Spring Summer 2012 Catalog
The Breathless Zoo
“I have long been a fan of Rachel Poliquin's otherworldly online museum, ravishingbeasts.com, but after reading The Breathless Zoo I know just what she means when she says that all taxidermy, like storytelling, is ‘deeply marked by human longing.’ I am already longing to read The Breathless Zoo again.”
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A Matter of Simple Justice
“The words ‘untold story’ always pique my interest, since those stories often contain wonderful surprises. A Matter of Simple Justice is just such a story. I am thrilled that our friend Barbara Hackman Franklin—along with President Nixon—is finally getting the credit she deserves for advancing the cause of women in the workplace.”
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Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound
“Leo Mazow’s much-anticipated Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound contains many delightful surprises. At last we have a book that considers Benton’s trenchant absorption in American sound.”
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Princeton
“An eloquent history of the distinguished Princeton campus.”
“The stories Maynard tells reveal the rich and interesting evolution of American architecture from the mid-eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries.”
Cold Modernism
“Cold Modernism is a wonderful book—insightful, erudite, and witty beyond words. I think it will have an enormous impact on modernist studies.”
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Of Cannibals and Kings
“As the primal text of Europe’s encounter with America, Ramón Pané’s Antiquities of the Indies is of unparalleled importance for understanding both the native culture of the Caribbean at the time of contact and the ways in which Europeans tried to make sense of it. Most significantly, the collection is introduced by Neil Whitehead’s magisterial survey of the politics of this founding moment of anthropological discourse.”
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Machado de Assis
“G. Reginald Daniel's work is a thoughtful analysis of how racial identity and race relations are dealt with in the work of Machado de Assis. It allows us to understand how Machado's universal principles, as well as his ambiguity regarding the ‘mulatto’ condition in Brazil, in fact erode the very foundations of raciologic thinking. ”
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A Bibliographical Description of Books and Pamphlets of American Verse Printed from 1610 Through 1820
“This book is an outstanding scholarly achievement, the work of a scholarly lifetime to which students of early American poetry will be indebted for generations to come. Its meticulous research is judiciously assembled and framed so as to guarantee maximum ease of access to the more than one thousand works described.”
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William Parks
William Parks: The Colonial Printer in the Transatlantic World of the Eighteenth Century is a cultural biography that traces the important early American printer and newspaper publisher’s path from the rural provinces of England to London and then to colonial Maryland and Virginia. While incorporating much new biographical information, the book widens the lens to take in the print culture on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Condorcet
“The volume is a vital, genuinely original contribution to the literature on Condorcet's political thought—and how he applied his general views on republicanism and constitutionalism to the case of the United States—as well as on early European responses to American constitutional development.”
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The Complete Plays of Jean Racine
As Voltaire famously opined, Athaliah, Racine’s last play, is “perhaps the greatest masterwork of the human spirit.”
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The Wake of Iconoclasm
“This book is a significant contribution to the field of Dutch art and religious culture. Angela Vanhaelen looks closely and with fresh eyes at these images of Dutch church interiors, and with the close observation of each detail, their architectural spaces and church-attending inhabitants come alive to the reader.”
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Insular and Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought in the Early Medieval Period
Covering the arts of Ireland and England with some incursions onto mainland Europe, the terms Insular and Anglo-Saxon are two of the most problematic in medieval art history. Originally used to define the manuscripts of ninth- and tenth-century Ireland and the north of England, the term Insular is now more widely applied to include all of the media of these and earlier periods.
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Strange Beauty
“Cynthia Hahn offers a refreshing new synthesis on the topic of medieval reliquaries. She shows that they are a form of ‘representation’ that mediates religious experience of relics as well as their political and institutional meanings.”
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Invoking Angels
“Invoking Angels makes an important contribution to the growing scholarly literature on medieval and early modern ritual magic.”
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The Italian Piazza Transformed
“There is no doubt that this is a significant contribution to the field . . . an exemplary presentation of extremely complex historical processes. The scholarship is formidable.”
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Reasoned and Unreasoned Images
“Josh Ellenbogen offers a truly unique treatment of the nature of scientific uses of photography at the turn of the nineteenth century, one that will certainly be debated but whose value will lie in the specificity of its analysis and the originality of its argument. This will be an influential book, dealing with many contemporary issues in our understanding of photographic evidence and revealing their historical background. It has already influenced my own thinking.”
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Ingres and the Studio
“Ingres and the Studio offers a powerful new account of Ingres’s principally female portrait subjects, situated in the context of contemporary aesthetic and artistic debates—and no less situated within the context of Ingres’s studio practice and its psychological dynamics.”
