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The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan: The Career of Matsumoto Jiichiro (Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies)
by Ian NearyWritten by an internationally recognized specialist on Buraku studies, this book casts new light on majority-minority relations and the struggle for Buraku liberation. Ian Neary focuses on the Burakumin activist, left-wing politician, family company manager and arguably the most important Buraku leader of the twentieth century: Matsumoto Jiichiro. Based on primary material reflecting recent research, each chapter locates Matsumoto Jiichiro’s experience within the broader developments in Japan's social, political and economic history and illuminates dimensions of its social history during the twentieth century that are frequently left unconsidered. As an examination of Buraku history this book will appeal to scholars and students of Japanese political and economic history, ethnic and racial studies, socialism, social thought and social movements.
The Burden of Choice: Recommendations, Subversion, and Algorithmic Culture
by Jonathan CohnThe Burden of Choice examines how recommendations for products, media, news, romantic partners, and even cosmetic surgery operations are produced and experienced online. Fundamentally concerned with how the recommendation has come to serve as a form of control that frames a contemporary American as heteronormative, white, and well off, this book asserts that the industries that use these automated recommendations tend to ignore and obscure all other identities in the service of making the type of affluence they are selling appear commonplace. Focusing on the period from the mid-1990s to approximately 2010 (while this technology was still novel), Jonathan Cohn argues that automated recommendations and algorithms are far from natural, neutral, or benevolent. Instead, they shape and are shaped by changing conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and class. With its cultural studies and humanities-driven methodologies focused on close readings, historical research, and qualitative analysis, The Burden of Choice models a promising avenue for the study of algorithms and culture.
The Burden of Visual Truth: The Role of Photojournalism in Mediating Reality (Routledge Communication Series)
by Julianne NewtonAs the visual component of contemporary media has overtaken the verbal, visual reportage has established a unique and extremely significant role in 21st-century culture. Julianne Newton has prepared this comprehensive analysis of the development of the role of visual reportage as a critical player in the evolution of our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world. The Burden of Visual Truth offers a first assessment of the role of visual journalism within the context of the complex, cross-disciplinary pool of literature and ideas required for synthesis. Newton approaches the subject matter from several perspectives, examining the theoretical and ideological bases for visual truth, particularly as conveyed by the news media, and applying relevant research on photojournalism and reality imagery to contemporary newspaper, broadcast, and internet professional practice. She extends visual communication theory by proposing an ecology of the visual for 21st century life and developing a typology of human visual behavior. Scholars in visual studies, media studies, journalism, nonverbal communication, cultural history, and psychology will find this analysis invaluable as a comprehensive base for studying reality imaging and human visual behavior. The volume also is appropriate for journalism and media studies coursework at the undergraduate and graduate levels. With its conclusions about the future of visual reportage, The Burden of Visual Truth also will be compelling reading for journalism and mass communication professionals concerned with improving media credibility and maintaining a significant course for journalism in the 21st century. For all who seek to understand the role of visual media in the formation of their views of the world and of their own identities, this volume is a must-read.
The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery
by Nikole Hannah-Jones Rochelle RileyThe Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery is a plea to America to understand what life post-slavery remains like for many African Americans, who are descended from people whose unpaid labor built this land, but have had to spend the last century and a half carrying the dual burden of fighting racial injustice and rising above the lowered expectations and hateful bigotry that attempt to keep them shackled to that past. The Burden, edited by award-winning Detroit newspaper columnist Rochelle Riley, is a powerful collection of essays that create a chorus of evidence that the burden is real. As Nikole Hannah-Jones states in the book’s foreword, “despite the fact that black Americans remain at the bottom of every indicator of well-being in this country—from wealth, to poverty, to health, to infant mortality, to graduation rates, to incarceration—we want to pretend that this current reality has nothing to do with the racial caste system that was legally enforced for most of the time the United States of America has existed.” The Burden expresses the voices of other well-known Americans, such as actor/director Tim Reid who compares slavery to a cancer diagnosis, former Detroit News columnist Betty DeRamus who recounts the discrimination she encountered as a young black Detroiter in the south, and the actress Aisha Hinds who explains how slavery robbed an entire race of value and self-worth. This collection of essays is a response to the false idea that slavery wasn’t so bad and something we should all just “get over it.” The descendants of slaves have spent over 150 years seeking permission to put this burden down. As Riley writes in her opening essay, “slavery is not a relic to be buried, but a wound that has not been allowed to heal. You cannot heal what you do not treat. You cannot treat what you do not see as a problem. And America continues to look the other way, to ask African Americans to turn the other cheek, to suppress our joy, to accept that we are supposed to go only as far as we are allowed.” The Burden aims to address this problem. It is a must-read for every American.
