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One of the most enduring and prolific American authors of the latter half of the twentieth century, John Updike has long been recognized by critics for his importance as a social commentator. Yet, John Updike and the Cold War is the first work to examine how Updike's views grew out of the defining context of American culture in his time—the Cold War. Quentin Miller argues that because Updike's career began as the Cold War was taking shape in the mid-1950s, the world he creates in his entire literary oeuvre—fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose—reflects the optimism and the anxiety of that decade.

Miller asserts that Updike's frequent use of Cold War tension as a metaphor for domestic life and as a cultural reality that affects the psychological security of his characters reveals the inherent conflict of his fictional world. Consequently, this conflict helps explain some of the problematic relationships and aimless behavior of Updike's characters, as well as their struggles to attain spiritual meaning.

By examining Updike's entire career in light of the historical events that coincide with it, Miller shows how important the early Cold War mind-set was to Updike's thinking and to the development of his fiction. The changes in Updike's writing after the 1950s confirm the early Cold War era's influence on his ideology and on his celebrated style. By the Cold War's end in the late 1980s, Updike's characters look back fondly to the Eisenhower years, when their national identity seemed so easy to define in contrast to the Soviet Union. This nostalgia begins as early as his writings in the 1960s, when the breakdown of an American consensus disillusions Updike's characters and leaves them yearning for the less divisive 1950s.

While underscoring how essential history is to the study of literature, Miller demonstrates that Updike's writing relies considerably on the growth of the global conflict that defined his time. Cogent and highly readable, John Updike and the Cold War makes an important contribution to Updike scholarship.

    A biography of Alabama’s first Senator, this book is also the fascinating story of Southern frontier life as portrayed in contemporary letters and documents. When Madison County, Alabama, was still wilderness, Walker trekked across the mountains from Georgia with his bride, Matilda Pope, his slaves, and all his household possessions, to build a plantation near Huntsville. Here he began his extraordinary political career: member of the first territorial legislature; speaker of the house in the second; U.S. territorial judge; president of Alabama’s Constitutional Convention; and when statehood was won, first U.S. Senator.

One of the most famous American journals is that of seventeenth-century Puritan leader John Winthrop. As the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an office he held with few interruptions for two decades, he worked to establish a society in which he thought true Christianity could flourish, beyond the reach of the unfaithful Church of England. Winthrop recorded the daily events of his life—the political infighting and religious disputes among Puritans, as well as their relations with other colonists, Indians, and England. His journal is a window into a world that, while unfamiliar, continues to influence our sense of the meaning of America.
    In the first in-depth study of Winthrop since 1958, James G. Moseley provides a fascinating new look at this extraordinary man, paying careful attention to the connections between Winthrop’s political activity and his writing. Moseley first examines Winthrop as a writer, using the journal to analyze Winthrop as a man resolving challenges based as much on his acutely pragmatic intelligence as on his deeply felt religious convictions. Second, Moseley traces how historians have responded to Winthrop—how his famous journal has been read and misread by those who have filtered the man and his cultural context through many lenses.
    By examining Winthrop’s ancestors and early life in England, especially the religious changes he experienced, Moseley removes the blinders of modernism, portraying Winthrop as never before. He shows how Winthrop’s successful struggle to accept the deaths of his first two wives led him away from moralistic views of Christianity, himself, and his world to more magnanimous views.
    Arguing that writing was the medium through which Winthrop developed his capacity for leadership, Moseley shows how the journal enabled Winthrop to reflect objectively on his situation and to adjust his behavior. Winthrop was, Moseley suggests, not only a politician but a historian, and his interpretations of foundational events in American history in his journal are an invaluable resource for understanding the nature of leadership and the meaning of liberty in Puritan America.
    Winthrop’s World is a very graceful, well-written, and engaging narrative that provides new insight into the Puritan way of life and into the man who provided a window between our world and his.

Captures the exploits of one of the Smithsonian's early specimen collectors in the American West.

A Classic in the History of Exploration, a Judicious Account of the Role of the Cabots in the Discovery of the New World
John Cabot, Giovanni Caboto in his native Italian, led an expedition to the New World in 1497 on behalf of King Henry VII of England. He is considered the first European to explore North America since the Viking voyages five hundred years earlier. Although Cabot’s exact landfall on his first voyage is not known—it could have been Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, or even Maine—his claim for England to this territory countered the Spanish and Portuguese explorations to the south, and changed world history. Cabot made three roundtrips between Bristol, England, and North America, and later, his son Sebastian, made two similar voyages. John and Sebastian Cabot: The Discovery of North America by historian Sir Charles Raymond Beazley was first published in 1898. Its enduring value in addition to its lucid, well-balanced and researched narrative is the author’s detailed history of prior voyages to the North American continent, including those from China and the Pacific Islands as well as those from the realms of mythology. The author also includes all extant references to the Cabots in historical documents.

This is an analysis of the first 10 post—Cold War  novels of one of the most significant ethicists in contemporary fiction.

This book challenges distinctions between “popular” and “serious” literature by recognizing le Carré as one of the most significant ethicists in contemporary fiction, contributing to an overdue reassessment of his literary stature. Le Carré’s ten post–Cold War novels constitute a distinctive subset of his espionage fiction in their response to the momentous changes in geopolitics that began in the 1990s. Through a close reading of these novels, Snyder traces how—amid the “War on Terror” and transnationalism—le Carré weighs what is at stake in this conflict of deeply invested ideologies.

Over half of the plays of the English Renaissance were written collaboratively—by multiple dramatists working together. Joint Enterprises examines this kind of dramatic production, charting its social and professional significance as a historically embedded but personally inflected creative phenomenon. By situating individual joint works such as Eastward Hoe, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Changeling in specific institutional contexts, Heather Hirschfeld explores the diverse motivations driving dramatic collaborations, traces the distinct writerly relationships that developed from such energies, and analyzes their rhetorical effects in individual plays.

Drawing on a range of documentary and literary sources as well as recent methodological advances in theater history, the book presents a sequence of case studies designed to accommodate both the larger cultural setting of the early modern theater and the localized, idiosyncratic factors influencing discrete literary productions. Each chapter chronicles the professional setting of a particular joint work and then investigates its rhetorical or linguistic traces in the resultant text. This approach allows Hirschfeld to locate specific links between modes of collaborative production and forms of dramatic representation and then explicate the literary and political implications of these connections.

Hirschfeld's case studies provide a fresh account of the institutionalization—the steady growth, organization, and incorporation—of the professional drama in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English cultural life. By attending to the changing shapes and stakes of joint enterprises, she shows that dramatists did not unconsciously absorb the practice of collaborative writing from general social discourses, but rather were aware of the material and symbolic significances of their work, meanings structured by the traditions of the developing professional theater and by the cultural pressures and anxieties attendant upon a new and often fragile institution.

This book examines the life of Jonathan Fisher (1768–1847), a native of Braintree, Massachusetts, and graduate of Harvard College who moved in his late twenties to Blue Hill, Maine, where he embarked on a multifaceted career as a pioneer minister, farmer, entrepreneur, and artist. Drawing on a vast record of letters, diaries, sermons, drawings, paintings, and buildings, Kevin D. Murphy reconstructs Fisher's story and uses it to explore larger issues of material culture, visual culture, and social history during the early decades of the American republic.

Murphy shows how Fisher, as pastor of the Congregational church in Blue Hill from 1796 to 1837, helped spearhead the transformation of a frontier settlement on the eastern shores of the Penobscot Bay into a thriving port community; how he used his skills as an architect, decorative painter, surveyor, and furniture maker not only to support himself and his family, but to promote the economic growth of his village; and how the fluid professional identity that enabled Fisher to prosper on the eastern frontier could only have existed in early America where economic relations were far less rigidly defined than in Europe.

Among the most important artifacts of Jonathan Fisher's life is the house he designed and built in Blue Hill. The Jonathan Fisher Memorial, as it is now known, serves as a point of departure for an examination of social, religious, and cultural life in a newly established village at the turn of the nineteenth century. Fisher's house provided a variety of spaces for agricultural and domestic work, teaching, socializing, artmaking, and more.

