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Bad Colonists
The South Seas Letters of Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke
Nicholas Thomas and Richard Eves
Duke University Press, 1999
In Bad Colonists Nicholas Thomas and Richard Eves provide a window into the fantasies and realities of colonial life by presenting separate sets of letters by two late-nineteenth-century British colonists of the South Pacific: Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke. Thomas and Eves frame the letters—addressed mostly to the colonists’ mothers—with commentary that explores colonial degeneration in the South Pacific. Using critical anthropology and theories of history-making to view the letter as artifact and autobiography, they examine the process whereby men and women unraveled in the hot, violent, uncivil colonial milieu.
An obscure colonial trader, Walker wrote to his mother in England from Australia, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and New Caledonia—and also from ships in between those places—during the 1870s and 1880s. Becke was a trader, too, but he was also a successful author of popular fiction that drew on his experiences in the Pacific. Written from Micronesia in the early 1880s, Becke’s letters are like Walker’s in that they report one setback after another. Both collections vividly evoke the day-to-day experiences of ordinary late-nineteenth-century colonists and open up new questions concerning the making and writing of selves on the colonial periphery.
Exposing insecurities in an epoch normally regarded as one of imperial triumph, Bad Colonists will appeal to students and scholars of anthropology, colonial history, cultural studies, and Pacific history and culture.
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Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights
A Brief History with Documents
Edited by Lawrence A. Clayton and David M. Lantigua
University of Alabama Press, 2020
An accessible reader of both popular and largely unavailable writings of Bartolomé de las Casas
 
With the exception of Christopher Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas is arguably the most notable figure of the Encounter Age. He is remembered principally as the creator of the Black Legend, as well as the protector of American Indians. He was one of the pioneers of the human rights movement, and a Christian activist who invoked law and Biblical scripture to challenge European colonialism in the great age of the Encounter. He was also one of the first and most thorough chroniclers of the conquest, and a biographer who saved the diary of Columbus’s first voyage for posterity by transcribing it in his History of the Indies before the diary was lost.
 
Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights: A Brief History with Documents provides the most wide-ranging and concise anthology of Las Casas’s writings, in translation, ever made available. It contains not only excerpts from his most well-known texts, but also his largely unavailable writings on political philosophy and law, and addresses the underappreciated aspects of his thought. Fifteen of the twenty-six documents are entirely new translations of Las Casas’s writings, a number of them appearing in English for the first time.
 
This volume focuses on his historical, political, and legal writings that address the deeply conflicted and violent sixteenth-century encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples of the Americas. It also presents Las Casas as a more comprehensive and systematic philosophical and legal thinker than he is typically given credit for. The introduction by Lawrence A. Clayton and David M. Lantigua places these writings into a synthetic whole, tracing his advocacy for indigenous peoples throughout his career. By considering Las Casas’s ideas, actions, and even regrets in tandem, readers will understand the historical dynamics of Spanish imperialism more acutely within the social-political context of the times.
 
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Baseball's Greatest Series
Yankees, Mariners, and the 1995 Matchup That Changed History
Donnelly, Chris
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Baseball's Greatest Series details what many believe to be the most exciting postseason series in baseball history: the 1995 Division Series between the New York Yankees and the Seattle Mariners.

This division series was not simply about two teams playing five postseason games. It was about Ken Griffey Jr., Lou Piniella, Buck Showalter, Gene Michael, Jim Leyritz, Randy Johnson, Wade Boggs, Tony Fernandez, Pat Kelly, Dion James, Darryl Strawberryùand many others who changed the course of baseball history . . .
A team playing to keep baseball alive in the Pacific Northwest
A manager who was literally managing for his job
A New York sports icon who for one week reminded everybody of the dominating player he had been a decade earlier

Chris Donnelly's replay of this entire season reminds readers that it was a time when grown men cried their eyes out after defeat, and others, just a few hundred feet away, poured beer and champagne over one another while 57,000 people in Seattle's Kingdome celebrated. Five games they were. Five games that reminded people, after the devastating players' strike in 1994, how great a game baseball is because comebacks are always possible, no matter how great the obstacles may seem.

