Bruce Kuklick

A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture

Fascism Comes to America

Emmanuel Gerard

Fifty years later, the murky circumstances and tragic symbolism of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination trouble many people around the world. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick reveal a tangled web of international politics in which many people—black and white, well-meaning and ruthless, African, European, and American—bear responsibility for this crime.

Murdering Patrice Lumumba

Death in the Congo

Shibe Park was demolished in 1976, and today its site is surrounded by the devastation of North Philadelphia. Kuklick, however, vividly evokes the feelings people had about the home of the Philadelphia Athletics and later the Phillies.

Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909-1976

To Every Thing a Season

At a time when almost all African American college students attended black colleges, philosopher William Fontaine was the only black member of the University of Pennsylvania faculty—and quite possibly the only black member of any faculty in the Ivy League. Little is known about Fontaine, but his predicament was common to African American professionals and intellectuals at a critical time in the history of civil rights and race relations in the United States. Black Philosopher, White Academy is at once a biographical sketch of a man caught up in the issues and the dilemmas of race in the middle of the last century; a portrait of a salient aspect of academic life then; and an intellectual history of a period in African American life and letters, the discipline of philosophy, and the American academy. It is also a meditation on the sources available to a practicing historian and, frustratingly, the sources that are not. Bruce Kuklick stays close to the slim packet of evidence left on Fontaine's life and career but also strains against its limitations to extract the largest possible insights into the life of the elusive Fontaine.

The Career of William Fontaine

Black Philosopher, White Academy

From the 1880s through the 1920s a motley collection of American scholars, soldiers of fortune, institutional bureaucrats, and financiers created the academic fields that give us our knowledge of the ancient Near East. Bruce Kuklick's new book begins with the story of the initial adventure of these determined investigators--a twelve-year dig near the Biblical Babylon, at Nippur, conducted at intervals from 1888 through 1900 and bankrolled by the Babylonian Exploration Fund. To unearth tens of thousands of cunneiform tablets, the leaders of this venture faced harsh living conditions in the desert and an academic war of each against all that was quickly begun at the site itself. As their knowledge increased, they risked their personal religious beliefs in the search for historical truth. Kuklick discusses their tribulations to illuminate two other contemporary developments: first, the maturation of the American university, particularly in contrast to its German counterpart; and second, the influence of religious-secular conflict on the ways in which Western scholarship appropriated or appreciated other cultures. The Nippur expedition spawned unseemly (and entertaining) fights among the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Harvard, and Chicago for leadership in the study of ancient Near East--not to mention disagreements with their own developing museums and an international scandal called the Hilprecht controversy. More significant than these quarrels was the concern for the meaning of history displayed in this period of Near Eastern scholarship. The field was linked to Biblical criticism and Judeo-Christian interests, and many of the orientalists originally possessed strong religious commitments--which some put aside as they struggled for objectivity. As recent critics have shown, "orientalism" was an example of the West's ability to appropriate the "other" for its own purposes. However, Kuklick's study demonstrates that the censure of orientalism hinges on modes of argumentation that scholars of the ancienet Near East helped to legitimate, and at no small cost to themselves. Bruce Kuklick is Killbrew Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are To Every Thing a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909-1976 (Princeton), Churchmen and Philosophers: Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey, and The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge Massachusetts, 1860-1930. Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Bruce Kuklick

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