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

cover of Dark December: The Full Account of the Battle of the Bulge

Dark December

The Full Account of the Battle of the Bulge

Robert E. Merriam

Westholme Publishing, 2011

One of the Most Important Histories of the Greatest Battle on the Western Front in World War II

“Dark December occupies a distinguished place among war books. Every paragraph is based upon evidence, not flimsy wartime rumors. Technical enough for the professional, accurate enough for the historian (in fact, it is history of the best), it is lucid and understandable for the general reader.”—New York Herald Tribune

“If other veterans of the Army’s historical division can maintain Mr. Merriam’s high standard of stimulating, critical and painstaking work, we will be fortunate. Dark December can be heartily recommended to anyone faintly interested in the war.”—New York Times

“The book explodes a number of myths which have been winning their improper way into general belief.” —Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Booklist

The massive German counteroffensive through Belgium’s Ardennes forest in December 1944 took the American and British armies by surprise and changed the outcome of the war. With whole divisions destroyed and decimated, the American army scrambled to contain the German threat, while also trying to determine how such an attack had gone undetected. The Americans succeeded in winning the month-long battle, commonly known as the Battle of the Bulge, through the tenacity of several pockets of troops, notably those in the Belgian town of Bastogne, and the remarkable rapid movement of Patton’s Third Army to seal the breech in the American lines. The battle stalled the British and American advances and lengthened the war with the result that the Soviet Union was able to make greater gains in Europe than previously anticipated. Dark December is a thorough and engrossing examination of the Battle of the Bulge by a historian who had the opportunity to prepare notes as the battle was occurring and consult classified American as well as German records. Notably, the book contains unique and critical information, including details gleaned from interviews conducted by the author with commanding officers on both sides, some of which are the only reports gathered from these sources. Originally published in 1947, this the first paperback edition with the complete original text and maps.

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cover of Dark Designs and Visual Culture

Dark Designs and Visual Culture

Michele Wallace

Duke University Press, 2004

Michele Wallace burst into public consciousness with the 1979 publication of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, a pioneering critique of the misogyny of the Black Power movement and the effects of racism and sexism on black women. Since then, Wallace has produced an extraordinary body of journalism and criticism engaging with popular culture and gender and racial politics. This collection brings together more than fifty of the articles she has written over the past fifteen years. Included alongside many of her best-known pieces are previously unpublished essays as well as interviews conducted with Wallace about her work. Dark Designs and Visual Culture charts the development of a singular, pathbreaking black feminist consciousness.

Beginning with a new introduction in which Wallace reflects on her life and career, this volume includes other autobiographical essays; articles focused on popular culture, the arts, and literary theory; and explorations of issues in black visual culture. Wallace discusses growing up in Harlem; how she dealt with the media attention and criticism she received for Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, which was published when she was just twenty-seven years old; and her relationship with her family, especially her mother, the well-known artist Faith Ringgold. The many articles devoted to black visual culture range from the historical tragedy of the Hottentot Venus, an African woman displayed as a curiosity in nineteenth-century Europe, to films that sexualize the black body—such as Watermelon Woman, Gone with the Wind, and Paris Is Burning. Whether writing about the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings, rap music, the Million Man March, Toshi Reagon, multiculturalism, Marlon Riggs, or a nativity play in Bedford Stuyvesant, Wallace is a bold, incisive critic. Dark Designs and Visual Culture brings the scope of her career and thought into sharp focus.

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cover of Dark End Of The Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry

Dark End Of The Street

Margins in American Vanguard Poetry

Maria Damon

University of Minnesota Press, 1993

Damon foregrounds a number of modern American poets work and lives in order to argue that the American avant-garde is located in the experimental literary works of social "outsiders." Discussed is the work of Black/Jewish surrealist street poet Bob Kaufman, Boston-Brahmin Robert Lowell and three teenaged women writing from a South Boston housing project, pre-Stonewall gay poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and Jewish lesbian-in-exile Gertrude Stein.

"An engaging and important book. Damon's sophisticated, theoretical approaches to American verse, coupled with her fresh, writerly style in The Dark End of The Street, put her on the forefront of American poetry's next generation of literary criticism." -American Literature"A work of art as well as a work of criticism. Addresses important questions about art and social life, about the margins and the center, and about oppression and suppression." -George Lipsitz
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cover of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine

Dark Hope

Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine

David Shulman

University of Chicago Press, 2007

For decades, we’ve been shocked by images of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But for all their power, those images leave us at a loss: from our vantage at home, it’s hard for us to imagine the struggles of those living in the midst of the fighting. Now, American-born Israeli David Shulman takes us right into the heart of the conflict with Dark Hope, an eye-opening chronicle of his work as a member of the peace group Ta‘ayush, which takes its name from the Arabic for “living together.”

Though Shulman never denies the complexity of the issues fueling the conflict—nor the culpability of people on both sides—he forcefully clarifies the injustices perpetrated by Israel by showing us the human dimension of the occupation. Here we meet Palestinians whose houses have been blown up by the Israeli army, shepherds whose sheep have been poisoned by settlers, farmers stripped of their land by Israel’s dividing wall. We watch as whip-swinging police on horseback attack crowds of nonviolent demonstrators, as Israeli settlers shoot innocent Palestinians harvesting olives, and as families and communities become utterly destroyed by the unrelenting violence of the occupation.

Opposing such injustices, Shulman and his companions—Israeli and Palestinian both—doggedly work through checkpoints to bring aid, rebuild houses, and physically block the progress of the dividing wall. As they face off against police, soldiers, and hostile Israeli settlers, anger mixes with compassion, moments of kinship alternate with confrontation, and, throughout, Shulman wrestles with his duty to fight the cruelty enabled by “that dependable and devastating human failure to feel.”

With Dark Hope, Shulman has written a book of deep moral searching, an attempt to discover how his beloved Israel went wrong—and how, through acts of compassionate disobedience, it might still be brought back.

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cover of Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow

Dark Journey

Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow

Neil R. McMillen

University of Illinois Press, 1989

"Remarkable for its relentless truth-telling, and the depth and thoroughness of its investigation, for the freshness of its sources, and for the shock power of its findings. Even a reader who is not unfamiliar with the sources and literature of the subject can be jolted by its impact."--C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of Books
 
"Dark Journey is a superb piece of scholarship, a book that all students of southern and African-American history will find valuable and informative."--David J. Garrow, Georgia Historical Quarterly
 
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cover of Dark Laughter: Spanish Film, Comedy, and the Nation

Dark Laughter

Spanish Film, Comedy, and the Nation

Juan F. Egea

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

In Dark Laughter, Juan F. Egea provides a remarkable in-depth analysis of the dark comedy film genre in Spain, as well as a provocative critical engagement with the idea of national cinema, the visual dimension of cultural specificity, and the ethics of dark humor.

Egea begins his analysis with General Franco's dictatorship in the 1960s—a regime that opened the country to new economic forces while maintaining its repressive nature—exploring key works by Luis García Berlanga, Marco Ferreri, Fernando Fernán-Gómez, and Luis Buñuel. Dark Laughter then moves to the first films of Pedro Almodóvar in the early 1980s during the Spanish political transition to democracy before examining Alex de la Iglesia and the new dark comedies of the 1990s. Analyzing this younger generation of filmmakers, Egea traces dark comedy to Spain's displays of ultramodernity such as the Universal Exposition in Seville and the Barcelona Olympic Games.

At its core, Dark Laughter is a substantial inquiry into the epistemology of comedy, the intricacies of visual modernity, and the relationship between cinema and a wider framework of representational practices.

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cover of Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945

Dark Lens

Imaging Germany, 1945

Françoise Meltzer

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Esteemed scholar Françoise Meltzer examines images of war ruins in Nazi Germany and the role that images play in how we construct memories of war.
 
