When a group of young political activists met in 1944 to launch the African National Congress Youth League, it included the nucleus of a remarkable generation of leaders who forged the struggle for freedom and equality in South Africa for the next half century: Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Jordan Ngubane, Ellen Kuzwayo, Albertina Smith, A. P. Mda, Dan Tloome, and David Bopape. It was Anton Lembede, however whom they chose as their first president.
Lembede, who had just begun practicing law in Johannesburg, was known for his sharp intellect, fiery personality, and unwavering commitment to the struggle at hand. The son of farm laborers from the district of Georgedale, Natal, Lembede had worked tirelessly to put himself through school and college, and then to qualify for the bachelor of laws degree. When he began law practice in 1943, he had also earned the respect of his fellows, not only for his intellectual achievements (which were many), but also for his dedication to the cause of freedom in South Africa. “I am,” he explained, “Africa’s own child.”
His untimely death in 1947 at the age of 33 sent a wave of grief through the Congress Youth, who had looked to him for moral as well as political leadership. With the publication of Freedom In Our Lifetime, the editors acknowledge Lembede’s early contribution to the freedom movement, in particular his passionate and eloquent articulation of the African-centered philosophy he called “Africanism.”
This study examines the social changes that took place in Southern Rhodesia after the arrival of the British South Africa Company in the 1890s. Summer’s work focuses on interactions among settlers, the officials of the British South America Company and the administration, missionaries, humanitarian groups in Britain, and the most vocal or noticeable groups of Africans. Through this period of military conquest and physical coercion, to the later attempts at segregationist social engineering, the ideals and justifications of Southern Rhodesians changed drastically. Native Policy, Native Education policies, and, eventually, segregationist Native Development policies changed and evolved as the white and black inhabitants of Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) struggled over the region’s social form and future.
Summers’s work complements a handful of other recent works reexamining the social history of colonial Zimbabwe and demonstrating how knowledge, perception, and ideologies interacted with the economic and political dimensions of the region’s past.
Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family's quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States.
Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana's state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie's great-great-granddaughter Marie-José was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium.
Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.
In Field Seasons, Anna Marie Prentiss chronicles her experiences as an archaeologist, providing an insider’s look at the diverse cultures, personal agendas, and career pathways associated with American archaeology since the late twentieth century. As the narrative moves from her academic training to employment in government and private consulting to her eventual professorship at a state university, several themes emerge.
This book is about career paths. Its discussion of the diverse jobs within the archaeological profession makes it valuable to students seeking guidance about their career options. It also provides insight into the cultures of American archaeology, a discipline with many schools of thought and unique subcultures. The world of archaeological field technicians is quite different from that of government bureaucrats or academics. Prentiss also explores the elements of cultural change within archaeology while she reflects on her personal evolution throughout her thirty years within the discipline.
The book’s unique personal assessment of the state of American archaeology will appeal to a broad swath of students and professionals. Students will find it an entertaining road map to possible careers while professionals will find plenty of scholarly material concerning ethics, archaeological theory, and interpretations of the archaeological record.
From the Big-Game Hunters who appeared on the continent as far back as 12,000 years ago to the Inuits plying the Alaskan waters today, the Native peoples of North America produced a culture remarkable for its vibrancy, breadth, and diversity--and for its survival in the face of almost inconceivable trials. This book is at once a history of that culture and a celebration of its splendid variety. Rich in historical testimony and anecdotes and lavishly illustrated, it weaves a magnificent tapestry of Native American life reaching back to the earliest human records.
A recognized expert in North American studies, Jonathan King interweaves his account with Native histories, from the arrival of the first Native Americans by way of what is now Alaska to their later encounters with Europeans on the continent's opposite coast, from their exchanges with fur traders to their confrontations with settlers and an ever more voracious American government. To illustrate this history, King draws on the extensive collections of the British Museum--artwork, clothing, tools, and artifacts that demonstrate the wealth of ancient traditions as well as the vitality of contemporary Native culture. These illustrations, all described in detail, form a pictorial document of relations between Europeans and Native American peoples--peoples as profoundly different and as deeply related as the Algonquians and the Iroquois, the Chumash of California and the Inuipat of Alaska, the Cree and the Cherokee--from their first contact to their complicated coexistence today.
Brass tinklers and pendants. Owl effigies, copper kettles, crucifixes with blue glass stones. What do they have in common? The answer spans thousands of years and a multitude of peoples and places, and reveals how people made sense of their world as they collected and used the objects they encountered.
Foreign Objects demonstrates the breadth and vibrancy of contemporary archaeology. Taking a broad set of archaeological cases from across the Americas, editor Craig N. Cipolla and the volume contributors explore how indigenous communities have socialized foreign objects over time. The book critiques the artificial divide between prehistory and history, studying instead the long-term indigenous histories of consumption, a term typically associated with capitalism and modern-world colonialism.
The case studies range from “exotic” stone tools used millennia ago to nineteenth-century patent medicines made and marketed by an Indian doctress. Foreign Objects focuses on how indigenous groups and foreign objects became entangled with one another in myriad ways. The book explores how the framework of consumption can shed new light on trade, exchange, materiality, and cultural production.
