It has been 27 years since the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the history of the conflict, its consequences, and long-term implications for the politics and lives of its citizens has remained a source of interest for scholars across the globe and across disciplines. This scholarship has included works by historians and political scientists seeking to explain the war’s origins with a view to Bosnia’s traditional multi-ethnic character and background. The country has been used as a case study in state- and peace-building, as well as to study the implications of ongoing transitional justice processes. Other scholars within the fields of human rights and genocide studies have focused on documenting the war crimes committed against the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the conflict and the mass-scale displacement of people, mostly Bosnian Muslims, from their homes and homelands. International law scholars have carried this work further, tracing the development of courts created in response to war crimes in Bosnia and their effectiveness in generating justice for victims.

Diaspora communities have formed in North America (especially in St. Louis), Europe, and Australia because of war and displacement, and have themselves become a considerable topic of study spanning the disciplines of anthropology, migration studies, political science, memory studies, conflict and security studies, psychology, and geography.

This volume seeks to illuminate how Bosnian migrant and diaspora scholars are contributing to the development of Bosnian Studies. The authors included in this volume are either writing from their (new) home bases in Australia, Austria, Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others, or they have returned to Bosnia after a period of migration. Their chapters have distinct entry points of inquiry, demonstrating how scholars have integrated Bosnia as a theme across the range of disciplines in which they are situated. The selections included in the volume range from literary analysis to personal memoirs of the conflict, from studies of heritage and identity to political science analysis of diaspora voting, to genocide studies and questions of (or lack of) ethics in the growing field of Bosnian Studies.

In the late nineteenth century, a new era began in American urban history, characterized by an explosion of both the populations and the proportions of cities, obliterating their traditional social and physical characteristics. Commercial businesses relocated, slums emerged around the core, and new residential areas were established along the periphery. The period was one of extreme disorder—labor and ethnic unrest, election violence, rising crime rates—but it was also a time of political innovation and civic achievement.

In documenting the changes Cincinnati experienced during  the Progressive Era, Zane L. Miller provides a clear perspective on the processes of urbanization that transformed the American city. His focus is political because politics provided continuity amid the diversity of city life. The most important aspect of political continuity in Cincinnati and in other cities was "bossism," often depicted as an example of corruption, but which was in many cities part of the quest for a new urban order. In Cincinnati, Boss George B. Cox's machine was a response to the disorder of the times; interestingly, the machine actually helped to control disorder, paving the way for later reforms. Miller carefully explores both the nature and the significance of bossism, showing how it and municipal reform were both essential components of the modern urban political system.

Originally published in 1968, Boss Cox's Cincinnati is considered a classic in the field of urban studies.

Four men played leading roles in the political drama that unfolded in South Texas during the first decades of this century:

• James B. Wells, who ruled as boss of Cameron County and served as leading conservative spokesman of the Democratic Party in Texas;
• Archer (Archie) Parr, whose ruthless tactics and misuse of public funds in Duval County established him as one of the most notoriously corrupt politicians in Texas history;
• Manuel Guerra, Mexican American rancher and merchant whose domination of Starr County mirrored the rule of his Anglo counterparts in the border region;
• John Nance Garner, who served the interests of these bosses of South Texas as he set forth on the road that would lead him to the United States vice-presidency.

Evan Anders's Boss Rule in South Texas tells the story of these men and the county rings they shaped in South Texas during the Progressive Era.

Power was the byword of the bosses of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and Anders explores the sources of that power. These politicos did not shirk from using corrupt and even violent means to attain their goals, but Anders demonstrates that their keen sensitivity to the needs of their diverse constituency was key to their long-term success. Patronage and other political services were their lifeblood, and the allies gained by these ranged from developers and businessmen to ranchers and Mexican Americans, wealthy and poor.

Besides examining the workings of the Democratic machines of four South Texas counties, Anders explores the role of the Hispanic populace in shaping the politics of the border region, the economic development of the Lower Rio Grande Valley and its political repercussions, the emergence and nature of progressive movements at both local and state levels, and the part played by the Texas Rangers in supporting bossism in South Texas.

At the opening of the twentieth century, labor strife repeatedly racked the nation. Union organization and collective bargaining briefly looked like a promising avenue to stability. But both employers and many middle-class observers remained wary of unions exercising independent power.

