front cover of Far from Mecca
Far from Mecca
Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean
Aliyah Khan
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Honorable Mention, 2022 MLA Prize for a First Book

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry, and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis, Khan argues for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean. Case studies explored range from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth-century Jamaica, to early twentieth-century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the attempted government coup in 1990 by the Jamaat al-Muslimeen in Trinidad, as well as the island’s calypso music, to contemporary judicial cases concerning Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.
 
[more]

front cover of The Fatal Embrace
The Fatal Embrace
Jews and the State
Benjamin Ginsberg
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In this provocative book, Benjamin Ginsberg examines the cycle of Jewish success and anti-Semitic attack throughout the history of the Diaspora, with a concentrated focus on the "special case" of America. For Ginsberg, the essential issue is not anti-Jewish feeling, but the conditions under which such sentiment is likely to be used in the political arena. The Fatal Embrace identifies the political dynamics that, historically, have set the stage for the persecution of Jews.
[more]

front cover of Feeding the Eternal City
Feeding the Eternal City
Jewish and Christian Butchers in the Roman Ghetto
Kenneth Stow
Harvard University Press, 2024

A surprising history of interfaith collaboration in the Roman Ghetto, where for three centuries Jewish and Christian butchers worked together to provision the city despite the proscriptions of Church law.

For Rome’s Jewish population, confined to a ghetto between 1555 and 1870, efforts to secure kosher meat were fraught with challenges. The city’s papal authorities viewed kashrut—the Jewish dietary laws—with suspicion, and it was widely believed that kosher meat would contaminate any Christian who consumed it. Supplying kosher provisions entailed circumventing canon law and the institutions that regulated the butchering and sale of meat throughout the city.

Kenneth Stow finds that Jewish butchers collaborated extensively with their Christian counterparts to ensure a supply of kosher meat, regardless of the laws that prohibited such interactions. Jewish butchers sold nonkosher portions of slaughtered animals daily to Christians outside the ghetto, which in turn ensured the affordability of kosher meat. At the same time, Christian butchers also found it profitable to work with Jews, as this enabled them to sell good meat otherwise unavailable at attractive prices. These relationships could be warm and almost intimate, but they could also be rife with anger, deception, and even litigation. Nonetheless, without this close cooperation—and the willingness of authorities to turn a blind eye to it—meat-eating in the ghetto would have been nearly impossible. Only the rise of the secular state in the late nineteenth century brought fundamental change, putting an end to canon law and allowing the kosher meat market to flourish.

A rich social history of food in early modern Rome, Feeding the Eternal City is also a compelling narrative of Jewish life and religious acculturation in the capital of Catholicism.

[more]

front cover of Felix Longoria's Wake
Felix Longoria's Wake
Bereavement, Racism, and the Rise of Mexican American Activism
By Patrick Carroll
University of Texas Press, 2003

Winner, Tullis Prize, Texas State Historical Association, 2004

Private First Class Felix Longoria earned a Bronze Service Star, a Purple Heart, a Good Conduct Medal, and a Combat Infantryman's badge for service in the Philippines during World War II. Yet the only funeral parlor in his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas, refused to hold a wake for the slain soldier because "the whites would not like it." Almost overnight, this act of discrimination became a defining moment in the rise of Mexican American activism. It launched Dr. Héctor P. García and his newly formed American G.I. Forum into the vanguard of the Mexican civil rights movement, while simultaneously endangering and advancing the career of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who arranged for Longoria's burial with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

In this book, Patrick Carroll provides the first fully researched account of the Longoria controversy and its far-reaching consequences. Drawing on extensive documentary evidence and interviews with many key figures, including Dr. García and Mrs. Longoria, Carroll convincingly explains why the Longoria incident, though less severe than other acts of discrimination against Mexican Americans, ignited the activism of a whole range of interest groups from Argentina to Minneapolis. By putting Longoria's wake in a national and international context, he also clarifies why it became such a flash point for conflicting understandings of bereavement, nationalism, reason, and emotion between two powerful cultures—Mexicanidad and Americanism.

[more]

front cover of Fencing in Democracy
Fencing in Democracy
Border Walls, Necrocitizenship, and the Security State
Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret Dorsey
Duke University Press, 2019
Border walls permeate our world, with more than thirty nation-states constructing them. Anthropologists Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Díaz-Barriga argue that border wall construction manifests transformations in citizenship practices that are aimed not only at keeping migrants out but also at enmeshing citizens into a wider politics of exclusion. For a decade, the authors studied the U.S.-Mexico border wall constructed by the Department of Homeland Security and observed the political protests and legal challenges that residents mounted in opposition to the wall. In Fencing in Democracy Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga take us to those border communities most affected by the wall and often ignored in national discussions about border security to highlight how the state diminishes citizens' rights. That dynamic speaks to the citizenship experiences of border residents that is indicative of how walls imprison the populations they are built to protect. Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga brilliantly expand conversations about citizenship, the operation of U.S. power, and the implications of border walls for the future of democracy.
[more]

front cover of Finland-Swedes in Michigan
Finland-Swedes in Michigan
Mika Roinila
Michigan State University Press, 2012

Who are the Finland-Swedes? Defined as citizens of Finland with a Swedish mother tongue, many know these people as “Swede- Finns” or simply “Swedes.” This book, the first ever to focus on this ethnolinguistic minority living in Michigan, examines the origins of the Finland-Swedes and traces their immigration patterns, beginning with the arrival of hundreds in the United States in the 1860s. A growing population until the 1920s, when immigration restrictions were put in place, the Finland-Swedes brought with them unique economic, social, cultural, religious, and political institutions, explored here in groundbreaking detail. Drawing on archival, church, and congregational records, interviews, and correspondence, this book paints a vivid portrait of Finland-Swedish life in photographs and text, and also includes detailed maps that show the movement of this group over time. The latest title in the Discovering the Peoples of Michigan series even includes a sampling of traditional Finland-Swedish recipes.

[more]

front cover of A Fire in Their Hearts
A Fire in Their Hearts
Yiddish Socialists in New York
Tony Michels
Harvard University Press, 2009

In a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience.

The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers’ education societies, Yiddish schools, and a press that found its strongest voice in the mass-circulation newspaper Forverts.

Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanization, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a transnational culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around.

The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.

[more]

front cover of Fires of Hatred
Fires of Hatred
Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe
Norman M. Naimark
Harvard University Press, 2002

Of all the horrors of the last century—perhaps the bloodiest century of the past millennium—ethnic cleansing ranks among the worst. The term burst forth in public discourse in the spring of 1992 as a way to describe Serbian attacks on the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but as this landmark book attests, ethnic cleansing is neither new nor likely to cease in our time.

Norman Naimark, distinguished historian of Europe and Russia, provides an insightful history of ethnic cleansing and its relationship to genocide and population transfer. Focusing on five specific cases, he exposes the myths about ethnic cleansing, in particular the commonly held belief that the practice stems from ancient hatreds. Naimark shows that this face of genocide had its roots in the European nationalism of the late nineteenth century but found its most virulent expression in the twentieth century as modern states and societies began to organize themselves by ethnic criteria. The most obvious example, and one of Naimark’s cases, is the Nazi attack on the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. Naimark also discusses the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia during the Greco–Turkish War of 1921–22; the Soviet forced deportation of the Chechens-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars in 1944; the Polish and Czechoslovak expulsion of the Germans in 1944–47; and Bosnia and Kosovo.

In this harrowing history, Naimark reveals how over and over, as racism and religious hatreds picked up an ethnic name tag, war provided a cover for violence and mayhem, an evil tapestry behind which nations acted with impunity.

[more]

front cover of First Nationalism Then Identity
First Nationalism Then Identity
On Bosnian Muslims and Their Bosniak Identity
Mirsad Kriještorac
University of Michigan Press, 2022

First Nationalism Then Identity focuses on the case of Bosnian Muslims, a rare historic instance of a new nation emerging. Although for Bosnian Muslims the process of national emergence and the assertion of a new salient identity have been going on for over two decades, Mirsad Kriještorac is the first to explain the significance of the whole process and how the adoption of their new Bosniak identity occurred. He provides a historical overview of Yugoslav and Bosnian Slavic Muslims’ transformation into a full-fledged distinct and independent national group as well as addresses the important question in the field of nationalism studies about the relationship between and workings of nationalism and identity. While this book is noteworthy for ordinary readers interested in the case of Bosnian Muslims, it is an important contribution to the scholarly debate on the role of nationalism in the political life of a group and adds an interdisciplinary perspective to comparative politics scholarship by drawing from anthropology, history, geography, and sociology.