The ruins of war have long held the power to stupefy and appall. Can such ruins ever be persuasively depicted and comprehended? Can images of ruins force us to identify with the suffering of the enemy and raise uncomfortable questions about forgiveness and revenge?
 
Françoise Meltzer explores these questions in Dark Lens, which uses the images of war ruins in Nazi Germany to investigate problems of aestheticization and the representation of catastrophe. Through texts that give accounts of bombed-out towns in Germany in the last years of the war, painters’ attempts to depict the destruction, and her own mother’s photographs taken in 1945, Meltzer asks if any medium offers a direct experience of war ruins for the viewer. Refreshingly accessible and deeply personal, Dark Lens is a compelling look at the role images play in constructing memory.
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cover of Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers' Project

Dark Mirror

African Americans and the Federal Writers' Project

J. J. Butts

The Ohio State University Press, 2021

Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project explores Black writers’ engagement with the emerging welfare state. J. J. Butts highlights the conflicting understandings of culture and modernity that pervaded the New Deal’s most ambitious and important cultural project of the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). FWP guidebooks produced by African American writers such as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison introduced an inclusive, pluralist understanding of the nation’s culture and history. Using sociological discourses of urban pathology, they justified rebuilding landscapes to remedy social ills as part of a broader agenda for modernization. Drawing on archival research and textual analysis, Dark Mirror shows how FWP guidebooks sought to minimize the tensions between pluralism and modernization, often at the expense of the former. It also demonstrates how Black FWP authors responded to these ideas in FWP texts and in their own narrative and documentary writing. Highlighting the deep racial currents undercutting the promises of the welfare state, these texts provide what Richard Wright called a “dark mirror” for the nation, setting up new modes of engagement with liberalism and reshaping African American literature.
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cover of Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment

Dark Side of the Light

Slavery and the French Enlightenment

Louis Sala-Molins

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and Montesquieu are best known for their humanist theories and liberating influence on Western civilization. But as renowned French intellectual Louis Sala-Molins shows, Enlightenment discourses and scholars were also complicit in the Atlantic slave trade, becoming instruments of oppression and inequality. 

Translated into English for the first time, Dark Side of the Light scrutinizes Condorcet’s Reflections on NegroSlavery and the works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot side by side with the Code Noir (the royal document that codified the rules of French Caribbean slavery) in order to uncover attempts to uphold the humanist project of the Enlightenment while simultaneously justifying slavery. Wielding the pen of both the ironist and the moralist, Sala-Molins demonstrates the flawed nature of these attempts and the reasons given for this denial of rights, from the imperatives of public order to the incomplete humanity of the slave (and thus the need for his progressive humanization through slavery), to the economic prosperity that depended on his labor. At the same time, Sala-Molins uses the techniques of literature to give equal weight to the perspective of the “barefooted, the starving, and the slaves” through expository prose and scenes between slave and philosopher, giving moral agency and flesh-and-blood dimensions to issues most often treated as abstractions. 

Both an urgent critique and a measured analysis, Dark Side of the Light reveals the moral paradoxes of Enlightenment philosophies and their world-changing consequences. 

Louis Sala-Molins is a moral and political philosopher and emeritus professor at the University of Toulouse. He is the author of many books, including Le Code Noir, ou Le calvaire de Canaan and L’Afrique aux Amériques. 

John Conteh-Morgan is associate professor of French and Francophone, African-American, and African studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa: A Critical Introduction.
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cover of Dark Victorians

Dark Victorians

Vanessa D. Dickerson

University of Illinois Press, 2007

Dark Victorians illuminates the cross-cultural influences between white Britons and black Americans during the Victorian age. In carefully analyzing literature and travel narratives by Ida B. Wells, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Carlyle, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others, Vanessa D. Dickerson reveals the profound political, racial, and rhetorical exchanges between the groups. From the nineteenth-century black nationalist David Walker, who urged emigrating African Americans to turn to England, to the twentieth-century writer Maya Angelou, who recalls how those she knew in her childhood aspired to Victorian ideas of conduct, black Americans have consistently embraced Victorian England. At a time when scholars of black studies are exploring the relations between diasporic blacks, and postcolonialists are taking imperialism to task, Dickerson considers how Britons negotiated their support of African Americans with the controlling policies they used to govern a growing empire of often dark-skinned peoples, and how philanthropic and abolitionist Victorian discourses influenced black identity, prejudice, and racism in America.
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cover of Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903

Dark Voices

W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903

Shamoon Zamir

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Dark Voices is the first sustained examination of the intellectual formation of W. E. B. Du Bois, tracing the scholar and civil rights leader's thought from his undergraduate days in the 1880s to the 1903 publication of his masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, and offering a new reading of his work from this period.

Bringing to light materials from the Du Bois archives that have not been discussed before, Shamoon Zamir explores Du Bois's deep engagement with American and European philosophy and social science. He examines the impact on Du Bois of his studies at Harvard with William James and George Santayana, and shows how the experience of post-Reconstruction racism moved Du Bois from metaphysical speculation to the more instrumentalist knowledge of history and the new discipline of sociology, as well as toward the very different kind of understanding embodied in the literary imagination. Providing a new and detailed reading of The Souls of Black Folk in comparison with Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Zamir challenges accounts that place Du Bois alongside Emerson and James, or characterize him as a Hegelian idealist. This reading also explores Du Bois's relationship to African American folk culture, and shows how Du Bois was able to dramatize the collapse of many of his hopes for racial justice and liberation.

The first book to place The Souls of Black Folk in its intellectual context, Dark Voices is a case study of African American literary development in relation to the broader currents of European and American thought.
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cover of Dark Voyage: An American Privateer's War on Britain's African Slave Trade

Dark Voyage

An American Privateer's War on Britain's African Slave Trade

Christian M. McBurney

Westholme Publishing, 2026

At the start of the American War of Independence, Great Britain dominated overseas commerce and was the leading slave-trading nation in the world. In 1776, American privateers—privately owned ships granted commissions by the Continental Congress to attack and disrupt enemy trade—began to prey on British merchantmen.  Some privateers captured British slave ships with African captives on board just before they arrived at their Caribbean Island destinations.
            One privateer was given an extraordinary task: to sail across the Atlantic to attack British slave trading posts and ships on the coast of West Africa. Based on a little-known contemporary primary source, The Journal of the Good Ship Marlborough, the story of this remarkable voyage is told here for the first time and will have a major impact on our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and the American Revolution. The voyage of the Marlborough was the brainchild of John Brown, a prominent Rhode Island merchant—and an investor in two slave trading voyages himself. The motivation was not altruistic. The officers and crew of the Marlborough wanted to advance the cause of independence from Britain through harming Britain’s economy, but they also desired to enrich themselves by selling the plunder they captured—including enslaved Africans.
            The work of the Marlborough and other American privateers was so disruptive that it led to an unintended consequence: virtually halting the British slave trade. British slave merchants, alarmed at losing money from their ships being captured, invested in many fewer slave voyages.  As a result tens of thousands of Africans were not forced onto slave ships, transported to the New World, and consigned to a lifetime of slavery or an early death.
            In Dark Voyage: An American Privateer’s War on Britain’s African Slave Trade, veteran researcher and writer Christian McBurney recreates the harrowing voyage of the Marlborough, while placing it in the context of Atlantic World slavery. In Africa, Marlborough’s officers come across an array of African and European slave traders willing to assist them in attacking the British. This book is also the first study to detail the many captures American privateers made of British slave ships during the Revolutionary War.
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cover of Dark and Bloody Ground: The American Revolution Along the Southern Frontier

Dark and Bloody Ground

The American Revolution Along the Southern Frontier

Richard D. Blackmon

Westholme Publishing, 2012

The Battles along the Rivers, Mountains, and in the Deep Woods of the South that Changed the Fate of Nations

The American Revolution marked a dramatic change in the struggle for land along the southern frontier. In the colonial era, American Indian leaders and British offi cials attempted to accommodate the westward expansion of Anglo-Americans through land cessions designed to have the least impact on Indian societies. The region remained generally peaceful, but with the onset of the Revolution, the British no longer exercised sole authority to curb the settlements appearing within territory claimed by the Creeks, Shawnee, and most importantly, the Cherokee. Whether it was to escape the economic uncertainty of the east, the rigors of the confl ict, or the depredations of troops and militias on both sides, settlers fl ooded west. Under these conditions, the war in the south took on a savage character as Indians, Loyalists, and Whigs all desperately fought to defend their communities and maintain control of their own destinies. Taking advantage of the political turmoil in the east, the Cherokee Nation launched a coordinated offensive in 1776 against illegal frontier settlements. The Whigs responded with a series of expeditions from each of the Southern colonies that razed Cherokee towns and their food supplies. All the while, both British and Whig leaders walked a fi ne line: If the Indians attacked settlers without distinguishing between Loyalists and Whigs, those groups could unite and thwart both British and Indian interests; if the Indians attacked the western frontier with Loyalist and British support, the Whigs would face a two-front war—an event that ended up happening.

