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A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche, together with an annotated translation of The Paekche Annals of the Samguk sagi
Jonathan W. Best
Harvard University Press, 2006

This volume presents two histories of the early Korean kingdom of Paekche (trad. 18 BCE–660 CE). The first, written by Jonathan Best, is based largely on primary sources, both written and archaeological. This initial history of Paekche serves, in part, to introduce the second, an extensively annotated translation of the oldest history of the kingdom, the Paekche Annals (Paekche pon’gi). Written in the chronicle format standard for the traditional official histories of East Asia, the Paekche Annals constitutes one section of the Histories of the Three Kingdoms (Samguk sagi), a comprehensive account of early Korean history compiled under the editorial direction of Kim Pusik (1075–1151). Although these two representations of Paekche history differ markedly, the underlying problem faced by both the twelfth-century and the twenty-first-century historian is essentially the same: fashioning a responsible, encompassing, and reasonably coherent history of the kingdom from meager, and often disparate and fragmentary, evidence.

Included in the volume are 22 appendixes on problems in Paekche history; a concordance of proper names, official titles, omens, and weights and measures; a glossary of geographical names; and six historical maps of the kingdom showing its changing boundaries.

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Hegemonic Mimicry
Korean Popular Culture of the Twenty-First Century
Kyung Hyun Kim
Duke University Press, 2021
In Hegemonic Mimicry, Kyung Hyun Kim considers the recent global success of Korean popular culture—the Korean wave of pop music, cinema, and television, which is also known as hallyu—from a transnational and transcultural perspective. Using the concept of mimicry to think through hallyu's adaptation of American sensibilities and genres, he shows how the commercialization of Korean popular culture has upended the familiar dynamic of major-to-minor cultural influence, enabling hallyu to become a dominant global cultural phenomenon. At the same time, its worldwide popularity has rendered its Koreanness opaque. Kim argues that Korean cultural subjectivity over the past two decades is one steeped in ethnic rather than national identity. Explaining how South Korea leaped over the linguistic and cultural walls surrounding a supposedly “minor” culture to achieve global ascendance, Kim positions K-pop, Korean cinema and television serials, and even electronics as transformative acts of reappropriation that have created a hegemonic global ethnic identity.
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The Horn of Africa
Intra-State and Inter-State Conflicts and Security
Edited by Redie Bereketeab and Cyril Obi
Pluto Press, 2013

The Horn of Africa, comprising Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia, is the most conflict-ridden region in Africa. This book explores the origins and impact of these conflicts at both an intra-state and inter-state level and the insecurity they create.

The contributors show how regional and international interventions have compounded pre-existing tensions and have been driven by competing national interests linked to the 'War on Terror' and acts of piracy off the coast of Somalia.

The Horn of Africa outlines proposals for multidimensional mechanisms for conflict resolution in the region. Issues of border demarcation, democratic deficit, crises of nation and state building, and the roles of political actors and traditional authorities are all clearly analysed.

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Humane Development
Participation and Change Among the Sadama of Ethiopia
John H. Hamer
University of Alabama Press, 1987
Seeks to show that the Sadama are a people quite adaptable to change on their own terms
 
Humane Development seeks to show that the Sadama are a people quite adaptable to change on their own terms. According to their narrative history and from what is know from documents in recent times, individuals have often taken risks that have sometimes favored and at other times gone against the enhancement of their lifestyle.
 
Certainly people can, as the experience of the Sadama shows, effectively participate in change at the local level. They bring a vast experience to the challenge of choosing, and also a knowledge of the relationship between their environment, tools, and organization that has enabled them to survive through the millennia. When people are permitted to draw upon their heritage in making choices, they approach the changing situation with confidence. More­over, the opportunity to choose among alternatives, rather than being subjected to an externally made choice, maximizes the possibility for innovation.
 
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A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991
Second Edition
Bahru Zewde
Ohio University Press, 2002

Bounded by Sudan to the west and north, Kenya to the south, Somalia to the southeast, and Eritrea and Djibouti to the northeast, Ethiopia is a pivotal country in the geopolitics of the region. Yet it is important to understand this ancient and often splintered country in its own right.

In A History of Modern Ethiopia, Bahru Zewde, one of Ethiopia’s leading historians, provides a compact and comprehensive history of his country, particularly the last two centuries. Of importance to historians, political scientists, journalists, and Africanists alike, Bahru’s A History of Modern Ethiopia, now with additional material taking it up to the last decade, will be the preeminent overview of present-day Ethiopia.

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Hausa Women in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Catherine M. Coles and Beverly Mack
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991
    The Hausa are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, with populations in Nigeria, Niger, and Ghana.  Their long history of city-states and Islamic caliphates, their complex trading economies, and their cultural traditions have attracted the attention of historians, political economists, linguists, and anthropologists. The large body of scholarship on Hausa society, however, has assumed the subordination of women to men.
    Hausa Women in the Twentieth Century refutes the notion that Hausa women are pawns in a patriarchal Muslim society.  The contributors, all of whom have done field research in Hausaland, explore the ways Hausa women have balanced the demands of Islamic expectations and Western choices as their society moved from a precolonial system through British colonial administration to inclusion in the modern Nigerian nation. This volume examines the roles of a wide variety of women, from wives and workers to political activists and mythical figures, and it emphasizes that women have been educators and spiritual leaders in Hausa society since precolonial times.  From royalty to slaves and concubines, in traditional Hausa cities and in newer towns, from the urban poor to the newly educated elite, the "invisible women" whose lives are documented here demonstrate that standard accounts of Hausa society must be revised.
    Scholars of Hausa and neighboring West African societies will find in this collection a wealth of new material and a model of how research on women can be integrated with general accounts of Hausa social, religious, political, and economic life. For students and scholars looking at gender and women's roles cross-culturally, this volume provides an invaluable African perspective.
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Hegemony and Culture
Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba
David D. Laitin
University of Chicago Press, 1986
In this ambitious work, David D. Laitin explores the politics of religious change among the Yoruba of Nigeria, then uses his findings to expand leading theories of ethnic and religious politics.
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Hunting the Ethical State
The Benkadi Movement of Côte d'Ivoire
Joseph Hellweg
University of Chicago Press, 2011

In the 1990s a nationwide crime wave overtook Côte d’Ivoire. The Ivoirian police failed to control the situation, so a group of poor, politically marginalized, and mostly Muslim men took on the role of the people’s protectors as part of a movement they called Benkadi. These men were dozos—hunters skilled in ritual sacrifice—and they applied their hunting and occult expertise, along with the ethical principles implicit in both forms of knowledge, to the tracking and capturing of thieves. Meanwhile, as Benkadi emerged, so too did the ethnic, regional, and religious divisions that would culminate in Côte d’Ivoire’s 2002–07 rebellion. 

Hunting the Ethical State
reveals how dozos worked beyond these divisions to derive their new roles as enforcers of security from their ritual hunting ethos. Much as they used sorcery to shape-shift and outwit game, they now transformed into unofficial police, and their ritual networks became police bureaucracies. Though these Muslim and northern-descended men would later resist the state, Joseph Hellweg demonstrates how they briefly succeeded at making a place for themselves within it. Ultimately, Hellweg interprets Benkadi as a flawed but ingenious and thoroughly modern attempt by non-state actors to reform an African state.

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The Hatchet's Blood
Separation, Power, and Gender in Ehing Social Life
Marc R. Schloss
University of Arizona Press, 1988
Winner of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology

The ritual complexes of the Ehing, a farming people of southern Senegal, embody an elaborate set of prohibitions on social behavior and prescribe the general rules of Ehing social organization. Power is distributed and maintained in Ehing culture by the concept of Odieng (“hatchet”), which as a spirit acts upon human beings much as an ax does upon a tree, falling from above to punish its victims for transgression. Marc R. Schloss’s ethnography of the Ehing is a study of the meaning of Odieng’s power, explaining why its rules are so essential to the Ehing way of life.
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The Hot 'Cold War'
The USSR in Southern Africa
Vladimir Shubin
Pluto Press, 2008

This book analyses the causes of armed conflicts in Southern Africa during the Cold War. It examines the influence of the various external forces in the region during this period and their relationship to local movements and governments.

The book focuses on states experiencing violent internal conflict and foreign intervention, that is Angola, Mozambique, Namibia , South Africa and Zimbabwe.

The author provides an unique history of the key part that the Soviet Union played in these developments. Spanning 30 years, the book explores how each country struggled for genuine independence against colonialism and apartheid and their place in the wider conflicts encompassed by the Cold War.

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Herero Heroes
A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923
Jan-Bart Gewald
Ohio University Press, 1998

The Herero-German war led to the destruction of Herero society. Yet Herero society reemerged, reorganizing itself around the structures and beliefs of the German colonial army and Rhenish missionary activity.

This book describes the manner in which the Herero of Namibia struggled to maintain control over their own freedom in the face of advancing German colonialism. Taking advantage of the South AFrican invasion in of Namibia in World War One the Herero established themselves in areas of their own choosing. The effective reoccupation of land by the Herero forced the new colonial state, anxious to maintain peace and cut costs, to come to terms with the existence of Herero society.

The study ends in 1923 when the death and funeral of Samuel Maherero — first paramount of the Herero and then resistance leader — was the catalyst that brought the disparate groups of Herero together to establish a single unitary Herero identity.

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History after Apartheid
Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa
Annie E. Coombes
Duke University Press, 2003
The democratic election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994 marked the demise of apartheid and the beginning of a new struggle to define the nation’s past. History after Apartheid analyzes how, in the midst of the momentous shift to an inclusive democracy, South Africa’s visual and material culture represented the past while at the same time contributing to the process of social transformation. Considering attempts to invent and recover historical icons and narratives, art historian Annie E. Coombes examines how strategies for embodying different models of historical knowledge and experience are negotiated in public culture—in monuments, museums, and contemporary fine art.

History after Apartheid explores the dilemmas posed by a wide range of visual and material culture including key South African heritage sites. How prominent should Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress be in the museum at the infamous political prison on Robben Island? How should the postapartheid government deal with the Voortrekker Monument mythologizing the Boer Trek of 1838? Coombes highlights the contradictory investment in these sites among competing constituencies and the tensions involved in the rush to produce new histories for the “new” South Africa.

She reveals how artists and museum officials struggled to adequately represent painful and difficult histories ignored or disavowed under apartheid, including slavery, homelessness, and the attempted destruction of KhoiSan hunter-gatherers. Describing how contemporary South African artists address historical memory and the ambiguities uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Coombes illuminates a body of work dedicated to the struggle to simultaneously remember the past and move forward into the future.

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History From South Africa
Alternative Visions and Practices
Joshua Brown
Temple University Press, 1991

More starkly than any other contemporary social conflict, the crisis in South Africa highlights the complexities and conflicts in race, gender, class, and nation. These original articles, most of which were written by South African authors, are from a special issue of the Radical History Review, published in Spring 1990, that mapped the development of interpretations of the South African past that depart radically from the official history. The articles range from the politics of black movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to studies of film, television, and theater as reflections of modern social conflict.

History from South Africa is presented in two main sections: discussions of the historiography of South Africa from the viewpoint of those rewriting it with a radical outlook; and investigations into popular history and popular culture—the production and reception of history in the public realm. In addition, two photo essays dramatize this history visually; maps and a chronology complete the presentation. The book provides a fresh look at major issues in South African social and labor history and popular culture, and focuses on the role of historians in creating and interacting with a popular movement of resistance and social change.

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Hawaii’s Past in a World of Pacific Islands
James M. Bayman
University Press of Colorado, 2013
Given its relatively late encounter with the West, Hawaii offers an exciting opportunity to study a society whose traditional lifeways and technologies were recorded in native oral traditions and written documents before they were changed by contact with non-Polynesian cultures. This book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series chronicles the role of archaeology in constructing a narrative of Hawaii’s cultural past, focusing on material evidence dating from the Polynesians’ first arrival on Hawaii’s shores about a millennium ago to the early decades of settlement by Americans and Europeans in the nineteenth century. A final chapter discusses new directions taken by native Hawaiians toward changing the practice of archaeology in the islands today.
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Hawai'i
Eight Hundred Years of Political and Economic Change
Sumner La Croix
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Relative to the other habited places on our planet, Hawai‘i has a very short history. The Hawaiian archipelago was the last major land area on the planet to be settled, with Polynesians making the long voyage just under a millennium ago. Our understanding of the social, political, and economic changes that have unfolded since has been limited until recently by how little we knew about the first five centuries of settlement.

Building on new archaeological and historical research, Sumner La Croix assembles here the economic history of Hawai‘i from the first Polynesian settlements in 1200 through US colonization, the formation of statehood, and to the present day. He shows how the political and economic institutions that emerged and evolved in Hawai‘i during its three centuries of global isolation allowed an economically and culturally rich society to emerge, flourish, and ultimately survive annexation and colonization by the United States. The story of a small, open economy struggling to adapt its institutions to changes in the global economy, Hawai‘i offers broadly instructive conclusions about economic evolution and development, political institutions, and native Hawaiian rights.
 
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How "Natives" Think
About Captain Cook, For Example
Marshall Sahlins
University of Chicago Press, 1995
When Western scholars write about non-Western societies, do they inevitably perpetuate the myths of European imperialism? Can they ever articulate the meanings and logics of non-Western peoples? Who has the right to speak for whom? Questions such as these are among the most hotly debated in contemporary intellectual life. In How "Natives" Think, Marshall Sahlins addresses these issues head on, while building a powerful case for the ability of anthropologists working in the Western tradition to understand other cultures.

In recent years, these questions have arisen in debates over the death and deification of Captain James Cook on Hawai'i Island in 1779. Did the Hawaiians truly receive Cook as a manifestation of their own god Lono? Or were they too pragmatic, too worldly-wise to accept the foreigner as a god? Moreover, can a "non-native" scholar give voice to a "native" point of view? In his 1992 book The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, Gananath Obeyesekere used this very issue to attack Sahlins's decades of scholarship on Hawaii. Accusing Sahlins of elementary mistakes of fact and logic, even of intentional distortion, Obeyesekere portrayed Sahlins as accepting a naive, enthnocentric idea of superiority of the white man over "natives"—Hawaiian and otherwise. Claiming that his own Sri Lankan heritage gave him privileged access to the Polynesian native perspective, Obeyesekere contended that Hawaiians were actually pragmatists too rational and sensible to mistake Cook for a god.