From Don Mattingly's only postseason home run, which caused a near riot, to Edgar Martinez's legendary eleventh inning series-clinching double, Donnelly chronicles the earlier struggles of both teams during the 1980s, their mid-1990s resurgence, all five heart-stopping games of the series, and the dramatic and long-lasting effects of Seattle's victory. Simply stated, Baseball's Greatest Series hits a home run.

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Bearing Witness
Memories of Arkansas Slavery
George E. Lankford
University of Arkansas Press, 2006
The first edition of Bearing Witness brought together for the first time 176 slave narratives from the state of Arkansas. Now, this new edition adds ten previously undiscovered accounts. No one knew the truths of slavery better than the slaves themselves, but no one consulted them until the 1930s. Then, recognizing that this generation of unique witnesses would soon be lost to history, the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project acted to interview as many former slaves as possible. In a continuation of the project's interest in the life histories of ordinary people, writers interviewed over two thousand former slaves, more than a third of them in Arkansas. These oral histories were first published in the 1970s in a thirty-nine-volume series organized by state, and they transformed America's understanding of slavery. They have offered crucial evidence on a variety of other topics as well: the Civil War, Reconstruction, agricultural practices, everyday life, and oral history itself. But some former Arkansas slaves were interviewed in Texas, Oklahoma, and other states, so their narratives were published in those other collections. And more than half of the testimonies in the Arkansas volume were interviews with people who had moved to Arkansas after freedom. Folklorist George Lankford combed all of the state collections for the testimonies properly belonging to Arkansas and deleted from this state's collection the testimony of later migrants
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Before Amoris Laetitia
The Sources of the Controversy
Jaroslaw Kupczak
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
The publication of Pope Francis’ post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia started the most important theological debate in the Catholic Church since the end of the Second Vatican Council. The cardinals, bishops, theologians, priests, lay Catholics found themselves on the opposite sides of this crucial and complicated discussion. This book attempts to shed some light on this debate by tracing its genealogy. Since Amoris Laetitia is a post-synodal document, the large part of the book is devoted to the theological analysis of the two Synods of Bishops convoked by Pope Francis in the first years of his pontificate: the extraordinary in October 2014 and the ordinary that took place a year later. The main topics for the two synods were determined, however, in the speech given by Cardinal Walter Kasper during the cardinals consistory in February 2014 whose main aim was to prepare the possibility of admitting divorced persons who live in second unions to Holy Communion. The arguments of Cardinal Kasper are presented in the first chapter of the book and confronted with the most significant statements of the Magisterium of the Church on the issue of admittance to the Holy Communion. This book is a study at the intersection of Church history, the history of theology, and systematic theology: dogmatic and moral. Kupczak is interested in the chronology of the events connected to the two synods on the family but in the context of theological problems discussed therein: the theological significance of contemporary cultural changes; the relation of the Church to the world; the understanding of the indissolubility of the sacramental marriage and the Eucharist; the methods of ethically assessing human acts, particularly the concept of so-called intrinsically evil acts (intrinsece malum); and the relation of conscience to the general moral norm. The non-partisan ambition of this book is to serve as a “road map”— a help in navigation for the reader in the complicated discussions leading to publication of Amoris Laetitia. The uniqueness of this book consists in combining the historical analysis of the events leading to the publication of Amoris Laetitia with research of the theological discussion that ensued. Since Amoris Laetitia is a post-synodal exhortation, this book rests on the assumption that crucial for its understanding is a thorough analysis of its genealogy. Only in the light of this historical and theological perspective the debates surrounding Amoris Laetitia may be understood.
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Before They Could Vote
American Women's Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919
Edited by Sidonie A. Smith and Julia Watson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition—some well known, some forgotten over generations—who confronted barriers of gender, class, race, and sexual difference as they pursued or adapted to adventurous new lives in a rapidly changing America. The engaging selections—from captivity narratives to letters, manifestos, criminal confessions, and childhood sketches—span a hundred years in which women increasingly asserted themselves publicly. Some rose to positions of prominence as writers, activists, and artists; some sought education or wrote to support themselves and their families; some transgressed social norms in search of new possibilities. Each woman’s story is strikingly individual, yet the brief narratives in this anthology collectively chart bold new visions of women’s agency.

