“Arturo Toscanini came to town as part of a highly publicized maestro exchange between the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic that had been set up by Arthur Judson, manager of both orchestras.”

“The Useless Mouths” and Other Literary Writings, by Simone de Beauvoir and edited by Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann

Making Sense of American Liberalism, edited by Jonathan Bell and Timothy Stanley

Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance: Igniting Citizenship, by Yvonne Daniel

The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture, by Jared Gardner

How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse, by John Timberman Newcomb

Comprising just over 9 percent of the titles reviewed by CHOICE during the past year, and less than 3 percent of the more than 25,000 titles submitted to CHOICE during this same period, Outstanding Academic Titles are truly the “best of the best.” Congratulations to our authors, editors, and to everyone who worked on these titles!

• Stephen Wade’s well-reviewed The Beautiful Music All Around Us is available for only $14.97 (regularly $24.95).
• John Caps’s musical biography of Henry Mancini, the creator of “Moon River” and the score to The Pink Panther, along with hundreds of other familiar works. Get it for $17.97 (regularly $29.95).

We’ve recently added our Spring 2013 titles to our website, so even if the book is not yet available, you can pre-order it at the Anniversary Sale discount:

• Murphy Hicks Henry’s Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass, that traces the progress of women in bluegrass from Sally Ann Forrester, who played accordion and sang with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys from 1943 to 1946, to present artists such as Alison Krauss, Rhonda Vincent, and the Dixie Chicks. Pre-order now for $17.97 (regularly $29.95).
• David Whiteis’s Southern Soul-Blues highlights some of southern soul’s most popular and important entertainers including classic artists such as Denise LaSalle, the late J. Blackfoot, Latimore, and Bobby Rush–as well as contemporary artists T. K. Soul, Ms. Jody, Sweet Angel, Willie Clayton, and Sir Charles Jones. Pre-order now for $14.97 (regularly $24.95).

If you like American music, we have over 120 other carefully selected and edited titles in-print and on sale until January 31, 2012.

Professor Nettl’s works include Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology, which was called, “Light and entertaining, moving and head-noddingly simple without sacrificing the complexity of its implications. . . . Classic Bruno Nettl.” by the Journal of Folklore Research, and the classic introduction to ethnomusicology, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Concepts, in its second edition.

Congratulations, Professor Nettl!

“Adults have also used the holiday to make known to others their desires for the future. Robert Green Ingersoll, the son of a Presbyterian abolitionist minister, taught in Mount Vernon and Metropolis and practiced law in Shawneetown and Peoria. He was a colonel in the Union army and after the war became Illinois attorney general before becoming prominent on the national stage. In his ‘Christmas Sermon,’ written in 1892, he said, ‘I believe in Christmas and in every day that has been set aside for joy.’ The following requests for Christmas, written in 1897, express his humanism.

If I had the power to produce exactly what I want for next Christmas, I would have all the kings and emperors resign and allow the people to govern themselves.

I would have all the nobility crop their titles and give their lands back to the people. I would have the pope throw away his tiara, take off his sacred vestments, and admit that he is not acting for God—is not infallible—but is just an ordinary Italian. I would have all the cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, and clergymen admit that they know nothing about theology, nothing about hell or heaven, nothing about the destiny of the human race, nothing about devils or ghosts, gods or angels. I would have them tell all their “flocks” to think for themselves, to be manly men and womanly women, and to do all in their power to increase the sum of human happiness.

I would have all the professors in colleges, all the teachers in schools of every kind, including those in Sunday schools, agree that they would teach only what they know, that they would not palm off guesses as demonstrated truths.

I would like to see all the politicians changed to statesmen—to men who long to make their country great and free; to men who care more for public good than private gain—men who long to be of use.

I would like to see all the editors of papers and magazines agree to print the truth and nothing but the truth, to avoid all slander and misrepresentation, and to let the private affairs of the people alone.

I would like to see drunkenness and prohibition both abolished.

I would like to see corporal punishment done away with in every home, in every school, in every asylum, reformatory, and prison. Cruelty hardens and degrades; kindness reforms and ennobles.

I would like to see the millionaires unite and form a trust for the public good.

I would like to see a fair division of profits between capital and labor, so that the toiler could save enough to mingle a little June with the December of his life.

I would like to see an international court established in which to settle disputes between nations, so that armies could be disbanded and the great navies allowed to rust and rot in perfect peace.

I would like to see the whole world free—free from injustice—free from superstition.

This will do for next Christmas. The following Christmas, I may want more.”

Events this year include:

• An online exhibit called Fine Print* (*and Digital!). A gallery of books, journals, digital collections, and reference works exemplifying the work of AAUP members.
• A blog tour, featuring writings from the perspectives of 26 member presses and their authors.
• Influence maps highlighting the geographical spread of University Presses, both in their physical locations and in their subjects.

Check back with us Wednesday when we take our turn hosting the blog tour with a post by  folklorist Stephen Wade on the value of “humane scholarship” through the work of University Presses.

This price will be good through the closing of our own Urbana’s Market at the Square, whose final day this year will be November 3. The Market at the Square is one of dozens of markets featured in the book. If you would like to know if your local market if featured, browse our Farmers’ Markets of the Heartland Guide, which lists all of the markets and most of the vendors discussed in the book. The video below gives a beautiful, short introduction to Janine MacLachlan’s enthusiastic, vivid portrayal of the markets she loves:

“This is why I think the big tent, or as I call it, the DH collective, is so important. We need people who can do all kinds of different things (innovate, built, create, critique, tweak, and disseminate, among other things). I think anyone who is interested in DH should be welcome into the collective and then be permitted to find their space and their community (or form their own) within the collective. Excluding people because they don’t do x or y recreates the pattern of academia as it stand right now. We might never change what it means to be a humanist, but we can change how higher education operates. That, to me, is the biggest promise DH holds.”

If you would like to know more about Topics in Digital Humanites, we have a series for that.

There are likely to be sightings of folklorist, musician, and author Stephen Wade, who may stop by the University of Illinois Press’s tables to sign copies of The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience, available at the 40% discount.

We will also have information on our ongoing Mellon-funded project, Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World. Complete details may be found at www.folklorestudies.org. Funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the series is a collaborative venture of the University of Illinois Press, the University Press of Mississippi, and the University of Wisconsin Press, in conjunction with the American Folklore Society.

So come by our tables and say, “Hello!”

“People with power have the means to mold the way a society views the world. They can establish their own outlook as orthodox or the mainstream view. They can make the views of their challengers heretical or even turn the opposition into solitary voices crying in the wilderness. They can establish the language of normal political discussion. The normal words and phrases used have inherent biases validating their position. Hegemony is complete when ordinary citizens do not perceive the limitations imposed by the belief system of their society, neither its assumptions, its restrictions on subject matter, nor the biases inherent in the words they use. Instead, one normally assumes that public discourse is framed by self-evident truths.

In the antebellum American republic, the people whom the abolitionists called the Slave Power established a hegemonic North-South consensus of racial ideas. The planters and their northern business partners, the commodity brokers and bankers, held this hegemonic ideological power. The commodities that slaves produced provided two-thirds of the nation’s exports, making planters the richest class in the country and their northern allies the second richest class. The defense of slavery was thus critical both to the prosperity of the planters and to the accumulation of capital in the North.

The Slave Power was most vulnerable in the North, where slavery had been abolished in the wake of the War for Independence. Slavery was serving less and less the self-interest of most Northerners, indeed of most Southerners as well. More and more, it was harming their interests. As the unavoidable tensions caused by slavery mounted, the Slave Power “played the race card,” in the latter-day phrase, with an intensity never seen before, saturating the nation, above all the North, with the message that blacks as slaves were happy and useful, but when free were lazy and dangerous. To convey this message they mobilized every vehicle of culture: the political rally, the newspaper, the church, the school, and most vividly the minstrel show. The formative American nation was thus thoroughly indoctrinated with an ideology of race.

The Republican revolution overthrew the Slave Power. But the Republicans did not complete their revolution in the South. During the struggles of Reconstruction, they repudiated their Radical contingent and finally came to terms with the former Confederates, leaving them in local control and allowing them to restore plantation production based on half-free labor. By the turn of the twentieth century, the new national corporate establishment, after defeating the challenges of the Farmers’ Alliance movement and the Knights of Labor, finally established a corporate hegemony that continued into the twenty-first century. Also by the turn of the twentieth century, the ex-Confederates had finally crushed all opposition and achieved a “solid South.” The age of segregation had begun.

Although the corporate elite in the North used free labor, they retained most of the racial ideology of the antebellum nation. They endorsed segregation in the South and tolerated its labor system, half free for blacks and little better for many whites. In the North, industrialists continued their “white only” hiring policy of the antebellum era. This policy helped keep black workers on the plantations and made possible a vigorous revival of southern commodity exports. Also, just as at the beginning of the racial system, planters in the West Indies had used a few less-debased whites to control many blacks, now industrialists used a few more-debased black strikebreakers to control many whites. The racial ideology of the antebellum regime was well suited to the needs of the new northern leaders. Indeed they built on it with so-called scientific racism.

The racial system showed increasing instability as the nation moved toward globalism. World War I opened industrial jobs in the North to black workers for the first time, giving rise to a process of black urbanization and the appearance of the more assertive “new Negro.” The racial system became more unstable with the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, which created the first important split in the American elite since the Civil War. In response to the Great Depression, one faction, the New Dealers, favored economic and social programs. They began a reform movement. In the New Deal movement, African Americans came together with such other previously marginalized groups as the “new immigrants” and organized labor. Civil rights once again became a political issue.

After World War II, American leaders positioned themselves as the leaders of the “free world.” At the same time, through the Atlantic Pact, they gave military support to the European powers that were trying to suppress the freedom movements in their colonies. The struggle of the “free world” against the “Communist slave world” precipitated the Cold War ideological crisis of the racial system. The black freedom movement saw its moment and seized it. The movement brought down the “white only” signs, opened the polling booth to black Southerners, and restored vitality to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. By the late 1960s, more than half of African Americans had escaped from the bottom layer of society that they had occupied for three hundred years.
The black freedom movement came to grief when it moved from abolishing the legal disabilities that African Americans suffered to addressing their disproportionate poverty. Civil rights made slight demands on the nation’s resources and enhanced its political image. But programs to provide jobs and to combat poverty required resources the nation’s leaders wanted to use for their increasingly costly military ventures. Indeed social programs already in place were eroded ever more as the “welfare state” was displaced by the “national security state.” In the backlash against social programs, new racial stereotypes appeared, Sambo the servant being replaced by Willie Horton the criminal and by the “gangsta rappers.” The plight of the black poor and other poor people worsened with the “information revolution,” which privileged a quality education out of the reach of most people and facilitated the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries.

The nation’s growing gap between rich and poor signals a new crisis in which, for the first time in three hundred years, the line of class is more sharply drawn than the line of race. Historically, African Americans, however, as the last hired and first fired, have been the “miners’ canary,” the harbingers of coming trouble. In the misery, chaos, and high incarceration rates suffered by African Americans of the inner city, one may see some of what lies ahead for the rest of American society.”

Order Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America in hardcover, or for your Kindle, or on Google Play (currently being offered at HALF PRICE on both platforms).