Curiously then, as Sahlins shows, Obeyesekere turns eighteenth-century Hawaiians into twentieth-century modern Europeans, living up to the highest Western standards of "practical rationality." By contrast, Western scholars are turned into classic custom-bound "natives", endlessly repeating their ancestral traditions of the White man's superiority by insisting Cook was taken for a god. But this inverted ethnocentrism can only be supported, as Sahlins demonstrates, through wholesale fabrications of Hawaiian ethnography and history—not to mention Obeyesekere's sustained misrepresentations of Sahlins's own work. And in the end, although he claims to be speaking on behalf of the "natives," Obeyesekere, by substituting a home-made "rationality" for Hawaiian culture, systematically eliminates the voices of Hawaiian people from their own history.

How "Natives" Think goes far beyond specialized debates about the alleged superiority of Western traditions. The culmination of Sahlins's ethnohistorical research on Hawaii, it is a reaffirmation for understanding difference.
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Hemispheric American Studies
Levander, Caroline F
Rutgers University Press, 2007
This landmark collection brings together a range of exciting new comparative work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric studies. Scholars working in the fields of Latin American studies, Asian American studies, American studies, American literature, African Diaspora studies, and comparative literature address the urgent question of how scholars might reframe disciplinary boundaries within the broad area of what is generally called American studies. The essays take as their starting points such questions as: What happens to American literary, political, historical, and cultural studies if we recognize the interdependency of nation-state developments throughout all the Americas? What happens if we recognize the nation as historically evolving and contingent rather than already formed? Finally, what happens if the "fixed" borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?

With essays that examine stamps, cartoons, novels, film, art, music, travel documents, and governmental publications, Hemispheric American Studies seeks to excavate the complex cultural history of texts and discourses across the ever-changing and stratified geopolitical and cultural fields that collectively comprise the American hemisphere. This collection promises to chart new directions in American literary and cultural studies.



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History, Power, and Identity
Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992
Jonathan D. Hill
University of Iowa Press, 1996

 For the past five centuries, indigenous and African American communities throughout the Americas have sought to maintain and recreate enduring identities under conditions of radical change and discontinuity. The essays in this groundbreaking volume document this cultural activity—this ethnogenesis—within and against the broader contexts of domination; the authors simultaneously encompass the entanglements of local communities in the webs of national and global power relations as well as people's unique abilities to gain control over their history and identity.

By defining ethnogenesis as the synthesis of people's cultural and political struggles,History, Power, and Identity breaks out of the implicit contrast between isolated local cultures and dynamic global history. From the northeastern plains of North America to Amazonia, colonial and independent states in the Americas interacted with vast multilingual and multicultural networks, resulting in the historical emergence of new ethnic identities and the disappearance of many earlier ones. The importance of African, indigenous American, and European religions, myths, and symbols, as historical cornerstones in the building of new ethnic identities, emerges as one of the central themes of this convincing collection.

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The House of the Bacabs, Copan, Honduras
David Webster
Harvard University Press, 1989
Claude Baudez, William L. Fash, Jr., Berthold Riese, William T. Sanders, and David Webster contribute to this monograph, and using an integrated art historical and anthropological approach, consider the House of the Bacabs’ context as an elite Maya structure, its excavation and restoration, and its iconographic and epigraphic reconstruction and interpretation, to establish models for understanding Classic Maya social and political life.
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The Hall of the North American Indian
Change and Continuity
Hillel S. Burger
Harvard University Press, 1990
In 1990, the Peabody Museum reopened its Hall of the North American Indian, which since the late nineteenth century has displayed the most signifcant objects from the museum's vast Native American collections. In stunning full-page color photographs by Hillel Burger, this catalog captures the extraordinary richness of the collections.
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History's Shadow
Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century
Steven Conn
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Who were the Native Americans? Where did they come from and how long ago? Did they have a history, and would they have a future? Questions such as these dominated intellectual life in the United States during the nineteenth century. And for many Americans, such questions about the original inhabitants of their homeland inspired a flurry of historical investigation, scientific inquiry, and heated political debate.

History's Shadow traces the struggle of Americans trying to understand the people who originally occupied the continent claimed as their own. Steven Conn considers how the question of the Indian compelled Americans to abandon older explanatory frameworks for sovereignty like the Bible and classical literature and instead develop new ones. Through their engagement with Native American language and culture, American intellectuals helped shape and define the emerging fields of archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and art. But more important, the questions posed by the presence of the Indian in the United States forced Americans to confront the meaning of history itself, both that of Native Americans and their own: how it should be studied, what drove its processes, and where it might ultimately lead. The encounter with Native Americans, Conn argues, helped give rise to a distinctly American historical consciousness.

A work of enormous scope and intellect, History's Shadow will speak to anyone interested in Native Americans and their profound influence on our cultural imagination.

History’s Shadow is an intelligent and comprehensive look at the place of Native Americans in Euro-American’s intellectual history. . . . Examining literature, painting, photography, ethnology, and anthropology, Conn mines the written record to discover how non-Native Americans thought about Indians.” —Joy S. Kasson, Los Angeles Times

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Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology as Historical Process
Edited by Kenneth E. Sassaman and Donald H. Holly Jr.
University of Arizona Press, 2011
The remains of hunter-gatherer groups are the most commonly discovered archaeological resources in the world, and their study constitutes much of the archaeological research done in North America. In spite of paradigm-shifting discoveries elsewhere in the world that may indicate that hunter-gatherer societies were more complex than simple remnants of a prehistoric past, North American archaeology by and large hasn’t embraced these theories, instead maintaining its general neoevolutionary track. This book will change that.

Combining the latest empirical studies of archaeological practice with the latest conceptual tools of anthropological and historical theory, this volume seeks to set a new course for hunter-gatherer archaeology by organizing the chapters around three themes. The first section offers diverse views of the role of human agency, challenging the premise that hunter-gatherer societies were bound by their interactions with the natural world. The second section considers how society and culture are constituted. Chapters in the final section take the long view of the historical process, examining how cultural diversity arises out of interaction and the continuity of ritual practices.

A closing commentary by H. Martin Wobst underscores the promise of an archaeology of foragers that does not associate foraging with any particular ideology or social structure but instead invites inquiry into counterintuitive alternatives. Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology as Historical Process seeks to blur the divisions between prehistory and history, between primitive and modern, and between hunter-gatherers and people in other societies. Because it offers alternatives to the dominant discourse and contributes to the agenda of hunter-gatherer research, this book will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of foraging peoples.
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Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, 1540-1838
Amos J. Wright
University of Alabama Press, 2003

Identifies town site locations and clarifies entries from the earliest documents and maps of explorers in Alabama

This encyclopedic work is a listing of 398 ancient towns recorded within the present boundaries of the state of Alabama, containing basic information on each village's ethnic affiliation, time period, geographic location, descriptions, and (if any) movements. While publications dating back to 1901 have attempted to compile such a listing, none until now has so exhaustively harvested the 214 historic maps drawn between 1544, when Hernando de Soto's entourage first came through the southeastern territory, and 1846, when Indian removal to the Oklahoma Territory was complete. Wright combines the map data with a keen awareness of both previously published information and archival sources, such as colonial town lists, census information, and travel narratives.

The towns are listed alphabetically, and the text of each entry develops chronologically. While only a few of these towns have been accurately located by archaeologists, this volume provides a wealth of information for the future study of cultural geography, southeastern archaeology, and ethnohistory. It will be an enduring reference source for many years to come.

SAMPLE ENTRY,

ALIBAMA TOWN (Alibama)
The Alibama consisted of several towns—Mucclassa, Tawasa, Tomopa, Koarsati (Knight 1981, 27:48). Pickett ([1851] 1962:81) adds Ecanchati, Pawokti, and Autauga. The Alibama Town can also be added. Many maps show the Alibama as a group, but one map, 1796 Thomas and Andrews, locates the "Alabama Town"on the east bank of the Coosa just below Wetumpka.

Swanton ([1922] 1970a:209) wrote that the Tuskegee at the Alabama forks may have been known as the "Alabama Town"; however, this is unlikely, as Major W. Blue, a removal agent, wrote in July 1835 that Coosada, Alabama Town, and Tuskegee were ready to emigrate and they all lived adjoining each other in Macon County (ASP, Military Affairs 1861,6:731).

On 6 July 1838, some twenty-seven towns, including "Alibama" (NA M234 R225), attended the Creek council held in Indian Territory. Thomas Bibb, brother to Alabama territorial govenor William Wyatt Bibb, and others, including Nashville investors, founded the town of Alabama in 1817 at Ten Mile Bluff in Montgomery County (Moser 1980-94, 4:131). The town soon disappeared into history.

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History Is in the Land
Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona's San Pedro Valley
T. J. Ferguson and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Arizona’s San Pedro Valley is a natural corridor through which generations of native peoples have traveled for more than 12,000 years, and today many tribes consider it to be part of their ancestral homeland. This book explores the multiple cultural meanings, historical interpretations, and cosmological values of this extraordinary region by combining archaeological and historical sources with the ethnographic perspectives of four contemporary tribes: Tohono O’odham, Hopi, Zuni, and San Carlos Apache.

Previous research in the San Pedro Valley has focused on scientific archaeology and documentary history, with a conspicuous absence of indigenous voices, yet Native Americans maintain oral traditions that provide an anthropological context for interpreting the history and archaeology of the valley. The San Pedro Ethnohistory Project was designed to redress this situation by visiting archaeological sites, studying museum collections, and interviewing tribal members to collect traditional histories. The information it gathered is arrayed in this book along with archaeological and documentary data to interpret the histories of Native American occupation of the San Pedro Valley.

This work provides an example of the kind of interdisciplinary and politically conscious work made possible when Native Americans and archaeologists collaborate to study the past. As a methodological case study, it clearly articulates how scholars can work with Native American stakeholders to move beyond confrontations over who “owns” the past, yielding a more nuanced, multilayered, and relevant archaeology.
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The Hohokam
Desert Farmers and Craftsmen, Excavations at Snaketown, 1964–1965
Emil W. Haury
University of Arizona Press, 1976
"For a calculated 1,400 years, Snaketown was a viable village, but unlike so many tells in the Near East, the people remained the same while their culture changed. The smoothly graded typological sequences for most attributes suggest to me that the ethnic identity of the inhabitants was not interrupted, that they were one and the same people experiencing normal internal evolutionary cultural modifications wtih occasional boosts of features and ideas newly arrived from the outside." —Emil W. Haury

 
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Household Archaeology at the Bridge River Site (EeRl4), British Columbia
Spatial Distributions of Features, Lithic Artifacts, and Faunal Remains on Fifteen Anthropogenic Floors from Housepit 54
Anna Marie Prentiss, Ethan Ryan, Ashley Hampton, Kathryn Bobolinski, Pei-Lin Yu, Matthew Schmader, and Alysha Edwards
University of Utah Press, 2022
Household Archaeology at Bridge River offers a unique contribution to the study of household archaeology, providing unprecedented insights into the history of a long-lived house in the Interior Pacific Northwest. With fifteen intact anthropogenic floors dating to pre-Colonial times, Bridge River’s Housepit 54 provides an extraordinary archaeological record—the first to allow researchers to adequately test for relationships between occupational variation and social change.

The authors take a methodological approach that integrates the study of household spatial organization with consideration of archaeological formation processes. Repeating the same set of analyses for each floor, they examine stability from standpoints of occupation and abandonment cycles, structure and organization of activity areas, and variation in positioning of wealth-related items. This volume is an outstanding example of research undertaken through a collaborative partnership between scholars from the University of Montana and the community of the St’át’imc Nation.
 
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Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology of the Colorado High Country
Mark Stiger
University Press of Colorado, 2001
Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology of the Colorado High Country offers data on 8,000 years of cultural change across a wide area of western Colorado and updates archaeological methodology in the mountain West.

Synthesizing research from several important, previously neglected sites, the book anchors its findings in a massive body of data that Mark Stiger gathered over eight years at Tenderfoot - a large lithic-scatter site once categorized as insignificant. Advances in spatial analysis, theoretical approaches, and excavation methods have allowed lithic-scatter sites, once considered less revealing than intact structures and similar sites, to yield startlingly rich cultural evidence.

Presenting artifactual data that reflects changes in houses, game drives, fire pits, stone tools, and debitage, Stiger explains the cultural sequence in the Upper Gunnison Basin and its connections to changes across the West.  He relates environmental and cultural changes, relying on paleoenvironmental evidence, changes in floral and faunal usage patterns, and data recovered in multi-year, repetitive surface collections.  An overview and critique of past research in the region complements discussion of the advantages of horizontally extensive block excavations and other contemporary ways of excavating and analyzing surface sites.

Stiger's findings hold promise for future research, as high-altitude surface sites are common, under-researched, and relatively well-preserved. The advances in archaeological method and theory that enabled Stiger's outstanding results in the Upper Gunnison Basin will allow many other Western sites to yield fascinating evidence.
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Holes in Our Moccasins, Holes in Our Stories
Apachean Origins and the Promontory, Franktown, and Dismal River Archaeological Records
Edited by John W. Ives and Joel C. Janetski
University of Utah Press, 2022
From 1930 to 1931, Julian Steward recovered hundreds of well-worn moccasins, along with mittens, bison robe fragments, bows, arrows, pottery, bone and stone tools, cordage, gaming pieces, and abundant faunal remains, making Utah’s Promontory Caves site one of the most remarkable hunter-gatherer archaeological records in western North America. Although Steward recognized that the moccasins and other artifacts were characteristic of the Canadian Subarctic and northern Plains and not the Great Basin, his findings languished for decades. 

