The Chicago Blog: History Archives

Q&A on intellectual property with the author of Piracy

Adrian Johns, author of Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates was recently interviewed by Serena Golden of Inside Higher Ed. In a series of questions that highlight several of the current hot-button issues in the IP debate including biotechnology patents and the Google books settlement, Golden engages Johns in a fascinating conversation that expands upon the historical account of intellectual property disputes found in Johns's book. A sample from the interview follows, or navigate to the Inside Higher Ed website for the complete article.

Q: Which of the current intellectual property debates do you see as most consequential, and why?
A: I see two conflicts as especially consequential: the patent struggles in the life sciences, and the copyright furor ignited by the Google Books initiative. In the life sciences, patenting has become a huge issue in several contexts. The pharmaceuticals industry has aroused fierce controversy in the developing world because of what are perceived as inequitable restrictions, agribusiness has generated similarly intense arguments, and biotechnology involves extending IP into the domain of life and its constituents. The stakes for the future of IP here are high because the human consequences are so evident, and the political interests very real. In the case of Google Books, the extraordinary promise of this vast enterprise may only be realizable via severe qualifications to the principles and practices by which publishing has operated for generations. The compromises that lie at the heart of copyright are in play once more. They may not seem so reasonable when the possibility exists of such a huge expansion of access to the world's books. Yet on the other hand, such access would give Google itself substantial control.

In these realms, challenges are looming to the two basic elements of our intellectual property system. I do not think it inconceivable that they could provoke legal and (perhaps) policy shifts as major as the establishment of copyright itself in the eighteenth century, and the development of modern patent systems in the nineteenth.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Piracy and the history of intellectual property disputes

Offering some fascinating insights on one of the most contentious issues in publishing right now, a review of Adrian John's Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates appeared in the January 21 edition of Abu Dhabi's The National. Reviewer Caleb Crain writes "by making words, music and images easy to copy and share, the internet may seem to have fractured trust between producers and consumers of culture around the world in a novel way. But in fact, producers and consumers have been in conflict for centuries." In his new book Johns offers a detailed account of this conflict, from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century, to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first.

In his review Crain briefly summarizes the history of intellectual property disputes detailed in Johns's book, and picks out a few details he finds most salient to current debates. From The National:

When literary property was abolished in Paris after 1789, cheaply printed, timely, derivative literature flushed everything else out of the marketplace—imagine the final triumph of the Huffington Post over the New York Times. Moralistic bullying failed when 19th-century American reprinters tried to agree not to pirate one another's piracies. Turning on consumers led to public relations disaster when the BBC hunted down illicit listeners in the 1920s, and again when Hollywood fought video tapes as home piracy in the 1980s. Unlike bullying and persecution, however, law has sometimes succeeded, especially when law has built on the conventions and courtesies that authors, publishers and readers have aspired to live up to among themselves. Yet some laws have proved so ambiguous that litigants have lost heart, gone bankrupt, or died before they could recover their rights.
In other words, Google's private negotiations with publishers and authors are an excellent start, but to ensure the future of copyright online, the people of the world, through their elected representatives, need to have a look for themselves. Intellectual property has been reconsidered and renegotiated with every new technology, and to hesitate to do so now, out of a timorous respect for earlier compromises, would be a failure of imagination.

Read the full review on The National website. The review's author Caleb Crain also posts opinion and criticism to his blog, Steamboats are Ruining Everything.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Speaking the truth and exposing the bunk

Here's a link to one of the more interesting blogs we've stumbled across lately. Rationally Speaking, a blog managed by Massimo Pigliucci, CUNY philosopher and author of Making Sense of Evolution: The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology, as well as the forthcoming Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk, is a spin off Pigliucci's work on the philosophy of science with a focus on debunking virtually everything from Google, to the idea of American democracy itself. Recently, they've started up a new podcast, with the inaugural episode titled "Can history be a science?" and a special Valentines' day episode on the science and philosophy of love right around the corner. Listen and read at http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/.

The free e-book of the day!

For the next 24 hours only the University of Chicago Press is pleased to offer the e-edition of Adrian John's brand new book Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates as a free download from our website.

About the book&mdash: "[Johns] traces the tensions between authorized and unauthorized producers and distributors of books, music, and other intellectual property in British and American culture from the 17th century to the present. … The shifting theoretical arguments about copyright and authorial property are presented in a cogent and accessible manner. Johns' research stands as an important reminder that today's intellectual property crises are not unprecedented, and offers a survey of potential approaches to a solution." —Publishers Weekly

Check back tomorrow for Johns' previous work, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, (click the link for more about the book), and at the beginning of every month for more free e-books from the University of Chicago Press. Or to browse all our currently available e-books, see our complete list of e-books by subject.

E-books from the University of Chicago Press are offered in Adobe Digital Editions format for Mac, PC, and a number of mobile devices such as the Sony Reader, IREX, BeBook, and more. Check out these links to find out more about Adobe Digital Editions or more about e-books from the University of Chicago Press.

The modern afterlives of the bodies in the bog

According to Wikipedia, recorded discoveries of bog bodies—human bodies which have been found remarkably preserved by the unique conditions of the sphagnum bogs in which they are found—go back as far as the 18th century. The mystery surrounding the significance of these bodies and the nature of their demise has for centuries provoked a macabre fascination in the public mind, but until the mid-twentieth century, no one even knew how long the bodies had lain in their muddy graves. As Philip Hoare notes in a recent book review in the Telegraph, it was not until Danish archaeologist PV Glob's 1969 book The Bog People, that many of these bodies were revealed to be human sacrifices dating back to the early iron age. As Hoare writes "sentenced to death for worldly crimes but slain to propitiate the terrible deities, they were strangled with leather nooses or were pinned face down with wooden struts to drown in the mud."

Hoare continues:

As a young girl in Copenhagen, Karin Sanders, [author of the new book on the subject Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination], was also a fan of Glob's book. But hers is a decidedly post-modern account, one which seeks to show how the bog bodies took their place in our culture, out of theirs, 'estranged from us even as they mirror us'. She deftly teases out the paradoxes: born of neither land nor water but something in between, the bodies are an uncanny link between the pagan beliefs that prompted their deaths and our own supposedly rational world.

Demonstrating the profound impact these discoveries have made on modern western society, Sanders shows how these eerily preserved remains came alive in art and science as material metaphors for such concepts as trauma, nostalgia, and identity. Sigmund Freud, Joseph Beuys, Serge Vandercam, Seamus Heaney, and other major figures have used them to reconsider fundamental philosophical, literary, aesthetic, and scientific concerns. Sanders contends that the power of bog bodies to provoke such a wide range of responses is rooted in their unique status as both archeological artifacts and human beings. They emerge as corporeal time capsules that transcend archaeology to challenge our assumptions about what we can know about the past.

To find out more read the complete review in the Telegraph.

The New Republic's The Book website reviews Chicago

The New Republic has just debuted its new online book reviews site, and in the midst of clicking around we were pleased to note that The Book as it's called, is featuring one of our titles amongst its inaugural reviews. In an article posted to the site last Wednesday, Harvard economist Edward L. Gleaser reviews Dominic A. Pacyga's Chicago: A Biography—a thoroughly detailed and uncommonly intimate portrait of the city and its inhabitants written by a native Chicagoan. In his piece Glaeser inventories a few of the main topics in the book including Chicago's rapid industrial growth in the early 20th century, the city's role in the invention of the skyscraper, and Pacyga's unique focus on the stories of the city's working class.

Navigate to TNR's The Book to read the full review and see a gallery of photographs from the book.

Haiti—What is the lesson here?

Kevin Rosario, author of The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America has written an insightful piece for the Wall Street Journal on Haiti's recent tragedy. Drawing on the topic of his book Rosario's article offers a brief historical account of how Western culture has interpreted similar disasters in the past and details the rise of what he calls a "dominant narrative of disasters as instruments of progress"—a narrative which, in light of recent calamities like Katrina and Haiti, Rosario notes might itself be starting to fall apart.

Navigate to the Wall Street Journal website to read the article, or for a more thorough examination of how disasters have played out in the Western consciousness pick up a copy of The Culture of Calamity, or read an excerpt.

Santa Claus vs Bigfoot

Joshua Blu Buhs, author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend has a written an article for the Washington Post's Short Stack blog that makes an unlikely, but nevertheless illuminating comparison between the mythical creature that is the subject of his book, and another mythical figure more appropriate to the season: Santa Claus. As Buhs argues, "though comparatively domesticated, his rough edges hidden behind a great white beard and cherubic cheeks," as with Bigfoot, the myth of S. Claus has volumes to tell us about ourselves and the culture we inhabit.

As Buhs writes, "We tell stories about Santa Claus not because we believe in him, but because those stories convey messages we want shared—about generosity and pure love and respect for others. And that's why we tell stories about Bigfoot. Not only to argue for and against the existence of the Big Guy, but because through those stories we come to understand more about ourselves, our neighbors, and our place in this world."

Navigate to Buh's article on the Short Stack blog for more, or see this excerpt from his book, this interview, or Buhs in dialogue with Sigrid Schmalzer, author of The People's Peking Man, about the cultural significance of Bigfoot in contrast with his oriental analogue, the "yeren."

Quote if the Week: Reinhold Niebuhr

Meanwhile we are drawn into an historic situation in which the paradise of our domestic security is suspended in a hell of global insecurity; and the conviction of the perfect compatibility of virtue and prosperity which we have inherited from both our Calvinist and our Jeffersonian ancestors is challenged by the cruel facts of history. For our sense of responsibility to a world community beyond our own borders is a virtue, even though it is partly derived from the prudent understanding of our own interests. But this virtue does not guarantee our ease, comfort, or prosperity. We are the poorer for the global responsibilities which we bear. And the fulfillments of our desires are mixed with frustrations and vexations.

—Reinhold Niebuhr, from The Irony of American History

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892—1971) was one of the most influential American theologians of the twentieth century, best known for relating the Christian faith to the realities of modern politics and diplomacy. The recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, he is the author of many books, including The Nature and Destiny of Man.

Ever since Barack Obama called him "one of my favorite philosophers" Niebuhr's work has enjoyed renewed attention, most recently cited by some commentators as underpinning the theological subtext of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech last week in Oslo.

We also have an excerpt an excerpt from The Irony of American History.

Jazz.com interview with George E. Lewis

Jazz.com's Ted Panken recently posted an in-depth two-part interview with George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. In the interview Panken and Lewis engage in a detailed dialogue on the history, theory, as well as practice of one of the most influential jazz collectives of the 20th century—The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

From Panken's preface to the interview:

A Power Stronger Than Itself is a landmark work. The bedrock of the text is an exhaustively researched linear narrative history, constructed on over 90 interviews from which Lewis traces keen portraits of numerous members; AACM archival records; encyclopedic citations from contemporaneous literature, both from American and European sources; and vividly recounted personal experience.
Furthermore, Lewis contextualizes the musical production of AACM members—a short list of "first-wavers" includes such late 20th-century innovators as Muhal Richard Abrams, who stamped his character on the principles by which the AACM would operate; the founding members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago (Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, and Don Moye); Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Henry Threadgil, Amina Claudine Myers, and John Stubblefield—within both the broader spectrum of experimental activity and the critical theory that surrounded it, expressing complex concepts with rigorous clarity and elegant prose.

Read both parts of the interview on the Jazz.com website, or for more about the book read this excerpt.

How the Second City became first in comedy

As nearly everybody knows, or should know, the Second City is responsible for producing some of the best comedic talent of the last fifty years—Martin Short, Jim Belushi, Tina Fey—the list is quite long. But the story of how the Second City became the number one source for great comedy, (and the University of Chicago's not so small role in its rise to fame), is perhaps less well known.

As this excerpt from Stephen E. Kercher's Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America relates, it was in the mid-50's that, David Shepherd, Paul Sills, and Eugene Troobnic formed the Compass Players—an improvisational comedy troupe consisting of "alumni, dropouts and hangers-on from the University of Chicago," several of whose members would go on to form the venerable Second City in 1959.

But even though stardom didn't strike until the Second City, it was the Compass Players who established the improvisational style, and foundational principles upon which the fame of its successor relied. Expanding on the chapters of Kercher's book touching on the Players, Janet Coleman's The Compass: The Improvisational Theatre that Revolutionized American Comedy provides the definitive account of this phenomena and how the rag-tag comedy troupe from the U of C gave birth to a new form of improvisational comedy, and a radically new kind of comedian.

It's always nice to hear about all the home grown talent we've got here in the Windy City, let alone Hyde Park, so after you've made your way down to the Second City this weekend to catch some of the star-studded shows they've got lined up for their 50th anniversary celebration, grab a copy of The Compass to find out how it all began.

Pure Food and Financial Protection

Many of the nation's financial problems in the last few years have at least some of their roots in the mismanagement of personal finance. Some blame the fiscal hubris of consumers and speculators who bit off more than they could chew. Others blame industry, claiming that many corporations and lenders have made it a common practice to dupe consumers into making unwise investments—from mortgage brokers failing to inform their clients of the full terms of their loan repayment plans, to volatile interest rates and hidden fees on credit card debit. Yet others blame both—while a public consumer culture that encourages irresponsible spending may be partially to blame, the recession has also provided ample evidence on which to base a solid argument for increased consumer protection standards against predatory corporate practices as well.

In a recent article for the American Prospect, Larry Glickman author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America discusses Barak Obama's proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) and the history of government policy designed to protect the consumer. From the The Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, to the Truth in Lending and Fair Labeling and Packaging Acts of the 70s, Glickman's article demonstrates how consumer protection legislation has inevitably provoked a strong reaction from the right but nevertheless enjoys a fair amount of public support once enacted, and according to Glickman, for good reason.

Read the article on the American Prospect website or find out more about Glickman's book.

The birth of environmentalism in the Lake District

Seemingly but one of the many placid bodies of water carved out of the glaciated rock that inhabits the heart of England's Lake District, the man-made Thirlmere—which since the late nineteenth century has been supplying water to the city of Manchester more than 160 km away—was once the focus of one of the first conflicts pitting industrial progress against a burgeoning conservation movement. In her new book, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism, Harriet Ritvo offers the fascinating tale of Thirlmere's construction and the struggles to stop it, all while delivering an insightful analysis of how this conflict can inform modern environmental and conservation campaigns.

In a recent review of the book for The Independent, Emma Townshend writes:

Ritvo's account of this confrontation between industrial commerce and early environmentalism is clear and utterly readable. Thirlmere was the first modern conflict between these two camps, so difficult to reconcile. Ideas about natural beauty versus the need for modern utilities were discussed here in detail for the first time. But the consequent history of big-dam making has proved equally controversial—such as at Hetch Hetchy in the US, a parallel turn of the century project to bring water supplies to San Francisco by creating a dam in the centre of the new Yosemite National Park.
In our own decade, the Three Gorges project on the Yangtze took its place in the history books as the most destructive dam ever built in archaeological, cultural and human terms, having displaced some 1.24 million people from their homes and contributed to the extinction of the Yangtze River dolphin. Yet the project is also hailed in China for its formidable contribution to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions: in its first three years the dam has already generated enough electricity to cover a third of its building costs, and it provides significant winter flood protection to the provinces downstream, including several of China's biggest cities.

There are no easy answers, and the dam at Three Gorges demonstrates exactly why Ritvo's fascination with the conflict at Thirlmere remains relevant to us today.

For Townshend's complete article navigate to The Independent website.

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
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Press Release: Graham, The Moon, Come to Earth

Though the telegram may be long gone, the allure of a dispatch from a foreign land remains strong. So when Philip Graham began chronicling his sojourn in Portugal at the popular McSweeney’s Web site, it didn’t take long for his dispatches to attract a following of readers eager to experience the faded glories and living mysteries of Lisbon.

Now Graham has expanded on those dispatches, and the resulting book, The Moon, Come to Earth, is travel writing at its lyrical, introspective best. Whether wandering Lisbon’s cobbled medieval streets or wrestling with complicated local customs on the subway, Graham brings an attentive eye and love of idiosyncrasy to scenes that epitomize the paradox of living in a foreign city: Neither a tourist nor a local, he is forever between cultures, fascinated and admiring, but at the same time separate and uncertain. Through his explorations, the culture of Portugal—its rich literary culture, inventive cuisine, and saudade-drenched music—comes vibrantly to life. The Moon, Come to Earth is both a love letter to Lisbon and a testament to the pleasures and discoveries of travel itself.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt and see the author's website.

"South Asia Across the Disciplines" on the web

In January we announced the birth of the new series "South Asia Across the Disciplines"—a unique collaborative publication effort between Columbia University Press, the University of California Press, and the University of Chicago Press designed to increase publication opportunities for emerging scholars in the field. We recently unveiled a new website for the project offering more details, including a formal call for submissions and a list of forthcoming publications at www.saacrossdisciplines.org.

According to the SAAD website:

"South Asia Across the Disciplines" publishes work that aims to raise innovative questions in the field. These include the relationship between South Asian studies and the disciplines; the conversation between past and present in South Asia; the history and nature of modernity, especially in relation to cultural change, political transformation, secularism and religion, and globalization. Above all, the series showcases monographs that strive to open up new archives, especially in South Asian languages, and suggest new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian scholarship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal. We invite manuscripts from art history, history, literary studies, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and the interpretive social sciences, especially those that show an openness to disciplines other than their own.
As a collaboration among leading university presses, "South Asia Across the Disciplines" marks a new approach. Each book in the series is published under the imprint of one of the three presses, but all are promoted as part of the series, sharing in design, advertising, and publicity.

To find out more about this exciting new publication initiative from three of the academy's leading publishers, navigate to www.saacrossdisciplines.org.

Press Release: Ritvo, The Dawn of Green

Green jobs. Green technology. Green agriculture. Green energy. In the twenty-first century, green—and the environmental consciousness that’s associated with it—is good. But where did the green revolution, and the modern environmental movement, get started? Historian Harriet Ritvo has traced it origins to an unlikely place—a bucolic reservoir in the English Lake District. To look at it today, with its placid sheen, surrounding evergreens, and apparent lack of pollution or development, Thirlmere hardly looks like the site of a revolution. But under its calm surface lurks the enduring legacy of a nineteenth-century conflict that pitted industrial progress against natural conservation—and helped launch the environmental movement as we know it.

Purchased by the city of Manchester in the 1870s, Thirlmere was dammed and converted into a reservoir, its water piped a hundred miles south to the burgeoning industrial city and its workforce. This feat of civil engineering—and of natural resource diversion—inspired one of the first environmental struggles of modern times. The Dawn of Green re-creates the battle for Thirlmere and the clashes between conservationists who wished to preserve the lake and developers eager to supply the needs of industry and a growing urban population. Bringing to vivid life the colorful and strong-minded characters who populated both sides of the debate, Ritvo shows how lessons learned in the Lake District can inform and guide modern environmental and conservation campaigns.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
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Chicago's biography

Several new reviews of Dominic Pacyga's Chicago: A Biography have popped up on the radar recently, one in the Chicago Sun-Times and another on Drexel University's online magazine The Smart Set. Both focus their attention on Pacyga's book for reversing the usual top-down approach to the telling of Chicago history, letting the stories of ordinary people narrate this "biographical" account of city life. Thomas Frisbie quotes Pacyga in his review for the Sun-Times:

"I try to look at everyday people as much as I can, at people in neighborhoods, how they build their community, how they survive, how they prosper or don't prosper," said Pacyga, who grew up in the Back of the Yards, attended De La Salle Institute and worked at the Union Stockyards when he was in college.
There are sections, for example, on "Ted Swigon’s Back of the Yards" and "Angeline Jackson's neighborhood." Swigon was an altar boy at St. John of God's Church and attended Quigley Preparatory Seminary before transferring to De La Salle. Jackson came from Mississippi to Chicago, eventually moving to Englewood.

"[Jackson's story] tells a lot about how that neighborhood went through racial change and how it went through physical change," Pacyga said. "She soon found herself living over an off-ramp of the Dan Ryan Expy. The Dan Ryan plowed right in front of her house."

And Jessa Crispin writes for The Smart Set:

When professor and Chicago historian Dominic A. Pacyga sat down to start his new history of the city, there was an overwhelming amount of material to work with. He decided not to write a chronological history of the city, something that could take up multiple volumes, but to treat Chicago as if it were a person—hence the title Chicago: A Biography. He focused on what he believes to be Chicago's defining characteristics, rather than its more flashier aspects. Some of the more sensational characters—the sociopaths like Leopold and Loeb, the gangsters like John Dillinger, the bisexual eccentrics like Frank Lloyd Wright—get either a cursory mention or none at all. His attention is taken up by what really does define the city: a fight for fairness for laborers, for the poor, and for children; capitalism and corruption run amok; the work produced and the people who do it.

The full text of both reviews can be found online. Also see a gallery of photographs from the book.

Two local authors on Chicago Tonight

For two consecutive nights WTTW's Chicago Tonight has featured interviews with University of Chicago Press authors from our regional list. On Wednesday evening Dominic A. Pacyga was invited on the show to discuss his fascinating new chronicle of our fair city in Chicago: A Biography. A south side native who spent his college years working at the Union Stock Yards, in his new book Pacyga offers a comprehensive catalog of the city's great industrialists, reformers, and politicians, while giving voice to the city's steelyard workers and kill floor operators as well.

And on Thursday, Liam T. A. Ford made an appearance to talk about his account of one of the most prominent of Chicago's landmarks in Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City. As Ford tells it, the tale of Soldier Field truly is the story of Chicago, filled with political intrigue and civic pride. More than just the home of 'da Bears, Ford's book traces the stadium's multiple roles as both one of the city's most important a cultural centers—drawing crowds of thousands for everything from rodeos and NASCAR races, to Catholic masses, and political rallies—to a bargaining chip for city politicians from the infamous Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson, to Mayor Daley himself, as the stadium played a central (albeit short-lived) role in the city's bid for the 2016 Olympic games.

Check out the videos below or navigate to the Chicago Tonight website to watch.

Liam T. A. Ford

Dominic A. Pacyga

Also see this gallery of photographs from Pacyga's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | History
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A giant moose goes to Paris

In the wake of the American revolution, world-renowned French naturalist Count Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle opined that the flora and fauna of the New World (humans included) were inferior to European specimens. Buffon's theory of American "degeneracy" began a French and American culture war, as prominent Americans, among them Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, fought to refute the European claims.

