28167 books match the query 'History' and 6372 start with t

cover of The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán

The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán

David L. Haskell

University Press of Colorado, 2018

The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán investigates how the elites of the Tarascan kingdom of Central Mexico sought to influence interactions with Spanish colonialism by reworking the past to suit their present circumstances. Author David L. Haskell examines the rhetorical power of the Relación de Michoacán—a chronicle written from 1539 to 1541 by Franciscan friar Jerónimo de Alcalá based on substantial indigenous testimony and widely considered to be an extremely important document to the study of early colonial relations and the prehispanic past. Haskell focuses on one such testimonial, the narrative of the kingdom’s Chief Priest relaying the history of the royal family. This analysis reveals that both the structure of that narrative and its content convey meaning about the nature of rulership and how conceptualizations of rulership shaped indigenous responses to colonialism in the region.
 
Informed by theoretical approaches to narrative, historicity, structure, and agency developed by cultural and historical anthropologists, Haskell demonstrates that the author of the Relación de Michoacán shaped, and was shaped by, a culturally distinct conceptualization and experience of the time in which the past and the present are mutually informing. The book asks, How reliable are past accounts of events when these accounts are removed from the events they describe? How do the personal agendas of past chroniclers and their informants shape our present understanding of their cultural history? How do we interpret chronicles such as the Relación de Michoacán on multiple levels? It also demonstrates that answers to these questions are possible when attention is paid to the context of narrative production and the narratives themselves are read closely.
 
The Two Taríacuris and the Early Colonial and Prehispanic Past of Michoacán makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on indigenous experience and its cultural manifestations in Early Colonial period Central Mexico and the anthropological literature on historicity and narrative. It will be of interest to Mesoamerican specialists of all disciplines, cultural and historical anthropologists, and theorists and critics of narrative.
 
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cover of The Type V City: Codifying Material Inequity in Urban America

The Type V City

Codifying Material Inequity in Urban America

Jeana Ripple

University of Texas Press, 2025

How building codes shaped material, social, and environmental landscapes in American cities.

Almost every American city contains neighborhoods dominated by wood frame construction—light, cheap, combustible, and requiring the lowest upfront investment of labor and material in the building industry. Known as a Type V (five) construction in the terminology of building codes, these buildings became ubiquitous in the American urban landscape thanks to the abundance of timber, housing affordability aspirations, and the adoption of a uniform code.

In The Type V City, Jeana Ripple examines the social and spatial history of building codes and material patterns in five cities—New York, Tampa, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle—to reframe the stories of America’s building priorities, methods, negotiations, and assumptions. By examining the development of building materials and codes alongside the environmental, social, economic, and political context of each city’s development, Ripple reveals previously overlooked connections between the power structures underpinning regulatory evolution and the impacts that lay just beyond the frame of city builders’ priorities. Handsomely illustrated and informed by both archival research and insights enabled by contemporary data analysis, The Type V City critiques the homogenous construction practices underlying US urbanization and raises pointed questions for future generations of data-driven city planners and architects.

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cover of The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920

The Tyranny of Change

America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920

Chambers, John Whiteclay II

Rutgers University Press, 2000

Between 1890 and 1920, the forces accompanying industrialization sent the familiar nineteenth-century world plummeting toward extinction. The traditional countryside with its villages and family farms was eclipsed by giant corporations and sprawling cities. America appeared headed into an unknown future.

In lively, accessible prose, John Chambers incorporates the latest scholarship about the social, cultural, political, and economic changes which produced modern America. He illuminates the experiences of blacks, Asians, Latinos, as well as other working men and women in the cities and countryside as they struggled to improve their lives in a transformed economy. He explores the dimensions of the new consumer society and the new information and entertainment industries: newspapers, magazines, the movies. Striding these pages are many of the prominent individuals who shaped the attitudes and institutions of modern America: J. P. Morgan and corporate reorganization; Jane Addams and the origin of modern social work; Mary Pickford and the new star-oriented motion picture industry; and the radical labor challenge of “Big Bill” Haywood and the “Wobblies.”

While recognizing a “progressive ethos”—a mixture of idealistic vision and pragmatic reforms—which dominated the mainstream reforms that characterized the period, Chambers elaborates the role of civic volunteerism as well as the state in achieving directed social change. He also emphasizes the importance of radical and conservative political forces in shaping the so-called “Progressive Era.”

The revised edition in this classic work has an updated bibliography and a new preface, both of which incorporate particularly the new social and cultural research of the past decade.

