Fairleigh Dickinson University Press – serie

"What May Words Say…?" A Reading of The Merchant of Venice contains, in a form resembling a running commentary, a comprehensive and in many respects unconventional interpretation of The Merchant of Venice. The play's development of ideas is unfolded in a literary analysis that focuses on the poet's words in their philological, historical, and philosophical contexts. What the words say is that the play is dominated by the three Delphic maxims, Know thyself, Nothing too much, and Give surety and harm is at hand. Within the intellectual and ethical compass of these tenets the two-stranded action of the play is developed, and the question why Shakespeare added the story of the caskets to the story of the bond is answered by the words law and choice, which are as closely connected semantically as the two stories are interrelated in the dramatic structure. The self-knowledge achieved in the musical cadence of the play is everyone's seeing God's image in the other person, and the law finally chosen is forgiveness.

Working toward an analysis of the influence of photography on the construction of an Italian "type" to serve the mandates of the new nation in the 1860s, this book engages the work of writers and photographers who have addressed or participated in this venture. From Giovanni Verga and Italo Calvino's writings to the conceptual visual philosophy of Tommaso Campanella and Luigi Ghirri's photography. From the Arcadic gaze of Baron von Gloeden to Tina Modotti's revolutionary vision, the works analyzed in this book have all contributed in shaping our contemporary visual vocabulary. And, while Italy is at the center of my considerations, the ideas that populate this work are in many ways globally applicable and relevant.Looters, Photographers, and Thieves seeks to contribute to the fascinating discourse on the photographic image and its specific uses in the representation of racial, ethnic and gender difference, and suggest how the isolation of images according to the dictates of power relations might influence and condition ways of seeing. Finally, this book is meant as a locus where the images produced in the shaping of notions of citizenship and cultural relevance in nineteenth and twentieth century Italy might reveal the processes of the imaginary. As such, the arguments and images in each chapter thread through each other to propose ways by which to approach disparate subjects and forms in order to envision photographers themselves as seers rather than gazers.

Alan Nolan's 1961 Iron Brigade, the classic study of Brigadier General John Gibbon's Black Hat Brigade composed of the 19th Indiana, the 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin and the 24th Michigan, drew public attention to the superior unit during the Civil War Centennial. Since then, much has been written about Gibbon's Iron Brigade but nothing has published on the original Iron Brigade from which Gibbon's brigade inherited it name.In The Original Iron Brigade, author Thomas Reed discusses the history of the 1st Brigade,1st Division, 1st Corps, Army of the Potomac, composed of three New York two year regiments, the 22nd, 34th, and 30th New York Infantry, the 14th Brooklyn Militia (84th New York Infantry) and the 2nd United States Sharpshooters. The brigade's story begins with the 14th Brooklyn's role during the First Battle of Manassas in 1861 and ends with the disbanding of the brigade in June 1863. Based on original unpublished diaries and letters of the men of the brigade, this book describes how the Original Iron Brigade earned its name by its hard marching during the spring of 1862. The brigade attacked Stonewall Jackson's troops along the unfinished railroad line during the Second Battle of Manassas, stormed Turner's Gap during the Battle of South Mountain, and attacked Stonewall Jackson's men again at the Dunker Church in the Battle of Antietam.

The Cultures of Italian Migration allows the adjective "Italian" to qualify people's movements along diverse trajectories and temporal dimensions. Discussions on migrations to and from Italy meet in that discursive space where critical concepts like "home," "identity," "subjectivity," and "otherness" eschew stereotyping. This volume demonstrates that interpretations of old migrations are necessary in order to talk about contemporary Italy. New migrations trace new non linear paths in the definition of a multicultural Italy whose roots are unmistakably present throughout the centuries.Some of these essays concentrate on topics that are historically long-term, such as emigration from Italy to the Americas and southern Pacific Ocean. Others focus on the more contemporary phenomena of immigration to Italy from other parts of the world, including Africa. This collection ultimately offers an invitation to seek out new and different modes of analyzing the migratory act.

This book is a study of the reports of the Einsatzgruppen, the four SS extermination squads that followed in the wake of the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. It was the Einsatzgruppen that began the systematic massacre of Jews and other Oundesirables.O These killings are the principal focus of this book and are analyzed in the central chapters from several perspectives. These reports provide a virtually complete and self-contained body of documents and are a fertile source for historians of the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

