Newman's Book Research Articles

Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks: The Sacramental Imagination of Engelhard of Langheim

Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks: The Sacramental Imagination of Engelhard of Langheim

Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature's "Secret Fire"

Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature's "Secret Fire"

Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular Against the Sacred

Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular Against the Sacred

Finally, a Python-Based Computational Physics Text

Here, Eric Ayars provides an overview and review of Mark Newman's book, Computational Physics.

The use of cloud technologies in universities. Google services

Google is a mathematical term for 1 with 100 zeros. The term was introduced by Milton Sirota, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner, and described in Kasner and James Newman's book Mathematics and Imagination. Google's play on words reflects the company's mission, which is to organize the vast amount of data available on the global Internet.Google's work is based on a single goal: to organize the data accumulated around the world and make it as accessible and useful as possible. An important aspect in accomplishing this challenging task is to organize the knowledge base held by academic institutions. In an academic environment, data sharing is essential for both teaching and research. In this regard, Google provides tools to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration that students, faculty, and other community members can use anytime, anywhere.

Cardinal John Henry Newman and ‘the ideal state and purpose of a university’: nurse education, research and practice development for the twenty‐first century

Cardinal John Henry Newman's book, The Idea of a University, first published in the mid nineteenth century, is often invoked as the epitome of the liberal Enlightenment University in discussions and debates about the role and purpose of nurse education. In this article I will examine Newman's book in greater detail and with a more critical eye than is generally the case in the writing of nurse academics. In particular, I will focus on the claims that Newman was a champion of the Enlightenment University of the nineteenth century, that he promoted the idea of 'disinterested' universal knowledge for its own sake, that he was an early advocate of the pursuit of knowledge through scientific research, and the supposition that he would have welcomed the discipline of nursing into the University. In each case, I will suggest that these claims are based on an extremely selective reading of Newman's work. I will conclude by employing the example of practice development to propose an alternative way for nursing to find its place in the modern University that does not involve a retreat into what I will argue is an outdated and nostalgic view of the aims and purpose of higher education.

Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New CriticismBallad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism. Steve Newman . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 294.

<i>Steve Newman,</i> Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism<i>Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism</i>. Steve Newman . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 294.

:Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers

This book is a contextual biography of Richard Allen (1760–1831), minister (ordained in 1799 by Francis Asbury), first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (founded in 1816), and defender of black rights in religion and society. Several substantial documents survive to help us understand Allen's life: a narrative, co-authored with Absalom Jones, of the yellow fever that plagued Philadelphia in 1793; an autobiography dictated shortly before Allen died; and a few addresses and execution-day sermons. There are also personal documents and brief comments on religion and on slavery. As Richard S. Newman notes, the gaps in the record are wide. About two-thirds of this work is a companion to the autobiography and the yellow fever narrative. Newman's strategy here is like Vincent Carretta's in Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005). Both write as detectives (not as skeptics), augmenting the writings of their subjects with further documentation. On the positive side, Newman's book is a model of contextual research that should be read by students, scholars, and lay people interested in Allen. On the negative side, the book, insofar as its intent is usually the confirmation of Allen's texts, rarely shows distance from its subject. Lay people reading this book will probably infer that the purpose of scholarship on early black abolitionists and early black Christians is celebration of their achievements. From a twenty-first-century perspective, some praise seems appropriate, but we should also pass beyond the individuals and assess the positive and negative implications of their ideas and values. Scholars have made such assessments of nineteenth-century abolitionists. We should measure eighteenth-century abolitionists, white as well as black, in the same way.

Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947 (review)

Reviewed by: Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935–1947 Susan Smulyan (bio) Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935–1947. By Kathy M. Newman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. xiii+237. $55/$21.95. Kathy Newman's book succeeds in several contexts. It is part of a new concern among cultural historians and historians of technology for the users (or the audience, as we might think of them in this case because of broadcasting's mass-entertainment potential) and their reaction to, and influence on, new technologies. It also takes its place in a new generation of scholarship [End Page 825] that pushes beyond the work of Susan Douglas (Inventing American Broadcasting [1989] and Listening In [2000]), Michele Hilmes (Radio Voices [1997]), Robert McChesney (Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy [1995]), and this reviewer (Selling Radio [1996]) in order to explore important and overlooked moments in radio history. The field has burgeoned in the last several years with a large number of well-attended panels at scholarly meetings, the founding of The Radio Journal, the publication of an exciting anthology called Radio Reader (2001), and a new series of international radio conferences in Madison, Wisconsin, and Melbourne, Australia. Newman stands at the head of a group of young scholars trained in several disciplines who are writing about radio, and her work shows the influence of literary and cultural criticism on a historical case study. She is less concerned with presenting a linear history that documents change over time or in digging up new material (although she does both) than in changing our perceptions of a particular set of historical actors. Radio Active explores the ways in which commercial radio turned listeners into consumers and at the same time energized new consumers to protest their own commodification. It makes several points that will change the ways in which scholars of consumerism, radio, and advertising think about audiences and audience resistance. By tying radio to the consumer movement, Newman has opened up new understandings of both. In addition, she has linked the reactions of what she calls "audience intellectuals" with ordinary listeners. Audience intellectuals are defined as those who studied and constructed commercial radio, including Paul Lazarsfeld, Theodore Adorno, and Hadley Cantril. Newman also devotes a chapter to the less-well-known, but here usefully recuperated, activists James Rorty, Ruth Brindze, and Peter Morell, who protested commercial radio and influenced the consumer movement of the 1930s. She deals with consumer boycotts of products advertised on the radio, such as the CIO boycott of Philco receivers because of newscaster Boake Carter's on-air antagonism, and she concludes with an interesting reading of Frederic Wakeman's important novel about the commercial radio industry, The Hucksters (1948). Newman does not completely avoid the evidentiary problems of using radio advertising as a historical source. It remains difficult to know when particular ads were aired, and she has depended on nostalgic compilations which do not include dates. Yet scholars have stayed away from this topic for a long time and surely it is better to have some analysis than to have none at all. The strength of the book lies in the way it links a disparate set of events and actors to show that there was resistance to radio advertising. Some readers may find the resistance to have been less than overwhelming. Newman agrees that "the power of the individual listener is surely limited" but concludes thus: ". . . I continue to be interested in the power of listeners/consumers to organize collectively. Radio may have 'activated' listeners, [End Page 826] but in virtually every case it was political leaders, church leaders, consumer leaders, union leaders, and clubwoman leaders who organized these 'activated' listeners into powerful coalitions that the broadcast industry could not ignore. Radio advertising certainly provoked listener resentment. But it was grassroots organizers who turned that resentment into collective action. In the radio age, consumers were 'radio active.' Some attention to their stories, to their successes, and to their failures should help us in our own active efforts to grapple with mass culture today" (p. 192). Susan Smulyan Dr. Smulyan is associate professor of American civilization at Brown University, where she teaches courses...