As a recent review in Natural History magazine notes, Lee Allen Dugatkin's Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America, vividly recreates these debates, including the amazing story—referenced in the book's title—of Jefferson's shipment of a full-grown moose carcass to Buffon, in the hopes of definitively proving that North American fauna were every bit the equal of Europe's. Laurence A. Marschall writes for Natural History:

He succeeded, with the help of correspondents in New England, who arranged to kill a moose in Vermont, cart it to the coast, and ship its skeleton and skin to Paris, where it arrived around October 1, 1787. Unfortunately, Buffon died within little more than a year of the moose, writing nothing more on the subject, so we will never know if he was convinced of the error of his ways.

Still, though the giant moose may not have made much of an impact on Buffon's Histoire, thanks to Dugatkin's fascinating, not to mention entertaining, chronicle of these debates, we can rest assured that it has found its rightful place in ours.

For more, read Marschall's review in the current issue of Natural History magazine.

Press Release: Ford, Soldier Field

As fall beckons with changing leaves and shortening days, one thing is certain: NFL football is back, and Chicagoans everywhere are packing their coolers and grills for a trip to Soldier Field. For decades, the stadium’s signature columns provided an iconic backdrop for the Chicago Bears, but few realize that it has been much more than that. Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City explores how this amphitheater evolved from a public war memorial into a majestic arena that helped define Chicago.

Chicago Tribune staff writer Liam T. A. Ford led the reporting on the stadium’s 2003 renovation—and simultaneously found himself unearthing a dramatic history. As he tells it, the tale of Soldier Field truly is the story of Chicago, filled with political intrigue and civic pride. Designed by Holabird and Roche, Soldier Field arose through a serendipitous combination of local tax dollars, City Beautiful boosterism, and the machinations of Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson. The result was a stadium that stood at the center of Chicago’s political, cultural, and sporting life for nearly sixty years, long before the arrival of Walter Payton and William “the Refrigerator” Perry.

Ford describes it all in the voice of a seasoned reporter: the high school football games, track and field contests, rodeos, and even NASCAR races. Photographs, including many from the Chicago Park District’s extensive collections, capture remarkable scenes of the swelling crowds at ethnic festivals, Catholic masses, and political rallies. This book will remind readers that Soldier Field hosted such luminaries as Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr., Judy Garland and Johnny Cash—as well as the Grateful Dead’s final show.

Now part of the city’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games, Chicago’s stadium on the lake continues to make dramatic history. Soldier Field captures this history in the making and will captivate armchair historians and sports fans alike.

Read the press release.

Press Release: Walls, Passage to Cosmos

This month marks the 240th anniversary of the birth of Alexander von Humboldt. Although today he is less well known than some of the luminaries he inspired, Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin.

With The Passage to Cosmos, Humboldt remerges for a new age. Here, Laura Dassow Wall traces Humboldt’s ideas for Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world’s peoples—and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. In reclaiming Humboldt’s transcultural and transdisciplinary project, Walls situates America in a lively and contested field of ideas, actions, and interests, and reaches beyond to a new worldview that integrates the natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities.

To the end of his life, Humboldt called himself “half an American,” but ironically his legacy has largely faded in the United States. The Passage to Cosmos will reintroduce this seminal thinker to a new audience and return America to its rightful place in the story of his life, work, and enduring legacy.

Read the press release. Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Biology | History | Press Releases
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A crisis is whatever the president says it is

The Bush presidency may be one of the most criticized in the history of the office, but the one criticism leveled at the previous administration perhaps more often than any is that the former President exploited the threat of terrorism to hurdle constitutional checks and balances on executive power. Arguably, it was the public reaction to Bush's relentless power grab that became one of the driving forces behind the election of the current administration. Yet as New York Times contributor Anand Giridharadas points out in a recent article, President Obama has become the target for some of the very same accusations, as some argue that he too has used the Great Recession, and a renewed terrorist threat from Afghanistan, to push his own left wing agenda.

So with both sides of the aisle directing similar criticisms at one another, do their accusations actually carry any weight? Giridharadas' article cites Peter Alexander Meyers, author of Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen who argues that in fact, presidential power, regardless of party affiliation, has "been steadily accruing since the nineteenth century, edging both Congress and the public out of decision-making during anything claimed to be a crisis." Giridharadas writes:

Beginning arguably with President Grover Cleveland's clampdown on the railroad strikes using emergency authority, which paved the way for broader regulation of the railroads and eventually of national commerce under subsequent presidents, Mr. Meyers contends that the boundary between foreign war and domestic crisis has slowly blurred in the public mind.
Mr. Meyers is particularly alert to the role of culture in bolstering this trend. As it is, the federal government has limited constitutional authority and ever more intricate problems to manage.

The effect of television and the Internet in an event like 9/11 or the Great Recession, is, he shows, to amplify and rerun and spread the sense of alarm. The result is that citizens have effectively acquiesced over time to two propositions that he believes to be dangerous when held in tandem: that, in crisis, the president knows best; and that a crisis is whatever the president says it is.

Mr. Meyers, also politically sympathetic to Mr. Obama, believes that Mr. Bush did not create on his own the culture of emergency for which his presidency is often blamed, and that Mr. Obama, as a consequence, will not reverse what is not merely one administration's doing.

"It was a monumental mistake to think that 'everything changed on 9/11,'" Mr. Meyers said in an e-mail message. But, he added, "I, with great regret but without surprise, would say that those who think that 'everything changed on November 4' are fooling themselves again."

You can find the complete article on the NYT website.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What went wrong with public housing in Chicago?

This week's Chicago Reader has an excellent piece on the failure of Chicago's infamous housing projects and D. Bradford Hunt's new book on the subject Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing. Hunt offers a fresh and insightful look at why the highrise buildings of the Chicago Housing Authority became dilapidated post-apocalyptic wastelands that are now largely demolished. The Reader's Deanna Isaacs writes:

Amid all the unemployment, poverty, and broken families, the institutional racism, political corruption, and bureaucratic incompetence, Hunt believes he's found a relatively simple answer to the question of what went wrong with public housing in Chicago: too many kids. Taking into account all the other influences, he says, that was the single most important factor. The decisions that put multibedroom apartments filled with youngsters into hard-to-access towers were the CHA's blueprint for disaster.
Hunt wants to make it clear that he doesn't blame "families for having lots of kids, or single mothers. The tenants are the victims here," he says. "They wanted what everyone wants: building maintenance, security, and decent schools for their kids—and they fought to make the buildings work." The devil is in "the policy choices." The projects became ungovernable because there weren't enough adults, he says. "This concentration of people under 21 years old was unprecedented in the urban experience."

Hunt argues that these misguided policy decisions—made on both the federal and municipal levels—engendered disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a social quagmire in which it still struggles.

To find out more about Hunt's take on the failure of the Chicago projects pick up a copy of this week's Reader or find the article online here.

The politics of Soldier Field

Football fans nationwide know Soldier Field as the home of the Chicago Bears—where a last-minute field goal defeated the defending champion Pittsburgh Steelers yesterday. But as Liam T. A. Ford's book, Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City, reminds us, the Bears are latecomers to Soldier Field. For more than half a century before football became the stadium's mainstay, it played host to everything from a worldwide gathering of Catholics, to heavyweight prizefights, and even rodeos—all while playing a pivotal role in the careers of some of Chicago's biggest political bosses as well.

As columnist John Kass notes in a recent article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune, many big names in Chicago politics—Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson and Edward Kelly to name a few—were intimately tied up in the stadium's construction and use as they pushed for the "great public works" that allowed them "to control gargantuan budgets and cement their power."

Drawing an analogy to the city's recent bid for the 2016 Olympic games Kass asks, "Does any of this have the ring of current events?"

As the day for the IOC's decision draws nearer, and debates about the public payoff of the games get louder, as Kass points out, Ford's new book offers some essential insights on the Chicago of today through a revealing look at the past of one of its great civic works.

To find out more read John Kass's article on the Chicago Tribune website.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dorothea Lange's forgotten photographs

Having produced some of the most powerful images of Depression-era rural America, including the now iconic Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange's documentary photography for the Farm Security Administration offers a profound (and timely) record of the devastating effects of the Depression, as well as American's resilience in the face of hardship. But surprisingly, many of Lange's photographs for the FSA, (and arguably some of her best) have remained hidden from the public eye, consigned to archives where they have languished for years, rarely seen. Now, in Anne Whiston Spirn's recent Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field Lange's never-before-published photos and captions from her fieldwork in California, the Pacific Northwest, and North Carolina during 1939 can finally receive the exposure they merit.

Focusing on selections of photographs accompanied by field notes and citations strategically selected by Spirn, as a recent review in Bookforum notes, [Daring to Look] "presents a case study of Lange's artistic agility"—the juxtapositions of image and text allowing readers to experience a diversity of voices and points of view, dismissing what reviewer Jordan Bear calls the "maudlin sentimentality" sometimes ascribed to Lange's work.

And for a sampling of some of these images see this illustrated excerpt from the book. Read Jordan Bear's full review on the Bookforum website.

Abrams, Lewis, and Mitchell trio at the Chicago Jazz Festival

In his book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music George E. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, has produced the definitive history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Based in Chicago and counting among its members musicians like Anthony Braxton and Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, the AACM emerged in the '60s as one of the most influential organizations in the history of North American avant-garde music and art. Since then it has become one of Chicago's premier outlets for the edgier side of jazz and has risen to international renown spawning groups like the globe-trotting Art Ensemble of Chicago.

And to this day, largely due to the AACM and its mission to carve out a space in the midst of Chicago's industrial landscape for musical creativity and experimentation, Chicago's avant-garde jazz scene continues to thrive. This Friday you can head on down to the Chicago Jazz Festival at the Petrillo Music Shell to check out the Trio featuring Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell—both founding AACM members—alongside George Lewis himself on trombone. The Reader's Bill Meyer writes, "putting such uncompromising music on the big stage is a gutsy move by the Jazz Institute, but this may turn out to be the most rewarding set of the festival."

In the meantime, bone up on the history of the jazz in Chicago and all the Great Black Music the AACM helped produce with George E. Lewis's A Power Stronger Than Itself.

Read an excerpt from the book.

The Whole Foods boycott and the history of consumer activism in America

In a posting for the Washington Post's Short Stack blog Lawrence B. Glickman, author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America weighs in on the recent calls for a Whole Foods boycott in protest of an article written by company executive John Mackey critical of Obama's health care reform program. With a large customer base of progressives ardently in support of reform, many feel betrayed by a company which they assumed would share their political and social agenda.

Glickman's article points out the long history of consumer activism in the United States and the influential role it sometimes plays in American politics (think Boston Tea Party), yet as Glickman writes:

Despite their frequency throughout U.S. history, boycotts have rarely achieved their intended goals.… In the early 1900's, African Americans in twenty-five Southern cities initiated boycotts of segregated streetcars. Most of these campaigns were short-lived, unsuccessful, and lost to history. Yet they marked an early step in the campaign against segregation, which culminated in large measure with another, successful effort—the most famous boycott in the history of the United States: the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and 1956. That movement not only ended Jim Crow transportation in that city but brought the Civil Rights campaign to the forefront of the nation's political agenda and moral consciousness.
Without the early failures, we might never have seen the later and celebrated successes.

Read the complete article on the Washington Post's Short Stack blog.

Press Release: Rowland, Giordano Bruno

New in Paperback—Giordano Bruno (1548—1600) is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland's biography establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo—a thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours.

Writing with great verve and erudition, Rowland traces Bruno's wanderings through a sixteenth-century Europe where every certainty of religion and philosophy has been called into question, and reveals how he valiantly defended his ideas to the very end, when he was burned at the stake as a heretic on Rome's Campo de' Fiori.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Leo Durocher and the "Collapsing Cubs"

Leo "the Lip" Durocher began his five-decade career inauspiciously, riding the bench for the powerhouse 1928 Yankees, hitting so poorly that Babe Ruth nicknamed him "the All-American Out." But soon Durocher—who would become infamous for his cantankerousness, fighting moxie, and will to win—hit his stride taking the 1934 World Series with the "Gashouse Gang" Cardinals, turning the Brooklyn Dodgers around as player-manager five years later, and managing the New York Giants to their 1951 pennant win. But as Joe Distelheim notes in a recent review of Durocher's autobiography, Nice Guys Finish Last, not even "the Lip" could "swagger and tough talk" his way around The Curse of the Billy Goat. Distelheim writes:

Odds are good, dear reader, that I already was following the Cubs when your mother was born, so you'll understand that I took particular interest in the Chicago part of the chronology. Durocher had an easy act to follow; he took over in 1966 after a particularly fallow period even for the Cubs of that era. They were coming off an eighth-place finish and a failed five-year experiment with a "college of coaches" running things instead of a manager.
In the book, Durocher doesn't omit the oft-told story: He declared that the Cubs weren't an eighth-place team. Right. His first year, they finished 10th.

This was not a team without talent. It included future Hall of Famers Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Fergie Jenkins (plus Durocher himself) and Hall shoulda-been Ron Santo. The trouble with the Cubs, though, Durocher writes, was all those home run hitters. In his view, Banks was too old, too hobbled, too admired by sports writers. Santo was too slow, too mouthy, too prone to fail in the clutch.

Banks, however, was and is regarded in Chicago as St. Francis is in Assisi. Santo was and is similarly adored. Durocher got no place with his bosses when he suggested trading them. So, he cooked up a deal for Williams, proposing to send him to the Orioles for a flock of Curt Blefarys. That didn't fly, either.

Even though burdened with these mediocrities, by Year Two of Durocher the Cubs were in the first division, primed for the 1969 pennant race that would become legendary for both the Collapsing Cubs and the Miracle Mets.

An entertaining account of the career of a man who presided over some of the most exciting wins, and disappointing losses of the 20th century, Leo Durocher's Nice Guys Finish Last brings the personalities and play-by-play of baseball's greatest era to vivid life.

For more read Distelheim's review in The Hard Ball Times or see another recent review of the book published in last week's Beachwood Reporter.

"Imagine getting behind-the-scenes reports from someone who absolutely doesn't care about stepping on toes. That's Nice Guys Finish Last." —Rick Kaempfer, Beachwood Reporter

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Looting the birthplace of civilization

Lawrence Rothfield's The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum offers a revealing look at the plundering of Iraq's cultural heritage during the Iraq war. Housing relics dating back to the dawn of human civilization some twelve thousand years ago, Iraq's National Museum as well as many important archeological sites were looted while, according to Rothfield, nearly everyone, including some of the highest ranking U.S. government officials, simply looked the other way. As Benjamin Moser writes his review for the September edition of Harper's magazine:

The destruction inevitable in wartime might have been mitigated if Iraq had not suffered the bad luck of being invaded by George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. One of the many low points of their low endeavor came when Rumsfeld (whose boundless self-regard was untethered to any reckonable aptitude) said that "stuff happens" in reply to early reports of widespread looting. "The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over," Rumsfeld scoffed, "and its the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you think 'M y goodness, were there that many vases?'"
This attitude, Rothfield shows, … even placed Rummy and his "war president" in unfavorable contrast with Saddam Hussein, who, during his invasion of Kuwait, took precautions to prevent the looting of the Kuwait Museum.… After Rumsfeld ignored repeated pleas to prevent the entirely foreseeable looting, disaster came: a full-scale destruction of countless monuments in the birthplace of civilization.

A powerful, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of military adventure and cultural destruction, The Rape of Mesopotamia is essential reading for all concerned with the future of our past.

Pick up a copy of Harper's magazine to read the full review and in the meantime, read this excerpt from the book.

"A time machine tour of our continent's abundant past"

For some time now the movement to preserve natural habitats has gained in popularity as we begin to understand our species' limited capacity to thrive in isolation from the untold number of other organisms that make up the ecosystems in which we live. And with the clear and present danger posed by mass-extinctions, climate change, and the rapid depletion of natural resources, many long for a return to the abundance that the wilds of North America once offered. But while it is impossible to turn back the hands of time, with Steve Nicholls' recent book, Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery we can at least gain a clearer picture of what it was like, and perhaps the inspiration to repair the damage. As Marion Elizabeth Rodgers writes a recent review of the book for the Washington Times:

Paradise Found is one of the best books I have read in years. The book guides us easily through the North Atlantic, the East Coast, subtropical Caribbean, the West Coast, Baja California and the Great Plains, seamlessly blending firsthand accounts from historical journals, personal anecdotes and the latest scientific inquiry. Wildlife filmmaker and entomologist Steve Nicholls paints a picture of 500 years of people and nature, giving us a time machine tour of our continent's abundant past.
And what an abundance there was! Meadows full of ducks, forests filled with all kinds of berries and nuts—oaks, pecans and most plentiful of all, the American chestnut. Those forests were not the same as we know today. These were natural cathedrals, with green roofs arching 50 feet above one's head; giant trunks measured more than 20 feet in circumference. So many strawberries littered the ground that one naturalist noted his horse's hooves were being stained red with their juice. At the mouth of a river was an island filled with so many egrets that it looked as if it were blanketed with snow.…

Digging into the journals and diaries of explorers and settlers, [Nicholls] became convinced if more people knew the true vitality of nature, they would not only be awed, but be reminded of the sheer scale of our impact on the planet—and be spurred to repair the damage. Environmental awareness is not new, but as Mr. Nicholls states, "our mentality has been to preserve and isolate sections of nature, in national parks or wilderness areas, separate from the human world."

We city folk have grown so apart from nature that I wonder how many comprehend how much has been lost from our own backyards. Here in Georgetown, the cocoon where I live, neighbors shop at eco-friendly Whole Foods, yet, in apparent disconnect, chop down century-old trees and spray pesticides on their properties, replacing soil with cement and trees with clumps of liriope. Is it any wonder that the amount and variety of songbirds have steadily diminished, while the pesky mosquito remains?

This detached attitude is, in no small way, responsible for the scale of effects Mr. Nicholls outlines in his book. "The bottom line is that we are just one part of nature," he writes, and the sooner we become enlightened with that humbling realization, the sooner we can bring about a balance to our immediate environment and beyond.

Read the rest of the review on the Washington Times website. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Pervasive policy failure

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In a new review essay on protecting cultural artifacts, n+1's Alexander Bevilacqua singles out Lawrence Rothfield's The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum as "an exposé that is all the more powerful for its calm tone.… His conclusion: Americans in positions of power and responsibility are collectively culpable for the destruction of the Iraqi cultural heritage, a 'pervasive policy failure.'"

Bevilacqua praises Rothfield for delving "deeper into the matter than simply blaming the Bush administration" for the April 2003 looting of the Iraq Museum, when more than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest evidence of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy worldwide market in illicit antiquities. In the years since that then, the losses have only mounted, with gangs digging up roughly half a million artifacts that had previously been unexcavated. Bevilacqua writes that:

The US is a global power with no cultural ministry and was not a member of UNESCO from 1984 to late 2003. There were, therefore, structural causes for US negligence in Iraq: for one, "the absence of social networks between cultural heritage advocates and war planners." This, Rothfield notes, stands in contrast to the (otherwise regrettable) British occupation, in which political players had a lively interest in Mesopotamian archaeology and were connected by social networks to scholars. In the American case, within a generally hurried and often inefficient war planning process, protecting cultural sites received little attention. General Tommy Franks was most succinct: "I don't have time for this fucking bullshit." If war planners failed to think of Iraq's heritage, archaeologists and curators share the blame for what came to pass. Archaeologists did not focus on the problem of preserving Iraq's cultural heritage until the fall of 2002. Once they did, they found they had no access to important players in the State and Defense departments.

As a curator and collector tells Rothfield in this excerpt "nobody thought of culture."

The Burnham Plan Centennial with author Carl Smith

In 1909, with the backing of the Commercial Club of Chicago, architects Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett published one of the most influential documents in the history of urban planning: The Plan of Chicago. Responsible for many of the city's most distinctive features, including its lakefront parks and roadways, the Magnificent Mile, and Navy Pier, the Plan (see a digitized scan of the original Plan at the Encyclopedia of Chicago website) reflected the city elite's response to the massive influx of inhabitants to urban centers during America's industrial age. Even today as the City of Chicago celebrates the centennial of the Plan's publication Burnham's influential document continues to spark debate over how urban planners can strike a balance between providing a livable habitat and one that can sustain industrial and economic growth.

For the centennial celebration, the city—along with the University of Chicago, the Press, the Chicago Public Library, and many other supporting organizations—is offering a chance for Chicagoans to engage that debate first-hand with a number of events and activities this summer and fall—from Zaha Hadid and the UNStudio's architectural exhibits in Millennium Park, "honoring the forward-looking spirit of the Plan of Chicago, to the CPL's One Book, One Chicago series which has, for it's Fall 2009 program, chosen author Carl Smith's fascinating examination of the Burnham Plan in, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City.

The One Book, One Chicago program will run throughout the months of September and October with a number of readings and talks, hosted by some of the city's most prominent architects and scholars among others, focusing on Smith's book and it's insightful examination of Burnham's Plan. But beginning today and running through the weekend, Carl Smith himself will be hosting daily lectures and guided tours highlighting some of the city's most prominent historic landmarks and their relationship to the Plan. Smith will also give a talk this Sunday at the Arlington Heights Memorial Library and another at the Harold Washington Public Library downtown on October 24th (become a fan of our Plan of Chicago Facebook page for updates on more activities and talks featuring Smith and other UCP authors during the centennial celebrations).

It's impossible to understand where our fair city is headed without understanding its past, so read up on the subject with a copy of Smith's The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City or one of our other fascinating books on Chicago's storied architectural history (scroll down the page a bit) and then get involved with some of the great events for the Plan of Chicago Centennial Celebration.

Read the introduction and first chapter to Smith's book.

Writing Hiroshima's Ground Zero

Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso both spoke today at the city's annual August 6 ceremony, held to mark the anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack, which on this day in 1945 decimated Hiroshima and killed or fatally harmed 140,000 people. In today's Daily Telegraph, columnist Kate Day compares the event to past August Sixths with a series of striking photographs that reflect the way the city has incorporated its tragic past into its modern landscape.

John Whittier Treat's Writing Ground Zero delves deep into that process, recounting controversial history of Japanese public discourse around Hiroshima and Nagasaki—a discourse alternatively celebrated and censored—from August 6, 1945, to the present day.

