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Title: The royal image: illustrations of the Grandes chroniques de France, 1274-1422 
Author: Hedeman, Anne Dawson
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Art | Art History | Medieval Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: The Grandes Chroniques de France is a vernacular, frequently illustrated history of the medieval French monarchs. Originally describing the lives of the kings from their origins in Troy in 1274 to the reign of Philip Augustus, it was updated in several stages to the life of Charles VI. Copied and amended for a variety of royal and courtly patrons, approximately 130 of these manuscripts exist today. Anne Hedeman provides the first critical and comprehensive study of the chronicle's illustrations.Hedeman concentrates on the illustrations in twenty manuscripts, analyzing their artistic and cultural significance and offering new methods for studying illustrated manuscripts. She discusses the chronicle in relation to the political ideology of Louis IX, vernacular history, and the Latin chronicle tradition at Saint-Denis. Looking at the manuscripts of various periods, the author compares their representations of historical events, kingship, and individuals in and around the royal court. She also contrasts the styles of several authors and illustrators of the chronicle. The Royal Image includes a catalogue of over seventy-five illustrated manuscripts, and an appendix listing the artists. An additional appendix lists surviving manuscripts.   [brief]
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Title: Rugged justice: the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the American West, 1891-1941 
Author: Frederick, David C
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | History | United States History | Californian and Western History | California and the West | Law
Publisher's Description: Few chapters in American judicial history have enjoyed as colorful a past as has the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Created in 1891, its jurisdiction now encompasses California, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Hawaii, and Alaska. David Frederick has mined archival sources, including court records and legal papers throughout the West and in Washington, D.C., to document the Ninth Circuit's first fifty years. His findings are much more than a record of the court, however, for they also provide a unique social and cultural history of the West.During these years, the court heard key cases involving railroads, the Alaska gold rush, Chinese immigration, organized labor, and use of natural resources. Many of the decisions from this period foreshadowed issues that are with us today. Frederick also documents the court's part in Western development and in issues relating to World War I, Prohibition, New Deal legislation, and the evolving role of federal judges.Frederick portrays the West's most important judicial institution with clarity and intelligence, reminding us that the evolution of the Ninth Circuit both reflected and affected the dramatic changes occurring in the West during the court's early years. This is a book that will appeal not only to lawyers, but to historians, sociologists, and general readers as well.   [brief]
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Title: Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity
Author: Mitchell, Timothy 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | Middle Eastern Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Postcolonial Studies | Economics and Business | Middle Eastern History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Can one explain the power of global capitalism without attributing to capital a logic and coherence it does not have? Can one account for the powers of techno-science in terms that do not merely reproduce its own understanding of the world? Rule of Experts examines these questions through a series of interrelated essays focused on Egypt in the twentieth century. These explore the way malaria, sugar cane, war, and nationalism interacted to produce the techno-politics of the modern Egyptian state; the forms of debt, discipline, and violence that founded the institution of private property; the methods of measurement, circulation, and exchange that produced the novel idea of a national "economy," yet made its accurate representation impossible; the stereotypes and plagiarisms that created the scholarly image of the Egyptian peasant; and the interaction of social logics, horticultural imperatives, powers of desire, and political forces that turned programs of economic reform in unanticipated directions. Mitchell is a widely known political theorist and one of the most innovative writers on the Middle East. He provides a rich examination of the forms of reason, power, and expertise that characterize contemporary politics. Together, these intellectually provocative essays will challenge a broad spectrum of readers to think harder, more critically, and more politically about history, power, and theory.   [brief]
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Title: Rural change and royal finances in Spain at the end of the old regime 
Author: Herr, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History
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Title: Rural China takes off: institutional foundations of economic reform 
Author: Oi, Jean Chun
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | China | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: In this incisive analysis of one of the most spectacular economic breakthroughs in the Deng era, Jean C. Oi shows how and why Chinese rural-based industry has become the fastest growing economic sector not just in China but in the world. Oi argues that decollectivization and fiscal decentralization provided party officials of the localities - counties, townships, and villages - with the incentives to act as entrepreneurs and to promote rural industrialization in many areas of the Chinese countryside. As a result, the corporatism practiced by local officials has become effective enough to challenge the centrality of the national state.Dealing not only with the political setting of rural industrial development, Oi's original and strongly argued study also makes a broader contribution to conceptualizations of corporatism in political theory. Oi writes provocatively about property rights and principal-agent relationships and shows the complex financial incentives that underpin and strengthen the growth in local state corporatism and shape its evolution. This book will be essential for those interested in Chinese politics, comparative politics, and communist and post-communist systems.   [brief]
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Title: The Russian city between tradition and modernity, 1850-1900 
Author: Brower, Daniel R
