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Islands in History and Representation
With contributions from an international range of leading authorities on literature, history, art and geography, this book discusses the cultural significance of islands.
Becoming Historians
In this unique collection, the memoirs of eleven historians provide a fascinating portrait of a formative generation of scholars. Born around the time of World War II, these influential historians came of age just before the upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s and helped to transform both their discipline and the broader world of American higher education. The self-inventions they thoughtfully chronicle led, in many cases, to the invention of new fields—including women’s and gender history, social history, and public history—that cleared paths in the academy and made the study of the past more capacious and broadly relevant. In these stories—skillfully compiled and introduced by James Banner and John Gillis—aspiring historians will find inspiration and guidance, experienced scholars will see reflections of their own dilemmas and struggles, and all readers will discover a rare account of how today’s seasoned historians embarked on their intellectual journeys.
A World of Their Own Making
Discusses ritual events we regard as family traditions and how they must be open to perpetual revision so we can satisfy our human needs and changing circumstances.
Remembering, Forgetting and City Builders
Bringing together a range of case studies from North America, South Asia, East Europe and the Middle East, this book critically explores how urban spaces are designed, planned and experienced in relation to the politics of collective and personal memory construction.
The Architecture of Address
The Architecture of Address traces the evolution of an American species of lyric capable of public pronouncement without polemic. Beginning with Whitman, Jake Adam York seeks to describe a kind of poem wherein the most ambitious poets--including Hart Crane and Robert Lowell--occupy and reconstruct important public spaces. This study argues that American poets become civic actors when their poems imagine and reconstruct the conceptual architecture of the monument.
Islands of the Mind
In Islands of the Mind, John R. Gillis takes us on a rich and fascinating journey through the centuries and across the ocean in search of the meanings of islands in the collective imagination and history of the western world. Islands, he shows, have always sparked the imagination with notions of danger, adventure, isolation and even perfection. They have lured explorers and been the reason for battles between colonizing empires. Islands have given birth to unique cultures, they have prompted scientists and anthropologists with clues to human beginnings, and have been known to occasionally disappear without a trace. Gillis unravels both the actual and conceptual history of islands, beginning with the imagined lands of Homer's Odyssey and ending with a look at modern-day cruise destinations. This multifaceted survey shows how and why islands have occupied such a central place in the western imagination, and how they came to be master symbols and inexhaustible metaphors for so many different things.
The Human Shore
Since before recorded history, people have congregated near water. But as growing populations around the globe continue to flow toward the coasts on an unprecedented scale and climate change raises water levels, our relationship to the sea has begun to take on new and potentially catastrophic dimensions. The latest generation of coastal dwellers lives largely in ignorance of the history of those who came before them, the natural environment, and the need to live sustainably on the world’s shores. Humanity has forgotten how to live with the oceans. In The Human Shore, a magisterial account of 100,000 years of seaside civilization, John R. Gillis recovers the coastal experience from its orig...
University in Chains
President Eisenhower originally included 'academic' in the draft of his landmark, oft-quoted speech on the military-industrial-complex. Giroux tells why Eisenhower saw the academy as part of the famous complex - and how his warning was vitally prescient for 21st-century America. Giroux details the sweeping post-9/11 assault being waged on the academy by militarization, corporatization, and right-wing fundamentalists who increasingly view critical thought itself as a threat to the dominant political order. Giroux argues that the university has become a handmaiden of the Pentagon and corporate interests, it has lost its claim to independence and critical learning and has compromised its role as a democratic public sphere. And yet, in spite of its present embattled status and the inroads made by corporate power, the defense industries, and the right wing extremists, Giroux defends the university as one of the few public spaces left capable of raising important questions and educating students to be critical and engaged agents. He concludes by making a strong case for reclaiming it as a democratic public sphere.
