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Today, the portrait of the Pacific Islander, Mai, painted by Joshua Reynolds is world-renowned as a symbol of empire and of the eighteenth century. But Reynolds painted other visitors from the New World, now forgotten. One especially haunting portrait was of a Cherokee warrior called Ostenaco, who visited Britain a dozen years before Mai. This book is less about Reynolds’s portraits than the full, complicated, and richly illuminating lives behind them. It tells the whole life story of Mai, the refugee from Ra‘iatea who voyaged with James Cook to London in the 1770s and returned home again to seek vengeance on his neighboring Islanders. It traces, for the first time, the entire biography of Ostenaco, who grew up in the southern Appalachians, engaged with colonists throughout his adulthood, and became entangled with imperial politics in complex ways during the American Revolution. And it reveals the experiences of the painter who encountered both Indigenous visitors, Reynolds himself—an artist often celebrated as a founder of modern British art but rarely seen as a figure of empire. This book interweaves all three parallel and otherwise unconnected lives together, explaining their links but also exposing some of the extraordinary diversity of the eighteenth-century world. It shows that Indigenous people pushed back and shaped European expansion far more than is acknowledged. It also reveals how much more conflicted Britons were about their empire in this era than is assumed, even while they witnessed its reach into every corner of the globe.

In City of Islands, Dr. Tammy L. Brown uses the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals as “windows” into the dynamic history of immigration in New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America. This is an important book because it is the first interdisciplinary, book-length study of how specific Caribbean intellectuals—Ethelred Brown, Richard B. Moore, Pearl Primus, Shirley Chisholm, and Paule Marshall, used the written, spoken and performed word in the cause of racial equality in the United States and in the Caribbean throughout the entire twentieth century. In the discipline of History, Caribbean immigrants living in the United States is surprisingly understudied. We have only four book-length historical accounts, and they only cover Caribbean contributions to the tradition of black political radicalism during the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast, City of Islands includes original analysis of sermons, speeches, poetry, short stories, novels, and choreography, to provide insights into each individual’s personality and intellectual style of self-presentation.

La Meri (Russell Meriwether Hughes, 1899–1988) was a performing artist, choreographer, teacher, and writer who built her career on ethnologic dance from many parts of the world. In the 1920s and 1930s, under the management of her agent-husband Guido Carreras, she toured in Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. Despite the heavy schedule of travel and performances, she was able to obtain instruction in local dance genres, purchase costumes, and obtain recordings of the music in many of the countries. The new material would then be added to her concert programs. In late 1939, touring was no longer possible because of World War II, so La Meri and Carreras settled in New York City. There, she established a school, the Ethnologic Dance Center, and dance companies. She continued performing in New York and on tour in the United States, and, in addition to teaching and concert work, created original choreographies using techniques such as those of India and Spain. In 1960, she moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where she continued her work until 1984, when she returned to San Antonio. In addition to her practical work in dance, La Meri also published writings that set forth her conceptions, understandings, goals and methodologies. This book is both a biography of La Meri and an analysis of the significance of her theory and practice, with attention to her own performance, choreography, writings, and teaching.

As Turkey pushes for its place in the global pecking order and embraces neoliberal capitalism, the nation has seen a period of unprecedented shifts in political, religious, and gender and sexual identities. This book shows how this social transformation in Turkey is felt most strongly among its young people, eager to surrender to the seduction of sexual modernity, but also longing to reman attached to traditional social relations, identities and histories. Engaging a wide array of upwardly-mobile young adults, Ozyegin links the biographies of individuals with the biography of a nation, revealing their creation of conflicted identities in a country which has existed uneasily between West and East, modern and traditional, and secular and Islamic. For these young people sexuality, gender expression, and intimate relationships in particular serve as key sites for reproducing and challenging patriarchy and paternalism that was hallmark of earlier generations. As the book evocatively shows, the quest for sexual freedom and an escape frpm patriarchal constructions of selfless femininity and protective masculinity promise both personal transformations and profound sexual guilt and anxiety. A poignant and original study, the book presents a snapshot of cultural change on the eve of rapid globalization in the Muslim world.

Warren S. McCulloch (1898-1969) has become an icon of the American cybernetics movement and of current work in the cognitive neurosciences. Much of this legacy stems from his classic 1943 work with Walter Pitts on the logic of neural networks, and from his colourful role as chairman of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953). This biographical work looks beyond McCulloch’s iconic status by exploring the varied scientific, personal, and institutional contexts of McCulloch’s life. By doing so, the book presents McCulloch as a transdisciplinary investigator who took on many scientific identities beyond that of a cybernetician: scientific philosopher, neurophysiologist, psychiatrist, poet, mentor-collaborator, and engineer, and finally, his public persona towards the end of his life, the rebel genius. The book argues that these identities were neither products of McCulloch’s own will nor were they simply shaped by his institutional contexts. In integrating context and agency, the book as provides a more nuanced and rich understanding of McCulloch’s role in the history of American science as well as the institutional contexts of scientific investigations of the brain and mind: in particular at Yale University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The book argues that one of McCulloch’s most important contributions was opening up new ways of understanding the brain: no longer simply an object of medical investigation, the brain became the centre of the multidisciplinary neurosciences.

