Bøker utgitt av University of Wisconsin Press

Religion is deeply embedded in American history, and one cannot understand American history's broad dynamics without accounting for it. Without detailing the history of religions, teachers cannot properly explain key themes in US survey courses, such as politics, social dynamics, immigration and colonization, gender, race, or class. From early Native American beliefs and practices, to European explorations of the New World, to the most recent presidential elections, religion has been a significant feature of the American story. In Understanding and Teaching Religion in US History, a diverse group of eminent historians and history teachers provide a practical tool for teachers looking to improve history instruction at the upper-level secondary and undergraduate level. This book offers a breadth of voices and approaches to teaching this crucial part of US history. Religion can be a delicate topic, especially in public education, and many students and teachers bring strongly held views and identities to their understanding of the past. The editors and contributors aim to help the reader see religion in fresh ways, to present sources and perspectives that may be unfamiliar, and to suggest practical interventions in the classroom that teachers can use immediately.

Originally published by Howard Fertig, Inc. under the title Masses and Man, copyright Ã1980.

Russia is a large, diverse, and complicated country whose far-flung regions maintain their own histories and cultures, even as President Vladimir Putin increases his political control. Powerful, autocratic regimes still need to establish their legitimacy; in Russia, as elsewhere, developing a compelling national narrative and building a sense of pride and belonging in a national identity is key to maintaining a united nation. It can also legitimate political power when leaders present themselves as the nation's champions. Putin's hold thus requires effective nation building-- propagating the ever-evolving and often contested story of who, exactly, is Russian and what, exactly, that means. Even in the current autocratic system, however, Russia's multiethnic nature and fractured political history mean that not all political symbols work the same way everywhere; not every story finds the same audience in the same way. The message may emanate from Moscow, but regional actors--including local governments, civic organizations, and cultural institutions--have some agency in how they spread the message: some regionalization of identity work is permitted to ensure that Russian national symbols and narratives resonate with people, and to avoid protest. This book investigates how nation building works on the ground through close studies of three of Russia's ethnic republics: Karelia, Tatarstan, and Buryatia. Understanding how the project of legitimating nationalism, in support of a unified country and specifically Putin's regime, works in practice offers crucial context in understanding the shape and story of contemporary Russia.

In November 2020, B.J. Hollars answered a call from his father-in-law while teaching. "When will you be home?" Steve asked. "I have news." So began the Hollars family's year of plenty-a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family's daily devastations alongside his father-in-law's decline, he recounts the small mercies along the way: birthdays, campfires, fishing trips, kayaking, and fireflies. As he, his wife, Meredith, and their three young children grapple with how best to say goodbye to the person they love, they are forced to reassess their own lives. How can we make the most of our time, they wonder, when time feels so short?Written in vignettes and accompanied by photographs and family interviews, Year of Plenty provides a poignant and unflinching account of how death separates us not only from the people we love but from places and memories too. Hollars explores how death's all-consuming weight has the potential to fracture-rather than strengthen-even those relationships we think we know the best. Ultimately, he cracks wide personal moments from his own life and allows the world to peer in.

Hart Island has served as a potter's field for more than a century, holding over a million indigent, unclaimed, or unknown New Yorkers' bodies-and yet it is little-known even among locals. In this absorbing and elegiac story, on this island shaped like a miniature boot of Italy, Gary Zebrun explores overlapping connections of family, crime, sexuality, and human decency.Driven out of the Coast Guard during the days of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," Sal Cusumano hauls coffins to Hart Island with a burial crew of Rikers Island inmates and guards. Only there can he fully leave his family troubles on Staten Island behind: Justin, his adopted brother and lover; his mother, Ida, slipping rapidly into dementia; the memory of Francesco, his father, a bookie gunned down on his stoop; and his brother Antony, a Manhattan homicide detective moonlighting with the mob. But the island ceases to be his sanctuary after Antony ensnares him-and others-in a crime that involves a nocturnal visit to the potter's field. This compelling and intricately plotted novel moves through the shadows as its characters yearn for belonging and forgiveness. Set on the eve of the COVID pandemic, it is part love story, part crime novel, and part mystery.

