Bøker utgitt av University of Michigan Press

At the turn of the twentieth century, Francis W. Kelsey began to amass a large collection of artifacts from ancient sites across the Mediterranean, with an emphasis on Imperial Rome, to broaden the teaching of antiquity at the University of Michigan. Among the objects now housed in the museum that bears his name is a collection of seven hundred colorful stones dating to the Roman period, one of the largest and most varied collections of Roman decorative stones outside Europe. These pieces were obtained as archaeological artifacts, mostly architectural, with many deriving from well-known ancient buildings, such as the Baths of Diocletian in Rome and the Palace of Herod in Jericho, allowing for new interpretations of their architectural decoration and design. Chapters trace the formation of the collection, study the archaeology of the artifacts, and detail the history of each stone and its study with a comprehensive bibliography. In keeping with the nature of the collection, Roman Decorative Stone Collections focuses on archaeological contexts and object biographies, from the stones' first use to their eventual display in the Kelsey Museum. Entries are accompanied by rich photographs detailing the stone's appearances, environmental factors, and their collectors. The fully illustrated catalogue includes essays deriving from Kelsey's original notes on sources, buildings, sites, and dealers. As the first formal catalogue of these items, Roman Decorative Stone Collections is an accessible resource of Roman archaeology, antiquities, and the decorative arts.

The alignment of voter preferences and the preferences of their parliamentary representatives has long been understood as a vital part of representative democracy. However, recent decades have seen a considerable increase in such gaps between mass (the public) and elite (the representatives) policy preferences, appearing not just as isolated or single-topic issues, but rather across the spectrum of political dimensions. The negative effects can include decreased trust and voter engagement, dissatisfaction with democratic ideals and process, and even democratic backsliding. Mass-Elite Representation Gap in Old and New Democracies brings together a global array of scholars to examine the issue from new angles, drawing on evidence from North Africa, East Asia, Southeast Asia, South America, and Europe. This global-level analysis of different representation gaps demonstrates that these gaps vary in content, structure, and the timing of formation. Moreover, recognizing the socially, culturally, and internationally embedded nature of party politics, the contributors in the volume trace the historical origin of gaps observed in different world regions. The findings show that earlier choices made by political elites during historical-critical junctures lead to preference mismatch, undermining the quality of democratic representation.

Revolutionary Stagecraft draws on a rich corpus of literary, historical, and technical materials to reveal a deep entanglement among technological modernization, political agendas, and the performing arts in modern China. This unique approach to Chinese theater history combines a close look at plays themselves, performance practices, technical theater details, and behind-the-scenes debates over "how to" make theater amid the political upheavals of China's 20th century. The book begins at a pivotal moment in the 1920s--when Chinese theater artists began to import, use, and write about modern stage equipment--and ends in the 1980s when China's scientific and technological boom began. By examining iconic plays and performances from the perspective of the stage technologies involved, Tarryn Li-Min Chun provides a fresh perspective on their composition and staging. The chapters include stories on the challenges of creating imitation neon, rigging up a makeshift revolving stage, and representing a nuclear bomb detonating onstage. In thinking about theater through technicity, the author mines well-studied materials such as dramatic texts and performance reviews for hidden technical details and brings to light a number of previously untapped sources such as technical journals and manuals; set design renderings, lighting plots, and prop schematics; and stage technology how-to guides for amateur thespians. This approach focuses on material stage technologies, situating these objects equally in relation to their technical potential, their human use, and the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that influence them. In each of its case studies, Revolutionary Stagecraft reveals the complex and at times surprising ways in which Chinese theater artists and technicians of the 20th century envisioned and enacted their own revolutions through the materiality of the theater apparatus.

Born in Japan and trained in Germany, dancer and choreographer Ito Michio (1893-1961) achieved prominence in London before moving to the U.S. in 1916 and building a career as an internationally acclaimed artist. During World War II, Ito spent two years in the Japanese internment camps, later repatriating to Japan, where he contributed to imperial war efforts by creating propaganda performances and performing revues for the occupying Allied Forces in Tokyo. Throughout, Ito continually invented stories of voyages made, artists befriended, performances seen, and political activities carried out-stories later dismissed as false. Fantasies of Ito Michio argues that these invented stories, unrealized projects, and questionable political affiliations are as fundamental to Ito's career as his "real" activities, helping us understand how he sustained himself across experiences of racialization, imperialism, war, and internment. Tara Rodman reveals a narrative of Ito's life that foregrounds the fabricated and overlooked to highlight his involvement with Japanese artists, such as Yamada Kosaku and Ishii Baku, and global modernist movements. Rodman offers "fantasy" as a rubric for understanding how individuals such as Ito sustain themselves in periods of violent disruption and as a scholarly methodology for engaging the past.

