A world list of books in the English language.

The phenomenon of national identities, always a key issue in the modern history of Bohemian Jewry, was particularly complex because of the marginal differences that existed between the available choices. Considerable overlap was evident in the programs of the various national movements and it was possible to change one's national identity or even to opt for more than one such identity without necessarily experiencing any far-reaching consequences in everyday life. Based on many hitherto unknown archival sources from the Czech Republic, Israel and Austria, the author's research reveals the inner dynamic of each of the national movements and maps out the three most important constructions of national identity within Bohemian Jewry - the German-Jewish, the Czech-Jewish and the Zionist. This book provides a needed framework for understanding the rich history of German- and Czech-Jewish politics and culture in Bohemia and is a notable contribution to the historiography of Bohemian, Czechoslovak and central European Jewry.

In the mid-nineteenth century successive cultural Bohemias were proclaimed in Paris, London, New York, and Melbourne. Focusing on networks and borders as the central modes of analysis, this book charts for the first time Bohemia’s cross-Channel, transatlantic, and trans-Pacific migrations, locating its creative expressions and social practices within a global context of ideas and action. Though the story of Parisian Bohemia has been comprehensively told, much less is known of its Anglophone translations. The Bohemian Republic offers a radical reinterpretation of the phenomenon, as the neglected lives and works of British, Irish, American, and Australian Bohemians are reassessed, the transnational networks of Bohemia are rediscovered, the presence and influence of women in Bohemia is reclaimed, and Bohemia’s relationship with the marketplace is reconsidered. Bohemia emerges as a marginal network which exerted a paradoxically powerful influence on the development of popular culture, in the vanguard of material, social and aesthetic innovations in literature, art, journalism, and theatre. Underpinned by extensive and original archival research, the book repopulates the concept of Bohemianism with layers of the networked voices, expressions, ideas, people, places, and practices that made up its constituent social, imagined, and interpretive communities. The reader is brought closer than ever to the heart of Bohemia, a shadowy world inhabited by the rebels of the mid-nineteenth century.

Originally published in 1962, this book tells the flamboyant story of Abe Ruef and San Francisco’s infamous era of graft. In the year 1906, San Francisco was rocked by two calamitous earthquakes. Nature herself was responsible for one; a man named Ruef was responsible for the other. Abraham Ruef (1864-1936), known as Abe Ruef, was a rogue of innumerable refinements. A classical scholar, a wit, a bon vivant, he was also a political boss who not only picked the city’s officials—among them, “Handsome Gene” Schmitz, San Francisco’s “bassoon mayor”—but picked the city’s pockets as well. When he was finally arraigned for graft, Ruef attempted to appoint himself District Attorney to prosecute the case! In A Debonair Scoundrel, Lately Thomas reconstructs the little known but fantastic career and its gaudy, dramatic setting: a city thrown into wild disorder; fighting in the courts reeking with corruption; kidnappings, and flying bullets with overtones of slapstick comedy and suspense. The men who saw to Ruef’s undoing were relics of a bygone West: millionaire Rudolph Spreckels, who tried to reform his own class; Fremont Older, the Evening Bulletin crusading editor—and others, such as Teddy Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst. Their encounter with Abe Ruef is wittily described by Lately Thomas, author of The Vanishing Evangelist, who has brought his magnificently creative gifts to a book as brilliant and rambunctious as the fabulous era he describes.

The encyclopedia takes a broad, multidisciplinary approach to the history of the period. It includes general and specific entries on politics and business, labor, industry, agriculture, education and youth, law and legislative affairs, literature, music, the performing and visual arts, health and medicine, science and technology, exploration, life on the Western frontier, family life, slave life, Native American life, women, and more than a hundred influential individuals.