Results by title

Dissent from the Homeland begins a new evaluation of how Americans think about September 11, 2001 and its aftermath. In this special issue well-known writers and scholars from across the humanities and social sciences take a critical look at U.S. domestic and foreign policies—past and present—as well as the recent surge of patriotism. These dissenting voices provide a thought-provoking alternative to the apparently overwhelming public approval of the U.S. military response to the September 11 attacks.

Addressing such questions as why the Middle East harbors a deep-seated hatred for the U.S., the contributors refuse to settle for the easy answers preferred by the mass media. "Thoughts in the Presence of Fear" urges Americans away from the pitfall of national self-righteousness toward an active peaceableness—an alert, informed, practiced state of being—deeply contrary to both passivity and war. Another essay argues that the U.S. drive to win the Cold War made the nation more like its enemies, leading the government to support ruthless anti-Communist tyrants such as Mobutu, Suharto, and Pinochet. "Groundzeroland" offers a sharp commentary on the power of American consumer culture to absorb the devastation and loss of life by transforming the attack sites into patriotic tourist attractions. James Nachtwey’s photo essay provides a visual document of the devastation of the attacks.

Contributors. Michael Baxter, Jean Baudrillard, Robert Bellah, Daniel Berrigan, Wendell Berry, Vincent Cornell, Stanley Hauerwas, Fredric Jameson, Frank Lentricchia, Catherine Lutz, Jody McAuliffe, John Milbank, James Nachtwey, Peter Ochs, Anne Rosalind Slifkin, Rowan Williams, Susan Willis, Slavoj Zizek

For more information about SAQ, please visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/saq/

Dissent from the Homeland is a book about patriotism, justice, revenge, American history and symbology, art and terror, and pacifism. In this deliberately and urgently provocative collection, noted writers, philosophers, literary critics, and theologians speak out against the war on terrorism and the government of George W. Bush as a response to the events of September 11, 2001. Critiquing government policy, citizen apathy, and societal justifications following the attacks, these writers present a wide range of opinions on such issues as contemporary American foreign policy and displays of patriotism in the wake of the disaster.

Whether illuminating the narratives that have been used to legitimate the war on terror, reflecting on the power of American consumer culture to transform the attack sites into patriotic tourist attractions, or insisting that to be a Christian is to be a pacifist, these essays refuse easy answers. They consider why the Middle East harbors a deep-seated hatred for the United States. They argue that the U.S. drive to win the cold war made the nation more like its enemies, leading the government to support ruthless anti-Communist tyrants such as Mobutu, Suharto, and Pinochet. They urge Americans away from the pitfall of national self-righteousness toward an active peaceableness—an alert, informed, practiced state of being—deeply contrary to both passivity and war. Above all, the essays assembled in Dissent from the Homeland are a powerful entreaty for thought, analysis, and understanding. Originally published as a special issue of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly, Dissent from the Homeland has been expanded to include new essays as well as a new introduction and postscript.

Contributors. Srinivas Aravamudan, Michael J. Baxter, Jean Baudrillard, Robert N. Bellah, Daniel Berrigan, Wendell Berry, Vincent J. Cornell, David James Duncan, Stanley Hauerwas, Fredric Jameson, Frank Lentricchia, Catherine Lutz, Jody McAuliffe, John Milbank, Peter Ochs, Donald E. Pease, Anne R. Slifkin, Rowan Williams, Susan Willis, Slavoj Zizek

Dissent in American Religion, originally published in 1973, was the first book to present religious dissent in the United States as a pervasive but hidden and often-ignored stream in American life. The first volume in the Chicago History of American Religion series, it reviewed the history of our nation’s longest dissenting tradition—a tradition older and richer in the realm of religion than in any other facet of national life. Indeed, Edwin Scott Gaustad argued that religious dissent was essential to the character of the American religious experience and stood in profound disagreement with society’s orthodox values and beliefs.

This new edition, which reinaugurates the Chicago History of American Religion series under the new editorship of John Corrigan, features new commentary by Gaustad and Corrigan on the past thirty years of American religious history and the importance of understanding dissent in American religion today.

“This is an important and erudite work which shows the originality and scope which scholarship can bring to human experience.” —Los Angeles Times

“We shall understand the religious past and present better for reading Gaustad’s brief, well-written, helpful book.” —Commonweal

Dissent in Dangerous Times presents essays by six distinguished scholars, who provide their own unique views on the interplay of loyalty, patriotism, and dissent.

