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Hailed at the time of its publication in 1969, Bill Hosokawa's Nisei remains an inspiring account of the original Japanese immigrants and their role in the development of the West. Hosokawa recounts the ordeals faced by the immigrant generation and their American-born offspring, the Nisei; the ill-advised government decisions that led to their uprooting during World War II; how they withstood harsh camp life; and their courageous efforts to prove their loyalty to the United States.

As Hosokawa additionally demonstrates, since World War II, Japanese Americans have achieved exceptional social, economic, and political progress. Their efforts led to apologies by four U.S. presidents for wartime injustices and redress through the landmark Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Brought up-to-date in this newly revised edition, Nisei details the transformation of these "quiet Americans" from despised security risks to respected citizens.

Richard Nixon and the film industry arrived in Southern California in the same year, 1913. In Nixon and the Silver Screen, Mark Feeney offers a new and often revelatory way of thinking about one of our most controversial presidents: by looking not just at Nixon's career—but Hollywood's. Nixon viewed more movies while in office than any other president, and Feeney argues that Nixon’s story, both in politics and in his personal life, is nothing if not quintessentially American. Bearing in mind the events that shaped his presidency from 1969 to 1974, Feeney sees aspects of Nixon’s character—and the nation’s—refracted and reimagined in the more than 500 films Nixon watched during his tenure in the White House. The verdict? Nixon’s legacy, for better or worse, is forever representative of the “Silver Age” in Hollywood, shaping and being shaped by that flickering silver screen.

Was it an omen? Richard Nixon and the film industry arrived in Southern California in the same year, 1913. As Mark Feeney relates in this unusual and unusually absorbing book, Nixon and the movies have shared a long and complex history. Some of that history—the president's multiple screenings of Patton before and during the invasion of Cambodia, or Oliver Stone's Nixon—is well known. Yet much more is not. How many are aware, for example, that Nixon was an enthusiastic filmgoer who watched more than five hundred movies during his presidency?

Nixon at the Movies takes a new and often revelatory approach to looking at Nixon's career—and Hollywood's. From the obvious (All the President's Men) to the less so (Elvis Presley movies and Nixon's relationship to '60s youth culture) to several onscreen "alternate" Nixons (Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, Tony Curtis in The Sweet Smell of Success, Gene Hackman in The Conversation), Feeney sees aspects of Nixon's character, and the nation's, refracted and reimagined in film. Conversely, Feeney argues that Nixon can help us see the movies in a new light, making a strong case for Nixon as the movies' tutelary deity during the early '70s, playing a role in Hollywood's Silver Age comparable to FDR's during its Golden Age.

Stylishly written and bracingly eclectic, Nixon at the Movies draws on biography, politics, cultural history, and film criticism to show just how deeply in the twentieth-century American grain lies the pair of seemingly incongruous nouns in its title. As Nixon once remarked to Garry Wills: "Isn't that a hell of a thing, that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?"

Most analysts have deemed Richard Nixon’s challenge to the judicial liberalism of the Warren Supreme Court a failure—“a counterrevolution that wasn’t.” Nixon’s Court offers an alternative assessment. Kevin J. McMahon reveals a Nixon whose public rhetoric was more conservative than his administration’s actions and whose policy towards the Court was more subtle than previously recognized. Viewing Nixon’s judicial strategy as part political and part legal, McMahon argues that Nixon succeeded substantially on both counts.

Many of the issues dear to social conservatives, such as abortion and school prayer, were not nearly as important to Nixon. Consequently, his nominations for the Supreme Court were chosen primarily to advance his “law and order” and school desegregation agendas—agendas the Court eventually endorsed. But there were also political motivations to Nixon’s approach: he wanted his judicial policy to be conservative enough to attract white southerners and northern white ethnics disgruntled with the Democratic party but not so conservative as to drive away moderates in his own party. In essence, then, he used his criticisms of the Court to speak to members of his “Silent Majority” in hopes of disrupting the long-dominant New Deal Democratic coalition. 

           

For McMahon, Nixon’s judicial strategy succeeded not only in shaping the course of constitutional law in the areas he most desired but also in laying the foundation of an electoral alliance that would dominate presidential politics for a generation.

