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Title: The naked text: Chaucer's Legend of good women 
Author: Delany, Sheila
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies | English Literature | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: A sequel to her seminal book on Chaucer's House of Fame , Sheila Delany's elegant and innovative study of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women explores what it meant to be a reader and a writer, and to be English and a courtier, in the late fourteenth century. The richness of late medieval art, philosophy, and history are powerfully brought to bear on one of Chaucer's most controversial works. So too are the insights of modern critical theory - semiotics, historicism, and gender studies especially - making this a unique achievement in medieval and Chaucerian studies.Delany's strikingly original readings of Chaucer's Orientalism, his sexual wordplay, his theological attitudes, and his treatment of sex and gender have given us a Chaucer for our time.   [brief]
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Title: Narrowing the nation's power: the Supreme Court sides with the states 
Author: Noonan, John Thomas 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Law | American Studies | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: Narrowing the Nation's Power is the tale of how a cohesive majority of the Supreme Court has, in the last six years, cut back the power of Congress and enhanced the autonomy of the fifty states. The immunity from suit of the sovereign, Blackstone taught, is necessary to preserve the people's idea that the sovereign is "a superior being." Promoting the common law doctrine of sovereign immunity to constitutional status, the current Supreme Court has used it to shield the states from damages for age discrimination, disability discrimination, and the violation of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and fair labor standards. Not just the states themselves, but every state-sponsored entity--a state insurance scheme, a state university's research lab, the Idaho Potato Commission - has been insulated from paying damages in tort or contract. Sovereign immunity, as Noonan puts it, has metastasized. "It only hurts when you think about it," Noonan's Yalewoman remarks. Crippled by the states' immunity, Congress has been further brought to heel by the Supreme Court's recent invention of two rules. The first rule: Congress must establish a documentary record that a national evil exists before Congress can legislate to protect life, liberty, or property under the Fourteenth Amendment. The second rule: The response of Congress to the evil must then be both "congruent" and "proportionate." The Supreme Court determines whether these standards are met, thereby making itself the master monitor of national legislation. Even legislation under the Commerce Clause has been found wanting, illustrated here by the story of Christy Brzonkala's attempt to redress multiple rapes at a state university by invoking the Violence Against Women Act. The nation's power has been remarkably narrowed. Noonan is a passionate believer in the place of persons in the law. Rules, he claims, are a necessary framework, but they must not obscure law's task of giving justice to persons. His critique of Supreme Court doctrine is driven by this conviction.   [brief]
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Title: A nation of empire: the Ottoman legacy of Turkish modernity 
Author: Meeker, Michael E
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: This innovative study of modern Turkey is the result of many years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research. Michael Meeker expertly combines anthropological and historical methods to examine the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in a major region of the country, the eastern Black Sea coast. His most significant finding is that a state-oriented provincial oligarchy played a key role in successive programs of reform over the course of more than two hundred years of imperial and national history. As Meeker demonstrates, leading individuals backed by interpersonal networks determined the outcome of the modernizing process, first during the westernizing period of the Empire, then during the revolutionary period of the Republic.To understand how such a state-oriented provincial oligarchy was produced and reproduced along the eastern Black Sea coast, Meeker integrates a contemporary ethnographic study of public life in towns and villages with a historical study of official documents, consular reports, and travel narratives. A Nation of Empire provides anthropologists, historians, and students of Eastern Europe and the Middle East with a new understanding of the complexities and contradictions of modern Turkish experience.   [brief]
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Title: A nation of provincials: the German idea of Heimat 
Author: Applegate, Celia
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | German Studies
