28164 books match the query 'History' and 908 start with d

cover of Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920-40

Distinction and Denial

Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920-40

Mary Ann Calo

University of Michigan Press, 2007

Distinctionand Denial challenges conventional theories of race and art by examining the role early twentieth-century art critics played in marginalizing African American artists. Mary Ann Calo dispels the myth of a unified African American artistic tradition through an engaging study of the germinal writing of Alain Locke and other significant critics of the era, who argued that African American artists were both a diverse group and a constituent element of America’s cultural center. By documenting the effects of the “Negro aesthetic” on African American artists working in the interwar years, Distinctionand Denial shows that black artistic production existed between the claims of a distinctly African American tradition and full inclusion into American modernist culture—never fully inside or outside the mainstream.

“A major contribution to the scholarship of African American artists in the inter-war period. With scrupulous research and probing analyses, Calo’s study enables scholars, students, and those interested in the Harlem Renaissance to grasp the intellectual debates, institutional support, and art world promotion that advanced an emerging cohort of African American artists.”

—Patricia Hills, Boston University

“A careful, thorough, historically grounded study that builds a new and significant argument challenging conventional histories of African American art. Sure to become indispensable to any scholarly discussion of American art or African American cultural studies.”

—Helen Langa, American University

Mary Ann Calo is Professor of Art History and Director of the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts at Colgate University. She is author of Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth Century and editor of Critical Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings.

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cover of Distinguishing the Righteous from the Roguish: The Arkansas Supreme Court, 1836–1874

Distinguishing the Righteous from the Roguish

The Arkansas Supreme Court, 1836–1874

J.W. Looney

University of Arkansas Press, 2016

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.
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cover of Distorted Mirrors: Americans and Their Relations with Russia and China in the Twentieth Century

Distorted Mirrors

Americans and Their Relations with Russia and China in the Twentieth Century

Donald E. Davis & Eugene P. Trani

University of Missouri Press, 2009

As the United States enters the twenty-first century, it confronts two powers that loomed less large on the world stage a century before. Yet American policies toward Russia and China have been shaped by attitudes going back even further, as this new book relates.
Distorted Mirrors traces American prejudices toward the two countries by focusing on the views of influential writers and politicians over the course of the twentieth century. Donald Davis and Eugene Trani show where American images of Russia and China originated, how they evolved, and how they have often helped sustain foreign policies generally negative toward the former and positive toward the latter.
This wide-ranging survey draws on memoirs, archives, and interviews, much the material appearing in print for the first time, to show how influential individuals shaped these perceptions and policies based on what they saw—or thought they saw—in those two countries. Through a series of tableaux that traces America’s relations with Russia and China through the twentieth century, the authors show how personalities of certain players impacted interpretation of key situations and conflicts and how cultural attitudes toward Russia and China became ingrained and difficult to dislodge.
The book traces formative attitudes back to two late-nineteenth-century books, with George Kennan’s Siberia and the Exile System painting a grim picture of tsarist penal colonies and William Rockhill’s Land of the Lamas depicting China as an exotic Shangri-la. Davis and Trani show how these images were sustained over the years: for Russia, by Slavic expert Samuel Harper, State Department official Robert Kelley, journalist Eugene Lyons, ambassador William Bullitt, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and policymakers George F. Kennan and Paul Nitze; and for China, by President Woodrow Wilson, philosopher John Dewey, journalist Edgar Snow, novelist Pearl S. Buck, ambassador Nelson T. Johnson, FDR, journalist Theodore White, and statesman Henry Kissinger. They also relate how Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush tried to replace these misconceptions with a policy of accommodation, and they assess the state of current U.S. attitudes and policies.
Distorted Mirrors marks a fresh approach to U.S. relations with these countries, emphasizing long-term attitudes that influenced policies rather than the reverse. It shows us that perceptions shaped over the course of the twentieth century are crucial for their bearing on the twenty-first, particularly if those unrestrained prejudices reemerge.
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cover of Distracted by Alabama: Tangled Threads of Natural History, Local History, and Folklore

Distracted by Alabama

Tangled Threads of Natural History, Local History, and Folklore

James Seay Brown Jr.

University of Alabama Press, 2022

Where rivers, railroads, and redhorse fish tell the story of Alabama’s soul.

A gateway to Alabama for the omnivorous mind, Distracted by Alabama is a collection of twelve captivating essays about Alabama and the South by Samford University writer and scholar Jim Brown, a former president of the Alabama Folklife Association.

During his decades living and teaching in Alabama, Brown followed his curiosity down myriad pathways about Alabama and the region, including the state’s majestic landscape, plants and animals found nowhere else, history, and rich folkways. In the tapestry of Alabama culture, Brown traces the threads of Native American, African slave, and European settler influences, woven over the centuries into novel patterns that surprise and fascinate.  

Writing in the voice of a learned companion, Brown reveals insights and stories about unforgettable facets of Alabama culture, such as Sacred Harp singers and African American railroad callers, the use of handmade snares and stationary fishtraps to catch river redhorse and freshwater drum, white oak basketmaking and herbal medicine traditions, the evolution of the single-pen log cabin into the impressive two-story I-house, and a wealth of other engrossing stories.

An instant classic, Distracted by Alabama is a keepsake that readers who love, visit, or are curious about Alabama and Southern culture will return to again and again.
 

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cover of Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women's Experience of Modern War

Disturbing Practices

History, Sexuality, and Women's Experience of Modern War

Laura Doan

University of Chicago Press, 2013

For decades, the history of sexuality has been a multidisciplinary project serving competing agendas. Lesbian, gay, and queer scholars have produced powerful narratives by tracing the homosexual or queer subject as continuous or discontinuous. Yet organizing historical work around categories of identity as normal or abnormal often obscures how sexual matters were known or talked about in the past. Set against the backdrop of women’s work experiences, friendships, and communities during World War I, Disturbing Practices draws on a substantial body of new archival material to expose the roadblocks still present in current practices and imagine new alternatives.

In this landmark book, Laura Doan clarifies the ethical value and political purpose of identity history—and indeed its very capacity to give rise to innovative practices borne of sustained exchange between queer studies and critical history. Disturbing Practices insists on taking seriously the imperative to step outside the logic of identity to address questions as yet unasked about the modern sexual past.

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cover of Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution

Disunion Among Ourselves

The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution

Eli Merritt

University of Missouri Press, 2025

Winner of the 2024 Society of the Cincinnati Prize from the American Revolution Institute

Winner of the 2023 American Revolution Round Table of Philadelphia book award

In this eye-opening account, Eli Merritt reveals the deep political divisions that almost tore the Union apart during the American Revolution. So fractious were the founders’ political fights that they feared the War of Independence might end in disunion and civil war.