In Dark and Bloody Ground: The American Revolution Along the Southern Frontier, Richard Blackmon uses a wealth of primary source material to recount the confl ict between American Indians and Anglo-Americans in the colonial South during one of the most turbulent periods of North American history. He explains the complex points of contact in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia between native groups and settlers, while revealing the political gamesmanship between rival British and Whig traders and offi cials to secure Indian loyalty. The author also explains the critical role of the southern frontier to the American victory, a victory achieved long after the decision at Yorktown. Before the war, clashes between Cherokee and Shawnee hunters in Kentucky had become so commonplace that it was known as a “dark and bloody ground.” With the rise in Anglo-American settlements there, led by Daniel Boone and others, the dark and bloody ground became a metaphor for the entire struggle for the Southern frontier.
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cover of Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance

Darkening Mirrors

Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance

Stephanie Leigh Batiste

Duke University Press, 2012

In Darkening Mirrors, Stephanie Leigh Batiste examines how African Americans participated in U.S. cultural imperialism in Depression-era stage and screen performances. A population treated as second-class citizens at home imagined themselves as empowered, modern U.S. citizens and transnational actors in plays, operas, ballets, and films. Many of these productions, such as the 1938 hits Haiti and The "Swing" Mikado recruited large casts of unknown performers, involving the black community not only as spectators but also as participants. Performances of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism are inevitably linked to issues of embodiment, including how bodies signify blackness as a cultural, racial, and global category. Whether enacting U.S. imperialism in westerns, dramas, dances, songs, jokes, or comedy sketches, African Americans maintained a national identity that registered a diasporic empowerment and resistance on the global stage. Boldly addressing the contradictions in these performances, Batiste challenges the simplistic notion that the oppressed cannot identify with oppressive modes of power and enact themselves as empowered subjects. Darkening Mirrors adds nuance and depth to the history of African American subject formation and stage and screen performance.
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cover of Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White

Darkroom

A Memoir in Black and White

Lila Quintero Weaver

University of Alabama Press, 2012

A Latina girl’s journey through the shadows of the civil rights era.

Darkroom is a deeply moving graphic memoir that chronicles Lila Quintero Weaver’s experience growing up as an Argentine immigrant in 1960s Alabama during the height of the civil rights movement. Through striking black-and-white illustrations and heartfelt narrative, Weaver explores the complexities of race, identity, and belonging in a society divided by segregation. Neither Black nor White, her family occupies a unique position that offers a powerful lens on the struggles for justice and equality. This coming-of-age story blends personal history with pivotal social change, inviting readers to reflect on themes of immigration, cultural assimilation, and moral courage. Darkroom is both an intimate portrait and a universal tale of resilience, making it an essential read for those interested in civil rights, memoirs, and graphic storytelling.

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cover of Darling Queen — Dear old Bones: Queen Whilemina's Correspondence with her English Governess Miss Saxton Winter, 1886–1935

Darling Queen — Dear old Bones

Queen Whilemina's Correspondence with her English Governess Miss Saxton Winter, 1886–1935

Edited by Emerentia van Heuven-van Nes

Amsterdam University Press, 2017

This book presents a remarkable collection of letters from Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (1880–1962) and her governess, Elizabeth Saxton Winter (1855–1936), an Englishwoman. The earliest letters are those of a child, sent to Miss Winter when she was on holiday in England, but after Wilhelmina’s education was finished in 1896 and she had no more need of a governess, she continued to write to Winter weekly. Her long letters cover a wide range of subjects: including her perspective on people and events, encounters with famous individuals, kings and emperors, but also sad times and loneliness, her belief in the Almighty, and above all, her development to her role as queen – her inauguration was in 1898 –  and the high seriousness with which she regarded her duties. The resulting volume offers unprecedented insight into her life as child of her mother queen-regent Emma, as queen, as wife of prince Hendrik and as mother of princess Juliana.
 
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cover of Dartmouth Song Book

Dartmouth Song Book

Paul R. Zeller

Dartmouth College Press, 2002

Dartmouth Song Book
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cover of Dartmouth Veterans: Vietnam Perspectives

Dartmouth Veterans

Vietnam Perspectives

Edited by Phillip C. Schaefer

Brandeis University Press, 2014

These are tales of what it was like for young men to go from the bucolic hills of New Hampshire to a land wracked by war and violence. The result is a collection of more than fifty accounts, showing the variety of experiences and reactions to this dramatic period in American history. Some soldiers were drafted, some volunteered; some supported the war, but many turned against it. Common to all the stories is the way in which war changes men, for good and ill, and the way in which the Vietnam experience colored so much of the rest of these writers’ lives.
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cover of Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin

Darwin Deleted

Imagining a World without Darwin

Peter J. Bowler

University of Chicago Press, 2013

The ideas and terminology of Darwinism are so pervasive these days that it seems impossible to avoid them, let alone imagine a world without them. But in this remarkable rethinking of scientific history, Peter J. Bowler does just that. He asks: What if Charles Darwin had not returned from the voyage of the Beagle and thus did not write On the Origin of Species? Would someone else, such as Alfred Russel Wallace, have published the selection theory and initiated a similar transformation? Or would the absence of Darwin’s book have led to a different sequence of events, in which biology developed along a track that did not precipitate a great debate about the impact of evolutionism? Would there have been anything equivalent to social Darwinism, and if so would the alternatives have been less pernicious and misappropriated?

In Darwin Deleted, Bowler argues that no one else, not even Wallace, was in a position to duplicate Darwin’s complete theory of evolution by natural selection. Evolutionary biology would almost certainly have emerged, but through alternative theories, which were frequently promoted by scientists, religious thinkers, and moralists who feared the implications of natural selection. Because non-Darwinian elements of evolutionism flourished for a time in the real world, it is possible to plausibly imagine how they might have developed, particularly if the theory of natural selection had not emerged until decades after the acceptance of the basic idea of evolution. Bowler’s unique approach enables him to clearly explain the non-Darwinian tradition—and in doing so, he reveals how the reception of Darwinism was historically contingent. By taking Darwin out of the equation, Bowler is able to fully elucidate the ideas of other scientists, such as Richard Owen and Thomas Huxley, whose work has often been misunderstood because of their distinctive responses to Darwin.
Darwin Deleted boldly offers a new vision of scientific history. It is one where the sequence of discovery and development would have been very different and would have led to an alternative understanding of the relationship between evolution, heredity, and the environment—and, most significantly, a less contentious relationship between science and religion. Far from mere speculation, this fascinating and compelling book forces us to reexamine the preconceptions that underlie many of the current controversies about the impact of evolutionism. It shows how contingent circumstances surrounding the publication of On the Origin of Species polarized attitudes in ways that still shape the conversation today. 

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cover of Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior

Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior

Robert J. Richards

University of Chicago Press, 1987

With insight and wit, Robert J. Richards focuses on the development of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior from their first distinct appearance in the eighteenth century to their controversial state today. Particularly important in the nineteenth century were Charles Darwin's ideas about instinct, reason, and morality, which Richards considers against the background of Darwin's personality, training, scientific and cultural concerns, and intellectual community. Many critics have argued that the Darwinian revolution stripped nature of moral purpose and ethically neutered the human animal. Richards contends, however, that Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and their disciples attempted to reanimate moral life, believing that the evolutionary process gave heart to unselfish, altruistic behavior.

"Richards's book is now the obvious introduction to the history of ideas about mind and behavior in the nineteenth century."—Mark Ridley, Times Literary Supplement

"Not since the publication of Michael Ghiselin's The Triumph of the Darwinian Method has there been such an ambitious, challenging, and methodologically self-conscious interpretation of the rise and development and evolutionary theories and Darwin's role therein."—John C. Greene, Science

"His book . . . triumphantly achieves the goal of all great scholarship: it not only informs us, but shows us why becoming thus informed is essential to understanding our own issues and projects."—Daniel C. Dennett, Philosophy of Science

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cover of Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin's Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859-1872

Darwin and the General Reader

The Reception of Darwin's Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859-1872

Alvar Ellegård

University of Chicago Press, 1990

Drawing on his investigation of over one hundred mid-Victorian British newspapers and periodicals, Alvar Ellegård describes and analyzes the impact of Darwin's theory of evolution during the first dozen years after the publication of the Origin of Species. Although Darwin's book caused an immediate stir in literary and scientific periodicals, the popular press largely ignored it. Only after the work's implications for theology and the nature of man became evident did general publications feel compelled to react; each social group responded according to his own political and religious prejudices. Ellegård charts the impact of this revolution in science, maintaining that although the idea of evolution was generally accepted, Darwin's primary contribution, the theory of natural selection, was either ignored or rejected among the public.
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cover of Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection

Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection

Evelleen Richards

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Darwin’s concept of natural selection has been exhaustively studied, but his secondary evolutionary principle of sexual selection remains largely unexplored and misunderstood. Yet sexual selection was of great strategic importance to Darwin because it explained things that natural selection could not and offered a naturalistic, as opposed to divine, account of beauty and its perception. 
 
Only now, with Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, do we have a comprehensive and meticulously researched account of Darwin’s path to its formulation—one that shows the man, rather than the myth, and examines both the social and intellectual roots of Darwin’s theory. Drawing on the minutiae of his unpublished notes, annotations in his personal library, and his extensive correspondence, Evelleen Richards offers a richly detailed, multilayered history. Her fine-grained analysis comprehends the extraordinarily wide range of Darwin’s sources and disentangles the complexity of theory, practice, and analogy that went into the making of sexual selection. Richards deftly explores the narrative strands of this history and vividly brings to life the chief characters involved. A true milestone in the history of science, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection illuminates the social and cultural contingencies of the shaping of an important—if controversial—biological concept that is back in play in current evolutionary theory.
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cover of Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction

Darwin and the Novelists

Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction

George Levine

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Levine shows how Darwin's ideas affected nineteenth-century novelists—from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad. "Levine stands in our day as the premier critic and commentator on Victorian prose."—Frank M. Turner, Nineteenth-Century Literature. "Magnificently written, with a care and delicacy worthy of its subject."—Nina Auerbach, University of Pennsylvania
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cover of Darwin's Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation

Darwin's Evolving Identity

Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation

Alistair Sponsel

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Why—against his mentor’s exhortations to publish—did Charles Darwin take twenty years to reveal his theory of evolution by natural selection? In Darwin’s Evolving Identity, Alistair Sponsel argues that Darwin adopted this cautious approach to atone for his provocative theorizing as a young author spurred by that mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell.  While we might expect him to have been tormented by guilt about his private study of evolution, Darwin was most distressed by harsh reactions to his published work on coral reefs, volcanoes, and earthquakes, judging himself guilty of an authorial “sin of speculation.” It was the battle to defend himself against charges of overzealous theorizing as a geologist, rather than the prospect of broader public outcry over evolution, which made Darwin such a cautious author of Origin of Species. 


Drawing on his own ambitious research in Darwin’s manuscripts and at the Beagle’s remotest ports of call, Sponsel takes us from the ocean to the Origin and beyond. He provides a vivid new picture of Darwin’s career as a voyaging naturalist and metropolitan author, and in doing so makes a bold argument about how we should understand the history of scientific theories.
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cover of Darwin's Footprint: Cultural Perspectives on Evolution in Greece (1880–1930s)

Darwin's Footprint

Cultural Perspectives on Evolution in Greece (1880–1930s)

Maria Zarimis

Central European University Press, 2015

Darwin’s Footprint examines the impact of Darwinism in Greece, investigating how it has shaped Greece in terms of its cultural and intellectual history, and in particular its literature.

The book demonstrates that in the late 19th to early 20th centuries Darwinism and associated science strongly influenced celebrated Greek literary writers and other influential intellectuals, which fueled debate in various areas such as ‘man’s place in nature’, eugenics, the nature-nurture controversy, religion, as well as class, race and gender.

In addition, the study reveals that many of these individuals were also considering alternative approaches to these issues based on Darwinian and associated biological post-Darwinian ideas. Their concerns included the Greek “race” or nation, its culture, language and identity; also politics and gender equality.

Zarimis’s monograph devotes considerable space to Xenopoulos (1867-1951), notable novelist, journalist and playwright.

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cover of Darwin's Most Wonderful Plants: A Tour of His Botanical Legacy

Darwin's Most Wonderful Plants

A Tour of His Botanical Legacy

Ken Thompson

University of Chicago Press, 2019

For many people, the story of Charles Darwin goes like this: he ventured to the Galapagos Islands on the Beagle, was inspired by the biodiversity of the birds he saw there, and immediately returned home to write his theory of evolution. But this simplified narrative is inaccurate and lacking: it leaves out a major part of Darwin’s legacy. He published On the Origin of Species nearly thirty years after his voyages. And much of his life was spent experimenting with and observing plants.

Darwin was a brilliant and revolutionary botanist whose observations and theories were far ahead of his time. With Darwin’s Most Wonderful Plants, biologist and gardening expert Ken Thompson restores this important aspect of Darwin’s biography while also delighting in the botanical world that captivated the famous scientist. Thompson traces how well Darwin’s discoveries have held up, revealing that many are remarkably long-lasting. Some findings are only now being confirmed and extended by high-tech modern research, while some have been corrected through recent analysis.

We learn from Thompson how Darwin used plants to shape his most famous theory and then later how he used that theory to further push the boundaries of botanical knowledge. We also get to look over Darwin’s shoulder as he labors, learning more about his approach to research and his astonishing capacity for hard work. Darwin’s genius was to see the wonder and the significance in the ordinary and mundane, in the things that most people wouldn’t look at twice.
Both Thompson and Darwin share a love for our most wonderful plants and the remarkable secrets they can unlock. This book will instill that same joy in casual gardeners and botany aficionados alike.
[more]
cover of Darwin's Orchids: Then and Now

Darwin's Orchids

Then and Now

Edited by Retha Edens-Meier and Peter Bernhardt

University of Chicago Press, 2014

For biologists, 2009 was an epochal year: the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of a book now known simply as The Origin of Species. But for many botanists, Darwin’s true legacy starts with the 1862 publication of another volume: On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing, or Fertilisation of Orchids. This slim but detailed book with the improbably long title was the first in a series of plant studies by Darwin that continues to serve as a global exemplar in the field of evolutionary botany. In Darwin’s Orchids, an international group of orchid biologists unites to celebrate and explore the continuum that stretches from Darwin’s groundbreaking orchid research to that of today.

