In Bad Medicine, Sarah A. Whitt exposes how Native American boarding schools and other settler institutions like asylums, factories, and hospitals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked together as a part of an interconnected system of settler domination. In so doing, Whitt centers the experiences of Indigenous youth and adults alike at the Carlisle Indian School, Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, Ford Motor Company Factory, House of the Good Shepherd, and other Progressive Era facilities. She demonstrates that in the administration of these institutions, which involved moving Indigenous people from one location to another, everyday white Americans became deputized as agents of the settler order. Bringing together Native American history, settler colonial studies, and the history of medicine, Whitt breaks new ground by showing how the confinement of Indigenous people across interlocking institutional sites helped concretize networks of white racial power—a regime that Native nations and communities continue to negotiate and actively resist today.

Weaving together oral and written sources, The Institutionalization of Islam in Southern Senegal investigates previously overlooked dimensions of Islamization in Senegambia through the processes of intermarriage, Qur’anic education, and jihãd. Due to its geographic location at the point where Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau meet, the Middle Casamance has historically been a melting pot where centralized and decentralized societies have coexisted for generations. In the past, historians have failed to consider the contributions of the Middle Casamance region and Mandinka Muslim settlements to the development of Islam, despite centers for Islamic education having existed in the region centuries before the emergence of the Sufi and jihãd movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Aly Dramé seeks to close this gap by conceptualizing the leading role played by these Mandinka settlements and how religious spaces are negotiated, acquired, and transformed through intermarriage, Qur’anic education, and jihãd when peoples from distinct backgrounds encounter one another. 

Drawing on archival documents, oral history and traditions, travelers’ accounts, the Arabic text Pakao al-Qurano (Holy Book of Pakao), and original ethnography, The Institutionalization of Islam in Southern Senegal demonstrates how these communities reframe the debates about the institutionalization of Islam in Senegambia geographically, chronologically, and thematically.