SUBJECT INDEX:

SOCIAL SCIENCE:

The Best of the Best: Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández; For two years, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández shared the life of what he calls the “Weston School,” an elite New England boarding school. Vividly describing the pastoral landscape and graceful buildings, the rich variety of classes and activities, and the official and unofficial rules that define the school, The Best of the Best reveals a small world of deeply ambitious, intensely pressured students. For Gaztambide-Fernández, Weston is daunting yet strikingly bucolic, inspiring but frustratingly incurious, and sometimes—especially for young women—a gilded cage for a gilded age.; Hardcover 2009

Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, 1467-1680: Lee Butler; An institution in decline, possessing little power or authority in a warrior-dominated age, or a still potent symbol of social and political legitimacy? Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan traces the fate of the imperial Japanese court from the lowest point in terms of influence and prosperity in the turbulent sengoku period to its more stable position in the Tokugawa period. In showing how the court adapted and survived, the author examines internal court politics and protocols, external court relations, court finances, court structure, and ceremonial observances. Emperor and courtiers, he concludes, adjusted to the warrior elite, while retaining the ideological advantage bestowed by culture, tradition, and birth.; Hardcover 2002

Exiles at Home: Shirley Elizabeth Thompson; New Orleans has always captured our imagination as an exotic city in its racial ambiguity and pursuit of les bons temps. In tracing the experiences of creoles of color, Thompson illuminates the role ordinary Americans played in shaping an understanding of identity and belonging.; Hardcover 2009

Fractured Rebellion: Andrew G. Walder; Fractured Rebellion is the first full-length account of the evolution of China’s Red Guard Movement in Beijing, the nation’s capital, from its beginnings in 1966 to its forcible suppression in 1968. Andrew Walder combines historical narrative with sociological analysis as he explores the radical student movement’s crippling factionalism, devastating social impact, and ultimate failure.; Hardcover 2009

Highbrow/Lowbrow: Lawrence Levine; In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are.; Hardcover 1988 / Paperback 1990

The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell: Elizabeth Cleghorn (Stevenson) Gaskell; Edited by J. A. V. Chapple; Edited by Arthur Pollard; Hardcover 1966

The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: Sarah Maza; Who, exactly, were the French bourgeoisie? Unlike the Anglo-Americans, who widely embraced middle-class ideals and values, the French--even the most affluent and conservative--have always rejected and maligned bourgeois values and identity.In this new approach to the old question of the bourgeoisie, Sarah Maza focuses on the crucial period before, during, and after the French Revolution, and offers a provocative answer: the French bourgeoisie has never existed.; Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005

Pont-de-Montvert: Patrice Higonnet; In the seventeenth century, both rich and poor of Pont-de-Montvert had their own politics; one century later, the political differences had vanished though the social ones remained. During the nineteenth century, its social structure was transformed, as were its connections with politics. In this book, Higonnet explains these changes and describes the conditions of life for different people at different times in a village that is both a part of France and a world unto itself.; Hardcover 1971

Praying for Power: Timothy Brook; Timothy Brook studies three widely separated and economically dissimilar counties. He draws on rich data in monastic gazetteers to examine the patterns and social consequences of patronage.; Hardcover

Unmaking the Public University: Christopher Newfield; Unmaking the Public University is the story of how conservatives have maligned and restructured public universities in a campaign to end public education’s democratizing influence on American society.; Hardcover 2008

The Village of Cannibals: Alain Corbin; Translated by Arthur Goldhammer; In August 1870 in the French village of Hautefaye, a young nobleman, falsely accused of shouting republican slogans, was savagely tortured for hours by a mob of peasants who later burned him alive. The Village of Cannibals is a fascinating inquiry into the social and political ingredients of an alchemy that transformed ordinary people into brutal executioners in nineteenth-century France.; Hardcover 1992 / Paperback 1993