In the prehistoric Southwest, if you traveled from one community to another, you would have observed tremendous diversity in how people looked and spoke. This volume is the first to look at how prehistoric people’s appearance and speech conveyed their identities. Previously, Southwest archaeologists have studied identity using architecture, ceramics, textiles, and jewelry. This book uses a holistic, comparative approach to consider all aspects of appearance. Advocating a people-centered perspective for studying the past, Neitzel and her colleagues show how these characteristics conveyed information about an individual’s social status, cultural affiliation, inter-group connections, religious beliefs, and ceremonial roles.
Contributors: Ann L. W. Stodder, Museum of New Mexico, and Department of Anthropology, The University of New Mexico; Laurie Webster, University of Arizona; and Jane H. Hill, School of Anthropology, University of Arizona (emerita)
Over many centuries, the prehistoric Fremont and Anasazi peoples of present-day Utah left an artistic record in which distinctive styles are readily identifiable. From the Uinta Mountains through the central canyonlands to the Virgin River, Utah’s abundant prehistoric rock art offers glimpses of a lost world.
The Rock Art of Utah is a rich sample of the many varieties of rock art found in the state. Through nearly two hundred high-quality photographs and drawings from the Donald Scott Collection, all made during the 1920s and 1930s, rock art expert Polly Schaafsma provides a fascinating, comprehensive tour of this unique legacy.
From the Uinta Mountains through the central canyonlands to the Virgin River, Utah’s abundant prehistoric rock art offers glimpses of a lost world. Over many centuries, the Fremont and Anasazi peoples left an artistic record in which distinctive styles are readily identifiable.
The name Black Hawk permeates the built environment in the upper midwestern United States. It has been appropriated for everything from fitness clubs to used car dealerships. Makataimeshekiakiak, the Sauk Indian war leader whose name loosely translates to “Black Hawk,” surrendered in 1832 after hundreds of his fellow tribal members were slaughtered at the Bad Axe Massacre.
Re-Collecting Black Hawk examines the phenomena of this appropriation in the physical landscape, and the deeply rooted sentiments it evokes among Native Americans and descendants of European settlers. Nearly 170 original photographs are presented and juxtaposed with texts that reveal and complicate the significance of the imagery. Contributors include tribal officials, scholars, activists, and others including George Thurman, the principal chief of the Sac and Fox Nation and a direct descendant of Black Hawk. These image-text encounters offer visions of both the past and present and the shaping of memory through landscapes that reach beyond their material presence into spaces of cultural and political power. As we witness, the evocation of Black Hawk serves as a painful reminder, a forced deference, and a veiled attempt to wipe away the guilt of past atrocities. Re-Collecting Black Hawk also points toward the future. By simultaneously unsettling and reconstructing the midwestern landscape, it envisions new modes of peaceful and just coexistence and suggests alternative ways of inhabiting the landscape.
An examination of anticolonial thought and practice across key Indigenous thinkers.
Accounts of decolonization routinely neglect Indigenous societies, yet Native communities have made unique contributions to anticolonial thought and activism. Remapping Sovereignty examines how twentieth-century Indigenous activists in North America debated questions of decolonization and self-determination, developing distinctive conceptual approaches that both resonate with and reformulate key strands in other civil rights and global decolonization movements. In contrast to decolonization projects that envisioned liberation through state sovereignty, Indigenous theorists emphasized the self-determination of peoples against sovereign state supremacy and articulated a visionary politics of decolonization as earthmaking. Temin traces the interplay between anticolonial thought and practice across key thinkers, interweaving history and textual analysis. He shows how these insights broaden the political and intellectual horizons open to us today.
The colonizing wars against Native Americans created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. Tariq D. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and class war as foundational aspects of capitalist domination and vital elements of the nation’s long history of internal repression and social control. Khan shows how the state wielded the tactics, weapons, myths, and ideology refined in America’s colonizing wars to repress anarchists, labor unions, and a host of others labeled as alien, multi-racial, multi-ethnic urban rabble. The ruling classes considered radicals of all stripes to be anticolonial insurgents. As Khan charts the decades of red scares that began in the 1840s, he reveals how capitalists and government used much-practiced counterinsurgency rhetoric and tactics against the movements they perceived and vilified as “anarchist.”
Original and boldly argued, The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean offers an enlightening new history with relevance for our own time.
Robert G. Hays chronicles the "Indian problem" precisely as it was explained to Americans through the editorial columns of the New York Times between 1860 and 1900, the years when battles between white settlers and Native Americans split a nation and its spirit apart.
Covering the final forty-one years of the nineteenth century, Hays’s collection of Times editorials gives readers what current accounts cannot: perspectives by contemporary writers with unique insights into the public images of Native Americans and their place in a nation bent on expansion. The authentic voices of a national newspaper’s daily record speak with an urgency both immediate and real.
These editorials express the unbridled bitterness and raw ambition of a nation immersed in an agenda of conquest. They also resonate with the struggle to find a common ground. Some editorials are patronizing and ironic: "Yet it seems pitiful to cage so fine a savage among a herd of vulgar criminals in a penitentiary." Others include a willingness to poke fun: "Many persons on the platform were astonished to find that an ‘illiterate barbarian’ could handle the weapon of sarcasm. The truth is that the Indians spoke far better than ninety-nine out of a hundred members of congress." And yet others evince an attitude of respect, which set the tone for reconciling national ambition with natural rights.
In some instances, the Times allowed Native Americans to tell their own stories, as in this eloquent, moving account of the testimony of Satanta, the warrior chief of the Kiowas: "A certain dim foreboding of the Indians’ fate swept across his mind, and in its passage lit his eyes up with a fierce light, and his voice rose to a pitch of frenzy as he exclaimed: ‘We don’t want to settle—I love to roam over the prairie; there I am free and happy."
