A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY1403 start with D start with D
D-Day, the Allied invasion of northwestern France in June 1944, has remained in the forefront of American memories of the Second World War to this day. Depictions in books, news stories, documentaries, museums, monuments, memorial celebrations, speeches, games, and Hollywood spectaculars have overwhelmingly romanticized the assault as an event in which citizen-soldiers—the everyday heroes of democracy—engaged evil foes in a decisive clash fought for liberty, national redemption, and world salvation.
In D-Day Remembered, Michael R. Dolski explores the evolution of American D-Day tales over the course of the past seven decades. He shows the ways in which that particular episode came to overshadow so many others in portraying the twentieth century’s most devastating cataclysm as “the Good War.” With depth and insight, he analyzes how depictions in various media, such as the popular histories of Stephen Ambrose and films like The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan, have time and again reaffirmed cherished American notions of democracy, fair play, moral order, and the militant, yet non-militaristic, use of power for divinely sanctioned purposes. Only during the Vietnam era, when Americans had to confront an especially stark challenge to their pietistic sense of nationhood, did memories of D-Day momentarily fade. They soon reemerged, however, as the country sought to move beyond the lamentable conflict in Southeast Asia.
Even as portrayals of D-Day have gone from sanitized early versions to more realistic acknowledgments of tactical mistakes and the horrific costs of the battle, the overarching story continues to be, for many, a powerful reminder of moral rectitude, military skill, and world mission. While the time to historicize this morality tale more fully and honestly has long since come, Dolski observes, the lingering positive connotations of D-Day indicate that the story is not yet finished.
Silent parachutes dotting the night sky—that’s how one woman in Normandy in June 1944 learned that the D-Day invasion was underway. Though they yearned for liberation, the people of Normandy steeled themselves for further warfare, knowing that their homes, land, and fellow citizens would have to bear the brunt of the attack. In D-Day through French Eyes, Mary Louise Roberts resets our view of the usual stories of that momentous operation, taking readers across the Channel to view the invasion anew. Roberts builds her history from an impressive range of gripping first-person accounts from French citizens, reinvigorating a story we thought we knew. The result is a fresh perspective on the heroism, sacrifice, and achievement of D-Day.
The first fruits of Greek botany.
Theophrastus of Eresus in Lesbos, born about 370 BC, is the author of the most important botanical works that have survived from classical antiquity. He was in turn student, collaborator, and successor of Aristotle. Like his predecessor he was interested in all aspects of human knowledge and experience, especially natural science. His writings on plants form a counterpart to Aristotle’s zoological works.
In the Enquiry into Plants Theophrastus classifies and describes varieties—covering trees, plants of particular regions, shrubs, herbaceous plants, and cereals; in the last of the nine books he focuses on plant juices and medicinal properties of herbs. This edition is in two volumes; the second contains two additional treatises, On Odours and Weather Signs.
In De causis plantarum Theophrastus turns to plant physiology. Books 1 and 2 are concerned with generation, sprouting, flowering and fruiting, and the effects of climate. In Books 3 and 4 Theophrastus studies cultivation and agricultural methods. In Books 5 and 6 he discusses plant breeding; diseases and other causes of death; and distinctive flavors and odors. The Loeb Classical Library edition is in three volumes.
Theophrastus’ celebrated Characters is of a quite different nature. This collection of descriptive sketches is the earliest known character-writing and a striking reflection of contemporary life.
The first fruits of Greek botany.
Theophrastus of Eresus in Lesbos, born about 370 BC, is the author of the most important botanical works that have survived from classical antiquity. He was in turn student, collaborator, and successor of Aristotle. Like his predecessor he was interested in all aspects of human knowledge and experience, especially natural science. His writings on plants form a counterpart to Aristotle’s zoological works.
In the Enquiry into Plants Theophrastus classifies and describes varieties—covering trees, plants of particular regions, shrubs, herbaceous plants, and cereals; in the last of the nine books he focuses on plant juices and medicinal properties of herbs. This edition is in two volumes; the second contains two additional treatises, On Odours and Weather Signs.
In De causis plantarum Theophrastus turns to plant physiology. Books 1 and 2 are concerned with generation, sprouting, flowering and fruiting, and the effects of climate. In Books 3 and 4 Theophrastus studies cultivation and agricultural methods. In Books 5 and 6 he discusses plant breeding; diseases and other causes of death; and distinctive flavors and odors. The Loeb Classical Library edition is in three volumes.
Theophrastus’ celebrated Characters is of a quite different nature. This collection of descriptive sketches is the earliest known character-writing and a striking reflection of contemporary life.
The first fruits of Greek botany.
Theophrastus of Eresus in Lesbos, born about 370 BC, is the author of the most important botanical works that have survived from classical antiquity. He was in turn student, collaborator, and successor of Aristotle. Like his predecessor he was interested in all aspects of human knowledge and experience, especially natural science. His writings on plants form a counterpart to Aristotle’s zoological works.
In the Enquiry into Plants Theophrastus classifies and describes varieties—covering trees, plants of particular regions, shrubs, herbaceous plants, and cereals; in the last of the nine books he focuses on plant juices and medicinal properties of herbs. This edition is in two volumes; the second contains two additional treatises, On Odours and Weather Signs.
In De causis plantarum Theophrastus turns to plant physiology. Books 1 and 2 are concerned with generation, sprouting, flowering and fruiting, and the effects of climate. In Books 3 and 4 Theophrastus studies cultivation and agricultural methods. In Books 5 and 6 he discusses plant breeding; diseases and other causes of death; and distinctive flavors and odors. The Loeb Classical Library edition is in three volumes.
Theophrastus’ celebrated Characters is of a quite different nature. This collection of descriptive sketches is the earliest known character-writing and a striking reflection of contemporary life.
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize
Winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize
A New Yorker, Financial Times, Spectator, Times, and Telegraph Book of the Year
In this definitive biography of the mythic general who refused to accept the Nazi domination of France, Julian Jackson captures Charles de Gaulle as never before. Drawing on unpublished letters, memoirs, and papers from the recently opened de Gaulle archive, he shows how this volatile visionary of staunch faith and conservative beliefs infuriated Churchill, challenged American hegemony, recognized the limitations of colonial ambitions in Algeria and Vietnam, and put a broken France back at the center of world affairs.
“With a fluent style and near-total command of existing and newly available sources…Julian Jackson has come closer than anyone before him to demystifying this conservative at war with the status quo, for whom national interests were inseparable from personal honor.”
—Richard Norton Smith, Wall Street Journal
“A sweeping-yet-concise introduction to the most brilliant, infuriating, and ineffably French of men.”
—Ross Douthat, New York Times
“Classically composed and authoritative…Jackson writes wonderful political history.”
—Adam Gopnik, New Yorker
“A remarkable book in which the man widely chosen as the Greatest Frenchman is dissected, intelligently and lucidly, then put together again in an extraordinary fair-minded, highly readable portrait. Throughout, the book tells a thrilling story.”
—Antonia Fraser, New Statesman
“Makes awesome reading, and is a tribute to the fascination of its subject, and to Jackson’s mastery of it…A triumph, and hugely readable.”
—Max Hastings, Sunday Times
Born in Arizona Territory to Italian immigrant parents, De Grazia had a humble childhood as a copper miner’s son, which later influenced his famous persona. De Grazia often held forth at his gallery in Tucson’s Catalina foothills dressed in a pseudo-prospector’s getup of scraggly beard, jeans, flannel shirt, boots, and beat-up cowboy hat. Outrageous stories of womanizing, scores of children, and drinking binges created an eclectic image that fueled stories of mythic proportions, along with global sales of his colorful paintings inspired by the Southwest and Mexico. He made millions through his paintings and the licensing of his art for greeting cards and trinkets. Critics called his work kitsch or commercial, yet thousands of admirers continue to love it.
Calling De Grazia a complicated man doesn’t begin to explain him. He once described himself as “not saint nor devil, but both.” In this first comprehensive biography of De Grazia, authors James W. Johnson with Marilyn D. Johnson tell the story of a life remarkably lived.
Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, 2004
San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2005
La familia de León was one of the foundation stones on which Texas was built. Martín de León and his wife Patricia de la Garza left a comfortable life in Mexico for the hardships and uncertainties of the Texas frontier in 1801. Together, they established family ranches in South Texas and, in 1824, the town of Victoria and the de León colony on the Guadalupe River (along with Stephen F. Austin's colony, the only completely successful colonization effort in Texas). They and their descendents survived and prospered under four governments, as the society in which they lived evolved from autocratic to republican and the economy from which they drew their livelihood changed from one of mercantile control to one characterized by capitalistic investments.
Combining the storytelling flair of a novelist with a scholar's concern for the facts, Ana Carolina Castillo Crimm here recounts the history of three generations of the de León family. She follows Martín and Patricia from their beginnings in Mexico through the establishment of the family ranches in Texas and the founding of the de León colony and the town of Victoria. Then she details how, after Martín's death in 1834, Patricia and her children endured the Texas Revolution, exile in New Orleans and Mexico, expropriation of their lands, and, after returning to Texas, years of legal battles to regain their property. Representative of the experiences of many Tejanos whose stories have yet to be written, the history of the de León family is the story of the Tejano settlers of Texas.
