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Earline's Pink Party
The Social Rituals and Domestic Relics of a Southern Woman
Elizabeth Findley Shores
University of Alabama Press, 2017
In Earline’s Pink Party Elizabeth Findley Shores sifts through her family’s scattered artifacts to understand her grandmother’s life in relation to the troubled racial history of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

A compelling, genre-bending page-turner, Earline’s Pink Party: The Social Rituals and Domestic Relics of a Southern Woman analyzes the life of a small-city matron in the Deep South. A combination of biography, material culture analysis, social history, and memoir, this volume offers a new way of thinking about white racism through Shores’s conclusion that Earline’s earliest childhood experiences determined her worldview.
 
Set against a fully drawn background of geography and culture and studded with detailed investigations of social rituals (such as women’s parties) and objects (such as books, handwritten recipes, and fabric scraps), Earline’s Pink Party tells the story of an ordinary woman, the grandmother Shores never knew. Looking for more than the details and drama of bourgeois Southern life, however, the author digs into generations of family history to understand how Earline viewed the racial terror that surrounded her during the Jim Crow years in this fairly typical southern town.
 
Shores seeks to narrow a gap in the scholarship of the American South, which has tended to marginalize and stereotype well-to-do white women who lived after Emancipation. Exploring her grandmother’s home and its contents within the context of Tuscaloosa society and historical events, Shores evaluates the belief that women like Earline consciously engaged in performative rituals in order to sustain the “fantastical” view of the white nobility and the contented black underclass. With its engaging narrative, illustrations, and structure, this fascinating book should interest scholars of memory, class identity, and regional history, as well as sophisticated lay readers who enjoy Southern history, foodways, genealogy, and material culture.
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East Asian Cartographic Print Culture
The Late Ming Publishing Boom and its Trans-Regional Connections
Alexander Akin
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Alexander Akin examines how the expansion of publishing in the late Ming dynasty prompted changes in the nature and circulation of cartographic materials in East Asia. Focusing on mass-produced printed maps, this book investigates a series of path-breaking late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century works in genres including geographical education, military affairs, and history, analysing how maps achieved unprecedented penetration among published materials, even in the absence of major theoretical or technological changes like those that transformed contemporary European cartography. By examining contemporaneous developments in neighboring Choson Korea and Japan, the study demonstrates the crucial importance of considering the broader East Asian sphere in this period as a network of communication and publication, rather than as discrete units with separate cartographic histories. It also reexamines the place of the Jesuits in this context, arguing that in printing maps on Ming soil they should be seen as participants in the local cartographic publishing boom and its trans-regional repercussions.
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Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots
The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920–2000
Jacob Eyferth
Harvard University Press, 2009

This book charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. The Chinese revolution—understood as a series of interconnected political, social, and technological transformations—was, Jacob Eyferth argues, as much about the redistribution of skill, knowledge, and technical control as it was about the redistribution of land and political power.

The larger context for this study is the “rural–urban divide”: the institutional, social, and economic cleavages that separate rural people from urbanites. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It asks how a vision of rural people as unskilled has affected their place in the body politic and contributed to their disenfranchisement. By viewing skill as a contested resource, subject to distribution struggles, it addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China.

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Echoes of Chongqing
Women in Wartime China
Danke Li
University of Illinois Press, 2010

This collection of annotated oral histories records the personal stories of twenty Chinese women who lived in the wartime capital of Chongqing during China's War of Resistance against Japan during World War II. By presenting women's remembrances of the war, this study examines the interplay between oral history and traditional historical narrative, public discourse, and private memories. The women interviewed came from differing social, economic, and educational backgrounds and experienced the war in a variety of ways, some of them active in the communist resistance and others trying to support families or pursue educations in the face of wartime upheaval. Their stories demonstrate that the War of Resistance had two faces: one presented by official propaganda and characterized by an upbeat unified front against Japan, the other a record of invisible private stories and a sobering national experience of death and suffering. The accounts of how women coped, worked, and lived during the war years in the Chongqing region recast historical understanding of the roles played by ordinary people in wartime and give women a public voice and face that, until now, have been missing from scholarship on the war.

