Liberal Arts Faculty Books

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  The Making of a Patriot: Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit

  Sheila L. Skemp

  On January 29, 1774, Benjamin Franklin was called to appear before the Privy Council--a select group of the king's advisors--in an octagonal-shaped room in Whitehall Palace known as the Cockpit. Spurred by jeers and applause from the audience in the Cockpit, Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn unleashed a withering tirade against Franklin. Though Franklin entered the room as a dutiful servant of the British crown, he left as a budding American revolutionary. In The Making of a Patriot, renowned Franklin historian Sheila L. Skemp presents an insightful, lively narrative that goes beyond the traditional Franklin biography--and behind the common myths--to demonstrate how Franklin's ultimate decision to support the colonists was by no means a foregone conclusion. In fact, up until the Cockpit ordeal, he was steadfastly committed to achieving "an accommodation of our differences." The Making of a Patriot sheds light on the conspiratorial framework within which actors on both sides of the Atlantic moved toward revolution. It highlights how this event ultimately pitted Franklin against his son, suggesting that the Revolution was, in no small part, also a civil war.

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  Becoming the Gentleman: British Literature and the Invention of Modern Masculinity, 1660-1815

  Jason Solinger

  Becoming the Gentleman explains why British citizens in the long eighteenth century were haunted by the question of what it meant to be a gentleman. Supplementing recent work on femininity, Solinger identifies a corpus of texts that address masculinity and challenges the notion of a masculine figure that has been regarded as unchanging.

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  Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe: Performance, Geography, Privacy

  Joseph P. Ward and Angela Vanhaelen

  Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse individuals that could coalesce through the performative uptake of shared cultural forms and practices. The contributors argue that such forms of association were social productions of space as well as collective identities. Chapters explore a range of cultural activities such as theatre performances; travel and migration; practices of persuasion; the embodied experiences of lived space; and the central importance of media and material things in the creation of publics and the production of spaces. They assess a multiplicity of publics that produced and occupied a multiplicity of social spaces where collective identity and voice could be created, discovered, asserted, and exercised. Cultural producers and consumers thus challenged dominant ideas about just who could enter the public arena, greatly expanding both the real and imaginary spaces of public life to include hitherto excluded groups of private people. The consequences of this historical reconfiguration of public space remain relevant, especially for contemporary efforts to meaningfully include the views of ordinary people in public life.

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  Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985

  Jay Watson

  Jay Watson argues that southern literary studies has been overidealized and dominated by intellectual history for too long. In Reading for the Body, he calls for the field to be rematerialized and grounded in an awareness of the human body as the site where ideas, including ideas about the U.S. South itself, ultimately happen. Employing theoretical approaches to the body developed by thinkers such as Karl Marx, Colette Guillaumin, Elaine Scarry, and Friedrich Kittler, Watson also draws on histories of bodily representation to mine a century of southern fiction for its insights into problems that have preoccupied the region and nation alike: slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy; the marginalization of women; the impact of modernization; the issue of cultural authority and leadership; and the legacy of the Vietnam War. He focuses on the specific bodily attributes of hand, voice, and blood and the deeply embodied experiences of pain, illness, pregnancy, and war to offer new readings of a distinguished group of literary artists who turned their attention to the South: Mark Twain, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Katherine Anne Porter, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walker Percy. In producing an intensely embodied U.S. literature these writers, Watson argues, were by turns extending and interrogating a centuries-old tradition in U.S. print culture, in which the recalcitrant materiality of the body serves as a trope for the regional alterity of the South. Reading for the Body makes a powerful case for the body as an important methodological resource for a new southern studies.

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  Small Town South

  David Wharton

  Since 1983 David Wharton has photographed the twelve states that define the American South, focusing his attention on rural and small-town culture, vernacular architecture and landscape, the role of religion in Southern life, and the relationship between Southerners, their natural surroundings, and the communities they have built. Small Town South is the result of Wharton's travels through a region that extends from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas in the west to Virginia and the Carolinas in the east, from Kentucky and Tennessee in the north to Florida in the south, with Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia forming the region's center in between. No other photographer has devoted so much time and attention to recording this distinctive American place. The 115 duotone photographs which serve as the book's core, combined with the author's insightful text, convey an overall sense of what the small Southern town has become and looks like during the early twenty-first century. Wharton organizes his study into thematic portfolios that address themes such as the intersection of tradition and modernity, local commemorations of the past, the omnipresence of the church in town life, the difficulties of making a living in the New World economy, the look of Main Street, the display of public murals and memorials, and the iconographic unfolding of community values. Many have likened Wharton's photographic eye and approach to the work of other photographic masters of the South, including Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, William Christenberry, Shelby Lee Adams, Alex Harris, Rob Amberg, and Martha A. Strawn. And, just as we turn to those artists to help us understand and reckon with Southern history and culture, we now can look to David Wharton as another pioneer photographer of the Southern small town in all its simplicity and complexity.

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  Localizing Islam in Europe: Turkish Islamic Communities in Germany and the Netherlands

  Ahmet Yûkleyen

  In the twentieth century, Muslim minorities emerged in Europe seeking work, a refuge from conflict, and higher life standards. As a result, there are now more than 12 million Muslims in Western Europe. As these immigrants became permanent residents, the Islamic communities they developed had to respond to their European context, reinterpreting Islam in accordance with local conditions. In Localizing Islam in Europe, Yükleyen brings this adaptation to light, demonstrating how Islam and Europe have shaped one another and challenging the idea that Islamic beliefs are inherently antithetical to European secular, democratic, and pluralist values. Yûkleyen compares five different forms of religious communities among Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands and Germany that represent a spectrum from moderate to revolutionary Islamic opinions. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, he finds that, despite differences in goals and beliefs, these communities play an intermediary role, negotiating between the social and religious needs of Muslims and the socioeconomic, legal, and political context of Europe. Yûkleyen’s rich ethnography shows that there is no single form of assimilated and privatized “European Islam” but rather Islamic communities and their interpretations and practices that localize Islam in Europe.

