Past Into Present

First-person interpretation--the portrayal of historical characters through interactive dramatization or roleplaying--is an effective, albeit controversial, method used to bring history to life at museums, historic sites, and other public venues. Stacy Roth examines the techniques of first-person interpretation to identify those that have been most effective with audiences while allowing interpreters to maintain historical fidelity. Past into Present focuses on first-person interpretation's most challenging form: the unscripted, spontaneous, conversational approach employed in "living history" environments such as Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, Conner Prairie in Indiana, and Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. While acknowledging that a wide range of methods can touch audiences effectively, Roth identifies a core set of practices that combine positive communication techniques, classic interpretive philosophy, and time-tested learning theories to promote audience enjoyment, provoke thought and inquiry, convey important messages and themes, and relate to individual visitor interests. She offers numerous examples of conversation and demonstration strategies, visitor behavior profiles, and suggestions for depicting conflict and controversy, and she provides useful character development guidelines, interpretive training advice, and recommendations for adapting first-person interpretation for diverse audiences.

Published on the occasion of Bridget Riley’s major exhibition at David Zwirner in London in the summer of 2014, this fully illustrated catalogue offers intimate explorations of paintings and works on paper produced by the legendary British artist over the past fifty years, focusing specifically on her recurrent use of the stripe motif. Riley has devoted her practice to actively engaging viewers through elementary shapes such as lines, circles, curves, and squares, creating visual experiences that at times trigger optical sensations of vibration and movement. The London show, her most extensive presentation in the city since her 2003 retrospective at Tate Britain, explored the stunning visual variety she has managed to achieve working exclusively with stripes, manipulating the surfaces of her vibrant canvases through subtle changes in hue, weight, rhythm, and density. As noted by Paul Moorhouse, “Throughout her development, Riley has drawn confirmation from Euge`ne Delacroix’s observation that ‘the first merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.’ [Her] most recent stripe paintings are a striking reaffirmation of that principle, exciting and entrancing the eye in equal measure.” Created in close collaboration with the artist, the publication’s beautifully produced color plates offer a selection of the iconic works from the exhibition. These include the artist’s first stripe works in color from the 1960s, a series of vertical compositions from the 1980s that demonstrate her so-called “Egyptian” palette—a “narrow chromatic range that recalled natural phenomena”—and an array of her modestly scaled studies, executed with gouache on graph paper and rarely before seen. A range of texts about Riley’s original and enduring practice grounds and contextualizes the images, including new scholarship by art historian Richard Shiff, texts on both the artist’s wall paintings and newest body of work by Paul Moorhouse, 20th Century Curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and a 1978 interview with Robert Kudielka, her longtime confidant and foremost critic. Additionally, the book features little-seen archival imagery of Riley at work over the years; documentation of her recent commissions for St. Mary’s Hospital in West London, taken especially for this publication; and installation views of the exhibition itself, installed throughout the three floors of the gallery’s eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse located in the heart of Mayfair.

Following decades of silence about the involvement of doctors, medical researchers and other health professionals in the Holocaust and other National Socialist (Nazi) crimes, scholars in recent years have produced a growing body of research that reveals the pervasive extent of that complicity. This interdisciplinary collection of studies presents documentation of the critical role medicine played in realizing the policies of Hitler’s regime. It traces the history of Nazi medicine from its roots in the racial theories of the 1920s, through its manifestations during the Nazi period, on to legacies and continuities from the postwar years to the present.

Bridget Riley’s explorations of perception through form and color have made her into one of the most significant painters working today. Since the early 1960s, she has used elementary shapes—lines, circles, curves, and squares—to create visual experiences that immediately draw the viewer in, often triggering optical vibrations and illusions. More recently, Riley has shifted back to black and white in her large-scale paintings, marking a departure from her recent colored stripe paintings and a return to the palette of some of her earliest works. Published on the occasion of her 2015 solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Bridget Riley: Works 1981–2015 presents paintings from the last thirty-four years of her career, including images of Rajasthan, a wall painting previously shown in Germany and England, and exhibited for the first time in New York. These dynamic reproductions begin with stripe paintings from the 1980s and end with a coda of sorts —a return to black and white that ties back to her work from the 1960s, but bear traces of Riley’s deep engagement with color in the interim. As critic Éric de Chassey puts it in his essay for Riley’s 2015 catalogue with Galerie Max Hetzler: “The black-and-white paintings not only enter into a dialogue with the 1960s works, but take stock of every painting experience Riley has created during a long career.” Also included is a selection of the artist’s works on paper; taken together, these complementary aspects of her practice over the past four decades reveal the astonishing variety she has achieved by developing and rediscovering different forms. An essay by art historian Richard Shiff helps contextualize the developments in Riley’s practice since the early 1980s, and further emphasizes her influence and lineage as a painter. Rounding out the publication are biographical notes by Robert Kudielka, one of the artist’s foremost critics. With a career spanning six decades, Bridget Riley remains one of the most exciting painters today, and Bridget Riley: Works 1981–2015 presents a selection of works from what may be her richest period to date.

Roger Sale’s Seattle, Past to Present has become a beloved reflection of Seattle’s history and its possible futures as imagined in 1976, when the book was first published. Drawing on demographic analysis, residential surveys, portraiture, and personal observation and reflection, Sale provides his take on what was most important in each of Seattle’s main periods, from the city’s founding, when settlers built a city great enough that the railroads eventually had to come; down to the post-Boeing Seattle of the 1970s, when the city was coming to terms with itself based on lessons from its past. Along the way, Sale touches on the economic diversity of late nineteenth-century Seattle that allowed it to grow; describes the major achievements of the first boom years in parks, boulevards, and neighborhoods of quiet elegance; and draws portraits of people like Vernon Parrington, Nellie Cornish, and Mark Tobey, who came to Seattle and flourished. The result is a powerful assessment of Seattle’s vitality, the result of old-timers and newcomers mixing both in harmony and in antagonism. With a new introduction by Seattle journalist Knute Berger, this edition invites today's readers to revisit Sale’s time capsule of Seattle—and perhaps learn something unexpected about this ever-changing city.

William's life began in a small town in Axton, Virginia on his grandfather's farm. William grew up with his brother Howard and they played different games during their childhood. William attended several elementary schools and later high school where he graduated. He had a successful military career where he served for twenty-four years. He met his wife Beulah at the start of his military career in 1970. They were married in October 1973. William and Beulah traveled to different states dur

Compiled for the first time, here are all of Newbery Award– winning author Richard Peck’s previously published short stories and two brand-new ones. From comedy to tragedy to historical to contemporary; from "Priscilla and the Wimps," Peck’s first short story, to "Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground," which inspired both A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder, to "The Electric Summer," Peck’s jumping-off point for Fair Weather, readers will thrill at Peck’s engaging short fiction. Complete with the author’s own notes on the stories as well as tips and hints for aspiring writers and two new stories, this vibrant and varied collection offers something for everyone.

From King Arthur and Robin Hood, through to video games and jousting-themed restaurants, medieval culture continues to surround us and has retained a strong influence on literature and culture throughout the ages. This fascinating and illuminating guide is written by two of the leading contemporary scholars of medieval literature, and explores: The influence of medieval cultural concepts on literature and film, including key authors such as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Mark Twain The continued appeal of medieval cultural figures such as Dante, King Arthur, and Robin Hood The influence of the medieval on such varied disciplines such as politics, music, children’s literature, and art. Contemporary efforts to relive the Middle Ages. Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present surveys the critical field and sets the boundaries for future study, providing an essential background for literary study from the medieval period through to the twenty-first century.