Imaginative Theology: A Strategy of Subversion

Imaginative Theology:A Strategy of Subversion Philip Sheldrake (bio) Barbara Newman has written a complex, highly original and stimulating book. In broad terms it studies the meaning, role and implications of "goddesses" or female representations of the sacred in medieval religious literature. As an interdisciplinary study, the book may be approached from several different perspectives—most obviously it can be appreciated as a work of medieval religious history, as a study of medieval European literature or, more broadly, as a nuanced and scholarly contribution to women's studies. However, Newman begins to open up broader and provocative questions for contemporary theology (and the role of spirituality in relation to it) by insisting that these representations and the literary genres that employed them should be viewed as specifically theological. Attempts to "retrieve" feminine images for God in Christian, especially medieval, spiritual literature are obviously not new and already have a great deal of contemporary currency—for example, since the re-emergence of Julian of Norwich's Showings or Revelations and the popularization of the spirituality of the Beguines.However, Newman's focus is quite precise and uncovers an under-rated and indeed largely forgotten class of feminine religious representations. These are "the allegorical goddesses" as she calls them that, alongside the saints and the angels, were allowed a place close to God but within essentially monotheistic parameters. Such "goddesses" were numerous and included such figures as Lady Wisdom, Ecclesia, Dame Nature, Love and Lady Poverty (as in the legends of St Francis). The use of the word "goddesses" is provocative and some readers will take issue with this designation. Newman makes a vital distinction between reading the goddesses as in some way female representations of the divine (which they were) and as representations of women (which they were not). This form of representation is neither feminist theology nor Jungian psychology before its time but something quite distinctive. On the other hand, the production of these allegorical figures cannot simply be reduced to the strange habit (in modern eyes) of personifying abstract values and universal virtues. Even the question whether medieval writers "believed in" their goddesses or whether such figures were understood to be "real" rather than fictions cannot be answered in a straightforward way. [End Page 211] At the risk of over-simplifying Newman's extended and careful argument, we may risk the following brief comments. The female representations are imaginative exercises. They are designated "goddesses" because they function in a specifically religious way as a medium for relating to God (or reflecting about God's attributes and relationship to the human condition). Yet these representations do not directly impinge on questions of doctrine. Paradoxically, only one Son of God was permissible within orthodox Trinitarian theology. Yet, medieval writers could posit any number of allegorical "daughters." This is because the roles of the "goddesses" were not as instruments of theological speculation let alone definition. While the goddesses in some sense implied a likeness to God, they essentially acted more broadly as mediations between God and the cosmos and representations of God's characteristics to humankind. Crucially, the personification of divine attributes or, as Newman puts it (41) "[giving] the divine attributes body and voice," made them accessible not merely to the intellectual faculty but also to human imagination. The accessibility of the divine to the imagination brings us to one of the most interesting aspects of Newman's book that moves us beyond purely medieval studies and even beyond another useful tool for studying an aspect of the history of Christian spirituality. The crucial foundation is that the medieval use of allegory is not simply a literary device but is properly theological. In Chapter 7, Newman promotes the notion of "imaginative theology" as an additional category to be placed alongside the classic four-fold framework for interpreting medieval theology—monastic, scholastic, pastoral and mystical—supplemented by the recent concept of vernacular theology (in the mother tongue, by means of a wide range of literary genres and available to laypeople, especially to women). Needless to say, to some degree all these categories overlap and "imaginative theology" blends particularly with the vernacular and the mystical. I suggest that Newman's new category expands...

Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935–1947

In her incisive return to network radio's golden age, Kathy M. Newman takes on the conventional wisdom that radio listeners in the period of old-time radio were passive and accepting tuners-in to what networks and stations offered. On the contrary, argues Newman (an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University), at least some listeners were active about making their often critical anticommercial reactions known to radio's powers-that-be. Based on her American studies dissertation at Yale University, Newman's book here describes aspects of a rising intellectual consumer movement, one largely dominated by women, who made eighty-five percent of all consumer purchases in this period. Sometimes groups of women were gathered by the broadcasters for listening or in research panels, but often group listening led to concerted action (on occasion, boycotts)—or at least complaints about advertising messages on the air. Newman's book appears in two parts. “Cultural Critics in the Age of Radio” offers two chapters, one on the psychology of radio advertising and radio activists and the other on the origins of the consumer movement. This is followed by “Consumers on the March: CIO Boycotts, Active Listeners, and ‘Consumer Time,’” which provides several consumer activist case studies (the Congress of Industrial Organizations—sponsored boycott of Philco Radio, which had advertising on the program of the antilabor commentator Boake Carter; women writers and listeners and the debate over the content and impact of radio serials; and NBC's Consumer Time broadcasts and the postwar consumer revolt). She concludes by discussing the rise and fall of a “Radio Republic”— an assessment of the arguments found in Frederic Wakeman's novel The Hucksters (1946), which featured radio advertising in a central way.

A Different Shade of Gray: Midlife and Beyond in the Inner City

A Different Shade of Gray: Midlife and Beyond in Inner City. Katherine S. Newman. New York: The New Press. 2003. 306 pp. ISBN 1-56584-615-X. $29.95 (cloth). Katherine Newman's book examines a long-neglected group within inner city: minorities who are middle aged and older. African American, Puerto Rican, and Dominican respondents in New York City participated in life history interviews. Newman discusses these data against a backdrop of both a larger New York city survey and national data derived from middle-aged and older persons. Her resultant ability to compare her respondents to their neighbors and to minorities and Whites nationally strengthens her conclusions about her respondents' situations and how they might be ameliorated. These older inner-city residents, who have worked hard against many odds, are beset by health, income, family, and safety problems that are unthinkable for most middle-class Americans, and contradictory to dominant conceptions concerning how middle age and retirement should unfold. Their stories convey a sense of strength and resilience, but Newman makes it clear that, without policy intervention, they will often struggle in vain. Her book is informed by a life course approach and consequent attention to both local history-such as neighborhood changes, cycles in response to economic changes, and crack wars-and related national landscape. Together, these help explain how their lives have been shaped by both opportunities, such as economic upswings and public sector jobs opened by affirmative action, and constraints, such as intersecting class, race, and gender discrimination in labor markets that single mothers face. The most engagingly written chapters, such as Chapters 1 (which provides an overview of book) and 3, begin with stories of different persons who serve as exemplars to flesh out main points. Chapter 2 provides what Newman refers to as the big picture: a statistical comparison of Whites and minorities in relation to childhood poverty, education, employment, income, marriage patterns, and health. Chapters 3 through 5 look at different dimensions that shape aging experiences of her inner-city residents: and neighborhood locations, men's and women's relationships in middle and later years, and effects of economic hardship on physical and mental health. The emerging picture is that and family/kin obligations intersect for both men and women to influence their later lives through such things as health, family structure, and pension availability. Chapter 6, longest and perhaps most interesting chapter, explores racial and ethnic relations among different groups in inner-city New York. Readers must bear in mind, however, that chapter is about perceptions and is not necessarily meant to assert, for instance, whether one group really has more of a work ethic than another. One significant finding is that each group understands that minority group membership provides structural barriers, but they also hold individuals accountable for their choices. …

The Intervention of Philology: Gender, Learning, and Power in Lohenstein's Roman Plays

Newman, Jane O. The Intervention of Phiology: Gender, Learning, and Power in Lohenstein's Roman Plays. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 228 pp. $45.00 hardcover. This study, grounded in current approaches to early modern literature but also heavily influenced by the methodologies of comparative literature, including an international context for German texts and a deep investment in post-modern theory (with special emphasis on gender, alterity, and race), will undoubtedly be reviewed in other venues from a comparativist perspective. In this context, however, I will focus on assessing the contributions the book makes to scholarship about literature. Lohenstein's four Trauerspiele on subjects from Roman history (Sophonisbe, Epicharis, Agrippina, and Cleopatra) continue to confuse, distress, and fascinate those who read them, and Newman's book helps make the case that they deserve their position in the canon of important literary works in German. It also constitutes a significant of the texts that will be particularly fruitful for scholars, students, and lovers of literature returning to the plays after initial readings. Newman, in this densely written book, takes on some of the most difficult texts written in the language, difficult in part because they are, as she puts it, artifacts of the bizarre, full of salacious scenes of seduction, incest, cross-dressing, and torture, of grisly scenes of murder and mayhem, of disturbing scenes of matricide, dissection, and suicide. Lohenstein's dramas are also difficult because they are themselves densely written and because, as she notes, the more closely and slowly one reads them, the less certain one becomes of the meaning. Following Walter Benjamin's observation that such bizarre and confounding texts of the seventeenth century require the intervention of philology, which she defines following Roman Jakobson as slow reading, she applies what I suppose might be termed a post-modern philological approach to the plays. In this task she is assisted by the plays themselves, which contain an extensive polyhistorical endnote apparatus, with all sorts of pertinent as well as seemingly arcane references to works on Roman history and North African travelogues, which Newman appropriately refers to as the basement or the margins of the plays and treats as a source of clues about their meanings. She also brings in the geopolitical situation in Eastern Europe in the late seventeenth century, includingthe relationship between Silesia and the Holy Roman Empire and the role of women as rulers and regents in the small Silesian duchies. The book's primary contribution to the study of seventeenth century literature and to Lohenstein studies consists in the bold nature of the questions Newman asks about the disturbing contents of the plays and in the slow reading approach to finding some of the answers. She rejects the reductive interpretations of the past, including my own in my dissertation-based book of 1976, and destabilizes the texts in ways that conform to the texts themselves in order to find new possibilities for understanding. Her findings in the subtexts from the basement and margins are in some cases breathtakingly exciting, in most cases helpful in deepening and extending the potential for explication of some of the most opaque passages in German-language literature. …

