front cover of The Making of the New Deal Democrats
The Making of the New Deal Democrats
Voting Behavior and Realignment in Boston, 1920-1940
Gerald H. Gamm
University of Chicago Press, 1990
"Why is The Making of New Deal Democrats so significant? One of the major controversies in the study of American elections has to do with the nature of electoral realignments. One school argues that a realignment involves a major shift of voters from one party to another, while another school argues that the process consists largely of mobilization of previously inactive voters. The debate is crucial for understanding the nature of the New Deal realignment.

Almost all previous work on the subject has dealt with large-scale national patterns which make it difficult to pin down the precise processes by which the alignment took place. Gamm's work is most remarkable in that it is a close analysis of shifting voter alignments on the precinct and block level in the city of Boston. His extremely detailed and painstaking work of isolating homogeneous ethnic units over a twenty-year period allows one to trace the voting behavior of the particular ethnic groups that ultimately formed the core of the New Deal realignment."—Sidney Verba, Harvard University
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The Making of the New Deal
The Insiders Speak
Katie Louchheim
Harvard University Press, 1983

There has never been a phenomenon in American life to equal the invasion of Washington by the young New Dealers—hundreds of men and women still in their twenties and thirties, brilliant and dedicated, trained in the law, economics, public administration, technology, pouring into public life to do nothing less than restructure American society. They proposed new programs, drafted legislation, staffed the new agencies. They were active in the Administration, the Congress, the courts, the news media. They fanned out all over America to discover the facts, plan ways of easing the pain of their foundering country, and report on the results. Many of them went on to be rich, famous, and powerful, but their early experience in Washington was perhaps the most inspiriting of their lives.

Katie Louchheim was among those who arrived in Washington in the 1930s, and being a keen writer as well as the wife of a member of the SEC, she had a front-row seat for the spectacle of social progress. Now, a half-century later, she has gathered reminiscences from her old friends and colleagues, interviewed others, and woven them together into a lively, informal word-picture of that exciting time. Among the many insiders who recount their views are Alger Hiss, Robert C. Weaver, Paul A. Freund, James H. Rowe, Wilbur J. Cohen, Abe Fortas, David Riesman, and Joseph L. Rauh. This book, a singular and uplifting primary document of an extraordinary period, is destined to appeal across a wide spectrum of readers of American history.

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The Making of the New Negro
Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance
Anna Pochmara
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

The Making of the New Negro examines black masculinity in the period of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s in America and was marked by an outpouring of African American art, music, theater and literature. The Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro Movement, began attracting extensive academic attention in the 1990s as scholars discovered how complex, significant, and fascinating it was.

Drawing on African American texts, archives, unpublished writings, and contemporaneous European discourses, this book highlights both the canonical figures of the New Negro Movement and African American culture such as W. E. B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright, and other writers such as Wallace Thurman, who have not received as much scholarly attention despite their significant contributions to the movement.
 
Anna Pochmara offers a striking combination of thorough literary analysis and historicist investigation in order to provide novel insights into one of the most important periods of black history in the United States.
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The Making of the Northwest Forest Plan
The Wild Science of Saving Old Growth Ecosystems
K. Norman Johnson
Oregon State University Press, 2023

Tree sitters. Logger protests. Dying timber towns. An iconic species on the brink. The Timber Wars consumed the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s and early1990s and led political leaders to ask scientists for a solution. The Northwest Forest Plan was the result.  

For most of the twentieth century, the central theme of federal forest management in the Pacific Northwest had been logging old-growth forests to provide a sustained yield of timber. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a series of studies by young scientists highlighted the destructive impact of that logging on northern spotted owls, salmon, and the old-growth ecosystem itself.  

Combining this new science with newly minted environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act, environmental activists obtained court injunctions to stop old-growth logging on federal land, setting off a titanic struggle in the Pacific Northwest to find a way to accommodate conservation imperatives as well as the logging that provided employment for tens of thousands of people. That effort involved years of controversy and debate, federal courts, five science assessments, Congress, and eventually the president of the United States. It led to creation of the Northwest Forest Plan, which sharply and abruptly shifted the primary goal of federal forestry toward conserving the species and ecosystems of old-growth forests.   Scientists went from spectators to planners and guides, employing their latest scientific findings and expertise to create a forest plan for 20 million acres that would satisfy the courts. The largest upheaval in federal forest management in history had occurred, along with a precipitous decline in timber harvest, and there was no going back.  

In this book, three of the scientists who helped craft that change tell the story as they know it: the causes, development, adoption, and implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan. The book also incorporates personal reflections from the authors, short commentaries and histories from key figures— including spotted owl expert Eric Forsman—and experiences from managers who implemented the Plan as best they could. Legal expert Susan Jane M. Brown helped interpret court cases and Debora Johnson turned spatial data into maps. The final chapters cover the Plan’s ongoing significance and recommendations for conserving forest and aquatic ecosystems in an era of megafires and climate change.

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The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China
The Dynamics of Institutional Change
Morris L. Bian
Harvard University Press, 2005

When, how, and why did the state enterprise system of modern China take shape? The conventional argument is that China borrowed its economic system and development strategy wholesale from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. In an important new interpretation, Morris Bian shows instead that the basic institutional arrangement of state-owned enterprise—bureaucratic governance, management and incentive mechanisms, and the provision of social services and welfare—developed in China during the war years 1937–1945.

Bian offers a new theory of institutional change that explains the formation of China’s state enterprise system as the outcome of the sustained systemic crisis triggered by the Sino–Japanese war. This groundbreaking work combines critical analysis of government policies with case studies of little-studied enterprises in heavy industries and the ordnance industry. Drawing on extensive research in previously unavailable archives, Bian adds a valuable historical perspective to the current debate on how to reform China’s sluggish and unprofitable state-owned firms.

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The Making of the Supply Chain
How Five CSCMP Supply Chain Hall of Famers Shaped the Industry
Remko van Hoek
Epic Books, 2024

In The Making of the Supply Chain, Remko van Hoek explores the stories of five very different supply chain pioneers—George Stephenson, Henry Ford, George Lauer, Elizabeth Dole, and J. B. Hunt—to demonstrate how innovations in supply chain management have changed the world by reshaping how we obtain our products and services.

Van Hoek reflects on these leaders’ seminal achievements in supply chain management, relates their breakthroughs to current best practices and opportunities for the future, and chronicles how other leaders have converted lessons from these Hall of Famers into new breakthroughs.

Informed by his work with the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) Supply Chain Hall of Fame,Van Hoek presents these inspiring stories in an engaging and highly accessible style.

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The Making of the Unborn Patient
A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery
Casper, Monica J
Rutgers University Press, 1998
Winner of the 1998 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems

It is now possible for physicians to recognize that a pregnant woman's fetus is facing life-threatening problems, perform surgery on the fetus, and if it survives, return it to the woman's uterus to finish gestation. Although fetal surgery has existed in various forms for three decades, it is only just beginning to capture the public's imagination. These still largely experimental procedures raise all types of medical, political and ethical questions. Who is the patient? What are the technical difficulties involved in fetal surgery? How do reproductive politics seep into the operating room, and how do medical definitions and meanings flow out of medicine and into other social spheres? How are ethical issues defined in this practice and who defines them? Is fetal surgery the kind of medicine we want? What is involved in reframing fetal surgery as a women's health issue, rather than simply a pediatric concern? In this ethnographic study of the social, cultural and historical aspects of fetal surgery, Monica Casper addresses these questions. The Making of the Unborn Patient examines two important and connected events of the second half of the 20th century: the emergence of fetal surgery as a new medical specialty and the debut of the unborn patient.
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The Making of The Wind in the Willows
Peter Hunt
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2018
The adventures of Mole, Ratty, Mr. Toad, and Mr. Badger—and their tangles with the Weasels—have been adored by children for more than a century. Yet, with its oddly bureaucratic town dramas and the esoteric hobbies of its protagonists, The Wind in the Willows was originally intended almost entirely for adults. Though first inspired by bedtime stories Kenneth Grahame told to his son Alastair, as he wrote them down, the tales of these woodland creatures developed into something much more sophisticated.
            Peter Hunt explores the unusual trajectory of The Wind in the Willows through previously unpublished archival materials, original drawings, and fan letters (including one from Theodore Roosevelt). He identifies the colleagues and friends on whom Grahame is thought to have based the characters of Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad, and explores the literary genres of boating, caravanning, and motoring on which the author drew. He also recounts the extraordinary correspondence surrounding the book’s first publication and the influence of two determined women—publisher’s agent Constance Smedley and the author’s wife, Elspeth Grahame—who helped turn the book into the classic for children we know and love today. Generously illustrated throughout, this book celebrates one of the most beloved works of children’s literature ever published.
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The Making of Theatrical Reputations
Studies from the Modern London Theatre
Yael Zarhy-Levo
University of Iowa Press, 2008

Today's successful plays and playwrights achieve their prominence not simply because of their intrinsic merit but because of the work of mediators, who influence the whole trajectory of a playwright's or a theatre company's career. Critics and academic writers are primarily considered the makers of reputations, but funding organizations and various media agents as well as artistic directors, producers, and directors also pursue separate agendas in shaping the reputations of theatrical works. In The Making of Theatrical Reputations Yael Zarhy-Levo demonstrates the processes through which these mediatory practices by key authority figures situate theatrical companies and playwrights within cultural and historical memory.

 To reveal how these authorizing powers-that-be promote theatrical events, companies, and playwrights, Zarhy-Levo presents four detailed case studies that reflect various angles of the modern London theatre. In the case of the English Stage Company's production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, she centers on a specific event. She then focuses on the trajectory of a single company, the Theatre Workshop, particularly through its first decade at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London. Next, she explores the career of the dramatist John Arden, especially its first ten years, in part drawing upon an interview with Arden and his wife, actress and playwright Margaretta D'Arcy, before turning to her fourth study: the playwright Harold Pinter's shifting reputation throughout the different phases of his career.

Zarhy-Levo's accounts of these theatrical events, companies, and playwrights through the prism of mediation bring fresh insights to these landmark productions and their creators.

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The Making of Tocqueville's America
Law and Association in the Early United States
Kevin Butterfield
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to draw attention to Americans’ propensity to form voluntary associations—and to join them with a fervor and frequency unmatched anywhere in the world. For nearly two centuries, we have sought to understand how and why early nineteenth-century Americans were, in Tocqueville’s words, “forever forming associations.” In The Making of Tocqueville’s America, Kevin Butterfield argues that to understand this, we need to first ask: what did membership really mean to the growing number of affiliated Americans?

Butterfield explains that the first generations of American citizens found in the concept of membership—in churches, fraternities, reform societies, labor unions, and private business corporations—a mechanism to balance the tension between collective action and personal autonomy, something they accomplished by emphasizing law and procedural fairness. As this post-Revolutionary procedural culture developed, so too did the legal substructure of American civil society. Tocqueville, then, was wrong to see associations as the training ground for democracy, where people learned to honor one another’s voices and perspectives. Rather, they were the training ground for something no less valuable to the success of the American democratic experiment: increasingly formal and legalistic relations among people.
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The Making of Urban Europe, 1000-1950
Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees
Harvard University Press, 1985

Europe became a land of cities during the last millennium. The story told in this book begins with North Sea and Mediterranean traders sailing away from Dorestad and Amalfi, and with warrior kings building castles to fortify their conquests. It tells of the dynamism of textile towns in Flanders and Ireland. While London and Hamburg flourished by reaching out to the world and once vibrant Spanish cities slid into somnlence, a Russian urban network slowly grew to rival that of the West. Later as the tide of industrialization swept over Europe, the most intense urban striving and then settled back into the merchant cities and baroque capitals of an earlier era.

By tracing the large-scale precesses of social, economic, and political change within cities, as well as the evolving relationships between town and country and between city and city, the authors present an original synthsis of European urbanization within a global context. They divide their study into three time periods, making the early modern era much more than a mere transition from preindustrial to industrial economies. Through both general analyzes and incisive case studies, Hohenberg and Lees show how cities originated and what conditioned their early development and later growth. How did urban activity respond to demographic and techological changes? Did the social consequences of urban life begin degradation or inspire integration and cultural renewal? New analytical tools suggested by a systems view of urban relations yield a vivid dual picture of cities both as elements in a regional and national heirarchy of central places and also as junctions in a transnational network for the exchange of goods, information, and influence.

A lucid text is supplemented by numerous maps, illustrations, figures, and tables, and by substantial bibliography. Both a general and a scholarly audience will find this book engrossing reading.

