Books published by University of Illinois Press

A story of the evangelical Protestants' fears of and struggles against the changes in American society engendered by the postal innovations that created a communication revolution in nineteenth century America.

Coming to terms with a troubled past is the mark of the modern condition. But how does memory operate? This title includes collection of essays that probes this question by focusing on Germany, where historical trauma and political turbulence over the past century have deeply scarred modern memory and identity.

Explores why Klytemnestra, this very problematic female figure from ancient Greece, reemerges so insistently at the end of the last millennium and how late twentieth-century women writers reconceptualize the infamous queen.

Combines engagements with modern and postmodern theories of identity, difference, contingency, and time with strategic forays into ancient, early Christian, and medieval philosophy. This work also provides the philosophical underpinnings for a politics and ethics of difference.

Unearths the Irish roots of Bram Stoker's gothic masterpiece, offering an interpretation of the author's relationship to his novel and to the politics of blood that consumes its characters. This title presents Stoker's novel as a subtly ironic commentary on England's preoccupation with racial purity.

Demonstrating the extraordinary versatility of African-American men's writing since the 1970s, this title illustrates how African-American male novelists and playwrights have absorbed, challenged, and expanded the conventions of black American writing and, with it, black male identity.

Whether you're nurturing your first idea for a children's book or have a published book or two under your belt, this title guides and inspires you, challenges and encourages you, and improves your chances of reaching your ultimate goal as a children's book author: your reader inside your story and your story inside your reader.

In the mid-1970s, David M. Schneider announced that kinship did not exist in any culture known to humankind. This volume provides an assessment of Schneider's ideas, focusing particularly on his contributions to kinship studies and the implications of his work for cultural relativism.

Presents the correspondence of the Quaker activist Lucretia Coffin Mott that illustrates the length and breadth of her public life as a leading reformer while providing an intimate glimpse of her family life.

The free love Oneida Community, founded in New York state during the turbulent decades before the Civil War, practiced an extraordinary system of complex marriage as part of its sustained experiment in creating the kingdom of heaven on earth. This work shows how complex marriage was introduced among previously monogamous Oneida Community members.

From colonial times to the present, the United States has been home to a steady stream of utopian experimental communities. This title takes us inside one of the longer-lived of such communities, Celo Community in western North Carolina, to explore the dynamics of intentional communities in America.

Why is soccer the sport of choice in South America, while baseball has soared to popularity in the Caribbean? How did cricket become India's national sport, while China is a stronghold of table tennis? This book deals with these questions.

Offering a detailed view of a key figure in the great changes that swept Illinois and the country from the Jacksonian era through the Gilded Age, this mature biography of the three-time governor of Illinois, chronicles Oglesby's pivotal contribution to American political life, while also providing a sensitive portrait of this able, energetic man.

A sampling of the petitions about issues of race and slavery that southerners submitted to their state legislatures between the American Revolution and the Civil War, this volume provides the first general access to a body of primary documents key to an understanding of blacks' and whites' experience of the slave society of the Old South.

From the decadent turn of the century to the Third Reich, the acerbic satirist Karl Kraus was one of the most famous-and feared-intellectuals in Europe. This title provides an introductory essay on Kraus' life and milieu and annotations that clarify many of Kraus' literary and sociohistorical allusions.

How progressivism transformed higher education in the New South by focusing on practical, utilitarian education, creating a vast educational bureaucracy, and making the universities into instruments of the state.

Uses modern linguistics to tackle the problem of interpreting a written language that relied neither on punctuation nor on capitalization to mark clause boundaries and subordination. This linguistic re-interpretation provides new insight into the rules that govern syntactic relationships and indicates how these rules differ for prose and verse.

A unique and rare look into life as it was for the people in the Soviet Union during WWII, unclouded by old-style Soviet portrayals and psuedo-histories that painted a glowing portrait of the "heroic proleteriate."

Explores the emotional relationships among siblings. Through the letters brothers and sisters wrote to each other over the course of nearly a century (1840-1920), this title reveals the inner workings of ten nineteenth-century families, illuminating their everyday lives and central relationships.

Blending biography, cultural history, and literary criticism, this title explores the religious concerns, metaphysical realities, and spiritual pursuits that undergirded the early friendship and literary collaborations of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S Burroughs.

Traces the Zarzuela from its beginnings in 17th century Spain to its awareness via the Internet and its role in defining American urban ethnicity. This is a book on Hispanic art form, bridging classical and popular music. It examines Cuba's role in transmitting the Zarzuela to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Exploring the intersection of ideas about woman, subjectivity, and literary authority, this title reveals the female subject as crucial in framing contradictions central to modernism, particularly the tension between modernism's claim to timeless art and its critique of historical conditions.

The years 1894-1904 mark the tenure of Andrew S Draper as president of the University of Illinois. Draper, a superintendent of schools, presided over many crucial improvements in the university's physical plant, curricula, and other areas. This volume examines the Draper years from the perspectives of faculty, students, and administrators.

Examining the vision and methods of the original proponents of the Cook County Juvenile Court, this title uncovers the court's intrinsic flaws as well as the sources of its debilitation. It argues that the impotence of the juvenile court system stems from contradictions that lie at the very heart of progressivism.

Integrating photographs, firsthand observations, and interviews against a backdrop of ethnic practices and traditions, this title explores how Polish Americans creatively adapted the rural peasant folklore of the old country to life in multicultural, urban America.

Providing books, articles, theses, and dissertations dealing with history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints beginning with its inception in 1830, these writings range from works of serious scholarship to stories of the pioneers, biographical sketches of church officers, and devotional biographies of leading Mormon men and women.

Focusing on a period of American history marked by a sharp division between Anglo-Americans and non-Anglo European immigrants, this title examines the creation and dissemination of "homemaking myths": stories that weave immigrants into the basic fabric of America by linking them to the pivotal events and ideas of their new homeland.

Tierra del Fuego is the southernmost inhabited locale in the world and one of South America's most popular tourist destinations, although there's nothing there except the end of the world. This title investigates the West's complex relationship to this island synonymous with the word elsewhere.

A photodocumentary that captures the faces and memories of the senior statesmen and women of the gay and lesbian community: a community that calls Greenwich Village - haven to the unorthodox and site of the famous Stonewall riots - its actual or symbolic home.

Sketching the socially marginal, ingenuous, traveling characters common to both old and new versions, this title shows how the new American picaresque transforms the satirical aims of the original into an effort to map and catalog the immensity and variety of America.