Contributors place foreign objects in the spotlight and offer a comparison of how this general class of material played a part in indigenous and colonial worlds. Each chapter illustrates how notions of consumption fit into their place in time and also delves into how foreign objects related to ideas of the body and personhood, how people used them to participate in political and spiritual worlds, and how they presented new ways of enduring or resisting European colonialism and capitalism. Foreign Objects is a critical look at consumption through the lens of indigenous knowledge and archaeological theory.
Contributors:
Matthew A. Beaudoin
Lewis Borck
Kathleen J. Bragdon
Craig N. Cipolla
Charles R. Cobb
John L. Creese
Diana DiPaolo Loren
Martin Gallivan
Meghan C. L. Howey
Barbara J. Mills
Maxine Oland
Lee M. Panich
Patricia E. Rubertone
Christopher Shephard
Keith D. Stephenson
The editors introduce the research with scientific context. A review of seventy-five years of Paleoindian archaeology in Colorado highlights the foundation on which new work builds, and a survey of Colorado's ancient climates and ecologies helps readers understand Paleoindian settlement patterns.
Eight essays discuss archaeological evidence from Plains to high Rocky Mountain sites. The book offers the most thorough analysis to date of Dent--the first Clovis site discovered. Essays on mountain sites show how advances in methodology and technology have allowed scholars to reconstruct settlement patterns and changing lifeways in this challenging environment.
Colorado has been home to key moments in human settlement and in the scientific study of our ancient past. Readers interested in the peopling of the New World as well as those passionate about the methods and history of archaeology will find new material and satisfying overviews in this book. Contributors include Rosa Maria Albert, Robert H. Brunswig, Reid A. Bryson, Linda Scott Cummings, James Doerner, Daniel C. Fisher, David L. Fox, Bonnie L. Pitblado, Jeffrey L. Saunders, Todd A. Surovell, R. A. Varney, and Nicole M. Waguespack.
From Quarry to Cornfield provides an innovative model for examining the technology of hoe production and its contribution to the agriculture of Mississippian communities.
Lithic specialist Charles Cobb examines the political economy in Mississippian communities through a case study of raw material procurement and hoe production and usage at the Mill Creek site on Dillow Ridge in southwest Illinois. Cobb outlines the day-to-day activities in a Mississippian chiefdom village that flourished from about A.D. 1250 to 1500. In so doing, he provides a fascinating window into the specialized tasks of a variety of "day laborers" whose contribution to the community rested on their production of stone hoes necessary in the task of feeding the village. Overlooked in most previous studies, the skills and creativity of the makers of the hoes used in village farming provide a basis for broader analysis of the technology of hoe use in Mississippian times.
Although Cobb's work focuses on Mill Creek, his findings at this site are representative of the agricultural practices of Mississippian communities throughout the eastern United States. The theoretical underpinnings of Cobb's study make a clear case for a reexamination of the accepted definition of chiefdom, the mobilization of surplus labor, and issues of power, history, and agency in Mississippian times. In a well-crafted piece of writing, Cobb distinguishes himself as one of the leaders in the study of lithic technology. From Quarry to Cornfield will find a well-deserved place in the ongoing discussions of power and production in the Mississippian political economy.
In this provocative work, Cheryl Claassen challenges long-standing notions n this provocative work, Cheryl Claassen challenges long-standing notions Iabout hunter-gatherer life in the southern Ohio Valley as it unfolded some Iabout hunter-gatherer life in the southern Ohio Valley as it unfolded some I8,000 to 3,500 years ago. Focusing on freshwater shell mounds scattered 8,000 to 3,500 years ago. Focusing on freshwater shell mounds scattered along the Tennessee, Ohio, Green, and Harpeth rivers, Claassen draws on the latest archaeological research to offer penetrating new insights into the sacred world of Archaic peoples. Some of the most striking ideas are that there were no villages in the southern Ohio Valley during the Archaic period, that all of the trading and killing were for ritual purposes, and that body positioning in graves reflects cause of death primarily.
Mid-twentieth-century assessments of the shell mounds saw them as the products of culturally simple societies that cared little about their dead and were concerned only with food. More recent interpretations, while attributing greater complexity to these peoples, have viewed the sites as mere villages and stressed such factors as population growth and climate change in analyzing the way these societies and their practices evolved. Claassen, however, makes a persuasive case that the sites were actually the settings for sacred rituals of burial and
renewal and that their large shell accumulations are evidence of feasts associated with those ceremonies. She argues that the physical evidence—including the location of the sites, the largely undisturbed nature of the deposits, the high incidence of dog burials, the number of tools per body found at the sites, and the indications of human sacrifice and violent death—not only supports this view but reveals how ritual practices developed over time. The seemingly sudden demise of shellfish consumption, Claassen contends, was not due to overharvesting and environmental change; it ended, rather, because the sacred rituals changed.