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Sheltering Art
“Rochelle Ziskin's learned study brings to vibrant life the extensive social and political networks out of which two major early eighteenth-century Parisian art collections grew, and reveals how the practices that built each collection were decisively shaped by the ideals of these overlapping networks—as well as by the conflicts that sometimes divided them.”
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Making Modern Paris
“Finally we have a thorough and nuanced monograph on the architect Victor Baltard, his contribution to the design of the world's most renowned public market, and his rightful place—and that of his oeuvre, including the markets—in shaping the modern French capital.”
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The Smile of Tragedy
“The Smile of Tragedy is a valuable addition to the literature on Nietzsche. . . . The book is clearly argued and well-written, with an abundance of references to the primary sources seamlessly integrated into the text. Particularly impressive is the concise and sustained development of the exposition, the arc of which unfolds without loss of shape or focus.”
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The Violence of Victimhood
“The Violence of Victimhood is original in its question and extremely well researched. The discussion of widely held and largely unexamined claims regarding the moral status of the other, of trauma, of victims, of powerlessness, and so on is very fresh and insightful. . . . The breadth and depth of the research is astounding. Diane Enns knows all the secondary literature and brings it fruitfully to bear without losing her own original voice.”
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Kant's Political Theory
“An impressive contemporary collection featuring some very distinguished contributors. Especially when brought together in one volume, these essays make important contributions to the literature on Kant's political philosophy.”
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Women of the Right
“Pathbreaking research and sparkling analysis in an accessible and coherent collection that brilliantly illuminates a neglected area of social science research on right-wing movements.”
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The Making of a Market
“This is a thoughtful econometric analysis of the development of credit markets in late nineteenth-century Yucatán, Mexico. Juliette Levy's argument is at once straightforward and innovative. Levy is certainly not the first scholar to make use of Yucatán's rich notarial archives, but no one has made better or more systematic use of this type of documentation.”
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Trust, Democracy, and Multicultural Challenges
“This is a well-written book. . . . It presents an important argument and tackles a vast body of literature. It makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates in political theory about democracy and trust. And probably most important, it sets out a highly controversial argument in a convincing and measured way.”
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Fostering Autonomy
“In this superb and timely analysis, Elizabeth Ben-Ishai explains why states should strive to foster autonomy and how social service systems can be used to pursue this goal. Blending theoretical insights with careful empirical observations, Ben-Ishai challenges us to rethink our conceptions of citizenship, autonomy, and the state. Her relational approach yields a powerful critique of prevailing assumptions and practices. It also provides valuable conceptual resources for thinking about where we should go from here.”
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Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation
“There is nothing like Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation in drug-control literature. It covers a region, Central America, that other studies deal with peripherally, if at all. The authors make their subject a compelling story, one that is essential to an understanding of recent and contemporary Central America. Bunck and Fowler's exceptional study will appeal to both students and scholars in various disciplines, including history, political science, sociology, and criminal justice.”
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Care Work and Class
“Merike Blofield’s well-crafted book tackles an understudied yet highly relevant topic, offering a finely nuanced analysis of why domestic workers’ rights are ignored despite decades of democracy in Latin America. Carework and Class breaks new ground by revealing the conditions under which legal reform occurs, but it also shows when and why laws that protect domestic workers are actually enforced. ”
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This Far by Faith
“This Far by Faith opens the red door to the whole church, from pulpit to pews. In doing so, it provides a most sensitive and sensible examination of a diocese as a living organism. It also provides a model for writing church history hereafter. It is, then, a book that transcends its subject and invites anyone interested in American religion to consider its method and meaning.”
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Pennsylvania in Public Memory
“Pennsylvania is widely known for being at the center of the nation’s industrial rise, and upon its fall, factories once devoted to the production of goods turned to issuing memories. Carolyn Kitch opens readers' eyes to the profound, intriguing questions, conflicts, and implications raised by this move to heritage. She provides a needed panorama of the messages and meanings with which communities, and the nation, wrestle in a postindustrial age.”
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Counterfeit Amateurs
“Allen Sack has lived the dream and yet seen the nightmares of college sport. Understanding the demands upon athletes who also want educations, he seeks intercollegiate reform through athletes’ rights.”
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Too Young to Run?
“John Seery’s book is applied political theory at its best: it enunciates a proposition that no doubt will be initially implausible to many readers and offers a superb defense that should change a lot of minds and, along the way, provide wonderful food for thought about what constitutes a truly democratic electorate.”
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Art and Globalization
“In our era of biennales and international galleries, contemporary art compels both a new, wider analysis as well as a rethinking of basic forms and definitions. Presented in the form of dialogues, even debates, in transcript, followed by individual responses, Art and Globalization’s distillation of collective seminar discussions intends to open, rather than to close, its topics: considerations of both the recent history of visual culture toward some guiding theory of globalization and its consequences for art production and consumption across space rather than time.”