Kwame Nkrumah, who won independence for Ghana in 1957, was the first African statesman to achieve world recognition. Nkrumah and his movement also brought about the end of independent chieftaincy—one of the most fundamental changes in the history of Ghana.

Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples’ Party was committed not only to the rapid termination of British colonial rule but also to the elimination of chiefly power. This book is an account of Kwame Nkrumah and his government’s long struggle to wrest administrative control of the Ghanaian countryside from the chiefs. Based largely upon previously unstudied documentation in Ghana, this study charts the government’s frustrated attempts to democratize local government and the long and bitter campaigns mounted by many southern chiefs to resist their political marginalization.

Between 1951 and the creation of the First Republic in 1960, Ghanaian governments sought to discard the chiefly principle in local government, then to weaken chieftaincy by attrition and eventually, by altering the legal basis of chieftaincy, to incorporate and control a considerably altered chieftaincy. The book demonstrates that chieftaincy was consciously and systematically reconstructed in the decade of the 1950s with implications which can still be felt in modern Ghana.

Winner of the Premio Iberoamericano Book Award in 1997 (Spanish Edition)

What form does the crisis of modernity take in Latin America when societies are politically demobilized and there is no revolutionary agenda in sight? How does postmodern criticism reflect on enlightenment and utopia in a region marked by incomplete modernization, new waves of privatization, great masses of excluded peoples, and profound sociocultural heterogeneity? In No Apocalypse, No Integration Martín Hopenhayn examines the social and philosophical implications of the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of leftist and state-sponsored social planning in Latin America.
With the failure of utopian movements that promised social change, the rupture of the link between the production of knowledge and practical intervention, and the defeat of modernization and development policy established after World War II, Latin American intellectuals and militants have been left at an impasse without a vital program of action. Hopenhayn analyzes these crises from a theoretical perspective and calls upon Latin American intellectuals to reevaluate their objects of study, their political reality, and their society’s cultural production, as well as to seek within their own history the elements for a new collective discourse. Challenging the notion that strict adherence to a single paradigm of action can rescue intellectual and cultural movements, Hopenhayn advocates a course of epistemological pluralism, arguing that such an approach values respect for difference and for cultural and theoretical diversity and heterodoxy.
This essay collection will appeal to readers of sociology, public policy, philosophy, cultural theory, and Latin American history and culture, as well as to those with an interest in Latin America’s current transition.

The Civil War was barely over before Southerners and other students of the war began to examine the Confederate high command in search of an explanation for the South's failure. Although years of research failed to show that the South's defeat was due to a single, overriding cause, the actions of the Southern leaders during the war were certainly among the reasons the South lost the war.

In No Band of Brothers, Steven Woodworth explores, through a series of essays, various facets of the way the Confederacy waged its unsuccessful war for secession. He examines Jefferson Davis and some of his more important generals, including Pierre G. T. Beauregard, Leonidas Polk, Joseph E. Johnston, Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson; the Confederacy's strategic plans; and the South's success in making competent officers out of men with very little military preparation.

Woodworth particularly looks at the personalities and personal relationships that affected the course and outcome of the war. What made a good general? What could make an otherwise able man a failure as a general? What role did personal friendships or animosities play in the Confederacy's top command assignments and decisions? How successful was the Confederacy in making competent generals out of its civilian leaders? In what ways did Jefferson Davis succeed or fail in maximizing the chances for the success of his cause?

In analyzing the Confederate leadership, Woodworth reveals some weaknesses, many strengths, and much new information. No Band of Brothers will be an important addition to Civil War scholarship and will be welcomed by professional historians, amateur historians, students, and the general reader alike.

A mere handful of battlefields have come to epitomize the anguish and pain of America's Civil War: Gettysburg, Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Chickamauga. Yet another name belongs on that infamous list: Stones River, the setting for Peter Cozzens's No Better Place to Die.
 
It was here that both the Union and Confederate armies lost over one-quarter of their forces in battle casualties. The Confederacy's defeat at Stones River unleashed a wave of dissension that crippled the army's high command and ultimately closed Tennessee to the South for two years. The loss deterred the British and French from coming to the aid of the South in the Civil War, with tragic effects for the Southern cause.
 
