Follow

• 

  January 6 and the Politics of History

  James Downs, Stephanie McCurry, Joanne Freeman, Elizabeth Hinton, Jill Lepore, William Sturkey, and Julian E. Zelizer

  Publication Date: 3-1-2024

  On January 6, 2021, more than two thousand rioters stormed the doors of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., hoping to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power from former president Donald Trump to his successor, Joseph Biden. The deaths, property damage, and vicious rampage that ensued were witnessed on live television as an unprecedented attack on the democratic process and those who strive to protect it.

  As an installment of UGA Press’s History in the Headlines series, this book offers a rich discussion between highly respected scholars on the historical backdrop and context for contemporary issues from the headlines. In addition to the historical context, this conversation demonstrates how historians speak to one another about contentious topics and how they contribute in meaningful ways to the public’s understanding of momentous events. This volume focuses on the historical context of the January 6 attack and employs a free-flowing conversation style that allows the historians a more unconventional format. The participants discuss if—and if so, how—historians should engage in public debates and what that engagement means to their roles as academic authorities in the public.

• 

  The Chai-Light Zone: Rod Serling, Secular Jew

  Steven Gimbel, Stephen J. Stern, and David DeAngelo

  Publication Date: 7-2024

  The Twilight Zone is remembered as a science fiction television series that reflected the uneasiness of Cold War America. Its creator, Rod Serling, was a secular Jew who fought in World War II and returned stateside to see moral problems at home, like racism and the potential for technology to rob us of our humanity. The Twilight Zone was Serling's attempt to influence mainstream culture in an ethically positive direction. His moral compass, which shaped his writing on the series, is entangled with his brand of cultural Judaism. By examining a range of episodes, the authors of this volume bring this Jewish moral influence out from the twilight and into the full light of day.

• 

  In on the Joke: The Ethics of Humor and Comedy

  Steven Gimbel and Thomas Wilk

  Publication Date: 1-29-2024

  Who is morally permitted to tell jokes about Jews? Poles? Women? Only those in the group? Only those who would be punching up? Anyone, since they are just jokes? All of the standard approaches are too broad or too narrow. In on the Joke provides a more sophisticated approach according to which each person possesses "joke capital" that can serve as "comic insurance" covering certain jokes in certain contexts. When Bob tells a joke about Jews, we can never know exactly what Bob is intending since we cannot see inside Bob’s mind. But we could reasonably infer, if we knew Bob himself was Jewish, if he worked tirelessly for Jewish causes, or was a card-carrying Neo-Nazi. Each would affect his joke capital, and, in certain circumstances, we would have a moral standing to demand to see his ledger to see how much joke capital he had with respect to Jews. The permissibility of that joke depends upon four factors: the joke, the teller of the joke, the audience, and the setting. The view developed in In on the Joke is the only view that clearly explains how each of these components work together in an integrated, effective ethic of humor.

• 

  The Battalion: Citizen Soldiers at War on the Western Front

  Ian A. Isherwood

  Publication Date: 8-16-2024

  How did ordinary citizens become soldiers during the First World War, and how did they cope with the extraordinary challenges they confronted on the Western Front? These are questions Ian Isherwood seeks to answer in this absorbing and deeply researched study of the actions and experiences of an infantry battalion throughout the conflict. His work gives us a vivid impression of the reality of war for these volunteers and an insight into the motivation that kept them fighting.

  The narrative traces the history of the 8th Battalion The Queen’s (Royal West Surrey Regiment), a Kitchener battalion raised in 1914. The letters, memoirs and diaries of the men of the battalion, in particular the correspondence of their commanding officer, reveal in fascinating detail what wartime life was like for this group of men. It includes vivid accounts of the major battles in which they were involved – Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele, the German Spring Offensive, and the final 100 Days campaign.

  The battalion took heavy losses, yet those who survived continued to fight and took great pride in their service, an attitude that is at odds with much of the popular perception of the Great War. Ian Isherwood brings in the latest research on military thinking and learning, on emotional resilience, and cultural history to tell their story.

