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CHOICE BESTOWS OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE HONOR ON SIUC EMERITUS HISTORY PROFESSOR’S RECENT BOOK   Sweden and Visions of Norway: Politics and Culture, 1814–1905 by H. Arnold Barton has been named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine, a publication of the American Library Association. Barton is a professor emeritus of history at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the author of numerous, renowned scholarly works on Scandinavian history.   In Sweden and Visions of Norway (224 pages, 33 illus., $45.00 cloth), published by Southern Illinois University Press in December of 2002, Barton investigates Norwegian political and cultural influences in Sweden during the period of the Swedish-Norwegian dynastic union from 1814 to 1905. Barton is the first historian to look beyond the cultural conflicts and examine the impact of the union on internal developments, particularly in Sweden. Prior to 1814, Norway, unlike Sweden, had no constitution and only the rudiments of higher culture, yet paradoxically, Norway exerted a greater direct influence on Sweden.   Choice called the work a “truly pioneering study. . . Barton makes a solid case, backed by impeccable scholarship, that after the union was dissolved in 1905, Sweden had been so thoroughly influenced that its future development would be appreciably different from what it might have been otherwise. Richly illustrated, thoroughly annotated, and gracefully written, this monograph will likely remain definitive for this period in Nordic history.”   H. Arnold Barton is a professor emeritus of history at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of Northern Arcadia: Foreign Travelers in Scandinavia, 1765–1815; A Folk Divided: Homeland Swedes and Swedish Americans, 1840–1940; and The Search for Ancestors: A Swedish-American Family Saga. In 2000, His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden bestowed on Barton the insignia of Commander of the Royal Order of the Polar Star.   Every year in the January issue, Choice publishes a list of Outstanding Academic Titles that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community. The list is quite selective: it contains approximately ten percent of some 6,600 works reviewed in Choice each year. The magazine’s editor apply several criteria to reviewed titles, including overall excellence in presentation and scholarship, importance relative to other literature in the field, originality and uniqueness of treatment, value to undergraduate students, and importance in building undergraduate library collections.   Other recent Choice Outstanding Academic Title winners from SIU Press are A Contextualistic Worldview by Lewis E. Hahn (2001), “A Clown in the Grave”: Complexities and Tensions in the Works of Gregory Corso by Michael Skau (2001), The World Wars Through the Female Gaze by Jean Gallagher (2000), Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth Century Temperance Rhetoric by Carol Mattingly (2000), and Creating the Self in Contemporary American Theatre by Robert J. Andreach (2000).   More marketing news