The seminal medieval history of the Second Commonwealth period of ancient Jewish history. Sepher Yosippon was written in Hebrew by a medieval historian and noted by modern scholars for its eloquent style. This is the first known chronicle of Jewish history and legend-from Adam to the destruction of the Second Temple-since the canonical histories written by Flavius Josephus in Greek and later translated by Christian scholars into Latin. Sepher Yosippon has been cited and referred to by scholars, poets, and authors as the authentic source for ancient Israel for over a millennium, until overshadowed by the twentiethcentury Hebrew translations of Josephus. It is based on Pseudo Hegesippus's fourth-century anti-Jewish summary of Josephus's Jewish War. However, the anonymous author (a.k.a. Joseph ben Gurion Hacohen) also consulted with the Latin versions of Josephus's works available to him. At the same time, he included a wealth of Second Temple literature as well as Roman and Christian sources. This book contains Steven Bowman's translation of the complete text of David Flusser's standard Hebrew edition of Sepher Yosippon, which includes the later medieval interpolations referring to Jesus. The present English edition also contains the translator's introduction as well as a preface by the fifteenth-century publisher of the book. The anonymous author of this text remains unique for his approach to history, his use of sources, and his almost secular attitude, which challenges the modern picture of medieval Jews living in a religious age. In his influential novel, A Guest for the Night, the Nobel Laureate author Shmuel Yosef Agnon emphasized the importance of Sepher Yosippon as a valuable reading to understand human nature. Bowman's translation of Flusser's notes, as well as his own scholarship, offers a well-wrought story for scholars and students interested in Jewish legend and history in the medieval period, Jewish studies, medieval literature, and folklore studies.

This is an engaging autobiographical account of a young American woman's life in her Samoan husband's native home. Fay Calkins, a descendant of Puritan settlers, met Vai Ala'ilima, a descendant of Samoan chiefs, while working on her doctoral dissertation in the Library of Congress. After an unconventional courtship and a typical American wedding, they set out for Western Samoa, where Fay was to find a way of life totally new and charming, if at times frustrating and confusing. Soon after her arrival in the islands, the bride of a few months found herself with a family of seven boys in a wide range of ages, sent by relatives to live with the new couple. She was stymied by the economics of trying to support numerous guests, relatives, and a growing family, and still contribute to the lavish feasts that were given on any pretext--feasts, where the guests brought baskets in which to take home as much of the largesse as they could carry. Fay tried to introduce American institutions: a credit union, a co-op, a work schedule, and hourly wages on the banana plantation begun by her and her husband. In each instance, she quickly learned that Samoans were unwilling or unable to grasp her Western ideas of input equaling output, of personal property, or of payment received for work done. Despite these frustrations and disappointments, however, life among the people of her Samoan chief was for Fay happy and productive.

The Cinema of Sofia Coppola provides the first comprehensive analysis of Coppola's oeuvre that situates her work broadly in relation to contemporary artistic, social and cultural currents. Suzanne Ferriss considers the central role of fashion - in its various manifestations - to Coppola's films, exploring fashion's primacy in every cinematic dimension: in film narrative; production, costume and sound design; cinematography; marketing, distribution and auteur branding. She also explores the theme of celebrity, including Coppola's own director-star persona, and argues that Coppola's auteur status rests on an original and distinct visual style, derived from the filmmaker's complex engagement with photography and painting. Ferriss analyzes each of Coppola's six films, categorizing them in two groups: films where fashion commands attention (Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled and The Bling Ring) and those where clothing and material goods do not stand out ostentatiously, but are essential in establishing characters' identities and relationships (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Somewhere). Throughout, Ferriss draws on approaches from scholarship on fashion, film, visual culture, art history, celebrity and material culture to capture the complexities of Coppola's engagement with fashion, culture and celebrity. The Cinema of Sofia Coppola is beautifully illustrated with color images from her films, as well as artworks and advertising artefacts.

Jan Ken Po, Ai Kono Sho"" ""Junk An'a Po, I Canna Show"" These words to a simple child's game brought from Japan and made local, the property of all of Hawaii's people, symbolize the cultural transformation experienced by Hawaii's Japanese. It is the story of this experience that Dennis Ogawa tells so well here.

From the late eighteenth century to the present day, public exhibitions featuring displays of human anatomy have proven popular with a wide range of audiences, successfully marketed as educational facilities for medical professionals as well as improving entertainments for the general public. Partly a product of the public sanitation and health reform movements that began in the eighteenth century, partly a form of popular spectacle, early public anatomical exhibitions drew on two apparently distinct cultural developments: firstly, the professionalisation of medicine from the mid 1700s and the increasingly central role of practical anatomy within it; secondly, the rise of a culture of public spectacles such as world fairs, public museums, circuses and side shows, and the use of new visual technologies these spaces pioneered. Such spectacles often drew on medical discourses as a way of lending legitimacy to their displays of human bodies, while their popularity also helped make the then-contentious practice of anatomy publicly acceptable.
This book examines the cultural work performed by such exhibitions and their role in (re)producing new ways of seeing and knowing the body over the modern era. While public anatomical exhibitions might seem to occupy a marginal position in the history of popular culture and that of medicine, their distinctive intermixing of the medical and the spectacular has made them an influential and intensely productive cultural space, an important site of emergence for new ideas about bodily health and care. This book traces the influential role of such exhibitions in popularising a distinctly modern idea of the body as something requiring constant work and careful self-cultivation-an idea which continues to play a central role in the contemporary fascination with practices and possibilities of self-improvement. Through a series of representative case studies-including eighteenth-century exhibitions of anatomical Venuses, nineteenth-century anatomical museums "for men only" that served as quack clinics for sexual disorders, traditional and contemporary freak shows, and the recent public display of real human remains in Body Worlds and other such exhibitions-Anatomy as Spectacle traces how these exhibitions taught their spectators to see their bodies as something requiring constant self-monitoring and management, constructing an embodied modern subject who is always responsible, productive, temperate, and focused on self-improvement.

Naomi "Omie" Wise was drowned by her lover in the waters of North Carolina's Deep River in 1807, and her murder has been remembered in ballad and story for well over two centuries. Mistakes, romanticization and misremembering have been injected into Naomi's biography over time, blurring the line between reality and fiction. The authors of this book, whose family has lived in the Deep River area since the 18th century, are descendants of many of the people who knew Naomi Wise or were involved in her murder investigation. This is the story of a young woman betrayed and how her death gave way to the folk traditions by which she is remembered today. The book sheds light on the plight of impoverished women in early America and details the fascinating inner workings of the Piedmont North Carolina Quaker community that cared for Naomi in her final years and kept her memory alive.