An elucidating collection of ten original essays, Making Animal Meaning reconceptualizes methods for researching animal histories and rethinks the contingency of the human-animal relationship. The vibrant and diverse field of animal studies is detailed in these interdisciplinary discussions, which include voices from a broad range of scholars and have an extensive chronological and geographical reach. These exciting discourses capture the most compelling theoretical underpinnings of animal significance while exploring meaning-making through the study of specific spaces, species, and human-animal relations. A deeply thoughtful collection — vital to understanding central questions of agency, kinship, and animal consumption — these essays tackle the history and philosophy of constructing animal meaning.
Rabbi Ben Kamin has written a definitive personal expression about race, coming of age in the 1960s, a forbidden friendship, and his personal love for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is a story that spans a four-decade search for a lost high school chum, a deep misunderstanding, and a coming to terms with an America painfully evolving from the blood of MLK to the promise of Barack Obama.
The book is a remembrance of Kamin's life at Cincinnati's notorious Woodward High School, a microcosm of the 1960s and of America itself, as well as detailing Kamin's search-for Clifton, for America, for the key to understanding what race relations really are in the United States. Simultaneously, it is the story of the emerging rabbi's search for the legacy of his spiritual mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., taking Kamin from Cincinnati to Cleveland to Memphis to New Orleans and other points, and constantly bringing him home to his friend Clifton and "the heaving hallways" of that high school.
On November 10, 1975, SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a giant freighter, sank with its entire crew of 29 aboard, in one of the most violent storms ever witnessed on Lake Superior. In 29 Missing, Kantar tells the "Fitz's" story from the christening in 1958 as the largest ship on the Great Lakes to the expedition in 1995 to recover the ship's bell in what proved to be a moving memorial to the lost crew. Using information from government investigative reports, the book provides a dramatic hour-by-hour account of what transpired during that terrible voyage, including dialogue from actual radio transmissions between the Fitzgerald and the Arthur Anderson, the freighter that followed behind the Fitz.
In his passionate retelling of the story, designed primarily for young adults, Kantar provides the facts leading up to the disappearance, detailing the subsequent expeditions to the wreck site as well as the leading theories about the sinking that have been debated by maritime experts.
Michigan’s "storms of November" are famous in song, lore, and legend and have taken a tragic toll, breaking the hulls of many ships and sending them to cold, dark, and silent graves on the bottoms of the Great Lakes. On November 18, 1958, when the limestone carrier Carl D. Bradley broke up during a raging storm on Lake Michigan, it became the largest ship in Great Lakes' history to vanish beneath storm-tossed waves. Along with the Bradley, thirty-three crew members perished. Most of the casualties hailed from the little harbor town of Rogers City, Michigan, a community that was stung with grief when, in an instant, twenty-three women became widows and fifty- three children were left fatherless. Nevertheless, this is also a story of survival, as it recounts the tale of two of the ship’s crew, whose fifteen-hour ordeal on a life raft, in gale-force winds and 25 foot waves, is a remarkable story of endurance and tenacity.
Written in a style that is equally appealing to young adults and adult readers, Black November is a tale of adventure, courage, heroism, and tragedy. Kantar, the author of 29 Missing, a book about the loss of the great lakes freighter the Edmund Fitzgerald, has once again crafted a dramatic narrative that is both informative and compelling. Although the Carl D. Bradley has been called "the ship that time forgot," Black November recalls that tragic day nearly fifty years ago and is a moving tribute to the ship and its crew.
This is the harrowing story of one of the worst shipwrecks in Great Lakes history. In the early morning hours of November 29, 1966, the S.S. Daniel J. Morrell was caught in a deadly storm on Lake Huron. Waves higher than the ship crested over it, and winds exceeding sixty miles per hour whipped at its hull, splitting the 603-foot freighter into two giant pieces. Amazingly, after the bow went down, the stern blindly powered itself through the stormy seas for another five miles! Twenty-eight men drowned in the icy waters of Lake Huron, but one sailor—26-year-old Dennis Hale—miraculously survived the treacherous storm. Wearing only boxer shorts, a lifejacket, and a pea coat, Hale clung to a life raft in near-freezing temperatures for 38 hours until he was rescued late in the afternoon of the following day. Three of his fellow crewmates died in his raft.
In Deadly Voyage, Andrew Kantar recounts this tale of tragedy and triumph on Lake Huron. Informed by meticulous research and the eyewitness details provided by Hale, and illustrated with photographs from the Coast Guard search and rescue operation, Kantar depicts one of the most tragic shipwrecks in Great Lakes history.
