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Winner of the American Library in Paris Book Award Named a Best Book of 2019 by BookPage During World War II, French villagers offered safe harbor to countless strangers—mostly children—as they fled for their lives. The same place offers refuge to migrants today. Why? In a remote pocket of Nazi-held France, ordinary people risked their lives to rescue many hundreds of strangers, mostly Jewish children. Was this a fluke of history, or something more? Anthropologist Maggie Paxson, certainties shaken by years of studying strife, arrives on the Plateau to explore this phenomenon: What are the traits that make a group choose selflessness? In this beautiful, wind-blown place, Paxson discovers ...
In a small village beside a reed-lined lake in the Russian north, a cluster of farmers has lived for centuries -- in the time of tsars and feudal landlords; Bolsheviks and civil wars; collectivization and socialism; perestroika and open markets. Solovyovo is about the place and power of social memory. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork in that single village, it shows how villagers configure, transmit, and enact social memory through narrative genres, religious practice, social organization, commemoration, and the symbolism of space. Margaret Paxson relates present-day beliefs, rituals, and practices to the remembered traditions articulated by her informants. She brings to life the everyday social and agricultural routines of the villagers as well as holiday observances, religious practices, cosmology, beliefs and practices surrounding health and illness, the melding of Orthodox and communist traditions and their post-Soviet evolution, and the role of the yearly calendar in regulating village lives. The result is a compelling ethnography of a Russian village, the first of its kind in modern, North American anthropology.
2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world. A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced."...
The Macmillan Profiles series is a collection of volumes featuring profiles of famous people, places and historical events. This text profiles heroes and activists of the Holocaust, including Elie Wiesel, Oskar Schindler, Simon Wiesenthal, Primo Levi, Anne Frank and Raoul Wallenberg, as well as soldiers, Partisans, ghetto leaders, diplomats and ordinary citizens who fought German aggression and risked their lives to save Jews.
The result is a compelling ethnography of a Russian village, the first of its kind in modern, North American anthropology.
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The librarian walks the streets of her beloved Paris. An old lady with a limp and an accent, she is invisible to most. Certainly no one recognizes her as the warrior and revolutionary she was, when again and again she slipped into the Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Vilnius to carry food, clothes, medicine, money, and counterfeit documents to its prisoners. Often she left with letters to deliver, manuscripts to hide, and even sedated children swathed in sacks. In 1944 she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured for twelve days, and deported to Dachau. Through Epistolophilia, Julija Šukys follows the letters and journals—the “life-writing”—of this woman, Ona Šimaitė (1894–1970). A...
Marion Zimmer Bradley's legendary saga of Avalon's extraordinary women continues with a tale of fiery visions, a lost king, and a forthcoming destiny... A boy raised in secret after traitors kill his parents will return to Avalon-and when he does, he'll be faced with a formidable task: to prove his worth as a son of the kings and priestesses of his land and lead his followers to victory, wielding the newly-forged sword Excalibur.
"Anyone who has spent time in Russia knows the importance of 'going to the dacha.' In this ethnography Melissa Caldwell reveals the mystique of rural life by exploring the social nature of gardening and making food, and Russian relationships to the land. It's truly an innovative study!"--Catherine Wanner, author of Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism "In this engaging ethnography, Melissa Caldwell brilliantly demonstrates what is peculiarly Russian about the dacha, long an object of literary and nostalgic imagining, while simultaneously situating the 'vacation cottage' within larger histories of leisure, consumption, home, and post-socialist transition. A must-read for scholars of Russia or tourism."--Pamela Ballinger, author of History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans