28167 books match the query 'History' and 1092 start with f

cover of From Jail to Jail: Mis Sea#83 Tpg#8

From Jail to Jail

Mis Sea#83 Tpg#8

Tan Malaka

Ohio University Press, 1991

From Jail to Jail  is the political autobiography of Sutan Ibrahim gelar Tan Malaka, an enigmatic and colorful political thinker of twentieth-century Asia, who was one of the most influential figures of the Indonesian Revolution. Variously labeled a communist, Trotskyite, and nationalist, Tan Malaka managed to run afoul of nearly every political group and faction involved in the Indonesian struggle for independence. During his decades of political activity, he spent periods of exile and hiding in nearly every country in Southeast Asia. As a Marxist who was expelled from and became a bitter enemy of his country’s Communist Party and as a nationalist who was imprisoned and murdered by his own government’s forces as a danger to its anticolonial struggle, Tan Malaka was and continues to be soaked in contradiction and controversy.

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cover of From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the "Good Enough" Mother

From Klein to Kristeva

Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the "Good Enough" Mother

Janice Doane and Devon Hodges

University of Michigan Press, 1993

Recent feminist and psychoanalytic accounts of mothering have been profoundly shaped by the work of Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Nancy Chodorow, and Julia Kristeva. Although their work spans many decades, these writers share the goal of understanding object relations, that is, the child's relation to internalized "objects" —most often the mother, as the child's first caretaker. Doane and Hodges chart the development of "mother-centered" psychoanalysis and its influence on feminist thought in a number of fields and show how the effort to elevate the importance of the mother has become implicated in the current effort to restrict possibilities for women to "opportunities" associated with hearth and home. The authors argue that discussions of the maternal role always exist within an ideological framework in which they are purveyed to particular groups at particular times. In our own historical moment, ideas of maternal propriety have been vigorously argued, as in custody battles, where experts debate whether or not individual women are "good enough" mothers. From Klein to Kristeva traces the ways in which object-relations accounts of mothering have worked to encourage the view that "good enough" mothers find "their whole self" at home. What does this view of mothering mean for working women? How does it help promote arguments that "fetal rights" are more important than a mother's own desires? By recovering the historial context of object-relations theory and closely attending to the language of important theorists, Doane and Hodges make visible the extraordinary influence of object relations on the discourses in many fields and demonstrate the power of psychological theory to shape both popular and academic discussions of maternal propriety.
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cover of From Knights to Pioneers: One German Family in Westphalia and Missouri

From Knights to Pioneers

One German Family in Westphalia and Missouri

Anita M. Mallinckrodt

Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

Anita M. Mallinckrodt traces the 750-year history of the Mallinckrodt family from its earliest documented beginnings in thirteenth-century Westphalia (in the Dortmund area) through immigration to Missouri in 1831 and beyond.

In part 1, Mallinckrodt tells the story of some of her family’s leading personalities in order to explicate the history and society of medieval and early modern Germany: the life and times of knight Ludwig (c. 1241) and crusader Gerd (c. 1450–1504); the 1451 and 1492 adventures of the mercenary knight Hermann and his son Wilhelm; the 1594 feuding of the noble brothers Dietrich and Hermann, which led to a double murder; the liberal Dortmund publisher Arnold’s struggles in the early 1800s to establish freedom of the press and to free Westphalian farmers from serfdom; and the wealthy, aristocratic Sister Pauline (b. 1817), founder of the Sisters of Charity and recently beatified for her efforts on behalf of the poor and blind children of her day.

In parts 2 and 3, Mallinckrodt focuses on the first of her forebears to immigrate to the New World—Julius and Emil in 1831, followed by Conrad, Hermann, August, Helene, Sophie, and Luise in 1838—and their immediate families and descendants in Missouri. These early pioneers cleared the forests, built schools and churches, supported German-language periodicals, and founded social and cultural organizations that would benefit later waves of immigrants. In the 1860s, they participated in their adopted country’s Civil War and held strong views toward slavery and the Union. Mallinckrodt ends her family’s history with the deaths of the Dortmund pioneers in the 1890s.

But From Knights to Pioneers is much more than a single family’s history. The experiences Mallinckrodt relates reflect those of many German families who left their mark on centuries of history and of many midwestern families transplanted from the Old World. Especially interesting is the continuity between the old and new ways of life—entries on genealogical tables need not end with the comment "immigrated to the USA," for immigrants often wrote notable chapters of family history that deserve recognition in their old homelands. Similarly, knowledge of pre-immigration history is essential for those Americans whose traditions surely did not begin, as oral history often suggests, with the fact that "great-grandfather arrived in the Midwest from Germany in 1831." Thus the purpose of this book is to set a family’s immigration chapter against its European background, without passing judgment on the cultural influence of outstanding individuals in the United States or of German immigration per se.

Drawing on her extensive research in both Europe and the United States, Mallinckrodt presents an exceptionally detailed picture of the social and political contexts of each of her subjects. The richness of her exposition of both the Old World background and the lives of the immigrants to the New World offers important insights into aspects of European and American history.

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cover of From Kosovo to Darfur: The Regional Biases within Humanitarian Military Interventionism

From Kosovo to Darfur

The Regional Biases within Humanitarian Military Interventionism

Sidita Kushi

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Why are some violent crises more likely to prompt humanitarian military interventions than others? Conventional wisdom says that humanitarian military interventions occur due to national interests, shared values and norms, or economic benefits for the interveners. Yet neither of these factors can fully explain the selectivity of such interventions. The international community continues to ignore the decades-long suffering in Darfur, often dismisses the genocidal policies within Myanmar, and even perpetuates the suffering in contemporary Yemen, while undertaking humanitarian-laden missions in Libya, Syria, and the Balkans.

Using in-depth case studies and new data on all post–Cold War internal armed conflicts matched to third-party responses, From Kosovo to Darfur offers the first regionally sensitive analysis of humanitarian military intervention since the end of the Cold War. It shows that international military interventions in the context of acute humanitarian crises are driven by different pathways within the Western versus the non-Western world and fueled by elite perceptions of the crisis, making interventions closer to the geographic and cultural West most probable and most intense. As our international community becomes increasingly interdependent and aware of human suffering across borders, From Kosovo to Darfur points to new pathways of conflict trajectories and reveals vital implications for leaders, scholars, and nongovernmental actors advocating for or against international military intervention as a policy choice.
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cover of From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898

From Liberation to Conquest

The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898

Bonnie M. Miller

University of Massachusetts Press, 2011

The American people overwhelmingly supported the nation's entry into the Spanish-American War of 1898, which led to U.S. imperial expansion into the Caribbean and Pacific. In this book, Bonnie M. Miller explores the basis of that support, showing how the nation's leading media makers—editorialists, cartoonists, filmmakers, photographers, and stage performers—captured the public's interest in the Cuban crisis with heart-rending depictions of Cuban civilians, particularly women, brutalized by bloodthirsty Spanish pirates.

Although media campaigns initially advocated for the United States to step in to rescue Cuba from the horrors of colonial oppression, the war ended just months later with the U.S. acquisition of Spain's remaining empire, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. President William McKinley heeded the call for war, with the American people behind him, and then proceeded to use the conflict to further his foreign policy agenda of expanding U.S. interests in the Caribbean and Far East.

Miller examines the shifting media portrayals of U.S. actions for the duration of the conflict, from liberation to conquest. She shows how the media capitalized on the public's thirst for drama, action, and spectacle and adapted to emerging imperial possibilities. Growing resistance to American imperialism by the war's end unraveled the consensus in support of U.S policy abroad and produced a rich debate that found expression in American visual and popular culture.
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cover of From Liberation to Remediation: The Rhetoric of General Education

From Liberation to Remediation

The Rhetoric of General Education

Kelly Ritter

Utah State University Press, 2026

Ever since its origins as a post–World War II movement designed to democratize education and promote civic engagement, General Education has been the source and subject of political battles. From Liberation to Remediation explores how Gen Ed’s initial goal of providing a common intellectual foundation for all students has been gradually undermined, resulting in a growing perception that General Education is unnecessary for high-achieving students and is instead a remedial path for those deemed underprepared.
 
Kelly Ritter addresses how lawmakers, for-profit testing companies, and even universities fuel public misconceptions of what Gen Ed can provide for our democracy and the role that a broad-based college education plays in social uplift. Tracing the history of the public rhetoric that persuades parents and students to see these courses as a set of interchangeable precollege credits to gain (or game) by any means necessary, she examines how positive and negative public responses to the curricula affected the position of core subjects in US universities, focusing on first-year writing. She also explores the role local, state, and organizational politics played in Gen Ed’s positioning, including decisions related to race, social class, and educational attainment; the impact credit-by-exemption and seamless transfer had on the quality and import of Gen Ed programming in both high schools and colleges; and the perceived use-value of the courses themselves in the face of rising college costs. Finally, she considers which student populations have benefited from the denigration of Gen Ed’s value and which have been left behind.
 
Drawing on archival research and case studies, From Liberation to Remediation raises important questions about equity, access, and the role of General Education in US higher education’s future and demonstrates that recovering the original post-war democratizing principles and practices of Gen Ed is critical to the continuance of a literate, empathetic, and civic-minded democracy for the twenty-first century.
 
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cover of From Liberty to Democracy: The Transformation of American Government

From Liberty to Democracy

The Transformation of American Government

Randall G. Holcombe

University of Michigan Press, 2002

At the nation's founding, the fundamental principle underlying American government was liberty, and the nation's new government was designed to protect the rights of individuals. The American founders intended to design a government that would protect the rights of its citizens, and at that time the most serious threat to people's rights was government. Thus, the United States government was designed with a constitutionally limited scope to preserve the rights of individuals and limit the powers of government.
The government's activities during two world wars and the Great Depression greatly increased its involvement in people's economic affairs, and by the time of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the transformation was complete. By the end of the twentieth century, the fundamental principle underlying American government had been transformed to democracy, and public policy was designed to further the will of the majority. The result has been a government that is larger and broader in scope.
From Liberty to Democracy examines American political history using the framework of public choice theory to show how American government grew more democratic, and how this resulted in an increase in the size and scope of government. It should appeal to historians, political scientists, and economists who are interested in the evolution of American government but does not assume any specialized training and can be read by anyone interested in American political history.
Randall G. Holcombe is DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics, Florida State University
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cover of From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World

From Lived Experience to the Written Word

Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World

Pamela H. Smith

University of Chicago Press, 2022

How and why early modern European artisans began to record their knowledge.

In From Lived Experience to the Written Word, Pamela H. Smith considers how and why, beginning in 1400 CE, European craftspeople began to write down their making practices. Rather than simply passing along knowledge in the workshop, these literate artisans chose to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs, and recipe books, sparking early technical writing and laying the groundwork for how we think about scientific knowledge today.
 
Focusing on metalworking from 1400–1800 CE, Smith looks at the nature of craft knowledge and skill, studying present-day and historical practices, objects, recipes, and artisanal manuals. From these sources, she considers how we can reconstruct centuries of largely lost knowledge. In doing so, she aims not only to unearth the techniques, material processes, and embodied experience of the past but also to gain insight into the lifeworld of artisans and their understandings of matter.
 
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cover of From Madness to Mental Health: Psychiatric Disorder and Its Treatment in Western Civilization

From Madness to Mental Health

Psychiatric Disorder and Its Treatment in Western Civilization

Eghigian, Greg

Rutgers University Press, 2009

From Madness to Mental Health neither glorifies nor denigrates the contributions of psychiatry, clinical psychology, and psychotherapy, but rather considers how mental disorders have historically challenged the ways in which human beings have understood and valued their bodies, minds, and souls.

Greg Eghigian has compiled a unique anthology of readings, from ancient times to the present, that includes Hippocrates; Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, penned in the 1390s; Dorothea Dix; Aaron T. Beck; Carl Rogers; and others, culled from religious texts, clinical case studies, memoirs, academic lectures, hospital and government records, legal and medical treatises, and art collections. Incorporating historical experiences of medical practitioners and those deemed mentally ill, From Madness to Mental Health also includes an updated bibliography of first-person narratives on mental illness compiled by Gail A. Hornstein.

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cover of From Man to Ape: Darwinism in Argentina, 1870-1920

From Man to Ape

Darwinism in Argentina, 1870-1920

Adriana Novoa and Alex Levine

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Upon its publication, The Origin of Species was critically embraced in Europe and North America. But how did Darwin’s theories fare in other regions of the world? Adriana Novoa and Alex Levine offer here a history and interpretation of the reception of Darwinism in Argentina, illuminating the ways culture shapes scientific enterprise.

In order to explore how Argentina’s particular interests, ambitions, political anxieties, and prejudices shaped scientific research, From Man to Ape focuses on Darwin’s use of analogies. Both analogy and metaphor are culturally situated, and by studying scientific activity at Europe’s geographical and cultural periphery, Novoa and Levine show that familiar analogies assume unfamiliar and sometimes startling guises in Argentina. The transformation of these analogies in the Argentine context led science—as well as the interaction between science, popular culture, and public policy—in surprising directions. In diverging from European models, Argentine Darwinism reveals a great deal about both Darwinism and science in general.

Novel in its approach and its subject, From Man to Ape reveals a new way of understanding Latin American science and its impact on the scientific communities of Europe and North America.

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cover of From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic

From Many Gods to One

Divine Action in Renaissance Epic

Tobias Gregory

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Epic poets of the Renaissance looked to emulate the poems of Greco-Roman antiquity, but doing so presented a dilemma: what to do about the gods? Divine intervention plays a major part in the epics of Homer and Virgil—indeed, quarrels within the family of Olympian gods are essential to the narrative structure of those poems—yet poets of the Renaissance recognized that the cantankerous Olympians could not be imitated too closely. The divine action of their classical models had to be transformed to accord with contemporary tastes and Christian belief.

From Many Gods to One offers the first comparative study of poetic approaches to the problem of epic divine action. Through readings of Petrarch, Vida, Ariosto, Tasso, and Milton, Tobias Gregorydescribes the narrative and ideological consequences of the epic’s turn from pagan to Christian. Drawing on scholarship in several disciplines—religious studies, classics, history, and philosophy, as well as literature—From Many Gods to One sheds new light on two subjects of enduring importance in Renaissance studies: the precarious balance between classical literary models and Christian religious norms and the role of religion in drawing lines between allies and others.

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cover of From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850

From Market-Places to a Market Economy

The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850

Winifred Barr Rothenberg

University of Chicago Press, 1992

In this highly original empirical study, Winifred Barr Rothenberg documents the emergence of a market economy in rural Massachusetts between 1785 and 1800—decades before America's first industrial revolution. Drawing the data from exhaustive research in farm account books, probate documents, and town tax valuations the author makes a significant contribution to the long-standing and vigorous debate about the pace, pattern, and genesis of growth in the early American economy.

Rothenberg forcefully disputes recent historical interpretations of the preindustrial New England village as a so-called moral economy, insulated from the exigencies of the market. She discovers the simultaneous emergence of markets for farm produce, farm labor, and rural capital. Then, linking market integration to labor productivity growth and agricultural improvement, she confirms that market-led growth in Massachusetts agriculture lay at the origins of the American industrial revolution.
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cover of From Memory to History: Television Versions of the Twentieth Century

From Memory to History

Television Versions of the Twentieth Century

Jim Cullen

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Our understanding of history is often mediated by popular culture, and television series set in the past have provided some of our most indelible images of previous times. Yet such historical television programs always reveal just as much about the era in which they are produced as the era in which they are set; there are few more quintessentially late-90s shows than That ‘70s Show, for example.
 
