No Time for Fear summons the voices of more than 100 women who served as nurses overseas during World War II, letting them tell their story as no one else can. Fessler has meticulously compiled and transcribed more than 200 interviews with American military nurses of the Army, Army Air Force, and Navy who were present in all theaters of WWII. Their stories bring to life horrific tales of illness and hardship, blinding blizzards, and near starvation—all faced with courage, tenacity, and even good humor. This unique oral-history collection makes available to readers an important counterpoint to the seemingly endless discussions of strategy, planning, and troop movement that often characterize discussions of the Second World War.
Olympic gold medalist. Two-time world heavyweight champion. Hall of Famer. Infomercial and reality TV star. George Foreman’s fighting ability is matched only by his acumen for selling. Yet the complete story of Foreman’s rise from urban poverty to global celebrity has never been told until now.
Raised in Houston’s “Bloody Fifth” Ward, battling against scarcity in housing and food, young Foreman fought sometimes for survival and other times just for fun. But when a government program rescued him from poverty and introduced him to the sport of boxing, his life changed forever.
In No Way but to Fight, Andrew R. M. Smith traces Foreman’s life and career from the Great Migration to the Great Society, through the Cold War and culture wars, out of urban Houston and onto the world stage where he discovered that fame brought new challenges. Drawing on new interviews with George Foreman and declassified government documents, as well as more than fifty domestic and international newspapers and magazines, Smith brings to life the exhilarating story of a true American icon. No Way but to Fight is an epic worthy of a champion.
Few subjects are as intensely debated in the United States as the death penalty. Some form of capital punishment has existed in America for hundreds of years, yet the justification for carrying out the ultimate sentence is a continuing source of controversy. No Winners Here Tonight explores the history of the death penalty and the question of its fairness through the experience of a single state, Ohio, which, despite its moderate midwestern values, has long had one of the country’s most active death chambers.
In 1958, just four states accounted for half of the forty-eight executions carried out nationwide, each with six: California, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas. By the first decade of the new century, Ohio was second only to Texas in the number of people put to death each year. No Winners Here Tonight looks at this trend and determines that capital punishment has been carried out in an uneven fashion from its earliest days, with outcomes based not on blind justice but on the color of a person’s skin, the whim of a local prosecutor, or the biases of the jury pool in the county in which a crime was committed.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins’s work is the only comprehensive study of the history of the death penalty in Ohio. His analysis concludes that the current law, crafted by lawmakers to punish the worst of the state’s killers, doesn’t come close to its intended purpose and instead varies widely in its implementation. Welsh-Huggins takes on this controversial topic evenhandedly and with respect for the humanity of the accused and the victim alike. This exploration of the law of capital punishment and its application will appeal to students of criminal justice as well as those with an interest in law and public policy.
Ninety-nine men entered the cold, dark tunnels of the Consolidation Coal Company’s No.9 Mine in Farmington, West Virginia, on November 20, 1968. Some were worried about the condition of the mine. It had too much coal dust, too much methane gas. They knew that either one could cause an explosion. What they did not know was that someone had intentionally disabled a safety alarm on one of the mine’s ventilation fans. That was a death sentence for most of the crew. The fan failed that morning, but the alarm did not sound. The lack of fresh air allowed methane gas to build up in the tunnels. A few moments before 5:30 a.m., the No.9 blew up. Some men died where they stood. Others lived but suffocated in the toxic fumes that filled the mine. Only 21 men escaped from the mountain.
Globalization has become an inescapable fact of contemporary life. Some leaders, in both the East and the West, believe that human rights are culture-bound and that liberal democracy is essentially Western, inapplicable to the non-Western world. How can civilized life be preserved and issues of human rights and civil society be addressed if the material forces dominating world affairs are allowed to run blindly, uncontrolled by any cross-cultural consensus on how human values can be given effective expression and direction?
In a thoughtful meditation ranging widely over several civilizations and historical eras, Wm. Theodore de Bary argues that the concepts of leadership and public morality in the major Asian traditions offer a valuable perspective on humanizing the globalization process. Turning to the classic ideals of the Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, and Japanese traditions, he investigates the nature of true leadership and its relation to learning, virtue, and education in human governance; the role in society of the public intellectual; and the responsibilities of those in power in creating and maintaining civil society.
De Bary recognizes that throughout history ideals have always come up against messy human complications. Still, he finds in the exploration and affirmation of common values a worthy attempt to grapple with persistent human dilemmas across the globe.
With great care and detail, Walker argues that African American freemasonry provides a critical theoretical lens for understanding the distinctive ways African Americans have constructed a radically democratic political imaginary through racial solidarity and political nationalism, forcing us to reconsider much more circumspectly the complex relationship between voluntary associations and democratic politics.