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Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy
Biographical Writing in the Early Global Age
Camilla Russell
Harvard University Press, 2022

A new history illuminates the Society of Jesus in its first century from the perspective of those who knew it best: the early Jesuits themselves.

The Society of Jesus was established in 1540. In the century that followed, thousands sought to become Jesuits and pursue vocations in religious service, teaching, and missions. Drawing on scores of unpublished biographical documents housed at the Roman Jesuit Archive, Camilla Russell illuminates the lives of those who joined the Society, building together a religious and cultural presence that remains influential the world over.

Tracing Jesuit life from the Italian provinces to distant missions, Russell sheds new light on the impact and inner workings of the Society. The documentary record reveals a textual network among individual members, inspired by Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. The early Jesuits took stock of both quotidian and spiritual experiences in their own records, which reflect a community where the worldly and divine overlapped. Echoing the Society’s foundational writings, members believed that each Jesuit’s personal strengths and inclinations offered a unique contribution to the whole—an attitude that helps explain the Society’s widespread appeal from its first days.

Focusing on the Jesuits’ own words, Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy offers a new lens on the history of spirituality, identity, and global exchange in the Renaissance. What emerges is a kind of genetic code—a thread connecting the key Jesuit works to the first generations of Jesuits and the Society of Jesus as it exists today.

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Being Comanche
The Social History of an American Indian Community
Morris W. Foster
University of Arizona Press, 1991
Winner, Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award (American Society for Ethnohistory)

Comanches have engaged Euro-Americans' curiosity for three centuries. Their relations with Spanish, French, and Anglo-Americans on the southern Plains have become a highly resonant part of the mythology of the American West. Yet we know relatively little about the community that Comanches have shared and continue to construct in southwestern Oklahoma. Morris W. Foster has written the first study of Comanches' history that identifies continuities in their intracommunity organization from the initial period of European contact to the present day. Those continuities are based on shared participation in public social occasions such as powwows, peyote gatherings, and church meetings Foster explains how these occasions are used to regulate social organization and how they have been modified by Comanches to adapt them to changing political and economic relations with Euro-Americans. Using a model of community derived from sociolinguistics, Foster argues that Comanches have remained a distinctive people by organizing their face-to-face relations with one another in ways that maintain Comanche-Comanche lines of communication and regulate a shared sense of appropriate behavior. His book offers readers a significant reinterpretation of traditional anthropological and historical views of Comanche social organization.
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Beneath the Starry Flag
New Jersey's Civil War Experience
Siegel, Alan A
Rutgers University Press, 2001

Few events in American history can match the triumph and tragedy of the Civil War. Many books have been written about the War between the States, but until now, none has chronicled—in their own words—the many important roles played by people from New Jersey.

Beneath the Starry Flag
is a collection of richly detailed eyewitness accounts by New Jerseyans who lived during the Civil War. Drawing from letters, journals, regimental histories, and newspaper accounts, Alan A. Siegel places the reader in the midst of these desperate times. The book depicts the war years chronologically, from the tense days when one state, then another seceded from the Union, through battles lost and won, to the victory at Appomattox and Lincoln’s funeral procession across New Jersey.

Readers will learn of the remarkable valor of New Jersey soldiers such as John Beech, a Trenton potter who won a Medal of Honor for bravery at Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle. They will learn too of the sacrifices made by civilians, such as Cornelia Hancock of Salem County, who ministered to soldiers wounded on battlefields from Gettysburg to Petersburg. Siegel also tells of other people and institutions who played very different roles in the war, including Somerset County’s Daniel Cory, who said he would shoot the president if he could, the state’s leading Copperhead newspapers, which denounced the draft and discouraged enlistments, and the State Legislature, which at one point called for a truce and negotiations to end the conflict.

