Title: War, institutions, and social change in the Middle East 
Author: Heydemann, Steven
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Politics | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Postcolonial Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Few areas of the world have been as profoundly shaped by war as the Middle East in the twentieth century. Despite the prominence of war-making in this region, there has been surprisingly little research investigating the effects of war as a social and political process in the Middle East. To fill this gap, War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars who explore the role of war preparation and war-making on the formation and transformation of states and societies in the contemporary Middle East. Their findings pose significant challenges to widely accepted assumptions and present new theoretical starting points for the study of war and the state in the contemporary developing world. Heydemann's collaborators include political scientists, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists from the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Their essays are both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, covering topics such as the effects of World War II on state-market relations in Syria and Egypt, the role of war in the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the political economy of Lebanese militias, and the effects of the 1967 war on state and social institutions in Israel. The volume originated as a research planning project of the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the Social Science Research Council.   [brief]
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Title: Customers and patrons of the mad-trade: the management of lunacy in eighteenth-century London: with the complete text of John Monro's 1766 case book
Author: Andrews, Jonathan 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | History of Science | Psychology | Social Problems | Psychiatry
Publisher's Description: This book is a lively commentary on the eighteenth-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients he saw in the course of his private practice--patients drawn from a great variety of social strata--offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides, Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, some of it strange and some quite familiar. They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and othersuccessful doctors were practicing, not to say inventing, the diagnosis and treatment of madness.   [brief]
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Title: Subtle bodies: representing angels in Byzantium
Author: Peers, Glenn
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Art | Medieval Studies | Art History | Christianity | Art and Architecture
Publisher's Description: Throughout the course of Byzantine history, Christian doctrine taught that angels have a powerful place in cosmology. It also taught that angels were immaterial, bodiless, invisible beings. But if that were the case, how could they be visualized and depicted in icons and other works of art? This book describes the strategies used by Byzantine artists to represent the incorporeal forms of angels and the rationalizations in defense of their representations mustered by theologians in the face of iconoclastic opposition. Glenn Peers demonstrates that these problems of representation provide a unique window on Late Antique thought in general.   [brief]
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Title: Political Islam: essays from Middle East report
Author: Beinin, Joel 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Islam
Publisher's Description: The essays and case studies collected here - featuring some of the best material from Middle East Report over the past decade as well as much original material - challenge the facile generalizations about what Western media and political establishments usually call "Islamic fundamentalism." The authors demonstrate the complexity of these movements and offer complementary and contrasting interpretations of their origins and significance. The material included covers a broad range of themes - including democracy and civil society, gender relations and popular culture - as they have emerged in countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa.   [brief]
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Title: Industrialization, family life, and class relations: Saint Chamond, 1815-1914 
Author: Accampo, Elinor Ann
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this provocative study, Elinor Accampo explores the interrelationship between the structure of work and strategies of family formation in Saint Chamond, a French city that underwent intensive industrialization during the nineteenth century. Through a detailed analysis of fertility, mortality, marriages, and migration, the author analyzes the ways in which the family responded to changes in the organization of work. In the first half of the nineteenth century work was in the home, and families tended to be large in order to meet the demand for workers. But by the 1860s the mechanization of labor had begun to separate family life and work life, fundamentally transforming the relationship between work and family and making the survival of the working-class family more difficult. Accampo argues that workers began to have smaller families much earlier than has previously been suggested, and she demonstrates that fertility declined for reasons unique to working-class conditions. This decline in family size, and the context in which it took place, provides fascinating new material for understanding the working class world and the dynamics of class relations.   [brief]
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Title: Ambrose of Milan: church and court in a Christian capital
