18284 books match the query 'United States' and 552 start with h

cover of Hijacking the Agenda: Economic Power and Political Influence

Hijacking the Agenda

Economic Power and Political Influence

Christopher Witko

Russell Sage Foundation, 2021

Why are the economic interests and priorities of lower- and middle-class Americans so often ignored by the U.S. Congress, while the economic interests of the wealthiest are prioritized, often resulting in policies favorable to their interests? In Hijacking the Agenda, political scientists Christopher Witko, Jana Morgan, Nathan J. Kelly, and Peter K. Enns examine why Congress privileges the concerns of businesses and the wealthy over those of average Americans. They go beyond demonstrating that such economic bias exists to illuminate precisely how and why economic policy is so often skewed in favor of the rich.
 
The authors analyze over 20 years of floor speeches by several hundred members of Congress to examine the influence of campaign contributions on how the national economic agenda is set in Congress. They find that legislators who received more money from business and professional associations were more likely to discuss the deficit and other upper-class priorities, while those who received more money from unions were more likely to discuss issues important to lower- and middle-class constituents, such as economic inequality and wages. This attention imbalance matters because issues discussed in Congress receive more direct legislative action, such as bill introductions and committee hearings. While unions use campaign contributions to push back against wealthy interests, spending by the wealthy dwarfs that of unions. 
 
The authors use case studies analyzing financial regulation and the minimum wage to demonstrate how the financial influence of the wealthy enables them to advance their economic agenda. In each case, the authors examine the balance of structural power, or the power that comes from a person or company’s position in the economy, and kinetic power, the power that comes from the ability to mobilize organizational and financial resources in the policy process. The authors show how big business uses its structural power and resources to effect policy change in Congress, as when the financial industry sought deregulation in the late 1990s, resulting in the passage of a bill eviscerating New Deal financial regulations. Likewise, when business interests want to preserve the policy status quo, it uses its power to keep issues off of the agenda, as when inflation eats into the minimum wage and its declining purchasing power leaves low-wage workers in poverty. Although groups representing lower- and middle-class interests, particularly unions, can use their resources to shape policy responses if conditions are right, they lack structural power and suffer significant resource disadvantages. As a result, wealthy interests have the upper hand in shaping the policy process, simply due to their pivotal position in the economy and the resulting perception that policies beneficial to business are beneficial for everyone.
 
Hijacking the Agenda is an illuminating account of the way economic power operates through the congressional agenda and policy process to privilege the interests of the wealthy and marks a major step forward in our understanding of the politics of inequality.
 
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cover of Hiking The Escalante

Hiking The Escalante

Rudi Lambrechts

University of Utah Press, 1999

An invaluable resource to anyone traversing the Escalante, this comprehensive guide details 43 hikes.

Publisher's Note: Realizing there are virtually no marked trails in the Escalante country (mostly canyons that wander and have many intersections, challenging anyone to write explicit description), this book includes directions to the trailhead, how to follow a particular route with choices of side canyons along the way, and occasional alternate endings. Some of the hikes may be appropriate for beginners. Some only the most experienced should attempt.

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cover of Hiking the Road to Ruins: Daytrips and Camping Adventures to Iron Mines, Old Military Sites, and Things Abandoned in the New York City Area...and Beyond

Hiking the Road to Ruins

Daytrips and Camping Adventures to Iron Mines, Old Military Sites, and Things Abandoned in the New York City Area...and Beyond

Steinberg, David A

Rutgers University Press, 2015

In this easy to use, informative, and occasionally eccentric guidebook, David A. Steinberg blazes the trail to more than twenty-five unusual landmarks and hard-to-find destinations that are mostly within a two-hour drive of New York City. Suitable for the experienced hiker or camping adventurer—as well as anyone who has the desire to explore—Hiking the Road to Ruins includes many new ruins and historic sites to see: remnants of the two World’s Fairs in Queens, mysterious stone chambers scattered about northern Westchester County, winter adventuring in Harriman, and quarries that contain amazing artifacts. 

In this new edition, Steinberg adds four additional chapters and has revised throughout the book to include detailed directions, GPS coordinates to specific sites, a hand-drawn map, and suggestions for the optimal time and season to visit. Having led many types of hikes and trips over the past fifteen years, Steinberg leaves no part of the trip unplanned. He even suggests ideal conditions for outings. An overcast day, for instance, sets up the haunted atmosphere appropriate for visiting a water tower in Mountainside, New Jersey, that has links to a murder-suicide in the 1970s. 

Newcomers will gain experience as they make their way through the book, which includes a chapter on equipment and safety, detailed instructions on how to program a hand-held Global Positioning System receiver, and a glossary of terms. 

Both a practical guide and a creative chronicle, Hiking the Road to Ruins will inspire everyone to hit the trail in search of adventure.
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cover of Hill Farms: Surviving Modern Times in Early Twentieth-Century Vermont

Hill Farms

Surviving Modern Times in Early Twentieth-Century Vermont

Dona Brown

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

There is a stubborn myth that has persisted for almost two centuries: the narrative of the abandoned farm in the rural American northeast. In Hill Farms, historian Dona Brown confronts this myth of rural decline with a focus on Jamaica, Vermont, a small town in the hills west of Brattleboro. Through this town’s history, she reveals a more complex economic and environmental narrative, a story of the continued use of traditional farm methods despite the growing power of modernization and demands for increased efficiencies. 

Brown examines the records of a 1930 study by the University of Vermont’s now infamous Eugenics Survey, part of a flood of problematic investigations of Vermont rural life at the time, wherein eugenicists interviewed residents in every Jamaica household about crops, incomes, and housing conditions. These researchers from various disciplines saw in Jamaica and towns like it poverty and ignorance rather than a commitment to farming as a modest but sustainable way of life. Extensive handwritten notes from the Eugenics Survey provide a remarkable glimpse into the daily lives and practices of these upland farmers, revealing the value in maintaining older, less intensive farming practices and shedding new light on the social and environmental history of the time. As debates around farming and rural life intensified during the Great Depression, advocates beyond Vermont rose to the defense of traditional farms. Though industrialized agriculture ultimately prevailed, the old farming strategies cultivated by these upcountry residents continue to attract adherents in the face of new challenges to traditional farming in our own times. 

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cover of Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics

Hillary Clinton in the News

Gender and Authenticity in American Politics

Shawn J. Parry-Giles

University of Illinois Press, 2014

The charge of inauthenticity has trailed Hillary Clinton from the moment she entered the national spotlight and stood in front of television cameras. Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics shows how the U.S. news media created their own news frames of Clinton's political authenticity and image-making, from her participation in Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign through her own 2008 presidential bid.

Using theories of nationalism, feminism, and authenticity, Parry-Giles tracks the evolving ways the major networks and cable news programs framed Clinton's image as she assumed roles ranging from surrogate campaigner, legislative advocate, and financial investor to international emissary, scorned wife, and political candidate.  This study magnifies how the coverage that preceded Clinton's entry into electoral politics was grounded in her earliest presence in the national spotlight, and in long-standing nationalistic beliefs about the boundaries of authentic womanhood and first lady comportment. Once Clinton dared to cross those gender boundaries and vie for office in her own right, the news exuded a rhetoric of sexual violence. These portrayals served as a warning to other women who dared to enter the political arena and violate the protocols of authentic womanhood.