Do you want to play a game? Incarceration Games reexamines the complex history and troubled legacy of improvised, interactive role-playing experiments. With particular attention to the notorious Stanford prison study, the author draws on extensive archival research and original interviews with many of those involved, to refocus attention on the in-game choices of the role-players themselves. Role-playing as we understand it today was initially developed in the 1930s as a therapeutic practice within the New York state penal system. This book excavates that history and traces the subsequent adoption of these methods for lab experimentation, during the postwar "stage production era" in American social psychology. It then examines the subsequent mutation of the Stanford experiment, in particular, into cultural myth--exploring the ways in which these distorted understandings have impacted on everything from reality TV formats to the "enhanced interrogation" of real-world terror suspects. Incarceration Games asks readers to reconsider what they thought they knew about this tangled history, and to look at it again from the role-player's perspective.

Geographies of Relation demonstrates how examining texts created throughout the Americas about diaspora and borderlands offers a lens to think about representations of race, ethnicity, and gender. Theresa Delgadillo crosses interdisciplinary and canonical borders to investigate the interrelationships of African-descended, Latinx and mestizx peoples through an analysis of Latin American, Latinx, and African American literature, film, and performance. Not only does Delgadillo offer a rare extended analysis of Black Latinidades in Chicanx literature and theory, but she also considers over a century's worth of literary, cinematic, and performative texts to support her argument about the significance of these cultural sites and overlaps. Chapters illuminate the significance of Toña La Negra in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, reconsider feminist theorist's Gloria Anzaldúa offerings to revise exclusionary Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, unpack encounters between African Americans and Black Puerto Ricans in texts about twentieth-century New York, explore the expression of the African diaspora in colonial and contemporary Peru through literature and performance, and revisit the centrality of Black power in ending colonialism in various narratives. Thus, Geographies of Relation demonstrates the long histories of diaspora networks and exchanges across the Americas as well as the interrelationships among Indigenous, mestizx, Chicanx, and Latinx peoples. It offers a compelling argument that geographies of relation are as significant as national frameworks at structuring cultural formation and change in this hemisphere.

As India's power and prominence rise on the international stage, its longstanding tradition of democracy is under threat. Since establishing a secular and democratic constitution in 1950, India has held elections at the local, state, and national levels with frequent transitions of power between opposing parties. This commitment to democracy has provided political order to a country that is twice the size of Europe and with a stunning array of social and economic divides. Despite this rich tradition, India's democracy faces an unprecedented threat with the rise of Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party. After decisively winning general elections in 2014, Modi and the BJP have pursued a range of anti-democratic policies in which the state and society are used to undermine the opposition, to stifle free speech, and to harass religious minorities. The Troubling State of India's Democracy brings together leading scholars from around the world to assess the conditions of India's democracy across three important dimensions: politics, specifically the state of political parties and the party system; the state, including the condition of federalism and the health of various institutions; and society, including NGOs, ethnic and religious tensions, and control of the media. Even though elements of India's democracy seem to function--like its commitment to elections--the contributors document a disturbing trajectory, one that not only threatens to undermine India's own stability, but could also affect the global order.

In Search of Admiration and Respect examines the institutionalization of Chinese cultural diplomacy in the period between high imperialism and the international ascendance of the People's Republic of China. During these years, Chinese intellectuals and officials tried to promote the idea of China's cultural refinement in an effort to combat negative perceptions of the nation. Yanqiu Zheng argues that, unlike similar projects by more established powers, Chinese cultural diplomacy in this era was not carried out solely by a functional government agency; rather, limited resources forced an uneasy collaboration between the New York-based China Institute and the Chinese Nationalist government. In Search of Admiration and Respect uses the Chinese case to underscore what Zheng calls "infrastructure of persuasion," in which American philanthropy, museums, exhibitions, and show business had disproportionate power in setting the agenda of unequal intercultural encounters. This volume also provides historical insights into China's ongoing quest for international recognition. Drawing upon diverse archival sources, Zheng expands the contours of cultural diplomacy beyond established powers and sheds light on the limited agency of peripheral nations in their self-representation.

