Humanities at Stanford
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Humanities at Stanford
Book of the Month
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy
Princeton University Press
Machiavelli praised his military genius. European royalty sought out his secret elixir against poison. His life inspired Mozart's first opera, whilst for centuries poets and playwrights recited bloody, romantic tales of his victories, defeats, intrigues, concubines, and mysterious death. But until now no modern historian has recounted the full story of Mithradates, the ruthless king and visionary rebel who challenged the power of Rome in the first century BC. In this richly illustrated book -- the first biography of Mithradates in fifty years -- Adrienne Mayor combines a storyteller's gifts with the most recent archaeological and scientific discoveries to tell the tale of Mithradates as it has never been told before.
Publications
Recent Humanities Publications - 2009
Jack Rakove, History, American Studies and Political Science
The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence
Harvard University Press
In The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Jack Rakove, guides his readers through the two founding documents of the United States of America: the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1787-8). In making the documents more accessible, Rakove provides an introductory essay, commentaries, historical background, targets language that has proved particularly difficult or controversial and cites leading Supreme Court cases. A chronology of events also provides a framework for understanding the road to Philadelphia.
A Companion to Bede
Boydell Press
The Venerable Bede is a crucial figure for Anglo-Saxonists, arguably the most important, known character from the period. A scholar of international standing from an early period of the Anglo-Saxon church (c.672-732), he was an author not only of the well-known Ecclesiastical History of the English People, but also of scriptural commentaries, hagiographies, scientific works, admonitory letters, and poetry. This book provides an informative, comprehensive, and up-to-date guide to Bede and his writings, underlining in his particular his importance in the development of European history and culture. It places Bede in his contemporary Northumbrian and early Anglo-Saxon England, dedicates individual chapters to his works, and includes a chapter on Bede's legacy for subsequent history.
Dan Edelstein, French and Italian
The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution
University of Chicago Press
In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. But the significance of the natural right did not end with its legal application. Edelstein argues that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he argues that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre.
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy
Princeton University Press, 2009
Machiavelli praised his military genius. European royalty sought out his secret elixir against poison. His life inspired Mozart's first opera, whilst for centuries poets and playwrights recited bloody, romantic tales of his victories, defeats, intrigues, concubines, and mysterious death. But until now no modern historian has recounted the full story of Mithradates, the ruthless king and visionary rebel who challenged the power of Rome in the first century BC. In this richly illustrated book -- the first biography of Mithradates in fifty years -- Adrienne Mayor combines a storyteller's gifts with the most recent archaeological and scientific discoveries to tell the tale of Mithradates as it has never been told before.
Life: Organic Form and Romanticism
Yale University Press, 2009
What makes something alive? Or, more to the point, what is life? The question is as old as the ages and has not been (and may never be) resolved. Life springs from life, and liveliness motivates matter to act the way it does. Yet vitality in its very unpredictability often appears as a threat. In this intellectually stimulating work, Denise Gigante looks at how major writers of the Romantic period strove to produce living forms of art on an analogy with biological form, often finding themselves face to face with a power known as monstrous.
The poets Christopher Smart, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats were all immersed in a culture obsessed with scientific ideas about vital power and its generation, and they broke with poetic convention in imagining new forms of “life.” In Life: Organic Form and Romanticism, Gigante offers a way to read ostensibly difficult poetry and reflects on the natural-philosophical idea of organic form and the discipline of literary studies.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, English
Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
This book offers historically-grounded, feminist interventions into American literary history by one of the country's leading scholars in American Studies. Integrating criticism, biography, social history, popular culture, and personal narrative Fishkin explores the poetry, fiction, nonfiction and drama of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century. These charismatic, readable essays range from explorations of feminist humor and chutzpah, to meditations on the personal and the political, to examinations of feminists' challenges to cultural paradigms. Fishkin’s lively voice engages readers with the American past and leaves a bold stamp on the literary landscape.