Mapping the discursive logics of the language of freemasonry as a metaphoric rendering of American democracy, this study interrogates the concrete forms of an associational culture, revealing how paradoxical aspects of freemasonry such as secrecy and public association inform the production of particular ideas and expressions of democracy in America.
This illuminating study examines the dramatic transformation of Bohemian noble identity from the rise of mass politics in the late nineteenth century to the descent of the Iron Curtain after World War II.
At the turn of the twentieth century, some 300 noble families owned over a third of the Habsburg Bohemian Crownlands. With the Empire's demise in 1918, the once powerful Bohemian nobility quickly became a target of the nationalist revolution sweeping the new Czechoslovak state. Eagle Glassheim traces the evolving efforts of the nobles to define their place in this revolutionary new order.
Nobles saw little choice but to ally with Czech and German national parties, initially in the hopes of assuaging radical land reform. Yet they retained aristocratic political and social traditions that continued to shape their national identities after 1918. Some moved toward a hybrid national identification, embracing a form of German internationalism and a vision of pan-European unity that led many to support Hitler's expansionist efforts in the late 1930s. Others trumpeted their new-found Czech nationalism in resisting the Nazi occupation.
Noble Nationalists offers valuable insights on the nationalization of a conservative political elite, as well as on the national and social revolutions that recast Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.
“Nobody who has not taken one can imagine the beauty of a walk through Rome by full moon,” wrote Goethe in 1787. Sadly, the imagination is all we have today: in Rome, as in every other modern city, moonlight has been banished, replaced by the twenty-four-hour glow of streetlights in a world that never sleeps. Moonlight, for most of us, is no more.
So James Attlee set out to find it. Nocturne is the record of that journey, a traveler’s tale that takes readers on a dazzling nighttime trek that ranges across continents, from prehistory to the present, and through both the physical world and the realms of art and literature. Attlee attends a Buddhist full-moon ceremony in Japan, meets a moon jellyfish on a beach in Northern France, takes a moonlit hike in the Arizona desert, and experiences a lunar eclipse on New Year’s Eve atop the snowbound Welsh hills. Each locale is illuminated not just by the moonlight he seeks, but by the culture and history that define it. We learn about Mussolini’s pathological fear of moonlight; trace the connections between Caspar David Friedrich, Rudolf Hess, and the Apollo space mission; and meet the inventors of the Moonlight Collector in the American desert, who aim to cure all kinds of ailments with concentrated lunar rays. Svevo and Blake, Whistler and Hokusai, Li Po and Marinetti are all enlisted, as foils, friends, or fellow travelers, on Attlee’s journey.
Pulled by the moon like the tide, Attlee is firmly in a tradition of wandering pilgrims that stretches from Basho to Sebald; like them, he presents our familiar world anew.
Between 1867 and 1875, George Armstrong Custer contributed fifteen letters under the apt pseudonym Nomad to the New York-based sportsman's journal Turf, Field and Farm. Previously available only in a collector's typescript edition, the Nomad letters offer valuable insight into the character of the Boy General as he gives expression to his abiding love for hunting, horses, and hounds.
Vivid accounts of days in the field after buffalo and deer alternate with letters that attest to Custer's passion for Kentucky thoroughbreds and trotters and his devotion to his favorite hunting dogs. Moreover, the letters show Custer as a student of literature who constandy alluded to works of fiction and drama and who loved to quote poetry as he self-consciously honed his skills as a writer.
The Nomad letters also open the way to controversy since three of the letters written in 1867, as Brian Dippie's careful annotations make clear, offer a strikingly different account of Custer's ill-starred induction into Indian fighting than the accepted version recorded five years later in his memoirs, My Life on the Plains. Composed only a few months after the abortive Hancock Expedition that led to Custer's court-martial and suspension from rank and pay for one year, the Nomad letters are full of a passion and venom absent from My Life on the Plains. They provide an immediate response to the events of 1867 that will interest all students of the Western Indian wars and of Custer's fascinating career.
How risky encounters between American and Czech writers behind the Iron Curtain shaped the art and politics of the Cold War and helped define an era of dissent.
“In some indescribable way, we are each other’s continuation,” Arthur Miller wrote of the imprisoned Czech playwright Václav Havel. After a Soviet-led invasion ended the Prague Spring, many US-based writers experienced a similar shock of solidarity. Brian Goodman examines the surprising and consequential connections between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War—connections that influenced art and politics on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
American writers had long been attracted to Prague, a city they associated with the spectral figure of Franz Kafka. Goodman reconstructs the Czech journeys of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and John Updike, as well as their friendships with nonconformists like Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Ivan Klíma, and Milan Kundera. Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, was home to a literary counterculture shaped by years of engagement with American sources, from Moby-Dick and the Beats to Dixieland jazz and rock ’n’ roll. Czechs eagerly followed cultural trends in the United States, creatively appropriating works by authors like Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves.