Publisher's Description: At the center of this pioneering work in modern European history is the German word Heimat - the homeland, the local place. Translations barely penetrate the meaning of the word, which has provided the emotional and ideological common ground for a variety of associations and individuals devoted to the cause of local preservation. Celia Applegate examines at both the national and regional levels the cultural meaning of Heimat and why it may be pivotal to the troubled and very timely question of German identity.The ideas and activities clustered around Heimat shed new light particularly on problems of modernization. Instead of viewing the Germans as a dangerously anti-modern people, Applegate argues that they used the cultivation of Heimat to ground an abstract nationalism in their attachment to familiar places and to reconcile the modern industrial and urban world with the rural landscapes and customs they admired. Primarily a characteristic of the middle classes, love of Heimat constituted an alternative vision of German unity to the familiar aggressive, militaristic one. The Heimat vision of Germany emphasized cultural diversity and defined German identity by its internal members rather than its external enemies.Applegate asks that we re-examine the continuities of German history from the perspective of the local places that made up Germany, rather than from that of prominent intellectuals or national policymakers. The local patriotism of Heimat activists emerges as an element of German culture that persisted across the great divides of 1918, 1933, and 1945. She also suggests that this attachment to a particular place is a feature of Europeans in general and is deserving of further attention.   [brief]
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Title: National ideology under socialism: identity and cultural politics in Ceauşescu's Romania
Author: Verdery, Katherine
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Politics | Cultural Anthropology | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The current transformation of many Eastern European societies is impossible to understand without comprehending the intellectual struggles surrounding nationalism in the region. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery shows how the example of Romania suggests that current ethnic tensions come not from a re . . . [more]
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Title: Nationalism and the genealogical imagination: oral history and textual authority in tribal Jordan
Author: Shryock, Andrew
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level.The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators - those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a "genealogical nationalism" as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state.Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written.   [brief]
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Title: Nationalism and the Nordic imagination: Swedish art of the 1890s
Author: Facos, Michelle
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Art History | European Studies
Publisher's Description: This richly illustrated book is a lucid introduction to a largely neglected manifestation of Modernism that came out of fin-de-siècle Sweden. Michelle Facos presents the first study in English to seriously examine the movement known as Swedish National Romanticism. Her work is especially valuable in showing how the movement's primitivist tendencies were related to, but different from, similar cultural forces in Germany and other parts of Europe at that time. Facos shows how a small group of Swedish artists espoused a politically progressive, culturally conservative form of nationalism. These artists - among them Carl Larsson, Bruno Liljefors, and Hanna Hirsch Pauli - produced a specifically national Swedish art by focusing on indigenous history, legends, and folk tales as well as uniquely Swedish-Nordic values, geography, and ethnography. Their breathtaking images of the Nordic landscape shaped a communal "Folk" identity that accented regionalism, solidarity, and attachment to the past and protested against the perceived dangers of capitalist industrialism and urban expansion. By 1900 Sweden was on its way to realizing a society of social, economic, and political equality, and the National Romantic painters were no longer renegades. Facos's portrayal of their movement will attract readers in the arts, historians, folklorists, cultural anthropologists, and sociologists.   [brief]
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Title: A nationality of her own: women, marriage, and the law of citizenship 
Author: Bredbenner, Candice Lewis 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | United States History | Women's Studies | Law | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: In 1907, the federal government declared that any American woman marrying a foreigner had to assume the nationality of her husband, and thereby denationalized thousands of American women. This highly original study follows the dramatic variations in women's nationality rights, citizenship law, and immigration policy in the United States during the late Progressive and interwar years, placing the history and impact of "derivative citizenship" within the broad context of the women's suffrage movement. Making impressive use of primary sources, and utilizing original documents from many leading women's reform organizations, government agencies, Congressional hearings, and federal litigation involving women's naturalization and expatriation, Candice Bredbenner provides a refreshing contemporary feminist perspective on key historical, political, and legal debates relating to citizenship, nationality, political empowerment, and their implications for women's legal status in the United States. This fascinating and well-constructed account contributes profoundly to an important but little-understood aspect of the women's rights movement in twentieth-century America.   [brief]
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Title: Native and newcomer: making and remaking a Japanese city 
Author: Robertson, Jennifer Ellen
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Japan | Asian History | Urban Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: This expertly crafted ethnography examines the ways in which native and new citizens of Kodaira, a Tokyo suburb, have both remade the past and imagined the future of their city in a quest for an "authentic" Japanese community.