From the Preface:
The de Peysters were an armigerous family of Ghent, and can be traced as landowners of some importance in that neighborhood as far back as the thirteenth century. By custom they were associated with various of the mediaeval guilds of Ghent, especially the Goldsmiths' Guild, serving frequently as Chief-Dean and Syndic of more than one. Many, including Johannes de Peyster's grandfather, Josse de Peyster (1554- ?) of Ghent, were described as goldsmith, probably in the old meaning of banker. Their conversion to Protestantism caused the family to take refuge in Holland, while some established themselves in London and in Rouen.
The interest of the author, Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr., in his Dutch and Colonial ancestors prompted him to write this book. His painstaking research has given us a record of the de Peyster family up to the present, and brought to light many interesting and little-known facts about the family. Attention is called to the variation in the spelling of some names, in many instances of the same person, but the spelling follows the records as found.
1993 Choice Outstanding Academic Book, sponsored by Choice Magazine.
The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with North American Indians in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians the surviving De Soto chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. These documents, available here in a two volume set, are the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture that vanished in the wake of European contact.
1993 Choice Outstanding Academic Book, sponsored by Choice Magazine.
The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with North American Indians in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians the surviving De Soto chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. These documents, available here in a two volume set, are the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture that vanished in the wake of European contact.
The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with indigenous North Americans in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. The De Soto Chronicles Volume 1 and Volume 2 present for the first time all four primary accounts of the De Soto expedition together in English translation.
The four primary accounts are generally referred to as Elvas, Rangel, Biedma (in Volume 1), and Garcilaso, or the Inca (in Volume 2). In this landmark 1993 publication, Clayton’s team presents the four accounts with literary and historical introductions. They further add brief essays about De Soto and the expedition, translations of De Soto documents from the Spanish Archivo General de Indias, two short biographies of De Soto, and bibliographical studies.
For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, The De Soto Chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. They form the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture largely lost in the wake of European contact.
1993 Choice Outstanding Academic Book, sponsored by Choice Magazine.
The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with North American Indians in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians the surviving De Soto chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. These documents, available here in a two volume set, are the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture that vanished in the wake of European contact.
The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with indigenous North Americans in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. The De Soto Chronicles Volume 1 and Volume 2 present for the first time all four primary accounts of the De Soto expedition together in English translation.
The four primary accounts are generally referred to as Elvas, Rangel, Biedma (in Volume 1), and Garcilaso, or the Inca (in Volume 2). In this landmark 1993 publication, Clayton’s team presents the four accounts with literary and historical introductions. They further add brief essays about De Soto and the expedition, translations of De Soto documents from the Spanish Archivo General de Indias, two short biographies of De Soto, and bibliographical studies.
For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, The De Soto Chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. They form the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture largely lost in the wake of European contact.
In the 2000s, as the World Bank was reeling from revelations of past hydropower failures, it nonetheless promoted the enormous Nam Theun 2 project. NT2, the Bank believed, offered a new, wiser model of dam development that would alleviate poverty, protect the environment, engage locally affected people in a transparent fashion, and stimulate political transformation. This was a tall order. For the first time, this book shows in detail why, despite assertions of success from the World Bank and other agencies involved in the project, the dam's true story has been one of substantial loss for affected villagers and the regional environment. Nam Theun 2 is an important case study that illustrates much broader problems of global development policy.
During the Sonoran Desert’s glorious and brutal summer season Annerino, a photojournalist, author, and explorer, watched four border crossers step off a bus and nonchalantly head into the American no-man’s land. On assignment for Newsweek, Annerino did more than just watch on that blistering August day. He joined them on their ultramarathon, life-or-death quest to find work to feed their families, amid temperatures so hot your parched throat burns from breathing and drinking water is the ultimate treasure.
As their water dwindled and the heat punished them, Annerino and the desperate men continued marching fifty miles in twenty-four hours and managed to survive their harrowing journey across the deadliest migrant trail in North America, El Camino del Diablo, “The Road of the Devil.” Driven by the mounting death toll, John returned again and again to the sun-scorched despoblado (uninhabited lands)—where hidden bighorn sheep water tanks glowed like diamonds—to document the lives, struggles, and heartbreaking remains of those who continue to disappear and perish in a region that’s claimed the lives of more than 9,700 men, women, and children.
Following the historic paths of indigenous Hia Ced O’odham (People of the Sand), Spanish missionary explorer Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino, and California-bound Forty-Niners, Annerino’s journeys on foot, crisscrossed the alluring yet treacherous desert trails of the El Camino del Diablo, Hohokam shell trail, and O’odham salt trails where hundreds of gambusinos (Mexican miners) and Euro-American pioneers succumbed during the 1850s.
As the migrants kept coming, the deaths kept mounting, and Annerino kept returning. He crossed celebrated Sonoran Desert sanctuaries—Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Barry M. Goldwater Range, sacred ancestral lands of the Tohono O’odham—that had become lost horizons, killing grounds, graveyards, and deadly smuggling corridors that also claimed the lives of National Park rangers and Border Patrol agents. John Annerino’s mission was to save someone, anyone, everyone—when he could find them.
Dead in Their Tracks is the saga of a merciless despoblado in the Great Southwest, of desperate yet hopeful migrants and refugees who keep staggering north. It is the story of ranchers, locals, and Border Patrol trackers who’ve saved countless lives, and heavily armed smugglers who haunt an inhospitable, if beautiful, wilderness that remains off the radar for journalists and news organizations that dare not set foot in the American desert waiting to welcome them on its terms.
The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journey—but it’s also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependant on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.
Personal and profane, funny and fervent, The Dead Ladies Project ranges from the nineteenth century to the present, from historical figures to brand-new hangovers, in search, ultimately, of an answer to a bedrock question: How does a person decide how to live their life?
If George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are the saints in America’s civil religion, then the twenty-ninth president, Warren G. Harding, is our sinner. Prior to the Nixon administration, the Harding scandals were the most infamous of the twentieth century. Harding is consistently judged a failure, ranking dead last among his peers.
By examining the public memory of Harding, Phillip G. Payne offers the first significant reinterpretation of his presidency in a generation. Rather than repeating the old stories, Payne examines the contexts and continued meaning of the Harding scandals for various constituencies. Payne explores such topics as Harding’s importance as a midwestern small-town booster, his rumored black ancestry, the role of various biographers in shaping his early image, the tension between public memory and academic history, and, finally, his status as an icon of presidential failure in contemporary political debates. Harding was a popular president and was widely mourned when he died in office in 1923; but with his death began the construction of his public memory and his fall from political grace.
In Dead Last, Payne explores how Harding’s name became synonymous with corruption, cronyism, and incompetence and how it is used to this day as an example of what a president should not be.
In more than forty years at the Wisconsin State Journal, Hesselberg frequently found himself writing about fatal accidents, crime investigations, and the deaths of the wealthy, famous, or notorious. But he was most drawn to the curious, the unknown, and the unsung—the deaths that normally wouldn’t make much of a splash, if any mention at all, in the news columns of a daily paper.
Digging deeper, he uncovered the extraordinary among the ordinary, memorializing the lives of a sword designer, a radio villain, a pioneering female detective, a homeless woman who spoke fluent French, a beloved classroom tarantula, and many more. Their stories are alternately amusing, sad, surprising, and profound. Together they speak to a shared human experience and inspire us to see the people around us with new eyes, valuing the lives while they are still being lived.
Winner of the Bolton-Johnson Prize
Winner of the Utley Prize
Winner of the Distinguished Book Award, Society for Military History
“The Dead March incorporates the work of Mexican historians…in a story that involves far more than military strategy, diplomatic maneuvering, and American political intrigue…Studded with arresting insights and convincing observations.”
—James Oakes, New York Review of Books
“Superb…A remarkable achievement, by far the best general account of the war now available. It is critical, insightful, and rooted in a wealth of archival sources; it brings far more of the Mexican experience than any other work…and it clearly demonstrates the social and cultural dynamics that shaped Mexican and American politics and military force.”
—Journal of American History
It has long been held that the United States emerged victorious from the Mexican–American War because its democratic system was more stable and its citizens more loyal. But this award-winning history shows that Americans dramatically underestimated the strength of Mexican patriotism and failed to see how bitterly Mexicans resented their claims to national and racial superiority. Their fierce resistance surprised US leaders, who had expected a quick victory with few casualties.
By focusing on how ordinary soldiers and civilians in both countries understood and experienced the conflict, The Dead March offers a clearer picture of the brief, bloody war that redrew the map of North America.
Now in paperback!
The volume covers Qumran scholarship in separate countries: the USA, Canada, Israel, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Italy, and Eastern Europe. Each essay carries a detailed bibliography for the respective country. Biographies of all the major scholars active in the field are briefly given as well. This book thereby exhaustively surveys past and present Qumran research, outlining its particular development in various circumstances and national contexts. For the first time, perspectives and information not recorded in any other publication are highlighted.
Features:
A reexamination of the people and movements associated with Qumran, their outlook on the world, and what bound them together
Dead Sea Scrolls, Revise and Repeat examines the identity of the Qumran movement by reassessing former conclusions and bringing new methodologies to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The collection as a whole addresses questions of identity as they relate to law, language, and literary formation; considerations of time and space; and demarcations of the body. The thirteen essays in this volume reassess the categorization of rule texts, the reuse of scripture, the significance of angelic fellowship, the varieties of calendrical use, and celibacy within the Qumran movement. Contributors consider identity in the Dead Sea Scrolls from new interdisciplinary perspectives, including spatial theory, legal theory, historical linguistics, ethnicity theory, cognitive literary theory, monster theory, and masculinity theory.