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The Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini
“This is the first English translation of Domenico Bernini’s important biography of his father and a splendid addition to the literature on the preeminent genius of the Roman Baroque. Not only does Mormando’s elegant translation make this primary source available to those who do not read Italian, but his accompanying commentary is illuminating and exhaustive, drawing as it does on nearly six hundred secondary sources. This is the book every student and admirer of Bernini has been waiting for.”
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Charlemagne and Louis the Pious
Carolingian historical texts have long stood at the base of our modern knowledge about the eighth and ninth centuries. The ninth century gave birth to a new revival of secular biography, which has come to be recognized as one of the brightest bands in the spectrum of Carolingian historical writing. This collection brings together, for the first time in one volume, the five royal/imperial biographies written during the Carolingian period.
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Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims
“Dietz provides a counterpart to the apparent single-minded scholarly focus on pilgrimage to holy sites as the only ‘religiously motivated travel.’ This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in early Christian travel around the Mediterranean world.”
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Public Forgetting
“In his sustained meditation on forgetting, Bradford Vivian makes a singular and extremely valuable contribution to the field of memory studies. He substantially advances the theoretical discussion of memory and forgetting with his extended critiques (rhetorical analyses, really) of both ancient and recent formulations of collective public memory and forgetting. The conclusion is almost poetic in its lightness of touch. It pulls all the strands of the book into a single compelling case for forgetting as part of memory.”
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Pathways to Power
“A heavily documented and scholarly sophisticated text, it will find its main audience with comparative politics scholars and advanced graduate students in the area of Latin American politics.”
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Mining for the Nation
“The research in Mining for the Nation is highly original. It fills a gap in Chilean labor and mining history, both in English and in Spanish. The book offers a reinterpretation of the Popular Front experience in Chile and the first serious book-length political history of the coal region and the role of the Communist Party there from the 1930s to 1952. Additionally, it serves as a very readable history of the complex connections among local, regional, national, and international politics in 1930s–1950s Chile.”
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Producing Knowledge, Protecting Forests
“[Producing Knowledge, Protecting Forests] is concise yet rich in ethnographic and theoretical insights. It will be a classic for years to come.”
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The Illusion of Civil Society
“This volume is a finely wrought piece of scholarship that will appeal not only to students of civil society but also to scholars (and critics) of neo-liberalism, globalization, democratization, patron-client relations, and urban transformation in Latin America and other parts of the global south.”
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Income Inequality in Capitalist Democracies
“Employing Brady and Collier’s cutting-edge suggestions (in Rethinking Social Inquiry) for combining quantitative and qualitative methods, Birchfield does a stellar job of showing how societal institutions and cultural values interact to foster and justify sharply different levels of economic inequality among advanced industrial societies.”
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Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty
“Rural poverty has been seriously neglected by scholars, making this book particularly welcome. It is balanced, well written, and focused on a timely issue. It should be of interest to social workers and a broad array of social scientists.”
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Falckner's Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania
Originally circulated in Germany, Falckner’s pamphlet was one in a wave of pamphlets about the American colonies disseminated in Europe during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It stood alongside influential works by Penn and Pastorius that circulated among Pietists and other groups to raise awareness in Europe about the practical and spiritual climates in Pennsylvania. Falckner’s pamphlet, in particular, was used in a promotional manner and utilizes a question-and-answer format, addressing everything from how to plan for a voyage to America to common professions for Europeans in the New World, dealings with the native population, seasonal climate, and hundreds of other issues.
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Extracts from Letters Written by Alfred B. McCalmont, 1862–1865
Published in 1908 for private circulation by the author’s son, this volume contains a selection of more than ninety letters written by Alfred B. McCalmont to family members from the war front from September 1862 to June 1865. These letters take the reader from the organization of McCalmont’s Petroleum Guards (Company I) in the 142nd Pennsylvania Volunteers in 1862 through his service as lieutenant colonel and then colonel, providing both details of battle and insights into the life of a commanding officer. McCalmont would be promoted to brigadier general in the final hours of the war.
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The Pennsylvania-German in the Revolutionary War, 1775–1783
Published by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1908, this volume is one among many compiled to help illuminate the achievements of the Pennsylvania Germans during our nation’s early years. In the pre–World War I era, such works were written to dismiss the common belief that “the German element of this country has been practically a non-entity in its development” and to lift the “curtain of ignorance” on the subject. In this volume, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg Richards takes on this task by examining the role played by Pennsylvania Germans during the American Revolution.
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