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The Ecological City
Preserving and Restoring Urban Biodiversity
Rutherford H. Platt
University of Massachusetts Press, 1994
Interdisciplinary in content as well as approach, this collection of original essays takes a fresh look at the ecology of urban communities. Written by experts from a variety of professions--academic researchers, private and public program managers, and citizen activists--the book explores issues of geography, ecology, landscape architecture, urban forestry, law, and environmental education. Contributions include broad overviews of common problems a well as detailed case studies of specific programs.

Although several contributors are natural scientists, the book focuses on matters of public policy and public-private collaboration. The aim is not only to assess the impact of increasing urbanization on biodiversity, but also to propose new ways of preserving and restoring the balance between the natural and the built environment through planning and design.
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The Economic and Social History of an English Village (Crawley, Hampshire), A.D. 909-1928
Norman Scott Brien Gras and Ethel Culbert Gras
Harvard University Press

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Eden on the Charles
The Making of Boston
Michael Rawson
Harvard University Press, 2014

Drinking a glass of tap water, strolling in a park, hopping a train for the suburbs: some aspects of city life are so familiar that we don’t think twice about them. But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationships—social, cultural, political, economic, and legal—were established during America’s first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of America’s first cities.

Eden on the Charles explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a “city upon a hill” to the process of urbanization—and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of Boston’s distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the city’s development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In Boston’s history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships that—for better or worse—have defined urban America to this day.

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Edward W. Blyden's Intellectual Transformations
Afropublicanism, Pan-Africanism, Islam, and the Indigenous West African Church
Harry N. K. Odamtten
Michigan State University Press, 2019
Distinguished by its multidisciplinary dexterity, this book is a masterfully woven reinterpretation of the life, travels, and scholarship of Edward W. Blyden, arguably the most influential Black intellectual of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It traces Blyden’s various moments of intellectual transformation through the multiple lenses of ethnicity, race, religion, and identity in the historical context of Atlantic exchanges, the Back-to-Africa movement, colonialism, and the global Black intellectual movement. In this book Blyden is shown as an African public intellectual who sought to reshape ideas about Africa circulating in the Atlantic world. The author also highlights Blyden’s contributions to different public spheres in Europe, in the Jewish Diaspora, in the Muslim and Christian world of West Africa, and among Blacks in the United States. Additionally, this book places Blyden at the pinnacle of Afropublicanism in order to emphasize his public intellectualism, his rootedness in the African historical experience, and the scholarship he produced about Africa and the African Diaspora. As Blyden is an important contributor to African studies, among other disciplines, this volume makes for critical scholarly reading.
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Einstein on Race and Racism
Einstein on Race and Racism, First Paperback Edition
Jerome, Fred
Rutgers University Press, 2005
Honorable Mention in the 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards

Nearly fifty years after his death, Albert Einstein remains one of America's foremost cultural icons. A thicket of materials, ranging from scholarly to popular, have been written, compiled, produced, and published about his life and his teachings. Among the ocean of Einsteinia-scientific monographs, biographies, anthologies, bibliographies, calendars, postcards, posters, and Hollywood films-however, there is a peculiar void when it comes to the connection that the brilliant scientist had with the African American community. Nowhere is there any mention of his close relationship with Paul Robeson, despite Einstein's close friendship with him, or W.E.B. Du Bois, despite Einstein's support for him.

This unique volume is the first to bring together a wealth of writings by the scientist on the topic of race. Although his activism in this area is less well known than his efforts on behalf of international peace and scientific cooperation, Einstein spoke out vigorously against racism both in the United States and around the world. Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor suggest that one explanation for this historical amnesia is that Einstein's biographers avoided "controversial" topics, such as his friendships with African Americans and his political activities, including his involvement as co-chair of an antilynching campaign, fearing that mention of these details may tarnish the feel-good impression his image lends topics of science, history, and America.

