front cover of RACE & THE CITY
RACE & THE CITY
Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820-1970
Edited by Henry Louis Taylor, Jr.
University of Illinois Press, 1993
"Provides a rich prism through which to explore the social, economic, and political development
of black Cincinnati. These studies offer insight into both the dynamics of racism and a
community's changing responses to it." -- Peter Rachleff, author of Black Labor in
Richmond
 
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Race and Renaissance
African Americans in Pittsburgh since World War II
Joe W. Trotter
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013
African Americans from Pittsburgh have a long and distinctive history of contributions to the cultural, political, and social evolution of the United States. From jazz legend Earl Fatha Hines to playwright August Wilson, from labor protests in the 1950s to the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, Pittsburgh has been a force for change in American race and class relations.   

Race and Renaissance presents the first history of African American life in Pittsburgh after World War II. It examines the origins and significance of the second Great Migration, the persistence of Jim Crow into the postwar years, the second ghetto, the contemporary urban crisis, the civil rights and Black Power movements, and the Million Man and Million Woman marches, among other topics.

In recreating this period, Trotter and Day draw not only from newspaper articles and other primary and secondary sources, but also from oral histories. These include interviews with African Americans who lived in Pittsburgh during the postwar era, uncovering firsthand accounts of what life was truly like during this transformative epoch in urban history.

In these ways, Race and Renaissance illuminateshow African Americans arrived at their present moment in history. It also links movements for change to larger global issues: civil rights with the Vietnam War; affirmative action with the movement against South African apartheid. As such, the study draws on both sociology and urban studies to deepen our understanding of the lives of urban blacks.
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Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-21
Brian Kelly
University of Illinois Press, 2001
Brian Kelly's acclaimed look at the fault lines in the society of an Alabama city challenges the notion that white workers led the resistance to racial equality in the Jim Crow South. Kelly focuses on the forces that brought the black and white miners of Birmingham, Alabama, together during the hard-fought strikes of 1908 and 1920. He examines the systematic efforts by the region's powerful industrialists to create racial divisions as a means of splitting the workforce, preventing unionization, and keeping wages the lowest in the United States. He also details the role played by Birmingham's small but influential black middle class, whose espousal of industrial accommodation outraged black miners and revealed significant tensions within the African American community.
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Race, Jobs, and the War
Andrew E. Kersten
University of Illinois Press, 1999
A richly detailed look at the crucial role of federally supported civil rights activism

In this rigorous and thoroughly documented study focusing on the pivotal Midwest, Andrew E. Kersten shows how a tiny government agency--the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC)--influenced the course of civil rights reform, moving the United States closer to a national fair employment policy and laying the foundation for today's contested affirmative action practices.

Rejecting claims that black advancement during the war was due primarily to shortages of labor, Race, Jobs, and the War contends that the FEPC made significant strides in breaking racial barriers, settling complaints, and pursuing a vigorous educational campaign to foster more harmonious industrial relations between white and minority workers.

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Race Mixing
Black–White Marriage in Postwar America
Renee C. Romano
Harvard University Press, 2003

Marriage between blacks and whites is a longstanding and deeply ingrained taboo in American culture. On the eve of World War II, mixed-race marriage was illegal in most states, politicians argued for segregated facilities in order to prevent race mixing, and interracial couples risked public hostility, legal action, even violence. Yet, sixty years later, black-white marriage is no longer illegal or a divisive political issue, and the number of such couples and their mixed-race children has risen dramatically. Renee Romano explains how and why such marriages have gained acceptance, and what this tells us about race relations in contemporary America.

Although significant numbers of both blacks and whites still oppose interracial marriage, larger historical forces have greatly diminished overt racism and shaped a new consciousness about mixed-race families. The social revolutions of the 1950s and '60s (with their emphasis on individualism and nonconformity), the legal sanctions of new civil rights laws, and a decline in the institutional stability of marriage have all contributed to the growing tolerance for interracial relationships. Telling the powerful stories of couples who married across the color line, Romano shows how cultural shifts are lived by individuals, and how they have enabled mixed couples to build supportive communities for themselves and their children.

However, Romano warns that the erosion of this taboo does not mean that racism no longer exists. The history of interracial marriage helps us understand the extent to which America has overcome its racist past, and how much further we must go to achieve meaningful racial equality.

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Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles
A Transnational Perspective, 1890-1940
Stephanie Lewthwaite
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Beginning near the end of the nineteenth century, a generation of reformers set their sights on the growing Mexican community in Los Angeles. Experimenting with a variety of policies on health, housing, education, and labor, these reformers—settlement workers, educationalists, Americanizers, government officials, and employers—attempted to transform the Mexican community with a variety of distinct and often competing agendas.

In Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles, Stephanie Lewthwaite presents evidence from a myriad of sources that these varied agendas of reform consistently supported the creation of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences across Los Angeles. Reformers simultaneously promoted acculturation and racialization, creating a “landscape of difference” that significantly shaped the place and status of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans from the Progressive era through the New Deal.

The book journeys across the urban, suburban, and rural spaces of Greater Los Angeles as it moves through time and examines the rural–urban migration of Mexicans on both a local and a transnational scale. Part 1 traverses the world of Progressive reform in urban Los Angeles, exploring the link between the region’s territorial and industrial expansion, early campaigns for social and housing reform, and the emergence of a first-generation Mexican immigrant population. Part 2 documents the shift from official Americanization and assimilation toward nativism and exclusion. Here Lewthwaite examines competing cultures of reform and the challenges to assimilation from Mexican nationalists and American nativists. Part 3 analyzes reform during the New Deal, which spawned the active resistance of second-generation Mexican Americans.

Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles achieves a full, broad, and nuanced account of the various—and often contradictory—efforts to reform the Mexican population of Los Angeles. With a transnational approach grounded in historical context, this book will appeal to students of history, cultural studies, and literary studies
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front cover of Race, Rape, and Injustice
Race, Rape, and Injustice
Documenting and Challenging Death Penalty Cases in the Civil Rights Era
Barrettt J. Foerster
University of Tennessee Press, 2012
This book tells the dramatic story of twenty-eight law students—one of whom was the author—who went south at the height of the civil rights era and helped change death penalty jurisprudence forever.
    The 1965 project was organized by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which sought to prove statistically whether capital punishment in southern rape cases had been applied discriminatorily over the previous twenty years. If the research showed that a disproportionate number of African Americans convicted of raping white women had received the death penalty regardless of nonracial variables (such as the degree of violence used), then capital punishment in the South could be abolished as a clear violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
    Targeting eleven states, the students cautiously made their way past suspicious court clerks, lawyers, and judges to secure the necessary data from dusty courthouse records. Trying to attract as little attention as possible, they managed—amazingly—to complete their task without suffering serious harm at the hands of white supremacists. Their findings then went to University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang, who compiled and analyzed the data for use in court challenges to death penalty convictions. The result was powerful evidence that thousands of jurors had voted on racial grounds in rape cases.
    This book not only tells Barrett Foerster’s and his teammates story but also examines how the findings were used before a U.S. Supreme Court resistant to numbers-based arguments and reluctant to admit that the justice system had executed hundreds of men because of their skin color. Most important, it illuminates the role the project played in the landmark Furman v. Georgia case, which led to a four-year cessation of capital punishment and a more limited set of death laws aimed at constraining racial discrimination.

A Virginia native who studied law at UCLA, BARRETT J. FOERSTER (1942–2010) was a judge in the Superior Court in Imperial County, California.

MICHAEL MELTSNER is the George J. and Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University. During the 1960s, he was first assistant counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. His books include The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer and Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment.


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front cover of Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering
Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering
The History of an Occupational Color Line
Amy E. Slaton
Harvard University Press, 2010

Despite the educational and professional advances made by minorities in recent decades, African Americans remain woefully underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, mathematics, and engineering. Even at its peak, in 2000, African American representation in engineering careers reached only 5.7 percent, while blacks made up 15 percent of the U.S. population. Some forty-five years after the Civil Rights Act sought to eliminate racial differences in education and employment, what do we make of an occupational pattern that perpetually follows the lines of race?

Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering pursues this question and its ramifications through historical case studies. Focusing on engineering programs in three settings—in Maryland, Illinois, and Texas, from the 1940s through the 1990s—Amy E. Slaton examines efforts to expand black opportunities in engineering as well as obstacles to those reforms. Her study reveals aspects of admissions criteria and curricular emphases that work against proportionate black involvement in many engineering programs. Slaton exposes the negative impact of conservative ideologies in engineering, and of specific institutional processes—ideas and practices that are as limiting for the field of engineering as they are for the goal of greater racial parity in the profession.

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The Race to 270
The Electoral College and the Campaign Strategies of 2000 and 2004
Daron R. Shaw
University of Chicago Press, 2006

The Electoral College has played an important role in presidential politics since our nation’s founding, but surprisingly little information exists about precisely how it affects campaign strategy. Daron R. Shaw, a scholar who also worked as a strategist in both Bush-Cheney campaigns, has written the first book to go inside the past two presidential elections and reveal how the race to 270 was won—and lost. 

Shaw’s nonpartisan study lays out how both the Democrats and the Republicans developed strategies to win decisive electoral votes by targeting specific states and media markets. Drawing on his own experience with Republican battle plans, candidate schedules, and advertising purchases—plus key contacts in the Gore and Kerry camps—Shaw goes on to show that both sides used information on weekly shifts in candidate support to reallocate media buys and schedule appearances. Most importantly, he uses strikingly original research to prove that these carefully constructed plans significantly affected voters’ preferences and opinions—not in huge numbers, but enough to shift critical votes in key battlegrounds. 

Bridging the gap between those who study campaigns and those who conduct them, The Race to 270 will provide political scientists and practitioners alike with fresh insights about the new strategies that stem from one of our oldest institutions.

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Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture
Ho, Jennifer Ann
Rutgers University Press, 2015
The sheer diversity of the Asian American populace makes them an ambiguous racial category. Indeed, the 2010 U.S. Census lists twenty-four Asian-ethnic groups, lumping together under one heading people with dramatically different historical backgrounds and cultures. In Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, Jennifer Ann Ho shines a light on the hybrid and indeterminate aspects of race, revealing ambiguity to be paramount to a more nuanced understanding both of race and of what it means to be Asian American. 
 
Exploring a variety of subjects and cultural artifacts, Ho reveals how Asian American subjects evince a deep racial ambiguity that unmoors the concept of race from any fixed or finite understanding. For example, the book examines the racial ambiguity of Japanese American nisei Yoshiko Nakamura deLeon, who during World War II underwent an abrupt transition from being an enemy alien to an assimilating American, via the Mixed Marriage Policy of 1942. It looks at the blogs of Korean, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese Americans who were adopted as children by white American families and have conflicted feelings about their “honorary white” status. And it discusses Tiger Woods, the most famous mixed-race Asian American, whose description of himself as “Cablinasian”—reflecting his background as Black, Asian, Caucasian, and Native American—perfectly captures the ambiguity of racial classifications.   
 
Race is an abstraction that we treat as concrete, a construct that reflects only our desires, fears, and anxieties. Jennifer Ho demonstrates in Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture that seeing race as ambiguous puts us one step closer to a potential antidote to racism. 
 
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Racial Hygiene
Medicine under the Nazis
Robert N. Proctor
Harvard University Press, 1988

Scholars exploring the history of science under the Nazis have generally concentrated on the Nazi destruction of science or the corruption of intellectual and liberal values. Racial Hygiene focuses on how scientists themselves participated in the construction of Nazi racial policy. Robert Proctor demonstrates that the common picture of a passive scientific community coerced into cooperation with the Nazis fails to grasp the reality of what actually happened—namely, that many of the political initiatives of the Nazis arose from within the scientific community, and that medical scientists actively designed and administered key elements of National Socialist policy.

The book presents the most comprehensive account to date of German medical involvement in the sterilization and castration laws, the laws banning marriage between Jews and non-Jews, and the massive program to destroy “lives not worth living.” The study traces attempts on the part of doctors to conceive of the “Jewish problem” as a “medical problem,” and how medical journals openly discussed the need to find a “final solution” to Germany’s Jewish and gypsy “problems.”

Proctor makes us aware that such thinking was not unique to Germany. The social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century in America and Europe gave rise to theories of racial hygiene that were embraced by enthusiasts of various nationalities in the hope of breeding a better, healthier, stronger race of people. Proctor also presents an account of the “organic” health movement that flourished under the Nazis, including campaigns to reduce smoking and drinking, and efforts to require bakeries to produce whole-grain bread. A separate chapter is devoted to the emergence of a resistance movement among doctors in the Association of Socialist Physicians. The book is based on a close analysis of contemporary documents, including German state archives and more than two hundred medical journals published during the period.

Proctor has set out not merely to tell a story but also to urge reflection on what might be called the “political philosophy of science”—how movements that shape the policies of nations can also shape the structure and priorities of science. The broad implications of this book make it of consequence not only to historians, physicians, and people concerned with the history and philosophy of science, but also to those interested in science policy and medical ethics.