Feasting with Shellfish in the Southern Ohio Valley is a work bound to stir controversy and debate among scholars of the Archaic period. Just as surely, it will encourage a new appreciation for the spiritual life of ancient peoples—how they thought about the cosmos and the mysterious forces that surrounded them.
Trending upward as an archaeological field of study, protohistoric mobile groups provide fascinating new directions for cutting-edge research in the American Southwest and beyond. These mobile residents represent the ancient and ancestral roots of many modern indigenous peoples, including the Apaches, Jumano, Yavapai, and Ute. These important protohistoric and historic mobile people have tended to be ignored because their archaeological sites were deemed too difficult to identify, too scant to be worthy of study, and too different to incorporate. This book brings together information from a diverse collection of authors working throughout the American Southwest and its fringes to make the bold statement that these groups can be identified in the archaeological record and their sites have much to contribute to the study of cultural process, method and theory, and past lifeways. Mobile groups are integral for assessing the grand reorganizational events of the Late Prehistoric period and are key to understanding colonial contact and transformations. Now, the only analyses, overviews, and class lectures that will be considered comprehensive will be those that address the presence of these many widespread mobile peoples.
The seemingly inhospitable Sonoran Desert has provided sustenance to indigenous peoples for centuries. Although it is to all appearances a land bereft of useful plants, fully one-fifth of the desert's flora are edible.
This volume presents information on nearly 540 edible plants used by people of more than fifty traditional cultures of the Sonoran Desert and peripheral areas. Drawing on thirty years of research, Wendy Hodgson has synthesized the widely scattered literature and added her own experiences to create an exhaustive catalog of desert plants and their many and varied uses.
Food Plants of the Sonoran Desert includes not only plants such as gourds and legumes but also unexpected food sources such as palms, lilies, and cattails, all of which provided nutrition to desert peoples. Each species entry lists recorded names and describes indigenous uses, which often include nonfood therapeutic and commodity applications. The agave, for example, is cited for its use as food and for alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages, syrup, fiber, cordage, clothing, sandals, nets, blankets, lances, fire hearths, musical instruments, hedgerows, soap, and medicine, and for ceremonial purposes. The agave entry includes information on harvesting, roasting, and consumption—and on distinguishing between edible and inedible varieties.
No other source provides such a vast amount of information on traditional plant uses for this region. Written to be easily accessible to general readers, the book is an invaluable compendium for anyone interested in the desert's hidden bounty.
Fluted Points of the Far West provides the first large-scale overview of fluted points in the far western United States, including details of their attributes, trends in production, and range of variability. It serves as a compendium of groundbreaking research by the California Fluted Lanceolate Uniform Testing and Evaluation Database (CalFLUTED) project. Details regarding size, morphology, material, basal flaking technology, breakage patterns, repair patterns, manufacturing (as revealed by unfinished fluted bifaces), margin grinding, and flute scratching are provided through this research, both in terms of general trends and noteworthy exceptions.
Designed as a ready reference, these data are also summarized for each of the four sample states covered: California, Nevada, Oregon, and Utah. Summaries introduce the history and circumstances of fluted point studies by state, a list of references for each state used in the CalFLUTED study reports, a comprehensive listing of the relevant CalFLUTED study reports, and a breakdown by state of fluted point attribute details as listed above.
Reviews and discussions cover a range of topics, including classification of fluted points, identifying flute scars, and indicative traits that a fluted point is not from the prehistoric Far West. Additional discussions cover hafting alternatives, fluted point dating, far western fluted point typology, and the likely direction of further research on a range of fluted point topics.
In this volume, contributors demonstrate the real-world application of Indigenous theory to the work they do in their own communities and how this work is driven by urgency, responsibility, and justice—work that is from the skin.
In From the Skin, contributors reflect on and describe how they apply the theories and concepts of Indigenous studies to their communities, programs, and organizations, and the ways the discipline has informed and influenced the same. They show the ways these efforts advance disciplinary theories, methodologies, and praxes. Chapters cover topics including librarianship, health programs, community organizing, knowledge recovery, youth programming, and gendered violence. Through their examples, the contributors show how they negotiate their peoples’ knowledge systems with knowledge produced in Indigenous studies programs, demonstrating how they understand the relationship between their people, their nations, and academia.
Editors J. Jeffery Clark and Elise Boxer propose and develop the term practitioner-theorist to describe how the contributors theorize and practice knowledge within and between their nations and academia. Because they live and exist in their community, these practitioner-theorists always consider how their thinking and actions benefit their people and nations. The practitioner-theorists of this volume envision and labor toward decolonial futures where Indigenous peoples and nations exist on their own terms.
Contributors
Randi Lynn Boucher-Giago
Elise Boxer
Shawn Brigman
J. Jeffery Clark
Nick Estes
Eric Hardy
Shalene Joseph
Jennifer Marley
Brittani R. Orona
Alexander Soto
In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.
Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain’s colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent’s first peoples a place in the nation they were creating.
In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian’s craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation’s birth and identity.