From Memory to History takes readers on a journey through over fifty years of historical dramas and sitcoms that were set in earlier decades of the twentieth century. Along the way, it explores how comedies like M*A*S*H and Hogan’s Heroes offered veiled commentary on the Vietnam War, how dramas ranging like Mad Men echoed current economic concerns, and how The Americans and Halt and Catch Fire used the Cold War and the rise of the internet to reflect upon the present day. Cultural critic Jim Cullen is lively, informative, and incisive, and this book will help readers look at past times, present times, and prime time in a new light.
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cover of From Mesopotamia to Iraq: A Concise History

From Mesopotamia to Iraq

A Concise History

Hans J. Nissen and Peter Heine

University of Chicago Press, 2009

The recent reopening of Iraq’s National Museum attracted worldwide attention, underscoring the country’s dual image as both the cradle of civilization and a contemporary geopolitical battleground. A sweeping account of the rich history that has played out between these chronological poles, From Mesopotamia to Iraq looks back through 10,000 years of the region’s deeply significant yet increasingly overshadowed past.

Hans J. Nissen and Peter Heine begin by explaining how ancient Mesopotamian inventions—including urban society, a system of writing, and mathematical texts that anticipated Pythagoras—profoundly influenced the course of human history. These towering innovations, they go on to reveal, have sometimes obscured the major role Mesopotamia continued to play on the world stage. Alexander the Great, for example, was fascinated by Babylon and eventually died there. Seventh-century Muslim armies made the region one of their first conquests outside the Arabian peninsula. And the Arab caliphs who ruled for centuries after the invasion built the magnificent city of Baghdad, attracting legions of artists and scientists. Tracing the evolution of this vibrant country into a contested part of the Ottoman Empire, a twentieth-century British colony, a republic ruled by Saddam Hussein, and the democracy it has become, Nissen and Heine repair the fragmented image of Iraq that has come to dominate our collective imagination.

In hardly any other continuously inhabited part of the globe can we chart such developments in politics, economy, and culture across so extended a period of time. By doing just that, the authors illuminate nothing less than the forces that have made the world what it is today.

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cover of From Metaphor to Direct Speech: Contemporary Russophone Drama and Performance Theory

From Metaphor to Direct Speech

Contemporary Russophone Drama and Performance Theory

E. Susanna Weygandt

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

New Drama—a collection of actors, directors, and playwrights in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus—is one of the most active and vibrant artistic movements in the Russophone world today yet remains understudied in the West. E. Susanna Weygandt demonstrates that the major innovation of New Drama is a sonic turn, an aesthetic development that moves away from traditional, Stanislavskian embodied performance to something almost purely aural. New Drama, which began in the tumult following the collapse of the Soviet Union and continues even in an increasingly censorious Russia today, emphasizes contemporary social issues and privileges disadvantaged voices, using documentary modes to literally bring the voices of the dispossessed to the ears of the audience members.

As a result, the Russophone New Dramatists speak dissent and dramatize resistance. Ultimately, they shift theatrical productions from something constrained and limited, in both place and time, to an ephemeral but unbounded gateway for social activism. The sonic stage thus effectively functions as a social forum, transposing action from the actors to the audience. From Metaphor to Direct Speech therefore contributes to cultural as well as performance studies, offering a compelling look not just at developments in theatrical modes but also at dissent and cultural aesthetics in Russia today.
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cover of From Midnight to Glorious Morning?: India Since Independence

From Midnight to Glorious Morning?

India Since Independence

Mihir Bose

Haus Publishing, 2017

Mihir Bose was born in January 1947. Eight months later, India became a modern, free nation. The country he knew growing up in the 1960s has undergone vast and radical change. India today exports food, sends space probes to Mars, and, all too often, Indian businesses rescue their ailing competitors in the West.
In From Midnight to Glorious Morning?, Bose travels the length and breadth of India to explore how a country that many doubted would survive has been transformed into one capable of rivaling China as the world’s preeminent economic superpower. Multifarious challenges still continue to plague the country: although inequality and corruption are issues not unique to India, such a rapid ascent to global prominence creates a precarious position. However, as Bose outlines, this rapid ascent provides evidence that India is ever capable of making great strides in the face of great adversity.
Bose’s penetrating analysis of the last seventy years asks what is yet to be done for India in order to fulfill the destiny with which it has been imbued. The predictions of doom in August 1947 have proved to be unfounded; the growth of the nation in population and capital has been exponential, and there is much to celebrate. But Bose’s nuanced, personal, and trenchant book shows that it is naïve to pretend the hoped-for bright morning has yet dawned.
 
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cover of From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology

From Midwives to Medicine

The Birth of American Gynecology

McGregor, Deborah K

Rutgers University Press, 1998

From Midwives to Medicine examines the development of modern medical treatment of women and the related history of women's health in the mid-1800s. McGregor looks not only at the medical figures who devised and practiced the innovative therapist, but also at the history of the patient experience in the development and the professionalization of a medical specialty. In exploring the controversial career of J. Marion Sims, "the father of gynecology," and the history of the Woman's Hospital of the State of New York, McGregor chronicles the emergence of a practice involving previously untried medical techniques and the use of experimentation on patients according to a social hierarchy based on race and sex.

Using patient records and archival material from the female governors and administrators at the hospital, From Midwives to Medicine shows how a new medical practice developed out of the changing patterns and historical experiences of childbirth, as well as out of the context of the social relations f the sexes. Sim's patients were slave women in the antebellum South, poor Irish immigrants in the industrial North, and upper-class white. Protestant, Manhattan socialites who sought help for their "hysterical" symptoms. During his career, which began in the South and flourished at the Women's Hospital in New York. Sims performed and perfected his technique to "cure" vesico-vaginal fistulas, the tears of childbirth, from which so many women suffered. But Sims achieved these successes on the operating table only after years of practicing his "silver suture" technique on unanesthetized slave women, who he believed "by the nature of their race... had a specific physiological tolerance for pain unknown to whites."
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cover of From Migrants to Refugees: The Politics of Aid along the Tanzania-Rwanda Border

From Migrants to Refugees

The Politics of Aid along the Tanzania-Rwanda Border

Jill Rosenthal

Duke University Press, 2023

In From Migrants to Refugees Jill Rosenthal tells the history of how Rwandan migrants in a Tanzanian border district became considered either citizens or refugees as nation-state boundaries solidified in the wake of decolonization. Outlining the process by which people who have long lived and circulated across the Rwanda-Tanzania border came to have a national identity, Rosenthal reveals humanitarian aid’s central role in the ideological processes of decolonization and nation building. From precolonial histories to the first Rwandan refugee camps during decolonization in the 1960s to the massive refugee camps in the 1990s, Rosenthal highlights the way that this area became a testing ground for novel forms of transnational aid to refugees that had global implications. As local and national actors, refugees, and international officials all attempted to control the lives and futures of refugee groups, they contested the authority of the nation-state and the international refugee regime. This history, Rosenthal demonstrates, illuminates how tensions between state and international actors divided people who share a common history, culture, and language across national borders.
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cover of From Mineralogy to Geology: The Foundations of a Science, 1650-1830

From Mineralogy to Geology

The Foundations of a Science, 1650-1830

Rachel Laudan

University of Chicago Press, 1987

"A fine treatment of this critical time in geology's history. Although it goes against our standard histories of the field, Laudan defends her views convincingly. Her style is direct, with carefully reasoned personal opinions and interpretations clearly defined."—Jere H. Lipps, The Scientist
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cover of From Mission to Madness: LAST SON OF THE MORMON PROPHET

From Mission to Madness

LAST SON OF THE MORMON PROPHET

Valeen Tippetts Avery

University of Illinois Press, 1998

Brilliant and charismatic, David Hyrum Smith was a poet, painter, singer, philosopher, naturalist, and highly effective missionary for the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In this richly detailed biography, Valeen Tippetts Avery chronicles the life of the last son of Joseph Smith and his first wife, Emma. Avery draws on a large body of correspondence for details of David's life and on his poetry to reveal his personality and emotional struggles. She tells of his mental deterioration, starting with a probable breakdown early in 1870 and ending with his death in 1904 in the Northern Illinois Hospital and Asylum for the Insane in Elgin, where he had been confined for twenty-seven years.