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Racial Union
Law, Intimacy, and the White State in Alabama, 1865-1954
Julie Novkov
University of Michigan Press, 2008

In November 2001, the state of Alabama opened a referendum on its long-standing constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage. A bill on the state ballot offered the opportunity to relegate the state's antimiscegenation law to the dustbin of history. The measure passed, but the margin was alarmingly slim: more than half a million voters, 40 percent of those who went to the polls, voted to retain a racist and constitutionally untenable law.

Julie Novkov's Racial Union explains how and why, nearly forty years after the height of the civil rights movement, Alabama struggled to repeal its prohibition against interracial marriage---the last state in the Union to do so. Novkov's compelling history of Alabama's battle over miscegenation shows how the fight shaped the meanings of race and state over ninety years. Novkov's work tells us much about the sometimes parallel, sometimes convergent evolution of our concepts of race and state in the nation as a whole.

"A remarkably nuanced account of interlocked struggles over race, gender, class and state power. Novkov's site is Alabama, but her insights are for all America."
---Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

"Hannah Arendt shocked Americans in the 1950s by suggesting that interracial intimacy was the true measure of a society's racial order. Julie Novkov's careful, illuminating, powerful book confirms Arendt's judgment. By ruling on who may be sexually linked with whom, Alabama's courts and legislators created a racial order and even a broad political order; Novkov shows us just how it worked in all of its painful, humiliating power."
---Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Harvard College Professor

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Racializing Objectivity
How the White Southern Press Weaponized Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow
Gwyneth Mellinger
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

When the civil rights movement began to challenge Jim Crow laws, the white southern press reframed the coverage of racism and segregation as a debate over journalism standards. Many white southern editors, for instance, designated Black Americans as “Negro” in news stories, claiming it was necessary for accuracy and “objectivity,” even as white subjects went unlabeled. These news professionals disparaged media outlets that did not adhere to these norms, such as the Black press. In this way, the southern white press weaponized journalism standards—and particularly the idea of objectivity—to counter and discredit reporting that challenged white supremacy.

Through deep engagement with letters and other materials in numerous archives from editors, journalists, and leaders of newswire services, Racializing Objectivity interrogates and exposes how the white southern press used journalism standards as a professional rationalization for white supremacy and a political strategy to resist desegregation. Gwyneth Mellinger argues that white skin privilege gave these news professionals a stake in the racial status quo and was thus a conflict of interest as they defended Jim Crow. Her study includes an examination of the Southern Education Reporting Service, an objectivity project whose impartiality, she contends, instead affirmed systemic racism. In a pointed counternarrative, Mellinger highlights Black editors and academics who long criticized the supposed objectivity of the press and were consequently marginalized and often dismissed as illegitimate, fanciful, and even paranoid.

Elegant and incisive, Racializing Objectivity unequivocally demonstrates that a full telling of twentieth-century press history must reckon with the white southern press’ cooptation of objectivity and other professional standards to skew racial narratives about Black Americans, as well as northern whites and democracy itself.

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Radical Gotham
Anarchism in New York City from Schwab's Saloon to Occupy Wall Street
Edited by Tom Goyens
University of Illinois Press, 2017
New York City's identity as a cultural and artistic center, as a point of arrival for millions of immigrants sympathetic to anarchist ideas, and as a hub of capitalism made the city a unique and dynamic terrain for anarchist activity. For 150 years, Gotham's cosmopolitan setting created a unique interplay between anarchism's human actors and an urban space that invites constant reinvention. Tom Goyens gathers essays that demonstrate anarchism's endurance as a political and cultural ideology and movement in New York from the 1870s to 2011. The authors cover the gamut of anarchy's emergence in and connection to the city. Some offer important new insights on German, Yiddish, Italian, and Spanish-speaking anarchists. Others explore anarchism's influence on religion, politics, and the visual and performing arts. A concluding essay looks at Occupy Wall Street's roots in New York City's anarchist tradition. Contributors: Allan Antliff, Marcella Bencivenni, Caitlin Casey, Christopher J. Castañeda, Andrew Cornell, Heather Gautney, Tom Goyens, Anne Klejment, Alan W. Moore, Erin Wallace, and Kenyon Zimmer.
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Radical Hospitality
American Policy, Media, and Immigration
Nour Halabi
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Radical Hospitality: American Policy, Media, and Immigration re-imagines the ethical relationship of host societies towards newcomers by applying the concept of hospitality to two specific realms that impact the lives of immigrants in the United States: policy and media. The book calls attention to the moral responsibility of the host in welcoming a stranger. It sets the stage for the analysis with a historical background of the first host-guest diads of American hospitality, arguing that the early history of American hospitality was marked by the degeneration of the host-guest relationship into one of host-hostage, normalizing a racial discrimination that continues to plague immigration hospitality to this day. Author Nour Halabi presents a historical policy and media discourse analysis of immigration regulation and media coverage during three periods of US history: the 1880s and the Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1920s and the National Origins Act and the 2000s and the Muslim travel ban. In so doing, it demonstrates how U.S. immigration hospitality, from its peaks in the post-Independence period to its nadir in the Muslim travel ban, has fallen short of true hospitality in spite of the nation’s oft-touted identity as a “nation of immigrants.” At the same time, the book calls attention to how a discourse of hospitality, although fraught, may allow a radical reimagining of belonging and authority that unsettles settler-colonial assumptions of belonging and welcome a restorative outlook to immigration policy and its media coverage in society.
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Radical Sisters
Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C.
Anne M. Valk
University of Illinois Press, 2010
Radical Sisters offers a fresh exploration of the ways that 1960s political movements shaped local, grassroots feminism in Washington, D.C. Rejecting notions of a universal sisterhood, Anne M. Valk argues that activists periodically worked to bridge differences for the sake of alleviating women's plight, even while maintaining distinct political bases. While most historiography on the subject tends to portray the feminist movement as deeply divided over issues of race, Valk presents a more nuanced account, showing feminists of various backgrounds both coming together to promote a notion of "sisterhood" and being deeply divided along the lines of class, race, and sexuality.
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Radicalism in the Mountain West, 1890-1920
Socialists, Populists, Miners, and Wobblies
David R. Berman
University Press of Colorado, 2013
Radicalism in the Mountain West, 1890-1920 traces the history of radicalism in the Populist Party, Socialist Party, Western Federation of Miners, and Industrial Workers of the World in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.

Focusing on the populist and socialist movements, David R. Berman sheds light on American radicalism with this study of a region that epitomized its rise and fall. As the frontier industrialized, self-reliant pioneers and prospectors transformed into wage- laborers for major corporations with government, military, and church ties. Economically and politically stymied, westerners rallied around homegrown radicals such as William "Big Bill" Haywood and Vincent "the Saint" St. John and touring agitators such as Eugene Debs and Mary "Mother" Jones. Radicalism in the Mountain West tells how volleys of strikes, property damage, executions, and deportations ensued in the absence of negotiation.

Drawing on years of archival research and diverse materials such as radical newspapers, reports filed by labor spies and government agents, and records of votes, subscriptions, and memberships, Berman offers Western historians and political scientists an unprecedented view into the region's radical past.

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Radicals and Rogues
The Women Who Made New York Modern
Lottie Whalen
Reaktion Books, 2023
From artists to activists, an explosive and eye-opening new history of the women who gave us New York.
 
This is the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth-century capital of modern culture. Across the 1910s and ’20s, through provocative creative acts, shocking fashion, political activism, and dynamic social networks, these women reimagined modern life and fought for the chance to realize their visions. Taking the reader on a journey through the city’s salons and bohemian hangouts, Radicals and Rogues celebrates the tastemakers, collectors, curators, artists, and poets at the forefront of the early avant-garde scene. Focusing on these trailblazers at the center of artistic innovation—including Beatrice Wood, Mina Loy, the Stettheimer sisters, Clara Tice, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Marguerite Zorach, and Louise Arensberg—Lottie Whalen offers a lively new history of remarkable women in early twentieth-century New York City.
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Radio and the Performance of Government
Broadcasting by the Czechoslovaks in Exile in London, 1939–1945
Erica Harrison
Karolinum Press, 2023
An original study of radio propaganda in Czechoslovakia.

Between 1939 and 1945, Czechoslovakia disappeared from the maps, existing only as an imagined ‘free republic’ on the radio waves. Following the German invasion and annexation of Bohemia and Moravia and the declaration of independence by Slovakia on 15 March 1939, the Czechoslovak Republic was gone. From their position in exile in wartime London, former Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš and the government that formed around him depended on radio to communicate with the public they strove to represent. The broadcasts made by government figures in London enabled a performance of authority to impress their hosts, allies, occupying enemies, and claimed constituents.

This book examines this government program for the first time, making use of previously unstudied archival sources to examine how the exiles understood their mission and how their propaganda work was shaped by both British and Soviet influences. This study assesses the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the government’s radio propaganda as they navigated the complexities of exile, with chapters examining how they used the radio to establish their authority, how they understood the past and future of the Czechoslovak nation, and how they struggled to include Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia within it.
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Radio's America
The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture
Bruce Lenthall
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Orson Welles’s greatest breakthrough into the popular consciousness occurred in 1938, three years before Citizen Kane, when his War of the Worlds radio broadcast succeeded so spectacularly that terrified listeners believed they were hearing a genuine report of an alien invasion—a landmark in the history of radio’s powerful relationship with its audience. In Radio’s America, Bruce Lenthall documents the enormous impact radio had on the lives of Depression-era Americans and charts the formative years of our modern mass culture.

Many Americans became alienated from their government and economy in the twentieth century, and Lenthall explains that radio’s appeal came from its capability to personalize an increasingly impersonal public arena. His depictions of such figures as proto-Fascist Charles Coughlin and medical quack John Brinkley offer penetrating insight into radio’s use as a persuasive tool, and Lenthall’s book is unique in its exploration of how ordinary Americans made radio a part of their lives. Television inherited radio’s cultural role, and as the voting tallies for American Idol attest, broadcasting continues to occupy a powerfully intimate place in American life. Radio’s America reveals how the connections between power and mass media began.

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Railroads and the Transformation of China
Elisabeth Köll
Harvard University Press, 2019

As a vehicle to convey both the history of modern China and the complex forces still driving the nation’s economic success, rail has no equal. Railroads and the Transformation of China is the first comprehensive history, in any language, of railroad operation from the last decades of the Qing Empire to the present.

China’s first fractured lines were built under semicolonial conditions by competing foreign investors. The national system that began taking shape in the 1910s suffered all the ills of the country at large: warlordism and Japanese invasion, Chinese partisan sabotage, the Great Leap Forward when lines suffered in the “battle for steel,” and the Cultural Revolution, during which Red Guards were granted free passage to “make revolution” across the country, nearly collapsing the system. Elisabeth Köll’s expansive study shows how railroads survived the rupture of the 1949 Communist revolution and became an enduring model of Chinese infrastructure expansion.

The railroads persisted because they were exemplary bureaucratic institutions. Through detailed archival research and interviews, Köll builds case studies illuminating the strength of rail administration. Pragmatic management, combining central authority and local autonomy, sustained rail organizations amid shifting political and economic priorities. As Köll shows, rail provided a blueprint for the past forty years of ambitious, semipublic business development and remains an essential component of the PRC’s politically charged, technocratic economic model for China’s future.

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Raising Cane in the 'Glades
The Global Sugar Trade and the Transformation of Florida
Gail M. Hollander
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Over the last century, the Everglades underwent a metaphorical and ecological transition from impenetrable swamp to endangered wetland.  At the heart of this transformation lies the Florida sugar industry, which by the 1990s was at the center of the political storm over the multi-billion dollar ecological “restoration” of the Everglades.  Raising Cane in the ’Glades is the first study to situate the environmental transformation of the Everglades within the economic and historical geography of global sugar production and trade.

Using, among other sources, interviews, government and corporate documents, and recently declassified U.S. State Department memoranda, Gail M. Hollander demonstrates that the development of Florida’s sugar region was the outcome of pitched battles reaching the highest political offices in the U.S. and in countries around the world, especially Cuba—which emerges in her narrative as a model, a competitor, and the regional “other” to Florida’s “self.”  Spanning the period from the age of empire to the era of globalization, the book shows how the “sugar question”—a label nineteenth-century economists coined for intense international debates on sugar production and trade—emerges repeatedly in new guises. Hollander uses the sugar question as a thread to stitch together past and present, local and global, in explaining Everglades transformation.
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Rampant Women
Suffragists Right Assembly
Linda J. Lumsden
University of Tennessee Press, 1997
Dr. Linda J. Lumsden analyzes the First Amendment components of the women's suffrage movement, in particular their right to assembly as they organized pageants, parades, open air meetings and public demonstrations. The book opens with a woman-centered essay on the freedom of expression before the 20th century. The first chapter describes the heroism it took for women in the 19th century to gather in mass meetings, delegations and conventions. Chapter 2 explores Open-Air campaigns; Chapter 3 on petitioning as a political tool. Chapter 4 is on parades, starting with the first suffrage parades in 1908 (New York City; Boone, Iowa; and Oakland, California) and ending with the last one in 1917. Pageants are featured in chapter 5, and the chapter 6 is on picketing. The concluding chapter develops her position that suffrage assemblies provided the leverage for later protestors who sought a public arena to decry their political dissent. Four appendices then follow: a list of suffrage organizations; prominent suffragists in the 1910s; a chronology of major events in the U.S. suffrage movement; and, finally a list of when and where women won the vote. There is a brief mention of the 1913 suffrage paraders in Louisville, but generally the book focuses on states other than Kentucky.
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Rape in Chicago
Race, Myth, and the Courts
Dawn Rae Flood
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Spanning a period of four tumultuous decades from the mid-1930s through the mid-1970s, this study reassesses the ways in which Chicagoans negotiated the extraordinary challenges of rape, as either victims or accused perpetrators. Drawing on extensive trial testimony, government reports, and media coverage, Dawn Rae Flood examines how individual men and women, particularly African Americans, understood and challenged rape myths and claimed their right to be protected as American citizens--protected by the State against violence, and protected from the State's prejudicial investigations and interrogations. Flood shows how defense strategies, evolving in concert with changes in the broader cultural and legal environment, challenged assumptions about black criminality while continuing to deploy racist and sexist stereotypes against the victims. Thoughtfully combining legal studies, medical history, and personal accounts, Flood pays special attention to how medical evidence was considered in rape cases and how victim-patients were treated by hospital personnel. She also analyzes medical testimony in modern rape trials, tracing the evolution of contemporary "rape kit" procedures as shaped by legal requirements, trial strategies, feminist reform efforts, and women's experiences.
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A Reader's Guide to Andrei Bely's "Petersburg"
Edited by Leonard Livak
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
Andrei Bely's 1913 masterwork Petersburg is widely regarded as the most important Russian novel of the twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov ranked it with James Joyce's Ulysses, Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Few artistic works created before the First World War encapsulate and articulate the sensibility, ideas, phobias, and aspirations of Russian and transnational modernism as comprehensively.

Bely expected his audience to participate in unraveling the work's many meanings, narrative strains, and patterns of details. In their essays, the contributors clarify these complexities, summarize the intellectual and artistic contexts that informed Petersburg's creation and reception, and review the interpretive possibilities contained in the novel. This volume will aid a broad audience of Anglophone readers in understanding and appreciating Petersburg.
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The Readers of Novyi Mir
Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past
Denis Kozlov
Harvard University Press, 2013

In the wake of Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union entered a period of relative openness known as the Thaw. Soviet citizens took advantage of the new opportunities to meditate on the nation’s turbulent history, from the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Terror, to World War II. Perhaps the most influential of these conversations took place in and around Novyi mir (New World), the most respected literary journal in the country. In The Readers of Novyi Mir, Denis Kozlov shows how the dialogue between literature and readers during the Thaw transformed the intellectual life and political landscape of the Soviet Union.

Powerful texts by writers like Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, and Ehrenburg led thousands of Novyi mir’s readers to reassess their lives, entrenched beliefs, and dearly held values, and to confront the USSR’s history of political violence and social upheaval. And the readers spoke back. Victims and perpetrators alike wrote letters to the journal, reexamining their own actions and bearing witness to the tragedies of the previous decades.

Kozlov’s insightful treatment of these confessions, found in Russian archives, and his careful reading of the major writings of the period force today’s readers to rethink common assumptions about how the Soviet people interpreted their country’s violent past. The letters reveal widespread awareness of the Terror and that literary discussion of its legacy was central to public life during the late Soviet decades. By tracing the intellectual journey of Novyi mir’s readers, Kozlov illuminates how minds change, even in a closed society.

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Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century
Recovering and Transforming the Pedagogy of Robert Scholes
Ellen C. Carillo
Utah State University Press, 2021
Robert Scholes passed away on December 9, 2016, leaving behind an intellectual legacy focused broadly on textuality. Scholes’s work had a significant impact on a range of fields, including literary studies, composition and rhetoric, education, media studies, and the digital humanities, among others. In Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century contemporary scholars explore and extend the continued relevance of Scholes’s work for those in English and writing studies.
 
In this volume, Scholes’s scholarship is included alongside original essays, providing a resource for those considering everything from the place of the English major in the twenty-first century to best practices for helping students navigate misinformation and disinformation. Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century not only keeps Scholes’s legacy alive but carries it on through a commitment, in Scholes’s (1998) own words, to “offer our students . . . the cultural equipment they are going to need when they leave us.”
 
Contributors:
Angela Christie, Paul T. Corrigan, Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Doug Hesse, Alice S. Horning, Emily J. Isaacs, Christopher La Casse, Robert Lestón, Kelsey McNiff, Thomas P. Miller, Jessica Rivera-Mueller, Christian Smith, Kenny Smith
 
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Reading Berlin 1900
Peter Fritzsche
Harvard University Press, 1996
The great cities at the turn of the century were mediated by words--newspapers, advertisements, signs, and schedules--by which the inhabitants lived, dreamed, and imagined their surroundings. In this original study of the classic text of urban modernism--the newspaper page--Peter Fritzsche analyzes how reading and writing dramatized Imperial Berlin and anticipated the modernist sensibility that celebrated discontinuity, instability, and transience. It is a sharp-edged story with cameo appearances by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Döblin. This sumptuous history of a metropolis and its social and literary texts provides a rich evocation of a particularly exuberant and fleeting moment in history.
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Reading Etty Hillesum in Context
Writings, Life, and Influences of a Visionary Author
Edited by Klaas Smelik, Gerrit van Oord, and Jurjen Wiersma
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
The diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum (1914—1943) have a special place among the Jewish-Dutch testimonies of the Shoah, somuch so that Etty Hillesum studies has become its own field. This book offers the most important contributions from the pastfifteen years of international research into Hillesum’s work and life, studying her ethical, philosophical, spiritual, and literary existential search.
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Reading Huizinga
Willem Otterspeer
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

Johan Huizinga, the Dutch founding father of cultural history, ranks among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Perhaps best known is Huizinga’s revolutionary insight into the formative role of play in human culture, a theory he espoused in the celebrated Homo Ludens, which was published in 1938. For Huizinga, philology was the mother of all interpretive endeavors, reading and writing were part of a collective ritual that channeled human passion into beautiful forms, and passion remained the fundamental fact of human life. In this clear, engaging study, the renowned Dutch scholar Willem Otterspeer paints an original portrait of Huizinga in the context of interwar Europe—and shares his subject’s own hallmark passion for history.

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Reading, Writing, and Revolution
Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas
By Philis M. Barragán Goetz
University of Texas Press, 2020

2022 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award
Tejas Foco Non-fiction Book Award, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies
2021 Tejano Book Prize, Tejano Genealogy Society of Austin
2021 Jim Parish Award for Documentation and Publication of Local and Regional History, Webb County Heritage Foundation
2021 Runner-up, Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book

The first book on the history of escuelitas, Reading, Writing, and Revolution examines the integral role these grassroots community schools played in shaping Mexican American identity.

Language has long functioned as a signifier of power in the United States. In Texas, as elsewhere in the Southwest, ethnic Mexicans’ relationship to education—including their enrollment in the Spanish-language community schools called escuelitas—served as a vehicle to negotiate that power. Situating the history of escuelitas within the contexts of modernization, progressivism, public education, the Mexican Revolution, and immigration, Reading, Writing, and Revolution traces how the proliferation and decline of these community schools helped shape Mexican American identity.

Philis M. Barragán Goetz argues that the history of escuelitas is not only a story of resistance in the face of Anglo hegemony but also a complex and nuanced chronicle of ethnic Mexican cultural negotiation. She shows how escuelitas emerged and thrived to meet a diverse set of unfulfilled needs, then dwindled as later generations of Mexican Americans campaigned for educational integration. Drawing on extensive archival, genealogical, and oral history research, Barragán Goetz unravels a forgotten narrative at the crossroads of language and education as well as race and identity.

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Readings in Chinese Literary Thought
Stephen Owen
Harvard University Press
This dual-language compilation of seven complete major works and many shorter pieces from the Confucian period through the Ch’ing dynasty will be indispensable to students of Chinese literature. Stephen Owen’s masterful translations and commentaries have opened up Chinese literary thought to theorists and scholars of other languages.
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Reagan's Legacy in a World Transformed
Jeffrey L. Chidester
Harvard University Press, 2015

Since Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, the global community has witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the integration of Europe, the War on Terror and the Arab Spring, a hot Chinese economy and a major international recession. Reagan’s Legacy in a World Transformed brings together scholars from diverse disciplines and persuasions to assess the fortieth president’s policies and their ongoing impact today, and to offer a timely retrospective on his complex legacy.

The authors consider the influence of Reagan’s free-market ideas on economic globalization, showing how deregulation succeeded in spurring economic expansion. In foreign policy, Reagan favored significant increases in military spending (“peace through strength”) and an assertive agenda abroad. His break with détente in dealing with the Soviet Union, notably expressed in his 1982 March of Freedom speech, effectively restored the early Cold War strategy of rolling back communism. More than twenty years later, President George W. Bush invoked this speech in describing his goals in the Middle East—a striking example of how Reagan’s ideas affected the post-9/11 world.

In contrast with his hawkish stance on defense, Reagan’s efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals, negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev, constitute one of his enduring contributions to stability. Although Reagan’s policies soared on rhetoric rooted in ideological conviction, the president engaged in pragmatic internationalism when a multilateral approach served America’s interests. He believed that America had a special mission as a moral leader and beacon of freedom, a view that continues to inform U.S. foreign policy.

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Rebel Footprints
A Guide to Uncovering London's Radical History
David Rosenberg
Pluto Press, 2019
"There is so much that is inspirational in this book, whether the struggles of Jewish tailors in Spitalfields, bakers across the city (who were obliged to work 16-hour shifts in poorly ventilated basements), or the battles against fascism in Cable Street." ― Guardian
 
If you visit London, and you’ve only experienced Buckingham Palace, The Tower of London, and The Millennium Wheel, you’ve missed the true essence of London, and its politically-charged, rebellious history. A truly radical response to conservative heritage tours and banal day trips, Rebel Footprints brings to life the history of social movements in England's capital by providing lively commentary, maps, and walking tours you will not find anywhere else.
 
David Rosenberg transports readers from well-known landmarks to history-making hidden corners, while telling the story of protest and struggle in London from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
 
From the suffragettes to the socialists, from the chartists to the trade unionists: Rosenberg invites us to step into the footprints of a diverse cast of dedicated fighters for social justice. Individual chapters highlight particular struggles and their participants, from famous faces to lesser-known luminaries. Chapters include:
 
*Writers and Rioters in the Fleet Street Precinct
*Trailblazers for Democracy in Clerkenwell Green
*The Spark of Rebellion in Bow
*Coming in from the Cold: Immigrant Agitators and Radicals in Spitalfields
*No Gods, No Masters: Radical Bloomsbury
*Life on the Boundary: Fighting for Housing in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch

*Stirrings from the South: The Battersea Four
*peaking Truth to Power: Suffragettes and Westminster
*Not Afraid of the Prison Walls: Rebel Women and Men of Poplar
*People's Power in Bermondsey

 
Rebel Footprints sets London's radical campaigners against the backdrop of the city's multi-faceted development. Self-directed walks pair with narratives that seamlessly blend history, politics, and geography, while specially commissioned maps and illustrations immerse the reader in the story of the city.            
 
Whether you're visiting London for the first time, or born and raised there, Rosenberg invites you to see London as you never have before—the radical center of the English-speaking world.     
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Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany
Jay Howard Geller
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, 100,000 Jews live in Germany. Their community is diverse and vibrant, and their mere presence in Germany is symbolically important. In Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany, scholars of German-Jewish history, literature, film, television, and sociology illuminate important aspects of Jewish life in Germany from 1949 to the present day.  In West Germany, the development of representative bodies and research institutions reflected a desire to set down roots, despite criticism from Jewish leaders in Israel and the Diaspora.  In communist East Germany, some leftist Jewish intellectuals played a prominent role in society, and their experience reflected the regime’s fraught relationship with Jewry.  Since 1990, the growth of the Jewish community through immigration from the former Soviet Union and Israel have both brought heightened visibility in society and challenged preexisting notions of Jewish identity in the former “land of the perpetrators.”

 
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Rebuilding Pulp And Paper Workers Union
1933-1941
Robert H. Zieger
University of Tennessee Press, 1984
This study of the pulp and paper workers' union helps explain the AFL's often limited response to worker militancy in the 1930s as well as the more institutionalized moderation that emerged from the labor upsurge. Zieger sympathetically explains the union's limited goals but steady achievements—i.e., raising wages, narrowing differentials, and organizing blacks, women, and ethnically diverse workers—without resorting to strikes.
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Reconsidering the Insular Cases
The Past and Future of the American Empire
Gerald L. Neuman
Harvard University Press, 2015
Over a century has passed since the United States Supreme Court decided a series of cases, known as the “Insular Cases,” that limited the applicability of constitutional rights in Puerto Rico and other overseas territories and allowed the United States to hold them indefinitely as subordinated possessions without the promise of representation or statehood. Essays in this volume, which originated in a Harvard Law School conference, reconsider the Insular Cases. Leading legal authorities examine the history and legacy of the cases, which are tinged with outdated notions of race and empire, and explore possible solutions for the dilemmas they created. Reconsidering the Insular Cases is particularly timely in light of the latest referendum in Puerto Rico expressing widespread dissatisfaction with its current form of governance, and litigation by American Samoans challenging their unequal citizenship status. This book gives voice to a neglected aspect of U.S. history and constitutional law and provides a rich context for rethinking notions of sovereignty, citizenship, race, and place, as well as the roles of law and politics in shaping them.
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The Red Atlas
How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World
John Davies and Alexander J. Kent
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, its legacy and the accompanying Russian-American tension continues to loom large.  Russia’s access to detailed information on the United States and its allies may not seem so shocking in this day of data clouds and leaks, but long before we had satellite imagery of any neighborhood at a finger’s reach, the amount the Soviet government knew about your family’s city, street, and even your home would astonish you. Revealing how this was possible, The Red Atlas is the never-before-told story of the most comprehensive mapping endeavor in history and the surprising maps that resulted.

