A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY48 start with U start with U
Western democracy is currently under attack by a resurgent Russia, weaponizing new technologies and social media. How to respond? During the Cold War, the West fought off similar Soviet propaganda assaults with shortwave radio broadcasts. Founded in 1949, the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast uncensored information to the Soviet republics in their own languages. About one-third of Soviet urban adults listened to Western radio. The broadcasts played a key role in ending the Cold War and eroding the communist empire.
R. Eugene Parta was for many years the director of Soviet Area Audience Research at RFE/RL, charged among others with gathering listener feedback. In this book he relates a remarkable Cold War operation to assess the impact of Western radio broadcasts on Soviet listeners by using a novel survey research approach. Given the impossibility of interviewing Soviet citizens in their own country, it pioneered audacious interview methods in order to fly under the radar and talk to Soviets traveling abroad, ultimately creating a database of 51,000 interviews which offered unparalleled insights into the media habits and mindset of the Soviet public. By recounting how the “impossible” mission was carried out, Under the Radar also shows how the lessons of the past can help counter the threat from a once and current adversary.
Cundill Prize Finalist
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
“Superbly original…Breaks new ground by showing how a collective consciousness emerged among revolutionaries.”
—The Economist
“A clearly written, brilliantly researched examination of the people and movements that shaped Asia’s course in the 20th century and continue to influence the continent today.”
—Walter Russell Mead, Wall Street Journal
“The most gripping work of history I have ever read. It is a truly profound meditation on the struggles for freedom that shaped modern Asia…a flat out literary masterpiece.”
—Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters
European empires had not yet reached their zenith when Asian radicals planted the seeds of their destruction. They gained energy and recruits after the Bolshevik Revolution, which sparked visions of a free and radically equal world. Thanks to cheap printing presses and the new possibility of international travel, these utopian revolutionaries built clandestine webs of resistance from London and Paris to Calcutta, Bombay, Hanoi, and Shanghai. Tim Harper takes us into this shadowy world, following the interconnected lives of Asian Marxists, anarchists, and nationalists such as M. N. Roy, Ho Chi Minh, and Tan Malaka.
Underground Asia shows for the first time how these national liberation movements crucially depended on global action and reveals how these insurgencies shape the region to this day.
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
A major historian tells the dramatic and untold story of the shadowy networks of revolutionaries across Asia who laid the foundations in the early twentieth century for the end of European imperialism on their continent.
This is the epic tale of how modern Asia emerged out of conflict between imperial powers and a global network of revolutionaries in the turbulent early decades of the twentieth century.
In 1900, European empires had not yet reached their territorial zenith. But a new generation of Asian radicals had already planted the seeds of their destruction. They gained new energy and recruits after the First World War and especially the Bolshevik Revolution, which sparked utopian visions of a free and communist world order led by the peoples of Asia. Aided by the new technologies of cheap printing presses and international travel, they built clandestine webs of resistance from imperial capitals to the front lines of insurgency that stretched from Calcutta and Bombay to Batavia, Hanoi, and Shanghai. Tim Harper takes us into the heart of this shadowy world by following the interconnected lives of the most remarkable of these Marxists, anarchists, and nationalists, including the Bengali radical M. N. Roy, the iconic Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, and the enigmatic Indonesian communist Tan Malaka. He recreates the extraordinary milieu of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, and conspiracies in which they worked. He shows how they fought with subterfuge, violence, and persuasion, all the while struggling to stay one step ahead of imperial authorities.
Underground Asia shows for the first time how Asia’s national liberation movements crucially depended on global action. And it reveals how the consequences of the revolutionaries’ struggle, for better or worse, shape Asia’s destiny to this day.
Previous praise for Tim Harper
Praise for Forgotten Wars:
“[A] compelling book.”—Philip Delves Broughton, Wall Street Journal
“Lucid…majestic.”—Peter Preston, The Observer
“Authoritative.”—Pankaj Mishra, New Yorker
Praise for Forgotten Armies:
“Panoramic… Vivid.”—Benjamin Schwarz, New York Times Book Review
“A spectacular book.”—Martin Jacques, The Guardian
The authors of this edited volume address the hidden attraction that existed between the extremes of left and right, and of internationalism and nationalism under the decades of communist dictatorship in Eastern Europe. One might suppose that under the suppressive regimes based on leftist ideology and internationalism their right-wing opponents would have been defeated and ultimately removed. These essays, on the other hand, recount the itinerary of survival and revival of "right-wing" thought and activities under communist dictatorship. Resistance and accommodation are explored in the various phases from the Stalinist era to the demise of the Soviet Bloc, with the continuity provided by tacit or concealed right-wing discourses receiving particular consideration. The Eastern European right, both in its conservative and fascist version, centered on nationalism, a legitimizing factor that increased with the downfall of the regimes, and the authors thus accord nationalism special attention.
