Samuel and Althea Stroum Books

The Plains region that stretches from northern Colorado to southern Alberta and from the Rockies to the western Dakotas is the land of the Cheyenne and the Blackfeet, the Crow and the Sioux. Its rolling grasslands and river valleys have nurtured human cultures for thousands of years. On cave walls, glacial boulders, and riverside cliffs, native people recorded their ceremonies, vision quests, battles, and daily activities in the petroglyphs and pictographs they incised, pecked, or painted onto the stone surfaces.

In this vast landscape, some rock art sites were clearly intended for communal use; others just as clearly mark the occurrence of a private spiritual encounter. Elders often used rock art, such as complex depictions of hunting, to teach traditional knowledge and skills to the young. Other sites document the medicine powers and brave deeds of famous warriors. Some Plains rock art goes back more than 5,000 years; some forms were made continuously over many centuries.

Archaeologists James Keyser and Michael Klassen show us the origins, diversity, and beauty of Plains rock art. The seemingly endless variety of images include humans, animals of all kinds, weapons, masks, mazes, handprints, finger lines, geometric and abstract forms, tally marks, hoofprints, and the wavy lines and starbursts that humans universally associate with trancelike states. Plains Indian Rock Art is the ultimate guide to the art form. It covers the natural and archaeological history of the northwestern Plains; explains rock art forms, techniques, styles, terminology, and dating; and offers interpretations of images and compositions.

From the river valleys of interior British Columbia south to the hills of northern Oregon and east to the continental divide in western Montana, hundreds of cliffs and boulders display carved and painted designs created by ancient artists who inhabited this area, the Columbia Plateau, as long as seven thousand years ago.

Expressing a vital social and spiritual dimension in the lives of these hunter-gathers, rock art captivates us with its evocative power and mystery. At once an irreplaceable yet fragile cultural resource, it documents Native histories, customs, and visions through thousands of years.

This valuable reference and guidebook addresses basic questions of what petroglyphs and pictographs are, how they were produced, and how archaeologists classify and date them. James Keyser identifies five regions on the Columbia Plateau, each with its own variant of the rock art style identifiable as belonging exclusively to the region. He describes for each region the setting and scope of the rock art along with its design characteristics and possible meaning. Through line drawings, photographs, and detailed maps he provides a guide to the sites where rock art can be viewed.

In western Montana, rock art motifs express the ritualistic seeking of a spirit helper from the natural world. In interior British Columbia, rayed arcs above the heads of human figures demonstrate possession of a guardian spirit. Twin figures on the central Columbia Plateau reveal another belief--the special power of twins--and hunting scenes celebrate success of the chase. The grimacing evocative face of Tsagiglalal, in lower Columbia pictographs, testifies to the Plateau Indians’ “death cult” response to the European diseases that decimated their villages between 1700 and 1840. On the southeastern Plateau, images of horse-back riders mark the adoption, after 1700 of the equestrian and cultural habits of the northwestern Great Plains Indians.

Despite geographic differences in emphasis, similarities in design and technique link the drawings of all five regions. Human figures, animals depicting numerous species on the Plateau, geometric motifs, mysterious beings, and tally marks, whether painted or carved, appear throughout the Columbia Plateau.

The first edition of Shaping Seattle Architecture, published in 1994, introduced readers to Seattle’s architects by showcasing the work of those who were instrumental in creating the region’s built environment. Twenty years later, the second edition updates and expands the original with new information and illustrations that provide an even richer exploration of Seattle architecture.

The book begins with a revised introduction that brings the story of Seattle architecture into the twenty-first century and situates developments in Seattle building design within local and global contexts. The book’s fifty-four essays present richly illustrated profiles that describe the architects' careers, provide an overview of their major works, and explore their significance.

Shaping Seattle Architecture celebrates a wide range of people who helped form the region's built environment. It provides updated information about many of the architects and firms profiled in the first edition. Four individuals newly included in this second edition are Edwin J. Ivey, a leading residential designer; Fred Bassetti, an important contributor to Northwest regional modernism; L. Jane Hastings, one of the region’s foremost women in architecture; and Richard Haag, founder of the landscape architecture program at the University of Washington and designer of Gas Works Park and the Bloedel Reserve.

The book also includes essays on the buildings of the Coast Salish people, who inhabited Puget Sound prior to Euro-American settlement; the role that architects played in speculative housing developments before and after World War II; and the vernacular architecture built by nonprofessionals that makes up a portion of the fabric of the city.

Shaping Seattle Architecture concludes with a substantial reference section, updated to reflect the last twenty years of research and publications. A locations appendix offers a geographic guide to surviving works. The research section directs interested readers to further resources, and the appendix “Additional Significant Seattle Architects” provides thumbnail sketches of nearly 250 important figures not included in the main text.

The Pacific Northwest experiences the most varied and fascinating weather in the United States, including world-record winter snows, the strongest non-tropical storms in the nation, and shifts from desert to rain forest in a matter of miles. Local weather features dominate the meteorological landscape, from the Puget Sound convergence zone and wind surges along the Washington Coast, to gap winds through the Columbia Gorge and the �Banana Belt� of southern Oregon. This book is the first comprehensive and authoritative guide to Northwest weather that is directed to the general reader; helpful to boaters, hikers, and skiers; and valuable to expert meteorologists.

