jewish communities of Fez and Amsterdam, and details of the Atlantic-Mediterranean trade. At once a sweeping view of two continents, three faiths, and five nation-states and an intimate story of one man's remarkable life, A Man of Three Worlds is history at its most compelling.
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Historical biography, History, United States history
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&“We can no longer see ourselves as minor spectators or weary watchers of history after finishing this astonishing work of…
nonfiction.&” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy In Down Along with That Devil&’s Bones, journalist Connor Towne O&’Neill takes a deep dive into American history, exposing the still-raging battles over monuments dedicated to one of the most notorious Confederate generals, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Through the lens of these conflicts, O&’Neill examines the legacy of white supremacy in America, in a sobering and fascinating work sure to resonate with readers of Tony Horwitz, Timothy B. Tyson, and Robin DiAngelo. When O&’Neill first moved to Alabama, as a white Northerner, he felt somewhat removed from the racism Confederate monuments represented. Then one day in Selma, he stumbled across a group of citizens protecting a monument to Forrest, the officer who became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and whom William Tecumseh Sherman referred to as &“that devil.&” O&’Neill sets off to visit other disputed memorials to Forrest across the South, talking with men and women who believe they are protecting their heritage, and those who have a different view of the man&’s poisonous history. O&’Neill&’s reporting and thoughtful, deeply personal analysis make it clear that white supremacy is not a regional affliction but is in fact coded into the DNA of the entire country. Down Along with That Devil&’s Bones presents an important and eye-opening account of how we got from Appomattox to Charlottesville, and where, if we can truly understand and transcend our past, we could be headed next.
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History, Asian history
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Originally conceived as a military history, this second edition completes the story of the Middle Eastern populations that underwent significant…
transformation in the nineteenth century, finally imploding in communal violence, paramilitary activity, and genocide after the Berlin Treaty of 1878. Now called The Ottomans 1700-1923: An Empire Besieged, the book charts the evolution of a military system in the era of shrinking borders, global consciousness, financial collapse, and revolutionary fervour. The focus of the text is on those who fought, defended, and finally challenged the sultan and the system, leaving long-lasting legacies in the contemporary Middle East. Richly illustrated, the text is accompanied by brief portraits of the friends and foes of the Ottoman house. Written by a foremost scholar of the Ottoman Empire and featuring illustrations that have not been seen in print before, this second edition is essential reading for both students and scholars of the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman society, military and political history, and Ottoman-European relations.
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History, United States history, Politics and government
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The Silent Guns of Two Octobers uses new as well as previously under-appreciated documentary evidence to link the Cuban Missile…
Crisis to the Checkpoint Charlie tank standoff to achieve the impossible—craft a new, thoughtful, original analysis of a political showdown everyone thought they knew everything about. Ultimately the book concludes that much of the Cold War rhetoric the leaders employed was mere posturing; in reality neither had any intention of starting a nuclear war. Theodore Voorhees reexamines Khrushchev’s and Kennedy’s leadership, decision, and rhetoric in light of the new documentary evidence available. Voorhees examines the impact of John F. Kennedy's domestic political concerns about his upcoming first midterm elections on his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis through his use of back-channel dealings with Khrushchev during the lead-up to the crisis and in the closing days when the two leaders managed to reach a settlement.
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General fictionHistory, Criticism
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This book re-locates Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘smaller stories’ in the literary and cultural context of the nineteenth century. While Gaskell is…
recognised as one of the major novelists of her time, the short stories that make up a large proportion of her published work have not yet received the critical attention they deserve. This study re-claims them as an indispensable part of her literary output that enables us to better contextualize and assess her achievement holistically as a highly-skilled woman of letters. The periodicals in which Gaskell’s shorter pieces were published offer a microcosm of nineteenth-century society, and Gaskell took full advantage of the medium to apply a consistent and barbed challenge to cultural and gendered constructs of roles and social behaviour. Although her eminently readable prose still flows easily in her short stories, it is less likely to elide the sharp corners of domestic violence, the disabling experiences of women, the pain of death and loss, and the complications of family life.
