Interdisciplinary Collection Of Essays Research Articles

Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century, edited by James Gregory and Daniel J.R. Grey

Reviewed by: Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century ed. by James Gregory and Daniel J. R. Grey Katherine Haldane Grenier (bio) Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century, edited by James Gregory, and Daniel J. R. Grey; pp. xii + 282. London and New York: Routledge, 2020, $160.00. Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century, a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary collection of essays, uses ideals and expressions of union and disunion as a lens through which to examine the nineteenth century, focusing mostly on Great Britain and the United States. The editors, James Gregory and Daniel J. R. Grey, describe their book as exploring "episodes, institutions, sites and representations concerned with union, concord and bonds of sympathy, but also … moments of secession, separation, discord and disjunction" (1). These are broad themes which could encompass a wide assortment of topics, and indeed, the essays in this volume are varied. Their topics include marriage, political unions, jury trials, popular travel, church disestablishment, the administration of the 1834 Poor Law, and the selection of art for the Houses of Parliament. Such diverse topics can seem disjointed, and the book might benefit from a stronger elucidation of the connections which tie these essays together. Yet ideas in many of the individual essays do engage with each other in intriguing ways, and offer some valuable examples of the many ways that union and disunion played out in nineteenth-century people's lives and political structures. The collection is divided into five sections: artistic representations of union and disunion; transnational diplomacy between Britain and Europe; the politics of union and disunion in Great Britain; union and disunion in the United States; family division and union. A key argument that runs through these organizational divisions is that unions, even those that seemed the most stable, were subject to a constant process of contestation, negotiation, and redefinition. Gordon Pentland and Gary D. Hutchison demonstrate this point in discussions of the Anglo-Scottish union. Pentland's study of three Scottish political leaders during the nineteenth century shows the nuance with which they approached the political relationship with England and the impreciseness of simple characterizations of "unionist" and "nationalist" when applied to Scottish political thought of this era (108). Hutchison finds that the Conservative Party was more influential in Scottish governance and politics in this period than has been recognized, [End Page 144] and that their lack of success in electoral politics as the century went on led to innovative approaches to administrative reform of the union. Turning to the United States, Lawrence T. McDonnell provides another example that unity could not be taken for granted. While South Carolina politics are often considered to have been particularly cohesive in the 1850s, McDonnell's assessment of the legacy of John C. Calhoun shows how that unanimity was forged. South Carolina politicians in the 1850s were consumed by the effort to achieve cohesion within the various factions that emerged after Calhoun's death; whether or not that internal unity would lead to disunity from the North was not a sure thing. Other essays usefully remind us that elite politicians were not the only actors who helped to establish and maintain unions. Gregory examines an 1849 visit of 250 middle-class British excursionists to Paris, a trip which was intended to promote good Anglo-French relations after recent tensions. While the trip demonstrated the eagerness of many middle-class people to play a role in their nation's international affairs, it also opened a debate in the press about who should most properly represent British interests abroad. Rachel Egloff's contribution to the volume also examines ways in which Britons outside the political class endeavored to participate in international politics, in this case through literary activity. Rose Blaze de Bury, a British writer married to a French diplomat and the subject of Egloff's essay, was deeply interested in international politics and was concerned with strengthening Britons' understanding of the need for increased political unity in the German-speaking world. Egloff analyzes the textual strategies through which Blaze de Bury claimed authority as an expert in the "masculine" (87) world of "hard" European politics (89). Kim Stevenson and Judith Rowbotham investigate how...

The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 1: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Angela Wright and Dale Townshend, and: The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 2: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

