28164 books match the query 'History' and 932 start with l

cover of Liberalism without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922–1936

Liberalism without Democracy

Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922–1936

Abdeslam M. Maghraoui

Duke University Press, 2006

The history of Western intervention in the Middle East stretches from the late eighteenth century to the present day. All too often, the Western rationale for invading and occupying a country to liberate its people has produced new forms of domination that have hindered rather than encouraged the emergence of democratic politics. Abdeslam M. Maghraoui advances the understanding of this problematic dynamic through an analysis of efforts to achieve liberal reform in Egypt following its independence from Great Britain in 1922.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Egypt’s reformers equated liberal notions of nationhood and citizenship with European civilization and culture. As Maghraoui demonstrates, in their efforts to achieve liberalization, they sought to align Egypt with the West and to dissociate it from the Arab and Islamic worlds. Egypt’s professionals and leading cultural figures attempted to replace the fez with European-style hats; they discouraged literary critics from studying Arabic poetry, claiming it was alien to Egyptian culture. Why did they feel compelled to degrade local cultures in order to accommodate liberal principles?

Drawing on the thought of Lacan, Fanon, Said, and Bhabha, as well as contemporary political theory, Maghraoui points to liberalism’s inherent contradiction: its simultaneous commitments to individual liberty and colonial conquest. He argues that when Egypt’s reformers embraced the language of liberalism as their own, they adopted social prejudices built into that language. Efforts to achieve liberalization played out—and failed—within the realm of culture, not just within the political arena. Opinions voiced through literary works, cartoons, newspaper articles on controversial social issues, and other forms of cultural expression were ultimately more important to the fate of liberalism in Egypt than were questions of formal political participation and representation. Liberalism without Democracy demonstrates the powerful—and under appreciated—role of language and culture in defining citizenship and political community.

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cover of Liberalization's Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India

Liberalization's Children

Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India

Ritty A. Lukose

Duke University Press, 2009

Liberalization’s Children explores how youth and gender have become crucial sites for a contested cultural politics of globalization in India. Popular discourses draw a contrast between “midnight’s children,” who were rooted in post-independence Nehruvian developmentalism, and “liberalization’s children,” who are global in outlook and unapologetically consumerist. Moral panics about beauty pageants and the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day reflect ambivalence about the impact of an expanding commodity culture, especially on young women. By simply highlighting the triumph of consumerism, such discourses obscure more than they reveal. Through a careful analysis of “consumer citizenship,” Ritty A. Lukose argues that the breakdown of the Nehruvian vision connects with ongoing struggles over the meanings of public life and the cultural politics of belonging. Those struggles play out in the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism; reconfigurations of youthful, middle-class femininity; attempts by the middle class to alter understandings of citizenship; and assertions of new forms of masculinity by members of lower castes.

Moving beyond elite figurations of globalizing Indian youth, Lukose draws on ethnographic research to examine how non-elite college students in the southern state of Kerala mediate region, nation, and globe. Kerala sits at the crossroads of development and globalization. Held up as a model of left-inspired development, it has also been transformed through an extensive and largely non-elite transnational circulation of labor, money, and commodities to the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Focusing on fashion, romance, student politics, and education, Lukose carefully tracks how gender, caste, and class, as well as colonial and postcolonial legacies of culture and power, affect how students navigate their roles as citizens and consumers. She explores how mass-mediation and an expanding commodity culture have differentially incorporated young people into the structures and aspirational logics of globalization.

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cover of Liberals under Autocracy: Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866–1904

Liberals under Autocracy

Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866–1904

Anton A. Fedyashin

University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

With its rocky transition to democracy, post-Soviet Russia has made observers wonder whether a moderating liberalism could ever succeed in such a land of extremes. But in Liberals under Autocracy, Anton A. Fedyashin looks back at the vibrant Russian liberalism that flourished in the country’s late imperial era, chronicling its contributions to the evolution of Russia’s rich literary culture, socioeconomic thinking, and civil society.
    For five decades prior to the revolutions of 1917, The Herald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy) was the flagship journal of Russian liberalism, garnering a large readership. The journal articulated a distinctively Russian liberal agenda, one that encouraged social and economic modernization and civic participation through local self-government units (zemstvos) that defended individual rights and interests—especially those of the peasantry—in the face of increasing industrialization. Through the efforts of four men who turned The Herald into a cultural nexus in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, the publication catalyzed the growing influence of journal culture and its formative effects on Russian politics and society.
    Challenging deep-seated assumptions about Russia’s intellectual history, Fedyashin’s work casts the country’s nascent liberalism as a distinctly Russian blend of self-governance, populism, and other national, cultural traditions. As such, the book stands as a contribution to the growing literature on imperial Russia's nonrevolutionary, intellectual movements that emphasized the role of local politics in both successful modernization and the evolution of civil society in an extraparliamentary environment.

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cover of Liberals, Conservatives, and Mavericks: On Christian Churches of Eastern Europe since 1980. A Festschrift for Sabrina P. Ramet

Liberals, Conservatives, and Mavericks

On Christian Churches of Eastern Europe since 1980. A Festschrift for Sabrina P. Ramet

Frank Cibulka

Central European University Press, 2025

No Church is monolithic—this is the preliminary premise of this volume on the public place of religion in a representative number of post-communist countries. The studies confirm that within any religious organization we can expect to find fissures, factions, theological or ideological quarrels, and perhaps even competing interest groups, such as missionary workers, regular clergy versus secular clergy, and sometimes even competing ecclesiastical hierarchies. The main focus of the book rests on the divisions arising within select Christian Churches, as they confront the processes of secularization and atheization. The coverage area includes Russia and the Ukraine, East-Central Europe and South-Eastern Europe. Some chapters focus on individual clergy who challenge the mainstream of their given Church either from a more liberal or from a more conservative perspective, while others deal with the divisive forces impacting the religious organizations.

This festschrift to honor Sabrina Ramet’s seminal contribution to the study of religion in the politics of the communist and post-communist world, brings together several generations of scholars from a variety of countries, both those well established in their fields of study as well as young promising academics.

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cover of Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party

Liberated Territory

Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party

Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazerow, eds.

Duke University Press, 2008

With their collection In Search of the Black Panther Party, Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazerow provided a broad analysis of the Black Panther Party and its legacy. In Liberated Territory, they turn their attention to local manifestations of the organization, far away from the party’s Oakland headquarters. This collection’s contributors, all historians, examine how specific party chapters and offshoots emerged, developed, and waned, as well as how the local branches related to their communities and to the national party.

The histories and character of the party branches vary as widely as their locations. The Cape Verdeans of New Bedford, Massachusetts, were initially viewed as a particular challenge for the local Panthers but later became the mainstay of the Boston-area party. In the early 1970s, the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, chapter excelled at implementing the national Black Panther Party’s strategic shift from revolutionary confrontation to mainstream electoral politics. In Detroit, the Panthers were defined by a complex relationship between their above-ground activities and an underground wing dedicated to armed struggle. While the Milwaukee chapter was born out of a rising tide of black militancy, it ultimately proved more committed to promoting literacy and health care and redressing hunger than to violence. The Alabama Black Liberation Front did not have the official imprimatur of the national party, but it drew heavily on the Panthers’ ideas and organizing strategies, and its activism demonstrates the broad resonance of many of the concerns articulated by the national party: the need for jobs, for decent food and housing, for black self-determination, and for sustained opposition to police brutality against black people. Liberated Territory reveals how the Black Panther Party’s ideologies, goals, and strategies were taken up and adapted throughout the United States.

Contributors: Devin Fergus, Jama Lazerow, Ahmad A. Rahman, Robert W. Widell Jr., Yohuru Williams

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cover of Liberated: The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun

Liberated

The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun

Kaz Rowe

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2023

Courageous Surrealist artist Claude Cahun championed freedom at every turn, from rejecting gender norms and finding queer love to risking death to sabotage the Nazis.

At the turn of the twentieth century in Nantes, France, Lucy Schwob met Suzanne Malherbe, and lightning struck. The two became partners both artistically and romantically and transformed themselves into the creative personas Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Together, the couple embarked on a radical journey of Surrealist collaboration that would take them from conservative provincial France to the vibrancy of 1920s Paris to the oppression of Nazi-occupied Jersey during World War II, where they used art to undermine the Nazi regime.

Cahun and Moore challenged gender roles and championed freedom at a time when strict societal norms meant that the truth of their relationship had to remain secret. Featuring ten photographs by Cahun and Moore, this graphic biography by cartoonist Kaz Rowe brings Cahun’s inspiring story to life.

Ages thirteen to eighteen
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cover of Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema

Liberating Hollywood

Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema

Smukler, Maya M

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Winner of the 2018 Richard Wall Memorial Award​ from the Theater Library Association

Liberating Hollywood examines the professional experiences and creative output of women filmmakers during a unique moment in history when the social justice movements that defined the 1960s and 1970s challenged the enduring culture of sexism and racism in the U.S. film industry. Throughout the 1970s feminist reform efforts resulted in a noticeable rise in the number of women directors, yet at the same time the institutionalized sexism of Hollywood continued to create obstacles to closing the gender gap. Maya Montañez Smukler reveals that during this era there were an estimated sixteen women making independent and studio films: Penny Allen, Karen Arthur, Anne Bancroft, Joan Darling, Lee Grant, Barbara Loden, Elaine May, Barbara Peeters, Joan Rivers, Stephanie Rothman, Beverly Sebastian, Joan Micklin Silver, Joan Tewkesbury, Jane Wagner, Nancy Walker, and Claudia Weill. Drawing on interviews conducted by the author, Liberating Hollywood is the first study of women directors within the intersection of second wave feminism, civil rights legislation, and Hollywood to investigate the remarkable careers of these filmmakers during one of the most mythologized periods in American film history.
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cover of Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America

Liberating Language

Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America

Shirley Wilson Logan

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Liberating Language identifies experiences of nineteenth-century African Americans—categorized as sites of rhetorical education—that provided opportunities to develop effective communication and critical text-interpretation skills. Author Shirley Wilson Logan considers how nontraditional sites, which seldom involved formal training in rhetorical instruction, proved to be effective resources for African American advancement.

Logan traces the ways that African Americans learned lessons in rhetoric through language-based activities associated with black survival in nineteenth-century America, such as working in political organizations, reading and publishing newspapers, maintaining diaries, and participating in literary societies. According to Logan, rhetorical training was manifested through places of worship and military camps, self-education in oratory and elocution, literary societies, and the black press. She draws on the experiences of various black rhetors of the era, such as

Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, Fanny Coppin, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, and the lesser-known Oberlin-educated Mary Virginia Montgomery, Virginia slave preacher "Uncle Jack," and former slave "Mrs. Lee."

Liberating Language addresses free-floating literacy, a term coined by scholar and writer Ralph Ellison, which captures the many settings where literacy and rhetorical skills were acquired and developed, including slave missions, religious gatherings, war camps, and even cigar factories. In Civil War camp- sites, for instance, black soldiers learned to read and write, corresponded with the editors of black newspapers, edited their own camp-based papers, and formed literary associations.

Liberating Language outlines nontraditional means of acquiring rhetorical skills and demonstrates how African Americans, faced with the lingering consequences of enslavement and continuing oppression, acquired rhetorical competence during the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century.

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cover of Liberating Voices: Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers

Liberating Voices

Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers

Karyn L. Hollis

Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

During the 1920s and 1930s at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, working-class women were educated in the liberal arts and instructed in writing to assume more powerful roles in the industrial workplace. In Liberating Voices: Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, Karyn L. Hollis tells the remarkable story of how this multiclass, multiethnic American institution rooted in composition pedagogy, literary history, and leftist thought emerged from the broad social, economic, and ideological trends of the era. The summer school curriculum, Hollis shows, enhanced the individual and collective self-confidence of the 1,800 women who studied there between 1921 and 1938.

Drawing heavily on the women’s writings—including autobiography, poetry, labor drama, humor, and economic reporting—Liberating Voices adds significantly to the small oeuvre of published writing by working-class women, who were, in this case, mostly nontraditional students, immigrants, and minorities. Outlining a materialist pedagogy that centers on the women’s daily economic struggles as well as their family and community experiences, Hollis reveals the tensions that stemmed from differences in race, ethnicity, class, and religion. She also shows how the students exploited cultural scripts and drew strength from their diversity, eventually insisting on a democratic sharing of power with faculty and administrators at the Summer School.

Hollis provides a thorough ethnography of the Summer School with respect to its place in the social and political history of the 1920s and 1930s, and then situates the school’s pedagogy within the history of American education and composition instruction. Concepts from literary criticism and composition theory provide the framework for an analysis of the working women’s autobiographical writing, revealing how the narrative voice of their prose grew from weak and individualized to empowered and collective as the women described their families, childhood, work, unions, and education over time. The volume is complemented by sixteen illustrations.

Additional analysis of the women’s poetry points to their skill as both producers and consumers of literature. The common theme of body versus a powerful machine in the workplace bears witness to the industrial exploitation the women endured. Taking up postmodern questions of agency and voice, Hollis argues that the women used a variety of cultural texts to construct discourses that reflected their needs and desires. Liberating Voices not only provides a previously untold chapter in the history of American worker education, it also showcases a liberating pedagogy that has salient implications for contemporary classrooms.

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cover of Liberation Theology and Praxis in Contemporary Latin America: As It Was in the Beginning?

Liberation Theology and Praxis in Contemporary Latin America

As It Was in the Beginning?

Edited by Pablo Bradbury and Niall H.D. Geraghty

University of London Press, 2025

A study of liberationist Christianity in Latin America, offering new insights for discussing liberation theology.

This highly interdisciplinary collection brings together diverse and complementary approaches from history, theology, cultural studies, architecture, sociology, and anthropology to reevaluate the legacy of liberation theology in Latin America.

Liberation theology was born in the 1960s at a time of Church renewal and socio-economic ferment, as many sought more radical solutions in the context of the exhaustion of developmentalist projects and the institutionalized violence of capitalism. The book’s central focus on the lived experiences and embodied practices of those engaged in social action in the region challenges the narrative that suggests that liberation theology had reached its decline by the end of the 1970s. It demonstrates that liberationist Christianity was at once more diverse and internally conflicted, more widely resonant outside ecclesial confines, and more interconnected over time than often allowed.

The chapters investigate a range of topics: the ecclesiology of a revolutionary movement of Argentine priests in the 1960s and ́1970s, the engagement of liberation theology with Participatory Action Research and its influence on architectural approaches and urbanism, 1980s feminist liberation theology, encounters with Western human rights at a time of Cold War repression and exile, and ecofeminist political theology in contemporary Latin America. Pulling these threads together, Liberation Theology and Praxis in Contemporary Latin America invites us to reconsider how we understand liberation theology’s history as well as its reach into the present day.
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cover of Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements

Liberation and Democratization

The South African and Palestinian National Movements

Mona N. Younis

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

The first comprehensive comparison of two of the century’s most important liberation movements.

Arising in the 1910s and emerging as legitimate governing bodies in the 1990s, the South African and the Palestinian national liberation movements have exhibited remarkable parallels over the course of their development. The fortunes of the African National Congress and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, however, have proven strikingly different. How the movements, despite similar circumstances and experiences, have arrived at such dissimilar outcomes is described in Liberation and Democratization.

Younis traces the evolution of the movements, from early domination by elites to the ascendancy of mass-based forces in their last phases of expansion. She shows how this latest shift, accompanied by a democratization of the process of liberation, made the movements more effective in the 1980s. Liberation and Democratization also identifies dissimilarities—the balance of class forces and resources—that led to the A.N.C.’s greater success relative to the P.L.O.’s achievements. The first comprehensive comparison of two of the most significant liberation movements of this century, Younis’s work brings to light problems and dynamics that will remain at work well into the future.
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cover of Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa

Liberation and Development

Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa

Leslie Anne Hadfield

Michigan State University Press, 2016

Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa is an account of the community development programs of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa. It covers the emergence of the movement’s ideas and practices in the context of the late 1960s and early 1970s, then analyzes how activists refined their practices, mobilized resources, and influenced people through their work. The book examines this history primarily through the Black Community Programs organization and its three major projects: the yearbook Black Review, the Zanempilo Community Health Center, and the Njwaxa leatherwork factory. As opposed to better-known studies of antipolitical, macroeconomic initiatives, this book shows that people from the so-called global South led development in innovative ways that promised to increase social and political participation. It particularly explores the power that youth, women, and churches had in leading change in a hostile political environment. With this new perspective on a major liberation movement, Hadfield not only causes us to rethink aspects of African history but also offers lessons from the past for African societies still dealing with developmental challenges similar to those faced during apartheid.
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cover of Liberation and Education: Perspectives on Black Educational Thought

Liberation and Education

Perspectives on Black Educational Thought

Ronald E. Chennault

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Liberation and Education brings together a collection of essays about Black educators’ and organizations’ quests to cultivate and employ educational strategies for the liberation of Black people. The contributions examine the enduring nature of Black people’s thinking about education prior to and through enslavement to the present. It documents a variety of critical accounts of how Black people have developed ways to free themselves mentally from the legacies of slavery, the view of Black inferiority, and historical and systemic racism.

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cover of Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics

Liberty Power

Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics

Corey M. Brooks

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was the first party built on opposition to slavery to win on the national stage—but its victory was rooted in the earlier efforts of under-appreciated antislavery third parties. Liberty Power tells the story of how abolitionist activists built the most transformative third-party movement in American history and effectively reshaped political structures in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

As Corey M. Brooks explains, abolitionist trailblazers who organized first the Liberty Party and later the more moderate Free Soil Party confronted formidable opposition from a two-party system expressly constructed to suppress disputes over slavery. Identifying the Whigs and Democrats as the mainstays of the southern Slave Power’s national supremacy, savvy abolitionists insisted that only a party independent of slaveholder influence could wrest the federal government from its grip. A series of shrewd electoral, lobbying, and legislative tactics enabled these antislavery third parties to wield influence far beyond their numbers. In the process, these parties transformed the national political debate and laid the groundwork for the success of the Republican Party and the end of American slavery.
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cover of Liberty and Justice for All?: Rethinking Politics in Cold War America

Liberty and Justice for All?

Rethinking Politics in Cold War America

Kathleen G. Donohue

University of Massachusetts Press, 2012

From the congressional debate over the “fall of China” to the drama of the Army–McCarthy hearings to the kitchen faceoff between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev, the political history of the early Cold War was long dominated by studies of presidential administrations, anticommunism, and foreign policy. In Liberty and Justice for All? a group of distinguished historians representing a variety of disciplinary perspectives—social history, cultural history, intellectual history, labor history, urban history, women's history, African American studies, and media studies—expand on the political history of the early Cold War by rethinking the relationship between politics and culture. How, for example, did folk music help to keep movement culture alive throughout the 1950s? How did the new medium of television change fundamental assumptions about politics and the electorate? How did American experiences with religion in the 1950s strengthen the separation of church and state? How did race, class, and gender influence the relationship between citizens and the state? These are just some of the questions addressed in this wide-ranging set of essays.

In addition to volume editor Kathleen G. Donohue, contributors include Howard Brick, Kari Frederickson, Andrea Friedman, David Greenberg, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Jennifer Klein, Laura McEnaney, Kevin M. Schultz, Jason Scott Smith, Landon R. Y. Storrs, and Jessica Weiss.

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cover of Liberty and Law

Liberty and Law

Brian Tierney

Catholic University of America Press, 2014

Liberty and Law examines a previously underappreciated theme in legal history - the idea of permissive natural law. The idea is mentioned only peripherally, if at all, in modern histories of natural law. Yet it engaged the attention of jurists, philosophers, and theologians over a long period and formed an integral part of their teachings. This ensured that natural law was not conceived of as merely a set of commands and prohibitions that restricted human conduct, but also as affirming a realm of human freedom, understood as both freedom from subjection and freedom of choice. Freedom can be used in many ways, and throughout the whole period from 1100 to 1800 the idea of permissive natural law was deployed for various purposes in response to different problems that arose. It was frequently invoked to explain the origin of private property and the beginnings of civil government.
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cover of Liberty and the Search for Identity

Liberty and the Search for Identity

Ivan Zoltan Denes

Central European University Press, 2006

Liberalism was not only the first modern ideology, it was also the first secular movement to have an international presence. The scholarly articles in this collection, skillfully edited by Iván Zoltán Dénes, examine liberal ideas and movements from Scotland to the Ottoman Empire. The volume seeks to uncover and analyze various relationships between liberalisms and nationalisms, national identities and modernity concepts, nations and empires, nation-states and nationalities, traditions and modernities, images of the self and the others, modernization strategies and identity creations. This volume provides an important historical analysis that is essential toward understanding the questions and motivations of liberalism in the European Union today. This is, therefore, a timely contribution to both historiography and contemporary politics.
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cover of Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America

Liberty's Grid

A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America

Amir Alexander

University of Chicago Press, 2024

The surprising history behind a ubiquitous facet of the United States: the gridded landscape.
 
Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, all precisely measured and perfectly aligned, turn both urban and rural America into a checkerboard landscape that stretches from horizon to horizon. In evidence throughout the country, but especially the West, the pattern is a hallmark of American life. One might consider it an administrative convenience—an easy way to divide land and lay down streets—but it is not. The colossal grid carved into the North American continent, argues historian and writer Amir Alexander, is a plan redolent with philosophical and political meaning.
 
In 1784 Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young United States. All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a single rectilinear grid, transforming the natural landscape into a mathematical one. Following Isaac Newton and John Locke, he viewed mathematical space as a blank slate on which anything is possible and where new Americans, acting freely, could find liberty. And if the real America, with its diverse landscapes and rich human history, did not match his vision, then it must be made to match it.
 
