Results by title

The 1910 Revolution is still tangibly present in Mexico in the festivals that celebrate its victories, on the monuments to its heroes, and, most important, in the stories and memories of the Mexican people. Yet there has never been general agreement on what the revolution meant, what its objectives were, and whether they have been accomplished.

This pathfinding book shows how Mexicans from 1910 through the 1950s interpreted the revolution, tried to make sense of it, and, through collective memory, myth-making, and history writing, invented an idea called "la Revolución." In part one, Thomas Benjamin follows the historical development of different and often opposing revolutionary traditions and the state's efforts to forge them into one unified and unifying narrative. In part two, he examines ways of remembering the past and making it relevant to the present through fiestas, monuments, and official history. This research clarifies how the revolution has served to authorize and legitimize political factions and particular regimes to the present day. Beyond the Mexican case, it demonstrates how history is used to serve the needs of the present.

Traces the changing meanings of lynching and examines the political power of lynching as metaphor

Between 1880 and 1930, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Beyond the horrific violence inflicted on these individuals, lynching terrorized whole communities and became a defining characteristic of Southern race relations in the Jim Crow era. As spectacle, lynching was intended to serve as a symbol of white supremacy. Yet, Jonathan Markovitz notes, the act's symbolic power has endured long after the practice of lynching has largely faded away.

Tracing how shuttered mission schools became contested commemorative landscapes

During the Early Republic and Jacksonian eras, Euro-American colonists and Native nations in the South and Old Northwest established mission schools intended to Christianize Indigenous peoples. In Lost Missions, Sean T. Jacobson recovers the histories and afterlives of these institutions, arguing that they played a far more consequential role in Native–settler relations than scholars have previously acknowledged. Mission schools advanced a spiritual vision of a multiethnic Christian America—one that ultimately collapsed amid the federally sponsored Indian Removal campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s.

Following the closure of these schools, their physical and symbolic landscapes became powerful sites of memory. Euro-American Christians later transformed former missions into commemorative spaces that celebrated “frontier” piety and national expansion. Through monuments, pageantry, and local histories, Protestant and Catholic Americans alike recast missionary labor as a foundational component of American nation-building. In doing so, these narratives framed the Christianization of Native peoples as a benevolent civilizing project, one that implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—sanitized the coercion, dispossession, and violence that accompanied westward expansion and the forced removal of Indigenous nations.

By the late twentieth century, however, these commemorative narratives faded. Suburban development, commercialization, and shifting cultural priorities rendered many mission sites once again “lost,” stripped of the civic meaning they once held. Yet Jacobson shows that these landscapes still speak, especially when viewed from Indigenous perspectives. Reinterpreted through Native histories of endurance and survival, former missions reveal counternarratives of persistence amid profound loss. As tribal nations increasingly engage with these sites today, Lost Missions probes their contested status as places of memory and conscience, illuminating how public history continues to shape and challenge understandings of America’s colonial past. 

In May 1725, during a three-year conflict between English colonists and the Eastern Abenaki Nation, a thirty-four-man expedition led by Captain John Lovewell set out to ambush their adversaries, acquire some scalp bounties, and hasten the end of the war. Instead, the Abenakis staged a surprise attack of their own at Pigwacket, Maine, that left more than a third of the New Englanders dead or severely wounded. Although Lovewell himself was slain in the fighting, he emerged a martyred hero, celebrated in popular memory for standing his ground against a superior enemy force. 

In this book, Robert E. Cray revisits the clash known as “Lovewell's Fight” and uses it to illuminate the themes of war, death, and memory in early New England. He shows how a military operation plagued from the outset by poor decision-making, and further marred by less-than-heroic battlefield behavior, came to be remembered as early America's version of the Alamo. The government of Massachusetts bestowed payouts, pensions, and land on survivors and widows of the battle, while early chroniclers drafted a master narrative for later generations to emboss. William Henry Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau kept the story alive for later generations. Although some nineteenth-century New Englanders disapproved of Lovewell's notoriety as a scalp hunter, it did not prevent the dedication of a monument in his honor at the Fryeburg, Maine, battlesite in 1904.

Even as the actual story of “Lovewell's Fight” receded into obscurity—a bloody skirmish in a largely forgotten war—it remained part of New England lore, one of those rare military encounters in which defeat transcends an opponent's victory to assume the mantle of legend.