When Tave wakes up alone in the hospital, she barely remembers the car wreck. Far from home, dazed, and despondent, she struggles to face the challenges of her new paralysis-all while worrying about her partner, Les, also severely injured in the accident, now cared for by her homophobic parents who refuse to allow contact.In rehab, Tave relearns life skills and comes to recognize that her future will be completely different than she'd imagined. Where will she live? How will she find the help she needs? Can her friends rise to the occasion? Or will she be forced to move back in with her mother, putting up with endless talk of faith healers? Her one beacon of hope is Beth, her physical therapist. But Beth's relationship problems with her own girlfriend push her toward overinvolvement-and risk damaging both her career and Tave's recovery.A story of courage, resilience, and love, Unswerving challenges readers' preconceived notions of disability, of limitations, and of the inevitability of fate.

Daniel Khalastchi boldly strides across a landscape of smoldering fires, unmarked boxes, and pictures of senators in airplane bathrooms. Exhilarating and innovative, The Story of Your Obstinate Survival collapses genre and upends narrative convention with dazzling wordplay and thrilling imagery. Inhabiting a world trapped somewhere between dreams and reality, these poems fuse the political and personal, public and private, pleasing and piquant, to examine both calamities and the dogged persistence required to endure. On display throughout is Khalastchi's exceptional capacity for detail and specificity, filling up this world to the point of breaking but never beyond, insisting on survival despite it all. Crowds around the circus serve as means of an escape, a legislative party bus of palliative care. There standing by the advent tent are penitential dentures, striking in their likeness to entire choking towns. Backed down and bound the carnival carnivorous is glowing, a midway ways away alit and stilted by the night. --Excerpt from "Trying to I Can't Hit Anything Yet the Bodies Pile Up"

A chicken lives for eighteen months after its head is cut off. Tourists pose with an inflatable sex doll at the 9/11 memorial. A sex-reveal party starts a wildfire in a forest named for a conquistador. The author's cancer treatments are intertwined with the rise of domestic fascism. "Is that something I should put in a poem?" asks Nick Lantz; the resounding answer is yes! Mixing sincerity with irony, lyric with vernacular, Lantz's collisions of style and subject are at their most vibrant in the long sequence at the center of the collection, a series of poems that brilliantly capture the disruption and disorder of our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in breathless, unpunctuated verse. Depicting the uncanny dissonance of living during and beyond events that feel world ending, this volume reminds us of the ways in which we carry our own traumas and the traumas of history with us in our daily lives. Life is all gilded frescoes > at the clubhouse until Titus and his men pass through with torches, until Cortés and his men > and his men and so on, until men forget what their hands looked like without torches. --Excerpt from "Ruin"

In raw, lyrical poems, Host explores parasitic relationships--between men and women, sons and mothers, and humans and the earth--and considers their consequences. How much control do we have over our lives? To what extent are we being controlled? And how much does it matter in the end? Revealing the unvarnished pain of mistreatment--whether inflicted maliciously or accidentally--Lisa Fay Coutley examines legacies of abuse in poems that explore how trauma parasitizes bodies, infecting the text, repeating in language and image the injuries the body has been subjected to. > light can pour warm through a cold bay window while water under sun is dark > erases a girl's thigh. The trees start starving themselves into everyone's favorite color. > below her throne. The body knows no wrong move. The more love, the more. --Excerpt from "Oubliette"

Teaches the student to communicate in everyday situations, with each chapter introducing a new situational context. Students learn to discuss work, vacations, health, and entertainment. Students also learn to practice basic skills such as shopping, ordering tickets, and renting an apartment.

In seven concise chapters that document both the history of Nordic folkloristics and the ongoing vivacity of Nordic folklore today, Thomas A. DuBois demonstrates how the informal, traditional elements of a culture or subculture are an integral and vibrant part of the Nordic world. From methods of preparing suovabiergu (smoked reindeer meat) in Sápmi, to celebrating graduation by "running the falls" at Uppsala University in Sweden, to massive folk music festivals in Finland and tales of supernatural visitors bestowing baby names in Iceland, folklore offers unique insights into the everyday life of Nordic society. The study of Nordic folklore began in the nineteenth century, when early folklorists imagined that the true character of a nation could be found among the tales of the peasantry. Today, the theories, tools, and institutions developed by influential folklorists in the Nordic region continue to lead the way in documentation, preservation, and analysis of folklore.