From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like New York, DC, and London to towns like Pontiac, MI and Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough information to create street-level maps. What they chose to include on these maps can seem obvious like locations of factories and ports, or more surprising, such as building heights, road widths, and bridge capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology, while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths and channels around rivers and harbors, could only have been gained by actual Soviet feet on the ground. The Red Atlas  includes over 350 extracts from these incredible Cold War maps, exploring their provenance and cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their makers and the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us.

A fantastic historical document of an era that sometimes seems less distant, The Red Atlas offers an uncanny view of the world through the eyes of Soviet strategists and spies.
 
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Red Chicago
American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928-35
Randi Storch
University of Illinois Press, 2007

Red Chicago is a social history of American Communism set within the context of Chicago's neighborhoods, industries, and radical traditions. Using local party records, oral histories, union records, party newspapers, and government documents, Randi Storch fills the gap between Leninist principles and the day-to-day activities of Chicago's rank-and-file Communists.

Uncovering rich new evidence from Moscow's former party archive, Storch argues that although the American Communist Party was an international organization strongly influenced by the Soviet Union, at the city level it was a more vibrant and flexible organization responsible to local needs and concerns. Thus, while working for a better welfare system, fairer unions, and racial equality, Chicago's Communists created a movement that at times departed from international party leaders' intentions. By focusing on the experience of Chicago's Communists, who included a large working-class, African American, and ethnic population, this study reexamines party members' actions as an integral part of the communities and industries in which they lived and worked.

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Red Leviathan
The Secret History of Soviet Whaling
Ryan Tucker Jones
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A revealing and authoritative history that shows how Soviet whalers secretly helped nearly destroy endangered whale populations, while also contributing to the scientific understanding necessary for these creatures’ salvation.
 
The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today’s oceans. In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales’ destruction. As other countries—especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway—expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission’s rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today’s cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior. And in a final twist, Red Leviathan reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country’s whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling—not long before the world’s whales might have disappeared altogether.
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Red Scare
A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920
Robert K. Murray
University of Minnesota Press, 1955

Red Scare was first published in 1955. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Few periods in American history have been so dramatic, so fraught with mystery, or so bristling with fear and hysteria as were the days of the great Red Scare that followed World War I. For sheer excitement, it would be difficult to find a more absorbing tale than the one told here. The famous Palmer raids of that era are still remembered as one of the most fantastic miscarriages of justice ever perpetrated upon the nation. The violent labor strife still makes those who lived through it shudder as they recall the Seattle general strike and Boston police strike, the great coal and steel strikes, and the bomb plots, shootings, and riots that accompanied these conflicts. But, exciting as the story may be, it has far greater significance than merely that of a lively tale. For, just as American was swept by a wave of unreasoning fear and was swayed by sensational propaganda in those days, so are we being tormented by similar tensions in the present climate of the cold war.

The objective analysis of the great Red Scare which Mr. Murray provides should go a long way toward helping us to avert some of the tragic consequences that the nation suffered a generation ago before hysteria and fear had finally run their course. The author traces the roots of the phenomenon, relates the outstanding events of the Scare, and evaluates the significant effects of the hysteria upon subsequent American life.

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The Red Thread
The Passaic Textile Strike
Jacob A. Zumoff
Rutgers University Press, 2021
This book tells the story of 15,000 wool workers who went on strike for more than a year, defying police violence and hunger. The strikers were mainly immigrants and half were women. The Passaic textile strike, the first time that the Communist Party led a mass workers’ struggle in the United States, captured the nation’s imagination and came to symbolize the struggle of workers throughout the country when the labor movement as a whole was in decline during the conservative, pro-business 1920s. Although the strike was defeated, many of the methods and tactics of the Passaic strike presaged the struggles for industrial unions a decade later in the Great Depression.

 
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Red-Hot and Righteous
The Urban Religion of The Salvation Army
Diane Winston
Harvard University Press, 2000

In this engrossing study of religion, urban life, and commercial culture, Diane Winston shows how a (self-styled "red-hot") militant Protestant mission established a beachhead in the modern city. When The Salvation Army, a British evangelical movement, landed in New York in 1880, local citizens called its eye-catching advertisements "vulgar" and dubbed its brass bands, female preachers, and overheated services "sensationalist." Yet a little more than a century later, this ragtag missionary movement had evolved into the nation's largest charitable fund-raiser--the very exemplar of America's most cherished values of social service and religious commitment.

Winston illustrates how the Army borrowed the forms and idioms of popular entertainments, commercial emporiums, and master marketers to deliver its message. In contrast to histories that relegate religion to the sidelines of urban society, her book shows that Salvationists were at the center of debates about social services for the urban poor, the changing position of women, and the evolution of a consumer culture. She also describes Salvationist influence on contemporary life--from the public's post-World War I (and ongoing) love affair with the doughnut to the Salvationist young woman's career as a Hollywood icon to the institutionalization of religious ideals into nonsectarian social programs.

Winston's vivid account of a street savvy religious mission transformed over the decades makes adroit use of performance theory and material culture studies to create an evocative portrait of a beloved yet little understood religious movement. Her book provides striking evidence that, counter to conventional wisdom, religion was among the seminal social forces that shaped modern, urban America--and, in the process, found new expression for its own ideals.

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Rediscovering Fort Sanders
The American Civil War and Its Impact on Knoxville's Cultural Landscape
Charles H. Faulkner
University of Tennessee Press, 2020
In the fall of 1863, Knoxville came under Union occupation, and troops went immediately to work to strengthen existing defenses and construct new ones. The most important of these was the earthwork atop a hill west of the city that came to be known as Fort Sanders. The fort would be the site of a critical battle on November 29, in which General James Longstreet’s Southern forces mounted a bold but ill-conceived assault that lasted only twenty minutes yet resulted in over eight hundred Rebel casualties. The completion of the fort under General Davis Tilson would safeguard Knoxville from further attack for the rest of the war.
            Rediscovering Fort Sanders is a unique book that combines a narrative history of pre-Civil War Knoxville, the war years and continuing construction of Fort Sanders, the failed attempts to preserve the postwar fort, and the events which led to its almost total destruction. Research by Terry and Charles Faulkner resulted in two major discoveries: the fort was actually located a block farther to the west then previously recognized, and there are still identifiable remnants of the fortification where none were believed to exist.
            More than just a chronicle of a significant chapter in Civil War and postwar history, this book will inspire others to continue the effort to ensure that the site and remains of Fort Sanders are preserved and properly commemorated for future generations.
 

 

 
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Rediscovering Jacob Riis
Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York
Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Before publishing his pioneering book How the Other Half Lives—a photojournalistic investigation into the poverty of New York’s tenement houses, home to three quarters of the city’s population—Jacob Riis (1849-1914) spent his first years in the United States as an immigrant and itinerant laborer, barely surviving on his carpentry skills until he landed a job as a muckraking reporter. These early experiences provided Riis with an understanding of what it was like to be poor in the immigrant communities that populated New York’s slums, and it was this empathy that would shine through in his iconic photos.

With Rediscovering Jacob Riis, art historian Bonnie Yochelson and historian Daniel Czitrom place Jacob Riis’s images in historical context even as they expose a clear sightline to the present. In the first half of their book, Czitrom explores Riis’s reporting and activism within the gritty specifics of Gilded Age New York: its new immigrants, its political machines, its fiercely competitive journalism, its evangelical reformers, and its labor movement. In delving into Riis’s intellectual education and the lasting impact of How the Other Half Lives, Czitrom shows that though Riis argued for charity, not sociopolitical justice, the empathy that drove his work continues to inspire urban reformers today.
In the second half of the book, Yochelson describes for the first time Riis’s photographic practice: his initial reliance on amateur photographers to take the photographs he needed, his own use of the camera, and then his collecting of photographs by professionals, who by 1900 were documenting social reform efforts for government agencies and charities. She argues that while Riis is rightly considered a revolutionary in the history of photography, he was not a photographic artist. Instead, Riis was a writer and lecturer who first harnessed the power of photography to affect social change.

As staggering inequality continues to be an urgent political topic, this book, illustrated with nearly seventy of Riis’s photographs, will serve as a stunning reminder of what has changed, and what has not.
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Reel Pleasures
Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania
Laura Fair
Ohio University Press, 2017

Reel Pleasures brings the world of African moviehouses and the publics they engendered to life, revealing how local fans creatively reworked global media—from Indian melodrama to Italian westerns, kung fu, and blaxploitation films—to speak to local dreams and desires. In it, Laura Fair zeroes in on Tanzanians’ extraordinarily dynamic media cultures to demonstrate how the public and private worlds of film reception brought communities together and contributed to the construction of genders, generations, and urban citizenship over time.

Radically reframing the literatures on media exhibition, distribution, and reception, Reel Pleasures demonstrates how local entrepreneurs and fans worked together to forge the most successful cinema industry in colonial sub-Saharan Africa. The result is a major contribution to the literature on transnational commodity cultures.

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Re-examining the Cold War
U.S.–China Diplomacy, 1954–1973
Robert S. Ross
Harvard University Press, 2001
The twelve essays in this volume underscore the similarities between Chinese and American approaches to bilateral diplomacy and between their perceptions of each other’s policy-making motivations. Much of the literature on U.S.–China relations posits that each side was motivated either by ideologically informed interests or by ideological assumptions about its counterpart. But as these contributors emphasize, newly accessible archives suggest rather that both Beijing and Washington developed a responsive and tactically adaptable foreign policy. Each then adjusted this policy in response to changing international circumstances and changing assessments of its counterpart’s policies. Motivated less by ideology than by pragmatic national security concerns, each assumed that the other faced similar considerations.
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Refuge Denied
The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust
Sarah A. Ogilvie
University of Wisconsin Press
In May of 1939 the Cuban government turned away the Hamburg-America Line’s MS St. Louis, which carried more than 900 hopeful Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Germany. The passengers subsequently sought safe haven in the United States, but were rejected once again, and the St. Louis had to embark on an uncertain return voyage to Europe. Finally, the St. Louis passengers found refuge in four western European countries, but only the 288 passengers sent to England evaded the Nazi grip that closed upon continental Europe a year later. Over the years, the fateful voyage of the St. Louis has come to symbolize U.S. indifference to the plight of European Jewry on the eve of World War II. 

Although the episode of the St. Louis is well known, the actual fates of the passengers, once they disembarked, slipped into historical obscurity. Prompted by a former passenger’s curiosity, Sarah Ogilvie and Scott Miller of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum set out in 1996 to discover what happened to each of the 937 passengers. Their investigation, spanning nine years and half the globe, took them to unexpected places and produced surprising results. Refuge Denied chronicles the unraveling of the mystery, from Los Angeles to Havana and from New York to Jerusalem. 

Some of the most memorable stories include the fate of a young toolmaker who survived initial selection at Auschwitz because his glasses had gone flying moments before and a Jewish child whose apprenticeship with a baker in wartime France later translated into the establishment of a successful business in the United States. Unfolding like a compelling detective thriller, Refuge Denied is a must-read for anyone interested in the Holocaust and its impact on the lives of ordinary people.
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The Regulatory Process
With Illustrations from Commercial Aviation
By Emmette S. Redford
University of Texas Press, 1969

The subject of regulation is one of the most vital and troublesome in our system of government. In this detailed study of early and mid-twentieth-century regulation of commercial aviation Emmette S. Redford illustrates what happens when government regulates a particular industry.

He first sets forth the perspectives for a study of an area of regulation and develops an argument for eclectic perspectives in the study of selected systems, or universes, of social action, such as the performance of an economic function under government regulation.

These perspectives are illustrated in the following series of case studies on regulation of commercial aviation:

  1. The significance of belief patterns on the content of the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938.
  2. The role of Congress in the regulation of commercial aviation in a two-year period.
  3. The interactions of Congress, the president, and the regulated industry in strengthening safety regulation through passage of the Federal Aviation Act of 1958.
  4. The actions of the Civil Aeronautics Board on a set of complicated economic issues in the General Passenger Fare Investigation.
  5. The position of the Air Transport Association in the regulatory pattern.

In "An Essay on Evaluation" Redford summarizes what is revealed in the case studies that is significant with respect to the system of government regulation. He searches for standards for evaluating a system of social control, or for evaluating parts of it, and relates his conclusions to issues regarding the beneficence of a system of regulated private supply of a service.