From the halls of Congress to the open prairies, and from the fight against George III to the Trail of Tears, Liberty’s Grid tells the story of the battle between grid makers and their opponents. When Congress endorsed Jefferson’s plan, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided. Transcendentalists, urban reformers, and conservationists saw the grid not as a place of possibility but as an artificial imposition that crushed the human spirit. Today, the ideas Jefferson associated with the grid still echo through political rhetoric about the country’s founding, and competing visions for the nation are visible from Manhattan avenues and Kansan pastures to Yosemite’s cliffs and suburbia’s cul-de-sacs. An engrossing read, Liberty’s Grid offers a powerful look at the ideological conflict written on the landscape.
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cover of Liberty, Equality, and Justice: Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, and the Regulation of Business, 1865–1932

Liberty, Equality, and Justice

Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, and the Regulation of Business, 1865–1932

Ross Evans Paulson

Duke University Press, 1997

Liberty, equality, and justice have long been treasured in American culture as core values. In Liberty, Equality, and Justice, Ross Evans Paulson studies social and intellectual changes in a critical period of American history—from the end of the Civil War to the early days of the Depression—and argues that attempts to achieve civil rights, women’s rights, and the regulation of business faltered because so many Americans ranked liberty for themselves higher than equality with others and justice for all.
Surveying a crucial period in the formation of the modern state and society, Paulson examines the prevailing conflicts of the time and the limitations of various attempts to institute reform, radical change, or ritualistic renewal of American society. His reading of existing scholarship highlights contested social constructs, clashing priorities, changing meanings of key terms, and shifting institutional dynamics in light of their contributions to a complex tragedy in which all parties fell short of the demands for democratic mutuality. Along with discussions of the movements and manipulations of presidential, congressional, and judicial politics, he integrates the experiences of diverse populations—including African Americans, women, Asian immigrants, Native Americans, and working people—and offers a new interpretation of the ways in which social change and political events interact to reframe the many possibilities of American society.
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cover of Libraries amid Protest: Books, Organizing, and Global Activism

Libraries amid Protest

Books, Organizing, and Global Activism

Sherrin Frances

University of Massachusetts Press, 2020

In September 2011, Occupy Wall Street activists took over New York's Zuccotti Park. Within a matter of weeks, the encampment had become a tiny model of a robust city, with its own kitchen, first aid station, childcare services—and a library of several thousand physical books. Since that time, social movements around the world, from Nuit Debout in Paris to Gezi Park in Istanbul, have built temporary libraries alongside their protests. While these libraries typically last only a few weeks at a time and all have ultimately been dismantled or destroyed, each has managed to collect, catalog, and circulate books, serving a need not being met elsewhere.

Libraries amid Protest unpacks how these protest libraries—labor-intensive, temporary installations in parks and city squares, poorly protected from the weather, at odds with security forces—continue to arise. In telling the stories of these surprising and inspiring spaces through interviews and other research, Sherrin Frances confronts the complex history of American public libraries. She argues that protest libraries function as the spaces of opportunity and resistance promised, but not delivered, by American public libraries.
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cover of Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth-Century America

Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth-Century America

Edited by Christine Pawley and Louise S. Robbins

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

For well over one hundred years, libraries open to the public have played a crucial part in fostering in Americans the skills and habits of reading and writing, by routinely providing access to standard forms of print: informational genres such as newspapers, pamphlets, textbooks, and other reference books, and literary genres including poetry, plays, and novels. Public libraries continue to have an extraordinary impact; in the early twenty-first century, the American Library Association reports that there are more public library branches than McDonald's restaurants in the United States. Much has been written about libraries from professional and managerial points of view, but less so from the perspectives of those most intimately involved—patrons and librarians.
 
Drawing on circulation records, patron reviews, and other archived materials, Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth-Century America underscores the evolving roles that libraries have played in the lives of American readers. Each essay in this collection examines a historical circumstance related to reading in libraries. The essays are organized in sections on methods of researching the history of reading in libraries; immigrants and localities; censorship issues; and the role of libraries in providing access to alternative, nonmainstream publications. The volume shows public libraries as living spaces where individuals and groups with diverse backgrounds, needs, and desires encountered and used a great variety of texts, images, and other media throughout the twentieth century.
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cover of Libri Annales Pontificum Maximorum: The Origins of the Annalistic Tradition

Libri Annales Pontificum Maximorum

The Origins of the Annalistic Tradition

Bruce W. Frier

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Recent years have seen a welcome growth of interest in the history of early Rome. Libri Annales Pontificum Maximorum: the Origins of the Annalistic Tradition contributes important information on this period by focusing on the earliest stages of Roman historical writing. The book is once again available, with a new Introduction by the author that brings the work up to date and helps place it in its current context. This book remains the starting point for study of the pre-annalistic tradition of Roman history.
When first published, the volume sparked a lively debate among classicists and historians of the ancient world. Previous scholarship had often assigned the pontifical chronicle a central role not only in preserving the history of the early Republic, but also in shaping the form of the annalistic tradition. But the author showed that these assumptions rested on insecure foundations; to a large extent, they misrepresented the historiographic development of the annalistic tradition as we know it from, above all, Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.
Perhaps the book's most controversial contention was that the final eighty-book edition of the chronicle, which previous scholars had dated to the later second century BCE, is more probably a massive reworking of materials in the Augustan period. This finding will likely require a considerable revision in our understanding of the development of the annalistic tradition. In the course of making these innovative arguments, the author offers extensive information about the origins of the annalistic tradition and about the early history and historiography of Rome.
Bruce W. Frier is Professor of Classics and Roman Law, and Henry King Ransom Professor of Law, University of Michigan. He has published numerous books and articles on classical and legal topics, and has won the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the American Philological Association.
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cover of Lie Of The Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape

Lie Of The Land

Migrant Workers and the California Landscape

Don Mitchell

University of Minnesota Press, 1996

A hard-hitting look at the story behind California's famous scenery.

The beauty of the California landscape is integral to its place in the imagination of generations of people around the world. In The Lie of the Land, geographer Don Mitchell looks at the human costs associated with this famous scenery. Through an account of the labor history of the state, Mitchell examines the material and ideological struggles over living and working conditions that played a large part in the construction of the contemporary California landscape.

The Lie of the Land examines the way the California landscape was built on the backs of migrant workers, focusing on migratory labor and agribusiness before World War II. The book relates the historical geography of California to the processes of labor that made it, discussing not only significant strikes but also on the everyday existence of migrant workers in the labor camps, fields, and “Hoovervilles” where they lived. Mitchell places class struggle at the heart of social development, demonstrating concretely how farm workers affected their social and material environment, as well as exploring how farm owners responded to their workers’ efforts to improve their living and working conditions. Mitchell also places “reformers” in context, revealing the actual nature of their role in relation to migrant workers’ efforts—that of undermining the struggle for genuine social change. In addition, this volume captures the significance of the changing composition of the agricultural workforce, particularly in racial terms, as the class struggle evolved over a period of decades. Mitchell has written a narrative history that describes the intimate connection between landscape representations and the material form of geography. The Lie of the Land places people squarely in the middle of the landscapes they inhabit, shedding light on the complex and seemingly contradictory interactions between progressive state agents, radical workers, and California growers as they seek to remake the land in their own image.
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cover of Lieder in America: On Stages and In Parlors

Lieder in America

On Stages and In Parlors

Heather Platt

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Lieder and the rise of song recital in the United States, 1850–1914

Though viewed as quintessentially German, lieder became a centerpiece of nineteenth century song recitals in the United States. By the 1890s, these songs, which were often sung in English, were a sensation among tutored and untutored music lovers alike. Heather Platt examines the varied supporters and singers who both established the lied as a concert repertoire and shaped a new kind of recital dedicated to art songs. Lieder were embraced and spread by performers like Max Heinrich and advocates like John Sullivan Dwight, as well as by the women’s clubs that flourished nationwide. At the same time as examining the critical reception of the artists and songs, Platt reveals ways in which US recital programs anticipated trends in European recitals. She also places lieder against the backdrop of the time, when factors like the growth in the sheet music industry, the evolution of American art song, and emerging anti-German feeling had a profound impact on the genre’s popularity.

