front cover of The Muridiyya on the Move
The Muridiyya on the Move
Islam, Migration, and Place Making
Cheikh Anta Babou
Ohio University Press, 2021
Highlights the role of transnational space making in the construction of diasporic Muridiyya identity. The construction of collective identity among the Muridiyya abroad is a communal but contested endeavor. Differing conceptions of what should be the mission of Muridiyya institutions in the diaspora reveal disciples’ conflicting politics and challenge the notion of the order’s homogeneity. While some insist on the universal dimension of Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke’s calling and emphasize dawa (proselytizing), others prioritize preserving Muridiyya identity abroad by consolidating the linkages with the leadership in Senegal. Diasporic reimaginings of the Muridiyya abroad, in turn, inspire cultural reconfigurations at home. Drawing from a wide array of oral and archival sources in multiple languages collected in five countries, The Muridiyya on the Move reconstructs over half a century of the order’s history, focusing on mobility and cultural transformations in urban settings. In this groundbreaking work, Babou highlights the importance of the dahira (urban prayer circle) as he charts the continuities and ruptures between Muridiyya migrations. Throughout, he delineates the economic, socio-political, and other forces that powered these population movements, including colonial rule, the economic crises of the postcolonial era, and natural disasters.
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Fighting the Greater Jihad
Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853–1913
Cheikh Anta Babou
Ohio University Press, 2007

In Senegal, the Muridiyya, a large Islamic Sufi order, is the single most influential religious organization, including among its numbers the nation’s president. Yet little is known of this sect in the West. Drawn from a wide variety of archival, oral, and iconographic sources in Arabic, French, and Wolof, Fighting the Greater Jihad offers an astute analysis of the founding and development of the order and a biographical study of its founder, Cheikh Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke.

Cheikh Anta Babou explores the forging of Murid identity and pedagogy around the person and initiative of Amadu Bamba as well as the continuing reconstruction of this identity by more recent followers. He makes a compelling case for reexamining the history of Muslim institutions in Africa and elsewhere in order to appreciate believers’ motivation and initiatives, especially religious culture and education, beyond the narrow confines of political collaboration and resistance. Fighting the Greater Jihad also reveals how religious power is built at the intersection of genealogy, knowledge, and spiritual force, and how this power in turn affected colonial policy.

Fighting the Greater Jihad will dramatically alter the perspective from which anthropologists, historians, and political scientists study Muslim mystical orders.

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African Security
Local Issues and Global Connections
Abu Bakarr Bah
Ohio University Press, 2024
African Security: Local Issues and Global Connections provokes new ways of thinking about solutions to African security—solutions that consider the eclectic and sometimes disparate natures of African conflicts and that address both their domestic and their external dimensions. The book centers on the concept of glocalized security, which draws from sociological critiques that point to localization within globalization. This edited collection brings the concept of glocalization into African security studies by examining the fusion of domestic and external drivers of conflicts and how that relationship creates a glocalized security situation across Africa. The chapters in this volume engage the literature on domestic and external causes of conflicts in Africa, most notably issues of patrimonialism, ethnicity, natural resources, climate change, and geopolitics. These conflict drivers are woven in with known theories on security, such as neocolonialism, liberal peace, responsibility to protect (R2P), and collective security. The book presents rich qualitative and historical data, convincingly analyzed and theorized. Contributors: Folahanmi Aina, Alfred Babo, Abu Bakarr Bah, Noamane Cherkaoui, Nikolas Emmanuel, Tenley K. Erickson, John Mwangi Githigaro, Michael Nwankpa, Norman Sempijja, and Akram Zaoui
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The Life and Death of Gus Reed
A Story of Race and Justice in Illinois during the Civil War and Reconstruction
Thomas Bahde
Ohio University Press, 2014

Gus Reed was a freed slave who traveled north as Sherman’s March was sweeping through Georgia in 1864. His journey ended in Springfield, Illinois, a city undergoing fundamental changes as its white citizens struggled to understand the political, legal, and cultural consequences of emancipation and black citizenship. Reed became known as a petty thief, appearing time and again in the records of the state’s courts and prisons. In late 1877, he burglarized the home of a well-known Springfield attorney—and brother of Abraham Lincoln’s former law partner—a crime for which he was convicted and sentenced to the Illinois State Penitentiary.

Reed died at the penitentiary in 1878, shackled to the door of his cell for days with a gag strapped in his mouth. An investigation established that two guards were responsible for the prisoner’s death, but neither they nor the prison warden suffered any penalty. The guards were dismissed, the investigation was closed, and Reed was forgotten.

Gus Reed’s story connects the political and legal cultures of white supremacy, black migration and black communities, the Midwest’s experience with the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the resurgence of nationwide opposition to African American civil rights in the late nineteenth century. These experiences shaped a nation with deep and unresolved misgivings about race, as well as distinctive and conflicting ideas about justice and how to achieve it.

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A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991
Second Edition
Bahru Bahru Zewde
Ohio University Press, 2002

Bounded by Sudan to the west and north, Kenya to the south, Somalia to the southeast, and Eritrea and Djibouti to the northeast, Ethiopia is a pivotal country in the geopolitics of the region. Yet it is important to understand this ancient and often splintered country in its own right.

In A History of Modern Ethiopia, Bahru Zewde, one of Ethiopia’s leading historians, provides a compact and comprehensive history of his country, particularly the last two centuries. Of importance to historians, political scientists, journalists, and Africanists alike, Bahru’s A History of Modern Ethiopia, now with additional material taking it up to the last decade, will be the preeminent overview of present-day Ethiopia.

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Pioneers Of Change In Ethiopia
The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century
Bahru Bahru Zewde
Ohio University Press, 2002

In this exciting new study, Bahru Zewde, one of the foremost historians of modern Ethiopia, has constructed a collective biography of a remarkable group of men and women in a formative period of their country’s history. Ethiopia’s political independence at the end of the nineteenth century put this new African state in a position to determine its own levels of engagement with the West. Ethiopians went to study in universities around the world. They returned with the skills of their education acquired in Europe and America, and at home began to lay the foundations of a new literature and political philosophy. Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia describes the role of these men and women of ideas in the social and political transformation of the young nation and later in the administration of Haile Selassie.

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Broker, Mediator, Patron, and Kinsman
An Historical Analysis of Key Leadership Roles in a Rural Malaysian District
Conner Bailey
Ohio University Press, 1976

This study attempts to relate questions of rural leadership to the constantly changing social and economic environment of a rural district in Malaysia during the twentieth century. The study itself began as an effort to analyze a single instance of structural change in Malay village leadership which occurred while the author worked in Sik District as a Peace Corps Volunteer (1968–1971). A research proposal was developed positing a traditional pattern of behavior which could be identified as traditional leadership, the better to contrast this with the bureaucratic style of the district’s new penghulus (headmen of a mukim, or subdistrict).

As research progressed, it became obvious that there was in fact no single traditional leadership pattern to be discovered, but rather that over time adaptations were regularly made whenever a significant change in Sik’s social and economic environment occurred. Although the study has retained rural leadership as a primary concern, it has been found necessary to relate it to Sik’s social and economic history.

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The Rescue of Joshua Glover
A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War
H. Robert Baker
Ohio University Press, 2006

On March 11, 1854, the people of Wisconsin prevented agents of the federal government from carrying away the fugitive slave, Joshua Glover. Assembling in mass outside the Milwaukee courthouse, they demanded that the federal officers respect his civil liberties as they would those of any other citizen of the state. When the officers refused, the crowd took matters into its own hands and rescued Joshua Glover. The federal government brought his rescuers to trial, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court intervened and took the bold step of ruling the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional.

The Rescue of Joshua Glover delves into the courtroom trials, political battles, and cultural equivocation precipitated by Joshua Glover’s brief, but enormously important, appearance in Wisconsin on the eve of the Civil War.

H. Robert Baker articulates the many ways in which this case evoked powerful emotions in antebellum America, just as the stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was touring the country and stirring antislavery sentiments. Terribly conflicted about race, Americans struggled mightily with a revolutionary heritage that sanctified liberty but also brooked compromise with slavery. Nevertheless, as The Rescue of Joshua Glover demonstrates, they maintained the principle that the people themselves were the last defenders of constitutional liberty, even as Glover’s rescue raised troubling questions about citizenship and the place of free blacks in America.

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Principles Of Interpretation
Continental Thought Series, V5
Edward Goodwin Ballard
Ohio University Press, 1983

This is a major phenomenological work in which real learning works in graceful tandem with genuine and important insight. Yet this is not a work of scholarship; it is a work of philosophy, a work that succeeds both in the careful, descriptive massing of detail and in the power of its analysis of the conditions that underlie the possibility of such things as description, interpretation, perception, and meaning.

Principles of Interpretation formulates answers to these questions: How does the interpretative process proceed? What are its fundamentals? What assurance have we that our interpretations are in principal faithful to that which is to be interpreted? What conclusions are indicated concerning the past phases of our history and its present tendencies?

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Apartheid’s Leviathan
Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence
Faeeza Ballim
Ohio University Press, 2023
A fascinating study that shows how the intersection of technology and politics has shaped South African history since the 1960s. This book details the development of an interconnected technological system of a coal mine and of the Matimba and Medupi power stations in the Waterberg, a rural region of South Africa near the country’s border with Botswana. South Africa’s state steel manufacturing corporation, Iscor, which has since been privatized, developed a coal mine in the region in the 1970s. This set the stage for the national electricity provider, Eskom, to build coal-fueled power stations in the Waterberg. Faeeza Ballim follows the development of these technological systems from the late 1960s, a period of heightened repression as the apartheid government attempted to realize its vision of racial segregation, to the deeply fraught construction of the Medupi power station in postapartheid South Africa. The Medupi power station was planned toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century as a measure to alleviate the country’s electricity shortage, but the continued delay of its completion and the escalation of its costs meant that it failed to realize those ambitions while public frustration and electricity outages grew. By tracing this story, this book highlights the importance of technology to our understanding of South African history. This characterization challenges the idea that the technological state corporations were proxies for the apartheid government and highlights that their activities in the Waterberg did not necessarily accord with the government’s strategic purposes. While a part of the broader national modernization project under apartheid, they also set the stage for worker solidarity and trade union organization in the Waterberg and elsewhere in the country. This book also argues that the state corporations, their technology, and their engineers enjoyed ambivalent relationships with the governments of their time, relationships that can be characterized as both autonomous and immersive. In the era of democracy, while Eskom has been caught up in government corruption—a major scourge to the fortunes of South Africa—it has also retained a degree of organizational autonomy and offered a degree of resistance to those who sought to further corruption. The examination of the workings of these technological systems, and the state corporations responsible for them, complicates conventional understandings of the transition from the authoritarian rule of apartheid to democratic South Africa, which coincided with the transition from state-led development to neoliberalism. This book is an indispensable case study on the workings of industrial and political power in Africa and beyond.
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Africa Every Day
Fun, Leisure, and Expressive Culture on the Continent
Kemi Balogun
Ohio University Press, 2019
Africa Every Day presents an exuberant, thoughtful, and necessary counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis in introductory African studies classes on war, poverty, corruption, disease, and human rights violations on the continent. These challenges are real and deserve sustained attention, but this volume shows that adverse conditions do not prevent people from making music, falling in love, playing sports, participating in festivals, writing blogs, telling jokes, making videos, playing games, eating delicious food, and finding pleasure in their daily lives. Across seven sections—Celebrations and Rites of Passage; Socializing and Friendship; Love, Sex, and Marriage; Sports and Recreation; Performance, Language, and Creativity; Technology and Media; and Labor and Livelihoods—the accessible, multidisciplinary essays in Africa Every Day address these creative and dynamic elements of daily life, without romanticizing them. Ultimately, the book shows that forms of leisure and popular culture in Africa are best discussed in terms of indigenization, adaptation, and appropriation rather than the static binary of European/foreign/global and African. Most of all, it invites readers to reflect on the crucial similarities, rather than the differences, between their lives and those of their African counterparts. Contributors: Hadeer Aboelnagah, Issahaku Adam, Joseph Osuolale Ayodokun, Victoria Abiola Ayodokun, Omotoyosi Babalola, Martha Bannikov, Mokaya Bosire, Emily Callaci, Deborah Durham, Birgit Englert, Laura Fair, John Fenn, Lara Rosenoff Gauvin, Michael Gennaro, Lisa Gilman, Charlotte Grabli, Joshua Grace, Dorothy L. Hodgson, Akwasi Kumi-Kyereme, Prince F. M. Lamba, Cheikh Tidiane Lo, Bill McCoy, Nginjai Paul Moreto, Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, James Nindi, Erin Nourse, Eric Debrah Otchere, Alex Perullo, Daniel Jordan Smith, Maya Smith, Steven Van Wolputte, and Scott M. Youngstedt.
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African Miracle, African Mirage
Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast
Abou B. Bamba
Ohio University Press, 2016

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Ivory Coast was touted as an African miracle, a poster child for modernization and the ways that Western aid and multinational corporations would develop the continent. At the same time, Marxist scholars—most notably Samir Amin—described the capitalist activity in Ivory Coast as empty, unsustainable, and incapable of bringing real change to the lives of ordinary people. To some extent, Amin’s criticisms were validated when, in the 1980s, the Ivorian economy collapsed.

In African Miracle, African Mirage, Abou B. Bamba incorporates economics, political science, and history to craft a bold, transnational study of the development practices and intersecting colonial cultures that continue to shape Ivory Coast today. He considers French, American, and Ivorian development discourses in examining the roles of hydroelectric projects and the sugar, coffee, and cocoa industries in the country’s boom and bust. In so doing, he brings the agency of Ivorians themselves to the fore in a way not often seen in histories of development. Ultimately, he concludes that the “maldevelopment” evident by the mid-1970s had less to do with the Ivory Coast’s “insufficiently modern” citizens than with the conflicting missions of French and American interests within the context of an ever-globalizing world.

