For the month of March we have lowered the e-book list price of six Women’s History titles in the University of Illinois Press catalog to $2.99.
The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America by Linda Gordon
Gordon’s classic study is the most complete history of birth control ever written. It covers the entire history of the intense controversies about reproductive rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years, from the earliest attempts of women to organize for the legal control of their bodies to the effects of second-wave feminism. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.
The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention by Judith Wellman
Feminists from 1848 to the present have rightly viewed the Seneca Falls convention as the birth of the women’s rights movement in the United States and beyond. The convention succeeded by uniting powerful elements of the antislavery movement, radical Quakers, and the campaign for legal reform under a common cause. Wellman shows that these three strands converged not only in Seneca Falls, but also in the life of women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.
Echoes of Chongqing: Women in Wartime China by Danke Li
This collection of annotated oral histories records the personal stories of twenty Chinese women who lived in the wartime capital of Chongqing during China’s War of Resistance against Japan during World War II. Their stories demonstrate that the War of Resistance had two faces: one presented by official propaganda and characterized by an upbeat unified front against Japan, the other a record of invisible private stories and a sobering national experience of death and suffering. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.
Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music by Eileen M. Hayes
Drawing on fieldwork conducted at eight women’s music festivals, Eileen M. Hayes shows how studying these festivals—attended by predominately white lesbians—provides critical insight into the role of music and lesbian community formation. She argues that the women’s music festival is a significant institutional site for the emergence of black feminist consciousness in the contemporary period. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.
Kaija Saariaho by Pirkko Moisala
This book is the first comprehensive study of the music and career of contemporary composer Kaija Saariaho. Born in Finland in 1952, Saariaho received her early musical training at the Sibelius Academy, where her close circle included composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. She has since become internationally known and recognized for her operas L’amour de loin and Adriana Mater and other works that involve electronic music. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.
Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens by Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone
Growing up in a West Virginia coal mining community, Hazel Dickens drew on the mountain music and repertoire of her family and neighbors when establishing her own vibrant and powerful vocal style that is a trademark in old-time, bluegrass, and traditional country circles. Working Girl Blues presents forty original songs that Hazel Dickens wrote about coal mining, labor issues, personal relationships, and her life and family in Appalachia. Conveying sensitivity, determination, and feistiness, Dickens comments on each of her songs, explaining how she came to write them and what they meant to her. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.
The claim has caused quite a dustup amongst flight historians. Some crucial evidence supporting the Wright brothers’ title may pivot with aviation pioneer Octave Chanute, the subject of University of Illinois Press author Simine Short’s book, Locomotive to Aeromotive. "Click for larger image")
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Q&A with Rob White, author of Contemporary Film Directors book Todd Haynes
Posted by sfastQ: Haynes has seemingly taken radical shifts in direction from film to film. Is there a commonality that can be found in each of his works?
White: Roughly speaking, Haynes alternates between films about “rock’n’roll suicide” (Superstar, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There) and domestic melodramas (Safe, Far from Heaven, Mildred Pierce). Then there are Poison and the TV short Dottie Gets Spanked, which make up a kind of early 1990s “New Queer Cinema” interlude. The music films are narratively complex mosaics whereas the family movies are linear, and that difference reinforces the pattern of alternation. It’s unusual for a filmmaker to split his work like this but of course it’s not a hard and fast division. There are numerous interconnections and one in particular comes to the fore in my book: it’s the drama of leaving home—which is both a specific story incident in almost all of Haynes’s films and something more symbolic. This ordinary life event takes on a larger metaphorical significance as a defining act of social noncompliance.
Home in Haynes’s films isn’t a happy place, even when it’s loving and protective. It’s a place of danger, especially for the misfit (though normality is tough too). Sometimes home is horrible or haunted—somewhere to get trapped or go mad. In perhaps the most powerful scene in the glam-rock fantasia Velvet Goldmine, away from all its music-industry glitz and glamor, the teenage Arthur (Christian Bale) is humiliated by his father. Soon afterward he escapes on a bus from Manchester to London, and while the scene is made poignant by the fact that his mother runs after the vehicle to wave goodbye, it’s a scene of liberation, temporary and insufficient though it proves to be.
A more complex example is the journey Safe’s Carol (Julianne Moore) takes from her affluent life in southern California to a recovery community in New Mexico. Her conventional life has become unendurable—the comfort of it has actually started to make her sick—but her search for something better is much more risky than she realizes. Through such stories, Haynes dwells on the fundamental political question of what it means (and costs) not to belong, and I very much wanted in the book to stress the
consistency, coherence, and seriousness of this preoccupation in his work. Continue reading →