BiblioVault - Books about Resurgence

American Indian Persistence and Resurgence

Karl Kroeber

Duke University Press, 1994

This collection celebrates the resurgence of Native Americans within the cultural landscape of the United States. During the past quarter century, the Native American population in the United States has seen an astonishing demographic growth reaching beyond all biological probability as increasing numbers of Americans desire to admit or to claim Native American ancestry. This volume illustrates a unique moment in history, as unprecedented numbers of Native Americans seek to create a powerful, flexible sense of cultural identity.
Diverse commentators, including literary critics, anthropologists, ethnohistorians, poets and a novelist address persistent issues facing Native Americans and Native American studies today. The future of White-Indian relation, the viability of Pan-Indianism, tensions between Native Americans and North American anthropologists, and new devlopments in ethnohistory are among the topics discussed. The survival of Native Americans as recorded in this collection, an expanded edition of a special issue of boundary 2, brings into focus the dynamically adaptive values of Native American culture. Native Americans’ persistence in U.S. culture—not disappearing under the pressure to assimilate or through genocidal warfare—reminds us of the extent to which any living culture is defined by the process of transformation.

Contributors. Linda Ainsworth, Jonathan Boyarin, Raymomd J. DeMallie, Elaine Jahner, Karl Kroeber, William Overstreet, Douglas R. Parks, Katharine Pearce, Jarold Ramsey, Wendy Rose, Edward H. Spicer, Gerald Vizenor, Priscilla Wald

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For a Short Time Only

Itinerants and the Resurgence of Popular Culture in Early America

Peter Benes

University of Massachusetts Press, 2016

Winner of the 2017 Theatre Library Association's George Freedley Memorial Book Award
By the 1740s, colonists living in North America began to encounter scores of itinerant performers from England and Europe. These show people—acrobats, wire dancers, tumblers, trick riders, painters, dancing-masters, waxworks proprietors, healers, and singing and language teachers—brought novelty and culture to remote areas. Advertising in newspapers, they attracted audiences with the hook of appearing "for a short time only."

In this richly illustrated and deeply researched book, Peter Benes examines the rise of early American popular culture through the lives and work of itinerants who circulated in British North America and the United States from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Although they were frequently reviled as quacks and absconders by many provincials, these transients enjoyed a unique camaraderie and found audiences among high- and lowbrow alike. Drawing on contemporary diaries, letters, reminiscences, and hitherto inaccessible newspaper ads, broadsides, and images, Benes suggests why some elements of Europe's carnival and folklore traditions failed to gain acceptance in American society while others flourished brilliantly.

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The Islamic State We Knew

Insights Before the Resurgence and Their Implications

Howard J. Shatz

RAND Corporation, 2015

This report provides information known by the end of 2011 about the Islamic State’s origins, finances, organization, methods of establishing territorial control, and response to airpower. Countering the Islamic State can rely, in part, on the great deal of accumulated knowledge available. Iraqis and coalition forces routed the group once, and this history can inform the components of another successful strategy to defeat the Islamic State.

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The Resurgence of Conservatism in Anglo-American Democracies

Barry Cooper, Allan Kornberg, and William Mishler, eds.

Duke University Press, 1987

This work presents analyses by experts on the rise of anew tide of conservative governments in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain in an attempt to find what, if any, common ideologies and programs unite them, with what results, in terms of institutional change and policy direction, have been, and what are the prospects for permanent change.

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