The first complete study of the nuclear theme in Japan's intellectual and artistic life, Writing Ground Zero covers works from the earliest survivor writers, including Hara Tamiki and Ota Yoko, as well as such intellectuals as Oe Kenzaburo and Oda Makoto. Outlining the Japanese contribution to ongoing international debates on ethics and history, it adds a rich context to Prime Minister Taro Aso's hope that, as he put it today, "Japan will … lead the international community toward the abolishment of nuclear weapons and lasting peace."

The history of young men and fire

Sixty years ago today, a crew of fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned.

One of those three survivors, Bob Sallee, will speak to the public this week in Montana as part of ceremonies held to observe the anniversary of the conflagration.

Sallee, of course, also figures prominently in Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, which hauntingly searches out and fits together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

In this evocative excerpt, Maclean reflects on how it was that of the crew only Rumsey and Sallee survived.

If you had known ahead of time that only two would survive, you probably never would have picked these two—they were first-year jumpers, this was the first fire they had ever jumped on, Sallee was one year younger than the minimum age, and around the base they were known as roommates who had a pretty good time for themselves. They both became big operators in the world of the woods and prairies, and part of this story will be to find them and ask them why they think they alone survived, but even if ultimately your answer or theirs seems incomplete, this seems a good place to start asking the question. In their statements soon after the fire, both say that the moment Dodge reversed the route of the crew they became alarmed, for, even if they couldn't see the fire, Dodge's order was to run from one. They reacted in seconds or less. They had been traveling at the end of the line because they were carrying unsheathed saws. When the head of the line started its switchback, Rumsey and Sallee left their positions at the end of the line, put on extra speed, and headed straight uphill, connecting with the front of the line to drop into it right behind Dodge.

Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine

The NYT published a story today about a new sign of hope for the peaceful co-habitation of the West Bank coming from a group of ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews living in the outlying communities of Modiin Illit and Beitar Illit. According to the Times, though the rapidly growing populations of their settlements along disputed territories account for much of the Israeli government's claims for the need to expand into Palestinian territory, "these ultra-Orthodox inhabitants often express contempt for the settler movement, with its vows never to move."

The people here, who shun most aspects of modernity, came for three reasons: they needed affordable housing no longer available in and around Jerusalem or Tel Aviv; they were rejected by other Israeli cities as too cult-like; and officials wanted their presence to broaden Israel's narrow border.… Yet they are lumped with everyone else.

With an unsurpassed ideological commitment to their religion, but not to the hardline Zionist movements with which ultra-Orthodox communities are sometimes associated, their desire to divorce themselves from the broader nationalist movement brings new hope for a deal with the Palestinians over many existing land disputes and the possibility of a future in which both groups can co-exist peacefully.

In the summer of 2007 the press also published a book documenting a similar ray of hope for a resolution to the decades long conflict between Israel and Palestine in Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine—an eye-opening chronicle of the author David Shulman's work as a member of the peace group Ta'ayush, which takes its name from the Arabic for "living together." Comprised of both Israeli and Palestinian activists working side by side, Shulman's book documents the group's dogged efforts to pass through Israeli checkpoints to deliver aid, rebuild houses, and physically block the progress of the dividing wall. As they face off against police, soldiers, and hostile Israeli settlers, anger mixes with compassion, moments of kinship alternate with confrontation, and, throughout, Shulman wrestles with his duty to fight the cruelty enabled by "that dependable and devastating human failure to feel."

Offering humanizing accounts of the reality of a people struggling to overcome one of the most complicated conflicts of our era, both the Times article and Shulman's book make for essential reading on the topic.

For more read the complete NYT article or read an excerpt from Shulman's book.

Faking Knossos

From Freud, to Joyce, to Hilda Doolittle, and Robert Graves, many of the twentieth-century's most influential artists and intellectuals have, through their work, demonstrated an obsession with the roots of Western culture in ancient Minoan civilization. The source of this phenomenon, as Cathy Gere argues in her new book Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, can be traced in large part to British archaeologist Arthur Evans' coetaneous discovery of the palace of Knossos on Crete.

Beginning in the Spring of 1900 Evans engaged in an unprecedented project to not only unearth the ancient Minoan civilization, but to recreate it, commissioning a cadre of artists and architects like Piet de Jong, and Swiss artist Émile Gilliéron to reconstruct the city's ancient buildings out of reinforced concrete, and piece together sparse fragments of Minoan frescoes with artwork of their own. The result, as Mary Beard notes in her review of Gere's book for the August New York Review of Books, was a "radical blurring of the boundary between authentic Minoan artifact" and modern fakes.

Yet despite its historical inaccuracies, as Gere shows, Evans' work gained intense popularity amongst modern interpreters who found in his fanciful reconstruction at Crete, the ancient pagan precedents for their own visions of Western civilization. In her review Beard praises Gere's work for its insightful demonstration that as much as "twentieth-century culture, from Evans on, projected its own concerns onto Minoan archaeology," Minoan archaeology conversely influenced twentieth-century culture. And with Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, we now have a fascinating chronicle of this unprecedented confluence between the ancient and modern worlds—one which continues to shape western culture to the present day.

You can read Beard's full review at the New York Review of Books website, or read the introduction to the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the Earth to the Moon and back

Where were you on July 20, 1969? Newspapers all over the United States posed this question to readers over the past couple of days, generating hundreds of responses that explain how the moon landing, with its worldwide scale, also had countless much more personal dimensions.

"At that moment I had serious doubts about the relevance of our hard work and the ordering of my personal priorities," remembers a then-student archaeologist.

"We had the technology to put a man on the moon," a Vietnam veteran remembers thinking, "yet here I am, dirty and worn out, fighting like it was 1869."

At the National Review Online, John Derbyshire remembers being at work as a bartender in Liverpool when "in a fragile contraption hurled by a spasm of burning gases across a quarter million miles of empty space (and built, as it happens, less than ten miles from my present home), human beings set themselves down on the surface of another world, in an alien landscape."

Though the unfamiliar landscape he traverses is a bit closer to home, and though the moon he writes of is artificial, Phillip Graham's forthcoming The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon has more in common with the lunar landing than its title. In the dispatch from which the book takes its name, Graham remembers walking around the city with his daughter and finding

a huge sphere, like a moon, sitting in the corner of a recessed plaza, made of some sort of durable white canvas; it's lit from within like a giant light bulb, and across its surface are painted stretches of lunar craters and mountain ranges. More than a few of the people passing by stage goofy poses before it, casting themselves as temporary stars of their own remake of E.T.
Perking up, Hannah murmurs, "So pretty." The moon, it appears, has come to earth tonight, magically, just for her, and even if it has left the shifting clouds behind, Hannah radiates concentration and lines up her shots. I decide to give her all the time she needs, suspecting that my daughter must feel some kinship with this fallen moon. After all, they're fellow travelers, taken out of context and isolated. I lean back on a stone bench and marvel at just how private public art can be.

Echoing the wonder expressed by those who thrilled to fuzzy-screened TVs forty years ago, Graham illuminates the intensely personal quality of even our most broadly shared experiences, whether they involve a moon we can reach out and touch, or the one that—except in exceptional circumstances—we can only look up at.

What the Lincoln-Douglas debates mean

Harry V. Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, first published in 1959, has long been regarded as the standard historiography of the pivotal 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln during his candidacy for the U.S. Senate and Democratic incumbent Stephen A. Douglas on the issue of slavery. And in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication, the University of Chicago Press has just reissued a new edition of Jaffa's classic work, acknowledged today by Forbes magazine columnist Peter Robinson in an article that quotes Jaffa himself to demonstrate how the debates "turned on issues that were present at the very founding of western civilization—and that we must face again today."

In the article Jaffa argues that "the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was identical to the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato's Republic." Just as Thrasymachus argues that justice "possesses no independent or objective standing" and is at the mercy of those in power, so too did Douglas argue that "the citizens of Kansas or Nebraska could make slavery acceptable in their states simply by voting in favor of it." The article continues:

Lincoln considered this absurd. "Lincoln thought slavery was wrong," Jaffa explains, "and he did not think a vote of the people could make it right."
Like the Founders, Lincoln believed implicitly in an objective moral order. Today we believe in "values."

"The secretary of state, the president, they all talk about 'values,'" Jaffa says. "A 'value' is a subjective desire, not an objective truth. George Washington said, 'The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality.' If you had said, 'Oh, Mr. Washington, you mean in our 'values?' Washington would have replied, 'What the hell are you talking about?…'"

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln. All believed that morality—that goodness and justice—were not merely human constructs but real.

"We have to return to the political thought of the American founders and Abraham Lincoln," Harry Jaffa says. "Nothing is at stake but the salvation of Western civilization."

Naviagte to the Forbes website to read the rest of the article or find out more about the anniversary edition of Jaffa's groundbreaking work. Also see our edition of The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 edited and with an introduction by Paul M. Angle.

Millennium turns five

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The City of Chicago is celebrating the five-year anniversary of Millennium Park this week with a series of free outdoor events hosted at the park.

The past five years, though, represent only a tiny fraction of the history of the landmark. And, in Millennium Park, Timothy Gilfoyle tells that story from the beginning, when the site of the park was part of Lake Michigan. To do so, he studied the history of downtown; spent years with the planners, artists, and public officials behind Millennium Park; documented it at every stage of its construction; and traced the skeins of financing through municipal government, global corporations, private foundations, and wealthy civic leaders. As the Chicago Sun-Times observed when the book appeared, "the creation of the $475 million park—which opened in July 2004 four years late and at more than twice its originally projected cost—was fraught with tension among its high-powered participants, including Mayor Richard M. Daley, fund-raiser John H. Bryan and his network of deep-pocket private donors, and architects Frank Gehry and Adrian Smith, among others.… This high-stakes game of push-and-pull forms the dramatic core of historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle's absorbing and lavishly illustrated Millennium Park."

The tribute this lovely book pays to the park will last for many, many birthdays. But our Trivia Quiz based on the book will only be fun before you read Millennium Park and learn all of the answers yourself!

Backstage at the revolution

At the start of NPR's Bastille Day-inspired story this morning about the music of the French Revolution, listeners were asked to "imagine it's the year 1789 and you are waking up in Paris. You might hear an angry mob outside your window, about to storm the Bastille prison." For those who wish to take this kind of mental journey back in time, Victoria Johnson's Backstage at the Revolution zooms in from the birds-eye view to the street level, where some of that mob is busy searching for weapons—at the Paris Opera.

The Opera, as Johnson tells it, began the Revolution at center stage when a part of the crowd on its way to the Bastille stopped at the opera house for the arms they thought would be stashed inside. The organization's official caterer, Charles Mangin, unlocked the doors and, as he later wrote, "armed the citizens of the District of St. Martin des Champs with halbards, pikes, and sabres belonging to the Opera."

The long story of the Opera's Revolutionary life neither begins nor ends, of course, on that fateful July 14. Johnson's cultural history explains how, despite its reputation for despotism and wasteful extravagance, the Opera survived the Revolution in large part because of its image as a unique icon of French culture.

As NPR's Miles Hoffman surmised in this morning's story, "the people who were in power were aristocrats or members of the upper middle class, and they didn't necessarily have an allergy to high culture. They co-opted classical music. They inspired, or directed, important composers of the time to write great ceremonial pieces for big outdoor celebrations. So music became, in a sense, a tool of the revolution."

Slumming and the unmatchable thrill of doing something disreputable

The New York Times City Room blog ran an article yesterday on a 19th century pastime that began as a morally transgressive practice of the urban upper class, but also played an important role in dramatically recasting the racial and sexual landscape of cities like New York and Chicago. "Slumming", as the practice was popularly known, invited "well-off white urban [dwellers] to explore black, Chinese, gay, or poor working-class communities" in search of a good time, and the unmatchable thrill of doing something disreputable. In the late 1800's upper class whites, sometimes accompanied by a local guide, would push their way into the living spaces residents in impoverished neighborhoods in a voyeuristic attempt to "see how the other half lived," reveling in the excitement of police raids, opium dens, and "gawking at prostitutes, gays, lesbians and cross-dressers." The City Room posting cites Chad Heap, author of Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 as he explains how, in the course of the following decades, the practice of slumming evolved into a vital avenue for communication and appreciation across social, economic and cultural barriers that typified Jazz-Age America. From the City Room blog:

"In the late 19th century, American cities, especially New York, began to become more sizable and cities became more spatially socially divided, especially along race and class lines," Professor Heap said.
He pointed to the post-Civil War building boom of the Gilded Age, which allowed the upper middle class to escape from the morass of poverty downtown. Slumming brought them back: "As problematic as slumming can be as a voyeuristic sport, it's positive in the context of its period." It allowed white Americans to choose to socialize and intermingle with more marginal groups in their cabarets, bars, speakeasies and nightclubs.

The article continues:

Slumming crossed not only ethic and class lines lines, but sexual lines as well. "That is, a spectatorship of sexualized groups," Professor Heap said. He noted that people would go and gawk at prostitutes, gays, lesbians and cross-dressers. It allowed many in the upper middle class to explore sexual identities without the constraints of their own neighborhoods.

And indeed eclectic neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Chicago's Bronzeville might not be what they are today if not for the mingling between different social and economic groups facilitated by the early phenomenon of slumming.

The article also notes a resurgence in the practice today. For example, for twenty bucks you can still get a tour of some of Chicago's disappearing projects (though one should note that the poverty is still alive and well in our fair city), and tours of Brazilian favelas seem to be gaining in popularity, as well as staged illegal border crossings in Mexico's Parque EcoAlberto. But as Heap notes, most people today engage in the same type of voyeurism today simply by turning on the TV (or going to the movies for that matter).

Continue reading the rest of the article on the NYT City Room blog or read the introduction to Heap's book to find out more about this fascinating phenomenon of 19th century urban American life whose effects are still felt powerfully today.

Update: The New Yorker also ran a short but positive blurb about Heap's book recently. You can find it online in the Books Briefly Noted section of the magazine.

CPL showcases The Plan of Chicago for the One Book, One Chicago program this Fall

The Chicago Public Library has just announced that Carl Smith's The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City has been selected for its One Book, One Chicago program starting this Fall. According to the CPL website the "One Book, One Chicago encourages all Chicagoans to read the same book at the same time, offering events, discussions, exhibits and more to enhance the experience." And what better topic to bring together our diverse city than the fascinating story of how it all began?

Arguably the most influential document in the history of urban planning, Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago, coauthored by Edward Bennett and produced in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago, proposed many of the city's most distinctive features, including its lakefront parks and roadways, the Magnificent Mile, and Navy Pier. And as Carl Smith's fascinating history points out, the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment.

Beginning this August, we'll be blogging here, and at our Plan of Chicago Facebook page to keep you updated on all the forthcoming One Book, One Chicago events and discussions. You can also find out more about the program at the Chicago Public Library website.

Inventing the Public Enemy

Humboldt Park native Michael Mann's new film Public Enemies, which portrays the life and death of one of the Chicago's most notorious criminals, John Dillinger, premiers in theaters this weekend. And in all likelihood, similar to last year's summer blockbuster Batman, you can be sure that thousands of Chicagoans, eager to see their city—or at least bits and pieces of their city—up on the big screen will be packing the theaters.

In light of such predictable crowds most reasonable people will choose to pass on Public Enemies in favor of some more edifying cultural experience this Fourth of July weekend. But, as David E. Ruth's Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934 demonstrates, with the right frame of mind—and the right book—Public Enemies might be as edifying as it gets. In Inventing the Public Enemy Ruth scrutinizes innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, scores of novels, and hundreds of Hollywood movies, to show how the media's "gangsters" are less a reflection of reality than a projection created from Americans' values, concerns, and ideas about what sells.

Ruth takes us through a media landscape filled with efficient criminal executives demonstrating the multifarious uses of organization; dapper, big-spending gangsters highlighting the promises and perils of an emerging consumer society; and gunmen and molls guiding an uncertain public through the shifting terrain of modern gender roles. In this fascinating study, Ruth reveals how the public enemy provides a far-ranging and insightful critique of modern culture.

A New Series from the University of Chicago Press

American Beginnings, 1500—1900

Edited by Edward Gray, Stephen Mihm, and Mark Peterson

Our new series, American Beginnings will publish original books, written by scholars but accessible to students and a general readership, that address critical issues in American history from the initial period of European contact through the beginning of the twentieth century. The series will focus particularly on questions of power, in all its manifold forms, in the centuries when America evolved from a loose collection of disparate colonies to a full-fledged nation-state. While it will include books on the kinds of institutions typically associated with power— government, legal systems, and voluntary organizations, to name a few—the series also seeks studies that explore expressions of power in more intimate contexts, such as the family and the household.

By affording a broad chronological frame, American Beginnings encourages work that moves beyond conventional periodization and in turn brings new insight to the formative influences on the early American past.

The series will include works by senior and junior scholars from a broad array of subfields, including political history, labor history, African American history, gender history, and financial history. In doing so, it hopes to facilitate novel interdisciplinary discussions about the practices of power in the American past.

For more information, you may contact Edward Gray (egray@fsu.edu), Stephen Mihm (mihm@uga.edu), or Mark Peterson (mark-peterson@berkeley.edu). You may also contact Robert Devens, the Press's editor for American history (rdevens@press.uchicago.edu).

Link to the announcement or download in PDF format.

Archived in History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Counterprotesting a reunion of the protest police

This Friday evening, the Chicago officers who policed the 1968 Democratic Convention will reunite for the first time in 41 years. The gathering, billed by organizers as an occasion for the "Chicago Police [to] be honored and recognized for their contributions to maintaining law and order—and for taking a stand against Anarchy," has rankled veterans of the anti-war demonstrations. As the Chicago Tribune reports

Don Rose, a former spokesman for the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, condemned the reunion at a City Hall press conference held by Chicago Copwatch, a community group that is organizing a march to the Fraternal Order of Police hall—where the event is being held—on the night of the reunion.
Rose took issue with the "provocative language" used by reunion organizers. . .

"They seem to be seeking to rewrite history," Rose said. "These were unprovoked assaults by the police."

A counterprotest is planned.

John Schultz, a former professor and chair of the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College, was in the middle of the action on those tumultuous August days. While other writers contemplated the events of the 1968 Chicago riots from the safety of their hotel rooms, Schultz was in the city streets, being threatened by police, choking on tear gas, and listening to all the rage, fear, and confusion around him. We recently reissued the book that resulted from his experience of the protests, No One Was Killed: The Democratic National Convention, August 1968. The book is Schultz's account of the contradictions and chaos of convention week, the adrenalin, the sense of drama and history, and how the mainstream press was getting it all wrong. Read an excerpt.

Also relevant to any discussion of the role of the police in the 1968 DNC protests is Frank Kusch's book Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention the only book on Chicago '68 that gives voice to the officers on the street. You can also read an excerpt from that one.

Archived in Books for the News | History
Posted by SXH at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Chicago Gardens: Past and Present" at the Chicago Tourism Center

A new exhibit at the Chicago Tourism Center showcasing some of Chicago's most gorgeous gardens is currently on display from June 17-August 16. According to the Chicago Tourism Center website, the exhibit highlights the planning and growth of Millennium Park's Lurie Garden; public gardens in Chicago parks; community gardens; garden inspired photography and artwork, as well as gardens as explored in Cathy Jean Maloney's, Chicago Gardens: The Early History.

Demonstrating how Chicago earned the sobriquet, Urbs in Horto, in Chicago Gardens Maloney draws on decades of researching the city's horticultural heritage to reveal the unusual history of Chicago's first gardens. Challenged by the region's clay soil, harsh winters, and fierce winds, Maloney shows how innovative horticulturalists found both pragmatic and aesthetic uses for many of the area's hardy native species. This same creative spirit thrived in the city's local fruit and vegetable markets, encouraging the growth of what would become the nation's produce hub. And her vibrant depictions of Chicagoans like "Bouquet Mary," a flower peddler who built a greenhouse empire, add charming anecdotal evidence to her argument—that Chicago's garden history rivals that of New York or London and ensures its status as a world-class capital of horticultural innovation.

With exquisite archival photographs, prints, and postcards, as well as field guide descriptions of living legacy gardens for today's visitors, Chicago Gardens will delight green-thumbs from all parts of the world.

Find out more about the book on our website including these extracts about five historic Chicago gardens, then plan your trip to see the exhibit at the Chicago Tourism Center, 72 E. Randolph Street 10 am - 6 pm, through August 16.

Archived in Author Events | Chicago | History
Posted by TXM at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Consumer protection all over again?

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Debate is already raging over the Consumer Financial Protection Agency just proposed as part of the Obama Administration's plans for regulating the financial system. Yesterday afternoon, the Los Angeles Times blog Money & Co. highlighted representative arguments of those battling on each side of the issue:

"Providing this much power to one agency is truly frightening as they will get to set the rules and pick the winners/losers for the financial sector," the LAT quotes Andrew Busch, a markets strategist at BMO Capital Markets in Chicago, as writing.

The California Public Interest Research Group, on the other hand, argued that "the CFPA would ensure the safety, fairness and sustainability of credit.… The president's proposal addresses a glaring oversight in the regulatory structure by creating an agency designed to monitor the safety of financial products from the viewpoint of the consumer."

As Larry Glickman, author of the forthcoming Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America, might point out, this isn't the first time Americans have argued at high pitch over regulations designed to protect consumers. In Buying Power, he tells the story of the decade-long—and ultimately successful—campaign that conservatives launched in the late 1960s against proposed legislation to create a Consumer Protection Agency.

"Although the fight over the CPA is little remembered today," Glickman writes, "it was front page news throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s, and it sheds light on both the decline of Great Society liberalism and the rise of a new and ascendant style of conservatism."

He concludes, however, that though "Great Society liberalism was defeated in large measure because of its association with consumerism (and visa versa), there is reason to believe that [a] new wave of consumer activism may contribute to an emergent liberalism, one which uses the nexus of the market and the internet to remind people that consumption is a vital component of citizenship in a global society."

Indeed, especially in the current economic climate—as Glickman pointed out recently in the New York Times—Americans are once again aware of the importance of consumer demand.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Changing history

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Considering the future of the history profession, an article in yesterday's New York Times notes that, to some, "there is no doubt that the days when diplomatic history dominated the profession are gone. — The shift in focus began in the late 1960s and early '70s, when a generation of academics began looking into the roles of people generally missing from history books — women, minorities, immigrants, workers. Social and cultural history, often referred to as bottom-up history, offered fresh subjects."

A definitive account of this dominant trend in U.S. historical writing, The Cultural Turn in U.S. History showcases its freshest and most revealing examples, covering topics that range from nineteenth-century anxieties about greenback dollars to confidence games in 1920s Harlem, from Shirley Temple's career to the story of a Chicano community in San Diego that created a public park under a local freeway.