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The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1994
With a New Preface and a New Chapter
Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees
Harvard University Press, 1995

Europe became a land of cities during the last millennium. The story told in this book begins with North Sea and Mediterranean traders sailing away from Dorestad and Amalfi, and with warrior kings building castles to fortify their conquests. It tells of the dynamism of textile towns in Flanders and Ireland. While London and Hamburg flourished by reaching out to the world and once vibrant Spanish cities slid into somnolence, a Russian urban network slowly grew to rival that of the West. Later, as the tide of industrialization swept over Europe, the most intense urban striving settled back into the merchant cities and baroque capitals of an earlier era.

By tracing the large-scale processes of social, economic, and political change within cities, as well as the evolving relationships between town and country and between city and city, the authors present an original synthesis of European urbanization within a global context. They divide their study into three time periods, making the early modern era much more than a mere transition from preindustrial to industrial economies. Through both general analyses and incisive case studies, Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees show how cities originated and what conditioned their early development and later growth. How did urban activity respond to demographic and technological changes? Did the social consequences of urban life begin degradation or inspire integration and cultural renewal? New analytical tools suggested by a systems view of urban relations yield a vivid dual picture of cities both as elements in a regional and national hierarchy of central places and also as junctions in a transnational network for the exchange of goods, information, and influence.

A lucid text is supplemented by numerous maps, illustrations, figures, and tables, and by a substantial bibliography. Both a general and a scholarly audience will find this book engrossing reading.

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The Making of Working-Class Religion
Matthew Pehl
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Religion has played a protean role in the lives of America's workers. In this innovative volume, Matthew Pehl focuses on Detroit to examine the religious consciousness constructed by the city's working-class Catholics, African American Protestants, and southern-born white evangelicals and Pentecostals between 1910 and 1969.

Pehl embarks on an integrative view of working-class faith that ranges across boundaries of class, race, denomination, and time. As he shows, workers in the 1910s and 1920s practiced beliefs characterized by emotional expressiveness, alliance with supernatural forces, and incorporation of mass culture's secular diversions into the sacred. That gave way to the more pragmatic class-conscious religion cultures of the New Deal era and, from the late Thirties on, a quilt of secular working-class cultures that coexisted in competitive, though creative, tension. Finally, Pehl shows how the ideology of race eclipsed class in the 1950s and 1960s, and in so doing replaced the class-conscious with the race-conscious in religious cultures throughout the city.

An ambitiously inclusive contribution to a burgeoning field, The Making of Working-Class Religion breaks new ground in the study of solidarity and the sacred in the American heartland.

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Making the American Home
Middle-Class Women and Domestic Material Culture, 1840–1940
Marilyn F. Motz
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988
The transformation of a house into a home has been in our culture a traditional task of women. The articles examine this process as they reflected the role of American middle-class women as homemakers in the years 1840–1940.
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Making the American Mouth
Dentists and Public Health in the Twentieth Century
Picard, Alyssa
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Why are Americans so uniquely obsessed with teeth? Brilliantly white, straight teeth?

Making the American Mouth is at once a history of United States dentistry and a study of a billion-dollar industry. Alyssa Picard chronicles the forces that limited Americans' access to dental care in the early twentieth century and the ways dentists worked to expand that access--and improve the public image of their profession. Comprehensive in scope, this work describes how dentists' early public health commitments withered under the strain of fights over fluoride, mid-century social movements for racial and gender equity, and pressure to insure dental costs. It explains how dentists came to promote cosmetic services, and why Americans were so eager to purchase them. As we move into the twentyfirst century, dentists' success in shaping their industry means that for many, the perfect American smile will remain a distant--though tantalizing--dream.
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Making the American Self
Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln
Daniel W. Howe
Harvard University Press

What does it mean to be an American, and how have individual Americans consciously endeavored to create their own identity? "Self-improvement," "self-culture," "self-made man," to "make something of oneself"--all are terms that were used from colonial to Victorian times. The particular language that framed the quest has fallen out of fashion, but it was a powerful cultural imperative for hundreds of years. The quest, in all its "post" guises, continues. Daniel Howe considers the ideas Americans once had about a proper construction of the self. Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Bushnell, Horace Mann, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Dorothea Dix, Frederick Douglass, among others, engaged in discussion about the composition of human nature, the motivation of human behavior, and what can be done about the social problems these create. They shared a common model of human psychology, in which powerful but base passions must be mastered by reason in the service of virtue. How to accomplish this was often itself a subject of passionate controversy.

The story reveals that Americans both distrusted individual autonomy and were enthusiastic about it; passions, reason, and moral sense collided on how to manage it. Howe is empathetic to all the quests--for elites and artisans, blacks and women--seeing in them a basic pursuit of identity. The author demonstrates that aspirations for "self-control" and "self-discipline," grounded in conservatism and evangelical Christianity, also shaped movements that branched leftward to promote social welfare, feminism, and civil rights.

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Making the American Team
Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience
Mark Dyreson
University of Illinois Press, 1998

Sport dominates television and the mass media. Politics and business are a-bustle with sports metaphors. Endorsements by athletes sell us products. "Home run," "slam dunk," and the rest of the vocabulary of sport color daily conversation. Even in times of crisis and emergency, the media reports the scores and highlights. 

Marky Dyreson delves into how our obsession with sport came into being with a close look at coverage of the Olympic Games between 1896 and 1912. How people reported and consumed information on the Olympics offers insight into how sport entered the heart of American culture as part of an impetus for social reform. Political leaders came to believe in the power of sport to revitalize the "republican experiment." Sport could instill a new sense of national identity that would forge a new sense of community and a healthy political order while at the same time linking America's intellectual and power elite with the experiences of the masses.

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Making The Best Years of Our Lives
The Hollywood Classic That Inspired a Nation
By Alison Macor
University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 Wall Award Finalist, Theatre Library Association

How a Hollywood gem transformed the national discourse on post-traumatic stress disorder.


Released in 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives became an immediate success. Life magazine called it “the first big, good movie of the post-war era” to tackle the “veterans problem.” Today we call that problem PTSD, but in the initial aftermath of World War II, the modern language of war trauma did not exist. The film earned the producer Samuel Goldwyn his only Best Picture Academy Award. It offered the injured director, William Wyler, a triumphant postwar return to Hollywood. And for Harold Russell, a double amputee who costarred with Fredric March and Dana Andrews, the film provided a surprising second act.

Award-winning author Alison Macor illuminates the film’s journey from script to screen and describes how this authentic motion picture moved audiences worldwide. General Omar Bradley believed The Best Years of Our Lives would help “the American people to build an even better democracy” following the war, and the movie inspired broad reflection on reintegrating the walking wounded. But the film’s nuanced critique of American ideals also made it a target, and the picture and its creators were swept up in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the late 1940s. In this authoritative history, Macor chronicles the making and meaning of a film that changed America.

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Making The Black Jacobins
C. L. R. James and the Drama of History
Rachel Douglas
Duke University Press, 2019
C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins remains one of the great works of the twentieth century and the cornerstone of Haitian revolutionary studies. In Making The Black Jacobins, Rachel Douglas traces the genesis, transformation, and afterlives of James's landmark work across the decades from the 1930s on. Examining the 1938 and 1963 editions of The Black Jacobins, the 1967 play of the same name, and James's 1936 play, Toussaint Louverture—as well as manuscripts, notes, interviews, and other texts—Douglas shows how James continuously rewrote and revised his history of the Haitian Revolution as his politics and engagement with Marxism evolved. She also points to the vital significance theater played in James's work and how it influenced his views of history. Douglas shows The Black Jacobins to be a palimpsest, its successive layers of rewriting renewing its call to new generations.
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Making the Carry
The Lives of John and Tchi-Ki-Wis Linklater
Timothy Cochrane
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

An extraordinary illustrated biography of a Métis man and Anishinaabe woman navigating great changes in their homeland along the U.S.–Canada border in the early twentieth century

John Linklater, of Anishinaabeg, Cree, and Scottish ancestry, and his wife, Tchi-Ki-Wis, of the Lac La Croix First Nation, lived in the canoe and border country of Ontario and Minnesota from the 1870s until the 1930s. During that time, the couple experienced radical upheavals in the Quetico–Superior region, including the cutting of white and red pine forests, the creation of Indian reserves/reservations and conservation areas, and the rise of towns, tourism, and mining. With broad geographical sweep, historical significance, and biographical depth, Making the Carry tells their story, overlooked for far too long.

John Linklater, a renowned game warden and skilled woodsman, was also the bearer of traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous heritage, both of which he was deeply committed to teaching others. He was sought by professors, newspaper reporters, museum personnel, and conservationists—among them Sigurd Olson, who considered Linklater a mentor. Tchi-Ki-Wis, an extraordinary craftswoman, made a sweeping array of necessary yet beautiful objects, from sled dog harnesses to moose calls to birch bark canoes. She was an expert weaver of large Anishinaabeg cedar bark mats with complicated geometric designs, a virtually lost art.

Making the Carry traces the routes by which the couple came to live on Basswood Lake on the international border. John’s Métis ancestors with deep Hudson’s Bay Company roots originally came from Orkney Islands, Scotland, by way of Hudson Bay and Red River, or what is now Winnipeg. His family lived in Manitoba, northwest Ontario, northern Minnesota, and, in the case ofJohn and Tchi-Ki-Wis, on Isle Royale. A journey through little-known Canadian history, the book provides an intimate portrait of Métis people.

Complete with rarely seen photographs of activities from dog mushing to guiding to lumbering, as well as of many objects made by Tchi-Ki-Wis, such as canoes, moccasins, and cedar mats, Making the Carry is a window on a traditional way of life and a restoration of two fascinating Indigenous people to their rightful place in our collective past.

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Making the Case
Advocacy and Judgment in Public Argument
Kathryn M. Olson
Michigan State University Press, 2012

In an era when the value of the humanities and qualitative inquiry has been questioned in academia and beyond, Making the Case is an engaging and timely collection that brings together a veritable who’s who of public address scholars to illustrate the power of case-based scholarly argument and to demonstrate how critical inquiry into a specific moment speaks to general contexts and theories. Providing both a theoretical framework and a wealth of historically situated texts, Making the Case spans from Homeric Greece to twenty-first-century America. The authors examine the dynamic interplay of texts and their concomitant rhetorical situations by drawing on a number of case studies, including controversial constitutional arguments put forward by activists and presidents in the nineteenth century, inventive economic pivots by Franklin Roosevelt and Alan Greenspan, and the rhetorical trajectory and method of Barack Obama.

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Making the Cut
How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming Our Lives
Anthony Elliott
Reaktion Books, 2008
From London to New York, Madrid to Melbourne, Singapore to Tehran, the demand for cosmetic surgery is soaring. Botox injections, collagen fillers, breast implants, microdermabrasion, mini face-lifts: extreme reinvention is all the rage. For better or worse, ours is the era of cosmetic surgical culture.
 
In this captivating book, which draws upon research conducted in Europe, America and Australasia, social commentator Anthony Elliott investigates the rise and rise of cosmetic surgery, lucidly reviewing recent developments in celebrity culture and the consumer industries, which many argue are responsible for the popularity of cosmetic and surgical forms of extreme reinvention. Yet it is not just cultural forces advancing the makeover industries: Elliott shows that cosmetic surgical culture has become increasingly global in our own time as a result of major institutional changes dominating public life in Western societies. He provocatively argues that personal vulnerabilities have reached the point where people turn to surgical culture in an effort to reinvent themselves and improve their life prospects
 
Making the Cut paints a disturbing social portrait of a global culture held in thrall to immediacy, where cosmetic surgical enhancements of the body are fundamental to new forms of self-design and self-improvement.
 
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Making the Desert Modern
Americans, Arabs, and Oil on the Saudi Frontier, 1933–1973
Chad Parker
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
In 1933 American oilmen representing what later became the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) signed a concession agreement with the Saudi Arabian king granting the company sole proprietorship over the oil reserves in the country’s largest province. As drilling commenced and wells proliferated, Aramco soon became a major presence in the region. In this book Chad H. Parker tells Aramco’s story, showing how an American company seeking resources and profits not only contributed to Saudi “nation building” but helped define U.S. foreign policy during the early Cold War. In the years following World War II, as Aramco expanded its role in Saudi Arabia, the idea of “modernization” emerged as a central component of American foreign policy toward newly independent states. Although the company engaged in practices supportive of U.S. goals, its own modernizing efforts tended to be pragmatic rather than policy-driven, more consistent with furthering its business interests than with validating abstract theories. Aramco built the infrastructure necessary to extract oil and also carved an American suburb out of the Arabian desert, with all the air-conditioned comforts of Western modern life. At the same time, executives cultivated powerful relationships with Saudi government officials and, to the annoyance of U.S. officials, even served the monarchy in diplomatic disputes. Before long the company became the principal American diplomatic, political, and cultural agent in the country, a role it would continue to play until 1973, when the Saudi government took over its operation.
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Making the East Latin
The Latin Literature of the Levant in the Era of the Crusades
Julian Yolles
Harvard University Press

“This new day, new joy, the consummation of toil and devotion with ever new and eternal rejoicing, required new words, new songs from all!”

So wrote Raymond of Aguilers, a Provençal priest, when an army of nobles, knights, footmen, and priests from across Europe managed to conquer Jerusalem after three years of traveling and fighting. And there certainly were new words and new songs. These settlers produced a hybrid Latin literature—a “Levantine Latinity”—distinct from that in Europe, and their new literary tradition both drew on and resisted Levantine Muslim, Christian, and Jewish cultures in the newly occupied territories.

This volume analyzes the literary and rhetorical techniques of well-known authors such as William of Tyre, literary compositions of communities of canons in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and individual scholars in the Principality of Antioch. These varied sources reveal the coherent and increasingly sophisticated ways in which Crusader settlers responded to their new environment while maintaining ties with their homelands in western Europe. In a short time, Levantine Latinity emerged to form an indispensable part of the literary history of both the Near East and Europe.

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Making the Empire Work
London and American Interest Groups, 1690–1790
Alison Olson
Harvard University Press, 1992

The British government had few imperial administrators in the American colonies and perhaps fewer ways to exert its authority by force, yet Americans rarely questioned that authority until the eve of the American Revolution. The empire worked and Americans accepted British rule not because they feared the government, but rather because they had effective methods for influencing it to their own benefit.

Alison Olson reveals a source of that influence in networks of interest groups working cooperatively in England and America. Between 1640 and 1790 voluntary interest groups emerged in English politics. They began in London and gradually formed loose connections with smaller but similar interests in the English and American provinces. When the London groups became capable of lobbying the national government, they were willing to use their influence on behalf of the provincials as well. This “representation” of the Americans, though never official, was crucial to keeping the colonists content within the empire.

The type of interest group that could accommodate colonial participation was the associational, identified by the voluntary character of its membership. It included religious and ethnic communities—Presbyterians, Jews, Lutherans, Quakers, Baptists, Huguenots—and merchant groups. London lobbyists, acting as intermediaries between the colonies and the imperial government, gave American interests a vitally important role in the making of English imperial decisions and gave the English government a key source of information on just what decisions would and would not provoke American resistance. When these connections collapsed, the dissolution of the first British empire was not far away.

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Making the European Monetary Union
Harold James
Harvard University Press, 2012

Europe’s financial crisis cannot be blamed on the Euro, Harold James contends in this probing exploration of the whys, whens, whos, and what-ifs of European monetary union. The current crisis goes deeper, to a series of problems that were debated but not resolved at the time of the Euro’s invention.

Since the 1960s, Europeans had been looking for a way to address two conundrums simultaneously: the dollar’s privileged position in the international monetary system, and Germany’s persistent current account surpluses in Europe. The Euro was created under a politically independent central bank to meet the primary goal of price stability. But while the monetary side of union was clearly conceived, other prerequisites of stability were beyond the reach of technocratic central bankers. Issues such as fiscal rules and Europe-wide banking supervision and regulation were thoroughly discussed during planning in the late 1980s and 1990s, but remained in the hands of member states. That omission proved to be a cause of crisis decades later.

Here is an account that helps readers understand the European monetary crisis in depth, by tracing behind-the-scenes negotiations using an array of sources unavailable until now, notably from the European Community’s Committee of Central Bank Governors and the Delors Committee of 1988–89, which set out the plan for how Europe could reach its goal of monetary union. As this foundational study makes clear, it was the constant friction between politicians and technocrats that shaped the Euro. And, Euro or no Euro, this clash will continue into the future.

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Making the Forever War
Marilyn B. Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism
Mary L. Dudziak
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
The late historian Marilyn B. Young, a preeminent voice on the history of U.S. military conflict, spent her career reassessing the nature of American global power, its influence on domestic culture and politics, and the consequences felt by those on the receiving end of U.S. military force. At the center of her inquiries was a seeming paradox: How can the United States stay continually at war, yet Americans pay so little attention to this militarism?

Making the Forever War brings Young's articles and essays on American war together for the first time, including never before published works. Moving from the first years of the Cold War to Korea, Vietnam, and more recent "forever" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Young reveals the ways in which war became ever-present, yet more covert and abstract, particularly as aerial bombings and faceless drone strikes have attained greater strategic value. For Young, U.S. empire persisted because of, not despite, the inattention of most Americans. The collection concludes with an afterword by prominent military historian Andrew Bacevich.
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Making the Frontier Man
Violence, White Manhood, and Authority in the Early Western Backcountry
Matthew C. Ward
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023

Contextualizes the Development of Early American Violence and Gun Culture 

For western colonists in the early American backcountry, disputes often ended in bloodshed and death. Making the Frontier Man examines early life and the origins of lawless behavior in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio from 1750 to 1815. It provides a key to understanding why the trans-Appalachian West was prone to violent struggles, especially between white men. Traumatic experiences of the Revolution and the Forty Years War legitimized killing as a means of self-defense—of property, reputation, and rights—transferring power from the county courts to the ordinary citizen. Backcountry men waged war against American Indians in state-sponsored militias as they worked to establish farms and seize property in the West. And white neighbors declared war on each other, often taking extreme measures to resolve petty disputes that ended with infamous family feuds.  

Making the Frontier Man focuses on these experiences of western expansion and how they influenced American culture and society, specifically the nature of western manhood, which radically transformed in the North American environment. In search of independence and improvement, the new American man was also destitute, frustrated by the economic and political power of his elite counterparts, and undermined by failure. He was aggressive, misogynistic, racist, and violent, and looked to reclaim his dominance and masculinity by any means necessary.  

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Making the Gods Speak
The Ritual Production of Revelation in Chinese Religious History
Vincent Goossaert
Harvard University Press, 2022
For two millennia, Chinese society has been producing divine revelations on an unparalleled scale, in multifarious genres and formats. This book is the first comprehensive attempt at accounting for the processes of such production. It builds a typology of the various ritual techniques used to make gods present and allow them to speak or write, and it follows the historical development of these types and the revealed teachings they made possible. Within the large array of visionary, mediumistic, and mystical techniques, Vincent Goossaert devotes the bulk of his analysis to spirit-writing, a family of rites that appeared around the eleventh century and gradually came to account for the largest numbers of books and tracts ascribed to the gods. In doing so, he shows that the practice of spirit-writing must be placed within the framework of techniques used by ritual specialists to control human communications with gods and spirits for healing, divining, and self-divinization, among other purposes. Making the Gods Speak thus offers a ritual-centered framework to study revelation in Chinese cultural history and comparatively with the revelatory practices of other religious traditions.
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Making the Grade
The Economic Evolution of American School Districts
William A. Fischel
University of Chicago Press, 2009

A significant factor for many people deciding where to live is the quality of the local school district, with superior schools creating a price premium for housing. The result is a “race to the top,” as all school districts attempt to improve their performance in order to attract homebuyers. Given the importance of school districts to the daily lives of children and families, it is surprising that their evolution has not received much attention.

In this provocative book, William Fischel argues that the historical development of school districts reflects Americans’ desire to make their communities attractive to outsiders. The result has been a standardized, interchangeable system of education not overly demanding for either students or teachers, one that involved parents and local voters in its governance and finance. Innovative in its focus on bottom-up processes generated by individual behaviors rather than top-down decisions by bureaucrats, Making the Grade provides a new perspective on education reform that emphasizes how public schools form the basis for the localized social capital in American towns and cities.

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Making the Heartland Quilt
A Geographical History of Settlement and Migration in Early-Nineteenth-Century Illinois
Douglas K. Meyer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

In Making the Heartland Quilt, Douglas K. Meyer reconstructs the settlement patterns of thirty-three immigrant groups and confirms the emergence of discrete culture regions and regional way stations. Meyer argues that midcontinental Illinois symbolizes a historic test strip of the diverse population origins that unfolded during the Great Migration. Basing his research on the 1850 U.S. manuscript schedules, Meyer dissects the geographical configurations of twenty-three native and ten foreign-born adult male immigrant groups who peopled Illinois. His historical geographical approach leads to the comprehension of a new and clearer map of settlement and migration history in the state.

 
Meyer finds that both cohesive and mixed immigrant settlements were established. Balkan-like immigrant enclaves or islands were interwoven into evolving local, regional, and national settlement networks. The midcontinental location of Illinois, its water and land linkages, and its lengthy north-south axis enhanced cultural diversity. The barrier effect of Lake Michigan contributed to the convergence and mixing of immigrants. Thus, Meyer demonstrates, Illinois epitomizes midwestern dichotomies: northern versus southern; native-born versus foreign-born; rural versus urban; and agricultural versus manufacturing.
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Making the Human
Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans
Corinne Mitsuye Sugino
Rutgers University Press
From the debate over affirmative action to the increasingly visible racism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have emerged as key figures in a number of contemporary social controversies. In Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino offers the lens of racial allegory to consider how media, institutional, and cultural narratives mobilize difference to normalize a white, Western conception of the human. Rather than focusing on a singular arena of society, Sugino considers contemporary sources across media, law, and popular culture to understand how they interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, communication, and gender and sexuality studies, Sugino argues that Asian American racialization and gendering plays a key role in shoring up abstract concepts such as “meritocracy,” “family,” “justice,” “diversity,” and “nation” in ways that naturalize hierarchy. In doing so, Making the Human grapples with anti-Asian racism’s entanglements with colonialism, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and gendered violence.
 
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Making the Immigrant Soldier
How Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender Intersect in the US Military
Cristina-Ioana Dragomir
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Immigrants to the United States have long used the armed forces as a shortcut to citizenship. Cristina-Ioana Dragomir profiles Lily, Alexa, and Vikrant, three immigrants of varying nationalities and backgrounds who chose military service as their way of becoming American citizens. Privileging the trio’s own words and experiences, Dragomir crafts a human-focused narrative that moves from their lives in their home countries and decisions to join the military to their fraught naturalization processes within the service. Dragomir illuminates how race, ethnicity, class, and gender impacted their transformation from immigrant to soldier, veteran, and American. She explores how these factors both eased their journeys and created obstacles that complicated their access to healthcare, education, economic resources, and other forms of social justice.

A compelling union of analysis and rich storytelling, Making the Immigrant Soldier traces the complexities of serving in the military in order to pursue the American dream.

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Making the Majors
The Transformation of Team Sports in America
Eric Leifer
Harvard University Press, 1995

In this in-depth look at major league sports, Eric Leifer traces the growth and development of major leagues in baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, and predicts fundamental changes as the majors pursue international expansion. He shows how every past expansion of sports publics has been accompanied by significant changes in the way sporting competition is organized. With each reorganization, the majors have created teams closer in ability, bringing repetition to competition across time, only to expand and energize the public's search for differences between teams and for events that disrupt the repetitive flow. "The phenomenal success of league sports," Leifer writes, "rests on their ability to manufacture inequalities for fans to latch on to without jeopardizing the equalities that draw fans in."

Leifer supports his theory with historical detail and statistical analysis. He examines the special concerns of league organizers in pursuing competitive balance and presents a detailed analysis of how large-city domination has been undermined in the modern era of Major League Baseball. Using games from the four major league sports, he then shows how fans can themselves affect the course of competition. In NFL football, for example, fans account for nearly all of the persisting inequality in team performance. The possibility of sustaining inequality among equals emerges from the cross-pressures that fans and leagues place on competition.

With substantial data in hand, Leifer asks the essential question facing the leagues today: how can they sustain a situation that depends entirely on simultaneous equality and contention, one in which fan involvement may evaporate as soon as one team dominates? His answer has significant implications for the future of major league sports, both nationally and internationally.

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Making the March King
John Philip Sousa's Washington Years, 1854-1893
Patrick Warfiled
University of Illinois Press, 2013
John Philip Sousa's mature career as the indomitable leader of his own touring band is well known, but the years leading up to his emergence as a celebrity have escaped serious attention. In this revealing biography, Patrick Warfield explains how the March King came to be by documenting Sousa's early life and career. Covering the period 1854 to 1893, this study focuses on the community and training that created Sousa, exploring the musical life of late nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia as a context for Sousa's development.

Warfield examines Sousa's wide-ranging experience composing, conducting, and performing in the theater, opera house, concert hall, and salons, as well as his leadership of the United States Marine Band and the later Sousa Band, early twentieth-century America's most famous and successful ensemble. Sousa composed not only marches during this period but also parlor, minstrel, and art songs; parade, concert, and medley marches; schottisches, waltzes, and polkas; and incidental music, operettas, and descriptive pieces. Warfield's examination of Sousa's output reveals a versatile composer much broader in stylistic range than the bandmaster extraordinaire remembered as the March King.