While dissent has played a central role in our national history and in the American cultural imagination, it is usually dangerous to those who practice it, and always unpalatable to its targets. War does not encourage the tolerance of opposition at home any more than it does on the front: if the War on Terror is to be a permanent war, then the consequences for American political freedoms cannot be overestimated.

"Dissent in Dangerous Times examines the nature of political repression in liberal societies, and the political and legal implications of living in an environment of fear. This profound, incisive, at times even moving volume calls upon readers to think about, and beyond, September 11, reminding us of both the fragility and enduring power of freedom."
--Nadine Strossen, President, American Civil Liberties Union, and Professor of Law, New York Law School.


Contributors to this volume

Lauren Berlant

Wendy Brown

David Cole

Hugh Gusterson

Nancy L. Rosenblum

Austin Sarat

Winner of the Richard L. Wentworth Prize in American History, Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize, and the William Rockhill Nelson Award

On a hot summer evening in 1958, a group of African American students in Wichita, Kansas, quietly entered Dockum's Drug Store and sat down at the whites-only lunch counter. This was the beginning of the first sustained, successful student sit-in of the modern civil rights movement, instigated in violation of the national NAACP's instructions.

Dissent in Wichita traces the contours of race relations and black activism in this unexpected locus of the civil rights movement. Based on interviews with more than eighty participants in and observers of Wichita's civil rights struggles, this powerful study hones in on the work of black and white local activists, setting their efforts in the context of anticommunism, FBI operations against black nationalists, and the civil rights policies of administrations from Eisenhower through Nixon.

Through her close study of events in Wichita, Eick reveals the civil rights movement as a national, not a southern, phenomenon. She focuses particularly on Chester I. Lewis, Jr., a key figure in the local as well as the national NAACP. Lewis initiated one of the earliest investigations of de facto school desegregation by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and successfully challenged employment discrimination in the nation's largest aircraft industries.

Dissent in Wichita offers a moving account of the efforts of Lewis, Vivian Parks, Anna Jane Michener, and other courageous individuals to fight segregation and discrimination in employment, public accommodations, housing, and schools. This volume also offers the first extended examination of the Young Turks, a radical movement to democratize and broaden the agenda of the NAACP for which Lewis provided critical leadership.

Through a close study of personalities and local politics in Wichita over two decades, Eick demonstrates how the tenor of black activism and white response changed as economic disparities increased and divisions within the black community intensified. Her analysis, enriched by the words and experiences of men and women who were there, offers new insights into the civil rights movement as a whole and into the complex interplay between local and national events.

Musical sound has been central to heteromasculinist productions of nation and homeland, whether Chicano, Tejano, Texan, Mexican, or American. If this assertion holds true, as Deborah R. Vargas suggests, then what are we to make of those singers and musicians whose representations of gender and sexuality are irreconcilable with canonical Chicano/Tejano music or what Vargas refers to as “la onda”? These are the “dissonant divas” Vargas discusses, performers who stimulate our listening for alternative borderlands imaginaries that are inaudible within the limits of “la onda.”

Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music focuses on the Texan monument of the Alamo and its association with Rosita Fernandez; Tejano corrido folklore and its musical antithesis in Chelo Silva; the female accordion-playing bodies of Ventura Alonza and Eva Ybarra as incompatible with the instrumental labor of conjunto music; geography as national border, explored through the multiple national music scales negotiated by Eva Garza; and racialized gender, viewed through Selena’s integration of black diasporic musical sound. Vargas offers a feminist analysis of these figures’ contributions by advancing a notion of musical dissonance—a dissonance that recognizes the complexity of gender, sexuality, and power within Chicana/o culture.

Incorporating ethnographic fieldwork, oral history, and archival research, Vargas’s study demonstrates how these singers work together to explode the limits of Texan, Chicano, Tejano, Mexican, and American identities.

Although most accounts of the Civil War's New Mexico campaign have focused on the Confederate effort, Distant Bugles, Distant Drums brings to life the epic march of 1,000 men recruited from Colorado's towns, farms, and mining camps to fight 3,000 Confederate soldiers in New Mexico.

Drawing on previously overlooked diaries, letters, and contemporary newspaper accounts, military historian Flint Whitlock brings the Civil War in the West to life. Distant Bugles, Distant Drums details the battles of 1,000 Coloradans against 3,000 Confederate soldiers in New Mexico and offers vivid portraits of the leaders and soldiers involved - men whose strengths and flaws would shape the fate of the nation.

