Results by title

Second Place, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas

The Gulf Coast has been a principal place of entry into Texas ever since Alonso Alvarez de Pineda explored these shores in 1519. Yet, nearly five hundred years later, the maritime history of Texas remains largely untold. In this book, Richard V. Francaviglia offers a comprehensive overview of Texas' merchant and military marine history, drawn from his own extensive collection of maritime history materials, as well as from research in libraries and museums around the country.

Based on recent discoveries in nautical archaeology, Francaviglia tells the stories of the Spanish flotilla that wrecked off Padre Island in 1554 and of La Salle's flagship Belle, which sank in 1687. He explores the role of the Texas Navy in the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836 and during the years of the Texas Republic and also describes the Civil War battles at Galveston and Sabine Pass. Finally, he recounts major developments of the nineteenth century, concluding with the disastrous Galveston Hurricane in 1900. More than one hundred illustrations, many never before published, complement the text.

The first full-length study of skiing in the United States, this book traces the history of the sport from its utilitarian origins to its advent as a purely recreational and competitive activity.

During the mid-1800s, inhabitants of frontier mining communities in the Sierra and Rocky mountains used skis for many practical reasons, including mail and supply delivery, hunting, and railroad repair. In some towns skis were so common that, according to one California newspaper, “the ladies do nearly all their shopping and visiting on them.”

But it was Norwegian immigrants in the Midwest, clinging to their homeland traditions, who first organized the skisport. Through the founding of local clubs and the National Ski Association, this ethnic group dominated American skiing until the 1930s.

At this time, a wave of German immigrants infused America with the ethos of what we today call Alpine skiing. This type of skiing became increasingly popular, especially in the East among wealthy collegians committed to the romantic pursuit of the “strenuous life.” Ski clubs proliferated in towns and on college campuses and specialized resorts cropped up from New England to California. At the same time, skiing became mechanized with tows and lifts, and the blossoming equipment and fashion industries made a business of the sport.

On the eve of World War II, as the book concludes its story, all the elements were in place for the explosion in recreational and competitive skiing that erupted after 1945.

Eight essays connected by various common strands. The most important one is the community of the main subject-matter: socialism, capitalism, democracy, change of system. These four expressions cover four phenomena of great and comprehensive importance. Each piece in the book deals with these and the connections between them.

One of the Leitmotifs is the “capitalism/socialism” pair of opposites. Capitalism has a history of several hundred years, while the socialist regime existed only for a few decades. But this pair of opposites was central to the history of the twentieth century. This antagonism put its stamp on political thinking, on the foreign policy and military preparedness of every country, and on some appallingly destructive armed conflicts. All these had great secondary influence on each country’s economic development and the standard of living and disposition of its inhabitants.

None of the studies is confined to one country—not to Hungary or to any other. Each tries to embrace the problems common to greater units. However, the greater unit comprehended is not the same in each study. One may deal with the capitalist or socialist system in general, another will all the post-socialist countries, and a third the Central East European region. But all extend the analysis beyond the borders of one country.

Tracing the archaeological origins of Creole identity in the early colonial Caribbean.

While most studies of intercultural contact focus on the impact of the intrusive power on the native culture, this book examines the effects of the colonization process on the Spaniards in the New World during the 16th century. The site of Puerto Real on the north coast of Haiti serves as a case study. Based on the results of excavations at both Puerto Real and St. Augustine, Florida, this study suggests that the introduction of New World and African cultural elements into Spanish colonial culture began almost at contact. The model of acculturative processes, developed in St. Augustine and tested at Puerto Real, can serve to guide future Spanish colonial research. It can also be applied to non-Hispanic colonial sites in the New World. Did the French and British adapt to their new environments in a manner similar to the Spanish? Work done at Puerto Real demonstrates the utility of archaeology in the study of the effects of culture contact.

 

Winner of the 2015 National Council on Public History Book Award 
Today well over two hundred museums focusing on African American history and culture can be found throughout the United States and Canada. Many of these institutions trace their roots to the 1960s and 1970s, when the struggle for racial equality inspired a movement within the black community to make the history and culture of African America more “public.”

This book tells the story of four of these groundbreaking museums: the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago (founded in 1961); the International Afro-American Museum in Detroit (1965); the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C. (1967); and the African American Museum of Philadelphia (1976). Andrea A. Burns shows how the founders of these institutions, many of whom had ties to the Black Power movement, sought to provide African Americans with a meaningful alternative to the misrepresentation or utter neglect of black history found in standard textbooks and most public history sites. Through the recovery and interpretation of artifacts, documents, and stories drawn from African American experience, they encouraged the embrace of a distinctly black identity and promoted new methods of interaction between the museum and the local community.

Over time, the black museum movement induced mainstream institutions to integrate African American history and culture into their own exhibits and educational programs. This often controversial process has culminated in the creation of a National Museum of African American History and Culture, now scheduled to open in the nation's capital in 2015.

Mitsuko “Mitzi” Asai was not yet ten years old in the spring of 1942 when President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—about two-thirds of them US citizens—from their homes on the West Coast to inland prison camps. They included Mitzi and most of her family, who owned a fruit orchard in Hood River, Oregon. The Asais spent much of World War II in the camps while two of the older sons served in the Pacific in the US Army. Three years later, when the camps began to close, the family returned to Hood River to find an altered community. Shop owners refused to serve neighbors they had known for decades; racism and hostility were open and largely unchecked. Humiliation and shame drove teenaged Mitzi to reject her Japanese heritage, including her birth name. More than a decade later, her life took another turn when a Fulbright grant sent her to teach in Japan, where she reconnected with her roots.

