Winner Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award
For thousands of years, humans have lived on the sprawling escarpment in Arizona known as the Mogollon Rim, a stretch that separates the valleys of central Arizona from the mountains of the north. A vast portion of this dramatic landscape is the traditional home of the Dilzhe’e (Tonto Apache) and the Yavapai. Now Daniel Herman offers a compelling narrative of how—from 1864 to 1934—the Dilzhe’e and the Yavapai came to central Arizona, how they were conquered, how they were exiled, how they returned to their homeland, and how, through these events, they found renewal.
Herman examines the complex, contradictory, and very human relations between Indians, settlers, and Federal agents in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arizona—a time that included Arizona’s brutal Indian wars. But while most tribal histories stay within the borders of the reservation, Herman also chronicles how Indians who left the reservation helped build a modern state with dams, hydroelectricity, roads, and bridges. With thoughtful detail and incisive analysis, Herman discusses the complex web of interactions between Apache, Yavapai, and Anglos that surround every aspect of the story.
Rim Country Exodus is part of a new movement in Western history emphasizing survival rather than disappearance. Just as important, this is one of the first in-depth studies of the West that examines race as it was lived. Race was formulated, Herman argues, not only through colonial and scientific discourses, but also through day-to-day interactions between Indians, agents, and settlers. Rim Country Exodus offers an important new perspective on the making of the West.
In 1968 Jim Morrison, founder and lead singer of the rock band the Doors, wrote to Wallace Fowlie, a scholar of French literature and a professor at Duke University. Morrison thanked Fowlie for producing an English translation of the complete poems of Rimbaud. He needed the translation, he said, because, "I don’t read French that easily. . . . I am a rock singer and your book travels around with me." Fourteen years later, when Fowlie first heard the music of the Doors, he recognized the influence of Rimbaud in Morrison’s lyrics.
In Rimbaud and Jim Morrison Fowlie, a master of the form of the memoir, reconstructs the lives of the two youthful poets from a personal perspective. In their twinned stories he discovers an uncanny symmetry, a pattern far richer than the simple truth that both led lives full of adventure and both made poetry of their thirst for the liberation of the self. The result is an engaging account of the connections between an exceptional French symbolist who gave up writing poetry at the age of twenty, died young, and whose poems are still avidly read to this day, and an American rock musician whose brief career ignited an entire generation and has continued to fascinate millions around the world in the twenty years since his death in Paris. In this dual portrait, Fowlie gives us a glimpse of the affinities and resemblances between European literary traditions and American rock music and youth culture in the late twentieth century.
A personal meditation on two unusual, yet emblematic, cultural figures, this book also stands as a summary of a noted scholar’s lifelong reflections on creative artists.
In a new interpretation of a poet who has swayed the course of modern poetry--in France and elsewhere--James Lawler focuses on what he demonstrates is the crux of Rimbaud's imagination: the masks and adopted personas with which he regularly tested his identity and his art.
A drama emerges in Lawler's urbane and resourceful reading. The thinking, feeling, acting Drunken Boat is an early theatrical projection of the poet's self; the Inventor, the Memorialist, and the Ingénu assume distinct roles in his later verse. It is, however, in Illuminations and Une Saison en enfer that Rimbaud enacts most powerfully his grandiose dreams. Here the poet becomes Self Creator, Self-Critic, Self-Ironist; he takes the parts of Floodmaker, Oriental Storyteller, Dreamer, Lover; and he recounts his descent into Hell in the guise of a Confessor.
In delineating and exploring the poet's "theatre of the self" Lawler shows us the tragic lucidity and the dramatic coherence of Rimbaud's work.
Ring Lardner - American Writers 49 was first published in 1965. 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.
In this ambitious project, historian Katrina Thompson examines the conceptualization and staging of race through the performance, sometimes coerced, of black dance from the slave ship to the minstrel stage. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Thompson explicates how black musical performance was used by white Europeans and Americans to justify enslavement, perpetuate the existing racial hierarchy, and mask the brutality of the domestic slave trade. Whether on slave ships, at the auction block, or on plantations, whites often used coerced performances to oppress and demean the enslaved.
As Thompson shows, however, blacks' "backstage" use of musical performance often served quite a different purpose. Through creolization and other means, enslaved people preserved some native musical and dance traditions and invented or adopted new traditions that built community and even aided rebellion.
Thompson shows how these traditions evolved into nineteenth-century minstrelsy and, ultimately, raises the question of whether today's mass media performances and depictions of African Americans are so very far removed from their troublesome roots.
The Ringling Brothers began their business under the most modest of circumstances and through hard work, business savvy, and some luck created the largest, most famous circus in the world. They became wealthy men, one 50 cent admission ticket at a time.