In particular, Making the March King demonstrates how Sousa used his theatrical training to create the character of the March King. The exuberant bandmaster who pleased audiences was both a skilled and charismatic conductor and a theatrical character whose past and very identity suggested drama, spectacle, and excitement. Sousa's success was also the result of perseverance and lessons learned from older colleagues on how to court, win, and keep an audience. Warfield presents the story of Sousa as a self-made business success, a gifted performer and composer who deftly capitalized on his talents to create one of the most entertaining, enduring figures in American music.

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Making the Mark
Gender, Identity, and Genital Cutting
Miroslava Prazak
Ohio University Press, 2016
Why do female genital cutting practices persist? How does circumcision affect the rights of girls in a culture where initiation forms the lynchpin of the ritual cycle at the core of defining gender, identity, and social and political status? In Making the Mark, Miroslava Prazak follows the practice of female circumcision through the lives and activities of community members in a rural Kenyan farming society as they decide whether or not to participate in the tradition. In an ethnography twenty years in the making, Prazak weaves multiple Kuria perspectives—those of girls, boys, family members, circumcisers, political and religious leaders—into a riveting account. Though many books have been published on the topic of genital cutting, this is one of the few ethnographies to give voice to evolving perspectives of practitioners, especially through a period of intense anticutting campaigning on the part of international NGOs, local activists, and donor organizations. Prazak also examines the cultural challenges that complicate the human-rights anti-FGM stance. Set in the rolling hills of southwestern Kenya, Making the Mark examines the influences that shape and change female genital cutting over time, presenting a rich mosaic of the voices contributing to the debate over this life-altering ritual.
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Making the MexiRican City
Migration, Placemaking, and Activism in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Delia Fernández-Jones
University of Illinois Press, 2023

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2023

Large numbers of Latino migrants began to arrive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1950s. They joined a small but established Spanish-speaking community of people from Texas, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Delia Fernández-Jones merges storytelling with historical analysis to recapture the placemaking practices that these Mexicans, Tejanos, and Puerto Ricans used to create a new home for themselves. Faced with entrenched white racism and hostility, Latinos of different backgrounds formed powerful relationships to better secure material needs like houses and jobs and to recreate community cultural practices. Their pan-Latino solidarity crossed ethnic and racial boundaries and shaped activist efforts that emphasized working within the system to advocate for social change. In time, this interethnic Latino alliance exploited cracks in both overt and structural racism and attracted white and Black partners to fight for equality in social welfare programs, policing, and education.

Groundbreaking and revelatory, Making the MexiRican City details how disparate Latino communities came together to respond to social, racial, and economic challenges.

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Making the Mission
Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco
Ocean Howell
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, residents of the city’s iconic Mission District bucked the city-wide development plan, defiantly announcing that in their neighborhood, they would be calling the shots. Ever since, the Mission has become known as a city within a city, and a place where residents have, over the last century, organized and reorganized themselves to make the neighborhood in their own image.

In Making the Mission, Ocean Howell tells the story of how residents of the Mission District organized to claim the right to plan their own neighborhood and how they mobilized a politics of place and ethnicity to create a strong, often racialized identity—a pattern that would repeat itself again and again throughout the twentieth century. Surveying the perspectives of formal and informal groups, city officials and district residents, local and federal agencies, Howell articulates how these actors worked with and against one another to establish the very ideas of the public and the public interest, as well as to negotiate and renegotiate what the neighborhood wanted. In the process, he shows that national narratives about how cities grow and change are fundamentally insufficient; everything is always shaped by local actors and concerns.
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Making the Modern
Industry, Art, and Design in America
Terry Smith
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In this ambitious book, Terry Smith chronicles the modernist revolution in American art and design between the world wars—from its origins in the new industrial age of mass production, automation, and corporate culture to its powerful and transforming effects on the way Americans came to see themselves and their world. From Ford Motor's first assembly line in 1913 to the New York World's Fair of 1939, Smith traces the evolution of visual imagery in the first half of America's century of progress.
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Making the Modern Middle East
Second Edition
T.G. Fraser, Andrew Mango, and Robert McNamara
Gingko, 2015
A century ago, as World War I got underway, the Middle East was dominated, as it had been for centuries, by the Ottoman Empire. But by 1923, its political shape had changed beyond recognition, as the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the insistent claims of Arab and Turkish nationalism and Zionism led to a redrawing of borders and shuffling of alliances—a transformation whose consequences are still felt today.
           
This fully revised and updated second edition of The Makers of the Modern Middle East traces those changes and the ensuing history of the region through the rest of the twentieth century and on to the present. Focusing in particular on three leaders—Emir Feisal, Mustafa Kemal, and Chaim Weizmann—the book offers a clear, authoritative account of the region seen from a transnational perspective, one that enables readers to understand its complex history and the way it affects present-day events.
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Making the Most of College
Students Speak Their Minds
Richard J. Light
Harvard University Press, 2001

Why do some students make the most of college, while others struggle and look back on years of missed deadlines and missed opportunities? What choices can students make, and what can teachers and university leaders do, to improve more students’ experiences and help them achieve the most from their time and money? Most important, how is the increasing diversity on campus—cultural, racial, and religious—affecting education? What can students and faculty do to benefit from differences, and even learn from the inevitable moments of misunderstanding and awkwardness?

From his ten years of interviews with Harvard seniors, Richard Light distills encouraging—and surprisingly practical—answers to fundamental questions. How can you choose classes wisely? What’s the best way to study? Why do some professors inspire and others leave you cold? How can you connect what you discover in class to all you’re learning in the rest of life? Light suggests, for instance: studying in pairs or groups can be more productive than studying alone; the first and most important skill to learn is time management; supervised independent research projects and working internships offer the most learning and the greatest challenges; and encounters with students of different religions can be simultaneously the most taxing and most illuminating of all the experiences with a diverse student body.

Filled with practical advice, illuminated with stories of real students’ self-doubts, failures, discoveries, and hopes, Making the Most of College is a handbook for academic and personal success.

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Making the Most of Mess
Reliability and Policy in Today's Management Challenges
Emery Roe
Duke University Press, 2013
In Making the Most of Mess, Emery Roe emphasizes that policy messes cannot be avoided or cleaned up; they need to be managed. He shows how policymakers and other professionals can learn these necessary skills from control operators who manage large critical infrastructures such as water supplies, telecommunications systems, and electricity grids. The ways in which they prevent major accidents and failures offer models for policymakers and other professionals to manage the messes they face.

Throughout, Roe focuses on the global financial mess of 2008 and its ongoing aftermath, showing how mismanagement has allowed it to morph into other national and international messes. More effective management is still possible for this and many other policy messes but that requires better recognition of patterns and formulation of scenarios, as well as the ability to translate pattern and scenario into reliability. Developing networks of professionals who respond to messes is particularly important. Roe describes how these networks enable the avoidance of bad or worse messes, take advantage of opportunities resulting from messes, and address societal and professional challenges. In addition to finance, he draws from a wide range of case material in other policy arenas. Roe demonstrates that knowing how to manage policy messes is the best approach to preventing crises.

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Making the Most of Tomorrow
A Laboratory of Socialist Modernity in Czechoslovakia
Matej Spurný
Karolinum Press, 2019
Most, one of the most impressive historical cities of Northern Bohemia, was destroyed in the sixties and seventies for coal mining. When plans to redevelop the city began, hope and expectations ran high; in the end, however, Most became a symbol for the heartless incompetence of Czechoslovak communism.

In this book, Matěj Spurný explores the historical city of Most from the nineteenth century into the years following World War II, investigating the decision to destroy it as well as the negotiations concerning the spirit of the proposed new city. Situating postwar Most in the context of cultural and social shifts in Czechoslovakia and Europe as a whole, Spurný traces the path a medieval city took to become a showcase of brutalist architecture and the regime’s technicist inhumanity.

But the book, like the city of Most itself, does not end in tragedy. Fusing architectural and political history with urban and environmental studies, Spurný’s tale shows the progress that can be made when Czechs confront the crimes of the past—including the expulsion of local Germans and the treatment of the Romani minority—and engage with rational, contemporary European concepts of urban renewal.
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Making the Most of Your Library Career
Lois Stickell
American Library Association, 2014

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Making the News
Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France
Dean de la Motte
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999
Much recent writing on print culture has focused on the social and political implications of the transition from "elite" to "mass" culture in the 1800s. The essays in this volume add significantly to our understanding of the role of the nineteenth-century French press in producing the commodities, consumers, and ideological frameworks that are the hallmarks of this shift. The book also offers an opportunity for useful comparisons with recent scholarship on the rise on the popular press in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany.

The essays address a wide range of topics, from the emergence of commercial daily newspapers during the July Monarchy to the photographic representation of women in the Paris Commune. Together they demonstrate that the French mass press was far more heterogeneous than previously supposed, tapping into an expanding readership composed of a variety of publics—from affluent bourgeois to disaffected workers to disenfranchised women. It was also relentlessly innovative, using caricature, argot, advertisements, and other attention-grabbing techniques that blurred the lines separating art, politics, and the news.
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Making the News
Politics, the Media, and Agenda Setting
Amber E. Boydstun
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Media attention can play a profound role in whether or not officials act on a policy issue, but how policy issues make the news in the first place has remained a puzzle. Why do some issues go viral and then just as quickly fall off the radar? How is it that the media can sustain public interest for months in a complex story like negotiations over Obamacare while ignoring other important issues in favor of stories on “balloon boy?”
           
With Making the News, Amber Boydstun offers an eye-opening look at the explosive patterns of media attention that determine which issues are brought before the public. At the heart of her argument is the observation that the media have two modes: an “alarm mode” for breaking stories and a “patrol mode” for covering them in greater depth. While institutional incentives often initiate alarm mode around a story, they also propel news outlets into the watchdog-like patrol mode around its policy implications until the next big news item breaks. What results from this pattern of fixation followed by rapid change is skewed coverage of policy issues, with a few receiving the majority of media attention while others receive none at all. Boydstun documents this systemic explosiveness and skew through analysis of media coverage across policy issues, including in-depth looks at the waxing and waning of coverage around two issues: capital punishment and the “war on terror.”
           
Making the News
shows how the seemingly unpredictable day-to-day decisions of the newsroom produce distinct patterns of operation with implications—good and bad—for national politics.

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Making the News Popular
Mobilizing U.S. News Audiences
Anthony Nadler
University of Illinois Press, 2016
The professional judgment of gatekeepers defined the American news agenda for decades. Making the News Popular examines how subsequent events brought on a post-professional period that opened the door for imagining that consumer preferences should drive news production--and unleashed both crisis and opportunity on journalistic institutions.

Anthony Nadler charts a paradigm shift, from market research's reach into the editorial suite in the 1970s through contemporary experiments in collaborative filtering and social news sites like Reddit and Digg. As Nadler shows, the transition was and is a rocky one. It also goes back much further than many experts suppose. Idealized visions of demand-driven news face obstacles with each iteration. Furthermore, the post-professional philosophy fails to recognize how organizations mobilize interest in news and public life. Nadler argues that this civic function of news organizations has been neglected in debates on the future of journalism. Only with a critical grasp of news outlets' role in stirring broad interest in democratic life, he says, might journalism's digital crisis push us toward building a more robust and democratic news media.

Wide-ranging and original, Making the News Popular offers a critical examination of an important, and still evolving, media phenomenon.

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Making the Palace Machine Work
Mobilizing People, Objects, and Nature in the Qing Empire
Martina Siebert
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This volume brings the studies of institutions, labour, and material cultures to bear on the history of science and technology by tracing the workings of the Imperial Household Department (Neiwufu) in the Qing court and empire. An enormous apparatus that employed 22,000 men and women at its heyday, the Department operated a "machine" with myriad moving parts. The first part of the book portrays the people who kept it running, from technical experts to menial servants, and scrutinises the paper trails they left behind. Part two uncovers the working principles of the machine by following the production chains of some of its most splendid products: gilded statues, jade, porcelain, and textiles. Part three tackles the most complex task of all, managing living organisms in nature, including lotus plants grown in imperial ponds in Beijing, fresh medicines sourced from disparate regions, and tribute elephants from Southeast Asia.
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Making the Past Present
David Jones, the Middle Ages and Modernism
Paul Robichaud
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
Robichaud charts the growth of Jones's medievalism from his earliest Pre-Raphaelite influences, showing how his commitment to modernist aesthetics transformed his vision of the Middle Ages.
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Making the Radical University
Identity and Politics on the American College Campus, 1966–1991
Elizabeth M. Kalbfleisch
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

In the 1960s, professors, students, and activists on the political Left viewed college curricula as useful sites for political transformation. They coordinated efforts to alter general education requirements at the college level to foster change in American thought, with greater openness toward people who had previously been excluded, including women, people of color, the poor and working classes, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ community. Their work reshaped American culture and politics, while prompting a significant backlash from conservatives attempting to, in their view, protect classical education from modern encroachment.

Elizabeth M. Kalbfleisch details how American universities became a battleground for identity politics from the 1960s through the 1980s. Focusing on two case studies at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin, Making the Radical University examines how curricular changes led to polarizing discussions nationwide around academic standards and identity politics, including the so-called canon wars. Today, these debates have only become more politically charged, complex, and barbed.

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Making the Renaissance Man
Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy
Timothy McCall
Reaktion Books, 2023
Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo’s David, the pugnacious, passionate, and—crucially—important story of Renaissance manhood.
 
Making the Renaissance Man explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses, flaunted splendor in lavish rituals of knighting, and demonstrated prowess through the hunt—all ostentatious performances of masculinity and the drive to rule. Hardly frivolous pastimes, these activities were essential displays of privilege and virility; indeed, violence underlay the cultural veneer of the Italian Renaissance. Timothy McCall investigates representations and ideals of manhood in this time and provides a historically grounded and gorgeously illustrated account of how male identity and sexuality proclaimed power during a century crucial to the formation of Early Modern Europe.
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Making the Right Choice
Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka
Asha L. Abeyasekera
Rutgers University Press, 2021

Making the Right Choice unravels the entangled relationship between marriage, morality, and the desire for modernity as it plays out in the context of middle-class status concerns and aspirations for upward social mobility within the Sinhala-Buddhist community in urban Sri Lanka. By focusing on individual life-histories spanning three generations, the book illuminates how narratives about a gendered self and narratives about modernity are mutually constituted and intrinsically tied to notions of agency. The book uncovers how "becoming modern" in urban Sri Lanka, rather than causing inter-generational conflict, is a collective aspiration realized through the efforts of bringing up educated and independent women capable of making "right" choices. The consequence of this collective investment is a feminist conundrum: agency does not denote the right to choose, but the duty to make the "right" choice; hence agency is experienced not as a sense of "freedom," but rather as a burden of responsibility.

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Making the Scene in the Garden State
Popular Music in New Jersey from Edison to Springsteen and Beyond
Dewar MacLeod
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Making the Scene in the Garden State explores New Jersey’s rich musical heritage through stories about the musicians, listeners and fans who came together to create sounds from across the American popular music spectrum. The book includes chapters on the beginnings of musical recording in Thomas Edison’s factories in West Orange; early recording and the invention of the Victrola at Victor Records’ Camden complex; Rudy Van Gelder’s recording studios (for Blue Note, Prestige, and other jazz labels) in Hackensack and Englewood Cliffs; Zacherley and the afterschool dance television show Disc-o-Teen, broadcast from Newark in the 1960s; Bruce Springsteen’s early years on the Jersey Shore at the Upstage Club in Asbury Park; and, the 1980s indie rock scene centered at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. Concluding with a foray into the thriving local music scenes of today, the book examines the sounds, sights and textures of the locales where New Jerseyans have gathered to rock, bop, and boogie.
 
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Making the Second Ghetto
Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960
Arnold R. Hirsch
University of Chicago Press, 2021
First published in 1983 and praised by the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Thomas Sugrue, Arnold R. Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto is the rare book that has only become more piercingly prescient over the years.

Hirsch’s classic and groundbreaking work of urban history is a revelatory look at Chicago in the decades after the Great Depression, a period when the city dealt with its rapidly growing Black population not by working to abolish its stark segregation but by expanding and solidifying it. Even as the civil rights movement rose to prominence, Chicago exploited a variety of methods of segregation—including riots, redevelopment, and a host of new legal frameworks—that provided a national playbook for the emergence of a new kind of entrenched inequality. Hirsch’s chronicle of the strategies employed by ethnic, political, and business interests in reaction to the Great Migration of Southern Blacks in the mid-twentieth century makes startingly clear how the violent reactions of an emergent white population found common ground with policy makers to segregate first a city and then the nation.

This enlarged edition of Making the Second Ghetto features a visionary afterword by historian N. D. B. Connolly, explaining why Hirsch’s book still crackles with “blistering relevance” for contemporary readers.
 
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Making the Transition to Classroom Success
Culturally Responsive Teaching for Struggling Language Learners
Helaine W. Marshall and Andrea DeCapua
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Features a chapter on flipped classrooms!
 
 Learners with no, minimal, or limited exposure to formal education generally do not share the expectations and assumptions of their new setting; as a result, they are likely to find themselves confounded by the ways in which the language and content are presented, practiced, and assessed in Western-style educational settings. Institutions and teachers must tailor therefore their instruction to this population. Making the Transition to Classroom Success: Culturally Responsive Teaching for Struggling Language Learners examines how understanding secondary and adult L2 learners’ educational paradigm, rooted deeply in their past experiences and cultural orientations, provides a key to the solution to a lack of progress.

Making the Transition to Classroom Success builds on and expands on two earlier books, Meeting the Needs of Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Schooling and Breaking New Ground: Teaching Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education in U.S. Secondary Schools.  These previous books focused specifically on a subset of struggling L2 learners--those with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE) in U.S. secondary schools—and detailed the instructional model (MALP). Making the Transition broadens the applications of the MALP model to include academic thinking tasks, flipped classrooms, project design, and rubrics.

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Making the Unequal Metropolis
School Desegregation and Its Limits
Ansley T. Erickson
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In a radically unequal United States, schools are often key sites in which injustice grows. Ansley T. Erickson’s Making the Unequal Metropolis presents a broad, detailed, and damning argument about the inextricable interrelatedness of school policies and the persistence of metropolitan-scale inequality. While many accounts of education in urban and metropolitan contexts describe schools as the victims of forces beyond their control, Erickson shows the many ways that schools have been intertwined with these forces and have in fact—via land-use decisions, curricula, and other tools—helped sustain inequality.

Taking Nashville as her focus, Erickson uncovers the hidden policy choices that have until now been missing from popular and legal narratives of inequality. In her account, inequality emerges not only from individual racism and white communities’ resistance to desegregation, but as the result of long-standing linkages between schooling, property markets, labor markets, and the pursuit of economic growth. By making visible the full scope of the forces invested in and reinforcing inequality, Erickson reveals the complex history of, and broad culpability for, ongoing struggles in our schools.
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Making the Unseen Visible
Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure
Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Oregon State University Press, 2023
Many of the effects of nuclear fallout and radiation have been intentionally hidden by governments around the world, and public knowledge has been driven by activists demanding recognition and justice. Many downwinders fought for years, in the press and in the courts, to have their health and environmental concerns taken seriously. Although these battles have taken place worldwide, one of the most significant has been the extended legal battle around the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington and the controversial Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project.  

From 2017 to 2020, Jacob Hamblin and Linda Richards ran the Oregon State University Downwinders Project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, to support research and scholarship on the Hanford downwinders cases. Additionally, each summer the project team sponsored a workshop that brought a variety of stakeholders together to explore the science, history, and lived experiences of nuclear exposure. These workshops took a broad view of nuclear exposure, beyond Hanford, beyond the United States, and beyond academia. Community members and activists presented their testimonies and creative work alongside scholars studying exposure worldwide.  

Making the Unseen Visible collects the best work arising from the project and its workshops. Scholarly research chapters and reflective essays cover topics and experiences ranging from colonial nuclear testing in North Africa, to Hiroshima survivor stories, to uranium mining in the Navajo Nation, to battles over public memory around Hanford. Scholarship on nuclear topics has largely happened on a case study basis, focusing on individual disasters or locations. Making the Unseen Visible brings a variety of current community and scholarly work together to create a clearer, larger web uniting nuclear humanities research across time and geography.
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Making the White Man's West
Whiteness and the Creation of the American West
Jason E. Pierce
University Press of Colorado, 2016

The West, especially the Intermountain states, ranks among the whitest places in America, but this fact obscures the more complicated history of racial diversity in the region. In Making the White Man’s West, author Jason E. Pierce argues that since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the American West has been a racially contested space. Using a nuanced theory of historical “whiteness,” he examines why and how Anglo-Americans dominated the region for a 120-year period.

In the early nineteenth century, critics like Zebulon Pike and Washington Irving viewed the West as a “dumping ground” for free blacks and Native Americans, a place where they could be segregated from the white communities east of the Mississippi River. But as immigrant populations and industrialization took hold in the East, white Americans began to view the West as a “refuge for real whites.” The West had the most diverse population in the nation with substantial numbers of American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, but Anglo-Americans could control these mostly disenfranchised peoples and enjoy the privileges of power while celebrating their presence as providing a unique regional character. From this came the belief in a White Man’s West, a place ideally suited for “real” Americans in the face of changing world.

The first comprehensive study to examine the construction of white racial identity in the West, Making the White Man’s West shows how these two visions of the West—as a racially diverse holding cell and a white refuge—shaped the history of the region and influenced a variety of contemporary social issues in the West today.

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Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better
Forward-Looking Policies to Help Low-Income Families
Carolyn J. Heinrich
Russell Sage Foundation, 2009
Work first. That is the core idea behind the 1996 welfare reform legislation. It sounds appealing, but according to Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better, it collides with an exceptionally difficult reality. The degree to which work provides a way out of poverty depends greatly on the ability of low-skilled people to maintain stable employment and make progress toward an income that provides an adequate standard of living. This forward-looking volume examines eight areas of the safety net where families are falling through and describes how current policies and institutions could evolve to enhance the self-sufficiency of low-income families. David Neumark analyzes a range of labor market policies and finds overwhelming evidence that the minimum wage is ineffective in promoting self-sufficiency. Neumark suggests the Earned Income Tax Credit is a much more promising policy to boost employment among single mothers and family incomes. Greg Duncan, Lisa Gennetian, and Pamela Morris find no evidence that encouraging parents to work leads to better parenting, improved psychological health, or more positive role models for children. Instead, the connection between parental work and child achievement is linked to parents' improved access to quality child care. Rebecca Blank and Brian Kovak document an alarming increase in the number of single mothers who receive neither wages nor public assistance and who are significantly more likely to suffer from medical problems of their own or of a child. Time caps and work hour requirements embedded in benefits policies leave some mothers unable to work and ineligible for cash benefits. Marcia Meyers and Janet Gornick identify another gap: low-income families tend to lose financial support and health coverage long before they earn enough to access employer-based benefits and tax provisions. They propose building "institutional bridges" that minimize discontinuities associated with changes in employment, earnings, or family structure. Steven Raphael addresses a particularly troubling weakness of the work-based safety net—its inadequate provision for the large number of individuals who are or were incarcerated in the United States. He offers tractable suggestions for policy changes that could ease their transition back into non-institutionalized society and the labor market. Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better shows that the "work first" approach alone isn't working and suggests specific ways the social welfare system might be modified to produce greater gains for vulnerable families.
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Making the World a Better Place
African American Women Advocates, Activists, and Leaders, 1773-1900
Jacqueline Jones Royster
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
In Making the World a Better Place, Royster argues that African American women must be taken seriously as historical actors who were more consistently and more variously engaged in community- and nation-building than they have been given credit for. Their considerable rhetorical expertise becomes evident when looking carefully at their work in terms of identity, agency, authority, and expressiveness. Their writings constitute a substantial artifactual record of their levels of engagement, their excellence in sociopolitical work, and the legacies of leadership and action. The writing of African American women during the nineteenth century reflects their own perceptions of the ways and means of their lives. They deserve to be recognized as consequential contributors to the narratives of the nation, rather than marginalized as a group. To that end, Jacqueline Jones Royster offers a deeper understanding, often through their own words, of these women, their practices, and their achievements. 
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Making the World Global
U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary
Isaac A. Kamola
Duke University Press, 2019
Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within these institutions reimagined the world instead as a single global market and higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold. By the 1990s, American universities embraced this language of globalization, and globalization eventually became the organizing logic of higher education. In Making the World Global Isaac A. Kamola examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial institutions created the conditions that made it possible to imagine the world as global. Examining the Center for International Studies, Harvard Business School, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, and NYU, Kamola demonstrates that how we imagine the world is always symptomatic of the material relations within which knowledge is produced.
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Making the World Safe for Capitalism
How Iraq Threatened the US Economic Empire and had to be Destroyed
Christopher Doran
Pluto Press, 2012

The Iraq war defined the first decade of the twenty-first century – leading to mass protests and raising profound questions about domestic politics and the use of military force. Yet most explanations of the war have a narrow focus either on political personalities or oil.