The Athapaskan departure from the Canadian Subarctic centuries ago and their subsequent arrival in the American Southwest has remained the subject of continuous debate in anthropological research. This book examines archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and traditional oral history data and brings them together in fresh ways, in many cases for the first time. With a backdrop of these new and interrelated lines of evidence, each subfield must now reevaluate its approach and the forms of evidence it uses to construct arguments.
The contributors here include the most knowledgeable scholars in each of the above fields, collectively providing the most up-to-date research on early Athapaskans and their movements and migrations. Each chapter approaches Athapaskan migration with data obtained from different regions, providing clarity as to the basis for individual arguments. Often, entrenched regional visualizations and localized conventions are clarified only when placed in juxtaposition to those of other regions. Because of this, conclusions rest on sometimes widely divergent theoretical and methodological underpinnings, thus expressing preference for and conveying weight to certain types of evidence and lines of reasoning. The goal of this volume is to expose these arguments in order to clarify appropriate directions for future research, making advances possible.
This major synthesis of work explores new evidence gathered at Basketmaker III sites on the Colorado Plateau in search of further understanding of Anasazi development.
Since the 1960s, large-scale cultural resource management projects have revealed the former presence of Anasazi within the entire northern Southwest. These discoveries have resulted in a greatly expanded view of the BMIII period (A.D. 550-750) which immediately proceeds the Pueblo phase. Particularly noteworthy are finding of Basketmaker remains under those of later periods and in sites with open settings, as opposed to the more classic Basketmaker cave and rock shelter sites.
Foundations of Anasazi Culture explores this new evidence in search of further understanding of Anasazi development. Several chapters address the BMII-BMIII transition, including the initial production and use of pottery, greater reliance on agriculture, and the construction of increasingly elaborate structures. Other chapters move beyond the transitional period to discuss key elements of the Anasazi lifestyle, including the use of gray-,red-, and white-ware ceramics, pit structures, storage cists, surface rooms, full dependence on agriculture, and varying degrees of social specialization and differentiation. A number of contributions address one or more of these issues as they occur at specific sites. Other contributors consider the material culture of the period in terms of common elements in architecture, ceramics, lithic technology, and decorative media.
This work on BMIII sites on the Colorado Plateau will be useful to anyone with an interest in the earliest days of Anasazi civilization.
Who was Acorn Whistler, and why did he have to die? A deeply researched analysis of a bloody eighteenth-century conflict and its tangled aftermath, The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler unearths competing accounts of the events surrounding the death of this Creek Indian. Told from the perspectives of a colonial governor, a Creek Nation military leader, local Native Americans, and British colonists, each story speaks to issues that transcend the condemned man’s fate: the collision of European and Native American cultures, the struggle of Indians to preserve traditional ways of life, and tensions within the British Empire as the American Revolution approached.
At the hand of his own nephew, Acorn Whistler was executed in the summer of 1752 for the crime of murdering five Cherokee men. War had just broken out between the Creeks and the Cherokees to the north. To the east, colonists in South Carolina and Georgia watched the growing conflict with alarm, while British imperial officials kept an eye on both the Indians’ war and the volatile politics of the colonists themselves. They all interpreted the single calamitous event of Acorn Whistler’s death through their own uncertainty about the future. Joshua Piker uses their diverging accounts to uncover the larger truth of an early America rife with violence and insecurity but also transformative possibility.
From the day he was born, Federico Jiménez Caballero was predicted to be a successful man. So, how exactly did a young boy from Tututepec, Oaxaca, become a famous Indigenous jewelry artist and philanthropist in Los Angeles? Federico tells the remarkable story of willpower, curiosity, hard work, and passion coming together to change one man’s life forever.
As a child growing up in a small rural town in southern Mexico, Federico Jiménez Caballero faced challenges that most of us cannot imagine, let alone overcome. From a young age, Federico worked tirelessly to contribute to his large family, yet his restless spirit often got him into trouble. Finding himself in the middle of a village-wide catastrophe, he was exiled to a boarding school in Oaxaca City where he was forced to become independent, resilient, and razor-sharp in order to stay afloat. Through his incredible people skills, bravery, and a few nudges from his bold mother, Federico found himself excelling in his studies and climbing the ranks in Oaxaca City. He always held a deep love and respect for his Mixtec Indigenous roots and began to collect Indigenous jewelry and textiles. Through a series of well-timed connections, Federico met his wife Ellen, and, shortly afterward, he came to the United States as a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the late 1960s.
Carrying his passion for Indigenous jewelry with him from Oaxaca, Federico owned a series of shops in Los Angeles and sold jewelry at flea markets to well-known Hollywood stars. Over the years, he cultivated relationships and became a philanthropist as well as the owner of a museum in Oaxaca City. This book is the inspiring first-person account of eighty years in the life of a man who moved from humble beginnings to the bright lights of Hollywood, following his passion and creating long-lasting relationships as he climbed the ladder of success.