Ringlingville USA chronicles the brothers' journey from immigrant poverty to enduring glory as the kings of the circus world. The Ringlings and their circus were last studied in depth over four decades ago. Now, for the first time, the brothers' detailed financial records and personal correspondence are available to researchers. Jerry Apps weaves together that information with newspaper accounts, oral histories, colorful anecdotes, and stunning circus ephemera and photos, many never before been published, to illuminate the importance of the Ringlings' accomplishments. He describes how the Ringling Brothers confronted the challenges of taxation, war, economic pressure, changing technology, and personal sorrows to find their place in history. The brothers emerge as complex characters whose ambition, imagination, and pure hucksterism fueled the phenomenon that was the Ringling Brothers' Circus.
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.
Based on actual events from 1989 in International Falls, Minnesota, Riot tells the story of sixth-grader Bryan, whose family becomes stressed when nonunion labor “rats” are hired by the local paper mill, leaving his father, a union worker, angry and out of a job. Tension erupts into daily fights at school and nightly acts of vandalism with no solution in sight. Already torn between his parents’ opposing viewpoints on how to handle the escalating situation, Bryan’s growing feelings for the daughter of a nonunion worker only complicate matters.
Bryan tries to understand the turmoil affecting his home and his town, but it is becomes harder and harder to separate his friends from his enemies. And when he witnesses a violent act that implicates his father, he must wrestle with family loyalty and telling the truth.
2023 Best Book in the Humanities, Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section
Challenging conventional narratives of Mexican history, this book establishes race-making as a central instrument for the repression of social upheaval in nineteenth-century Mexico rather than a relic of the colonial-era caste system.
Many scholars assert that Mexico’s complex racial hierarchy, inherited from Spanish colonialism, became obsolete by the turn of the nineteenth century as class-based distinctions became more prominent and a largely mestizo population emerged. But the residues of the colonial caste system did not simply dissolve after Mexico gained independence. Rather, Ana Sabau argues, ever-present fears of racial uprising among elites and authorities led to persistent governmental techniques and ideologies designed to separate and control people based on their perceived racial status, as well as to the implementation of projects for development in fringe areas of the country.
Riot and Rebellion in Mexico traces this race-based narrative through three historical flashpoints: the Bajío riots, the Haitian Revolution, and the Yucatan’s caste war. Sabau shows how rebellions were treated as racially motivated events rather than political acts and how the racialization of popular and indigenous sectors coincided with the construction of “whiteness” in Mexico. Drawing on diverse primary sources, Sabau demonstrates how the race war paradigm was mobilized in foreign and domestic affairs and reveals the foundations of a racial state and racially stratified society that persist today.
The Republic of Texas was still in its first exultation over independence when John Salmon "Rip" Ford arrived from South Carolina in June of 1836. Ford stayed to participate in virtually every major event in Texas history during the next sixty years. Doctor, lawyer, surveyor, newspaper reporter, elected representative, and above all, soldier and Indian fighter, Ford sat down in his old age to record the events of the turbulent years through which he had lived. Stephen Oates has edited Ford's memoirs to produce a clear and vigorous personal history of Texas.
A historical account of ideology in the Global South as the postwar laboratory of socialism, its legacy following the Cold War, and the continuing influence of socialist ideas worldwide.
In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran.
These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model.
Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.
It has already been called the scientific breakthrough of the century: the detection of gravitational waves. Einstein predicted these tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime nearly a hundred years ago, but they were never perceived directly until now. Decades in the making, this momentous discovery has given scientists a new understanding of the cataclysmic events that shape the universe and a new confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Ripples in Spacetime is an engaging account of the international effort to complete Einstein’s project, capture his elusive ripples, and launch an era of gravitational-wave astronomy that promises to explain, more vividly than ever before, our universe’s structure and origin.
The quest for gravitational waves involved years of risky research and many personal and professional struggles that threatened to derail one of the world’s largest scientific endeavors. Govert Schilling takes readers to sites where these stories unfolded—including Japan’s KAGRA detector, Chile’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope, the South Pole’s BICEP detectors, and the United States’ LIGO labs. He explains the seeming impossibility of developing technologies sensitive enough to detect waves from two colliding black holes in the very distant universe, and describes the astounding precision of the LIGO detectors. Along the way Schilling clarifies concepts such as general relativity, neutron stars, and the big bang using language that readers with little scientific background can grasp.
Ripples in Spacetime provides a window into the next frontiers of astronomy, weaving far-reaching predictions and discoveries into a gripping story of human ambition and perseverance.
A Physics Today Best Book of the Year
A Forbes “For the Physics and Astronomy Lover in Your Life” Selection
“Succinct, accessible, and remarkably timely… This book is a rare find.”
—Physics Today
“Belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in learning the scientific, historical, and personal stories behind some of the most incredible scientific advances of the 21st century.”
—Forbes
The detection of gravitational waves has already been called the scientific breakthrough of the century. Einstein predicted these tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime over a hundred years ago, but they were only recently perceived directly for the first time. Ripples in Spacetime is an engaging account of the international effort to complete Einstein’s project, capture his elusive ripples, and launch an era of gravitational-wave astronomy that promises to explain, more vividly than ever before, our universe’s structure and origin.
