For more than forty years, Helen M. Stummer has captured images depicting the dignity, humanity, and suffering of people living in conditions of poverty. Her efforts taught her to understand firsthand the resilience of people living in insufferable conditions. In her inspiring memoir, Risking Life and Lens, Stummer recounts her experiences as a socially-concerned documentary photographer whose passion for her work overcame her fears.
Stummer’s images, from the mean streets of Manhattan and Newark, New Jersey, to the back woods of Maine and the mountains of Guatemala, expose the myths of poverty and serve as a metaphor for her challenges in her own life. The 159 photographs reproduced here recount Stummer’s journey as an artist and her personal quest for truth.
Risking Life and Lens shares Stummer’s work and educational efforts and it provides valuable insights about race, class, and social justice—issues that continue to divide the country and the world. Her work has created change in both her own life and the lives of those who view it.
An essential guide to the role of microeconomic incentives, macro policies, and technological change in enhancing agriculture resilience.
Climate change and the recent COVID-19 pandemic have exposed the vulnerability of global agricultural supply and value chains. There is a growing awareness of the importance of interactions within and between these supply chains for understanding the performance of agricultural markets. This book presents a collection of research studies that develop conceptual models and empirical analyses of risk resilience and vulnerability in supply chains. The chapters emphasize the roles played by microeconomic incentives, macroeconomic policies, and technological change in contributing to supply chain performance. The studies range widely, considering for example how agent-based modeling and remote sensing data can be used to assess the impact of shocks, and how recent shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the African Swine fever in China affected agricultural labor markets, the supply chain for meat products, and the food retailing sector. A recurring theme is the transformation of agricultural supply chains and the volatility of food systems in response to microeconomic shocks. The chapters not only present new findings but also point to important directions for future research.
Until about twenty years ago, the consensus view on the cause of financial-system distress was fairly simple: a run on one bank could easily turn to a panic involving runs on all banks, destroying some and disrupting the financial system. Since then, however, a series of events—such as emerging-market debt crises, bond-market meltdowns, and the Long-Term Capital Management episode—has forced a rethinking of the risks facing financial institutions and the tools available to measure and manage these risks.
The Risks of Financial Institutions examines the various risks affecting financial institutions and explores a variety of methods to help institutions and regulators more accurately measure and forecast risk. The contributors--from academic institutions, regulatory organizations, and banking--bring a wide range of perspectives and experience to the issue. The result is a volume that points a way forward to greater financial stability and better risk management of financial institutions.
In February 1990 assailants murdered Kenya’s distinguished Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Robert Ouko. The horror of the attack, the images of his mutilated and burned corpse, the evidence of a notorious cover-up, and the revelations of the pressures, conflicts, and fears he faced in his last weeks have engaged Kenya’s publics for years. The Risks of Knowledge minutely examines the multiple and unfinished investigations into the crime.
Among the probes was an extensive 1990 inquiry organized by a New Scotland Yard team invited to Kenya by the government, as well as an open public commission of inquiry appointed by President Daniel arap Moi. The commission ran for seventeen months in 1990-91 before the president shut it down. International and Kenyan unrest over Ouko’s brutal death brought increasing attention to corruption and violence associated with the Moi government, leading in late 1991 to multiparty politics and in December 2002 to the elections that ended the Moi era.
This powerfully argued book raises important issues about the production of knowledge and the politics of memory that will interest a large interdisciplinary audience.
Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing is the first book-length study of the rhetoric inherent in and surrounding HIV testing. In addition to providing a history of HIV testing in the United States from 1985 to the present, J. Blake Scott explains how faulty arguments about testing’s power and effects have promoted unresponsive and even dangerous testing practices for so-called healthy subjects as well as those deemed risky.A new afterword to the paperback edition discusses changes in testing technology, treatments, and public health responses in the last ten years. The ultimate goal of Risky Rhetoric is to offer strategies to policy makers, HIV educators and test counselors, and other rhetors for developing more responsive and egalitarian testing-related rhetorics and practices.
