Title: The urban wilderness: a history of the American city 
Author: Warner, Sam Bass 1928-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Urban Studies | American Studies | United States History | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: Sam Bass Warner, Jr., examines the historical roots of the major economic and social problems facing the U.S. in the 1990s. He documents the efforts, both failed and successful, to provide for basic human needs in the urban context, especially for decent housing and health care. For this edition, Wa . . . [more]
Matches in book (61):
Similar Items

Title: Lawrence and his laboratory: a history of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory 
Author: Heilbron, J. L
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Science | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: The Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California, was the birthplace of particle accelerators, radioisotopes, and modern big science. This first volume of its history is a saga of physics and finance in the Great Depression, when a new kind of science was born.Here we learn how Ernest Lawrence used local and national technological, economic, and manpower resources to build the cyclotron, which enabled scientists to produce high-voltage particles without high voltages. The cyclotron brought Lawrence forcibly and permanently to the attention of leaders of international physics in Brussels at the Solvay Congress of 1933. Ever since, the Rad Lab has played a prominent part on the world stage.The book tells of the birth of nuclear chemistry and nuclear medicine in the Laboratory, the discoveries of new isotopes and the transuranic elements, the construction of the ultimate cyclotron, Lawrence's Nobel Prize, and the energy, enthusiasm, and enterprise of Laboratory staff. Two more volumes are planned to carry the story through the Second World War, the establishment of the system of national laboratories, and the loss of Berkeley's dominance of high-energy physics.   [brief]
Matches in book (46):
Similar Items

Title: Rome before Avignon: a social history of thirteenth-century Rome 
Author: Brentano, Robert 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Medieval History | Religion | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Robert Brentano evokes papal Rome in all its paradox and complicated brilliance. From a detailed re-creation of the physical "town" with its series of brick campanili and green and purple mosaic floors, to the intrigues of the great families, like the Orsini and Colonna, the reader is guided through complex and fascinating culture. Brentano's skill lies in his ability to combine the story of the vaulting ambition of the great families, only mildly tempered by their very real religious piety, with a vivid reconstruction of everyday life in postclassical Rome.   [brief]
Matches in book (51):
Similar Items

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]
Matches in book (42):
Similar Items

Title: Asceticism and society in crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern saints 
Author: Harvey, Susan Ashbrook
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Classics | Classical Religions | Classical History
Publisher's Description: John of Ephesus traveled throughout the sixth-century Byzantine world in his role as monk, missionary, writer and church leader. In his major work, The Lives of the Eastern Saints , he recorded 58 portraits of monks and nuns he had known, using the literary conventions of hagiography in a strikingly personal way. War, bubonic plague, famine, collective hysteria, and religious persecution were a part of daily life and the background against which asceticism developed an acute meaning for a beleaguered populace. Taking the work of John of Ephesus as her guide, Harvey explores the relationship between asceticism and society in the sixth-century Byzantine East.Concerned above all with the responsibility of the ascetic to lay society, John's writing narrates his experiences in the villages of the Syrian Orient, the deserts of Egypt, and the imperial city of Constantinople. Harvey's work contributes to a new understanding of the social world of the late antique Byzantine East, skillfully examining the character of ascetic practices, the traumatic separation of "Monophysite" churches, the fluctuating roles of women in Syriac Christianity, and the general contribution of hagiography to the study of history.   [brief]
Matches in book (45):
Similar Items

Title: Oedipus lex: psychoanalysis, history, law 
Author: Goodrich, Peter 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | Law | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Oedipus Lex offers an original and evocative reading of legal history and institutional practice in the light of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It explores the unconscious of law through a wealth of historical and contemporary examples. Peter Goodrich provides an anatomy of law's melancholy and boredom, of addiction to law, of legal repressions, and the aesthetics of jurisprudence. He retraces the genealogy of law and invokes the failures and exclusions - the poets, women, and outsiders - that legal science has left in its wake.Goodrich analyzes the role and power of the image of law and details the history of law's plural jurisdictions and traditions of resistance to law. He explores mechanisms of repression and representation as constituents of modern subjectivity, using long-abandoned medieval texts and early appearances of feminism as resources for the understanding and renewal of legal scholarship. Not simply deconstruction but also reconstruction, this work is keenly attuned to the discontinuties, silences, and gaps in the cultural tradition called law.   [brief]
Matches in book (32):
Similar Items