“Schilling’s deliciously nerdy grand tour takes us through compelling backstory, current research, and future expectations.”
—Nature
“A lively and readable account… Schilling underlines that this discovery is the opening of a new window on the universe, the beginning of a new branch of science.”
—Graham Farmelo, The Guardian
The greatest classic of Sindhi literature presented here in an authoritative and vivid modern English translation.
Shah Abdul Latif’s Risalo is acknowledged across Pakistan and the wider diaspora as the greatest classic of Sindhi literature. In this collection of short Sufi verses, originally composed for musical performance, the poet creates a vast imaginative world of interlocking references to traditional Islamic themes of mystical and divine love and the scenery, society, and legends of the Sindh region.
Latif (1689–1752), a contemporary of the Panjabi poet Bullhe Shah, belonged to the class of Sufi saints whose shrines remain prominent features of the Sindhi landscape. The Risalo reflects Latif’s profound engagement with the fundamental literature of Islam as well as his openness to varied local traditions, including notable poems praising the spiritual devotion of local Hindu yogis.
This edition presents, alongside the original text in the Sindhi Naskh script, the first translation of the Risalo into modern English prose, offering a new readership access to the writings of one of the masters of Sufi poetry.
Familiar accounts of religious freedom in the United States often tell a story of visionary founders who broke from the centuries-old patterns of Christendom to establish a political arrangement committed to secular and religiously neutral government. These novel commitments were supposedly embodied in the religion clauses of the First Amendment. But this story is largely a fairytale, Steven D. Smith says in this incisive examination of a much-mythologized subject. He makes the case that the American achievement was not a rejection of Christian commitments but a retrieval of classic Christian ideals of freedom of the church and freedom of conscience.
Smith maintains that the distinctive American contribution to religious freedom was not in the First Amendment, which was intended merely to preserve the political status quo in matters of religion. What was important was the commitment to open contestation between secularist and providentialist understandings of the nation which evolved over the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, far from vindicating constitutional principles, as conventional wisdom suggests, the Supreme Court imposed secular neutrality, which effectively repudiated this commitment to open contestation. Rather than upholding what was distinctively American and constitutional, these decisions subverted it. The negative consequences are visible today in the incoherence of religion clause jurisprudence and the intense culture wars in American politics.
The Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, is the only law in American history to legalize preventive detention. It restricted the freedom of a certain individual or a group of individuals based on actions that may be taken that would threaten the security of a nation or of a particular area. Yet the Act was never enforced before it was repealed in 1971.
Masumi Izumi links the Emergency Detention Act with Japanese American wartime incarceration in her cogent study, The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law. She dissects the entangled discourses of race, national security, and civil liberties between 1941 and 1971 by examining how this historical precedent generated “the concentration camp law” and expanded a ubiquitous regime of surveillance in McCarthyist America.
Izumi also shows how political radicalism grew as a result of these laws. Japanese Americas were instrumental in forming grassroots social movements that worked to repeal Title II. The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law is a timely study in this age of insecurity where issues of immigration, race, and exclusion persist.
Detroit's public school system, lauded as a model for the nation in the 1920s and 1930s, has become one of the city's most conspicuous failures. Jeffrey Mirel draws on Detroit's experience to offer a new interpretation of urban educational decline in the twentieth century, suggesting specific answers to what ails America's public schools and how public education can be improved.
Jeffrey Mirel has won two prestigious book awards for The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System. Stanford University and the American Educational Research Association awarded the book the 1994-95 "Outstanding Book Award" stating, "Mirel's documentation and interpretations serve as valuable and refreshing commentary on the current status of urban education, and by extension, all American education and society. . . . The book is admirably written with touches of drama, pathos, and hope." The American Educational Studies Association awarded Mirel the 1994 "Critics' Choice Award" for his outstanding contribution to Educational Studies.
This new paperback edition includes a comprehensive epilogue focusing on recent events in Detroit educational reform. Detailing the formation and rapid collapse of a campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s to radically restructure the Detroit public schools, Mirel's new analysis of this experiment illuminates both the persistence of historical trends in the school district and the possibilities for change.
Jeffrey Mirel is David L Angus Collegiate Professor of Education, University of Michigan.
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 monarchical presidential regimes that prevailed in the Arab world for so long looked as though they would last indefinitely—until events in Tunisia and Egypt made clear their time was up. The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life exposes for the first time the origins and dynamics of a governmental system that largely defined the Arab Middle East in the twentieth century.
Presidents who rule for life have been a feature of the Arab world since independence. In the 1980s their regimes increasingly resembled monarchies as presidents took up residence in palaces and made every effort to ensure their sons would succeed them. Roger Owen explores the main features of the prototypical Arab monarchical regime: its household; its inner circle of corrupt cronies; and its attempts to create a popular legitimacy based on economic success, a manipulated constitution, managed elections, and information suppression.
Why has the Arab world suffered such a concentration of permanent presidential government? Though post-Soviet Central Asia has also known monarchical presidencies, Owen argues that a significant reason is the “Arab demonstration effect,” whereby close ties across the Arab world have enabled ruling families to share management strategies and assistance. But this effect also explains why these presidencies all came under the same pressure to reform or go. Owen discusses the huge popular opposition the presidential systems engendered during the Arab Spring, and the political change that ensued, while also delineating the challenges the Arab revolutions face across the Middle East and North Africa.
The monarchical presidential regimes that prevailed in the Arab world for so long looked as though they would last indefinitely—until events in Tunisia and Egypt made clear their time was up. The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life exposes for the first time the origins and dynamics of a governmental system that largely defined the Arab Middle East in the twentieth century.
Presidents who rule for life have been a feature of the Arab world since independence. In the 1980s their regimes increasingly resembled monarchies as presidents took up residence in palaces and made every effort to ensure their sons would succeed them. Roger Owen explores the main features of the prototypical Arab monarchical regime: its household; its inner circle of corrupt cronies; and its attempts to create a popular legitimacy based on economic success, a manipulated constitution, managed elections, and information suppression.
Why has the Arab world suffered such a concentration of permanent presidential government? Though post-Soviet Central Asia has also known monarchical presidencies, Owen argues that a significant reason is the “Arab demonstration effect,” whereby close ties across the Arab world have enabled ruling families to share management strategies and assistance. But this effect also explains why these presidencies all came under the same pressure to reform or go. Owen discusses the huge popular opposition the presidential systems engendered during the Arab Spring, and the political change that ensued, while also delineating the challenges the Arab revolutions face across the Middle East and North Africa.
This sweeping history of the development of professional, institutionalized intelligence examines the implications of the fall of the state monopoly on espionage today and beyond.
During the Cold War, only the alliances clustered around the two superpowers maintained viable intelligence endeavors, whereas a century ago, many states could aspire to be competitive at these dark arts. Today, larger states have lost their monopoly on intelligence skills and capabilities as technological and sociopolitical changes have made it possible for private organizations and even individuals to unearth secrets and influence global events.
Historian Michael Warner addresses the birth of professional intelligence in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent rise of US intelligence during the Cold War. He brings this history up to the present day as intelligence agencies used the struggle against terrorism and the digital revolution to improve capabilities in the 2000s. Throughout, the book examines how states and other entities use intelligence to create, exploit, and protect secret advantages against others, and emphasizes how technological advancement and ideological competition drive intelligence, improving its techniques and creating a need for intelligence and counterintelligence activities to serve and protect policymakers and commanders.
The world changes intelligence and intelligence changes the world. This sweeping history of espionage and intelligence will be a welcomed by practitioners, students, and scholars of security studies, international affairs, and intelligence, as well as general audiences interested in the evolution of espionage and technology.
The financial and economic collapse that began in the United States in 2008 and spread to the rest of the world continues to burden the global economy. David Kotz, who was one of the few academic economists to predict it, argues that the ongoing economic crisis is not simply the aftermath of financial panic and an unusually severe recession but instead is a structural crisis of neoliberal, or free-market, capitalism. Consequently, continuing stagnation cannot be resolved by policy measures alone. It requires major institutional restructuring.
Kotz analyzes the reasons for the rise of free-market ideas, policies, and institutions beginning around 1980. He shows how the neoliberal capitalism that resulted was able to produce a series of long although tepid economic expansions, punctuated by relatively brief recessions, as well as a low rate of inflation. This created the impression of a “Great Moderation.” However, the very same factors that promoted long expansions and low inflation—growing inequality, an increasingly risk-seeking financial sector, and a series of large asset bubbles—were not only objectionable in themselves but also put the economy on an unsustainable trajectory. Kotz interprets the current push for austerity as an attempt to deepen and preserve neoliberal capitalism. However, both economic theory and history suggest that neither austerity measures nor other policy adjustments can bring another period of stable economic expansion. Kotz considers several possible directions of economic restructuring, concluding that significant economic change is likely in the years ahead.
The financial and economic collapse that began in the United States in 2008 and spread to the rest of the world continues to burden the global economy. David Kotz, who was one of the few academic economists to predict it, argues that the ongoing economic crisis is not simply the aftermath of financial panic and an unusually severe recession but instead is a structural crisis of neoliberal, or free-market, capitalism. Consequently, continuing stagnation cannot be resolved by policy measures alone. It requires major institutional restructuring.
“Kotz’s book will reward careful study by everyone interested in the question of
stages in the history of capitalism.”