This volume connects Steward’s work with results from new excavations in Promontory Caves 1 and 2 and illustrates that the early Promontory Phase resulted from an intrusive large-game hunting population very different from nearby late Fremont communities. Lingering for just one or two human generations, the cave occupants began to accept people as well as material and symbolic culture from surrounding thirteenth-century neighbors. Volume contributors employ a transdisciplinary approach to evaluate the possibility that the Promontory Phase materials reflect the presence of Apachean ancestors.  In these records lies the seeds for the intensive Plains-Puebloan interactions of the centuries that followed. 
 
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front cover of The Henderson Site Burials
The Henderson Site Burials
Glimpses of a Late Prehistoric Population in the Pecos Valley
Thomas R. Rocek and John D. Speth
University of Michigan Press, 1986
The Henderson site is a small, late prehistoric pueblo in southeastern New Mexico. It sits on a crest overlooking the Hondo River in Chaves County. The site contains a multiroom structure with two phases of occupation: the first around AD 1200 and the second around AD 1300 to 1400. This volume presents descriptions and analysis of the ten burials found at the Henderson site.
[more]

front cover of Hardaway Revisited
Hardaway Revisited
Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast
I. Randolph Daniel
University of Alabama Press, 1998

A provocative reanalysis of one of the most famous Early Archaic archaeological sites in the southeastern United States

Since the early 1970s, southeastern archaeologists have focused their attention on identifying the function of prehistoric sites and settlement practices during the Early Archaic period (ca. 9,000-10,500 B.P.). The Hardaway site in the North Carolina Piedmont, one of the most importantarchaeological sites in eastern North America, has not yet figured notably in this research. Daniel's reanalysis of the Hardaway artifacts provides a broad range of evidence—including stone tool morphology, intrasite distributions of artifacts, and regional distributions of stoneraw material types—that suggests that Hardaway played a unique role in Early Archaic settlement.

The Hardaway site functioned as a base camp where hunting and gathering groups lived for extended periods. From this camp they exploited nearby stone outcrops in the Uwharrie Mountains to replenish expended toolkits. Based on the  results of this study, Daniel's new model proposes that settlement was conditioned less by the availability of food resources than by the limited distribution of high-quality knappable stone in the region. These results challenge the prevalent view of Early Archaic settlement that group movement was largely confined by the availability of food resources within major southeastern river valleys.

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front cover of Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Lower Ohio River Valley
Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of the Lower Ohio River Valley
Richard Jefferies
University of Alabama Press, 2009
By the Early Holocene (10,000 to 8,000 B.P.), small wandering bands of Archaic hunter-gatherers began to annually follow the same hunting trails, basing their temporary camps on seasonal conditions and the presence of food. The Pleistocene glaciers had receded by this time, making food more plentiful in some areas and living conditions less hazardous. Although these Archaic peoples have long been known from their primary activities as hunters and gatherers of wild food resources, recent evidence has been found that indicates they also began rudimentary cultivation sometime during the Middle Holocene.
Richard Jefferies—an Archaic specialist—comprehensively addresses the approximately 7,000 years of the prehistory of eastern North America, termed the Archaic Period by archaeologists. Jefferies centers his research on a 380-mile section of the Lower Ohio River Valley, an area rife with both temporary and long-term Archaic sites. He covers the duration of the Holocene and provides a compendium of knowledge of the era, including innovative research strategies and results. Presenting these data from a cultural-ecological perspective emphasizing the relationships between hunter-gatherers and the environments in which they lived, Jefferies integrates current research strategies with emerging theories that are beginning to look at culture history in creative ways
[more]

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The History of the American Indians
James Adair; edited, introduced, and annotated by Kathryn E. Holland Braund
University of Alabama Press, 2009

A fully annotated edition of a classic work detailing the cultures of five southeastern American Indian tribes during the Contact Period

James Adair was an Englishman who lived and traded among the southeastern Indians for more than 30 years, from 1735 to 1768. During that time he covered the territory from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. He encountered and lived among Indians, advised governors, spent time with settlers, and worked tirelessly for the expansion of British interests against the French and the Spanish. Adair’s acceptance by the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, and Chickasaws provided him the opportunity to record, compare, and analyze their cultures and traditions.

Adair’s written work, first published in England in 1775, is considered one of the finest histories of the Native Americans. His observations provide one of the earliest and what many modern scholars regard as the best account of southeastern Indian cultures. This edition adheres to current standards of literary editing, following the original closely, and provides fully annotated and indexed critical apparatus.
 
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front cover of Histories of Southeastern Archaeology
Histories of Southeastern Archaeology
Edited by Shannon Tushingham, Jane Hill, and Charles H. McNutt
University of Alabama Press, 2002
This volume provides a comprehensive, broad-based overview, including first-person accounts, of the development and conduct of archaeology in the Southeast over the past three decades.

Histories of Southeastern Archaeology originated as a symposium at the 1999 Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) organized in honor of the retirement of Charles H. McNutt following 30 years of teaching anthropology. Written for the most part by members of the first post-depression generation of southeastern archaeologists, this volume offers a window not only into the archaeological past of the United States but also into the hopes and despairs of archaeologists who worked to write that unrecorded history or to test scientific theories concerning culture.

The contributors take different approaches, each guided by experience, personality, and location, as well as by the legislation that shaped the practical conduct of archaeology in their area. Despite the state-by-state approach, there are certain common themes, such as the effect (or lack thereof) of changing theory in Americanist archaeology, the explosion of contract archaeology and its relationship to academic archaeology, goals achieved or not achieved, and the common ground of SEAC.
 

This book tells us how we learned what we now know about the Southeast's unwritten past. Of obvious interest to professionals and students of the field, this volume will also be sought after by historians, political scientists, amateurs, and anyone interested in the South.

Additional reviews:

"A unique publication that presents numerous historical, topical, and personal perspectives on the archaeological heritage of the Southeast."—Southeastern Archaeology
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front cover of Hinterlands and Regional Dynamics in the Ancient Southwest
Hinterlands and Regional Dynamics in the Ancient Southwest
Alan P. Sullivan
University of Arizona Press, 2007
Hinterlands and Regional Dynamics in the Ancient Southwest is the first volume dedicated to understanding the nature of and changes in regional social autonomy, political hegemony, and organizational complexity across the entire prehistoric American Southwest. With geographic coverage extending from the Great Plains to the Colorado River, and from Mesa Verde to the international border, the volume’s ten case studies synthesize research that enhances our understanding of the ancient Southwest’s highly variable demographic, land use, and economic histories. For this volume, “hinterlands” are those areas whose archaeological records do not disclose the ceramic, architectural, and network evidence that initially led to the establishment of the Hohokam, Chaco, and Casas Grandes regional systems. Employing a variety of perspectives, such as the cultural landscapes approach, heterarchy, and the common-pool resource model, as well as technical methods, such as petrographic and stylistic-attribute analyses, the volume’s contributors explore variation in hinterland identities, subsistence ecology, and sociopolitical organization as regional systems expanded and contracted between the 9th and 14th centuries AD. The hinterlands of the prehistoric Southwest were home to a substantial number of people and were often used as resource catchments by the inhabitants of regional systems. Importantly, hinterlands also influenced developments of nearby regional systems, under whose footprint they managed to retain considerable autonomy. By considering the dynamics between hinterlands and regional systems, the volume reveals unappreciated aspects of the ancient Southwest’s peoples and their lives, thereby deepening our awareness of the region’s rich and complicated cultural past.
[more]

front cover of Hunter-Gatherer Mortuary Practices during the Central Texas Archaic
Hunter-Gatherer Mortuary Practices during the Central Texas Archaic
By Leland C. Bement
University of Texas Press, 1995

Beginning over 10,000 years ago and continuing until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s, hunter and gatherer societies occupied the Edwards Plateau of central Texas. Archaeological studies over the past eighty years have reconstructed their subsistence, technology, and settlement patterns, but until now little information has been available on their burial practices, due to the scarcity of known burial sites. This detailed archaeological report describes the human skeletal remains, burial furnishings, and fauna recovered from Bering Sinkhole in Kerr County, the first carefully excavated hunter-gatherer burial site in central Texas.

The remains in Bering Sinkhole were deposited from 7,500 to 2,000 years ago. Leland Bement's analysis reveals a growing elaboration in burial rituals during the period and also uncovers important data on the diet and health of the hunter-gatherers. He discusses climate change based on faunal remains and compares burial goods such as bone, antler, freshwater shell, marine shell, turtle, and stone artifacts with those found at other Texas mortuary sites and with deposits at hunter-gatherer habitation sites in Central Texas.

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front cover of Historic Native Peoples of Texas
Historic Native Peoples of Texas
By William C. Foster
University of Texas Press, 2008

Several hundred tribes of Native Americans were living within or hunting and trading across the present-day borders of Texas when Cabeza de Vaca and his shipwrecked companions washed up on a Gulf Coast beach in 1528. Over the next two centuries, as Spanish and French expeditions explored the state, they recorded detailed information about the locations and lifeways of Texas's Native peoples. Using recent translations of these expedition diaries and journals, along with discoveries from ongoing archaeological investigations, William C. Foster here assembles the most complete account ever published of Texas's Native peoples during the early historic period (AD 1528 to 1722).

Foster describes the historic Native peoples of Texas by geographic regions. His chronological narrative records the interactions of Native groups with European explorers and with Native trading partners across a wide network that extended into Louisiana, the Great Plains, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Foster provides extensive ethnohistorical information about Texas's Native peoples, as well as data on the various regions' animals, plants, and climate. Accompanying each regional account is an annotated list of named Indian tribes in that region and maps that show tribal territories and European expedition routes.

This authoritative overview of Texas's historic Native peoples reveals that these groups were far more cosmopolitan than previously known. Functioning as the central link in the continent-wide circulation of trade goods and cultural elements such as religion, architecture, and lithic technology, Texas's historic Native peoples played a crucial role in connecting the Native peoples of North America from the Pacific Coast to the Southeast woodlands.

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front cover of Hunters of the Mid-Holocene Forest
Hunters of the Mid-Holocene Forest
Old Cordilleran Culture Sites at Granite Falls, Washington
James C. Chatters, Jason B. Cooper, and Philippe D. LeTourneau
University of Utah Press, 2020
University of Utah Anthropological Papers No. 134

This volume examines an almost purely lithic record known in the Puget Sound region as the Olcott Complex. Only loosely described off and on since the early 1960s by a series of researchers, none of whom used the same analytical approach, the Olcott record has never been systematically analyzed until now. As a result, this book fills in enormous gaps in our knowledge regarding the age, mode of subsistence, and adaptive strategy of the Olcott Complex. Chatters and colleagues describe the intensive excavation of three Olcott sites that were threatened by highway construction. The book concludes by pulling those findings together to place the Olcott Complex into its proper place in regional prehistory. An exemplary model of how to conduct archaeological research, the volume demonstrates how important research issues can be addressed in a cultural resource management context.

Extensive appendices available online.
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front cover of Hidden Thunder
Hidden Thunder
Rock Art of the Upper Midwest
Geri Schrab
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016

In Hidden Thunder, renowned watercolor artist Geri Schrab and archaeologist Robert "Ernie" Boszhardt give readers an up-close-and-personal look at rock art. With an eye toward preservation, Schrab and Boszhardt take you with them as they research, document, and interpret at the ancient petroglyphs and pictographs made my Native Americans in past millennia. In addition to publicly accessible sites such as Wisconsin’s Roche-a-Cri State Park and Minnesota’s Jeffers Petroglyphs, Hidden Thunder covers the artistic treasures found at several remote and inaccessible rock art sites—revealing the ancient stories through words, full-color photographs, and artistic renditions.

Offering the duo perspectives of scientist and artist, Boszhardt shares the facts that archaeologists have been able to establish about these important artifacts of our early history, while Schrab offers the artist's experience, describing her emotional and creative response upon encountering and painting these sites. Viewpoints by members of the Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe, and other Native nations offer additional insight on the historic and cultural significance of these sites. Together these myriad voices reveal layers of meaning and cultural context that emphasize why these fragile resources—often marred by human graffiti and mishandling or damage from the elements—need to be preserved.

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front cover of Held Captive By Indians
Held Captive By Indians
Selected Narratives 1642-1836
Richard Vanderbeets
University of Tennessee Press, 1994
Among the early white settlers, accounts of Indian captivities and massacres became America's first literature of catharsis - a means by which a population that disapproved of fiction and play-acting could satisfy its appetite for stories about other people's misfortunes. This collection of unaltered captivity narratives, first published in 1973, remains an invaluable source of information for historians and ethnologists, providing a fascinating glimpse of a vanished era. For this edition, VanDerBeets has written a new preface discussing the proliferation of recent scholarship about captivity narratives, especially those written by women.
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front cover of Hunting for Hides
Hunting for Hides
Deerskins, Status, and Cultural Change in the Protohistoric Appalachians
Heather A. Lapham
University of Alabama Press, 2006
Changes in Native American communities as they adapted to advancing Europeans.
 
This volume investigates the use of deer, deerskins, and nonlocal goods in the period from A.D. 1400 to 1700 to gain a comprehensive understanding of historic-era cultural changes taking place within Native American communities in the southern Appalachian Highlands. In the 1600s, hunting deer to obtain hides for commercial trade evolved into a substantial economic enterprise for many Native Americans in the Middle Atlantic and Southeast.  An overseas market demand for animal hides and furs imported from the Americas, combined with the desire of infant New World colonies to find profitable export commodities, provided a new market for processed deerskins as well as new sources of valued nonlocal goods.  This new trade in deerskins created a reorganization of the priorities of native hunters that initiated changes in native trade networks, political alliances, gender relations, and cultural belief systems.  

