The old regime province of Languedoc provides the setting for Stephen Miller's rich analysis of state and society relations in eighteenth-century France. Continuing where William Beik's pathbreaking seventeenth-century study ends, this book sheds new light on the origins of the French Revolution and the social and political developments thereafter.
Beik's widely acclaimed study depicted Languedoc as the classic example of the ruling compromise between crown and the social elites established by Louis XIV. Building on this study, Miller shows that the monarchical state was far from being a neutral modernizing force. Rather it was committed to reinforcing not just fiscal inequalities, but also those of personal honor, authority, and rights. 
 Based on years of research in the National Archives of France as well as local archives, this book surveys recent scholarship on various aspects of political culture. It then sensibly stresses the importance of evaluating Languedoc in the economic and administrative context. Miller argues that the monarchy's search for revenue in the 1770s and 1780s led to close collaboration with the high-ranking nobles and ecclesiastics of the province. The originality of Miller's research is its discovery that this devolution of power excluded the majority of the provincial elite from the circuits of royal authority. Impetus for opposition to royal absolutism in 1788 and 1789 came from nobles anxious to protect their privileges from the efforts of the crown and its allies to draw revenue from the province. This discovery, Miller shows, helps explain the difficulty the nobles had in winning political support from common subjects after 1789. 
"Miller's work engages directly in an important debate over the nature of the absolutist state, an ongoing debate of interest to most serious scholars of eighteenth-century France. This book will advance the discussion."―Rafe Blaufarb, Florida State University
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
 Stephen Miller is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. This is his first book.
 PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: 
 "Miller's detailed study of elites and peasants triangulating power with a changing state through the 18th century and the revolution thus entails dialogue with scholars of today and classic observations by Montesquieu and Tocqueville. Miller carefully examines general and structural trends in income, investment, and social interactions within an uneasy dialectic of competing elites (nobility, hierarchical clergy, emergent merchants, local and regional institutions) grappling with the demands of the monarchy and the possibilities of revolutionary change. He enriches these portraits with numerous examples illustrating regional differences among ceremonial Toulouse, Protestants of Nimes, ports, and rural estates while paying close attention to the peasants and urban classes who challenged elites. . . . Readers. . . in history and French studies will appreciate its balanced review of ongoing debates and the questions and contributions the author advances. . . Recommended." ― G. W. McDonogh, Choice
 "Miller thus addresses the important questions, and he does so with wide-ranging, imaginative research. He has explored tax rolls and wealth distribution, Old Regime political institutions, and the local unfolding of the revolution itself. The book is especially impressive for its reconstruction of the different levels of political action in the province, both before and after 1789." ― Jonathan Dewald, American Historical Review
 "[A] detailed and informative scholarly study." ― James Hanrahan, French Studies
 "Stephen Miller's erudite study of Languedoc explicitly builds upon the findings of historians of absolutism by affirming the cohabitation of aristocracy and Crown. . . . The vast canvas of Miller's book and his

State and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: A Study of Political Power and Social Revolution in Languedoc

History

Miller,Stephen

Europe

Unknown Sponsor

One of the nation's first film critics, an acclaimed speechwriter on his own and for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a propagandist during World War II, and a leading producer on Broadway, Robert E. Sherwood scripted some of the most popular plays and films of his day, including Waterloo Bridge, The Best Years of Our Lives, Idiot's Delight, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and Rebecca. His work brought him four Pulitzer Prizes and an Oscar. In his personal life, however, he was driven by a deep conviction that war was a societal evil that must be eradicated and human rights a moral responsibility that all governments should protect. At times, his belief in pacifism and his commitment to defending freedom and justice came into conflict with each other, causing frustration and emotional trauma which found their way into his writings and actions. In this book, Harriet Hyman Alonso unravels Sherwood's inner struggle and portrays his political journey. Relying largely on his letters, diaries, plays, films, essays, and biography of Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, she traces Sherwood's obsession with the world of politics and its effects on his life and art, from his experience as a soldier in World War I to the Cold War. She also describes his participation in the Algonquin Round Table, his friendships and working relationships with such notables as Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Edna Ferber, Spencer Tracy, Harry Hopkins, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, his two marriages and uneasy relationship with his daughter, and his leadership role in the Broadway community. Alonso brings together history, theater and film studies, and peace studies in this interdisciplinary political biography. In the process, she illuminates major currents in U.S. foreign policy, society, and culture from 1896 to 1955―the years of the remarkable life of Robert E. Sherwood.

Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War

Alonso, Harriet Hyman

Humor & Entertainment

From the very beginning in the 1770s, singing was an important part of the worship services of the Shakers, formally known as the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. Yet until the early nineteenth century, nearly all Shaker songs were wordless―expressed in unknown tongues or as enthusiastic vocalizations. Only when Shaker missionaries moved west into Ohio and Kentucky did they begin composing hymn texts, chiefly as a means of conveying the sect's unconventional religious ideas to new converts. In 1812–13, the Shakers published their first hymnal. This venture, titled Millennial Praises, included the texts without music for one hundred and forty hymns and elucidated the radical and feminist theology of the Shakers, neatly distilled in verse. This scholarly edition of the hymnal joins the texts to original Shaker tunes for the first time. One hundred and twenty-six of the tunes preserved in the Society's manuscript hymnals have been transcribed from Shaker musical notation into modern standard notation, thus opening this important religious and folk repertoire to modern scholars. Many texts are presented with a wide range of variant tunes from Shaker communities in New England, New York, Ohio, and Kentucky. Introductory essays by volume editors Christian Goodwillie and Jane F. Crosthwaite place Millennial Praises in the context of Shaker history and offer a thorough explication of the Society's theology. They track the use of the hymnal from the point of publication up to the present day, beginning with the use of the hymns by both Shaker missionaries and anti-Shaker apostates and ending with the current use of the hymns by the last remaining Shaker family at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. The volume includes a CD of historical recordings of six Shaker songs by Brother Ricardo Belden, the last member of the Society at Hancock Shaker Village.

Millennial Praises: A Shaker Hymnal

Arts & Photography

Music

Throughout this collection, which was plucked from a pile of 300 manuscripts and awarded the Grace Paley Prize in short fiction, Caspers details the many ways reality can interfere with our dreams. Not surprisingly, dissatisfaction becomes a dominant theme. . . . Many of Caspers's stories are set in Minnesota's cattle and dairy country, and all of them traffic in the kind of Midwestern realism that doesn't rely on pyrotechnics to generate dramatic heat. Throughout, Caspers's people―it's difficult to consider some of them mere characters―question the decisions they've made or the ones they refuse to make. There's nothing flashy about Caspers's prose; like the beauty of the prairie itself, its attraction lies in details seen up close.New York Times Book Review

Heavier Than Air: Stories (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Caspers, Nona

Short Stories & Anthologies

In this new and expanded edition of an already classic work, H. Bruce Franklin brings the epic story of the superweapon and the American imagination into the ominous twenty-first century, demonstrating its continuing importance both to comprehending our current predicament and to finding ways to escape from it. Sweeping through two centuries of American culture and military history, Franklin traces the evolution of superweapons from Robert Fulton's eighteenth-century submarine through the strategic bomber, atomic bomb, and Star Wars to a twenty-first century dominated by "weapons of mass destruction," real and imagined. Interweaving culture, science, technology, and history, he shows how and why the American pursuit of the ultimate defensive weapon―guaranteed to end all war and bring universal triumph to American ideals―has led our nation and the world into an epoch of terror and endless war.

War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination

Politics & Social Sciences

FRANKLIN, H. Bruce

Social Sciences

This powerful novel depicts the reign of violence perpetrated in Peru in the 1980s by the Shining Path guerrillas, a Maoist-based organization, and the subsequent authoritarian counterattack by the Peruvian government. It explores these horrific events through the eyes of a young American photojournalist and humanitarian worker, Lisette, who bears witness to the genocide of the Peruvian Indians in whose village she has chosen to live. "I use the camera to block my view," says Lisette. This is the start of her double vision―trying to forget and trying to recall―and her struggle to come to terms with the human capacity for cruelty. But the grim reality in Peru is so overpowering that she carries it with her back to New York and through the rest of her life. Having abandoned a lover along with the fight, she desperately tries to find meaning beyond that of mere survival.

Corner of the Dead (Juniper Prize for Poetry)

Lurie, Lynn

United States

First published in 1727 under the title Indian Converts, or Some account of the lives and dying speeches of a considerable number of the Christianized Indians of Martha's Vineyard, in New-England, Experience Mayhew's history of the Wampanoag Indians on Martha's Vineyard provides a rare look at the lives and culture of four generations of Native Americans in colonial America. Dividing his treatment into four sections―Indian Ministers, Good Men, Religious Women, and Pious Children―Mayhew details the books that different age groups were reading, provides insights into early New England pedagogy and childrearing practices, and describes each individual in terms of genealogy, religious practice, way of life, and place of residence. In addition to drawing on his own firsthand knowledge of the community and transcriptions of oral testimony he and others collected, Mayhew inserts translations of Wampanoag texts that have since been lost. Although the book has been out of print since the early nineteenth century, scholars have long recognized its importance for understanding the history of New England's Native communities. In an extensive introduction to this new scholarly edition, Laura Arnold Leibman places Indian Converts in a broader cultural context and explores its significance. She shows how Mayhew's biographies illuminate the theological upheavals that rocked early eighteenth-century New England on the eve of the Great Awakening, shifts that altered not only the character of Puritanism but also the landscape of Wampanoag religious and cultural life. An accompanying online archive that includes over 600 images and documents further contextualizes Mayhew's work and provide suggestions for students' investigations of the text.

Experience Mayhew's Indian Converts: A Cultural Edition (Native Americans of the Northeast)

Americas

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