This first full-length study of Susan Howe illuminates the historical, autobiographical, and theoretical influences that underlie the work of this enigmatic and important contemporary American poet. In Led by Language , poet and scholar Rachel Tzvia Back offers a close and detailed reading of Susan Howe's provocative and powerful poetry. Howe's work is dense, often difficult, but always distinctive, and Back's volume explains a number of features crucial to understanding her poems. In this complete survey of Howe's major work, from 1978's Secret History of the Dividing Line to 1999's Pierce-Arrow , Back highlights the key strategies underlying Howe's work: linguistic experimentation, historical motifs, autobiographical references, and visual experimentation with types, fonts, and images. One of the book's most compelling arguments is Back's case for reading Howe's work autobiographically. An obsession with history characterizes Howe's poetry--historical figures from Mary Magdalene to Melville haunt her work--and Back deftly demonstrates the intensely personal nature of much of the historical terrain Howe traverses. This study debunks the myth of Howe's impenetrability, making her work accessible to a wide range of readers. Back has created a thorough guide to reading and understanding this important poet, and her book will be welcomed by students and scholars of contemporary poetry, American literature, literary theory, and cultural studies.

Each of the 52 volumes in the World Almanac Library of the States is filled with the most up-to-date information, including the latest Census results. Full-color photos bring to life the story of each state, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other outlying areas. In addition to an in-depth factual profile of each state in the form of a state Almanac, each book offers fascinating and lively discussions of the state's history, people, geography, government, economy, culture, and lifestyles. Each title also includes a section on notable people, a calendar of events, and enough primary source documents, time lines, maps, and other tools to make this unquestionably the best young adult reference material on the United States of America available anywhere.

This book, a linguist's reassessment of early European Jewish history, will be of interest to anyone who has ever wondered how the Jewish people, lacking their own territorial base and living as a minority among often hostile non-Jewish peoples over the four corners of the globe, succeeded in preserving a separate identity for close to two thousand years. The book makes a number of innovative and controversial claims about the relationship of the contemporary Jews to the Old Palestinian Jews.

In this case study of the history of ornithology, the author rejects the view that 18th-century natural history disappeared with the rise of 19th-century biology.

This book argues that the American conservative movement, as it now exists, does not have deep roots. It began in the 1950s as the invention of journalists and men of letters reacting to the early Cold War and trying to construct a rallying point for likeminded opponents of international Communism. The resulting movement has exaggerated the permanence of its values; while its militant anti-Communism, instilled in its followers, and periodic suppression of dissent have weakened its capacity for internal debate. Their movement came to power at least partly by burying an older anti-welfare state Right, one that in fact had enjoyed a social following that was concentrated in a small-town America. The newcomers played down the merits of those they had replaced; and in the 1980's the neoconservatives, who took over the postwar conservative movement from an earlier generation, belittled their predecessors in a similar way. Among the movement's major accomplishments has been to recreate its own past. The success of this revised history lies in the fact that even the movement's critics are now inclined to accept it.

Norman Levine's Canada Made Me , first published in England in 1958, is a bitter, critical reassessment of the moral and cultural values of Canada. His account of his three-month journey from Halifax to Ucluelet, a fishing village on the west coast, is an unconventional portrait of Canada's underbelly. The book ends with the words: `I wondered why I felt so bitter about Canada. After all, it was all part of a dream, an experiment that could not come off. It was foolish to believe that you can take the throwouts, the rejects, the human kickabouts from Europe and tell them: Here you have a second chance. Here you can start a new life. But no one ever mentioned the price one had to pay; how much of oneself you had to betray.' Canada Made Me was regarded as so controversial that it did not appear in a Canadian edition until 1979. Critical opinion, however, has slowly swung around to the point the book was recently described in the Globe and Mail as a `laconic classic'. For this new edition Norman Levine has written an introduction which traces the book's publishing history and reputation.