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War, History, Politics and government
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This book reveals the nature and level of British engagement with controversial and lethal nerve agent weapons from the end…
of the Second World War to Britain’s submission of a draft Chemical Weapons Convention. At the very heart of this highly secretive aspect of British defence policy were fundamental questions over whether Britain should acquire nerve agent weapons for potential first-use against the Soviet Union, retain them purely for their deterrence value, or drive for either unilateral or international chemical weapons disarmament. These considerations and concerns over nerve agent weapons were not limited to low-level defence committees, nor were they consigned to the periphery, but featured prominently at the highest levels of the British government and defence planning. Importantly, and despite stringent secrecy, the book further uncovers how public scrutiny and protest movements played a substantial and successful part in influencing policy and attitudes towards nerve agent weapons.
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History, General non-fiction
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This collection explores the representation, articulation and construction of youth subcultures in a range of texts and contexts. It brings…
together scholars working in literary studies, screen studies, sociology and cultural studies whose research interests lie in the aesthetics and cultural politics of youth. It contributes to, and extends, contemporary theoretical perspectives around youth and youth cultures.Contributors examine a range of topics, including ‘bad girl’ fiction of the 1950s, novels by subcultural writers such as Colin MacInnes, Alex Wheatle and Courttia Newland, as well as screen representations of Mods, the 1990s Rave culture, heavy metal, and the Manchester scene. Others explore interventions into subcultural theory with respect to metal, subcultural locations, abjection, graffiti cultures, and the potential of subcultures to resist dominant power frameworks in both historical and contemporary contexts.
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Business and economics, History
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This book examines the Irish experience of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic through a detailed study of the disease in the…
most industrialised region of the country, the province of Ulster. By exploring the different themes of dispersion of the disease; mortality; gender; medical response and politics - and through case studies of different towns in the province of Ulster - it builds up a picture of the social, economic and political impact of influenza in Ireland. The Ulster experience of the pandemic is examined by constructing micro-histories of industrial cities and towns, along with provincial market towns and a naval port, to provide a basis for comparison of the differing approaches taken to combat the influenza outbreaks throughout Ulster. Contemporary opinion was that Ireland was considerably less affected by the war than the rest of the UK but, this book shows that the war did have a significant influence on how the influenza pandemic impacted on the Irish population from an economic, social and medical point of view. The book also explores the immediate aftermath of the pandemic and how it influenced the Irish response to the influenza scare of 1920 and the viral pandemic of Encephalitis Lethargica which was prevalent for ten years after 1918, as well as discussing what if any lessons learnt from 1918 have been applied to the present-day outbreak of Covid 19. This book will be of interest to academics in economic history, social history, Irish history and pandemic history, and those studying the effects of pandemics on the economy, health provision and pandemic preparedness.
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History
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More than a century and a half ago, John Adams urged scholars investigate the communications of the Boston Committee of…
Correspondence, the most radical and important of the revolutionary committees of correspondence. Such a study, Adams suggested, would reveal the underlying impetus of the revolutionary movement. Now, for the first time, Richard D. Brown has made an exhaustive and systematic analysis of the committee that set a pattern for America and for the world by keeping alive the revolutionary spirit at a time when the issues were cloudy and public interest was dormant. The Boston committee, organized to arouse the people of Massachusetts and to inform them of their rights, initiated the use of local committees of correspondence and went on to become a major revolutionary institution which helped bring about fundamental changes in Massachusetts politics. Mr. Brown's book focuses on the years 1772 to 1774, when the inhabitants of Massachusetts moved from quiet accommodation with the British imperial system to massive rebellion against it. His investigations of the records of the Boston committee and of voluminous town records never before studied have resulted in a revision of previous interpretations regarding the interaction between leaders in Boston and the people in the towns. The author's findings indicate that the Boston committee did not control Massachusetts political action, manipulating the political behavior of the towns, as earlier theorists have suggested. Though Boston was a leader, the towns generally acted independently, and government by consent developed effectively on the local level. The letters which passed between the capital and the countryside reveal an expanding political consciousness and an ever-increasing political sophistication at the grass-roots level. They articulate an essentially radical view of politics based on popular sovereignty. As an account of the process of political integration among a colonial people engaged in an independence movement, this book will appeal not only to historians but also to political scientists concerned with the emerging nations of the twentieth century.