Islam and Social Change in French West Africa: History of an Emancipatory Community
Cambridge University Press, 2009
Exploring the history and religious community of a group of Muslim Sufi mystics who came largely from socially marginal backgrounds in colonial French West Africa, this study shows the relationship between religious, social, and economic change in the region. It highlights the role that intellectuals – including not only elite men, but also women, slaves, and the poor – played in shaping social and cultural change and illuminates the specific religious ideas on which Muslims drew and the political contexts that gave their efforts meaning. In contrast to depictions that emphasize the importance of international networks and anti-modern reaction in twentieth-century Islamic reform, this book claims that, in West Africa, such movements were driven by local forces and constituted only the most recent round in a set of centuries-old debates about the best way for pious people to confront social injustice. It argues that traditional historical methods prevent an appreciation of Muslim intellectual history in Africa by misunderstanding the nature of information gathering during colonial rule and misconstruing the relationship between documents and oral history.
Michael Marrinan, Art and Art History
Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800-1850
Stanford University Press, 2009
Romantic Paris is a richly illustrated survey of cultural life in Paris during some of the most tumultuous decades of the city's history. Between the coups d'état of Napoléon Bonaparte and of his nephew, Louis-Napoléon, Paris weathered extremes of political and economic fortune. Once the shining capital of a pan-European empire, it was overrun by foreign armies. Projects for grand public works were delayed and derailed by plague, armed uprisings, and civil war. At the same time, Paris was the theater of a revolution in the arts that challenged classical culture by depicting the vagaries of contemporary life and the thrill of unbridled experimentation. In Romantic Paris, Michael Marrinan plots the zigzag trajectory of the monuments, spaces, and habits of a city that looks both to the past and the future with all the optimism, self-doubts, and creative energy of a culture poised at the threshold of modernity.
Touching Fire: A Forestry Memoir
Hooper, Trish Publications, 2009
A professor in the Stanford English Department for over thirty years, George Dekker has written a book that recalls a decidedly unscholarly adventure of his youth. Touching Fire: A Forestry Memoir brings back to life the seven student summers he spent as a forest firefighter in northwestern California. A description of fighting fires in the wild, his narrative celebrates the coastal redwoods and protests the irresponsible harvesting practices that have made them an endangered species. The memoir also recounts the hard choices he had to make as a young man between a life in the Forestry and very different kind of life in the Academy.
Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems
Yale University Press, 2009
Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From Biblical times to the present day, poetry has continuously drawn us to the natural world. In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems that take nature as their subject, and he demonstrates their force and beauty. In our own time of environmental crises, he contends, poetry has a unique capacity to restore our attention to our environment in its imperiled state. And, as we take heed, we may well become better stewards of the earth.
Steven J. Zipperstein, History
Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing
Yale University Press, 2009
Born in Chicago in 1918, the prodigiously gifted and erudite Isaac Rosenfeld was anointed a “genius” upon the publication of his “luminescent” novel, Passage from Home and was expected to surpass even his closest friend and rival, Saul Bellow. Yet when felled by a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, Rosenfeld had published relatively little, his life reduced to a metaphor for literary failure.
In this deeply contemplative book, Steven J. Zipperstein seeks to reclaim Rosenfeld's legacy by “opening up” his work. Zipperstein examines for the first time the “small mountain” of unfinished manuscripts the writer left behind, as well as his fiercely candid journals and letters. In the process, Zipperstein unearths a turbulent life that was obsessively grounded in a profound commitment to the ideals of the writing life.
Paula Findlen (History), Wendy Wassyng Roworth, and Catherine M. Sama, eds.
Italy's Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour
Stanford University Press, 2009
In the age of the Grand Tour, foreigners flocked to Italy to gawk at its ruins and paintings, enjoy its salons and cafés, attend the opera, and revel in their own discovery of its past. But they also marveled at the people they saw, both male and female. In an era in which castrati were "rock stars," men served women as cicisbei, and dandified Englishmen became macaroni, Italy was perceived to be a place where men became women. The great publicity surrounding female poets, journalists, artists, anatomists, and scientists, and the visible roles for such women in salons, academies, and universities in many Italian cities also made visitors wonder whether women had become men. Such images, of course, were stereotypes, but they were nonetheless grounded in a reality that was unique to the Italian peninsula. This volume illuminates the social and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Italy by exploring how questions of gender in music, art, literature, science, and medicine shaped perceptions of Italy in the age of the Grand Tour.
