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This work is a detailed study of how Americans in the 1920s and 1930s interpreted and remembered the First World War. Steven Trout asserts that from the beginning American memory of the war was fractured and unsettled, more a matter of competing sets of collective memories—each set with its own spokespeople— than a unified body of myth. The members of the American Legion remembered the war as a time of assimilation and national harmony. However, African Americans and radicalized whites recalled a very different war. And so did many of the nation’s writers, filmmakers, and painters.

Trout studies a wide range of cultural products for their implications concerning the legacy of the war: John Dos Passos’s novels Three Soldiers and 1919, Willa Cather’s One of Ours, William March’s Company K, and Laurence Stallings’s Plumes; paintings by Harvey Dunn, Horace Pippin, and John Steuart Curry; portrayals of the war in The American Legion Weekly and The American Legion Monthly; war memorials and public monuments like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; and commemorative products such as the twelve-inch tall Spirit of the American Doughboy statue.

Trout argues that American memory of World War I was not only confused and contradictory during the ‘20s and ‘30s, but confused and contradictory in ways that accommodated affirmative interpretations of modern warfare and military service. Somewhat in the face of conventional wisdom, Trout shows that World War I did not destroy the glamour of war for all, or even most, Americans and enhanced it for many.

On the Border of Belonging: Luisa Capetillo, Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta, and Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo is a philosophical-historiographical project that spearheads the construction of an intellectual tradition of women from the Hispanophone Caribbean at the turn of the 20th century. On the Border of Belonging engages Luisa Capetillo (Puerto Rico), Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta (Cuba), Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo (Dominican Republic) as interlocutors with the landfall of Western modernity revealing a tense intersection between a desire to belong to modernity while sitting on the margins of its possibilities. The vexed relationship with belonging creates a counter-archive of contradictions that reveals a vivid philosophical patchwork that spirals and repeats across the archipelago. In this crosscurrent of ideas, Luisa Capetillo defends the possibilities of a spiritual- anarchist political life; Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta challenges the norms of love and kinship; and Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo contests the standards of maternal and infant care. 

First published in French in 1808 and translated into English two years later under the title An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of the Negroes, this book was a touchstone for nineteenth-century abolitionists in England and the United States. Written by Abbe Henri Gregoire (1750–1831), it argued vigorously against assumptions of black inferiority and in favor of the humanity, equality, and cultural achievements of people of African heritage. His treatise summarized most of the available written thought on race up to that time. A leading activist in the French Revolution, Gregoire reflected in his arguments the spirit of “libertie, egalite, and fraternite” and anticipated twentieth-century race inquiry and theory. Although influential in its time, the first translation of Gregoire's work was incomplete and flawed. This new edition presents a fresh, accurate, and complete text of this key document in the history of Western racial thought. The book includes a substantial biography of Gregoire and analysis of the historical context in which he wrote and the impact of his work.

How did the 1950s become “The Sixties”? This is the question at the heart of Daniel Horowitz's On the Cusp. Part personal memoir, part collective biography, and part cultural history, the book illuminates the dynamics of social and political change through the experiences of a small, and admittedly privileged, generational cohort.

A Jewish “townie” from New Haven when he entered Yale College in fall 1956, Horowitz reconstructs the undergraduate career of the class of 1960 and follows its story into the next decade. He begins by looking at curricular and extracurricular life on the all-male campus, then ranges beyond the confines of Yale to larger contexts, including the local drama of urban renewal, the lingering shadow of McCarthyism, and decolonization movements around the world. He ponders the role of the university in protecting the prerogatives of class while fostering social mobility, and examines the growing significance of race and gender in American politics and culture, spurred by a convergence of the personal and the political. Along the way he traces the political evolution of his classmates, left and right, as Cold War imperatives lose force and public attention shifts to the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam. 

Throughout Horowitz draws on a broad range of sources, including personal interviews, writings by classmates, reunion books, issues of the Yale Daily News, and other undergraduate publications, as well as his own letters and college papers. The end product is a work consistent with much of Horowitz's previously published scholarship on postwar America, further exposing the undercurrent of discontent and dissent that ran just beneath the surface of the so-called Cold War consensus.

Runner-up, National Council on Public History Book Award, 2008

The 1930s exodus of "Okies" dispossessed by repeated droughts and failed crop prices was a relatively brief interlude in the history of migrant agricultural labor. Yet it attracted wide attention through the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and the images of Farm Security Administration photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. Ironically, their work risked sublimating the subjects—real people and actual experience—into aesthetic artifacts, icons of suffering, deprivation, and despair. Working for the Farm Security Administration in California's migrant labor camps in 1938-39, Sanora Babb, a young journalist and short story writer, together with her sister Dorothy, a gifted amateur photographer, entered the intimacy of the dispossessed farmers' lives as insiders, evidenced in the immediacy and accuracy of their writings and photos. Born in Oklahoma and raised on a dryland farm, the Babb sisters had unparalleled access to the day-by-day harsh reality of field labor and family life.

This book presents a vivid, firsthand account of the Dust Bowl refugees, the migrant labor camps, and the growth of labor activism among Anglo and Mexican farm workers in California's agricultural valleys linked by the "Dirty Plate Trail" (Highway 99). It draws upon the detailed field notes that Sanora Babb wrote while in the camps, as well as on published articles and short stories about the migrant workers and an excerpt from her Dust Bowl novel, Whose Names Are Unknown. Like Sanora's writing, Dorothy's photos reveal an unmediated, personal encounter with the migrants, portraying the social and emotional realities of their actual living and working conditions, together with their efforts to organize and to seek temporary recreation. An authority in working-class literature and history, volume editor Douglas Wixson places the Babb sisters' work in relevant historical and social-political contexts, examining their role in reconfiguring the Dust Bowl exodus as a site of memory in the national consciousness.

Focusing on the material conditions of everyday existence among the Dust Bowl refugees, the words and images of these two perceptive young women clearly show that, contrary to stereotype, the "Okies" were a widely diverse people, including not only Steinbeck's sharecropper "Joads" but also literate, independent farmers who, in the democracy of the FSA camps, found effective ways to rebuild lives and create communities.

Uncovering the Black Power movement’s contributions to theorizing the politics of automation​

 

On the Eve of the Cybercultural Revolution offers a comprehensive look at the Black Power movement’s theoretical work and insights into the entanglement of capitalism, technology, and racism. Drawing upon James and Grace Lee Boggs’s expanded notion of the cybercultural era, Brian Bartell demonstrates how a range of artists, writers, and activists from the 1960s prefigured the wider discourse around automation and made it a central concern of their politics.

Rather than reducing automation to an isolated technical phenomenon, theorists of the Black radical tradition identified its important historical antecedents in colonialism and plantation slavery, emphasizing how the emerging cyberculture joined with issues such as the reorganization of labor, ecological harm, and racial inequality. Examining the work of Martin Luther King Jr., Noah Purifoy, the Black Panthers, and others, On the Eve of the Cybercultural Revolution outlines the new forms of social reproduction conceived outside of the dominant structures of racial capitalism.

Bartell synthesizes a wide range of source texts, including political speeches, literature, and activist archives, to show how the Black Power movement sought to create a postscarcity, more-than-capitalist economy. By shedding light on the movement’s underexplored engagement with theories of technology, he provides a crucial key to understanding the historical dynamics responsible for our technocapitalist present.

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The first English translation of an essay that is among Alexander von Humboldt’s least known but most important scientific works.

In the nineteenth century, Alexander von Humboldt was arguably the world’s most famous celebrity after Napoleon. What started in 1799 as a serendipitous trip to the New World tropics with his friend Aimé Bonpland to collect plants and minerals expanded into a five-year exploration of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú, México, and Cuba. The discoveries the two amassed were nothing short of staggering, and much of our knowledge of tropical botany, zoology, geography, and geology can be traced back to these journeys. The voyage, and the publication of Humboldt’s travel narratives and scientific studies from these expeditions, which totaled dozens of books, elevated Humboldt to cult status. 

In the past two decades, Humboldt’s writings have been rediscovered in multiple fields, including biogeography; Earth and environmental sciences; American and Latin American studies; nineteenth-century art, poetry, and literature; and transatlantic cultural history. His ideas are profoundly relevant to twenty-first-century thinking on the relationship between humans and nature, and the ecological framework in which he viewed the world remains essential two centuries after his travels.

Among his many interests, Humboldt invested considerable effort in explaining the underlying causes of the uneven distribution of plant species across the globe. His extended essay On the Geographical Distribution of Plants is among his least known but most important works, laying foundations for the development of ecology, climatology, and evolutionary biology in the following decades. It was first published in 1815 as an introduction to a seven-volume Latin botanical monograph, Nova genera et species plantarum (New Genera and Species of Plants). The essay, republished in 1817 as a standalone volume, held great influence over nineteenth-century naturalists. It is Humboldt’s most comprehensive and detailed treatment of plant geography. In the essay, he applies what he calls “botanical arithmetic” to reveal ecological and biogeographic patterns of plants, applications that still ground modern macroecology; and he provides frameworks to link vegetation patterns and climate, which are essential in modern Earth system science.  Introduced and organized by ecologist Stephen T. Jackson and translated from Latin to English by Philip Holt, this book is essential for the libraries of scientists, historians, and all Humboldt admirers.

Estonia is perhaps the only country in Europe that lacks a comprehensive history of its Jewish minority. Spanning over 150 years of Estonian Jewish history, On the Margins is a truly unique book. Rebuilding a life beyond so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Jewish cultural autonomy in interwar Estonia, and the trauma of Soviet occupation of 1940–41 are among the issues addressed in the book but most profoundly, the book wrestles with the subject of the Holocaust and its legacy in Estonia.

Specifically, it examines the quasi-legal system of murder instituted in Nazi-occupied Estonia, confiscation of Jewish property, and Jewish forced labor camps and develops an analysis of the causes of collaboration during the Holocaust. The book also explores the dynamics of war crimes trials in the Soviet Union since the 1960s and so-called denaturalization trials in the United States in the 1980s. The haunting memory of Soviet and Nazi rule, the book concludes, prevents a larger segment of today’s Estonian population from facing up to the Holocaust and the universal message that it carries.E

Robert B. Textor Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, 2000
Honorable Mention, Victor Turner Award, Society for Humanistic Anthropology, 2001
Leeds Prize, Society of Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology, 2001

Friendly gossip, political rallies, outdoor concerts, drugs, shoeshines, and sex-for-sale—almost every aspect of Latin American life has its place and time in the public plaza. In this wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary study, Setha M. Low explores the interplay of space and culture in the plaza, showing how culture acts to shape public spaces and how the physical form of the plaza encodes the social and economic relations within its city.

Low centers her study on two plazas in San José, Costa Rica, with comparisons to public plazas in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. She interweaves ethnography, history, literature, and personal narrative to capture the ambiance and meaning of the plaza. She also uncovers the contradictory ethnohistories of the European and indigenous origins of the Latin American plaza and explains why the plaza is often a politically contested space.

Delve into Rome’s lost history through the stories of a single city block.

Cutting through the heart of Rome is Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a time-worn street named for the mysterious “shops” said to run beneath it. History lies thick here, a museum atop a convent atop ancient ruins; layered in are traces of artisans and poets, pilgrims and saints, a Fascist deportation, a communist coffee bar, a political assassination, and shopkeepers, too. These stories all rest upon a single city block, the same place where, in 13 BCE, the triumphal Roman general Lucius Cornelius Balbus built a monumental theater complex in his own honor.

Elizabeth Rodini’s On the Street of the Hidden Shops digs deep into this corner of the city, uncovering a set of surprising, often poignant narratives that range across two thousand years. For as the walls of Balbus’s compound decayed and the neighborhood was rebuilt, this block would come to shelter Romans from all walks of life: the daughters of local prostitutes, an earnest young man in search of a bride, an entrepreneur determined to preserve the city’s colorful dialect, a Jewish family recently liberated from the nearby Ghetto, and a band of idealistic archaeologists unearthing a long-forgotten past, as well as a gifted baker, a medieval donkey, and a Renaissance ghost. Their stories survive in archives and artifacts but also in the enduring power of rumor and legend.

On the Street of the Hidden Shops invites us on a captivating journey to one place across many centuries. Its tight urban focus reveals a Rome most visitors miss, while uncovering some of the many Romes that have been largely lost to history.

Delve into Rome’s lost history through the stories of a single city block.

Cutting through the heart of Rome is Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a time-worn street named for the mysterious “shops” said to run beneath it. History lies thick here, a museum atop a convent atop ancient ruins; layered in are traces of artisans and poets, pilgrims and saints, a Fascist deportation, a communist coffee bar, a political assassination, and shopkeepers, too. These stories all rest upon a single city block, the same place where, in 13 BCE, the triumphal Roman general Lucius Cornelius Balbus built a monumental theater complex in his own honor.

Elizabeth Rodini’s On the Street of the Hidden Shops digs deep into this corner of the city, uncovering a set of surprising, often poignant narratives that range across two thousand years. For as the walls of Balbus’s compound decayed and the neighborhood was rebuilt, this block would come to shelter Romans from all walks of life: the daughters of local prostitutes, an earnest young man in search of a bride, an entrepreneur determined to preserve the city’s colorful dialect, a Jewish family recently liberated from the nearby Ghetto, and a band of idealistic archaeologists unearthing a long-forgotten past, as well as a gifted baker, a medieval donkey, and a Renaissance ghost. Their stories survive in archives and artifacts but also in the enduring power of rumor and legend.

On the Street of the Hidden Shops invites us on a captivating journey to one place across many centuries. Its tight urban focus reveals a Rome most visitors miss, while uncovering some of the many Romes that have been largely lost to history.

A Mesoamerican travel book from two perspectives and two centuries.

In 1839 John Lloyd Stephens, then 31 years old, and his traveling companion, artist Frederick Catherwood, disappeared into the vast rain forest of eastern Guatemala. They had heard rumors that remains of a civilization of incomparable artistic and cultural merit were moldering in the steamy lowland jungles. They braved Indian uprisings, road agents, heat, and biting insects to eventually encounter what is today known as the lost civilization of the Maya.

In 1841 Stephens published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan to instant acclaim with both American and international audiences. His conversational style was fresh and crisp and his subject matter, the search for lost cities on the Central American isthmus, was romantic and adventurous. Stephens's book has been characterized as the "great American nonfiction narrative of the 19th century." Indeed, what Stephens wrote about the Maya makes a major contribution to Maya studies.

Steve Glassman retraces Stephens's route, visiting the same archaeological sites, towns, markets, and churches and meeting along the way the descendants of those people Stephens described, from mestizo en route to the cornfields to town elders welcoming the Norte Americanos. Glassman's work interlaces discussion of the history, natural environment, and architecture of the region with descriptions of the people who live and work there. Glassman compares his 20th-century experience with Stephens's 19th-century exploration, gazing in awe at the same monumental pyramids, eating similar foods, and avoiding the political clashes that disrupt the governments and economies of the area.

Stephens's books are still widely available, but his importance to literary professionals has been overlooked. With this new travelogue, Glassman reaffirms Stephens's reputation and brings his work to wider critical and public attention.

Sophisticated and innovative, On the Waves of Empire reveals how maritime labor and shipping capital stitched together, tore apart, and re-stitched the seams of empire.

Frank Denius was not yet twenty-one when he fought his way across Europe and was awarded four Silver Stars, a Presidential Unit Citation, and two Purple Hearts. On the Way describes Denius’s formative experiences during World War II in gripping detail and will cause any reader to wonder how he or she might have held up under similar pressure. The powerful opening chapters are followed by a detailed account of Denius’s life and career after the war, assembled into a first-person memoir from conversations between Denius and Thomas Hatfield, and published by the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Discharged from the army in October 1945, Denius enrolled at the University of Texas within a week. He is a lifelong supporter of the university: as part of the Texas Exes, as a donor to numerous academic programs, and as a fan of Longhorn football. Former UT football coach Mack Brown liked to say, “Frank has been to more practices than I have.”

Denius graduated from the University of Texas School of Law and joined one of Austin’s leading law firms in the late 1940s. Denius recounts how Texas operated in Lyndon Johnson’s prime, observes power plays in the Texas energy industry, and describes his role in building a regional university into a global leader.