Instead of disbanding into separate regional confederacies, the founders managed to unite for the sake of liberty and self-preservation. In so doing, they succeeded in holding the young nation together. To achieve this, they forged grueling compromises, in­cluding Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Mississippi-Fisheries Compromise of 1779, and the ratification of the Articles of Confederation in 1781.

In addition to bringing new insights to the history of the American Revolution, Disunion Among Ourselves has inevitable resonances with our present era of political hyperpolarization and serves as a touchstone for contemporary politics, reminding us that the founders overcame far tougher times than our own through commitment to ethical constitutional democracy and compromise.

 

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cover of Divas in the Convent: Nuns, Music, and Defiance in Seventeenth-Century Italy

Divas in the Convent

Nuns, Music, and Defiance in Seventeenth-Century Italy

Craig A. Monson

University of Chicago Press, 2012

When eight-year-old Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana (1590–1662) entered one of the preeminent convents in Bologna in 1598, she had no idea what cloistered life had in store for her. Thanks to clandestine instruction from a local maestro di cappella—and despite the church hierarchy’s vehement opposition to all convent music—Vizzana became the star of the convent, composing works so thoroughly modern and expressive that a recent critic described them as “historical treasures.” But at the very moment when Vizzana’s works appeared in 1623—she would be the only Bolognese nun ever to publish her music—extraordinary troubles beset her and her fellow nuns, as episcopal authorities arrived to investigate anonymous allegations of sisterly improprieties with male members of their order.
           
Craig A. Monson retells the story of Vizzana and the nuns of Santa Cristina to elucidate the role that music played in the lives of these cloistered women. Gifted singers, instrumentalists, and composers, these nuns used music not only to forge links with the community beyond convent walls, but also to challenge and circumvent ecclesiastical authority. Monson explains how the sisters of Santa Cristina—refusing to accept what the church hierarchy called God’s will and what the nuns perceived as a besmirching of their honor—fought back with words and music, and when these proved futile, with bricks, roof tiles, and stones. These women defied one Bolognese archbishop after another, cardinals in Rome, and even the pope himself, until threats of excommunication and abandonment by their families brought them to their knees twenty-five years later. By then, Santa Cristina’s imaginative but frail composer literally had been driven mad by the conflict.
           
Monson’s fascinating narrative relies heavily on the words of its various protagonists, on both sides of the cloister wall, who emerge vividly as imaginative, independent-minded, and not always sympathetic figures. In restoring the musically gifted Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana to history, Monson introduces readers to the full range of captivating characters who played their parts in seventeenth-century convent life.
 
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cover of Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Divergent Modernities

Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Julio Ramos

Duke University Press, 2001

Since its first publication in Spanish nearly a decade ago, Julio Ramos’s Desenucuentros de la modernidad en America Latina por el siglo XIX has been recognized as one of the most important studies of modernity in the western hemisphere. Available for the first time in English—and now published with new material—Ramos’s study not only offers an analysis of the complex relationships between history, literature, and nation-building in the modern Latin American context but also takes crucial steps toward the development of a truly comparative inter-American cultural criticism.

With his focus on the nineteenth century, Ramos begins his genealogy of an emerging Latin Americanism with an examination of Argentinean Domingo Sarmiento and Chilean Andrés Bello, representing the “enlightened letrados” of tradition. In contrast to these “lettered men,” he turns to Cuban journalist, revolutionary, and poet José Martí, who, Ramos suggests, inaugurated a new kind of intellectual subject for the Americas. Though tracing Latin American modernity in general, it is the analysis of Martí—particularly his work in the United States—that becomes the focal point of Ramos’s study. Martí’s confrontation with the unequal modernization of the New World, the dependent status of Latin America, and the contrast between Latin America’s culture of elites and the northern mass culture of commodification are, for Ramos, key elements in understanding the complex Latin American experience of modernity.

Including two new chapters written for this edition, as well as translations of three of Martí’s most important works, Divergent Modernities will be indispensable for anyone seeking to understand development and modernity across the Americas.

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cover of Divergent Paths of the Restoration: An Encyclopedia of the Smith–Rigdon Movement

Divergent Paths of the Restoration

An Encyclopedia of the Smith–Rigdon Movement

Steven L. Shields

Signature Books, 2021

When Joseph Smith founded the Church of Christ in 1830, he declared it to be God’s restoration of true Christianity, the Kingdom of God on earth. Although he foresaw opposition to such bold claims, he could not fathom that time and unforeseen circumstances would help to spawn hundreds of off-shoots and competing denominations—all claiming their origins in a movement born and sustained originally by Smith and Sidney Rigdon. Many of these groups have endured and boast multiple congregations of believers in many countries; others came and went quickly and have long since been forgotten. Some have survived but have only appealed to a handful of believers. Steven L Shields has for decades chronicled the various origins and paths of all known Restoration movements. This fifth edition of his encyclopedic study, offered as an ebook, includes recent groups born as internet communities. That so many groups and individuals have been unsatisfied with the more mainstream Mormon churches, yet cling to tenets of the Smith–Rigdon movement, speaks to the strengths of the restoration concept and the naïve view that one denomination can successfully meet all the needs of believers. 
[more]
cover of Divergent Paths of the Restoration: An Encyclopedia of the Smith–Rigdon Movement, Volume 1: Sections 1–4

Divergent Paths of the Restoration

An Encyclopedia of the Smith–Rigdon Movement, Volume 1: Sections 1–4

Steven L. Shields

Signature Books, 2022

When Joseph Smith founded the Church of Christ in 1830, he declared it to be God’s restoration of true Christianity, the Kingdom of God on earth. Although he foresaw opposition to such bold claims, he could not fathom that time and unforeseen circumstances would help to spawn hundreds of off-shoots and competing denominations—all claiming their origins in a movement born and sustained originally by Smith and Sidney Rigdon. Many of these groups have endured and boast multiple congregations of believers in many countries; others came and went quickly and have long since been forgotten. Some have survived but have only appealed to a handful of believers. Steven L Shields has for decades chronicled the various origins and paths of all known Restoration movements. This fifth edition of his encyclopedic study, offered as an ebook, includes recent groups born as internet communities. That so many groups and individuals have been unsatisfied with the more mainstream Mormon churches, yet cling to tenets of the Smith–Rigdon movement, speaks to the strengths of the restoration concept and the naïve view that one denomination can successfully meet all the needs of believers. 
[more]
cover of Divergent Paths of the Restoration: An Encyclopedia of the Smith–Rigdon Movement, Volume 2: Sections 5–12 & Appendices