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  American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary

  Deborah Barker and Kathryn B. McKee

  Employing innovations in media studies, southern cultural studies, and approaches to the global South, this collection of essays examines aspects of the southern imaginary in American cinema and offers fresh insight into the evolving field of southern film studies. In their introduction, Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee argue that the southern imaginary in film is not contained by the boundaries of geography and genre; it is not an offshoot or subgenre of mainstream American film but is integral to the history and the development of American cinema. Ranging from the silent era to the present and considering Hollywood movies, documentaries, and independent films, the contributors incorporate the latest scholarship in a range of disciplines. The volume is divided into three sections: "Rereading the South" uses new critical perspectives to reassess classic Hollywood films; "Viewing the Civil Rights South" examines changing approaches to viewing race and class in the post-civil rights era; and "Crossing Borders" considers the influence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and media studies on recent southern films. The contributors to American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary complicate the foundational term "southern," in some places stretching the traditional boundaries of regional identification until they all but disappear and in others limning a persistent and sometimes self-conscious performance of place that intensifies its power.

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  Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities

  Oliver J. Dinius and Angela Vergara

  Company towns were the spatial manifestation of a social ideology and an economic rationale. The contributors to this volume show how national politics, social protest, and local culture transformed those founding ideologies by examining the histories of company towns in six countries: Argentina (Firmat), Brazil (Volta Redonda, Santos, Fordlândia), Canada (Sudbury), Chile (El Salvador), Mexico (Santa Rosa, Río Blanco), and the United States (Anaconda, Kellogg, and Sunflower City). Company towns across the Americas played similar economic and social roles. They advanced the frontiers of industrial capitalism and became powerful symbols of modernity. They expanded national economies by supporting extractive industries on thinly settled frontiers and, as a result, brought more land, natural resources, and people under the control of corporations. U.S. multinational companies exported ideas about work discipline, race, and gender to Latin America as they established company towns there to extend their economic reach. Employers indeed shaped social relations in these company towns through education, welfare, and leisure programs, but these essays also show how working-class communities reshaped these programs to serve their needs. The editors' introduction and a theoretical essay by labor geographer Andrew Herod provide the context for the case studies and illuminate how the company town serves as a window into both the comparative and transnational histories of labor under industrial capitalism.

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  Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature: Power, Anxiety, and Subversion

  Mary Hayes

  A study of medieval attitudes towards the ventriloquism of God's and Christ's voices through human media, which reveals a progression from an orthodox view of divine vocal power to an anxiety over the authority of the priest's voice to a subversive take on the divine voice that foreshadows Protestant devotion.

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  A Biography of the English Language

  C. M. Millward and Mary Hayes

  The third edition of A BIOGRAPHY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE continues to examine the structure of English, from its Indo-European pre-history, through the invasions that shaped Old and Middle English, through its speakers' conscious efforts to police it in the Early Modern period, through its present-day transformations manifest in urban slang and text-messaging. The textbook explores three important issues: how languages and language change are systematic; how the inner history of a language is profoundly affected by its outer history of political and culural events; and how the English of the past has everywhere left its traces on present-day English. By uncovering the language's past, one can better use it to communicate as well as speculate about its future use in ever-changing globalized media.

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  The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America

  Jarod Roll and Erik S. Gellman

  How two southern ministers preached and practiced a vision of a more democratic America In this exceptional dual biography and cultural history, Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll trace the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives, Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War. Williams and Whitfield preached a working-class gospel rooted in the American creed that hard, productive work entitled people to a decent standard of living. Gellman and Roll detail how the two preachers galvanized thousands of farm and industrial workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also link the activism of the 1930s and 1940s to that of the 1960s and emphasize the central role of the ministers' wives, with whom they established the People's Institute for Applied Religion. This detailed narrative illuminates a cast of characters who became the two couples' closest allies in coordinating a complex network of activists that transcended Jim Crow racial divisions, blurring conventional categories and boundaries to help black and white workers make better lives. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.

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  The West African Slave Plantation: A Case Study

  Mohammed Bashir Salau

  Mohammed Bashir Salau addresses the neglected literature on Atlantic Slavery in West Africa by looking at the plantation operations at Fanisau in Hausaland, and in the process provides an innovative look at one piece of the historically significant Sokoto Caliphate.

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  The Verbal Complex in Subordinate Clauses from Medieval to Modern German

  Christopher D. Sapp

  This research monograph is an empirical and theoretical study of clause-final verbal complexes in the history of German. The book presents corpus studies of Middle High German and Early New High German and surveys of contemporary varieties of German. These investigations of the verbal complex address not only the frequencies of the word orders, but also the linguistic factors that influence them. On that empirical basis, the analysis adopted is the classic verb-final approach, with alternative orders derived by Verb (Projection) Raising. Verb Raising in these historical and modern varieties is subject to morphological, prosodic, and sociolinguistic restrictions, suggesting that the orders in question are not driven by narrow syntax but by their effects at the interface with phonology. This study will be of interest to students and scholars studying the diachronic syntax of German, West Germanic dialect syntax, and the relationship between prosody and word order.

