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

cover of Supreme Court Appointments: Judge Bork and the Politicization of Senate Confirmations

Supreme Court Appointments

Judge Bork and the Politicization of Senate Confirmations

Norman Vieira and Leonard Gross

Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

Norman Vieira and Leonard Gross provide an in-depth analysis of the political and legal framework surrounding the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees.

President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court met with a fierce opposition that was apparent in his confirmation hearings, which were different in many ways from those of any previous nominee. Lasting longer than any other Supreme Court confirmation battle, the Senate hearings dragged on for eighty-seven hours over a twelve-day period. Bork personally testified for more than thirty hours, outlining his legal philosophy in greater detail than had ever before been required of a Supreme Court nominee. Nor had any previous Supreme Court nominee faced the number of witnesses who testified at the Bork hearings.

Deriving their material from hundreds of in-depth interviews with those who participated in the confirmation hearings, Vieira and Gross present a firsthand account of the behind-the-scenes pressure on senators to oppose Bork. Special-interest groups, they note, attempted to control the confirmation process, with both the media and public-opinion polls playing major roles in the defeat of the nomination. Both liberal and conservative groups used the Bork debate to raise money for political war chests.

This behind-the-scenes view of the politics and personalities involved in the Bork confirmation controversy provides a framework for future debates regarding the confirmation process. To help establish that framework, Vieira and Gross examine the similarities as well as the differences between the Bork confirmation battle and other confirmation proceedings for Supreme Court nominees. They also analyze the Supreme Court nominations made after the Bork hearings, including an extensive examination of the controversial Clarence Thomas nomination.

 

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cover of Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day

Supremely Tiny Acts

A Memoir of a Day

Sonya Huber

The Ohio State University Press, 2021

Winner (Bronze, Autobiography & Memoir), 2021 Foreword Indies Awards

“I think we have to get to the real, to catch the facts we have, to hold on to what we see. . . .in this time where lies are currency,” Sonya Huber writes in her book-length essay Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day. On the theory that naming the truths of quotidian experience can counter the dangerous power of lies, she carefully recounts two anxiety-fueled days one fall. On the first, she is arrested as part of a climate protest in Times Square. On the other, she must make it to her court appearance while also finding time to take her son to get his learner's permit. Paying equal attention to minor details, passing thoughts, and larger political concerns around activism and parenting in the Trump-era United States, Huber asks: How can one simultaneously be a good mother, a good worker, and a good citizen? As she reflects on the meaning of protest and on whiteness and other forms of privilege within political activism, Huber offers a wry, self-aware, and stirring testament to the everyday as a seedbed for meaningful change.
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cover of Surabaya, City of Work: A Socioeconomic History, 1900–2000

Surabaya, City of Work

A Socioeconomic History, 1900–2000

Howard Dick

Ohio University Press, 2002

Surabaya is Indonesia’s second largest city but is not well known to the outside world. Yet in 1900, Surabaya was a bigger city than Jakarta and one of the main commercial centers of Asia. Collapse of sugar exports during the 1930s depression, followed by the Japanese occupation, revolution, and independence, brought on a long period of stagnation and retreat from the international economy. Not until the export boom of the 1990s did Surabaya regain prominence as Southeast Asia’s leading non–capital–city industrial area.

Previous thinking on Indonesia is being reassessed in light of recent political and economic upheaval. Surabaya, City of Work offers an alternative to the Jakarta-centric focus of most writing on the country. It is a multifaceted view of a fascinating and complex city in the dimensions of time and space, economy and society, and the current transition toward decentralization makes it highly topical.

Exploration of this eventful economic history gives new insight into Indonesia’s modern economic development. Industrialization is recognized as being associated with rapid urbanization, but this is the first study of Indonesia from an explicitly urban perspective. Surabaya, City of Work takes a broad approach that links industrialization to socioeconomic trends, the increasing role of government, changing land use, and trade patterns.

This well–illustrated local history encompassing national events and trends will be a central work on Indonesia for years to come.

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cover of Surf and Rescue: George Freeth and the Birth of California Beach Culture

Surf and Rescue

George Freeth and the Birth of California Beach Culture

Patrick Moser

University of Illinois Press, 2022

The mixed-race Hawaiian athlete George Freeth brought surfing to Venice, California, in 1907. Over the next twelve years, Freeth taught Southern Californians to surf and swim while creating a modern lifeguard service that transformed the beach into a destination for fun, leisure, and excitement. Patrick Moser places Freeth’s inspiring life story against the rise of the Southern California beach culture he helped shape and define. Freeth made headlines with his rescue of seven fishermen, an act of heroism that highlighted his innovative lifeguarding techniques. But he also founded California's first surf club and coached both male and female athletes, including Olympic swimming champion and “father of modern surfing” Duke Kahanamoku. Often in financial straits, Freeth persevered as a teacher and lifeguarding pioneer--building a legacy that endured long after his death during the 1919 influenza pandemic.

A compelling merger of biography and sports history, Surf and Rescue brings to light the forgotten figure whose novel way of seeing the beach sparked the imaginations of people around the world.

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cover of Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe

Surge to Freedom

The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe

J. F. Brown

Duke University Press, 1991

In praise of Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe:
"Nobody has yet produced a more perceptive and inclusive work on the events of what is arguably the most important year of our lifetimes. This book is essential for anyone with an interest in Eastern Europe, radical social change, or post-bipolar global politics."—Joel M. Jenswold, Social Science Quarterly

"Brown has been a close observer of the region for decades, and the breadth of his knowledge and the acuity of his judgments are evident throughout."—Michael Bernhard, Political Science Quarterly

"There is no surer guide than Brown to an understanding of these events, and no one better qualified to describe the complex and daunting problems facing the new non-communist governments."—John C. Campbell, Foreign Affairs

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cover of Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds

Surpassing Wonder

The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds

Donald Harman Akenson

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Elegant and inventive, Surpassing Wonder uncovers how the ancient Hebrew scriptures, the Christian New Testament, and the Talmuds of the Rabbis are related and how, collectively, they make up the core of Western consciousness. Donald Harman Akenson provides an incisive critique of how religious scholars have distorted the holy books and argues that it was actually the inventor of the Hebrew scriptures who shaped our concept of narrative history—thereby founding Western culture.
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cover of Surplus Citizens: Struggle and Nationalism in the Greek Crisis

Surplus Citizens

Struggle and Nationalism in the Greek Crisis

Dimitra Kotouza

Pluto Press, 2018

The crisis in Greece has elicited the full spectrum of responses - from optimism for a left parliamentary politics inspired by Syriza's electoral victory, to pessimism about the intransigence of the EU and calls for the reinstatement of full national sovereignty in Europe. In Surplus Citizens, Dimitra Kotouza questions the terms of the debate by demonstrating how the national framing of social contestation posed obstacles to transformative collective action, but also how this framing has been challenged. Analysing the increasing superfluousness of subordinate classes in Greece as part of a global phenomenon with racialised and gendered dimensions, the book interrogates the strengths, contradictions and limits of collective action and identity in the crisis, from the movement of the squares and neighbourhood assemblies, to new forms of labour activism, environmental struggles, immigrant protests, anti-fascism and pro-refugee activism. Arguing against the strategic fixation on unified identities and pointing instead to the transformative potential of internal dispute within movements, Surplus Citizens highlights the relevance of a discussion of Greece to collective action beyond it, as we continue to traverse a global financial crisis that has provoked conflicts over nationalism, immigration and the rise of neo-fascism.
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cover of Surplus: The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life

Surplus

The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life

Christopher T. Morehart

University Press of Colorado, 2015

The concept of surplus captures the politics of production and also conveys the active material means by which people develop the strategies to navigate everyday life. Surplus: The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life examines how surpluses affected ancient economies, governments, and households in civilizations across Mesoamerica, the Southwest United States, the Andes, Northern Europe, West Africa, Mesopotamia, and eastern Asia.

