The 2021 volume of Ceramics in America features wide ranging essays and new discoveries on ceramics used and collected in the American context. Of special note is the reporting of seventeenth-century Chinese porcelain discovered in the ca. 1607 contest of Jamestown, Virginia. Another essay documents the archaeologically-recovered Chinese export porcelain of James and Dolley Madison from their home Montpelier in Virginia. Other articles explore ceramics made to commemorate historical and political events both in America and Great Britain. The subject of nineteenth-century American stonewares made in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, and Virginia is covered in four important articles. A special collector’s biopic surveys a highly important American collection of eighteenth-century armorial Chinese porcelain. Other articles will include a profile of North Carolina potter David Stuempfle who continues the old-age tradition of producing wood fired stoneware and a summary of an archaeologically recovered assemblage of early nineteenth-century slip decorated earthenwares attributed to Enoch Wood and James Caldwell of Burslem, Staffordshire.

The features of humankind’s interaction with the natural enrivonment have, over the course of evolution, slowly consolidated specific models of behavior. In the social dimension, these primitive schemes of interaction between the body and the enviroment have generated the blooming of consciousness and gradually also of language. Neuroscience sheds light on the mechanism by which the artifical envionrnment – i. e. architecture – has represented a crucial moment of change in improving human beings’ cognitive capacities. This fact situates the beginning of architecture in an even more distant past. There are certain natural situations which, taken together with humankind’s actions and body, in the phase of homo erectus, which can therefore be considered the very first architecture. In particular, the technology and architecture which humankind has developed over the last two centuries, along with cultural and social transformations, have modified the environment without a sufficient awareness of the fundamental role played by nature in cognitive evolution. Today’s cities, and the entirety of our environmental conditions, are nothing other than the mirror image of this fogetting.

A comprehensive, novel reassessment of the life and work of one of America's most influential self-taught artists, John Kane. The book presents a full account of Kane's life as a working man, including his time as a steelworker, coal miner, street paver, and commercial painter in and around Pittsburgh at the height of the industrial era. How these occupations shaped his development as an artist and his breakthrough success in the modern art world is carefully explored and analyzed in this richly illustrated volume. Kane's dramatic life story demonstrates the power of perseverance and creativity: his dedication to painting resulted in a fascinating body of work that has ended up in some of America's most important museums and private collections.

This book is an academic biography of Liu Ching-chih, a renowned musicologist and translation scholar, and a prolific music critic in Hong Kong. Three Library Collections named after him are housed in the University of Hong Kong Libraries, the Hong Kong Central Library, and the Library of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the University of Heidelberg. This volume of life writing is distinguished from average biographies by its reliance on systematic analyses of an extensive array of texts and interview data. The chapters integrate chronologies, narratives, analyses and intertextual connections, with the voice of Liu foregrounded, to present a multifaceted character whose decades-long scholarship spanned across music criticism, the history of new music in China, and translation. Several chapters document Liu’s process of working on his major book projects,. One chapter portrays Liu as a scholar-music critic, and another features his leadership at the Hong Kong Translation Society. A chapter that documents Liu’s immensely rich array of academic and cultural services in Hong Kong is followed by a linguistic and cultural profile of the scholar. The ending chapter, on the biography project itself, traces the evolution of the project, explains the research methodology, and provides a metadiscoursal account of the writing of the book. The book provides a valuable reference for those who want to know about humanities scholars, public intellectuals, music criticism, music research, and civic societies in Hong Kong, for those who are curious about the academic exchange between Hong Kong and mainland China during the 1980s-1990s, and for those who are interested in an interdisciplinary approach in life writing research and the genre of life writing concerning in particular scholars.

This book intends to explore the atmospheric issue from an independent, architectural perspective. It is composed of two main sections. The first one introduces and analyzes the atmospheric concept inside the lexical scope of the architectural discipline, mapping the whole taxonomy of semantic declinations that are recognized by architecture, in addition to retracing the etymology of the term ‘atmosphere’ and its evolution. The second section studies the topic throughout the sensory-emotional filter of the perceiving subject located in the built environment, gleaning suggestions from neuroscientific knowledge. More recently, architecture and neuroscience have started to interact, both in the combination of their theories and through experiment-based investigations.

By 1920, Buenos Aires was the largest and most cosmopolitan city of Latin America due to mass immigration from Europe. Unbridled urban expansion had drastic effects on the social and cultural topography of the Argentine capital, raising ideological and aesthetic issues that shaped the modernist landscape of the country. Artists across disciplines responded to these changes with conflicting depictions of urban space. Centering these conflicts as a cognitive map of modernity’s new realities in the city and in understandings of the city itself, Buenos Aires and the Arts looks at the interaction between modernity and modernism in literature, photography, film, and painting during the interwar period. This was a time of profound change and heightened cultural activity in Argentina. Eleni Kefala analyzes works by Jorge Luis Borges, Oliverio Girondo, José Ferreyra, Xul Solar, Roberto Arlt, and Horacio Coppola, with a focus on the city of Buenos Aires as a playground of modernity.

