Results by title

234 books match the query 'Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies)' and 13 start with h

cover of Habsburg Encounters with Native America: Familiar Strangers

Habsburg Encounters with Native America

Familiar Strangers

Jonathan Singerton

Central European University Press, 2025

The central European lands of the Habsburg monarchy have long shared an intertwined past with the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. This volume focuses on the process of encountering these peoples as a continual action across several centuries that has produced numerous and varied instances of cultural dialogues, perspectives, and understandings. Moreover, this central European element is something that has not been considered in its own right before now and has been overshadowed by the focus on a wider Germanic fascination for Indigenous cultures. Breaking away from this wider narrative allows us not only to recover a more distinct historical connection but also uncovers the particular dynamics of direct and indirect contact between Indigenous worlds and that of the Habsburg monarchy.
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cover of Haiti and the Uses of America: Post-U.S. Occupation Promises

Haiti and the Uses of America

Post-U.S. Occupation Promises

Verna, Chantalle F.

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Contrary to popular notions, Haiti-U.S. relations have not only been about Haitian resistance to U.S. domination. In Haiti and the Uses of America, Chantalle F. Verna makes evident that there have been key moments of cooperation that contributed to nation-building in both countries.
 
In the years following the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), Haitian politicians and professionals with a cosmopolitan outlook shaped a new era in Haiti-U.S. diplomacy. Their efforts, Verna shows, helped favorable ideas about the United States, once held by a small segment of Haitian society, circulate more widely. In this way, Haitians contributed to and capitalized upon the spread of internationalism in the Americas and the larger world.
 
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cover of Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics

Happy Days and Wonder Years

The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics

Marcus, Daniel

Rutgers University Press, 2004

In the twenty-first century, why do we keep talking about the Fifties and the Sixties? The stark contrast between these decades, their concurrence with the childhood and youth of the baby boomers, and the emergence of television and rock and roll help to explain their symbolic power. In Happy Days and Wonder Years, Daniel Marcus reveals how interpretations of these decades have figured in the cultural politics of the United States since 1970.

From Ronald Reagan's image as a Fifties Cold Warrior to Bill Clinton's fandom for Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy, politicians have invoked the Fifties and the Sixties to connect to their public. Marcus shows how films, television, music, and memoirs have responded to the political nostalgia of today, and why our entertainment remains immersed in reruns, revivals, and references to earlier times. This book offers a new understanding of how politics and popular culture have influenced our notions of the past, and how events from long ago continue to shape our understanding of the present day.
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cover of Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America, The Civil War to the Millennium

Hard Road to Freedom

The Story of African America, The Civil War to the Millennium

Horton, Lois E

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Hard Road to Freedom tells the story of African America from its African roots to the political and social upheavals at the end of the twentieth century. It interweaves the experiences of individual black Americans with an analysis of the nation's pursuit of its fundamental principles, of freedom, and civil rights. The book begins with African cultures and the African people who withstood the horrors of the slave trade and slavery to help shape a new multiracial society in North America. The American Revolution brought freedom to some, but most remained in the grip of slavery. African Americans and their allies continually raised the cry for freedom, building determined black communities and dedicated antislavery organizations that contributed to the abolition of slavery. The precarious freedom after the Civil War brought new opportunities, but also new dangers and the limitations of Jim Crow. The wars and the depression in the early twentieth century found black Americans forging new alliances, creating a cultural renaissance, and fighting for democracy and freedom abroad. At home, they struggled against the denials of freedom and citizenship that still barred their full participation and that tarnished America's standing in the eyes of the international community. Throughout the social and political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s and the political and cultural backlash that followed, African Americans continued to raise their voices in often eloquent and always insistent appeals that the nation live up to the promise of its principles. This book tells of America's unsteady advance along the road to freedom, the triumphs and hope, as well as the failures and despair, from the vantage point of the African Americans who resolutely played a critical role in that story.
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cover of Harder than War: Catholic Peacemaking in Twentieth-Century America

Harder than War

Catholic Peacemaking in Twentieth-Century America

McNeal, Patricia F.

