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A deep dive into racial politics, Hollywood, and Black cultural struggles for liberation as reflected in the extraordinary life and times of Sammy Davis Jr.   Through the lens of Sammy Davis Jr.'s six-decade career in show business-from vaudeville to Vegas to Broadway, Hollywood, and network TV-Dancing Down the Barricades examines the workings of race in American culture. The title phrase holds two contradictory meanings regarding Davis's cultural politics: Did he dance the barricades down, as he liked to think, or did he simply dance down them, as his more radical critics would have it?   Davis was at once a pioneering, barrier-busting, anti-Jim Crow activist and someone who was widely associated with accommodationism and wannabe whiteness. Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson attends to both threads, analyzing how industry norms, productions, scripts, roles, and audience expectations and responses were all framed by race against the backdrop of a changing America. In the spirit of better understanding Davis's life and career, Dancing Down the Barricades examines the complexities of his constraints, freedoms, and choices for what they reveal about Black history and American political culture.

"A must-read for anyone interested in the history of drag performance."-?Publishers WeeklyA rich and provocative history of drag's importance in modern British culture.   Drag: A British History is a groundbreaking study of the sustained popularity and changing forms of male drag performance in modern Britain. With this book, Jacob Bloomfield provides fresh perspectives on drag and recovers previously neglected episodes in the history of the art form.   Despite its transgressive associations, drag has persisted as an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture-drag artists have consistently asserted themselves as some of the most renowned and significant entertainers of their day. As Bloomfield demonstrates, drag was also at the center of public discussions around gender and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Victorian sex scandals to the "permissive society" of the 1960s. This compelling new history demythologizes drag, stressing its ordinariness while affirming its important place in British cultural heritage.

Edgar G. Ulmer is perhaps best known today for Detour, considered by many to be the epitome of a certain noir style that transcends its B-list origins. But in his lifetime he never achieved the celebrity of his fellow Austrian and German emigre directors-Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and Robert Siodmak. Despite early work with Max Reinhardt and F. W. Murnau, his auspicious debut with Siodmak on their celebrated Weimar classic People on Sunday, and the success of films like Detour and Ruthless, Ulmer spent most of his career as an itinerant filmmaker earning modest paychecks for films that have either been overlooked or forgotten. In this fascinating and well-researched account of a career spent on the margins of Hollywood, Noah Isenberg provides the little-known details of Ulmer's personal life and a thorough analysis of his wide-ranging, eclectic films-features aimed at minority audiences, horror and sci-fi flicks, genre pictures made in the U.S. and abroad. Isenberg shows that Ulmer's unconventional path was in many ways more typical than that of his more famous colleagues. As he follows the twists and turns of Ulmer's fortunes, Isenberg also conveys a new understanding of low-budget filmmaking in the studio era and beyond.

"Makes an excellent case for Parrott as an unjustly forgotten historical figure."-The New Yorker"Remind[s] us of the brazenly talented women sidelined by convention."-New York Times The riveting biography of Ursula Parrott-best-selling author, Hollywood screenwriter, and voice for the modern woman.   Credited with popularizing the label "ex-wife" in 1929, Ursula Parrott wrote provocatively about divorcées, career women, single mothers, work-life balance, and a host of new challenges facing modern women. Her best sellers, Hollywood film deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law made her a household name. Part biography, part cultural history, Becoming the Ex-Wife establishes Parrott's rightful place in twentieth-century American culture, uncovering her neglected work and keen insights into American women's lives during a period of immense social change.   Although she was frequently dismissed as a "woman's writer," reading Parrott's writing today makes it clear that she was a trenchant philosopher of modernity-her work was prescient, anticipating issues not widely raised until decades after her decline into obscurity. With elegant wit and a deft command of the archive, Marsha Gordon tells a timely story about the life of a woman on the front lines of a culture war that is still raging today.

