The first novel in the acclaimed "History of Bestiality" trilogy. Living high in the Alps in a German principality, our narrator tells us he's dutifully fulfilling his obligations as a Servant of Justice and acting as a daily witness to injustice masquerading as a court of law. One day he notices that the judge is much too engrossed in looking at pornographic photographs showing various other pillars of the town engaged in a variety of sexual activities with minors. The incident propels him on a mental journey back through his life: black-humor fantasies and suicidal drinking binges; the Roman catacombs, warm summer nights in Brooklyn; brothels in Stockholm, his childhood in Norway, and wanderings in Germany. But aside from court records he has been keeping his own long and detailed account of man's cruelty to man in a massive twelve-volume study he calls his History of Bestiality. --
Johannes Fabian was one of the first anthropologists to introduce the concept of popular culture into the study of contemporary Africa. Drawing on his research in the Shaba region of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), he has been writing for thirty years about the practices, beliefs, and objects that make up popular culture in an urban African setting: labor and language, religious movements, theater and storytelling, music and painting, grassroots literacy and historiography. In Moments of Freedom Fabian reflects on anthropological uses of the concept of popular culture. He retraces how his explorations of popular culture in this urban-industrial setting showed that classiclal culture theory did not account for large aspects of contemporary African life. Popular culture draws on various genres of representation and performance, and Fabian explores the notion of genre itself as it applies to Shaba religious discourse, painting, and the theater. He also addresses the element of time and how spatial thinking about culture, ethnicity, and globalization acts as an obstacle to appreciating the contemporaneity of African popular culture. The volume ends with a discussion of contestation in light of current calls for democratization. In Moments of Freedom, Johannes Fabian takes stock of decades of anthropological work on popular culture and examines the development of his own thought over time. Throughout the volume, he makes eloquent connections to other firelds such as history, folklore studies, and cultural studies, suggesting areas for further research in each.
The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, was the bloodiest single day in American history, with more than 6,000 soldiers killed--four times the number lost on D-Day, and twice the number killed in the September 11th terrorist attacks. In Crossroads of Freedom, America's most eminent Civil War historian, James M. McPherson, paints a masterful account of this pivotal battle, the events that led up to it, and its aftermath. As McPherson shows, by September 1862 the survival of the United States was in doubt. The Union had suffered a string of defeats, and Robert E. Lee's army was in Maryland, poised to threaten Washington. The British government was openly talking of recognizing the Confederacy and brokering a peace between North and South. Northern armies and voters were demoralized. And Lincoln had shelved his proposed edict of emancipation months before, waiting for a victory that had not come--that some thought would never come. Both Confederate and Union troops knew the war was at a crossroads, that they were marching toward a decisive battle. It came along the ridges and in the woods and cornfields between Antietam Creek and the Potomac River. Valor, misjudgment, and astonishing coincidence all played a role in the outcome. McPherson vividly describes a day of savage fighting in locales that became forever famous--The Cornfield, the Dunkard Church, the West Woods, and Bloody Lane. Lee's battered army escaped to fight another day, but Antietam was a critical victory for the Union. It restored morale in the North and kept Lincoln's party in control of Congress. It crushed Confederate hopes of British intervention. And it freed Lincoln to deliver the Emancipation Proclamation, which instantly changed the character of the war. McPherson brilliantly weaves these strands of diplomatic, political, and military history into a compact, swift-moving narrative that shows why America's bloodiest day is, indeed, a turning point in our history.
The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American political tradition from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidentialism in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Aziz Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule—one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women. These practices of liberty and exclusion were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin. However, at crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.
The saga of the Freedom Rides is an improbable, almost unbelievable story. In the course of six months in 1961, four hundred and fifty Freedom Riders expanded the realm of the possible in American politics, redefining the limits of dissent and setting the stage for the civil rights movement. In this new version of his encyclopedic Freedom Riders, Raymond Arsenault offers a significantly condensed and tautly written account. With characters and plot lines rivaling those of the most imaginative fiction, this is a tale of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph. Arsenault recounts how a group of volunteers--blacks and whites--came together to travel from Washington DC through the Deep South, defying Jim Crow laws in buses and terminals and putting their lives on the line for racial justice. News photographers captured the violence in Montgomery, shocking the nation and sparking a crisis in the Kennedy administration. Here are the key players--their fears and courage, their determination and second thoughts, and the agonizing choices they faced as they took on Jim Crow--and triumphed. Winner of the Owsley Prize Publication is timed to coincide with the airing of the American Experience miniseries documenting the Freedom Rides "Arsenault brings vividly to life a defining moment in modern American history." --Eric Foner, The New York Times Book Review "Authoritative, compelling history." --William Grimes, The New York Times "For those interested in understanding 20th-century America, this is an essential book." --Roger Wilkins, Washington Post Book World "Arsenault's record of strategy sessions, church vigils, bloody assaults, mass arrests, political maneuverings and personal anguish captures the mood and the turmoil, the excitement and the confusion of the movement and the time." --Michael Kenney, The Boston Globe
This book shows how international discourse citing ‘self-determination’ over the last hundred years has functioned as a battleground between two ideas of freedom: a ‘radical’ idea of freedom, and a ‘liberal-conservative’ idea of freedom. The book examines each of the major moments in which ‘self-determination’ has been a central part of the language of high-level international politics and law: the early 20th century discourse of V.I. Lenin and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, the aftermath of the First World War and the formulation of the UN Charter, the 1950-1960s UN debates on ‘self-determination’, and the 2008-2010 International Court of Justice case on Kosovo’s declaration of independence. At each of these moments in history, ‘self-determination’ was at the top of the international agenda. And at each moment, a fight over the meaning of freedom played out in ‘self-determination’ discourse. Besides providing insights into the historical times in which self-determination was prominently cited internationally, the book offers a recasting and renewal of international debates on freedom in international discourse.