Two documentary sources for these essays that stand out are files of the security services and the exceptionally rich Oral History Archive compiled by the 1956 Institute in Budapest, Hungary.
Each chapter provides pedagogical case studies for teaching content such as antisemitism, resistance and rescue, and the postwar lives of displaced persons. It will transform how students learn about the Holocaust and the circumstances surrounding it.
When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.
Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms—ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more—to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.
Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) was a public intellectual who played a pivotal role in shaping modern Japan’s cultural identity. A self-taught folk scholar and elite bureaucrat, he promoted folk studies in Japan. So extensive was his role that he has been compared with the fabled Grimm Brothers of Germany and the great British folklorist James G. Frazer (1854–1941), author of The Golden Bough. This monograph is only the second book-length English-language examination of Yanagita, and it is the first analysis that moves beyond a biographical account of his pioneering work in folk studies.
An eccentric but insightful critic of Japan’s rush to modernize, Yanagita offers a compelling array of rebuttals to mainstream social and political trends in his carefully crafted writings. Through a close reading of Yanagita’s interdisciplinary texts, which comment on a wide range of key cultural issues that characterized the first half of Japan’s twentieth century, Melek Ortabasi seeks to reevaluate the historical significance of his work. Ortabasi’s inquiry simultaneously exposes, discursively, some of the fundamental assumptions we embrace about modernity and national identity in Japan and elsewhere.
Frederick Jackson Turner Award Finalist
Winner of the David Montgomery Award
Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Book Award
Winner of the Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award
Winner of the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize
Winner of the Américo Paredes Book Award
“A deeply humane book.”
—Mae Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects
“Necessary and timely…A valuable text to consider alongside the current fight for DACA, the border concentration camps, and the unending rhetoric dehumanizing Mexican migrants.”
—PopMatters
“A deep dive into the history of Mexican migration to and from the United States.”
—PRI’s The World
In the 1970s, the Mexican government decided to tackle rural unemployment by supporting the migration of able-bodied men. Millions of Mexican men crossed into the United States to find work. They took low-level positions that few Americans wanted and sent money back to communities that depended on their support. They periodically returned to Mexico, living their lives in both countries. After 1986, however, US authorities disrupted this back-and-forth movement by strengthening border controls. Many Mexican men chose to remain in the United States permanently for fear of not being able to come back north if they returned to Mexico. For them, the United States became a jaula de oro—a cage of gold. Undocumented Lives tells the story of Mexican migrants who were compelled to bring their families across the border and raise a generation of undocumented children.
The inequalities that persist in America have deep historical roots. Evelyn Nakano Glenn untangles this complex history in a unique comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. During this era the country experienced enormous social and economic changes with the abolition of slavery, rapid territorial expansion, and massive immigration, and struggled over the meaning of free labor and the essence of citizenship as people who previously had been excluded sought the promise of economic freedom and full political rights.
After a lucid overview of the concepts of the free worker and the independent citizen at the national level, Glenn vividly details how race and gender issues framed the struggle over labor and citizenship rights at the local level between blacks and whites in the South, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest, and Asians and haoles (the white planter class) in Hawaii. She illuminates the complex interplay of local and national forces in American society and provides a dynamic view of how labor and citizenship were defined, enforced, and contested in a formative era for white-nonwhite relations in America.
This extraordinary book provides a snapshot of socialism throughout the Kádár regime in Hungary (1956-1989) and captures the essence of the world behind the ‘iron curtain’ in a stunning, and often stark, collection of photographs.
Unfinished Socialism is a visually stunning anthropological study containing 450 photographs, many previously unpublished, which portray life in Hungary from every angle: from the May Day March to pop music and from the homeless to sport.
With an introduction that will help the reader understand and appreciate the true meaning of the photographs, this political, social and cultural study of the Kádár years transports the reader back to a time of great significance in Hungary’s long and turbulent history.
Union by Law analyzes the broader social and legal history of Filipino American workers’ rights-based struggles, culminating in the devastating landmark Supreme Court ruling, Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio (1989). Organized chronologically, the book begins with the US invasion of the Philippines and the imposition of colonial rule at the dawn of the twentieth century. The narrative then follows the migration of Filipino workers to the United States, where they mobilized for many decades within and against the injustices of American racial capitalist empire that the Wards Cove majority willfully ignored in rejecting their longstanding claims. This racial innocence in turn rationalized judicial reconstruction of official civil rights law in ways that significantly increased the obstacles for all workers seeking remedies for institutionalized racism and sexism. A reclamation of a long legacy of racial capitalist domination over Filipinos and other low-wage or unpaid migrant workers, Union by Law also tells a story of noble aspirational struggles for human rights over several generations and of the many ways that law was mobilized both to enforce and to challenge race, class, and gender hierarchy at work.