Features
- Essays that draw on new theoretical frameworks and recent advances in Qumran studies
- A tribute to the late Peter Flint, whose scholarship helped to shape Qumran studies
This easy-to-use reference work documents the many long-vanished towns, forts, settlements, and former state capitals that were once thriving communities of Alabama.
Dead Towns of Alabama is not merely a series of obituaries for dead towns. Instead, it brings back to life 83 Indian towns, 77 fort sites, and 112 colonial, territorial, and state towns. W. Stuart Harris conjures up a wealth of fascinating images from Alabama's rich and colorful past--images of life as the Indians lived it, of colonial life in the wilderness, of Spanish explorers and French exiles, of danger and romance, of riverboats and railroads, of plantations and gold mines, of stagecoaches and ferries. Overall, it presents a thoroughly absorbing panorama of Alabama's early history.
Here we learn about two former capitals--St. Stephens and Cahaba--that have deteriorated to mouldering ruins now. We learn about once thriving communities--county seats, river landings and crossings, trading posts, junctions, and other settlements--that time has forgotten. Absent from most maps, these sites come alive again in Harris's fascinating account, filled anew with the bustling activity of their former inhabitants.
First published in 1977, Dead Towns of Alabama is a unique guidebook to every region of the state. It is an invaluable resource for historians, students, tourists, and anyone interested in exploring Alabama's interesting historical and cultural past.
In Deadline, anthropologist Robert Samet answers this question by focusing on the relationship between populism, the press, and what he calls “the will to security.” Drawing on nearly a decade of ethnographic research alongside journalists on the Caracas crime beat, he shows how the media shaped the politics of security from the ground up. Paradoxically, Venezuela’s punitive turn was not the product of dictatorship, but rather an outgrowth of practices and institutions normally associated with democracy. Samet reckons with this apparent contradiction by exploring the circulation of extralegal denuncias (accusations) by crime journalists, editors, sources, and audiences. Denuncias are a form of public shaming or exposé that channels popular anger against the powers that be. By showing how denuncias mobilize dissent, Deadline weaves a much larger tale about the relationship between the press, popular outrage, and the politics of security in the twenty-first century.
The threat of biological weapons has never attracted as much public attention as in the past five years. Current concerns largely relate to the threat of weapons acquisition and use by rogue states or by terrorists. But the threat has deeper roots—it has been evident for fifty years that biological agents could be used to cause mass casualties and large-scale economic damage. Yet there has been little historical analysis of such weapons over the past half-century.
Deadly Cultures sets out to fill this gap by analyzing the historical developments since 1945 and addressing three central issues: Why have states continued or begun programs for acquiring biological weapons? Why have states terminated biological weapons programs? How have states demonstrated that they have truly terminated their biological weapons programs?
We now live in a world in which the basic knowledge needed to develop biological weapons is more widely available than ever before. Deadly Cultures provides the lessons from history that we urgently need in order to strengthen the long-standing prohibition of biological weapons.
Back Cover
“If there is a paradigmatic tale of occupational health . . . Deadly Dust is it.”
—James L. Weeks, Science
“Rosner and Markowitz have produced a carefully crafted history of the rise and fall of this occupational disease, focusing especially on the political forces behind changing disease definitions. . . Deadly Dust comes as a fresh breeze into one of the more stuffy and too often ignored alleys of medical history.”
—Robert N. Proctor, The Journal of the American Medical Association
“A thought-provoking, densely referenced, uncompromising history. . . Like all good history, it challenges our basic assumptions about how the world is ordered and offers both factual information and a conceptual framework for rethinking what we ‘know’.”
—Rosemary K. Sokas, The New England Journal of Medicine
Back Cover continued
“Deadly Dust raises an important methodological problem that has long gone underarticulated in medical historical circles: how can social historians of medicine offer political or economic explanations for the scientific efforts of their professional subjects without losing a grip on the biological aspects of disease?”
—Christopher Sellers, The Journal of the History of Medicine
"A sophisticated understanding of how class and conflict shape social, economic, political, and intellectual change underlies this first attempt at a history of occupational health spanning the twentieth century."
—Claudia Clark, The Journal of American History%; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"
"This volume is well worth reading as a significant contribution to American social history."
—Charles O. Jackson, The American Historical Review
David Rosner is Distinguished Professor of History and Sociomedical Sciences, and Director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Columbia University.
Gerald Markowitz is Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.
The Deadly Truth chronicles the complex interactions between disease and the peoples of America from the pre-Columbian world to the present.
Grob's ultimate lesson is stark but valuable: there can be no final victory over disease. The world in which we live undergoes constant change, which in turn creates novel risks to human health and life. We conquer particular diseases, but others always arise in their stead. In a powerful challenge to our tendency to see disease as unnatural and its virtual elimination as a real possibility, Grob asserts the undeniable biological persistence of disease.
Diseases ranging from malaria to cancer have shaped the social landscape--sometimes through brief, furious outbreaks, and at other times through gradual occurrence, control, and recurrence. Grob integrates statistical data with particular peoples and places while giving us the larger patterns of the ebb and flow of disease over centuries. Throughout, we see how much of our history, culture, and nation-building was determined--in ways we often don't realize--by the environment and the diseases it fostered.
The way in which we live has shaped, and will continue to shape, the diseases from which we get sick and die. By accepting the presence of disease and understanding the way in which it has physically interacted with people and places in past eras, Grob illuminates the extraordinarily complex forces that shape our morbidity and mortality patterns and provides a realistic appreciation of the individual, social, environmental, and biological determinants of human health.
This is the harrowing story of one of the worst shipwrecks in Great Lakes history. In the early morning hours of November 29, 1966, the S.S. Daniel J. Morrell was caught in a deadly storm on Lake Huron. Waves higher than the ship crested over it, and winds exceeding sixty miles per hour whipped at its hull, splitting the 603-foot freighter into two giant pieces. Amazingly, after the bow went down, the stern blindly powered itself through the stormy seas for another five miles! Twenty-eight men drowned in the icy waters of Lake Huron, but one sailor—26-year-old Dennis Hale—miraculously survived the treacherous storm. Wearing only boxer shorts, a lifejacket, and a pea coat, Hale clung to a life raft in near-freezing temperatures for 38 hours until he was rescued late in the afternoon of the following day. Three of his fellow crewmates died in his raft.
In Deadly Voyage, Andrew Kantar recounts this tale of tragedy and triumph on Lake Huron. Informed by meticulous research and the eyewitness details provided by Hale, and illustrated with photographs from the Coast Guard search and rescue operation, Kantar depicts one of the most tragic shipwrecks in Great Lakes history.
The Columbus Day Storm of 1962 was a freak of nature, a weather outlier with deadly winds topping one hundred miles per hour. The storm killed dozens, injured hundreds, damaged more than fifty thousand homes, and leveled enough timber to build one million homes. To find an equally ferocious storm of its kind, fast-forward fifty years and cross the continent to Superstorm Sandy’s 2012 attack on the East Coast. While Superstorm Sandy was predicted days in advance, the Columbus Day Storm caught ill-equipped weather forecasters by surprise.
This unrivalled West Coast windstorm fueled the Asian log export market, helped give birth to the Oregon wine industry, and influenced the 1962 World Series. It remains a cautionary tale and the Pacific Northwest benchmark for severe windstorms in this era of climate change and weather uncertainty. From its genesis in the Marshall Islands to its final hours on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, the storm plowed an unparalleled path of destruction.
In A Deadly Wind, veteran journalist John Dodge tells a compelling story spiced with human drama, Cold War tension, and Pacific Northwest history. This is a must-read for the tens of thousands of storm survivors, for history buffs, and for anyone interested in the intersection of severe weather events and climate change.
Central to Deaf Empowerment is the struggle between the dominant hearing society and Deaf people over the best means of communication, with the educational setting as the constant battleground. This evocative work first tracks the history of interaction between these two factions, highlighting the speaking majority’s desire to compel Deaf people to conform to “the human sciences” conventionality by learning speech. Then, it sharply focuses on the development of the Deaf social movement's ideology to seek general recognition of sign language as a valid cultural variation. Also, the influence of social movements of the 60s and 70s is examined in relation to the changing context and perception of the Deaf movement, as well as to its rhetorical refinement.
Deaf Empowerment delineates the apex of effective Deaf rhetoric in describing the success of the Deaf President Now! protest at Gallaudet University in 1988, its aftermath, and ensuing strategies. It concludes with an assessment of the goal of a multicultural society and offers suggestions for community building through a new humanitarianism. Scholars of social movements and Deaf studies will find it to be a uniquely provocative addition to their libraries and classrooms.
The fifth volume in the Gallaudet Classics in Deaf Studies series features works written from 1764 up to1840. Pierre Desloges offers a stirring paean to sign language in an excerpt from his book, the first ever published by a deaf person. Saboureux de Fontenay and Jean Massieu, two prominent leaders, relate their respective experiences in autobiographical accounts. In separate essays, Charles-Michel de l’Epée and Roch-Ambroise Sicard describe systems for teaching manual French, followed by a critique of these methods by Roch-Ambroise Bébian, a well-known hearing friend of Deaf people during that era. Ferdinand Berthier, a renowned Deaf teacher and writer in the 19th century, concludes with a history of Deaf people up to that time.
The Deaf Experience shows clearly how this extraordinary era of French deaf education influenced the adoption of the manual method by the first schools for deaf students in America, in sharp contrast to the oral movement that repressed sign-language-centered education for nearly a century afterward. Deaf studies scholars and students alike will welcome the return of this invaluable resource.