• 

  The War That Made America Essays Inspired by the Scholarship of Gary W. Gallagher

  Caroline E. Janney, Peter S. Carmichael, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean

  Publication Date: 3-2024

  This collection of original essays reveals the richness and dynamism of contemporary scholarship on the Civil War era. Inspired by the lines of inquiry that animated the writings of the influential historian Gary W. Gallagher, this volume includes nine essays by leading scholars in the field who explore a broad range of themes and participants in the nation's greatest conflict, from Indigenous communities navigating the dangerous shoals of the secession winter to Confederate guerrillas caught in the legal snares of the Union’s hard war to African Americans pursuing landownership in the postwar years. Essayists also explore how people contested and shaped the memory of the conflict, from outright silences and evasions to the use of formal historical writing. Other contributors use comparative and transnational history to rethink key aspects of the conflict. The result is a thorough examination of Gallagher’s scholarly legacy and an assessment of the present and future of the Civil War history field.

• 

  Giants and Dwarfs in European Art and Culture, ca. 1350-1750

  Robin O'Bryan and Felicia M. Else

  Publication Date: 3-16-2024

  Not since Edward Wood’s Giants and Dwarfs published in 1868 has the subject been the focus of a scholarly study in English. Treating the topic afresh, this volume offers new insights into the vogue for giants and dwarfs that flourished in late-medieval and early modern Europe. From chapters dealing with the real dwarfs and giants in the royal and princely courts, to the imaginary giants and dwarfs that figured in the crafting of nationalistic and ancestral traditions, to giants and dwarfs used as metaphorical expression, scholars discuss their role in art, literature, and ephemeral display. Some essays examine giants and dwarfs as monsters and marvels and collectibles, while others show artists and writers emphasizing contrasts in scale to inspire awe or for comic effect. As these investigations reveal, not all court dwarfs functioned as jesters, and giant figures might equally be used to represent heroes, anti-heroes, and even a saint.

• 

  No Big Deal

  Rachele Salvini

  Publication Date: 4-19-2024

  Dixon e Lena. Londra e Livorno. Due vite apparentemente distanti, eppure così simili. Lui è il bersaglio prediletto delle cattiverie dei compagni di scuola, che lo deridono; delle ragazze, che lo considerano mediocre; del padre, soprattutto, un uomo alcolizzato e violento che lo picchia con metodo. In Italia Lena vive una situazione meno estrema, ma dentro di lei il disagio è lo stesso. Sente di non piacere a nessuno: non ai ragazzi, a cui pare risultare invisibile, e di certo non alla madre, una donna oppressiva e impantanata in un matrimonio ormai al capolinea. Arriva finalmente un approdo, qualcuno su cui fare affidamento – l’amico Ale per Dixon, l’amore di Tommaso per Lena. Ma il vero approdo, per entrambi, diventa la musica, uno strumento per reagire alla confusione dei rapporti disfunzionali e trovare un posto nel mondo. Dixon si unisce come chitarrista ai (No Big Deal), una band indipendente in cerca di gloria, mentre Lena coltiva il sogno di diventare una giornalista musicale trasferendosi a Londra. I loro percorsi paralleli si intersecano in un pub della capitale tra i fumi dell’alcol e le note rock del gruppo, e finiranno per essere inestricabilmente legati. I fantasmi del passato e le insidie del presente presto mostreranno quanto la felicità sia instabile e quanto il successo, anzi il semplice sogno del successo, sia difficile da gestire.

• 

  Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit

  Kerry Wallach

  Publication Date: 3-12-2024

  This is the first ever book on Rahel Szalit (1888–1942), one of the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. Szalit was a sought-after illustrator and painter who was murdered in the Holocaust and was all but lost to history. Szalit’s fascinating life demonstrates how women artists gained access to Jewish and avant-garde movements by experimenting with different media and genres. Drawing on a range of sources from 35 archives in 7 countries (Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Austria, France, Israel, and the US), this biography recovers Szalit’s life and presents a representative collection of her art, bringing Szalit into the larger conversation about Jewish artists, Expressionism, and modern art.