History demonstrates that the costs of owning one’s soil and one’s destiny remain without measure. Many of the problems blocking the progress of Native Americans continue unsolved: unemployment, infant mortality, suicide, crime, alcoholism, and poverty. Following such works as Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Hays looks back on the records of national history for the roots of our challenges today.
Patrisia Gonzales addresses "Red Medicine" as a system of healing that includes birthing practices, dreaming, and purification rites to re-establish personal and social equilibrium. The book explores Indigenous medicine across North America, with a special emphasis on how Indigenous knowledge has endured and persisted among peoples with a legacy to Mexico. Gonzales combines her lived experience in Red Medicine as an herbalist and traditional birth attendant with in-depth research into oral traditions, storytelling, and the meanings of symbols to uncover how Indigenous knowledge endures over time. And she shows how this knowledge is now being reclaimed by Chicanos, Mexican Americans and Mexican Indigenous peoples.
For Gonzales, a central guiding force in Red Medicine is the principal of regeneration as it is manifested in Spiderwoman. Dating to Pre-Columbian times, the Mesoamerican Weaver/Spiderwoman—the guardian of birth, medicine, and purification rites such as the Nahua sweat bath—exemplifies the interconnected process of rebalancing that transpires throughout life in mental, spiritual and physical manifestations. Gonzales also explains how dreaming is a form of diagnosing in traditional Indigenous medicine and how Indigenous concepts of the body provide insight into healing various kinds of trauma.
Gonzales links pre-Columbian thought to contemporary healing practices by examining ancient symbols and their relation to current curative knowledges among Indigenous peoples. Red Medicine suggests that Indigenous healing systems can usefully point contemporary people back to ancestral teachings and help them reconnect to the dynamics of the natural world.
In the early 1800s, the U.S. government attempted to rid the Southeast of Indians in order to make way for trading networks, American immigration, optimal land use, economic development opportunities, and, ultimately, territorial expansion westward to the Pacific. The difficult removal of the Chickasaw Nation to Indian Territory—later to become part of the state of Oklahoma— was exacerbated by the U.S. government’s unenlightened decision to place the Chickasaws on lands it had previously provided solely for the Choctaw Nation.
This volume deals with the challenges the Chickasaw people had from attacking Texans and Plains Indians, the tribe’s ex-slaves, the influence on the tribe of intermarried white men, and the presence of illegal aliens (U.S. citizens) in their territory. By focusing on the tribal and U.S. government policy conflicts, as well as longstanding attempts of the Chickasaw people to remain culturally unique, St. Jean reveals the successes and failures of the Chickasaw in attaining and maintaining sovereignty as a separate and distinct Chickasaw Nation.
Remembering Awatovi is the engaging story of a major archaeological expedition on the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona. Centered on the large Pueblo village of Awatovi, with its Spanish mission church and beautiful kiva murals, the excavations are renowned not only for the data they uncovered but also for the interdisciplinary nature of the investigations. In archaeological lore they are also remembered for the diverse, fun-loving, and distinguished cast of characters who participated in or visited the dig.
Hester Davis’s lively account—part history of archaeology, part social history—is told largely in the words of the participants, among whom were two of Davis’s siblings, artist Penny Davis Worman and archaeologist Mott Davis. Life in the remote field camp abounded with delightful storytelling, delicious food, and good-natured high-jinks. Baths were taken in a stock tank, beloved camp automobiles were given personal names, and a double bed had to be trucked across the desert and up a mesa to celebrate a memorable wedding.
Remembering Awatovi is illustrated with over 160 portraits and photographs of camp life. Essays by Eric Polingyouma and Brian Fagan enrich the presentation.
Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award 2017
Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook lives in Akwesasne, an indigenous community in upstate New York that is downwind and downstream from three Superfund sites. For years she witnessed elevated rates of miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer in her town, ultimately drawing connections between environmental contamination and these maladies. When she brought her findings to environmental health researchers, Cook sparked the United States’ first large-scale community-based participatory research project.
In The River Is in Us, author Elizabeth Hoover takes us deep into this remarkable community that has partnered with scientists and developed grassroots programs to fight the contamination of its lands and reclaim its health and culture. Through in-depth research into archives, newspapers, and public meetings, as well as numerous interviews with community members and scientists, Hoover shows the exact efforts taken by Akwesasne’s massive research project and the grassroots efforts to preserve the Native culture and lands. She also documents how contaminants have altered tribal life, including changes to the Mohawk fishing culture and the rise of diabetes in Akwesasne.
Featuring community members such as farmers, health-care providers, area leaders, and environmental specialists, while rigorously evaluating the efficacy of tribal efforts to preserve its culture and protect its health, The River Is in Us offers important lessons for improving environmental health research and health care, plus detailed insights into the struggles and methods of indigenous groups. This moving, uplifting book is an essential read for anyone interested in Native Americans, social justice, and the pollutants contaminating our food, water, and bodies.
Liebling recorded the litigation over the fate of the Pyramid Lake Reservation lands in a series of articles published in The New Yorker in 1955. Reprinted here in their entirety, the essays discuss the affair in detail, following it from the shores of the lake to the halls of Congress, and introducing readers to the colorful world of 1950s Nevada. This is a valuable record of one of Nevada’s most enduring and significant debates over the uses of the land and the precious water that nourishes it. Introduction by Elmer R. Rusco.
Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 is the most renowned colonial uprisings in the history of the American Southwest. Traditional text-based accounts tend to focus on the revolt and the Spaniards' reconquest in 1692—completely skipping over the years of indigenous independence that occurred in between. Revolt boldly breaks out of this mold and examines the aftermath of the uprising in colonial New Mexico, focusing on the radical changes it instigated in Pueblo culture and society.
In addition to being the first book-length history of the revolt that incorporates archaeological evidence as a primary source of data, this volume is one of a kind in its attempt to put these events into the larger context of Native American cultural revitalization. Despite the fact that the only surviving records of the revolt were written by Spanish witnesses and contain certain biases, author Matthew Liebmann finds unique ways to bring a fresh perspective to Revolt.
Most notably, he uses his hands-on experience at Ancestral Pueblo archaeological sites—four Pueblo villages constructed between 1680 and 1696 in the Jemez province of New Mexico—to provide an understanding of this period that other treatments have yet to accomplish. By analyzing ceramics, architecture, and rock art of the Pueblo Revolt era, he sheds new light on a period often portrayed as one of unvarying degradation and dissention among Pueblos. A compelling read, Revolt's "blood-and-thunder" story successfully ties together archaeology, history, and ethnohistory to add a new dimension to this uprising and its aftermath.
The mid-thirteenth century AD marks the beginning of tremendous social change among Ancestral Pueblo peoples of the northern US Southwest that foreshadow the emergence of the modern Pueblo world. Regional depopulations, long-distance migrations, and widespread resettlement into large plaza-oriented villages forever altered community life. Archaeologists have tended to view these historical events as adaptive responses to climatic, environmental, and economic conditions. Recently, however, more attention is being given to the central role of religion during these transformative periods, and to how archaeological remains embody the complex social practices through which Ancestral Pueblo understandings of sacred concepts were expressed and transformed.
The contributors to this volume employ a wide range of archaeological evidence to examine the origin and development of religious ideologies and the ways they shaped Pueblo societies across the Southwest in the centuries prior to European contact. With its fresh theoretical approach, it contributes to a better understanding of both the Pueblo past and the anthropological study of religion in ancient contexts This volume will be of interest to both regional specialists and to scholars who work with the broader dimensions of religion and ritual in the human experience.
Rio del Norte chronicles the upper Rio Grande region and its divers peoples across twelve thousand years of continuous history. Based on the most up-to-date historical and archaeological research, Rio del Norte is a tour de force, highlighting the unbroken history of the upper Rio Grande.
Beginning with the mammoth hunters of eleven millennia ago, Carroll Riley adeptly eaves the threads of twelve thousand years of continuous history through the introduction of agriculture, the rise of the Basketmaker-Pueblo (Anasazi) people, and the extraordinary "quickening" that occurred along the Rio Grande and its tributaries as the Anasazi era ended.
At that time large towns appeared, some holding several thousand people who practiced irrigation-based agriculture, maintained complex social and political organizations, and had a rich artistry. This "golden age" was continuing when Spaniards contacted, then colonized and missionized the region. In 1680 the Pueblos joined in a powerful record and ousted the invaders. Although the Spanish returned, the Pueblos have maintained important parts of their cultural heritage to the present.
Reassesses the ancient Indigenous McKeithen site in northern Florida in light of new data, analyses, and theories
Revisiting McKeithen Weeden Island further illuminates an Indigenous Late Woodland (ca. AD 200–900) mound-and-village community in northern Florida that was first excavated in the late 1970s. Since then, some artifacts received additional analyses, and the topic of prechiefdom societies has been broadly reconsidered in anthropology and archaeology. These developments allow new perspectives on McKeithen’s history and significance.
Prudence M. Rice, a Mayanist who began her career at the University of Florida, revisits what is known about McKeithen and recontextualizes the 1970s excavations. Weeden Island and McKeithen are best known through mortuary mounds and mortuary ritual, mainly involving unusual pottery bird effigies. Rice discusses current theoretical trends in studies of ritual and belief systems and their relation to mound-building at McKeithen in early stages of developing societal complexity.
Revisiting McKeithen Weeden Island serves as a masterful example of an esteemed archaeologist advancing the field through rethought and updated interpretations of the site and its significance, primarily through its pottery. Rice’s case study ultimately also fosters understanding of later Mississippian society and other civilizations around the world at this time period. Archaeologists, anthropologists, and social historians as well as students and avocational readers will welcome Rice’s insight.
The use of cars and trucks over the past century has remade American geography—pushing big cities ever outward toward suburbanization, spurring the growth of some small towns while hastening the decline of others, and spawning a new kind of commercial landscape marked by gas stations, drive-in restaurants, motels, tourist attractions, and countless other retail entities that express our national love affair with the open road. By its very nature, this landscape is ever changing, indeed ephemeral. What is new quickly becomes old and is soon forgotten.
In this absorbing book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle ponder how “Roadside America” might be remembered, especially since so little physical evidence of its earliest years survives. In straightforward and lively prose, supplemented by copious illustrations—historic and modern photographs, advertising postcards, cartoons, roadmaps—they survey the ways in which automobility has transformed life in the United States. Asking how we might best commemorate and preserve this part of our past—which has been so vital economically and politically, so significant to the cultural aspirations of ordinary Americans, yet so often ignored by scholars who dismiss it as kitsch—they propose the development of an actual outdoor museum that would treat seriously the themes of our roadside history.
Certainly, museums have been created for frontier pioneering, the rise of commercial agriculture, and the coming of water- and steam-powered industrialization and transportation, especially the railroad. Is now not the time, the authors ask, for a museum forcefully exploring the automobile’s emergence and the changes it has brought to place and landscape? Such a museum need not deny the nostalgic appeal of roadsides past, but if done properly, it could also tell us much about what the authors describe as “the most important kind of place yet devised in the American experience.”