As Anthony Grafton observed when the NYT interviewed him for the story,

traditional fields aren't disappearing, they are shifting focus. Military history, for example, has switched from battlefield strategy to subjects like "the way soldiers thought about what they were fighting for," he said.

The Cultural Turn in U.S. History at once explains the origins and harnesses the vitality of such approaches, offering a glimpse of the profession's shape in years to come.

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Offering a more personal take on the evolution of the discipline, Becoming Historians collects the memoirs of eleven influential historians who came of age just before the upheavals of the 1960s and '70s and helped to transform how history is studied. The self-inventions they chronicle led, in many cases, to the invention of such fields as women's and gender history, social history, and public history, clearing paths in the academy and making the study of the past more capacious and broadly relevant.

As New Books in History editor Marshall Poe said in the introduction to his interview with the book's editors, "academic history ain't what it used to be. If you want to know how and why, read this book."

Archived in Books for the News | History | Reviews
Posted by MM at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back and forth on Bigfoot

Brian Switek's Laelaps blog ran an appreciative review of Joshua Blu Buhs' Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend last Monday, noting the book's cultural analysis that seeks to understand the how and why the beast has sparked such unflagging interest amongst the American public.

As Buhs explains, the most devoted of the Sasquatch devotees appear to have been "white working class males." According to Buhs, during the social upheaval of the sixties and seventies, these men gravitated towards the myth in response the perceived threats of consumerism, civil rites, and feminization." For them, writes Switek, "Bigfoot often represented the elusive vestige of 'true' masculinity that could only be found in the wild."

But as time went on the myth of Bigfoot—once a symbol of resistance towards the establishment—was appropriated by mainstream consumer culture and employed, as Switek writes, as "a desexualized symbol used to purvey goods from beer to beef jerky." And with that one might think the story of Bigfoot mania would have come to an end. Yet, two men in rural Georgia announced last summer that they had killed Bigfoot and drew instant, feverish attention leading to more than 1,000 news stories worldwide. And for further evidence that the myth is still a hot topic in some circles, check out the lively discussion on Switek's blog (including several posts by Buhs). Here's an excerpt from a true believer:

Although I'm not going to be suckered into buying and reading a book that is so completely misleading, I think it is time to recommend that Joshua [do] better "research" before he makes such unfounded, speculative conclusions. Like others writers who clearly approached this topic with a rather shallow conclusion in mind, anyone who thinks this subject is perpetuated by social needs, rather than persistent direct sightings and encounters with these animals, is a fool.

To which Buhs eventually replies:

My book is not about eyewitnesses, the evidence for Bigfoot, or the evidence against Bigfoot. I state my skepticism about Bigfoot's existence at the beginning of the book because that seemed like good form.
But the question I ask is, Why all the fuss?…

There are many legendary creatures which don't get nearly as much attention—sea serpents, for example, haven't captured the American public's attention. There are plenty of reports of them in Lake Champlain, Ogopogo, and elsewhere. They are inherently interesting—gigantic creatures living in our midst—and yet they haven't generated a lot of buzz since the late nineteenth century.

See the Laelaps blog.

To find out more about the book see an excerpt and an interview with the author.

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Frank Lloyd Wright's lost masterpiece

Following up on SXH's recent post commemorating the anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's birthday, another fascinating article on the life and career of the Midwest's iconic architect appeared last month in Newsweek. In her article, contributor Cathleen McGuigan writes on the two buildings bookending the great architect's life work. It is widely recognized that New York City's Guggenheim Museum, the last major work undertaken by Wright in his lifetime, provided the capstone to his career, but Buffalo's Larkin Building, "Wright's first large scale project," is too often forgotten. Why?

McGuigan writes:

[Opening in 1906 the building was] "revolutionary in the world of business, and within its mighty brick walls, it expressed the optimism of an era, and the excitement of a booming city." … Outside, the imposing building was a fortress against its grimy industrial neighborhood. But inside it was airy, planned around a skylit, sun-filled, five-story atrium. The executives sat there together at long desks, not in private offices, so the 1,800 clerical workers could overlook them from the upper-floor balconies along the sides—an arrangement that symbolized the openness of the Larkin corporate culture. On the building's exterior was inscribed the motto: HONEST LABOR NEEDS NO MASTER.

But Larkin's soap making business, which the building housed, proved not to be as stalwart as the walls which surrounded it, and folded during the Great Depression. Abandoned, the building was finally bulldozed in 1950, despite protests by preservationists. But while McGuigan's article laments the demise of Wright's first masterpiece, Jack Quinan's Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building: Myth and Fact brings it back to life with more than one hundred photographs, floor plans, maps, and diagrams. More than a historical record of the building's conception, construction, evaluation, and finally demolition, Quinan also examines the Larkin Building as a structure at the center of economic and personal relationships, providing the definitive take on this lost treasure of American architecture.

Read McGuigan's article online or find out more about Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building: Myth and Fact.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Commentary | History
Posted by TXM at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism—talk and book signing at the Corcoran Gallery

In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began an unprecedented project to reconstruct the palace of Knossos on Crete, but instead, as Cathy Gere demonstrates in her new book, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, created a complex of concrete buildings on the site owing at least as much to modernist architecture as to Bronze Age remains. As Tom Holland of the Times Literary Supplement writes: "the fabulously ancient palace of Knossos enjoys, as Gere points out in her arresting first sentence, 'the dubious distinction of being one of the first reinforced concrete buildings ever erected on the island.'"

Gere shows how Evans' idiosyncratic reconstruction of the palace of Knossos was nevertheless successful at bringing ancient Greek legends to life and sparking the imaginations of a host of twentieth century artists and intellectuals. Influencing the likes of Joyce, Picasso, and Sigmund Freud to name a few, Evans' often fanciful vision of Cretan civilization, promulgated through the work of visionaries like these, had a profoundly transformative effect on the way Western culture viewed its past, as well as its future.

On Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 7:00 PM Gere is scheduled to make an appearance at Washington DC's Corcoran Gallery of Art to deliver a talk on the subject, examining how—based on Evans' work—European modernism reimagined ancient Cretean civilization in its own image, employing its creative reinterpretation of Cretan society as an early blueprint for twentieth century movements as disparate as fascism, pacifism, feminism and psychoanalysis.

For more about the book see Tom Holland's recent review for the TLS and another review from the May 14 edition of the Economist. For more details on Gere's lecture, navigate to Corcoran Gallery website.

NYT Sunday Book Review: Bigfoot

NYT contributor Florence Williams begins her review of Joshua Blu Buhs' new book for this weekend's Sunday Book Review:

Because I watched TV in the 1970s, I have an image of Bigfoot stamped on my brain like a paw print. He resembles Chewbacca (minus the bandolier) walking through a grainy forest, scowling over his shoulder at the camera. But your Bigfoot image might be different, because for a while the hairy hominid was everywhere, in B movies and liquor advertisements and docu- and mocumentaries. He also starred in some "real" footage taken in 1967. That one was actually a she, complete with pendulous breasts.
Why did this ginormous, nonexistent ape capture our collective imaginations for five decades, and what does our infatuation say about us? Joshua Blu Buhs, the author of a previous book, about fire ants, takes up these questions in Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend.

Writing with a scientist's skepticism but an enthusiast's deep engagement in Bigfoot Buhs traces the wild and wooly story of America's favorite homegrown monster beginning with nineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of America and treks to the Himalayas to reckon with the Abominable Snowman, all the way to northern California in 1958, when reports of a hairy hominid loping through remote woodlands marked Bigfoot's emergence as a modern marvel. But more than just an entertaining history of the Sasquatch, Buhs book also focuses its attention on a fascinating cultural critique of "the white working-class men who were the beast's advocates, hoaxers, hunters and most ardent consumers." As Williams explains:

Buhs argues compellingly that Bigfoot's heyday in the 1960s and '70s was a difficult time for white, rural men in America. They were threatened by women's rights, civil rights and service-oriented, materialist culture that didn't value working with one's hands or backwoods know-how. Believing in Bigfoot was a way to snub effete, skeptical scientists. Hunting him re-engaged their imperiled backcountry survival skills.… Bigfoot, even in its fakery, was "representative of the really real, the world beyond the facade, a world of life and death and vital things.…"

Insightfully illuminating what this monster say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media, Buhs' Bigfoot offers definitive take on this elusive beast.

Read the rest of the article in the upcoming New York Times Sunday Book Review or online here. Also see this excerpt from the book and an interview with the author.

Tank Man of Tiananmen: enough said?

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Tomorrow, June 5, marks the twentieth anniversary of one of the most famous images in recent memory. On this day in 1989, the Los Angeles Times was probably the first American newspaper to publish a photograph that continued (and still continues) to appear on countless TV screens and in publications around the world: that of an anonymous man who had stepped in front of a row of tanks near the embattled Tiananmen Square.

Four photographers captured this now-iconic moment, and in commemoration of its anniversary they reflect on the the encounter at the New York Times's Lens blog. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, authors of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, have also reflected—extensively—on the definitive image. In their chapter devoted to Tiananmen imagery, they reconsider its meaning, arguing that the photo can be seen as both a progressive celebration of human rights and as a societal vision limited by individualism. "The choice between the individual and the authoritarian state is any easy one," they conclude, "but either way you get the empty street."

In addition to their extensive discussion in No Caption Needed, Hariman and Lucaites also have discussed the matter on their blog of the same name, where they've posted about, among other things, a Chick-fil-A ad that parodied the Tank Man image.

The definitive wildman

Two recent reviews of Joshua Blu Buhs' new book, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend focus attention on the author's ability to extract a penetrating cultural critique from his book's unlikely subject. From nineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of America, right up to the claims of two hunters in rural Georgia last August that they killed Bigfoot, Buhs traces the cultural transformation of the myth from its early days when "Bigfoot hunting was a means by which white working class men could… [prove] their manhood in difficult conditions," to its various modern uses as a highly effective marketing tool.

Delivering an insightful exploration of what our fascination with this monster says about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media, Buhs' Bigfoot offers the definitive history of the legendary wildman.

Check out the reviews on the Bookslut website and on John Rimmer's Magonia blog. ("Magonia"—I'll save you a trip to Wikipedia—is a magical land that is described in French folktales.)

Also, read an excerpt from the book and an interview with the author.

North America's lost abundance

Two new reviews of Steve Nicholls' Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery begin by offering a picture of the North American wilderness before European settlement—rivers teaming with more salmon than water, "colonies of nesting seabirds in nearly unimaginable numbers," and "great herds of ruminants" grazing their way across endless plains—a far cry from the American landscape that most of see today. But while the reality of this unspoiled natural habitat maybe forever lost, both reviews point out that in Paradise Found Nicholls has managed to successfully reproduce its fascinating history. With the benefit of the copious records left behind by the first European settlers, Nicholls employs both historical narrative and scientific inquiry to produce an enthralling description of just what an amazing place North America was and how it looked when the explorers first found it. But more than a celebration of what once was, as Gregory McNamee notes in the Washington Post , Nicholls' book also serves as a potent reminder of how much we have lost along the way, and an urgent call to action for future generations. McNamee writes:

Nicholls's book is an effort at making a blueprint of sorts, a plan by which to rebuild a house whose dimensions we can only guess at. The abundance of nature was what made American independence possible in the first place; our present poverty on so many fronts is a consequence of our maltreatment of that nature. But the knowledge of what we have done, chronicled so carefully in this lucid book, may be the first step toward recovering that squandered wealth.

And Bill McKibben writes in the Boston Globe:

This is a book worth owning, especially since our attack on abundance has happened just slowly enough that we've readjusted our sights ("changing baseline" is Nicholls's phrase) with each generation, never really letting the sheer horror of it all sink in. If we had a time machine, he insists, "I'm convinced that every person alive today would be overawed by the true vitality of nature." Books like this are as close as we're going to get.

To read the full reviews navigate to Boston.com or the Washington Post website. Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biology | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Obsession: The TV Show

jacket image Did you catch the premiere Monday night of A&E's new candid reality show Obsessed? (If you missed it, you can watch full episodes at AETV.) The program follows sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder, an anxiety disorder that, according to the title cards at the beginning of the show, affects 3.3 million Americans. In the first episode, Helen, who suffers panic attacks while driving and must check and recheck her alarm clock before bed, and Scott, a germaphobe who sleeps on his couch because making the bed perfectly every morning would prove too insurmountable, get relief from their debilitating rituals through intensive behavioral therapy. At the end of the episode, viewers learn than Helen can now drive on the freeway and Scott has welcomed a new housemate—a dog.

With this television show's debut, OCD had entered the living rooms of all cable subscribers. And chances are, many viewers will recognize a bit of themselves in the participants portrayed on their screens. But OCD wasn't always so prevalent. The psychological disorder was considered very rare—afflicting perhaps one in twenty thousand—only thirty years ago. So how did we go from that to a world where OCD gets its own reality show so quickly?

Lennard J. Davis answers that question—and poses many others—in Obsession: A History. Beginning with its roots in demonic possession and its secular successors, Davis gracefully tracks the evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a medical and psychiatric problem. In compiling the biography of this disease, Davis examines the often contradictory faces of the condition: obsession is not only a phenomenon of modern existence but also a medical category—both a pathology and a goal.

For more from Davis on obsession, read an interview with the author, listen to a podcast, or watch a video of the author delivering a lecture on the subject at New York University.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Psychology
Posted by SXH at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Press Release: Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism

Throughout human history, people have looked to the ancient world for lost knowledge and timeless wisdom—perhaps never more so than in the aftermath of World War I, whose swathe of devastation left millions dead and the Enlightenment dream in ruins. So when British archaeologist Arthur Evans began publishing breathless accounts of the ancient Minoan civilization he was uncovering on Crete—pagan, pacifistic, and matriarchal—it fired the imaginations of a whole generation of artists and intellectuals.

With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere tells the story of Evans’s excavations and their wide-ranging influence on the world of Western ideas. Over the first three decades of the twentieth century, Evans’s fanciful depiction of Minoan society drew the fervent attention of writers, artists, and thinkers who were at the forefront of the burgeoning modernist movement, including Robert Graves, H.D., Girgio de Chirico, Sigmund Freud, and James Joyce. As Gere traces the unexpected paths of Evans’s ideas through the lives and works of these figures, what emerges is an unforgettable portrait of an age of wrenching change—and of those who responded to it with intellectual vigor and fervid innovation.

Read the press release.

A hilarious work of Minoan historiography

As Sir Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of an ancient Cretan civilization in the early twentieth century he claimed to have discovered a culture that was pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—so very unlike his native England. Freud, Joyce, Picasso, and many others embraced this vision of a lost paradise.

Reviews have begun to arrive for Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism in which Cathy Gere explores how disillusioned modernists sought—and created—an ancient culture that offered an alternative to the one they inhabited. A review in Harper's notes that Gere uncovers a century of "bizarre misreadings of the nearly unknown ancient culture of Crete, and in so doing has produced that rarest of literary surprises: a genuinely hilarious work of Minoan historiography." The review continues:

[Gere traces] the unexpected genealogy of the ancient Cretans in the modern imagination, from the time they were first unearthed beneath a modest hillock at the end of the nineteenth century to their emergence as peaceful pastoralists who worshiped a goddess, pirouetted over bulls, and displayed suspicious tendency to reflect in great detail the moral, political, and even sexual preoccupations of Sir Arthur Evans, the English millionaire who led the excavation for almost half a century.
Gere locates the original impulse for "Minoan modernism" in Nietzsche's theories of the birth of tragedyand in the "excavations" the charlatan Heinrich Schliemann carried out at Mycenae and Troy. Schliemann breathed into the nascent discipline of archaeology a fairy-tale atmosphere of childhood longing and quasi-supernatural wish-fulfillment… that runs through Gere's series of portraits of those writers and artists "who would make the ancient world urgently relevant to literary and artistic modernism…"

The book has also just been reviewed in the Economist, which begins by drily noting that "archaeology is an inexact science." Find out more about Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism on our website.

Archived in History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Press Release: Buhs, Bigfoot

Let’s get this straight from the start: Bigfoot doesn’t exist. All the reported sightings are almost certainly either mistakes or hoaxes. At the same time, Bigfoot is America’s premier homegrown monster, a figure as familiar as—if far hairier than—Uncle Sam. And he remains big news: when two men from rural Georgia claimed last autumn that they’d killed a Bigfoot, reporters and camera crews flocked to their press conference, and more than 1,000 news stories followed worldwide.

Just what makes this shaggy beast so enduring? With Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, Joshua Blu Buhs hacks his way through the forest of myths, mysteries, and pseudoscience surrounding Bigfoot to write a cultural history of this modern monster. Buhs begins his trek in the forests of nineteenth-century America, with tales of wildmen roaming the hills; he then travels to the Himalayas to come to grips (not literally) with the Abominable Snowman, then back to the late 1950s in northern California, where the contemporary creature first emerged as a media marvel. Along the way, we meet hunters and hucksters, charlatans and serious seekers, as Buhs travels the back roads of America in an attempt to understand Bigfoot’’s hold on our imagination. Just what does all the ensuing cryptozoology and craziness say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, and the media?

Though Buhs always keeps his skeptic’s eye open, he writes with an enthusiast’s deep love for his subject; the result is a biography of Bigfoot that will leave other hunters following its footprints for years to come.

Read the press release.

Also, see an excerpt and an interview with the author.

Press Release: Heap, Slumming

Greenwich Village. Harlem. Bronzeville. Even in this freewheeling, globalized age, the names of these iconic neighborhoods still conjure up an atmosphere of glamour, excitement, and illicit thrills. But long before today’s teens or even yesterday’s beatniks wandered their streets, these neighborhoods exercised a powerful attraction for upright members of the middle class looking for dissipation and disreputable fun.

With Slumming, Chad Heap brings these early havens of hip to life, recreating the long-lost nightlife of early twentieth-century New York and Chicago. From jazz clubs and speakeasies to black-and-tan parties and cabarets, Heap packs Slumming with vivid scenes, fascinating characters, and wild anecdotes of a late-night life on the borders of the forbidden. And while he doesn’t ignore the role of exploitation and voyeurism in slumming—or the resistance it often provoked—he argues that the relatively uninhibited mingling it promoted across bounds of race and class helped to dramatically recast the racial and sexual landscape of burgeoning U.S. cities.

The unforgettable tale of an urban past that continues to resonate in our day, Slumming is a late-night treat for all urbanites and fans of the demi-monde.

Read the press release or read the introduction.

Press Release: Brown, Beyond the Frontier

In 2006 David S. Brown’s Richard Hofstadter, a sweeping intellectual biography of a man and his era, was published to great acclaim— E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post called it “the most important political book of the year that’s not about politics”—and definitively established the continuing importance of Hofstadter’s work and his legacy as a leader of the Eastern intellectual establishment.

With Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing, Brown returns with a collective biography of the prominent intellectuals—including William Appleman Williams, Charles Beard, and Christopher Lasch—who publicly opposed Hofstadter and the growing interventionist consensus he represented among America’s postwar elite.

Troubled by the burgeoning military-industrial complex and what they saw as America’s reckless fomenting of the cold war, they argued strenuously for a different path: a return to an older American tradition of progressivism and reform. Only that way, they believed, could the individual freedom and self-sufficiency that historically had represented the heart of American democracy survive. And while America’s imperial ambitions clearly remain strong, Brown shows how these ideas remain potent today, animating the work of prominent figures like William Cronon and Thomas Frank.

A fascinating follow-up to Richard Hofstadter, Beyond the Frontier draws timely attention to an intellectual tradition that is currently being rediscovered by conservatives and liberals alike.

Read the press release.

Everything old is new again

The "Home & Garden" section of today's New York Times features a story on a group of horticulturalists who have dedicated themselves to a unique gardening project that combines antiquarianism, botany, and a bit of banditry to preserve the heirloom roses of New York City.

According to the article, roses "captured the hearts of early New Yorkers" prompting many amateur rosarians in the city to breed and cultivate their own varieties, many of which gained world wide popularity during the late nineteenth century. But while horticulturalists one hundred years ago took the availability of a wide variety of cultivars for granted, more recently the mass production of the more profitable "hybrid tea roses," to the exclusion of everything else, has drastically decreased the available selection. Now, rose enthusiasts like Douglas Brenner, Stephen Scanniello, and Betty Vickers—the so called "rose rustlers" featured in the NYT article—have made it their task to seek out and re-propagate the antique species, often by raiding old estates and cemeteries and to take cuttings of feral plants.

Back in 2002 we reprinted the classic story of antique rose collectors and their crusade in Thomas Christopher's In Search of Lost Roses. Detailing the heritage of 2,500 years of breeding and gardening, and the eccentric personalities determined to preserve and protect it, In Search of Lost Roses offers a fun and edifying tale perfect for spring reading.

To find out more about the book read this excerpt and an interview with the author.

Read the rest of the article about the resurgence of New York's heirloom roses on the NYT website.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | History
Posted by TXM at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Press Release: Brague, The Legend of the Middle Ages

For decades now, in volume after volume, the celebrated French thinker Rémi Brague has delved deep into the past and emerged, again and again, with fresh insights that sharply illuminate the present. In his acclaimed The Wisdom of the World, for example, Brague showed how modernity stripped the universe of its ethical and sacred wisdom. The Law of God, his last work, added depth and context to current debates about God’s role in worldly affairs. And now, The Legend of the Middle Ages proceeds in Brague’s characteristically brilliant style to unknot the long-tangled strands of our ideas about this misunderstood age.

Recently, the Middle Ages have emerged as the model for a harmonious future—a time when different religions and cultures peacefully coexisted and exchanged ideas. This legend, Brague argues, comes no closer to telling the full story than the Enlightenment-era portrayal of the Middle Ages as a benighted past from which the West had to evolve.

Here, in a penetrating interview and sixteen essays, he marshals nuanced readings of medieval religion and philosophy to reconstruct the true character of this complicated and intellectually rich period. Brague’s vibrant portrait—of an age neither dark nor devoid of conflict—not only makes for compelling intellectual history but also, finally, sorts out the era’s true lessons for our own time.

Read the press release.

Also, read an interview with Brague.