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  Brazil’s Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964

  Oliver J. Dinius

  Brazil's Steel City presents a social history of the National Steel Company (CSN), Brazil's foremost state-owned company and largest industrial enterprise in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on the role the steelworkers played in Brazil's social and economic development under the country's import substitution policies from the early 1940s to the 1964 military coup. Counter to prevalent interpretations of industrial labor in Latin America, where workers figure above all as victims of capitalist exploitation, Dinius shows that CSN workers held strategic power and used it to reshape the company's labor regime, extracting impressive wage gains and benefits. Dinius argues that these workers, and their peers in similarly strategic industries, had the power to undermine the state capitalist development model prevalent in the large economies of postwar Latin America.

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  The Copts of Egypt: Challenges of Modernisation and Identity

  Vivian Ibrahim

  The Copts of Egypt, who consist of 10-15 per cent of the population, have traditionally been viewed as a 'beleaguered and persecuted minority'. Using newly discovered Coptic archival sources Vivian Ibrahim presents a fresh and vivid alternative reading of the community during the twentieth century. Avoiding the established portrayal of a monolithic entity headed by the Coptic Pope, Ibrahim examines the multifaceted dimensions of the Coptic community, assessing Coptic-State relations on one hand and Coptic intra-communal dimensions on the other. Examining the impact of the British Occupation of Egypt on the making of new national identities, she explores the emergence of a new politically active Coptic class; highlighting popular Coptic grassroots mobilisation during the 1919 revolution through the case-study of the Coptic priest Qommus Sergius. She discusses the centrality of the Copt and Wafdist, Makram Ebeid, on constitutional politics, and his role as a whistleblower during the 'Black Book Affair'. Breaking with the portrayal of a defenceless community, Ibrahim also reveals a strong Coptic response to the emergence and threats of Political Islam through the press. She presents and analyses for the first time, the unique satirical 'Ode to the Fezzed Shaykh', aimed at Muslim Brotherhood leader Hassan al-Banna. In 'The Copts of Egypt', Ibrahim also reveals fierce factionalism within the Coptic community in its struggle for modernisation. Examining mass corruption in monasteries and in the run-up to papal election campaigns, she analyses the ways in which the Church used the Egyptian State to bolster its claim to political as well as religious representation over the community. Through the establishment of benevolent and philanthropic societies, Ibrahim argues that Coptic youths were amongst the first to negotiate a role for themselves in post-revolutionary Egypt. Adopting President Nasser's revolutionary rhetoric of tathir, or cleansing, Ibrahim examines how a group of Coptic youths abducted their Pope and forced through their own agenda of religious and political reform. This book will be essential reading for scholars of the Coptic community and Middle East Studies.

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  Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South

  Jarod Roll

  Crossing the color line with revivalism among working-class Southerners In Spirit of Rebellion, Jarod Roll documents an alternative tradition of American protest by linking working-class political movements to grassroots religious revivals. He reveals how ordinary rural citizens in the South used available resources and their shared faith to defend their agrarian livelihoods amid the political and economic upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century. On the frontier of the New Cotton South in Missouri's Bootheel, the relationships between black and white farmers were complicated by racial tensions and bitter competition. Despite these divisions, workers found common ground as dissidents fighting for economic security, decent housing, and basic health, ultimately drawing on the democratic potential of evangelical religion to wage working-class revolts against commodity agriculture and the political forces that buoyed it. Roll convincingly shows how the moral clarity and spiritual vigor these working people found in Pentecostal revivals gave them the courage and fortitude to develop an expansive agenda of workers' rights by tapping into existing organizations such as the Socialist Party, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the NAACP, and the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union.

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  The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U. S. Nationalism

  Leigh Anne Duck

  How could liberalism and apartheid coexist for decades in our country, as they did during the first half of the twentieth century? This study looks at works by such writers as Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison to show how representations of time in southern narrative first accommodated but finally elucidated the relationship between these two political philosophies. Although racial segregation was codified by U.S. law, says Leigh Anne Duck, nationalist discourse downplayed its significance everywhere but in the South, where apartheid was conceded as an immutable aspect of an anachronistic culture. As the nation modernized, the South served as a repository of the country's romantic notions: the region was represented as a close-knit, custom-bound place through which the nation could temper its ambivalence about the upheavals of progress. The Great Depression changed this. Amid economic anxiety and the international rise of fascism, writes Duck, "the trope of the backward South began to comprise an image of what the United States could become." As she moves from the Depression to the nascent years of the civil rights movement to the early cold war era, Duck explains how experimental writers in each of these periods challenged ideas of a monolithically archaic South through innovative representations of time. She situates their narratives amid broad concern regarding national modernization and governance, as manifest in cultural and political debates, sociological studies, and popular film. Although southern modernists' modes and methods varied along this trajectory, their purpose remained focused: to explore the mutually constitutive relationships between social forms considered "southern" and "national."

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  The Shadow of Enlightenment: Optical and Political Transparency in France 1789-1848

  Theresa H. Levitt

  This book is the first to place revolutionary advances in light and optics in the cultural context of France in the first half of the nineteenth century. The narrative follows the work and careers of France's two chief rivals on the subject of light: Arago and Biot. Their disagreement began on the subject of technical optics, but expanded to include politics, religion, agricultural policy, education, dinner companions, housing arrangements, photography, railroads, vital forces, astrology, the Egyptian calendar, and colonial slavery. At the heart of their disagreement was always a question of visibility, and the extent of transparency or obscurity they assigned to the world. Optical transparency formed a crucial condition for Arago's vision of a liberal republic governed by reason. Biot's call for strong forms of authority rested on his claims that the world did not offer itself up for universal agreement so easily.

