Bøger udgivet af Academica Press

Speaking of Wagner compiles in a new and highly accessible format celebrated author, lecturer, and Metropolitan Opera commentator William Berger's collection of talks and presentations about Richard Wagner, the most controversial, and perhaps the most widely influential, artist in history. These talks have been successful with diverse audiences, ranging from newcomers to the field to the most exacting experts, often at the same time! Berger's book preserves that wide range of tone: erudite but engaging, from lofty to startlingly coarse (as the subject requires), and connecting the subject to references from mythology to psychology and even (and especially) to cutting-edge pop culture.

In 1759, the court of the Italian Duchy of Parma adopted the inspiration of cultural creators who recommended a reform of Italian opera along French lines. These writers favored combining Italian-style music with the wider range of musical genres and scenic variety of French opera. As the music critic and commentator George W. Loomis shows in this groundbreaking volume, the young composer Tommaso Traetta was engaged to create new operas responding to these demands. As Loomis deftly demonstrates, Traetta's operas were largely oriented toward the formal aria, a byproduct of making Italian music an essential component of this cross-cultural fusion. Nevertheless, they were strikingly innovative in their use of chorus, integrated dance, and accompanied recitative. Structurally, the operas reflect the French distinction between scenes of action and divertissements. After a brief flowering, the project was abandoned, primarily for lack of interest, but Traetta's Parma operas deserve a previously unrecognized place in the history of Western music for their stimulation of opera seria in Italy and beyond. This included the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose genre-defining Idomeneo (1781) proved a turning point in the development of opera.

Examines the short life of the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, one of the most overlooked individuals in the pantheon of leaders in the Third Reich. Born to German mercantile parents in the Baltic region of the Russian Empire, he was a student in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution.

Presents a series of think-pieces about the security challenges of the present, both in the realm of cyberspace and otherwise, with a particular consideration of the promise and possible negative effects of new digital technologies.

The past decade has overflowed in a raging stream of contradictions. Old certainties have yielded to relentless insecurity over a time when much of the human experience got immeasurably better even as many things only ever seemed to get worse. As Paul du Quenoy's globetrotting criticism reveals, the arts were in a ferment that matched profound and yet totally unpredicted social and political transformations. Balanced, sometimes precariously, against the demands of an absurd and increasingly superfluous academic career, du Quenoy spent the 2010s seeking enlightenment, inspiration, and, above all, diversion, in total works of art all over the world, ranging from the traditional cultural capitals to humbler and more remote surroundings. Peering through the prism of performance, Through the Years With Prince Charming offers a unique bird's eye view of art and life in a changing world.

The first full-length study to examine the ubiquity and implications of death in Herman Melville's prose fiction. As Corey Evan Thompson shows, death occurs in all of Melville's novels and much of his shorter fiction by various means.

The distinguished Russian archeologist Aleksei P. Okladnikov's study reveals how a field archeologist goes about determining and writing prehistory. Relying on petroglyphs and pictographs left on cliffs and boulders, Okladnikov lays out in detail and straightforward language the prehistory of Siberia by ""reading"" these artifacts.

Explores the military and military-political history of Chukotka, the far northeastern region of the Russian Federation, separated from Alaska by the Bering Strait. This study is based on primary sources, including archeological, folkloric, and documentary evidence, dating from ancient times to the nineteenth century.

The United Nations and other organisations have helped codify the international law under which commanders may be held responsible. This book explores the factors that have moved civilization closer to a standard approach to rule of law and the accountability of leaders for the actions of those they command.

Explores national security challenges posed by new technologies and examines some ongoing efforts to understand and mitigate their potential negative effects. The authors, drawn from among a roster of international scholars, approach these issues from different yet ultimately complementary angles.

Explores the mimetic encounters of classical material across Alexander Pope's poetry. Focusing particularly on Pope's Horatian Imitations, Megumi Ohsumi attempts to identify the extent to which mimesis plays a role in Pope's oeuvre.

As the beating drums within the US for a war with Iran grow louder, it is important to understand precisely how and why neo-conservatives have chosen to orchestrate a sustained and coordinated campaign for a US attack on Iran. This study breaks down some of the key rhetorical techniques neo-conservatives have utilized in this campaign.

Presents a fresh perspective on certain themes of Renaissance erotic magic and its relation to mass psychology and psychoanalysis, and offers an alternative for the study of the media strategies that determine Western worldviews and behaviours.

Eurasia remains a zone of confrontation between the United States and Russia. Over the last decade, this confrontation has reached the Middle East, and, extending through Central Asia to China and points further afield, it has acquires global dimensions. This book examines these tensions.