During the nineteenth century, upstream diversions from the Gila River decreased the arable land on the Gila River Indian Reservation to only a few thousand acres. As a result the Pima Indians, primarily an agricultural people, fell into poverty. Many Pima farmers and leaders lamented this suffering and in 1914 the United States Indian Irrigation Service assigned a 33-year-old engineer named Clay “Charles” Southworth to oversee the Gila River adjudication. As part of that process, Southworth interviewed 34 Pima elders, thus putting a face on the depth of hardships facing many Indians in the late nineteenth century.
Feeding the Ancestors presents an exquisite group of carved spoons from the Pacific Northwest that resides in the collections of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Carved from the horns of mountain goats and Dall sheep, and incorporating elements of abalone shell and metal, most of the spoons were collected in Alaska in the late nineteenth century and were made and used by members of the Tlingit tribe. Hillel Burger's beautiful color photographs reveal every nuance of the carvers' extraordinary artistry.
Anne-Marie Victor-Howe introduces the collectors and describes the means by which these and other ethnographic objects were acquired. In the process, she paints a vivid picture of the "Last Frontier" just before and shortly after the United States purchased Alaska. A specialist in the ethnography of the Native peoples of the Northwest Coast, Victor-Howe provides a fascinating glimpse into these aboriginal subsistence cultures as she explains the manufacture and function of traditional spoons. Her accounts of the clan stories associated with specific carvings and of the traditional shamanic uses of spoons are the result of extensive consultation with Tlingit elders, scholars, and carvers.
Feeding the Ancestors is the first scholarly study of traditional feast spoons and a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Pacific Northwest Coast peoples and their art.
The recognition of Flower Worlds is one of the most significant breakthroughs in the study of Indigenous spirituality in the Americas. These worlds are solar and floral spiritual domains that are widely shared among both pre-Hispanic and contemporary Native cultures in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Flower Worldsis the first volume to bring together a diverse range of scholars to create a truly multidisciplinary understanding of Flower Worlds. During the last thirty years, archaeologists, art historians, ethnologists, Indigenous scholars, and linguists have emphasized the antiquity and geographical extent of similar Flower World beliefs among ethnic and linguistic groups in the New World.
Flower Worlds are not simply ethereal, otherworldly domains, but rather they are embodied in lived experience, activated, invoked, and materialized through ritual practices, expressed in verbal and visual metaphors, and embedded in the use of material objects and ritual spaces. This comprehensive book illuminates the origins of Flower Worlds as a key aspect of religions and histories among societies in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. It also explores the role of Flower Worlds in shaping ritual economies, politics, and cross-cultural interaction among Indigenous peoples.
Flower Worlds reaches into multisensory realms that extend back at least 2,500 years, offering many different disciplines, perspectives, and collaborations to understand these domains. Today, Flower Worlds are expressed in everyday work and lived experiences, embedded in sacred geographies, and ritually practiced both individually and in communities. This volume stresses the importance of contemporary perspectives and experiences by opening with living traditions before delving into the historical trajectories of Flower Worlds, creating a book that melds scientific and humanistic research and emphasizes Indigenous voices.
Contributors: Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, James M. Córdova, Davide Domenici, Ángel González López, Kelley Hays-Gilpin, Michael D. Mathiowetz, Cameron L. McNeil, Felipe S. Molina, Johannes Neurath, John M. D. Pohl, Alan R. Sandstrom, David Delgado Shorter, Karl A. Taube, Andrew D. Turner, Lorena Vázquez Vallín, Dorothy Washburn
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557) wrote the first comprehensive history of Spanish America, the Historia general y natural de las Indias, a sprawling, constantly revised work in which Oviedo attempted nothing less than a complete account of the Spanish discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Americas from 1492 to 1547, along with descriptions of the land's flora, fauna, and indigenous peoples. His Historia, which grew to an astounding fifty volumes, includes numerous interviews with the Spanish and indigenous leaders who were literally making history, the first extensive field drawings of America rendered by a European, reports of exotic creatures, ethnographic descriptions of indigenous groups, and detailed reports about the conquest and colonization process.
Fernández de Oviedo's Chronicle of America explores how, in writing his Historia, Oviedo created a new historiographical model that reflected the vastness of the Americas and Spain's enterprise there. Kathleen Myers uses a series of case studies—focusing on Oviedo's self-portraits, drawings of American phenomena, approaches to myth, process of revision, and depictions of Native Americans—to analyze Oviedo's narrative and rhetorical strategies and show how they relate to the politics, history, and discursive practices of his time. Accompanying the case studies are all of Oviedo's extant field drawings and a wide selection of his text in English translation.
The first study to examine the entire Historia and its evolving rhetorical and historical context, this book confirms Oviedo's assertion that "the New World required a different kind of history" as it helps modern readers understand how the discovery of the Americas became a catalyst for European historiographical change.
The future is not a fixed idea but a highly variable one that reflects the values of those who are imagining it. By studying the ways that visionaries imagined the future—particularly that of America—in the past century, much can be learned about the cultural dynamics of the time.