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  Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture

  Peter P. Reed

  Rogue Performances recovers eighteenth and nineteenth-century American culture's fascination with outcast and rebellious characters. Highwaymen, thieves, beggars, rioting mobs, rebellious slaves, and mutineers dominated the stage in the period's most popular plays. Peter Reed also explores ways these characters helped to popularize theatrical forms such as ballad opera, patriotic spectacle, blackface minstrelsy, and melodrama. Reed shows how both on and offstage, these paradoxically powerful, persistent, and troubling figures reveal the contradictions of class and the force of the disempowered in the American theatrical imagination. Through analysis of both well known and lesser known plays and extensive archival research, this book challenges scholars to re-think their assumptions about the role of class in antebellum American drama.

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  The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent

  Jeffrey R. Watt

  A fascinating examination of alleged demon possession and witchcraft in a seventeenth-century convent in Carpi, Italy. In 1636, residents at the convent of Santa Chiara in Carpi in northern Italy were struck by an extraordinary illness that provoked bizarre behavior. Eventually numbering fourteen, the afflicted nuns were subject to screaming fits, throwing themselves on the floor, and falling abruptly into a deep sleep. When medical experts' cures proved ineffective, exorcists ministered to the women and concluded that they were possessed by demons and the victims of witchcraft. Catering to women from elite families, the nunnery suffered much turmoil for three years and, remarkably, three of the victims died from their ills. A maverick nun and a former confessor were widely suspected to be responsible, through witchcraft, for these woes. Based primarily on the exhaustive investigation by the Inquisition of Modena, The Scourge of Demons examines this fascinating case in its historical context. The travails of Santa Chiara occurred at a time when Europe witnessed peaks in both witch-hunting and in the numbers of people reputedly possessed by demons. Female religious figures appeared particularly prone to demonic attacks, and Counter-Reformation Church authorities were especially interested in imposing stricter discipline on convents. Watt carefully considers how the nuns of Santa Chiara understood and experienced alleged possession and witchcraft, concluding that Santa Chiara's diabolical troubles and their denouement -- involving the actions of nuns, confessors, inquisitorial authorities, and exorcists -- were profoundly shaped by the unique confluence of religious, cultural, judicial, and intellectual trends that flourished in the 1630s.

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  The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah's Book Club

  Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jaime Harker

  The Oprah Affect explores the cultural impact of Oprah’s Book Club, particularly in light of debates about the definition and purpose of literature in American culture. For the critics collected here, Oprah’s Book Club stands, in the context of American literary history, not as an egregious undermining of who we are and what we represent, as some have maintained, but as the latest manifestation of a tradition that encourages symbiotic relationships between readers and texts. Powered by women writers and readers, novels in this tradition attract crowds, sell well, and make unabashed appeals to emotion. The essays consider the interlocking issues of affect, affinity, accessibility, and activism in the context of this tradition. Juxtaposing book history; reading practices; literary analysis; feminist criticism; and communication, religious, political, and cultural studies; the contributors map a range of possibilities for further research on Oprah’s Book Club.A complete chronological list of Book Club picks is included.

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  Unmentionables

  Beth Ann Fennelly

  With elegant word play and her usual subversive wit, Beth Ann Fennelly questions our everyday human foibles.

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  Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare

  Thomas Hallock and Ivo Kamps

  The essays in this volume interrogate the unique and often problematic relationship between early modern cultural studies and ecocriticism, providing theoretical insights and models for a future practice that successfully wed the two disciplines.

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  Ouida the Phenomenon: Evolving Social, Political, and Gender Concerns in Her Fiction

  Natalie Schroeder and Shari Hodges Holt

  This first full-length study of the works of best-selling Victorian novelist Ouida (Marie Louise Ramé) examines the evolution of social, political, and gender issues in Ouida’s fiction, from her “high society” romances of the 1860s to her satirical exposés of contemporary society in the 1890s. Schroeder and Holt demonstrate the significance of this relatively unexamined author’s works for literary studies today by investigating the ideological connections between Victorian, modern, and postmodern cultures inherent in Ouida’s works, while revealing Ouida’s oeuvre as a complex reflection of Victorian cultural paradoxes. Situating Ouida within the context of central nineteenth-century cultural debates such as the New Woman controversy, the Aesthetes’ discourse in alternative male sexualities, and the aesthetic controversy over popular sensation fiction, Schroeder and Holt likewise examine how Ouida’s concerns anticipate such modern/postmodern issues as the conflict between popular and “high” culture and the development of a consumerist society based on commodity spectacle.

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  Chosen among Women: Mary and Fatima in Medieval Christianity and Shi`ite Islam

  Mary F. Thurlkill

  Chosen among Women: Mary and Fatima in Medieval Christianity and Shi`ite Islam combines historical analysis with the tools of gender studies and religious studies to compare the roles of the Virgin Mary in medieval Christianity with those of Fatima, daughter of the prophet Muhammad, in Shi`ite Islam. The book explores the proliferation of Marian imagery in Late Antiquity through the Church fathers and popular hagiography. It examines how Merovingian authors assimilated powerful queens and abbesses to a Marian prototype to articulate their political significance and, at the same time, censure holy women's public charisma. Mary Thurlkill focuses as well on the importance of Fatima in the evolution of Shi`ite identity throughout the Middle East. She examines how scholars such as Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi advertised Fatima as a symbol of the Shi`ite holy family and its glorified status in paradise, while simultaneously binding her as a mother to the domestic sphere and patriarchal authority. This important comparative look at feminine ideals in both Shi`ite Islam and medieval Christianity is of relevance and value in the modern world, and it will be welcomed by scholars and students of Islam, comparative religion, medieval Christianity, and gender studies.