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From Mastery to Mystery
A Phenomenological Foundation for an Environmental Ethic
Bryan E Bannon
Ohio University Press, 2014

From Mastery to Mystery is an original and provocative contribution to the burgeoningfield of ecophenomenology. Informed by current debates in environmental philosophy, Bannon critiques the conception of nature as u200a“substance” that he finds tacitly assumed by the major environmental theorists. Instead, this book reconsiders the basic goals of an environmental ethic by questioning the most basic presupposition that most environmentalists accept: that nature is in need of preservation.

Beginning with Bruno Latour’s idea that continuing to speak of nature in the way we popularly conceive of it is ethically and politically disastrous, this book describes a way in which the concept of nature can retain its importance in our discussion of the contemporary state of the environment. Based upon insights from the phenomenological tradition, specifically the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the concept of nature developed in the book preserves the best antihumanistic intuitions of environmentalists without relying on either a reductionistic understanding of nature and the sciences or dualistic metaphysical constructions.

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Writing Women in Central America
Gender and the Fictionalization of History
Laura Barbas-Rhoden
Ohio University Press, 2003

What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past?

Writing Women in Central America explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts. This study analyzes how authors appropriate history to confront the rhetoric of the state, global economic powers, and even dissident groups within their own cultures. Laura Barbas-Rhoden winds a common thread in the literary imaginations of Claribel Alegría, Rosario Aguilar, Gioconda Belli, and Tatiana Lobo and shows how these writers offer provocative supplements to the historical record.

Writing Women in Central America considers more than a dozen narratives in which the authors craft their own interpretations of history to make room for women, indigenous peoples, and Afro-Latin Americans. Some of the texts reveal silences in the narratives of empire- and nation-building. Others reinterpret events to highlight the struggle of marginalized peoples for dignity and humanity in the face of oppression. All confront the ways in which stories have been told about the past.

Yet ultimately, Professor Barbas-Rhoden asserts, all concern the present and the future. As seen in Writing Women in Central America, though their fictions are historical, the writers direct their readers beyond the present toward a more just future for all who live in Central America.

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The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity
Phenomenology and the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians
Michael D. Barber
Ohio University Press, 2011

World-renowned analytic philosophers John McDowell and Robert Brandom, dubbed “Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians,” recently engaged in an intriguing debate about perception. In The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity Michael D. Barber is the first to bring phenomenology to bear not just on the perspectives of McDowell or Brandom alone, but on their intersection. He argues that McDowell accounts better for the intelligibility of empirical content by defending holistically functioning, reflectively distinguishable sensory and intellectual intentional structures. He reconstructs dimensions implicit in the perception debate, favoring Brandom on knowledge’s intersubjective features that converge with the ethical characteristics of intersubjectivity Emmanuel Levinas illuminates.

Phenomenology becomes the third partner in this debate between two analytic philosophers, critically mediating their discussion by unfolding the systematic interconnectionamong perception, intersubjectivity, metaphilosophy, and ethics.

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A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke
William Barillas
Ohio University Press, 2021
A constellation of essays that reanimates the work of this pivotal twentieth-century American poet for a new century. This volume is the first to reconsider Roethke’s work in terms of the expanded critical approaches to literature that have emerged since his death in 1963. Editor William Barillas and over forty contributors, including highly respected literary scholars, critics, and writers such as Peter Balakian, Camille Paglia, Jay Parini, and David Wojahn, collectively make a case for Roethke’s poetry as a complete, unified, and evolving body of work. The accessible essays employ a number of approaches, including formalism, ecocriticism, reader-response, and feminist critique to explicate the poetics, themes, and the biographical, historical, cultural, and literary contexts of Roethke’s work.
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The Midwestern Pastoral
Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland
William Barillas
Ohio University Press, 2006
The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience. It is exemplified in the poetry, fiction, and essays of writers who express an informed love of the nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest. Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists—Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison—in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, and others. For these writers, the aim of writing is not merely intellectual and aesthetic, but democratic and ecological. In depicting and promoting commitment to local communities, human and natural, they express their love for, their understanding of, and their sense of place in the American Midwest. Students and serious readers, as well as scholars in the growing field of literature and the environment, will appreciate this study of writers who counter alienation and materialism in modern society.
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Standing Our Ground
Women, Environmental Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal
Joyce M. Barry
Ohio University Press, 2012

Standing Our Ground: Women, Environmental Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal examines women’s efforts to end mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. Mountaintop removal coal mining, which involves demolishing the tops of hills and mountains to provide access to coal seams, is one of the most significant environmental threats in Appalachia, where it is most commonly practiced.

The Appalachian women featured in Barry’s book have firsthand experience with the negative impacts of Big Coal in West Virginia. Through their work in organizations such as the Coal River Mountain Watch and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, they fight to save their mountain communities by promoting the development of alternative energy resources. Barry’s engaging and original work reveals how women’s tireless organizing efforts have made mountaintop removal a global political and environmental issue and laid the groundwork for a robust environmental justice movement in central Appalachia.

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Labor and Democracy in Namibia, 1971–1996
Gretchen Bauer
Ohio University Press, 1998

In this compelling study of labor and nationalism during and after Namibia's struggle for liberation, Gretchen Bauer addresses the very difficult task of consolidating democracy in an independent Namibia. Labor and Democracy in Namibia, 1971-1996 argues that a vibrant and autonomous civil society is crucial to the consolidation of new democracies, and it identifies trade unions, in particular, as especially important organizations of civil society. In Namibia, however, trade unions have emerged from the liberation struggle and the first years of independence in a weakened state. Dr. Bauer gives a lucid explanation for this phenomenon by tracing the origins and evolution of the trade unions in Namibia and discusses the implications thereof for the future of democracy in Namibia.

Based on material not widely available before independence in 1990, this study takes a critical look at the nationalist movement in Namibia. Through the use of dozens of interviews with political leaders, trade unionists, community activists, and others, Bauer offers the controversial suggestion that there are many within the nationalist movement (now the ruling party in government) who would rather not see a strong trade union movement (or any other potential rival) emerge in independent Namibia.

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Love among the Poets
The Victorian Poetics of Intimacy
Pearl Chaozon Bauer
Ohio University Press, 2024
British literature of the Victorian period has always been celebrated for the quality, innovativeness, and sheer profusion of its love poetry. Every major Victorian poet produced notable poems about love. This includes not only canonical figures, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti, but also lesser-known poets whose works have only recently become widely recognized and studied, such as Augusta Webster and the many often anonymous working-class poets whose verses filled the pages of popular periodicals. Modern critics have claimed, convincingly, that love poetry is not just one strain of Victorian poetry among many; it is arguably its representative, even definitive, mode. This collection of essays reconsiders the Victorian poetry of love and, just as importantly, of intimacy—a more inclusive term that comprehends not only romance but love for family, for God, for animals, and for language itself. Together the essays seek to define a poetics of intimacy that arose during the Victorian period and that continues today, a set of poetic structures and strategies by which poets can represent and encode feelings of love. There exist many studies of intimate relations (especially marriage) in Victorian novels. But although poetry rivals the novel in the depth and diversity of its treatment of love, marriage, and intimacy, that aspect of Victorian verse has remained underexamined. Love among the Poets offers an expansive critical overview. With its slate of distinguished contributors, including scholars from the US, Canada, Britain, and Australia, the volume is a wide-ranging account of this vital era of poetry and of its importance for the way we continue to write, love, and live today.
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Protecting the Empire’s Frontier
Officers of the 18th (Royal Irish) Regiment of Foot during Its North American Service, 1767–1776
Steven M. Baule
Ohio University Press, 2013

Protecting the Empire’s Frontier tells stories of the roughly eighty officers who served in the 18th (Royal Irish) Regiment of Foot, which served British interests in America during the crucial period from 1767 through 1776. The Royal Irish was one of the most wide-ranging regiments in America, with companies serving on the Illinois frontier, at Fort Pitt, and in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, with some companies taken as far afield as Florida, Spanish Louisiana, and present-day Maine. When the regiment was returned to England in 1776, some of the officers remained in America on staff assignments. Others joined provincial regiments, and a few joined the American revolutionary army, taking up arms against their king and former colleagues.

Using a wide range of archival resources previously untapped by scholars, the text goes beyond just these officers’ service in the regiment and tells the story of the men who included governors, a college president, land speculators, physicians, and officers in many other British regular and provincial regiments. Included in these ranks were an Irishman who would serve in the U.S. Congress and as an American general at Yorktown; a landed aristocrat who represented Bath as a member of Parliament; and a naval surgeon on the ship transporting Benjamin Franklin to France. This is the history of the American Revolutionary period from a most gripping and everyday perspective.

An epilogue covers the Royal Irish’s history after returning to England and its part in defending against both the Franco-Spanish invasion attempt and the Gordon Rioters. With an essay on sources and a complete bibliography, this is a treat for professional and amateur historians alike.

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Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College
A Documentary History
Roland M. Baumann
Ohio University Press, 2010

In 1835 Oberlin became the first institute of higher education to make a cause of racial egalitarianism when it decided to educate students “irrespective of color.” Yet the visionary college’s implementation of this admissions policy was uneven. In Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College: A Documentary History, Roland M. Baumann presents a comprehensive documentary history of the education of African American students at Oberlin College.

Following the Reconstruction era, Oberlin College mirrored the rest of society as it reduced its commitment to black students by treating them as less than equals of their white counterparts. By the middle of the twentieth century, black and white student activists partially reclaimed the Oberlin legacy by refusing to be defined by race. Generations of Oberlin students, plus a minority of faculty and staff, rekindled the college’s commitment to racial equality by 1970. In time, black separatism in its many forms replaced the integrationist ethic on campus as African Americans sought to chart their own destiny and advance curricular change.

Oberlin’s is not a story of unbroken progress, but rather of irony, of contradictions and integrity, of myth and reality, and of imperfections. Baumann takes readers directly to the original sources by including thirty complete documents from the Oberlin College Archives. This richly illustrated volume is an important contribution to the college’s 175th anniversary celebration of its distinguished history, for it convincinglydocuments how Oberlin wrestled over the meaning of race and the destiny of black people in American society.

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Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin
Boris Bazhanov
Ohio University Press, 1990
On January 1, 1928, Bazhanov escaped from the Soviet Union and became for many years the most important member of a new breed—the Soviet defector. At the age of 28, he had become an invaluable aid to Stalin and the Politburo, and had he stayed in Stalin’s service, Bazhanov might well have enjoyed the same meteoric careers as the man who replaced him when he left, Georgy Malenkov. However, Bazhanov came to despise the unethical and brutal regime he served. One he decided to become anti–communist, he sought to bring down the regime. Planning his departure carefully, he brought with him documentation which revealed some of the innermost secrets of the Kremlin. Despite being pursued by the OGPU (an earlier incarnation of the KGB), he arrived eventually in Paris, and Bazhanov set to work writing his message to the West. While Bazhanov did successfully escape to the West, Stalin had Bazhanov watched and several attempts were made to assassinate him. Bazhanov may have been fearful for his life much of the time, but he was a man of courage and conviction, and he damned Stalin as often and as publicly as he could. In this riveting and illuminating book, Bazhanov provides an eyewitness account of the inner workings and personalities of the Soviet Central Committee and the Politburo in the 1920s. Bazhanov clearly details how Stalin invaded the communications of his opponents, rigged votes, built up his own constituency, and maneuvered to achieve his coup d’etat despite formidable odds. he also provides a better understanding of the curiously vapid way in which he other revolutionary leaders, most notably Trotsky, failed to appreciate the threat and let Stalin override them. He reveals how those Soviets with a sense of fairness, justice, and ethics were extinguished by Stalin and his minions, and how the self–centered, protective bureaucratic machine was first built. Bazhanov’s view, at the right hand of Stalin, is unique and chilling. Bazhanov’s post–defection prediction of Stalin’s continuing and fatal danger to Trotsky shows how well Bazhanov understood the dictator. His formation, in 1940, of an armed force recruited from Soviet Army prisoners to help Mannerheim defend Finland from Stalin’s forces and his 1941 decision to decline the position of Hitler’s Gauleiter of German–occupied Russia are fascinating. But perhaps the most interesting facet to Bazhanov’s tale is the fact that almost no Soviets—even today—know the real story of the Communist party’s criminal acquiescence in Stalin’s rise to, and abuse of, power.
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Home and Away
The Rise and Fall of Professional Football on the Banks of the Ohio, 1919–1934
Carl M. Becker
Ohio University Press, 1998
Early in this century, growing cities seeking to promote their communities came to view the budding local football team as an agent of civic progress and took the necessary measures to see that their interests were ably represented. As a result, semiprofessional clubs such as the Ironton Tanks and the Portsmouth Spartans faced off against such legendary teams as the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers. Towns scrambled to raise subscription dollars to build new stadiums, buy contracts for prospective stars, and finance the many road trips. Capturing the local color of a region as well as the spirited charm of a sport as it came into its own—before the rules were formalized and the teams so strongly established—Carl Becker documents a rare time in American history when ideals were being formed and broken and the promise for greatness seemed just within reach of all who tried to grasp it. Home and Away is a unique chronicle, more than just a history of the game of football, it is also an intimate study of how the citizens and organizations that made up these cities worked to put themselves on the map of an ever-shifting American landscape.
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Home and Away
The Rise and Fall of Professional Football on the Banks of the Ohio, 1919–1934
Carl M. Becker
Ohio University Press, 1998
Early in this century, growing cities seeking to promote their communities came to view the budding local football team as an agent of civic progress and took the necessary measures to see that their interests were ably represented. As a result, semiprofessional clubs such as the Ironton Tanks and the Portsmouth Spartans faced off against such legendary teams as the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers. Towns scrambled to raise subscription dollars to build new stadiums, buy contracts for prospective stars, and finance the many road trips. Capturing the local color of a region as well as the spirited charm of a sport as it came into its own—before the rules were formalized and the teams so strongly established—Carl Becker documents a rare time in American history when ideals were being formed and broken and the promise for greatness seemed just within reach of all who tried to grasp it. Home and Away is a unique chronicle, more than just a history of the game of football, it is also an intimate study of how the citizens and organizations that made up these cities worked to put themselves on the map of an ever-shifting American landscape.
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Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa
Felicitas Becker
Ohio University Press, 2018

In recent years, anthropologists, historians, and others have been drawn to study the profuse and creative usages of digital media by religious movements. At the same time, scholars of Christian Africa have long been concerned with the history of textual culture, the politics of Bible translation, and the status of the vernacular in Christianity. Students of Islam in Africa have similarly examined politics of knowledge, the transmission of learning in written form, and the influence of new media. Until now, however, these arenas—Christianity and Islam, digital media and “old” media—have been studied separately.

Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa is one of the first volumes to put new media and old media into significant conversation with one another, and also offers a rare comparison between Christianity and Islam in Africa. The contributors find many previously unacknowledged correspondences among different media and between the two faiths. In the process they challenge the technological determinism—the notion that certain types of media generate particular forms of religious expression—that haunts many studies. In evaluating how media usage and religious commitment intersect in the social, cultural, and political landscapes of modern Africa, this collection will contribute to the development of new paradigms for media and religious studies.

Contributors: Heike Behrend, Andre Chappatte, Maria Frahm-Arp, David Gordon, Liz Gunner, Bruce S. Hall, Sean Hanretta, Jorg Haustein, Katrien Pype, and Asonzeh Ukah.

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Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory
Marc Becker
Ohio University Press, 1993
José Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian political theorist of the 1920s, was instrumental in developing an indigenous Latin American revolutionary Marxist theory. He rejected a rigid, orthodox interpretation of Marxism and applied his own creative elements, which he believed could move a society to revolutionary action without the society having to depend upon more traditional economic factors. His interpretation of Peruvian history had a profound effect upon subsequent social movements throughout Latin America.

This volume reviews the essential elements of Mariátegui's thought and important influences on his intellectual development. It demonstrates the role he played in defining a Latin american identity, the nature of his intellectual contribution to the development of indigenous revolutionary movements in Latin America, and the inflluence he had on successful revolutionary movements in Cuba and Nicaragua. An understanding of Mariátegui's thought is fundamental to understanding the nature of revolutionary changes in Latin America.
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Amy Levy
Critical Essays
Linda Hunt Beckman
Ohio University Press, 2000
After a century of critical neglect, poet and writer Amy Levy is gaining recognition as a literary figure of stature. This definitive biography accompanied by her letters, along with the recent publication of her selected writings, provides a critical appreciation of Levy’s importance in her own time and in ours. As an educated Jewish woman with homoerotic desires, Levy felt the strain of combating the structures of British society in the 1880s, the decade in which she built her career and moved in London’s literary and bohemian circles. Unwilling to cut herself off from her Jewish background, she had the additional burden of attempting to bridge the gap between communities. In Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters Linda Hunt Beckman examines Levy’s writings and other cultural documents for insight into her emotional and intellectual life. This groundbreaking study introduces us to a woman well deserving of a place in literary and cultural history.
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For the Prevention of Cruelty
The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States
Diane L. Beers
Ohio University Press, 2006

Animal rights. Those two words conjure diverse but powerful images and reactions. Some nod in agreement, while others roll their eyes in contempt. Most people fall somewhat uncomfortably in the middle, between endorsement and rejection, as they struggle with the profound moral, philosophical, and legal questions provoked by the debate. Today, thousands of organizations lobby, agitate, and educate the public on issues concerning the rights and treatment of nonhumans.

For the Prevention of Cruelty is the first history of organized advocacy on behalf of animals in the United States to appear in nearly a half century. Diane Beers demonstrates how the cause has shaped and reshaped itself as it has evolved within the broader social context of the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial society.

Until now, the legacy of the movement in the United States has not been examined. Few Americans today perceive either the companionship or the consumption of animals in the same manner as did earlier generations. Moreover, powerful and lingering bonds connect the seemingly disparate American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals of the nineteenth century and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals of today. For the Prevention of Cruelty tells an intriguing and important story that reveals society’s often changing relationship with animals through the lens of those who struggled to shepherd the public toward a greater compassion.

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Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits
War in Northern Uganda, 1985–97
Heike Behrend
Ohio University Press, 1999

In August 1986, Alice Auma, a young Acholi woman in northern Uganda, proclaiming herself under the orders of a Christian spirit named Lakwena, raised an army called the “Holy Spirit Mobile Forces.” With it she waged a war against perceived evil, not only an external enemy represented by the National Resistance Army of the government, but internal enemies in the form of “impure” soldiers, witches, and sorcerers. She came very close to her goal of overthrowing the government but was defeated and fled to Kenya.

This book provides a unique view of Alice’s movement, based on interviews with its members and including their own writings, examining their perceptions of the threat of external and internal evil. It concludes with an account of the successor movements into which Alice’s forces fragmented and which still are active in the civil wars of the Sudan and Uganda.

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Cast Out
Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective
A. L. Beier
Ohio University Press, 2008

Throughout history, those arrested for vagrancy have generally been poor men and women, often young, able-bodied, unemployed, and homeless. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on the European and American experiences. Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective is the first book to consider the shared global heritage of vagrancy laws, homelessness, and the historical processes they accompanied.

In this ambitious collection, vagrancy and homelessness are used to examine a vast array of phenomena, from the migration of labor to social and governmental responses to poverty through charity, welfare, and prosecution. The essays in Cast Out represent the best scholarship on these subjects and include discussions of the lives of the underclass, strategies for surviving and escaping poverty, the criminalization of poverty by the state, the rise of welfare and development programs, the relationship between imperial powers and colonized peoples, and the struggle to achieve independence after colonial rule. By juxtaposing these histories, the authors explore vagrancy as a common response to poverty, labor dislocation, and changing social norms, as well as how this strategy changed over time and adapted to regional peculiarities.

Part of a growing literature on world history, Cast Out offers fresh perspectives and new research in fields that have yet to fully investigate vagrancy and homelessness. This book by leading scholars in the field is for policy makers, as well as for courses on poverty, homelessness, and world history.

Contributors:
Richard B. Allen
David Arnold
A. L. Beier
Andrew Burton
Vincent DiGirolamo
Andrew A. Gentes
Robert Gordon
Frank Tobias Higbie
Thomas H. Holloway
Abby Margolis
Paul Ocobock
Aminda M. Smith
Linda Woodbridge

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Social History and African Environments
William Beinart
Ohio University Press, 2003

The explosion of interest in African environmental history has stimulated research and writing on a wide range of issues facing many African nations.

This collection represents some of the finest studies to date. The general topics include African environmental ideas and practices; colonial science, the state and African responses; and settlers and Africans' culture and nature. The contributors are Emmanuel Kreike, Karen Middleton, Innocent Pikirayi, Terence Ranger, JoAnn McGregor, Helen Tilley, Grace Garswell, John McCracken, Ingrid Yngstrom, David Bunn, Sandra Swart, Robert J. Gordon, and Jane Carruthers.

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The Birth of Sense
Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy
Don Beith
Ohio University Press, 2018

In The Birth of Sense, Don Beith proposes a new concept of generative passivity, the idea that our organic, psychological, and social activities take time to develop into sense. More than being a limit, passivity marks out the way in which organisms, persons, and interbodily systems take time in order to manifest a coherent sense. Beith situates his argument within contemporary debates about evolution, developmental biology, scientific causal explanations, psychology, postmodernism, social constructivism, and critical race theory. Drawing on empirical studies and phenomenological reflections, Beith argues that in nature, novel meaning emerges prior to any type of constituting activity or deterministic plan.

The Birth of Sense is an original phenomenological investigation in the style of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and it demonstrates that the French philosopher’s works cohere around the notion that life is radically expressive. While Merleau-Ponty’s early works are widely interpreted as arguing for the primacy of human consciousness, Beith argues that a pivotal redefinition of passivity is already under way here, and extends throughout Merleau-Ponty’s corpus. This work introduces new concepts in contemporary philosophy to interrogate how organic development involves spontaneous expression, how personhood emerges from this bodily growth, and how our interpersonal human life remains rooted in, and often thwarted by, domains of bodily expressivity.

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Water Brings No Harm
Management Knowledge and the Struggle for the Waters of Kilimanjaro
Matthew V. Bender
Ohio University Press, 2019

In Water Brings No Harm, Matthew V. Bender explores the history of community water management on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Kilimanjaro’s Chagga-speaking peoples have long managed water by employing diverse knowledge: hydrological, technological, social, cultural, and political. Since the 1850s, they have encountered groups from beyond the mountain—colonial officials, missionaries, settlers, the independent Tanzanian state, development agencies, and climate scientists—who have understood water differently. Drawing on the concept of waterscapes—a term that describes how people “see” water, and how physical water resources intersect with their own beliefs, needs, and expectations—Bender argues that water conflicts should be understood as struggles between competing forms of knowledge.

Water Brings No Harm encourages readers to think about the origins and interpretation of knowledge and development in Africa and the global south. It also speaks to the current global water crisis, proposing a new model for approaching sustainable water development worldwide.

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The Texture of Change
Dress, Self-Fashioning and History in Western Africa, 1700–1850
Jody Benjamin
Ohio University Press, 2024
The Texture of Change examines historical change across a broad region of western Africa—from Saint Louis, Senegal, to Freetown, Sierra Leone—through the development of textile commerce, consumption, and dress. Indigo-dyed and printed cotton, wool, linen, and silk cloths constituted major trade items that linked African producers and consumers to exchange networks that were both regional and global. While much of the historiography of commerce in Africa in the eighteenth century has focused on the Atlantic slave trade and its impact, this study follows the global cloth trade to account for the broad extent and multiple modes of western Africa’s engagement with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Jody Benjamin analyzes a range of archival, visual, oral, and material sources drawn from three continents to illuminate entanglements between local textile industries and global commerce and between the politics of Islamic reform and encroaching European colonial power. The study highlights the roles of a diverse range of historical actors mentioned only glancingly in core-periphery or Atlantic-centered framings: women indigo dyers, maroon cotton farmers, petty traveling merchants, caravan guides, and African Diaspora settlers. It argues that their combined choices within a set of ecological, political, and economic constraints structured networks connecting the Atlantic and Indian Ocean perimeters.
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The Radiology Handbook
A Pocket Guide to Medical Imaging
J. S. Benseler
Ohio University Press, 2006

Designed for busy medical students, The Radiology Handbook is a quick and easy reference for any practitioner who needs information on ordering or interpreting images.

The book is divided into three parts:

- Part I presents a table, organized from head to toe, with recommended imaging tests for common clinical conditions.

- Part II is organized in a question and answer format that covers the following topics: how each major imaging modality works to create an image; what the basic precepts of image interpretation in each body system are; and where to find information and resources for continued learning.

- Part III is an imaging quiz beginning at the head and ending at the foot. Sixty images are provided to self-test knowledge about normal imaging anatomy and common imaging pathology.

Published in collaboration with the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine, The Radiology Handbook is a convenient pocket-sized resource designed for medical students and non radiologists.

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African Asylum at a Crossroads
Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights
Iris Berger
Ohio University Press, 2015

African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights examines the emerging trend of requests for expert opinions in asylum hearings or refugee status determinations. This is the first book to explore the role of court-based expertise in relation to African asylum cases and the first to establish a rigorous analytical framework for interpreting the effects of this new reliance on expert testimony.

Over the past two decades, courts in Western countries and beyond have begun demanding expert reports tailored to the experience of the individual claimant. As courts increasingly draw upon such testimony in their deliberations, expertise in matters of asylum and refugee status is emerging as an academic area with its own standards, protocols, and guidelines. This deeply thoughtful book explores these developments and their effects on both asylum seekers and the experts whose influence may determine their fate.

Contributors: Iris Berger, Carol Bohmer, John Campbell, Katherine Luongo, E. Ann McDougall, Karen Musalo, Tricia Redeker Hepner, Amy Shuman, Joanna T. Tague, Meredith Terretta, and Charlotte Walker-Said.

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Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya
The Dialectic of Domination
Bruce Berman
Ohio University Press, 1990

This history of the political economy of Kenya is the first full length study of the development of the colonial state in Africa.

Professor Berman argues that the colonial state was shaped by the contradictions between maintaining effective political control with limited coercive force and ensuring the profitable articulation of metropolitan and settler capitalism with African societies.

This dialectic of domination resulted in both the uneven transformation of indigenous societies and in the reconstruction of administrative control in the inter-war period.

The study traces the evolution of the colonial state from its skeletal beginnings in the 1890s to the complex bureaucracy of the post-1945 era which managed the growing integration of the colony with international capital. These contradictions led to the political crisis of the Mau Mau emergency in 1952 and to the undermining of the colonial state.

The book is based on extensive primary sources including numerous interviews with Kenyan and British participants. The analysis moves from the micro-level of the relationship of the District Commissioners and the African population to the macro-level of the state and the political economy of colonialism.

Professor Berman uses the case of Kenya to make a sophisticated contribution to the theory of the state and to the understanding of the dynamics of the development of modern African political and economic institutions.

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Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa
Bruce Berman
Ohio University Press, 2004

The politics of identity and ethnicity will remain a fundamental characteristic of African modernity. For this reason, historians and anthropologists have joined political scientists in a discussion about the ways in which democracy can develop in multicultural societies. In Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa, the contributors address why ethnicity represents a political problem, how the problem manifests itself, and which institutional models offer ways of ameliorating the challenges that ethnicity poses to democratic nation-building.