Presents a collection of essays about the transformation of America, which has turned from a united nation to one more divided than ever under the presidency of Donald Trump. Author and attorney Tiberiu Dianu writes in the hope that America is mature enough to learn from its mistakes and avoid further scars along its evolving history.

Noted Nigerian historian Onianwa Oluchukwu Ignatus investigates the air war component of the Nigerian-Biafran War, a crucial postcolonial conflict in Africa. The book focuses on the Biafra's air operations against oil installations and facilities owned by multinational oil companies in Nigeria.

Boldly focusing on sexuality as a definer of social order, this book argues that there is an ""M theory"" - a master theory of theories - not only in Quantum Physics, but also in Continental Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Sociology, disclosing how the ontological structure of the ""fantastic four"" ingredients of metaphysics has recurred through time.

Top analyst Leslie Gruis's timely new book argues that privacy is an individual right and democratic value worth preserving, even in a cyberized world. Since the time of the printing press, technology has played a key role in the evolution of individual rights and helped privacy emerge as a formal legal concept. All governments exercise extraordinary powers during national security crises. In the United States, many imminent threats during the twentieth century induced heightened government intrusion into the privacy of Americans. The Privacy Act of 1974 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA, 1978) reversed that trend. Other laws protect the private information of individuals held in specific sectors of the commercial world. Risk management practices were extended to computer networks, and standards for information system security began to emerge. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) incorporated many such standards into its Cybersecurity Framework, and is currently developing a Privacy Framework. These standards all contribute to a patchwork of privacy protection which, so far, falls far short of what the U.S. constitutional promise offers and what our public badly needs. Greater privacy protections for U.S. citizens will come as long as Americans remember how democracy and privacy sustain one another, and demonstrate their commitment to them.

Alexandra Kitty's vital new book is a guide to the stratagems and techniques of war propaganda. When nations go to war, governments need reliable and effective methods of rallying public opinion to support their actions, regardless of the political leanings or educational background of citizens. The Mind Under Siege explores real life case studies and research in human motivation to show why propaganda is more powerful, potent, and effective than other types of persuasive messages. Reliance on primal phobias, and the threat to reproduction, well-being, and life itself make propaganda a reliable and powerful tool. For journalists and other news producers, Kitty's book shows how to ask the right questions and avoid spreading misinformation and propaganda and how to see more insidious forms of manipulation and narrative through psychological research and case studies.

Presents the Reverend George William Allen, an important figure in esoteric religious and cultural movements that swept North America and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. This original biography is the first serious scholarly attempt to define the man, his theology, his philosophy and to trace his influence.

Examines how universities effectively censor teaching, how social and political activism effectively censors its opponents, and how academics censor themselves and each other. A Book Too Risky To Publish concludes that few universities are now living up to their original mission to promote free inquiry and unfettered critical thought.

As this dynamic biography reveals, the writer Ernest William Hornung (1866-1921) became a household name in the 1890s. Peter Rowland's superb literary biography traces Hornung's rise to fame and fortune, as the writer deftly turned his hand to comedy, romance, and drama.

Examines figures of speech, arguing that figures of speech in prose and poetry, literature and talk, make sense as turns of rhetoric by means of their energeia (vividness, radiance). David Reid analyses figures from Homer to literary giants of the twentieth century, mostly drawn from poetry, but also from prose and colloquial turns of phrase.

Examines the concept of ""forbidden knowledge"" in religion, science, government, and psychology. Burton Porter takes the general position that too much material is prohibited, especially today, even while business and government invade individual privacy more and more.

No dramatist has treated identity in as many ways and in such depth as William Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's Identities, James Driscoll shows how the Bard used history, comedy, tragedy, and romance to develop comprehensive treatments of personal identity.

Analyses the internal tensions of the Soviet-led Cold War alliance as its careened toward its end. Starting with the peak of the alliance's power under Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the book follows its ossification to its increasing haplessness under Brezhnev's successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.

Chronicles a heretofore untold story of civil rights in modern America. In embracing the Western urban experience, this book relates the struggle for civil rights and school desegregation in Denver, Colorado.

Highlights the connections between colonial legacies in Africa and the performance of modern local governments. The book notes interlocking exigencies that have influenced the behaviour local authorities within the colonial context of their past governments and compares them to analogous local governments across the continent.

In the 400 years since the first execution was carried out for treason in Virginia, American jurisdictions have debated the appropriateness and methods of capital punishment. Over that time, courts have placed varying restrictions on its application. Political scientists James Whisker and Kevin Spiker survey this history from a new perspective.

Brings together the memoirs of five members of an extended Russian family who remained in the USSR between 1917 and 1943 but subsequently escaped from Soviet rule, ultimately settling in the United States after enduring decades of communism, war, and life in refugee camps.