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cover of Hillary Clinton's Career in Speeches: The Promises and Perils of Women's Rhetorical Adaptivity

Hillary Clinton's Career in Speeches

The Promises and Perils of Women's Rhetorical Adaptivity

Shawn J. Parry-Giles

Michigan State University Press, 2023

Women candidates are under more pressure to communicate competence and likability than men. And when women balance these rhetorical pressures, charges of inauthenticity creep in, suggesting the structural and strategic anti-woman backlash at play in presidential politics. Hillary Clinton demonstrated considerable ability to adapt her rhetoric across roles, contexts, genres, and audiences. Comparisons between Clinton’s campaign speeches and those of her presidential opponents (Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump) show that her rhetorical range exceeded theirs. And comparisons with Democratic women candidates of 2020 suggest they too exhibited a rhetorical range and faced a backlash similar to Clinton. Hillary Clinton’s Career in Speeches combines statistical text-mining methods with close reading to analyze the rhetorical highs and lows of one of the most successful political women in U.S. history. Drawing on Clinton’s oratory across governing and campaigning, the authors debunk the stereotype that she was a wooden and insufferably wonkish speaker. They marshal evidence for the argument that the sexist tactics in American politics function to turn women’s rhetorical strengths into political liabilities. 
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cover of Hillary and Bill: The Clintons and the Politics of the Personal

Hillary and Bill

The Clintons and the Politics of the Personal

William H. Chafe

Duke University Press, 2016

In Hillary and Bill, William H. Chafe boldly argues that the trajectory of the Clintons' political lives can be understood only through the prism of their personal relationship. Inseparable from the day they first met, their personal dynamic has determined their political fates. Hillary was instrumental in Bill's triumphs as Arkansas's governor, and she saved his presidential candidacy in 1992 during the Gennifer Flowers sex scandal. He responded by delegating to her powers that no other First Lady had ever exercised. Chafe's penetrating insights—into subjects such as health care, Kenneth Starr, welfare reform, and the Lewinsky scandal—add texture and depth to our understanding of the Clintons' experience together. Hillary and Bill is the definitive account of the Clintons’ relationship and its far-reaching impact on American political life.
 
In this new edition, Chafe explores how Hillary adopted a new persona as a U.S. senator, returning to the consensus-oriented reformer she had been before she met Bill. Listening to her constituents and building bridges to Republicans in Congress, she left behind the us-against-them political personality of her White House years. She kept this persona as secretary of state, establishing personal ties with foreign leaders and reaching out to average citizens in the countries she visited. Still, she retained her obsession with her personal privacy and permitted the Clinton Foundation to create potential conflicts of interest with her government responsibilities. The key question, as she approached the 2016 presidential race, was which Hillary would be the presidential candidate—the person who reaches out to others and seeks collaborators or the Hillary who demonizes the opposition and fiercely protects her privacy and self-image.
 
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cover of Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks

Hillbilly Hellraisers

Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks

J Perkins

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Long a bastion of antigovernment feeling, the Ozark region today is home to fervent strains of conservative-influenced sentiment. Does rural heritage play an exceptional role in the perpetuation of these attitudes? Have such outlooks been continuous?

J. Blake Perkins searches for the roots of rural defiance in the Ozarks--and discovers how it changed over time. Eschewing generalities, Perkins focuses on the experiences and attitudes of rural people themselves as they interacted with government from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century.He uncovers the reasons local disputes and uneven access to government power fostered markedly different reactions by hill people as time went by. Resistance in the earlier period sprang from upland small farmers' conflicts with capitalist elites who held the local levers of federal power. But as industry and agribusiness displaced family farms after World War II, a conservative cohort of town business elites, local political officials, and midwestern immigrants arose from the region's new low-wage, union-averse economy. As Perkins argues, this modern antigovernment conservatism bore little resemblance to the backcountry populism of an earlier age but had much in common with the movement elsewhere.

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cover of Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls: Women's Country Music, 1930-1960

Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls

Women's Country Music, 1930-1960

Stephanie Vander Wel

University of Illinois Press, 2020

A PopMatters Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the booming popularity of country music threw a spotlight on a new generation of innovative women artists. These individuals blazed trails as singers, musicians, and performers even as the industry hemmed in their potential popularity with labels like woman hillbilly, singing cowgirl, and honky-tonk angel.

Stephanie Vander Wel looks at the careers of artists like Patsy Montana, Rose Maddox, and Kitty Wells against the backdrop of country music's golden age. Analyzing recordings and appearances on radio, film, and television, she connects performances to real and imagined places and examines how the music sparked new ways for women listeners to imagine the open range, the honky-tonk, and the home. The music also captured the tensions felt by women facing geographic disruption and economic uncertainty. While classic songs and heartfelt performances might ease anxieties, the subject matter underlined women's ambivalent relationships to industrialism, middle-class security, and established notions of femininity.

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cover of Hillel at Michigan, 1926/27-1945: Struggles of Jewish Identity in a Pivotal Era

Hillel at Michigan, 1926/27-1945

Struggles of Jewish Identity in a Pivotal Era

Andrei S. Markovits and Kenneth Garner

Michigan Publishing Services, 2016

This book provides the very first in-depth analysis of the founding decades of a major Hillel chapter in the United States. Hillel at the University of Michigan was founded in 1926 as the fourth such chapter in the United States following its establishment at three other public universities in the Midwest: Illinois (1923); Wisconsin (1924); Ohio State (1925).
 
The study analyzes Hillel's challenges as a big-tent, catch-all institution trying to represent all Jewish students on campus regardless of their religious orientation, cultural preferences, and ideological predilections. It looks at Hillel's interactions with the then powerful Jewish fraternities and sororities that provided the main locus of Jewish life on campus at the time, as well as its relations with the University's leadership and many of its cultural and political constituencies. Most of these activities occurred at a time when anti-Semitism was rife in the United States, particularly in the larger Detroit area, home to Henry Ford and Father Charles Edward Coughlin.
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cover of Hillside Fields: A History of Sports in West Virginia

Hillside Fields

A History of Sports in West Virginia

Bob Barnett

West Virginia University Press, 2013

West Virginia’s championship teams at WVU and Marshall and athletic superstars like Jerry West and Mary Lou Retton are familiar to all, but few know the untold story of sports in the Mountain State. Hillside Fields: A History of Sports in West Virginia chronicles the famous athletic triumphs and heart-breaking losses of local heroes and legendary teams, recording the titanic struggles of a small state competing alongside larger rivals.
Hillside Fields
provides a broad view of the development of sports in West Virginia, from one of the first golf clubs in America at Oakhurst Links to the Greenbrier Classic; from the first girls basketball championship in 1919 to post Title IX; from racially segregated sports to integrated teams; and from the days when West Virginia Wesleyan and Davis & Elkins beat the big boys in football to the championship teams at WVU, Marshall, West Virginia State and West Liberty.
Hillside Fields
explains how major national trends and events, as well as West Virginia’s economic, political, and demographic conditions, influenced the development of sports in the state. The story of the growth of sports in West Virginia is also a story of the tribulations, hopes, values and triumphs of a proud people.
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cover of Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict

Hinterland

America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict

Phil A. Neel

Reaktion Books, 2018

Over the last forty years, the human landscape of the United States has been fundamentally transformed. The metamorphosis is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering, coastal hubs for finance, infotech, and the so-called creative class. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America’s hinterland, populated by towering grain threshers and hunched farmworkers, where laborers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and “fulfillment centers” and where cold storage trailers are filled with fentanyl-bloated corpses when the morgues cannot contain the dead.