Through the eyes of Jonathan Fisher, we see his family grow and face the challenges of the new century, responding to religious, social, and economic change—sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. We appreciate how an extraordinarily energetic man was able to capitalize on the wide array of opportunities offered by the frontier to give shape to his personal vision of community.

Jonathan Odell's live and writings give us insight into the American Revolution by revealing Loyalist ideology—the ambitious few have led the gullible multitude to slaughter—and he rails against the British military for fighting a war of containment aimed at bringing the rebel leadership to negotiation. This policy effectually trapped the Loyalists between the British army, which ignored them, and the rebels, who despised them.
One of the best-educated of the colonialists, Odell, a physician turned Anglican minister and then writer, lived the gamut of experience: powerful friends sustained him and the British commanders-in-chief Sir William Howe, Henry Clinton, and Sir Guy Carleton employed him; nevertheless, during the war he was a lonely exile ("Tory hunters" forced him from his home in 1775), and, at the end of the war, when his hope for reconciliation between the Loyalists and the Americans came to nothing, he reluctantly emigrated to Canada.
Here is a voice, all but silenced for over two hundred years, that must now be heard if we are to better understand the American Revolution.

Katrina Hazzard-Gordon offers the first analysis of the development of the jook—an underground cultural institution created by the black working class—together with other dance arenas in African-American culture. Beginning with the effects of African slaves’ middle passage experience on their traditional dances, she traces the unique and virtually autonomous dance culture that developed in the rural South. Like the blues, these secular dance forms and institutions were brought north and urbanized by migrating blacks. In northern cities, some aspects of black dance became integrated into white culture and commercialized. Focusing on ten African-American dance arenas from the period of enslavement to the mid-twentieth century, this book explores the jooks, honky-tonks, rent parties, and after-hours joints as well as the licensed membership clubs, dance halls, cabarets, and the dances of the black elite.

Jook houses emerged during the Reconstruction era and can be viewed as a cultural response to freedom. In the jook, Hazzard-Gordon explains, an immeasurable amount of core black culture including food, language, community fellowship, mate selection, music, and dance found a sanctuary of expression when no other secular institution flourished among the folk. The jook and its various derivative forms have provided both entertainment and an economic alternative (such as illegal lotteries and numbers) to people excluded from the dominant economy. Dances like the Charleston, shimmy, snake hips, funky butt, twist, and slow drag originated in the jooks; some can be traced back to Africa.

Social dancing links black Americans to their African past more strongly than any other aspect of their culture. Citing the significance of dance in the African-American psyche, this study explores the establishments that nurtured ancestral as well as communal links for African-Americans, vividly describing black dances, formal rituals, such as debutante balls, and the influence of black dance on white culture.

Architect, designer, and theorist Josef Frank (1885-1967) was known throughout Europe in the 1920s as one of the continent's leading modernists. Yet despite his important contributions to the development of modernism, Frank has been largely excluded from histories of the movement. Josef Frank: Life and Work is the first study that comprehensively explores the life, ideas, and designs of this complex and controversial figure.

Educated in Vienna just after the turn of the century, Frank became the leader of the younger generation of architects in Austria after the First World War. But Frank fell from grace when he emerged as a forceful critic of the extremes of modern architecture and design during the early 1930s. Dismissing the demands for a unified modern style, Frank insisted that it was pluralism, not uniformity, that most characterized life in the new machine age. He called instead for a more humane modernism, one that responded to people's everyday needs and left room for sentimentality and historical influences. He was able to put these ideas into practice when, in 1933, he was forced to leave Vienna for Sweden. There his work came to define Swedish (or Scandinavian) modern design. For more than thirty years he was the chief designer for the Stockholm furnishings firm Svenskt Tenn, producing colorful, cozy, and eclectic designs that provided a refreshing alternative to the architectural mainstream of the day and presaged the coming revolt against modernism in the 1960s.

In this sensitive study of one of the twentieth century's seminal architects and thinkers, Christopher Long offers new insight into Josef Frank's work and ideas and provides an important contribution to the understanding of modernist culture and its history.

One of our greatest writers about the sea has written an engrossing story of one of history's most legendary maritime explorers. Patrick O'Brian's biography of naturalist, explorer and co-founder of Australia, Joseph Banks, is narrative history at its finest. Published to rave reviews, it reveals Banks to be a man of enduring importance, and establishes itself as a classic of exploration.