Myths are not just the stories from the ancient Greeks and Romans--they represent deep truths from the essential concerns people face in their lives. Readers may already have heard of the Trojan Horse or how Oedipus married his own mother, but why have these stories lingered? In Classical Myth: An Introduction, Barry B. Powell provides the historical and theoretical background necessary for us to understand not only the concept of what a myth is, but the cultural context of how it emerged, and the different approaches to interpreting myth that were put forward by ancient theorists and their more recent successors. Then he helps readers to understand classical myth as it is found in its primary sources: the works of Homer and Hesiod, and the Greek tragedians and historians, Ovid and Vergil. By examining a number of prominent themes in classical myth, this textbook explores the relationship between myth and art, politics, society, and history of the ancient world. This completely revised second edition features new illustrations and will help readers who want to understand myths or study their original sources.

Blending archival work, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic arts, and science fiction, Queer Chimerica unpacks the ways in which the transnational circulation of queer culture, politics, and institutions are structured through the antagonist interdependence of China and the United States. By examining the intersecting timelines of the rise of queer theory and the rise of China in the late Cold War era, Shana Ye explores the relationship between the discourse of queer fluidity and capital's demands for labor flexibility. Drawing on rare archival material and oral historical accounts of queer life from the 1950s to the late 2010s, the author shows how these accounts make sense of the variegated landscapes of desires, transformations, and conundrums in postsocialist China. The author illustrates party cadres in the Cultural Revolution, tongzhi activism mediated by the explosive politics of Tiananmen upheaval, HIV/AIDS community outreach workers, feminist artists and digital activists, leftist queer theorists, and fictional bio-engineers, layering these vivid depictions to reveal the poetic messiness of queer world-making. QueerChimerica offers insight into the governmentality of LGBT rights, the rules of legibility and recognition, the geo- and bio-politics of identity, and the class-ridden appropriation of queer history and community. Thus understanding the production of queerness unveils the uneven distributions of capital, knowledge, affect, and opportunity that reproduce queer precarity and agency.

People with Down syndrome possess a culture. They are producers of culture. And in the 21st century, this culture is increasingly visible as a global phenomenon. Down Syndrome Culture examines Down syndrome alongside its social, cultural, and artistic representation. Author Benjamin Fraser draws upon neomaterialist and posthumanist approaches to disability as well as the work of disability theorists such as David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, Susan Antebi, Tobin Siebers, and Stuart Murray. By particularly focusing on Down syndrome, he showcases the unique place that it holds as an intellectual and developmental disability--one that fits between the social and medical models of disability--within the disability studies field. Down Syndrome Culture also pushes the traditionally Anglophone borders of disability studies by examining examples in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese-language texts, and incorporating the work of thinkers in Iberian and Latin American studies. Through a close analysis of life writing, documentaries, and fiction films, the book emphasizes the central role of people with Down syndrome in contemporary cultural production. Chapters discuss the autobiography of Andy Trias Trueta, the social actors of the documentary Los niños [The Grown-Ups] (2016), dancers from Danza Mobile, and a variety of fiction films, challenging ableist understandings of disability in nuanced ways. Ultimately, this book reveals the lives, cultural work, and representations of people with trisomy 21 in an international context.

Roman merchants, artisans, and service providers faced substantial prejudice. Contemporary authors labeled them greedy, while the Roman on the street accused merchants of lying and cheating. Legally and socially, merchants were kept at arm's length from respectable society. Yet merchants were common figures in daily life, populating densely packed cities and traveling around the Mediterranean. The Reputation of the Roman Merchant focuses on the strategies retailers, craftsmen, and many other workers used to succeed, examining how they developed good reputations despite the stigma associated with their work. In a novel approach, blending social and economic history, The Reputation of the Roman Merchant considers how reputation worked as an informal institution, establishing and reinforcing traditional Roman norms while lowering the cost of doing business for individual workers. From histories and novels to inscriptions and art, this volume identifies common reputation strategies, explores how points of pride and personal accomplishments were shared with others, and explains responses to merchant activities on the small-scale. The book concludes that merchants invested heavily in their reputations as a way to set themselves apart from common, negative stereotypes without admitting that there was anything shameful about the work they did.

