Search results

An accessible and well-informed tour through a little-known, important aspect of race in American history.. In Hidden Heroism , Robert Edgerton investigates the history of Afro-American participation in American wars, from the French and Indian War to the present. He argues that blacks in American society have long-suffered from a "natural coward" stereotype that is implicit in the racism propagated from America's earliest days, and often intensified as blacks slowly received freedom in Americ...

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture is a contribution to the revival of early modern women's writings and cultural production in English that began in the 1980s. Its originality is twofold: it links women's writing in English with the wider context of Baroque culture, and it introduces the issue of gender into discussion of the Baroque. The title comes from Julia Kristeva's study of Teresa of Avila, that 'the secrets of Baroque civilization are female'. The book is built...

Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub collaborated on films together from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s, making formally radical adaptations in several languages of major works of European literature by authors including Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Hoelderlin, Pierre Corneille, Arnold Schoenberg, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini. The impact of their work comes in part from a search for radical objectivity, a theme present in certain underground currents of modernist art and the...

What might the digital revolution we're currently living through mean for conventional paper books? Is there a future for the long-form text at all? At the onset of the digital deluge, books had evolved into the perfect reading machine. In the screen era, technology increasingly and emphatically foregrounds itself in the digital reading experience. It is one thing to identify what we lose in the process (which is a natural human tendency), but quite another and, it might be argued, an ultimately...

Billie Holiday singing at the New Orleans Swing Club. Dexter Gordon hanging out at Bop City. Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane all swinging through for gigs. Was this slice of jazz history in New York or perhaps New Orleans? No, this was San Francisco's Fillmore District in its heyday. The Fillmore in the 1940's and 1950's was an eclectic, integrated and hopping neighborhood of streets full of restaurants, pool halls, theaters and stores - many minority-owned - and b...

The son of black sharecroppers, John Oliver Hodges attended segregated schools in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the 1950s and '60s, worked in plantation cotton fields, and eventually left the region to earn multiple degrees and become a tenured university professor. Both poignant and thought provoking, Delta Fragments is Hodges's autobiographical journey back to the land of his birth. Brimming with vivid memories of family life, childhood friendships, the quest for knowledge, and the often brutal i...

Diese Studie hat das Testamentsrecht des Vorderen Orients in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart am Beispiel AEgyptens zum Gegenstand. Erb- und Familienrecht bilden den Kern des traditionellen islamischen Rechts. Das agyptische Testamentsgesetz stellt die erste neuzeitliche Kodifikation dieses Rechtsbereichs dar und hat dem Gesetzgeber in einigen weiteren Landern der Region als Vorbild gedient. In der Untersuchung wird analysiert, inwieweit die heutige Gesetzgebung auf den Grundsatzen des klassischen, i...

Together Let Us Sweetly Live offers a rare look at the unique grassroots African American religious institutions called the Singing and Praying Bands. This folksong and ring shout tradition began in Chesapeake Bay country in the early nineteenth century, with a fusion of Methodist prayer meeting worship and African religious, danced song traditions. Although scholars have assumed ring shouts died out long ago, Jonathan C. David shows otherwise, ushering us inside tidewater communities of Marylan...

Saints and Citizens is a bold new excavation of the history of Indigenous people in California in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showing how the missions became sites of their authority, memory, and identity. Shining a forensic eye on colonial encounters in Chumash, Luiseno, and Yokuts territories, Lisbeth Haas depicts how native painters incorporated their cultural iconography in mission painting and how leaders harnessed new knowledge for control in other ways. Through her portr...

When faced by the Court-ordered "all deliberate speed" time frame for school desegregation, a fearful Houston school board member urged the city to "make haste slowly," in order for the school system to receive decisions based on sound judgment and discretion. Houston, Texas, had what may have been the largest racially segregated "Jim Crow" public school system in the United States when the Supreme Court declared the practice unconstitutional in 1954. Ultimately, helped by members of its busines...

The intertribal pow-wow is the most widespread venue for traditional Indian music and dance in North America. Heartbeat of the People is an insider's journey into the dances and music, the traditions and regalia, and the functions and significance of these vital cultural events. Tara Browner focuses on the Northern pow-wow of the northern Great Plains and Great Lakes to investigate the underlying tribal and regional frameworks that reinforce personal tribal affiliations. Interviews with dancers...

The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia explores the creation, destruction, appropriation, and enduring legacy of one of early America's most important places: the homelands of the Haudenosaunees (also known as the Iroquois Six Nations). Throughout the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries of European colonization the Haudenosaunees remained the dominant power in their homelands and one of the most important diplomatic players in the struggle for the continent following European...

The Roma are Europe’s largest minority, and yet they remain one of the most misunderstood and underrepresented. Scholarship on the Roma in German-speaking countries has focused mostly on the portrayal of “Zigeuner/Gypsies” in literature by non-Roma and on persecution during the Nazi period. Rarely have scholars examined the actual voices of Roma to glean their perspectives on their social interactions and customs. Without such studies the Roma appear passive in the face of their long and trouble...