Bøker utgitt av Cornell University Press

This cultural history of the Seven Years' War in French-claimed North America focuses on the meanings of wartime violence and the profound impact of the encounter between Canadian, Indian, and French cultures of war and diplomacy.

In Chained to History, Steven J. Brady places slavery at the center of the story of America's place in the world in the years prior to the calamitous Civil War. Beginning with the immediate aftermath of the War of the American Revolution, Brady follows the military, economic, and moral lines of the diplomatic challenges of attempting to manage, on the global stage, the actuality of human servitude in a country dedicated to human freedom. Chained to History shows how slavery was interwoven with America's foreign relations and affected policy controversies ranging from trade to extradition treaties to military alliances. Brady highlights the limitations placed on American policymakers who, working in an international context increasingly supportive of abolition, were severely constrained regarding the formulation and execution of preferred policy. Policymakers were bound to the slave interest based in the Democratic Party and the tortured state of domestic politics bore heavily on the conduct of foreign affairs. As international powers not only abolished the slave trade but banned human servitude as such, the American position became untenable.From the Age of Revolutions through the American Civil War, slavery was a constant factor in shaping US relations with the Atlantic World and beyond. Chained to History addresses this critical topic in its complete scope and shows the immoral practice of human bondage to have informed how the United States re-entered the community of nations after 1865.

In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim excavates the transnational linkages between women of North Korea and a worldwide women's movement. Women of Asia, especially those espousing communism, are often portrayed as victims or pawns of a patriarchal Confucian state. Kim undercuts this standard analysis through detailed archival work in the international women's press, and finds that North Korean women asserted themselves in unexpected places from the late 1940s--just before the official beginning of the Korean War--to 1975, the year designated by the UN as International Women's Year. By centering North Korea and the "East," Kim defies convention to offer an entirely new genealogy of the global women's movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women's Union (KDWU), as part of the global left women's movement led by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), insisted family and domestic issues must be part of both national and international debates, highlighting how race, nationality, sex, and class connect to form systems of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Their intersectional program claimed that there is "no peace without justice," that "the personal is the political," and that "women's rights are human rights" many decades before activists of the West embraced such agendas. Among Women across Worlds is an archaeology of forgotten movements and ideas that became the foundation for those that have come to define our era.

Collectivization Generation is a history of agricultural collectivization in Soviet Uzbekistan, but it is not focused on Party decisions. Instead, Marianne Kamp offers a history of everyday life that relies on oral history accounts from those she calls the collectivization generation. Born between the early 1900s and the early 1920s, the collectivization generation were rural youth who participated in the transformation of agricultural life in the early 1930s as teens or young adults. A top-down restructuring ruptured their predictable life trajectories and created new categories for understanding self and society. For many, the newly formed kolkhozes became their economic, social, and political milieu throughout their working years, shaping their identities and their material lives. In Collectivization Generation, we meet Uzbeks who were driven from their homes by bandits, whose fathers disappeared in the Stalinist gulag, who suffered starvation and orphanhood. We also meet Uzbeks who told of embracing the project of collectivization, of feeling rewarded with dignity, recognition, pay, association with national triumphs, and with the progress represented by a tractor.

In Waste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste-in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources-from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the...

In Unfinished Spirit, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein brings to light the extraordinary archive of Muriel Rukeyser's (1913-1980) unpublished and incomplete literary works, revealing the ways in which misogyny influences the kinds of texts we read and value. Despite her status today as an influential poet, much of Rukeyser's critical and feminist writing remained unfinished, suppressed by the sexism of editors, political censure, the withdrawal of funding and publishing contracts, as well the conditions of single motherhood and economic precarity.From Savage Coast, her novel of the Spanish Civil War (which Kennedy-Epstein recovered, edited, and published to great acclaim in 2013) to her photo-text collaboration with Berenice Abbott, essays on women writers, radio scripts, and biographies, Unfinished Spirit traces the creation, reception, and rejection of Rukeyser's most ambitious texts-works that continued the radical, avant-garde project of modernism and challenged an increasingly hegemonic Cold War culture. Bound together by Rukeyser's radical vision of artistic creation and political engagement, these incomplete texts open a space to theorize the politics of the unfinished for understanding women's artistic production, reasserting the importance of the archive as a primary site of feminist criticism.