Press Release: Schultz, The Chicago Conspiracy Trial

In 1969, the Chicago Seven were charged with intent to “incite, organize, promote, and encourage” antiwar riots during the Democratic National Convention. The Chicago Conspiracy Trial is an electrifying account of the months-long trial that commanded the attention of a divided nation. John Schultz, on assignment for the Evergreen Review, witnessed the whole trial, from the jury selection to the aftermath of the verdict. His vivid account exposes the raw emotions and judicial corruption that came to define one of the most significant legal events in American history.

“A beautiful, compelling, tear-jerking, mind-boggling book.” —William Burroughs

“A probe into the American conscience.” —David Graber, Los Angeles Times

Read the press release or read an excerpt.

The definitive take on Bigfoot

Do a quick Google search for "Bigfoot" or "Sasquatch" and near the top of the results you'll find more than a few links to websites like this one, dedicated to the "scientific" exploration of the Bigfoot/Sasquatch mystery, offering everything from geographical data and personal accounts of the latest sightings, to some of the coolest t-shirts money can buy—evidence that Bigfoot mania still grips some not insignificant segment of the American population. But while other folks might consider serious inquiry into the existence of the Sasquatch to be an exercise in futility, as Sumit Paul-Choudhury notes in a recent review for the New Scientist Joshua Blu Buhs' new book investigating the social significance of the myth itself proves quite worthwhile. Paul-Choudhury writes:

That belief in mythical animals is a product of social change is central to [Joshua Blu Buh's] Bigfoot, an exhaustive study of wild-man myth-making in the 20th century. Buhs's book starts out… suggesting that the Himalayan legend of the yeti became "folklore for an industrial age" because it meshed well with Britain's post-colonial concerns and drew on popular fascination with far-flung places.…
Buhs goes on to describe how the search for Bigfoot and Sasquatch was dominated by the concerns of white, working-class men. For this disenfranchised group the quest was a validation of their lifestyle, skills and knowledge, which they perceived as being threatened by mass media, formal education and popular culture. The hunters' desire to be accepted as scientific, while simultaneously disparaging the scientific establishment, makes for thought-provoking reading: there are obvious parallels with the attitudes of intelligent-design enthusiasts and climate change skeptics.

Thus drawing fascinating connections between the myth of Bigfoot and modern Americans' relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media, Buhs new book offers the definitive take on this elusive beast.

Find out more about the book on our website or read Sumit Paul-Choudhury's full review in the New Scientist.

Press Release: Burgoyne and Marckwardt, The Defense of Jisr Al-Doreaa

Ever since the U.S. military invaded Iraq in 2003, the nightly news has offered accounts of troops fighting a lethal and adaptive insurgency, where the divisions between enemy and ally are ambiguous at best, and where working with the local population is essential for day-to-day survival. But what does this mean for soldiers on the ground? And how can troops facing deployment quickly adapt to such a hostile environment?

From the lessons they learned during multiple tours of duty in Iraq, two American veterans of the war have written a tactical primer based on the military classic The Defence of Duffer’s Drift. Over the course of six dreams, a young officer deployed for the first time in Iraq fights the same battle again and again, learning each time—the hard way—which misconceptions he needs to discard and which lessons he must learn to defeat a dangerous enemy and achieve a lasting victory.

Accompanied by the Boer War-era novella that inspired it, The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa offers an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand how the United States plans to win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rehabilitating intellectualism

For the past eight years the term "intellectual" has been frequently interpreted by the media as a piece of anti-populist or elitist rhetoric. But in a recent article for the New Republic Ross Posnock notes that Obama's presidency has rehabilitated the term as one of praise rather than opprobrium, and with it interest in the history of black intellectualism in America. Tapping into this renewed interest, Posnock cites Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's new book, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher for its revealing look at the life and thought of its highly influential, yet often neglected subject.

Inheriting the role of the leading spokesperson for black intellectualism from such figures as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Boise, the authors show how Alain L. Locke both continued their legacy of leadership but also vitally updated the role. Posnock writes: Harris and Molesworth's book "brings alive [Locke's] distinctive fashioning of the role of black intellectual" demonstrating his unique ability to operate as "a race man," but also as "an apolitical aesthete," keeping "up the pressure on both roles, as his thought continually refined itself and deepened." Thus, expanding the influence of black intellectuals in American culture Harris and Molesworth deliver fascinating evidence of Locke's profound impact as the "father of the Harlem Renaissance," promoting and sparring with such diverse figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey among others.

To find out more about Locke's unique and important contributions to American culture read Posnock's article at the New Republic website, then pick up a copy of Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher.

John Hope Franklin, 1915-2009

Historian John Hope Franklin, professor emeritus at Duke University, passed away early Wednesday morning at the age of 94. He was professor in the department of history at the University of Chicago from 1964 to 1982, chair of the department from 1967 to 1970, and John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor from 1969 to 1982.

An outspoken champion of the Civil Rights movement, Franklin was involved in many of the pivotal issues regarding racial equality during the twentieth century, including, as NPR's Debbie Elliott recently noted, "helping Thurgood Marshall and his team craft their landmark Brown v. Board of Education case against school segregation." Professionally, he was regarded as a pioneering scholar in African American history and during his lifetime produced a host of definitive works on the subject. The Press is proud to have published Racial Equality in America (1976), George Washington Williams: A Biography (1985), as well as his Reconstruction after the Civil War, now in a third edition.

Among the many awards and honors he has received in recognition of his groundbreaking work, Franklin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, and in 2006, the John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities. He was also an avid horticulturalist and orchid collector, a pursuit recognized in the form of the orchid named in his honor in 1976.

Archived in Commentary | History
Posted by TXM at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lawrence Glickman on the New Frugality

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In response to the fall of consumer confidence "to its lowest level in more than three decades," the New York Times's Room for Debate blog asked a few experts on the subject: How fast do spending habits change and are they affected by cultural pressures? Are new habits of thrift likely to last past an economic recovery?

Lawrence Glickman, author of the forthcoming Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America, responds that an ethos of "recognizing consumer power even as people buy less" is resurfacing.

"Americans are once again aware of the importance of consumer demand now that we're in recessionary times," Glickman writes.

Indeed, in recent months, shopping has been cast as something akin to political action.
This is nothing new. The attempt to turn economic clout into political power has been an important element of our political culture ever since the American Revolution. Even as Americans have been enthusiastic shoppers, they have also been avid in coordinating purchasing power for political purposes. No decade in American history saw more consumer activism than the Depression decade of the 1930s.

Although one might think that the intensity of consumer protest would correlate with prosperity, Americans during the Depression engaged in a host of boycotts, large and small, including "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" campaigns of African Americans and the boycott of the products of Nazi Germany organized by some Jewish American organizations.

This upsurge in politicized consumption, which at first might seem counterintuitive (after all, Americans had fewer resources to shop), makes sense when we realize that during economically depressed periods, people are far more aware of the power of their dollars.

Read the rest of Glickman's commentary. And follow it up with his definitive history of American consumer activism, which comes out in July.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | History
Posted by MM at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Drug money

An article in yesterday's New York Times reveals some not so startling facts about corporate interests infiltrating the ivory tower at Harvard's Medical School where the American Medical Student Association recently brought the school under national scrutiny by giving it an F grade in terms of how well it monitors and controls drug industry money. The article begins with one entering medical student's tale of innocence lost:

In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.
Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

"I felt really violated," Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. "Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn't as pure as I think it should be."

But on the other side of the issue are many arguments about the enabling funding that drug companies provide, made all the more enticing to school faculty and administrators in the context of the current economic downturn. The NYT article cites: Dr. Thomas P. Stossel, "a Harvard Medical professor who has served on advisory boards for Merck, Biogen Idec and Dyax, and has written widely on academic-industry ties. 'I think if you look at it with intellectual honesty, you see industry interaction has produced far more good than harm.'"

You can read the rest of the article on the NYT website, but for a more thorough treatment of these contentious issues we offer acclaimed journalist Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism. In his book, Greenberg reveals a middle path, suggesting that while the threat has been overhyped, the need for oversight is real and a valuable asset to the integrity of academic science. From research that has shifted overseas so corporations can avoid regulations to conflicts of interest in scientific publishing, Greenberg argues that the temptations of money will always be a threat, but they can be effectively countered through the vigilance of scientists, the press, and the public. Based on extensive, candid interviews with scientists and administrators, Science for Sale is an indispensable resource for anyone who cares about the future of scientific research.

Find out more about the book on the UCP website or read the rest of the article.

The perdurance of the Paris Opera

Last Thursday's Times Higher Education contains a review of Victoria Johnson's Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime in which reviewer Brian Vick praises the book for its "unique, insightful and colorful perspective on the French Revolution and the Paris Opera's early history." Spanning academic disciplines to combine "early modern French cultural history with the theory of organizations and entrepreneurship" Johnson provides a novel explanation for how the Paris Opera not only managed to escape destruction during the French Revolution, but was protected by French revolutionary officials, despite its long association with the royal court and ostentatious displays of aristocratic opulence. Exploring beyond the context of the revolution itself, Johnson's book uncovers the roots of the Opera's survival in its identity as a uniquely privileged icon of French culture—an identity established during its founding one hundred years earlier under Louis XIV. Thus, Vick concludes, more than just an account of the revolution, "the work provides a full and persuasive history of the early Paris Opera…at once scholarly and for the most part engagingly written, the book could be worth keeping in mind as reading matter the next time one is thinking of 'chunnelling' over to Paris to catch a performance of the Opera."

More recently, the author joined host Bryn Terfel on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters to discuss her work with several other experts on the topic including Tim Blanning, Professor of History at Cambridge, and opera historian Sarah Lenton. Archived audio of the conversation should be available online at the Music Matters website for the next couple of days, or read the rest of Vick's review at the THE website.

The end of car culture?

A review of Brian Ladd's Autophobia published in Friday's Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune begins by noting the relevance of the book's topic to the nation's current economic crisis—a crisis spearheaded by rapid changes to our auto-centric culture like "volatile gas prices, car-oriented subdivisions in foreclosure," and "an auto industry in free fall." But then, wasn't it just yesterday that this very same car culture was the driving force behind one of the biggest economic booms in our nation's history? As reviewer Jim Foti notes, Ladd's book offers up ample evidence that since its invention, the automobile has played an integral role in America's successes, as well as its failures, provoking heated debates over whether they are sources of good or evil—markers of progress, or signs of the apocalypse. And while many might argue for the latter considering our current state of affairs, Foti notes that "as Ladd points out, so far the car's doomsayers have been wrong every time."

On Saturday, Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller also reviewed Ladd's book, along with another insightful critique of America's automotive culture, Cotten Seiler's Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. Praising both books, she takes special note of Republic of Drivers writing: "Seiler's book is written with grace and authority and finely wrought insight. He points out how the language of driving and the language of capitalism both employ 'tropes of motion:' moving, hustling. Cars, he says, 'are products of a highly specific conception of what it means to be modern and free.' We may believe that we're in the driver's seat, that is, but in point of fact, cars took control of the cultural steering wheel before we even hit the city limits."

For more insights on America's car culture read an excerpt from Autophobia and listen to an audio interview with the author.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Art on TV

The latest issue of ArtForum magazine contains an interesting review of Lynn Spigel's new book, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television. The review, which builds upon the positive assessment given by Andy Battaglia in his recent article for the magazine's sister publication BookForum, praises the work for "contradicting our peculiar amnesia" regarding TV's early links to the urbane world of modern art.

As Spigel aptly demonstrates, from the 1940's through the '60s TV served as an exciting new platform for the arts, inviting the participation of architects and designers like and Eero Saarinen and Saul Bass, to fine artists like Andy Warhol. Offering a stark contradiction to former FCC chairman Newton Minow's characterization of the medium as a "vast wasteland," Spigel's account even suggests that their work actually profited from their relationship with the "vulgar medium."

As ArtForum's Matthew Brannon writes, "since advertisers take it for granted that their job is to sell, they are denied that most dangerously available solipsistic avenue that fine art borders: I don't care what you think.…" Thus Brannon concludes that advertising offered these artists a lesson in visual communication: "how to say much with little [and] how to persuade someone without insulting them. I'm as interested in tact as I am in taste."

Pick up a copy of ArtForum to read the rest of Brannon's review, or read an excerpt from the book.

A love affair with Naples

Offering a tale of passion, vivacity, and beauty appropriate for some Valentines weekend reading, Shirley Hazzard's new book The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples eloquently recounts the author's love affair with a city, which, ironically, has recently gained more notoriety for the proliferation of both its crime, and its trash. But as reviewer Judith Martin notes in her article for this Sunday's NYT Book Review, while acknowledging the city's more contemporary conundrums, Hazzard's insight into Naples' rich history and culture is more than enough to redeem its romantic soul. From Martin's review:

Shirley Hazzard, the noted Australian writer, lives in New York but has spent long stretches of time in a house on Capri. She counts herself as one of the few living Anglo-Americans with a lifelong crush on Naples, rather than the usual Italian cities: Florence, Rome or (as in my case) Venice. In Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples, she writes poetically about the lure of an intimate daily relationship with the architectural remains of Naples many rich historical epochs.…
She loves visiting other centuries, a lure that every history-hungry traveler will recognize, and beautifully describes the wonders strewn everywhere about the region. Her sense of the presence of past visitors like Augustus Caesar, Goethe, and Lord Byron should resonate with any lover of Italy.

See this Sunday's New York Times to read the complete review, also read the introduction to the book, "Italian Hours."

Lincoln and the Great Depression

jacket image As Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday is celebrated everywhere from Illinois to Australia, Barry Schwartz's Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era takes on a special resonance.

Charting the rise and fall of Lincoln's status as an unquestioned American hero, Schwartz explains how Americans have looked at Lincoln differently as our circumstances and attitudes have shifted. Schwartz starts his story at the beginning of the Great Depression, because "if every era sees itself in Abraham Lincoln and reveals itself in what it says about him, the Lincoln of the Depression and World War II was unique. This Lincoln was the last of its kind, taking American history's heroic genre as far as it would ever go. He must be the benchmark against which imaginations of subsequent Lincolns are gauged."

As we live through a period that many people have compared to the Depression under a president who identifies with and often speaks of Lincoln, it's particularly interesting to consider, in light of Schwartz's insight, what our era is saying about itself right now by way of what we say about the 16th president.

And it's hard to imagine that we'll ever say more than what we've collectively said today—at least until 2109.

Archived in Books for the News | History
Posted by MM at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Press Release: Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era

George W. Bush has just left office in the midst of widespread public disapproval. But how will his presidency be viewed decades from now? It’s hard to know: the reputations of American presidents, including such recent ones as JFK and Richard Nixon, fluctuate remarkably in the years following their tenure. And as we prepare to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial, it’s important to realize that even a figure as eminent as our sixteenth president is not immune to the vicissitudes of public memory. As Barry Schwartz reveals in Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era, in the years between his assassination and World War II, Abraham Lincoln became a sort of secular saint, held up as a model for all Americans. But, Schwartz explains, that was the apogee of Lincoln’s popularity; over the ensuing decades, changes in American culture inexorably diminished Lincoln’s standing. Disenchantment with government, a growing understanding of the plight of racial minorities, and a new focus on diversity all contributed to a climate in which no single figure, including Lincoln, could be comfortably held up as a symbol for all Americans—thus, even as the nation grew ever-closer to living the ideals for which he had served as a symbol, Lincoln himself faded into the background of American life.

But is there any way back from this post-heroic era? Even as we celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial, can he still offer salient lessons for us? As America prepares to welcome a new president whose very election testifies to Lincoln’s achievement, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era offers a thoughtful, measured look at how we’ve understood the man—and the nation he helped save.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt.

The soldier-artists of the Mekong Delta

The latest issue of Time magazine is running a noteworthy review of Sherry Buchanan's new book, Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings and Stories, 1964-1975—a collection of works by ten artists recruited by the Viet Cong during the U.S. conflict to carry their sketchbooks, ink, and watercolors into combat. Buchanan traveled across Vietnam to gather some of this never-before-published material, and as the Time review notes, the resulting book is a fascinating departure from the "common American narrative," offering "extraordinary insight into Vietnamese hearts, military and civilian."

To find out more read the article on the Time magazine website or see these sample pages [PDF format] featuring a selection of artworks form the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Heiress as Urban Guerilla

jacket image Thirty-five years ago today, on February 4, 1974, 19-year-old Patty Hearst, daughter of newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her Berkeley, Calif., apartment by armed members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Nine weeks later, Hearst, along with her captors and conspirators, robbed a San Francisco bank. After more than a year on the lam, Hearst was captured on September 18, 1975 and convicted of armed robbery in March 1976. She served only twenty-one months of her seven-year sentence before it was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. In 2001, Patty Hearst was pardoned by President Bill Clinton.

The bizarre story of brainwashed heiress captured a nation's attention, and, even today, the sensational tale seems to defy belief. But William Graebner sees the robbery—and the spectacular 1976 trial that ended with Hearst's criminal conviction—as oddly appropriate to the troubled mood of the nation at the time, an instant exemplar of a turbulent era.

In Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America, the first substantial reconsideration of Patty Hearst's story in more than twenty-five years, Graebner vividly re-creates the atmosphere of uncertainty and frustration of mid-1970s America. Drawing on copious media accounts of the robbery and trial—as well as cultural artifacts from glam rock to Invasion of the Body Snatchers—Graebner paints a compelling portrait of a nation confused and frightened by the upheavals of 1960s liberalism and beginning to tip over into what would become Reagan-era conservatism, with its invocations of individual responsibility and the heroic. Trapped in the middle of that shift, the affectless, zombielike Hearst was a ready-made symbol of all that seemed to have gone wrong with the sixties—the inevitable result, some said, of rampant permissiveness, feckless elitism, the loss of moral clarity, and feminism run amok.

By offering a fresh look at Patty Hearst and her trial—for the first time free from the agendas of the day, yet set fully in their cultural context—Patty's Got a Gun delivers a nuanced portrait of both an unforgettable moment and an entire era, one whose repercussions continue to be felt today.

Read an excerpt of the book and listen to an interview with the author.

Archived in Books for the News | History
Posted by SXH at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Press Release: Spigel, TV by Design

TV by Design takes us back to the cold war years to witness the rise of two cultural superpowers: modern art and network television. Often mistakenly cast as polar opposites, television and fine art were intimately linked in this period as TV creators and producers drew inspiration from the latest trends in graphic design, avant-garde cinema, pop art, and modernist architecture. By broadcasting art’s cutting edge directly into America’s living rooms, TV gave modern art unprecedented national exposure. Lynn Spigel populates this fascinating history with the stories of the many artists—including Eero Saarinen, Duke Ellington, Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, Andy Warhol, William Golden, and Richard Avedon—that worked in or were influenced by television and illustrates it with an array of photos, ads, and stills from the period. A lively correction to the medium’s reputation as a vast wasteland, TV by Design reveals the dynamic history of the ways television brought entertainment and art into people’s everyday lives.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt.

Anne Durkin Keating on Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs

Anne Durkin Keating, author of Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide made an appearance recently on WTTW's Chicago Tonight. On the show Durkin joined host Phil Ponce to discuss all things concerning the urban demography and geography of Chicagoland including whether Obama's house is really in Hyde Park, how the Olympics might impact the South Side, and a 149 year old Methodist summer camp in Des Plains.

Check out the archived video online on the WTTW website.

John Patrick Diggins, 1936-2009

The New York Times reports today that intellectual historian and author John Patrick Diggins passed away Wednesday in Manhattan at the age of 73. Diggins—whose scholarly work encompassed the breadth of American political thought from "the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the present day"—was known for his "provocative, revisionist approach to the history of the American left and right." The NYT notes that "he nourished a sneaking fondness for the Lyrical Left but declared Ronald Reagan to be 'one of the two or three truly great presidents in history.'" The NYT article continues: "The tension between liberal ideals, pragmatism and authority ran like a leitmotif through books like The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest and the Foundation of Liberalism, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority and Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy"—all of which the University of Chicago Press is honored to have published.

The Things They Carried (and Painted)

jacket image

This weekend marks the 41st anniversary of the beginning of the Tet Offensive, a major assault launched during the tacit lunar New Year ceasefire by the Viet Cong against the South Vietnamese and American armies. Though American forces quickly turned back the onslaught, the campaign was a political and psychological victory for the Communists and further eroded US support for the war.

Demonized by Americans as reds, gooks, and fanatical killers, the Viet Cong were said to have "committed the most unbelievable acts of terrorism the world has ever known," as Hubert Humphrey once declared. But a new book offers an entirely new perspective on these enemy fighters. Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings and Stories, 1964-1975, by Sherry Buchanan, presents never-before-published drawings, poems, letters, and oral histories by ten of the most celebrated Viet Cong war artists.

These guerrilla artists—some military officers and some civilians—lived clandestinely with the fighters, moving camp alongside them, going on reconnaissance missions, and carrying their sketchbooks, ink, and watercolors into combat. Trained by professors from the Hanoi Institute of Fine Arts who journeyed down the perilous Ho Chi Minh Trail to ensure a pictorial history of the war, they recorded battles and events from Operation Junction City to Khe Sanh to the Tet Offensive. They also sketched as the spirit moved them, rendering breathtaking landscapes, hut and bunker interiors, activities at base camps, troops on the move, portraits for the families of fallen soldiers, and the unimaginable devastation that the conflict left in its wake. The collective record of these supposedly savage soldiers is an extraordinary historical and artistic document of people at war.

See sample images from the interior here. And also check out Buchanan's Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories (1965-1973) to see more of the things they carried. The engravings gathered in this copiously illustrated volume are at once searing, caustic, and moving, running the full emotional spectrum with both sardonic reflections—I Love the Fucking Army and the Army Loves Fucking Me—and poignant maxims—When the Power of Love Overcomes the Love of Power, the World Will Know Peace. Part pop art and part military artifact, they collectively capture the large moods of the sixties and the darkest days of Vietnam—all through the world of the tiny Zippo.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History
Posted by SXH at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing on deadline

Each day is another deadline. Then there is that ultimate deadline at the end of our lives. Our sense of the passage of time, and how our experience is shaped by the complexities of multiple deadlines, is the subject of Harald Weinrich's book, On Borrowed Time: The Art and Economy of Living with Deadlines. John Gilbey reviewed the book for the Times Higher Education:

Any tome that starts with a discussion of Hippocrates, Socrates, and Plato and ends with an analysis of the 1998 film Run Lola Run has to be worthy of closer study. This one does not disappoint.
Weinrich gives himself a very broad canvas—the impact that shortness of time has had on humanity across history—and he fills it well. He uses an unhurried, easy, and assured narrative style to tease out the complex nature of how we perceive time in natural and contrived situations.