• 

  Desire in the Iliad: The Force that Moves the Epic and Its Audience

  Rachel H. Lesser

  Publication Date: 1-6-2023

  This book is the first study to examine desire in the Iliad in a comprehensive way and to explain its relationship to the epic’s narrative structure and audience reception. It offers a new reading of the poem that shows how the characters’ desires, especially those of the mortal hero Achilleus and the divine king Zeus, motivate plot and keep the audience engaged with the epic until and even beyond its end. The author argues that the characters’ desires are primarily organized in narrative triangles that feature two parties in conflict over a third. A variety of desires animate these triangles, including sexual passion, longing for a lost loved one, yearning for lamentation, and aggressive desires for vengeance and status, and they are signified with terms such as erōs, himeros, pothē, menos, thumos, boulē, and eeldōr as well as through the epic’s thematic emotions of grief and anger. This book shows how the mortals’ and gods’ triangular desires together drive and shape two Iliadic plots, the main plot of Achilleus’ withdrawal from the fighting and then return to battle, and the “superplot” of the larger Trojan War story. The author also argues that these plots and their motivating desires arouse the listener’s—or reader’s—own corresponding desires: narrative desire to know and understand the Iliad’s full story, sympathetic desire for characters’ welfare, and empathetic passions, longings, and wishes. Our desires invest us in the epic narrative and their resolution brings us satisfaction.

• 

  Serpents of War: An American Officer's Story of World War I Combat and Captivity

  Harry Dravo Parkin, Steven Trout, and Ian A. Isherwood

  Publication Date: 6-2023

  Serpents of War, the memoir of Pennsylvanian Major Harry Dravo Parkin, is a rare account of World War I as seen from the perspective of a battalion commander. As a mid-level officer responsible for the lives and welfare of over a thousand men, Parkin conveys the stress of command at a time when one innocent blunder could cost an officer his combat assignment, brings the inferno of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive to life in terrifying, gory detail, and recounts being taken prisoner by the Imperial German Army—a rare experience among American soldiers in 1918. In addition, Parkin provides a detailed account of the 79th Division’s attack on Mountfaucon, a military action that remains controversial to this day. This is a book by a brave soldier, a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism on the battlefield, and a gifted writer.

  Serpents of War is an abridged edition of a nearly 200,000-word World War I memoir that resides in Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library, enhanced by the contributions of two scholars of World War I and memory. Written in an unassuming but eloquent style, Parkin’s narrative seldom strains for effect. It possesses a strong sense of setting, a knack for capturing the chaos and strange exhilaration of battle, and a sharp eye for the interpersonal, social dynamics of military life—the personality clashes and simmering feuds, as well as the moments of comradeship and accord. Serpents of War is an absorbing memoir that holds the reader’s attention from beginning to end.

• 

  Daughters Healing from Family Mobbing: Stories and Approaches to Recover from Shunning, Aggression, and Family Violence

  Stephanie A. Sellers

  Publication Date: 4-18-2023

  “Family Mobbing” is a strategic process of power and control. When daughters are mobbed, they’re not just shunned, attacked, or slandered: they’re also subjugated by a system of family rules that reinforces patriarchal oppression. What makes mobbing so insidious–and so under-reported–is that here, family itself is the site of violence, trauma, and shame.
  
  Family violence against girls and women is still legal–even in America, and even now. Across cultures, girls and women may be shunned or shamed, emotionally mistreated, or physically attacked by their families to maintain status, social conventions, and the family’s own standing within their community. Family Mobbing tactics can include slander, gossip, rejection, beatings, anti-Queer violence, and even honor killings, child marriages, and forced abortion.
  
  Author Stephanie Sellers–herself a survivor–explores the global phenomenon of Family Mobbing, revealing the secrets and patterns that play out behind closed doors and remain unseen, unacknowledged, and unaddressed.