John A. Jakle is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Keith A. Sculle is the former head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. They have coauthored such books as America’s Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Automobile Age; Motoring: The Highway Experience in America; Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age; and The Gas Station in America.
The mass migrations to the United States from Europe that began in the 1830s were strongly influenced by what is known today as emigration literature--travelers' writings about their experiences in the New World. Such accounts were particularly popular with German readers; over 150 examples of the genre were published in Germany between 1827 and 1856. Gottfried Duden's Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America, published in 1829, was one of the most influential of these books. The timing, format, coverage, and literary qualities of the Report, and its idyllic descriptions of pioneer farming in Missouri, combined to make it an instant success. It attracted thousands of Germans to the Midwest, and particularly to Missouri, the focus of Duden's account. This edited and annotated translation is the first complete version to be published in English. It provides for the general public and the professional historian a significant contribution to U.S. immigration history and a unique and delightful fragment of Missouri's rich German heritage.
Duden presented his account in the form of personal letters, a style that helped make the book believable. The Mississippi- Missouri valley reminded him of his native Rhineland where the rivers facilitated trade and transportation, and fertile river bottomland offers the perfect environment for agriculture. Duden farmed the land he bought during his sojourn in Missouri, and his book includes meticulous descriptions of clearing, fencing, and harvesting. His pro-emigration bias, colored by the fact that he himself had been able to hire help on his Missouri farm, made his view of the farmer's life, it turned out, more idyllic than practical. Many would-be gentlemen farmers, inspired by his book to come to Missouri, found pioneer farming more strenuous than they had expected.
Do Americans, in all their cultural diversity, share any fundamental consensus? Does such a consensus, or anything else, make America exceptional in the modern world?
Since 1960 most historians have answered no--except perhaps for the current nostalgia for the Eisenhower years (the "Ozzie and Harriet" years of popular recollection) of middle-class American prosperity.
In Republic of the Dispossessed social historian Rowland Berthoff maintains not only that there was--and still is--a middle-class consensus and that America is exceptional in it but that it goes back some five hundred years. The consensus stems from all those European peasants and artisans who, from 1600 to 1950, fled dispossession in the Old World. They brought with them basic social values that acted as a template for middle-class American values. To consider modern American society as exceptional--that is, as distinctive and different from any contemporary European pattern of thought--is therefore, in Berthoff's theory, not at all the "illogical absurdity" that current conventional wisdom makes it.
The Berthoff thesis, as he develops it in these ten essays from throughout the course of his career, is well worth a second look by those within and beyond the field of social history. It suggests that the ideal--both peasant and classical republican-- of maintaining a balance between personal liberty and communal equality has long inspired American reaction to the drastic modern changes of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration.
Observing that most Americans still see themselves as independent, basically equal, middle-class citizens, Berthoff explains the current apprehension among Americans that at the end of the twentieth century they are once again being dispossessed-- thus, the current emphasis on "traditional values." Because that problem is the same that worried their European ancestors as much as five hundred years ago, Berthoff argues, the time has come to face the question head-on.
Since we discovered that, in Tocqueville’s words, “the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the heart,” how have we Americans made do? In The Real American Dream one of the nation’s premier literary scholars searches out the symbols and stories by which Americans have reached for something beyond worldly desire. A spiritual history ranging from the first English settlements to the present day, the book is also a lively, deeply learned meditation on hope.
Andrew Delbanco tells of the stringent God of Protestant Christianity, who exerted immense force over the language, institutions, and customs of the culture for nearly 200 years. He describes the falling away of this God and the rise of the idea of a sacred nation-state. And, finally, he speaks of our own moment, when symbols of nationalism are in decline, leaving us with nothing to satisfy the longing for transcendence once sustained by God and nation.
From the Christian story that expressed the earliest Puritan yearnings to New Age spirituality, apocalyptic environmentalism, and the multicultural search for ancestral roots that divert our own, The Real American Dream evokes the tidal rhythm of American history. It shows how Americans have organized their days and ordered their lives—and ultimately created a culture—to make sense of the pain, desire, pleasure, and fear that are the stuff of human experience. In a time of cultural crisis, when the old stories seem to be faltering, this book offers a lesson in the painstaking remaking of the American dream.
Alongside the young rebel, the contemporary concept of identity emerged in the 1950s. It was in that decade that “identity” was first used to define collective selves in the politicized manner that is recognizable today: in terms such as “national identity” and “racial identity.” Medovoi traces the rapid absorption of identity themes across many facets of postwar American culture, including beat literature, the young adult novel, the Hollywood teen film, early rock ‘n’ roll, black drama, and “bad girl” narratives. He demonstrates that youth culture especially began to exhibit telltale motifs of teen, racial, sexual, gender, and generational revolt that would burst into political prominence during the ensuing decades, bequeathing to the progressive wing of contemporary American political culture a potent but ambiguous legacy of identity politics.
Conducting original fieldwork is a science and an art. Anthropology students can easily get an A in Aborigines without ever understanding their own tribal behavior. American culture, like all others, has its share of ritual and myths, ranging from singles bars to sports events. This volume guides undergraduate students to correct scientific methods and successful personal approaches in their work.
Researching American Culture covers the universe of ethnography: the researcher’s role, interviewing, questionnaire construction, ethics, coping with the limitations of time and space. Guides for researchers, original research papers by undergraduates, and essays by professional anthropologists are all included. By applying anthropological techniques to today’’s behavior, students learn to be objective about their own culture and skeptical about practices rarely questioned.