Through research on faunal remains and mortuary assemblages, Lapham tracks both the products Native Americans produced for colonial trade--deerskins and other furs--as well as those items received in exchange--European and native prestige goods that end up in burial contexts. Zooarchaeological analyses provide insights into subsistence practices, deer-hunting strategies, and deer-hide production activities, while an examination of mortuary practices contributes information on the use of the nonlocal goods acquired through trade in deerskins. This study reveals changes in economic organization and mortuary practices that provide new insights into how participation in the colonial deerskin trade initially altered Native American social relations and political systems.
[more]

front cover of How the Indians Lost Their Land
How the Indians Lost Their Land
Law and Power on the Frontier
Stuart Banner
Harvard University Press, 2007

Between the early seventeenth century and the early twentieth,nearly all the land in the United States was transferred from AmericanIndians to whites. This dramatic transformation has been understood in two very different ways--as a series of consensual transactions, but also as a process of violent conquest. Both views cannot be correct. How did Indians actually lose their land?

Stuart Banner provides the first comprehensive answer. He argues that neither simple coercion nor simple consent reflects the complicated legal history of land transfers. Instead, time, place, and the balance of power between Indians and settlers decided the outcome of land struggles. As whites' power grew, they were able to establish the legal institutions and the rules by which land transactions would be made and enforced.

This story of America's colonization remains a story of power, but a more complex kind of power than historians have acknowledged. It is a story in which military force was less important than the power to shape the legal framework within which land would be owned. As a result, white Americans--from eastern cities to the western frontiers--could believe they were buying land from the Indians the same way they bought land from one another. How the Indians Lost Their Land dramatically reveals how subtle changes in the law can determine the fate of a nation, and our understanding of the past.

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front cover of The Headpots of Northeast Arkansas and Southern Pemiscot County, Missouri
The Headpots of Northeast Arkansas and Southern Pemiscot County, Missouri
James F. Cherry
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
In 1981, James F. Cherry embarked on what evolved into a passionate, personal quest to identify and document all the known headpots of Mississippian Indian culture from northeast Arkansas and the bootheel region of southeast Missouri. Produced by two groups the Spanish called the Casqui and Pacaha and dating circa AD 1400–1700, headpots occur, with few exceptions, only in a small region of Arkansas and Missouri. Relatively little is known about these headpots: did they portray kinsmen or enemies, the living or the dead or were they used in ceremonies, in everyday life, or exclusively for the sepulcher? Cherry’s decades of research have culminated in the lavishly illustrated The Headpots of Northeast Arkansas and Southern Pemiscot County, Missouri, a fascinating, comprehensive catalog of 138 identified classical style headpots and an invaluable resource for understanding the meaning of these remarkable ceramic vessels.
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front cover of How It Is
How It Is
The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova
V. F. Cordova; Edited by Kathleen Dean Moore, Kurt Peters, Ted Jojola, and Amber Lacy, with a Foreword by Linda Hogan
University of Arizona Press, 2007
Viola Cordova was the first Native American woman to receive a PhD in philosophy. Even as she became an expert on canonical works of traditional Western philosophy, she devoted herself to defining a Native American philosophy. Although she passed away before she could complete her life’s work, some of her colleagues have organized her pioneering contributions into this provocative book.

In three parts, Cordova sets out a complete Native American philosophy. First she explains her own understanding of the nature of reality itself—the origins of the world, the relation of matter and spirit, the nature of time, and the roles of culture and language in understanding all of these. She then turns to our role as residents of the Earth, arguing that we become human as we deepen our relation to our people and to our places, and as we understand the responsibilities that grow from those relationships. In the final section, she calls for a new reverence in a world where there is no distinction between the sacred and the mundane.

Cordova clearly contrasts Native American beliefs with the traditions of the Enlightenment and Christianized Europeans (what she calls “Euroman” philosophy). By doing so, she leads her readers into a deeper understanding of both traditions and encourages us to question any view that claims a singular truth. From these essays—which are lucid, insightful, frequently funny, and occasionally angry—we receive a powerful new vision of how we can live with respect, reciprocity, and joy.
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front cover of Heartbeat of the People
Heartbeat of the People
Music and Dance of the Northern Pow-wow
Tara Browner
University of Illinois Press, 2002
The intertribal pow-wow is the most widespread venue for traditional Indian music and dance in North America. Heartbeat of the People is an insider's journey into the dances and music, the traditions and regalia, and the functions and significance of these vital cultural events. Tara Browner focuses on the Northern pow-wow of the northern Great Plains and Great Lakes to investigate the underlying tribal and regional frameworks that reinforce personal tribal affiliations. Interviews with dancers and her own participation in pow-wow events and community provide fascinating on-the-ground accounts and provide detail to a rare ethnomusicological analysis of Northern music and dance.
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front cover of Home Before the Raven Caws
Home Before the Raven Caws
Richard Feldman
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2012
In 1903 Alaska governor John Brady collected fifteen old totem poles for preservation at Stika National Historical Park, creating one of the most famous collections of totem poles in the world. One pole became separated, and its fate remained a mystery for nearly ninety years. This revised edition of Home before the Raven Caws unravels the mystery of that missing pole from the Brady collection. The old Alaskan pole found its way to Indiana over a hundred years ago. A new version of the pole stands today at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. The first portion of the book serves as a general primer of the history and cultural significance, identification, carving, and raising of totem poles.
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front cover of Harriman Expedition to Alaska
Harriman Expedition to Alaska
Encountering the Tlingit and Eskimo in 1899
George Grinnell
University of Alaska Press, 2007
In 1899, George Bird Grinnell journeyed to Alaska on the Harriman Expedition, a scientific cruise from Seattle to the North Pacific. Accompanied by explorer John Muir and photographer Edward S. Curtis, Grinnell spent two months chronicling the lives of the Natives of Alaska and Siberia.

A keen observer of his surroundings, Grinnell provides a unique perspective on northern life in the late nineteenth century. He documented hunting techniques and material culture of the Eskimo of Siberia, as well as the totem poles and architecture of the Tlingit of Southeast. As a pioneer conservationist, Grinnell was one of the first to express concern over the effects of trade and industry on Alaska's peoples and natural resources.

Illustrated with photos and drawings by Harriman Expedition members, including Edward S. Curtis, this volume makes the work of a passionate observer available to a new generation of readers.
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front cover of Hunters, Carvers, and Collectors
Hunters, Carvers, and Collectors
The Chauncey C. Nash Collection of Inuit Art
Maija M. Lutz
Harvard University Press, 2012

In the late 1950s, Chauncey C. Nash started collecting Inuit carvings just as the art of printmaking was being introduced in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), an Inuit community on Baffin Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. Nash donated some 300 prints and sculptures to Harvard’s Peabody Museum—one of the oldest collections of early modern Inuit art. The Peabody collection includes not only early Inuit sculpture but also many of the earliest prints on paper made by the women and men who helped propel Inuit art onto the world stage.

Author Maija M. Lutz draws from ethnology, archaeology, art history, and cultural studies to tell the story of a little-known collection that represents one of the most vibrant and experimental periods in the development of contemporary Inuit art. Lavishly illustrated, Hunters, Carvers, and Collectors presents numerous never-before-published gems, including carvings by the artists John Kavik, Johnniebo Ashevak, and Peter Qumalu POV Assappa. This latest contribution to the award-winning Peabody Museum Collections Series fills an important gap in the literature of Native American art.

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front cover of Havasupai Legends
Havasupai Legends
Religion and Mythology of the Havasupai Indians of the Grand Canyon
Robert C Euler
University of Utah Press, 1994
For almost seven hundred years, the Havasupai Indians, who call themselves People of the Blue Water, have lived in an area that includes the depths of the western Grand Canyon and the heights of the San Francisco Peaks. Here they inhabited the greatest altitude variation of any Indians in Southwestern America.

Written in consultation with some of the last Havasupai shamans, this book details their religious beliefs, customs, and healing practices. A second section presents legends of the Havasupai origin, the first people, and tales of Coyote, Gila Monster, Bear, and others.
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front cover of Havasupai Habitat
Havasupai Habitat
A. F. Whiting's Ethnography of a Traditional Indian Culture
A. F. Whiting; Edited by Steven A. Weber and P. David Seaman
University of Arizona Press, 1985
The Havasupai Indians have lived for centuries in Cataract Canyon, and even came to be confined there by treaty. When anthopologist Alfred F. Whiting set out to study the Havasupai in the early 1940s, he found a culture that in many aspect remained unchanged. In Havasupai Habitat editors Weber and Seaman have distilled Whiting's ethnographic research. Part I comprises ten thematic chapters dealing with various aspects of culture, such as hunting and gathering, child care, housing, and religion. Part II offers a systematic presentation of Havasupai knowledge of weather and astronomy, minerals, animals, and plants; and for each item listed, Whiting has provided scientific and common English terminology, phonetic spelling, and a description of usage.

Published in 1985, Havasupai Habitat offers a rich ethnography on lifeways of the Havasupai people.
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front cover of The Hodges Ruin
The Hodges Ruin
A Hohokam Community in the Tucson Basin
Isabel Kelly, James E. Officer, and Emil W. Haury
University of Arizona Press, 1977
The Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona is a peer-reviewed monograph series sponsored by the School of Anthropology. Established in 1959, the series publishes archaeological and ethnographic papers that use contemporary method and theory to investigate problems of anthropological importance in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and related areas.
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front cover of Homol'ovi
Homol'ovi
An Ancient Hopi Settlement Cluster
E. Charles Adams
University of Arizona Press, 2002
Beginning sometime in the thirteenth century, people from the Hopi Mesas established a cluster of villages to the south along the Little Colorado River. They were attracted by the river’s resources and the region's ideal conditions for growing cotton. By the late 1300s, these Homol'ovi villages were the center of a robust trade in cotton among many clusters of villages near or on the southern Colorado Plateau and were involved in the beginning of katsina religion among Hopi people.

Charles Adams has directed fifteen years of research at these sites for the Arizona State Museum, including excavations in five of the seven primary Homol'ovi villages and in other villages predating them. Through this research he concludes that the founders of these settlements were Hopis who sought to protect their territory from migrating groups elsewhere in the Pueblo world. This book summarizes that research and broadens our understanding of the relationship of Homol'ovi to ancient and modern Hopi people.

Each Homol'ovi village had a unique history of establishment, growth, sociopolitical organization, length of occupation, and abandonment; and although the villages shared much in the way of material culture, their size and configuration were tremendously varied. By comparing Homol'ovi research to information from projects on other settlements in the area, Adams has been able to reconstruct a provocative history of the Homol'ovi cluster that includes relationships among the individual villages and their relationships to nearby clusters. He shows that social organization within villages is apparent by the number and variety of ritual structures, while political organization among villages is indicated by the need for cooperation to share water for irrigation and by the exchange of such materials as pottery, obsidian, and ground stone.

Adams advances several important theories about why Homol'ovi was founded where and when it was, who its founders were, and the importance of cotton in making Homol'ovi an important center of trade in the 1300s. He also considers why Pueblo settlements suddenly became so large, addressing theoretical issues pertaining to multiple settlements and the rise of enormous villages containing more than 1,000 rooms.

Homol'ovi is a rich work of synthesis and interpretation that will be important for anyone with an interest in Southwest archaeology, Arizona history, or Hopi culture. By considering the settlement trajectory of an entire cluster of sites, it will also prove valuable to archaeologists worldwide.
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front cover of Hopi Oral Tradition and the Archaeology of Identity
Hopi Oral Tradition and the Archaeology of Identity
Wesley Bernardini
University of Arizona Press, 2005
As contemporary Native Americans assert the legacy of their ancestors, there is increasing debate among archaeologists over the methods and theories used to reconstruct prehistoric identity and the movement of social groups. This is especially problematic with respect to the emergence of southwestern tribes, which involved shifting populations and identities over the course of more than a thousand years.

Wesley Bernardini now draws on an unconventional source, Hopi traditional knowledge, to show how hypotheses that are developed from oral tradition can stimulate new and productive ways to think about the archaeological record. Focusing on insights that oral tradition has to offer about general processes of prehistoric migration and identity formation, he describes how each Hopi clan acquired its particular identity from the experiences it accumulated on its unique migration pathway. This pattern of “serial migration” by small social groups often saw the formation of villages by clans that briefly came together and then moved off again independently, producing considerable social diversity both within and among villages.

Using Anderson Mesa and Homol’ovi as case studies, Bernardini presents architectural and demographic data suggesting that the fourteenth century occupation of these regions was characterized by population flux and diversity consistent with the serial migration model. He offers an analysis of rock art motifs—focusing on those used as clan symbols—to evaluate the diversity of group identities, then presents a compositional analysis of Jeddito Yellow Ware pottery to evaluate the diversity of these groups’ eventual migration destinations.

Evidence supporting serial migration greatly complicates existing notions of links between ancient and modern social groups, with important implications for the implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Bernardini’s work clearly demonstrates that studies of cultural affiliation must take into account the fluid nature of population movements and identity in the prehistoric landscape. It takes a decisive step toward better understanding the major demographic change that occurred on the Colorado Plateau from 1275 to 1400 and presents a strategy for improving the reconstruction of cultural identity in the past.

[more]

front cover of Hopi Dwellings
Hopi Dwellings
Architectural Change at Orayvi
Catherine M. Cameron
University of Arizona Press, 1999
The dramatic split of the Hopi community of Orayvi in 1906 had lasting consequences not only for the people of Third Mesa but also for the very buildings around which they centered their lives. This book examines architectural and other effects of that split, using architectural change as a framework with which to understand social and cultural processes at prehistoric Southwestern pueblos. Catherine Cameron examines architectural change at Orayvi from 1871 to 1948, a period of great demographic and social upheaval.

Her study is unique in its use of historic photographs to document and understand abandonment processes and apply that knowledge to prehistoric sites. Photos taken by tourists, missionaries, and early anthropologists during the late nineteenth century portray original structures, while later photos show how Orayvi buildings changed over a period of almost eighty years. Census data relating to house size and household configuration shed additional light on social change in the pueblo.

