Results by title
78 books match the query 'North' and 17 start with t
The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania
Peter Markoe
Westholme Publishing, 2008
An Important Book in America’s Early Encounter with the Arab World
“A pungent satire on American affairs.” —Samuel Eliot Morison
In 1787, while American sailors languished in a Barbary prison, delegates debated the Constitution in Philadelphia. Despite America’s desire to respond to the crisis, without a central government, the new republic had no means to create a naval force. Enter an anonymously published book, The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania: or, Letters Written by a Native of Algiers on the Affairs of the United States in America, which began circulating among the delegates. Consisting of a series of letters ostensibly written by an Algerian agent “Mehmet” back to his leader, the spy predicted that the former colonies would never be able to resolve their differences and be “ruined by disunion.” The book created a sensation and it helped tip the balance for those in favor of adopting the new Constitution. Following the Constitution’s final ratification in 1789, the United States created a navy and began asserting its power overseas. With its commentary about men and women, business and pleasure, and historical and religious comparisons between nations, The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania provides both a contemporary snapshot of early American life and the political ideas of the period. Never before reprinted, and recently rated one of the five best works in the history of America’s encounter with the Arab world, this new edition is edited by historian Timothy Marr, who reconsiders the importance of this early work in the political and literary history of the United States.
The Desert Is Alive
Aesthetic Cartographies and the SaharaJill Jarvis
University of Chicago Press, 0
How contemporary writers and filmmakers from across the African Sahara confront the colonial ideology of desert emptiness.
Jill Jarvis’s The Desert Is Alive challenges the image of the Sahara desert as a historical and cultural blank zone through a new “aesthetic cartography” that combines literary and film study with interdisciplinary thinking about space, borders, and infrastructures. In fields that still bear the imprint of a French colonial mindset, the Sahara has long been overlooked as a site of intellectual and cultural vitality. The Desert Is Alive breaks with a longstanding conceptual divide between “North” and “Subsaharan” Africa by resolutely centering the African Sahara and recognizing that the desert is not just full, but “peopled” in unexpected ways.
Jarvis accounts for colonial transformations of Saharan land during the twentieth century, attesting to the tactical and symbolic allure that this desert’s purported “emptiness” has held for French empire-building. Jarvis also considers how such tactics have been repurposed by postcolonial states. She takes up the last manuscript composed by Swiss writer Isabelle Eberhardt, who died in a flood at Aïn Sefra, Algeria in 1904, and examines the first novel published by French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, composed while he worked as a pilot at Tarfaya, Morocco, in order to build the first trans-Saharan flight line during the 1920s. Jarvis then explores depictions of Timbuktu (Mali) and Nouadhibou (Mauretania) in films by Mauritanian-French director Abderrahmane Sissako. Jarvis concludes with chapters that unfold the unfinished history of French nuclear violence in the Sahara. First, she discusses multimedia and documentary works that reckon with the enduring impact of the seventeen nuclear bombs that France detonated in the Algerian desert in the 1960s. Finally, Jarvis turns to works by Tuareg poet and artist Hawad that confront the ongoing legacy of uranium mining on Indigenous land in northern Niger. The result is a rich contribution to Francophone cultural studies, African studies, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism.
The Extraordinary Life of Charles Pomeroy Stone
Soldier, Surveyor, Pasha, EngineerBlaine Lamb
Westholme Publishing, 2016
In the winter of 1861, as the secession crisis came to a head, an obscure military engineer, Charles Pomeroy Stone, emerged as the rallying point for the defense of Washington, D.C. against rebel attack. He was protector of the newly elected president and right-hand man of the army’s commanding general, General Winfield Scott, under whom he had served with distinction during the Mexican–American War. Nevertheless, with in a year, this same hero sat in a military prison accused of incompetence and possible treason.