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General non-fiction, History, Laws and statutes, Politics and government, Psychology
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Taking the postcolonial – or, more specifically, the post-apartheid – university as its focus, the book takes the violence and…
the trauma of the global neoliberal hegemony as its central point of reference. Following a primarily psychoanalytic line of enquiry, it engages a range of disciplines – law, philosophy, literature, gender studies, cultural studies and political economy – in order better to understand the conditions of possibility of an emancipatory, or decolonised, higher education. And this in the context of both the inter-generational transmission of the trauma of colonialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the trauma of neoliberal subjectivity in the postcolonial university. Oriented around an important lecture by Jacqueline Rose, the volume contains contributions from world-renowned authors, such as Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe, as well as numerous legal and other theorists who share their concern with interrogating the contemporary crisis in higher education. This truly interdisciplinary collection will appeal to a wide range of readers right across the humanities, but especially those with substantial interests in the contemporary state of the university, as well as those with theoretical interests in postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cultural studies, jurisprudence and law.
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History, Politics and government, Religion
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This book is the first to systematically examine the connection between religion and transitional justice in post-communism. There are four…
main goals motivating this book: 1) to explain how civil society (groups such as religious denominations) contribute to transitional justice efforts to address and redress past dictatorial repression; 2) to ascertain the impact of state-led reckoning programs on religious communities and their members; 3) to renew the focus on the factors that determine the adoption (or rejection) of efforts to reckon with past human rights abuses in post-communism; and 4) to examine the limitations of enacting specific transitional justice methods, programs and practices in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union countries, whose democratization has differed in terms of its nature and pace. Various churches and their relationship with the communist states are covered in the following countries: Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia and Belarus.
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History
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Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleIn Port Cities and Intruders, historian Michael Pearson explores the role of…
port cities and their orientation, relations between the coast and the interior, the place of the coast in the world economy, and the impact of the Portuguese in the early modern period.
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History
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Distinguished poet and translator David R. Slavitt here provides a translation of and meditation upon the Book of Lamentations, the…
biblical account of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 587 B.C.,on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av—Tish'a b'Av. (Six centuries later the Romans destroyed the second Temple on the same day.) Most of the Jewish population was deported to Babylon, and the ensuing period came to be known as the Babylonian Captivity. According to tradition, the Book of Lamentations was written in response to this political, social, and religious crisis. The five poems composing the book express Israel's sorrow, brokenness, and bewilderment before God.Tish'a b'Av is the day on which observant Jews fast and pray. And mourn. As Slavitt observes in his meditation:" It is forbidden on Tish'a b'Av even to study the Torah, except for the Book of Job and the Book of Lamentations. This is the day on which we grieve for every terrible thing that happens in this world. It is the worst day of the year."Slavitt's meditation provides a context for reading the scriptural text. Cast in the same style as the Hebrew poetry, his meditation recounts how sorrow and catastrophe have characterized so much of the history of the Jewish people, from their enslavement in Egypt to the Holocaust of Nazi Germany.Few translations of this remarkable book of the Bible attempt to reproduce in English, as Slavitt does here, the Hebrew acrostics. In the original, each verse begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet in sequential order; Slavitt elegantly reproduces this effect using the first 22 letters of the English alphabet. More than a structural or mnemonic device, Slavitt argues, the acrostics are "a serious assertion that the language itself is speaking, that the speech is inspired, and that there is, beyond all the disaster and pain the book recounts, an intricacy and an orderly coherence."