Siegel allows them all, enlisted men and officers, politicians and plain citizens, patriots and conspirators, to speak in their own words in often moving firsthand accounts. Their motives, emotions, and deeds are chronicled in this collection of stories, some which have been out of print for many years, others that have not been heard since they were first written more than a century ago.

[Beneath the Starry Flag
is an invaluable addition to what we know about this remarkable time in American history, perfect for the general reader or Civil War historian.]  

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Beneath These Red Cliffs
An Ethnohistory of the Utah Paiutes
Ronald L. Holt
Utah State University Press, 2006
Ronald Holt recounts the survival of a people against all odds. A compound of rapid white settlement of the most productive Southern Paiute homelands, especially their farmlands near tributaries of the Colorado River; conversion by and labor for the Mormon settlers; and government neglect placed the Utah Paiutes in a state of dependency that ironically culminated in the 1957 termination of their status as federally recognized Indians. That recognition and attendant services were not restored until 1980, in an act that revived the Paiutes’ identity, self-government, land ownership, and sense of possibility. 

With a foreword by Lora Tom, chair of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah.
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Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the First Nations
The Treaties of 1736-62
Edited by Susan Kalter
University of Illinois Press, 2006

British colonial relations with the native peoples of eastern North America

This is an annotated edition of the treaties between the British colonies and Indian nations, originally printed and sold by Benjamin Franklin. Last published in 1938, Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the First Nations makes these important treaties available once again, featuring a simpler, easier-to-read format, extensive explanatory notes, and maps. A detailed introduction by Susan Kalter puts the treaties in their proper historical and cultural context. 

This carefully researched edition shows these treaties to be complex intercultural documents, and provides significant insight into the British colonists’ relationship with native peoples of North America. They also reveal the complexity of Benjamin Franklin’s perceptions of Native Americans, showing him in some negotiations as a promoter of the Indian word against the colonial one. Finally, the treaties offer an enormous wealth of linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural information about the Iroquois, the Delawares, and their allies and neighbors.

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The Best Writings of Ulysses S. Grant
Edited by John F. Marszalek
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

Famous for his military acumen and for his part in saving the Union during the American Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant also remains known for his two-volume memoirs, considered among the greatest military memoirs ever written. Grant’s other writings, however, have not received the same acclaim, even though they show the same literary skill. Originally published in the thirty-two volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, the letters and speeches are the major source of information about Grant’s life and era and have played a key role in elevating his reputation to that of the leading general of the Civil War and the first of the modern presidents. In this collection, editor John F. Marszalek presents excerpts from Grant’s  most insightful and skillfully composed writings and provides perspective through introductory comments tying each piece to the next. The result is a fascinating overview of Grant’s life and career.

In sixteen chronological chapters, selections from Grant’s letters and other writings reveal his personal thoughts on the major events of his momentous life, including the start of the Civil War, the capture of Vicksburg, Lincoln’s reelection, Lee’s surrender, his terms as president, the Panic of 1873, and his bouts of mouth and throat cancer. Throughout, Grant’s prose reveals clearly the power of his words and his ability to present them well. Although some historians have maligned his presidency as one of the most corrupt periods in American history, these writings reinforce Grant’s greatness as a general, demonstrate the importance of his presidency, and show him to be one of the driving forces of the nineteenth century.

With this compendium, Marszalek not only celebrates the literary talent of one of America’s greatest military figures but also vindicates an individual who, for so long, has been unfairly denigrated. A concise reference for students of American history and Civil War enthusiasts as well as a valuable introduction for those who are new to Grant’s writings, this volume provides intriguing insight into one of the nineteenth century’s most important Americans.

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Bibles
An Illustrated History from Papyrus to Print
Christopher de Hamel
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011

A unique visual history of the world’s best-selling book of all time, Bibles provides a rich snapshot of the biblical bookmaking tradition through images from fifty rare and important Bibles. As the captivating and colorful images collected here reveal, in many ways the history of the Bible mirrors the history of the book and publishing.

Presented chronologically, the Bibles provide a fascinating look into the book making techniques and characteristics of their time. From the fragile papyrus fragments of the ancient world to medieval illuminated manuscripts and glorious modern printed editions, each image is accompanied by a caption which explains its particular significance. In addition, each chapter includes a short introduction that contextualizes each book within its time period. Featuring many unusual examples—some of which have never been illustrated in print before—Bibles includes many of the great biblical texts of the Eastern and Western traditions, including the Magdalen Papyrus, the Laudian Acts, the Anglo-Saxon Exodus, St Margaret’s Gospel-book, the Douce Apocalypse, the Bible Moralisée (MS. Bodley 270b), the Kennicott Bible, the Guttenberg Bible, and the King James Bible.

Drawing exclusively from one of the finest collections of Bibles in the world, which is held at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, this book tells the remarkable story of the development of the Bible across media, language, and provenance.

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Black Texas Women
A Sourcebook
By Ruthe Winegarten
University of Texas Press, 1994

When Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph was published in 1995, it was acclaimed as the first comprehensive history of black women's struggles and achievements. This companion volume contains the original source materials that Ruthe Winegarten uncovered during her extensive research.

Like a time capsule of black women's history, A Sourcebook includes petitions from free women of color, lawsuits, slave testimonies, wills, plantation journals, club minutes, autobiographies, ads, congressional reports, contracts, prison records, college catalogues, newspaper clippings, protest letters, and much more.

In addition to the documents, a biographical section highlights the lives of women from various walks of life. The book concludes with a timeline that begins in 1777 and reaches to 1992. This wealth of original material will be a treasure trove for scholars and general readers interested in the emerging field of black women's history.

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Body Parts of Empire
Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive
Nerissa S. Balce
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Body Parts of Empire is a study of abjection in American visual culture and popular literature from the Philippine-American War (1899–1902). During this period, the American national territory expanded beyond its continental borders to islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Simultaneously, new technologies of vision emerged for imagining the human body, including the moving camera, stereoscopes, and more efficient print technologies for mass media.

Rather than focusing on canonical American authors who wrote at the time of U.S. imperialism, this book examines abject texts—images of naked savages, corpses, clothed native elites, and uniformed American soldiers—as well as bodies of writing that document the goodwill and violence of American expansion in the Philippine colony. Contributing to the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and gender studies, the book analyzes the actual archive of the Philippine-American War and how the racialization and sexualization of the Filipino colonial native have always been part of the cultures of America and U.S. imperialism. By focusing on the Filipino native as an abject body of the American imperial imaginary, this study offers a historical materialist optic for reading the cultures of Filipino America.
 

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Bonds of Affection
Civic Charity and the Making of America--Winthrop, Jefferson, and Lincoln
Matthew S. Holland
Georgetown University Press, 2007

Notions of Christian love, or charity, strongly shaped the political thought of John Winthrop, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln as each presided over a foundational moment in the development of American democracy. Matthew Holland examines how each figure interpreted and appropriated charity, revealing both the problems and possibilities of making it a political ideal.

Holland first looks at early American literature and seminal speeches by Winthrop to show how the Puritan theology of this famed 17th century governor of the Massachusetts Colony (he who first envisioned America as a "City upon a Hill") galvanized an impressive sense of self-rule and a community of care in the early republic, even as its harsher aspects made something like Jefferson's Enlightenment faith in liberal democracy a welcome development . Holland then shows that between Jefferson's early rough draft of the Declaration of Independence and his First Inaugural Jefferson came to see some notion of charity as a necessary complement to modern political liberty.

However, Holland argues, it was Lincoln and his ingenious blend of Puritan and democratic insights who best fulfilled the promise of this nation's "bonds of affection." With his recognition of the imperfections of both North and South, his humility in the face of God's judgment on the Civil War, and his insistence on "charity for all," including the defeated Confederacy, Lincoln personified the possibilities of religious love turned civic virtue.

