Ancient Greece

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Carollee Bengelsdorf

"A belated, but nontheless very good effort to explore the irreconocilable tension between democracy and authoritarian, paternalist socialism in revolutionary Cuba. Informed by critical Marxism, book challenges the notion that Cuba is an excellent case of 'direct democracy,' laying responsibility for the absence of freedom and accountability squarely on Castro's dictatorial vocation and the Communist party's hegemony. In a surprising departure, author concludes that 'to the degree the (Cuban) leadership continues to insist upon defining the boundaries of civil society, it must in the end fail' (p. 178)"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

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John M. Grammer

In a group of five biographical and critical sketches that cover the period from 1810 to 1861, John M. Grammer explores the process by which "the South" was created as a concept in American culture. Three of the five Virginians Grammer examines were politicians with a literary bent - John Taylor, John Randolph, and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. The other two, George Fitzhugh and Joseph Glover Baldwin, were fiction writers fascinated with politics. United in their desire to represent the South as a refuge of pastoral and republican order in an America where, as Emerson observed, "the ancient manners were giving way," all of these men aspired to speak for their region; and all of them, sooner or later, found that they had to begin by reinventing it. Grammer relates the debate over southern identity not only to the wish to defend slavery or agrarian life but to the larger search for order in the aftermath of an age of revolution. He also connects it to the long-standing American concern, born of the ideology of republicanism, over the mortality of American society. Southerners' search for a stable identity and their at times fierce defense of slavery were, according to Grammer, a response to what J. G. A. Pocock has called "the Machiavellian moment" in republican cultures - the moment when the republic is made to recognize its finitude in time. He maintains that we can best understand our antebellum southern writers by thinking of them not as the unwitting ancestors of Faulkner, but as the fully self-conscious contemporaries of Emerson and Whitman, the heirs of Jefferson and Hamilton - as citizens of a young republic facing what looked more and more like its imminent demise. With increasing mechanization and westward expansion transforming their formerly stable world, all antebellum Americans lived in a Machiavellian moment, and as Grammer deftly demonstrates, the long effort to mold the South into a symbol of order, like Whitman's search for a suitably symbolic America, must be understood in relation to that condition. A major, innovative contribution to the fields of both southern history and southern literary criticism, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South is a valuable volume for all students of the South.

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James Lincoln Collier

Explores the childhood, character, and influential events that shaped the life of Alexander Hamilton, one of America's founding fathers.

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Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne

These new and specially commissioned essays discuss the ways in which performance is central to the practice and ideology of democracy in classical Athens. From theatre to law-court to gymnasium to symposium, performance is a basic part of Athenian society; how do these different areas interrelate and inform the politics and culture of the democratic city? Drama, rhetoric, philosophy, literature and art are all discussed by leading scholars in this interdisciplinary volume.