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Title: The rise of Islam and the Bengal frontier, 1204-1760 
Author: Eaton, Richard Maxwell
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Asian History | Middle Eastern History | South Asia | Islam
Publisher's Description: In all of the South Asian subcontinent, Bengal was the region most receptive to the Islamic faith. This area today is home to the world's second-largest Muslim ethnic population. How and why did such a large Muslim population emerge there? And how does such a religious conversion take place? Richard Eaton uses archaeological evidence, monuments, narrative histories, poetry, and Mughal administrative documents to trace the long historical encounter between Islamic and Indic civilizations.Moving from the year 1204, when Persianized Turks from North India annexed the former Hindu states of the lower Ganges delta, to 1760, when the British East India Company rose to political dominance there, Eaton explores these moving frontiers, focusing especially on agrarian growth and religious change.   [brief]
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Title: The rise of the Paris red belt 
Author: Stovall, Tyler Edward
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Social Science | French Studies
Publisher's Description: From 1920 until the present, the working-class suburbs of Paris, known as the Red Belt, have constituted the heart of French Communism, providing the Party not only with its most solid electoral base but with much of its cultural identity as well. Focusing on the northeastern suburb of Bobigny, Stovall explores the nature of working-class life and politicization as he skillfully documents how this unique region and political culture came into being. The Rise of the Paris Red Belt reveals that the very process of urban development in metropolitan Paris and the suburbs provided the most important opportunities for the local establishment of Communist influence.The rapid increase in Paris' suburban population during the early twentieth century outstripped the development of the local urban infrastructure. Consequently, many of these suburbs, often represented to their new residents as charming country villages, soon degenerated into suburban slums. Stovall argues that Communists forged a powerful political block by mobilizing the disillusionment and by improving some of the worst aspects of suburban life.As a social history of twentieth-century France, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt calls into question traditional assumptions about the history of both French Communism and the French working-class. It suggests that those interested in working-class politics, especially in the twentieth century, should consider the significance of residential and consumer issues as well as those relating to the workplace. It also suggests that urban history and urban development should not be considered autonomous phenomena, but rather expressions of class relations. The Rise of the Paris Red Belt brings to life a world whose citizens, though often overlooked, are nonetheless the history of modern France.   [brief]
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Title: Risk and rationality: philosophical foundations for populist reforms 
Author: Shrader-Frechette, K. S 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics | Social Problems | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: Only ten to twelve percent of Americans would voluntarily live within a mile of a nuclear plant or hazardous waste facility. But industry spokespersons claim that such risk aversion represents ignorance and paranoia, and they lament that citizen protests have delayed valuable projects and increased their costs.Who is right? In Risk and Rationality , Kristin Shrader-Frechette argues that neither charges of irresponsible endangerment nor countercharges of scientific illiteracy frame the issues properly. She examines the debate over methodological norms for risk evaluation and finds analysts arrayed in a spectrum. Points of view extend from cultural relativists who believe that any risk can be justified (since no rational standards are ultimately possible) to naive positivists who believe that risk evaluation can be objective, neutral, and value free. Both camps, she argues, are wrong, because risk evaluation as a social process is rational and objective, even though all risk-evaluation rules are value-laden.Shrader-Frechette defends a middle position called "scientific proceduralism." She shows why extremist views are unreliable, reveals misconceptions underlying current risk-evaluation methods and strategies, and sketches the reforms needed to set hazard assessment and risk evaluation on a publicly defensible foundation.These reforms involve mathematical, economic, ethical, and legal procedures. They constitute a new paradigm for assessment when acceptance of public hazards is rational, recognizing that laypersons are often more rational in their evaluation of societal risks than either experts or governments have acknowledged. Such reforms would provide citizens with more influence in risk decisions and focus on mediating ethical conflicts, rather than seeking to impose the will of experts. Science, she argues, need not preclude democracy.   [brief]
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Title: Ritual ground: Bent's Old Fort, world formation, and the annexation of the Southwest 
Author: Comer, Douglas C
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Cultural Anthropology | California and the West | United States History