In the 1910s and 1920s, Black musicians organized more than fifty independent locals within the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) in an attempt to control audition criteria, set competitive wages, and secure a voice in national decision-making. Leta Miller follows the AFM’s history of Black locals, which competed directly with white locals in the same territories, from their origins and successes in the 1920s through Depression-era crises to the fraught process of dismantling segregated AFM organizations in the 1960s and 70s. Like any union, Black AFM locals sought to ensure employment and competitive wages for members with always-evolving solutions to problems. Miller’s account of these efforts includes the voices of the musicians themselves and interviews with former union members who took part in the difficult integration of Black and white locals. She also analyzes the fundamental question of how musicians benefitted from membership in a labor organization.
Broad in scope and rich in detail, Union Divided illuminates the complex working world of unionized Black musicians and the AFM’s journey to racial inclusion.
Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture confronts one of the most vexing questions with which labor activists and labor academics struggle: why is there so much opposition to organized labor in the United States? Scholars often point to powerful obstacles from employers or governmental policies, but Lawrence Richards offers a more complete picture of the causes for union decline in the postwar period by examining the attitudes of the workers themselves. Large numbers of American workers in the 1970s and 1980s told pollsters that they would vote against a union if an election were held at their place of employment, and Richards provides a provocative explanation for this hostility: a pervasive strain of antiunionism in American culture that has made many workers distrustful of organized labor.
Weighing the arguments of previous historians and sociologists, Richards posits that this underlying antiunion culture in America has been remarkably consistent over the course of half a century. Assessing organizing efforts among blue-collar, white-collar, and pink-collar workers, Richards examines the tactics and countertactics of company and union representatives who sought to either exploit or neutralize workers' popular negative stereotypes of organized labor's insidious control over workers' autonomy. The book considers a number of case studies of organizing drives throughout recent history, from the failed attempt by District 65 to organize clerical workers at New York University in 1970, to a similarly fruitless drive by the Textile Workers Union in 1980 at a textile factory in Charlottesville, Virginia. In both of these particular cases and in many more, antiunion culture has operated to hinder unions' efforts to organize the unorganized. By examining the manifestations and motivations of antiunion culture in the United States, Richards helps explain why so many American workers seem to vote against their own self-interest and declare themselves "Union Free and Proud."
After Upton Sinclair's powerful novel appeared in 1906, “the jungle” became a compelling metaphor for life and work in the nation's meatpacking industry. Harsh living and working conditions from the killing floor to the hide cellar to the packingtowns, cycles of overwork and underemployment, and the ever-present crowds of new and unskilled laborers characterized an often-violent industry in which the appetite of workers for the protection of unions was exceeded only by the zeal of their employers to prevent workers from organizing. Unionizing the Jungles—which originated in a seminar at the University of Iowa sponsored by the Center for Recent United States History—brings together historians and anthropologists whose studies of various phases of the meatpacking industry, its unions, and its impact on communities in the twentieth century both raise and answer important questions.
The rise and decline of industrial unionism in the packinghouse industry is a unique story that casts into bold relief the conflicts between labor and capital and the tensions based on race and gender in a perpetually changing workforce. The essayists in Unionizing the Jungles discuss the structurally distinctive features of the packinghouse industry—such as the fact that violence and extreme antiunionism were central elements of its culture—the primary actors in the union-building process, the roots of the distinctive interracialism of the United Packinghouse Workers of America and the explosion of industrial unionism in the 1930s, and the community-based militant unionism of the Independent Union of All Workers. Central themes throughout these essays include the role of African American workers, the constant battle for racial equality, and the eruption of gender conflict in the 1950s. Structural and technological changes in the corporate economy, the increased mobility of capital, and a more hostile political economy all contributed to the difficulties the labor movement faced in the 1980s and beyond.
Focusing on the workplace and the community as arenas of conflict and accommodation, the new labor historians in these vigorous essays consider the historical and contemporary problems posed by the development of the packinghouse industry and its unions and reflect on the implications of this dramatic history for the larger story of the changing relations between labor and capital in mass production.