'One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation' OLIVIA LAING What can freedom really mean? In this invigorating, essential book, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about the concept in ways that are responsive to our divided world. Drawing on pop culture, theory and the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, she follows freedom - with all its complexities - through four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. On Freedom offers a bold new perspective on the challenging times in which we live. 'Tremendously energising' Guardian 'This provocative meditation...shows Nelson at her most original and brilliant' New York Times 'Nelson is such a friend to her reader, such brilliant company... Exhilarating' Literary Review * A New York Times Notable Book * * A Guardian and TLS 'Books of 2021' Pick *
In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the “major utopians” who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century’s “minor utopias” whose stories, overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag, suggest that the future need not be as catastrophic as the past. The book is organized around six key moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe: 1900 (the Paris World's Fair), 1919 (the Paris Peace Conference), 1937 (the Paris exhibition celebrating science and light), 1948 (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 1968 (moral indictments and student revolt), and 1992 (the emergence of visions of global citizenship). Winter considers the dreamers and the nature of their dreams as well as their connections to one another and to the history of utopian thought. By restoring minor utopias to their rightful place in the recent past, Winter fills an important gap in the history of social thought and action in the twentieth century.
Winner of the PROSE Award An NRC Handelsblad Best Book of the Year “Ambitious and impressive...At a time when the very survival of both freedom and democracy seems uncertain, books like this are more important than ever.” —The Nation “Helps explain how partisans on both the right and the left can claim to be protectors of liberty, yet hold radically different understandings of its meaning...This deeply informed history of an idea has the potential to combat political polarization.” —Publishers Weekly “Ambitious and bold, this book will have an enormous impact on how we think about the place of freedom in the Western tradition.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough “Brings remarkable clarity to a big and messy subject...New insights and hard-hitting conclusions about the resistance to democracy make this essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of our current dilemmas.” —Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why It Matters For centuries people in the West identified freedom with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. The equation of liberty with restraints on state power—what most people today associate with freedom—was a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking. So what triggered this fateful reversal? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of Western thinking about freedom, Annelien de Dijn argues that this was not the natural outcome of such secular trends as the growth of religious tolerance or the creation of market societies. Rather, it was propelled by an antidemocratic backlash following the French and American Revolutions. The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries who created our modern democracies—it was first conceived by their critics and opponents. De Dijn shows that far from following in the path of early American patriots, today’s critics of “big government” owe more to the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.
Cassandra Pybus adds greatly to the work of [previous] scholars by insisting that slaves stand at the center of their own history . . . Her 'biographies' of flight expose the dangers that escape entailed and the courage it took to risk all for freedom. Only by measuring those dangers can the exhilaration of success be comprehended and the unspeakable misery of failure be appreciated.--Ira Berlin, from the Foreword During the American Revolution, thousands of slaves fled their masters to find freedom with the British. Epic Journeys of Freedom is the astounding story of these runaways and the lives they made on four continents. Having emancipated themselves, with the rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears, these men and women struggled tenaciously to make liberty a reality in their own lives. This alternative narrative of freedom fought for and won is uniquely compelling; historian Cassandra Pybus's groundbreaking research has uncovered individual stories of runaways who left America to forge difficult new lives in far-flung corners of the British Empire. Harry, for example, one of George Washington's slaves, escaped from Mount Vernon in 1776, was evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783, and eventually relocated to Sierra Leone in West Africa with his wife and three children. Ralph Henry, who ran away from the Virginia firebrand Patrick Henry in 1776, took a similar path to precarious freedom in Sierra Leone, while others, such as John Moseley and John Randall, were evacuated with the British forces to England. Stranded in England without skills or patronage during a period of high unemployment, they were among thousands of newly freed poor blacks who struggled just to survive. While some were relocated to Sierra Leone, others, like Moseley and Randall, found themselves transported to the distant penal colony of Botany Bay, in Australia. Epic Journeys of Freedom, written in the best tradition of history from the bottom up, is a fascinating insight into the meaning of liberty; it will change forever the way we think about the American Revolution.