"It is in his description of that arduous three-year voyage [on the ship Endeavor] that Mr. O'Brian is at his most brilliant. . . . He makes us understand what life within this wooden world was like, with its 94 male souls, two dogs, a cat and a goat."—Linda Colley, New York Times

"An absorbing, finely written overview, meant for the general reader, of a major figure in the history of natural science."—Frank Stewart, Los Angeles Times

"[This book is] the definitive biography of an extraordinary subject."—Robert Taylor, Boston Globe

"His skill at narrative and his extensive knowledge of the maritime history . . . give him a definite leg up in telling this . . . story."—Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle

Having operated now for more than 140 years, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB) was founded in 1875 as Branch Normal College by Joseph Carter Corbin, a native of Ohio and the son of former slaves. Corbin, who had a classical education, was the first African American superintendent of public education in Arkansas and literally built the school from the ground up. There was a desperate need for teachers in Arkansas, as there was a great desire for education by former slaves who had been prohibited from learning to read and write.

Corbin himself cleared the land that would soon house the college and then set about to create a school that would produce the first African American teachers following the Reconstruction years. For almost three decades, he worked tirelessly on behalf of Arkansas’s black community to meet the need for educators.

In the early days, Corbin worked both as the president and the janitor so that he could control costs and keep the school going. He often waived matriculation fees and other expenses to allow impoverished students the opportunity to graduate and become qualified to teach throughout Arkansas.

Although he might not have realized it at the time, Corbin was a member of the so-called aristocrats of color, the African American elite of national prominence and a group that included such luminaries as Booker T. Washington. Corbin was a true giant in the history of education in Arkansas. His story, told by a former UAPB student, is monumental for the scope of what one man was able to accomplish.

LeRoy Anderson in 1981 first published, under the title For Christ Will Come Tomorrow, his definitive study of a charismatic, millenarian prophet and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Most High. He told there of a Mormon posse’s 1862 attack on the Morrisite compound, killing Joseph Morris, and of the continuing Morrisite movement, which survived into the mid-twentieth century. In this newly revised edition, Anderson revisits his subject by referring to more recently discovered documents, considering other scholars’ continuing work on Morris’s sect and related subjects, and examining a 1980s messianic sect that claimed a direct connection to the Morrisites.

New documentary sources include a holograph “History of George Morris,” written by Joseph Morris’s brother, which Anderson quotes at length. What was once a little-studied subject has since received attention from a number of scholars. Anderson references such current work on Mormon schismatic movements and broader subjects, much of which drew on his work. Perhaps the book’s most interesting and unintended influence was on that obscure 1980s messianic sect, in Montana, which learned of Morris through Joseph Morris and the Saga of the Morrisites.

This masterful study charts the extensive common ground and telling differences between two widely separated coal-mining communities: Lanarkshire, in the Clyde Valley of southwest Scotland, and the northern Illinois coalfield that became a prime destination for skilled Scottish migrant miners in the mid-nineteenth century.   Challenging the prevailing exceptionalist paradigm of labor history, John Laslett examines the social, economic, and political context of each of these communities in generous detail. He traces the progressive heightening of class consciousness as the coal industry evolved from skilled hand labor to an increasingly mechanized extraction process and the escalating hostility between miners and mineowners as their interests split along class lines. Examining the rise of militant industrial unionism in both areas, Laslett provides a sophisticated explanation of the American and Scottish miners' divergent approaches to collectivist solutions.   Based on a profound knowledge of both communities, Colliers across the Sea tells a compelling story of industrial transformation's human costs, of conflict and greed, and of democratic aspirations and community.

 “Joseph Smith’s Quorum of the Anointed” The first Latter-day Saint temple ceremonies were performed, not in Kirtland, Ohio, but on the second floor of Joseph Smith’s Red Brick Store in Nauvoo, Illinois. For nearly four years beginning in 1842, the prophet’s modest mercantile functioned as the de facto temple?the site of the first washings, anointings, endowments, and sealings. In contrast, the grand edifice known as the Nauvoo Temple was in operation for only two months before the Saints left Illinois for the West.