Mirroring the structure of Fertilisation of Orchids, Darwin’s Orchids investigates flowers from Darwin’s home in England, through the southern hemisphere, and on to North America and China as it seeks to address a set of questions first put forward by Darwin himself: What pollinates this particular type of orchid? How does its pollination mechanism work? Will an orchid self-pollinate or is an insect or other animal vector required? And how has this orchid’s lineage changed over time? Diverse in their colors, forms, aromas, and pollination schemes, orchids have long been considered ideal models for the study of plant evolution and conservation. Looking to the past, present, and future of botany, Darwin’s Orchids will be a vital addition to this tradition.
[more]
cover of Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins

Darwin's Sacred Cause

Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins

Adrian Desmond and James Moore

University of Chicago Press, 2011

There has always been a mystery surrounding Darwin: How did this quiet, respectable gentleman come to beget one of the most radical ideas in the history of human thought? It is difficult to overstate what Darwin was risking in publishing his theory of evolution. So it must have been something very powerful—a moral fire, as Desmond and Moore put it—that helped propel him. That moral fire, they argue, was a passionate hatred of slavery.

In opposition to the apologists for slavery who argued that blacks and whites had originated as separate species, Darwin believed the races belonged to the same human family. Slavery was a “sin,” and abolishing it became his “sacred cause.” By extending the abolitionists’ idea of human brotherhood to all life, Darwin developed our modern view of evolution.

Drawing on a wealth of fresh manuscripts, family letters, diaries, and even ships’ logs, Desmond and Moore argue that only by acknowledging Darwin’s abolitionist heritage can we fully understand the development of his groundbreaking ideas.

[more]
cover of Das Arkansas Echo: A Year in the Life of Germans in the Nineteenth-Century South

Das Arkansas Echo

A Year in the Life of Germans in the Nineteenth-Century South

Kathleen Condray

University of Arkansas Press, 2020

In the late nineteenth century, a thriving immigrant population supported three German-language weekly newspapers in Arkansas. Most traces of the community those newspapers served disappeared with assimilation in the ensuing decades—but luckily, the complete run of one of the weeklies, Das Arkansas Echo, still exists, offering a lively picture of what life was like for this German immigrant community.

“Das Arkansas Echo”: A Year in the Life of Germans in the Nineteenth-Century South examines topics the newspaper covered during its inaugural year. Kathleen Condray illuminates the newspaper’s crusade against Prohibition, its advocacy for the protection of German schools and the German language, and its promotion of immigration. We also learn about aspects of daily living, including food preparation and preservation, religion, recreation, the role of women in the family and society, health and wellness, and practical housekeeping. And we see how the paper assisted German speakers in navigating civic life outside their immigrant community, including the racial tensions of the post-Reconstruction South.

“Das Arkansas Echo”: A Year in the Life of Germans in the Nineteenth-Century South offers a fresh perspective on the German speakers who settled in a modernizing Arkansas. Mining a valuable newspaper archive, Condray sheds light on how these immigrants navigated their new identity as southern Americans.
 
[more]
cover of Dash of Pepper!: The Depression, The Hobo, and the 1931 World Series

Dash of Pepper!

The Depression, The Hobo, and the 1931 World Series

Justin Wingerter

University of Missouri Press, 2027

Dash of Pepper!: The Depression, The Hobo, and the 1931 World Series is the first book about the 1931 World Series and its unlikely star, Johnnie Leonard Roosevelt “Pepper” Martin. Born in Oklahoma in 1904, Martin grew up in poverty, performing farm labor with his family and attending school only sporadically (he was eventually expelled for his lack of shoes). Local sandlots served as his introduction to baseball, bringing him into an unpretentious world of hand-me-down leather, battered balls bursting at the seams, and boyhood. He was immediately hooked.

Martin spent his adolescence working a variety of odd jobs and playing for even odder baseball teams before making a living as a player for the East Texas League beginning in 1925, the owner of which sold him to the St. Louis Cardinals later that year. Martin played for the Cardinals’ minor league affiliates for the next two years, all while continuing his boyhood habit of “hoboing” freight trains to travel to games. Promoted to the major leagues in 1927, Martin was sent back down to the minors two years later, making his return to the Big Leagues in 1931 and soon thereafter emerging as the star of that year’s World Series. Historians still credit Martin, with his .500 batting average, 4 doubles, 1 home run, and 5 RBIs, for the Cardinals’ taking the championship. 

Author Justin Wingerter documents the words of reporters from every state who told of a Depression-weary nation enthralled by the self-described hobo with endless hustle — “Don’t say Pepper, say STAR,” wrote The St. Louis Star (a play on its motto, “Don’t say ‘paper,’ say STAR”) after the Cardinals’ Game Three win. As Wingerter argues, Martin became a symbol of the forgotten man at a time when his fellow Americans needed a hero. His performance in the 1931 Series was followed obsessively by farmers, businesspeople, industrial workers, and even inmates, all of whom found in Martin a source of solace in a time of widespread misery. As one sportswriter opined in Waterloo, Iowa, “The Pepper Martins have a way of making us forget it all.” 

In Dash of Pepper!, Wingerter explores the 1931 World Series in the context of the era’s national mood, populating the book’s pages with a host of colorful characters reaching far beyond Martin: One-Eyed Connelly, the famed gatecrasher who eventually met his match; the masked assailants of the St. Louis Milk War, a violent labor action that shared the city’s frontpages with the Series; banking regulators rushing to save deposits at Philadelphia’s Franklin Trust, and more.

With Dash of Pepper!, Wingerter makes an original contribution to the field, its focus on American society making it particularly valuable to lovers of United States history in addition to baseball fans.

[more]
cover of Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census

Data Are Made, Not Found

A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census

danah boyd

University of Chicago Press, 2026

An eye-opening story of the people who make the census, the United States’ largest and most consequential dataset, and the growing threats to their crucial work. 

By many measures, the US census is the government’s largest non-wartime operation, and one of the world’s oldest and biggest data-making endeavors. The 2020 census required more than a decade of planning and technical work—not to mention managing nearly a quarter of a million temporary workers simultaneously—to collect data about the American public. That data was then processed to count each of 331,449,281 residents once—and only once—and in the right place. The operation is also one of the country’s most consequential. Census data determine how political power and federal funding are allocated. Census data make politics, and consequently, politics make census data. In this urgent book, danah boyd explores what it took for the Census Bureau to make the 2020 census, amidst a global pandemic and natural disasters, and while navigating political forces that constrained the budget, micro-managed the schedule, and attacked statisticians’ methods. 

With rare insider access to the Census Bureau, boyd observed and interviewed hundreds of government civil servants who made the 2020 census. By documenting the perspectives of government workers, Data Are Made, Not Found provides a rare glimpse into what it takes to make democracy’s data. Each chapter reveals a different challenge—ranging from the last-minute fights about a citizenship question to the not-so-helpful help of well-intended stakeholders to avoid undercounts—and shows how civil servants responded to each problem, controversy, and hurdle. Boyd shows how many of the challenges that the Census Bureau faced in 2020 resulted from decades of political operatives, data users, and various stakeholders playing what boyd calls “Jenga politics,” weakening the administrative state for short-term political gains by removing support and adding more requirements. 

Civil servants saved the 2020 census, but future censuses—and other data-making efforts related to elections, health, and the economy—are precarious. Boyd’s message is clear and compelling: protecting democracy means protecting the people and institutions that produce this data.

[more]
cover of Daughter of the Empire State: The Life of Judge Jane Bolin

Daughter of the Empire State

The Life of Judge Jane Bolin

Jacqueline A. McLeod

University of Illinois Press, 2016

This long overdue biography of the nation's first African American woman judge elevates Jane Matilda Bolin to her rightful place in American history as an activist, integrationist, jurist, and outspoken public figure in the political and professional milieu of New York City before the onset of the modern Civil Rights movement.

Bolin was appointed to New York City's domestic relations court in 1939 for the first of four ten-year terms. When she retired in 1978, her career had extended well beyond the courtroom. Drawing on archival materials as well as a meeting with Bolin in 2002, historian Jacqueline A. McLeod reveals how Bolin parlayed her judicial position to impact significant reforms of the legal and social service system in New York.