White women's rights: the racial origins of feminism in the United States

Louise Newman reinterprets an important period (1870s-1920s) in the history of women's rights, focusing attention on a core contradiction at the heart of early feminist theory. At a time when white elites were concerned with imperialist projects and civilizing missions, progressive white women developed an explicit racial ideology to promote their cause, defending patriarchy for primitives while calling for its elimination among the civilized. Exploring how progressive white women at the turn of the century laid the intellectual groundwork for the feminist social movements that followed, Newman's book thus speaks to contemporary debates concerning the effect of race on current feminist scholarship.

H/Z: Why Lesléa Newman Makes Heather into Zoe

H/Z:Why Lesléa Newman Makes Heather into Zoe Elizabeth A. Ford (bio) "Few changes in American mores over the past 50 years have been as dramatic or as salutary as the nation's increased acceptance of homosexuals." —Phillip Lopate, 1997. Consider Lopate's assertion as you read these three fragments trapped in the time capsule of a hot month in a recent summer: 20 August 1995: Denis Donoghue concludes his review of Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality with a personal comment. He says that his interest in Andrew Sullivan's work, which assesses the current politics of homosexuality, is catalyzed by his affection for his lesbian daughter, "the writer Emma Donoghue," whose homosexuality "does not darken [his] love for her, or qualify the joy [he] takes in her personality, her immense gifts" (26).1 The opening sentence of that paragraph slightly diminishes the power of his declaration: "I am not, in my own person," Donoghue makes clear, "directly caught in this dispute" (26). 25 August 1995: A shopping trip to a split-down-the-middle Carter's outlet leaves me bemused. Although department stores have always separated boys' apparel from girls', surely baby clothing has never been so irrevocably divided, so aggressively gendered. Marooned between two poles of certainty, the layette counter offers the only gender-neutral option, bland infant garments sporting amorphous patterns (not flower shapes, but not airplanes either).2 I imagine the Carter's design team heaving sighs of relief and trashing these insincere either/or ensembles, now that almost all prospective parents choose to know their babies' gender. The word layette (way too feminine) will vanish. 27 August 1995: A pretty little girl grins fetchingly from the Children's Books page of the New York Times Book Review. Catherine Stock's frontispiece accompanies Roger Sutton's review of Too Far Away to Touch, by Lesléa Newman.3 Stock's watercolor still-life shows a gold-framed photo of two faces: a smiling blonde child, eyes closed, being hugged by a tousle-haired young man whose own closed eyes are slightly shadowed. Dark background tones in this illustration foreshadow the content of Newman's text, in which the child tells about her visits with a favorite uncle, who, Sutton explains, is dying of AIDS. The descriptive phrase that Sutton applies to Newman's text could also refer to the watercolor—"poignant, but not sticky." His generally positive review of Newman's book and a similar picture book by Judith Vigna concludes with a contemplative paragraph about purpose: "What are these books for?" he asks. "Will children want to read them or hear them again?" (27). These salvaged fragments may sound like gleanings from an Internet search generated by the terms gay/lesbian, children, literature, and clothing. But I hope to reveal the codes—Barthian and other—that connect these fragments and to use them to explore a central, unspoken anxiety that haunts the conjunction of gay/lesbian issues and children's literature. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls "the experience and identity of gay or proto-gay children" a "fraught space of life-or-death struggle that has been more or less abandoned by constructivist gay theory" (42). Books that present gay or lesbian themes to children may be seen as opening up that "fraught space" to their readers. Ultimately, it is the fear of what children might learn about their own sexual identities, not about the sexuality of adults around them, that makes these books controversial. "Unsubtle, overly didactic" Authors who chose gay themes and who write for children must also choose whether or not to be commercially viable. Those who want to sell books must learn, as Newman seems to have learned, to maintain a "safe" distance between child and gay adult characters. More like a wall than a comfort zone, distance problematizes the treatment of gay themes in children's literature and may keep the genre from reflecting the growing cultural acceptance that Lopate identifies as a contemporary reality. Writers who hope to promote cultural acceptance would be unusual if they did not hope for readers and sales as well. The New York Times Book Review, itself a commodity, affects the transaction...