Preparations to initiate the first members of Joseph Smith’s Quorum of the Anointed, or Holy Order, as it was also known, were made on May 3, 1842. The walls of the second level of the Red Brick Store were painted with garden-themed murals, the rooms fitted with carpets, potted plants, and a veil hung from the ceiling. All the while, the ground level continued to operate as Joseph Smith’s general mercantile.

In this companion volume to The Nauvoo Endowment Companies and The Development of LDS Temple Worship, 1846-2000: A Documentary History, the editors have assembled all available primary references to the Anointed Quorum and its regular gatherings, both in the Red Brick Store and elsewhere (women were initially washed and anointed in Emma Smith’s bedroom and then escorted to the store) prior to the opening of the Nauvoo Temple. The sources include excerpts from the diaries of William Clayton, Joseph Fielding, Zina D. H. Jacobs, Heber C. Kimball, John Taylor, Willard Richards, George A. Smith, Joseph Smith, Wilford Woodruff, and Brigham Young; autobiographies and reminiscences by Joseph C. Kingsbury, George Miller, and Mercy Fielding Thompson; letters from Vilate Kimball and Lucius N. Scoville; the Manuscript History of Brigham Young; General Record of the Seventies, Book B; Bathsheba W. Smith’s unedited testimony from the 1892 Temple Lot Case; other manuscripts such as the Historian’s Office Journal and “Meetings of Anointed Quorum”; and published records such as the History of the Church, Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate and Times and Seasons.
from the jacket flap:

Despite the secrecy imposed upon members of the Anointed Quorum, word of the gatherings above Joseph Smith’s store soon spread. In one instance, housekeeper Maria Jane Johnston helped prepare the special ceremonial clothing for John Smith to wear at the group’s meetings. In another, Ebenezer Robinson innocently opened the upstairs door at the mercantile and was startled to see church apostle John Taylor in a long white robe and “turban,” carrying a sword. Only Nauvoo’s elite were invited to participate in these new ceremonies?never more than ninety individuals and even fewer during Joseph Smith’s lifetime?and, as the editors of the current volume write, only those who had been introduced to the prophet’s doctrine of plural marriage.

An unusual aspect of the Quorum of the Anointed, compared to the membership in the Nauvoo Masonic Lodge, was that women were initiated as regular members. However, the women effectively disappear after Brigham Young’s assumption of leadership in 1844, following Joseph Smith’s death, and remain virtually absent until the Nauvoo Temple is completed nearly a year and a half later. Readers will also note some of the differences in protocol between what Smith instigated and what Young eventually settled on, for instance that members could be washed and anointed repeatedly but were “endowed” only once. There were not yet proxy ordinances.

Among Latter-day Saints today, temple worship is a sensitive topic; but the editors of this volume do not reveal anything that would be considered invasive or indelicate. In fact, the accounts, which come almost exclusively from the early LDS leadership itself, manifest discretion about what to report.

Never before have these primary, authoritative sources been correlated by date for comparison and fuller understanding of the gradual development of the temple ceremonies. Readers may find an added benefit in discovering some of their own ancestors’ names included in these records; but in fact, anyone interested in LDS temple worship will find this compilation of primary documents to be invaluable.

Exploring the legend of the man who brought Christianity to the British Isles 

“This author testifieth Joseph of Arimathea to be the first preacher of the word of God within our realms. Long after that, when Austin came from Rome, this our realm had bishops and priests there-in, as is well known to the learned of our realm.”—Elizabeth I, in a 1559 letter to Roman Catholic bishops on the precedence of the Church of England

