During a wedding celebration, Jamil, the sole heir of a rich landowner, meets and falls in love with Naji, who sells grass for a living. The novel follows the boys' escape from their village to a neighboring city and beyond in the hopes of finding a place where they can be together freely. Even as their love evolves, their strong connection ......
Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos
Postcolonial and post-World War II Southeast Asia churned with new political, social, and cultural realities and possibilities. Liberal democracies flourished briefly, only to be discarded in favor of dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes, as the disorder and slow response times inherent to democracy proved unsavory or unequal to the ......
Fleeing her family, a woman finds unexpected solace in an empty hotel. A therapist struggling to make sense of a shattering professional failure becomes convinced someone is watching his every move. A coach's disciplinary tactic doesn't so much backfire as it implodes his players' lives. Inhabiting a (mostly) midwestern landscape, Alex Pickett's ......
Russia is a large, diverse, and complicated country whose far-flung regions maintain their own histories and cultures, even as President Vladimir Putin increases his political control. Powerful, autocratic regimes still need to establish their legitimacy; in Russia, as elsewhere, developing a compelling national narrative and building a sense of ......
In fourteen essays that speak to the full breadth of George L. Mosse's intellectual horizons and scholarly legacy, Masses and Man explores radical nationalism, fascism, and Jewish modernity in twentieth-century Europe. Breaking from the conventions of historical analysis, Mosse shows that "secular religions" like fascism cannot be understood only ......
Religion is deeply embedded in American history, and one cannot understand American history's broad dynamics without accounting for it. Without detailing the history of religions, teachers cannot properly explain key themes in US survey courses, such as politics, social dynamics, immigration and colonization, gender, race, or class. From early ......
Danish film director Carl Th. Dreyer, one of the twentieth century's most famous filmmakers, is best known for his masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and his midcentury classics, Day of Wrath and Ordet. Both viewers and scholars largely leave his early work, for Nordisk Film, on the shelf, dismissing it as immature melodramatic fare produced ......
In November 2020, B.J. Hollars answered a call from his father-in-law while teaching. "When will you be home?" Steve asked. "I have news." So began the Hollars family's year of plenty--a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family's daily ......
A proud Armenian who claimed a distant link to nobility, born in what was then part of czarist Russia, Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987) became one of the most astonishing and confounding directors of American film and theater, directing the original stage productions of Porgy and Bess, Carousel, and Oklahoma!, as well as films including Love Me ......
