Name: Mabel McKay
Brand: Greg Sarris
Price: 29.95 USD
Availability: InStock

Pierre Asselin

Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965

$29.95

Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War opens in 1954 with the signing of the Geneva accords that ended the eight-year-long Franco-Indochinese War and created two Vietnams. In agreeing to the accords, Ho Chi Minh and other leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam anticipated a new period of peace leading to national reunification under their rule; they never imagined that within a decade they would be engaged in an even bigger feud with the United States. Basing his work on new and largely inaccessible Vietnamese materials as well as French, British, Canadian, and American documents, Pierre Asselin explores the communist path to war. Specifically, he examines the internal debates and other elements that shaped Hanoi's revolutionary strategy in the decade preceding U.S. military intervention, and resulting domestic and foreign programs. Without exonerating Washington for its role in the advent of hostilities in 1965, Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War demonstrates that those who directed the effort against the United States and its allies in Saigon were at least equally responsible for creating the circumstances that culminated in arguably the most tragic conflict of the Cold War era.

Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965

Richard Kalmin

Migrating Tales

$34.95

Migrating Tales situates the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, in its cultural context by reading several rich rabbinic stories against the background of Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Mesopotamian literature of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, much of it Christian in origin. In this nuanced work, Richard Kalmin argues that non-Jewish literature deriving from the eastern Roman provinces is a crucially important key to interpreting Babylonian rabbinic literature, to a degree unimagined by earlier scholars. Kalmin demonstrates the extent to which rabbinic Babylonia was part of the Mediterranean world of late antiquity and part of the emerging but never fully realized cultural unity forming during this period in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and western Persia.

Kalmin recognizes that the Bavli contains remarkable diversity, incorporating motifs derived from the cultures of contemporaneous religious and social groups. Looking closely at the intimate relationship between narratives of the Bavli and of the Christian Roman Empire, Migrating Tales brings the history of Judaism and Jewish culture into the ambit of the ancient world as a whole.

Detlef Liebs

Summoned to the Roman Courts

$34.95

Summoned to the Roman Courts is the first work by Detlef Liebs, an internationally recognized expert on ancient Roman law, to be made available in English. Originally presented as a series of popular lectures, this book brings to life a thousand years of Roman history through sixteen studies of famous court cases—from the legendary trial of Horatius for the killing of his sister, to the trial of Jesus Christ, to that of the Christian leader Priscillian for heresy. Drawing on a wide variety of ancient sources, the author not only paints a vivid picture of ancient Roman society, but also illuminates how ancient legal practices still profoundly affect how the law is implemented today.

Andrew Friedman

Covert Capital

$29.95

The capital of the U.S. Empire after World War II was not a city. It was an American suburb. In this innovative and timely history, Andrew Friedman chronicles how the CIA and other national security institutions created a U.S. imperial home front in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. In this covert capital, the suburban landscape provided a cover for the workings of U.S. imperial power, which shaped domestic suburban life. The Pentagon and the CIA built two of the largest office buildings in the country there during and after the war that anchored a new imperial culture and social world.

As the U.S. expanded its power abroad by developing roads, embassies, and villages, its subjects also arrived in the covert capital as real estate agents, homeowners, builders, and landscapers who constructed spaces and living monuments that both nurtured and critiqued postwar U.S. foreign policy. Tracing the relationships among American agents and the migrants from Vietnam, El Salvador, Iran, and elsewhere who settled in the southwestern suburbs of D.C., Friedman tells the story of a place that recasts ideas about U.S. immigration, citizenship, nationalism, global interconnection, and ethical responsibility from the post-WW2 period to the present. Opening a new window onto the intertwined history of the American suburbs and U.S. foreign policy, Covert Capital will also give readers a broad interdisciplinary and often surprising understanding of how U.S. domestic and global histories intersect in many contexts and at many scales.

American Crossroads, 37

Kornel Chang

Pacific Connections

$34.95

In the late nineteenth century the borderlands between the United States, the British Empire in Canada, and the Asia-Pacific Rim emerged as a crossroads of the Pacific world. In Pacific Connections, Kornel Chang tells the dramatic stories of the laborers, merchants, smugglers, and activists who crossed these borders into the twentieth century, and the American and British empire-builders who countered them by hardening racial and national lines. But even as settler societies attempted to control the processes of imperial integration, their project fractured under its contradictions. Migrant workers and radical activists pursued a transnational politics through the very networks that made empire possible. Charting the U.S.-Canadian borderlands from above and below, Chang reveals the messiness of imperial formation and the struggles it spawned from multiple locations and through different actors across the Pacific world. Pacific Connections is the winner of the Outstanding Book in History award from the Association for Asian American Studies and is a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize from the American Studies Association.

James Vernon

Distant Strangers

$24.95

What does it mean to live in the modern world? How different is that world from those that preceded it, and when did we become modern?

In Distant Strangers, James Vernon argues that the world was made modern not by revolution, industrialization, or the Enlightenment. Instead, he shows how in Britain, a place long held to be the crucible of modernity, a new and distinctly modern social condition emerged by the middle of the nineteenth century. Rapid and sustained population growth, combined with increasing mobility of people over greater distances and concentrations of people in cities, created a society of strangers.

Vernon explores how individuals in modern societies adapted to live among strangers by forging more abstract and anonymous economic, social, and political relations, as well as by reanimating the local and the personal.

Greg Sarris

Mabel McKay

$29.95

A world-renowned Pomo basket weaver and medicine woman, Mabel McKay expressed her genius through her celebrated baskets, her Dreams, her cures, and the stories with which she kept her culture alive. She spent her life teaching others how the spirit speaks through the Dream, how the spirit heals, and how the spirit demands to be heard.

Greg Sarris weaves together stories from Mabel McKay's life with an account of how he tried, and she resisted, telling her story straight—the white people's way. Sarris, an Indian of mixed-blood heritage, finds his own story in his search for Mabel McKay's. Beautifully narrated, Weaving the Dream initiates the reader into Pomo culture and demonstrates how a woman who worked most of her life in a cannery could become a great healer and an artist whose baskets were collected by the Smithsonian.

Hearing Mabel McKay's life story, we see that distinctions between material and spiritual and between mundane and magical disappear. What remains is a timeless way of healing, of making art, and of being in the world. Sarris’s new preface, written expressly for this edition, meditates on Mabel McKay’s enduring legacy and the continued importance of her teachings.

Jon Wiener

How We Forgot the Cold War

$27.95

Hours after the USSR collapsed in 1991, Congress began making plans to establish the official memory of the Cold War. Conservatives dominated the proceedings, spending millions to portray the conflict as a triumph of good over evil and a defeat of totalitarianism equal in significance to World War II. In this provocative book, historian Jon Wiener visits Cold War monuments, museums, and memorials across the United States to find out how the era is being remembered. The author’s journey provides a history of the Cold War, one that turns many conventional notions on their heads.

In an engaging travelogue that takes readers to sites such as the life-size recreation of Berlin’s “Checkpoint Charlie” at the Reagan Library, the fallout shelter display at the Smithsonian, and exhibits about “Sgt. Elvis,” America’s most famous Cold War veteran, Wiener discovers that the Cold War isn’t being remembered. It’s being forgotten. Despite an immense effort, the conservatives’ monuments weren’t built, their historic sites have few visitors, and many of their museums have now shifted focus to other topics. Proponents of the notion of a heroic “Cold War victory” failed; the public didn’t buy the official story. Lively, readable, and well-informed, this book expands current discussions about memory and history, and raises intriguing questions about popular skepticism toward official ideology.

Johann Chapoutot

Greeks, Romans, Germans

$29.95

Much has been written about the conditions that made possible Hitler's rise and the Nazi takeover of Germany, but when we tell the story of the National Socialist Party, should we not also speak of Julius Caesar and Pericles? Greeks, Romans, Germans argues that to fully understand the racist, violent end of the Nazi regime, we must examine its appropriation of the heroes and lessons of the ancient world. When Hitler told the assembled masses that they were a people with no past, he meant that they had no past following their humiliation in World War I of which to be proud. The Nazis' constant use of classical antiquity—in official speeches, film, state architecture, the press, and state-sponsored festivities—conferred on them the prestige and heritage of Greece and Rome that the modern German people so desperately needed. At the same time, the lessons of antiquity served as a warning: Greece and Rome fell because they were incapable of protecting the purity of their blood against mixing and infiltration. To regain their rightful place in the world, the Nazis had to make all-out war on Germany's enemies, within and without.

John H. M. Laslett

Sunshine Was Never Enough

$27.95

Delving beneath Southern California’s popular image as a sunny frontier of leisure and ease, this book tells the dynamic story of the life and labor of Los Angeles’s large working class. In a sweeping narrative that takes into account more than a century of labor history, John H. M. Laslett acknowledges the advantages Southern California’s climate, open spaces, and bucolic character offered to generations of newcomers. At the same time, he demonstrates that—in terms of wages, hours, and conditions of work—L.A. differed very little from America’s other industrial cities. Both fast-paced and sophisticated, Sunshine Was Never Enough shows how labor in all its guises—blue and white collar, industrial, agricultural, and high tech—shaped the neighborhoods, economic policies, racial attitudes, and class perceptions of the City of Angels.

Laslett explains how, until the 1930s, many of L.A.’s workers were under the thumb of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association. This conservative organization kept wages low, suppressed trade unions, and made L.A. into the open shop capital of America. By contrast now, at a time when the AFL-CIO is at its lowest ebb—a young generation of Mexican and African American organizers has infused the L.A. movement with renewed strength. These stories of the men and women who pumped oil, loaded ships in San Pedro harbor, built movie sets, assembled aircraft, and in more recent times cleaned hotels and washed cars is a little-known but vital part of Los Angeles history.

James L. Gelvin

Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print

$34.95

The second half of the nineteenth century marks a watershed in human history. Railroads linked remote hinterlands with cities; overland and undersea cables connected distant continents. New and accessible print technologies made the wide dissemination of ideas possible; oceangoing steamers carried goods to faraway markets and enabled the greatest long-distance migrations in recorded history.

In this volume, leading scholars of the Islamic world recount the enduring consequences these technological, economic, social, and cultural revolutions had on Muslim communities from North Africa to South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and China. Drawing on a multiplicity of approaches and genres, from commodity history to biography to social network theory, the essays in Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print offer new and diverse perspectives on a transnational community in an era of global transformation.

Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print

David E. Hayes-Bautista

El Cinco de Mayo

$28.95

Why is Cinco de Mayo—a holiday commemorating a Mexican victory over the French at Puebla in 1862—so widely celebrated in California and across the United States, when it is scarcely observed in Mexico? As David E. Hayes-Bautista explains, the holiday is not Mexican at all, but rather an American one, created by Latinos in California during the mid-nineteenth century. Hayes-Bautista shows how the meaning of Cinco de Mayo has shifted over time—it embodied immigrant nostalgia in the 1930s, U.S. patriotism during World War II, Chicano Power in the 1960s and 1970s, and commercial intentions in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, it continues to reflect the aspirations of a community that is engaged, empowered, and expanding.

Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration

California in the 1930s

$24.95

Alive with the exuberance, contradictions, and variety of the Golden State, this Depression-era guide to California is more than 700 pages of information that is, as David Kipen writes in his spirited introduction, “anecdotal, opinionated, and altogether habit-forming.” Describing the history, culture, and roadside attractions of the 1930s, the WPA Guide to California features some of the very best anonymous literature of its era, with writing by luminaries such as San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, composer-writer- hobo Harry Partch, and authors Tillie Olsen and Kenneth Patchen.

James H. Johnson

Venice Incognito

$34.95

"The entire town is disguised," declared a French tourist of eighteenth-century Venice. And, indeed, maskers of all ranks—nobles, clergy, imposters, seducers, con men—could be found mixing at every level of Venetian society. Even a pious nun donned a mask and male attire for her liaison with the libertine Casanova. In Venice Incognito, James H. Johnson offers a spirited analysis of masking in this carnival-loving city. He draws on a wealth of material to explore the world view of maskers, both during and outside of carnival, and reconstructs their logic: covering the face in public was a uniquely Venetian response to one of the most rigid class hierarchies in European history. This vivid account goes beyond common views that masking was about forgetting the past and minding the muse of pleasure to offer fresh insight into the historical construction of identity.

Miroslava Chávez-García

States of Delinquency

$29.95

This unique analysis of the rise of the juvenile justice system from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries uses one of the harshest states—California—as a case study for examining racism in the treatment of incarcerated young people of color. Using rich new untapped archives, States of Delinquency is the first book to explore the experiences of young Mexican Americans, African Americans, and ethnic Euro-Americans in California correctional facilities including Whittier State School for Boys and the Preston School of Industry. Miroslava Chávez-García examines the ideologies and practices used by state institutions as they began to replace families and communities in punishing youth, and explores the application of science and pseudo-scientific research in the disproportionate classification of youths of color as degenerate. She also shows how these boys and girls, and their families, resisted increasingly harsh treatment and various kinds of abuse, including sterilization.

Nayan Shah

Stranger Intimacy

$34.95

In exploring an array of intimacies between global migrants Nayan Shah illuminates a stunning, transient world of heterogeneous social relations—dignified, collaborative, and illicit. At the same time he demonstrates how the United States and Canada, in collusion with each other, actively sought to exclude and dispossess nonwhite races. Stranger Intimacy reveals the intersections between capitalism, the state's treatment of immigrants, sexual citizenship, and racism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Sydney L. Iaukea

The Queen and I

$34.95

In this exposé Sydney L. Iaukea ties personal memories to newly procured political information about Hawai`i’s crucial Territorial era. Spurred by questions surrounding intergenerational property disputes in her immediate family, she delves into Hawai`i’s historical archives. There she discovers the central role played by her great-great-grandfather in the politics of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Hawai`i—in particular, Curtis P. Iaukea’s trusted position with the Hawaiian Kingdom’s last ruling monarch, Queen Lili`uokalani. As Iaukea charts her ancestor’s efforts to defend a culture under siege, she reveals astonishing legal and legislative maneuvers that show us how capitalism reshaped cultural relationships. She finds resonant parallels and connections between her own upbringing in Maui’s housing projects, her family’s penchant for hiding property, and the Hawaiian peoples’ loss of their country and lands.

Judith Carney

In the Shadow of Slavery

$25.95

The transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans. In the Shadow of Slavery provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foods—millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the “Asian” long bean, for example—are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding. In this exciting, original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves' food plots—“botanical gardens of the dispossessed”—became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies.

David Christian

Maps of Time

$29.95

An introduction to a new way of looking at history, from a perspective that stretches from the beginning of time to the present day, Maps of Time is world history on an unprecedented scale. Beginning with the Big Bang, David Christian views the interaction of the natural world with the more recent arrivals in flora and fauna, including human beings.

Cosmology, geology, archeology, and population and environmental studies—all figure in David Christian's account, which is an ambitious overview of the emerging field of "Big History." Maps of Time opens with the origins of the universe, the stars and the galaxies, the sun and the solar system, including the earth, and conducts readers through the evolution of the planet before human habitation. It surveys the development of human society from the Paleolithic era through the transition to agriculture, the emergence of cities and states, and the birth of the modern, industrial period right up to intimations of possible futures. Sweeping in scope, finely focused in its minute detail, this riveting account of the known world, from the inception of space-time to the prospects of global warming, lays the groundwork for world history—and Big History—true as never before to its name.

Maia Ramnath

Haj to Utopia

$34.95

In The Haj to Utopia, Maia Ramnath tells the dramatic story of Ghadar, the Indian anticolonial movement that attempted overthrow of the British Empire. Founded by South Asian immigrants in California, Ghadar—which is translated as “mutiny”—quickly became a global presence in East Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and East Africa. Ramnath brings this epic struggle to life as she traces Ghadar’s origins to the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, its establishment of headquarters in Berkeley, California, and its fostering by anarchists in London, Paris, and Berlin. Linking Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in 1914 to Ghadar’s declaration of war on Britain, Ramnath vividly recounts how 8,000 rebels were deployed from around the world to take up the battle in Hindustan. The Haj to Utopia demonstrates how far-flung freedom fighters managed to articulate a radical new world order out of seemingly contradictory ideas.

Gail Hershatter

The Gender of Memory

$34.95

What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting—even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

Kerwin Lee Klein

From History to Theory

$29.95

From History to Theory describes major changes in the conceptual language of the humanities, particularly in the discourse of history. In seven beautifully written, closely related essays, Kerwin Lee Klein traces the development of academic vocabularies through the dynamically shifting cultural, political, and linguistic landscapes of the twentieth century. He considers the rise and fall of “philosophy of history” and discusses past attempts to imbue historical discourse with scientific precision. He explores the development of the “meta-narrative” and the post-Marxist view of history and shows how the present resurgence of old words—such as “memory”—in new contexts is providing a way to address marginalized peoples. In analyzing linguistic changes in the North American academy, From History to Theory innovatively ties semantic shifts in academic discourse to key trends in American society, culture, and politics.

G.E.R. Lloyd

The Revolutions of Wisdom

$38.95

G.E.R. Lloyd's wide-ranging and historical study of the development of Greek science is a valuable contribution to current debates in the philosophy of language, on the analysis of scientific revolutions, and the rationality of science.

Susan P. Mattern

Rome and the Enemy

$34.95

How did the Romans build and maintain one of the most powerful and stable empires in the history of the world? This illuminating book draws on the literature, especially the historiography, composed by the members of the elite who conducted Roman foreign affairs. From this evidence, Susan P. Mattern reevaluates the roots, motivations, and goals of Roman imperial foreign policy especially as that policy related to warfare. In a major reinterpretation of the sources, Rome and the Enemy shows that concepts of national honor, fierce competition for status, and revenge drove Roman foreign policy, and though different from the highly rationalizing strategies often attributed to the Romans, dictated patterns of response that remained consistent over centuries.

Mattern reconstructs the world view of the Roman decision-makers, the emperors, and the elite from which they drew their advisers. She discusses Roman conceptions of geography, strategy, economics, and the influence of traditional Roman values on the conduct of military campaigns. She shows that these leaders were more strongly influenced by a traditional, stereotyped perception of the enemy and a drive to avenge insults to their national honor than by concepts of defensible borders. In fact, the desire to enforce an image of Roman power was a major policy goal behind many of their most brutal and aggressive campaigns.

Rome and the Enemy provides a fascinating look into the Roman mind in addition to a compelling reexamination of Roman conceptions of warfare and national honor. The resulting picture creates a new understanding of Rome's long mastery of the Mediterranean world.

Paul Cartledge

Spartan Reflections

$30.95

The complex and distinctive Spartan tradition has been a prominent theme in western thinking from antiquity to today. Sparta is also one of a handful of ancient Greek cities with enough existing evidence for historians to create a realistic social portrait. Over the past quarter-century Paul Cartledge has established himself as the leading international authority on ancient Sparta. Spartan Reflections is a superb collection of his essays—two are published here for the first time, and the rest, often difficult to locate, have been revised and updated for publication in book form. Giving us a real sense of what Sparta was like as a culture, these essays constitute a fascinating introduction to and overview of ancient Spartan history and its reception. This collection, unique in breadth and scope, will be an essential source for anyone interested in this idiosyncratic society.

Cartledge brings us up to date on what is known about the most important and intriguing aspects of Sparta: its military development, questions of gender and sexuality, and the difficult problem of artistic and literary aspects of Sparta. We learn about the institutions that distinguished Sparta from other city-states, including its religion, education process, degree of literacy, secret service, unusual system of servitude, and institutionalized pederasty. Throughout, Cartledge also makes important comparisons with Athens, helping us grasp what is really striking about Sparta.

Cartledge's writing is clear and engaging as he draws from myriad sources both ancient and modern, as well as from political and cultural theory. These essays, together with their magisterial bibliography, demonstrate his remarkable scholarly and intellectual range. Spartan Reflections will be an important source on the most significant issues in Sparta scholarship today as well as a fascinating look at this culture for general readers.

A Selection of the History Book Club

Jeffrey Race

War Comes to Long An, Updated and Expanded

$34.95

This landmark study of the Vietnamese conflict, examined through the lens of the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements in the rural province of Long An up until American intervention in the area, offers a human, balanced, penetrating account of war. Two new forewords by Robert K. Brigham of Vassar College and Jeffrey Record of the Air War College explore the book's enduring influence. A new end chapter offers previously unpublished scholarship on the conflict.

War Comes to Long An, Updated and Expanded

Wendy Kline

Building a Better Race

$30.95

Wendy Kline's lucid cultural history of eugenics in America emphasizes the movement's central, continuing interaction with popular notions of gender and morality. Kline shows how eugenics could seem a viable solution to problems of moral disorder and sexuality, especially female sexuality, during the first half of the twentieth century. Its appeal to social conscience and shared desires to strengthen the family and civilization sparked widespread public as well as scientific interest.