"A heroic narrative."-One of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023"A detailed examination of . . . the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision that defined libel laws and increased protections for journalists."-The New York Times Book ReviewA deeply researched legal drama that documents this landmark First Amendment ruling-one that is more critical and controversial than ever.   Actual Malice tells the full story of New York Times v. Sullivan, the dramatic case that grew out of segregationists' attempts to quash reporting on the civil rights movement. In its landmark 1964 decision, the Supreme Court held that a public official must prove "actual malice" or reckless disregard of the truth to win a libel lawsuit, providing critical protections for free speech and freedom of the press.   Drawing on previously unexplored sources, including the archives of the New York Times Company and civil rights leaders, Samantha Barbas tracks the saga behind one of the most important First Amendment rulings in history. She situates the case within the turbulent 1960s and the history of the press, alongside striking portraits of the lawyers, officials, judges, activists, editors, and journalists who brought and defended the case. As the Sullivan doctrine faces growing controversy, Actual Malice reminds us of the stakes of the case that shaped American reporting and public discourse as we know it.

With full legalization seeming inevitable, it's time to shift the conversation-from whether recreational cannabis should be legalized to how.  Weed Rules argues that it's time for states to abandon their "grudging tolerance" approach to legal weed and to embrace "careful exuberance." In this thorough and witty book, law professor Jay Wexler invites policy makers to responsibly embrace the enormous benefits of cannabis, including the joy and euphoria it brings to those who use it.   The "grudging tolerance" approach has led to restrictions that are too strict in some cases-limiting how and where cannabis can be used, cultivated, marketed, and sold-and far too loose in others, allowing employers and police to discriminate against users. This book shows how focusing on joy and community can lead us to an equitable marijuana policy in which minority communities, most harmed by the war on drugs, play a leading role in the industry. Centering pleasure and fun as legitimate policy goals, Weed Rules puts forth specific policies to advocate for a more just, sensible, and joyous post-legalization society.

Surviving prison as an innocent person is a surreal nightmare no one wants to think about. But it can happen to you.    Justin Brooks has spent his career freeing innocent people from prison. With You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent, he offers up-close accounts of the cases he has fought, embedding them within a larger landscape of innocence claims and robust research on what we know about the causes of wrongful convictions.   Putting readers at the defense table, this book forces us to consider how any of us might be swept up in the system, whether we hired a bad lawyer, bear a slight resemblance to someone else in the world, or are not good with awkward silence. The stories of Brooks's cases and clients paint the picture of a broken justice system, one where innocence is no protection from incarceration or even the death penalty. Simultaneously relatable and disturbing, You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand how injustice is served by our system.

"This wide-ranging book reveals Lawrence Kramer's command of poetry, novels, music, philosophy, history, and other topics too numerous to list. Refreshingly free of jargon, Experiencing Sound should be required reading for anyone who cares about how we understand ourselves and navigate the world through sound."--Michael L. Klein, author of Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject "Kramer ventures far off the beaten paths of sound studies. With inspiring intellectual ease, he strolls with his reader across the whole of Western cultural history, inviting us to hear music, literature, and philosophy in entirely new ways. This is the work of a master essayist."--Axel Englund, author of Deviant Opera: Sex, Power, and Perversion on Stage

A lavish collector's edition of the complete poems of eminent Japanese master of the haiku, Matsuo Basho.   Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) is arguably the greatest figure in the history of Japanese literature and the master of the haiku. Basho: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Basho offers in English a full picture of the haiku of Basho, 980 poems in all.   In Fitzsimons's beautiful rendering, Basho is much more than a philosopher of the natural world and the leading exponent of a refined Japanese sensibility. He is also a poet of queer love and eroticism; of the city as well as the country, the indoors and the outdoors, travel and staying put; of lonesomeness as well as the desire to be alone. Basho: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Basho reveals how this work speaks to our concerns today as much as it captures a Japan emerging from the Middle Ages. For dedicated scholars and those coming upon Basho for the first time, this beautiful collector's edition of Fitzsimons's elegant award-winning translation, with the original Japanese, allows readers to enjoy these works in all their glory.

"Remarkably accessible, this book offers an authoritative history of the Gulf, boldly linking the region to the wider currents of global history."--Dale F. Eickelman, author of The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach "Simply compelling! Allen Fromherz does for the Gulf what Braudel did for the Mediterranean."--G. R. Garthwaite, Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies and Professor Emeritus of History at Dartmouth College

Showcases the wonderful world of honey from hive to jar.   A beautifully illustrated global survey of the flavor of honey, The World Atlas of Honey includes profiles of more than eighty countries and the botanical sources of honey found in each. With text, illustrations, and photos, honey expert C. Marina Marchese takes readers through the global history of honey production from the earliest beekeepers to today's harvests.   This colorful guide celebrates the exceptional range and diversity of honey, revealing how terroir-the environment in which a food is produced-influences honey's qualities just as it does for wine, olive oil, coffee, and chocolate. The book also covers the methods used by honey sommeliers to taste and evaluate honey. Unique and authoritative, The World Atlas of Honey puts honey on the culinary map and elevates it to an epicurean treasure.

