LITMIR.BIZ

In Contested Treasure , Thomas Barton examines how the Jews in the Crown of Aragon in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries negotiated the overlapping jurisdictions and power relations of local lords and the crown. The thirteenth century was a formative period for the growth of royal bureaucracy and the development of the crown’s legal claims regarding the Jews. While many Jews were under direct royal authority, significant numbers of Jews also lived under nonroyal and seigniorial jurisdiction. Barton argues that royal authority over the Jews (as well as Muslims) was far more modest and contingent on local factors than is usually recognized. Diverse case studies reveal that the monarchy’s Jewish policy emerged slowly, faced considerable resistance, and witnessed limited application within numerous localities under nonroyal control, thus allowing for more highly differentiated local modes of Jewish administration and coexistence. Contested Treasure refines and complicates our portrait of interfaith relations and the limits of royal authority in medieval Spain, and it presents a new approach to the study of ethnoreligious relations and administrative history in medieval European society.

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The first of two volumes chronicling the history and role of music in the African American experience, Nothing but Love in God’s Water explores how songs and singers helped African Americans challenge and overcome slavery, subjugation, and suppression. From the spirituals of southern fields and the ringing chords of black gospel to the protest songs that changed the landscape of labor and the cadences sung before dogs and water cannons in Birmingham, sacred song has stood center stage in the African American drama. Myriad interviews, one-of-a-kind sources, and rare or lost recordings are used to examine this enormously persuasive facet of the movement. Nothing but Love in God’s Water explains the historical significance of song and helps us understand how music enabled the civil rights movement to challenge the most powerful nation on the planet.

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Religion Around Emily Dickinson begins with a seeming paradox posed by Dickinson’s posthumously published works: while her poems and letters contain many explicitly religious themes and concepts, throughout her life she resisted joining her local church and rarely attended services. Prompted by this paradox, W. Clark Gilpin proposes, first, that understanding the religious aspect of the surrounding culture enhances our appreciation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and, second, that her poetry casts light on features of religion in nineteenth-century America that might otherwise escape our attention. Religion, especially Protestant Christianity, was “around” Emily Dickinson not only in explicitly religious practices, literature, architecture, and ideas but also as an embedded influence on normative patterns of social organization in the era, including gender roles, education, and ideals of personal intimacy and fulfillment. Through her poetry, Dickinson imaginatively reshaped this richly textured religious inheritance to create her own personal perspective on what it might mean to be religious in the nineteenth century. The artistry of her poetry and the profundity of her thought have meant that this personal perspective proved to be far more than “merely” personal. Instead, Dickinson’s creative engagement with the religion around her has stimulated and challenged successive generations of readers in the United States and around the world.

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Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucer’s and Gower’s writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise. These writings helped define gradations of cultural authority, determining who could contribute to the production of legitimate knowledge and granting certain socioeconomic groups political leverage in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising simultaneously examines Chaucer’s and Gower’s negotiations—often articulated at the site of gender—over poetics and over the roles that vernacular poetry should play in the late medieval English social formation. This study investigates how Chaucer’s and Gower’s texts positioned poetry to become a powerful participant in processes of social control.

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Condorcet (1743–1794) was the last of the great eighteenth-century French philosophes and one of the most fervent américanistes of his time. A friend of Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine and a member of the American Philosophical Society, he was well informed and enthusiastic about the American Revolution. Condorcet’s writings on the American Revolution, the Federal Constitution, and the new political culture emerging in the United States constitute milestones in the history of French political thought and of French attitudes toward the United States. These remarkable texts, however, have not been available in modern editions or translations. This book presents first or new translations of all of Condorcet’s major writings on the United States, including an essay on the impact of the American Revolution on Europe; a commentary on the Federal Constitution, the first such commentary to be published in the Old World; and his Eulogy of Franklin , in which Condorcet paints a vivid picture of his recently deceased friend as the archetype of the new American man: self-made, practical, talented but modest, tolerant and free of prejudice—the embodiment of reason, common sense, and the liberal values of the Enlightenment.

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· First authorized edition to be published, with revised translation. . The title suggests it is a manual for would-be guerrillas. In fact, it is more of a political analysis, and marks the first time Che argues for the primacy of the subjective factor in the building of a revolutionary movement – a theme he constantly returned to. · Incongruously, Che’s book has been reprinted and studied by the CIA and US military for counterinsurgency training! (Wimberly Scott’s “Special Forces Guerrilla Warfare Manual” Paladin Press) · Ocean’s new edition has been revised and authorized by Che’s widow Aleida March. · Features a new preface by Che’s long-time guerrilla compañero Harry “Pombo” Villegas.