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cover of The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere

The Tyranny of Opinion

Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere

Pablo Piccato

Duke University Press, 2010

In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, as Mexico emerged out of decades of civil war and foreign invasion, a modern notion of honor—of one’s reputation and self-worth—became the keystone in the construction of public culture. Mexicans gave great symbolic, social, and material value to honor. Only honorable men could speak in the name of the public. Honor earned these men, and a few women, support and credit, and gave civilian politicians a claim to authority after an era dominated by military heroism.

Tracing how notions of honor changed in nineteenth-century Mexico, Pablo Piccato examines legislation, journalism, parliamentary debates, criminal defamation cases, personal stories, urban protests, and the rise and decline of dueling in the 1890s. He highlights the centrality of notions of honor to debates over the nature of Mexican liberalism, describing how honor helped to define the boundaries between public and private life; balance competing claims of free speech, public opinion, and the protection of individual reputations; and motivate politicians, writers, and other men to enter public life. As Piccato explains, under the authoritarian rule of Porfirio Díaz, the state became more active in the protection of individual reputations. It implemented new restrictions on the press. This did not prevent people from all walks of life from defending their honor and reputations, whether in court or through violence. The Tyranny of Opinion is a major contribution to a new understanding of Mexican political history and the evolution of Mexican civil society.

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cover of The U.S. Army Stability Operations Field Manual: U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3-07

The U.S. Army Stability Operations Field Manual

U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3-07

The United States Army

University of Michigan Press, 2009

Field Manual 3-07, Stability Operations, represents a milestone in Army doctrine.

With a focus on transforming conflict, managing violence when it does occur and maintaining stable peace, The U.S. Army Stability Operations Field Manual (otherwise known as FM 3-07) signals a stark departure from traditional military doctrine. The Army officially acknowledges the complex continuum from conflict to peace, outlines the military's responsibility to provide stability and security, and recognizes the necessity of collaboration, coordination, and cooperation among military, state, commercial, and non-government organizations in nation-building efforts.

The manual reflects a truly unique collaboration between the Army and a wide array of experts from hundreds of groups across the United States Government, the intergovernmental and non-governmental communities, America's allies around the world, and the private sector. All branches of the armed forces, U.S. agencies ranging from the State Department to Homeland Security to Health and Human Services, international agencies from the United Nations to the Red Cross to the World Bank, countries from the United Kingdom to India to South Africa, private think tanks from RAND to the United States Institute of Peace to the Center for New American Security, all took part in the shaping of this document.

The U.S. Army Stability Operations FieldManual, marks just the second time in modern history that the U.S. Army has worked with a private publisher to produce a military doctrinal document.

Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell, IV is Commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Michèle Flournoy, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy

Shawn Brimley, Fellow, Center for a New American Security

Janine Davidson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Plans

"It is a roadmap from conflict to peace, a practical guidebook for adaptive, creative leadership at a critical time in our history. It institutionalizes the hard-won lessons of the past while charting a path for tomorrow. This manual postures our military forces for the challenges of an uncertain future, an era of persistent conflict where the unflagging bravery of our Soldiers will continue to carry the banner of freedom, hope, and opportunity to the people of the world."
—From the foreword by Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell, IV, Commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

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cover of The U.S. Army in the War of 1812

The U.S. Army in the War of 1812

Robert Quimby

Michigan State University Press, 1997

This two-volume work by historian Robert Quimby presents a comprehensive and detailed analysis of military strategy, operations, and management during one of America’s most neglected and least understood military campaigns, the War of 1812. With causes that can be traced to the epic contest against Napoleon in Europe beginning in 1803, the war itself was the first conducted by the young Constitutional government of the United States. Quimby demonstrates that failed American initiatives at the beginning of hostilities shattered the unrealistic optimism of the war’s staunchest advocates; and while initial failures were followed by military success in 1813, whatever advantage might have been gained was soon lost to incompetent leadership. Major exceptions occurred in the Old Northwest, and in what was then the Southwest, where U.S. forces finally broke the strength of the long-successful Indian-British alliance.  
      In retrospect, what occurred during the War of 1812 demonstrated the necessity for gaining citizen support before committing the nation to armed conflict; it also provided a series of object lessons on how not to conduct a military campaign. Finally Quimby argues that, notwithstanding several victories at war’s end, including the fabled Battle of New Orleans, American perceptions that the United States "won" the war are erroneous; at best the struggle ended in a draw. The United States Army in the War of 1812 is an up-to-date and long overdue reassessment of military actions conducted during a pivotal conflict in American history, one that shaped U.S. military doctrine for a half century.

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cover of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

The United States Army and Marine Corps

University of Chicago Press, 2007

The handbook the US military created to fight counterinsurgencies in the twenty-first century.