"Predatory Data is a groundbreaking book that connects historical practices of eugenics to big data's contemporary challenges. Anita Say Chan highlights the power of community-based alternatives to extractive data rooted in feminist, people of color, and Indigenous perspectives. An essential book for anyone looking to envision more equitable technological futures."--Shaka McGlotten, author of Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality "Predatory Data is the framework that we have been waiting for--to refuse, resist, and reimagine new possibilities as a part of decolonizing algorithmic and data practices."--Nishant Shah, Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Narratives Studio, Chinese University of Hong Kong

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1959.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1955.

"In this bold, speculative, and immensely learned study . . . Tiffany['s concept of] lyric substance--the 'sense' of materiality supplied to us by poets like Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore--constitutes a world whose inaccessibility is legitimized by the principles of scientific materialism. Thus lyric, too long on the periphery of materialist discourse, emerges as being squarely in its center."--Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University, author of "The Futurist Moment and "Wittgenstein's Ladder"A lyrical inquiry into the circle of ideas: materialism, science, poetics. Winding through the whole is a fascinating exploration of toys--children's toys, physicists' toy models, philosophers' robots, nuclear weaponeers' toy towns. . . . My hope is that this book will contribute to a growing interest not in cleaving science from the arts but rather in exploring, poetically, the language, images and things that illuminate both." --Peter Galison, Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and Physics, Harvard University"A brilliant achievement, synthesizing the history of science and poetics, technology and the arts, in an iconology of materialism. . . All that is solid melts into air in this book, but just as quickly the airy poems of our climate condense into material, objective forms, weird gadgets, and objects of scientific research. . . A wonderful feast of learning and wit." --W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, author of "Picture Theory and "Iconology"In clear-eyed and gorgeous prose, "Toy Medium moves the question of Art's encounter with Science to an utterly original point of conflagration: where matter is mostly not matter. . . . Going to the bottom of theImagination, where it still truly involves images, Tiffany explores how we have learned to see the inscrutable via our imagistic grasp of materiality. . . . This book is daring, brilliant, and deeply clever."--Jorie Graham, Boylston Professor of English, Harvard University, author of "Materialism and winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"Few sites within the university open a richer critical reflection than that of the M.F.A., with its complex crossing of professionalism, theory, humanistic knowledge, and the absolute exposure of practice. Howard Singerman's "Art Subjects does a magnificent job of both laying out our current crises, letting us see the shards of past practices embedded in them, and of demonstrating--rendering urgent and discussable--what it now means either to assume or award the name of the artist."--Stephen Melville, author of "Seams, editor of "Vision and Textuality""Art Subjects is a must read for anyone interested in both the education and status of the visual artist in America. With careful attention to detail and nuance, Singerman presents a compelling picture of the peculiarly institutional myth of the creative artist as an untaught and unteachable being singularly well adapted to earn a tenure position at a major research university. A fascinating study, thoroughly researched yet oddly, and movingly, personal."--Thomas Lawson, Dean, Art School, CalArts

"Sonia Saldivar-Hull's book proposes two moves that will, no doubt, leave a mark on Chicano/a and Latin American Studies as well as in cultural theory. The first consists in establishing alliances between Chicana and Latin American writers/activists like Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga on the one hand and Rigoberta Menchu and Domitilla Barrios de Chungara on her. The second move consists in looking for theories where you can find them, in the non-places of theories such as prefaces, interviews and narratives. By underscoring the non-places of theories, Sonia Saldivar-Hull indirectly shows the geopolitical distribution of knowledge between the place of theory in white feminism and the theoretical non-places of women of color and of third world women. Saldivar-Hull has made a signal contribution to Chicano/a Studies, Latin American Studies and cultural theory." --Walter D. Mignolo, author of "Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking "This is a major critical claim for the sociohistorical contextualization of Chicanas who are subject to processes of colonization--our conditions of existence. Through a reading of Anzaldua, Cisneros and Viramontes, Saldivar-Hull asks us to consider how the subalternized text speaks, how and why it is muted? How do testimonio, autobiography and history give shape to the literary where embodied wholeness may be possible. It is a critical de-centering of American Studies and Mexican Studies as usual, as she traces our cross(ed) genealogies, situated on the borders." --Norma Alarcon, Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