Divergent Paths of the Restoration

An Encyclopedia of the Smith–Rigdon Movement, Volume 2: Sections 5–12 & Appendices

Steven L. Shields

Signature Books, 2022

When Joseph Smith founded the Church of Christ in 1830, he declared it to be God’s restoration of true Christianity, the Kingdom of God on earth. Although he foresaw opposition to such bold claims, he could not fathom that time and unforeseen circumstances would help to spawn hundreds of off-shoots and competing denominations—all claiming their origins in a movement born and sustained originally by Smith and Sidney Rigdon. Many of these groups have endured and boast multiple congregations of believers in many countries; others came and went quickly and have long since been forgotten. Some have survived but have only appealed to a handful of believers. Steven L Shields has for decades chronicled the various origins and paths of all known Restoration movements. This fifth edition of his encyclopedic study, offered as an ebook, includes recent groups born as internet communities. That so many groups and individuals have been unsatisfied with the more mainstream Mormon churches, yet cling to tenets of the Smith–Rigdon movement, speaks to the strengths of the restoration concept and the naïve view that one denomination can successfully meet all the needs of believers. 
[more]
cover of Diversity and Disparities: America Enters a New Century

Diversity and Disparities

America Enters a New Century

John Logan is professor of sociology and director of the Research Initiative on Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences at Brown University and editor of Diversity and Disparities: America Enters a New Century.

Russell Sage Foundation, 2014

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.
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cover of Diversity: Gender, Color, and Culture

Diversity

Gender, Color, and Culture

Philomena Essed

University of Massachusetts Press, 1996

Contemporary discussions of race, gender, and cultural identity often seem to presuppose an exclusively American context. Yet as Philomena Essed points out in this forcefully argued book, continuing migration has given rise to ever more diverse societies. At the same time, the erosion of traditional national identities has sparked a backlash against racial and ethnic minorities.

Essed examines these problems in a series of interrelated essays, urging us throughout the book to create a society in which diversity is accepted, encouraged, and made central to everyday life.
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cover of Diversity: The History of a Wandering Value

Diversity

The History of a Wandering Value

Lorraine Daston

Central European University Press, 2026

It is startling to realize how quickly and thoroughly the value of diversity, until a few decades ago a value largely confined to the aesthetic and organic realms, has acquired deep political and moral significance. Universities, corporations, and governments are now judged by the degree to which they achieve diversity among their leaders and recognize diversity among their publics. Older values of the liberal polity, for example that of honoring merit without regard to creed, race, sex, or ethnicity, have been increasingly eclipsed by values that closely attend to these and other differentiating traits (which traits matter is contentious). How did this sea change in value come about, and come about so swiftly? And what kind of value is diversity? The long history of diversity as an aesthetic and economic value helps explain the recent rapid rise of diversity as a moral and political value.
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cover of Diverting the Gila: The Pima Indians and the Florence-Casa Grande Project,  1916–1928

Diverting the Gila

The Pima Indians and the Florence-Casa Grande Project, 1916–1928

David H. DeJong

University of Arizona Press, 2021

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans assumed the land and water resources of the West were endless. Water was as vital to newcomers to Arizona’s Florence and Casa Grande valleys as it had always been to the Pima Indians, who had been successfully growing crops along the Gila River for generations when the white settlers moved in.

Diverting the Gila explores the complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering to divide and divert the scarce waters of the Gila River. Residents of Florence, Casa Grande, and the Pima Reservation fought for vital access to water rights. Into this political foray stepped Arizona’s freshman congressman Carl Hayden, who not only united the farming communities but also used Pima water deprivation to the advantage of Florence-Casa Grande and Upper Gila Valley growers. The result was the federal Florence-Casa Grande Project that, as legislated, was intended to benefit Pima growers on the Gila River Indian Reservation first and foremost. As was often the case in the West, well-heeled, nontribal political interests manipulated the laws at the expense of the Indigenous community.

Diverting the Gila is the sequel to David H. DeJong’s 2009 Stealing the Gila, and it continues to tell the story of the forerunner to the San Carlos Irrigation Project and the Gila River Indian Community’s struggle to regain access to their water.
 
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cover of Divide, Provide and Rule: An Integrative History of Poverty Policy, Social Reform, and Social Policy in Hungary under the Habsburg Monarchy

Divide, Provide and Rule

An Integrative History of Poverty Policy, Social Reform, and Social Policy in Hungary under the Habsburg Monarchy

Susan Zimmermann

Central European University Press, 2011

A concise and comprehensive account of the transformation of social policy from traditional poor relief towards social insurance systems in a European state before World War One. Brings together the analysis of older, mostly local welfare policies with the history of social policy developed by the state and operated at a national level. Explores also the interaction of various layers of and actors in welfare policy, i.e. of poor relief, social reform policies and the unfolding welfare state over time, including often neglected elements of these policies such as e.g. protective policies at the work place, housing policy, child protection, and prostitution policies.
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cover of Divided Dominion: Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia

Divided Dominion

Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia

Ethan A. Schmidt

University Press of Colorado, 2014

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.

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cover of Divided Friends

Divided Friends

William L. Portier

Catholic University of America Press, 2013

In two sets of intertwined biographical portraits, spanning two generations, Divided Friends dramatizes the theological issues of the modernist crisis, highlighting their personal dimensions and extensively reinterpreting their long-range effects. The four protagonists are Bishop Denis J. O?Connell, Josephite founder John R. Slattery, together with the Paulists William L. Sullivan and Joseph McSorley. Their lives span the decades from the Americanist crisis of the 1890s right up to the eve of Vatican II. In each set, one leaves the church and one stays. The two who leave come to see their former companions as fundamentally dishonest. Divided Friends entails a reinterpretation of the intellectual fallout from the modernist crisis and a reframing of the 20th century debate about Catholic intellectual life.
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cover of Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation

Divided Korea

Toward a Culture of Reconciliation

Roland Bleiker

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

In 2002, North Korea precipitated a major international crisis when it revealed the existence of a secret nuclear weapons program and announced its withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Earlier in the year, George W. Bush had declared North Korea part of the “axis of evil,” and soon afterward his administration listed the country as a potential target of a preemptive nuclear strike. Pyongyang’s angry reaction ensured the complete deterioration of relations on the Korean peninsula, where only two years before the leaders of North and South Korea had come together in a historic summit meeting.

Few international conflicts are as volatile, protracted, or seemingly insoluble as the one in Korea, where mutual mistrust, hostile Cold War attitudes, and the possibility of a North Korean economic collapse threaten the security of the entire region. For Roland Bleiker, this persistently recurring pattern suggests profound structural problems within and between the two Koreas that have not been acknowledged until now. Expanding the discussion beyond geopolitics and ideology, Bleiker places peninsular tensions in the context of an ongoing struggle over competing forms of Korean identity. Divided Korea examines both domestic and international attitudes toward Korean identity, the legacy of war, and the possibilities for-and anxieties about-unification.

Divided Korea challenges the prevailing logic of confrontation and deterrence, embarking on a fundamental reassessment of both the roots of the conflict and the means to achieve a more stable political environment and, ultimately, peace. In order to realize a lasting solution, Bleiker concludes, the two Koreas and the international community must first show a willingness to accept difference and contemplate forgiveness as part of a broader reconciliation process.


Roland Bleiker is professor of international relations at the University of Queensland. From 1986 to 1988 he served as chief of office for the Swiss delegation to the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission in Panmunjom.

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cover of Divided Loyalties: Young Somali Americans and the Lure of Extremism

Divided Loyalties

Young Somali Americans and the Lure of Extremism

Joseph Weber

Michigan State University Press, 2020

Why do people join violent extremist movements? What attracts so many to fight for terrorist groups like al-Shabab, al-Qaida, and the Islamic State? Journalism professor Joseph Weber answers these questions by examining the case of the more than fifty Somali Americans, mostly young men from Minnesota, who made their way to Somalia or Syria, attempted to get to those countries, aided people who did, or financially backed terrorist groups there. Often defying parents who had fled to the United States seeking safety and prosperity for their children, many of these youths ended up dead, missing, or imprisoned. But for every person who went on or attempted this journey believing they were rising to the defense of Islam, more rejected the temptations of terrorism. What made the difference? The book takes a close look at one man from Minneapolis, the American-born son of a couple who had fled Somalia, who came dangerously close to answering the ISIS call. Abdirahman Abdirashid Bashir’s cousins and friends had taken up arms for the group and reached out to him to join them. From 2014 to 2016 he and a dozen friends—some still in their teens—schemed to find ways to get to Syria. Some succeeded. In the end, Bashir made a different choice. Not only did he reject ISIS’s call, he decided to work with the FBI to spy on his friends and ultimately to testify against them in court. Drawing on extensive interviews, Weber explains why.
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cover of Divided Parties, Strong Leaders

Divided Parties, Strong Leaders

Ruth Bloch Rubin

University of Chicago Press, 2025

Drawing on nearly a century of legislative history, this careful account invites readers to think anew about when, why, and how leaders of divided parties wield power in Congress.

For decades, legislative scholars have viewed party divisions as critical constraints on congressional leadership. The more a party’s rank and file disagree with one another, the weaker their leaders are predicted to be; as member preferences converge, leader power is thought to increase.

In a powerful corrective to this prevailing view, Ruth Bloch Rubin argues that party divisions are not inherently limiting. Divided Parties, Strong Leaders highlights and examines variation in how members of party factions choose to work together. She shows that leaders of divided parties are well positioned to overcome, and even draw strength from, their divided ranks when the collaborative efforts of their coalitions’ competing factions are evenly matched. By contrast, their capacity to get what they want is more limited when one faction has out-collaborated its competition. Presenting detailed case studies of some of the most storied leaders of the postwar Congress, including Speakers Sam Rayburn and Nancy Pelosi, Bloch Rubin analyzes the factional configuration each leader encountered and explains why it mattered for their exercise of power.

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cover of Divided We Stand: Watertown, Massachusetts, 1630-1680

Divided We Stand

Watertown, Massachusetts, 1630-1680

Roger Thompson

University of Massachusetts Press, 2001

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.
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cover of Divided Worlds? Challenges in Classics and New Testament Studies

Divided Worlds? Challenges in Classics and New Testament Studies

Caroline Johnson Hodge

SBL Press, 2023

This volume brings together scholars from New Testament studies and classics, whose fields of study have much in common but are not often in in conversation. The contributors explore how the ancient works they study can be resources for thinking critically and creatively about issues that matter today. The essays address our obligation to take positive moral stands on divisive issues of both the past and the present, including empire, racial/ethnic and religious difference, economic inequality, gender and sexuality, slavery, and disability. Contributors include Douglas Boin, Denise Kimber Buell, Gay L. Byron, Allen Dwight Callahan, Joy Connolly, Jennifer A. Glancy, Shelley P. Haley, Caroline Johnson Hodge, Katherine Lu Hsu, Timothy Joseph, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Yii-Jan Lin, Dominic Machado, Joseph A. Marchal, Thomas R. Martin, Candida R. Moss, Laura Salah Nasrallah, Jorunn Økland, and Abraham Smith.

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cover of Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police

Divided in Unity

Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police

Andreas Glaeser

University of Chicago Press, 1999

More than a decade after unification, Germany remains deeply divided. Following East and West German police officers on their patrols through the newly-united city of Berlin and observing how they make sense of one another in a fast-changing environment, Andreas Glaeser explains how East-West boundaries have been maintained by the interactions of institutions, practices, and cultural forms-including diverging patterns of understanding rooted in vastly different social systems, readily revived Cold War images, the continuing search for an adequate response to Germany's Nazi past, and the politics and organization of unification, which impose highly asymmetrical burdens on east and west. Glaeser also leverages his ethnography to develop an innovative approach to studying identity formation processes. Central to his theory is an emphasis on the exchange of identifications and the particular ways in which they are deployed and recognized in interpretations, narratives, and performances as parts of face-to-face encounters, political discourses, and organizational practices.
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cover of Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma

Dividing Lines

Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma

J. Mills Thornton, III

University of Alabama Press, 2006

Presents the story of the civil rights movement from the perspective of community-municipal history at the grassroots level

Thornton demonstrates that the movement had powerful local sources in its three birth cities—Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. There, the arcane mechanisms of state and city governance and the missteps of municipal politicians and civic leaders—independent of emerging national trends in racial mores—led to the great swell of energy for change that became the civil rights movement.

[more]
cover of Dividing Time: The Invention of Historical Periods in Early Modern Europe

Dividing Time

The Invention of Historical Periods in Early Modern Europe

Frederic Clark

University of Chicago Press, 2027

A bold reconstruction of the origins of the “ancient, medieval, modern” trope used to define historical eras and the transitions between them.

