Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine, January 2010 The Encyclopedia of Play: A Social History explores the concept of play in history and modern society in the United States and internationally. Its scope encompasses leisure and recreation activities of children as well as adults throughout the ages, from dice games in the Roman empire to video games today. As an academic social history, it includes the perspectives of several curricular disciplines, from sociology to child psychology, from lifestyle history to social epidemiology. This two-volume set will serve as a general, non-technical resource for students in education and human development, health and sports psychology, leisure and recreation studies and kinesiology, history, and other social sciences to understand the importance of play as it has developed globally throughout history and to appreciate the affects of play on child and adult development, particularly on health, creativity, and imagination.

This book examines the health/fitness interaction in an historical context. Beginning in primitive hunter-gatherer communities, where survival required adequate physical activity, it goes on to consider changes in health and physical activity at subsequent stages in the evolution of “civilization.” It focuses on the health impacts of a growing understanding of medicine and physiology, and the emergence of a middle-class with the time and money to choose between active and passive leisure pursuits. The book reflects on urbanization and industrialization in relation to the need for public health measures, and the ever-diminishing physical demands of the work-place. It then evaluates the attitudes of prelates, politicians, philosophers and teachers at each stage of the process. Finally, the book explores professional and governmental initiatives to increase public involvement in active leisure through various school, worksite, recreational and sports programmes.

New York and its folklore scholars hold an important place in the history of the discipline. In New York dialogue between folklore researchers in the academy and those working in the public arena has been highly productive. In this volume, the works of New York's academic and public folklorists are presented together. Unlike some folklore anthologies, New York State Folklife Reader does not follow an organizational plan based on regions or genres. Because the New York Folklore Society has always tried to “give folklore back to the people,” the editors decided to divide the edited volume into sections about life processes that all New York state residents share. The book begins with five essays on various aspects of folk cultural memory: personal, family, community, and historical processes of remembrance expressed through narrative, ritual, and other forms of folklore. Following these essays, subsequent sections explore aspects of life in New York through the lens of Play, Work, Resistance, and Food. Both the New York Folklore Society and its journal were, as society cofounder Louis Jones explained, “intended to reach not just the professional folklorists but those of the general public who were interested in the oral traditions of the State.” Written in an accessible and readable style, this volume offers a glimpse into New York State's rich cultural diversity.

How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, in the span between 1492 and 1933, the vanquished Moor became Black, and how this figure, enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, paradoxically came to represent Spain itself. The imagined Gypsy about which flamenco imagery turns dances on a knife's edge delineating Christian and non-Christian, White and Black worlds. This figure's subversive teetering undermines Spain's symbolic linkage of religion with race, a prime weapon of conquest. Flamenco's Sonidos Negros live in this precarious balance, amid the purposeful confusion and ruckus cloaking embodied resistance, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by enslavement and colonization.

Offers a comprehensive thematic introduction to a wide range of medieval writings about the outlaw-hero from a series of different historical perspectives. By the fifteenth century, churchmen were complaining that laypeople preferred to hear stories about Robin Hood rather than to listen to the word of God. But what was the attraction of this outlaw for contemporary audiences? The essays collected here seek to examine the outlaw's legend in relation to late medieval society, politics and piety. They set out the different types of evidence which give us access to representations of Robin and his men in the pre-Reformation period, ask whether stories about the outlaw had any basis in reality and explore the many different purposes for which his legend was adapted. The volume is divided into six parts: the sources for the medieval legend of Robin Hood and its origins; social structure; social conflict; kingship, law and warfare; piety and the church; and the outlaw's legend in Wales and Scotland. Key issues addressed by its essays include the dating of the surviving tales, attitudes to social hierarchy, representations of gender and masculinity, the extent to which the tales drew upon or shaped contemporary attitudes towards law and justice, the development of Robin Hood plays and games, and whether the legend emerged from or appealed to particular social groups. It not only sheds new light on a character who, whether "real" or not, is one of the most important and memorable figures in the history of medieval England but also explores the extent to which the outlaw became popular in Scotland and Wales.

"Explores the life and work of Lydia Bailey, a leading printer in the book trade in Philadelphia from 1808 to 1861. Includes a list of almost nine hundred of her known imprints"--Provided by publisher.