Beginning with Bolin's childhood and educational experiences at Wellesley and Yale, Daughter of the Empire State chronicles Bolin's relatively quick rise through the ranks of a profession that routinely excluded both women and African Americans. Deftly situating Bolin's experiences within the history of black women lawyers and the historical context of high-achieving black New Englanders, McLeod offers a multi-layered analysis of black women's professionalization in a segregated America.

Linking Bolin's activist leanings and integrationist zeal to her involvement in the NAACP, McLeod analyzes Bolin's involvement at the local level as well as her tenure on the organization's national board of directors. An outspoken critic of the discriminatory practices of New York City's probation department and juvenile placement facilities, Bolin also co-founded, with Eleanor Roosevelt, the Wiltwyck School for boys in upstate New York and campaigned to transform the Domestic Relations Court with her judicial colleagues. McLeod's careful and highly readable account of these accomplishments inscribes Bolin onto the roster of important social reformers and early civil rights trailblazers.

[more]
cover of Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline Hopkins

Daughter of the Revolution

The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline Hopkins

Dworkin, Ira

Rutgers University Press, 2007

Pauline E. Hopkins (1859–1930) came to prominence in the early years of the twentieth century as an outspoken writer, editor, and critic. Frequently recognized for her first novel, Contending Forces, she is currently one of the most widely read and studied African American novelists from that period.

While nearly all of Hopkins’s fiction remains in print, there is very little of her nonfiction available. This reader brings together dozens of her hard-to-find essays, including longer nonfiction works such as Famous Men of the Negro Race and The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century, some of which are published here for the first time in their entirety.

Through these works, along with two juvenile essays from the 1870s, a personal letter, and two speeches, readers encounter a voice that is committed to constructing an international discourse on race, recovering the militant abolitionist tradition to combat Jim Crow, celebrating black political participation during and after the Reconstruction era, articulating the connections between race and labor, and insisting on equal rights for women.  Hopkins’s writing will challenge contemporary scholars to rethink their understanding of black activism and modernity in the early twentieth century.

 

[more]
cover of Daughters of Independence

Daughters of Independence

Joanna Liddle

Rutgers University Press, 1989

Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi explore the connection in India between gender and caste, and gender and class. They ask whether the subordination of women has diminished as India moves from a caste to a class structure, and what effect colonization had on the status of women in India. Focusing on educated, professional women, the authors look at the particular experiences of 120 women they interviewed, and also interpret the larger patterns of social relations that emerge from the interviews. These sensitive stories are told with an eloquence that is often moving and inspiring.

For thousands of years Indian women have had a cultural tradition of resisting male domination. At the same time, the control of female sexuality has always been central to social hierarchies in India. Women are constrained in both class and caste hierarchies, to help distinguish the men at the top of the hierarchy from men at the bottom, where women are less constrained. In class society the seclusion of women allowed men to have sexual control over women and to retain the property that was transferred in marriage.

In contemporary India, professional women have had success entering the professions as the social groups to which they belong move increasingly to class rather than caste structures. But men continue to control the type of education they receive and the type of employment open to them, and to participate in the sexual harassment of women in the workplace. The concept that women are inferior to men--a concept that is not part of the Indian cultural heritage--is growing. In a sense, working professional women strengthen male control. The class structure is no more egalitarian than the caste structure, as oppression simply takes other forms.

[more]
cover of Daughters of Time: Women in the Western Tradition

Daughters of Time

Women in the Western Tradition

Mary Kinnear

University of Michigan Press, 1982

Daughters of Time: Women in the Western Tradition by Mary Kinnear offers a sweeping and insightful exploration of women’s roles, identities, and achievements throughout the history of Western civilization. Spanning from ancient societies to the twentieth century, Kinnear draws on social, cultural, and intellectual history to illuminate both the well-known and hidden contributions of women in Europe and North America.Structured both chronologically and thematically, the book investigates key moments and turning points in women’s history—from the family structures and gender norms of ancient Greece and Rome, through the medieval period and the Renaissance, to the movements for reform, political rights, and social change in modern times. Kinnear foregrounds women's experiences in work, politics, religion, and domestic life while also examining the evolution of broader social attitudes and institutional barriers.Thoughtfully engaging with the insights of feminist scholarship, Daughters of Time challenges the traditional exclusion of women from major historical narratives, revealing how the conceptual frameworks of Western philosophy and culture have both shaped and limited women’s lives. Kinnear highlights the tensions, contradictions, and progress marking women’s status and rights, and provides keen analysis of how concepts like equality, reform, collective action, and family have shaped the possibilities for women across generations.Accessible, rigorously researched, and rich with examples, Daughters of Time is an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand the complexity and significance of women’s history in the West, as well as the ongoing debates about gender, power, and social change.
[more]
cover of David Davis, Abraham Lincoln's Favorite Judge

David Davis, Abraham Lincoln's Favorite Judge

Raymond J. McKoski

University of Illinois Press, 2025

One of Abraham Lincoln’s staunchest and most effective allies, Judge David Davis masterminded the floor fight that gave Lincoln the presidential nomination at the 1860 Republican National Convention. This history-changing event emerged from a long friendship between the two men. It also altered the course of Davis’s career, as Lincoln named him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1862.

Raymond J. McKoski offers a biography of Davis’s public life, his impact on the presidency and judiciary, and his personal, professional, and political relationships with Lincoln. Davis lent his vast network of connections, organizational and leadership abilities, and personal persuasiveness to help Lincoln’s political rise. When Davis became a judge, he honed an ability to hear each case with complete impartiality, a practice that endeared him to Lincoln but one day put him at odds with the president over important Civil War–era rulings. McKoski details these cases while providing an in-depth account of Davis’s role in Lincoln’s two unsuccessful campaigns for U.S. Senate and the fateful run for the presidency.

[more]
cover of David Lloyd George: Great Britain

David Lloyd George

Great Britain

Alan Sharp

Haus Publishing, 2010

David Lloyd George (1863-1945). The end of the First World War saw Britain at the height of its power. Its fleet and air force were the largest in the world. Its armies had triumphed in the Middle East and spearheaded the final attacks in Western Europe that had driven the defeated Germans to seek an armistice. Britain now had to translate this military victory into the achievement of its war aims and future security and prosperity. Its main negotiator at the forthcoming peace conference would be its prime minister, the ebullient and enigmatic David Lloyd George, the "Welsh Wizard" and "the man who had won the war." Lloyd George's energy had maintained the war effort through the dark days of 1917 and early 1918, but now he anticipated, with relish, the prospect of winning the peace. Few were better equipped. He was a skilled and accomplished negotiator with the knack of reconciling the apparently irreconcilable. His admirers, of whom there were many, pointed to his brilliant and agile mind, his rapid grasp of complex questions and his powers of persuasion. His critics, who were also numerous, distrusted his sleight of hand, fleetness of foot and, frankly, his word. His six months in Paris in 1919, as he pitted his wits against formidable world leaders like Woodrow Wilson and Georges Clemenceau, were among the most enjoyable but exhausting of his life. This study investigates the extent to which Lloyd George succeeded in his aims and evaluates the immediate and longer-term results of his negotiations for Britain.
[more]
cover of David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism

David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism

Gregory A Prince

University of Utah Press, 2005

Ordained as an apostle in 1906, David O. McKay served as president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1951 until his death in 1970. Under his leadership, the church experienced unparalleled growth—nearly tripling in total membership—and becoming a significant presence throughout the world.

The first book to draw upon the David O. McKay Papers at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, in addition to some two hundred interviews conducted by the authors, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism focuses primarily on the years of McKay's presidency. During some of the most turbulent times in American and world history, McKay navigated the church through uncharted waters as it faced the challenges of worldwide growth in an age of communism, the civil rights movement, and ecumenism. Gregory Prince and Robert Wright have compiled a thorough history of the presidency of a much-loved prophet who left a lasting legacy within the LDS Church.