In the 126 years since the guns fell silent at Stones River, few books have examined the bloody clash and its impact on the war's subsequent outcome. No Better Place to Die recounts the events and strategies that brought the two armies to the banks of this central Tennessee river on December 31, 1862. Cozzens re-creates the battle itself, following the movements and performance of individual regiments. A series of maps clarifies the combat activity.
 
Cozzens frequently lets the men who fought the battle speak for themselves, through letters, diaries, memoirs, and battlefield communications. Here we learn about such critical moments as General Philip Sheridan's gallant defense along the Wilkinson Pike, one of the war's most tenacious stands against overwhelming odds, and the bravery in battle exemplified by Brekenridge's attack on the Union left, a doomed assault with the poignancy of Pickett's charge.
 
Over twenty thousand Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured in the bloody New Year's battle of Stone's River. The impact of their struggle extended far beyond the thousands of shattered human lives, ultimately imperiling the fortunes of the Confederacy. No Better Place to Die pays tribute to the heroes, the scoundrels, the mistakes, the bravery, and the grief at Stone's River.

Investigating the cultural, social, and political histories of punishment during ninety years surrounding the 1838 abolition of slavery in Jamaica, Diana Paton challenges standard historiographies of slavery and discipline. The abolition of slavery in Jamaica, as elsewhere, entailed the termination of slaveholders’ legal right to use violence—which they defined as “punishment”—against those they had held as slaves. Paton argues that, while slave emancipation involved major changes in the organization and representation of punishment, there was no straightforward transition from corporal punishment to the prison or from privately inflicted to state-controlled punishment. Contesting the dichotomous understanding of pre-modern and modern modes of power that currently dominates the historiography of punishment, she offers critical readings of influential theories of power and resistance, including those of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Ranajit Guha.

No Bond but the Law reveals the longstanding and intimate relationship between state formation and private punishment. The construction of a dense, state-organized system of prisons began not with emancipation but at the peak of slave-based wealth in Jamaica, in the 1780s. Jamaica provided the paradigmatic case for British observers imagining and evaluating the emancipation process. Paton’s analysis moves between imperial processes on the one hand and Jamaican specificities on the other, within a framework comparing developments regarding punishment in Jamaica with those in the U.S. South and elsewhere. Emphasizing the gendered nature of penal policy and practice throughout the emancipation period, Paton is attentive to the ways in which the actions of ordinary Jamaicans and, in particular, of women prisoners, shaped state decisions.

In 1959, a Black man named Eldrewey Stearns was beaten by Houston police after being stopped for a traffic violation. He was not the first to suffer such brutality, but the incident sparked Stearns’s conscience and six months later he was leading the first sit-in west of the Mississippi River. No Color Is My Kind, first published in 1997, introduced readers to Stearns, including his work as a civil rights leader and lawyer in Houston’s desegregation movement between 1959 and 1963. This remarkable and important history, however, was nearly lost to bipolar affective disorder. Stearns was a fifty-two-year-old patient in a Galveston psychiatric hospital when Thomas Cole first met him in 1984. Over the course of a decade, Cole and Stearns slowly recovered the details of Stearns’s life before his slide into mental illness, writing a story that is more relevant today than ever.

In this new edition, Cole fills in the gaps between the late 1990s and now, providing an update on the progress of civil rights in Houston and Stearns himself. He also reflects on his tumultuous and often painful collaboration with Stearns, challenging readers to be part of his journey to understand the struggles of a Black man’s complex life. At once poignant, tragic, and emotionally charged, No Color Is My Kind is essential reading as the current movement for racial reconciliation gathers momentum.

