UCLA History Faculty Publications
last modified
April 15, 2009 02:42 PM
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Sidis and Scholars, Essays on African Indians This exciting collection of essays brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the history and present circumstances of one of India's least known minority groups, the African Indians. Following the editors' introduction which covers the scholarly literature on Africans in India and an historical overview that looks at the larger history of Africans in India, the essays focus on two different communities of African Indians - the Sidis of Gujarat and the Sidis of Uttara Kannada. They illumine various aspects of the life of Sidis in contemporary India, their worship at the Sufi shrine of Gori Pir, their music and dance, their liminal existence and their agonizing dilemmas and predicament in the complex mosaic that is present-day India.
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Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas What are the meanings, boundaries and relevance of the categories Right, Center, and Left in our world's current political climate? In this book, Anderson takes a "panning shot" across the modern intellectual landscape, critically examining these issues in 15 essays, 14 of which were previously published in The London Review of Books or New Left Review. One of Anderson's central themes is refreshingly simple: he continually echoes Carl Schmitt's claim that "dividing friend from foe...is the opposition that defines the nature of the political as such." This concept is illustrated most clearly in essays on "the Center," such as when Anderson demarcates Timothy Garton Ash's allegiances to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia as compared to the rest of "Eastern Europe." In effect, everyone has to come down on one side of the political fence at some point. Through the lens of this binary opposition, Anderson appraises a gamut of philosophers, political theorists and writers of various subgenres, wielding both his sharp intellect and pen to elucidate-and rebuke-their ideas. He reinforces the idea that all life inevitably revolves around politics.
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Beyond Words: Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa Even within anthropology, a discipline that strives to overcome misrepresentations of peoples and cultures, colonialist depictions of the so-called Dark Continent run deep. The grand narratives, tribal tropes, distorted images, and “natural” histories that forged the foundations of discourse about Africa remain firmly entrenched. In Beyond Words, Andrew Apter explores how anthropology can come to terms with the “colonial library” and begin to develop an ethnographic practice that transcends the politics of Africa’s imperial past.
The way out of the colonial library, Apter argues, is by listening to critical discourses in Africa that reframe the social and political contexts in which they are embedded. Apter develops a model of critical agency, focusing on a variety of language genres in Africa situated in rituals that transform sociopolitical relations by self-consciously deploying the power of language itself. To break the cycle of Western illusions in discursive constructions of Africa, he shows, we must listen to African voices in ways that are culturally and locally informed. In doing so, Apter brings forth what promises to be a powerful and influential theory in contemporary anthropology. |
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The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle Culture in Nigeria When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, it celebrated a global vision of black nationhood and citizenship animated by the exuberance of its recent oil boom. Andrew Apter's The Pan-African Nation tells the full story of this cultural extravaganza, from Nigeria's spectacular rebirth as a rapidly developing petro-state to its dramatic demise when the boom went bust. (Published by the University of Chicago Press.)
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American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier From Borderland to Border State In the heart of North America, the Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers come together, uniting waters from west, north, and east on a journey to the south. This is the region that Stephen Aron calls the "American Confluence". His innovative book examines the history of that region;a home to the Osage, a colony exploited by the French, and a new frontier explored by Lewis and Clark. Aron focuses on the region's transition from a place of overlapping borderlands to one of oppositional Border States. American Confluence is a lively account that should delight amateur and professional historians alike.
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Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight Los Angeles pulsed with economic vitality and demographic growth in the decades following World War II. This vividly detailed cultural history of L.A. from 1940 to 1970 traces the rise of a new suburban consciousness adopted by a generation of migrants who abandoned older American cities for So. California's booming urban region. Eric Avila explores expressions of this new "white identity" in popular culture with provocative discussions of Hollywood and film noir, Dodger Stadium, Disneyland, and L.A.'s renowned freeways. These institutions not only mirrored this new culture of suburban whiteness and helped shape it, but also, as Avila argues, reveal the profound relationship between the increasingly fragmented urban landscape of Los Angeles and the rise of a new political outlook that rejected the tenets of New Deal liberalism and anticipated the emergence of the New Right. Eric Avila offers a unique argument about the restructuring of urban space in the two decades following WWII and the role played by new suburban spaces in dramatically transforming the political culture of the U.S. Avila's work helps us see how and why the postwar suburb produced the political culture of 'balanced budget conservatism' that is now the dominant force in politics, how the eclipse of the New Deal since the 1970s represents not only a change of views but also an alteration of spaces.
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Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS Disease and Democracy is the first comparative analysis of how Western democratic nations have coped with AIDS. Peter Baldwin's exploration of divergent approaches to the epidemic in the United States and several European nations is a springboard for a wide-ranging and sophisticated historical analysis of public health practices and policies. In addition to his comprehensive presentation of information on approaches to AIDS, Baldwin's authoritative book provides a new perspective on our most enduring political dilemma: how to reconcile individual liberty with the safety of the community.
Baldwin finds that Western democratic nations have adopted much more varied approaches to AIDS than is commonly recognized. He situates the range of responses to AIDS within the span of past attempts to control contagious disease and discovers the crucial role that history has played in developing these various approaches. Baldwin finds that the various tactics adopted to fight AIDS have sprung largely from those adopted against the classic epidemic diseases of the nineteenth century--especially cholera--and that they reflect the long institutional memories embodied in public health institutions.
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First Century Slavery & 1 Corinthians 7:21 Scott Bartchy serves as Professor of Christian Origins and the History of Religion in the Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles, and as Director of the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA. An honors graduate of Milligan College, he earned his M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School and his Ph.D. in New Testament & Christian Origins from Harvard University, following which he taught in the Protestant Faculty of the University of Tuebingen, Germany and became the Director of the Institute zur Erforschung des Urchristentums there. He also has taught at Emmanuel School of Religion. Since the original appearance of this book Bartchy has continued to publish his research on ancient slavery, gender roles, and community formation in relation to Paul's letters and the traditions about Jesus of Nazareth.
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History Derailed: Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II History Derailed succeeds in capturing the common as well as the diverse features of the parts of a notoriously complex region during the period from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 to the start of WWI. The opening chapter provides an effective synthesis on the origins of backwardness in the region, from the second serfdom in the Baltic region to Ottoman domination in the Balkans. But Berend also demonstrates that Balkan societies were themselves resistant to the modernizing impulses coming from the West. An economic historian, the author is equally good at covering cultural and political developments, especially the grand appeal of romantic nationalism. By showing how modernized, literary languages were reformed and even invented by nationalist intellectuals, Berend sides with those scholars who believe in the constructed nature of ethnic and national identities. Yet he is also keenly aware that nationalism developed upon preexisting religious and regional identities. The later chapters depict the belated, and incomplete, industrialization and the conflicts between democratic and authoritarian politics.
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Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650-1800 Ruth Bloch's stellar essays on the origins of Anglo-American conceptions of gender and morality are brought together in this valuable book, which collects six of her most influential pieces and includes two new essays. The volume addresses a basic historical question: Why did the attitudes toward gender and family relations that we now consider traditional values emerge when they did? Bloch looks deeply into eighteenth-century culture to answer this question, highlighting long-term developments in religion, intellectual history, law, and literature, showing that the eighteenth century was a time of profound transformation for women's roles as wives and mothers, for ideas about sexuality, and for notions of female moral authority. She engages topics from British moral philosophy to colonial laws regarding courtship, and from the popularity of the sentimental novel to the psychology of religious revivalism. Lucid, provocative, and wide-ranging, these eight essays bring a revisionist challenge to both women's studies and cultural studies as they ask us to reconsider the origins of the system of gender relations that has dominated American culture for two hundred years.
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The Economics of Global Turbulence Robert Brenner charts the turbulent post-war history of the global system and unearths the mechanisms of over-production and over-competition which lie behind its long-term crisis since the early 1970s. He thereby demonstrates the thoroughly systematic factors behind wage repression, high unemployment and unequal development, and raises disturbing and far-reaching questions about the global economy's future trajectory.
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Through Women's Eyes: An American History The first book for the survey course to combine narrative and documents in a comprehensive volume. Through Women's Eyes offers fresh, substantive sources that reinforce and extend the historical synthesis. Each chapter is organized into three closely integrated sections: narrative, documentary essays, and visual essays. By combining narrative history with textual and visual evidence, the book explicitly models for students how historians work, how the questions they ask shape the history they write, and how these questions change over time. Plentiful cross-references, Questions for Consideration, and document headnotes underscore the connections between the narrative and essays while fostering students' skills in source analysis. Ellen Carol DuBois and Lynn Dumenil bring their command of the scholarship and their extensive experience in teaching the U.S. survey and women's history and in writing texts for undergraduates to the creation of this path-breaking textbook for the American women's history course.
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Rethinking Confucianism Written by Benjamin A. Elman, John B. Duncan, and Herman Ooms, this ambitious volume brings together a group of distinguished scholars who have worked together over five years' time in an attempt to explain the present pan-Asian revival of Confucianism a century after it was declared moribund by leading philosophers and thinkers in China and Japan as well as in the West. This collaborative study of China and its historical sphere of influence in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam begins by clearly establishing the principal threads that made up Confucian thought in the period of its unchallenged eminence. It also examines the pitfalls of Western scholars who have tended to lump together as Confucianism many diverse currents of Chinese and other Asian classical thought. Uniquely, the book explores as well traditional Confucian views of issues such as gender, medicine, and ritual, and examines the reasons given by leading Asian and Western scholars for rejecting Confucianism at the end of the nineteenth century.
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Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France Caroline Ford examines how the so-called feminization of religion in France from the French Revolution to the First World War contributed to the formation of a distinctive secular (laïc) republican political culture in France. She also reveals the effect of women’s close association with religion on their civil and social status, which gave rise in France to heated debates about the limits of female agency, women’s property rights, and women’s role in the family and in society. She argues that religious women were often far more than the passive instruments of a male ecclesiastical hierarchy. In showing that these women could dispose of their bodies, souls, and properties in ways that were unimaginable to their secular counterparts, Ford’s book obliges one to rethink the categories of tradition and modernity that have structured most thinking about this subject. Ford’s book is centered on a set of micro-histories and causes célèbres whose narratives are fascinating in and of themselves. They include conflicts within religious orders, the cults of some latter-day female saints, and riveting legal disputes involving women who converted to Catholicism. The fact that women have been portrayed as the quintessential carriers of religion ever since France embraced laïcite sheds light on problems faced by the secular French state today as it attempts to regulate religious expression—including emblems of Islam—in the public sphere.
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Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary In these four artfully crafted essays, Patrick Geary explores the way ancient and medieval authors wrote about women. Geary describes the often marginal role women played in origin legends from antiquity until the twelfth century. Not confining himself to one religious tradition or region, he probes the tensions between women in biblical, classical, and medieval myths (such as Eve, Mary, Amazons, princesses, and countesses), and actual women in ancient and medieval societies. Using these legends as a lens through which to study patriarchal societies, Geary chooses moments and texts that illustrate how ancient authors (all of whom were male) confronted the place of women in their society. Unlike other books on the subject, Women at the Beginning attempts to understand not only the place of women in these legends, but also the ideologies of the men who wrote about them. The book concludes that the authors of these stories were themselves struggling with ambivalence about women in their own worlds and that this struggle manifested itself in their writings.
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The Israel-Palestine Conflict James L. Gelvin's new account of the century-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians presents a compelling, accessible and up-to-the-moment introduction for students and general readers. Placing events in the disputed area within the framework of global history, the book skillfully interweaves biographical sketches, eyewitness accounts, poetry, fiction and official documentation into its narrative, including photographs, maps and an abundance of supplementary material as well. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century in Palestine, it traces the evolution and interactions of the two communities from their first encounters up to the present conflict.