[more]
cover of Lies, Passions, and Illusions: The Democratic Imagination in the Twentieth Century

Lies, Passions, and Illusions

The Democratic Imagination in the Twentieth Century

François Furet

University of Chicago Press, 2014

François Furet needs little introduction. Widely considered one of the leading historians of the French Revolution, he was a maverick for his time, shining a critical light on the entrenched Marxist interpretations that prevailed during the mid-twentieth century. Shortly after his death in 1997, the New York Review of Books called him “one of the most influential men in contemporary France.” Lies, Passions, and Illusions is a fitting capstone to this celebrated author’s oeuvre: a late-career conversation with philosopher Paul Ricoeur on the twentieth century writ large, a century of violence and turmoil, of unprecedented wealth and progress, in which history advanced, for better or worse, in quantum leaps.
           
This conversation would be, sadly, Furet’s last—he died while Ricoeur was completing his edits. Ricoeur did not want to publish his half without Furet’s approval, so what remains is Furet’s alone, an astonishingly cohesive meditation on the political passions of the twentieth century. With strokes at once broad and incisive, he examines the many different trajectories that nations of the West have followed over the past hundred years. It is a dialogue with history as it happened but also as a form of thought. It is a dialogue with his critics, with himself, and with those major thinkers—from Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt—whose ideas have shaped our understanding of the tragic dramas and upheavals of the modern era. It is a testament to the crucial role of the historian, a reflection on how history is made and lived, and how the imagination is a catalyst for political change. Whether new to Furet or deeply familiar with his work, readers will find thought-provoking assessments on every page, a deeply moving look back at one of the most tumultuous periods of history and how we might learn and look forward from it. 
 
 
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cover of Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims

Life Among the Piutes

Their Wrongs and Claims

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins

University of Nevada Press, 1994

This autobiographical work was written by one of the country's most well-known Native American women, Sarah Winnemucca. She was a Paiute princess and a major figure in the history of Nevada; her tribe still resides primarily in the state. Life Among the Piutes deals with Winnemucca's life and the plight of the Paiute Indians. Life Among the Piutes is Winnemucca's powerful legacy to both white and Paiute cultures. Following the oral tradition of Native American people, she reaches out to readers with a deeply personal appeal for understanding. She also records historical events from a unique perspective. She managed to record the Native American viewpoint of whites settling the West, told in a language that was not her own and by a woman during the time when even white women were not allowed to vote. Sarah Winnemucca dedicated her life to improving the living and social conditions for her people. She gave more than 400 speeches across the United States and Europe to gain support for the Paiutes. She died of tuberculosis in 1891. Life Among the Piutes was originally published in 1883.

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cover of Life And Death At Paloma: Practices In Peruvian Village

Life And Death At Paloma

Practices In Peruvian Village

Jeffrey Quilter

University of Iowa Press, 1989

Gold, pomp, and circumstances surrounded the mummies of Inca emperors, but the elaborate funerary rites at the end of prehistory were only part of a tradition that began thousands of years earlier. Life and Death at Paloma, the first in-depth treatment of burials from a preagricultural South American village, analyzes the life of its people during a revolutionary time in prehistory: the transition from a hunting-gathering-fishing way of life to a more sedentary horticultural society.
Drawing upon the data that he collected as part of the University of Missouri's excavations at Paloma, Jeffrey Quilter gives us the first study of preceramic Peruvian life through his analysis of this site's graves and contents. His extensively illustrated book is also the first attempt to infer social organization from such data for this period—circa 5000 to 2500 B.C.—in Peru. In addition, he presents the only available summary and discussion of the known preceramic interments from western South America.
Coastal Peru is one of the few New World regions where the early development of complex societies can be studied. Life and Death at Paloma will greatly assist such research by specialists in mortuary studies, in Andean prehistory, and in hunter-gatherer societies.
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cover of Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine

Life Atomic

A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine

Angela N. H. Creager

University of Chicago Press, 2013

After World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began mass-producing radioisotopes, sending out nearly 64,000 shipments of radioactive materials to scientists and physicians by 1955. Even as the atomic bomb became the focus of Cold War anxiety, radioisotopes represented the government’s efforts to harness the power of the atom for peace—advancing medicine, domestic energy, and foreign relations.
           
In Life Atomic, Angela N. H. Creager tells the story of how these radioisotopes, which were simultaneously scientific tools and political icons, transformed biomedicine and ecology. Government-produced radioisotopes provided physicians with new tools for diagnosis and therapy, specifically cancer therapy, and enabled biologists to trace molecular transformations. Yet the government’s attempt to present radioisotopes as marvelous dividends of the atomic age was undercut in the 1950s by the fallout debates, as scientists and citizens recognized the hazards of low-level radiation. Creager reveals that growing consciousness of the danger of radioactivity did not reduce the demand for radioisotopes at hospitals and laboratories, but it did change their popular representation from a therapeutic agent to an environmental poison. She then demonstrates how, by the late twentieth century, public fear of radioactivity overshadowed any appreciation of the positive consequences of the AEC’s provision of radioisotopes for research and medicine.
[more]
cover of Life Out of Balance: Homeostasis and Adaptation in a Darwinian World

Life Out of Balance

Homeostasis and Adaptation in a Darwinian World

Joel B. Hagen

University of Alabama Press, 2021

Exploring how scientists came to understand life's balance between stability and adaptation.

Life Out of Balance focuses on a period in history when new ideas of self-regulation, adaptation, and fitness became central to a variety of biological disciplines. During the decades surrounding World War II, these ideas developed in several quite different contexts and led to greater debates about the merits of such models as applied to larger systems, including society at large. Particularly in its later cybernetic form, homeostasis seemed to provide new ways of discussing balance and regulation that avoided discredited approaches of earlier champions of vitalism and mechanism. It provided a common perspective and terminology for discussing self-regulating “systems,” whether biological, mechanical, or social. Although enormously fruitful and influential, homeostatic perspectives also generated numerous controversies when critics questioned the degree to which biological systems are characterized by balance and self-regulation. Resolving these controversies continues to be a challenge in modern biology.

If natural selection constitutes the first law of biology, scientists who champion homeostasis as a theoretical model claim that it is a second law, equally important and closely related to the first. Such claims notwithstanding, homeostasis has generated a series of controversies since it was formalized by Walter Cannon in the late 1920s. Critics contended that Cannon took a too-optimistic view of life, not only ignoring pathological deviations from normality but also failing to adequately explain the ability of living things to respond adaptively to environmental challenges.

Underlying these controversies was the unresolved problem of integrating physiology and other areas of functional biology with the emerging evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian natural selection. The physiological idea of homeostasis as the adaptive “fit” between the organism and its environment and the Darwinian idea of adaptation and fitness in terms of reproductive success might seem to be complementary in an unproblematic way, but historically they have had an uneasy relationship.
 

[more]
cover of Life Out of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics

Life Out of Sequence

A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics

Hallam Stevens

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Thirty years ago, the most likely place to find a biologist was standing at a laboratory bench, peering down a microscope, surrounded by flasks of chemicals and petri dishes full of bacteria. Today, you are just as likely to find him or her in a room that looks more like an office, poring over lines of code on computer screens. The use of computers in biology has radically transformed who biologists are, what they do, and how they understand life. In Life Out of Sequence, Hallam Stevens looks inside this new landscape of digital scientific work.
           