The Burdens of Aspiration: Schools, Youth, and Success in the Divided Social Worlds of Silicon Valley
by Elsa DavidsonDuring the tech boom, Silicon Valley became one of the most concentrated zones of wealth polarization and social inequality in the United States—a place with a fast-disappearing middle class, persistent pockets of poverty, and striking gaps in educational and occupational achievement along class and racial lines. Low-wage workers and their families experienced a profound sense of exclusion from the techno-entrepreneurial culture, while middle class residents, witnessing up close the seemingly overnight success of a “new entrepreneurial” class, negotiated both new and seemingly unattainable standards of personal success and the erosion of their own economic security. The Burdens of Aspiration explores the imprint of the region’s success-driven public culture, the realities of increasing social and economic insecurity, and models of success emphasized in contemporary public schools for the region’s working and middle class youth. Focused on two disparate groups of students—low-income, “at-risk” Latino youth attending a specialized program exposing youth to high tech industry within an “under-performing” public high school, and middle-income white and Asian students attending a “high-performing” public school with informal connections to the tech elite—Elsa Davidson offers an in-depth look at the process of forming aspirations across lines of race and class. By analyzing the successes and sometimes unanticipated effects of the schools' attempts to shape the aspirations and values of their students, she provides keen insights into the role schooling plays in social reproduction, and how dynamics of race and class inform ideas about responsible citizenship that are instilled in America's youth.
The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France
by Ethan B. KatzAn informative look at the ever-changing relationship between France’s predominant non-Christian immigrant minorities over the course of 100 years.Headlines from France suggest that Muslims have renewed an age-old struggle against Jews and that the two groups are once more inevitably at odds. But the past tells a different story. The Burdens of Brotherhood is a sweeping history of Jews and Muslims in France from World War I to the present. Here Ethan Katz introduces a richer and more complex world that offers fresh perspective for understanding the opportunities and challenges in France today.Focusing on the experiences of ordinary people, Katz shows how Jewish–Muslim relations were shaped by everyday encounters and by perceptions of deeply rooted collective similarities or differences. We meet Jews and Muslims advocating common and divergent political visions, enjoying common culinary and musical traditions, and interacting on more intimate terms as neighbors, friends, enemies, and even lovers and family members. Drawing upon dozens of archives, newspapers, and interviews, Katz tackles controversial subjects like Muslim collaboration and resistance during World War II and the Holocaust, Jewish participation in French colonialism, the international impact of the Israeli–Arab conflict, and contemporary Muslim antisemitism in France.We see how Jews and Muslims, as ethno-religious minorities, understood and related to one another through their respective relationships to the French state and society. Through their eyes, we see colonial France as a multiethnic, multireligious society more open to public displays of difference than its postcolonial successor. This book thus dramatically reconceives the meaning and history not only of Jewish–Muslim relations but ultimately of modern France itself.Praise for The Burdens of BrotherhoodWinner of the American Library in Paris Book AwardWinner of the J. Russell Major Prize for the Best Book in French HistoryWinner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival MaterialWinner of the 2016 David H. Pinkney Prize for the Best Book in French History“A compelling, important, and timely history of Jewish/Muslim relations in France since 1914 that investigates the ways and venues in which Muslims and Jews interacted in metropolitan France . . . This insightful, well-researched, and elegantly written book is mandatory reading for scholars of the subject and for those approaching it for the first time.” —J. Haus, Choice
The Burgtheater and Austrian Identity: Theatre and Cultural Politics in Vienna, 1918-38
by Robert Pyrah"The collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918 galvanized discussion about national identity in the new Republic of Austria. As Robert Pyrah shows in this thoroughly documented study, the complex identity politics of interwar Austria were played out in the theatres of Vienna, which enjoyed a cultural prominence rarely matched in other countries. By 1934, productions across the city were being co-opted to serve the newly patriotic cause of the Dollfuss and Schuschnigg regimes, and the Burgtheater, once known as the first German stage, had been transformed into a national theatre for Austria. Using case studies of key productions and a wealth of previously unseen archival material, Pyrah sheds new light on artistic and ideological developments throughout the period, including the neglected earlier years. He documents previously unexplored overlaps in the cultural programmes of Left and Right, and unearths evidence that key institutions were subverted by the Right well before the suspension of parliamentary rule in 1933."
