28164 books match the query 'History' and 1912 start with c

cover of Carolingian Portraits: A Study in the Ninth Century

Carolingian Portraits

A Study in the Ninth Century

Eleanor Shipley Duckett

University of Michigan Press, 1989

Recreates the 9th-century world of Charlemagne through portraits of outstanding figures of the age
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cover of Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City

Carry the Rock

Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City

Jay Jennings

University of Arkansas Press, 2023

In 2007, as the fiftieth anniversary of the fight to integrate Little Rock Central High School approached, veteran sportswriter and native son of Little Rock Jay Jennings returned to his hometown to take the pulse of the city and the school. He found a compelling story in Central High's football team, where Black and white students toiled under longtime coach Bernie Cox, whose philosophy of discipline and responsibility and punishing brand of physical football had led the team to win seven state championships.

Carry the Rock tells the story of the dramatic ups and downs of a high school football season and reveals a city struggling with its legacy of racial discrimination and the complex issues of contemporary segregation. In the season Jennings masterfully chronicles, Cox finds his ideas sorely tested in his attempts to unify the team, and the result is an account brimming with humor, compassion, frustration, and honesty. What Friday Night Lights did for small-town Texas, Carry the Rock does for the urban South and for any place like Little Rock where sports, race, and community intersect.
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cover of Carrying All before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800

Carrying All before Her

Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800

Chelsea Phillips

University of Delaware Press, 2022

The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women (Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan) to demonstrate that pregnancy affected celebrity identity, impacted audience reception and interpretation of performance, changed company repertory and altered company hierarchy, influenced the development and performance of new plays, and had substantial economic consequences for both women and the companies for which they worked. Deepening the fields of celebrity, theatre, and women's studies, as well as social and medical histories, Phillips reveals an untapped history whose relevance and impact persists today.

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cover of Carrying a Secret in My Heart: Children of the Victims of the Reprisals after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 - An Oral History

Carrying a Secret in My Heart

Children of the Victims of the Reprisals after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 - An Oral History

Zsuzsanna Korösi

Central European University Press, 2003

For a decade now, the authors have been conducting interviews for Hungary's Oral History Archives, with the children of those Hungarians - national heroes, as they are generally seen today - who were imprisoned or executed for their involvement in the 1956 revolution. The vast body of material that has been collected, and is now at the disposal of sociologists, psychologists and others in the academic community, forms the basis of this volume. This is a documentation of memories of the revolt and, more particularly, its aftermath. The virtually spontaneous twelve-day uprising exerted a lasting effect on the fates of the families of the more than 20,000 who were imprisoned and 229 executed by the régime in the harsh reprisals that followed the crushing of the revolution (the last of them as late as the early 1960s), with active police surveillance extended to tens of thousands more. This intimidation, and the attendant social and economic devastation that it wrought, bore especially hard on the psyches, upbringing and education, and hence the subsequent opportunities and life courses of the children who grew up within those families. The material is grouped by theme: e.g. the effects on communication within families, changes in social status, how relatives and friends reacted, and what sorts of problems these children encountered in pursuing their studies, in trying to assimilate into society as adults, and in relating to those fathers who did return. In an appendix, the editors present detailed biographies of the people most directly affected, offering an unparalleled glimpse into the fates of those they interviewed. The documentation includes letters that the children wrote to their imprisoned fathers and the farewell letters of the executed to their families.
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cover of Carrying the Colors: The Life and Legacy of Medal of Honor Recipient Andrew Jackson Smith

Carrying the Colors

The Life and Legacy of Medal of Honor Recipient Andrew Jackson Smith

W. Robert Beckman

Westholme Publishing, 2025

An Escaped Slave who Fought for the Union and Whose Wartime Heroism was Finally Recognized with the Nation's Highest Honor for Military Valor

In 1862, Andrew “Andy” Jackson Smith, son of a white landowner and enslaved woman, es­caped to Union troops operating in Kentucky, made his way to the North, and volunteered for the 55th Massachusetts, one of the newly formed African American regiments. The regiment was deployed to South Carolina, and during a desperate assault on a Confederate battery, the color bearer was killed. Before the flag was lost, Smith quickly retrieved it and under heavy fire held the colors steady while the decimated regiment withdrew. The regiment’s commanding officer pro­moted Smith to color sergeant and wrote him a commendation for both saving the regimental flag and bravery under fire. Honorably discharged, Smith returned to Kentucky, where over the course of the next forty years he invested in land. In the early twentieth century, Burt G. Wilder, medical officer of the 55th, contacted Smith about his experiences for a book he was writing. During their correspondence, Wilder realized Smith was eligible for the nation’s highest award. In 1916, Wilder applied to the army, but his request for Smith’s medal was denied due to the “absence of records.” At Smith’s death in 1932, his daughter Caruth received a box of his papers revealing the extent of her father’s heroism. Her nephew took up the cause and through long and painstaking research located the lost records. With the help of historians, local politicians, and others, Andrew Jackson Smith received his long overdue Medal of Honor in 2001.

In Carrying the Colors: The Life and Legacy of Medal of Honor Recipient Andrew Jackson Smith, the riveting journey from slavery to a White House ceremony is revealed, with the indomitable spirit of Smith—slave, soldier, landowner, father—mirrored by the dogged pursuit of his grandson and his allies in the quest to discover the truth about an American who dedicated his life to the service of his community and country.

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cover of Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store

Carson Pirie Scott

Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store

Joseph M. Siry

University of Chicago Press, 1988

Long recognized as a Chicago landmark, the Carson Pirie Scott Building also represents a milestone in the development of architecture. The last large commercial structure designed by Louis Sullivan, the Carson building reflected the culmination of the famed architect's career as a creator of tall steel buildings. In this study, Joseph Siry traces the origins of the building's design and analyzes its role in commercial, urban, and architectural history.
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cover of Carter's Conversion: The Hardening of American Defense Policy

Carter's Conversion

The Hardening of American Defense Policy

Brian J. Auten

University of Missouri Press, 2008

When presidential candidate Jimmy Carter advocated defense budget cuts, he did so not only to save money but also with the hope of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons. Three yearslater, when President Carter announced his support of full-scale development of the MX missile and modernization of NATO’s Long-Range Theater Nuclear Force, it marked a dramatic policy shift for his administration.
In light of Carter’s cost-cutting in the first year of his administration, previous observers have attributed Carter’s subsequent shift either to the “shocks of 1979”—the Soviet Union’s move into Afghanistan and the seizure of power by Islamic revolutionaries in Iran—or to domestic political pressure, such as interest group activity, executive-legislative bargaining, or interbureaucratic conflict. Brian Auten now argues that these explanations only partially explain this midterm policy change.
In Carter’s Conversion, Auten reveals how strategic ideas and studies, allied relations, and arms control negotiations each worked to deflect Carter’s initial defense stance away from the policy path suggested by the prevailing international military environment. He also shows how the administration’s MX and Long-Range Theater Nuclear Force decisions subsequently hardened following significant adjustments to these three variables.
Employing the approach to international relations known as neoclassical realism, Auten demonstrates that Carter reassessed his strategic thinking and revised his policy stance accordingly. Integrating declassified documents, interviews, and private archives with a mountain of secondary sources, he provides a historical analysis of defense policy transformation over the first three years of the Carter administration and a detailed examination of how Carter and his national security team addressed challenges posed by the expansion of Soviet military power.
Full of rich history and cogent analysis, Carter’s Conversion presents a wealth of detailed arguments about how Carter adjusted his policy outlook, couched in a thorough understanding of weapons, arms control dynamics, and defense policy-making. As a revision ofcommon interpretations, it provides both an example of self-correcting policy change and a realist argument about the end of superpower détente and the start of the “Second Cold War.”
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cover of Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking

Cartesian Poetics

The Art of Thinking

Andrea Gadberry

University of Chicago Press, 2020

What is thinking? What does it feel like? What is it good for? Andrea Gadberry looks for answers to these questions in the philosophy of René Descartes and finds them in the philosopher’s implicit poetics. Gadberry argues that Descartes’s thought was crucially enabled by poetry and shows how markers of poetic genres from love lyric and elegy to the puzzling forms of the riddle and the anagram betray an impassioned negotiation with the difficulties of thought and its limits. Where others have seen Cartesian philosophy as a triumph of reason, Gadberry reveals that the philosopher accused of having “slashed poetry’s throat” instead enlisted poetic form to contain thought’s frustrations.

Gadberry’s approach to seventeenth-century writings poses questions urgent for the twenty-first. Bringing literature and philosophy into rich dialogue, Gadberry centers close reading as a method uniquely equipped to manage skepticism, tolerate critical ambivalence, and detect feeling in philosophy. Helping us read classic moments of philosophical argumentation in a new light, this elegant study also expands outward to redefine thinking in light of its poetic formations.
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cover of Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use

Cartographic Encounters

Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use

Edited by G. Malcolm Lewis

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Ever since a Native American prepared a paper "charte" of the lower Colorado River for the Spaniard Hernando de Alarcón in 1540, Native Americans have been making maps in the course of encounters with whites. This book charts the history of these cartographic encounters, examining native maps and mapmaking from the pre- and post-contact periods.

G. Malcolm Lewis provides accessible and detailed overviews of the history of native North American maps, mapmaking, and scholarly interest in these topics. Other contributions include a study of colonial Aztec cartography that highlights the connections among maps, space, and history; an account of the importance of native maps as archaeological evidence; and an interpretation of an early-contact-period hide painting of an actual encounter involving whites and two groups of warring natives.

Although few original native maps have survived, contemporary copies and accounts of mapmaking form a rich resource for anyone interested in the history of Native American encounters or the history of cartography and geography.
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cover of Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe

Cartographic Humanism

The Making of Early Modern Europe

Katharina N. Piechocki

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Piechocki calls for an examination of the idea of Europe as a geographical concept, tracing its development in the 15th and 16th centuries.

What is “Europe,” and when did it come to be? In the Renaissance, the term “Europe” circulated widely. But as Katharina N. Piechocki argues in this compelling book, the continent itself was only in the making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Cartographic Humanism sheds new light on how humanists negotiated and defined Europe’s boundaries at a momentous shift in the continent’s formation: when a new imagining of Europe was driven by the rise of cartography. As Piechocki shows, this tool of geography, philosophy, and philology was used not only to represent but, more importantly, also to shape and promote an image of Europe quite unparalleled in previous centuries. Engaging with poets, historians, and mapmakers, Piechocki resists an easy categorization of the continent, scrutinizing Europe as an unexamined category that demands a much more careful and nuanced investigation than scholars of early modernity have hitherto undertaken. Unprecedented in its geographic scope, Cartographic Humanism is the first book to chart new itineraries across Europe as it brings France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal into a lively, interdisciplinary dialogue.
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cover of Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps

Cartographic Japan

A History in Maps

Edited by Kären Wigen, Sugimoto Fumiko, and Cary Karacas

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Miles of shelf space in contemporary Japanese bookstores and libraries are devoted to travel guides, walking maps, and topical atlases. Young Japanese children are taught how to properly map their classrooms and schoolgrounds. Elderly retirees pore over old castle plans and village cadasters. Pioneering surveyors are featured in popular television shows, and avid collectors covet exquisite scrolls depicting sea and land routes. Today, Japanese people are zealous producers and consumers of cartography, and maps are an integral part of daily life.
 
But this was not always the case: a thousand years ago, maps were solely a privilege of the ruling elite in Japan. Only in the past four hundred years has Japanese cartography truly taken off, and between the dawn of Japan’s cartographic explosion and today, the nation’s society and landscape have undergone major transformations. At every point, maps have documented those monumental changes. Cartographic Japan offers a rich introduction to the resulting treasure trove, with close analysis of one hundred maps from the late 1500s to the present day, each one treated as a distinctive window onto Japan’s tumultuous history.
 
Forty-seven distinguished contributors—hailing from Japan, North America, Europe, and Australia—uncover the meanings behind a key selection of these maps, situating them in historical context and explaining how they were made, read, and used at the time. With more than one hundred gorgeous full-color illustrations, Cartographic Japan offers an enlightening tour of Japan’s magnificent cartographic archive.
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cover of Cartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space

Cartographic Memory

Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space

Juan Herrera

Duke University Press, 2022

In Cartographic Memory, Juan Herrera maps 1960s Chicano movement activism in the Latinx neighborhood of Fruitvale in Oakland, California, showing how activists there constructed a politics forged through productions of space. From Chicano-inspired street murals to the architecture of restaurants and shops, Herrera shows how Fruitvale’s communities and spaces serve as a palpable, living record of movement politics and achievements. Drawing on oral histories with Chicano activists, ethnography, and archival research, Herrera analyzes how activism has shaped Fruitvale. Herrera examines the ongoing nature of activism through nonprofit organizations and urban redevelopment projects like the Fruitvale Transit Village that root movements in place. Revealing that the social justice activism in Fruitvale fights for a space that does not yet exist, Herrera brings to life contentious politics about the nature of Chicanismo, Latinidad, and belonging while foregrounding the lasting social and material legacies of movements so often relegated to the past.
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cover of Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes

Cartographic Mexico

A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes

Raymond B. Craib

Duke University Press, 2004

In Cartographic Mexico, Raymond B. Craib analyzes the powerful role cartographic routines such as exploration, surveying, and mapmaking played in the creation of the modern Mexican state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such routines were part of a federal obsession—or “state fixation”—with determining and “fixing” geographic points, lines, and names in order to facilitate economic development and political administration. As well as analyzing the maps that resulted from such routines, Craib examines in close detail the processes that eventually generated them. Taking central Veracruz as a case in point, he shows how in the field, agrarian officials, military surveyors, and metropolitan geographers traversed a “fugitive landscape” of overlapping jurisdictions and use rights, ambiguous borders, shifting place names, and villagers with their own conceptions of history and territory. Drawing on an array of sources—including maps, letters from peasants, official reports, and surveyors’ journals and correspondence—Craib follows the everyday, contested processes through which officials attempted to redefine and codify such fugitive landscapes in struggle with the villagers they encountered in the field. In the process, he vividly demonstrates how surveying and mapmaking were never mere technical procedures: they were, and remain to this day, profoundly social and political practices in which surveyors, landowners, agrarian bureaucrats, and peasants all played powerful and complex roles.
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cover of Cartographies of Travel and Navigation

Cartographies of Travel and Navigation

Edited by James R. Akerman

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Finding one’s way with a map is a relatively recent phenomenon. In premodern times, maps were used, if at all, mainly for planning journeys in advance, not for guiding travelers on the road. With the exception of navigational sea charts, the use of maps by travelers only became common in the modern era; indeed, in the last two hundred years, maps have become the most ubiquitous and familiar genre of modern cartography.

Examining the historical relationship between travelers, navigation, and maps, Cartographies of Travel and Navigation considers the cartographic response to the new modalities of modern travel brought about by technological and institutional developments in the twentieth century. Highlighting the ways in which the travelers, operators, and planners of modern transportation systems value maps as both navigation tools and as representatives of a radical new mobility, this collection brings the cartography of travel—by road, sea, rail, and air—to the forefront, placing maps at the center of the history of travel and movement.

Richly and colorfully illustrated, Cartographies of Travel and Navigation ably fills the void in historical literature on transportation mapping.

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cover of Cartography and the Political Imagination: Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya

Cartography and the Political Imagination

Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya

Julie MacArthur

Ohio University Press, 2016

After four decades of British rule in colonial Kenya, a previously unknown ethnic name—“Luyia”—appeared on the official census in 1948. The emergence of the Luyia represents a clear case of ethnic “invention.” At the same time, current restrictive theories privileging ethnic homogeneity fail to explain this defiantly diverse ethnic project, which now comprises the second-largest ethnic group in Kenya.

In Cartography and the Political Imagination, which encompasses social history, geography, and political science, Julie MacArthur unpacks Luyia origins. In so doing, she calls for a shift to understanding geographic imagination and mapping not only as means of enforcing imperial power and constraining colonized populations, but as tools for articulating new political communities and dissent. Through cartography, Luyia ethnic patriots crafted an identity for themselves characterized by plurality, mobility, and cosmopolitan belonging.

While other historians have focused on the official maps of imperial surveyors, MacArthur scrutinizes the ways African communities adopted and adapted mapping strategies to their own ongoing creative projects. This book marks an important reassessment of current theories of ethnogenesis, investigates the geographic imaginations of African communities, and challenges contemporary readings of community and conflict in Africa.

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cover of Cartography in France, 1660-1848: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft

Cartography in France, 1660-1848

Science, Engineering, and Statecraft

Josef Konvitz

University of Chicago Press, 1987

French scientists, engineers, and public officials were responsible for the most important and distinctive innovations in cartography in eighteenth-century Europe. By expanding the analytical uses of maps, by establishing unprecedented standards of accuracy, and by nurturing institutional frameworks to sustain mapping projects over many years, the French contributed to one of the central concepts of modern times: that man, through direct observation and accumulated information can better understand and manage his affairs.

Concentrating on how and why new concepts and techniques of making and using maps were introduced, Josef Konvitz skillfully traces the modernization of cartography during the French Enlightenment. The story he unfolds is not merely a narrative of who did what, but an analysis of how the map itself influenced attitudes toward the land and the consequent effects on planning and the development of resources. Throughout, Konvitz demonstrates the significant relationship between cartography and political, economic, and military life. He emphasizes efforts to enlarge the practical applications of maps in government and the impact of government policy on the evolution of cartography.
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cover of Cartography: The Ideal and Its History

Cartography

The Ideal and Its History

Matthew H. Edney

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include.
 
In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same.
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cover of Cartomancy and Tarot in Film: 1940-2010

Cartomancy and Tarot in Film

1940-2010

Emily E. Auger

Intellect Books, 2016

In the first book-length study of Tarot cards on the silver screen, Emily E. Auger contextualizes cartomancy—the practice of fortune telling via playing cards—and dives deep into its invention and promulgation in film. After providing an introduction to divination and cartomancy, Auger offers detailed descriptions and analyses of the roles that cartomancy and Tarot cards play in films. The book features an abbreviated filmography—including nearly 200 films—detailing their relationships to cartomancy. As Tarot communities continue to grow worldwide, Cartomancy and Tarot in Film will be of interest to scholars of esoteric studies, film, folklore, playing cards, popular culture, and religion, as well as diviners the world over.
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cover of Cartophilia: Maps and the Search for Identity in the French-German Borderland

Cartophilia

Maps and the Search for Identity in the French-German Borderland

Catherine Tatiana Dunlop

University of Chicago Press, 2015

The period between the French Revolution and World War II was a time of tremendous growth in both mapmaking and map reading throughout Europe. There is no better place to witness this rise of popular cartography than in Alsace-Lorraine, a disputed borderland that the French and Germans both claimed as their national territory. Desired for its prime geographical position and abundant natural resources, Alsace-Lorraine endured devastating wars from 1870 to 1945 that altered its borders four times, transforming its physical landscape and the political allegiances of its citizens. For the border population whose lives were turned upside down by the French-German conflict, maps became essential tools for finding a new sense of place and a new sense of identity in their changing national and regional communities.
 
Turning to a previously undiscovered archive of popular maps, Cartophilia reveals Alsace-Lorraine’s lively world of citizen mapmakers that included linguists, ethnographers, schoolteachers, hikers, and priests. Together, this fresh group of mapmakers invented new genres of maps that framed French and German territory in original ways through experimental surveying techniques, orientations, scales, colors, and iconography. In focusing on the power of “bottom-up” maps to transform modern European identities, Cartophilia argues that the history of cartography must expand beyond the study of elite maps and shift its emphasis to the democratization of cartography in the modern world.
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cover of Cartucho and My Mother's Hands

Cartucho and My Mother's Hands

By Nellie Campobello

University of Texas Press, 1988

Nellie Campobello, a prominent Mexican writer and "novelist of the Revolution," played an important role in Mexico's cultural renaissance in the 1920s and early 1930s, along with such writers as Rafael Muñoz and Gregorio López y Fuentes and artists Diego Rivera, Orozco, and others. Her two novellas, Cartucho (first published in 1931) and My Mother's Hands (first published as Las manos de Mamá in 1938), are autobiographical evocations of a childhood spent amidst the violence and turmoil of the Revolution in Mexico. Campobello's memories of the Revolution in the north of Mexico, where Pancho Villa was a popular hero and a personal friend of her family, show not only the stark realism of Cartucho but also the tender lyricism of My Mother's Hands. They are noteworthy, too, as a first-person account of the female experience in the early years of the Mexican Revolution and unique in their presentation of events from a child's perspective.

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cover of Casa Pueblo: A Puerto Rican Model of Self-Governance

Casa Pueblo

A Puerto Rican Model of Self-Governance

Alexis Massol González, Translated by Ashwin Ravikumar and Paul Schroeder Rodríguez

Lever Press, 2022

As a community-based organization in the mountains of south-central Puerto Rico, Casa Pueblo implements alternatives to extractive capitalism that do not rely on governments or distant non-profits. In this book, Alexis Massol-González, Casa Pueblo’s founder, reflects on its extraordinary forty-year history of experiments with community self-governance. Massol-González received the prestigious Goldman Prize (popularly known as the Green Nobel) for the organization’s initiatives to protect the environment, affirm cultural and human values, and create sustainable economic alternatives. This collective translation was undertaken in the spirit of the organization and offers a chronological account of Casa Pueblo’s evolution from a small group of concerned citizens to an internationally recognized model for activism.
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cover of Casanova's Lottery: The History of a Revolutionary Game of Chance

Casanova's Lottery

The History of a Revolutionary Game of Chance

Stephen M. Stigler

University of Chicago Press, 2022

The fascinating story of an important lottery that flourished in France from 1757 to 1836 and its role in transforming our understanding of the nature of risk.

In the 1750s, at the urging of famed adventurer Giacomo Casanova, the French state began to embrace risk in adopting a new Loterie. The prize amounts paid varied, depending on the number of tickets bought and the amount of the bet, as determined by each individual bettor. The state could lose money on any individual Loterie drawing while being statistically guaranteed to come out on top in the long run. In adopting this framework, the French state took on risk in a way no other has, before or after. At each drawing the state was at risk of losing a large amount; what is more, that risk was precisely calculable, generally well understood, and yet taken on by the state with little more than a mathematical theory to protect it.

Stephen M. Stigler follows the Loterie from its curious inception through its hiatus during the French Revolution, its renewal and expansion in 1797, and finally to its suppression in 1836, examining throughout the wider question of how members of the public came to trust in new financial technologies and believe in their value. Drawing from an extensive collection of rare ephemera, Stigler pieces together the Loterie’s remarkable inner workings, as well as its implications for the nature of risk and the role of lotteries in social life over the period 1700–1950. 

Both a fun read and fodder for many fields, Casanova's Lottery shines new light on the conscious introduction of risk into the management of a nation-state and the rationality of playing unfair games.
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cover of Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America

Case Closed

Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America

Cohen, Beth B

Rutgers University Press, 2006

Following the end of World War II, it was widely reported by the media that Jewish refugees found lives filled with opportunity and happiness in America. However, for most of the 140,000 Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) who immigrated to the United States from Europe in the years between 1946 and 1954, it was a much more complicated story.

Case Closed challenges the prevailing optimistic perception of the lives of Holocaust survivors in postwar America by scrutinizing their first years through the eyes of those who lived it. The facts brought forth in this book are supported by case files recorded by Jewish social service workers, letters and minutes from agency meetings, oral testimonies, and much more.

Cohen explores how the Truman Directive allowed the American Jewish community to handle the financial and legal responsibility for survivors, and shows what assistance the community offered the refugees and what help was not available. She investigates the particularly difficult issues that orphan children and Orthodox Jews faced, and examines the subtleties of the resettlement process in New York and other locales. Cohen uncovers the truth of survivors' early years in America and reveals the complexity of their lives as "New Americans."
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cover of Case for Critical Literacy: A History of Reading in Writing Studies

Case for Critical Literacy

A History of Reading in Writing Studies

Alice S. Horning

Utah State University Press, 2024

The Case for Critical Literacy explores the history of reading within writing studies and lays the foundation for understanding the impact of this critical, yet often untaught, skill. Every measure of students’ reading comprehension, whether digital or analog, demonstrates that between 50 and 80 percent of students are unable to capture the substance of a full discussion or evaluate material for authority, accuracy, currency, relevancy, appropriateness, and bias.
 
This book examines how college-level instruction reached this point and provides pedagogical strategies that writing instructors and teachers can use to address the problem. Alice Horning makes the case for the importance of critical reading in the teaching of writing with intentionality and imagination, while sharing glimpses of her own personal history with reading and writing. Horning provides the context for understanding what college faculty face in their classrooms and offers a history of critical literacy that explains why, to date, it has mostly neglected or ignored the diverse statuses of students’ reading challenges.
 
The Case for Critical Literacy explores actionable options to better meet students’ literacy needs. College and university faculty, especially writing instructors, will benefit from an understanding of what has happened in the field and what needs to change.
 
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cover of Casement

Casement

Angus Mitchell

Haus Publishing, 2026

An illumination of the life of diplomat Roger Casement. 

At the time of his execution for treason in 1916, few were aware who Roger Casement was or what he represented. Since then, he has been lauded for his investigations into Belgian brutality in the Congo Free State and human rights abuses in the Peruvian rubber industry, but much else about him has remained obscured behind speculation about his sexuality and secret Irish revolutionary activity while in service of the British Empire. As such, his place in history has been ill-defined and multifarious: his involvement in the waging of war followed by the delicate negotiation of peace; his republicanism perceived variously as an eccentric enthusiasm and as a threat to the British Empire; his contemporary legacy overshadowed by the Black Diaries of disputed legitimacy, detailing alleged liaisons with young men.

In Casement, Angus Mitchell illuminates a life shrouded in mystery, which operated in the conflicting spheres of British foreign diplomacy and Irish revolutionary activity. Considering Casement’s rebellious nature, Mitchell asks if it was motivated as much by his “incorrigible” Irishness as by his exposure of the appalling crimes against humanity that he witnessed in Africa and South America. Most significantly, Casement demonstrates that his legacy cannot be ascribed to just one cause, whether as a critic of global colonialism or as a founding father of the modern Irish nation-state. Casement’s true commitment was to a universal understanding based on humanity, tolerance, and justice.
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cover of Cash Flow: The Businesses of Menstruation

Cash Flow

The Businesses of Menstruation

Camilla Mørk Røstvik

University College London, 2022

Commerce and menstruation from the twentieth century to today.

The menstrual product industry has played a large role in shaping the past hundred years of menstrual culture, including technological innovation, creative advertising, and education in classrooms. How much do we know about this sector and how has it changed in later decades? What constitutes “the industry,” who works in it, and how is it adapting to the current menstrual equity movement?
 
Cash Flow provides a new academic study of the menstrual corporate landscape that links its twentieth-century origins to the current day. Drawing on a range of previously unexplored archival materials and interviews with industry insiders, each chapter examines one key company and brand: Saba in Norway, Essity in Sweden, Tambrands in the Soviet Union, Procter & Gamble in Britain and Europe, Kimberly-Clark in North America, and start-ups Clue and Thinx. The book provides timely insights into a secretive and largely unexamined corporate world and the ongoing political and industry-wide debate about the cost of menstrual products. Cash Flow will be of interest to a wide range of groups within and outside academia, including scholars in the emerging field of critical menstruation studies and menstrual activists.
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cover of Cash For Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America

Cash For Your Trash

Scrap Recycling in America

Carl A. Zimring

Rutgers University Press, 2005

Over the past two decades, concern about the environment has brought with it a tremendous increase in recycling in the United States and around the world. For many, it has become not only a civic, but also a moral obligation. Long before our growing levels of waste became an environmental concern, however, recycling was a part of everyday life for many Americans, and for a variety of reasons. From rural peddlers who traded kitchen goods for scrap metal to urban children who gathered rags in exchange for coal, individuals have been finding ways to reuse discarded materials for hundreds of years.

In Cash for Your Trash, Carl A. Zimring provides a fascinating history of scrap recycling, from colonial times to the present. Moving beyond the environmental developments that have shaped modern recycling enterprises, Zimring offers a unique cultural and economic portrait of the private businesses that made large-scale recycling possible. Because it was particularly common for immigrants to own or operate a scrap business in the nineteenth century, the history of the industry reveals much about ethnic relationships and inequalities in American cities. Readers are introduced to the scrapworkers, brokers, and entrepreneurs who, like the materials they handled, were often marginalized. 

Integrating findings from archival, industrial, and demographic records, Cash for Your Trash demonstrates that over the years recycling has served purposes far beyond environmental protection. Its history and evolution reveals notions of Americanism, the immigrant experience, and the development of small business in this country.

[more]
cover of Cash, Clothes, and Construction: Rethinking Value in Bolivia's Pluri-economy

Cash, Clothes, and Construction

Rethinking Value in Bolivia's Pluri-economy

Kate Maclean

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A groundbreaking feminist perspective on Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) rule in Bolivia and the country’s radical transformation under Evo Morales
 

The presidency of Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006–2019) has produced considerable academic scholarship, much of it focused on indigenous social movements or extractivism, and often triumphalist about the successes of Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). Turning a new lens on the movement, Cash, Clothes, and Construction presents the first gender-based analysis of “pluri-economy,” a central pillar of Bolivia’s program under Morales, evaluating the potential of this vision of “an economy where all economies fit” to embrace feminist critiques of capitalism and economic diversity. 

 

Based on more than twelve years of empirical research exploring the remarkable transformations in Bolivia since 2006, this book focuses on three sectors—finance, clothing, and construction—in which indigenous women have defied gendered expectations. Kate Maclean presents detailed case studies of women selling secondhand high street clothes from the United States in the vast, peri-urban markets of Bolivian cities; Aymaran designers of new pollera (traditional Andean dress) fashions, one of whom exhibited her collection in New York City; and the powerful and rich chola paceña, whose real estate investments have transformed the cultural maps of La Paz and El Alto. 

 

Cash, Clothes, and Construction offers a gendered analysis of the mission of MAS to dismantle neoliberalism and decolonize politics and economy from the perspective of the Indigenous women who have radically transformed Bolivia’s economy from the ground up.

[more]
cover of Casper Jaggi: Master Swiss Cheese Maker

Casper Jaggi

Master Swiss Cheese Maker

Jerry Apps

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2008

Have you ever wondered why Swiss cheese has holes? You'll find out in this story about a Swiss cheese maker named Casper Jaggi. Casper Jaggi was only six years old when his father taught him how to make cheese in the Swiss Alps. In 1913, Jaggi left Switzerland in search of new opportunities in the United States. Like many other Swiss, he settled in Green County, Wisconsin, where the rolling hills dotted with grazing cows reminded him of home. And soon, he'd be turning cow's milk into cheese, just as he did in Switzerland.

The book opens the doors to Jaggi's Brodhead Swiss Cheese Factory - largest factory of its kind in Wisconsin in the 1950s. Archival photos help illustrate, step-by-step, the process Jaggi and his workers followed to transform 2,000 pounds of milk in a copper kettle into a 200-pound wheel of Swiss cheese.
 
Jaggi was one of the many European immigrants who helped establish Wisconsin's reputation for delicious cheese. The artisan cheese makers crafting award-winning cheeses today are continuing this rich tradition in America's Dairyland.
 
[more]
cover of Cass Gilbert's West Virginia State Capitol

Cass Gilbert's West Virginia State Capitol

Ann Wilkins

West Virginia University Press, 2014

At the turn of the twentieth century, West Virginia was in the throes of its formative years as a state. After more than two decades of alternating its government seat between Wheeling and Charleston and the destruction of the Gothic Revival Capitol in Charleston by fire in 1921, a building commission was formed to create a permanent Capitol that would display the young state’s pride, wealth, and sophistication to the entire nation. To achieve these goals, the legislature approved a budget of more than $6.5 million for the design and construction of this statehouse and the Commission appointed by the Governor hired internationally renowned Cass Gilbert as its architect. After much debate, an impressive site along the shore of the Kanawha River in Charleston was selected as its location.

As one of the most influential architects of the early twentieth century, Cass Gilbert is known for structures such as the Woolworth Building, the United States Supreme Court building, and the Minnesota State Capitol. He believed architecture should reflect historic tradition and established social order, and this conservative philosophy is evinced within the classic form and proportions of the West Virginia State Capitol. As one of his final commissions, the West Virginia Capitol, with its golden “dome of majestic proportion,” marble interiors, ornamental reliefs, and rich woodwork, remains a distinguished example of noble simplicity in American architecture.

Cass Gilbert’s West Virginia State Capitol narrates the intricate story behind this architectural feat. Its close examination of the design, construction, and execution of this commission not only reveals the social, political, and financial climate of West Virginia during this period but also provides insight into the cultural importance of this public building. As Cass Gilbert’s design process is traced through unpublished documentation, drawings, and letters from several archives, the over one hundred accompanying photographs—many historical and others newly commissioned for this book—divulge the subtle beauty of the Capitol complex. At the same time, an extensive analysis of historical and contemporary illustrations and primary sources further elucidates the architectural value of this structure.

With welcomes by West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin and State Senator Brooks F. McCabe, Jr., a prologue by art historians Bernard Schultz and Mary L. Soldo Schultz, and an epilogue by Chad Proudfoot, this revealing and comprehensive study examines the importance of this often overlooked architectural accomplishment, solidifying its significance as a socio-political symbol as well as its place within the history of American public architecture.

[more]
cover of Cass Hite: The Life of an Old Prospector

Cass Hite

The Life of an Old Prospector

James H. Knipmeyer

University of Utah Press, 2016

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Cass Hite was a well-known prospector in the Glen Canyon area of southern Utah. He lived as a recluse yet knew most of the river runners, trekkers, cowboys, and Native Americans that passed through the region. He often wrote to newspapers and was in turn sought out by reporters for his vibrant comments. Hite followed the trail of gold and silver to destinations throughout the West—a time recounted in a memoir he penned in rhyming verse. After his death, his name remained prominent in the region. The tiny hamlet of Hite was an important ferry crossing of the Colorado River (since replaced by a bridge), and the nearby Hite Marina kept the name in the public eye for thousands of boaters.

Despite this notoriety, no one has written a full-length, scholarly account of Hite’s life. This biography fills that void, detailing Hite’s story from his birth in central Illinois in 1845 to his death in Glen Canyon in 1914. It corrects some of the long-accepted stories about Hite and puts others in their proper perspective, while revealing new information. Scores of photographs and excerpts from Hite’s own writing further illuminate this colorful prospector’s life. 
[more]
cover of Cassatt Reconsidered

Cassatt Reconsidered

Mary G. Morton

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0

A sweeping reconsideration of the artist we thought we knew—and the forces that obscured her legacy.

Fiercely ambitious and independent, Mary Cassatt defied expectations to become one of the most radical artists of the Impressionist movement, though she was—and remains—the least understood. Cassatt commanded and manipulated strains of old master and contemporary painting to express her female subjectivity through a brilliantly modern oeuvre on par with those of the most revered Impressionists. However, mishandled by the Parisian art establishment during her lifetime, and later by art historians and curators, she became known almost exclusively as a sentimentalizing painter of mothers and children.

How did this happen to the most aspiring, revolutionary female artist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In Cassatt Reconsidered, author Mary G. Morton probes this central question and more, demonstrating how Cassatt disturbed conventional ideals of femininity, childhood, and maternity, an uncompromising feat for which she paid dearly during her lifetime and in the annals of art historiography.

Vibrantly illustrated with more than 100 images, Cassatt Reconsidered rewards readers with a fuller understanding of an artist who stands apart for daring to express, on her own terms, the unique, intimate experiences of modern women.

[more]
cover of Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective

Cast Out

Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective

A. L. Beier

Ohio University Press, 2008

Throughout history, those arrested for vagrancy have generally been poor men and women, often young, able-bodied, unemployed, and homeless. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on the European and American experiences. Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective is the first book to consider the shared global heritage of vagrancy laws, homelessness, and the historical processes they accompanied.

In this ambitious collection, vagrancy and homelessness are used to examine a vast array of phenomena, from the migration of labor to social and governmental responses to poverty through charity, welfare, and prosecution. The essays in Cast Out represent the best scholarship on these subjects and include discussions of the lives of the underclass, strategies for surviving and escaping poverty, the criminalization of poverty by the state, the rise of welfare and development programs, the relationship between imperial powers and colonized peoples, and the struggle to achieve independence after colonial rule. By juxtaposing these histories, the authors explore vagrancy as a common response to poverty, labor dislocation, and changing social norms, as well as how this strategy changed over time and adapted to regional peculiarities.

Part of a growing literature on world history, Cast Out offers fresh perspectives and new research in fields that have yet to fully investigate vagrancy and homelessness. This book by leading scholars in the field is for policy makers, as well as for courses on poverty, homelessness, and world history.

Contributors:
Richard B. Allen
David Arnold
A. L. Beier
Andrew Burton
Vincent DiGirolamo
Andrew A. Gentes
Robert Gordon
Frank Tobias Higbie
Thomas H. Holloway
Abby Margolis
Paul Ocobock
Aminda M. Smith
Linda Woodbridge

[more]
cover of Cast in Deathless Bronze: Andrew Rowan, the Spanish-American War, and the Origins of American Empire

Cast in Deathless Bronze

Andrew Rowan, the Spanish-American War, and the Origins of American Empire

Donald Tunnicliff Rice

West Virginia University Press, 2016

In 1898, when war with Spain seemed inevitable, Andrew Summers Rowan, an American army lieutenant from West Virginia, was sent on a secret mission to Cuba. He was to meet with General Calixto García, a leader of the Cuban rebels, in order to gather information for a U.S. invasion. Months later, after the war was fought and won, a flamboyant entrepreneur named Elbert Hubbard wrote an account of Rowan’s mission titled “A Message to García.” It sold millions of copies, and Rowan became the equivalent of a modern-day rock star. His fame resulted in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, radio shows, and two movies. Even today he is held up as an exemplar of bravery and loyalty. The problem is that nothing Hubbard wrote about Rowan was true.
 
Donald Tunnicliff Rice reveals the facts behind the story of “A Message to García” while using Rowan’s biography as a window into the history of the Spanish-American War, the Philippine War, and the Moro Rebellion. The result is a compellingly written narrative containing many details never before published in any form, and also an accessible perspective on American diplomatic and military history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 
[more]
cover of Caste War Now and Never: Unreading Gender, Race, and Land in Yucatán

Caste War Now and Never

Unreading Gender, Race, and Land in Yucatán

S. B. West

University of Arizona Press, 2026

In Caste War Now and Never scholar S. B. West considers Yucatán’s nineteenth-century Caste War, the longest and most violent Indigenous uprising of the Western Hemisphere, to argue that it actually never occurred.

Instead, West writes that the violent events grouped under the “Caste War” label must be understood through alternative frameworks that resist the emergent logics of race war and include related regulatory matrices like gender and land. Through this lens, the Caste War emerges as a discursive construct rooted in an anti-Indigenous archive that served the political interests of a frustrated regional elite during the rise of liberalism and nationhood. West argues that Caste War discourse unfolds as a technology that mobilized and legitimized genocidal actions against racialized rebels and inspired assimilation into hegemonic political and social structures.

In the second half of the book, West looks at the Caste War to engage its contemporary polysemic nature through close readings of Yucatec Maya texts, stories, and other forms of knowledge production. These sources reframe the Caste War as an important part of a framework of resistance that defies colonial time and reclaims narrative control of its events.

Caste War Now and Never captures how Maya communities understand the conflict as ongoing and demonstrates that although the Caste War never occurred as such, it continues to endure presently.

[more]
cover of Caste and Class in a Southern Town

Caste and Class in a Southern Town

John Dollard

University of Wisconsin Press, 1989

An extraordinary powerful exposition of social patterns in a small town, Caste and Class in a Southern Town has become a benchmark in social science methodology and a classic in American studies. Now fifty years after its original publication, John Dollard’s most famous work offers timeless insights and remains essential to those interested in race-related social issues.

In 1937, W. E. B. Du Bois observed, "Dr. Dollard’s study is one of the most interesting and penetrating that has been made concerning the South and is marked by courage and real insight. . . . Dr. Dollard’s book marks a distinct advance in the study of the Southern scene."

 

[more]
cover of Castings: Monuments and Monumentality in Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney

Castings

Monuments and Monumentality in Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney

Guy Rotella

Vanderbilt University Press, 2004

Whether looming over public squares or dotting old battlefields, monuments certify a culture's present by securing its past and pledging its future. They embody exemplary persons or events and the shared ideals they stood for, prompting an obligation to keep those ideals standing now and forever. But monuments also exaggerate the staying power of civilizations and of art. In the second half of the twentieth century, postmodern critics often decried monuments not only for their pretensions and stiffness but also for their supposed role in perpetuating oppressive cultural conventions. Even so, many artists and thinkers of the same period tried to reimagine monuments in ways that were humbler and more provisional but still culturally confirming.

In Castings, Guy Rotella examines the work of five important poets who have engaged in that effort: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney. Considering their wider careers as well as particular poems--including Bishop's "The Monument," Lowell's "For the Union Dead," Merrill's "Bronze," Walcott's "The Sea Is History," and Heaney's "In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge"--Rotella argues that these writers are less concerned with defending or condemning monuments than with pursuing ancient and current debates about the political, aesthetic, and broadly cultural issues that monuments condense. Among these concerns are the competing claims of life and art, persistence and change, meaning and meaninglessness, the self and society, and the governing and the governed.

Original and provocative, Rotella's readings will make us ponder how the human impulse to build to last, to reify our culturally derived and ideologically driven faiths, might coexist with those other creeds of our place and time: relativism, multiculuralism, and diversity.

[more]
cover of Castle Valley America: Hard Land, Hard-won Home

Castle Valley America

Hard Land, Hard-won Home

Nancy Taniguchi

Utah State University Press, 2004

This is American history told through the stories of an atypical, for Utah, region. Castle Valley is roughly conterminous with two counties, Carbon and Emery, which together formed a rural, industrial enclave in a mostly desert environment behind the mountain range that borders Utah's principal corridor of settlement. In Castle Valley, coal mining and the railroad attracted diverse, multiethnic communities and a fair share of historic characters, from Butch Cassidy, who stole its largest payroll, to Mother Jones, who helped organize its workers against its mining companies. Among the last major segments of the state to be settled, it was also a generally poor region that stretched the capabilities of people to scratch a living from a harsh landscape.

The people of Castle Valley experienced complex, unusual combinations of both social cohesion and conflict, but they struggled through poverty, labor disputes, major mining disasters, and other challenges to build communities whose stories reflected the historical course of the nation as a whole. In order to convey her subject's both unique and representative qualities, Nancy Taniguchi has written an epic history that is not just local history, but American history written locally.