Weaving a rich tapestry of insights from political science and literature and American religious history and political theory, Bonds of Affection is a major contribution to the study of American political identity. Matthew Holland makes plain that civic charity, while commonly rejected as irrelevant or even harmful to political engagement, has been integral to our national character.

The book includes the full texts of Winthrop's speech "A Model of Christian Charity"; Jefferson's rough draft of the Declaration and his First Inaugural; and Lincoln's Second Inaugural.

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The Book of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna (Medieval Texts in Translation)
Deborah Mauskopf Agnellus of Ravenna
Catholic University of America Press, 2004
This translation makes this fascinating text accessible for the first time to an English-speaking audience. A substantial introduction to Agnellus and his composition of the text is included along with a full bibliography
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Books Like Sapphires
From the Library of Congress Judaica Collection
Ann Brener
Brandeis University Press, 2024
Illustrated highlights from the Judaica Collection of the Library of Congress.
 
Books Like Sapphires showcases a wide range of Hebraic treasures from the storied collection at the Library of Congress, many of them for the first time. Tracing the history of Judaica collecting in the twentieth-century United States, the book illuminates varied works, telling their stories alongside vibrant color images. These include a unique manuscript about a betrothal scandal in Renaissance Crete, an illustrated Esther Scroll, a poem from 1477 celebrating the new technology of printing, amusing rhymed couplets in sixteenth-century Padua, and the Washington Haggadah. This book also tells the story of the patrons and collectors, first among them Jacob Schiff, as well as archivists and curators, who made the storied Judaica archive at the Library of Congress the precious resource that it is today.
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The Briny South
Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World
Nienke Boer
Duke University Press, 2023
In The Briny South Nienke Boer examines the legal and literary narratives of enslaved, indentured, and imprisoned individuals crossing the Indian Ocean to analyze the formation of racialized identities in the imperial world. Drawing on court records, ledgers, pamphlets, censors’ reports, newsletters, folk songs, memoirs, and South African and South Asian works of fiction and autobiography, Boer theorizes the role of sentiment and the depiction of emotions in the construction of identities of displaced peoples across the Indian Ocean. From Dutch East India Company rule in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to early apartheid South Africa, Boer shows how colonial powers and settler states mediated and manipulated subaltern expressions of emotion as a way to silence racialized subjects and portray them as inarticulately suffering. In this way, sentiment operated in favor of the powerful rather than as an oppositional weapon of the subaltern. By tracing the entwinement of displacement, race, and sentiment, Boer frames the Indian Ocean as a site of subjectification with a long history of transnational connection—and exploitation.
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Bruce Grit
The Black Nationalist Writings Of
William Seraile
University of Tennessee Press, 2003
John Edward Bruce (1856–1924) witnessed the dying days of American slavery, the turbulence of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the development of American imperialism. As a journalist, historian, and bibliophile, he was a major figure in African American history and politics during his lifetime. In this first intellectual biography of Bruce—a prolific writer and correspondent who published most frequently under the name Bruce Grit—William Seraile explores Bruce’s tireless advocacy on behalf of African peoples everywhere, particularly in the United States.

Bruce wrote for more than a hundred different newspapers and founded several of them, including the Argus, the Sunday Item, and Washington Grit in Washington, D.C., and the Weekly Standard in Yonkers, New York. A cultural nationalist and Pan-Africanist, Bruce was known as a race-first proponent. In his quest to see that African Americans were granted full political and civil rights, he championed the contributions of African civilization to western culture as a whole, amassing an impressive collection of books, articles, and other scholarly documentation. For most of his career, he believed that African Americans would eventually be able to claim an equal share of the American Dream. However, by the end of his life, he became disillusioned and concluded that the best hope for their future lay in emigration back to Africa.

Seraile traces Bruce’s shifting strategies and tactics and his alliances with famous contemporaries such as Arthur A. Schomburg, Carter G. Woodson, Booker T. Washington, and Marcus Garvey. He argues that underlying all of Bruce’s work was what would become his greatest legacy: his promotion of history and culture of African people in the diaspora as valuable fields of study.