The Regulatory Process is a study of interest to the aviation industry, to students of regulation of the economy, and to those who seek an understanding of social systems.

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Rehabilitating Lochner
Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform
David E. Bernstein
University of Chicago Press, 2011

In this timely reevaluation of an infamous Supreme Court decision, David E. Bernstein provides a compelling survey of the history and background of Lochner v. New York. This 1905 decision invalidated state laws limiting work hours and became the leading case contending that novel economic regulations were unconstitutional. Sure to be controversial, Rehabilitating Lochner argues that the decision was well grounded in precedent—and that modern constitutional jurisprudence owes at least as much to the limited-government ideas of Lochner proponents as to the more expansive vision of its Progressive opponents.
 

Tracing the influence of this decision through subsequent battles over segregation laws, sex discrimination, civil liberties, and more, Rehabilitating Lochner argues not only that the court acted reasonably in Lochner, but that Lochner and like-minded cases have been widely misunderstood and unfairly maligned ever since.

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Reimagining Nabokov
Pedagogies for the 21st Century
José Vergara
Amherst College Press, 2022
In Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, eleven teachers of Vladimir Nabokov describe how and why they teach this notoriously difficult, even problematic, writer to the next generations of students. Contributors offer fresh perspectives and embrace emergent pedagogical methods, detailing how developments in technology, translation and archival studies, and new interpretative models have helped them to address urgent questions of power, authority, and identity. Practical and insightful, this volume features exciting methods through which to reimagine the literature classroom as one of shared agency between students, instructors, and the authors they read together.

“It is both timely and refreshing to have an influx of teacher-scholars who engage Nabokov from a variety of perspectives… this volume does justice to the breadth of Nabokov’s literary achievements, and it does so with both pedagogical creativity and scholarly integrity."—Dana Dragunoiu, Carleton University

"[A] valuable study for any reader, teacher, scholar, or student of Nabokov. Amongst specific and urgent insights on the potential for digital methods, the relevance of Nabokov for students today, and how to reconcile issues of identity with an author who disavowed history and politics, are much wider and timeless questions of authorial control and the ability to access reality."—Anoushka Alexander-RoseNabokov Online Journal 
 
Reimagining Nabokov takes a holistic approach to the many stumbling blocks in teaching Nabokov today. Especially intriguing about this volume is that through its essays a fresh picture of Nabokov emerges, not as an authoritarian and paranoid world-creator (an image long entrenched in Nabokov scholarship), but as someone who is tentative, hopeful, socially conscious, compassionate, and traumatized by the experience of exile....Reimagining Nabokov models pedagogical concepts that can be applied to teaching any literary text with a social conscience.—Alisa Ballard Lin, Modern Language Review


Contributions by Galya Diment, Tim Harte, Robyn Jensen, Sara Karpukhin, Yuri Leving, Roman Utkin, José Vergara, Meghan Vicks, Olga Voronina, Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, and Matthew Walker.
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Religion, Politics, and Sugar
The LDS Church, the Federal Government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907-1927
Matthew C. Godfrey
Utah State University Press, 2007
One famous target of Progressive Era attempts to rein in monopolistic big business was the eastern Sugar Trust. Less known is how federal regulators also tried to break monopoly control over beet sugar in the West by going after the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, a business supported and controlled by the Latter-day Saints church and run by Mormon authorities. As sugar beet agriculture boomed, the Mormon church’s involvement led directly to monopolistic practices by Utah-Idaho Sugar and to federal investigations. Church leaders encouraged members, a majority population in much of the intermountain West, to patronize the company exclusively, as suppliers and consumers. As early as 1890, Mormon church president Wilford Woodruff had called missionaries to raise money for the fledgling company and asserted divine inspiration for church support.

Utah-Idaho bridged the cooperative, theocratic, self-sufficient economic model of nineteenth-century Mormonism and the integration of the Mormon West into the national market economy. Religion, Politics, and Sugar shows, through the example of an important western business, how national commercial, political, and legal forces in the
early twentieth century came west and, more specifically, how they affected the important role the Mormon church played in economic affairs in the region.
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Reluctant Interveners
America's Failed Responses to Genocide from Bosnia to Darfur
Eyal Mayroz
Rutgers University Press, 2020
2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title
Featured in the 2020 Association of University Presses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show

Why do we allow our governments to get away with “bystanding” to genocide? How can we, when alerted to the mass slaughter of innocents, still not take a stand? Reluctant Interveners provides the most comprehensive answers yet to these confronting questions, focusing on the complex relationships between the citizenry, the media, the political elites, and institutions in the most powerful nation in the world, the United States of America.

Eyal Mayroz offers a sobering account of the interactions between the governing and the governed, and the dynamics which transformed moral concerns for the lives of faraway “others” into cold political calculations. Exposed are the processes that turned the promise of “never again” to a recurring reality of ever again, the role of the office of the presidency in their advancement, and the resultant image of America as seen by the rest of the world. In a time of ubiquitous social media and populist revival, a greater role for the U.S. citizenry in decision-making on responses to genocide may be in the cards. The question is, in which directions will these trends take American foreign policy?
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Remember This
The Lesson of Jan Karski
Clark Young
Georgetown University Press, 2023

A powerful remembrance of the lessons and legacy of Jan Karski, who risked his life to share the truth with the world—and a cautionary tale for our times.

Richly illustrated with stills from the black-and-white film adaptation of the acclaimed stage play, Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski tells the story of World War II hero, Holocaust witness, and Georgetown University professor Jan Karski. A messenger of truth, Karski risked his life to carry his harrowing reports of the Holocaust from war-torn Poland to the Allied nations and, ultimately, the Oval Office, only to be ignored and disbelieved. Despite the West's unwillingness to act, Karski continued to tell others about the atrocities he saw, and, after a period of silence, would do so for the remainder of his life. This play carries forward his legacy of bearing witness so that future generations might be inspired to follow his example and "shake the conscience of the world."

Accompanying the text of the stage play in this volume are essays and conversations from leading diplomats, thinkers, artists, and writers who reckon with Karski's legacy, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, award-winning author Aminatta Forna, best-selling author Azar Nafisi, President Emeritus of Georgetown Leo J. O'Donovan, SJ, Ambassador Samantha Power, Ambassador Cynthia P. Schneider, historian Timothy Snyder, Academy Award nominated actor David Strathairn, and best-selling author Deborah Tannen.

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The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World
Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States
Daniel J. Walkowitz
Rutgers University Press, 2018
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jewish socialist movement played a vital role in protecting workers’ rights throughout Europe and the Americas. Yet few traces of this movement or its accomplishments have been preserved or memorialized in Jewish heritage sites.
 
The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World investigates the politics of heritage tourism and collective memory. In an account that is part travelogue, part social history, and part family saga, acclaimed historian Daniel J. Walkowitz visits key Jewish museums and heritage sites from Berlin to Belgrade, from Krakow to Kiev, and from Warsaw to New York, to discover which stories of the Jewish experience are told and which are silenced. As he travels to thirteen different locations, participates in tours, displays, and public programs, and gleans insight from local historians, he juxtaposes the historical record with the stories presented in heritage tourism.  What he finds raises provocative questions about the heritage tourism industry and its role in determining how we perceive Jewish history and identity. This book offers a unique perspective on the importance of collective memory and the dangers of collective forgetting.  
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Remembering 1989
Future Archives of Public Protest
Anke Pinkert
University of Chicago Press, 2024
This account of the “laboratory of radical democracy” in the months before East Germany’s absorption in the West challenges memories of Germany’s reunification.

For many, 1989 is an iconic date, one we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The year prompts some to rue the defeat of socialism in the East, while others celebrate a victory for democracy and capitalism in the reunified Germany. Remembering 1989 focuses on a largely forgotten “interregnum”: the months between the outbreak of protests in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 and its absorption by the West in 1990. Anke Pinkert, who herself participated in those protests, recalls these months as a volatile but joyous “laboratory of radical democracy,” and tells the story of how and why this “time out of joint” has been erased from Germany’s national memory.

Remembering 1989 argues that in order to truly understand Germany’s historic transformation, we must revisit protesters’ actions across a wide range of minor, vernacular, and often transient sources. Drawing on rich archives including videotapes of untelevised protests, illegally printed petitions by Church leaders, audio recordings of dissident meetings, and interview footage with military troops, Pinkert opens the discarded history of East European social uprisings to new interpretations and imagines alternatives to Germany’s neoliberal status quo. The result is a vivid, unexpected contribution to memory studies and European history.
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Remembering Brown at Fifty
The University of Illinois Commemorates Brown v. Board of Education
Edited by Orville Vernon Burton and David O'Brien
University of Illinois Press, 2009

Inspired by the University of Illinois's celebration of the Brown v. Board of Education decision's fiftieth anniversary, this collection addresses the significance of Brown in the contributors' lives or work in education and civil rights. Several authors describe their personal roles in the Brown case or similar cases, while others examine and illustrate events, performances, and exhibitions that were part of the anniversary commemoration. The book not only explores the repercussions of the Brown decision, but also stands as a historic document in its own right, preserving the reactions of many prominent intellectuals, artists, and activists fifty years after the decision.
 
Contributors are Kal Alston, Margaret L. Andersen, Kathryn H. Anthony, Nathaniel C. Banks, Bernice McNair Barnett, Christopher Benson, Ed Blankenheim, Julian Bond, Orville Vernon Burton, Jason Chambers, Constance Curry, Joseph A. De Laine Jr., Mary L. Dudziak, Joe R. Feagin, John Hope Franklin, Ophelia De Laine Gona, Lani Guinier, Darlene Clark Hine, Freeman A. Hrabowski III, John Jennings, Ralph Lemon, George Lipsitz, Jim Loewen, Laughlin McDonald, David O'Brien, James C. Onderdonk, Sekou Sundiata, Christopher Teal, Nicholas Watkins, Carrie Mae Weems, Juan Williams, and Joy Ann Williamson.

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Remembering Emmett Till
Dave Tell
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Take a drive through the Mississippi Delta today and you’ll find a landscape dotted with memorials to major figures and events from the civil rights movement. Perhaps the most chilling are those devoted to the murder of Emmett Till, a tragedy of hate and injustice that became a beacon in the fight for racial equality. The ways this event is remembered have been fraught from the beginning, revealing currents of controversy, patronage, and racism lurking just behind the placid facades of historical markers.

In Remembering Emmett Till, Dave Tell gives us five accounts of the commemoration of this infamous crime. In a development no one could have foreseen, Till’s murder—one of the darkest moments in the region’s history—has become an economic driver for the Delta. Historical tourism has transformed seemingly innocuous places like bridges, boat landings, gas stations, and riverbeds into sites of racial politics, reminders of the still-unsettled question of how best to remember the victim of this heinous crime. Tell builds an insightful and persuasive case for how these memorials have altered the Delta’s physical and cultural landscape, drawing potent connections between the dawn of the civil rights era and our own moment of renewed fire for racial justice.
 
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Remembering Paris in Text and Film
Echoes of Baudelaire in Text and on Screen
Edited by Alistair Rolls and Marguerite Johnson
Intellect Books, 2021
An investigation of Paris as an urban space and a poetic site of remembrance. 

Experiencing urban space conjures visions of the past alongside contemplation of the present. This edited volume investigates this feeling of seeing double by investigating Paris—a city that has come to embody the tension of this sensation—through a dual lens of nostalgia and modernity. 

Contributors survey Paris in film, poetry, and prose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, presenting the city as both a concrete reality and as a collection of the myths associated with it. Interdisciplinary and deeply researched, the essays distill complex concepts of the urban, the textual, and the modern for a wide readership.
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Remembering the Holocaust
Michael E. Stevens
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1997
This moving documentary volume brings together fourteen interviews of Holocaust survivors who later settled in Wisconsin. With words and photographs they describe the richness of pre-war Jewish life in Europe; the advent of proscriptive laws, arrests, and deportation; the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi camps; and ultimately the liberation and postwar experiences of the survivors.
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Remembering to Forget
Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye
Barbie Zelizer
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Barbie Zelizer reveals the unique significance of the photographs taken at the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany after World War II. She shows how the photographs have become the basis of our memory of the Holocaust and how they have affected our presentations and perceptions of contemporary history's subsequent atrocities. Impressive in its range and depth and illustrated with more than 60 photographs, Remembering to Forget is a history of contemporary photojournalism, a compelling chronicle of these unforgettable photographs, and a fascinating study of how collective memory is forged and changed.

"[A] fascinating study. . . . Here we have a completely fresh look at the emergence of photography as a major component of journalistic reporting in the course of the liberation of the camps by the Western Allies. . . . Well written and argued, superbly produced with more photographs of atrocity than most people would want to see in a lifetime, this is clearly an important book."—Omer Bartov, Times Literary Supplement
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Remembrance of Things Present
The Invention of the Time Capsule
Nick Yablon
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Time capsules offer unexpected insights into how people view their own time, place, and culture, as well as their duties to future generations. Remembrance of Things Present traces the birth of this device to the Gilded Age, when growing urban volatility prompted doubts about how the period would be remembered—or if it would be remembered at all. Yablon details how diverse Americans – from presidents and mayors to advocates for the rights of women, blacks, and workers – constructed prospective memories of their present. They did so by contributing not just written testimony to time capsules but also sources that historians and archivists considered illegitimate, such as photographs, phonograph records, films, and everyday artifacts.