Like other Union officers, Stone had the misfortune to run afoul of radical politicians in the nation’s capital who sought to control the war effort by undermining the professional military establishment. Their weapon, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, applied a litmus test of commitment to abolition, loyalty to the Republican Party and battlefield success for the retention and promotion of army commanders. Stone, a Democrat who did not see the conflict as a crusade against slavery, and who lost his only battle, failed on all counts.
Readers of Civil War history know Stone best for his mistreatment at the hands of the Joint Committee.When his name appears, it is almost always in connection with the battle at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, during which a close associate of Lincoln’s was killed, and its aftermath. His story, however, goes far beyond that engagement. In The Extraordinary Life of Charles Pomeroy Stone: Soldier, Surveyor, Pasha, Engineer that ranges from the Halls of Montezuma to Gold Rush California, and from the pyramids of Egypt to the foot of the Statue of Liberty, historian Blaine Lamb brings to light the many facets of Stone’s remarkable life and career. He weaves into the narrative such characters as Ulysses S. Grant,William Tecumseh Sherman, Abraham Lincoln,Winfield Scott, Alexander von Humboldt, Thaddeus Lowe, Chinese Gordon, Khedive Ismail, and Frederic Auguste Bartholdi. But the center of this tale of nineteenth-century adventure, exploration, war, and intrigue remains Stone himself, a man of honor, steadfast loyalty, and tragic innocence.
The Forgotten Frontier
A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African FrontierAndrew C. Hess
University of Chicago Press, 1978
The sixteenth-century Mediterranean witnessed the expansion of both European and Middle Eastern civilizations, under the guises of the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman empire. Here, Andrew C. Hess considers the relations between these two dynasties in light of the social, economic, and political affairs at the frontiers between North Africa and the Iberian peninsula.
The Georgia of the North
Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New JerseyHettie V. Williams
Rutgers University Press, 2024
The Harkis
The Wound That Never HealsVincent Crapanzano
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In this haunting chronicle of betrayal and abandonment, ostracism and exile, racism and humiliation, Vincent Crapanzano examines the story of the Harkis, the quarter of a million Algerian auxiliary troops who fought for the French in Algeria’s war of independence. After tens of thousands of Harkis were massacred by other Algerians at the end of the war, the survivors fled to France where they were placed in camps, some for as long as sixteen years. Condemned as traitors by other Algerians and scorned by the French, the Harkis became a population apart, and their children still suffer from their parents’ wounds. Many have become activists, lobbying for recognition of their parents’ sacrifices, compensation, and an apology.
More than just a retelling of the Harkis’ grim past and troubling present, The Harkis is a resonant reflection on how children bear responsibility for the choices their parents make, how personal identity is shaped by the impersonal forces of history, and how violence insinuates itself into every facet of human life.
The Languages of Scandinavia
Seven Sisters of the NorthRuth H. Sanders
University of Chicago Press, 2017
While the two linguistic families that comprise Scandinavia’s languages ultimately have differing origins, the Seven Sisters have coexisted side by side for millennia. As Sanders reveals, a crisscrossing of names, territories, and even to some extent language genetics—intimate language contact—has created a body of shared culture, experience, and linguistic influences that is illuminated when the story of these seven languages is told as one. Exploring everything from the famed whalebone Lewis Chessmen of Norse origin to the interactions between the Black Death and the Norwegian language, The Languages of Scandinavia offers profound insight into languages with a cultural impact deep-rooted and far-reaching, from the Icelandic sagas to Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s internationally popular Millennium trilogy. Sanders’s book is both an accessible work of linguistic scholarship and a fascinating intellectual history of language.
The Last Civilized Place
Sijilmasa and Its Saharan DestinyBy Ronald A. Messier and James A. Miller
University of Texas Press, 2015
Set along the Sahara’s edge, Sijilmasa was an African El Dorado, a legendary city of gold. But unlike El Dorado, Sijilmasa was a real city, the pivot in the gold trade between ancient Ghana and the Mediterranean world. Following its emergence as an independent city-state controlling a monopoly on gold during its first 250 years, Sijilmasa was incorporated into empire—Almoravid, Almohad, and onward—leading to the “last civilized place” becoming the cradle of today’s Moroccan dynasty, the Alaouites. Sijilmasa’s millennium of greatness ebbed with periods of war, renewal, and abandonment. Today, its ruins lie adjacent to and under the modern town of Rissani, bypassed by time.