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  Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner

  Jay Watson

  Forensic Fictions is the first book-length critical study of William Faulkner's fictional depictions of the legal vocation and the practice of law. Examining Faulkner's lawyer characters in light of the southern storytelling tradition, Jay Watson argues that the forensic competence of the Faulknerian lawyer is a direct function of his skill as a raconteur. To trace the biographical and historical roots of Faulkner's lifelong preoccupation with the legal profession, Watson draws on contemporary scholarship in narrative, rhetoric, jurisprudence, legal and intellectual history, literary theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His approach yields insightful readings of forensic characters and scenes from such works as "An Odor of Verbena," The Hamlet, "Wild Palms," Absalom, Absalom! and The Reivers. Watson shows the links between storytelling and the competence of Faulkner's legal characters by examining the intertextual logic that connects the two most important lawyers in the Yoknapatawpha fiction: the incompetent Horace Benbow and the more capable Gavin Stevens, whose entrance into Faulkner's oeuvre coincides with Benbow's untimely departure from it. Focusing on the nine novels in which these two characters appear, Watson traces the evolutionary process by which Stevens supplants Benbow. Three of the Stevens novels--Intruder in the Dust, Knight's Gambit, and Requiem for a Nun--from what Watson calls Faulkner's "forensic trilogy" and, when read together, constitute the writer's most sustained investigation of the rhetorical and ethical responsibilities of the lawyer-citizen. Faulkner, Watson argues, saw the forensic figure as a potential hybrid of homo loquens and homo politicus, capable of combing the roles of storyteller, rhetorician, and theatrical performer with those of critic, citizen, and ethical man. As such, this figure served as a provocative authorial surrogate through whom Faulkner could explore diverse and often contradictory aspects of his personal experience, his family background, his cultural heritage, and, most of all, his own artistic use of language.

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  Smonk

  Tom Franklin

  It's 1911 and the townsfolk of Old Texas, Alabama, have had enough. Every Saturday night for a year, E. O. Smonk has been destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men, all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over-and-under rifle. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty, and goitered—an expert with explosives and knives—Smonk hates horses, goats, and the Irish, and it's high time he was stopped. But capturing old Smonk won't be easy—and putting him on trial could have shocking and disastrous consequences, considering the terrible secret the citizens of Old Texas are hiding.

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  Journeyman's Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner's Mississippi to post 9/11 New York

  Adam Gussow

  Journeyman’s Road offers a bold new vision of where the blues have been in the course of the twentieth century and what they have become at the dawn of the new millennium: a world music rippling with postmodern contradictions. Author Adam Gussow brings a unique perspective to this exploration. Not just an award-winning scholar and memoirist, he is an accomplished blues harmonica player, a Handy award nominee and veteran of the international club and festival circuit. With this unusual depth of experience, Gussow skillfully places blues literature in dialogue with the music that provokes it, vibrantly articulating a vital American tradition. Journeyman’s Road tells unfamiliar stories about a popular American art form, takes contrarian positions, explodes familiar mythologies, and frames the contemporary blues scene in bold, new ways. Taking its title from Gussow’s self-described status as a “journeyman,”-a musician who has completed his apprenticeship and is well on his way to becoming a master-this new book brings together articles that Gussow wrote for publications such as Blues Access and Harper’s, as well as critical scholarly essays, including the first comprehensive examination of William Faulkner’s relationship with the blues. At the heart of Gussow’s story is his own unlikely yet remarkable streetside partnership with Harlem bluesman Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, a musical collaboration marked not just by a series of polarities-black and white, Mississippi and Princeton, hard-won mastery and youthful apprenticeship-but by creative energies that pushed beyond apparent differences to forge new dialogues and new sounds. Undercutting familiar myths about the down-home sources of blues authenticity, Gussow celebrates New York’s mongrel blues scene: the artists, the jam sessions, the venues, the street performers, and the eccentrics. At once elegiac and forward-looking, Journeyman’s Road offers a collective portrait of the New York subculture struggling with the legacy of 9/11 and healing itself with the blues. Filled with photographs and complete with a comprehensive bibliography, Journeyman’s Road is an expedition through the evolution and culture of the blues, a trip filled with the genre’s characteristic collisions and contradictions, paradoxes and multiplicities, innovative calls and often unexpected responses. Adam Gussow is the rare academic who has lived the life of a bluesman. An accomplished harmonica player, recording artist, and journalist, he is assistant professor of English and southern studies at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition and Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir.

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  Conversations with Larry Brown

  Jay Watson and Larry Brown

  In a fifteen-year period beginning in 1988, Mississippi native Larry Brown (1951-2004) published two collections of short stories, five novels, a memoir, and two collections of essays. Two of his novels, Joe and Father and Son, won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Brown wrote with compassion, humor, and unflinching honesty about the struggles of rural and small-town working-class southerners. Twenty-nine years old when his writing career began, Brown's plainspoken style, sharp eye for detail, and keen ear for dialogue quickly established him as one of the most respected and compelling new voices in contemporary southern literature. Conversations with Larry Brown brings together interviews Brown gave between 1988 and 2004. The collection includes interview material from a full-length film documentary about Brown's life and work as well as two previously unpublished pieces. Across these conversations, Brown offers insights into all of his books and several of his short stories.

