Manliness Civilization

When former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement on the fourth of July, 1910 to fight current black heavywight champion Jack Johnson in Reno, Nevada, he boasted that he was doing it "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro." Jeffries, though, was trounced. Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, Gail Bederman demonstrates, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance. In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans—Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—she illuminates the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.

In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the 'major utopians' who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century's 'minor utopias' whose stories, overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag, suggest that the future need not be as catastrophic as the past. The book is organized around six key moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe: 1900 (the Paris World's Fair), 1919 (the Paris Peace Conference), 1937 (the Paris exhibition celebrating science and light), 1948 (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 1968 (moral indictments and student revolt), and 1992 (the emergence of visions of global citizenship). Winter considers the dreamers and the nature of their dreams as well as their connections to one another and to the history of utopian thought. By restoring minor utopias to their rightful place in the recent past, Winter fills an important gap in the history of social thought and action in the twentieth century.

No more apologies for being a man! Best-selling social commentator Anthony Esolen draws on timeless wisdom to defend the masculine virtues of strength, drive, ambition, and determination in building and upholding civilization itself. This is a book that should not have to be written. Its purpose is to return to men a sense of their worth as men and to give to boys the noble aim of manliness, an aim which is their due by right. One of the most courageous and penetrating writers of our time, Anthony Esolen shows that men and women would both be happier if men came to a just appraisal of their worth. The manhood he praises does not boast or swagger, but it appreciates its powers. It is reluctant to hurt, but it does not cringe or cower. The whole of civilization rests on the shoulders of men who have done work that most people would not do—and that the physically weaker sex could not have done. And though the masculine mystique is about more than physical force, the differences between the sexes—manifold and profound—are all related in some way to that one, the easiest difference to see and the hardest to deny. The feminist who mindlessly asserts that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” takes her comfortable world—including the bicycle—for granted. And she betrays her lovelessness and ingratitude. Worse, she poisons the minds and hearts of boys with her talk of “toxic masculinity.” No Apologies, with its compelling vision of a strong and effective manhood, reminds men that they have powers as men, and that those powers must be used for the common good, for everyone—men, women, and children all.

The Manly Modern, the first major book on the history of masculinity in Canada, traces the history of what happened when men's supposed modernity became one of their defining features. Through a series of case studies covering such diverse subjects as car culture, mountaineering, war veterans, murder trials, and a bridge collapse, Christopher Dummitt argues that the very idea of what it meant to be modern was gendered. A strong current of anti-modernist sentiment bubbled just beneath the surface of postwar masculinity, creating rumblings about the state of modern manhood that, ironically, mirrored the tensions that burst forth in 1960s gender radicalism.