On their way to Colorado in search of gold and silver for the Confederacy's dwindling coffers, Texan Confederates won a series of engagements along the Rio Grande. Hastily assembled troops that had marched to meet them from Colorado finally turned them back in an epic conflict at Gloriéta Pass.

Miners, farmers, and peacetime officers turned themselves overnight into soldiers to keep the Confederacy from capturing the West's mines, shaping the outcome of the Civil War. Distant Bugles, Distant Drums tells their story. Southwest Book Award Winner from the Border Regional Library Association

In Distant Corners, his follow-up to Soccer in a Football World, David Wangerin details several of the people, places, and events that shaped American soccer history. Despite its struggle for popular acceptance, soccer in the United States has a rich history. Wangerin profiles Tom Cahill, the almost-forgotten "father of American soccer," and writes passionately about the 1979 North American Soccer League season, the high-water mark of the game in the twentieth century.

Wangerin shows how the American appetite for soccer has ebbed and grown over the years, chronicling the game at the college and professional levels and describing the city of St. Louis's unique historic attachment to the sport. Wangerin believes that the time is ripe for American fans to look into their own history and recognize the surprisingly deep connection their country has to soccer.

Distant Islands is a modern narrative history of the Japanese American community in New York City between America's centennial year and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Often overshadowed in historical literature by the Japanese diaspora on the West Coast, this community, which dates back to the 1870s, has its own fascinating history.
 
The New York Japanese American community was a composite of several micro communities divided along status, class, geographic, and religious lines. Using a wealth of primary sources—oral histories, memoirs, newspapers, government documents, photographs, and more—Daniel H. Inouye tells the stories of the business and professional elites, mid-sized merchants, small business owners, working-class families, menial laborers, and students that made up these communities. The book presents new knowledge about the history of Japanese immigrants in the United States and makes a novel and persuasive argument about the primacy of class and status stratification and relatively weak ethnic cohesion and solidarity in New York City, compared to the pervading understanding of nikkei on the West Coast. While a few prior studies have identified social stratification in other nikkei communities, this book presents the first full exploration of the subject and additionally draws parallels to divisions in German American communities.
 
Distant Islands is a unique and nuanced historical account of an American ethnic community that reveals the common humanity of pioneering Japanese New Yorkers despite diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and life stories. It will be of interest to general readers, students, and scholars interested in Asian American studies, immigration and ethnic studies, sociology, and history.

Winner- Honorable Mention, 2018 Immigration and Ethnic History Society First Book Award

The adult children he interviewed live at least 200 miles from their parents. In most ways they are similar to the millions of other professionals whose careers have led them to move away from their parents. We hear their voices, as they speak frankly about the advantages, pains, and challenges of separation.

Climo considers distant relationships to be different from other relationships and to be a growing social problem. Distant living complicates communications by shaping and restricting both phone calls and visits. His description of the typical phone call and typical seasonal visit, with their patterns and limitations, will sound familiar to many of us. In addition to affecting communications, distance affects memories of past parent-child relationships in ways that influence present relationships. Memories, which take on great weight, tend to determine current behavior. Most seriously, distance limits the kinds of assistance children can provide when their parents become ill, resulting in frustration, anger, guilt, and a sense of powerlessness.

Climo urges us to be more aware of distant living as a growing social problem. The percentage of children who move away from their parents will continue to increase. Once adult children acknowledge the challenges distance creates, they can learn to develop better communications and to deal with their feelings of ambivalence.

A dynamic account of the history, practice, and theory of poetry as performance.

Distant Reading considers poetry as performance, offers new insights into its popularity, and proposes a new history of its origins. It also explores related issues concerning the reception of poetry, the impact of the computer on how we read poetry, the persistence of the letter "I" in poems by avant-garde poets, the strangeness of the line-break as a demand on the reader's attention, and the idea of the reader as consumer. These themes are connected by a historically contextualized and theoretically sophisticated discussion of contemporary American and British poets continuing to work in the modernist tradition.

The introductory essay establishes a new methodology that transforms close reading into what Middleton calls "distant reading," interpretive reading that acknowledges the distances that texts travel from their point of composition to readers in other geographical and historical locations. It indicates that poetic innovation is often driven by a desire on the part of the poet to make this distance do cultural work in the meanings that the poem generates.