Urgent and unsparing, this book opens our eyes to America’s new heart of darkness. Driven by an ever-expanding socioeconomic crisis, America’s class structure is recomposing itself in new geographies of race, poverty, and production. The center has fallen. Riots ricochet from city to city led by no one in particular. Anarchists smash financial centers as a resurgent far right builds power in the countryside. Drawing on his direct experience of recent popular unrest, from the Occupy movement to the wave of riots and blockades that began in Ferguson, Missouri, Phil A. Neel provides a close-up view of this landscape in all its grim but captivating detail. Inaugurating the new Field Notes series, published in association with the Brooklyn Rail, Neel’s book tells the intimate story of a life lived within America’s hinterland.
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cover of Hinton Rowan Helper: Abolitionist and Racist

Hinton Rowan Helper

Abolitionist and Racist

Hugh C. Bailey

University of Alabama Press, 1965

Statistical fanatic, abolitionist, militant racist

Hinton Rowan Helper—a statistical fanatic, abolitionist, militant racist, Republican propagandist, ardent patriot, international railway projector, and promoter of inter-American co-operation ­was a man of great paradox and tragedy. Born and reared a Southerner, he became a caustic and potent critic of slavery, who sought to “liberate” his people from its burdens. Unlike many of his Northern abolitionist friends, however, he loathed not only the Negro but most “non-Anglo-Saxon peoples.” It is shocking to read Helper's violent pleas for abolition and to know of his contempt for the Negro.
 
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cover of Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness

Hip Hop Desis

South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness

Nitasha Tamar Sharma

Duke University Press, 2010

Hip Hop Desis explores the aesthetics and politics of South Asian American (desi) hip hop artists. Nitasha Tamar Sharma argues that through their lives and lyrics, young “hip hop desis” express a global race consciousness that reflects both their sense of connection with Blacks as racialized minorities in the United States and their diasporic sensibility as part of a global community of South Asians. She emphasizes the role of appropriation and sampling in the ways that hip hop desis craft their identities, create art, and pursue social activism. Some desi artists produce what she calls “ethnic hip hop,” incorporating South Asian languages, instruments, and immigrant themes. Through ethnic hip hop, artists, including KB, Sammy, and Deejay Bella, express “alternative desiness,” challenging assumptions about their identities as South Asians, children of immigrants, minorities, and Americans. Hip hop desis also contest and seek to bridge perceived divisions between Blacks and South Asian Americans. By taking up themes considered irrelevant to many Asian Americans, desi performers, such as D’Lo, Chee Malabar of Himalayan Project, and Rawj of Feenom Circle, create a multiracial form of Black popular culture to fight racism and enact social change.
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cover of Hip-Hop Civics: Connected Learning in the Rap Classroom

Hip-Hop Civics

Connected Learning in the Rap Classroom

Jabari M. Evans

University of Michigan Press, 2025

In Hip-Hop Civics, Jabari Evans demonstrates how Hip-Hop can be deployed in revamping formal civic education for Black and Brown youth. Based on an original ethnographic study of a Hip-Hop-based education program, the Songwriting and Production Program (SWP) administered by the Foundation of Music in two of Chicago’s lowest performing public schools, Evans argues that Hip-Hop culture is central to students’ lives and can be used as a vehicle for students to engage in civic practices and extract critical lessons about mainstream media, relational currency, identity development, and race/racism within the classroom. Through a compelling exploration of the SWP program, Evans contends that Hip-Hop should be part of formal education spaces and instruction, a conclusion he reaches through his understanding of how Hip-Hop impacted his own life, and by witnessing students discuss, write, and produce Hip-Hop music as part of the SWP program. 
 
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cover of Hipbillies: Deep Revolution in the Arkansas Ozarks

Hipbillies

Deep Revolution in the Arkansas Ozarks

Jared M. Phillips

University of Arkansas Press, 2019

Counterculture flourished nationwide in the 1960s and 1970s, and while the hippies of Haight–Ashbury occupied the public eye, a faction of back to the landers were quietly creating their own haven off the beaten path in the Arkansas Ozarks. In Hipbillies, Jared Phillips combines oral histories and archival resources to weave the story of the Ozarks and its population of country beatniks into the national narrative, showing how the back to the landers engaged in “deep revolution” by sharing their ideas on rural development, small farm economy, and education with the locals—and how they became a fascinating part of a traditional region’s coming to terms with the modern world in the process.
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cover of Hippie Homesteaders: Arts, Crafts, Music and Living on the Land in West Virginia

Hippie Homesteaders

Arts, Crafts, Music and Living on the Land in West Virginia

Carter Taylor Seaton

West Virginia University Press, 2014

It’s the 1960s. The Vietnam War is raging and protests are erupting across the United States. In many quarters, young people are dropping out of society, leaving their urban homes behind in an attempt to find a safe place to live on their own terms, to grow their own food, and to avoid a war they passionately decry. During this time, West Virginia becomes a haven for thousands of these homesteaders—or back-to-the-landers, as they are termed by some. Others call them hippies.

When the going got rough, many left. But a significant number remain to this day. Some were artisans when they arrived, while others adopted a craft that provided them with the cash necessary to survive. Hippie Homesteaders tells the story of this movement from the viewpoint of forty artisans and musicians who came to the state, lived on the land, and created successful careers with their craft. There’s the couple that made baskets coveted by the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery. There’s the draft-dodger that fled to Canada and then became a premier furniture maker. There’s the Boston-born VISTA worker who started a quilting cooperative. And, there’s the immigrant Chinese potter who lived on a commune.

Along with these stories, Hippie Homesteaders examines the serendipitous timing of this influx and the community and economic support these crafters received from residents and state agencies in West Virginia. Without these young transplants, it’s possible there would be no Tamarack: The Best of West Virginia, the first statewide collection of fine arts and handcrafts in the nation, and no Mountain Stage, the weekly live musical program broadcast worldwide on National Public Radio since 1983. Forget what you know about West Virginia.

Hippie Homesteaders isn’t about coal or hillbillies or moonshine or poverty. It is the story of why West Virginia was—and still is—a kind of heaven to so many.

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cover of Hired Pens: Professional Writers in America’s Golden Age of Print

Hired Pens

Professional Writers in America’s Golden Age of Print

Ronald Weber

Ohio University Press, 1997

Just as mass-market magazines and cheap books have played important roles in the creation of an American identity, those skilled craftsmen (and women) whose careers are the subjects of Ronald Weber’s narrative profoundly influenced the outlook and strategies of the high-culture writers who are generally the focus of literary studies.