Examining change at Orayvi afforded an opportunity to study the architectural effects of an event that must have happened many times in the past--the partial abandonment of a pueblo--by tracing the effects of sudden population decline on puebloan architecture. Cameron's work provides clues to how and why villages were abandoned and re-established repeatedly in the prehistoric Southwest as it offers a unique window on the relationship between Pueblo houses and the living people who occupied them.
[more]

front cover of Homol'ovi II
Homol'ovi II
Archaeology of an Ancestral Hopi Village, Arizona
Edited by E. Charles Adams and Kelley Ann Hays
University of Arizona Press, 1991
Homol'ovi II is a fourteenth-century, ancestral Hopi pueblo with over 700 rooms. Although known by archaeologists since 1896, no systematic excavations were conducted at the pueblo until 1984. This report summarizes the findings of the excavations by the Arizona State Museum of five rooms and an outside activity area, which now form the core of the interpretive program for Homolovi Ruins State Park. The significant findings reported here are that the excavated deposits date between A.D. 1340 and 1400; that nearly all the decorated ceramics during this period were imported from villages on the Hopi Mesas; that cotton was a principal crop which probably formed the basis of Homol'ovi II's participation in regional exchange; that chipped stone was a totally expedient technology in contrast to ground stone which was becoming more diverse; and that the katsina cult was probably present or developing at Homol'ovi II. These findings from the basis for future excavations that should broaden our knowledge of the developments taking place in fourteenth-century Pueblo society connecting the people whom archaeologists term the Anasazi with those calling themselves Hopi.
[more]

front cover of Hopi Cookery
Hopi Cookery
Juanita Tiger Kavena
University of Arizona Press, 1980
More than one hundred authentic recipes center around Hopi staples of beans, corn, wheat, chilies, meat, gourds, and native greens and fruits.
[more]

front cover of Husk of Time
Husk of Time
The Photographs of Victor Masayesva
Victor Masayesva, Jr.; Introduction by Beverly R. Singer
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Photographer and filmmaker Victor Masayesva, Jr., was raised in the Hopi village of Hotevilla and was educated at the Horace Mann School in New York, Princeton University, and the University of Arizona. His immersion in photographic experimentation embraces a projection of stories and symbols, natural objects, and locations both at Hopi and worldwide. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he is perhaps best known for his feature-length film Imagining Indians. For Masayesva, photography is a discipline that he approaches in a manner similar to the way that he was taught about himself and his clan identity. As he navigates his personal associations with Hopi subject matter in varied investigations of biology, ecology, humanity, history, planetary energy, places remembered, and musings on things broken and whole, he has created an extraordinary visual cosmography. In this compilation of his photographic journey, Masayesva presents some of the most important and vibrant images of that visual quest and reflects on them in provocative essays.
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A Hopi Social History
By Scott Rushforth and Steadman Upham
University of Texas Press, 1992

All anthropologists and archaeologists seek to answer basic questions about human beings and society. Why do people behave the way they do? Why do patterns in the behavior of individuals and groups sometimes persist for remarkable periods of time? Why do patterns in behavior sometimes change?

A Hopi Social History explores these basic questions in a unique way. The discussion is constructed around a historically ordered series of case studies from a single sociocultural system (the Hopi) in order to understand better the multiplicity of processes at work in any sociocultural system through time. The case studies investigate the mysterious abandonments of the Western Pueblo region in late prehistory, the initial impact of European diseases on the Hopis, Hopi resistance to European domination between 1680 and 1880, the split of Oraibi village in 1906, and some responses by the Hopis to modernization in the twentieth century.

These case studies provide a forum in which the authors examine a number of theories and conceptions of culture to determine which theories are relevant to which kinds of persistence and change. With this broad theoretical synthesis, the book will be of interest to students and scholars in the social sciences.

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Hopi Basket Weaving
Artistry in Natural Fibers
Helga Teiwes
University of Arizona Press, 1996
"With the inborn wisdom that has guided them for so long through so many obstacles, Hopi men and women perpetuate their proven rituals, strongly encouraging those who attempt to neglect or disrespect their obligations to uphold them. One of these obligations is to respect the flora and fauna of our planet. The Hopi closeness to the Earth is represented in all the arts of all three mesas, whether in clay or natural fibers. What clay is to a potter's hands, natural fibers are to a basket weaver." —from the Introduction

Rising dramatically from the desert floor, Arizona's windswept mesas have been home to the Hopis for hundreds of years. A people known for protecting their privacy, these Native Americans also have a long and less known tradition of weaving baskets and plaques. Generations of Hopi weavers have passed down knowledge of techniques and materials from the plant world around them, from mother to daughter, granddaughter, or niece.

This book is filled with photographs and detailed descriptions of their beautiful baskets—the one art, above all others, that creates the strongest social bonds in Hopi life. In these pages, weavers open their lives to the outside world as a means of sharing an art form especially demanding of time and talent. The reader learns how plant materials are gathered in canyons and creek bottoms, close to home and far away. The long, painstaking process of preparation and dying is followed step by step. Then, using techniques of coiled, plaited, or wicker basketry, the weaving begins.

Underlying the stories of baskets and their weavers is a rare glimpse of what is called "the Hopi Way," a life philosophy that has strengthened and sustained the Hopi people through centuries of change. Many other glimpses of the Hopi world are also shared by author and photographer Helga Teiwes, who was warmly invited into the homes of her collaborators. Their permission and the permission of the Cultural Preservation Office of the Hopi Tribe gave her access to people and information seldom available to outsiders.

Teiwes was also granted access to some of the ceremonial observances where baskets are preeminent. Woven in brilliant reds, greens, and yellows as well as black and white, Hopi weavings, then, not only are an arresting art form but also are highly symbolic of what is most important in Hopi life. In the women's basket dance, for example, woven plaques commemorate and honor the Earth and the perpetuation of life. Other plaques play a role in the complicated web of Hopi social obligation and reciprocity.

Living in a landscape of almost surreal form and color, Hopi weavers are carrying on one of the oldest arts traditions in the world. Their stories in Hopi Basket Weaving will appeal to collectors, artists and craftspeople, and anyone with an interest in Native American studies, especially Native American arts. For the traveler or general reader, the book is an invitation to enter a little-known world and to learn more about an art form steeped in meaning and stunning in its beauty.
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Haudenosaunee Women Lacrosse Players
Making Meaning through Rematriation
Sharity L. Bassett
Michigan State University Press, 2024
Since the 1970s lacrosse has become one of the fastest-growing sports in North America, and Haudenosaunee communities have worked at the international level to claim lacrosse as an important part of Haudenosaunee culture and tradition. Lacrosse is also known as the medicine game as it is part of a medicine ceremony named in creation narratives and the Great Law of Peace that binds the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Six Nations. The number of Haudenosaunee women and girls playing the sport has burgeoned since the 1980s. This book roots lacrosse as a Haudenosaunee sport both within and outside of these communities. It shows how the concept of rematriation—a culturally relevant framework that articulates the work Haudenosaunee peoples are doing to reconnect to the power imbued with matrilineal and matrifocal societies—situates Haudenosaunee women who play lacrosse within a complex understanding of contemporary, traditional, and medicinal lacrosse. Because they cannot seamlessly claim this as their medicine game, as the Haudenosaunee Nationals and other men’s teams do, Haudenosaunee women players must articulate some of the most nuanced understandings of tradition and medicine. These articulations connect to larger conversations within Haudenosaunee communities regarding the power that women hold and the rematriation of that power to define and uphold tradition. Haudenosaunee Women Lacrosse Players demonstrates how the cycle of action and articulation—with the intergenerational help of female leadership—firmly roots lacrosse within Haudenosaunee cultural fabric.
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Hunters of the Northern Forest
Designs for Survival among the Alaskan Kutchin
Richard K. Nelson
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Boreal forest Indians like the Kutchin of east-central Alaska are among the few native Americans who still actively pursue a hunter's way of life. Yet even among these people hunting and gathering is vanishing so rapidly that it will soon disappear. This updated edition of Hunters of the Northern Forest stands as the only complete account of subsistence and survival among the Kutchin, capturing a final glimpse of a way of life at the crossroads of cultural development.
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Households on the Mimbres Horizon
Excavations at La Gila Encantada, Southwestern New Mexico
Barbara J. Roth
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Pithouse sites represent the basic form of occupation in the Mimbres Mogollon region of southwestern New Mexico from AD 200 to the late 900s. This study presents the results of excavations of one such site, called La Gila Encantada.

Little is known about the variability present at pithouse sites away from the major Mimbres and Gila River Valleys. Nonriverine occupations have been understudied until now. This book describes subsistence and settlement practices and compares the results with recent research conducted at the larger villages in the Mimbres River Valley. Despite basic similarities in material culture, households at La Gila Encantada appear to have followed different trajectories than those along the rivers. Examining these differences, archaeologist Barbara J. Roth provides insights into some of the reasons why they existed and shows that the variability present in pithouse occupations over the years was tied to multiple factors, including environmental differences, economic practices, and the social composition of groups occupying the sites. With chapters assessing ceramic data, chipped and groundstone analysis, shell and mineral jewelry, and regional context, this look at the past offers relevant insights into current issues in Southwest archaeology, including identity, interaction, and household organization.
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A History of Navajo Nation Education
Disentangling Our Sovereign Body
Wendy Shelly Greyeyes; Foreword by Kevin K. Washburn
University of Arizona Press, 2022
A History of Navajo Nation Education: Disentangling Our Sovereign Body unravels the tangle of federal and state education programs that have been imposed on Navajo people and illuminates the ongoing efforts by tribal communities to transfer state authority over Diné education to the Navajo Nation.

On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, this important education history explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance. An iron grip of colonial domination over Navajo education remains, thus inhibiting a unified path toward educational sovereignty. In providing the historical roots to today’s challenges, Wendy Shelly Greyeyes clears the path and provides a go-to reference to move discussions forward.
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Hand Trembling, Frenzy Witchcraft, and Moth Madness
A Study of Navajo Seizure Disorders
Jerrold E. Levy
University of Arizona Press, 1987
According to traditional Navajo belief, seizures are the result of sibling incest, sexual witchcraft, or possession by a supernatural spirit—associations that have kept such disorders from being known outside Navajo families. This new study is concerned with discovering why the Navajos have accorded seizures such importance and determining their meaning in the larger context of Navajo culture. The book is based on a 14-year study of some 40 Navajo patients and on an epidemiological survey among the Navajos and among three Pueblo tribes.
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Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy
James Kale McNeley
University of Arizona Press, 1981
"The author has written a well-documented book on the Navajo concept of personality. . . . Holy Wind gives life, movement, thought, speech, and behavior and links the Navajo soul to the immanent powers of the universe. . . . A valuable case study." —Journal of Psychology & Theology

"An admirable volume . . . it illustrates how much we can learn about the importance of poetry as a fundamental activity by investigating the traditions of what should be acknowledged as the New World's unique classical past." —New Scholar

"This book is a fascinating analysis of what obviously is a central dimension in the traditional Navajo awareness of life." —New Mexico Historical Review
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A History of the Osage People
Louis F. Burns
University of Alabama Press, 2004

Traces 400 years of Osage culture from prehistoric times to the group's current status as an officially recognized tribe.

Osage traditional lands are located in mid-continental America encompassed by the present-day states of Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Major waterways through these lands and the defensible terrain of the Ozark range provided the tribe a distinct advantage in prehistoric and early historic times. A warlike people, the Osage long encroached on neighboring tribal lands, especially those of the Caddo to the southwest. Yet good natural boundaries and centuries of success in warfare afforded the tribe little advantage in attempts to forestall Euro-American westward expansion. Three major routes to the West—the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers and the Continental Trail—crossed Osage land, so conflict with the newcomers was inevitable.

Louis Burns draws on ancestral oral traditions and research in a broad body of literature to tell the story of the Osage people. He writes clearly and concisely, from the Osage perspective. First published in 1989 and for many years out of print, this revised edition is augmented by a new preface and maps. Because of its masterful compilation and synthesis of the known data, A History of the Osage People continues to be the best reference for information on an important American Indian people.

Louis F. Burns, of Osage-French-Scottish heritage, is a member of the Mottled Eagle Clan and author of six books, including Symbolic and Decorative Art of the Osage People.

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High Stakes
Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty
Jessica R. Cattelino
Duke University Press, 2008
In 1979, Florida Seminoles opened the first tribally operated high-stakes bingo hall in North America. At the time, their annual budget stood at less than $2 million. By 2006, net income from gaming had surpassed $600 million. This dramatic shift from poverty to relative economic security has created tangible benefits for tribal citizens, including employment, universal health insurance, and social services. Renewed political self-governance and economic strength have reversed decades of U.S. settler-state control. At the same time, gaming has brought new dilemmas to reservation communities and triggered outside accusations that Seminoles are sacrificing their culture by embracing capitalism. In High Stakes, Jessica R. Cattelino tells the story of Seminoles’ complex efforts to maintain politically and culturally distinct values in a time of new prosperity.

Cattelino presents a vivid ethnographic account of the history and consequences of Seminole gaming. Drawing on research conducted with tribal permission, she describes casino operations, chronicles the everyday life and history of the Seminole Tribe, and shares the insights of individual Seminoles. At the same time, she unravels the complex connections among cultural difference, economic power, and political rights. Through analyses of Seminole housing, museum and language programs, legal disputes, and everyday activities, she shows how Seminoles use gaming revenue to enact their sovereignty. They do so in part, she argues, through relations of interdependency with others. High Stakes compels rethinking of the conditions of indigeneity, the power of money, and the meaning of sovereignty.

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Historic Zuni Architecture and Society
An Archaeological Application of Space Syntax
T. J. Ferguson
University of Arizona Press, 1996
The historic architecture and settlements of the Zuni Indian Tribe in western New Mexico provide an unusual opportunity to investigate social change. In this monograph, the development of historic Zuni society is analyzed by delineating systematic links between the structure of Zuni society and the structure of architectural forms that the Zuni people built to facilitate their activities. Ferguson shows how the structure of open space within Zuni settlements was linked to defense. As long as the Zunis were subject to attack by Spaniards or Navajos, they built settlements that were difficult for outsiders to get into or move around in. As the need for defense waned, settlements became more open and accessible. He also shows how the internal spaces of traditional Zuni houses are oriented around the activities of the women--matriarchs of their families and clans. Federal housing projects tended to spatially isolate the activities of women from interaction with the rest of the household, thus instituting unexpected social change.