The Nonconformists tells the story of a group of writers who crossed boundaries of language and politics, rearranging them in the process. The transnational circulation of literature played an important role in the formation of new subcultures and reading publics, reshaping political imaginations and transforming the city of Kafka into a global capital of dissent. From the postwar dream of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism” to the neoconservative embrace of Eastern bloc dissidence on the eve of the Velvet Revolution, history was changed by a collision of literary cultures.
A new English translation of the first text translated from Arabic to Armenian for research and classroom use
Robert W. Thomson translates this ninth-century commentary defending the miaphysite theological position of the Armenian church against the chalcedonian position of the Greek Byzantine church. Nonnus’s exegesis of the gospel falls in the context of trends in Eastern Christian biblical exposition, primarily the Syrian tradition. Therefore, Thomson emphasizes the parallels in Syriac commentaries on the book of John, noting also earlier Greek writers whose works were influential in Syria. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the Armenian church and church history.
Features:
Recent polls suggest that fewer than 40 percent of Americans believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, despite it being one of science’s best-established findings. More and more parents are refusing to vaccinate their children for fear it causes autism, though this link can been consistently disproved. And about 40 percent of Americans believe that the threat of global warming is exaggerated, despite near consensus in the scientific community that manmade climate change is real.
Why do people believe bunk? And what causes them to embrace such pseudoscientific beliefs and practices? Noted skeptic Massimo Pigliucci sets out to separate the fact from the fantasy in this entertaining exploration of the nature of science, the borderlands of fringe science, and—borrowing a famous phrase from philosopher Jeremy Bentham—the nonsense on stilts. Presenting case studies on a number of controversial topics, Pigliucci cuts through the ambiguity surrounding science to look more closely at how science is conducted, how it is disseminated, how it is interpreted, and what it means to our society. The result is in many ways a “taxonomy of bunk” that explores the intersection of science and culture at large.
No one—not the public intellectuals in the culture wars between defenders and detractors of science nor the believers of pseudoscience themselves—is spared Pigliucci’s incisive analysis. In the end, Nonsense on Stilts is a timely reminder of the need to maintain a line between expertise and assumption. Broad in scope and implication, it is also ultimately a captivating guide for the intelligent citizen who wishes to make up her own mind while navigating the perilous debates that will affect the future of our planet.
Russia's historic transition from communism in the 1990s sparked intense, often ideological debates. This book offers a firsthand glimpse into the intellectual challenges that Russia's turbulent transition generated. It deals with many of the most important reforms, from Gorbachev's half-hearted "perestroika," to the mass privatization program, to the efforts to build legal and regulatory institutions of a market economy. The essays in this book attempt to identify the driving forces of Russia's rapidly changing economic and social reality.
To understand Yeltsin's reforms, the book argues, it is essential to grasp their twin goals of destroying the remnants of the communist order and building the institutions of a market economy. Time after time, reforms were shaped to assure that communism, with its overwhelming control of the economy and society, the planning ministries, and pervasive centralization, cannot come back to Russia. Many of the successes, as well as the pathologies, of the Russian economy during the 1990s must be understood from this perspective. Despite many setbacks, Yeltsin succeeded in his life's mission. By the end of the twentieth century, both a market economy and a democracy were developed in Russia. Each was both vulnerable and flawed, but the escape from communism was certain. A decade after communism, Russia became a normal country.
Relations between China and the United States have been of central importance to both countries over the past half-century, as well as to all states affected by that relationship—Taiwan and the Soviet Union foremost among them. Only recently, however, has the opening of archives made it possible to research this history dispassionately. The eight chapters in this volume offer the first multinational, multi-archival review of the history of Chinese-American conflict and cooperation in the 1970s.
On the Chinese side, normalization of relations was instrumental to Beijing's effort to enhance its security vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and was seen as a tactical necessity to promote Chinese military and economic interests. The United States was equally motivated by national security concerns. In the wake of Vietnam, policymakers saw normalization as a means of forestalling Soviet power. As the essays in this volume show, normalization was far from a foregone conclusion.
Norman Corwin is regarded as the most acclaimed creative artist of radio’s Golden Age (mid 1930s to late 1940s). Corwin worked as a producer for CBS at a time when radio was the centerpiece of American family life. His programs brought high moments to the medium during a period when exceptional creativity and world crisis shaped its character and conviction. Bannerman’s book is more than biography: it is also social history—the story of network radio, its great achievements and ultimate decline. Many of Corwin’s programs are considered radio classics. During World War II his programs energized the people and marshaled morale. We Hold These Truths, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the American Bill of Rights, was broadcast eight days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and On a Note of Triumph, a VE-Day special for CBS, marked the historic culmination of a momentous conflict. Bannerman’s work is a portrayal of a remarkable man, who led an influential fight for the art and integrity of broadcasting, who endured unfounded accusations during the blacklisting period of the McCarthy era, and who by his dedication accomplished significant programs of historic dimensions.