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Unhappy Valley, Book One
Conflict in Kenya & Africa
Bruce Berman
Ohio University Press, 1992
This long-awaited book is a considerable revision in the understanding of the history of colonial Kenya and, more widely, colonialism in Africa. There is a substantial amount of new work and this is interlocked with shared areas of concern that the authors have been exploring since 1976.

The authors investigate major themes. These include the conquest origins and subsequent development of the colonial state, the contradictory social forces that articulated African societies to European capitalism, and the creation of new political communities and changing meanings of ethnicity in Africa, in the context of social differentiation and class formation. There is substantial new work on the problems of Mau Mau and of wealth, poverty and civic virtue in Kikuyu political thought.

The authors make a fresh contribution to a deeper historical understanding of the development of contemporary Kenyan society and, in particular, of the British and Kukuyu origins of Mau Mau and the emergency of the 1950s.

They also highlight some of the shortcomings of ideas about development, explore the limitations of narrowly structuralist Marxist theory of the state, and reflect on the role of history in the future of Africa.

Book One on State and Class will be used by students of African history as well as of colonial Kenya; it is also concerned with the theory of history and of political science.
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Unhappy Valley, Book Two
Conflict in Kenya & Africa
Bruce Berman
Ohio University Press, 1992
This long-awaited book is a considerable revision in the understanding of the history of colonial Kenya and, more widely, colonialism in Africa. There is a substantial amount of new work and this is interlocked with shared areas of concern that the authors have been exploring since 1976.

The authors investigate major themes. These include the conquest origins and subsequent development of the colonial state, the contradictory social forces that articulated African societies to European capitalism, and the creation of new political communities and changing meanings of ethnicity in Africa, in the context of social differentiation and class formation. There is substantial new work on the problems of Mau Mau and of wealth, poverty and civic virtue in Kikuyu political thought.

The authors make a fresh contribution to a deeper historical understanding of the development of contemporary Kenyan society and, in particular, of the British and Kukuyu origins of Mau Mau and the emergency of the 1950s.

They also highlight some of the shortcomings of ideas about development, explore the limitations of narrowly structuralist Marxist theory of the state, and reflect on the role of history in the future of Africa.

Book Two on Violence and Ethnicity gives new insights into popular consciousness, into revolutionary change and into the subtle realities of ethnicity; it will be of particular value to readers of Ngugi.
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Unhappy Valley
Clan, Class & State In Colonial Kenya
Bruce Berman
Ohio University Press, 1991

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Retribution Forthcoming
Poems
Katie Berta
Ohio University Press, 2024
Influenced by Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Rachel Zucker, and other poets of the New York school, the poems in Retribution Forthcoming blend a talky, quick, funny voice with candid examinations of gender norms, class pressures, and the existential. Their speaker explores her mortality anxiety through her experiences of gendered exploitation, reflecting on bodily autonomy and the nexus of violences that women face. Using oblique and direct strategies, these poems recount sexual coercion, the ways consumerist society reinforces and reifies gender conformity and performativity, and the psychological ramifications of these abuses of power. Retribution Forthcoming examines selfhood, consciousness, and mortality as they intertwine with our identities and the ways those identities are politicized. At its core, though, this book is an account of sexual assault and its aftermath, exploring how trauma interacts with belief and our ability to trust others and ourselves.
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Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste
Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia
Bill Best
Ohio University Press, 2013

The Brown Goose, the White Case Knife, Ora’s Speckled Bean, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter—these are just a few of the heirloom fruits and vegetables you’ll encounter in Bill Best’s remarkable history of seed saving and the people who preserve both unique flavors and the Appalachian culture associated with them. As one of the people at the forefront of seed saving and trading for over fifty years, Best has helped preserve numerous varieties of beans, tomatoes, corn, squashes, and other fruits and vegetables, along with the family stories and experiences that are a fundamental part of this world. While corporate agriculture privileges a few flavorless but hardy varieties of daily vegetables, seed savers have worked tirelessly to preserve genetic diversity and the flavors rooted in the Southern Appalachian Mountains—referred to by plant scientists as one of the vegetative wonders of the world.

Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce readers to the cultural traditions associated with seed saving, as well as the remarkable people who have used grafting practices and hand-by-hand trading to keep alive varieties that would otherwise have been lost. As local efforts to preserve heirloom seeds have become part of a growing national food movement, Appalachian seed savers play a crucial role in providing alternatives to large-scale agriculture and corporate food culture. Part flavor guide, part people’s history, Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce you to a world you’ve never known—or perhaps remind you of one you remember well from your childhood.

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Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste
Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia
Bill Best
Ohio University Press
The Brown Goose, the White Case Knife, Ora’s Speckled Bean, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter — these are just a few of the heirloom fruits and vegetables you’ll encounter in Bill Best’s remarkable history of seed saving and the people who preserve both unique flavors and the Appalachian culture associated with them. As one of the people at the forefront of seed saving and trading for over fifty years, Best has helped preserve numerous varieties of beans, tomatoes, corn, squashes, and other fruits and vegetables, along with the family stories and experiences that are a fundamental part of this world. While corporate agriculture privileges a few flavorless but hardy varieties of daily vegetables, seed savers have worked tirelessly to preserve genetic diversity and the flavors rooted in the Southern Appalachian Mountains — referred to by plant scientists as one of the vegetative wonders of the world.

Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce readers to the cultural traditions associated with seed saving, as well as the remarkable people who have used grafting practices and hand-by-hand trading to keep alive varieties that would otherwise have been lost. As local efforts to preserve heirloom seeds have become part of a growing national food movement, Appalachian seed savers play a crucial role in providing alternatives to large-scale agriculture and corporate food culture. Part flavor guide, part people’s history, Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce you to a world you’ve never known — or perhaps remind you of one you remember well from your childhood.
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Black and White in Colour
African History on Screen
Vivian Bickford-Smith
Ohio University Press, 2007

Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen considers how the African past has been represented in a wide range of historical films. Written by a team of eminent international scholars, the volume provides extensive coverage of both place and time and deals with major issues in the written history of Africa. Themes include the slave trade, imperialism and colonialism, racism, and anticolonial resistance. Many of the films will be familiar to readers: they include Out of Africa, Hotel Rwanda, Breaker Morant, Cry Freedom, The Battle of Algiers, and Chocolat.

This collection of essays is a highly original and useful contribution to African historiography, as well as a significant addition to the growing body of work within the emerging subdiscipline of “film and history.” It will appeal to those interested in African history and the ways in which films use the past to raise questions about the present.

Contributors: Mahir Saul, Ralph A. Austen, Robert Baum, Robert Harms, Nigel Worden, Carolyn Hamilton and Litheko Modisane, Richard Mendelsohn, Shamil Jeppie, Bill Nasson, Nigel Penn, Ruth Watson, Patrick Harries, David Moore, Teresa Barnes, Vivian Bickford-Smith, Mohamed Adhikari, and David Philips.

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Kant’s Methodology
An Essay in Philosophical Archeology
Charles P. Bigger
Ohio University Press, 1995

Kant’s revolution in methodology limited metaphysics to the conditions of possible experience. Since, following Hume, analysis—the “method of discovery” in early modern physics—could no longer ground itself in sense or in God’s constituting reason a new arché, “origin” and “principle,” was required, which Kant found in the synthesis of the productive imagination, the common root of sensibility and understanding. Charles Bigger argues that this imaginative “between” recapitulates the ancient Gaia myth which, as used by Plato in the Timaeus, offers a way into this originary arché. Since it depends on myth and the “likely story” rather than on a self-certain apprehension of Being, this facilitates an imaginative approach to the natural sciences which, through its synthetic a priori formations, can claim to be Kantian.

Bigger explores Kant’s ethics as an alternative to metaphysics that holds open the prospect of a Good beyond Being—and phenomenology—whose traces nevertheless appear in original synthesis. Though wary of its reductive implications, Bigger uses Derrida’s difference, a medial, feminine arché, as a way into this creative and procreative metaxu (between). As Emmanuel Levinas suggests, this is Plato’s gap [chaos] between being and becoming, whose possibility, beyond both, lies in chora and the Good. This Open also presents the possibility for a new, yet still Kantian, understanding of the formal and material conditions for the natural sciences.

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The Red Earth
A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation
Tran Bu Binh
Ohio University Press, 1985

Phu Rieng was one of many French rubber plantations in colonial Vietnam; Tran Tu Binh was one of 17,606 laborers brought to work there in 1927, and his memoir is a straightforward, emotionally searing account of how one Vietnamese youth became involved in revolutionary politics. The connection between this early experience and later activities of the author becomes clear as we learn that Tran Tu Binh survived imprisonment on Con Son island to help engineer the general uprising in Hanoi in 1945.

The Red Earth is the first of dozens of such works by veterans of the 1924–45 struggle in Vietnam to be published in English translation. It is important reading for all those interested in the many-faceted history of modern Vietnam and of communism in the non-Western world.

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The Decolonization Of Africa
David Birmingham
Ohio University Press, 1995
This bold, popularizing synthesis presents a readily accessible introduction to one of the major themes of twentieth-century world history. Between 1922, when self-government was restored to Egypt, and 1994, when nonracial democracy was achieved in South Africa, 54 new nations were established in Africa. Written within the parameters of African history, as opposed to imperial history, this study charts the processes of nationalism, liberation and independence that recast the political map of Africa in these years. Ranging from Algeria in the North, where a French colonial government used armed force to combat Algerian aspirations to home-rule, to the final overthrow of apartheid in the South, this is an authoritative survey that will be welcomed by all students tackling this complex and challenging topic.
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Empire in Africa
Angola and Its Neighbors
David Birmingham
Ohio University Press, 2006
The dark years of European fascism left their indelible mark on Africa. As late as the 1970s, Angola was still ruled by white autocrats, whose dictatorship was eventually overthrown by black nationalists who had never experienced either the rule of law or participatory democracy. Empire in Africa takes the long view of history and asks whether the colonizing ventures of the Portuguese can bear comparison with those of the Mediterranean Ottomans or those experienced by Angola’s neighbors in the Belgian Congo, French Equatorial Africa, or the Dutch colonies at the Cape of Good Hope and in the Transvaal. David Birmingham takes the reader through Angola’s troubled past, which included endemic warfare for the first twenty-five years of independence, and examines the fact that in the absence of a viable neocolonial referee such as Britain or France, the warring parties turned to Cold War superpowers for a supply of guns. For a decade Angola replaced Vietnam as a field in which an international war by proxy was conducted. Empire in Africa explains how this African nation went from colony to independence, how in the 1990s the Cold War legacy turned to civil war, and how peace finally dawned in 2002.
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Portugal and Africa
Ris Af#81
David Birmingham
Ohio University Press, 2004
Portugal was the first European nation to assert itself aggressively in African affairs. David Birmingham’s Portugal and Africa, a collection of uniquely accessible historical essays, surveys this colonial encounter from its earliest roots. The Portuguese established sugar plantations on Africa’s offshore islands and built factories on the beaches in the fifteenth century, but Professor Birmingham explains that their focus shifted to regions where medieval African miners had discovered deep seams of gold ore. Later, when even richer mines and more fertile lands were captured from the native peoples of the Americas, Portuguese ships became the great “slave bridge” that spanned the Atlantic and ferried captive black workers to the colonies of the New World. Portugal lost its major mining claims in Africa to the British, but it left a legacy of a new pattern of white settler colonization based on American-style plantations. The blending of European and African cultures and races led to the emergence of elite communities, from the Kongo princes of the seventeenth century to the creolized generals of today. Portugal and Africa focuses extensively on Angola to cast new light on the final years of the colonial experience and its traumatic legacies. After 1950, Portuguese Angola became one of the most dynamic of Africa’s colonies and the largest white colony outside of Algeria or South Africa. Angola’s eventual collapse in a series of wars had devastating results. Birmingham brings the terror and devastation to life in a series of powerful chapters that are a model of disciplined scholarship and informed passion.
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Switzerland
A Village History
David Birmingham
Ohio University Press, 2004

Switzerland: A Village History is an account of an Alpine village that illuminates the broader history of Switzerland and its rural, local underpinnings. It begins with the colonization of the Alps by Romanized Celtic peoples who came from the plain to clear the wilderness, establish a tiny monastic house, and create a dairy economy that became famous for its cheeses. Over ten centuries the village, like the rest of Switzerland, went through the traumas of religious reformation and political revolution. A single currency, a unified postal service, and eventually an integrated army brought improved stability and prosperity to the union of two dozen small republics.

Yet Switzerland’s enduring foundation remains the three thousand boroughs to which the Swiss people feel they truly belong. In Switzerland: A Village History, distinguished scholar David Birmingham tells the story of his childhood village-Château-d’Oex-where records of cheesemaking date to 1328. The evolution of this ancient grazing and forest economy included the rise of the legal profession to keep track of complex deeds, grazing allotments, and animal rights-of-way. Switzerland’s eventual privatization of communal grazing land drove many highlanders to emigrate to the European plains and overseas to the Americas. The twentieth century brought wealth from foreign tourism to Switzerland, punctuated by austerities imposed by Europe’s wars. Alpine peasants were integrated into Swiss union society and began at last to share in some of the prosperity flowing from urban industry.

Switzerland: A Village History replaces the mythology and patriotic propaganda that too often have passed for Swiss history with a rigorous, insightful, and charming account of the daily life, small-scale rivalries, and local loyalties that actually make up Swiss history.