Vilja Hulden reveals how this tension provided the opening for pro-business organizations to shift public attention from concerns about inequality and dangerous working conditions to a belief that unions trampled on an individual's right to work. Inventing the term closed shop, employers mounted what they called an open-shop campaign to undermine union demands that workers at unionized workplaces join the union. Employer organizations lobbied Congress to resist labor's proposals as tyrannical, brought court cases to taint labor's tactics as illegal, and influenced newspaper coverage of unions. While employers were not a monolith nor all-powerful, they generally agreed that unions were a nuisance. Employers successfully leveraged money and connections to create perceptions of organized labor that still echo in our discussions of worker rights.

From its origins as a Puritan settlement on the Shawmut Peninsula to the multicultural capital of the knowledge industry that it is today, the city of Boston has played a significant role in our nation's history. In this book, the preeminent historian of Boston, Thomas H. O'Connor, takes readers on a delightful tour of the city, past and present. Drawing on lifelong acquaintance as a native son and scholar, O'Connor has assembled a personal, informal, and eclectic series of essays about Boston's people, places, and events.

Along the way you will meet figures of national significance and local heroes (or rogues), from John Adams and Phillis Wheatley to "Honey Fitz" and the Brink's gang; visit spaces sacred and profane, from the African Meeting House and Holy Cross Cathedral to Filene's Basement and the L Street Bathhouse; learn about institutions of civic importance and local color, from the Museum of Fine Arts and Massachusetts General Hospital to private clubs and nightspots; and be enlightened about the lore surrounding such quintessentially Boston topics as baked beans, the Curse of the Bambino, and the Steaming Kettle.

Boston A to Z wears its learning lightly but never fails to inform as it entertains. While celebrating some of Boston's finest achievements, it doesn't shy away from darker episodes. Longtime residents will find enlightenment about familiar and arcane aspects of their city, and visitors or newcomers will enjoy an engaging introduction to the life, culture, and history of Boston.

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION.

In this urbane and delightful book, Walter Muir Whitehill follows the course of Boston's history, describing the changing face of the city and the society that changed with it, through more than three hundred years. This edition includes a chapter describing the major changes of the city since 1958, as well as new pictures. Generously illustrated, written with a knowledge of and affection for a great city that are visible on every page, this book speaks equally to those who know Boston well and those who are discovering the city for the first time.

This urbane and delightful book covering more than 300 years of the course of Boston's history has now been enlarged with an account of the city's new urban design, architecture, and historic preservation and is richly illustrated with 32 additional photographs and drawings. In the last three decades momentous changes have visited this colonial city made modern. Lawrence Kennedy portrays the Boston that preserved much of the intimacy of the remembered place while creating a dramatic new skyline. Boston has been remarkably transformed while keeping human the features of a beloved city.

Donna Merwick rejects the usual assumption that Boston Catholicism is, definitively, Irish Catholicism. In her penetrating study of three distinct generations of Boston priests in the late nineteenth century, the author shows that Irish Catholicism met with steady opposition. Her account of the struggle of Boston clerics and intellectuals to relate their faith to their experiences in the changing city provides a new interpretation of Boston Catholic culture.

In the 1840s Catholic influence in Boston was minimal and, therefore, accepted. The clergy, like other Bostonians, took pride in the city's history and colonial traditions. In measuring the impact of the massive Irish-Catholic immigration of the 1850s upon this first group of priests, the author traces in part the desperate efforts of Archbishop John J. Williams to maintain Boston's genteel traditions. The character of the clergy changed from the first generation, in which priests wrote novels and radical editorials, to a second generation, in which the influence of European Catholicism was strengthened. Immigrant priests and their Irish parishioners eventually outnumbered the Yankee Catholics, but they nevertheless failed to win genuine leadership in the diocese.

A third group of priests, emerging in the 1890s under the leadership of Cardinal William O'Connell, displaced not only two generations of clergymen, but also two ways of life: one which sought to leave a legacy of admiration for the Boston Protestant heritage, and one which never understood Boston and tried to replace its cultural ways with something Irish, European, and Jansenistic. O'Connell, who had the Progressive's instinct for organization, imposed a kind of intellectual martial law on the clergy which discouraged, even punished, nonconformity. It is only at this point that it becomes reasonable to consider the traditional view that Boston Catholic thought is monolithic.

As fresh today as when it was first published a half-century ago, Boston’s Immigrants illuminates the history of a particular city and an important phase of the American experience. Focusing on the life of people from the perspective of the social historian, the book explores a wide range of subjects: peasant society and the cause of European migration, population growth and industrial development, the ideology of progress and Catholic thought, and urban politics and the dynamic of prejudice. A generation of students and scholars has profited from its insights, and general readers have enjoyed its lively style. A new Preface by the author reflects upon the book’s intellectual origins.

As fresh in 1991 as when it first published a half-century ago, Boston's Immigrants illuminates the history of a particular city and an important phase of the American experience. Focusing on the life of people from the perspective of the social historian, the book explores a wide range of subjects: peasants society and the cause of European migration, population growth and industrial development, the ideology of progress and Catholic thought, and urban politics and the dynamic of prejudice. A generation of students and scholars has profited from its insights, and general readers have enjoyed its lively style. A new preface by the author reflects upon the book's intellectual origins.

George Washington Prize Finalist
Winner of the Society of the Cincinnati Prize

“Fascinating… Hinderaker’s meticulous research shows that the Boston Massacre was contested from the beginning… [Its] meanings have plenty to tell us about America’s identity, past and present.”
—Wall Street Journal

On the night of March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd gathered in front of Boston’s Custom House, killing five people. Denounced as an act of unprovoked violence and villainy, the event that came to be known as the Boston Massacre is one of the most famous and least understood incidents in American history. Eric Hinderaker revisits this dramatic confrontation, examining in forensic detail the facts of that fateful night, the competing narratives that molded public perceptions at the time, and the long campaign to transform the tragedy into a touchstone of American identity.

“Hinderaker brilliantly unpacks the creation of competing narratives around a traumatic and confusing episode of violence. With deft insight, careful research, and lucid writing, he shows how the bloodshed in one Boston street became pivotal to making and remembering a revolution that created a nation.”
—Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions

“Seldom does a book appear that compels its readers to rethink a signal event in American history. It’s even rarer…to accomplish so formidable a feat in prose of sparkling clarity and grace. Boston’s Massacre is a gem.”
—Fred Anderson, author of Crucible of War

As Boston approaches its four-hundredth anniversary, it is remarkable that it still maintains its historic character despite constant development. The fifty buildings featured in this book all pre-date 1800 and illustrate Boston’s early history. This is the first book to survey Boston’s fifty oldest buildings and does so through an approachable narrative which will appeal to nonarchitects and those new to historic preservation. Beginning with a map of the buildings’ locations and an overview of the historic preservation movement in Boston, the book looks at the fifty buildings in order from oldest to most ­recent. Geographically, the majority of the buildings are located within the downtown area of Boston along the Freedom Trail and within easy walking distance from the core of the city. This makes the book an ideal guide for tourists, and residents of the city will also find it interesting as it includes numerous properties in the surrounding neighborhoods. The buildings span multiple uses from homes to churches and warehouses to restaurants. Each chapter features a building, a narrative focusing on its historical significance, and the efforts made to preserve it over time. Full ­color photos and historical drawings illustrate each building and area. Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them presents the ideals of historic preservation in an approachable and easy­-to-­read manner appropriate for the broadest audience. Perfect for history lovers, architectural enthusiasts, and tourists alike. 

Throughout his life, James Boswell struggled to fashion a clear account of himself, but try as he might, he could not reconcile the truths of his era with those of his religious upbringing. Boswell’s Enlightenment examines the conflicting credos of reason and faith, progress and tradition that pulled Boswell, like so many eighteenth-century Europeans, in opposing directions. In the end, the life of the man best known for writing Samuel Johnson’s biography was something of a patchwork affair. As Johnson himself understood: “That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL.”

Few periods in Boswell’s life better crystallize this internal turmoil than 1763–1765, the years of his Grand Tour and the focus of Robert Zaretsky’s thrilling intellectual adventure. From the moment Boswell sailed for Holland from the port of Harwich, leaving behind on the beach his newly made friend Dr. Johnson, to his return to Dover from Calais a year and a half later, the young Scot was intent on not just touring historic and religious sites but also canvassing the views of the greatest thinkers of the age. In his relentless quizzing of Voltaire and Rousseau, Hume and Johnson, Paoli and Wilkes on topics concerning faith, the soul, and death, he was not merely a celebrity-seeker but—for want of a better term—a truth-seeker. Zaretsky reveals a life more complex and compelling than suggested by the label “Johnson’s biographer,” and one that 250 years later registers our own variations of mind.

An original call to reorient architecture around our relationship to plants.
 
When we look at trees, we see a form of natural architecture, and yet we have seemingly always exploited trees to make new buildings of our own. Whereas a tree creates its own structure, humans generally destroy other things to build, with increasingly disastrous consequences. In Botanical Architecture, Paul Dobraszczyk looks closely at how elements of plants—seeds, roots, trunks, branches, leaves, flowers, and canopies—compare with and constitute human-made buildings.
 
Given the omnipresence of plant life in and around our structures, Dobraszczyk argues that we ought to build as much for plants as for ourselves, understanding that our lives are always totally dependent on theirs. Botanical Architecture offers a provocative and original take on the relationship between ecology and architecture.

A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past.
 
This book traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes of plant depiction emerged and ultimately gave rise to practices now recognized as central to modern botanical illustration. The author draws on centuries of remarkable and varied documentation from across Europe and the Mediterranean.
 
Lavishly illustrated, Botanical Icons marshals ample evidence for a dynamic and critical tradition of botanical inquiry and nature observation in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean. The author reveals that many of the critical practices characteristic of modern botanical illustrations began in premodern manuscript culture. Consequently, he demonstrates that the distinctions between pre- and early modern botanical illustration center more on the advent of print, the expansion of collections and documentation, and the narrowing of the range of accepted forms of illustration than on the invention of critical and observational practices exclusive to modernity.
 
Griebeler’s emphasis on continuity, intercultural collaboration, and the gradual transformation of Mediterranean traditions of critical botanical illustration persuasively counters previously prevalent narratives of rupture and Western European exceptionalism in the histories of art and science.

From Roman times to the present, knowledge of plants and their cultivation have exerted a deep impact on cultural changes. This book highlights the religious, artistic, political, and economic consequences of horticultural pursuits.

Far from a mere trade, horticulture profoundly affected Jewish and Persian mystical poetry and caused deep changes in Ottoman arts. It contributed to economic and political changes in Judea, Al Andalus, Japan, Yuan China, early modern Mexico, Europe, and the United States. This book explores the roles of peasants, botanists, horticulturists, nurserymen and gentlemen collectors in these developments, and concludes with a reflection on the future of horticulture in the present context of widespread environmental devastation and ecological uncertainty.

This book brings together an international body of scholars working on eighteenth-century botany within the context of imperial expansion. The eighteenth century saw widespread exploration, a tremendous increase in the traffic in botanical specimens, taxonomic breakthroughs, and horticultural experimentation. The contributors to this volume compare the impact of new developments and discoveries across several regions, broadening the geographical scope of their inquiries to encompass imperial powers that did not have overseas colonial possessions—such as the Russian, Ottoman, and Qing empires and the Tokugawa shogunate—as well as politically borderline regions such as South Africa, Yemen, and New Zealand.

The essays in this volume examine the botanical ambitions of eighteenth-century empires; the figure of the botanical explorer; the links between imperial ambition and the impulse to survey, map, and collect botanical specimens in “new” territories; and the relationships among botanical knowledge, self-representation, and material culture.

A poetry collection that employs intuition, humor, and celebration while seeking to break out of restrictive social structures. 
 
Mary Wilson’s Both, Apollo speaks from inside the bodies and binaries that so often act as constraints. It sometimes tries to negotiate its way out. It laments, celebrates, reasons, jokes, and occasionally begs. It runs into a wall and hugs it, offers it pizza, and speeds through grammars and cities until dizziness catapults it from the grid. It tries to queer the echoes of its language in the hope that a rhyme might break the logic of “either/or” and give rise to “both/and.”
 