Rutgers University Press, 1992

Patricia McNeal's comprehensive study of American Catholic peacemaking in the twentieth century documents the growth of pacifism and nonviolence within the American Catholic community, and assesses its impact on the church and the nation.
McNeal begins with the first official Catholic peace organization in the United States, the Catholic Association for International Peace, founded in 1927. An elitist lay organization supported by the church hierarchy, the CAIP based their opposition to war on the "just war" doctrine. With the emergence of pacifism among American Catholics in 1930s, Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Peace movement, added to the Catholic theological agenda the concepts of pacifism, conscientious objection, and nuclear pacifism. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement became the midwife in the formation of other Catholic peace organizations such as PAX, the Catholic Peace Fellowship, and PAX Christi-USA during the Vietnam War. Members of these groups cooperated with the broader peace movement in the United States. Their main focus became opposition to nuclear warfare and nuclear weapons.

During the Viet Nam War, Catholic Workers burned their draft cards and turned from nonviolence to resistance by practicing civil disobedience. Daniel and Philip Berrigan escalated that resistance when they destroyed draft files, and symbolically poured blood over and hammered nuclear weapons to awaken the national conscience to the life-ending effects of nuclear warfare.
McNeal concludes that Catholic peacemakers had the greatest impact not on the government but on the institutional church. In 1971 the American hierarchy judged that the Vietnam War was not a "just war." For the first time in the United States, and possibly in history, a national hierarchy announced as unjust a war being waged by its own nation.
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cover of Harnessed to the Pole: Sledge Dogs in Service to American Explorers of the Arctic 1853-1909

Harnessed to the Pole

Sledge Dogs in Service to American Explorers of the Arctic 1853-1909

Sheila Nickerson

University of Alaska Press, 2014

In the second half of the nineteenth century, an epic race was underway in some of the most brutal stretches on the planet. Explorers from around the world hoped to stake their claim on the Arctic, with the North Pole being the ultimate prize. Those with the greatest success found that the fastest way to travel was on four legs—using a team of hardworking sledge dogs.

Harnessed to the Pole follows the adventures of eight American explorers and their dog teams, starting with Elisha Kent Kane and ending with Robert Peary, controversial claimant of the title of first to reach the North Pole. While history has long forgotten these “little camels of the north,” Sheila Nickerson reveals how critical dogs were to the Arctic conquest. Besides providing transportation in extreme conditions, sledge dogs protected against wolves and polar bears, helped in hunting, found their way through storms, and provided warmth in extreme cold. They also faced rough handling, starvation, and the possibility of being left behind as expeditions plunged ahead. Harnessed to the Pole is an extraordinary—and unflinching—look at the dogs that raced to the top of the world.
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cover of Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam Era

Hearts and Minds

Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam Era

Michael Bibby

Rutgers University Press, 1996

The early 1960s to the mid-1970s was one of the most turbulent periods in American history. The U.S. military was engaged in its longest, costliest overseas conflict, while the home front was torn apart by riots, protests, and social activism. In the midst of these upheavals, an underground and countercultural press emerged, giving activists an extraordinary forum for a range of imaginative expressions. Poetry held a prominent place in this alternative media. The poem was widely viewed by activists as an inherently anti-establishment form of free expression, and poets were often in the vanguards of political activism.

Hearts and Minds is the first book-length study of the poems of the Black Liberation, Women's Liberation, and GI Resistance movements during the Vietnam era. Drawing on recent cultural and literary theories, Bibby investigates the significance of images, tropes, and symbols of human bodies in activist  poetry. Many key political slogans of the period––"black is beautiful," "off our backs"––foreground the body. Bibby demonstrates that figurations of bodies marked important sites of social and political struggle.

Although poetry played such an important role in Vietnam-era activism, literary criticism has largely ignored most of this literature. Bibby recuperates the cultural-historical importance of Vietnam-era activist poetry, highlighting both its relevant contexts and revealing how it engaged political and social struggles that continue to motivate contemporary history. Arguing for the need to read cultural history through these "underground" texts, Hearts and Minds offers new grounds for understanding the recent history of American poetry and the role poetry has played as a medium of imaginative political expression.