In this social history, Lawrence R. Samuel examines the future visions of intellectuals, artists, scientists, businesspeople, and others to tell a chronological story about the history of the future in the past century. He defines six separate eras of future narratives from 1920 to the present day, and argues that the milestones reached during these years—especially related to air and space travel, atomic and nuclear weapons, the women's and civil rights movements, and the advent of biological and genetic engineering—sparked the possibilities of tomorrow in the public's imagination, and helped make the twentieth century the first century to be significantly more about the future than the past.
The idea of the future grew both in volume and importance as it rode the technological wave into the new millennium, and the author tracks the process by which most people, to some degree, have now become futurists as the need to anticipate tomorrow accelerates.
Oscar and Lilian Handlin show us how the new voyagers in the twentieth century--from Asia, Africa, Australia, and Latin America--record their experiences in the United States. The narratives of the non-Europeans, they find, clearly reflect the circumstances of their composition, as well as the political prejudices of their authors. These literary products have earned far less attention than those of the English, French, Germans, and Russians, and this volume proposes to redress the balance.
The earliest of the thirty-one travel accounts was written by Rabindranath Tagore in 1924, and the most recent by V. S. Naipaul in 1989. Many accounts are newly translated from Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Spanish. Some authors are well known, but the less famous are equally insightful. Some insights are weighty, many are amusing. Octavio Paz, a sympathetic observer who admired his country's neighbor, was uneasy that the most powerful country in the world sustained "a global ideology…as outdated as the doctrine of free enterprise, the steam boat, and other relics of the nineteenth century." The Israeli journalist Hanoch Bartov observed that "God conceived the car first, with man an afterthought, created for the car's use (a Southern California legend)." In coming to a truer understanding of the United States, these writers noted the frightening repercussions of unsettled lives, perceived class differentiation, contentions regarding the status of women, the sense of national unity amid diversity, and countless other issues of concern to those who try to find meaning in the contemporary world.
Best known as author of The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman is now increasingly recognized as one of the greatest nineteenth–century American historians. In Pontiac, Pioneers, La Salle and Montcalm and Wolfe, Parkman, more than anyone else, first grasped the tragic element implicit in our pioneer heritage and placed the opening up of the great North American wilderness in broad historical perspective.
Handsome, brilliant, courageous, Parkman drove himself relentlessly. The result was a severe breakdown in his twenties, complicated in later years by other illnesses. This interpretative biography chronicles his triumph over these setbacks and sheds new light on the impressive histories that seem to become ever more contemporary with the passage of time.
A historian who lived the kind of history he wrote, Francis Parkman is a major—and controversial—figure in American historiography. His narrative style, while popular with readers wanting a "good story," has raised many questions with professional historians. Was Parkman writing history or historical fiction? Did he color historical figures with his own heroic self-image? Was his objectivity compromised by his "unbending, conservative, Brahmin" values? These are some of the many issues that Wilbur Jacobs treats in this thought-provoking study.
Jacobs carefully considers the "apprenticeship" of Francis Parkman, first spent in facing the rigors of the Oregon Trail and later in struggling to write his histories despite a mysterious, frequently incapacitating illness. He shows how these events allowed Parkman to create a heroic self-image, which impelled his desire for fame as a historian and influenced his treatment of both the "noble" and the "savage" characters of his histories.
In addition to assessing the influence of Parkman's development and personality on his histories, Jacobs comments on Parkman's relationship to basic social and cultural issues of the nineteenth century. These include the slavery question, Native American issues, expansion of the suffrage to new groups, including women, and anti-Catholicism.
Contributors. Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Günter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, José Estaban Muñoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos
Americans look to China with fascination and fear, unsure whether the rising Asian power is friend or foe but certain it will play a crucial role in America’s future. This is nothing new, Gordon Chang says. For centuries, Americans have been convinced of China’s importance to their own national destiny. Fateful Ties draws on literature, art, biography, popular culture, and politics to trace America’s long and varied preoccupation with China.
China has held a special place in the American imagination from colonial times, when Jamestown settlers pursued a passage to the Pacific and Asia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans plied a profitable trade in Chinese wares, sought Chinese laborers to build the West, and prized China’s art and decor. China was revered for its ancient culture but also drew Christian missionaries intent on saving souls in a heathen land. Its vast markets beckoned expansionists, even as its migrants were seen as a “yellow peril” that prompted the earliest immigration restrictions. A staunch ally during World War II, China was a dangerous adversary in the Cold War that followed. In the post-Mao era, Americans again embraced China as a land of inexhaustible opportunity, playing a central role in its economic rise.
Through portraits of entrepreneurs, missionaries, academics, artists, diplomats, and activists, Chang demonstrates how ideas about China have long been embedded in America’s conception of itself and its own fate. Fateful Ties provides valuable perspective on this complex international and intercultural relationship as America navigates an uncertain new era.
Who gets to speak for China? During the interwar years, when American condescension toward “barbarous” China yielded to a fascination with all things Chinese, a circle of writers sparked an unprecedented public conversation about American-Chinese relations. Hua Hsu tells the story of how they became ensnared in bitter rivalries over which one could claim the title of America’s leading China expert.