The Allied landings on the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944, have assumed legendary status in the annals of World War II. But in overly romanticizing D-day, Olivier Wieviorka argues, we have lost sight of the full picture. Normandy offers a balanced, complete account that reveals the successes and weaknesses of the titanic enterprise.
In addition to describing the landings with precision and drama, Wieviorka covers the planning and diplomatic background, Allied relationships, German defensive preparations, morale of the armies, economics and logistics, political and military leaders, and civilians’ and soldiers’ experience of the fighting. Surprisingly, the landing itself was not the slaughter the general staff expected. The greater battle for Normandy—waged on farmland whose infamous hedgerows, the bocage, created formidable obstacles—took a severe toll not only in lives lost, but on the survivors who experienced this grueling ordeal.
D-day, Wieviorka notes, was a striking accomplishment, but it was war, violent and cruel. Errors, desertions, rivalries, psychological trauma, self-serving motives, thefts, and rapes were all part of the story. Rather than diminishing the Allied achievement, this candid book underscores the price of victory and acknowledges the British, American, and Canadian soldiers who dashed onto the Normandy beaches not as demigods, but as young men.
Basing this compelling war memoir on his original World War II diary, Pfc. Richard D. Courtney tells what it was like to be a combat infantryman in the greatest and most destructive war in history.
A frontier has been called "an area inviting entrance." For the Norman invaders of England the Welsh peninsula was such an area. Fertile forested lowlands invited agricultural occupation; a fierce but primitive and disunited native population was scarcely a formidable deterrent.
In The Normans in South Wales, Lynn H. Nelson provides a comprehensive history of the century during which the Normans accomplished this occupation. Skillfully he combines facts and statistics gleaned from a variety of original sources—The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Domesday Book, Church records, charters of the kings and of the marcher lords, and more imaginative literary sources such as the chanson de geste and the frontier epic—to give a vivid picture of a century of strife. He describes the fluctuating conflict between Norman invaders in the lowlands and Welsh tribesmen in the highlands; the hard struggle of medieval frontiersmen to take from the new land a profit commensurate with their labors; the development of a Cambro-Norman society distinct and quite different from the Anglo-Norman culture which engendered it; and the attempt of the frontiersman to prevent the Anglo-Norman authorities from taking control of the lands he had won.
The turbulent Welsh tribes provided an ever present harassment along the frontier, and Nelson begins his presentation with an account of the failure of the Saxons to control them. He examines the methods adopted by William the Conqueror to cope with the problem—the creation of the great marcher lordships and the subsequent problems in controlling these lordships—and the weakness of some Anglo-Norman kings and the strength of others.
By 1171 the conquest of the Welsh frontier was complete; but as Nelson points out, this conquest was strangely limited. The frontier, which extended throughout the lowlands of Wales, stopped at the 600-foot contour line in the mountains. In his final chapter Nelson speculates upon the curious fact that large areas of seemingly inviting moorlands lying above this line remained closed to the Cambro-Norman, and his speculations lead him to some interesting inferences about the nature of the frontier's influence upon the civilization which moves in to occupy it.
North Africa has been a vital crossroads throughout history, serving as a connection between Africa, Asia, and Europe. Paradoxically, however, the region's historical significance has been chronically underestimated. In a book that may lead scholars to reimagine the concept of Western civilization, incorporating the role North African peoples played in shaping "the West," Phillip Naylor describes a locale whose transcultural heritage serves as a crucial hinge, politically, economically, and socially.
Ideal for novices and specialists alike, North Africa begins with an acknowledgment that defining this area has presented challenges throughout history. Naylor's survey encompasses the Paleolithic period and early Egyptian cultures, leading readers through the pharonic dynasties, the conflicts with Rome and Carthage, the rise of Islam, the growth of the Ottoman Empire, European incursions, and the postcolonial prospects for Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Western Sahara.
Emphasizing the importance of encounters and interactions among civilizations, North Africa maps a prominent future for scholarship about this pivotal region.
Now with a new afterword that surveys the “North African Spring” uprisings that roiled the region from 2011 to 2013, this is the most comprehensive history of North Africa to date, with accessible, in-depth chapters covering the pre-Islamic period through colonization and independence.