Nancy J. Taniguchi, who lived for thirteen years in Castle Valley and was previously on the faculty of the College of Eastern Utah in Price, is professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus. She is the author of numerous published articles in mining, legal, women's, western, and Utah history and of one book, Necessary Fraud: Progressive Reform
and Utah Coal
.

[more]
cover of Castle and Cathedral: Longing for the Sacred in a Skeptical Age

Castle and Cathedral

Longing for the Sacred in a Skeptical Age

Bruce R. Berglund

Central European University Press, 2017

This book takes a new approach to interwar Prague by addressing religion as an integral part of the city's cultural history. Berglund views Prague's cultural history in the broader context of religious change and secularization in 20th-century Europe. Based on detailed knowledge of sources, the monograph explores the interdisciplinary linkages between politics, architecture and theology in the building of symbolism and a "new mythology" of the first Czechoslovak republic (1918-1938). Berglunds text provides an important service for understanding both Czech history as well as current Czech political debate. The author's method can be characterized as culture history, able to connect several disciplines, emphasizing common topic (religion, politics, symbolics). Modern Czech elites, superficially characterized as "ateistic", appears in a new light to be deeply religious, a transition from more traditional, (mostly) Catholic religiosity, to a concept of a new, modern, ethical religion. The study incorporates biographical research, focusing on three principal characters: Tomás Garrigue Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's first president; his daughter Alice Garrigue Masaryková, founding director of the Czechoslovak Red Cross; and Joze Plecnik, the Slovenian architect who directed the renovations of Prague Castle.
[more]
cover of Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History

Castles, Battles, and Bombs

How Economics Explains Military History

Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll

University of Chicago Press, 2008

Castles, Battles, and Bombs reconsiders key episodes of military history from the point of view of economics—with dramatically insightful results. For example, when looked at as a question of sheer cost, the building of castles in the High Middle Ages seems almost inevitable: though stunningly expensive, a strong castle was far cheaper to maintain than a standing army. The authors also reexamine the strategic bombing of Germany in World War II and provide new insights into France’s decision to develop nuclear weapons. Drawing on these examples and more, Brauer and Van Tuyll suggest lessons for today’s military, from counterterrorist strategy and military manpower planning to the use of private military companies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

"In bringing economics into assessments of military history, [the authors] also bring illumination. . . . [The authors] turn their interdisciplinary lens on the mercenary arrangements of Renaissance Italy; the wars of Marlborough, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon; Grant's campaigns in the Civil War; and the strategic bombings of World War II. The results are invariably stimulating."—Martin Walker, Wilson Quarterly

 

"This study is serious, creative, important. As an economist I am happy to see economics so professionally applied to illuminate major decisions in the history of warfare."—Thomas C. Schelling, Winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics

[more]
cover of Cataclysm: General Hap Arnold and the Defeat of Japan

Cataclysm

General Hap Arnold and the Defeat of Japan

Herman S. Wolk

University of North Texas Press, 2010

[more]
cover of Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge

Cataclysms

A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge

Dan Diner, Translated by William Templer with Joel Golb

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Cataclysms is a profoundly original look at the last century. Approaching twentieth-century history from the periphery rather than the centers of decision-making, the virtual narrator sits perched on the legendary stairs of Odessa and watches as events between the Baltic and the Aegean pass in review, unfolding in space and time between 1917 and 1989, while evoking the nineteenth century as an interpretative backdrop.
     Influenced by continental historical, legal, and social thought, Dan Diner views the totality of world history evolving from an Eastern and Southeastern European angle. A work of great synthesis, Cataclysms chronicles twentieth century history as a “universal civil war” between a succession of conflicting dualisms such as freedom and equality, race and class, capitalism and communism, liberalism and fascism, East and West.
    Diner’s interpretation rotates around cataclysmic events in the transformation from multinational empires into nation states, accompanied by social revolution and “ethnic cleansing,” situating the Holocaust at the core of the century’s predicament. Unlike other Eurocentric interpretations of the last century, Diner also highlights the emerging pivotal importance of the United States and the impact of decolonization on the process of European integration.
[more]
cover of Cataclysms: An Environmental History of Humanity

Cataclysms

An Environmental History of Humanity

Laurent Testot

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Humanity is by many measures the biggest success story in the animal kingdom; but what are the costs of this triumph? Over its three million years of existence, the human species has continuously modified nature and drained its resources. In Cataclysms, Laurent Testot provides the full tally, offering a comprehensive environmental history of humanity’s unmatched and perhaps irreversible influence on the world.

Testot explores the interconnected histories of human evolution and planetary deterioration, arguing that our development from naked apes to Homo sapiens has entailed wide-scale environmental harm. Testot makes the case that humans have usually been catastrophic for the planet, “hyperpredators” responsible for mass extinctions, deforestation, global warming, ocean acidification, and unchecked pollution, as well as the slaughter of our own species. Organized chronologically around seven technological revolutions, Cataclysms unspools the intertwined saga of humanity and our environment, from our shy beginnings in Africa to today’s domination of the planet, revealing how we have blown past any limits along the way—whether by exploding our own population numbers, domesticating countless other species, or harnessing energy from fossils. Testot’s book, while sweeping, is light and approachable, telling the stories—sometimes rambunctious, sometimes appalling—of how a glorified monkey transformed its own environment beyond all recognition.
 
In order to begin reversing our environmental disaster, we must have a better understanding of our own past and the incalculable environmental costs incurred at every stage of human innovation. Cataclysms offers that understanding and the hope that we can now begin to reform our relationship to the Earth.
 
[more]
cover of Catalogue of Watermarks in Italian Printed Maps, ca. 1540-1600

Catalogue of Watermarks in Italian Printed Maps, ca. 1540-1600

David Woodward

University of Chicago Press, 1996

This catalogue presents over three-hundred photographic images of watermarks found in Italian printed maps of the sixteenth century. Such watermarks are essential tools in identifying paper moulds and are part of the evidence that bibliographers use in dating the paper on which maps and other documents were printed. The images reproduced in the catalogue have been selected from some 1200 beta-radiographs of watermarks gathered from Italian printed maps issued mostly in composite atlases printed in Venice and Rome between 1540 and 1600. These beta-radiographs reveal minute variations that are almost invisible to the eye. A special feature of the book is a visual index of miniature black-and-white line tracings of the watermarks.

Fifteen years in the making, this catalogue will be an essential reference for bibliographers and archivists dealing with rare books and maps of the period, for map collectors, map librarians, and scholars and librarians working with early printed items and manuscripts.
[more]
cover of Catalogue of the Roman Imperial Coins in the Charles University Collection (235–284 A.D.)

Catalogue of the Roman Imperial Coins in the Charles University Collection (235–284 A.D.)

David Lužický

Karolinum Press, 2026

Spotlights over five hundred Roman Imperial coins from Charles University's vast collection of ancient coins.

Charles University’s collection of ancient coins in its present state has existed since l945. Greek, Roman, and other ancient coins were entrusted to the care of the Seminar for Ancient History and compiled into a single collection along with antique coins from the original collection of the Czech University. The collection contains about 4,000 pieces altogether, mostly in silver and bronze.

This publication presents a catalogue of 564 Roman Imperial coins dating from 235 to 284 A. D. and is part of efforts to gradually catalogue the entirety of Charles University’s collection of ancient coins, stored in the depository of the CU Institute of Greek and Latin Studies. The book builds upon Václav Marek’s 1985 monograph, The Roman Republican Coins in the Collection of Charles University, and Federico Gambacorta’s 2013 continuation titled Catalogue of the Late Roman, Byzantine and Barbaric Coins in the Charles University Collection (364–1092 A. D.).

[more]
cover of Catalogue of the Slavonic Cyrillic Manuscripts of the National Szechenyi Library

Catalogue of the Slavonic Cyrillic Manuscripts of the National Szechenyi Library

Ralph Cleminson

Central European University Press, 2007

This volume provides a thorough introduction to the Cyrillic collection, and contains the detailed descriptions of the fifty-six Slavonic Cyrillic codices or fragments thereof held by the National Széchényi Library in Budapest, the vast majority of which are here described for the first time. The analysis of the codices has been done using the resources of modern technology. Written from the thirteenth to early nineteenth century, the codices were mostly produced within the confines of the historical Kingdom of Hungary. The catalogue is extensively illustrated with pictures of the most characteristic and decorative pages and a few covers of the codices.This publication is a further step towards the complete documentation of the Cyrillic manuscript heritage of Central Europe.
[more]
cover of Catalyst for Controversy: Paul Carus of Open Court

Catalyst for Controversy

Paul Carus of Open Court

Harold Henderson

Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

"I am not a common atheist; I am an atheist who loves God."—Paul Carus, "The God of Science," 1904

In the summer of 1880, while teaching at the military academy of the Royal Corps of Cadets of Saxony in Dresden, Paul Carus published a brief pamphlet denying the literal truth of scripture and describing the Bible as a great literary work comparable to the Odyssey.

This unremarkable document was Carus’s first step in a wide-ranging intellectual voyage in which he traversed philosophy, science, religion, mathematics, history, music, literature, and social and political issues. The Royal Corps, Carus later reported, found his published views "not in harmony with the Christian spirit, in accordance with which the training and education of the Corps of Cadets should be conducted." And so the corps offered the young teacher the choice of asking "most humbly for forgiveness for daring to have an opinion of my own and to express it, perhaps even promise to publish nothing more on religious matters, or to give up my post. I chose the latter. . . . There was thus no other choice for me but to emigrate and, trusting in my own powers, to establish for myself a new home." His resignation was effective on Easter Sunday, 1881.

Carus toured the Rhine, lived briefly in Belgium, and taught in a military college in England to learn English well enough to "thrive in the United States." By late 1884 or early 1885 he was on his way to the New World. Thriving in the United States proved more difficult than it had in England, but before 1885 ended he had published his first philosophical work in English, Monism and Meliorism. The book was not widely read, but it did reach Edward C. Hegeler, a La Salle, Illinois, zinc processor who became his father-in-law as well as his ideological and financial backer.

Established in La Salle, Carus began the work that would place him among the prominent American philosophers of his day and make the Open Court Publishing Company a leading publisher of philosophical, scientific, and religious books. He edited The Open Court and The Monist, offering the finest view of Oriental thought and religion then available in the West, and sought unsuccessfully to bring about a second World Parliament of Religions. He befriended physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach. For eleven years he employed D. T. Suzuki, who later became a great Zen Buddhist teacher. He published more articles by Charles S. Peirce, now viewed as one of the great world philosophers, in The Monist than appeared in any other publication.

Biographer Harold Henderson concludes his study of this remarkable man: "Whenever anyone is so fired with an idea that he or she can’t wait to write it down, there the spirit of Paul Carus remains, as he would have wished, active in the world."

[more]
cover of Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border

Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border

Elliott Young

Duke University Press, 2004

Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border rescues an understudied episode from the footnotes of history. On September 15, 1891, Garza, a Mexican journalist and political activist, led a band of Mexican rebels out of South Texas and across the Rio Grande, declaring a revolution against Mexico’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz. Made up of a broad cross-border alliance of ranchers, merchants, peasants, and disgruntled military men, Garza’s revolution was the largest and longest lasting threat to the Díaz regime up to that point. After two years of sporadic fighting, the combined efforts of the U.S. and Mexican armies, Texas Rangers, and local police finally succeeded in crushing the rebellion. Garza went into exile and was killed in Panama in 1895.

Elliott Young provides the first full-length analysis of the revolt and its significance, arguing that Garza’s rebellion is an important and telling chapter in the formation of the border between Mexico and the United States and in the histories of both countries. Throughout the nineteenth century, the borderlands were a relatively coherent region. Young analyzes archival materials, newspapers, travel accounts, and autobiographies from both countries to show that Garza’s revolution was more than just an effort to overthrow Díaz. It was part of the long struggle of borderlands people to maintain their autonomy in the face of two powerful and encroaching nation-states and of Mexicans in particular to protect themselves from being economically and socially displaced by Anglo Americans. By critically examining the different perspectives of military officers, journalists, diplomats, and the Garzistas themselves, Young exposes how nationalism and its preeminent symbol, the border, were manufactured and resisted along the Rio Grande.
[more]
cover of Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century

Catastrophe and Meaning

The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century

Edited by Moishe Postone and Eric Santner

University of Chicago Press, 2003

How should we understand the relation of the Holocaust to the broader historical processes of the century just ended? How do we explain the bearing of the Holocaust on problems of representation, memory, memorialization, and historical practice? These are some of the questions explored by an esteemed group of scholars in Catastrophe and Meaning, the most significant multiauthored book on the Holocaust in over a decade.

This collection features essays that consider the role of anti-Semitism in the recounting of the Holocaust; the place of the catastrophe in the narrative of twentieth-century history; the questions of agency and victimhood that the Holocaust inspires; the afterlife of trauma in literature written about the tragedy; and the gaps in remembrance and comprehension that normal historical works fail to notice.
Contributors:
Omer Bartov, Dan Diner, Debòrah Dwork, Saul Friedländer, Geoffrey Hartman, Dominick LaCapra, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Anson Rabinbach, Frank Trommler, Shulamit Volkov, Froma Zeitlin
[more]
cover of Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene

Catastrophic Thinking

Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene

David Sepkoski

University of Chicago Press, 2020

A history of scientific ideas about extinction that explains why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to “think catastrophically” about extinction.

We live in an age in which we are repeatedly reminded—by scientists, by the media, by popular culture—of the looming threat of mass extinction. We’re told that human activity is currently producing a sixth mass extinction, perhaps of even greater magnitude than the five previous geological catastrophes that drastically altered life on Earth. Indeed, there is a very real concern that the human species may itself be poised to go the way of the dinosaurs, victims of the most recent mass extinction some 65 million years ago.
 
How we interpret the causes and consequences of extinction and their ensuing moral imperatives is deeply embedded in the cultural values of any given historical moment. And, as David Sepkoski reveals, the history of scientific ideas about extinction over the past two hundred years—as both a past and a current process—is implicated in major changes in the way Western society has approached biological and cultural diversity. It seems self-evident to most of us that diverse ecosystems and societies are intrinsically valuable, but the current fascination with diversity is a relatively recent phenomenon. In fact, the way we value diversity depends crucially on our sense that it is precarious—that it is something actively threatened, and that its loss could have profound consequences. In Catastrophic Thinking, Sepkoski uncovers how and why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to think catastrophically about extinction.
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