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Kwame Nkrumah
The Father of African Nationalism
David Birmingham
Ohio University Press, 1998
The first African statesman to achieve world recognition was Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), who became president of the new Republic of Ghana in 1960. He campaigned ceaselessly for African solidarity and for the liberation of southern Africa from white settler rule. His greatest achievement was to win the right of black peoples in Africa to have a vote and to determine their own destiny. He turned a dream of liberation into a political reality. He was the leader of Ghana who urged Africa to shed the colonial yoke and who inspired black people everywhere to seek their freedom. This revised edition of Birmingham’s fine and accessible biography chronicles the public accomplishments of this extraordinary leader, who faced some of the century’s most challenging political struggles over colonial transition. African nationalism, and pan-Africanism. It also relates some of the personal trials of a complex individual. As a student in America in the late 1930s, Nkrumah, shy, disorganized, but ambitious and persistent, earned four degrees in ten years. For political training he then went to England. Nkrumah found writing difficult throughout his lifetime, but once back in his African homeland, with its oral heritage, Nkrumah blossomed as a charming conversationalist, a speechmaker, and eventually a visionary and inspiring leader. Nkrumah’s crusades were controversial, however, and in the 1960s he gradually lost his heroic stature both among his own people and among his fellow leaders. He lived his last years in exile. This remarkable life story, which touches on many of the issues facing modern Africa, will open a window of understanding for the general leader as well as for graduate and undergraduate classes. In this new edition, Birmingham also examines Nkrumah’s exile and provides insight into the image of Nkrumah that has emerged in the light of research recently published.
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The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy
M. B. B. Biskupski
Ohio University Press, 2010

The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy is a series of closely integrated essays that traces the idea of democracy in Polish thought and practice. It begins with the transformative events of the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed revolutionary developments in the socioeconomic and demographic structure of Poland, and continues through changes that marked the postcommunist era of free Poland.

The idea of democracy survived in Poland through long periods of foreign occupation, the trials of two world wars, and years of Communist subjugation. Whether in Poland itself or among exiles, Polish speculation about the creation of a liberal-democratic Poland has been central to modern Polish political thought. This volume is unique in that is traces the evolution of the idea of democracy, both during the periods when Poland was an independent country—1918-1939—and during the periods of foreign occupation before 1918 through World War II and the Communist era. For those periods when Poland was not free, the volume discusses how the idea of democracy evolved among exile and underground Polish circles.

This important work is the only single-volume English-language history of modern Polish democratic thought and parliamentary systems and represents the latest scholarly research by leading specialists from Europe and North America.

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Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century
Abstracting Economics
Daniel Bivona
Ohio University Press, 2016
Since the 1980s, scholars have made the case for examining nineteenth-century culture—particularly literary output—through the lens of economics. In Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics, two luminaries in the field of Victorian studies, Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp, have collected contributions from leading thinkers that push New Economic Criticism in new and exciting directions. Spanning the Americas, India, England, and Scotland, this volume adopts an inclusive, global view of the cultural effects of economics and exchange. Contributors use the concept of abstraction to show how economic thought and concerns around money permeated all aspects of nineteenth-century culture, from the language of wills to arguments around the social purpose of art. The characteristics of investment and speculation; the fraught symbolic and practical meanings of paper money to the Victorians; the shifting value of goods, services, and ideas; the evolving legal conceptualizations of artistic ownership—all of these, contributors argue, are essential to understanding nineteenth-century culture in Britain and beyond. Contributors: Daniel Bivona, Suzanne Daly, Jennifer Hayward, Aeron Hunt, Roy Kreitner, Kathryn Pratt Russell, Cordelia Smith, and Marlene Tromp.
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Julius Nyerere
Paul Bjerk
Ohio University Press, 2017

With vision, hard-nosed judgment, and biting humor, Julius Nyerere confronted the challenges of nation building in modern Africa. Constructing Tanzania out of a controversial Cold War union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar, Nyerere emerged as one of independent Africa’s most influential leaders. He pursued his own brand of African socialism, called Ujamaa, with unquestioned integrity, and saw it profoundly influence movements to end white minority rule in Southern Africa. Yet his efforts to build a peaceful nation created a police state, economic crisis, and a war with Idi Amin’s Uganda. Eventually—unlike most of his contemporaries—Nyerere retired voluntarily from power, paving the way for peaceful electoral transitions in Tanzania that continue today.

Based on multinational archival research, extensive reading, and interviews with Nyerere’s family and colleagues, as well as some who suffered under his rule, Paul Bjerk provides an incisive and accessible biography of this African leader of global importance. Recognizing Nyerere’s commitment to participatory government and social equality while also confronting his authoritarian turns and policy failures, Bjerk offers a portrait of principled leadership under the difficult circumstances of postcolonial Africa.

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A Room of His Own
A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland
Barbara Black
Ohio University Press, 2012

In nineteenth-century London, a clubbable man was a fortunate man, indeed. The Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Carlton, the United Service are just a few of the gentlemen’s clubs that formed the exclusive preserve known as “clubland” in Victorian London—the City of Clubs that arose during the Golden Age of Clubs. Why were these associations for men only such a powerful emergent institution in nineteenth-century London? Distinctly British, how did these single-sex clubs help fashion men, foster a culture of manliness, and assist in the project of nation building? What can elite male affiliative culture tell us about nineteenth-century Britishness?

A Room of His Own sheds light on the mysterious ways of male associational culture as it examines such topics as fraternity, sophistication, nostalgia, social capital, celebrity, gossip, and male professionalism. The story of clubland (and the literature it generated) begins with Britain’s military heroes home from the Napoleonic campaign and quickly turns to Dickens’s and Thackeray’s acrimonious Garrick Club Affair. It takes us to Richard Burton’s curious Cannibal Club and Winston Churchill’s The Other Club; it goes underground to consider Uranian desire and Oscar Wilde’s clubbing and resurfaces to examine the problematics of belonging in Trollope’s novels. The trespass of French socialist Flora Tristan, who cross-dressed her way into the clubs of Pall Mall, provides a brief interlude. London’s clubland—this all-important room of his own—comes to life as Barbara Black explores the literary representations of clubland and the important social and cultural work that this urban site enacts. Our present-day culture of connectivity owes much to nineteenth-century sociability and Victorian networks; clubland reveals to us our own enduring desire to belong, to construct imagined communities, and to affiliate with like-minded comrades.

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A Room of His Own
A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland
Barbara Black
Ohio University Press
In nineteenth-century London, a clubbable man was a fortunate man, indeed. The Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Carlton, the United Service are just a few of the gentlemen’s clubs that formed the exclusive preserve known as “clubland” in Victorian London—the City of Clubs that arose during the Golden Age of Clubs. Why were these associations for men only such a powerful emergent institution in nineteenth-century London? Distinctly British, how did these single-sex clubs help fashion men, foster a culture of manliness, and assist in the project of nation-building? What can elite male affiliative culture tell us about nineteenth-century Britishness?

A Room of His Own sheds light on the mysterious ways of male associational culture as it examines such topics as fraternity, sophistication, nostalgia, social capital, celebrity, gossip, and male professionalism. The story of clubland (and the literature it generated) begins with Britain’s military heroes home from the Napoleonic campaign and quickly turns to Dickens’s and Thackeray’s acrimonious Garrick Club Affair. It takes us to Richard Burton’s curious Cannibal Club and Winston Churchill’s The Other Club; it goes underground to consider Uranian desire and Oscar Wilde’s clubbing and resurfaces to examine the problematics of belonging in Trollope’s novels. The trespass of French socialist Flora Tristan, who cross-dressed her way into the clubs of Pall Mall, provides a brief interlude. London’s clubland—this all-important room of his own—comes to life as Barbara Black explores the literary representations of clubland and the important social and cultural work that this urban site enacts. Our present-day culture of connectivity owes much to nineteenth-century sociability and Victorian networks; clubland reveals to us our own enduring desire to belong, to construct imagined communities, and to affiliate with like-minded comrades.
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Row by Row
Talking with Kentucky Gardeners
Katherine J. Black
Ohio University Press, 2015

For two and a half years, Katherine J. Black crisscrossed Kentucky, interviewing home vegetable gardeners from a rich variety of backgrounds. Row by Row: Talking with Kentucky Gardeners is the result, a powerful compilation of testimonies on the connections between land, people, culture, and home.

The people profiled here share a Kentucky backdrop, but their life stories, as well as their gardens, have as many colors, shapes, and tastes as heirloom tomatoes do. Black interviewed those who grow in city backyards, who carve out gardens from farmland, and who have sprawling plots in creek bottoms and former pastures. Many of the gardeners in Row by Row speak eloquently about our industrialized food system’s injuries to the land, water, and health of people. But more often they talk about what they are doing in their gardens to reverse this course.

Row by Row is as sure to appeal to historians, food studies scholars, and sustainability advocates as it is to gardeners and local food enthusiasts. These eloquent portraits, drawn from oral histories and supplemented by Deirdre Scaggs’ color photographs, form a meditation on how gardeners make sense of their lives through what they grow and how they grow it.

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Sowing the American Dream
How Consumer Culture Took Root in the Rural Midwest
David Blanke
Ohio University Press, 2000

From 1840 to 1900, midwestern Americans experienced firsthand the profound economic, cultural, and structural changes that transformed the nation from a premodern, agrarian state to one that was urban, industrial, and economically interdependent. Midwestern commercial farmers found themselves at the heart of these changes. Their actions and reactions led to the formation of a distinctive and particularly democratic consumer ethos, which is still being played out today.

By focusing on the consumer behavior of midwestern farmers, Sowing the American Dream provides illustrative examples of how Americans came to terms with the economic and ideological changes that swirled around them. From the formation of the Grange to the advent of mail-order catalogs, the buying patterns of rural midwesterners set the stage for the coming century.

Carefully documenting the rise and fall of the powerful purchasing cooperatives, David Blanke explains the shifting trends in collective consumerism, which ultimately resulted in a significant change in the way that midwestern consumers pursued their own regional identity, community, and independence.

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Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean
Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia
Adrian Blevins
Ohio University Press, 2015

In Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray collect essays from today’s finest established and emerging writers with roots in Appalachia. Together, these essays take the theme of silencing in Appalachian culture, whether the details of that theme revolve around faith, class, work, or family legacies.

In essays that take wide-ranging forms—making this an ideal volume for creative nonfiction classes—contributors write about families left behind, hard-earned educations, selves transformed, identities chosen, and risks taken. They consider the courage required for the inheritances they carry.

Toughness and generosity alike characterize works by Dorothy Allison, bell hooks, Silas House, and others. These writers travel far away from the boundaries of a traditional Appalachia, and then circle back—always—to the mountains that made each of them the distinctive thinking and feeling people they ultimately became. The essays in Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean are an individual and collective act of courage.

Contributors:
Dorothy Allison, Rob Amberg, Pinckney Benedict, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Sheldon Lee Compton, Michael Croley, Richard Currey, Joyce Dyer, Sarah Einstein, Connie May Fowler, RJ Gibson, Mary Crockett Hill, bell hooks, Silas House, Jason Howard, David Huddle, Tennessee Jones, Lisa Lewis, Jeff Mann, Chris Offutt, Ann Pancake, Jayne Anne Phillips, Melissa Range, Carter Sickels, Aaron Smith, Jane Springer, Ida Stewart, Jacinda Townsend, Jessie van Eerden, Julia Watts, Charles Dodd White, and Crystal Wilkinson.

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Scheler’s Critique of Kant’s Ethics
Continental Thought Series, V. 22
Philip Blosser
Ohio University Press, 1995

“My interest in [Max] Scheler’s critique of Kant runs back nearly a decade…. The more I read of Scheler, the more I began to see the value of a project dealing with his critique of Kant in Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wetethik, which would possess the virtue of focusing in a single project three important strands of philosophical interest: phenomenology, Kantianism, and ethics….

“The study is divided into six chapters and two appendices. Each of the chapters constituting the body of the work contains a brief analysis of the Kantian position or discussion of the basic questions at issue in it, an exposition of Scheler’s critique of the Kantian position and its presuppositions, and a detailed appraisal of Scheler’s critique.”—from the introduction by the author

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Resistance on the National Stage
Theater and Politics in Late New Order Indonesia
Michael H. Bodden
Ohio University Press, 2010

Resistance on the National Stage analyzes the ways in which, between 1985 and 1998, modern theater pracxadtitioners in Indonesia contributed to a rising movement of social protest against the long-governing New Order regime of President Suharto. It examines the work of an array of theater groups and networks from Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta that pioneered new forms of theater-making and new themes that were often presented more directly and critically than previous groups had dared to do.

Michael H. Bodden looks at a wide range of case studies to show how theater contributed to and helped build the opposition. He also looks at how specific combinations of social groups created tensions and gave modern theater a special role in bridging social gaps and creating social networks that expanded the reach of the prodemocracy movement. Theater workers constructed new social networks by involving peasants, Muslim youth, industrial workers, and lower-middle-class slum dwellers in theater productions about their own lives. Such networking and resistance established theater as one significant arena in which the groundwork for the ouster of Suharto in May 1998, and the succeeding Reform era, was laid.

Resistance on the National Stage will have broad appeal, not only for scholars of contemporary Indonesian culture and theater, but also for those interested in Indonesian history and politics, as well as scholars of postcolonial theater and culture.

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The History of Indiana Law
David J. Bodenhamer
Ohio University Press, 2006

Long regarded as a center for middle-American values, Indiana is also a cultural crossroads that has produced a rich and complex legal and constitutional heritage. The History of Indiana Law traces this history through a series of expert articles by identifying the themes that mark the state’s legal development and establish its place within the broader context of the Midwest and nation.

The History of Indiana Law explores the ways in which the state’s legal culture responded to—and at times resisted—the influence of national legal developments, including the tortured history of race relations in Indiana. Legal issues addressed by the contributors include the Indiana constitutional tradition, civil liberties, race, women’s rights, family law, welfare and the poor, education, crime and punishment, juvenile justice, the role of courts and judiciary, and landmark cases. The essays describe how Indiana law has adapted to the needs of an increasingly complex society.