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An outstanding new anthology by one of history's greatest orators.Here, at last, is a comprehensive anthology presenting the voice of one of history’s greatest orators, Fidel Castro. Love him or hate him, there is no denying he is a “master of the spoken word,” as Gabriel García Márquez has described him.Emerging in the 1960s as a leading voice in support of Third World anticolonial struggles and continuing to play a role in the antiglobalization movement of today, Fidel Castro remains an articulate and penetrating—if controversial—political thinker and leader, who has outlasted ten hostile US presidents.His direct, forthright approach, his incredible grasp of diverse economic, historical, and cultural topics, and his idealism stand in stark contrast against the spin and superficiality of most political leaders.Covering five decades of Fidel’s speeches, this selection begins with his famous courtroom defense (“History will Absolve Me”), and also includes his speech on learning of Che Guevara’s death in Bolivia, his analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. With his declining health and the emergence of new leaders such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, this book sheds light not just on Castro’s mighty role in Latin America’s immediate past, but also on his legacy for the future.The [i]Fidel Castro Reader includes a chronology of the Cuban Revolution, an extensive glossary and index as well as 24 pages of photos. As the first anthology of Castro’s speeches to be published in English since the 1960s, this is an essential resource for both scholars and general readers.“Fidel’s devotion to the word is almost magical.” —[b]Gabriel García Márquez“Fidel is the leader of one of the smallest countries in the world, but he has helped to shape the destinies of millions of people across the globe.” —[b]Angela Davis“Fidel Castro is a man of the masses… The Cuban revolution has been a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people.” —[b]Nelson Mandela“Fidel’s is a singing and dancing intellect.” —[b]Alice Walker“[The editors] have done an admirable, even heroic, job of editing and excerpting this reader [which] serves a purpose for both historians and politicos.”  —[b][i]Foreword Magazine

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• Che “mania” set to continue with two new films, including one by Robert Redford based on Che’s motorcycle diary and another biographical movie by Steven Soderbergh (director of “Traffic”). Redford’s film is due for release in September 2003 (just after the release of this book). Soderbergh’s film, with Benicio del Torre, will be released halfway through the Fall 2003 season. • A new, revised and expanded edition of an Ocean Press classic complementing several best-selling biographies • New, unpublished essays and photographs • Prepared and published with the assistance of Che’s family and closest collaborators in Cuba • Illustrations: 24 new photos (many never been published) • Ocean Press has exclusive access to Che’s archives in Havana and will include incredible, must-have new material to this already highly successful collection of Che’s work.

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"An extraordinary accomplishment and an important piece of writing…" Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of <i>Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye</i>


"MW Larson has made an important contribution to the English-speaking world's understanding of the events in Japan during and after March 11, 2011. Larson's book captures the complexity of what happened: a triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that took the lives of almost 20,000 people, and uprooted hundreds of thousands more. Larson gives a textured and compassionate account of those events via the accounts of people who lived through them. He shows a journalist's ability to listen, and a novelist's flair for bringing those stories to life. He also shows an intense concern for the fate of Tohoku, having spent much time himself up in the disaster zone, which shows in his feel for places and the people. The personal connection makes the story all the more compelling, as the disaster has clearly changed Larson's life as well. Well done!" – Martin Fackler, former Tokyo bureau chief for the <i>New York Times</i>


Larson follows the lives of a hairdresser, a café owner, a cattle rancher, and a nuclear-energy worker from the moment the 2011 tsunami hit Japan's Tohoku region through the subsequent years of recovery, grief, and frustration. In simple, straightforward prose, Larson chronicles their attempts to recover what they had lost despite a government response replete with missed opportunities and predictable missteps.

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The new society that the world awaited might yet be born in the humble guise of a backwoods village. This was the belief shared by the many groups which moved into the American frontier to create experimental communities&mdash;communities which they hoped would be models for revolutionary changes in religion, politics, economics, and education in American society. For, as James Madison wrote, the American Republic was «useful in proving things before held impossible.» The communitarian ideal had its roots in the radical Protestant sects of the Reformation. Arthur Bestor shows the connection between the «holy commonwealths» of the colonial period and the nonsectarian experiments of the nineteenth century. He examines in particular detail Robert Owen's ideals and problems in creating New Harmony. Two essays have been added to this volume for the second edition. In these, «Patent-Office Models of the Good Society» and «The Transit of Communitarian Socialism to America,» Bestor discusses the effects of the frontier and of the migration of European ideas and people on these communities. He holds that the communitarians could believe in the possibility of nonviolent revolution through imitation of a small perfect society only as long as they saw American institutions as flexible. By the end of the nineteenth century, as American society became less plastic, belief in the power of successful models weakened.

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