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Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin's "Iron Fist" Head of the secret police from 1937 to 1938, N. I. Yezhov was a foremost Soviet leader during these years, second in power only to Stalin himself. Under Yezhov’s orders, millions of arrests, imprisonments, deportations, and executions were carried out. This book, based upon unprecedented access to Communist Party archives and Yezhov’s personal archives, looks into the life and career of the enigmatic man who administered Stalin’s Great Terror.
J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov seek to answer a series of troubling questions. What kind of person calmly and efficiently sends thousands of innocent people to their deaths? What could prepare a man for such a role? How could a person whom acquaintances describe as friendly, pleasant, and even gallant carry out one of history’s most horrifying campaigns of terror? The authors uncover the full details of Yezhov’s rise to power and conclude that he was not merely Stalin’s tool but a skillful maneuverer in his own right. The historical documents provide a thorough portrait of Yezhov and reveal a man of fanatical dedication to his leader and his party—a man who became a willing murderer. Readers will find his story chilling, the more so in our own times, when the impulse to terror that engulfed Yezhov seems neither surprising nor unfamiliar.
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Encyclopedia of Chicago One of the great American metropolises, Chicago rises out of the prairie in the heart of the country, buffeted by winds coming off the plains and cooled by the waters of the inland sea of Lake Michigan. Chicago is a city of size and mass, the cradle of modern architecture, the freight hub of the nation, a city built on slaughterhouses and cacophonous financial trading tempered by some of the finest cultural institutions in the world. While many histories have been written of the city, none can claim the scope and breadth of the long-awaited Encyclopedia of Chicago. James R. Grossman is Vice President for Research and Education at the Newberry Library and senior lecturer in history at the University of Chicago. Ann Durkin Keating is professor of history at North Central College in Naperville, IL. Janice L. Reiff is associate professor of history and interim director of the Oral History Program at UCLA.
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Armenian Baghesh/Bitlis and Taron/Mush Armenian Baghesh/Bitlis and Taron/Mush is the second of the conference proceedings to be published. This beautiful, rugged land in the southwestern sector of historic Greater Armenia is known to have been one of the earliest centers of Armenian settlement. It was here that evolved Armenian Baghesh and Taron, which became a part of the medieval principality of Turuberan and later the administrative districts of Bitlis and Mush.
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Armenian Tsopk/Kharpert Located in the southwestern sector of the plateau, Tsopk or Sophene (later Kharpert or Harput) had close ties with Mesopotamia and Syria, stood for centuries as a buffer zone beween rival empires, and served as a conduit for cultural-political currents flowing in and out of Armenia. It both shares a history with and has a history distinct from that of Greater Armenia lying to the east. Below the great citadel of Kharpert is a fertile plain, traversed by tributaries and branches of the Aratsani or Eurphrates River. For the Armenians, the shimmering waters and the waves of grain made this their Voski Dasht—Golden Plain.
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Armenian Tsopk/Kharpert George Makdisi has brought together six of the most distinguished scholars in the field to explore the religion and culture of medieval Islam. This is an original and stimulating exchange. Makdisi's introductory essay focuses on the interaction between religion and culture in classical Islam and Christendom, Merlin Swartz analyses the homilies of Ibn al-Jawazi, Irfan Shahid considers the implications of the Arabic character of the Koran, George Saliba assesses Ash'arite thought in astrology and astronomy, Roger Arnaldez reflects on the religious cultures of medieval Islam, and Mahmoud Ayoub draws together the common historic threads of Muslim-Jewish and Muslim-Christian popular worship. W. Montgomery Watt concludes the volume by addressing the question of the future of Islam, posing a parallel with the Judaic reaction to Hellenistic culture.
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What Hath God Wrought Howe's panoramic narrative portrays revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated the extension of the American empire. Railroads, canals, newspapers, and the telegraph dramatically lowered travel times and spurred the spread of information. These innovations prompted the emergence of mass political parties and stimulated America's economic development from an overwhelmingly rural country to a diversified economy in which commerce and industry took their place alongside agriculture. In history, the author weaves together political and military events with social, economic, and cultural history. He examines the rise of Andrew Jackson and his Democratic party, but contends that John Quincy Adams and other Whigs-advocates of public education and economic integration, defenders of the rights of Indians, women, and African Americans-were the true prophets of America's future. He reveals the power of religion to shape many aspects of American life during this period, including slavery and antislavery, women's rights and other reform movements, politics, education, and literature. Howe's story of American expansion culminates in the bitterly controversial but brilliantly executed war waged against Mexico to gain California and Texas for the United States.
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Practical Matter Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart examine the profound transformation that began in 1687. From the year when Newton published his Principia to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, science gradually became central to Western thought and economic development. The book aims at a general audience and examines how, despite powerful opposition on the Continent, a Newtonian understanding gained acceptance and practical application. By the mid-eighteenth century the new science had achieved ascendancy, and the race was on to apply Newtonian mechanics to industry and manufacturing. They end the story with the temple to scientific and technological progress that was the Crystal Palace exhibition. Choosing their examples carefully, Jacob and Stewart show that there was nothing preordained or inevitable about the centrality awarded to science. "It is easy to forget that science might have been stillborn, or remained the esoteric knowledge of court elites. Instead, for better and for worse, science became a centerpiece of Western culture."
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Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe Jacob investigates what it meant to be cosmopolitan in Europe during the early modern period. Then--as now--being cosmopolitan meant the ability to experience people of different nations, creeds, and colors with pleasure, curiosity, and interest. Yet such a definition did not come about automatically, nor could it always be practiced easily by those who embraced its principles. Cosmopolites had to strike a delicate balance between the transgressive and the subversive, the radical and the dangerous, the open-minded and the libertine. Jacob traces the history of this precarious balancing act to illustrate how ideals about cosmopolitanism were eventually transformed into lived experiences and practices. From the representatives of the Inquisition who found the mixing of Catholics and Protestants and other types of "border crossing" disruptive to their authority to the struggles within urbane masonic lodges to open membership to Jews, Jacob also charts the moments when the cosmopolitan impulse faltered.
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Les Lumieres Au Quotidien This French translation of Jacob’s award-winning Living the Enlightenment (1991) makes available to a wider audience a study of the interaction between freemasonry and politics throughout Western Europe from the 1720s to the 1790s. It is based upon archival sources used for the first time in the original edition.