Reviewed by: The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 1: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Angela Wright and Dale Townshend, and: The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 2: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright JoEllen Mary DeLucia Angela Wright and Dale Townshend, eds., The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 1: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 516; 16 b/w illus. $155.00 cloth. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, eds., The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 2: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020) Pp. 541; 14 illus. $155.00 cloth. Defining the Gothic has been a perennial problem. Is it a literary genre, an aesthetic, or a style? As a historical marker, does it refer to the liberty-loving Goths of pre-Roman Britain, a medieval chivalric culture, or is it a negative definition of modernity? During the long eighteenth-century, Gothic was used as an adjective to describe architecture, political values, and, later, literary texts; in the nineteenth century, the term largely disappeared. In the twentieth century, Victorian studies adapted the Gothic as a “retrospective construct” (II:15)—a category used to group everything from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the Kelmscott Press’s The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer under the same umbrella. The Gothic’s search for a clear referent has had the sometimes frustrating but also liberating effect of evacuating the term of any clear meaning. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, the editors of the first two volumes of The Cambridge History of the Gothic, argue that instead of linking the Gothic to a historical period, discipline, or set of formal characteristics, we should understand it as a “mode.” Mode in these volumes means something close to a method or approach, an active means of both interrogating dominant histories and writing “counter-history” (I: 6). The discontinuities and the unevenness in the application of the term Gothic make the case for it as an approach or process. As Robert Miles argues, the Gothic might best be understood as “a temporal contrast . . . between the premodern world of ghosts (timeless, circular, repetitious, with porous boundaries between the self and other, this world and the next), and the empty, chronometric, homogenous time of modernity” (I: 449); or, as Tom Duggett persuasively suggests, “a zeitgeist term—a word in the process of becoming, through contestation and self-contradiction” (II: 105). One of the great strengths of Townshend and Wright’s turn to mode instead of form is that they are able to develop a truly interdisciplinary collection of essays, putting literature, history, art, architecture, and drama into conversation with one another. At the same time, the constraints of the linear history demanded by the form of a three-volume Cambridge History, with separate volumes dedicated to the long eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and a yet to be published volume on the twentieth century, work against the Gothic mode itself. As I read, I sometimes wished that the essays were grouped in a non-linear fashion, interrogating instead of replicating progressive historical form. Despite these formal constraints, the collected essays provide a fascinating interdisciplinary and transnational look at the Gothic, which almost always begins its story with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764); those in eighteenth-century studies would find these volumes most useful as a means of building a counternarrative of our period’s influence, one that contests the aesthetic and philosophical tenets of the neo-Classical and Enlightenment impulses that still dominate understandings of the eighteenth century; in addition, the collection would aid eighteenth centuryists in responding to recent calls to think and teach beyond the traditional boundaries of period and [End Page 1012] discipline and track the echoes of issues central to the eighteenth century across periods and national traditions. With the third volume yet to be released, this review only considers the first two volumes, which are dedicated to the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they include an impressive forty-one essays from forty-two scholars writing from different disciplinary and national perspectives. In keeping with the Gothic mode, the essays are best read...

Bridging the Distance: Common Issues of the Rural West . Edited by David B. Danbom. Foreword by David M. Kennedy.

Bridging the Distance: Common Issues of the Rural West . Edited by David B. Danbom. Foreword by David M. Kennedy. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015. xiii + 296 pp. Illustrations, maps, charts, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $30.00, paper.) Congratulations to editor David B. Danbom on his excellent timing for explaining the motivations behind the ranchers’ occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge during winter 2016 as well as the responses of the local community and the Burns Paiute Tribe. This interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the consequences of historical decisions. David M. Kennedy’s foreword and Jon K. Lauck’s essay introduce the volume with a solid western historiography. Kennedy observed how surprised Frederick Jackson Turner would be that today’s census data reveals even fewer residents in many areas than in the … glaserles{at}ccsu.edu

What Was Enlightenment?

A review of John Bender’s Ends of Enlightenment, a collection of interdisciplinary essays that situate the realist novel in the realms of European Enlightenment philosophy and science.

Revisiting Rural Women's History

The neXT Three ArTicles GreW ouT of the July 2012 rural Women’s studies Association (rWsA) conference held at st. Thomas university in Fredericton, new Brunswick. This is not the first time the rWsA has partnered with Agricultural History. more than twenty years ago, in 1993, the Agricultural history society published a volume titled American Rural and Farm Women in Historical Perspective, edited by historians Joan Jensen and nancy Grey osterud. A product of the Fourth national conference on American rural and Farm Women in historical perspective, held at the university of california– davis in June 1992, the editors believed that the interdisciplinary collection of essays pointed “to exciting new directions in farm women’s history.” cer-

Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers ed. by Bryan Albin Giemza (review)