Stevens chronicles the emergence of bioinformatics—the mode of working across and between biology, computing, mathematics, and statistics—from the 1960s to the present, seeking to understand how knowledge about life is made in and through virtual spaces. He shows how scientific data moves from living organisms into DNA sequencing machines, through software, and into databases, images, and scientific publications. What he reveals is a biology very different from the one of predigital days: a biology that includes not only biologists but also highly interdisciplinary teams of managers and workers; a biology that is more centered on DNA sequencing, but one that understands sequence in terms of dynamic cascades and highly interconnected networks. Life Out of Sequence thus offers the computational biology community welcome context for their own work while also giving the public a frontline perspective of what is going on in this rapidly changing field.

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cover of Life Under the Palms: The Sublime World of the Anti-colonialist Jacob Haafner

Life Under the Palms

The Sublime World of the Anti-colonialist Jacob Haafner

Paul van der Velde

National University of Singapore Press, 2019

Jacob Gotfried Haafner (1754–1809) was one of the most popular European travel writers of the early nineteenth century, writing in the Romantic mode. A Dutch citizen, Haafner spent more than twenty years of his early life living outside of Europe, in India, Ceylon, Mauritius, Java, and South Africa. Books like his popular Travels in a Palanquin were translated into the major European languages, and his essays against the work of Christian missionaries in Asia stirred up great controversy. Haafner worked to spread understanding of the cultures he’d come to know in his journeys, promoting European understanding of Indian literature, myth, and religion, translating the Ramayana into Dutch.
 
With the help of generous excerpts from Haafner's own writings, including material newly translated into English, Paul van der Velde tells an affecting story of a young man who made a world for himself along the Coromandel Coast, in Ceylon and Calcutta, but who returned to Europe to live the last years of his life in Amsterdam, suffering an acute nostalgia for Asia. This will be compelling reading for anyone interested in European response to the cultures of Asia.
 
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cover of Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want

Life Within Limits

Well-being in a World of Want

Michael Jackson

Duke University Press, 2011

The sense that well-being remains elusive, transitory, and unevenly distributed is felt by the rich as well as the poor, and in all societies. To explore this condition of existential dissatisfaction, the anthropologist Michael Jackson traveled to Sierra Leone, described in a recent UN report as the “least livable” country in the world. There he revisited the village where he did his first ethnographic fieldwork in 1969–70 and lived in 1979. Jackson writes that Africans have always faced forces from without that imperil their lives and livelihoods. Though these forces have assumed different forms at different times—slave raiding, warfare, epidemic illness, colonial domination, state interference, economic exploitation, and corrupt government—they are subject to the same mix of magical and practical reactions that affluent Westerners deploy against terrorist threats, illegal immigration, market collapse, and economic recession. Both the problem of well-being and the question of what makes life worthwhile are grounded in the mystery of existential discontent—the question as to why human beings, regardless of their external circumstances, are haunted by a sense of insufficiency and loss. While philosophers have often asked the most searching questions regarding the human condition, Jackson suggests that ethnographic method offers one of the most edifying ways of actually exploring those questions.
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cover of Life and Death in Central Apulia: Burial Practices and Italic Communities Between the Sixth and Third Centuries BCE

Life and Death in Central Apulia

Burial Practices and Italic Communities Between the Sixth and Third Centuries BCE

Bice Peruzzi

University of Wisconsin Press, 2027

Long overshadowed in ancient historiography, the Peucetians of Central Apulia are brought into focus for the first time in Life and Death in Central Apulia. Carefully examining Peucetian burial assemblages, archaeologist Bice Peruzzi traces a social history of this Italic people from the sixth to the third centuries BCE. She demonstrates that, far from being passive recipients of the more “advanced” cultures of their Greek or Roman neighbors, the Peucetians made nuanced, deliberate, and informed choices in the preparation and treatment of their dead, reflecting the complexities of individual, social, and cultural identities of the deceased. This indicates a mature culture, in full interaction with other Mediterranean peoples, and is visible and worthy of scholarly attention in its own right. This detailed study offers a fresh look at ancient Italy beyond the historiographic dominance of Greece and Rome and represents the recovery of one thread of a vibrant, ancient Mediterranean cultural tapestry.

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cover of Life and Death in a Venetian Convent: The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus Domini, 1395-1436

Life and Death in a Venetian Convent

The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus Domini, 1395-1436

Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni

University of Chicago Press, 2000

These works by Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni offer an intimate portrait of the women who inhabited the Venetian convent of Corpus Domini, where they shared a religious life bounded physically by the convent wall and organized temporally by the rhythms of work and worship. At the same time, they show how this cloistered community vibrated with news of the great ecclesiastical events of the day, such as the Great Western Schism and the Council of Constance.

While the chronicle recounts the history of the nuns' collective life, the necrology provides highly individualized biographies of nearly fifty women who died in the convent between 1395 and 1436. We follow the fascinating stories that led these women, from adolescent girls to elderly widows, to join the convent; and we learn of their cultural backgrounds and intellectual accomplishments, their ascetic practices and mystical visions, their charity and devotion to each other and their fortitude in the face of illness and death.

The personal and social meaning of religious devotion comes alive in these texts, the first of their kind to be translated into English.

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cover of Life and Death in the Ancient City of Teotihuacan: A Modern Paleodemographic Synthesis

Life and Death in the Ancient City of Teotihuacan

A Modern Paleodemographic Synthesis

Rebecca Storey

University of Alabama Press, 1992

Cities arose independently in both the Old World and in the pre-Columbian New World. Lacking written records, many of these New World cities can be studied only through archaeology, including the earliest pre-Columbian city, Teotihuacan, Mexico, one of the largest cities of its time (150 B.C. to A.D. 750). Thus, an important question is how similar New World cities are to their Old World counterparts.


Before recent times, the dense populations of cities made them unhealthy places because of poor sanitation and inadequate food supplies. Storey's research shows clearly that although Teotihuacan was a very different environment and culture from 17th-century London, these two great cities are comparable in terms of health problems and similar death rates.

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cover of Life and Death in the Central Highlands: An American Sergeant in the Vietnam War, 1968-1970

Life and Death in the Central Highlands

An American Sergeant in the Vietnam War, 1968-1970

James T. Gillam

University of North Texas Press, 2010

[more]
cover of Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983

Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983

Tim Lawrence

Duke University Press, 2016

As the 1970s gave way to the 80s, New York's party scene entered a ferociously inventive period characterized by its creativity, intensity, and hybridity. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor chronicles this tumultuous time, charting the sonic and social eruptions that took place in the city’s subterranean party venues as well as the way they cultivated breakthrough movements in art, performance, video, and film. Interviewing DJs, party hosts, producers, musicians, artists, and dancers, Tim Lawrence illustrates how the relatively discrete post-disco, post-punk, and hip hop scenes became marked by their level of plurality, interaction, and convergence. He also explains how the shifting urban landscape of New York supported the cultural renaissance before gentrification, Reaganomics, corporate intrusion, and the spread of AIDS brought this gritty and protean time and place in American culture to a troubled denouement.
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cover of Life and Labor on the Border: Working People of Northeastern Sonora, Mexico, 1886–1986

Life and Labor on the Border

Working People of Northeastern Sonora, Mexico, 1886–1986

Josiah McC. Heyman

University of Arizona Press, 1991

For thousands of Mexican laborers, life among the United States border represents an opportunity both to earn wages and to gain access to consumer goods; for anthropologist Josiah Heyman this labor force presents an opportunity to gain a better understanding of working people, "to uncover the order underlying the history of waged lives." 

Life and Labor on the Border traces the development of the urban working class in northern Sonora over the period of a century. Drawing on an extensive collection of life histories, Heyman describes what has happened to families over several generations as people have left the countryside to work for American-owned companies in northern Sonora or to cross the border to find other employment. 