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Picture Imperfect A frequent reviewer for the Nation and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, UCLA historian here follows up on his The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy with a historically nuanced polemic. In four beautifully crafted, highly allusive essays, Jacoby excavates a plethora of utopian movements, with an emphasis on Jewish traditions and thinkers, with the aim of getting readers to dream of a better world. The first chapter immediately confronts the 20th century's giant utopian failure: totalitarianism in its various forms. The second chapter details philosophical (and particularly liberal) objections to utopian thought generally. The next chapter concentrates on Zionism as it was originally envisioned, moving from Mordechai Noah and Theodor Herzl to Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer and Fritz Mauthner. The last chapter, "A Longing that Cannot Be Uttered", treats god as a kind of utopia, looks at a variety of Jewish approaches to the sacred.
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The Embedded Corporation The book's vantage point for exploring the varieties of capitalism is the headquarters of large corporations--in particular, their human resources departments, where changes in markets and technology turn into corporate labor policies affecting millions of workers. Jacoby reveals the inner workings of these departments. Despite some cross-fertilization, Japanese and American corporations maintain distinctive approaches to human resource management, with Japanese HR departments occupying a more central position within the corporation. As Jacoby shows, this has important consequences for how firms compete, for corporate governance, and even for the level of inequality in Japan and the United States. The Embedded Corporation is a major contribution to our understanding of comparative management and the relationship between business, society, and the global economy.
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Modern Iran In this updated edition of Modern Iran itself a substantially revised and expanded version of her classic work Roots of Revolution the author provides a new preface and a fully annotated and indexed epilogue, reviewing recent developments in Iran since 2003. Keddie provides insightful commentary on Iran's nuclear and foreign policy, its relations with the United Nations and the United States, increasing conservative and hard-line tendencies in the government, and recent developments in the economy, cultural and intellectual life, and human rights.
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Women in the Middle East: Past and Present Written by a pioneer in the field of Middle Eastern women's history, Women in the Middle East is a concise, comprehensive, and authoritative history of the lives of the region's women since the rise of Islam. Nikki Keddie shows why hostile or apologetic responses are completely inadequate to the diversity and richness of the lives of Middle Eastern women, and she provides a unique overview of their past and rapidly changing present. The book also includes a brief autobiography that recounts Keddie's political activism as one of the first women in Middle East Studies.
Positioning women within their individual economic situations, identities, families, and geographies, Keddie's book examines the experiences of women in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, in Iran, and in all the Arab countries. She discusses the interaction of a changing Islam with political, cultural, and socioeconomic developments. In doing so, she shows that, like other major religions, Islam incorporated ideas and practices of male superiority but also provoked challenges to them. Keddie breaks with notions of Middle Eastern women as faceless victims, and assesses their involvement in the rise of modern nationalist, socialist, and Islamist movements. While acknowledging that conservative trends are strong, she notes that there have been significant improvements in Middle Eastern women's suffrage, education, marital choice, and health.
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Colliers Across the Sea This masterful study charts the extensive common ground and telling differences between two widely separated coal-mining communities: Lanarkshire, in the Clyde Valley of southwest Scotland, and the northern Illinois coalfield that became a prime destination for skilled Scottish migrant miners in the mid-nineteenth century.
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On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa This book explores the history of trans-Saharan trade in western Africa in the nineteenth century. It treats the Sahara as a bridge that connected peoples across the continent. This is the first study of its kind to document the history and organization of trans-Saharan trade in western Africa using original source material. It examines the internal dynamics of a trade network system based on a case-study of the Wad Nun traders who specialized in outfitting camel caravans in the nineteenth century. Through an examination of contracts, correspondence, fatwas, and interviews with retired caravaners, Lydon shows how traders used their literacy skills in Arabic and how they had recourse to experts of Islamic law to regulate their long-distance transactions. The book also considers the methods employed by women participating in caravan trade. By embracing a continental approach, this study bridges the divide between West African and North African studies. The work will be of interest to historians of African, Middle Eastern, and world history and to scholars of long-distance trade, Muslim societies, and Islamic law.
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The Ancient Roman World Numerous books deal with ancient Rome, but this volume from the World in Ancient Times series has the advantage of being more readable, more complete, and more attractive than most. Printed on thick, white paper and with full-color photos, the book begins with the founding of Rome (and the legends surrounding it) and includes chapters on important figures, such as Julius Caesar, Augustus, Hadrian, and on such topics as the Etruscans, the evolution of the republic, Greek influences, slavery, and the rise of Christianity. The book is more accessible than many volumes on the subject; the writing is quite engaging, with plenty of sourced quotations. It's a promising start to a new series, to be followed by volumes on China and Greece, which will also be written by a historian in tandem with an author who writes for young adults.
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Thicker Than Water: The Origins of Blood as Symbol and Ritual Blood is more than a fluid solution of cells, platelets and plasma. It is a symbol for the most basic of human concerns--life, death and family find expression in rituals surrounding everything from menstruation to human sacrifice.
Comprehensive in its scope and provocative in its argument, this book examines beliefs and rituals concerning blood in regional and religious contexts throughout human history. Meyer reveals the origins of a wide range of blood rituals, from the earliest surviving human symbolism of fertility and the hunt, to the Jewish bris, and the clitoridectomies given to young girls in parts of Africa. The book also explores how cultural practices influence gene selection and makes a connection with the natural sciences by exploring how color perception influences the human proclivity to create blood symbols and rituals.
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Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought Nineteenth-century European thought, especially in Germany, was increasingly dominated by a new historicist impulse to situate every event, person, or text in its particular context. At odds with the transcendent claims of philosophy and--more significantly--theology, historicism came to be attacked by its critics for reducing human experience to a series of disconnected moments, each of which was the product of decidedly mundane, rather than sacred, origins. By the late nineteenth century and into the Weimar period, historicism was seen by many as a grinding force that corroded social values and was emblematic of modern society's gravest ills. Resisting History examines the backlash against historicism, focusing on four major Jewish thinkers. David Myers situates these thinkers in proximity to leading Protestant thinkers of the time, but argues that German Jews and Christians shared a complex cultural and discursive world best understood in terms of exchange and adaptation rather than influence.