The April 1988 murder and decapitation of twenty-three-year-old Michael Miley in rural southern Illinois horrified and enraged local residents and law enforcement officials, some of whom suspected the homicide was a hate crime. The Rita Nitz Story: A Life Without Parole is an in-depth personal investigation into Miley’s murder, for which Rita Nitz was convicted as an accomplice to life in prison. Born in 1959, Rita was thirty when she was sentenced in 1989. Her husband, Richard Nitz, was convicted of the murder. Detailing the crime and its aftermath, Larry L. Franklin uncovers a disturbing set of facts that illuminate a possible miscarriage of justice.
Was Rita Nitz involved in the murder of Michael Miley? Franklin doesn’t purport her guilt or her innocence but instead details the plight of a troubled woman who was a victim of sexual abuse and domestic violence at the hands of family members and spouses and who may also have been a victim of inadequate legal representation and a judicial system more interested in delivering the maximal punishment than in serving justice. Consulting with experts in prosecutorial conduct, jury psychology, and forensic evidence, Franklin discovered details that were withheld from the jury and the public during the trial in 1989. He also suggests other theories and names possible perpetrators involved in the murder that further imply shoddy police work and a tainted criminal investigation.
Drawing on numerous conversations with Rita at the Dwight Correctional Center in Illinois, Franklin divulges the story of Rita’s tumultuous youth and her three problematic marriages. He shows her to be a battered woman who didn’t fully understand the circumstances and behavior that led to her being implicated in such a hideous crime and who lacked the financial resources and emotional strength to navigate the legal tangle that entrapped her.
Franklin also points out the disparity in justice between Rita and Richard, who is up for parole in less than twenty years, while Rita remains sentenced to life without parole. In attempting to reach the truth about Miley’s murder, Franklin highlights abuses in the Illinois correctional system and disparities between the treatment of male and female convicts, sketching a blueprint that could improve law enforcement and justice in rural Illinois.
Ranging widely across time and geography, Rites of Place is to date the most comprehensive and diverse example of memory studies in the field of Russian and East European studies. Leading scholars consider how public rituals and the commemoration of historically significant sites facilitate a sense of community, shape cultural identity, and promote political ideologies. The aims of this volume take on unique importance in the context of the tumultuous events that have marked Eastern European history—especially the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, World War II, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. With essays on topics such as the founding of St. Petersburg, the battle of Borodino, the Katyn massacre, and the Lenin cult, this volume offers a rich discussion of the uses and abuses of memory in cultures where national identity has repeatedly undergone dramatic shifts and remains riven by internal contradictions.
Contributors: Paul Arthur, André Bazin, Mark A. Cohen, Serge Daney, Mary Ann Doane, James F. Lastra, Ivone Margulies, Abé Mark Normes, Brigitte Peucker, Richard Porton, Philip Rosen, Catherine Russell, James Schamus, Noa Steimatsky, Xiaobing Tang
The Islands of the Sun and the Moon in Bolivia's Lake Titicaca were two of the most sacred locations in the Inca empire. A pan-Andean belief held that they marked the origin place of the Sun and the Moon, and pilgrims from across the Inca realm made ritual journeys to the sacred shrines there. In this book, Brian Bauer and Charles Stanish explore the extent to which this use of the islands as a pilgrimage center during Inca times was founded on and developed from earlier religious traditions of the Lake Titicaca region.
Drawing on a systematic archaeological survey and test excavations in the islands, as well as data from historical texts and ethnography, the authors document a succession of complex polities in the islands from 2000 BC to the time of European contact in the 1530s AD. They uncover significant evidence of pre-Inca ritual use of the islands, which raises the compelling possibility that the religious significance of the islands is of great antiquity. The authors also use these data to address broader anthropological questions on the role of pilgrimage centers in the development of pre-modern states.
This book examines ritual practices and public festivals in the Otavalo and Cotacachi areas of northern Andean Ecuador's Imbabura province. Otavaleños are a unique group in that they maintain their traditional identity but also cultivate a cosmopolitanism through frequent international travel. Ritual Encountersexplores the moral, mythic, and modern crossroads at which Otavaleños stand, and how, at this junction, they come to define themselves as millennial people.
Michelle Wibbelsman shows that Otavaleños are deeply engaged in transnational mobility and in the cultural transformations that have resulted from Otavalan participation in global markets, international consumer trends, and technological developments. Rituals have persisted among this ethnic community as important processes for symbolically capturing and critically assessing cultural changes in the face of modern influences. As religious expression, political commentary, transcendental communication, moral judgment, and transformative experience, Otavalan rituals constitute enduring practices that affirm ethnic identities, challenge dominant narratives, and take issue with power inequalities behind hegemony. Ritual Encounters thus offers an appreciation of the modern and mythic community as a single and emergent condition.
Zinacantan, Chamula, and Chenalhó are neighboring Mayan communities situated in highland Chiapas, Mexico, near the city of San Cristóbal Las Casas. The inhabitants of the three communities speak dialects of the Tzotzil language. Five religious fiestas, celebrated by these communities in honor of their saints, provide the data for Victoria Bricker's comparative study of ritual humor.
In Chenalhó and Chamula performances of ritual humor are concentrated in the five-day period of a single fiesta, while in Zanacantan similar performances are distributed over threee fiestas. In these fiesta settings, performers in distinctive costumes make obscene and sacreligious remarks in the context of religious ritual. These performances are defined as ritual humor because they occur only in ritual settings.
Bricker's study constitutes a controlled cross-cultural comparison of ceremonial or ritual humor in its social and cultural setting. Much new information is provided in verbatim texts, recorded during actual fiesta performances. The study reveals that, although the three communities share a common pool of ritual symbols, they elaborate them differently in ritual humor. The study analyzes the symbolic expression of values, social organization, and interethnic relations.
Winner of the Ellii Kongas-Maranda Prize from the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society, 2003.
Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women preserves the precious remnants of a rich culture on the verge of extinction while affirming women's pivotal role in the health of their communities. Centered around extensive interviews with elders of the Sephardic communities of the former Ottoman Empire, this volume illuminates a fascinating complex of preventive and curative rituals conducted by women at home--rituals that ensured the physical and spiritual well-being of the community and functioned as a vital counterpart to the public rites conducted by men in the synagogues.
Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt take us into the homes and families of Sephardim in Turkey, Israel, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States to unravel the ancient practices of domestic healing: the network of blessings and curses tailored to every occasion of daily life; the beliefs and customs surrounding mal ojo (evil eye), espanto (fright), and echizo (witchcraft); and cures involving everything from herbs, oil, and sugar to the powerful mumia (mummy) made from dried bones of corpses.
For the Sephardim, curing an illness required discovering its spiritual cause, which might be unintentional thought or speech, accident, or magical incantation. The healing rituals of domesticated medicine provided a way of making sense of illness and a way of shaping behavior to fit the narrow constraints of a tightly structured community. Tapping a rich and irreplaceable vein of oral testimony, Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women offers fascinating insight into a culture where profound spirituality permeated every aspect of daily life.
Propitiating the supernatural forces that could grant bountiful crops or wipe out whole villages through natural disasters was a sacred duty in ancient Peruvian societies, as in many premodern cultures. Ritual sacrifices were considered necessary for this propitiation and for maintaining a proper reciprocal relationship between humans and the supernatural world.
The essays in this book examine the archaeological evidence for ancient Peruvian sacrificial offerings of human beings, animals, and objects, as well as the cultural contexts in which the offerings occurred, from around 2500 B.C. until Inca times just before the Spanish Conquest. Major contributions come from the recent archaeological fieldwork of Steve Bourget, Anita Cook, and Alana Cordy-Collins, as well as from John Verano's laboratory work on skeletal material from recent excavations. Mary Frame, who is a weaver as well as a scholar, offers rich new interpretations of Paracas burial garments, and Donald Proulx presents a fresh view of the nature of Nasca warfare. Elizabeth Benson's essay provides a summary of sacrificial practices.
