Title: Selected letters
Author: Olson, Charles 1910-1970
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Literature | Poetry | Autobiographies and Biographies | American Literature | American Studies | Letters
Publisher's Description: For Charles Olson, letters were not only a daily means of communication with friends but were at the same time a vehicle for exploratory thought. In fact, many of Olson's finest works, including Projective Verse and the Maximus Poems, were formulated as letters. Olson's letters are important to an understanding of his definition of the postmodern, and through the play of mind exhibited here we recognize him as one of the vital thinkers of the twentieth century. In this volume, edited and annotated by Ralph Maud, we see Olson at the height of his powers and also at his most human. Nearly 200 letters, selected from a known 3,000, demonstrate the wide range of Olson's interests and the depth of his concern for the future. Maud includes letters to friends and loved ones, job and grant applications, letters of recommendation, and Black Mountain College business letters, as well as correspondence illuminating Olson's poetics. As we read through the letters, which span the years from 1931, when Olson was an undergraduate, to his death in 1970, a fascinating portrait of this complex poet and thinker emerges.   [brief]
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Title: Selected letters of Alessandra Strozzi
Author: Macinghi Strozzi, Alessandra 1407-1471
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Renaissance History | Women's Studies | European Studies | Literature in Translation | Autobiography | European History | Letters
Publisher's Description: The letters of Alessandra Strozzi provide a vivid and spirited portrayal of life in fifteenth-century Florence. Among the richest autobiographical materials to survive from the Italian Renaissance, the letters reveal a woman who fought stubbornly to preserve her family's property and position in adverse circumstances, and who was an acute observer of Medicean society. Her letters speak of political and social status, of the concept of honor, and of the harshness of life, including the plague and the loss of children. They are also a guide to Alessandra's inner life over a period of twenty-three years, revealing the pain and sorrow, and, more rarely, the joy and triumph, with which she responded to the events unfolding around her.This edition includes translations, in full or in part, of 35 of the 73 extant letters. The selections carry forward the story of Alessandra's life and illustrate the range of attitudes, concerns, and activities which were characteristic of their author.   [brief]
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Title: King Charles I 
Author: Gregg, Pauline
Published: University of California Press,  1984
Subjects: History | European History
Publisher's Description: This is a lucid, fair-minded account of a difficult and tragic man. Pauline Gregg has drawn heavily on original documents, letters, and speeches to show how Charles's heritage, upbringing, and personality, as well as his relationships with friends, advisors, and favorites, all took place against a b . . . [more]
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Title: The tireless traveler: twenty letters to the Liverpool Mercury 
Author: Trollope, Anthony 1815-1882
Published: University of California Press,  1978
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Letters
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Title: Lives together/worlds apart: mothers and daughters in popular culture 
Author: Walters, Suzanna Danuta
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Gender Studies | Popular Culture | American Studies | Gender Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In the 1940s film Now, Voyager, Bette Davis plays a daughter struggling against her mother's stifling repression. Nearly fifty years later, in the Hollywood saga Postcards from the Edge , Shirley MacLaine, as a neglectful and bossy mother, inflicts untold psychological pain on her daughter, played by Meryl Streep. These dramas of conflict and the ambivalent struggle for separation have been central to popular images of mothers and daughters in the last half-century in the U.S. Walters boldly challenges these dichotomies and proposes an innovative and multilayered understanding of the cultural construction of the mother/daughter relationship.In a discussion of popular media ranging from themes of maternal martyrdom to maternal malevolence, Walters shows that since World War II, mainstream culture has generally represented the mother/daughter relationship as one of never-ending conflict and thus promoted an "ideology of separation" as necessary to the daughter's emancipation and maturity. This ideological move is placed in a social context of the anti-woman backlash of the early post-war period and the renewed anti-feminism of the Reagan and Bush years.Walters uses exceptions to mainstream imagery-films such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , television shows like "Maude," novels like The Joy Luck Club -to offer evidence of alternative traditions and paradigms. Timely and vividly argued, Lives Together/Worlds Apart makes a brilliant contribution to discussions of popular culture and feminism.   [brief]
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Title: Letters from freedom: post-cold war realities and perspectives
