Scholars of language ideology have encouraged us to reflect on and explore where social categories come from, how they have been reproduced, and whether and to what extent they are relevant to everyday interactional practices. Taking up on these issues, this book focuses on how ethnicity has been semiotically constructed, valued, and reproduced in Indonesia since Dutch colonial times, and how this category is drawn upon in everyday talk. In doing so, this book also seeks to engage with scholarship on superdiversity while highlighting some points of engagement with work on ideas about community. The book draws upon a broad range of scholarship on Indonesia, recordings of Indonesian television from the mid-1990s onwards, and recordings of the talk of Indonesian students living in Japan. It is argued that some of the main mechanisms for the reproduction and revaluation of ethnicity and its links with linguistic form include waves of technological innovations that bring people into contact (e.g. changes in transportation infrastructure, introduction of print media, television, radio, the internet, etc.), and the increasing use of one-to-many participation frameworks such as school classrooms and the mass media. In examining the talk of sojourning Indonesians the book goes on to explore how ideologies about ethnicity are used to establish and maintain convivial social relations while in Japan. Maintaining such relationships is not a trivial thing and it is argued that the pursuit of conviviality is an important practice because of its relationship with broader concerns about eking out a living.

The Battle of Fredericksburg is known as the most disastrous defeat the Federal Army of the Potomac experienced in the American Civil War. The futile assaults by Federal soldiers against the Confederate defensive positions on Marye's Heights and behind the infamous stone wall along the "Sunken Road" solidified Ambrose Burnside's reputation as an inept army commander and reinforced Robert E. Lee's undefeatable image. Follow historian James Bryant behind the lines of confrontation to discover the strategies and blunders that contributed to one of the most memorable battles of the Civil War.

From the twelve days of Christmas to the Spring traditions of Valentine, Shrovetide, and Easter eggs, through May Day revels and Midsummer fires, and on to the waning of the year, Harvest Home, and Hallowe'en; Ronald Hutton takes us on a fascinating journey through the ritual year in Britain.
His comprehensive study covers all the British Isles and the whole sweep of history from the earliest written records to the present day. Great and lesser, ancient and modern, Christian and pagan, all rituals are treated with the same attention. The result is a colorful and absorbing history in which Ronald Hutton challenges many common assumptions about the customs of the past and the festivals of the present debunking many myths and illuminates the history of the calendar we live by.
Stations of the Sun is the first complete scholarly work to cover the full span of British rituals, challenging the work of specialists from the late Victorian period onwards, reworking our picture of the field thoroughly, and raising issues for historians of every period.

Large, wooden-hulled schooners graced the seas of coastal Maine for more than a century as vessels of trade and commerce. With the advent of steam-powered craft, however, these elegant four-, five- or six-masted wooden ships became obsolete and vanished from the harbors and horizons. The Edward Lawrence, the last of the six-masters, became her own funeral pyre in Portland Harbor, burning to ash before everyone's eyes. The Carroll A. Deering washed ashore with no trace of her crew, empty as a ghost ship except for three cats and a pot of pea soup still cooking on the stove. In this testament to the beauty of the Maine coastal region, maritime history enthusiast Ingrid Grenon tells the story of these magnificent relics of the bygone Age of Sail and celebrates the people who devoted their lives to the sea.

For better or worse, Navy captain William S. ""Deak"" Parsons made the atomic bomb happen. As ordnance chief and associate director at Los Alamos, Parsons turned the scientists' nuclear creation into a practical weapon. As weaponeer, he completed the assembly of ""Little Boy"" during the flight to Hiroshima. As bomb commander, he approved the release of the bomb that forever changed the world. Yet over the past fifty years only fragments of his story have appeared, in part because of his own self-effacement and the nation's demand for secrecy. Based on recently declassified Manhattan Project documents, including Parsons's logs and other untapped sources, the book offers an unvarnished account of this unsung hero and his involvement in some of the greatest scientific advances of the twentieth century. Described by the author as a naval officer with the heart of a sailor and the searching mind of a scientist, Parsons was the first officer to recognize radar's full potential, the military's leader in the development of the proximity fuse, and the warrior who took both that fuse and the atom bomb--the two most revolutionary weapons of World War II--into combat. Al Christman credits the success of many programs to Parsons's battles against bureaucratic inertia, his championing of new ideas, and his charismatic but low-key leadership. His influence continued even after the war when the so-called ""Atomic Admiral"" helped establish the Navy's postwar nuclear policies and advance the scientific developments that are at the heart of today's sea service. Filled with human drama set against a background of national peril, this book tells a fascinating story that will draw in even the nontechnical reader.