"This is an astonishing accomplishment which not only tells the reader about a neglected historical figure, but about myriad neglected dimensions of both Mormon history and the history of religion in general." -- Jan Shipps, author of Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition
"This will stand alone as a biography of David H. Smith. . . . But it is also an insightful look at the times and environment from which the Smith family, and its ideas, emerged." -- Paul M. Edwards, author of Our Legacy of Faith: A Brief History of the Reorganized Church
 
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cover of From Missouri: An American Farmer Looks Back

From Missouri

An American Farmer Looks Back

Thad Snow, Edited by Bonnie Stepenoff

University of Missouri Press, 2012

After years of subjecting the editors of St. Louis newspapers to eloquent letters on subjects as diverse as floods, tariffs, and mules, Thad Snow published his memoir From Missouri in his mid-seventies in 1954. He was barely retired from farming for more than half a century, mostly in the Missouri Bootheel, or “Swampeast Missouri,” as he called it. Now back in print with a new introduction by historian Bonnie Stepenoff, these sketches of a life, a region, and an era will delight readers new to this distinctive American voice as well as readers already familiar with this masterpiece of the American Midwest.

Snow purchased a thousand acres of southeast Missouri swampland in 1910, cleared it, drained it, and eventually planted it in cotton. Although he employed sharecroppers, he grew to become a bitter critic of the labor system after a massive flood and the Great Depression worsened conditions for these already-burdened workers. Shocking his fellow landowners, Snow invited the Southern Tenant Farmers Union to organize the workers on his land. He was even once accused of fomenting a strike and publicly threatened with horsewhipping.

Snow’s admiration for Owen Whitfield, the African American leader of the Sharecroppers’ Roadside Demonstration, convinced him that nonviolent resistance could defeat injustice. Snow embraced pacifism wholeheartedly and denounced all war as evil even as America mobilized for World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he became involved with creating Missouri’s conservation movement. Near the end of his life, he found a retreat in the Missouri Ozarks, where he wrote this recollection of his life.

This unique and honest series of personal essays expresses the thoughts of a farmer, a hunter, a husband, a father and grandfather, a man with a soft spot for mules and dogs and all kinds of people. Snow’s prose reveals much about a way of life in the region during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the social and political events that affected the entire nation. Whether arguing that a good stock dog should be left alone to do its work, explaining the process of making swampland suitable for agriculture, or putting forth his case for world peace, Snow’s ideas have a special authenticity because they did not come from an ivory tower or a think tank—they came From Missouri.

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cover of From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea

From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive

The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea

Paige West

Duke University Press, 2012

In this vivid ethnography, Paige West tracks coffee as it moves from producers in Papua New Guinea to consumers around the world. She illuminates the social lives of the people who produce coffee, and those who process, distribute, market, and consume it. The Gimi peoples, who grow coffee in Papua New Guinea's highlands, are eager to expand their business and social relationships with the buyers who come to their highland villages, as well as with the people working in Goroka, where much of Papua New Guinea's coffee is processed; at the port of Lae, where it is exported; and in Hamburg, Sydney, and London, where it is distributed and consumed. This rich social world is disrupted by neoliberal development strategies, which impose prescriptive regimes of governmentality that are often at odds with Melanesian ways of being in, and relating to, the world. The Gimi are misrepresented in the specialty coffee market, which relies on images of primitivity and poverty to sell coffee. By implying that the "backwardness" of Papua New Guineans impedes economic development, these images obscure the structural relations and global political economy that actually cause poverty in Papua New Guinea.
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cover of From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity

From Monastery to Hospital

Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity

Andrew T. Crislip

University of Michigan Press, 2005

From Monastery to Hospital traces the origin of the late Roman hospital to the earliest groups of Christian monastics. Often characterized as holy men and miracle-workers who transformed late antique spirituality, monks held an equally significant impact on the development of medicine in Late Antiquity. Andrew Crislip illuminates the innovative approaches to health care within the earliest monasteries that provided the model for the greatest medical achievement of Late Antiquity: the hospital.

From Monastery to Hospital draws on some of the most vibrant areas of scholarship of the ancient world, including asceticism, the study of the body, history of the family, and the history of medicine. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of early Christianity, Roman History, the history of medicine, and Catholic, Coptic, and Eastern Orthodox history and theology. It will also be of interest to the broader field of history of Christianity, especially with its connections to charitable traditions in the church through the modern period.

Andrew Crislip is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Hawaii.

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cover of From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire

From Moon Goddesses to Virgins

The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire

By Pete Sigal

University of Texas Press, 2000

For the preconquest Maya, sexuality was a part of ritual discourse and performance, and all sex acts were understood in terms of their power to create, maintain, and destroy society. As postconquest Maya adapted to life under colonial rule, they neither fully abandoned these views nor completely adopted the formulation of sexuality prescribed by Spanish Catholicism. Instead, they evolved hybridized notions of sexual desire, represented in the figure of the Virgin Mary as a sexual goddess, whose sex acts embodied both creative and destructive components.

This highly innovative book decodes the process through which this colonization of Yucatan Maya sexual desire occurred. Pete Sigal frames the discussion around a series of texts, including the Books of Chilam Balam and the Ritual of the Bacabs, that were written by seventeenth and eighteenth century Maya nobles to elucidate the history, religion, and philosophy of the Yucatecan Maya communities. Drawing on the insights of philology, discourse analysis, and deconstruction, he analyzes the sexual fantasies, fears, and desires that are presented, often unintentionally, in the "margins" of these texts and shows how they illuminate issues of colonialism, power, ritual, and gender.

[more]
cover of From Moonshine To Madison Avenue: Cultural History Of The Nascar Winston Cup Series

From Moonshine To Madison Avenue

Cultural History Of The Nascar Winston Cup Series

Mark D. Howell

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

NASCAR Winston Cup stock car racing is America’s fastest growing and most popular spectator sport. This book is a cultural and social reading of Winston Cup racing, the people who made the sport what it is today, and the corporations who sponsor the participants during their thirty-two race, ten-month quest for the national championship.
[more]
cover of From Mother and Daughter: Poems, Dialogues, and Letters of Les Dames des Roches

From Mother and Daughter

Poems, Dialogues, and Letters of Les Dames des Roches

Madeleine and Catherine des Roches

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Among the best-known and most prolific French women writers of the sixteenth century, Madeleine (1520–87) and Catherine (1542–87) des Roches were celebrated not only for their uncommonly strong mother-daughter bond but also for their bold assertion of poetic authority for women in the realm of belles lettres. The Dames des Roches excelled in a variety of genres, including poetry, Latin and Italian translations, correspondence, prose dialogues, pastoral drama, and tragicomedy; collected in From Mother and Daughter are selections from their celebrated oeuvre, suffused with an engaging and enduring feminist consciousness.
 
