This fascinating account of a French woman's impressions of America in the late nineteenth century reveals an unusual cross-cultural journey through fin de siècle Paris, Chicago, and New York. Madame Leon Grandin's travels and extended stay in Chicago in 1893 were the result of her husband's collaboration on the fountain sculpture for the World's Columbian Exposition. Initially impressed with the city's fast pace and architectural grandeur, Grandin's attentions were soon drawn to its social and cultural customs, reflected as observations in her writing. During a ten-month interval as a resident, she was intrigued by the interactions between men and women, mothers and their children, teachers and students, and other human relationships, especially noting the comparative social freedoms of American women. After this interval of acclimatization, the young Parisian socialite had begun to view her own culture and its less liberated mores with considerable doubt. "I had tasted the fruit of independence, of intelligent activity, and was revolted at the idea of assuming once again the passive and inferior role that awaited me!" she wrote. Grandin's curiosity and interior access to Chicago's social and domestic spaces produced an unusual travel narrative that goes beyond the usual tourist reactions and provides a valuable resource for readers interested in late nineteenth-century America, Chicago, and social commentary. Significantly, her feminine views on American life are in marked contrast to parallel reflections on the culture by male visitors from abroad. It is precisely the dual narrative of this text--the simultaneous recounting of a foreigner's impressions, and the consequent questioning of her own cultural certainties--that make her book unique. This translation includes an introductory essay by Arnold Lewis that situates Grandin's account in the larger context of European visitors to Chicago in the 1890s.

The ultimate girl-friendly phrasebook to give les filles américaines in Paris that certain je ne sais quoi Where but Paris would a young woman rather be sipping espresso at a sidewalk café, browsing a fashionable boutique, or strolling along a romantic riverbank hand in hand with her lover? The city of lights is every girl's dream destination, but upon arrival she doesn't want to stick out like an unrefined American. Luckily, with Parisienne French, she'll know just exactly how to speak, act, and dress like she has always lived there. Whether ordering drinks at a hip underground club, discussing Impressionism at the Musée d'Orsay or just chatting about what fashion is ?in” this season, Parisienne French has the entire vocabulary and modern slang a girl needs to know. The French love their language and appreciate when foreigners take the time to know it too. With this book, the reader will be warmly welcomed to la vie parisienne.

Inspired by the reading and writing habits of citizens leading up to the French Revolution, The Writing Public is a compelling addition to the long-running debate about the link between the Enlightenment and the political struggle that followed. Elizabeth Andrews Bond scoured France's local newspapers spanning the two decades prior to the Revolution as well as its first three years, shining a light on the letters to the editor. A form of early social media, these letters constituted a lively and ongoing conversation among readers. Bond takes us beyond the glamorous salons of the intelligentsia into the everyday worlds of the craftsmen, clergy, farmers, and women who composed these letters. As a result, we get a fascinating glimpse into who participated in public discourse, what they most wanted to discuss, and how they shaped a climate of opinion. The Writing Public offers a novel examination of how French citizens used the information press to form norms of civic discourse and shape the experience of revolution. The result is a nuanced analysis of knowledge production during the Enlightenment. Thanks to generous funding from The Ohio State University Libraries and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes, available on the Cornell University Press website and other Open Access repositories.

Focusing on multiple aspects of Renaissance culture, and in particular its preoccupation with the reading and rewriting of classical sources, this book examines representations of homosexuality in sixteenth-century France. Analysing a wide range of texts and topics, it presents an assessment of queer theory that is grounded in historical examples, including French translations of Boccaccio's Decameron, the poetry of Ronsard, works in praise of and satirising Henri III and his mignons, Montaigne's Essais, Brantôme's Dames galantes, the figures of the androgyne and the hermaphrodite, and religious discourses and practices of penance and confession. Close comparison with the ancient models on which they drew - the elegy and epic, the works of Plato, Ovid, Lucian, and others - reveals Renaissance writers redeploying an established set of cultural understandings and assumptions at once congruent and at odds with their own society's socio-sexual norms. Throughout this study, emphasis is placed on the coexistence of different models of homosexuality during the Renaissance - homosexual desire was simultaneously universal and individual, neither of these views excluding the other. Insisting equally on points of convergence and difference between Renaissance and modern understandings of homosexuality, this book works towards a historicisation of the concept of queerness.

"Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century?" The question that guides this volume stems from Walter Benjamin's studies of nineteenth-century Parisian culture as the apex of capitalist aesthetics. Thirteen scholars test Benjamin's ideas about the centrality of Paris, formulated in the 1930s, from a variety of methodological perspectives. Many investigate the underpinnings of the French capital's reputation and mythic force, which was based largely upon the city's capacity to put itself on display. Some of the authors reassess the famed centrality of Paris from the vantage point of our globalized twenty-first century by acknowledging its entanglements with South Africa, Turkey, Japan, and the United States. The volume equally studies a broader range of media than Benjamin did himself: from modernist painting and printmaking, photography, and illustration to urban planning. The essays conclude that Paris did in many ways function as the epicenter of modernity's international reach, especially in the years from 1850 to 1900, but did so only as a consequence of the idiosyncratic force of its mythic image. Above all, the essays affirm that the study of late nineteenth-century Paris still requires nimble and innovative approaches commensurate with its legend and global aura.