Author: McLynn, Neil 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Classics | History | Classical Religions | Christianity | Ancient History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: In this new and illuminating interpretation of Ambrose, bishop of Milan from 374 to 397, Neil McLynn thoroughly sifts the evidence surrounding this very difficult personality. The result is a richly detailed interpretation of Ambrose's actions and writings that penetrates the bishop's painstaking presentation of self. McLynn succeeds in revealing Ambrose's manipulation of events without making him too Machiavellian. Having synthesized the vast complex of scholarship available on the late fourth century, McLynn also presents an impressive study of the politics and history of the Christian church and the Roman Empire in that period.Admirably and logically organized, the book traces the chronology of Ambrose's public activity and reconstructs important events in the fourth century. McLynn's zesty, lucid prose gives the reader a clear understanding of the complexities of Ambrose's life and career and of late Roman government.   [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: Tribes and state formation in the Middle East
Author: Khoury, Philip S. (Philip Shukry) 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Tribes and State Formation is the first effort to bring together the disciplines of history, anthropology, and political science around a major topic that none of these alone is adequately equipped to address. How and why did certain tribal societies metamorphose over time into states? Scholars concerned with general questions of theory and methodology and the interaction of anthropology and history, as well as political scientists and sociologists concerned with concepts of the state in the Middle East and other developing regions, will be well served by this innovative work.The articles by an array of distinguished scholars cover a wide range of topics: the relationship of ideology to tribal and state power, comparisons between different regional patterns of tribe-state interaction, historical case studies from North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Iran extending to the contemporary period; theoretical and methodological inquiries, and systematic reviews of the literature on tribes and states. The articles argue against a unilinear approach to the study of tribes and state formation by emphasizing that states often existed alongside tribes and even created tribes for their own purposes. Some case studies emphasize the incompatibility of states and tribalism, while others illustrate the many areas in which tribes actually enhanced rather than impeded state formation.   [brief]
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Title: Looking for God in Brazil: the progressive Catholic Church in urban Brazil's religious arena
Author: Burdick, John 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Christianity
Publisher's Description: For a generation, the Catholic Church in Brazil has enjoyed international renown as one of the most progressive social forces in Latin America. The Church's creation of Christian Base Communities (CEBs), groups of Catholics who learn to read the Bible as a call for social justice, has been widely hailed. Still, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that the CEBs are lagging far behind the explosive growth of Brazil's two other major national religious movements - Pentacostalism and Afro-Brazilian Umbanda .On the basis of his extensive fieldwork in Rio di Janeiro, including detailed life histories of women, blacks, youths, and the marginal poor, John Burdick offers the first in-depth explanation of why the radical Catholic Church is losing, and Pentecostalism and Umbanda winning, the battle for souls in urban Brazil.   [brief]
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Title: St. Teresa of Avila: author of a heroic life 
Author: Slade, Carole
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Religion | Christianity | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | Renaissance History
Publisher's Description: With few exceptions, representations of Renaissance women were created by men. The Spanish saint, Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), who chose to represent herself, was one of those exceptions. What prompted her to write Book of Her Life, Interior Castle , and other works? What does the self-portrait of this sixteenth-century nun, mystic, and founder of convents reveal about its author, the church, state, and role of women? St. Teresa of Avila , an innovative analysis of Teresa's autobiographical writings, explores these and many other questions. Bringing to bear a knowledge of Inquisition studies, theory of autobiography, scriptural hermeneutics, and hagiography, Carole Slade defines Teresa's writings as a project of self-interpretation undertaken mainly as the result of the perceived, later realized, threat of an accusation of heresy. Being female and of paternal Jewish ancestry, Teresa was vulnerable to such a charge.Teresa's writing project presented her with serious difficulties. Judicial confession, her prescribed genre, presumed the writer's guilt, while the subordinate female script precluded a defense against the suspicion that her mystical experiences came from the devil. Through careful textual analysis, Slade demonstrates that Teresa exploited the nuances of numerous genres - hagiography, New World chronicle, mystical theological treatise, and early novel - to create an innocent textual persona and depict herself in heroic terms.A signal contribution to our understanding of Teresa's rhetorical and literary talent and life circumstances, this book will engage readers across a broad range of disciplines.   [brief]
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Title: Wondrous in his saints: counter-Reformation propaganda in Bavaria 
Author: Soergel, Philip M
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | Christianity | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: At the close of the sixteenth century, despite Protestant attempts to discourage popular devotion to saints and shrines, the Roman Church in Bavaria initiated a propagandistic campaign through the publishing of pilgrimage books and pamphlets. Philip Soergel's cogent exploration of this little-known pilgrimage literature yields a vivid portrait of religion before, during, and after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.These "advertisements," combining testimonies of miracles with fantastic legends about shrines, fueled the conflict between Catholics and Protestants and helped shape a distinctive Catholic historical consciousness. Soergel stresses the power of the printed word as a defense of traditional authority, testing other historians' assertions about the neglect of printing and literacy in the Counter-Reformation.   [brief]