Combining the scientist's letters, speeches, and articles with engaging narrative and historical discussions that place his public statements in the context of his life and times, this important collection not only brings attention to Einstein's antiracist public activities, but also provides insight into the complexities of antiracist culture in America. The volume also features a selection of candid interviews with African Americans who knew Einstein as children.

For a man whose words and reflections have influenced so many, it is long overdue that Einstein's thoughts on this vital topic are made easily accessible to the general public.

 
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Elite Byzantine Kinship, ca. 950-1204
Blood, Reputation, and the Genos
Nathan Leidholm
Arc Humanities Press, 2019
By the end of the twelfth century, the Byzantine <i>genos </I> was a politically effective social group based upon ties of consanguineous kinship, but, importantly, it was also a cultural construct, an idea that held very real power, yet defies easy categorization. This study explores the role and function of the Byzantine aristocratic family group, or <i>genos</i>, as a distinct social entity, particularly its political and cultural role, as it appears in a variety of sources in the tenth through twelfth centuries.
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Elusive Archives
Material Culture in Formation
Martin Brückner
University of Delaware Press, 2021
The essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What holds these disparate things together here are the questions authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of its method a provisional collection of things, an elusive archive.  Scattered matter then becomes fixed within each author’s analytical framework rather than within the walls of an archive’s reading room or in cases along a museum corridor.

This book follows the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered, arranged, conceptualized and even displayed rather than by “discovering” artifacts in an archive and then asking how they came to be there. The authors approach material culture outside the traditional bounds of learning about the past. Their essays are varied not only in subject matter but also in narrative format and conceptual reach, making the volume accessible and easy to navigate for a quick reference or, if read straight through, build toward a new way to think about material culture.
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Emancipation without Equality
Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line
Thomas E. Smith
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
At the Pan–African Conference in London in 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois famously prophesied that the problem of the twentieth century would be the global color line, the elevation of "whiteness" that created a racially divided world. While Pan-Africanism recognized the global nature of the color line in this period, Thomas E. Smith argues that it also pushed against it, advocating for what Du Bois called "opportunities and privileges of modern civilization" to open up to people of all colors.

Covering a period roughly bookended by two international forums, the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference and the 1911 Universal Races Congress, Emancipation without Equality chronicles how activists of African descent fought globally for equal treatment and access to rights associated with post-emancipated citizenship. While Euro-American leaders created a standard to guide the course of imperialism at the Berlin Conference, the proceedings of the Universal Races Congress demonstrated that Pan-Africanism had become a visible part of a growing, global, anti-imperialist protest.
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The End of Eden
Agrarian Spaces and the Rise of the California Social Novel
Terry Beers
University of Nevada Press, 2018
The story of the Joad family’s journey from their ravaged farm in dustbowl Oklahoma to the storied paradise of California helped inform a nation about the brutality, poverty, and vicious competition among fellow immigrants desperate for work. But Steinbeck is only one successor to a rich and esteemed literary tradition in California. 

Drawing on history and cultural theory, The End of Eden traces the rise of the California social novel, its embrace of the agrarian dream, and its ambivalence about technology and the development it enables. It relies on various cultural conceptions of space, among them, the American Public Land Survey (the source of the “grid” allotments shaping homestead claims), Mexican-era diseños, and Native American traditions that defined a fluid relationship between human beings and the land.
 
This animation of four California social novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries demonstrates how conflicts over space and place signify cultural conflict. It is deeply informed by the author’s understanding of historical land issues. The works include Joaquin Miller’s Unwritten History: Life Amongst the Modocs, Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, Frank Norris’ The Octopus, and Mary Austin’s The Ford.

Miller’s Unwritten History: Life Amongst the Modocs and Jackson’s Ramona examine the tragic but inevitable consequences for native people of making space—inhabited already by Native American and Hispanic populations—safe for Americans who pursue the agrarian dream without regard to its effects upon those who claim prior tenure on the land. Norris’ The Octopus and Austin’s The Ford examine the murkier story of trying to preserve or to reclaim the agrarian dream when confronted by the unchecked materialist interests of American capitalism.

