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Image one: E-book titled Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II - synopsis: During the nineteenth century, American schools for deaf education regarded sign language as the natural language of Deaf people, using it as the principal mode of instruction and communication. These schools inadvertently became the seedbeds of an emerging Deaf community and culture. But beginning in the 1880s, an oralist movement developed that sought to suppress sign language, removing Deaf teachers and requiring deaf people to learn speech and lip reading. Historians have all assumed that in the early decades of the twentieth century oralism triumphed overwhelmingly. Susan Burch shows us that everyone has it wrong; not only did Deaf students continue to use sign language in schools, hearing teachers relied on it as well. In Signs of Resistance, Susan Burch persuasively reinterprets early twentieth century Deaf history: using community sources such as Deaf newspapers, memoirs, films, and oral (sign language) interviews, Burch shows how the Deaf community mobilized to defend sign language and Deaf teachers, in the process facilitating the formation of collective Deaf consciousness, identity and political organization.
Image two: E-book titled Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS - synopsis: Serving as a vital supplement to the existing scholarship on AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, Viral Cultures is the first book to critically examine the archives that have helped preserve and create the legacy of those radical activities. Marika Cifor charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States and the infrastructure developed to maintain it, safeguarding the material for future generations to remember these social movements and to revitalize the epidemic's past in order to remake the present and future of AIDS. Drawing on large institutional archives such as the New York Public Library, as well as those developed by small, community-based organizations, this work of archival ethnography details how contemporary activists, artists, and curators use these records to build on the cultural legacy of AIDS activism to challenge the conditions of injustice that continue to undergird current AIDS crises.
Image one: E-book titled Children at Play: An American History - synopsis: From sociologists to psychologists and from anthropologists to social critics, writers have produced mountains of books about the meaning and importance of children's play. But what do we know about how children actually play, especially American children of the last two centuries? In this fascinating and enlightening book, Howard Chudacoff presents a history of children's play in the United States and ponders what it tells us about ourselves. Through expert investigation in primary sources, including dozens of children's diaries, hundreds of autobiographical recollections of adults, and a wealth of child-rearing manuals--along with wide-ranging reading of the work of educators, journalists, market researchers, and scholars--Chudacoff digs into the "underground" of play.
Image two: E-book titled Babysitter: An American History - synopsis: Informed by her research on the history of teenage girls’ culture, Miriam Forman-Brunell analyzes the babysitter, who has embodied adults’ fundamental apprehensions about girls’ pursuit of autonomy and empowerment. In fact, the grievances go both ways, as girls have been distressed by unsatisfactory working conditions. In her quest to gain a fuller picture of this largely unexamined cultural phenomenon, Forman-Brunell analyzes a wealth of diverse sources, such as The Baby-sitter’s Club book series, horror movies like "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," urban legends, magazines, newspapers, television shows, and more.
Image one: E-book titled Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials - synopsis: With Digging Up the Dead, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and occasionally gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial throughout American history. Taking us to the contested grave sites of such figures as Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and even Abraham Lincoln, Kammen explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public and often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures. Grave-robbing, cases of mistaken identity, and the financial lures of cemetery tourism all come into play as Kammen delves deeply into this little-known, yet surprisingly persistent, aspect of American history.
Image two: E-book titled Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America - synopsis: Americans' long and restless search for identity through family trees illuminates the story of America itself, according to Francois Weil, as preoccupation with social standing, racial purity, and national belonging gave way to an embrace of diversity in one's forebears, pursued through Ancestry.com and advances in DNA testing. While seeking out one’s ancestors was a genteel pursuit in the colonial era, when an aristocratic pedigree secured a place in the British Atlantic empire, genealogy later developed into a middle-class diversion in the young republic. Over the next century, knowledge of one’s family background came to represent a quasi-scientific defense of elite “Anglo-Saxons” in a nation transformed by immigration and the emancipation of slaves. By the mid-twentieth century, when a new enthusiasm for cultural diversity took hold, the practice of tracing one’s family tree had become thoroughly democratized and commercialized.
Image one: Art and Poetry Month
Image two: E-book titled Lockdown Cultures: The Arts and Humanities in the Year of the Pandemic, 2020-21 (2022) - synopsis: This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analyzed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past.
Image three: E-book titled Building Fires in the Snow: A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction and Poetry (2016) - synopsis: Diversity has always been central to Alaska identity, as the state’s population consists of people with many different backgrounds, viewpoints, and life experiences. This book opens a window into these diverse lives, gathering stories and poems about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer life into a brilliant, path-breaking anthology. In these pages we see the panoply of LGBTQ life in Alaska today, from the quotidian urban adventures of a family—shopping, going out, working—to intimate encounters with Alaska’s breathtaking natural beauty.
Image one: Book titled The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2001) - synopsis: An autobiography of the Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., compiled and edited from articles, essays, speeches, sermons, letters, and other sources, examining his private and public life and describing his involvement in many important events in the Civil Rights Movement. - available in the UNT Dallas Library collection
Image two: Book titled Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare? (2012) - synopsis: While Martin Luther King, Jr., saw America as essentially a dream as yet unfulfilled, Malcolm X viewed America as a realized nightmare. James Cone cuts through superficial assessments of King and Malcolm as polar opposites to reveal two men whose visions are complementary and moving toward convergence. - available in the UNT Dallas Library collection
Image one: E-book titled Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism (2021) - synopsis: Invokes contemporary discourse on racial capitalism in a powerful reassessment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking and legacy. Like today’s organizers, King was more than a dreamer. He knew that his call for a “radical revolution of values” was complicated by the production and circulation of value under capitalism. Shining new light on King’s largely implicit economic and political theories, and expanding appreciation of the Black radical tradition to which he belonged, this book reconstructs, develops, and carries forward King’s strikingly prescient critique of capitalist society.
Image two: E-book titled Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature (2014) - synopsis: African American writers have incorporated Martin Luther King Jr. into their work since he rose to prominence in the mid-1950s. Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature is a study by award-winning author Trudier Harris of King’s character and persona captured and reflected in works of African American literature as they continue to evolve.