Publisher's Description: From about 1830 to 1849, Bent's Old Fort, located in present-day Colorado on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, was the largest trading post in the Southwest and the mountain-plains region. Although the raw enterprise and improvisation that characterized the American westward movement seem to have little to do with ritual, Douglas Comer argues that the fort grew and prospered because of ritual and that ritual shaped the subsequent history of the region to an astonishing extent.At Bent's Old Fort, rituals of trade, feasting, gaming, marriage, secret societies, and war, as well as the "calcified ritual" provided by the fort itself, brought together and restructured Anglo, Hispanic, and American Indian cultures. Comer sheds new light on this heretofore poorly understood period in American history, building at the same time a powerfully convincing case to demonstrate that the human world is made through ritual.Comer gives his narrative an anthropological and philosophical framework; the events at Bent's Old Fort provide a compelling example not only of "world formation" but of a world's tragic collapse, culminating in the Sand Creek massacre. He also calls attention to the reconstructed Bent's Old Fort on the site of the original. Here visitors reenact history, staff work out personal identities, and groups lobby for special versions of history by ritual recasting of the past as the present.   [brief]
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Title: A river and its city: the nature of landscape in New Orleans
Author: Kelman, Ari 1968-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | United States History | Environmental Studies | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: This engaging environmental history explores the rise, fall, and rebirth of one of the nation's most important urban public landscapes, and more significantly, the role public spaces play in shaping people's relationships with the natural world. Ari Kelman focuses on the battles fought over New Orleans's waterfront, examining the link between a river and its city and tracking the conflict between public and private control of the river. He describes the impact of floods, disease, and changing technologies on New Orleans's interactions with the Mississippi. Considering how the city grew distant - culturally and spatially - from the river, this book argues that urban areas provide a rich source for understanding people's connections with nature, and in turn, nature's impact on human history.   [brief]
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Title: Roads to Rome: the antebellum Protestant encounter with Catholicism 
Author: Franchot, Jenny 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | American Studies | United States History | Christianity
Publisher's Description: The mixture of hostility and fascination with which native-born Protestants viewed the "foreign" practices of the "immigrant" church is the focus of Jenny Franchot's cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America.Franchot analyzes the effects of religious attitudes on historical ideas about America's origins and destiny. She then focuses on the popular tales of convent incarceration, with their Protestant "maidens" and lecherous, tyrannical Church superiors. Religious captivity narratives, like those of Indian captivity, were part of the ethnically, theologically, and sexually charged discourse of Protestant nativism.Discussions of Stowe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell - writers who sympathized with "Romanism" and used its imaginative properties in their fiction - further demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character.   [brief]
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Title: Robert Maynard Hutchins: a memoir 
Author: Mayer, Milton Sanford 1908-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | Autobiographies and Biographies | Print Media | Education | United States History
Publisher's Description: At age 28, he was dean of Yale Law School; at 30, president of the University of Chicago. By his mid-thirties, Robert Maynard Hutchins was an eminent figure in the world of educational innovation and liberal politics. And when he was 75, he told a friend, "I should have died at 35."Milton Mayer, Hutchins's colleague, and friend, gives an intimate picture of the remarkably outstanding, and fallible, man who participated in many of this century's most important social and political controversies. He captures the energy and intellectual fervor Hutchins could transmit to others, and which the man brought to the fields of law, politics, civil rights, and public affairs.Rich in detail and anecdote, this memoir vividly brings to life both a man and an age.   [brief]
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Title: Roberto Rossellini 
Author: Brunette, Peter
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts
Publisher's Description: This is the first full-length study in any language of the most significant film director of Italian Neorealism. Peter Brunette combines close analyses of Roberto Rossellini's formal and narrative style with a thorough account of his position in the political and cultural landscape of postwar Italy. More than forty films are explored, including Open City, Paisan, Voyage to Italy, The Rise to Power of Louis XIV, and films made in the director's later years that documented crucial epochs in human history. Brunette's book is based on eight years of research, during which he interviewed members of the director's family as well as Rossellini himself. Brunette also draws on an enormous body of European and American criticism and discusses the various intellectual debates spawned by the director's work. This landmark study is both a comprehensive introduction to one of the most influential practitioners of the contemporary cinema and a boldly original discussion of Italian Neorealism.   [brief]