Author: Michnik, Adam
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Politics | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Social and Political Thought | European History | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: A hero to many, Polish writer Adam Michnik ranks among today's most fearless and persuasive public figures. His imprisonment by Poland's military regime in the 1980s did nothing to quench his outpouring of writings, many of which were published in English as Letters from Prison . Beginning where that volume ended, Letters from Freedom finds Michnik briefly in prison at the height of the "cold civil war" between authorities and citizens in Poland, then released. Through his continuing essays, articles, and interviews, the reader can follow all the momentous changes of the last decade in Poland and East-Central Europe. Some of the writings have appeared in English in various publications; most are translated here for the first time.Michnik is never detached. His belief that people can get what they want without hatred and violence has always translated into action, and his actions, particularly the activity of writing, have required his contemporaries to think seriously about what it is they want. His commitment to freedom is absolute, but neither wild-eyed nor humorless; with a characteristic combination of idealism and pragmatism, Michnik says, "In the end, politics is the art of foreseeing and implementing the possible."Michnik's blend of conviction and political acumen is perhaps most vividly revealed in the interviews transcribed in the book, whether he is the subject of the interview or is conducting a conversation with Czeslaw Milosz, Vacláv Havel, or Wojciech Jaruzelski. These face-to-face exchanges tell more about the forces at work in contemporary Eastern Europe than could any textbook. Sharing Michnik's intellectual journey through a tumultuous era, we touch on all the subjects important to him in this wide-ranging collection and find they have importance for everyone who values conscience and responsibility. In the words of Jonathan Schell, "Michnik is one of those who bring honor to the last two decades of the twentieth century."   [brief]
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Title: Athenian democracy in transition: Attic letter-cutters of 340 to 290 B.C 
Author: Tracy, Stephen V 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Classics | Ancient History | Archaeology
Publisher's Description: Furthering his masterful new approach to classifying and interpreting epigraphical data presented in Attic Letter-Cutters of 229 to 86 B.C. , Stephen V. Tracy has produced a masterful study of the inscriptions from the time of King Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, Demosthenes, and Demetrios. Detailed study of the hands in this largest group of primary documents has enabled him to offer a number of new insights, such as reassessing the career of Demetrios of Phaleron and taking issue with the commonly accepted view that Athenian democracy ended in 322 B.C. with the defeat by the Macedonians at Krannon.Tracy pieces together stone documents and shows that the "handwriting" of individual stonecutters can be identified by the way particular letters are cut into the stone. He offers new readings, redatings, joins and associations, as well as initial publication of some fragments from the excavations in the Athenian agora.   [brief]
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Title: A question of balance: Charles Seeger's philosophy of music
Author: Greer, Taylor Aitken 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Music | Ethnomusicology | Musicology | Composers
Publisher's Description: One of this century's most influential musical intellects takes center stage in Taylor Greer's meticulously wrought study of Charles Seeger (1886-1979). Seeger left an indelible mark in the fields of musicology, music criticism, ethnomusicology, and avant-garde musical composition, but until now there has been no extended appreciation and critique of Seeger's work as a whole, nor has an accessible guide to his texts been available.Exploring the entire corpus of Charles Seeger's writing, A Question of Balance highlights the work of those persons who most influenced him, especially Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell, and Ralph Perry. Invited to inaugurate the music department at the University of California's Berkeley campus in 1912, Seeger became keenly aware of his deficiencies in general education and put himself on a rigorous regimen of intellectual development that included studying history, anthropology, political theory, and philosophy. For the remainder of his life his ideas about music heavily influenced the development of ethnomusicology and systematic musicology.Charles Seeger is perhaps best known as the father of the folk singers Pete, Mike, and Peggy Seeger and as the husband of the innovative American composer Ruth Crawford. This book makes clear that Seeger was an extremely important thinker and educator in his own right. Seeger's intellectual curiosity was as eclectic as it was enthusiastic, and Greer skillfully weaves together the connections Seeger made between music, the humanities, and the sciences. The result is a luminous tapestry depicting Seeger's ideal schemes of musicology. At the same time it reflects the turbulence and vitality in American musical life during the early decades of the century.   [brief]
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Title: Living letters of the law: ideas of the Jew in medieval Christianity
Author: Cohen, Jeremy 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Religion | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: In Living Letters of the Law , Jeremy Cohen investigates the images of Jews and Judaism in the works of medieval Christian theologians from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. He reveals how - and why - medieval Christianity fashioned a Jew on the basis of its reading of the Bible, and how this hermeneutically crafted Jew assumed distinctive character and power in Christian thought and culture.Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness, which constructed the Jews so as to mandate their survival in a properly ordered Christian world, is the starting point for this illuminating study. Cohen demonstrates how adaptations of this doctrine reflected change in the self-consciousness of early medieval civilization. After exploring the effect of twelfth-century Europe's encounter with Islam on the value of Augustine's Jewish witnesses, he concludes with a new assessment of the reception of Augustine's ideas among thirteenth-century popes and friars.Consistently linking the medieval idea of the Jew with broader issues of textual criticism, anthropology, and the philosophy of history, this book demonstrates the complex significance of Christianity's "hermeneutical Jew" not only in the history of antisemitism but also in the broad scope of Western intellectual history.   [brief]
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Title: Letters from prison and other essays
Author: Michnik, Adam
Published: University of California Press,  1986
Subjects: Politics | European History
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Title: Three mothers, three daughters: Palestinian women's stories 
Author: Gorkin, Michael
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Women's Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This remarkable collection of oral histories from six Palestinian women, three mothers and three of their daughters, affords an unparalleled view into the daily lives of women who have lived, and continue to live, through a turbulent and rapidly changing era. In recording these stories, Michael Gorkin and Rafiqa Othman have preserved each woman's distinctive voice, capturing in vivid and moving detail a broad range of experience - everything from recollections of native villages to an account of incarceration as a political prisoner. Highly personal events such as courting, marriage, and childbirth are interwoven with memories of upheavals such as the wars of 1948 and 1967. The women speak with surprising candor about conflicts between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, men and women, Arabs and Jews. These beautifully written narratives bear witness to the power of Palestinian culture in sustaining the often difficult lives of women. The book also provides brilliant testimony to the experience of living in the midst of the Arab-Israeli conflict.Michael Gorkin, a Jewish-American psychologist who lives in Israel, and Rafiqa Othman, a Palestinian special education teacher, have collected the narratives from different cultural and geographic locations within the boundaries of historical Palestine - including East Jerusalem, a refugee camp on the West Bank, and an Arab village within Israel. With surprising intimacy, the mothers and daughters discuss their views about sex, marriage, and child-rearing; ideas about themselves and their relationship to God, their families, and their homeland; and questions of shame, devotion, freedom, and honor.In the preface, introduction and epilogue, Gorkin and Othman frame the stories and describe the project. The linked stories of mothers and daughters attest to the profound changes that have occurred in the lives of Palestinian women during this century - in the areas of education, work, political involvement and personal freedom. In addition to delineating this astonishing historical and cultural transformation, the stories create lasting images of the people these women have loved and hated, the pleasures they have enjoyed, the dangers they have survived, and the hopes they continue to cherish.   [brief]
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Title: Athens and Macedon: Attic letter-cutters of 300 to 229 B.C
Author: Tracy, Stephen V 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Classical History | Archaeology | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: Little of the historiography of third-century Athens survives, and much of what we know - or might know - about the period has come down to us in inscriptions carved by Attic stonemasons of the time. In this book Stephen Tracy, the world's preeminent expert in this area, provides new insight into an . . . [more]
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Title: God's daughters: evangelical women and the power of submission
Author: Griffith, R. Marie (Ruth Marie) 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Religion | Gender Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: In recent decades, religious conservatives and secular liberals have battled over the "appropriate" role of women in society. In this absorbing exploration of Women's Aglow Fellowship, the largest women's evangelical organization in the world, R. Marie Griffith challenges the simple generalizations often made about charismatic or "spirit-filled" Christian women and uncovers important connections between Aglow members and the feminists to whom they so often seem opposed. Women's Aglow is an international, interdenominational group of "spirit-filled" women who meet outside the formal church structure for healing prayer, worship, and testimony. Aglow represents a wider evangelical culture that has gained recent media attention as women inspired by the Christian men's group, Promise Keepers, have initiated parallel groups such as Praise Keepers and Promise Reapers. These groups are generally newcomers to an institutional landscape that Aglow has occupied for thirty years, but their beliefs and commitments are very similar to Aglow's. While historians have examined earlier women's prayer groups, they've tended to ignore these modern-day evangelical groups because of their assumed connection to the "religious right." God's Daughters reveals a devotional world in which oral and written testimonies recount the afflictions of human life and the means for seeking relief and divine assistance. A relationship with God, envisioned as father, husband or lover, and friend, is a way to come to terms with pain, dysfunctional family relationships, and a desire for intimacy. Griffith's book is also valuable in showing the complex role that women play within Pentecostalism, a movement that has become one of the most important in twentieth-century world religions.   [brief]
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Title: Migrant daughter: coming of age as a Mexican American woman
Author: Tywoniak, Frances Esquibel 1931-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Women's Studies | Chicano Studies | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Taking us from the open spaces of rural New Mexico and the fields of California's Great Central Valley to the intellectual milieu of student life in Berkeley during the 1950s, this memoir, based on an oral history by Mario T. García, is the powerful and moving testimonio of a young Mexican American woman's struggle to rise out of poverty. Migrant Daughter is the coming-of-age story of Frances Esquibel Tywoniak, who was born in Spanish-speaking New Mexico, moved with her family to California during the Depression to attend school and work as a farm laborer, and subsequently won a university scholarship, becoming one of the few Mexican Americans to attend the University of California, Berkeley, at that time. Giving a personal perspective on the conflicts of living in and between cultures, this eloquent story provides a rare glimpse into the life of a young Mexican American woman who achieved her dreams of obtaining a university education. In addition to the many fascinating details of everyday life the narrative provides, Mario T. García's introduction contextualizes the place and importance of Tywoniak's life. Both introduction and narrative illustrate the process by which Tywoniak negotiated her relation to ethnic identity and cultural allegiances, the ways in which she came to find education as a channel for breaking with fieldwork patterns of life, and the effect of migration on family and culture. This deeply personal memoir portrays a courageous Mexican American woman moving between many cultural worlds, a life story that at times parallels, and at times diverges from, the real life experiences of thousands of other, unnamed women.   [brief]
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Title: Sonia's daughters: prostitutes and their regulation in imperial Russia 
Author: Bernstein, Laurie
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | European History | European Studies | Women's Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: Prostitution in Imperial Russia was so tenacious that it survived not only the tsarist regime's most tumultuous years but the Bolshevik revolution itself. Laurie Bernstein's comprehensive study is the first to look at how the state and society responded to the issue of prostitution - the attitudes of prostitutes themselves, state regulation, societal reactions, and attempts at reform. She finds that prostitution and its regulation were integral to Russia's structures of gender, class, and politics.The first historian from outside the former Soviet Union to be granted access to these archival materials on prostitution, Bernstein takes the reader to the streets of Russia's cities, to the state-licensed brothels, medical clinics, hospital wards, halfway houses for "fallen women," and to the highest circles of the tsarist administration.   [brief]
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Title: Factory daughters: gender, household dynamics, and rural industrialization in Java
Author: Wolf, Diane L
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Gender Studies | Sociology | Southeast Asia | Anthropology
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Title: William Faulkner and the tangible past: the architecture of Yoknapatawpha 
Author: Hines, Thomas S
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | Literature | American Literature | United States History
Publisher's Description: The world of William Faulkner is seen from a new perspective in Thomas Hines's imaginative and many-faceted study. Hines assesses the impact of the built environment on Faulkner's consciousness and shows how the architecture of the writer's fictional county of Yoknapatawpha reflects the actual architecture of Oxford, Mississippi, and neighboring areas. Over 110 distinctive photographs, in both color and black-and-white, beautifully complement the text, making this book both a reading and viewing pleasure.Much has been written on the role of nature in Faulkner's work, but architecture and the built environment - the opposite of nature - have been virtually ignored. Arguing that nature and architecture are of equal importance in Faulkner's cosmos, Hines examines the writer's use of architectural modes - primitive, classical, gothic, and modern - to demarcate caste and class, to convey mood and ambience, and to delineate character. Hines provides not only another way of understanding Faulkner's work but also a means of appreciating the power of architecture to reflect what Faulkner called "the comedy and tragedy of being alive."Hines's gifts as an architectural historian and photographer and his intimate knowledge of Faulkner country are evident throughout this handsome book. Combining cultural, intellectual, architectural, and literary history, William Faulkner and the Tangible Past will take Faulkner lovers, as well as lovers of architecture, on a fascinating tour of Yoknapatawpha County.   [brief]
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Title: Darwin in Russian thought 
Author: Vucinich, Alexander 1914-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Science | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: Darwin in Russian Thought represents the first comprehensive and systematic study of Charles Darwin's influence on Russian thought from the early 1860s to the October Revolution. While concentrating on the role of Darwin's theory in the development of Russian science and philosophy, Vucinich also explores the dominant ideological and sociological interpretations of evolutionary thought, providing a deft analysis of the views held by the leaders of Russian nihilism, populism, anarchism, and marxism.Darwin's thinking profoundly influenced intellectual discourse in Russia: it effected the emergence of "theoretical theology," a modern effort to provide theological responses to the revolutionary changes in the natural sciences, contributed to the evolution of a modern scientific community, and spurred the rapidly growing concern with the epistemological and ethical foundations of science in general. Scholarly battles were waged among the critics of Darwin - Karl von Baer, Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii and Sergei Ivanovich Korzhinskii, and others - and the defenders of the faith.Vucinich is able to delineate the distinctive national characteristics of Russian Darwinism: the strong influence of Lamarckian thought, the delayed recognition of the contributions of genetics, the near-universal rejection of Social Darwinism, the early anticipation of the triumph of "evolutionary synthesis," and the heavy concentration on the social and moral aspects of evolutionary thought. Vividly argued and rich in detail, Darwin in Russian Thought provides a unique glimpse into the Russian psyche.   [brief]
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Title: The power of the gun: the emergence of modern Chinese warlordism 
Author: McCord, Edward Allen
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: This detailed study offers a new interpretation of the emergence of warlordism in early twentieth-century China. Focusing on the provinces of Hunan and Hubei, Edward McCord shows how the repeated use of the military to settle disputes over the structure and allocation of political power in the early Republic ultimately thwarted the consolidation of civil authority. Warlordism flourished as military commanders took advantage of the growing militarization of politics to establish their dominance over early Republican government.McCord's study brings into sharp focus the social and political context of warlordism and is an essential bridge completing the narrative of events between two revolutionary eras. With the role of the military in modern Chinese politics receiving renewed attention today, this work is especially timely.   [brief]
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Title: Reading Columbus 
Author: Zamora, Margarita
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | Latin American Studies | Latin American History | European Literature
Publisher's Description: Christopher Columbus authored over a hundred documents, many of them letters giving testimony on the Discovery to Isabela and Ferdinand. In this first book in English to focus specifically on these writings, Margarita Zamora offers an original analysis of their textual problems and ideological implications. Her comprehensive study takes into account the newly discovered "Libro Copiador," which includes previously unknown letters from Columbus to the Crown.Zamora examines those aspects of the texts that have caused the most anxiety and disagreement among scholars - questions concerning Columbus's destination, the authenticity and authority of the texts attributed to him, Las Casas's editorial role, and Columbus's views on the Indians. In doing so she opens up the vast cultural context of the Discovery. Exploring the ways in which the first images of America as seen through European eyes both represented and helped shape the Discovery, she maps the inception and growth of a discourse that was to dominate the colonizing of the New World.   [brief]
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