• 

  Peter Williamson, French and Indian Cruelty: A Modern Critical Edition

  Timothy J. Shannon

  Publication Date: 3-2023

  This book is the first scholarly edition of the most popular Native American captivity narrative published in eighteenth-century Britain. In this fully annotated modern version, Timothy J. Shannon re-acquaints modern readers with this popular North American captivity narrative, featuring a Scottish protagonist. He tells the story of Peter Williamson, a native of Aberdeen, who claimed he was kidnapped into indentured servitude in North America, lived as a captive among Indians there, and then fought as a soldier in the Seven Years’ War until he was taken prisoner by the French.

• 

  Democracy's Shield: Voices of WWII

  Michael J. Birkner, Grace E. Gallagher, and Rachel I. Main

  Publication Date: 2022

  Based on a body of 700 oral history interviews archived at Gettysburg College, Democracy's Shield relates the American military experience through the voices of those who served – from early awareness of the conflict in Europe and East Asia to the dropping of the atomic bomb, victory, occupation and homecoming.

  The text is illustrated with images of artifacts from the library's Special Collections.

  Table of Contents

  Foreword
  Introduction
  Portents of War
  Pearl Harbor
  Draft Status and Volunteering
  Exams, Induction, Training
  Heading to the Front
  Attitudes about the Enemy
  Race, Gender and the War Effort
  GI Joe
  Aboard Ship
  Up in the Air
  Medical Experience
  Leisure Activity
  Connections with Home
  European Theater
  D-Day
  Pacific Theater
  Experience of Battle
  POWs
  Death Camps
  Atomic Bomb
  Occupation
  Going Home
  Reflections
  The Interviewees
  Note on Sources
  Acknowledgments
  About the Editors
  The Dwight D. Eisenhower Society
  War in Focus
  Credits and Illustrations
  Donors

• 

  Reflections from Pioneering Women in Psychology

  Jamila Bookwala and Nicky J. Newton

  Publication Date: 4-2022

  This volume traces the life journeys of a cohort of influential and transformative women in psychology, now in or nearing retirement, who have changed the discipline and the broader world of academia in significant ways. The 26 reflective essays record how these scholars thrived in an academic landscape that was often, at best, unwelcoming, and, at worst, hostile, toward them. They explicitly and implicitly acknowledge that their paths were inextricably linked with the evolution of women's roles in society; they highlight and celebrate their achievements as much as they acknowledge and recognize the obstacles, barriers, and hurdles they overcame. They tell their stories with candor and humor, resulting in a compilation of inspiring essays. The end result of these individual narratives is a volume that provides a unique resource for current and future academics to help them navigate through the crossroads, curves, and challenges of their own careers in academia.

• 

  A Reader in Moral Philosophy

  Daniel R. DeNicola

  Publication Date: 4-2022

  This lively anthology provides classic and contemporary defenses and critiques of the central ethical theories, along with readings on a selection of moral issues such as freedom of expression, immigration, and the treatment of non-human animals. Generous excerpts of canonical texts are included alongside contemporary works, all carefully selected and thoughtfully edited for student use. Readings on the ethical theories are organized intuitively, by implicit source of value: god, human nature, culture, reason, consent, character, emotion, care, particulars, and intuitions. The interconnections among readings amplify teaching possibilities and create a vigorous conversation about morality.

• 

  America in the French Imaginary, 1789-1914: Music, Revolution and Race

  Diana R. Hallman and César Leal

  Publication Date: 5-2022

  Following the American Revolution, French authors often viewed the United States as a laboratory for the forging of new practices of liberté and égalité, in affinity with France's own Revolutionary ideals but in competition with lingering anti-American depictions of an inferior, untamed New World.
  
  The volume examines French imagining of America through musical/theatrical portrayals of the American Revolution and Republic, soundscapes of the Statue of Liberty, homages to Washington, Franklin and Lafayette and negotiations of Francophone identity in New Orleans. The subject of race features prominently in paradoxical depictions of slavery, freedom, and revolution in the United States and French Caribbean colonies of 'Amérique' and in varied interpretations of American music and gendered identity. Essays consider French constructions of the Indigenous American and Black American 'exotic' that intersect with tropes of noble, pastoral savagery, menacing barbarism and the 'civilising' potency of French culture. Such French constructions reveal both a revulsion of racial alterity and an attraction to the expressive, even subversive, freedom of Americanness. Investigations of French conceptions of America extend to critiques of American orchestral music, Gottschalk's Louisianan-Caribbean Creole works, Buffalo Bill's spectacles and the cakewalk in Paris. With scholarly contributions on music, dance, theatre and opera, the volume will be essential reading for students and scholars of these disciplines.