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Title: Romain Rolland and the politics of intellectual engagement 
Author: Fisher, David James
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | European History
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Title: Roman honor: the fire in the bones
Author: Barton, Carlin A 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Classics | Ancient History | Classical History | Classical Politics | Classical Religions | Comparative Literature
Publisher's Description: This book is an attempt to coax Roman history closer to the bone, to the breath and matter of the living being. Drawing from a remarkable array of ancient and modern sources, Carlin Barton offers the most complex understanding to date of the emotional and spiritual life of the ancient Romans. Her provocative and original inquiry focuses on the sentiments of honor that shaped the Romans' sense of themselves and their society. Speaking directly to the concerns and curiosities of the contemporary reader, Barton brings Roman society to life, elucidating the complex relation between the inner life of its citizens and its social fabric. Though thoroughly grounded in the ancient writings - especially the work of Seneca, Cicero, and Livy - this book also draws from contemporary theories of the self and social theory to deepen our understanding of ancient Rome. Barton explores the relation between inner desires and social behavior through an evocative analysis of the operation, in Roman society, of contests and ordeals, acts of supplication and confession, and the sense of shame. As she fleshes out Roman physical and psychological life, she particularly sheds new light on the consequential transition from republic to empire as a watershed of Roman social relations. Barton's ability to build productively on both old and new scholarship on Roman history, society, and culture and her imaginative use of a wide range of work in such fields as anthropology, sociology, psychology, modern history, and popular culture will make this book appealing for readers interested in many subjects. This beautifully written work not only generates insight into Roman history, but also uses that insight to bring us to a new understanding of ourselves, our modern codes of honor, and why it is that we think and act the way we do.   [brief]
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Title: Romance and the "yellow peril": race, sex, and discursive strategies in Hollywood fiction
Author: Marchetti, Gina
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Hollywood films about Asians and interracial sexuality are the focus of Gina Marchetti's provocative new work. While miscegenation might seem an unlikely theme for Hollywood, Marchetti shows how fantasy-dramas of interracial rape, lynching, tragic love, and model marriage are powerfully evident in American cinema.The author begins with a discussion of D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms , then considers later films such as Shanghai Express , Madame Butterfly , and the recurring geisha movies. She also includes some fascinating "forgotten" films that have been overlooked by critics until now.Marchetti brings the theoretical perspective of recent writing on race, ethnicity, and gender to her analyses of film and television and argues persuasively that these media help to perpetuate social and racial inequality in America. Noting how social norms and taboos have been simultaneously set and broken by Hollywood filmmakers, she discusses the "orientalist" tensions underlying the construction of American cultural identity. Her book will be certain to interest readers in film, Asian, women's, and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: The romance of American psychology: political culture in the age of experts 
Author: Herman, Ellen
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Social Science | American Studies | Politics | Psychology | United States History
Publisher's Description: Psychological insight is the creed of our time. A quiet academic discipline two generations ago, psychology has become a voice of great cultural authority, informing everything from family structure to government policy. How has this fledgling science become the source of contemporary America's most potent ideology?In this groundbreaking book - the first to fully explore the political and cultural significance of psychology in post-World War II America - Ellen Herman tells the story of Americans' love affair with the behavioral sciences. It began during wartime. The atmosphere of crisis sustained from the 1940s through the Cold War gave psychological "experts" an opportunity to prove their social theories and behavioral techniques. Psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists carved a niche within government and began shaping military, foreign, and domestic policy. Herman examines this marriage of politics and psychology, which continued through the tumultuous 1960s.Psychological professionals' influence also spread among the general public. Drawn by promises of mental health and happiness, people turned to these experts for enlightenment. Their opinions validated postwar social movements from civil rights to feminism and became the basis of a new world view. Fascinating and long overdue, this book illuminates one of the dominant forces in American society.   [brief]
