In "Neither Letters nor Swimming": The Rebirth of Swimming and Free-diving, John McManamon documents the revival of interest in swimming during the European Renaissance and its conceptualization as an art. Renaissance scholars realized that the ancients considered one truly ignorant who knew “neither letters nor swimming.”
A deep dive into the history of aquatics that exposes centuries-old tensions of race, gender, and power at the root of many contemporary swimming controversies. Shifting Currents is an original and comprehensive history of swimming. It examines the tension that arose when non-swimming northerners met African and Southeast Asian swimmers. Using archaeological, textual, and art-historical sources, Karen Eva Carr shows how the water simultaneously attracted and repelled these northerners—swimming seemed uncanny, related to witchcraft and sin. Europeans used Africans’ and Native Americans’ swimming skills to justify enslaving them, but northerners also wanted to claim water’s power for themselves. They imagined that swimming would bring them health and demonstrate their scientific modernity. As Carr reveals, this unresolved tension still sexualizes women’s swimming and marginalizes Black and Indigenous swimmers today. Thus, the history of swimming offers a new lens through which to gain a clearer view of race, gender, and power on a centuries-long scale.
The saga of Caligula’s barges sunk in Lake Nemi south of Rome—how the huge vessels came to be there in the first place; why they became a cause célèbre for Mussolini’s Fascist regime; how they were, after multiple attempts, recovered from the lake bed; and why they were shortly thereafter destroyed—is, in the words of author John McManamon, a good story that is worth telling: “It has memorable characters, twists and turns in the plot, no lack of conflict and tension, and a dramatic ending where something clearly went wrong.” In From Caligula to the Nazis: The Nemi Ships in Diana’s Sanctuary, McManamon takes readers on an excursion through history to the fiery ending of the tale, a journey propelled by narrative energy and enhanced by the fruits of careful research. Related topics include Roman mythology and state religion, the erratic reign of the infamous Caligula, underwater archaeology as practiced during the Renaissance, the ideological exploitation of archaeology by Il Duce and his fascist followers, and a historical whodunit to ascertain the choices that led to the arson of the ship remains. McManamon covers every chapter in the 2,000-year history of the ships and does not ignore the mistaken interpretations that at times led subsequent researchers into blind alleys. In the end, From Caligula to the Nazis provides for both academic specialists and informed general readers the careful unwinding of a centuries-long mystery, replete with heroes, villains, gods, kings, and numerous ordinary folk swept up into the maelstrom.
In the age of European expansion, pearls became potent symbols of imperial supremacy. Pearls for the Crown demonstrates how European art legitimated racialized hierarchies and inequitable notions about humanity and nature that still hold sway today. When Christopher Columbus encountered pristine pearl beds in southern Caribbean waters in 1498, he procured the first source of New World wealth for the Spanish Crown, but he also established an alternative path to an industry that had remained outside European control for centuries. Centering her study on a selection of key artworks tied to the pearl industry, Mónica Domínguez Torres examines the interplay of materiality, labor, race, and power that drove artistic production in the early modern period. Spanish colonizers exploited the expertise and forced labor of Native American and African workers to establish pearling centers along the coasts of South and Central America, disrupting the environmental and demographic dynamics of their overseas territories. Drawing from postcolonial theory, material culture studies, and ecocriticism, Domínguez Torres demonstrates how, through use of the pearl, European courtly art articulated ideas about imperial expansion, European superiority, and control over nature, all of which played key roles in the political circles surrounding the Spanish Crown. This highly anticipated interdisciplinary study will be welcomed by scholars of art history, the history of colonial Latin America, and ecocriticism in the context of the Spanish colonies.
Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupil nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupul's lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education - and also to those who seek alternatives to other establisehd service industries. Ivan Illich was born in Vienna in 1926. He studied theology and philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome and obtained a PhD in history at the University of Salzburg. He came to the United States in 1951, where he served as assistant pastor in an Irish-Puerto Rican parish in New York. From 1956 to 1960 he was assigned as vice rector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, where he organized an intensive training center for American preists in Latin American culture. Illich was a co-founder of the widely known and controversial Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and since 1964 he has directed research seminars on "Institutional Alternatives in a Technological Society," with special focus on Latin America. Ivan Illich's writings have appeared in The New York Review, The Saturday Review, Esprit, Kuvsbuch, Siempre, America, Commonweal, Epreuves, and Tern PS Modernes.
This Weimar-era novel of a futuristic society, written by the screenwriter for the iconic 1927 film, was hailed by noted science-fiction authority Forrest J. Ackerman as "a work of genius."
Part of the regionalist movement that included Grant Wood, Paul Engle, Hamlin Garland, and Jay G. Sigmund, James Hearst helped create what Iowa novelist Ruth Suckow called a poetry of place. A lifelong Iowa farner, Hearst began writing poetry at age nineteen and eventually wrote thirteen books of poems, a novel, short stories, cantatas, and essays, which gained him a devoted following Many of his poems were published in the regionalist periodicals of the time, including the Midland, and by the great regional presses, including Carroll Coleman's Prairie Press. Drawing on his experiences as a farmer, Hearst wrote with a distinct voice of rural life and its joys and conflicts, of his own battles with physical and emotional pain (he was partially paralyzed in a farm accident), and of his own place in the world. His clear eye offered a vision of the midwestern agrarian life that was sympathetic but not sentimental - a people and an art rooted in place.
100 YEARS OF HEADLINES is a one-of-a-kind history of Stanford University. With nearly 200 previously unavailable front pages from The Stanford Daily, this large format book tells a rich, vibrant story of Big Games, wars, student protests, Nobel prizes, NCAA championships, construction, medical advances, university politics, and other events both major and minor that have shaped campus life. No publication can match the impact and immediacy of The Dailys front page. Through headlines, articles, photographs, weather reports, ads, and more, these pages provide a rough draft of history as it occurred. Told from a students point of view, the coverage of campus news is straightforward and exciting. Each front page in this compilation has been digitally imaged from the original bound volumes in the Universitys archives and is presented in its entirety, exactly as it ran. Organized chronologically, 100 YEARS OF HEADLINES covers the broad sweep of Stanford history from its founding to the present day.
Fayhee's wayward wanderings have been recounted in his monthly "Smoke Signals" column for the "Mountain Gazette, " of which he is the editor. In this volume he distills his favorite tales.