Reviewed by: Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers ed. by Bryan Albin Giemza Peter D. O’Neill (bio) Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers. Edited by Bryan Albin Giemza. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Pp. 223. $60.00 cloth) Studies of Irish migration to the United States recently have placed renewed focus on the experiences of the Irish in the American South. In Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers, an interdisciplinary collection of essays, editor Bryan Albin Giemza has produced a worthy addition to this literature. Contributors to the volume include two persons particularly responsible for the resurgent interest in this area, Kieran Quinlan and David Gleeson. Quinlan’s “After Strange Kin: Further Reflections on the Relations between Ireland and the American South,” is found in “Questions of Historical Definition,” the first of three sections in the collection. As its title suggests, the essay reflects upon the impact of Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South (2007), Quinlan’s influential challenge both to facile, religion-based categorizations of Irish migrants to the South and to frequently ill-informed comparisons between the geographic entities of Ireland and the South. Completing the opening section of this volume are William Ferris’s “‘A Lengthening Chain in the Shape of Memories’: The Irish and Southern Culture” and Patrick Griffin’s “Irish Migration to the Colonial South: A Plea for a Forgotten Topic,” both of which offer a nuanced view of Irish migration to the southern states. The second section, “Manipulating Culture: Influence, Reconsidered,” will resonate with persons interested in literary and cultural studies. Geraldine Higgins’s superb “Tara, the O’Haras, and the Irish Gone With the Wind,” investigates the element of Irishness in the racialist chemistry of Margaret Mitchell’s famous text. Next is Kathryn Stelmach Artuso’s “Transatlantic Rites of Passage in the Friendship and Fiction of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen,” an insightful, if [End Page 518] at times repetitive, exposé of the relationship between two celebrated writers: Welty, a Mississippian, and Bowen, a Dublin-born Anglo-Irishwoman. Rounding off the section are two illuminating essays, “Shared Traditions: Irish and Appalachian Ballads and Whiskey Songs” by Emily Kader and “Black and Celts on the Riverine Frontiers: The Roots of American Popular Music” by Christopher Smith. It is to the final section on “Ideology and Ambivalence” that Gleeson contributes his chapter, “Another ‘Lost Cause’: The Irish in the South Remember the Confederacy.” In this essay, Gleeson, author of the seminal work The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (2001), describes how the Irish in the South engaged in Lost Cause rituals, so that they “and their offspring overcame a mixed war record and suspicions of their foreignness, becoming part of what it meant to be southern in the New South” (p. 179). He sets the stage nicely for Giemza’s “On the Uses of Slavery: The Irish in the South and Civil War Rhetoric.” This absorbing and groundbreaking essay uncovers the previously obscured Irish roots of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, author of the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott ruling. The essay examines the significance of Taney’s Roman Catholicism with regard to the slavery issue, and presents a fascinating account of observations by Irish who visited the United States during the Civil War. Giemza observes that “invented rhetorical parallels between Ireland and the American South . . . deployed by the likes of Irish revolutionary John Mitchel . . . had real traction among the Southern Irish ascendant” (p. 189). Ironically, Conor O’Callaghan, whose “Smoke ‘n’ Guns: A Preface to a Poem about Marginal Souths, and Then the Poem” concludes the collection, indulges in similarly misguided invention. In equating the Irish Republican Army with the Ku Klux Klan, O’Callaghan displays a historical revisionism just as blinkered as that in which Mitchel engaged more than 150 years earlier. This chapter seems an incongruous choice for the collection’s “Coda.” Yet it does not despoil what precedes it; to the contrary, O’Callaghan’s conflation underlines the need for the clarity and the precision amply provided by the rest of the contributors to this fine collection. [End...

Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic (review)

Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic. Edited by Linda Greger son and Susan Juster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2011. Pp. 334. $59.95. ISBN 978-0-812-24289-8.). This interdisciplinary collection of essays provides fertile ground for scholarly inquiry on the colonial history of this hemisphere. The twelve chapters and Final Reflections offer readers a balanced approach and a wealth of information with which to understand this transatlantic encounter that often involved contradictory objectives - religion and compassion pitted against self-interest and conquest. As the editors point out, European colonization of the New World must be understood in its entire complexity; England's colonizing efforts perhaps owe more to Spain that previously thought. This approach, using historiography and literary analysis, gives rise to Atlantic studies in an assessment of religious conflict among Europeans, not just violence to native peoples; accusations of cruelty abound while lands inhabited by non-Christian natives were even deemed empty or vacuum domicilium (Carla Gardina Pestana), thus justifying imperial expansion. The editors wisely arrange essays by topic into three parts: I, Launching Imperial Projects; II, Colonial Accommodations; and III, Violent Encounters. Each essay addresses a common set of questions on the interaction between religion and empire. Legal, literary, and archival documents are all brought to bear concerning ways in which Europeans sought to establish and maintain their colonies and manage the Christianization of native inhabitants. In part I Rolena Adorno goes a stage further regarding the well-known debate in Valladolid between the royal chronicler Sepulveda and the Dominican friar Las Casas, whom she sees primarily as a legal scholar; the encomenderos still managed to repeal New Laws he espoused for indigenous rights. Barbara Fuchs considers literary models and the picaresque in captive narratives. Linda Gregerson examines the challenges of the New England Company to bring the Gospel to a people with no tradition of writing. Part II largely involves missionary efforts and devotional practices both in Catholic and Protestant traditions. Cornelius Conover focuses on St. Philip of Jesus, the Discalced Franciscan martyred in Japan in 1597. Politics and religion intertwine regarding intercessional powers of local patron saints. St. Philip with very human defects begins the tradition of Creole saints, including the Virgin of Guadalupe and even St. Teresa of Avila who wrote on the Christianization of these new lands. Father Chaumonot's autobiography exemplifies the struggles of a Jesuit missionary who often lost his native French language. …

André Thevet's ‘true’ portrait of Moctezuma and its European legacy

André Thevet's ‘true’ portrait of Moctezuma and its European legacy

Women on Their Own: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Being Single. Ed. by Rudolph M. Bell and Virginia Yans. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008. viii, 273 pp. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8135-4210-2.)

On the whole, it is encouraging to see from this interdisciplinary collection of essays that the historical subject of single women is becoming more complex. Once, it was no subject at all, then it acquired some standing as the study of what was once called spinsters, and now the historical study of single women has proliferated. This book, for example, arises from a year-long seminar in 2003–2004 at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, whose Web page now offers a bibliography on works that deal with this subject (http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/rcha) and links to related resources, notably the Scholars of Single Women Network (http://medusanet.ca/singlewomen/resources/bib_main.htm). The essays in Women on Their Own range widely, at least on topics since the early nineteenth century. Widows loom large: they vote in Montreal in 1832, run businesses in Albany from 1813 to 1885, give away millions of dollars in the person of Olivia Sage, and weep decorously for Confederate heroes. Women who never married are conspicuous, too: in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the American depression of the 1930s, contemporary Ireland, the recent United States, and the modern Caribbean. There is even an essay on how blind women considered the business of not marrying, an essay in which Helen Keller is significant.

Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music (review)

Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music. Edited by Ray Allen and Ellie M. Hisama. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007. [x, 308 p. ISBN-10: 15804612 ; ISBN-13: 9781580462129. $75.] Bibliographical references, music examples, discography, index. Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music is a well-written, interdisciplinary collection of essays by leading scholars on Crawford Seeger from musicology, music theory, music education, folklore, history, American studies, and women's studies. The book explores the relationship between Crawford's high modernist compositions and her work in traditional American folk music, providing a rich, nuanced understanding of Crawford's life and music, and twentieth-century American musical life and aesthetics. The level of scholarship is impeccable with solid writing throughout, a foreword by American music scholar Carol Oja, notes for each chapter, useful music examples in over half of the chapters, a selected discography, brief biographies of contributors, and index. Because of its interdisciplinary approach, this collection will appeal to a wide array of readers. The book's twelve chapters are organized into two parts: the first six address primarily Crawford's ultramodern music and the last six explore the legacy of her work in folk music. However, there are strong relationships drawn between both of these aspects of her career throughout both sections. This being the case, some redundancy might be expected, but there is actually quite little, and when similar material is written about, it is always with a fresh approach. The first two chapters are written respectively by Crawford's outstanding biographer, Judith Tick, and theorist Joseph Straus, author of The Music of Crawford Seeger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Tick's Writing the Music of Crawford into Mainstream Music History (chap. 1) orients the reader to the reception history of Crawford over the last seventy-five years by addressing the importance of publications and performances of her 1931 String Quartet, the impact of 1970s feminism on music scholarship, changes in analytical approaches to modernist music, and particularly the connection between Elliott Carter's and Crawford's music. Straus's Ruth Crawford's Precompositional Strategies (chap. 2), drawing somewhat from his masterful book on her music, shows his skill at clarifying what is often difficult theoretical material. He identifies and provides examples from her music of several of her approaches: ostinato, retrograde, rotation, and unique arrangements sometimes with partial serialization. He also briefly suggests reasons for these plans: the need for an organizing principle, her playfulness, and a dichotomy between mechanical and free melodies. This is followed by a detailed analysis of the fourth movement of the String Quartet of 1931. Chapters 3 and 4 provide focused analyses of individual pieces. Linear Aggregates and Proportional Design in Crawford's Piano Study in Mixed Accents (chap. 3) by Lyn Ellen Burkett, an interesting discussion of the expressive meaning of Crawford's structure in this piece and its relationship to Schoenberg's serialism highlights the original contributions of Crawford. After carefully analyzing the piano work's palindromes, interpolations, and aggregates, Burkett discusses how Crawford neutralizes the perception of dissonance and draws from art criticism to interpret the aggregates in terms of reference, deference, and difference. Ellie Hisama's In Pursuit of a Proletarian Music: Crawford's 'Sacco, Vanzetti' (chap. 4) is an exploration of the context and musical structure of one of Crawford's two most explicitly politically-charged works, the 1932 song Sacco, Vanzetti which refers to the 1927 execution of Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. …

A boy named Sue: gender and country music

From the smiling, sentimental mothers portrayed in 1930s radio barn dance posters, to the sexual shockwaves generated by Elvis Presley, to the female superstars redefining contemporary country music, gender roles and imagery have profoundly influenced the ways country music is made and enjoyed. Proper male and female roles have influenced the kinds of sounds and images that could be included in country music; preconceptions of gender have helped to determine the songs and artists audiences would buy or reject; and gender has shaped the identities listeners made for themselves in relation to the music they revered. This interdisciplinary collection of essays is the first book-length effort to examine how gender conventions, both masculine and feminine, have structured the creation and marketing of country music. essays explore the uses of gender in creating the personas of stars as diverse as Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline, and Shania Twain. authors also examine how deeply conventions have influenced the institutions and everyday experiences that give country music its image: the popular and fan press, the country music industry in Nashville, and the line dance crazes that created the dance hall boom of the 1990s. From Hank Thompson's The Wild Side of Life to Johnny Cash's Boy Named Sue, from Tammy Wynette's Stand by Your Man to Loretta Lynn's ode to birth control, The Pill, A Boy Named Sue demonstrates the role gender played in the development of country music and its current prominence.

Love, Hate, and Fear in Canada's Cold War

LOVE, HATE, AND FEAR IN CANADA'S COLD WAR Edited by Richard Cavell Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. vi, 2i6pp, $50.00 cloth (ISBN 0-8020-3676-7), $24.95 paper (ISBN 0-8020-8500-8)Any commentary on excesses of Cold War period appearing today naturally invites comparison to post-g/n society. Unfortunately, this collection of essays predates September 2001 terrorist attacks, having originated as a lecture series held at UBC's Green College 2000-01 academic year. The similarities between 19503 against red menace and current war on terror are acknowledged briefly editor Richard Cavell's introduction, as well as a perfunctory footnote accompanying one of essays, but for most part reader is left to draw his or her own comparisons.Cavell's introduction points to two overarching themes essays that follow. The first of these is that personal was indeed political during Cold War. The theory of found applications not only foreign policy, but as an instrument of social and cultural control. This domestic containment consisted of attempts to protect idealized, suburban nuclear family while simultaneously excluding anyone considered to deviate from societal norms. second, this collection tries to distinguish between Cold War as it took place Canada and America's Cold War. Cavell argues that rather than just emulating foreign policy and social trends of United States, Canada fought its own uniquely Cold War, and thus experience must be read differently. A key point Cavell's argument is that, for all participants, Cold War was about preserving national identity in face of a foreign (17), but case of Canada that threat was seen to emanate more from United States than from USSR.Of interdisciplinary collection of essays that follows, first, by political scientist Reg Whitaker, is only one that directly addresses this question of what created a distinctly Canadian experience and style of Cold War. The answer, according to Whitaker, is fact-and nature-of Canada-US relationship: the United States is ambiguous that defines threatening Other (35).Whitaker wonders what stance sole remaining superpower will take when small state and nonstate antagonists have replaced its main adversary (38). We now have a fairly good idea of answer to this question: as George W. …

The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe (review)

This interdisciplinary collection of essays takes as its starting point the belief that material culture provides rich access to the most personal and meaningful events of people's lives, and that lost cultural beliefs are embodied in everyday utilitarian articles not usually defined as "works of art." These common objects, which sometimes sneak into museum collections through the back door, are often quite beautiful in and of themselves. However, they are often treated as irrelevant to historical discourse precisely because they belong to the domain of women, who traditionally serve as caretakers of the intimate worlds of marriage, family, and sex.

Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period by Naomi J. Miller, Naomi Yavneh

Reviews 143 laxly confusions, of sex and gender in the early modern period. What may seem at first glance to be anomalous probably is not. The Bedtrick's ambition, comparativist orientation, and its play fulness prevent it from argumentatively engaging questions "cul tural studies* might pose: what is at work to approve this copu lating pair and condemn another? what allows the fictional indi vidual to evade social demands? what might the conjugal/forni cating pair displace? what might the "tricked" partner represent? In Splitting theDifference, Doniger concludes "gender trumps cul ture." By mounting evidence that individuals are ignorant of the identity (frequently overtly split or fragmented) of those with whom they are most physically intimate, Doniger implies in The Bedtrick that indeed "culture is the shadow of gender." However, the surrogates, so crucial to the bedtrick, are as likely to repre sent a beleaguered figure of nostalgia, the status quo, or a restored order, as an object or subject of sexual desire. The Bedtrick engenders a good many more questions than it answers, and therein may lie its greatest value. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh. Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000. 390 pp. $69.95. Reviewed by Donna C. Woodford Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, edited by Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh, is the firstbook in the new Women and Gender in the Early Modern World series fromAshgate. The book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on mothers and other caregiving figures in the early modern peri od. Spanning the disciplines of literature, music, art history, and social history, and covering territories throughout Europe and the Americas, the essays explore the roles of caregivers in the early modern world and the ways inwhich those roles were interpreted and used both by the caregivers themselves and by the cultures inwhich they lived. In her introductory essay, Miller establishes the book's aim of exploring the "spectrum, and spectacle, ofmaternity in particular and of female caregivers at large in the early modern period" (1). The concepts of spectrum and spectacle prove central to the vol ume since the essays not only examine a variety of caregivers, including "mothers and stepmothers, midwives and wet nurses, wise women and witches, saints and Amazons, murderers and 144 The Journal for Early Modern Cultured Studies nurturers," but also explore the many ways inwhich those care giving roles were turned into spectacles that sometimes empow ered or glorified the caregiver and sometimes limited or condemned her (1). Early modern women, Miller observes, were often identi fied by their caregiving responsibilities both inside and outside the family, and while roles such as mother, midwife, wet nurse, and educator could potentially empower women by giving them author ity in the home and in the community, these same roles could be used to define and limit the condition of female caregivers or to condemn women who did not live up to a given ideal. The essays in this volume are divided into five categories: conception and lactation; nurture and instruction; domestic pro duction; social authority; and mortality. Part One includes four essays on the subjects of conception and lactation, and while these essays explore different disciplines in different countries, they together show how the breast and the womb could alternately be constructed as sources of life and feminine creativity and as dan gerous threats to men and a patriarchal society. In her essay, Judith Rose suggests that both the poet, Gaspara Stampa, and the painter, Sofinisba Anguissola, ally themselves with images of the Virgin Mary and thus with a positive, acceptable form of creativity for female artists. Likewise, Yavneh examines Anguissola's realis tically depicted nursing Madonna and suggests that the artist was drawing parallels between the influence ofmaternal milk and the influence of a female artist. In contrast, Caroline Bicks's essay is a fascinating examination of early modern fears about the power of midwives both to spread stories about the paternity of a child and to emasculate male children by tying the umbilical cord too short, which was thought to affect both the length of the child's genitals and his ability to speak freely...