In The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington atmospheric scientist and popular radio commentator Cliff Mass unravels the intricacies of Northwest weather, from the mundane to the mystifying. By examining our legendary floods, snowstorms, and windstorms, and a wide variety of local weather features, Mass answers such interesting questions as:

o Why does the Northwest have localized rain shadows?

o What is the origin of the hurricane force winds that often buffet the region?

o Why does the Northwest have so few thunderstorms?

o What is the origin of the Pineapple Express?

o Why do ferryboats sometimes seem to float above the water's surface?

o Why is it so hard to predict Northwest weather?

Mass brings together eyewitness accounts, historical records, and meteorological science to explain Pacific Northwest weather. He also considers possible local effects of global warming. The final chapters guide readers in interpreting the Northwest sky and in securing weather information on their own.

Penguins, among the most delightful creatures in the world, are also among the most vulnerable. The fragile status of most penguin populations today mirrors the troubled condition of the southern oceans, as well as larger marine conservation problems: climate change, pollution, and fisheries mismanagement. This timely book presents the most current knowledge on each of the eighteen penguin species-from the majestic emperor penguins of the Antarctic to the tiny blue penguins of New Zealand and Australia, from the northern rockhopper penguins of the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans to the Galapagos penguins of the equator-written by the leading experts in the field.

Included for each species:

o Life history

o Distribution, population sizes and trends

o International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) status

o Threats to survival

o Legal protection

The book also provides information on current conservation efforts, outlines the most important actions to be taken to increase each population's resilience, and recommends further research needed to protect penguins and the living creatures that share their environment.

Beautifully illustrated with full-color photographs of each species in their natural habitat and detailed charts and graphs, Penguins will be an invaluable tool for researchers, conservation groups, and policy makers. It will also enchant anyone interested in the lives or the plight of these fascinating animals.

Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s0BbIU6cqE&feature=plcp

In the first major study of women in an Arab country’s Jewish community, Rachel Simon examines the changing status of Jewish women in Libya from the second half of the nineteenth century until 1967, when most Jews left the country. Simon shows how social, economic, and political changes in Libyan society as a whole affected its Jewish minority and analyzes the developments in women’s social position, family life, work, education, and participation in public life.

Jews lived in Libya for more than two thousand years. As a result of their isolation from other Jewish centers and their extended coexistence with Berber and Arab Muslims, the Jews of Libya were strongly influenced by the manners, customs, regulations, and beliefs of the Muslim majority. The late nineteenth century witnessed a growing European cultural and economic penetration of Ottoman Liibya, which increased after the Italian occupation of Libya in 1911. Italian rule continued until a British Military Administration was established in 1942-43. Libya became independent in late 1951. The changing political regimes presented the Jewish minority with different models of social and cultural behavior. These changes in the foci of inspiration and imitation had significant implications for the position of Jewish women, as Jewish traditional society was exposed to modernizing and Westernizing influences.

Economic factors had a strong impact on the position of women. Because of recurring economic crises in the late nineteenth century, Jewish families became willing to allow women to work outside the home. Some families also allowed their daughters to pursue vocational training and thus exposed them also to academic studies, especially at schools operated by representatives of European Jewish organizations.

Although economic and educational opportunities for women increased, the Jewish community as a whole remained traditional in its social structure, worldview, and approach to interpersonal relations. The principles upon which the community operated did not change drastically, and the male power structure did not alter in either the private or the public domain. Thus the position of women changed little within these spheres, despite the expansion of opportunities for women in education and economic life. Change was slow, evolutionary, and within the framework of traditional society.

Autobiographical texts are rare in the Sephardi world. Gabriel Arié’s writings provide a special perspective on the political, economic, and cultural changes undergone by the Eastern Sephardi community in the decades before its dissolution, in regions where it had been constituted since the expulsion from Spain in 1492. His history is a fascinating memoir of the Sephardi and Levantine bourgeoisie of the time. For his entire life, Arié—teacher, historian, community leader, and businessman—was caught between East and West. Born in a small provincial town in Ottoman Bulgaria in 1863, he witnessed the disappearance of a social and political order that had lasted for centuries and its replacement by new ideas and new ways of life, which would irreversibly transform Jewish existence.

A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe publishes in full the autobiography (covering the years 1863-1906) and journal (1906-39) of Gabriel Arié, along with selections from his letters to the Alliance Israélite Universelle. An introduction by Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue analyzes his life and examines the general and the Jewish contexts of the Levant at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia (OPE) was a philanthropic organization, the oldest Jewish organization in Russia. Founded by a few wealthy Jews in St. Petersburg who wanted to improve opportunities for Jewish people in Russia by increasing their access to education and modern values, OPE was secular and nonprofit. The group emphasized the importance of the unity of Jewish culture to help Jews integrate themselves into Russian society by opening, supporting, and subsidizing schools throughout the country.