—Edwin Dickens, Science & Society
“Whereas [others] suggest that the downfall of the postwar system in Europe and the United States is the result of the triumph of ideas, Kotz argues persuasively that it is actually the result of the exercise of power by those who benefit from the capitalist economic organization of society. The analysis and evidence he brings to bear in support of the role of power exercised by business and political leaders is a most valuable aspect of this book—one among many important contributions to our knowledge that makes it worthwhile.”
—Michael Meeropol, Challenge
The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors is a masterful survey of the manner in which Greek historians, from Herodotus to Polybius, explained the conditions of a state’s success and the dangers of power. Both the differences and the similarities among the major authors’ ideas are carefully analyzed: the changing notions of excess, or hybris; the common stress on public morality; and the value of goodwill and union.
The first woman to be elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and the first woman to hold a professorship at the College de France, Jacqueline de Romilly has serves as director of the Department of Greek at the Sorbonne and had lectured at numerous universities and institutions of learning around the world. The author or editor of numerous volumes concerning Thucydides, Jacqueline de Romilly has in recent years become increasingly interested in the history of moral and political ideas.
Gerald Horne weaves Barnett's fascinating life story through a groundbreaking history of the ANP, including its deep dedication to Pan-Africanism. An activist force in journalism, Barnett also helped send doctors and teachers to Africa, advised African governments, gave priority to foreign newsgathering, and saw the African American struggle in global terms. Yet Horne also confronts Barnett's contradictions. A member of the African American elite, Barnett's sympathies with black aspirations often clashed with his ethics and a powerful desire to join the upper echelons of business and government. In the end, Barnett's activist success undid his work. Horne traces the dramatic story of the ANP's collapse as the mainstream press, retreating from Jim Crow, finally covered black issues and hired African American journalists.
Revelatory and entertaining, The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press tells the story of a forgotten pioneer and the ambitious black institution he created.
Latin America is characterized by a uniquely rich history of cultural and racial mixtures known collectively as mestizaje. These mixtures reflect the influences of indigenous peoples from Latin America, Europeans, and Africans, and spawn a fascinating and often volatile blend of cultural practices and products. Yet no scholarly study to date has provided an articulate context for fully appreciating and exploring the profound effects of distinct local invocations of syncretism and hybridity. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race fills this void by charting the history of Latin America's experience of mestizaje through the prisms of literature, the visual and performing arts, social commentary, and music.
In accessible, jargon-free prose, Marilyn Grace Miller brings to life the varied perspectives of a vast region in a tour that stretches from Mexico and the Caribbean to Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina. She explores the repercussions of mestizo identity in the United States and reveals the key moments in the story of Latin America's cult of synthesis. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race examines the inextricable links between aesthetics and politics, and unravels the threads of colonialism woven throughout national narratives in which mestizos serve as primary protagonists.
Illuminating the ways in which regional engagements with mestizaje represent contentious sites of nation building and racial politics, Miller uncovers a rich and multivalent self-portrait of Latin America's diverse populations.
Paraguay plays a very small role in the modern world, but for part of the nineteenth century it was a significant regional force. Between 1800 and 1865 it changed from an imperial backwater into a dynamic, dictator-led, financially sound nation. Then came the terrible War of the Triple Alliance, and by 1870 Paraguay had virtually been destroyed.
John Hoyt Williams re-creates the era’s people, places, and events in rich detail and a vigorous style, but this is much more than a mere narrative. His archival research in Paraguay and several other countries enables him to offer new facts and interpretations, correct a number of misapprehensions, and explode a few myths.
He also provides the clearest, most objective portraits available of the three extraordinary men who ruled Paraguay during this time: Dr. José Gaspar de Francia, “El Supremo”; Carlos Antonio López, “the Corpulent Despot”; and López’s flamboyant son Francisco Solano López. Discussions of social, economic, and cultural conditions round out a masterly account of a remarkable historical period.
Founded in eastern Arkansas during the Great Depression, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) has long fascinated historians, who have emphasized its biracial membership and the socialist convictions of its leaders, while attributing its demise to external factors, such as the mechanization of agriculture, the repression of wealthy planters, and the indifference of New Dealers. However, as James Ross notes in this compelling revisionist history, such accounts have largely ignored the perspective of the actual sharecroppers and other tenant farmers who made up the union’s rank and file.
Drawing on a rich trove of letters that STFU members wrote to union leaders, government officials, and others, Ross shows that internal divisions were just as significant—if not more so—as outside causes in the union’s ultimate failure. Most important, the STFU’s fatal flaw was the yawning gap between the worldviews of its leadership and those of its members. Ross describes how, early on, STFU secretary H. L. Mitchell promoted the union as one involving many voices—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in discord—but later pushed a more simplified narrative of a few people doing most of the union’s work. Struck by this significant change, Ross explores what the actual goals of the rank and file were and what union membership meant to them. “While the white leaders may have expressed a commitment to racial justice, white members often did not,” he writes. “While the union’s socialist and communist leaders may have hoped for cooperative land ownership, the members often did not.” Above all, the poor farmers who made up the membership wanted their immediate needs for food and shelter met, and they wanted to own their own land and thus determine their own futures. Moreover, while the leadership often took its inspiration from Marx, the membership’s worldview was shaped by fundamentalist, Pentecostal Christianity.
In portraying such tensions and how they factored into the union’s implosion, Ross not only offers a more nuanced view of the STFU, he also makes a powerful new contribution to our understanding of the Depression-era South.
In an age of government imposed austerity, and after 30 years of neo-liberal restructuring, the future of the welfare state looks increasingly uncertain. Asbjørn Wahl offers an accessible analysis of the situation across Europe, identifies the most important challenges and presents practical proposals for combating the assault on welfare.
Wahl argues that the welfare state should be seen as the result of a class compromise forged in the 20th century, which means that it cannot easily be exported internationally. He considers the enormous shifts in power relations and the profound internal changes to the welfare state which have occurred during the neo-liberal era, pointing to the paradigm shift that the welfare state is going through. This is illustrated by the shift from welfare to workfare and increased top-down control.
As well as being a fascinating study in its own right that will appeal to students of economics and politics, The Rise and Fall of the Welfare State also points to an alternative way forward for the trade union movement based on concrete examples of struggles and alliance-building.
When she was in fifth grade, Monica Abbott declared that she would one day become an Olympic athlete. In the decades that would follow, her prediction would prove stunningly true, as she would not only compete in the Games but go on to claim two Silver Medals as pitcher for Team USA softball.
In her twenty-plus years as a professional athlete, Abbott has set a high standard of firsts and achievements—but her talents and tenacity have not only shattered records but have also created new possibilities for female athletes everywhere. In Rise and Shine, Abbott chronicles significant lessons and experiences from her childhood, her University of Tennessee and professional softball years, her time in the Olympics, and beyond. Throughout the book, she shares insights cultivated on her journey, offering them to readers of all ages and skill sets to consider as they endeavor to bring their lives into contact with their dreams.
How do we set goals yet unseen? How do we thrive even while overcoming obstacles? And perhaps most importantly, how do we turn our successes into advantages for others? With a foreword by world-renowned tennis icon Billie Jean King, Rise and Shine is more than a record of medals and firsts; it is the story of making dreams come true and of lifting others with you as you rise.
Rise of a Japanese Chinatown is the first English-language monograph on the history of a Chinese immigrant community in Japan. It focuses on the transformations of that population in the Japanese port city of Yokohama from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 to the normalization of Sino-Japanese ties in 1972 and beyond. Eric C. Han narrates the paradoxical story of how, during periods of war and peace, Chinese immigrants found an enduring place within a monoethnic state.
This study makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the construction of Chinese and Japanese identities and on Chinese migration and settlement. Using local newspapers, Chinese and Japanese government records, memoirs, and conversations with Yokohama residents, it retells the familiar story of Chinese nation building in the context of Sino-Japanese relations. But it builds on existing works by directing attention as well to non-elite Yokohama Chinese, those who sheltered revolutionary activists and served as an audience for their nationalist messages. Han also highlights contradictions between national and local identifications of these Chinese, who self-identified as Yokohama-ites (hamakko) without claiming Japaneseness or denying their Chineseness. Their historical role in Yokohama’s richly diverse cosmopolitan past can offer insight into a future, more inclusive Japan.
Winner, McGannon Communications Research Award, 2004
In 1971, the Sloan Commission on Cable Communications likened the ongoing developments in cable television to the first uses of movable type and the invention of the telephone. Cable's proponents in the late 1960s and early 1970s hoped it would eventually remedy all the perceived ills of broadcast television, including lowest-common-denominator programming, inability to serve the needs of local audiences, and failure to recognize the needs of cultural minorities. Yet a quarter century after the "blue sky" era, cable television programming closely resembled, and indeed depended upon, broadcast television programming. Whatever happened to the Sloan Commission's "revolution now in sight"?
In this book, Megan Mullen examines the first half-century of cable television to understand why cable never achieved its promise as a radically different means of communication. Using textual analysis and oral, archival, and regulatory history, she chronicles and analyzes cable programming developments in the United States during three critical stages of the medium's history: the early community antenna (CATV) years (1948-1967), the optimistic "blue sky" years (1968-1975), and the early satellite years (1976-1995). This history clearly reveals how cable's roots as a retransmitter of broadcast signals, the regulatory constraints that stymied innovation, and the economic success of cable as an outlet for broadcast or broadcast-type programs all combined to defeat most utopian visions for cable programming.
Every presidential election since 1964 has been won by the candidate backed by the most united party; yet as party unity has become more important to voting decisions, it has also become increasingly difficult to achieve. In his latest book, Martin Wattenberg offers an in-depth interpretation of the presidential elections of the 1980s, illuminating current theories of political behavior and how they operate in today's candidate-centered politics.