Of the several regional arrangements that function within the United Nations, the most elaborate in organization and function is the Organization of American States. Although the United Nations holds the primary responsibility for preserving international peace, its charter concedes virtual autonomy to regional arrangements in dealing with matters considered appropriate for regional action. This latitude stimulated a trend toward regionalism which eventually posed the important question of how to preserve legitimate regionalism like Pan-Americanism without impairing the essential overall authority of the United Nations.
Following an introductory description of all existing regional arrangements, this comprehensive case study examines every aspect of security cooperation in the Western Hemisphere in the mid-twentieth century: the historical origins and development of the inter-American system; the perfecting of the security structure; and, most important, the functioning of the system under test by controversies among the member nations, and by two world wars, the Korean emergency, and the aggressive threats of international Communism. Particular attention is given to the Cuban situation.
This volume was the first to recognize, boldly and imaginatively, the overwhelming influence wielded in the OAS by the powerful and wealthy United States. This elastic association of one Great Power and twenty small states, based on a mutuality of interests and a common devotion to the principles of civilized international behavior, can be said to have reached full maturity in 1948 with the adoption of the OAS charter, which articulated the goals toward which it had been striving for fifty-eight years: sovereign equality, nonintervention, and consultation for the peaceful solution of disputes and for hemisphere defense. Ironically, just when the Good Neighbor Policy and the rise of Hitler seemed to have cemented inter-American relations, breaks in the solidarity began to appear. World War II produced new forces destined to profoundly alter the bases and objectives of inter-American cooperation. The “be good” policy began to change to a “do good” policy, and in diplomatic discussions, economic measures began to eclipse those concerned with peril to the peace and security of the hemisphere.
In 1973–1974 soaring commodity prices and an oil embargo alerted Americans to the twin dangers of resource exhaustion and dependence on unreliable foreign materials suppliers. This period seemed to mark a watershed in history as the United States shifted from the era of relative resource abundance to relative materials scarcity.
Alfred E. Eckes’s comprehensive study shows that resource depletion and supply dislocations are not concerns unique to the 1970s. Since 1914, the quest for secure and stable supplies of industrial materials has been an important underlying theme of international relations and American diplomacy.
Although the United States has been blessed with a diversified materials base, it has pursued a minerals strategy designed to exploit low-cost, high-quality ores abroad. Eckes demonstrates how this policy has led to official protection for overseas private investments, involving a role for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Some modern historians have neglected the importance of resources in shaping diplomacy and history. This book, based on a vast variety of unutilized archival collections and recently declassified government documents, helps to correct that imbalance. In the process it illuminates an important and still timely aspect of America’s global interests.
"A valuable addition to Latin American and U.S. historiography." —Library Journal
"Schmidt sees American racism, bondholders cultures, the technocratic side of Progressivism, and the National City Bank looting of Haiti as the factors motivating Wilson's 1915 invasion....As a detailed case study in an exceptional manifestation of U. S. imperial control the book will attract a readership beyond students of Caribbean history." —Kirkus
"An important and well-documented account....an interesting case study in twentieth-century imperialism. Schmidt sees the occupation of Haiti as part of a general tendency in American foreign policy...Schmidt analyses in detail the mechanics of the invasion, and discusses the actions, attitudes, and policies of the U.S. administration....A model of academic elegance." —Caribbean Studies
"All the more convincing because the author has used previously inaccessible archive materials." —Journal of American History
One of the most-followed antitrust cases of recent times—United States v. Apple—reveals an often-missed truth: what Americans most fear is competition itself.
In 2012 the Department of Justice accused Apple and five book publishers of conspiring to fix ebook prices. The evidence overwhelmingly showed an unadorned price-fixing conspiracy that cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet before, during, and after the trial millions of Americans sided with the defendants. Pundits on the left and right condemned the government for its decision to sue, decrying Amazon’s market share, railing against a new high-tech economy, and rallying to defend beloved authors and publishers. For many, Amazon was the one that should have been put on trial. But why? One fact went unrecognized and unreckoned with: in practice, Americans have long been ambivalent about competition.
Chris Sagers, a renowned antitrust expert, meticulously pulls apart the misunderstandings and exaggerations that industries as diverse as mom-and-pop grocers and producers of cast-iron sewer pipes have cited to justify colluding to forestall competition. In each of these cases, antitrust law, a time-honored vehicle to promote competition, is put on the defensive. Herein lies the real insight of United States v. Apple. If we desire competition as a policy, we must make peace with its sometimes rough consequences. As bruising as markets in their ordinary operation often seem, letting market forces play out has almost always benefited the consumer. United States v. Apple shows why supporting cases that protect price competition, even when doing so hurts some of us, is crucial if antitrust law is to protect and maintain markets.