American myths about national character tend to overshadow the historical realities. Reginald Horsman’s book is the first study to examine the origins of racialism in America and to show that the belief in white American superiority was firmly ensconced in the nation’s ideology by 1850.
The author deftly chronicles the beginnings and growth of an ideology stressing race, basic stock, and attributes in the blood. He traces how this ideology shifted from the more benign views of the Founding Fathers, which embraced ideas of progress and the spread of republican institutions for all. He finds linkages between the new, racialist ideology in America and the rising European ideas of Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and scientific ideologies of the early nineteenth century. Most importantly, however, Horsman demonstrates that it was the merging of the Anglo-Saxon rhetoric with the experience of Americans conquering a continent that created a racialist philosophy. Two generations before the “new” immigrants began arriving in the late nineteenth century, Americans, in contact with blacks, Indians, and Mexicans, became vociferous racialists.
In sum, even before the Civil War, Americans had decided that peoples of large parts of this continent were incapable of creating or sharing in efficient, prosperous, democratic governments, and that American Anglo-Saxons could achieve unprecedented prosperity and power by the outward thrust of their racialism and commercial penetration of other lands. The comparatively benevolent view of the Founders of the Republic had turned into the quite malevolent ideology that other peoples could not be “regenerated” through the spread of free institutions.
Authors Richard Moorsteen and Morton Abramowitz propose an innovative plan for improving U.S.–China relations. Dealing effectively with China requires both a long-term perspective and an approach that faces up to fundamental issues, going beyond “atmospherics” and gestures.
Yet such a goal must be achieved within the prevailing uncertainty about China’s intentions. It must be sought through an evolving process of exploratory steps that would enable policymakers to discover more about Chinese responses and to incorporate this knowledge into future policy: (1) a policy of “one China but not now” that could gradually move us toward Peking’s preferred “one China”; (2) a U.S. position on Chinese representation in the United Nations that would allow us to acquiesce in Peking’s admission; (3) quiet but explicit encouragement to both Bangkok and Peking for a modest improvement in relations between them; (4) an effort to convey U.S. views (and to explore Peking’s) on nuclear non-proliferation in Asia; (5) an approach to offset Chinese fears about the U.S.–Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks.
The authors analyze deficiencies in the way the government now develops its China policy. To implement their new approach, they propose both organizational and procedural changes, including new modes of interaction between government China specialists and their policymaking superiors and the establishment of a policy group high enough in rank and broad enough in responsibility to deal with U.S.–China relations as a whole.
Russian-American Dialogue on Cultural Relations, 1776-1914, the third volume in the Russian-American Dialogues series, provides English translations of the best Russian scholarship on cultural relations. Each essay originally appeared as an article in the former Soviet Union. Five issues are discussed: the contributions that each country made to the cultural life of the other; the correspondence and interactions between scientists, writers, and others from the two nations; the development of public perceptions and how these changed over time; the "American focus" in Russian periodicals during the nineteenth century; and the significant roles of Russians and the Russian presence in American history. The Russian articles on each of these subjects are followed by comments from American historians.
The articles by the Russian scholars make extensive use of and liberally cite material from Russian archives and publications. As a result, they provide American readers with new scientific exchanges, personalities, and points of view. The result is a plethora of new material for Western historians of Russia as well as of the United States. The book provides an opportunity for scholars to examine more thoroughly the relevant issues of Russian-American cultural relations.
An important scholarly contribution, Russian-American Dialogue on Cultural Relations, 1776-1914 brings a new dimension to the relationship between the United States and Russia before 1914. It will be of interest not only to historians of this period but to all historians and students of international cultural relations.
In the 1950s, America was seen as a vast melting pot in which white ethnic affiliations were on the wane and a common American identity was the norm. Yet by the 1970s, these white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of plucky immigrants making their way in the New World through the sweat of their brow. Although this turn to ethnicity was for many an individual search for familial and psychological identity, Roots Too establishes a broader white social and political consensus arising in response to the political language of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, whites sought renewed status in the romance of Old World travails and New World fortunes. Ellis Island replaced Plymouth Rock as the touchstone of American nationalism. The entire culture embraced the myth of the indomitable white ethnics—who they were and where they had come from—in literature, film, theater, art, music, and scholarship. The language and symbols of hardworking, self-reliant, and ultimately triumphant European immigrants have exerted tremendous force on political movements and public policy debates from affirmative action to contemporary immigration.
In order to understand how white primacy in American life survived the withering heat of the Civil Rights movement and multiculturalism, Matthew Frye Jacobson argues for a full exploration of the meaning of the white ethnic revival and the uneasy relationship between inclusion and exclusion that it has engendered in our conceptions of national belonging.
An incendiary critique of contemporary American society that also offers concrete solutions for the dilemmas facing progressive politics.
As the political climate of the United States moves rightward, effective and visionary voices from the left become both rarer and more essential. In Resisting State Violence, African American scholar-activist Joy James provides such a voice. Taking the convergence of race, gender, and class as fundamental trajectories, James offers a stimulating and iconoclastic account of a world in which the United States functions as the political-police center.