Image one: E-book titled Prairie Man: The Struggle between Sitting Bull and Indian Agent James McLaughlin (2015) - synopsis: U.S. Government policy toward Native Americans after the Battle of the Little Big Horn was to give them a makeover as Americans after finally and firmly displacing them from their lands. Sitting Bull, when forced to accept reservation life, understood who was in control, but his view of reservation life was very different from that of the Indian Bureau and its agents. His people’s birth right was their native heritage and culture. Although redrawn by the Government, he believed that the prairie land still held a special meaning of place for the Lakota. Those in power dictated a contrary view - with the closing of the frontier, the Indian was challenged to accept the white road or vanish. In the case of the Lakota, that position was given personification in the form of Agent James McLaughlin. This book explores the story within Sitting Bull’s and James McLaughlin’s conflict and offers new perspectives and insights.
Image two: E-book titled The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army (2014) - synopsis: In 1791, General Arthur St. Clair led the United States army in a campaign to destroy a complex of Indian villages at the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio. Almost within reach of their objective, St. Clair’s 1,400 men were attacked by about one thousand Indians. The U.S. force was decimated, suffering nearly one thousand casualties in killed and wounded, while Indian casualties numbered only a few dozen. Native American historian Colin Calloway demonstrates here that St. Clair’s Defeat—as it came to be known—was hugely important for its time. It was both the biggest victory the Native Americans ever won, and, proportionately, the biggest military disaster the United States had suffered.
Image one: E-book titled Horror in the Heartland: Strange and Gothic Tales from the Midwest (2017) - synopsis: From tales of the booming grave-robbing industry of late 19th-century Indiana to the story of a Michigan physician who left his estate to his pet monkeys, Keven McQueen investigates a spooky and twisted side of Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Exploring burial customs, unexplained deaths, ghost stories, premature burials, bizarre murders, peculiar wills and much more, this creepy collection reveals the region’s untold stories and offers intriguing, if sometimes macabre, insights into human nature.
Image two: E-book titled The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (2015) - synopsis: The book opens with the influential theoretical works of Linda Williams, Carol J. Clover, and Barbara Creed. Subsequent essays explore the history of the genre, from classic horror such as King Kong and Bride of Frankenstein to Fatal Attraction and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Other topics covered include the work of horror auteurs David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and George Romero; the Aliens series; and the importance of gender in relation to horror marketing and reception.
Image one: E-book titled Food across Borders (2017) - synopsis: The act of eating defines and redefines borders. What constitutes "American" in our cuisine has always depended on a liberal crossing of borders, from "the line in the sand" that separates Mexico and the United States, to the grassland boundary with Canada, to the imagined divide in our collective minds between "our" food and "their" food. Immigrant workers have introduced new cuisines and ways of cooking that force the nation to question the boundaries between "us" and "them." The stories told in Food across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.
Image two: E-book titled La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence (2014) - synopsis: Commemorating Juan Ponce de León's landfall on the Atlantic coast of Florida, this ambitious volume explores five centuries of Hispanic presence in the New World peninsula, reflecting on the breadth and depth of encounters between the different lands and cultures. Melding history, literature, anthropology, music, culture, and sociology, La Florida is a unique presentation of the Hispanic roots that run deep in Florida's past and present and will assuredly shape its future.
Image one: E-book titled E-book titled Your Undergraduate Degree in Psychology: From College to Career (2013) - synopsis: Drawing on current research data, applied theory, and both academic and workplace experiences, this book will help stimulate self-reflection and improve decision making as students approach their careers. The text covers key topics in the college-to-career transition, including career planning and development, identifying and transferring marketable skills, building and sustaining strong networks, understanding what employers want and don’t want, coping with personal life changes, becoming a valued employee, and more.
Image two: E-book titled Expanding Your English and Creative Skills through Art and the Humanities (2018) - synopsis: Expanding your English and Creative Skills through Art and the Humanities has been designed for students or professionals who would like to use and improve their English in areas such as history, art history, literature, film and media, and language, at an upper-intermediate or advanced level. This book integrates practice of the four skills (reading, listening, speaking and writing) and has been written from a holistic and humanistic approach.
Image one: E-book titled Babysitter: An American History (2009) - synopsis: In Babysitter, Miriam Forman-Brunell brings critical attention to the ubiquitous, yet long-overlooked babysitter in the popular imagination and American history. Informed by her research on the history of teenage girls’ culture, Forman-Brunell analyzes the babysitter, who has embodied adults’ fundamental apprehensions about girls’ pursuit of autonomy and empowerment. In fact, the grievances go both ways, as girls have been distressed by unsatisfactory working conditions. In her quest to gain a fuller picture of this largely unexamined cultural phenomenon, Forman-Brunell analyzes a wealth of diverse sources, such as The Baby-sitter’s Club book series, horror movies like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, urban legends, magazines, newspapers, television shows, and more.
Image two: E-book titled Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Library (2015) - synopsis: Despite dire predictions in the late twentieth century that public libraries would not survive the turn of the millennium, their numbers have only increased. Two of three Americans frequent a public library at least once a year, and nearly that many are registered borrowers. Although library authorities have argued that the public library functions primarily as a civic institution necessary for maintaining democracy, generations of library patrons tell a different story. In Part of Our Lives, Wayne A. Wiegand delves into the heart of why Americans love their libraries. The book traces the history of the public library, featuring records and testimonies from as early as 1850. Rather than analyzing the words of library founders and managers, Wiegand listens to the voices of everyday patrons who cherished libraries. Drawing on newspaper articles, memoirs, and biographies, Part of Our Lives paints a clear and engaging picture of Americans who value libraries not only as civic institutions, but also as social spaces for promoting and maintaining community.