We are used to dividing time, indicating the beginning or end of an era based on a year, a month, or even a specific day, after which (supposedly) “nothing was the same.” In this book, historian and classicist Frederic Clark looks at a particularly enduring form of dividing time—the tripartite distinction between antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity—in order to analyze the history of this division, how it has been constructed and deployed, and what its past and present implications are.

Clark argues that the study of the past has always depended on subdividing it into multiple parts, which tend to underpin any attempt to articulate a system of culture or value. After all, certain eras, ages, and epochs are celebrated as having ushered in a new, better time, whereas others are depicted as extended periods of decay and darkness. Clark provides an ingenious critique of the foundational assumptions underlying our narratives of periodization and the complex and messy process by which historical schemas develop, from the Renaissance through the early modern period to the Enlightenment and beyond. The result is an engaging and erudite tour through time and its many contested divisions, imagined and reimagined across history.

[more]
cover of Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures

Dividing the Isthmus

Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures

By Ana Patricia Rodríguez

University of Texas Press, 2009

In 1899, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) was officially incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, beginning an era of economic, diplomatic, and military interventions in Central America. This event marked the inception of the struggle for economic, political, and cultural autonomy in Central America as well as an era of homegrown inequities, injustices, and impunities to which Central Americans have responded in creative and critical ways. This juncture also set the conditions for the creation of the Transisthmus—a material, cultural, and symbolic site of vast intersections of people, products, and narratives.

Taking 1899 as her point of departure, Ana Patricia Rodríguez offers a comprehensive, comparative, and meticulously researched book covering more than one hundred years, between 1899 and 2007, of modern cultural and literary production and modern empire-building in Central America. She examines the grand narratives of (anti)imperialism, revolution, subalternity, globalization, impunity, transnational migration, and diaspora, as well as other discursive, historical, and material configurations of the region beyond its geophysical and political confines.

Focusing in particular on how the material productions and symbolic tropes of cacao, coffee, indigo, bananas, canals, waste, and transmigrant labor have shaped the transisthmian cultural and literary imaginaries, Rodríguez develops new methodological approaches for studying cultural production in Central America and its diasporas.

Monumental in scope and relentlessly impassioned, this work offers new critical readings of Central American narratives and contributes to the growing field of Central American studies.

[more]
cover of Dividing the Land: Early American Beginnings of Our Private Property Mosaic

Dividing the Land

Early American Beginnings of Our Private Property Mosaic

Edward T. Price

University of Chicago Press, 1995

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.
[more]
cover of Dividing the Union: Jesse Burgess Thomas and the Making of the Missouri Compromise

Dividing the Union

Jesse Burgess Thomas and the Making of the Missouri Compromise

Matthew W. Hall

Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

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. 
[more]
cover of Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture

Divination Engines

Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture

Xiaochang Li

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A revealing and surprising origin story, showing how attempts to render human speech and language computable led from the era of big data to today’s AI.
 
Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In this eye-opening book, technology expert Xiaochang Li shows readers how that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI. With original research and clear explanations, Li elucidates the origins of what’s known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human speech, she demonstrates how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting instead for work-arounds that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Li reveals, transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access, circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and ever-growing amounts of new data.
 
At its core, Divination Engines illuminates how the artifacts of human communication—speech, text, and images—have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today’s algorithmic culture.

[more]
cover of Divination, Politics, and Ancient Near Eastern Empires

Divination, Politics, and Ancient Near Eastern Empires

Alan Lenzi

SBL Press, 2014

Advance your understanding of divination’s role in supporting or undermining imperial aspirations in the ancient Near East

This collection examines the ways that divinatory texts in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East undermined and upheld the empires in which the texts were composed, edited, and read. Nine essays and an introduction engage biblical scholarship on the Prophets, Assyriology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the critical study of Ancient Empires.

Features:

  • Interdisciplinary approaches include propaganda studies
  • Essays examine how biblical and other ancient Near Eastern texts were shaped by political and theological empires
  • Index of ancient sources
[more]
cover of Divine Expectations: An American Woman In Nineteenth-Century Palestine

Divine Expectations

An American Woman In Nineteenth-Century Palestine

Barbara Kreiger

Ohio University Press, 1999

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.

[more]
cover of Divine Presence in Spain and Western Europe 1500–1960: Visions, Religious Images and Photographs

Divine Presence in Spain and Western Europe 1500–1960

Visions, Religious Images and Photographs

William A. Christian Jr.

Central European University Press, 2012

This study addresses the relation of people to divine beings in contemporary and historical communities, as exemplified in three strands. One is a long tradition of visions of mysterious wayfarers in rural Spain who bring otherworldly news and help, including recent examples. Another treats the seeming vivification of religious images—statues, paintings, engravings, and photographs apparently exuding blood, sweat and tears in Spanish homes and churches  in the early modern period and the revival of the phenomenon throughout Europe in the twentieth century.  Of special interest is the third strand of the book: the transposition of medieval and early modern representations of the relations between humans and the divine into the modern art of photography. Christian presents a pictorial examination of the phenomenon with a large number of religious images, commercial postcards and family photographs from the first half of past century Europe.
[more]
cover of Divine Speech in Human Words: Thomistic Engagements with Scripture

Divine Speech in Human Words

Thomistic Engagements with Scripture

Emmanuel Durand, OP

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

Is the portrait of God revealed in Scripture fundamentally intelligible? The biblical accounts of God reveal seemingly contradictory themes: God’s holiness and narratives telling of his anger; the Divine Omnipotence faced with the Impossible; the suffering Christ upon the Cross and the transcendent Trinity of Persons in God; the unique Savior and the universality of God’s salvific will; and so forth. How are we to hold together all of this data without denying any aspect of the mystery of God? Must we give into our ambient culture’s sense that the biblical God cannot be taken seriously by truly discerning and rational minds when they try to understand “the Divine”? Or, in the midst of this apparent contradiction, can we find the lines of harmony in the revealed mysteries? In Divine Speech in Human Words, Fr. Emmanuel Durand unties some of the knots that face us when we reflect on the God of biblical Revelation. In each of the essays gathered here, Fr. Durand sympathetically articulates the tensions and apparent contradictions experienced by contemporary minds as they strive to understand the revealed truth of God. A whole host of topics are covered in this volume: the Cross and the revelation of the Trinity; God’s holiness and transcendence; divine immutability and the sorrow of a loving God; Divine Providence and human prayer; the fatherhood of God and eschatology; Christ’s way of life; and many others. Drawing philosophical insights from the Thomistic tradition as his intellectual tools, Fr. Durand nonetheless emphasizes the importance of a properly theological mode of reflection, allowing these issues to be illuminated by the revealed truth of Sacred Scripture. Thus, for each of these difficult topics, he shows that a vital theological response must not limit itself to mere logical rigor but, rather, requires metaphysical insight and, above all, sapiential appreciation of God’s revealed word. With such instruments in hand, each essay approaches the tensions of biblical revelation with an eager readiness to show how a thoughtful Thomistic practice of biblical theology can guide faith as it seeks an understanding of both contemporary and perennial theological problems.
[more]
cover of Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi's Seconda prattica