Having received such lavish praise for the first volume of his definitive taxonomic handbook, Daniel Otte now turns his attention to the bandwing grasshoppers. As before, the book includes:
– Highly detailed, full-color drawings of all species, including more than one color phase when appropriate;
– Illustrated keys and lists of principal recognition features;
– Information on distributional limits, habitat preferences, ecology, behavior, and life cycle;
– Excellent point-distribution maps;
– Pertinent references, taxonomic index, history of name changes, and an explanation of the characters used to derive phylogenies.
Like its predecessor, this volume will be useful to scientists in agriculture, environmental assessment, biogeography, grassland ecology, and insect taxonomy. It will also appeal to amateur naturalists.
Walter E. Klippel came to the University of Tennessee in 1977 as an assistant professor of anthropology. In the forty years that followed, he supervised and mentored countless students in archaeology and biological anthropology, published more than fifty journal articles and book chapters, and assembled a zooarchaeological comparative collection of national significance. During his tenure, Klippel’s important contributions to the field of zooarchaeology would impact not only his students and colleagues but the development of zooarchaeological research as a whole. Even after his retirement in 2017, Klippel’s influence is readily apparent in the studies of his contemporaries. North American Zooarchaeology: Reflections on History and Continuity is their tribute to his work.
Developed by friends, students, and colleagues of Walter Klippel, North American Zooarchaeology presents a wide-ranging collection of essays through the lens of his remarkable career. Each chapter of the volume represents a prevailing theme notable in Klippel’s research, including geological and landscape contexts, taphonomy, and the incorporation of actualistic methodologies and new technologies into zooarchaeological analyses. The diversity of topics represented across the ten chapters showcase just how extensive Klippel’s research interests are and suggest how much contemporary zooarchaeology owes to his vision. The authors take up this broad palette to explore the various ways in which the framework of zooarchaeology can be used and applied in nontraditional settings.
With a foreword by Bonnie Styles and Bruce McMillan, longtime friends and colleagues of Walter Klippel, this volume reflects on the history and continuity of zooarchaeology in North America and honors one of its most notable contemporary contributors. With its multifaceted approach, this volume is sure to appeal to a broad array of practitioners in the field of zooarchaeology.
The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century was first published in 1974. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In his preface the author writes: "Europe's style was both courageous and ignoble, Europe's achievement both magnificent and appalling. There is less need now that Europe's hegemony is over, for pride or shame to color historical judgments." In that candid vein Mr. Davies provides a balanced and impartial history of British, French, and Dutch beginnings in North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa to the end of the seventeenth century. He contrasts two styles of empire: the planting of trading posts in order to gather fur, fish, and slaves; and the planting of people in colonies of settlement to grow tobacco and sugar. He shows that the first style, involving little outlay of capital, was favored by European merchants; the second, by rulers and landlords. In his conclusion he examines the impact made by the Europeans on the people they traded with and expropriated, and assesses the diplomatic, economic, and cultural repercussions of the North Atlantic on Europe itself.
"Should provide valuable supplementary reading in courses in British imperial and American colonial history, as well as a source of information for those who teach them." –History.
“Saints and sinners, whores and housewives, swindlers and laborers alike attempted a hasty adjustment to novel conditions in a land that seemed strange and forbidding,” writes William R. Hunt in his narrative history of Alaska mining. Hunt offers an exciting anecdotal account that follows hungry prospectors, canny shopkeepers, hopeful hangers-on, and crafty lawyers through the gold mining camps and temporary towns of nineteenth-century Alaska. Hunt has hiked and mined many of the same claims he writes about in the book, and North of 53 offers a rare glimpse into far-flung communities from Skagway to the Yukon to the deep interior of Alaska to the Ididarod and Nome on the Bering Sea.
The Northeast's Changing Forest reviews the history and conditions of the forest in the nine northeastern states. This diverse region stretches from the shores of Lake Erie to Passamaquoddy Bay and from Cape May, New Jersey to northern Maine. The forests range from the dune forest of the New Jersey beaches to subalpine forests in the White Mountains and the Adirondacks. Heavily cleared for agriculture in the nineteenth century, the region's forests have increased in area since 1909 by an amount equal to the entire forest area of Maine, which is 17 million acres.
The region's forests can be thought of as five "forests," each playing a distinct economic role. In the Industrial Forest, the growing and harvesting of industrial wood is the primary use, accompanied by substantial use for hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, and wilderness canoeing. In the Suburban Forest, the general emphasis on "green backdrop" roles belies the importance of casual recreation, firewood cutting, and industrial wood uses. In the Rural Forest of the region's farming and thinly settled rural areas, traditional forest uses continue. In the Recreational Forest, heavily developed areas for skiing, lakeside camps and resorts, and coastal developments set the tone. Finally, in the Wild Forest, preservation of nature is dominant.
