Books

The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) were the largest political party in Russia in the crucial revolutionary year of 1917. Heirs to the legacy of the People’s Will movement, the SRs were unabashed proponents of peasant rebellion and revolutionary terror, emphasizing the socialist transformation of the countryside and a democratic system of government as their political goals. They offered a compelling, but still socialist, alternative to the Bolsheviks, yet by the early 1920s their party was shattered and its members were branded as enemies of the revolution. In 1922, the SR leaders became the first fellow socialists to be condemned by the Bolsheviks as “counter-revolutionaries” in the prototypical Soviet show trial. Scott B. Smith presents both a convincing account of the defeat of the SRs and a deeper analysis of the significance of the political dynamics of the Civil War for subsequent Soviet history. Smith reveals a complex and nuanced picture of the postrevolutionary struggle and demonstrates that the Civil War—and in particular the struggle with the SRs—was the formative experience of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state.

Now, Now is concerned with questions of time and memory: how our perceptions are shaped, moment by moment, within the continuous meeting of past and future—of what happened, and what has not yet happened, but will.

Tatjana Aleksic examines the widespread use of the sacrificial metaphor in cultural texts and its importance to sustaining communal ideologies in the Balkan region. Aleksic further relates the theme to the sanctioning of ethnic cleansing, rape, and murder in the name of homogeneity and collective identity. She employs cultural theory, sociological analysis, and human rights studies to expose a historical narrative that is predominant regionally, if not globally.

Winner of the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Keeper is a book of lyric poems concerned with relationships of different sorts—with the natural world, with people and animals, and with the unseen and unknown.

Read a review on Keeper from the Valparaiso Poetry Review

Read a review of Keeper by Judith Kitchen, excerpted from the Winter 2014 issue of Georgia Review

Second Suburb uncovers the unique story of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and its significance to American social, architectural, environmental, and political history.

Winner of the 2011 Allen Noble Book Award from the Pioneer America Society: Best edited book in North American material culture.

The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary examines histories, journalism, and literature in the period between world wars to expose both the positive and the negative treatment of the Habsburg monarchy following its dissolution and the powerful influence of fiction and memory over history. Originally published in Polish, Adam Kozuchowski’s study analyzes the myriad factors that contributed to this phenomenon.

Winner of the 2016 Karl von Vogelsang Staatspreis fuer Geschichte der Gesellschaftswissenschaften (Austrian State Prize for the History of Social Sciences)

This volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas—political, intellectual, and institutional—the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. For the first time anywhere, this collection analyzes all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in emigre literary theory and criticism.

Winner of the 2012 Efim Etkind Prize for the best book on Russian culture, awarded by the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia.

The first history of The Carnegie Museums and Library of Pittsburgh, a cultural conglomeration that has served millions of people since its inception in 1895. Gangewere details the political turmoil, budgetary constraints, and cultural tides that have influenced the caretakers and the collections along the way. He provides individual histories of the library, music hall, museums, and science center, and describes the importance of each as an educational and research facility.

Comprised of essays by geologists, ecologists, and historians, this study examines the development of Los Angeles as an example of the complex interactions between urban planning and nature.

Often referred to as “the Big Tomato,” Sacramento is a city whose makeup is significantly more complex than its agriculture-based sobriquet implies. In River City and Valley Life, the contributors reveal the major transformations to the natural and built environment that have shaped Sacramento and its suburbs, residents, politics, and economics throughout its history. This environmental history provides a compelling case study of urban and suburban development in California and the American West.

Allan Franklin provides an overview of notable experiments in particle physics. Using papers published in Physical Review, the journal of the American Physical Society, as his basis, Franklin details the experiments themselves, their data collection, the events witnessed, and the interpretation of results. From these papers, he distills the dramatic changes to particle physics experimentation from 1894 through 2009.

This book by a major American poet is for poetry readers at all levels, academic and non-academic. It is a sequence of poems that will surprise and delight readers—in the voices of an old woman full of memories, a glamorous tulip, and an earthy dog who always has the last word.

Philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is a cultural phenomenon. Yet Rand’s work has until recently received little serious attention from academics. This new series seeks a fuller scholarly understanding of this highly original and influential thinker. The chapters in this volume address the basis of her egoism in a virtue-centered normative ethics; her account of how moral norms in general are themselves based on a fundamental choice by an agent to value his own life; and how her own approach to the foundations of ethics is to be compared and contrasted with familiar approaches in the analytic ethical tradition.

Angelique Bamberg provides the first book-length study of the community of Chatham Village in Pittsburgh. She establishes its historical significance to urban planning and reveals the complex development process, social significance, and breakthrough construction and landscaping techniques that shaped this idyllic community.

Spanish King of the Incas tells the fascinating story of a Spanish commoner who participated in the conquest of Latin America, then changed loyalties. He declared himself a king among the Calchaqui Indians and was eventually executed for his role in an Inca rebellion in 1667.