In this volume Yehudi Bauer describes the efforts made to aid European victims of World War II by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, American Jewry's chief representative abroad. Drawing on the mass of unpublished material in the JDC archives and other repositories, as well as on his thorough knowledge of recent and continuing research into the Holocaust, he focuse…
Rosemary Zumwalt examines the split between the literary folklorists and the anthropological folklorists during the period from 1888, when the American Folklore Society was founded, to the early 1940s, when control of the Journal of American Folklore by the anthropologists was ended. At the center of the conflict were concerns of professionalism, science, and academic discipline. For the litera…
Asian Politics in Development
Asian American Religions brings together some of the most current research on Asian American religions from a social science perspective. The volume focuses on religion in Asian American communities in New York, Houston, Los Angeles, and the Silicon Valley/Bay Area, and it includes a current demographic overview of the various Asian populations across the United States. It also provides informa…
Few modern materials have been as central to histories of environmental toxicity, medical ignorance, and legal liability as asbestos. A naturally occurring mineral fibre once hailed for its ability to guard against fire, asbestos is now best known for the horrific illnesses it causes. This book offers a new take on the established history of asbestos from a literary critical perspective, showin…
Shakespeare was fascinated by law, which permeated Elizabethan everyday life. The general impression one derives from the analysis of many plays by Shakespeare is that of a legal situation in transformation and of a dynamically changing relation between law and society, law and the jurisdiction of Renaissance times. Shakespeare provides the kind of literary supplement that can better illustrate…
Trinummus is another fabula palliata by Plautus. Enriched by the art of the Latin author, the result was too tedious and very elitist, compared to what usually characterized the Plautine comic. Through stock characters of fixed social types (e.g. the old, the Young, the slaves), several cultural themes are analyzed, such as friendship, morality, loyalty, money. Thus, the senex Charmides, whose …
Jenny Huberman provides an ethnographic study of encounters between western tourists and the children who work as unlicensed peddlers and guides along the riverfront city of Banaras, India. She examines how and why these children elicit such powerful reactions from western tourists and locals in their community as well as how the children themselves experience their work and render it meaningfu…
Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a play without a theme. Instead, it repeatedly poses one question in a variety of forms: What if the world were other than it is? As You Like It is a set of experiments in which its characters conditionally change an aspect of their world and see what comes of it: what if I were not a girl but a man? What if I were not a duke, but someone like Robin Hood? What …