"In 1944, at the height of World War II, 982 European refugees found a temporary haven at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York. They were men, women, and children who had spent frightening years one step ahead of Nazi pursuers and death. They spoke nineteen different languages, and, while most of the refugees were Jewish, a number were Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant Christians. From the time they arrived at the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter on August 5 they began re-creating their lives and embarked on the road to becoming American citizens. In the history of World War II and the Holocaust, this "token" save by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Refugee Board was too little and too late for millions. But for those few who reached Oswego it was life changing. The Shelter and the Fence tells their stories"--

"Saying No to Hate grounds readers in the history of antisemitism in America, emphasizing the strategies Jews have used to address threats and thereby preparing us to recognize, understand, and confront hatred today"--

"There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna"--

"This volume presents the collected papers of Miriam T. Griffin, an eminent scholar of Roman history and ancient thought whose work has played a central role in forging links between scholarship on the history of the Graeco-Roman world and its philosophies. Spanning a period of over forty years and a distinguished career as Fellow of Somerville College at Oxford, these papers include both published works, many of them now difficult to find in their original printings, and previously unpublished lectures. The collection covers a range of topics in Roman Republican and Imperial history, Roman historiography, and the interplay of Latin philosophy and Roman politics, as well as featuring a host of key Latin authors, most notably Cicero, Seneca, and Tacitus. The last of these categories, the interplay of philosophy and politics in Rome, is also the most prominent in the volume: though deeply interested in ancient philosophy, and especially Stoicism, Miriam Griffin writes primarily as a historian concerned with how Roman thinking was related to political circumstances and actions. Many of the essays have opened up new areas of discussion and formed the basis of later scholarship dealing with history and philosophy, and although some of them are quite general, serving as useful introductions to the subject area, others are more detailed and technical, inviting discussion and controversy. The style throughout is consistently dynamic and engaging, resulting in a fascinating and formidable collection from a scholar unrivalled as an expert in both the history of the Graeco-Roman world and its philosophies, and a true pioneer in the bridging of these two spheres."

Traces the history and significance of the Jewish fall festival which commemorates the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness and the festival with which they celebrated their arrival in the Promised Land.

This volume of essays is intended as a tribute to the distinguished medieval historian Christopher Brooke. It addresses new questions in areas of medieval history which Professor Brooke has made his own: urban life and religious life. The fourteen essays explore the coexistence of religious ideas and ecclesiastical institutions with urban practices and townspeople. They span five hundred years of the history of western Christendom, ranging from Magdeburg to Majorca, and from Cambridge to Cluny. The essays break new ground in a number of areas in medieval history: in economic history, the history of ideas, and the history of religious institutions. The contributors have been attuned throughout to the complex interactions of groups and ideas within urban space. The book also contains a bibliography of Christopher Brooke's writings and an appreciation of his work.

The Greek and Jewish diasporas are the most significant diasporas of Western civilisation. "Homelands and Diasporas" is the first book to explore the similarities and differences between these two experiences. In the process it sheds fascinating light on their fundamental importance for both Greek and Jewish societies. The authors examine Greek and Jewish diasporas throughout history, from classical and Biblical times to the present, and all over the world - in Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, Russia, the Near and Middle East, Spain and the US. They analyse the very nature of diaspora, examining both the Greek concept of noble expansion and the Jewish idea of enforced exile, and analyse community structures as well as social and religious networks, combining Scriptural analysis with cultural and political history. Diaspora is a difficult and emotive concept but "Homelands and Diasporas" offers a balanced and perceptive guide to the connected histories of these two peoples away from their homelands.

International scholars and specialists in Jewish, German, British and European history offer this first comparative approach to the study of German and British Jewish history from the late 18th century to the 1930s. The volume's comparative dimension goes beyond a parallel exploration of the Jewish experience in the two societies by examining British and German Jewries in equal measure and discussing a broad spectrum of social, political, cultural and economic issues.