Both, Apollo is a love poem to whatever has the grace to appear, quietly finding hope. Moments of humor and tenderness accompany the speaker with each act of crossing and circling back. The poems in Both, Apollo are constantly in flux, and Wilson’s lyricism acts as a teaching tool for using both the real and the imagination to guide us in moment-by-moment navigation of our world. 
 
Both, Apollo won the Omnidawn Chapbook contest, selected by Victoria Chang.
 

Both from the Ears and Mind offers a bold new understanding of the intellectual and cultural position of music in Tudor and Stuart England. Linda Phyllis Austern brings to life the kinds of educated writings and debates that surrounded musical performance, and the remarkable ways in which English people understood music to inform other endeavors, from astrology and self-care to divinity and poetics. Music was considered both art and science, and discussions of music and musical terminology provided points of contact between otherwise discrete fields of human learning. This book demonstrates how knowledge of music permitted individuals to both reveal and conceal membership in specific social, intellectual, and ideological communities. Attending to materials that go beyond music’s conventional limits, these chapters probe the role of music in commonplace books, health-maintenance and marriage manuals, rhetorical and theological treatises, and mathematical dictionaries. Ultimately, Austern illustrates how music was an indispensable frame of reference that became central to the fabric of life during a time of tremendous intellectual, social, and technological change.

A revealing look at the commercial strategy and diverse output of this canonical Renaissance artist.
 
In this vivid account, Ana Debenedetti reexamines the life and work of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli through a novel lens: his business acumen. Focusing on the organization of Botticelli’s workshop and the commercial strategies he devised to make his way in Florence’s very competitive art market, Debenedetti looks with fresh eyes at the remarkable career and output of this pivotal artist within the wider context of Florentine society and culture. Uniquely, Debenedetti evaluates Botticelli’s celebrated works, like The Birth of Venus, alongside less familiar forms such as tapestry and embroidery, showing the breadth of the artist’s oeuvre and his talent as a designer across media.

Harry Humes’s first collection of poetry, Winter Weeds, won the 1983 Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press. Ridge Music was an Associated Writing Programs Contest finalist. In 1993 he won the Eighth Annual World’s Greatest Short Short Story Competition for “The Cough.” Humes, born in Girardville, Pennsylvania, in 1935, is the recipient of the Theodore Roethke Poetry Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches English at Kutztown University and lives in Lenhartsville, Pennsylvania.

What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Sociologist Hannah Wohl draws on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market to develop a rich sociological perspective of creativity. From inside the studio, we see how artists experiment with new ideas and decide which works to abandon, destroy, put into storage, or exhibit. Wohl then transports readers into the art world, where we discover how artists’ understandings of their work are shaped through interactions in studio visits, galleries, international art fairs, and collectors’ homes.
 
Bound by Creativity reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions. Ultimately, we come to appreciate how judgment is integral to the creative process, both resulting in the creation of original works while also limiting an artist’s ability to break new ground. Exploring creativity through the lens of judgment sheds new light on the production of cultural objects, markets, and prestige. 

Bound by Steel and Stone analyzes the Colorado-Kansas Railway through the economic enterprise in the American West in the decades after the supposed 1890 closing of the frontier. In it, J. Bradford Bowers weaves a tale of reinvention against the backdrop of the newly settled West, showing how the railway survived in one form or another for nearly fifty years, overcoming competition from other railroads, a limited revenue base, and even more limited capital financing.
 
Offering the Colorado-Kansas Railway as an example of how shortline railroads helped to integrate the rural landscape with the larger urban and economic world, Bowers reveals the constant adaptations driven by changing economic forces and conditions. He puts the railway in context of the wider environmental and political landscapes, the growing quarrying and mining business, the expansion of agriculture and irrigation, Progressive-era political reforms, and land development. In the new frontier of enterprise in the early twentieth-century American West, the railroad highlights the successes and failures of the men inspired to pursue these new opportunities as well as the story of one woman who held these fragile industries together well into the second half of the twentieth century.
 
Bound by Steel and Stone is an insightful addition to the history of industrialization and economic development in Colorado and the American West.
 