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  Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

  Beth Ann Fennelly

  Beth Ann Fennelly, writing to a newly pregnant friend, goes beyond the nuts and bolts or sentimentality of other parenting literature, in letters that range in tone from serious to sisterly, from lighthearted to downright funny. Some answer specific questions; others muse about the identity shift a woman encounters when she enters Mommyland. This book invites all mothers to join the grand circle of giving and receiving advice about children.

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  Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction

  Annette Trefzer

  How Faulkner, Welty, Lytle, and Gordon reimagined and reconstructed the Native American past in their work. In this book, Annette Trefzer argues that not only have Native Americans played an active role in the construction of the South’s cultural landscape—despite a history of colonization, dispossession, and removal aimed at rendering them invisible—but that their under-examined presence in southern literature also provides a crucial avenue for a post-regional understanding of the American South. William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Andrew Lytle, and Caroline Gordon created works about the Spanish conquest of the New World, the Cherokee frontier during the Revolution, the expansion into the Mississippi Territory, and the slaveholding societies of the American southeast. They wrote 100 years after the forceful removal of Native Americans from the southeast but consistently returned to the idea of an "Indian frontier," each articulating a different vision and discourse about Native Americans—wholesome and pure in the vision of some, symptomatic of hybridity and universality for others. Trefzer contends that these writers engage in a double discourse about the region and nation: fabricating regional identity by invoking the South’s "native" heritage and pointing to issues of national guilt, colonization, westward expansion, and imperialism in a period that saw the US sphere of influence widen dramatically. In both cases, the "Indian" signifies regional and national self-definitions and contributes to the shaping of cultural, racial, and national "others." Trefzer employs the idea of archeology in two senses: quite literally the excavation of artifacts in the South during the New Deal administration of the 1930s (a surfacing of material culture to which each writer responded) and archeology as a method for exploring texts she addresses (literary digs into the textual strata of America’s literature and its cultural history).

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  The Long Reformation

  Jeffrey R. Watt

  Part of the Problems in European Civilization series, this volume includes secondary-source essays organized around the major controversies and interpretations of Reformation history, including The "Successes" of the Reformation and The Reformation of Rituals, with an emphasis on how the effects of the Reformation unfolded over time. The text is suitable for upper-level courses focused exclusively on the Reformation, as well as courses in Western Civilization, early modern Europe, or Renaissance history. Pedagogical tools include chapter introductions, timelines, illustrations, maps, and suggested readings.

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  New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

  Charles Reagan Wilson, James G. Thomas Jr., and Ann J. Abadie

  When the University of North Carolina Press joined with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi to publish the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture in 1989, a pioneering reference work was born. The first reference book to deal exclusively with an American regional culture, the Encyclopedia has served as a model for many similar projects at the state and regional levels. In the years since the Encyclopedia was published, globalization, economic transformations, and other cultural shifts have profoundly changed the South. Now, the Press and the Center have come together again to publish The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, a thoroughly revised and updated edition of the original reference that reflects these changes and the newest scholarship about the region. This edition is published as a series of 24 individual volumes based on the thematic sections of the original Encyclopedia. The series is now complete, and all 24 volumes are now available as E-books. Volume 1: Religion Volume 2: Geography Volume 3: History Volume 4: Myth, Manners, and Memory Volume 5: Language Volume 6: Ethnicity Volume 7: Foodways Volume 8: Environment Volume 9: Literature Volume 10: Law and Politics Volume 11: Agriculture and Industry Volume 12: Music Volume 13: Gender Volume 14: Folklife Volume 15: Urbanization Volume 16: Sports and Recreation Volume 17: Education Volume 18: Media Volume 19: Violence Volume 20: Social Class Volume 21: Art and Architecture Volume 22: Science and Medicine Volume 23: Folk Art Volume 24: Race

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  Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies

  Adetayo Alabi

  Telling Our Stories investigates the continuities and divergences in selected Black autobiographies from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The stories of slaves, creative writers, and political activists are discussed both as texts produced by individuals who are products of specific societies and as interconnected books. The book identifies influences of environmental and cultural differences on the texts while it adopts cross-cultural and postcolonial reading approaches to examine the continuities and divergences in them.

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  Tender Hooks: Poems

  Beth Ann Fennelly

  Beth Ann Fennelly is fearless in delineating the joys, absorptions, and yes jealousies of new motherhood. Having studied motherhood "as if for an exam," reality proved "wilder and deeper and funnier" than anything she'd anticipated.Tender Hooks is Fennelly's spirited exploration of parenting, with all its contradictions and complexities.

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  Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation

  John R. Neff

  By the end of the Civil War, fatalities from that conflict had far exceeded previous American experience, devastating families and communities alike. As John Neff shows, commemorating the 620,000 lives lost proved to be a persistent obstacle to the hard work of reuniting the nation, as every memorial observation compelled painful recollections of the war. Neff contends that the significance of the Civil War dead has been largely overlooked and that the literature on the war has so far failed to note how commemorations of the dead provide a means for both expressing lingering animosities and discouraging reconciliation. Commemoration—from private mourning to the often extravagant public remembrances exemplified in cemeteries, monuments, and Memorial Day observances—provided Americans the quintessential forum for engaging the wars meaning.

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  On the Communion of Damasus and Meletius: Fourth-Century Synodal Formulae in the Codex Veronensis LX, with Critical Edition and Translation Studies and Texts 145

  Lester L. Field Jr.