At its core, Resisting State Violence is about the many ways the current structure of American government and society is inimical to human rights. James examines the prevalence of racist violence in U.S. policies, making provocative connections between seemingly disparate themes and events, and always, insistently, linking global and U.S. domestic politics. She creates a picture of a nation that consistently uses dehumanization to normalize and rationalize violence in foreign policy, all the while creating a domestic climate that pathologizes blackness and sexuality, portraying those most vulnerable to violence as its carriers. In the systematic and ubiquitous nature of state violence, however, James sees a possibility of hope in the building of coalitions across race, class, gender, and national divides. She argues that the very commonality that makes the system seem so overpowering can serve as the basis for resistance-that the elements that hold together a web of oppression and misuse of power also mark its vulnerabilities, especially when confronted with an equally systematic resistance. James offers concrete solutions for the dilemmas facing progressive politics and the individuals who work to achieve social justice. Resisting State Violence is a clear-sighted and uncompromising guidebook for those who want to understand the forces that hinder social change, and to effectively move beyond them.As the 2000 census resoundingly demonstrated, the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of the United States has all but dissolved. In a country founded and settled by their ancestors, British Protestants now make up less than a fifth of the population. This demographic shift has spawned a “culture war” within white America. While liberals seek to diversify society toward a cosmopolitan endpoint, some conservatives strive to maintain an American ethno-national identity. Eric Kaufmann traces the roots of this culture war from the rise of WASP America after the Revolution to its fall in the 1960s, when social institutions finally began to reflect the nation’s ethnic composition.
Kaufmann begins his account shortly after independence, when white Protestants with an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent established themselves as the dominant American ethnic group. But from the late 1890s to the 1930s, liberal and cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. This struggle against ethnic dominance was mounted not by subaltern immigrant groups but by Anglo-Saxon reformers, notably Jane Addams and John Dewey. It gathered social force by the 1920s, struggling against WASP dominance and achieving institutional breakthrough in the late 1960s, when America truly began to integrate ethnic minorities into mainstream culture.
The terrorist attacks against U.S. targets on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, sparked an intense debate about "human rights." According to contributors to this provocative book, the discussion of human rights to date has been far too narrow. They argue that any conversation about human rights in the United States must include equal rights for all residents.
Essays examine the historical and intellectual context for the modern debate about human rights, the racial implications of the war on terrorism, the intersection of racial oppression, and the national security state. Others look at the Pinkerton detective agency as a forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the role of Africa in post–World War II American attempts at empire-building, and the role of immigration as a human rights issue.
Race is not a subject most people associate with archaeological research. Yet because of archaeologists’ interest in long time-spans they are perfectly positioned to investigate the “naturalness” of racial designations through time.
Race and the Archaeology of Identity brings together twelve of America’s most perceptive and talented historical archaeologists. Their focus is on the recent archaeological record—stretching geographically from Jamaica to northern Michigan; their time frame is from colonial days to the late nineteenth century; and their subjects range from frontier fur traders to Victorian city dwellers. Using textual and archaeological sources, contributors explore such topics as the connections of race to economics, the creation and maintenance of institutionalized poverty, the role of race in structuring and guiding intercultural connections, and the importance of race in creating and defining space.
Contributors explore such topics as the connections of race to economics, the role of race in structuring and guiding intercultural connections, and the importance of race in creating and defining space.
The contributors analyze Thomas Jefferson’s legacy in light of his sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings; the way that Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor, rallied his organization against Chinese immigrant workers; and the eugenicist origins of the early-twentieth-century birth-control movement led by Margaret Sanger. They draw attention to the writing of Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Piute and one of the first published Native American authors; the anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett; the Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan; and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who linked civil rights struggles in the United States to anticolonial efforts abroad. Other figures considered include Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (who fought against Anglo American expansion in what is now Texas), Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. In the afterword, George Lipsitz reflects on U.S. racial politics since 1965.
Contributors. Bruce Baum, Cari M. Carpenter, Gary Gerstle, Duchess Harris, Catherine A. Holland, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Laura Janara, Ben Keppel, George Lipsitz, Gwendolyn Mink, Joel Olson, Dorothy Roberts, Patricia A. Schechter, John Kuo Wei Tchen, Jerry Thompson
At the close of the twentieth century American society is more diverse and tolerant than ever, yet haunted by the threat of ethnic fragmentation. Race Pride and the American Identity describes the rise of multiculturalism in America, identifying the political forces which in the last thirty years have created a country that is both pluralistic and factionalized.
In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, minority activists challenged universities, museums, and other institutions to expand their representation of minority heritage. Joseph Tilden Rhea argues that such struggles for cultural representation constitute a distinct social movement, which he terms the Race Pride movement. While the earlier Civil Rights movement focused on obtaining legal inclusion, the Race Pride movement aimed at achieving cultural inclusion.
After thirty years of Race Pride activism, multiculturalism is now the mainstream. However, Rhea suggests that multiculturalism's emphasis on diversity is not sufficient to solve America's racial problems. He concludes that Americans must now move beyond the celebration of difference by also affirming what is shared in the American experience.
In Remaking Chinese America, Xiaojian Zhao explores the myriad forces that changed and unified Chinese Americans during a key period in American history. Prior to 1940, this immigrant community was predominantly male, but between 1940 and 1965 it was transformed into a family-centered American ethnic community. Zhao pays special attention to forces both inside and outside of the country in order to explain these changing demographics. She scrutinizes the repealed exclusion laws and the immigration laws enacted after 1940. Careful attention is also paid to evolving gender roles, since women constituted the majority of newcomers, significantly changing the sex ratio of the Chinese American population.
As members of a minority sharing a common cultural heritage as well as pressures from the larger society, Chinese Americans networked and struggled to gain equal rights during the cold war period. In defining the political circumstances that brought the Chinese together as a cohesive political body, Zhao also delves into the complexities they faced when questioning their personal national allegiances. Remaking Chinese America uses a wealth of primary sources, including oral histories, newspapers, genealogical documents, and immigration files to illuminate what it was like to be Chinese living in the United States during a period that—until now—has been little studied.