Image one: E-book titled American Jewish History: A Primary Source Reader (2014) - synopsis: Presenting the American Jewish historical experience from its communal beginnings to the present through documents, photographs, and other illustrations, many of which have never been published, this entirely new collection of source materials complements existing textbooks on American Jewish history with an organization and pedagogy that reflect the latest historiographical trends and the most creative teaching approaches. Ten chapters, organized chronologically, include source materials that highlight the major thematic questions of each era and tell many stories about what it was like to immigrate and acculturate to American life, practice different forms of Judaism, engage with the larger political, economic, and social cultures that surrounded American Jews, and offer assistance to Jews in need around the world.
Image two: E-book titled From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express: A History of Chinese Food in the United States (2015) - synopsis: Historian Haiming Liu takes readers on a compelling journey from the California Gold Rush to the present, letting us witness both the profusion of Chinese restaurants across the United States and the evolution of many distinct American-Chinese iconic dishes from chop suey to General Tso’s chicken. Along the way, Haiming Liu explains how immigrants adapted their traditional food to suit local palates and gives us a taste of Chinese cuisine embedded in the bittersweet story of Chinese Americans.
Image one: American: Government, History, and Culture
Image two: E-book titled Barbecue: The History of an American Institution (2020) - synopsis: The definitive history of an iconic American food, with new chapters, sidebars, and updated historical accounts. The full story of barbecue in the United States had been virtually untold before Robert F. Moss revealed its long, rich history in his 2010 book Barbecue: The History of an American Institution. Moss researched hundreds of sources—newspapers, letters, journals, diaries, and travel narratives—to document the evolution of barbecue from its origins among Native Americans to its present status as an icon of American culture. He mapped out the development of the rich array of regional barbecue styles, chronicled the rise of barbecue restaurants, and profiled the famed pitmasters who made the tradition what it is today.
Image three: E-book titled Winnebago Nation: The Peculiar Place of the RV in American Culture (2014) - synopsis: In Winnebago Nation, popular critic James B. Twitchell takes a light-hearted look at the culture and industry behind the yearning to spend the night in one’s car. Informed by his own experiences on the road, Twitchell recounts the RV’s origins and evolution over the twentieth century; its rise, fall, and rebirth as a cultural icon; its growing mechanical complexity as it evolved from an estate wagon to a converted bus to a mobile home; and its role in bolstering and challenging conceptions of American identity.
Image one: LGBTQ+ Pride Month
Image two: E-book titled Letters to O.N.E.: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s (2012) - synopsis: Long before the Stonewall riots, ONE magazine the first openly gay magazine in the United States offered a positive viewpoint of homosexuality and encouraged gay people to resist discrimination and persecution. Despite a limited monthly circulation of only a few thousand, the magazine influenced the substance, character, and tone of the early American gay rights movement. This book is a collection of letters written to the magazine, a small number of which were published in ONE, but most of them were not. The letters candidly explore issues such as police harassment of gay and lesbian communities, antigay job purges, and the philosophical, scientific, and religious meanings of homosexuality.
Image three: E-book titled Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (2010) - synopsis: During World War II, as the United States called on its citizens to serve in unprecedented numbers, the presence of gay Americans in the armed forces increasingly conflicted with the expanding anti-homosexual policies and procedures of the military. In Coming Out under Fire, Allan Berube examines in depth and detail these social and political confrontations—not as a story of how the military victimized homosexuals, but as a story of how a dynamic power relationship developed between gay citizens and their government, transforming them both. Drawing on G.I.s’ wartime letters, extensive interviews with gay veterans, and declassified military documents, Berube thoughtfully constructs a startling history of the two wars gay military men and women fought—one for America and another as homosexuals within the military.
Image one: E-book titled Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives (2021) - synopsis: Hypertext is now commonplace: links and linking structure nearly all of our experiences online. Yet the literary, as opposed to commercial, potential of hypertext has receded. One of the few tools still focused on hypertext as a means for digital storytelling is Twine, a platform for building choice-driven stories without relying heavily on code. In Twining, Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop lead readers on a journey at once technical, critical, contextual, and personal. The book’s chapters alternate careful, stepwise discussion of adaptable Twine projects, offer commentary on exemplary Twine works, and discuss Twine’s technological and cultural background. Beyond telling the story of Twine and how to make Twine stories, Twining reflects on the ongoing process of making.
Image two: E-book titled For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front (2010) - synopsis: World War I prompted the first massive organized propaganda campaign of the twentieth century. Posters, pamphlets, and other media spread fear about the “Hun,” who was often depicted threatening American families in their homes, while additional campaigns encouraged Americans and their allies to support the war effort. With most men actively involved in warfare, women and children became a special focus—and a tool—of social manipulation during the war. For Home and Country examines the propaganda that targeted noncombatants on the home front in the United States and Europe during World War I. By examining a diverse collection of literary texts, songs, posters, and toys, Celia Malone Kingsbury reveals how these pervasive materials were used to fight the war’s cultural battle.
Image one: E-book titled Poetry of Psychiatry: Essays on Early Twentieth-Century Russian Symbolist Culture (2014) - synopsis: A century ago the Symbolists in Moscow and St. Petersburg dreamed of a fundamental transformation of life in Russia. From their reading of signs in the heavens, these poets, philosophers, and mystics sensed that tsardom was on the threshold of an apocalyptic upheaval. The eventual collision between these dreams and tsarist reality generated enormous intellectual turbulence and the need for substitutes. Not least psychoanalysis came to the rescue of these stranded dreamers.
Image two: E-book titled American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (2004) - synopsis: Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms, Howl touched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs.
Image one: E-book titled Art on Trial: Art Therapy in Capital Murder Cases (2013) - synopsis: A man kidnaps his two children, murders one, and attempts to kill the other. The prosecution seeks the death penalty, while the defense employs an unusual strategy to avoid the sentence. The defendant’s attorneys turn to more than 100 examples of his artwork, created over many years, to determine whether he was mentally ill at the time he committed the crimes. Detailing an outstanding example of the use of forensic art therapy in a capital murder case, David Gussak, an art therapist contracted by the defense to analyze the images that were to be presented as evidence, recounts his findings and his testimony in court, as well as the future implications of his work for criminal proceedings.