Rebuilding Higher Education in Eastern Europe

In reflecting on the idea of a university, one may receive guidance from Cardinal Newman's book by that name in which this important nineteenthcentury Englishman lays out core values central to his philosophy of higher education.

The critic and the visionary

The first Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology was H. G. Wood. The subject of his Inaugural Lecture given in 1940 was The function of a Department of Theology in a modern University. Appropriately enough he took up the views of John Henry, Cardinal Newman, the one Birmingham theologian whose work is on the way to becoming classic. In the present climate, Newman's book The Idea of a University is worth looking at again. As he showed over a hundred years ago, purely utilitarian values cannot produce good education. Nor can a general acquaintance with a bit of everything. Specialisation and in-depth study is the only way to learn how to think rather than pick up information jackdaw-like. Scholarly grappling with the great minds of the past, the so-called ‘irrelevant’ and ‘ivory-tower’ occupation of those who inhabit an Arts Faculty, is essential for the formation of minds. ‘To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression’ – this Newman regarded as ‘an object as intelligible as the cultivation of virtue’.1 Society needs minds and not just technicians, and in an institution which is concerned with truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, theology is indispensable to the universality which a University should embrace.

Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English?

To a former editor of theJournalwho in the daily review of manuscripts encountered countless errors in grammar, syntax, paragraphing, paragraph structuring, punctuation, and spelling, to one who has been made weary by excessive redundancy and by the needless repetition of a single word when the language is rich with synonyms, to a reader who has had to conclude that the English language and English composition are poorly taught in our schools and colleges if indeed they are taught at all, to such a one Ed Newman's book has been a fresh breeze on a sultry day. Justification for the volume is found in the sentence, Those for whom words have lost their value are likely to find that ideas have also lost their value. It is fervently hoped that those who read this review will be impelled to read the book. They will be rewarded by a feeling

Erratum: The World of Mathematics . A small library of the literature of mathematics from A'h-mose the Scribe to Albert Einstein, presented with commentaries and notes by James R. Newman. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1956. vols. 1-4. 2535 pp. Illus. $20.

The name of the publisher, Simon and Schuster, New York, and the publication date, 1956, were inadvertently omitted from the review of James R. Newman's book The World of Mathematics, which appeared in the issue of 1 Feb., page 197.

Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Cardinal Newman, A Grammar of Assent by John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University by John Henry Cardinal Newman

Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Cardinal Newman, A Grammar of Assent by John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University by John Henry Cardinal Newman