When people think of Kentucky, three things usually come to mind: bourbon, Colonel Sanders's secret chicken recipe, and the glamorous Kentucky Derby. Add college basketball to that list, and you have yourself a superfecta. Looking beyond these time-honored traditions, however, visitors will find in Kentucky a diverse patchwork of faces and places, each as unique as the state's geography. Kentucky, Y'all: A Celebration of the People and Culture of the Bluegrass State is an entertaining and informative compilation of the state's favorite oddities, cultural quirks, traditions, and rites of passage. Authors and proud Kentuckians Blair Thomas Hess and Cameron M. Ludwick share the best stories from their experiences as writers, travelers, and residents in this ode to the Commonwealth. From the iconic to the obscure, the book reveals vital knowledge that every Kentuckian—whether by birth, residence, or simply in mind and heart—should know. What is beer cheese? Who was Bill Monroe? Where can you get a hemp hot dog? Readers are introduced to the brilliant minds behind the Louisville Slugger, the Bowie Knife, and pioneering work in genetics. The book also includes a handy list of dos and don'ts of tailgating, a Kentucky sayings glossary, and bucket lists of things to do, drink, read, and eat.Featuring hand-drawn illustrations that represent life, fashion, and entertainment in the Commonwealth, Kentucky, Y'all is an insightful and exuberant guide to the Bluegrass State—for Kentucky natives and visitors alike.

Although there are currently only a handful of members of the Shaker faith and one active community in the world today, Shakerism at its peak comprised thousands of members living in communal villages across the eastern United States. Kentucky's iconic Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill was one of these communities, and it remains an enduring cultural touchstone. The history of the Shakers is often reduced to the handmade objects they produced and sold, but their lives were so much more than their material culture. Their efforts were suffused with their religious beliefs: each piece's sturdy simplicity memorializes the Believers' devotion to God and how it guided their every action.Shaker Made is photographer Carol Peachee's love letter to the cultural artifacts - the architecture, furniture, and crafts - of one of America's most influential utopian societies. Peachee has photographed Pleasant Hill for more than four decades - from small items such as eyeglasses, embroidered handkerchiefs, elixir bottles, and bonnets, to the distinguished furniture and architecture of the more than 260 buildings that the Shakers built at Pleasant Hill. The curator of collections at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Rebecca Soules, provides an informative foreword to the photos, while Peachee herself offers a lovingly written introduction explaining her personal connection to the subject. The attention to detail in the simple yet beautifully composed photographs evokes the "spirit of the maker" and serves as an elegant and respectful tribute to the history and legacy of the Pleasant Hill Shakers - an often-misunderstood people who sought to honor the divine in all aspects of life.

Machiavelli’s observation on leaders’ challenge to balance power is just as relevant in our time – with renewed military, economic and cultural conflicts – as it was in 16th century Florence. China’s growth, Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the increasing political and economic salience of the Global South have made the importance of competent leadership in political governance an ever more relevant issue.This anthology examines the challenges for leadership and statecraft in a progressively complex world and considers the question of how we can create political elites that are capable of safely guiding the West through the many challenges we face. By ensuring that both our past and present are taken into consideration, world-leading researchers and writers investigate how ideas of leadership have developed through history to give us a greater understanding of statecraft – and of what skills and organisations are needed to run small states, large empires and everything in between.

Iconoclasm, the destruction of images, is part of our history – from the destroying of religious images in early Christianity to today’s toppling of statues of Confederate generals and slave traders. Images, buildings and objects that violate religious or ideological beliefs must be wrecked. Those who perform such purges – iconoclasts – are convinced they are carrying out an act of purification. The past has been turned upside down in a desire to start over from the very beginning.The different contributions in the anthology Iconoclasm: Rejecting the Past make the consequences crystal-clear. Not just invaluable cultural treasures but also human lives are lost when fanaticism has free rein. We saw this when the Islamic State destroyed museum artefacts that were thousands of years old, when Mao’s Red Guards burned books and persecuted people who did not share their beliefs during China’s Cultural Revolution, or when the Russian Bolsheviks dynamited churches and desecrated icons.There are countless examples of the damage these destructive forces have wrought over the centuries. The battle cry of iconoclasm, which is so strong today, demonstrates its continued appeal. Iconoclasm: Rejecting the Past is a warning bell, an alarm, alerting readers to the threat against the tolerance and openness of democratic society.