[more]

front cover of Flavor and Soul
Flavor and Soul
Italian America at Its African American Edge
John Gennari
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In the United States, African American and Italian cultures have been intertwined for more than a hundred years. From as early as nineteenth-century African American opera star Thomas Bowers—“The Colored Mario”—all the way to hip-hop entrepreneur Puff Daddy dubbing himself “the Black Sinatra,” the affinity between black and Italian cultures runs deep and wide. Once you start looking, you’ll find these connections everywhere. Sinatra croons bel canto over the limousine swing of the Count Basie band. Snoop Dogg deftly tosses off the line “I’m Lucky Luciano ’bout to sing soprano.” Like the Brooklyn pizzeria and candy store in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever, or the basketball sidelines where Italian American coaches Rick Pitino and John Calipari mix it up with their African American players, black/Italian connections are a thing to behold—and to investigate.

In Flavor and Soul, John Gennari spotlights this affinity, calling it “the edge”—now smooth, sometimes serrated—between Italian American and African American culture. He argues that the edge is a space of mutual emulation and suspicion, a joyous cultural meeting sometimes darkened by violent collision. Through studies of music and sound, film and media, sports and foodways, Gennari shows how an Afro-Italian sensibility has nourished and vitalized American culture writ large, even as Italian Americans and African Americans have fought each other for urban space, recognition of overlapping histories of suffering and exclusion, and political and personal rispetto.

Thus, Flavor and Soul is a cultural contact zone—a piazza where people express deep feelings of joy and pleasure, wariness and distrust, amity and enmity. And it is only at such cultural edges, Gennari argues, that America can come to truly understand its racial and ethnic dynamics.
[more]

front cover of The Folds of Parnassos
The Folds of Parnassos
Land and Ethnicity in Ancient Phokis
By Jeremy McInerney
University of Texas Press, 2000

Independent city-states (poleis) such as Athens have been viewed traditionally as the most advanced stage of state formation in ancient Greece. By contrast, this pioneering book argues that for some Greeks the ethnos, a regionally based ethnic group, and the koinon, or regional confederation, were equally valid units of social and political life and that these ethnic identities were astonishingly durable.

Jeremy McInerney sets his study in Phokis, a region in central Greece dominated by Mount Parnassos that shared a border with the panhellenic sanctuary at Delphi. He explores how ecological conditions, land use, and external factors such as invasion contributed to the formation of a Phokian territory. Then, drawing on numerous interdisciplinary sources, he traces the history of the region from the Archaic age down to the Roman period. McInerney shows how shared myths, hero cults, and military alliances created an ethnic identity that held the region together over centuries, despite repeated invasions. He concludes that the Phokian koinon survived because it was founded ultimately on the tenacity of the smaller communities of Greece.

[more]

front cover of For Both Cross and Flag
For Both Cross and Flag
Catholic Action, Anti-Catholicism, and National Security Politics in World War II San Francisco
Authored by William Issel
Temple University Press, 2010
Against a backdrop of war and anti-Catholic sentiment, one man loses his rights because he is falsely accused
In this fascinating, detailed history, William Issel recounts the civil rights abuses suffered by Sylvester Andriano, an Italian American Catholic civil leader whose religious and political activism in San Francisco provoked an Anti-Catholic campaign against him. A leading figure in the Catholic Action movement, Andriano was falsely accused in state and federal Un-American Activities Committee hearings of having Fascist sympathies prior to and during World War II. As his ordeal began, Andriano was subjected to a hostile investigation by the FBI, whose confidential informants were his political rivals. Furthermore, the U.S. Army ordered him to be relocated on the grounds that he was a security risk.

For Both Cross and Flag provides a dramatic illustration of what can happen when parties to urban political rivalries, rooted in religious and ideological differences, seize the opportunity provided by a wartime national security emergency to demonize their enemy as “a potentially dangerous person.”

Issel presents a cast of characters that includes archbishops, radicals, the Kremlin, and J. Edgar Hoover, to examine the significant role faith-based political activism played in the political culture that violated Andriano’s constitutional rights. Exploring the ramifications of this story, For Both Cross and Flag presents interesting implications for contemporary events and issues relating to urban politics, ethnic groups, and religion in a time of war.
[more]

front cover of Foreign Attachments
Foreign Attachments
The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy
Tony Smith
Harvard University Press, 2005

Who speaks for America in world affairs? In this insightful new book, Tony Smith finds that, often, the answer is interest groups, including ethnic ones. This seems natural in a country defined by ethnic and cultural diversity and a democratic political system. And yet, should not the nation's foreign policy be based on more general interests? On American national interests?

In exploring this question, Smith ranges over the history of ethnic group involvement in foreign affairs; he notes the openness of our political system to interest groups; and he investigates the relationship between multiculturalism and U.S. foreign policy. The book has three major propositions. First, ethnic groups play a larger role in the formulation of American foreign policy than is widely recognized. Second, the negative consequences of ethnic group involvement today outweigh the benefits this activism at times confers on America in world affairs. And third, the tensions of a pluralist democracy are particularly apparent in the making of foreign policy, where the self-interested demands of a host of domestic actors raise an enduring problem of democratic citizenship--the need to reconcile general and particular interests.