In Mediating Modernity, contemporary Jewish scholars pay tribute to Michael A. Meyer, scholar of German-Jewish history and the history of Reform Judaism, with a collection of essays that highlight growing diversity within the discipline of Jewish studies. The occasion of Meyer's seventieth birthday has served as motivation for his colleagues Lauren B. Strauss and Michael Brenner to compile this volume, with essays by twenty-four leading academics, representing institutions in five countries. Mediating Modernity is introduced by an overview of modern Jewish historiography, largely drawing on Meyer's work in that field, delineating important connections between the writing of history and the environment in which it is written. Meyer's own areas of specialization are reflected in essays on Moses Mendelssohn, German-Jewish historiography, the religious and social practices of German Jews, Reform Judaism, and various Jewish communities in America. The volume's field of inquiry is broadened by essays that deal with gender issues, literary analysis, and the historical relationship of Israel and the Palestinians. Though other volumes have been compiled to honor Jewish historians, Mediating Modernity is unique in the personal and intellectual relationships shared by its contributors and Michael A. Meyer. Scholars of Jewish studies, German history, and religious history will appreciate this timely volume.

"In his captivating new book, based on new evidence and a series of interviews, author and scholar Maxim D. Shrayer offers a richly journalistic portrait of Russia's dwindling yet still vibrant and influential Jewish community. This is simultaneously an in-depth exploration of the texture of Jewish life in Putin's Russia and an emigre's moving elegy for Russia's Jews, which forty years ago constituted one of the world's largest Jewish populations and which presently numbers only about 180,000. Why do Jews continue to live in Russia after the antisemitism and persecution they had endured there? What are the prospects of Jewish life in Russia? What awaits the children born to Jews who have not left? "With or Without You" asks and seeks to answer some of the central questions of modern Jewish history and culture"--

This original study examines different incarnations of the Pyrenees, beginning with the assumptions of 18th-century geologists, who treated the mountains like a laboratory, and romantic 19th-century tourists and habitués of the spa resorts, who went in search of the picturesque and the sublime. The book analyses the individual visions of the heroic Pyrenees which in turn fascinated 19th-century mountaineers and the racing cyclists of the early Tour de France. Martyn Lyons also investigates the role of the Pyrenees during the Second World War as an escape route from Nazi-occupied France, when for thousands of refugees these dangerous borderlands became 'the mountains of liberty', and considers the place of the Pyrenees in recent times right up to the present day. Drawing on travel writing, press reports and scientific texts in several languages, The Pyrenees in the Modern Era explores both the French and Spanish sides of the Pyrenees to provide a nuanced historical understanding of the cultural construction of one of Europe's most prominent border regions. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Europe's cultural history in a transnational context.

Throughout history, revolutions have been a potent force of social, economic and political change. The Encyclopedia of Revolutions and Revolutionaries: From Anarchism to Zhou Enlai is the first single-volume encyclopedia devoted to this significant historical phenomenon. Written by a team of international scholars, the book's more than 500 entries cover periods of unrest and change from antiquity to the present, including the Spartacus RevoEncompassing history and the world, The Encyclopedia of Revolutions and Revolutionaries brings to life the forms of revolutions and resistance movements undertaken to effect fundamental societal change; the non-violent and passive demonstrations that have transformed the world; and the intellectual and economic upheavals that have shaped human thought and institutions.

Totality has been an abiding concern from the first generation of Western Marxists, most notably Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, and Bloch, through the second, exemplified by the Frankfurt School, Lefebvre, Goldmann, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Della Volpe, up to the most recent, typified by Althusser, Colletti, and Habermas. Yet no consensus has been reached concerning the term's multiple meanings—expressive, decentered, longitudinal, latitudinal, normative—or its implications for other theoretical and practical matters. By closely following the adventures of this troublesome but central concept, Marxism & Totality offers an unconventional account of the history of Western Marxism.

This volume makes available some of the most exciting research currently underway into Greek society after Liberation. Together, its essays map a new social history of Greece in the 1940s and 1950s, a period in which the country grappled--bloodily--with foreign occupation and intense civil conflict.