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity provides a comprehensive history of urban development in European Russia during the last half of the nineteenth century. Using both statistical perspectives on urbanization and cultural representations of the city, Brower constructs a synthetic view of the remaking of urban Russia. He argues that the reformed municipalities succeeded in creating an embryonic civil society among the urban elite but failed to fashion a unified, orderly city. By the end of the century, the cities confronted social disorder of a magnitude that resembled latent civil war.Drawing on a wide range of archival and published sources, including census materials and reports from municipal leaders and tsarist officials, Brower offers a new approach to the social history of Russia. The author emphasizes the impact of the massive influx of migrants on the country's urban centers, whose presence dominated the social landscape of the city. He outlines the array of practices by which the migrant laborers adapted to urban living and stresses the cultural barriers that isolated them from the well-to-do urban population. Brower suggests that future scholarship should pay particular attention to the duality between the sweeping visions of social progress of the elite and the unique practices of the urban workforce. This contradiction, he argues, offers a key explanation for the social instability of imperial Russia in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.   [brief]
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Title: Russian opera and the symbolist movement
Author: Morrison, Simon Alexander 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Music | Opera | Musicology | Composers | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Literature
Publisher's Description: An aesthetic, historical, and theoretical study of four scores, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement is a groundbreaking and imaginative treatment of the important yet neglected topic of Russian opera in the Silver Age. Spanning the gap between the supernatural Russian music of the nineteenth century and the compositions of Prokofiev and Stravinsky, this exceptionally insightful and well-researched book explores how Russian symbolist poets interpreted opera and prompted operatic innovation. Simon Morrison shows how these works, though stylistically and technically different, reveal the extent to which the operatic representation of the miraculous can be translated into its enactment. Morrison treats these largely unstudied pieces by canonical composers: Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, Rimsky-Korsakov's Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, Scriabin's unfinished Mysterium, and Prokofiev's Fiery Angel. The chapters, revisionist studies of these composers and scores, address separate aspects of Symbolist poetics, discussing such topics as literary and musical decadence, pagan-Christian syncretism, theurgy, and life creation, or the portrayal of art in life. The appendix offers the first complete English-language translation of Scriabin's libretto for the Preparatory Act. Providing valuable insight into both the Symbolist enterprise and Russian musicology, this book casts new light on opera's evolving, ambiguous place in fin de siècle culture.   [brief]
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Title: Russia's last capitalists: the Nepmen, 1921-1929 
Author: Ball, Alan M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1921 Lenin surprised foreign observers and many in his own Party, by calling for the legalization of private trade and manufacturing. Within a matter of months, this New Economic Policy (NEP) spawned many thousands of private entrepreneurs, dubbed Nepmen. After delineating this political background, Alan Ball turns his attention to the Nepmen themselves, examining where they came from, how they fared in competition with the socialist sector of the economy, their importance in the Soviet economy, and the consequences of their "liquidation" at the end of the 1920s. Alan Ball's history of this experiment with capitalism is strikingly relevant to current efforts toward economic reform in the USSR.   [brief]
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Title: Russia's women: accommodation, resistance, transformation
Author: Clements, Barbara Evans 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: By ignoring gender issues, historians have failed to understand how efforts to control women - and women's reactions to these efforts - have shaped political and social institutions and thus influenced the course of Russian and Soviet history. These original essays challenge a host of traditional assumptions by integrating women into the Russian past. Using recent advances in the study of gender, the family, class, and the status of women, the authors examine various roles of Russian women and offer a broad overview of a vibrant and growing field.   [brief]
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Title: Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood glamour photography
Author: Dance, Robert 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Photography | California and the West
Publisher's Description: When Ruth Harriet Louise joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio with "more stars than there are in heaven," she was twenty-two years old and the only woman working as a portrait photographer for the Hollywood studios. In a career that lasted from 1925 until 1930, Louise (born Ruth Goldstein) photographed all the stars, contract players, and many of the hopefuls who passed through the studio's front gates, including Greta Garbo, Lon Chaney, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, and Norma Shearer. This book, which coincides with a major traveling retrospective of Louise's work organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, is the first collection of her exquisite photographs. Containing over one hundred breathtaking images--reproduced from the original negatives--, it attests to the talent and vision of a surprisingly unknown photographer who formed the images and helped create the popularity of some of our most enduring stars. Louise shot about one hundred thousand negatives that distilled the glamour, drama, and excitement of MGM's feature productions. Louise's original photographs were circulated to millions of moviegoers, magazine and newspaper readers, and fans. The movies and publicity machine that these photographs supported shaped the basic notions of stardom, glamour, and fashion in the 1920s and still affect our ideas today. Robert Dance and Bruce Robertson re-create the entire process--from the moment a performer sat in front of Louise's camera to the point at which a fan pasted a star's picture into a scrapbook. They provide insight into Louise's work habits in the studio and describe the personal dynamics between Louise and the actors she photographed. They include a condensed account of the methods of other photographers, a sharp analysis of fan culture in the period, and superb readings of Louise's photographs. With its combination of well-known and rare images, all magnificently reproduced, this book is a fitting tribute to one of the most gifted and underappreciated glamour photographers of Hollywood's golden period. Note: The hardcover edition of this book does have a dust jacket. (Some hardcovers of University of California Press books available in paperback do not.)   [brief]
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