While reaching out to Jews across Russia, OPE encountered opposition on all fronts. It was hobbled by the bureaucracy and sometimes outright hostility of the Russian government, which imposed strict regulations on all aspects of Jewish lives. The OPE was also limited by the many disparate voices within the Jewish community itself. Debates about the best type of schools (secular or religious, co-educational or single-sex, traditional or "modern") were constant. Even the choice of language for the schools was hotly debated.

Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia offers a model of individuals and institutions struggling with the concern so central to contemporary Jews in America and around the world: how to retain a strong Jewish identity, while fully integrating into modern society.

Gifted travel writer, poet, professor of English, and insightful observer of human nature, Colleen McElroy journeyed to Madagascar to undertake a Fulbright research project exploring Malagasy oral traditions and myths. In Over the Lip of the World she depicts with equal verve the various storytelling traditions of the island and her own adventures in trying to find and record them.

McElroy’s tale of an African American woman’s travels among the people of Madagascar is told with wit, insight, and humor. Throughout it she interweaves English translations of Malagasy stories of heroism and morality, royalty and commoners, love and revenge, and the magic of tricksters and shapechangers.

Repairing the American Metropolis is based on Douglas Kelbaugh’s Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design, first published in 1997. It is more timely and significant than ever, with new text, charts, and images on architecture, sprawl, and New Urbanism, a movement that he helped pioneer. Theory and policies have been revised, refined, updated, and developed as compelling ways to plan and design the built environment.

This is an indispensable book for architects, urban designers and planners, landscape architects, architecture and urban planning students and scholars, government officials, developers, environmentalists, and citizens interested in understanding and shaping the American metropolis.

A native of northern Russia, Alexander Baranov was a middle-aged merchant trader with no prior experience in the fur trade when, in 1790, he arrived in North America to assume command over Russia’s highly profitable sea otter business. With the title of chief manager, he strengthened his leadership role after the formation of the Russian American Company in 1799. An adventuresome, dynamic, and charismatic leader, he proved to be something of a commercial genius in Alaska, making huge profits for company partners and shareholders in Irkutsk and St. Petersburg while receiving scandalously little support from the homeland.

Baranov receives long overdue attention in Kenneth Owens’s Empire Maker, the first scholarly biography of Russian America’s virtual imperial viceroy. His eventful life included shipwrecks, battles with Native forces, clashes with rival traders and Russian Orthodox missionaries, and an enduring marriage to a Kodiak Alutiiq woman with whom he had two children. In the process, the book reveals maritime Alaska and northern California during the Baranov era as fascinating cultural borderlands, where Russian, English, Spanish, and New England Yankee traders and indigenous peoples formed complex commercial, political, and domestic relationships that continue to influence these regions today.

During the last two centuries BCE, the Western Han capital of Chang'an, near today's Xi'an in northwest China, outshone Augustan Rome in several ways while administering comparable numbers of imperial subjects and equally vast territories. At its grandest, during the last fifty years or so before the collapse of the dynasty in 9 CE, Chang’an boasted imperial libraries with thousands of documents on bamboo and silk in a city nearly three times the size of Rome and nearly four times larger than Alexandria. Many reforms instituted in this capital in ate Western Han substantially shaped not only the institutions of the Eastern Han (25–220 CE) but also the rest of imperial China until 1911.

Although thousands of studies document imperial Rome’s glory, until now no book-length work in a Western language has been devoted to Han Chang’an, the reign of Emperor Chengdi (whose accomplishments rival those of Augustus and Hadrian), or the city's impressive library project (26-6 BCE), which ultimately produced the first state-sponsored versions of many of the classics and masterworks that we hold in our hands today. Chang’an 26 BCE addresses this deficiency, using as a focal point the reign of Emperor Chengdi (r. 33–7 bce), specifically the year in which the imperial library project began. This in-depth survey by some of the world’s best scholars, Chinese and Western, explores the built environment, sociopolitical transformations, and leading figures of Chang’an, making a strong case for the revision of historical assumptions about the two Han dynasties. A multidisciplinary volume representing a wealth of scholarly perspectives, the book draws on the established historical record and recent archaeological discoveries of thousands of tombs, building foundations, and remnants of walls and gates from Chang’an and its surrounding area.

From their home bases in Idaho and neighboring areas of the Northwest, organizations such as the Order, the Aryan Nations Church, the Posse Comitatus, and the Golden Mean Society have drawn national attention and spread the gospel of a “constitutionally pure, Christian homeland.” For the reader who knows these groups only from a selection of inflammatory quotes and violent deeds, this compelling work presents the first disciplined exploration of the backgrounds and belief systems of the Christian patriot movement. Using information gathered from interviews and direct observation of patriot gatherings, Aho replaces the stereotype of solitary crazies from the fringes of society with more complex and disturbing realities.