Ultimately, Distant Reading treats poetry as a cultural practice that is always situated within specific sites of performance—recited on stage, displayed in magazines, laid out on a page, scrolled on the computer screen—rather than as a transcendent cloud of meaning tethered only to its words.

During the period from 1836 to 1874, the legal system in the new state of Arkansas developed amid huge social change. While the legislature could, and did, determine what issues were considered of importance to the populace, the Arkansas Supreme Court determined the efficacy of legislation in cases involving land titles, banks, transportation, slavery, family law, property, debt, contract, criminal law, and procedure.

Distinguishing the Righteous from the Roguish examines the court’s decisions in this era and shows how Arkansas, as a rural slave-holding state, did not follow the transformational patterns typical of some other states during the nineteenth century. Rather than using the law to promote broad economic growth and encourage social change, the Arkansas court attempted to accommodate the interests of the elite class by preserving the institution of slavery. The ideology of paternalism is reflected in the decisions of the court, and Looney shows how social and political stability—an emphasis on preserving the status quo of the so-called “righteous”—came at the expense of broader economic development.

In recent years, stories of reckless lawyers and greedy citizens have given the legal system, and victims in general, a bad name. Many Americans have come to believe that we live in the land of the litigious, where frivolous lawsuits and absurdly high settlements reign.

Scholars have argued for years that this common view of the depraved ruin of our civil legal system is a myth, but their research and statistics rarely make the news. William Haltom and Michael McCann here persuasively show how popularized distorted understandings of tort litigation (or tort tales) have been perpetuated by the mass media and reform proponents. Distorting the Law lays bare how media coverage has sensationalized lawsuits and sympathetically portrayed corporate interests, supporting big business and reinforcing negative stereotypes of law practices.

Based on extensive interviews, nearly two decades of newspaper coverage, and in-depth studies of the McDonald's coffee case and tobacco litigation, Distorting the Law offers a compelling analysis of the presumed litigation crisis, the campaign for tort law reform, and the crucial role the media play in this process.

 

This insightful study places African American women's stardom in historical and industrial contexts by examining the star personae of five African American women: Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Halle Berry. Interpreting each woman's celebrity as predicated on a brand of charismatic authority, Mia Mask shows how these female stars have ultimately complicated the conventional discursive practices through which blackness and womanhood have been represented in commercial cinema, independent film, and network television.

Mask examines the function of these stars in seminal yet underanalyzed films. She considers Dandridge's status as a sexual commodity in films such as Tamango, revealing the contradictory discourses regarding race and sexuality in segregation-era American culture. Grier's feminist-camp performances in sexploitation pictures Women in Cages and The Big Doll House and her subsequent blaxploitation vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown highlight a similar tension between representing African American women as both objectified stereotypes and powerful, self-defining icons. Mask reads Goldberg's transforming habits in Sister Act and The Associate as representative of her unruly comedic routines, while Winfrey's daily television performance as self-made, self-help guru echoes Horatio Alger narratives of success. Finally, Mask analyzes Berry's meteoric success by acknowledging the ways in which Dandridge's career made Berry's possible.

In Divergent Paths to College, Megan M. Holland examines how high schools structure different pathways that lead students to very different college destinations based on race and class. She finds that racial and class inequalities are reproduced through unequal access to key sources of information, even among students in the same school and even in schools with well-established college-going cultures. As the college application process becomes increasingly complex and high-stakes, social capital, or relationships with people who can provide information as well as support and guidance, becomes much more critical. Although much has been written about the college-bound experience, we know less about the role that social capital plays, and specifically how high schools can serve as organizational brokers of social ties. The relationships that high schools cultivate between students and higher education institutions by inviting college admissions officers into their schools to market to students, is a particularly critical, yet unexplored source of college information.