Over the past half century, China has accomplished a great deal in the study of Islam, and established a certain academic system for its study. This book offers a history of contemporary Islamic research in China, analyzing the interdisciplinary research emerging from this system, from its background to the people involved, mechanisms, and their publications, scientific conferences, reference works and historical materials, and the branches of research: history, religion, philosophy, politics, and culture.

A Festschrift for Rifaat Ebied celebrating a lifetime of work in the field of Semitic Studies, in particular Syriac, Christian Arabic, and Mandaic.

During the early Hollywood sound era, studio director George Cukor produced nearly fifty films in as many years, famously winning the Best Director Oscar at the 1964 Academy Awards for My Fair Lady. His collaborations with so-called difficult actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe unsettled producers even as his ticket sales lined their pockets. Fired from Gone with the Wind for giving Vivien Leigh more screen time than Clark Gable, Cukor quickly earned a double-sided reputation as a "woman's director. " While the label celebrated his ability to help actresses deliver their best performances, the epithet also branded the gay director as suitable only for work on female-centered movies such as melodramas and romantic comedies. Desperate for success after a failed drag film nearly ended his career, Cukor swore to work within Hollywood's constraints.Nevertheless, What Price Hollywood? Gender and Sex in the Films of George Cukor finds that Cukor continued to explore gender and sexuality on-screen. Drawing on a broad array of theoretical lenses, Elyce Rae Helford examines how Cukor's award-winning films—titles including My Fair Lady and The Philadelphia Story—as well as his lesser-known films engage Hollywood masculinity and gender performativity through camp, drag, and mixed genres. Blending biography with critical analysis of more than twenty-five films, What Price Hollywood? tells the story of a once-in-a-generation director who produced some of the best films in history.

During funerals of nobles in the Kuba kingdom (Democratic Republic of Congo), visitors used to theatrically offer so-called bongotols to the deceased and the mourning family. These highly appreciated valuables were either positioned under the corpse to support it or displayed on top of it.In addition to their religious meaning they displayed the status and wealth of both givers and takers. Visitors would receive similar items in return. Afterwards the bongotols were stashed until, on occasion of a next burial, they would continue their cycles of gift and counter gift among the titled Kuba aristocracy.Death and display brings ethnographic research and archival sources to bear on these intriguing heirlooms. Their rich iconography offers a kaleidoscope of traditional Kuba sociality, cosmology and ritual.

In this edited volume, authors seek to document and analyze how state and non-state actors leverage digital rhetoric as a twenty-first-century weapon of war. Rhet Ops offer readers a chance to focus on the human dimension of rhetorical practice within mobile technologies and social networks: to reflect not only on the durable question of what it means to conduct oneself ethically as a speaker or writer, but also what it means to learn the art of rhetoric as a means to engage adversaries in war and conflict.

The volume examines the process of globalization from a genealogical point of view. By doing so, it offers a contribution to the understanding of the deep and critical spatial transformation reshaping our world from both a political and a conceptual point of view, taking into consideration recent developments including Brexit and the politics of Donald Trump. Focusing his analysis on the natural element of “air”, Vegetti provides an original approach to globalization. Following in the the footsteps of the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, Vegetti defines our global age as characterized by the transformation of the air into a concrete social space, first through the advent of airplanes, radio waves, and radar and now in the present-day structure of global networks.

For decades, smiling images of "Aunt Jemima" and other historical and fictional black cooks could be found on various food products and in advertising. Although these images were sanitized and romanticized in American popular culture, they represented the untold stories of enslaved men and women who had a significant impact on the nation's culinary and hospitality traditions, even as they were forced to prepare food for their oppressors.Kelley Fanto Deetz draws upon archaeological evidence, cookbooks, plantation records, and folklore to present a nuanced study of the lives of enslaved plantation cooks from colonial times through emancipation and beyond. She reveals how these men and women were literally "bound to the fire" as they lived and worked in the sweltering and often fetid conditions of plantation house kitchens. These highly skilled cooks drew upon knowledge and ingredients brought with them from their African homelands to create complex, labor-intensive dishes. However, their white owners overwhelmingly received the credit for their creations. Deetz restores these forgotten figures to their rightful place in American and Southern history by uncovering their rich and intricate stories and celebrating their living legacy with the recipes that they created and passed down to future generations.

Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future uses the lens of queer ecologies to explore environmental destruction in Appalachia while mapping out alternative futures that follow from critical queer perspectives on the United States' exploitation of the land. With essays by Lis Regula, Jessica Cory, Chet Pancake, Tijah Bumgarner, MJ Eckhouse, and other essential thinkers, this collection brings to light both emergent and long-standing marginalized perspectives that give renewed energy to the struggle for a sustainable future. A new and valuable contribution to the field of Appalachian studies, rural queer studies, Indigenous studies, and ethnographic studies of the United States, Deviant Hollers presents a much-needed objection to the status quo of academic work, as well as to the American exceptionalism and white supremacy pervading US politics and the broader geopolitical climate. By focusing on queer critiques and acknowledging the status of Appalachia as a settler colony, Deviant Hollers offers new possibilities for a reimagined way of life.

Rural life and culture hold a practical and symbolic importance in American society. A central tenet to the survival of our cherished values—and of ourselves as a species—is the stewardship of cultural diversity and the places that foster it, like rural America. These may be the places that teach us to use land to make a living and to make a life, to forge and carry on our identities, and to feel history. They may yield a harvest of policies for managing an environmental balancing act that will preserve essential resources for America's children's children.Power and Place: Preservation, Progress, and the Culture War over Land examines the ongoing culture wars that pit conservation against economic progress. For author Melinda Bollar Wagner, what began as a study of Appalachia's long-standing and continuing status as an energy sacrifice zone evolved into a twenty-four-year research project that sheds new light on the physical and emotional parameters of cultural attachment to land. Drawing on interviews with more than 220 residents from ten communities in five Appalachian counties, Power and Place gives voice to rural citizens whose place at the table is far from assured with regard to critical energy, environmental, and infrastructure decisions.

At the conclusion of WWII, no part of the world experienced a more dramatic transformation than East Asia. The region's political stability throughout the postwar period prompted exponential economic growth that ultimately established South Korea, Japan, and China as East Asia's most important powers. While many citizens of these nations now live in a time of unprecedented prosperity, the arrangement that supported this region's transformation is fragile. With the second largest economy and a burgeoning military sector, China is widely acknowledged as the preeminent rising world power. The onus of maintaining balance in the region now rests primarily with South Korea and Japan in partnership with the United States. However, because of long-standing weaknesses in South Korea–Japan relations and an inconsistent US commitment to the region, the possibility that China could usher in a more uncertain era of revisionism has never been more likely.In Strengthening South Korea-Japan Relations: East Asia's International Order and a Rising China, Dennis Patterson and Jangsup Choi address the historical roots of this weak alliance. Combining decades of research with current public opinion data, the authors warn that the tendency of these nations to rely on the United States to maintain the status quo has become dangerously unstable. A new strategy, one of cooperation and collaboration, is needed to prevent China from upending the region's current liberal international order.

This book highlights aspects of the spiritual culture within Islam that flourished along the 'Silk Roads' – the term coined by Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877 to describe the web of caravan routes that connected China, South and Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. The movement of goods and of people was accompanied by the circulation of ideas, bringing about a vivid exchange in the cultural sphere – sufism, or tasawwuf, was one such idea. Focusing on this theme, these conference proceedings draw attention to the multiple dimensions embraced by tasawwuf, both in its temporal (i. e. historical, ethnographical and social) context, as well as its atemporal one (i.e. concerning spirituality and the ways this is conveyed and transmitted, both in the past and in the present).

Unlike in English and French cultural fields, where fashion during WWII is widely debated, in Italy the relationship between fashion and Fascism is an under-researched topic, separated from the study of Fascist institutions and bureaucracy. The behind-the-scene history of the fashion magazine Bellezza, the Italian Vogue founded in 1941, has never been submitted to scholarly attention. Its utopian function in defining a new culture of fashion and code of glamour contributed to the totalitarian project of building a ‘new Italian woman’. The current volume fills this gap, using the case of Bellezza as a kaleidoscope through which to examine Italian history and culture drawing on new primary sources and extraordinary iconography.