Nicholas Temperley documents the lives, careers, and music of three British composers who emigrated from England in mid-career and became leaders in the musical life of the early United States. William Selby of London and Boston (1738-98), Rayner Taylor of London and Philadelphia (1745-1825), and George K. Jackson of London, New York, and Boston (1757-1822) were among the first trained professional composers to make their home in America and to pioneer the building of an art music tradition in the New World akin to the esteemed European classical music. Why, in middle age, would they emigrate and start over in uncertain and unfavorable conditions? How did the new environment affect them personally and musically? Temperley compares their lives, careers, and compositional styles in the two countries and reflects on American musical nationalism and the changing emphasis in American musical historiography.

Bound for Beatitude is about St. Thomas Aquinas’s theology of beatitude and the journey thereto. Consequently, the work’s topic is the meaning and purpose of human life embedded in that of the whole cosmos. This study is not an antiquarian exercise in the thought of some sundry medieval thinker, but an exercise of ressourcement in the philosophical and theological wisdom of one of the most profound theologians of the Catholic Church, one whom the Church has canonized, granted the title “Doctor of the Church,” and for a long time regarded as the common doctor. This exercise of ressourcement takes its methodological cues from the common doctor; hence, it is an integrated exercise of philosophical, dogmatic, and moral theology. Its specific theological topic, the ultimate human end, perfect happiness, beatitude, and the journey thereto—stands at the very heart of St. Thomas’s theology. Far from being passé, his theology of beatitude is of urgent pertinence as the crisis of humanity and of creation and the exile of God seems to approach its apogee. By way of a presentation, interpretation, and defense of Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of beatitude and the journey thereto, Bound for Beatitude advances an argument based on four theses: (1) The loss of a theology of beatitude has greatly impoverished contemporary theology. In order to succeed and flourish, theology must recover a sound teleological orientation. (2) In order to recover a sound teleological orientation, theology must recover metaphysics as its privileged instrument. (3) Thomas Aquinas provides a still pertinent model for how theology might achieve these goals in a metaphysically profound theology of beatitude and the beatific vision. Finally, (4) Aquinas’s rich and sophisticated account of the virtues charts the journey to beatitude in a way that still has analytic force and striking relevance in the early twenty-first century.

On October 27, 2018, three congregations were holding their morning Shabbat services at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood when a lone gunman entered the building and opened fire. He killed eleven people and injured six more in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history. The story made international headlines for weeks following the shooting, but Pittsburgh and the local Jewish community could not simply move on when the news cycle did.

The essays in this anthology, written by local journalists, academics, spiritual leaders, and other community members, reveal a city’s attempts to come to terms with an unfathomable horror. Here, members from each of the three impacted congregations are able to reflect on their experiences in a raw, profound way. Local journalists who covered the story as it unfolded explore the personal and public aspects of reporting the news. Activists consider their work at a calm distance from the chaotic intensity of their daily efforts. Academics mesh their professional expertise with their personal experiences of this shattering event in their hometown. A local rabbi shares his process for crafting messages of comfort even as he attempts to reckon with his own feelings.

Bringing these local voices together into a chorus raises them over the din of international chroniclers who offer important contributions but cannot feel the intensity of this tragedy in the same way as Pittsburghers. The essays in this anthology tell a collective story of city shaken to its very core, but determined that love will ultimately win.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will go to Jewish Family and Community Service of Pittsburgh (https://www.jfcspgh.org/), which serves individuals and families of all faiths throughout the Greater Pittsburgh community.

Winner of the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History
Winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize
Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize
Winner of the Mary Nickliss Prize
Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize

Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock, but it does not end there. Bound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Drawing from plantation records, legal documents, and personal family papers, it reveals the many creative ways enslaved couples found to upend white Christian ideas of marriage.

“A remarkable book… Hunter has harvested stories of human resilience from the cruelest of soils… An impeccably crafted testament to the African-Americans whose ingenuity, steadfast love and hard-nosed determination protected black family life under the most trying of circumstances.”
—Wall Street Journal

“In this brilliantly researched book, Hunter examines the experiences of slave marriages as well as the marriages of free blacks.”
—Vibe

“A groundbreaking history… Illuminates the complex and flexible character of black intimacy and kinship and the precariousness of marriage in the context of racial and economic inequality. It is a brilliant book.”
—Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother

In this expanded and revised edition of a fresh and original case-study textbook on environmental ethics, Christine Gudorf and James Huchingson continue to explore the line that separates the current state of the environment from what it should be in the future.

