University of Pittsburgh Press
The University of Pittsburgh Press is a publisher with distinguished lists in a wide range of scholarly and cultural fields. They publish books for general readers, scholars, and students. The Press focuses on selected academic areas: Latin American studies, Russian and East European studies, Central Asian studies, composition and literacy studies, environmental studies, urban studies, the history of architecture and the built environment, and the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. Their books about Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania include history, art, architecture, photography, biography, fiction, and guidebooks.
Their renowned Pitt Poetry Series represents many of the finest poets active today, as reflected in the many prestigious awards their work has garnered over the past four decades. In addition, the Press is home to the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and, in rotation with other university presses, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. They sponsor the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which recognises the finest collective works of short fiction available in an international competition.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 296
ISBN: 9780822984924
Pub Date: 15 May 1985
Description:
The disagreement of philosophers is notorious. In this book, Rescher develops a theory that accounts for this conflict and shows how the basis for philosophical disagreement roots in divergent 'cognitive values'-values regarding matters such as importance, centrality, and priority. In light of this analysis, Rescher maintains that, despite this inevitable discord, a skeptical or indifferentist reaction to traditional philosophy is not warranted, seeing that genuine value-conflicts are at issue.
He argues that philosophy is an important and worthwhile enterprise, notwithstanding its inability to achieve rationally constrained consensus on the issues. Given the nature of the enterprise, consensus is not a realistic goal, and failure to achieve it is not a defect. Accordingly, Rescher argues against the revisionist views proposed by Richard Rorty and Robert Nozick. His discussions are devoted to providing a clear view of why philosophical problems arise and how philosophers address them.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822985631
Pub Date: 15 Apr 1985
Description:
Ambivalent Alliance convincingly defends several provocative insights into a key period in the history of French Catholicism. It investigates the strange marriage of convenience, from 1899 to 1939, between the French church and the ultra-rightist, chauvinist, monarchist, and anti-Semitic organization called the Acton Fran\u00e7aise, and raises many disturbing questions. Why did an increasingly international church find a narrowly patriotic group so appealing?
How could it endorse a movement founded by an agnostic whose philosophy sanctioned violence and the persecution of Jews and othe \u201cundesirables\u201d?The twentieth-century French church was still feeling the shock waves of the French Revolution, assaulted from without and torn from within regarding its role in politics. Challenging the views of prominent historians of the period, Arnal shows that between 1899 and 1939 Catholic leaders pursued a consistent strategy of political and social conservatism. Whereas many regarded the church's flirtations with social democracy and its occasional attempts to rally French Catholics behind constitutional politics as proof of its progressive character, Arnal sees a fundamentally reactionary continuity in church leadership. Pius XI did not condemn the Acton Fran\u00e7aise for its fascist ideology; he feared independence among Catholics more than the radical right. Arnal's wide-ranging study brings a controversial new interpretation to the political and ecclesiastical history of the twentieth-century.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780822953685
Pub Date: 31 Mar 1985
Description:
Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. What emerges is not merely autobiography, but a biography of the reader, a \u201crepresentative life\u201d of our time.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9780822985624
Pub Date: 15 Nov 1984
Description:
Remington profiles the Bolshevik project of social transformation and political centralization known as War Communism. He argues that the effort to institute a centrally planned and administered economy shaped the ideology of the regime, the relations between the regime and the working class, and the character of state power.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 560
ISBN: 9780822959014
Pub Date: 15 Nov 1984
Description:
Women and the Trades has long been regarded as a masterwork in the field of social investigation. Originally published in 1909, it was one of six volumes of the path breaking Pittsburgh Survey, the first attempt in the United States to study, systematically and comprehensively, life and labor in one industrial city. No other book documents so precisely the many technological and organizational changes that transformed women's wage work in the early 1900s.
Despite Pittsburgh's image as a male-oriented steel town, many women also worked for a living-rolling cigars, canning pickles, or clerking in stores. The combination of manufacturing, distribution, and communication services made the city of national economic developments.What Butler found in her visits to countless workplaces did not flatter the city, its employers, or its wage earners. With few exceptions, labor unions served the interests of skilled males. Women's jobs were rigidly segregated, low paying, usually seasonal, and always insecure. Ethnic distinctions erected powerful barriers between different groups of women, as did status hierarchies based on job function.Professor Maurine Weiner Greenwald's introduction provides biographical sketches of Butler and photographer Lewis Hine and examines the validity of Butler's assumptions and findings, especially with regard to protective legislation, women worker's \u201cpassivity,\u201d and working-class family strategies.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 160
ISBN: 9780822953586
Pub Date: 30 Jun 1984
Description:
“Aliveness is Gary Gildner’s striking quality,” Crystal McLean writes in the magazine New Letters, and thise selection of Gary Gildner’s previously published poems, plus eighteen new poems, demonstrates the aptness of that perception. Accessible and eminently readable, the poems in Blue Like the Heavens also possess great emotional depth. Readers who complain about the obscurity of contemporary American poetry will delight in this book.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9780822953470
Pub Date: 30 Jun 1983
Description:
Sydney Saylor Farr is a woman who knows Appalachia well. Born on Stoney Fork in southeastern Kentucky, she has lived much of her life close to the mountains, among people whose roots are deep in the soil and who pass on to their children a love for the land, a strong sense of belonging and of place.Mountain food and how it is cooked is very much a part of this sense of place.