Winner of the Evans Handcart Award. 
Winner of the Mormon History Association Turner-Bergera Best Biography Award. 

[more]
cover of Dawn at Mineral King Valley: The Sierra Club, the Disney Company, and the Rise of Environmental Law

Dawn at Mineral King Valley

The Sierra Club, the Disney Company, and the Rise of Environmental Law

Daniel P. Selmi

University of Chicago Press, 2022

The story behind the historic Mineral King Valley case, which reveals how the Sierra Club battled Disney’s ski resort development and launched a new environmental era in America.
 
In our current age of climate change–induced panic, it’s hard to imagine a time when private groups were not actively enforcing environmental protection laws in the courts. It wasn’t until 1972, however, that a David and Goliath–esque Supreme Court showdown involving the Sierra Club and Disney set a revolutionary legal precedent for the era of environmental activism we live in today.
 
Set against the backdrop of the environmental movement that swept the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dawn at Mineral King Valley tells the surprising story of how the US Forest Service, the Disney company, and the Sierra Club each struggled to adapt to the new, rapidly changing political landscape of environmental consciousness in postwar America. Proposed in 1965 and approved by the federal government in 1969, Disney’s vast development plan would have irreversibly altered the practically untouched Mineral King Valley, a magnificently beautiful alpine area in the Sierra Nevada mountains. At first, the plan met with unanimous approval from elected officials, government administrators, and the press—it seemed inevitable that this expanse of wild natural land would be radically changed and turned over to a private corporation. Then the scrappy Sierra Club forcefully pushed back with a lawsuit that ultimately propelled the modern environmental era by allowing interest groups to bring litigation against environmentally destructive projects.
 
An expert on environmental law and appellate advocacy, Daniel P. Selmi uses his authoritative narrative voice to recount the complete history of this revolutionary legal battle and the ramifications that continue today, almost 50 years later.
[more]
cover of Dawn in Arctic Alaska

Dawn in Arctic Alaska

Diamond Jenness

University of Chicago Press, 1985

"The Karluk had disappeared. Whether the vessel had freed itself from the ice and steamed eastward, or whether, still imprisoned, it had been carried by the ice westward, we could not know. In any case it was gone, leaving our hunting party of six men marooned on a sandy islet surrounded by thin ice and open water. The wind finally died away, in the calm air the water rapidly froze over again, and on September 30 we crossed with our two sleds to the mainland."

In 1913 a young ethnologist from New Zealand boarded a ship for the Arctic, beginning a personal journey that was to make Diamond Jenness one of the twentieth century's foremost authorities on Alaskan Eskimos. Jenness had been asked to join the Stefansson expedition, and his official duties were to collect ethnographic details on the Eskimos—their culture, technology, religion, and social organization. His account of the expedition was published as People of the Twilight in 1928, but Jenness also kept a diary of his three years among the Eskimos. He was eventually persuaded to publish it as Dawn in Arctic Alaska.

Predating the genre of personal ethnographies that has become so popular and important today, Jenness's tales blend his keen observations of the Arctic and its people with his own reflections and sensory experiences. He expresses great adimiration for the customs and character of the Eskimos and great regret and disappointment over the destruction of their lifeway through contact with white men.
[more]
cover of Dawn of Industrial Agriculture in Iowa: Anthropology, Literature, and History

Dawn of Industrial Agriculture in Iowa

Anthropology, Literature, and History

E. Paul Durrenberger

University Press of Colorado, 2021

In The Dawn of Industrial Agriculture in Iowa E. Paul Durrenberger recounts the transformation of Iowa’s family farms into today’s agricultural industry through the lens of the lives and writings of Iowa novelist Paul Corey and poet Ruth Lechlitner. This anthropological biography analyzes Corey’s fiction, Lechlitner’s poetry, and their professional and personal correspondence to offer a new perspective on an era (1925–1947) that saw the collapse and remaking of capitalism in the United States, the rise of communism in the Soviet Union, the rise and defeat of fascism around the world, and the creation of a continuous warfare state in America.
 
Durrenberger tells the story that Corey aimed to record and preserve of the industrialization of Iowa’s agriculture and the death of its family farms. He analyzes Corey’s regionalist focus on Iowa farming and regionalism’s contemporaneous association in Europe with rising fascism. He explores Corey’s adoption of naturalism, evident in his resistance to heroes and villains, to plot structure and resolution, and to moral judgment, as well as his ethnographic tendency to focus on groups rather than individuals.
 
An unusual and wide-ranging study, The Dawn of Industrial Agriculture in Iowa offers important insight into the relationships among fiction, individual lives, and anthropological practice, as well as into a pivotal period in American history.
 
[more]
cover of Dawn's Light Woman & Nicolas Franchomme: Marriage and Law in the Illinois Country

Dawn's Light Woman & Nicolas Franchomme

Marriage and Law in the Illinois Country

Carl J. Ekberg and Sharon K. Person

Southern Illinois University Press, 2022

WINNER, 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award in “Books, Scholarly”!

Native women’s marital rights and roles in colonial Illinois society

Kaskaskia, Illinois, once the state’s capital, torn from the state by flood waters, and now largely forgotten, was once the home to a couple who helped transform the region in the 1720s from a frontier village to a civil society. In the heart of France’s North American empire, the village was a community of French-Canadian fur traders and Kaskaskia Indians who not only lived together but often intermarried. These Indigenous and French intermarriages were central to colonial Illinois society, and the coupling of Marguerite 8assecam8c8e (Dawn’s Light Woman) and Nicolas Franchomme, in particular, was critical to expanding the jurisdiction of French law.
 
While the story of Marguerite and Nicolas is unknown today, it is the story of how French customary law (Coutume de Paris) governed colonial marriage, how mixed Indian-French marriages stood at the very core of early colonial Illinois society, and how Illinois Indian women benefited, socially and legally, from being married to French men. All of this came about due to a lawsuit in which Nicolas successfully argued that his wife had legal claim to her first husband’s estate—a legal decision that created a precedent for society in the Illinois Country.
 
Within this narrative of a married couple and their legal fight—based on original French manuscripts and supported by the comprehensively annotated 1726 Illinois census—is also the story of the village of Kaskaskia during the 1720s, of the war between Fox Indians and French settlers, with their Indian allies, in Illinois, and of how the spread of plow agriculture dramatically transformed the Illinois Country’s economy from largely fur trade–based to expansively agricultural.
[more]
cover of Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New England

Dawnland Encounters

Indians and Europeans in Northern New England

Edited by Colin G. Calloway

University Press of New England, 1991

Colin G. Calloway collects, for the first time, documents describing the full range of encounters of Indians and Europeans in northern New England during the Colonial era. His comprehensive and highly readable introduction to the subject of Indian and European interaction in northern New England covers early encounters, missionary efforts, diplomacy, war, commerce, and cultural interchange and features a wide range of primary sources, including narratives, letters, account books, treaties, and council proceedings. Together with period illustrations, the documents testify to the richness and variety of the inter-ethnic relations in northern New England. They also show that while conflict certainly occurred, the encounters were also marked by cooperation and accommodation.
[more]
cover of Day of Days

Day of Days

John Smolens

Michigan State University Press, 2020

In the spring of 1927, Andrew Kehoe, the treasurer for the school board in Bath, Michigan, spent weeks surreptitiously wiring the public school, as well as his farm, with hundreds of pounds of dynamite. The explosions on May 18, the day before graduation, killed and maimed dozens of children, as well as teachers, administrators, and village residents, including Kehoe’s wife, Nellie. A respected member of the community, Kehoe himself died when he ignited his truck, which he had loaded with crates of explosives and scrap metal. Decades later, one survivor, Beatrice Marie Turcott, recalls the spring of 1927 and how this haunting experience leads her to the conviction that one does not survive the present without reconciling hard truths about the past. In its portrayal of several Bath school children, Day of Days examines how such traumatic events scar one’s life long after the dead are laid to rest and physical wounds heal, and how an anguished but resilient American village copes with the bombing, which at the time seemed incomprehensible, and yet now may be considered a harbinger of the future.
[more]
cover of Day of the Dead in the USA, Second Edition: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon

Day of the Dead in the USA, Second Edition

The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon

Regina M Marchi

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Honoring relatives by tending graves, building altars, and cooking festive meals has been a major tradition among Latin Americans for centuries. The tribute, "El Día de los Muertos," has enjoyed renewed popularity since the 1970s when Latinx activists and artists in the United States began expanding "Day of the Dead" north of the border with celebrations of performance art, Aztec danza, art exhibits, and other public expressions.
 
Focusing on the power of public ritual to serve as a communication medium, this revised and updated edition combines a mix of ethnography, historical research, oral history, and critical cultural analysis to explore the manifold and unexpected transformations that occur when the tradition is embraced by the mainstream. A testament to the complex role of media and commercial forces in constructions of ethnic identity, Day of the Dead in the USA provides insight into the power of art and ritual to create community, transmit oppositional messages, and advance educational, political, and economic goals.
 
Today Chicano-style Day of the Dead events take place in all fifty states. This revised edition provides new information about:
  • The increase in events across the US, incorporating media coverage and financial aspects,
  • Recent political movements expressed in contemporary Day of the Dead celebrations, including #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo
  • Greater media coverage and online presence of the celebration in blogs, websites, and streaming video
  • Día de los Muertos themes and iconography in video games and films 
  • The proliferation of commercialized merchandise such as home goods, apparel, face paints and jewelry at mainstream big box and web retailers, as well as the widespread proliferation of calavera-themed decorations and costumes for Halloween
  • 24 new full color illustrations

 
[more]
cover of Days on the Family Farm: From the Golden Age through the Great Depression

Days on the Family Farm

From the Golden Age through the Great Depression

Carrie A. Meyer

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

From the beginning of the twentieth century to World War II, farm wife May Lyford Davis kept a daily chronicle that today offers a window into a way of life that has all but disappeared. May and her husband Elmo lived through two decades of prosperity, the Great Depression, and two World Wars in their Midwestern farming community. Like many women of her time, Davis kept diaries that captured the everyday events of the family farm; she also kept meticulous farming accounts. In doing so, she left an extraordinary record that reflects not only her own experiences but also the history of early twentieth-century American agriculture.

May and Elmo’s story, engagingly told by Carrie A. Meyer, showcases the large-scale evolution of agriculture from horses to automobile and tractors, a surprisingly vibrant family and community life, and the business of commercial farming. Details such as what items were bought and sold, what was planted and harvested, the temperature and rainfall, births and deaths, and the direction of the wind are gathered to reveal a rich picture of a world shared by many small farmers.

With sustainable and small-scale farming again on the rise in the United States, Days on the Family Farm resonates with both the profound and mundane aspects of rural life—past and present—in the Midwest.

Carrie A. Meyer is associate professor of economics at George Mason University.

[more]
cover of Daytime Stars

Daytime Stars

Olga Berggolts, translated by Lisa Kirschenbaum

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

For 872 days during World War II, the city of Leningrad endured a crushing blockade at the hands of German forces. Close to one million civilians died, most from starvation. Amid the devastation, Olga Berggolts broadcast her poems on the one remaining radio station, urging listeners not to lose hope. When the siege had begun, the country had already endured decades of revolution, civil war, economic collapse, and Stalin's purges. Berggolts herself survived the deaths of two husbands and both of her children, her own arrest, and a stillborn birth after being beaten under interrogation.

Berggolts wrote her memoir Daytime Stars in the spirit of the thaw after Stalin's death. In it, she celebrated the ideals of the revolution and the heroism of the Soviet people while also criticizing censorship of writers and recording her doubts and despair. This English translation by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum makes available a unique autobiographical work by an important author of the Soviet era. In her foreword, Katharine Hodgson comments on experiences of the Terror about which Berggolts was unable or unwilling to write.
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cover of Dayton: The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City

Dayton

The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City

Adam A. Millsap

The Ohio State University Press, 2019

The Rust Belt was once the crown of American manufacturing, a symbol of the country’s economic prowess. But now it is named for what it has become: a deteriorating stretch of industrial cities left behind by a post-industrial world. In Dayton: The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City, Adam A. Millsap turns his focus to his hometown, an archetypal Rust Belt city, to examine its history and discuss its future.
Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Millsap’s book explores the economic background of the region made famous by J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. From early twentieth-century optimism, through the Great Depression and post-WWII manufacturing decline, to Dayton now, with its labor-force problems and opioid crisis, Millsap tracks the underlying forces driving the city’s trajectory. Race relations, interstates, suburbanization, climate, crime, geography, and government policies all come into play as Millsap develops a picture of the city, past and present. By examining the past, Millsap proposes a plan for the future, claiming that there is hope for Dayton to thrive again. And if Dayton can rise from its industrial ashes, then perhaps the Rust Belt can shed its stigma and once again become the backbone of American innovation.
 
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cover of De Grazia: The Man and the Myths

De Grazia

The Man and the Myths

James W. Johnson with Marilyn D. Johnson

University of Arizona Press, 2014

Artist Ted De Grazia (1909–1982) lived life with passion and verve, embracing risk and romance, becoming a legend in Arizona, and gaining international acclaim. De Grazia: The Man and the Myths is a biography that reveals the eccentric, colorful man behind the myths.

Born in Arizona Territory to Italian immigrant parents, De Grazia had a humble childhood as a copper miner’s son, which later influenced his famous persona. De Grazia often held forth at his gallery in Tucson’s Catalina foothills dressed in a pseudo-prospector’s getup of scraggly beard, jeans, flannel shirt, boots, and beat-up cowboy hat. Outrageous stories of womanizing, scores of children, and drinking binges created an eclectic image that fueled stories of mythic proportions, along with global sales of his colorful paintings inspired by the Southwest and Mexico. He made millions through his paintings and the licensing of his art for greeting cards and trinkets. Critics called his work kitsch or commercial, yet thousands of admirers continue to love it.

Calling De Grazia a complicated man doesn’t begin to explain him. He once described himself as “not saint nor devil, but both.” In this first comprehensive biography of De Grazia, authors James W. Johnson with Marilyn D. Johnson tell the story of a life remarkably lived.
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cover of De León, a Tejano Family History

De León, a Tejano Family History

By Ana Carolina Castillo Crimm

University of Texas Press, 2003

Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, 2004
San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2005

La familia de León was one of the foundation stones on which Texas was built. Martín de León and his wife Patricia de la Garza left a comfortable life in Mexico for the hardships and uncertainties of the Texas frontier in 1801. Together, they established family ranches in South Texas and, in 1824, the town of Victoria and the de León colony on the Guadalupe River (along with Stephen F. Austin's colony, the only completely successful colonization effort in Texas). They and their descendents survived and prospered under four governments, as the society in which they lived evolved from autocratic to republican and the economy from which they drew their livelihood changed from one of mercantile control to one characterized by capitalistic investments.

Combining the storytelling flair of a novelist with a scholar's concern for the facts, Ana Carolina Castillo Crimm here recounts the history of three generations of the de León family. She follows Martín and Patricia from their beginnings in Mexico through the establishment of the family ranches in Texas and the founding of the de León colony and the town of Victoria. Then she details how, after Martín's death in 1834, Patricia and her children endured the Texas Revolution, exile in New Orleans and Mexico, expropriation of their lands, and, after returning to Texas, years of legal battles to regain their property. Representative of the experiences of many Tejanos whose stories have yet to be written, the history of the de León family is the story of the Tejano settlers of Texas.

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