Heyman searches for the origins of "working classness" in these family histories, revealing aspects of life that strengthen people' s involvement with a consumer economy, including the role of everyday objects like sewing machines, cars, and stoves. He considers the consequences of changing political and economic tides, and also the effects on family life of the new role of women in the labor force. Within the broad sweep of family chronicles, key junctures in individual lives—both personal and historical crises—offer additional insights into social class dynamics. 

Heyman's work dispels the notion that border inhabitants are uniformly impoverished or corrupted by proximity to the United States. These life stories instead convey the positive sense of people's goals in life and reveal the origins of a distinctive way of life in the Borderlands.
[more]
cover of Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands: The Geoarchaeology of an Ancient Society

Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands

The Geoarchaeology of an Ancient Society

Curtis E. Larsen

University of Chicago Press, 1983

According to archeological and historical records, the Bahrain Islands of the Arabian Gulf were the home of a flourishing civilization four thousant years ago. Then, as now, these islands served as an important locus of maritime trade, but they were also characterized as a land of copious artesian springs and fertile fields. Modern Bahrain, in contrast, is beset by environmental and demographic problems: the depletion of the artesian water supply, abandonment of rural agricultural lands, and rapid population growth. In this exemplary interdisciplinary study, Curtis E. Larsen combines archeological, geological, historical, and anthropological methods to reconstruct the paleoenvironmental and socioeconomic context that links Bahrain's present to its past.
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cover of Life and Letters of General W. H. L. Wallace

Life and Letters of General W. H. L. Wallace

Isabel Wallace. Foreword by John Y. Simon

Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Originally published in 1909, this biography by Isabel Wallace recounts the life of her adoptive father, the little-recognized William Hervy Lamme Wallace, the highest-ranking Union officer to fall at the battle of Shiloh.

Born in 1821 in Ohio, Wallace and his family moved to Illinois in 1834, where he was educated at Rock Springs Seminary in Mount Morris. On his way to study law with Abraham Lincoln in Springfield in 1844, Wallace was persuaded by local attorney T. Lyle Dickey, a close friend of Lincoln, to join his practice in Ottawa instead. Wallace eventually married Dickey’s daughter, Martha Ann, in 1851.

When the Civil War broke out, both Wallace and Dickey immediately volunteered for service with the Eleventh Illinois, which assembled in Springfield. Wallace was elected as the unit’s colonel; a successful lawyer, a friend of President Lincoln, a generation older than most privates, and an officer with Mexican War experience, he was entirely suited for such command. Wallace was appointed brigadier general for his performance at Fort Donelson, the first notable Union victory in the Civil War. Wallace’s troops had saved the day, although the Eleventh Illinois had lost nearly two-thirds of its men. He then moved with his troops to Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, where Confederates launched a surprise attack on the forces of Major General Ulysses S. Grant at Shiloh Church on Sunday, April 6, 1862. Wallace, who held only temporary command of one of Grant’s six divisions, fought bravely but was mortally wounded as he began to withdraw his men on the afternoon of the battle. His wife, who had arrived at Pittsburg Landing by steamer on the day of the battle, was at his side when he died three days later. Grant praised Wallace in 1868 as “the equal of the best, if not the very best, of the Volunteer Generals with me at the date of his death.”

Isabel Wallace traces her father’s life from his upbringing in Ottawa through his education, his service in the Mexican War, his law practice, his courtship of and marriage to her mother, and his service in the Eleventh Illinois until his mortal injury at Shiloh. She also details his funeral and her and her mother’s life in the postwar years. Based on the copious letters and family papers of the general and his wife, the biography also provides historical information on federal politics of the period, including commentary on Lincoln’s campaign and election and on state politics, especially regarding T. Lyle Dickey, Wallace’s father-in-law and law partner, prominent Illinois politician, and associate of Lincoln. It is illustrated with fifteen black-and-white halftones.

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cover of Life and Thought in the Ancient Near East

Life and Thought in the Ancient Near East

Louis L. Orlin

University of Michigan Press, 2010

Intended for readers seeking insight into the day-to-day life of some of the world's most ancient peoples, Life and Thought in the Ancient Near East presents brief, fascinating explorations of key aspects of the civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Asia Minor, and Iran. With vignettes on agriculture, architecture, crafts and industries, literature, religion, topography, and history, Orlin has created something refreshingly unique: a modern guidebook to an ancient world. The book also reaches out to students of the Ancient Near Eastern World with essays on decipherments, comparative cultural developments between Egypt and Mesopotamia, and language and literature.

In addition to general readers, the book will be useful in the classroom as a text supplementing a more conventional introduction to Near Eastern Studies.

"Well-written and accessible, Life and Thought in the Ancient Near East deftly connects the past with present experience by drawing out the differences between, for instance, modern churches and ancient temples, and frequently employing biblical references. This simplicity together with connecting contemporary to ancient experience makes the text ideal for freshmen and general readers."
---Marc Cooper, Professor of History, Missouri State University

Now Professor Emeritus, Louis L. Orlin taught in the department of Ancient Near Eastern History and Literature at the University of Michigan for more than thirty years. He is the author and editor of several books, including Assyrian Colonies in Cappadocia and Ancient Near Eastern Literature: A Bibliography of One Thousand Items on the Cuneiform Literatures of the Ancient World.

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cover of Life and Thought in the Middle Ages

Life and Thought in the Middle Ages

Robert S. Hoyt, Editor

University of Minnesota Press, 1967

Life and Thought in the Middle Ages 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.

The period of the early Middle Ages - from the fourth to the eleventh centuries—used to be commonly called "the dark ages." Now that term has been discarded by scholars, who reject its implications as they recognize increasingly, the historical importance of the period. In this volume eight historians, in as many essays, discuss various aspects of the life and thought which prevailed during the centuries which extended from the time of the establishment of Germanic "successor states" in the western provinces of the Roman Empire to the appearance of some of the economic and feudal institutions which provided a basis for the civilization of the high Middle Ages.

The essay, by showing that a process of assimilation and synthesis of the Roman, Christian, and barbarian elements characterized life in the early Middle Ages, demonstrate that the significance of the period is far better indicated by words like "transition" or "transformation" than by the term "dark ages."

An essay by the late Professor Adolf Katzenellenbogen, "The Image of Christ in the Early Middle Ages," is illustrated with eighteen halftones showing examples of art of the period.

The other essays are "The Barbarian Kings of Lawgivers and Judges" by Katherine Fischer Drew; "Of Towns and Trade" by Robert S. Lopez; "The Two Levels of Feudalism" by Joseph R. Strayer; "The Life of the Silent Majority" by Lynn White, Jr; "Beowulf and Bede" by John C. McGalliard; "Viking - Tunnit - Eskimo" by the late T. J. Oleson; "The Church, Reform, and Renaissance in the Early Middle Ages" by Karl F. Morrison.

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cover of Life and Times of Cultural Studies: The Politics and Transformation of the Structures of Knowledge

Life and Times of Cultural Studies

The Politics and Transformation of the Structures of Knowledge

Richard E. Lee

Duke University Press, 2003

Moving world-systems analysis into the cultural realm, Richard E. Lee locates the cultural studies movement within a broad historical and geopolitical framework. He illuminates how order and conflict have been reflected and negotiated in the sphere of knowledge production by situating the emergence of cultural studies at the intersection of post–1945 international and British politics and a two-hundred-year history of conservative critical practice. Tracing British criticism from the period of the French Revolution through the 1960s, he describes how cultural studies in its infancy recombined the elite literary critical tradition with the First New Left’s concerns for history and popular culture—just as the liberal consensus began to come apart.