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Title: Native place, city, and nation: regional networks and identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937 
Author: Goodman, Bryna 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: This book explores the role of native place associations in the development of modern Chinese urban society and the role of native-place identity in the development of urban nationalism. From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, sojourners from other provinces dominated the population of Shanghai and other expanding commercial Chinese cities. These immigrants formed native place associations beginning in the imperial period and persisting into the mid-twentieth century. Goodman examines the modernization of these associations and argues that under weak urban government, native place sentiment and organization flourished and had a profound effect on city life, social order and urban and national identity.   [brief]
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Title: Native sources of Japanese industrialization, 1750-1920
Author: Smith, Thomas C. (Thomas Carlyle) 1916-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Asian Studies | Japan | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Native Sources is a collection of seminal essays on the demographic, economic, and social history of Tokugawa and modern Japan by one of the most eminent historians of Japan in this country. Gathered together for the first time and made accessible to students and scholars, Professor Smith's essays a . . . [more]
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Title: Natural conflict resolution
Author: Aureli, Filippo 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Science | Zoology | Psychology | Cultural Anthropology | Politics | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Aggression and competition are customarily presented as the natural state of affairs in both human society and the animal kingdom. Yet, as this book shows, our species relies heavily on cooperation for survival as do many others - from wolves and dolphins to monkeys and apes. A distinguished group of fifty-two authors, including many of the world's leading experts on human and animal behavior, review evidence from multiple disciplines on natural conflict resolution, making the case that reconciliation and compromise are as much a part of our heritage as is waging war. Chimpanzees kiss and embrace after a fight. Children will appeal to fairness when fighting over a toy. Spotted hyenas, usually thought to be a particularly aggressive species, use reconciliation to restore damaged relationships. As these studies show, there are sound evolutionary reasons for these peacekeeping tendencies. This book also addresses the cultural, ecological, cognitive, emotional, and moral perspectives of conflict resolution.   [brief]
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Title: The natural history of Big Sur
Author: Henson, Paul 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Environmental Studies | California and the West | Natural History | Ecology
Publisher's Description: Each year millions of people visit the area of rugged California coastline and wild mountains known as Big Sur. Finally here is a book that is both a natural history of this beautiful region and an excellent guide to its extensive public lands. The first section introduces the area's geology, climate, flora, fauna, and human history. The second section describes selected sites, trails, and features that are mentioned in Part One.Although Big Sur is world famous for awe-inspiring scenery, it is less known for its great ecological diversity and its significance as a haven for many species of terrestrial and marine wildlife. In no other part of the world do fog-loving coastal redwoods thrive on one slope of a canyon while arid-climate yuccas grow on the other. Similarly, sea otters and cormorants live near dry-climate creatures like canyon wrens and whiptail lizards. The area's staggering beauty and forbidding wilderness have inspired artists, poets, naturalists, and hikers - and also real estate developers.As increasing tourism, development pressure, and land-use decisions continue to affect Big Sur, this book will do much to heighten awareness of the region's biotic richness and fragility. Written in nontechnical language, with generous color photographs, drawings, maps, species lists, and a bibliography, it will attract both the casual and the serious naturalist, as well as anyone concerned about preserving California's natural heritage.   [brief]
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Title: Natural history of the White-Inyo Range, eastern California 
Author: Hall, Clarence A
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Ecology | Earth Sciences | California and the West | Natural History
Publisher's Description: The White-Inyo Range - rising sharply from the eastern edge of Owens Valley - is one of the most extraordinary landscapes in the world. High, dry, and amazingly diverse, it boasts an expansive alpine tundra and features the oldest living species on earth - the 4,000-year-old Bristlecone Pines. This colorful and authoritative volume assembles a wealth of information of deep interest to the hikers and scientists attracted to White-Inyo's altitude and isolation.The nearly two dozen contributors to the volume are leading experts on the flora and fauna, the geology, geomorphology, meteorology, anthropology, and archaeology of the area. The book offers descriptions of more than 650 kinds of living organisms, from the handful of fish to the abundance of reptile, amphibian, bird and plant species. (It provides descriptions of hundreds of flowering plants.) It contains an 8-color geologic map and a roadside guide that enables the visitor to make sense of the area's complex geological history. Readers will also learn about air currents that make the range a delight for sailplane pilots and create strange cloud formations. And a special chapter tells what is known of the Native Americans who moved up and down the mountain slopes in response to seasonal changes.For anyone who wishes to visit this astonishing area or to do research there, this volume will be a unique, comprehensive resource.   [brief]
