An invention of the Industrial Revolution, the accordion provided the less affluent with an inexpensive, loud, portable, and durable "one-man-orchestra" capable of producing melody, harmony, and bass all at once. Imported from Europe into the Americas, the accordion with its distinctive sound became a part of the aural landscape for millions of people but proved to be divisive: while the accordion formed an integral part of working-class musical expression, bourgeois commentators often derided it as vulgar and tasteless.

This rich collection considers the accordion and its myriad forms, from the concertina, button accordion, and piano accordion familiar in European and North American music to the exotic-sounding South American bandoneon and the sanfoninha. Capturing the instrument's spread and adaptation to many different cultures in North and South America, contributors illuminate how the accordion factored into power struggles over aesthetic values between elites and working-class people who often were members of immigrant and/or marginalized ethnic communities. Specific histories and cultural contexts discussed include the accordion in Brazil, Argentine tango, accordion traditions in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, cross-border accordion culture between Mexico and Texas, Cajun and Creole identity, working-class culture near Lake Superior, the virtuoso Italian-American and Klezmer accordions, Native American dance music, and American avant-garde.

Contributors are María Susana Azzi, Egberto Bermúdez, Mark DeWitt, Joshua Horowitz, Sydney Hutchinson, Marion Jacobson, James P. Leary, Megwen Loveless, Richard March, Cathy Ragland, Helena Simonett, Jared Snyder, Janet L. Sturman, and Christine F. Zinni.

The story of how everyday nineteenth-century clerks helped to articulate modern capitalism.

The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In Accounting for Capitalism, Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the “bottom line” became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of absolutes, grafted onto our very sense of reason and trust.

This is a big story, told through an ostensibly marginal event: the birth of a class of “merchant clerks” in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The personal trajectory of these young men from farm to metropolis, homestead to boarding house, and, most significantly, from growing things to selling them exemplified the enormous social effort required to domesticate the profit motive and turn it into the practical foundation of civic life. As Zakim reveals in his highly original study, there was nothing natural or preordained about the stunning ascendance of this capitalism and its radical transformation of the relationship between “Man and Mammon.” 
 

The community of San José, California, is a national model for social justice and community activism. This legacy has been hard earned. In the twentieth century, the activists of the city’s Mexican American community fought for equality in education and pay, better conditions in the workplace, better health care, and much more.

Sociologist and activist Josie Méndez-Negrete has returned to her hometown to document and record the stories of those who made contributions to the cultural and civic life of San José. Through interview excerpts, biographical and historical information, and analysis, Méndez-Negrete shows the contributions of this singular community throughout the twentieth century and the diversity of motivations across the generations.

Activists share with Méndez-Negrete how they became conscious about their communities and how they became involved in grassroots organizing, protest, and social action. Spanning generations, we hear about the motivations of activists in the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century. We hear firsthand stories of victories and struggles, successes and failures from those who participated.

Activist Leaders of San José narrates how parents—both mothers and fathers—were inspired to work for the rights of their people. Workers’ and education rights were at the core, but they also took on the elimination of at-large elections to open city politics, labor rights, domestic abuse, and health care. This book is an important record of the contributions of San José in improving conditions for the Mexican American community.

Employing adulthood as a category of historical analysis.

Who gets to be an adult—and who decides? This book argues that consideration of age is a crucial element in scholarship that addresses power and inequality. Exploring how concepts of adulthood have changed over time in Britain and the United States from 1350 to the present day, the essays collected here engage with the intersectional identities of gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability, and ask how these affect understandings of adulthood.
 

In the American Civil War missives from relatives to soldiers relating the details of what was occurring in the villages and towns unscarred by the conflict were rare. Edited by Barbara Butler Davis, Affectionately Yours: The Civil War Home-Front Letters of the Ovid Butler Family includes transcriptions of sixty-five holograph letters written from 1863 to 1865 to their son Scot. The letters are housed in the collection of the Irvington Historical Society and relate a fascinating social history of the Indianapolis community during the Civil War. The book also includes a foreword by Civil War historian Alan T. Nolan.