Historic Zuni Architecture and Society utilizes an interdisciplinary approach, analyzing archaeological data using method, theory, and techniques from the fields of architecture, planning, and ethnology. Archaeologists will find in the book an innovative application of space syntax to archaeological problems, and cultural anthropologists and others interested in the history of the Zuni Indians will value its observations about changes that are currently taking place in Zuni social organization.
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Histories of Infamy
Francisco López de Gómara and the Ethics of Spanish Imperialism
Cristián A. Roa-de-la-Carrera
University Press of Colorado, 2005
"Roa-de-la-Carrera convincingly shows that Gómara, as well as other historians in the period, cannot easily ignore nor erase the contradictions of the Spanish colonial project."
- Luis Fernando Restrepo, University of Arkansas

“In an eloquent and thorough exegesis, Roa-de-la-Carrera reveals how and why López de Gómara, having written the best of all possible books in exultation of Spanish imperialism, nevertheless failed to convince the readers of his time."
- Susan Schroeder, Tulane University

In Histories of Infamy, Cristián Roa-de-la-Carrera explores Francisco López de Gómara's (1511-ca.1559) attempt to ethically reconcile Spain's civilizing mission with the conquistadors' abuse and exploitation of Native peoples.

The most widely read account of the conquest in its time, Gómara's Historia general de las Indias y Conquista de México rationalized the conquistadors' crimes as unavoidable evils in the task of bringing "civilization" to the New World. Through an elaborate defense of Spanish imperialism, Gómara aimed to convince his readers of the merits of the conquest, regardless of the devastation it had wrought upon Spain's new subjects. Despite his efforts, Gómara's apologist text quickly fell into disrepute and became ammunition for Spain's critics. Evaluating the effectiveness of ideologies of colonization, Roa-de-la-Carrera's analysis will appeal to scholars in colonial studies and readers interested in the history of the Americas.

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Historic Preservation
Collective Memory and Historic Identity
Barthel, Diane
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Historic preservation is a cultural movement gaining momentum and adherents throughout Europe and the United States. How do we decide what to preserve and how to preserve? Who benefits from the efforts of preservationists, curators, developers, and other "symbolic bankers" to safeguard an increasing variety of structures for future generations? Diane Barthel raises these and other questions in this important new book. Taking a comparative approach, Barthel finds that preservation in Britain has largely been an elite enterprise aimed at preserving traditional values. In the United States, by contrast, the pattern is much more dynamic and democratic, though also more permeated by commercialism. Is preservation becoming another means of consuming history, like media representations or "historic" shopping outlets? Or does it have a special significance as a very tangible means of getting in touch with our collective and individual pasts? These and other issues--including war and remembrance, agrarian and industrial preservation, and religious preservation in a secular society--demonstrate the significance of what Barthel calls "the Preservation Project" and why we all have a stake in how our history is reconstructed and interpreted.
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HISTORY IN URBAN PLACES
THE HISTORIC DISTRICTS OF THE UNITED STA
DAVID HAMER
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

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Household Chores and Household Choices
Theorizing the Domestic Sphere in Historical Archaeology
Edited by Kerri S. Barile and James C. Brandon
University of Alabama Press, 2004

Discusses the concepts of “home,” “house,” and “household” in past societies

Because archaeology seeks to understand past societies, the concepts of "home," "house," and "household" are important. Yet they can be the most elusive of ideas. Are they the space occupied by a nuclear family or by an extended one? Is it a built structure or the sum of its contents? Is it a shelter against the elements, a gendered space, or an ephemeral place tied to emotion? We somehow believe that the household is a basic unit of culture but have failed to develop a theory for understanding the diversity of households in the historic (and prehistoric) periods.

In an effort to clarify these questions, this volume examines a broad range of households—a Spanish colonial rancho along the Rio Grande, Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in Tennessee, plantations in South Carolina and the Bahamas, a Colorado coal camp, a frontier Arkansas farm, a Freedman's Town eventually swallowed by Dallas, and plantations across the South—to define and theorize domestic space. The essays devolve from many disciplines, but all approach households from an archaeological perspective, looking at landscape analysis, excavations, reanalyzed collections, or archival records. Together, the essays present a body of knowledge that takes the identification, analysis, and interpretation of households far beyond current conceptions.

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History Is Bunk
Assembling the Past at Henry Ford's Greenfield Village
Swigger Jessie
University of Massachusetts Press

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"History Is Bunk"
Assembling the Past at Henry Ford's Greenfield Village
Jessie Swigger
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
In 1916 a clearly agitated Henry Ford famously proclaimed that "history is more or less bunk." Thirteen years later, however, he opened the outdoor history museum Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. It was written history's focus on politicians and military heroes that was bunk, he explained. Greenfield Village would correct this error by celebrating farmers and inventors.

The village eventually included a replica of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory, the Wright brothers' cycle shop and home from Dayton, Ohio, and Ford's own Michigan birthplace. But not all of the structures were associated with famous men. Craft and artisan shops, a Cotswold cottage from England, and two brick slave cabins also populated the village landscape. Ford mixed replicas, preserved buildings, and whole-cloth constructions that together celebrated his personal worldview.

Greenfield Village was immediately popular. But that only ensured that the history it portrayed would be interpreted not only by Ford but also by throngs of visitors and the guides and publicity materials they encountered. After Ford's death in 1947, administrators altered the village in response to shifts in the museum profession at large, demographic changes in the Detroit metropolitan area, and the demands of their customers.

Jessie Swigger analyzes the dialogue between museum administrators and their audiences by considering the many contexts that have shaped Greenfield Village. The result is a book that simultaneously provides the most complete extant history of the site and an intimate look at how the past is assembled and constructed at history museums.
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The Heart of America
Our Landscape, Our Future
Tim Palmer
Island Press, 1999
From the cliffs of Big Sur to the dunes at Cape Hatteras, from the bogs of the Boundary Waters to the deserts of the Rio Grande, the landscape of America has shaped us into the people we are. Not only is it central to ecological health and essential to the economy, it has helped form our culture and serves as a basis of national pride. The heart of America lies in the rock and soil, the mountains and the plains that surround us.In this illuminating portrait of America at the threshold of the new millennium, author Tim Palmer explores and assesses the landscape of the United States -- both timeless wonders of natural beauty and lost places scarred by human exploitation. He takes the reader on an informative and inspirational tour of our most vital landscapes, including mountains, forests, grasslands, deserts, rivers, lakes, wetlands, and seashores. He introduces us to the basic geography and ecological value of each landscape, describes historical patterns of land use, considers the most serious threats, and discusses what is being done to protect the landscape for future generations. Throughout, he instills a deeper understanding of the importance of the land, a sense of outrage at the damage that has been done, and a feeling of hope that those working to correct past abuses will succeed.Weaving together geographical, historical, and ecological information and insights, Palmer draws on thirty years of professional experience as a writer, photographer, conservationist, planner, landscape architect, and veteran traveler to present a fresh look at the past, present, and future of our land.Resounding in its account of these landscapes, compelling in the force of its information and the hope of its timely message, The Heart of America offers a fascinating measure of the land around us and a unique look at the place we call home.
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The Hero in Transition
Ray B. Browne
University of Wisconsin Press, 1983
An investigation of society’s heroes during any time period will reveal the personnel deemed worthy of being emulated at that particular time by that particular society. There will be many old and time-tested figures, sometimes with new faces and new profiles; there will also be a mix of new faces. Thus the hero—like history itself—is constantly in transition, and both the hero and the transition are fundamental to the study of a culture. These essays turn the pantheon of heroes around before our eyes and reveal the many complicated aspects of hero worship.
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Highbrow/Lowbrow
The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
Lawrence Levine
Harvard University Press, 1988

In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are.

For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms—Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow—enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America—housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy—now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. A growing chasm between “serious” and “popular,” between “high” and “low” culture came to dominate America’s expressive arts.

“If there is a tragedy in this development,” Lawrence Levine comments, “it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period—and many have still not regained—their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.”

In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.

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Happy Days
Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America
Benjamin L. Alpers
Rutgers University Press, 2024
After the techno-futurism of the 1950s and the utopian 1960s vision of a “great society,” the 1970s saw Americans turning to the past as a source for both nostalgic escapism and serious reflection on the nation’s history. While some popular works like Grease presented the relatively recent past as a more innocent time, far away from the nation’s post-Vietnam, post-Watergate malaise, others like Roots used America’s bicentennial as an occasion for deep soul-searching. 
 
Happy Days investigates how 1970s popular culture was obsessed with America’s past but often offered radically different interpretations of the same historical events and icons. Even the figure of the greaser, once an icon of juvenile delinquency, was made family-friendly by Henry Winkler’s Fonzie at the same time that he was being appropriated in more threatening ways by punk and gay subcultures. The cultural historian Benjamin Alpers discovers similar levels of ambivalence toward the past in 1970s neo-noir films, representations of America’s founding, and neo-slave narratives by Alex Haley and Octavia Butler. By exploring how Americans used the 1970s to construct divergent representations of their shared history, he identifies it as a pivotal moment in the nation’s ideological fracturing. 
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Hope and Scorn
Eggheads, Experts, and Elites in American Politics
Michael J. Brown
University of Chicago Press, 2020

Intellectuals “have been both rallying points and railed against in American politics, vessels of hope and targets of scorn,” writes Michael J. Brown as he invigorates a recurrent debate in American life: Are intellectual public figures essential voices of knowledge and wisdom, or out-of-touch elites? Hope and Scorn investigates the role of high-profile experts and thinkers in American life and their ever-fluctuating relationship with the political and public spheres.

From Eisenhower’s era to Obama’s, the intellectual’s role in modern democracy has been up for debate. What makes an intellectual, and who can claim that privileged title? What are intellectuals’ obligations to society, and how, if at all, are their contributions compatible with democracy? For some, intellectuals were models of civic engagement. For others, the rise of the intellectual signaled the fall of the citizen. Carrying us through six key moments in this debate, Brown expertly untangles the shifting anxieties and aspirations for democracy in America in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Hope and Scorn begins with “egghead” politicians like Adlai Stevenson; profiles scholars like Richard Hofstadter and scholars-turned-politicians like H. Stuart Hughes; and ends with the rise of public intellectuals such as bell hooks and Cornel West. In clear and unburdened prose, Brown explicates issues of power, authority, political backlash, and more. Hope and Scorn is an essential guide to American concerns about intellectuals, their myriad shortcomings, and their formidable abilities.

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“Here, There and Everywhere”
The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture
Edited by Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May
University Press of New England, 2000
American popular culture is everywhere. All over the world, kids wear Levis, radios blare rap songs, television stations broadcast American programs, and Hollywood movies draw huge audiences. Does this massive "Americanization" of the globe represent some sinister form of cultural imperialism? Alternatively, do audiences and consumers in the importing countries accept American movies, music, and television programs because they match local trends and desires? Do receiving communities transform these products to fit their own needs, to the point where they are no longer "American" but in fact have become indigenous? And who is in charge of all of this, anyway? Is it Wall Street, Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the CIA, or Hollywood? Is it, at least partly, local economic and political elites in the receiving countries? Or is it simply "the people," nationalities be damned? These are the questions at the heart of the essays collected in "Here, There and Everywhere." Essays by 23 authors from 14 countries cover topics from Japan to Spain, Nigeria to Russia, and from West Germany to East Germany (a distance that seemed to be further than travelling to the moon, yet was covered by rock 'n' roll most easily, despite the wall). In five sections, they examine the historical background, the impact of Hollywood, the power of American popular music from jazz to rock 'n' roll and rap, and the popularity of as well as resistance to American popular culture in particular countries.
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Hop on Pop
The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture
Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
Hop on Pop showcases the work of a new generation of scholars—from fields such as media studies, literature, cinema, and cultural studies—whose writing has been informed by their ongoing involvement with popular culture and who draw insight from their lived experiences as critics, fans, and consumers. Proceeding from their deep political commitment to a new kind of populist grassroots politics, these writers challenge old modes of studying the everyday. As they rework traditional scholarly language, they search for new ways to write about our complex and compelling engagements with the politics and pleasures of popular culture and sketch a new and lively vocabulary for the field of cultural studies.
The essays cover a wide and colorful array of subjects including pro wrestling, the computer games Myst and Doom, soap operas, baseball card collecting, the Tour de France, karaoke, lesbian desire in the Wizard of Oz, Internet fandom for the series Babylon 5, and the stress-management industry. Broader themes examined include the origins of popular culture, the aesthetics and politics of performance, and the social and cultural processes by which objects and practices are deemed tasteful or tasteless. The commitment that binds the contributors is to an emergent perspective in cultural studies, one that engages with popular culture as the culture that "sticks to the skin," that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to examine it from a distance. By refusing to deny or rationalize their own often contradictory identifications with popular culture, the contributors ensure that the volume as a whole reflects the immediacy and vibrancy of its objects of study.
Hop on Pop will appeal to those engaged in the study of popular culture, American studies, cultural studies, cinema and visual studies, as well as to the general educated reader.

Contributors. John Bloom, Gerry Bloustein, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Diane Brooks, Peter Chvany, Elana Crane, Alexander Doty, Rob Drew, Stephen Duncombe, Nick Evans, Eric Freedman, Joy Fuqua, Tony Grajeda, Katherine Green, John Hartley, Heather Hendershot, Henry Jenkins, Eithne Johnson, Louis Kaplan, Maria Koundoura, Sharon Mazer, Anna McCarthy, Tara McPherson, Angela Ndalianis, Edward O’Neill, Catherine Palmer, Roberta Pearson, Elayne Rapping, Eric Schaefer, Jane Shattuc, Greg Smith, Ellen Strain, Matthew Tinkhom, William Uricchio, Amy Villarego, Robyn Warhol, Charles Weigl, Alan Wexelblat, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi

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History's Memory
Writing America’s Past, 1880-1980
Ellen Fitzpatrick
Harvard University Press, 2004

Enthusiasts and critics both have looked to the political upheavals of the 1960s to explain recent transformations in historical study. But how new, in fact, are our contemporary approaches to the study and writing of American history? This question lies at the heart of History's Memory, Ellen Fitzpatrick's sweeping study of the past century of American historical writing.

