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Title: The English Civil War and after, 1642-1658
Author: Ashton, Robert 1924-
Published: University of California Press,  1970
Subjects: History | European History | Military History
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Title: The enigma of 1989: the USSR and the liberation of Eastern Europe 
Author: Lévesque, Jacques
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Politics | History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The Soviet external empire fell in 1989 virtually without bloodshed. The domino-like collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe was not anticipated by political experts in either the East or the West. Most surprising of all was the Soviet Union's permissive reactions to the secession. For the first time in modern history, such an epochal upheaval could take place not only without war but also without major international tensions.This book is the first comprehensive scholarly attempt to elucidate Soviet behavior toward Eastern Europe in 1989. Jacques Lévesque thoroughly analyses the policies of the USSR toward Eastern Europe during the Gorbachev era and clarifies the goals that underpinned these policies.Based on interviews with political leaders and exhaustive research in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and the other ex-Warsaw Pact countries, this book traces the nuances of each country's case as a set of continually changing, mutually reinforcing causes and effects.   [brief]
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Title: The Enlightenment against the Baroque: economics and aesthetics in the eighteenth century 
Author: Saisselin, Rémy G. (Rémy Gilbert) 1925-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Economics and Business | Popular Culture | Art | Renaissance History
Publisher's Description: How do seemingly disparate arenas of Enlightenment philosophy, economic theories, boudoir etiquette, literary styles, and artistic modes coincide in the late eighteenth century? In this poetic essay on the evolution of the idea of luxury and art, Rémy Saisselin uses precise, witty examples to describe the development of our modern taste, ultimately the successor of the more spiritual and grand baroque goût . His analysis both illuminates and distinguishes between eighteenth-century and modern varieties of conspicuous consumption.This persuasive discourse depicts the rise of luxe as an escape from ennui and shows how, for the first time in European history, a large class of wealthy, leisured people emerged to make art, luxury, and the avoidance of boredom its preoccupation. Saisselin provides an original and lucid picture of the first phases in the emergence of a specifically bourgeois taste.   [brief]
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Title: Entangled edens: visions of the Amazon
Author: Slater, Candace
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Literature | Folklore and Mythology | Natural History | Latin American Studies | History of Science
Publisher's Description: Candace Slater takes us on a journey into the Amazon that will forever change our ideas about one of the most written-about, filmed, and fought-over areas in the world. In this book she deftly traces a rich and marvelous legacy of stories and images of the Amazon that reflects the influence of widely different groups of people--conquistadors, corporate executives, subsistence farmers --over the centuries. A careful, passionate consideration of one of the most powerful environmental icons of our time, Entangled Edens makes clear that we cannot defend the Amazon's dazzling array of plants and animals without comprehending its equally astonishing human and cultural diversity. Early explorers describe encounters with fearsome warrior women and tell of golden cities complete with twenty-four-carat kings. Contemporary miners talk about a living, breathing gold. TV documentaries decry deforestation and mercury poisoning. How do these disparate visions of the Amazon relate to one another? As she fits the pieces of the puzzle together, Slater shows how today's widespread portrayal of the region as a fragile rain forest on the brink of annihilation is every bit as likely as earlier depictions to obscure important aspects of this immense and complicated region. In this book, Slater draws on her fifteen years of experience collecting stories and oral histories among many different groups of people in the Amazon. Throughout Entangled Edens, the voices of contemporary Amazonians mingle with the analyses of such writers as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Theodore Roosevelt, and nineteenth-century naturalist Henry Walter Bates. Slater convinces us that these stories and ideas, together with an understanding of their origins and ongoing impact, are as critical as scientific analyses in the fight to preserve the rain forest.   [brief]
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Title: Environment and experience: settlement culture in nineteenth-century Oregon 
Author: Boag, Peter G
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | United States History | Californian and Western History | Environmental Studies
Publisher's Description: The pioneer battling with a hostile environment - whether it be arid land, drought, dust storms, dense forests, or harsh winters - is a staple of western American history. In this innovative, multi-disciplinary work, Peter Boag takes issue with the image of the settler against the frontier, arguing that settlers viewed their new surroundings positively and attempted to create communities in harmony with the landscape. Using Oregon's Calapooia Valley as a case study, Boag presents a history of both land and people that shows the process of change as settlers populated the land and turned it to their own uses.By combining local sources, ranging from letters and diaries to early maps and local histories, and drawing upon the methods of geography, natural history, and literary analysis, Boag has created a richly detailed grass-roots portrait of a frontier community. Most significantly, he analyzes the connections among environmental, cultural, and social changes in ways that illuminate the frontier experience throughout the American west.   [brief]
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Title: Envisioning power: ideologies of dominance and crisis
Author: Wolf, Eric R 1923-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Anthropology | Social Theory | Social and Political Thought | Political Theory | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: With the originality and energy that have marked his earlier works, Eric Wolf now explores the historical relationship of ideas, power, and culture. Responding to anthropology's long reliance on a concept of culture that takes little account of power, Wolf argues that power is crucial in shaping the circumstances of cultural production. Responding to social-science notions of ideology that incorporate power but disregard the ways ideas respond to cultural promptings, he demonstrates how power and ideas connect through the medium of culture.Wolf advances his argument by examining three very different societies, each remarkable for its flamboyant ideological expressions: the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast, the Aztecs of pre-Hispanic Mexico, and National Socialist Germany. Tracing the history of each case, he shows how these societies faced tensions posed by ecological, social, political, or psychological crises, prompting ideological responses that drew on distinctive, historically rooted cultural understandings. In each case study, Wolf analyzes how the regnant ideology intertwines with power around the pivotal relationships that govern social labor. Anyone interested in the history of anthropology or in how the social sciences make comparisons will want to join Wolf in Envisioning Power .   [brief]
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Title: Epic encounters: culture, media, and U.S. interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000
Author: McAlister, Melani 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: American Studies | United States History | Middle Eastern History | Popular Culture | Middle Eastern Studies | Ethnic Studies | Religion
Publisher's Description: In the last half of the twentieth century, cultural products--from films and news reports to museum exhibits and novels--profoundly shaped ideas about the relationship between Americans and the Middle East. In this innovative book, Melani McAlister explores the cultural history of political interests, arguing that U.S. encounters with the Middle East were influenced by both the presence of oil and the religious symbolism of the region. McAlister's richly textured study shows how culture functions as a social and historical force in shaping politics and identity. She skillfully weaves lively and accessible readings of popular culture with a rigorous analysis of U.S. foreign policy and the domestic politics of race. McAlister begins by situating the postwar development of U.S.-Middle East relations, including the rise of anticolonialism and the establishment of the state of Israel. Subsequent chapters consider specific events and cultural texts such as the epic film The Ten Commandments, the King Tut museum exhibit, writings from the Black arts movement, the U.S.-Iranian hostage crisis, and the 1990-1991 Gulf War. In each of these cases, McAlister demonstrates how representations of the Middle East have been a site of struggle over both the nature of U.S. foreign policy and the construction of race, religion, and gender within the United States. Truly interdisciplinary, this work will appeal to a wide audience as it illuminates the significant intersection of culture and politics that is at the heart of both nationalism and globalization.   [brief]
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Title: Epic traditions in the contemporary world: the poetics of community 
Author: Beissinger, Margaret H
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Literature | Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Comparative Literature
Publisher's Description: The epic tradition has been part of many different cultures throughout human history. This noteworthy collection of essays provides a comparative reassessment of epic and its role in the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds, as it explores the variety of contemporary approaches to the epic genre. Employing theoretical perspectives drawn from anthropology, literary studies, and gender studies, the authors examine familiar and less well known oral and literary traditions - ancient Greek and Latin, Arabic, South Slavic, Indian, Native American, Italian, English, and Caribbean - demonstrating the continuing vitality of the epic tradition.Juxtaposing work on the traditional canon of western epics with scholarship on contemporary epics from various parts of the world, these essays cross the divide between oral and literary forms that has long marked the approach to the genre. With its focus on the links among narrative, politics, and performance, the collection creates a new dialogue illustrating the sociopolitical significance of the epic tradition. Taken together, the essays raise compelling new issues for the study of epic, as they examine concerns such as national identity, gender, pedagogy, and the creation of the canon.   [brief]
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Title: Erasmus of the Low Countries 
Author: Tracy, James D
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | European History | Autobiographies and Biographies | Renaissance History
Publisher's Description: Few historical figures have been more important in modeling the ideal of impartial critical scholarship than Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536). Yet his critical scholarship, though beholden to no one, was not dispassionate. James Tracy shows how Erasmus the scholar sought through his writings to promote the moral and religious renewal of Christian society.Tracy finds the genesis of the humanist's notion of a "Christian republic" of pious and learned individuals in his "Burgundian," or Low Countries, roots. Erasmus's vision of reform, Tracy argues, sprung from a humanist tradition focusing on the importance of teaching ( doctrina ), a tradition from which Erasmus departed in his optimism about human nature and his deep suspicion of the powers that be. Amid the storms of Reformation controversy, he pruned back the "dissimulation" by which he had thought to convey different meanings to different readers, yet in the end he could not control the way his words were read. If Erasmus's scholarly ideal carries an enduring fascination, so too does his dilemma as a man of circumspection who would also be a reformer.   [brief]
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Title: Eros and the Jews: from biblical Israel to contemporary America
Author: Biale, David 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Religion | Sociology | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Contradictory stereotypes about Jewish sexuality pervade modern culture, from Lenny Bruce's hip eroticism to Woody Allen's little man with the big libido (and even bigger sexual neurosis). Does Judaism in fact liberate or repress sexual desire? David Biale does much more than answer that question as he traces Judaism's evolving position on sexuality, from the Bible and Talmud to Zionism up through American attitudes today. What he finds is a persistent conflict between asceticism and gratification, between procreation and pleasure.From the period of the Talmud onward, Biale says, Jewish culture continually struggled with sexual abstinence, attempting to incorporate the virtues of celibacy, as it absorbed them from Greco-Roman and Christian cultures, within a theology of procreation. He explores both the canonical writings of male authorities and the alternative voices of women, drawing from a fascinating range of sources that includes the Book of Ruth, Yiddish literature, the memoirs of the founders of Zionism, and the films of Woody Allen.Biale's historical reconstruction of Jewish sexuality sees the present through the past and the past through the present. He discovers an erotic tradition that is not dogmatic, but a record of real people struggling with questions that have challenged every human culture, and that have relevance for the dilemmas of both Jews and non-Jews today.   [brief]
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Title: Erotic faculties 
Author: Frueh, Joanna
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Art | Gender Studies | Women's Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Art Theory
Publisher's Description: The erotic and the intellectual come together to create a new kind of criticism in the lushly written work of Joanna Frueh. Addressing sexuality in ways that are usually hidden or left unsaid, Frueh - a noted performance artist and art historian - explores subjects such as aging, beauty, love, sex, pleasure, contemporary art, and the body as a site and vehicle of knowledge. Frueh's language is explicit, graphic, fragmented. She assumes multiple voices: those of lover, prophet, daughter, mythmaker, art critic, activist, and bleeding heart. What results is an utterly original narrative that frees us from the false objectivity of traditional critical discourse and affirms the erotic as a way to ease human suffering.Through personal reflection, parody, autobiography, and poetry, Frueh shows us what it means to perform criticism, to personalize critical thinking. Rejecting postmodern, deconstructed prose, she recuperates the sentimental, proudly asserts a romantic viewpoint, and disrupts academic and feminist conventions. Erotic Faculties seeks to free the power of our unutilized erotic faculties and to expand the possibilities of criticism; it is a wild ride and a consummate pleasure.   [brief]
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Title: The erotic Whitman 
Author: Pollak, Vivian R
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Literature | American Studies | Gender Studies | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: In this provocative analysis of Whitman's exemplary quest for happiness, Vivian Pollak skillfully explores the intimate relationships that contributed to his portrayal of masculinity in crisis. She maintains that in representing himself as a characteristic nineteenth-century American and in proposing to heal national ills, Whitman was trying to temper his own inner conflicts as well. The poet's expansive vision of natural eroticism and of unfettered comradeship between democratic equals was, however, only part of the story. As Whitman waged a conscious campaign to challenge misogynistic and homophobic literary codes, he promoted a raceless, classless ideal of sexual democracy that theoretically equalized all varieties of desire and resisted none. Pollak suggests that this goal remains imperfectly achieved in his writings, which liberates some forbidden voices and silences others. Integrating biography and criticism, Pollak employs a loosely chronological organization to describe the poet's multifaceted "faith in sex." Drawing on his early fiction, journalism, poetry, and self-reviews, as well as letters and notebook entries, she shows how in spite of his personal ambivalence about sustained erotic intimacy, Whitman came to imagine himself as "the phallic choice of America."   [brief]
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Title: Essays in population history: Mexico and the Caribbean 
Author: Cook, Sherburne Friend 1896-1974
Published: University of California Press,  1979
Subjects: Latin American Studies
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Title: Essays on the blurring of art and life
Author: Kaprow, Allan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Art | Art Criticism | Art Theory
Publisher's Description: As the creator of "Happenings" and "Environments," Allan Kaprow is the prince and prophet of all we call performance art today. He is also known for having written some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and influential essays of his generation. From "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" in 1958 to "The Meaning of Life" in 1990, Kaprow has conducted a sustained philosophical inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life, and thus into the nature of meaning itself. With the publication of this book, twenty-three of Kaprow's most significant essays are brought together in one volume for the first time.Kaprow charts his own evolution as an artist and also comments on contemporaneous developments in the arts. From the modernist avant-garde of the fifties to the current postmodern fin de siècle , Kaprow has written about - and from within - the shifting, blurring boundaries of genre, media, culture, and experience. Edited and introduced by critic Jeff Kelley, these essays bring into crisp focus the thinking of one of the most influential figures in the varied landscape of American art since the late 1950s.   [brief]
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Title: Essential subtleties on the silver sea: the Yin-hai jing-wei: a Chinese classic on ophthalmology
Author: Sun, Simiao 581-682
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | China | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: Here is the first translation into English of the complete Yin-Hai Jing-Wei , a classic fifteenth-century text on Chinese ophthalmology. As one of the few original manuscripts on traditional Chinese medicine translated into a Western language, this work offers an unprecedented view of the practice of medicine, and specifically eye care, in premodern China. Superbly rendered from the classical Chinese and extensively annotated by Paul U. Unschuld and Jürgen Kovacs, the text provides detailed descriptions of the etiology, symptomatology, and therapy of every eye disease known to fifteenth-century Chinese practitioners. The translators' introduction also provides the first in-depth analysis of the development of this specialty within Chinese medicine. As a source for comparative studies of Chinese and Western medicine and numerous other issues in the history of medicine and Chinese thought, the Yin-Hai Jing-Wei has no equal in the Western world.   [brief]
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Title: Ethics in an epidemic: AIDS, morality, and culture 
Author: Murphy, Timothy F 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Sociology | Ethics | Medicine | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: AIDS strikes most heavily at those already marginalized by conventional society. With no immediate prospect of vaccination or cure, how can liberty, dignity, and reasoned hope be preserved in the shadow of an epidemic? In this humane and graceful book, philosopher Timothy Murphy offers insight into our attempts - popular and academic, American and non-American, scientific and political - to make moral sense of pain.Murphy addresses the complex moral questions raised by AIDS for health-care workers, politicians, policy makers, and even people with AIDS themselves. He ranges widely, analyzing contrasting visions of the origin and the future of the epidemic, the moral and political functions of obituaries, the uncertain value of celebrity involvement in anti-AIDS education, the functional uses of AIDS in the discourse of presidential campaigns, the exclusionary function of HIV testing for immigrants, the priority given to AIDS on the national health agenda, and the hypnotic publicity given to "innocent" victims.Murphy's discussions of the many social and political confusions about AIDS are unified by his attempt to articulate the moral assumptions framing our interpretations of the epidemic. By understanding those assumptions, we will be in a better position to resist self-serving and invidious moralizing, reckless political response, and social censure of the sick and the dying.   [brief]
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Title: Ethnocriticism: ethnography, history, literature 
Author: Krupat, Arnold
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Anthropology | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Native American Studies
Publisher's Description: Ethnocriticism moves cultural critique to the boundaries that exist between cultures. The boundary traversed in Krupat's dexterous new book is the contested line between native and mainstream American literatures and cultures.For over a century the discourses of ethnography, history, and literature have sought to represent the Indian in America. Krupat considers all these discourses and the ways in which Indians have attempted to "write back," producing an oppositional - or at least a parallel - discourse.   [brief]
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Title: Ethnographic presents pioneering anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands
Author: Hays, Terence E
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | East Asia Other
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Title: The Ethnography of reading
Author: Boyarin, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Literature
Publisher's Description: Writing, the subject of much innovative scholarship in recent years, is only half of what we call literacy. The other half, reading, now finally receives its due in these groundbreaking essays by a distinguished group of anthropologists and literary scholars.The essays move well beyond the simple rubric of "literacy" in its traditional sense of evolutionary advancement from oral to written communication. Some investigate reading in exotically cross-cultural contexts. Some analyze the long historical transformation of reading in the West from a collective, oral practice to the private, silent one it is today, while others demonstrate that in certain Western contexts reading is still very much a social activity. The reading situations described here range from Anglo-Saxon England to contemporary Indonesia, from ancient Israel to a Kashaya Pomo Indian reservation.Filled with insights that erase the line between orality and textuality, this collection will attract a broad readership in anthropology, literature, history, and philosophy, as well as in religious, gender, and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: European Jewry and the First Crusade
Author: Chazan, Robert
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Religion | Medieval History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: One of the unanticipated results of the First Crusade in 1095 was a series of violent assaults on major Jewish communities in the Rhineland. Robert Chazan offers the first detailed analysis of these events, illuminating the attitudes that triggered the assaults as well as the beliefs that informed J . . . [more]
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