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This book is about the transformation of Europe into "Eurabia", a cultural and political appendage of the Arab/Muslim world. Eurabia is fundamentally anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-American, and antisemitic. The institution responsible for this transformation, and that continues to propagate its ideological message, is the Euro-Arab Dialogue, developed by European and Arab politicians and intellectuals over the past thirty years.'This is a provocative and disturbing book. With all the drama of a master writer, Bat Ye'or presents a wide range of historical and contemporary documents and facts to tell the story of how the European Union is being subverted by Islamic hostility to the very ethics and values of Europe itself. Readers who seek a fair resolution of the Arab-Israel conflict will be shocked by the evidence produced in these pages of unfair pressures and deliberate distortions. Europe's independence of spirit is shown in the process of being undermined. This book challenges the current demonization of Israel and should be essential reading (and re-reading) for everyone interested in true peace in the Middle East. It is also a waring to Europe not to allow the anti-American and anti-Israel pressures of Islam to subvert Europe's true values:vibrant democracy,humanitarian free thinking, and social fair dealing.'Sir Martin Gilbert'Bat Ye'or has traced a nearly secret history of Europe over the past thirty years, convincingly showing how the Euro-Arab Dialogue has blossomed from a minor discussion group into the engine for the continent's Islamization. In delineating this phenomenon, she also provides the intellectual resources with which to resist it. Will her message be listened to?'Daniel Pipes'No writer has done more than Bat Ye'or to draw attention to the menacing character of Islamic extremism. Future historians will one day regard her coinage of the term 'Eurabia' as prophetic. Those who wish to live in a free society must be eternally vigilant. Bat Ye'or's vigilance is unrivalled.'N

A Huguenot on the Hackensack is the first full-length study of David Demarest, an early European settler of northeastern New Jersey and progenitor of a large and locally influential family. The book examines Demarest's life, the legacy of his family, and the wider "Jersey Dutch" community in which the family played a prominent part. The book looks beneath accumulated layers of legend and older historical interpretations to formulate a new and more realistic (and more interesting) account of Demarest's life and legacy.Demarest, a Huguenot (French Protestant), was born about 1620 in the French province of Picardy. He first appears in history with the record of his marriage to Marie Sohier in Middleburg, the Netherlands, in 1643. After marriage and the start of a family, his life unfolded in four sojourns of about a decade or a bit more: Middleburg, 1643 to about 1651; Mannheim, Germany, from about 1651 to 1663; Staten Island and New Harlem, 1663-78, and finally the French Patent along the Hackensack River in New Jersey, 1678 to his death in 1693. New evidence and new interpretations provide a picture of Demarest as an ambitious and upwardly mobile entrepreneur with an unusual talent for balancing risk and opportunity, and a dedicated churchman and community leader under both Dutch and English rule. The book next considers the Demarests in the eighteenth century, when the family rose to prominence in Bergen County, played important roles in the Reformed Church in Hackensack and Schraalenburgh, and began to spread out to other parts of the country. Recapitulating Demarest's own career as an entrepreneur and land developer, some of his descendants settled parts of central Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and Kentucky. Many of those who remained in New Jersey were active in public affairs and the Revolutionary War.By the end of the nineteenth century, enormous changes in Bergen County, including the spread of railroads and the transition from a farming economy to a suburban one, spelled the beginning of the end for the cohesiveness and influence of old, locally prominent Jersey Dutch families such as the Demarests. With further economic and demographic changes following World War II, such families were subsumed into the general population.The book concludes with an assessment of the Demarest family's American experience, looks at how pioneer students of Demarest family history shaped and interpreted his life and legacy against the background of changes in American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and suggests what might yet be learned about Demarest through genetic evidence and the increasing availability of digitized records. Demarest's life and legacy are of interest not just to the large number of his descendants and the numerous descendants of other Jersey Dutch families, but more broadly to those interested in regional history, New Netherland, and American social history.

Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama is a collection of essays that explores the relationship of gender and justice as represented in English Renaissance drama. Many of the essays are concerned with interrogating the ways that women relied upon and/or reacted to the legal (and overarching political) systems in early modern England. Other essays examine issues involving the role of narrative, evidence, and gendered expectations about justice in the plays of this time period. An implicit concern of these essays is whether women were empowered or disempowered in this interaction with the legal/political system.

Despite critical interest in the role of women in the French Revolution, there is no single, comprehensive study of the works of the two most prolific women writers of the period—Olympe de Gouges and Manon Roland. At a time when politicians were molding public policy concerning life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and constituting criteria for citizenship, increasing numbers of women in Paris were clamoring for rights. New medical and philosophical theories redefining female nature were trotted out to justify women's continued exclusion from full political participation. Such theories focused on the female body as the locus of women's intellectual inadequacies and promulgated the idea that women who acted outside of the confines of their physiological nature were considered desensitized and unfeminine. Deviant Women of the French Revolution and the Rise of Feminism aims to uncover the work of those women who challenged prevailing views of female nature, sought social reforms, and were deemed "deviant" for their writing and/or activism during the French Revolution.

This volume draws from a variety of disciplines in an attempt to provide a holistic analysis of diversity within collegiate fraternal life. It also brings a wide range of scholarly approaches to the inquiry of diversity within college fraternities and sororities. It explores not only from whence these groups have come but where they are currently situated and what issues arise as they progress.

