Results by title

Johnny and Sarah Frank’s lives were steeped in the old ways of survival in the upland boreal forest of northeastern Alaska. Constantly on the move in search of game and other wild resources, sharing the harvest with others around them, and passing on their skills and cultural values through a rich tradition of oral literature, the Franks are vivid examples of how the Gwich’in people survived as a nation. Neerihiinjìk: We Traveled From Place To Place is a narrative of Johnny and Sarah’s life together. Both lived well into their nineties, and, through their abundant social warmth and manifest intelligence, they had an extraordinary influence on the lives of people around them. 

The stories told by Johnny and Sarah in their native language are presented here with English translations on facing pages. The finished texts were transcribed from more than thirty-five hours of tape recordings. Johnny’s tales are focused on the days of long ago, the adventures of Indian warriors, and the feats and songs of powerful medicine men. Sarah, on the other hand, shapes her stories around her own daily life and her useful knowledge of the environment and its resources. Together, they present a balanced view of the Gwich’in world – the masculine and the feminine, the spiritual as well as the practical. 

Neerihiinjìk adds greatly to the Franks’ reputation as rugged individuals who were versed in the ways of their ancestors and who figured prominently in the history of twentieth century Northern Dene.

Charts the global resonance of the image of Nefertiti over the past century. 

From the moment that the bust of Nefertiti was uncovered after over three thousand years and shown at its first exhibition in Berlin in 1924, it rapidly became an iconic image. Today, the silhouette alone of this powerful ancient Egyptian queen is recognized and admired around the world.

In Nefertiti: The Making of a Global Icon, historian Sebastian Conrad tracks the full story of the world’s embrace and appropriation of this famous visage. Starting with the discovery of the bust and Germany’s claims to its possession, Conrad shows how it became a contested object, tracing Egypt’s efforts to call for its restitution from 1924 to the present. He also canvasses the uses to which Nefertiti’s image has been put and the causes with which it has been associated: for cosmetic ads and beauty clinics; by advocates for European unity; by drag queens and the queer community; by National Socialists; by nationalists in Egypt and Bengal; by Afro-Brazilian communities; and by important Black figures from Elijah Muhammad to Beyoncé. Against a global backdrop, Conrad showcases the stunning object’s fame and the often-controversial issues and debates in which it has been embroiled. He also argues that the story of Nefertiti’s trajectory offers insights into the changing shape of globalization from the era of imperialism to the present.

This accessible, deeply researched book reveals both how much is at stake in the life of objects and how Nefertiti’s arresting likeness continues to challenge us today.

How films help us understand the inevitable death of Earth and humanity

Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction brings cinema studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis into novel configuration around the concept of negative life, a sundering of human and nonhuman relations. Engaging a philosophical and cinematic corpus that rejects the pastoralism of “entanglement” or “enmeshment,” Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay counter ecocritical pieties and cut a new path for theory. They examine films by Julian Pölsler, Kelly Reichardt, Lee Isaac Chung, Mahesh Mathai, Paul Schrader, and others that exemplify the existential contradictions currently intensifying amid the sixth mass extinction. Each case study testifies formally and thematically to negative life as a structural condition of thought and film. Together, the cases reveal the unlivable dimension of life and art, where form, desire, and nonbelonging tarry with the future-oriented promise of ecostudies—where all that lives connects. Negative Life militates against this promise, showing that faith in connection is a dead end.

A groundbreaking study of the meaning of childhood in French colonial Senegal

Negotiating Childhood explores how colonial child protection policies and African children’s responses to them produced new ways of defining, measuring, documenting, and experiencing childhood in the French colony of Senegal from 1848 to 1940. In this groundbreaking book, Kelly M. Duke Bryant takes the scholarship in new directions, offering to a literature dominated by studies of British colonies in the twentieth century a study of childhood in a French colony from the immediate post-emancipation period through the 1930s. This focus allows her to complicate the generally accepted timeline of child protection in colonial Africa and question other assumptions about children’s history on the continent.

This deeply researched work uses a wide range of sources to examine children’s experiences in spaces where they encountered French discipline and surveillance, such as wardship courts, public streets, schools, juvenile reformatories, and vaccine clinics. The book shows not only how these spaces re-ordered African childhood, but also how children themselves shaped and limited French efforts to impose order, especially when the state depended on African children’s cooperation to make good on rhetoric about child “protection.” It also charts the rise of documentation in children’s lives, as colonial representatives recorded names, ages, and other details about the African children with whom they interacted. Tracing the “documented” child back to the early colonial period, Negotiating Childhood historicizes the emergence of identity documentation—so crucial to our contemporary world—and questions the naturalness of the very idea of the “child.”

The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 was a landmark event in Egyptology that was celebrated around the world. Had Howard Carter found his prize a few years earlier, however, the treasures of Tut might now be in the British Museum in London rather than the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. That's because the years between World War I and World War II were a transitional period in Middle Eastern archaeology, as nationalists in Egypt and elsewhere asserted their claims to antiquities discovered within their borders. These claims were motivated by politics as much as by scholarship, with nationalists seeking to unite citizens through pride in their ancient past as they challenged Western powers that still exercised considerable influence over local governments and economies. James Goode's analysis of archaeological affairs in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq during this period offers fascinating new insight into the rise of nationalism in the Middle East, as well as archaeological and diplomatic history.

The first such work to compare archaeological-nationalistic developments in more than one country, Negotiating for the Past draws on published and archival sources in Arabic, English, French, German, Persian, and Turkish. Those sources reveal how nationalists in Iraq and Iran observed the success of their counterparts in Egypt and Turkey, and were able to hold onto discoveries at legendary sites such as Khorsabad and Persepolis. Retaining artifacts allowed nationalists to build museums and control cultural heritage. As Goode writes, "Going to the national museum became a ritual of citizenship." Western archaeologists became identified (in the eyes of many) as agents of imperialism, thus making their work more difficult, and often necessitating diplomatic intervention. The resulting "negotiations for the past" pulled patrons (such as John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Lord Carnarvon), archaeologists (James Breasted and Howard Carter), nationalist leaders (Ataturk and Sa'd Zaghlul), and Western officials (Charles Evan Hughes and Lord Curzon) into intractable historical debates with international implications that still resonate today.

Rediscovers the crucial role that women played in the influential Negritude movement.

The Negritude movement, which signaled the awakening of a pan-African consciousness among black French intellectuals, has been understood almost exclusively in terms of the contributions of its male founders: Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon G. Damas. This masculine genealogy has completely overshadowed the central role played by French-speaking black women in its creation and evolution. In Negritude Women, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting offers a long-overdue corrective, revealing the contributions made by the women who were not merely integral to the success of the movement, but often in its vanguard.

WINNER OF THE SUSAN COLVER ROSENBERGER AWARD

A foundational work of educational history, Horace Mann Bond’s study reveals how race, labor, and power shaped Black schooling in Alabama—and why those lessons still matter today.

Originally published in 1939, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel by Horace Mann Bond is a pioneering work of educational and social history. Drawing on extensive data and firsthand observation, Bond explores how the economic structures of the cotton South and the industrializing North influenced the development of Black education in Alabama. He examines disparities in funding, curriculum, and access, while also highlighting the resilience and agency of African American communities in pursuing educational advancement. This reissued edition preserves Bond’s critical insights and remains a vital resource for scholars of African American history, education policy, and Southern studies.

Much of the violence that characterized Reconstruction was directly associated with the Negro militia movement organized by Radical politicians to support their precarious regimes in Southern states. This book is the story of that ill-fated movement, a story with important implication for later times.

Most Southern whites did not disguise their hostility toward the governments that were imposed on their states after Reconstruction entered its Radical phase. and Radical leaders lived in constant fear that this hostility would flare into open revolt. Organization of a loyal protective force was imperative if they were to remain in power.

Although planned originally as a defensive force, the Negro militia was quickly used by the Radicals for such purposes as controlling elections. The resentment of Southern whites resulting from this political activity was aggravated by crimes of violence, depredations, and minor social offenses committed by some of the militiamen. However, the white Southerner’s fundamental enmity toward the Negro militia stemmed from the racial implications of a policy that armed the Negroes and placed them in positions of authority over white men.

At first, opposition to the Negro militia movement took the form of legal stratagems and other measures short of force, but the final blow to the Negro militia was dealt by white volunteer rifle companies— illegal, armed counterforces that were at the very core of the White Line movement. The race riot as a political technique was born, the most notorious riot occurring at Hamburg, South Carolina, where, the author states, the policy of “disbandment through extermination” was successfully employed. Disintegration of the entire movement was inevitable.

“It is ironic,” Singletary states, “that the organization of this protective force, because of its racial implications, actually aided in the destruction of the very thing it was created to protect.”

Before its publication, Negro Militia and Reconstruction won the Moncado Prize, a cash award made biennially by the American Military Institute for “the best original book-length manuscript in any field of United States Military history.”