Written by leading scholars of African American and women's history, the essays in this volume seek to reconceptualize the political history of black women in the United States by placing them “at the center of our thinking.” The book explores how slavery, racial discrimination, and gender shaped the goals that African American women set for themselves, their families, and their race and looks at the political tools at their disposal. By identifying key turning points for black women, the essays create a new chronology and a new paradigm for historical analysis. The chronology begins in 1837 with the interracial meeting of antislavery women in New York City and concludes with the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The contributors focus on specific examples of women pursuing a dual ambition: to gain full civil and political rights and to improve the social conditions of African Americans. Together, the essays challenge us to rethink common generalizations that govern much of our historical thinking about the experience of African American women.

Contributors include Bettina Aptheker, Elsa Barkley Brown, Willi Coleman, Gerald R. Gill, Ann D. Gordon, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Martha Prescod Norman, Janice Sumler-Edmond, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, and Bettye Collier-Thomas.

This book brings together for the first time in English the major writings of Mikhail Epstein, one of post-Soviet Russia's most prominent theoreticians of cultural studies and postmodernism. Written from a non-Western point of view yet informed by a familiarity with Western literary theory, it offers a fresh, lucid perspective on the post-communist literary scene as well as a practical and theoretical introduction to the new discipline of Russian “culturology.”

A collection of essays, papers, and addresses which explains the author's views on racism.

The story of Alabama—where history shaped a state and a nation.

Alabama: The Making of an American State is itself a watershed event in the long and storied history of the state of Alabama. Here, presented for the first time ever in a single, magnificently illustrated volume, Edwin C. Bridges conveys the magisterial sweep of Alabama’s rich, difficult, and remarkable history with verve, eloquence, and an unblinking eye.

From Alabama’s earliest fossil records to its settlement by Native Americans and later by European settlers and African slaves, from its territorial birth pangs and statehood through the upheavals of the Civil War and the civil rights movement, Bridges makes evident in clear, direct storytelling the unique social, political, economic, and cultural forces that have indelibly shaped this historically rich and unique American region.

Illustrated lavishly with maps, archival photographs, and archaeological artifacts, as well as art works, portraiture, and specimens of Alabama craftsmanship—many never before published—Alabama: The Making of an American State makes evident as rarely seen before Alabama’s most significant struggles, conflicts, achievements, and developments.

Drawn from decades of research and the deep archival holdings of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, this volume will be the definitive resource for decades to come for anyone seeking a broad understanding of Alabama’s evolving legacy.

Author, collector, and historian Alice Morse Earle (1851–1911) was among the most important and prolific writers of her day. Between 1890 and 1904, she produced seventeen books as well as numerous articles, pamphlets, and speeches about the life, manners, customs, and material culture of colonial New England. Earle's work coincided with a surge of interest in early American history, genealogy, and antique collecting, and more than a century after the publication of her first book, her contributions still resonate with readers interested in the nation's colonial past.

An intensely private woman, Earle lived in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and four children and conducted much of her research either by mail or at the newly established Long Island Historical Society. She began writing on the eve of her fortieth birthday, and the impressive body of scholarship she generated over the next fifteen years stimulated new interest in early American social customs, domestic routines, foodways, clothing, and childrearing patterns. 

Written in a style calculated to appeal to a wide readership, Earle's richly illustrated books recorded the intimate details of what she described as colonial “home life.” These works reflected her belief that women had played a key historical role, helping to nurture communities by constructing households that both served and shaped their families. It was a vision that spoke eloquently to her contemporaries, who were busily creating exhibitions of early American life in museums, staging historical pageants and other forms of patriotic celebration, and furnishing their own domestic interiors.

Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark explores Newark’s Krueger-Scott African-American Cultural Center collection of over 100 oral histories. Historian Katie Singer separates these stories into thematic categories of social and political events, including church, work, and activism, in order to paint an intimate portrait of everyday urbanity and the larger Black urban experience in Newark. Through the examination of these Krueger-Scott narratives, Singer challenges historical falsehoods with the lived experiences of Newarkers who traveled North during the Great Migration, as well as established city residents. Alien Soil effectively contextualizes Newark history and re-inserts Black voices into historiography traditionally dominated by “outsiders."

The book begins with the Krueger-Scott Mansion’s deep history, followed by the sequence of events surrounding the proposed Cultural Center. Last owned by African-American millionaire and beauty-culture entrepreneur Louise Scott, the Victorian Krueger-Scott Mansion was built by beer baron Gottfried Krueger in 1888. Through the history of the Mansion, and the ultimately failed Cultural Center project, one learns about the Newark that African Americans migrated to, what they found when they got there, how living in the city changed them, and how they, individually and collectively, changed Newark.

After the Cultural Center project was officially halted in 2000, the cassette tapes of the oral history interviews were stored away at the Newark Public Library. Ten years later they were unearthed, and ultimately digitized. As of yet, no one has applied these sources directly to their research. Deeply committed to these rich, insightful stories, Singer calls for a more thoughtful consideration of all cities, reminding us that Newark is much more than its 1967 rebellion.
 

The River Dnipro (formerly better known by the Russian name of Dnieper) is intimately linked to the history and identity of Ukraine. Cybriwsky discusses the history of the river, from when it was formed and its many uses and modifications by human agencies from ancient times to the present.

From key vantage points along the river’s course—its source in western Russia, through Belarus and Ukraine, to the Black Sea—interesting stories shed light on past and present life in Ukraine. Scenes set along the river from Russian and Ukrainian literature are evoked, as well as musical compositions and works of art. Topics include the legacy of the region’s cultural ancestors as the Kyivan Rus, the period of Cossack dominion, the epic battles for the river’s bridges in World War II, the building of dams and huge reservoirs by the Soviet Union, and the crisis of Chornobyl (Chernobyl). The author argues that the Dnipro and the farmlands along it are Ukraine’s chief natural resources, and that the country's future depends on putting both to good use.

Written without academic pretence in an informal style with dashes of humor, Along Ukraine's River is illustrated with original line drawings, maps, and photographs.

Virtually every American alive has at some point consumed at least one, and very likely more, consciousness altering drug. Even those who actively eschew alcohol, tobacco, and coffee cannot easily avoid the full range of psychoactive substances pervading the culture. With many children now taking Ritalin for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, professional athletes relying on androstenidione to bulk up, and the chronically depressed resorting to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac, the early twenty-first century appears no less rife with drugs than previous periods.

Yet, if the use of drugs is a constant in American history, the way they have been perceived has varied extensively. Just as the corrupting cigarettes of the early twentieth century ("coffin nails" to contemporaries) became the glamorous accessory of Hollywood stars and American GIs in the 1940s, only to fall into public disfavor later as an unhealthy and irresponsible habit, the social significance of every drug changes over time. 

The essays in this volume explore these changes, showing how the identity of any psychoactive substance—from alcohol and nicotine to cocaine and heroin—owes as much to its users, their patterns of use, and the cultural context in which the drug is taken, as it owes to the drug's documented physiological effects. Rather than seeing licit drugs and illicit drugs, recreational drugs and medicinal drugs, “hard” drugs and “soft” drugs as mutually exclusive categories, the book challenges readers to consider the ways in which drugs have shifted historically from one category to another. 

In addition to the editors, contributors include Jim Baumohl, Allan M. Brandt, Katherine Chavigny, Timothy Hickman, Peter Mancall, Michelle McClellan, Steven J. Novak, Ron Roizen, Lori Rotskoff, Susan L. Speaker, Nicholas Weiss, and William White.

Throughout his life, Clarence Adams exhibited self-reliance, ambition, ingenuity, courage, and a commitment to learning—character traits often equated with the successful pursuit of the American Dream. Unfortunately, for an African American coming of age in the 1930s and 1940s, such attributes counted for little, especially in the South. 

Adams was a seventeen-year-old high school dropout in 1947 when he fled Memphis and the local police to join the U.S. Army. Three years later, after fighting in the Korean War in an all-black artillery unit that he believed to have been sacrificed to save white troops, he was captured by the Chinese. After spending almost three years as a POW, during which he continued to suffer racism at the hands of his fellow Americans, he refused repatriation in 1953, choosing instead the People's Republic of China, where he hoped to find educational and career opportunities not readily available in his own country. 

While living in China, Adams earned a university degree, married a Chinese professor of Russian, and worked in Beijing as a translator for the Foreign Languages Press. During the Vietnam War he made a controversial anti-war broadcast over Radio Hanoi, urging black troops not to fight for someone else's political and economic freedoms until they enjoyed these same rights at home. 

In 1966, having come under suspicion during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he returned with his wife and two children to the United States, where he was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to face charges of “disrupting the morale of American fighting forces in Vietnam and inciting revolution in the United States.” After these charges were dropped, he and his family struggled to survive economically. Eventually, through sheer perseverance, they were able to fulfill at least part of the American Dream. By the time he died, the family owned and operated eight successful Chinese restaurants in his native Memphis.

The story of the American newsroom is that of modern American journalism. In this holistic history, Will Mari tells that story from the 1920s through the 1960s, a time of great change and controversy in the field, one in which journalism was produced in “news factories” by news workers with dozens of different roles, and not just once a day, but hourly, using the latest technology and setting the stage for the emergence later in the century of the information economy. During this time, the newsroom was more than a physical place—it symbolically represented all that was good and bad in journalism, from the shift from blue- to white-collar work to the flexing of journalism’s power as a watchdog on government and an advocate for social reform. Told from an empathetic, omnivorous, ground-up point of view, The American Newsroom: A History, 1920–1960 uses memoirs, trade journals, textbooks, and archival material to show how the newsroom expanded our ideas of what journalism could and should be.

"A meticulously researched, highly informed, carefully argued, and very accessible account of American socialism, socialists, and socialistic thinking, from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s . . . challenges the intellectual and political legacy of Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, whose spirit still hovers over animated discussions about the 'failures' of socialism in the United States."
---James A. Miller, George Washington University

"A valuable rethinking and reframing of the traditions of leftist literary scholarship in the U.S."
---Sylvia Cook, University of Missouri, St. Louis

American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois explores the contributions of three writers to the development of American socialism over a fifty--year period and asserts the vitality of socialism in modern American literature and culture.

Drawing upon a wide range of texts including archival sources, Mark W. Van Wienen demonstrates the influence of reform-oriented, democratic socialism both in the careers of these writers and in U.S. politics between 1890 and 1940. While offering unprecedented in-depth analysis of modern American socialist literature, this book charts the path by which the supposedly impossible, dangerous ideals of a cooperative commonwealth were realized, in part, by the New Deal.

American Socialist Triptych provides in-depth, innovative readings of the featured writers and their engagement with socialist thought and action. Upton Sinclair represents the movement's most visible manifestation, the Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901; Charlotte Perkins Gilman reflects the socialist elements in both feminism and 1890s reform movements, and W. E. B. Du Bois illuminates social democratic aspirations within the NAACP. Van Wienen's book seeks to re-energize studies of Sinclair by treating him as a serious cultural figure whose career peaked not in the early success of The Jungle but in his nearly successful 1934 run for the California governorship. It also demonstrates as never before the centrality of socialism throughout Gilman's and Du Bois's literary and political careers.

More broadly, American Socialist Triptych challenges previous scholarship on American radical literature, which has focused almost exclusively on the 1930s and Communist writers. Van Wienen argues that radical democracy was not the phenomenon of a decade or of a single group but a sustained tradition dispersed within the culture, providing a useful genealogical explanation for how socialist ideas were actually implemented through the New Deal.