No Color Is My Kind is an uncommon chronicle of identity, fate, and compassion as two men—one Jewish and one African American—set out to rediscover a life lost to manic depression and alcoholism. In 1984, Thomas Cole discovered Eldrewey Stearns in a Galveston psychiatric hospital. Stearns, a fifty-two-year-old black man, complained that although he felt very important, no one understood him. Over the course of the next decade, Cole and Stearns, in a tumultuous and often painful collaboration, recovered Stearns’ life before his slide into madness—as a young boy in Galveston and San Augustine and as a civil rights leader and lawyer who sparked Houston’s desegregation movement between 1959 and 1963. While other southern cities rocked with violence, Houston integrated its public accommodations peacefully. In these pages appear figures such as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Leon Jaworski, and Dan Rather, all of whom—along with Stearns—maneuvered and conspired to integrate the city quickly and calmly. Weaving the tragic story of a charismatic and deeply troubled leader into the record of a major historic event, Cole also explores his emotionally charged collaboration with Stearns. Their poignant relationship sheds powerful and healing light on contemporary race relations in America, and especially on issues of power, authority, and mental illness.

“No condition is permanent,” a popular West African slogan, expresses Sara S. Berry’s theme: the obstacles to African agrarian development never stay the same.  Her book explores the complex way African economy and society are tied to issues of land and labor, offering a comparative study of agrarian change in four rural economies in sub-Saharan Africa, including two that experienced long periods of expanding peasant production for export (southern Ghana and southwestern Nigeria), a settler economy (central Kenya), and a rural labor reserve (northeastern Zambia). 
    The resources available to African farmers have changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century.  Berry asserts that the ways resources are acquired and used are shaped not only by  the incorporation of a rural area into colonial (later national) and global political economies, but also by conflicts over culture, power, and property within and beyond rural communities.  By tracing the various debates over rights to resources and their effects on agricultural production and farmers’ uses of income, Berry presents agrarian change as a series of on-going processes rather than a set of discrete “successes” and “failures.” 
    No Condition Is Permanent enriches the discussion of agrarian development by showing how  multidisciplinary studies of local agrarian history can constructively contribute to development policy.  The book is a contribution both to African agrarian history and to debates over the role of agriculture in Africa’s recent economic crises.

It is a curious and relatively little-known fact that for two decades—from the end of World War II until the late 1960s—existentialism’s most fertile ground outside of Europe was in the Middle East, and Jean-Paul Sartre was the Arab intelligentsia’s uncontested champion. In the Arab world, neither before nor since has another Western intellectual been so widely translated, debated, and celebrated.
 
By closely following the remarkable career of Arab existentialism, Yoav Di-Capua reconstructs the cosmopolitan milieu of the generation that tried to articulate a political and philosophical vision for an egalitarian postcolonial world. He tells this story by touring a fascinating selection of Arabic and Hebrew archives, including unpublished diaries and interviews. Tragically, the warm and hopeful relationships forged between Arab intellectuals, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and others ended when, on the eve of the 1967 war, Sartre failed to embrace the Palestinian cause. Today, when the prospect of global ethical engagement seems to be slipping ever farther out of reach, No Exit provides a timely, humanistic account of the intellectual hopes, struggles, and victories that shaped the Arab experience of decolonization and a delightfully wide-ranging excavation of existentialism’s non-Western history.

The first new biography of America's foremost woman of letters in twenty years, No Gifts from Chance presents an Edith Wharton for our times. Far from the emotionally withdrawn and neurasthenic victim of earlier portraits, she is revealed here as an ambitious, disciplined, and self-determined woman who fashioned life to her own desires. Drawing on government records, legal and medical documents, and recently opened collections of Wharton's letters, Shari Benstock's biography offers new information on what have been called the key mysteries of her life: the question of her paternity, her troubled relations with her mother and older brothers, her marriage to manic-depressive Teddy Wharton, and her extramarital affair with Morton Fullerton.

At a moment when performance art and performance generally are at the center of the international art world, Frazer Ward offers us insightful readings of major performance pieces by the likes of Acconci, Burden, Abramovic, and Hsieh, and confronts the twisting and troubled relationship that performance art has had with the spectator and the public sphere. Ward contends that the ethical challenges with which performance art confronts its viewers speak to the reimagining of the audience, in terms that suggest the collapse of notions like “public” and “community.” A thoughtful, even urgent discussion of the relationship between art and the audience that will appeal to a broad range of art historians, artists, and others interested in constructions of the public sphere.