• 

  Traditional Chinese Fiction in the English-Speaking World: Transcultural and Translingual Encounters

  Junjie Luo (罗俊杰)

  Publication Date: 8-2022

  This book develops interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to analyzing the cross-cultural travels of traditional Chinese fiction. It ties this genre to issues such as translation, world literature, digital humanities, book culture, and images of China. Each chapter offers a case study of the historical and cultural conditions under which traditional Chinese fiction has traveled to the English-speaking world, proposing a critical lens that can be used to explain these cross-cultural encounters. The book seeks to identify connections between traditional Chinese fiction and other cultures that create new meanings and add to the significance of reading, teaching, and studying these classical novels and stories in the English-speaking world. Scholars, students, and general readers who are interested in traditional Chinese fiction, translation studies, and comparative and world literature will find this book useful.

• 

  Personal Memories of the Early Analytic Philosophers: Analytic Logic/Synthetic Lives

  Jeffrey Maynes and Steven Gimbel

  Publication Date: 9-2022

  Analytic Philosophy began in the first decades of the 20th century at Cambridge with Bertrand Russell, in Vienna with the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists, and in Berlin with Hans Reichenbach’s Society for Empirical Philosophy. While the story of the rise of this intellectual movement is chronicled in a number of recent and not so recent books, these treatments largely focus on the story of the ideas. Largely missing are the figures themselves, their lives and personalities. Those are saved in the memories of the people who knew them. Analytic Logic/Synthetic Lives is a collection of eleven edited transcripts of oral history interviews collected over twenty years with those who had such memories – the widows, spouses, classmates, and students of these towering figures of 20th century analytic thought. The primary and secondary scholarly literature on the history of early analytic philosophy is plentiful, but the same is not true when it comes to the personal side of these figures. This volume fills that hole by collecting personal remembrances from those who knew them best.

• 

  Ecocinema Theory and Practice 2

  Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt

  Publication Date: 2022

  This second volume builds on the initial groundwork laid by Ecocinema Theory and Practice by examining the ways in which ecocritical cinema studies have matured and proliferated over the last decade, opening whole new areas of study and research.

  Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specifc national and indigenous flm contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, flm festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifes how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic prac-tices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis.

  This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical flm and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies.

• 

  Pollo Fritto e Disperazione

  Rachele Salvini

  Publication Date: 2022

  Autori e autrici dell'America contemporanea, accomunati dall'appartenenza al mondo delle scuole di scrittura creativa di fiction e nonfiction e dalla pubblicazione su prestigiose riviste letterarie. Un taglio minimalista e antiretorico per vivisezionare frammenti e situazioni - infanzia, adolescenza, età adulta e vecchiaia. Temi che spaziano dall'identità culturale e di genere alle nevrosi, dal dolore della perdita all'inafferrabile trascorrere del tempo. Un diffuso senso di solitudine, in cui la comunicazione con l'altro è complicata se non rotta; dove il dolore, a vari livelli, è un'ombra scura che si allunga su un presente fragile e contraddittorio.

• 

  Reclaiming the Wicked Son: Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers

  Stephen J. Stern and Steven Gimbel

  Publication Date: 9-2022

  Reclaiming the Wicked Son: Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers takes the ideas of six well-known secular Jewish philosophers—Karl Marx, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ayn Rand, Peter Singer, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler—and views them through a wide range of Jewish lenses from the Talmudic tradition and prophetic Judaism to Kabbalist approaches, thereby understanding the 20th-century secular thinkers as on-going elements of a living Jewish intellectual tradition.

