"Abbott offers a fruitful new way to read science fiction, one that also greatly enriches our understanding of western history and its impact on our collective imagination. Detailing the overlap of science fiction and western fiction - especially relating to their mutual interest in and concerns about frontier expansionism - he reveals an unsuspected common ground that informs the writings of both camps." "Reviewing the work of many Hugo and Nebula Award winners, as well as drawing upon popular film and television series (like the Buck Rogers serials), Abbott's study journeys across the far reaches of science fiction's universe."

This is the first book-length exploration of the ways art from the edges of the Roman Empire represented the future, examining visual representations of time and the role of artwork in Roman imperial systems. This book focuses on four kingdoms from across the empire: Cottius’s Alpine kingdom in the north, King Juba II’s Mauretania in the south-west, Herodian Judea in the east, and Kommagene to the north-east. Art from the imperial frontier is rarely considered through the lens of the aesthetics of time, and Roman provincial art and the monuments of allied rulers are typically interpreted as evidence of the interaction between Roman and local identities. In this interdisciplinary study, which explores statues, wall paintings, coins, monuments, and inscriptions, readers learn that these artworks served as something more: they were created to represent the futures that allied rulers and their people foresaw. The pressure of Roman imperialism drove patrons and artists on the empire’s borders to imbue their creations with increasingly sophisticated ideas about the future, as they wrestled with consequential decisions made under periods of intense political pressure. Comprehensively illustrated and providing an important new approach to Roman material culture at the edge of empire, Visions of the Future in Roman Frontier Kingdoms 100 BCE–100 CE is suitable for students and scholars working on Rome and its frontiers, as well as Roman material culture more broadly, and those studying the aesthetics of time in art and art history.

An entertaining cultural history of the American family vacation during the height of its popularity from 1945 to 1973. Reveals the ways in which the ritual of the family road trip, for most middle-class Americans became a way of defining what it meant to be (and become) American.

What is the future of the American West? This book look at works of utopian, dystopian, and apocalyptic science fiction to show how narratives of the past and future powerfully shape our understanding of the present-day West.

The essays collected in this volume explore the frontier theme in American history, not only as it relates to issues of political jurisdiction, territorial expansion, and cultural interaction, but also as a concept which is applicable to any different types of historically significant boundaries that have been used to differentiate and separate, that have been renegotiated, or that might be historiographically redefined. Physical geography, demographic movements, international relations, political culture, social customs, language, religion, and other cultural factors, as they intertwined over time, have all played roles in the historical processes of defining the nation, its values and the limits of its power. The same factors have also given rise to different social groups, interests and jurisdictions within the nation. These essays examine many kinds of frontiers and boundaries -- territorial, economic, ethnic, literary, artistic, ideological, political, institutional, administrative, and even historiographical -- discussing theoretical and interpretative problems in their demarcation, as well as their transgression, and their relationship with the exercise of power, from colonial times to the present.

“Through elegant ethnography and nuanced theorization . . . gives us a new way of thinking about violence, development, modernity, and ultimately, the city.” —Ananya Roy, University of California, Los Angeles Beirut is a city divided. Following the Green Line of the civil war, dividing the Christian east and the Muslim west, today hundreds of such lines dissect the city. For the residents of Beirut, urban planning could hold promise: a new spatial order could bring a peaceful future. But with unclear state structures and outsourced public processes, urban planning has instead become a contest between religious-political organizations and profit-seeking developers. Neighborhoods reproduce poverty, displacement, and urban violence. For the War Yet to Come examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut’s southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order. Hiba Bou Akar argues these neighborhoods are arranged, not in the expectation of a bright future, but according to the logic of “the war yet to come”: urban planning plays on fears and differences, rumors of war, and paramilitary strategies to organize everyday life. As she shows, war in times of peace is not fought with tanks, artillery, and rifles, but involves a more mundane territorial contest for land and apartment sales, zoning and planning regulations, and infrastructure projects. Winner of the Anthony Leeds Prize “Upends our conventional notions of center and periphery, of local and transnational, even of war and peace.” —AbdouMaliq Simone, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity “Fascinating, theoretically astute, and empirically rich.” —Asef Bayat, University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign “An important contribution.” —Christine Mady, International Journal of Middle East Studies

Most Christians are unaware that there is such a thing as a biblical cosmology. That is, we do not have a clear idea of the whole of creation, both visible and invisible, its parts and realms, and how they fit together. We live by bits and pieces of conflicting notions supplied by the Bible and the secular world, and there is little comprehension of the overall design of reality and the all-embracing vision of creation that the Bible provides and the Church has taught for centuries. The matter seems too complex for the typical contemporary Christian and so the matter is dropped as irrelevant. The consequences are deadly; ignorance breeds arrogance, indifference, and finally spiritual death. The Little Book of Big Frontiers intends to make the complex issue of cosmology understandable. Vivid and ordinary stories and images are used to illustrate extremely difficult concepts that will open up new frontiers for the reader. Readers will come away with a whole new understanding of the cosmos and how it works, integrating the interior realties of the soul with the world around them, rediscovering realms that were once known to the early Christians but, alas, are now lost within the secularization of our culture.