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Winner, Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization Of American Historians, 1988
American Historical Association, Pacific Branch Book Award, 1989
Texas Institute of Letters Friends Of The Dallas Public Library Award, 1987
Texas Historical Commission T. R. Fehrenbach Award, Best Ethnic, Minority, And Women's History Publication, 1987

Before the idea of the Anthropocene, there was the angry planet
 

How might we understand an earthquake as a complaint, or erosion as a form of protest—in short, the Earth as an angry planet? Many novels from the end of the millennium did just that, centering around an Earth that acts, moves, shapes human affairs, and creates dramatic, nonanthropogenic change.

In Angry Planet, Anne Stewart uses this literature to develop a theoretical framework for reading with and through planetary motion. Typified by authors like Colson Whitehead, Octavia Butler, and Leslie Marmon Silko, whose work anticipates contemporary critical concepts of entanglement, withdrawal, delinking, and resurgence, angry planet fiction coalesced in the 1990s and delineated the contours of a decolonial ontology. Stewart shows how this fiction brought Black and Indigenous thought into conversation, offering a fresh account of globalization in the 1990s from the perspective of the American Third World, construing it as the era that first made connections among environmental crises and antiracist and decolonial struggles.

By synthesizing these major intersections of thought production in the final decades of the twentieth century, Stewart offers a recent history of dissent to the young movements of the twenty-first century. As she reveals, this knowledge is crucial to incipient struggles of our contemporary era, as our political imaginaries grapple with the major challenges of white nationalism and climate change denial.

A new perspective on the farmworker movement that recenters Texas and activist Antonio Orendain.

Another Road to Justice chronicles an important yet overlooked chapter in US labor history: the farmworker movement in Texas. Eclipsed by the activities of the United Farm Workers in California during the 1960s through ‘80s, Texas organizers were, nonetheless, diligent radicals, deeply engaged in consciousness raising, social reform, and labor action.

In this engrossing account, Timothy Paul Bowman explores the lives and impact of Texas activists, above all Antonio Orendain—a key figure in the struggle of Mexican and Mexican American workers along the international border in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. A formerly undocumented immigrant who became the leading organizer in the region, Orendain went from Cesar Chavez’s righthand man in the UFW to one of his biggest rivals by the middle of the 1970s. Through efforts like the Starr County Strike of 1966–1967 and the 1975 melon strike, Orendain and other workers achieved significant gains. At the same time, tensions between organizers splintered the UFW, leading Orendain to form the Texas Farm Workers Union. Bowman shines light on this history and the often-overlooked activists who earnestly fought to overcome oppression, often at great personal cost.

This book breaks new ground in the history of anthropology, opening up an explicit examination of anthropology in the Cold War era. With historical distance, Cold War anthropology has begun to emerge as a distinct field within the discipline. This book brings a number of different approaches to bear on the questions raised by anthropology's Cold War history.

The contributors show how anthropologists became both tools and victims of the Cold War state during the rise of the United States in the post-War period. Examining the intersection between science and power, this book is a compelling read for anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and anyone interested in the way in which colonial and neo-colonial knowledge is produced and constructed.

Between 1914 and 1918, German anthropologists conducted their work in the midst of full-scale war. The discipline was relatively new in German academia when World War I broke out, and, as Andrew D. Evans reveals in this illuminating book, its development was profoundly altered by the conflict. As the war shaped the institutional, ideological, and physical environment for anthropological work, the discipline turned its back on its liberal roots and became a nationalist endeavor primarily concerned with scientific studies of race.

Combining intellectual and cultural history with the history of science, Anthropology at War examines both the origins and consequences of this shift. Evans locates its roots in the decision to allow scientists access to prisoner-of-war camps, which prompted them to focus their research on racial studies of the captives. Caught up in wartime nationalism, a new generation of anthropologists began to portray the country’s political enemies as racially different. After the war ended, the importance placed on racial conceptions and categories persisted, paving the way for the politicization of scientific inquiry in the years of the ascendancy of National Socialism.

The increasing radicalization of political life in most countries in Europe lends special relevance to studies of the antifascist legacies on the continent. This insightful collection of essays is an in-depth review of antifascism in Slovenia, setting it in the context of related movements elsewhere in Europe. The period treated by the 19 essays comprises the interwar period, World War Two, and the post-war decades. The comparative and transnational perspectives advanced by the volume change our understanding of antifascism.

The essays deal with the right-wing but also left-wing instrumentalization of antifascism, with a particular focus on the communist and post-communist periods. The authors point out that antifascism comes in various strains, whether inspired by liberalism, social democracy, communism, monarchism, anarchism, or even Christian conservatism. The contributors bring to light several overlooked antifascist actors, campaigns, and organisations, mostly in Slovenia and the Adriatic area.

A landmark work of contemporary Russian literature, now in English for the first time

Set in a fictitious town in North Kazakhstan settled by political and ethnic exiles, this panoramic narrative follows the relationship between the titular character Anton, a Moscow historian of the vital “1960s generation,” and his grandfather, Leonid, a titan of physical and intellectual rigor who is now on the verge of death. As Anton contemplates the fading away of that once-powerful vitality, he lets his thoughts plunge deep into the past, presented in a series of fine-grained sketches, scattered reminiscences, and subtly interconnected episodes, back and forth from childhood to present day. The resulting novel is a “Soviet family Robinson”: the history of rugged and free-thinking intellectuals eking out a tolerable, even enviable homestead existence despite the difficulties of the Stalin years. One of the most vibrant works of literary fiction created since the fall of the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Chudakov’s Anton is a testament to humanity's tenacity and tenderness. 

The first in-depth study in English to analyze post-utopian historical novels written during and in the wake of brutal Latin American dictatorships and authoritarian regimes

During neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, murder, repression, and exile had reduced the number of intellectuals and Leftists, and many succumbed to or were coopted by market forces and ideologies. The opposition to the economic violence of neoliberal projects lacked a united front, and feasible alternatives to the contemporary order no longer seemed to exist. In this context, some Latin American literary intellectuals penned post-utopian historical novels as a means to reconstruct memory of significant moments in national history. Through the distortion and superimposition of distinct genres within the narratives, authors of post-utopian historical novels incorporated literary, cultural, and political traditions to expose contemporary challenges that were rooted in unresolved past conflicts.

In Anything but Novel, Jennie Irene Daniels closely examines four post-utopian novels—César Aira’s Ema, la cautiva, Rubem Fonseca’s O Selvagem da Ópera, José Miguel Varas’s El correo de Bagdad, and Santiago Páez’s Crónicas del Breve Reino—to make their contributions more accessible and to synthesize and highlight the literary and social interventions they make. Although the countries the novels focus on (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador) differ widely in politics, regime changes, historical precedents, geography, and demographics, the development of a shared subgenre among the literary elite suggests a common experience and interpretation of contemporary events across Latin America. These novels complement one another, extending shared themes and critiques.

Daniels argues the novels demonstrate that alternatives exist to neoliberalism even in times when it appears there are none. Another contribution of these novels is their repositioning of the Latin American literary intellectuals who have advocated for the marginalized in their societies. Their work has opened new avenues and developed previous lines of research in feminist, queer, and ethnic studies and for nonwhite, nonmale writers.

2021 Finalist Raul Yzaguirre Best Political/Current Affairs Book, International Latino Book Awards

Winner of the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education Inaugural Book Award

Unraveling the intertwined histories of Latino radicalism and religion in urban America, this book examines how Latino activists transformed churches into staging grounds for protest against urban renewal and displacement.