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The Unknown American Revolution The history of the American Revolution that most of us have absorbed is but a fable, writes UCLA historian Gary Nash. In this insightful, challenging antidote to historical amnesia, Nash (Race and Revolution) deftly illustrates that while the Revolution has been implanted in our collective memory as the idealized Glorious Cause, in reality it was more a chaotic and bloody civil war, replete with fragile alliances, a multitude of fronts and clashing cultures. He especially succeeds in detailing the crucial role and often overlooked plight of Native Americans, adding the obscure names of men such as Cornplanter, Dragging Canoe and Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, who allied the Iroquois nation with the British, to the pantheon of the Revolution's players. By 1789 Washington was forced to commit a third of his army to destroying the Iroquois, explicitly ordering that their villages not be merely overrun but destroyed. Of course, Native Americans who remained neutral or fought alongside the Americans fared no better later at the hands of settlers. Tightly though densely written, this expertly researched tome shakes the stainless steel history of the American Revolution to its core.
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Furnishing the Eighteenth Century Furnishing the 18th Century is a collection of original essays that delves into the history of furniture, examining every day items such as tea tables, jewelry boxes, dressers and sofas to uncover the social practices of the 18th century, including tea drinking, gambling, prostitution, conversation, and letter writing, both in Europe and in the colonies. The essays take serious consideration of what the furniture of one's house has to say about 18th century taste, social hierarchies, consumerism, gender, and even sex.
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Athenian Political Oratory The celebrated orators and speeches of ancient Athens have been read and enjoyed for thousands of years. Focusing on the works of three of the greatest orators in history-Demosthenes, Lysias, and Hypereides-this collection of speeches is an indispensable source for anyone interested in classical civilization and literature, political science and rhetoric. Each of the three sections-The Thirty Tyrants, Philip and Athens, and Athens Under Alexander-includes an introduction providing an historical overview of the period and each speech is preceded by its own brief introduction. Rendered in lively, readable prose, the translations capture the energy, vigor and power of the originals.
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Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age Karl Pearson, founder of modern statistics, came to this field by way of passionate early studies of philosophy and cultural history as well as ether physics and graphical geometry. His faith in science grew out of a deeply moral quest, reflected also in his socialism and his efforts to find a new basis for relations between men and women. This biography recounts Pearson's extraordinary intellectual adventure and sheds new light on the inner life of science.
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Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity Between 300 and 600, Christianity experienced a momentous change from persecuted cult to state religion. One of the consequences of this shift was the evolution of the role of the bishop--as the highest Church official in his city--from model Christian to model citizen. Claudia Rapp's exceptionally learned, innovative, and groundbreaking work traces this transition with a twofold aim: to deemphasize the reign of the emperor Constantine, which has traditionally been regarded as a watershed in the development of the Church as an institution, and to bring to the fore the continued importance of the religious underpinnings of the bishop's role as civic leader. Rapp rejects Max Weber's categories of "charismatic" versus "institutional" authority that have traditionally been used to distinguish the nature of episcopal authority from that of the ascetic and holy man. Instead she proposes a model of spiritual authority, ascetic authority and pragmatic authority, in which a bishop's visible asceticism is taken as evidence of his spiritual powers and at the same time provides the justification for his public role. In clear and graceful prose, Rapp provides a wholly fresh analysis of the changing dynamics of social mobility as played out in episcopal appointments.
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Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment This far-reaching study redraws the intellectual map of the Enlightenment and boldly reassesses the legacy of that highly influential period for us today. Peter Hanns Reill argues that in the middle of the eighteenth century, a major shift occurred in the way Enlightenment thinkers conceived of nature that caused many of them to reject the prevailing doctrine of mechanism and turn to a vitalistic model to account for phenomena in natural history, the life sciences, and chemistry. As he traces the ramifications of this new way of thinking through time and across disciplines, Reill provocatively complicates our understanding of the way key Enlightenment thinkers viewed nature. His sophisticated analysis ultimately questions postmodern narratives that have assumed a monolithic Enlightenment--characterized by the dominance of instrumental reason--that has led to many of the disasters of modern life.
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Spain's Centuries of Crisis: 1300-1474 This book is a comprehensive history of Spain from the turn of the fourteenth century to the union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1474. In the early 1300s instabilities threatened to undermine Spain's basic social, economic, political, and cultural structures. This text focuses on the crises of Spain in the late middle ages, ranging from plague and famine to violence and civil war. It considers the early transformations that underpinned the country's later successes and describes resolutions to the country's hardships brought about by the reforms of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, in the late 1470s. The book examines the administrative changes and cultural revival that readied Spain for the opportunities and challenges of the oncoming early modern Age of Discovery.
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From Heaven to Earth Between the late 12th century and the mid-14th, Castile saw a reordering of mental, spiritual, and physical space. Fresh ideas about sin and intercession coincided with new ways of representing the self and emerging perceptions of property as tangible. This radical shift in values or mentalités was most evident among certain social groups, including mercantile elites, affluent farmers, lower nobility, clerics, and literary figures--"middling sorts" whose outlooks and values were fast becoming normative. Drawing on such primary documents as wills, legal codes, land transactions, litigation records, chronicles, and literary works, Teofilo Ruiz documents the transformation in how medieval Castilians thought about property and family at a time when economic innovations and an emerging mercantile sensibility were eroding the traditional relation between the two. He also identifies changes in how Castilians conceived of and acted on salvation and in the ways they related to their local communities and an emerging nation-state. Ruiz interprets this reordering of mental and physical landscapes as part of what Le Goff has described as a transition "from heaven to earth," from spiritual and religious beliefs to the quasi-secular pursuits of merchants and scholars. Examining how specific groups of Castilians began to itemize the physical world, Ruiz sketches their new ideas about salvation, property, and themselves--and places this transformation within the broader history of cultural and social change in the West.
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Spanish Society, 1400-1800 This is a fascinating account of Spain's passage from the Middle Ages to modernity. From the 'street theatre' of village carnivals to the violence of the Spanish Inquisition, and revealing everyday life from the court to the brothel, Spanish Society 1400 - 1600 explores the changing relationships between society's haves and have-nots. With pen portraits of major historical figures such as St Teresa and Torquemada, and including sections on diet and health, honor and sexuality, Ruiz paints a vivid picture of a passionate history that includes stories and vignettes about real people and events which brings the period to life. For those interested in Spanish history.
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Medieval Europe and the World Medieval Europe and the World: From Late Antiquity to Modernity, 400-1500 examines the development of western European social, political, economic, and cultural institutions during one of the most complex and creative periods the world has ever known. The book looks at the history of Medieval Europe in relation to its links with the rest of the world, exploring the interaction of western Europe with Islam, the Far East, Africa, and such outlying areas as Scandinavia, Iberia, and Eastern Europe. It considers the genesis and shaping of distinct western ideals, social affairs, economic patterns, and new cultural forms in relation to Islam and Byzantium--two other great civilizations that deeply influenced the growth of western Europe's unique history. Placing emphasis on medieval Europe's social and economic transformations and the diversity of social orders, the book analyzes the ways in which these elements interconnected during the formation of medieval society. It also gives special consideration to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, an era that serves as a bridge between the cultural developments of the early and central Middle Ages and the emergence of new patterns of thought and social organization in the late medieval period.
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Vietnam: Past and Present In this new edition, D. R. SarDesai pays particular attention to the normalization of U.S.-Vietnamese relations, Vietnam's policy of economic liberalization, the role of industrialized nations in the globalization of Vietnam's economy, and Vietnam's growing participation with the Allied countries of the Pacific region. A new chapter on the Vietnamese-American community in the United States is also included. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art Debora Silverman's book enables the reader to see van Gogh's and Gauguin's art--from the familiar masterpieces of Arles, Nuenen, Tahiti to lesser-known drawings and objects--in constantly new and surprising ways and to appreciate the special character of their nineteenth-century cultures and contexts. This book, the first of its kind, opens up an unmined terrain of central importance: the relationship between religion and modernism.
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Explorations In Connected History This volume reflects on two and a half centuries of Mughal-European relations, beginning with the early sixteenth centruy and is based on extensive research into Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Persian materials of the period. It uses the idea of contained conflict to reject both the view of total cultural incompatibility between East and West, and the simplistic paradigm of partnership and mutual understanding proposed by some recent scholars.
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Explorations In Connected History From the Tagus to the Ganges is a set of interlinked studies that deploys the concept of 'connected histories' to shed important light on aspects of the history of early modern Eurasia. These studies are based on a wide variety of Asian and European materials, and while their main focus is on relations between European and South Asia, other parts of the world also play a major role in the arguments. "History writing on South Asia has over time debated the politics of its sources. It has also confronted the assumptions underlying the periodization of Indian history. As reflected in this collection of essays, Subrahmanyam takes a sharp and discriminating look at the archive to challenge certain enduring beliefs regarding temporal and geographical frontiers in the task of history writing.
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Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries 1400-1800 A groundbreaking work based on detailed and sensitive readings of travel accounts in Persian, dealing with India, Iran, and Central Asia between about 1400 and 1800. This is the first comprehensive treatment of this neglected genre of literature (safar nama) that links the Mughals, Safavids and Central Asia in a crucial period of transformation and cultural contact. The authors’ close reading of these travel-accounts help us enter the mental and moral worlds of the Muslim and non-Muslim literati who produced these valuable narratives. These accounts are presented in a comparative framework, which sets them side by side with other Asian accounts, as well as early modern European travel-narratives, and opens up a rich and unsuspected vista of cultural and material history. This book can be read for a better understanding of the nature of early modern encounters, but also for the sheer pleasure of entering a new world.
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Christopher Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies In 1492, previously separate worlds collided and began to merge, often painfully, into the world-system in which we live today. Columbus's four Atlantic voyages (1492-1504) helped link Africa, Europe, and the Americas in a conflicted economic and cultural symbiosis. These carefully selected documents describe the voyages and their immediate impact on Europe and the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. Symcox and Sullivan's engaging introduction presents Columbus as neither hero nor villain, but as a significant historical actor who improvised responses to a changed world. Document headnotes provide context for understanding Columbus's voyages within the broader context of fifteenth-century Europe and the policies of the Spanish crown. Maps, illustrations, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography invite students to analyze and interpret the documents.
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The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca This book is a history of the Mixtec Indians of southern Mexico, who in their own language call themselves Tay Ñudzahui, “people of the rain place.” These people were among the most populous cultural and language groups of Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest. This study focuses on several dozen Mixtec communities in the region of Oaxaca during the period from about 1540 to 1750.
The work is largely based on an extraordinary collection of primary sources, translated and analyzed by the author, that were written by Mixtecs in the roman alphabet from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. To complement this native-language corpus, the author has examined preconquest and early colonial pictorial writings, Spanish-language civil and trial records, and Nahuatl (Aztec) texts. This book won the 2002 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Award, sponsored by the American Society for Ethnohistory. |
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The Man Who Flattened Earth Self-styled adventurer, literary wit, philosopher, and statesman of science, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) stood at the center of Enlightenment science and culture. Offering an elegant and accessible portrait of this remarkable man, Mary Terrall uses the story of Maupertuis's life, self-fashioning, and scientific works to explore what it meant to do science and to be a man of science in eighteenth-century Europe. Beginning his scientific career as a mathematician in Paris, Maupertuis entered the public eye with a much-discussed expedition to Lapland, which confirmed Newton's calculation that the earth was flattened at the poles. He also made significant, and often intentionally controversial, contributions to physics, life science, navigation, astronomy, and metaphysics. Called to Berlin by Frederick the Great, Maupertuis moved to Prussia to preside over the Academy of Sciences there. Equally at home in salons, cafes, scientific academies, and royal courts, Maupertuis used his social connections and his printed works to enhance a carefully constructed reputation as both a man of letters and a man of science. His social and institutional affiliations, in turn, affected how Maupertuis formulated his ideas, how he presented them to his contemporaries, and the reactions they provoked. Terrall not only illuminates the life and work of a colorful and important Enlightenment figure, but also uses his story to delve into many wider issues, including the development of scientific institutions, the impact of print culture on science, and the interactions of science and government.
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The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture The Civil War retains a powerful hold on the American imagination, with each generation since 1865 reassessing its meaning and importance in American life. This volume collects twelve essays by leading Civil War scholars who demonstrate how the meanings of the Civil War have changed over time.
The essays move among a variety of cultural and political arenas--from public monuments to parades to political campaigns; from soldiers' memoirs to textbook publishing to children's literature--in order to reveal important changes in how the memory of the Civil War has been employed in American life. Setting the politics of Civil War memory within a wide social and cultural landscape, this volume recovers not only the meanings of the war in various eras, but also the specific processes by which those meanings have been created. By recounting the battles over the memory of the war during the last 140 years, the contributors offer important insights about our identities as individuals and as a nation.
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The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris In The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris, Dora B. Weiner examines the experiences of the sick and handicapped indigent men, women, and children in Paris during the French Revolution and Empire. Weiner argues that significant groups of Revolutionary physicians and reformers interpreted equality to include every citizen's right to health care. These reformers faced political, religious, and professional opposition, and daunting problems of funding. And they needed the participation of the poor as "citizen-patients," patients with both rights and duties, who acted as responsible partners in the pursuit and maintenance of public and personal health. Weiner surveys the 20,000 patients institutionalized in twenty Paris hospitals and hospices and explains how the Revolution changed the status and work of nurses, pharmacists, midwives, and students, as well as doctors. Clinical teaching, professional specialization, and approaches to public health were all affected. Weiner emphasizes health care for children, deaf and blind people, and mentally ill patients and underscores the role of women as administrators and dispensers of hospital care.
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Comprendre Et Soigner Comprendre et soigner (To understand and to treat: Philippe Pinel [1745-1826]: The medicine for the mind) is the result of many years of research on Pinel, universally regarded as the beginner of modern psychiatry, by Dora Weiner, a scholar who teaches history and human sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles. Weiner is closely involved with a group of French psychiatrists and historians attempting a reassessment of Pinel's life and work, which makes it natural for her book to have appeared in French.
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Memoirs on Paris Hospitals Memoirs on Paris Hospitals introduces the English-speaking reader to Jacques Tenon's classic text of the French Enlightenment and the basic reference work for hospital reformers and architects in France for over half a century.....written in a style appealing to the non-specialist general reader. This excellent edition by Dora B. Weiner strives to transmit the style and tone of a French masterwork dating from an age that raised fundamental issues still relevant for our times as we struggle with our own health care systems and hospital reforms.
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Raspail, Scientist and Reformer According to his great-granddaughter, Francois-Vincent Raspail's reason for beginning his botanical researches with grasses was at least partly because of "their humble, 'proletarian' place in the kingdom of nature." Even in his first choice of a scientific subject, therefore, Raspail demonstrated his democratic convictions. It is precisely this combination of science and democracy which provides the theme for Dora Weiner's major biography of this hitherto rather obscure individual.
The two threads of science and democracy were inextricably bound together in the career of Raspail, but their union operated differently on either side of the watershed year of 1830. Prior to that date, Raspail's political views served primarily to keep him from pursuing formal studies and obtaining the normal academic credentials. After that time, they produced a rechanneling of his scientific efforts in the interest of the health of the poor.
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Science Without Laws Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human disease? One way is by repeatedly returning to, manipulating, observing, interpreting, and reinterpreting certain subjects—such as flies, mice, worms, or microbes—or, as they are known in biology, “model systems.” Across the natural and social sciences, other disciplinary fields have developed canonical examples that have played a role comparable to that of biology's model systems, serving not only as points of reference and illustrations of general principles or values but also as sites of continued investigation and reinterpretation. The essays in this collection assess the scope and function of model objects in domains as diverse as biology, geology, and history, attending to differences between fields as well as to epistemological commonalities. Contributors examine the role of the fruit fly Drosophila and nematode worms in biology, troops of baboons in primatology, box and digital simulations of the movement of the earth's crust in geology, and meteorological models in climatology. They analyze the intensive study of the prisoner's dilemma in game theory, ritual in anthropology, the individual case in psychoanalytic research, and Athenian democracy in political theory. The contributors illuminate the processes through which particular organisms, cases, materials, or narratives become foundational to their fields, and they examine how these foundational exemplars—from the fruit fly to Freud's Dora—shape the knowledge produced within their disciplines.
Contributors are Rachel A. Ankeny, Angela N. H. Creager, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, John Forrester, Clifford Geertz, Carlo Ginzburg, E. Jane Albert Hubbard, Elizabeth Lunbeck, Mary S. Morgan, Josiah Ober, Naomi Oreskes, Susan Sperling, Marcel Weber, and M. Norton Wise.
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Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas
Beginning with a sustained analysis of Seneca's theory of monarchy in the treatise De clementia, Peter Stacey traces the formative impact of ancient Roman political philosophy upon medieval and Renaissance thinking about princely government on the Italian peninsula, from the time of Frederick II to the early modern period. Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince offers a systematic reconstruction of the pre-humanist and humanist history of the genre of political reflection known as the mirror-for-princes tradition - a tradition which, as Stacey shows, is indebted to Seneca's speculum above all other classical accounts of the virtuous prince - and culminates with a comprehensive and controversial reading of the greatest work of Renaissance monarchical political theory, Machiavelli's The Prince. Peter Stacey brings to light a story which has been lost from view in recent accounts of the Renaissance debt to classical antiquity, providing a radically revisionist account of the history of the Renaissance prince.
