Results by title

234 books match the query 'Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies)' and 8 start with l

Sort by

L.A. Chic

A Locational History of Los Angeles Fashion

Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner

Intellect Books, 2018

Los Angeles is undergoing a makeover. Leaving behind its image as all freeways and suburbs, sunshine and noir, it is reinventing itself for the twenty-first century as a walkable, pedestrian friendly, ecologically healthy, and global urban hotspot of fashion and style, while driving initiatives to rejuvenate its downtown core, public spaces, and ethnic neighborhoods. By providing a locational history of Los Angeles fashion and style mythologies through the lens of institutions such as manufacturing, museums, and designers and readings of contemporary film, literature and new media, L.A. Chic provides an in-depth analysis of the social changes, urban processes, desires, and politics that inform how the good life is being re-imagined in Los Angeles.

Throughout the book, Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner dig up submerged and marginalized elements of the city’s cultural history but also tap into the global circuits of urban affect that are being mobilized for promoting L.A. as an example for the global, multi-ethnic city of the future. Engagingly written, highly visual, and featuring numerous photographs throughout, L.A. Chic will appeal to any culturally inclined reader with an interest in Los Angeles, its cultural history, and modern urban style.

[more]

La Violencia and the Hebrew Bible

The Politics and Histories of Biblical Hermeneutics on the America

Susanne Scholz

SBL Press, 2016

Exegetically noteworthy and culturally-theologically relevant

Violence in its wide range of horrifying expressions is real in people’s lives, and biblical interpreters must take violence in the world seriously to arrive at relevant ideas about the place of the Bible in the world. Each essay addresses people’s experiences of violence in the study of the Bible through the context of la violencia, the Spanish noun referring to the brutal, repressive, and murderous policies of state-sponsored violence practiced in many South and Central American and Caribbean countries during the twentieth century that external powers such as the USA often endorsed and fostered. The volume represents an important contribution to biblical studies and to the field of Latina/o studies. The contributors are Cheryl B. Anderson, Pablo Andiñach, Nancy Bedford, Lee Cuéllar, Steed V. Davidson, Serge Frolov, Renata Furst, Julia M. O’Brien, Todd Penner, José Enrique Ramírez, Ivoni Richter Reimer, and Susanne Scholz.

Features:

Twelve essays by scholars living and working on the American continent
Articles reveal the complex historical, political, and cultural conditions on the American continent that have contributed to our understanding of violence in the Bible
Focus on themes of racial, social, and cultural violence

[more]

Launching Global Health

The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation

Steven Palmer

University of Michigan Press, 2010

From the Rockefeller Foundation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S. philanthropies have played a leading role in the evolution of international health. Launching Global Health examines one of the earliest of these initiatives abroad, the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Board. The flagship agency made its first call in British Guiana in 1914 to experiment with its new "American method" for the treatment of hookworm disease. Within months it was involved in ambitious hookworm programs in six Central American and Caribbean sites, its directors self-consciously choosing to test run the prototype for their global project in the nearest and clearest domain of American imperial influence. These efforts continued until 1930, when most of the International Health Board hookworm campaigns had evolved into public health projects of a different nature. Launching Global Health is the first book to explore the inaugural Rockefeller Foundation campaigns in depth and to treat them as an ensemble---as a laboratory for discovering and testing the elements of a global health system for the twentieth century. Orienting the study according to the priorities and perspectives of the social and cultural history of medicine and marrying the results with social science and institutional approaches, Steven Palmer rediscovers elements and dynamics in the original history of global health that were either discarded or that have continued to operate beneath the radar of scholarship. In particular, Palmer examines the extraordinary encounters that took place between the Rockefeller proselytizers of biomedicine and public health and the diverse populations whom they were attempting to help. Launching Global Health devotes special attention to the health narratives and practices of laboring people of different ethnicities and how they clashed and blended with the stories and rituals being promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation, ultimately showing the locally assembled health teams of microscopists, inspectors, and dispensers to have been active agents in the shaping of encounters between imperial and popular medicine. A volume in the series Conversations in Medicine and Society.

[more]

Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery

In the Crucible of Public Debate

David Zarefsky

University of Chicago Press, 1990

Winner of the Speech Communication's Winans-Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address.

Zarefsky examines the dynamics of the seven 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, placing them in historical context and explaining the complicated issue of slavery in the territories, their focal point. He elucidates the candidates' arguments, analyzes their rhetorical strategies, and shows how public sentiment is transformed.

[more]

Long Journey to Justice

El Salvador, the United States, and Struggles against Empire

Molly Todd

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

As bloody wars raged in Central America during the last third of the twentieth century, hundreds of North American groups “adopted” villages in war-torn Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Unlike government-based cold war–era Sister City programs, these pairings were formed by ordinary people, often inspired by individuals displaced by US-supported counterinsurgency operations.

Drawing on two decades of work with former refugees from El Salvador as well as unprecedented access to private archives and oral histories, Molly Todd’s compelling history provides the first in-depth look at “grassroots sistering.” This model of citizen diplomacy emerged in the mid-1980s out of relationships between a few repopulated villages in Chalatenango, El Salvador, and US cities.

Todd shows how the leadership of Salvadorans and left-leaning activists in the US concerned with the expansion of empire as well as the evolution of human rights–related discourses and practices created a complex dynamic of cross-border activism that continues today.

[more]

Long Road to Harpers Ferry

The Rise of the First American Left

Mark A. Lause

Pluto Press, 2018

This is the first comprehensive history of pre–Civil War American radicalism, mapping the journeys of the land reformers, Jacksonian radicals, and militant abolitionists who paved the way to the failed slave revolt at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
Offering new and fascinating insights into the cast of characters who created a homegrown socialist movement in America—from Thomas Paine’s revolution to Robert Owen’s utopianism, and from Thomas Skidmore’s agrarianism to George Henry Evans’s industrial workers’ reforms—Long Road to Harpers Ferry captures the spirit of the times. Showing how class solidarity and consciousness became more important to a generation of workers than notions of American citizenship, the book offers a fascinating historical background to help us understand the rise of radicalism in the United States today.

[more]

Looking Beneath the Surface

The Story of Archaeology in New Jersey

Mounier, R. Alan

Rutgers University Press, 2002

For more than ten thousand years, humans have lived in New Jersey. From Summit to Cape May, from Trenton to the Jersey Shore, the state is a treasure trove of archaeological artifacts, revealing much about those who occupied the region prior to European settlement. As a rule, only the most durable of human creations¾items of stone and pottery¾survive the ravages of time. To complicate matters, the onslaught of our own culture and the indiscriminate looting of sites by greedy collectors have further diminished the cultural materials left behind. The task of the archaeologist is to gather and interpret these scraps for the benefit of science and the public. But digging up relics is a trivial pursuit if the only outcome is a collection of artifacts, however attractive or valuable they may be. Understanding what those relics mean in human terms is crucial.

In Looking beneath the Surface, R. Alan Mounier looks at the human past of New Jersey. With particular focus on the ancient past and native cultures, the author tells the story of archaeology in the state as it has unfolded, and as it continues to unfold. New investigations and discoveries continually change our views and interpretations of the past. In jargon-free language, Mounier provides an in-depth introduction offering information to understand general archaeological practices as well as research in New Jersey. Subsequent chapters describe artifact types, archaeological settlements, and burial practices in detail. He concludes with vignettes of twenty-one archaeological investigations throughout the state to illustrate the variability of sites and the accomplishments of dedicated archaeologists, both professional and amateur.

[more]