Old Is Gold

Toyo Suyemoto is known informally by literary scholars and the media as "Japanese America's poet laureate." But Suyemoto has always described herself in much more humble terms. A first-generation Japanese American, she has identified herself as a storyteller, a teacher, a mother whose only...

The essays in English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explore the theatrical anecdote's role in the construction of stage fame in England's emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing such anecdotes in theatre scholarship today. This collection showcases...

A firsthand look at the lives of those who reside in no man's land--the violence they endure and their immense resilience. "No man's land" invokes stretches of barren landscape, twisted barbed wire, desolation, and the devastation of war. But this is not always the...

A vivid history of how Cold War politics helped solve one of the twentieth century's biggest refugee crises When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in...

This is the first book on the history and culture of collecting the works of Lewis Carroll as well as the worldwide industry of items and art based on Carroll's works in popular culture. Ten large, major private collections from around the world are...

The history of the modern United States is the history of coal--and of coal miners. Trish Kahle reveals miners as forgers of a coal-fired social contract that was contested throughout the twentieth century as Americans sought to define the meaning of citizenship in an...

A president's work is defined by two challenges: knowing what to do and finding the time to do it. While the first of these has commanded extensive attention, the second has received little to none--until now. The President's Day is a groundbreaking study of...

The dark history of eugenic thought in Germany from the nineteenth century to today--and the courageous countervoices Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi genocide claimed the lives of nearly three hundred thousand people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies. Not until the 1980s would...

This book examines the history of the Japanese Red Cross Society (JRCS) and through it offers a new account of the humanitarian movement in modern Japan. Michiko Suzuki argues that contrary to its typical portrayal, the JRCS was not wholly subordinate to the government...

In the early twentieth century, wage loans became a major source of cash for workers all over the United States. From Black washerwomen to white foremen, Illinois roomers to Georgia railroad men, workers turned to labor income as collateral for borrowing capital. Networks of...

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Harlem has been the capital of both Black America and a global African diaspora, an early home for Italian and Jewish immigrant communities, an important Puerto Rican neighborhood, and a representative site of gentrification. How...

How Methodist settlers in the American West acted as agents of empire In the early years of American independence, Methodism emerged as the new republic's fastest growing religious movement and its largest voluntary association. Following the contours of settler expansion, the Methodist Episcopal Church...

In nineteenth-century imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, new scientific fields like psychophysics, empirical psychology, clinical psychiatry, and neuroanatomy transformed the understanding of mental life in ways long seen as influencing modernism. Turning to the history of psychiatric classification for mental illnesses, Cate I....

A wide-ranging history tracing the birth of biopolitics in Enlightenment thought and its aftermath. In Enlightenment Biopolitics, historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when...

In 1776 the United States government started out on a shoestring and quickly went bankrupt fighting its War of Independence against Britain. At the war's end, the national government owed tremendous sums to foreign creditors and its own citizens. But lacking the power to...

Victorians' views of water and its role in how the social fabric of Victorian Britain was imagined Water matters like few other substances in people's daily lives. In the nineteenth century, it left its traces on politics, urban reform, and societal divisions, as well...

After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act loosened discriminatory restrictions, people from Northeast Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and eventually China immigrated to the United States in large numbers. Highly skilled Asian immigrants flocked to professional-managerial occupations, especially in science, technology,...

During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles,...

From the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras, revolutionary upheavals characterized China's twentieth century. In Revolutionary Becomings, Ying Qian studies documentary film as an "eventful medium" deeply embedded in these...

Joyce's early texts, which informed his later masterpieces, available for the first time in a comprehensive critical edition This book offers the first critical edition of the forty short texts James Joyce called "epiphanies." Among Joyce's earliest literary compositions, although published posthumously, the epiphanies...