Titles

WINNER OF THE 2007 HISTORY OF WOMEN RELIGIOUS DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARD Whether they were secular canonesses or beguines, tertiaries or Sisters of the Common Life, quasi-religious women in the later Middle Ages lived their lives against a backdrop of struggle and insecurity resulting, in large measure, from their ambivalent legal status. Because they lacked one or more of the canonical earmarks of religious women strictly...

With the beginning of the National Socialist dictatorship, Germany not only experienced a deep political turning point but the private life of Germans also changed fundamentally. The Nazi regime had far-reaching ideas about how the individual should think and act. In "A Third Reich, as I See It" Janosch Steuwer examines the private diaries of ordinary Germans written between 1933 and 1939...

"Black People Are My Business": Toni Cade Bambara's Practices of Liberation studies the works of Bambara (1939–1995), an author, documentary filmmaker, social activist, and professor. Thabiti Lewis's analysis serves as a cultural biography, examining the liberation impulses in Bambara's writing, which is concerned with practices that advance the material value of the African American experience and exploring the introspection between artist production and...

How does emigration affect those left behind? The fall of Yugoslavia in the 1990s led citizens to look for a better, more stable life elsewhere. For the older generations, however, this wasn't an option. In this powerful and moving work, Ivana Bajic-Hajdukovic reveals the impact that waves of emigration from Serbia had on family relationships and, in particular, on elderly mothers who stayed. With nowhere to go, and any savings given to their...

This unique exchange of letters between literary icon Sinclair Ross and several prominent writers, publishers, agents, and editors asks why many Canadian artists, especially those in western provinces, spent a lifetime struggling for recognition and remuneration. Featuring exchanges with Earle Birney, Margaret Laurence, and Margaret Atwood, among others, this collection exposes the...

Although written a century ago, the sixteen stories by Emilia Pardo Bazán collected in this volume are strikingly relevant to contemporary concerns. Noted for narrative complexity, stylistic variety, and feminist themes, Pardo Bazán's stories explore many aspects of the relationships between men and women. Readers of these stories will encounter memorable and affecting characters. A mysterious nun spends her days in a convent crying over...

Although historians have devoted a great deal of attention to the development of federal government policy regarding civil rights in the quarter century following World War II, little attention has been paid to the equally important developments at the state level. Few states underwent a more dramatic transformation with regard to civil rights than Michigan did. In 1948, the Michigan Committee on Civil Rights characterized the state of civil rights in Michigan as...

Because of the increasing influence of hip hop music and culture on a generation raised during its dominance, it is important to address hip hop and African American vernacular not merely as elements of folk and popular cultures but as rhetoric worthy of serious scrutiny. In Gettin' Our Groove On, Kermit E. Campbell not only insists on this worthiness but also investigates the role that African American vernacular plays in giving a voice to...

"Gha-ra-bagh!" chronicles the initial stages of the former Soviet Union's first mass national democratic movement. The popular ground swell, which came to be known as the Karabagh movement, transformed the political consciousness of Soviet Armenians and led them to challenge the legitimacy of the Soviet system. The book, whose title refers to the chant that was used during demonstrations, brings to life the drama of the events of 1988 from the perspective...

The "Good War" in American Memory dispels the long-held myth that Americans forged an agreement on why they had to fight in World War II. John Bodnar's sociocultural examination of the vast public debate that took place in the United States over the war's meaning reveals that the idea of the "good war" was highly contested. Bodnar's comprehensive study of the disagreements that marked the American remembrance of World War II in the six decades following its end draws on an array of sources: fiction and...

In 1862 at the age of thirty-two, Centreville, Michigan, physician John Bennitt joined the 19th Michigan Infantry Regiment as an assistant surgeon and remained in military service for the rest of the war. During this time Bennitt wrote more than two hundred letters home to his wife and daughters sharing his careful and detailed observations of army life, his medical...

Winner of the John Grenzebach Award from the American Association of Fund-Raising Council Trust for Philanthropy and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education Philanthropy and voluntarism are among the most familiar and least understood of American institutions. The oldest American nonprofit corporation—Harvard College—dates from 1636, but most of the million or so nonprofits currently...

From cinema's beginnings, the film image of the "Jew" has closely followed the fortunes and misfortunes of Jews. Analyzing more than 70 films made in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, East and West Germany, France, Italy, the United States, and Israel from 1920 to the 1990s, noted historian Omer Bartov argues that depictions of the "Jew" in film have been fed by, or have reacted to, certain stereotypical depictions of Jews arising from...

While the role the United States played in France's liberation from Nazi Germany is widely celebrated, it is less well known that American Jewish individuals and organizations mobilized to reconstruct Jewish life in France after the Holocaust. In A "Jewish Marshall Plan," Laura Hobson Faure explores how American Jews committed themselves and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring much needed aid to their French coreligionists. Hobson Faure sheds...

Greatly influenced by writers ranging from Dickens and Proust to Woolf and Colette, Anna Banti was a prominent figure on the Italian literary scene from the 1940s until her death in 1985. The five tales in "La signorina" e altri racconti display her talent across many genres—fiction, science fiction, historical fiction, mystery. Banti's stories portray the ageless conflict between the expectations of society and the aspirations of the individual. In...

A vivid and disquieting narrative of Jesuit slaveholding and its historical relationship with Jesuit universities in the United States The Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, is renowned for the quality of the order's impact on higher education. Less well known, however, is the relationship between Jesuit higher education and slavery. For more than two hundred years, Jesuit colleges and seminaries in the United States supported themselves on the labor of the...

Although Jesus called on his first followers to welcome children in his name and to become like children, the lives of the first Christian children have remained in the shadows. This book explores the hidden lives of children at the origins of Christianity. It draws on insights gained from comparisons of children's experiences in ancient Judaism and the Graeco-Roman world. The authors also engage a vast body of early Christian...

Interdisciplinary in scope, this anthology redresses the undue neglect of Anglophone Caribbeans—almost 25 percent of the Black population in...

Born in Switzerland in 1878, Robert Walser worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before discovering what William H. Gass calls his "true profession." From 1899 until he was misdiagnosed a schizophrenic and hospitalized in 1933, Walser produced nine novels and more than a thousand short stories and prose pieces. Walser's contemporary admirers were few but well-placed. They included Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, and Walter...