Johannes Morsink argues that the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the human rights movement today are direct descendants of revulsion to the Holocaust and the desire to never let it happen again.
Much recent scholarship about human rights has severed this link between the Holocaust, the Universal Declaration, and contemporary human rights activism in favor of seeing the 1970s as the era of genesis. Morsink forcefully presents his case that the Universal Declaration was indeed a meaningful though underappreciated document for the human rights movement and that the declaration and its significance cannot be divorced from the Holocaust. He reexamines this linkage through the working papers of the commission that drafted the declaration as well as other primary sources.
This work seeks to reset scholarly understandings of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the foundations of the contemporary human rights movement.
The University and the People chronicles the influence of Populism—a powerful agrarian movement—on public higher education in the late nineteenth century. Revisiting this pivotal era in the history of the American state university, Scott Gelber demonstrates that Populists expressed a surprising degree of enthusiasm for institutions of higher learning. More fundamentally, he argues that the mission of the state university, as we understand it today, evolved from a fractious but productive relationship between public demands and academic authority.
Populists attacked a variety of elites—professionals, executives, scholars—and seemed to confirm academia’s fear of anti-intellectual public oversight. The movement’s vision of the state university highlighted deep tensions in American attitudes toward meritocracy and expertise. Yet Populists also promoted state-supported higher education, with the aims of educating the sons (and sometimes daughters) of ordinary citizens, blurring status distinctions, and promoting civic engagement. Accessibility, utilitarianism, and public service were the bywords of Populist journalists, legislators, trustees, and sympathetic professors. These “academic populists” encouraged state universities to reckon with egalitarian perspectives on admissions, financial aid, curricula, and research. And despite their critiques of college “ivory towers,” Populists supported the humanities and social sciences, tolerated a degree of ideological dissent, and lobbied for record-breaking appropriations for state institutions.
Unlikely Partners recounts the story of how Chinese politicians and intellectuals looked beyond their country’s borders for economic guidance at a key crossroads in the nation’s tumultuous twentieth century. Julian Gewirtz offers a dramatic tale of competition for influence between reformers and hardline conservatives during the Deng Xiaoping era, bringing to light China’s productive exchanges with the West.
When Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successors seized the opportunity to reassess the wisdom of China’s rigid commitment to Marxist doctrine. With Deng Xiaoping’s blessing, China’s economic gurus scoured the globe for fresh ideas that would put China on the path to domestic prosperity and ultimately global economic power. Leading foreign economists accepted invitations to visit China to share their expertise, while Chinese delegations traveled to the United States, Hungary, Great Britain, West Germany, Brazil, and other countries to examine new ideas. Chinese economists partnered with an array of brilliant thinkers, including Nobel Prize winners, World Bank officials, battle-scarred veterans of Eastern Europe’s economic struggles, and blunt-speaking free-market fundamentalists.
Nevertheless, the push from China’s senior leadership to implement economic reforms did not go unchallenged, nor has the Chinese government been eager to publicize its engagement with Western-style innovations. Even today, Chinese Communists decry dangerous Western influences and officially maintain that China’s economic reinvention was the Party’s achievement alone. Unlikely Partners sets forth the truer story, which has continuing relevance for China’s complex and far-reaching relationship with the West.
Unfortunately, we’re all too familiar with the US’s legacy of maligning immigrants. Some Americans see immigrants as inherently threatening, a blank screen onto which the nation’s worst fears are projected. But this phenomenon is neither timeless nor static. Instead, it arose and transformed alongside the unprecedented arrival of immigrants in the early twentieth century—and the federal government’s response. In The Unruly Facts of Race, sociologist Sunmin Kim explains how American ideas about race and ethnicity were transformed in the early twentieth century as an unintended consequence of anti-immigrant mobilization.
Kim presents a wealth of archival evidence, including the proceedings of the 1907 Dillingham Commission, to reconstruct how competing racialized visions of nationhood evolved in the early twentieth-century immigration debate. Immigration restrictionist politicians believed that the United States should be a White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant nation. However, when they mobilized researchers—some of whom were women and/or immigrants—to gather data at a massive scale to rationalize their aims, they were met with unruly facts that did not support their racial project. Newer European immigrants, as the data showed, were not much different from descendants of earlier immigrants from northern Europe. When facts failed to support the vilification of immigrants, exclusionist politicians instead turned to race as a marker of ineluctable difference to justify their aims. This led to a new principle of national belonging: the United States transitioned to a country that encompassed various European groups, including Catholics and Jews, but excluded non-White immigrants, as they were deemed too different to become a part of the nation.
