In My Century the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation—in which Wat was a major participant—that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world. But Wat’s book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system, of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of “the devil in history.” “It was then,” Wat writes, “that I began to be a believer.”
Here, Gunter Grass writes of great events and seemingly trivial ones, of technical developments and scientific discoveries, of achievements in culture, sport, of megolamania, persecution and murder, war and disasters and of new beginnnings.
In postwar France, the aesthetics of appropriation and collage gave cultural form to a struggle over meaning. A new wave of avant-garde experimentation used--or stole, plagiarized, and expropriated--elements from advertising, journalism, literature, art, and other sources of common discourse (the ironically named "beautiful language" of this book's title, itself an appropriation from Guy Debord's collaged M & e ́moires). Redeployed, often in startling or pointed juxtapositions, these elements took on newly oppositional meanings. A famous photograph taken inside the occupied Sorbonne in May 1968, for example, shows a massive academic painting altered by a clever cartoonish speech bubble that transforms the painting into a parody of itself and memorializes an event very different from the one captured by the original artist."The Beautiful Language of My Century"describes the various forms of critical culture that culminated in the events of May 1968, and investigates the ways those forms have come down to us today. McDonough explores the montage practice developed by Guy Debord and his situationist colleagues under the name of d & e ́tournementand its expression in the later fifties as a form of cultural theft. He addresses the influence of colonialism on these practices, examining a 1961 exhibit of torn posters of the Algerian War ("La France d & e ́chir & e ́e"), Godard's early film Le Petit Soldat,and Christo's Project for a Temporary Wall of Steel Drums.He discusses the French left's adoption in the mid-sixties of the "end of art" as a theoretical position and describes the leftist idea of the f & e teas a Rabelaisian and revolutionary upwelling of everything that is low. This influential conception, inspired equally by the American urban revolts of the sixties and the writings of theorists Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille, coalesced into a new image of revolution, a new model of contestation, in the events of May 1968--when the struggle over language and culture merged with a broader resistance to capitalist modernization.
When Thomas D. Clark was hired to teach history at the University of Kentucky in 1931, he began a career that would span nearly three-quarters of a century and would profoundly change not only the history department and the university but the entire Commonwealth. His still-definitive History of Kentucky (1937) was one of more than thirty books he would write or edit that dealt with Kentucky, the South, and the American frontier. In addition to his wide scholarly contributions, Clark devoted his life to the preservation of Kentucky's historical records. He began this crusade by collecting vast stores of Kentucky's military records from the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. His efforts resulted in the Commonwealth's first archival system and the subsequent creation of the Kentucky Library and Archives, the University of Kentucky Special Collections and Archives, the Kentucky Oral History Commission, the Kentucky History Center (recently named for him), and the University Press of Kentucky. Born in 1903 on a cotton farm in Louisville, Mississippi, Thomas Dionysius Clark would follow a long and winding path to find his life's passion in the study of history. He dropped out of school after seventh grade to work first at a sawmill and then on a canal dredgeboat before resuming his formal education. Clark's earliest memories—hearing about local lynch-mob violence and witnessing the destruction of virgin forest—are an invaluable window into the national issues of racial injustice and environmental depredation. In many ways, the story of Dr. Clark's life is the story of America in the twentieth century. In My Century in History, Clark offers vivid memories of his journey, both personal and academic, a journey that took him from Mississippi to Kentucky and North Carolina, to leadership of the nation's major historical organizations, and to visiting professorships in Austria, England, Greece, and India, as well as in universities throughout the United States. An enormously popular public lecturer and teacher, he touched thousands of lives in Kentucky and around the world. With his characteristic wit and insight, Clark now offers his many admirers one final volume of history—his own.
These memoirs of the distinguished Iraqi statesman Tawfiq al-Suwaydi (1892-1968) evocatively recapture a now largely vanished Arab world¿and are an eloquent reminder that Iraq was once a far more open and tolerant society than it is today. Al-Suwaydi served as Iraq¿s prime minister (1929, 1946, 1950) three times, as foreign minister on numerous occasions, and as ambassador to Iran, the League of Nations, and the United Nations. He frequently undertook sensitive diplomatic missions on behalf of the Iraqi monarchy. Among the major world figures with whom he interacted personally were Kemal Ataturk, Adnan Menderes, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion, John Foster Dulles, Anthony Eden, George Curzon, Benito Mussolini, George Antonius, and Kings Abdullah, Faisal, Hussein, and Ibn Saud. From this vantage point, he wrote with an insider¿s detail about the diplomatic, political, and geostrategic issues that vexed Iraq and the entire Arab world from the early twentieth century through the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. A comprehensive essay by Antony T. Sullivan, senior associate for Middle East affairs at TerraBuilt Corporation International, introduces this first English-language edition of the memoirs.
The first book devoted to the history of African Americans in south Florida and their pivotal role in the growth and development of Miami, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century traces their triumphs, drudgery, horrors, and courage during the first 100 years of the city's history. Firsthand accounts and over 130 photographs, many of them never published before, bring to life the proud heritage of Miami's black community. Beginning with the legendary presence of black pirates on Biscayne Bay, Marvin Dunn sketches the streams of migration by which blacks came to account for nearly half the city’s voters at the turn of the century. From the birth of a new neighborhood known as "Colored Town," Dunn traces the blossoming of black businesses, churches, civic groups, and fraternal societies that made up the black community. He recounts the heyday of "Little Broadway" along Second Avenue, with photos and individual recollections that capture the richness and vitality of black Miami's golden age between the wars. A substantial portion of the book is devoted to the Miami civil rights movement, and Dunn traces the evolution of Colored Town to Overtown and the subsequent growth of Liberty City. He profiles voting rights, housing and school desegregation, and civil disturbances like the McDuffie and Lozano incidents, and analyzes the issues and leadership that molded an increasingly diverse community through decades of strife and violence. In concluding chapters, he assesses the current position of the community--its socioeconomic status, education issues, residential patterns, and business development--and considers the effect of recent waves of immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean. Dunn combines exhaustive research in regional media and archives with personal interviews of pioneer citizens and longtime residents in a work that documents as never before the life of one of the most important black communities in the United States.
In selecting Margaret Walker as the recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1942—making her the first African American to receive this national literary award—Stephen Vincent Benét proclaimed hers a vibrant new voice, finding in her collection For My People “a controlled intensity of emotion and a language that, at times, even when it is most modern, has something of a surge of biblical poetry.” Today, more than seventy years later, Walker’s voice still resonates with particular power. Addressing the literature and culture of black America, This Is My Century, first published in 1989, marked a significant contribution to American poetry, bringing together Walker’s selection of one hundred of her own poems. On the eve of the centennial of Walker’s birth, the University of Georgia Press is proud to reissue this classic of American letters. In addition to her award-winning debut collection, the volume includes Prophets for a New Day (1970), a celebration of the civil rights movement; October Journey (1973), a collection of autobiographical and dedicatory poems; and thirty-seven previously uncollected poems.