[more]

front cover of Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites?
Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites?
The Asian Ethnic Experience Today
Mia Tuan
Rutgers University Press, 1999

What does it mean to be an Asian-American in the United States today? Are Asian-Americans considered "honorary whites" or forever thought of as "foreigners?"

Mia Tuan examines the salience and meaning of ethnicity for later generation Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, and asks how their concepts of ethnicity differ from that of white ethnic Americans. She interviewed 95 middle-class Chinese and Japanese Californians and analyzes the importance of ethnic identities and the concept of becoming a "real" American for both Asian and white ethnics. She asks her subjects about their early memories and experiences with Chinese/Japanese culture; current lifestyle and emerging cultural practices; experiences with racism and discrimination; and  attitudes toward current Asian immigration.

[more]

front cover of A Forgetful Nation
A Forgetful Nation
On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States
Ali Behdad
Duke University Press, 2005
In A Forgetful Nation, the renowned postcolonialism scholar Ali Behdad turns his attention to the United States. Offering a timely critique of immigration and nationalism, Behdad takes on an idea central to American national mythology: that the United States is “a nation of immigrants,” welcoming and generous to foreigners. He argues that Americans’ treatment of immigrants and foreigners has long fluctuated between hospitality and hostility, and that this deep-seated ambivalence is fundamental to the construction of national identity. Building on the insights of Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, he develops a theory of the historical amnesia that enables the United States to disavow a past and present built on the exclusion of others.

Behdad shows how political, cultural, and legal texts have articulated American anxiety about immigration from the Federalist period to the present day. He reads texts both well-known—J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—and lesser-known—such as the writings of nineteenth-century nativists and of public health officials at Ellis Island. In the process, he highlights what is obscured by narratives and texts celebrating the United States as an open-armed haven for everyone: the country’s violent beginnings, including its conquest of Native Americans, brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans, and colonialist annexation of French and Mexican territories; a recurring and fierce strand of nativism; the need for a docile labor force; and the harsh discipline meted out to immigrant “aliens” today, particularly along the Mexican border.

[more]

front cover of The Formation of the Soviet Union
The Formation of the Soviet Union
Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923, Revised Edition
Richard Pipes
Harvard University Press, 1997

Here is the history of the disintegration of the Russian Empire, and the emergence, on its ruins, of a multinational Communist state. In this revealing account, Richard Pipes tells how the Communists exploited the new nationalism of the peoples of the Ukraine, Belorussia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Volga-Ural area--first to seize power and then to expand into the borderlands.

The Formation of the Soviet Union acquires special relevance in the post-Soviet era, when the ethnic groups described in the book once again reclaimed their independence, this time apparently for good.

In a 1996 Preface to the Revised Edition, Pipes suggests how material recently released from the Russian archives might supplement his account.

[more]

front cover of Fortress of My Youth
Fortress of My Youth
Memoir of a Terezín Survivor
Jana Renée Friesová
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Jana Renée Friesová was fifteen when she was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Czech ghetto town of Terezín. Her memoir tells the poignantly familiar story of a young girl who, even under the most abominable circumstances, engages in intense adolescent friendships, worries with her companions over her looks, and falls in love.
Anne Frank’s diary ends with deportation to a concentration camp; Fortress of My Youth, in contrast, takes the reader deep into the horrors of daily life in a camp that were faced by a young girl and her family. But Friesová also tells of love, joy, sacrifice, and the people who shared in the most profound experiences of her life.

[more]

front cover of Fragmented Memories
Fragmented Memories
Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India
Yasmin Saikia
Duke University Press, 2004
Fragmented Memories is a beautifully rendered exploration of how, during the 1990s, socially and economically marginalized people in the northeastern Indian state of Assam sought to produce a past on which to base a distinctive contemporary identity recognized within late-twentieth-century India. Yasmin Saikia describes how groups of Assamese identified themselves as Tai-Ahom—a people with a glorious past stretching back to the invasion of what is now Assam by Ahom warriors in the thirteenth century. In her account of the 1990s Tai-Ahom identity movement, Saikia considers the problem of competing identities in India, the significance of place and culture, and the outcome of the memory-building project of the Tai-Ahom.