Title: Erasmus of the Low Countries 
Author: Tracy, James D
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | European History | Autobiographies and Biographies | Renaissance History
Publisher's Description: Few historical figures have been more important in modeling the ideal of impartial critical scholarship than Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536). Yet his critical scholarship, though beholden to no one, was not dispassionate. James Tracy shows how Erasmus the scholar sought through his writings to promote the moral and religious renewal of Christian society.Tracy finds the genesis of the humanist's notion of a "Christian republic" of pious and learned individuals in his "Burgundian," or Low Countries, roots. Erasmus's vision of reform, Tracy argues, sprung from a humanist tradition focusing on the importance of teaching ( doctrina ), a tradition from which Erasmus departed in his optimism about human nature and his deep suspicion of the powers that be. Amid the storms of Reformation controversy, he pruned back the "dissimulation" by which he had thought to convey different meanings to different readers, yet in the end he could not control the way his words were read. If Erasmus's scholarly ideal carries an enduring fascination, so too does his dilemma as a man of circumspection who would also be a reformer.   [brief]
Matches in book (46):
Similar Items

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]
Matches in book (17):
Similar Items

Title: The Question of "eclecticism": studies in later Greek philosophy 
Author: Dillon, John M
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Classics | Classical Philosophy | Social and Political Thought
Publisher's Description: This collection of essays is addressed to the growing number of philosophers, classicists, and intellectual historians who are interested in the development of Greek thought after Aristotle. In nine original studies, the authors explore the meaning and history of "eclecticism" in the context of ancient philosophy. The book casts fresh light on the methodology of such central figures as Cicero, Philo, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, and Ptolemy, and also illuminates many of the conceptual issues discussed most creatively in this period.   [brief]
Matches in book (41):
Similar Items

Title: Modern drama and the rhetoric of theater 
Author: Worthen, William B 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Theatre | Rhetoric
Publisher's Description: The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience.How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play.Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.   [brief]
Matches in book (27):
Similar Items

Title: Inside the drama-house: Rama stories and shadow puppets in South India 
Author: Blackburn, Stuart H
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | South Asia | Cinema and Performance Arts | Hinduism
Publisher's Description: Stuart Blackburn takes the reader inside a little-known form of shadow puppetry in this captivating work about performing the Tamil version of the Ramayana epic. Blackburn describes the skill and physical stamina of the puppeteers in Kerala state in South India as they perform all night for as many as ten weeks during the festival season. The fact that these performances often take place without an audience forms the starting point for Blackburn's discussion - one which explores not only this important epic tale and its performance, but also the broader theoretical issues of text, interpretation, and audience.Blackburn demonstrates how the performers adapt the narrative and add their own commentary to re-create the story from a folk perspective. At a time when the Rama story is used to mobilize political movements in India, the puppeteers' elaborate recitation and commentary presents this controversial tale from another ethical perspective, one that advocates moral reciprocity and balance.While the study of folk narrative has until now focused on tales, tellers, and tellings, this work explores the importance of audience - absent or otherwise. Blackburn's elegant translations of the most dramatic and pivotal sequences of the story enhance our appreciation of this unique example of performance art.   [brief]
Matches in book (27):
Similar Items

Title: Public faces, private voices: community and individuality in South India 
Author: Mines, Mattison 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Individuality is often viewed as an exclusively Western value. In non-Western societies, collective identities seem to eclipse those of individuals. These generalities, however, have overlooked the importance of personal uniqueness, volition, and achievement in these cultures. As an anthropologist in Tamil Nadu, South India, Mattison Mines found private and public expressions of self in all sectors of society. Based on his twenty-five years of field research, Public Faces, Private Voices weaves together personal life stories, historical description, and theoretical analysis to define individuality in South Asia and to distinguish it from its Western counterpart.This engaging and controversial book will be of great interest to scholars and students working in anthropology, psychology, sociology, South Asian history, urban studies, and political science.   [brief]
Matches in book (23):
Similar Items

