Results by title
92 books match the query 'Boundaries' and 16 start with t
Technical Territories
Data, Subjects, and Spaces in Infrastructural AsiaLuke Munn
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Territory is shifting. No longer defined by the dotted line of the border or the national footprint of soil, today’s territories are enacted through data infrastructures. From subsea cables to server halls, these infrastructures underpin new forms of governance, shaping subjects and their everyday lives. Technical Territories moves from masked protestors in Hong Kong to asylum-seekers in Christmas Island and sand miners in Singapore, exploring how these territories are both political and visceral, altering the experience of their inhabitants.
Infrastructures have now become geopolitical, strategic investments that advance national visions, extend influence, and trigger trade wars. Yet at the same time, these technologies also challenge sovereignty as a bounded container, enacting a more distributed and decoupled form of governance. Such “technical territories” construct new zones where subjects are assembled, rights are undermined, labor is coordinated, and capital is extracted. The stable line of the border is replaced by more fluid configurations of power. Luke Munn stages an interdisciplinary intervention over six chapters, drawing upon a wide range of literature from technical documents and activist accounts, and bringing insights from media studies, migration studies, political theory, and cultural and social studies to bear on these new sociotechnical conditions.
Territorial Imaginaries
Beyond the Sovereign MapEdited by Kären Wigen
University of Chicago Press, 2025
This strikingly colorful volume contends that modern mapping has never been sufficient to illustrate the complex reality of territory and political sovereignty, whether past or present. For Territorial Imaginaries, editor Kären Wigen has assembled an impressive slate of experts, spanning disciplines from political science to art history, to contribute perspectives and case studies covering three main themes: mapping before the nation-state, rethinking and critiquing mapping practices, and robust traditions of counter-cartography.
Each contributor proposes alternative ways to think about mapping, and the essays are supported with rich archival documentation. Among the far-reaching case studies are Barbara Mundy’s cartographic history of Indigenous dispossession in the Americas, Peter Bol’s examination of two Chinese maps created five hundred years apart, and Ali Yaycıoğlu’s exploration of tensions between top-down and bottom-up mapping of Habsburg and Ottoman border claims.
Texas Takes Shape
A History in Maps from the General Land OfficeBy Mark Lambert, James Harkins, Brian A. Stauffer, and Patrick Walsh
University of Texas Press, 2025
2025 Second Place, Presidio La Bahía Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas
2026 Ron Tyler Award for Best Illustrated Book on Texas History and Culture, Texas State Historical Association (TSHA)
A comprehensive volume on historical mapping in Texas.
The Texas General Land Office’s map collection contains over 45,000 maps, some dating from the sixteenth century, making it one of the most important cartographic archives in Texas. As products and agents of history drawn by cartographers with motives and means as diverse as the places they document, maps provide a unique perspective on geopolitical, cultural, and economic processes. The maps of the GLO offer key insights into Texas’s sprawling history. They speak to issues of changing borders, social and political upheaval, and questions of sovereignty and power.
Texas Takes Shape offers an illuminating selection from the GLO archive: over one hundred maps that tell—and sometimes obscure—the stories of European colonization, Spanish and Mexican rule, the Republic of Texas, and the modern US state. There are maps here of every scale, from the hemispheric visions of European explorers to individual survey plats. Accompanying essays offer fascinating lessons on topics ranging from Indigenous cartography to military and railroad mapmaking and frontier surveys. Artful and informative, Texas Takes Shape examines a unique place through the eyes and imaginations of those who sought to govern it, profit from it, understand it, and call it home.
The Agrarian Dispute
The Expropriation of American-Owned Rural Land in Postrevolutionary MexicoJohn J. Dwyer
Duke University Press, 2008
Dwyer weaves together elite and subaltern history and highlights the intricate relationship between domestic and international affairs. Through detailed studies of land redistribution in Baja California and Sonora, he demonstrates that peasant agency influenced the local application of Cárdenas’s agrarian reform program, his regional state-building projects, and his relations with the United States. Dwyer draws on a broad array of official, popular, and corporate sources to illuminate the motives of those who contributed to the agrarian dispute, including landless fieldworkers, indigenous groups, small landowners, multinational corporations, labor leaders, state-level officials, federal policymakers, and diplomats. Taking all of them into account, Dwyer explores the circumstances that spurred agrarista mobilization, the rationale behind Cárdenas’s rural policies, the Roosevelt administration’s reaction to the loss of American-owned land, and the diplomatic tactics employed by Mexican officials to resolve the international conflict.
