Contested the second weekend in April each year since 1934, the Masters is the world’s most prestigious golf tournament and most-watched tournament on television. Tickets are in such demand that even the waiting list is closed, and players value the title above all others. In Making the Masters, award-winning golf writer David Barrett focuses his attention on how the Masters was conceived, how it got off the ground in 1934, and how it fully established itself in 1935. The key figure in the tournament’s creation and success was Bobby Jones, who was a living legend after winning the Grand Slam in 1930 and immediately retiring at the age of twenty-eight. He went on to found Augusta National and sought a high-profile tournament for his new course. But nearly as important was Clifford Roberts, a banker friend of Jones who not only embraced Jones’s vision but became his right-hand man in working to bring that vision to reality. Barrett explores how Jones and Roberts built the Masters from scratch, creating a golf institution embellished by the often surprising details of what that entailed as they were trying to establish a golf club and golf tournament in tough economic times. It also vividly chronicles the events of the 1934 and 1935 Masters, with Gene Sarazen’s spectacular victory in 1935 providing the climax. Set against the backdrop of golf, and America, in the 1930s, the book provides an informative and entertaining read for fans of the Masters and students of golf history.

Making Girls into Women offers an account of the historical emergence of "the lesbian" by looking at late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women's writing. Kathryn R. Kent proposes that modern lesbian identity in the United States has its roots not just, or even primarily, in sexology and medical literature, but in white, middle-class women’s culture. Kent demonstrates how, as white women's culture shifted more and more from the home to the school, workplace, and boarding house, the boundaries between the public and private spheres began to dissolve. She shows how, within such spaces, women's culture, in attempting to mold girls into proper female citizens, ended up inciting in them other, less normative, desires and identifications, including ones Kent calls "protolesbian" or queer. Kent not only analyzes how texts represent queer erotics, but also theorizes how texts might produce them in readers. She describes the ways postbellum sentimental literature such as that written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Emma D. Kelley eroticizes, reacts against, and even, in its own efforts to shape girls’ selves, contributes to the production of queer female identifications and identities. Tracing how these identifications are engaged and critiqued in the early twentieth century, she considers works by Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop, as well as in the queer subject-forming effects of another modern invention, the Girl Scouts. Making Girls into Women ultimately reveals that modern lesbian identity marks an extension of, rather than a break from, nineteenth-century women’s culture.

Majority of papers read at Conference on Contemporary Ramayana Traditions, held September 1987 in Sankt Augustin, Germany.