Joshua Landy (French) and Michael Saler, eds.
The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age
Stanford University Press, 2009
The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is, of course, something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"—or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy. More details here.
Recent Humanities Publications - 2008
Hilton Obenzinger, Hume Writing Center for Honors and Advanced Writing
Busy Dying
Chax Press, 2008
Muslim enclaves within non-Islamic polities are commonly believed to have been beleaguered communities undergoing relentless cultural and religious decline. Cut off from the Islamic world, these Muslim groups, it is assumed, passively yielded to political, social, and economic forces of assimilation and acculturation before finally accepting Christian dogma.
At Columbia University in April 1968, Hilton Obenzinger was one of many students who dramatically occupied the presidentâs office. For six days they protested the universityâs secret research to support the Vietnam War and its plans to build a gym in Morningside Park despite the opposition of Harlem. The occupation and subsequent strike was a generational moment repeated in universities around the country and throughout the world. Busy Dying is an autobiographical novel, a portrait of the authorâs Polish Jewish family, a coming of age in poetry, music, politics, and friends in New York City and Columbia, including a dangerous exodus through the Yukon to end up teaching on an Indian reservation in Northern California. All of this is comically and sometimes tragically relived as the author is inspired by a series of encounters and coincidences, including the revelations of students he teaches at Stanford today and the surprising discovery of the story behind Hilton Obenzinger, a 1980s Long Island high school humor magazine.
Guardians of Islam: Religious Authority and Muslim Communities of Late Medieval Spain
Columbia University Press, 2008
Muslim enclaves within non-Islamic polities are commonly believed to have been beleaguered communities undergoing relentless cultural and religious decline. Cut off from the Islamic world, these Muslim groups, it is assumed, passively yielded to political, social, and economic forces of assimilation and acculturation before finally accepting Christian dogma.
Kathryn A. Miller radically reconceptualizes what she calls the exclave experience of medieval Muslim minorities. By focusing on the legal scholars (faqihs) of fifteenth-century Aragonese Muslim communities and translating little-known and newly discovered texts, she unearths a sustained effort to connect with Muslim coreligionaries and preserve practice and belief in the face of Christian influences. Devoted to securing and disseminating Islamic knowledge, these local authorities intervened in Christian courts on behalf of Muslims, provided Arabic translations, and taught and advised other Muslims. Miller follows the activities of the faqihs, their dialogue with Islamic authorities in nearby Muslim polities, their engagement with Islamic texts, and their pursuit of traditional ideals of faith. She demonstrates that these local scholars played a critical role as cultural mediators, creating scholarly networks and communal solidarity despite living in an environment dominated by Christianity.
Jody Allen Randolph, ed.
Eavan Boland: A Critical Companion
W. W. Norton, 2008
Over the course of ten books of poems spanning four decades, Eavan Boland has changed the landscape of Irish poetry, creating new spaces and a new language. A Critical Companion is an essential guide to the poetry, prose, and critical writing of this acclaimed poet. Contains biographical introductions and chronology; introductory surveys of each aspect of Boland's work; a representative selection of Boland's poetry and prose writings; reviews, interviews and critical discussions of each of Boland's books; photographs; and a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
Golden Legends: Images of Abyssinia, Samuel Johnson to Bob Marley
Stanford University Press, 2008
From the eighteenth century to the present, travelers, explorers, journalists, and imaginative writers like Samuel Johnson and legendary reggae musician Bob Marley have shared a fascination with Abyssinia. So did even earlier writers and mapmakers, who thought Abyssinia was the land of the mythical (and fabulously rich) Christian ruler Prester John. In this book, Carnochan examines the allure of the exotic, as represented by Abyssinia, to the British imagination, as well as the beginnings of anthropology and the variations of quest narrative in modern travel writing.
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global
Oxford University Press, 2008
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet analyzes the relationship between the imagination of the global and the ethical commitment to the local in environmentalist thought and writing from the 1960s to the present. The book combines in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed analyses of novels, poems, films, computer software and installation artworks from the U.S. and abroad that translate new connections between global, national and local forms of awareness into innovative aesthetic forms combining allegory, epic, and views of the planet as a whole with modernist and postmodernist strategies of fragmentation, montage, collage, and zooming.
Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England
University of Chicago Press, 2008
In Jennifer Summit’s latest publication, Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England she asserts that libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shaped the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Memory’s Library also demonstrates how much current discussions about the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.
Josiah Ober, Political Science
Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens
Princeton University Press, 2008
Combining a history of Athens with contemporary theories developed by economists and political scientists, Josiah Ober examines Athenian democracy's unique contribution to the ancient Greek city-state's remarkable success, and demonstrates the valuable lessons Athenian political practices hold for us today.
Gregory Freidin (editor), Slavic Languages & Literatures
Isaac Babel's Selected Writings
W. W. Norton, 2008
The scope of this Norton Critical Edition surpasses that of any other Isaac Babel paperback edition and includes his fiction, non-fiction, autobiography, plays and political writings. The texts are introduced and annotated by the renowned Babel scholar and Slavic Languages & Literatures professor, Gregory Freidin.
Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970
Stanford University Press, 2008
Co-edited by History professor, Gordon Chang, Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 is the first comprehensive study of the lives and artistic production of artists of Asian ancestry active in the United States before 1970.
Walter Scheidel, Classics with Ian Morris, Classics and Richard Saller, History
The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World
Cambridge University Press, 2008
By combining textual and archaeological data that have previously been treated separately, Classics professor Walter Scheidel (with editors Ian Morris and Richard P. Saller) has produced the first inclusive one-volume survey of the economies of classical antiquity: The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World. This important work represents a major advance in our understanding of the economic expansion that made the civilization of the classical Mediterranean world possible.
Andrew Foster Altschul, English (Creative Writing)
Lady Lazarus
Harcourt, 2008
“Lady Lazarus is the story of Calliope Bird Morath, the daughter of famous punk rockers Brandt Morath and Penny Power. Her father committed suicide when she was four years old, and she has grown up to become "the most famous poet in America, perhaps the most famous poet in American history" (the title is from Sylvia Plath), hounded by the media and haunted by memories of her father. It's set in Southern California during the "grunge revolution" of the early 1990s, as well as in the crazed celebrity culture of the 21st century (think: Gawker), and is partly narrated by a washed-up music journalist who’s obsessed with Calliope, her father, and the connections between punk rock and poetry.” - Andrew Foster Altschul, Book Notes essay for Lady Lazarus
For more information, visit: http://www.andrewfosteraltschul.com/ladylazarus.html
Silverfish
HarperCollins India Original, 2008
A retired schoolteacher in present-day Calcutta is caught in the labyrinth of rusty bureaucracy and political crime under a communist government. Across a vast ocean of time, a widow leads a life of stark suffering in a wealthy feudal household in 19th century, British-ruled Bengal, at a time when widow burning has gone out of practice but widow remarriage is far from coming into vogue.
As their stories begin to connect, they weave a larger narrative of historical forgetting, of voices that have been pushed out of a nation’s memory. And what we are left with is the intriguing tale of two cities: the same geographical space separated by decades of experience and neglect.
Silverfish is available in bookshops throughout India, and also from many online stores, many of which will deliver internationally.
For more information, visit: http://www.saikatmajumdar.com/silverfish/index.html
Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories
Knopf Publications, 2008
“One of our most exquisite storytellers” (Esquire) gives us his first collection in over a decade: ten potent new stories that, along with twenty-one classics, display his mastery over a quarter century.
Tobias Wolff’s first two books, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and Back in the World, were a powerful demonstration of how the short story can “provoke our amazed appreciation,” as The New York Times Book Review wrote then. In the years since, he’s written a third collection, The Night in Question, as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs (This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army), the novella The Barracks Thief, and, most recently, a novel, Old School.
Now he returns with fresh revelations—about biding one’s time, or experiencing first love, or burying one’s mother—that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary: a retired Marine enrolled in college while her son trains for Iraq, a lawyer taking a difficult deposition, an American in Rome indulging the Gypsy who’s picked his pocket. In these stories, as with his earlier, much-anthologized work, he once again proves himself, according to the Los Angeles Times, “a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.”
Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children’s literature. Its history is inseparable from the history of childhood, as children are indelibly molded by the tales they hear and read—stories they will one day share with their own sons and daughters.
Children’s Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop’s fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter. Seth Lerer here explores the iconic books, ancient and contemporary alike, that have forged a lifelong love of literature in young readers during their formative years. Along the way, Lerer also looks at the changing environments of family life and human growth, schooling and scholarship, and publishing and politics in which children found themselves changed by the books they read. This ambitious work appraises a broad trajectory of influences—including Shakespeare’s plays, John Locke’s theories of education, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and the Puritan tradition—which have each shaped children’s literature through the ages as well.
The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children’s literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Shel Silverstein, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers. Children’s Literature is an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word.
Robert Harrison, French & Italian
Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.
With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur’an; Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt—all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power.
Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison’s earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility—and its enduring importance to humanity.
New Collected Poems
W.W. Norton, 2008
An Origin Like Water: Poems 1967–1987 confirmed Eavan Boland’s place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems now brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding material from her subsequent volumes and filling out key poems from the early years. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous. Boland’s work traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement, and patient experimentation with form, theme, and language.
Spies in Arabia
Oxford University Press, 2008
At the dawn of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents began to venture in increasing numbers to the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, a region of crucial geopolitical importance spanning present-day Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. They were drawn by the twin objectives of securing the land route to India and finding adventure and spiritualism in a mysterious and ancient land. But these competing desires created a dilemma: how were they to discreetly and patriotically gather facts in a region they were drawn to for its legendary inscrutability and by the promise of fame and escape from Britain?
In this groundbreaking book, Priya Satia tracks the intelligence community's tactical grappling with this problem and the myriad cultural, institutional, and political consequences of their methodological choices during and after the Great War. She tells the story of how an imperial state in thrall to the cultural notions of equivocal agents and beset by an equally captivated and increasingly assertive mass democracy invented a wholly new style of "covert empire" centered on the world's first brutal aerial surveillance regime in Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources--from the fictional to the recently declassified--this book explains how Britons reconciled genuine ethical scruples with the actual violence of their Middle Eastern empire. As it vividly demonstrates how imperialism was made fit for an increasingly democratic and anti-imperial world, what emerges is a new interpretation of the military, cultural, and political legacies of the Great War and of the British Empire in the twentieth century.
Unpacking the romantic fascination with "Arabia" as the land of espionage, Spies in Arabia presents a stark tale of poetic ambition, war, terror, and failed redemption--and the prehistory of our present discontents.
Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008
An eminent historian offers a sweeping look at Europe's tumultuous twentieth century, showing how the rejection of violence after World War II transformed a continent.
In the last decade we've seen an ever-widening rift between the United States and Europe, most visibly over Iraq. But as James J. Sheehan reminds us in his timely book, it wasn't always thus. How did America and Europe come to take such different paths?
In Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? Stanford historian Sheehan charts what is perhaps the most radical shift in Europe's history. For centuries, nations defined themselves by their willingness and ability to wage war. But after World War II, Europe began to redefine statehood, rejecting ballooning defense budgets in favor of material well-being, social stability, and economic growth. Sheehan reveals how and why this happened, and what it means for America as well as the rest of the world.
Succinct yet broad in scope, Sheehan's authoritative history provides much-needed context for understanding the fractured era in which we live.
Recent Humanities Publications - 2007
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Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (Religious Studies), eds.
Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910-1927
Northwestern University Press (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), 2007
In the decades since Martin Heidegger's death, many of his early writings--notes and talks, essays and reviews--have made it into print, but in such scattershot fashion and erratic translation as to mitigate their usefulness for understanding the development, direction, and ultimate shape of his work. This timely collection, edited by two preeminent Heidegger scholars, brings together in English translation the most philosophical of Heidegger's earliest occasional writings from 1910 to the end of 1927. These important philosophical documents fill out the context in which the early Heidegger wrote his major works and provide the background against which they appeared.