In this book, Susan Edmunds explores he relationship between modernist domestic fiction and the rise of the U.S. welfare state. This relationship, which began in the Progressive era, emerged as maternalist reformers developed an inverted discourse of social housekeeping in order to call for state protection and regulation of the home. Modernists followed suit, turning the genre of domestic fiction inside out in order to represent new struggles on the border between home, market and state. Edmunds uses the work of Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Tillie Olsen, Edna Ferber, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor to trace the significance of modernists' radical reconstitution of the genre of domestic fiction. Using a grotesque aesthetic of revolutionary inversion, these writers looped their depictions of the domestic sphere through revolutionary discourses associated with socialism, consumerism and the avant-garde. These authors used their grotesque discourses to deal with issues of social conflict ranging from domestic abuse and racial violence to educational reform, public health care, eugenics, and social security. With the New Deal, the U.S. welfare state realized maternalist ambitions to disseminate a modern sentimental version of the home to all white citizens, successfully translating radical bids for collective social security into a racialized order of selective and detached domestic security. The book argues that modernists engaged and contested this historical trajectory from the start. In the process, they forged an enduring set of terms for understanding and negotiating the systemic forms of ambivalence, alienation and conflict that accompany Americans' contemporary investments in"family values."

In the 1880s a Swiss-born biologist, Johann B ttikofer, while working for the Royal Museum of Natural History in Leiden, The Netherlands, carried out two extended expeditions to Liberia, West Africa. In 1890 he published the results of his work in German in two-volumes, entitled "Reisebilder aus Liberia" (Travel Sketches from Liberia). B ttikofer worked extensively in the forested regions of coastal Liberia and made the acquaintance of many prominent Liberians and other personalities of that era. His zoological work there is actually exceeded by his detailed descriptions of the state of Liberia some 50 years following its colonization by freed American slaves and their descendents. It constitutes the first comprehensive monograph on the Republic of Liberia.

An innovative and accessible overview of how ancient Scandinavians understood and made use of their mythological stories. Old Norse Mythology provides a unique survey of the mythology of Scandinavia: the gods THorr (Thor) with his hammer, the wily and duplicitous Odinn (Odin), the sly Loki, and other fascinating figures. They create the world, battle their enemies, and die at the end of the world, which arises anew with a new generation of gods. These stories were the mythology of the Vikings, but they were not written down until long after the conversion to Christianity, mostly in Iceland. In addition to a broad overview of Nordic myths, the book presents a case study of one myth, which tells of how THorr (Thor) fished up the World Serpent, analyzing the myth as a sacred text of the Vikings. Old Norse Mythology also explores the debt we owe to medieval intellectuals, who were able to incorporate the old myths into new paradigms that helped the myths to survive when they were no longer part of a religious system. This superb introduction traces the use of the mythology in ideological contexts, from the Viking Age until the twenty-first century, as well as in entertainment.

Prophesies of Godlessness explores the surprisingly similar expectations of religious and moral change voiced by major American thinkers from the time of the Puritans to today. These predictions of "godlessness" in American society -- sometimes by those favoring the foreseen future, sometimes by those fearing it -- have a history as old as America, and indeed seem crucially intertwined with it.
This book shows that there have been and continue to be patterns to these prophesies. They determine how some people perceive and analyze America's prospective moral and religious future, how they express themselves, and powerfully affect how others hear them. While these patterns have taken a sinuous and at times subterranean route to the present, when we think about the future of America we are thinking about that future largely with terms and expectations first laid out by past generations, some stemming back before the very foundations of the United States. Even contemporary atheists and those who predict optimistic techno-utopias rely on scripts that are deeply rooted in the American past.
This book excavates the history of these prophesies. Each chapter attends to a particular era, and each is organized around a focal individual, a community of thought, and changing conceptions of secularization. Each chapter also discusses how such predictions are part of all thought about "the good society," and how such thinking structures our apprehension of the present, forming a feedback loop of sorts. Extending from the role of prophesies in Thomas Jefferson's thought, to the Civil War, through progressivism, the Scopes Trial, the Cold War and beyond, Prophesies of Godlessness demonstratesthat expectations about America's future character and piety are not an accidental feature of American thought, but have been, and continue to be, absolutely essential to the meaning of the nation itself.