Kim’s analysis shows that throughout US history, the opportunity for belonging for some immigrants was predicated on the exclusion of others. His focus on the role of facts in the early twentieth century provides a refreshing take on why the so-called “nation of immigrants” has always demonized some immigrants while cherishing others, highlighting the selection and control of immigrants as the core principles of the American nation-building project. Amid a vitriolic explosion of American immigration discourse, Kim offers a needed corrective to and context for debates around who belongs in the United States.
“Recommended for all libraries.”—Frederic Krome, Library Journal
Finalist for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Chicago Tribune, 10 Best Books of 2024
A Hyperallergic Best Book of the Year
The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime.
In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now.
The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War—revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.
To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.
Unspeakable approaches Douglas as neither monster nor literary hero, but as a man who participated in an exploitative sexual subculture that was tolerated in ways we may find hard to understand. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, police records, novels, and photographs—including sources by the children Douglas encountered—Cleves identifies the cultural practices that structured pedophilic behaviors in England, Italy, and other places Douglas favored. Her book delineates how approaches to adult-child sex have changed over time and offers insight into how society can confront similar scandals today, celebrity and otherwise.
For centuries, people have been thinking and writing—and fiercely debating—about the meaning of marriage. Just a hundred years ago, Progressive era reformers embraced marriage not as a time-honored repository for conservative values, but as a tool for social change.
In Until Choice Do Us Part, Clare Virginia Eby offers a new account of marriage as it appeared in fiction, journalism, legal decisions, scholarly work, and private correspondence at the turn into the twentieth century. She begins with reformers like sexologist Havelock Ellis, anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who argued that spouses should be “class equals” joined by private affection, not public sanction. Then Eby guides us through the stories of three literary couples—Upton and Meta Fuller Sinclair, Theodore and Sara White Dreiser, and Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood—who sought to reform marriage in their lives and in their writings, with mixed results. With this focus on the intimate side of married life, Eby views a historical moment that changed the nature of American marriage—and that continues to shape marital norms today.
Histories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out of that familiar account are nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Recounting the fascinating history of audio-recorded literature, Matthew Rubery traces the path of innovation from Edison’s recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for his tinfoil phonograph in 1877, to the first novel-length talking books made for blinded World War I veterans, to today’s billion-dollar audiobook industry.
The Untold Story of the Talking Book focuses on the social impact of audiobooks, not just the technological history, in telling a story of surprising and impassioned conflicts: from controversies over which books the Library of Congress selected to become talking books—yes to Kipling, no to Flaubert—to debates about what defines a reader. Delving into the vexed relationship between spoken and printed texts, Rubery argues that storytelling can be just as engaging with the ears as with the eyes, and that audiobooks deserve to be taken seriously. They are not mere derivatives of printed books but their own form of entertainment.
We have come a long way from the era of sound recorded on wax cylinders, when people imagined one day hearing entire novels on mini-phonographs tucked inside their hats. Rubery tells the untold story of this incredible evolution and, in doing so, breaks from convention by treating audiobooks as a distinctively modern art form that has profoundly influenced the way we read.
In 1905, Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the book that established the core psychoanalytic thesis that sexuality is central to formations of the unconscious. With this book, Eric L. Santner inverts Freud’s title to take up the sexuality of theory—or, more exactly, the modes of enjoyment to be found in the kinds of critical thinking that, since the 1960s, have laid claim to that ancient word, “theory.” Santner unfolds his argument by tracking his own relationship with this tradition and the ways his intellectual and spiritual development has been informed by it.
Untying Things Together is both an intellectual history of major theoretical paradigms and a call for their reexamination and renewal. Revisiting many of the topics he has addressed in previous work, Santner proposes a new way of conceptualizing the eros of thinking, attuned to how our minds and bodies individually and collectively incorporate or “encyst” on a void at the heart of things. Rather than proposing a “return to theory,” Santner’s book simply employs theory as a way of further “(un)tying together” the resources of philosophy, art and literature, theology, psychoanalysis, political thought, and more.
Prior to 1931, many Mexican Americans left the United States voluntarily, prompted by homesickness, unemployment, and the Mexican government’s offer of free small land parcels. As the Great Depression deepened, repatriation pressures increased. Anglo groups lobbied for laws that excluded aliens from jobs and welfare benefits. Many businessmen, government officials, and social workers believed that removing Mexican Americans would open up jobs for U.S. citizens and alleviate some of the burden placed on relief agencies.
The Department of Labor’s federal deportation drive, launched in 1931, created an atmosphere of fear and tension in Mexican American communities. Immigration agents conducted surprise searches for people who had entered the country illegally, and Mexicans who had crossed the border before restrictive legislation was passed became prime targets of the deportation campaign.