After generations when few aside from the landowner and technical communities paid the forests much attention, they have now become focal points for policy conflicts. Proposals for large additions to the Adirondack Park's Forever Wild lands, for creating a Maine Woods National Park, and for eliminating all timber harvesting on the region's National Forests are prominent examples. The legislatures of every state in the region deal annually with issues of forest taxation, forest practices regulation, public ownership, and land uses affecting forests. The Northeast's Changing Forest gives readers an historic, geographic, and ecological background for understanding the condition of the forests of the Northeast and the outlook for their future.
Northern Arcadia is a comparative study of the accounts of foreign visitors to the Nordic lands during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Before the late eighteenth century, few foreigners ventured as far as Scandinavia. The region seemed a cold hyperborean wilderness and a voyage there a daring adventure. From the mid-1760s on, however, foreigners arrived in the Nordic lands in increasing numbers, leaving numerous accounts that became increasingly popular, satisfying a growing curiosity about regions beyond the traditional grand tour.
The pre-Romantic mood of the period—with its predilection for untamed nature and for peoples uncorrupted by overrefined civilization—further stimulated fascination with the North. European titerati discovered the Nordic sagas, finding them exhilarating, passionate, imaginative, and original. The French Revolution and the ensuing European wars effectively closed off much of the Continent to foreign travel, turning attention to the still neutral northern kingdoms.
Travel literature about Scandinavia thus illuminates the shift in the European intellectual climate from the enlightened rationalism and utilitarianism of the earlier travelers in this period to the pre-Romantic sensibility of those who followed them. In a Europe torn by war and revolution, sensitive souls could find their new Arcadia in the North—at least until the Scandinavian kingdoms themselves became engulfed by the Napoleonic wars after 1805.
The first scholar to examine as a whole the travel literature dealing with Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and the Færø Islands, H. Arnold Barton discusses accounts left by both the celebrated and the obscure. Well-known travelers include Vittorio Alfieri, Francisco de Miranda, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Malthus, and Aaron Burr. Literary travelers of the day included Nathanael Wraxall, William Coxe, Charles Gottlob Küttner, Edward Daniel Clarke, and John Carr.
Northern Arcadia brings out contrasts: among the various Nordic lands and regions; among the reactions of travelers of differing nationality; between the earlier as opposed to the later travelers of the time; between native Scandinavian and foreign perceptions of the North; between conditions in Scandinavia and those in other parts of the Western world; between then and now. It incorporates continuity and change, reality and mentality.
More than 50,000 draft-age American men and women migrated to Canada during the Vietnam War, the largest political exodus from the United States since the American Revolution. How are we to understand this migration three decades later? Was their action simply a marginal, highly individualized spin-off of the American antiwar movement, or did it have its own lasting collective meaning?
John Hagan, himself a member of the exodus, searched declassified government files, consulted previously unopened resistance organization archives and contemporary oral histories, and interviewed American war resisters settled in Toronto to learn how they made the momentous decision. Canadian immigration officials at first blocked the entry of some resisters; then, under pressure from Canadian church and civil liberties groups, they fully opened the border, providing these Americans with the legal opportunity to oppose the Vietnam draft and military mobilization while beginning new lives in Canada. It was a turning point for Canada as well, an assertion of sovereignty in its post–World War II relationship with the United States.
Hagan describes the resisters’ absorption through Toronto’s emerging American ghetto in the late 1960s. For these Americans, the move was an intense and transformative experience. While some struggled for a comprehensive amnesty in the United States, others dedicated their lives to engagement with social and political issues in Canada. More than half of the draft and military resisters who fled to Canada thirty years ago remain there today. Most lead successful lives, have lost their sense of Americanness, and overwhelmingly identify themselves as Canadians.
After the triumphs of Montgomery and Selma, Martin Luther King, Jr., rallied his forces and headed north. The law was on his side, the nation seemed to be behind him, the crusade for civil rights was rapidly gathering momentum—and then, in Chicago, heartland of America, the movement stalled. What happened? This book is the first to give us the full story—a vivid account of how the Chicago Freedom Movement of 1965–1967 attempted to combat northern segregation. Northern Protest captures this new kind of campaign for civil rights at a fateful turning point, with effects that pulse through the nation’s race relations to the day.
Combating the outright, unconstitutional denial of basic political and civil rights had been King’s focus in the South. In the North, the racial terrain was different. James Ralph analyzes the shift in the planning stages—moving from addressing public constitutional rights to private-impact legal rights—as King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) mounted an unprecedented attack on housing discrimination, one of the most blatant social and economic inequities of urban America. A crisis in the making is unfolded as King, the SCLC, and a coalition of multiracial Chicago civil rights groups mobilize protests against the city’s unfair housing practices. Ralph introduces us to Chicago’s white ethnics, city officials, and business and religious leaders in a heated confusion of responses. His vibrant account, based in part on many in-depth interviews with participants, reveals the true lineaments of urban America, with lessons reaching beyond the confines of the city. The Chicago Freedom Movement is given a national context—as King envisioned it, and as it finally played out. Here, the Chicago crusade becomes emblematic of the civil rights movement today and tomorrow. Ralph argues that this new push for equality in more private realms of American life actually undermined popular support for the movement and led to its ultimate decline.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
This comprehensive compilation of Moore's archaeological reports on northwest Florida and southern Alabama and Georgia presents the earliest documented investigations of this region.
