"The first translation from the Greek that I ever did was the apple orchard of Sappho in my fifteenth year. It left me so excited with accomplishment that I couldn't sleep well for nights. Since that time, on the freight trains of my youthful years of wandering, in starlit camps on desert and mountain ranges, in snow-covered cabins, on shipboard, in bed, in the bath, in love, in time of loneliness and despair, in jail, while employed as an attendant of the insane, and on many other jobs and in many other places, the Anthology and the lyric poets of Greece have been my constant companions."...

The movement from tradition to modernity engulfed all of the Jewish communities in the West, but hitherto historians have concentrated on the intellectual revolution in Germany by Moses Mendelssohn in the second half of the eighteenth century as the decisive event in the origins of Jewish modernity. In The Jews of Georgian England, Todd M. Endelman challenges the Germanocentric orientation of the bulk of modern Jewish historiography and argues that the modernization of European Jewry encompassed far more than an intellectual revolution.
His study recounts the rise of the...

Detroit's public school system, lauded as a model for the nation in the 1920s and 1930s, has become one of the city's most conspicuous failures. Jeffrey Mirel draws on Detroit's experience to offer a new interpretation of urban educational decline in the twentieth century, suggesting specific answers to what ails America's public schools and how public education can be improved.

Jeffrey Mirel has won two prestigious book awards for The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System. Stanford University and the American Educational Research Association awarded the book the 1994-95...

The Japanese Army's invasion of China in 1937 was the first step toward a hemispheric war that would last until the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. What ended in one atrocity began with another: the savage military takeover of China's capital city, which quickly became known as the Rape of Nanking. The Japanese Army's conduct from December 1937 to February 1938 constitutes one of the most barbarous events not just of the war but of the century. The violence was documented at the time and then redocumented during the war crimes trial in Tokyo after the war. This book brings...

The Acehnese, a Muslim people of Sumatra, fought Dutch attempts to colonize them for forty years. After its "pacification," Acehnese society evolved peacefully, yet nonetheless the Acehnese participated fully in the Indonesian revolution and in a rebellion against the Indonesian central government not long after. Based on field work done in the early 1960s, James Siegel's The Rope of God, traces the evolution in Islam, in the economy, and in the structure of the family to show how it was that Aceh mobilized itself as a society from the time of the colonial war to the emergence of the...

In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of its first publication, we are happy to reissue Nancy Milio's 9226 Kercheval, a groundbreaking book which analyzes the success of the Mom and Tots Center in urban Detroit in the late 1960s. At the time of its first publication, Robert Coles called the book "rare and extremely important" and remarked, "I can only hope that all those concerned with urban problems might read this unusual and inspiring book."Milio adds a new Preface to update readers on the fate of the center and the issues of poverty and health care which continue today.
From the...

A unified interpretation of the evolution of species, humanity, and society

First published in 1960, Season of Adventure details the story of Fola, a light-skinned middle-class girl who has been tipped out of her easy hammock of social privilege into the complex political and cultural world of her recently independent homeland, the Caribbean island of San Cristobal. After attending a ceremony of the souls to raise the dead, she is carried off by the unrelenting accompaniment of steel drums onto a mysterious journey in search of her past and of her identity. Gradually, she is caught in the crossfire of a struggle between people who have "pawned their future to...

This important contribution to the canon debate is remarkable in examining the actual process of canon formation from threee unusual and complementary angles. The first two chapters discuss historical attitudes to canons from antiquity onwards, showing the religious, aesthetic, cultural and political interests which have shaped our modern critical canons. Each of the four succeeding chapters examines an exemplary defendant, interpreter, or critic of canons; Ernst Gomrich, Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode and Edward Said. A final chapter considers the origins and rationale of the contemporary...

Despite the enormous amount of work that has attempted to combine historical and anthropological approaches in recent years, few books have outlined the underlying premises that make integration of the two fields difficult. In Out of Time, Nicholas Thomas argues that a "historical perspective" cannot simply be added to conventional anthropology, which systematically takes ethnography "out of time." Drawing examples from the Polynesian anthropological literature, he points to discredited social evolutionary ideas that have persisted even after apparently dramatic theoretical shifts and...