The Border between Them
Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri LineJeremy Neely
University of Missouri Press, 2007
The most bitter guerrilla conflict in American history raged along the Kansas-Missouri border from 1856 to 1865, making that frontier the first battleground in the struggle over slavery. That fiercely contested boundary represented the most explosive political fault line in the United States, and its bitter divisions foreshadowed an entire nation torn asunder. Jeremy Neely now examines the significance of the border war on both sides of the Kansas-Missouri line and offers a comparative, cross-border analysis of its origins, meanings, and consequences.
A narrative history of the border war and its impact on citizens of both states, The Border between Them recounts the exploits of John Brown, William Quantrill, and other notorious guerrillas, but it also uncovers the stories of everyday people who lived through that conflict. Examining the frontier period to the close of the nineteenth century, Neely frames the guerrilla conflict within the larger story of the developing West and squares that violent period with the more peaceful—though never tranquil—periods that preceded and followed it.
Focusing on the countryside south of the big bend in the Missouri River, an area where there was no natural boundary separating the states, Neely examines three border counties in each state that together illustrate both sectional division and national reunion. He draws on the letters and diaries of ordinary citizens—as well as newspaper accounts, election results, and census data—to illuminate the complex strands that helped bind Kansas and Missouri together in post–Civil War America. He shows how people on both sides of the line were already linked by common racial attitudes, farming practices, and ambivalence toward railroad expansion; he then tells how emancipation, industrialization, and immigration eventually eroded wartime divisions and facilitated the reconciliation of old foes from each state.
Today the “border war” survives in the form of interstate rivalries between collegiate Tigers and Jayhawks, allowing Neely to consider the limits of that reconciliation and the enduring power of identities forged in wartime. The Border between Them is a compelling account of the terrible first act of the American Civil War and its enduring legacy for the conflict’s veterans, victims, and survivors, as well as subsequent generations.
The Borders of "Europe"
Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of BorderingNicholas De Genova, editor
Duke University Press, 2017
Contributors. Ruben Andersson, Nicholas De Genova, Dace Dzenovska, Evelina Gambino, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Clara Lecadet, Souad Osseiran, Lorenzo Pezzani, Fiorenza Picozza, Stephan Scheel, Maurice Stierl, Laia Soto Bermant, Martina Tazzioli
The Borders of America
Migration, Control, and Resistance Across Latin America and the CaribbeanSoledad Álvarez Velasco, Nicholas De Genova, Gustavo Dias, and Eduardo Domenech, editors
Duke University Press, 2026
Contributors. Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Tanya Basok, Janneth Clavijo, Nicholas De Genova, Gustavo Dias, Eduardo Domenech, Roberto Dufraix-Tapia, Jonathan Echeverri Zuluaga, Valentina Glockner Fagetti, Luin Goldring, Patricia Landolt, Carolina Moulin, Margarita Luz Núñez Chaim, Juan Ordóñez, Daniel Quinteros, Romina Ramos, Martha Rojas-Wiesner, Fabio Santos, Amarela Varela-Huerta, and Laura Velasco Ortiz
The Boundaries of Blackness
AIDS and the Breakdown of Black PoliticsCathy Cohen
University of Chicago Press, 1999
The Boundaries of Blackness is the first full-scale exploration of the social, political, and cultural impact of AIDS on the African-American community. Informed by interviews with activists, ministers, public officials, and people with AIDS, Cathy Cohen unflinchingly brings to light how the epidemic fractured, rather than united, the black community. She traces how the disease separated blacks along different fault lines and analyzes the ensuing struggles and debates.
More broadly, Cohen analyzes how other cross-cutting issues—of class, gender, and sexuality—challenge accepted ideas of who belongs in the community. Such issues, she predicts, will increasingly occupy the political agendas of black organizations and institutions and can lead to either greater inclusiveness or further divisiveness.
The Boundaries of Blackness, by examining the response of a changing community to an issue laced with stigma, has much to teach us about oppression, resistance, and marginalization. It also offers valuable insight into how the politics of the African-American community—and other marginal groups—will evolve in the twenty-first century.
