Author: Sara B. Pritchard File Type: pdf Because of its location, volume, speed, and propensity for severe flooding, the Rhone, Frances most powerful river, has long influenced the economy, politics, and transportation networks of Europe. Humans have tried to control the Rhone for over two thousand years, but large-scale development did not occur until the twentieth century. The Rhone valley has undergone especially dramatic changes since World War II. Hydroelectric plants, nuclear reactors, and industrialized agriculture radically altered the river, as they simultaneously fueled both the physical and symbolic reconstruction of France. In Confluence, Sara B. Pritchard traces the Rhones remaking since 1945. She interweaves this story with an analysis of how state officials, technical elites, and citizens connected the environment and technology to political identities and state-building. In the process, Pritchard illuminates the relationship between nature and nation in France. Pritchards innovative integration of science and technology studies, environmental history, and the political history of modern France makes a powerful case for envirotechnical analysis an approach that highlights the material and rhetorical links between ecological and technological systems. Her groundbreaking book demonstrates the importance of environmental management and technological development to culture and politics in the twentieth century. As Pritchard shows, reconstructing the Rhone remade France itself. **Review Original in its contribution, persuasive in its argument, and elegant in its design, this is a highly impressive work. Pritchard outlines the interconnections among technology, environment, and society in a systematic and coherent way. Her innovative treatment of the Rhone develops the envirotechnical approach into a mature, sophisticated, and powerfully compelling analytical tool. A superb piece of scholarship and a remarkable accomplishment. (Michael D. Bess, author of The Light-Green Society Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000) Pritchard has written an outstanding interdisciplinary study of the efforts to manage the Rhone River since 1945. In so doing, she provides the reader with a perceptive model of the envirotech approach toward understanding complex phenomena involving technology and society. (Joel Tarr, Carnegie Mellon University) Pritchard has recovered the fascinating story of Frances massive, half-century mobilization of state-of-the-art technological and ecological know-how in transforming the nations largest river the unruly Rhone into a futuristic valley of economic productivity and recreational pleasure. (Leo Marx, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Pritchard examines how the development of the Rhone River has been integral to the modernization of post-WW II France...Expertly linking ecology and technology to the political and cultural history of France, Pritchard illustrates how the Rhone is emblematic of the processes through which technologies and strategies of environmental management materialized France as a nation in the territorial space declared within its borders. To this end, the importance of the rivers value in areas such as hydroelectricity, agriculture, nuclear energy, and industrialism went well beyond the economic realm. Instead, these uses were derived from discursive and material visions at the very core of national identity and the project of nation building. (A. C. Stanley Choice 2011-09-01) About the Author Sara B .Pritchard is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University.

Author: Gustaf Sobin File Type: pdf Bits of late Roman coinage, the mutilated torso of a marble Venus, blue debris from an early medieval glassworks, and the powder rasped from the reputed tomb of Mary Magdalenethese tantalizing mementos of human history found scattered throughout the landscape of southeastern France are the points of departure for Gustaf Sobins lyrical narrative. A companion volume to his acclaimed Luminous Debris, Ladder of Shadows picks up where the former left off with late antiquity, covering a period from roughly the third to the thirteenth century. Here Sobin offers brilliant readings of late Roman and early Christian ruins in his adopted region of Provence, sifting through iconographic, architectural, and sacramental vestiges to shed light on nothing less than the existential itself.**

