Books

This edited volume offers new and revisionary narratives of composition and rhetoric’s history. It examines composition instruction and practice at secondary schools and normal colleges, the two institutions that trained the majority of U.S. composition teachers and students during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapters provide accounts of writing instruction within contexts often overlooked by current historical scholarship.

This book considers representations of science and technology at world’s fairs as influential cultural forces and at a critical moment in history, when tensions and ideological divisions between political regimes would soon lead to war. It examines five fairs and expositions from across the globe—including three that were staged (Paris, 1937; Dusseldorf, 1937; and New York, 1939-40), and two that were in development before the war began but never executed (Tokyo, 1940; and Rome, 1942).

Winner, 2017 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award

Iswari P. Pandey looks deeply into the South Asian community in Mid-South America to track the migration of literacies, showing how different meaning-making practices are adapted and reconfigured for cross-language relations and cross-cultural understanding.

Collected here are poems from Peter Oresick’s previous books, beginning with The Story of Glass (1977), and to them are added 36 new poems called Under the Carpathians. His work—known for working class and Catholic themes—probes labor and social history, post-World War II America, Eastern European identity, Eastern Rite Catholicism, and Russian icons and fine art and especially Pittsburgh-born pop art icon Andy Warhol.

Maximilian I used astrology to help guide political actions, turning to astrologers and their predictions to find the most propitious times to sign treaties or arrange marriage contracts. Perhaps more significantly, he employed astrology as a political tool to gain support for his reforms and to reinforce his own legitimacy and that of the Habsburg dynasty. Hayton analyzes the various rhetorical tools astrologers used to argue for the nobility, antiquity, and utility of their discipline, and how they strove to justify their “science” on the grounds that through its rigorous interpretation of the natural world, astrology could offer more reliable predictions.

Science as It Could Have Been focuses on the crucial issue of contingency within science. It considers a number of case studies, past and present, from a wide range of scientific disciplines—physics, biology, geology, mathematics, and psychology—to explore whether components of human science are inevitable, or if we could have developed an alternative successful science based on essentially different notions, conceptions, and results.

Michael Zeheter offers a probing case study of the environmental changes made to fight cholera in two markedly different British colonies: Madras in India and Quebec City in Canada. He examines the complex political and economic factors that came to bear on the reshaping of each colony’s environment and the urgency placed on disease control.

Zeynep Kezer offers a critical account of how the built environment mediated Turkey’s transition from a pluralistic (multiethnic and multireligious) empire into a modern, homogenized nation-state following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.

Kaleidoscope of Poland is a highly readable volume containing short articles on major personalities, places, events, and accomplishments from the thousand-year record of Polish history and culture. Featuring approximately 900 compact text entries and 600 illustrations, it provides a handy reference at home, a perfect supplement to traditional guide books when traveling, an aid to language study, or simply browsed with enjoyment from cover to cover by anyone with an interest in Poland. Essentially a “cultural dictionary,” it offers a knowledge base that can be referred to time and time again.

A study of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s scheme, during the mid-twentieth century, to create and reinforce a buffer zone on the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti through the establishment of state institutions and an ideological campaign against what was considered an encroaching black, inferior, and bellicose Haitian state.

A comprehensive history of “happenstance plants” in American urban environments. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the present, Falck examines the proliferation, perception, and treatment of weeds in metropolitan centers from Boston to Los Angeles.

David Hernandez’s Dear, Sincerely is his most intimate and dynamic collection to date, bringing the reader into poems that are simultaneously personal and universal, and sometimes political. With his characteristic dreamlike imagery, inventive rhythms, and biting wit, Hernandez’s voice reaches toward us with an accessible profundity. Dear, Sincerely is an imaginative book that explores the Self, the collective We, the cosmos, and the murky division that separates one from the other.

Manual for Living offers three distinct approaches to life, each one riven by flashes of joy and despair, and all conditions in between. As in all of her work, Dolin’s lyric voice attends to language and the world equally. Her verbal sleights-of-hand offer readers insights for ways to live. Manual for Living is a wise book: drink deeply from it.

In Energy Corridor, Houston, Texas is the macabre avatar for a nation that has systematically stripped political and economic power from the middle and lower classes. In these poems the speaker wrestles with the guilt and complacency of living in the world’s wealthiest nation.

Orbit connects the intimate with what is farthest from us, mixing what we can imagine with what is daily and near. Landscapes stretch from stable and fulfilling domestic interiors to the destiny of our sun as an exploding red giant.