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  Workers at War: Labor in China’s Arsenals, 1937-1953

  Joshua H. Howard

  This book focuses on the lives, struggles, and contrasting perspectives of the 60,000 workers, military administrators, and technical staff employed in the largest, most strategic industry of the Nationalist government, the armaments industry based in the wartime capital, Chongqing. The author argues that China's arsenal workers participated in three interlocked conflicts between 1937 and 1953: a war of national liberation, a civil war, and a class war. The work adds to the scholarship on the Chinese revolution, which has previously focused primarily on rural China, showing how workers’ alienation from the military officers directing the arsenals eroded the legitimacy of the Nationalist regime and how the Communists mobilized working-class support in Chongqing. Moreover, in emphasizing the urban, working-class, and nationalist components of the 1949 revolution, the author demonstrates the multiple sources of workers’ identities and thus challenges previous studies that have exclusively stressed workers’ particularistic or regional identities.

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  Conversations with Audre Lorde

  Audre Lorde and Joan Wylie Hall

  Audre Lorde (1934-1992), the author of eleven books of poetry, described herself as a "Black feminist lesbian poet warrior mother," but she added that this phrase was inadequate in capturing her full identity. The interviews in this collection portray the many additional sides of the Harlem-born author and activist. She was also a rebellious child of Caribbean parents, a mastectomy patient, a blue-collar worker, a college professor, a student of African mythology, an experimental autobiographer in her book titled Zami, a critic of imperialism, and a charismatic orator. Despite her intense engagement with the major social movements of her time, Lorde told interviewers that she was always an outsider, a position of weakness and of strength. Most of her schoolmates were white. She married a white legal-aid attorney, and after their divorce she was the partner of a white psychologist for many years. These intimate alliances with whites caused some African Americans of both genders to question the depth of her solidarity. Lorde expressed distrust of some white feminists and charged that they lacked real understanding of African American struggles. Writing proved to be her powerful weapon against injustice. Painfully aware that differences could provoke prejudice and violence, she promoted the bridging of barriers. These interviews reveal the sense of displacement that made Lorde a champion of the outcast and the forgotten--whether in New York, Mississippi, Berlin, or Soweto.

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  Measure for Measure: Texts and Contexts

  William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Ivo Kamps, and Karen Raber

  This edition of the Shakespeare play, Measure for Measure features the Bevington edition along with four sets of thematically arranged primary documents and illustrations to help facilitate your ability to view many different approaches to both the play and the early modern culture out of which the play emerged.

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  From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe

  Jeffrey R. Watt

  In the broadest treatment yet of suicide in Europe during the period 1500–1800, 11 authors combine elements of social, cultural, legal, and intellectual history to trace important changes in the ways Europeans experienced and understood voluntary death. Well into the seventeenth century, Europeans viewed suicide as a terrible crime and an unforgivable sin resulting from demonic temptation. By the late eighteenth century, however, suicide was rarely subject to judicial penalties, and society tended to blame self-inflicted death on insanity rather than on the devil. From Sin to Insanity shows that early modern Europe witnessed nothing less than the birth of modern suicide: increasing in frequency, self-inflicted death became decriminalized, secularized, and medicalized, viewed as a regrettable but not shameful result of reversals in fortune or physical or mental infirmity. The ten chapters focus on suicide cases and attitudes toward self-murder from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries in geographical settings as diverse as Scandinavia and Hungary, France and Germany, England and Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands.

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  Hell at the Breech: A Novel

  Tom Franklin

  In 1897, in the rural southwestern area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered. Seeking retribution, his outraged friends -- mostly poor cotton farmers -- form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe are responsible. The hooded members of this gang wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre, where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty. Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham War are four people: the county's aging sheriff, sympathetic to both sides; the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell-at-the-Breech; a ruthless detective who wages his own private war against the gang; and a young store clerk harboring a terrible secret. Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the dark events of dark days, events that lead the people involved to discover their capacity for good, for evil, or for both. It is a mesmerizing and unforgettable display of talent by a writer of immeasurable gifts.

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  Choosing Death: Suicide and Calvinism in Early Modern Geneva

  Jeffrey R. Watt

  In this case study of the Republic of Geneva, Jeffrey R. Watt convincingly argues the early modern era marked decisive change in the history of suicide. His analysis of criminal proceedings and death records shows that magistrates of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries often imposed penalties against the bodies and estates of those who took their lives. According to beliefs shared by theologian John Calvin, magistrates, and common folk, self-murder was caused by demon possession. Similar views and practices were found among both Protestants and Catholics throughout Reformation Europe. By contrast, in the late eighteenth century many philosophies defended the right to take one's life under certain circumstances; Geneva’s magistrates in effect decriminalized suicide; and even commoners blamed suicide on mental illness or personal reversals, not on satanic influences. Watt uses Geneva's uniquely rich and well-organized sources in this first study to provide reliable evidence on suicide rates for premodern Europe. He places his findings within a wide range of historical and sociological scholarship, and while suicide was rare through the seventeenth century, he shows that Geneva experienced an explosion in self-inflicted deaths after 1750. Quite simply, early modern Geneva witnessed nothing less than the birth of modern suicide both in attitudes toward it—thoroughly secularized, medicalized, and stripped of diabolical undertones—and the frequency of it.

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  American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998 (1999)

  Ted M. Ownby

  The dreams of abundance, choice, and novelty that have fueled the growth of consumer culture in the United States would seem to have little place in the history of Mississippi--a state long associated with poverty, inequality, and rural life. But as Ted Ownby demonstrates in this innovative study, consumer goods and shopping have played important roles in the development of class, race, and gender relations in Mississippi from the antebellum era to the present. After examining the general and plantation stores of the nineteenth century, a period when shopping habits were stratified according to racial and class hierarchies, Ownby traces the development of new types of stores and buying patterns in the twentieth century, when women and African Americans began to wield new forms of economic power. Using sources as diverse as store ledgers, blues lyrics, and the writings of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and Will Percy, he illuminates the changing relationships among race, rural life, and consumer goods and, in the process, offers a new way to understand the connection between power and culture in the American South.