A wide-reaching interdisciplinary approach to various cultural conceptions of space, The End of Eden provides a crucial understanding of the conflicts depicted in social novels that lament the ways in which land is allocated and developed, the ways in which American agrarianism—and its promise of local, sustainable land use—is undermined, and how it applies to contemporary California. In an era where California confronts, yet again, the complicated patterns of land use: fracking, water use and water rights, coastal regulation and management, and agribusiness, this groundbreaking work provides an ever-relevant context.
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Engineered to Sell
European Émigrés and the Making of Consumer Capitalism
Jan L. Logemann
University of Chicago Press, 2019
The mid-twentieth-century marketing world influenced nearly every aspect of American culture—music, literature, politics, economics, consumerism, race relations, gender, and more. In Engineered to Sell, Jan L. Logemann traces the transnational careers of consumer engineers in advertising, market research, and commercial design who transformed capitalism from the 1930s through the 1960s. He argues that the history of marketing consumer goods is not a story of American exceptionalism. Instead, the careers of immigrants point to the limits of the “Americanization” paradigm. Logemann explains the rise of a dynamic world of goods and examines how and why consumer engineering was shaped by transatlantic exchanges. From Austrian psychologists and little-known social scientists to the illustrious Bauhaus artists, the emigrés at the center of this story illustrate the vibrant cultural and commercial connections between metropolitan centers: Vienna and New York; Paris and Chicago; Berlin and San Francisco. By focusing on the transnational lives of emigré consumer researchers, marketers, and designers, Engineered to Sell details the processes of cultural translation and adaptation that mark both the midcentury transformation of American marketing and the subsequent European shift to “American” consumer capitalism.
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Engineering the Future, Understanding the Past
A Social History of Technology
Erik van der Vleuten, Ruth Oldenziel, and Mila Davids
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Technology today is often presented as our best hope of solving the world's social and sustainability problems. And that's nothing new: engineers have always sought to meet the big challenges of their times-even as those challenges have shaped their technology. This book offers a historical look at those interactions between engineering and social challenges, showing how engineers developed solutions to past problems, and looking at the ways that those solutions often bring with them unintended consequences that themselves require solving.
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Envisioning Freedom
Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life
Cara Caddoo
Harvard University Press, 2014

Viewing turn-of-the-century African American history through the lens of cinema, Envisioning Freedom examines the forgotten history of early black film exhibition during the era of mass migration and Jim Crow. By embracing the new medium of moving pictures at the turn of the twentieth century, black Americans forged a collective—if fraught—culture of freedom.

In Cara Caddoo’s perspective-changing study, African Americans emerge as pioneers of cinema from the 1890s to the 1920s. Across the South and Midwest, moving pictures presented in churches, lodges, and schools raised money and created shared social experiences for black urban communities. As migrants moved northward, bound for Chicago and New York, cinema moved with them. Along these routes, ministers and reformers, preaching messages of racial uplift, used moving pictures as an enticement to attract followers.

But as it gained popularity, black cinema also became controversial. Facing a losing competition with movie houses, once-supportive ministers denounced the evils of the “colored theater.” Onscreen images sparked arguments over black identity and the meaning of freedom. In 1910, when boxing champion Jack Johnson became the world’s first black movie star, representation in film vaulted to the center of black concerns about racial progress. Black leaders demanded self-representation and an end to cinematic mischaracterizations which, they charged, violated the civil rights of African Americans. In 1915, these ideas both led to the creation of an industry that produced “race films” by and for black audiences and sparked the first mass black protest movement of the twentieth century.

