Books published by University of Wisconsin Press

During the 1990s and early 2000s in Europe, more than fifty historical commissions were created to confront, discuss, and document the genocide of the Holocaust and to address some of its unresolved injustices. Amending the Past offers the first in-depth account of these commissions, examining the complexities of reckoning with past atrocities and large-scale human rights violations.

What exactly is popular culture? How should it be studied? What forces come together in producing, disseminating, and consuming it? This collection offers responses to these and similar questions. Edited by Harold E. Hinds, Jr., Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, the book charts some of the key turning points in the ""culture wars.

Readers of detective stories turn to historical crime fiction to learn about life in past societies and how citizens and crime fighters coped with laws and restrictions. This study covers all recorded history - from ancient Egypt, through Classical Greece and Rome, to medieval Europe.

In journeys of self-discovery, quests to define our national identity, opportunities to escape from the daily routine, and expressions of social protest - the American road narrative has been a significant and popular literary genre for four decades. Romance of the Road captures America's love affair with roads, cars, travel, speed, and the lure of open spaces. With roots reaching back to quest romance and pilgrimage, the literature of the American highway explores our diverse and often conflicted cultural values. This comprehensive study of an important American art form examines how road narratives create dialogues between travelers, authors, and readers about who we are, what we value, and where we hope to be going.

In this volume, almost two dozen essays consider political, moral and technological issues raised by the film.

In 1984, America celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the first successful roller coaster device erected at Coney Island. This book examines every phase of roller coaster history, from the use of the roller coaster by Albert Einstein to demonstrate his theory of physics, to John Allen's use of psychology in designing one.

This book discusses the figure of the unchaste woman in a wide range of fiction written between 1835 and 1880; serious novels by Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Meredith, and George Eliot; popular novels that provided light reading for middle-class women (including books by Dinah Craik, Rhoda Broughton, and Ouida); sensational fiction; propaganda for social reform; and stories in cheap periodicals such as the "Family Herald" and the "London Journal," which reached a different and far wider audience than either serious or popular novels.

A collection of twenty-five essays from eight countries, illustrating the many approaches to science fiction.

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling "the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language," as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said's narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said's Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes's comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that "Islam" and "America" are not mutually exclusive terms. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said's Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes's comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that "Islam" and "America" are not mutually exclusive terms.Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

This is the first book by this author, a first-generation Ukrainian-American, resident in Alaska. The collection was the winner of the 1997 Brittingham Prize in Poetry.

This text explores taboos against eating certain kinds of flesh from a historical and cultural perspective. New research on the use and avoidance of flesh foods, from antiquity to the present day, is integrated in this edition.