Fabritio Caroso was dancing master to some of the greatest princely families of Italy, and Nobiltà di dame, his sumptuous collection of ballroom dances and their music, reflects an age that believed that the person of high rank should be a work of art, uniting strength and beauty. Caroso's detailed instructions (including rules for steps, style and etiquetter, and forty-eight actual choreographies) are unequalled by any contemporary manual in their specificity and clarity. Most dances are preceeded by an engraving showing the opening position and illustrating many aspects of dress, posture, and gesture. A full scholarly apparatus, giving new information unavailable elsewhere, makes the book even more valuable to dancers and to students of dance and music at the junction of the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

This book brings vividly to life the courtiers and servants of the imperial court in Vienna and the royal court at Paris-Versailles. Drawing on a wealth of material masterfully set in a comparative context, the book makes a unique contribution to the field of court studies. Staff, numbers, costs and hierarchies; daily routines and ceremonies; court favourites and the nature of rulership; the integrative and centripetal forces of the central courtly establishment: all are seen in a long-term, comparative perspective that highlights both the similarities and the distinctiveness of developments in France and the Habsburg lands. In the process, most conventional views of each court - and of court life in general - are challenged, and an alternative interpretation emerges. Finally, by relocating the household in the heart of the early modern state, Vienna and Versailles forces us to rethink the process of statebuilding and the notion of 'absolutism'.

With this masterful work, Louis A. Perez Jr. transforms the way we view Cuba and its relationship with the United States. On Becoming Cuban is a sweeping cultural history of the sustained encounter between the peoples of the two countries and of the ways that this encounter helped shape Cubans' identity, nationality, and sense of modernity from the early 1850s until the revolution of 1959. Using an enormous range of Cuban and U.S. sources--from archival records and oral interviews to popular magazines, novels, and motion pictures--Perez reveals a powerful web of everyday, bilateral connections between the United States and Cuba and shows how U.S. cultural forms had a critical influence on the development of Cubans' sense of themselves as a people and as a nation. He also articulates the cultural context for the revolution that erupted in Cuba in 1959. In the middle of the twentieth century, Perez argues, when economic hard times and political crises combined to make Cubans painfully aware that their American-influenced expectations of prosperity and modernity would not be realized, the stage was set for revolution.

This inter-disciplinary volume demonstrates, from a range of perspectives, the complex cultural work and struggles over meaning that lie at the heart of what we call memory. In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective and local. At the same time, memory and memorial practices have become sites of contestation, and the politics of memory are increasingly prominent.

Flitter examines those narratives within the intellectual parameters that defined them, probing the conceptual strategies by which writers represented history.

Using a comparative perspective, this volume studies the court as a crucial center of government and politics, as well as the dominant focus for the ruling elites. The essays explore how the early modern court gradually developed from the medieval royal household to its very different form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Comparing England, Germany, France, Spain as well as the Netherlands and Italy, the editors find that several common themes emerge: the problem of integrating a number of often vastly different provinces and principalities through the attraction of a court; the capital city's function as the basis of the court and as its rival; the role of the Court during the great religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the court as an instrument for domesticating the nobility and a stronghold of aristocratic influence.