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was one of the most prominent and productive authors of the twentieth century-and his works have been among the most cinematically transformed in history. For more than five decades, adaptations of his plays, stories, and novels dominated movie theaters and, later, television screens. More than ninety individual works were filmed, and for many filmgoers his name was a greater draw than that of the director. Works such as Of Human Bondage, "The Letter," The Painted Veil, "Rain," The Razor's Edge, and others were produced multiple times, with starring roles sought by actors like Bette Davis, Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Lionel Barrymore, Charles Laughton, and Bill Murray.This study of the famous author explores the relationship between literature and film, what is involved in adaptation, and how best to judge films based on celebrated books. Robert Calder, the world's leading scholar of Maugham's work, offers fascinating production histories, insight into both fortunate and misguided casting decisions, shrewd analyses of performances and film techniques, and summaries of public and critical responses. Maugham's characters were often conflicted, iconoclastic, and morally out of step with their times, which may have accounted for the popularity of his fiction. Most of Maugham's works could be adapted to satisfy the tastes of moviegoers and the demands of the Hays Office censors, if not the expectations of their author.

Denmark, Norway, and Sweden enjoy some of the happiest populations and highest standards of living in the world, thanks in part to stable, democratic systems of government. Here, David Delfs Erbo Andersen presents a syncretic history of political and socioeconomic developments in the three Scandinavian countries since the early modern period, and contrasts their peaceful transitions with the more dramatic histories of otherwise similar European countries, like France and Germany. Unlike these and many other countries--the United States among them--Scandinavia's transition to democracy from monarchy was not marked by major violent upheavals or extreme political antagonism. Rather, Scandinavia's peaceful process of democratization owed itself to the development of a penetrative bureaucracy in the early modern period and the activism of cooperative associations, first of farmers in the early nineteenth century and then of industrialized workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thanks to the gradual, relatively consensual adoption of political reforms and social norms, the history of "Nordic democratic exceptionalism" today helps account for the ongoing stability of the Scandinavian countries.

Imperial Rome privileged the elite male citizen as one of sound mind and body, superior in all ways to women, noncitizens, and nonhumans. One of the markers of his superiority was the power of his voice, both literal (in terms of oratory and the legal capacity to represent himself and others) and metaphoric, as in the political power of having a "voice" in the public sphere. Muteness in ancient Roman society has thus long been understood as a deficiency, both physically and socially.In this volume, Amy Koenig deftly confronts the trope of muteness in Imperial Roman literature, arguing that this understanding of silence is incomplete. By unpacking the motif of voicelessness across a wide range of written sources, she shows that the Roman perception of silence was more complicated than a simple binary and that elite male authors used muted or voiceless characters to interrogate the concept of voicelessness in ways that would be taboo in other contexts. Paradoxically, Koenig illustrates that silence could in fact be freeing-that the loss of voice permits an untethering from other social norms and expectations, thus allowing a freedom of expression denied to many of the voiced.

Suzette Mullen had been raised to play it safe-and she hated causing others pain. With college and law degrees, a kind and successful husband, two thriving adult sons, and an ocean-view vacation home, she lived a life many people would envy. But beneath the happy facade was a woman who watched her friends walk boldly through their lives and wondered what was holding her back from doing the same. Digging into her past, Suzette uncovered a deeply buried truth: she'd been in love with her best friend-a woman-for nearly two decades-and still was. Leaning into these "unspeakable" feelings would put Suzette's identity, relationships, and life of privilege at risk-but taking this leap might be her only chance to feel fully alive. As Suzette opened herself up to new possibilities, an unexpected visit to a new city helped her discover who she was meant to be. Introspective, bittersweet, and empowering, The Only Way Through Is Out is both a coming-out and coming-of-age story, as well as a call to action for every human who is longing to live authentically but is afraid of the cost.