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Title: Struggle and survival in the modern Middle East
Author: Burke, Edmund 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Until now, we have known very little of the lives of ordinary Middle Eastern men and women, despite extensive research on the modern Middle East. With this collection of essays, the life stories of peasants, villagers, pastoralists, and urbanites can finally be heard - no more will our view of the Middle East be seen only over the shoulders of the elite.These twenty-four biographies are drawn from the entire Middle East - from Morocco to Afghanistan - and provide vantage points from which to understand modern Middle Eastern history "from the bottom up." Spanning the past 150 years and reflecting important transformations, the stories challenge elite-centered accounts of what has occurred in the Middle East and illuminate hidden corners of a largely unrecorded world.The essays, divided chronologically, provide a comprehensive framework for those unfamiliar with Middle Eastern social history. "Pre-Colonial Lives" covers the period from 1850 until World War I, "Colonial Lives" chronicles the beginning of European rule, and "Contemporary Lives" relates the massive changes of the postwar era. Through them, we see how specific ecologies, ways of life, ethnic, class and gender situations can shape individual human action.   [brief]
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Title: Gimme some truth: the John Lennon FBI files
Author: Wiener, Jon
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: American Studies | Politics | Sociology | Social Problems | Music | Social Theory | Cultural Anthropology | Law
Publisher's Description: When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the Nixon White House in 1972 about the Bureau's surveillance of John Lennon, he began by explaining that Lennon was a "former member of the Beatles singing group." When a copy of this letter arrived in response to Jon Wiener's 1981 Freedom of Information request, the entire text was withheld - along with almost 200 other pages - on the grounds that releasing it would endanger national security. This book tells the story of the author's remarkable fourteen-year court battle to win release of the Lennon files under the Freedom of Information Act in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. With the publication of Gimme Some Truth , 100 key pages of the Lennon FBI file are available - complete and unexpurgated, fully annotated and presented in a "before and after" format.Lennon's file was compiled in 1972, when the war in Vietnam was at its peak, when Nixon was facing reelection, and when the "clever Beatle" was living in New York and joining up with the New Left and the anti-war movement. The Nixon administration's efforts to "neutralize" Lennon are the subject of Lennon's file. The documents are reproduced in facsimile so that readers can see all the classification stamps, marginal notes, blacked out passages and - in some cases - the initials of J. Edgar Hoover. The file includes lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges.Fascinating, engrossing, at points hilarious and absurd, Gimme Some Truth documents an era when rock music seemed to have real political force and when youth culture challenged the status quo in Washington. It also delineates the ways the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations fought to preserve government secrecy, and highlights the legal strategies adopted by those who have challenged it.   [brief]
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Title: Holy women of the Syrian Orient
Author: Brock, Sebastian P
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Religion | Classical Religions | Religion
Publisher's Description: The fifteen hagiographies about holy women of the Syrian Orient collected here include stories of martyrs' passions and saints' lives, pious romances and personal reminiscences. Dating from the fourth to seventh centuries A.D., they are translated from Syriac into accessible and vivid prose. Annotations and source notes by the translators help clarify elements that may be unfamiliar to some readers. This collection bears witness to the profound contributions women made to early Chistianity: their various roles, their leadership inside and outside the church structure, and their power to influence others. A new preface discusses recent developments in the field and updates the bibliography.   [brief]
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Title: A new world in a small place: church and religion in the Diocese of Rieti, 1188-1378 
Author: Brentano, Robert 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Religion | Christianity | European History | Medieval History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Distinguished historian Robert Brentano provides an entirely new perspective on the character of the church, religion, and society in the medieval Italian diocese of Rieti from 1188 to 1378. Combing through a cache of previously ignored documents stored in a tower of the cathedral, he uses wills, li . . . [more]
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Title: Between memory and desire: the Middle East in a troubled age
Author: Humphreys, R. Stephen