Though separated by only eleven years in age, Hemingway and Williams seem literary generations apart. Yet both authors bridged their modernist/postmodernist divide through mutual examinations of the polemics behind heteromasculinity, Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises and Williams in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This book explores the two works many sociopolitical, literary, and intertextual ties, in particular how the conclusion of one echoes that of the other, not just in its irony but also in its implication of the audiences participation in engendering the social rules responsible for the protagonists struggle to negotiate his sexual identity. Hemingway's Sun shares more with Williams' Cat than just a similar ending, however. Both works explore more broadly the construction of a queer masculinity, where the parameters that define masculinity and sexuality grow as unstable and irresolute as the frontier during a war or the line of scrimmage during a football game.

It is hard to believe that there was a time, not long ago, when there was no right to obtain government information, no protection against hazards in children's toys and other consumer products, no federal safety standards for motor vehicles, and no insurance to protect an investors' money and securities in brokerage accounts. These and other consumer rights were created only after fierce political battles in the decade between 1966 and 1976. People's Warrior is the untold story of that era and one of its towering leaders, Congressman John Moss. Based on previously undisclosed materials and interviews with key players of the time People's Warrior tells the story of a stormy decade in America, one in which key laws, such as the Freedom of Information Act and the Consumer Product Safety Act were enacted by Congress, despite overwhelming political opposition. It is also the improbable story of one man's life and determination. Moss fought for twelve years, against three presidents and at times his own party, for a freedom of information law that has stood the test of time and been copied around the world. Although at first stymied by special interests, he won sweeping consumer protection reforms. He went on to challenge Wall Street in an intense battle to enact major new investor protection laws. What happened to Moss and his progressive agenda in later decades, and what the future may bring for that agenda, make up the final part of this compelling story of a man and an era.

During a period when African-American education was at the epicenter of the civil rights movement, Thompson’s Journal documented the rapid growth of educational discrimination in the South despite significant increases in public school funding, providing irrefutable evidence that racially segregated public education was inherently discriminatory, hence, unconstitutional. Between 1932 and 1954, Thompson’s editorials provided a nuanced, insider’s account of one of the most successful policy research ventures in American history: the movement to overturn racial segregation as public policy, chronicling the rise during the Depression, World War II and the postwar period of a policy community committed to expanding human rights nationally and internationally. A brilliant essayist, Thompson sought to close the gap between America’s democratic precepts and its undemocratic practices by molding public opinion favorable to a significant expansion of civil rights among scholars, policymakers and the public. An expert witness in several landmark higher education cases argued before the U. S. Supreme Court including Sipuel (1948), Sweatt (1950) and McLaurin (1950), Thompson’s editorials provided an informed, eyewitness account of African-American teachers’ pivotal role in the NAACP litigation campaign culminating in the landmark Brown et al v. Board of Education of Topeka et al (1954) desegregation ruling. This is the first, full-length study of Charles H. Thompson’s contributions to American education and the civil rights movement.

For generations, historians believed that the study of the African-American experience centered on the questions about the processes and consequences of enslavement. Even after this phase passed, the modern Civil Rights Movement took center stage and filled hundreds of pages, creating a new framework for understanding both the history of the United States and of the world. Suburban Erasure by Walter David Greason contributes to the most recent developments in historical writing by recovering dozens of previously undiscovered works about the African-American experience in New Jersey. More importantly, his interpretation of these documents complicates the traditional understandings about the Great Migration, civil rights activism, and the transformation of the United States as a global, economic superpower. Greason details the voices of black men and women whose vision and sacrifices made the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. possible. Then, in the second half of this study, the limitations of this dream of integration become clear as New Jersey—a state that took the lead in showing American how to overcome the racism of the past—fell victim to a recurring pattern of colorblindness that entrenched the legacy of racial inequality in the consumer economy of the late twentieth century. Suburbanization simultaneously erased the physical architecture of rural segregation in New Jersey and ideologically obscured the deepening, persistent injustices that became the War on Drugs and the prison-industrial complex. His solution for the twenty-first century involves the most fundamental effort to racially integrate state and local government conceived since the Reconstruction Era. Suburban Erasure is a must read for people concerned with democracy, human rights, and the future of civil society.

Race as Narrative in Italian Women's Writing Since Unification explores racist ideas and critiques of racism in four long narratives by female authors Grazia Deledda, Matilde Serao, Natalia Ginzburg, and Gabriella Ghermandi, who wrote in Italy after national unification. Starting from the premise that race is a political and socio-historical construction, Melissa Coburn makes the argument that race is also a narrative construction. This is true in that many narratives have contributed to the historical construction of the idea of race; it is also true in that the concept of race metaphorically reflects certain formal qualities of narration. Coburn demonstrates that at least four sets of qualities are common among narratives and central to the development of race discourse: intertextuality; the processes of characterization, plot, and tropes; the tension between the projections of individual, group, and universal identities; and the processes of identification and otherness. These four sets of qualities become organizing principles of the four sequential chapters, paralleling a sequential focus on the four different narrative authors. The juxtaposition of these close, contextualized readings demonstrates salient continuities and discontinuities within race discourse over the period examined, revealing subtleties in the historical record overlooked by previous studies.