Explore the vast range of titles available.

In September 1850, the celebrated soprano Jenny Lind, better known as the Swedish Nightingale, arrived in the United States for what would be her last major musical tour. Her wild success in the young nation was built upon an advertising campaign by Phineas Taylor Barnum that leveraged her talent and various aspects of her identity. In this article, we consider the music written for Lind and how the sound she produced impacted her audiences, as well as those who did not even hear her. It is not an attempt to recreate Lind’s voice but to mark its absence by ‘audiolizing’ the genres it produced. We describe the tension between the written sheet music found in the archives and the corresponding performances by Lind and her imitators, as described in the press. Lind’s voice communicated to American society in several registers simultaneously: her vocal performance is variously described as a model for the voice of the masses, a respondent in sing-along sessions with audiences in the street, and also as an indescribable vehicle for spiritual transcendence. We will trace the correspondence of these identities and in so doing, hope to amplify the popular soundscapes of the mid-nineteenth century America.

With the invention of photography in the first half of the nineteenth century, the camera soon became a widely used instrument in the field of medicine. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, photography helped to classify the pathological while defining the 'normal.' In this process the body became a highly de-individualized entity, but the individuality depicted in medical studio portraits reveals a struggle with scientific objectivity. This article engages with medical portrait photography by analyzing the photographs of Dr. James Buckner Luckie's first and second case of successful triple amputation. The series of photographs is unusual because it shows a black man and a white man in a sequence. The pictures are trophies of medical success, but they also visualize the tensions that are characteristic of nineteenth-century American professional medicine: between racist assumptions, scientific discourse, and popular entertainment venues, as for example freak shows.

This collection offers cultural historical analyses of enfreakment and freak shows, examining the social construction and spectacular display of wondrous, monstrous, or curious Otherness in the formerly relatively neglected region of Continental Europe. Forgotten stories are uncovered about freak-show celebrities, medical specimen, and philosophical fantasies presenting the anatomically unusual in a wide range of sites, including curiosity cabinets, anatomical museums, and traveling circus ac.

The contributions from the fields of anthropology, cultural geography, history, literature, American studies, and Native American studies comprise a variety of case studies and approaches, but they all agree on criticizing a profound preoccupation with Western theory concepts that do not fit the nature of Indian ghosts. Waterman's account can be read as a parable to contemporary discourses on museums and their human remains, a never-ending ghost story.

Neither a manifesto nor a comprehensive collection of Indigenous American verse, the book celebrates the linguistic, cultural, historical, and experiential diversity of human existence on the continent as expressed in the work of \"some of the finest poets publishing today in the Indigenous Americas\" (10). In its transgression of settler-state borders and state-national literary traditions, Sing brings the self-limiting artificiality of such boundaries into relief and evidences the potential and power of Indigenous art to speak to contemporary challenges facing communities of all stripes.