Title: On Heidegger's Nazism and philosophy 
Author: Rockmore, Tom 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | German Studies | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: That Martin Heidegger supported National Socialism has long been common knowledge. Yet the relation between his philosophy and political commitments remains highly contentious and recently has erupted into a vociferous debate. Boldly refuting arguments that the philosopher's political stance was accidental or adopted under coercion, Rockmore argues that Heidegger's philosophical thought and his Nazism are inseparably intertwined, that he turned to National Socialism on the basis of his philosophy, and that his later evolution is largely determined by his continuing concern with Nazism.After developing a framework that clearly outlines the interrelation of Nazism and Heidegger's philosophy, Rockmore analyzes the famous rectoral address the philosopher delivered in 1933 upon becoming rector of the University of Freiburg. In that speech Heidegger sought to ground politics in philosophy. Rockmore examines the inseparable relation of politics and philosophy in Heidegger's Being and Time , the recently published Contributions to Philosophy (written from 1936 to 1938), and the interpretations of Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and technology.In his conclusion Rockmore considers the ongoing discussion of Heidegger's thought and Nazism in France. Combining extensive documentation of the Heidegger controversy with philosophical and historical analysis, this book raises profound questions about the social and political responsibility of philosophy.   [brief]
Matches in book (55):
Similar Items

Title: Inside the American couple: new thinking/new challenges 
Author: Yalom, Marilyn
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Women's Studies | Women's Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: One of the most fundamental human urges is to form a pair. Despite many tendencies that threaten traditional marriage and even make committed cohabitation problematic, very few people live through adulthood without at least one lengthy relationship, and up to ninety percent of Americans marry at least once in their lives. This pioneering volume draws attention to issues that question the unspoken traditional practices underlying coupling in America. In it, some of today's most innovative feminist scholars consider the dramatic changes couples have experienced over the past fifty years, such as the proliferation of divorce, the increase in ethnically-mixed relationships, the preponderance of older couples, and the new visibility of same-sex unions. Approaching their subject from a range of disciplines, the authors explore the couple as an enduring paradigm for human relationships, despite the changes in ideology and practice that couples have experienced over time. The essays delve into such subjects as the historical roots of modern marriage, the recent phenomenon of lesbian and gay commitment ceremonies, the home as a workplace and a place of refuge, and the stresses that turn a happy marriage into an unhappy one. One chapter explodes the myth that feminists are responsible for the high incidence of divorce, while another focuses on the financial worth of the wife after the demise of a long-standing marriage. Taken together, these essays impart a deep and complex picture of the challenges facing couples in our time. The vital and engaging narratives show that however anxious our society may be in the face of dissolving marriages and dysfunctional families, couples will continue to form the bedrock of American society in the twenty-first century.   [brief]
Matches in book (43):
Similar Items

Title: Robert Maynard Hutchins: a memoir 
Author: Mayer, Milton Sanford 1908-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | Autobiographies and Biographies | Print Media | Education | United States History
Publisher's Description: At age 28, he was dean of Yale Law School; at 30, president of the University of Chicago. By his mid-thirties, Robert Maynard Hutchins was an eminent figure in the world of educational innovation and liberal politics. And when he was 75, he told a friend, "I should have died at 35."Milton Mayer, Hutchins's colleague, and friend, gives an intimate picture of the remarkably outstanding, and fallible, man who participated in many of this century's most important social and political controversies. He captures the energy and intellectual fervor Hutchins could transmit to others, and which the man brought to the fields of law, politics, civil rights, and public affairs.Rich in detail and anecdote, this memoir vividly brings to life both a man and an age.   [brief]
Matches in book (58):
Similar Items

Title: Khomeinism: essays on the Islamic Republic 
Author: Abrahamian, Ervand 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: "Fanatic," "dogmatic," "fundamentalist" - these are the words most often used in the West to describe the Ayatollah Khomeini. The essays in this book challenge that view, arguing that Khomeini and his Islamic movement should be seen as a form of Third World political populism - a radical but pragmatic middle-class movement that strives to enter, rather than reject, the modern age.Ervand Abrahamian, while critical of Khomeini, asks us to look directly at the Ayatollah's own works and to understand what they meant to his principal audience - his followers in Iran. Abrahamian analyzes political tracts dating back to 1943, along with Khomeini's theological writings and his many public statements in the form of speeches, interviews, proclamations and fatwas (judicial decrees). What emerges, according to Abrahamian, is a militant, sometimes contradictory, political ideology that focuses not on issues of scripture and theology but on the immediate political, social, and economic grievances of workers and the middle class.These essays reveal how the Islamic Republic has systematically manipulated history through televised "recantations," newspapers, school textbooks, and even postage stamps. All are designed to bolster the clergy's reputation as champions of the downtrodden and as defenders against foreign powers. Abrahamian also discusses the paranoia that permeates the political spectrum in Iran, contending that such deep distrust is symptomatic of populist regimes everywhere.   [brief]
Matches in book (32):
Similar Items