When Clarence Bloomfield Moore cruised the rivers of Florida in search of prehistoric artifacts a century ago, he laid the groundwork for archaeological investigations to follow. This volume reflects Moore's fieldwork along the northwest Florida coast, the most archaeologically rich area of the state, as well as Southern Alabama and Georgia.
Here readers will share Moore's first look at the area in 1901-1903 and additional observations made in 1918 during what was to be his last field season. Moore's works reveal ceramics, tools, skeletal remains, and exotic artifacts excavated from the earthen mounds and shell middens built by native peoples over the last two millennia.
In the introduction to this edition, David Brose and Nancy Marie White place Moore's investigations within the context of the science, natural history, and antiquarianism of his day. They document what happened to the sites he explored, tell how his findings fit into the body of his research, and explain how those findings should be interpreted in the context of Southeastern culture history and modern archaeological theory.
Moore was the most knowledgeable Southeastern archaeologist of his time; his writings are a benchmark for anyone studying those areas today.
Adoption of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 ended a long and sometimes acrimonious debate over the question of how to organize and govern the western territories of the United States. Many eastern leaders viewed the Northwest Territory as a colonial possession, while freedom-loving settlers demanded local self- government. These essays address the ambiguities of the Ordinance, balance of power politics in North America, missionary activity in the territory, slavery, and higher education in the Old Northwest.
In Norwegians in Michigan, Clifford Davidson shows how Norwegians took advantage of opportunities when they began settling in Michigan in the nineteenth century. Norwegians sailed Lake Michigan, joined the lumber trade, farmed the northwest part of the state, and mined copper and iron in the Upper Peninsula. At the same time, they brought a unique culture that came to be associated with Michigan and the Midwest. The first generations of Norwegians in Michigan maintained close cultural ties with their homeland.
Some Norwegian immigrants adjusted to life in a new land more quickly than others. Among these, according to Davidson, were engineers trained in Norway who developed Michigan's bridges, tunnels, and eventually even the cars that used them.
Illustrated with photographs, maps, and documents, Norwegians in Michigan vividly chronicles a now-familiar pattern of immigrants' cultural understandings prodding and shaping the culture of an emerging region and nation.
This perennially popular book, now revised and expanded with additional historical photos and documents, offers a concise introduction to Wisconsin's Norwegian immigrants. The narrative examines the mass migration of Norwegians from 1837, when Ole Nattestad became the first Norwegian settler in Wisconsin, to the late nineteenth century, when Norwegian immigration largely came to a close. This volume demonstrates the efforts of immigrants to balance newfound American customs with the most treasured traditions of their homeland.
New to this edition are selected letters of Ole Munch Ræder, a scholar sent by the Norwegian government in 1847 to study the American legal system. Ræder visited several Wisconsin cities and villiages and paid special attention to the Norwegian community. His compelling accounts, which appeared in newspapers in Norway, offer a contemporary view of Norwegian life in Wisconsin.
Much knowledge and understanding can be generated from the experiences of everyday life. In this engaging study, Alvin O. Korte examines how this concept applies to Spanish-speaking peoples adapted to a particular locale, specifically the Hispanos and Hispanas of northern New Mexico. Drawing on social philosopher Alfred Schutz’s theory of typification, Korte looks at how meaning and identity are crafted by quotidian activities. Incorporating phenomenological and ethnomethodological strategies, the author investigates several aspects of local Hispano culture, including the oral tradition, leave-taking, death and remembrances of the dead, spirituality, and the circle of life. Although avoiding a social-problems approach, the book devotes necessary attention to mortificación (the death of the self), desmadre (chaos and disorder), and mancornando (cuckoldry). Nosotros is a vivid and insightful exploration with applications in numerous fields.
Since the end of the cold war, Africa has seen a dramatic rise in new political and religious phenomena, including an eviscerated privatized state, neoliberal NGOs, Pentecostalism, a resurgence in accusations of witchcraft, a culture of scamming and fraud, and, in some countries, a nearly universal wish to emigrate. Drawing on fieldwork in Togo, Charles Piot suggests that a new biopolitics after state sovereignty is remaking the face of one of the world’s poorest regions.