Kline traces this growing public interest by looking at a variety of sources, including the astonishing "morality masque" that climaxed the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition; the nationwide correspondence of the influential Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena, California; the medical and patient records of a "model" state institution that sterilized thousands of allegedly feebleminded women in California between 1900 and 1960; the surprising political and popular support for sterilization that survived initial interest in, and then disassociation from, Nazi eugenics policies; and a widely publicized court case in 1936 involving the sterilization of a wealthy young woman deemed unworthy by her mother of having children.

Kline's engaging account reflects the shift from "negative eugenics" (preventing procreation of the "unfit") to "positive eugenics," which encouraged procreation of the "fit," and it reveals that the "golden age" of eugenics actually occurred long after most historians claim the movement had vanished. The middle-class "passion for parenthood" in the '50s had its roots, she finds, in the positive eugenics campaign of the '30s and '40s. Many issues that originated in the eugenics movement remain controversial today, such as the use of IQ testing, the medical ethics of sterilization, the moral and legal implications of cloning and genetic screening, and even the debate on family values of the 1990s. Building a Better Race not only places eugenics at the center of modern reevaluations of female sexuality and morality but also acknowledges eugenics as an essential aspect of major social and cultural movements in the twentieth century.

Ross Frank

From Settler to Citizen

$30.95

The unique arts-and-crafts tradition of the American Southwest illuminates this economic and social history of colonial New Mexico, casting new light on the development of New Mexico's Hispanic community and its changing relationship with Pueblo Indians. Ross Frank's analysis of Pueblo Indian pottery, Pueblo and Spanish blankets, and Spanish religious images—or santos—links economic change to social and cultural change in this region. Using these cultural artifacts to gauge shifts in power and status, Frank charts the creation of a culturally innovative and dominating Hispanic settler—or vecino—community during the final decades of the eighteenth century.

Contrary to previous views of this period as an economic backwater, Frank shows that Spanish New Mexico instead experienced growth that tied the region closely to colonial economic reforms of the Spanish empire. The resulting economic boom dramatically altered the balance of power between the Spanish settlers and the Pueblo Indians, giving the vecinos the incentive and the means to exploit their Pueblo Indian neighbors. Frank shows that the vecinos used different strategies to take control of the Pueblo textile and pottery trade. The Hispanic community began to define its cultural identity through the economic and social subordination of the Pueblo Indians.

Connecting economic change to powerful cultural and social changes, Frank provides a new understanding of this "borderlands" region of northern New Spain in relatoin to the Spanish colonial history of Mexico. At the same time, From Settler to Citizen recovers the previously unexplored history of an important Hispanic community.

S.D. Goitein

A Mediterranean Society, Volume V

$36.95

This six-volume "portrait of a Mediterranean personality" is a composite portrait of the individuals who wrote the personal letters, contracts, and all other manuscript fragments that found their way into the Cairo Geniza. Most of the fragments from the Geniza, a storeroom for discarded writings that could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, had been removed to Cambridge University Library and other libraries around the world. Professor Goitein devoted the last thirty years of his long and productive life to their study, deciphering the language of the documents and organizing what he called a "marvelous treasure trove of manuscripts" into a coherent, fascinating picture of the society that created them.

It is a rich, panoramic view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. The first and second volumes describe the economic foundations of the society and the institutions and social and political structures that characterized the community. The remaining material, intended for a single volume describing the particulars of the way people lived, blossomed into three volumes, devoted respectively to the family, daily life, and the individual. The divisions are arbitrary but helpful because of the wealth of information. The author refers throughout to other passages in his monumental work that amplify what is discussed in any particular section. The result is an incomparably clear and immediate impression of how it was in the Mediterranean world of the tenth through the thirteenth century.

Volume V, subtitled The Individual, draws a portrait of the individual—a social person who mingled within the community; addressed the challenges of poverty, illness, aging, and death; possessed friends, enemies, and lovers; prayed and responded within a religious community; learned, created, thought and taught.

Sir Ronald Syme

Sallust

$36.95

With this classic book, Sir Ronald Syme became the first historian of the twentieth century to place Sallust—whom Tacitus called the most brilliant Roman historian—in his social, political, and literary context. Scholars had considered Sallust to be a mere political hack or pamphleteer, but Syme's text makes important connections between the politics of the Republic and the literary achievement of the author to show Sallust as a historian unbiased by partisanship. In a new foreword, Ronald Mellor delivers one of the most thorough biographical essays of Sir Ronald Syme in English. He both places the book in the context of Syme's other works and details the progression of Sallustian studies since and as a result of Syme's work.

Elizabeth D. Heineman

What Difference Does a Husband Make?

$31.95

In October 1946, seven million more women than men lived in occupied Germany. In this study of unwed, divorced, widowed, and married women at work and at home across three political regimes, Elizabeth Heineman traces the transitions from early National Socialism through the war and on to the consolidation of democracy in the West and communism in the East.

Based on thorough and extensive research in German national and regional archives as well as the archives of the U.S. occupying forces, this pathbreaking book argues that marital status can define women's position and experience as surely as race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Heineman finds that, while the war made the experience of single women a dramatic one, state activity was equally important. As a result, West German women continued to be defined in large part by their marital status. In contrast, by the time of reunification marital status had become far less significant in the lives of East German women.

In one broad, comprehensive sweep, Elizabeth Heineman compares prewar and postwar, East and West, lived experience and public policy. Her sharp analytical insights will enrich our understanding of the history of women in modern Germany and the role of marital status in twentieth-century life worldwide.

S.D. Goitein

A Mediterranean Society, Volume VI

$31.95

This six-volume "portrait of a Mediterranean personality" is a composite portrait of the individuals who wrote the personal letters, contracts, and all other manuscript fragments that found their way into the Cairo Geniza. Most of the fragments from the Geniza, a storeroom for discarded writings that could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, had been removed to Cambridge University Library and other libraries around the world. Professor Goitein devoted the last thirty years of his long and productive life to their study, deciphering the language of the documents and organizing what he called a "marvelous treasure trove of manuscripts" into a coherent, fascinating picture of the society that created them.

It is a rich, panoramic view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. The first and second volumes describe the economic foundations of the society and the institutions and social and political structures that characterized the community. The remaining material, intended for a single volume describing the particulars of the way people lived, blossomed into three volumes, devoted respectively to the family, daily life, and the individual. The divisions are arbitrary but helpful because of the wealth of information. The author refers throughout to other passages in his monumental work that amplify what is discussed in any particular section. The result is an incomparably clear and immediate impression of how it was in the Mediterranean world of the tenth through the thirteenth century.

Volume VI, prepared by Paula Sanders, is a volume of cumulative, analytical indices.

John Gregory Dunne

Delano

$34.95

In September 1965, Filipino and Mexican American farm workers went on strike against grape growers in and around Delano, California. More than a labor dispute, the strike became a movement for social justice that helped redefine Latino and American politics. The strike also catapulted its leader, Cesar Chavez, into prominence as one of the most celebrated American political figures of the twentieth century. More than forty years after its original publication, Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike, based on compelling first-hand reportage and interviews, retains both its freshness and its urgency in illuminating a moment of unusually significant social ferment.

Mark Munn

The School of History

$41.95

History, political philosophy, and constitutional law were born in Athens in the space of a single generation--the generation that lived through the Peloponnesian War (431-404 b.c.e.). This remarkable age produced such luminaries as Socrates, Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and the sophists, and set the stage for the education and early careers of Plato and Xenophon, among others. The School of History provides the fullest and most detailed intellectual and political history available of Athens during the late fifth century b.c.e., as it examines the background, the context, and the decisive events shaping this society in the throes of war. This expansive, readable narrative ultimately leads to a new understanding of Athenian democratic culture, showing why and how it yielded such extraordinary intellectual productivity.

As both a source and a subject, Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War is the central text around which the narrative and thematic issues of the book revolve. Munn re-evaluates the formation of the Greek historiographical tradition itself as he identifies the conditions that prompted Thucydides to write--specifically the historian's desire to guide the Athenian democracy as it struggled to comprehend its future.

The School of History fully encompasses recent scholarship in history, literature, and archaeology. Munn's impressive mastery of the huge number of sources and publications informs his substantial contributions to our understanding of this democracy transformed by war. Immersing us fully in the intellectual foment of Athenian society, The School of History traces the history of Athens at the peak of its influence, both as a political and military power in its own time and as a source of intellectual inspiration for the centuries to come.

A Main Selection of the History Book Club

Philip Rousseau

Basil of Caesarea

$38.95

Basil of Caesarea is thought of most often as an opponent of heresy and a pioneer of monastic life in the eastern church. In this new biographical study, however, controversy is no longer seen as the central preoccupation of his life nor are his ascetic initiatives viewed as separable from his pastoral concern for all Christians. Basil's letters, sermons, and theological treatises, together with the testimonies of his relatives and friends, reveal a man beset by doubt. He demanded loyalty, but gave it also, and made it a central feature of his church. In Rousseau's portrait, Basil's understanding of human nature emerges as his major legacy.

Ussama Makdisi

The Culture of Sectarianism

$31.95

Focusing on Ottoman Lebanon, Ussama Makdisi shows how sectarianism was a manifestation of modernity that transcended the physical boundaries of a particular country. His study challenges those who have viewed sectarian violence as an Islamic response to westernization or simply as a product of social and economic inequities among religious groups. The religious violence of the nineteenth century, which culminated in sectarian mobilizations and massacres in 1860, was a complex, multilayered, subaltern expression of modernization, he says, not a primordial reaction to it.

Makdisi argues that sectarianism represented a deliberate mobilization of religious identities for political and social purposes. The Ottoman reform movement launched in 1839 and the growing European presence in the Middle East contributed to the disintegration of the traditional Lebanese social order based on a hierarchy that bridged religious differences. Makdisi highlights how European colonialism and Orientalism, with their emphasis on Christian salvation and Islamic despotism, and Ottoman and local nationalisms each created and used narratives of sectarianism as foils to their own visions of modernity and to their own projects of colonial, imperial, and national development. Makdisi's book is important to our understanding of Lebanese society today, but it also makes a significant contribution to the discussion of the importance of religious discourse in the formation and dissolution of social and national identities in the modern world.

S.D. Goitein

A Mediterranean Society, Volume I

$34.95

This six-volume "portrait of a Mediterranean personality" is a composite portrait of the individuals who wrote the personal letters, contracts, and all other manuscript fragments that found their way into the Cairo Geniza. Most of the fragments from the Geniza, a storeroom for discarded writings that could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, had been removed to Cambridge University Library and other libraries around the world. Professor Goitein devoted the last thirty years of his long and productive life to their study, deciphering the language of the documents and organizing what he called a "marvelous treasure trove of manuscripts" into a coherent, fascinating picture of the society that created them.

