In The Modern Balkans, historian Richard C. Hall gives a complete account of the historical events that have shaped the Balkan region of Southeastern Europe. Originally separated from the rest of Europe by culture, politics, and economics, the Balkans have slowly been integrating into Western Europe since the nineteenth century. But this process of economic and political development, following the Western European model, has been far from smooth in the Balkans. As Hall explains, it has often been marked by violence and destruction, the result of many wars and rebellions. Though Soviet power imposed a nearly fifty-year peace in the region, the collapse of the Soviet Union renewed conflict that continued through the end of the twentieth century. Hall concentrates here on the significant political and economic events that have had the greatest impact on the role of the Balkans in Europe; in particular, he examines the development of national states in the nineteenth century, the influence of the two world wars, and the collapse of Yugoslavia.
This clear and concise history of the Balkan Peninsula will appeal to readers and scholars interested in European history and the Balkans’ unique role in it.
Perhaps no other institution has had a more significant impact on Latin American history than the large landed estate—the hacienda. In Mexico, the latifundio, an estate usually composed of two or more haciendas, dominated the social and economic structure of the country for four hundred years. A Mexican Family Empire is a careful examination of the largest latifundio ever to have existed, not only in Mexico but also in all of Latin America—the latifundio of the Sánchez Navarros.
Located in the northern state of Coahuila, the Sánchez Navarro family's latifundio was composed of seventeen haciendas and covered more than 16.5 million acres—the size of West Virginia. Charles H. Harris places the history of the latifundio in perspective by showing the interaction between the various activities of the Sánchez Navarros and the evolution of landholding itself. In his discussion of the acquisition of land, the technology of ranching, labor problems, and production on the Sánchez Navarro estate, and of the family's involvement in commerce and politics, Harris finds that the development of the latifundio was only one aspect in the Sánchez Navarros' rise to power. Although the Sánchez Navarros conformed in some respects to the stereotypes advanced about hacendados, in terms of landownership and the use of debt peonage, in many important areas a different picture emerges. For example, the family's salient characteristic was a business mentality; they built the latifundio to make money, with status only a secondary consideration. Moreover, the family's extensive commercial activities belie the generalization that the objective of every hacendado was to make the estates self-sufficient. Harris emphasizes the great importance of the Sánchez Navarros' widespread network of family connections in their commercial and political activities.
A Mexican Family Empire is based on the Sánchez Navarro papers—75,000 pages of personal letters, business correspondence, hacienda reports and inventories, wills, land titles, and court records spanning the period from 1658 to 1895. Harris's thorough research of these documents has resulted in the first complete social, economic, and political history of a great estate. The geographical and chronological boundaries of his study permit analysis of both continuity and change in Mexico's evolving socioeconomic structure during one of the most decisive periods in its history—the era of transition from colony to nation.
Maury Maverick was possibly the first liberal United States Congressman from Texas to achieve national and even international stature. A dedicated Democrat, he was ready to attack Franklin D. Roosevelt whenever he felt that Roosevelt was flagging in his enthusiasm for reform. He was honest to the point of rudeness, and he belonged to the "damn the torpedoes" class that pulled ahead regardless of political consequences.
He was at home with the literate—he was a prodigious writer and speaker—but always ready to puncture their pretensions. And he could cuss with sailors, pecan shellers, and any breed of saloon keeper. Put all that together with a short, stocky, bulldog frame, a fierce face and a voice to match, and you have one of the nation's more colorful political figures.
Launched in 1994, the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning (MJCSL) is an international, peer-reviewed, multi-disciplinary academic journal for college and university faculty and administrators, with an editorial board and cadre of peer reviewers representing faculty from many higher education disciplines and professional fields. It is a publication of the University of Michigan’s Ginsberg Center.
Each issue consists of articles at the cutting edge of research, theory, pedagogy, and other matters related to academic service-learning, campus-community partnerships, and engaged, public scholarship in higher education that extend the knowledge base and support and strengthen researchers’ and practitioners’ work. We also publish review essays of newly-released books pertinent to service-learning and community engagement.