Through careful examination of hundreds of historical essays and books, Fitzpatrick has uncovered striking continuities in the writing of American history. The contributions of earlier scholars, some of them outside the mainstream of the historical profession, reveal that interest in the history of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and the working class has been long-standing. Whether in the Progressive era's attention to issues of class, or in the renewed concern with Native Americans in the 1930s and 1940s, Fitzpatrick demonstrates that over the past century historians have frequently grappled with issues that we think of today as innovative.

This reinterpretation of a century of American historical writing challenges the notion that the politics of the recent past alone explains the politics of history. Fitzpatrick offers a wise historical perspective on today's heated debates, and reclaims the long line of historians who tilled the rich and diverse soil of our past.

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Historians in Public
The Practice of American History, 1890-1970
Ian Tyrrell
University of Chicago Press, 2005
From lagging book sales and shrinking job prospects to concerns over the discipline's "narrowness," myriad factors have been cited by historians as evidence that their profession is in decline in America. Ian Tyrrell's Historians in Public shows that this perceived threat to history is recurrent, exaggerated, and often misunderstood. In fact, history has adapted to and influenced the American public more than people—and often historians—realize.

Tyrrell's elegant history of the practice of American history traces debates, beginning shortly after the profession's emergence in American academia, about history's role in school curricula. He also examines the use of historians in and by the government and whether historians should utilize mass media such as film and radio to influence the general public. As Historians in Public shows, the utility of history is a distinctive theme throughout the history of the discipline, as is the attempt to be responsive to public issues among pressure groups.

A superb examination of the practice of American history since the turn of the century, Historians in Public uncovers the often tangled ways history-makers make history-both as artisans and as actors.
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The Historian behind the History
Conversations with Southern Historians
Megan L. Bever
University of Alabama Press, 2014
The Historian behind the History brings together a collection of valuable interviews with prominent southern historians conducted over the course of a decade by graduate students in the University of Alabama’s history program for the journal Southern History. In the interviews, ten notable southern historians and mentors illuminate the state of historiography, their experiences in the profession, and their thoughts about graduate education and southern history.
 
The historians and their main topics include:
 
Richard J. M. Blackett on antebellum and African American history
Dan T. Carter on Reconstruction, Civil Rights, and George Wallace
Pete Daniel on the New Deal and the Cold War South                                                   
Laura F. Edwards on the Early Republic, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and women’s history
William W. Freehling on the antebellum South
Gary W. Gallagher on the Civil War
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore on Jim Crow
James M. McPherson on the Civil War
Theodore Rosengarten on the Depression
J. Mills Thornton III on the antebellum South
 
In his introduction, award-winning author and historian George C. Rable draws together the multifaceted themes of these interviews, offering a compelling overview of the nature of the field. Edited by Megan L. Bever and Scott A. Suarez, The Historian behind the History offers critical insights about the craft and professional life of the historian. 
 
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Henry Adams
Selected Letters
Henry Adams
Harvard University Press, 1992

Henry Adams has been called an indispensable figure in American thought. Although he famously “took his own life” in the autobiographical Education of Henry Adams, his letters—more intimate and unbuttoned, though hardly unselfconscious—are themselves indispensable for an understanding of the man and his times.

This selection, the first based on the authoritative 6-volume Letters, represents every major private and public event in Adams’s life from 1858 to 1918 and confirms his reputation as one of the greatest letter writers of his time. Adams knew everyone who was anyone and went almost everywhere, and—true to the Adams family tradition—recorded it all. These letters to an array of correspondents from American presidents to Henry James to 5-year-old honorary nieces reveal Adams’s passion for politics and disdain for politicians, his snobbish delight in society and sincere affection for friends, his pose of dilettantism and his serious ambitions as writer and historian, his devastation at his wife’s suicide and his acquiescence in the role of Elizabeth Cameron’s “tame cat,” his wicked humor at others’ expense and his own reflexive self-depreciation.

This volume allows the reader to experience 19th-century America through the eyes of an observer on whom very little was lost, and to make the acquaintance of one of the more interesting personalities in American letters. As Ernest Samuels says in his introduction, “The letters lift the veil of old-age disenchantment that obscures the Education and exhibit Adams as perhaps the most brilliant letter writer of his time. What most engages one in the long course of his correspondence is the tireless range of his intellectual curiosity, his passionate effort to understand the politics, the science, and the human society of the world as it changed around him… It is as literature of a high order that his letters can finally be read.”

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Henry Adams
Ernest Samuels
Harvard University Press, 1989

Henry Adams sought, late in life, to thwart prospective biographers by writing his own biography. Published soon after his death in 1918, The Education of Henry Adams was rightly greeted as a masterpiece. Not until thirty years later, with the appearance of the first volume of Ernest Samuels’s biography, did it become apparent how much the story had been colored by Adams’s singular philosophy of history and how great was the disparity between the protagonist of the Education and Adams as he actually was. Upon its completion in 1964, Samuels’s life of Henry Adams was hailed as “one of the great biographical achievements of our time”; its laurels included a Pulitzer Prize.

Ernest Samuels has now distilled his ample narrative into a single absorbing volume. We see Adams as a lively undergraduate, in contrast to the jaded young man of the Education; as budding writer, newspaper correspondent, eager participant in political maneuverings in Washington and at the American embassy in London; as teacher at Harvard and editor of the North American Review; settled in Washington, as scholar, biographer, historian, novelist; as insatiable traveler; as friend and adviser to statesmen; as elderly cosmopolite spending half of each year abroad; and always as witty chronicler of the social scene and trenchant commentator on the events of his time. We are drawn into the personal drama of Adams’s middle years: his married life with Clover; the halcyon period in Washington in the early 1880s, catastrophically terminated by Clover’s depression and suicide; his growing passion for Elizabeth Cameron; and his flight to the South Seas. Throughout the book we follow the genesis and progress of his writings, from his muck-raking journalism in President Grant’s Washington, through the social and political criticism of his novels, his biographies, and his great History, to the classic Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, the daring theories of the Education, and his last essays.

Few biographies have so broad a canvas—sixty years of American political, social, and intellectual life, from the pre–Civil War years to the First World War. And few offer so revealing a portrait of a complex human being and an extraordinary career.

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History Repeating Itself
The Republication of Children's Historical Literature and the Christian Right
Gregory M. Pfitzer
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
Recently publishers on the Christian Right have been reprinting nineteenth-century children's history books and marketing them to parents as "anchor texts" for homeschool instruction. Why, Gregory M. Pfitzer asks, would books written more than 150 years ago be presumed suitable for educating twenty-first-century children? The answer, he proposes, is that promoters of these recycled works believe that history as a discipline took a wrong turn in the early twentieth century, when progressive educators introduced social studies methodologies into public school history classrooms, foisting upon unsuspecting and vulnerable children ideologically distorted history books.

In History Repeating Itself, Pfitzer tests these assertions by scrutinizing and contextualizing the original nineteenth-century texts on which these republications are based. He focuses on how the writers borrowed from one another to produce works that were similar in many ways yet differed markedly in terms of pedagogical strategy and philosophy of history. Pfitzer demonstrates that far from being non-ideological, these works were rooted in intense contemporary debates over changing conceptions of childhood.

Pfitzer argues that the repurposing of antiquated texts reveals a misplaced resistance to the idea of a contested past. He also raises essential philosophical questions about how and why curricular decisions are shaped by the "past we choose to remember" on behalf of our children.
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The Heroic and the Notorious
U.S. Senators from Illinois
David Kenney and Robert E. Hartley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

This sweeping survey constitutes the first comprehensive treatment of the men and women who have been chosen to represent Illinois in the United States Senate from 1818 to the present day. David Kenney and Robert E. Hartley underscore nearly two centuries of Illinois history with these biographical and political portraits, compiling an incomparably rich resource for students, scholars, teachers, journalists, historians, politicians, and any Illinoisan interested in the state’s senatorial heritage.

Originally published as An Uncertain Tradition: U.S. Senators From Illinois 1818–2003, this second edition brings readers up to date with new material on Paul Simon, Richard Durbin, and Peter Fitzgerald, as well as completely new sections on Roland Burris, Barack Obama, and Illinois’s newest senator, Mark Kirk. This fresh and careful study of the shifting set of political issues Illinois’s senators encountered over time is illuminated by the lives of participants in the politics of choice and service in the Senate. Kenney and Hartley offer incisive commentary on the quality of Senate service in each case, as well as timeline graphs relating to the succession of individuals in each of the two sequences of service, the geographical distribution of senators within the state, and the variations in party voting for Senate candidates. Rigorously documented and supremely readable, this convenient reference volume is enhanced by portraits of many of the senators.

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Hidden Illness in the White House
Kenneth R. Crispell and Carlos Gomez
Duke University Press, 1988
The serious illness of three presidents—Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy—as well as the injury Ronald Reagan received in the assassination attempt upon him have revealed our woefully inadequate system for handling presidential incapacity. The authors believe that this flawed system poses a major threat to the nation, and they provide sobering reports on how the government functioned (or failed to function) during times of presidential impairment. The public was kept in the dark regarding the gravity of the presidential condition, often unaware that critical decisions were being made while the president was suffering from a severe illness.

Hidden Illness in the White House contains startling new information on the severity of Roosevelt’s illness during the crucial Yalta negotiations and the fact that Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease, a life-threatening illness, long before he was elected to the presidency. In each case the authors demonstrate that a largely successful effort was made to conceal the president’s true medical condition from the public.
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The Hall of Fame for Great Americans
A Biography of Stanford White's Forgotten Memorial
Sheila Gerami
University of Tennessee Press, 2024
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans provides a window into the cultural changes taking place in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. This book is the first examination of the institutional and social history of America’s first hall of fame, from its dynamic opening in 1901 through its protracted decline in the late twentieth century and its brief return to relevancy in the early twenty-first century.

It also examines in depth what is arguably the least studied project of Stanford White, one of the most distinguished architects of the Gilded Age. Originally designed for New York University’s new campus in the Bronx, the Hall of Fame once housed ninety-eight bronze busts of men and women deemed “great Americans” within its elegant colonnade, including the likes of George Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, and Robert E. Lee.

The Hall was conceived when the Great Man theory dominated American thought. However, as times changed, challenges to ideas concerning greatness and heroism grew, and heroes once celebrated were scrutinized for their flaws. The monument is now a shell of its former glory and largely forgotten, and the NYU campus that once housed the colonnade was eventually sold to Bronx Community College.

In 2017, following the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, by white supremacists attempting to prevent the removal of a monument to General Lee, Andrew Cuomo, then governor of New York, thrust the Hall of Fame back into the limelight by ordering the busts of Lee and Stonewall Jackson to be removed. This action joined a national trend to remove monuments deemed offensive. Gerami argues that the rise and fall of this institution mirrors the nation’s changing conception of what comprises a hero. This biography of a public art memorial answers questions about the importance of art history and the cultural evolution of what it means to be great in America.
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A History of America in 100 Maps
Susan Schulten
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Throughout its history, America has been defined through maps. Whether made for military strategy or urban reform, to encourage settlement or to investigate disease, maps invest information with meaning by translating it into visual form. They capture what people knew, what they thought they knew, what they hoped for, and what they feared. As such they offer unrivaled windows onto the past.
 
In this book Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European discovery to the digital age. With stunning visual clarity, A History of America in 100 Maps showcases the power of cartography to illuminate and complicate our understanding of the past.
 
Gathered primarily from the British Library’s incomparable archives and compiled into nine chronological chapters, these one hundred full-color maps range from the iconic to the unfamiliar. Each is discussed in terms of its specific features as well as its larger historical significance in a way that conveys a fresh perspective on the past. Some of these maps were made by established cartographers, while others were made by unknown individuals such as Cherokee tribal leaders, soldiers on the front, and the first generation of girls to be formally educated. Some were tools of statecraft and diplomacy, and others were instruments of social reform or even advertising and entertainment. But when considered together, they demonstrate the many ways that maps both reflect and influence historical change.
 
Audacious in scope and charming in execution, this collection of one hundred full-color maps offers an imaginative and visually engaging tour of American history that will show readers a new way of navigating their own worlds.
 
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Hard Aground
The Wreck of the USS Tennessee and the Rise of the US Navy
Andrew C. A. Jampoler
University of Alabama Press, 2023

Three intertwined stories that reveal the challenges faced by the US Navy in its evolution between the Civil War and the First World War

Hard Aground brings together three intertwined stories documenting the US Navy’s strategic and matériel evolution from the end of Civil War through the First World War. These incidents had lasting consequences for how the navy would modernize itself throughout the rest of the twentieth century.

The first story focuses on the reconstruction of the US Navy following the swift and near-total dismantling of the Union Navy infrastructure after the Civil War. This reconstruction began with barely enough time for the navy’s campaigns in the Spanish-American War, and for its role in the First World War. Jampoler argues that the federal government discovered that the fleet requested by the navy, and paid for by Congress, was the wrong fleet. Focus was on battleships and cruisers rather than destroyers and other small combat vessels needed to hunt submarines and serve as convoy escorts.

