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The United States detains and deports several hundred thousand migrants every year. Many spend significant amounts of time in immigration detention as they await adjudication of their immigration cases. The Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey is located in a converted warehouse, managed by a private, for-profit prison company. Over three decades, migrants and asylum seekers have been brought to EDC directly from Newark Airport or have been transferred to the site from elsewhere in the United States, including from the US-Mexico border region.

Through a longitudinal, site-specific study unique in its kind, this volume unites the voices and perspectives of formerly detained migrants, scholars, journalists, lawyers, and social and faith movement leaders, who share their experiences of Elizabeth Detention Center and reconstruct its social history and its location in New Jersey's political economy and in the changing legal landscapes of immigration detention in the United States.

The essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What holds these disparate things together here are the questions authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of its method a provisional collection of things, an elusive archive. Scattered matter then becomes fixed within each author’s analytical framework rather than within the walls of an archive’s reading room or in cases along a museum corridor.

This book follows the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered, arranged, conceptualized and even displayed rather than by “discovering” artifacts in an archive and then asking how they came to be there. The authors approach material culture outside the traditional bounds of learning about the past. Their essays are varied not only in subject matter but also in narrative format and conceptual reach, making the volume accessible and easy to navigate for a quick reference or, if read straight through, build toward a new way to think about material culture.

At the Pan–African Conference in London in 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois famously prophesied that the problem of the twentieth century would be the global color line, the elevation of “whiteness” that created a racially divided world. While Pan-Africanism recognized the global nature of the color line in this period, Thomas E. Smith argues that it also pushed against it, advocating for what Du Bois called "opportunities and privileges of modern civilization" to open up to people of all colors.

Covering a period roughly bookended by two international forums, the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference and the 1911 Universal Races Congress, Emancipation without Equality chronicles how activists of African descent fought globally for equal treatment and access to rights associated with post-emancipated citizenship. While Euro-American leaders created a standard to guide the course of imperialism at the Berlin Conference, the proceedings of the Universal Races Congress demonstrated that Pan-Africanism had become a visible part of a growing, global, anti-imperialist protest.

Coming to terms with emotions and how they influence human behaviour, seems to be of the utmost importance to societies that are obsessed with everything "neuro." On the other hand, emotions have become an object of constant individual and social manipulation since "emotional intelligence" emerged as a buzzword of our times. Reflecting on this burgeoning interest in human emotions makes one think of how this interest developed and what fuelled it. From a historian's point of view, it can be traced back to classical antiquity. But it has undergone shifts and changes which can in turn shed light on social concepts of the self and its relation to other human beings (and nature). The volume focuses on the historicity of emotions and explores the processes that brought them to the fore of public interest and debate.

Less celebrated than the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the 1933–1934 Century of Progress Exposition brought visitors face-to-face with gleaming American consumerism in the midst of the Great Depression. Lindsay Fullerton draws on a wealth of personal photographs, scrapbooks, oral histories, and writings to illuminate the wildly different experiences of fairgoers against the backdrop of a city steeped in poverty and segregation.

The Exposition took place amidst massive changes sparked by expansion of mass media, Franklin Roosevelt’s election, the repeal of Prohibition, and the Great Migration. A diverse cross-section of Chicagoans informs Fullerton’s history of the event in the context of the fast-changing America of the interwar era. These personal accounts tell stories of how attendees interpreted their own experiences while being surrounded by whiz-bang products and full-throated evangelism on the benefits of progress.

A colorful people’s history, Ephemeral City takes readers inside the other Chicago World’s Fair and how visitors interacted with a pivotal moment in American history.

After a short period of independence, Estonia was occupied in World War II by the Red Army, then Nazi Germany, and again, for a lasting occupation, by the Soviets. No wonder that a greater part of the roughly one million Estonians had harshly eventful lives.

This anthology contains 25 selected life stories collected from Estonians who lived through the tribulations of the 20th century, and describe the travails of ordinary people under numerous regimes. The autobiographical accounts provide authentic perspectives on events of this period, where time is placed in the context of life-spans, and subjects grounded in personal experience. Most of the life stories reveal sufferings under foreign (Russian) oppression.

The volume is the product of a large-scale national project to record history by collecting autobiographical accounts, and a process of engaged selection for publication which followed. The variety of life-experiences recorded offers comparison across cultures, as well as an overview of the powerful neighbors as they relinquish and strengthen their hold on Estonia.

Revered by the public, respected by scholars, and imitated by politicians, Abraham Lincoln remains influential more than two hundred years after his birth. His memory has inspired books, monuments, and museums and also sparked controversies, rivalries, and forgeries. That so many people have been interested in Lincoln for so long makes him an ideal subject for exploring why history matters to ordinary Americans as well as to academic specialists.

In Everybody's History, Keith A. Erekson focuses on the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society—an organization composed of lawyers, historians, collectors, genealogists, teachers, college presidents, and newspaper editors—who joined together during the 1920s and 1930s to recover a part of Lincoln's life his biographers had long ignored: the years from age seven to twenty-one when he lived on the Indiana frontier. Participants in the “Lincoln Inquiry,” as it was commonly known, researched old records, interviewed aging witnesses, hosted pageants, built a historical village, and presented their findings in public and in print. Along the way they defended their methods and findings against competitors in the fields of public history and civic commemoration, and rescued some of Indiana's own history by correcting a forgotten chapter of Lincoln's.