What does it mean to be an American, and how have individual Americans consciously endeavored to create their own identity? "Self-improvement," "self-culture," "self-made man," to "make something of oneself"--all are terms that were used from colonial to Victorian times. The particular language that framed the quest has fallen out of fashion, but it was a powerful cultural imperative for hundreds of years. The quest, in all its "post" guises, continues. Daniel Howe considers the ideas Americans once had about a proper construction of the self. Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Bushnell, Horace Mann, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Dorothea Dix, Frederick Douglass, among others, engaged in discussion about the composition of human nature, the motivation of human behavior, and what can be done about the social problems these create. They shared a common model of human psychology, in which powerful but base passions must be mastered by reason in the service of virtue. How to accomplish this was often itself a subject of passionate controversy.
The story reveals that Americans both distrusted individual autonomy and were enthusiastic about it; passions, reason, and moral sense collided on how to manage it. Howe is empathetic to all the quests--for elites and artisans, blacks and women--seeing in them a basic pursuit of identity. The author demonstrates that aspirations for "self-control" and "self-discipline," grounded in conservatism and evangelical Christianity, also shaped movements that branched leftward to promote social welfare, feminism, and civil rights.
This volume brings together contributions from a variety of anthropologists working in a variety of fields, including archaeology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, and ethnohistory, in order to reflect on the importance of memory and its public presentation. The intense interest surrounding the 400th anniversary of Jamestown in 2007 was the immediate occasion for this theme, and the volume has several chapters on issues devoted to memory in the U.S. South. While museums often present themselves as neutral settings for the interpretation of artifacts, they are deeply embedded in cultural, political, and social situations that anthropologists are in a unique position to evaluate. Moreover, the volume is noteworthy for including analyses of more informal sites of memory, including oral history, that connect local pasts and futures. A sophisticated, multilayered examination of a now trendy topic in anthropology, this work seeks to question widely held notions about collective memory, always reminding us that museums and monuments inform each of us of the past in some particular way and insist that we add it to our consciousness—that we remember it.
Margaret Williamson Huber is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Mary Washington. She is the author of Powhatan Lord of Life and Death: Command and Consent in Seventeenth-Century Virginia.
Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings, no. 39
In addition to crocuses and robins, springtime in Iowa brings out another harbinger of warmer weather: mushrooms. Melting snow and warmer temperatures provide optimal opportunity for mushroom enthusiasts; people of all ages can be found wandering the woods, clutching bags and hoping to spot a clump of elusive morels. Now, for budding naturalists, beginning mushroom hunters, and professionals outside of the area of mycology, Donald Huffman and Lois Tiffany have provided this laminated guide to the most common mushrooms of Iowa.
The guide illustrates forty-three species of Iowa mushrooms using color photos that show the fungi in the wild, from the yellow morel to the destroying angel to the pear-shaped puffball. Huffman and Tiffany give common and scientific names, descriptions of caps and stalks, descriptions of where the mushrooms can be found (on the ground in woods, in clusters on fallen logs, etc.), the season when they are most likely to be seen, plus information on edibility from the “choice edible” yellow morel, much coveted by generations of mushroom hunters, to the poisonous false morel.
Mushrooms’ diverse forms and variety of colors, along with their seemingly mysterious appearances and disappearances, have long made them objects of fascination. Mushrooms in Your Pocket will be an invaluable companion for finding and identifying these unusual and interesting organisms.
William Bradford Huie’s first novel, Mud on the Stars, is largely autobiographical and is set in the years 1929-1942. As in many of his later books, the theme here is of the education of the inexperienced youth, which is, after all, the quintessential American story. Drawing on his own boyhood, Huie gives the reader a detailed account of rural life and race relations in the Tennessee Valley in the early years of this century, including a vivid picture of college life at The University of Alabama during the Great Depression. Through a careful weaving of characters and events, fact and fiction, Huie’s novel captures the tumultuous times before World War II in the urban South, times of social unrest and testing of new political ideologies. The book’s publication in 1942 was a huge financial success, by the economic standards of the day, and not only brought Huie the acclaim his talent warranted but also focused an approving national spotlight on this prolific Alabama writer.