The Author: William Seraile is professor of black studies at Lehman College. He is the author of Voice of Dissent: Theophilus Gould Steward and Black America, Fire in His Heart: Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner and the A.M.E. Church, and New York’s Black Regiments During the Civil War.


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Buried Indians
Digging Up the Past in a Midwestern Town
Laurie Hovell McMillin
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

    In Buried Indians, Laurie Hovell McMillin presents the struggle of her hometown, Trempealeau, Wisconsin, to determine whether platform mounds atop Trempealeau Mountain constitute authentic Indian mounds. This dispute, as McMillin subtly demonstrates, reveals much about the attitude and interaction-past and present-between the white and Indian inhabitants of this Midwestern town.
    McMillin's account, rich in detail and sensitive to current political issues of American Indian interactions with the dominant European American culture, locates two opposing views: one that denies a Native American presence outright and one that asserts its long history and ruthless destruction. The highly reflective oral histories McMillin includes turn Buried Indians into an accessible, readable portrait of a uniquely American culture clash and a dramatic narrative grounded in people's genuine perceptions of what the platform mounds mean.

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Byron's Letters and Journals
George Gordon Byron
Harvard University Press, 1981

George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.

An enchanting epistolary saga ends with the publication of this volume. Volume XI: ‘For freedom’s battle’ contains the letters Byron wrote from Greece between August 1823 and April 9, 1824, ten days before his death. Also included are over fifty letters dating from 1807 to 1820 that have come to light since Leslie A. Marchand began this project ten years ago.

In the letters from Greece a new set of correspondents appears, and a new tone is apparent. Although occasionally playful, Byron is preoccupied with the revolution and his efforts to unite the Greeks in a common cause despite their discord. His chief correspondents are his business agents in the islands and his banker friend in Genoa, Charles Barry, to whom he writes frank accounts of daily affairs. His letters to Hobhouse and to John Bowring attempt to give a realistic picture of the Greek struggle. To Teresa Guiccioli he writes only short, dutiful postscripts in English to the longer letters addressed to her brother.

Among the additional letters that became available too late to take their chronological place in the earlier volumes are those discovered in 1976, locked in a trunk at Barclays Bank; all but one of these fourteen letters were written to Scrope Davies, Byron’s witty friend and drinking companion.

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Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents
A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders' Typika and Testaments
John Philip Thomas
Harvard University Press, 2000
The nature of the typkia, discussed by John Thomas in the introduction, was one of flexible and personal documents, which differed considerably in form, length, and content. Not all of them were foundation documents in the strict sense, since they could be issued at any time in the history of an institution. Some were wills; others were reform decrees and rules; yet others were primarily liturgical in character.
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Byzantium
Church, Society, and Civilization Seen through Contemporary Eyes
Deno John Geanakoplos
University of Chicago Press, 1984
Deno John Geanakoplos here offers a prodigious collection of source materials on the Byzantine church, society, and civilization (many translated for the first time into English), arranged chronologically and topically, and knit together with an analytical historical commentary. His selections from Byzantine writers as well as from more obscure documents and chronicles in Latin, Arabic, Slavic, Italian, Armenian, and French reflect all the diversity of Byzantine life—the military tactics of the long-invincible cataphract cavalry and the warships armed with Greek fire, the mysticism of Hesychast monks, the duties of imperial officers, the activities of daily life from the Hippodrome and Hagia Sophia to the marketplaces, baths, and brothels. Geanakoplos not only covers the traditional areas of political, ecclesiastical, socioeconomic, administrative, and military life, but also provides a vivid picture of Byzantine culture—education, philosophy, literature, theology, medicine, and science. Of particular interest are the insights into the empire's relations with the Latin West, the Slavs, the Arabs, the Turks, and other neighboring peoples.

Byzantium is much more than a sourcebook. The running commentary reflects the most recent scholarly research in Byzantine studies and places each translated source in its precise historical context. Through the use of both primary sources and commentary, Geanakoplos has represented in all its richness and complexity one of the world's great civilizations. There is no comparable book on Byzantine history and civilization in any language.
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