Lee tracks the intellectual project of cultural studies as it developed over three decades, beginning with its institutional foundation at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). He links work at the CCCS to the events of 1968 and explores cultural studies’ engagement with theory in the debates on structuralism. He considers the shift within the discipline away from issues of working-class culture toward questions of identity politics in the fields of race and gender. He follows the expansion of the cultural studies project from Britain to Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States. Contextualizing the development and spread of cultural studies within the longue durée structures of knowledge in the modern world-system, Lee assesses its past and future as an agent of political and social change.

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cover of Life and Times of a Big River: An Uncommon Natural History of Alaska's Upper Yukon

Life and Times of a Big River

An Uncommon Natural History of Alaska's Upper Yukon

Peter J. Marchand

University of Alaska Press, 2015

When Richard Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971, eighty million acres were flagged as possible national park land. Field expeditions were tasked with recording what was contained in these vast acres. Under this decree, five men were sent into the sprawling, roadless interior of Alaska, unsure of what they’d encounter and ultimately responsible for the fate of four thousand pristine acres.
Life and Times of a Big River follows Peter J. Marchand and his team of biologists as they set out to explore the land that would ultimately become the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. Their encounters with strange plants, rare insects, and little-known mammals bring to life a land once thought to be static and monotonous. And their struggles to navigate and adapt to an unforgiving environment capture the rigorous demands of remote field work. Weaving in and out of Marchand's narrative is an account of the natural and cultural history of the area as it relates to the expedition and the region’s Native peoples. Life and Times of a Big River chorincles this riveting, one-of-a-kind journey of uncertainty and discovery from a disparate (and at one point desperate) group of biologists.
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cover of Life and Works

Life and Works

Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus

Catholic University of America Press, 1998

This volume presents the earliest and most important life of Gregory Thaumaturgus, preached by St. Gregory of Nyssa, and all the works that can be attributed to Gregory Thamumaturgus himself. It includes his Address of Thanksgiving to his teacher Origen; his Christian adaptation and interpretation of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes; his regulations restoring order in the Christian community after an invasion by the Goths; a remarkable treatise on God's ability to suffer and another on the Trinity; and two small texts that may or may not have been written by him.
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cover of Life at Swift Water Place: Northwest Alaska at the Threshold of European Contact

Life at Swift Water Place

Northwest Alaska at the Threshold of European Contact

Edited by Doug D. Anderson and Wanni W. Anderson

University of Alaska Press, 2019

This is a multidisciplinary study of the early contact period of Alaskan Native history that follows a major hunting and fishing Inupiaq group at a time of momentous change in their lifeways. The Amilgaqtau yaagmiut were the most powerful group in the Kobuk River area. But their status was forever transformed thanks to two major factors. They faced a food shortage prompted by the decline in caribou, one of their major foods. This was also the time when European and Asian trade items were first introduced into their traditional society. The first trade items to arrive, a decade ahead of the Europeans themselves, were glass beads and pieces of metal that the Inupiat expertly incorporated into their traditional implements. This book integrates ethnohistoric, bio-anthropological, archaeological, and oral historical analyses.
 
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cover of Life at the Margins of the State: Comparative Landscapes from the Old and New Worlds

Life at the Margins of the State

Comparative Landscapes from the Old and New Worlds

Alicia M. Boswell

University Press of Colorado, 2022

Life at the Margins of the State examines the sociopolitical and cultural nuances, negotiations, and strategies of resistance developed by marginal communities—including frontiers, borderlands, borders, and other locations where there was a substantive difference in scale from more hegemonic political entities. The volume explores not just the nature of interactions in the political margins but the political, social, and economic trajectories of the societies that formed there.
 
Case studies from the New and Old Worlds—including historic California, medieval Iceland, ancient Mesoamerica, ancient Nubia, colonial El Salvador, the prehistoric Levant, pre-Columbian Amazon, Africa’s historic central Sahel, and ancient Peru—offer novel perspectives on how borderland societies adapted to the unique human and natural environments of these liminal spaces. Contributors draw on archaeological evidence as well as historical documents and linguistic data to facilitate the documentation of local histories and the strategies employed by communities living in or near ancient states and empires.
 
This close study of groups on the margins shows that peripheral polities are not simply the by-products of complexity emanating from a political core and demonstrates that traditional assumptions and models need to be reconsidered.
 
Contributors:
Tara D. Carter, Mikael Fauvelle, Elena A.A. Garcea, Esteban Gomez, Scott MacEachern, Claire Novotny, Bradley J Parker, Erin Smith, John H. Walker
 
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cover of Life between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties

Life between Two Deaths, 1989-2001

U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties

Phillip E. Wegner

Duke University Press, 2009

Through virtuoso readings of significant works of American film, television, and fiction, Phillip E. Wegner demonstrates that the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 fostered a unique consciousness and represented a moment of immense historical possibilities now at risk of being forgotten in the midst of the “war on terror.” Wegner argues that 9/11 should be understood as a form of what Jacques Lacan called the “second death,” an event that repeats an earlier “fall,” in this instance the collapse of the Berlin Wall. By describing 9/11 as a repetition, Wegner does not deny its significance. Rather, he argues that it was only with the fall of the towers that the symbolic universe of the Cold War was finally destroyed and a true “new world order,” in which the United States assumed disturbing new powers, was put into place.

Wegner shows how phenomena including the debate on globalization, neoliberal notions of the end of history, the explosive growth of the Internet, the efflorescence of new architectural and urban planning projects, developments in literary and cultural production, new turns in theory and philosophy, and the rapid growth of the antiglobalization movement came to characterize the long nineties. He offers readings of some of the most interesting cultural texts of the era: Don DeLillo’s White Noise; Joe Haldeman’s Forever trilogy; Octavia Butler’s Parable novels; the Terminator films; the movies Fight Club, Independence Day, Cape Fear, and Ghost Dog; and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In so doing, he illuminates fundamental issues concerning narrative, such as how beginnings and endings are recognized and how relationships between events are constructed.

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cover of Life beyond the Boundaries: Constructing Identity in Edge Regions of the North American Southwest

Life beyond the Boundaries

Constructing Identity in Edge Regions of the North American Southwest

Karen Harry

University Press of Colorado, 2018

Life beyond the Boundaries explores identity formation on the edges of the ancient Southwest. Focusing on some of the more poorly understood regions, including the Jornada Mogollon, the Gallina, and the Pimería Alta, the authors use methods drawn from material culture science, anthropology, and history to investigate themes related to the construction of social identity along the perimeters of the American Southwest.

Through an archaeological lens, the volume examines the social experiences of people who lived in edge regions. Through mobility and the development of extensive social networks, people living in these areas were introduced to the ideas and practices of other cultural groups. As their spatial distances from core areas increased, the degree to which they participated in the economic, social, political, and ritual practices of ancestral core areas increasingly varied. As a result, the social identities of people living in edge zones were often—though not always—fluid and situational.

Drawing on an increase of available information and bringing new attention to understudied areas, the book will be of interest to scholars of Southwestern archaeology and other researchers interested in the archaeology of low-populated and decentralized regions and identity formation. Life beyond the Boundaries considers the various roles that edge regions played in local and regional trajectories of the prehistoric and protohistoric Southwest and how place influenced the development of social identity. 

Contributors: Lewis Borck, Dale S. Brenneman, Jeffery J. Clark, Severin Fowles, Patricia A. Gilman, Lauren E. Jelinek, Myles R. Miller, Barbara J. Mills, Matthew A. Peeples, Kellam Throgmorton, James T. Watson

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