Divining the Oracle

Monteverdi's Seconda prattica

Massimo Ossi

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Claudio Monteverdi's historical position in music has been compared to that of Shakespeare in literature: almost exact contemporaries, each worked from traditional beginnings to transform nearly every genre he attempted. In this book, Massimo Ossi delves into the most significant aspect of Monteverdi's career: the development, during the first years of the seventeenth century, of a new compositional style he called the seconda prattica or "second manner."

Challenged in print for the unconventional aspects of his music, Monteverdi found himself at the center of a debate between defenders of Renaissance principles and the newest musical currents of the time. The principles of the seconda prattica, Ossi argues in this sophisticated analysis of Monteverdi's writings, music, and approaches to text-setting, were in fact much more significant to the course of Monteverdi's career than previously thought by modern scholars-not only did Monteverdi continue to pursue their aesthetic and theoretical implications for the rest of his life, but they also affected his dramatic compositions as well as his chamber vocal music and sacred works.

Ossi "divines the oracle" of Monteverdi's ambiguous theoretical concepts in a clear way and in terms of pure music; his book will enhance our understanding of Monteverdi as one of the most significant figures in western music history.
[more]
cover of Dixie Diaspora: An Anthology of Southern Jewish History

Dixie Diaspora

An Anthology of Southern Jewish History

Mark K. Bauman

University of Alabama Press, 2006

Regional Jewish history at its best.
 
This book is an anthology of essays designed to introduce readers to key issues in this growing field of scholarship and to encourage further study. Divided into five sections--“Jews and Judaism,” “Small Town Life,” “Business and Governance,” “Interaction,” and “Identity”--the essays cover a broad geographical and chronological span and address a variety of topics, including economics, politics, roles of women, ethnicity, and race. This organizational structure enhances the volume’s historical treatment of regional Jewish history and lends itself to cross-disciplinary study in fields such as cultural studies, religious studies, and political science.
         

 
 
[more]
cover of Dixie Heretic: The Civil Rights Odyssey of Renwick C. Kennedy

Dixie Heretic

The Civil Rights Odyssey of Renwick C. Kennedy

Tennant McWilliams

University of Alabama Press, 2023

A life-and-times biography of the minister and social reformer Renwick C. Kennedy

Drawn from some 5,000 letters, six decades of daily-diary writings, and extensive interviews, Dixie Heretic: The Civil Rights Odyssey of Renwick C. Kennedy offers a life-and-times biography of the Alabama Black Belt minister, Renwick C. Kennedy (1900–1985). Here, Tennant McWilliams gives an unvarnished account of Kennedy’s tortuous efforts to make his congregants and other southern whites “better Christians.”

Kennedy came from “upcountry” South Carolina, a place rife with Scotch-Irish Associate Reformed Presbyterians—people of biblical infallibility and individual piety and salvation. In 1927, after a life-changing theology education at Princeton, he moved to Camden, Alabama, county seat of Wilcox County. There, he came to believe that God had a mandate for him: to change the “Half Christian” conservative, and the often violent, racial behaviors around him. As a neo-orthodox Protestant, Kennedy never rejected literal approaches to the Bible. Still, out of the “Full Christian” Social Gospel, he urged changed racial behavior. Ultimately this led him to publish confrontational short stories and essays in Christian Century and New Republic—most set in fictitious “Yaupon County.”

In World War II, Kennedy served as a chaplain with the famed 102nd Evacuation Hospital. He came home hoping the Allied victory would spur Americans to fight racial segregation just as they had fought racial fascism in Europe. The 1948 Dixiecrat movement dashed these hopes, turning much of his neo-orthodox optimism to cynicism. His hope found fleeting resurgence in the civil rights movement, and saw Kennedy quietly leading desegregation of Troy University, where he was an administrator. But the era’s assassinations, combined with George Wallace and the rise of southern white Republicans, regularly returned him to the frustrated hopes of 1948 and fostered a pessimism about truly changed hearts that he took to his grave in 1985.
 

[more]
cover of Dixie Walker of the Dodgers: The People's Choice

Dixie Walker of the Dodgers

The People's Choice

Maury Allen and Susan Walker

University of Alabama Press, 2010

Fred “Dixie” Walker was a gifted ballplayer from a family of gifted athletes. (His father, uncle, and brother all played major league baseball.) Dixie Walker played in the majors for 18 seasons and in 1,905 games, assembling a career batting average of .306 while playing for the Yankees, White Sox, Tigers, Dodgers, and Pirates. Walker won the 1944 National League batting title, was three times an All-Star, and was runner-up for Most Valuable Player in the National League in 1946. He was particularly beloved by Brooklyn Dodgers fans, to whom he was the “People’s Choice.”
 
But few remember any of those achievements today. Dixie Walker—born in Georgia, and a resident of Birmingham, Alabama, for most of his life—is now most often remembered as one of the southerners on the Dodgers team who resented and resisted Jackie Robinson when he joined the ball club in 1947, as the first African American major leaguer in the modern game. Having grown up in conditions of strict racial segregation, Walker later admitted to being under pressure from Alabama business associates when, in protest, he demanded to be traded away from the Dodgers.
 
Written by a professional sportswriter knowledgeable of the era and of personalities surrounding that event, and Dixie Walker’s daughter, this collaborative work provides a fuller account of Walker and fleshes out our understanding of him as a player and as a man. Walker ultimately came to respect Robinson, referred to him as “a gentleman,” and gave him pointers, calling him “as outstanding an athlete as I ever saw.”
[more]
cover of Dixie's Great War: World War I and the American South

Dixie's Great War

World War I and the American South

Edited by John M. Giggie and Andrew J. Huebner

University of Alabama Press, 2021

Examining the First World War through the lens of the American South

How did World War I affect the American South? Did southerners experience the war in a particular way? How did regional considerations and, more generally, southern values and culture impact the wider war effort? Was there a distinctive southern experience of WWI?