The name Joseph of Arimathea is generally well known, either from the accounts in each of the New Testament Gospels that tell of his providing a tomb for the burial of Jesus; from his depictions in medieval and Renaissance art; from his associations with the Holy Grail that later found greater expression in medieval Arthurian stories; and even from the story that has endured in western Britain that as a trader in tin, copper, and lead, he had traveled often to the region—and with him came the Christian religion. These stories are strongly rooted, despite the lack of impeccable source material—so much so that Elizabeth I used Joseph of Arimathea as proof that the Church of England predated the Catholic church in her country. In Joseph of Arimathea Glyn S. Lewis brings these fragments together in order to provide as fully as is possible what we can infer about this first-century apostle.
   The author first discusses Arimathea, a town that has yet to be positively identified. He then reviews the accounts of Joseph’s entombment of Jesus that appear in each of the four Gospels. From these earliest references, the author next consults the literary and oral tradition evidence of Joseph’s passage by ship to the south of France among a group of fugitives escaping persecution for being Christians, and his early visits to Britain as a trader in precious ores. These voyages are said to have brought him to the area around Glastonbury, which became a flourishing monastery in the Middle Ages. Whether or not Joseph of Arimathea visited Britain, his story remains an enthralling and fascinating mystery. 

The apparent parallels between Mormon ritual and doctrine and those of Freemasonry have long been recognized. That Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and other early church leaders were, at least for a time, Masons, is common knowledge. Yet while early historians of the LDS Church openly acknowledged this connection, the question of influence was later dismissed and almost became taboo among faithful church members. Just as Mormons have tried to downplay any ties to Freemasonry, Masons have sought to distance themselves from Mormonism. In Joseph’s Temples, Michael Homer reveals how deeply the currents of Freemasonry and Mormonism entwined in the early nineteenth century. He goes on to lay out the later declining course of relations between the two movements, until a détente in recent years.
 
There are indications that Freemasonry was a pervasive foundational element in Mormonism and that its rituals and origin legends influenced not just the secret ceremonies of the LDS temples but also such important matters as the organization of the Mormon priesthood, the foundation of the women’s Relief Society, the introduction and concealment of polygamy, and the church’s position on African Americans’ full membership. Freemasonry was also an important facet of Mormons’ relations with broader American society.
 
The two movements intertwined within a historical context of early American intellectual, social, and religious ferment, which influenced each of them and in varying times and situations placed them either in the current or against the flow of mainstream American culture and politics. Joseph’s Temples provides a comprehensive examination of a dynamic relationship and makes a significant contribution to the history of Mormonism, Freemasonry, and their places in American history. 

Recipient of the Meritorious Book Award from the Utah Division of State History

It is said that Josh Gibson is the only man ever to have hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium. Some claim he hit as many as seventy-five home runs in a season. All agreed he was a frightening hitter to face.  What Satchel Paige was to pitching in the Negro leagues, Gibson was to hitting: their greatest star, biggest gate attraction, and most important symbol.
 
Though Gibson is best remembered as "the black Babe Ruth," Ruth became a beloved symbol of the national pastime, while Gibson lived a life veiled in the darkness that came both from the shadow world of the Negro leagues and from within his own tortured soul.
 
Mark Ribowsky, the widely acclaimed biographer of Satchel Paige, pulls no punches in his portrait of this magnificent, troubled athlete. This is the most complete, thorough, and authoritative account of the life of black ball's greatest hitter, and one of its most important stars.

A gifted and charismatic entertainer, Josh White (1914-1969) was a blues star of the 1930s, a cabaret star of the 1940s, and a folk star of the 1950s and the 1960s. In 1963, a Billboard magazine poll ranked him America's third most popular male folksinger, surpassed only by Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, and ahead of Bob Dylan. White brought American folk and blues to audiences around the world and released several dozen albums, all featuring his distinctive guitar style, supple voice, and unique showmanship.

In this compelling biography, Elijah Wald traces White's journey from a childhood leading blind singers on the streets of Greenville, South Carolina, to the heights of Manhattan cafe society. He explores the complexities of White's music, his struggles with discrimination and stereotypes, his political involvements, and his sometimes raucous personal life.

White was always drawn to music and made his first recordings at age fourteen. By the 1930s he had become a recording star, with equally strong careers in blues and gospel. In the 1940s he was discovered by white audiences and regularly appeared in New York cabarets alongside such artists as Billie Holiday. He also became an outspoken proponent of civil rights and frequently appeared at rallies and benefits, as well as at the Roosevelt White House, becoming known as "the Presidential Minstrel." He was one of the few black figures to star on Broadway and appear in Hollywood films, the only black solo performer to have his own national tour, and a daring sex symbol with adoring fans on both sides of the color line.