Gilbey goes so far as to venture:

I believe that the structure and style of this book would lend itself well to being adapted for the screen, either as a single banquet or as a selection of very tasty snacks. If there is anyone out there looking to produce a high-quality, slightly quirky philosophical programme with a recognisably European flavour, then I strongly suggest that you take a look at this book and seek to secure the rights.

Rights of course can be sought through our Rights Department.

Conveniently, Times Higher Education served up quite a spread of Chicago books in their latest issue. The repast also includes:
Margaret Linley reviews The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910
Howard Segal reviews Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America
Peter J. Smith reviews Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness
and Caroline Bruzelius reviews Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals

Chris Otter on the political history of gaslight

Chris Otter, author of The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 is today's guest on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed. On the program Otter joins host Laurie Taylor and Lynda Nead, Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, to discuss the political and social changes brought about in 19th century Britain by the use of gas lighting. Tune in at the Thinking Allowed website after the live broadcast, or find out more about Otter's book.

Artistry of the Viet Cong

Arts and culture blog truthdig.com posted a review last week of Sherry Buchanan's recent book, Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings and Stories, 1964-1975—a collection of work by ten Vietnamese soldier-artists that, as truthdig contributor Christian G. Appy notes, offers the western world new insight into the experiences of those on the other side of the Vietnam War and the resilience of those soldiers in the face of the much better equipped U. S. military. Appy's article begins by quoting a Chicago novelist:

"We lost the war because the Vietnamese just flat out beat us. And we lost the war because we didn't understand that they were poets." I was offered this Delphic explanation of American defeat in Vietnam by Larry Heinemann, a novelist who survived some of the war's fiercest fighting in 1967 and 1968 as a soldier with the 25th Infantry Division near the Cambodian border in Tay Ninh province.… But how could poetry, or any kind of art, help explain one of history's most astonishing victories? I think what Heinemann meant was that the Communist-led cause in Vietnam mobilized not just bodies, but souls.…
To maintain morale, the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) deployed hundreds of artists, writers, actors, singers, photographers, puppeteers and dancers. These members of the "Literature and Arts" section of the military (Van Nghe) did not just visit combat troops, or lecture to them; they lived with them, moved with them, camped with them, and sometimes fought along with them. They were military artists in residence, only the residence was a war zone, not a campus. When combat was imminent they might move to the rear, but, when necessary, they picked up arms and fought, and died.…

Sherry Buchanan's new book, Mekong Diaries: Viet Cong Drawings & Stories, 1964-1975, gives us a stunning look at some of the wartime art produced by the Vietnamese soldier-artists who served in the "American War" to drive out the U.S., topple the American-backed government in Saigon and reunite Vietnam. The book's title is a bit misleading. This is not a collection of diaries. There are a few scraps of moving wartime correspondence and some wartime poems by Nguyen Duy, but this is, primarily, a collection of watercolors and sketches created during the war by soldier-artists.

And you can preview a selection of these watercolors and sketches in PDF format here , or continue reading Christian Appy's article on Mekong Diaries on the truthdig blog.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

TV as fine art

In a speech before the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961, the then-chairman of the FCC Newton N. Minow famously dubbed TV a "vast wasteland." And as Andy Battaglia notes in his article for the February/March issue of Bookforum, "ambassadors of high culture voiced similar worries almost from the moment the first televised image was broadcast to a putatively unwitting and undereducated public." But in her new book TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television, author Lynn Spigel offers an alternative account of the medium's history that "upends talk of early television as an empty enterprise," by demonstrating a surprising partnership between television and the world of modern art that transformed the way Americans experienced the world visually. Battaglia writes:

Focusing on broadcasting's formative era, the '40s through the '70s, Lynn Spigel… looks at the ways in which the new medium got in bed with various disciplines—in the fine arts as well as more utilitarian modes of graphic design—thought to be of higher mind.…
Valuable chapters survey developments in visionary set design and avant-garde programming (including "silent" broadcasts by comic Ernie Kovacs and provocatively awkward ones by Andy Warhol), but the book mainly focuses on the more general task laid out in its epilogue's title, "Framing TV, Unframing Art." "Although broadcast historians aren't wrong," Spigel writes, "the singular focus on programs blinds us to the variety of visual experiences that early TV actually offered." Part of that variety involved simply watching shows in a decidedly modern zoned-out state, to be sure. But part of it helped prod the masses to contemplate what it meant to look, at art and at everything else. Just think of the recent scene in Mad Men in which a young ad exec stares up at a Rothko and says, "Maybe you're just supposed to experience it."

The January 13th edition of the Village Voice also ran a short review praising Spigel's work for its revelatory account of television's symbiotic relationship with fine art. And rumor has it that another review will be appearing in Bookforum's sister publication, Artforum soon.

Read an excerpt from chapter two of Spigel's book: "An Eye for Design: Corporate Modernism at CBS."

The Chicagoan on Eight Forty-Eight

Author Neil Harris, joined Eight Forty-Eight host Richard Steele on this morning's program to discuss how he stumbled upon several issues of the Chicagoan deep in the stacks at the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library and his resurrection of the forgotten 1920's publication in his new coffee table book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.

Listen in on the conversation on the website for Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight.

Also read an interview with the author, see a gallery of covers and illustrations from the magazine and sample pages in PDF (7mb) from the book.

Slogans that shape our lives

Jan R. Van Meter, author of Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History, made an appearance earlier today on KCUR public radio's Up to Date with Steve Kraske to discuss his new book and some of the fascinating stories it contains about the various slogans and catch phrases that have helped define American public life. Archived audio of the show will be available on the KCUR website after the show.

And If you're in Kansas City this evening you can catch more of Van Meter this evening at 6:30pm at the Kansas City Public Library, Central Location. Navigate to our author events page or to the Kansas City Public Library website for more info.

Also, read a web feature on contemporary slogans that we'll remember and listen to another audio interview with Van Meter for the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chicagoan and the University

Today the University of Chicago homepage features an article and video on Neil Harris's new book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age. In the video, Harris discusses how he discovered issues of the Chicagoan in the Regenstein Library and his first impressions of the long-lost magazine. The article by Greg Borzo gives more details and notes how the magazine reflects the University's own prominence "in the city's cultural, political, and social life during the 1920s and '30s." Borzo quotes Harris as he explains:

"Back then, the University of Chicago was a bigger player, relatively speaking, than it is today because there was no University of Illinois-Chicago, and the Catholic universities were not as prominent. Plus, [former Chicago President Robert Maynard] Hutchins was the golden boy, and we had a football team."
As illuminating as the Chicagoan is about socialites and politicians, its deepest value is a record of its creators. "The significance and importance of this glorious publication lies in it contributors," Harris says.

There were a lot of contributors—468 people during one seven-month period, according to a magazine promotion. Harris tracked down the identity of scores of these contributors, and the book includes a chapter with short biographies of more than 80 of them. Most were quite young (and inexpensive) when they worked for the Chicagoan.

A surprising number attended the University, including Richard "Riq" Atwater, co-author of the award-winning Mr. Popper's Penguins; Meyer Levin, the best-selling novelist of the 1956 mystery Compulsion; Robert Pollak, drama and music critic; and Susan Wilbur, author and translator of literary works.…

"The Chicagoan carried within it the imprint of many aspiring talents," Harris wrote in his book. "It is hoped that this anthology will offer them not just a brief reprieve from oblivion but quite possibly a vestibule to new celebrity."

The feature also has a collection of cartoons from the magazine as well as links to our own interview with Harris and gallery of covers and illustrations.

Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1917-2008

Conor Cruise O'Brien, Irish intellectual, politician, diplomat, writer, critic, professor, journalist, historian, and playwright, died yesterday in Dublin at the age of 91. He had been in ill health since suffering a stroke in 1998.

The scope of O'Brien's life and career can only be gestured at in this space. He was a special representative to Dag Hammarskjöld, secretary-general of the United Nations, in the Congo crisis of 1961. He was chancellor of the University of Ghana as well as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University. He was Ireland's Minister for Posts and Telegraphs. He was editor-in-chief of the London-based newspaper the Observer. At the age when most retire from work, he taught and lectured at numerous universities around the world. And throughout he wrote many books.

The University of Chicago Press is honored to have published:

The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke, which historian Paul Johnson described as "a book by the greatest living Irishman on the greatest Irishman who ever lived."
The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800, which critic Richard Brookhiser said "should be read by anyone interested in Jefferson—or in a good fight."
Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, in which O'Brien draws his own life experiences to interpret Ireland's past and present, its conflicts, politics, and "sacred nationalism."

Archived in Books for the News | History
Posted by DB at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Neil Harris discusses the Chicagoan

Author Neil Harris appeared yesterday evening on WFMT's Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner for the first of two conversations about his new book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age. You can catch the second part of the conversation on WFMT next Monday, December 22. But until then, listen to the archived audio from yesterday's show and after each broadcast from the Critical Thinking webpage.

The Windy City's lost counterpart to the New Yorker, the Chicagoan sought to transform the city's reputation for organized crime, political mayhem, and industrial squalor by demonstrating the presence of style and sophistication in the Midwest. But after nine years of publication that straddled the roaring 20s and the Great Depression, the magazine folded and was forgotten. Now, Harris's book, featuring a stunning collection of articles, illustrations, and covers, resurrects the magazine in all its brilliance offering a window into one of the most exciting chapters in the city's history.

Also, read an interview with the author, see a gallery of covers and illustrations from the magazine and sample pages in PDF (7mb) from the book.

The "rogue colony" of New Orleans

The December 10 edition of the Nation contains a fascinating article about the long and colorful history of New Orleans that enlists Shannon Lee Dawdy's new book Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans to help explain how New Orleans acquired it's "rogue character" and became the unique, multicultural city we know today. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro writes for the Nation:

Effectively abandoned by the French crown in 1731, the colony was governed from that time by local elites, its levee becoming a bustling free-for-all of traders peddling everything from Mississippi furs to Martinique sugar and Mexican ceramics and maize. New Orleans's reputation as a low swamp of race-mixing and sin was present from the start and—as Shannon Lee Dawdy shows in Building the Devil's Empire, her penetrating study of the colony's founding—cited frequently as the explanation for its "failure."
In French New Orleans, "smuggling not only helped fill the gaps of collapsed mercantilism," Dawdy writes, "it was the basis of the local political economy.…" Dawdy shows clearly how Nouvelle-Orléans—with its intra-American trade and tenuous ties to the metropole—became, by the 1740s, a self-consciously Creole place.… That Creole identity informed France's decision to let the estranged colony go, as Louis XV handed it off to his cousin Carlos III and Spain, who in 1768 encountered a Creole revolt—a sign that this "rogue colony" (Dawdy's phrase) would not be an easy rule.

Continue reading on the Nation's website.

"Who knew Camus had something to say about gardens?"

If you're living in the northern U.S. it is likely that your garden is presently covered under several inches of snow, but as a recent article in the New York Times demonstrates, through the long winter months many gardeners never cease thinking about them. Writing for yesterday's "Sunday Book Review" Dominique Browning offers a list of a few of her favorite gardening books for midwinter reading that includes Robert Pogue Harrison's new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Browning writes:

The year's most thought-provoking, original and weighty garden book (though the lightest in heft) is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. Here the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization and The Dominion of the Dead, a book about cemeteries and burial practices, turns his thoughts to the garden as "sanctuary of repose." Making a garden fulfills, as Harrison puts it, "a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelter, which is a distinctly animal need." Burrowing into a more refined issue than what makes a garden, he meditates on why we garden. It's impossible to summarize the answer, overflowing as his book is with eccentric connections and voracious readings, ranging over centuries and across continents. Part of what makes it exciting is the way Harrison sets up surprise encounters with unexpected writers, who spring up as though self-seeded among the perennials. Who knew Camus had something to say about gardens?…
Reading Harrison's book is like strolling down a path through a well cultivated, richly sown, light-dappled woodland. There's no point of arrival, though there may be resting places here and there. Just as in the making of a garden, there's no end to the wonder; the journey is everything. You don't have to be a gardener to love this book, but by the end you'll be asking yourself why on earth you aren't.

Read the rest of the review on the NYT website.

Also, read an excerpt.

A lost magazine of the jazz age

Last Sunday's New York Times Book Review closes with a noteworthy piece by Matt Weiland on Neil Harris's, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age. Weiland praises the book for its handsome resurrection of one of Chicago's most stylish publications, offered here for a whole new age to enjoy:

[The Chicagoan] was founded in 1926 by a group of Chicagoans inflamed by the example and success of the New Yorker, which had begun the year before. It was published every two weeks, and before long Time magazine was heralding it for having the "finish and flair worthy of a national publication." But its readership began to decline as the Great Depression set in, its frequency was reduced to monthly, and in 1935 it died a quiet death. Somehow this vibrant magazine was completely forgotten until a few years ago, when the distinguished cultural historian Neil Harris came upon a set of the magazine's run in the library of the University of Chicago. It has now been brought back into print, if not to life, by the University of Chicago Press.
What a marvelous job they have done! This is a book you will want to own, a coffee-table book nicer and better than most coffee tables. The University of Chicago Press has swung for the fences, producing the book to the highest standards—a nearly 400-page oversize volume, designed with care and attentiveness, to period detail and featuring loads of full-color images. It's a pleasure to see the ball sail into the bleachers… Thanks to Neil Harris's serendipitous discovery and the University of Chicago Press's superb effort, The Chicagoan takes its rightful place on the top shelf.

Read the review on the NYT website. We have a gallery of covers and illustrations from the magazine and sample pages in PDF (7mb) from the book.

Press Release: Harris, The Chicagoan

“In all the seven seas and the lands bordering thereon there is probably no name which more quickly calls up thoughts of crime, violence, and wickedness than does that of Chicago.” So wrote journalist R. L. Duffus at the height of the Jazz Age—and he was not alone in that opinion. During those heady days, writers and newspapers nationwide lamented Chicago's utter filth and brutality. For most, the Windy City conjured images of slums, squalor, and social pathology. An industrial Gomorrah that made heroes of corrupt politicians, mob bosses, and murderers, Chicago had a serious image problem.

Enter the Chicagoan. Urbane in aspiration and first published just sixteen months after the first appearance of the New Yorker in 1925, the magazine sought passionately to redeem Chicago's unhappy reputation. In its own words, the popular biweekly claimed to represent “a cultural, civilized, and vibrant” city “which needs make no obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs-Elysees.” The University of Chicago Press is proud to publish The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age by noted historian Neil Harris. The book brings this forgotten magazine back to brilliant and vivid life for a new generation of readers to enjoy.

Read the press release.

Obsession—illness or ideal?

We were pleased to note this morning that Lennard J. Davis's new book, Obsession: A History is the frontpage story in this week's Chicago Reader. The article by the Reader's Deanna Isaacs focuses both on Davis himself and on the way his book complicates the common notion of obsession as a medical disorder, demonstrating that it's actually much more prevalent in modern society than one might guess:

We live in an age of obsession, some of us sick with it and some of us wildly successful because of it. If you ran the appointed number of miles for your workout this morning, took all your supplements, read the papers, perused all the necessary Web sites, and are planning to put in a focused, 10- or 12-hour day on the job, you're headed down the culturally approved obsessive path to reward.
If, on the other hand, you're mopping your kitchen floor ten times a day or heading to the sink for your 80th hand-washing, hoarding every plastic bag you ever got at Jewel, and lying awake at night counting the lights in neighboring buildings, someone close to you is probably suggesting that you see a doctor, get a diagnosis, and take a pill to fix your obvious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Never mind that the guy writing the prescription is just as obsessed as you are. He's on the right side of our cultural fixation and you're not.

That's the argument in Obsession: A History, UIC professor Lennard J. Davis's study of the rise and bifurcated path of obsessive behavior as both an illness and an ideal in the modern world.… He says that in our culture it's not only common but highly desirable to be a little nuts, as long as the craziness takes the form of obsession—the "singular attention to a particular thing" that our highly specialized jobs, electronically connected environment, and extreme hobbies demand.

Pick up a copy of the Reader for the complete article or find it online here. Also read an interview with the author and listen to Davis on the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Famous slogans on BookTV

Jan Van Meter was recently interviewed on CSPAN's BookTV on the topic of his new book Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History—a fascinating historical analysis of various catchphrases and slogans, from FDR's "speak softly and carry a big stick," to King's "I have a dream," that have become an indelible part of American public culture. In the interview Van Meter addresses not only the slogans and catchphrases of the past, but also those of the present with Barak Obama's campaign mantra "Yes we can" topping his list. Watch the interview online at the CSPAN website or catch the rebroadcasts on BookTV, Saturday, November 29, at 2:00 PM; Sunday, November 30, at 4:00 AM; and Sunday, November 30, at 3:00 PM.

Also read a web feature on contemporary slogans that we'll remember and listen to another interview with Van Meter for the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Automobility—addiction or affliction?

I'll be honest, I drive to work nearly every day. But every time I see a politician's stump speech or an oil industry executive advocating the expansion of drilling into the Alaskan wilderness, or beneath the rapidly diminishing polar caps, I can't help but cringe—simultaneously in outrage at what the long term environmental effects of such actions might be, and guilt for my own complicity. But according to Brian Ladd, author of Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age I'm not alone. In fact, as the NYT's Tom Vanderbilt points out in the Sunday Book Review, Americans have had quite a conflicted relationship to the automobile almost since its very inception, and in his new book, Ladd gives some insightful reasons why:

[Recently] the car has certainly lost some of its luster, lending credence to the words of an English observer: "From being the plaything of society," the car "has come to dominate society. It is now our tyrant, so that at last we have turned in revolt against it, and begun to protest against its arrogant ways."
The only problem with this incipient revolt is that these words actually date to 1911, the shaky toddler years of American motorization. That they could have been uttered in 1973, or perhaps yesterday, is what animates Brian Ladd's Autophobia. People have been predicting the death, or at least severe retrenchment, of the car virtually since its invention. But while the literature may be filled with books like Dead End, Car Trouble and Autokind vs. Mankind—among many others—the roads are filled with ever more traffic. The car, since it began, has seemingly been driven by Beckett: It can't go on, it goes on.…

Throughout the car's life, Ladd argues, its critics have often "failed to appreciate the depth of the automobile's hold on ordinary people," reaching for conspiracies to help explain the ubiquity of car culture when the answers seem far simpler. The car, beyond any symbolic power, is usually the fastest—if far from the healthiest—way to get around. But this itself contains a point that the car's boosters, Ladd argues, often ignore—a so-called path dependence. Once you started to make room for the car in the landscape—doing things that made the car "an easy, convenient, even necessary, but not always wise choice"—it was hard to turn back.

Read the rest of the review on the New York Times website.

Also read this excerpt from the book and listen to an audio interview with the author.

Archived in History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Chic" Chicago

In 1926 a colorful new magazine appeared on newsstands and in magazine racks across Chicago. The Chicagoan was the Windy City's attempt at an arts and culture magazine to rival the sophistication of the New Yorker, whose first issue was published only months before. But while the New Yorker would grow to reach a national audience, maintaining a wide circulation even in today's anti-print climate, after nine short but exciting years that straddled "prohibition, the depression and the jazz age," the Chicagoan folded and was forgotten—until now. Enter Neil Harris's new book The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age—a fascinating collection of articles, photographs, and illustrations that, as a recent review in the UK's Spectator magazine notes, brings the heyday of the publication—and the city—back to life:

Think quiz. 'A crescent-shaped town, 26 miles by 15, along a great lake. An unchallenged murder record—a splendid university—hobo capital to the country—and the finest of grand opera. Altogether the most zestful spectacle on this earth.' Where are we? In case of doubt, the city's short-lived house magazine spelled out the answer in 48 point type, 'Chi - CA - go.' Actually the emphasis should have been on the Chic, because as demonstrated by this elegant collection of covers, illustrations and stories from the Chicagoan, in its heyday Chicago was the most stylish, exciting and quintessentially American of all the cities that encircle the United States landmass. New York looked over its shoulder to Europe, New Orleans pretended to be French, San Francisco was a rootless amalgam of Spanish mission and Pacific piracy, but Chicago sucked pure Americana out of the corn, cattle and railroads of the mid-West to create a culture that was unique to the continent. Forget Al Capone and the stench of the stockyards, this is where Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman made an art out of jazz, where Frank Lloyd Wright created modern architecture, where skyscrapers, city parks and suburbs were born.

Even the New Yorker itself has published a brief review acknowledging its long-lost counterpart's return to the stage.

Also, see this special website for the book featuring a gallery of sample cover images.

Archived in Chicago | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Beyond Brangelina

Yet another rumor has surfaced about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's adoption plans. Whatever else one might want to say about them, at least the reports are timely: Saturday, November 15, is National Adoption Day (part of National Adoption Month). And unlike some commemorative days and months
(National Hamburger Month?!), National Adoption Day has serious goals and tangible results, including courtroom hearings (PDF) to finalize a projected 3,500 foster children's adoptions across the US.

All of this organized national support helps to create an environment far removed from that surrounding adoptions a century ago, when children were still transferred between households by a variety of unregulated private arrangements. What happened between then and the adoptions that will be finalized this Saturday? Few people (perhaps no people) know that history better than Ellen Herman, author of the brand new Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in Modern America. The fullest account to date of modern adoption's history, this book traces the dramatic evolution of Americans' ideas about what constitutes a family.

As Herman puts it in a description of her wonderful Adoption History Project, history is an indispensable resource for understanding the personal, political, legal, social, scientific, and human dimensions of adoption's particular form of kinship. In the process of narrating this history, she offers as many insights about twentieth-century social welfare, statecraft, and science as she does about childhood, family, and private life.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Sociology
Posted by MM at 09:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A modern music missed by modern scholarship

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Peter Monaghan has written several interesting articles recently about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, "a celebrated avant-garde collective that began in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago in the 1960s," and the subject of George E. Lewis's recent A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. In both articles Monaghan notes the significance of Lewis's book as the first academic treatment of the AACM and the highly influential experimental music it produced, and ponders the question, put forth in Lewis's book, of why such a groundbreaking group of artists hasn't received more attention by mainstream academics:

In his book, both social history and critical study, Lewis makes a claim that devotees of the AACM have long embraced but that is discomforting some composers and critics: The jazz-related collective, which emerged from black, working-class areas of Chicago in the 1960s, became one of the most significant artistic forces of the 20th century—yet histories of American musical experimentalism almost never say so.…
Lewis cites the historian Jon D. Cruz's observation that criticism of the new music as "just noise" recalled many slave owners' earlier obliviousness to the significations of slave songs. "Similarly," writes Lewis, "the noisy anger of the new musicians seemed strange, surprising, and unfathomable to many critics, along with the idea that blacks might actually have something to be angry about."