Christopher Doran provides a unique perspective, arguing that the drive to war came from the threat Iraq might pose to American economic hegemony if the UN sanctions regime was ended. Doran argues that this hegemony is rooted in third world debt and corporate market access. It was protection of these arrangements that motivated US action, not Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction or a simplistic desire to seize its oil.

This book will provide new insights on the war which still casts a shadow over global politics, and will have wide appeal to all those concerned about the Middle East, world peace and global development.

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Making the World Safe for Workers
Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism
Elizabeth McKillen
University of Illinois Press, 2018
 
In this intellectually ambitious study, Elizabeth McKillen explores the significance of Wilsonian internationalism for workers and the influence of American labor in both shaping and undermining the foreign policies and war mobilization efforts of Woodrow Wilson's administration. McKillen highlights the major fault lines and conflicts that emerged within labor circles as Wilson pursued his agenda in the context of Mexican and European revolutions, World War I, and the Versailles Peace Conference. As McKillen shows, the choice to collaborate with or resist U.S. foreign policy remained an important one for labor throughout the twentieth century. In fact, it continues to resonate today in debates over the global economy, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the impact of U.S. policies on workers at home and abroad.

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The Male Pill
A Biography of a Technology in the Making
Nelly Oudshoorn
Duke University Press, 2003
The Male Pill is the first book to reveal the history of hormonal contraceptives for men. Nelly Oudshoorn explains why it is that, although the technical feasibility of male contraceptives was demonstrated as early as the 1970s, there is, to date, no male pill. Ever since the idea of hormonal contraceptives for men was introduced, scientists, feminists, journalists, and pharmaceutical entrepreneurs have questioned whether men and women would accept a new male contraceptive if one were available. Providing a richly detailed examination of the cultural, scientific, and policy work around the male pill from the 1960s through the 1990s, Oudshoorn advances work at the intersection of gender studies and the sociology of technology.

Oudshoorn emphasizes that the introduction of contraceptives for men depends to a great extent on changing ideas about reproductive responsibility. Initial interest in the male pill, she shows, came from outside the scientific community: from the governments of China and India, which were interested in population control, and from Western feminists, who wanted the responsibilities and health risks associated with contraception shared more equally between the sexes. She documents how in the 1970s, the World Health Organization took the lead in investigating male contraceptives by coordinating an unprecedented, worldwide research network. She chronicles how the search for a male pill required significant reorganization of drug-testing standards and protocols and of the family-planning infrastructure—including founding special clinics for men, creating separate spaces for men within existing clinics, enrolling new professionals, and defining new categories of patients. The Male Pill is ultimately a story as much about the design of masculinities in the last decades of the twentieth century as it is about the development of safe and effective technologies.

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A Mandarin and the Making of Public Policy
Reflections
Tong Dow Ngiam
National University of Singapore Press, 2001
Singapore's success story has increasingly been recognised but few have told it from the perspective of an insider. As a senior civil servant and "mandarin" from 1959 to 1999, Ngiam Tong Dow served with the founding generation of political leaders and contributed to the country's economic growth. In this book, he reflects on these experiences, sharing personal anecdotes and perceptive insights of Singapore's early decades. He also boldly questions some of the policies of government and emerging trends in the country to suggest how Singapore must change to survive and thrive in the future.
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Manifold Greatness
The Making of the King James Bible
Edited by Helen Moore and Julian Reid
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011

Published to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, Manifold Greatness tells the story of the creation and immediate afterlife of the King James translation of the Bible, first published in 1611. Revolutionary at its time, the King James translation quickly became the dominant authorized translation of the Christian Bible in English. There are more than one billion copies in print, making it the best-selling book of all time, and its effect on the English language is incalculable, both in common speech and in literature. 

This accessible and richly illustrated visual history contains eighty color illustrations, including images of rare manuscripts, artifacts, and archival material such as the annotated Bodleian Bishops’ Bible of 1602, pages from the Wycliffite and Tyndale Bibles, and an edition of the Bishop’s Bible owned by Elizabeth I. Eight chapters contributed by leading academics in the field discuss the history of biblical translation, the political background of the project, the Oxford Translators—including Henry Savile, John Rainolds, and John Harmar—and their working milieu, the cultural politics, and the reception and influence of the King James Bible up until the 1769 publication of the Oxford Standard Edition, which was the first revision of the original 1611 translation.  Also included is a look at the later reception of the King James Bible in America, including a chapter specifically on the King James Bible and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Manifold Greatness
brings together key research and documentation to provide a lively and comprehensive visual account to celebrate one of the most important occasions in publishing and modern religious history.

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Mapping Yorùbá Networks
Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities
Kamari Maxine Clarke
Duke University Press, 2004
Three flags fly in the palace courtyard of Òyótúnjí African Village. One represents black American emancipation from slavery, one black nationalism, and the third the establishment of an ancient Yorùbá Empire in the state of South Carolina. Located sixty-five miles southwest of Charleston, Òyótúnjí is a Yorùbá revivalist community founded in 1970. Mapping Yorùbá Networks is an innovative ethnography of Òyótúnjí and a theoretically sophisticated exploration of how Yorùbá òrìsà voodoo religious practices are reworked as expressions of transnational racial politics. Drawing on several years of multisited fieldwork in the United States and Nigeria, Kamari Maxine Clarke describes Òyótúnjí in vivid detail—the physical space, government, rituals, language, and marriage and kinship practices—and explores how ideas of what constitutes the Yorùbá past are constructed. She highlights the connections between contemporary Yorùbá transatlantic religious networks and the post-1970s institutionalization of roots heritage in American social life.

Examining how the development of a deterritorialized network of black cultural nationalists became aligned with a lucrative late-twentieth-century roots heritage market, Clarke explores the dynamics of Òyótúnjí Village’s religious and tourist economy. She discusses how the community generates income through the sale of prophetic divinatory consultations, African market souvenirs—such as cloth, books, candles, and carvings—and fees for community-based tours and dining services. Clarke accompanied Òyótúnjí villagers to Nigeria, and she describes how these heritage travelers often returned home feeling that despite the separation of their ancestors from Africa as a result of transatlantic slavery, they—more than the Nigerian Yorùbá—are the true claimants to the ancestral history of the Great Òyó Empire of the Yorùbá people. Mapping Yorùbá Networks is a unique look at the political economy of homeland identification and the transnational construction and legitimization of ideas such as authenticity, ancestry, blackness, and tradition.

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Mark Twain & France
The Making of a New American Identity
Paula Harrington and Ronald Jenn
University of Missouri Press, 2017
Blending cultural history, biography, and literary criticism, this book explores how one of America's greatest icons used the French to help build a new sense of what it is to be “American” in the second half of the nineteenth century.

While critics have generally dismissed Mark Twain’s relationship with France as hostile, Harrington and Jenn see Twain’s use of the French as a foil to help construct his identity as “the representative American.” Examining new materials that detail his Montmatre study, the carte de visite album, and a chronology of his visits to France, the book offers close readings of writings that have been largely ignored, such as The Innocents Adrift manuscript and the unpublished chapters of A Tramp Abroad, combining literary analysis, socio-historical context and biographical research.
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Mau Mau’s Children
The Making of Kenya’s Postcolonial Elite
David P. Sandgren; Foreword by Thomas Spear
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

In 1963 David P. Sandgren went to Kenya to teach in a small, rural school for boys, where he remained for the next four years. These were heady times for Kenyans, as the nation gained its independence, approved a new constitution, and held its first elections. In the school where Sandgren taught, the sons of Gikuyu farmers rose to the challenges of this post colonial era and, in time, entered Kenyan society as adults, joining Kenya’s first generation of post colonial elites.
    In Mau Mau’s Children, Sandgren has reconnects with these former students. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, he provides readers with a collective biography of the lives of Kenya’s first postcolonial elite, stretching from their 1940s childhood to the peak of their careers in the 1990s. Through these interviews, Mau Mau’s Children shows the trauma of growing up during the Mau Mau Rebellion, the nature of nationalism in Kenya, the new generational conflicts arising, and the significance of education and Gikuyu ethnicity on his students' path to success.

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The Mayan in the Mall
Globalization, Development, and the Making of Modern Guatemala
J. T. Way
Duke University Press, 2012
In The Mayan in the Mall, J. T. Way traces the creation of modern Guatemala from the 1920s to the present through a series of national and international development projects. Way shows that, far from being chronically underdeveloped, this nation of stark contrasts—where shopping malls and multinational corporate headquarters coexist with some of the Western Hemisphere's poorest and most violent slums—is the embodiment of globalized capitalism.

Using a wide array of historical and contemporary sources, Way explores the multiple intersections of development and individual life, focusing on the construction of social space through successive waves of land reform, urban planning, and economic policy. His explorations move from Guatemala City's poorest neighborhoods and informal economies (run predominantly by women) to a countryside still recovering from civil war and anti-Mayan genocide, and they encompass such artifacts of development as the modernist Pan-American Highway and the postmodern Grand Tikal Futura, a Mayan-themed shopping mall ringed by gated communities and shantytowns. Capitalist development, Way concludes, has dramatically reshaped the country's physical and social landscapes—engendering poverty, ethnic regionalism, and genocidal violence—and positioned Guatemala as a harbinger of globalization's future.

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Melville
The Making of the Poet
Hershel Parker
Northwestern University Press, 2007

“Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber?” the London John Bull remarked in October of 1851. And yet, the reviewer went on, “few books which professedly deal in metaphysics, or claim the parentage of the muses, contain as much true philosophy and as much genuine poetry as the tale of the Pequod's whaling expedition.” A decade and a half before surprising the world with a book of Civil war poetry, Melville was already confident of what was “poetic” in his prose. As Hershel Parker demonstrates in this book, Melville was steeped in poetry long before he called himself a poet. 

Here Parker, the dean of Melville studies, gives a compelling, in-depth account of how one of America’s greatest writers grew into the vocation of a poet. His work corrects two of the most pernicious misconceptions about Melville perpetuated by earlier critics: that he repudiated fiction writing after Pierre, and that he hadn’t begun writing poetry (let alone had a book of poems ready for publication) as early as 1860. In clearing up these misapprehensions, Parker gives a thorough and thoroughly involving account of Melville’s development as a poet. Parker demonstrates for the first time just how crucial poetry was to Melville from childhood to old age, especially its re-emergence in his life after 1849. Drawing on Melville's shrewd annotations of great British poets and on his probing, skeptical engagement with commentaries on poetry (particularly by the great Scots reviewers), Parker paints a richly textured portrait of a hitherto unseen side of Herman Melville.


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Mercury and the Making of California
Mining, Landscape, and Race, 1840–1890
Andrew Scott Johnston
University Press of Colorado, 2015
Mercury and the Making of California, Andrew Johnston’s multidisciplinary examination of the history and cultural landscapes of California’s mercury-mining industry, raises mercury to its rightful place alongside gold and silver in the development of the American West.

Gold and silver could not be refined without mercury; therefore, its production and use were vital to securing power and wealth in the West. The first industrialized mining in California, mercury mining had its own particular organization, structure, and built environments. These were formed within the Spanish Empire, subsequently transformed by British imperial ambitions, and eventually manipulated by American bankers and investors. In California mercury mining also depended on a workforce differentiated by race and ethnicity. The landscapes of work and camp and the relations among the many groups involved in the industry—Mexicans, Chileans, Spanish, English, Irish, Cornish, American, and Chinese—form a crucial chapter in the complex history of race and ethnicity in the American West.

This pioneering study explicates the mutual structuring of the built environments of the mercury-mining industry and the emergence of California’s ethnic communities. Combining rich documentary sources with a close examination of the existing physical landscape, Johnston explores both the detail of everyday work and life in the mines and the larger economic and social structures in which mercury mining was enmeshed, revealing the significance of mercury mining for Western history.
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Message in a Bottle
The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
Janet Golden
Harvard University Press, 2006

A generation has passed since a physician first noticed that women who drank heavily while pregnant gave birth to underweight infants with disturbing tell-tale characteristics. Women whose own mothers enjoyed martinis while pregnant now lost sleep over a bowl of rum raisin ice cream. In Message in a Bottle, Janet Golden charts the course of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) through the courts, media, medical establishment, and public imagination.

Long considered harmless during pregnancy (doctors even administered it intravenously during labor), alcohol, when consumed by pregnant women, increasingly appeared to be a potent teratogen and a pressing public health concern. Some clinicians recommended that women simply moderate alcohol consumption; others, however, claimed that there was no demonstrably safe level for a developing fetus, and called for complete abstinence. Even as the diagnosis gained acceptance and labels appeared on alcoholic beverages warning pregnant women of the danger, FAS began to be de-medicalized in some settings. More and more, FAS emerged in court cases as a viable defense for people charged with serious, even capital, crimes and their claims were rejected.