Hiking Washington�s History reveals the stories embedded in Washington�s landscape. This trail guide narrates forty historic trails, ranging from short day hikes to three- or four-day backpacking trips over mountain passes. Every region in the state is included, from the northwesternmost tip of the continental United States at Cape Flattery to the remote Blue Mountains in the southeast. Each chapter begins with a brief overview of the region�s history followed by individual trail narratives and historical highlights. Quotes from diaries, journals, letters, and reports, as well as contemporary and historic photographs, describe sites and trails from Washington�s past. Each trail description includes a map and provides directions, so hikers can follow the historic route. Judy Bentley tells readers how to get there, what to expect, and what to look for.

Despite Washington State�s rapid growth, a remarkable number of historic trails have been preserved in national parks, restored by cities and towns, returned to public use by the railroads, or opened to hikers by Native American tribes. Some trails, such as the Iron Goat Trail, have been fully restored and interpreted. Others, such as the Naches Pass Trail, have been abused but survive. Some are easily accessible, such as the Duwamish River Trail in Seattle and the Spokane House trails near Spokane. Others, such as Chief Joseph�s Summer Trail, require a half-day journey just to reach the trailhead.

Hiking Washington�s History is for hikers, amateur historians, newcomers unfamiliar with the state's history, and Northwest natives who know only part of that history. Savor the vicarious experience of a hike from a cozy chair on a rainy winter day, or put your boots on and hit the trail when the sun shines.

Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aulywhW2mY

Among all the large whales on Earth, the most unusual and least studied is the narwhal, the northernmost whale on the planet and the one most threatened by global warming. Narwhals thrive in the fjords and inlets of northern Canada and Greenland. These elusive whales, whose long tusks were the stuff of medieval European myths and Inuit legends, are uniquely adapted to the Arctic ecosystem and are able to dive below thick sheets of ice to depths of up to 1,500 meters in search of their prey-halibut, cod, and squid.

Join Todd McLeish as he travels high above the Arctic circle to meet:

Teams of scientific researchers studying the narwhal's life cycle and the mysteries of its tusk

Inuit storytellers and hunters

Animals that share the narwhals' habitat: walruses, polar bears, bowhead and beluga whales, ivory gulls, and two kinds of seals

McLeish consults logbooks kept by whalers and explorers and interviews folklorists and historians to tease out the relationship between the real narwhal and the mythical unicorn. In Colorado, he visits climatologists studying changes in the seasonal cycles of the Arctic ice. From a history of the trade in narwhal tusks to descriptions of narwhals' vocalizations as heard through hydrophones, Narwhals reveals the beauty and thrill of the narwhal and its habitat, and the threat it faces from a rapidly changing world.

Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHwaqdKyLCQ&list=UUge4MONgLFncQ1w1C_BnHcw&index=9&feature=plcp

Sudden cardiac arrest is the leading cause of death among adults, yet it need not be fatal. Though survival in most communities is very poor, a few communities achieve rates as high as 50%. Why are some communities so successful in snatching life from the jaws of death? Resuscitate! describes the steps any EMS system can take to improve cardiac arrest survival. It is written for the medical directors, administrative directors, fire chiefs, dispatch directors, and program supervisor who direct and run EMS systems all across the country, and for the EMTs, paramedics, and dispatchers who provide frontline care.

This second edition of Resuscitate! provides fifteen concrete steps to improve survival. Four steps will lead to rapid improvements at the local level and are relatively easy to implement. Six additional steps are more difficult to implement but also likely to improve survival. The remaining steps recommend changes at the national level.

Resuscitate! is the official textbook for the Resuscitation Academy, held twice a year in Seattle. Cosponsored by Seattle Medic One, King County EMS, and the Medic One Foundation, the Academy draws attendees from throughout the world for two intensive days of classes, demonstrations, and workshops to acquire the knowledge and tools to improve survival in their own communities. This new edition includes lessons learned from attendees of the Academy as well as from the faculty's evolving thoughts on how to measure performance and improve survival, one community at a time. It also includes an addendum on the Resuscitation Academy (resuscitationacademy.org).

For more than thirty years, Mickey S. Eisenberg M.D., Ph.D. , has played a leading role in developing King County, Washington's emergency response to cases of sudden cardiac arrest, a system recognized as among the very best in the nation. He is a professor of medicine at the University of Washington and serves as the medical director of King County Emergency Medical Services.

This groundbreaking study of a little-explored branch of American literature both chronicles and reinterprets the variety of patterns found within Hawaii’s pastoral and heroic literary traditions, and is unprecedented in its scope and theme. As a literary history, it covers two centuries of Hawaii’s culture since the arrival of Captain James Cookin 1778. Its approach is multicultural, representing the spectrum of native Hawaiian, colonial, tourist, and polyethnic local literatures. Explicit historical, social, political, and linguistic context of Hawaii, as well as literary theory, inform Stephen Sumida’s analyses and explications of texts, which in turn reinterpret the nonfictional contexts themselves. These “texts” include poems, song lyrics, novels and short fiction, drama and oral traditions that epitomize cultural milieus and sensibilities.