Image two: E-book titled The Art of Art Therapy: What Every Art Therapist Needs To Know (2011) - synopsis: The Art of Art Therapy is written primarily to help art therapists define and then refine a way of thinking about their work. This book invites the reader to first consider closely the main elements of the discipline embodied in its name: the “Art Part” and the “Therapy Part.” The interface helps readers put the two together in an integrated, artistic way, followed by chapters on Applications and Related Service.
Image one: E-book titled A Companion to Modern African Art (2013) - synopsis: Offering a wealth of perspectives on African modern and Modernist art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this new Companion features essays by African, European, and North American authors who assess the work of individual artists as well as exploring broader themes such as discoveries of new technologies and globalization. A pioneering continent-based assessment of modern art and modernity across Africa includes original and previously unpublished fieldwork-based material.
Image two: E-book titled Modernist Art in Ethiopia (2019) - synopsis: If modernism initially came to Africa through colonial contact, what does Ethiopia’s inimitable historical condition—its independence save for five years under Italian occupation—mean for its own modernist tradition? In Modernist Art in Ethiopia—the first book-length study of the topic—Elizabeth W. Giorgis recognizes that her home country’s supposed singularity, particularly as it pertains to its history from 1900 to the present, cannot be conceived outside the broader colonial legacy. She uses the evolution of modernist art in Ethiopia to open up the intellectual, cultural, and political histories of it in a pan-African context.
Image one: E-book titled The Shaman's Mirror: Visionary Art of the Huichol (2012) - synopsis: Huichol Indian yarn paintings are one of the world’s great indigenous arts, sold around the world and advertised as authentic records of dreams and visions of the shamans. Using glowing colored yarns, the Huichol Indians of Mexico paint the mystical symbols of their culture—the hallucinogenic peyote cactus, the blue deer-spirit who appears to the shamans as they croon their songs around the fire in all-night ceremonies deep in the Sierra Madre mountains, and the pilgrimages to sacred sites, high in the central Mexican desert of Wirikuta. Hope MacLean provides the first comprehensive study of Huichol yarn paintings, from their origins as sacred offerings to their transformation into commercial art. Drawing on twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork, she interviews Huichol artists who have innovated important themes and styles.
Image two: Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (2015) - synopsis: In 1916, as World War I raged around them, a group of bohemians gathered at a small nightclub in Zurich, Switzerland for a series of bizarre performances. Three readers simultaneously recited a poem in three languages; a monocle-wearing teenager performed a spell from New Zealand; another young man flung bits of papier-mâché into the air and glued them into place where they landed. One of these artists called the sessions “both buffoonery and a requiem mass.” Soon they would be known by a more evocative name: Dada. In Destruction Was My Beatrice, modernist scholar Jed Rasula presents the first narrative history of the emergence, decline, and legacy of Dada, showing how this strange artistic phenomenon spread across Europe and then the world in the wake of the Great War, fundamentally reshaping modern culture in ways we’re still struggling to understand today.
Image one: E-book titled The Motive for Metaphor: Brief Essays on Poetry and Psychoanalysis (2015) - synopsis: This book is a small anthology: each chapter a kind of meditation—on poetry and psychoanalysis; on a poem, sometimes two; on poetry in general; on thought itself. The poems, both contemporary and classical, are beautiful and well worth a reader’s attention. The chapters were originally poetry columns that the author wrote for Psychologist-Psychoanalyst and Division/Review (both journals of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association).
Image two: E-book titled The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science, and Nonsense (2013) - synopsis: A surprising number of Victorian scientists wrote poetry. Many came to science as children through such games as the spinning-top, soap-bubbles and mathematical puzzles, and this playfulness carried through to both their professional work and writing of lyrical and satirical verse. This is the first study of an oddly neglected body of work that offers a unique record of the nature and cultures of Victorian science. Whereas science and literature studies have mostly focused upon canonical literary figures, this original and important book conversely explores the uses literature was put to by eminent Victorian scientists.
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Image one: E-book titled Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subculture of the Punk and Hardcore Generation (2011) - synopsis: Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation is a vibrant, in-depth, and visually appealing history of punk, which reveals punk concert flyers as urban folk art. David Ensminger exposes the movement’s deeply participatory street art, including flyers, stencils, and graffiti. This discovery leads him to an examination of the often-overlooked presence of African Americans, Latinos, women, and the LGBTQ community who have widely impacted the worldviews and music of this subculture.
Image two: E-book titled Ripped, Torn, and Cut: Pop, Politics, and Fanzines from 1976 (2018) - synopsis: Offers a collection of original essays exploring the motivations behind - and the politics within - the multitude of fanzines that emerged in the wake of British punk from 1976 that would be cut and pasted in bedrooms across the UK. From these, glimpses into provincial cultures, teenage style wars, and formative political ideas may be gleaned.
Image one: E-book titled The Poetry of Physics ad the Physics of Poetry (2010) - synopsis: A book of physics taught without mathematics, that also takes into account the social impact and influences from the arts and society. It combines physics, literature, history, and philosophy from the dawn of human life to the 21st century.
Image two: E-book titled Poetry for Historians: Or, W.H. Auden and History (2018) - synopsis: This is a book about the conflict between history and poetry - and historians and poets - in Atlantic World society from the end of the seventeenth century to the present day. Blending historiography and theory, it proceeds by asking: what is the point of poetry as far as historians are concerned? The focus is on W. H. Auden’s Cold War-era history poems, but the book also looks at other poets from the seventeenth century onwards, providing original accounts of their poetic and historical educations.
Image one: E-book titled Caring for Equality: A History of African American Health and Healthcare (2018) - synopsis: In Caring for Equality, David McBride chronicles the struggle by African Americans and their white allies to improve poor black health conditions as well as inadequate medical care. Black American health progress resulted from the steady influence of what David McBride calls the health equality ideal: the principle that health of black Americans could and should be equal to that of whites and other Americans.
Image two: E-book titled Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: "There Is a Mystery..." - synopsis: In Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: “There is a Mystery…,” Stephen C. Finley, Margarita Simon Guillory, and Hugh R. Page, Jr. assemble twenty groundbreaking essays that provide a rationale and parameters for Africana Esoteric Studies (AES): a new trans-disciplinary enterprise focused on the investigation of esoteric lore and practices in Africa and the African Diaspora.