Newly divorced, Virginia Bigelow is struggling with pressing financial debt, the frustration of a stalled teaching career, an increasingly isolated and lonely existence, and the challenges of being a single parent to an autistic child. When she learns that Travis Lee Hilliard, the man who murdered her father in the 1980s, has been released from prison, she drops everything and sets out on an ill-conceived journey to confront him in order to mete out the justice she feels he deserves.Meanwhile, having spent three decades serving a life sentence for murdering the California preacher who rescued him from the streets, Travis thinks of himself as a reformed man. Traveling from Folsom Prison to his new home in the Mojave Desert, a remote location with minimal temptations, he struggles to reconcile his past and embrace his newfound freedom. But there are more challenges to staying on the straight and narrow than he ever could have imagined.Virginia's and Travis's braided narratives slowly tighten as they approach their inevitable collision. Unflinching, compassionate, and gripping, this bold novel evocatively examines the ambiguities wrought by both violence and redemption.

Opening with "Hors d'oeuvres" and closing with a "Feast," the stories in Cravings pulse with longing, missed opportunities, recriminations, and joy. Garnett Kilberg Cohen leads readers through acutely crafted explorations of the way events shape and change our lives, sometimes for the better and sometimes in ways that haunt us forever. Love, friendship, childhood, parenthood, and leaving home-all these experiences of desire, driven by the unrelenting passage of time-form the heart of this charismatic collection. Kilberg Cohen's captivating and vulnerable characters often recognize their shortcomings and past mistakes, but cannot always rise above them. One woman learns to forgive her husband's ex; another fears her love of salty snacks caused a family tragedy. A stoic rural community drives a newcomer out of town; a young man's entire life is colored by a traumatic childhood event at a zoo. Focusing on the specific, unforgettable moments that reveal our connections to one another, Cravings offers an expansive vision of humanity that lingers long after the final page is turned.

In 2010, Blake Geoffrion became the first player from the University of Wisconsin hockey team to receive the Hobey Baker Award, recognizing him as the best player in men's college hockey. Blake was a rising scion of hockey royalty, descendant of legendary Canadian players Howie Morenz and Bernie "Boom Boom" Geoffrion, and he would soon be the first fourth-generation player to reach the NHL. His professional career promised to cement his family's storied legacy on ice. But in 2012, while playing for the Montreal Canadiens' minor league team beneath Morenz's and Boom Boom's retired numbers, Geoffrion suffered a devastating injury that ended his career-and nearly his life. With sure-footed and swift-moving prose, Sam Jefferies tells Geoffrion's story against the backdrop of modern North American hockey. Thorough research and scores of interviews fuel this tale of soaring success and terrible tragedy, offering insight not only into one man's athletic journey but also into the rise of American hockey on the national and international stage. Geoffrion's brief career, marked by tribulation and triumph, illustrates the subtle but omnipresent currents of American media, sports labor, and the interplay between college and professional athletics. It tells the story of what was, what is, and what may yet be for the fastest game on earth.

As the Great War rages across Europe, Rand Brandt, an idealistic young forester in the northwoods of Wisconsin, discovers a remarkable gift: his touch can grow any plant in minutes. Overjoyed, he dreams of devoting his life to conservation, restoring to its former glory a landscape devastated by lumbering. At night, Rand tests his powers, pushing his physical limits and revealing his secret only to his lover, Gabriel. But his frequent absences from camp don't go unnoticed, and it isn't long before Rand is drafted to grow timber for the war effort. Along with Gabriel, he's shipped to France--though the army is a dangerous place for two men in love. While at camp, Rand also realizes the true price of his gift: everything he grows withers and dies, leaving the soil empty of all living matter. Horrified, he throws himself into ever more self-destructive trials, buckling under the pressure of so many secrets. In order to survive, he must confront the terrifying possibility that his gift is actually a curse, upending everything he believes about nature, love, and himself.

First published in 1975, The Nationalization of the Masses is George L. Mosse's major statement about political symbols and the means of their diffusion. Focusing on Germany and, to a lesser degree, France and Italy, Mosse analyzes the role of symbols in fueling mass politics, mass movements, and nationalism in a way that is broadly applicable and as relevant today as it was almost fifty years ago. In this analysis Mosse introduces terms like "secular religion," "political liturgy," "national mystique," "the new politics," and "the aesthetics of politics" that are now standard in studies of nationalism and fascism, demonstrating the importance of his cultural, anthropologically informed lens to contemporary discourse. This new edition contains a critical introduction by Victoria de Grazia, Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University, contextualizing Mosse's research and exploring its powerful influence on subsequent generations of historians.