Authoritarianism seems to be everywhere in the political world--even the definition of authoritarianism as any form of non-democratic governance has grown very broad. Attempts to explain authoritarian rule as a function of the interests or needs of the ruler or regime can be misleading. Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want argues that to understand how authoritarian systems work we need to look not only at the interests and intentions of those at the top, but also at the inner workings of the various parts of the state. Courts, elections, security force structure, and intelligence gathering are seen as structured and geared toward helping maintain the regime. Yet authoritarian regimes do not all operate the same way in the day-to-day and year-to-year tumble of politics. In Autocrats Can't Always Get What They Want, the authors find that when state bodies form strong institutional patterns and forge links with key allies both inside the state and outside of it, they can define interests and missions that are different from those at the top of the regime. By focusing on three such structures (parliaments, constitutional courts, and official religious institutions), the book shows that the degree of autonomy realized by a particular part of the state rests on how thoroughly it is institutionalized and how strong its links are with constituencies. Instead of viewing authoritarian governance as something that reduces politics to rulers' whims and opposition movements, the authors show how it operates--and how much what we call "authoritarianism" varies.

Transnational Philippines: Cultural Encounters in Philippine Literature in Spanish approaches literature that has been forgotten or neglected in studies on other literatures in Spanish due, in part, to the fact that today Spanish is no longer spoken in the Philippines or in Asia. However, isolation has not always been the case, and by omitting Philippine literature in Spanish from the picture of world literatures and Spanish-language literatures, the landscape of these disciplines is incomplete. Transnational Philippines studies how this literary production stemmed from its relationship with other cultures, literature, and arts. It attempts to break this literature's isolation and show how it is part of the broad literary system of literature written in Spanish. Yet Transnational Philippines also questions the constraints of traditional literary genres in order to make room for Philippine texts and other colonial and postcolonial texts, so that those texts can be taken into consideration in literary studies. Its chapters elaborate on the problems surrounding the cultural and identity relations of the Philippines with other regions and the literary nature of Philippine texts. By addressing the need for a postnational approach to Spanish-language Philippine literature, the book challenges the Spain/Latin America dichotomy existing in Spanish language literary studies and leans toward a global conception of the Hispanophone.

Imagine yourself in Weimar Germany: you are visually inundated with depictions of dance. Perusing a women's magazine, you find photograph after photograph of leggy revue starlets, clad in sequins and feathers, coquettishly smiling at you. When you attend an art exhibition, you encounter Otto Dix's six-foot-tall triptych Metropolis, featuring Charleston dancers in the latest luxurious fashions, or Emil Nolde's watercolors of Mary Wigman, with their luminous blues and purples evoking her choreographies' mystery and expressivity. Invited to the Bauhaus, you participate in the Metallic Festival, and witness the school's transformation into a humorous, shiny, technological total work of art; you costume yourself by strapping a metal plate to your head, admire your reflection in the tin balls hanging from the ceiling, and dance the Bauhaus' signature step in which you vigorously hop and stomp late into the night. Yet behind the razzle dazzle of these depictions and experiences was one far more complex involving issues of gender and the body during a tumultuous period in history, Germany's first democracy (1918-1933). Rather than mere titillation, the images copiously illustrated and analyzed in Marking Modern Movement illuminate how visual artists and dancers befriended one another and collaborated together. In many ways because of these bonds, artists and dancers forged a new path in which images revealed artists' deep understanding of dance, their dynamic engagement with popular culture, and out of that, a possibility of representing women dancers as cultural authorities to be respected. Through six case studies, Marking Modern Movement explores how and why these complex dynamics occurred in ways specific to their historical moment. Extensively illustrated and with color plates, Marking Modern Movement is a clearly written book accessible to general readers and undergraduates. Coming at a time of a growing number of major art museums showcasing large-scale exhibitions on images of dance, the audience exists for a substantial general-public interest in this topic. Conversing across German studies, art history, dance studies, gender studies, and popular culture studies, Marking Modern Movement is intended to engage readers coming from a wide range of perspectives and interests.

