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As American classical music struggled for recognition in the mid-nineteenth century, George Frederick Bristow emerged as one of its most energetic champions and practitioners. Katherine K. Preston explores the life and works of a figure admired in his own time and credited today with producing the first American grand opera and composing important works that ranged from oratorios to symphonies to chamber music. Preston reveals Bristow's passion for creating and promoting music, his skills as a businessman and educator, the respect paid him by contemporaries and students, and his tireless work as both a composer and in-demand performer. As she examines Bristow against the backdrop of the music scene in New York City, Preston illuminates the little-known creative and performance culture that he helped define and create. Vivid and richly detailed, George Frederick Bristow enriches our perceptions of musical life in nineteenth-century America.

Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Author Katherine Preston reveals how-contrary to the existing historiography on the American musical culture of this period-English-language opera not only flourished in the United States during this time, but found its success significantly bolstered by the support of women impresarios, prima-donnas, managers, and philanthropists who provided financial backing to opera companies. This rich and compelling study details the lives and professional activities of several important players in American postbellum opera, including manager Effie Ober, philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, and performers/artistic directors Caroline Richings, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, Clara Louise Kellogg, and'the people's prima donna'Emma Abbott. Drawing from an impressive range of primary sources, including contemporaneous music and theater periodicals, playbills, memoirs, librettos, scores, and reviews and commentary on the performances in digitized newspapers, Preston tells the story of how these and other women influenced the activities of some of the more than one hundred opera companies touring the United States during the second half of the 19th century, performing opera in English for a diverse range of audiences. Countering a pervasive and misguided historical understanding of opera reception in the United States-unduly influenced by modern attitudes about the genre as elite, exclusive, expensive, and of interest only to a niche market-Opera for the People demonstrates the important (and hitherto unsuspected) place of opera in the rich cornucopia of late-century American musical theatre, which would eventually lead to the emergence of American musical comedy.

Evangelicals are increasingly recognizing the importance of the end of the age judgment of Old Covenant Jerusalem in AD 70. However, to maintain a futurist eschatology, they resort to saying that those events merely foreshadowed the'real'end, the end of human history. In this book, Preston definitively refutes that theory. There is not another book like this, anywhere!

Until recently digital processing of biomedical images was conducted solely in the research laboratories of the universities and industry. However, with the advent of computerized tomography in 1972 and the computerized white blood cell differential count in 1974, enormous changes have suddenly occurred. Digital image pro­ cessing in biomedicine has now become the most active sector in the digital image processing field. Processing rates have reached the level of one trillion picture elements per year in the United States alone and are expected to be ten trillion per year in 1980. This enormous volume of activity has stimulated further re­ search in biomedical image processing in the last two years with the result that important inroads have been made in applications in radiology, oncology, and ophthalmology. Although much significant work in this field is taking place in Europe, it is in the United States and Japan that the level of activity is highest.