Tender, plump, and tasty, the blue mussel (Mytiius edulis) is treasured in most of the world's cuisines but strangely ignored in North American cooking. This edible mollusk is naturally abundant on both American coasts and easily cultivated. As over-harvesting makes many other seafoods ever more scarce and expensive, the blue mussel offers an inexpensive and attractive alternative to more costly and wasteful sources of protein. To tempt American palates and draw attention to this remarkably versatile and nutritious seafood, Sarah Hurlburt has written The Mussel Cookbook.
In her entertaining introduction, Hurlburt tells about mussels—how they live, how they saved a bridge from collapsing, why barrels of them appeared in American police stations, how they are farmed in Spain, France, and Holland. Then she offers over a hundred recipes. Whether you are a beginning cook or a devotee of haute cuisine, you will find recipes to match your abilities: simple dishes for the out-of-doors, appetizers, soups and stews, salads, casseroles, main dishes from abroad, and elegant party entrees. From Europe Hurlburt brings back paella, cannelloni, and souffle of mussels, among many others. From Asia come curried and stir-fried mussels as well as the delectable midia dolma. There are a dozen quick-and-easy tricks; there are flamed mussels and mussels Rockefeller. She describes how to clean and freeze mussels, and gives tips on how to use them.
Sarah Hurlburt in collaboration with her husband, Graham, has spent many years learning about the blue mussel. Together they have studied European methods of mussel farming and begun their own experimental Cultivation project in Massachusetts. Ms. Hurlburt's recipes have been featured in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald American, and Harvard Magazine. Stories about the Hurlburts' adventures with mussels have appeared in the Washington Post, the Cornell Quarterly, and the Marine Fisheries Review. A discussion of their work has appeared in the Congressional Record.
The rise of merchant capital in Mecca conditioned the development of Meccan social, economic, religious, and political structure. Mahmood Ibrahim traces the roots of capitalism from the emergence of merchants as the main force in Mecca through the first civil war in Islam (656–661). Through a rereading of original Arabic sources and drawing from modern scholarship on the subject, Ibrahim offers a new interpretation of the rise of Islam.
He argues that Islam contributed certain institutional beliefs and practices that unblocked obstacles and helped merchants gain political and economic hegemony over western Asia. Ibrahim contends that, with the conquest of Mecca, the newly formed Muslim state spread its control to the rest of Arabia, which mobilized a significant social force and allowed for further expansion outside Arabia, thus extending merchant control to include new surplus-producing regions, a vast network of trade routes, and wider markets.
This extensively researched study offers a new interpretation of the history of Islam, including the formation of Islamic society and the unfolding of the first civil war. In offering a better understanding of the Umayyad Caliphate that ruled Islam for a century to come, Ibrahim helps lay the groundwork for understanding the Middle East as it is today.
Of interest to scholars of Middle Eastern studies, this important work will be necessary reading for students of Near Eastern and North African history, as well as students of the history of Medieval Europe.
A personal account of the aging body and advanced technologies by a preeminent philosopher of technology
Medical Technics is a rigorous examination of how medical progress has modified our worlds and contributed to a virtual revolution in longevity. Don Ihde offers a unique autobiographical tour of medical events experienced in a decade, beginning in his 70s. Ihde offers experiential and postphenomenological analyses of technologies such as sonography and microsurgery, and ultimately asks what it means to increasingly become a cyborg.
Forerunners: Ideas FirstThe physical signs of Roman Catholicism pervade the Mexican countryside. Colonial churches and neighborhood chapels, wayside shrines, and mountaintop crosses dot the landscape. Catholicism also permeates the traditional cultures of rural communities, although this ideational influence is less immediately obvious. It is often couched in enigmatic idiom and imagery, and it is further obscured by the vestiges of pagan customs and the anticlerical attitudes of many villagers. These heterodox tendencies have even led some observers to conclude that Catholicism in rural Mexico is little more than a thin veneer on indigenous practice.
In Mary, Michael, and Lucifer John M. Ingham attempts to develop a modern semiotic and structuralist interpretation of traditional Mexican culture, an interpretation that accounts for the culture's apparent heterodoxy. Drawing on field research in Tlayacapan, Morelos, a village in the central highlands, he shows that nearly every domain of folk culture is informed with religious meaning. More precisely, the Catholic categories of spirit, nature, and evil compose the basic framework of the villagers' social relations and subjective experiences.