Once considered a period of decline, Late Antiquity (third through eighth centuries C.E.) is now seen as a creative period of transition between the ancient and medieval worlds. Ostensibly an "otherworldly" religion, Christianity became a powerful worldly cultural force. But this power was shaped and severely limited by a large number of factors, including its own highly diverse traditions, scriptures, practices, and theologies. William Klingshirn and Mark Vessey have assembled some of the most influential scholars in the study of Late Antiquity to test the limits of Christianity. The sixteen essays in this collection investigate the ways in which the concept of "limits" (temporal, spatial, ideological, social, and cultural) can help us to understand the texture of Christianity during this formative period. Taken together, the essays in this volume constitute as yet the most sustained study of cultural transformations evoked by Robert Markus's phrase "the end of ancient Christianity." This timely volume will interest students of early Christian history and theology, as well as historians of the Roman empire and early middle ages. Because it examines a formative period of western civilization, it will also speak to anyone who wonders why Christianity takes the form it does today. Contributors include Gerald Bonner, Peter Brown, Virginia Burrus, John Cavadini, Elizabeth Clark, Paula Fredriksen, Sidney Griffith, David Hunter, Conrad Leyser, Paul Meyvaert, Oliver Nicholson, James O'Donnell, Philip Rousseau, Frederick Russell, Carole Straw, and Robert Wilken.William E. Klingshirn is Associate Professor of Greek and Latin, The Catholic University of America. Mark Vessey is Associate Professor of English, University of British Columbia.

One of the country's most enduringly successful composers, Aaron Copland created a distinctively American style and aesthetic in works for a diversity of genres and mediums, including ballet, opera, and film. Also active as a critic, mentor, advocate, and concert organizer, he played a decisive role in the growth of serious music in the Americas in the twentieth century.In The American Stravinsky, Gayle Murchison closely analyzes selected works to discern the specific compositional techniques Copland used, and to understand the degree to which they derived from European models, particularly the influence of Igor Stravinsky. Murchison examines how Copland both Americanized these models and made them his own, thereby finding his own compositional voice. Murchison also discusses Copland's aesthetics of music and his ideas about its purpose and social function.

War is overwhelmingly a male occupation. Yet its victims are often civilians -- many among them women and children.In Women and War Jenny Matthews gives a voice to this silent majority of casualties through a series of deeply moving -- sometimes disturbing -- photographs of human subjects in the midst of war and conflict wherever they are found.Twenty years of visual and written diaries tell of human struggle around the world -- in Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Burma, Chechnya, Haiti, the United Kingdom, Guatemala, and Sudan, among others. Jenny Matthews documents women and the roles they play -- avoiding, coping, confronting, participating -- as well as the emotions they experience: anger, fear, despair, joy, hope, terror.Jenny Matthews records the stories of the people she photographs, both visually and with written diaries that underscore the immediacy of the images, drawing connections between the different countries. Above all her book is a celebration of the lives of women, and how their role as actual or potential mothers changes their relationship to war.Jenny Matthews, freelance photographer and filmmaker, chronicles the devastating effects of armed conflict on women. Her work has been exhibited by Oxfam and Womankind Worldwide, and has appeared in magazines such as Mother Jones.

Drawing on myth, religious beliefs, and a revealing selection of iconography from the Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf and ancient Egyptian images of Isis to medieval Madonnas and contemporary visions of female Hindu deities, psychotherapist and folklorist Shahrukh Husain offers readers a comprehensive, cross-cultural panorama of goddess worship through the ages. Using a wealth of examples from every era and tradition, she traces a long and primal struggle that over the course of millennia saw originally female deities usurped by male-dominated priestly hierarchies, a process reflected both in myth and in actual religious practice, which saw the goddess principle attacked, diminished, and eclipsed, but never entirely eliminated. Husain examines cosmic concepts of creation and seasonal fertility, the mythic rivalries and partnerships between male and female divinities, and the explicitly sexual duality personified in the West by the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene (but common to cultures all over the world), as well as such other aspects as the warrior, the queen, and the witch or crone who snips the threads of Fate. Finally, she reviews contemporary attitudes, values, and rites, finding a new vitality after centuries of suppression: the goddess is today a subject of renewed interest to feminist theorists, cultural historians, Wiccans and Paganists, and even environmentalists, for whom the Gaia hypothesis offers a powerful metaphor reconciling modern science with ancient wisdom. Filled with vivid full-color illustrations and dozens of informative sidebars on subjects as diverse as the Vestal Virgins of Rome, the Matronit of the Kabbala, and the almost universal association of the planet Venus with goddess figures, this is a book that will appeal to a wide audience, from scholars in women's studies, anthropology, folklore, and ancient history to more general readers interested in the female influence on cultural evolution and the antecedents to modern New Age thought. Shahrukh Husain is a psychotherapist, folklorist, and storyteller. She has lectured extensively and has worked as a consultant on TV documentaries and in an advisory role to members of Parliament on cultural matters ranging from marriage and race to religion and language issues. Her publications include Daughters of the Moon: Witch Tales from around the World (1993) and Handsome Heroines (1996).

