The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a growing interest in America's folk heritage, as Americans began to enthusiastically collect, present, market, and consume the nation's folk traditions. Examining one of this century's most prominent "folk revivals"--the reemergence of Southern Appalachian handicraft traditions in the 1930s--Jane Becker unravels the cultural politics that bound together a complex network of producers, reformers, government officials, industries, museums, urban markets, and consumers, all of whom helped to redefine Appalachian craft production in the context of a national cultural identity. More ...

Dinner time is dancing time at Grandma's house. While chicken and dumplings simmer on the stove, all three generations of the family have a hard time keeping still, grooving to the music on the kitchen radio. Their dancing creates some mighty big appetites, but will the merriment let up long enough for everyone to make it to the table? Lively verse and playful illustrations celebrate a family night to remember. More ...

Arthur F. Roemmelt ‘65 provides a first-person account written in a refreshingly informal style, based upon case studies of the author’s patients, children with a variety of psychiatric disorders. The book is provocative both as a testimonial and as a eulogy to long and costly psychotherapy, a type of treatment “no longer desirable in a society that is adamant about cost effectiveness and armed with efficient medications.” It also warns that the increasing substitution of pharmacology for psychotherapy has negative as well as positive consequences. Dr. Roemmelt, a psychiatrist who practices in Syracuse, NY, argues with conviction and compassion that what troubles many children is more truly treated in therapy rather than, as a mere biochemical imbalance, by means of medication. More ...

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Hamilton Professor of Economics Derek Jones has collaborated with University of Delaware Professor Jeffrey Miller to compile a book that examines the early transition experiences of Bulgaria by making comparisons with the experiences from other socialized countries and analyzing the reasons for the uneven pace of change. They highlight important and distinctive features of Bulgaria’s economic reform such as attempts to nurture small farms, introduce progressive human resource management practices and trade union reform. More ...

In Lucy Ferriss's most recent novel, The Misconceiver, she examines a futuristic America that has renounced abortion rights. Ferriss creates a frightening world set 20 years in the future, uncomfortably close to the political debates of today. Ferriss, a professor of English at Hamilton College, has created a time unsettling to contemplate, where women have lost reproductive rights and “misconceptions” are once again performed secretly in basements and back-alleys. More ...

Hamilton Professor of Classics Barbara Gold, in conjunction with Professors of Classics Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter, examines interrelated topics in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature: the status of women as writers, the status of women as rhetorical figures, and the status of women in society from the fifth to the early seventeenth century. More ...

From 1916 to 1919, approximately half a million black southerners made the same trek northward; in the decade that followed, a million more joined them in the cities of the North. Filled with voices of hope and courage, Journey to Freedom by Hamilton History Professor Maurice Isserman, reveals the stories of the men and women who went looking for freedom, dignity, equal rights, and basic economic opportunity up north. Coverage also relates the far-reaching social, economic, and political consequences for the nation as a whole during this greatest internal mass migration of people in American history. More ...

What happens when liberation theology's attempt to mobilize the Brazilian poor for political and social change meets the realities of church, community, and culture in this predominantly Catholic country? In Women, Religion, and Social Change in Brazil's Popular Church , Hamilton Government Professor Carol Ann Drogus assesses the successes and failures of the movement as she documents how religious personality and gender affect the way the urban poor on the eastern outskirts of Sao Paulo respond to the liberationist message. More ...