It is a rich, panoramic view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. The first and second volumes describe the economic foundations of the society and the institutions and social and political structures that characterized the community. The remaining material, intended for a single volume describing the particulars of the way people lived, blossomed into three volumes, devoted respectively to the family, daily life, and the individual. The divisions are arbitrary but helpful because of the wealth of information. The author refers throughout to other passages in his monumental work that amplify what is discussed in any particular section. The result is an incomparably clear and immediate impression of how it was in the Mediterranean world of the tenth through the thirteenth century.

Volume I, subtitled Economic Foundations, gives an overview of the Mediterranean (history, peoples, culture) during the high middle ages; discusses the working class; the business world, and government's role in commerce; and provides a complete description of travel and seafaring.

Sharon Marcus

Apartment Stories

$33.95

In urban studies, the nineteenth century is the "age of great cities." In feminist studies, it is the era of the separate domestic sphere. But what of the city's homes? In the course of answering this question, Apartment Stories provides a singular and radically new framework for understanding the urban and the domestic. Turning to an element of the cityscape that is thoroughly familiar yet frequently overlooked, Sharon Marcus argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and feminine spheres.

Moving deftly from novels to architectural treatises, legal debates, and popular urban observation, Marcus compares the representation of the apartment house in Paris and London. Along the way, she excavates the urban ghost tales that encoded Londoners' ambivalence about city dwellings; contends that Haussmannization enclosed Paris in a new regime of privacy; and locates a female counterpart to the flâneur and the omniscient realist narrator—the portière who supervised the apartment building.

Walter O. Weyrauch, editor

Gypsy Law

$33.95

Approximately one thousand years ago Gypsies, or Roma, left their native India. Today Gypsies can be found in countries throughout the world, their distinct culture still intact in spite of the intense persecution they have endured. This authoritative collection brings together leading Gypsy and non-Gypsy scholars to examine the Romani legal system, an autonomous body of law based on an oral tradition and existing alongside dominant national legal networks.

For centuries the Roma have survived by using defensive strategies, especially the absolute exclusion of gadje (non-Gypsies) from their private lives, their values, and information about Romani language and social institutions. Sexuality, gender, and the body are fundamental to Gypsy law, with rules that govern being pure (vujo) or impure (marime). Women play an important role in maintaining legal customs, having the power to sanction and to contaminate, but they are not directly involved in legal proceedings.

These essays offer a comparative perspective on Romani legal procedures and identity, including topics such as the United States' criminalization of many aspects of Gypsy law, parallels between Jewish and Gypsy law, and legal distinctions between Romani communities. The contributors raise broad theoretical questions that transcend the specific Gypsy context and offer important insights into understanding oral legal traditions. Together they suggest a theoretical framework for explaining the coexistence of formal and informal law within a single legal system. They also highlight the ethical dilemmas encountered in comparative law research and definitions of "human rights."

Evelyn S. Rawski

The Last Emperors

$36.95

The Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) was the last and arguably the greatest of the conquest dynasties to rule China. Its rulers, Manchus from the north, held power for three centuries despite major cultural and ideological differences with the Han majority. In this book, Evelyn Rawski offers a bold new interpretation of the remarkable success of this dynasty, arguing that it derived not from the assimilation of the dominant Chinese culture, as has previously been believed, but rather from an artful synthesis of Manchu leadership styles with Han Chinese policies.

S.D. Goitein

A Mediterranean Society, Volume III

$34.95

This six-volume "portrait of a Mediterranean personality" is a composite portrait of the individuals who wrote the personal letters, contracts, and all other manuscript fragments that found their way into the Cairo Geniza. Most of the fragments from the Geniza, a storeroom for discarded writings that could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, had been removed to Cambridge University Library and other libraries around the world. Professor Goitein devoted the last thirty years of his long and productive life to their study, deciphering the language of the documents and organizing what he called a "marvelous treasure trove of manuscripts" into a coherent, fascinating picture of the society that created them.

It is a rich, panoramic view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. The first and second volumes describe the economic foundations of the society and the institutions and social and political structures that characterized the community. The remaining material, intended for a single volume describing the particulars of the way people lived, blossomed into three volumes, devoted respectively to the family, daily life, and the individual. The divisions are arbitrary but helpful because of the wealth of information. The author refers throughout to other passages in his monumental work that amplify what is discussed in any particular section. The result is an incomparably clear and immediate impression of how it was in the Mediterranean world of the tenth through the thirteenth century.

Volume III, subtitled The Family, reveals the Mediterranean family—the extended family, marriage (rituals, economics, social and cultural safeguards), the Mediterranean household, widowhood, divorce, remarriage, and the world of women.

Ronald Niezen

Spirit Wars

$31.95

Spirit Wars is an exploration of the ways in which the destruction of spiritual practices and beliefs of native peoples in North America has led to conditions of collective suffering--a process sometimes referred to as cultural genocide. Ronald Niezen approaches this topic through wide-ranging case studies involving different colonial powers and state governments: the seventeenth-century Spanish occupation of the Southwest, the colonization of the Northeast by the French and British, nineteenth-century westward expansion and nationalism in the swelling United States and Canada, and twentieth-century struggles for native people's spiritual integrity and freedom. Each chapter deals with a specific dimension of the relationship between native peoples and non-native institutions, and together these topics yield a new understanding of the forces directed against the underpinnings of native cultures.

Judith Tucker

In the House of the Law

$31.95

In an rewarding new study, Tucker explores the way in which Islamic legal thinkers understood Islam as it related to women and gender roles. In seventeenth and eighteenth century Syria and Palestine, Muslim legal thinkers gave considerable attention to women's roles in society, and Tucker shows how fatwas, or legal opinions, greatly influenced these roles. She challenges prevailing views on Islam and gender, revealing Islamic law to have been more fluid and flexible than previously thought. Although the legal system had a consistent patriarchal orientation, it was modulated by sensitivities to the practical needs of women, men, and children. In her comprehensive overview of a field long neglected by scholars, Tucker deepens our understanding of how societies, including our own, construct gender roles.

Josephine M.T. Khu, editor

Cultural Curiosity

$31.95

This anthology of autobiographical essays reveals the human side of the Chinese diaspora. Written by ethnic Chinese who were born or raised outside of China, these moving pieces, full of the poignant details of everyday life, describe the experience of growing up as a visible minority and the subsequent journey each author made to China. The authors—whose diverse backgrounds in countries such as New Zealand, Denmark, Sri Lanka, England, Indonesia, and the United States mirror the complex global scope of the Chinese diaspora—describe in particular how their journey to the country of their ancestors transformed their sense of what it means to be Chinese. The collection as a whole provides important insights into what ethnic identity has come to mean in our transnational era.

Among the pieces is Brad Wong's discussion of his visit to his grandfather's poverty-stricken village in China's southern Guangdong province. He describes working with a few of the peasants tilling vegetables and compares life in the village with his middle-class upbringing in a San Francisco suburb. In another essay, Milan Lin-Rodrigo tells of her life in Sri Lanka and of the trip she made to China as an adult. She describes the difficult and sometimes humorous cultural differences she experienced when she met her Chinese half-sister and her father's first wife.

Josephine Khu's lively afterword provides background information on the Chinese diaspora and gives a theoretical framework for understanding the issues raised in the essays. This intimate and rich anthology will be compelling reading for all who are seeking answers to the increasingly complex issue of ethnic and personal identity.

Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller

Survivors

$31.95

Between 1915 and 1923, over one million Armenians died, victims of a genocidal campaign that is still denied by the Turkish government. Thousands of other Armenians suffered torture, brutality, deportation. Yet their story has received scant attention. Through interviews with a hundred elderly Armenians, Donald and Lorna Miller give the "forgotten genocide" the hearing it deserves. Survivors raise important issues about genocide and about how people cope with traumatic experience. Much here is wrenchingly painful, yet it also speaks to the strength of the human spirit.

S.D. Goitein

A Mediterranean Society, Volume IV

$34.95

This six-volume "portrait of a Mediterranean personality" is a composite portrait of the individuals who wrote the personal letters, contracts, and all other manuscript fragments that found their way into the Cairo Geniza. Most of the fragments from the Geniza, a storeroom for discarded writings that could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, had been removed to Cambridge University Library and other libraries around the world. Professor Goitein devoted the last thirty years of his long and productive life to their study, deciphering the language of the documents and organizing what he called a "marvelous treasure trove of manuscripts" into a coherent, fascinating picture of the society that created them.

It is a rich, panoramic view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. The first and second volumes describe the economic foundations of the society and the institutions and social and political structures that characterized the community. The remaining material, intended for a single volume describing the particulars of the way people lived, blossomed into three volumes, devoted respectively to the family, daily life, and the individual. The divisions are arbitrary but helpful because of the wealth of information. The author refers throughout to other passages in his monumental work that amplify what is discussed in any particular section. The result is an incomparably clear and immediate impression of how it was in the Mediterranean world of the tenth through the thirteenth century.

Volume IV, subtitled Daily Life, details city life, domestic architecture, furnishings and housewares, clothing and jewelry, food and drink, and other material culture.

Susan B. Hanley

Everyday Things in Premodern Japan

$31.95

Japan was the only non-Western nation to industrialize before 1900 and its leap into the modern era has stimulated vigorous debates among historians and social scientists. In an innovative discussion that posits the importance of physical well-being as a key indicator of living standards, Susan B. Hanley considers daily life in the three centuries leading up to the modern era in Japan. She concludes that people lived much better than has been previously understood—at levels equal or superior to their Western contemporaries. She goes on to illustrate how this high level of physical well-being had important consequences for Japan's ability to industrialize rapidly and for the comparatively smooth transition to a modern, industrial society.

While others have used income levels to conclude that the Japanese household was relatively poor in those centuries, Hanley examines the material culture—food, sanitation, housing, and transportation. How did ordinary people conserve the limited resources available in this small island country? What foods made up the daily diet and how were they prepared? How were human wastes disposed of? How long did people live? Hanley answers all these questions and more in an accessible style and with frequent comparisons with Western lifestyles. Her methods allow for cross-cultural comparisons between Japan and the West as well as Japan and the rest of Asia. They will be useful to anyone interested in the effects of modernization on daily life.