Boundaries begins with a lucid overview of the field, highlighting the key developments and theories in the environmental movement. Specific cases offer a rich and diverse range of situations from around the globe, from saving the forests of Java and the use of pesticides in developing countries to restoring degraded ecosystems in Nebraska. With an emphasis on the concrete circumstances of particular localities, the studies continue to focus on the dilemmas and struggles of individuals and communities who face daunting decisions with serious consequences. This second edition features extensive updates and revisions, along with four new cases: one on water privatization, one on governmental efforts to mitigate global climate change, and two on the obstacles that teachers of environmental ethics encounter in the classroom. Boundaries also includes an appendix for teachers that describes how to use the cases in the classroom.

Drawing on rich ethnographic data as well as archaeological evidence, The Boundaries of Ancient Trade challenges long-standing conceptions of highly centralized sociopolitical and economic organization and trade along the Afar salt trail—one of the last economically significant caravan-based
trade routes in the world.
 
For thousands of years, farmers in the Tigray, Amhara, and Afar regions of Ethiopia and Eritrea have run caravans of nearly 250,000 people and pack animals annually along an eighty-mile route through both cold, high-altitude farmlands and some of the hottest volcanic desert terrain on earth. In her fieldwork, archaeologist Helina Solomon Woldekiros followed the route with her own donkey and camel caravan, observing and interviewing over 150 Arho (caravaners), salt miners, salt cutters, warehouse owners, brokers, shop owners, and salt village residents to model the political economy of the ancient Aksumite state. The first integrated ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research on this legendary route, this volume provides evidence that informal economies and local participation have played a critical role in regional trade and, ultimately, in maintaining the considerable power of the Aksumite state. Woldekiros also contributes new insights into the logistics of pack animal–based trade and variability in the central and regional organization of global ancient trade.
 
Using a culturally informed framework for understanding the organization of the ancient salt route and its role in linking the Aksumite state to rural highland agricultural and lowland mobile pastoralist populations, The Boundaries of Ancient Trade makes a key contribution to theoretical discussions of hierarchy and more diffuse power structures in ancient states. This work generates new interest in the region as an area of global relevance in archaeological and anthropological debates on landscape, social interaction, and practice theories.
 

The legal domain distinguishes between different types of data and attaches a different level of protection to each of them. Thus, non-personal data are left largely unregulated, while privacy and data protection rules apply to personal data or personal information. There are stricter rules for processing sensitive personal data than for ‘ordinary’ personal data, and metadata or communications data are regulated differently than content communications data. Technological developments challenge these legal categorisations on at least three fronts: First, the lines between the categories are becoming harder to draw and more fluid. Second, working with various categories of data works well when the category a datum or dataset falls into is relatively stable. However, this is less and less so. Third, scholars increasingly question the rationale behind the various legal categorisations. This book assesses to what extent either of these strategies is feasible and to what extent alternative approaches could be developed by combining insights from three fields: technology, practice and law.

Using Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer as a springboard, Gary Saul Morson examines a number of key topics in contemporary literary theory, including the nature of literary genres and their relation to interpretation. He convincingly argues that genre is not a property of texts alone but arises from the interaction between texts and readers.

It is commonly believed that international law originated in relations among European states that respected one another as free and equal. In fact, as Jennifer Pitts shows, international law was forged at least as much through Europeans’ domineering relations with non-European states and empires, leaving a legacy still visible in the unequal structures of today’s international order.

Pitts focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great age of imperial expansion, as European intellectuals and administrators worked to establish and justify laws to govern emerging relationships with non-Europeans. Relying on military and commercial dominance, European powers dictated their own terms on the basis of their own norms and interests. Despite claims that the law of nations was a universal system rooted in the values of equality and reciprocity, the laws that came to govern the world were parochial and deeply entangled in imperialism. Legal authorities, including Emer de Vattel, John Westlake, and Henry Wheaton, were key figures in these developments. But ordinary diplomats, colonial administrators, and journalists played their part too, as did some of the greatest political thinkers of the time, among them Montesquieu and John Stuart Mill.

