Superbly researched and vividly written, "The Devil's Music "is one of the only books to trace the rise and development of the blues both in relation to other forms of black music and in the context of American social history as experienced by African Americans. From its roots in the turn-of-the-century honky-tonks of New Orleans and the barrelhouses and plantations of the Mississippi Delta to modern legends such as John Lee Hooker and B. B. King, the blues comes alive here through accounts by the blues musicians themselves and those who knew them. Throughout this wide-ranging and fascinating book, Giles Oakley describes the texture of the life that made the blues possible, and the changing attitudes toward the music. "The Devil's Music" is a wholehearted and loving examination of one of America's most powerful traditions.

Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame by Sarah Keller explores the career of experimental filmmaker and visual artist Barbara Hammer. Hammer first garnered attention in the early 1970s for a series of films representing lesbian subjects and subjectivity. Over the five decades that followed, she made almost a hundred films and solidified her position as a pioneer of queer experimental cinema and art. In the first chapter, Keller covers Hammer's late 1960s-1970s work and explores the tensions between the representation of women's bodies and contemporary feminist theory. In the second chapter, Keller charts the filmmaker's physical move from the Bay Area to New York City, resulting in shifts in her artistic mode. The third chapter turns to Hammer's primarily documentary work of the 1990s and how it engages with the places she travels, the people she meets, and the histories she explores. In the fourth chapter, Keller then considers Hammer's legacy, both through the final films of her career-which combine the methods and ideas of the earlier decades-and her efforts to solidify and shape the ways in which the work would be remembered. In the final chapter, excerpts from the author's interviews with Hammer during the last three years of her life offer intimate perspectives and reflections on her work from the filmmaker herself. Hammer's full body of work as a case study allows readers to see why a much broader notion of feminist production and artistic process is necessary to understand art made by women in the past half century. Hammer's work-classically queer and politically feminist-presses at the edges of each of those notions, pushing beyond the frames that would not contain her dynamic artistic endeavors. Keller's survey of Hammer's work is a vital text for students and scholars of film, queer studies, and art history.

Recent debates around the French Revolution have questioned the need for an overall paradigm of interpretation, as the certainties underpinning both 'classic' and 'revisionist' views have faded. In Experiencing the French Revolutionauthors argue against a single 'paradigm quest', in favour of a plurality of approaches to underscore the diverse ways in which the turbulent changes of late eighteenth-century France can be explored. From broad cultural trends to very personal trajectories, a team of experts offers fresh perspectives on the individual and collective experience of Revolution, both within and outside France. Using a range of methodologies, including biographical studies of key individuals and groups, archival studies of structures and institutions, and new sources available from digital humanities archives, contributors provide: new insights into the clandestine book trade of pre-revolutionary France, and the surprising effectiveness of Louis XVI's state control a reappraisal of Robespierre, whose opinions were shaped and transformed by years of upheaval an exploration of how revolutionary situations inspired both dissent and discipline within the new citizen armies an analysis of the revolutionary shockwaves felt beyond France, and how its currents were exploited for national political ends in Belgium, England and Wales.

Focusing on a decade in Irish history which has been largely overlooked, Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland provides the most complete account of the 1950s in Ireland, through the eyes of the young people who contributed, slowly but steadily, to the social and cultural transformation of Irish society. Eleanor O'Leary presents a picture of a generation with an international outlook, who played basketball, read comic books and romance magazines, listened to rock'n'roll music and skiffle, made their own clothes to mimic international styles and even danced in the street when the major stars and bands of the day rocked into town. She argues that this engagement with imported popular culture was a contributing factor to emigration and the growing dissatisfaction with standards of living and conservative social structures in Ireland. As well as outlining teenagers' resistance to outmoded forms of employment and unfair work practices, she maps their vulnerability as a group who existed in a limbo between childhood and adulthood. Issues of unemployment, emigration and education are examined alongside popular entertainments and social spaces in order to provide a full account of growing up in the decade which preceded the social upheaval of the 1960s. Examining the 1950s through the unique prism of youth culture and reconnecting the decade to the process of social and cultural transition in the second half of the 20th century, this book is a valuable contribution to the literature on 20th-century Irish history.

Space, Place, and Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City offers the first sustained comparative examination of the relationship between confraternal life and the spaces of the late medieval and early modern city. By considering cities large (Rome) and small (Aalst) in regions as disparate as Ireland and Mexico, the essays collected here seek to uncover the commonalities and differences in confraternal practice as they played out on the urban stage. From the candlelit oratory to the bustling piazza, from the hospital ward to the festal table, from the processional route to the execution grounds, late medieval and early modern cities, this interdisciplinary book contends, were made up of fluid and contested 'confraternal spaces.' Contributors are: Kira Maye Albinsky, Meryl Bailey, Cormac Begadon, Caroline Blondeau-Morizot, Danielle Carrabino, Andrew Chen, Ellen Decraene, Laura Dierksmeier, Ellen Alexandra Dooley, Douglas N. Dow, Anu Mand, Rebekah Perry, Pamela A.V. Stewart, Arie van Steensel, and Barbara Wisch.