Robert Kelley

Battling the Inland Sea

$33.95

In its natural condition the Sacramento Valley was a flood-ravaged region where an inland sea a hundred miles long regularly formed during the rainy season, to drain slowly away by the summer months. Today the Valley is marvelously productive, with a great capital city at its center, but only after a seventy-year struggle to devise and build an intricate thousand miles of levees and drains. Robert Kelley sets that battle within the encompassing national political culture, which produced, through the Republican and Democratic parties, widely diverging ideas about how best to reclaim the Valley from flood. He draws on approaches developed in the field of policy analysis to examine the relationship between American political culture and environmental policy-making. We find that the prolonged controversy over the Sacramento Valley illuminates American decision-making, then and now.

Timothy Brook

The Confusions of Pleasure

$29.95

The Ming dynasty was the last great Chinese dynasty before the Manchu conquest in 1644. During that time, China, not Europe, was the center of the world: the European voyages of exploration were searching not just for new lands but also for new trade routes to the Far East. In this book, Timothy Brook eloquently narrates the changing landscape of life over the three centuries of the Ming (1368-1644), when China was transformed from a closely administered agrarian realm into a place of commercial profits and intense competition for status.

The Confusions of Pleasure marks a significant departure from the conventional ways in which Chinese history has been written. Rather than recounting the Ming dynasty in a series of political events and philosophical achievements, it narrates this longue durée in terms of the habits and strains of everyday life. Peppered with stories of real people and their negotiations of a rapidly changing world, this book provides a new way of seeing the Ming dynasty that not only contributes to the scholarly understanding of the period but also provides an entertaining and accessible introduction to Chinese history for anyone.

S.D. Goitein

A Mediterranean Society, Volume II

$34.95

This six-volume "portrait of a Mediterranean personality" is a composite portrait of the individuals who wrote the personal letters, contracts, and all other manuscript fragments that found their way into the Cairo Geniza. Most of the fragments from the Geniza, a storeroom for discarded writings that could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, had been removed to Cambridge University Library and other libraries around the world. Professor Goitein devoted the last thirty years of his long and productive life to their study, deciphering the language of the documents and organizing what he called a "marvelous treasure trove of manuscripts" into a coherent, fascinating picture of the society that created them.

It is a rich, panoramic view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. The first and second volumes describe the economic foundations of the society and the institutions and social and political structures that characterized the community. The remaining material, intended for a single volume describing the particulars of the way people lived, blossomed into three volumes, devoted respectively to the family, daily life, and the individual. The divisions are arbitrary but helpful because of the wealth of information. The author refers throughout to other passages in his monumental work that amplify what is discussed in any particular section. The result is an incomparably clear and immediate impression of how it was in the Mediterranean world of the tenth through the thirteenth century.

Volume II, subtitled The Community, explores the nature of medieval religious democracy, including discussion of the community, social services, local government, worship, education, interfaith relations, relations between religion and the state, and the relations between the communities and the state.

Charlotte Furth

A Flourishing Yin

$33.95

This book brings the study of gender to Chinese medicine and in so doing contextualizes Chinese medicine in history. It examines the rich but neglected tradition of fuke, or medicine for women, over the seven hundred years between the Song and the end of the Ming dynasty. Using medical classics, popular handbooks, case histories, and belles lettres, it explores evolving understandings of fertility and menstruation, gestation and childbirth, sexuality, and gynecological disorders.

Furth locates medical practice in the home, where knowledge was not the monopoly of the learned physician and male doctors had to negotiate the class and gender boundaries of everyday life. Women as healers and as patients both participated in the dominant medical culture and sheltered a female sphere of expertise centered on, but not limited to, gestation and birth. Ultimately, her analysis of the relationship of language, text, and practice reaches beyond her immediate subject to address theoretical problems that arise when we look at the epistemological foundations of our knowledge of the body and its history.

Peter Green

Alexander to Actium

$62.95

The Hellenistic Age, the three extraordinary centuries from the death of Alexander in 323 B. C. to Octavian's final defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, has offered a rich and variegated field of exploration for historians, philosophers, economists, and literary critics. Yet few scholars have attempted the daunting task of seeing the period whole, of refracting its achievements and reception through the lens of a single critical mind. Alexander to Actium was conceived and written to fill that gap.

In this monumental work, Peter Green—noted scholar, writer, and critic—breaks with the traditional practice of dividing the Hellenistic world into discrete, repetitious studies of Seleucids, Ptolemies, Antigonids, and Attalids. He instead treats these successor kingdoms as a single, evolving, interrelated continuum. The result clarifies the political picture as never before. With the help of over 200 illustrations, Green surveys every significant aspect of Hellenistic cultural development, from mathematics to medicine, from philosophy to religion, from literature to the visual arts.

Green offers a particularly trenchant analysis of what has been seen as the conscious dissemination in the East of Hellenistic culture, and finds it largely a myth fueled by Victorian scholars seeking justification for a no longer morally respectable imperialism. His work leaves us with a final impression of the Hellenistic Age as a world with haunting and disturbing resemblances to our own. This lively, personal survey of a period as colorful as it is complex will fascinate the general reader no less than students and scholars.

Philip Rousseau

Pachomius

$33.95

Pachomius, who died in 346, has long been regarded as the "founder of monasticism." Available again, Philip Rousseau's careful reading of the available texts reveals that Pachomius's pioneering enterprise has been consistently misread in light of later monastic practices. Rousseau not only provides a fuller and more accurate portrait of this great teacher and spiritual director but also gives a new perspective on the development of monasticism. In a new preface Rousseau reviews the scholarly developments that have modified his views and emphases since the book was published. The result is to make Pachomius an even less assured pioneer, a man likely to have been more involved in the village and urban society of his time than previously thought.

Douglas C. Comer

Ritual Ground

$31.95

From about 1830 to 1849, Bent's Old Fort, located in present-day Colorado on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, was the largest trading post in the Southwest and the mountain-plains region. Although the raw enterprise and improvisation that characterized the American westward movement seem to have little to do with ritual, Douglas Comer argues that the fort grew and prospered because of ritual and that ritual shaped the subsequent history of the region to an astonishing extent.

At Bent's Old Fort, rituals of trade, feasting, gaming, marriage, secret societies, and war, as well as the "calcified ritual" provided by the fort itself, brought together and restructured Anglo, Hispanic, and American Indian cultures. Comer sheds new light on this heretofore poorly understood period in American history, building at the same time a powerfully convincing case to demonstrate that the human world is made through ritual.

Comer gives his narrative an anthropological and philosophical framework; the events at Bent's Old Fort provide a compelling example not only of "world formation" but of a world's tragic collapse, culminating in the Sand Creek massacre. He also calls attention to the reconstructed Bent's Old Fort on the site of the original. Here visitors reenact history, staff work out personal identities, and groups lobby for special versions of history by ritual recasting of the past as the present.

Robert M. Levine

Vale of Tears

$33.95

The massacre of Canudos In 1897 is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. Looking at the event through the eyes of the inhabitants, Levine challenges traditional interpretations and gives weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-raced descent and were thus perceived as opponents to progress and civilization.

In 1897 Brazilian military forces destroyed the millenarian settlement of Canudos, murdering as many as 35,000 pious rural folk who had taken refuge in the remote northeast backlands of Brazil. Fictionalized in Mario Vargas Llosa's acclaimed novel, War at the End of the World, Canudos is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. When looked at through the eyes of the inhabitants of Canudos, however, this historical incident lends itself to a bold new interpretation which challenges the traditional polemics on the subject. While the Canudos movement has been consistently viewed either as a rebellion of crazed fanatics or as a model of proletarian resistance to oppression, Levine deftly demonstrates that it was, in fact, neither.

Vale of Tears probes the reasons for the Brazilian ambivalence toward its social history, giving much weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-race descent. They were perceived as opponents to progress and civilization and, by inference, to Brazil's attempts to "whiten" itself. As a result there are major insights to be found here into Brazilians' self-image over the past century.

Joan Dayan

Haiti, History, and the Gods

$31.95

In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Joan Dayan charts the cultural imagination of Haiti not only by reconstructing the island's history but by highlighting ambiguities and complexities that have been ignored. She investigates the confrontational space in which Haiti is created and recreated in fiction and fact, text and ritual, discourse and practice. Dayan's ambitious project is a research tour de force that gives human dimensions to this eighteenth-century French colony and provides a template for understanding the Haiti of today.

In examining the complex social fabric of French Saint-Domingue, which in 1804 became Haiti, Dayan uncovers a silenced, submerged past. Instead of relying on familiar sources to reconstruct Haitian history, she uses a startling diversity of voices that have previously been unheard. Many of the materials recovered here—overlooked or repressed historical texts, legal documents, religious works, secret memoirs, letters, and literary fictions—have never been translated into English. Others, such as Marie Vieux Chauvet's radical novel of vodou, Fonds des Nègres, are seldom used as historical sources.

Dayan also argues provocatively for the consideration of both vodou rituals and narrative fiction as repositories of history. Her scholarship is enriched by the insights she has gleaned from conversations and experiences during her many trips to Haiti over the past twenty years. Taken together, the material presented in Haiti, History, and the Gods not only restores a lost chapter of Haitian history but suggests necessary revisions to the accepted histories of the New World.

Francis Paul Prucha

American Indian Treaties

$38.95

American Indian affairs are much in the public mind today—hotly contested debates over such issues as Indian fishing rights, land claims, and reservation gambling hold our attention. While the unique legal status of American Indians rests on the historical treaty relationship between Indian tribes and the federal government, until now there has been no comprehensive history of these treaties and their role in American life.

Francis Paul Prucha, a leading authority on the history of American Indian affairs, argues that the treaties were a political anomaly from the very beginning. The term "treaty" implies a contract between sovereign independent nations, yet Indians were always in a position of inequality and dependence as negotiators, a fact that complicates their current attempts to regain their rights and tribal sovereignty.

Prucha's impeccably researched book, based on a close analysis of every treaty, makes possible a thorough understanding of a legal dilemma whose legacy is so palpably felt today.

Bret Hinsch

Passions of the Cut Sleeve

$31.95

The first detailed treatment of the Chinese homosexual tradition in any Western language, Passions of the Cut Sleeve shatters preconceptions and stereotypes. Gone is the image of the sternly puritanical Confucian as sole representative of Chinese sexual practices—and with it the justification for the modern Chinese insistence that homosexuality is a recent import from the decadent West. Rediscovering the male homosexual tradition in China provides a startling new perspective on Chinese society and adds richly to our understanding of homosexuality.

Bret Hinsch's reconstruction of the Chinese homosexual past reveals unexpected scenes. An emperor on his deathbed turns over the seals of the empire to a male beloved; two men marry each other with elaborate wedding rituals; parents sell their son into prostitution. The tradition portrays men from all levels of society—emperors, transvestite actors, rapists, elegant scholars, licentious monks, and even the nameless poor.

Drawing from dynastic histories, erotic novels, popular Buddhist tracts, love poetry, legal cases, and joke books, Passions of the Cut Sleeve evokes the complex and fascinating male homosexual tradition in China from the Bronze Age until its decline in recent times.

T. Fujitani

Splendid Monarchy

$31.95

Using ceremonials such as imperial weddings and funerals as models, T. Fujitani illustrates what visual symbols and rituals reveal about monarchy, nationalism, city planning, discipline, gender, memory, and modernity. Focusing on the Meiji Period (1868-1912), Fujitani brings recent methods of cultural history to a study of modern Japanese nationalism for the first time.

David Arnold

Colonizing the Body

$33.95

In this innovative analysis of medicine and disease in colonial India, David Arnold explores the vital role of the state in medical and public health activities, arguing that Western medicine became a critical battleground between the colonized and the colonizers.

Focusing on three major epidemic diseases—smallpox, cholera, and plague—Arnold analyzes the impact of medical interventionism. He demonstrates that Western medicine as practiced in India was not simply transferred from West to East, but was also fashioned in response to local needs and Indian conditions.

By emphasizing this colonial dimension of medicine, Arnold highlights the centrality of the body to political authority in British India and shows how medicine both influenced and articulated the intrinsic contradictions of colonial rule.

Achille Mbembe

On the Postcolony

$30.95

Achille Mbembe is one of the most brilliant theorists of postcolonial studies writing today. In On the Postcolony he profoundly renews our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa. In a series of provocative essays, Mbembe contests diehard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of postcolonial theory.

This thought-provoking and groundbreaking collection of essays—his first book to be published in English—develops and extends debates first ignited by his well-known 1992 article "Provisional Notes on the Postcolony," in which he developed his notion of the "banality of power" in contemporary Africa. Mbembe reinterprets the meanings of death, utopia, and the divine libido as part of the new theoretical perspectives he offers on the constitution of power. He works with the complex registers of bodily subjectivity — violence, wonder, and laughter — to profoundly contest categories of oppression and resistance, autonomy and subjection, and state and civil society that marked the social theory of the late twentieth century.

This provocative book will surely attract attention with its signal contribution to the rich interdisciplinary arena of scholarship on colonial and postcolonial discourse, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster

Postsuburban California

$33.95

Neither a city nor a traditional suburb, Orange County, California represents a striking example of a new kind of social formation. This multidisciplinary volume offers a cogent case study of the "postsuburban" phenomenon.

Paula Findlen

Possessing Nature

$33.95

In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. Italian patricians, their curiosity fueled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory.

Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.

Charles McClain

In Search of Equality

$34.95

Charles McClain's illuminating new study probes Chinese efforts to battle manifold discrimination—in housing, employment, and education—in nineteenth-century America. Challenging the stereotypical image of a passive, insular group, McClain reveals a politically savvy population capable of mobilizing to fight mistreatment. He draws on English- and Chinese-language documents and rarely studied sources to chronicle the ways the Chinese sought redress and change in American courts.

McClain focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area, the home of almost one-fifth of the fifty thousand Chinese working in California in 1870. He cites cases in which Chinese laundrymen challenged the city of San Francisco's discriminatory building restrictions, and lawsuits brought by parents to protest the exclusion of Chinese children from public schools. While vindication in the courtroom did not always bring immediate change (Chinese schoolchildren in San Francisco continued to be segregated well into the twentieth century), the Chinese community's efforts were instrumental in establishing several legal landmarks.

In their battles for justice, the Chinese community helped to clarify many judicial issues, including the parameters of the Fourteenth Amendment and the legal meanings of nondiscrimination and equality. Discussing a wide range of court cases and gleaning their larger constitutional significance, In Search of Equality brings to light an important chapter of American cultural and ethnic history. It should attract attention from American and legal historians, ethnic studies scholars, and students of California culture.

Stefan Tanaka

Japan's Orient

$33.95

Stefan Tanaka examines how late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japanese historians created the equivalent of an "Orient" for their new nation state. He argues that the Japanese attempted to use a variety of pasts—Chinese, Indian, and proto-historic Japanese—to construct an identity that was both modern and Asian.

Lesley B. Simpson

Many Mexicos

$33.95

Perhaps no country's history is as fascinating and perplexing as that of Mexico. "Mother Mexico," land of paradox, of contradiction and extreme--these are the strands that Lesley Byrd Simpson weaves into a unified fabric in presenting the country's history.

First published in 1941, Many Mexicos was awarded the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for Literature. Travelers, students, and all who delight in the adventure of narrative history have since treasured the volume for its clarity and readability. Now, completely revised, the Silver Anniversary Edition reflects the vast published output of these past twenty-five years on the history of Mexico. Some chapters have been enlarged, others corrected. A map of Mexico showing political subdivisions is now included, and, in general, new material has been added to document the author's controversial statement (and there are many).

Bloody conquests and revolutions; men, good or evil; art, religion, and institutions brought from Spain or made in Mexico; topography and climate; the conflict of cultures and races; and finally, the emergence of Mexico into today's bewildering world--this in broad outline is the absorbing story Mr. Simpson so warmly presents.

Timothy Mitchell

Colonising Egypt

$31.95

Extending deconstructive theory to historical and political analysis, Timothy Mitchell examines the peculiarity of Western conceptions of order and truth through a re-reading of Europe's colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.

Mikiso Hane

Reflections on the Way to the Gallows

$29.95

In this book, for the first time, we can hear the startling, moving voices of adventurous and rebellious Japanese women as they eloquently challenged the social repression of prewar Japan. The extraordinary women whose memoirs, recollections, and essays are presented here constitute a strong current in the history of modern Japanese life from the 1880s to the outbreak of the Pacific War.

Peter Irons

Justice at War

$36.95

Justice at War irrevocably alters the reader's perception of one of the most disturbing events in U.S. history—the internment during World War II of American citizens of Japanese descent. Peter Irons' exhaustive research has uncovered a government campaign of suppression, alteration, and destruction of crucial evidence that could have persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the internment order. Irons documents the debates that took place before the internment order and the legal response during and after the internment.

Edward Berenson

The Trial of Madame Caillaux

$29.95

Edward Berenson recounts the trial of Henriette Caillaux, the wife of a powerful French cabinet minister, who murdered her husband's enemy Le Figaro editor Gaston Calmette, in March 1914, on the eve of World War I. In analyzing this momentous event, Berenson draws a fascinating portrait of Belle Epoque politics and culture.

Anton Kaes

The Weimar Republic Sourcebook

$52.95

A laboratory for competing visions of modernity, the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) continues to haunt the imagination of the twentieth century. Its political and cultural lessons retain uncanny relevance for all who seek to understand the tensions and possibilities of our age. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook represents the most comprehensive documentation of Weimar culture, history, and politics assembled in any language. It invites a wide community of readers to discover the richness and complexity of the turbulent years in Germany before Hitler's rise to power.

Drawing from such primary sources as magazines, newspapers, manifestoes, and official documents (many unknown even to specialists and most never before available in English), this book challenges the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, and social life. Its thirty chapters explore Germany's complex relationship to democracy, ideologies of "reactionary modernism," the rise of the "New Woman," Bauhaus architecture, the impact of mass media, the literary life, the tradition of cabaret and urban entertainment, and the situation of Jews, intellectuals, and workers before and during the emergence of fascism.

While devoting much attention to the Republic's varied artistic and intellectual achievements (the Frankfurt School, political theater, twelve-tone music, cultural criticism, photomontage, and urban planning), the book is unique for its inclusion of many lesser-known materials on popular culture, consumerism, body culture, drugs, criminality, and sexuality; it also contains a timetable of major political events, an extensive bibliography, and capsule biographies. This will be a major resource and reference work for students and scholars in history; art; architecture; literature; social and political thought; and cultural, film, German, and women's studies.

John A. Crow

The Epic of Latin America, Fourth edition

$39.95

Uniquely comprehensive and comparative, praised for its devotion to social and cultural developments as well as politics and economics, The Epic of Latin America is once again revised and brought up to date, with chapters on the great upheavals of the 1980s. The book received the Gold Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California for outstanding literary achievement by a California author and was selected by the American Library Association as one of the "fifty best books of the year."

The Epic of Latin America, Fourth edition

W. W. Robinson

Land in California

$29.95

The story of California can be told in terms of its land. Better still, it can be told in terms of men and women claiming the land. These men and women form a procession that begins in prehistory and comes down to the present moment. Heading the procession are Indians, stemming out of a mysterious past, speaking a babel of tongues, and laying claims to certain hunting, fishing, and acorn-gathering areas-possessory claims doomed to fade quickly before conquering white races.

Following the Indians are Spanish speaking soldiers, settlers, and missionaries who, in 1769, began coming up through Lower California and taking over the fertile coast valleys and the harbors of California. Their laws were the Laws of the Indies controlling Spanish colonization and governing ownership of land. Missions, presidios, pueblos, and ranchos were born in the period of these people.

Albert Soboul

A Short History of the French Revolution, 1789-1799

$26.95

Albert Soboul has held the Chair of the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbone since 1967, and is probably the leading Marxist scholar working in that field today. The book translated here should be regarded more as a synopsis of Professor Soboul's interpretation of the Revolution than as a detailed account of the course of events; it is an essay in analysis rather than a narrative. In it the author argues that the French Revolution can only be understood in terms of class struggle, and that any attempt to diminish the significance of class conflict as its motive force obscures the meaning of the events of the Revolution and rends them ultimately incomprehensible.

The course of the Revolution and its final outcome, which was clear by the time Napoleon seized power in 1799, were the products of a complex class struggle enacted simultaneously on many levels, leading finally to the triumph of the bourgeoisie, the defeat of the aristocracy, and the fragmentation and collapse of the popular forces, who as the allies of the bourgeoisie had played a vital part in securing its victory.

Professor Soboul shows that although the Revolution was caused initially by specific factors peculiar to the structure of French society at the end of the Old Regime, it came to constitute the definitive type of the bourgeois revolution and opened the way for the ascendary of industrial capitalism in the next century, not merely in France, but in the rest of Europe and the world at large.

Cover image for A Short History of the French Revolution, 1789-1799, isbn: 9780520034198

Gerard Chaliand, editor

The Art of War in World History

$57.95

This engrossing anthology gathers together a remarkable collection of writings on the use of strategy in war. Gérard Chaliand has ranged over the whole of human history in assembling this collection—the result is an integration of the annals of military thought that provides a learned framework for understanding global political history.

Included are writings from ancient and modern Europe, China, Byzantium, the Arab world, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. Alongside well-known militarists such as Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Walter Raleigh, Rommel, and many others are "irregulars" such as Cortés, Lawrence of Arabia, and even Gandhi. Contrary to standard interpretations stressing competition between land and sea powers, or among rival Christian societies, Chaliand shows the great importance of the struggles between nomadic and sedentary peoples, and of the conflicts between Christianity and Islam. With the invention of firepower, a relatively recent occurrence in the history of warfare, modes of organization and strategic concepts—elements reflecting the nature of a society—have been key to how war is waged.

Unparalleled in its breadth, this anthology will become the standard work for understanding a fundamental part of human history—the conduct of war.

"This anthology is not only an unparalleled corpus of information and an aid to failing memory; it is also and above all a reliable and liberating guide for research. . . . Ranging "from the origins to the nuclear age," it compels us to widen our narrow perspectives on conflicts and strategic action and open ourselves up to the universal."—from the Foreword

Gene A. Brucker

Renaissance Florence, Updated edition

$28.95

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the city of Florence experienced the most creative period in her entire history. This book is an in-depth analysis of that dynamic community, focusing primarily on the years 1380-1450 in an examination of the city's physical character, its economic and social structure and developments, its political and religious life, and its cultural achievement. For this edition, Mr. Brucker has added Notes on Florentine Scholarship and a Bibliographical Supplement.

I. Hrbek, editor

UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. III, Abridged Edition

$33.95

Volume III of this acclaimed series is now available in an abridged paperback edition. The result of years of work by scholars from all over the world, The UNESCO General History of Africa reflects how the different peoples of Africa view their civilizations and shows the historical relationships between the various parts of the continent. Historical connections with other continents demonstrate Africa's contribution to the development of human civilization. Each volume is lavishly illustrated and contains a comprehensive bibliography.

Volume III documents the increasing influence of Islam and its dissemination and interaction with traditional African culture in northern and western regions. The essays place Africa in the context of world history at the opening of the seventh century and examine the impact of Islamic penetration, expansion of the Bantu-speaking peoples, and the growth of civilizations in West Africa.

UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. III, Abridged Edition

Daniel C. Hallin

The Uncensored War

$31.95

This book was finished in the tenth year after the end of the Vietnam War. The year 1985 was also the year of Rambo, and of a number of other celebration of the Vietnam War in popular culture. It was the year Congress cut off aid to the "Contras" in Nicaragua, and then abruptly reversed itself and approved "humanitarian" aid to support the guerrilla war in that country. The "Vietnam Syndrome" showed signs of giving way tot he "Grenada Syndrome": the fear of repeating the Vietnam experience showed signs of giving way to a desire to relive it in an idealized form. The nation seemed deeply confused about its identity as an actor in world politics, and thus particularly vulnerable to appealing myths. So it is a good time to take a sober look back and the nation's consciousness during the Vietnam War itself--which as we shall see, despite the popular image of an independent media demolishing the nation's illusions, was also governed by a powerful mythology, born in part out of the traumas of earlier wars.

Roland Marchand

Advertising the American Dream

$41.95

It has become impossible to imagine our culture without advertising. But how and why did advertising become a determiner of our self-image? Advertising the American Dream looks carefully at the two decades when advertising discovered striking new ways to play on our anxieties and to promise solace for the masses.

As American society became more urban, more complex, and more dominated by massive bureaucracies, the old American Dream seemed threatened. Advertisers may only have dimly perceived the profound transformations America was experiencing. However, the advertising they created is a wonderfully graphic record of the underlying assumptions and changing values in American culture. With extensive reference to the popular media—radio broadcasts, confession magazines, and tabloid newspapers—Professor Marchand describes how advertisers manipulated modern art and photography to promote an enduring "consumption ethic."

Stephen Powers

Tribes of California

$36.95

This classic of American Indian ethnography, originally published in 1877, is again available in its complete form. In the summers of 1871 and 1872 Powers visited Indian groups in the northern two-thirds of California. A journalist by profession, he was untrained in ethnography, but was nonetheless an astonishingly intelligent observer who had a gift for writing in a spirited manner. He reported faithfully what he heard and portrayed accurately what he saw among the native survivors of Gold Rush days in a series of seventeen articles published mostly in The Overland Monthly. These were partly unwritten, added to, and reorganized by Powers to be published in 1877 as a report of the U.S. Geographical Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region.

Powers’ book is still basic and is referred to by everyone who deals with native cultures. The 1877 edition was not large, and Tribes of California is at last reprinted in response to growing demand for this rare volume. For this edition all of the original illustrations have been retained and the basic text printed in facsimile. Professor Robert F. Heizer has provided annotations throughout and an introduction to indicate contemporary thought about the volume.

Adam Michnik

Letters From Prison and Other Essays

$33.95

Among the voices that speak to us from Poland today, the most important may be that of Adam Michnik. Michnik now sits in a jail belonging to the totalitarian regime, yet his first concern--and herein lies one of the keys to his thinking, and one should add, to his character--is with the quality of his own conduct, which, together with teh conduct of other victims of the present situation, will, he is sure, one day set the tone for whatever political system follows the totalitarian debacle. His essays are the most valuable guide we have to the origins of the revolution, and, more particularly, to its innovative practices.

Randy Shaw

Beyond the Fields

$23.95

Cesar Chavez is the most prominent Latino in United States history books, and much has been written about Chavez and the United Farm Worker's heyday in the 1960s and '70s. But left untold has been their ongoing impact on 21st century social justice movements. Beyond the Fields unearths this legacy, and describes how Chavez and the UFW's imprint can be found in the modern reshaping of the American labor movement, the building of Latino political power, the transformation of Los Angeles and California politics, the fight for environmental justice, and the burgeoning national movement for immigrant rights. Many of the ideas, tactics, and strategies that Chavez and the UFW initiated or revived—including the boycott, the fast, clergy-labor partnerships and door-to-door voter outreach—are now so commonplace that their roots in the farmworkers' movement is forgotten.

This powerful book also describes how the UFW became the era's leading incubator of young activist talent, creating a generation of skilled alumni who went on to play critical roles in progressive campaigns. UFW volunteers and staff were dedicated to furthering economic justice, and many devoted their post-UFW lives working for social change. When Barack Obama adopted “Yes We Can” as his 2008 campaign theme, he confirmed that the spirit of “Si Se Puede” has never been stronger, and that it still provides the clearest roadmap for achieving greater social and economic justice in the United States.

Caroline Walker Bynum

Holy Feast and Holy Fast

$33.95

In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women.

Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation.

Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.

Marc Bloch

French Rural History

$29.95

From the Preface by Lucien Febvre:

MARC BLOCH'S Caracteres originaux de l'histoire ruralefranfaise, which was originally published at Oslo in 1931 and appeared simultaneously at Paris under the imprint Belles Lettres, has long been out of print. As he told me on more than one occasion, he had every intention of bringing out another edition. In Marc Bloch's own mind this was not simply a matter of reissuing the original text. He knew, none better, that time stops for no historian, that every good piece of historical writing needs to be rewritten after twenty years: otherwise the writer has failed in his objective, failed to goad others into testing his foundations and improving on his rasher hypotheses by subjecting them to greater precision. Marc Bloch was not given time to refashion his great book as he would have wished. One wonders whether he would in fact ever have brought himself to do it. I have the impression that the prospect of this somewhat dreary and certainly difficult task (however one may try to avoid it, revision of an earlier work is always hampered by the original design, which offers few easy loopholes for escape) held less appeal than the excitement of conceiving and executing an entirely new book. However this may be, our friend has carried this secret, with so many others, to his grave. The fact remains that one of our historical classics, now more than twenty years old, is due for republication and is here presented to the reader.

Raphael Sealey

A History of the Greek City States, 700-338 B. C.

$29.95

This book introduces the reader to the serious study of Greek history, concentrating more on problems than on narrative. The topics selected have been prominent in modern research and references to important discussions of these have been provided. Outlined are controversial issues of which differing views can be defended. Mr. Sealey's preference is for interpretations which see Greek history as the interaction of personalities, rather than for those which see it as a struggle for economic classes or of abstract ideas.

Sealey assumes that the Greek cities of the archaic and classical periods did not inherit any political institutions from the Bronze Age; that the extensive invasions that brought Mycenaean civilization to an end destroyed political habits as effectively as stone palaces. Accordingly, he believes that the Greeks of the historic period were engaged in the fundamental enterprise of building organized society out of nothing.

The first chapters of this work deal with the stops taken by the early tyrants, in Sparta and Athens, toward constructing stable organs of authority and of political expression. In later chapters, interest shifts to relations that developed between the states and especially to the development of lasting alliances. Attention is given to the Peloponnesian League, to the Persian Wars, to the Delian League, and to the Second Athenian Sea League of the fourth century.

A History of the Greek City States, 700-338 B. C.

Anthony Snodgrass

Archaic Greece

$33.95

Until quite recently, it has been the accepted view that the Archaic period of Greek history was by definition merely a prelude to the Oassical period, an era regarded as unsurpassed in its literary, intellectual, artistic, and political achievements. Lately, however, ancient historians and Classical archaeologists have undertaken a major reappraisal of their subject, one result of which has been a broadening view of the Archaic period and its importance to the history of Greece. In this first major book on Archaic Greece to be written by an archaeologist, Professor Snodgrass shows how the supremacy of Classical Greece would have been impossible without the preceding centuries of the Archaic period.

The intellectual revolution which divided the Archaic period from the Oassical transformed something remarkable into something unique. But there was an earlier revolution, a "structural revolution," which took place not merely within the Archaic period, but at its beginning. It had far-reaching effects: it established the economic basis of Greek society, as well as the main outlines of its social framework; it drew the political map of the Greek world in a form that was to endure for four centuries; it set up, with even greater permanence, the forms of state that were to determine Greek political history; it provided the interests and goals, not merely for Greek but for Western art as a whole, which were to be pursued over the next two and a half millennia; it gave Greece in the Homeric epics an ideal of behavior and a memento of past glory to sustain it; it provided much of the basis of Greek religion; and it furnished many lesser things, among them the means for Greek society to defend its independence militarily. It is doubtful whether, before or since, all these features have ever come about in one conn try with such concertedness and such speed.

Archaic Greece gives a broader cultural history of the period than has hitherto been attempted, and Professor Snodgrass shows that it can be seen, for perhaps the first time, as a complete episode in its own right. His fresh and personal approach to his subject, together with the book's superb illustrations, will ensure a wide audience.