Using personal experience and narrative, as well as the voices of students, trainees, and academic colleagues, this book illustrates how an initiative beginning over thirty years ago to train obstetrician-gynecologists in Ghana can serve as a model for global engagement by universities and learners at many levels. In addition to detailing a proven sustainable model for global health programs, this book highlights the ethical and moral imperatives participants should expect and demand of truly engaged academic global health.
Contributors and topics covered include:
Susan Deans-Smith and Gilbert M. Joseph on the Arena of Dispute
Eric Van Young on the New Cultural History
William E. French on Cultural History of Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Mary Kay Vaughan on Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics in the Mexican Revolution
Stephen Haber on Mexico’s "New" Cultural History
Florencia E. Mallon on Cycles of Revisionism
Susan Migden Socolow on Putting the "Cult" in Culture
Claudio Lomnitz on the Politics of the "New Cultural History of Mexico"
One of the most interesting questions that can be raised about the twentieth century world concerns the degree to which industrialization created a common culture for all peoples. Reported here are the results of an empirical investigation designed to produce instruments to measure those personal values that have been central variables in the theory of modernization of societies.
The purpose of Joseph Kahl’s research is primarily methodological: to advance the description and measurement of those value orientations used by men to organize their occupational careers. It seeks to delineate and measure a set of values that represents a “modern” view of work and life.
The working laboratory was Brazil and Mexico, two countries undergoing rapid industrialization. More than six hundred men in Brazil and more than seven hundred in Mexico responded to questionnaires. In addition, over twenty-five men in each country were asked to sit beside a tape recorder and talk freely of their worldviews. The respondents were divided between inhabitants of the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City and those who lived in provincial towns of fewer than ten thousand inhabitants. The samples included manual and nonmanual employees.
The results showed that the main variable predicting whether or not a man would tend toward modernism was his social-class position. Middle-class men were much more modern in outlook than working-class men. Residence in a metropolis rather than in a small town also increased modernism, though to a lesser extent. Differences between Brazil and Mexico (and, indeed, the United States) were found to be surprisingly small, of considerably less weight than position in the social structure in predicting value orientations.
The author addresses himself primarily to sociologists and their students who are themselves studying aspects of socio-economic development. His findings, however, cannot fail to be of interest and benefit to social scientists of various disciplines and to all who are concerned with the process of development—planners at the national and local levels, demographers, and businesspeople.
A comparative study of contemporary Israeli and Palestinian diasporas.
Exilic and diasporic experience have become ubiquitous in recent decades. Jews, lacking a homeland, spread to various parts of the world, making the Jewish diaspora paradigmatic. But after the establishment of Israel in 1948, a different kind of diaspora emerged, as more than a tenth of Israeli citizens have chosen to leave their newly established state and resettle. Meanwhile, about half of all Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, now reside in exile, predominantly as a result of the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Recognizing that Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab societies coexist and are engaged in constant relations, Nahum Karlinsky assembles an impressive array of contributors to explore these diasporas alongside one another and in dialogue with other diasporic communities. The collected essays cover such topics as the experiences of Palestinian exiles within Israel, the demographics of today’s Israeli diaspora, the unique place of Israeli Jews in the United States, literatures of Palestinian transnationals, the emergence of Berlin as a queer Israeli-Jewish immigrant enclave, and self-reflections on voluntary exile. The Modern Israeli and Palestinian Diasporas challenges and reimagines the very notion of a homeland.
Allan Keiler chronicles the life of the legendary singer and activist from the childhood manifestation of her musical genius to her worldwide celebrity. As he shows, community and familial support could not shield her from the economic hardship and bigotry she encountered in her early performing days. Early successes in London and Berlin set the stage for her American breakthrough while the triumphant 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert established her immediately as an icon in the struggle against discrimination. Keiler reveals a woman more comfortable as artist than activist. But if Anderson's intense privacy and devotion to her work distanced her from a direct role in the civil rights movement, she remained a powerful symbol of possibility.
Drawing on rare archives and meetings with Anderson before her death, Marian Anderson is a magnificent study of a groundbreaking American artist.
