The Boston Red Sox are one of the most iconic teams in all of professional sports, representing not just a city or a state, but an entire region--they're New England's sole entry into MLB. Baseball immortals Tris Speaker and Babe Ruth wore a Red Sox uniform early in their careers, and many other great players, including Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Rice, Wade Boggs, and Pedro Martinez have played for New England's beloved ball club. Sports historian Robert W. Cohen has chosen the 50 best ever to play for the Sox and profiles their exploits. Chances are you'll find your favorite player here.

Grand Tours is a chronicle of the American visits of five charismatic pianists--Leopold de Meyer, Henri Herz, Sigismund Thalberg, Anton Rubenstein, and Hans von Bulow--during the late nineteenth century. Performing Beethoven and Chopin in gold-rush era California, these pianists introduced many Americans to the delights of the concert hall. With humor and insight, Lott describes the clash between the flamboyant, elegant, European pianists and American audiences more accustomed to circuses and rodeos than these "serious" entertainments. Lott also explores the creative and sometimes outlandish publicity techniques of managers seeking to capitalize on rich but uncharted American markets. The tours, which included almost a thousand concerts in more than one hundred cities in America and Canada, illustrate the rigors of the performing life, the wide range of nineteenth-century audiences and their gradual transformation from boisterous participators to respectful listeners, and the establishment of the piano recital as it exists today. With the colorful personalities of the pianists, the juxtaposition of high art and unsophisticated audiences, and the predilection of Americans to treat even the most serious subjects with humor, the book is illuminating and entertaining. The text is illustrated with ads, newspaper clippings, and correspondence that bring to life this collision of cultures.

Charting the rise and development of Christianity, Carter Lindberg has succeeded in writing a concise and compelling history of the world's largest religion. He spans over 2,000 years of colorful incident to give an authoritative history of Christianity for both the general reader and the beginning student.
Ranges from the missionary journeys of the apostles to the tele-evangelism of the twenty-first century.
Demonstrates how the Christian community received and forged its identity from its development of the Bible to the present day.
Covers topics fundamental to understanding the course of Western Christianity, including the growth of the papacy, heresy and schism, reformation and counter-reformation.
Includes an introduction to the historiography of Christianity, a note on the problems of periodization, an appendix on theological terms, and a useful bibliography.
An authoritative yet succinct history, written to appeal to a general audience as well as students of the history of Christianity.
Written by internationally regarded theologian, Carter Lindberg, who is the author of numerous titles on theology and Church history.

From the 1920s and 1930s, when American cinema depicted the South as a demi-paradise populated by wealthy landowners, glamorous belles, and happy slaves, through later, more realistic depictions of the region in films based on works by Erskine Caldwell, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Robert Penn Warren, Hollywood's view of the South has been as ever-changing as the place itself. This comprehensive reference guide to Southern films offers credits, plot descriptions, and analyses of how the stereotypes and characterizations in each film contribute to our understanding of a most contentious American time and place.

Organized by subjects including Economic Conditions, Plantation Life, The Ku Klux Klan, and The New Politics, "Hollywood's Image of the South" seeks to coin a new genre by describing its conventions and attitudes. Even so, the Southern film crosses all known generic boundaries, including the comedy, the women's film, the "noir," and many others. This invaluable guide to an under-recognized category of American cinema illustrates how much there is to learn about a time and place from watching the movies that aim to capture it.

"Important...a truly fascinating reading on this controversial subject."
-- "Library Journal"

"The reprinted documents are what makes Burg's book valuable, and they allow readers to judge for themselves whether gays and lesbians deserve to be fully integrated into the modern military."--"The Journal of Sex Research"

In Ancient Greece and Rome, in Crusader campaigns and pirate adventures, same-sex romances were a common and condoned part of military culture. From the Peloponnesian War to the Gulf War, from Achelleus to Lawrence of Arabia gays and lesbians have played a crucial but often hidden role in military campaigns. But recent debates over the legality of gay service in the military and the "don't ask, don't tell" policy have obscured this rich aspect of military history. Richard Burg has recovered important documents and assembled an anthology on these often invisible gay and lesbian warriors.