Traditions of sacrifice exist in almost every human culture and often embody a society’s most meaningful religious and symbolic acts. Ritual violence was particularly varied and enduring in the prehistoric South American Andes, where human lives, animals, and material objects were sacrificed in secular rites or as offerings to the divine. Spectacular discoveries of sacrificial sites containing the victims of violent rituals have drawn ever-increasing attention to ritual sacrifice within Andean archaeology. Responding to this interest, this volume provides the first regional overview of ritual killing on the pre-Hispanic north coast of Peru, where distinct forms and diverse trajectories of ritual violence developed during the final 1,800 years of prehistory.
Presenting original research that blends empirical approaches, iconographic interpretations, and contextual analyses, the contributors address four linked themes—the historical development and regional variation of north coast sacrifice from the early first millennium AD to the European conquest; a continuum of ritual violence that spans people, animals, and objects; the broader ritual world of sacrifice, including rites both before and after violent offering; and the use of diverse scientific tools, archaeological information, and theoretical interpretations to study sacrifice. This research proposes a wide range of new questions that will shape the research agenda in the coming decades, while fostering a nuanced, scientific, and humanized approach to the archaeology of ritual violence that is applicable to archaeological contexts around the world.
Trick-or-treating. Flower girls. Bedtime stories. Bar and bat mitvah. In a nation of increasing ethnic, familial, and technological complexity, the patterns of children's lives both persist and evolve. This book considers how such events shape identity and transmit cultural norms, asking such questions as:
* How do immigrant families negotiate between old traditions and new?
* What does it mean when children engage in ritual insults and sick jokes?
* How does playing with dolls reflect and construct feelings of racial identity?
* Whatever happened to the practice of going to the Saturday matinee to see a Western?
* What does it mean for a child to be (in the words of one bride) "flower-girl material"? How does that role
cement a girl's bond to her family and initiate her into society?
* What is the function of masks and costumes, and why do children yearn for these accoutrements of disguise?
Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives suggests the manifold ways in which America's children come to know their society and themselves.
A timely consideration of the meaning of transnational cultural interactions today
In an era of increasing globalization, the cultural and the international have borders as permeable as most nations’s—and an understanding of one requires making sense of the other. Foregrounding the role of mediation—understood here as a site of representation, transformation, and pluralization—the authors engage two specific questions: How might we make theoretical and practical sense of transnational cultural interactions? And how are we to understand the ways in which the sites of mediation represent, transform, and remediate internationals? Accordingly, the authors consider international issues like security, development, political activism, and the war against terrorism through the lens of cultural practices such as traveling through airports, exhibiting art and photography, logging on to the Internet, and spinning news stories.
Contributors: Robin Brown, U of Leeds; David Campbell, U of Newcastle upon Tyne; Michael Dillon, U of Lancaster; Debbie Lisle, Queen’s U, Belfast; Moya Lloyd, Queen’s U, Belfast; Timothy W. Luke, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State U; Patricia L. Price, Florida International U; Jayne Rodgers, U of Leeds; Marysia Zalewski, Queen’s U, Belfast."In the remoteness of their mountain retreat, the herders of Chillihuani, Peru, recognize that respect for others is the central and most significant element of all thought and action," observes Inge Bolin. "Without respect, no society, no civilization, can flourish for long. Without respect, humanity is doomed and so is the earth, sustainer of all life."
In this beautifully written ethnography, Bolin describes the rituals of respect that maintain harmonious relations among people, the natural world, and the realm of the gods in an isolated Andean community of llama and alpaca herders that reaches up to 16,500 feet. Bolin was the first foreigner to visit Chillihuani, and she was permitted to participate in private family rituals, as well as public ceremonies. In turn, she allows the villagers to explain the meaning of their rituals in their own words.
From these first-hand experiences, Bolin offers an intimate portrait of an annual ritual cycle that dates back to Inca and pre-Inca times, including the ancient Pukllay; weddings; the Fiesta de Santiago, with its horse races on the top of the world; and Peru's Independence Day, when the Rituals of Respect for elders and young people alike are carried out within male and female hierarchies reminiscent of Inca times.
Rituals of the Past explores the various approaches archaeologists use to identify ritual in the material record and discusses the influence ritual had on the formation, reproduction, and transformation of community life in past Andean societies. A diverse group of established and rising scholars from across the globe investigates how ritual influenced, permeated, and altered political authority, economic production, shamanic practice, landscape cognition, and religion in the Andes over a period of three thousand years.