In the late 1960s, the American city found itself in steep decline. An urban crisis fueled by federal policy wreaked destruction and displacement on poor and working-class families. The urban drama included religious institutions, themselves undergoing fundamental change, that debated whether to stay in the city or move to the suburbs. Against the backdrop of the Black and Brown Power movements, which challenged economic inequality and white supremacy, young Latino radicals began occupying churches and disrupting services to compel church communities to join their protests against urban renewal, poverty, police brutality, and racism.

Apostles of Change tells the story of these occupations and establishes their context within the urban crisis; relates the tensions they created; and articulates the activists' bold, new vision for the church and the world. Through case studies from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston, Felipe Hinojosa reveals how Latino freedom movements frequently crossed boundaries between faith and politics and argues that understanding the history of these radical politics is essential to understanding the dynamic changes in Latino religious groups from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

While the later work of the great Modernist poet Marianne Moore was hugely popular during her final two decades, since her death critics have condemned it as trivial. This book challenges that assessment: with fresh readings of many of the late poems and of the iconic, cross-dressing public persona Moore developed to deliver them, Apparition of Splendor demonstrates that Moore used her late-life celebrity in daring and innovative ways to activate egalitarian principles that had long animated her poetry. Dressed as George Washington in cape and tricorn and writing about accessible topics like sports, TV shows, holidays, love, activism, mortality and celebrity itself, she reached a wide cross-section of Americans, encouraging them to consider what democracy means in their daily lives, particularly around issues of gender, sexuality, racial integration, class, age, and immigration. Moore actively sought out publication in popular venues (like Vogue, The New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening Post, etc.) and wrote on material chosen to directly appeal to the audiences there, influencing younger contemporaries, including poets like Ashbery, O’Hara, and Bishop, and artists like Warhol, Yoko Ono, and Ray Johnson.

The selection of federal judges constitutes one of the more significant legacies of any president; the choices of Lyndon Baines Johnson affected important social policies for decades. This book explores the process of making judicial appointments, examining how judges were selected during Johnson's administration and the president's own participation in the process. Appointment of Judges: The Johnson Presidency is the first in-depth study of the judicial selection process in the Johnson years and is one of the few books that has analyzed any individual president's process.

Based on sources in the archives of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and correspondence from senators, party officials, Justice Department officers, the American Bar Association, Supreme Court justices, and the candidates themselves, the book is an important exploration of a significant aspect of presidential power. The author shows that Johnson recognized the great impact for social and economic policy the judiciary could have in America and sought out judges who shared his vision of the Great Society. More than any previous president since William Howard Taft, Johnson took an active personal role in setting up the criteria for choosing judges and in many cases participated in decisions on individual nominees. The president utilized the resources of the White House, the Department of Justice, other agencies, and private individuals to identify judicial candidates who met criteria of compatible policy perspective, excellent legal qualifications, political or judicial experience, youth, and ethnic diversity. The book notes how the criteria and judicial selection process evolved over time and how it operated during the transitions between Kennedy and Johnson and between Johnson and Nixon.

The first book to present an analysis of Arab response to fascism and Nazism from the perspectives of both individual countries and the Arab world at large, this collection problematizes and ultimately deconstructs the established narratives that assume most Arabs supported fascism and Nazism leading up to and during World War II. Using new source materials taken largely from Arab memoirs, archives, and print media, the articles reexamine Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi responses in the 1930s and throughout the war.

While acknowledging the individuals, forces, and organizations that did support and collaborate with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism focuses on the many other Arab voices that identified with Britain and France and with the Allied cause during the war. The authors argue that many groups within Arab societies—elites and non-elites, governing forces, and civilians—rejected Nazism and fascism as totalitarian, racist, and, most important, as new, more oppressive forms of European imperialism. The essays in this volume argue that, in contrast to prevailing beliefs that Arabs were de facto supporters of Italy and Germany—since “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”—mainstream Arab forces and currents opposed the Axis powers and supported the Allies during the war. They played a significant role in the battles for control over the Middle East.