The Moroccan-American Project at Sijilmasa draws on archaeology, historical texts, field reconnaissance, oral tradition, and legend to weave the story of how this fabled city mastered its fate. The authors’ deep local knowledge and interpretation of the written and ecological record allow them to describe how people and place molded four distinct periods in the city’s history. Messier and Miller compare models of Islamic cities to what they found on the ground to understand how Sijilmasa functioned as a city. Continuities and discontinuities between Sijilmasa and the contemporary landscape sharpen questions regarding the nature of human life on the rim of the desert. What, they ask, allows places like Sijilmasa to rise to greatness? What causes them to fall away and disappear into the desert sands?
The Life of Belisarius
The Last Great General of RomeLord Mahon
Westholme Publishing, 2005
The Man Who Recaptured the Lost Glory of Rome
Serving the Byzantine Emperor Justinian during the 6th century A.D., Belisarius defeated a superior Persian force that threatened to extinguish Constantinople; his small army next drove the Vandals out of the ancient Roman provinces of North Africa and forced the Visigoths to retreat from Italy, returning Rome to the Emperor for the final time. His ability to achieve victory against overwhelming odds and his fairness to both his own troops and those of his enemies became legendary. Despite his successes, Justinian recalled Belisarius and, swayed by jealous advisers, accused the general of conspiring to overthrow him. Although innocent, he was publicly humiliated and stripped of his rank. But when a massive army of barbarians moved against Constantinople and the citizenry panicked in fear, they turned to their only true hero, Belisarius. The forsaken general donned his armor, called out his trusted veterans, and repulsed the barbarian horde. But instead of showing gratitude, Justinian banished him from the city.
The Lost Paradise
Andalusi Music in Urban North AfricaJonathan Glasser
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Through a historical and ethnographic account of the Andalusi music of Algiers, Tlemcen, and their Algerian and Moroccan borderlands since the end of the nineteenth century, Glasser shows how anxiety about Andalusi music’s disappearance has emerged from within the practice itself and come to be central to its ethos. The result is a sophisticated examination of musical survival and transformation that is also a meditation on temporality, labor, colonialism and nationalism, and the relationship of the living to the dead.
The Mayflies of North and Central America
George F. Edmunds Jr., Steven L. Jensen, and Lewis Berner
University of Minnesota Press, 1976
The Mayflies of North and Central America was first published in 1976. 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.
Mayflies have fascinated man for centuries because of the brief span of their adult lives. These aquatic insects spend most of their lives as nymphs in water, then develop into winged stages and soon die, most species having an adult life of only two or three days. This brevity is implied in the very name of the order, Ephemeroptera.
The mayflies are almost worldwide in distribution, being found everywhere except in Antarctica, the extreme Arctic, and many small oceanic islands. All by three of the twenty families in the world occur in North or Central America, the regions covered in this volume. The book provides a modern, useful, and well-illustrated key to the adults and nymphs. Data on habitats, behavior, and life history are given for each genus. Characteristics of nymphs and adults are given for families, subfamilies, and genera, with brief accounts for extralimital families.
A discussion of methods of collecting and preserving specimens precedes the main portion of the text. The book is generously illustrated with drawings, photographs, and a map.
The role of aquatic insects as indicators of water pollution has received increasing attention, and in this connection this book will be of special interest to those concerned with pollution problems. Mayflies, besides indicating the presence of pollutants, also help remove such substances from the waters, the authors explain.
As a basic reference work, the book is essential for all biological science libraries. Many fly-fishermen are amateur students of mayflies, since the nymphs of larger species are used as bait. With the help of this volume the fisherman can acquire a greater knowledge of aquatic entomology and relate to his sport.
The Mediterranean Incarnate
Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War IINaor Ben-Yehoyada
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The book centers on the town of Mazara del Vallo, located on the southwestern tip of Sicily some ninety nautical miles northeast of the African shore. Ben-Yehoyada intertwines the town’s recent turbulent history—which has been fraught with conflicts over fishing rights, development projects, and how the Mediterranean should figure in Italian politics at large—with deep accounts of life aboard the Naumacho, linking ethnography with historical anthropology and political-economic analysis. Through this sophisticated approach, he crafts a new viewpoint on the historical processes of transnational region formation, one offered by these moving ships as they weave together new social and political constellations.
The Unfinished Arab Spring
Micro-Dynamics of Revolts between Change and ContinuityEdited by Fatima El Issawi and Francesco Cavatorta
Gingko, 2020
Theatre History Studies 2026, Vol 44
Edited by Jocelyn L. Buckner
University of Alabama Press, 2026
The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference
Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference is dedicated to the growth and improvement of all forms of theatre throughout a twelve-state region encompassing Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The purposes of the conference are to unite people and organizations within the region and elsewhere who have an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. THS is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and is included in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. THS is cataloged in numerous periodical indexes and databases.
Along with sixteen book reviews on the latest publications from established and emerging voices in the field, this issue of Theatre History Studies contains four sections with two introductions and nine essays total. In the general section, three essays consider performance histories and reevaluations of historiographical approaches. The special section on queer historiographies responds to calls for a more expansive and inclusive understanding of trans histories and for centralizing contemporary queer performers. In part III, the Robert A. Schanke Research Award-winning paper from the 2024 MATC conference by Ali-Reza Mirsajadi addresses erasures in the theatrical archive and highlights the long legacy of queer, Southwest Asian, and North African representation in dramatic texts. Taken together, volume 44 captures how this journal serves theatre historians as scholars and laborers as they work to attend and tend to their field.
Triumph of the Expert
Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British ColonialismJoseph Morgan Hodge
Ohio University Press, 2007
The most striking feature of British colonialism in the twentieth century was the confidence it expressed in the use of science and expertise, especially when joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop natural and human resources of the empire.
Triumph of the Expert is a history of British colonial doctrine and its contribution to the emergence of rural development and environmental policies in the late colonial and postcolonial period. Joseph Morgan Hodge examines the way that development as a framework of ideas and institutional practices emerged out of the strategic engagement between science and the state at the climax of the British Empire. Hodge looks intently at the structural constraints, bureaucratic fissures, and contradictory imperatives that beset and ultimately overwhelmed the late colonial development mission in sub-Saharan Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Caribbean.
Triumph of the Expert seeks to understand the quandaries that led up to the important transformation in British imperial thought and practice and the intellectual and administrative legacies it left behind.
Tuhami
Portrait of a MoroccanVincent Crapanzano
University of Chicago Press, 1980
In a sensitive and bold experiment in interpretive ethnography, Crapanzano presents Tuhami's bizarre account of himself and his world. In so doing, Crapanzano draws on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and symbolism to reflect upon the nature of reality and truth and to probe the limits of anthropology itself. Tuhami has become one of the most important and widely cited representatives of a new understanding of the whole discipline of anthropology.
Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew
Entangled Lives in MoroccoLawrence Rosen
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Through the intellectual lives of these four men, this book explores a number of interpretative and theoretical issues that have made Arab culture distinct, especially in relationship to the West: how nothing is ever hard and fast, how everything is relational and always a product of negotiation. It showcases the vitality of the local in a global era, and it contrasts Arab notions of time, equality, and self with those in the West. Likewise, Rosen unveils his own entanglement in their world and the drive to keep the analysis of culture first and foremost, even as his own life enmeshes itself in those of his study. An exploration of faith, politics, history, and memory, this book highlights the world of everyday life in Arab society in ways that challenge common notions and stereotypes.