Hawaii’s rich literary tradition begins with ancient Polynesian chant and encompasses the compelling novels of O.A. Bushnell, Shelley Ota, Kazuo Miyamoto, Milton Marayama, and John Dominis Holt; the stories of Patsy Saiki and Darrell Lum; the dramas of Aldyth Morris; the poetry of Cathy Song, Erick Chock, Jody Manabe, Wing Tek Lum, and others of the contemporary “Bamboo Ridge” group; Hawaiian songs and poetry, or mele; and works written by visitors from outside the islands, such as the journals of Captain Cook and the prose fiction of Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and James Michener. Sumida discusses the renewed enthusiasm for native Hawaiian culture and the controversies over Hawaii’s vernacular pidgins and creoles. His achievement in developing a functional and accessible critical and intellectual framework for analyzing this diverse material is remarkable, and his engaging and perceptive analysis of these works invites the reader to explore further in the literature itself and to reconsider the present and future direction of Hawaii’s writers.

The Shattered Gourd uses the lens of visual art to examine connections between the United States and the Yoruba region of western Nigeria.

In Yoruba legend, the sacred Calabash of Being contained the Water of Life; when the gourd was shattered, its fragments were scattered over the ground, death invaded the world, and imperfection crept into human affairs. In more modern times, the shattered gourd has symbolized the warfare and enslavement that culminated in the black diasporas.

The "re-membering" of the gourd is represented by the survival of people of African origin all over the Americas, and, in this volume, by their rediscovery of African art forms on the diaspora soil of the United States. Twentieth-century African American artists employing Yoruba images in their work have gone from protest art to the exploration and celebration of the self and the community. But because the social, economic, and political context of African art forms differs markedly from that of American culture, critical contradictions between form and meaning often appear in African American works that use African forms.

In this book � the first to treat Yoruba forms while transcending the conventional emphasis on them as folk art, focusing instead on the high art tradition � Moyo Okediji uses nearly four dozen works to illustrate a broad thematic treatment combined with a detailed approach to individual African and African American artists. Incorporating works by such artists as Meta Warrick Fuller, Hale Woodruff, Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, Ademola Olugebefola, Paul Keene, Jeff Donaldson, Howardena Pindell, Muneer Bahauddeen, Michelle Turner, Michael Harris, Winnie Owens-Hart, and John Biggers, the author invites the reader to envision what he describes as "the immense possibilities of the future, as the twenty-first century embraces the twentieth in a primal dance of the diasporas," a future that heralds the advent of the global as a distinct movement in art, beyond postmodernism.

In the early twentieth century, the appearance of new houses across the United States shifted dramatically. Rejecting the elaborate decoration and complexity of Victorian homes, these new houses featured open, parlorless interiors and a minimalist aesthetic, radiating an aura of warmth, coziness, and naturalness. Nowhere were such residences more evident than in West Coast cities, especially Seattle, where explosive growth generated entire neighborhoods of this new house type--the bungalow. It was the nation's first modern home, and it established the essential characteristics of popular housing for the rest of the twentieth century.

In The Seattle Bungalow, Janet Ore modifies the common notion that architectural change flows only from the design elite--the architects, domestic reformers, and planners who advocate for changes in domestic architecture--and argues that ordinary people played a crucial role in creating the bungalow. Through their growing power as consumers, modest-income families influenced the physical form of early twentieth-century houses and suburban landscapes. Still operating within a nineteenth-century labor and contracting system, small home builders responded to rising consumer demand for new conveniences such as electricity and central heating by simplifying their structures. Ambitious salespeople-real estate agents, plan book purveyors, and builders--created a new market for affordable small houses through astute advertising and financing. And once families acquired their homes, they used them flexibly, adapting their lives to their domestic spaces and refashioning their homes when necessary. From such efforts sprang the Seattle bungalow, an artifact of ordinary people's part in creating modern culture.

In the course of his ongoing study of the aesthetic world of the Limba of Sierra Leone, anthropologist Simon Ottenberg met three men from Wara Wara Bafodea chiefdom who played an instrument called the kututeng, known elsewhere in Africa as the mbira and sometimes in the West as the thumb piano. Each of the three was blind, poor, unmarried, and childless in a society where children bring status and where musicianship is not a standard role for the blind. Each man’s life experiences had influenced the way he performed Kututeng, a traditional but changing form of music.

In this book, Ottenberg approaches Limba Kututeng music through the lives of these three musicians—Sayo Kamara, Muctaru Mansaray, and Marehu Mansaray. He looks at their different styles of performance, the social settings in which they play, the meanings of their song texts, and the relationships between their musical form and other Limba arts.

Ottenberg filters his analysis through the concepts of personhood and agency: he is concerned with the actions and experiences of individuals within a larger cultural structure, with the way people act to maintain or re-create their culture and society as they go about their everyday business. By examining the lives and music of these three men, he is able to show how each one has been an agent for either innovation or stability in Kututeng music in this Limba chiefdom.

Throughout the book, Ottenberg attempts to let the musicians’ voices and personalities be heard and seen. He believes that looking at music and performance through their eyes, rather than solely through the anthropologist’s organized categories, offers a useful alternative way of understanding how music is practiced, responded to, and changed by individuals. At the same time, Ottenberg makes readers aware of his own agency—the effects his presence, personality, and life experiences had on his fieldwork.