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Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums
1750-1918
Dominique Bauer
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This book examines ephemeral exhibitions from 1750 to 1918. In an era of acceleration and elusiveness, these transient spaces functioned as microcosms in which reality was shown, simulated, staged, imagined, experienced and known. They therefore had a dimension of spectacle to them, as the volume demonstrates. Against this backdrop, the different chapters deal with a plethora of spaces and spatial installations: the wunderkammer, the spectacle garden, cosmoramas and panoramas, the literary space, the temporary museum, and the alternative exhibition space.
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Ethics in the Gutter
Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics
Kate Polak
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics explores an often-overlooked genre of graphic narratives: those that fictionalize historical realities. While autographics, particularly those that place the memoirist in the context of larger cultural conversations, have been the objects of sustained study, fictional graphic narratives that—as Linda Hutcheon has put it—both “enshrine and question” history are also an important area of study. By bringing narratology and psychological theory to bear on a range of graphic narratives, Kate Polak seeks to question how the form utilizes point of view and the gutter as ethical tools that shape the reader’s empathetic reactions to the content. 

This book’s most important questions surround how we receive and interpret representations of history, considering the ways in which what we think we know about historical atrocities can be at odds with the convoluted circumstances surrounding violence. Beginning with a new look at Watchmen, and including examinations of such popular series as Scalped and Hellblazer as well as Bayou and Deogratias, the book questions how graphic narratives create an alternative route by which to understand large-scale violence. Ethics in the Gutter explores how graphic narrative representations of violence can teach readers about the possibilities and limitations of empathy and ethics.
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Ethnic Chrysalis
China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration
Loretta E. Kim
Harvard University Press, 2019
Ethnic Chrysalis is the first book in English to cover the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has for centuries inhabited areas now belonging to the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. The Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was a formative period for Orochen identity, and its actions preserved the Orochen as a separate ethnic group. While incorporating the Orochen into the imperial political domain through military conscription and compulsory resource extraction, the Qing government created two Orochen subgroups that experienced disparate levels of social and economic autonomy. The use of “Orochen” as an official modifier by Qing officials forms an early layer of the chrysalis that embodies various senses of ethnic identity for people who have been identified, or self‐identified, as Orochen. Since the Qing, the Orochen have continued to cherish the perception that their Qing‐period ancestors were key players in the defense and economy of northeast China. Tracing the evolution of Qing policies toward the Orochen along the Chinese‐Russian borderland, Loretta Kim examines how the impact of political organization in one era can endure in a group’s social and cultural values.
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Ethnopornography
Sexuality, Colonialism, and Archival Knowledge
Pete Sigal, Zeb Tortorici, and Neil L. Whitehead, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
This volume's contributors explore the links among sexuality, ethnography, race, and colonial rule through an examination of ethnopornography—the eroticized observation of the Other for supposedly scientific or academic purposes. With topics that span the sixteenth century to the present in Latin America, the United States, Australia, the Middle East, and West Africa, the contributors show how ethnopornography is fundamental to the creation of race and colonialism as well as archival and ethnographic knowledge. Among other topics, they analyze eighteenth-century European travelogues, photography and the sexualization of African and African American women, representations of sodomy throughout the Ottoman empire, racialized representations in a Brazilian gay pornographic magazine, colonial desire in the 2007 pornographic film Gaytanamo, the relationship between sexual desire and ethnographic fieldwork in Africa and Australia, and Franciscan friars' voyeuristic accounts of indigenous people's “sinful” activities. Outlining how in the ethnopornographic encounter the reader or viewer imagines direct contact with the Other from a distance, the contributors trace ethnopornography's role in creating racial categories and its grounding in the relationship between colonialism and the erotic gaze. In so doing, they theorize ethnography as a form of pornography that is both motivated by the desire to render knowable the Other and invested with institutional power.

Contributors. Joseph A. Boone, Pernille Ipsen, Sidra Lawrence, Beatrix McBride, Mireille Miller-Young, Bryan Pitts, Helen Pringle, Pete Sigal, Zeb Tortorici, Neil L. Whitehead
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Eurafricans in Western Africa
Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century
George E. Brooks
Ohio University Press, 2003

Eurafricans in Western Africa traces the rich social and commercial history of western Africa. The most comprehensive study to date, it begins prior to the sixteenth century when huge profits made by middlemen on trade in North African slaves, salt, gold, pepper, and numerous other commodities prompted Portuguese reconnaissance voyages along the coast of western Africa. From Senegal to Sierra Leone, Portuguese, including “New Christians” who reverted to Judaism while living in western Africa, thrived where riverine and caravan networks linked many African groups.