This New England community has made national headlines for the notorious Sacco and Vanzetti trial; it has hosted Presidents Washington, Jackson and Lincoln, among other leaders; and it played a formative role in the establishment of the Animal Rescue League of Boston. In popular culture, "Dedham" made its mark as the setting for several notable films and works of fiction. Author James L. Parr gives a fresh take on "Dedham's" famous moments and also weaves in lesser-known stories of its heritage and traditions. This town has accumulated some eccentricities, from the legendary apparitions that haunted the cemetery for most of October 1887 to the still-active, two-centuries-old Society in Dedham for Apprehending Horse Thieves. Explore the intricate microcosm of American history that belongs to this charming New England town.

The Vietnam War, Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine High School shooting, and attacks of 9/11 all shattered myths of national identity. Vietnam was a war the U.S. didn't win on the ground in Asia or politically at home; Oklahoma City revealed domestic terrorism in the heartland; Columbine debunked legends of high school as an idyllic time; and 9/11 demonstrated U.S. vulnerability to international terrorism. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was intended to separate the victims from the war that caused their death. This focus on individuals lost (evident in all the memorials and museums discussed here) conflates the function of cemeteries, where deaths are singular and grieving is personal, with that of memorials - to remember and mourn communal losses and reflect on national events seen in a larger context. Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 traces the evolution and consequences of this new hybrid paradigm, which grants a heroic status to victims and by extension to their families, thereby creating a class of privileged participants in the permanent memorial process. It argues against this practice, suggesting instead that victims' families be charged with determining the nature of an interim memorial, one that addresses their needs in the critical time between the murder of their loved ones and the completion of the permanent memorial. It also charges that the memorials discussed here are variously based on strategies of diversion and denial that direct our attention away from actual events, and reframe tragedy as secular or religious triumph. Thus they basically camouflage history. Seen as an aggregate, they define a nation of victims, exactly the concept they and their accompanying celebratory narratives were apparently created to obscure.

Cincinnati's Northside neighborhood rests in the amphitheater created by the Mill Creek and West Fork Creek. Settled in 1790, incorporated in 1865, and annexed in 1873, it was Cincinnati's first commuter suburb. Its colorful history from Native American days to the present is evidenced by its many names-Ludlow Station, Helltown, Happy Valley, Tanyard, and Cumminsville. The abolitionist sentiment made it a hotbed for Underground Railroad activity. A large German presence birthed its many beer gardens and saloons. Wealthy estate owners of Clifton and Avondale came to Frogtown to buy perennials for formal gardens. The fashion-conscious came to seek the large number of merchant tailors and milliners for their high-quality and contemporary styles. Beer drinkers sought Bruckman's Beer, fermented on the canal. The famous Crosley brothers started their empire in Northside. This Cincinnati neighborhood still sparkles today with the diversity and creativity of its past. Step back in time to see the stories that still make Cincinnati's Northside neighborhood such a vibrant and exciting community.

Since its founding in 1751, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has been at the crossroads of history as the site of Washington's headquarters during the Whiskey Rebellion, a city shelled and occupied by Confederate forces and the home to Dickinson College and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. With lively vignettes and firsthand accounts, Joseph David Cress recounts the remarkable history of the borough. Tales of the McClintock Slave Riot of 1847 and the courthouse fire of 1845 stand alongside the legendary figures of Molly Pitcher and all-American athlete Jim Thorpe. Cress chronicles Carlisle's evolution from an outpost on Pennsylvania's rough-and-tumble frontier to a vibrant and thriving hub of the Cumberland Valley.

This visual history of the 20th centuryas middle decades in Santa Paula illustrates how a rural city settled into its middle age. As a sequel to Images of America: Santa Paula, which covered the pioneering and settlement years of 1870 to 1930, it continues this Ventura County cityas story through the Depression decade and the World War II and Korean War home front years that led up to the sixties. The time from 1930 to 1960 was prosperous for the two main industries in Santa Paula and its environs: citrus cultivation and oil production. The population increases reflected the job opportunities that these industries presented, bringing other families, businesses, and opportunities to the growing city.

