The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg


Richard Handler - 1997
    More than a detailed history of a museum and tourist attraction, it examines the packaging of American history, and consumerism and the manufacturing of cultural beliefs. Through extensive fieldwork—including numerous site visits, interviews with employees and visitors, and archival research—Richard Handler and Eric Gable illustrate how corporate sensibility blends with pedagogical principle in Colonial Williamsburg to blur the lines between education and entertainment, patriotism and revisionism.During much of its existence, the "living museum" at Williamsburg has been considered a patriotic shrine, celebrating the upscale lifestyles of Virginia’s colonial-era elite. But in recent decades a new generation of social historians has injected a more populist and critical slant to the site’s narrative of nationhood. For example, in interactions with museum visitors, employees now relate stories about the experiences of African Americans and women, stories that several years ago did not enter into descriptions of life in Colonial Williamsburg. Handler and Gable focus on the way this public history is managed, as historians and administrators define historiographical policy and middle-level managers train and direct front-line staff to deliver this "product" to the public. They explore how visitors consume or modify what they hear and see, and reveal how interpreters and craftspeople resist or acquiesce in being managed. By deploying the voices of these various actors in a richly textured narrative, The New History in an Old Museum highlights the elements of cultural consensus that emerge from this cacophony of conflict and negotiation.

Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know(r)


Andrew Finkel - 2012
    Turkey is the link between Islam and Western democracy, between Europe and the Middle East. In this concise introduction, Andrew Finkel, who has spent twenty years in Turkey writing about the country for publications such as The Economist and Time magazine, unravels Turkey's complexities. He sets the complications and transformations of present-day Turkey against the historical background of the Ottoman Empire, the secular nationalist revolution led by Kemal Atat�rk, and repeated political interventions by the military, which sees itself as the guardian of Atat�rk's legacy. Finkel reveals a nation full of surprises. Where else but in Turkey, Finkel writes, would secularist liberals have supported a prime minister who was once jailed for promoting religious extremism? From the Kurdish question to economic policy, from Turkey's role in Iraq to its quest for EU membership, Finkel illuminates the past and present of this unique, and uniquely consequential, country in Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know(R).What Everyone Needs to Know(R) is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.

Education for Socially Engaged Art


Pablo Helguera - 2011
    Helguera's spunky primer promises to offer a much-needed critical compass for those adrift in the expanded social field." -Claire Bishop, Professor of Contemporary Art and Exhibition History, CUNY, and author of Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship"This is an extremely timely and thoughtful reference book. Drawn from empirical and extensive experience and research, it provides a curriculum and framework for thinking about the complexity of socially engaged practices. Locating the methodologies of this work in between disciplines, Helguera draws on histories of performance, pedagogy, sociology, ethnography, linguistics, community and public practices. Rather than propose a system he exposes the temporalities necessary to make these situations possible and resonant. This is a tool that will allow us to consider the difficulties of making socially engaged art and move closer to finding a language through which we can represent and discuss its impact."-Sally Tallant, Artistic Director, Liverpool Biennial"Helguera has produced a highly readable book that absolutely needs to be in the back pocket of anyone interested in teaching or learning about socially engaged art"-Tom Finkelpearl, Director of the Queens Museum, New York, and author of Dialogues in Public Art

Remembering Ahanagran: A History of Stories


Richard White - 1998
    In prose that is neither history nor memoir but something larger and brighter than both, Remembering Ahanagran captures her memories of her early years in Ireland, her migration to the United States, and her marriage to Harry White, the Harvard-educated son of Russian Jewish emigrants. Her son, eminent historian Richard White, in collaboration with Sara, forces history as it is traditionally written into conversation with personal recollections.

Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City


Elijah Anderson - 1999
    This unwritten set of rules—based largely on an individual's ability to command respect—is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson's incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.