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  Outside the Lines: African Americans and the Integration of the National Football League

  Charles K. Ross

  Outside the Lines traces how sports laid a foundation for social change long before the judicial system formally recognized the inequalities of racial separation. Integrating sports teams to include white and black athletes alike, the National Football League served as a microcosmic fishbowl of the highs and lows, the trials and triumphs, of racial integration. Watching a football game on a Sunday evening, most sports fans do not realize the profound impact the National Football League had on the civil rights movement. Similarly, in a sport where seven out of ten players are black, few are fully aware of the history and contributions of their athletic forebears. Among the touchdowns and tackles lies a rich history of African American life and the struggle to achieve equal rights. Although the Supreme Court did not reverse their 1896 decision of "separate but equal" in the Plessy v Ferguson case until more than fifty years later, sports laid a foundation for social change long before our judicial system formally recognized the inequalities of racial separation. Integrating sports teams to include white and black athletes alike, the National Football League served as a microcosmic fishbowl of the highs and lows, the trials and triumphs, of racial integration. In this chronicle of black NFL athletes, Charles K. Ross has given us the story of the Jackie Robinsons of American football.

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  Piety, Power, and Politics: Religion and Nation Formation in Guatemala, 1821-1871

  Douglas Sullivan-González

  Douglass Sullivan Gonzalez examines the influence of religion on the development of nationalism in Guatemala during the period 1821-1871, focusing on the relationship between Rafael Carrera amd the Guatemalan Catholic Church. He illustrates the peculiar and fascinating blend of religious fervor, popular power, and caudillo politics that inspired a multiethnic and multiclass alliance to defend the Guatemalan nation in the mid-nineteenth century. Led by the military strongman Rafael Carrera, an unlikely coalition of mestizos, Indians, and creoles (whites born in the Americas) overcame a devastating civil war in the late 1840s and withstood two threats (1851 and 1863) from neighboring Honduras and El Salvador that aimed at reintegrating conservative Guatemala into a liberal federation of Central American nations. Sullivan-Gonzalez shows that religious discourse and ritual were crucial to the successful construction and defense of independent Guatemala. Sermons commemorating independence from Spain developed a covenantal theology that affirmed divine protection if the Guatemalan people embraced Catholicism. Sullivan-Gonzalez examines the extent to which this religious and nationalist discourse was popularly appropriated.Recently opened archives of the Guatemalan Catholic Church revealed that the largely mestizo population of the central and eastern highlands responded favorably to the church's message. Records indicate that Carrera depended upon the clerics' ability to pacify the rebellious inhabitants during Guatemala's civil war (1847-1851) and to rally them to Guatemala's defense against foreign invaders. Though hostile to whites and mestizos, the majority indigenous population of the western highlands identified with Carrera as their liberator. Their admiration for and loyalty to Carrera allowed them a territory that far exceeded their own social space. Though populist and antidemocratic, the historic legacy of the Carrera years is the Guatemalan nation. Sullivan-Gonzalez details how theological discourse, popular claims emerging from mestizo and Indian communities, and the caudillo's ability to finesse his enemies enabled Carrera to bring together divergent and contradictory interests to bind many nations into one.

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  Equality: Selected Readings

  Louis P. Pojman and Robert Westmoreland

  Equality: Selected Readings collects the most representative material on the subject of equality, providing critical analyses of the egalitarian principles which underlie contemporary debate on issues such as welfare, civil and human rights, affirmative action, and immigration. The most comprehensive anthology of its kind, this volume includes a broad range of readings, from the classical works of Aristotle, Hobbes, and Rousseau to contemporary selections by John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, R.M. Hare, Harry Frankfurt, Wallace Matson, Robert Nozick, Michael Walzer, and others. Several important topics are covered in depth, including the concept of equality; equal opportunity; welfare egalitarianism; resource egalitarianism; complex equality; and equal human worth and human rights. A comprehensive introduction and bibliography are also included. Ideal for courses in political philosophy, this unique work covers all sides of the crucial debate over equality and strives to expand readers' understanding of the issues at stake in order to help them arrive at informed judgments.

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  America’s Feeble Weapon: Funding the Marshall Plan in France and Italy, 1948-1950

  Chiarella Esposito

  Unlike earlier studies of the Marshall Plan, this volume concentrates not on events in Washington, but on those in France and Italy--the second and third largest beneficiaries of the Plan. Using U.S., French, and Italian sources, the author analyzes the impact of the Plan on French and Italian economic policy between 1948 and 1950. Taking neither a realist nor revisionist stance, the author argues that massive American aid to Western Europe was a perceived political necessity--that American, French, and Italian governments shared with Truman the strategic-ideological goal of Communist containment. Yet, not all of the philosophy embedded in the Plan could be implemented, and American ideology did not, therefore, have a decisive influence in reshaping postwar French or Italian economic policies. The book's introduction discusses the goals of the Marshall Plan and how postwar political circumstances led France and Italy to dissimilar economic recovery paths that would often clash with American goals. The following seven chapters analyze how American officials sought to influence French and Italian economic policies. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 cover the French case; chapters 5, 6, and 7, the Italian. The concluding chapter provides a direct comparison of the French and Italian experiences and suggests implications for current historiographical debates.