African slaves in Haiti emancipated themselves from French rule in 1804 and created the first independent black republic in the Western Hemisphere. But they reinstituted slavery for the most vulnerable members of Haitian society—the children of the poor—by using them as unpaid servants to the wealthy. These children were—and still are—restavecs, a French term whose literal meaning of "staying with" disguises the unremitting labor, abuse, and denial of education that characterizes the children's lives.
In this memoir, Jean-Robert Cadet recounts the harrowing story of his youth as a restavec, as well as his inspiring climb to middle-class American life. He vividly describes what it was like to be an unwanted illegitimate child "staying with" a well-to-do family whose physical and emotional abuse was sanctioned by Haitian society. He also details his subsequent life in the United States, where, despite American racism, he put himself through college and found success in the Army, in business, and finally in teaching.
This is the life story of Rosa Cavalleri, an Italian woman who came to the United States in 1884, one of the peak years in the nineteenth-century wave of immigration. A vivid, richly detailed account, the narrative traces Rosa’s life in an Italian peasant village and later in Chicago. Marie Hall Ets, a social worker and friend of Rosa’s at the Chicago Commons settlement house during the years following World War I, meticulously wrote down her lively stories to create this book.
Rosa was born in a silk-making village in Lombardy, a major source of north Italian emigration; she first set foot in the United States at the Castle Garden immigrant depot on the tip of Manhattan. Her life in this country was hard and Ets chronicles it in eloquent detail—Rosa endures a marriage at sixteen to an abusive older man, an unwilling migration to a Missouri mining town, and the unassisted birth of a child, and manages to escape from a husband who tried to force her into prostitution. Rosa’s exuberant personality, remarkable spirit, and ability as a storyteller distinguish this book, a unique contribution to the annals of U.S. immigration.
“I saw many killed. I almost starved. But I escaped to refugee camps in Thailand and eventually made it to the U.S.” Thus begins Leth Oun’s poignant and vivid memoir. A survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields—having spent a torturous three years, eight months, and ten days imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge—Oun thrived in America, learning English, becoming a citizen, and working as an officer in the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division.
In A Refugee’s American Dream, Oun shares hard memories of Cambodia, where his father was executed, and his family enslaved in labor camps.
Following the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Oun survived a year of homelessness then nearly four years in refugee camps. Arriving in America, 17 and penniless, Oun struggled, washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant for $3.15 an hour. Still, he persevered, graduating from Widener University and completing thousands of hours of training to pursue a career in the Secret Service.
While on President Obama’s protection team, he returns to Cambodia after 32 years, reunites with family, and bonds with Reik, the Secret Service dog he handles. Through his most difficult moments, Oun displays truly inspiring resilience that ultimately leads to great achievements.
The authors’ proceeds will go to help Cambodians in need
Bringing to life the stories of political teatristas, feminists, gunrunners, labor organizers, poets, journalists, ex-prisoners, and other revolutionaries, The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico examines the inspiration Chicanas/os found in social movements in Mexico and Latin America from 1971 to 1979. Drawing on fifteen years of interviews and archival research, including examinations of declassified government documents from Mexico, this study uncovers encounters between activists and artists across borders while sharing a socialist-oriented, anticapitalist vision. In discussions ranging from the Nuevo Teatro Popular movement across Latin America to the Revolutionary Proletariat Party of America in Mexico and the Peronista Youth organizers in Argentina, Alan Eladio Gómez brings to light the transnational nature of leftist organizing by people of Mexican descent in the United States, tracing an array of festivals, assemblies, labor strikes, clandestine organizations, and public protests linked to an international movement of solidarity against imperialism.
Taking its title from the “greater Mexico” designation used by Américo Paredes to describe the present and historical movement of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Chicanas/os back and forth across the US-Mexico border, this book analyzes the radical creativity and global justice that animated “Greater Mexico” leftists during a pivotal decade. While not all the participants were of one mind politically or personally, they nonetheless shared an international solidarity that was enacted in local arenas, giving voice to a political and cultural imaginary that circulated throughout a broad geographic terrain while forging multifaceted identities. The epilogue considers the politics of going beyond solidarity.
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book, 2002
The history of Mexican Americans is a history of the intermingling of races—Indian, White, and Black. This racial history underlies a legacy of racial discrimination against Mexican Americans and their Mexican ancestors that stretches from the Spanish conquest to current battles over ending affirmative action and other assistance programs for ethnic minorities. Asserting the centrality of race in Mexican American history, Martha Menchaca here offers the first interpretive racial history of Mexican Americans, focusing on racial foundations and race relations from prehispanic times to the present.
Menchaca uses the concept of racialization to describe the process through which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. authorities constructed racial status hierarchies that marginalized Mexicans of color and restricted their rights of land ownership. She traces this process from the Spanish colonial period and the introduction of slavery through racial laws affecting Mexican Americans into the late twentieth-century. This re-viewing of familiar history through the lens of race recovers Blacks as important historical actors, links Indians and the mission system in the Southwest to the Mexican American present, and reveals the legal and illegal means by which Mexican Americans lost their land grants.
The refugee is conventionally considered a powerless figure, eagerly cast aside by both migrant and host communities. In his book, The Refugee Aesthetic, Timothy August investigates how and why a number of Southeast Asian American artists and writers have recently embraced the figure of the refugee as a particularly transformative position. He explains how these artists, theorists, critics, and culture-makers reconstruct their place in the American imagination by identifying and critiquing the underlying structures of power that create refugees in the contemporary world.
August looks at the outside forces that shape refugee representation and how these expressions are received. He considers the visual legacy of the Southeast Asian refugee experience by analyzing music videos, graphic novels, and refugee artwork. August also examines the power of refugee literature, showing how and why Southeast Asian American writers look to the refugee position to disentangle their complicated aesthetic legacy.