Kenneth G. Holum

Theodosian Empresses

$33.95

Theodosian Empresses sets a series of compelling women on the stage of history and offers new insights into the eastern court in the fifth century.

Sebouh David Aslanian

From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean

$39.95

Drawing on a rich trove of documents, including correspondence not seen for 300 years, this study explores the emergence and growth of a remarkable global trade network operated by Armenian silk merchants from a small outpost in the Persian Empire. Based in New Julfa, Isfahan, in what is now Iran, these merchants operated a network of commercial settlements that stretched from London and Amsterdam to Manila and Acapulco. The New Julfan Armenians were the only Eurasian community that was able to operate simultaneously and successfully in all the major empires of the early modern world—both land-based Asian empires and the emerging sea-borne empires—astonishingly without the benefits of an imperial network and state that accompanied and facilitated European mercantile expansion during the same period. This book brings to light for the first time the trans-imperial cosmopolitan world of the New Julfans. Among other topics, it explores the effects of long distance trade on the organization of community life, the ethos of trust and cooperation that existed among merchants, and the importance of information networks and communication in the operation of early modern mercantile communities.

From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean

Daniel Lord Smail

On Deep History and the Brain

$24.95

When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that in the wake of the Decade of the Brain and the best-selling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.

Walter Burkert

Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual

$30.95

"Tantalizingly rich . . . this is a splendid book."

--Greece and Rome

"Burken relegates his learned documentation to the notes and writes in a lively and fluent style. The book is recommended as a major contribution to the interpretation of ancient Greek myth and ritual. The breadth alone of Burkert's learning renders his book indispensable."

--Classical Outlook

"Impressive. . . founded on a striking knowledge of the complex evidence (literary, epigraphical, archaeological, comparative) for this extensive subject. Burkert offers a rare combination of exact scholarship with imagination and even humor. A brilliant book, in which . . .the reader can see at every point what is going on in the author's mind--and that is never uninteresting, and rarely unimportant."

--Times Literary Supplement

"Burkert's work is of such magnitude and depth that it may even contribute to that most difficult of tasks, defining myth, ritual, and religion. . [He] locates his work in the context of culture and the historv of ideas, and he is not hesitant to draw on sociology and biology. Consequently his work is of significance for philosophers, historians, and even theologians, as well as for classicists and historians of Greek culture. His hypotheses are courageous and his conclusions are bold; both establish standards for methodology as well as results. "

--Religious Studies Review

Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual

Erwin G. Gudde

California Place Names, 40th Anniversary Edition

$32.95

This anniversary edition concentrates on the origins of the names currently used for the cities, towns, settlements, mountains, and streams of California, with engrossing accounts of the history of their usage. The dictionary includes a glossary and a bibliography.

California Place Names, 40th Anniversary Edition

Morris Rossabi, editor

China Among Equals

$36.95

Scholars have long accepted China's own view of its traditional foreign relations: that China devised its own world order and maintained it from the second century B.C. to the nineteenth century. China ruled out equality with any nation: foreign rulers and their envoys were treated as subordinates or inferiors, required to send periodic tribute embassies to the Chinese emperor. The Chinese court was otherwise uninterested in foreign lands. Its principal interests were to maintain peace with what it perceived to be barbarian neighbors and to coax or coerce them into admitting China's superiority and accepting the Chinese emperor as the Son of Heaven.

But Chinese foreign policy was not monolithic. Court officials in traditional times were much more realistic and pragmatic than is commonly assumed. They did not scorn foreign trade, nor were ignorant of foreign lands. Challenging the accepted view of Chinese foreign relations, the authors of China among Equals contribute to a clearer assessment of Chinese foreign relations and policy. From the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, China did not dogmatically enforce its own world order. Chinese were eager for foreign trade and knowledgeable about their neighbors. The Sung (960-1279), the principal dynasty during that era, was flexible in its dealings with foreigners. Its officials recognized the military and political weakness of the dynasty, and in general they adopted a realistic and pragmatic foreign policy. They were compelled to accept foreign states as equals, and the relations between China and other states were defined by diplomatic parity.

Samir Kassir

Beirut

$34.95

Widely praised as the definitive history of Beirut, this is the story of a city that has stood at the crossroads of Mediterranean civilization for more than four thousand years. The last major work completed by Samir Kassir before his tragic death in 2005, Beirut is a tour de force that takes the reader from the ancient to the modern world, offering a dazzling panorama of the city's Seleucid, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French incarnations. Kassir vividly describes Beirut's spectacular growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concentrating on its emergence after the Second World War as a cosmopolitan capital until its near destruction during the devastating Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. Generously illustrated and eloquently written, Beirut illuminates contemporary issues of modernity and democracy while at the same time memorably recreating the atmosphere of one of the world's most picturesque, dynamic, and resilient cities.

François Hartog

The Mirror of Herodotus

$39.95

Herodotus's great work is not only an account of the momentous historical conflict between the Greeks and the Persians but also the earliest sustained exploration in the West of the problem of cultural difference. François Hartog asks fundamental questions about how Herodotus represented this difference. How did he and his readers understand the customs and beliefs of those who were not Greek? How did the historian convince his readers that his account of other peoples was reliable? How is it possible to comprehend a way of life radically different from one's own? What are the linguistic, rhetorical, and philosophical means by which Herodotus fashions his text into a mirror of the marginal and unknown? In answering these questions, Hartog transforms our understanding of the "father of history." His Herodotus is less the chronicler of a victorious Greece than a brilliant writer in pursuit of otherness.

Joaquim M. Machado de Assis

Counselor Ayres' Memorial

$19.95

"A small masterwork, freshly translated , by one of the great novelists of the 19th century. A retired Brazilian diplomat (Ayres) recounts the love affair of a young widow who would rather be faithful to her dead Romeo. How she rejoins the world of the living, rekindling Ayres' spirit as well, is told with muted allusions to Brazil's plantation life and its emancipation of the slaves."

--Chicago Tribune

"This novel first appeared in 1908 , the year of Machado de Assi s' death . . It is a mild story, mildly told with a muted form of irony . . it is without self-pity, an elegiac book . . . unmistakably the work of a masterful writer."

--Kirkus Reviews

"Packed with wit, with compassion, with valiant self-knowledge. It is an experience I urge you to undertake."

--Cleveland Plain Dealer

"A novel as ironic as any of Machado's earlier fiction, but with a new sense of ripeness and tender regard for those whom life tries and tests. It is a last fitting monument to the art of Machado de Assis."

--Nation

Thomas Mullaney

Coming to Terms with the Nation

$34.95

China is a vast nation comprised of hundreds of distinct ethnic communities, each with its own language, history, and culture. Today the government of China recognizes just 56 ethnic nationalities, or minzu, as groups entitled to representation. This controversial new book recounts the history of the most sweeping attempt to sort and categorize the nation's enormous population: the 1954 Ethnic Classification project (minzu shibie). Thomas S. Mullaney draws on recently declassified material and extensive oral histories to describe how the communist government, in power less than a decade, launched this process in ethnically diverse Yunnan. Mullaney shows how the government drew on Republican-era scholarship for conceptual and methodological inspiration as it developed a strategy for identifying minzu and how non-Party-member Chinese ethnologists produced a “scientific” survey that would become the basis for a policy on nationalities.

Edward J. Watts

Riot in Alexandria

$34.95

This innovative study uses one well-documented moment of violence as a starting point for a wide-ranging examination of the ideas and interactions of pagan philosophers, Christian ascetics, and bishops from the fourth to the early seventh century. Edward J. Watts reconstructs a riot that erupted in Alexandria in 486 when a group of students attacked a Christian adolescent who had publicly insulted the students' teachers. Pagan students, Christians affiliated with a local monastery, and the Alexandrian ecclesiastical leaders all cast the incident in a different light, and each group tried with that interpretation to influence subsequent events. Watts, drawing on Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac sources, shows how historical traditions and notions of a shared past shaped the interactions and behavior of these high-profile communities. Connecting oral and written texts to the personal relationships that gave them meaning and to the actions that gave them form, Riot in Alexandria draws new attention to the understudied social and cultural history of the later fifth-century Roman world and at the same time opens a new window on late antique intellectual life.

Rebecca Solnit

Infinite City

$29.95

What makes a place? Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place. She explores the area thematically—connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridge’s foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcock’s filming of Vertigo. Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasures—butterfly habitats, queer sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both progressive and conservative, and details the cultural geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by redevelopment, and much, much more. Breathtakingly original, this atlas of the imagination invites us to search out the layers of San Francisco that carry meaning for us—or to discover our own infinite city, be it Cleveland, Toulouse, or Shanghai.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Cartographers: Ben Pease and Shizue Seigel

Designer: Lia Tjandra

Artists: Sandow Birk, Mona Caron, Jaime Cortez, Hugh D'Andrade, Robert Dawson, Paz de la Calzada, Jim Herrington, Ira Nowinski, Alison Pebworth, Michael Rauner, Gent Sturgeon, Sunaura Taylor

Writers and researchers: Summer Brenner, Adriana Camarena, Chris Carlsson, Lisa Conrad, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Paul La Farge, Genine Lentine, Stella Lochman, Aaron Shurin, Heather Smith, Richard Walker

Additional cartography: Darin Jensen; Robin Grossinger and Ruth Askevold, San Francisco Estuary Institute

Peter Winn

Americas

$34.95

Stunning in its sweep, Americas is the most authoritative history available of contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean. From Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, and from Cuba to Trinidad and Tobago, Americas examines the historical, demographic, political, social, cultural, religious, and economic trends in the region. For this new edition Peter Winn has provided a new preface and made revisions throughout to include the most up-to-date information on changes and developments in Latin America since the last revised edition of 1999.

F. L. Carsten

The Rise of Fascism, Second edition

$31.95

"The best scholarly description of European Fascism available."

--American Historical Review

"Professor Carsten surveys the major and minor European fascist groups which flourished between the world wars, including such movements as were active in Romania, Austria, Hungary, Finland, Britain, and Belgium. In doing so, he has produced a useful, if brief, addition to the growing number of studies on this subject."

--The Historian

"A short, responsible survey of how fascism came to power in Italy and Germany, with some valuable comparative data on fascist movements in other European countries."

--Foreign Affairs

"The core of this factual, but extremely readable book consists of an account of Italian fascism up to 1929 and Nazism up to 1934."

--International Review of Social History

"To date, this is the best study on the origins of fascism . . . . "

--Library Journal