Hired Pens, a history of the writing profession in the United States, recognizes the place of independent writers who wrote for their livelihood from the 1830s and 1840s, with the first appearance of a broad-based print culture, to the 1960s.

Many realist authors began on this American Grub Street. Jack London turned out hackwork for any paying market he could find, while Scott Fitzgerald’s stories in slick magazines in the 1920s and early ’30s established his name as a writer.

From Edgar Allen Poe’s earliest forays into writing for pay to Sylvia Plath’s attempts to produce fiction for mass-circulation journals, Hired Pens documents without agenda the evolution of professional writing in all its permutations—travel accounts, sport, popular biography and history, genre and series fiction—and the culture it fed.

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cover of Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism

Hiroshima in History

The Myths of Revisionism

Edited with an introduction by Robert James Maddox

University of Missouri Press, 2007

When President Harry Truman authorized the use of atomic weapons against Japan, he did so to end a bloody war that would have been bloodier still had the planned invasion of Japan proved necessary. Revisionists claim that Truman’s real interest was a power play with the Soviet Union and that the Japanese would have surrendered even earlier had the retention of their imperial system been assured. Truman wanted the war to continue, they insist, in order to show off America’s powerful new weapon.

This anthology exposes revisionist fallacies about Truman’s motives, the cost of an invasion, and the question of Japan’s surrender. Essays by prominent military and diplomatic historians reveal the hollowness of revisionist claims, exposing the degree to which these agenda-driven scholars have manipulated the historical record to support their contentions. They show that, although some Japanese businessmen and minor officials indicated a willingness to negotiate peace, no one in a governmental decision-making capacity even suggested surrender. And although casualty estimates for an invasion vary considerably, the more authoritative approximations point to the very bloodbath that Truman sought to avoid.

Volume editor Robert Maddox first examines the writings of revisionist Gar Alperovitz to expose the unscholarly methods Alperovitz employed to support his claims, then distinguished Japanese historian Sadao Asada reveals how difficult it was for his country’s peace faction to prevail even after the bombs had been dropped. Other contributors point to continuing Japanese military buildups, analyze the revisionists’ low casualty estimates for an invasion, reveal manipulations of the Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, and show how even the exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum hewed to the revisionist line. And a close reading of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s acclaimed Racing the Enemy exposes many grave discrepancies between that recent revisionist text and its sources.

The use of atomic bombs against Japan remains one of the most controversial issues in American history. Gathered in a single volume for the first time, these insightful readings take a major step toward settling that controversy by showing how insubstantial Hiroshima revisionism really is—and that sometimes history cannot proceed without decisive action, however regrettable.

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cover of Hispanic Arizona, 1536–1856

Hispanic Arizona, 1536–1856

James E. Officer

University of Arizona Press, 1987

The history of the American West has usually been seen from the perspective of American expansion. Drawing on previously unexplored primary sources, James E. Officer has now produced a major work that traces the Hispanic roots of southern Arizona and northern Sonora—one which presents the Spanish and Mexican rather than Anglo point of view. Officer records the Hispanic presence from the earliest efforts at colonization on Spain’s northwestern frontier through the Spanish and Mexican years of rule, thus providing a unique reference on Southwestern history.
 
The heart of the work centers on the early nineteenth century. It explores subjects such as the constant threat posed by hostile Apaches, government intrigue and revolution in Sonora and the provincias internas, and patterns of land ownership in villages such as Tucson and Tubac. Also covered are the origins of land grants in present-day southern Arizona and the invasion of southern Arizona by American “49ers” as seen from the Mexican point of view. Officer traces kinship ties of several elite families who ruled the frontier province over many generations—men and women whose descendants remain influential in Sonora and Arizona today.
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cover of Hispanic Population of the United States

Hispanic Population of the United States

Frank D. Bean

Russell Sage Foundation, 1987

The Hispanic population in the United States is a richly diverse and changing segment of our national community. Frank Bean and Marta Tienda emphasize a shifting cluster of populations—Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central and South American, Spanish, and Caribbean—as they examine fertility and immigration, family and marriage patterns, education, earnings, and employment. They discuss, for instance, the effectiveness of bilingual education, recommending instead culturally supportive programs that will benefit both Hispanic and non-Hispanic students. A study of the geographic distribution of Hispanics shows that their tendency to live in metropolitan areas may, in fact, result in an isolation which denies them equal access to schooling, jobs, and health care. Bean and Tienda offer a critical, much-needed assessment of how Hispanics are faring and what the issues for the future will be. Their findings reveal and reflect differences in the Hispanic population that will influence policy decisions and affect the Hispanic community on regional and national levels. "...represents the state of the art for quantitative analysis of ethnic groups in the United States." —American Journal of Sociology A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series
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cover of Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places: Community and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary America

Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places

Community and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary America

Edited by Daniel D. Arreola

University of Texas Press, 2004

Hispanics/Latinos are the largest ethnic minority in the United States—but they are far from being a homogenous group. Mexican Americans in the Southwest have roots that extend back four centuries, while Dominicans and Salvadorans are very recent immigrants. Cuban Americans in South Florida have very different occupational achievements, employment levels, and income from immigrant Guatemalans who work in the poultry industry in Virginia. In fact, the only characteristic shared by all Hispanics/Latinos in the United States is birth or ancestry in a Spanish-speaking country.

In this book, sixteen geographers and two sociologists map the regional and cultural diversity of the Hispanic/Latino population of the United States. They report on Hispanic communities in all sections of the country, showing how factors such as people's country/culture of origin, length of time in the United States, and relations with non-Hispanic society have interacted to create a wide variety of Hispanic communities. Identifying larger trends, they also discuss the common characteristics of three types of Hispanic communities—those that have always been predominantly Hispanic, those that have become Anglo-dominated, and those in which Hispanics are just becoming a significant portion of the population.

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cover of Historians Against History: The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing Since 1830

Historians Against History

The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing Since 1830

David W. Noble

University of Minnesota Press, 1967

Historians Against History was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Professor Noble examines the basic philosophy and writing of six American historians, George Bancroft, Frederick Jackson, Charles A. Beard, Carl Becker, Vernon Louis Parrington, and Daniel J. Boorstin, and finds in them a common tradition which he calls anti-historical. He argues that this viewpoint is founded in the frontier interpretation of American history, that American historians have served as the chief political theorists and theologians of this country since 1830, and that their writings can be interpreted as Jeremiads designed to preserve a national covenant with nature.

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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 Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America's Past

Historians on Hamilton

How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America's Past

Romano, Renee C

Rutgers University Press, 2018

America has gone Hamilton crazy. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning musical has spawned sold-out performances, a triple platinum cast album, and a score so catchy that it is being used to teach U.S. history in classrooms across the country. But just how historically accurate is Hamilton? And how is the show itself making history?

Historians on Hamilton brings together a collection of top scholars to explain the Hamilton phenomenon and explore what it might mean for our understanding of America’s history. The contributors examine what the musical got right, what it got wrong, and why it matters. Does Hamilton’s hip-hop take on the Founding Fathers misrepresent our nation’s past, or does it offer a bold positive vision for our nation’s future? Can a musical so unabashedly contemporary and deliberately anachronistic still communicate historical truths about American culture and politics? And is Hamilton as revolutionary as its creators and many commentators claim?

Perfect for students, teachers, theatre fans, hip-hop heads, and history buffs alike, these short and lively essays examine why Hamilton became an Obama-era sensation and consider its continued relevance in the age of Trump. Whether you are a fan or a skeptic, you will come away from this collection with a new appreciation for the meaning and importance of the Hamilton phenomenon.
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cover of Historic Architecture in Alabama: A Guide to Styles and Types, 1810-1930

Historic Architecture in Alabama

A Guide to Styles and Types, 1810-1930

Robert S. Gamble

University of Alabama Press, 2001

Discover the stories behind Alabama’s timeless structures.

Robert Gamble outlines in detail the primary architectural currents and styles that have surfaced in Alabama over the years and defined the state's built landscape. The structures and styles, all well-illustrated,range from folk houses and early settlement buildings to railway terminals, churches, libraries, municipal and university buildings, palatial private mansions, and modest homes. Structures from every period and every major stylistic era—Federal, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate, Romanesque and Mission Revival, and the Richardsonian—are documented meticulously, along with examples of early—Modern buildings, including Alabama's only Frank Lloyd Wright structure and skyscrapers from the Chicago school.

More than 200 photographs, supplemented by sketches, plans, and etchings, provide the general reader and the design professional with images of Alabama architecture in all its variety and range. Many illustrations offer rare views of buildings long since demolished. A substantial glossary of architectural terms and a thorough bibliography enhance this standard sure to be welcomed anew by any lover of old buildings, whether weekend rambler or serious student.




 

[more]
cover of Historic Illinois from the Air

Historic Illinois from the Air

David Buisseret

University of Chicago Press, 1990

"A distinctive and skillful effort to bring facets of Illinois history to a popular as well as an academic audience."—John Hoffman, Illinois Historical Survey, University of Illinois Library
[more]
cover of Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, 1540-1838

Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, 1540-1838

Amos J. Wright

University of Alabama Press, 2003

Discover the lost towns that shaped Alabama’s earliest history.

This encyclopedic work is a listing of 398 ancient towns recorded within the present boundaries of the state of Alabama, containing basic information on each village's ethnic affiliation, time period, geographic location, descriptions, and (if any) movements. While publications dating back to 1901 have attempted to compile such a listing, none until now has so exhaustively harvested the 214 historic maps drawn between 1544, when Hernando de Soto's entourage first came through the southeastern territory, and 1846, when Indian removal to the Oklahoma Territory was complete. Wright combines the map data with a keen awareness of both previously published information and archival sources, such as colonial town lists, census information, and travel narratives.

The towns are listed alphabetically, and the text of each entry develops chronologically. While only a few of these towns have been accurately located by archaeologists, this volume provides a wealth of information for the future study of cultural geography, southeastern archaeology, and ethnohistory. It will be an enduring reference source for many years to come.

SAMPLE ENTRY, 

ALIBAMA TOWN (Alibama)
The Alibama consisted of several towns—Mucclassa, Tawasa, Tomopa, Koarsati (Knight 1981, 27:48). Pickett ([1851] 1962:81) adds Ecanchati, Pawokti, and Autauga. The Alibama Town can also be added. Many maps show the Alibama as a group, but one map, 1796 Thomas and Andrews, locates the "Alabama Town"on the east bank of the Coosa just below Wetumpka.

Swanton ([1922] 1970a:209) wrote that the Tuskegee at the Alabama forks may have been known as the "Alabama Town"; however, this is unlikely, as Major W. Blue, a removal agent, wrote in July 1835 that Coosada, Alabama Town, and Tuskegee were ready to emigrate and they all lived adjoining each other in Macon County (ASP, Military Affairs 1861,6:731).

On 6 July 1838, some twenty-seven towns, including "Alibama" (NA M234 R225), attended the Creek council held in Indian Territory. Thomas Bibb, brother to Alabama territorial govenor William Wyatt Bibb, and others, including Nashville investors, founded the town of Alabama in 1817 at Ten Mile Bluff in Montgomery County (Moser 1980-94, 4:131). The town soon disappeared into history.

[more]
cover of Historic Native Peoples of Texas

Historic Native Peoples of Texas

By William C. Foster

University of Texas Press, 2008

Several hundred tribes of Native Americans were living within or hunting and trading across the present-day borders of Texas when Cabeza de Vaca and his shipwrecked companions washed up on a Gulf Coast beach in 1528. Over the next two centuries, as Spanish and French expeditions explored the state, they recorded detailed information about the locations and lifeways of Texas's Native peoples. Using recent translations of these expedition diaries and journals, along with discoveries from ongoing archaeological investigations, William C. Foster here assembles the most complete account ever published of Texas's Native peoples during the early historic period (AD 1528 to 1722).

Foster describes the historic Native peoples of Texas by geographic regions. His chronological narrative records the interactions of Native groups with European explorers and with Native trading partners across a wide network that extended into Louisiana, the Great Plains, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Foster provides extensive ethnohistorical information about Texas's Native peoples, as well as data on the various regions' animals, plants, and climate. Accompanying each regional account is an annotated list of named Indian tribes in that region and maps that show tribal territories and European expedition routes.

This authoritative overview of Texas's historic Native peoples reveals that these groups were far more cosmopolitan than previously known. Functioning as the central link in the continent-wide circulation of trade goods and cultural elements such as religion, architecture, and lithic technology, Texas's historic Native peoples played a crucial role in connecting the Native peoples of North America from the Pacific Coast to the Southeast woodlands.

[more]
cover of Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historic Identity

Historic Preservation

Collective Memory and Historic Identity

Barthel, Diane

Rutgers University Press, 1996

Historic preservation is a cultural movement gaining momentum and adherents throughout Europe and the United States. How do we decide what to preserve and how to preserve? Who benefits from the efforts of preservationists, curators, developers, and other "symbolic bankers" to safeguard an increasing variety of structures for future generations? Diane Barthel raises these and other questions in this important new book. Taking a comparative approach, Barthel finds that preservation in Britain has largely been an elite enterprise aimed at preserving traditional values. In the United States, by contrast, the pattern is much more dynamic and democratic, though also more permeated by commercialism. Is preservation becoming another means of consuming history, like media representations or "historic" shopping outlets? Or does it have a special significance as a very tangible means of getting in touch with our collective and individual pasts? These and other issues--including war and remembrance, agrarian and industrial preservation, and religious preservation in a secular society--demonstrate the significance of what Barthel calls "the Preservation Project" and why we all have a stake in how our history is reconstructed and interpreted.
[more]
cover of Historic Texas from the Air

Historic Texas from the Air

By David Buisseret, Richard Francaviglia, Gerald Saxon, and Jack Graves

University of Texas Press, 2009

The extremely varied geography of Texas, ranging from lush piney woods to arid, mountainous deserts, has played a major role in the settlement and development of the state. To gain full perspective on the influence of the land on the people of Texas, you really have to take to the air—and the authors of Historic Texas from the Air have done just that. In this beautiful book, dramatic aerial photography provides a complete panorama of seventy-three historic sites from around the state, showing them in extensive geographic context and revealing details unavailable to a ground-based observer.