  The promise of upward mobility—the notion that everyone has the chance to get ahead—is one of this country's most cherished ideals, a hallmark of the American Dream. But in today's volatile labor market, the tradition of upward mobility for all may be a thing of the past. In a competitive world of deregulated markets and demanding shareholders, many firms that once offered the opportunity for advancement to workers have remade themselves as leaner enterprises with more flexible work forces. Divergent Paths examines the prospects for upward mobility of workers in this changed economic landscape. Based on an innovative comparison of the fortunes of two generations of young, white men over the course of their careers, Divergent Paths documents the divide between the upwardly mobile and the growing numbers of workers caught in the low-wage trap. The first generation entered the labor market in the late 1960s, a time of prosperity and stability in the U.S. labor market, while the second generation started work in the early 1980s, just as the new labor market was being born amid recession, deregulation, and the weakening of organized labor. Tracking both sets of workers over time, the authors show that the new labor market is more volatile and less forgiving than the labor market of the 1960s and 1970s. Jobs are less stable, and the penalties for failing to find a steady employer are more severe for most workers. At the top of the job pyramid, the new nomads—highly credentialed, well-connected workers—regard each short-term project as a springboard to a better-paying position, while at the bottom, a growing number of retail workers, data entry clerks, and telemarketers, are consigned to a succession of low-paying, dead-end jobs. While many commentators dismiss public anxieties about job insecurity as overblown, Divergent Paths carefully documents hidden trends in today's job market which confirm many of the public's fears. Despite the celebrated job market of recent years, the authors show that the old labor market of the 1960s and 1970s propelled more workers up the earnings ladder than does today's labor market. Divergent Paths concludes with a discussion of policy strategies, such as regional partnerships linking corporate, union, government, and community resources, which may help repair the career paths that once made upward mobility a realistic ambition for all American workers.

More than half a century after the first Jim Crow laws were dismantled, the majority of urban neighborhoods in the United States remain segregated by race. The degree of social and economic advantage or disadvantage that each community experiences—particularly its crime rate—is most often a reflection of which group is in the majority. As Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo note in Divergent Social Worlds, "Race, place, and crime are still inextricably linked in the minds of the public." This book broadens the scope of single-city, black/white studies by using national data to compare local crime patterns in five racially distinct types of neighborhoods. Peterson and Krivo meticulously demonstrate how residential segregation creates and maintains inequality in neighborhood crime rates. Based on the authors' groundbreaking National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS), Divergent Social Worlds provides a more complete picture of the social conditions underlying neighborhood crime patterns than has ever before been drawn. The study includes economic, social, and local investment data for nearly nine thousand neighborhoods in eighty-seven cities, and the findings reveal a pattern across neighborhoods of racialized separation among unequal groups. Residential segregation reproduces existing privilege or disadvantage in neighborhoods—such as adequate or inadequate schools, political representation, and local business—increasing the potential for crime and instability in impoverished non-white areas yet providing few opportunities for residents to improve conditions or leave. And the numbers bear this out. Among urban residents, more than two-thirds of all whites, half of all African Americans, and one-third of Latinos live in segregated local neighborhoods. More than 90 percent of white neighborhoods have low poverty, but this is only true for one quarter of black, Latino, and minority areas. Of the five types of neighborhoods studied, African American communities experience violent crime on average at a rate five times that of their white counterparts, with violence rates for Latino, minority, and integrated neighborhoods falling between the two extremes. Divergent Social Worlds lays to rest the popular misconception that persistently high crime rates in impoverished, non-white neighborhoods are merely the result of individual pathologies or, worse, inherent group criminality. Yet Peterson and Krivo also show that the reality of crime inequality in urban neighborhoods is no less alarming. Separate, the book emphasizes, is inherently unequal. Divergent Social Worlds lays the groundwork for closing the gap—and for next steps among organizers, policymakers, and future researchers. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology

Africans are among the fastest-growing immigrant groups in the United States. Although they are racially and ethnically diverse, few studies have examined how these differences affect their patterns of incorporation into society. This book is the first to highlight the role of race and ethnicity, Arab ethnicity in particular, in shaping the experiences of African immigrants. It demonstrates that American conceptions of race result in significant inequalities in the ways in which African immigrants are socially integrated. Thomas argues that suggestions that Black Africans are model-minorities who have overcome the barriers of race are misleading, showing that Black and Arab-ethnicity Africans systematically experience less favorable socioeconomic outcomes than their White African counterparts. Overall, the book makes three critical arguments. First, historical and contemporary constructions of race have important implications for understanding the dynamics of African immigration and settlement in the United States. Second, there are significant racial inequalities in the social and economic incorporation of contemporary African immigrants. Finally, Arab ethnicity has additional implications for understanding intra-racial disparities in incorporation among contemporary African immigrants. In general, these arguments are foundational for understanding the diversity of African immigrant experiences.