Blue sky, yellow flowers, cool jazz, and Renaissance poetry all inhabit Betsy Sholl's latest collection of poetry. Grounded in the everyday but never mundane, these poems remind readers of the wonders that surround us. From a child's drawing tattooed onto the arm of a mechanic to bats under the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin, Sholl points to the richness of life. As the volume carefully and slowly immerses us in the poet's world, we gradually begin to understand that this is our journey of exploration as much as hers. Where does one find joy in the face of loss? Why does music exist in a world of grief? How long does it take love to overwhelm pain? Through these powerful poems we learn to see past the unreliability of memory and into the depth of the present. The child makes you a blue inch at the top of the page, and it's still hard for grown-ups to think you comeall the way down to the space between grass blades--Excerpt from "Dear Sky"

Originally published under the title Continental Films: cinâema franðcais sous contrãole allemand.

The Culture of Western Europe, George L. Mosse's sweeping cultural history, was originally published in 1961 and revised and expanded in 1974 and 1988. Originating from the lectures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for which Mosse would become famous, the book addresses, in crisp and accessible language, the key issues he saw as animating the movement of culture in Europe. Mosse emphasizes the role of both rational and irrational forces in making modern Europe, beginning with the interplay between eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century Romanticism. He traces cultural and political movements in all areas of society, especially nationalism but also economics, class identity and conflict, religion and morality, family structure, medicine, and art. This new edition restores the original 1961 illustrations and features a critical introduction by Anthony J. Steinhoff, professor in the department of history at the Université du Québec à Montréal, contextualizing Mosse's project and arguing for its continued relevance today.

Understanding and Teaching Contemporary US History since Reagan is designed for teachers looking for new perspectives on teaching the recent past, the period of US history often given the least attention in classrooms. Less of a traditional textbook than a pedagogical Swiss Army knife, the volume offers a diversity of voices and approaches to teaching a field that, by its very nature, invites vigorous debate and puts generational differences in stark relief. Older history is likely to feel removed from the lived experiences of both teachers and students, allowing for a certain dispassion of perspective. By contrast, contemporary history creates unique challenges, as individual teachers and students may think they know "what really happened" by virtue of their personal experiences. The volume addresses a wide swath of topics, from social movements around identity and representation to the Supreme Court, law enforcement, migration, climate change, and international relations. Emphasizing critical thinking and primary-source analysis, it will aid teachers in creating an invigorating and democratizing classroom experience. Intended for use in both secondary and postsecondary classrooms, the book's structure allows for a variety of applications and invites a broad audience.

For more than 150 years, individuals have traveled the countryside with pen, paper, tape recorders, and even video cameras to document versions of songs, music, and stories shared by communities. As technologies and methodologies have advanced, the task of gathering music has been taken up by a much broader group than scholars. The resulting collections created by these various people can be impacted by the individual collectors' political and social concerns, cultural inclinations, and even simple happenstance, demonstrating a crucial yet underexplored relationship between the music and those preserving it.Collecting Music in the Aran Islands, a critical historiographical study of the practice of documenting traditional music, is the first to focus on the archipelago off the west coast of Ireland. Deirdre Ní Chonghaile argues for a culturally equitable framework that considers negotiation, collaboration, canonization, and marginalization to fully understand the immensely important process of musical curation. In presenting four substantial, historically valuable collections from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she illustrates how understanding the motivations and training (or lack thereof) of individual music collectors significantly informs how we should approach their work and contextualize their place in the folk music canon.

Charlotte "Charlie" Sobczak finds the most comfort in making cheese-a craft she learned at the side of her father, Karl Mayer. In the wake of his untimely death, she and her daughter, Lucy, return to her rural hometown of Falls River, Wisconsin. With her marriage to Rick floundering, and still grieving the childhood loss of her sister and mother to polio and depression, she decides to pour all her efforts into reopening the family's Morgan Cheese Factory. Hyperaware of her own childhood losses and the challenges posed by Rick's PTSD and heavy drinking, Charlie strives to build a stable home for Lucy. Her degree in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin gives her a leg up, and the quiet joys of working at the cheese vat provide a deep, healing peace that points the way toward happiness.But Falls River is too narrow-minded to accept a female business owner, and Charlie is ill-prepared for the pettiness and conventions of small-town life. When debts come due, including a lien against her family's land, she must quickly figure out who is on her side-and how to keep her dreams alive.