Author: Jill Fields File Type: pdf Erudite, exhaustive, and engaging, Fields wonderfully original study deftly navigates several current literatures womens and gender history, the history of sexuality, cultural studies, and the burgeoning scholarship on consumer culture. Using fashion to gauge changing conceptualizations of femininity and the female body, Fields traces discursive production and the policing of boundaries without ever neglecting the material contexts of social and economic relations.--Regina Morantz-Sanchez, author of Conduct Unbecoming a Woman Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century BrooklynTheoretically sophisticated, methodologically innovative and just provocative, An Intimate Affair joins together the histories of production, consumption, representation, and fashion to claim the body as an arena upon which questions of pleasure and danger, power and authority, gender identities, racial purity and class access, became contested during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. After reading Fields, putting on or taking off lingerie will never again feel the same.--Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Womens Studies, University of California, Santa BarbaraThis is a delightful book on a surprisingly important--and one can legitimately say--revealing topic. The archival work is impressive, the analysis solid we gain greater knowledge of women in consumer society and of ongoing controversies about sexuality from the results.--Peter N. Stearns, Provost, George Mason UniversityAn Intimate Affair is a major contribution to the histories of fashion and of women. Wide-ranging in scope, this book demonstrates conclusively the importance of clothing in historical analysis and pushes the boundaries of cultural studies theory about the body to encompass the most intimate body covering. Fields illustrates how cultural studies and womens studies theory, the investigation of material objects, and the history of laboring people and women can be brought together to produce a compelling narrative. Both academics and general readers will find this book fascinating, for it has major implications for how all of us regard our bodies.--Lois W. Banner, Professor of History and Gender Studies, University of Southern California, and author of American BeautyJill Fields has produced a remarkable book that reveals the ways in which intimate apparel has shaped modern conceptions of glamour, femininity, beauty, and sexuality. She brilliantly traces the creation of lingerie from the workers who made it to the advertisers who glamorized it to the women who bought it.--Steven J. Ross, Professor of History, University of Southern California

Author: Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante File Type: pdf By the end of the twentieth century, Mexican multimedia conglomerate Televisa stood as one of the most powerful media companies in the world. Most scholars have concluded that the companys success was owed in large part to its executives who walked in lockstep with the government and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which ruled for seventy-one years. At the same time, government decisions regulating communications infrastructure aided the development of the television industry. In one of the first books to be published in English on Mexican television, Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante argues that despite the cozy relationship between media moguls and the PRI, these connections should not be viewed as static and without friction. Through an examination of early television news programs, this book reveals the tensions that existed between what the PRI and government officials wanted to be reported and what was actually reported and how. Further, despite the increasing influence of television on society, viewers did not always accept or agree with what they saw on the air. Television news programming played an integral role in creating a sense of lo mexicano (that which is Mexican) at a time of tremendous political, social, and cultural change. At its core the book grapples with questions about the limits of cultural hegemony at the height of the PRI and the cold war. **Review For most of its eighty-plus years, the media behemoth known today as Televisa, long the de facto propaganda arm of the Mexican state, has been all but hermetically sealed against inspection by researchers. Few have interviewed its executives, let alone probed its archives. That Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante has accessed two decades worth of broadcast news scripts is a feat of scholarly gumption and tenacity. Her resulting book offers a fascinating and unprecedentedly detailed account of news dissemination between 1950 and 1970 by the most influential television company in the Spanish- speaking world.Andrew Paxman, Hispanic American Historical Review (Andrew Paxman Hispanic American Historical Review 2015-08-03) As the party that governed Mexico for seventy years returns to power amid protests over collusion between the media and politicians, Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante has published a timely examination of just how much influence television has. Based on five case studies and rare access to the archives of Latin Americas most influential television empire, Televisa, the study offers far more than its title promises. . . . The study also adds important insights to the rich literature on national identity formation. Muy Buenas Noches is a significant contribution that will add to the scholarly discussion in a variety of disciplines and fields.Juanita Darling, American Journalism (Juanita Darling American Journalism 2015-08-03) Each chapters consistent grounding in the larger arc of Mexican and international history makes Muy Buenas Noches an easily digestible book, even for those with little previous knowledge of the country. Undoubtedly, Muy Buenas Noches will stand as a central text for future researchers intrigued by the questions Gonzalez de Bustamante raises, as well as those searching for the historical roots of the countrys current media climate.Taylor Jardno, NACLA Report on the Americas (Taylor Jardno NACLA Report on the Americas 2015-08-03) One of the strengths of Gonzalezs book lays in her ability to paint a vivid picture of the behind-the-scenes machinations that defined the relationship between Telesistema Mexicano and the Mexican government. . . . Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante has produced an outstanding account of the first two decades of Mexican television news. Her illumination of the tensions that infused the connections between Telesistema Mexicano, the PRI, Mexican viewers, and the United States during the Cold War succeeds in underscoring the limits of cultural hegemony. In the process, this well written and solidly researched monograph will be of interest to both scholars and students of modern Mexico, media studies, and the Cold War.Michael A. Krysko, A Contra corriente (Michael A. Krysko A Contra corriente 2015-08-03) About the Author Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante is an assistant professor of journalism and affiliated faculty at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona, and a former reporter and news anchor.