By offering a direct line to posterity, time capsules stimulated various hopes for the future. Remembrance of Things Present delves into these treasure chests to unearth those forgotten futures.
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Renewal
Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II
Mark Wild
University of Chicago Press, 2019
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity sought to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American urban life. Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust, and troubled by missionaries’ complicity with colonial regimes, they redirected their energies back home.

Renewal explores the rise and fall of this movement, which began as an effort to restore the church’s standing but wound up as nothing less than an openhearted crusade to remake our nation’s cities. These campaigns reached beyond church walls to build or lend a hand to scores of organizations fighting for welfare, social justice, and community empowerment among the increasingly nonwhite urban working class. Church leaders extended their efforts far beyond traditional evangelicalism, often dovetailing with many of the contemporaneous social currents coursing through the nation, including black freedom movements and the War on Poverty.

Renewal illuminates the overlooked story of how religious institutions both shaped and were shaped by postwar urban America. 
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Renunciation
Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists
Ross Posnock
Harvard University Press, 2016

Renunciation as a creative force in the careers of writers, philosophers, and artists is the animating idea behind Ross Posnock’s new book. Taking up acts of abandonment, rejection, and refusal that have long baffled critics, he shows how renunciation has reframed the relationship of artists and intellectuals to society in productive and unpredictable ways.

In a work of remarkable synthesis that includes traditions and genres from antiquity to postmodernity, Posnock discovers connections among disparate figures ranging from Lao Tzu to Dave Chappelle and Bob Dylan. The thread running through these acts of renunciation, he argues, is an aesthetic and ethical resistance to the demand that one’s words and actions be straightforward and immediately comprehensible. Modern art in particular valorizes the nonconceptual and the intuitive, seeking to make silence articulate and incompletion fertile.

Renouncers reject not only artistic and scholarly conventions but also the public roles that attend them. Wittgenstein, Rimbaud, and Glenn Gould brazenly flouted professional and popular expectations, demanding that philosophy, poetry, music play by new rules. Emerson and Nietzsche severed all institutional ties, while William James waged a guerrilla campaign from his post at Harvard against what all three considered to be the enemy: the pernicious philosophical insistence on rationality. Posnock also examines renunciations in light of World War II—the veterans J. D. Salinger and George Oppen, and the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan—while a fourth cluster includes the mystic Thomas Merton and the abstract painters Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin.

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Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles
The Most Iconic Moments in American Sports
Steven Gietschier
University of Illinois Press, 2017
What were the iconic sports moments of the last century? In Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles , a team of sports aficionados climb onto their bar stools to address that never-solved but essential question. Triumphs and turning points, rivalries and record-setters ”each chapter tracks down the real story behind the epic moments and legendary careers sports fans love to debate. Topics include Abner Doubleday and the origins of baseball; the era-defining 1979 duel between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson; how Denver and Cleveland relive The Drive; the myths surrounding the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle; Billie Jean King's schooling of Bobby Riggs; the Miracle on Ice; and ESPN's conquest of the sports world. Filled with eye-opening lore and analysis, Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles is an entertaining look at what we think we know about sports.
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Republic on the Wire
Cable Television, Pluralism, and the Politics of New Technologies, 1948-1984
McMurria, John
Rutgers University Press, 2017
The history of cable television in America is far older than networks like MTV, ESPN, and HBO, which are so familiar to us today. Tracing the origins of cable TV back to the late 1940s, media scholar John McMurria also locates the roots of many current debates about premium television, cultural elitism, minority programming, content restriction, and corporate ownership. 
 
Republic on the Wire takes us back to the pivotal years in which media regulators and members of the viewing public presciently weighed the potential benefits and risks of a two-tiered television system, split between free broadcasts and pay cable service. Digging into rare archives, McMurria reconstructs the arguments of policymakers, whose often sincere advocacy for the public benefits of cable television were fueled by cultural elitism and the priority to maintain order during a period of urban Black rebellions. He also tells the story of the people of color, rural residents, women’s groups, veterans, seniors, and low-income viewers who challenged this reasoning and demanded an equal say over the future of television. 
 
By excavating this early cable history, and placing equality at the center of our understanding of media democracy, Republic on the Wire is a real eye-opener as it develops a new methodology for studying media policy in the past and present.  
 
 

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The Republican Roosevelt
Second Edition
John Morton Blum
Harvard University Press

This is a book about politics and politicians; about elections, lawmaking, governing, and how they work. It is also about power, its increasing concentration in American society, and its implications at home and abroad especially for those who exercise it. It is a book about the Republican Party during the period in which it developed the forces and frictions which still characterize it today. Finally, it is a book about a remarkably successful and vibrant man who contained within himself much of the best and the worst of his environment, who contributed generously to American life, who knew in his time disappointment, temptation, and pain, but also glory; a man remembered most by his intimates for the “fun of him.”

The author is in an enviable position to assess these matters. During five years as Associate Editor of The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, he read and studied all TR's letters as well as all his published works, and delved deeply into the relevant literature of the period, including the vast material in the Congressional Record. From this rich store, John Morton Blum has drawn a new interpretation of Roosevelt the conservative, Roosevelt the professional Republican politician and Roosevelt the leader of men. He presents new material on Roosevelt's work as the manager of the Republican Party and as manager of Congress. He relates Roosevelt's roles in these situations to his conduct of foreign policy—a foreign policy so anticipatory of that of contemporary America—and to his Progressiveness—a doctrine of government with strong affinities to both the New Deal and the New Crusade.

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A Rescuer's Story
Pastor Pierre-Charles Toureille in Vichy France
Tela Zasloff
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
In telling Pierre-Charles Toureille’s story, Tela Zasloff also describes the wide-ranging network of Protestant pastors and lay people in southern French villages who participated in an aggressive rescue effort. She delves into their motivations, including their Huguenot heritage as members of a religious minority.
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Rescuing the Children
A Holocaust Memoir
Vivette Samuel; Translated and with an introduction by Charles B. Paul; With a foreword by Elie Wiesel
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002
Rescuing the Children is the memoir of Vivette Samuel, who at age twenty-two began working for the Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE, or Society for Assistance to Children). The OSE and similar organizations saved 86 percent of Jewish children in France from deportation to Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
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Resistance of the Heart
Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany
Nathan Stoltzfus
Rutgers University Press, 2001

In February 1943 the Gestapo arrested approximately 10,000 Jews remaining in Berlin. Most died at Auschwitz. Two thousand of those Jews, however, had non-Jewish partners and were locked into a collection center on a street called Rosenstrasse. As news of the surprise arrest pulsed through the city, hundreds of Gentile spouses, mostly women, hurried to the Rosenstrasse in protest. A chant broke out: "Give us our husbands back."

Over the course of a week protesters vied with the Gestapo for control of the street. Now and again armed SS guards sent the women scrambling for cover with threats that they would shoot. After a week the Gestapo released these Jews, almost all of whom survived the war.

The Rosenstrasse Protest was the triumphant climax of ten years of resistance by intermarried couples to Nazi efforts to destroy their families. In fact, ninety-eight percent of German Jews who did not go into hiding and who survived Nazism lived in mixed marriages. Why did Hitler give in to the protesters? Using interviews with survivors and thousands of Nazi records never before examined in detail, Nathan Stoltzfus identifies the power of a special type of resistance--the determination to risk one's own life for the life of loved ones. A "resistance of the heart..."

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Resonant Violence
Affect, Memory, and Activism in Post-Genocide Societies
Kerry Whigham
Rutgers University Press, 2022
From the Holocaust in Europe to the military dictatorships of Latin America to the enduring violence of settler colonialism around the world, genocide has been a defining experience of far too many societies. In many cases, the damaging legacies of genocide lead to continued violence and social divisions for decades. In others, however, creative responses to this identity-based violence emerge from the grassroots, contributing to widespread social and political transformation. Resonant Violence explores both the enduring impacts of genocidal violence and the varied ways in which states and grassroots collectives respond to and transform this violence through memory practices and grassroots activism. By calling upon lessons from Germany, Poland, Argentina, and the Indigenous United States, Resonant Violence demonstrates how ordinary individuals come together to engage with a violent past to pave the way for a less violent future.
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The Rest Is Slander
Five Stories
Thomas Bernhard
Seagull Books, 2022
A collection of previously untranslated stories from a master of twentieth-century Austrian literature, Thomas Bernhard.

“The cold increases with the clarity,” said Thomas Bernhard while accepting a major literary prize in 1965. That clarity was the postwar realization that the West’s last remaining cultural reference points were being swept away by the ever-greater commodification of humankind. Collecting five stylistically transitional tales by Bernhard, all of which take place in sites of extreme cold, this volume extends that bleak vision of the master Austrian storyteller.
 
In “Ungenach,” the reluctant heir of an enormous estate chooses to give away his legacy to an assortment of oddballs as he discovers the past of his older brother, who was murdered during a career in futile colonialist philanthropy. In “The Weatherproof Cape,” a lawyer tries to maintain a sense of familial solidarity with a now-dead client with the help of an unremarkable piece of clothing. “Midland in Stilfs” casts a jaundiced eye on the laughable efforts of a cosmopolitan foreigner to attain local authenticity on a moribund Alpine farmstead. In “At the Ortler,” two middle-aged brothers—one a scientist, the other an acrobat—meditate on their unusual career paths while they climb a mountain to reclaim a long-abandoned family property. And in “At the Timberline,” the unexpected arrival of a young couple in a mountain village leads to the discovery of a scandalous crime that casts a shadow on the personal life of the policeman investigating it.
 
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Restaging the Past
Historical Pageants, Culture and Society in Modern Britain
Edited by Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, and Alexander Hutton
University College London, 2020
Restaging the Past is the first collection devoted to the study of pageants in Britain, ranging from their Edwardian origins to the present day. In the twentieth century, people all across Britain succumbed to “pageant fever.” Thousands of people dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from local history, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between 1900 and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns, and tiny villages, and engaged a wide range of organizations and social groups, from Women’s Institutes to political parties, schools to churches, and even youth organizations.
 
Pageants were community events, bringing people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians, and other writers, and as a result were featured repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, the contributors argue that it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change—and, they show, because of its former prominence, some lingering signs of “pageant fever” can still be seen in Britain today.
 
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Restricted Data
The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States
Alex Wellerstein
University of Chicago Press, 2021
The first full history of US nuclear secrecy, from its origins in the late 1930s to our post–Cold War present.

The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to American science and American democracy—and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, and it was always contested. The atomic bomb was not merely the application of science to war, but the result of decades of investment in scientific education, infrastructure, and global collaboration. If secrecy became the norm, how would science survive? 

Drawing on troves of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time through the author’s efforts, Restricted Data traces the complex evolution of the US nuclear secrecy regime from the first whisper of the atomic bomb through the mounting tensions of the Cold War and into the early twenty-first century. A compelling history of powerful ideas at war, it tells a story that feels distinctly American: rich, sprawling, and built on the conflict between high-minded idealism and ugly, fearful power. 
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Resurrection
Comics in Post-Soviet Russia
José Alaniz
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Winner, 2023 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book

Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia traces the “kopecks to rubles” journey of Russian comics at the turn of the century. As the follow-up to José Alaniz’s groundbreaking Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (2010), Resurrection authoritatively and exhaustively details the Russian comic landscape of the last three decades: beginning after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and encompassing the fourth Putin administration, the COVID-19 crisis, and beyond. Bolstering his analysis with interviews with some of the major figures in Russia’s comics industry, Alaniz particularly focuses on the representation of masculinity, disability, historical trauma, and superheroes, as well as on the recent rise of fandom, alternative micropresses, and nonfiction graphic narrative. Resurrection is a sweeping discussion of the metamorphosis of contemporary Russian comic art from its rebirth to its entry into mainstream culture.
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Rethinking Therapeutic Culture
Edited by Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Social critics have long lamented America’s descent into a “culture of narcissism,” as Christopher Lasch so lastingly put it fifty years ago. From “first world problems” to political correctness, from the Oprahfication of emotional discourse to the development of Big Pharma products for every real and imagined pathology, therapeutic culture gets the blame. Ask not where the stereotype of feckless, overmedicated, half-paralyzed millennials comes from, for it comes from their parents’ therapist’s couches.
 
Rethinking Therapeutic Culture makes a powerful case that we’ve got it all wrong. Editors Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis bring us a dazzling array of contributors and perspectives to challenge the prevailing view of therapeutic culture as a destructive force that encourages narcissism, insecurity, and social isolation. The collection encourages us to examine what legitimate needs therapeutic practices have served and what unexpected political and social functions they may have performed. Offering both an extended history and a series of critical interventions organized around keywords like pain, privacy, and narcissism, this volume offers a more nuanced, empirically grounded picture of therapeutic culture than the one popularized by critics. Rethinking Therapeutic Culture is a timely book that will change the way we’ve been taught to see the landscape of therapy and self-help.
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Retro Ball Parks
Instant History, Baseball, and the New American City
Daniel Rosensweig
University of Tennessee Press, 2005
Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore opened in 1992 as an intentional antidote to the modern multiuse athletic stadium. Home to only one sport and featuring accents of classic parks of previous generations. Oriole Park attempted to reconstitute Baltimore’s past while serving as a cornerstone of downtown redevelopment. Since the gates opened at Camden yards, more than a dozen other American cities have constructed “new old” major league parks – Cleveland, Detroit, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Houston, Arlington, Texas, and San Diego. In Retro Ball Parks, Daniel Rosenweig explores the cultural and economic role of retro baseball parks and traces the cultural implications of re-creating the old in new urban spaces.