In the 1950s, White won acclaim in Europe, then saw his achievements collapse in the polarized political ferment of the McCarthy era. Attempting to strike a balance that would keep his career afloat, he instead ended up alienating both political camps. Although still a star in England, he became the forgotten man at home until his resurrection during the folk revival.

While African National Congress narratives dominate much of the scholarship on South Africa’s freedom struggle, Josie Mpama/Palmer’s political life offers a different perspective. Highly critical of the patriarchal attitudes that hindered black women from actively participating in politics, Mpama/Palmer was an outspoken advocate for women’s social equality and encouraged black women to become more involved in national conversations. The first black woman to join the Communist Party of South Africa and an antiapartheid activist, Josie Mpama/Palmer remained involved in critical issues all her life, especially protests against Bantu Education and other forms of racial and sexist discrimination. She was an integral figure in establishing the Federation of South African Women, an organization open to women of all races. Mpama/Palmer’s activism and political legacy would become an inspiring example for women in South Africa and around the world to get up and get moving.

José Martí (1853–1895) was the founding hero of Cuban independence. In all of modern Latin American history, arguably only the “Great Liberator” Simón Bolívar rivals Martí in stature and legacy. Beyond his accomplishments as a revolutionary and political thinker, Martí was a giant of Latin American letters, whose poetry, essays, and journalism still rank among the most important works of the region. Today he is revered by both the Castro regime and the Cuban exile community, whose shared veneration of the “apostle” of freedom has led to his virtual apotheosis as a national saint.

In José Martí: A Revolutionary Life, Alfred J. López presents the definitive biography of the Cuban patriot and martyr. Writing from a nonpartisan perspective and drawing on years of research using original Cuban and U.S. sources, including materials never before used in a Martí biography, López strips away generations of mythmaking and portrays Martí as Cuba’s greatest founding father and one of Latin America’s literary and political giants, without suppressing his public missteps and personal flaws. In a lively account that engrosses like a novel, López traces the full arc of Martí’s eventful life, from his childhood and adolescence in Cuba, to his first exile and subsequent life in Spain, Mexico City, and Guatemala, through his mature revolutionary period in New York City and much-mythologized death in Cuba on the battlefield at Dos Ríos. The first major biography of Martí in over half a century and the first ever in English, José Martí is the most substantial examination of Martí’s life and work ever published.

The first full-length study of a significant figure of the Spanish Enlightenment

Latin American independence histories of the last 150 years have tended to stereotype Captain General Bustamante, governor of the Spanish colony of Guatemala from 1811 to 1818, as a tyrannical arch-villain who personified colonial oppression. Timothy Hawkins, in contrast, examines Bustamante and his administration within the context of preservation of empire, the effort by colonial officials and partisans to maintain the integrity of the Spanish empire in spite of internal and external unrest.

Based on extensive primary research in the archives of Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain, Hawkins’s approach links the Central American experience to that of areas such as Peru, Venezuela, and Mexico, that also responded equivocally and haphazardly to rebellious uprisings against colonial rule. While conceding that Bustamante’s role in the suppression of unrest turned him into one of the more controversial figures in Latin American history, Hawkins argues that the Bustamante administration should not be seen as an isolated and perverse case of Spanish repression but as an example of a relatively successful, if short lived, campaign by Spain to preserve its empire.

Journal and Letter Book of Nicholas Buckeridge, 1651-1654 was first published in 1973. 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.Nicholas Buckeridge was an employee of the East India Company from the 1640’s into the 1660’s, and his journal and letter book provide an account of English trade with India, Persia and East Africa in the mid-seventeenth century, a period for which few records of this kind have survived. Many logbooks and journals of the early years of the company have been preserved at the India office but materials for the general period of 1645 to 1660 are very scant. Buckeridge describes the places he visited, the problems of trading, the goods traded, and some of the prices obtained in the trading. The journal complements the early records of the Assada plantation venture of the East India Company and also provides a picture of the perilous life of a merchantman in his endeavors for the company. The editor, a former rare-book librarian at the University of Minnesota, provides a general introduction as well as brief introductions to each of the eighteen pieces from the letter book and journal. There are a facsimile reproduction of a page from the Buckeridge account and two maps. This is a publication from the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota.