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Between 1964 and 1974 Tanzania came to be regarded as a model nation and a leading frontline state in the struggle for African liberation on the continent and beyond. During this time, a number of African American and Caribbean nationalists, leftists, and pan-Africanists traveled to and settled in Tanzania to join the country that many believed to be leading Africa’s liberation struggle. This historical study examines the political landscape of that crucial moment when African American, Caribbean, and Tanzanian histories overlapped, shedding light on the challenges of creating a new nation and the nature of African American and Caribbean participation in Tanzania’s nationalist project. In examining the pragmatic partnerships and exchanges between socialist Tanzania and activists and organizations associated with the Black Power movements in the United States and the Caribbean, this study argues that the Tanzanian one-party government actively engaged with the diaspora and sought to utilize its political, cultural, labor, and intellectual capital to further its national building agenda, but on its own terms, creating tension within the pan-Africanism movement. An excellent resource for academics and nonacademics alike, this work is the first of its kind, revealing the significance of the radical political and social movements of Tanzania and what it means for us today.

The series, established by one of the twentieth-century West's most distinguished historians, Leonard Arrington, has become a leading forum for prominent historians to address topics related to Mormon history. The first lecturer was Arrington himself. He was followed by Richard Lyman Bushman, Richard E. Bennett, Howard R. Lamar, Claudia L. Bushman, Kenneth W. Godfrey, Jan Shipps, Donald Worster, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and F. Ross Peterson. Utah State University hosts the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series. The University Libraries' Special Collections and Archives houses the Arrington collection. The state's land grant university began collecting records very early, and in the 1960s became a major depository for Utah and Mormon records. Leonard and his wife Grace joined the USU faculty and family in 1946, and the Arringtons and their colleagues worked to collect original diaries, journals, letters, and photographs.

Although trained as an economist at the University of North Carolina, Arrington became a Mormon historian of international repute. Working with numerous colleagues, the Twin Falls, Idaho, native produced the classic Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints in 1958. Utilizing available collections at USU, Arrington embarked on a prolific publishing and editing career. He and his close ally, Dr. S. George Ellsworth helped organize the Western History Association, and they created the Western Historical Quarterly as the scholarly voice of the WHA. While serving with Ellsworth as editor of the new journal, Arr ington also helped both the Mormon History Association and the independent journal Dialogue get established.

How a grassroots movement led primarily by women shaped Alabama’s environmental consciousness.

A Movement of the People: The Roots of Environmental Education and Advocacy in Alabama is a detailed history of the Alabama Environmental Quality Association (AEQA). The AEQA helped to establish groundbreaking environmental protection and natural resource preservation policies for the state and the region and grew into one of the nation’s most progressive environmental education efforts.

The AEQA began in 1966 with the relatively simple political action agenda of cleaning up unsightly and unsanitary roadside trash. These inspired citizens collaborated with civic leaders to identify and remove illegal rural dumps and create more regulated landfills statewide. Eventually they became involved in the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign and with the US Public Health Service in its attempt to rid the state of the yellow-fever mosquito vector, Aedes aegypti, which breeds in standing, fetid water. The acme of these early efforts was the passage of Alabama’s Solid Waste Disposal Law of 1969, one of the nation’s first such bills.

The AEQA’s dedicated staff and supporters spearheaded other environmental projects, many of which remain active today, such as recycling programs with industry giants throughout the Southeast and the founding of the Bartram Trail Conference, a multistate initiative to identify and preserve the path that Quaker botanist William Bartram took through the territory before its formation into states.

Using recorded interviews with Martha McInnis, executive vice president of the AEQA, and full access to a meticulously preserved archive of the organization’s papers and artifacts, Katie Lamar Jackson relates this previously untold story of remarkable “citizen activism.” A Movementof the People is a valuable account of the organization’s growth and advancement, both economically and societally, which serves as a blueprint for successful civic activism and grassroots organizing.

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling “the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,” as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic.
    In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said’s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it.
    This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms.
    This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes.  The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms.


Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Preacher, teacher, and postmistress, Charlotte Levy Riley was born into slavery but became a popular evangelist after emancipation. Although several nineteenth-century accounts by black preaching women in the northern states are known, this is the first discovery of such a memoir in the South.
            Born in 1839 in Charleston, South Carolina, Riley was taught to read, write, and sew despite laws forbidding black literacy. Raised a Presbyterian, she writes of her conversion at age fourteen to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, embracing its ecstatic worship and led by her own spiritual visions. Her memoir is revelatory on many counts, including life in urban Charleston before and after emancipation, her work as a preacher at multiracial revivals, the rise of African American civil servants in the Reconstruction era, and her education and development as a licensed female minister in a patriarchal church.
            Crystal J. Lucky, who discovered Riley’s forgotten book in the library archives at Wilberforce University in Ohio, provides an introduction and notes on events, society, and religious practice in the antebellum era and during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and places A Mysterious Life and Calling in the context of other spiritual autobiographies and slave narratives.

Each of us has a narrative compass, a story that has guided our lifework. In this extraordinary collection, women scholars from a variety of disciplines identify and examine the stories that have inspired them, haunted them, and shaped their research, from Little House on the Prairie to Little Women, from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Nancy Drew, Mary Jane, and even the Chinese memoir Jottings from the Transcendant's Abode at Mt. Youtai. Telling the "story of her story" leads each of the essayists to insights about her own approach to studying narratives and to a deeper, often surprising, understanding of the power of imagination.

Contributors are Deyonne Bryant, Minjie Chen, Cindy L. Christiansen, Beverly Lyon Clark, Karen Coats, Wendy Doniger, Bonnie Glass-Coffin, Betsy Hearne, Joanna Hearne, Ann Hendricks, Rania Huntington, Christine Jenkins, Kimberly Lau, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Maria Tatar, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Roberta Seelinger Trites, Claudia Quintero Ulloa, and Ofelia Zepeda.
 

The transformation from an undifferentiated public to a surfeit of interest groups has become yet another distinguishing feature of the increasing polarization of American politics. Jill Edy and Patrick Meirick contend that the media has played a key role in this splintering. A Nation Fragmented reveals how the content and character of the public agenda has transformed as the media environment evolved from network television and daily newspapers in the late 1960s to today’s saturated social media world with 200 cable channels.

The authors seek to understand what happened as the public’s sense of shared priorities deteriorated. They consider to what extent our public agenda has “fallen apart” as attention to news has declined, and to what extent we have been “driven apart” by changes in the issue agendas of news. Edy and Meirick also show how public attention is limited and spread too thin except in cases where a highly consistent news agenda can provoke a more focused public agenda. 

A Nation Fragmented explores the media’s influence and political power and, ultimately, how contemporary democracy works.

A Nation Rising chronicles the political struggles and grassroots initiatives collectively known as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Scholars, community organizers, journalists, and filmmakers contribute essays that explore Native Hawaiian resistance and resurgence from the 1970s to the early 2010s. Photographs and vignettes about particular activists further bring Hawaiian social movements to life. The stories and analyses of efforts to protect land and natural resources, resist community dispossession, and advance claims for sovereignty and self-determination reveal the diverse objectives and strategies, as well as the inevitable tensions, of the broad-tent sovereignty movement. The collection explores the Hawaiian political ethic of ea, which both includes and exceeds dominant notions of state-based sovereignty. A Nation Rising raises issues that resonate far beyond the Hawaiian archipelago, issues such as Indigenous cultural revitalization, environmental justice, and demilitarization.

Contributors. Noa Emmett Aluli, Ibrahim G. Aoudé, Kekuni Blaisdell, Joan Conrow, Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, Edward W. Greevy, Ulla Hasager, Pauahi Ho'okano, Micky Huihui, Ikaika Hussey, Manu Ka‘iama, Le‘a Malia Kanehe, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Anne Keala Kelly, Jacqueline Lasky, Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor, Nalani Minton, Kalamaoka'aina Niheu, Katrina-Ann R. Kapa'anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira, Jonathan Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio, Leon No'eau Peralto, Kekailoa Perry, Puhipau, Noenoe K. Silva, D. Kapua‘ala Sproat, Ty P. Kawika Tengan, Mehana Blaich Vaughan, Kuhio Vogeler, Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright

The Only Time America Was Free of Debt—and How It Led to the Two-Party Political System
“An engaging treatment of a topic of perennial concern and frequent misunderstanding, this lucid tale of the brief moment when the United States was debt-free should be on every Congress member’s bedside table.”—Peter J.Woolley, Professor of Comparative Politics, Fairleigh Dickinson University
When President James Monroe announced in his 1824 message to Congress that, barring an emergency, the large public debt inherited from the War for Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, and the War of 1812 would be extinguished on January 1, 1835, Congress responded by crafting legislation to transform that prediction into reality. Yet John Quincy Adams,Monroe’s successor, seemed not to share the commitment to debt freedom, resulting in the rise of opposition to his administration and his defeat for reelection in the bitter presidential campaign of 1828. The new president, Andrew Jackson, was thoroughly committed to debt freedom, and when it was achieved, it became the only time in American history when the country carried no national debt. In A Nation Wholly Free: The Elimination of the National Debt in the Age of Jackson, award-winning economic historian Carl Lane shows that the great and disparate issues that confronted Jackson, such as internal improvements, the “war” against the Second Bank of the United States, and the crisis surrounding South Carolina’s refusal to pay federal tariffs, become unified when debt freedom is understood as a core element of Jacksonian Democracy.
The era of debt freedom lasted only two years and ten months. As the government accumulated a surplus, a fully developed opposition party emerged—the beginning of our familiar two-party system—over rancor about how to allocate the newfound money. Not only did government move into an oppositional party system at this time, the debate about the size and role of government distinguished the parties in a pattern that has become familiar to Americans. The partisan debate over national debt and expenditures led to poorly thought out legislation, forcing the government to resume borrowing. As a result, after Jackson left office in 1837, the country fell into a major depression. Today we confront a debt that exceeds $17 trillion. Indeed, we have been borrowing ever since that brief time we freed ourselves from an oversized debt. A thoughtful, engaging account with strong relevance to today, A Nation Wholly Free is the fascinating story of an achievement that now seems fanciful.

"National Book Award-winning author and historian Martin E. Marty's A Nation of Behavers is a characteristically perceptive new map of American religion. . . . Marty's years of astute observation of America's religious trends and developments have yielded six informal but clearly defined clusters around which people attempt to find not only basic group identity but also some kind of power. Anyone concerned about belief and its manifestations will be immensely aided by Marty's cogent comments on recent religious happenings."—Commonweal

"This is a book for everyone, more than for the scholar of American religion. . . . Its value is in breadth of vision and new interpretation."—Dean R. Hoge, Theology Today

"As a means of making sense out of the potpourri of competing groups that compose religious America today, A Nation of Behavers is a first-rate tool."—Edward A. Fiske, New York Times

Despite the pundits who have written its epitaph and the latter-day refugees who have fled its confines for the half-acre suburban estate, the city neighborhood has endured as an idea central to American culture. In A Nation of Neighborhoods, Benjamin Looker presents us with the city neighborhood as both an endless problem and a possibility.

Looker investigates the cultural, social, and political complexities of the idea of “neighborhood” in postwar America and how Americans grappled with vast changes in their urban spaces from World War II to the Reagan era. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the city neighborhood’s significance and purpose became proxies for broader debates over the meaning and limits of American democracy. By studying the way these contests unfolded across a startling variety of genres—Broadway shows, radio plays, urban ethnographies, real estate documents, and even children’s programming—Looker shows that the neighborhood ideal has functioned as a central symbolic site for advancing and debating theories about American national identity and democratic practice.

How is it that in the twentieth century virtually all Americans came to think of themselves as “middle class”? In this cultural history of real estate brokerage, Jeffrey M. Hornstein argues that the rise of the Realtors as dealers in both domestic space and the ideology of home ownership provides tremendous insight into this critical question. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a group of prominent real estate brokers attempted to transform their occupation into a profession. Drawing on traditional notions of the learned professions, they developed a new identity—the professional entrepreneur—and a brand name, “Realtor.” The Realtors worked doggedly to make home ownership a central element of what became known as the “American dream.” Hornstein analyzes the internal evolution of the occupation, particularly the gender dynamics culminating in the rise of women brokers to predominance after the Second World War. At the same time, he examines the ways organized real estate brokers influenced American housing policy throughout the century.

Hornstein draws on trade journals, government documents on housing policy, material from the archives of the National Association of Realtors and local real estate boards, demographic data, and fictional accounts of real estate agents. He chronicles the early efforts of real estate brokers to establish their profession by creating local and national boards, business practices, ethical codes, and educational programs and by working to influence laws from local zoning ordinances to national housing policy. A rich and original work of American history, A Nation of Realtors® illuminates class, gender, and business through a look at the development of a profession and its enormously successful effort to make the owner-occupied, single-family home a key element of twentieth-century American identity.
 