The History of Indiana Law is an indispensable reference and invaluable first source to learn about law and society in Indiana during almost two centuries of statehood.

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The History of Indiana Law
David J. Bodenhamer
Ohio University Press, 2006

Long regarded as a center for middle-American values, Indiana is also a cultural crossroads that has produced a rich and complex legal and constitutional heritage. The History of Indiana Law traces this history through a series of expert articles by identifying the themes that mark the state’s legal development and establish its place within the broader context of the Midwest and nation.

The History of Indiana Law explores the ways in which the state’s legal culture responded to—and at times resisted—the influence of national legal developments, including the tortured history of race relations in Indiana. Legal issues addressed by the contributors include the Indiana constitutional tradition, civil liberties, race, women’s rights, family law, welfare and the poor, education, crime and punishment, juvenile justice, the role of courts and judiciary, and landmark cases. The essays describe how Indiana law has adapted to the needs of an increasingly complex society.

The History of Indiana Law is an indispensable reference and invaluable first source to learn about law and society in Indiana during almost two centuries of statehood.

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Familiarity Is the Kingdom of the Lost
Dugmore Boetie
Ohio University Press, 2020
A fast-paced romp through apartheid-era South Africa that exemplifies the creative human capacity to overcome seemingly omnipotent enemies and overwhelming odds. The picaresque hero of this novel, Duggie, is a dispossessed black street kid turned con man. Duggie’s response to being confined to the lowest level of South Africa’s oppressive and humiliating racial hierarchy is to one-up its absurdity with his own glib logic and preposterous schemes. Duggie’s story, as one critic puts it, offers “an encyclopedic catalogue of rip-offs, swindles, and hoaxes” that regularly land him in jail and rely on his white targets’ refusal to admit a black man is capable of outsmarting them. Duggie exploits South Africa’s bureaucratic pass laws and leverages his artificial leg every chance he gets. As “a worthless embarrassment to the authorities and a bad example to the convicts,” Duggie even manages to get himself thrown out of jail. From Duggie’s Depression-era childhood in urban Johannesburg to World War II and the rise of the white supremacist apartheid regime to his final, bitter triumph, Boetie’s narrative celebrates humanity’s relentless drive to survive at any cost. This new edition of Boetie’s out-of-print classic features a recently discovered photograph of the author, an introduction replete with previously unpublished research, numerous annotations, and is accompanied by Lionel Abrahams’ haunting poem, “Soweto Funeral,” composed after attending Boetie’s interment, all of which render the text accessible to a new generation of readers.
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A Poet’s Prose
Selected Writings Of Louise Bogan
Louise Bogan
Ohio University Press, 2005

Although best known as a master of the formal lyric poem, Louise Bogan (1897–1970) also published fiction and what would now be called lyrical essays. A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan showcases her devotion to compression, eloquence, and sharp truths.

Louise Bogan was poetry reviewer for the New Yorker for thirty-eight years, and her criticism was remarkable for its range and effect. Bogan was responsible for the revival of interest in Henry James and was one of the first American critics to notice and review W. H. Auden. She remained intellectually and emotionally responsive to writers as different from one another as Caitlin Thomas, Dorothy Richardson, W. B. Yeats, André Gide, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Bogan’s short stories appeared regularly in magazines during the 1930s, penetrating the social habits of the city as well as the loneliness there. The autobiographical element in her fiction and journals, never entirely confessional, spurred some of her finest writing. The distinguished poet and critic Mary Kinzie provides in A Poet’s Prose a selection of Bogan's best criticism, prose meditations, letters, journal entries, autobiographical essays, and published and unpublished fiction.

Louise Bogan won the Bollingen Prize in 1954 for her collected poems. She is the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Elizabeth Frank, Louise Bogan: A Portrait.

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Apartheid’s Black Soldiers
Un-national Wars and Militaries in Southern Africa
Lennart Bolliger
Ohio University Press, 2021
New oral histories from Black Namibian and Angolan troops who fought in apartheid South Africa’s security forces reveal their involvement, and its impact on their lives, to be far more complicated than most historical scholarship has acknowledged. In anticolonial struggles across the African continent, tens of thousands of African soldiers served in the militaries of colonial and settler states. In southern Africa, they often made up the bulk of these militaries and, in some contexts, far outnumbered those who fought in the liberation movements’ armed wings. Despite these soldiers' significant impact on the region’s military and political history, this dimension of southern Africa’s anticolonial struggles has been almost entirely ignored in previous scholarship. Black troops from Namibia and Angola spearheaded apartheid South Africa’s military intervention in their countries’ respective anticolonial war and postindependence civil war. Drawing from oral history interviews and archival sources, Lennart Bolliger challenges the common framing of these wars as struggles of national liberation fought by and for Africans against White colonial and settler-state armies. Focusing on three case studies of predominantly Black units commanded by White officers, Bolliger investigates how and why these soldiers participated in South Africa’s security forces and considers the legacies of that involvement. In tackling these questions, he rejects the common tendency to categorize the soldiers as “collaborators” and “traitors” and reveals the un-national facets of anticolonial struggles. Finally, the book’s unique analysis of apartheid military culture shows how South Africa’s military units were far from monolithic and instead developed distinctive institutional practices, mythologies, and concepts of militarized masculinity.
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Witchcraft Dialogues
Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges
Geore Clement Bond
Ohio University Press, 2001
Witchcraft Dialogues analyzes the complex manner in which human beings construct, experience, and think about the “occult.” It brings together anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, to engage the metaphysical properties of “witchcraft” and “sorcery” and to explore their manifestations in people’s lived experiences. While many Africanist scholars shun the analysis of “witchcraft” as an appropriate domain of investigation, the experiences, thoughts, activities, and powers that “witchcraft” encompasses have become increasingly the source of interest and debate. Concepts of witchcraft and the phenomena to which they are applied express something fundamental to the human condition and have their equation in the logic of other human practices such as racism and its various crafts. Thus, the focus on “witchcraft” is not just a concern with the occult, but a manifestation of the convergence of interest in mediating and transcending disciplinary domains. The contributors to this volume embrace the challenge of exploring “witchcraft” as a mode of experiencing and explaining human circumstances as well as confronting the limitations of their own intellectual traditions and paradigms. The range of their explorations takes us in new directions, making use not only of their academic training but also of their personal experiences, to reframe the conceptual terrain of the “occult” and the epistemological orientations of their various academic fields of inquiry.
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Eight Prison Camps
A Dutch Family in Japanese Java
Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga
Ohio University Press, 1996

Eldest daughter of eight children, the author grew up in Surakarta, Java, in what is now Indonesia. In the months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, however, Dutch nationals were rounded up by Japanese soldiers and put in internment camps. Her father and brother were sent to separate men’s camps, leaving the author, her mother, and the five younger children in the women’s camp. In this and later seven other prison camps in central Java, their lives gradually deteriorated from early days of fear and crowding to near starvation, forced labor, beatings, and seeing others disappear or die. On the family’s return to Holland after the war, they found a nation recovering from German occupation and largely ignorant of the horror of the Far East experience.

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S. L. Frank
The Life And Work Of A Russian Philosopher, 1877-1950
Philip Boobbyer
Ohio University Press, 1995

“There are many reasons for writing a biography of Semyon Frank. Quite apart from his philosophy, he lived a remarkable life. Born in Moscow in 1877, he was exiled from Soviet Russia in 1922 and died in London in 1950. The son of a Jewish doctor, he became a revolutionary Social Democrat in his teens and finished his life as a Neoplatonist Christian. One of the Russian revisionist Marxists, he was then involved in the Kadet Party during the 1905 revolution before breaking with active political activity and turning to philosophy. He lived in Petrograd through the First World War until September 1917, after which he went to Saratov, where he experienced the chaos of the Russian Civil War. Living in Germany after his exile, he witnessed the rise of Hitler in Berlin, left for France in a hurry in 1937, and spent part of the war hiding from the Gestapo in the Grenoble mountains. It was a life that encompassed a lot of history.

”Yet along with this, Frank was arguably Russia’s greatest twentieth-century philosopher. Indeed, V.V. Zen‘kovskii, the historian of Russian philosophy, considered Frank ’in strength of philosophic vision … the most outstanding among Russian philosophers generally — not merely among those who share his ideas.‘ For its lucidity, conciseness, systematic character, and unity, Zen’kovskii considered Frank’s system ‘ the highest achievement … of Russian philosophy.’ Doubtless, Zen‘kovskii’s assessment is disputable, but his remarks emphasize Frank’s stature in the Russian tradition. In the style of German idealism, Frank constructed a comprehensive philosophical system, which he believed offered a coherent alternative to materialism. He was deeply worried by the implications of epistemological relativism and constructed a system of metaphysics designed to link epistemology and ontology, to bridge the gulf between thought and being. In addition, he attempted to express the idea of a personal God in philosophical language. His system also embraced social philosophy, anthropology, and ethics.“

— from the Introduction by the author

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The Cape Herders
A History of the Khoikhoi of Southern Africa
Emile Boonzaier
Ohio University Press, 1996

The Cape Herders provides the first comprehensive picture of the Khoikhoi people. In doing so, it fills a long-standing gap in the resources of Southern African studies, and at a time when interest in the indigenous populations of South Africa is growing daily.

Combining the insights of archaeology, history, and anthropology, this account ranges from the origins of the Khoikhoi in Southern Africa to the contemporary politics of the Namaqualand “reserves.” Its authors have produced a scholarly, yet accessible, book, lavishly illustrated and supplemented with short biographies and fascinating detail.

The Cape Herders explodes a variety of South African myths—not least those surrounding the negative stereotype of the “Hottentot” and those which contribute to the idea that the Khoikhoi are by now “a vanished people.” The story it tells instead is one of enduring interest—the history of a herding people in Southern Africa, its society, economy, and culture, its relationship to the indigenous hunters of the Cape, its encounters with European expeditions, and its subsequent exposure to the first effects of colonization. It is a story of change and adaptation, and it confirms the Khoikhoi’s central role in the making of today’s South Africa.

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Becoming a Place of Unrest
Environmental Crisis and Ecophenomenological Praxis
Robert Booth
Ohio University Press, 2021
The key to mitigating the environmental crisis isn’t just based on science; it depends upon a profound philosophical revision of how we think about and behave in relation to the world. Our ongoing failure to interrupt the environmental crisis in a meaningful way stems, in part, from how we perceive the environment—what Robert Booth calls the "more-than-human world.” Anthropocentric presumptions of this world, inherited from natural science, have led us to better scientific knowledge about environmental problems and more science-based—yet inadequate—practical “solutions.” That’s not enough, Booth argues. Rather, he asserts that we must critically and self-reflexively revise how we perceive and consider ourselves within the more-than-human world as a matter of praxis in order to arrest our destructive impact on it. Across six chapters, Booth brings ecophenomenology—environmentally focused phenomenology—into productive dialogue with a rich array of other philosophical approaches, such as ecofeminism, new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology. The book thus outlines and justifies why and how a specifically ecophenomenological praxis may lead to the disruption of the environmental crisis at its root. Booth’s observations and arguments make the leap from theory to practice insofar as they may influence how we fundamentally grasp the environmental crisis and what promising avenues of practical activism might look like. In Booth’s view, this is not about achieving a global scientific consensus regarding the material causes of the environmental crisis or the responsible use of “natural resources.” Instead, Booth calls for us to habitually resist our impetus to uncritically reduce more-than-human entities to “natural resources” in the first place. As Booth recognizes, Becoming a Place of Unrest cannot and does not tell us how we should act. Instead, it outlines and provides the basic means by which to instill positive and responsible conceptual and behavioral relationships with the rest of the world. Based on this, there is hope that we may begin to develop more concrete, actionable policies that bring about profound and lasting change.
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Buckeye Women
The History of Ohio’s Daughters
Stephane Elise Booth
Ohio University Press, 2001

By the last two decades of the twentieth century, Ohio women had held positions as university presidents, chief executive officers, judges, superintendents of schools, and lieutenant governor. They had won Pulitzer Prizes and, in one case, the Nobel Prize for Literature.

But these women stood on the shoulders of those who came before: the pioneering women who helped tame the Ohio frontier, who filled the breach, who worked for reform, and who struggled for their own rights as citizens of one of the most prosperous states in the Union.

Buckeye Women is an accessible and comprehensive account of the role Ohio women have assumed in the history of the state and a narrative of their hardships and of the victories that have been won in the past two hundred years.

In this timely contribution to the Ohio Bicentennial Series, Professor Stephane Booth has written a rich and well-researched volume, providing for the first time a record of the vast and pivotal accomplishments shared by the women of Ohio over the last two centuries and documenting their contribution to the state’s remarkable heritage.

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Claribel Alegría and Central American Literature
Critical Essays
Sandra M. Boschetto
Ohio University Press, 1993

These essays examine the multifaceted work of the Central American author whom Latin American literary historians consider precursor of “cultural dialogism” in poetry and fiction. As poet, essayist, journalist, novelist, and writer of “quasi–testimonio,” Alegría’s multiple discourses transgress the boundaries between traditional and postmodern political theories and practices. Her work reveals an allegory of relation and negotiation between “intelligentsia” and subaltern peoples as well as the need for a more socially extensive literature, not exclusive of more elite “magical literatures.”

The essays in the fist section frame Alegría’s discourses within sociohistorical, political, and literary contexts in order to illuminate the author’s singular place in the literary and political history of Central America. The essays in the second section engage in a feminist dialogic in which the reader encounters various critical validations and valorizations of Alegría’s many female voices. The third section involves the reader in the pursuit of extratextual or extraliterary resonances in Alegría’s work.