Contributors deal with theoretical and methodological concerns including non-human and human agency; the development and maintenance of political and religious authority, ideology, cosmologies, and social memory; and relationships with ritual action. The authors use a diverse array of archaeological, ethnographic, and linguistic data and historical documents to demonstrate the role ritual played in prehispanic, colonial, and post-colonial Andean societies throughout the regions of Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. By providing a diachronic and widely regional perspective, Rituals of the Past shows how ritual is vital to understanding many aspects of the formation, reproduction, and change of past lifeways in Andean societies.
Contributors: Sarah Abraham, Carlos Angiorama, Florencia Avila, Camila Capriata Estrada, David Chicoine, Daniel Contreras, Matthew Edwards, Francesca Fernandini, Matthew Helmer, Hugo Ikehara, Enrique Lopez-Hurtado, Jerry Moore, Axel Nielsen, Yoshio Onuki, John Rick, Mario Ruales, Koichiro Shibata, Hendrik Van Gijseghem, Rafael Vega-Centeno, Verity Whalen
Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize
In The Rival, Sara Wallace takes her readers on an intimate journey through a woman’s solitary, surreal rural childhood and her brutal, sexually fraught first marriage to the conflicted redemption she finds in motherhood and a second chance at love. In this debut poetry collection, Wallace reveals how closely emotional devastation and transcendence can coexist. The Rival is sensuous, darkly humorous, and frequently luminous in its unflinching exploration of the inner life.
Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800 was first published in 1976. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This volume presents an account of European expansion in Asia through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - the story of the rivalries of the East India companies and the growth of British maritime dominance which forged the Pax Britannica destined to keep Asia under European control until 1941. The author explains that it is called Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient because the few thousands of Europeans who built these empires thought of themselves primarily as merchants rather than as rulers.
The book consists of two parts, the first, narrative, the second, interpretive. The story of European commercial activity in the East is told in three chapters, the first ending with the Dutch conquest of Ceylon in 1656 and the reorganization and revival of the English East India Company as a permanent joint stock company under Oliver Cromwell's charter of 1657. The second chapter ends with the European peace settlement at Utrecht in 1713, and the third with the establishment of British preponderance in the East India trade at the close of the eighteenth century.
In the second part the author discusses the organization and structure of East India companies, the commodities in East India trade, the nature, growth, and development of the "country trade," and the relations between Europeans and Asians with some reference to the growth of European knowledge of Asia and the influence of the European presence in Asia on social history in both Asia and Europe.
Taiwan has been depicted as an island facing the incessant threat of forcible unification with the People's Republic of China. Why, then, has Taiwan spent more than three decades pouring capital and talent into China?
In award-winning Rival Partners, Wu Jieh-min follows the development of Taiwanese enterprises in China over twenty-five years and provides fresh insights. The geopolitical shift in Asia beginning in the 1970s and the global restructuring of value chains since the 1980s created strong incentives for Taiwanese entrepreneurs to rush into China despite high political risks and insecure property rights. Taiwanese investment, in conjunction with Hong Kong capital, laid the foundation for the world’s factory to flourish in the southern province of Guangdong, but official Chinese narratives play down Taiwan’s vital contribution. It is hard to imagine the Guangdong model without Taiwanese investment, and, without the Guangdong model, China’s rise could not have occurred. Going beyond the received wisdom of the “China miracle” and “Taiwan factor,” Wu delineates how Taiwanese businesspeople, with the cooperation of local officials, ushered global capitalism into China. By partnering with its political archrival, Taiwan has benefited enormously, while helping to cultivate an economic superpower that increasingly exerts its influence around the world.
The manuscript for Rivall Friendship was first acquired by the Newberry Library in 1937. At the time of the acquisition, the author of this seventeenth-century romance was anonymous. Scholar Jean R. Brink now suggests, based on dating of the manuscript and her analysis of its feminist themes, that the author was a woman. Specifically, Brink attributes the text to Bridget Manningham, who was the older sister of Thomas Manningham, a Jacobean and Caroline bishop, and the granddaughter of John Manningham, a diarist who recorded performances of Shakespeare’s plays.