Structures of Agency
Oxford University Press, 2007
Michael Bratman is a highly distinguished philosopher known for his recent contributions to important debates on human agency. In this volume he tries to extend the reach of his theory, known as the "planning theory of intention and agency" which he has been developing over the last twenty years.
Bratman's primary concern is with what he calls "strong" forms of human agency--including forms of human agency that are the target of our talk about self-determination, self-government, and autonomy. The essays in this volume, a mixture of published and unpublished, explore the theoretical possibilities of using his planning theory with other concerns about phenomena of identification and with resources from hierarchical theories of agency. This work has been widely discussed, is unusually cohesive and focused, and will be very useful and influential in book form.
Domestic Violence
W. W. Norton, 2007
These are poems about the charged spaces in which people live, about the interiors where seductions, quarrels, memories, and griefs occur. A marriage is a window for outward violence; a painted cup becomes a theater for a long love; in an ordinary room a mythic violation takes place.
Charlotte Elishva Fonrobert (Religious Studies) and Martin Jaffee, eds.
The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature
Cambridge University Press, 2007
This volume guides beginning students of rabbinic literature to the range of historical-interpretive and culture-critical issues that contemporary scholars use when studying the rabbinic texts of late antiquity. The editors, themselves well-known interpreters of rabbinic literature, have gathered an international collection of scholars to support students' initial steps in confronting the enormous and complex rabbinic corpus. Unlike other introductions to rabbinic writings, the present volume includes approaches shaped by anthropology, gender studies, oral-traditional studies, classics, and folklore studies.
Estelle Freedman, History, ed.
The Essential Feminist Reader
Modern Library, 2007
The Essential Feminist Reader is the first anthology to present the full scope of feminist history. Prizewinning historian Estelle B. Freedman brings decades of teaching experience and scholarship to her selections, which span more than five centuries. Moving beyond standard texts by English and American thinkers, this collection features primary source material from around the globe, including short works of fiction and drama, political manifestos, and the work of less well-known writers.
Freedman’s cogent Introduction assesses the challenges facing feminism, while her accessible, lively commentary contextualizes each piece. The Essential Feminist Reader is a vital addition to feminist scholarship, and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of women.
American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945
Princeton University Press, 2007
Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression.
Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference.
Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History
Penguin Plume, 2007
If any global archaeologist were asked to name the top ten archaeological discoveries that have made the greatest impact on archaeology and history, most lists would be likely to unanimously mention the following huge impact discoveries: the Rosetta Stone, Pompeii, Nineveh, Troy, King Tut's Tomb, Machu Picchu, Thera-Akrotiri, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Olduvai Gorge starting with the Leakey Era and the Tomb of the Ten Thousand Warriors in China. This exciting book, written with a taut narrative, relates the dramatic moments of these discoveries, whether by professional archaeologists or by amateurs' accidents, and highlights their significance to history.
For more information, visit http://www.tendiscoveries.com/.
Inventing English: A Portable History of Language
Columbia University Press, 2007
Seth Lerer’s Inventing English is a masterful, engaging history of the English language from the age of Beowulf to the rap of Eminem. Many have written about the evolution of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, but only Lerer situates these developments in the larger history of English, America, and literature. Each concise chapter illuminates a moment of invention--a time when people discovered a new form of expression or changed the way they spoke or wrote. In conclusion, Lerer wonders whether globalization and technology have turned English into a world language that reflects on what has been preserved and what has been lost. A unique blend of historical and personal narrative, Inventing English is a surprising tale of a language that is as dynamic as the people to whom it belongs.
The Archimedes Codex: Revealing the Secrets of the World’s Greatest Palimpsest (with William Noel)
Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., 2007
In 1998, the auction house Christie's sold a medieval prayer book for more than $2 million. The price owed to a startling discovery: the prayers had been written over the earliest surviving manuscript of Archimedes (287–212 B.C.), the ancient world's greatest mathematician. In a delightful and fast-paced archeological and scientific detective story, Netz, a Stanford classicist, and Noel, director of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, make palpable the excitement this discovery evoked.