Kututeng music is not an ancient tradition in Limba country, or in Sierra Leone in general, but dates to the early twentieth century. In recent years it has begun to change in response to the popularity of other musical forms in Sierra Leone. Ottenberg shows effectively how these three men have helped reformulate the nature of Kututeng in the chiefdom capital town, giving it a new vitality that is consistent with the aesthetic values of the Limba world.

Rural fires were an even more persistent scourge than famine in late imperial Russia, as Cathy Frierson shows in this first comprehensive study. Destroying almost three billion rubles’ worth of property in European Russia between 1860 and 1904, accidental and arson fires acted as a brake on Russia’s economic development while subjecting peasants to perennial shocks to their physical and emotional condition. The fire question captured the attention of educated, progressive Russians, who came to perceived it as a key obstacle to Russia’s becoming a modern society in the European model.

Using sources ranging from literary representations and newspaper articles to statistical tables and court records, Frierson demonstrates the many meanings fire held for both peasants and the educated elite. To peasants, it was an essential source of light and warmth as well as a destructive force that regularly ignited their cramped villages of wooden, thatch-roofed huts. Absent the rule of law, they often used arson to gain justice or revenge, or to exert social control over those who would violate village norms. Frierson shows that the vast majority of arson cases in European Russia were not peasant-against-gentry acts of protest but peasant-against-peasant acts of "self-help" law or plain spite.

Both the state and individual progressives set out to resolve the fire question and to educate, cajole, or coerce the peasantry into the modern world. Fire insurance, building codes, "scientific" village layouts, and volunteer firefighting brigades reduced the average number of buildings consumed in each blaze, but none of these measures succeeded in curbing the number of fires each year.

More than anything else, this history of fire and arson in rural European Russia is a history of their cultural meanings in the late imperial campaign for modernity. Frierson shows the special associations of women with fire in rural life and in elite understanding of fire in the Russian countryside. Her study of the fire question demonstrates both peasant agency in fighting fire and educated Russians' hardening conviction that peasants stood in the way of Russia's advent into the company of prosperous, rational, civilized nations.

The majestic beauty of Mount Rainier, which dominates the Seattle and Tacoma skyscapes, has in many ways defined the Pacific Northwest. At the same time, those two major cities have strongly influenced the development of Rainier as a national park. From the late 1890s, when the Pacific Forest Reserve became Mount Rainier National Park, the evolving relationship between the mountain and its surrounding residents has told a history of the region itself. That story also describes the changing nature of our national park system.

From the late nineteenth century to the present, park service representatives and other officials have created policies, built roads and hotels, and regulated public use of and access to Mount Rainier. Conflicting interests have shaped the decision-making process and characterized human interaction with the park. The Rainier National Park Company promoted Paradise Inn as a destination resort for East Coast tourists; Cooperative Campers of the Pacific Northwest developed backcountry camps for working-class recreationists; Asahel Curtis of the Good Roads Association wanted a road encircling the mountain; The Mountaineers promoted free public campgrounds and a roadless preserve; others focused on managing and protecting the upper mountain. The National Park Service mediated among the various parties while developing their own master plan for the park.

In an engaging and accessible style, historian Theodore Catton tells the story of Mount Rainier, examining the controversies and compromises that have shaped one of America's most beautiful and beloved parks. National Park, City Playground reminds us that the way we manage our wilderness areas is a vital concern not only for the National Park Service, but for all citizens.

Prolonged violence in the Horn of Africa, the northeastern corner of the continent, has led growing numbers of Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Somalis to flee to the United States. Despite the enmity created by centuries of conflict, they often find themselves living as neighbors in their adopted cities, with their children as class-mates in school. In many ways, they are successfully navigating life in their new home; however, they continue to struggle to bridge old ethnic divisions and find salaam, or peace, with one another. News from home fuels historical grievances and perpetuates tensions within their communities, delaying acculturation, undermining attempts at reconciliation, and sabotaging the opportunity to reach the American Dream.

In conversations with forty East African immigrants living in Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, Sandra Chait captures the immigrants' struggle for identity in the face of competing stories and documents how some individuals have been able to transcend the ghosts from the past and extend a tentative hand to their former enemies.

How Many Machine Guns Does It Take to Cook One Meal? explores the cultural forces that shaped two pivotal events affecting the entire West Coast: the 1919 Seattle General Strike and the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. In contrast to traditional approaches that downplay culture or focus on the role of socialists or communists, Victoria Johnson shows how strike participants were inspired by distinctly American notions of workplace democracy that can be traced back to the political philosophies of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

Johnson examines the powerful stories and practices from our own egalitarian traditions that resonated with these workers and that have too often been dismissed by observers of the American labor movement. Ultimately, she argues that organized labor's failure to draw on these traditions in later decades contributed to its decreasing capacity to mobilize workers as well as to the increasing conservatism of American political culture.

This book will appeal to scholars of western and labor history, sociology, and political science, as well as to anyone interested in the intersection of labor and culture.