The Burial Record of Prehistoric Liangshan in Southwest China
by Anke HeinThis book proposes a new model and scheme of analysis for complex burial material and applies it to the prehistoric archaeological record of the Liangshan region in Southwest China that other archaeologists have commonly given a wide berth, regarding it as too patchy, too inhomogeneous, and overall too unwieldy to work with. The model treats burials as composite objects, considering the various elements separately in their respective life histories. The application of this approach to the rich and diverse archaeological record of the Liangshan region serves as a test of this new form of analysis. This volume thus pursues two main aims: to advance the understanding of the archaeology of the immediate study area which has been little examined, and to present and test a new scheme of analysis that can be applied to other bodies of material.
The Burial Record of Prehistoric Liangshan in Southwest China: Graves as Composite Objects
by Anke HeinThis book proposes a new model and scheme of analysis for complex burial material and applies it to the prehistoric archaeological record of the Liangshan region in Southwest China that other archaeologists have commonly given a wide berth, regarding it as too patchy, too inhomogeneous, and overall too unwieldy to work with.The model treats burials as composite objects, considering the various elements separately in their respective life histories. The application of this approach to the rich and diverse archaeological record of the Liangshan region serves as a test of this new form of analysis. This volume thus pursues two main aims: to advance the understanding of the archaeology of the immediate study area which has been little examined, and to present and test a new scheme of analysis that can be applied to other bodies of material.
The Burial of the Dead (Routledge Revivals)
by W. H. BaseviFirst published in 1920, The Burial of the Dead emerged from the idea that the primitive man did not imagine graves as receptacles for the dead, but refuges for the living. The book is an anthropological and a philosophical quest to understand when and how the custom of burial came about within primitive society. The book does not limit itself to the customs and traditions of burial, but also engages with the concepts of death, life, and afterlife as conceived by the primitive man. In doing so, the author traces a continuity between the strength of beliefs in a primitive society and in a modern one, as well as the development of those beliefs into universal principles. This book will be of interest to anyone trying to unravel the mystery of death and especially to students of anthropology, history, philosophy and religion.
The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh
by David DamroschA “lively and accessible” history of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, and its sensational rediscovery in the nineteenth century (The Boston Sunday Globe).Composed in Middle Babylonia around 1200 BCE, The Epic of Gilgamesh foreshadowed later stories that would become as fundamental as any in human history: the Bible, Homer, The Thousand and One Nights. But in 600 BCE, the clay tablets that bore the story were lost—buried beneath ashes and ruins when the library of the wild king Ashurbanipal was sacked in a raid.The Buried Book begins with the rediscovery of the forgotten epic and its deciphering in 1872 by George Smith, a brilliant self-taught linguist who created a sensation—and controversy—when he discovered Gilgamesh among the thousands of tablets in the British Museum’s collection. From there the story goes backward in time, all the way to Gilgamesh himself. Damrosch reveals the story as a literary bridge between East and West: a document lost in Babylonia, discovered by an Iraqi, decoded by an Englishman, and appropriated in novels by both Philip Roth and Saddam Hussein. This is an illuminating, fast-paced tale of history as it was written, stolen, lost, and—after 2,000 years, countless battles, fevered digs, conspiracies, and revelations—finally found.“Damrosch creates vivid portraits of archaeologists, Assyriologists, and ancient kings, lending his history an almost novelistic sense of character. [He] has done a superb job of bringing what was buried to life.” —The New York Times Book Review“As astounding as the content of the Epic of Gilgamesh in which the questing hero travels to the underworld and back . . . superb and engrossing.” —Booklist (starred review)“Damrosch’s fascinating literary sleuthing will appeal to scholars and lay readers alike.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii
by Gabriel ZuchtriegelThe director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park offers a vivid view of daily life in the lost city, shares the latest discoveries, and reflects on preserving heritage. In The Buried City, Gabriel Zuchtriegel takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of Pompeii and reveals new archaeological finds that are being unearthed at the site’s biggest dig in a generation. As director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park, Zuchtriegel presents a uniquely intimate perspective on this city that was tragically destroyed and frozen in time by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Among the ruins, we find unmade beds, dishes left drying, and bodies of victims encased in ash, but Zuchtriegel shows that we’ve only begun to understand this fascinating place, as a third of the site remains unexcavated. Zuchtriegel leads us into the heart of the city, reconstructing Pompeii as it would have been, showing us who lived there, what mattered to them, and what happened in their final hours. The Buried City reveals the latest discoveries unearthed at Pompeii—including a banquet hall with murals of Greek gods, a fresco of what appears to be a pizza, and the remains of individuals crushed by debris—all buried for almost two thousand years. Zuchtriegel offers a vivid portrait of this World Heritage site as a vibrant and diverse city, connecting us to a past that is much closer than we think and inviting us to reflect on our role as keepers of the site and its history.