Image one: Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015) - synopsis: Editors Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown have brought twenty stories together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia’s Brood span genres (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism), but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be.
Image two: E-book titled Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps (2015) - synopsis: In Nursing Civil Rights, Charissa J. Threat investigates the parallel battles against occupational segregation by African American women and white men in the U.S. Army. As Threat reveals, both groups viewed their circumstances with the Army Nurse Corps as a civil rights matter, and each conducted separate integration campaigns to end the discrimination they suffered.
Image one: E-book titled Before Jackie Robinson: The Transcendent Role of Black Sporting Pioneers (2017) - synopsis: While the accomplishments and influence of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, and Muhammad Ali are doubtless impressive solely on their merits, these luminaries of the Black sporting experience did not emerge spontaneously. Their rise was part of a gradual evolution in social and power relations in American culture between the 1890s and 1940s that included athletes such as jockey Isaac Murphy, barnstorming pilot Bessie Coleman, and golfer Teddy Rhodes.
Image two: E-book titled Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas (2016) - synopsis: Retraces the path of the cakewalk and African-inspired dance as forerunners to formalized productions at theaters in the major metropolitan areas. From Houston's Ensemble and Encore Theaters to the Jubilee in Fort Worth, gospel stage plays of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters in Dallas, as well as San Antonio's Hornsby Entertainment Theater Company and Renaissance Guild, concluding with ProArts Collective in Austin, this book features founding narratives, descriptions of key players and memorable productions, and enlightening discussions of community reception and the business challenges faced by each theatre.
Image one: Black History Month
Image two: E-book titled Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis (2016) - synopsis: In locating the rise of black gay identities in historical context, author Kevin Mumford explores how activists, performers, and writers rebutted negative stereotypes and refused sexual objectification. Examining the lives of both famous and little-known black gay activists--from James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin to Joseph Beam and Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald--Mumford analyzes the ways in which movements for social change both inspired and marginalized black gay men.
Image three: E-book titled Reckoning Day: Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America (2013) - synopsis: Reckoning Day is the first book to examine the relationship of African Americans to the atom bomb in postwar America. It tells the wide-ranging story of African Americans’ response to the atomic threat in the postwar period. It examines the anti-nuclear writing and activism of major figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Lorraine Hansberry as well as the placement (or absence) of black characters in white-authored doomsday fiction and nonfiction.
Image two: E-book titled La Florida: Five Hundered Years of Hispanic Presence (2014) - synopsis: Commemorating Juan Ponce de León's landfall on the Atlantic coast of Florida, this ambitious volume explores five centuries of Hispanic presence in the New World peninsula, reflecting on the breadth and depth of encounters between the different lands and cultures. Melding history, literature, anthropology, music, culture, and sociology, La Florida is a unique presentation of the Hispanic roots that run deep in Florida's past and present and will assuredly shape its future.
Image one: E-book titled Romanesque Art (2016) - synopsis: In art history, the term ‘Romanesque art‘ distinguishes the period between the beginning of the 11th and the end of the 12th century. This era showed a great diversity of regional schools each with their own unique style. In architecture as well as in sculpture, Romanesque art is marked by raw forms. Through its rich iconography and captivating text, this work reclaims the importance of this art which is today often overshadowed by the later Gothic style.
Image two: E-book titled Developing a Sense of Place: The Role of the Arts in Regenerating Communities (2020) - synopsis: Developing a Sense of Place brings together new models and case studies, each drawn from a specific geographical or socio-cultural context. Selected for their lasting effect in their local community, the case studies explore new models for opening up the relationship between the university and its regional partners, explicitly connecting creative, critical, and theoretical approaches to civic development.
Image one: E-book titled Wives and Wanderers in a New Guinea Highlands Society: Women's Lives in the Wahgi Valley (2022) - synopsis: Brings to the reader anthropologist Marie Reay’s field research from the 1950s and 1960s on women’s lives in the Wahgi Valley, Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Dramatically written, each chapter adds to the main story that Reay wanted to tell, contrasting young girls’ freedom to court and choose partners, with the constraints (and violence) they were to experience as married women. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of gender relations, anthropology and feminism, Melanesia and the Pacific. The material in this book, which Reay had written by 1965 but never published, remains startlingly contemporary and relevant.
Image two: E-book titled Women, Disability, and Culture (2020) - synopsis: Women and girls with disabilities find themselves constantly having to deal with multiple, intersectional discrimination due to both their gender and their disability, as well as social conditioning. Indeed, the intersection made up of factors such as race, ethnic origin, social background, cultural substrate, age, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, gender, disability, status as refugee or migrant and others besides, has a multiplying effect that increases discrimination yet further. This book seeks to focus attention on the condition of women with disabilities, offering points for reflection on the different, often invisible, cultural and social undertones that continue to feed into prejudicial stereotypes.
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Image one: E-Book titled Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College (2017) - synopsis: Richard Theodore Greener (1844–1922) was a renowned Black activist and scholar. In 1870, he was the first Black graduate of Harvard College. During Reconstruction, he was the first Black faculty member at a southern white college, the University of South Carolina. He was even the first Black US diplomat to a white country, serving in Vladivostok, Russia. A notable speaker and writer for racial equality, he also served as a dean of the Howard University School of Law and as the administrative head of the Ulysses S. Grant Monument Association. Yet he died in obscurity, his name barely remembered. His Black friends and colleagues often looked askance at the light-skinned Greener’s ease among whites and sometimes wrongfully accused him of trying to “pass.” While he was overseas on a diplomatic mission, Greener’s wife and five children stayed in New York City, changed their names, and vanished into white society. Greener never saw them again. At a time when Americans viewed themselves simply as either white or not, Greener lost not only his family but also his sense of clarity about race. Richard Greener’s story demonstrates the human realities of racial politics throughout the fight for abolition, the struggle for equal rights, and the backslide into legal segregation.