Wattenberg investigates the impact that political parties' declining relevance has had on presidential politics. As the parties' ability to polarize opinion weakened and voters were set politically adrift, the candidates themselves had to fill the power vacuum. Interestingly, as the candidates have become more prominent, their popularity has spiraled downward. Wattenberg's national survey data debunks the notion of Reagan as the "teflon president;' demonstrating that many negative judgments stuck to Reagan's public image throughout the 1980s, particularly the criticisms of his conservative policies.
The author's intricate analysis shows that many people were torn between candidates whose policies they preferred and those who they thought would produce the best results, and these contradictory attitudes were primarily resolved in favor of Reagan and Bush.
This book is not only the successor volume to the author's widely used book on American parties, it is also a controversial and thought-provoking commentary on American parties, politics, and representative government.
A bold history of the rise of central banks, showing how institutions designed to steady the ship of global finance have instead become as destabilizing as they are dominant.
While central banks have gained remarkable influence over the past fifty years, promising more stability, global finance has gone from crisis to crisis. How do we explain this development? Drawing on original sources ignored in previous research, The Rise of Central Banks offers a groundbreaking account of the origins and consequences of central banks’ increasing clout over economic policy.
Many commentators argue that ideas drove change, indicating a shift in the 1970s from Keynesianism to monetarism, concerned with controlling inflation. Others point to the stagflation crises, which put capitalists and workers at loggerheads. Capitalists won, the story goes, then pushed deregulation and disinflation by redistributing power from elected governments to markets and central banks. Both approaches are helpful, but they share a weakness. Abstracting from the evolving practices of central banking, they provide inaccurate accounts of recent policy changes and fail to explain how we arrived at the current era of easy money and excessive finance.
By comparing developments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland, Leon Wansleben finds that central bankers’ own policy innovations were an important ingredient of change. These innovations allowed central bankers to use privileged relationships with expanding financial markets to govern the economy. But by relying on markets, central banks fostered excessive credit growth and cultivated an unsustainable version of capitalism. Through extensive archival work and numerous interviews, Wansleben sheds new light on the agency of bureaucrats and calls upon society and elected leaders to direct these actors’ efforts to more progressive goals.
As the rest of the world worries about what a future might look like under Chinese supremacy, Edward Luttwak worries about China’s own future prospects. Applying the logic of strategy for which he is well known, Luttwak argues that the most populous nation on Earth—and its second largest economy—may be headed for a fall.
For any country whose rising strength cannot go unnoticed, the universal logic of strategy allows only military or economic growth. But China is pursuing both goals simultaneously. Its military buildup and assertive foreign policy have already stirred up resistance among its neighbors, just three of whom—India, Japan, and Vietnam—together exceed China in population and wealth. Unless China’s leaders check their own ambitions, a host of countries, which are already forming tacit military coalitions, will start to impose economic restrictions as well.
Chinese leaders will find it difficult to choose between pursuing economic prosperity and increasing China’s military strength. Such a change would be hard to explain to public opinion. Moreover, Chinese leaders would have to end their reliance on ancient strategic texts such as Sun Tzu’s Art of War. While these guides might have helped in diplomatic and military conflicts within China itself, their tactics—such as deliberately provoking crises to force negotiations—turned China’s neighbors into foes. To avoid arousing the world’s enmity further, Luttwak advises, Chinese leaders would be wise to pursue a more sustainable course of economic growth combined with increasing military and diplomatic restraint.
The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture explores the transformation of Yiddish from a low-status vernacular to the medium of a complex modern culture. David Fishman examines the efforts of east European Jews to establish their linguistic distinctiveness as part of their struggle for national survival in the diaspora. Fishman considers the roots of modern Yiddish culture in social and political conditions in Imperial Tsarist and inter-war Poland, and its relationship to Zionism and Bundism. In so doing, Fishman argues that Yiddish culture enveloped all socioeconomic classes, not just the proletarian base, and considers the emergence, at the turn of the century, of a pro-Yiddish intelligentsia and a Yiddishist movement.
As Fishman points out, the rise of Yiddishism was not without controversy. Some believed that the rise of Yiddish represented a shift away from a religious-dominated culture to a completely secular, European one; a Jewish nation held together by language, rather than by land or religious content. Others hoped that Yiddish culture would inherit the moral and national values of the Jewish religious tradition, and that to achieve this result, the Bible and Midrash would need to exist in modern Yiddish translation. Modern Yiddish culture developed in the midst of these opposing concepts.
Fishman follows the rise of the culture to its apex, the founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilna in 1925, and concludes with the dramatic story of the individual efforts that preserved the books and papers of YIVO during the destruction and annihilation of World War II and in postwar Soviet Lithuania. The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, like those efforts, preserves the cultural heritage of east European Jews with thorough research and fresh insights.