Madeleine and Catherine spent their entire lives in civil war–torn Poitiers, where a siege of the city, vandalism, and desecration of churches fueled their political and religious commentary. Members of an elite literary circle that would inspire salon culture during the next century, the Dames des Roches addressed the issues of the day, including the ravages of religious civil wars, the weak monarchy, education for women, marriage and the family, violence against women, and the status of women intellectuals. Through their collaborative engagement in shared public discourse, both mother and daughter were models of moral, political, and literary agency.
[more]
cover of From Mountain Man to Millionaire: The "Bold and Dashing Life" of Robert Campbell, Revised and Expanded Edition

From Mountain Man to Millionaire

The "Bold and Dashing Life" of Robert Campbell, Revised and Expanded Edition

William R. Nester

University of Missouri Press, 2011

The western fur trade era—a time when trappers and traders endured constant danger from man, beast, and weather—was one of the most colorful periods in American history. Over a decade ago, William R. Nester wrote the first biography of Robert Campbell (1804–1879); the subsequent discovery of nearly five hundred new documents, most from two major caches of letters, led to this even-more-detailed and vivid account of Campbell’s self-described “bold and dashing life.”

Campbell came to America from Ireland in 1822 and entered the fur trade soon after. He quickly rose from trapper to brigade leader to partner, all within a half dozen years, and this new edition includes an expanded narrative of his adventures in the Rocky Mountain fur trade. In the mid-1830s, having amassed considerable wealth, Campbell retired from the mountains and embarked on a new career. He returned to St. Louis and built up a business empire that embraced mercantile, steamboat, railroad, and banking interests, thus becoming a leading force behind the region’s economic development. A more extensive account of the cutthroat business world in which Campbell operated now enriches this portion of the book.

Nester masterfully depicts the “sterling character” for which Campbell was renowned. Campbell enjoyed deep and enduring friendships and strong familial ties, both in America and abroad. Although he was an outstanding businessman and philanthropist, his personal life was marred by tragedy. Ten of his thirteen children died prematurely. Despite those tragic losses, his faith in God never faltered. He believed that all worldly successes should honor God and once wrote that , “all worldly gain is but dross.” This edition elucidates the complex relations among his family and chronicles both tragic events and humorous incidents in more depth.

Exploring the letters, journals, and account books that Campbell left behind, Nester places him in the context of the times in which he lived, showing the economic, political, social, and cultural forces that provided the opportunities and challenges that shaped his life. Nester provides new insights into Campbell’s ownership of slaves, his attitudes toward slavery, and his behind-the-scenes political and economic activities during the Civil War. This comprehensive exploration of Robert Campbell’s life depicts a fascinating era in American history.
[more]
cover of From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom: Understanding Past Land Use in the Northern Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico

From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom

Understanding Past Land Use in the Northern Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico

Bradley J. Vierra

University of Utah Press, 2013

The American Southwest is characterized by environmentally and culturally diverse landscapes, which include the northern Rio Grande valley as it cuts through north-central New Mexico from Taos to Albuquerque. The region has a long and rich history of anthropological research primarily focused on the archaeological remains found along this valley corridor. Only recently has research involving large-scale surveys and excavations been conducted on the nearby mesas and mountains that form the rugged margins of the river valley. From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom incorporates this new research into a perspective that links the ever-changing and complementary nature of lowland and upland land use.

The essays in this collection are unified by three specific themes: landscape, movement, and technology. Landscape involves the ecological backdrop of the northern Rio Grande valley, including past and present environments. Movement refers to the positioning of people across the landscape along with the dynamic and fluid nature with which people—past and present—view their relationship with the “above” and “below.” Technology not only refers to the tools and facilities that past people may have used but to the organization of labor needed to cooperatively exploit a variety of subsistence resources and the exchange of products across the region. This volume provides both a cross section of current research from expert scholars and a broad perspective that seeks to integrate new data from lowland and upland contexts. From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom will appeal to those interested in obsidian source studies, geoarchaeology, past climatic regimes, foraging societies, early agriculture, ceramic technology, subsistence, early village formation, ethnogenesis, and historic multiethnic economies.

[more]
cover of From Myth to Fiction: The Saga of Hadingus

From Myth to Fiction

The Saga of Hadingus

Georges Dumézil

University of Chicago Press, 1973

In this work the distinguished religious historian Georges Dumézil considers how the early mythology of a people can be creatively transposed into the epic of their origin or the "history" of their kings, or the source of their fiction. The Saga of Hadingus, written by a twelfth-century Danish "historian," Saxo-Grammaticus, provides an extraordinarily interesting instance of this kind of transposition. By comparing this work to a myth as it was handed down to Saxo, Professor Dumézil demonstrates how the saga can be seen as a literary structure derived from the religious structure of the myth.

As Professor Dumézil and others have shown, some Indo-European peoples, after their conversion to Christianity, have reordered an earlier mythology to constitute the epic of their origins. For instance, Celtic mythology became history in one case and a source of fiction in another; and from the two texts, Welsh and Irish, by comparison one can reconstruct the original myth.

The Scandinavian nations provide a unique case, for here the pre-Christian texts are still read and have preserved much of the area's mythology in its original form. In addition, we have the work of Saxo and other known writers who composed and signed human transpositions of this mythology purporting to be history. This permits Professor Dumézil to make observations of a rare kind, for knowing something of the author's personality facilitates an understanding of the process of transposition itself.

Professor Dumézil shows how Saxo began by wanting only to tell the story of Denmark and its rulers as nobly as he could—and then later on to extend that narrative back in time. This led him to the only extant Scandinavian literature—that centered on Iceland—that he reordered and reinterpreted to the greater glory of Denmark.

In order to provide a content for the reign of the third king of the Danish Skoldunger dynasty, Hadingus, Saxo simply reworked a Scandinavian account of the career of the god Njördr. In this light Professor Dumézil reads The Saga of Hadingus as a fascinating substitution of a psychological and completely personal narrative for a story of purely social value.

This book contains six appendixes including two that consider the relationship between myth and folklore. They complement Professor Dumézil's careful exegeses and imaginative scholarship to make this the most important, specialized work on Scandinavian mythology available in English.





[more]
cover of From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science

From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences

Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science

Edited by David Cahan

University of Chicago Press, 2003

During the nineteenth century, much of the modern scientific enterprise took shape: scientific disciplines were formed, institutions and communities were founded, and unprecedented applications to and interactions with other aspects of society and culture occurred.

In this book, eleven leading historians of science assess what their field has taught us about this exciting time and identify issues that remain unexamined or require reconsideration. They treat both scientific disciplines—biology, physics, chemistry, the earth sciences, mathematics, and the social sciences—in their specific intellectual and sociocultural contexts as well as the broader topics of science and medicine; science and religion; scientific institutions and communities; and science, technology, and industry.

Providing a much-needed overview and analysis of a rapidly expanding field, From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences will be essential for historians of science, but also of great interest to scholars of all aspects of nineteenth-century life and culture.

Contributors:
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Jed Z. Buchwald, David Cahan, Joseph Dauben, Frederick Gregory, Michael Hagner, Sungook Hong, David R. Oldroyd, Theodore M. Porter, Robert J. Richards, Ulrich Wengenroth
[more]
cover of From Noose to Needle: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State

From Noose to Needle

Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State

Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn

University of Michigan Press, 2002

From Noose to Needle contributes a new perspective on the controversial topic of capital punishment by asking how the conduct of state killing reveals broader contradictions in the contemporary liberal state, especially, but not exclusively, in the United States. Moving beyond more familiar legal and sociological approaches to this matter, Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn asks several questions. Why do executions no longer take the form of public spectacles? Why are certain methods of execution considered barbaric? Why must the liberal state strictly segregate the imposition of a death sentence, whether by judge or jury, from its actual infliction, whether by a state official or an ordinary citizen? Why are women so infrequently sentenced to death and executed? How does the state seek to hide the suffering inflicted by capital punishment through its endorsement of a bio-medical conception of pain? How does the nearly-universal shift to lethal injection pose problems for the late liberal state by confusing its punitive and welfare responsibilities?
Drawing on a wide range of theoretical sources, including John Locke, Max Weber, Nicos Poulantzas, Friedrich Nietzsche, J. L. Austin, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, Elaine Scarry, and others, Kaufman-Osborn grounds his appropriation of these authors in analyses of specific recent executions, including that of Wesley Allan Dodd and Charles Campbell in Washington, Karla Faye Tucker in Texas, and Allen Lee Davis in Florida.
From Noose to Needle will be of interest to students of law, political theory, and sociology as well as more general readers interested in the troublesome issue of capital punishment.
Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn is Baker Ferguson Professor of Politics and Leadership, Whitman College.
[more]
cover of From Occupation to Independence: A History of the Peoples of the English-Speaking Caribbean Region

