Most people today encounter ancient Greek vases as static, untouchable artifacts safely out of reach behind glass, in the quiet of a museum gallery. Once, however, these vessels were also useful objects, made to be held, filled, and generally used in a variety of settings, from the ritual to the quotidian. This volume considers these ancient vases ......
In his many best-selling books, Yi-Fu Tuan seizes big, metaphysical issues and considers them in uniquely accessible ways. Human Goodness is evidence of this talent and is both as simple, and as epic, as it sounds. Genuinely good people and their actions, Tuan contends, are far from boring, naive, and trite; they are complex, varied, and ......
Aleksandr Aleksandrov, Transsexuality, and Imperial Russia
Aleksandr Aleksandrov was an author and soldier in service of the Russian tsar, active in the Prussian theater of the War of the Fourth Coalition (1806-7) and in the Napoleonic wars. In scholarship, he is better known by his birth name, Nadezhda Andreevna Durova, and often referred to with the female pronouns bestowed upon him at birth. In this ......
In 1963, nearly two decades after the end of the most destructive war in human history, George L. Mosse assembled a group of interdisciplinary scholars from diverse backgrounds to answer a seemingly simple question: What is fascism? The landmark seminar that followed, held at Stanford University, came to define the intellectual conversation about ......
Ifayemi Elebuibon and Yoruba Ancestral Knowledge Systems
Born in 1947, Ifa?y?mi? ???u?nda?gbonu? ?l??bui?b?n descends from a long line of Yoruba healers, philosophers, and priests. A fervent disciple of Ifa from age four, Elebuibon grew to become both a living moral exemplar and an internationally recognized face of his religion. The first scholarly work to connect the biography of a devout Ifa ......
With nearly half a million Iranian Americans living in and around Los Angeles, Southern California is home to more Iranians than anywhere outside Iran. Although many community members identify as secular, stereotypes characterize Iranian Americans, like other populations from Muslim-majority countries, as pejoratively religious and culturally ......
Since the collapse of socialism, Bulgaria's population has been on the move-out of rural regions and into cities, or out of the country altogether. Yet today there is a countermovement of young, urban Bulgarians, born after 1989, seeking to repopulate rural villages and reclaim traditional Bulgarian folklife. Though many of these young Bulgarians ......
Flexible States and Porous Boundaries in the History of Coastal West Africa
Beginning in the late fifteenth century, more than two million people were taken from areas that lay behind the Bight of Benin, enslaved, and forced into the perilous Middle Passage bound for the New World. While a vast swath of scholarly work on this region has explored the relationships among the ruling elites and overseas traders that ......
Like in other parts of the world, the protection of human rights and other practices of constitutionalism remains uneven in Malawi and Kenya. However, as Eunice N. Sahle argues in this book, from a comparative historical perspective, these countries' adoption of new transformative constitutional frameworks in 1994 and 2010, respectively, provided ......