Burg shows us that the Amazons of legend weren't just fictional. We learn about the richness and variety of their culture in documents from Plato, Seneca and Suetonius. From courts-martial proceedings we discover women warriors in seventeenth century England who passed as men in order to serve, and army officers whose underground culture fostered long-term romantic friendships.

There are also sections on the American Civil War, World War I and II, the contemporary U.S. military as well as sailors and pirates. This anthology will forever change the way we think about "gays in the military."

After decades of scholarship on the civil rights movement at the local level, the insights of bottom-up movement history remain essentially invisible in the accepted narrative of the movement and peripheral to debates on how to research, document, and teach about the movement. This collection of original works refocuses attention on this bottom-up history and compels a rethinking of what and who we think is central to the movement.

The essays examine such locales as Sunflower County, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; and Wilson, North Carolina; and engage such issues as nonviolence and self-defense, the implications of focusing on women in the movement, and struggles for freedom beyond voting rights and school desegregation. Events and incidents discussed range from the movement's heyday to the present and include the Poor People's Campaign mule train to Washington, D.C., the popular response to the deaths of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, and political cartoons addressing Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

The kinds of scholarship represented here--which draw on oral history and activist insights (along with traditional sources) and which bring the specificity of time and place into dialogue with broad themes and a national context--are crucial as we continue to foster scholarly debates, evaluate newer conceptual frameworks, and replace the superficial narrative that persists in the popular imagination.

This book, written with unique access to official archives, tells the secret story of Britain's H-bomb - the scientific and strategic background, the government's policy decision, the work of the remarkable men who created the bomb, the four weapon trials at a remote Pacific atoll in 1957-58, and the historic consequences.

Michigan has long been proud of its military service, but many of its early accomplishments are unknown to most of the state's residents. This book fills the void in our knowledge by bringing together an impressive array of information on Michigan's armed forces from 1775 to 1860. Here we find the name rank, unit, and dates of service for all known Michigan men who served in the Revolutionary War, Indian Wars, War of 1812, Black Hawk War, Toledo War, Patriot War, and the Mexican-American War. Accompanying histories explain the reasons behind the conflicts and include maps showing all theaters of operations for Michigan troops. The in-depth accounts of the state's role in these hostilities often serve as the first serious and comprehensive studies of the contributions made by its citizens in these events.

The book's many points of interest include its treatment of the dramatic Revolutionary War period, when local Indians, British garrisons at Detroit and Mackinac, and a few Michigan men, well placed, held sway over most of the old Northwest. The book also documents "foreigners" who fought for Michigan's cause, with a disproportionate number of soldiers of French descent serving during the War of 1812, and of Irish ancestry serving in the Mexican-American War. Specific information on names of Native American soldiers is not available, but their general roles as combatants are noted. Ultimately, this book stands as a fitting memorial to the many men who took up arms on behalf of Michigan.

World's fairs contributed mightily to defining a relationship between religion and the wider world of human culture. Even at the base level of popular culture found on the midways of the earliest international expositions--where Victorian ladies gawked at displays of non-Western, "primitive" life--the concept of religion as an independent field of study began to take hold in public consciousness. The World's Parliament of Religions at the Chicago exposition of 1893 did as much as any other single event to introduce the idea that religion could be viewed as simply one concern among many within the rapidly diversifying modern lifestyle.

A chronicle of the emergence and development of religion as a field of intellectual inquiry, Exhibiting Religion: Colonialism and Spectacle at International Expositions, 1851-1893 is an extensive survey of world's fairs from the inaugural Great Exhibition in London to the Chicago Columbian Exposition and World's Parliament of Religions. As the first broad gatherings of people from across the world, these events were pivotal as forums in which the central elements of a field of religion came into contact with one another.

John Burris argues that comparative religion was the focal point for early attempts at comparative culture and that both were defined more by the intercultural politics and material exchanges of colonialism than by the spirit of objective intellectual inquiry. Equally a work of American and British religious history and a cultural history of the emerging field of religion, this book offers definitive theoretical insights into the discipline of religious studies in its early formation.