From Occupation to Independence

A History of the Peoples of the English-Speaking Caribbean Region

Richard Hart

Pluto Press, 1999

[more]
cover of From Old Regime to Industrial State: A History of German Industrialization from the Eighteenth Century to World War I

From Old Regime to Industrial State

A History of German Industrialization from the Eighteenth Century to World War I

Richard H. Tilly and Michael Kopsidis

University of Chicago Press, 2020

In From Old Regime to Industrial State, Richard H. Tilly and Michael Kopsidis question established thinking about Germany’s industrialization. While some hold that Germany experienced a sudden breakthrough to industrialization, the authors instead consider a long view, incorporating market demand, agricultural advances, and regional variations in industrial innovativeness, customs, and governance.  They begin their assessment earlier than previous studies to show how the 18th-century emergence of international trade and the accumulation of capital by merchants fed commercial expansion and innovation. This book provides the history behind the modern German economic juggernaut.
[more]
cover of From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction

From Oligarchy to Republicanism

The Great Task of Reconstruction

Forrest A. Nabors

University of Missouri Press, 2026

On December 4, 1865, members of the 39th United States Congress walked into the Capitol Building to begin their first session after the end of the Civil War. They understood their responsibility to put the nation back on the path established by the American Founding Fathers. The moment when the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress remade the nation and renewed the law is in a class of rare events. The Civil War should be seen in this light.

In From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, Forrest A. Nabors shows that the ultimate goal of the Republican Party, the war, and Reconstruction was the same. This goal was to preserve and advance republicanism as the American founders understood it, against its natural, existential enemy: oligarchy. The principle of natural equality justified American republicanism and required abolition and equal citizenship. Likewise, slavery and discrimination on the basis of color stand on the competing moral foundation of oligarchy, the principle of natural inequality, which requires ranks.

The effect of slavery and the division of the nation into two “opposite systems of civilization” are causally linked. Charles Devens, a lawyer who served as a general in the Union Army, and his contemporaries understood that slavery’s existence transformed the character of political society.

One of those dramatic effects was the increased power of slaveowners over those who did not have slaves. When the slave state constitutions enumerated slaves in apportioning representation using the federal three-fifths ratio or by other formulae, intra-state sections where slaves were concentrated would receive a substantial grant of political power for slave ownership. In contrast, low slave-owning sections of the state would lose political representation and political influence over the state. This contributed to the non-slaveholders’ loss of political liberty in the slave states and provided a direct means by which the slaveholders acquired and maintained their rule over non-slaveholders.

This book presents a shared analysis of the slave South, synthesized from the writings and speeches of the Republicans who served in the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth or Fortieth Congress from 1863-1869. The account draws from their writings and speeches dated before, during, and after their service in Congress. Nabors shows how the Republican majority, charged with the responsibility of reconstructing the South, understood the South.

Republicans in Congress were generally united around the fundamental problem and goal of Reconstruction. They regarded their work in the same way as they regarded the work of the American founders. Both they and the founders were engaged in regime change, from monarchy in the one case, and from oligarchy in the other, to republicanism. The insurrectionary states’ governments had to be reconstructed at their foundations, from oligarchic to republican. The sharp differences within Congress pertained to how to achieve that higher goal.
[more]
cover of From Patrician to Professional Elite

From Patrician to Professional Elite

Walter Powell

Russell Sage Foundation, 1988

The Association of the Bar of the City of New York (ABCNY) is no ordinary professional organization. Formed in 1870 and housed in an imposing mid-town edifice, it was the first modern bar association, nationally known for its eminent membership, its reformist stance—and its intimidating selectivity. During much of its history, the ABCNY appeared to be more an upper-class, WASP legal club than an open, collegial association. How did such an organization fare in the face of post-war pressures for inclusiveness? From Patrician to Professional Elite offers a rare view of the internal dynamics of an institution adapting to a changed environment. The ABCNY maintained its elite identity by adopting a meritocratic organizational model in place of a class-based model. By shedding its overt exclusivity, the ABCNY asserted its legitimacy; by embracing an "open elite" or meritocratic model, the associate retained its high standing and relative homogeneity. In fact, the ABCNY today is dominated by the same functional group of lawyers as before, the corporate legal elite. This fascinating study of organizational change prompts a re-examination of fundamental questions about the class basis of modern professionalism and the dominance of elites within professions, in addition to illuminating the larger question of the role of elite institutions in democratic societies.
[more]
cover of From Pink to Green: Disease Prevention and the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement

From Pink to Green

Disease Prevention and the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement

Ley, Barbara L

Rutgers University Press, 2009

From the early 1980s, the U.S. environmental breast cancer movement has championed the goal of eradicating the disease by emphasizing the importance of reducing—even eliminating exposure to chemicals and toxins. From Pink to Green chronicles the movement's disease prevention philosophy from the beginning.

Challenging the broader cultural milieu of pink ribbon symbolism and breast cancer "awareness" campaigns, this movement has grown from a handful of community-based organizations into a national entity, shaping the cultural, political, and public health landscape. Much of the activists' everyday work revolves around describing how the so called "cancer industry" downplays possible environmental links to protect their political and economic interests and they demand that the public play a role in scientific, policy, and public health decision-making to build a new framework of breast cancer prevention.

From Pink to Green successfully explores the intersection between breast cancer activism and the environmental health sciences, incorporating public and scientific debates as well as policy implications to public health and environmental agendas.

[more]
cover of From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South

From Pity to Pride

Growing Up Deaf in the Old South

Hannah Joyner

Gallaudet University Press, 2004

The antebellum South’s economic dependence on slavery engendered a rigid social order in which a small number of privileged white men dominated African Americans, poor whites, women, and many people with disabilities. From Pity to Pride examines the experiences of a group of wealthy young men raised in the old South who also would have ruled over this closely regimented world had they not been deaf. Instead, the promise of status was gone, replaced by pity, as described by one deaf scion, “I sometimes fancy some people to treat me as they would a child to whom they were kind.”

In this unique and fascinating history, Hannah Joyner depicts in striking detail the circumstances of these so-called victims of a terrible “misfortune.” Joyner makes clear that Deaf people in the North also endured prejudice. She also explains how the cultural rhetoric of paternalism and dependency in the South codified a stringent system of oppression and hierarchy that left little room for self-determination for Deaf southerners. From Pity to Pride reveals how some of these elite Deaf people rejected their family’s and society’s belief that being deaf was a permanent liability. Rather, they viewed themselves as competent and complete. As they came to adulthood, they joined together with other Deaf Americans, both southern and northern, to form communities of understanding, self-worth, and independence.

[more]
cover of From Plantation to Paradise?: Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764–1789

From Plantation to Paradise?

Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764–1789

David M. Powers

Michigan State University Press, 2014

In 1764 the first printing press was established in the French Caribbean colonies, launching the official documentation of operas and plays performed there, and marking the inauguration of the first theatre in the colonies. A rigorous study of pre–French Revolution performance practices in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Powers’s book examines the elaborate system of social casting in these colonies; the environments in which nonwhite artists emerged; and both negative and positive contributions of the Catholic Church and the military to operas and concerts produced in the colonies. The author also explores the level of participation of nonwhites in these productions, as well as theatre architecture, décor, repertoire, seating arrangements, and types of audiences. The status of nonwhite artists in colonial society; the range of operas in which they performed; their accomplishments, praise, criticism; and the use of créole texts and white actors/singers à visage noirs (with blackened faces) present a clear picture of French operatic culture in these colonies. Approaching the French Revolution, the study concludes with an examination of the ways in which colonial opera was affected by slave uprisings, the French Revolution, the emergence of “patriotic theatres,” and their role in fostering support for the king, as well as the impact on subsequent operas produced in the colonies and in the United States.
[more]
cover of From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics

From Point to Pixel

A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics

Meredith Hoy

Dartmouth College Press, 2017

In this fiercely ambitious study, Meredith Anne Hoy seeks to reestablish the very definitions of digital art and aesthetics in art history. She begins by problematizing the notion of digital aesthetics, tracing the nineteenth- and twentieth-century movements that sought to break art down into its constituent elements, which in many ways predicted and paved the way for our acceptance of digital art. Through a series of case studies, Hoy questions the separation between analog and digital art and finds that while there may be sensual and experiential differences, they fall within the same technological categories. She also discusses computational art, in which the sole act of creation is the building of a self-generating algorithm. The medium isn’t the message—what really matters is the degree to which the viewer can sense a creative hand in the art.
[more]
cover of From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism: Doctors, Healers, and Public Power in Costa Rica, 1800–1940

From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism

Doctors, Healers, and Public Power in Costa Rica, 1800–1940

Steven Palmer

Duke University Press, 2003

From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism presents the history of medical practice in Costa Rica from the late colonial era—when none of the fifty thousand inhabitants had access to a titled physician, pharmacist, or midwife—to the 1940s, when the figure of the qualified medical doctor was part of everyday life for many of Costa Rica’s nearly one million citizens. It is the first book to chronicle the history of all healers, both professional and popular, in a Latin American country during the national period.
Steven Palmer breaks with the view of popular and professional medicine as polar opposites—where popular medicine is seen as representative of the authentic local community and as synonymous with oral tradition and religious and magical beliefs and professional medicine as advancing neocolonial interests through the work of secular, trained academicians. Arguing that there was significant and formative overlap between these two forms of medicine, Palmer shows that the relationship between practitioners of each was marked by coexistence, complementarity, and dialogue as often as it was by rivalry. Palmer explains that while the professionalization of medical practice was intricately connected to the nation-building process, the Costa Rican state never consistently displayed an interest in suppressing the practice of popular medicine. In fact, it persistently found both tacit and explicit ways to allow untitled healers to practice. Using empirical and archival research to bring people (such as the famous healer or curandero Professor Carlos Carbell), events, and institutions (including the Rockefeller Foundation) to life, From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism demonstrates that it was through everyday acts of negotiation among agents of the state, medical professionals, and popular practitioners that the contours of Costa Rica’s modern, heterogeneous health care system were established.
[more]
cover of From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals: Peasant Catechists in the Salvadoran Revolution

From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals

Peasant Catechists in the Salvadoran Revolution

Leigh Binford

Rutgers University Press, 2023

From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals explains how a group of Catholic lay catechists educated in liberation theology came to take up arms and participate on the side of the rebel FMLN during El Salvador’s revolutionary war (1980-92). In the process they became transformed from popular intellectuals to insurgent intellectuals who put their organizational and cognitive skills at the service of a collective effort to create a more egalitarian and democratic society. The book highlights the key roles that peasant catechists in northern Morazán played in disseminating liberation theology before the war and supporting the FMLN during it—as quartermasters, political activists, and musicians, among other roles. Throughout, From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals highlights the dialectical nature of relations between Catholic priests and urban revolutionaries, among others, in which the latter learned from the former and vice-versa. Peasant catechists proved capable at making independent decisions based on assessment of their needs and did not simply follow the dictates of those with superior authority, and played an important role for the duration of the twelve-year military conflict. 
[more]
cover of From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan, 1945-1989: Primary Documents

From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan, 1945-1989

Primary Documents

Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya, and Fumihiko Sumitomo, eds.

Duke University Press, 0

A trove of primary source materials, From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan 1945–1989 is an invaluable scholarly resource for readers who wish to explore the fascinating subject of avant-garde art in postwar Japan. In this comprehensive anthology, an array of key documents, artist manifestos, critical essays, and roundtable discussions are translated into English for the first time. The pieces cover a broad range of artistic mediums—including photography, film, performance, architecture, and design—and illuminate their various points of convergence in the Japanese context.

The collection is organized chronologically and thematically to highlight significant movements, works, and artistic phenomena, such as the pioneering artist collectives Gutai and Hi Red Center, the influential photography periodical Provoke, and the emergence of video art in the 1980s. Interspersed throughout the volume are more than twenty newly commissioned texts by contemporary scholars. Including Bert Winther-Tamaki on art and the Occupation and Reiko Tomii on the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, these pieces supplement and provide a historical framework for the primary source materials. From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan 1945–1989 offers an unprecedented look at over four decades of Japanese art—both as it unfolded and as it is seen from the perspective of the present day.

Publication of The Museum of Modern Art

[more]
cover of From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America

From Power to Prejudice

The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America

Leah N. Gordon

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Americans believe strongly in the socially transformative power of education, and the idea that we can challenge racial injustice by reducing white prejudice has long been a core component of this faith. How did we get here? In this first-rate intellectual history, Leah N. Gordon jumps into this and other big questions about race, power, and social justice.
            To answer these questions, From Power to Prejudice examines American academia—both black and white—in the 1940s and ’50s. Gordon presents four competing visions of  “the race problem” and documents how an individualistic paradigm, which presented white attitudes as the source of racial injustice, gained traction. A number of factors, Gordon shows, explain racial individualism’s postwar influence: individuals were easier to measure than social forces; psychology was well funded; studying political economy was difficult amid McCarthyism; and individualism was useful in legal attacks on segregation. Highlighting vigorous midcentury debate over the meanings of racial justice and equality, From Power to Prejudice reveals how one particular vision of social justice won out among many contenders.
[more]
cover of From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology

From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology

Bruce M. Knauft

University of Michigan Press, 1999

What have anthropologists taught us about Melanesia--one of anthropology's most important and intensively studied world regions? In this book, Professor Bruce Knauft draws together and critically reanalyzes what we know about major features of Melanesian cultural history, warfare and politics, gender, bodily practices, and spirituality as discerned from more than a century of academic study. From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology is arguably the most comprehensive single reassessment of Melanesia as an ethnographic world area to have been published in several decades. Written for students as well as professional scholars, this work further broadens our understanding by analyzing the history of Melanesian ethnography and relating this history to the larger relationship between Melanesia as a contemporary world area and anthropology as a field of contemporary human study. Bruce M. Knauft is Professor of Anthropology, Emory University, and the author of three previous books as well as some thirty journal articles and chapters. Knauft's interests span a wide range of issues in the anthropology of Melanesia and he is articulate with general issues of cultural theory and anthropological history.
[more]
cover of From Princess to Chief: Life with the Waccamaw Siouan Indians of North Carolina

From Princess to Chief

Life with the Waccamaw Siouan Indians of North Carolina

Priscilla Freeman Jacobs

University of Alabama Press, 2013

A collaborative life history of Priscilla Freeman Jacobs, From Princess to Chief tells the story of the first female chief (from 1986 to 2005) of the state-recognized Waccamaw Siouan Indian Tribe of North Carolina. 
 
In From Princess to Chief, Priscilla Freeman Jacobs and Patricia Barker Lerch detail Jacobs’s birth and childhood, coming of age, education, young adulthood, marriage and family, Indian activism, and spiritual life. Jacobs is descended from a family of Indian leaders whose activism dates back to the early twentieth century. Her ancestors pressured the local county and state governments to fund their Indian schools, led the drive for the Waccamaw Sioux to be recognized as Indians in state and federal legislation, and finally succeeded in opening the long-awaited Indian schools in the 1930s. 
 