Amit Prakash draws on extensive archival materials to understand the colonial legacy of how minority populations have been policed in twentieth century Paris, showing how colonial racism was integrated into the policing of Paris, and that architecture, urbanism, and social housing contributed to this legacy.

Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the ?ole de Paris, 1944-1964 is the first book dedicated to the postwar or 'nouvelle' ?ole de Paris. It challenges the customary relegation of the ?ole de Paris to the footnotes, not by arguing for some hitherto 'hidden' merit for the art and ideas associated with this school, but by establishing how and why the ?ole de Paris was a highly significant vehicle for artistic and political debate. The book presents a sustained historical study of how this 'school' was constituted by the paintings of a diverse group of artists, by the combative field of art criticism, and by the curatorial policies of galleries and state exhibitions. By thoroughly mining the extensive resources of the newspaper and art journal press, gallery and government archives, artists' writings and interviews with surviving artists and art critics, the book traces the artists, exhibitions, and art critical debates that made the ?ole de Paris a zone of aesthetic and political conflict. Through setting the ?ole de Paris into its artistic, social, and political context, Natalie Adamson demonstrates how it functioned as the defining force in French postwar art in its defence of the tradition of easel painting, as well as an international point of reference for the expansion of modernism. In doing so, she presents a wholly new perspective on the vexed relationships between painting, politics, and national identity in France during the two decades following World War II.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Paris was widely acknowledged as the cultural capital of the world, the home of avant-garde music and art, symbolist literature and bohemian culture. Edinburgh, by contrast, may still be thought of as a rather staid city of lawyers and Presbyterian ministers, academics and doctors. While its great days as a centre for the European Enlightenment may have been behind it, however, late Victorian Edinburgh was becoming the location for a new set of cultural institutions, with its own avant-garde, that corresponded with a renewed Scottish national consciousness. While Morningside was never going to be Montparnasse, the period known as the Belle Epoque was a time in both French and Scottish society when there were stirrings of non-conformity, which often clashed with a still powerful establishment. And in this respect, French bourgeois society could be as resistant to change as the suburbs of Edinburgh. With travel and communication becoming ever easier, a growing number of international contacts developed that allowed such new and radical cultural ideas to flourish. In a series of linked essays, based on research into contemporary archives, documents and publications in both countries, as well as on new developments in cultural research, this book explores an unexpected dimension of Scottish history, while also revealing the Scottish contribution to French history. In a broader sense, and particularly as regards gender, it considers what is meant by 'modern' or 'radical' in this period, without imposing any single model. In so doing, it seeks not to treat Paris-Edinburgh links in isolation, or to exaggerate them, but to use them to provide a fresh perspective on the internationalism of the Belle Epoque.

This thrilling wartime adventure tells the true story of the downed American aviators who were rescued by French resistance fighters, taken to Nazi-occupied Paris, and hidden under the very noses of the Gestapo. Escape from Paris is the true story of a small group of U.S. aviators whose four B-17 Flying Fortresses were shot down over German-occupied France on a single, fateful day: July 14, 1943, Bastille Day. They were rescued by brave French civilians and taken to Paris for eventual escape out of France. In the French capital, where German troops walked on every street and Gestapo agents hid around every corner, the flyers met a brave Parisian resistance family living and working in the Hôtel des Invalides, a complex of buildings and military memorials, where Nazi officials had set up offices. Hidden in the complex the Americans, along with dozens of other downed Allied pilots and resistance operatives, hatched daring escape plots. The danger of discovery by the Nazis grew every day, as did an unlikely romance when one of the American airmen begins a star-crossed wartime romance with the twenty-two-year old daughter of the family sheltering him—a noir tale of war, courage and desperation in the shadows of the City of Light. Based on official American, French, and German documents, histories, personal memoirs, and the author's interviews with several of the story's key participants, Escape from Paris crosses the traditional lines of World War II history with tense drama of air combat over Europe, the intrigue of occupied Paris, and courageous American and Allied pilots and French resistance fighters pitted against Nazi thugs. All of this set in one of the world's most beautiful and captivating cities.

In the twenty-first century, housing has become a site of ecological experimentation and environmental remediation. From the vantage point of contemporary architecture, conservation concerns and emergent building science technologies support one another, with new processes and materials deployed to reduce energy usage, water consumption, and carbon dioxide emissions. Landscapes of Housing examines this trend in historical perspective, arguing for a more considered environmental vision that includes the organic, social, and cultural dimensions of landscape. By shifting the focus from architecture, the book highlights and critiques the relationship between dwelling and landscape itself. Contributors from a wide range of international perspectives propose a more integrative ecology that includes history, culture, society, and materiality, in addition to technology, within contemporary ecological housing programs. This book will be a resource for upper-level students, academics, and researchers in landscape architecture interested in the social and political implications of ecological housing.