Over the years, Chief Seattle's famous speech has been embellished, popularized, and carved into many a monument, but its origins have remained inadequately explained. Understood as a symbolic encounter between indigenous America, represented by Chief Seattle, and industrialized or imperialist America, represented by Isaac L Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory, it was first published in a Seattle newspaper in 1887 by a pioneer who claimed he had heard Seattle (or Sealth) deliver it in the 1850s. No other record of the speech has been found, and Isaac Stevens's writings do not mention it Yet it has long been taken seriously as evidence of a voice crying out of the wilderness of the American past.

Answering Chief Seattle presents the full and accurate text of the 1887 version and traces the distortions of later versions in order to explain the many layers of its mystery. This book also asks how the speech could be heard and answered, by reviewing its many contexts. Mid-century ideas about land, newcomers, ancestors, and future generations informed the ways Stevens and his contemporaries understood Chief Seattle and recreated him as a legendary figure.

Today's world is shaped by an obsession with cultural difference that penetrates everyday life and matters of state in unprecedented ways. Culture and cultural difference are commonly used to explain everything that's in the news - from wars to economic development and consumer behavior. This fuels the belief that our world is shaped by clashing cultures, a view that is counterproductive when it assumes falsely that culture is a timeless container that traps nations and ethnic groups.

Seeing Culture Everywhere challenges the misguided and dangerous global obsession with cultural difference and directly critiques the popular notion that world affairs are determined by essential civilizations with immutable and conflicting cultures. The book offers an alternative view of a world in which cultural mixing, not isolation, is the norm, but where several historical trends have come together at the beginning of the twenty-first century to produce the current wave of "culture think." Brimming with concrete examples that move from genocide in Rwanda to schools in Berlin, from the Chrysler boardroom to the war in Iraq, it contemplates how ethnic identity can be mobilized in the service of all kinds of goals - violent or nonviolent, laudable or despicable - and the unintended effects such mobilization invariably produces. The authors suggest ways to remain sensitive to the cultural impacts of policies and decisions without falling into the traps of determinism, essentialism, and misrepresentation.

Seeing Culture Everywhere will be useful in the fields of anthropology, law, intercultural communication, and international relations, as well as for general readers interested in ethnicity and travel.

On November 11, 1919, the citizens of Centralia, Washington, gathered to watch former servicemen, local Boy Scouts, and other community groups march in the Armstice Day parade. When the marchers swung past the meeting hall of the Industrial Workers of the World, a group of veterans broke ranks, charged the hall, and were met by gunshots. Before the day was over, four of the marchers were dead and one of the Wobblies had been lynched by the mob.

Through a wealth of newly available primary source material including previously sealed court documents, FBI records released under the Freedom of Information Act, and interviews with surviving witnesses, Tom Copeland has pieced together the events of that day and has traced the fate of the men who were accused and convicted of murdering the marchers. Copeland focuses on Elmer Smith, the local attorney who advised the Wobblies that they had the right to defend their hall against an anticipated attack.

Although he never belonged to the IWW, Smith sympathized with their interests, championing the rights of working people, and speaking on their behalf. He was originally arrested with the Wobbles and then took up their cause in the courts, beginning a life-long struggle to free the men who were charged with murdering the Centralia marchers. Copeland recounts Smith’s disbarment and eventual reinstatement, his run for political office, his speeches throughout the Northwest, and his unyielding support for the workers’ cause.

This book is a balanced treatment of the Centalia tragedy and its legal repercussions written by a practicing lawyer. It is also a compelling human drama, centering on the marginal life of an industrial frontier labor lawyer, a study of radical politics of the 1920s, and a depiction of conditions of life in the lumber camps and towns. It is thus biography as well as legal, political, and social history.

Henry Friedman was robbed of his adolescence by the monstrous evil that annihilated millions of European Jews and changed forever the lives of those who survived. When the Nazis overran their home town near the Polish-Ukrainian border, the Friedman family was saved by Ukrainian Christians who had worked at their farm. Henry, his mother, his younger brother, and a young schoolteacher—who had been hired by his father when Jews were forbidden to attend school—were hidden in a loft over the animal stalls at a neighbor’s farm; his father hid in another hayloft half a mile away.

When the family was liberated by the Russians after eighteen months in hiding, Henry, at age fifteen, was emaciated and too weak to walk. The Friedmans eventually made their way to a displaced persons camp in Austria where Henry learned quickly to wheel and deal, seducing women of various ages and nationalities and mastering the intricacies of dealing in the black market. In I’m No Hero, he confronts with unblinking honesty the pain, the shame, and the bizarre comedy of his passage to adulthood.

The family came to Seattle in 1949, where Henry Friedman has made his home ever since. In 1988 he returned with his wife to Brody and Suchowola, where he succeeded in finding Julia Symchuk, who, as a young girl, had warned his father that the Gestapo was looking for him, and whose family had hidden the Friedmans in their loft. The following year he was able to bring Julia to Seattle for a triumphal visit, where she was honored in many ways, although, as Friedman writes, “in her own country she had never been honored with anything except hard work.”

