In the mid-eighteenth century, colonial Americans became enamored with the rich colors and silky surface of mahogany. This exotic wood, imported from the West Indies and Central America, quickly displaced local furniture woods as the height of fashion. Over the next century, consumer demand for mahogany set in motion elaborate schemes to secure the trees and transform their rough-hewn logs into exquisite objects. But beneath the polished gleam of this furniture lies a darker, hidden story of human and environmental exploitation.
Mahogany traces the path of this wood through many hands, from source to sale: from the enslaved African woodcutters, including skilled “huntsmen” who located the elusive trees amidst dense rainforest, to the ship captains, merchants, and timber dealers who scrambled after the best logs, to the skilled cabinetmakers who crafted the wood, and with it the tastes and aspirations of their diverse clientele. As the trees became scarce, however, the search for new sources led to expanded slave labor, vicious competition, and intense international conflicts over this diminishing natural resource. When nineteenth-century American furniture makers turned to other materials, surviving mahogany objects were revalued as antiques evocative of the nation's past.
Jennifer Anderson offers a dynamic portrait of the many players, locales, and motivations that drove the voracious quest for mahogany to adorn American parlors and dining rooms. This complex story reveals the cultural, economic, and environmental costs of America’s growing self-confidence and prosperity, and how desire shaped not just people’s lives but the natural world.
Weaving together the international and the domestic in creative new ways, The Malthusian Moment charts the explosion of Malthusian thinking in the United States from World War I to Earth Day 1970, then traces the just-as-surprising decline in concern beginning in the mid-1970s. In addition to offering an unconventional look at World War II and the Cold War through a balanced study of the environmental movement’s most contentious theory, the book sheds new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the rise of consumption, the growth of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the civil rights and women’s movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the “New Right.”
Critical studies of the range of King’s public discourse as forms of sermonic rhetoric
The nine essays in this volume offer critical studies of the range of King’s public discourse as forms of sermonic rhetoric. They focus on five diverse and relative short examples from King’s body of work: “Death of Evil on the Seashore,” “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “I Have a Dream,” “A Time to Break Silence,” and “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”
Taken collectively, these five works span both the duration of King’s career as a public advocate but also represent the broad scope of his efforts to craft and project a persuasive vision a beloved community that persists through time.
As cultural mediators, Chamelco's market women offer a model of contemporary Q'eqchi' identity grounded in the strength of the Maya historical legacy. Guatemala's Maya communities have faced nearly five hundred years of constant challenges to their culture, from colonial oppression to the instability of violent military dictatorships and the advent of new global technologies. In spite of this history, the people of San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala, have effectively resisted significant changes to their cultural identities. Chamelco residents embrace new technologies, ideas, and resources to strengthen their indigenous identities and maintain Maya practice in the 21st century, a resilience that sets Chamelco apart from other Maya towns.
Unlike the region's other indigenous women, Chamelco's Q'eqchi' market women achieve both prominence and visibility as vendors, dominating social domains from religion to local politics. These women honor their families' legacies through continuation of the inherited, high-status marketing trade. In Maya Market Women, S. Ashley Kistler describes how market women gain social standing as mediators of sometimes conflicting realities, harnessing the forces of global capitalism to revitalize Chamelco's indigenous identity. Working at the intersections of globalization, kinship, gender, and memory, Kistler presents a firsthand look at Maya markets as a domain in which the values of capitalism and indigenous communities meet.
Americans at the end of the twentieth century worried that managed care had fundamentally transformed the character of medicine. In The Medical Delivery Business, Barbara Bridgman Perkins uses examples drawn from maternal and infant care to argue that the business approach in medicine is not a new development. Health care reformers throughout the century looked to industrial, corporate, and commercial enterprises as models for the institutions, specialties, and technological strategies that defined modern medicine.
In the case of perinatal care, the business model emphasized specialized over primary care, encouraged the use of surgical and technological procedures, and unnecessarily turned childbirth into an intensive care situation. Active management techniques, for example, encouraged obstetricians to accelerate labor with oxytocin to augment their productivity. Despite the achievements of the childbirth and women’s health movement in the 1970s, aggressive medical intervention has remained the birth experience for millions of American women (and their babies) every year.
The Medical Delivery Business challenges the conventional view that a dose of the market is good for medicine. While Perkins is sympathetic to the goals of progressive and feminist reformers, she questions whether their strategies will succeed in making medicine more equitable and effective. She argues that the medical care system itself needs to be fundamentally "re-formed," and the reforms must be based on democracy, caring, and social justice as well as economics.
When exploring the links between America and postcolonialism, scholars tend to think either in terms of contemporary multiculturalism, or of imperialism since 1898. This narrow view has left more than the two prior centuries of colonizing literary and political culture unexamined.
Messy Beginnings challenges the idea of early America’s immunity from issues of imperialism, that its history is not as “clean” as European colonialism. By addressing the literature ranging from the diaries of American women missionaries in the Middle East to the work of Benjamin Franklin and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and through appraisals of key postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, the contributors to this volume explore the applicability of their models to early American culture.
Messy Beginnings argues against the simple concept that the colonization of what became the United States was a confrontation between European culture and the “other.” Contributors examine the formation of America through the messy or unstable negotiations of the idea of “nation.”
The essays forcefully show that the development of “Americanness” was a raced and classed phenomenon, achieved through a complex series of violent encounters, legal maneuvers, and political compromises. The complexity of early American colonization, where there was not one coherent “nation” to conquer, contradicts the simple label of imperialism used in other lands. The unique approach of Messy Beginnings will reshape both pre-conceived notions of postcolonialism, and how postcolonialists think about the development of the American nation.
Winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, J. M. G. Le Clézio here conjures the consciousness of Mexico, powerfully evoking the dreams that made and unmade an ancient culture. Le Clézio’s haunting book takes us into the dream that was the religion of the Aztecs, a religion whose own apocalyptic visions anticipated the coming of the Spanish conquerors. Here the dream of the conquistadores rises before us, too, the glimmering idea of gold drawing Europe into the Mexican dream. Against the religion and thought of the Aztecs and the Tarascans and the Europeans in Mexico, Le Clézio also shows us those of the “barbarians” of the north, the nomadic Indians beyond the pale of the Aztec frontier.
Finally, Le Clézio’s book is a dream of the present, a meditation on what in Amerindian civilizations—in their language, in their way of telling tales, of wanting to survive their own destruction—moved the poet, playwright, and actor Antonin Artaud and motivates Le Clézio in this book. His own deep identification with pre-Columbian cultures, whose faith told them the wheel of time would bring their gods and their beliefs back to them, finds fitting expression in this extraordinary book, which brings the dream around.
“We are lucky to have in Le Clézio a writer of great quality who brings his particular sensibility and talent here to remind us of the very nature of the rituals and myths of the civilizations of ancient Mexico; he provides us with descriptions as precise as they are mysterious.”—Le Figaro
"Based on exhaustive research in U.S. and Mexican archives, this study offers a richly-textured history of Mexican immigrants in rural California. A work of exceptional breadth, especially with regard to repatriation, [it] is a pivotal contribution to Chicano historiography and immigration studies."--Vicki L. Ruiz, Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Professor in the Humanities, The Claremont Graduate School
In the first forty years of this century, over one million Mexican immigrants moved to the United States, attracted by the prospect of farm work in California. They became workers in industrial agriculture --barely recognized, never respected, and poorly paid. Native white American workers did not resent the Mexicans during prosperous times, when everyone who wanted to work could do so. But during the Great Depression, native workers began to realize that many of the Mexican workers were here to stay. Native workers, blaming their unemployment on the immigrants, joined with government officials to demand that Mexican workers and their families return to Mexico. During the 1930s, the federal government and county relief agencies cooperated in a nasty repatriation program, forcing half a million Mexicans living in the U.S. to return to Mexico.
Camille Guerin-Gonzales tells the story of their migration, their years here, and of the repatriation program--one of the largest mass removal operations ever sanctioned by the U.S. government.She documents both their efforts to resist and the overpowering forces that worked against them.
This paperback edition of M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America adds major new material about Ross Perot's role, the 1991-1992 Senate investigation, and illegal operations authorized by Ronald Reagan.
Peru’s ancient Moche culture is represented in a magnificent collection of artifacts at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. In this richly illustrated volume, Jeffrey Quilter presents a fascinating introduction to this intriguing culture and explores current thinking about Moche politics, history, society, and religion.
Quilter utilizes the Peabody’s collection as a means to investigate how the Moche used various media, particularly ceramics, to convey messages about their lives and beliefs. His presentation provides a critical examination and rethinking of many of the commonly held interpretations of Moche artifacts and their imagery, raising important issues of art production and its role in ancient and modern societies.
The most up-to-date monograph available on the Moche—and the first extensive discussion of the Peabody Museum’s collection of Moche ceramics—this volume provides an introduction for the general reader and contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions. Quilter’s fresh reading of Moche visual imagery raises new questions about the art and culture of ancient Peru.
In TheMorality of Everyday Life, Thomas Fleming offers an alternative to the enlightened liberalism espoused by thinkers as different as Kant, Mill, Rand, and Rawls. Philosophers in the liberal tradition, although they disagree on many important questions, agree that moral and political problems should be looked at from an objective point of view and a decision made from a rational perspective that is universally applied to all comparable cases.
Fleming instead places importance on the particular, the local, and moral complexity. He advocates a return to premodern traditions, such as those exemplified in the texts of Aristotle, the Talmud, and the folk wisdom in ancient Greek literature, for a solution to ethical predicaments. In his view, liberalism and postmodernism ignore the fact that human beings by their very nature refuse to live in a world of universal abstractions.
While such modern philosophers as Kant and Kohlberg have regarded a mother’s self-sacrificing love for her children as beneath their level of morality, folk wisdom tells us it is nearly the highest morality, taking precedence over the duties of citizenship or the claims of humanity. Fleming believes that a modern type of “casuistry” should be applied to these moral conflicts in which the line between right and wrong is rarely clear.
This volume will appeal to students of ethics and classics, as well as the general educated reader, who will appreciate Fleming’s jargon-free prose. Teachers will find this text useful because each chapter is a self-contained essay that could be used as the basis for classroom discussion.
"Romney’s unique vantage point is the strongest draw of this narrative: Romney and his family lived much of their life in the Mexican Mormon colonies. But the narrative’s value is much broader and deeper than just that. Romney’s insights into Mexican politics and personalities, and his view of the course of history from inside rather than from outside, are fascinating, colorful and opinionated. He was clear about who he admired and why, and who he did not."
—from the Foreword
In the 1880s, as a precondition to granting Utah statehood, the United States government enacted laws to put a stop to the Mormon practice of polygamy. Those who continued to practice this principle were forced underground as federal marshals roamed the territory searching for "polygs." In response, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints looked for safe places to send its members; many found refuge across the border in Mexico.
Unavailable since its original publication in 1938, this important document of a little-known chapter in Mormon history is now reprinted with a foreword by Martha Sonntag Bradley. Romney was raised and spent much of his life in the colonies, making this book a significant contribution to LDS history. It chronicles a new kind of Mormon pioneer facing the hardships of an unfamiliar land, a tenuous relationship with the government, and the necessary fortitude to hold fast to one’s belief in the face of difficulty and trial.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press