Welfare agencies throughout the United States organized repatriation programs. The Los Angeles County Welfare Bureau, with the most extensive program, was responsible for the removal of more than thirteen thousand Mexican Americans. A few well-publicized deportations had frightened Mexicans who were unsure of their immigration status. Many chose repatriation over possible deportation.
Using much archival material and many previously unpublished government documents, Hoffman focuses on the repatriation experience in Los Angeles. The city’s large Mexican American population provides an excellent case study of the entire movement. He also surveys the process of Mexican repatriation throughout the entire United States.
A comprehensive overview of the controversy surrounding Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
Few if any books of the past fifty years have moved a broad section of the German public to think about their country’s Nazi past as has Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The main argument of his book is that Germans committed the unthinkable acts of the Holocaust not because they were forced to but out of a deeply held conviction that killing Jews was morally just. Unwilling Germans? traces the intense and varied reception of a book that has created more heated debate than any other treatment of Germany’s genocidal past.
When Goldhagen’s book first appeared, it was almost universally dismissed by journalists and historians alike. However, following a book tour in Germany, Goldhagen started winning over many of his ardent detractors and finding a young, receptive audience. Although German scholars reacted to Goldhagen and his argument with outrage and dismissal, ironically the German public was mesmerized by both the book and Goldhagen himself.Unwilling Germans? reprints articles that originally appeared in German newspapers, the popular press, and journals, as well as offering original essays. Among the writers whose work is represented are historians, journalists, political scientists, and literary critics, including Jürgen Habermas and Klaus Theweleit. The book traces the initial reactions in Germany to the debate surrounding the U.S. publication of the book, the subsequent reviews and reactions upon the publication of the German translation, and recent commentary by Goldhagen and the American historian Christopher Browning. A unique and fascinating collection, Unwilling Germans? will help to sort out the confusing nature of the response to the “Goldhagen Debate,” and shed light on both Germany’s continuing process of coming to terms with its Nazi past and the resonances of that debate in the United States.ISBN 0-8166-3100-X Cloth $44.95xxISBN 0-8166-3101-8 Paper $17.95224 pages 5 7/8 x 9 JuneTranslation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
Since the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., has personified black leadership with his use of direct action protests against white authority. A century ago, in the era of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington pursued a different strategy to lift his people. In this compelling biography, Norrell reveals how conditions in the segregated South led Washington to call for a less contentious path to freedom and equality. He urged black people to acquire economic independence and to develop the moral character that would ultimately gain them full citizenship. Although widely accepted as the most realistic way to integrate blacks into American life during his time, Washington’s strategy has been disparaged since the 1960s.
The first full-length biography of Booker T. in a generation, Up from History recreates the broad contexts in which Washington worked: He struggled against white bigots who hated his economic ambitions for blacks, African-American intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois who resented his huge influence, and such inconstant allies as Theodore Roosevelt. Norrell details the positive power of Washington’s vision, one that invoked hope and optimism to overcome past exploitation and present discrimination. Indeed, his ideas have since inspired peoples across the Third World that there are many ways to struggle for equality and justice. Up from History reinstates this extraordinary historical figure to the pantheon of black leaders, illuminating not only his mission and achievement but also, poignantly, the man himself.
This volume is the second in the series Cold War Documentary Readers, a project of the US National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project.
The volume is the first documented account of this early Cold War crisis from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Based on the recent unprecedented access to the once-closed archives of several member states of the Warsaw Pact, this collection of primary-source documents presents one of the most notorious events of post-war European history in a highly readable format.
Previously unreleased Kremlin records, once highly classified American documents, materials from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and transcripts of internal East German Communist Party Politburo meetings in the days leading to the uprising in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) are among the highlights of this sensational documentary.
In this volume, as in the previous one in the series, each part is preceded by a detailed introductory essay to provide the necessary historical and political context. The individual documents are introduced by short headnotes summarizing the contents and orienting the reader. A chronology, glossary and bibliography offer further background information.
Robert Carriker examines for the first time the intricate histories of these subsistence homestead projects, which have long been buried in bureaucratic records and clouded by misunderstanding, showing that in many ways they were among the agency’s most successful efforts. He provides case studies of the projects, rescuing their obscure histories using archival documents and rare photographs. He also reveals the machinations of civic groups and private citizens across the West who jockeyed for access to the funds being allotted for New Deal community building.
By describing what took place on these western homesteads, Carriker shows that the DSH’s agenda was not as far-fetched as some have reported. The tendency to condemn the Division and its projects, he argues, has failed to appreciate the good that came from some of the individual homestead communities—particularly those in the Far West.
