28167 books match the query 'History' and 1838 start with s

cover of Starved for Light: The Long Shadow of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency

Starved for Light

The Long Shadow of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency

Christian Warren

University of Chicago Press, 2024

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

A wide-ranging history of rickets tracks the disease’s emergence, evolution, and eventual treatment—and exposes the backstory behind contemporary worries about vitamin D deficiency.

 
Rickets, a childhood disorder that causes soft and misshapen bones, transformed from an ancient but infrequent threat to a common scourge during the Industrial Revolution. Factories, mills, and urban growth transformed the landscape. Malnutrition and insufficient exposure to sunlight led to severe cases of rickets across Europe and the United States, affecting children in a variety of settings: dim British cities and American slave labor camps, moneyed households and impoverished ones. By the late 1800s, it was one of the most common pediatric diseases, seemingly an intractable consequence of modern life.
 
Starved for Light offers the first comprehensive history of this disorder. Tracing the efforts to understand, prevent, and treat rickets—first with the traditional remedy of cod liver oil, then with the application of a breakthrough corrective, industrially produced vitamin D supplements—Christian Warren places the disease at the center of a riveting medical history, one alert to the ways society shapes our views on illness. Warren shows how physicians and public health advocates in the United States turned their attention to rickets among urban immigrants, both African Americans and southern Europeans; some concluded that the disease was linked to race, while others blamed poverty, sunless buildings and cities, or cultural preferences in diet and clothing. Spotlighting rickets’ role in a series of medical developments, Warren leads readers through the encroachment on midwifery by male obstetricians, the development of pediatric orthopedic devices and surgeries, early twentieth-century research into vitamin D, appalling clinical experiments on young children testing its potential, and the eventual commercialization of all manner of vitamin D supplements. As vitamin D consumption rose in the mid-twentieth century, rickets—previously a major concern for doctors, parents, and public health institutions—faded in its severity and frequency, and as a topic of discussion. But despite the availability of drugstore supplements and fortified milk, small numbers of cases still appear today, and concerns and controversies about vitamin D deficiency in general continue to grow.
 
Sweeping and engaging, Starved for Light illuminates the social conditions underpinning our cures and our choices, helping us to see history’s echoes in contemporary prescriptions.
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cover of Starving for Justice: Hunger Strikes, Spectacular Speech, and the Struggle for Dignity

Starving for Justice

Hunger Strikes, Spectacular Speech, and the Struggle for Dignity

Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval

University of Arizona Press, 2017

In the 1990s three college campuses in California exploded as Chicano/a and Latino/a students went on hunger strikes. Through courageous self-sacrifice, these students risked their lives to challenge racial neoliberalism, budget cuts, and fee increases. The strikers acted and spoke spectacularly and, despite great odds, produced substantive change.

Social movement scholars have raised the question of why some people risk their lives to create a better world. In Starving for Justice, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval uses interviews and archival material to examine people’s willingness to make the extreme sacrifice and give their lives in order to create a more just society.

Popular memory and scholarly discourse around social movements have long acknowledged the actions of student groups during the 1960s. Now Armbruster-Sandoval extends our understanding of social justice and activism, providing one of the first examinations of Chicana/o and Latina/o student activism in the 1990s.

Students at University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Santa Barbara; and Stanford University went on hunger strikes to demand the establishment and expansion of Chicana/o studies departments. They also had even broader aspirations—to obtain dignity and justice for all people. These students spoke eloquently, making their bodies and concerns visible. They challenged anti-immigrant politics. They scrutinized the rapid growth of the prison-industrial complex, racial and class polarization, and the university’s neoliberalization. Though they did not fully succeed in having all their demands met, they helped generate long-lasting social change on their respective campuses, making those learning institutions more just.

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cover of Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution

Starving the Beast

Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution

Monica Prasad

Russell Sage Foundation, 2018

Since the Reagan Revolution of the early 1980s, Republicans have consistently championed tax cuts for individuals and businesses, regardless of whether the economy is booming or in recession or whether the federal budget is in surplus or deficit. In Starving the Beast, sociologist Monica Prasad uncovers the origins of the GOP’s relentless focus on tax cuts and shows how this is a uniquely American phenomenon.

Drawing on never-before seen archival documents, Prasad traces the history of the 1981 tax cut—the famous “supply side” tax cut, which became the cornerstone for the next several decades of Republican domestic economic policy. She demonstrates that the main impetus behind this tax cut was not business group pressure, racial animus, or a belief that tax cuts would pay for themselves. 

Rather, the tax cut emerged because in America--unlike in the rest of the advanced industrial world—progressive policies are not embedded within a larger political economy that is favorable to business.  Since the end of World War II, many European nations have combined strong social protections with policies to stimulate economic growth such as lower taxes on capital and less regulation on businesses than in the United State.  Meanwhile, the United States emerged from World War II with high taxes on capital and some of the strongest regulations on business in the advanced industrial world.  This adversarial political economy could not survive the economic crisis of the 1970s.

Starving the Beast suggests that taking inspiration from the European model of progressive policies embedded in market-promoting political economy could serve to build an American economy that works better for all.
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cover of State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810-1900

State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810-1900

Fernando López-Alves

Duke University Press, 2000

Despite a shared colonial past, South American nations experienced different patterns of conflict in the nineteenth century. These differences led to the creation of a variety of states and regimes, from authoritarian military oligarchies to popular democracies. Using a rigorous logic of comparison, Fernando López-Alves explores the roots of state building in five countries and explains why the political systems of these early postindependent societies were prone to militarism, corporatism, or liberal democracy.
Breaking with the traditional economic analysis of South American development, López-Alves argues that civil-military relations lay at the core of state building. By comparing three countries in particular—Uruguay, Colombia, and Argentina—during an intense phase of state and regime formation, he shows how war and the collective action of the rural poor contributed to the construction of central armies, the rise of new social classes, and the emergence of civilian organizations. He also examines characteristics unique to each country’s war-formed culture and discusses how coalitions were built during this period. Examples from Paraguay and Venezuela and references to state formation in Europe, the United States, Asia, and the Middle East add to the complexity and richness of the study’s comparative analysis.
Drawing on a vast bibliography of both primary and secondary sources, López-Alves goes beyond providing insights into the particular development of Latin American countries and introduces a comprehensive theory of state formation applicable to other regions. This book will interest Latin Americanists, historians, political scientists, and sociologists studying state formation.
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cover of State Formation in the Liberal Era: Capitalisms and Claims of Citizenship in Mexico and Peru

State Formation in the Liberal Era

Capitalisms and Claims of Citizenship in Mexico and Peru

Edited by Ben Fallaw and David Nugent

University of Arizona Press, 2020

State Formation in the Liberal Era offers a nuanced exploration of the uneven nature of nation making and economic development in Peru and Mexico. Zeroing in on the period from 1850 to 1950, the book compares and contrasts the radically different paths of development pursued by these two countries.

Mexico and Peru are widely regarded as two great centers of Latin American civilization. In State Formation in the Liberal Era, a diverse group of historians and anthropologists from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Latin America compare how the two countries advanced claims of statehood from the dawning of the age of global liberal capitalism to the onset of the Cold War. Chapters cover themes ranging from foreign banks to road building and labor relations. The introductions serve as an original interpretation of Peru’s and Mexico’s modern histories from a comparative perspective.