The rapturous reception that greeted The Good Earth—Pearl Buck’s novel about a Chinese peasant family—spawned a literary market for sympathetic writings about China. Stories of enterprising Americans making their way in a land with “four hundred million customers,” as Carl Crow said, found an eager audience as well. But on the margins—in Chinatowns, on Ellis Island, and inside FBI surveillance memos—a different conversation about the possibilities of a shared future was taking place.
A Floating Chinaman takes its title from a lost manuscript by H. T. Tsiang, an eccentric Chinese immigrant writer who self-published a series of visionary novels during this time. Tsiang discovered the American literary market to be far less accommodating to his more skeptical view of U.S.-China relations. His “floating Chinaman,” unmoored and in-between, imagines a critical vantage point from which to understand the new ideas of China circulating between the world wars—and today, as well.
In a stunningly original work about the impact of cultural perceptions in international relations, Simei Qing offers a new perspective on relations between the United States and China after World War II.
From debates over Taiwan in the Truman administration to military confrontation in Korea to relations with the Soviet Union, Qing explores how policies on both sides became persistently counterproductive. Implicit moral and cultural values became woven into policy rationales for both China and the United States. Cultural visions of modernity and understandings of identity played a critical role in each nation's evaluation of the other's intentions and in defining interests and principles in their diplomatic relationship.
Based on American, Russian, and newly declassified Chinese sources, this book reveals rarely examined assumptions that were entrenched in mainstream policy debates on both sides, and sheds light on the origins and development of U.S.-China confrontations that continue to resonate today. Simei Qing also provides a compelling look at the vital role of deeply anchored visions in the origins of human military conflicts.
Between 1936 and 1939, Roosevelt’s perceptions of the Spanish Civil War were transformed. Initially indifferent toward which side won, FDR became an increasingly committed supporter of the leftist government. He believed that German and Italian intervention in Spain was part of a broader program of fascist aggression, and he worried that the Spanish Civil War would inspire fascist revolutions in Latin America. In response, Roosevelt tried to send food to Spain as well as illegal covert aid to the Spanish government, and to mediate a compromise solution to the civil war. However unsuccessful these initiatives proved in the end, they represented an important stage in Roosevelt’s emerging strategy to aid democracy in Europe.
Behdad shows how political, cultural, and legal texts have articulated American anxiety about immigration from the Federalist period to the present day. He reads texts both well-known—J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—and lesser-known—such as the writings of nineteenth-century nativists and of public health officials at Ellis Island. In the process, he highlights what is obscured by narratives and texts celebrating the United States as an open-armed haven for everyone: the country’s violent beginnings, including its conquest of Native Americans, brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans, and colonialist annexation of French and Mexican territories; a recurring and fierce strand of nativism; the need for a docile labor force; and the harsh discipline meted out to immigrant “aliens” today, particularly along the Mexican border.
Asian Americans have become the love-hate subject of the American psyche: at times celebrated as the model minority, at other times hated as foreigners. Wen Liu examines contemporary Asian American identity formation while placing it within a historical and ongoing narrative of racial injury. The flexible racial status of Asian Americans oscillates between oppression by the white majority and offers to assimilate into its ranks. Identity emerges from the tensions produced between those two poles. Liu dismisses the idea of Asian Americans as a coherent racial population. Instead, she examines them as a raced, gendered, classed, and sexualized group producing varying physical and imaginary boundaries of nation, geography, and citizenship. Her analysis reveals repeated norms and acts that capture Asian Americanness as part of a racial imagination that buttresses capitalism, white supremacy, neoliberalism, and the US empire.
An innovative challenge to persistent myths, Feeling Asian American ranges from the wartime origins of Asian American psychology to anti-Asian attacks to present Asian Americanness as a complex political assemblage.
The experience of Central Americans in the United States is marked by a vicious contradiction. In entertainment and information media, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are hypervisible as threatening guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and “forever illegals.” Central Americans are unseen within the broader conception of Latinx community, foreclosing avenues to recognition.
Yajaira M. Padilla explores how this regime of visibility and invisibility emerged over the past forty years—bookended by the right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump—and how Central American immigrants and subsequent generations have contested their rhetorical disfiguration. Drawing from popular films and TV, news reporting, and social media, Padilla shows how Central Americans in the United States have been constituted as belonging nowhere, imagined as permanent refugees outside the boundaries of even minority representation. Yet in documentaries about cross-border transit through Mexico, street murals, and other media, US Central Americans have counteracted their exclusion in ways that defy dominant paradigms of citizenship and integration.
An incisive look at Hmong religion in the United States, where resettled refugees found creative ways to maintain their traditions, even as Christian organizations deputized by the government were granted an outsized influence on the refugees’ new lives.
Every year, members of the Hmong Christian Church of God in Minneapolis gather for a cherished Thanksgiving celebration. But this Thanksgiving takes place in the spring, in remembrance of the turbulent days in May 1975 when thousands of Laotians were evacuated for resettlement in the United States. For many Hmong, passage to America was also a spiritual crossing. As they found novel approaches to living, they also embraced Christianity—called kev cai tshiab, “the new way”—as a means of navigating their complex spiritual landscapes.