Each site in Historic Texas from the Air appears in a full-page color photograph, accompanied by a concise description of the site's history and importance. Contemporary and historical photographs, vintage postcard images, and maps offer further visual information about the sites. The book opens with images of significant natural landforms, such as the Chisos Mountains and the Big Thicket, then shows the development of Texas history through Indian spiritual sites (including Caddo Mounds and Enchanted Rock), relics from the French and Spanish occupation (such as the wreck of the Belle and the Alamo), Anglo forts and methods of communication (including Fort Davis and Salado's Stagecoach Inn), nineteenth-century settlements and industries (such as Granbury's courthouse square and Kreische Brewery in La Grange), and significant twentieth-century locales, (including Spindletop, the LBJ Ranch, and the Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport).

For anyone seeking a visual, vital overview of Texas history, Historic Texas from the Air is the perfect place to begin.

[more]
cover of Historical Archaeology and the Latter-day Saint Past

Historical Archaeology and the Latter-day Saint Past

Benjamin C. Pykles

Utah State University Press, 2025

Historical Archaeology and the Latter-day Saint Past reviews the history of archaeological investigations at sites connected to the Latter-day Saints and examines the ways archaeology has contributed to the understanding of that past. Examples from various sites, where over time archaeologists have utilized a wide range of methods, illustrate the potential of historical archaeology to confirm, complete, correct, and sometimes confuse understandings of the Latter-day Saints.

The Arrington Lecture series, established in honor of one of the twentieth-century American West’s most distinguished historians, Leonard Arrington, has become a leading forum for prominent scholars to address topics related to Latter-day Saint history. Utah State University hosts the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series through the Merrill-Cazier Library’s Special Collections and Archives.

 
[more]
cover of Historical Archaeology in the Cortez Mining District: Under the Nevada Giant

Historical Archaeology in the Cortez Mining District

Under the Nevada Giant

Erich Obermayr

University of Nevada Press, 2025

The Cortez Hills Expansion Project archaeological excavations uncovered a wealth of information about the Cortez Mining District, from its beginning in 1863 to the government-mandated end to the mining of precious metals in the district during World War II. Obermayr and McQueen use archaeological data as a foundation to tell the story of life in one of Nevada’s most intriguing, long-lived mining districts. Archaeologists excavate and analyze many thousands of artifacts, uncovering the homes and workplaces—and even trash dumps—of prospectors and miners, mill workers, charcoal burners, brickmakers, blacksmiths, teamsters, and families. They present an archaeological view of everyday life: how Cortez was populated by a variety of ethnic groups, how they lived, what products they bought or consumed, what their social status was, and how, even in this remote location, they created their own version of lives exemplifying the era’s Victorian ideals.
 
Readers interested in the archaeology of the West, mining history, and the history of Nevada will find this book fascinating.
 
[more]
cover of Historical Atlas of West Virginia

Historical Atlas of West Virginia

FRANK S. RIDDEL

West Virginia University Press, 2008

Few reference works are as valuable to both scholars and non-scholars as a historical atlas. Therefore, The Historical Atlas of West Virginia will be an important title for libraries, schools, and every West Virginian who wants to understand how historical forces are mapped onto the state’s terrain. This atlas also shows how the distribution of natural resources intersects with various means of distribution. Frank Riddel’s The Historical Atlas of West Virginia is copiously illustrated with maps, tables, and charts depicting everything from geological deposits and strata that have fed the state’s industries to the settlement patterns of the immigrants who settled in West Virginia. Using federal and state statistics, it also includes revelations from the national census figures since 1790.

[more]
cover of Historical Thinking

Historical Thinking

Sam Wineburg

Temple University Press, 2001

Since ancient times, the pundits have lamented young people's lack of historical knowledge and warned that ignorance of the past surely condemns humanity to repeating its mistakes. In the contemporary United States, this dire outlook drives a contentious debate about what key events, nations, and people are essential for history students. Sam Wineburg says that we are asking the wrong questions. This book demolishes the conventional notion that there is one true history and one best way to teach it.

Although most of us think of history -- and learn it -- as a conglomeration of facts, dates, and key figures, for professional historians it is a way of knowing, a method for developing and understanding about the relationships of peoples and events in the past. A cognitive psychologist, Wineburg has been engaged in studying what is intrinsic to historical thinking, how it might be taught, and why most students still adhere to the "one damned thing after another" concept of history.

Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children's drawings, Wineburg's essays offer "rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present." Arguing that we all absorb lessons about history in many settings -- in kitchen table conversations, at the movies, or on the world-wide web, for instance -- these essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking.
[more]
cover of Histories of Southeastern Archaeology

Histories of Southeastern Archaeology

Edited by Shannon Tushingham, Jane Hill, and Charles H. McNutt

University of Alabama Press, 2002

This volume provides a comprehensive, broad-based overview, including first-person accounts, of the development and conduct of archaeology in the Southeast over the past three decades.

Histories of Southeastern Archaeology originated as a symposium at the 1999 Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) organized in honor of the retirement of Charles H. McNutt following 30 years of teaching anthropology. Written for the most part by members of the first post-depression generation of southeastern archaeologists, this volume offers a window not only into the archaeological past of the United States but also into the hopes and despairs of archaeologists who worked to write that unrecorded history or to test scientific theories concerning culture.

The contributors take different approaches, each guided by experience, personality, and location, as well as by the legislation that shaped the practical conduct of archaeology in their area. Despite the state-by-state approach, there are certain common themes, such as the effect (or lack thereof) of changing theory in Americanist archaeology, the explosion of contract archaeology and its relationship to academic archaeology, goals achieved or not achieved, and the common ground of SEAC.
 

This book tells us how we learned what we now know about the Southeast's unwritten past. Of obvious interest to professionals and students of the field, this volume will also be sought after by historians, political scientists, amateurs, and anyone interested in the South.

Additional reviews:

"A unique publication that presents numerous historical, topical, and personal perspectives on the archaeological heritage of the Southeast."—Southeastern Archaeology
[more]
cover of Histories of the Transgender Child

Histories of the Transgender Child

Jules Gill-Peterson

University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A groundbreaking twentieth-century history of transgender children


With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender.

Beginning with the early 1900s when children with “ambiguous” sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children’s sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and ’70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Julian Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children’s bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender’s plasticity, placing race at the center of their analysis and at the center of transgender studies.

Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century—a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.

[more]
cover of History 31st Regiment: Illinois Volunteers Organized by John A. Logan

History 31st Regiment

Illinois Volunteers Organized by John A. Logan

W. S. Morris, J. B. Kuykendall, and L. D. Hartwell. Foreword by John Y. Simon

Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

The story of John A. Logan’s famed 31st Regiment Illinois Volunteers, told by three veterans, follows the regiment from the battles of Belmont, Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Kenesaw Mountain, and Atlanta through the March to the Sea and into North Carolina. "Few regiments," notes historian John Y. Simon in the foreword, "fought longer or more fiercely, suffered more casualties, or won more victories."