Assamese herself, Saikia lived in several different Tai-Ahom villages between 1994 and 1996. She spoke with political activists, intellectuals, militant leaders, shamans, and students and observed and participated in Tai-Ahom religious, social, and political events. She read Tai-Ahom sacred texts and did archival research—looking at colonial documents and government reports—in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London. In Fragmented Memories, Saikia reveals the different narratives relating to the Tai-Ahom as told by the postcolonial Indian government, British colonists, and various texts reaching back to the thirteenth century. She shows how Tai-Ahom identity is practiced in Assam and also in Thailand. Revealing how the “dead” history of Tai-Ahom has been transformed into living memory to demand rights of citizenship, Fragmented Memories is a landmark history told from the periphery of the Indian nation.

[more]

front cover of Fratricide in the Holy Land
Fratricide in the Holy Land
A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Avner Falk
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
    This is the first English-language book ever to apply psychoanalytic knowledge to the understanding of the most intractable international struggle in our world today—the Arab-Israeli conflict. Two ethnic groups fight over a single territory that both consider to be theirs by historical right—essentially a rational matter. But close historical examination shows that the two parties to this tragic conflict have missed innumerable opportunities for a rational partition of the territory between them and for a permanent state of peace and prosperity rather than perennial bloodshed and misery.
    Falk suggests that a way to understand and explain such irrational matters is to examine the unconscious aspects of the conflict. He examines large-group psychology, nationalism, group narcissism, psychogeography, the Arab and Israeli minds, and suicidal terrorism, and he offers psychobiographical studies of Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat, two key players in this tragic conflict today.
[more]

front cover of French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630-1815
French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630-1815
Robert Englebert
Michigan State University Press, 2013
In the past thirty years, the study of French-Indian relations in the center of North America has emerged as an important field for examining the complex relationships that defined a vast geographical area, including the Great Lakes region, the Illinois Country, the Missouri River Valley, and Upper and Lower Louisiana. For years, no one better represented this emerging area of study than Jacqueline Peterson and Richard White, scholars who identified a world defined by miscegenation between French colonists and the native population, or métissage, and the unique process of cultural accommodation that led to a “middle ground” between French and Algonquians. Building on the research of Peterson, White, and Jay Gitlin, this collection of essays brings together new and established scholars from the United States, Canada, and France, to move beyond the paradigms of the middle ground and métissage. At the same time it seeks to demonstrate the rich variety of encounters that defined French and Indians in the heart of North America from 1630 to 1815. Capturing the complexity and nuance of these relations, the authors examine a number of thematic areas that provide a broader assessment of the historical bridge-building process, including ritual interactions, transatlantic connections, diplomatic relations, and post-New France French-Indian relations.
[more]

front cover of French Canadians in Michigan
French Canadians in Michigan
John P. DuLong
Michigan State University Press, 2001

As the first European settlers in Michigan, the French Canadians left an indelible mark on the place names and early settlement patterns of the Great Lakes State. Because of its importance in the fur trade, many French Canadians migrated to Michigan, settling primarily along the Detroit- Illinois trade route, and throughout the fur trade avenues of the Straits of Mackinac. When the British conquered New France in 1763, most Europeans in Michigan were Francophones. John DuLong explores the history and influence of these early French Canadians, and traces, as well, the successive 19th- and 20th-century waves of industrial migration from Quebec, creating new communities outside the old fur trade routes of their ancestors.

[more]

front cover of The French Imperial Nation-State
The French Imperial Nation-State
Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars
Gary Wilder
University of Chicago Press, 2005
France experienced a period of crisis following World War I when the relationship between the nation and its colonies became a subject of public debate. The French Imperial Nation-State focuses on two intersecting movements that redefined imperial politics—colonial humanism led by administrative reformers in West Africa and the Paris-based Negritude project, comprising African and Caribbean elites.

Gary Wilder develops a sophisticated account of the contradictory character of colonial government and examines the cultural nationalism of Negritude as a multifaceted movement rooted in an alternative black public sphere. He argues that interwar France must be understood as an imperial nation-state—an integrated sociopolitical system that linked a parliamentary republic to an administrative empire. An interdisciplinary study of colonial modernity combining French history, colonial studies, and social theory, The French Imperial Nation-State will compel readers to revise conventional assumptions about the distinctions between republicanism and racism, metropolitan and colonial societies, and national and transnational processes.
[more]