Image two: E-Book titled Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African American Anthology (2009) - synopsis: This anthology of Black writers traces the evolution of African-American perspectives throughout American history, from the early years of slavery to the end of the 20th century. The essays, manifestos, interviews, and documents assembled here, contextualized with critical commentaries from Marable and Mullings, introduce the reader to the character and important controversies of each period of black history. The selections represent a broad spectrum of ideology. Conservative, radical, nationalistic, and integrationist approaches can be found in almost every period, yet there have been striking shifts in the evolution of social thought and activism. The editors judiciously illustrate how both continuity and change affected the African-American community in terms of its internal divisions, class structure, migration, social problems, leadership, and protest movements. They also show how gender, spirituality, literature, music, and connections to Africa and the Caribbean played a prominent role in Black life and history.
Image one: E-Book titled Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers: Reflections from the Deep South, 1964-1980 (2017) - synopsis: While bus boycotts, sit-ins, and other acts of civil disobedience were the engine of the civil rights movement, the law provided context for these events. Lawyers played a key role amid profound political and social upheavals, vindicating clients and together challenging white supremacy. Here, in their own voices, twenty-six lawyers reveal the abuses they endured and the barriers they broke as they fought for civil rights. These eyewitness accounts provide unique windows into some of the most dramatic moments in civil rights. The narratives depict attorney-client relationships extraordinary in their mutual trust and commitment to risk-taking. White and black, male and female, northern- and southern-born, these recruits in the battle for freedom helped shape a critical chapter of American history.
Image two: E-Book titled Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History (2018) - synopsis: Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities.
Image one: E-Book titled Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era (2014) - synopsis: Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era profiles the most important figures of this cultural and intellectual movement. Highlighting the accomplishments of black women who sought to create positive change after the end of WWI, this reference work includes representatives not only from the literary scene but also: activists, actresses, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, musicians, political leaders, and scholars. By acknowledging the women who played vital—if not always recognized—roles in this movement, this book shows how their participation helped set the stage for the continued transformation of the black community well into the 1960s.
Image two: E-Book titled We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow (2018) - synopsis: In We Face the Dawn, Margaret Edds tells the gripping story of how the South’s most significant grassroots legal team challenged the barriers of racial segregation in mid-century America. African-American lawyers Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson initiated and argued one of the five cases that combined into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, but their influence extends far beyond that momentous ruling. They were part of a small brotherhood, headed by social-justice pioneer Thurgood Marshall and united largely through the Howard Law School, who conceived and executed the NAACP’s assault on racial segregation in education, transportation, housing, and voting. Hill and Robinson’s work served as a model for southern states and an essential underpinning for Brown. When the Virginia General Assembly retaliated with laws designed to disbar the two lawyers and discredit the NAACP, they defiantly carried the fight to the United States Supreme Court and won.
Image one: E-book titled S/he: Sex and Gender in Hispanic Cultures (2017) - synopsis: This book focuses on sex, and gender issues in the Hispanic world, paying homage to all who do not fit within the strict parameters of previous definitions by including broadened descriptions of identity, both biological and social, and by highlighting aspects of traditional and non-traditional lifestyles as portrayed in art and literature.
Image two: E-book titled Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992 (2018) - synopsis: Cuba’s grassroots revolution prevailed on America's doorstep in 1959, fueling intense interest within the multiracial American Left even as it provoked a backlash from the U.S. political establishment. In this groundbreaking book, historian Teishan A. Latner contends that in the era of decolonization, the Vietnam War, and Black Power, socialist Cuba claimed center stage for a generation of Americans who looked to the insurgent Third World for inspiration and political theory. As Americans studied the island’s achievements in education, health care, and economic redistribution, Cubans in turn looked to U.S. leftists as collaborators in the global battle against inequality and allies in the nation’s Cold War struggle with Washington.
Image three: E-book titled Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the Southwest (1993) - synopsis: This collection of essays establishes the importance of this literary heritage through a critical examination of key texts produced in the Southwest from 1542 to 1848. Drawing on research in the archives of southwestern libraries and applying contemporary literary theoretical constructs to these centuries-old manuscripts, the authors—all noted scholars in Chicano literature—demonstrate that these works should be recognized as an integral part of American literature.
Image one: E-book titled Octavio Paz: Homage and Profanation (2018) - synopsis: Critical study on the work of Octavio Paz, paying homage to the Mexican poet and diplomat. This work was translated into English by Catharine Lailson from its original French title, Octavio Paz: Hommage et Profanations. Contents include: “Toward the origin,” “Freedom,” “Freedom and action,” “Analogy,” “Elective affinity,” “From poetry to theory,” “Otherness,” and “Coda on Time.”
Image two: E-book titled Revolutionary Cuba: A History (2014) - synopsis: This is the first book in more than three decades to offer a complete and chronological history of revolutionary Cuba, including the years of rebellion that led to the revolution. Beginning with Batista's coup in 1952, which catalyzed the rebels, and bringing the reader to the present-day transformations initiated by Raúl Castro, Luis Martínez-Fernández provides a balanced interpretive synthesis of the major topics of contemporary Cuban history.
Image one: America - Government, History, Culture
Image two: E-book titled Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West (2011) - synopsis: The 586-square-mile Hanford compound on the Columbia River is known both for its origins as part of the Manhattan Project, which made the first atomic bombs, and for the monumental effort now under way to clean up forty-five years of waste from manufacturing plutonium for nuclear weapons. Atomic Frontier Days tells a complex story of production, community building, politics, and environmental sensibilities. In brilliantly structured parallel stories, the authors bridge the divisions that accompany the Hanford nuclear reservation's headlines and offer perspective on today's controversies.
Image three: E-book titled Woodstock Scholarship: An Interdisciplinary Annotated Bibliography (2016) - synopsis: Since August 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair looms large when recounting the history and impact of the baby boom generation and the societal upheavals of the Sixties. This interdisciplinary annotated bibliography records the details of over 400 English-language resources on the Festival, including books, chapters, articles, websites, transcriptions and videos. Divided into six main subsections―Culture & Society, History, Biography, Music, Film, Arts & Literature―for ease of consultation Woodstock Scholarship sheds light on all facets of a key happening in our collective history.