Vacationing in Dictatorships examines the political effects of international tourism in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain in the postwar era. Despite sharp economic and political differences between the two dictatorial regimes at the start of the Cold War, significant similarities existed as both states took advantage of international tourism to improve their image abroad and pursued processes of economic modernization to acquire hard currencies. By the end of the 1970s though, the two countries achieved rather different results in terms of tourism development, despite the fact that both shared many features in the 1940s and 1950s.By comparing the rise and evolution of international tourism on different sides of the Iron Curtain, Adelina Stefan provides a different assessment of the geopolitics of postwar Europe and that further refines the Cold War's geographies separating eastern and western Europe. As a result, Vacationing in Dictatorships reveals a new perspective on the Cold War that reveals not only the developmental similarities between Eastern and Southern Europe, but also the ideological struggle that pitted socialist East against capitalist West.

An Imaginary Cinema is the first systematic study of Sergei Eisenstein's unrealized films as well as a deeply informed historical and theoretical inquiry into the role and meaning of the unmade in his oeuvre. Eisenstein directed some of the twentieth century's most important films, from the early classic of montage, Battleship Potemkin, to his late masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible. Alongside these, however, the Soviet filmmaker also toiled over a compelling array of unrealized projects, from ideas that never grew beyond complex, passionate notebook scrawls and sketches to productions that were mounted and shot to some degree of completion without ever being finished. Working from the archival remnants of several of the director's most fascinating unrealized projects--from his bold vision to film Marx's Das Kapital to his time in Hollywood struggling to adapt Dreiser's An American Tragedy--Dustin Condren's book reveals new aspects of Eisenstein's genius, showing the filmmaker in a constant state of process, open to working toward impossible and sometimes utopian ends, and committed to the pursuit of creative and theoretical discovery. Condren's analysis of these unrealized projects in An Imaginary Cinema reveals Eisenstein at crucial moments of his personal and artistic biography, and it also tells the wider story of a canonical artist negotiating the political labyrinths of Stalinist Russia, the economic pitfalls of Hollywood, and the technological shifts of early cinema.

Murder in a cathedral, horrific illnesses and deformities, narrow escapes from injury and death, a vengeful dragon, a wandering eyeball, a bawdy monk and other sinners redeemed--the accounts of miracles performed by the Virgin Mary gathered and translated in The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France provide vivid glimpses into medieval life and beliefs. Bruce L. Venarde provides fluent translations of the first five collections of Marian miracle narratives from France, written in Latin between 1130 and 1150, and never before available in English.The stories recorded in these collections--by Herman of Tournai; Hugh Farsit; Haimo of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives; John, son of Peter; and Gautier of Compiègne--offer descriptions of travel, living conditions, medical knowledge, conflict between lay and religious authorities, and the burgeoning cult of the Virgin Mary, which had only recently become important to Christian devotion. Including notes, tables, and maps that orient and illuminate the texts, The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France makes these riveting tales available to readers seeking a view into the medieval past.

The War on Rescue documents how governments block assistance to people in times of crisis. Focusing on the European Migration Crisis of 2015 to 2022 to address the reasons why governments do this, William Plowright discusses the strategies employed which prevent suffering people from receiving help. The European Migration Crisis motivated people from across the world to offer assistance to needy refugees and migrants across Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa. Both large and small organizations rushed to bring food, medical care, and rescue to those stranded at sea. However, many European governments sought to prevent humanitarian assistance and deny safe haven to the desperate. Boats filled with those rescued were blocked from harbors, activists were arrested, staff were threatened, and at times faced violence. The War on Rescue adds to social science understanding and explanations for humanitarian assistance and the reasons why governments obstruct rescue efforts.

Crucible of the Incurable concerns how people face life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Anthony Stavrianakis spent a year in clinics and with people living with the illness in the United States. He examines the multiple meanings of care in a context of a chronic, degenerative, one-hundred percent fatal, neuromuscular illness, whose most common duration is between two and five years. How do people diagnosed with ALS continue to "live as well as possible, for as long as possible" in accordance with the normative work at the heart of outpatient ALS care? Crucible of the Incurable shows how those touched by the situation of a person living with ALS bear this problem and this task. Given the sense of certitude around the diagnosis, given past experiences of those aware of its usual progression, and given the uncertainty of the disease's cause and its progression for each specific person; how then do people orient themselves to the experience of life with this illness, how to support those who are confronted with it, and how to provide aid or solace.

