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28164 books match the query 'History' and 1838 start with s

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Searching for Their Places

Women in the South across Four Centuries

Edited by Thomas H. Appleton, Jr. & Angela Boswell

University of Missouri Press, 2003

Searching for Their Places is a collection inspired by the Fifth Southern Conference on Women’s History. The essays in this volume are particularly astute in assessing how southern women, in the course of “searching for their places,” have individually or collectively sought to empower themselves. The essays, written by outstanding historians in this field, represent some of the freshest and most exciting scholarship about women in the South. They convincingly illustrate how the national experience looks different when southern women become the focus.

The essayists use extensive analyses of primary source materials to examine a variety of issues that have confronted women in the South from the days of English colonization through the civil rights struggles of the post–World War II era. The collection is well balanced in its periodization, with one essay on the seventeenth century, four on the antebellum years, one on the Civil War, three on the immediate postbellum era, and four based in the twentieth century.

Studying women of different colors, backgrounds, and stations across the region and across four centuries, Searching for Their Places will appeal to historians, the general reader, and anyone interested in women’s studies.

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Searching for a Different Future

The Rise of a Global Middle Class in Morocco

Shana Cohen

Duke University Press, 2004

By examining how neoliberal economic reform policies have affected educated young adults in contemporary Morocco, Searching for a Different Future posits a new socioeconomic formation: the global middle class. During Morocco’s postcolonial period, from the 1950s through the 1970s, development policy and nationalist ideology supported the formation of a middle class based on the pursuit of education, employment, and material security. Neoliberal reforms adopted by Morocco since the early 1980s have significantly eroded the capacity of the state to nurture the middle class, and unemployment and temporary employment among educated adults has grown. There is no longer an obvious correlation between the best interests of the state and those of the middle-class worker. As Shana Cohen demonstrates, educated young adults in Morocco do not look toward the state for economic security and fulfillment but toward the diffuse, amorphous global market.

Cohen delves into the rupture that has occurred between the middle class, the individual, and the nation in Morocco and elsewhere around the world. Combining institutional economic analysis with cultural theory and ethnographic observation including interviews with seventy young adults in Casablanca and Rabat, she reveals how young, urban, educated Moroccans conceive of their material, social, and political conditions. She finds that, for the most part, they perceive improvement in their economic and social welfare apart from the types of civic participation commonly connected with nationalism and national identity. In answering classic sociological questions about how the evolution of capitalism influences identity, Cohen sheds new light on the measurable social and economic consequences of globalization and on its less tangible effects on individuals’ perception of their place in society and prospects in life.

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Searchlight

The Camp That Didn't Fail

Harry Reid

University of Nevada Press, 2007

Deep in the desolate Mojave Desert in Nevada’s extreme southern tip lies a small mining town called Searchlight. This meticulously researched book by Searchlight’s most distinguished native son recounts the colorful history of the town and the lives of the hardy people who built it and sustained a community in one of the least hospitable environments in the United States. Its story encompasses both Nevada’s early twentieth-century mining boom and the phenomenal growth of southern Nevada after World War II. Searchlight is a valuable contribution to the history of Nevada and a lively account of life in the forbidding depths of the Mojave Desert.<br> <br>

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Season of Rains

Africa in the World

Stephen Ellis

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Africa is playing a more important role in world affairs than ever before. Yet the most common images of Africa in the American mind are ones of poverty, starvation, and violent conflict. But while these problems are real, that does not mean that Africa is a lost cause. Instead, as Stephen Ellis explains in Season of Rains, we need to rethink Africa’s place in time if we are to understand it in all its complexity—it is a region where growth and prosperity coexist with failed states. This engaging, accessible book by one of the world’s foremost researchers on Africa captures the broad spectrum of political, economic, and social foundations that make Africa what it is today.

Ellis is careful not to position himself in the futile debate between Afro-optimists and Afro-pessimists. The forty-nine diverse nations that make up sub-Saharan Africa are neither doomed to fail nor destined to succeed. As he assesses the challenges of African sovereignties, Ellis is not under the illusion that governments will suddenly become more benevolent and less corrupt. Yet, he sees great dynamism in recent technological and economic developments. The proliferation of mobile phones alone has helped to overcome previous gaps in infrastructure, African retail markets are becoming integrated, and banking is expanding. Businesses from China and emerging powers from the West are investing more than ever before in the still land-rich region, and globalization is offering possibilities of enormous economic change for the growing population of one billion Africans, actively engaged in charting the future of their continent.

This highly readable survey of the continent today offers an indispensable guide to how money, power, and development are shaping Africa’s future.

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Season of Terror

The Espinosas in Central Colorado, March–October 1863

Charles F. Price

University Press of Colorado, 2013

Season of Terror is the first book-length treatment of the little-known true story of the Espinosas—serial murderers with a mission to kill every Anglo in Civil War–era Colorado Territory—and the men who brought them down.

For eight months during the spring and fall of 1863, brothers Felipe Nerio and José Vivián Espinosa and their young nephew, José Vincente, New Mexico–born Hispanos, killed and mutilated an estimated thirty-two victims before their rampage came to a bloody end. Their motives were obscure, although they were members of the Penitentes, a lay Catholic brotherhood devoted to self-torture in emulation of the sufferings of Christ, and some suppose they believed themselves inspired by the Virgin Mary to commit their slaughters.

Until now, the story of their rampage has been recounted as lurid melodrama or ignored by academic historians. Featuring a fascinating array of frontier characters, Season of Terror exposes this neglected truth about Colorado’s past and examines the ethnic, religious, political, military, and moral complexity of the controversy that began as a regional incident but eventually demanded the attention of President Lincoln.

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Seasons in the Sun

The Story of Big League Baseball in Missouri

Roger D. Launius

University of Missouri Press, 2002

The heart of professional baseball, if not its roots, may be found in the American Midwest, especially in Missouri. In Seasons in the Sun, Roger D. Launius offers an excellent overview of the teams, pennant races, trials, and triumphs of the different major-league teams that have resided in the state over the years.

Since 1876, when St. Louis became a charter member of the newly formed National League, there have also been other major-league franchises from less well known leagues in St. Louis. The St. Louis major-league baseball experience is not limited to the extraordinary success and fame of the Cardinals, who have won more World Series championships than any other National League team. St. Louis also claims the excellent but short-lived Brown Stockings, the city’s first entry into the National League; the American League’s Browns, who spent most of their existence in the first half of the twentieth century at the bottom of the standings; the virtually forgotten Terriers of the Federal League in 1914-1915; and the Maroons of the pre-twentieth-century National League.

On the other side of the state, Kansas City was home to one of the premier franchises of the Negro Leagues, the Kansas City Monarchs. The Monarchs were members of the Negro National League between 1920 and 1931, and won the Negro World Series in 1924 plus a host of league championships thereafter. Independent barnstormers between 1932 and 1936, they were part of the Negro American League from 1937 to1959. In addition, Kansas City hosted the American League’s Athletics for thirteen seasons between the team’s glory years in Philadelphia and Oakland. The A’s departed in 1967, but in 1969 the Royals replaced them as Kansas City’s American League entry. The Royals contended for the pennant within three years of their creation, then won a string of division championships in the late 1970s, the American League pennant in 1980, and the World Series against the cross-state Cardinals in 1985.

Major-league baseball has a long and significant history in the state of Missouri, and Launius has done a superb job of telling its story through words and pictures. As the first work to encapsulate this rich history of statewide major-league activities, Seasons in the Sun will be welcomed by baseball fans everywhere.

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Seasons of Plenty

Amana Communal Cooking

Emilie Hoppe

University of Iowa Press, 2008

Seasons of Plenty provides colorful descriptions, folk stories, appealing photgraphs and illustrations, excerpts from journals and ledgers, recipes for good food like savory dumpling soup, mashed potatoes with browned bread crumbs, Sauerbraten, and feather light apple fritters.

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Seattle Sports

Play, Identity, and Pursuit in the Emerald City

Terry Anne Scott

University of Arkansas Press, 2020

Seattle Sports: Play, Identity, and Pursuit in the Emerald City, edited by Terry Anne Scott, explores the vast and varied history of sports in this city where diversity and social progress are reflected in and reinforced by play. The work gathered here covers Seattle’s professional sports culture as well as many of the city’s lesser-known figures and sports milestones. Fresh, nuanced takes on the Seattle Mariners, Supersonics, and Seahawks are joined by essays on gay softball leagues, city court basketball, athletics in local Japanese American communities during the interwar years, ultimate, the fierce women of roller derby, and much more. Together, these essays create a vivid portrait of Seattle fans, who, in supporting their teams—often in rain, sometimes in the midst of seismic activity—check the country’s implicit racial bias by rallying behind outspoken local sporting heroes.

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Seaway to the Future

American Social Visions and the Construction of the Panama Canal

Alexander Missal

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

Realizing the century-old dream of a passage to India, the building of the Panama Canal was an engineering feat of colossal dimensions, a construction site filled not only with mud and water but with interpretations, meanings, and social visions. Alexander Missal’s Seaway to the Future unfolds a cultural history of the Panama Canal project, revealed in the texts and images of the era’s policymakers and commentators. Observing its creation, journalists, travel writers, and officials interpreted the Canal and its environs as a perfect society under an efficient, authoritarian management featuring innovations in technology, work, health, and consumption. For their middle-class audience in the United States, the writers depicted a foreign yet familiar place, a showcase for the future—images reinforced in the exhibits of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition that celebrated the Canal’s completion. Through these depictions, the building of the Panama Canal became a powerful symbol in a broader search for order as Americans looked to the modern age with both anxiety and anticipation.

Like most utopian visions, this one aspired to perfection at the price of exclusion. Overlooking the West Indian laborers who built the Canal, its admirers praised the white elite that supervised and administered it. Inspired by the masculine ideal personified by President Theodore Roosevelt, writers depicted the Canal Zone as an emphatically male enterprise and Chief Engineer George W. Goethals as the emblem of a new type of social leader, the engineer-soldier, the benevolent despot. Examining these and other images of the Panama Canal project, Seaway to the Future shows how they reflected popular attitudes toward an evolving modern world and, no less important, helped shape those perceptions.

Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association

“Provide[s] a useful vantage on the world bequeathed to us by the forces that set out to put America astride the globe nearly a century ago.”—Chris Rasmussen, Bookforum

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Seaways and Gatekeepers

Trade and State in the Eastern Archipelagos of Southeast Asia, c.1600–c.1906

Heather Sutherland

National University of Singapore Press, 2020

The eastern archipelagos of Southeast Asia stretch from Mindanao and Sulu in the north to Bali in the southwest and New Guinea in the southeast. Many of the inhabitants of this area are often described as “people without history,” in part because colonial borders long ago cut across shared underlying patterns of relations. Yet many of these societies were linked to transoceanic trading systems for millennia. Indeed, some of the world’s most prized commodities once came from territories which were either “stateless” or under the tenuous control of loosely structured polities in this region.

In this book, trade provides the integrating framework for local and regional histories that cover more than three hundred years, from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, when new technologies and changing markets helped lead to Western dominance. This book presents theories from the social sciences and economics that can help liberate scholars from dependence on states as narrative frameworks. It will also appeal to those working on wider themes such as global history, state formation, the evolution of markets, and anthropology.

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Secession and the Union in Texas

By Walter L. Buenger

University of Texas Press, 1984

In 1845 Texans voted overwhelmingly to join the Union. They voted just as overwhelmingly to secede in 1861. The story of why and how that happened is filled with colorful characters, such as the aged Sam Houston, and with the southwestern flavor of raiding Comanches, German opponents of slavery, and a border with Mexico.

Texas was unique among the seceding states because of its ambivalence toward secession. Yet for all its uniqueness the story of the secession of Texas has broad implications for the secession movement in general. Despite the local color and the southwestern nature of the state, Texas was more southern than western in 1860. Texans supported the Union or insisted upon secession for reasons common to the South and to the whole nation. Most Texans in 1860 were recent immigrants from southern and border states. They still thought and acted like citizens of their former states. The newness of Texas then makes it a particularly appropriate place from which to draw conclusions about the entire secession movement.

Secession and the Union in Texas is both a narrative of secession in Texas and a case study of the causes of secession in a southern state. Politics play a key role in this history, but politics broadly defined to include the influence of culture, partisanship, ideology, and self-interest. As any study of a mass movement carried out in tense circumstances must be, this is social history as well as political history. It is a study of public hysteria, the pressure for consensus, and the vanishing of a political process in which rational debate about secession and the Union could take place.

Although relying primarily on traditional sources such as manuscript collections and newspapers, a particularly rich source for this study, the author also uses election returns, population shifts over the course of the 1850s, and the breakdown of population within Texas counties to provide a balanced approach.

These sources indicate that Texans were not simply secessionists or unionists. At the end of 1860 Texans ranged from ardent secessionists to equally passionate supporters of the Union. But the majority fell in between these two extremes, creating an atmosphere of ambivalence toward secession which was not erased even by the war.

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Second Chances

Surviving AIDS in Uganda

Susan Reynolds Whyte, editor

Duke University Press, 2014

During the first decade of this millennium, many thousands of people in Uganda who otherwise would have died from AIDS got second chances at life. A massive global health intervention, the scaling up of antiretroviral therapy (ART), saved them and created a generation of people who learned to live with treatment. As clients they joined programs that offered free antiretroviral medicine and encouraged "positive living." Because ART is not a cure but a lifelong treatment regime, its consequences are far-reaching for society, families, and individuals. Drawing on personal accounts and a broad knowledge of Ugandan culture and history, the essays in this collection explore ART from the perspective of those who received second chances. Their concerns about treatment, partners, children, work, food, and bodies reveal the essential sociality of Ugandan life. The collection is based on research undertaken by a team of social scientists including both Western and African scholars.

