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Title: Made in God's image?: Eve and Adam in the Genesis mosaics at San Marco, Venice 
Author: Jolly, Penny Howell
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | Art History | Medieval Studies | Women's Studies | Religion
Publisher's Description: The stunning mosaics that illustrate the story of Creation in the church of San Marco in Venice are the focus of Penny Howell Jolly's compelling and provocative book. Scholars of medieval art have long been interested in the Genesis mosaics because they copy a nearly destroyed fifth-century illuminated Greek manuscript known as the Cotton Genesis. But instead of seeing the mosaics as a vehicle for reconstructing a lost cycle of paintings, Jolly presents them as a social document revealing the essential misogyny that existed in thirteenth-century Venice. Jolly analyzes more than twenty scenes, one by one in narrative order, and her perceptive reading goes well beyond what the Genesis Vulgate text says about Eve and Adam. The mosaics establish Eve as the culpable character from the very moment of her Creation, says Jolly, and depict her as dangerous and unrepentant at the end. Incorporating both feminist religious and narratological studies, Jolly poses important questions on the nature of visual language as opposed to verbal language. The very ability of visual forms to recall a rich variety of references is one source of their power, and propaganda must have enough breadth of reference to be read by diverse groups. The San Marco cupola, Jolly maintains, is dealing in powerful propaganda, and her pictorial observations offer an articulate and refreshing new view of this well-known work.   [brief]
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Title: "Mademoiselle Irnois" and other stories 
Author: Gobineau, Arthur, comte de 1816-1882
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature
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Title: Magic lands: western cityscapes and American culture after 1940
Author: Findlay, John M 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | United States History | California and the West | American Studies | Urban Studies | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: The American West conjures up images of pastoral tranquility and wide open spaces, but by 1970 the Far West was the most urbanized section of the country. Exploring four intriguing cityscapes - Disneyland, Stanford Industrial Park, Sun City, and the 1962 Seattle World's Fair - John Findlay shows how each created a sense of cohesion and sustained people's belief in their superior urban environment. This first book-length study of the urban West after 1940 argues that Westerners deliberately tried to build cities that differed radically from their eastern counterparts.In 1954, Walt Disney began building the world's first theme park, using Hollywood's movie-making techniques. The creators of Stanford Industrial Park were more hesitant in their approach to a conceptually organized environment, but by the mid-1960s the Park was the nation's prototypical "research park" and the intellectual downtown for the high-technology region that became Silicon Valley.In 1960, on the outskirts of Phoenix, Del E. Webb built Sun City, the largest, most influential retirement community in the United States. Another innovative cityscape arose from the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and provided a futuristic, somewhat fanciful vision of modern life.These four became "magic lands" that provided an antidote to the apparent chaos of their respective urban milieus. Exemplars of a new lifestyle, they are landmarks on the changing cultural landscape of postwar America.   [brief]
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Title: The magic mountains: hill stations and the British raj 
Author: Kennedy, Dane Keith
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | European History | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Perched among peaks that loom over heat-shimmering plains, hill stations remain among the most curious monuments to the British colonial presence in India. In this engaging and meticulously researched study, Dane Kennedy explores the development and history of the hill stations of the raj. He shows that these cloud-enshrouded havens were sites of both refuge and surveillance for British expatriates: sanctuaries from the harsh climate as well as an alien culture; artificial environments where colonial rulers could nurture, educate, and reproduce themselves; commanding heights from which orders could be issued with an Olympian authority.Kennedy charts the symbolic and sociopolitical functions of the hill stations over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that these highland communities became much more significant to the British colonial government than mere places for rest and play. Particularly after the revolt of 1857, they became headquarters for colonial political and military authorities. In addition, the hill stations provided employment to countless Indians who worked as porters, merchants, government clerks, domestics, and carpenters.The isolation of British authorities at the hill stations reflected the paradoxical character of the British raj itself, Kennedy argues. While attempting to control its subjects, it remained aloof from Indian society. Ironically, as more Indians were drawn to these mountain areas for work, and later for vacation, the carefully guarded boundaries between the British and their subjects eroded. Kennedy argues that after the turn of the century, the hill stations were increasingly incorporated into the landscape of Indian social and cultural life.   [brief]
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Title: A magic still dwells: comparative religion in the postmodern age
Author: Patton, Kimberley C. (Kimberley Christine) 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Religion | Comparative Religions