The presence of Mies

Presence of is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that reconsiders work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, putting forth new ways of thinking about his work and new possibilities for extending its influence into contemporary architecture and cultural theory.The work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of this century's most important architects, has alternately been revered and reviled.The diverse outlook of contributors produces a stimulating array of perspectives that consider multiple resonances of Mies's work in relation to technology, image culture, philosophy, art, and education. Editor Detlef Mertins and president and director of Canadian Centre for Architecture, Phyllis Lambert, reconsider aspects of Mies's research and practice. Fritz Neumeyer, whose book on Mies's writings, Artless Word is a point of reference for many Mies scholars, and Sanford Kwinter both address architecture's relationship to technology; Dan Hoffman and Ben Nicholson discuss pedagogical ambitions and work of their design studios, at Cranbrook Academy of Art and Illinois Institute of Technology, respectively, where they have extended and transformed aspects of Mies's architecture and teaching. Rosalind Krauss and Ignasi de Sol-Morales Rubi stake out opposed interpretations of Minimalism and Mies. Rebecca Comay and George Baird both test-drive Mies through philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Brian Boigon and Beatriz Colomina address Mies in relation to the culture of images, while K. Michael Hays proposes new interpretations of Mies's abstraction. Presence of also includes over 120 black and white illustrations of master's buildings.These essays result from a symposium organized by University of Toronto School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture marking 25th Anniversary of a monolithic Miesian edifice, The Toronto-Dominion Centre, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1963 (called by Philip Johnson the biggest Mies in world).

Rage, Power, and Aggression

Most clinicians and, it now seems to me, most writers and academicians across many areas of study have given less than adequate time to the many dimensions of rage, anger, power, aggression, and destructiveness. Following a very lucid and learned introduction by the series editor, Dr Ethel Spector Person, the editors of this book, Drs Glick and Roose, present scholarly opinions from the perspectives of psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, anthropology, ethology, and neurobiology. The purpose of this collection of interdisciplinary essays is to allow us to ponder the how and the why of certain human affects, to define them, and then to view them from perspectives that may have been underrepresented in the larger bodies of writing of these various fields. Additionally, we are able to compare the philosophical frameworks that distinguish these perspectives. Thus, the great benefit of this work is at least threefold: we can explore select emotional tones

Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays on the social and cultural life of late imperial Russia describes the struggle of new elites to take up a middle position in society--between tsar and people. During this period autonomous social and cultural institutions, pluralistic political life, and a dynamic economy all seemed to be emerging: Russia was experiencing a sense of social possibility akin to that which Gorbachev wishes to reanimate in the Soviet Union. But then, as now, diversity had as its price the potential for political disorder and social dissolution. Analyzing the attempt of educated Russians to forge new identities, this book reveals the social, cultural, and regional fragmentation of the times.The contributors are Harley Balzer, John E. Bowlt, Joseph Bradley, William C. Brumfield, Edith W. Clowes, James M. Curtis, Ben Eklof, Gregory L. Freeze, Abbott Gleason, Samuel D. Kassow, Mary Louise Loe, Louise McReynolds, Sidney Monas, John O. Norman, Daniel T. Orlovsky, Thomas C. Owen, Alfred Rieber, Bernice G. Rosenthal, Christine Ruane, Charles E. Timberlake, William Wagner, and James L. West. Samuel D. Kassow has written a conclusion to the volume.

Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays

North American Indians have fired the imaginations of Europeans for the past five hundred years. The Native populations of North America have served a variety of European cultural and emotional needs, ranging from noble savage role models for Old World civilization to a more sympathetic portrayal as subjugated victims of American imperialism. This comprehensive, interdisciplinary collection of essays offers the first in-depth, extended look at the complicated, changing relationship between European and Native peoples. The contributors explore three aspects of this relationship: Why and how did the cultures and histories of Europeans enable Native peoples to become absorbed into the reality of the Old World? What happened in actual encounters between American Indian visitors and their European hosts? How did continued and increased interaction between Indians and Europeans affect established imagery and preconceptions on both sides? Christian Feest is the editor of European Review of Native American Studies and is currently a professor at the Institut fur Historische Ethnologie, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat. His books include Peoples of the Twilight: European Views on Native Minnesota, 1823-1862.

Conflict and Control: Challenge to Legitimacy of Modern Governments.

Attempts to account for the relative stability of the modern police state, asks if democracy is even a possibility in developing countries, and examines the possibility for civil liberties in the totalitarian state. 'This interdisciplinary collection of essays is a useful contribution to the increasingly rich discussion of legitimacy which in recent years has drawn much attention from social scientists and political theorists.' -- Perspective, Vol 9, No 2, March 1980