As a result, Lewis contends, music historians have failed to acknowledge the influence of the "transgressive new black music" of the AACM and other innovators like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor, dispatching them to the ranks of mere jazz oddballs.

Lewis's critique of American avant-gardism is "profoundly important and long overdue," according to a specialist in American and 20th-century music, Amy C. Beal, an associate professor of music at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "Histories of 20th-century music and jazz are racially segregated, and there are various institutional reasons why that happens," she says, "It's time we started examining them."

You can read both Monaghan's pieces —"Thoroughly Modern Music" and "Experimental Music and Academe"—online at the Chronicle.com website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

The Economist on Patty's Got a Gun

Does the election of Barack Obama signal the end of the culture wars, the end of the politics of polarization? If you can't sink a candidacy with the ankle weight of a '60s-era bomber, has that decade's grip on our politics finally been broken?

Once the partisans have been cleared out of the way, the historians are unencumbered. For instance, William Graebner in Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America.

In April 1974, twenty-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst robbed a San Francisco bank in the company of members of the Symbionese Liberation Army—who had kidnapped her nine weeks earlier. What was she? Traumatized victim, brainwashed zombie, or domestic terrorist? From a review yesterday in the Economist:

What makes this book worth reading is not so much the first half, a compelling enough account of Ms. Hearst's kidnapping and subsequent time in the headlines, as the second half: an attempt to put the Hearst affair in the context of an America struggling to emerge from the Vietnam quagmire and the ignominy of Watergate. The America of the 1970s, he argues, was ridding itself of the legacy of the "permissive" 1960s, and was preparing for the rightward shift of Reaganism and an emphasis in the 1980s on the individual.… As Mr. Graebner puts it, it is possible that in a different decade Ms. Hearst might well have been acquitted.

We also have an excerpt from the book and an audio interview with the author.

Obsessive cover design

Here at the University of Chicago Press, publishing books of rich and valuable scholarship is all in a day's work. And while most book reviews assess the learned content between the covers, occasionally a book is noted not just for the insight inside but for the package it comes in.

Lennard Davis's Obsession: A History is such a book. Professor Davis's book was recently heralded by the Economist, but Isaac Tobin's cover design has been trumpeted far and wide in the blogosphere, from Readerville to the Book Design Review. We think both Davis's and Tobin's achievements deserve wide praise. And the synchronicity of the two is just a bonus. As Readerville notes, "Extra points for the subtle implication that to even think of such a thing—much less actually do it—perfectly reflects the title." Here's to obsessive scholarship and obsessive design, together at last.

Archived in Commentary | History | Psychology
Posted by SXH at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Press Release: Graebner, Patty's Got a Gun

It was an unforgettably bizarre image: a beret-clad Patty Hearst, looking for all the world like a brainwashed zombie, toting a submachine gun as she and her erstwhile kidnappers from the Symbionese Liberation Army robbed a San Francisco bank in broad daylight. In that moment, Patty Hearst became one of the indelible symbols of 1970s America—an era suffused with confusion, anomie, and a vague sense of dissolution and decline, the heady promise of the 1960s already seeming impossibly distant.

With Patty’s Got a Gun, William Graebner offers the first full reconsideration of the Patty Hearst story in decades. Setting the abduction, robbery, and the sensational criminal trial that followed fully in the context of the era, he offers us a Patty Hearst who more than anything served as a mirror to her times. Politicians, pundits and reporters saw in Hearst the embodiment (and often the justification) of their own take on the problems of American culture, from feminism to individualism to plain old lax parenting—and the conclusions they drew directly fueled the burgeoning Reaganite retrenchment. Steeped in the culture of the 1970s, Patty’s Got a Gun grippingly recreates the media circus around the Hearst trial—and the single, affectless individual at its heart.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt or listen to an audio interview.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Economist on Obsession

In a review titled “The double face of single-mindedness” The Economist yesterday reviewed Obsession: A History by Lennard J. Davis. In our own age, notes the review,

obsession is both a common mental illness and a cultural ideal. The two are connected, thinks Mr. Davis: twin results of a single process, and perhaps the inevitable consequence of modernity. In just a few decades "obsessive-compulsive disorder' has gone from extremely rare—affecting one person in 2,000 according to a 1973 estimate—to extremely common, affecting two or three people in 100.

Obsessiveness as an ideal has been with us for several centuries at least. The reviewer takes note of Davis' chapter on "graphomania—the madness of incessant writing." Nineteenth-century novelists like Balzac and Zola devoted themselves to "the continuous, cumulative production of words." In the words of the reviewer: "These writers knew they were sacrificing their lives to obsession, but they accepted the price and others lionized them for it."

A bit like some bloggers we know.

Read an interview with Davis or listen to a podcast episode.

Archived in History | Reviews
Posted by DB at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A lost magazine from an elegant era

In the early part of the twentieth century H. G. Wells pronounced the city of Chicago "a great industrial desolation" and a "nineteenth century nightmare." Often noted by outsiders only for its slums, squalor, and stockyards, during the twenties and thirties Chicago fought hard to transform its image into one of a sophisticated urban center, struggling for cultural superiority with it's arch rival to the east, and the burgeoning megalopolis in the west. One of the city's weapons in this struggle was a new publication which, in its own words, claimed to represent "a cultural, civilized, and vibrant" city "which needs make no obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs Elysees." Urbane in aspiration and first published just sixteen months after the 1925 appearance of the New Yorker, the Chicagoan sought passionately to redeem the Windy City's unhappy reputation by demonstrating the presence of style and sophistication in the Midwest. Nevertheless, for all it's elegance and flair the magazine had a life span of less than a decade, forgotten as the boom years of the Jazz age lapsed into the Great Depression.

Now, as Julia Keller notes in a recent review for the Chicago Tribune, "thanks to the archival detective work of Neil Harris, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, we can glide our way back to an era when elegance mattered—not only in dress and deportment, but also in sentence and image. In the The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age… a hefty, gorgeous hunk of a book that reproduces one entire issue as well as 149 covers and many articles, a vanished era returns. It comes back in all of its fussy glory, its daffy humor, its gentle insistence that even a city best known for gangsters and stockyards could yearn for beauty and glamor."

Keller continues:

Harris dug out the issues, tracked down the identities of the artists, writers and editors who created them and put the whole enterprise into historical context in the spirited essays that precede each section. With its vivid covers, its book and theater and concert reviews, its whimsical cartoons, and its cheeky profiles, The Chicagoan sought to convey "the personality of its namesake city," Harris writes, billing itself as "the only oracle of smart Chicago.…" It tried to suggest that a city's cultural life was key, that the Midwest wasn't just a holding pen for cows and crooked politicians. The place had style. The place had charm. The place was here to stay—even if The Chicagoan, sadly, wasn't.

See our online gallery for The Chicagoan, including two dozen covers and interior images from the magazine. Read Keller's review on the Chicago Tribune website.

Press Release: Howard, Concentration Camps on the Home Front

Two of the ten camps that the U.S. government established to incarcerate over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II weren’t out West; they were deep in the Jim Crow South. This sudden arrival of strangers who belonged on neither side of the color line has long been a lost chapter in the history of the war—until now.

Enter Concentration Camps on the Home Front, an incendiary, stirring depiction of life in the camps and its aftermath. John Howard breaks new ground with the first book to tell the story of the Southern camps; the first to reveal government efforts to convert inmates to Christianity; the first to explore prisoners’ acts of resistance and defiance; and the first to expose the calculated dispersal of the prisoners after the war, a move which aimed to prevent the creation of ethnic enclaves in both Northern cities and the Southern countryside.

Howard’s eye-opening account of one of modern American history’s most shameful episodes resonates with current debates over the government’s right to imprison without trial, racial profiling, and a host of other contemporary issues. But this disturbing story makes its greatest impact by bringing to light the widespread and irreversible damage the camps did to individuals, families, and communities.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chicago Audio Works Podcast: Episode 2

In the second episode of the Chicago Audio Works podcast we feature an interview with Jan Van Meter, author of Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History. Host Chris Gondek talks with Van Meter about the various slogans and catchphrases that permeate our public culture—from Theodore Roosevelt's "speak softly and carry a big stick," to the Virginia Slims marketing slogan "You've come a long way, baby"—and their profound influence on American values, beliefs, and politics.

Chicago Audio Works is produced by Chris Gondek of Heron & Crane and the Invisible Hand. This and previous episodes of Chicago Audio Works are also available from iTunes and other digital media aggregators.

See all audio and video available from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
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Our podcast debut

We now do mp3. Chicago Audio Works is our new Press podcast, currently featuring interviews of our authors and certain to include archival audio, author readings, and other items of aural interest as we go along.

Episode 1 is an interview with William Graebner, author of Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America. Graebner takes us back to that queasy decade of the '70s, an unstable age when an heiress could become an weapon-wielding revolutionary—and back again—in a matter of months.

Graebner is interviewed by Gordon Buffonge. Chicago Audio Works is produced by Chris Gondek of Heron & Crane and the Invisible Hand. Episodes of Chicago Audio Works are available from iTunes and other digital media aggregators.

See all audio and video available from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in History | UCP News
Posted by DB at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nancy G. Siraisi a MacArthur "Genius"

Press author Nancy G. Siraisi, a Brooklyn-based medical historian, is one of the twenty-five new fellows announced this morning by the MacArthur Foundation. The MacArthur Fellowships, known as "genius grants," provide each recipient with $500,000 over five years, no strings attached. MacArthur's widely reported announcement noted that the grants "offer the opportunity for Fellows to accelerate their current activities or take their work in new directions."

They are intended to celebrate "extraordinarily creative individuals who inspire new heights in human achievement," MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton said in an announcement on the foundation's Web site. Siraisi, for her part, "continues to provide contributions to the evolving scholarly understanding of medical history and, specifically, Renaissance intellectual history." In Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, for example, she explores the inner workings of the medical community and illustrates the connections of medicine to both natural philosophy and technical skills.

As we congratulate Nancy Siraisi, we proudly add her name to the growing list of Press authors who have received the genius grant, including Stuart Dybek, a 2007 MacAurthur Fellow; George Lewis, a 2002 fellow whose book A Power Stronger Than Itself we published earlier this year; Danielle Allen, author of Talking to Strangers; and David Shulman, whose new Spring, Heat, Rains the Press will publish in November.

Archived in Biology | History
Posted by MM at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The power of a few plain jottings

A few days ago the New York Sun's staff reporter Adam Kirsch reviewed The Terezín Album of Mariánka Zadikow:

The book itself could not be more ordinary: It is a high-quality facsimile, with translations, of an autograph album belonging to a teenage girl. As usual with such albums, it is full of her friends' signatures and messages, along with the occasional poem or drawing. For page after page, reading it is just like reading a high school yearbook: "All the very best for the future, little cousin!" writes Marianka's cousin Lotte; "Marianka! Should you be bored, remember your colleague," writes Regina; "I wish you lots of happiness, Marianka!" writes Hana.
What makes all this ordinariness so gripping is the fact that this particular album was kept by a Jewish prisoner in the Nazi camp at Terezin, known in German as Theresienstadt.…

In these lines, you can already see the principle that writers like Primo Levi would establish as the cardinal rule of writing about the Holocaust. Only directness and simplicity are eloquent in this context; the more "impressive" the language, the less of an impression it makes.

Read the full review on the New York Sun website.

Archived in History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Press Release: Falconieri, The Man Who Believed He Was King of France

Replete with shady merchants, scoundrels, hungry mercenaries, scheming nobles, and maneuvering cardinals, The Man Who Believed He Was King of France proves the adage that truth is often stranger than fiction—or at least as entertaining. Cast against the divisive backdrop of the Hundred Years’ War, this book retraces the steps of Giannino di Guccio, the alleged lost heir to Louis X, who was reportedly switched at birth with the son of a Tuscan merchant. Once convinced of his birthright, Giannino claims for himself the name Jean I, king of France, and sets out on a brave—if ultimately ruinous—quest that leads him across Europe to prove his identity.

From Italy to Hungry, then through Germany and France, the would-be king’s unique combination of guile and earnestness seems to command the aid of lords and soldiers, the indulgence of inn-keepers and merchants, and the collusion of priests and rogues along the way. With the skill of a crime scene detective, Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri digs up evidence in the historical record to follow the story of a life so incredible that it was long considered a literary invention of the Italian Renaissance.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Medieval and Renaissance | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Press Release: Hasik, Arms and Innovation

Military technologies such as Predator drones and devices that protect American troops from Iraqi roadside bombs are in the news every day, but the story behind them is not. Who is responsible for the development of such technologies? Surprisingly, some of the most important new military systems of the past decade have been produced by small firms that beat out their larger competitors to secure government contracts. In Arms and Innovation, defense-industry consultant James Hasik argues that such companies have a number of advantages relative to their bigger competitors, including an entrepreneurial spirit and fewer bureaucratic obstacles, and thus can both be more responsive to changes in the environment and more strategic in their planning. This book will forge a new understanding of how business and the defense industry interact in the post-terror world.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remembering 9/11


	A variety of responses were possible on that day and in the days that followed. Once the fuse of necessity was lit, we could have carried it elsewhere, we could have borne that necessity, made use of it, in a thousand other ways.

Peter Alexander Meyers, author of the forthcoming Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen, reflects on democracy and the perils of antipolitics.

When the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked seven years ago today, the probability that the United States would not respond with vigor and violence was exactly zero. Whatever ethics may suggest for you or me, a nation that turns the other cheek is bound for suicide.

Events like 9/11 are murderous because people are killed; they are unjust because innocents suffer. But what we seek to commemorate today was a tragedy, and that is something quite different.

The clue to this difference is that American response became in just one torturous hour a necessity rather than a choice. Once we were forced to act, the matter was wrested from our hands, not so much by the attackers as by the facts of who we are and how we fit into and depend upon circumstances of long making and global significance.

Continue reading "Remembering 9/11" »

Archived in Commentary | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Where are the ghosts of 9/11?

jacket image David Simpson, author of 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration wonders, where are the ghosts?

Seven years after 9/11 one of the strangest things is that there are no ghosts. There never were. The photographs that appeared day after day in The New York Times seemed to me then flagrantly dishonorable in their very effort to commemorate. They left little to be haunted by as they reconstructed the lives of the dead as Disneyfied icons of optimistic upward mobility, dreams achieved, selfless happiness, and civic virtue amidst an energetic and responsive democracy. No one was cruel, unhappy, or disappointed, no one unappeased.

Ghosts call for appeasement and are symptomatic of unfinished business. Whether from a desire to be properly buried, to be forgiven, to punish, or simply to visit once again the living, to mourn with them, inform them or warn them, the ghost demands attention. It says, above all: I have come to trouble you, in death as I might have done in life, and to confront you what you cannot easily dismiss or understand. As we approach a critical election I fear that these ghosts will once again be prevented from haunting us in any profound way; that they will again be conjured away even as they are conjured up as a revenge motif by a deadly political game whose logic requires endless war and whose methods are the manufacture of a fear that is always of the 'other' and never of the uncanny that is all too at home in the homeland itself.

I'd like to believe that the heavy tread of the politicians toward brave little Georgia and the cross-border raids into Pakistan do not prefigure some October surprise that will once again exploit our September memories, but I remember how little we had of a critical and vigilant journalism during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. Far too many on all sides have died to avenge the dead of 9/11. We have managed little or no concern about these deaths even when they are our own. Except for the immediately bereaved who have hardly been allowed to speak but are constantly spoken for, we have continued to be kept (do we keep ourselves?) from our own hauntings, our own Godzillas or jungles of screaming souls. We remain collectively all too untroubled by the dead of 9/11, all too confident of the way to go. There has been no new seriousness of the sort that 9/11 seemed to demand seven years ago. The rhetoric of trauma was everywhere in the months after 9/11, but it concealed the absence of trauma itself, of deep trauma's imperative toward introversion and arrestation. We did not stop the clock for deep reflection. I fear that the next two months are not likely to produce any more complex emotions than the ones we have had thrust upon us for the last seven years.

—David Simpson

Archived in Commentary | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rain Taxi reviews A Power Stronger than Itself

The Fall 2008 print edition of the Rain Taxi Review of Books published a positive review of George E. Lewis's new book A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Rain Taxi contributor W. C. Bamberger begins:

Founded in 1965, the AACM … seeks to enable black composers and performers of experimental music to take control of its presentation and recording. For more than forty years the name and acronym have been appearing in the liner notes of recordings by The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Muhal Richard Abrams, and many others, but information about the group has always been rather hazy, a frustration that George E. Lewis's impressive sociological-historical study more than remedies.
Lewis, a trombonist and electronic musician, is also an AACM member and past president, and so brings an insider's perspective to his analysis. He also conducted nearly 100 interviews with musicians and writers and presents their memories and views, some of them clashing, in hopes that "a useful story might be realized out of the many voices heard in this book, the maelstrom of heteroglossia in which we nervously tread water." There is no picket fencing here: Lewis doesn't utilize the high point or famous member system, so many too-little known musicians have their say. This is in part to give credit where credit is due, and to refuse "stars" exclusive rights to the AACM's history.…

Others in his wake will find this a valuable resource, and will also find it difficult to match Lewis for depth and critical insight.

Pick up a copy of the Fall 2008 edition of Rain Taxi to read the review.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Derek Hyra on HUD and the housing crisis

jacket To mark HUD's birthday, we asked Derek Hyra, author of The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville, to reflect on the future of urban development in the midst of the housing crisis:

September 9 marks the birthday of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which was established on this day in 1965. And HUD's headquarters, the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, is approaching its fortieth anniversary. These milestones, though, probably won't be greeted with unqualified celebration. Once an embodiment of the Great Society's reforming spirit, HUD has developed such a reputation for inefficiency, corruption, and incompetence that one prominent urban scholar recently recommended dismantling the agency and tearing down the Weaver building. But HUD doesn't need to be razed. It needs to remodeled, rehabilitated, and reinvigorated with Presidential leadership and Congressional reform.

HUD and its affiliated local authorities have several critical responsibilities. The agency houses one million tenants in public housing and assists another 1.8 million households with rent subsidies. In addition to deploying $4 billion each year to cities and counties across the nation, HUD also houses the Federal Housing Administration, which provides federal guarantees on affordable mortgages.

As the HUD building enters its fifth decade, the agency has the potential, with adequate resources and support, to achieve where the private market has failed. This year's Housing and Economic Recovery Act gives the FHA authority to guarantee $300 billion in subprime loans and deploys an additional $4 billion in grants. This monumental housing act has reinvigorated HUD and might help pull the country out of its current credit crisis and keep nearly 400,000 families in their homes.

Additional reforms are needed in HUD's major programs. Public housing and the voucher program need to be retooled with effective strategies to maintain viable public housing and to prevent the concentration of vouchers recipients in declining communities. Increased oversight is also needed to ensure that local housing authorities effectively and appropriately spend housing and block grant resources.

So let's not foreclose on HUD. With proper reform and strategic funding, HUD has the potential to once again be a model, and remodeled, federal agency that assists the nation with its affordable housing and community development needs.

—Derek Hyra

(See also an excerpt from Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer by Wendell E. Pritchett, a biography of the first secretary of HUD—as well as the first African American cabinet-level officer in the federal goverment.)

A new look at Dorothea Lange's Depression-era photographs

Both the Times Higher Education and the New Yorker's book blog, the Book Bench have recently published positive reviews of Anne Whiston Spirn's, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field. Book Bench contributor Eliza Honey writes:

Daring to Look is a collection of photographs, many of them previously unpublished, taken by Dorothea Lange, in 1939, for the Farm Security Administration. Though Lange's shots of Depression-era individuals and families are well known, many of her negatives of empty home interiors have spent the past decades in archives, until Anne Whiston Spirn, the editor of this volume, unearthed them. Like Lange's portraits, her interiors are gentle reflections of a quiet and stark way of life.
Though the book looks deceivingly like it's meant for a coffee table, Spirn's accompanying text reveals much more. It's so engrossing, in fact, that, had the book not been so heavy, I would have taken it to the park during my lunch break.

And from the THE:

This first presentation of Lange's 1939 photographs with their accompanying texts provides a very valuable scholarly resource. Spirn's personal contribution, for anyone interested in Lange, comes in the third and final section, which both brings us up to date and reflects upon history, as she photographs sites and descendants of Lange's 1939 subjects.
From her broad knowledge base and sympathetic understanding of the history of the locale, Spirn offers a rich study of past and present life and landscape.

Read the rest of the Book Bench review, or read the THE review.

Also see this illustrated excerpt from the book.

The "coming home" of the black midle class

Julia Vitullo-Martin has an interesting review of Derek S. Hyra's new book, The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville, in Sunday's New York Post. In his book Hyra looks at the nation's two most important historic, urban black neighborhoods—New York's Harlem and Chicago's Bronzeville—to explore the shifting dynamics of class and race as these two iconic black communities undergo an unprecedented period of gentrification. From the Post review:

Hyra's most fundamental concern: As these neighborhoods come back economically, what will happen to their poor residents? Hyra notes that both Bronzeville and Harlem are "revitalizing without drastic racial changeover." In the last 10 years, Central Harlem's white population increased to 2% from 1.5%, and the white proportion in Bronzeville increased to 4% from 2.5%.
Yet while Hyra is very worried about the displacement of the poor, he argues that class antagonism is actually important to the redevelopment of formerly impoverished communities. Black middle-class values translate into effective political activity and organizations, including block clubs, planning boards and religiously affiliated community development corporations. The problem, as he sees it, is that the "coming home" of the black middle class will produce a neighborhood in which poor blacks are no longer welcome.

Is he correct? Only time will tell. After all, the new, large, urban black middle class is itself a new phenomenon. How its development will affect the historic neighborhoods it treasures is an open question.

Read the rest of the article on the New York Post website.