Contributors. Phoebe Kajubi, David Kyaddondo, Lotte Meinert, Hanne O. Mogensen, Godfrey Etyang Siu, Jenipher Twebaze, Michael A. Whyte, Susan Reynolds Whyte

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Second Front Now--1943

An Opportunity Delayed

Walter Scott Dunn

University of Alabama Press, 2009

Addresses head-on the central issue of invasion timing in the Allied European strategy of World War II

In Second Front Now – 1943: An Opportunity Delayed, military historian Walter S. Dunn offers a sharply argued and meticulously researched reassessment of one of the most consequential strategic debates of World War II: the decision not to launch a full-scale Allied invasion of Western Europe in 1943. At a time when Nazi Germany was stretched across multiple fronts and the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the fighting in the East, the question of when—and where—to open a Second Front in Europe became a defining issue among Allied leaders.

Dunn explores the complex interplay of military planning, political caution, logistical constraints, and inter-Allied tensions that led Britain and the United States to postpone a cross-Channel invasion. Drawing from official records, wartime correspondence, and operational analyses, he reconstructs the strategic environment of 1943 and challenges the conventional wisdom that the delay was inevitable—or even prudent. Instead, Dunn presents a compelling case that an earlier invasion may have been both feasible and decisive, potentially shortening the war and altering the balance of postwar power.

With clarity and analytical rigor, the book examines the competing priorities of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, the influence of Mediterranean operations, and the evolving capabilities of Allied forces. It also considers the broader implications of the delay, including its impact on Soviet–Western relations and the shaping of the Cold War order that followed.

Blending narrative accessibility with scholarly depth, Second Front Now – 1943 is essential reading for students, historians, and anyone interested in the strategic decisions that defined the Allied path to victory. Dunn invites readers to reconsider a pivotal “missed moment” in history—and to reflect on how differently the war, and the world, might have unfolded.

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Second Life

A West Bank Memoir

Janet Gunn

University of Minnesota Press, 1995

Second Life was first published in 1995.“Having sat out the U.S. civil rights movement and the Vietnam war protest during the sixties, I joined my first cause in the late eighties, a middle-aged academic on the other side of the world.” So writes Janet Varner Gunn, who from 1988 to 1990 took time out from university teaching to do human rights work on the West Bank. During that time she became involved with the case of Mohammad Abu Aker, a Palestinian teenager who was critically shot during a stone-throwing demonstration. The years following Mohammad’s injury, during which he was deemed a “living martyr” of the Intifada and which ended with his eventual death at nineteen in 1990, are recounted in this deeply personal book. Gunn interweaves her account of Mohammad’s medical struggles and the politics surrounding his symbolic place in the Intifada with her own story of loss and recovery. As a human rights worker for whom Mohammad initially represented a “case,” Gunn was involved in getting him the medical care he needed to survive. As a scholar, she became fascinated by the way Mohammad’s injury and subsequent “second life” took on a larger significance because of its timing, which coincided with the declaration of an independent Palestine. The book contains rich accounts of the “small news” of daily life in Deheishe, the refugee camp where Mohammad lived with his family. Gunn describes the laughter with which residents of the camp have learned to meet the violent disruption of their daily lives, hoping that her readers will “be moved not by the victimization of an oppressive occupation but by the examples of hope and steadfastness I discovered in Deheishe’s holding on for dear life.” Janet Varner Gunn has taught in the Department of English at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, after completing a Senior Fulbright Lectureship. She is the author of Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience (1982).

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Second Lives

Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television

Michael Szalay

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A history of prestige television through the rise of the “black-market melodrama.”

In Second Lives, Michael Szalay defines a new television genre that has driven the breathtaking ascent of TV as a cultural force over the last two decades: the black-market melodrama. Exemplified by the likes of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, the genre moves between a family’s everyday life and its secret second life, which may involve illegal business, espionage, or even an alternate reality. Second lives allow characters (and audiences) to escape what feels like endless work into a revanchist vision of the white middle class family. But there is for this grimly resigned genre no meaningful way back to the Fordist family wage for which it longs. In fact, Szalay argues, black-market melodramas lament the very economic transformations that untethered TV viewing from the daily rhythms of the nine-to-five job and led, ultimately, to prestige TV.

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Second Nature

An Environmental History of New England

Richard W. Judd

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

Winner of the 2014 New England Historical Association's James P. Hanlan Book Award
Bounded by the St. Lawrence Valley to the north, Lake Champlain to the west, and the Gulf of Maine to the east, New England may be the most cohesive region in the United States, with a long and richly recorded history. In this book, Richard W. Judd explores the mix of ecological process and human activity that shaped that history over the past 12,000 years. He traces a succession of cultures through New England's changing postglacial environment down to the 1600s, when the arrival of Europeans interrupted this coevolution of nature and culture.

A long period of tension and warfare, inflected by a variety of environmental problems, opened the way for frontier expansion. This in turn culminated in a unique landscape of forest, farm, and village that has become the embodiment of what Judd calls “second nature”—culturally modified landscapes that have superseded a more pristine “first nature.”

In the early 1800s changes in farm production and industrial process transformed central New England, while burgeoning markets at the geographical margins brought rapid expansion in fishing and logging activities. Although industrialization and urbanization severed connections to the natural world, the dominant cultural expression of the age, Romanticism, provided new ways of appreciating nature in the White Mountains and Maine woods. Spurred by these Romantic images and by a long tradition of local resource management, New England gained an early start in rural and urban conservation.

In the 1970s environmentalists, inspired by a widespread appreciation for regional second-nature landscapes, moved quickly from battling pollution and preserving wild lands to sheltering farms, villages, and woodlands from intrusive development. These campaigns, uniquely suited to the region's land-use history, ecology, and culture, were a fitting capstone to the environmental history of New England.

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Second Verse, Same as the First

The 2012 Presidential Election in the South

Scott E. Buchanan

University of Arkansas Press, 2014

Second Verse, Same as the First is a volume of essays covering the 2012 election as it played out in the eleven former states of the Confederacy. The essays are organized by state and emphasize the presidential campaign, but each state chapter also includes analysis on notable congressional races and important patterns at the state level. Interesting patterns in the South and their implications for the balance of power between the two major parties are analyzed. Additional chapters cover the issues that dominated voter decision making and the nomination process. Second Verse, Same as the First is a necessity for academics, journalists, and political enthusiasts seeking a deeper understanding of contemporary changes in southern electoral politics.

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Second World, Second Sex

Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War

Kristen Ghodsee

Duke University Press, 2019

Women from the state socialist countries in Eastern Europe—what used to be called the Second World—once dominated women’s activism at the United Nations, but their contributions have been largely forgotten or deemed insignificant in comparison with those of Western feminists. In Second World, Second Sex Kristen Ghodsee rescues some of this lost history by tracing the activism of Eastern European and African women during the 1975 United Nations International Year of Women and the subsequent Decade for Women (1976-1985). Focusing on case studies of state socialist Bulgaria and nonaligned but socialist-leaning Zambia, Ghodsee examines the feminist networks that developed between the Second and Third Worlds and shows how alliances between socialist women challenged American women’s leadership of the global women’s movement. Drawing on interviews and archival research across three continents, Ghodsee argues that international ideological competition between capitalism and socialism profoundly shaped the world women inhabit today.