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Title: The romance of democracy: compliant defiance in contemporary Mexico
Author: Gutmann, Matthew C 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Latino Studies | Latin American Studies | Sociology | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: The Romance of Democracy gives a unique insider perspective on contemporary Mexico by examining the meaning of democracy in the lives of working-class residents in Mexico City today. A highly absorbing and vividly detailed ethnographic study of popular politics and official subjugation, the book provides a detailed, bottom-up exploration of what men and women think about national and neighborhood democracy, what their dreams are for a better society, and how these dreams play out in their daily lives. Based on extensive fieldwork in the same neighborhood he discussed in his acclaimed book The Meanings of Macho, Matthew C. Gutmann now explores the possibilities for political and social change in the world's most populous city. In the process he provides a new perspective on many issues affecting Mexicans countrywide.   [brief]
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Title: Romance on a global stage: pen pals, virtual ethnography, and "mail-order" marriages
Author: Constable, Nicole
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | American Studies | Asian American Studies | Postcolonial Studies | Sociology | Gender Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: By the year 2000 more than 350 Internet agencies were plying the email-order marriage trade, and the business of matching up mostly Western men with women from Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America had become an example of globalization writ large. This provocative work opens a window onto the complex motivations and experiences of the people behind the stereotypes and misconceptions that have exploded along with the practice of transnational courtship and marriage. Combining extensive Internet ethnography and face-to-face fieldwork, Romance on a Global Stage looks at the intimate realities of Filipinas, Chinese women, and U.S. men corresponding in hopes of finding a suitable marriage partner. Through the experiences of those engaged in pen pal relationships - their stories of love, romance, migration, and long-distance dating - this book conveys the richness and dignity of women's and men's choices without reducing these correspondents to calculating opportunists or naive romantics. Attentive to the structural, cultural, and personal factors that prompt women and men to seek marriage partners abroad, Romance on a Global Stage questions the dichotomies so frequently drawn between structure and agency, and between global and local levels of analysis.   [brief]
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Title: Romancing the past: the rise of vernacular prose historiography in thirteenth-century France 
Author: Spiegel, Gabrielle M
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Medieval History | European History | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: In a poststructuralist study of thirteenth-century French historical texts, Gabrielle Spiegel investigates the reasons for the rise of French vernacular prose historiography at this particular time. She argues that the vernacular prose histories that have until now been regarded as royalist were act . . . [more]
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Title: Rome and the enemy: imperial strategy in the principate
Author: Mattern, Susan P 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Classics | Classical History | Classical Politics | Classical Literature and Language | Military History | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: How did the Romans build and maintain one of the most powerful and stable empires in the history of the world? This illuminating book draws on the literature, especially the historiography, composed by the members of the elite who conducted Roman foreign affairs. From this evidence, Susan P. Mattern reevaluates the roots, motivations, and goals of Roman imperial foreign policy especially as that policy related to warfare. In a major reinterpretation of the sources, Rome and the Enemy shows that concepts of national honor, fierce competition for status, and revenge drove Roman foreign policy, and though different from the highly rationalizing strategies often attributed to the Romans, dictated patterns of response that remained consistent over centuries. Mattern reconstructs the world view of the Roman decision-makers, the emperors, and the elite from which they drew their advisers. She discusses Roman conceptions of geography, strategy, economics, and the influence of traditional Roman values on the conduct of military campaigns. She shows that these leaders were more strongly influenced by a traditional, stereotyped perception of the enemy and a drive to avenge insults to their national honor than by concepts of defensible borders. In fact, the desire to enforce an image of Roman power was a major policy goal behind many of their most brutal and aggressive campaigns. Rome and the Enemy provides a fascinating look into the Roman mind in addition to a compelling reexamination of Roman conceptions of warfare and national honor. The resulting picture creates a new understanding of Rome's long mastery of the Mediterranean world.   [brief]