In the late nineteenth century, medical educators intent on transforming American physicians into scientifically trained, elite professionals swiftly recognized the value of medical school design for their reform efforts. Between 1893 and 1940, nearly every medical college in the country rebuilt or substantially renovated its facility. In Building Schools, Making Doctors, Katherine Carroll reveals how the new buildings constructed during this fifty-year period did more than passively house a new system of medical training; they actively participated in defining and promoting a reformed pedagogy, modern science, and the new physician. Interdisciplinary and wide ranging, her study moves architecture from the periphery of medical education to the center, revealing a network of medical educators, architects, and philanthropists who believed that the educational environment itself shaped how students learned and the type of physicians they became. Carroll offers the first comprehensive study of the science and pedagogy formulated by new facilities, the influence of donors and architects, the impact of educational centers on the urban landscape and the local community, and the privileging of white men within the medical profession during this formative period for physicians and medical schools.

The Schuylkill River flows more than 100 miles from the mountains of the Pennsylvania Coal Region to the Delaware River. It passes through five counties - Schuylkill, Berks, Chester, Montgomery, and Philadelphia - and its valley is home to more than three million people, yet few are aware of the hidden ruins and traces left by a pioneering 200-year-old inland waterway: the Schuylkill Navigation. Some of it is literally buried in their own backyards. Often called the Schuylkill Canal, this complex Navigation system actually boasted twenty-seven canals. The first of the anthracite-carrying routes in America, the 108-mile Navigation shadowed the Schuylkill River for nearly all its length. It once had more than thirty dams and slackwater pools, more than 100 stone locks, numerous aqueducts, and the first transportation tunnel in the nation. They were all built by hand starting in 1816. In the 1940s, as part of a massive environmental cleanup of the river, this important and influential infrastructure was largely dismantled - but not entirely. Two short sections of the watered canal get plenty of attention: the Oakes Reach at Schuylkill Canal Park near Phoenixville and the Manayunk Canal in Philadelphia. Both are popular recreational destinations. What happened to the rest of it? Photographer Sandy Sorlien resolved to find out. Over the course of seven years, she traveled upriver repeatedly to bushwhack along the riverbanks and to row and paddle in the river itself. Armed with camera and binoculars, loppers and trekking poles, nineteenth-century maps and modern satellite imagery, and abetted by local historians and an archaeologist, she found all sixty-one lock sites and explored most of the canal beds. Her photographs reveal a mysterious remnant landscape, evidence of a bold industrial innovation that spelled its own demise. The water pollution created by the coal industry and obstructive dams meant the end of a way of life for the towns that boomed along the canals, from Pottsville to Reading, Birdsboro to Phoenixville, Bridgeport to Philadelphia. Along with Sorlien's full-color plates and explanatory essays, Inland features a selection of historic images, rare historic Schuylkill Navigation Company maps, and early Philadelphia Watering Committee plans. The book also includes a foreword by renowned landscape scholar John R. Stilgoe, an essay on regional transportation history by Mike Szilagyi, Trails Project Manager for the Schuylkill River Greenways Natural Heritage Area, and an afterword by Karen Young, Director of the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center. A sweeping new Schuylkill River map by Morgan Pfaelzer connects it all. Inland is the first to present contemporary photographs from a survey of the entire Schuylkill Navigation, becoming an essential resource for future historians and a resonant visual history all its own.

Marlene Dietrich never threw away anything. She kept her good-luck rag doll (it appeared with her in The Blue Angel and followed her to dressing tables on every movie set). She kept the letters she received from her lovers and her husband of fifty-three years. She kept every article of clothing made for her by the great French couturiers and the legendary Hollywood costume designers. She kept everything. After Dietrich's death, all of the articles were collected – 25,000 objects and 18,000 images. Here, her treasures are brought together in 289 photographs from her own collection, with extended captions by her daughter, Maria Riva. We see Dietrich across the years and roles of her life: a child, a young actress in Berlin, a newlywed, a devoted American, a mother, and of course, a glamorous Hollywood legend. An intimate look into the life of an unforgettable star, Marlene Dietrich: Photographs and Memories gifts fans with insights from Marlene herself.

Occupying Massachusetts: Layers of History on Indigenous Land is an art book that engages with history. Featuring photographs of dwellings and vernacular structures found in rural Massachusetts, the book is a meditation on the human occupation of land, with an emphasis on the long presence of Indigenous people and the waves of settlement by people from other countries that began during the early 1600s and continues today.Utilizing a muted colour palette, Matthews's photographs of both structures and historical markers are subtle and haunting. They suggest the presence of histories, embedded in the landscape but often invisible. Although the book is focused on Massachusetts, it implicitly raises larger issues of settlement and nationhood. How did the United States of America come to occupy its land? How is this story told? As a longtime occupant/occupier of Massachusetts herself, Matthews aims to understand more deeply the land on which she lives.The main text of the book comes from photographs of historic markers, which were installed around the state at different times by different interest groups. The words on these markers describe early relations between Indigenous people and largely English settlers, from diverse points of view. In this way, the book explores how difficult histories are written and how they change over time. Concluding essays by Indigenous activist David Brule and poet Suzanne Gardinier provide important perspectives as well, connecting the past and future. Occupying Massachusetts is a moving story whose message will be appreciated for years to come.