  Jewish Studies as a field focuses on Judaism, but Jewishness is broader than Judaism, and as a result, a number of thinkers who come from Jewish backgrounds are excluded from the discourse in Jewish Studies. The goal of this volume is to act as a bridge between the religious and secular Jewish discourse communities, allowing a more inclusive and more comprehensive account of Jewish thought.

  While the philosophers who discussed may not have considered themselves to be Jewish philosophers. But, by reading them Judaically, they can be understood in terms of a more robust historical and intellectual context in which they partake of a tradition to which they are not often connected.

• 

  German-Jewish Studies: Next Generations

  Kerry Wallach and Aya Elyada

  Publication Date: 10-2022

  As a field, German-Jewish Studies emphasizes the dangers of nationalism, monoculturalism, and ethnocentrism, while making room for multilingual and transnational perspectives with questions surrounding migration, refugees, exile, and precarity. Focusing on the relevance and utility of the field for the twenty-first century, German-Jewish Studies explores why studying and applying German-Jewish history and culture must evolve and be given further attention today. The volume brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to reconsider the history of antisemitism—as well as intersections of antisemitism with racism and colonialism—and how connections to German Jews shed light on the continuities, ruptures, anxieties, and possible futures of German-speaking Jews and their legacies.

• 

  Taking Problem-Solving Courts to Scale: Diverse Applications of the Specialty Court Model

  Eilenn M. Ahlin and Anne S. Douds

  Publication Date: 4-2021

  In the more than 30 years since the drug court model transformed the criminal justice landscape, problem-solving courts have expanded their reach beyond criminogenic needs. They now address demographic similarities (e.g., veterans courts, tribal wellness courts, community courts) and offense characteristics (e.g., prostitution courts, sex offender courts). The rapid expansion of problem-solving courts to meet many different individuals suggests this template is appropriate and adaptable to just about any categorical characteristic. This book calls on problem-solving court experts to offer a fresh perspective on the evolving discourse on these courts' proliferation. Contributors describe diverse applications of the problem-solving court model while critically appraising these niche courts' evidence. This book provides a comprehensive account to date of how problem-solving courts are continuing to revolutionize justice. This collective body of work strengthens our understanding of their placement in the throes of a call for meaningful criminal justice reform. Taking Problem-Solving Courts to Scale is presented in three sections to address specialty courts focused on criminogenic needs, individual characteristics, and offense characteristics. At the outset of each section, the editors describe the courts' purpose falling under these broad categories and highlight key elements from the chapters falling within.

• 

  The Flowering of Ecology: Maria Sibylla Merian's Caterpillar Book

  Kay Etheridge

  Publication Date: 2021

  The Flowering of Ecology presents an English translation of Maria Sibylla Merian’s 1679 ‘caterpillar’ book, Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandelung und sonderbare Blumen–Nahrung. Her processes in making the book and an analysis of its scientific content are presented in a historical context. Merian raised insects for five decades, recording the food plants, behavior and ecology of roughly 300 species. Her most influential invention was an 'ecological' composition in which the metamorphic cycles of insects (usually moths and butterflies) were arrayed around plants that served as food for the caterpillars. Kay Etheridge analyzes the 1679 caterpillar book from the viewpoint of a biologist, arguing that Merian’s study of insect interactions with plants, the first of its kind, was a formative contribution to natural history.

• 

  Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice, 2nd edition

  Julia A. Hendon, Lisa Overholtzer, and Rosemary A. Joyce

  Publication Date: 2-2021

  Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice, Second Edition, provides readers with a diverse and well-balanced view of the archaeology of the indigenous societies of Mexico and Central America, helping students better understand key concepts and engage with contemporary debates and issues within the field. The fully updated second edition incorporates contemporary research that reflects new approaches and trends in Mesoamerican archaeology. New and revised chapters from first-time and returning authors cover the archaeology of Mesoamerican cultural history, from the early Gulf Coast Olmec, to the Classic and Postclassic Maya, to the cultures of Oaxaca and Central Mexico before and after colonization.