Jacobs’s lasting legacies to her community include the many initiatives on which she collaborated with her father, Clifton Freeman, including the acquisition of common land for the tribe, initiation of a tribal board of directors, incorporation of a development association, and the establishment of a day care and many other social and educational programs. In the 1970s Jacobs served on the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs and was active in the Coalition of Eastern Native Americans.
 
Introducing the powwow as a way for young people to learn about the traditions of Indian people throughout the state of North Carolina, Jacobs taught many children how to dance and wear Indian regalia with pride and dignity. Throughout her life, Jacobs has worked hard to preserve the traditional customs of her people and to teach others about the folk culture that shaped and molded her as a person.
 
Told from the point of view of an eyewitness to the community’s effort to win federal recognition in 1950 and their lives since, From Princess to Chief helps preserve the story of Jacobs’s Indian community.
[more]
cover of From Protest to President: A Social Justice Journey through the Emergence of Adult Education and the Birth of Distance Learning

From Protest to President

A Social Justice Journey through the Emergence of Adult Education and the Birth of Distance Learning

George A Pruitt

Rutgers University Press, 2023

From Protest to President describes an inspirational odyssey of a young, Black activist coming of age in Mississippi and Chicago in the tumultuous 1960s and '70s, culminating in a notable thirty-five-year presidency at Thomas Edison State University.  
 
From barbershop encounters with Malcolm X to death threats at Illinois State University and gunfire at Towson State, Pruitt provides a powerful narrative poised at the intersection of social justice, higher education and politics. He recounts leadership experiences at HBCUs and public universities across the country, as he advocated for autonomy at Morgan State and fought to preserve Tennessee State University.  
 
His steadfast activism, integrity and courage led to groundbreaking work in providing access to higher education for working adults and the military.
 
From his days as a student protester in high school and college to his appearances on Capitol Hill, Pruitt has earned the reputation as a candid and influential leader in higher education.  

 
[more]
cover of From Puerto Rico To Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies

From Puerto Rico To Philadelphia

Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies

Carmen Whalen

Temple University Press, 2001

"We were poor but we had everything we needed," reminisces Dona Epifania. Nonetheless, when a man she knew told her about a job in Philadelphia, she grasped the opportunity to leave Coamas. "He went to Puerto Rico and told me there were beans to cook. I came here and cooked for fourteen workers." In San Lorenzo, Dona Carmen and her husband made the same decision: "We didn't want to, nobody wanted to leave....There wasn't any alternative." Don Florencio recalls that in Salinas work had gotten scarce, "especially for the youth, the young men....The farmworker that was used to cutting cane, already the sugar cane was disappearing," and government licensing regulations made fishing "more difficult for the poor."

Puerto Rican migration to the mainland following World War II took place for a range of reasons -- globalization of the economy, the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, state policies, changes in regional and  local economies, social networks, and, not least, the decisions made by individual immigrants. In this wide-ranging book, Carmen Whalen weaves them all into a tapestry of Puerto Rican immigration to Philadelphia.

Like African Americans and Mexicans, Puerto Ricans were recruited for low-wage jobs, only to confront racial discrimination as well as economic restructuring. As Whalen shows, they were part of that wave of newcomers who came from areas in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia characterized by  a heavy U.S. military and economic presence, especially export processing zones looking for a new life in depressed urban environments already populated by earlier labor migrants. But Puerto Rican in-migration was also unique, especially in its regional and gender dimensions. Many migrants came as part of contract labor programs shaped by competing agendas.

By the 1990s, economic conditions, government policies, and racial ideologies had transformed Puerto Rican labor migrants into what has been called "the other underclass." The author analyzes this continuation of "culture and poverty" interpretations and contrasts it with the efforts of Philadelphia's Puerto Ricans to recreate their communities and deal with the impact of  economic restructuring and residential segregation in the City of Brotherly Love.
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cover of From Quarry to Cornfield: The Political Economy of Mississippian Hoe Production

From Quarry to Cornfield

The Political Economy of Mississippian Hoe Production

Charles Richard Cobb

University of Alabama Press, 2001

An innovative model for examining the technology of hoe production and its contribution to the agriculture of Mississippian communities.

Lithic specialist Charles Cobb examines the political economy in Mississippian communities through a case study of raw material procurement and hoe production and usage at the Mill Creek site on Dillow Ridge in southwest Illinois. Cobb outlines the day-to-day activities in a Mississippian chiefdom village that flourished from about A.D. 1250 to 1500. In so doing, he provides a fascinating window into the specialized tasks of a variety of "day laborers" whose contribution to the community rested on their production of stone hoes necessary in the task of feeding the village. Overlooked in most previous studies, the skills and creativity of the makers of the hoes used in village farming provide a basis for broader analysis of the technology of hoe use in Mississippian times.

Although Cobb's work focuses on Mill Creek, his findings at this site are representative of the agricultural practices of Mississippian communities throughout the eastern United States. The theoretical underpinnings of Cobb's study make a clear case for a reexamination of the accepted definition of chiefdom, the mobilization of surplus labor, and issues of power, history, and agency in Mississippian times. In a well-crafted piece of writing, Cobb distinguishes himself as one of the leaders in the study of lithic technology. From Quarry to Cornfield will find a well-deserved place in the ongoing discussions of power and production in the Mississippian political economy.

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cover of From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich

From Racism to Genocide

Anthropology in the Third Reich

Gretchen E. Schafft

University of Illinois Press, 2007

In paperback for the first time, From Racism to Genocide is an explosive, richly detailed account of how Nazi anthropologists justified racism, developed practical applications of racist theory, and eventually participated in every phase of the Holocaust. 

Using original sources and previously unpublished documentation, Gretchen E. Schafft shows the total range of anti-human activity from within the confines of a particular discipline. Based on seven years of archival research in the United States and abroad, the work includes many original photos and documents, most of which have never before been published. It uses primary data and original texts whenever possible, including correspondence written by perpetrators. The book also reveals that the United States was not merely a bystander in this research, but instead contributed professional and financial support to early racial research that continued through the first five years of Hitler’s regime.

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cover of From Rebellion to Riots: Collective Violence on Indonesian Borneo

From Rebellion to Riots

Collective Violence on Indonesian Borneo

Jamie S. Davidson

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

From Rebellion to Riots is a critical analysis of the roots of contemporary violence in one of Indonesia’s most ethnically heterogeneous provinces, West Kalimantan. Since the late 1960s, this province has suffered periodic outbreaks of ethnic violence among its Dayak, Malay, Madurese, and ethnic Chinese populations. Citing evidence from his research, internal military documents, and ethnographic accounts, Jamie S. Davidson refutes popular explanations for these flare-ups. The recurrent violence has less to do with a clash of cultures, the ills of New Order-led development, or indigenous marginalization than with the ongoing politicization of ethnic and indigenous identity in the region.
            Looking at key historical moments, markedly different in their particulars, Davidson reveals the important links between ethnic violence and subnational politics. In one case, army officers in Soeharto’s recently established New Order regime encouraged anti-Chinese sentiments. To move against communist-inspired rebellion, they recruited indigenous Dayaks to expunge tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese from interior towns and villages. This counter-insurgent bloodshed inadvertently initiated a series of clashes between Dayaks and Madurese, another migrant community. Driven by an indigenous empowerment movement and efforts by local elites to control benefits provided by decentralization and democratization, these low-intensity riots rose to immense proportions in the late 1990s. From Rebellion to Riots demonstrates that the endemic violence in this vast region is not the inevitable outcome of its ethnic diversity, and reveals that the initial impetus for collective bloodshed is not necessarily the same as the forces that sustain it.

“A comprehensive case study . . . . Essential reading for students of the West Kalimantan violence.”—Dave McRae, Indonesia
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