front cover of French in Michigan
French in Michigan
Russell M. Magnaghi
Michigan State University Press, 2016
Compared to other nationalities, few French have immigrated to the United States, and the state of Michigan is no exception in that regard. Although the French came in small numbers, those who did settle in or pass through Michigan played important roles as either permanent residents or visitors.
The colonial French served as explorers, soldiers, missionaries, fur traders, and colonists. Later, French priests and nuns were influential in promoting Catholicism in the state and in developing schools and hospitals. Father Gabriel Richard fled the violence of the French Revolution and became a prominent and influential citizen of the state as a U.S. Congressman and one of the founders of the University of Michigan. French observers of Michigan life included Alexis de Tocqueville. French entrepreneurs opened copper mines and a variety of service-oriented businesses. Louis Fasquelle became the first foreign-language instructor at the University of Michigan, and François A. Artault introduced photography to the Upper Peninsula. As pioneers of the early automobile, the French made a major contribution to the language used in auto manufacturing.
[more]

front cover of Frenchtown Chronicles of Prairie du Chien
Frenchtown Chronicles of Prairie du Chien
History and Folklore from Wisconsin's Frontier
Mary Elise Antoine
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016

Albert Coryer, the grandson of a fur trade voyageur-turned-farmer, had a gift for storytelling. Born in 1877, he grew up in Prairie du Chien hearing tales of days gone by from his parents, grandparents, and neighbors who lived in the Frenchtown area. Throughout his life, Albert soaked up the local oral traditions, including narratives about early residents, local landmarks, interesting and funny events, ethnic customs, myths, and folklore.

Late in life, this lively man who had worked as a farm laborer and janitor drew a detailed illustrated map of the Prairie du Chien area and began to write his stories out longhand, in addition to sharing them in an interview with a local historian and folklore scholar. The map, stories, and interview transcript provide a colorful account of Prairie du Chien in the late nineteenth century, when it was undergoing significant demographic, social, and economic change. With sharp historical context provided by editors Lucy Eldersveld Murphy and Mary Elise Antoine, Coryer’s tales offer an unparalleled window into the ethnic community comprised of the old fur trade families, Native Americans, French Canadian farmers, and their descendants.

[more]

front cover of From Bananas to Buttocks
From Bananas to Buttocks
The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture
Edited by Myra Mendible
University of Texas Press, 2007

From the exuberant excesses of Carmen Miranda in the "tutti frutti hat" to the curvaceous posterior of Jennifer Lopez, the Latina body has long been a signifier of Latina/o identity in U.S. popular culture. But how does this stereotype of the exotic, erotic Latina "bombshell" relate, if at all, to real Latina women who represent a wide spectrum of ethnicities, national origins, cultures, and physical appearances? How are ideas about "Latinidad" imagined, challenged, and inscribed on Latina bodies? What racial, class, and other markers of identity do representations of the Latina body signal or reject?

In this broadly interdisciplinary book, experts from the fields of Latina/o studies, media studies, communication, comparative literature, women's studies, and sociology come together to offer the first wide-ranging look at the construction and representation of Latina identity in U.S. popular culture. The authors consider such popular figures as actresses Lupe Vélez, Salma Hayek, and Jennifer Lopez; singers Shakira and Celia Cruz; and even the Hispanic Barbie doll in her many guises. They investigate the media discourses surrounding controversial Latinas such as Lorena Bobbitt and Marisleysis González. And they discuss Latina representations in Lupe Solano's series of mystery books and in the popular TV shows El Show de Cristina and Laura en América. This extensive treatment of Latina representation in popular culture not only sheds new light on how meaning is produced through images of the Latina body, but also on how these representations of Latinas are received, revised, and challenged.

[more]

front cover of From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi
From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi
Our Embassy Years during Genocide
By Ambassador Robert Krueger and Kathleen Tobin Krueger
University of Texas Press, 2007

In 1994, while nations everywhere stood idly by, 800,000 people were slaughtered in eight weeks in Rwanda. Arriving as U.S. Ambassador to neighboring Burundi a few weeks later, Bob Krueger began drawing international attention to the genocide also proceeding in Burundi, where he sought to minimize the killing and to preserve its fledgling democratic government from destruction by its own army. From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi is a compelling eyewitness account of both a horrific and persistent genocide and of the ongoing efforts of many courageous individuals to build a more just society.

Krueger and his wife Kathleen graphically document the slaughter occurring all around them, as well as their repeated efforts to get the U.S. government and the international community to take notice and take action. Bob Krueger reconstructs the events of the military coup that precipitated the Burundi genocide and describes his efforts to uncover the truth by digging up graves and interviewing survivors. In straightforward and powerful language, Kathleen Krueger recounts her family's experience living amid civil war, including when she faced down a dozen AK-47-wielding African soldiers to save the life of a household worker.

From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi shines a piercing light on a genocide that has gone largely unreported, and identifies those responsible for it. It also offers hope that as the truth emerges and the perpetrators are brought to account, the people of Burundi will at last achieve peace and reconciliation.

