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Whether it’s building skyscrapers, running successful restaurants, researching diseases, performing music, cleaning hotel rooms, or holding public office, immigrants are changing Nashville from a mid‑sized city known for its country music industry to an increasingly diverse, multicultural destination. In Metro Nashville schools today, students speak more than 120 languages. The city is bigger, more congested, and more expensive than it’s ever been, drawing criticism from both longtime residents and newcomers. But growth has also brought top‑notch scientists and educators, a world‑class symphony, major league sports teams, investment from major corporations—and a wide range of immigrants whose talent and hard work have helped make all of that happen.

Through its profiles of thirty-nine immigrants from thirty-eight countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Australia, Nashville’s New Americans provides a case study from one of the fastest-growing cities in the country on the contributions immigrants are making to its culture and economy.

This volume makes available for the first time in English a variety of primary source materials relating to the life and work of Natalia Shelikov, a pioneering nineteenth-century Russian-American businesswoman. As a principal of the Russian-American Company, Shelikov worked in Alaska, and her business acumen and wide-ranging connections—including the empress of Russia and a swathe of northern leaders—were crucial to the growth of Alaska’s economy, as well as to the welfare of the Native people, in whose life and culture she took a strong interest. The letters, petitions, and personal documents presented here will be indispensable for students of Alaska and nineteenth-century women’s history.

Nathan Straus (1848–1931) encompassed worlds. He rose from his Jewish German immigrant family’s ruin in Civil War Georgia to become co-owner of Macy’s and Abraham & Straus department stores. He helped build American Zionism and cofounded the American Jewish Congress movement. His public service led to a nomination for New York City mayor. 

This, the first comprehensive biography of Straus, details each of these lives but argues that his most historic achievements lay elsewhere—in philanthropy. Inspired by both his Jewish values and no-nonsense pragmatism, Straus designed, funded, and oversaw four Progressive philanthropic initiatives. The greatest—his demonstration and advocacy campaigns for milk pasteurization—saved the lives of countless thousands of infants in New York City and, ultimately, across much of America and western Europe. Straus also founded America’s first TB preventorium for at-risk children: a model for the forty-five more that followed. Partnering with Hadassah, he brought American public health innovations to Mandate Palestine. He provided vast relief for New York City’s jobless in the severe 1890s depression. In all, Straus’s humanitarianism won the acclaim of American presidents and world leaders and the gratitude of millions. We can learn from him today.  

An influential American scientist and educator.

Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science is the first book-length study of the man who served a Harvard’s Professor of Geology and Paleontology during the Darwinian era. Shaler was a student of Louis Agassiz and went on to a successful, multifaceted career as a geologist, geographer, educator, humanist, and poet. Livingstone employs a thematic approach to chart Shaler’s career against the broader intellectual currents of America’s Gilded Age. After tracing Shaler’s life story from his boyhood in Kentucky through his student years at Harvard, his service with the Geological Survey, and eventually his years as Dean of Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, the author examines Shaler’s evolutionary vision and portrays his strategic efforts to reconcile the nineteenth century’s scientific and religious world views.

Livingstone assesses Shaler’s prolific writings, including those on race, which demonstrate a typical concern to provide a “scientific” perspective on the political questions of immigration restriction and eugenic control. IN addition, the book explores his efforts to interweave geography and history, particularly in relation to the American frontier; and his contributions to geology and geomorphology. The portrait of Shaler is completed with a review of his educational thinking and his role in establishing the American Summer School and in furthering scientific and technological education.

Nathaniel Southgate Shaler emerges from Livingstone’s work as a distinctive figure in the development of the new scientific culture, a figure who provides a focal point for assessing the impact of evolutionary naturalism on late-nineteenth-century American thought.

Nation and Migration provides a way to understand recent migration events in Europe that have attracted the world's attention. The emergence of the nations in the West promised homogenization, but instead the imagined national communities have everywhere become places of heterogeneity, and modern nation states have been haunted by the specter of minorities. This study analyses experiences relating to migration in 23 European countries. It is based on data from the International Social Survey Programme, a global cross-national collaborative exercise, with surveys made in 1995, 2003, and 2013. In the authors' view, a critical test for Europe will be its ability to find adequate responses to the challenges of globalization.

The book provides a detailed overview of how citizens in Europe are coping with a xenophobia fueled by their own sense of insecurity. The authors reconstruct the competing sociological reactions to migration in the forms of integration, assimilation and segregation. Hungary receives special attention: the data show that people living there are far less closed and xenophobic than they might seem through the prism of a media-instigated moral panic.

The major dilemma this volume addresses is the function of national identity in a modern society, for despite the trend towards globalization, the world continues to be riddled with national conflict.

Kłoskowska begins by looking at the controversy between two competing concepts of the origin of the nation – political and ethnic. She examines the central issues of the argument, and in particular, the characteristics and effects of ethnic differences on personal identity and the appropriation of national culture. Her theories are based upon autobiographies by individuals belonging to various national minorities in Poland and other areas where ethnic borders are blurred. The group studied included mostly young intellectuals: Ukrainians, Belarussians and Silesian-Germans. She examines the national attitudes of the various countries the ethnic minorities have been forced to live with. In her conclusion, Kłoskowska takes the view that national cultures are either ‘open’ or ‘closed’ and stresses the importance of participating in more than one cultural medium.

National Cultures at the Grass-Root Level is rich in information on contemporary theories of the nation, on its origin, character and future, and offers a deep insight into the complex and often ambiguous reality of national attitudes.

This meticulously researched and elegantly written book is the most authoritative study of the emergence of modern Romanian identity in Transylvania during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Based upon a plethora of contemporary published sources, Mitu approaches national identity from a variety of perspectives - from within the Romanian community itself and their reaction to the image others had of them.

The author sheds new light on the problems of self-evaluation using a method he describes as "functional analysis" to examine a complex set of ideologies and propaganda. This approach helps the reader to understand the intricate web of contemporary Romanian nationalism.

National Identity of Romanians in Transylvania appeals to scholars of modern Romanian history, those focusing on the Habsburg Monarchy and the study of modern nationalism. The book is an important contribution to the expanding debate on nationalism and national identity from an East European perspective.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

Two leaders of the National Park Service provide a front-row seat to the disastrous impact of partisan politics over the past fifty years—and offer a bold vision for the parks’ future.
 
The US National Parks, what environmentalist and historian Wallace Stegner called America’s “best idea,” are under siege. Since 1972, partisan political appointees in the Department of the Interior have offered two conflicting views of the National Park Service (NPS): one vision emphasizes preservation and science-based decision-making, and another prioritizes economic benefits and privatization. These politically driven shifts represent a pernicious, existential threat to the very future of our parks.
 
For the past fifty years, brothers Jonathan B. and T. Destry Jarvis have worked both within and outside NPS as leaders and advocates. National Parks Forever interweaves their two voices to show how our parks must be protected from those who would open them to economic exploitation, while still allowing generations to explore and learn in them. Their history also details how Congress and administration appointees have used budget and staffing cuts to sabotage NPS’s ability to manage the parks and even threatened their existence. Drawing on their experience, Jarvis and Jarvis make a bold and compelling proposal: that it is time for NPS to be removed from the Department of the Interior and made an independent agency, similar to the Smithsonian Institution, giving NPS leaders the ability to manage park resources and plan our parks’ protection, priorities, and future.

According to conventional wisdom, the national identity of the Jordanian state was defined by the ruling Hashemite family, which has governed the country since the 1920s. But this view overlooks the significant role that the "Arab street"—in this case, ordinary Jordanians and Palestinians—played and continues to play in defining national identity in Jordan and the Fertile Crescent as a whole. Indeed, as this pathfinding study makes clear, "the street" no less than the state has been a major actor in the process of nation building in the Middle East during and after the colonial era.

In this book, Betty Anderson examines the activities of the Jordanian National Movement (JNM), a collection of leftist political parties that worked to promote pan-Arab unity and oppose the continuation of a separate Jordanian state from the 1920s through the 1950s. Using primary sources including memoirs, interviews, poetry, textbooks, and newspapers, as well as archival records, she shows how the expansion of education, new jobs in the public and private sectors, changes in economic relationships, the establishment of national militaries, and the explosion of media outlets all converged to offer ordinary Jordanians and Palestinians (who were under the Jordanian government at the time) an alternative sense of national identity. Anderson convincingly demonstrates that key elements of the JNM's pan-Arab vision and goals influenced and were ultimately adopted by the Hashemite elite, even though the movement itself was politically defeated in 1957.

What happens when American Indians take over an institution designed to eliminate them?

 

The Bureau of Indian Affairs was hatched in the U.S. Department of War to subjugate and eliminate American Indians. Yet beginning in the 1970s, American Indians and Alaska Natives took over and now run the agency. Choctaw anthropologist Valerie Lambert argues that, instead of fulfilling settler-colonial goals, the Indians in the BIA have been leveraging federal power to fight settler colonialism, battle white supremacy, and serve the interests of their people. 

Although the missteps and occasional blunders of the Indians in the BIA have at times damaged the federal–Indian relationship and fueled the ire of their people, and although the BIA is massively underfunded, Indians began crafting the BIA into a Native agency by reformulating the meanings of concepts that lay at its heart—concepts such as tribal sovereignty, treaties, the trust responsibility, and Indian land. At the same time, they pursued actions to strengthen and bolster tribes, to foster healing, to fight the many injustices Indians face, and to restore the Indian land base.

This work provides an essential national-level look at an intriguing and impactful form of Indigenous resistance. It describes, in great detail, the continuing assaults made on Native peoples and tribal sovereignty in the United States during the twenty-first century, and it sketches the visions of the future that Indians at the BIA and in Indian Country have been crafting for themselves.