Against this growing consensus, however, dissident voices as prominent as Edmund Burke insisted that European states had extensive legal obligations abroad that ought not to be ignored. These critics, Pitts shows, provide valuable resources for scrutiny of the political, economic, and legal inequalities that continue to afflict global affairs.

The age of merely looking at the heavens, of mapping and cataloguing the positions of the stars down to fainter and fainter limits, is past. Throughout that long period the pace of astronomical discovery was necessarily very slow and for centuries it remained virtually static. The invention of the telescope and then the spectroscope brought about an acceleration in the rate of progress which has continued unabated to the present day. Scarcely a year now passes without some spectacular advance being made, so that today, with the co-operation of modern techniques in physics, chemistry, rocket technology and biology, many of the older notions have been completely overthrown and new ideas set up in their place. And now the rapidly developing techniques of rocket research have made it possible to carry astronomical instruments beyond the atmosphere which confines our visual and photographic observations to an extremely narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now we are able to view the universe in ultra-violet and infra-red light, and by X-rays and radio emissions which are otherwise almost completely absorbed by the atmosphere.

Each problem that is solved, however, only serves to present us with a host of others in increasing complexity. The boundaries are being pushed back steadily, it is true, but the realm of the partially understood and the totally unknown is still as great as ever, and it is with this vast no-man's-land of astronomy that this book is concerned. It deals, amongst other subjects, with astronomical instruments and their application, recent discoveries in the solar system, stellar evolution, the exploding stars, the galaxies, quasars, pulsars, the possibilities of extraterrestial life, relativity, etc. With this book as a guide, the reader cannot fail to experience some of the tremendous fascination of present-day astronomy and its innumerable unsolved problems.

Moving between the American South and Mexico, these stories explore how immigrant and native characters are shaped by absent family and geography. A Chilanga teen wins a trip to Miami to film a reality show about family while pining for the American brother she’s never met. A Louisiana carpenter tends to his drug-addicted son while rebuilding his house after a slew of hurricanes. A New Orleans ne’er-do-well opens a Catholic-themed bar in the wake of his devout mother’s death. A village girl from Chiapas baptizes her infant on a trek toward the U.S. border.

In the collection’s second half, we follow a Veracruzan-born drifter, Manuel, and his estranged American son, Tommy. Over decades, they negotiate separate nations and personal tragicomedies on their journeys from innocence to experience. As Manuel participates in student protests in Mexico City in 1968, he drops out to pursue his art. In the 1970s, he immigrates to Louisiana, but soon leaves his wife and infant son behind after his art shop fails. Meanwhile, Tommy grows up in 1980s Louisiana, sometimes escaping his mother’s watchful eye to play basketball at a park filled with the threat of violence. In college, he seeks acceptance from teammates by writing their term papers. Years later, as Manuel nears death and Tommy reaches middle age, they reconnect, embarking on a mission to jointly interview a former riot policeman about his military days; in the process, father and son discover what it has meant to carry each other’s stories and memories from afar.
 

What right do humans have to claim sovereignty over the land, to build fences and set boundaries when nature itself recognizes no such boundaries? Is there hope for a new land ethic that is less destructive toward the land, that views nature as something to be valued and nurtured rather than exploited and "developed"?One of the main challenges of contemporary environmentalism is to find a lasting, more ethical way for people to live on the planet. In Bounded People, Boundless Lands, legal scholar Eric T. Freyfogle asks a series of pointed and challenging questions about the human quest for ecological harmony. Deftly interweaving moral and ethical considerations with case studies and real-life situations, Freyfogle provides a deep philosophical examination of personal responsibility and the dominion of human beings over the earth. He raises provocative questions about private property rights, responsible land ownership, the rights of wildlife, and ecological health. Although the questions that Freyfogle asks are not new, they are presented in the context of contemporary events, often connected to legal cases, which allows him to bring age-old issues up to date, and to make direct connections between abstract concepts and our own lives.Throughout, Freyfogle questions the way human beings envision the land, thinking they can claim nature as their own, and criticizes market approaches to valuing and using nature. As an introduction to land ethics, but one that embraces environmental, legal, and philosophical arguments, Bounded People, Boundless Lands is a unique contribution to the environmental literature.