The second story relates the short, tragic life of the USS Tennessee (later renamed Memphis), one of the steel-hulled ships of the new Armored Cruiser Squadron that was a centerpiece of the navy’s modernization effort. The USS Tennessee was ordered on two unusual missions in the early months of the First World War, long before the United States formally entered the war. These little-known missions and the ship's shocking destruction in a storm surge in the Caribbean serve as the centerpiece of the story. Threaded through the narrative are biographical sketches of the principal players in the drama that unfolded following the ship’s demise, including two of Tennessee’s commanding officers: Vice Admiral Sims, who commanded the US Navy squadrons deployed to Europe in support of the Royal Navy; Rear Admiral William Caperton, who commanded the Caribbean squadron before the Memphis (formerly the Tennessee) was lost; Charles Pond, squadron commander during the wreck; and the American ambassador to the Ottoman court, President Wilson’s enthusiastic supporter, Henry Morgenthau.

Jampoler rounds out this fascinating account with the story of how the USS Tennessee’s destruction prompted fierce deliberations about the US Navy’s operations and chains of command for the remainder of the First World War and the high-level political wrangling inside the Department of the Navy immediately after the war, as civilian appointees and senior officers wrestled to reshape the department in their image.

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Humanitarian Violence
The U.S. Deployment of Diversity
Neda Atanasoski
University of Minnesota Press, 2013

When is a war not a war? When it is undertaken in the name of democracy, against the forces of racism, sexism, and religious and political persecution? This is the new world of warfare that Neda Atanasoski observes in Humanitarian Violence, different in name from the old imperialism but not so different in kind. In particular, she considers U.S. militarism—humanitarian militarism—during the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the 1990s wars of secession in the former Yugoslavia.

What this book brings to light—through novels, travel narratives, photojournalism, films, news media, and political rhetoric—is in fact a system of postsocialist imperialism based on humanitarian ethics. In the fiction of the United States as a multicultural haven, which morally underwrites the nation’s equally brutal waging of war and making of peace, parts of the world are subject to the violence of U.S. power because they are portrayed to be homogeneous and racially, religiously, and sexually intolerant—and thus permanently in need of reform. The entangled notions of humanity and atrocity that follow from such mediations of war and crisis have refigured conceptions of racial and religious freedom in the post–Cold War era. The resulting cultural narratives, Atanasoski suggests, tend to racialize ideological differences—whereas previous forms of imperialism racialized bodies. In place of the European racial imperialism, U.S. settler colonialism, and pre–civil rights racial constructions that associated racial difference with a devaluing of nonwhite bodies, Humanitarian Violence identifies an emerging discourse of race that focuses on ideological and cultural differences and makes postsocialist and Islamic nations the potential targets of U.S. disciplining violence.

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Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs
Constitutional Authority in Practice
Curtis A. Bradley
Harvard University Press, 2024

A new interpretation of the constitutional law of foreign affairs, as it has been developed throughout its history by presidents and by Congress.

In the more than 230 years since the Constitution took effect, the constitutional law governing the conduct of foreign affairs has evolved significantly. But that evolution did not come through formal amendments or Supreme Court rulings. Rather, the law has been defined by the practices of Congress and the executive branch, also known as “historical gloss.”

Curtis A. Bradley documents this process in action. He shows that expansions in presidential power over foreign affairs have often been justified by reference to historical gloss, but that Congress has not merely stepped aside. Belying conventional accounts of the “imperial presidency” in foreign affairs, Congress has also benefited from gloss, claiming powers for itself in the international arena not clearly addressed in the constitutional text and disrupting claims of exclusive presidential authority.

Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs proposes a constitutional theory that can make sense of these legal changes. In contrast, originalist theories of constitutional interpretation often ignore influential post-Founding developments, while nonoriginalist theories tend to focus on judicial decisions rather than the actions and reasoning of Congress and the executive branch. Moreover, the constitutional theories that do focus on practice have typically emphasized changes at particular moments in time. What we see in the constitutional law of foreign affairs, however, is the long-term accumulation of nonjudicial precedents that is characteristic of historical gloss. With gloss confirmed as a prime mover in the development of foreign affairs law, we can begin to recognize its broader status as an important and longstanding form of constitutional reasoning.

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Hemispheric Imaginings
The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire
Gretchen Murphy
Duke University Press, 2005
In 1823, President James Monroe announced that the Western Hemisphere was closed to any future European colonization and that the United States would protect the Americas as a space destined for democracy. Over the next century, these ideas—which came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine—provided the framework through which Americans understood and articulated their military and diplomatic role in the world. Hemispheric Imaginings demonstrates that North Americans conceived and developed the Monroe Doctrine in relation to transatlantic literary narratives. Gretchen Murphy argues that fiction and journalism were crucial to popularizing and making sense of the Doctrine’s contradictions, including the fact that it both drove and concealed U.S. imperialism. Presenting fiction and popular journalism as key arenas in which such inconsistencies were challenged or obscured, Murphy highlights the major role writers played in shaping conceptions of the U.S. empire.

Murphy juxtaposes close readings of novels with analyses of nonfiction texts. From uncovering the literary inspirations for the Monroe Doctrine itself to tracing visions of hemispheric unity and transatlantic separation in novels by Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Lew Wallace, and Richard Harding Davis, she reveals the Doctrine’s forgotten cultural history. In making a vital contribution to the effort to move American Studies beyond its limited focus on the United States, Murphy questions recent proposals to reframe the discipline in hemispheric terms. She warns that to do so risks replicating the Monroe Doctrine’s proprietary claim to isolate the Americas from the rest of the world.

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Haiti and the Uses of America
Post-U.S. Occupation Promises
Verna, Chantalle F.
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Contrary to popular notions, Haiti-U.S. relations have not only been about Haitian resistance to U.S. domination. In Haiti and the Uses of America, Chantalle F. Verna makes evident that there have been key moments of cooperation that contributed to nation-building in both countries.
 
In the years following the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), Haitian politicians and professionals with a cosmopolitan outlook shaped a new era in Haiti-U.S. diplomacy. Their efforts, Verna shows, helped favorable ideas about the United States, once held by a small segment of Haitian society, circulate more widely. In this way, Haitians contributed to and capitalized upon the spread of internationalism in the Americas and the larger world.
 
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Hands Across the Sea?
U.S.-Japan Relations, 1961-1981
Timothy P. Maga
Ohio University Press, 1997

In 1961, the U.S. economy and military remained unassailable in the eyes of the world. Within twenty years, America faced defeat in Vietnam and its economy had been shaken. Japan was now considered the great economic superpower, while the U.S. and Japan reversed roles as surplus and debtor nations. Hands across the Sea? examines this reversal of roles, determining how and why America and Japan became the post-World War II era’s most argumentative allies.

Through extensive research in a number of presidential libraries and author interviews with both American and Japanese policy-makers, Professor Maga finds a U.S.-Japan relationship forever troubled by cultural misunderstanding, America’s Cold War obsession, Japanese pride, and strangely conflicting goals in both trade and defense. Given the intensity of the arguments over some of these issues, it is remarkable that Washington and Tokyo continued a working dialogue during this critical time.

Hands across the Sea? represents the first in-depth study of the modern U.S.-Japan relationship. It especially discovers how serious the U.S.-Japan disagreements over trade, defense, the direction of the Cold War, nuclear policy, and the environment had become.

Whereas American observers of U.S.-Japan relations are quick to point out their fellow countrymen’s ignorance of other cultures and Japan’s brilliance in analyzing American policy and life, the evidence suggests otherwise. Steering far away from anyone’s political correctness, this book’s bottom line involves hard-hitting investigation and analysis.

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How Presidents Test Reality
Decisions on Vietnam, 1954 and 1965
John P. Burke, Fred L. Greenstein, Larry Berman, and Richard Immerman
Russell Sage Foundation, 1991

Just as famines and plagues can provide opportunities for medical research, the unhappy course of United States relations with Vietnam is a prime source of evidence for students of American political institutions. How Presidents Test Reality draws on the record of American decision making about Vietnam to explore the capacity of top government executives and their advisers to engage in effective reality testing.

Authors Burke and Greenstein compare the Vietnam decisions of two presidents whose leadership styles and advisory systems diverged as sharply as any in the modern presidency. Faced with a common challenge—an incipient Communist take-over of Vietnam—presidents Eisenhower and Johnson engaged in intense debates with their aides and associates, some of whom favored intervention and some of whom opposed it. In the Dien Bien Phu Crisis of 1954, Eisenhower decided not to enter the conflict; in 1965, when it became evident that the regime in South Vietnam could not hold out much longer, Johnson intervened.

How Presidents Test Reality uses declassified records and interviews with participants to assess the adequacy of each president’s use of advice and information. This important book advances our historical understanding of the American involvement in Vietnam and illuminates the preconditions of effective presidential leadership in the modern world.

"An exceptionally thoughtful exercise in what ‘contemporary history’ ought to be. Illuminates the past in a way that suggests how we might deal with the present and the future." —John Lewis Gaddis

"Burke and Greenstein have written what amounts to an owner's manual  for operating the National Security Council....This is a book Reagan's  people could have used and George Bush ought to read." —Bob Schieffer, The Washington Monthly

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Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups
Stephan Thernstrom, EditorAnn Orlov, Managing EditorOscar Handlin, Consulting Editor
Harvard University Press, 1980

From Acadians to Zoroastrians-Asians, American Indians, East Indians, West Indians, Europeans, Latin Americans, Afro-Americans, and Mexican Americans—the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups provides the first comprehensive and systematic review of the many peoples of this country. It should excite all Americans about their nation.

Informative and entertaining, this volume is an indispensable reference work for home, library and office. It establishes a foundation for the burgeoning field of ethnic studies; it will satisfy and stimulate the popular interest in ancestry and heritage. It is a guide to the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of the more than 100 ethnic groups who live in the United States.

Each ethnic group is described in detail. The origins, history and present situation of the familiar as well as the virtually unknown are presented succinctly and objectively. Not only the immigrants and refugees who came voluntarily but also those already in the New World when the first Europeans arrived, those whose ancestors came involuntarily as slaves, and those who became part of the American population as a result of conquest or purchase and subsequent annexation figure in these pages. The English and the Estonians, the Germans and the Gypsies, the Swedes and the Serbs are interestingly juxtaposed. Even entries about relatively well-known groups offer new material and fresh interpretations. The articles on less well-known groups are the product of intensive research in primary sources; many provide the first scholarly discussion to appear in English. One hundred and twenty American and European contributors have been involved in this effort, writing either on individual groups or on broad themes relating to many.

The group entries are at the heart of the book, but it contains, in addition, a series of thematic essays that illuminate the key facets of ethnicity. Some of these are comparative; some philosophical; some historical; others focus on current policy issues or relate ethnicity to major subjects such as education, religion, and literature. American identity and Americanization, immigration policy and experience, and prejudice and discrimination in U.S. history are discussed at length. Several essays probe the complex interplay between assimilation and pluralism—perhaps the central theme in American history—and the complications of race and religion.

Numerous cross-references and brief identifications will aid the reader with unfamiliar terms and alternative group names. Eighty-seven maps, especially commissioned, show where different groups have originated. Annotated bibliographies contain suggestions for further reading and research. Appendix I, on methods of estimating the size of groups, leads the reader through a maze of conflicting statistics. Appendix II reproduces, in facsimile, hard-to-locate census and immigration materials, beginning with the first published report on the nativities of the population in 1850.

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Healing Our Divided Society
Investing in America Fifty Years after the Kerner Report
Fred Harris and Alan Curtis
Temple University Press, 2018

In 1968, the Kerner Commission concluded that America was heading toward “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Today, America’s communities are experiencing increasing racial tensions and inequality, working-class resentment over the unfulfilled American Dream, white supremacy violence, toxic inaction in Washington, and the decline of the nation’s example around the world.

In Healing Our Divided Society, Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, along with Eisenhower Foundation CEO Alan Curtis, re-examine fifty years later the work still necessary towards the goals set forth in The Kerner Report. This timely volume unites the interests of minorities and white working- and middle-class Americans to propose a strategy to reduce poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. Reflecting on America’s urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development, and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work—and not work. 

Contributors include: Oscar Perry Abello, Elijah Anderson, Anil N.F. Aranha, Jared Bernstein, Henry G. Cisneros, Elliott Currie, Linda Darling-Hammond, Martha F. Davis, E. J. Dionne, Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Delbert S. Elliott, Carol Emig, Jeff Faux, Ron Grzywinski, Michael P. Jeffries, Lamar K. Johnson, Celinda Lake, Marilyn Melkonian, Gary Orfield, Diane Ravitch, Laurie Robinson, Herbert C. Smitherman, Jr., Joseph Stiglitz, Dorothy Stoneman, Kevin  Washburn, Valerie Wilson, Gary Younge,  Julian E. Zelizer, and the editors

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Honor Bound
Race and Shame in America
Leverenz, David
Rutgers University Press, 2012
As Bill Clinton said in his second inaugural address, “The divide of race has been America’s constant curse.” In Honor Bound, David Leverenz explores the past to the present of that divide. He argues that in the United States, the rise and decline of white people’s racial shaming reflect the rise and decline of white honor. “White skin” and “black skin” are fictions of honor and shame. Americans have lived those fictions for over four hundred years.

To make his argument, Leverenz casts an unusually wide net, from ancient and modern cultures of honor to social, political, and military history to American literature and popular culture.

He highlights the convergence of whiteness and honor in the United States from the antebellum period to the present. The Civil War, the civil rights movement, and the election of Barack Obama represent racial progress; the Tea Party movement represents the latest recoil.

From exploring African American narratives to examining a 2009 episode of Hardball—in which two white commentators restore their honor by mocking U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder after he called Americans “cowards” for not talking more about race—Leverenz illustrates how white honor has prompted racial shaming and humiliation. The United States became a nation-state in which light-skinned people declared themselves white. The fear masked by white honor surfaces in such classics of American literature as The Scarlet Letter and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and in the U.S. wars against the Barbary pirates from 1783 to 1815 and the Iraqi insurgents from 2003 to the present. John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers is used to frame the 2008 presidential campaign as white honor’s last national stand.

Honor Bound concludes by probing the endless attempts in 2009 and 2010 to preserve white honor through racial shaming, from the “birthers” and Tea Party protests to Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” in Congress and the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the front door of his own home. Leverenz is optimistic that, in the twenty-first century, racial shaming is itself becoming shameful.

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