When the U.S. military invaded Iraq, it  lacked a common understanding of the problems inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns. It had neither studied them, nor developed doctrine and tactics to deal with them. It is fair to say that in 2003, most Army officers knew more about the U.S. Civil War than they did about counterinsurgency.

The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was written to fill that void. The result of unprecedented collaboration among top U.S. military experts, scholars, and practitioners in the field, the manual espouses an approach to combat that emphasizes constant adaptation and learning, the importance of decentralized decision-making, the need to understand local politics and customs, and the key role of intelligence in winning the support of the population. The manual also emphasizes the paradoxical and often counterintuitive nature of counterinsurgency operations: sometimes the more you protect your forces, the less secure you are; sometimes the more force you use, the less effective it is; sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction. 

An new introduction by Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, places the manual in critical and historical perspective, explaining the significance and potential impact of this revolutionary challenge to conventional U.S. military doctrine.

An attempt by our military to redefine itself in the aftermath of 9/11 and the new world of international terrorism, The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual will play a vital role in American military campaigns for years to come.
 
The University of Chicago Press will donate a portion of the proceeds from this book to the Fisher House Foundation, a private-public partnership that supports the families of America’s injured servicemen. To learn more about the Fisher House Foundation, visit www.fisherhouse.org.
 
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cover of The UCL Institute of Education: From Training College to Global Institution, Second Edition

The UCL Institute of Education

From Training College to Global Institution, Second Edition

Richard Aldrich and Tom Woodin

University College London, 2021

The history of the Institute of Education at University College London from 1902 to 2020.

From its founding in 1902 as the London Day Training College to its establishment as a university institute and merger with University College London, the Institute of Education (IOE) has constantly grown into new areas of learning and social research. As a locus for leadership, it has exerted an influence upon the nature and direction of education nationally and internationally. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, the authors carefully develop the connections between the organization’s internal history and external historical developments. The result is an elegantly written history, characterized by substantial scholarship and analysis, and enlivened by illustrations and anecdotes. The pages of this book are studded with appearances by some of the most influential—and at times controversial—figures of education, including Sidney Webb, Cyril Burt, Susan Isaacs, Sophie Bryant, Richard Peters, Basil Bernstein, Ann Oakley, Celia Hoyles, and Stephen Ball. This edition extends Richard Aldrich’s text with two new chapters that speak to the extraordinary years of growth in the last two decades. The IOE is unique in successfully pursuing a world-leading research agenda while also supporting a wide range of teacher education, having an impact in London, across Britain, and the world.
 
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cover of The UP Saga

The UP Saga

Susan M. Martin

National University of Singapore Press, 2003

Histories of the plantations sector in Malaysia have largely focused on the rubber industry and on the rise and fall of big British-owned colonial enterprises. But since independence, the sector has entered a new phase of spectacular growth founded on the oil palm. This volume offers a radically different history of a firm which spans both eras. The fascinating story of United Plantations Berhad (UP) highlights a Scandinavian-founded firm that evolved along quite different lines from the normal models of British imperial business. Tracing the company’s origins before the First World War, it describes the crisis years of economic depression and Japanese occupation then on to the years of spectacular growth which has lasted since the time of the Emergency and Merdeka right up to the present day. The success of this firm - based not just on an extraordinary combination of agricultural, engineering and marketing innovation but also on the company’s engagement and commitment to its local environment - provides a glowing example of a partnership between Europeans and Asians which has benefited both sides.
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cover of The US Eighth Air Force in World War II: Ira Eaker, Hap Arnold, and Building American Air Power, 1942–1943

The US Eighth Air Force in World War II

Ira Eaker, Hap Arnold, and Building American Air Power, 1942–1943

William J. Daugherty

University of North Texas Press, 2024

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cover of The USS Wisconsin: A History of Two Battleships

The USS Wisconsin

A History of Two Battleships

Richard H. Zeitlin

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1988

Battleships were instrumental in America’s rise to world dominance at the end of the 19th century. Two battleships in particular, the U.S.S. Wisconsin BB-9 and BB-64, participated in wars and conflicts around the globe, demonstrating America’s strength and technological power. The keel of the BB-9 was laid down on the eve of the Spanish-American War, and she sailed with the Great White Fleet on its famous world voyage of 1907-1909. Representing a major advance in American naval technology, the Wisconsin both demonstrated American strength in the Pacific and served as the setting for peace talks between Panama and Colombia when the former gained independence in 1903. Recommissioned during World War I as a training ship, the BB-9 was then decommissioned in 1920. More than twenty years later, on December 7, 1943, the fast battleship Wisconsin (BB-64) was launched in response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The BB-64 served in the Pacific to the end of World War II and again in the Korean War. One of the Iowa- class battleships, the BB-64 was one of the fastest and sleekest on the ocean. In 1988, she was refitted and recommissioned for yet another tour of duty. This is the story of two proud vessels and their role in American naval and diplomatic history.