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Voices from Madagascar Voix de Madagascar
An Anthology of Contemporary Francophone Literature/Anthologie de littérature francophone contemporaine
Jacques Bourgeacq
Ohio University Press, 2001
There is currently in Madagascar a rich literary production (short stories, poetry, novels, plays) that has not yet reached the United States for lack of diffusion outside the country. Until recently, Madagascar suffered from political isolation resulting from its breakup with France in the 1970s and the eighteen years of Marxism that followed. With little hope that their voices would be heard outside the island, writers nevertheless have continued to express themselves in French (alongside a literature written in the Malagasy language). Malagasy literature in French had begun in the colonial era with three poets: Jean–Joseph Rabearivelo, Jacques Rabemananjara, and Flavien Ranaivo, all three presented in Léopold Senghor’s celebrated Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948). More recently, although a few Malagasy writers living outside the country have been published in France, the bulk of Malagasy literature today has remained largely unpublished, circulating locally mostly in manuscript form. Voices from Madagascar will bring a wide selection of these texts, both in French and in English, to the North American public.
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In Essentials, Unity
An Economic History of the Grange Movement
Jenny Bourne
Ohio University Press, 2017

The Patrons of Husbandry—or the Grange—is the longest-lived US agricultural society and, since its founding shortly after the Civil War, has had immeasurable influence on social change as enacted by ordinary Americans. The Grange sought to relieve the struggles of small farmers by encouraging collaboration. Pathbreaking for its inclusion of women, the Grange is also well known for its association with Gilded Age laws aimed at curbing the monopoly power of railroads.

In Essentials, Unity takes as its focus Grange founder Oliver Kelley and his home organization in Minnesota. Jenny Bourne draws upon numerous historical records to present a lively picture of a fraternal organization devoted to improving the lot of farmers but whose legacies extend far beyond agriculture. From struggles over minimum wage, birth control, and environmental regulation to the conflicts surrounding the Affordable Care Act, and from lunch-counter sit-ins to Occupy Wall Street, the Grange has shaped the very notion of collective action and how it is deployed even today. As this compact book so effectively illustrates, the history of the Patrons of Husbandry exposes the classic tension between the desires for achieving overall economic success and determining how the spoils are split.

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Establishing Congress
The Removal to Washington, D.C., and the Election of 1800
Kenneth R. Bowling
Ohio University Press, 2005

Establishing Congress: The Removal to Washington, D.C., and the Election of 1800 focuses on the end of the 1790s, when, in rapid succession, George Washington died, the federal government moved to Washington, D.C., and the election of 1800 put Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party in charge of the federal government.

Establishing Congress dispels the myths and misinformation that surround the federal government’s move to Washington and demonstrates that the election of 1800 changed American party politics forever, establishing the success of the American experiment in government and completing the founding of the Republic. It also contends that the lame-duck session of Congress had far-reaching implications for the governance of the District of Columbia. Later chapters examine aspects of the political iconography of the Capitol—one illuminating Jefferson’s role in turning the building into a temple for the legislature and an instrument for nation-building, another analyzing the fascinating decades-long debate over whether to bury George Washington in the Capitol.

The book considers as well the political implications of social life in early Washington, examining the political lobbying by Washington women within a social context and detailing the social and political life in the city’s homes, hotels, boardinghouses, and eating messes. Establishing Congress is an invaluable reference work for anyone interested in these pivotal moments in American history.

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Establishing Congress
The Removal to Washington, D.C., and the Election of 1800
Kenneth R. Bowling
Ohio University Press, 2005

Establishing Congress: The Removal to Washington, D.C., and the Election of 1800 focuses on the end of the 1790s, when, in rapid succession, George Washington died, the federal government moved to Washington, D.C., and the election of 1800 put Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party in charge of the federal government.

Establishing Congress dispels the myths and misinformation that surround the federal government’s move to Washington and demonstrates that the election of 1800 changed American party politics forever, establishing the success of the American experiment in government and completing the founding of the Republic. It also contends that the lame-duck session of Congress had far-reaching implications for the governance of the District of Columbia. Later chapters examine aspects of the political iconography of the Capitol—one illuminating Jefferson’s role in turning the building into a temple for the legislature and an instrument for nation-building, another analyzing the fascinating decades-long debate over whether to bury George Washington in the Capitol.

The book considers as well the political implications of social life in early Washington, examining the political lobbying by Washington women within a social context and detailing the social and political life in the city’s homes, hotels, boardinghouses, and eating messes. Establishing Congress is an invaluable reference work for anyone interested in these pivotal moments in American history.

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The House and Senate in the 1790s
Petitioning, Lobbying, and Institutional Development
Kenneth R. Bowling
Ohio University Press, 2002

Amid the turbulent swirl of foreign intrigue, external and internal threats to the young nation’s existence, and the domestic partisan wrangling of the 1790s, the United States Congress solidified its role as the national legislature. The ten essays in The House and Senate in the 1790s demonstrate the mechanisms by which this bicameral legislature developed its institutional identity. The first essay sets the scene for the institutional development of Congress by examining its constitutional origins and the efforts of the Founders to empower the new national legislature. The five following essays focus on two related mechanisms—petitioning and lobbying—by which citizens and private interests communicated with national lawmakers.

Although scholars tend to see lobbying as a later nineteenth-century development, the papers presented here clearly demonstrate the existence of lobbyists and lobbying in the 1790s. The final four papers examine other aspects of the institutional development of the House and the Senate, including the evolution of political parties and congressional leadership.

The essays in this collection, the third volume in the series Perspectives on the History of Congress, 1789-1801, originated in a series of conferences held by the United States Capitol Historical Society from 1994 to 2001.

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Inventing Congress
Origins and Establishment of the First Federal Congress
Kenneth R. Bowling
Ohio University Press, 1999

On March 4, 1789, New York City's church bells pealed, cannons fired, and flags snapped in the wind to celebrate the date set for the opening of the First Federal Congress. In many ways the establishment of Congress marked the culmination of the American Revolution as the ship of state was launched from the foundation of the legislative system outlined in Article I of the Constitution.

Inventing Congress presents the latest scholarship on the interrelated intellectual, institutional, cultural, and political antecedents of the formation of the First Federal Congress. The first section covers the origins of the body, ranging in discussion from the question of how the founders' understanding of classical Greek and Roman republican precedent shaped their thinking, to the political lessons learned during the Continental and Confederation Congresses.

The second section concerns itself with the establishment of the First Federal Congress, examining several heretofore little-treated aspects of the most important Congress in history, including its relationship to the press, morality, the arts and sciences, and economic philosophy.

Inventing Congress represents the papers from the first two conferences sponsored by the United States Capitol Historical Society in its series, “Perspectives on the History of Congress, 1789-1801.”

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Neither Separate Nor Equal
Congress in the 1790s
Kenneth R. Bowling
Ohio University Press, 2000

Scholars today take for granted the existence of a “wall of separation” dividing the three branches of the federal government. Neither Separate nor Equal: Congress in the 1790s demonstrates that such lines of separation among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, however, were neither so clearly delineated nor observed in the first decade of the federal government's history.

The first two essays describe the social and cultural milieu attending the movement of the republican court from New York to Philadelphia and the physical and social environment of Philadelphia in the 1790s. The following section examines the congressional career of New York's Egbert Benson, the senatorial career of Robert Morris as an expression of his economic interests, the vigorous opposition of Rep. William Branch Giles to the Federalist policies of the Washington administration, and finally the underappreciated role of congressional spouses.

The last five essays concentrate on areas of interbranch cooperation and conflict. In particular, they discuss the meaning of separation of powers in the 1790s, Washington as an active president with Congress, the contrast between Hamilton's and Jefferson's exercise of political influence with Congress, and John Adams's relationship with Congress during the Quasi-War crisis.

The essays in this collection, the second volume of the series Perspectives on the History of Congress, 1789-1801, originated in two conferences held in 1995 and 1996 by the United States Capitol Historical Society.

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Preaching Prevention
Born-Again Christianity and the Moral Politics of AIDS in Uganda
Lydia Boyd
Ohio University Press, 2015

Preaching Prevention examines the controversial U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) initiative to “abstain and be faithful” as a primary prevention strategy in Africa. This ethnography of the born-again Christians who led the new anti-AIDS push in Uganda provides insight into both what it means for foreign governments to “export” approaches to care and treatment and the ways communities respond to and repurpose such projects. By examining born-again Christians’ support of Uganda’s controversial 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill, the book’s final chapter explores the enduring tensions surrounding the message of personal accountability heralded by U.S. policy makers.

Preaching Prevention is the first to examine the cultural reception of PEPFAR in Africa. Lydia Boyd asks, What are the consequences when individual responsibility and autonomy are valorized in public health initiatives and those values are at odds with the existing cultural context? Her book investigates the cultures of the U.S. and Ugandan evangelical communities and how the flow of U.S.-directed monies influenced Ugandan discourses about sexuality and personal agency. It is a pioneering examination of a global health policy whose legacies are still unfolding.

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Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid
Belinda Bozzoli
Ohio University Press, 2004

A compelling study of the origins and trajectory of one of the legendary black uprisings against apartheid, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid draws on insights gained from the literature on collective action and social movements. It delves into the Alexandra Rebellion of 1986 to reveal its inner workings.

Belinda Bozzoli’s aim is to examine how the residents of Alexandra, a poverty-stricken segregated township in Johannesburg, manipulated and overturned the meanings of space, time, and power in their sequestered world. She explains how they used political theater to convey, stage, and dramatize their struggle and how young and old residents generated differing ideologies and tactics, giving rise to a distinct form of generational politics.

Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid asks the reader to enter into the world of the rebels and to confront the moral complexity and social duress they experienced as they invented new social forms and violently attacked old ones. It is an important study of collective action that will be of great interest to sociologists and to scholars of Africa, particularly to those interested in the antiapartheid struggle.

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The Voice of Toil
Nineteenth-Century British Writings about Work
David J. Bradshaw
Ohio University Press, 1999

One of the most recurrent and controversial subjects of nineteenth–century discourse was work. Many thinkers associated work with honest pursuit of doing good, not the curse accompanying exile from Eden but rather “a great gift of God.” Sincerely undertaken work comprised a mission entailing a commitment to serve others and promote a better future for all.

Satisfaction with what work could do for individuals had its counterbalance in the anger and dismay expressed at the conditions of those whom Robert Owen, in 1817, first called the “working class.” What working–class people confronted both at the labor site and at their lodgings was construed as oppressive, and the misery of their lives became the subject of sentimental poetry, government report, popular fiction, and journalistic expose. Perhaps as heated as the discussion about conditions of lower–class workers was the conversation about separate spheres of work for men and women. This conversation, too, found its way into the literature and public discourse of the day.

In The Voice of Toil, the editors have collected the central writings from a pivotal place and time, including poems, stories, essays, and a play that reflect four prominent ways in which the subject of work was addressed: Work as Mission, Work as Opportunity, Work as Oppression, and (Separate) Spheres of Work. The resulting anthology offers a provocative text for students of nineteenth-century British literature and history and a valuable resource for scholars.

The text includes readings from John Wesley, William Blake, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale, William Morris, Joanna Baillie, Friedrich Engels, Matthew Arnold, Angela Burdett–Coutts, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Bernard Shaw and many others.

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Taifa
Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania
James R. Brennan
Ohio University Press, 2012

Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race—both translatable as taifa in Swahili—were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume. They were instead categories crafted by local African thinkers to make sense of deep inequalities, particularly those between local Africans and Indian immigrants. Taifa shows how nation and race became the key political categories to guide colonial and postcolonial life in this African city.

Using deeply researched archival and oral evidence, Taifa transforms our understanding of urban history and shows how concerns about access to credit and housing became intertwined with changing conceptions of nation and nationhood. Taifa gives equal attention to both Indians and Africans; in doing so, it demonstrates the significance of political and economic connections between coastal East Africa and India during the era of British colonialism, and illustrates how the project of racial nationalism largely severed these connections by the 1970s.

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Dolores Huerta Stands Strong
The Woman Who Demanded Justice
Marlene Targ Brill
Ohio University Press, 2018
Today, we know Dolores Huerta as the cofounder, with Cesar Chavez, of the National Farmworkers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers of America. We know her as a tireless advocate for the rights of farmworkers, Mexican American immigrants, women, and LGBTQ populations. And we know her as the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012. Before all that, though, Huerta was a child in the farming community of Stockton, California, and then a teenager whose teachers underestimated her because she was Chicana. When she became a teacher herself, she witnessed her students coming to school shoeless and hungry. Many took days off from school to work in the farm fields to help feed their families. What could she do to help them? A young mother at the time, Huerta quit her teaching job to organize their parents. That began her journey to educate a nation about who produces our food and the conditions under which they work. Dolores Huerta Stands Strong follows Huerta’s life from the mining communities of the Southwest where her father toiled, to the vineyards and fields of California, and across the country to the present day. As she worked for fair treatment for others, Dolores earned the nation’s highest honors. More important, she found her voice.
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Jane Addams
The Most Dangerous Woman in America
Marlene Targ Brill
Ohio University Press, 2024
This book explains who Jane Addams was and why she caused such a stir in the United States and worldwide. The story follows Jane from her first realization of the unfairness that limited the lives, livelihoods, and health of disadvantaged people in the late 1800s to her becoming one of the most beloved—and most disliked—women of her day. She worked to create a more peaceful, fair world for all people, no matter their race, color, nationality, or gender. Along her journey, Jane cofounded Hull-House, the most celebrated settlement house in the United States, and she became a motivating author, speaker, and women’s rights and peace advocate. She worked tirelessly on community, state, and national levels to promote women’s, workers’, and children’s rights, and she spoke passionately against the evils of war. Jane devoted her activities and writings to championing programs for these and other humanitarian causes. Votes for women! Equal rights for African Americans! Good schools and a healthy environment for children! No one—not millionaires, presidents, or the FBI—could stand in the way of her quest for justice. Jane became one of few women worldwide to earn a Nobel Peace Prize. Her efforts to improve social services and communities and to train leaders to carry out this work led to the opening of the first professional school of social work—named in her honor—at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her writing, teaching, and actions were based on the belief that “without the advance and improvement of the whole, no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or material individual condition.”
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Wittgenstein & Critical Theory
Beyond Postmodern Criticism and Toward Descriptive Investigations
Susan B. Brill
Ohio University Press, 1994
The crucial point of Brill’s study is that of fit: which critical methods prove most useful towards opening up which texts? Close investigations into the parameters of the language games of texts, critics, and methods enable us to determine which paths to take towards more complete descriptive analyses and critique. Such an emphasis on the philosophical method of Ludwig Wittgenstein reorients literary criticism to involve a conjoint responsibility to both reader and text as the literary critic assumes the humbler role of a guide who assists a reader in/to diverse literary texts. Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach provides us with a strong means of developing such a method for literary criticism—a method that points the way forward beyond postmodern criticisms and to a categorically new approach to literary texts.