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Second in Command

Reevaluating the Role of Vice Presidents and Running Mates in Modern American Politics

Edited by Karine Prémont and Christopher J. Devine

University of Michigan Press, 2026

In recent years, the office of the vice president has become a focal point of presidential politics and governance. From the emergence of the modern vice presidency under Walter Mondale to Mike Pence’s and Kamala Harris’s dramatic influence on the outcome of the 2020 election, Second in Command explores how vice presidents and vice-presidential candidates have shaped the direction of the country and changed American politics. The frenzy of speculation surrounding the “veepstakes” every four years and extensive media coverage of the vice-presidential debate may seem odd, given the vice presidency’s limited constitutional powers and dismal public reputation.

Dispelling the myth that the vice presidency is a powerless or merely ceremonial role, Second in Command draws on the multidisciplinary expertise of more than a dozen leading vice-presidential scholars to reveal the complex, consequential, and often misunderstood nature of the office. With accessible language and vivid examples, it traces the transformation of vice-presidential power over the past half-century, reveals the evolving electoral significance of vice-presidential running mates, and highlights the need for a deeper public understanding of these pivotal figures. Chapters employ a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, including elite interviews, archival research, case studies, and advanced statistical modeling to cover topics such as gender and media effects in running mate selection and the representation of vice presidents in popular culture. This book offers a fresh, engaging, and essential perspective on a vital institution at the heart of American democracy.

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Second-Place Mo

Morris Udall ’76 and the Twilight of Democratic Liberalism

Jon Krampner

Michigan State University Press, 2027

Second-Place Mo examines the rightward drift of the Democratic Party that began in earnest with Jimmy Carter’s defeat of Morris “Mo” Udall for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976—a turning point that set the party toward a free-market economy and away from economic liberalism.

The candidacy of Mo Udall, a congressman from Arizona, was the first time in almost a century that a member of the House of Representatives had a chance to become president; it also promised a continuation of the Democrats’ tradition of New Deal liberalism, which had been the party’s guiding star since the 1930s. But the Udall campaign was rocked by events beyond its control, its own mistakes, and the whirlwind candidacy of Jimmy Carter, who went on to win the nomination and the presidency.

Mo Udall chalked up eight second-place primary finishes without a victory. His candidacy was memorable for his dogged persistence, sunny good humor, and unabashed liberalism. This book chronicles a Democratic primary filled with memorable candidates, including the militarist and arch-Zionist Scoop Jackson; the newly minted more-populist-than-thou Fred Harris; the Hamlet-like figures of Birch Bayh and Hubert Humphrey; the fading, injured apostle of the Confederate South, George Wallace; the affable yet ineffective Kennedy in-law, Sargent Shriver; the anti-abortion housewife from Long Island, Ellen McCormack; and others. All are vividly brought to life—including Jimmy Carter, a thrower of sharp elbows before he became the beloved, humanitarian former president—set against the backdrop of Udall’s doomed effort.

Second-Place Mo examines why Udall’s 1976 campaign failed and what lessons his near misses hold for contemporary politics. Along the way, it recovers a figure whose principled liberalism and self-deprecating humor offer an instructive contrast to the politics of our own moment.

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Secrecy and Insurgency

Socialities and Knowledge Practices in Guatemala

Silvia Posocco

University of Alabama Press, 2014

Secrecy and Insurgency deals with the experiences of guerrilla combatants of the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (Rebel Armed Forces) in the aftermath of the peace accords signed in December 1996 between the Guatemalan government and guerrilla insurgents.

Drawing on a broad field of contemporary theory, Silvia Posocco’s Secrecy and Insurgency presents a vivid ethnographic account of secrecy as both sociality and a set of knowledge practices. Informed by multi-sited anthropological fieldwork among displaced communities with experiences of militancy in the guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, the book traces the contours of dispersed and intermittent guerrilla social relations, unraveling the gendered dimensions of guerrilla socialities and subjectivities in a local context marked by violence and rapid social change.

The chapters chart shifting regimes of governance in the northern departamento of Petén; the inception of violence and insurgency; guerrilla practices of naming and secret relations; moral orders based on sameness and sharing; and forms of relatedness, embodiment, and subjectivity among the combatants. The volume develops new critical idioms for grappling with partiality, perspective, and incompleteness in ethnography and contributes to new thinking on the anthropology of Guatemala.

Secrecy and Insurgency will be of interest to social and cultural anthropologists, human geographers, and scholars in Latin American studies, human rights, women’s studies, and gender studies.

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Secret Body

Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions

Jeffrey J. Kripal

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Over the course of his twenty-five-year career, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s study of religion has had two major areas of focus: the erotic expression of mystical experience and the rise of the paranormal in American culture. This book brings these two halves together in surprising ways through a blend of memoir, manifesto, and anthology, drawing new connections between these two realms of human experience and revealing Kripal’s body of work to be a dynamic whole that has the potential to renew and reshape the study of religion.
Kripal tells his story, biographically, historically and politically contextualizing each of the six books of his Chicago corpus, from Kali’s Child to Mutants and Mystics, all the while answering his censors and critics and exploring new implications of his thought. In the process, he begins to sketch out a speculative “new comparativism” in twenty theses. The result is a new vision for the study of religion, one that takes in the best of the past, engages with outside critiques from the sciences and the humanities, and begins to blaze a new positive path forward. A major work decades in the making, Secret Body will become a landmark in the study of religion.

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Secret Covenants

New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy

Bruno, Cheryl L.

Signature Books, 2024

Navigating the intricate labyrinth of early Mormon plural marriage can be fascinating, frustrating, and often confusing. The essays in this volume venture into the depths of historical inquiry, presenting a diverse array of perspectives on the subject. Authored by a consortium of esteemed scholars and researchers in the field of Mormon studies, it addresses the nuanced intricacies of Joseph Smith’s involvement in plural marriage.

Delving into the core of this discourse, these experts meticulously analyze foundational documents, highlighting the complexities Joseph Smith faced in practicing plural marriage and shedding light on the legal aspects of polygamy in 1840s Illinois. It navigates lesser-known details of Smith’s proposals and relationships, including the enigmatic story of Fanny Alger.

Secret Covenants presents a balanced exploration. It critiques traditional portrayals, providing multiple viewpoints, such as the examination of Emma Smith’s vehement rejection of polygamy after her husband’s death, and an analysis of the societal impact on women within polygamous unions. Furthermore, the authors address evolving doctrinal debates triggered by the “Marriage Revelation” and its impact on Mormon philosophy and thought.

This anthology serves as a foundational resource for academic scholars, individuals interested in religious history, and anyone seeking to understand the many layers of Mormon plural marriage.