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cover of The UberReader: SELECTED WORKS OF AVITAL RONELL

The UberReader

SELECTED WORKS OF AVITAL RONELL

Edited by Diane Davis

University of Illinois Press, 2007

"Avital Ronell has put together what must be one of the most remarkable critical oeuvres of our era… Zeugmatically yoking the slang of pop culture with philosophical analysis, forcing the confrontation of high literature and technology or drug culture, Avital Ronell produces sentences that startle, irritate, illuminate. At once hilarious and refractory, her books are like no others.”--Jonathan Culler, Diacritics
 
For twenty years Avital Ronell has stood at the forefront of the confrontation between literary study and European philosophy. She has tirelessly investigated the impact of technology on thinking and writing, with groundbreaking work on Heidegger, dependency and drug rhetoric, intelligence and artificial intelligence, and the obsession with testing. Admired for her insights and breadth of field, she has attracted a wide readership by writing with guts, candor, and wit.
 
Coyly alluding to Nietzsche’s “gay science,” The ÜberReader presents a solid introduction to Avital Ronell’s later oeuvre. It includes at least one selection from each of her books, two classic selections from a collection of her early essays (Finitude’s Score), previously uncollected interviews and essays, and some of her most powerful published and unpublished talks. An introduction by Diane Davis surveys Ronell’s career and the critical response to it thus far.
 
With its combination of brevity and power, this Ronell “primer” will be immensely useful to scholars, students, and teachers throughout the humanities, but particularly to graduate and undergraduate courses in contemporary theory.
 
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cover of The Ukrainian Question: Russian Empire and Nationalism in the 19th Century

The Ukrainian Question

Russian Empire and Nationalism in the 19th Century

Alexei Miller

Central European University Press, 2003

This pioneering work treats the Ukrainian question in Russian imperial policy and its importance for the intelligentsia of the empire. Miller sets the Russian Empire in the context of modernizing and occasionally nationalizing great power states and discusses the process of incorporating the Ukraine, better known as "Little Russia" in that time, into the Romanov Empire in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This territorial expansion evolved into a competition of mutually exclusive concepts of Russian and Ukrainian nation-building projects.
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cover of The Ultimate Chicago Pizza Guide: A History of Squares & Slices in the Windy City

The Ultimate Chicago Pizza Guide

A History of Squares & Slices in the Windy City

Steve Dolinsky

Northwestern University Press, 2021

The Ultimate Chicago Pizza Guide is your comprehensive guide to the history of the styles, locales, and people that make the Windy City a prime destination for slices and pies. Most locals have strong opinions about whether thin, tavern-style, or deep-dish takes the crown, which toppings are essential, and who makes the best pie in town—and in Chicago, there's a destination for every preference. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chicago saw an unprecedented number of new pizzerias opening their doors, very few of which focused on the proverbial deep-dish. Several high-end chefs made the pivot to pizza, and in many cases, brought new ideas and styles, like East Coast Sicilians and thin, crispy (and cheeseless) Roman pies. With so many slices to try in the city’s seventy-seven neighborhoods, it would seem impossible to find the best of the best.
 
Enter renowned food journalist Steve Dolinsky. He embarked on a memorable quest for his first book, Pizza City, USA: 101 Reasons Why Chicago Is America’s Greatest Pizza Town, tasting more than 185 pizzas all over the region. For his follow-up, Dolinsky focuses on the city’s pizzerias, while still honoring a few suburban stalwarts.
 
This user-friendly guide is organized by pizza style—including thin, tavern, artisan, Neapolitan, deep-dish, stuffed, by-the-slice, Roman, and Detroit—so you can find the right recommendation for every family member, visitor, and occasion. Dolinsky highlights his favorites, offers a pizza lover’s glossary so you can order like a pro, and shows you every pie he ate, so you can compare notes and cook up your next pizza night. With recipes, local beer pairings, gluten-free options, and more, The Ultimate Chicago Pizza Guide is an essential resource both for locals and for visitors in search of a serious pizza getaway.
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cover of The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus: Art, Faith and Empire in Early Islam