After the auction, they were given access to study the palimpsest; after frustrating days of trying to read the writings beneath the prayer manuscript, Netz, Noel and a team of scientists and conservators turned to a variety of imaging techniques to reconstruct the hidden Archimedes manuscript, which turned out to be heretofore undiscovered works, Balancing Planes, On Floating Bodies, The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Stomachion, in which Archimedes wrote about topics ranging from gravity to infinity.
The manuscript also revealed some lost speeches by Hyperides, one of the 10 canonical orators of antiquity. Netz and Noel's book chronicles the often difficult and demanding work surrounding the preservation of antiquities as they uncover one of the most exciting documents of ancient history.
More information can be found in the Stanford Magazine: http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/sepoct/features/archimedes.html
Josiah Ober, Classics (with Kurt Raaflaub and Robert Wallace)
Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece
University of California Press, 2007
This book presents a state-of-the-art debate about the origins of Athenian democracy by five eminent scholars. The result is a stimulating, critical exploration and interpretation of the extant evidence on this intriguing and important topic. The authors address such questions as: Why was democracy first realized in ancient Greece? Was democracy "invented" or did it evolve over a long period of time? What were the conditions for democracy, the social and political foundations that made this development possible? And what factors turned the possibility of democracy into necessity and reality?
The authors first examine the conditions in early Greek society that encouraged equality and "people's power." They then scrutinize, in their social and political contexts, three crucial points in the evolution of democracy: the reforms connected with the names of Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes in the early and late sixth and mid-fifth century. Finally, an ancient historian and a political scientist review the arguments presented in the previous chapters and add their own perspectives, asking what lessons we can draw today from the ancient democratic experience.
Designed for a general readership as well as students and scholars, the book intends to provoke discussion by presenting side by side the evidence and arguments that support various explanations of the origins of democracy, thus enabling readers to join in the debate and draw their own conclusions.
San Francisco Ballet at Seventy-Five
Chronicle Books, 2007
Long renowned as one of the world's preeminent ballet companies, San Francisco Ballet marks its seventy-fifth anniversary with a stunningly beautiful retrospective. Replete with intimate portraits of the dancers and behind-the-scenes contributors, this book is the first serious depiction of America's oldest ballet company.
The illustrated volume, with more than 100 full-color and archival photographs, includes a DVD that provides insight into the Company's illustrious history, including interviews with key insiders and exclusive footage of rehearsals and performances. It is being distributed by Chronicle Books, sold online and is available for purchase in San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House Ballet Shop.
The First Day of the Blitz
Yale University Press, 2007
On September 7, 1940, the long-feared and anticipated attack by the German Luftwaffe plunged London into a cauldron of fire and devastation. This compelling book recreates that day in all its horror, using rich archival sources and first-hand accounts, many never before published. Eminent historian Peter Stansky weaves together the stories of people who recorded their experiences of the opening hours of the Blitz. Then, exploring more deeply, the author examines what that critical day meant to the nation at the time, and what it came to mean in following years.
Much of the future of Britain was determined in the first twelve hours of bombing, Stansky contends. The Blitz set in motion a range of responses that contributed to ultimate victory over Germany and to a transformation of British society. The wave of terror, though designed to quash morale, instead inspired stoicism, courage, and a new camaraderie. The tragic London bombing can reveal much of relevance to our own violent times, Stansky concludes: both the effectiveness of modern terror and its ultimate failure are made powerfully clear by the events of September 7, 1940.
The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900
Cornell University Press, 2007
In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer uncovers the lost world of American women's classicism during its glory days from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and freedom.
Using both texts and material culture, Winterer exposes the neoclassical world of furnishings, art, and fashion created in part through networks dominated by elite women. Many of these women were at the center of the national experience. Here readers will find Abigail Adams, teaching her children Latin and signing her letters as Portia, the wife of the Roman senator Brutus; the Massachusetts slave Phillis Wheatley, writing poems in imitation of her favorite books, Alexander Pope's Iliad and Odyssey; Dolley Madison, giving advice on Greek taste and style to the U.S. Capitol's architect, Benjamin Latrobe; and the abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child, who showed Americans that modern slavery had its roots in the slave societies of Greece and Rome.