Kurdistan—understanding the Middle East

Last Wednesday the New York Times' Papercuts blog posted a short article on the Kurds and their important role in the complicated culture and politics of the Middle East. In the post, Papercuts contributor Barry Gewen cites several useful books on the subject including Susan Meiselas' Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, Second Edition. Gewen writes:

The hour of the Kurds has come round again. They are the great success story of the Iraq war, what the Bush administration always hoped for across the entire country. They have a functioning, popularly supported regional government. Their economy is booming. Religion has little retrograde or divisive influence on their public institutions. Women are respected (there have been many important female leaders in Kurdish history) and Israel is viewed approvingly. Terrorism is generally unknown in the Kurdish areas of Iraq. What's more, the Kurds are ready to defend themselves and what they have achieved. Anyone who wants to understand the future of Iraq and the Middle East in general has to take them into account.
Two new books help us to do just that. Actually, one of them isn't new. Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History by the photographer Susan Meiselas first appeared in 1998 and is now being reissued in an updated edition by the University of Chicago Press. It's an extraordinarily handsome volume. In a labor of love, Meiselas spent six years combing libraries, archives and family collections for old photographs, postcards, documents, newspaper clippings, whatever, to produce a visually stunning montage designed to prick the conscience of the world.

Read the posting on the NYT's Papercuts blog.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Press Release: Hyra, The New Urban Renewal

Most of us probably think we know how urban gentrification works: rich young whites move into poor, non-white areas and gobble up cheap real estate, eventually forcing longtime residents to move to more affordable but distant locales. Since the late 1990s, however, a surprising new pattern has emerged as a handful of poverty-stricken black neighborhoods have evolved into residential hotspots boasting high-income housing, destination dining, designer boutiques, and even bed-and-breakfasts—all while managing to stay black.
No two neighborhoods in the country exemplify this trend better than Harlem in New York City and Bronzeville in Chicago. In this groundbreaking book, Derek S. Hyra—a resident of both of these neighborhoods—moves from the streets to city hall to corporate boardrooms, tracing the web of factors at play in the remarkable revitalization of these two historic enclaves.

Read the press release.

A Caesar for our own time

An interesting review of Maria Wyke's new book Caesar: A Life in Western Culture appeared in the August 18 edition of the Wall Street Journal. In the review, Peter Stothard praises the book for its insightful exploration of the various ways in which modern culture has invoked and appropriated Caesar and his legacy—from Mussolini, seeking a Caesarian mandate for this own grand ambitions, to Caesars Palace, Las Vegas:

Ms. Wyke's concern is how we have created and adapted Caesar's image and historical importance over the past 2,000 years… The principle behind this kind of study is known as "reception theory." Its typical proponent is skeptical of how much we can know of what someone like Caesar and his contemporaries did and thought; a reception theorist is much more confident of how we have come to use and think about them ourselves. A comic book can thus be as important as a commander's campsite. A bust loudly but unconvincingly proclaimed by its discoverer to be authentic is as significant as a newly interpreted paragraph from "De Bello Gallico." The skill of a reception theorist such as Ms. Wyke lies in what she chooses to include and what she chooses to leave out.…
Ms. Wyke, however, is a sophisticated practitioner of her craft, a professor of Latin at University College London and a graduate of the British Film Institute. She is the pre-eminent British authority on the relationship between modern film and classical history. She wittily describes how Bernard Shaw's distaste for the "deification of Love" in his play "Caesar and Cleopatra" was overridden for the 1945 movie version—and for all later movie attempts on the same theme. She also notes that the Caesars Palace Casino, built in 1966 and inspired by the sword-and-sandal movies of the era, came deliberately without apostrophe: Everyone could be a Caesar.…

Read the rest of the review on the Wall Street Journal website.

Prison Intimacies

The August 21 edition of the Times Higher Education includes a review of Regina Kunzel's new book, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality. The THE's Lynne Segal writes:

Being a product of "situational" aberrations, same-sex activity in prisons is of little interest to historians of sexuality, the psychiatrist and historian Vernon Rosario believes. He is quite wrong, according to feminist historian Regina Kunzel. In her latest book, Criminal Intimacy, Kunzel argues persuasively that the increasingly open secrets of prison life, although usually officially buried, expose the perennial fault-lines of many of our understandings of modern sexuality. As she illustrates, the hallmark of modern discourses of sexuality is the move from sexual acts, seen as decent or indecent, to sexual identities, seen as normal or perverse, generated from within. Sex behind bars, however, has always provided evidence that fails to mirror this account, leaving its occurrence apparently cut off in some anachronistic space all its own.

Read the review on the THE website.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention Revisited

This week's edition of the Chicago Reader is running an interesting review of Frank Kusch's Battleground Chicago—an unconventional look at the 1968 'police riots' at the Democratic National Convention. The event has become infamous for the brutality of the police in attempting to control the groups of anti-war protesters demonstrating at the convention. But Kusch's book goes beyond this stereotypical image using seldom heard accounts of the event from the police's point of view to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of how and why they acted as they did. The Reader's Barry Wightman writes:

Kusch… constructs his narrative from interviews he conducted with 80 former Chicago policemen who were on the street during the convention. These are regular guys who fought in World War II and Korea, lived in the bungalow belt, and found themselves on the fault line during one of the tectonic shifts of the period. And every time one of them is quoted, the story comes alive.…

Read the review from the Reader. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Finding Our Place in the World

Conventionally, people tend to thing of maps as useful tools with which to physically orient ourselves within a landscape, yet in their recent book, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, editors James A. Ackerman and Robert W. Karrow demonstrate that throughout the ages maps have had a much greater range of utility. The August edition of the The Art Book features a review of Maps that praises the editors for their insightful exploration of maps' varying purposes—from maps that orient us geographically, to those that orient us historically and even culturally. From the Art Book:

[In Maps] essays by distinguished contributors break the boundaries of chronology and the limitations of conventional Western geography to consider instead a cluster of maps' varying purposes.…
The extensive first essay, 'Finding our way' by Akerman (organiser of a splendid Newberry exhibition on American road maps), addresses most observers' experiences of maps, i.e. as instructions for directed travel.… Allegorical pathways, clearly charted for religious or fantasy realms, are reserved for a fine later essay, 'Imaginary worlds', by Ricardo Padron. Another fascinating essay, on the conceptual or thematic use of maps (including geological or astronomical maps), often with statistical graphs to convey data, is provided by Michael Friendly and Gilles Palsky.… More particular maps of cities or regions, including property or military maps, are surveyed by Matthew Edney, who links their spatial uses to 'expansive' societies with expansive economic activity and social stratification. He notes that 'social needs, power relations, and cultural conventions underpin the production and use of all maps'.…

Ultimately, Maps:Finding Our Place in the World shows clearly how interdisciplinary and visual the study of maps can be.

Read the article or see a collection of unusual maps from the book.

Press Release: Maloney, Chicago Gardens

After pulling apart the peonies and deadheading the last of the mums, gardeners will take a long look at their backyards and head indoors to plan for next season. And as the hostas yellow and wilt outside, nature enthusiasts can take shelter with—and inspiration from—the stories in Cathy Jean Maloney’s beautiful new book, Chicago Gardens: The Early History.

Maloney has spent decades researching the city’s horticultural heritage, and her latest book reveals the remarkable story of Chicago’s first gardeners. Challenged by the region’s clay soil and harsh winters, Midwestern pioneers were forced to find imaginative uses for prairie plants, pounding salsify into gravy and grinding grain into coffee. Innovative nurserymen and florists would later develop a market for local fruit and flowers, in part by naming their varieties after Chicago’s well-known: the Mrs. Potter Palmer Carnation, for example, as well as the well-grown: the Bridgeport Chicago Drumhead Cabbage, in honor of the neighborhood’s Irish inhabitants. Gardening was no longer simply a way to fill one’s belly, but also a way to line one’s pockets. By the late 1880’s, Chicago had become the nation’s produce hub.

Today, Chicago earns the limelight as a leader in “green” cities. Chicago Gardens unveils a tradition of horticultural innovation—a story too long hidden under a bushel basket.

Read the press release.

Also see a special web feature for the book, five Chicago gardens.

Review: Fenske, The Skyscraper and the City

The August 16 edition of the Wall Street Journal ran a short but positive review of Gail Fenske's new book, The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York. Fenske's book uses an in-depth architectural analysis of New York's Woolworth building as a lens through which to view the city's distinctive urban culture. As WSJ reviewer Nicholas Desai writes: "The building's style, inside and out, is hybrid, almost a pastiche, offering Tudor, Byzantine and Gothic elements—modern but not modernist," and Fenske's book insightfully connects this unique eclecticism to the cultural contradictions that defined New York City's modernity.

Desai's review continues praising Fenske's prose as "academic but clear, enlivened by her interest in the cultural moment" and calls her work "a definitive take on a 20th-century classic."

Read it online at the WSJ website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kelan Phil Cohran and Chicago's mecca of the avant-garde

The latest edition of Time Out Chicago is running an article about Kelan Phil Cohran—whose notable work as a jazz composer and multi-instrumentalist once landed him a spot in Sun Ra's Arkestra and, more recently, a central role in George E. Lewis's new book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Lewis's book is the definitive history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an important and influential Chicago jazz collective which Cohran helped to found in 1965. But as Time Out's Jake Austen notes, Cohran not only played an important role in organizing the association and establishing Chicago as a mecca for avant-garde jazz, but continues to be a major force in the jazz scene today:

After settling in Chicago in the mid-'50s, Cohran became an integral part of the South Side's cultural fabric during the next half-century, forming the AACM and turning a Bronzeville movie house into the Afro-Arts Theater (home base of Cohran's Artistic Heritage Ensemble, Oscar Brown Jr. and Gwendolyn Brooks, among others). He also became a fixture in public schools, teaching and demonstrating his musical ideas from 1965 until the '90s.… But Cohran is best known for his stint with Sun Ra's Arkestra from 1959 to 1961.…
Yet what makes Cohran's work so compelling to contemporary audiences may be the ways he veers away from Sun Ra and his AACM colleagues. While Ra explored the spaceways, Cohran… studied his own planet.… Cohran's interest in folk, as well as an activist's desire to serve the people, makes his music more populist than most experimental sounds. "My music is an expression of my community," he says. "That's why it lasts: because it wasn't for me."

And tonight starting at 6:30 you can catch Cohran at the Pritzker Pavilion in downtown Chicago where he headlines a concert titled "Made in Chicago: Kelan Phil Cohran and the Legacy of Sun Ra." To find out more about Cohran, his stint with the Arkestra, and the role he played in forming the AACM, check out this excerpt from Lewis's book. To find out more about the show navigate to the Time Out Chicago website.

Venus Flytrap returns to Cincinnati

John Kieswetter, the Cincinnati Enquirer's TV/Radio/Media reporter heralded the arrival of one of Cincinnati's favorite TV personalities, comedian and actor Tim Reid, with a nice post to his blog last Thursday. His posting touches on Reid's historic career in comedy, and details his recent itinerary, which brought him back to the city he once fictionally inhabited as radio DJ Venus Flytrap on the late 70's sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. According to Keiswetter, Reid was scheduled to host the local Emmy Awards dinner and to throw out the first pitch at the Reds-Astros game. In his post Kieswetter remarks: "I bet he's surprised at how often he's recognized here, and how fondly so many of us remember 'WKRP.'"

But while most people recognize Reid from his hit TV show, fewer remember his earlier work in the pioneering stand-up act "Tim and Tom" with comedian Tom Dreesen—the first interracial comedy team in the history of show business. Now with Reid's forthcoming book, Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White, co-authored with Dreesen and Ron Rappaport, the fascinating story of this ground-breaking comedic duo is revealed—from their beginnings in the nightclubs of Chicago to to their acrimonious breakup after 5 hard years on the road.

The book is set to publish this September and Dreesen and Reid are scheduled to make quite a few appearances in support of the book's release. Navigate to the Tim and Tom book page to find out more about the book or to place an advance order. Also, see our author events page to find out more about the upcoming events.

The soft weapons of autobiography

The July 31 edition of the London Review of Books has published several interesting articles focusing on two recent books, both of which offer some intriguing insights into the West's engagement with Middle Eastern Muslim cultures in the twentieth century.

As the LRB's Roxanne Varzi notes, Gillian Whitlock's Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit is a fascinating exploration of modern Middle Eastern autobiography, that demonstrates how the genre has been used in Western society as a window into an often inaccessible culture, but perhaps more often is appropriated and commodified by Western culture to serve its own interests. In her article Varzi focuses on the latter phenomenon writing:

"You shouldn't overlook the what Gillian Whitlock in Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, calls the paratext: the liminal features that surround the text, not just the book's jacket and typeface but interviews with the author, reviews and commentaries. It is in transit, as commodities, that these narratives, which Whitlock calls 'veiled memoirs,' are shaped by and for the public. Whitlock reproduces an Audi ad that shows [Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran], outfitted in a cream suit, floating among shelves of books in a library (a library that contains no contemporary Iranian literature) above the words: 'Never let reality get in the way of imagination.' She is presented as the embodiment of imagination, and yet the 'reality' of contemporary Iran, which she claims to reveal to her audiences, is what provides her cultural capital.
Reading these memoirs, like watching bad reality television, gives the false sense that we are being told the 'truth' by the powerless at a time when those with the power to construct reality have limited our access to the facts.

The July 31LRB also contains an interesting piece by Megan Vaughn on Richard C. Keller's Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa—a book that explores the history of French psychology in North Africa and its complicated nature as both a progressive and innovative scientific endeavor, and as a means for furthering colonial goals.

Pick up a copy of this month's LRB to read the full reviews.

NPR reviews A Power Stronger Than Itself

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviewed George E. Lewis's new book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music for the July 29 edition of NPR's Fresh Air. In the review, Whitehead outlines the book's captivating scholarly portrait of the Chicago avant-garde jazz collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which, since its inception in 1965, has counted among its ranks internationally acclaimed artists such as Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Muhal Richard Abrams, and gained world wide recognition as one of the defining forces in the avant-garde jazz scene.

Listen to the archived audio on the NPR website.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Dorothea Lange and Daring to Look on NPR

The Sunday edition of NPR's All Things Considered included a segment on Anne Whiston Spirn and her book, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field.

The NPR story begins where almost every mention of Lange begins, with the photograph titled "Migrant Mother." Spirn explains why Lange took that photograph and similar images that showed the destitute during the 1930s. Spirn also discusses her favorite Lange photograph, "Migratory Children Living in 'Rambler's Park,'" in which a roll of linoleum figures prominently.

We have an illustrated excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History
Posted by DB at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The other side of nineteenth-century NYC

Writing for the July 17 Times Higher Eduction Laurel Brake delivers an enthusiastic review of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York—a book whose look at the provocative weeklies that proliferated in mid-nineteenth century NYC Brake notes, reveals an important, yet often overlooked, aspect of the city's history and culture. From the review:

Generically, [the "flash" papers] mostly seem to be saucily illustrated weeklies, ranging from titillating to soft porn, including simple woodcuts, more than 50 of which are reproduced here. Their distribution points (which included hawker-newsboys, saloons, oyster bars, barber shops, steamboats and theatres), sporting connections and maps and accounts of brothels suggest that most were aimed at a bachelor subculture. An exception is the Whip and Satirist, whose detailed woman's fashion column implies that it both sought female readers and employed women writers.
Commentary and excerpts support the authors' contention that the existence of this genre in antebellum New York establishes the city as cultural capital of the republic in low culture as well as high and indicates a dimension of this period and its press neglected in hegemonic accounts of this "Victorian" city.

Read the review on the THE website. Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Allan H. Meltzer op-ed in the Wall Street Journal

Allan H. Meltzer, professor of economics and author of A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 1: 1913-1951, wrote an interesting op-ed piece for today's Wall Street Journal that warns policymakers against increasing the Federal Reserve's supervision of investment banks. In his article, Meltzer argues that the Federal Reserve's increased involvement with private investment banking firms could lead to greater assurance of government bailouts, and encourage more of the risky lending practices that have led to the highly publicized bank closures in recent months.

Read Meltzer's article on the WSJ website, or find out more about Meltzer's book, A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 1: 1913-1951. Volume Two is currently slated for publication in the Fall of 2009.

The economics of war

Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll's new book Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History was given a positive review by Geoffrey Blainey in the July/August edition of the Australian Book Review. Praising the book for its unique and insightful use of economic principles to explain military strategy throughout the ages Baliney writes:

Castles, Battles & Bombs offers insights about various periods of warfare. Some insights arise from the alertness of the authors… but other lessons in the book probably arise from their unusual technique. As economics is perhaps the most advanced of the social sciences, and as it is not frightened of making bold generalisations about human behaviour, some of its theories, the authors imply, should be applicable to military behaviour. Accordingly, they select six important episodes in warfare, five in western Europe and one in the United States, and then found a well-known economic theory or tool which might help to illuminate each episode.
In studying medieval warfare, and its emphasis on building defensive castles rather than equipping large armies, the authors invoke the principle of 'opportunity cost'. They point out that the castle had special advantages. It was a cheap way of guarding and controlling conquered enemy territory. Moreover, in an era of defensive warfare, a small force of men could defend it for a long period against a large army waiting outside the ditches and walls.…

The heavy British bombing of German cities in World War II persuaded the authors to consult another economic theory: 'diminishing marginal returns.' In the face of massive air raids, German railways and factories were surprisingly resilient, and Germany continued to make more and more aircraft. Moreover, contrary to predictions, the bombs did not weaken the German civilian morale, just as the earlier German bombing of London had not dinted British morale.…

Read the full review on the ABR website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Economics | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two books in the TLS

The July 4 Times Literary Supplement ran an excellent review Evelyn Bloch-Dano's Madame Proust: A Biography—an engaging account of the life of Jeanne Wiel, mother to Marcel Proust, and as Bloch-Dano demonstrates, a decisive influence on the great writer's career. Touching on a myriad of ways in which Proust's mother helped to mold her son into one of the nineteenth-century's most famous novelists the review pays special attention to Proust's mother as a German Jew living in France just before the Dreyfus affair, which revealed the strong undercurrents of antisemitism and injustice that permeated French culture and greatly affected the role Jeanne took in protecting her son from the social pressures and prejudices of the day. Ingrid Wassenar writes for the TLS:

For Bloch-Dano the key to Jeanne is her status as an assimilated Jew. She is represented as a Third Republic Esther: "To save her people, Esther must hide her true origins without ever denying them." In the Old Testament, Esther treads a fine line between obeying the Persian King Ahasuerus and placating her Israelite uncle, Mordecai. In similar ways Jeanne Weil did not truly belong to herself.…
Madame Proust raises fascinating questions about the nature of maternal love and the degree to which motherhood necessitates self-effacement. As the author insists: "We have to admit that this supremely intelligent woman had no other ambition than the happiness of her loved ones. She wouldn't have conceived of her role as sacrificial, but let's hope there were some secondary benefits.…"

Read an excerpt from the book on our website.

In the same issue Paul Reitter continues on the theme of Judaism in Western culture with a review of Michael P. Steinberg's Judaism Musical and Unmusical. Steinberg's book argues that modernity gave rise to a Jewish consciousness that has increasingly distanced itself from the sacred in favor of worldliness and secularity—a trend contributed to by a who's who of Jewish composers and intellectuals including such figures as Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Salomon, Arnaldo Momigliano, Leonard Bernstein, and Daniel Libeskind. From Reitter's review:

In 1934, Sigmund Freud, old, ailing, and painfully aware of the precariousness of the political situation in Austria, decided to write a book about Moses.… Completed in exile in Britain, Moses and Monotheism argues —doggedly and not very convincingly—that Moses was an Egyptian. Thus, at a time of unprecedented Jewish dispossession, we find Freud struggling mightily to take away Moses, too.… [But in] Steinberg's reading, Freud, by denying "his people" Moses, does nothing other than make his greatest gift to "the Jews."
The idea on which this interpretation rests is an organizing principle in Steinberg's book. What he admires and wants to track are certain modern Jewish "subjectivities," ones that for him emerged vividly in Central Europe and … involved "resisting" the ideology of origins, "loving history," and cultivating a reflective cosmopolitan "secularity.…"

Steinberg's "constellating of Jewishness…could well have a substantial impact on discussions of Central European Jewish culture, where, as he emphasizes, there is a pressing need for new conceptual life.

The Chicago Blog

Publicity news from the University of Chicago Press including news tips, press releases, reviews, and intelligent commentary.

February 04, 2010

Q&A on intellectual property with the author of Piracy

February 03, 2010

Piracy and the history of intellectual property disputes

February 02, 2010

Speaking the truth and exposing the bunk

February 01, 2010

The free e-book of the day!

January 29, 2010

The modern afterlives of the bodies in the bog

January 26, 2010

The New Republic's The Book website reviews Chicago

January 20, 2010

Haiti—What is the lesson here?

December 21, 2009

Santa Claus vs Bigfoot

December 18, 2009

Quote if the Week: Reinhold Niebuhr

December 16, 2009

Jazz.com interview with George E. Lewis

December 11, 2009

How the Second City became first in comedy

December 09, 2009

Pure Food and Financial Protection

November 16, 2009

The birth of environmentalism in the Lake District

November 02, 2009

Press Release: Graham, The Moon, Come to Earth

October 27, 2009

"South Asia Across the Disciplines" on the web

October 21, 2009

Press Release: Ritvo, The Dawn of Green

October 13, 2009

Chicago's biography

October 09, 2009

Two local authors on Chicago Tonight

October 08, 2009

A giant moose goes to Paris

October 02, 2009

Press Release: Ford, Soldier Field

Press Release: Walls, Passage to Cosmos

September 29, 2009

A crisis is whatever the president says it is

September 24, 2009

What went wrong with public housing in Chicago?

September 21, 2009

The politics of Soldier Field

September 10, 2009

Dorothea Lange's forgotten photographs

September 03, 2009

Abrams, Lewis, and Mitchell trio at the Chicago Jazz Festival

September 02, 2009

The Whole Foods boycott and the history of consumer activism in America

Press Release: Rowland, Giordano Bruno

August 31, 2009

Leo Durocher and the "Collapsing Cubs"

August 26, 2009

Looting the birthplace of civilization

August 17, 2009

"A time machine tour of our continent's abundant past"

August 13, 2009

Pervasive policy failure

August 07, 2009

The Burnham Plan Centennial with author Carl Smith

August 06, 2009

Writing Hiroshima's Ground Zero

August 05, 2009

The history of young men and fire

July 27, 2009

Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine

July 24, 2009

Faking Knossos

July 21, 2009

From the Earth to the Moon and back

July 17, 2009

What the Lincoln-Douglas debates mean

July 16, 2009

Millennium turns five