One is reminded of just how fickle a mistress Fame can be when considering how the renown of certain historical figures only grows with time, while the reputations of countless others fade in the light of posterity. The luster of Charles Hodge’s fame has dimmed since his death in 1878. Whatever judgements exist, the truth remains that in the life of Charles Hodge one finds a stunning panoramic view of nineteenth-century Protestantism. His story touches many, if not all, of the most critical developments in American Christianity of his era, and it is impossible to deny that he exercised a profound influence in his day with lasting consequences after his death. American Presbyterianism, American Calvinism, and much of twentieth-century Protestant Fundamentalism are deeply indebted to Hodge’s theological thinking. This book offers the first biography of Hodge to appear in one hundred and thirty years. Thus, this work stands as the only modern synthetic work of his entire life and thought, and it is built upon the conviction that few Americans can match the depth, breadth, and longevity of Hodge’s theological influence. There are few figures better able to help one appreciate the immensely powerful and hugely complex nature of conservative American Protestantism in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries than the deeply pious, keenly intelligent, and yet largely forgotten Charles Hodge.

Knowledge is Pleasure is the biography of Florence Ayscough, one of the most respected interpreters of Chinese culture of the early 20^th century. Born in Concession-era Shanghai, Ayscough developed into an accomplished translator of Chinese poetry, art curator, critic, gardener and photographer. She played an important role in introducing western museums and collectors to Chinese Modernist painting. The author draws on Ayscough’s diaries, private correspondence and published writings to bring to life a woman of great intellectual vibrancy and cultural curiosity.

Virginia Woolf, The War Without, The War Within completes Lounsberry’s trilogy on Virginia Woolf’s luminous diary and the diaries she read. It offers the first treatment of Woolf’s final diary stage (1929–1941), in which she turned more to her diary—and to others' diaries—as the war pressures of the unfurling 1930s grew. It reveals her artistic wars within as the encroaching outer war (World War II) approached. For the first time, this book will explore each of Woolf’s 12 final diary books in depth and trace her final flowering as a diarist. We watch as Woolf increases her number of diary entries in the 1930s and uses her diary more and more as a morning prop (as well as a post-tea-time act). We see her wish to write a “meatier” diary in 1940: an “evening” diary for “Old Virginia.” Interwoven into her own diary as it unfolds are the 18 key diaries that helped shape both her semi-private diary style and her public prose, including the diaries of Leo and Countess Tolstoy, Dorothy Wordsworth, Guy de Maupassant, Alice James, and André Gide. This book functions as a new Woolf biography, marking her life through her diaries from age forty-seven to four days before her suicide in 1941. Additionally, a new reading of Woolf’s suicide is offered—one based on her diaries.

During the last year of her life, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings took on the arduous task of collecting materials toward a biography she intended to write on her deceased friend, Ellen Glasgow. The two authors met through correspondences they exchanged about their novels. Glasgow was drawn to Rawlings’s sympathy for animals and enthusiasm for nature. Rawlings discovered in Glasgow a writer who was able to articulate the same experiences she underwent when beginning and finishing writing projects. In The Remarkable Kinship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow, Ashley Lear examines the documents collected by Rawlings on Glasgow, along with her personal notes, to better understand the experiences that brought these two women writers together and the importance of literary friendships between women writers. Glasgow and Rawlings were pioneers of American literature, similarly characterized as regional writers and known for writing novels that were not typical of other women writing during their respective periods. This study sheds new light on the complexities of their professional success and personal struggles, both of which led them to find friendship and sympathy with one another.

The Later Tang was the first of several ephemeral states created by the Shatuo Turks in tenth-century China and Li Cunxu, a martial genius, was its founder. In fifteen years, he turned a small satrapy on China’s periphery into a powerhouse capable of unifying the north and much of the southwest. He governed on the principle of racial inclusion and refused to set the ruling minority above the Chinese majority through special privileges. As someone highly literate and artistically gifted, Li Cunxu seemed uniquely capable of bridging rifts within his culturally diverse ruling elite. Unfortunately, he shared the sort of self-absorbed narcissism typical of dynastic founders, which contributed to his denouement merely three years into the reign. The Later Tang dynasty presided over the epic changes that occasioned the Five Dynasties, when China evolved from a moribund medieval state dominated by hereditary elites to one organized around individual merit, an essential element of the nation-state. Critical to the evolution of governance in the tenth century was the rule of military magnates without vested interest in the old order.

Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and afterlives examines the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work in the context of the bicentenary of her birth. The essays in this volume cover the period from Brontë’s first publication to the twenty-first century, explaining why the author has been at the forefront of literary cultures. The contributors engage with topics including: the author cult which emerged shortly after her death; literary tourism in Haworth and Brussels; stage adaptations of her life and novels; her poetic legacy; the afterlives of her plots and characters in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the theatre and on the web. This book brings the story of Brontë’s legacy up-to-date, analysing texts such as obituaries, literary re-workings, adaptations for screen, vlogs, and erotic makeovers. The contributors take a fresh look at over 150 years of engagement with Brontë, considering genre, narrative style, the representation of national and regional identities, sexuality and gender identity, literary tourism, adaptation theories, cultural studies, postcolonial and transnational readings.