Golden argues that the reaction to FAS was shaped by the struggle over women's relatively new abortion rights and the escalating media frenzy over "crack" babies. It was increasingly used as evidence of the moral decay found within marginalized communities--from inner-city neighborhoods to Indian reservations. With each reframing, FAS became a currency traded by politicians and political commentators, lawyers, public health professionals, and advocates for underrepresented minorities, each pursuing separate aims.

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Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona
Edited by Luis F. B. Plascencia and Gloria H. Cuádraz
University of Arizona Press
On any given day in Arizona, thousands of Mexican-descent workers labor to make living in urban and rural areas possible. The majority of such workers are largely invisible. Their work as caretakers of children and the elderly, dishwashers or cooks in restaurants, and hotel housekeeping staff, among other roles, remains in the shadows of an economy dependent on their labor.

Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona centers on the production of an elastic supply of labor, revealing how this long-standing approach to the building of Arizona has obscured important power relations, including the state’s favorable treatment of corporations vis-à-vis workers. Building on recent scholarship about Chicanas/os and others, the volume insightfully describes how U.S. industries such as railroads, mining, and agriculture have fostered the recruitment of Mexican labor, thus ensuring the presence of a surplus labor pool that expands and contracts to accommodate production and profit goals.

The volume’s contributors delve into examples of migration and settlement in the Salt River Valley; the mobilization and immobilization of cotton workers in the 1920s; miners and their challenge to a dual-wage system in Miami, Arizona; Mexican American women workers in midcentury Phoenix; the 1980s Morenci copper miners’ strike and Chicana mobilization; Arizona’s industrial and agribusiness demands for Mexican contract labor; and the labor rights violations of construction workers today.

Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona fills an important gap in our understanding of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest by turning the scholarly gaze to Arizona, which has had a long-standing impact on national policy and politics.
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Mexicans in the Making of America
Neil Foley
Harvard University Press, 2014

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

According to census projections, by 2050 nearly one in three U.S. residents will be Latino, and the overwhelming majority of these will be of Mexican descent. This dramatic demographic shift is reshaping politics, culture, and fundamental ideas about American identity. Neil Foley, a leading Mexican American historian, offers a sweeping view of the evolution of Mexican America, from a colonial outpost on Mexico’s northern frontier to a twenty-first-century people integral to the nation they have helped build.

“Compelling…Readers of all political persuasions will find Foley’s intensively researched, well-documented scholarly work an instructive, thoroughly accessible guide to the ramifications of immigration policy.”
Publishers Weekly

“For Americans long accustomed to understanding the country’s development as an east-to-west phenomenon, Foley’s singular service is to urge us to tilt the map south-to-north and to comprehend conditions as they have been for some time and will likely be for the foreseeable future…A timely look at and appreciation of a fast-growing demographic destined to play an increasingly important role in our history.”
Kirkus Reviews

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Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States
Edited by John Tutino
University of Texas Press, 2012

Mexico and Mexicans have been involved in every aspect of making the United States from colonial times until the present. Yet our shared history is a largely untold story, eclipsed by headlines about illegal immigration and the drug war. Placing Mexicans and Mexico in the center of American history, this volume elucidates how economic, social, and cultural legacies grounded in colonial New Spain shaped both Mexico and the United States, as well as how Mexican Americans have constructively participated in North American ways of production, politics, social relations, and cultural understandings.

Combining historical, sociological, and cultural perspectives, the contributors to this volume explore the following topics: the Hispanic foundations of North American capitalism; indigenous peoples’ actions and adaptations to living between Mexico and the United States; U.S. literary constructions of a Mexican “other” during the U.S.-Mexican War and the Civil War; the Mexican cotton trade, which helped sustain the Confederacy during the Civil War; the transformation of the Arizona borderlands from a multiethnic Mexican frontier into an industrializing place of “whites” and “Mexicans”; the early-twentieth-century roles of indigenous Mexicans in organizing to demand rights for all workers; the rise of Mexican Americans to claim middle-class lives during and after World War II; and the persistence of a Mexican tradition of racial/ethnic mixing—mestizaje—as an alternative to the racial polarities so long at the center of American life.

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The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World
Cyrus Schayegh
Harvard University Press, 2017

In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, Cyrus Schayegh takes up a fundamental problem historians face: how to make sense of the spatial layeredness of the past. He argues that the modern world’s ultimate socio-spatial feature was not the oft-studied processes of globalization or state formation or urbanization. Rather, it was fast-paced, mutually transformative intertwinements of cities, regions, states, and global circuits, a bundle of processes he calls transpatialization.

To make this case, Schayegh’s study pivots around Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham in Arabic), which is roughly coextensive with present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. From this region, Schayegh looks beyond, to imperial and global connections, diaspora communities, and neighboring Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. And he peers deeply into Bilad al-Sham: at cities and their ties, and at global economic forces, the Ottoman and European empire-states, and the post-Ottoman nation-states at work within the region. He shows how diverse socio-spatial intertwinements unfolded in tandem during a transformative stretch of time, the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and concludes with a postscript covering the 1940s to 2010s.

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Migration and the Making of Industrial São Paulo
Paulo Fontes
Duke University Press, 2016
Published in 2008 and winner of the 2011 Thomas E. Skidmore Prize, Paulo Fontes's Migration and the Making of Industrial São Paulo is a detailed social history of São Paulo's extraordinary urban and industrial expansion. Fontes focuses on those migrants who settled in the suburb of São Miguel Paulista, which grew from 7,000 residents in the 1940s to over 140,000 two decades later. Reconstructing these migrants' everyday lives within a broad social context, Fontes examines the economic conditions that prompted their migration, their creation of an integrated identity and community, and their efforts to gain worker rights. Fontes challenges the stereotypes of Northeasterners as culturally backward, uneducated, violent, and unreliable, instead seeing them as a resourceful population with considerable social and political resolve. Fontes's investigations into Northeastern life in São Miguel Paulista yield a fresh understanding of São Paulo's incredible and difficult growth while outlining how a marginalized population exercised its political agency.
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Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost
William Poole
Harvard University Press, 2017

Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost tells the story of John Milton's life as England’s self-elected national poet and explains how the single greatest poem of the English language came to be written.

In early 1642 Milton—an obscure private schoolmaster—promised English readers a work of literature so great that “they should not willingly let it die.” Twenty-five years later, toward the end of 1667, the work he had pledged appeared in print: the epic poem Paradise Lost. In the interim, however, the poet had gone totally blind and had also become a controversial public figure—a man who had argued for the abolition of bishops, freedom of the press, the right to divorce, and the prerogative of a nation to depose and put to death an unsatisfactory ruler. These views had rendered him an outcast.

William Poole devotes particular attention to Milton’s personal situation: his reading and education, his ambitions and anxieties, and the way he presented himself to the world. Although always a poet first, Milton was also a theologian and civil servant, vocations that informed the composition of his masterpiece. At the emotional center of this narrative is the astounding fact that Milton lost his sight in 1652. How did a blind man compose this staggeringly complex, intensely visual work? Poole opens up the epic worlds and sweeping vistas of Milton’s masterpiece to modern readers, first by exploring Milton’s life and intellectual preoccupations and then by explaining the poem itself—its structure, content, and meaning.

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Mirror in Parchment
The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England
Michael Camille
University of Chicago Press, 1998
What is the status of visual evidence in history? Can we actually see the past through images? Where are the traces of previous lives deposited? Michael Camille addresses these important questions in Mirror in Parchment, a lively, searching study of one medieval manuscript, its patron, producers, and historical progeny.

The richly illuminated Luttrell Psalter was created for the English nobleman Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345). Inexpensive mechanical illustration has since disseminated the book's images to a much wider audience; hence the Psalter's representations of manorial life have come to profoundly shape our modern idea of what medieval English people, high and low, looked like at work and at play. Alongside such supposedly truthful representations, the Psalter presents myriad images of fantastic monsters and beasts. These patently false images have largely been disparaged or ignored by modern historians and art historians alike, for they challenge the credibility of those pictures in the Luttrell Psalter that we wish to see as real.

In the conviction that medieval images were not generally intended to reflect daily life but rather to shape a new reality, Michael Camille analyzes the Psalter's famous pictures as representations of the world, imagined and real, of its original patron. Addressed are late medieval chivalric ideals, physical sites of power, and the boundaries of Sir Geoffrey's imagined community, wherein agricultural laborers and fabulous monsters play a similar ideological role. The Luttrell Psalter thus emerges as a complex social document of the world as its patron hoped and feared it might be.
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front cover of Mirror In Parchment
Mirror In Parchment
The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England
Michael Camille
Reaktion Books, 1998
What is the status of visual evidence in history? Can we actually see the past through images? Where are the traces of previous lives deposited? Michael Camille addresses these important questions in Mirror in Parchment, a lively, searching study of one medieval manuscript, its patron, producers, and historical progeny.

The richly illuminated Luttrell Psalter was created for the English nobleman Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345). Inexpensive mechanical illustration has since disseminated the book's images to a much wider audience; hence the Psalter's representations of manorial life have come to profoundly shape our modern idea of what medieval English people, high and low, looked like at work and at play. Alongside such supposedly truthful representations, the Psalter presents myriad images of fantastic monsters and beasts. These patently false images have largely been disparaged or ignored by modern historians and art historians alike, for they challenge the credibility of those pictures in the Luttrell Psalter that we wish to see as real.

In the conviction that medieval images were not generally intended to reflect daily life but rather to shape a new reality, Michael Camille analyzes the Psalter's famous pictures as representations of the world, imagined and real, of its original patron. Addressed are late medieval chivalric ideals, physical sites of power, and the boundaries of Sir Geoffrey's imagined community, wherein agricultural laborers and fabulous monsters play a similar ideological role. The Luttrell Psalter thus emerges as a complex social document of the world as its patron hoped and feared it might be.
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Mobilizing Black Germany
Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement
Tiffany N. Florvil
University of Illinois Press, 2020
In the 1980s and 1990s, Black German women began to play significant roles in challenging the discrimination in their own nation and abroad. Their grassroots organizing, writings, and political and cultural activities nurtured innovative traditions, ideas, and practices. These strategies facilitated new, often radical bonds between people from disparate backgrounds across the Black Diaspora.

Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde’s role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism.

Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists’ politics, intellectualism, and internationalism.

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A Monastery in Time
The Making of Mongolian Buddhism
Caroline Humphrey and Hurelbaatar Ujeed
University of Chicago Press, 2013
A Monastery in Time is the first book to describe the life of a Mongolian Buddhist monastery—the Mergen Monastery in Inner Mongolia—from inside its walls. From the Qing occupation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the Cultural Revolution, Caroline Humphrey and Hürelbaatar Ujeed tell a story of religious formation, suppression, and survival over a history that spans three centuries.
 
Often overlooked in Buddhist studies, Mongolian Buddhism is an impressively self-sustaining tradition whose founding lama, the Third Mergen Gegen, transformed Tibetan Buddhism into an authentic counterpart using the Mongolian language. Drawing on fifteen years of fieldwork, Humphrey and Ujeed show how lamas have struggled to keep Mergen Gegen’s vision alive through tremendous political upheaval, and how such upheaval has inextricably fastened politics to religion for many of today’s practicing monks. Exploring the various ways Mongolian Buddhists have attempted to link the past, present, and future, Humphrey and Ujeed offer a compelling study of the interplay between the individual and the state, tradition and history.
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The Monetarists
The Making of the Chicago Monetary Tradition, 1927–1960
George S. Tavlas
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An essential origin story of modern society’s most influential economic doctrine.

The Chicago School of economic thought has been subject to endless generalizations—and mischaracterizations—in contemporary debate. What is often portrayed as a monolithic obsession with markets is, in fact, a nuanced set of economic theories born from decades of research and debate. The Monetarists is a deeply researched history of the monetary policies—and personalities—that codified the Chicago School of monetary thought from the 1930s through the 1960s. These policies can be characterized broadly as monetarism: the belief that prices and interest rates can be kept stable by controlling the amount of money in circulation. 

As economist George S. Tavlas makes clear, these ideas were more than just the legacy of Milton Friedman; they were a tradition in theory brought forth by a crucible of minds and debates throughout campus. Through unprecedented mining of archival material, The Monetarists offers the first complete history of one of the twentieth century’s most formative intellectual periods and places. It promises to elevate our understanding of this doctrine and its origins for generations to come.
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Money in the Air
Art Dealers and the Making of a Transatlantic Market, 1880–1930
Gail Feigenbaum
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
This volume explores the crucial role of art dealers in creating a transatlantic art market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“There was money in the air, ever so much money,” wrote Henry James in 1907, reflecting on the American appetite for art acquisitions. Indeed, collectors such as Henry Clay Frick and Andrew W. Mellon are credited with bringing noteworthy European art to the United States, with their collections forming the backbone of major American museums today. But what of the dealers, who possessed the expertise in art and recognized the potential of developing a new market model on both sides of the Atlantic?