The Ecosystem of Exile Politics relays the events in Bhutan that led to the exodus of one-sixth of the population, and then recounts the activism by Bhutan's refugee diaspora that followed in response. Susan Banki asserts that activism functions like a physical ecosystem, in which hubs of activism in different locations interact to pressure the home country. For Bhutan's refugee mobilizers, physical proximity offers advantages in Nepal and India, where organizing protests, lobbying, and collecting information about government abuse in Bhutan is aided by being close to the homeland. But in an ecosystem of exile politics, proximity is both a boon and a bane. Sites proximate to Bhutan can be spaces of risk and disempowerment, and refugee activists rarely secure legal, political, and social protection. While distant diasporas in the Global North may not be in precarious situations, they cannot tap into the advantages of proximity. In examining these phenomena, The Ecosystem of Exile Politics adds to theoretical understandings of exile politics and to empirical research on Bhutan and its refugee population.

Fyodor Dostoevsky--Darkness and Dawn (1848-1849), the third and final volume on the writer's childhood, adolescence, and youth, seeks to disclose, in a detailed and intimate way, Dostoevsky's last two years before his exile to Siberia. Together with the first two volumes, it attempts to present for the first time a complete and congruent picture of the writer's first twenty-eight years on earth. Thomas Gaiton Marullo first examines diverse responses of Russian church, state, and citizens to the French socialists, in particular, Charles Fourier, and to the revolutions of 1848 before he moves to lively debates on Dostoevsky's socialism and new attacks on his writings. He then considers the dynamics of the Petrashevsky and Durov circles; fresh assaults on Dostoevsky's works; and the increasing desperation of the writer himself, particularly with Andrei Kraevsky. In the final sections of his study, Marullo sheds light on Dostoevsky's readings of Belinsky's Letter to Gogol, the arrests of Petrashevsky and company, including Dostoevsky and brothers Andrei and Mikhail, as well as his responses to members of the Investigative Commission for the Petrashevsky Affair, his eight months in prison in the Peter-Paul Fortress, his mock execution on Semyonovsky Parade Ground, and his departure to exile in Siberia. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students, and devotees not only of Dostoevsky, but also of Russian and European history, culture, and civilization.

Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France uncovers the unexplored history of matrimonial agents, their novel marketing tactics, and the rise of personal advertisements to track the commercialization of marriage in nineteenth-century France. Brokers transformed courtship and marriage into forms of commercial exchange, linking them to the new urban values of abundance, pleasure, and social mobility. By studying agents' and readers' media fictions on love alongside court cases, legislation, and literature surrounding the industry, Andrea Mansker reveals the intimate and socioeconomic pressures of finding a spouse, while demonstrating how contemporaries used the business of matrimony to reimagine their public identities, relationships, and courtship rituals following unprecedented historical change from the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. The matchmaking business both responded to and helped shape national anxieties regarding fluctuating nuptial rates and changing laws on marriage and divorce. As a result, marriage itself was reconceived as a commercial contract inseparable from the atomistic and corrupt marketplace. The debates and pressures described in Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France are still relevant today. As online daters have discovered, the possibility of finding a mate in an expanded pool of candidates beyond one's family, locality, and nation offered individuals the liberating opportunity to explore new personas just as it produced a novel sense of danger about these impersonal transactions in the anonymous marketplace.

Drawing Coastlines reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set in place infrastructural interventions, vocabularies of development and conservation, and their lines and dots inscribe material conditions of existence and horizons of loss that entangle life forms. V. Chitra interlaces graphics and text by redrawing scientific images, the moments of their construction, the choices and consequences of what gets drawn and what does not, and how images are seen, performed, and manifest. These visual reconstructions show how images remake human-nonhuman relationships, arrange urban politics, and materialize landscapes in complex and contradictory ways. The multimodal format of Drawing Coastlines engages in the politics of its context where words and images combine to create coastal worlds, and to find, through a creative anthropology, openings to build new forms of care in the midst of crisis.