Title: The politics of Muslim cultural reform: jadidism in Central Asia 
Author: Khalid, Adeeb 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Islam | Asian Studies | Asian History | European History
Publisher's Description: Adeeb Khalid offers the first extended examination of cultural debates in Central Asia during Russian rule. With the Russian conquest in the 1860s and 1870s the region came into contact with modernity. The Jadids, influential Muslim intellectuals, sought to safeguard the indigenous Islamic culture by adapting it to the modern state. Through education, literacy, use of the press and by maintaining close ties with Islamic intellectuals from the Ottoman empire to India, the Jadids established a place for their traditions not only within the changing culture of their own land but also within the larger modern Islamic world.Khalid uses previously untapped literary sources from Uzbek and Tajik as well as archival materials from Uzbekistan, Russia, Britain, and France to explore Russia's role as a colonial power and the politics of Islamic reform movements. He shows how Jadid efforts paralleled developments elsewhere in the world and at the same time provides a social history of the Jadid movement. By including a comparative study of Muslim societies, examining indigenous intellectual life under colonialism, and investigating how knowledge was disseminated in the early modern period, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform does much to remedy the dearth of scholarship on this important period. Interest in Central Asia is growing as a result of the breakup of the former Soviet Union, and Khalid's book will make an important contribution to current debates over political and cultural autonomy in the region.   [brief]
Matches in book (46):
Similar Items

Title: Songs to make the dust dance: the Ryōjin hishō of twelfth-century Japan 
Author: Kwon, Yung-Hee K
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Asian Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Japan | Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: Breaking through the long-established image of Heian Japan (794-1185) as a culture dominated by ritualized aristocratic values, Yung-Hee Kim presents the picture of a country in transition, filled with a wide variety of common people responding to very ordinary situations. In popular songs called imayo , they expressed their concerns about religion, love, aging, and even current affairs.In 1179 Emperor Go-Shirakawa compiled Ryojin hisho , a twenty-volume collection of this song genre that juxtaposes the sacred with the profane, the high with the low, the male with the female, the old with the new. Kim makes these songs the core of her book, in translations that faithfully reflect the sounds and images of the originals and bring them to life within their own literary and cultural context.   [brief]
Matches in book (21):
Similar Items

Title: Historical economics: art or science? 
Author: Kindleberger, Charles Poor 1910-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Economics and Business | European History | United States History
Publisher's Description: Charles P. Kindleberger's writing has ranged widely in the past, from international economics to such specialized topics as the Marshall Plan. In recent years, however, his perspective has shifted to one that tempers the rigidity of technical economics with the flexibility of the liberal arts. Historical economics, drawing on history, politics, cultural anthropology, sociology, and geography, bridges the gap between abstraction and fact engendered by traditional conceptions of economic science. Inherently interdisciplinary, historical economics ultimately leads to a more meaningful understanding of contemporary economic phenomena.This selection of Kindleberger's work has been carefully culled to illustrate his approach to the subject. The essays cover a range of historical periods and in addition to his well known writing on financial issues also include European history and explorations of long-run changes in the American economy. Economists and historians, both the converted and the unconvinced, will want to consult this powerful argument for the importance of historical economics.   [brief]
Matches in book (29):
Similar Items

Title: Backstory 3: interviews with screenwriters of the 1960s 
Author: McGilligan, Patrick
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Writing
Publisher's Description: The Backstory series of unique "oral histories" chronicles the lives and careers of notable Hollywood screenwriters - in their own words. Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age focused on the early sound era and the 1930s. Backstory 2 featured Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. Backstory 3 takes up the history of American screenwriting in the 1960s, through the experiences of fourteen key scenarists. These lively interviews, conducted by Pat McGilligan and others, feature Jay Presson Allen, George Axelrod, Walter Bernstein, Horton Foote, Walon Green, Charles B. Griffith, John Michael Hayes, Ring Lardner Jr., Wendell Mayes, Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., Arnold Schulman, Stirling Silliphant, and Terry Southern.The series has proven useful and edifying for film students, scholars, and historians, for screenwriters and other professionals, and for film buffs in general. Applauded by reviewers and named among the "100 essential film books" by a Los Angeles Times -appointed panel, it is cited often and quoted in many film histories.   [brief]
Matches in book (30):
Similar Items