The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii
by Gabriel Zuchtriegel'The best book on Pompeii I've ever read' STEPHEN FRY'An essential read for anyone interested in this extraordinary place' TELEGRAPH'Brilliant' TOM HOLLANDA vast area of Pompeii is being excavated for the first time, revealing astonishing insights into how people really lived. In this revelatory new history, Director of Pompeii Gabriel Zuchtriegel shares the untold stories that are at last emerging.Pompeii is a world frozen in time. There are unmade beds, dishes left drying, tools abandoned by workmen, bodies embracing with love and fear. And alongside the remnants of everyday life, there are captivating works of art: lifelike portraits, exquisite frescos and mosaics, and the extraordinary sculpture of a sleeping boy, curled up under a blanket that's too small.The Buried City reconstructs the catastrophe that destroyed Pompeii on 24 August 79 CE, but it also offers a behind-the-scenes tour of the city as it was before: who lived here, what mattered to them, and what happened in their final hours. It offers us a vivid sense of Pompeii's continuing relevance, and proves that ancient history is much closer to us than we think.'A fascinating new book about what we are still learning about this most haunting of all lost cities... deeply moving' MAIL ON SUNDAY'Makes the familiar magical' DAN SNOW
The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii
by Gabriel Zuchtriegel'The best book on Pompeii I've ever read' STEPHEN FRY'An essential read for anyone interested in this extraordinary place' TELEGRAPH'Brilliant' TOM HOLLANDA vast area of Pompeii is being excavated for the first time, revealing astonishing insights into how people really lived. In this revelatory new history, Director of Pompeii Gabriel Zuchtriegel shares the untold stories that are at last emerging.Pompeii is a world frozen in time. There are unmade beds, dishes left drying, tools abandoned by workmen, bodies embracing with love and fear. And alongside the remnants of everyday life, there are captivating works of art: lifelike portraits, exquisite frescos and mosaics, and the extraordinary sculpture of a sleeping boy, curled up under a blanket that's too small.The Buried City reconstructs the catastrophe that destroyed Pompeii on 24 August 79 CE, but it also offers a behind-the-scenes tour of the city as it was before: who lived here, what mattered to them, and what happened in their final hours. It offers us a vivid sense of Pompeii's continuing relevance, and proves that ancient history is much closer to us than we think.'A fascinating new book about what we are still learning about this most haunting of all lost cities... deeply moving' MAIL ON SUNDAY'Makes the familiar magical' DAN SNOW
The Buried Life of Things
by Simon GoldhillSimon Goldhill offers a fresh and exciting perspective on how the Victorians used material culture to express their sense of the past in an age of progress, especially the biblical past and the past of classical antiquity. From Pompeian skulls on a writer's desk, to religious paraphernalia in churches, new photographic images of the Holy Land and the remaking of the cityscape of Jerusalem and Britain, Goldhill explores the remarkable way in which the nineteenth century's sense of history was reinvented through things. The Buried Life of Things shows how new technologies changed how history was discovered and analysed, and how material objects could flare into significance in bitter controversies, and then fade into obscurity and disregard again. This book offers a new route into understanding the Victorians' complex and often bizarre attempts to use their past to express their own modernity.