The Boundaries of Pluralism
The World of the University of Michigan’s Jewish Students from 1897 to 1945Andrei S. Markovits & Kenneth Garner
Michigan Publishing Services, 2020
Raoul Wallenberg Distinguished University Professor of History,
University of Michigan
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, University of Michigan,
and Director, Bentley Historical Library
The Boundaries of Their Dwelling
Sanz, Blake
University of Iowa Press, 2021
In the collection’s second half, we follow a Veracruzan-born drifter, Manuel, and his estranged American son, Tommy. Over decades, they negotiate separate nations and personal tragicomedies on their journeys from innocence to experience. As Manuel participates in student protests in Mexico City in 1968, he drops out to pursue his art. In the 1970s, he immigrates to Louisiana, but soon leaves his wife and infant son behind after his art shop fails. Meanwhile, Tommy grows up in 1980s Louisiana, sometimes escaping his mother’s watchful eye to play basketball at a park filled with the threat of violence. In college, he seeks acceptance from teammates by writing their term papers. Years later, as Manuel nears death and Tommy reaches middle age, they reconnect, embarking on a mission to jointly interview a former riot policeman about his military days; in the process, father and son discover what it has meant to carry each other’s stories and memories from afar.
The Cybernetic Border
Drones, Technology, and IntrusionIván Chaar López
Duke University Press, 2024
The Fine Line
Eviatar Zerubavel
University of Chicago Press, 1993
The Heimat Abroad
The Boundaries of GermannessKrista O'Donnell, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin, Eds.
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Germans have been one of the most mobile and dispersed populations on earth. Communities of German speakers, scattered around the globe, have long believed they could recreate their Heimat (homeland) wherever they moved, and that their enclaves could remain truly German. Furthermore, the history of Germany is inextricably tied to Germans outside the homeland who formed new communities that often retained their Germanness. Emigrants, including political, economic, and religious exiles such as Jewish Germans, fostered a nostalgia for home, which, along with longstanding mutual ties of family, trade, and culture, bound them to Germany.
The Heimat Abroad is the first book to examine the problem of Germany's long and complex relationship to ethnic Germans outside its national borders. Beyond defining who is German and what makes them so, the book reconceives German identity and history in global terms and challenges the nation state and its borders as the sole basis of German nationalism.
Krista O'Donnell is Associate Professor of History, William Paterson University.
Nancy Reagin is Professor of History, Pace University.
Renete Bridenthal is Emerita Professor of History, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
The Icon Curtain
The Cold War's Quiet BorderYuliya Komska
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Yuliya Komska transports readers to the western edge of the Bohemian Forest, one of Europe’s oldest borderlands, where in the 1950s civilians set out to shape the so-called prayer wall. A chain of new and repurposed pilgrimage sites, lookout towers, and monuments, the prayer wall placed two long-standing German obsessions, forest and border, at the heart of the century’s most protracted conflict. Komska illustrates how civilians used the prayer wall to engage with and contribute to the new political and religious landscape. In the process, she relates West Germany’s quiet sylvan periphery to the tragic pitch prevalent along the Iron Curtain’s better-known segments.
Steeped in archival research and rooted in nuanced interpretations of wide-ranging cultural artifacts, from vandalized religious images and tourist snapshots to poems and travelogues, The Icon Curtain pushes disciplinary boundaries and opens new perspectives on the study of borders and the Cold War alike.
The Toledo War
The First Michigan-Ohio RivalryDon Faber
University of Michigan Press, 2008
Most are familiar with the Michigan-Ohio football rivalry, an intense but usually good-natured contest that stretches back over one hundred years. Yet far fewer may know that in the early nineteenth century Michigan and Ohio were locked in a different kind of battle---one that began before Michigan became a state.
The conflict started with a long-simmering dispute over a narrow wedge of land called the Toledo Strip. Early maps were famously imprecise, adding to the uncertainty of the true boundary between the states. When Ohio claimed to the mouth of the Maumee River, land that according to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 fell in the territory of Michigan, the "Toledo War" began.
Today the fight may bring a smile to Michiganians and Ohioans because both states benefited: Ohioans won the war and Michigan got the Upper Peninsula. But back then passions about rightful ownership ran high, and it would take many years---and colorful personalities all the way up to presidents---to settle the dispute. The Toledo War: The First Michigan-Ohio Rivalry gives a well-researched and fascinating account of the famous war.
Travels in Intermediality
ReBlurring the BoundariesEdited by Bernd Herzogenrath
Dartmouth College Press, 2012