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Title: Rome before Avignon: a social history of thirteenth-century Rome 
Author: Brentano, Robert 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Medieval History | Religion | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Robert Brentano evokes papal Rome in all its paradox and complicated brilliance. From a detailed re-creation of the physical "town" with its series of brick campanili and green and purple mosaic floors, to the intrigues of the great families, like the Orsini and Colonna, the reader is guided through complex and fascinating culture. Brentano's skill lies in his ability to combine the story of the vaulting ambition of the great families, only mildly tempered by their very real religious piety, with a vivid reconstruction of everyday life in postclassical Rome.   [brief]
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Title: "Ronald Reagan," the movie: and other episodes in political demonology
Author: Rogin, Michael Paul
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | Politics | Popular Culture | United States History
Publisher's Description: The fear of the subversive has governed American politics, from the racial conflicts of the early republic to the Hollywood anti-Communism of Ronald Reagan. Political monsters - the Indian cannibal, the black rapist, the demon rum, the bomb-throwing anarchist, the many-tentacled Communist conspiracy, the agents of international terrorism - are familiar figures in the dream life that so often dominates American political consciousness. What are the meanings and sources of these demons? Why does the American political imagination conjure them up? Michael Rogin answers these questions by examining the American countersubversive tradition.   [brief]
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Title: Roots of North Indian Shīʿism in Iran and Iraq: religion and state in Awadh, 1722-1859 
Author: Cole, Juan Ricardo
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: In this pioneering study of the Twelver Shi'i branch of Islam prevalent in Iraq and Iran, J. R. I. Cole traces the influence of Shi'i rule on the development of religious communalism and conflict in the North Indian State of Awadh (Oudh). He also examines the relationship of the Shi'i clergy to the state and the clerical reaction to British imperialism and capitalism.Based on research in rare manuscripts and in archives, the book reveals that the Shi'i clergy advocated policies that caused resentment among Sunnis and Hindus, thereby promoting religious communalism and setting the stage for modern communal conflict. The Shi'i learned men took government posts in support of Awadh's Shi'i nawabs and shahs; Awadh state support, in turn, helped transform Shi'ism from a persecuted "sect" to a dominant, if still minority, religious establishment.Sociologically, the book draws attention to the specific role of the state in defining "sect" and "church." It also argues the importance of class divisions within the Shi'i community, showing that the dominant clerical ideology was often not accepted by the laboring strata. Cole's study supports the view that Muslim communalism in Northern India had genuine historical roots and was not simply an elite strategy of modern Muslim politicians. Contrary to the arguments of some writers and to the image projected by Iran's current ayatullahs, he claims that most Shi'i clergy did not play a role of opposition to the state.   [brief]
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Title: Rosenzweig and Heidegger: between Judaism and German philosophy
Author: Gordon, Peter Eli
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | German Studies | Religion | Judaism | European History | Intellectual History | Jewish Studies | Social and Political Thought
Publisher's Description: Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) is widely regarded today as one of the most original and intellectually challenging figures within the so-called renaissance of German-Jewish thought in the Weimar period. The architect of a unique kind of existential theology, and an important influence upon such philosophers as Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Leo Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas, Rosenzweig is remembered chiefly as a "Jewish thinker," often to the neglect of his broader philosophical concerns. Cutting across the artificial divide that the traumatic memory of National Socialism has drawn between German and Jewish philosophy, this book seeks to restore Rosenzweig's thought to the German philosophical horizon in which it first took shape. It is the first English-language study to explore Rosenzweig's enduring debt to Hegel's political theory, neo-Kantianism, and life-philosophy; the book also provides a new, systematic reading of Rosenzweig's major work, The Star of Redemption. Most of all, the book sets out to explore a surprising but deep affinity between Rosenzweig's thought and that of his contemporary, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Resisting both apologetics and condemnation, Gordon suggests that Heidegger's engagement with Nazism should not obscure the profound and intellectually compelling bond in the once-shared tradition of modern German and Jewish thought. A remarkably lucid discussion of two notably difficult thinkers, this book represents an eloquent attempt to bridge the forced distinction between modern Jewish thought and the history of modern German philosophy - and to show that such a distinction cannot be sustained without doing violence to both.   [brief]
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