Melissa May Borja explores how this religious change happened and what it has meant for Hmong culture. American resettlement policies unintentionally deprived Hmong of the resources necessary for their time-honored rituals, in part because these practices, blending animism, ancestor worship, and shamanism, challenged many Christian-centric definitions of religion. At the same time, because the government delegated much of the resettlement work to Christian organizations, refugees developed close and dependent relationships with Christian groups. Ultimately the Hmong embraced Christianity on their own terms, adjusting to American spiritual life while finding opportunities to preserve their customs.
Follow the New Way illustrates America’s wavering commitments to pluralism and secularism, offering a much-needed investigation into the public work done by religious institutions with the blessing of the state. But in the creation of a Christian-inflected Hmong American animism we see the resilience of tradition—how it deepens under transformative conditions.
As a child growing up in Cambodia, Ronnie Yimsut played among the ruins of the Angkor Wat temples, surrounded by a close-knit community. As the Khmer Rouge gained power and began its genocidal reign of terror, his life became a nightmare. In this stunning memoir, Yimsut describes how, in the wake of death and destruction, he decides to live.
Escaping the turmoil of Cambodia, he makes a perilous journey through the jungle into Thailand, only to be sent to a notorious Thai prison. Fortunately, he is able to reach a refugee camp and ultimately migrate to the United States, where he attended the University of Oregon and became an influential leader in the community of Cambodian immigrants. Facing the Khmer Rouge shows Ronnie Yimsut’s personal quest to rehabilitate himself, make a new life in America, and then return to Cambodia to help rebuild the land of his birth.
What does it mean to be an Asian-American in the United States today? Are Asian-Americans considered "honorary whites" or forever thought of as "foreigners?"
Mia Tuan examines the salience and meaning of ethnicity for later generation Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, and asks how their concepts of ethnicity differ from that of white ethnic Americans. She interviewed 95 middle-class Chinese and Japanese Californians and analyzes the importance of ethnic identities and the concept of becoming a "real" American for both Asian and white ethnics. She asks her subjects about their early memories and experiences with Chinese/Japanese culture; current lifestyle and emerging cultural practices; experiences with racism and discrimination; and attitudes toward current Asian immigration.
In this unique longitudinal study of how a divided people relate to one another, H. Arnold Barton outlines dilemmas created by the great migration of Swedes to the United States from 1840 through 1940 and the complex love-hate relationship that resulted between those who stayed and those who left. During that hundred-year period, one Swede out of five voluntarily immigrated to the United States, and four-fifths of those immigrants remained in their new country. This study seeks to explore the far-reaching implications of this mass migration for both Swedes and Swedish Americans.
The Swedes were a literate, historically aware people, and the 1.2 million Swedes who immigrated to the United States offer a particularly well-documented and illuminating case study. Barton has skillfully woven into the text translations of little known published and unpublished Swedish sources from both sides of the Atlantic, to embody—in haunting human terms—both what was gained and what was lost through emigration.
Past studies have traditionally shown ethnic mobilization to be a defensive reaction against the exclusive nativism of resident Americans. Barton convincingly demonstrates, however, that the creation of a distinctive Swedish-American identity was at least equally an expression of the immigrants’ need to justify leaving their homeland to their former compatriots and to themselves by asserting a rightful and unique place within the Swedish national community. He concludes that the relationship between Swedes and Swedish Americans was essentially similar to that experienced by other peoples divided by migration, and that the long debate over the United States and emigration at its deepest level reveals both hopes and fears most conspicuously symbolized by America and "Americanization" in an increasingly integrated world undergoing the relentless advance of modernization.
From the exuberant excesses of Carmen Miranda in the "tutti frutti hat" to the curvaceous posterior of Jennifer Lopez, the Latina body has long been a signifier of Latina/o identity in U.S. popular culture. But how does this stereotype of the exotic, erotic Latina "bombshell" relate, if at all, to real Latina women who represent a wide spectrum of ethnicities, national origins, cultures, and physical appearances? How are ideas about "Latinidad" imagined, challenged, and inscribed on Latina bodies? What racial, class, and other markers of identity do representations of the Latina body signal or reject?
In this broadly interdisciplinary book, experts from the fields of Latina/o studies, media studies, communication, comparative literature, women's studies, and sociology come together to offer the first wide-ranging look at the construction and representation of Latina identity in U.S. popular culture. The authors consider such popular figures as actresses Lupe Vélez, Salma Hayek, and Jennifer Lopez; singers Shakira and Celia Cruz; and even the Hispanic Barbie doll in her many guises. They investigate the media discourses surrounding controversial Latinas such as Lorena Bobbitt and Marisleysis González. And they discuss Latina representations in Lupe Solano's series of mystery books and in the popular TV shows El Show de Cristina and Laura en América. This extensive treatment of Latina representation in popular culture not only sheds new light on how meaning is produced through images of the Latina body, but also on how these representations of Latinas are received, revised, and challenged.
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