America's pastime has roots in New Jersey dating back to 1846 when the first baseball game using modern rules was played on Elysian Fields in Hoboken. The sport thrived throughout the state until the 1950s when fans began to turn away from local competition, preferring to watch games broadcast on television, to take a trip to see a major league team in New York, or to frequent newly air-conditioned movie theaters or bowling alleys. By the early 1990s, however, a growing disenchantment with the high ticket prices and corporate atmosphere of Major League Baseball led to the revival of a purer form of the sport in the Garden State.

In No Minor Accomplishment, sports historian and New Jersey native Bob Golon tells the story of the state's baseball scene since the Trenton Thunder arrived in 1994. Drawing on interviews with team owners and employees, industry executives and fans, Golon goes behind the scenes to show how maintaining a minor league ball club can be a risky business venture. Stadiums cost millions to build, and a team full of talented players does not immediately guarantee success. Instead, each of the eight minor league and independent professional teams in the state must tailor themselves to the communities in which they are situated. Shrewd marketing is necessary to attract fans, but Golon also explains how, unlike Major League Baseball, the business aspect of the minor and independent leagues is not something the average spectator notices.  For the fans, baseball in New Jersey is wholesome, exciting family entertainment.

The Cleveland Indians of 1928 were a far cry from the championship team of 1920. They had begun the decade as the best team in all of baseball, but over the following eight years, their owner died, the great Tris Speaker retired in the face of a looming scandal, and the franchise was in terrible shape. Seeing opportunity in the upheaval, Cleveland real estate mogul Alva Bradley purchased the ball club in 1927, infused it with cash, and filled its roster with star players such as Bob Feller, Earl Averill, and Hal Trosky. He aligned himself with civic leaders to push for a gigantic new stadium that—along with the team that played in it—would be the talk of the baseball world.

Then came the stock market crash of 1929. Municipal Stadium was built, despite the collapse of the industrial economy in Rust Belt cities, but the crowds did not follow. Always the shrewd businessman, Bradley had engineered a lease agreement with the city of Cleveland that included an out clause, and he exercised that option after the 1934 season, leaving the 80,000-seat, multimillion-dollar stadium without a tenant.

In No Money, No Beer, No Pennants, Scott H. Longert gives us a lively history of the ups and downs of a legendary team and its iconic players as they persevered through internal unrest and the turmoil of the Great Depression, pursuing a pennant that didn’t come until 1948. Illustrated with period photographs and filled with anecdotes of the great players, this book will delight fans of baseball and fans of Cleveland.

No More Separate Spheres! challenges the limitations of thinking about American literature and culture within the narrow rubric of “male public” and “female private” spheres from the founders to the present. With provocative essays by an array of cutting-edge critics with diverse viewpoints, this collection examines the ways that the separate spheres binary has malingered unexamined in feminist criticism, American literary studies, and debates on the public sphere. It exemplifies new ways of analyzing gender, breaks through old paradigms, and offers a primer on feminist thinking for the twenty-first century.

Using American literary studies as a way to talk about changing categories of analysis, these essays discuss the work of such major authors as Catharine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Catharine Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, María Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cynthia Kadohata, Chang Rae-Lee, and Samuel Delany. No More Separate Spheres! shows scholars and students different ways that gender can be approached and incorporated into literary interpretations. Feisty and provocative, it provides a forceful analysis of the limitations of any theory of gender that applies only to women, and urges suspicion of any argument that posits “woman” as a universal or uniform category.

By bringing together essays from the influential special issue of American Literature of the same name, a number of classic essays, and several new pieces commissioned for this volume, No More Separate Spheres! will be an ideal teaching tool, providing a key supplementary text in the American literature classroom.

Contributors. José F. Aranda, Lauren Berlant, Cathy N. Davidson, Judith Fetterley, Jessamyn Hatcher, Amy Kaplan, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, You-me Park, Marjorie Pryse, Elizabeth Renker, Ryan Schneider, Melissa Solomon, Siobhan Somerville, Gayle Wald , Maurice Wallace

Co-Winner of the 2004 Colorado Endowment for the Humanities Publication Prize

From burying scurvy victims up to their necks in the earth to drinking kerosene mixed with sugar to treat influenza, mid-nineteenth century medicine in the mining communities of the West usually consisted of home remedies that were often remarkable for their inventiveness but tragically random in their effectiveness. Only as a desperate last resort would people turn to the medical community, which had developed a deplorable reputation for quackery and charlatanism because of its lack of licensing regulations and uniform educational standards. No One Ailing Except a Physician takes readers back to those free-wheeling days in the mining towns and the dark recesses of the mines themselves, a time when illness or injury was usually survived more due to sheer luck than the interventions of medicine.

In this important new contribution to both mining and medical history, historians Duane A. Smith and Ronald C. Brown present a detailed analysis of the ailments that confronted the miners and the methods with which they and their doctors attempted to "cure" them. The occupational hazards of mining, with its strenuous labor and exposure to the elements, contributed to the miners' vulnerability to disease and injury, which was further worsened by the typical miner's refusal to heed prevailing medical wisdom and common sense, often leading to easily preventable diseases such as scurvy. And because medical science of the era had not progressed much beyond that of the ancient Greeks, such debilitating diseases such as cholera, influenza, dysentery, and malaria proved to be virtual death sentences, to say nothing of occupational accidents with fires and explosions, mine collapses, and safety cage mishaps.

No Ordinary Letter reconstructs the intellectual world of rural South African women who, in 1959, mounted determined campaigns across Natal to resist the expanding policies of apartheid. Challenging Bantu Authorities, detrimental agricultural schemes, restrictions on movement, and the extension of pass laws to women, these organizers drew on knowledge rooted in the lived experience of farmwork, household management, and community governance. The book shows how women assessed their political circumstances and crafted strategies—some peaceful, some destructive—to make themselves heard in a system structured to ignore them.

Foregrounding women as thinkers as well as activists, No Ordinary Letter reveals how rural organizers theorized their positions under apartheid law and within patriarchal households and communities. Their repertoire of political understanding encompassed the daily violence of apartheid, local cultures of honor that enabled them to shame others into action, and finely honed skills for navigating the authority of elders, in-laws, and traditional leaders. When the Camperdown Native Commissioner asked why a group had destroyed government property, they replied, “We were really writing a letter to the authorities which they could read. If we had written an ordinary letter, you would not have replied.” Their explanation captures how an underlying logic of violence became a vehicle for extraordinary political communication.

At the same time, the book underscores the profound constraints shaping women’s choices: poverty, state repression, and the multiple patriarchies embedded within both the apartheid state and African communities. These overlapping systems meant that the immediate enforcers of apartheid policy were often African men with their own stakes in patriarchal arrangements. No Ordinary Letter offers a groundbreaking account of how rural women understood, navigated, and contested these entangled structures of power, providing a fresh view on political thought and resistance in apartheid South Africa.

A rash of small wars erupted after the Cold War ended in Africa, the Balkans, and other parts of the former communist world. The wars were in “inter-zones,” the spaces left where weak states had withdrawn or collapsed. Consequently the debate over what constitutes war has returned to basics. No Peace, No War departs from the usual analysis that considers the new wars mindless mass actions to offer the paradoxical idea that to understand war one must deny war special status. Rather than leave war to the security specialists, these writers attempt to grasp its character as one among many aspects of social reality.

No Permanent Waves boldly enters the ongoing debates over the utility of the "wave" metaphor for capturing the complex history of women's rights by offering fresh perspectives on the diverse movements that comprise U.S. feminism, past and present. Seventeen essays--both original and reprinted--address continuities, conflicts, and transformations among women's movements in the United States from the early nineteenth century through today.

A respected group of contributors from diverse generations and backgrounds argue for new chronologies, more inclusive conceptualizations of feminist agendas and participants, and fuller engagements with contestations around particular issues and practices. Race, class, and sexuality are explored within histories of women's rights and feminism as well as the cultural and intellectual currents and social and political priorities that marked movements for women's advancement and liberation. These essays question whether the concept of waves surging and receding can fully capture the complexities of U.S. feminisms and suggest models for reimagining these histories from radio waves to hip-hop.

In No Place Like Home, Linda Hasselstrom ponders the changing nature of community in the modern West, where old family ranches are being turned into subdivisions and historic towns are evolving into mean, congested cities. Her scrutiny, like her life, moves back and forth between her ranch on the South Dakota prairie and her house in an old neighborhood at the edge of downtown Cheyenne, Wyoming. The vignettes that form the foundation of her consideration are drawn from the communities she has known during her life in the West, reflecting on how they have grown, thrived, failed, and changed, and highlighting the people and decisions that shaped them. Hasselstrom’s ruminations are both intensely personal and universal. She laments the disappearance of the old prairie ranches and the rural sense of community and mutual responsibility that sustained them, but she also discovers that a spirit of community can be found in unlikely places and among unlikely people. The book defines her idea of how a true community should work, and the kind of place she wants to live in. Her voice is unique and honest, both compassionate and cranky, full of love for the harsh, hauntingly beautiful short-grass prairie that is her home, and rich in understanding of the intricacies of the natural world around her and the infinite potentials of human commitment, hope, and greed. For anyone curious about the state of the contemporary West, Hasselstrom offers a report from the front, where nature and human aspirations are often at odds, and where the concepts of community and mutual responsibility are being redefined.

Caroline Crosby's life took a wandering course between her 1834 marriage to Jonathan Crosby and conversion to the infant Mormon Church and her departure for her final home, Utah, on New Year's Day, 1858. In the intervening years, she lived in many places but never long enough to set firm roots. Her adherence to a frontier religion on the move kept her moving, even after the church began to settle down in Utah. Despite the impermanence of her situation—perhaps even because of it—Caroline Crosby left a remarkably rich record of her life and travels, thereby telling us not only much about herself and her family but also about times and places of which her documentary record provides a virtually unparalleled view. A notable aspect of her memoirs and journals is what they convey of the character of their author, who, despite the many challenges of transience and poverty she faced, appears to have remained curious, dedicated, observant, and optimistic.

From Caroline's home in Canada, she and Jonathan Crosby first went to the headquarters of Joseph Smith's new church in Kirtland, Ohio. She recounts, in a memoir, the early struggles of his followers there. As the church moved west, the Crosbys did as well, but, as became characteristic, they did not move immediately with the main body to the center of the religion. For a while they settled in Indiana, finally reaching the new Mormon center of Nauvoo in 1842. Fleeing Nauvoo with the last of the Mormons in 1846, they spent two years in Iowa and set out for Utah in 1848, the account of which is the first of Caroline Crosby's vivid trail journals. The Crosbys were able to rest in Salt Lake City for less than two years before Brigham Young sent them on a church mission to the Society and Austral Islands in the South Pacific. She recorded, in detail, their overland travel to San Francisco and then by sea to French Polynesia and their service on the islands. In late 1852 the Crosbys returned to California, beginning what is probably the most historically significant time recorded in her writings, her diaries of life. First, in immediately post-Gold-Rush San Francisco and, second, in the new Mormon village of San Bernardino in southern California. There is no comparable record by a woman of 1850s life in these growing communities. The Crosbys responded in 1857 to Brigham Young's call for church members to gather in Utah and again abandoned a new home—the nicest one they had built and one of the finest houses in San Bernardino—again displaying their unquestioning loyalty to the Mormon church.

T. J. Jackson Lears draws on a wealth of primary sources — sermons, diaries, letters — as well as novels, poems, and essays to explore the origins of turn-of-the-century American antimodernism. He examines the retreat to the exotic, the pursuit of intense physical or spiritual experiences, and the search for cultural self-sufficiency through the Arts and Crafts movement. Lears argues that their antimodern impulse, more pervasive than historians have supposed, was not "simple escapism," but reveals some enduring and recurring tensions in American culture.

"It's an understatement to call No Place of Grace a brilliant book. . . . It's the first clear sign I've seen that my generation, after marching through the '60s and jogging through the '70s might be pausing to examine what we've learned, and to teach it."—Walter Kendrick, Village Voice

"One can justly make the claim that No Place of Grace restores and reinterprets a crucial part of American history. Lears's method is impeccable."—Ann Douglas, The Nation