Logan proved a valiant and valuable Union commander, yet when the Civil War first began, it was far from clear whether he would lead Union or Confederate troops. In dramatic fashion, however, he broke what Simon calls an "ominous silence ... interpreted by many as sympathy for the South." Speaking from a wagon platform in Marion, Illinois, Logan proclaimed: "[The] time has come when a man must be for or against his country." Logan accepted a commission from Illinois governor Richard Yates, recruited heavily in southern Illinois, and formed the 31st Regiment Illinois Volunteers.

The 31st became a prime component in Grant’s western campaigns, fighting for the first time at Belmont, Missouri. In February of 1862, the 31st foiled Confederate general Gideon J. Pillow’s dramatic escape from the Union siege at Fort Donelson. Although this is often listed as one of the proudest moments for the 31st, casualties ran high (fifty-eight killed), with Logan so severely wounded that at first he was reported dead. Logan’s valor at Fort Donelson won him promotion to brigadier general.

[more]
cover of History Afield: Stories from the Golden Age of Wisconsin Sporting Life

History Afield

Stories from the Golden Age of Wisconsin Sporting Life

Robert C Willging

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011

Stories of sportsmen past come to life in History Afield, an account of the many and varied sporting pursuits that are part of the Wisconsin tradition. Author and outdoorsman Robert Willging shares more than two dozen tales of Wisconsin sporting history, highlighting the hunt for waterfowl, upland birds, and deer; trout fishing in wild north Wisconsin rivers; and recreating at early Wisconsin lakeside resorts.
 
Anecdotes of fishing exploits on our plentiful waterways and presidential visits to northern Wisconsin reveal a unique slice of sporting culture, and chapters on live decoys and the American Water Spaniel demonstrate the human-animal bond that has played such a large part in that history. Tales of nature’s fury include a detailed account of the famous Armistice Day storm, as well as the dangers of ice fishing on Lake Superior. These historical musings and perspectives on sporting ethos provide a strong sense of the lifestyle that Willging has preserved for our new century.
 
Featuring first-hand interviews and a variety of historic photos depicting the Wisconsin sporting life, History Afield shows how the intimate relationship between humans and nature shaped this important part of the state’s heritage.
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cover of History Films, Women, and Freud's Uncanny

History Films, Women, and Freud's Uncanny

By Susan E. Linville

University of Texas Press, 2004

History films were a highly popular genre in the 1990s, as Hollywood looked back at significant and troubling episodes from World War II, the Cold War era, and the techno-war in the Persian Gulf. As filmmakers attempted to confront and manage intractable elements of the American past, such as the trauma of war and the legacy of racism, Susan Linville argues that a surprising casualty occurred—the erasure of relevant facets of contemporary women's history.

In this book, Linville offers a sustained critique of the history film and its reduction of women to figures of ambivalence or absence. Historicizing and adapting Freud's concept of the uncanny and its relationship to the maternal body as the first home, she offers theoretically sophisticated readings of the films Midnight Clear, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Nixon, Courage Under Fire, Lone Star, and Limbo. She also demonstrates that the uncanny is not only a source of anxiety but also potentially a progressive force for eroding nostalgic ideals of nation and gender. Linville concludes with a close reading of a recent 9/11 documentary, showing how the patterns and motifs of 1990s history films informed it and what that means for our future.

[more]
cover of History Is Bunk: Assembling the Past at Henry Ford's Greenfield Village

History Is Bunk

Assembling the Past at Henry Ford's Greenfield Village

Swigger Jessie

University of Massachusetts Press, 0

[more]
cover of History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin's Historical Markers

History Just Ahead

A Guide to Wisconsin's Historical Markers

Sarah Davis McBride

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1999

This guide to Wisconsin's historical markers is designed to acquaint readers and travelers with many of the dramatic events and noteworthy achievements that help to comprise Wisconsin history. History Just Ahead can be a companion book for the thousands of curious visitors, travelers, and residents who pause to read Wisconsin's markers every year. Containing over 400 marker texts and 100 illustrations, conveniently organzied by regions and counties with accompanying maps, this guidebook celebrates the Wisconsin heritage from geological epochs to recent ethnic settlement. Wisconsin's rich history is brought to life in this compendium, reminding us that historical markers are truely an important educational tool — helping to strengthen respect and understanding of state history and raising public awareness of the need to preserve our historical and natural environment.
[more]
cover of History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture

History Matters

Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture

Ira Sadoff

University of Iowa Press, 2009

In this capacious and energetic volume, Ira Sadoff argues that poets live and write within history, our artistic values always reflecting attitudes about both literary history and culture at large. History Matters does not return to the culture war that reduced complex arguments about human nature, creativity, identity, and interplay between individual and collective identity to slogans. Rather, Sadoff peels back layers of clutter to reveal the important questions at the heart of any complex and fruitful discussion about the connections between culture and literature.

Much of our most adventurous writing has occurred at history’s margins, simultaneously making use of and resisting tradition. By tracking key contemporary poets—including John Ashbery, Olena Kaltyiak Davis, Louise Glück, Czeslaw Milosz, Frank O’Hara, and C. K. Williams—as well as musing on jazz and other creative enterprises, Sadoff investigates the lively poetic art of those who have grappled with late twentieth-century attitudes about history, subjectivity, contingency, flux, and modernity. In plainspoken writing, he probes the question of the poet’s capacity to illuminate and universalize truth. Along the way, we are called to consider how and why art moves and transforms human beings.
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cover of History Of Louisa Barnes Pratt: The Autobiography of a Mormon Missionary Widow and Pioneer

History Of Louisa Barnes Pratt

The Autobiography of a Mormon Missionary Widow and Pioneer

George S Ellsworth

Utah State University Press, 1998

Volume 3, Life Writings of Frontier Women series, ed. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher

In her memoir, and 1870s revision of her journal and diary, Louisa Barnes Pratt tells of childhood in Massachusetts and Canada during the War of 1812, and independent career as a teacher and seamstress in New England, and her marriage to the Boston seaman Addison Pratt.

Converting to the LDS Church, the Pratts moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, from where Brigham Young sent Addison on the first of the long missions to the Society Islands that would leave Louisa on her own. As a sole available parent, she hauled her children west to Winter Quarters, to Utah in 1848, to California, and, in Addison's wake, to Tahiti in 1850.

The Pratts joined the Mormon colony at San Bernardino, California. When in 1858 a federal army's march on Utah led to the colonists' recall, Addision—alienated from the Mormon Church after long absences—chose not to go. Mostly separated thereafter (Addison died in 1872), Louisa settled in Beaver, Utah, where she campaigned for women's rights, contributed to the Woman's Exponent, and depended on her own means, as she had much of her life, until her death in 1880.

[more]
cover of History Of Utah's American Indians

History Of Utah's American Indians

Forrest S. Cuch

Utah State University Press, 2003

This book is a joint project of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs and the Utah State Historical Society. It is distributed to the book trade by Utah State University Press.

The valleys, mountains, and deserts of Utah have been home to native peoples for thousands of years. Like peoples around the word, Utah's native inhabitants organized themselves in family units, groups, bands, clans, and tribes. Today, six Indian tribes in Utah are recognized as official entities. They include the Northwestern Shoshone, the Goshutes, the Paiutes, the Utes, the White Mesa or Southern Utes, and the Navajos (Dineh). Each tribe has its own government. Tribe members are citizens of Utah and the United States; however, lines of distinction both within the tribes and with the greater society at large have not always been clear. Migration, interaction, war, trade, intermarriage, common threats, and challenges have made relationships and affiliations more fluid than might be expected. In this volume, the editor and authors endeavor to write the history of Utah's first residents from an Indian perspective. An introductory chapter provides an overview of Utah's American Indians and a concluding chapter summarizes the issues and concerns of contemporary Indians and their leaders. Chapters on each of the six tribes look at origin stories, religion, politics, education, folkways, family life, social activities, economic issues, and important events. They provide an introduction to the rich heritage of Utah's native peoples. This book includes chapters by David Begay, Dennis Defa, Clifford Duncan, Ronald Holt, Nancy Maryboy, Robert McPherson, Mae Parry, Gary Tom, and Mary Jane Yazzie.

Forrest Cuch was born and raised on the Uintah and Ouray Ute Indian Reservation in northeastern Utah. He graduated from Westminster College in 1973 with a bachelor of arts degree in behavioral sciences. He served as education director for the Ute Indian Tribe from 1973 to 1988. From 1988 to 1994 he was employed by the Wampanoag Tribe in Gay Head, Massachusetts, first as a planner and then as tribal administrator. Since October 1997 he has been director of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs.

[more]
cover of History Repeating Itself: The Republication of Children's Historical Literature and the Christian Right

History Repeating Itself

The Republication of Children's Historical Literature and the Christian Right

Gregory M. Pfitzer

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

Recently publishers on the Christian Right have been reprinting nineteenth-century children's history books and marketing them to parents as “anchor texts” for homeschool instruction. Why, Gregory M. Pfitzer asks, would books written more than 150 years ago be presumed suitable for educating twenty-first-century children? The answer, he proposes, is that promoters of these recycled works believe that history as a discipline took a wrong turn in the early twentieth century, when progressive educators introduced social studies methodologies into public school history classrooms, foisting upon unsuspecting and vulnerable children ideologically distorted history books. 

In History Repeating Itself, Pfitzer tests these assertions by scrutinizing and contextualizing the original nineteenth-century texts on which these republications are based. He focuses on how the writers borrowed from one another to produce works that were similar in many ways yet differed markedly in terms of pedagogical strategy and philosophy of history. Pfitzer demonstrates that far from being non-ideological, these works were rooted in intense contemporary debates over changing conceptions of childhood. 

Pfitzer argues that the repurposing of antiquated texts reveals a misplaced resistance to the idea of a contested past. He also raises essential philosophical questions about how and why curricular decisions are shaped by the “past we choose to remember” on behalf of our children.

[more]
cover of History and Health Policy in the United States: Putting the Past Back In

History and Health Policy in the United States

Putting the Past Back In

Stevens, Rosemary A

Rutgers University Press, 2006

In our rapidly advancing scientific and technological world, many take great pride and comfort in believing that we are on the threshold of new ways of thinking, living, and understanding ourselves. But despite dramatic discoveries that appear in every way to herald the future, legacies still carry great weight. Even in swiftly developing fields such as health and medicine, most systems and policies embody a sequence of earlier ideas and preexisting patterns.

In History and Health Policy in the United States, seventeen leading scholars of history, the history of medicine, bioethics, law, health policy, sociology, and organizational theory make the case for the usefulness of history in evaluating and formulating health policy today. In looking at issues as varied as the consumer economy, risk, and the plight of the uninsured, the contributors uncover the often unstated assumptions that shape the way we think about technology, the role of government, and contemporary medicine. They show how historical perspectives can help policymakers avoid the pitfalls of partisan, outdated, or merely fashionable approaches, as well as how knowledge of previous systems can offer alternatives when policy directions seem unclear.

Together, the essays argue that it is only by knowing where we have been that we can begin to understand health services today or speculate on policies for tomorrow.

[more]
cover of History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie: Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt in the Modern South

History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie

Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt in the Modern South

Edited by Gordon E. Harvey, Richard D. Starnes and Glenn Feldman

University of Alabama Press, 2006

Exploring the history, challenges, and promise of a changing South through the legacy of Wayne Flynt.

This collection of essays on the social and political history of the modern South consider the region’s poor, racial mores and race relations, economic opportunity, Protestant activism, political coalitions and interest groups, social justice, and progressive reform. History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie illuminates the dual role of historian and public advocate in modern America. In a time when the nation’s eyes have been focused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita onto the vulnerability and dire condition of poor people in the South, the applicability of research, teaching, and activism for this voiceless element seems all the more relevant.

Responding to the example of Wayne Flynt, whose fierce devotion to his state of Alabama and its region has not blinded his recognition of the inequities and despair that define southern life for so many, the scholars assembled in this work present contributions to the themes Flynt so passionately explored in his own work.Two seasoned observers of southern history and culture—John Shelton Reed and Dan T. Carter—offer assessments of Flynt’s influence on the history profession as a whole and on the region of the South in particular.

[more]
cover of History as They Lived It: A Social History of Prairie du Rocher, Illinois

History as They Lived It

A Social History of Prairie du Rocher, Illinois

Margaret Kimball Brown, Foreword by Carl J. Ekberg

Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

“His­tory as They Lived It deserves to be placed within the rich context of Illinois Country historiography going back more than a century. . . . It brings together the fully ripened thoughts of a mature scholar at the very moment that students of the Illinois Country need such a book.”—from the foreword by Carl J. Ekberg

Settled in 1722, Prairie du Rocher was at the geographic center of a French colony in the Mississippi Valley, which also included other villages in what is now Illinois and Missouri: Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Fort de Chartres, St. Philippe, Ste. Genevieve, and St. Louis.  Located in an alluvial valley near towering limestone bluffs, which inspired the village’s name—French for “prairie of the rock”— Prairie du Rocher is the only one of the seven French colonial villages that still exists today as a small compact community.

The village of Prairie du Rocher endured governance by France, Great Britain, Virginia, and the Illinois territory before Illinois became a state in 1818. Despite these changes, the villagers persisted in maintaining the community and its values. Margaret Kimball Brown looks at one of the oldest towns in the region through the lenses of history and anthropology, utilizing extensive research in archives and public records to give historians, anthropologists, and general readers a lively depiction of this small community and its people.

[more]
cover of History by Hollywood, Second Edition

History by Hollywood, Second Edition

Robert Brent Toplin

University of Illinois Press, 2010

This newly updated edition of History by Hollywood explores the question of what happens to history when Hollywood filmmakers get their hands on it. With a fresh look at recent films and television productions such as Titanic, Pearl Harbor, The Patriot, and John Adams, Robert Brent Toplin examines how filmmakers have interpreted American history through their movies. Toplin discusses how writers, producers, and directors become involved in making historical films, what influences their interpretations of the past, and the responses they make to the controversies their works excite. With a realistic appreciation of the challenges filmmakers face, he effectively measures the strengths and weaknesses of Hollywood's presentation of history in the films Mississippi Burning, JFK, Sergeant York, Missing, Bonnie and Clyde, Patton, All the President's Men, and Norma Rae.

[more]