In a country where playing the U.S. Department of State’s green card lottery is a national pastime and the preponderance of cybercafés and Western Union branches signals a widespread desire to connect to the rest of the world, Nostalgia for the Future makes clear that the cultural and political terrain that underlies postcolonial theory has shifted. In order to map out this new terrain, Piot enters into critical dialogue with a host of important theorists, including Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Deleuze, and Mbembe. The result is a deft interweaving of rich observations of Togolese life with profound insights into the new, globalized world in which that life takes place.
Drawing on her ethnographic research in Istanbul and Ankara during the late 1990s, Özyürek describes how ordinary Turkish citizens demonstrated their affinity for Kemalism in the ways they organized their domestic space, decorated their walls, told their life stories, and interpreted political developments. She examines the recent interest in the private lives of the founding generation of the Republic, reflects on several privately organized museum exhibits about the early Republic, and considers the proliferation in homes and businesses of pictures of Atatürk, the most potent symbol of the secular Turkish state. She also explores the organization of the 1998 celebrations marking the Republic’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Özyürek’s insights into how state ideologies spread through private and personal realms of life have implications for all societies confronting the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism and politicized religion.
A Times Higher Education Book of the Week
A virulent strain of antifeminism is thriving online that treats women’s empowerment as a mortal threat to men and to the integrity of Western civilization. Its proponents cite ancient Greek and Latin texts to support their claims—from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria to Seneca and Marcus Aurelius—arguing that they articulate a model of masculinity that sustained generations but is now under siege. Not All Dead White Men reveals that some of the most controversial and consequential debates about the legacy of the ancients are raging not in universities but online.
“A chilling account of trolling, misogyny, racism, and bad history proliferated online by the Alt-Right… Zuckerberg makes a persuasive case for why we need a new, more critical, and less comfortable relationship between the ancient and modern worlds in this important and very timely book.”
—Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey
“Explores how ideas about Ancient Greece and Rome are used and misused by antifeminist thinkers today.”
—Time
“Zuckerberg presciently analyzes these communities’…embrace of stoicism as a self-help tool to gain confidence, jobs, and girlfriends. Their adoration of men like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Ovid…is founded in a limited and distorted interpretation of ancient philosophy…lending heft and authority to sexism and abuse.”
—The Nation
“Traces the application—and misapplication—of classical authors and texts in online communities that see feminism as a threat.”
—Bitch Media
“No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights.”
—Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal
“Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”
—George Soros
The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. While state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality has quietly disappeared. In its place, economic liberalization has emerged as the dominant force. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn considers how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of broader social and economic justice.
Moyn places the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift and explores why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside exploding inequality.
“Moyn asks whether human-rights theorists and advocates, in the quest to make the world better for all, have actually helped to make things worse… Sure to provoke a wider discussion.”
—Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal
“A sharpening interrogation of the liberal order and the institutions of global governance created by, and arguably for, Pax Americana… Consistently bracing.”
—Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books
“Moyn suggests that our current vocabularies of global justice—above all our belief in the emancipatory potential of human rights—need to be discarded if we are work to make our vastly unequal world more equal… [A] tour de force.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
Raised in the squalor of a New York tenement until he was 10 years old, Nelson Díaz saw his life change when his family moved to a brand-new high-rise project in West Harlem in the 1950s. That experience, along with lessons learned as the only Latino law student at Temple University, would drive him throughout his life as a lawyer and activist, fighting for the expansion of rights for all Americans.
“No soy de aquí ni de allá” is a mantra for Puerto Ricans who feel like foreigners wherever they are and who seek a place for themselves. In his inspiring autobiography, Not from Here, Not from There, Díaz tells the story of his struggles and triumphs as his perspective widened from the New York streets and law school classrooms to the halls of power in Philadelphia and Washington, DC. Whether as a leader in economic development, a pioneer in court reform, or a champion of fair housing, Díaz has never stopped advocating for others. Díaz was happy to be the first Latino to “do something,” but he never wanted to be the last. This story of an outsider who worked his way to the inside offers powerful lessons on finding a place in the world by creating spaces where everyone is welcome.
From Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter, from Internet filters to the v-chip, censorship exercised on behalf of children and adolescents is often based on the assumption that they must be protected from “indecent” information that might harm their development—whether in art, in literature, or on a Web site. But where does this assumption come from, and is it true?
In Not in Front of the Children, Marjorie Heins explores the fascinating history of “indecency” laws and other restrictions aimed at protecting youth. From Plato’s argument for rigid censorship, through Victorian laws aimed at repressing libidinous thoughts, to contemporary battles over sex education in public schools and violence in the media, Heins guides us through what became, and remains, an ideological minefield. With fascinating examples drawn from around the globe, she suggests that the “harm to minors” argument rests on shaky foundations.
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