Image one: E-book titled Understanding James Baldwin (2019) - synopsis: The Harlem-born son of a storefront preacher, James Baldwin died almost thirty years ago, but his spirit lives on in the eloquent and still-relevant musings of his novels, short stories, essays, and poems. What concerned him most—as a black man, as a gay man, as an American—were notions of isolation and disconnection at both the individual and communal level and a conviction that only in the transformative power of love could humanity find any hope of healing its spiritual and social wounds. In Understanding James Baldwin, Marc K. Dudley reveals Baldwin's career spanning the civil rights movement and beyond, writing about race, sexual identity, and gendered politics, while traveling the world to promote dialogue on those issues.
Image two: E-book titled S/he: Sex and Gender in Hispanic Cultures (2017) - synopsis: The main title, S/HE, is a nod to the arguably-gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun from the 1960s inclusive English-language movement in the United States, which was concurrent with equal rights movements in terms of race, ethnicity, sex and gender. This book focuses on sex and gender issues in the Hispanic worlds, paying homage to all who do not fit within the strict parameters of previous definitions by including broadened descriptions of identity, both biological and social, and by highlighting aspects of traditional and non-traditional lifestyles as portrayed in art and literature.
Image one: E-book titled Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements (2013) - synopsis: The Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements covers the history of this movement through a cross-referenced dictionary with entries on specific countries and regions, influential historical figures, laws that criminalized same-sex sexuality, various historical terms that have been used to refer to aspects of same-sex love, and contemporary events and legal decisions.
Image two: E-book titled Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (2017) - synopsis: Clinical Encounters in Sexuality makes an intervention into the fields of clinical psychoanalysis and sexuality studies, in an effort to think about a range of issues relating to sexuality from a clinical psychoanalytic perspective. This book concentrates on a number of concepts, such as identity, desire, pleasure, and more. The editors, Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson, have chosen queer theory, a sub-field of sexuality studies, as an interlocutor for the clinical contributors, because it is at the forefront of theoretical considerations of sexuality, as well as being both reliant upon and suspicious of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and discourse.
Image one: E-book titled The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom (2018) - synopsis: The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom explores how the fantasies of genre, marketing, and children can never fully cloak the queerness lurking within the plucky families designed for American viewers' comic delight. Queer readings of family sitcoms demolish myths of yesteryear, demonstrating the illusion of American sexual innocence in television's early programs and its lasting consequences in the nation's self-construction, as they also allow fresh insights into the ways in which more recent programs negotiate new visions of sexuality while indebted to previous narrative traditions.
Image two: E-book titled After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics (2014) - synopsis: Through its increasing entanglement with capitalism, James Penney, controversially argues that queer theory has run its course. However, the 'end of queer' should not signal the death of liberatory sexual politics; rather, it presents the occasion to rethink the relation between sexuality and politics. The book makes a critical return to Marxism and psychoanalysis, via Freud and Lacan, and conducts a critical examination of queer theory's most famous proponents, including Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Image one: E-book titled Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History (2018) - synopsis: Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities.
Image two: E-book titled Transgender Lives: Complex Stories, Complex Voices (2015) - synopsis: Meet Katie, Hayden, Dean, Brooke, David, Julia, and Natasha. Each is transgender, and in this book, they share their personal stories. Through their narratives, you'll get to know and love each person for their humor, intelligence, perseverance, and passion. You'll learn how they each came to better understand, accept, and express their gender identities, and you'll follow them through the sorrows and successes of their personal journeys. Transgender Lives helps you understand what it means to be transgender in America while learning more about transgender history, the broad spectrum of transgender identities, and the transition process.
Image one: E-book titled Odd Couples: A History of Gay Marriage in Scandinavia (2011) - synopsis: Odd Couples is the first comprehensive history of registered partnership and gay marriage in Scandinavia. It traces the origins of laws which initially were extremely controversial-inside and outside the gay community-but have now gained broad popular and political support, as well as the positive effects and risks involved in state recognition of lesbian and gay couples. Through a comparison of how these laws have been received and practiced in all of the Scandinavian countries, including Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the author presents a nuanced study of a fascinating political process that began in the 1960s and continues to change the way we understand family, sexuality and nation.
Image two: E-book titled Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance, and Hope (2018) - synopsis: Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance and Hope is an outcome of a five-year international collaboration among partners that share a common legacy of British colonial laws that criminalize same-sex intimacy and gender identity/expression. The project sought to facilitate learning from each other and to create outcomes that would advance knowledge and social justice. The project was unique, combining research and writing with participatory documentary filmmaking. This visionary politics infuses the pages of the anthology.
Image one: E-book titled Derrida and Queer Theory (2017) - synopsis: This long-awaited volume of essays are compelling as they exuberantly take readers of Derrida to new, queerer heights and depths of understanding. Superbly edited and presented by Christian Hite, this book belongs in every collection of works on Derrida, deconstruction, or queer theory.
Image two: E-book titled Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism, and the Third Sex (2018) - synopsis: Ujarak, Iqallijuq, and Kupaaq were elders from the Inuit community on Igloolik Island in Nunavut. The three elders, among others, shared with Bernard Saladin d'Anglure the narratives which make up the heart of Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth. Through their words, and historical sources recorded by Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen, Saladin d'Anglure examines the Inuit notion of personhood and its relationship to cosmology and mythology. Central to these stories are womb memories, narratives of birth and reincarnation, and the concept of the third sex—an intermediate identity between male and female.
Image two: E-book titled Queer Festivals: Challenging Collective Identities in a Transnational Europe (2018) - synopsis: At queer festivals, activists, artists and participants come together to build new forms of sociability and practice their ideals through anti-binary and inclusive idioms of gender and sexuality. These ideals are moreover channeled through a series of organizational and cultural practices that aim at the emergence of queer as a collective identity. Through the study of festivals in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Copenhagen, and Oslo, Queer Festivals: Challenging Collective Identities in a Transnational Europe thoughtfully analyses the role of activist practices in the building of collective identities for social movement studies.