This first comprehensive and thoroughly documented study of the political development of two of the newly formed nations of Central Africa presents the full story of the successful efforts of the people of Malawi and Zambia to achieve self-government. Following a detailed examination of the impact of British colonial rule, the author provides a new interpretation of the earliest demonstrations of native discontent and he explains how the forces of protest found expression through proto-political parties and the formation of religious sects and millennial movements. He also interprets the objectives and tactics of the ruling white settlers in their abortive effort to establish the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
Basing his analysis on archival and other primary sources, including interviews with leading figures, Robert Rotberg traces the origins of the full-fledged political parties in both countries and describes the early congresses which were to become the dominant movements during the struggle for independence in Central Africa. He ends with an analysis of that struggle, bringing the story to its successful conclusion in late 1964. A postscript discusses the important changes of 1965.
Nineteenth-century New England was a hostile place for Catholics. In Massachusetts a mob torched a convent; in Maine a priest was tarred and feathered; and Rhode Island elected an anti-Catholic Know Nothing governor. “No Irish Need Apply” signs were common.
Newport was different. It was a religiously diverse and tolerant city that welcomed Catholic French troops during the American Revolution. Later, as it became the favored summer retreat for America’s Protestant social elite, Irish Catholics arrived to work in construction jobs, the tourist economy, and the grand Gilded Age cottages. By the end of the century, Newport’s Catholic community was flourishing. Moneyed Catholics acquired their own mansions, an Irish Catholic was mayor, and prominent Protestants were helping Catholic neighbors establish new schools and churches. In this deeply researched study, John F. Quinn delves into this rich Catholic history to discover why nineteenth-century Newport was particularly religiously tolerant and accepting.
After a tsunami destroyed the cooling system at Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, triggering a meltdown, protesters around the world challenged the use of nuclear power. Germany announced it would close its plants by 2022. Although the ills of fossil fuels are better understood than ever, the threat of climate change has never aroused the same visceral dread or swift action. Spencer Weart dissects this paradox, demonstrating that a powerful web of images surrounding nuclear energy holds us captive, allowing fear, rather than facts, to drive our thinking and public policy.
Building on his classic, Nuclear Fear, Weart follows nuclear imagery from its origins in the symbolism of medieval alchemy to its appearance in film and fiction. Long before nuclear fission was discovered, fantasies of the destroyed planet, the transforming ray, and the white city of the future took root in the popular imagination. At the turn of the twentieth century when limited facts about radioactivity became known, they produced a blurred picture upon which scientists and the public projected their hopes and fears. These fears were magnified during the Cold War, when mushroom clouds no longer needed to be imagined; they appeared on the evening news. Weart examines nuclear anxiety in sources as diverse as Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour, Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, and the television show The Simpsons.
Recognizing how much we remain in thrall to these setpieces of the imagination, Weart hopes, will help us resist manipulation from both sides of the nuclear debate.
One of England’s grand masters of history provides a clear and persuasive interpretation of the creation of “respectable society” in Victorian Britain. Integrating a vast amount of research previously hidden in obscure or academic journals, he covers not only the economy, social structure, and patterns of authority, but also marriage and the family, childhood, homes and houses, work and play.
By 1900 the structure of British society had become more orderly and well-defined than it had been in the 1830s and 1840s, but the result, F. M. L. Thompson shows, was fragmentation into a multiplicity of sections or classes with differing standards and notions of respectability. Each group operated its own social controls, based on what it considered acceptable or unacceptable conduct. This “internalized and diversified” respectability was not the cohesive force its middle-class and evangelical proponents had envisioned. The Victorian experience thus bequeathed structural problems, identity problems, and authority problems to the twentieth century, with which Britain is grappling.
By the third century BC, the once-modest settlement of Rome had conquered most of Italy and was poised to build an empire throughout the Mediterranean basin. What transformed a humble city into the preeminent power of the region? In The Rise of Rome, the historian and archaeologist Kathryn Lomas reconstructs the diplomatic ploys, political stratagems, and cultural exchanges whereby Rome established itself as a dominant player in a region already brimming with competitors. The Latin world, she argues, was not so much subjugated by Rome as unified by it. This new type of society that emerged from Rome’s conquest and unification of Italy would serve as a political model for centuries to come.
Archaic Italy was home to a vast range of ethnic communities, each with its own language and customs. Some such as the Etruscans, and later the Samnites, were major rivals of Rome. From the late Iron Age onward, these groups interacted in increasingly dynamic ways within Italy and beyond, expanding trade and influencing religion, dress, architecture, weaponry, and government throughout the region. Rome manipulated preexisting social and political structures in the conquered territories with great care, extending strategic invitations to citizenship and thereby allowing a degree of local independence while also fostering a sense of imperial belonging.
In the story of Rome’s rise, Lomas identifies nascent political structures that unified the empire’s diverse populations, and finds the beginnings of Italian peoplehood.
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