Now, Jack R. Gannon’s original groundbreaking volume on Deaf history and culture is available once again. In Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America, Gannon brought together for the first time the story of the Deaf experience in America from a Deaf perspective. Recognizing the need to document the multifaceted history of this unique minority with its distinctive visual culture, he painstakingly gathered as much material as he could on Deaf American life. The result is a 17-chapter montage of artifacts and information that forms an utterly fascinating record from the early nineteenth century to the time of its original publication in 1981.
Deaf Heritage tracks the development of the Deaf community both chronologically and by significant subjects. The initial chapter treats the critical topics of early attempts at deaf education, the impact of Deaf and Black deaf teachers, the establishment of schools for the deaf, and the founding of Gallaudet College. Individual chapters cover the 1880s through the 1970s, mixing milestones such as the birth of the National Association of the Deaf and the work of important figures, Deaf and hearing, with anecdotes about day-to-day deaf life. Other chapters single out important facets of Deaf culture: American Sign Language, Deaf Sports, Deaf artists, Deaf humor, and Deaf publications. The overall effect of this remarkable record, replete with archival photographs, tables, and lists of Deaf people’s accomplishments, reveals the growth of a vibrant legacy singular in American history.
In this landmark reader, Benjamin Fraser offers in five parts 44 Spanish documents dating from 1417 to the present, translated for the first time to trace the turbulent history of Deaf culture in Spain. Part I: The Birth of Oralism and Deafness as Metaphor illustrates the predominant impression of deafness as isolation, exemplified by Teresa de Cartagena writings in 1455-60 about deafness as an island. Part II: The Return to Deaf Education highlights writers who wished to restore “the Spanish ‘Art’” of educating deaf students. Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro wrote The Spanish School of Deafmutes, or Method of Teaching Them to Write and Speak the Spanish Language in 1795. Yet, Madrid’s Royal School for Deaf-Mutes, which opened in 1805, taught deaf students using methodical signs adopted from France’s Abbé de l’Epée.
Readings in Part III :The Contemporary Deaf Experience reveal considerations from the 1970s to the ‘90s of Deaf culture and linguistics similar to those in the United States, typified by the works of Inés Polo and Félix-Jesús Pinedo Peydró. The fourth part, The Recognition of Deaf Language and Culture, marks the expansion of academic research in Spain. María Angeles Rodríguez González spearheaded Spanish Sign Language (LSE) linguistics in 1992 with her publication Sign Language. The final part, A Selection of Deaf Poetry, concludes these documents with verse in Spanish spoken dialects rather than LSE, indicating that the evolution of the Deaf experience in Spain continues on its own path today.
The Deaf History Reader presents nine masterful chapters that bring together a remarkably vivid depiction of the varied Deaf experience in America. This collection features the finest scholarship from a noteworthy group of historians, including Reginald Boyd, Barry A. Crouch, Mary French, Brian H. Greenwald, Harlan Lane, Harry G. Lang, Kent R. Olney, Richard Pillard, Jill Hendricks Porco, Michael Reis, and volume editor John Vickrey Van Cleve.
The incisive articles collected here include an exploration of the genesis of the Deaf community and early evidence of the use of sign language; a comparison of a failed, oralist school for deaf students in Virginia to the success of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut; the development of Deaf consciousness among people who carried a dominant gene for deafness; a biographical sketch of Mary Ann Walworth Booth, an accomplished deaf woman who lived on the Western frontier; an account of Deaf agency in the Indiana Institution and the Evansville Day School; the early antecedents of mainstreaming deaf children despite the objections of their parents; a profile of Alexander Graham Bell that contrasts his support of eugenics to his defense of Deaf rights; the conflicting actions of supervisors of the Pennsylvania Society for the Advancement of the Deaf; and finally, the critical role played by deaf people in the Chicago Mission for the Deaf’s success in maintaining the Deaf community for more than five decades. The remarkably rich range of topics treated in The Deaf History Reader assure its future status as a standard resource for all Deaf scholars and students.
Other studies track societal paternalism toward deaf people in Italy, Hungary, and the United States. Adding to its intrigue, the new research in this milestone study provides evidence for previously uncredited self-determination of Deaf people in establishing education, employment, and social structures common throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Historians, teachers, and students alike will prize Deaf History Unveiled as a singular collection of insights that will change historical perspectives on the Deaf experience worldwide.
Since the French Revolution in1789, Deaf French people have struggled to preserve their cultural heritage, to win full civil rights, and to gain access to society through their sign language. Anne T. Quartararo depicts this struggle in her new book Deaf Identity and Social Images in Nineteenth-Century France. In it, she portrays the genesis of the French Deaf community, examines its identity as a minority culture, and analyzes how deaf people developed their cultural heritage, a deaf patrimonie that has been historically connected to the preservation of French sign language.
Quartararo begins by describing how Abbé de l’Epée promoted the education of deaf students with sign language, an approach supported by the French revolutionary government, which formally established the Paris Deaf Institute in 1791. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the school’s hearing director, Roch-Ambroise-Auguste Bébian, advocated the use of sign language even while the institute’s physician Dr. Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard worked to discredit signing.
In this meticulous study, Quartararo details the many variations in deaf education from 1830 to1930. She describes the banquet movement in the 1830s led by Ferdinand Berthier, Alponse Lenoir, and Claudius Forestier, which celebrated sign language and fostered the deaf association known as the Société Centrale. Quartararo also recounts how hearing educators at the Milan Congress in 1880 universally adopted oralism as the way to defeat deafness, and prohibited sign language in deaf schools. French deaf people refused to submit to this attack upon their cultural heritage, however, and an explosion of social activity among deaf people between 1880 and 1900 created a host of active deaf groups in all corners of the country. Deaf Identity and Social Images paints a unique, rich tapestry of the resilience of French deaf people in defending their culture through the most trying century in their history.
Inspired by the conference “Deaf People in Hitler’s Europe, 1933–1945,” hosted jointly by Gallaudet University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1998, this extraordinary collection, organized into three parts, integrates key presentations and important postconference research.
Henry Friedlander begins “Part I: Racial Hygiene” by analyzing the assault on deaf people and people with disabilities as an integral element in the Nazi attempt to implement their theories of racial hygiene. Robert Proctor documents the role of medical professionals in deciding who should be sterilized or forbidden to marry, and whom the Nazi authorities would murder. In an essay written especially for this volume, Patricia Heberer details how Nazi manipulation of eugenics theory and practice facilitated the justification for the murder of those considered socially undesirable.
“Part II: The German Experience” commences with Jochen Muhs’s interviews of deaf Berliners who lived under Nazi rule, both those who suffered abuse and those who, as members of the Nazi Party, persecuted others, especially deaf Jews. John S. Schuchman describes the remarkable 1932 film Misjudged People, which so successfully portrayed the German deaf community as a vibrant contributor to society that the Nazis banned its showing when they came to power. Horst Biesold’s contribution confirms the complicity of teachers who denounced their own students, labeling them hereditarily deaf and thus exposing them to compulsory sterilization. The section also includes the reprint of a chilling 1934 article entitled “The Place of the School for the Deaf in the New Reich,” in which author Kurt Lietz rued the expense of educating deaf students, who could not become soldiers or bear “healthy children.”
In “Part III: The Jewish Deaf Experience,” John S. Schuchman discusses the plight of deaf Jews in Hungary. His historical analysis is complemented by a chapter containing excerpts from the testimony of six deaf Jewish survivors who describe their personal ordeals. Peter Black’s reflections on the need for more research conclude this vital study of a little-known chapter of the Holocaust.
Deaf President Now! reveals the groundswell leading up to the history-making week in 1988 when the students at Gallaudet University seized the campus and closed it down until their demands were met. To research this probing study, the authors interviewed in-depth more than 50 of the principal players.
This telling book reveals the critical role played by a little-known group called the "Ducks," a tight-knit band of six alumni determined to see a deaf president at Gallaudet. Deaf President Now! details how they urged the student leaders to ultimate success, including an analysis of the reasons for their achievement in light of the failure of many other student movements. This fascinating study also scrutinizes the lasting effects of this remarkable episode in "the civil rights movement of the deaf." Deaf President Now! tells the full story of the insurrection at Gallaudet University, an exciting study of how deaf people won social change for themselves and all disabled people everywhere through a peaceful revolution.
Deaf Sport describes the full ramifications of athletics for Deaf people, from the meaning of individual participation to the cultural bonding resulting from their organization. Deaf Sport profiles noted deaf sports figures and the differences particular to Deaf sports, such as the use of sign language for score keeping, officiating, and other communication.
This important book analyzes the governing and business aspects of Deaf sport, both local deaf groups and the American Athletic Association of the Deaf and the World Games for the Deaf. It shows the positive psychological and educational impact of Deaf sport, and how it serves to socialize further the geographically dispersed members of the Deaf community.
Many people are unaware that from 1945 to 1975, downstate lawmakers dominated the Illinois political arena. In The Dealmakers of Downstate Illinois, Robert E. Hartley details the lives and contributions of three influential southern Illinois politicians, Paul Powell, Clyde Choate, and John Stelle. He describes how these “dealmakers” were able to work with Democrats and Republicans throughout the state to bring jobs and facilities to their region. Using a variety of coalitions, they maintained downstate political strength in the face of growing Chicago influence.
Hartley traces the personal histories of Powell, Choate, and Stelle, shows how they teamed up to advance a downstate political agenda, and reviews their challenges and successes. Beginning with an account of early experiences, including the battlefield courage that earned Choate the Medal of Honor as well as Stelle’s World War I experience and later entrepreneurship, the book continues with an exploration of the groundwork for their collaborative legislative agenda and their roles in the growth of Southern Illinois University and the passage of income tax legislation. Hartley reviews the importance of Powell’s relationship with Governor Stratton, Choate’s leadership of the 1972 Democratic National Convention and his relationships with Governor Walker and with Chicago interests.
The Dealmakers of Downstate Illinois is a vivid, straightforward tale of fighting in the legislative chambers, backstabbing behind the scenes, and trading special favors for votes in pursuit of not only personal gain but also the advancement of a regional agenda.
Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands brings to life one of the most significant (but under examined) figures in the history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Worcester, a scientist who had traveled twice to the Philippines on zoological expeditions, established himself as one of America’s leading experts on the Philippines. Over a fourteen-year career as a member of the U.S. colonial regime, Worcester devoted much of his time and energy to traveling among and photographing non-Christian minority groups in the Philippines. He amassed an archive of several thousand photographs taken by him or by government photographers. Worcester deployed those photographs in books, magazine articles, and lectures to promote his belief that the United States should maintain control of the Philippines for decades to come. While many historians have examined American colonial photography in the Philippines, this book is the first lengthy treatment of Worcester’s role in shaping American perceptions of the Philippines in the early twentieth century.
Lisa McNair was born in 1964, one year after her older sister, Denise, was murdered in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Dear Denise is a collection of forty letters from Lisa addressed to the sister she never knew, but in whose shadow of sacrifice and lost youth she was raised. These letters offer an intimate look into the life of a family touched by one of the most heinous tragedies of the Civil Rights Movement.
Written in a genuine, accessible, familiar, and easy-to-read voice, Lisa’s letters apprise her late sister of all that has come to pass in the years since her death. Lisa considers her own challenges and accomplishments as a student in remarkably different—and very racially complex—schools; the birth of their baby sister, Kim; their father’s election to the Alabama legislature; her evolving sense of faith and place, and sometimes lack thereof, within the Black church; her college experiences; and her own sense of self as she’s matured into adulthood. She reveals some of the family’s difficulties and health challenges, and shares some of their joys and celebrations.
The letters are accompanied by 29 black-and-white photographs, most of them from the McNair family collection, many of them taken by her father, a professional photographer who documented the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama both before and after Denise’s murder. An unswervingly candid, gentle, and nuanced book, Dear Denise is a testament to one singular life lived bravely and truthfully (if sometimes confusedly or awkwardly), during decades of bewildering social change and in the shadow of one life never fully lived.
During the Civil War, Americans felt themselves to be on intimate terms with their commander in chief, sending President Abraham Lincoln between two hundred and five hundred pieces of mail every day—letters that expressed the concerns, aspirations, grievances, and obsessions of the nation. Ranging from weighty political tomes to greetings accompanying homespun gifts, the letters reflect the pulse of the country in a time of upheaval. This illuminating collection includes straightforward correspondence from ordinary Americans requesting autographs and favors as well as pleas from the influential, such as the anguished open letter from New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley imploring Lincoln to end his “remiss” policy of caution on emancipation. This new paperback edition, featuring twenty-two illustrations, portrays a president clearly eager to review and respond to the advice, criticism, and requests of the nation’s citizens.
In the tense years of the early Cold War, American and Soviet women conducted a remarkable pen-pal correspondence that enabled them to see each other as friends rather than enemies.
In a compelling new perspective on the early Cold War, prizewinning historian Alexis Peri explores correspondence between American and Soviet women begun in the last years of World War II and continuing into the 1950s. Previously unexamined, the women’s letters movingly demonstrate the power of the personal, as the pen pals engaged in a “diplomacy of the heart” that led them to question why their countries were so divided.
Both Soviet and American women faced a patriarchal backlash after World War II that marginalized them professionally and politically. The pen pals discussed common challenges they faced, such as unequal pay and the difficulties of balancing motherhood with a career. Each side evinced curiosity about the other’s world, asking questions about family and marriage, work conditions, educational opportunities, and religion. The women advocated peace and cooperation but at times disagreed strongly over social and economic issues, such as racial segregation in the United States and mandatory labor in the Soviet Union. At first both governments saw no risk in the communications, as women were presumed to have little influence and no knowledge of state secrets, but eventually Cold War paranoia set in. Amid the Red Scare, the House Un-American Activities Committee even accused some of the American women of being communist agents.
A rare and poignant tale, Dear Unknown Friend offers a glimpse of the Cold War through the perspectives of women who tried to move beyond the label of “enemy” and understand, even befriend, people across increasingly bitter political divides.
In the 1640s--a decade of epidemic and warfare across colonial North America--eight Jesuit missionaries met their deaths at the hands of native antagonists. With their collective canonization in 1930, these men, known to the devout as the North American martyrs, would become the continent's first official Catholic saints. In The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs, Emma Anderson untangles the complexities of these seminal acts of violence and their ever-changing legacy across the centuries. While exploring how Jesuit missionaries perceived their terrifying final hours, the work also seeks to comprehend the motivations of the those who confronted them from the other side of the axe, musket, or caldron of boiling water, and to illuminate the experiences of those native Catholics who, though they died alongside their missionary mentors, have yet to receive comparable recognition as martyrs by the Catholic Church.
In tracing the creation and evolution of the cult of the martyrs across the centuries, Anderson reveals the ways in which both believers and detractors have honored and preserved the memory of the martyrs in this "afterlife," and how their powerful story has been continually reinterpreted in the collective imagination over the centuries. As rival shrines rose to honor the martyrs on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border, these figures would both unite and deeply divide natives and non-natives, francophones and anglophones, Protestants and Catholics, Canadians and Americans, forging a legacy as controversial as it has been enduring.
Written for both scholarly and general audiences, the book contains sections on the death watch, body preparation, selection or construction of a coffin or casket, digging the grave by hand, the wake, the funeral, and other topics. Crissman then demonstrates how technology and the encroachment of American society have turned these vital traditions into the disappearing practices of the past.
The variety of sources uncovered in the authors’ original archival research suggests the wide diversity of topics and approaches they employ: Nahua annals, Spanish chronicles, Inquisition case records, documents on land disputes, sermons, images, and death registers. Geographically, the range of research focuses on the viceroyalties of New Spain, Peru, and New Granada.
The resulting records—both documentary and archaeological—offer us a variety of vantage points from which to view each of these cultural groups as they came into contact with others. Much less tied to modern national boundaries or old imperial ones, the many facets of the new historical research exploring the topic of death demonstrate that no attitudes or practices can be considered either “Western” or universal.
Drawing from an eclectic array of sources ranging from Andrew Carnegie to grave markers in Chicago's potter's field, Rosenow portrays the complex political, social, and cultural relationships that fueled the United States' industrial ascent. The result is an undertaking that adds emotional depth to existing history while challenging our understanding of modes of cultural transmission.
Offering much more than a detached historical account of the "German miracle"—a ruined, war-torn nation evolving within a decade into the most flourishing country in Europe—Eugene Davidson delves into this intriguing story as a "participant observer." Drawing on countless interviews with Germans and Americans of various backgrounds and perspectives, from High Commissioner's office personnel to occupation troop GIs, storekeepers to housewives, Davidson insightfully conveys the atmosphere of postwar Germany and the role of the American occupation in achieving the nation's economic miracle.
The Death and Life of Germany examines the transformation of Germany, focusing on such key episodes as the unprecedented war-crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the almost unceasing attempts of the Western Allies to cooperate with the Russians, the startling effects of the currency reform and Marshall Plan aid, the break between East and West Germany that culminated in the Berlin airlift, the heroic East German uprising of June 17, 1953, and the eventual formation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic.
Davidson traces the progress of thought among Germans and Americans alike as their conceptions of postwar Germany gradually evolved and the leaders of a new, democratic West Germany emerged from the ashes of defeat.
The strength of Davidson's research and analysis and the continuing relevance of this important volume make The Death and Life of Germany an invaluable addition to the collections of scholars and general readers interested in the evolution of postwar Germany.
It is a remarkable story of life, death, and revival—told here for the first time in all its stunning color and bleak grays. The Death and Life of Monterey Bay begins in the eighteenth century when Spanish and French explorers encountered a rocky shoreline brimming with life—raucous sea birds, abundant sea otters, barking sea lions, halibut the size of wagon wheels,waters thick with whales. A century and a half later, many of the sea creatures had disappeared, replaced by sardine canneries that sickened residents with their stench but kept the money flowing. When the fish ran out and the climate turned,the factories emptied and the community crumbled. But today,both Monterey’s economy and wildlife are resplendent. How did it happen?
The answer is deceptively simple: through the extraordinary acts of ordinary people. The Death and Life of Monterey Bay is the biography of a place, but also of the residents who reclaimed it. Monterey is thriving because of an eccentric mayor who wasn’t afraid to use pistols, axes, or the force of law to protect her coasts. It is because of fishermen who love their livelihood, scientists who are fascinated by the sea’s mysteries, and philanthropists and community leaders willing to invest in a world-class aquarium. The shores of Monterey Bay revived because of human passion—passion that enlivens every page of this hopeful book.
Vancouver today is recognized as one of the most livable cities in the world as well as an international model for sustainability and urbanism. Single-family homes in this city are “a dying breed.” Most people live in the various low-rise and high-rise urban alternatives throughout the metropolitan area.
The Death and Life of the Single-Family House explains how residents in Vancouver attempt to make themselves at home without a house. Local sociologist Nathanael Lauster has painstakingly studied the city’s dramatic transformation to curb sprawl. He tracks the history of housing and interviews residents about the cultural importance of the house as well as the urban problems it once appeared to solve.
Although Vancouver’s built environment is unique, Lauster argues that it was never predestined by geography or demography. Instead, regulatory transformations enabled the city to renovate, build over, and build around the house. Moreover, he insists, there are lessons here for the rest of North America. We can start building our cities differently, and without sacrificing their livability.
Buddhism was a fact of life and death during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868): every household was expected to be affiliated with a Buddhist temple, and every citizen had to be given a Buddhist funeral. The enduring relationship between temples and their affiliated households gave rise to the danka system of funerary patronage.
This private custom became a public institution when the Tokugawa shogunate discovered an effective means by which to control the populace and prevent the spread of ideologies potentially dangerous to its power—especially Christianity. Despite its lack of legal status, the danka system was applied to the entire population without exception; it became for the government a potent tool of social order and for the Buddhist establishment a practical way to ensure its survival within the socioeconomic context of early modern Japan.
In this study, Nam-lin Hur follows the historical development of the danka system and details the intricate interplay of social forces, political concerns, and religious beliefs that drove this “economy of death” and buttressed the Tokugawa governing system. With meticulous research and careful analysis, Hur demonstrates how Buddhist death left its mark firmly upon the world of the Tokugawa Japanese.
Hugely successful when published in the 1960s, Death and the Dervish is an enduring classic made into a feature length film in 1974.
Luke, born in Ireland, was a former Canadian minister fleeing a checkered past and perhaps seeking to redeem himself by service to the black freedmen of northern Alabama. In 1869 he took a teaching post at Talladega College, the only school for blacks in the area. Later taking the position of schoolteacher to the black railroad workers near Talladega, Luke found himself enmeshed in the web of racial antagonisms, xenophobia, and partisan conflict rampant in much of the South
Death at Cross Plains follows the tragic course of William Luke’s life and death and vividly depicts the hatreds and failures that plunged the South into its darkest days.
In a public square in Beijing in 1904, multiple murderer Wang Weiqin was executed before a crowd of onlookers. He was among the last to suffer the extreme punishment known as lingchi. Called by Western observers “death by a thousand cuts” or “death by slicing,” this penalty was reserved for the very worst crimes in imperial China.
A unique interdisciplinary history, Death by a Thousand Cuts is the first book to explore the history, iconography, and legal contexts of Chinese tortures and executions from the tenth century until lingchi’s abolition in 1905. The authors then turn their attention to an in-depth investigation of “oriental” tortures in the Western imagination. While early modern Europeans often depicted Chinese institutions as rational, nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers consumed pictures of lingchi executions as titillating curiosities and evidence of moral inferiority. By examining these works in light of European conventions associated with despotic government, Christian martyrdom, and ecstatic suffering, the authors unpack the stereotype of innate Chinese cruelty and explore the mixture of fascination and revulsion that has long characterized the West’s encounter with “other” civilizations.
Compelling and thought-provoking, Death by a Thousand Cuts questions the logic by which states justify tormenting individuals and the varied ways by which human beings have exploited the symbolism of bodily degradation for political aims.
Was a convicted criminal executed on stage during a beheading scene? Was an unfortunate actor driven insane while playing a madman? Did a theatrical enactment of a crucifixion result in a real one? Did an androgynous young man seduce a priest when portraying a female saint? Enders answers these and other questions while presenting a treasure trove of tales that have long seemed true but are actually medieval urban legends. On topics ranging through politics, religion, marriage, class, and law, these tales, Enders argues, do the cultural work of all urban legends: they disclose the hopes, fears, and anxieties of their tellers. Each one represents a medieval meditation created or dramatized by the theater with its power to blur the line between fiction and reality, engaging anyone who watches, performs, or is represented by it. Each one also raises pressing questions about the medieval and modern world on the eve of the Reformation, when Europe had never engaged more anxiously and fervently in the great debate about what was real, what was pretend, and what was pretense.
Written with elegance and flair, and meticulously researched, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends will interest scholars of medieval and Renaissance literature, history, theater, performance studies, and anyone curious about urban legends.
How does one die by philosophy? In Diogenes Laertius, philosophers jump into volcanoes, bury themselves in dung, get eaten by dogs, hang themselves, drown, and vanish into thin air -- sometimes all in a single lifetime. But what happens when we look beyond the fantastic and absurd to examine the particular ways that the philosophers' lives and deaths are recounted?
Ava Chitwood's reexamination of Diogenes Laertius's philosophical biographies opens a new window on the intellectual culture and context in which the work of philosophers like Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Democritus was read, received, and transmitted. Chitwood's analysis also suggests a methodology for understanding the interplay between biography and philosophy and for evaluating biographical sources.
While Chitwood's approach combines the disciplines of classical philology and philosophy, Death by Philosophy is not intended solely for the specialist. This investigation offers the modern reader a fascinating, fresh, and entertaining view of the ancient literary and philosophical world.
Ava Chitwood is Assistant Professor of Classics, at the University of South Florida.
Brilliant examines the ways that an individual’s ethos can live on long after the biological body perishes. It does so through the collective memories of survivors, being passed down to subsequent generations. Such “remainings” are created by rituals and reinforced through commemorations and obituaries and projected through art and architecture. These powerful inducements to remember counter the finality of physical death, bridging the gap between absence and presence. Weaving together a rich collection of texts and images and guiding them with deeply meaningful insights, Brilliant offers a reflective meditation on the methods that artists, architects, and writers have developed to activate memory and animate their subjects into robust afterlife. In this way, he shows, death need no longer be seen as a terminal departure but rather a transformation into a new form of existence, one carried on by the communion of others.
Though Alexander the Great lived more than seventeen centuries before the onset of Iberian expansion into Muslim Africa and Asia, he loomed large in the literature of late medieval and early modern Portugal and Spain. Exploring little-studied chronicles, chivalric romances, novels, travelogues, and crypto-Muslim texts, Vincent Barletta shows that the story of Alexander not only sowed the seeds of Iberian empire but foreshadowed the decline of Portuguese and Spanish influence in the centuries to come.
Death in Babylon depicts Alexander as a complex symbol of Western domination, immortality, dissolution, heroism, villainy, and death. But Barletta also shows that texts ostensibly celebrating the conqueror were haunted by failure. Examining literary and historical works in Aljamiado, Castilian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, and Portuguese, Death in Babylon develops a view of empire and modernity informed by the ethical metaphysics of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. A novel contribution to the literature of empire building, Death in Babylon provides a frame for the deep mortal anxiety that has infused and given shape to the spread of imperial Europe from its very beginning.
Death in England provides the first ever social history of death-from the earliest times to Diana, Princess of Wales. As we discard the taboos surrounding death, this book charts the fascinating story of how people have coped with this fundamental aspect of their daily lives.
Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings reveal how attitudes, practices, and beliefs about death have undergone constant change, as well as how, why, and at what ages people died. Examining how death touches all aspects of society, they cover topics such as plagues and violence; wills and deathbeds; funerals and memorials; and beliefs and bereavement. This wide-ranging analysis is lavishly illustrated with photographs and drawings, their diversity reflecting the breadth of issues and periods covered.
The contributors are all specialists in their own fields, including archaeology, history, and sociology. The ten chapters cover: earliest times to the Bronze Age; the Iron and Roman Ages; the Early Middle Ages; from the advent of Purgatory to the Black Death; the Later Middle Ages and the Reformation; from Elizabeth I to the Civil War; the "Age of Decency"; the Enlightenment; the Victorian era; and the twentieth century.
With the pervasive depiction of death through the media and the ensuing public awareness of this topic, Death in England will be of interest not only to the general reader but also to students of archaeology, art, history, medicine, and sociology.
Death in the Congo is a gripping account of a murder that became one of the defining events in postcolonial African history. It is no less the story of the untimely death of a national dream, a hope-filled vision very different from what the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo became in the second half of the twentieth century.
When Belgium relinquished colonial control in June 1960, a charismatic thirty-five-year-old African nationalist, Patrice Lumumba, became prime minister of the new republic. Yet stability immediately broke down. A mutinous Congolese Army spread havoc, while Katanga Province in southeast Congo seceded altogether. Belgium dispatched its military to protect its citizens, and the United Nations soon intervened with its own peacekeeping troops. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, both the Soviet Union and the United States maneuvered to turn the crisis to their Cold War advantage. A coup in September, secretly aided by the UN, toppled Lumumba’s government. In January 1961, armed men drove Lumumba to a secluded corner of the Katanga bush, stood him up beside a hastily dug grave, and shot him. His rule as Africa’s first democratically elected leader had lasted ten weeks.
More than fifty years later, the murky circumstances and tragic symbolism of Lumumba’s assassination still trouble many people around the world. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick pursue events through a web of international politics, revealing a tangled history in which many people—black and white, well-meaning and ruthless, African, European, and American—bear responsibility for this crime.
From Alexanderplatz, the bustling Berlin square ringed by bleak slums, to Moabit, site of the city's most feared prison, Death in the Tiergarten illuminates the culture of criminal justice in late imperial Germany. In vivid prose, Benjamin Hett examines daily movement through the Berlin criminal courts and the lawyers, judges, jurors, thieves, pimps, and murderers who inhabited this world.
Drawing on previously untapped sources, including court records, pamphlet literature, and pulp novels, Hett examines how the law reflected the broader urban culture and politics of a rapidly changing city. In this book, German criminal law looks very different from conventional narratives of a rigid, static system with authoritarian continuities traceable from Bismarck to Hitler. From the murder trial of Anna and Hermann Heinze in 1891 to the surprising treatment of the notorious Captain of Koepenick in 1906, Hett illuminates a transformation in the criminal justice system that unleashed a culture war fought over issues of permissiveness versus discipline, the boundaries of public discussion of crime and sexuality, and the role of gender in the courts.
Trained in both the law and history, Hett offers a uniquely valuable perspective on the dynamic intersections of law and society, and presents an impressive new view of early twentieth-century German history.
Co-winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research
From January 1945, in the last months of the Third Reich, about 250,000 inmates of concentration camps perished on death marches and in countless incidents of mass slaughter. They were murdered with merciless brutality by their SS guards, by army and police units, and often by gangs of civilians as they passed through German and Austrian towns and villages. Even in the bloody annals of the Nazi regime, this final death blow was unique in character and scope.
In this first comprehensive attempt to answer the questions raised by this final murderous rampage, the author draws on the testimonies of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Hunting through archives throughout the world, Daniel Blatman sets out to explain—to the extent that is possible—the effort invested by mankind’s most lethal regime in liquidating the remnants of the enemies of the “Aryan race” before it abandoned the stage of history. What were the characteristics of this last Nazi genocide? How was it linked to the earlier stages, the slaughter of millions in concentration camps? How did the prevailing chaos help to create the conditions that made the final murderous rampage possible?
In its exploration of a topic nearly neglected in the current history of the Shoah, this book offers unusual insight into the workings, and the unraveling, of the Nazi regime. It combines micro-historical accounts of representative massacres with an overall analysis of the collapse of the Third Reich, helping us to understand a seemingly inexplicable chapter in history.
In 1988, the World Health Organization launched a campaign for the global eradication of polio. Today, this goal is closer than ever. Fewer than 1,300 people were paralyzed from the disease in 2004, down from approximately 350,000 in 1988.
In The Death of a Disease, science writers Bernard Seytre and Mary Shaffer tell the dramatic story of this crippling virus that has evoked terror among parents and struck down healthy children for centuries. Beginning in ancient Egypt, the narrative explores the earliest stages of research, describes the wayward paths taken by a long line of scientists-each of whom made a vital contribution to understanding this enigmatic virus-and traces the development of the Salk and Sabin vaccines. The book also tracks the contemporary polio story, detailing the remaining obstacles as well as the medical, governmental, and international health efforts that are currently being focused on developing countries such as India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Niger.
At a time when emerging diseases and the threat of bioterrorism are the focus of much media and public attention, this book tells the story of a crippling disease that is on the verge of disappearing. In the face of tremendous odds, the near-eradication of polio offers an inspiring story that is both encouraging and instructive to those at the center of the continued fight against communicable diseases.
The True Story of One of America’s Most Enigmatic and Tragic Heroes
Awarded Best Western History Book of 2008 by the Wild West History Association
"A superb biography"—Foreword Reviews
"An ambitious, well-written effort to restore a Wild West desperado to history.... Readers will surely remember Jack Slade from henceforth. A treat for Western history buffs and fans of true crime."—Kirkus Reviews
"An enjoyable read, and it is also a heroic effort."—Wall Street Journal
"Every bit the page-turner as Roughing It, with one added advantage—Rottenberg's book approaches the truth."—Wild West magazine
"Now and then a book of Western history comes along that captures an era and clears up many a mystery; Death of a Gunfighter is such a book."—Colorado Central magazine
In 1859, as the United States careened toward civil war, Washington's only northern link with America's richest state, California, was a stagecoach line operating between Missouri and the Pacific. Yet the stage line was plagued by graft, outlaws, and hostile Indians. At this critical moment, the company enlisted a former wagon train captain and Mexican War veteran to clean up its most dangerous division. Over the next three years, Joseph Alfred "Jack" Slade exceeded his employers' wildest dreams, capturing bandits and horse thieves and driving away gangs; he even shot to death a disruptive employee. He kept the stagecoaches and the U.S. Mail running, and helped launch the Pony Express, all of which kept California in the Union—and without California's gold, the Union would have failed to finance its cause. Across the Great Plains he became known as "The Law West of Kearny."
Slade's legend grew when he was shot multiple times and left for dead, only to survive and exact revenge on his would-be killer. But once Slade had restored the peace, leaving him without challenges, his life descended into an alcoholic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde nightmare, transforming him from a courageous leader, charming gentleman, and devoted husband into a vicious, quick-triggered ruffian—a purported outlaw —who finally lost his life at the hands of vigilantes.
Since Slade's death in 1864, persistent myths and stories have defied the efforts of writers and historians, including Mark Twain, to capture the real Jack Slade. Despite his notoriety, the pieces of Slade's fascinating life—including his marriage to the beautiful Maria Virginia—have remained scattered and hidden. He was never photographed and left almost no personal writings, not even a letter. In Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest for Jack Slade, the West's Most Elusive Legend, journalist Dan Rottenberg assembles years of research to reveal the true story of Jack Slade, one of America's greatest tragic heroes.
A trenchant examination of epic shifts in American thought by a major scholar in the field.
In the 1940s, American thought experienced a cataclysmic paradigm shift. Before then, national ideology was shaped by American exceptionalism and bourgeois nationalism: elites saw themselves as the children of a homogeneous nation standing outside the history and culture of the Old World. This view repressed the cultures of those who did not fit the elite vision: people of color, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. David W. Noble, a preeminent figure in American studies, inherited this ideology. However, like many who entered the field in the 1940s, he rejected the ideals of his intellectual predecessors and sought a new, multicultural, postnational scholarship. Throughout his career, Noble has examined this rupture in American intellectual life. In Death of a Nation, he presents the culmination of decades of thought in a sweeping treatise on the shaping of contemporary American studies and an eloquent summation of his distinguished career.
Exploring the roots of American exceptionalism, Noble demonstrates that it was a doomed ideology. Capitalists who believed in a bounded nationalism also depended on a boundless, international marketplace. This contradiction was inherently unstable, and the belief in a unified national landscape exploded in World War II. The rupture provided an opening for alternative narratives as class, ethnicity, race, and region were reclaimed as part of the nation’s history. Noble traces the effects of this shift among scholars and artists, and shows how even today they struggle to imagine an alternative postnational narrative and seek the meaning of local and national cultures in an increasingly transnational world. While Noble illustrates the challenges that the paradigm shift created, he also suggests solutions that will help scholars avoid romanticized and reductive approaches toward the study of American culture in the future.
Winner, Book Prize in Latin American Studies, Colonial Section of Latin American Studies Association (LASA), 2016
ALAA Book Award, Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation, 2016
The capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, was, in its era, one of the largest cities in the world. Built on an island in the middle of a shallow lake, its population numbered perhaps 150,000, with another 350,000 people in the urban network clustered around the lake shores. In 1521, at the height of Tenochtitlan’s power, which extended over much of Central Mexico, Hernando Cortés and his followers conquered the city. Cortés boasted to King Charles V of Spain that Tenochtitlan was “destroyed and razed to the ground.” But was it?
Drawing on period representations of the city in sculptures, texts, and maps, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City builds a convincing case that this global capital remained, through the sixteenth century, very much an Amerindian city. Barbara E. Mundy foregrounds the role the city’s indigenous peoples, the Nahua, played in shaping Mexico City through the construction of permanent architecture and engagement in ceremonial actions. She demonstrates that the Aztec ruling elites, who retained power even after the conquest, were instrumental in building and then rebuilding the city. Mundy shows how the Nahua entered into mutually advantageous alliances with the Franciscans to maintain the city's sacred nodes. She also focuses on the practical and symbolic role of the city’s extraordinary waterworks—the product of a massive ecological manipulation begun in the fifteenth century—to reveal how the Nahua struggled to maintain control of water resources in early Mexico City.
Since first reported to the world in 1780, the death of Captain Cook on a Hawaiian beach the previous year has been revered, celebrated, and shrouded in mystery. Simultaneously called a hero and an antihero, a ruthless invader, and a torchbearer of the Enlightenment, Cook’s reputation grew as much out of the moving story of his death as out of his adventures while he lived.
In a style that is more detective story than conventional biography, Glyn Williams explores the multiple narratives of Cook’s death. He reveals how the British Admiralty first attempted to censor accounts of Cook’s erratic behavior and how the “authorized” version of his death—a lengthy narrative serialized in the leading publications of the day—reduced the story to the final hours of a noble leader who gave his life to save others. Williams argues that the contrary evidence of a chaotic bloody fracas on the beach at Kealakekua Bay was ignored, and that the unexplained disappearance of Cook’s own journal helped the process of concealment. He believes that Cook was not entirely the man sanctified by the British public. More than two hundred years later, an explosive interplay between academic controversy and nationalist feelings has once more drawn attention to a life that has attracted praise and controversy, abhorrence and admiration. In short, Williams examines the story of Cook’s progress from obscurity to fame and, eventually, to infamy—a story that, until now, has never been fully told.
Historians overwhelmingly have blamed the demise of Reconstruction on Southerners' persistent racism. Heather Cox Richardson argues instead that class, along with race, was critical to Reconstruction's end. Northern support for freed blacks and Reconstruction weakened in the wake of growing critiques of the economy and calls for a redistribution of wealth.
Using newspapers, public speeches, popular tracts, Congressional reports, and private correspondence, Richardson traces the changing Northern attitudes toward African-Americans from the Republicans' idealized image of black workers in 1861 through the 1901 publication of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery. She examines such issues as black suffrage, disenfranchisement, taxation, westward migration, lynching, and civil rights to detect the trajectory of Northern disenchantment with Reconstruction. She reveals a growing backlash from Northerners against those who believed that inequalities should be addressed through working-class action, and the emergence of an American middle class that championed individual productivity and saw African-Americans as a threat to their prosperity.
The Death of Reconstruction offers a new perspective on American race and labor and demonstrates the importance of class in the post-Civil War struggle to integrate African-Americans into a progressive and prospering nation.
There were heroic lives and deaths before and after, but none quite like Socrates'. He did not die by sword or spear, braving all to defend home and country, but as a condemned criminal, swallowing a painless dose of poison. And yet Socrates' death in 399 BCE has figured large in our world ever since, shaping how we think about heroism and celebrity, religion and family life, state control and individual freedom, the distance of intellectual life from daily activity--many of the key coordinates of Western culture. In this book Emily Wilson analyzes the enormous and enduring power the trial and death of Socrates has exerted over the Western imagination.
Beginning with the accounts of contemporaries like Aristophanes, Xenophon, and, above all, Plato, the book offers a comprehensive look at the death of Socrates as both a historical event and a controversial cultural ideal. Wilson shows how Socrates' death--more than his character, actions, or philosophical beliefs--has played an essential role in his story. She considers literary, philosophical, and artistic works--by Cicero, Erasmus, Milton, Voltaire, Hegel, and Brecht, among others--that used the death of Socrates to discuss power, politics, religion, the life of the mind, and the good life. As highly readable as it is deeply learned, her book combines vivid descriptions, critical insights, and breadth of research to explore how Socrates' death--especially his seeming ability to control it--has mattered so much, for so long, to so many different people.
This child, scion of a family of power and privilege at Venice's time of greatness, left his father in a state of despair so profound and so public that it occasioned an outpouring of consoling letters, orations, treatises, and poems. In these documents, we find a firsthand account, richly colored by humanist conventions and expectations, of the life of the fifteenth-century boy, the passionate devotion of his father, the feelings of his brothers and sisters, the striking absence of his mother. The father's story is here as well: the career of a Venetian nobleman and scholar, patron and soldier, a participant in Venice's struggle for dominion in the north of Italy.
Through these sources also King traces the cultural trends that made Marcello's century famous. Her work enlarges our view of the literature of consolation, which had a distinctive tradition in Venice, and shifting attitudes toward death from the late Middle Ages onward.
For the depth and acuity of its insights into political, cultural, and private life in fifteenth-century Venice, this book will be essential reading for students of the Renaissance. For the grace and drama of its storytelling, it will be savored by anyone who wishes to look into life and death in a palace, and a city, long ago.
Death of the Moguls is a detailed assessment of the last days of the “rulers of film.” Wheeler Winston Dixon examines the careers of such moguls as Harry Cohn at Columbia, Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack L. Warner at Warner Brothers, Adolph Zukor at Paramount, and Herbert J. Yates at Republic in the dying days of their once-mighty empires. He asserts that the sheer force of personality and business acumen displayed by these moguls made the studios successful; their deaths or departures hastened the studios’ collapse. Almost none had a plan for leadership succession; they simply couldn't imagine a world in which they didn’t reign supreme.
Covering 20th Century-Fox, Selznick International Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, RKO Radio Pictures, Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, Republic Pictures, Monogram Pictures and Columbia Pictures, Dixon briefly introduces the studios and their respective bosses in the late 1940s, just before the collapse, then chronicles the last productions from the studios and their eventual demise in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He details such game-changing factors as the de Havilland decision, which made actors free agents; the Consent Decree, which forced the studios to get rid of their theaters; how the moguls dealt with their collapsing empires in the television era; and the end of the conventional studio assembly line, where producers had rosters of directors, writers, and actors under their command.
Complemented by rare, behind-the-scenes stills, Death of the Moguls is a compelling narrative of the end of the studio system at each of the Hollywood majors as television, the de Havilland decision, and the Consent Decree forced studios to slash payrolls, make the shift to color, 3D, and CinemaScope in desperate last-ditch efforts to save their kingdoms. The aftermath for some was the final switch to television production and, in some cases, the distribution of independent film.
The death penalty arouses our passions as does few other issues. Some view taking another person’s life as just and reasonable punishment while others see it as an inhumane and barbaric act. But the intensity of feeling that capital punishment provokes often obscures its long and varied history in this country.
Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the United States. Law professor Stuart Banner tells the story of how, over four centuries, dramatic changes have taken place in the ways capital punishment has been administered and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the penalty was standard for a laundry list of crimes—from adultery to murder, from arson to stealing horses. Hangings were public events, staged before audiences numbering in the thousands, attended by women and men, young and old, black and white alike. Early on, the gruesome spectacle had explicitly religious purposes—an event replete with sermons, confessions, and last-minute penitence—to promote the salvation of both the condemned and the crowd. Through the nineteenth century, the execution became desacralized, increasingly secular and private, in response to changing mores. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ironically, as it has become a quiet, sanitary, technological procedure, the death penalty is as divisive as ever.
By recreating what it was like to be the condemned, the executioner, and the spectator, Banner moves beyond the debates, to give us an unprecedented understanding of capital punishment’s many meanings. As nearly four thousand inmates are now on death row, and almost one hundred are currently being executed each year, the furious debate is unlikely to diminish. The Death Penalty is invaluable in understanding the American way of the ultimate punishment.
Death Underground: The Centralia and West Frankfort Mine Disasters examines two of the most devastating coal mine disasters in United States history since 1928. In two southern Illinois towns only forty miles apart, explosions killed 111 men at the Centralia No. 5 mine in 1947 and 119 men at the New Orient No. 2 mine in West Frankfort in 1951. Robert E. Hartley and David Kenney explain the causes of the accidents, identify who was to blame, and detail the emotional impact the disasters had on the survivors, their families, and their communities.
Politics at the highest level of Illinois government played a critical role in the conditions that led to the accidents. Hartley and Kenney address how safety was compromised when inspection reports were widely ignored by state mining officials and mine company supervisors. Highlighted is the role of Driscoll Scanlan, a state inspector at Centralia, who warned of an impending disaster but whose political enemies shifted the blame to him, ruining his career. Hartley and Kenney also detail the New Orient No. 2 mine explosion, the attempts at rescue, and the resulting political spin circulated by labor, management, and the state bureaucracy. They outline the investigation, the subsequent hearings, and the efforts in Congress to legislate greater mine safety.
Hartley and Kenney include interviews with the survivors, a summary of the investigative records, and an analysis of the causes of both mine accidents. They place responsibility for the disasters on individual mine owners, labor unions, and state officials, providing new interpretations not previously presented in the literature. Augmented by twenty-nine illustrations, the volume also covers the history, culture, and ethnic pluralism of coal mining in Illinois and the United States.
This history begins with a discussion of the physical setting, its geography and geology, and descriptions of the Timbisha, the first peoples to inhabit this tough and dangerous landscape. In the 19th-century and early 20th century, new arrivals came to exploit the mineral resources in the region and develop permanent agricultural and resort settlements. Although Death Valley was established as a National Monument in 1933, fear of the harsh desert precluded widespread acceptance by both the visiting public and its own administrative agency. As a result, Death Valley lacked both support and resources. This volume details the many debates over the park’s size, conflicts between miners, farmers, the military, and wilderness advocates, the treatment of the Timbisha, and the impact of tourists on its cultural and natural resources.
In time, Death Valley came to be seen as one of the great natural wonders of the United States, and was elevated to full national park status in 1994. The history of Death Valley National Park embodies the many tensions confronting American environmentalism.
Drawing on psychoanalytic, Marxist, and phenomenological analyses, and on Orlando Patterson’s notion of social death, JanMohamed develops comprehensive, insightful, and original close readings of Wright’s major publications: his short-story collection Uncle Tom’s Children; his novels Native Son, The Outsider, Savage Holiday, and The Long Dream; and his autobiography Black Boy/American Hunger. The Death-Bound-Subject is a stunning reevaluation of the work of a major twentieth-century American writer, but it is also much more. In demonstrating how deeply the threat of death is involved in the formation of black subjectivity, JanMohamed develops a methodology for understanding the presence of the death-bound-subject in African American literature and culture from the earliest slave narratives forward.
This beautifully illustrated book for children ages 8–11 relates dramatic moments from Great Lakes maritime history in a graphic-novel style. The book’s five true stories span four centuries but take place in one location: a dangerous stretch of water near Lake Michigan’s western shore that is known as “Death’s Door.”
Young readers will devour these tales of tragic accidents, mysterious disappearances, and heroic moments. The stories feature a 17th-century fur trading crew, an 18th-century Potawatomi trading party, a mail carrier and a shipbuilding family from the 19th century, and an early 20th-century basketball team. The narrator is Death’s Door itself, who wonders why people insist on crossing its treacherous waters, concluding it is “because they are human. Ambitious and restless…but loving too.”
An informative afterword provides insight into the author’s sources and features archival images and additional historical details about each of the stories.
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