Scholars considered these questions during “Dixie’s Great War,” a symposium held at the University of Alabama in October 2017 to commemorate the centenary of the American intervention in the war. With the explicit intent of exploring iterations of the Great War as experienced in the American South and by its people, organizers John M. Giggie and Andrew J. Huebner also sought to use historical discourse as a form of civic engagement designed to facilitate a community conversation about the meanings of the war.

Giggie and Huebner structured the panels thematically around military, social, and political approaches to the war to encourage discussion and exchanges between panelists and the public alike. Drawn from transcriptions of the day’s discussions and lightly edited to preserve the conversational tone and mix of professional and public voices, Dixie’s Great War: World War I and the American South captures the process of historians at work with the public, pushing and probing general understandings of the past, uncovering and reflecting on the deeper truths and lessons of the Great War—this time, through the lens of the South.

This volume also includes an introduction featuring a survey of recent literature dealing with regional aspects of WWI and a discussion of the centenary commemorations of the war. An afterword by noted historian Jay Winter places “Dixie’s Great War”—the symposium and this book—within the larger framework of commemoration, emphasizing the vital role such forums perform in creating space and opportunity for scholars and the public alike to assess and understand the shifting ground between cultural memory and the historical record.
 

[more]
cover of Dixiecrats and Democrats: Alabama Politics

Dixiecrats and Democrats

Alabama Politics

William D. Barnard

University of Alabama Press, 1984

A pivotal in the study of history and politics, not only in Alabama but in the other states of the South
 
Barnard’s account is elegantly concise, the labor of conspicuous scholarship. In an effort to analyze Alabama’s political bedrock, the author has tapped virtually every source. What results is a cogent and harmonious theme.

[more]
cover of Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France

Django Generations

Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France

Siv B. Lie

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Django Generations shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France.

Jazz manouche—a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunes—is among France’s most celebrated musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It centers on the recorded work of famed guitarist Django Reinhardt and is named for the ethnoracial subgroup of Romanies (also known, often pejoratively, as “Gypsies”) to which Reinhardt belonged. French Manouches are publicly lauded as bearers of this jazz tradition, and many take pleasure and pride in the practice while at the same time facing pervasive discrimination. Jazz manouche uncovers a contradiction at the heart of France’s assimilationist republican ideals: the music is portrayed as quintessentially French even as Manouches themselves endure treatment as racial others.

In this book, Siv B. Lie explores how this music is used to construct divergent ethnoracial and national identities in a context where discussions of race are otherwise censured. Weaving together ethnographic and historical analysis, Lie shows that jazz manouche becomes a source of profound ambivalence as it generates ethnoracial difference and socioeconomic exclusion. As the first full-length ethnographic study of French jazz to be published in English, this book enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global jazz, race and ethnicity, and citizenship while showing how music can be an important but insufficient tool in struggles for racial and economic justice.
 
[more]
cover of Do My Heart Good: My Odyssey Through Country Music, Medicine, and History

Do My Heart Good

My Odyssey Through Country Music, Medicine, and History

Cleve Francis

University of Illinois Press, 2026

Born to a struggling family in Jim Crow–era Louisiana, Cleve Francis followed his love for music and passion for science into parallel careers as a singer-songwriter and cardiologist. One of the few Black artists to record for a major country music label, Francis had four Billboard hits as a Capitol Nashville/Liberty Records artist in the 1990s.

Francis’s account follows his “multidimensional life” through two milieus that rarely welcome Black men: country music and medicine. Merging rich storytelling with thoughtful insights, Francis shares the obstacles and triumphs he experienced through his lifelong love of performing music and writing songs, his abiding interest in science and medicine, and his determination to overcome racial barriers. He also offers an insider’s view of the 1990s country music world—the discipline of finding songs and recording in Nashville, the fight to get his music on the radio, and a whirlwind of shows and encounters with country music legends.

Engaging and inspiring, Do My Heart Good is the story of how resolve, hard work, and joy composed a uniquely American success story.
[more]
cover of Do They Miss Me at Home?: The Civil War Letters of William McKnight, Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry

Do They Miss Me at Home?

The Civil War Letters of William McKnight, Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry

Donald C. Maness

Ohio University Press, 2010

William McKnight was a member of the Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry from September 1862 until his death in June of 1864. During his time of service, McKnight penned dozens of emotion-filled letters, primarily to his wife, Samaria, revealing the struggles of an entire family both before and during the war.

This collection of more than one hundred letters provides in-depth accounts of several battles in Kentucky and Tennessee, such as the Cumberland Gap and Knoxville campaigns that were pivotal events in the Western Theater. The letters also vividly respond to General John Hunt Morgan’s raid through Ohio and correct claims previously published that McKnight was part of the forces chasing Morgan. By all accounts Morgan did stay for a period of time at McKnight’s home in Langsville during his raid through Ohio, much to McKnight’s horror and humiliation, but McKnight was in Kentucky at the time. Tragically, McKnight was killed in action nearly a year later during an engagement with Morgan’s men near Cynthiana, Kentucky.

[more]
cover of Do You See Ice?: Inuit and Americans at Home and Away

Do You See Ice?

Inuit and Americans at Home and Away

Karen Routledge

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Many Americans imagine the Arctic as harsh, freezing, and nearly uninhabitable. The living Arctic, however—the one experienced by native Inuit and others who work and travel there—is a diverse region shaped by much more than stereotype and mythology. Do You See Ice? presents a history of Arctic encounters from 1850 to 1920 based on Inuit and American accounts, revealing how people made sense of new or changing environments.

Routledge vividly depicts the experiences of American whalers and explorers in Inuit homelands. Conversely, she relates stories of Inuit who traveled to the northeastern United States and were similarly challenged by the norms, practices, and weather they found there. Standing apart from earlier books of Arctic cultural research—which tend to focus on either Western expeditions or Inuit life—Do You See Ice? explores relationships between these two groups in a range of northern and temperate locations. Based on archival research and conversations with Inuit Elders and experts, Routledge’s book is grounded by ideas of home: how Inuit and Americans often experienced each other’s countries as dangerous and inhospitable, how they tried to feel at home in unfamiliar places, and why these feelings and experiences continue to resonate today.

The author intends to donate all royalties from this book to the Elders’ Room at the Angmarlik Center in Pangnirtung, Nunavut.
[more]
cover of Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man

Doc

The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man

Frank "Doc" Adams and Burgin Mathews

University of Alabama Press, 2012

Autobiography of jazz elder statesman Frank “Doc” Adams, highlighting his role in Birmingham, Alabama’s, historic jazz scene and tracing his personal adventure that parallels, in many ways, the story and spirit of jazz itself.