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Politics | Islam | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Middle Easterners today are caught between memories of the past and frustrated hopes for the future. They struggle to find solutions to crises of economic stagnation, political gridlock, and cultural identity. In recent decades Islam has become central to this struggle, and almost every issue involves fierce, sometimes violent debates over the role of religion in public life. R. Stephen Humphreys's new book presents a much-needed and thoughtful analysis of Islam's place in today's Middle East. In clear, accessible language, he integrates the medieval and modern history of the region to show how the sacred and secular are tightly interwoven in its political and intellectual life. Humphreys discusses the conflicts over power and resources that engage Middle Eastern politicians and looks at the major ideologies that have shaped these conflicts. He focuses on the impact of Islam on public life and examines Muslim ways of thinking about the "secular" versus the "religious." What values does Islam put into play? What challenges does it pose to "ordinary" politics? What resources does it bring to the struggle for social justice? Humphreys recognizes the Western tendency to dismiss Middle Eastern politics as an incoherent tale of violence and fanaticism, and his book is especially valuable for its analysis of the deeper issues behind the headlines. These issues include the region's apparent inability to evolve democratic institutions, conflicts rooted in the peace settlements after World War I, and the unresolved debates over which cultural and moral values should drive Middle Eastern policy. Between Memory and Desire reminds us that Middle Easterners remember the past in specific ways: the shame of the colonial era; the disappointments since independence; and the glory of the Middle Ages, when Muslim achievements were respected throughout the world. Even if these memories are only partially true, in defining the past, they also define what the future ought to be.   [brief]
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Title: Mass mediations: new approaches to popular culture in the Middle East and beyond 
Author: Armbrust, Walter
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Media Studies | Music | Cinema and Performance Arts
Publisher's Description: Offering a stimulating diversity of perspectives, this collection examines how popular culture through mass media defines the scale and character of social interaction in the Middle East. The contributors approach popular culture broadly, with an interest in how it creates new scales of communication and new dimensions of identity that affect economics, politics, aesthetics, and performance. Reflected in these essays is the fact that mass media are as ubiquitous in Cairo and Karachi as in Los Angeles and Detroit. From Persian popular music in Beverly Hills to Egyptians' reaction to a recent film on Gamal Abdel Nasser; from postmodern Turkish novels to the music of an Israeli transsexual singer, the essays illustrate the multiple contexts of modern cultural production. The unfolding of modernity in colonial and postcolonial societies has been little analyzed until now. In addressing transnational aspects of Middle Eastern societies, the contributors also challenge conventional assumptions about the region and its relation to the West. The volume will have wide appeal both to Middle Eastern scholars and to readers interested in global and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Early Gothic Saint-Denis: restorations and survivals 
Author: Blum, Pamela Z
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Art | Architectural History | Art History | Medieval Studies | Archaeology
Publisher's Description: quality. Indeed, the well-preserved sculptural passages provide a key to the Early Gothic style as well as revealing the distinct imprints of three artists and their influences on each other. Blum's penetrating analyses of the restorative techniques and materials are accompanied by telling photograph-diagrams that distinguish the original work from that done later.Pamela Blum's investigation has relevance not only for students and scholars of medieval art but for curators and collectors as well. Anyone concerned with survivals from the past will appreciate her scrupulous detection in studying one of France's greatest monuments.   [brief]
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Title: Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the new millennium
Author: Miller, Donald E. (Donald Earl) 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Religion | Sociology
Publisher's Description: During the past thirty years the American religious landscape has undergone a dramatic change. More and more churches meet in converted warehouses, many have ministers who've never attended a seminary, and congregations are singing songs whose melodies might be heard in bars or nightclubs. Donald E. Miller's provocative examination of these "new paradigm churches" - sometimes called megachurches or postdenominational churches shows how they are reinventing the way Christianity is experienced in the United States today.Drawing on over five years of research and hundreds of interviews, Miller explores three of the movements that have created new paradigm churches: Calvary Chapel, Vineyard Christian Fellowship, and Hope Chapel. Together, these groups have over one thousand congregations and are growing rapidly, attracting large numbers of worshipers who have felt alienated from institutional religion. While attempting to reconnect with first-century Christianity, these churches meet in nonreligious structures and use the medium of contemporary twentieth-century America to spread their message through contemporary forms of worship, Christian rock music, and a variety of support and interest groups.In the first book to examine postdenominational churches in depth, Miller argues that these churches are involved in a second Reformation, one that challenges the bureaucracy and rigidity of mainstream Christianity. The religion of the new millennium, says Miller, will connect people to the sacred by reinventing traditional worship and redefining the institutional forms associated with denominational Christian churches. Nothing less than a transformation of religion in the United States may be taking place, and Miller convincingly demonstrates how "postmodern traditionalists" are at the forefront of this change.   [brief]
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Title: Two churches: England and Italy in the thirteenth century
Author: Brentano, Robert 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | European History | Medieval History | Medieval Studies | Religion
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