"In this new portrait of Basil of Caesarea, which will certainly win acceptance as the standard work in English, erudition does not blunt perceptiveness: we are brought close to the heart of a man who struggled to reconcile the high calling of his faith with the appalling demands that a fast-changing world imposed on its leaders. This book takes another long stride towards what all Rousseau's earlier work has aimed atan undogmatic and sympathetic understanding of the fourth-century Church, and the presentation of its great spiritual leaders to new, often unsuspecting audiences."Garth Fowden, National Hellenic Research Foundation"

"An indispensable look at the working conditions, social lives, and collective action of black miners. . . . [Moodie's] meticulous, reflective, incessantly questioning approach to power, drink, sexuality, conflict, and routine life in mines and compounds reveals an extraordinary world at the edge of hope and desperation."--Charles Tilly, The New School for Social Research"Combines a rigorous use of theory with a marvellous and sensitive sympathy."--Terence O. Ranger, co-editor of "The Invention of Tradition

In the early years of the USSR, socialist festivals--events entailing enormous expense and the deployment of thousands of people--were inaugurated by the Bolsheviks. Avant-garde canvases decorated the streets, workers marched, and elaborate mass spectacles were staged. Why, with a civil war raging and an economy in ruins, did the regime sponsor such spectacles? In this first comprehensive investigation of the way festivals helped build a new political culture, James von Geldern examines the mass spectacles that captured the Bolsheviks' historical vision. Spectacle directors borrowed from a tradition that included tsarist pomp, avant-garde theater, and popular celebrations. They transformed the ideology of revolution into a mythologized sequence of events that provided new foundations for the Bolsheviks' claim to power.

Gavin I. Langmuir's work on the formation and nature of antisemitism has earned him an international reputation. In History, Religion, and Antisemitism he bravely confronts the problems that arise when historians have to describe and explain religious phenomena, as any historian of antisemitism must. How, and to what extent, can the historian be objective? Is it possible to discuss Christian attitudes toward Jews, for example, without adopting the historical explanations of those whose thoughts and actions one is discussing? What, exactly, does the historian mean by "religion" or "religious"? Langmuir's original and stimulating responses to these questions reflect his inquiry into the approaches of anthropology, sociology, and psychology and into recent empirical research on the functioning of the mind and the nature of thought. His distinction between religiosity, a property of individuals, and religion, a social phenomenon, allows him to place unusual emphasis on the role of religious doubts and tensions and the irrationality they can produce. Defining antisemitism as irrational beliefs about Jews, he distinguishes Christian anti-Judaism from Christian antisemitism, demonstrates that antisemitism emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries because of rising Christian doubts, and sketches how the revolutionary changes in religion and mentality in the modern period brought new faiths, new kinds of religious doubt, and a deadlier expression of antisemitism. Although he developed it in dealing with the difficult question of antisemitism, Langmuir's approach to religious history is important for historians in all areas.

"The Ancient Economy holds pride of place among the handful of genuinely influential works of ancient history. This is Finley at the height of his remarkable powers and in his finest role as historical iconoclast and intellectual provocateur. It should be required reading for every student of pre-modern modes of production, exchange, and consumption."--Josiah Ober, author of Political Dissent in Democratic Athens

This stimulating collection of essays, mostly concerned with subjects taken from Slavic literatures, is at once scholarly and reflective. The volume opens with a true story, "Brognart," which is a confession of the author's remorse based on conflict with French intellectuals. "Science Fiction and the Coming of the Antichrist" concerns Vladimir Solovyov. "Krasinski's Retreat" is another return to the author's student readings, which attempts to determine how a Polish romantic poet could write in 1833 a drama on the approaching world revolution. "Joseph Conrad's Father" sketches the biography of a poet and revolutionary and also throws some light upon the fate of the hero of the last chapter.