Publisher's Description: The first thorough assessment of the field of comparative religion in forty years, this groundbreaking volume surmounts the seemingly intractable division between postmodern scholars who reject the comparative endeavor and those who affirm it. The contributors demonstrate that a broader vision of religion, involving different scales of comparison for different purposes, is both justifiable and necessary. A Magic Still Dwells brings together leading historians of religions from a wide range of backgrounds and vantage points, and draws from traditions as diverse as Indo-European mythology, ancient Greek religion, Judaism, Buddhism, Ndembu ritual, and the spectrum of religions practiced in America. The contributors take seriously the postmodern critique, explain its impact on their work, uphold or reject various premises, and in several cases demonstrate new comparative approaches. Together, the essays represent a state-of-the-art assessment of current issues in the comparative study of religion.   [brief]
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Title: The magistrate's tael: rationalizing fiscal reform in eighteenth-century Chʿing China 
Author: Zelin, Madeleine
Published: University of California Press,  1984
Subjects: History | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: Madeleine Zelin shatters the image of China as a backward empire wracked by corruption and economic stagnation, thrust into the modern world when the western gunboats arrived in the 1840s, by providing an account of the indigenous evolution of the Chinese state. The Magistrate's Tael makes it possib . . . [more]
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Title: Magnetic mountain: Stalinism as a civilization
Author: Kotkin, Stephen
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: This study is the first of its kind: a street-level inside account of what Stalinism meant to the masses of ordinary people who lived it. Stephen Kotkin was the first American in 45 years to be allowed into Magnitogorsk, a city built in response to Stalin's decision to transform the predominantly agricultural nation into a "country of metal." With unique access to previously untapped archives and interviews, Kotkin forges a vivid and compelling account of the impact of industrialization on a single urban community.Kotkin argues that Stalinism offered itself as an opportunity for enlightenment. The utopia it proffered, socialism, would be a new civilization based on the repudiation of capitalism. The extent to which the citizenry participated in this scheme and the relationship of the state's ambitions to the dreams of ordinary people form the substance of this fascinating story. Kotkin tells it deftly, with a remarkable understanding of the social and political system, as well as a keen instinct for the details of everyday life.Kotkin depicts a whole range of life: from the blast furnace workers who labored in the enormous iron and steel plant, to the families who struggled with the shortage of housing and services. Thematically organized and closely focused, Magnetic Mountain signals the beginning of a new stage in the writing of Soviet social history.   [brief]
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Title: The Magnificent Ambersons: a reconstruction
Author: Carringer, Robert L
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film
Publisher's Description: Orson Welles considered The Magnificent Ambersons the crucial turning point in his career. He said, " They destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me." In 1942, while Welles was away, RKO Studios drastically recut the completed film. None of that deleted footage is known to survive.Now film scholar Robert Carringer has reconstructed Welles's own version of Ambersons , using all available surviving evidence including rare studio documents and the recollections of Welles himself and other original participants in the film.Carringer reaches startling conclusions about where the responsibility for the film's undoing ultimately lies. His spellbinding - and no doubt controversial - book will be eagerly welcomed by film historians and enthusiasts.   [brief]
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Title: The maiden of Ludmir: a Jewish holy woman and her world
Author: Deutsch, Nathaniel
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Women's Studies | European History | Judaism | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Hannah Rochel Verbermacher, a Hasidic holy woman known as the Maiden of Ludmir, was born in early-nineteenth-century Russia and became famous as the only woman in the three-hundred-year history of Hasidism to function as a rebbe - or charismatic leader - in her own right. Nathaniel Deutsch follows the traces left by the Maiden in both history and legend to fully explore her fascinating story for the first time. The Maiden of Ludmir offers powerful insights into the Jewish mystical tradition, into the Maiden's place within it, and into the remarkable Jewish community of Ludmir. Her biography ultimately becomes a provocative meditation on the complex relationships between history and memory, Judaism and modernity. History first finds the Maiden in the eastern European town of Ludmir, venerated by her followers as a master of the Kabbalah, teacher, and visionary, and accused by her detractors of being possessed by a dybbuk, or evil spirit. Deutsch traces the Maiden's steps from Ludmir to Ottoman Palestine, where she eventually immigrated and re-established herself as a holy woman. While the Maiden's story - including her adamant refusal to marry - recalls the lives of holy women in other traditions, it also brings to light the largely unwritten history of early-modern Jewish women. To this day, her transgressive behavior, a challenge to traditional Jewish views of gender and sexuality, continues to inspire debate and, sometimes, censorship within the Jewish community.   [brief]