Xenophon's Retreat: Greece, Persia, and the End of the Golden Age


Robin Waterfield - 2006
    The result is a rounded version of the story of Cyrus's ill-fated march and the Greeks' perilous retreat--a nuanced and dramatic perspective on a critical moment in history that may tell us as much about our present-day adventures in the Middle East, site of Cyrus's debacle and the last act of the Golden Age, as it does about the great powers of antiquity in a volatile period of transition.Just as Xenophon brought the thrilling, appalling expedition to life, Waterfield evokes Xenophon himself as a man of his times--reflecting for all time invaluable truths about warfare, overweaning ambition, the pitfalls of power, and the march of history.

Action Research


Ernest T. Stringer - 1996
    Updated web links and expanded appendices provide cutting edge information on action research along with new case studies and examples.

Converting to Judaism: How to Become a Jew (an Introduction to Judaism and Being Jewish)


Rachel Zahl - 2014
    Regularly priced at $4.99. Read on your PC, Mac, smart phone, tablet or Kindle device. So, you want to convert to Judaism? That’s great! You have to understand, though, that Judaism is not only a religion but is also a way of life. Jews consider themselves as one big family. Hence, to have a proper perspective about everything, you’ll have to mentally orient yourself that you’re trying to find a way in as a productive member of that Jewish family. You should also brace yourself for a long struggle ahead of you because converting to Judaism is not a walk in the park. This book will provide you with an excellent introduction to Judaism as well as what to expect during your conversion process, including lots of great tips and pointers that will help along the way. Here Is A Preview Of What You'll Learn... The Basic Beliefs of Judaism Important Practices of Judaism Celebrated Jewish Holidays Steps on How to Become a Jew Pointers for Converts Much, much more! Download your copy today! Tags: convert to Judaism, converting to Judaism, conversion to Judaism, how to become a jew, becoming a Jew, become a Jew, I want to become a Jew, I want to convert to Judaism, how to convert to Judaism, introduction to Judaism, being Jewish, how to be Jewish, Judaism beliefs, practice Judaism, practicing Judaism, how to become a Jew, Jewish convert, converting to Jew, convert to become a Jew, Jewish beliefs, Jewish customs, Jewish traditions, Jewish calendar, Jewish holidays, Jewish rituals, how to be Jewish, Jewish religious beliefs, becoming Jewish, Jewish celebrations, Jewish customs and traditions, Jewish baptism, Jewish practices, Jewish information, Jews religion, Jews, Jew, Judaism, Jew religion, becoming a Jew, Jews and Judaism, Jews culture, become a Jew, what is Judaism, Judaism beliefs, torah, Jewish commandments, introduction to Judaism, Jewish religion, Jewish religious beliefs, religion of Judaism, convert Judaism, converting questions, converting religion, converting religions, how to convert to Judaism, how to convert

Thunder Rides a Black Horse: Mescalero Apaches & the Mythic Present


Claire R. Farrer - 1996
    Why people behave as they do is as much a focus as is their actual behavior. Through instructions given to Farrer by Bernard Second, her Apache teacher for fourteen years, readers gain insight into the importance of narrative, not just in ceremony but especially in everyday living on a contemporary Indian reservation in the American Southwest. Sights and smells are almost palpable as the author provides the best in reflexive ethnography by allowing readers to see her as a person rather than an all-knowing anthropologist. She neither romanticizes nor patronizes the Apachean people, who are presented as people with foibles as well as possessing much worthy of admiration.

The Triangle Fire: A Brief History with Documents


Jo Ann E. Argersinger - 2009
    The tragedy brought national attention to the unsafe working conditions, long hours, and low pay that had prompted a national garment workers’ strike a year before. Jo Ann Argersinger’s volume examines the context, trajectory, and impact of this Progressive Era event. An introduction explores the demands industrialization placed upon urban working women, their fight to unionize, and the Triangle fire’s significance in the greater scope of labor reform. Documents from newspaper reports to the personal stories of labor agitators and fire survivors continue the story, giving voice to the "girl strikers," their enemies and upper-class allies in the effort to reform the garment industry, and the public outrage that followed the fire. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and an index enrich students’ understanding of this historical moment.

Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City


St. Clair Drake - 1945
    Based on a mass of research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers in the late 1930s, it is a historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side, the classic urban ghetto. Drake and Cayton's findings not only offer a generalized analysis of black migration, settlement, community structure, and black-white race relations in the early part of the twentieth century, but also tell us what has changed in the last hundred years and what has not. This edition includes the original Introduction by Richard Wright and a new Foreword by William Julius Wilson."Black Metropolis is a rare combination of research and synthesis, a book to be deeply pondered. . . . No one who reads it intelligently can ever believe again that our racial dilemma can be solved by pushing buttons, or by gradual processes which may reach four or five hundred years into the future."—Bucklin Moon, The Nation"This volume makes a great contribution to the building of the future American and the free world."—Louis Wirth, New York Times"By virtue of its range, its labor and its insight, the book seems certain to become a landmark not only in race studies but in the broader field of social anthropology."—Thomas Sancton, New Republic

Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense


Ann Laura Stoler - 2008
    In a series of nuanced mediations on the nature of colonial documents from the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler identifies the social epistemologies that guided perception and practice, revealing the problematic racial ontologies of that confused epistemic space.Navigating familiar and extraordinary paths through the lettered lives of those who ruled, she seizes on moments when common sense failed and prevailing categories no longer seemed to work. She asks not what colonial agents knew, but what happened when what they thought they knew they found they did not. Rejecting the notion that archival labor be approached as an extractive enterprise, Stoler sets her sights on archival production as a consequential act of governance, as a field of force with violent effect, and not least as a vivid space to do ethnography.

The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics


Charles Hirschkind - 2006
    Hirschkind shows how sermon tapes have provided one of the means by which Islamic ethical traditions have been recalibrated to a modern political and technological order--to its noise and forms of pleasure and boredom, but also to its political incitements and call for citizen participation. Contrary to the belief that Islamic cassette sermons are a tool of militant indoctrination, Hirschkind argues that sermon tapes serve as an instrument of ethical self-improvement and as a vehicle for honing the sensibilities and affects of pious living.Focusing on Cairo's popular neighborhoods, Hirschkind highlights the pivotal role these tapes now play in an expanding arena of Islamic argumentation and debate--what he calls an "Islamic counterpublic." This emerging arena connects Islamic traditions of ethical discipline to practices of deliberation about the common good, the duties of Muslims as national citizens, and the challenges faced by diverse Muslim communities around the globe. The Ethical Soundscape is a brilliant analysis linking modern media practices of moral self-fashioning to the creation of increasingly powerful religious publics.

The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st-Century Art World


Roger White - 2015
    Since then, painting has been declared dead several times over, and contemporary art has now expanded to include just about any object, action, or event: dance routines, slideshows, functional hair salons, seemingly random accretions of waste. In the meantime, being an artist has gone from a join-the-circus fantasy to a plausible vocation for scores of young people in America.But why--and how and by whom--does all this art get made? How is it evaluated? And for what, if anything, will today's artists be remembered? In The Contemporaries, Roger White, himself a young painter, serves as our spirited, skeptical guide through this diffuse creative world.White takes us into the halls of the RISD graduate program, where students learn critical lessons that go far beyond how to apply paint to canvases. In New York, we meet the neophytes who assist established artists--and who walk the fine line between "assistance" and "making the art." In Milwaukee, White trails a group of friends trying to create a viable scene where rent is cheap, but where the spotlight rarely shines. And he gives us an intimate perspective on three wildly different careers: that of Dana Schutz, an emerging star who is revitalizing painting; Mary Walling Blackburn, whose challenging art defies market forces; and Stephen Kaltenbach, a '70s wunderkind who is back on the critical radar, perhaps in spite of his own willful obscurity.From young artists trying to elbow their way in to those working hard at dropping out, White's essential book offers a once-in-a-generation glimpse of the inner workings of the American art world at a moment of unparalleled ambition, uncertainty, and creative exuberance.

Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City


Richard Lloyd - 2005
    The author maintains that the last two decades have seen the emergence of a mass alternative nation, populated by struggling screen writers, oddball thrift stores, indie rockers and thousands of coffee houses.