[more]

front cover of From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express
From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express
A History of Chinese Food in the United States
Liu, Haiming
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Received an Honorable Mention for the 2015-2016 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature, Adult Non-Fiction category

Finalist in the Culinary History category of the 2016 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards​


From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express takes readers on a compelling journey from the California Gold Rush to the present, letting readers witness both the profusion of Chinese restaurants across the United States and the evolution of many distinct American-Chinese iconic dishes from chop suey to General Tso’s chicken. Along the way, historian Haiming Liu explains how the immigrants adapted their traditional food to suit local palates, and gives readers a taste of Chinese cuisine embedded in the bittersweet story of Chinese Americans.
 
Treating food as a social history, Liu explores why Chinese food changed and how it has influenced American culinary culture, and how Chinese restaurants have become places where shared ethnic identity is affirmed—not only for Chinese immigrants but also for American Jews. The book also includes a look at national chains like P. F. Chang’s and a consideration of how Chinese food culture continues to spread around the globe. 
 
Drawing from hundreds of historical and contemporary newspaper reports, journal articles, and writings on food in both English and Chinese, From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express represents a groundbreaking piece of scholarly research. It can be enjoyed equally as a fascinating set of stories about Chinese migration, cultural negotiation, race and ethnicity, diverse flavored Chinese cuisine and its share in American food market today.
[more]

front cover of From French Community to Missouri Town
From French Community to Missouri Town
Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century
Bonnie Stepenoff
University of Missouri Press, 2006
A small French settlement thrived for half a century on the west bank of the Mississippi River before the Louisiana Purchase made it part of the United States in 1803. But for the citizens of Ste. Genevieve, becoming Americans involved more than simply acknowledging a transfer of power.
            Bonnie Stepenoff has written an engaging history of Missouri’s oldest permanent settlement to explore what it meant to be Americanized in our country’s early years. Picking up where other studies of Ste. Genevieve leave off, she traces the dramatic changes wrought by the transfer of sovereignty to show the process of social and economic transformation on a young nation’s new frontier.
            Stepenoff tells how French and Spanish residents—later joined by German immigrants and American settlers—made necessary compromises to achieve order and community, forging a democracy that represented different approaches to such matters as education, religion, property laws, and women’s rights. By examining the town’s historical circumstances, its legal institutions, and especially its popular customs, she shows how Ste. Genevieve differed from other towns along the Mississippi.
            Stepenoff has plumbed the town’s voluminous archives to share previously untold stories of Ste. Genevieve citizens that reflect how Americanization affected their lives. In these pages we meet a free woman of color who sued a prominent white family for support of her children; a slave who obtained her own freedom and then purchased her daughters’ freedom; a local sheriff who joined Aaron Burr’s conspiracy; and a doctor who treated cholera victims and later became a U.S. senator. More than colorful characters, these are real people shown pursuing justice and liberty under a new flag.
The story of Ste. Genevieve serves as a testament to Tocqueville’s observations on American democracy while also challenging some of the commonly held beliefs about that institution. From French Community to Missouri Town provides a better understanding not only of how democracy works but also of what it meant to become American when America was still young.
[more]

front cover of From Household to Empire
From Household to Empire
Society and Economy in Early Colonial New Mexico
Heather B. Trigg
University of Arizona Press, 2005
Published in cooperation with the
William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

Settlers at Santa Fe and outlying homesteads during the seventeenth century established a thriving economy that saw the exchange of commodities produced by indigenous peoples, settlers, and Franciscan friars for goods manufactured as far away as China, France, and Turkey. This early Spanish colonial period in New Mexico provides an opportunity to explore both economic activity within a colony and the relations between colony and homeland. By examining the material remains of this era from 1598 to 1680, Heather Trigg reveals a more complete picture of colonial life. Drawing on both archaeological and historical sources, Trigg analyzes the various levels of economic activity that developed: production of items in colonial households, exchanges between households, and trade between the colony and Mexico. Rather than focusing only on the flow of products and services, she also explores the social mechanisms that likely had a significant impact on the economic life of the colony. Because economic activity was important to so many aspects of daily life, she is able to show how and why colonial society worked the way it did. While focusing on the colonists, she also explores their relations with Pueblo peoples. Through her analysis of these two pools of data, Trigg generates insights not usually gleaned from the limited texts of the period, providing information about average colonists in addition to the governors and clergy usually covered in historical accounts. By using specific examples from historical documents and archaeological materials, she shows that colonists from all levels of society modified both formal and informal rules of economic behavior to better fit the reality of the colonial frontier. With its valuable comparative data on colonization, From Household to Empire provides a novel way of examining colonial economies by focusing on the maintenance and modification of social values. For all readers fascinated by the history of the Southwest, this book provides a fuller picture of life in early New Mexico than has previously been seen.
[more]

front cover of From Peones to Politicos
From Peones to Politicos
Class and Ethnicity in a South Texas Town, 1900–1987
By Douglas E Foley, with Clarice Mota, Donald E. Post, and Ignacio Lozano
University of Texas Press, 1988