Portuguese and their Luso-African descendants contended with French, Dutch, and English rivals for trade in gold, ivory, slaves, cotton textiles, iron bars, cowhides, and other African products. As the Atlantic slave trade increased, French and Franco-Africans and English and Anglo-Africans supplanted Portuguese and Luso-Africans in many African places of trade.

Eurafricans in Western Africa follows the changes that took root in the eighteenth century when French and British colonial officials introduced European legal codes, and concludes with the onset of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, when suppression of the slave trade and expanding commerce in forest and agricultural commodities again transformed circumstances in western Africa.

Professor George E. Brooks’s outstanding history of these vital aspects of western Africa is enriched by his discussion of the roles of the women who married or cohabited with European traders. Through accounts of incidents and personal histories, which are integrated into the narrative, the lives of these women and their children are accorded a prominent place in Professor Brooks’s fascinating discussion of this dynamic region of Africa.

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Everybody's History
Indiana's Lincoln Inquiry and the Quest to Reclaim a President's Past
Keith A. Erekson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Revered by the public, respected by scholars, and imitated by politicians, Abraham Lincoln remains influential more than two hundred years after his birth. His memory has inspired books, monuments, and museums and also sparked controversies, rivalries, and forgeries. That so many people have been interested in Lincoln for so long makes him an ideal subject for exploring why history matters to ordinary Americans as well as to academic specialists.

In Everybody's History, Keith A. Erekson focuses on the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society—an organization composed of lawyers, historians, collectors, genealogists, teachers, college presidents, and newspaper editors—who joined together during the 1920s and 1930s to recover a part of Lincoln's life his biographers had long ignored: the years from age seven to twenty-one when he lived on the Indiana frontier. Participants in the "Lincoln Inquiry," as it was commonly known, researched old records, interviewed aging witnesses, hosted pageants, built a historical village, and presented their findings in public and in print. Along the way they defended their methods and findings against competitors in the fields of public history and civic commemoration, and rescued some of Indiana's own history by correcting a forgotten chapter of Lincoln's.

Everybody's History traces the development of popular interest in Lincoln to uncover the story of an extensive network of nonprofessional historians who contested old authorities and advanced new interpretations. In so doing, the book invites all who are interested in the past to see history as both vital to public life and meaningful to everybody.
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Everyday Life
How the Ordinary Became Extraordinary
Joseph A. Amato
Reaktion Books, 2016
Most of the stories we tell are about great feats, dangerous journeys, or daring confrontations—exceptional moments in our existence. But what about how we live every single day? In Everyday Life, Joseph A. Amato offers an account of daily existence that reminds us how important the quotidian is. Ranging across social, economic, and cultural history—as well as anthropology, folklore, and technology—he explores how and why the pattern of our lives has changed and developed over time.
            Amato examines the common facts and occurrences in lives from all spheres, whether of a pauper or a noble, a criminal or state official, or a lunatic or a philosopher. Such facts include basic aspects of human existence, such as play, work, conflict, and healing, as well the logistics of survival, such as housing, clothing, cleaning, cooking, animals, plants, and machines. Tracing core historical developments like efficiency of production and greater mobility, Amato shows how we became modern in everyday ways. He explores how, paradoxically, commerce, technology, design,  industrialization, nationalism, and democratization—which have so undercut traditional culture and have homogenized, centralized, and secularized masses of people—have also profoundly transformed daily life, affording citizens with materially improved  lives, individual rights, and productive and rewarding expectations.
            A wide-ranging account of lives throughout history, this book gives us new insights into our own condition, showing us how extraordinary the ordinary can be.
 
