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When Jews left Aleppo, Syria, in the early twentieth century and established communities abroad, they carried with them a repertory of songs (pizmonim) with sacred Hebrew texts set to melodies borrowed from the popular Middle Eastern Arab musical tradition. Let Jasmine Rain Down tells the story of the pizmonim as they have continued to be composed, performed, and transformed through the present day; it is thus an innovative ethnography of an important Judeo-Arabic musical tradition and a probing contribution to studies of the link between collective memory and popular culture. Shelemay views the intersection of music, individual remembrances, and collective memory through the pizmonim. Reconstructing a century of pizmon history in America based on research in New York, Mexico, and Israel, she explains how verbal and musical memories are embedded in individual songs and how these songs perform both what has been remembered and what otherwise would have been forgotten. In confronting issues of identity and meaning in a postmodern world, Shelemay moves ethnomusicology into the domain of memory studies.
Secret police are central actors in dictatorships, yet we know very little about these institutions. Exploring communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, Henry Thomson opens this black box for the first time. This book will appeal to anyone interested in how authoritarian regimes and their secret police forces work.
In 1842, the pioneering French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804–1892) set out eastward across the Mediterranean, daguerreotype equipment in tow. He spent the next three years documenting lands that were then largely unknown to the West, including Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, in some of the earliest surviving photographic images of these places. Monumental Journey, the first monograph in English on this brilliant yet enigmatic artist, explores the hundreds of daguerreotypes Girault made during his unprecedented trip, offering a rare, early look at sites and cities that have since been altered—sometimes irrevocably—by urban, environmental, and politica...
This edition brings together in three fully edited volumes the correspondence and associated papers of Sir Joseph Banks regarding European and especially British exploration of Africa from 1767–1820, for the first time publishing this globally scattered material in one place, thereby revolutionizing its availability and understanding of the activities of a key figure who helped organize and publish a series of missions to penetrate the African interior, mainly from West Africa and by crossing the Sahara from Cairo and Tripoli. Banks was a founder in 1788 of the African Association, which mounted many of these missions, including those of Mungo Park to explore the River Niger, and J.L. Burk...