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an extraordinary achievement of law, politics, and human rights. On October 11, 2013, a diverse group of civil rights scholars met at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor to assess the interpretation, development, and administration of civil rights law in the five decades since President Johnson signed the Act. This volume comprises edited versions of the papers that these scholars presented, enriched by lively discussions at and after the conference, and it contributes to the continuing debates regarding the civil rights project in the United States and the world.

An innovative investigation of the entangled histories of race, transnational adoption, and post-Nazi Germany.

In a moving blend of family history and cutting-edge scholarship, Tracey Owens Patton’s A Nation’s Undesirables synthesizes work in rhetorical postmemory studies, critical adoption studies, Afrofuturism, and more to tell the story of her mother and aunt, Lore and Lilli. Two of thousands of children born to white German women and Black American men after World War II, the twins moved to the United States at age seven, where their mother renounced her parental rights and put them into the adoption system. They did not see her again for fifty-two years.

Patton takes up the twins’ story and their reckoning with their mixed-race, Black German identity to disrupt standard narratives around World War II, Black experiences in Germany, and race and adoption. Combining family interviews, historical artifacts, and autoethnographic reflection, Patton composes a new narrative of women and Black German children in the postwar era. In examining the systemic racism of Germany’s efforts to move children like Lore and Lilli out of the country—and the suppression of German women’s bodily autonomy—Patton amplifies the once unacknowledged identities of these Black German children to broaden our understanding of citizenship, racism, and sexism after World War II.

A Natural History of the Intermountain West was written to inform people about the wild world around us, with the idea that we all crave a connection to the natural world to ground us and give us a sense of place. It is also a book about change. While species are described throughout the chapters, the text is focused more on the profound processes that have shaped western ecosystems, based on a belief that understanding those processes is more meaningful than a list of names. The ways and the rapidity with which enormous ecosystems replace one another and sometimes even return as climates change are a magnificent testament to the tenacity of life.

The first book of its kind for this region, A Natural History of the Intermountain West takes a fresh look at the natural history of the southern Rockies and the Intermountain Region based on cutting-edge research, interviews with numerous scientists, and the author’s personal experience. Drawing together many disparate fields, the book integrates the evolution of western ecosystems with the geological and climatic history of the region. It is a passionate, humanistic, and scientific treatment of this area’s ecosystems, how they function, and how they came to be through time; it is a wonderful guide for the general public and scientists alike.

The Mojave Desert has a rich natural history. Despite being sandwiched between the larger Great Basin and Sonoran Deserts, it has enough mountains, valleys, canyons, and playas for any eager explorer. Ancient and current waterways carve the bajadas and valley bottoms. This diverse topography gives rise to a multitude of habitats for plants and animals, many of which are found nowhere else in the world.

A Natural History of the Mojave Desert explores how a combination of complex geology, varied geography, and changing climate has given rise to intriguing flora and fauna—including almost 3,000 plant species and about 380 terrestrial vertebrate animal species. Of these, one quarter of the plants and one sixth of the animals are endemic.

The authors, who, combined, have spent more than six decades living in and observing the Mojave Desert, offer a scientifically insightful and personally observed understanding of the desert. They invite readers to understand how the Mojave Desert looks, sounds, feels, tastes, and smells. They prompt us to understand how humans have lived in this desert where scant vegetation and water have challenged humans, past and present.

A Natural History of the Mojave Desert provides a lively and informed guide to understanding how life has adapted to the hidden riverbeds, huge salt flats, tiny wetlands, and windswept hills that characterize this iconic desert.

By most accounts Pete Likins has had a successful life. But his personal accomplishments are only the backdrop for the real story—the story of his family, whose trials and triumphs hold lessons for many American families in the 21st century.

This poignant but ultimately empowering memoir tells the story of Peter Likins, his wife Patricia, and the six children they adopted in the 1960s, building a family beset by challenges that ultimately strengthened all bonds. With issues such as inter-racial adoption, mental illness, drug addiction, unwed pregnancy, and homosexuality entwined in their lives, the Likins’ tale isn’t just a family memoir—it’s a story of the American experience, a memoir with a message. With circumstances of race, age, and health making all of their children virtually unadoptable by 1960s standards, Pat and Pete never strayed from the belief that loyalty and love could build a strong family.

Both Pete and Pat have served as teachers. and Pete’s long academic career—holding positions as a professor, dean, provost, and then president—illuminates more than just his personal success. Pete’s professional attainments produce a context for his family story, wherein high achievements in educational, athletic, and financial terms coexist with the joys and sorrows of this exceptional family.

A frank, open account of the difficulties his family faced, this is a brave story, told with unflinching honesty and remarkable compassion. A New American Family is a wonderful narrative of the genesis of a family and a journey to the deepest parts of a father’s heart.

A New Architecture for the U.S. National Accounts brings together a distinguished group of contributors to initiate the development of a comprehensive and fully integrated set of United States national accounts. The purpose of the new architecture is not only to integrate the existing systems of accounts, but also to identify gaps and inconsistencies and expand and incorporate systems of nonmarket accounts with the core system. 

Since the United States economy accounts for almost thirty percent of the world economy, it is not surprising that accounting for this huge and diverse set of economic activities requires a decentralized statistical system. This volume outlines the major assignments among institutions that include the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Labor, the Census Bureau, and the Governors of the Federal Reserve System. 

An important part of the motivation for the new architecture is to integrate the different components and make them consistent. This volume is the first step toward achieving that goal.

Charles Coolidge Parlin was considered by many to be the founder of market research. Working for the dominant Curtis Publishing Company, he revolutionized the industry by providing added value to advertisers through information about the racial, ethnic, and regional biases of readers and consumers. By maintaining contact with both businesses and customers, Parlin and Curtis publications were able to turn consumer wants into corporate profits.

In A New Brand of Business, Douglas Ward provides an intriguing business history that explains how and why Curtis developed its market research division. He reveals the evolution and impact of Parlin’s work, which understood how readers and advertisers in the emerging consumer economy looked at magazines and advertisements. Ward also examines the cultural and social reasons for the development and use of market research—particularly in regard to Curtis' readership of upper-income elites. The result weaves the stories of Parlin and Curtis into the changes taking place in American business and advertising in the early twentieth century.

In A New Deal for All? Andor Skotnes examines the interrelationships between the Black freedom movement and the workers' movement in Baltimore and Maryland during the Great Depression and the early years of the Second World War. Adding to the growing body of scholarship on the long civil rights struggle, he argues that such "border state" movements helped resuscitate and transform the national freedom and labor struggles. In the wake of the Great Crash of 1929, the freedom and workers' movements had to rebuild themselves, often in new forms. In the early 1930s, deepening commitments to antiracism led Communists and Socialists in Baltimore to launch racially integrated initiatives for workers' rights, the unemployed, and social justice. An organization of radicalized African American youth, the City-Wide Young People's Forum, emerged in the Black community and became involved in mass educational, anti-lynching, and Buy Where You Can Work campaigns, often in multiracial alliances with other progressives. During the later 1930s, the movements of Baltimore merged into new and renewed national organizations, especially the CIO and the NAACP, and built mass regional struggles. While this collaboration declined after the war, Skotnes shows that the earlier cooperative efforts greatly shaped national freedom campaigns to come—including the civil rights movement.

Illinois State Historical Society Certificate of Excellence 2016

During the Great Migration of the 1920s and 1930s, southern African Americans flocked to the South Side Chicago community of Bronzeville, the cultural, political, social, and economic hub of African American life in the city, if not the Midwest. The area soon became the epicenter of community activism as working-class African Americans struggled for equality in housing and employment. In this study, Lionel Kimble Jr. demonstrates how these struggles led to much of the civil rights activism that occurred from 1935 to 1955 in Chicago and shows how this working-class activism and culture helped to ground the early civil rights movement. Despite the obstacles posed by the Depression, blue-collar African Americans worked with leftist organizations to counter job discrimination and made strong appeals to New Deal allies for access to public housing. Kimble details how growing federal intervention in local issues during World War II helped African Americans make significant inroads into Chicago’s war economy and how returning African American World War II veterans helped to continue the fight against discrimination in housing and employment after the war. The activism that appeared in Bronzeville was not simply motivated by the “class consciousness” rhetoric of the organized labor movement but instead grew out of everyday struggles for racial justice, citizenship rights, and improved economic and material conditions. With its focus on the role of working-class African Americans—as opposed to the middle-class leaders who have received the most attention from civil rights historians in the past—A New Deal for Bronzeville makes a significant contribution to the study of civil rights work in the Windy City and enriches our understanding of African American life in mid-twentieth-century Chicago. 

This publication is partially funded by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan fund.

As the Great Depression touched every corner of America, the New Deal promoted indigenous arts and crafts as a means of bootstrapping Native American peoples. But New Deal administrators' romanticization of indigenous artists predisposed them to favor pre-industrial forms rather than art that responded to contemporary markets.

In A New Deal for Native Art, Jennifer McLerran reveals how positioning the native artist as a pre-modern Other served the goals of New Deal programs—and how this sometimes worked at cross-purposes with promoting native self-sufficiency. She describes federal policies of the 1930s and early 1940s that sought to generate an upscale market for Native American arts and crafts. And by unraveling the complex ways in which commodification was negotiated and the roles that producers, consumers, and New Deal administrators played in that process, she sheds new light on native art’s commodity status and the artist’s position as colonial subject.

In this first book to address the ways in which New Deal Indian policy specifically advanced commodification and colonization, McLerran reviews its multi-pronged effort to improve the market for Indian art through the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, arts and crafts cooperatives, murals, museum exhibits, and Civilian Conservation Corps projects. Presenting nationwide case studies that demonstrate transcultural dynamics of production and reception, she argues for viewing Indian art as a commodity, as part of the national economy, and as part of national political trends and reform efforts.

McLerran marks the contributions of key individuals, from John Collier and Rene d’Harnoncourt to Navajo artist Gerald Nailor, whose mural in the Navajo Nation Council House conveyed distinctly different messages to outsiders and tribal members. Featuring dozens of illustrations, A New Deal for Native Art offers a new look at the complexities of folk art “revivals” as it opens a new window on the Indian New Deal.

Recipient of the 1994 Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize

This comprehensive study provides a history of New Deal archaeology in the Southeast in the 1930s and early 1940s and focuses on the projects of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the National Park Service, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Utilizing primary sources including correspondence and unpublished reports, Lyon demonstrates the great importance of the New Deal projects in the history of southeastern and North American archaeology. New Deal archaeology transformed the practice of archaeology in the Southeast and created the basis for the discipline that exists today. With the current emphasis on curation and repatriation, archaeologists and historians will find this volume invaluable in reconstructing the history of the projects that generated the many collections that now fill our museums.

 

Many in higher education fear that the humanities are facing a crisis. But even if the rhetoric about “crisis” is overblown, humanities departments do face increasing pressure from administrators, politicians, parents, and students. In A New Deal for the Humanities, Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed bring together twelve prominent scholars who address the history, the present state, and the future direction of the humanities. These scholars keep the focus on public higher education, for it is in our state schools that the liberal arts are taught to the greatest numbers and where their neglect would be most damaging for the nation.
 
The contributors offer spirited and thought-provoking debates on a diverse range of topics. For instance, they deplore the push by administrations to narrow learning into quantifiable outcomes as well as the demands of state governments for more practical, usable training. Indeed, for those who suggest that a college education should be “practical”—that it should lean toward the sciences and engineering, where the high-paying jobs are—this book points out that while a few nations produce as many technicians as the United States does, America is still renowned worldwide for its innovation and creativity, skills taught most effectively in the humanities. Most importantly, the essays in this collection examine ways to make the humanities even more effective, such as offering a broader array of options than the traditional major/minor scheme, options that combine a student’s professional and intellectual interests, like the new medical humanities programs.
 
A democracy can only be as energetic as the minds of its citizens, and the questions fundamental to the humanities are also fundamental to a thoughtful life. A New Deal for the Humanities takes an intrepid step in making the humanities—and our citizens—even stronger in the future.

Sparked by Archibald MacLeish's assertion that "there always was a relationship between poet and place," Field and his co-editors offer an updated look at the contemporary poetry scene in A New Geography of Poets.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was just one of several new insurgent movements for democracy and social justice during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it must be understood in the context of other causes and organizations—in the United States and abroad—that inspired its founding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. In A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times, a diverse group of more than forty scholars and activists take a transnational approach in order to explore the different—though often interconnected—campaigns that mobilized people along varied racial, ethnic, gender, and regional dimensions from the birth of the New Left in the civil rights and pacifist agitation of the 1950s to the Occupy movements of today.
 
This volume features three never-before-published “manifesto drafts” written by Tom Hayden in early 1962 that generated the discussion leading to the Port Huron meeting. Other highlights include recollections from leading women in the Port Huron deliberations who, three years later, protested the subordination of women within the radical movements, thus setting the stage for the rise of women’s liberation. A New Insurgency is based on the University of Michigan’s conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement in 2012.
 
