Old Is Gold

Częstochowa was the home of the eighth largest Jewish community in Poland. After 1765, when there were 75 Jews in Czestochowa, the community grew steadily. With emancipation in 1862, many Jews migrated to Czestochowa and contributed to its industrial and commercial growth. In 1935,...

How Victorian authors engaged the imaginations of their readers and elevated the novel to new heights As novel publication exploded in nineteenth-century Britain, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot learned from experience--sometimes grudgingly--that readers tend to make their own imaginative...

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grassroots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth,...

The emergence of newly independent African nations onto the world stage in the mid-twentieth century precipitated a contest for influence among Cold War superpowers, leading the United States to mount an international campaign of photographic diplomacy underpinned by a faith in the medium's capacity...

Lost Literacies is the first full-length study of US comic strips from the period prior to the rise of Sunday newspaper comics. Where current histories assume that nineteenth-century US comics consisted solely of single-panel political cartoons or simple "proto-comics," Lost Literacies introduces readers to...

The first book to explore the history of college fight songs as a culturally important phenomenon, From Dixie to Rocky Top zeroes in on the US South, where college football has forged a powerful, quasi-religious sense of meaning and identity throughout the region. Tracing...

Mexican independence was, in a sense, an economic event. It was in the realm of the economic that elites managed to create a common ground with non-elites in their demands against foreign domination. Additionally, throughout the nineteenth century, independence was imagined by the lettered...

This engrossing narrative recounts the story of Jane de La Vaudère (née Jeanne Scrive), a prolific and celebrated writer of France's Belle Époque. Interweaving biography and literary analysis, Sharon Larson examines the ways in which La Vaudère adapted her persona to shifting literary trends...

Written by the preeminent Fitzgerald biographer and literary critic Scott Donaldson, this book presents a fresh, insightful exploration of the war between the sexes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's fictional and autobiographical writings.The volume opens with a close reading of Tender Is the Night, in...

"Science in fiction," "geek novels," "lab-lit"--whatever one calls them, a new generation of science novels has opened a space in which the reading public can experience and think about the powers of science to illuminate nature as well as to generate and mitigate social...

Heart operations today are quite common and relatively low-risk, but in the beginning it was just the opposite. Cardiac operations were reserved for desperately ill patients. The author documents this dramatic transition with profiles of 38 surgeons who were active between 1940 and 1985....

Catalan-language publishers were under constant threat during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-75). Both the Catalan language and the introduction of foreign ideas were banned by the regime, preoccupied as it was with creating a "one, great, and free Spain." Books against Tyranny compiles,...

The Hunt v. Arnold decision of 1959 against the state of Georgia marked a watershed moment in the fight against segregation in higher education. Though the Supreme Court declared school segregation illegal in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Georgia was among...

Few transformations in American politics have been as important as the integration of African Americans into the Democratic Party and the Republican embrace of racial policy conservatism. The story of this partisan realignment on race is often told as one in which political elites--such...

Georg Forster (1754-1794) was famous during his lifetime, notorious after his death, and largely forgotten by the later nineteenth century. Remembered today as the young man who sailed around the world with Captain Cook and as one of the leading figures in the revolutionary...

Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920 examines the Orientalist portrayal of Middle Eastern cultures in Decadent Literatures in England and Germany at the turn of the century. This book argues that the role of Orientalism in literary Decadence uniquely exposes its paradoxical...

2022 Best Book Award, Oral History Association Hundreds of stories of activists at the front lines of the intersecting African American and Mexican American liberation struggle Not one but two civil rights movements flourished in mid-twentieth-century Texas, and they did so in intimate conversation...

Longlisted for South Africa's 2022 Sunday Times Non-fiction Award Definitive and gripping narrative history of the Communist Party of South Africa. Renowned historian Tom Lodge has written an immensely readable and compelling sweep of history, spanning continents and the last hundred years, producing the...

In The Ontological Roots of Phenomenology: Rethinking the History of Phenomenology and Its Religious Turn, Anna Jani examines the common methodological background of phenomenology. Through attention to the phenomenon of being, the existential experience of religiosity can be phenomenologically described by the ontological difference...

From 1750 until Brazil won its independence in 1822, the Portuguese crown sought to extend imperial control over the colony's immense, sea-like interior and exploit its gold and diamond deposits using enslaved labor. Carrying orders from Lisbon into the Brazilian backlands, elite vassals, soldiers,...