The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution
by Peter HesslerFrom the acclaimed author of River Town and Oracle Bones, an intimate excavation of life in one of the world's oldest civilizations at a time of convulsive changeDrawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos.In the midst of the revolution, Hessler often traveled to digs at Amarna and Abydos, where locals live beside the tombs of kings and courtiers, a landscape that they call simply al-Madfuna: "the Buried." He and his wife set out to master Arabic, striking up a friendship with their instructor, a cynical political sophisticate. They also befriended Peter's translator, a gay man struggling to find happiness in Egypt's homophobic culture. A different kind of friendship was formed with the neighborhood garbage collector, an illiterate but highly perceptive man named Sayyid, whose access to the trash of Cairo would be its own kind of archaeological excavation. Hessler also met a family of Chinese small-business owners in the lingerie trade; their view of the country proved a bracing counterpoint to the West's conventional wisdom. Through the lives of these and other ordinary people in a time of tragedy and heartache, and through connections between contemporary Egypt and its ancient past, Hessler creates an astonishing portrait of a country and its people. What emerges is a book of uncompromising intelligence and humanity--the story of a land in which a weak state has collapsed but its underlying society remains in many ways painfully the same. A worthy successor to works like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, The Buried bids fair to be recognized as one of the great books of our time.
The Burn Farm
by Michael BensonBenson takes readers behind the scenes of the sadistic and horrific true story of Shelia LaBarre, a depraved woman who tkaes in troubled men as lovers, then savagely slaughters them and burns their bodies on her New Hampshire farm. photos. Original.
The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America's Soldiers
by Joseph Hickman“There’s a whole chapter on my son Beau… He was co-located [twice] near these burn pits.”–Joe Biden, former Vice President of the United States of AmericaThe Agent Orange of the 21st Century… Thousands of American soldiers are returning from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan with severe wounds from chemical war. They are not the victims of ruthless enemy warfare, but of their own military commanders. These soldiers, afflicted with rare cancers and respiratory diseases, were sickened from the smoke and ash swirling out of the “burn pits” where military contractors incinerated mountains of trash, including old stockpiles of mustard and sarin gas, medical waste, and other toxic material.This shocking work, now for the first time in paperback, includes: Illustration of the devastation in one soldier’s intimate story A plea for help Connection between the burn pits and Major Biden’s unfortunate suffering and death The burn pits’ effects on native citizens of Iraq: mothers, fathers, and children Denial from the Department of Defense and others Warning signs that were ignored and much moreBased on thousands of government documents, over five hundred in-depth medical case studies, and interviews with more than one thousand veterans and active-duty GIs, The Burn Pits will shock the nation. The book is more than an explosive work of investigative journalism—it is the deeply moving chronicle of the many young men and women who signed up to serve their country in the wake of 9/11, only to return home permanently damaged, the victims of their own armed forces’ criminal negligence.
The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850
by Whitney R. Cross"Burned-over District was a name applied to a small region, during a limited period of history, to indicate a particular phase of development. It described the religious character of western New York during the first half of the nineteenth century. Time, subject, and area have thus all combined to confine the scope of this book. The study has nevertheless seemed rewarding, mainly because its implications transcend all three limitations. "The meaning expands in a geographical sense because this one area provides a case history in the westward transit of New England culture. Likewise, it is representative as a sample of the change from youth to maturity in a single section affected by continuing westward movement. The subject of religion has broader significance in this period and locality than might at first appear. This section was the storm center, and religious forces were the driving propellants of social movements important for the whole country in that generation. As far as time goes, this book is an illustration of the way in which the minds of one era help to form the destinies of succeeding generations. Neither the causes of the Civil War nor the origins of national prohibition, to cite only two prominent examples, can be thoroughly understood without reference to the Burned-over District."--from the Preface
The Burning Earth: A History
by Sunil AmrithOne of The New Yorker's "Essential Reads" of 2024 A brilliant, paradigm-shifting global history of how humanity has reshaped the planet, and the planet has shaped human history, over the last 500 years. In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of an extraordinary expansion of human freedom and its planetary costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Portuguese silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railroads and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against stubborn nature. Amrith’s account of the ways in which the First and Second World Wars involved the massive mobilization not only of men, but of other natural resources from around the globe, provides an essential new way of understanding war as an irreversible reshaping of the planet. So too does this book reveal the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm. The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates in gorgeous prose, and on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic—vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images—in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.