American Socialist Triptych also revises modern American literary history, arguing for the endurance of realist and utopian literary modes at the height of modernist literary experimentation and showing the importance of socialism not only to the three featured writers but also to their peers, including Edward Bellamy, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Claude McKay. Further, by demonstrating the importance of social democratic thought to feminist and African American campaigns for equality, the book dialogues with recent theories of radical egalitarianism. Readers interested in American literature, U.S. history, political theory, and race, gender, and class studies will all find in American Socialist Triptych a valuable and provocative resource.

Takes a comparative perspective on family life and childhood in the past half century in Russia and Eastern Europe, highlighting similarities and differences. Focuses on the problematic domains of the institutions and laws devised to cope with family difficulties, and discusses the social strains created by the transition from communist to post-communist national systems. In addition to the substantial historic analysis, actual challenges are also discussed. The essays examine the changing gender roles, alterations in legal systems, the burdens faced by married and unmarried women who are mothers, the contrasts between government rhteoric and the implementation of policies toward marriage, children and parenthood. By addressing the specifics of welfare politics under the Communist rule and the directions of their transformation in 1990–2000s, this book contributes to the understanding of social institutions and family policies in these countries and the problems of dealing with the socialist past that this region face.

In Appalachian Dance: Creativity and Continuity in Six Communities, Susan Eike Spalding brings to bear twenty-five years' worth of rich interviews with black and white Virginians, Tennesseeans, and Kentuckians to explore the evolution and social uses of dance in each region.

Spalding analyzes how issues as disparate as industrialization around coal, plantation culture, race relations, and the 1970s folk revival influenced freestyle clogging and other dance forms like square dancing in profound ways. She reveals how African Americans and Native Americans, as well as European immigrants drawn to the timber mills and coal fields, brought movement styles that added to local dance vocabularies. Placing each community in its sociopolitical and economic context, Spalding analyzes how the formal and stylistic nuances found in Appalachian dance reflect the beliefs, shared understandings, and experiences of the community at large, paying particular attention to both regional and racial diversity.

Written in clear and accessible prose, Appalachian Dance is a lively addition to the literature and a bold contribution to scholarship concerned with the meaning of movement and the ever-changing nature of tradition.

An examination of the diverse motivations and practices of Arabic-learning foreigners from nineteenth-century mass tourism and European colonialism in the Middle East, up to the Second World War.

During the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, more Europeans visited the Middle East than ever before, as tourists, archaeologists, pilgrims, settler-colonists, and soldiers. These visitors engaged with the Arabic language to differing degrees. While some were serious scholars of Classical Arabic, in the Orientalist mold, many did not learn the language at all. Between these two extremes lies a neglected group of language learners who wanted to learn enough everyday colloquial Arabic to get by. The needs of these learners were met by popular language books, which boasted that they could provide an easy route to fluency in a difficult language.

Arabic Dialogues explores the motivations of Arabic learners and the effectiveness of instructional materials, principally in Egypt and Palestine, by analyzing a corpus of Arabic phrasebooks published in nine languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian) and in the territories of twenty-five modern countries. Beginning with Napoleon’s Expédition d’Égypte, the book moves through the periods of mass tourism and European colonialism in the Middle East, concluding with the Second World War. The book also considers how Arab intellectuals understood the project of teaching Arabic to foreigners, the remarkable history of Arabic learning among Yiddish- and Hebrew-speaking immigrants in Palestine, and the networks of language learners, teachers, and plagiarists who produced these phrasebooks.
 

A collection of essays representing forty-five years of reflection on the central problems of southern history bound together by a common concern with defining the crucial interaction of race and class in the formation of southern politics and life

“The tourist archipelagoes of my South / are prisons, too, corruptible” writes the poet Derek Walcott. While Walcott refers to the islands of the Caribbean, the analogous idea of a land made into solitary islands by an imprisoned and inherited corruption is historian J. Mills Thornton III’s American South. The captivating essays in Archipelagoes of My South: Episodes in the Shaping of a Region, 1830–1965 address this overarching and underlying narrative of Alabama politics and the history of the South.

Highlighting events as significant as the role of social and economic conflict in the southern secession movement, various aspects of Reconstruction, and the role of the Ku Klux Klan in the politics of the 1920s, Thornton draws from various points in the southern past in an effort to identify and understand the sources of the region’s power. Moreover, each essay investigates its subject matter and peels back layers with an aim to clarify why the enormous diversity of the southern experience makes that power so great, all the while allowing the reader to see connections that would not otherwise be apparent.

Archipelagoes of My South gathers previously uncollected essays into a single volume covering the entire length and breadth of Thornton’s career. The author’s principal concerns have always been the arc of regional evolution and the significance of the local. Thus, the mechanisms of political and social change and the interrelationships across eras and generations are recurring themes in many of these essays.

Even those who have spent their entire lives in the South may be unaware of the fractured layers of history that lie beneath the landscape they inhabit. For those southern residents who seek to comprehend more of their own past, this landmark compilation of essays on Alabama and southern history endeavors to provide illumination and enlightenment.
 

A groundbreaking synthesis of food studies, archival theory, and early American literature

 

There is no eating in the archive. This is not only a practical admonition to any would-be researcher but also a methodological challenge, in that there is no eating—or, at least, no food—preserved among the printed records of the early United States. Synthesizing a range of textual artifacts with accounts (both real and imagined) of foods harvested, dishes prepared, and meals consumed, An Archive of Taste reveals how a focus on eating allows us to rethink the nature and significance of aesthetics in early America, as well as of its archive.

Lauren F. Klein considers eating and early American aesthetics together, reframing the philosophical work of food and its meaning for the people who prepare, serve, and consume it. She tells the story of how eating emerged as an aesthetic activity over the course of the eighteenth century and how it subsequently transformed into a means of expressing both allegiance and resistance to the dominant Enlightenment worldview. Klein offers richly layered accounts of the enslaved men and women who cooked the meals of the nation’s founders and, in doing so, directly affected the development of our national culture—from Thomas Jefferson’s emancipation agreement with his enslaved chef to Malinda Russell’s Domestic Cookbook, the first African American–authored culinary text.

The first book to examine the gustatory origins of aesthetic taste in early American literature, An Archive of Taste shows how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States.

Sixty years ago, at the height of World War II, an extraordinary series of gatherings took place at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts. During the summers of 1942–1944, leading European figures in the arts and sciences met at the college with their American counterparts for urgent conversations about the future of human civilization in a precarious world. 

Two Sorbonne professors, the distinguished medievalist Gustave Cohen and the existentialist philosopher Jean Wahl, organized these “Pontigny” sessions, named after an abbey in Burgundy where similar symposia had been held in the decades before the war. Among the participants—many of whom were Jewish or had Jewish backgrounds—were the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Rachel Bespaloff, the poets Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the linguist Roman Jakobson, and the painters Marc Chagall and Robert Motherwell. 

In this collection of original essays, Stanley Cavell and Jacques Derrida lead an international group of scholars—including Jed Perl, Mary Ann Caws, Jeffrey Mehlman, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl—in assessing the lasting impact and contemporary significance of Pontigny-en- Amérique. Rachel Bespaloff, a tragic figure who wrote a major work on the Iliad, is restored to her rightful place beside Arendt and Simone Weil. Anyone interested in the “intellectual resistance” of Francophone intellectuals and artists, and the inspiring support from such American figures as Stevens and Moore, will want to read this pioneering work of scholarship and historical re-creation.

The steel industry played a central role in building post–World War II economic success in the US and in defining the parameters of the post–World War II social contract. As these long-term processes both preceded and contributed to the Great Recession, a new capitalism—one in which banks and the credit system took precedence over industrial production—changed the lives of many American workers, including steelworkers. As Goes Bethlehem raises important questions about why workers and their unions were not able to successfully contest this attack on industrial labor, instead settling for best navigating a long downward trajectory.

Through the experiences and reflections of steelworkers, Jill A. Schennum demonstrates the significance of work, and particularly of industrial work, in giving meaning to people’s lives, identities, and sense of worth. She uses workers’ narratives and voices to show the importance of work space, time, and social relations, rejecting dominant interpretations of blue-collar workers as alienated from their work but well-paid and co-opted by a middle-class standard of living. Schennum covers thirty-five years of investment and disinvestment, managerial initiatives, transfer decisions, layoffs and downsizings, external transfers, the eventual bankruptcy of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, and movement into retirement, unemployment, and new postindustrial jobs.

The very solidarities, rights of citizenship, and rule of law forged in the mill and built on by the union were constructed, in part, through exclusions based on race, ethnicity, gender, and region. These lines of fracture were mobilized to undermine working-class strength in the postindustrial period. Through the experiences of African American, Puerto Rican, coal country, and women workers in the steel mills, this book explores these issues of fracture and solidarity.

Analyzes the Southern Baptist denomination’s influence on southern culture during the 19th century
 
First published in 1967, Rufus Spain’s thorough investigation into Southern Baptist attitudes set the stage for research on religion in the American South. In At Ease in Zion, Spain questions the titular “ease” with society that Southern Baptists seemed to maintain following the Civil War. His analysis of denominational newspapers, as well as reports from the Southern Baptist Convention and state conventions, paint a compelling picture of the subjects’ complacency with their social existence, even as they criticized personal and recreational ethics.

While the South faced significant social, economic, and political changes after the Civil War, religion remained the primary moral influence. As the Southern Baptist denomination made up a significant majority of the population at that time, its leaders and attitudes had a clear and undeniable impact on social norms. Rufus Spain was one of the first writers to actively demonstrate the relationship between Southern religion and Southern society, and his work displays meticulous attention to the ways in which we are affected by complacency. He asserts that Southern Baptists viewed the American South as a version of God’s ideal society; any issues they wished to address were caused by individuals (such as those who did not conform to societal norms) or external attitudes (such as those in differing religions or regions).

At Ease in Zion is a critical part of the scholarly discussion on religion in society. Spain’s research offers a bold analysis of the American South and its citizens during one of the most tumultuous times in its history while providing a basis for arguments on “social Christianity” and its ever-shifting role in the world.
 

From remote islands to sunken lands, Gareth Roddy traces how travel writing and tourism shaped the cultural and political imagination of the British and Irish West between 1880 and 1940.

The west has long gripped the imagination. In Atlantic Isles, Gareth Roddy examines the cultural and political prominence of the "westward gaze," which flourished in late-nineteenth century Britain and Ireland. From Cornish cliffs and Welsh mountains to Hebridean islands and the Connemara highlands, the west was an imagined geography that transcended the national territories of these isles. In the west, geologists uncovered ancient layers of rock, ethnologists described older racial "types," philologists looked for the survival of Celtic languages, and antiquarians and archaeologists marveled at megalithic monuments at the Atlantic coastline.

This book draws on wide-ranging contemporary sources, including works of geology, philology, ethnology, history, geography, archaeology, folklore, literature, sociology, and an extensive collection of travel writing that popularized western landscapes among readers and tourists who explored the increasingly accessible west by road, rail, and steamer. Atlantic Isles reveals that western landscapes were especially powerful spaces of modern enchantment, where stories of sunken lands and mythical islands produced a sense of mystery and wonder in a supposedly disenchanted world. The significance of western landscapes for national identities is well known, but this book demonstrates that the west was also central to debates about Britishness and to the bold attempt to construct a narrative of multinational union that claimed deep historical roots at a time when the subject of Home Rule periodically dominated political debate.