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Everyday Renaissances
The Quest for Cultural Legitimacy in Venice
Sarah Gwyneth Ross
Harvard University Press, 2016

The world of wealth and patronage that we associate with sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy can make the Renaissance seem the exclusive domain of artists and aristocrats. Revealing a Renaissance beyond Michelangelo and the Medici, Sarah Gwyneth Ross recovers the experiences of everyday men and women who were inspired to pursue literature and learning.

Ross draws on a trove of original unpublished sources—wills, diaries, household inventories, account books, and other miscellany—to reconstruct the lives of over one hundred artisans, merchants, and others on the middle rung of Venetian society who embraced the ennobling virtues of a humanistic education. These men and women sought out the latest knowledge, amassed personal libraries, and passed both their books and their hard-earned wisdom on to their families and heirs.

Physicians were often the most avid—and the most anxious—of professionals seeking cultural legitimacy. Ross examines the lives of three doctors: Nicolò Massa (1485–1569), Francesco Longo (1506–1576), and Alberto Rini (d. 1599). Though they had received university training, these self-made men of letters were not patricians but members of a social group that still yearned for credibility. Unlike priests or lawyers, physicians had not yet rid themselves of the taint of artisanal labor, and they were thus indicative of a middle class that sought to earn the respect of their peers and betters, protect and advance their families, and secure honorable remembrance after death.

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Exhibiting Scotland
Objects, Identity, and the National Museum
Alima Bucciantini
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
In 1707 Scotland ceased to exist as an independent country and became part of Great Britain. Yet it never lost its distinct sense of identity, history, and politics. To preserve the country's unique antiquities and natural specimens, a Scottish earl founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1780, at the beginning of the Enlightenment's museum boom. Now numbering twelve million objects and specimens and representing everything from archaeology to applied arts and design, from social history to science and the natural world, these collections formed the foundation for what eventually became the National Museum of Scotland.

In Exhibiting Scotland, Alima Bucciantini traces how these collections have helped tell the changing stories of this country for centuries and how the museum reflects the Scots' continuing negotiation of their place within modern Britain.
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The Exile Mission
The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956
Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann
Ohio University Press, 2009

At midcentury, two distinct Polish immigrant groups—those Polish Americans who were descendants of economic immigrants from the turn of the twentieth century and the Polish political refugees who chose exile after World War II and the communist takeover in Poland—faced an uneasy challenge to reconcile their concepts of responsibility toward the homeland.

The new arrivals did not consider themselves simply as immigrants, but rather as members of the special category of political refugees. They defined their identity within the framework of the exile mission, an unwritten set of beliefs, goals, and responsibilities, placing patriotic work for Poland at the center of Polish immigrant duties.

In The Exile Mission, an intriguing look at the interplay between the established Polish community and the refugee community, Anna Jaroszyńska–Kirchmann presents a tale of Polish Americans and Polish refugees who, like postwar Polish exile communities all over the world, worked out their own ways to implement the mission’s main goals. Between the outbreak of World War II and 1956, as Professor Jaroszyńska–Kirchmann demonstrates, the exile mission in its most intense form remained at the core of relationships between these two groups.

The Exile Mission is a compelling analysis of the vigorous debate about ethnic identity and immigrant responsibility toward the homeland. It is the first full–length examination of the construction and impact of the exile mission on the interactions between political refugees and established ethnic communities.

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Expansion of Everyday Life, 1860–1876
Daniel Sutherland
University of Arkansas Press, 2000
During this period, five states joined the Union—Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada, Nebraska and Colorado—and the population reached nearly forty million. The westward movement was given a boost by the cornpletion of the first intercontinental railroad, and migration from farms and villages to towns and cities increased, accompanied by a shift from rural occupations and crafts to industrial tasks and trades. Overall, the pursuit of middle-class status became a driving force. As this book illustrates, however, most people, though affected by the major upheavals of history, simply pursued their personal lives. Sutherland chronicles dating and marriage customs, the dangers and discomforts of mining, and life in the gambling dens, saloons, dance halls, and "cathouses" of the period. Through extensive quotations from diaries, letters, and the popular press, the reader glimpses an American middle class just beginning to grope its way toward the modern world.
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