Although overshadowed by the larger undertakings of the New Deal, some of these western communities remain thriving neighborhoods—living legacies to FDR’s efforts that show how the country once chose to deal with economic hardship. Too often the DSH is noted for its failures; Carriker’s study shows that its western homesteads were instead qualified accomplishments.
Interrogates the connections between a city’s physical landscape and the poverty and social problems that are often concentrated at its literal lowest points.
In Urban Lowlands, Steven T. Moga looks closely at the Harlem Flats in New York City, Black Bottom in Nashville, Swede Hollow in Saint Paul, and the Flats in Los Angeles, to interrogate the connections between a city’s actual landscape and the poverty and social problems that are often concentrated at its literal lowest points. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective on the history of US urban development from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Moga reveals patterns of inequitable land use, economic dispossession, and social discrimination against immigrants and minorities. In attending to the landscapes of neighborhoods typically considered slums, Moga shows how physical and policy-driven containment has shaped the lives of the urban poor, while wealth and access to resources have been historically concentrated in elevated areas—truly “the heights.” Moga’s innovative framework expands our understanding of how planning and economic segregation alike have molded the American city.
The recent riots in Los Angeles brought the urban crisis back to the center of public policy debates in Washington, D.C., and in urban areas throughout the United States. The contributors to this volume examine the major policy issues--race, housing, transportation, poverty, the changing environment, the effects of the global economy--confronting contemporary American cities.
Raymond A. Mohl begins with an extended discussion of the origins, evolution, and current state of Federal involvement in urban centers. Michael B. Katz follows with an insightful look at poverty in turn-of-the-century New York and the attempts to ameliorate the desperate plight of the poor during this period of rapid economic growth. Arnold R. Hirsch, Mohl, and David R. Goldfield then pursue different facets of the racial dilemma confronting American cities. Hirsch discusses historical dimensions of residential segregation and public policy, while Mohl uses Overtown, Miami, as a case study of the social impact of the construction of interstate highways in urban communities. David Goldfield explores the political ramifications and incongruities of contemporary urban race relations.
Finally, Carl Abbott and Sam Bass Warner, Jr., examine the impact of global economic developments and the environmental implications of past policy choices. Collectively, the authors show us where we have been, some of the needs that must be addressed, and the urban policy alternatives we face.
The volume begins with a new translation of the 1945 play The Useless Mouths, written in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Other pieces were discovered after Beauvoir's death in 1986, such as the 1965 short novel "Misunderstanding in Moscow," involving an elderly French couple who confront their fears of aging. Two additional previously unknown texts include the fragmentary "Notes for a Novel," which contains the seed of what she later would call "the problem of the Other," and a lecture on postwar French theater titled Existentialist Theater. The collection notably includes the eagerly awaited translation of Beauvoir's contribution to a 1965 debate among Jean-Paul Sartre and other French writers and intellectuals, "What Can Literature Do?"
Prefaces to well-known works such as Bluebeard and Other Fairy Tales,La Bâtarde, and James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years are also available in English for the first time, alongside essays and other short articles. A landmark contribution to Beauvoir studies and French literary studies, the volume includes informative and engaging introductory essays by prominent and rising scholars.
Contributors are Meryl Altman, Elizabeth Fallaize, Alison S. Fell, Sarah Gendron, Dennis A. Gilbert, Laura Hengehold, Eleanore Holveck, Terry Keefe, J. Debbie Mann, Frederick M. Morrison, Catherine Naji, Justine Sarrot, Liz Stanley, Ursula Tidd, and Veronique Zaytzeff.
Battleships were instrumental in America’s rise to world dominance at the end of the 19th century. Two battleships in particular, the U.S.S. Wisconsin BB-9 and BB-64, participated in wars and conflicts around the globe, demonstrating America’s strength and technological power. The keel of the BB-9 was laid down on the eve of the Spanish-American War, and she sailed with the Great White Fleet on its famous world voyage of 1907-1909. Representing a major advance in American naval technology, the Wisconsin both demonstrated American strength in the Pacific and served as the setting for peace talks between Panama and Colombia when the former gained independence in 1903. Recommissioned during World War I as a training ship, the BB-9 was then decommissioned in 1920. More than twenty years later, on December 7, 1943, the fast battleship Wisconsin (BB-64) was launched in response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The BB-64 served in the Pacific to the end of World War II and again in the Korean War. One of the Iowa- class battleships, the BB-64 was one of the fastest and sleekest on the ocean. In 1988, she was refitted and recommissioned for yet another tour of duty. This is the story of two proud vessels and their role in American naval and diplomatic history.
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