Money in the Air investigates the often-overlooked role of these dealers in creating an international art world. Contributors examine the histories of well-known international firms like Duveen Brothers, M. Knoedler & Co., and Goupil & Cie and their relationships with American clients, as well as accounts of other remarkable dealers active in the transatlantic art market. Drawing on dealer archives, scholars reveal compelling findings, including previously unknown partnerships and systems of cooperation. This volume offers new perspectives on the development of art collections that formed the core of American art museums, such as the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Frick Collection.
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The Money Shot
Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows
Laura Grindstaff
University of Chicago Press, 2002
He leaped from his chair, ripped off his microphone, and lunged at his ex-wife. Security guards rushed to intercept him. The audience screamed, then cheered. Were producers concerned? Not at all. They were getting what they wanted: the money shot.

From "classy" shows like Oprah to "trashy" shows like Jerry Springer, the key to a talk show's success is what Laura Grindstaff calls the money shot—moments when guests lose control and express joy, sorrow, rage, or remorse on camera. In this new work, Grindstaff takes us behind the scenes of daytime television talk shows, a genre focused on "real" stories told by "ordinary" people. Drawing on extensive interviews with producers and guests, her own attendance of dozens of live tapings around the country, and more than a year's experience working on two nationally televised shows, Grindstaff shows us how producers elicit dramatic performances from guests, why guests agree to participate, and the supporting roles played by studio audiences and experts.

Grindstaff traces the career of the money shot, examining how producers make stars and experts out of ordinary people, in the process reproducing old forms of cultural hierarchy and class inequality even while seeming to challenge them. She argues that the daytime talk show does give voice to people normally excluded from the media spotlight, but it lets them speak only in certain ways and under certain rules and conditions. Working to understand the genre from the inside rather than pass judgment on it from the outside, Grindstaff asks not just what talk shows can tell us about mass media, but also what they reveal about American culture more generally.


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Mongrel Nation
Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain
Ashley Dawson
University of Michigan Press, 2007

Mongrel Nation surveys the history of the United Kingdom’s African, Asian, and Caribbean populations from 1948 to the present, working at the juncture of cultural studies, literary criticism, and postcolonial theory. Ashley Dawson argues that during the past fifty years Asian and black intellectuals from Sam Selvon to Zadie Smith have continually challenged the United Kingdom’s exclusionary definitions of citizenship, using innovative forms of cultural expression to reconfigure definitions of belonging in the postcolonial age. By examining popular culture and exploring topics such as the nexus of race and gender, the growth of transnational politics, and the clash between first- and second-generation immigrants, Dawson broadens and enlivens the field of postcolonial studies.

Mongrel Nation gives readers a broad landscape from which to view the shifting currents of politics, literature, and culture in postcolonial Britain. At a time when the contradictions of expansionist braggadocio again dominate the world stage, Mongrel Nation usefully illuminates the legacy of imperialism and suggests that creative voices of resistance can never be silenced.Dawson

“Elegant, eloquent, and full of imaginative insight, Mongrel Nation is a refreshing, engaged, and informative addition to post-colonial and diasporic literary scholarship.”

—Hazel V. Carby, Yale University

“Eloquent and strong, insightful and historically precise, lively and engaging, Mongrel Nation is an expansive history of twentieth-century internationalist encounters that provides a broader landscape from which to understand currents, shifts, and historical junctures that shaped the international postcolonial imagination.”

—May Joseph, Pratt Institute

Ashley Dawson is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island. He is coeditor of the forthcoming Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism.

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Monsters of the Gévaudan
The Making of a Beast
Jay M. Smith
Harvard University Press, 2011

In a brilliant, original rendition, Monsters of the Gévaudan revisits a spellbinding French tale that has captivated imaginations for over two hundred years, and offers the definitive explanation of the strange events that underlie this timeless story.

In 1764 a peasant girl was killed and partially eaten while tending a flock of sheep. Eventually, over a hundred victims fell prey to a mysterious creature, or creatures, whose cunning and deadly efficiency terrorized the region and mesmerized Europe. The fearsome aggressor quickly took on mythic status, and the beast of the Gévaudan passed into French folklore.

What species was this killer, why did it decapitate so many of its victims, and why did it prefer the flesh of women and children? Why did contemporaries assume that the beast was anything but a wolf, or a pack of wolves, as authorities eventually claimed, and why is the tale so often ignored in histories of the ancien régime? Smith finds the answer to these last two questions in an accident of timing. The beast was bound to be perceived as strange and anomalous because its ravages coincided with the emergence of modernity itself.

Expertly situated within the social, intellectual, cultural, and political currents of French life in the 1760s, Monsters of the Gévaudan will engage a wide range of readers with both its recasting of the beast narrative and its compelling insights into the allure of the monstrous in historical memory.

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front cover of Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion
Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion
Matthew L. Rasmussen
University of Utah Press, 2016
Mormonism in Britain began in the late 1830s with the arrival of American missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Not long afterward, thousands of British converts emigrated to Utah and became a kind of lifeblood for the early Mormon Church. The English North West, where Mormonism had its strongest presence, has since become a place of profound significance to the church, both institutionally and internationally. Despite its importance to Mormonism, this history has never been fully explored. Matthew Rasmussen provides the first detailed account and examines how Mormonism has changed and endured in Britain.

After many British believers left for America, church membership in England fell so sharply that the movement in Britain seemed to be on the brink of collapse. Yet British Mormonism gradually resurged and continues today. How did this religious minority flourish when so many nineteenth-century revivalist movements did not? Rasmussen explains Mormonism’s inception, perpetuation, and maturation in Britain in a compelling case study of a “new religious movement” with staying power. From its establishment in 1837 to its maturation in 1998, the Mormon perspective of Britain shifted dramatically. This book chronicles that shift, and illustrates how doctrinal adaptation has enabled Mormonism in Britain to persist. 
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Mother Figured
Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal
Deirdre de la Cruz
University of Chicago Press, 2015
There is no female religious figure so widely known and revered as the Virgin Mary. Mary has inspired in cultures around the world a deep devotion, a desire to emulate her virtue, and a strong belief in her power. Perhaps no population has been so deeply affected by this maternal figure as Filipino Catholics, whose apparitions of Mary have increased in response to recent events, drawing from a broad repertoire of the Catholic supernatural and pulling attention to new articulations of Christianity in the Global South.
 
In Mother Figured, historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz offers a detailed examination of several appearances and miracles of the Virgin Mary in the Philippines from materials and sites ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. By analyzing the effects of the mass media on the perception and proliferation of apparition phenomena, de la Cruz charts the intriguing emergence of new voices in the Philippines that are broadcasting Marian discourse globally. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and hitherto unexplored archives in the Philippines, the United States, and Spain, Mother Figured documents the conditions of Marian devotion’s modern development and tracks how it has transformed Filipinos’ social and political role within the greater Catholic world.
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Mr. Democrat
Jim Farley, the New Deal and the Making of Modern American Politics
Daniel Scroop
University of Michigan Press, 2006

Mr. Democrat tells the story of Jim Farley, Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign manager. As party boss, Farley experienced unprecedented success in the New Deal years. And like his modern counterpart Karl Rove, Farley enjoyed unparalleled access and power. Unlike Rove, however, Farley was instrumental in the creation of an overwhelming new majority in American politics, as the emergence of the New Deal transformed the political landscape of its time.

Mr. Democrat is timely and indispensable not just because Farley was a fascinating and unduly neglected figure, but also because an understanding of his career advances our knowledge of how and why he revolutionized the Democratic Party and American politics in the age of the New Deal.

Daniel Scroop is Lecturer in American History, University of Liverpool School of History.
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Muhammad Ali
The Making of an Icon
Michael Ezra
Temple University Press, 2009

Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Clay) has always engendered an emotional reaction from the public. From his appearance as an Olympic champion to his iconic status as a national hero, his carefully constructed image and controversial persona has always been intensely scrutinized. In Muhammad Ali, Michael Ezra considers the boxer who calls himself “The Greatest” from a new perspective. He writes about Ali’s pre-championship bouts, the management of his career and his current legacy, exploring the promotional aspects of Ali and how they were wrapped up in political, economic, and cultural “ownership.”

Ezra’s incisive study examines the relationships between Ali’s cultural appeal and its commercial manifestations. Citing examples of the boxer’s relationship to the Vietnam War and the Nation of Islam—which serve as barometers of his “public moral authority”—Muhammad Ali analyzes the difficulties of creating and maintaining these cultural images, as well as the impact these themes have on Ali’s meaning to the public.

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Museum Matters
Making and Unmaking Mexico’s National Collections
Edited by Miruna Achim, Susan Deans-Smith, Sandra Rozental
University of Arizona Press, 2021
This is a book about objects. Stones, ruins, bones, mummies, mannequins, statues, photographs, fakes, instruments, and natural history specimens all formed part of Mexico’s National Museum complex at different moments across two centuries of collecting and display.

Museum Matters traces the emergence, consolidation, and dispersal of this national museum complex by telling the stories of its objects. Objects that have been separated over time are brought back together in this book in order to shed light on the interactions and processes that have forged things into symbols of science, aesthetics, and politics. The contributors to this volume illuminate how collections came into being or ceased to exist over time, or how objects moved in and out of collections and museum spaces. They explore what it means to move things physically and spatially, as well as conceptually and symbolically.

Museum Matters unravels the concept of the national museum. By unmaking the spaces, frameworks, and structures that form the complicated landscape of national museums, this volume brings a new way to understand the storage, displays, and claims about the Mexican nation’s collections today.

Contributors
Miruna Achim, Christina Bueno, Laura Cházaro, Susan Deans-Smith, Frida Gorbach, Haydeé López Hernández, Carlos Mondragón, Bertina Olmedo Vera, Sandra Rozental, Mario Rufer

 
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Music and the Making of Portugal and Spain
Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Iberian Peninsula
Edited by Matthew Machin-Autenrieth, Salwa el-Shawan Castelo-Branco, and Samuel Llano
University of Illinois Press, 2023
How music embodies and contributes to historical and contemporary nationalism

What does music in Portugal and Spain reveal about the relationship between national and regional identity building? How do various actors use music to advance nationalism? How have state and international heritage regimes contributed to nationalist and regionalist projects? In this collection, contributors explore these and other essential questions from a range of interdisciplinary vantage points. The essays pay particular attention to the role played by the state in deciding what music represents Portuguese or Spanish identity. Case studies examine many aspects of the issue, including local recording networks, so-called national style in popular music, and music’s role in both political protest and heritage regimes. Topics include the ways the Salazar and Franco regimes adapted music to align with their ideological agendas; the twenty-first-century impact of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage program on some of Portugal and Spain's expressive practices; and the tensions that arise between institutions and community in creating and recreating meanings and identity around music.

Contributors: Ricardo Andrade, Vera Marques Alves, Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, José Hugo Pires Castro, Paulo Ferreira de Castro, Fernán del Val, Héctor Fouce, Diego García-Peinazo, Leonor Losa, Josep Martí, Eva Moreda Rodríguez, Pedro Russo Moreira, Cristina Cruces Roldán, and Igor Contreras Zubillaga

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Mythistory
The Making of a Modern Historiography
Joseph Mali
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Ever since Herodotus declared in Histories that to preserve the memories of the great achievements of the Greeks and other nations he would count on their own stories, historians have debated whether and how they should deal with myth. Most have sided with Thucydides, who denounced myth as "unscientific" and banished it from historiography.

In Mythistory, Joseph Mali revives this oldest controversy in historiography. Contesting the conventional opposition between myth and history, Mali advocates instead for a historiography that reconciles the two and recognizes the crucial role that myth plays in the construction of personal and communal identities. The task of historiography, he argues, is to illuminate, not eliminate, these fictions by showing how they have passed into and shaped historical reality. Drawing on the works of modern theorists and artists of myth such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Joyce and Eliot, Mali redefines modern historiography and relates it to the older notion and tradition of "mythistory."

Tracing the origins and transformations of this historiographical tradition from the ancient world to the modern, Mali shows how Livy and Machiavelli sought to recover true history from uncertain myth-and how Vico and Michelet then reversed this pattern of inquiry, seeking instead to recover a deeper and truer myth from uncertain history. In the heart of Mythistory, Mali turns his attention to four thinkers who rediscovered myth in and for modern cultural history: Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Walter Benjamin. His elaboration of the different biographical and historiographical routes by which all four sought to account for the persistence and significance of myth in Western civilization opens up new perspectives for an alternative intellectual history of modernity-one that may better explain the proliferation of mythic imageries of redemption in our secular, all too secular, times.
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