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Secret Habits

Catholic Literacy Education for Women in the Early Nineteenth Century

Carol Mattingly

Southern Illinois University Press, 2016

Literacy historians have credited the Protestant mandate to read scripture, as well as Protestant schools, for advances in American literacy. This belief, however, has overshadowed other important efforts and led to an incomplete understanding of our literacy history. In Secret Habits: Catholic Literacy Education for Women in the Early Nineteenth Century, Carol Mattingly restores the work of Catholic nuns and sisters to its rightful place in literacy studies.

Mattingly shows that despite widespread fears and opposition, including attacks by vaunted northeastern Protestant pioneers of literacy, Catholic women nonetheless became important educators of women in many areas of America. They founded convents, convent academies, and schools; developed their own curricula and pedagogies; and persisted in their efforts in the face of significant prejudices. The convents faced sharp opposition from Protestant educators, who often played on anti-Catholic fears to gain support for their own schools. Using a performative rhetoric of good works that emphasized civic involvement, Catholic women were able to educate large numbers of women and expand opportunities for literacy instruction.

A needed corrective to studies that have focused solely on efforts by Protestant educators, Mattingly’s work offers new insights into early nineteenth-century women’s literacy, demonstrating that literacy education was more religiously and geographically diverse than previously recognized.

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Secret History

Procopius

University of Michigan Press, 1961

Written with passion and personal malice, the Secret History of Procopius is a scathing indictment of the emperor Justinian and his sixth-century Byzantine court. Never has there been a more calculated attempt to ruin an entire reign in the eyes of posterity. Procopius writes of:
. . . How the Great General Belisarius was hoodwinked by his wife, whose lover became a monk.
. . . How Theodora, most depraved of all empresses, won Justinian's love.
. . . How she saved five hundred harlots from a life of sin, made off with her own natural son, and other curious incidents of her passion.

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Secret Maps

Maps You Were Never Meant to See, from the Middle Ages to Today

Tom Harper, Nick Dykes, and Magdalena Peszko

University of Chicago Press, 2025

An illustrated story of the relationship between mapping and secrecy, charting the role maps played in concealing and revealing knowledge across centuries.

Is there anything more intriguing than a secret map? One that reveals clandestine information or meanings, or a map that is itself a secret? Secret Maps features over one hundred examples of these kinds of maps, connected by their varied relationships to secrecy, and ranging from the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries and across the globe. They include views into state secrecy and power—such as maps used for domestic and military purposes, imperial expansion, espionage, and surveillance as well as those with private or commercial uses, such as charts of private land, trade routes, or the flights of private jets. The maps span widely in their scope and cover issues of broad interest, from old-fashioned spying to contemporary concerns about technology and privacy.

As illuminating as it is thrilling, Secret Maps unearths the once-hidden routes, landscapes, and locations that have covertly shaped our world.

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Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics

Dupuit and the Engineers

Robert B. Ekelund Jr. and Robert F. Hébert

University of Chicago Press, 1999

How did contemporary microeconomic theory emerge? Who were its chief architects? Conventional wisdom points largely to the work of Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) and his colleagues in England in the late nineteenth century. In this highly original and important contribution to the history of economic thought, Robert Ekelund and Robert Hébert convincingly argue that the intellectual tradition of microeconomic inquiry was initiated by members of the Corps des Ingénieurs des Ponts et Chaussées (French corps of state civil engineers), most notably Jules Dupuit (1804-66). Using documents previously unavailable in English, the authors present a cohesive and original picture of French economic thought that solidly documents the contributions of Dupuit and his colleagues. This is a seminal work about the foundations of modern microeconomics.

"A very fine piece of work that provides material I have never seen before, is well written, and has undoubtable merits."—William Baumol, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University

"By bringing to the forefront the achievements of French engineer Jules Dupuit, this work changes our view of the history of microeconomics. Secret Origin of Modern Microeconomics is a commentary on our discipline's mythology of origins: it reminds us that, in the construction and maintenance of canonical authority, the recoginition of founding fathers requires simultaneous, often subtle, gestures of exclusion."—Philippe Fontaine, école Normale Supèrieure de Cachan

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Secret Science

Spanish Cosmography and the New World

María M. Portuondo

University of Chicago Press, 2009

The discovery of the New World raised many questions for early modern scientists: What did these lands contain? Where did they lie in relation to Europe? Who lived there, and what were their inhabitants like? Imperial expansion necessitated changes in the way scientific knowledge was gathered, and Spanish cosmographers in particular were charged with turning their observations of the New World into a body of knowledge that could be used for governing the largest empire the world had ever known.

As María M. Portuondo here shows, this cosmographic knowledge had considerable strategic, defensive, and monetary value that royal scientists were charged with safeguarding from foreign and internal enemies. Cosmography was thus a secret science, but despite the limited dissemination of this body of knowledge, royal cosmographers applied alternative epistemologies and new methodologies that changed the discipline, and, in the process, how Europeans understood the natural world.

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Secret Witness

The Untold Story of the 1967 Bombing in Marshall, Michigan

Blaine Pardoe

University of Michigan Press, 2012

Every small town has a moment when the real world abruptly intrudes, shattering the town's notions of itself and its people. For citizens of Marshall, Michigan, that moment came August 18, 1967. Nola Puyear was working downtown at the Tasty Cafe that morning when she received a package. She opened it and was instantly killed in a fiery explosion.

In the months that followed, law enforcement and prosecutors wrestled with a crime that to all appearances was senseless. Evidence recovered from the blown-up restaurant, including a bottle of pills that had been tainted with lye, suggested a concerted plot to murder Mrs. Puyear. But why had someone wanted to kill the well-liked woman, by all accounts a pillar of her close-knit community? For that matter, was Marshall really the quaint paradise it seemed to be?

Secret Witness brings to light startling new evidence and freshly uncovered facts to address these and other questions that, to this day, surround one of Michigan's most brutal murders. Based on extensive interviews with surviving prosecutors, police, and witnesses, Blaine Pardoe re-creates the investigation that pried into Marshall's dark underbelly and uncovered the seamy private lives led by some of the town's citizenry but led to only tenuous theories about the bombing. The book also examines the pivotal role played by the Secret Witness program, an initiative by the Detroit News that offered rewards for anonymous tips related to violent crimes. What's ultimately revealed is the true depth of evil that occurred in Marshall that day. Every small town has dirty little secrets. This time, they were deadly.

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Secretly Inside

A Novel

Hans Warren; Translated by S. J. Leinbach

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

In the Dutch countryside the war seems far away. For most people, at least. But not for Ed, a Jew in Nazi-occupied Holland trying to find some safe sanctuary. Compelled to go into hiding in the rural province of Zeeland, he is taken in by a seemingly benevolent family of farmers. But, as Ed comes to realize, the Van 't Westeindes are not what they seem. Camiel, the son of the house, is still in mourning for his best friend, a German soldier who committed suicide the year before. And Camiel's fiery, unstable sister Mariete begins to nurse a growing unrequited passion for their young guest, just as Ed realizes his own attraction to Camiel. As time goes by, Ed is drawn into the domestic intrigues around him, and the farmhouse that had begun as his refuge slowly becomes his prison.

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Secrets I Won't Take with Me

Home, War, and the Struggle for Peace in Israel

Yossi Beilin

University of Alabama Press, 2025

An Israeli political leader’s riveting first-hand account of pivotal moments from recent Israeli history, including the Oslo Peace Accords, the founding of the Birthright Initiative, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the rise of the Israeli far right, and more

In Secrets I Won't Take with Me, Yossi Beilin, a key Israeli political and ministerial leader, offers an intimate and candid memoir that chronicles pivotal events in the nation’s recent history. From the crucible of its founding to the complexities of the modern era, Beilin reveals an insider’s perspective and previously undocumented insights about the events that have and continue to shape Israel.

Beginning his career as an academic and a journalist, Beilin became the spokesperson of the Labor Party in 1977. Among his many career highlights include the chairmanship of the Meretz-Yachad Party, Minister of Justice, Minister of Religious Affairs, and Deputy Finance Minister, and perhaps most significantly, as Deputy Foreign Minister during the Israel-PLO Oslo Peace Accords. As a key architect of the Oslo Peace Accords, he shares unprecedented details of the negotiations that defined an era.

Beyond diplomacy, Beilin illuminates his role in shaping Israel’s identity, from steering Israel away from its alliance with apartheid South Africa to the foundation of the influential Birthright program. With unflinching honesty, Beilin navigates the triumphs and tragedies of a nation, from the euphoria of the Six-Day War to the heartbreak of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. A deeply personal memoir of one man’s life interwoven with a nation’s, Beilin’s stunning account of his career serves as a masterful tour d’horizon of Israel’s recent past and evolving future.

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Secrets Need Words

Indonesian Poetry, 1966–1998

Harry Aveling

Ohio University Press, 2001

Short listed for the 2007 New South Wales Premier's Translation Prize

The period from 1966 to 1999 represents a distinct era in Indonesian history. Throughout the “New Order” regime of President Suharto, the policies of economic development and political stability were dominant. However, the public opinion of personal expression was consistently under suspicion, and indeed dissent was severely punished.

Secrets Need Words traces the development of Indonesian poetry throughout this entire period. Texts are presented both in the original Indonesian and in careful, stylistically sensitive English translations.

In this anthology of contemporary work by Indonesian poets, the renowned translator and editor Harry Aveling presents a series of ongoing analyses detailing the political and social shifts that have influenced the work of particular poets.

Professor Aveling's analyses, along with the poems themselves, demonstrate how the poets responded to the power of the state in a variety of ways ranging from direct confrontation to withdrawal into personal and private realms characterized by fantasy and the use of heavily rhythmic language.

Secrets Need Words will be of interest to scholars of Indonesia and comparative literature, and will be for many years to come a basic text for scholarship and teaching. But it also offers all readers of poetry an opportunity to explore a new, complex, and exciting body of literature from one of the world's largest nations.

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Secrets and Rivals

Wartime Letters and the Parents I Never Knew

R. Bruce Larson

University of Missouri Press, 2015

Ruth Larson saved nearly 700 letters she and her husband Bob exchanged during World War II. Opening the box while his mother lay dying, her son Bruce expected to find commonplace details of his parents’ early life together. He instead discovered a story of deception, obsession, and betrayal.

Reading through the letters, he is drawn into his parents’ courtship amid the hardships of separation and war. Beyond the tumultuous romance, Larson finds that he barely recognizes his father, whom he knew only as distant and impassive. He uncovers shocking truths about his mother, Ruth, whom family lore had pigeonholed as sweetly pious.

At the time of the letters, Bob is a young Coast Guard clerk fighting off depression with thoughts of his dream girl back home. Back in Minnesota, Ruth passes the days adrift in romantic fantasies and liaisons with local admirers. Bob’s suspicions about Ruth and his obsession with her from afar threaten the young man’s fragile hold on his sanity, but he will not give her up. Decades later, their son comes to feel a tenderness for both his parents and to understand how their losses, fears, and reluctance can transform and refashion family bonds.

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Secrets and Truths

Ethnography in the Archive of Romania's Secret Police

Katherine Verdery

Central European University Press, 2014

Nothing in Soviet-style communism was as shrouded in mystery as its secret police. Its paid employees were known to few and their actual numbers remain uncertain. Its informers and collaborators operated clandestinely under pseudonyms and met their officers in secret locations. Its files were inaccessible, even to most party members. The people the secret police recruited or interrogated were threatened so effectively that some never told even their spouses, and many have held their tongues to this day, long after the regimes fell.With the end of communism, many of the newly established governments—among them Romania's—opened their secret police archives. From those files, as well as her personal memories, the author has carried out historical ethnography of the Romanian Securitate. Secrets and Truths is not only of historical interest but has implications for understanding the rapidly developing "security state" of the neoliberal present.

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Secrets in a Dead Fish

The Spying Game in the First World War

Melanie King

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014

How did German intelligence agents use a dead fish to convey critical information to their operatives? What did an advertisement for a dog in the Times have to do with the movement of British troops into Egypt? And why did British officers suddenly become suspicious of the trousers hanging on a Belgian woman’s washing line?

Throughout World War I, spymasters and their networks of secret agents developed many clever—and sometimes comical—methods of covert communication. Stacks of bread in a bakery window, puffs of smoke from a chimney, and even woolen pullovers were all used to pass on secret messages that were decipherable only to the well-trained eye. Drawing on the memoirs of eight spies, Melanie King divulges these and other tricks of the trade while sharing details from their astonishing stories. Among her informants are British intelligence officers working undercover in Germany and France, including a former Metropolitan police officer who once hunted Jack the Ripper; a German secret service officer codenamed “Agricola;” an American newspaperman; and an Austrian agent who disguised himself during his career as everything from a Jewish peddler to a Russian officer.

A fascinating compendium of clever and long-forgotten ruses—interspersed with the stories of the spies themselves—Secrets in a Dead Fish sheds new light on the shadowy world of Great War espionage.

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Secrets of the English War Bow

Hugh D. H. Soar

Westholme Publishing, 2010

A Complete Recreation of the Deadliest Medieval Arm
Dominating medieval battlefields for more than two centuries but requiring long and arduous practice to command, the English war bow and its battle shaft are the symbols of the rise of British power in Europe. Despite being crafted for hundreds of years and wielded by generations of archers, no example of the war bow—the military version of the longbow—exists, outside of a single broken limb. Now for the first time, expert craftsmen use all available evidence including applied archaeology to unlock the secrets of the English war bow. Historian Hugh D. H. Soar is joined by Mark Stretton, master blacksmith, and Joseph Gibbs, bowyer, in order to demonstrate how a war bow and its associated arrow heads and shafts may have been constructed and used. In addition to showing the complete manufacture of a bow from tree selection to stringing and how specialized arrowheads were forged and attached to shafts, Secrets of the English War Bowprovides information on the actual performance of the war bow, including the bow's effectiveness against various materials and, for the first time, its use against moving targets, since bows were often drawn against mounted soldiers. Armed with this new information, Soar provides an analysis of both successes and failures of the war bow in several important battles. Illustrated in color and black and white, Secrets of the English War Bowprovides an invaluable service for those interested in medieval military history, archery, and technology.

