Shedding light on a seminal work
James Madison’s Notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention have acquired nearly unquestioned authority as the account of the U.S. Constitution’s creation, relied upon by generations of historians and other scholars. In her new book, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Harvard University Press, 2015), Boston College legal scholar Mary Sarah Bilder reveals that Madison revised the Notes to a far greater extent than previously recognized. In an unprecedented investigation that draws on digital technologies and traditional textual analysis to trace Madison’s composition, Bilder shows that The Notes began as a diary of the Convention’s proceedings, but were abandoned by Madison at a critical juncture and left incomplete. Madison did not return to finish them until several years later. By then, his views were influenced by the new government’s challenges and Thomas Jefferson’s political ideas. Madison’s evolving vision of republican government, his Virginia allegiances, his openness to constitutional protection for slavery, his fascination with the finer points of political jockeying, and his depictions of Alexander Hamilton and Charles Pinckney shifted during the writing and rewriting of his account. Bilder is a professor and Michael and Helen Lee Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School. More from Bilder via History News Network.
BC Libraries features faculty authors
Boston College Libraries has recently featured three professors who published books last year in the fields of art, management and Irish politics. In Text and Image in Medieval Persian Art (Edinburgh University Press), Calderwood Professor of Islamic and Asian Art Sheila Blair presents a case study of five pieces of Persian art (10th to 16th century) to show how an object can tell a story about time and through time. She was interviewed by librarian Nina Bogdanovsky. Intellectual Shamans: Management Academics Making a Difference (Cambridge University Press). She demonstrates how these individuals in the management academy use their intellectual gifts to perform roles as healers, connectors and sensemakers, like traditional shamans. She was interviewed by librarian Sonia Ensins. History Professor of the Practice Robert Savage‘s biography Sean Lemass (University College Dublin Press) presents a portrait of the influential politician who served as Ireland’s Taoiseach (prime minister) from 1959-66. Librarian Elliot Brandow interviewed Savage about his book.
Kaleidoscope
Kaleidoscope International Journal is an international relations and global studies publication run by Boston College undergraduates, with funding from the Institute for the Liberal Arts. Its goal is to promote greater awareness and understanding of international issues through research, articles and photography by students from a variety of disciplines. The most recent issue includes articles about Kuwait’s expatriate labor force and the preservation of Italy’s cultural heritage, as well as a photo essay on Patagonia. “It’s becoming increasingly important for all citizens to be better informed of international issues, events and trends,” said Omeed Alerasool ’15, who served as editor-in-chief for four years. “We want to reach out to people who are simply looking to learn more about the world.” Kaleidoscope Spring 2015 issue
Posted in Students
Tagged Institute for the Liberal Arts, international, undergraduate journal
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Being Catholic during the Dirty War
During Argentina’s Dirty War — an attempt by the government to fight communism by eliminating subversives —15,000 people were killed, 8,000 were jailed and some 6,000 were exiled. The Catholic Church and Argentina’s Dirty War (Oxford University Press, 2015), a new book by Boston College sociologist Gustavo Morello, SJ, explores the complex relationship of the Catholic Church and the political violence. Fr. Morello, who is a native of Argentina, focuses on the 1976 kidnapping, detainment and torture of American priest James Weeks and five seminarians by the Argentine military government as a means of understanding the broader issues of religion and politics that took place in that Latin American country. More from BC News
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Argentina, Catholic Church, Jesuit author, Latin America, Sociology Dept
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Life on 6th Street
Sociologist Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (The University of Chicago Press, 2014), will speak on Sept. 8 at 7:00 p.m. in Devlin Hall, 101. Listed among the best nonfiction books of 2014 by Publisher’s Weekly, On The Run examines the largely hidden world of warrants and surveillance that pervades daily life for young people in one poor neighborhood in Philadelphia. Goffman spent six years living in the neighborhood, observing the toll that pervasive policing and the presumption of criminality takes on families and young people’s futures. She is on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Listen to her TED Talk. Sponsor: Lowell Humanities Series.
The Whiskey of Our Discontent
Shakespeare, Not Stirred (Perigee Books, 2015), a new book co-authored by Associate Professor of English Caroline Bicks that seeks to relate Shakespeare to everyday life, presents cocktails and hors d’oeuvres inspired by the Bard’s characters and their predicaments. The volume has been featured by the Boston Globe and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s “Shakespeare Unlimited” podcast. Bicks also is the author of Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England and co-editor of The History of British Women’s Writing, 1500–1610, Volume 2.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged British literature, English Department, Shakespeare
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The New Bostonians
Boston College History Professor Marilynn Johnson examines the historical confluence of recent immigration and urban transformation in the Boston area in her new book, The New Bostonians: How Immigrants Have Transformed the Metro Area since the 1960s (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015). Since the 1980s, the Boston area has experienced an astounding renaissance—a development, Johnson argues, to which immigrants have contributed in numerous ways. Like the older Irish and other European immigrant groups whose labor once powered the region’s industrial economy, these newer migrants have been crucial in re-building the population, labor force and metropolitan landscape of the New Boston–although the fruits of the new prosperity have not been equally shared. Johnson also is the author of Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City and The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II.
Incarnate Grace
Boston College alumna Moira Linehan’s second collection of poetry, Incarnate Grace (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), explores various meanings of the word margin. “Margin” is chosen by the poet after hearing the word in response to her breast cancer diagnosis. From her travels to Ireland and Pacific Northwest to her home in Massachusetts, Linehan links the mundane to the mythic, intertwining connections between scripture and nature, storms and loss, winter and light, and breast cancer and embroidery. Her earlier collection of poems, If No Moon, was named an Honor Book in Poetry in the 8th annual Massachusetts Book Awards. Her poem, “Last Wishes,” received the Foley Poetry Award from America magazine.
The story of Samuel Battle
Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Browne has published One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (Beacon Press, 2015), the story of New York City’s first African American police officer. With an unpublished manuscript by Langston Hughes as his starting point, Browne conducted archival research and interviews to create an important social history of New York and riveting life and times of an American civil rights pioneer. Browne, a Boston College alumnus, is the editorial page editor of the New York Daily News. For more than 40 years he has been a part of the coverage of New York’s biggest stories. In 2007, he led a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for editorials that documented the epidemic illnesses afflicting thousands of 9/11 rescue and recovery workers. Read an excerpt of One Righteous Man in the latest issue of Boston College Magazine.
Posted in Alumni Authors
Tagged African American history, biography, New York City, police
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