Today's Russia, Unstuck in Time suggests, is a nation of time travelers, living either in memories of the Great Patriotic War and a society that provided for all its citizens or an alternative future in which the USSR never collapsed. Eliot Borenstein examines the ways in which films, fiction, television, social media, political parties, and even theme parks use the conventions of time travel and alternate history to fantasize about narratives that are more appealing than the post-Soviet present.Unstuck in Time explores the centrality of an uncannily persistent USSR in the post-Soviet cultural imagination through deeply engaged and entertaining readings of an impressive array of texts: fantasies in which characters time-crash into the Soviet past, fictions of triumphant far-future Soviet societies, and real-life enterprises feeding the belief that the Soviet Union never ended. Whether channeled into benign nostalgia or dangerous mythmaking, the cases that Borenstein analyzes reveal the extent to which the psychic shock of the end of the Soviet Union left Russians adrift, caught between a past many still long for and a future few can imagine.

Lex Lu argues in Appearance Politics that crafting an appealing and powerful outward image has long been an essential political instrument in China. Its traces may be found in historical records, imperial portraits, physiognomic prognostications, photographs, posters, statues, and digital images. Employing rare archival materials from Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, Lu tells the story of these political maneuverings. We learn the ways in which political actors and their agents designed their images, and we observe the shifting standards of male beauty that guided their decisions. Appearance Politics examines five case studies: the usurpation of Ming Prince Zhu Di; the rise of Manchu masculinity and its mixed standards of Han Chinese and Manchu beauty at the Yongzheng court; the use of modern photography and Western male beauty standards at the turn of the twentieth century; the making of the Republican founding father Sun Yat-sen; and the creation of visual templates of Mao Zedong. Lu's rich empirical study counters systematic stereotypical descriptions of Chinese male leadership embedded in Western media and scholarship.

In The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, Gerald Roche sheds light on a global crisis of linguistic diversity that will see at least half of the world's languages disappear this century. Roche explores the erosion of linguistic diversity through a study of a community on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau in the People's Republic of China. Manegacha is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future. The author uses the Manegacha case to show how linguistic diversity across Tibet is collapsing under assimilatory state policies. He looks at how global advocacy networks inadequately acknowledge this issue, highlighting the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world. The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet broadens our understanding of Tibet and China, the crisis of global linguistic diversity, and the radical changes needed to address this crisis.

The second volume of Old Norse Folklore explores medieval and early modern Nordic magic and witchcraft, covering syncretism, continuity, survival, and the reconstruction of pagan beliefs and cultic practices in this last area of western Europe to be Christianized. This volume not only considers these issues, but also pulls back the curtain on more obscure, yet important, corners of Nordic magico-religious tradition.In these chapters, Stephen A. Mitchell draws on materials from many different periods of the vast Nordic world, stretching from Greenland to the Baltic, and examines such diverse witnesses as sagas, judicial records, ballads, synodal statutes, runes, proverbs, church murals, leechbooks, and the language used to discuss magic and its actors. Old Norse Folklore addresses how theology helped shape the Nordic magical world and how language can help reveal this world, how magic was used as a practical matter in, and what it meant philosophically to, the medieval Nordic world, and how inherited traditions between and among the historically connected societies of northern Europe impacted cultural developments in late medieval Scandinavia.

In Bounded Wilderness, Kathryn Jasper focuses on the innovations undertaken at the hermitage of Fonte Avellana in central Italy during the eleventh century by its prior, Peter Damian (d. 1072). The congregation of Fonte Avellana experimented with reforming practices that led to new ways of managing property and relations among clergy, nobles, and the laity.Kathryn Jasper charts how Damian's notion of monastic reform took advantage of the surrounding topography and geography to amplify the sensory aspects of ascetic experiences. By focusing on monastic landscapes and land ownership, Jasper demonstrates that reform extended beyond abstract ideas. Rather, reform circulated locally through monastic networks and addressed practical concerns such as property boundaries and rights over water, orchards, pastures, and mills. Putting new sources, both documentary and archaeological, into conversation with monastic charters and Damian's letters, Bounded Wilderness reveals the interrelationship of economic practices, religious traditions, and the natural environment in the idea and implementation of reform.