Diversity, despite what we say, disturbs us. In the U.S., we debate linguistic rights, the need for an official language, and educational policies for language minority students. On the one hand, we believe in the rights of individuals, including (at least in the academy) the right to one’s own language. On the other hand, we sponsor a single common language, monolingual and standard, for full participation and communication in both the academy and in U.S. society.

In Diverse by Design, Christopher Schroeder reports on an institutional case study conducted at an officially designated Hispanic-Serving Institution. He gives particular attention to a cohort of Latino students in a special admissions program, to document their experience of a program designed to help students surmount the “obstacle” that ethnolinguistic diversity is perceived to be.

Ultimately, Schroeder argues for reframing multilingualism and multiculturalism, not as obstacles, but as intellectual resources to exploit. While diversity might disturb us, we can overcome its challenges by a more expansive sense of social identity. In an increasingly globalized society, literacy ideologies are ever more critical to educational equity, and to human lives.

The United States is more diverse than ever before. Increased immigration has added to a vibrant cultural fabric, and women and minorities have made significant strides in overcoming overt discrimination. At the same time, economic inequality has increased significantly in recent decades, and the Great Recession substantially weakened the economic standing not only of the poor but also of the middle class. Diversity and Disparities, edited by sociologist John Logan, assembles impressive new studies that interpret the social and economic changes in the United States over the last decade. The authors, leading social scientists from many disciplines, analyze changes in the labor market, family structure, immigration, and race. They find that while America has grown more diverse, the opportunities available to disadvantaged groups have become more unequal. Drawing on detailed data from the decennial census, the American Community Survey, and other sources, the authors chart the growing diversity and the deepening disparities among different groups in the United States Harry J. Holzer and Marek Hlavac document that although the economy always rises and falls over the business cycle, the Great Recession of 2007–2009 was a catastrophic event that saw record levels of unemployment, especially among less-educated workers, young people, and minorities. Emily Rosenbaum shows how the Great Recession amplified disparities in access to home ownership, and demonstrates that young adults, especially African Americans, are falling behind previous cohorts not only in home ownership and wealth but even in starting their own families and households. Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff explore the rise of class segregation as higher-income Americans are moving away from others into separate and privileged neighborhoods and communities. Immigration has also seen class polarization, with an increase in both highly skilled workers and undocumented immigrants. As Frank D. Bean and his colleagues show, the lack of a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants inhibits the educational and economic opportunities for their children and grandchildren. Barrett Lee and colleagues demonstrate that the nation and most cities and towns are becoming more diverse by race and ethnicity. However, while black-white segregation is slowly falling, Hispanics and Asians remain as segregated today as they were in 1980. Diversity and Disparities raises concerns about the extent of socioeconomic immobility in the United States today. This volume provides valuable information for policymakers, journalists, and researchers seeking to understand the current state of the nation.

In The Divided Dominion, Ethan A. Schmidt examines the social struggle that created Bacon's Rebellion, focusing on the role of class antagonism in fostering violence toward native people in seventeenth-century Virginia. This provocative volume places a dispute among Virginians over the permissibility of eradicating Native Americans for land at the forefront in understanding this pivotal event.

Myriad internal and external factors drove Virginians to interpret their disputes with one another increasingly along class lines. The decades-long tripartite struggle among elite whites, non-elite whites, and Native Americans resulted in the development of mutually beneficial economic and political relationships between elites and Native Americans. When these relationships culminated in the granting of rights—equal to those of non-elite white colonists—to Native Americans, the elites crossed a line and non-elite anger boiled over. A call for the annihilation of all Indians in Virginia united different non-elite white factions and molded them in widespread social rebellion.

The Divided Dominion places Indian policy at the heart of Bacon's Rebellion, revealing the complex mix of social, cultural, and racial forces that collided in Virginia in 1676. This new analysis will interest students and scholars of colonial and Native American history.

Divided Power is a collection of eight original essays written for the Fulbright Institute of International Relations that focuses on timely yet unanswerable questions about the relationship between the executive and legislative branches in the formation of American foreign policy. In trying to answer questions about what the nation’s foreign policy is, and who has the upper hand in making it, these essays examine the struggle between the constant of the division of powers mandated by the Constitution (ambiguous though it may be) and the ever-changing political realities and conventional wisdoms of the day. Within that context, the authors also examine the society and culture in which those realities and wisdoms are nested. The goal of these essays is to offer a snapshot in time of the interaction of the executive and legislative branches in the shaping of our foreign policy, framed and informed by the intellectual and political realities that characterize the post–Cold War, post–September 11 world.

Among all natural resource and environmental problems between the United States and Mexico, water has been the most troublesome, with ongoing historic contests over water supply becoming superseded by new controversies over water quality. Divided Waters analyzes the politics of water management along the U.S.-Mexico border, using the case of Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora as a window on the problems and possibilities involved. The authors explore the water problems that Ambos Nogales shares with larger border communities—surface and groundwater contamination, inadequate and insecure supplies, inequitable distribution of resources, flooding, and endangered riparian habitats—considering both the physical characteristics of the water supply and the coping mechanisms of the people who make use of it. They review the prevailing confusion of laws, administrative practices, and political incentives, then recommend the design elements they believe must be included before successful improvements can occur at both the institutional and the resource management levels.

Established in 1630, Watertown was among the original six towns of Massachusetts. Its early history was marked by frequent disputes, a penchant for questioning authority, and an atmosphere of tension and discord. In recounting the story of Watertown's formative years, Roger Thompson examines how the community managed to avoid descending into anarchy. He also explores the ways in which English settlers preserved their habits of behavior in a new-world environment, even as they were obliged to innovate and embrace change.

Thompson describes Watertown's early government, its relations with Native Americans and neighboring communities, its religious and economic affairs, and the day-to-day experiences of its people. Conflict occurred over a wide variety of issues: land allocation, administrative accountability, religious orthodoxy and exclusivity, generational and gender differences, livestock and fencing, haves and have-nots.

Thompson brings these disputes to life through a series of vivid case studies drawn from the unpublished Middlesex County Court Records. Among others, we meet John Sawin, who despite his best efforts at subterfuge was convicted of stealing and selling a neighbor's horse; Susanna Woodward, whose pregnancy resulted in a fiercely contested paternity case; and Edward Sanders, whose punishment for child abuse was both a whipping and a ruling that when in public he must "wear a rope round his neck openly to be seen hanging down two feet."

Throughout the book, the same themes reappear: continuity and change, the persistent conflicts of the first two generations, and the countervailing forces of communal cohesion.

When news of the O. J. Simpson verdict swept across the United States, a nation stood divided as blacks and whites reacted differently to the decision. Seldom has the racial division that permeates our society come so clearly and prominently into view.

Divided by Color supplies the reasons for this division, asserting that racial resentment continues to exist. Despite a parade of recent books optimistically touting the demise of racial hostility in the United States, the authors marshal a wealth of the most current and comprehensive evidence available to prove their case. Kinder and Sanders reveal that racial resentment remains the most powerful determinant of white opinion on such racially charged issues as welfare, affirmative action, school desegregation, and the plight of the inner city.

But more than a comprehensive description of American views on race, Divided by Color seeks to explain just why black and white Americans believe what they do. Kinder and Sanders analyze the critical factors that shape people's opinion on race-related issues, uncovering the relative importance of self-interest, group identity, ideological principles, as well as racial animosity. Finally, the authors explore how the racial divide has insinuated itself into the presidential election process and examine the role of political elites in framing racial issues for ordinary citizens.

The most accurate and thorough analysis of American attitudes toward race and racial policies undertaken in decades, Divided by Color is destined to become a landmark work on race in America.

Many property lines drawn in early America still survive today and continue to shape the landscape and character of the United States. Surprisingly, though, no one until now has thoroughly examined the process by which land was divided into private property and distributed to settlers from the beginning of colonization to early nationhood.

In this unprecedented study, Edward T. Price covers most areas of the United States in which the initial division of land was controlled by colonial governments—the original thirteen colonies, and Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas. By examining different land policies and the irregular pattern of property that resulted from them, Price chronicles the many ways colonies managed land to promote settlement, develop agriculture, defend frontiers, and attract investment. His analysis reveals as much about land planning techiniques carried to America from Europe as innovations spurred by the unique circumstances of the new world.

Price’s analysis draws on his thorough survey of property records from the first land plans in Virginia in 1607 to empresario grants in Texas in the 1820s. This breadth of data allows him to identify regional differences in allocating land, assess the impact of land planning by historical figures like William Penn of Pennsylvania and Lord Baltimore of Maryland, and trace changes in patterns of land division and ownership through transfers of power among Britain, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Mexico, and the Republic of Texas.

Winner, ISHS Superior Achievement Award for a Scholarly Publication, 2016

In 1820 the Missouri controversy erupted over the issue of slavery in the newly acquired lands of the Louisiana Purchase. It fell to Jesse Burgess Thomas (1777–1853), a junior U.S. senator from the new state of Illinois, to handle the delicate negotiations that led to the Missouri Compromise. Thomas’s maturity, good judgment, and restraint helped pull the country back from the brink of disunion and created a compromise that held for thirty-four years. In Dividing the Union, Matthew W. Hall examines the legal issues underlying the controversy and the legislative history of the Missouri Compromise while focusing on the aspects of Thomas’s life and character that gave him such influence. The first in-depth biography of Thomas, Hall’s work demonstrates how the legislative battle over the Compromise reflected the underlying nuances of the larger struggle over slavery.
 
The text of the Missouri Compromise originated from the Northwest Ordinance. Article VI of the Ordinance purported to prohibit slavery in the Northwest Territory, but paradoxically, a provision that assured property rights in another article was used to protect slavery. People in some parts of the Northwest sought to circumvent Article VI by formulating indenture laws and various state constitutional provisions addressing slavery. Pro- and antislavery activists eventually developed quite different interpretations of the relevant language in these documents, making negotiations over slavery in the new territory extremely complicated.
 
As Hall demonstrates, Thomas was perfectly situated geographically, politically, and ideologically to navigate the Missouri controversy. He was the first speaker of the Indiana Territorial General Assembly, one of the first territorial judges in the Illinois Territory, and the president of the Illinois State Constitutional Convention in 1818. Because the drive for statehood in Illinois was strong, the convention managed to skirt the divisive issue of slavery, due in large part to Thomas’s efforts. That he was never required to clearly articulate his own views on slavery allowed Thomas to maintain a degree of neutrality, and his varied political career gave him the experience necessary to craft a compromise.
 
Thomas’s final version of the Compromise included shrewdly worded ambiguities that supported opposing interests in the matter of slavery. These ambiguities secured the passage of the Compromise and its endurance until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. By weaving Thomas’s life story into the history of the Missouri Compromise, Hall offers new insight into both a pivotal piece of legislation and an important, previously overlooked figure in nineteenth-century American politics. 

Barbara Kreiger’s intriguing narrative presents the account of Clorinda Minor, a charismatic American Christian woman whose belief in the Second Coming prompted her to leave a comfortable life in Philadelphia in 1851 and take up agriculture in Palestine.

After her disappointment in a failed prophecy that the End of Days would take place in October 1844, Mrs. Minor determined that the Holy Land was not yet adequately prepared for such an event and decided that it would be her mission to teach the poverty-stricken Jews of Palestine to work the soil. In this very American story, Mrs. Minor, like so many other pioneers of her day, looked to the land as her future.

Even as her mission was distinctly religious, her daily efforts were in the social realm. And although her work brought Jews and Arabs together, and her small farm was a unique settlement where Christians, Muslims, and Jews labored alongside one another, the events detailed in Divine Expectations had dramatic and tragic diplomatic and international repercussions.

With the deft touch of a novelist, Barbara Kreiger weaves the little-known story of Clorinda Minor into the larger context of the region and its history, presenting it in its charming eccentricity and its gripping reality.

This first Gnomon Press edition was published in 1990.

Divine Right’s Trip is a countercultural classic that captures the spirit of the 1960s and early 1970s. The novel follows Divine Right (D. R.) Davenport, a restless young man on a journey of self-discovery, as he embarks on a cross-country road trip in his beloved but unreliable old Volkswagen bus, Urge. Accompanied at times by his free-spirited girlfriend, Estelle, D. R. embarks on an odyssey that takes him through communes, small towns, and encounters with eccentric characters, each offering insights into D. R.’s own struggles with identity, freedom, and belonging.

Originally published as a serial in the Last Whole Earth Catalog in 1971, Divine Right’s Trip is both a road novel and a coming-of-age story, reflecting the era’s tensions between individualism and community, rebellion and responsibility. Gurney Norman’s writing is infused with humor, sharp social observation, and a deep appreciation for the landscapes and people of Appalachia, where D. R. ultimately finds himself confronting his roots.

A defining work of Appalachian literature and the countercultural movement, Divine Right’sTrip remains a thought-provoking exploration of personal growth, societal change, and the search for meaning in an ever-shifting world.