"Up to the minute and also deeply historicized--each reading of Plath's poems is grounded in and examines larger patterns in her work or in the cultural reception of her writing."--Susan Van Dyne, Smith College"Anita Helle's collection of largely new essays on Sylvia Plath updates the continuing process of the important evaluation of her many-faceted works. I especially like the way established critics are juxtaposed with younger/newer scholars: the dialogue Helle creates here is appropriately exciting."--Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillSince Sylvia Plath's spectacular poems were announced to the world nearly a half century ago, fascination with the poet has never waned. In the past decade alone, Plath has been the subject of a new cultural explosion of interest--there have been novels, a feature film, and an array of public conferences, performances, and exhibitions, creating new conversations among different generations of scholars and readers. But because the posthumous record was incomplete--and in some cases, altered--the variety of distinctive materials Plath brought to her poetry has only recently been understood.The publication of Plath's Unabridged Journals, a "restored edition" of her Ariel poems, and Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, along with fresh attention to archives of periodical and popular culture, have provoked new readings of Plath and shed new light on her creative life and art. The Unraveling Archive provides a new assessment of Plath's creative life and work in light of an abundance of new material, offering essays that respond to new discoveries about familiar and neglected works. The book includes reproductions of two of Plath's original paintings from the 1950s and photographs rarely seen before, along with essays by Janet Badia, Tracy Brain, Marsha Bryant, Lynda K. Bundtzen, Kathleen Connors, Sandra Gilbert, Anita Helle, Ann Keniston, Diane Middlebrook, Kate Moses, and Robin Peel.Anita Helle is Associate Professor of English at Oregon State University.

At a time when so-called fundamentalism has become the privileged analytical frame for understanding Muslim societies past and present, this study offers another way of looking at Islam. In an innovative combination of anthropology, history, and social theory, Benjamin Soares explores Islam and Muslim practice in an important Islamic religious centre in West Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on extensive ethnography, archival research, and written sources, he provides a richly detailed discussion of Muslim religious practice--Sufism, Islamic reform, and other contemporary ways of being Muslim in western Mali and more broadly in the country. This book provides a major contribution to the study of Islam in Africa and will be welcomed by scholars and students in history, religion, and the social sciences, particularly those interested in anthropology, Islam, colonialism and the public sphere.Benjamin F. Soares is an anthropologist and senior researcher at the African Studies Center in Leiden, The Netherlands. He is the co-editor of Islam, Transnationalism, and the Public Sphere in Western Europe and the editor of Muslim/Christian Encounters in Africa.

Roman coins often shed light on Roman public life and society through the legends, portraits, and images they bear. The papers collected in this volume were originally presented at the Second E. Togo Salmon Conference on Roman Studies. The eight contributors are specialists in Roman coins or Roman history and in the relations between them.Coins are a unique source of information about the Roman world. In the case of the Roman Empire they were issued by or with the approval of the ruling power. The representations and legends they show therefore present an official view of contemporary affairs. The coins themselves, minted for official purposes such as paying the army, when studied carefully can help reconstruct official policies. They can also occasionally reveal what monuments now lost may have looked like.It is not infrequent to come across pleas that the ancient historian should make more frequent use of numismatic evidence. These essays make clear that efforts are being made both by numismatists and by historians to bring the two disciplines together. At the same time the papers reveal that the task is by no means a straightforward one. The survival of Roman coins is variable, and so attempts to reconstruct the size and distribution of issues calls for skilled and experienced analysis. This collection of papers provides evidence for the kind of deductions that the historian may make from Roman coins as well as the illustrations of the pitfalls that await the unwary. Those interested in Roman history, amateur coin collectors, and professional numismatists will all find much here to widen their knowledge of the public context of Roman coins.George Paul is Professor of Classics, McMaster University. Michael Ierardi is Lecturer in Classics, McMaster University.