Arguing that “aesthetics” should be central to the conceptualization of critical refugee studies, August shows how representational structures can galvanize or marginalize refugees, depending on how refugee aesthetics are used and circulated.
A new history reveals how the rise of the Latino vote has redrawn the political map and what it portends for the future of American politics.
The impact of the Latino vote is a constant subject of debate among pundits and scholars. Will it sway elections? And how will the political parties respond to the growing number of voters who identify as Latino? A more basic and revealing question, though, is how the Latino vote was forged—how U.S. voters with roots in Latin America came to be understood as a bloc with shared interests. In The Rise of the Latino Vote, Benjamin Francis-Fallon shows how this diverse group of voters devised a common political identity and how the rise of the Latino voter has transformed the electoral landscape.
Latino political power is a recent phenomenon. It emerged on the national scene during the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, when Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American activists, alongside leaders in both the Democratic and the Republican parties, began to conceive and popularize a pan-ethnic Hispanic identity. Despite the increasing political potential of a unified Latino vote, many individual voters continued to affiliate more with their particular ethnic communities than with a broader Latino constituency. The search to resolve this contradiction continues to animate efforts to mobilize Hispanic voters and define their influence on the American political system.
The “Spanish-speaking vote” was constructed through deliberate action; it was not simply demographic growth that led the government to recognize Hispanics as a national minority group, ushering in a new era of multicultural politics. As we ponder how a new generation of Latino voters will shape America’s future, Francis-Fallon uncovers the historical forces behind the changing face of America.
Several contributors illuminate ways that Latinos and Asians were historically racialized: by U.S. occupiers of Puerto Rico and the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, by public health discourses and practices in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles, by anthropologists collecting physical data—height, weight, head measurements—from Chinese Americans to show how the American environment affected “foreign” body types in the 1930s, and by Los Angeles public officials seeking to explain the alleged criminal propensities of Mexican American youth during the 1940s. Other contributors focus on the coalitions and tensions between Latinos and Asians in the context of the fight to integrate public schools and debates over political redistricting. One addresses masculinity, race, and U.S. imperialism in the literary works of Junot Díaz and Chang-rae Lee. Another looks at the passions, identifications, and charges of betrayal aroused by the sensationalized cases of Elián González, the young Cuban boy rescued off the shore of Florida, and Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos physicist accused of spying on the United States. Throughout this volume contributors interrogate many of the assumptions that underlie American and ethnic studies even as they signal the need for a research agenda that expands the purview of both fields.
Contributors. Nicholas De Genova, Victor Jew, Andrea Levine, Natalia Molina, Gary Y. Okihiro, Crystal Parikh, Greg Robinson, Toni Robinson, Leland T. Saito
A classic work of African American cultural, social, and political thought by a forerunner of the Black Power movement
One of the leading writers of African American intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century, Harold Cruse first came to international attention in 1967 with the publication of his influential and inflammatory book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. This fiercely opinionated and deeply informed critique of both integrationism and black nationalism established Cruse as a bold new voice on race and resistance in America.
First published in the wake of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual’s success, Rebellion or Revolution? collects reviews and essays Cruse wrote between 1950 and 1966, examining the relevance of such figures as James Baldwin, Booker T. Washington, Albert Camus, and Josephine Baker, as well as such subjects as Marxism and the African American community, the economics of black nationalism, and the emerging Black Power movement. Rebellion or Revolution? contains a number of significant writings not available elsewhere.Now, with a new foreword by Cedric Johnson, this work finally emerges as both an essential document from a crucial moment in African American history and a road map to the origins and evolution of Cruse’s critical thought, asserting its importance in today’s debates on race in America.This is distinguished historian John Hope Franklin's eloquent and forceful meditation on the persistent disparity between the goal of racial equality in America and the facts of discrimination.
In a searing critique of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin shows that this spokesman for democracy did not include African Americans among those "created equal." Franklin chronicles the events of the nineteenth century that solidified inequality in America and shows how emancipation dealt only with slavery, not with inequality.
In the twentieth century, America finally confronted the fact that equality is indivisible: it must not be divided so that it is extended to some at the expense of others. Once this indivisibility is accepted, Franklin charges, America faces the monumental task of overcoming its long heritage of inequality.
Racial Equality in America is a powerful reminder that our history is more than a record of idealized democratic traditions and institutions. It is a dramatic message to all Americans, calling them to know their history and themselves.
Few concepts evoke the twentieth century’s record of war, genocide, repression, and extremism more powerfully than the idea of totalitarianism. Today, studies of the subject are usually confined to discussions of Europe’s collapse in World War II or to comparisons between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In Race and the Totalitarian Century, Vaughn Rasberry parts ways with both proponents and detractors of these normative conceptions in order to tell the strikingly different story of how black American writers manipulated the geopolitical rhetoric of their time.
During World War II and the Cold War, the United States government conscripted African Americans into the fight against Nazism and Stalinism. An array of black writers, however, deflected the appeals of liberalism and its antitotalitarian propaganda in the service of decolonization. Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, C. L. R. James, John A. Williams, and others remained skeptical that totalitarian servitude and democratic liberty stood in stark opposition. Their skepticism allowed them to formulate an independent perspective that reimagined the antifascist, anticommunist narrative through the lens of racial injustice, with the United States as a tyrannical force in the Third World but also as an ironic agent of Asian and African independence.
Bringing a new interpretation to events such as the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, Rasberry’s bird’s-eye view of black culture and politics offers an alternative history of the totalitarian century.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press