Rivall Friendship is a post–English Civil War romance that examines proto-feminist issues, such as patriarchal dominance in the family and marriage. Manningham is scrupulous about maintaining verisimilitude, and unlike more fantastical romances of the period that feature monsters, giants, and magic, this text aspires to a level of probability in its historical and geographical details. The text of Rivall Friendship is accessible to most modern readers, particularly to students and scholars accustomed to working with seventeenth-century texts.
Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history. These rivers can shape a city’s success or cause its destruction. At the same time, city-building reshapes rivers and their landscapes. Cities have harnessed, modified, and engineered rivers, altering ecologies and creating new landscapes in the process of urbanization. Rivers are also shaped by the development of cities as urban landscapes, just as the cities are shaped by their relationship to the river.
In the river city, the city river is a dynamic contributor to the urban landscape with its flow of urban economies, geographies, and cultures. Yet we have rarely given these urban landscapes their due. Building on emerging interest in the resilience of cities, this book and the original symposium consider river cities and city rivers to explore how histories have shaped the present and how they might inform our visions of the future.
India’s sacred Ganga River is arguably one of the most iconic sites for worship, with a continuity of rituals for the living and the dead that span over two millennia. Along the river, from high in the Himalaya to the vast plains below, people gather daily to worship the Ganga through prayer and song. But large government-sponsored dams threaten to upend these practices.
In River Dialogues, Georgina Drew offers a detailed ethnographic engagement with the social movements contesting hydroelectric development on the Ganga. The book examines the complexity of the cultural politics that, on the one hand, succeeded in influencing an unprecedented reversal of government plans for three contested hydroelectric projects, and how, on the other hand, this decision sparked ripples of discontent after being paired with the declaration of a conservation zone where the projects were situated.
The book follows the work of women who were initially involved in efforts to stop the disputed projects. After looking to their discourses and actions, Drew argues for the use of a political ecology analysis that incorporates the everyday practice and everyday religious connections that animated the cultural politics of development. Drew offers a nuanced understanding of the struggles that communities enact to assert their ways of knowing and caring for resources that serves as an example for others critically engaging with the growing global advocacy of the “green economy” model for environmental stewardship.
Beginning in the spring of 1969, Huckleberry Finn inspired a question: Could you build a raft, float down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and on the way learn something about America and its peoples? Will Bagley, a vagrant longhair and future prize-winning western historian, and his friends could, and did. Now, a half century after the adventure, Bagley tells his story.
Case studies explore practical applications in different parts of the world, highlighting approaches to the use of integrative river science, measures of success, and steps that could be taken to improve performance in future efforts.
Winner, William P. Clements Prize, Best Non-Fiction Book on Southwestern America, 2004
Not quite the United States and not quite Mexico, La Junta de los Rios straddles the border between Texas and Chihuahua, occupying the basin formed by the conjunction of the Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the Chihuahuan Desert, ranking in age and dignity with the Anasazi pueblos of New Mexico.
In the first comprehensive history of the region, Jefferson Morgenthaler traces the history of La Junta de los Rios from the formation of the Mexico-Texas border in the mid-19th century to the 1997 ambush shooting of teenage goatherd Esquiel Hernandez by U.S. Marines performing drug interdiction in El Polvo, Texas. "Though it is scores of miles from a major highway, I found natives, soldiers, rebels, bandidos, heroes, scoundrels, drug lords, scalp hunters, medal winners, and mystics," writes Morgenthaler. "I found love, tragedy, struggle, and stories that have never been told." In telling the turbulent history of this remote valley oasis, he examines the consequences of a national border running through a community older than the invisible line that divides it.
The death of her father begins Dorothy Weil’s search for what causes the family’s “spinning of in all directions like the pieces of Chaos.” She embarks on a river odyssey, traveling the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers by steamboat, towboat, and even an old-fashioned flatboat. The river brings her family back, as she records the stories of her fellow “river rats”: steamboat veterans, deckhands, captains, and cooks.