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Title: The naturalness of religious ideas: a cognitive theory of religion
Author: Boyer, Pascal
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Philosophy | Psychology
Publisher's Description: Why do people have religious ideas? And why those religious ideas? The main theme of Pascal Boyer's work is that important aspects of religious representations are constrained by universal properties of the human mind-brain. Experimental results from developmental psychology, he says, can explain why certain religious representations are more likely to be acquired, stored, and transmitted by human minds. Considering these universal constraints, Boyer proposes an exciting new answer to the question of why similar religious representations are found in so many different cultures. His work will be widely discussed by cultural anthropologists, psychologists, and students of religion, history, and philosophy.   [brief]
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Title: Neither gods nor emperors: students and the struggle for democracy in China
Author: Calhoun, Craig J 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Sociology | Language and Linguistics | African Studies | American Studies
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Title: Nemea: a guide to the site and museum 
Author: Miller, Stephen G. (Stephen Gaylord) 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Classics | History | Archaeology | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: In classical antiquity, beginning in 573 B.C., Nemea hosted international athletic competitions like those at Olympia, Delphi, and Isthmia; the games at the four sites constituted the Panhellenic cycle, and the victors were the most famous athletes of antiquity. Nemea was never a city-state but served as a religious and athletic festival center where the Greek world assembled every two years under a flag of truce.Since 1974, excavations sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley have revealed many details of Nemea's history, as well as evidence for the nature of the buildings and other facilities which were part of the festival center. These discoveries, together with smaller finds in the museum and ancient literary and epigraphic sources, form the basis of a new and sharply defined picture of the Nemean Games.This guidebook is an introduction to the history and physical remains of the festival center and a complement to detailed final publications on the excavation now being prepared.   [brief]
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Title: Nerves and narratives: a cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth-century British prose 
Author: Logan, Peter Melville 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Literary Theory and Criticism | Victorian History | English Literature | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: The British middle class of the early nineteenth century was defined by its nervous complaints - hysteria, hypochondria, vapours, melancholia, and other maladies. Peter Melville Logan explores the link between medical theories of nervous physiology and narrative issues central to the literary writing of the period. He examines the assumption, implicit in medical thinking at the time, that the nervous body - unlike its non-nervous counterpart - has a narrative inscribed on its nerve fibers. It becomes "the body with a story to tell."Logan takes up several literary works whose nervous narrators connect their present disorder with an unnatural, unhealthy social order. Concentrating on novels by Godwin, Hays, and Edgeworth, and on De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater , Logan weaves cultural phenomena such as crowd psychology and attitudes toward opium addiction into the basic paradigm of the nervous narrative. He explains why these social critiques always tended to promote the same distempered civilization that brought them into being. He then looks at the emergence of the working-class body in the 1840s, changing medical theories, and George Eliot's treatment of medicine in Middlemarch .Logan's book is especially valuable for its rethinking of disciplinary categories that separate medicine from literature and for bringing to light lesser-known literary texts. With a foreword by Roy Porter, it will be a welcome addition to literary, gender, and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Nested games: rational choice in comparative politics
Author: Tsebelis, George
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: Clearly written and easily understood by the nonspecialist, Nested Games provides a systematic, empirically accurate, and theoretically coherent account of apparently irrational political actions.
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Title: Nets of awareness: Urdu poetry and its critics 
Author: Pritchett, Frances W 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | South Asia | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Frances Pritchett's lively, compassionate book joins literary criticism with history to explain how Urdu poetry - long the pride of Indo-Muslim culture - became devalued in the second half of the nineteenth century.This abrupt shift, Pritchett argues, was part of the backlash following the violent Indian Mutiny of 1857. She uses the lives and writings of the distinguished poets and critics Azad and Hali to show the disastrous consequences - culturally and politically - of British rule. The British had science, urban planning - and Wordsworth. Azad and Hali had a discredited culture and a metaphysical, sexually ambiguous poetry that differed radically from English lyric forms.Pritchett's beautiful reconstruction of the classical Urdu poetic vision allows us to understand one of the world's richest literary traditions and also highlights the damaging potential of colonialism.   [brief]
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