For much of U.S. history, the story of native people has been written by historians and anthropologists relying on the often biased accounts of European-American observers. Though we have become well acquainted with war chiefs like Pontiac and Crazy Horse, it has been at the expense of better knowing civic-minded intellectuals like Andrew J. Blackbird, who sought in 1887 to give a voice to his people through his landmark book History of the Ottawa and Chippewa People. Blackbird chronicled the numerous ways in which these Great Lakes people fought to retain their land and culture, first with military resistance and later by claiming the tools of citizenship. This stirring account reflects on the lived experience of the Odawa people and the work of one of their greatest advocates.
The copper mines of Michigan's Copper Country, in the Upper Peninsula, were active for 150 years, from 1845 until 1995. Many of the mine workers attempted to unionize, in order to obtain better working conditions, wages, and hours.
The Michigan miners were unsuccessful in their struggles with mine owners, which came to a climax in the 1913–14 Copper Country Strike. This nine-month battle between workers represented by the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and the three major mining companies in the region took a particularly nasty turn on Christmas Eve, 1913, at a party for strikers and their families organized by the WFM. As many as 500 people were in the Italian Benevolent Society hall in Calumet, Michigan, when someone reportedly shouted "fire." There was no fire, but it is estimated that 73–79 people, more than 60 of them children, died in the stampede for the exit.
Against this dramatic backdrop, Gary Kaunonen tells the story of Finnish immigrants to Copper Country. By examining the written record and material culture of Finnish immigrant proletarians-analyzing buildings, cultural institutions, and publications of the socialist-unionist media—Kaunonen adds a new depth to our understanding of the time and place, the events and a people.
In Finns in Michigan Gary Kaunonen probes the intricacies of immigration, labor, and ideology among the members of this intriguing and historically important ethnic group. He skillfully traces the evolution of a vibrant, diverse, dramatic, and at times deeply quarrelsome people who left an indelible mark on the state's history.
Kaunonen examines the many schisms and splits that define the course of Finnish social life in Michigan. Michigan's Finns flocked to diverse cultural organizations that span a broad ideological spectrum. This book examines an extraordinarily wide range of organizations, including religious institutions, temperance societies, working-class political and labor groups, the cooperative movement, and a nationalist association of Finns.
Finns in Michigan is a study of the contributions of Michigan's Finns in the workplace, in society, and in cultural life. Unlike previous, sometimes mythologized, histories of the Finns in Michigan, Kaunonen's rendition strives to be a more accurate representation of "the good, the bad, and the other" activities of a group he calls "possibly America's most diverse family."
A mirror of great changes that were occurring on the national labor rights scene, the 1913–14 Michigan Copper Strike was a time of unprecedented social upheaval in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With organized labor taking an aggressive stance against the excesses of unfettered capitalism, the stage was set for a major struggle between labor and management. The Michigan Copper Strike received national attention and garnered the support of luminaries in organized labor like Mother Jones, John Mitchell, Clarence Darrow, and Charles Moyer. The hope of victory was overshadowed, however, by violent incidents like the shooting of striking workers and their family members, and the bitterness of a community divided. No other event came to symbolize or memorialize the strike more than the Italian Hall tragedy, in which dozens of workers and working-class children died. In Community in Conflict, the efforts of working people to gain a voice on the job and in their community through their unions, and the efforts of employers to crush those unions, take center stage. Previously untapped historical sources such as labor spy reports, union newspapers, coded messages, and artifacts shine new light on this epic, and ultimately tragic, period in American labor history.
Germans are the largest ancestral group in Michigan, representing over 2.6 million descendants or 22% of the state’s population. Yet, unlike other immigrant groups, Germans have not retained their linguistic and cultural traditions as part of a distinct ethnic identity. The Bavarian villages of Frankenmuth and Gaylord stand as testaments to the once proud and vigorous German communities that dotted both rural and urban Michigan landscapes. Jeremy W. Kilar explores the social forces that transformed Germans from inward-looking immigrants to citizens in the cultural mainstream. Germans in Michigan is a story of assimilation and renewal and as such reveals the complexities of Americanization and immigration as social forces.
Much knowledge and understanding can be generated from the experiences of everyday life. In this engaging study, Alvin O. Korte examines how this concept applies to Spanish-speaking peoples adapted to a particular locale, specifically the Hispanos and Hispanas of northern New Mexico. Drawing on social philosopher Alfred Schutz’s theory of typification, Korte looks at how meaning and identity are crafted by quotidian activities. Incorporating phenomenological and ethnomethodological strategies, the author investigates several aspects of local Hispano culture, including the oral tradition, leave-taking, death and remembrances of the dead, spirituality, and the circle of life. Although avoiding a social-problems approach, the book devotes necessary attention to mortificación (the death of the self), desmadre (chaos and disorder), and mancornando (cuckoldry). Nosotros is a vivid and insightful exploration with applications in numerous fields.
The 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters Strike proved to be a pivotal event in twentieth-century American labor history. The Minneapolis Teamsters challenged the muscle of big business, as well as the authority of local, state, and federal government, and in the process they changed the very nature of labor relations in the United States. In The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, Philip Korth's description of events surrounding this landmark labor action are filtered through the recollections of the people who were there. Korth blends historical record with the words of actual participants to draw a thorough and compelling portrait of a labor strike and its consequences. Philip Korth's study illustrates the organizational strategies that made the Minneapolis strike a success, as well as how opposition and public perception defined emerging labor relations practices and public policy. At the same time, the author provides an in-depth examination of the conflict through interviews with witnesses and participants in this pivotal event in labor history.
In the spring of 1868, people from several Ojibwe villages located along the upper Mississippi River were relocated to a new reservation at White Earth, more than 100 miles to the west. In many public declarations that accompanied their forced migration, these people appeared to embrace the move, as well as their conversion to Christianity and the new agrarian lifestyle imposed on them. Beneath this surface piety and apparent acceptance of change, however, lay deep and bitter political divisions that were to define fundamental struggles that shaped Ojibwe society for several generations.
In order to reveal the nature and extent of this struggle for legitimacy and authority, To Be The Main Leaders of Our People reconstructs the political and social history of these Minnesota Ojibwe communities between the years 1825 and 1898. Ojibwe political concerns, the thoughts and actions of Ojibwe political leaders, and the operation of the Ojibwe political system define the work's focus. Kugel examines this particular period of time because of its significance to contemporary Ojibwe history. The year 1825, for instance, marked the beginning of a formal alliance with the United States; 1898 represented not an end, but a striking point of continuity, defying the easy categorizations of Native peoples made by non-Indians, especially in the closing years of the nineteenth century.
In this volume, the Ojibwe "speak for themselves," as their words were recorded by government officials, Christian missionaries, fur traders, soldiers, lumbermen, homesteaders, and journalists. While they were nearly always recorded in English translation, Ojibwe thoughts, perceptions, concerns, and even humor, clearly emerge. To Be The Main Leaders of Our People expands the parameters of how oral traditions can be used in historical writing and sheds new light on a complex, but critical, series of events in ongoing relations between Native and non-Native people.
Kazuko Kuramoto was born and raised in Dairen, Manchuria, in 1927, at the peak of Japanese expansionism in Asia. Dairen and the neighboring Port Arthur were important colonial outposts on the Liaotung Peninsula; the train lines established by Russia and taken over by the Japanese, ended there. When Kuramoto's grandfather arrived in Dairen as a member of the Japanese police force shortly after the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the family's belief in Japanese supremacy and its "divine" mission to "save" Asia from Western imperialists was firmly in place. As a third-generation colonist, the seventeen-year-old Kuramoto readily joined the Red Cross Nurse Corps in 1944 to aid in the war effort and in her country's sacred cause. A year later, her family listened to the emperor's radio broadcast ". . . we shall have to endure the unendurable, to suffer the insufferable." Japan surrendered unconditionally.
Manchurian Legacy is the story of the family's life in Dairen, their survival as a forgotten people during the battle to reclaim Manchuria waged by Russia, Nationalist China, and Communist China, and their subsequent repatriation to a devastated Japan. Kuramoto describes a culture based on the unthinking oppression of the colonized by the colonizer. And, because Manchuria was, in essence, a Japanese frontier, her family lived a freer and more luxurious life than they would have in Japan—one relatively unscathed by the war until after the surrender.
As a commentator Kuramoto explores her culture both from the inside, subjectively, and from the outside, objectively. Her memoirs describe her coming of age in a colonial society, her family's experiences in war-torn Manchuria, and her "homecoming" to Japan—where she had never been—just as Japan is engaged in its own cultural upheaval.
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