Brill’s work discusses at length the implications of Wittgenstein for literary criticism and theory. The volume specifically investigates the implications of Wittgenstein’s work for a number of contemporary critical orientations (notably poststructualism, feminism, and psychology). In addition, the research includes actual applications of Wittgenstein for literary criticism: diverse literary texts (including a number of poems and stories by Native American authors) are approached via a Wittgensteinian method as a means of discerning which critical approaches might be more or less efficacious. Not only does the book provide a solid introduction to Wittgensteinian philosophy for the critical scholars, but it also provides a clear methodology useful to critics seeking a means to navigate through the entanglement of contemporary criticism and theory.

Brill argues that a reliance upon the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein can enable literary critics to escape the seemingly endless dialectic between modern and postmodern theory. Instead of debating which theory is theoretically best, we need to describe when theories work—and when they do not.
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Talkative Polity
Radio, Domination, and Citizenship in Uganda
Florence Brisset-Foucault
Ohio University Press, 2019

For the first decade of the twenty-first century, every weekend, people throughout Uganda converged to participate in ebimeeza, open debates that invited common citizens to share their political and social views. These debates, also called “People’s Parliaments,” were broadcast live on private radio stations until the government banned them in 2009. In Talkative Polity, Florence Brisset-Foucault offers the first major study of ebimeeza, which complicate our understandings of political speech in restrictive contexts and force us to move away from the simplistic binary of an authoritarian state and a liberal civil society.

Brisset-Foucault conducted fieldwork from 2005 to 2013, primarily in Kampala, interviewing some 150 orators, spectators, politicians, state officials, journalists, and NGO staff. The resulting ethnography invigorates the study of political domination and documents a short-lived but highly original sphere of political expression. Brisset-Foucault thus does justice to the richness and depth of Uganda’s complex political and radio culture as well as to the story of ambitious young people who didn’t want to behave the way the state expected them to. Positioned at the intersection of media studies and political science, Talkative Polity will help us all rethink the way in which public life works.

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The Fin-de-Siecle Poem
English Literary Culture and the 1890s
Joseph Bristow
Ohio University Press, 2005
Featuring innovative research by emergent and established scholars, The Fin-de-Siecle Poem throws new light on the remarkable diversity of poetry produced at the close of the nineteenth century in England. Opening with a detailed preface that shows why literary historians have frequently underrated fin-de-siecle poetry, the collection explains how a strikingly rich body of lyrical and narrative poems anticipated many of the developments traditionally attributed to Modernism. Each chapter in turn provides insights into the ways in which late-nineteenth-century poets represented their experiences of the city, their attitudes toward sexuality, their responses to empire, and their interest in religious belief.

The eleven essays presented by editor Joseph Bristow pay renewed attention to the achievements of such legendary writers as Oscar Wilde, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and W.B. Yeats, whose careers have always been associated with the 1890s. This book also explores the lesser-known but equally significant advances made by notable women poets, including Michael Field, Amy Levy, Charlotte Mew, Alice Meynell, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Graham R. Tomson.

The Fin-de-Siecle Poem brings together innovative research on poetry that has been typecast as the attenuated Victorianism that was rejected by Modernism. The contributors underscore the remarkable innovations made in English poetry of the 1880s and 1890s and show how woman poets stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their better-known male contemporaries.Joseph Bristow is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he edits the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature. His recent books include The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, Oscar Wilde: Contextual Conditions, and the variorum edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
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Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture
The Making of a Legend
Joseph Bristow
Ohio University Press, 2009

Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer’s reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas. Always renowned—if not notorious—for his fashionable persona, Wilde courted celebrity at an early age. Later, he came to prominence as one of the most talented essayists and fiction writers of his time.

In the years leading up to his two-year imprisonment, Wilde stood among the foremost dramatists in London. But after he was sent down for committing acts of “gross indecency” it seemed likely that social embarrassment would inflict irreparable damage to his legacy. As this volume shows, Wilde died in comparative obscurity. Little could he have realized that in five years his name would come back into popular circulation thanks to the success of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome and Robert Ross’s edition of De Profundi. With each succeeding decade, the twentieth century continued to honor Wilde’s name by keeping his plays in repertory, producing dramas about his life, adapting his works for film, and devising countless biographical and critical studies of his writings.

This volume reveals why, more than a hundred years after his demise, Wilde’s value in the academic world, the auction house, and the entertainment industry stands higher than that of any modern writer.

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Eurafricans in Western Africa
Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century
George E. Brooks
Ohio University Press, 2003

Eurafricans in Western Africa traces the rich social and commercial history of western Africa. The most comprehensive study to date, it begins prior to the sixteenth century when huge profits made by middlemen on trade in North African slaves, salt, gold, pepper, and numerous other commodities prompted Portuguese reconnaissance voyages along the coast of western Africa. From Senegal to Sierra Leone, Portuguese, including “New Christians” who reverted to Judaism while living in western Africa, thrived where riverine and caravan networks linked many African groups.

Portuguese and their Luso-African descendants contended with French, Dutch, and English rivals for trade in gold, ivory, slaves, cotton textiles, iron bars, cowhides, and other African products. As the Atlantic slave trade increased, French and Franco-Africans and English and Anglo-Africans supplanted Portuguese and Luso-Africans in many African places of trade.

Eurafricans in Western Africa follows the changes that took root in the eighteenth century when French and British colonial officials introduced European legal codes, and concludes with the onset of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, when suppression of the slave trade and expanding commerce in forest and agricultural commodities again transformed circumstances in western Africa.

Professor George E. Brooks’s outstanding history of these vital aspects of western Africa is enriched by his discussion of the roles of the women who married or cohabited with European traders. Through accounts of incidents and personal histories, which are integrated into the narrative, the lives of these women and their children are accorded a prominent place in Professor Brooks’s fascinating discussion of this dynamic region of Africa.

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Black Lawyers, White Courts
The Soul of South African Law
Kenneth S. Broun
Ohio University Press, 2000

In the struggle against apartheid, one often overlooked group of crusaders was the coterie of black lawyers who overcame the Byzantine system that the government established oftentimes explicitly to block the paths of its black citizens from achieving justice.

Now, in their own voices, we have the narratives of many of those lawyers as recounted in a series of oral interviews. Black Lawyers, White Courts is their story and the anti-apartheid story that has before now gone untold.

Professor Kenneth Broun conducted interviews with twenty-seven black South African lawyers. They were asked to tell about their lives, including their family backgrounds, education, careers, and their visions for the future. In many instances they also discussed their years in prison or exile, or under house arrest. Most told of both education and careers interrupted because of the ongoing struggle.

The story of the professional achievements of black lawyers in South Africa—indeed their very survival—provides an example of the triumph of individuals and, ultimately, of the law. Black Lawyers, White Courts is about South Africa, and about black professionals in that country, but the lessons its protagonists teach extend far beyond circumstances, geography, or race.

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Literary Cincinnati
The Missing Chapter
Dale Patrick Brown
Ohio University Press, 2011

The history of Cincinnati runs much deeper than the stories of hogs that once roamed downtown streets. In addition to hosting the nation’s first professional baseball team, the Tall Stacks riverboat celebration, and the May Festival, there’s another side to the city—one that includes some of the most famous names and organizations in American letters.

Literary Cincinnati fills in this missing chapter, taking the reader on a joyous ride with some of the great literary personalities who have shaped life in the Queen City. Meet the young Samuel Clemens working in a local print shop, Fanny Trollope struggling to open her bizarre bazaar, Sinclair Lewis researching Babbitt, hairdresser Eliza Potter telling the secrets of her rich clientele, and many more who defined the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Queen City.

For lovers of literature everywhere—but especially in Cincinnati—this is a literary tour that will entertain, inform, and amuse.

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Flying through a Hole in the Storm
Poems
Fleda Brown
Ohio University Press, 2021
A keenly observant collection of poems on disaster, aging, and apocalypse. Golda Meir once said, “Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there’s nothing you can do.” The poems in Fleda Brown’s brave collection, her thirteenth, take readers on a journey through the fury of this storm. There are plenty of tragedies to weather here, both personal and universal: the death of a father, a child’s terminal cancer, the extinction of bees, and environmental degradation. Brown’s poems are wise, honest, and deeply observant meditations on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, and aging. With tributes to visionary artists, including Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, and Grandma Moses, as well as to life’s terrors, sadnesses, and joys, these works are beautiful dispatches from a renowned poet who sees the shadows lengthening and imagines what they might look like from the other side.
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Incidental Architect
William Thornton and the Cultural Life of Early Washington, D.C., 1794–1828
Gordon S. Brown
Ohio University Press, 2009

While the majority of scholarship on early Washington focuses on its political and physical development, in Incidental ArchitectGordon S. Brown describes the intellectual and social scene of the 1790s and early 1800s through the lives of a prominent couple whose cultural aspirations served as both model and mirror for the city’s own.

When William and Anna Maria Thornton arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1794, the new nation’s capital was little more than a raw village. The Edinburgh–educated Thornton and his accomplished wife brought with them the values of the Scottish Enlightenment, an enthusiasm for the arts, and a polished urbanity that was lacking in the little city emerging from the swamps along the Potomac. Thornton’s talents were manifold: He is perhaps best known as the original architect of the Capitol building, but he also served as a city commissioner and as director of the Patent Office, where his own experimentation in steam navigation embroiled him in a long-running dispute with inventor Robert Fulton.

In spite of their general preoccupation with politics and real estate development, Washington’s citizens gradually created a network of cultural institutions—theaters, libraries and booksellers, music venues, churches, schools, and even colleges and intellectual associations—that began to satisfy their aspirations.

Incidental Architect is a fascinating account of how the city’s cultural and social institutions were shaped by its earliest citizens.

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New Stories from the Midwest
Jason Lee Brown
Ohio University Press, 2011

New Stories from the Midwest presents a collection of stories that celebrate an American region too often ignored in discussions about distinctive regional literature. The editors solicited nominations from more than three hundred magazines, literary journals, and small presses, and narrowed the selection to nineteen authors comprising prize winners and new and established authors.

The stories, written by midwestern writers or focusing on the Midwest, demonstrate how the quality of fiction from and about the heart of the country rivals that of any other region.

The anthology includes an introduction from Lee Martin and short fiction by emerging and established writers such as Rosellen Brown, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Christie Hodgen, Gregory Blake Smith, and Benjamin Percy.

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Mad Dogs and Meerkats
A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa
Karen Brown
Ohio University Press, 2011

Through the ages, rabies has exemplified the danger of diseases that transfer from wild animals to humans and their domestic stock. In South Africa, rabies has been on the rise since the latter part of the twentieth century despite the availability of postexposure vaccines and regular inoculation campaigns for dogs.

In Mad Dogs and Meerkats: A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa, Karen Brown links the increase of rabies to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Her study shows that the most afflicted regions of South Africa have seen a dangerous rise in feral dog populations as people lack the education, means, or will to care for their pets or take them to inoculation centers. Most victims are poor black children. Ineffective disease control, which in part depends on management policies in neighboring states and the diminished medical and veterinary infrastructures in Zimbabwe, has exacerbated the problem.

This highly readable book is the first study of rabies in Africa, tracing its history in South Africa and neighboring states from 1800 to the present and showing how environmental and economic changes brought about by European colonialism and global trade have had long-term effects.

Mad Dogs and Meerkats is recommended for public health policy makers and anyone interested in human-animal relations and how societies and governments have reacted to one of the world’s most feared diseases.

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Healing the Herds
Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine
Karen Brown
Ohio University Press, 2010

During the early 1990s, the ability of dangerous diseases to pass between animals and humans was brought once more to the public consciousness. These concerns continue to raise questions about how livestock diseases have been managed over time and in different social, economic, and political circumstances. Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine brings together case studies from the Americas, western Europe, and the European and Japanese colonies to illustrate how the rapid growth of the international trade in animals through the nineteenth century engendered the spread of infectious diseases, sometimes with devastating consequences for indigenous pastoral societies. At different times and across much of the globe, livestock epidemics have challenged social order and provoked state interventions, often opposed by farmers and herders. The intensification of agriculture has transformed environments, with consequences for animal and human health.

But the last two centuries have also witnessed major changes in the way societies have conceptualized diseases and sought to control them. From the late nineteenth century, advances in veterinary technologies afforded veterinary scientists a new professional status and allowed them to wield greater political influence. While older methods have remained important to strategies of control and prevention, as demonstrated during the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain in 2001, the rise of germ theories and the discovery of vaccines against some infections made it possible to move beyond the blunt tools of animal culls and restrictive quarantines of the past. Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine offers a new and exciting comparative approach to the complex interrelationships of microbes, markets, and medicine in the global economy.

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