In From Thorns to Blossoms, Mitzi recounts her rich and varied life, from a childhood surrounded by barbed wire and hatred to a successful career as a high school English teacher and college instructor in English as a Second Language. Today, Asai descendants continue to tend the Hood River farm while the town confronts its shameful history. Originally published in 1990 as Made in Japan and Settled in Oregon, this revised and expanded edition describes the positive influence Mitzi’s immigrant parents had on their children, provides additional context for her story, and illuminates the personal side of a dark chapter in US history. It’s the remarkable story of a transformation from thorns into blossoms, pain into healing.

"In the beginning, there was no real plan, just a road trip that became a journey." In the years 1986 and 1987, Keith Carter and his wife, Patricia, visited one hundred small Texas towns with intriguing names like Diddy Waw Diddy, Elysian Fields, and Poetry. He says, "I tried to make my working method simple and practical: one town, one photograph. I would take several rolls of film but select only one image to represent that dot on my now-tattered map. The titles of the photographs are the actual names of the small towns. . . ." Carter created a body of work that evoked the essence of small-town life for many people, including renowned playwright and fellow Texan, Horton Foote. In 1988, Carter published his one town/one picture collection in From Uncertain to Blue, a landmark book that won acclaim both nationally and internationally for the artistry, timelessness, and universal appeal of its images—and established Carter as one of America's most promising fine art photographers.

Now a quarter century after the book's publication, From Uncertain to Blue has been completely re-envisioned and includes a new essay in which Carter describes how the search for photographic subjects in small towns gradually evolved into his first significant work as an artist. He also offers additional insight into his creative process by including some of his original contact sheets. And Patricia Carter gives her own perspective on their journey in her amplified notes about many of the places they visited as they discovered the world of possibilities from Uncertain to Blue.

For decades, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) exerted an outsized pull on the political stage. Formed in 1947 by anticommunist liberals such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the ADA established itself as the most prominent liberal organization in the United States for more than a quarter century. Shaped by the ADA, the New Politics movement upended Democratic Party politics with its challenge to the Vietnam War, demands for redistributive economic policies, and development of a far-reaching politics of race, gender, and sexuality.

By bringing the ADA and its influential public intellectuals into the story of the New Politics movement, Scott Kamen reveals how American liberalism shifted away from the working-class concerns of the New Deal era and began to cater to the interests of a new, suburban professional class. By the 1980s, many Democratic politicians, activists, and voters had embraced a neoliberal ideology that coupled socially liberal attitudes with market-based solutions, eschewing an older progressive politics steeped in labor issues.

Praise for Silvia Montiglio

"[A] brilliant and important book. . . . "
---Journal of Religion, on Silence in the Land of Logos

"[A]n invigorating reevaluation of both the ancient symbolic landscape and our preconceptions of it."
---American Journal of Philology, on Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture
 
 Best known for his adventures during his homeward journey as narrated in Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus remained a major figure and a source of inspiration in later literature, from Greek tragedy to Dante's Inferno to Joyce's Ulysses. Less commonly known, but equally interesting, are Odysseus' "wanderings" in ancient philosophy: Odysseus becomes a model of wisdom for Socrates and his followers, Cynics and Stoics, as well as for later Platonic thinkers. From Villain to Hero: Odysseus in Ancient Thought follows these wanderings in the world of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, retracing the steps that led the cunning hero of Homeric epic and the villain of Attic tragedy to become a paradigm of the wise man.

From Villain to Hero explores the reception of Odysseus in philosophy, a subject that so far has been treated only in tangential or limited ways. Diverging from previous studies, Montiglio outlines the philosophers' Odysseus across the spectrum, from the Socratics to the Middle Platonists. By the early centuries CE, Odysseus' credentials as a wise man are firmly established, and the start of Odysseus' rehabilitation by philosophers challenges current perceptions of him as a villain. More than merely a study in ancient philosophy, From Villain to Hero seeks to understand the articulations between philosophical readings of Odysseus and nonphilosophical ones, with an eye to the larger cultural contexts of both. While this book is the work of a classicist, it will also be of interest to students of philosophy, comparative literature, and reception studies.

With his thumbprint on the most ubiquitous films of childhood, Walt Disney is widely considered to be the most conventional of all major American moviemakers. The adjective "Disneyfied" has become shorthand for a creative work that has abandoned any controversial or substantial content to find commercial success.

But does Disney deserve that reputation? Douglas Brode overturns the idea of Disney as a middlebrow filmmaker by detailing how Disney movies played a key role in transforming children of the Eisenhower era into the radical youth of the Age of Aquarius. Using close readings of Disney projects, Brode shows that Disney's films were frequently ahead of their time thematically. Long before the cultural tumult of the sixties, Disney films preached pacifism, introduced a generation to the notion of feminism, offered the screen's first drug-trip imagery, encouraged young people to become runaways, insisted on the need for integration, advanced the notion of a sexual revolution, created the concept of multiculturalism, called for a return to nature, nourished the cult of the righteous outlaw, justified violent radicalism in defense of individual rights, argued in favor of communal living, and encouraged antiauthoritarian attitudes. Brode argues that Disney, more than any other influence in popular culture, should be considered the primary creator of the sixties counterculture—a reality that couldn't be further from his "conventional" reputation.