Image three: E-book titled Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (2016) - synopsis: Author Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at more than 400 American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity.
Image one: E-Book titled Tulip in the Desert: A Selection of the Poetry of Muhammad Iqbal (1999) - synopsis: Muhammad Iqbal (1877 1938) is one of the pre-eminent writers of the Indian subcontinent and the attention he has received from writers, translators and critics in western as well as Islamic countries testifies to his stature as a world literary figure. In his translation of Iqbal s poetry, Mustansir Mir seeks to convey every level of meaning and mood in the poems, while making the text as readable and idiomatic as possible.
Image two: E-Book titled Arrival Cities: Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the 20th Century (2020) - synopsis: Exile and migration played a critical role in the diffusion and development of modernism around the globe yet have long remained largely understudied phenomena within art historiography. Focusing on the intersections of exile, artistic practice and urban space, this volume brings together contributions by international researchers committed to revising the historiography of modern art. It pays particular attention to metropolitan areas that were settled by migrant artists in the first half of the 20th century. These arrival cities developed into hubs of artistic activities and transcultural contact zones where ideas circulated, collaborations emerged, and concepts developed.
Image one: E-book titled The Soul in the Brain: The Cerebral Basis of Language, Art, and Belief (2007) - synopsis: In this provocative study, Michael R. Trimble, M.D., tackles the interrelationship between brain function, language, art—especially music and poetry—and religion. By examining the breakdown of language in several neuropsychiatric disorders, he identifies brain circuits that are involved with metaphor, poetry, music, and religious experiences. Drawing on this body of evidence, Trimble argues that religious experiences and beliefs are explicable biologically and relate to brain function, especially of the nondominant hemisphere.
Image two: E-book titled The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie (2011) - synopsis: This collection of essays—from a broad array of contributors, including anthropologists, curators, fine artists, geographers, historians, and journalists—comprises short "biographies" of a number of famous taxidermized animals. Each essay traces the life, death, and museum "afterlife" of a specific creature, illuminating the overlooked role of the dead beast in the modern human-animal encounter through practices as disparate as hunting and zookeeping.
Image one: E-book titled Syria's Monuments: Their Survival and Destruction (2016) - synopsis: Syria's Monuments: Their Survival and Destruction examines the fate of the various monuments in Syria (including present-day Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine/Israel) from Late Antiquity to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. It examines travellers’ accounts, mainly from the 17th to 19th centuries, which describe religious buildings and housing in numbers and quality unknown elsewhere. The book charts the reasons why monuments lived or died, varying from earthquakes and desertification to neglect and re-use, and sets the political and social context for the Empire’s transformation toward a modern state, provoked by Western trade and example.
Image two: E-book titled Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital (2017) - synopsis: Mexico City became one of the centers of architectural modernism in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Through an exploration of schools, a university campus, a government ministry, a workers' park, and houses for Diego Rivera and Luis Barragán, Kathryn O'Rourke offers a new interpretation of modern architecture in the Mexican capital, showing close links between design, evolving understandings of national architectural history, folk art, and social reform.
Image one: E-book titled Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science (2011) - synopsis: The explorations within Beyond the Finite range from the images taken by the Hubble Telescope to David Bohm's quantum romanticism, from Kant and Burke to a "downward spiraling infinity" of the 21st century sublime, all lucid yet transcendent. Squarely positioned at the interface between science and art, this volume's chapters capture a remarkable variety of perspectives, with neuroscience, chemistry, astronomy, physics, film, painting and music discussed in relation to the sublime experience, topics surely to peak the interest of academics and students studying the sublime in various disciplines.
Image two: E-book titled Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (2015) - synopsis: Medieval robots took such forms as talking statues, mechanical animals, and silent metal guardians; some served to entertain or instruct while others performed disciplinary or surveillance functions. Variously ascribed to artisanal genius, inexplicable cosmic forces, or demonic powers, these marvelous fabrications raised fundamental questions about knowledge, nature, and divine purpose in the Middle Ages. Medieval Robots recovers the forgotten history of fantastical, aspirational, and terrifying machines that captivated Europe in imagination and reality between the ninth and fourteenth centuries.
Image one: E-book titled Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures (2012) - synopsis: Divided into three sections, Error brings together established critics and emerging voices to offer a significant contribution to the field of new media studies. In the first section, OC Hack, OCO contributors explore the ways in which errors, glitches, and failure provide opportunities for critical and aesthetic intervention within new media practices. In the second section, OC Game, OCO they examine how errors allow for intentional and accidental co-opting of rules and protocols toward unintended ends. The final section, OC Jam, OCO considers the role of error as both an inherent OC counter strategy OCO and a mode of tactical resistance within a network society.
Image two: E-book titled Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater (2012) - synopsis: The Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater covers history from 1887 to the present, in a chronology, and a dictionary with over 600 substantial and cross-referenced entries on authors, books, and genres as well as more general ones describing the historical background, cultural features, techniques and major theatres and clubs.
Image one: E-book titled Extraordinary Partnerships: How the Arts and Humanities are Transforming America (2020) - synopsis: This inspirative and hopeful collection demonstrates that the arts and humanities are entering a renaissance that stands to change the direction of our communities. Community leaders, artists, educators, scholars, and professionals from many fields show how they are creating responsible transformations through partnership in the arts and humanities. The diverse perspectives that come together in this book teach us how to perceive our lives and our disciplines through a broader context.
Image two: E-book titled The Yom Kippur Anthology (2018) - synopsis: Unequaled in-depth compilations of classic and contemporary writings, they have long guided rabbis, cantors, educators, and other readers seeking the origins, meanings, and varied celebrations of the Jewish festivals. Drawing on Jewish creativity from hundreds of sources—the Bible, postbiblical literature, Talmud, midrashim, prayers with commentaries, Hasidic tales, short stories, poems, liturgical music—and describing Yom Kippur observances in various lands and eras, The Yom Kippur Anthology vividly evokes the vitality of this holiday throughout history and its significance for the modern Jew.
