This volume reports in detail how a particular portion of the American wilderness developed into a settled farming community. To fully comprehend the history of the American people in the early national period, an understanding of this transformation from forest to community—and the pattern of life within such communities where the vast majority of the people live—is essential.

Three major conclusions emerge from Philip L. White's study of Beekmantown, New York. First, the economic advantages of the frontier attracted a first generation of settlers relatively high in social and economic status, but the disappearance of frontier conditions brought a second generation of settlers appreciably lower in status. Second, White rejects the romantic notion that the frontier fostered equality and argues instead that the frontier's economic opportunities fostered inequality. Finally, in contrast to revisionist arguments, he affirms that in Beekmantown the Jacksonian period does indeed warrant characterization as the era of the "common man."

This book represents a model in community history: the narrative is full of human interest; the scholarship is prodigious; the applications are universal.

Beyond Market Value chronicles Annette Campbell-White’s remarkable life, from a childhood spent in remote mining camps throughout the British Commonwealth, where books created an imaginary home; to her early adulthood in London, where she first discovered a vocation as a book collector; to Silicon Valley, where she built a pioneering career as a formidable venture capitalist. She recalls the impulsive purchase of the first book in her collection, T. S. Eliot’s A Song for Simeon, and her pursuit of rare editions of all one hundred titles listed in Cyril Connolly’s The Modern Movement. Campbell-White’s collecting and career peaked in 2005, when she acquired the last of the Connolly titles and was first named to Forbes’ Midas List, the annual ranking of the most successful dealmakers in venture capital.

In 2007, out of concern for their preservation, Campbell-White rashly sold the Connolly titles she had spent more than twenty years assembling, leading to a new appreciation of what remained of her collection and, going forward, a broader focus on collecting modernist letters, manuscripts, and ephemera. Beyond Market Value is both a loving tribute to literary collecting and a telling account of the challenges of being a woman in the male-dominated world of finance.

This collection's fascinating spectrum of topics begins with the literary and cinematic representations of slavery from the 1970s to the present. Other authors delve into visual culture from Blaxploitation to the art of Betye Saar to stage works like A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White as well as groundbreaking literary works like Corregidora and Captain Blackman. A pair of concluding essays concentrate on institutional change by looking at the Seventies surge of black publishing and by analyzing Ntozake Shange's for colored girls. . . in the context of current controversies surrounding sexual violence. Throughout, the writers reveal how Seventies black cultural production anchors important contemporary debates in black feminism and other issues while spurring the black imagination to thrive amidst abject social and political conditions.

Contributors: Courtney R. Baker, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Madhu Dubey, Nadine Knight, Monica White Ndounou, Kinohi Nishikawa, Samantha Pinto, Jermaine Singleton, Terrion L. Williamson, and Lisa Woolfork

The surprising story of the wine industry’s role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire.

“We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen,” stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony’s best agricultural land and planted grapevines. Soon enough, wine was the primary export of a region whose mostly Muslim inhabitants didn’t drink alcohol.

Settlers made fortunes while drawing large numbers of Algerians into salaried work for the first time. But the success of Algerian wine resulted in friction with French producers, challenging the traditional view that imperial possessions should complement, not compete with, the metropole. By the middle of the twentieth century, amid the fight for independence, Algerians had come to see the rows of vines as an especially hated symbol of French domination. After the war, Algerians had to decide how far they would go to undo the transformations the colonists had wrought—including the world’s fourth-biggest wine industry. Owen White examines Algeria’s experiment with nationalized wine production in worker-run vineyards, the pressures that resulted in the failure of that experiment, and the eventual uprooting of most of the country’s vines.

With a special focus on individual experiences of empire, from the wealthiest Europeans to the poorest laborers in the fields, The Blood of the Colony shows the central role of wine in the economic life of French Algeria and in its settler culture. White makes clear that the industry left a long-term mark on the development of the nation.

David Whiteis delves into how the current and upcoming Chicago blues generations carry on this legacy. Drawing on in-person interviews, Whiteis places the artists within the ongoing social and cultural reality their work reflects and helps create. Beginning with James Cotton, Eddie Shaw, and other bequeathers, he moves through an all-star council of elders like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and on to inheritors and today's heirs apparent like Ronnie Baker Brooks, Shemekia Copeland, and Nellie "Tiger" Travis.