Focusing on the tensions between disparate circuits of capital, claims of statehood, and the contested nature of citizenship, the volume spans disciplinary and geographic boundaries. It reveals how the presence (or absence) of U.S. influence shaped Latin American history and also challenges notions of Mexico’s revolutionary exceptionality. The book offers a new template for ethnographically informed comparative history of nation building in Latin America.
 
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cover of State Repression and the Labors of Memory

State Repression and the Labors of Memory

Elizabeth Jelin

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

A timely exploration of the nature of memory and its political uses

Hearing the news from South America at the turn of the millennium can be like traveling in time: here are the trials of Pinochet, the searches for “the disappeared” in Argentina, the investigation of the death of former president Goulart in Brazil, the Peace Commission in Uruguay, the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, a Truth Commission in Peru. As societies struggle to come to terms with the past and with the vexing questions posed by ineradicable memories, this wise book offers guidance.

Combining a concrete sense of present urgency and a theoretical understanding of social, political, and historical realities, State Repression and the Labors of Memory fashions tools for thinking about and analyzing the presences, silences, and meanings of the past. With unflappable good judgment and fairness, Elizabeth Jelin clarifies the often muddled debates about the nature of memory, the politics of struggles over memories of historical injustice, the relation of historiography to memory, the issue of truth in testimony and traumatic remembrance, the role of women in Latin American attempts to cope with the legacies of military dictatorships, and problems of second-generation memory and its transmission and appropriation. Jelin’s work engages European and North American theory in its exploration of the various ways in which conflicts over memory shape individual and collective identities, as well as social and political cleavages. In doing so, her book exposes the enduring consequences of repression for social processes in Latin America, and at the same time enriches our general understanding of the fundamentally conflicted and contingent nature of memory.
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cover of State and Opposition in Military Brazil

State and Opposition in Military Brazil

By Maria Helena Moreira Alves

University of Texas Press, 1985

Based on extensive research into opposition and government documents, including the previously unavailable Manual Básico da Escola de Guerra, Maria Helena Moreira Alves provides a rich description of the long and tortuous attempt by the Brazilian military government to create a workable “national security state” in the face of determined and resilient opposition.

She interviewed more than one hundred key figures in government, the military, business, professional associations, the Catholic church, grassroots organizations, and trade unions in order to analyze politically and historically the relationship between civil society and government structures in Brazil during the years 1964–1983. Her study charts the rise and subsequent decline of the military government’s power, concluding with a discussion of the abertura policy instituted under General João Batista Figueiredo.

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cover of State and Reservation: New Perspectives on Federal Indian Policy

State and Reservation

New Perspectives on Federal Indian Policy

Edited by George Pierre Castile and Robert L. Bee

University of Arizona Press, 1992

Ten original essays focus on the rise, change, and persistence of the Native American reservation system. Contributors drawn from history, anthropology, sociology, and political science offer divergent points of view buttressed by historical and ethnographic case studies. Together, these articles suggest that the time has come—or is long overdue—to rethink the basic assumptions underlying Federal Indian policy.

CONTENTS
Introduction, George Pierre Castile & Robert L. Bee
Part I—Historical Foundations of the Reservation System
An Elusive Institution: The Meanings of Indian Reservations in Gold Rush California, John M. Findlay
Crow Leadership Amidst Reservation Oppression, Frederick E. Hoxie
Part II—The Nonreservation Experience
Utah Indians and the Homestead Laws, Martha C. Knack
The Enduring Reservations of Oklahoma, John H. Moore
Without Reservation: Federal Indian Policy and the Landless Tribes of Washington, Frank W. Porter, III
Part III—Power and Symbols
Riding the Paper Tiger, Robert L. Bee
Indian Sign: Hegemony and Symbolism in Federal Indian Policy, George P. Castile
Part IV—The Resource Base
Primitive Accumulation, Reservations, and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Lawrence Weiss & David C.Maas
Shortcomings of the Indian Self-Determination Policy, George S. Esber, Jr.
Getting to Yes in the New West: The Negotiation of Policy, Thomas R. McGuire
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cover of State of Ambiguity: Civic Life and Culture in Cuba's First Republic

State of Ambiguity

Civic Life and Culture in Cuba's First Republic

Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras, Amparo Sánchez Cobos, eds.

Duke University Press, 2014

Cuba's first republican era (1902–1959) is principally understood in terms of its failures and discontinuities, typically depicted as an illegitimate period in the nation's history, its first three decades and the overthrow of Machado at best a prologue to the "real" revolution of 1959. State of Ambiguity brings together scholars from North America, Cuba, and Spain to challenge this narrative, presenting republican Cuba instead as a time of meaningful engagement—socially, politically, and symbolically. Addressing a wide range of topics—civic clubs and folkloric societies, science, public health and agrarian policies, popular culture, national memory, and the intersection of race and labor—the contributors explore how a broad spectrum of Cubans embraced a political and civic culture of national self-realization. Together, the essays in State of Ambiguity recast the first republic as a time of deep continuity in processes of liberal state- and nation-building that were periodically disrupted—but also reinvigorated—by foreign intervention and profound uncertainty.

Contributors. Imilcy Balboa Navarro, Alejandra Bronfman, Maikel Fariñas Borrego, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Marial Iglesias Utset, Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras Arenas, Ricardo Quiza Moreno, Amparo Sánchez Cobos, Rebecca J. Scott, Robert Whitney

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cover of State of Exception

State of Exception

Giorgio Agamben

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states.

The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt.

In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.
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cover of State of Fear: Policing a Postcolonial City

State of Fear

Policing a Postcolonial City

Joshua Barker

Duke University Press, 2024

In State of Fear, Joshua Barker reckons with how fear and violence are produced and reproduced through everyday practices of rule and control. Examining the ethnographic and historical genealogies of Indonesian policing, Barker focuses on the city of Bandung, which is permeated by anxieties about security, in spite of the fact that it’s a relatively safe city according to the data. Drawing from his fieldwork there during the latter years of the authoritarian New Order regime, Barker traces the complex relationship between the state and vigilante groups like neighborhood watch patrols and street gangs. Through interviews with police officers, vigilantes, and street-level toughs, he uncovers a struggle between two visions of social control that continues to animate policing in Indonesia: the modern, bureaucratic approach favored by the state, and a territorial approach that divides the city into fiefdoms overseen by charismatic individuals of authority. Synthesizing insights from in-depth ethnographic, historical, and theoretical work, Barker reveals how authoritarianism can take root not just from the top down but also from the bottom up.
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cover of State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity: Essays on the “Ever-Dying People”

State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity

Essays on the “Ever-Dying People”

Simon Rawidowicz

Brandeis University Press, 1998

This readable, insightful, and thought-provoking collection of essays, presents an original and innovative ideology that stirringly affirms the unity of the Jewish people. Rawidowicz's rich themes include the relationship between the State of Israel and the Diaspora; Jewish "difference" and its repercussions; Jewish learning; and Jewish continuity in the post-Holocaust world. In his foreword to the paper edition, Michael A. Meyer writes, "Forty years after his death, [Rawidowicz's] sober analyses, his realism with regard to both the State of Israel and the Diaspora, and his striving to find unities among dichotomies that divide the Jewish people -- all of these make his images and ideas still worthy of our reflection."
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cover of State of Minds: Texas Culture and Its Discontents

State of Minds

Texas Culture and Its Discontents

By Don Graham

University of Texas Press, 2011

John Steinbeck once famously wrote that "Texas is a state of mind." For those who know it well, however, the Lone Star State is more than one mind-set, more than a collection of clichés, more than a static stereotype. There are minds in Texas, Don Graham asserts, and some of the most important are the writers and filmmakers whose words and images have helped define the state to the nation, the world, and the people of Texas themselves. For many years, Graham has been critiquing Texas writers and films in the pages of Texas Monthly and other publications. In State of Minds, he brings together and updates essays he published between 1999 and 2009 to paint a unique, critical picture of Texas culture.

In a strong personal voice—wry, humorous, and ironic—Graham offers his take on Texas literary giants ranging from J. Frank Dobie to Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy and on films such as The Alamo, The Last Picture Show, and Brokeback Mountain. He locates the works he discusses in relation to time and place, showing how they sprang (or not) from the soil of Texas and thereby helped to define Texas culture for generations of readers and viewers—including his own younger self growing up on a farm in Collin County. Never shying from controversy and never dull, Graham's essays in State of Minds demolish the notion that "Texas culture" is an oxymoron.

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cover of State of Segregation: America’s Freedom Rights Struggles as Told by Alabama

State of Segregation

America’s Freedom Rights Struggles as Told by Alabama

Mark J. Tenhundfeld

University of Alabama Press, 2026

A revealing legal journey through Alabama’s civil rights battles, exposing systemic discrimination and the enduring fight for justice via landmark Supreme Court cases

State of Segregation: America’s Freedom Rights Struggles, as Told by Alabama by Mark J. Tenhundfeld offers a compelling exploration of Alabama’s civil rights and civil liberties history through the lens of thirty-two pivotal US Supreme Court cases. Each case, rooted in Alabama’s social and legal conflicts, reveals the persistent struggle to fulfill the Constitution’s promises of equal protection and due process. From early twentieth-century challenges to the Alabama Constitution of 1901 to contemporary battles over gerrymandering, Tenhundfeld traces how discrimination was embedded in the state’s institutions—and how it was contested.

State of Segregation uniquely blends legal analysis, historical narrative, and social commentary to expose the deep-rooted systems of racial, gender, and class-based discrimination in Alabama. Tenhundfeld argues that while discrimination is the most defining feature of Alabama’s past, it remains the most difficult to confront. By illuminating the legal strategies used to uphold and dismantle injustice, State of Segregation contributes to the broader understanding of how historical inequities continue to shape modern society.

Accessible to general readers and scholars alike, this work stands apart by combining Alabama history, civil rights struggles, and Supreme Court jurisprudence into a single, powerful narrative. It offers both cautionary tales about the fragility of freedom and enduring lessons for today’s social justice advocates.

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cover of State of Translation: Turkey in Interlingual Relations

State of Translation

Turkey in Interlingual Relations

Einar Wigen

University of Michigan Press, 2018

International politics often requires two or more languages. The resulting interlingual relations mean translation, either by interpreters who are quite literally in the middle of conversations, or by bilingual statesmen who negotiate internationally in one language and then legitimize domestically in another. Since no two languages are the same, what can be argued in one language may be impossible in another. Political concepts can thus be significantly reformulated in the translation process. State of Translation examines this phenomenon using the case of how 19th-century Ottoman and later Turkish statesmen struggled to reconcile their arguments in external languages (French, then English) with those in their internal language (Ottoman, later Turkish), and in the process further entangled them. Einar Wigen shows how this process structured social relations between the Ottoman state and its interlocutors, both domestically and internationally, and shaped the dynamics of Turkish relations with Europe.

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cover of State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State

State of Virginity

Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State

Ulrike Strasser

University of Michigan Press, 2006

Winner: 2005 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women; Selected by the German Studies Association as one of the top five books of 2004 in early modern history

"A fresh, original study of gender roles and religious ideology in the early modern Catholic state. . . . Using a rich array of archival sources, Strasser explores ways in which an increasingly centralized Bavarian government in Munich inaugurated marriage and convent reforms and a civil religion based on the veneration of the Virgin Mary. Her carefully selected case studies show how church and state collaborated to produce a shared discourse and consistent policies proscribing extramarital sex, and excluding those without property from marriage. "

—Choice

Ulrike Strasser is Associate Professor of History, Affiliate Faculty in Women's Studies, and Core Faculty in Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

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cover of State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth-Century Japan

State of War

The Violent Order of Fourteenth-Century Japan

Thomas Donald Conlan

University of Michigan Press, 2003

State of War represents a fundamental revision of Japanese history. By illuminating Japan through the lens of war, Thomas Conlan provides insight into how state and society functioned, as opposed to how they were portrayed in ideal. Conlan recreates the experience of war from the perspective of one warrior and then reconstructs how war was fought through statistical analysis of surviving casualty records. State of War also shows that tThe battles of the 14th century mark a watershed in Japanese history. The fiscal exigencies of waging war led to a devolution of political power to the provinces. Furthermore, the outbreak of war caused social status to become performative, based upon the ability to fight autonomously, rather than being prescriptive, or determined by edicts of investiture.
TBridging the intellectual gulf between the 14th and 20th centuries, Conlan also explores how the seemingly contradictory categories of “religion” and “war” were integrally related. The 14th-century belief that the outcome of battle was determined by the gods meant that religious institutions warred both ritually and physically, and that religious attitudes frequently underpinned warrior behavior.
Based on diverse sources, including documents, picture scrolls, medical and religious texts, and chronicles, State of War rehabilitates warfare as a focal point of historical inquiry and provides a fascinating new overview of premodern Japanese history.
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cover of Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory

Statemaking and Social Movements

Essays in History and Theory

Edited by Charles Bright and Susan Harding

University of Michigan Press, 1984

Statemaking does not end once states emerge but is a continuous process, argue the contributors to this volume. In their view, states are not static structures that “act upon" society, nor are states simple reflections of economic relations; states are instead highly dynamic structures that are constantly built up, dismantled, and transformed by complex interplays of political, social, and economic processes. This collection of original essays by leading scholars in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, and economics argues for historically specific theories of states and politics in place of ahistorical models. Case studies range in scope from Aztec Mexico and feudal Europe to Nazi Germany and contemporary America. What emerges from this ground-breaking interdisciplinary dialogue is a historically sensitive way of thinking about states, politics, and social movements and the transformative relationship between states and societies.
[more]
cover of Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory

Statemaking and Social Movements

Essays in History and Theory

Charles Bright and Susan Harding, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1984

Statemaking does not end once states emerge but is a continuous process, argue the contributors to this volume. In their view, states are not static structures that “act upon" society, nor are states simple reflections of economic relations; states are instead highly dynamic structures that are constantly built up, dismantled, and transformed by complex interplays of political, social, and economic processes. This collection of original essays by leading scholars in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, and economics argues for historically specific theories of states and politics in place of ahistorical models. Case studies range in scope from Aztec Mexico and feudal Europe to Nazi Germany and contemporary America. What emerges from this ground-breaking interdisciplinary dialogue is a historically sensitive way of thinking about states, politics, and social movements and the transformative relationship between states and societies.
[more]
cover of States at War, Volume 1: A Reference Guide for Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont in the Civil War

States at War, Volume 1

A Reference Guide for Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont in the Civil War

Edited by Richard F. Miller

University Press of New England, 2013

While many Civil War reference books exist, there is no single compendium that contains important details about the combatant states (and territories) that Civil War researchers can readily access for their work. People looking for information about the organization, activities, economies, demographics, and prominent personalities of Civil War states and state governments must assemble data from a variety of sources, and many key sources remain unavailable online. This volume, the first of six, provides a crucial reference book for Civil War scholars and historians, professional or amateur, seeking information about individual states or groups of states. Its principal sources include the Official Records, state adjutant-general reports, legislative journals, state and federal legislation, federal and state executive speeches and proclamations, and the general and special orders issued by the military authorities of both governments. Designed and organized for easy use, this book can be read in two ways: by individual state, with each chapter offering a stand-alone skeletal history of an individual state’s war years, or across states, comparing reactions to the same event or solutions to the same problems.
[more]
cover of States at War, Volume 2: A Reference Guide for New York in the Civil War

States at War, Volume 2

A Reference Guide for New York in the Civil War

Edited by Richard F. Miller

University Press of New England, 2014

While many Civil War reference books exist, there is no single compendium that contains important details about the combatant states (and territories) that Civil War researchers can readily access for their work. People looking for information about the organizations, activities, economies, demographics, and prominent personalities of Civil War states and state governments must assemble data from a variety of sources, with many key sources remaining unavailable online. This volume provides a crucial reference book for Civil War scholars and historians, professional or amateur, seeking information about New York during the war. Its principal sources include the Official Records, state adjutant general reports, legislative journals, state and federal legislation, executive speeches and proclamations on the federal and state levels, and the general and special orders issued by the military authorities of both governments, North and South. Designed and organized for easy use, this book can be read in two ways: by individual state, with each chapter offering a stand-alone history of an individual state’s war years; or across states, comparing reactions to the same event or solutions to the same problems.
[more]
cover of States at War, Volume 3: A Reference Guide for Pennsylvania in the Civil War

States at War, Volume 3

A Reference Guide for Pennsylvania in the Civil War

Edited by Richard F. Miller

University Press of New England, 2014

While many Civil War reference books exist, there is no single compendium that contains important details about the combatant states (and territories) that Civil War researchers can readily access for their work. People looking for information about the organizations, activities, economies, demographics, and prominent personalities of Civil War states and state governments must assemble data from a variety of sources, with many key sources remaining unavailable online. This volume provides a crucial reference book for Civil War scholars and historians, professional or amateur, seeking information about Pennsylvania during the war. Its principal sources include the Official Records, state adjutant general reports, legislative journals, state and federal legislation, executive speeches and proclamations on the federal and state levels, and the general and special orders issued by the military authorities of both governments, North and South. Designed and organized for easy use, this book can be read in two ways: by individual state, with each chapter offering a stand-alone history of an individual state’s war years; or across states, comparing reactions to the same event or solutions to the same problems.
[more]
cover of States at War, Volume 4: A Reference Guide for Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey in the Civil War

States at War, Volume 4

A Reference Guide for Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey in the Civil War

Edited by Richard F. Miller

University Press of New England, 2015

While many Civil War reference books exist, there is no single compendium that contains important details about the combatant states (and territories) that Civil War researchers can readily access for their work. People looking for information about the organizations, activities, economies, demographics, and prominent personalities of Civil War States and state governments must assemble data from a variety of sources, with many key sources remaining unavailable online. This crucial reference book, the fourth in the States at War series, provides vital information on the organization, activities, economies, demographics, and prominent personalities of Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey during the Civil War. Its principal sources include the Official Records, state adjutant-general reports, legislative journals, state and federal legislation, federal and state executive speeches and proclamations, and the general and special orders issued by the military authorities of both governments, North and South. Designed and organized for easy use by professional historians and amateurs, this book can be read in two ways: by individual state, with each chapter offering a stand-alone history of an individual state’s war years; or across states, comparing reactions to the same event or solutions to the same problems.
[more]
cover of States at War, Volume 5: A Reference Guide for Ohio in the Civil War

States at War, Volume 5

A Reference Guide for Ohio in the Civil War

Edited by Richard F. Miller

University Press of New England, 2015

While many Civil War reference books exist, there is no single compendium that contains important details about the combatant states (and territories) that Civil War researchers can readily access for their work. People looking for information about the organizations, activities, economies, demographics, and prominent personalities of Civil War States and state governments must assemble data from a variety of sources, with many key sources remaining unavailable online. This crucial reference book, the fifth in the States at War series, provides vital information on the organization, activities, economies, demographics, and prominent personalities of Ohio during the Civil War. Its principal sources include the Official Records, state adjutant-general reports, legislative journals, state and federal legislation, federal and state executive speeches and proclamations, and the general and special orders issued by the military authorities of both governments, North and South. Designed and organized for easy use by professional historians and amateurs, this book can be read in two ways: by individual state, with each chapter offering a stand-alone history of an individual state’s war years; or across states, comparing reactions to the same event or solutions to the same problems.
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cover of States at War, Volume 6: The Confederate States Chronology and a Reference Guide for South Carolina in the Civil War

States at War, Volume 6

The Confederate States Chronology and a Reference Guide for South Carolina in the Civil War

Edited by Richard F. Miller

University Press of New England, 2018

Although many Civil War reference books exist, Civil War researchers have until now had no single compendium to consult on important details about the combatant states (and territories). This crucial reference work, the sixth in the States at War series, provides vital information on the organization, activities, economies, demographics, and laws of Civil War South Carolina. This volume also includes the Confederate States Chronology. Miller enlists multiple sources, including the statutes, Journals of Congress, departmental reports, general orders from Richmond and state legislatures, and others, to illustrate the rise and fall of the Confederacy. In chronological order, he presents the national laws intended to harness its manpower and resources for war, the harsh realities of foreign diplomacy, the blockade, and the costs of states’ rights governance, along with mounting dissent; the effects of massive debt financing, inflation, and loss of credit; and a growing raggedness within the ranks of its army. The chronology provides a factual framework for one of history’s greatest ironies: in the end, the war to preserve slavery could not be won while 35 percent of the population was enslaved.
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cover of States at War: A Reference Guide for Michigan in the Civil War

States at War

A Reference Guide for Michigan in the Civil War

Richard F. Miller

University of Michigan Press, 2020

Unlike most books about the Civil War, which address individual battles or the war at the national level, States at War: A Reference Guide for Michigan in the Civil War chronicles the actions of an individual state government and its citizenry coping with the War and its ramifications, from transformed race relations and gender roles, to the suspension of habeas corpus, to the deaths of over 10,000 Michigan fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers who had been in action. The book compiles primary source material—including official reports, legislative journals, executive speeches, special orders, and regional newspapers—to provide an exhaustive record of the important roles Michigan and Michiganders had in the War. Though not burdened by marching armies or military occupation like some states to the southeast, Michigan nevertheless had a fascinating Civil War experience that was filled with acute economic anxieties, intense political divisions, and vital contributions on the battlefield. This comprehensive volume will be the essential starting point for all future research into Michigan’s Civil War-era history.
 

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States of Exception in American History

Edited by Gary Gerstle and Joel Isaac

University of Chicago Press, 2020

States of Exception in American History brings to light the remarkable number of instances since the Founding in which the protections of the Constitution have been overridden, held in abeyance, or deliberately weakened for certain members of the polity. In the United States, derogations from the rule of law seem to have been a feature of—not a bug in—the constitutional system.

The first comprehensive account of the politics of exceptions and emergencies in the history of the United States, this book weaves together historical studies of moments and spaces of exception with conceptual analyses of emergency, the state of exception, sovereignty, and dictatorship. The Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Cold War figure prominently in the essays; so do Francis Lieber, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, Clinton Rossiter, and others who explored whether it was possible for the United States to survive states of emergency without losing its democratic way. States of Exception combines political theory and the history of political thought with histories of race and political institutions. It is both inspired by and illuminating of the American experience with constitutional rule in the age of terror and Trump.
 
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cover of States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State

States of Imagination

Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State

Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds.

Duke University Press, 2001

The state has recently been rediscovered as an object of inquiry by a broad range of scholars. Reflecting the new vitality of the field of political anthropology, States of Imagination draws together the best of this recent critical thinking to explore the postcolonial state. Contributors focus on a variety of locations from Guatemala, Pakistan, and Peru to India and Ecuador; they study what the state looks like to those seeing it from the vantage points of rural schools, police departments, small villages, and the inside of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Focusing on the micropolitics of everyday state-making, the contributors examine the mythologies, paradoxes, and inconsistencies of the state through ethnographies of diverse postcolonial practices. They show how the authority of the state is constantly challenged from the local as well as the global and how growing demands to confer rights and recognition to ever more citizens, organizations, and institutions reveal a persistent myth of the state as a source of social order and an embodiment of popular sovereignty. Demonstrating the indispensable value of ethnographic work on the practices and the symbols of the state, States of Imagination showcases a range of studies and methods to provide insight into the diverse forms of the postcolonial state as an arena of both political and cultural struggle.
This collection will interest students and scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and history.

Contributors. Lars Buur, Mitchell Dean, Akhil Gupta, Thomas Blom Hansen, Steffen Jensen, Aletta J. Norval, David Nugent, Sarah Radcliffe, Rachel Sieder, Finn Stepputat, Martijn van Beek, Oskar Verkaaik, Fiona Wilson

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States of Marriage

Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali

Emily S. Burrill

Ohio University Press, 2015

States of Marriage shows how throughout the colonial period in French Sudan (present-day Mali) the institution of marriage played a central role in how the empire defined its colonial subjects as gendered persons with certain attendant rights and privileges. The book is a modern history of the ideological debates surrounding the meaning of marriage, as well as the associated legal and sociopolitical practices in colonial and postcolonial Mali. It is also the first to use declassified court records regarding colonialist attempts to classify and categorize traditional marriage conventions in the southern region of the country. In French Sudan, as elsewhere in colonial Africa, the first stage of marriage reform consisted of efforts to codify African marriages, bridewealth transfers, and divorce proceedings in public records, rendering these social arrangements “legible” to the colonial administration. Once this essential legibility was achieved, other, more forceful interventions to control and reframe marriage became possible. This second stage of marriage reform can be traced through transformations in and by the colonial court system, African engagements with state-making processes, and formations of “gender justice.” The latter refers to gender-based notions of justice and legal rights, typically as defined by governing and administrative bodies as well as by socioxadpolitical communities. Gender justice went through a period of favoring the rights of women, to a period of favoring patriarchs, to a period of emphasizing the power of the individual—but all within the context of a paternalistic and restrictive colonial state.
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cover of States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection

States of Memory

Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection

Jeffrey K. Olick, ed.

Duke University Press, 2003

States of Memory illuminates the construction of national memory from a comparative perspective. The essays collected here emphasize that memory itself has a history: not only do particular meanings change, but the very faculty of memory—its place in social relations and the forms it takes—varies over time. Integrating theories of memory and nationalism with case studies, these essays stake a vital middle ground between particular and universal approaches to social memory studies.

The contributors—including historians and social scientists—describe societies’ struggles to produce and then use ideas of what a “normal” past should look like. They examine claims about the genuineness of revolution (in fascist Italy and communist Russia), of inclusiveness (in the United States and Australia), of innocence (in Germany), and of inevitability (in Israel). Essayists explore the reputation of Confucius among Maoist leaders during China’s Cultural Revolution; commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States Congress; the “end” of the postwar era in Japan; and how national calendars—in signifying what to remember, celebrate, and mourn—structure national identification. Above all, these essays reveal that memory is never unitary, no matter how hard various powers strive to make it so.

States of Memory will appeal to those scholars—in sociology, history, political science, cultural studies, anthropology, and art history-who are interested in collective memory, commemoration, nationalism, and state formation.

Contributors. Paloma Aguilar, Frederick C. Corney, Carol Gluck, Matt K. Matsuda, Jeffrey K. Olick, Francesca Polletta, Uri Ram, Barry Schwartz, Lyn Spillman, Charles Tilly, Simonetta Falasca Zamponi, Eviatar Zerubavel, Tong Zhang

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cover of States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940

States of Nature

Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940

By Stuart George McCook

University of Texas Press, 2002

The process of nation-building in Latin America transformed the relations between the state, the economy, and nature. Between 1760 and 1940, the economies of most countries in the Spanish Caribbean came to depend heavily on the export of plant products, such as coffee, tobacco, and sugar. After the mid-nineteenth century, this model of export-led economic growth also became a central tenet of liberal projects of nation-building. As international competition grew and commodity prices fell over this period, Latin American growers strove to remain competitive by increasing agricultural production. By the turn of the twentieth century, their pursuit of export-led growth had generated severe environmental problems, including soil exhaustion, erosion, and epidemic outbreaks of crop diseases and pests.

This book traces the history of the intersections between nature, economy, and nation in the Spanish Caribbean through a history of the agricultural and botanical sciences. Growers and governments in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, and Costa Rica turned to scientists to help them establish practical and ideological control over nature. They hoped to use science to alleviate the pressing environmental and economic stresses, without having to give up their commitment to export-led growth. Starting from an overview of the relationship among science, nature, and development throughout the export boom of 1760 to 1930, Stuart McCook examines such topics as the relationship between scientific plant surveys and nation-building, the development of a "creole science" to address the problems of tropical agriculture, the ecological rationalization of the sugar industry, and the growth of technocratic ideologies of science and progress. He concludes with a look at how the Great Depression of the 1930s changed the paradigms of economic and political development and the role of science and nature in these paradigms.

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States of Terror

History, Theory, Literature

David Simpson

University of Chicago Press, 2019

How have we come to depend so greatly on the words terror and terrorism to describe broad categories of violence? David Simpson offers here a philology of terror, tracking the concept’s long, complicated history across literature, philosophy, political science, and theology—from Plato to NATO.

Introducing the concept of the “fear-terror cluster,” Simpson is able to capture the wide range of terms that we have used to express extreme emotional states over the centuries—from anxiety, awe, and concern to dread, fear, and horror. He shows that the choices we make among such words to describe shades of feeling have seriously shaped the attribution of motives, causes, and effects of the word “terror” today, particularly when violence is deployed by or against the state. At a time when terror-talk is widely and damagingly exploited by politicians and the media, this book unpacks the slippery rhetoric of terror and will prove a vital resource across humanistic and social sciences disciplines.
 
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States of Violence

Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2005

This extraordinary collection of essays recasts prevailing understandings of the role of violence in the formation of the modern world. By illuminating the links between exceptional ruptures and the routine maintenance of social order, the collection expands and redefines our understanding of political violence.

By means of a combination of detailed historical studies and imaginative reflection, this book explores the often unrecognized violent foundations of modern nations. Focusing on the relations between the state and the domestic order, it directs attention to contests over the establishment and representation of meanings and addresses the impact of state-centered categories and narratives on the organization and collective remembering of violence. The essays cover a wide range of regions, time periods, and processes, including the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, the United States, and Europe, and span violent uprisings as well as the quotidian administration of the law. As its title suggests, States of Violence brings together the stable and the transient, the institutional and the experiential, the state sanctioned and the insurgent, inviting recognition of the multiple intersections of practices of governance and processes of feeling.

"Few scholars have managed as effectively as these to denature the place of violence in modern social life and thought. They make it abundantly plain that the frank brutality, often associated with colonial contexts, is inseparable from less acknowledged forms of "peaceful violence" that pervade much of our contemporary political life."
-Jean Comaroff, Bernard E. and Ellen C. Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago

Fernando Coronil, a Venezuelan citizen, is Associate Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. His research focuses on contemporary historical transformations in Latin America and on theoretical issues concerning the state, modernity, and postcolonialism. His numerous publications include The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela; "Beyond Occidentalism: Towards Non-Imperial Geohistorical Categories"; and the introductory essay in Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, by Fernando Ortiz. He is completing a book on the coup against President Chávez of Venezuela.

Julie Skurski teaches in the Departments of Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan and is the Associate Director of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History. Her research concerns the intersections of national, racial, and gender relations in Latin America, with a focus on popular religiosity. Her publications include "The Ambiguities of Authenticity in Latin America: Doña Bárbara and the Construction of National Identity," in Becoming National, G. Eley and R. Suny, eds. She is currently completing Civilizing Barbarism, a book on gender, mestizaje, and the state in Venezuela.
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Statesmanship and Party Government

A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke

Harvey C. Mansfield

University of Chicago Press, 1965

In this incisive look at early modern views of party politics, Harvey C. Mansfield examines the pamphlet war between Edmund Burke and the followers of Henry St. John, First Viscount Bolingbroke during the mid-eighteenth century. In response to works by Bolingbroke published posthumously, Burke created his most eloquent advocacy of the party system. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the material, Mansfield shows that present-day parties must be understood in the light of the history of party government. The complicated organization and the public actions of modern parties are the result, he contends, and not the cause of a great change in opinion about parties.

Mansfield points out that while parties have always existed, the party government that we know today is possible only because parties are now considered respectable. In Burke’s day, however, they were thought by detractors to be a cancer in a free polity. Even many supporters of the parties viewed them as a dangerous instrument, only to be used cautiously by statesmen in dire times. Burke, however, was an early champion of the party system in Britain and made his arguments with a clear-eyed realism. In Statesmanship and Party Government, Mansfield provides a skillful evaluation of Burke’s writings and sheds light present-day party politics through a profound understanding of the historical background of the their inception.
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Statesmen, Scoundrels, and Eccentrics

A Gallery of Amazing Arkansans

Tom Dillard

University of Arkansas Press, 2010

From Native Americans, explorers, and early settlers to entertainers, business people, politicians, lawyers, artists, and many others, the well-known and not-so-well-known Arkansans featured in Statesmen, Scoundrels, and Eccentrics have fascinating stories. To name a few, there’s the “Hanging Judge,” Isaac C. Parker of Fort Smith, and Hattie Caraway, the first elected female U.S. senator. Isaac T. Gillam, a slave who became a prominent politician in post–Civil War Little Rock, is included, as is Norman McLeod, an eccentric Hot Springs photographer and owner of the city’s first large tourist trap. These entertaining short biographies from Dillard’s Remembering Arkansas column will be enjoyed by all kinds of readers, young and old alike. All the original columns reprinted here have also been enhanced with Dillard’s own recommended reading lists. Statesmen will serve as an introduction or reintroduction to the state’s wonderfully complex heritage, full of rhythm and discord, peopled by generations of hardworking men and women who have contributed much to the region and nation.
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Stateswomen

A Centennial History of Arkansas Women Legislators, 1922-2022

Lindsley Armstrong Smith

University of Arkansas Press, 2022

Celebrating the centenary of women legislators’ membership in the Arkansas General Assembly, Stateswomen shines a light on the women who have served as some of the state’s central decision makers. Drawing on documentary research and oral histories, Lindsley Armstrong Smith and Stephen A. Smith present lively, concise biographies for the nearly 150 women legislators who have served in the general assembly to date, chronicling their personal histories, volunteer work and social activism, and legislative victories. In a probing introduction, the authors examine the neglected role of women in Arkansas political history alongside the “long history of resistance to full citizenship rights for women in Arkansas”—demonstrating that political representation is essential for improving opportunities in the wider society.

The first comprehensive study dedicated to these trailblazing Arkansas legislators, Stateswomen will surely inspire history buffs, community-minded citizens, and political hopefuls alike.
 
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Stations in the Field

A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930

Raf De Bont

University of Chicago Press, 2015

When we think of sites of animal research that symbolize modernity, the first places that come to mind are grand research institutes in cities and near universities that house the latest in equipment and technologies, not the surroundings of the bird’s nest, the octopus’s garden in the sea, or the parts of inland lakes in which freshwater plankton reside. Yet during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a group of zoologists began establishing novel, indeed modern ways of studying nature, propagating what present-day ecologists describe as place-based research. 
           
Raf De Bont’s Stations in the Field focuses on the early history of biological field stations and the role these played in the rise of zoological place-based research. Beginning in the 1870s, a growing number of biological field stations were founded—first in Europe and later elsewhere around the world—and thousands of zoologists received their training and performed their research at these sites. Through case studies, De Bont examines the material and social context in which field stations arose, the actual research that was produced in these places, the scientific claims that were developed there, and the rhetorical strategies that were deployed to convince others that these claims made sense. From the life of parasitic invertebrates in northern France and freshwater plankton in Schleswig-Holstein, to migratory birds in East Prussia and pest insects in Belgium, De Bont’s book is fascinating tour through the history of studying nature in nature.
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Stations of the Cross

Adorno and Christian Right Radio

Paul Apostolidis

Duke University Press, 2000

Since the 1970s, American society has provided especially fertile ground for the growth of the Christian right and its influence on both political and cultural discourse. In Stations of the Cross political theorist Paul Apostolidis shows how a critical component of this movement’s popular culture—evangelical conservative radio—interacts with the current U.S. political economy. By examining in particular James Dobson’s enormously influential program, Focus on the Family—its messages, politics, and effects—Apostolidis reveals the complex nature of contemporary conservative religious culture.
Public ideology and institutional tendencies clash, the author argues, in the restructuring of the welfare state, the financing of the electoral system, and the backlash against women and minorities. These frictions are nowhere more apparent than on Christian right radio. Reinvigorating the intellectual tradition of the Frankfurt School, Apostolidis shows how ideas derived from early critical theory—in particular that of Theodor W. Adorno—can illuminate the political and social dynamics of this aspect of contemporary American culture. He uses and reworks Adorno’s theories to interpret the nationally broadcast Focus on the Family, revealing how the cultural discourse of the Christian right resonates with recent structural transformations in the American political economy. Apostolidis shows that the antidote to the Christian right’s marriage of religious and market fundamentalism lies not in a reinvocation of liberal fundamentals, but rather depends on a patient cultivation of the affinities between religion’s utopian impulses and radical, democratic challenges to the present political-economic order.
Mixing critical theory with detailed analysis, Stations of the Cross provides a needed contribution to sociopolitical studies of mass movements and will attract readers in sociology, political science, philosophy, and history.
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cover of Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History

Stature, Living Standards, and Economic Development

Essays in Anthropometric History

Edited by John Komlos

University of Chicago Press, 1994

What can body measurements tell us about living standards in the past? In this collection of essays studying height and weight data from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, North America, and Asia, fourteen distinguished scholars explore the relation between physical size, economic development, and standard of living among various socioeconomic groups.

Analyzing the differences in physical stature by social group, gender, age, provenance, and date and place of birth, these essays illuminate urban and rural differences in well-being, explore the effects of market integration on previously agricultural societies, contrast the experiences of several segments of society, and explain the proximate causes of downturns and upswings in well-being. Particularly intriguing is the researchers' conclusion that the environment of the New World during this period was far more propitious than that of Europe, based on data showing that European aristocrats were in worse health than even the poorest members of American society.
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Statutes in Court

The History and Theory of Statutory Interpretation

William D. Popkin

Duke University Press, 1999

How do judges determine the meaning of laws? The extent to which judges should exercise their discretion in interpreting legislation has been a contentious issue throughout American history, involving questions about the balance of power between the legislature and the judiciary. In Statutes in Court William D. Popkin provides an indispensable survey of the history of American statutory interpretation and then offers his own theory of “ordinary judging” that defines the proper scope of judicial discretion.
Popkin begins by discussing the British origins of statutory interpretation in this country. He then maps the evolving conceptions of the judicial role in the United States from Revolutionary times through the twentieth century before presenting his “ordinary judging” theory—one that asks the judge to use modest judicial discretion to assist the legislature in implementing good government. Claiming that theory cannot account for everything a judge does when determining statutory meaning or writing an opinion, Popkin shows how judges who strive to be conscientious in interpreting the law are often hampered by the lack of both a framework in which to fit their approach and a well-understood common vocabulary to explain what they do. Statutes in Court fills that gap.
This work will be valuable to anyone concerned about the judicial role in the interpretation of laws—from judiciary officials and law professors to legal historians and political scientists.
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Stay Tuned

Listening to the Network Era

Patrick Sullivan

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Since the 1950s, television flooded the American soundscape with not just pictures but sounds, a constant aural stream infiltrating domestic life. In Stay Tuned, Patrick Sullivan treats network-era television sound not as background noise or auxiliary signal but as a formative texture of aesthetic life in postwar America. He theorizes how television’s sonic forms—asynchronous audiovisuals, noises, affective rhythms, what he collectively terms “network aurality”—trouble traditional aesthetic theory. Stay Tuned takes up critiques of television sound and repurposes them as evidence of a deeper philosophical discomfort: Namely, that television sound does something to aesthetic categories that they weren’t built to handle. From the laugh track to the cartoon “boinks,” from noises to the jingle, Sullivan reads television sounds not as cultural detritus but as formal interventions—forcing a redefinition of what aesthetics means when form is mass-produced, commercial, and built for syndication. What emerges is not just a new theory and history of television sound but a reimagined account of aesthetic experience itself—expanded, recalibrated, and a little wacky.

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cover of Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia

Staying Italian

Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia

Jordan Stanger-Ross

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Despite their twin positions as two of North America’s most iconic Italian neighborhoods, South Philly and Toronto’s Little Italy have functioned in dramatically different ways since World War II. Inviting readers into the churches, homes, and businesses at the heart of these communities, Staying Italian reveals that daily experience in each enclave created two distinct, yet still Italian, ethnicities.

As Philadelphia struggled with deindustrialization, Jordan Stanger-Ross shows, Italian ethnicity in South Philly remained closely linked with preserving turf and marking boundaries. Toronto’s thriving Little Italy, on the other hand, drew Italians together from across the wider region. These distinctive ethnic enclaves, Stanger-Ross argues, were shaped by each city’s response to suburbanization, segregation, and economic restructuring. By situating malleable ethnic bonds in the context of political economy and racial dynamics, he offers a fresh perspective on the potential of local environments to shape individual identities and social experience.

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Staying Power

The History of Black People in Britain

Peter Fryer

Pluto Press, 2018

Staying Power is a panoramic history of black Britons. First published in 1984 amid race riots and police brutality, Fryer’s history performed a deeply political act, revealing how Africans, Asians, and their descendants had been erased from British history.
            Stretching back to the Roman conquest, encompassing the court of Henry VIII, and following a host of characters from the pioneering nurse and war hero Mary Seacole to the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, Peter Fryer paints a picture of two thousand years of black presence in Britain. By rewriting black Britons into British history, showing where they influenced political traditions, social institutions, and cultural life, Staying Power presented a radical challenge to racist and nationalist agendas. This edition includes a new foreword by Gary Younge examining the book’s continued significance in shaping black British identity today, alongside the now-classic introduction by Paul Gilroy.
 
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cover of Stealing Indian Women: Native Slavery in the Illinois Country

Stealing Indian Women

Native Slavery in the Illinois Country

Carl J. Ekberg

University of Illinois Press, 2009

Based almost entirely on original source documents from the United States, France, and Spain, Carl J. Ekberg’s Stealing Indian Women provides an innovative overview of Indian slavery in the Mississippi Valley. His detailed study of a fascinating and convoluted criminal case involving various slave women and a métis (mixed-blood) woodsman named Céladon illuminates race and gender relations, Creole culture, and the lives of Indian slaves--particularly women--in ways never before possible.
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cover of Stealing from the Gods: Temple Robbery in the Roman Imagination

Stealing from the Gods

Temple Robbery in the Roman Imagination

Isabel K. Köster

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Stealing from the Gods investigates how authors writing between the first century BCE and second century CE addressed the issue of temple robbery or sacrilegium. As a self-proclaimed empire of pious people, the Romans viewed temple robbery as deeply un-Roman and among the worst of offenses. On the other hand, given the constant financial pressures of warfare and administration, it was inevitable that the Romans would make use of the riches stored in sanctuaries. In order to resolve this dilemma, the Romans distinguished sharply between acceptable and unacceptable removals of sacred property. When those who conducted themselves as proper Romans plundered the property of the gods, their actions were for the good of the state. In contrast, the temple robber was viewed as a stranger to the norms of Roman society and an enemy of the state.

Ancient authors including Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Appian, and Pausanias present isolated, grotesque individuals whose actions have no bearing on the conduct of Romans as a whole, rendering temple robbery not a matter of collective responsibility, but of individual moral failure. By revealing how narratives of temple robbery are constructed from a literary perspective and how they inform discourses about military conquest and imperial rule, Isabel K. Köster shines a new light on how the Romans coped with the more pernicious aspects of their empire.
 
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cover of Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor

Stealing the General

The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor

Russell S. Bonds

Westholme Publishing, 2007

Selected by Civil War Interactive as One of the Top Civil War Books of All Time
On April 12, 1862—one year to the day after Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter and started the Civil War—a tall, mysterious smuggler and self-appointed Union spy named James J. Andrews and nineteen infantry volunteers infiltrated north Georgia and stole a steam engine called the General. Racing northward at speeds approaching sixty miles an hour, cutting telegraph lines and destroying track along the way, Andrews planned to open East Tennessee to the Union army, cutting off men and matériel from the Confederate forces in Virginia. If they succeeded, Andrews and his raiders could change the course of the war. But the General's young conductor, William A. Fuller, chased the stolen train first on foot, then by handcar, and finally aboard another engine, the Texas. He pursued the General until, running out of wood and water, Andrews and his men abandoned the doomed locomotive, ending the adventure that would soon be famous as The Great Locomotive Chase. But the ordeal of the soldiers involved was just beginning. In the days that followed, the "engine thieves" were hunted down and captured. Eight were tried and executed as spies, including Andrews. Eight others made a daring escape to freedom, including two assisted by a network of slaves and Union sympathizers. For their actions, before a personal audience with President Abraham Lincoln, six of the raiders became the first men in American history to be awarded the Medal of Honor—the nation's highest decoration for gallantry.

Americans north and south, both at the time and ever since, have been astounded and fascinated by this daring raid. But until now, there has not been a complete history of the entire episode and the fates of all those involved. Based on eyewitness accounts, as well as correspondence, diaries, military records, newspaper reports, deposition testimony and other primary sources, Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor by Russell S. Bonds is a blend of meticulous research and compelling narrative that is now considered to be the definitive history of "the boldest adventure of the war."

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cover of Stealing the Gila: The Pima Agricultural Economy and Water Deprivation, 1848-1921

Stealing the Gila

The Pima Agricultural Economy and Water Deprivation, 1848-1921

David H. DeJong

University of Arizona Press, 2009

By 1850 the Pima Indians of central Arizona had developed a strong and sustainable agricultural economy based on irrigation. As David H. DeJong demonstrates, the Pima were an economic force in the mid-nineteenth century middle Gila River valley, producing food and fiber crops for western military expeditions and immigrants. Moreover, crops from their fields provided an additional source of food for the Mexican military presidio in Tucson, as well as the U.S. mining districts centered near Prescott. For a brief period of about three decades, the Pima were on an equal economic footing with their non-Indian neighbors.

This economic vitality did not last, however. As immigrants settled upstream from the Pima villages, they deprived the Indians of the water they needed to sustain their economy. DeJong traces federal, territorial, and state policies that ignored Pima water rights even though some policies appeared to encourage Indian agriculture. This is a particularly egregious example of a common story in the West: the flagrant local rejection of Supreme Court rulings that protected Indian water rights. With plentiful maps, tables, and illustrations, DeJong demonstrates that maintaining the spreading farms and growing towns of the increasingly white population led Congress and other government agencies to willfully deny Pimas their water rights.

Had their rights been protected, DeJong argues, Pimas would have had an economy rivaling the local and national economies of the time. Instead of succeeding, the Pima were reduced to cycles of poverty, their lives destroyed by greed and disrespect for the law, as well as legal decisions made for personal gain.
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cover of Steam & Cinders: The Advent of Railroads in Wisconsin

Steam & Cinders

The Advent of Railroads in Wisconsin

Axel Lorenzsonn

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2009

Based on the author’s extensive research into the early history of Wisconsin’s rails, Steam and Cinders chronicles the boom and bust of the first railroads in the state, from the charters of the 1830s to the farm mortgages of the 1850s and consolidation of the railroads on the eve of the Civil War. Featuring more than 75 period photographs, historic maps, and drawings, Steam and Cinders preserves the legacy of early Wisconsin railroading for railroad buffs and armchair historians alike.
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cover of Steam City: Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore

Steam City

Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore

David Schley

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Anyone interested in the rise of American corporate capitalism should look to the streets of Baltimore. There, in 1827, citizens launched a bold new venture: a “rail-road” that would link their city with the fertile Ohio River Valley. They dubbed this company the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O), and they conceived of it as a public undertaking—an urban improvement, albeit one that would stretch hundreds of miles beyond the city limits.

Steam City tells the story of corporate capitalism starting from the street and moving outward, looking at how the rise of the railroad altered the fabric of everyday life in the United States. The B&O’s founders believed that their new line would remap American economic geography, but no one imagined that the railroad would also dramatically reshape the spaces of its terminal city. As railroad executives wrangled with city officials over their use of urban space, they formulated new ideas about the boundaries between public good and private profit. Ultimately, they reinvented the B&O as a private enterprise, unmoored to its home city. This bold reconception had implications not only for the people of Baltimore, but for the railroad industry as a whole. As David Schley shows here, privatizing the B&O helped set the stage for the rise of the corporation as a major force in the post-Civil War economy.

​Steam City examines how the birth and spread of the American railroad—which brought rapid communications, fossil fuels, and new modes of corporate organization to the city—changed how people worked, where they lived, even how they crossed the street. As Schley makes clear, we still live with the consequences of this spatial and economic order today.
 
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cover of Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860

Steam-Powered Knowledge

William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860

Aileen Fyfe

University of Chicago Press, 2012

With the overwhelming amount of new information that bombards us each day, it is perhaps difficult to imagine a time when the widespread availability of the printed word was a novelty. In early nineteenth-century Britain, print was not novel—Gutenberg’s printing press had been around for nearly four centuries—but printed matter was still a rare and relatively expensive luxury. All this changed, however, as publishers began employing new technologies to astounding effect, mass-producing instructive and educational books and magazines and revolutionizing how knowledge was disseminated to the general public.

In Steam-Powered Knowledge, Aileen Fyfe explores the activities of William Chambers and the W. & R. Chambers publishing firm during its formative years, documenting for the first time how new technologies were integrated into existing business systems. Chambers was one of the first publishers to abandon traditional skills associated with hand printing, instead favoring the latest innovations in printing processes and machinery: machine-made paper, stereotyping, and, especially, printing machines driven by steam power. The mid-nineteenth century also witnessed dramatic advances in transportation, and Chambers used proliferating railway networks and steamship routes to speed up communication and distribution. As a result, his high-tech publishing firm became an exemplar of commercial success by 1850 and outlived all of its rivals in the business of cheap instructive print. Fyfe follows Chambers’s journey from small-time bookseller and self-trained hand-press printer to wealthy and successful publisher of popular educational books on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating along the way the profound effects of his and his fellow publishers’ willingness, or unwillingness, to incorporate these technological innovations into their businesses.
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