According to Rosenweig, the new urban landscape around these retro stadiums often presents a more homogenous culture than the one the new park replaced. Indeed, whole sections of cities have razed in order to build stadiums that cater to clientele eager to enjoy a nostalgic urban experience. This mandate to draw suburban residents and tourists to the heart of downtown, combined with the accompanying gentrification of these newly redeveloped areas, has fundamentally altered historic urban centers.
Focusing on Cleveland’s Jacobs Field as a case study, Rosenweig explores the political economy surrounding the construction of downtown ball parks, which have emerged as key components of urban entertainment-based development. Blending economic and cultural analysis, he considers the intersection of race and class in these new venues. For example, he shows that African American consumers in the commercial district around Jacobs Field have largely been replaced by symbolic representations of African American culture, such as piped-in rap music and Jackie Robinson replica jerseys. He concludes that the question of authenticity, the question of what it means to simultaneously commemorate and commodify the past in retro ball parks, mirrors larger cultural issues regarding the nature and implications of urban redevelopment and gentrification.

Daniel Rosensweig is a professor in the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies Program at the University of Virginia


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The Revolution in Venezuela
Social and Political Change under Chávez
Thomas Ponniah
Harvard University Press, 2011

Is Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution under Hugo Chávez truly revolutionary? Most books and articles tend to view the Chávez government in an either-or fashion. Some see the president as the shining knight of twenty-first-century socialism, while others see him as an avenging Stalinist strongman. Despite passion on both sides, the Chávez government does not fall easily into a seamless fable of emancipatory or authoritarian history, as these essays make clear.

A range of distinguished authors consider the nature of social change in contemporary Venezuela and explore a number of themes that help elucidate the sources of the nation’s political polarization. The chapters range from Fernando Coronil’s “Bolivarian Revolution,” which examines the relationship between the state’s social body (its population) and its natural body (its oil reserves), to an insightful look at women’s rights by Cathy A. Rakowski and Gioconda Espina. This volume shows that, while the future of the national process is unclear, the principles elaborated by the Chávez government are helping articulate a new Latin American left.

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Revolution of the Ordinary
Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell
Toril Moi
University of Chicago Press, 2017
This radically original book argues for the power of ordinary language philosophy—a tradition inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell—to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Moi demonstrates this philosophy’s unique ability to lay bare the connections between words and the world, dispel the notion of literature as a monolithic concept, and teach readers how to learn from a literary text.

Moi first introduces Wittgenstein’s vision of language and theory, which refuses to reduce language to a matter of naming or representation, considers theory’s desire for generality doomed to failure, and brings out the philosophical power of the particular case. Contrasting ordinary language philosophy with dominant strands of Saussurean and post-Saussurean thought, she highlights the former’s originality, critical power, and potential for creative use. Finally, she challenges the belief that good critics always read below the surface, proposing instead an innovative view of texts as expression and action, and of reading as an act of acknowledgment. Intervening in cutting-edge debates while bringing Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell to new readers, Revolution of the Ordinary will appeal beyond literary studies to anyone looking for a philosophically serious account of why words matter.
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Revolutionary Worlds
Local Perspectives and Dynamics during the Indonesian Independence War, 1945-1949
Bambang Purwanto
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Revolutionary Worlds looks at the Indonesian revolution (1945-1949) from a local and regional perspective. With seventeen contributions, Indonesian and Dutch researchers bring to life the revolutionary world from widely differing perspectives. The authors explain how Indonesian, Chinese, Indian and Eurasian civilians, fighters, farmers and officials experienced and shaped the often volatile period between 1945 and 1950. The book focuses on different ideas of independence, survival strategies, mobilization, minorities, contestation of authority and the use of force against the backdrop of Indonesian and Dutch authorities’ efforts to gain or maintain control.

Bringing together two national historiographical traditions which have long remained largely separate, Revolutionary Worlds is the result of a collaboration between the Indonesian research project Proklamasi Kemerdekaan, Revolusi dan Perang di Indonesia ('Proclamation of Independence, Revolution and War in Indonesia', Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta) and the Dutch research group of the Regional Studies project, under the umbrella of the research programme Independence, Decolonization, Violence and War in Indonesia, 1945-1950.

The authors of this book – Taufik Ahmad, Galuh Ambar Sasi, Maarten van der Bent, Martijn Eickhoff, Farabi Fakih, Roel Frakking, Apriani Harahap, Anne-Lot Hoek, Sarkawi B. Husain, Julianto Ibrahim, Gerry van Klinken, Erniwati, Mawardi Umar, Anne van der Veer, Abdul Wahid, Tri Wahyuning M. Irsyam, and Muhammad Yuanda Zara – work with various universities and research institutes in Indonesia and the Netherlands.
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Rewriting Crusoe
The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media
Jakub Lipski
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Published in 1719, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of those extraordinary literary works whose importance lies not only in the text itself but in its persistently lively afterlife. German author Johann Gottfried Schnabel—who in 1731 penned his own island narrative—coined the term “Robinsonade” to characterize the genre bred by this classic, and today hundreds of examples can be identified worldwide. This celebratory collection of tercentenary essays testifies to the Robinsonade’s endurance, analyzing its various literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural implications in historical context. Contributors trace the Robinsonade’s roots from the eighteenth century to generic affinities in later traditions, including juvenile fiction, science fiction, and apocalyptic fiction, and finally to contemporary adaptations in film, television, theater, and popular culture. Taken together, these essays convince us that the genre’s adapt- ability to changing social and cultural circumstances explains its relevance to this day.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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A Rhetorical Crime
Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War
Weiss-Wendt, Anton
Rutgers University Press, 2018
The Genocide Convention was drafted by the United Nations in the late 1940s, as a response to the horrors of the Second World War. But was the Genocide Convention truly effective at achieving its humanitarian aims, or did it merely exacerbate the divisive rhetoric of Cold War geopolitics?

A Rhetorical Crime shows how genocide morphed from a legal concept into a political discourse used in propaganda battles between the United States and the Soviet Union. Over the course of the Cold War era, nearly eighty countries were accused of genocide, and yet there were few real-time interventions to stop the atrocities committed by genocidal regimes like the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. 

Renowned genocide scholar Anton Weiss-Wendt employs a unique comparative approach, analyzing the statements of Soviet and American politicians, historians, and legal scholars in order to deduce why their moral posturing far exceeded their humanitarian action.  
 
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Rhetorical Vectors of Memory in National and International Holocaust Trials
Marouf A. Hasian Jr.
Michigan State University Press, 2006

During the past several decades, the twentieth century Holocaust has become a defining event in many histories. This newfound respect for the Judeocide has been cathartic for both individuals and communities, in that it provides evidence that audiences around the world are rethinking the significance of the World War II narratives of bystanders, perpetrators, and victims. Given the complexities of these issues, scholars who are interested in studying Holocaust memory make choices about the questions on which they focus, the artifacts they select for analysis, and the perspectives they want to present.
     Hasian reviews how national and international courts have used Holocaust trials as forums for debates about individuated justice, historical record keeping, and pedagogical memory work. He concludes that the trials involving Auschwitz, Demjanjuk, Eichmann, Finta, Nuremberg, Irving, Kastner, Keegstra, Sawoniuk, and Zündel are highly problematic. The author provides a rhetorical analysis of holocaust trials as a way of looking into the question of what role court proceedings play in the creation of Holocaust collective memories.

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Rhetorics of Motherhood
Lindal Buchanan
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

Becoming a mother profoundly alters one’s perception of the world, as Lindal Buchanan learned firsthand when she gave birth. Suddenly attentive to representations of mothers and mothering in advertisements, fiction, film, art, education, and politics, she became intrigued by the persuasive force of the concept of motherhood, an interest that unleashed a host of questions: How is the construct defined? How are maternal appeals crafted, presented, and performed? What do they communicate about gender and power? How do they affect women? Her quest for answers has produced Rhetorics of Motherhood, the first book-length consideration of the topic through a feminist rhetorical lens.

 Although both male and female rhetors employ motherhood to promote themselves and their agendas, Buchanan argues it is particularly slippery terrain for women—on the one hand, affording them authority and credibility but, on the other, positioning them disadvantageously within the gendered status quo. Rhetorics of Motherhood investigates that paradox by detailing the cultural construction and performance of the Mother in American public discourse, tracing its use and impact in three case studies, and by theorizing how, when, and why maternal discourses work to women’s benefit or detriment. In the process, the reader encounters a fascinating array of issues—including birth control, civil rights, and abortion—and rhetors, ranging from Diane Nash and Margaret Sanger to Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama.

As Buchanan makes clear, motherhood is a rich site for investigating the interrelationships among gender, power, and public discourse. Her latest book contributes to the discipline of rhetoric by attending to and making a convincing case for the significance of this understudied subject. With its examination of timely controversies, contemporary and historical figures, and powerful women, Rhetorics of Motherhood will appeal to a wide array of readers in rhetoric, communications, American studies, women’s studies, and beyond.

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Richard Halliburton and the Voyage of the Sea Dragon
Gerald Max
University of Tennessee Press, 2020

Richard Halliburton (1900–1939), considered the world’s first celebrity travel writer, swam the length of the Panama Canal, recreated Ulysses’ voyages in the Mediterranean, crossed the Alps on an elephant, flew around the world in a biplane, and descended into the Mayan Well of Death, all the while chronicling his own adventures. Several books treat his life and travels, yet no book has addressed in detail Halliburton’s most ambitious expedition: an attempt to sail across the Pacific Ocean in a Chinese junk.

Set against the backdrop of a China devastated by invading Japanese armies and the storm clouds of world war gathering in Europe, Halliburton and a crew of fourteen set out to build and sail the Sea Dragon—a junk or ancient sailing ship—from Hong Kong to San Francisco for the Golden Gate International Exposition. After battling through crew conflicts and frequent delays, the Sea Dragon set sail on March 4, 1939. Three weeks after embarking, the ship encountered a typhoon and disappeared without a trace.

Richly enhanced with historic photographs, Richard Halliburton and the Voyage of the Sea Dragon follows the dramatic arc of this ill-fated expedition in fine detail. Gerry Max artfully unpacks the tensions between Halliburton and his captain, John Wenlock Welch (owing much to Welch’s homophobia and Halliburton’s unconcealed homosexuality). And while Max naturally explores the trials and tribulations of preparing, constructing, and finally launching the Sea Dragon, he also punctuates the story with the invasion of China by the Japanese, as Halliburton and his letters home reveal an excellent wartime reporter. Max mines these documents, many of which have only recently come to light, as well as additional letters from Halliburton and his crew to family and friends, photographs, films, and tape recordings, to paint an intricate portrait of Halliburton’s final expedition from inception to tragic end.

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Right in Michigan's Grassroots
From the KKK to the Michigan Militia
JoEllen McNergney Vinyard
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"A real contribution to Michigan history that gets to the root of the movements in twentieth-century American history that upon reflection can bring a certain discomfort and unease."
---Francis X. Blouin, Director of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan

Throughout the twentieth century, Michigan became home to nearly every political movement in America that emerged from the grassroots. Citizens organized on behalf of concerns on the "left," on the "right," and in the "middle of the road." Right in Michigan's Grassroots: From the KKK to the Michigan Militia is about the people who supported movements that others, then and later, would denounce as disgraceful---members of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s, the followers of Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s, anti-Communists and the John Birch Society in the post–World War II era, and the members of the Michigan Militia who first appeared in the 1990s.

The book explores the complex historical circumstances in Michigan that prompted the emergence of these organizations and led everyday men and women to head off, despite ridicule or condemnation, with plans unsanctioned and tactics unorthodox, variously brandishing weapons of intimidation, discrimination, fearmongering, and terror. Drawing heavily on primary sources, including the organizations' files and interviews with some of their leaders and surviving members, JoEllen Vinyard provides a far more complete portrait of these well-known extremist groups than has ever been available.

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A Right to Childhood
The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-46
Kriste Lindenmeyer
University of Illinois Press, 1997
      Warring factions in the United States like to use children as weapons
        for their political agendas as Americans try to determine the role--if
        any--of the federal government in the lives of children. But what is the
        history of child welfare policy in the United States? What can we learn
        from the efforts to found the U.S. Children's bureau in 1903 and its eventual
        dismemberment in 1946?
      This is the first history of the Children's Bureau and the first in-depth
        examination of federal child welfare policy from the perspective of that
        agency. Its goal was to promote "a right to childhood," and
        Kriste Lindenmeyer unflinchingly examines the successes--and the failures--of
        the Bureau. She analyzes infant and maternal mortality, the promotion
        of child health care, child labor reform, and the protection of children
        with "special needs" from the Bureau's inception through the
        Depression, and through all the legislation that impacted on its work
        for children. The meaningful accomplishments and the demise of the Children's
        Bureau have much to tell parents, politicians, and policy-makers everywhere.
 
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"Rights, Not Roses"
Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-80
Dennis A. Deslippe
University of Illinois Press, 2000

Educated, white collar professional women carried the most visible banners of feminism. But working class women were a powerful force in the campaign for gender equality. Dennis A. Deslippe explores how unionized wage-earning women led the struggle to place women's employment rights on the national agenda, decisively influencing both the contemporary labor movement and second-wave feminism. 

Deslippe's account unravels a complex history of how labor leaders accommodated and resisted working women's demands for change. Through case studies of unions representing packinghouse and electrical workers, Deslippe explains why gender equality emerged as an issue in the 1960s and how the activities of wage-earning women in and outside of their unions shaped the content of the debate. He also traces the fault lines separating working-class women--who sought gender equality within the parameters of unionist principles such as seniority--from middle-class women--who sought an equal rights amendment that would guarantee an abstract equality for all women. 

Thoughtful and detailed, "Rights, Not Roses" offers a new look at the complexities of working-class feminism.

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Riot
Mary Casanova
University of Minnesota Press, 2014


Based on actual events from 1989 in International Falls, Minnesota, Riot tells the story of sixth-grader Bryan, whose family becomes stressed when nonunion labor “rats” are hired by the local paper mill, leaving his father, a union worker, angry and out of a job. Tension erupts into daily fights at school and nightly acts of vandalism with no solution in sight. Already torn between his parents’ opposing viewpoints on how to handle the escalating situation, Bryan’s growing feelings for the daughter of a nonunion worker only complicate matters.

Bryan tries to understand the turmoil affecting his home and his town, but it is becomes harder and harder to separate his friends from his enemies. And when he witnesses a violent act that implicates his father, he must wrestle with family loyalty and telling the truth.

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Ripe for Revolution
Building Socialism in the Third World
Jeremy Friedman
Harvard University Press, 2021

A historical account of ideology in the Global South as the postwar laboratory of socialism, its legacy following the Cold War, and the continuing influence of socialist ideas worldwide.

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran.

These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model.

Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.

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The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America
Eric P. Kaufmann
Harvard University Press, 2004

As the 2000 census resoundingly demonstrated, the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of the United States has all but dissolved. In a country founded and settled by their ancestors, British Protestants now make up less than a fifth of the population. This demographic shift has spawned a “culture war” within white America. While liberals seek to diversify society toward a cosmopolitan endpoint, some conservatives strive to maintain an American ethno-national identity. Eric Kaufmann traces the roots of this culture war from the rise of WASP America after the Revolution to its fall in the 1960s, when social institutions finally began to reflect the nation’s ethnic composition.

Kaufmann begins his account shortly after independence, when white Protestants with an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent established themselves as the dominant American ethnic group. But from the late 1890s to the 1930s, liberal and cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. This struggle against ethnic dominance was mounted not by subaltern immigrant groups but by Anglo-Saxon reformers, notably Jane Addams and John Dewey. It gathered social force by the 1920s, struggling against WASP dominance and achieving institutional breakthrough in the late 1960s, when America truly began to integrate ethnic minorities into mainstream culture.

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The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade
Samantha Barbas
University of Chicago Press, 2021
A long-overdue biography of the legendary civil liberties lawyer—a vital and contrary figure who both defended Ulysses and fawned over J. Edgar Hoover.

In the 1930s and ’40s, Morris Ernst was one of America’s best-known liberal lawyers. The ACLU’s general counsel for decades, Ernst was renowned for his audacious fights against artistic censorship. He successfully defended Ulysses against obscenity charges, litigated groundbreaking reproductive rights cases, and supported the widespread expansion of protections for sexual expression, union organizing, and public speech. Yet Ernst was also a man of stark contradictions, waging a personal battle against Communism, defending an autocrat, and aligning himself with J. Edgar Hoover’s inflammatory crusades.

Arriving at a moment when issues of privacy, artistic freedom, and personal expression are freshly relevant, The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade brings this singularly complex figure into a timely new light. As Samantha Barbas’s eloquent and compelling biography makes ironically clear, Ernst both transformed free speech in America and inflicted damage to the cause of civil liberties. Drawing on Ernst’s voluminous cache of publications and papers, Barbas follows the life of this singular idealist from his pugnacious early career to his legal triumphs of the 1930s and ’40s and his later idiosyncratic zealotry. As she shows, today’s challenges to free speech and the exercise of political power make Morris Ernst’s battles as pertinent as ever.
 
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The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa
The Making of Malawi and Zambia, 1873–1964
Robert I. Rotberg
Harvard University Press

This first comprehensive and thoroughly documented study of the political development of two of the newly formed nations of Central Africa presents the full story of the successful efforts of the people of Malawi and Zambia to achieve self-government. Following a detailed examination of the impact of British colonial rule, the author provides a new interpretation of the earliest demonstrations of native discontent and he explains how the forces of protest found expression through proto-political parties and the formation of religious sects and millennial movements. He also interprets the objectives and tactics of the ruling white settlers in their abortive effort to establish the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Basing his analysis on archival and other primary sources, including interviews with leading figures, Robert Rotberg traces the origins of the full-fledged political parties in both countries and describes the early congresses which were to become the dominant movements during the struggle for independence in Central Africa. He ends with an analysis of that struggle, bringing the story to its successful conclusion in late 1964. A postscript discusses the important changes of 1965.

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The Rise of Nuclear Fear
Spencer R. Weart
Harvard University Press, 2012

After a tsunami destroyed the cooling system at Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, triggering a meltdown, protesters around the world challenged the use of nuclear power. Germany announced it would close its plants by 2022. Although the ills of fossil fuels are better understood than ever, the threat of climate change has never aroused the same visceral dread or swift action. Spencer Weart dissects this paradox, demonstrating that a powerful web of images surrounding nuclear energy holds us captive, allowing fear, rather than facts, to drive our thinking and public policy.

Building on his classic, Nuclear Fear, Weart follows nuclear imagery from its origins in the symbolism of medieval alchemy to its appearance in film and fiction. Long before nuclear fission was discovered, fantasies of the destroyed planet, the transforming ray, and the white city of the future took root in the popular imagination. At the turn of the twentieth century when limited facts about radioactivity became known, they produced a blurred picture upon which scientists and the public projected their hopes and fears. These fears were magnified during the Cold War, when mushroom clouds no longer needed to be imagined; they appeared on the evening news. Weart examines nuclear anxiety in sources as diverse as Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour, Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, and the television show The Simpsons.

Recognizing how much we remain in thrall to these setpieces of the imagination, Weart hopes, will help us resist manipulation from both sides of the nuclear debate.

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The Rise of Southern Republicans
Earl Black and Merle Black
Harvard University Press, 2002

The transformation of Southern politics over the past fifty years has been one of the most significant developments in American political life. The emergence of formidable Republican strength in the previously solid Democratic South has generated a novel and highly competitive national battle for control of Congress. Tracing the slow and difficult rise of Republicans in the South over five decades, Earl and Merle Black tell the remarkable story of political upheaval.

The Rise of Southern Republicans provides a compelling account of growing competitiveness in Southern party politics and elections. Through extraordinary research and analysis, the authors track Southern voters' shifting economic, cultural, and religious loyalties, black/white conflicts and interests during and after federal civil rights intervention, and the struggles and adaptations of congressional candidates and officials.

A newly competitive South, the authors argue, means a newly competitive and revitalized America. The story of how the South became a two-party region is ultimately the story of two-party politics in America at the end of the twentieth century. Earl and Merle Black have written a bible for anyone who wants to understand regional and national congressional politics over the past half-century. Because the South is now at the epicenter of Republican and Democratic strategies to control Congress, The Rise of Southern Republicans is essential to understanding the dynamics of current American politics.

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The Road from Isolation
The Campaign of the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, 1938-1941
Donald J. Friedman
Harvard University Press

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The Road to Dallas
The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
David Kaiser
Harvard University Press, 2008

Neither a random event nor the act of a lone madman—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was an appalling and grisly conspiracy. This is the unvarnished story.

With deft investigative skill, David Kaiser shows that the events of November 22, 1963, cannot be understood without fully grasping the two larger stories of which they were a part: the U.S. government’s campaign against organized crime, which began in the late 1950s and accelerated dramatically under Robert Kennedy; and the furtive quest of two administrations—along with a cadre of private interest groups—to eliminate Fidel Castro.

The seeds of conspiracy go back to the Eisenhower administration, which recruited top mobsters in a series of plots to assassinate the Cuban leader. The CIA created a secretive environment in which illicit networks were allowed to expand in dangerous directions. The agency’s links with the Mafia continued in the Kennedy administration, although the President and his closest advisors—engaged in their own efforts to overthrow Castro—thought this skullduggery had ended. Meanwhile, Cuban exiles, right-wing businessmen, and hard-line anti-Communists established ties with virtually anyone deemed capable of taking out the Cuban premier. Inevitably those ties included the mob.

The conspiracy to kill JFK took shape in response to Robert Kennedy’s relentless attacks on organized crime—legal vendettas that often went well beyond the normal practices of law enforcement. Pushed to the wall, mob leaders merely had to look to the networks already in place for a solution. They found it in Lee Harvey Oswald—the ideal character to enact their desperate revenge against the Kennedys.

Comprehensive, detailed, and informed by original sources, The Road to Dallas adds surprising new material to every aspect of the case. It brings to light the complete, frequently shocking, story of the JFK assassination and its aftermath.

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The Road to OPEC
United States Relations with Venezuela, 1919-1976
By Stephen G. Rabe
University of Texas Press, 1982

On September 10, 1960, Venezuela spearheaded the formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (other original members included Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait). However, in a world abundantly supplied with oil, the United States could and did ignore Venezuelan suggestions that OPEC and the consuming nations work together to control production and to increase prices. Then, in late 1973, OPEC sent shudders throughout the world economy, and an energy crisis struck with full force. Emboldened by the power of their oil cartel, Venezuelan leaders denounced the old economic relationship with the United States, nationalized U.S. oil and steel holdings, and fashioned a foreign economic policy that differed sharply from Washington's.

The Road to OPEC is the story of the fiery debates among U.S. oil companies, the Department of State, and the Venezuelan government over oil policies—clashes that led Venezuela to establish OPEC and to nationalize U.S.-owned properties. In addition, this is the first study of twentieth-century Venezuelan-U.S. relations. Its focus on oil diplomacy is placed within the context of key U.S. policies toward Latin America and such programs as the Open Door, the Good Neighbor, and the Alliance for Progress. The author also provides insight into both the politics of the contemporary energy crisis and the growing split between raw-material producers and their industrial customers.

The Road to OPEC is based on extensive archival research, as well as the author's successful use of the Freedom of Information Act to declassify files of such agencies as the National Security Council and the CIA.

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Roads Not Taken
An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt
Alexander Etkind
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
A journalist, diplomat, and writer, William Christian Bullitt (1891–1967) negotiated with Lenin and Stalin, Churchill and de Gaulle, Chiang Kai-shek and Goering. He took part in the talks that ended World War I and those that failed to prevent World War II. While his former disciples led American diplomacy into the Cold War, Bullitt became an early enthusiast of the European Union. From his early (1919) proposal of disassembling the former Russian Empire into dozens of independent states, to his much later (1944) advice to land the American troops in the Balkans rather than in Normandy, Bullitt developed a dissenting vision of the major events of his era. A connoisseur of American politics, Russian history, Viennese psychoanalysis, and French wine, Bullitt was also the author of two novels and a number of plays. A friend of Sigmund Freud, Bullitt coauthored with him a sensational biography of President Wilson. A friend of Bullitt, Mikhail Bulgakov depicted him as the devil figure in The Master and Margarita. Taking seriously Bullitt’s projects and foresights, this book portrays him as an original thinker and elucidates his role as a political actor. His roads were not taken, but the world would have been different if Bullitt’s warnings had been heeded. His experience suggests powerful though lost alternatives to the catastrophic history of the twentieth century.
            Based on Bullitt’s unpublished papers and diplomatic documents from the Russian archives, this new biography presents Bullitt as a truly cosmopolitan American, one of the first politicians of the global era. It is human ideas and choices, Bullitt’s projects and failures among them, that have brought the world to its current state.
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Roads to Renewal
The Report of Activities and Accomplishments of the Civil Works Administration in Michigan, November 1933–March 1934
James R. Anderson
Michigan State University Press, 2020
This publication makes available to historians and general readers a little-known document mapping the achievement of a crucial initiative in the plans for recovery from the harshest blows of the Great Depression, in one of America’s hardest-hit states. It presents a historically unique case history of the Federal Civil Works Administration, established by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The CWA addressed the issues of unemployment and destitution brought on by the Depression, specifically in Michigan. With a contextualizing introduction and afterword by historian James R. Anderson, the republication of this report—with its wealth of data and statistics, and its compelling information about the extent of the crisis and of the government’s initiatives—brings to light fascinating aspects of how critical (and impactful) such interventions were in the context of unprecedented economic challenges.
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