For all its concern with change in the present and future, science fiction is deeply rooted in the past and, surprisingly, engages especially deeply with the ancient world. Indeed, both as an area in which the meaning of "classics" is actively transformed and as an open-ended set of texts whose own 'classic' status is a matter of ongoing debate, science fiction reveals much about the roles played by ancient classics in modern times. Classical Traditions in Science Fiction is the first collection dedicated to the rich study of science fiction's classical heritage, offering a much-needed mapping of its cultural and intellectual terrain. This volume discusses a wide variety of representative examples from both classical antiquity and the past four hundred years of science fiction, beginning with science fiction's "rosy-fingered dawn" and moving toward the other-worldly literature of the present day. As it makes its way through the eras of science fiction, Classical Traditions in Science Fiction exposes the many levels on which science fiction engages the ideas of the ancient world, from minute matters of language and structure to the larger thematic and philosophical concerns.

William Penn, the might of Pittsburgh steel and the Revolutionary figures of Philadelphia dominate the scene of Pennsylvania history. Thomas White brings together a collection of tales that have been cast in the shadows by these giants of the Keystone State. From the 1869 storm that pelted Chester County with snails to the bloody end of the Cooley gang, White selects events with an eye for the humorous and strange. Mostly true accounts of cannibalistic feasts, goat-rescuing lawmen, heroic goldfish, the funeral of a gypsy queen and a Pittsburgh canine whose obituary was featured in the "New York Times" all leap from the lost pages of history.

In Reforming Saints, David J. Collins explains how and why Renaissance humanists composed Latin hagiography in Germany in the decades leading up to the Reformation. Contrary to the traditional wisdom, Collins's research uncovers a resurgence in the composition of saints' lives in the half century leading up to 1520. German humanists, he finds, were among the most active authors and editors of these texts.
Focusing on forty Latin depictions of German saints written between 1470 and 1520, Collins finds patterns both in how these humanists chose their subjects and how they presented their holiness. He argues that the humanist hagiographers took up the writing of saints' lives to investigate Germany's medieval past, to reconstruct and exalt its greatness, and to advocate programs of religious and cultural reform. This literature, says Collins, left a legacy that polemicists and philologists in Catholic Europe would be using for their own purposes by the end of the sixteenth century. These hagiographic writings are thus both reflective and formative of the religious and cultural conflicts that defined this period of European history. To bolster his case, Collins draws not only on the Latin saints' lives, but also on vernacular lives, maps and chorographic documents, personal and professional letters, papal, urban, and municipal archives, painting, sculpture and broadside print, and medieval and early modern histories and chronicles. The result is a fresh, new portrait of the humanism of Renaissance Germany.
With his surprising and insightful conclusions, Collins sheds new light on humanism's appropriation in Germany, particularly in its religious aspect. He approaches the humanists'writings on their own terms and recaptures the creative energy the humanists brought to the task of revising the legends of the saints. His scholarly perspective includes the roles of emperors, princes, abbots, city councilmen, artists, librarians, soldiers, peasants, and pilgrims, showing how humanists reached larger and less learned audiences than many other kinds of writing ever could. The cult of the saints and Renaissance humanism are two topics that have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Reforming Saints considers them as seldom before -- at their intersection.

On December 20, 1999, the city of Macau became a Special Administrative Region of China after nearly four hundred and fifty years of Portuguese administration. Drawing extensively on Portuguese and other sources and on interviews with key participants, this book examines the strategies and policies adopted by the Portuguese government during the negotiations. The study sets these events within the larger context of Portugal's retreat from empire, the British experience with Hong Kong, and changing social and political conditions within Macau. A weak player on the international stage, Portugal was still able to obtain concessions during the negotiations, notably in the timing of the retrocession and continuing Portuguese nationality arrangements for some Macau citizens. Yet the tendency of Portuguese leaders to use the Macau question as a tool in their domestic political agendas hampered their ability to develop an effective strategy and left China with the freedom to control the process of negotiation.