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Secrets of the Great Ocean Liners

John G. Sayers

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2020

In the heyday of ocean travel—between the late nineteenth century and World War II—ocean liners were a home away from home. Passengers prepared for voyages that could last as long as three months, and shipping companies ensured their guests were as comfortable as possible, providing entertainment, dining, sleeping quarters, and smoking lounges to accommodate passengers of all ages and budgets. Secrets of the Great Ocean Liners leads the reader through each stage of ocean liner travel, from booking a ticket and choosing a cabin to shore excursions, on-board games, social events, and even romances. This book dives into a vast, unique collection of ephemera to reveal the scandals, glamour, challenges, and tragedies of ocean liner travel. Shipping companies produced glitzy brochures, sailing schedules, voyage logs, passenger lists, postcards, and menus, all of which help us to enjoy daily life on board. Diaries, letters, and journals written by passengers also reveal a host of fascinating insights into the experience of traveling by sea.

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Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth, Second Edition

Weather, Climate Change, and Finding Deep Powder in Utah's Wasatch Mountains and Around the World

Jim Steenburgh

Utah State University Press, 2023

Utah has long claimed to have the greatest snow on Earth—the state itself has even trademarked the phrase. In Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth, Jim Steenburgh investigates Wasatch weather, exposing the myths, explaining the reality, and revealing how and why Utah’s powder lives up to its reputation. Steenburgh also examines ski and snowboard regions beyond Utah, providing a meteorological guide to mountain weather and snow climates around the world.

Chapters explore mountain weather, avalanches and snow safety, historical accounts of weather events and snow conditions, and the basics of climate and weather forecasting. In this second edition, Steenburgh explains what creates the best snow for skiing and snowboarding using accurate and accessible language and 150 color photographs and illustrations, making Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth a helpful tool for planning vacations and staying safe during mountain adventures.

This edition is updated with two new chapters covering microclimates and climate change in greater depth. Steenburgh addresses the declining snowpack and the future of snow across the western United States, as well as the declining snow and ice in several regions of the world—the European Alps in particular. Snowriders, weather enthusiasts, meteorologists, students of snow science, and anyone who dreams of deep powder and bluebird skies will want to get their gloves on this new edition of Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth.

Praise for the first edition:
“Everything you always wanted to know about how snow forms and how to follow forecasts so you see
how much an”d where is in the book. It’s a must-have for any fan of snow, sure to get you excited about
winter, and give you a bevy of conversation topics for the chairlift ride.”
—Utah Adventure Journal

“For backcountry enthusiasts that find themselves infatuated with weather patterns, snow-water
equivalents, microclimates, and Utah, this book is a dream come true.”
—The Backcountry Skiing Blog

“Steenburgh shares a career’s worth of knowledge in this book. His love of both snow science and skiing
is obvious, and he adds humor and personality to the scientific discussion.”
—First Tracks!! Online Skiing Magazine

“When it comes to snow, the details—both small- and large-scale—do matter. If we all observed our
surroundings with as much curiosity and enthusiasm as Steenburgh, the world could be a much better-
tended place.”
—American Scientist

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Secrets of the Universe

How We Discovered the Cosmos

Paul Murdin

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Discoveries in astronomy challenge our fundamental ideas about the universe. Where the astronomers of antiquity once spoke of fixed stars, we now speak of whirling galaxies and giant supernovae. Where we once thought Earth was the center of the universe, we now see it as a small planet among millions of other planetary systems, any number of which could also hold life. These dramatic shifts in our perspective hinge on thousands of individual discoveries: moments when it became clear to someone that some part of the universe—whether a planet or a supermassive black hole—was not as it once seemed.

Secrets of the Universe invites us to participate in these moments of revelation and wonder as scientists first experienced them. Renowned astronomer Paul Murdin here provides an ambitious and exciting overview of astronomy, conveying for newcomers and aficionados alike the most important discoveries of this science and introducing the many people who made them. Lavishly illustrated with more than 400 color images, the book outlines in seventy episodes what humankind has learned about the cosmos—and what scientists around the world are poised to learn in the coming decades. Arranged by types of discovery, it also provides an overarching narrative throughout that explains how the earliest ideas of the cosmos evolved into the cutting-edge astronomy we know today. Along the way, Murdin never forgets that science is a human endeavor, and that every discovery was the result of inspiration, hard work, or luck—usually all three.

The first section of Secrets explores discoveries made before the advent of the telescope, from stars and constellations to the position of our own sun. The second considers discoveries made within our own solar system, from the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter to the comets and asteroids at its distant frontier. The next section delves into discoveries of the dynamic universe, like gravitation, relativity, pulsars, and black holes. A fourth examines discoveries made within our own galaxy, from interstellar nebulae and supernovae to Cepheid variable stars and extrasolar planets. Next Murdin turns to discoveries made within the deepest recesses of the universe, like quasars, supermassive black holes, and gamma ray bursters. In the end, Murdin unveils where astronomy still teeters on the edge of discovery, considering dark matter and alien life.

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Sectionalism in Virginia from 1776 - 1861

Charles H. Ambler with a new introduction by Barbara Rasmussen

West Virginia University Press, 2008

This 1910 study of sectionalism in Virginia illustrates how the east and west of Virginia were destined to separate into two states. Barbara Rasmussen, professor of Public History and Director of Cultural Resource Management at West Virginia University writes a new introduction to Sectionalism in Virginia, setting Ambler’s classic grand achievement into the context of its production by creating an historical process for studying West Virginia history.

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Secular Days, Sacred Moments

The America Columns of Robert Coles

Robert Coles

Michigan State University Press, 2013

No writer or public intellectual of our era has been as sensitive to the role of faith in the lives of ordinary Americans as Robert Coles. Though not religious in the conventional sense, Coles is unparalleled in his astute understanding and respect for the relationship between secular life and sacredness, which cuts across his large body of work. Drawing inspiration from figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil, Coles’s extensive writings explore the tug of war between faith and doubt. As Coles himself admits, the “back-and-forthness between faith and doubt is the story of my life.” These thirty-one thought-provoking essays are drawn from Coles’s weekly column in the Catholic publication America. In them, he turns his inquisitive lens on a range of subjects and issues, from writers and painters to his recent reading and film viewing, contemporary events and lingering controversies, recollections of past and present mentors, events of his own daily life, and ordinary encounters with students, patients, neighbors, and friends. Addressing moral questions openly and honestly with a rare combination of rectitude and authorial modesty, these essays position Coles as a preeminent, durable, and trusted voice in the continuing national conversation over religion, civic life, and moral purpose.

