HEB YouTube Channel Launches

HEB has just officially launched its new YouTube Channel. Today, you can find an introduction to the collection as well as instructional videos on how to search the collection and navigate an e-book.

We will be adding new content periodically introducing various aspects of the HEB collection, so please be sure to subscribe. If you have any suggestions for future videos you’d like to see, please write to us at subscriptions@hebook.org.

New on HEB: Grounds for Play: The Nauṭaṅkī Theatre of North India

ACLS Humanites E-Book (HEB) has recently made available a new edition of Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India by Kathryn Hansen. This interactive XML-encoded update of the original 1992 edition has been enhanced with audio clips of interviews and performances, twenty-five additional images, and excerpts of Hindi source materials.

In Grounds for Play, Hansen draws on field research and archival holdings to investigate the social history and meanings of the Nautanki theater of northern India, a form embedded in premodern peasant society. The performances are comprised of many elements: music, dance, poetry, oral storytelling traditions, and written texts. Hansen shows how Nautanki explores important social issues such as political authority, community identity and gender differences.

Grounds for Play won the Coomaraswamy Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 1994. The book has been adopted for courses in world theater, folklore, ethnomusicology, gender studies, and South Asian history and culture.

Grounds for Play is part of HEB's ACLS Fellows' Publications series. Please find other titles from this series here.

Littman Library: Jewish Cultural Studies Series

As part of its forthcoming title release in summer 2015, the ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) collection will feature the first five installments of the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization's Jewish Cultural Studies series. These titles, edited by Simon J. Bronner, focus on the concept of Jewish identity as perceived by both Jews and non-Jews, exploring the cultural dimensions of concepts such as homeland and diaspora, assimilation and separation; as well as cultural institutions like the media, museums, schools and synagogues; and examining these from both religious and secular perspectives. The series is published by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization for the Jewish Section of the American Folklore Society, one of the 31 learned societies that work with HEB on collection development.

The Littman Library is a respected leader in Jewish Studies titles; 28 volumes of its ongoing series Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry are currently already available as part of the HEB collection.