"It is with no desire or hope to promote a correct or superior form of textuality, with no desire to correct a so-called interpretive or editorial textual abuse, nor any attempt to prevent anyone from doing anything imaginable with texts or books that I have undertaken this book. . . ." So writes Peter Shillingsburg in his introduction to this series of meditations on the possibilities of deriving "meaning" from the texts we read. Shillingsburg argues that as humans we are and always will be interested in the past, in what was meant, in what was revealed inadvertently by a text--and that is all to the good. But we learn more and can compare notes better when we understand the principles that govern the ways we read. Resisting Texts approaches crucial questions about the practice of textual editing and literary criticism by posing questions in the form "If we take such and such to be the goal of our reading, then what will follow from that assumption?" With humor and a lively imagination, Shillingsburg takes the reader on a fresh theoretical investigation of communication, understanding and misunderstanding, and textual satisfactions, drawing examples from Thackeray, Wordsworth, Melville, and others. Resisting Texts will appeal to all who enjoy the varieties of critical approaches to the written word. Peter L. Shillingsburg is Professor of English, University of North Texas.

Women first appeared on the legitimate stage in England following the Restoration in 1660, heralding a major change in British theater. The First Actresses: From Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons explores the vibrant and sometimes controversial relationship between art, gender, and the English theater in the 18th century. The richly illustrated book combines both well-known and seldom-seen portraits with fascinating essays that explore the ways that actresses used portraiture to enhance their reputations, deflect scandal, and increase their popularity and professional status. The featured works include paintings by major artists such as Johann Zoffany, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Thomas Lawrence. Created to accompany the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition of the same name, The First Actresses provides a vivid spectacle of femininity, fashion, and theatricality from Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons, during a period when portraiture became an important vehicle for the expression of concerns about female sexuality, social status, decorum, gender, and celebrity. The authors also chart the commercialization of the spectacle of the actress, as well as the connections between the 18th-century "star system" and modern celebrity culture.

Art's power to challenge inequities and build inclusive dialogues

Evaluating the rise of podcasting and the storytelling trends that emerged

While scholars have long acknowledged the importance of artistic relationships between ancient Greece and the Near East, recent discourse on multi-culturalism and diversity has ignited new debate over these issues both among scholars and in the broader public. Charges and countercharges of historical revisionism and systematic undervaluation of the debt owed by ancient Greece to the Near East and Africa have polarized the debate and obscured the actual evidence. In Imports and Immigrants, Gail L. Hoffman explores the primary archaeological basis for such discussions, namely the preserved physical remains, providing a foundation for constructive discussion of the relations and exchanges between ancient Greece and the Near East. Drawing together all the evidence and arguments for Near Eastern immigrants in Crete, Hoffman demonstrates there are basic problems with the accepted interpretations. Evidence of continued technical expertise casts doubt on the necessity of reintroduction, while careful scrutiny of the evidence supporting immigrant craftsmen reveals many inadequacies in the currently accepted analyses. Imports and Immigrants identifies the need for reassessing all dimensions of the question of artistic relationships between ancient Greece and other regions of the Aegean basin and suggests new avenues of inquiry in this important debate. The volume also reassesses arguments made for the presence of Near Eastern immigrants in Crete. This book includes a catalogue indispensable for future work on these issues and illustrations of most of the known imports to Crete.Gail L. Hoffman is Associate Professor of Greek Art and Archaeology, Department of Classics, Yale University.

WINNER > Best Popular Book on Archaeology --Biblical Archaeology SocietyApocalypse. Judgment Day. The End Time. Armageddon. Students of the Bible know it as the place where the cataclysmic battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil will unfold. Many believe that this battle will take place in the very near future. But few know that Armageddon is a real place--one that has seen more fighting and bloodshed than any other spot on earth.The name Armageddon is a corruption of the Hebrew phrase Har Megiddo, and it means "Mount of Megiddo." More than thirty bloody conflicts have been fought at the ancient site of Megiddo and adjacent areas of the Jezreel Valley during the past four thousand years. Egyptians, Israelites, Greeks, Muslims, Crusaders, Mongols, British, Germans, Arabs, and Israelis have all fought and died here. The names of the warring leaders reverberate throughout history: Thutmose III, Deborah, Gideon, Saul and Jonathan, Jezebel, Saladin, Napoleon, and Allenby, to name but the most famous. Throughout history Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley have been ground zero for battles that determined the very course of civilization. No wonder that the author of Revelation believed Armageddon, the penultimate battle between good and evil, would also take place here!The Battles of Armageddon introduces readers to a rich cast of ancient and modern warriors, while bringing together for the first time the wide range of conflicts that have been fought at Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley from the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age.Eric H. Cline has participated in more than seventeen seasons of excavation and survey in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Greece, and the United States. He is currently a Senior Staff Archaeologist at the ongoing excavations of Megiddo.