 

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cover of Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic

Hiding in Plain Sight

Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic

Erika Denise Edwards

University of Alabama Press, 2020

WINNER OF THE ASSOCIATION OF BLACK WOMEN HISTORIANS 2020 LETITIA WOODS-BROWN AWARD FOR THE BEST BOOK IN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN'S HISTORY 

WINNER OF THE WESTERN ASSOCIATION OF WOMEN HISTORIAN'S BARBARA “PENNY” KANNER AWARD

2021 FINALIST FOR THE HARRIET TUBMAN BOOK PRIZE

2020 FINALIST BERSHIRE CONFERENCE OF WOMEN HISTORIANS BOOK PRIZE

Uncovering the Afro-Argentine women behind the myth of a white nation.

Argentina promotes itself as a country of European immigrants. This makes it an exception to other Latin American countries, which embrace a more mixed—African, Indian, European—heritage. Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic traces the origins of what some white Argentines mischaracterize as a “black disappearance” by delving into the intimate lives of black women and explaining how they contributed to the making of a “white” Argentina. Erika Denise Edwards has produced the first comprehensive study in English of the history of African descendants outside of Buenos Aires in the late colonial and early republican periods, with a focus on how these women sought whiteness to better their lives and that of their children.

Edwards argues that attempts by black women to escape the stigma of blackness by recategorizing themselves and their descendants as white began as early as the late eighteenth century, challenging scholars who assert that the black population drastically declined at the end of the nineteenth century because of the whitening or modernization process. She further contends that in Córdoba, Argentina, women of African descent (such as wives, mothers, daughters, and concubines) were instrumental in shaping their own racial reclassifications and destinies.

This volume makes use of a wealth of sources to relate these women’s choices. The sources consulted include city censuses and notarial and probate records that deal with free and enslaved African descendants; criminal, ecclesiastical, and civil court cases; marriages and baptisms records and newsletters. These varied sources provide information about the day-to-day activities of cordobés society and how women of African descent lived, formed relationships, thrived, and partook in the transformation of racial identities in Argentina.
 

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cover of High-Profile Crimes: When Legal Cases Become Social Causes

High-Profile Crimes

When Legal Cases Become Social Causes

Lynn S. Chancer

University of Chicago Press, 2005

O. J. Simpson. The Central Park jogger. Bensonhurst. William Kennedy Smith. Rodney King. These are more than crimes and criminals, more than court cases. They are cultural events that, for better or worse, gave concrete expression to latent social conflicts in American society. In High-Profile Crimes, Lynn Chancer explores how these cases became conflated with larger social causes on a collective level and how this phenomenon has affected the law, the media, and social movements.

An astute and incisive chronicle of some of the most polarizing cases of the 1980s and 1990s, High-Profile Crimes shows that their landmark status results from the overlapping interaction of diverse participants. The merging of legal cases and social causes, Chancer argues, has wrought ambivalent effects on both social movements and the law. On the one hand, high-profile crimes offer important opportunities for emotional expression and raise awareness of social issues. But on the other hand, social problems cannot be resolved through the either/or determinations that are the goals of the legal system, creating frustration for those who look to the outcome of these cases for social progress. Guilt or innocence through the lens of the media leads to either defeat or victory for a social cause-a confounding situation that made the O. J. Simpson case, for example, unable to resolve the issues of domestic violence and police racism that it had come to symbolize.

Based on nearly two hundred interviews, Chancer's discussions of the infamous Central Park jogger and Bensonhurst cases-as well as the rape trials of William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson, the assault cases of Rodney King and Reginald Denny, and, finally, the O. J. Simpson murder trial-provide a convincing, multidimensional and innovative analysis of the most charged public dramas of the last two decades.
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cover of Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970

Historians in Public

The Practice of American History, 1890-1970

Ian Tyrrell

University of Chicago Press, 2005

From lagging book sales and shrinking job prospects to concerns over the discipline's "narrowness," myriad factors have been cited by historians as evidence that their profession is in decline in America. Ian Tyrrell's Historians in Public shows that this perceived threat to history is recurrent, exaggerated, and often misunderstood. In fact, history has adapted to and influenced the American public more than people—and often historians—realize.