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Secular Faith

How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics

Mark A. Smith

University of Chicago Press, 2015

When Pope Francis recently answered “Who am I to judge?” when asked about homosexuality, he ushered in a new era for the Catholic church. A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for a pope to express tolerance for homosexuality. Yet shifts of this kind are actually common in the history of Christian groups. Within the United States, Christian leaders have regularly revised their teachings to match the beliefs and opinions gaining support among their members and larger society.

Mark A. Smith provocatively argues that religion is not nearly the unchanging conservative influence in American politics that we have come to think it is. In fact, in the long run, religion is best understood as responding to changing political and cultural values rather than shaping them. Smith makes his case by charting five contentious issues in America’s history: slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and women’s rights. For each, he shows how the political views of even the most conservative Christians evolved in the same direction as the rest of society—perhaps not as swiftly, but always on the same arc. During periods of cultural transition, Christian leaders do resist prevailing values and behaviors, but those same leaders inevitably acquiesce—often by reinterpreting the Bible—if their positions become no longer tenable. Secular ideas and influences thereby shape the ways Christians read and interpret their scriptures.

So powerful are the cultural and societal norms surrounding us that Christians in America today hold more in common morally and politically with their atheist neighbors than with the Christians of earlier centuries. In fact, the strongest predictors of people’s moral beliefs are not their religious commitments or lack thereof but rather when and where they were born. A thoroughly researched and ultimately hopeful book on the prospects for political harmony, Secular Faith demonstrates how, over the long run, boundaries of secular and religious cultures converge.

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Secular Missionaries

Americans and African Development in the 1960s

Larry Grubbs

University of Massachusetts Press, 2010

In 1961, as President John F. Kennedy proclaimed the beginning of a "Decade of Development," the United States embarked on its first coherent "Africa" policy. Guided by the precepts of modernization theory, American policymakers, diplomats, academics, and Peace Corps volunteers were dispatched to promote economic growth and nation-building among the newly independent countries of sub-Saharan Africa. At the outset, Larry Grubbs shows, many of these" secular missionaries" were no less sanguine about their prospects for success than were their Christian predecessors a century earlier. But before long their optimism gave way to disillusionment, as rosy forecasts of sustained development collided with African political realities and colonial economies based on single-commodity exports subject to global price fluctuations. In this book, Grubbs presents a cultural history of this ill-fated American campaign to modernize Africa during its first decade of independence. Drawing on government documents and contemporary press accounts as well as an extensive body of scholarship on U.S.-Africa relations, he exposes the contradictions at the core of a self-serving idealism that promised to "win" the continent of Africa for the West in the context of the Cold War. While many Americans working in Africa considered themselves opponents of ethnocentrism, the modernization goals they served carried an ingrained, if unacknowledged, cultural and ideological sense of superiority and faith in American exceptionalism. Similarly, persistent myths about African backwardness and primitiveness continued to afflict U.S. policy, despite official pronouncements of confidence in the transformative power of Western expertise and can-do pragmatism in bringing African societies into the modern world. If the assumptions underlying U.S. policy toward Africa during the 1960s were simply relics of outmoded Cold War orthodoxies, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, Grubbs concludes, many of the same ideas imbue contemporary discussions of the ongoing "crisis" in Africa, from the campaigns to "Save Darfur" and stop the spread of AIDS to efforts to eliminate "blood diamonds" and forgive African debts.

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Secular Morality and International Security

American and British Decisions about War

Maria Fanis

University of Michigan Press, 2011

“[Fanis] demonstrates an impressive ability to travel nimbly between abstract theoretical concepts and a messy reality. In each one of the case study chapters, her analysis is rich, thoughtful, and imaginative.”
—Ido Oren, University of Florida

Combining insights from cultural studies, gender studies, and social history, Maria Fanis shows the critical importance of national identity in decisions about war and peace. She challenges conventional approaches by demonstrating that domestic ethical codes influence perceptions of threat from abroad. With an in-depth study of U.S.-British relations in the first half of the nineteenth century, and with an application to the recent War in Iraq, she ties changes in U.S. and British national interest to shifts in these nations’ domestic codes of morality.

Fanis’s findings have important implications for contemporary international relations theory. Apart from its relevance to current events, her work also makes a contribution to the literatures on foreign policy—specifically American and British foreign policies—and the causes of war.

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Secular Powers

Humility in Modern Political Thought

Julie E. Cooper

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Secularism is usually thought to contain the project of self-deification, in which humans attack God’s authority in order to take his place, freed from all constraints. Julie E. Cooper overturns this conception through an incisive analysis of the early modern justifications for secular politics. While she agrees that secularism is a means of empowerment, she argues that we have misunderstood the sources of secular empowerment and the kinds of strength to which it aspires.

Contemporary understandings of secularism, Cooper contends, have been shaped by a limited understanding of it as a shift from vulnerability to power. But the works of the foundational thinkers of secularism tell a different story. Analyzing the writings of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau at the moment of secularity’s inception, she shows that all three understood that acknowledging one’s limitations was a condition of successful self-rule. And while all three invited humans to collectively build and sustain a political world, their invitations did not amount to self-deification. Cooper establishes that secular politics as originally conceived does not require a choice between power and vulnerability. Rather, it challenges us—today as then—to reconcile them both as essential components of our humanity.

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Secularism and Its Ambiguities

Four Case Studies

Carlo Ginzburg

Central European University Press, 2023

In the best micro-historical tradition, Carlo Ginzburg, himself one of the founders and icons of this genre of historiography, dissects four moments of European intellectual history. This book relives the experience that participants in the Natalie Zemon Davis Lecture Series at the Budapest campus of Central European University had in 2019 listening to Ginzburg's eloquent and engaging discourses. For the purposes of this volume he has re-edited and completed the leporello of cases charged with the inherent ambiguity between secularism and religions.

Secularism is often identified with rejection or at least distancing from the sacred. However, if one assumes that secularism also appropriates and reworks the sacred, its ambiguities come to the fore. The dilemma accompanies the reception of La Boétie's Servitude volontaire between 1574 and today. Before Walter Benjamin, the lesser-known 19th-century Léon de Laborde defended the profanity of reproducing the arts. The tension around the secular pervades the case of the College de Sociologie (Paris, 1937-1939), an attempt to analyze the ideological components of fascism. The fourth lecture approaches a much-discussed contemporary phenomenon – fake news – from a long-term perspective. To what extent are some disturbing features of the world we live in the result of a long, tortuous, unpredictable trajectory?

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Secularism in Antebellum America

John Lardas Modern

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today.

Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.

[more]

Secularizing Islamists?

Jama'at-e-Islami and Jama'at-ud-Da'wa in Urban Pakistan

Humeira Iqtidar

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Secularizing Islamists? provides an in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama‘at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, Humeira Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism.

This book offers a fine-grained account of the workings of both parties that challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. Iqtidar particularly illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism, while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. She highlights the role that competition among Islamists and the focus on the state as the center of their activity plays in assisting secularization. The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of emerging trends in Muslim politics.

[more]