Everybody's History traces the development of popular interest in Lincoln to uncover the story of an extensive network of nonprofessional historians who contested old authorities and advanced new interpretations. In so doing, the book invites all who are interested in the past to see history as both vital to public life and meaningful to everybody.

By providing a survey of consumption and lifestyle in Hungary during the second half of the twentieth century, this book shows how common people lived during and after tumultuous regime changes. After an introduction covering the late 1930s, the study centers on the communist era, and goes on to describe changes in the post-communist period with its legacy of state socialism.

Tibor Valuch poses a series of questions. Who could be called rich or poor and how did they live in the various periods? How did living, furnishings, clothing, income, and consumption mirror the structure of the society and its transformations? How could people accommodate their lifestyles to the political and social system? How specific to the regime was consumption after the communist takeover, and how did consumption habits change after the demise of state socialism? The answers, based on micro-histories, statistical data, population censuses and surveys help to understand the complexities of daily life, not only in Hungary, but also in other communist regimes in east-central Europe, with insights on their antecedents and afterlives.

Showing that the most important figures of the 1960s were not always the most famous ones

Just weeks back from Vietnam, guitarist Larry Lee stood on stage at Woodstock alongside Jimi Hendrix, but he isn’t given more than a glance in the festival’s documentary. In Selma, Alabama, in March 1965, an eight-year-old girl named Sheyann Webb wrote her own obituary before joining the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. She survived Bloody Sunday, swept off the bridge in the arms of Hosea Williams as state troopers on horseback swung bullwhips and clubs. These are just a couple of the regular people at the heart of Craig Werner’s sweeping, mosaic history of the 1960s; it is their stories, not those of the icons, that give the era its deeper meaning.

In Everyday People and the Stories of Freedom in the Sixties, Werner assembles a rich and kaleidoscopic portrait of a decade in which Americans across the entire political spectrum claimed freedom as their cause. Moving beyond familiar myths and simplified narratives, he reveals a period defined by three interlocking realities: everything was open to change, everything seemed to happen at once, and everyone believed their vision of freedom was the one worth fighting for.

Bringing together stories too often told in isolation—the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, the global Cold War, the women’s movement, and the intertwined worlds of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll—Werner integrates the experiences of African Americans, women, Native Americans, Latinx communities, LGBTQ people, and immigrants into a single, propulsive narrative. Music, film, art, and fashion are not treated as colorful backdrops but as central forces in the making of political and social change. This book illuminates the economic, political, technological, and cultural forces that shaped the 1960s and continue to influence the present. It is a history of a decade told not from the top down, but from the ground up, by the people who lived it.

Supplemental materials for readers, students, and instructors are available on the publisher’s website, including full citations, playlists, images, and thematic sections on the Global Sixties, science and technology, religion, literature, music, film, visual art, and major figures and events.

Inspired by the iconic American Guide Series published by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, this new guide to Flint, the Saginaw Valley, and the Thumb showcases the industrial-agricultural heart of Michigan, which has been beating irregularly for the last three decades, but whose importance to its people has lasted millennia. The ten counties featured in the book have lost population, industries, small farms, natural resources, and clean water. Instead of focusing on loss, the authors uncover the region’s unique history and culture, characterized by the productive tension between factories and farms, urban and rural spaces, labor and management, migrants and the mainstream, conservatives and progressives. The book documents the genesis of an ecological awareness that grew out of deforestation, habitat and species loss, and a succession of water crises. Encyclopedic in scope like their WPA forebears, the book is a functional guide that offers suggestions and strategies for enriching travel while celebrating the tenacity of those who came, worked, and stayed: lumberjacks, farmers, foundry workers, labor activists, judges, Indigenous peoples, African Americans, artists, poets, and environmental warriors.

The borders of Russian history, whether chronological, geographical, political or intellectual, have always been patrolled, have sometimes been evaded, but have never been invisible. This volume attempts to extend those borders in several ways. The articles stress continuity rather than ruptures and their organization emphasizes persistent factors over time, particularly across the 1917 divide. Geographical dimensions are explored not through conquest but through regional responses to the center: local variants of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial policies in the Caucasus and Turkestan are complemented by Central Asian petitions for citizenship in the 1930s and Siberian healing in the 1990s. Ukrainian aspirations take a special focus, from Kyivan Rus’ to Ruthenian dreams.

Politically, of course, Marxist–Leninist ideology attempted to extend its own frontiers of Russian history. Several studies here attempt to assess the meaning of the Soviet period in terms of ideology, practices, processes and memory. It is fitting too that the now accepted boundaries of the Soviet era—the revolutionary decade and the first decade of transition—are subject to detailed attention and analysis. The intellectual borders of Russian and Soviet history, long policed from within and without, have been breached by the creative and wide-ranging use of newly accessible archival sources that form the basis for these articles. The sense of community exhibited by this collection, however, is not artificial nor is it wholly imagined. It derives from the honoree, whose scholarly life has exhibited the blurring of traditional boundaries, whether disciplinary, generational, or national, that is represented by the contributors to this volume.