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Title: Making environmental policy
Author: Fiorino, Daniel J
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Public Policy | Ecology
Publisher's Description: Who speaks for the trees, the water, the soil, and the air in American government today? Which agencies confront environmental problems, and how do they set priorities? How are the opposing claims of interest groups evaluated? Why do certain issues capture the public's attention?In Making Environmental Policy , Daniel Fiorino combines the hands-on experience of an insider with the analytic rigor of a scholar to provide the fullest, most readable introduction to federal environmental policymaking yet published. A committed environmental advocate, he takes readers from theory to practice, demonstrating how laws and institutions address environmental needs and balance them against other political pressures.Drawing on the academic literature and his own familiarity with current trends and controversies, Fiorino offers a lucid view of the institutional and analytic aspects of environmental policymaking. A chapter on analytic methods describes policymakers' attempts to apply objective standards to complex environmental decisions. The book also examines how the law, the courts, political tensions, and international environmental agencies have shaped environmental issues. Fiorino grounds his discussion with references to numerous specific cases, including radon, global warming, lead, and hazardous wastes. Timely and necessary, this is an invaluable handbook for students, activists, and anyone wanting to unravel contemporary American environmental politics.   [brief]
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Title: Making health work: human growth in modern Japan 
Author: Mosk, Carl
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Sociology | Demography | Japan | Asian History | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Mosk shows how population quality provides a key to understanding economic growth and social change in Japan.
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Title: Making modern mothers: ethics and family planning in urban Greece
Author: Paxson, Heather 1968-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Gender Studies | Sociology | Anthropology | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: In Greece, women speak of mothering as "within the nature" of a woman. But this durable association of motherhood with femininity exists in tension with the highest incidence of abortion and one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe. In this setting, how do women think of themselves as proper individuals, mothers, and Greek citizens? In this anthropological study of reproductive politics and ethics in Athens, Greece, Heather Paxson tracks the effects of increasing consumerism and imported biomedical family planning methods, showing how women's "nature" is being transformed to meet crosscutting claims of the contemporary world. Locating profound ambivalence in people's ethical evaluations of gender and fertility control, Paxson offers a far-reaching analysis of conflicting assumptions about what it takes to be a good mother and a good woman in modern Greece, where assertions of cultural tradition unfold against a backdrop of European Union integration, economic struggle, and national demographic anxiety over a falling birth rate.   [brief]
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Title: Making Muslim space in North America and Europe 
Author: Metcalf, Barbara Daly 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | History | Islam | Middle Eastern Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Focusing on the private and public use of space, this volume explores the religious life of the new Muslim communities in North America and Europe. Unlike most studies of immigrant groups, these essays concentrate on cultural practices and expressions of everyday life rather than on the political issues that dominate today's headlines. The authors emphasize the cultural strength and creativity of communities that draw upon Islamic symbols and practices to define "Muslim space" against the background of a non-Muslim environment.The range of perspectives is broad, encompassing middle-class professionals, mosque congregations, factory workers in France and the north of England, itinerant African traders, and prison inmates in New York. The truism that "Islam is a religion of the word" takes on concrete meaning as these disparate communities find ways to elaborate word-centered ritual and to have the visual and aural presence of sacred words in the spaces they inhabit.The volume includes 46 black-and-white photographs that illustrate Muslim populations in Edmonton, Philadelphia, the Green Haven Correction Facility, Manhattan, Marseilles, Berlin, and London, among other places. The focus on space directs attention to the new kinds of boundaries and consciousness that exist not only for these Muslim populations, but for people from all backgrounds in today's ever more integrated world.   [brief]
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Title: The making of a heretic: gender, authority, and the Priscillianist controversy 
Author: Burrus, Virginia
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Religion | Religion | Christianity | Classical Religions
Publisher's Description: Silenced for 1,600 years, the "heretics" speak for themselves in this account of the Priscillianist controversy that began in fourth-century Spain. In a close examination of rediscovered texts, Virginia Burrus provides an unusual opportunity to explore heresy from the point of view of the followers of Priscillian and to reevaluate the reliability of the historical record. Her analysis takes into account the concepts of gender, authority, and public and private space that informed established religion's response to this early Christian movement.Priscillian, who began his career as a lay teacher with particular influence among women, faced charges of heresy along with accusations of sorcery and sexual immorality following his ordination to the episcopacy. He was executed along with several of his followers circa 386. His purportedly "gnostic" doctrines produced controversy and division within the churches of Spain, dissension that continued into the early decades of the fifth century.Burrus's thorough and wide-ranging study enlarges upon previous scholarship, particularly in bringing a feminist perspective to bear on the gendered constructions of religious orthodoxies, making a valuable contribution to the recent commentary that explores new ways of looking at early Christian controversies.   [brief]
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Title: The making of a Japanese periphery, 1750-1920
Author: Wigen, Kären 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Geography | Asian History | Japan
Publisher's Description: Contending that Japan's industrial and imperial revolutions were also geographical revolutions, Kären Wigen's interdisciplinary study analyzes the changing spatial order of the countryside in early modern Japan. Her focus, the Ina Valley, served as a gateway to the mountainous interior of central Japan. Using methods drawn from historical geography and economic development, Wigen maps the valley's changes - from a region of small settlements linked in an autonomous economic zone, to its transformation into a peripheral part of the global silk trade, dependent on the state. Yet the processes that brought these changes - industrial growth and political centralization - were crucial to Japan's rise to imperial power. Wigen's elucidation of this makes her book compelling reading for a broad audience.   [brief]
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Title: The making of a social disease;: tuberculosis in nineteenth-century France 
Author: Barnes, David S
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | History and Philosophy of Science | Medicine | European History
Publisher's Description: In this first English-language study of popular and scientific responses to tuberculosis in nineteenth-century France, David Barnes provides a much-needed historical perspective on a disease that is making an alarming comeback in the United States and Europe. Barnes argues that French perceptions of the disease - ranging from the early romantic image of a consumptive woman to the later view of a scourge spread by the poor - owed more to the power structures of nineteenth-century society than to medical science. By 1900, the war against tuberculosis had become a war against the dirty habits of the working class.Lucid and original, Barnes's study broadens our understanding of how and why societies assign moral meanings to deadly diseases.   [brief]
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Title: The making of Elizabethan foreign policy, 1558-1603
Author: Wernham, R. B. (Richard Bruce) 1906-
Published: University of California Press,  1980
Subjects: History | European History
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Title: The making of fornication: eros, ethics, and political reform in Greek philosophy and early Christianity
Author: Gaca, Kathy L
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Classical Philosophy | Classical Religions | Classical Politics | Christianity | Ethics | Social and Political Thought | Ancient History | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory - with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order - as the foundation of Christian sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers.   [brief]
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Title: The making of modern Colombia: a nation in spite of itself
Author: Bushnell, David 1923-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Latin American Studies | Latin American History
Publisher's Description: Colombia's status as the fourth largest nation in Latin America and third most populous - as well as its largest exporter of such disparate commodities as emeralds, books, processed cocaine, and cut flowers - makes this, the first history of Colombia written in English, a much-needed book. It tells the remarkable story of a country that has consistently defied modern Latin American stereotypes - a country where military dictators are virtually unknown, where the political left is congenitally weak, and where urbanization and industrialization have spawned no lasting populist movement.There is more to Colombia than the drug trafficking and violence that have recently gripped the world's attention. In the face of both cocaine wars and guerrilla conflict, the country has maintained steady economic growth as well as a relatively open and democratic government based on a two-party system. It has also produced an impressive body of art and literature.David Bushnell traces the process of state-building in Colombia from the struggle for independence, territorial consolidation, and reform in the nineteenth century to economic development and social and political democratization in the twentieth. He also sheds light on the modern history of Latin America as a whole.   [brief]
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Title: The making of rehabilitation: a political economy of medical specialization, 1890-1980
Author: Gritzer, Glenn
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Focusing on the history of one medical field - rehabilitation medicine - this book provides the first systematic analysis of the underlying forces that shape medical specialization, challenging traditional explanations of occupational specialization.
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