How Wagner's Three Canonical Operas (The Flying Dutchman, Tannhaeuser, and Lohengrin) Paved the Way to his Mature Music Dramas
Scholars of Richard Wagner's works have long noted his numerous comparisons between their characters and plots in his letters, essays, and recorded remarks. Yet no one has previously attempted to assess their implications for our understanding of his art systematically. Paul Heise's quest to grasp the allegorical unity underlying Wagner's ......
Humans, like every other species, vary in almost every characteristic. Some differences, like skin color, are visible, while others, like susceptibility to certain diseases or differential sensitivity to toxins, are not. Varied motivations and talents are only revealed through behavior. Self-identified black and white subpopulations in America ......
Surviving evolutionary lines of animals and plants all had their adaptive keys for flourishing in the long run. In the case of humans, a lack of primate specializations opened the door to unique evolutionary possibilities. From the Miocene Era about 20 million years ago, nature began to offer new possibilities to creatures with larger brains and ......
Prosecutorial Democracy and the Future of Cancellation
For more than a decade, cancel culture has contributed to the stifling of public debate and the ruin of private lives. Academics, artists, and professionals have found themselves deplatformed, disinvited, and unemployed for little more than expressing an opinion or publishing research that departs from current dogma. In From Cancel Culture to ......
The Raj's Last Man Standing In Search of Geoffrey Langlands
Born in Hull in 1917, Geoffrey Langlands narrowly survived the Spanish Flu epidemic and Zeppelin bombings of World War I. Coming of age in time for World War II, he joined the elite No. 4 Commando unit in 1940. After successes in Europe, he was selected for officer training and posted to the Indian Army. He never left the subcontinent, serving ......
A Cultural History of Alcoholics Anonymous 1935-1960
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was founded in 1935. A great deal has been written about the addiction program and its membership, but little scholarship has been done on how it reflected the culture of the 1930s and Great Depression. Kevin Kaufmann's Rigorous Honesty investigates what AA can tell us about America in the 1930s. It begins by examining ......
Exophonic Literary Performance and the Shifting Sinosphere
This book explores the practice among Japanese writers in the modern era of composing kanshi, traditional Sinitic poetry. For the Japanese, writing poetry in Literary Sinitic (also known as Classical Chinese) is an "exophonic" practice, referring to the act of writing in a language other than one's native tongue. Meiji period (1868-1912) writers ......
The Ontology of the Mother-in-Law develops a political ontology of the "mother-in-law" as a neglected yet decisive figure of power beyond the classical opposition between father and mother, law and exception, state and civil society. While feminist critique traditionally identifies the father as the sole (evil) political Subject-law, sovereignty, ......
Recruitments, Exclusions, and Repressions Within the Soviet Communist Party, 1917-1941
The Soviet Communist Party faced a large-scale problem of regulating membership after the Russian Revolution of 1917. While recruitments were conducted mainly according to the internal Party rules, exclusion campaigns were periodically adopted to ensure ideological purity. In the decades before World War II, these reviews took various forms - from ......