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Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce The author's article "Falling into Feathers: Jews and the
Trans-Atlantic Ostrich Feather Trade", which is the basis for her book,
Plumes, is the 2008 winner of the Higby Prize, which is granted by the
American Historical Association every two years for the best article
published by the Journal of Modern History.
The thirst for exotic ornament among fashionable women in the metropoles of Europe and America prompted a bustling global trade in ostrich feathers that flourished from the 1880s until the First World War. When feathers fell out of fashion with consumers, the result was an economic catastrophe for many, a worldwide feather bust. In this remarkable book, Sarah Stein draws on rich archival materials to bring to light the prominent and varied roles of Jews in the feather trade. She discovers that Jews fostered and nurtured the trade across the global commodity chain and throughout the far-flung territories where ostriches were reared and plucked, and their feathers were sorted, exported, imported, auctioned, wholesaled, and finally manufactured for sale. From Yiddish-speaking Russian-Lithuanian feather handlers in South Africa to London manufacturers and wholesalers, from rival Sephardic families whose feathers were imported from the Sahara and traded across the Mediterranean, from New York’s Lower East Side to entrepreneurial farms in the American West, Stein explores the details of a remarkably vibrant yet ephemeral culture. This is a singular story of global commerce, colonial economic practices, and the rise and fall of a glamorous luxury item. |
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Making Jews Modern On the eve of the 20th century, Jews in the Russian and Ottoman empires
were caught up in the major cultural and social transformations that
constituted modernity for Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewries. What did it
mean to be Jewish and Russian, Jewish and Ottoman, Jewish and modern?
To answer these questions, Sarah Abrevaya Stein explores the texts most
widely consumed by Jewish readers: popular newspapers in Yiddish and
Ladino. This skillful comparative study yields new perspectives on the
role of print culture in imagining national and transnational
communities and the diverse ways in which modernity was envisioned
under the rule of empire.
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Measuring Time, Making History First volume of the Natalie Zemon Davis Annual
Lecture Series at Central European University, this small but rich book
contains three lectures delivered at CEU. Explores some of the ways
in which time matters or should matter to historians. Like everyone
else, historians assume that time exists, yet despite its obvious importance
to historical writing--what is history but the account of how things
change over time?--writers of history do not often inquire into the
meaning of time itself. Hunt asks a series of related questions about
time in history. Why is time now again on the agenda, for historians
and more generally in Western culture? How did Western Christian culture
develop its distinctive way of measuring time (BC/AD or BCE/CE) and
how does it influence our notion of history? What is the role of modernity--our
most contentious temporal category--in the historical discipline? Is
modernity an experience of temporal ty or an ideological construction?
Are modernity, the discipline of history, and even the notion of history
itself a western, and therefore imperialist, imposition? Should we,
can we, move beyond the modern within the historical discipline?
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The Self-Perception of Early Modern "Capitalist" The term “capitalist” appears
only late in the eighteenth century as a way of describing the speculating
or commercial classes. Yet money was ubiquitous in early modern Europe.
The goal of this conference is to examine how people who sought to make
it, struggled to acquire and keep it, viewed themselves. They operated
in cities great and small, in capitals of trade such as Venice, Hamburg,
Antwerp, London, Amsterdam, Lyon, and Marseille, but also in Leeds and
The Hague. How did they explain themselves; how did they understand
their worldly activities? How did they cope with a culture that had
for so long opposed material wealth to spiritual possessions, earthly
pursuits to the spiritual realm? This sort of “self perception”
can be read directly from the writings of merchants themselves (through
their memories, letters, addresses) and also it can be found in legitimating
discourses employed by contemporaries interested in valorizing trade.
Our work has been informed by Weber on Protestantism and capitalism,
yet we propose to access a new vocabulary, based on the sources and
taking into account also Catholic and Sephardic merchants.
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Acculturation and Its Discontents: The Italian Jewish Experience
Between Exclusion and Integration Exploring the fascinating cross-cultural
influences between Jews and Christians in Italy from the Renaissance
to the twentieth century, "Acculturation and Its Discontents"
assembles essays by leading historians, literary scholars, and musicologists
to present a well-rounded history of Italian Jewry.The contributors
offer rich portraits of the many vibrant forms of cultural and artistic
expression that Italian Jews contributed to, and this volume also pays
close attention to the ways in which Italian Jews - both freely and
under pressure - creatively adapted to the social, cultural, and legal
norms of the surrounding society. Tracing both the triumphs and tragedies
of Jewish communities within Italy over a broad span of time, "Acculturation
and Its Discontents" challenges conventional assumptions about
assimilation and state intervention and, in the process, charts the
complex process of cultural exchange that left such a distinctive imprint
not only on Italian Jewry, but also on Italian society itself.This collection
of rigorous and thought-provoking essays makes a major contribution
to both the history of Italian culture and the cultural influence and
significance of European Jews.
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Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the
American Midwest, 1880-1930 (Working Class in American History) Often overlooked in the history of Progressive
Era labor, the hoboes who rode the rails in search of seasonal work
have nevertheless secured a place in the American imagination. The stories
of the men who hunted work between city and countryside, men alternately
portrayed as either romantic adventurers or degenerate outsiders, have
not been easy to find. Nor have these stories found a comfortable home
in either rural or labor histories. Indispensable Outcasts weaves together
history, anthropology, gender studies, and literary analysis to reposition
these workers at the center of Progressive Era debates over class, race,
manly responsibility, community, and citizenship.Combining incisive
cultural criticism with the empiricism of a more traditional labor history,
Frank Tobias Higbie illustrates how these so-called marginal figures
were in fact integral to the communities they briefly inhabited and
to the cultural conflicts over class, masculinity, and sexuality they
embodied. He draws from life histories, the investigations of social
reformers, and the organizing materials of the Industrial Workers of
the World and presents a complex and compelling portrait of hobo life,
from its often violent and dangerous working conditions to its ethic
of 'transient mutuality' that enabled survival and resistance on the
road. More than a study of hobo life, this interdisciplinary book is
also a meditation on the possibilities for writing history from the
bottom up, as well as a frank discussion of the ways historians' fascination
with personal narrative has colored their construction and presentation
of history.
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