Insightful and wide-ranging, Blues Legacy reveals a constantly adapting art form that, whatever the challenges, maintains its links to a rich musical past.

This magical account of King Arthur’s last night on earth, rediscovered in a collection of T. H. White’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, spent twenty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list following its publication in 1977. While preparing for his final, fatal battle with his bastard son, Mordred, Arthur returns to the Animal Council with Merlyn, where the deliberations center on ways to abolish war. More self-revealing than any other of White’s books, Merlyn shows his mind at work as he agonized over whether to join the fight against Nazi Germany while penning the epic that would become The Once and Future King. The Book of Merlyn has been cited as a major influence by such illustrious writers as Kazuo Ishiguro, J. K. Rowling, Helen Macdonald, Neil Gaiman, and Lev Grossman.

“Arriving from beyond the curve of time and apparently from the grave, The Book of Merlyn stirs its own pages, saying, wait: you didn’t get the whole story. . . . It gives us a final glimpse of those two immortal characters, Wart and Merlyn, up close, slo-mo, with a considered and affectionate scrutiny. The book is an elegiac posting from a master storyteller of the twentieth century. Its reissue in our next century is just as welcome as when it first arrived forty years ago. . . . Certainly the moral questions about the military use of force perplex the world still. . . . The efficacy of treaties, the trading of insults among the potentates of the day, the testing of weapons, the weaponizing of trade—these strategies are still front and center. Rather terrifyingly so. We do well to revisit what that old schoolteacher of children, Merlyn, has been trying to point out to us about power and responsibility.”
—Gregory Maguire, from the foreword

This is the first comprehensive overview of the work of Murray Bookchin, the left-libertarian social theorist and political ecologist who is widely regarded as the visionary precursor of anti-corporate politics.

Bookchin's writing spans fifty years and engages with a wide variety of issues: from ecology to urban planning, from environmental ethics to debates about radical democracy. Weaving insights from Hegel and Marx, Kropotkin and Mumford, Bookchin presents a critical theory whose central utopian message is 'things could be other than they are'.

This accessible introduction maps the evolution of Bookchin’s project. It traces his controversial engagements with Marxism, anarchism, critical theory, postmodernism and eco-centric thought. It evaluates his attempt to develop a social ecology. Finally, it considers how his thinking relates to current debates in social theory and environmentalism, critical theory and philosophy, political ecology and urban theory.

Offering a clear account of Bookchin's key themes, this book provides a critical but sympathetic account of the strengths and weaknesses of Bookchin's writing.

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.

Young seventeen-year-old Joelito Filártiga was taken from his family home in Asunción, Paraguay, brutally tortured, and murdered by the Paraguayan police. Breaking Silence is the inside story of the quest for justice by his father—the true target of the police—Paraguayan artist and philanthropist Dr. Joel Filártiga. That cruel death, and the subsequent uncompromising struggle by Joelito's father and family, led to an unprecedented sea change in international law and human rights. The author, Richard Alan White, first became acquainted with the Filártiga family in the mid-1970s while doing research for his dissertation on Paraguayan independence. Answering a distressed letter from Joelito's father, he returned to Paraguay and journeyed with the Filártiga family on their long and difficult road to redress. White gives the reader a compelling first-hand, participant-observer perspective, taking us into the family with him, to give witness to not only their agony and sorrow, but their resolute strength as well—strength that led to a groundbreaking $10 million legal decision in Filártiga v. Peña. (Americo Norberto Peña-Irala was the Paraguayan police officer responsible for Joelito's abduction and murder, whom the Filártigas had arrested after finding him hiding in Brooklyn.)

That landmark decision, based on the almost obscure Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, ruled that U.S. courts could accept jurisdiction in international cases—recognizing the right of foreign human rights victims to sue—even though the alleged violation occurred in another country by a non-American and against a non-American. So fundamentally has the Filártiga precedent changed the landscape of international human rights law, that it has served as the basis for nearly 100 progeny suits, and grown to encompass not only human rights abuses, but also violations of international environmental and labor rights law. Today, there are dozens of class action suits pending against corporate defendants ranging from oil conglomerates destroying the Amazon rainforest to designer clothing companies running sweatshops abroad.

Breaking Silence is a remarkable, consuming story, documenting not only the most celebrated case in the international human rights field—but also the tragic and touchingly human story behind it that gives it life. In 2001, Dr. Filártiga was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Alien Tort Claims Act continues to be hotly debated among politicians and lawmakers.