Columbia University Press is pleased to announce that Gutenberg-e is now an open access site. These award winning monographs, coordinated with the American Historical Association, afford emerging scholars new possibilities for online publications, weaving traditional narrative with digitized primary sources, including maps, photographs, and oral histories. The American Council of Learned Societies also carry Gutenberg-e titles on their Humanities E-Book platform.

Recent Releases

Architecture and Memory: The Renaissance Studioli of Federico da Montefeltro

by Robert Kirkbride

The studioli of the ducal palaces at Urbino and Gubbio, Italy, demonstrate architecture's capacity to transact between the mental and physical realms of human experience. Constructed between 1474 and 1483 for the military captain Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, and his young, motherless son, Prince Guidobaldo, the studioli may be described as treasuries of emblems: they contain not things but images of things, rendered with remarkable perspectival exactitude. These small, image-filled chambers reflect how architecture and its ornament prepared a quattrocento mind with metaphors for wisdom and methods for learning: their trompe-l'oeil wood inlay crystallized new patterns for thinking and making.

This investigation of the studioli examines their position in the Western tradition of the memory arts, an approach not previously considered. Drawing on the densely layered imagery in the studioli and text sources readily available to the Urbino court, it examines how architecture equipped the late quattrocento mind with a bridge between the mathematical arts, which lend themselves to mechanical pursuits, and the art of rhetoric, a discipline central to memory and eloquence. As subtle ramifications of material and mental craft, the studioli offered the Montefeltro dukes models for education and prudent governance, extending an ancient legacy of open-ended models conceived to activate the imagination and exercise the memory.

Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood

by Jennifer E. Langdon

In the summer of 1947, Crossfire, a controversial thriller exposing American anti-Semitism, became a critical and box-office hit, and RKO producer Adrian Scott was at the pinnacle of his career. Within several months, however, he was infamous as a member of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted for his refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. In Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood, Jennifer E. Langdon reconstructs the production and reception of Scott's major films to explore the political and creative challenges faced by Hollywood radicals in the studio system and to reassess the relationship between film noir, antifascism and anticommunism, and the politics of Americanism.

Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico

by Sherry Fields

In Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico, Sherry Fields explores the cultures of health and illness in colonial Mexico as illuminated by popular beliefs and practices following the encounter of indigenous and European medical traditions. Her use of ex-votos as sources is especially interesting.

Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early 20th Century Vienna

by Maria Rentetzi

Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early 20th Century Vienna is "a complex, creative, and fascinating study" of women in Vienna working as independent researchers. She includes documentary research, material culture and built environment analysis, and oral histories to examine the culture of women in the unique positions of radioactivity researchers during the early twentieth century.

"Make It Yourself": Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890–1930

by Sarah A. Gordon

In "Make It Yourself": Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890–1930, Sarah A. Gordon uses home sewing to examine domestic labor, marketing practices, changing standards of femininity, and understandings of class, gender and race. As industrialization made ready-made garments increasingly available, many women, out of necessity or choice, continued to make their own clothing. In doing so, women used a customary female skill both as a means of supporting traditional ideas and as a tool of personal agency. The shifting meanings of sewing became a contested space where businesses promoted sewing machines as tools for maintaining domestic harmony; women interpreted patterns to suit—or flout—definitions of appropriate appearances; and girls were taught to sew in ways that reflected beliefs about class, race, and region. Gordon uses established as well as more unusual source materials, including dresses, sewing workbooks and paper dolls, to argue that home sewing is a unique vehicle for understanding larger changes in American culture.

Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities, 1965-83

by Timothy Hodgdon

This is a study "full of rich interpretation" that explores the diverse forms of masculinity found in counter cultural radicalism. Hodgdon argues that conceptions of masculinity developed along two main lines: anarchism and mysticism. These are explored by examining the communities of the Diggers of San Francisco, and The Farm in Tennessee.

How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century

by Tonio Andrade

The incorporation of Taiwan into the early modern European colonial trading networks, and its subsequent incorporation into the Chinese empire, are topics almost completely unexplored in Western language scholarship. This superb monograph not only opens them up but does so in an exciting way by exploring the complex interactions between the European trade diasporas and existing patterns of Asian migration and trade. The author is well acquainted with recent and current debates on the critical transformation taking place in the global economy during the late 16th and 17th centuries, and imaginatively covers a broad range of issues. He argues convincingly, and in wonderfully rich detail, that it was Dutch protection that made possible the slow Chinese colonization of Taiwan-and ultimately its incorporation into China. Andrade brilliantly reminds us of how important the brief episode of European occupation was to the future development of Taiwan, including the birth of its sugar industry.
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Advocating The Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840

by Joshua R. Greenberg

In his "thorough, and imaginative exploration" of the relationship between masculinity and the young labor movement in the Jacksonian era, Greenberg examines diverse sources, such as plays, debates about birth control and comic valentines. He argues that domestic issues and concerns guided workplace and political reactions to the new industrial economy.

The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe

by Sarah Lowengard

Seldom does any monograph attempt to be comparative, in this case to cross the Channel and to say new and interesting things about the scientific culture found in both England and France. By using color, as a practice as well as a branch of optical theory, the author manages to weave material culture along with abstract science—again an integration seldom found in a first work.