Books published by University of Wisconsin Press

By offering a comparative, institutional analysis of how state-supported pensions for the elderly developed in Britain, Canada and the United States, Anna Shola Orloff aims to make a contribution to understanding the growth of modern social welfare policies.

The War on Poverty, instituted in 1965 during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, was one of the chief elements of that president's Great Society initiative. This book describes and assesses the major social science research effort that grew up with, and in part because of, these programs. Robert H. Haveman's objective is to illuminate the process by which social and political developments have an impact on the direction of progress in the social sciences. Haveman identifies the policy measures most closely tied to the War on Poverty and the Great Society and describes the nature of these policies and their growth from 1965 to 1980. He examines the extent and growth of resources devoted to the poverty-related research that accompanied these programs, and assesses the impact of the growth in this research commitment over the 1965-1980 period.Haveman's was the first full overview of recent poverty-related research and an overview of methodological developments in the social sciences in the post-1965 period which were stimulated by the antipoverty effort.

Throughout its modern history, Russia has seen a succession of highly performative social acts that play out prominently in the public sphere. This innovative volume brings the fields of performance studies and Russian studies into dialogue for the first time and shows that performance is a vital means for understanding Russia's culture from the reign of Peter the Great to the era of Putin.

This collection of theatre writings by the Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky brings his powerful, wildly imaginative vision of theatre to an English-language audience for the first time. The centerpiece is his play That Third Guy (1937), a farce written at the onset of the Stalinist Terror and never performed.

For 872 days during World War II, the city of Leningrad endured a crushing blockade at the hands of German forces. Amid the devastation, Olga Berggolts broadcast her poems on the one remaining radio station. Berggolts wrote her memoir Daytime Stars in the spirit of the thaw after Stalin's death. In it, she celebrated the ideals of the revolution and the heroism of the Soviet people.

Reveals the daily lives and religious practice of ordinary Muslim men in Tajikistan as they aspire to become Sufi mystics. Benjamin Gatling describes in vivid detail the range of expressive forms - memories, stories, poetry, artifacts, rituals, and other embodied practices - employed as they try to construct a Sufi life in twenty-first-century Central Asia.

In Santiago's urban shantytowns, a searing history of poverty and Chilean state violence have prompted grassroots resistance movements among the poor and working class from the 1940s to the present. Underscoring this complex continuity, Alison J. Bruey offers a compelling history of the struggle for social justice and democracy during the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath.

A newly recovered modernist novel, recounting a passionate triangle of love and loss among three of the most daring women of belle époque Paris.

Presents Indonesia through the eyes of a popular thinker who believed that Indonesians and Muslims everywhere should embrace the thrilling promises of modern life, and navigate its dangers, with Islam as their compass. This sweeping biography also illustrates how public debates about religion are shaping national societies in the postcolonial world.

When the struggling Boston Braves relocated to Milwaukee in March 1953, the city went wild for its new baseball team. Within five years the team would win a World Series and two pennants. Yet in October 1964 team owners made a shocking announcement: the Braves were moving to Atlanta. Patrick Steele delves deeply into all facets of the story to understand how the "Milwaukee Miracle" went south.

Brings to light immensely important archival documents regarding the sexual politics of the Italian Fascist regime. Alessio Ponzio investigates the regulation and regimentation of gender in Fascist Italy, and the extent to which, in uneasy concert with the Catholic Church, the regime engaged in the cultural and legal engineering of masculinity and femininity.

Interweaves tales of companionable dogs, lucky hunts, and favourite coverts where quarry lurks with ruminations on the demise of hunting traditions, the sale of public lands and the privatization of places to hunt, the growing indifference to science, and the loss of wilderness on a planet increasingly transformed by the sprawl of humanity.

Examining the vanguard of New Turkish Cinema, Laurence Raw shows how these films reveal the effects of profound socio economic change on ordinary people in contemporary Turkey. Raw interleaves his film discussion with thoughtful commentary on nationalism, gender, personal identity, and cultural pluralism.

For decades, journalist Michael Norman has been tracking down spine-tingling tales that seem to arise from authentic incidents in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin. In Haunted Heartland he offers more than eighty entertaining, eerie stories. Are they true in the world that we know, or only in a dark vale of twilight?

A comprehensive overview of the Indian mounds of Wisconsin, discussing who built the mounds, and when and why they were built. It uses evidence drawn from archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, linguistics, and the traditions and beliefs of present-day Native Americans in the Midwest.

The potato chip has been one of America's favorite snacks since its accidental origin in a nineteenth-century kitchen. This book tells the story of this crispy, salty treat, from the early sales of locally made chips at corner groceries, county fairs, and cafes to the mass marketing and corporate consolidation of the modern snack food industry.

Few people understand what it is like to work in corrections. Claire Schmidt, whose extended family includes three generations of Wisconsin prison workers, introduces readers to penitentiary officers and staff as they share stories, debate the role of corrections in American racial politics and social justice, and talk about the important function of humor in their jobs.

After the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, the UN resolved to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. The resulting UN Genocide Convention treaty, however, was weakened in the midst of Cold War tensions. Anton Weiss-Wendt reveals in detail how the political aims of the superpowers rendered the convention a weak instrument for addressing abuses against human rights.

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan - known as ""the UP"" - is historically, geographically, and culturally distinct. Drawing on sixteen years of fieldwork, including interviews with seventy-five lifelong residents of the UP, Kathryn Remlinger examines how the idea of a unique Yooper dialect emerged.

Offers a personal history of the turbulent 1990s in New York City and Paris by a pioneering American AIDS journalist, lesbian activist, and daughter of French-Haitian elites. In an account that is by turns searing, hectic, and funny, Anne-Christine d'Adesky remembers "the poxed generation" of AIDS - their lives, their battles, and their determination to find love and make art.

When Nora Griffin, an artist in her midthirties, moves from Brooklyn to Provincetown, she isn't looking for trouble. Her partner, Janelle, is recovering from breast cancer treatment, and together they've decided that the quiet off-season on the tip of Cape Cod is the perfect place for Janelle to heal and Nora to paint. Then charismatic Baby Harris flirts into Nora's life in her red cowboy boots.

Growing up on a secluded smuggling route along the border of Northern Ireland and the Republic, Packy Jim McGrath regularly heard the news, songs, and stories of men and women who stopped to pass the time until cover of darkness. His stories reveal an intricate worldview that is both idiosyncratic and shared - a testament to individual talent, and a window into Irish vernacular culture.

Provides a history of the innovative work of Wisconsin's educational radio stations, from the first broadcast by experimental station 9XM at the University of Wisconsin to the network of stations known today as Wisconsin Public Radio.

The greatest portrayer of blue-fire deviltry, Edward Fitzball was a melodramatist on the nineteenth-century British stage. His Theatre of the Macabre was very much a forebearer of the sensationalized media of today. This book discusses Fitzball s life, and his dramatic oeuvre."