A hallmark of archaeological research on sociopolitical complexity, surplus is central to theories of political inequality and institutional finance. This book investigates surplus as a macro-scalar process on which states or other complex political formations depend and considers how past people—differentially positioned based on age, class, gender, ethnicity, role, and goal—produced, modified, and mobilized their social and physical worlds.

Placing the concept of surplus at the forefront of archaeological discussions on production, consumption, power, strategy, and change, this volume reaches beyond conventional ways of thinking about top-down or bottom-up models and offers a comparative framework to examine surplus, generating new questions and methodologies to elucidate the social and political economies of the past.

Contributors include Douglas J. Bolender, James A. Brown, Cathy L. Costin, Kristin De Lucia, Timothy Earle, John E. Kelly, Heather M. L. Miller, Christopher R. Moore, Christopher T. Morehart, Neil L. Norman, Ann B. Stahl, Victor D. Thompson, T. L. Thurston, and E. Christian Wells.


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cover of Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky's Liars and Narrative Exposure

Surprised by Shame

Dostoevsky's Liars and Narrative Exposure

Deborah A. Martinsen

The Ohio State University Press, 2003

In Surprised by Shame, Deborah A. Martinsen combines shame studies and literary criticism. She begins with a discussion of shame dynamics, including the tendency of those who witness shame to feel shame themselves. Because Dostoevsky identified shame as a fundamental source of lying, Martinsen focuses on scenes when liars are exposed. She argues that by making readers witness such scandal scenes, Dostoevsky surprises them with shame, thereby collapsing the distance between readers and characters and viscerally involving them in his message of human interconnection.

Treating Dostoevsky’s liars as case studies, Surprised by Shame discusses varieties of shame and shamelessness; it also illustrates how Dostoevsky uses lying to indicate and expose subconscious processes. In addition, Martinsen demonstrates how Dostoevsky plucks shame from the realm of character trait and plot motive and embeds it in the narrative dynamics of The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, thereby plunging readers into fictional experience and ethically transforming them.

By focusing on shame, this book uncovers new perspectives on Dostoevsky as writer and psychologist. By exposing how shame dynamics implicate readers in texts’ ethical actions, it enriches understanding of his tremendous influence on twentieth-century thinkers and writers. Finally, reading Dostoevsky as a prophet of shame-begotten violence reveals his universal relevance in a twenty-first century already scarred by acts of violence.

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cover of Surreal Geographies: A New History of Holocaust Consciousness

Surreal Geographies

A New History of Holocaust Consciousness

Kathryn L. Brackney

University of Wisconsin Press, 2024

Surreal Geographies recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Examining art, literature, and film produced from the immediate postwar period up to the present moment, Kathryn L. Brackney investigates changing portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors. In so doing, she demonstrates that the Holocaust has been understood not only through the documentary realism and postmodern fragmentation familiar to scholars but also through a surreal mode of meaning making. From an otherworldly “Planet Auschwitz” to the spare, intimate spaces of documentary interviews, Brackney shows that the humanity of victims has been produced, undermined, and guaranteed through evolving scripts for acknowledging and mourning mass violence.

Brackney offers a new look at familiar works by authors and artists such as Claude Lanzmann, W. G. Sebald, and Paul Celan, while making surprising connections to contemporary scholars like Timothy Snyder and Donna Haraway, and events such as the Space Race. In the process, she maps out a decades-long process through which transnational conventions of mourning have emerged in Western Europe, North America, and Israel, functioning to constitute Jewish victimization as “grievable life.” Ultimately, she shows how the Holocaust has developed into a figure for the destabilization and reformulation of the category of humanity and the problem of mourning across difference.
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cover of Surrealism at Play

Surrealism at Play

Susan Laxton

Duke University Press, 2019

In Surrealism at Play Susan Laxton writes a new history of surrealism in which she traces the centrality of play to the movement and its ongoing legacy. For surrealist artists, play took a consistent role in their aesthetic as they worked in, with, and against a post-World War I world increasingly dominated by technology and functionalism. Whether through exquisite-corpse drawings, Man Ray’s rayographs, or Joan Miró’s visual puns, surrealists became adept at developing techniques and processes designed to guarantee aleatory outcomes. In embracing chance as the means to produce unforeseeable ends, they shifted emphasis from final product to process, challenging the disciplinary structures of industrial modernism. As Laxton demonstrates, play became a primary method through which surrealism refashioned artistic practice, everyday experience, and the nature of subjectivity.
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cover of Surrealism from Paris to Shanghai

Surrealism from Paris to Shanghai

Lauren Walden

Hong Kong University Press, 2024

Surrealism through the lens of China.

Surrealism from Paris to Shanghai is the first English language book dedicated to introducing Chinese Surrealism, enlarging the geographical authority of Surrealist studies beyond a Eurocentric prism of analysis. The book reveals the mutual cultural influence between China and the Western avant-garde, moving beyond notions of “copying from the West.” Utilizing primary source materials, particularly periodicals, Lauren Walden reveals the underexplored dissemination of Surrealism in Shanghai. Highlighting how Surrealism was applied across a broad political spectrum in Shanghai including anti-colonialism, communism, and nationalism, Walden also demonstrates why Shanghai’s former French concession became the birthplace of Surrealism in China.
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cover of Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms

Surroundings

A History of Environments and Environmentalisms

Etienne S. Benson

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Given the ubiquity of environmental rhetoric in the modern world, it’s easy to think that the meaning of the terms environment and environmentalism are and always have been self-evident. But in Surroundings, we learn that the environmental past is much more complex than it seems at first glance. In this wide-ranging history of the concept, Etienne S. Benson uncovers the diversity of forms that environmentalism has taken over the last two centuries and opens our eyes to the promising new varieties of environmentalism that are emerging today.
 