Tyrrell's elegant history of the practice of American history traces debates, beginning shortly after the profession's emergence in American academia, about history's role in school curricula. He also examines the use of historians in and by the government and whether historians should utilize mass media such as film and radio to influence the general public. As Historians in Public shows, the utility of history is a distinctive theme throughout the history of the discipline, as is the attempt to be responsive to public issues among pressure groups.

A superb examination of the practice of American history since the turn of the century, Historians in Public uncovers the often tangled ways history-makers make history-both as artisans and as actors.
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cover of Histories of Infamy: Francisco López de Gómara and the Ethics of Spanish Imperialism

Histories of Infamy

Francisco López de Gómara and the Ethics of Spanish Imperialism

Cristián A. Roa-de-la-Carrera

University Press of Colorado, 2005

"Roa-de-la-Carrera convincingly shows that Gómara, as well as other historians in the period, cannot easily ignore nor erase the contradictions of the Spanish colonial project."
- Luis Fernando Restrepo, University of Arkansas

“In an eloquent and thorough exegesis, Roa-de-la-Carrera reveals how and why López de Gómara, having written the best of all possible books in exultation of Spanish imperialism, nevertheless failed to convince the readers of his time."
- Susan Schroeder, Tulane University

In Histories of Infamy, Cristián Roa-de-la-Carrera explores Francisco López de Gómara's (1511-ca.1559) attempt to ethically reconcile Spain's civilizing mission with the conquistadors' abuse and exploitation of Native peoples.

The most widely read account of the conquest in its time, Gómara's Historia general de las Indias y Conquista de México rationalized the conquistadors' crimes as unavoidable evils in the task of bringing "civilization" to the New World. Through an elaborate defense of Spanish imperialism, Gómara aimed to convince his readers of the merits of the conquest, regardless of the devastation it had wrought upon Spain's new subjects. Despite his efforts, Gómara's apologist text quickly fell into disrepute and became ammunition for Spain's critics. Evaluating the effectiveness of ideologies of colonization, Roa-de-la-Carrera's analysis will appeal to scholars in colonial studies and readers interested in the history of the Americas.

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cover of History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century

History's Shadow

Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century

Steven Conn

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Who were the Native Americans? Where did they come from and how long ago? Did they have a history, and would they have a future? Questions such as these dominated intellectual life in the United States during the nineteenth century. And for many Americans, such questions about the original inhabitants of their homeland inspired a flurry of historical investigation, scientific inquiry, and heated political debate.

History's Shadow traces the struggle of Americans trying to understand the people who originally occupied the continent claimed as their own. Steven Conn considers how the question of the Indian compelled Americans to abandon older explanatory frameworks for sovereignty like the Bible and classical literature and instead develop new ones. Through their engagement with Native American language and culture, American intellectuals helped shape and define the emerging fields of archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and art. But more important, the questions posed by the presence of the Indian in the United States forced Americans to confront the meaning of history itself, both that of Native Americans and their own: how it should be studied, what drove its processes, and where it might ultimately lead. The encounter with Native Americans, Conn argues, helped give rise to a distinctly American historical consciousness.

A work of enormous scope and intellect, History's Shadow will speak to anyone interested in Native Americans and their profound influence on our cultural imagination.

“History’s Shadow is an intelligent and comprehensive look at the place of Native Americans in Euro-American’s intellectual history. . . . Examining literature, painting, photography, ethnology, and anthropology, Conn mines the written record to discover how non-Native Americans thought about Indians.” —Joy S. Kasson, Los Angeles Times

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cover of Hollywood on the Hudson: Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff

Hollywood on the Hudson

Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff

Koszarski, Richard

Rutgers University Press, 2008

In Hollywood on the Hudson, Richard Koszarski rewrites an important part of the history of American cinema. During the 1920s and 1930s, film industry executives had centralized the mass production of feature pictures in a series of gigantic film factories scattered across Southern California, while maintaining New York as the economic and administrative center. But as Koszarski reveals, many writers, producers, and directors also continued to work here, especially if their independent vision was too big for the Hollywood production line.
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