Ask any displaced Appalachians what they miss most and they will probably talk about soup beans, country ham, and homemade buscuits. They may also remember the kitchens at home, the warmth from the wood-burning stove, the smell of coffee, and the family gathered around the kitchen table to eat and talk.More than Moonshine is both a cookbook and a narrative that recounts the way of life of southern Appalachia from the 1940s to 1983. The women of Stoney Fork rarely had cash to spend, so they depended upon the free products of nature - their cookery used every nutritious, edible thing they could scour from the gardens and hillsides. These survival skills are recounted in the pages of More than Moonshine, with instructions for making moonshine whiskey, for fixing baked groundhog with sweet potatoes, for making turnip kraut, craklin\u2019 bread, egg pie, apple stackcake, and other traditional dishes.More than Moonshine is more than a cookbook. It evokes a way of life in the mid-twentieth century not unlike that of pioneer days.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9780822953562
Pub Date: 30 Jun 1983
Description:
This memoir introduces the family of Charles Hart Spencer and his wife Mary Acheson: seven children born between 1884 and 1895. In a large Victorian house in Shadyside, an affluent Pittsburgh neighborhood, the family begins a middle-class way of life at the turn of the century. Mr.
Spencer, who worked—not very happily—for Henry Clay Frick, was one of the growing number of middle-management employees in American industrial cities in the 1880s and 1890s. His income, which supported his family of nine, a cook, two regular nurses, and at times a wet nurse and her baby, guaranteed a comfortable life but not a luxurious one. The Spencers represent a class that "too often stands silent or stereotyped as we rush forward toward the greater glamour of the robber barons or their immigrant workers." Through the eyes of Ethel Spencer, the third daughter, the reader is led through the routine of everyday life in the Spencer household: school, play, church on Sundays, illness, family celebrations, and vacations. Ethel was an observant child, with little sentimentality, and she wrote her memoir in later life as a professor of English at Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon University. The Spencers of Amberson Avenue offers a compelling account of middle-class Pittsburgh urban life. The book is richly illustrated with family photographs taken by Charles Spencer, who was a talented amateur photographer.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 284
ISBN: 9780822984900
Pub Date: 15 May 1983
Description:
Although Juan Peron changed the course of modern Argentine history, scholars have often interpreted him in terms of their own ideologies and interests, rather than seeing the effect of this man and his movement had on the Argentine people. The essays in this volume seek to uncover the man behind the myth, to define the true nature of Peronism. Several chapters view Per\u00f3n's rise to power, his deposition and eighteen-year exile, and his dramatic return in 1973.
Others examine: opposing forces in modern Argentina, including the church and its role in politics; the conflict between landed stancieros and urban industrialists, terrorist activities and their populist support base; Peronism and the labor movement; and Evita Per\u00f3n's role in advancing the political rights of women.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780822953432
Pub Date: 26 Oct 1982
Description:
Shelton assembles the best of his previous work together with a selection of new poems.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822984894
Pub Date: 15 Oct 1982
Description:
McCaffery interprets the works of three major writers of radically experimental fiction: Robert Coover; Donald Barthelme; and Willam H. Gass. The term \u201cmetafiction\u201d here refers to a strain in American writing where the self-concious approach to the art of fiction-making is a commentary on the nature of meaning itself.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 144
ISBN: 9780822953371
Pub Date: 30 Jun 1982
Description:
The Deepening Shade is an elegant synthesis of the psychology of life-threatening illness. The book\u2019s evocative power derives from the interweaving of clinical conceptualization with the words of patients and family members. Rather than focusing on death, Sourkes explores living with a life-threatening illness.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780822953319
Pub Date: 15 Mar 1982
Description:
A man desperately tries to keep his pact with the Devil, a woman is imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband because of religious differences, and, on the testimony of a mere stranger, \u201ca London citizen\u201d is sentenced to a private madhouse. This anthology of writings by mad and allegedly mad people is a comprehensive overview of the history of mental illness for the past five hundred years-from the viewpoint of the patients themselves.Dale Peterson has compiled twenty-seven selections dating from 1436 through 1976.
He prefaces each excerpt with biographical information about the writer. Peterson's running commentary explains the national differences in mental health care and the historical changes that have take place in symptoms and treatment. He traces the development of the private madhouse system in England and the state-run asylum system in the United States. Included is the first comprehensive bibliography of writings by the mentally ill.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822953272
Pub Date: 31 Dec 1981
Description:
Emplumada is Lorna Dee Cervantes’s first book, a collection of poems remarkable for their surface clarity, precision of image, and emotional urgency. Rooted in her Chicana heritage, these poems illuminate the American experience of the last quarter century and, at a time when much of what is merely fashionable in American poetry is recondite and exclusive, Cervantes has the ability to speak to and for a large audience.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822953333
Pub Date: 15 Oct 1981
Description:
The work of Michael Burkard has a rich interior quality different from that of any other voice in American poetry. He captures a sense of the mind revising and revealing itself, altering its perceptions.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780822953234
Pub Date: 15 Aug 1981
Description:
The Mexican oil boom of the 1970s brought great hope and prosperity with it. George Grayson shows the influence of oil and the oil sector both within Mexican society and in its relations with other nations. He traces the development of the oil industry from its beginnings in 1901 up until the 1980s, looking at topics that include the history of expropriation; the creation of the state-run company Petr\u00f3leos Mexicanos; graft and corruption within the Oil Workers Union; Mexico's relations with OPEC; the political nuances of oil and gas agreements with the United States; and the prospects for the Mexican oil industry and domestic reforms generated from oil revenue.