Through a series of richly contextualized case studies, Benson shows us how and why particular groups of people—from naturalists in Napoleonic France in the 1790s to global climate change activists today—adopted the concept of environment and adapted it to their specific needs and challenges. Bold and deeply researched, Surroundings challenges much of what we think we know about what an environment is, why we should care about it, and how we can protect it.
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cover of Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland

Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War

Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland

Stephen E. Towne

Ohio University Press, 2015

Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War represents pathbreaking research on the rise of U.S. Army intelligence operations in the Midwest during the American Civil War and counters long-standing assumptions about Northern politics and society. At the beginning of the rebellion, state governors in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois cooperated with federal law enforcement officials in various attempts—all failed—to investigate reports of secret groups and individuals who opposed the Union war effort. Starting in 1862, army commanders took it upon themselves to initiate investigations of antiwar sentiment in those states. By 1863, several of them had established intelligence operations staffed by hired civilian detectives and by soldiers detailed from their units to chase down deserters and draft dodgers, to maintain surveillance on suspected persons and groups, and to investigate organized resistance to the draft. By 1864, these spies had infiltrated secret organizations that, sometimes in collaboration with Confederate rebels, aimed to subvert the war effort. Stephen E. Towne is the first to thoroughly explore the role and impact of Union spies against Confederate plots in the North. This new analysis invites historians to delve more deeply into the fabric of the Northern wartime experience and reinterpret the period based on broader archival evidence.
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cover of Surveying in Early America: The Point of Beginning, An Illustrated History

Surveying in Early America

The Point of Beginning, An Illustrated History

Dan Patterson; Clinton Terry

Ohio University Press, 2020

Published by the University of Cincinnati Press

In Surveying in Early America: The Point of Beginning, An Illustrated History, award-winning photographer Dan Patterson and American historian Clinton Terry vividly examine the profession of surveying in the eighteenth century. Retracing the steps Washington and other surveyors took to map the Ohio River Valley, readers are immersed in historically accurate details of early surveying techniques and practices. Terry's narrative describes the practice of land and survey measurement—methods that did not substantially change until the invention of GPS technology 200 years later. Over 100 full color photographs exclusively shot for the book depict authentic and historically accurate reproductions of tools along with early American reenactors to provide an interpretive look at surveying as a primary means to building the American nation. Working with the Department of the Geographer, Patterson restages actual expeditions, brilliantly displaying the techniques and instruments Washington would have employed 260 years ago. Through the lens of Patterson's camera and Terry's accompanying narrative, readers see what Washington saw as he learned his trade, explored the vast American wilderness, and occasionally laid personal claim to great expanses of land along the way.

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cover of Survival Arts of the Primitive Paiutes

Survival Arts of the Primitive Paiutes

Margaret M. Wheat

University of Nevada Press, 1977

With over 24,000 copies in print, this bestselling book tells how the Paiutes survived in the harsh Nevada climate. Chronicling food-gathering methods, basket weaving, hunting, skinning, and working with rabbit skins, this book serves as an invaluable reference on early Paiute culture. Any inquiring person who has worked with the Native Americans of the West will testify to the difficulties of obtaining the information he seeks. They are an old and proud and reserved race, and acceptance of outsiders is not freely given. In her twenty years of painstaking work with the Northern Paiutes, Margaret Wheat earned that full measure of acceptance. She tells the story of the generation of Native Americans whose lives were changed forever by the arrival of pioneers and prospectors in 1849.
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cover of Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America

Survival City

Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America

Tom Vanderbilt

University of Chicago Press, 2002

On the road to Survival City, Tom Vanderbilt maps the visible and invisible legacies of the cold war, exhuming the blueprints for the apocalypse we once envisioned and chronicling a time when we all lived at ground zero. In this road trip among ruined missile silos, atomic storage bunkers, and secret test sites, a lost battleground emerges amid the architecture of the 1950s, accompanied by Walter Cotten’s stunning photographs. Survival City looks deep into the national soul, unearthing the dreams and fears that drove us during the latter half of the twentieth century.

“A crucial and dazzling book, masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating.”—Dave Eggers


“A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because [Vanderbilt] is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader.”—Los Angeles Times


“A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life.”—Greil Marcus, Bookforum

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cover of Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party

Survival Pending Revolution

The History of the Black Panther Party

Paul Alkebulan

University of Alabama Press, 2007

The Black Panther Party (BPP) seized the attention of America in the frenetic days of the late 1960s when a series of assassinations, discontent with the Vietnam War, and impatience with lingering racial discrimination roiled the United States, particularly its cities. The BPP inspired dread among the American body politic while receiving support from many urban black youths. The images of angry and armed young black radicals in the streets of U.S. cities seemed a stunning reversal and repudiation of the accommodationist and assimilationist black goals associated with Martin Luther King’s movement, as well as an unprecedented defiance of the civil power.
 
Although many have written about the BPP in memoirs and polemics, Survival Pending Revolution contributes to a new generation of objective, analytical BPP studies that are sorely needed. Alkebulan displays the entire movement’s history: its lofty and even idealistic goals and its in-your-face rhetoric, its strategies, tactics, and the internal divisions and ego clashes, drawing upon public records as well as the memories of both leaders and foot soldiers, to attempt a description that both understands the inner workings of the BPP and its role in the greater society.
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cover of Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities

Survival Schools

The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities

Julie L. Davis

University of Minnesota Press, 2013


In the late 1960s, Indian families in Minneapolis and St. Paul were under siege. Clyde Bellecourt remembers, “We were losing our children during this time; juvenile courts were sweeping our children up, and they were fostering them out, and sometimes whole families were being broken up.” In 1972, motivated by prejudice in the child welfare system and hostility in the public schools, American Indian Movement (AIM) organizers and local Native parents came together to start their own community school. For Pat Bellanger, it was about cultural survival. Though established in a moment of crisis, the school fulfilled a goal that she had worked toward for years: to create an educational system that would enable Native children “never to forget who they were.”


While AIM is best known for its national protests and political demands, the survival schools foreground the movement’s local and regional engagement with issues of language, culture, spirituality, and identity. In telling of the evolution and impact of the Heart of the Earth school in Minneapolis and the Red School House in St. Paul, Julie L. Davis explains how the survival schools emerged out of AIM’s local activism in education, child welfare, and juvenile justice and its efforts to achieve self-determination over urban Indian institutions. The schools provided informal, supportive, culturally relevant learning environments for students who had struggled in the public schools. Survival school classes, for example, were often conducted with students and instructors seated together in a circle, which signified the concept of mutual human respect. Davis reveals how the survival schools contributed to the global movement for Indigenous decolonization as they helped Indian youth and their families to reclaim their cultural identities and build a distinctive Native community.


The story of these schools, unfolding here through the voices of activists, teachers, parents, and students, is also an in-depth history of AIM’s founding and early community organizing in the Twin Cities—and evidence of its long-term effect on Indian people’s lives.


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cover of Survival at Treblinka: Geography, Gender, and Social Networks in Jewish Resistance

Survival at Treblinka

Geography, Gender, and Social Networks in Jewish Resistance

Chad S.A. Gibbs

University of Wisconsin Press, 2026

On August 2, 1943, prisoners at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, located in occupied Poland, launched an uprising against their captors, during which hundreds successfully escaped while guards killed as many in the process. In this groundbreaking work, Chad S.A. Gibbs draws upon recently discovered sources and novel research methods to fundamentally reassess Jewish resistance at Treblinka—both before and during the revolt.

Using the testimonies of revolt survivors, prior escapees, those who passed through the camp, and a handful of bystander witnesses and former SS guards, Gibbs sheds new light on the events of August 2 as well as many prior acts of resistance. Critical to these new interpretations of the revolt are the actions of women prisoners, who here assume a central place in this story for the first time.

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cover of Survival under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes

Survival under Dictatorships

Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes

László Borhi

Central European University Press, 2024

A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of East-Central Europe. The three events followed each other within a span of about ten years: the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in Nazi death and labor camps; the Arrow Cross terrorist rule in Budapest; and finally the Stalinist terror in Hungary and East-Central Europe. Through the prism of survival, László Borhi explores the relationship between the individual and power, attempting to understand the mechanism of oppression and terror produced by arbitrary, unbridled power through the experience of normal people.

Despite the obvious peculiarities of time and place, the Hungarian cases convey universal lessons about the Holocaust, Nazism, and Stalinism. In the author's conception, the National Socialist and Stalinist experiences are linked on several levels. Both regimes defended their visions of the future against social groups whom they saw as implacable enemies of those visions, and who therefore had to be destroyed for sake of social perfection. Furthermore, the social practices of National Socialism were passed on. And although Stalinism was imposed by a foreign power, some of the survival skills for coping with it were rehearsed under the previous hellish experience.

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cover of Survival: Dislocation and Repair in Burma

Survival

Dislocation and Repair in Burma

François Robinne

National University of Singapore Press, 2027

Captures the tenuous reality of daily life for those in and outside Burma.

In the wake of the military coup of February 2021, a new and unsettling reality has emerged in Burma. Unlike previous uprisings, this time the junta's reach extends beyond marginalized groups and ethnic territories to target the entire spectrum of civil society—urban and rural, young and old, across all groups, faiths, and social classes. The "Spring Revolution" sees Generation Z not only resisting authoritarian rule but also striving to forge a new societal vision.

In the face of totalitarian desocialization, a complex dance of dislocation and repair unfolds, within, outside, and along Burma's international borders. Survival takes a multi-sited approach to explore these dynamics: we hear from asylum seekers in France, the undocumented in Thailand, resistance leaders in constant motion, and, through the medium of the handphone, from within Burma. The result that emerges is a compelling picture of the individual struggle in an unforgiving situation, of interest to anyone who seeks a grounded understanding of the conflict—and what might emerge from it. Highly engaged yet academically rigorous, this compelling book also opens new spaces for understanding the complications of migration in today’s world.

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cover of Surviving Mexico's Dirty War: A Political Prisoner's Memoir

Surviving Mexico's Dirty War

A Political Prisoner's Memoir

Alberto Ulloa Bornemann, edited by Arthur Schmidt and Aurora Camacho de Schmidt

Temple University Press, 2007

This is the first major, book-length memoir of a political prisoner from Mexico's "dirty war" of the 1970s. Written with the urgency of a first-person narrative, it is a unique work, providing an inside story of guerrilla activities and a gripping tale of imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Mexican government. Alberto Ulloa Bornemann was a young idealist when he dedicated himself to clandestine resistance and to assisting Lucio Cabañas, the guerrilla leader of the "Party of the Poor." Here the author exposes readers to the day-to-day activities of revolutionary activists seeking to avoid discovery by government forces. After his capture, Ulloa Bornemann endured disappearance into a secret military jail and later abusive conditions in three civilian prisons. Although testimonios of former political prisoners from other Latin American nations have recently come into print, there are very few books about Mexico's political wars—and none as vivid and disturbing as this.
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cover of Surviving Mexico: Resistance and Resilience among Journalists in the Twenty-first Century

Surviving Mexico

Resistance and Resilience among Journalists in the Twenty-first Century

By Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine E. Relly

University of Texas Press, 2021

Mott KTA Journalism and Mass Communication Research Award, Kappa Tau Alpha
Tankard Book Award, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)
Knudson Latin America Prize, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)

Since 2000, more than 150 journalists have been killed in Mexico. Today the country is one of the most dangerous in the world in which to be a reporter. In Surviving Mexico, Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine E. Relly examine the networks of political power, business interests, and organized crime that threaten and attack Mexican journalists, who forge ahead despite the risks.

Amid the crackdown on drug cartels, overall violence in Mexico has increased, and journalists covering the conflict have grown more vulnerable. But it is not just criminal groups that want reporters out of the way. Government forces also attack journalists in order to shield corrupt authorities and the very criminals they are supposed to be fighting. Meanwhile some news organizations, enriched by their ties to corrupt government officials and criminal groups, fail to support their employees. In some cases, journalists must wait for a “green light” to publish not from their editors but from organized crime groups. Despite seemingly insurmountable constraints, journalists have turned to one another and to their communities to resist pressures and create their own networks of resilience. Drawing on a decade of rigorous research in Mexico, González de Bustamante and Relly explain how journalists have become their own activists and how they hold those in power accountable.

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cover of Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community

Surviving Southampton

African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community

Vanessa M. Holden

University of Illinois Press, 2021

The local community around the Nat Turner rebellion

The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner involved an entire community. Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and enslaved, who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the revolt. Mapping the region's multilayered human geography, Holden draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time. Her analysis recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event that reveals the continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local Black people. Holden follows how African Americans continued those practices through the rebellion’s immediate aftermath and into the future, showing how Black women and communities raised children who remembered and heeded the lessons absorbed during the calamitous events of 1831.

A bold challenge to traditional accounts, Surviving Southampton sheds new light on the places and people surrounding Americas most famous rebellion against slavery.

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cover of Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico

Surviving Spanish Conquest

Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico

Karen F. Anderson-Córdova

University of Alabama Press, 2017

Reveals the transformation that occurred in Indian communities during the Spanish conquest of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico from 1492 to 1550

In Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Karen F. Anderson-Córdova draws on archaeological, historical, and ethnohistorical sources to elucidate the impacts of sixteenth-century Spanish conquest and colonization on indigenous peoples in the Greater Antilles. Moving beyond the conventional narratives of the quick demise of the native populations because of forced labor and the spread of Old World diseases, this book shows the complexity of the initial exchange between the Old and New Worlds and examines the myriad ways the indigenous peoples responded to Spanish colonization.
 
Focusing on Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, the first Caribbean islands to be conquered and colonized by the Spanish, Anderson-Córdova explains Indian sociocultural transformation within the context of two specific processes, out-migration and in-migration, highlighting how population shifts contributed to the diversification of peoples. For example, as the growing presence of “foreign” Indians from other areas of the Caribbean complicated the variety of responses by Indian groups, her investigation reveals that Indians who were subjected to slavery, or the “encomienda system,” accommodated and absorbed many Spanish customs, yet resumed their own rituals when allowed to return to their villages. Other Indians fled in response to the arrival of the Spanish.
 
The culmination of years of research, Surviving Spanish Conquest deftly incorporates archaeological investigations at contact sites copious use of archival materials, and anthropological assessments of the contact period in the Caribbean. Ultimately, understanding the processes of Indian-Spanish interaction in the Caribbean enhances comprehension of colonization in many other parts of the world. Anderson-Córdova concludes with a discussion regarding the resurgence of interest in the Taíno people and their culture, especially of individuals who self-identify as Taíno. This volume provides a wealth of insight to historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and those interested in early cultures in contact.
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cover of Surviving Sudden Environmental Change: Answers From Archaeology

Surviving Sudden Environmental Change

Answers From Archaeology

Jago Cooper

University Press of Colorado, 2012

Archaeologists have long encountered evidence of natural disasters through excavation and stratigraphy. In Surviving Sudden Environmental Change, case studies examine how eight different past human communities-ranging from Arctic to equatorial regi
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cover of Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia

Surviving against the Odds

Village Industry in Indonesia

S. Ann Dunham

Duke University Press, 2009

President Barack Obama’s mother, S. Ann Dunham, was an economic anthropologist and rural development consultant who worked in several countries including Indonesia. Dunham received her doctorate in 1992. She died in 1995, at the age of 52, before having the opportunity to revise her dissertation for publication, as she had planned. Dunham’s dissertation adviser Alice G. Dewey and her fellow graduate student Nancy I. Cooper undertook the revisions at the request of Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng. The result is Surviving against the Odds, a book based on Dunham’s research over a period of fourteen years among the rural metalworkers of Java, the island home to nearly half Indonesia’s population. Surviving against the Odds reflects Dunham’s commitment to helping small-scale village industries survive; her pragmatic, non-ideological approach to research and problem solving; and her impressive command of history, economic data, and development policy. Along with photographs of Dunham, the book includes many pictures taken by her in Indonesia.

After Dunham married Lolo Soetoro in 1967, she and her six-year-old son, Barack Obama, moved from Hawai‘i to Soetoro’s home in Jakarta, where Maya Soetoro was born three years later. Barack returned to Hawai‘i to attend school in 1971. Dedicated to Dunham’s mother Madelyn, her adviser Alice, and “Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field,” Surviving against the Odds centers on the metalworking industries in the Javanese village of Kajar. Focusing attention on the small rural industries overlooked by many scholars, Dunham argued that wet-rice cultivation was not the only viable economic activity in rural Southeast Asia.

Surviving against the Odds includes a preface by the editors, Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper, and a foreword by her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, each of which discusses Dunham and her career. In his afterword, the anthropologist and Indonesianist Robert W. Hefner explores the content of Surviving against the Odds, its relation to anthropology when it was researched and written, and its continuing relevance today.

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cover of Surviving the Essex: The Afterlife of America's Most Storied Shipwreck

Surviving the Essex

The Afterlife of America's Most Storied Shipwreck

David O. Dowling

University Press of New England, 2016

Surviving the “Essex” tells the captivating story of a ship’s crew battered by whale attack, broken by four months at sea, and forced—out of necessity—to make meals of their fellow survivors. Exploring the Rashomon-like Essex accounts that complicate and even contradict first mate Owen Chase’s narrative, David O. Dowling examines the vital role of viewpoint in shaping how an event is remembered and delves into the ordeal’s submerged history—the survivors’ lives, ambitions, and motives, their pivotal actions during the desperate moments of the wreck itself, and their will to reconcile those actions in the short- and long-term aftermath of this storied event. Mother of all whale tales, Surviving the “Essex” acts as a sequel to Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea, while probing deeper into the nature of trauma and survival accounts, an extreme form of notoriety, and the impact that the story had on Herman Melville and the writing of Moby-Dick.
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[more]
cover of Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire

Surviving the Slaughter

The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire

Marie Beatrice Umutesi; Foreword by Catharine Newbury

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Though the world was stunned by the horrific massacres of Tutsi by the Hutu majority in Rwanda beginning in April 1994, there has been little coverage of the reprisals that occurred after the Tutsi gained political power. During this time hundreds of thousands of Hutu were systematically hunted and killed.
Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire is the eyewitness account of Marie Béatrice Umutesi. She tells of life in the refugee camps in Zaire and her flight across 2000 kilometers on foot. During this forced march, far from the world’s cameras, many Hutu refugees were trampled and murdered. Others died from hunger, exhaustion, and sickness, or simply vanished, ignored by the international community and betrayed by humanitarian organizations. Amidst this brutality, day-to-day suffering, and desperate survival, Umutesi managed to organize the camps to improve the quality of life for women and children.
In this first-hand account of inexplicable brutality, day-to-day suffering, and survival, Marie Béatrice Umutesi sheds light on a backlash of violence that targeted the Hutu refugees of Rwanda after the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1994.  Umutesi’s documentation of the flight and terror of these years provides the world a veritable account of a history that is still widely unknown. After translations from its original French into three other languages, this important book is available in English for the first time. It is more than a testimony to the lives and humanity lost; it is a call for those politicians, military personnel, and humanitarian organizations responsible for the atrocious crimes—and the devastating silence—to be held accountable.


“Umutesi’s tale, told with honesty and eloquence, is a tribute to the human spirit, a searing indictment of the agents who perpetrated these horrors, and a reproach to those who turned away.”—Catharine Newbury, African Studies Review

“Restores a human dimension that has been lacking in the history of the genocide and massacres in Rwanda.”—Danielle de Lame, African Studies Review

“A vivid account of the grueling nightmare experienced by tens of thousands of Rwandan civilians whom the world had deliberately forsaken. . . . An outstanding call for justice.”—Aloys Habimama, African Studies Review

 “A towering work. . . . An epic for our times, a tale to ponder for the lessons it conveys, testimony so powerful and moving that it reaches an unintended literary greatness.”—Jan Vansina, African Studies Review

“Of all the current books and films ten years after the Rwandan genocide, none is more effective than Surviving the Slaughter . . . . This book carries one along, often as if running with the refugees.”—Anne Serafin, Multicultural Review

[more]
cover of Surviving the Upheaval of Arctic War: Evacuation and Return of the Sámi People in Sápmi and Finland During and After the Second World War

Surviving the Upheaval of Arctic War

Evacuation and Return of the Sámi People in Sápmi and Finland During and After the Second World War

Veli-Pekka Lehtola

University of Alaska Press, 2021

[more]
cover of Survivors: CAMBODIAN REFUGEES IN THE UNITED STATES

Survivors

CAMBODIAN REFUGEES IN THE UNITED STATES

Sucheng Chan

University of Illinois Press, 2004

In this clear, comprehensive, and unflinching study, Sucheng Chan invites us to follow the saga of Cambodian refugees striving to distance themselves from a series of cataclysmic events in their homeland. Survivors tracks not only the Cambodians' fight for life lives but also their battle for self-definition in new American surroundings.
 
Unparalleled in scope, Survivors begins with the Cambodians' experiences under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, following them through escape to refugee camps in Thailand and finally to the United States, where they try to build new lives in the wake of massive trauma. Their struggle becomes primarily economic as they continue to negotiate new cultures and deal with rapidly changing gender and intergenerational relations within their own families. Poverty, crime, and racial discrimination all have an impact on their experiences in America, and each is examined in depth.  
 
Although written as a history, this is a thoroughly multidisciplinary study, and Chan makes use of research from anthropology, sociology, psychology, medicine, social work, linguistics and education. She also captures the perspective of individual Cambodians. Drawing on interviews with more than fifty community leaders, a hundred government officials, and staff members in volunteer agencies, Survivors synthesizes the literature on Cambodian refugees, many of whom come from varying socioeconomic backgrounds.
 
A major scholarly achievement, Survivors is unique in the Asian American canon for its memorable presentation of cutting-edge research and its interpretation of both sides of the immigration process.
 
[more]
cover of Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915-48

Susan Glaspell in Context

American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915-48

J. Ellen Gainor

University of Michigan Press, 2003


Susan Glaspell in Context not only discusses the dramatic work of this key American author -- perhaps best known for her short story "A Jury of Her Peers" and its dramatic counterpart, Trifles -- but also places it within the theatrical, cultural, political, social, historical, and biographical climates in which Glaspell's dramas were created: the worlds of Greenwich Village and Provincetown bohemia, of the American frontier, and of American modernism.
J. Ellen Gainor is Professor of Theatre, Women's Studies, and American Studies, Cornell University. Her other books include Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (co-edited with Jeffrey D. Mason) from the University of Michigan Press.
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cover of Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Rebellion

Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Rebellion

Emeline Jouve

University of Iowa Press, 2017

A pioneer of American modern drama and founding member of the Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) wrote plays of a kind that Robert Brustein defines as a “drama of revolt,” an expression of the dramatists’ discontent with the prevailing social, political, and artistic order. Her works display her determination to put an end to the alienating norms that, in her eyes and those of her bohemian peers, were stifling American society. This determination both to denounce infringements on individual rights and to reform American life through the theatre shapes the political dimension of her drama of revolt.

Analyzing plays from the early Trifles (1916) through Springs Eternal (1943) and the undated, incomplete Wings, author Emeline Jouve illustrates the way that Glaspell’s dramas addressed issues of sexism, the impact of World War I on American values, and the relationship between individuals and their communities, among other concerns. Jouve argues that Glaspell turns the playhouse into a courthouse, putting the hypocrisy of American democracy on trial. In staging rebels fighting for their rights in fictional worlds that reflect her audience’s extradiegetic reality, she explores the strategies available to individuals to free themselves from oppression. Her works envisage a better future for both her fictive insurgents and her spectators, whom she encourages to consider which modes of revolt are appropriate and effective for improving the society they live in. The playwright defines social reform in terms of collaboration, which she views as an alternative to the dominant, alienating social and political structures. Not simply accusing but proposing solutions in her plays, she wrote dramas that enacted a positive revolt.

A must for students of Glaspell and her contemporaries, as well as scholars of American theatre and literature of the first half of the twentieth century.
 
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cover of Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond

Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond

Jean T. Larmon

University Press of Colorado, 2021

Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond investigates climate change and sustainability through time, exploring how political control of water sources, maintenance of sustainable systems, ideological relationships with water, and fluctuations in water availability have affected and been affected by social change. Contributors focus on and build upon earlier investigations of the global diversity of water management systems and the successes and failures of their employment, while applying a multitude of perspectives on sustainability.
 
The volume focuses primarily on the Precolumbian Maya but offers several analogous case studies outside the ancient Maya world that illustrate the pervasiveness of water’s role in sustainability, including an ethnographic study of the sustainability of small-scale, farmer-managed irrigation systems in contemporary New Mexico and the environmental consequences of Angkor’s growth into the world’s most extensive preindustrial settlement. The archaeological record offers rich data on past politics of climate change, while epigraphic and ethnographic data show how integrated the ideological, political, and environmental worlds of the Maya were.
 
While Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond stresses how lessons from the past offer invaluable insight into current approaches of adaptation, it also advances our understanding of those adaptations by making the inevitable discrepancies between past and present climate change less daunting and emphasizing the sustainable negotiations between humans and their surroundings that have been mediated by the changing climate for millennia. It will appeal to students and scholars interested in climate change, sustainability, and water management in the archaeological record.
 
Contributors: Mary Jane Acuña, Wendy Ashmore, Timothy Beach, Jeffrey Brewer, Christopher Carr, Adrian S. Z. Chase, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Carlos R. Chiriboga, Jennifer Chmilar, Nicholas Dunning, Maurits W. Ertsen, Roland Fletcher, David Friedel, Robert Griffin, Joel D. Gunn, Armando Anaya Hernández, Christian Isendahl, David Lentz, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Dan Penny, Kathryn Reese-Taylor, Michelle Rich, Cynthia Robin, Sylvia Rodríguez, William Saturno, Vernon Scarborough, Payson Sheets, Liwy Grazioso Sierra, Michael Smyth, Sander van der Leeuw, Andrew Wyatt
 
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cover of Sustainability of Microstates: The Case of North Cyprus

Sustainability of Microstates

The Case of North Cyprus

Ozay Mehmet

University of Utah Press, 2009

Utah Series in Middle East Studies

This interdisciplinary study discusses the development, economics, and politics of North Cyprus, a divided state since 1960 when sovereignty was surrendered by the British to both Greek and Turkish Cypriots.  Mehmet works to demonstrate that, as a microstate with an area of just 3,442 square kilometers, North Cyprus possesses certain inherent comparative economic advantages in the service sectors that enable it to be sustainable in today's rapidly globalizing and competitive economic world.

Mehmet bases his arguments for the potential sustainability of North Cyprus on the concept of economic rationalism, in which participating parties work to optimize their own self-interest.  In an ethnic conflict like that of North Cyprus, the logic of optimization demands a rational, free, and objective balancing of competing interests to reach an agreed solution.  The economic rationalist approach sharply contrasts with the highly emotional political, historical, cultural, and legal approaches that have thus far dominated the study and discussion of the Cyprus problem, approaches that have largely resulted in a protracted conflict.

While recognizing the negative forces of ethnic tension and the very real possibility of a continued divided Cyprus state, Sustainability of Microstates nevertheless remains hopeful, designed to unleash the forces of convergence that may be deduced from economic rationalism, and unwavering in its conviction of the ultimate sustainability of North Cyprus.

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cover of Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Women's Movement and a Father-Daughter Collaboration

Sustaining Activism

A Brazilian Women's Movement and a Father-Daughter Collaboration

Jeffrey W. Rubin and Emma Sokoloff-Rubin

Duke University Press, 2013

In 1986, a group of young Brazilian women started a movement to secure economic rights for rural women and transform women's roles in their homes and communities. Together with activists across the country, they built a new democracy in the wake of a military dictatorship. In Sustaining Activism, Jeffrey W. Rubin and Emma Sokoloff-Rubin tell the behind-the-scenes story of this remarkable movement. As a father-daughter team, they describe the challenges of ethnographic research and the way their collaboration gave them a unique window into a fiery struggle for equality.

Starting in 2002, Rubin and Sokoloff-Rubin traveled together to southern Brazil, where they interviewed activists over the course of ten years. Their vivid descriptions of women’s lives reveal the hard work of sustaining a social movement in the years after initial victories, when the political way forward was no longer clear and the goal of remaking gender roles proved more difficult than activists had ever imagined. Highlighting the tensions within the movement about how best to effect change, Sustaining Activism ultimately shows that democracies need social movements in order to improve people’s lives and create a more just society.
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cover of Sustaining Landscapes: Governance and Ecology in Chinese Visual Culture, 960–1368 CE

Sustaining Landscapes

Governance and Ecology in Chinese Visual Culture, 960–1368 CE

Gerui Wang

Hong Kong University Press, 2025

Before climate policy, there was landscape painting—how visual culture illustrated ecological concerns in imperial China.

Sustaining Landscapes: Governance and Ecology in Chinese Visual Culture, 960–1368 CE examines ecological thought contested amid the rise of the Chinese landscape genre, tracing its intersections with infrastructure governance, natural resource management, and geospatial knowledge. It traces the pre-industrial notion of “sustainability” in policy debates, legal regulations, and arts. Landscape imagery on paintings, maps, as well as mass-produced artifacts such as fans and ceramic pillows documented both appropriate and exploitative use of natural resources, and critiqued on social inequity and political turmoil. This book breaks new ground by bringing together research on visual and material culture with analysis of politics and ecology. Wang argues that the Chinese landscape genre embodied a holistic approach to negotiating debates on human-nature interdependence and people-state relationships. It joins the increasing literature on ecocriticism and offers alternative perspectives to address contemporary challenges, ranging from environmental crisis to global governance.
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cover of Sustaining the Borderlands in the Age of NAFTA: Development, Politics, and Participation on the US-Mexico Border

Sustaining the Borderlands in the Age of NAFTA

Development, Politics, and Participation on the US-Mexico Border

Suzanne Simon

Vanderbilt University Press, 2014

Sustaining the Borderlands in the Age of NAFTA provides the only book-length study of the impact on residents of the US-Mexico border of NAFTA's Environmental and Labor Side Accords, which required each state to enforce labor and environmental regulations. Through field research in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, anthropologist Suzanne Simon tests the premise that the side accords would encourage Mexican grassroots democratization. The effectiveness of the side accords was tied to transparency and accountability and practically bound to opportunities for Mexican border populations to participate in the side accord petitioning and civil society input mechanisms. Simon conducted sixteen months of fieldwork with both a group of environmental activists and a group of those fighting for labor justice in Mexico. Both of these groups became enmeshed in the types of cross-border advocacy networks and coalition building efforts that are typical of the NAFTA era.



Although the key to the side accords' anticipated success lay in their ostensibly generous encouragement of a participatory politics and sustainable development opportunities, Sustaining the Borderlands reveals that the Mexican border populations for which they were largely created are effectively excluded from participating due to the ongoing online, territorial, class, and cultural barriers that shape the borderlands. Rather than experiencing the side accords and their companion institutions as transparent and accessible, residents experienced them as opaque and indecipherable. Simon concludes that the side accords have failed to deliver on their promise of bringing democracy to Mexico because practical mechanisms that would ensure their effective implementation were never put in place.



NAFTA took effect at a time when Mexico was undergoing a democratic transition. The treaty was supposed to encourage this transition and improve environmental and labor conditions on the US-Mexico border. This book demonstrates that, twenty years later, the promises of NAFTA have not come to pass.

[more]
cover of Sutherland Springs, Texas: Saratoga on the Cibolo

Sutherland Springs, Texas

Saratoga on the Cibolo

Richard B. McCaslin

University of North Texas Press, 2017

[more]
cover of Swahili Origins: Swahili Culture and The Shungwaya Phenomenon

Swahili Origins

Swahili Culture and The Shungwaya Phenomenon

James de Vere Allen

Ohio University Press, 1993

Kiswahili has become the lingua franca of eastern Africa. Yet there can be few historic peoples whose identity is as elusive as that of the Swahili. Some have described themselves as Arabs, as Persians or even, in one place, as Portuguese. It is doubtful whether, even today, most of the people about whom this book is written would unhesitatingly and in all contexts accept the name Swahili.

This book was central to the thought and lifework of the late James de Vere Allen. It is his major study of the origin of the Swahili and of their cultural identity. He focuses on how the African element in their cultural patrimony was first modified by Islam and later changed until many Swahili themselves lost sight of it.

They share a language and they share a culture. Their territory stretches from the coast of southern Somalia to the Lamu archipelago in Kenya, to the Rovuma River in modern Mozambique and out into the islands of the Indian Ocean. But they lack a shared historical experience.

James de Vere Allen, in this study of contentious originality, set out to give modern Swahili evidence of their shared history during a period of eight centuries.

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cover of Swallows and Settlers: The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria

Swallows and Settlers

The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria

Thomas R. Gottschang and Diana Lary

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Between the 1890s and the Second World War, twenty-five million people traveled from the densely populated North China provinces of Shandong and Hebei to seek employment in the growing economy of China's three northeastern provinces, the area known as Manchuria. This was the greatest population movement in modern Chinese history and ranks among the largest migrations in the world.
Swallows and Settlers is the first comprehensive study of that migration. Drawing methods from their respective fields of economics and history, the coauthors focus on both the broad quantitative outlines of the movement and on the decisions and experiences of individual migrants and their families. In readable narrative prose, the book lays out the historical relationship between North China and the Northeast (Manchuria) and concludes with an examination of ongoing population movement between these regions since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.
[more]
cover of Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies

Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor

Bender, Daniel E.

Rutgers University Press, 2004

In the early 1900s, thousands of immigrants labored in New Yorks Lower East Side sweatshops, enduring work environments that came to be seen as among the worst examples of Progressive-Era American industrialization. Although reformers agreed that these unsafe workplaces must be abolished, their reasons have seldom been fully examined.

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies is the first book on the origins of sweatshops, exploring how they came to represent the dangers of industrialization and the perils of immigration. It is an innovative study of the language used to define the sweatshop, how these definitions shaped the first anti-sweatshop campaign, and how they continue to influence our current understanding of the sweatshop.

[more]
cover of Sweatshop Capital: Profit, Violence, and Solidarity Movements in the Long Twentieth Century

Sweatshop Capital

Profit, Violence, and Solidarity Movements in the Long Twentieth Century

Beth Robinson

Duke University Press, 2025

In Sweatshop Capital, Beth Robinson examines the brutal sweatshop labor conditions that produced American consumer goods from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, as well as the labor and social movements that contested them. Arguing that sweatshop labor is a persistent feature of capitalism, she shows how manufacturers used both their influence in government and their mobility to sidestep US labor laws, maximize profits, and perpetuate abuses. She outlines how workers and their allies routinely confronted manufacturers by building solidarity networks across race, class, and national lines. Drawing on activists’ literature, news accounts, archival sources, and oral histories, Robinson presents the long history of the antisweatshop movements that responded to American capital’s pursuit of profit through hyperexploitation with a wide range of protest, legal action, and creativity. Beginning with the sweatshops and reformers of the Progressive Era, Robinson moves through the Great Depression and the activism of the Popular Front, the “free trade” globalization of the 1990s and its discontents, and, finally, the global cyber and gig economies of the twenty-first century and the growing movements to rein them in.
[more]
cover of Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea

Sweatshop

The History of an American Idea

Hapke, Laura

Rutgers University Press, 2004

Arguing that the sweatshop is as American as apple pie, Laura Hapke surveys over a century and a half of the language, verbal and pictorial, in which the sweatshop has been imagined and its stories told.  Not seeking a formal definition of the sort that policymakers are concerned with, nor intending to provide a strict historical chronology, this unique book shows, rather, how the “real” sweatshop has become intertwined with the “invented” sweatshop of our national imagination, and how this mixture of rhetoric and myth has endowed American sweatshops with rich and complex cultural meaning. 

Hapke uncovers a wide variety of tales and images that writers, artists, social scientists, reformers, and workers themselves have told about “the shop.” Adding an important perspective to historical and economic approaches, Sweatshop draws on sources from antebellum journalism, Progressive era surveys, modern movies, and anti-sweatshop websites. Illustrated chapters detail how the shop has been a facilitator of assimilation, a promoter of upward mobility, the epitome of exploitation, a site of ethnic memory, a venue for political protest, and an expression of twentieth-century managerial narratives.

An important contribution to the real and imagined history of garment industry exploitation, this book provides a valuable new context for understanding contemporary sweatshops that now represent the worst expression of an unregulated global economy.

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cover of Sweden and Visions of Norway: Politics and Culture 1814-1905

Sweden and Visions of Norway

Politics and Culture 1814-1905

H. Arnold Barton

Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

H. Arnold Barton investigates Norwegian political and cultural influences in Sweden during the period of the Swedish-Norwegian dynastic union from 1814 to 1905.

Although closely related in origins, indigenous culture, language, and religion, Sweden and Norway had very different histories, resulting in strongly contrasting societies and forms of government before 1814. After a proud medieval past, Norway had come under the Danish crown in the fourteenth century and had been reduced to virtually a Danish province by the sixteenth.

In 1814, as a spin-off of the Napoleonic Wars, Denmark relinquished Norway, which became a separate kingdom, dynastically united with Sweden with its own government under a constitution independently framed that year. Disputes during the next ninety-one years caused Norway unilaterally to dissolve the tie.

Seeing the union a failure, most historians have concentrated on its conflicts. Barton, however, examines the impact of the union on internal developments, particularly in Sweden. Prior to 1814, Norway, unlike Sweden, had no constitution and only the rudiments of higher culture, yet paradoxically, Norway exerted a greater direct influence on Sweden than vice versa.

Reflecting a society lacking a native nobility, Norway’s 1814 constitution was—with the exception of that of the United States—the most democratic in the world. It became the guiding star of Swedish liberals and radicals striving to reform the antiquated system of representation in their parliament. Norway’s cultural void was filled with a stellar array of artists, writers, and musicians, led by Bjørnsjerne Børnson, Henrik Ibsen, and Edvard Grieg. From the 1850s through the late 1880s, this wave of Norwegian creativity had an immense impact on literature, art, and music in Sweden. By the 1880s, however, August Strindberg led a revolt against an exaggerated “Norvegomania” in Sweden. Barton sees this reaction as a fundamental inspiration to Sweden’s intense search for its own cultural character in the highly creative Swedish National Romanticism of the 1890s and early twentieth century.

Thirty-three illustrations of art and architecture enhance Sweden and Visions of Norway.

[more]
cover of Sweden, Enlarged Edition: The Nation's History

Sweden, Enlarged Edition

The Nation's History

By Franklin D. Scott. Epilogue by Steven Koblik

Southern Illinois University Press, 1988

Steven Koblik’s epilogue extends Scott’s now standard text with an analysis of contemporary Swedish political, economic, and social behavior. In addition to the epilogue, Scott has made a number of alterations in the text in order to maintain the timeliness and comprehensiveness of the work.

Using a chronological-topical structure, Scott shows how and why Sweden progressed from times of backwardness to an age of military greatness, through two centuries of cultural development and relapse into poverty followed by a sudden outburst of productive energy and the creation of an exceptionally prosperous welfare state where the ideal is consensus rather than confrontation.

[more]
cover of Sweden: A Modern Democracy on Ancient Foundations

Sweden

A Modern Democracy on Ancient Foundations

Nils Herlitz

University of Minnesota Press, 1939

Sweden was first published in 1939. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Believing the journalists have done both the United States and Sweden a disservice in playing up Sweden as a democratic utopia and overemphasizing the importance of cooperatives, the author presents the facts as they appear to a Swedish publicist with a profound knowledge of the government and problems of his country.

To the English-reading public he now offers this succinct yet comprehensive survey of Swedish government and the essentials of its historical background. He has succeeded in presenting at the same time much of the spirit and the life of the Swedish people and their politics.

The aspects of Swedish life which Professor Herlitz treats are very little understood in foreign countries and should be taken into account by anyone who aspires to know the Sweden of today. His opening review of the historical development of the Swedish constitution may be studied with profit by all who are interested in government.

Of particular timeliness is his account of the rise of the Socialist party to dominance and his explanation of why many people see in the present government (with its majority coalition) the beginning of dictatorship.

After describing the organization and work of the riksdag and its relations to the government, he surveys public administration and civil service in Sweden. His chapter on "The Service-State" covers numerous topics of current interest, such as government monopolies, social legislation, relief problems, old-age pensions, and farm adjustment.

The book is an amplification of a series of lectures delivered by Professor Herlitz in the United States in the spring of 1938 in connection with the Swedish Tercentenary celebration.

[more]
cover of Sweden’s Development From Poverty to Affluence, 1750-1970

Sweden’s Development From Poverty to Affluence, 1750-1970

Steven Koblik, EditorTranslated by Joanne Johnson

University of Minnesota Press, 1975

Sweden's Development From Poverty to Affluence, 1750–1970 was first published in 1975. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Contemporary Sweden commands a degree of interest and attention from foreigners that is all out of proportion to its small size and its present position among the world powers. The country, at least since the publication of Marquis Childs's book Sweden: The Middle Way in 1936, has become synonymous with the idea of a welfare state or cradle-to-grave social security. But accurate, unbiased information about the development of modern Sweden has been scanty, and this book is designed to fill the gap.

Thirteen Swedish scholars—historians, political scientists, sociologists, and an economist—look at particular aspects of Swedish history over the last two centuries. Steven Koblik, the editor, provides an extensive general introduction as well as brief introductions as background for each of the essays.
[more]