“The fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement has drawn a great number of reflections and commemorations, but this carefully conceived volume offers an account of unrivaled ambition, exceptional breadth, and surprising insight. It both excavates the event itself—vividly, perceptively, exhaustively—and gives it the largest and most illuminating of contexts. A New Insurgency is as close to definitive as any volume of this kind can become.”
—Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History, University of Michigan

This anthology contains seventeen essays covering eighteenth-century agrarian unrest, the Revolutionary War, politics in the Jackson era, feminism and the women's movements, slavery from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, strikes and labor struggles, land use and regional planning issues, Blacks in Newark, the current political state of New Jersey, and more. The contributors are Michal R. Belknap, Lynn W. Dorsett, Gregory Evans Dowd, Charles E. Funnell, Steve Golin, Maxine N. Lurie, Richard P. McCormick, Gary Mitchell, Simeon F. Moss, Marie Marmo Mullaney, Mary R. Murrin, Gerald M. Pomper, Clement A. Price, Thomas L. Purvis, Daniel Schaffer, Warren E. Stickle III, Maurice Tandler.

An examination of Italian immigrants and their children in the early twentieth century, A New Language, A New World is the first full-length historical case study of one immigrant group's experience with language in America. Incorporating the interdisciplinary literature on language within a historical framework, Nancy C. Carnevale illustrates the complexity of the topic of language in American immigrant life. By looking at language from the perspectives of both immigrants and the dominant culture as well as their interaction, this book reveals the role of language in the formation of ethnic identity and the often coercive context within which immigrants must negotiate this process.

In A New Type of Womanhood, Natasha Kirsten Kraus retells the history of the 1850s woman’s rights movement. She traces how the movement changed society’s very conception of “womanhood” in its successful bid for economic rights and rights of contract for married women. Kraus demonstrates that this discursive change was a necessary condition of possibility for U.S. women to be popularly conceived as civil subjects within a Western democracy, and she shows that many rights, including suffrage, followed from the basic right to form legal contracts. She analyzes this new conception of women as legitimate economic actors in relation to antebellum economic and demographic changes as well as changes in the legal structure and social meanings of contract.

Enabling Kraus’s retelling of the 1850s woman’s rights movement is her theory of “structural aporias,” which takes the institutional structures of any particular society as fully imbricated with the force of language. Kraus reads the antebellum relations of womanhood, contract, property, the economy, and the nation as a fruitful site for analysis of the interconnected power of language, culture, and the law. She combines poststructural theory, particularly deconstructive approaches to discourse analysis; the political economic history of the antebellum era; and the interpretation of archival documents, including woman’s rights speeches, petitions, pamphlets, and convention proceedings, as well as state legislative debates, reports, and constitutional convention proceedings. Arguing that her method provides critical insight not only into social movements and cultural changes of the past but also of the present and future, Kraus concludes A New Type of Womanhood by considering the implications of her theory for contemporary feminist and queer politics.

Winner of the 2023 Southern Jewish Historical Society Book Award

Essays from a prolific career that challenge and overturn traditional narratives of southern Jewish history
 
Mark K. Bauman, one of the foremost scholars of southern Jewish history working today, has spent much of his career, as he puts it, “rewriting southern Jewish history” in ways that its earliest historians could not have envisioned or anticipated, and doing so by specifically  targeting themes and trends that might not have been readily  apparent to those scholars. A New Vision of Southern Jewish History: Studies in Institution Building, Leadership, Interaction, and Mobility features essays collected from over a forty-year career, including a never-before-published article.

The prevailing narrative in southern Jewish history tends to emphasize the role of immigrant Jews as merchants in small southern towns and their subsequent struggles and successes in making a place for themselves in the fabric of those communities. Bauman offers assessments that go far beyond these simplified frameworks and draws upon varieties of subject matter, time periods, locations, tools, and perspectives over three decades of writing and scholarship.

A New Vision of Southern Jewish History contains Bauman’s studies of Jewish urbanization, acculturation and migration, intra- and inter-group relations, economics and business, government, civic affairs, transnational diplomacy, social services, and gender—all complicating traditional notions of southern Jewish identity. Drawing on role theory as informed by sociology, psychology, demographics, and the nature and dynamics of leadership, Bauman traverses a broad swath—often urban—of the southern landscape, from Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore through Atlanta, New Orleans, Galveston, and beyond the country to Europe and Israel.

Bauman’s retrospective volume gives readers the opportunity to review a lifetime of work in a single publication as well as peruse newly penned introductions to his essays. The book also features an “Additional Readings” section designed to update the historiography in the essays.
 

How did tourism gain a central role in the postwar American Rustbelt city? And how did tourism development reshape the meaning and function of these cities? These are the questions at the heart of Aaron Cowan’s groundbreaking book, A Nice Place to Visit. 

Cowan provides an insightful, comparative look at the historical development of Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore in the post–World War II period to show how urban tourism provided a potential solution to the economic woes of deindustrialization. A Nice Place to Visit chronicles the visions of urban leaders who planned hotels, convention centers, stadiums, and festival marketplaces to remake these cities as tourist destinations. Cowan also addresses the ever-present tensions between tourist development and the needs and demands of residents in urban communities.

A Nice Place to Visit charts how these Rustbelt cities adapted to urban decline and struggled to meet the challenge of becoming an appealing place to visit, as well as good and just communities in which to live.

In 1828 Edward Mitchell was the first student of African descent to graduate from Dartmouth College, more than thirty-five years before any other Ivy League school admitted a black student. This book tells Mitchell’s life story with the help of a recently rediscovered trove of his college essays, notes on his religious conversion, and hand-copied versions of his sermons. Born and raised in the French slave colony of Martinique, Mitchell immigrated to the United States and came of age in Philadelphia, where he broke bread with the city’s African American clerics and civic leaders. The Dartmouth trustees initially denied Mitchell admission but yielded to unified student protest. After his graduation, Mitchell continued his northward journey to serve as a Baptist preacher and evangelist in the pulpits of northern New England. His religious odyssey concluded in Lower Canada, where he was remembered as “the most profound theologian ever settled.” During his travels throughout the Atlantic world in an age of revolution and religious revival, Mitchell encountered the dominant social, economic, and political realities of his time. Although long celebrated as the inspiration for Dartmouth’s legacy of educating men and women of African ancestry, Mitchell’s life story remained unknown for almost two centuries. This book, which embodies history as recovery, is a testament to the authors’ desire to know the man behind the story.

A North Country Almanac: Reflections of an Old-School Conservationist in a Modern World includes the musings of an independent mind on wilderness, the conservation ethic, and the joys of loving the outdoors. Although a lifelong conservationist, Thomas C. Bailey has never unquestioningly accepted environmental dogma. The essays here often challenge familiar assumptions about stewardship of natural resources. The former National Park ranger, fishing guide, and conservancy director offers a rich variety of perspectives on an interesting array of topics, returning always to his fundamental belief that conservation pioneers such as John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Aldo Leopold had it right when they affirmed Walt Whitman’s observation that “the secret of making the best person . . . is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.”

When Henry Hudson explored the Delaware River in 1609, he dubbed it “one of the finest, best, and pleasantest rivers in the world.” Today, those same qualities make the Delaware one of the most popular rivers for recreational use in the United States. Although in places a near-wilderness, the Delaware is easily accessible to millions of residents. On any summer day there may be thousands of people rushing down its exciting rapids or lazing through its serene eddies.

A Paddler’s Guide to the Delaware River is an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to experience the Delaware River in a kayak, canoe, raft, or tube—or, for that matter, an automobile or an armchair. Reading the book is like travelling down the river with an experienced guide. It charts the non-tidal Delaware 200 miles from Hancock, New York, to Trenton, New Jersey, describing access points, rapids, natural features, villages, historical sites, campgrounds, outfitters, and restaurants. The Delaware comes alive as the author introduces some of the people, places, events, and  controversies that have marked the river from earliest times to the present day.
Completely revised, the third edition offers:

• An overview of the river including watershed, history, place names, paddlecraft, safety, and fishing.
• The River Guide: ten sections that can each be paddled in one day (about 20 miles), with a mile-by-mile account of rapids, access, natural features, historic sites, and other features.
• All new maps, with names for virtually every rapid, eddy, and other river feature, plus detailed diagrams for routes through even the most severe rapids.
• Features in the River Guide highlight the people, events, natural history, and communities that define the river experience, such as Tom Quick, the infamous “avenger of the Delaware”; the mysterious migration of eels, the battle over Tocks Island Dam; and many others.
• Appendices of Important Contacts, Outfitters and Campgrounds, River Trip Checklists, and more.

Whether you are a novice out for an afternoon float, a seasoned adventurer on an overnight expedition, or a resident fascinated by the lore of the Delaware Valley, this book is an invaluable guide.