Houses, in the Argentine and Chilean films of the early 21st-century, provide much more than a backdrop to on-screen drama. Nor are they simply refuges from political turmoil or spaces of oppression. This volume argues that domestic spaces are instead the medium through which new, fragile common identities are constructed. The varied documentary and fiction films analyzed here – which include an early work by Oscar-winner Sebastián Lelio – use the domestic sphere as a laboratory in which to experiment with narrative, with audiovisual techniques, and with social configurations. Where previous scholarship has focused on the social fragmentation and political disillusionment visible in contemporary film, this book argues that in order to properly account for the political agency of cinema, it is necessary to move beyond deconstructive critical approaches to Latin American culture. In doing so, it expands the theoretical scope of studies in Latin American cinema by finding new points of contact between the cultural critique of Nelly Richard, the work of Bruno Latour, and theories of new materialism.

Far from merely considering the aural 'segments' of audiovisual texts (i.e. the soundtrack) in terms of their expressive and artistic significance, or being concerned only with 'audio' and technologically mediated sound in and of itself, this volume aims to understand how the theoretical concepts and methods developed to investigate aurality could reframe cinema and visual media as research objects. Distributed across ten different thematic sections, the contributors develop the theoretical content of 'aural epistemologies' in Film and Media Studies, discuss the role of listening culture in our experience as film spectators and media users and, finally, re-assess the significance of sound archives and sonic archaeologies in relation to our knowledge of past (sound)mediascapes.

Much of the American South, especially its small towns and rural areas, is connected not by interstate highways but through a web-like network of country roads, many of which appear only on the most detailed of maps. These are the backroads that most Southerners drive on every day. Unlike the interstates, whose roadsides have been largely scrubbed clean of regional character, these smaller roads travel through unplanned, vernacular landscapes that tell much about local life, both past and present, and suggest that we make connections between the two. David Wharton has been traveling throughout the American South since 1999, resulting in his first two books - Small Town South (2012) and The Power of Belief: Spiritual Landscapes from the Rural South (2016). As he journeyed, he often paused to make pictures of hamlets and the countryside he was driving through that did not fit the themes of those earlier books. These are scenes that speak to a sense of wonderment, or curiosity, about how those landscapes came to be and how they reflect a complex past with a modern-day world in which the urban competes with the rural in nearly every way. In Roadside South, the third book in Wharton's magical Trilogy of the American South, the photographer captures the quirky and the humorous, the sometimes sad and sometimes ironic scenes that are commonplace along the local, county, and state roads of the South. No artist has revealed the on-the-ground truth of the South as Wharton has, giving rise to a new understanding of and appreciation for a distinctive regional culture that all too frequently, and sometimes mistakenly, is imagined as a bastion of rural and small-town virtue.

Harlan Hubbard (1900-1988), Kentucky writer, environmentalist and artist, spent many years trying to rediscover and revive the vanishing language of landscape in his watercolor paintings. Known for their sense of drifting movement and their depiction of the simple way of life for which Hubbard was known, they inexplicably remain his least-studied artworks, despite being some of the best evidence of Hubbard's place in the history of landscape painting.The Watercolors of Harlan Hubbard not only argues Hubbard's place in the art historical canon, but also highlight and analyze the artist's own voice. In this unique collection, more than 200 watercolors are interspersed with anecdotes to present a personal meditation on the influence that Hubbard's work has had on the lives of those who knew him.

Originally written for the stage, We, the Women of Tehran illustrates from a female standpoint the origins and contradictions of the Iranian capital, and the rights of religious minorities and women. It showcases women who have played a leading role in various disciplines and sports but who all too often have simply become an element in the regime's propaganda. The volume presents a lively narrative with verses from the great Persian poets and a hefty dose of irony: as a way to laugh about complex issues and dismantle misleading stereotypes.

One of the most successful writers in Hollywood, Ernest Lehman penned some of the most iconic and memorable scenes to ever grace the silver screen. Hailed by Vanity Fair as "perhaps the greatest screenwriter in history," Lehman's work on films such as North by Northwest, The King and I, Sabrina, West Side Story, and the Sound of Music helped define a generation of movie making. But while his talent took center stage, the public knew little of Lehman himself, a native of Manhattan's Upper West Side and the Five Towns of Long Island devoted to his wife of 50 years. His relentless perfectionism, hypochondria and all-night writing sessions fueled by tequila and grilled cheese sandwiches were some of the quirks that made Lehman a legend in the Hollywood community. In Ernest Lehman: The Sweet Smell of Success, author Jon Krampner lays bare the life of this lauded yet elusive character. Moving seamlessly from post-production meetings to sound stages and onto the locations of Lehman's greatest films, Krampner's extensive biography brings to life the genius and singularity of the revered screenwriter's personality and the contributions he made to the world of cinema.