Like many other survivors, Henry Friedman has found it difficult to confront his past. Like others, too, he has felt the obligation to bear witness. Now retired, he devotes much of his time to telling his story, which he believes is a message of hope, to thousands of schoolchildren throughout the Pacific Northwest. He has received national recognition for his role in establishing the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and as a founder of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center.

The subject of Jewish identity is one of the most vexed and contested issues of modern religious and ethnic group history. This interdisciplinary collection draws on work in law, anthropology, history, sociology, literature, and popular culture to consider contemporary and historical responses to the question “Who and what is Jewish?”

These essays are focused especially on the issues of who creates the definitions, and how, and in what social and political contexts. The ten leading authorities writing here also look at the forces, ranging from new genetic and reproductive technologies to increasingly multicultural societies, that push against established boundaries. The authors examine how Jews have imagined themselves and how definitions of Jewishness have been established, enforced, challenged, and transformed. Does being a Jew require religious belief, practice, and formal institutional affiliation? Is there a biological or physical aspect of Jewish identity? What is the status of the convert to another religion? How do definitions play out in different geographic and historical settings? What makes Boundaries of Jewish Identity distinctive is its attention to the various Jewish “epistemologies” or ways of knowing who counts as a Jew. These essays reveal that possible answers reflect the different social, intellectual, and political locations of those who are asking.

This book speaks to readers concerned with Jewish life and culture and to audiences interested in religious, cultural, and ethnic studies. It provides an excellent opportunity to examine how Jews fit into an increasingly diverse America and an increasingly complicated global society.

Sudden cardiac arrest can strike anyone at any time. But in many cities, people who suffer sudden cardiac arrest are up to 46 times more likely to die than those who experience cardiac arrest in Seattle and King County, Washington, or Rochester, Minnesota--an astonishing and completely preventable variance in survival rates.

In Resuscitate!, Mickey S. Eisenberg, an expert in emergency medical services (EMS), identifies fifty factors associated with the likelihood of surviving cardiac arrest and lays out twenty-five specific steps involved in raising a community's cardiac arrest survival rate. He offers recommendations for immediate and long-term improvement of EMS services, with actions that can be taken at local and national levels that will ultimately benefit anyone who needs emergency care, for any reason.

This book will be valuable for EMS medical directors, administrators and supervisors, and personnel - paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers - as well as elected officials, health services administrators, and concerned citizens. In short, this book is for everyone who wants to learn what we can all do to help more people survive sudden cardiac arrest.

This audacious and illuminating memoir by Richard Baum, a senior China scholar and sometime policy advisor, reflects on forty years of learning about and interacting with the People’s Republic of China, from the height of Maoism during the author’s UC Berkeley student days in the volatile 1960s through globalization. Anecdotes from Baum’s professional life illustrate the alternately peculiar, frustrating, fascinating, and risky activity of China watching — the process by which outsiders gather and decipher official and unofficial information to figure out what’s really going on behind China’s veil of political secrecy and propaganda. Baum writes entertainingly, telling his narrative with witty stories about people, places, and eras.

China Watcher will appeal to scholars and followers of international events who lived through the era of profound political and academic change described in the book, as well as to younger, post-Mao generations, who will enjoy its descriptions of the personalities and political forces that shaped the modern field of China studies.

Ted Van Dyk, a shrewd veteran of countless national political and policy fights, casts fresh light on many of the leading personalities and watershed events of American politics since JFK. He was a Pentagon intelligence analyst during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and an aide to Jean Monnet and other leaders of the European movement before serving at the Johnson White House as Vice President Humphrey’s senior advisor and alter ego. He was involved in that administration’s Great Society triumphs and its Vietnam tragedy.

In the late 1960s, Van Dyk moved to Columbia University as vice president to help quell campus disorders which threatened the university. Over a period of 35 years he was a senior advisor to presidential candidates Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Ted Kennedy, Mondale, Hart, and Tsongas; contributed regular essays to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Fortune, and other national publications; and led two national think tanks. In 2001 the Bellingham, Washington, native returned to the Northwest to write a regular editorial-page column for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Van Dyk’s memoirs contain many previously untold stories from an historic period of national politics, portray brilliant and not-so-brilliant leaders and ideas, and also illuminate politics’ darker side. They bring to life the flawed realities and enduring opportunities of public policymaking in our time.

This extraordinary book is based on more than fifty diaries of Jewish Holocaust victims of all ages, written while the events described were actually taking place. Many of the writers did not survive. Patterson’s book is unique not only in the number of diaries and original texts it examines but also in the questions it raises and in the approach it takes from within Jewish traditions and contexts.

Patterson has organized his book around a series of themes that lead to a deeper understanding of the meaning of these works for both their writers and their readers, affirming the Holocaust diary as a form of spiritual resistance. Throughout, he draws upon his impressive knowledge of Jewish texts, ancient and modern—Torah, Talmud, Midrash, Zohar, the medieval commentators, the Hasidic masters, and modern Jewish philosophers and thinkers.

In Along the Edge of Annihilation David Patterson illuminates the spiritual and physical devastation experienced by the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust, and shows how they chose life and the spirit of life in the midst of the Inferno.