A woman who lived in silent darkness describes a world of love, light, and color. Where did Helen Keller find the strength and courage to break out of her silent and dark world and discover light? What inner resources of faith helped her overcome the limits of her physical body? In My Religion, this dynamic woman describes the spiritual odyessy that brought her to a faith that opened her spiritual sight.
This recording was originally made in 1960 by actress Lillian Gish and remastered for a new release.
A woman who lived in silent darkness describes a world of love, light, and color. Where did Helen Keller find the strength and courage to break out of her silent and dark world and discover light? What inner resources of faith helped her overcome the limits of her physical body? In My Religion, this dynamic woman describes the spiritual odyessy that brought her to a faith that opened her spiritual sight.
This recording was originally made in 1960 by actress Lillian Gish and remastered for a new release.
Miner Kilbourne Kellogg’s notes about his experiences with “the most completely and comfortably fitted-out expedition which ever went to Texas” is an account of the beauty, the wildness, and the dangers and inconveniences of 1872 Texas.
Editor Llerena Friend provides a setting for the journal by tracing the search for mineral wealth in post–Civil War Texas; by describing the aims of the Eastern-born Texas Copper and Land Association, whose expedition the diarist accompanied; and by narrating the life of Miner K. Kellogg—artist, world traveler, writer. Friend’s annotation of the journal fills in details about the names, places, and events that Kellogg mentions.
As the expedition travels across North Texas toward Double Mountain, Kellogg reveals himself not only as a man of artistic vision but also as a chronic complainer, an accomplished observer of human nature and individual personality, and a skillful interpreter of problems that beset the people in the uncivilized regions of Texas.
A cultured gentleman who had traveled the world and had sat in the company of presidents and princes, this non-Texan was disdainful of the “texans” of the wilderness, for whom “Cards & vulgar slang & stories of Indian adventures form the staple of their mental exercises.” An artist, he was often unable to draw, either because of his constant illnesses and frustrations or because of the unfavorable encampments of the party. Accustomed to the amenities and comforts of life, he criticized the lack of leadership and the purpose of the expedition, and complained incessantly of the chiggers, the “want of cleanliness decency & health,” and “the infernal bacon,” which became the stock fare.
Amid the complaints and derisions, however, appear vivid images of the Texas landscape, set down in word pictures by an artist’s pen: the night sky, “with a half moon now & then eclipsed by dark clouds passing over the clear starry vault of bluish grey”; the river-bank soil of “Vandyke brown color”; the mesquite trees in a melancholy and wild basin, “without a leaf upon their dead carcasses, yet still standing & clinging to the hope of resurrection from the life yet remaining in their roots”; and the “acres of the brilliant yellow Compositea & pink sabatea-like carpets spread in the morning air.”
Kellogg’s watercolor sketches were unfortunately lost in travel, but his literary record, “M. K. Kellogg’s Mems, Exploring Expedition to Texas, 1872,” remains as a personal account of an abortive attempt to exploit the natural resources of the Texas frontier during Reconstruction and an artist’s picture of the life and the land of that frontier.
Kessler supplies both the biography of a legend and an explanation of why that legend has endured.
Sacagawea is one of the most renowned figures of the American West. A member of the Shoshone tribe, she was captured by the Hidatsas as a child and eventually became one of the wives of a French fur trader, Toussaint Charbonneau. In 1805 Charbonneau joined Lewis and Clark as the expedition's interpreter. Sacagawea was the only woman to participate in this important mission, and some claim that she served as a guide when the expedition reached the upper Missouri River and the mountainous region.
Although much has been written about the historical importance of Sacagawea in connection with the expedition, no one has explored why her story has endured so successfully in Euro-American culture. In an examination of representative texts (including histories, works of fiction, plays, films, and the visual arts) from 1805 to the present, Kessler charts the evolution and transformation of the legend over two centuries and demonstrates that Sacagawea has persisted as a Euro-American legend because her story exemplified critical elements of America's foundation myths-especially the concept of manifest destiny. Kessler also shows how the Sacagawea legend was flexible within its mythic framework and was used to address cultural issues specific to different time periods, including suffrage for women, taboos against miscegenation, and modern feminism.
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