The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America
by Anders WalkerA startling and gripping reexamination of the Jim Crow era, as seen through the eyes of some of the most important American writers"Walker has opened up a fresh way of thinking about the intellectual history of the South during the civil-rights movement."—Robert Greene, The NationIn this dramatic reexamination of the Jim Crow South, Anders Walker demonstrates that racial segregation fostered not simply terror and violence, but also diversity, one of our most celebrated ideals. He investigates how prominent intellectuals like Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O&’Connor, and Zora Neale Hurston found pluralism in Jim Crow, a legal system that created two worlds, each with its own institutions, traditions, even cultures. The intellectuals discussed in this book all agreed that black culture was resilient, creative, and profound, brutally honest in its assessment of American history. By contrast, James Baldwin likened white culture to a &“burning house,&” a frightening place that endorsed racism and violence to maintain dominance. Why should black Americans exchange their experience for that? Southern whites, meanwhile, saw themselves preserving a rich cultural landscape against the onslaught of mass culture and federal power, a project carried to the highest levels of American law by Supreme Court justice and Virginia native Lewis F. Powell, Jr.Anders Walker shows how a generation of scholars and judges has misinterpreted Powell&’s definition of diversity in the landmark case Regents v. Bakke, forgetting its Southern origins and weakening it in the process. By resituating the decision in the context of Southern intellectual history, Walker places diversity on a new footing, independent of affirmative action but also free from the constraints currently placed on it by the Supreme Court. With great clarity and insight, he offers a new lens through which to understand the history of civil rights in the United States.
The Burning House: What Would You Take?
by Foster Huntington“Fascinating….Provocative.”—New York Times“Answering this question reveals a great deal about your personality, priorities and interests.”—The Guardian (UK)If your house were on fire, what would you take? Foster Huntington has collected answers to this telling question from thousands of responders all over the world to get to the heart of what it is that people truly value. The result is The Burning House, featuring the best of Huntington’s popular website, TheBurningHouse.com along with a wealth of all-new material. Fascinating and remarkably revealing, The Burning House provides a captivating keyhole into people’s lives, feelings, and innermost thoughts that will especially appeal to the many fans of PostSecret, Not Quite What I Was Planning, Found, and Awkward Family Photos. Illustrated with sometimes moving, often unusual photographs of people’s most prized possessions, The Burning House ingeniously celebrates the differences between human beings around the globe—and the surprising similarities that unite us all.
The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story
by Angela BourkeIn 1895, Bridget Cleary, a strong-minded and independent young woman, disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary. At first her family claimed she had been taken by fairies-but then her badly burned body was found in a shallow grave. Bridget's husband, father, aunt, and four cousins were arrested and tried for murder, creating one of the first mass media sensations in Ireland and England as people tried to make sense of what had happened. Meanwhile, Tory newspapers in Ireland and Britain seized on the scandal to discredit the cause of Home Rule, playing on lingering fears of a savage Irish peasantry. Combining historical detective work, acute social analysis, and meticulous original scholarship, Angela Bourke investigates Bridget's murder.
The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis
by James E. Lewis Jr.A multifaceted portrait of the early American republic as seen through the lens of the Burr ConspiracyIn 1805 and 1806, Aaron Burr, former vice president of the newly formed American republic, traveled through the Trans-Appalachian West gathering support for a mysterious enterprise, for which he was arrested and tried for treason in 1807. This book explores the political and cultural forces that shaped how Americans made sense of the uncertain rumors and reports about Burr’s intentions and movements, and examines what the resulting crisis reveals about their anxieties concerning the new nation’s fragile union and uncertain republic.Burr was said to have enticed some people with plans to liberate Spanish Mexico, others with promises of land in the Orleans Territory, still others with talk of building a new empire beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The Burr Conspiracy was a cause célèbre of the early republic—with Burr cast as the chief villain of the Founding Fathers—even as the evidence against him was vague and conflicting. Rather than trying to discover the real intentions of Burr or his accusers—Thomas Jefferson foremost among them—James E. Lewis Jr. looks at how differing understandings of the Burr Conspiracy were shaped by everything from partisan politics and biased newspapers to notions of honor and gentility. He also traces the enduring legacy of the stories that were told and accepted during this moment of uncertainty. The Burr Conspiracy offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of the United States at a time when it was far from clear to its people how long it would last.
The Business Of Crime: A Documentary Study Of Organized Crime In The American Economy
by Alan A BlockMembers of organized crime syndicates have gained control of key businesses and trade unions through their strategic positions as arbiters of labor-management conflicts and as dispensers of illegal credit. They are managing important sectors of the contemporary marketplace, engaging in activities far more significant than the vice enterprises usually associated with criminal activity. Difficult to access for scholarly study, organized crime is best documented in judicial findings and in legislative reports from criminal investigations and public hearings. In this book, Alan Block has assembled a rich cross section of these reports. Taken together, they illustrate how organized crime has infiltrated important industries and taken control of union pension and welfare funds. Designed for students of criminology, sociology, and deviance, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the business of crime in America today.