Doc tells the story of an accomplished jazz master, from his musical apprenticeship under John T. “Fess” Whatley and his time touring with Sun Ra and Duke Ellington to his own inspiring work as an educator and bandleader.

Central to this narrative is the often-overlooked story of Birmingham’s unique jazz tradition and community. From the very beginnings of jazz, Birmingham was home to an active network of jazz practitioners and a remarkable system of jazz apprenticeship rooted in the city’s segregated schools. Birmingham musicians spread across the country to populate the sidelines of the nation’s bestknown bands. Local musicians, like Erskine Hawkins and members of his celebrated orchestra, returned home heroes. Frank “Doc” Adams explores, through first-hand experience, the history of this community, introducing readers to a large and colorful cast of characters—including “Fess” Whatley, the legendary “maker of musicians” who trained legions of Birmingham players and made a significant mark on the larger history of jazz. Adams’s interactions with the young Sun Ra, meanwhile, reveal life-changing lessons from one of American music’s most innovative personalities.

Along the way, Adams reflects on his notable family, including his father, Oscar, editor of the Birmingham Reporter and an outspoken civic leader in the African American community, and Adams’s brother, Oscar Jr., who would become Alabama’s first black supreme court justice. Adams’s story offers a valuable window into the world of Birmingham’s black middle class in the days before the civil rights movement and integration. Throughout, Adams demonstrates the ways in which jazz professionalism became a source of pride within this community, and he offers his thoughts on the continued relevance of jazz education in the twenty-first century.

[more]
cover of Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House

Dockside Reading

Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House

Isabel Hofmeyr

Duke University Press, 2022

In Dockside Reading Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationships among print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the British colonial Custom House. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials would leaf through publications looking for obscenity, politically objectionable materials, or reprints of British copyrighted works, often dumping these condemned goods into the water. These practices, echoing other colonial imaginaries of the ocean as a space for erasing incriminating evidence of the violence of empire, informed later censorship regimes under apartheid in South Africa. By tracking printed matter from ship to shore, Hofmeyr shows how literary institutions like copyright and censorship were shaped by colonial control of coastal waters. Set in the environmental context of the colonial port city, Dockside Reading explores how imperialism colonizes water. Hofmeyr examines this theme through the concept of hydrocolonialism, which puts together land and sea, empire and environment.
[more]
cover of Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area

Dockworker Power

Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area

Peter Cole

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) and the Cornell ILR School, 2019
A Black Perspectives Best Black History Book of 2018

Dockworkers have power. Often missed in commentary on today's globalizing economy, workers in the world's ports can harness their role, at a strategic choke point, to promote their labor rights and social justice causes. Peter Cole brings such overlooked experiences to light in an eye-opening comparative study of Durban, South Africa, and the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Path-breaking research reveals how unions effected lasting change in some of the most far-reaching struggles of modern times. First, dockworkers in each city drew on longstanding radical traditions to promote racial equality. Second, they persevered when a new technology--container ships--sent a shockwave of layoffs through the industry. Finally, their commitment to black internationalism and leftist politics sparked transnational work stoppages to protest apartheid and authoritarianism. Dockworker Power not only brings to light surprising parallels in the experiences of dockers half a world away from each other. It also offers a new perspective on how workers can change their conditions and world.

 

[more]
cover of Doctor George: An Account of the Life of a Country Doctor

Doctor George

An Account of the Life of a Country Doctor

George T. Mitchell, M.D. Foreword by Glen W. Davidson

Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

Dr. George T. Mitchell of Marshall, Illinois, shares with humor and compassion stories and reflections about his medical practice of fifty years.

Having grown up in Marshall, Dr. Mitchell writes of his early experiences in midwestern America: basketball rivalries, school-boy pranks, and the traditions passed down through a family of doctors. Dr. Mitchell tells of his brief detour to obtain a degree in mechanical engineering, his decision to pursue a career in medicine, and his medical school experiences at the George Washington School of Medicine before the days of antibiotics and sophisticated medical technology. He vividly describes his subsequent service in World War II as a young surgeon at a military hospital helping injured soldiers resume normal lives while enduring the frustrations and occasional horrors of military life.

After the war, Dr. Mitchell joined his father’s practice in Marshall, where, he observes, he was among sixteen physicians in a rural county with a population of less than twenty thousand people. Within twenty-five years, the number of doctors had dropped to only four. In this memoir Dr. Mitchell conveys his unwillingness to just sit by and watch the health needs of his community increase while medical and other services decline. He, instead, became a community activist, representing rural concerns to the state medical society, organizing the first emergency medical technician teams in the county, masterminding the planning of a regional medical center, campaigning successfully for improved highway safety, and spurring the extension of reliable telephone service throughout his area.

As Dr. Mitchell recounts the house calls, farm accidents, emergency surgeries, and family counseling that comprised the life of this country doctor, he offers the keen insights of a clinician trained to look beyond what others only see.

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cover of Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences

Doctoring Traditions

Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences

Projit Bihari Mukharji

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Like many of the traditional medicines of South Asia, Ayurvedic practice transformed dramatically in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With Doctoring Tradition, Projit Bihari Mukharji offers a close look at that recasting, upending the widely held yet little-examined belief that it was the result of the introduction of Western anatomical knowledge and cadaveric dissection.
 
Rather, Mukharji reveals, what instigated those changes were a number of small technologies that were introduced in the period by Ayurvedic physicians, men who were simultaneously Victorian gentlemen and members of a particular Bengali caste. The introduction of these devices, including thermometers, watches, and microscopes, Mukharji shows, ultimately led to a dramatic reimagining of the body. By the 1930s, there emerged a new Ayurvedic body that was marked as distinct from a biomedical body. Despite the protestations of difference, this new Ayurvedic body was largely compatible with it. The more irreconcilable elements of the old Ayurvedic body were then rendered therapeutically indefensible and impossible to imagine in practice. The new Ayurvedic medicine was the product not of an embrace of Western approaches, but of a creative attempt to develop a viable alternative to the Western tradition by braiding together elements drawn from internally diverse traditions of the West and the East.
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cover of Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

Doctoring the Novel

Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

Sylvia A. Pamboukian

Ohio University Press, 2012

If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices?

Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stark Munro Letters. Contextualized in both medical and popular publishing, literary analysis reveals that even supposedly medico-scientific concepts such as orthodoxy and quackery evolve not in elite laboratories and bourgeois medical societies but in the rough-and-tumble of the public sphere, a view that acknowledges the considerable, and often underrated, influence of language on medical practices.
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