How does a relatively powerless ethnic group deal with the problems of economic inequality and racial discrimination? How do they gain power in the community? From Peones to Politicos examines these questions in detail, focusing on the changes in Mexicano-Anglo relations in one small South Texas community called North Town. These changes are typical of evolving Mexicano-Anglo relations in much of Texas and the Southwest.

The authors divide their study into three historical periods: the rancho era (1900–1930), the colonia era (1930–1970), and the contemporary period (1970–1977). They trace how Mexicano-Anglo relations have evolved away from the extremely exploitative, paternalistic sharecropper system of the rancho era, when open racism, strict social segregation, and effective Anglo political machines prevailed. They reveal, by contrast, how Mexicanos have become a power to be reckoned with by developing their own economic and political leaders and ethnic political organizations and challenging the Anglo control of the city, school, and county governments. The study also shows how Mexican American family practices have been changed by this transformation of the local political economy.

This revised edition of From Peones to Politicos presents updated fieldwork and additional discussion of class theory and the study of racial orders. Of special interest are reactions to the study by North Town residents themselves, which appear in the new Part IV.

[more]

front cover of From Rebellion to Riots
From Rebellion to Riots
Collective Violence on Indonesian Borneo
Jamie S. Davidson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
From Rebellion to Riots is a critical analysis of the roots of contemporary violence in one of Indonesia’s most ethnically heterogeneous provinces, West Kalimantan. Since the late 1960s, this province has suffered periodic outbreaks of ethnic violence among its Dayak, Malay, Madurese, and ethnic Chinese populations. Citing evidence from his research, internal military documents, and ethnographic accounts, Jamie S. Davidson refutes popular explanations for these flare-ups. The recurrent violence has less to do with a clash of cultures, the ills of New Order-led development, or indigenous marginalization than with the ongoing politicization of ethnic and indigenous identity in the region.
            Looking at key historical moments, markedly different in their particulars, Davidson reveals the important links between ethnic violence and subnational politics. In one case, army officers in Soeharto’s recently established New Order regime encouraged anti-Chinese sentiments. To move against communist-inspired rebellion, they recruited indigenous Dayaks to expunge tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese from interior towns and villages. This counter-insurgent bloodshed inadvertently initiated a series of clashes between Dayaks and Madurese, another migrant community. Driven by an indigenous empowerment movement and efforts by local elites to control benefits provided by decentralization and democratization, these low-intensity riots rose to immense proportions in the late 1990s. From Rebellion to Riots demonstrates that the endemic violence in this vast region is not the inevitable outcome of its ethnic diversity, and reveals that the initial impetus for collective bloodshed is not necessarily the same as the forces that sustain it.

“A comprehensive case study . . . . Essential reading for students of the West Kalimantan violence.”—Dave McRae, Indonesia
[more]

front cover of From Text to Context
From Text to Context
The Turn to History in Modern Judaism
Ismar Schorsch
Brandeis University Press, 1994
Essays examining the emergence of Jewish scholarship during the period 1818 - 1919, concentrating on the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.
[more]

logo for Rutgers University Press
From that Place and Time
A Memoir, 1938-1947
Dawidowicz, Lucy
Rutgers University Press, 2008
From that Place and Time is the memoir of Lucy S. Dawidowicz, an American-Jewish historian who set out to study Yiddish language and Jewish history at YIVO, the Jewish Scientific Institute in Vilna, Poland, in 1938. Escaping Poland only days before the Nazi onslaught, she worked in the New York YIVO during the war, and returned to Europe from 1946 to 1947 to aid Jewish displaced persons in Munich and Belsen with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Dawidowicz's memoir not only describes her pre-war year in Jewish Eastern Europe, but also treats the ghostly post-war period, and her role in salvaging what remained of Vilna's scorched Jewish archives and libraries.

Nancy Sinkoff's new introduction explores the historical forces, particularly the dynamic world of secular Yiddish culture, which shaped Dawidowicz's decision to journey to Poland and her reassessment of those forces in the last years of her life.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter