Pedigree and Panache


Book Description

"Art auctions have long captured the public imagination. They regularly make news headlines and have become synonymous with glamour, money and social distinction. The marketing of auction houses and the works they sell has resulted in firms attaining authoritative positions and the ability both to influence and reflect collecting tastes. Pedigree and panache is the first comprehensive history of the art auction in Australia. In this fascinating work, Shireen Huda investigates the construction of the glamorous reputation of art auctions and art auction houses. Featuring absorbing case studies of key art auctions and major art auction houses in Australia (including Christies, Sothebys and Deutscher-Menzies) the work provides an overview of the origin and international development of art auctions. The development of the Australian marketplace is then explored, detailing colonial inception and continuing until Christies' withdrawal of its saleroom presence in 2006."--Provided by publisher.




The Photomontages of Hannah Höch


Book Description

Here, in the first comprehensive survey of her work by an American museum, authors Peter Boswell, Maria Makela, and Carolyn Lanchner survey the full scope of Hoch's half-century of experimentation in photomontage - from her politically charged early works and intimate psychological portraits of the Weimar era to her later forays into surrealism and abstraction.




Restoring Natural Capital


Book Description

How can environmental degradation be stopped? How can it be reversed? And how can the damage already done be repaired? The authors of this volume argue that a two-pronged approach is needed: reducing demand for ecosystem goods and services and better management of them, coupled with an increase in supply through environmental restoration. Restoring Natural Capital brings together economists and ecologists, theoreticians, practitioners, policy makers, and scientists from the developed and developing worlds to consider the costs and benefits of repairing ecosystem goods and services in natural and socioecological systems. It examines the business and practice of restoring natural capital, and seeks to establish common ground between economists and ecologists with respect to the restoration of degraded ecosystems and landscapes and the still broader task of restoring natural capital. The book focuses on developing strategies that can achieve the best outcomes in the shortest amount of time as it: • considers conceptual and theoretical issues from both an economic and ecological perspective • examines specific strategies to foster the restoration of natural capital and offers a synthesis and a vision of the way forward Nineteen case studies from around the world illustrate challenges and achievements in setting targets, refining approaches to finding and implementing restoration projects, and using restoration of natural capital as an economic opportunity. Throughout, contributors make the case that the restoration of natural capital requires close collaboration among scientists from across disciplines as well as local people, and when successfully executed represents a practical, realistic, and essential tool for achieving lasting sustainable development.




Caves of Missouri


Book Description







From Puritanism to Postmodernism


Book Description

Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply of writers, including Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Thomas Pynchon. Characterised throughout by a vibrant and engaging style it is a superb introduction to American literature, placing it thoughtfully in its rich social, ideological and historical context. A tour de force of both literary and historical writing, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by co-author Richard Ruland, a new foreword by Linda Wagner-Martin and a fascinating interview with Richard Ruland, in which he reflects on the nature of American fiction and his collaboration with Malclolm Bradbury. It is published here for the first time.







Mapping Water in Dominica


Book Description

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/ 9780295748733 Dominica, a place once described as “Nature’s Island,” was rich in biodiversity and seemingly abundant water, but in the eighteenth century a brief, failed attempt by colonial administrators to replace cultivation of varied plant species with sugarcane caused widespread ecological and social disruption. Illustrating how deeply intertwined plantation slavery was with the environmental devastation it caused, Mapping Water in Dominica situates the social lives of eighteenth-century enslaved laborers in the natural history of two Dominican enclaves. Mark Hauser draws on archaeological and archival history from Dominica to reconstruct the changing ways that enslaved people interacted with water and exposes crucial pieces of Dominica’s colonial history that have been omitted from official documents. The archaeological record—which preserves traces of slave households, waterways, boiling houses, mills, and vessels for storing water—reveals changes in political authority and in how social relations were mediated through the environment. Plantation monoculture, which depended on both slavery and an abundant supply of water, worked through the environment to create predicaments around scarcity, mobility, and belonging whose resolution was a matter of life and death. In following the vestiges of these struggles, this investigation documents a valuable example of an environmental challenge centered around insufficient water. Mapping Water in Dominica is available in an open access edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Northwestern University Libraries.




Claude A. Swanson of Virginia


Book Description

Spanning most of the years of the one-party South, the public career of Virginian Claude A. Swanson, congressman, governor, senator, and secretary of the navy, extended from the second administration of Grover Cleveland into that of Franklin Roosevelt. His record, writes Henry C. Ferrell, Jr., in this definitive biography, is that of "a skillful legislative diplomat and an exceedingly wise executive encompassed in the personality of a professional politician." As a congressman, Swanson abandoned Cleveland's laissez faire doctrines to become the leading Virginia spokesman for William Jennings Bryan and the Democratic platform of 1896. His achievements as a reform governor are equaled by few Virginia chief executives. In the Senate, Swanson worked to advance the programs of Woodrow Wilson. In the 1920s, he contributed to formulation of Democratic alternatives to Republican policies. In Roosevelt's New Deal cabinet, he helped the Navy obtain favorable treatment during a decade of isolation. The warp and woof of local politics are well explicated by Ferrell to furnish insight into personalities and events that first produced, then sustained, Swan-son's electoral success. He examines Virginia educational, moral, and social reforms; disfranchisement movements; racial and class politics; and the impact of the woman's vote. And he records the growth of the Hampton Roads military-industrial complex, which Swanson brought about. In Virginia, Swanson became a dominant political figure, and Ferrell's study challenges previous interpretations of Virginia politics between 1892 and 1932 that pictured a powerful, reactionary Democratic "Organization," directed by Thomas Staples Martin and his successor Harry Flood Byrd, Sr., defeating would-be progressive reformers. A forgotten Virginia emerges here, one that reveals the pervasive role of agrarians in shaping the Old Dominion's politics and priorities.




Transnational Crime and the Interface Between Legal and Illegal Actors


Book Description

This study focuses on the interfaces between legal and illegal actors engaging in transnational crimes. These interfaces can be quite complex as the cases of Udo Proksch and Cornelius M. illustrate. Due to this complexity, such cases and the related interfaces cannot be caught easily with clear-cut and mutually excluding categories like 'transnational (organized) crime' versus 'legitimate' businesses and government agencies. The boundaries between transnational crime, terrorism, corporate crime and state crime fade away as one focuses on such concrete cases. As the rest of this study will show, the characteristics of these cases appear to be far more representative of transnational crimes in general than usually assumed. For a number of reasons, a study that focuses solely on interfaces can be an important and necessary addition to the existing criminological studies. The first reason has to do with the mentioned lack of systematic studies of the interfaces between legal and illegal actors. The second reason has to do with the observation mentioned above. By studying interfaces between legal and illegal actors, the rather thin boundaries between transnational crime, corporate crime and other types of crime become clear. Only after these boundaries are crossed, or even leveled, transnational crimes can be understood from a broader perspective. From such a perspective, transnational crimes are always taking place against a specific background of economic factors, state policies and legislation, as well as other factors. Thirdly, a systematic study of interfaces can help to indicate the different types and causes of interfaces that can be found in different types of transnational crime. Finally, as the role of legal actors with all kinds of transnational crimes is clarified, more effective legislative and policy instruments can be designed to counter this role. The first half of this study will be based on the literature on transnational crimes. The second half will describe the empirical research of the illicit art and antiquities trade that was done specifically for this study. The illicit art and antiquities trade was chosen for several reasons. On the one hand because it is a type of crime that is known for its interfaces between legal and illegal actors and on the other hand because empirical studies of this type of crime have been scarce, especially from a criminological perspective.