Graceland is much more than a wildly popular historic house and tourist destination associated with a famous entertainer, and Elvis Presley is much more than the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. As former Walters Art Museum director and medievalist Gary Vikan shows us in his fascinating new book, Graceland, the second-most visited historic house in the U.S., is a locus sanctus —a holy place—and Elvis is its resident saint, while the hordes of fans that crowd Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis are modern-day pilgrims, connected in spirit and practice to their early Christian counterparts, sharing a fascination for icons and iconography, relics, souvenirs, votives, and even a belief in miracles. Vikan reveals the emergence of contemporary holy places—Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the Grassy Knoll in Dallas, Place de l’Alma in Paris—and shows us that the saints of our day are our “martyred” secular charismatics, from Elvis to John F. Kennedy, Princess Diana, Michael Jackson, and others.

Creating tours, school programs, and other interpretive activities at historic house museums are among the most effective ways to engage the public in the history of their community and yet many organizations fail to achieve their potential. This guide describes the essential elements of successful interpretation: content, audience, and methods.

This book calls attention to the importance of scholarly reflection on the writing of liturgical history. The essays not only probe the impact of important shifts in historiography but also present new scholarship that promises to reconfigure some of the established images of liturgy’s past. Based on papers presented at the 2014 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Liturgy Conference, Liturgy’s Imagined Past/s seeks to invigorate discussion of methodologies and materials in contemporary writings on liturgy’s pasts and to resource such writing at a point in time when formidable questions are being posed about the way in which historians construct the object of their inquiry.

This volume explores the power of matter and materials in the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium. Recent attention to matter as dynamic and meaningful constitutes an emerging, interdisciplinary field of inquiry known as materiality, new materialism, or the material turn. Materials can be symbolic, but matter can also act on human subjects. This volume builds on these insights to consider the role of matter, materials, form, and embodied experiences in Byzantium. In many respects, Byzantine materiality represents a continuation of its Greco-Roman inheritance, which was also shared by neighboring peoples such as the Umayyads and Abbasids. But the Byzantines also developed their own, unique perspectives on matter and form, as with their parsing of the sacred materialities of icons, the Eucharist, and relics. Chapters in this volume consider the cultural meanings and functions of materials such as gold and ivory, the materiality of icons and relics, experiences of objects, as well as Byzantine philosophies of matter and form. Materiality takes center stage in Byzantine constructions of power, luxury, belief, and identity, which will be of interest to scholars and students of Byzantium and the wider medieval world.

Since at least the high point of the civil rights movement, African American Christianity has been widely recognized as a potent force for social change. Most attention to the political significance of Black churches, however, focuses on domestic protest and electoral politics. Yet some Black churches take a deep interest in the global issue of Israel and Palestine. Why would African American Christians get involved—and even take sides—in Palestine and Israel, and what does that reveal about the political significance of “the Black Church” today? This book examines African American Christian involvement in Israel and Palestine to show how competing visions of “the Black Church” are changing through transnational political engagement. Considering cases ranging from African American Christian Zionists to Palestinian solidarity activists, Roger Baumann traces how Black religious politics transcend domestic arenas and enter global spaces. These cases, he argues, illuminate how the meaning of the ostensibly singular and unifying category of “the Black Church”—spanning its history, identity, culture, and mission—is deeply contested at every turn. Black Visions of the Holy Land offers new insights into how Black churches understand their political role and social significance; the ways race, religion, and politics both converge and diverge; and why the meaning of overlapping racial and religious identities shifts when moving from national to global contexts.

The Routledge Handbook on Tourism in the Middle East and North Africa examines the importance of tourism as a historical, economic, social, environmental, religious and political force in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It highlights the ecological and resource challenges related to water, desert environments, climate change and oil. It provides an in-depth analysis of the geopolitical conditions that have long determined the patterns of tourism demand and supply throughout the region and how these play out in the everyday lives of residents and destinations as they attempt to grow tourism or ignore it entirely. While cultural heritage remains the primary tourism asset for the region as a whole, many new types of tourisms are emerging, especially in the Arabian Gulf region, where hyper-development is closely associated with the increasingly prominent role of luxury real estate and shopping, retail, medical tourism, cruises and transit tourism. The growing phenomenon of an expatriate workforce, and how its segregation from the citizenry creates a dual socio-economic system in several countries, is unmatched by other regions of the world. Many indigenous people of MENA keep themselves apart from other dominant groups in the region, although these social boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred as tourism, being one socio-economic force for change, has inspired many nomadic peoples to settle into towns and villages and rely more on tourists for their livelihoods. All of these issues and more shape the foundations of this book. This Handbook is the first of its kind to examine tourism from a broad regional and inclusive perspective, surveying a broad range of social, cultural, heritage, ecological and political matters in a single volume. With a wide range of contributors, many of whom are natives of the Middle East and North Africa, this Handbook is a vital resource for students and scholars interested in Tourism, Middle East Studies and Geography.

There is no other way to put it: Elvis is the King. Note the present tense: even though Elvis (supposedly) died nearly forty years ago, he has lived on in our hearts, as a sound, as an image, and as an especially vigorous personality. In fact, it’s safe to say no other celebrity has done so quite as well. The Death and Resurrection of Elvis Presley is the story of that afterlife, of Elvis after he left the building. Walking the eccentrically carpeted rooms of Graceland, bidding into stratospheric sums on his auctioned relics, and mingling among the some 200,000 impersonators of his likeness, Ted Harrison offers nothing less than the ultimate Elvis tribute. Harrison begins, of course, in pilgrimage: to Graceland. He shows how Elvis’s estate was pillaged nearly to ruin by his manager but was saved through the deft business acumen and financial vision of his divorced wife, one Priscilla Presley. If Graceland seems holy, that’s because it is: Harrison unveils in Elvis’s allure a deeply spiritual dimension, showing how Elvis fans, over the decades, have anointed their idol with Christ-like qualities. Through Elvis’s extravagance, Harrison raises fascinating links between money and faith, and through Elvis’s life, he shows how the King actually fulfilled a host of roles ranging from hero to martyr to saint. Underpinning the whole story is Elvis’s extraordinary charisma and—lest we forget—his astonishing musical genius. Fascinating, colorful, and deeply informative, this book is a must-have for any fan, anyone who was ever lucky enough to see Elvis alive or who hopes they might still be able to.