The River Home takes the reader into a world few ever glimpse, that of America’s riverboats. In the fast-paced narrative, with incisive characterizations and dialogue, the author introduces us to this vivid milieu and a gallery of fascinating people. We meet her father, a “wild river man from the Kentucky hills,” her mother, “a proper girl from a Cincinnati Dutch clan,” and her brother, a fourth-generation river man, as well as the artists and academics she meets in her adult life.
Weil’s voice is clear and wry, as well as poetic, bringing out both the sadness and joys of a family torn by mismatched backgrounds. Her themes speak to all: the confusion brought by family conflict, the strength of family love no matter how troubled the relationships, the mortality we all face, the importance of where we come from and where we go.
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.
As the site of several miracles in the Jewish and Christian traditions, the Jordan is one of the world’s holiest rivers. It is also the major political and symbolic border contested by Israelis and Palestinians. Combining biblical and folkloric studies with historical geography, Rachel Havrelock explores how the complex religious and mythological representations of the river have shaped the current conflict in the Middle East.
Winner of the SHEAR Book Prize
Honorable Mention, Avery O. Craven Award
“Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery as powerfully.”
—Ari Kelman, Times Literary Supplement
“[One] of the most impressive works of American history in many years.”
—The Nation
“An important, arguably seminal, book…Always trenchant and learned.”
—Wall Street Journal
A landmark history, by the author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Broken Heart of America, that shows how slavery fueled Southern capitalism.
When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an “empire for liberty” populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reconsideration dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War.
Walter Johnson deftly traces the connections between the planters’ pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton’s dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale.
But at the center of the story are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton—who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream.
“Shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the 19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on enslaved labor.”
—A. O. Scott, New York Times
“River of Dark Dreams delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write ‘history from the bottom up.’”
—Maya Jasanoff, New York Review of Books
Diverse influences transformed the borderlands as Spain, Mexico, and the United States competed for control of the region. Indian slaves joined Spanish society; Mexicans allied with Indians to defend river communities; Anglo Americans and Mexicans intermarried and collaborated; and women sued to confront spousal abuse and to secure divorces. Drawn into multiple conflicts along the border, Mexican nationals and Mexican Texans (tejanos) took advantage of their transnational social relations and ambiguous citizenship to escape criminal prosecution, secure political refuge, and obtain economic opportunities. To confront the racialization of their cultural practices and their increasing criminalization, tejanos claimed citizenship rights within the United States and, in the process, created a new identity.
Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
Since 1998, Alexander Sebastian Dent has analyzed rural music in the state of São Paulo, interviewing and spending time with listeners, musicians, songwriters, journalists, record-company owners, and radio hosts. Dent not only describes the production and reception of this music, he also explains why the genre experienced such tremendous growth as Brazil transitioned from an era of dictatorship to a period of intense neoliberal reform. Dent argues that rural genres reflect a widespread anxiety that change has been too radical and has come too fast. In defining their music as rural, Brazil’s country musicians—whose work circulates largely in cities—are criticizing an increasingly inescapable urban life characterized by suppressed emotions and an inattentiveness to the past. Their performances evoke a river of tears flowing through a landscape of loss—of love, of life in the countryside, and of man’s connections to the natural world.
His name is inextricably linked with a single work, A Sand County Almanac, a classic of natural history literature and the conservationist's bible. This book brings together the best of Leopold's essays.
A fully revised and updated edition of Gary Nichols’ widely used guide to river running in Utah. Major changes have occurred on Big and Little Cottonwood Creeks, which have many new drops with dangerous hydraulics. This edition accounts for these and other alterations in the state’s waterways over the past fifteen years. Also, several of the original river access points are now on private land. Alternative access points are presented and users are alerted to the necessity of requesting permission. All this and much more will once again make A River Runners’ Guide to Utah and Adjacent Areas the one source for vital and reliable information on more than ninety river trips for beginner and expert alike. It includes:
-Over 90 river trips with descriptions and maps
-Location of access and take-out points
-Instructions for all skill levels
-Ratings of all waterways by levels of difficulty
-Identification of danger areas and obstacles
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