A book about Vermont's history will likely bring to mind such topics as Abenaki Indians, the Green Mountain Boys and the state's famed covered bridges, but "Forgotten Tales of Vermont" takes readers far beyond traditional histories to uncover littleknown stories from Vermont's quirky past. Who knew that students from Castleton Medical School moonlighted as grave robbers until they were caught hiding Mrs. Churchill's head in a haystack? Or that an Egyptian mummy once turned up in Middlebury and is now buried at the local cemetery alongside the town's founders? Stories such as the Willoughby Lake monster and Slipperyskin, the bear that terrorized Lemington, are sure to bemuse, baffle and surprise even Vermonters who think they've heard it all. Culled from newspapers, books and journals, William M. Alexander's fascinating tales will entertain and inform readers for generations to come!

Louis E. Fenech offers a compelling new examination of one of the only Persian compositions attributed to the tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708): the Zafar-namah or 'Epistle of Victory.' Written as a masnavi, a Persian poem, this letter was originally sent to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (d. 1707) rebuking his most unbecoming conduct. Incredibly, Guru Gobind Singh's letter is included today within the Sikh canon, one of only a very small handful of Persian-language texts granted the status of Sikh scripture. As such, its contents are sung on special Sikh occasions. Perhaps equally surprising is the fact that the letter appears in the tenth Guru's book or the Dasam Granth in the standard Gurmukhi script (in which Punjabi is written) but retains its original Persian language, a vernacular few Sikhs know. Drawing out the letter's direct and subtle references to the Iranian national epic, the Shah-namah, and to Shaikh Sa'di's thirteenth-century Bustan, Fenech demonstrates how this letter served as a form of Indo-Islamic verbal warfare, ensuring the tenth Guru's moral and symbolic victory over the legendary and powerful Mughal empire. Through analysis of the Zafar-namah, Fenech resurrects an essential and intiguing component of the Sikh tradition: its Islamicate aspect.

This book is a novel contribution to contemporary research on Simone de Beauvoir, and a defense of the importance of the humanities. It reveals previously unexplored dimensions of Beauvoir's work by exposing her as a significant and inspiring humanist thinker. These essays argue that her works and influence testify to the transformative potential of humanistic research.

Enter Somerville, a city packed with stories larger than itself, to salute a heritage that justifies the fierce pride of its citizens. Share a perch on one of Somerville's celebrated hills with Dee Morris and Dora St. Martin and watch the raising of America's first flag and the stringing of its first telephone line. Strolling from neighborhood to neighborhood, this brief history knocks on the doors of everyone from the father of Fenway Park to Missy LeHand, Franklin D. Roosevelt s private secretary and steadfast companion. Even the notoriously elusive Captain Kidd is caught for inspection as he tries to slip through a trapdoor in a bedroom closet.

Journey back to the spring of 1775, when Bennington County, Vermont was no more than the wild frontier of the northern territory. It was from here that the first victory of the American Revolution was won, when Patriot Ethan Allen led the famed Green Mountain Boys to raid and capture towering Fort Ticonderoga from the British.

Two years later, the British were again defeated at the Battle of Bennington, sufferring two hundred casualties and the staggering capture of more than seven hundred soldiers by another Patriot, John Stark.

Dick Smith takes readers through the famed covered bridges, historic taverns and quaint villages of Bennington County that in another life played a vital role in leading our country toward independence.

Celebrated in literature and film as a playground for the rich and famous, Long Island's North Shore- its Gold Coast- has long had a firm hold on the imaginations of readers, vacationers and titans of industry. Glimpsed here are the palatial summer homes of the wealthy, historic old buildings and the dramatic landscape with its rolling hills, views of Connecticut and coves lined with boats. Offering 101 of the most iconic images of the people and places that have come to define the North Shore, local historian and author Richard Panchyk has created a volume sure to inspire the next generation of Eggers.

A vast region stretching roughly from the Volga River to Manchuria and the northern Chinese borderlands, Central Asia has been called the "pivot of history," a land where nomadic invaders and Silk Road traders changed the destinies of states that ringed its borders, including pre-modern Europe, the Middle East, and China. In Central Asia in World History, Peter B. Golden provides an engaging account of this important region, ranging from prehistory to the present, focusing largely on the unique melting pot of cultures that this region has produced over millennia. Golden describes the traders who braved the heat and cold along caravan routes to link East Asia and Europe; the Mongol Empire of Chinggis Khan and his successors, the largest contiguous land empire in history; the invention of gunpowder, which allowed the great sedentary empires to overcome the horse-based nomads; the power struggles of Russia and China, and later Russia and Britain, for control of the area. Finally, he discusses the region today, a key area that neighbors such geopolitical hot spots as Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China.