The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus

Art, Faith and Empire in Early Islam

Alain George

Gingko, 2020

An expansive illustrated history of the historic Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus is one of the oldest continuously used religious sites in the world. The mosque we see today was built in 705 CE by the Umayyad caliph al-Walid on top of a fourth-century Christian church that had been erected over a temple of Jupiter. Incredibly, despite the recent war, the mosque has remained almost unscathed, but over the centuries has been continuously rebuilt after damage from earthquakes and fires. In this comprehensive biography of the Umayyad Mosque, Alain George explores a wide range of sources to excavate the dense layers of the mosque’s history, also uncovering what the structure looked like when it was first built with its impressive marble and mosaic-clad walls. George incorporates a range of sources, including new information he found in three previously untranslated poems written at the time the mosque was built, as well as in descriptions left by medieval scholars. He also looks carefully at the many photographs and paintings made by nineteenth-century European travelers, particularly those who recorded the building before the catastrophic fire of 1893.
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cover of The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture

The Un-Americans

Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture

Joseph Litvak

Duke University Press, 2009

In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names.” Litvak proposes that sycophancy was (and continues to be) the price exacted for assimilation into mainstream American culture, not just for Jews, but also for homosexuals, immigrants, and other groups deemed threatening to American rectitude.

Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the early twenty-first century.

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cover of The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South

The Un-Natural State

Arkansas and the Queer South

Brock Thompson

University of Arkansas Press, 2010

The Un-Natural State is a one-of-a-kind study of gay and lesbian life in Arkansas in the twentieth century, a deft weaving together of Arkansas history, dozens of oral histories, and Brock Thompson's own story. Thompson analyzes the meaning of rural drag shows, including a compelling description of a 1930s seasonal beauty pageant in Wilson, Arkansas, where white men in drag shared the stage with other white men in blackface, a suggestive mingling that went to the core of both racial transgression and sexual disobedience. These small town entertainments put on in churches and schools emerged decades later in gay bars across the state as a lucrative business practice and a larger means of community expression, while in the same period the state's sodomy law was rewritten to condemn sexual acts between those of the same sex in language similar to what was once used to denounce interracial sex. Thompson goes on to describe several lesbian communities established in the Ozark Mountains during the sixties and seventies and offers a substantial account of Eureka Springs's informal status as the "gay capital of the Ozarks." Through this exploration of identity formation, group articulation, political mobilization, and cultural visibility within the context of historical episodes such as the Second World War, the civil rights movement, and the AIDS epidemic, The Un-Natural State contributes not only to our understanding of gay and lesbian history but also to our understanding of the South.
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cover of The Unbeliever: THE POETRY OF ELIZABETH BISHOP

The Unbeliever

THE POETRY OF ELIZABETH BISHOP

Robert Dale Parker

University of Illinois Press, 1988

Robert Parker ranges widely through
  literary history and theory to give the poems of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79)
  the serious critical attention they deserve. The Unbeliever shows that
  Bishop's poems, already famous for their clear and quiet tone, also struggle
  with confusion and wonder about things she can never make quiet or clear.
 
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cover of The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830–1875

The Unbounded Community

Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830–1875

Kenneth A. Scherzer

Duke University Press, 1992

Stick ball, stoop sitting, pickle barrel colloquys: The neighborhood occupies a warm place in our cultural memory—a place that Kenneth A. Scherzer contends may have more to do with ideology and nostalgia than with historical accuracy. In this remarkably detailed analysis of neighborhood life in New York City between 1830 and 1875, Scherzer gives the neighborhood its due as a complex, richly textured social phenomenon and helps to clarify its role in the evolution of cities.
After a critical examination of recent historical renderings of neighborhood life, Scherzer focuses on the ecological, symbolic, and social aspects of nineteenth-century community life in New York City. Employing a wide array of sources, from census reports and church records to police blotters and brothel guides, he documents the complex composition of neighborhoods that defy simple categorization by class or ethnicity. From his account, the New York City neighborhood emerges as a community in flux, born out of the chaos of May Day, the traditional moving day. The fluid geography and heterogeneity of these neighborhoods kept most city residents from developing strong local attachments. Scherzer shows how such weak spatial consciousness, along with the fast pace of residential change, diminished the community function of the neighborhood. New Yorkers, he suggests, relied instead upon the "unbounded community," a collection of friends and social relations that extended throughout the city.
With pointed argument and weighty evidence, The Unbounded Community replaces the neighborhood of nostalgia with a broader, multifaceted conception of community life. Depicting the neighborhood in its full scope and diversity, the book will enhance future forays into urban history.
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cover of The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema

The Uncanny Gaze

The Drama of Early German Cinema

Heide Schlupmann. Translated by Inga Pollmann. Foreword by Miriam Hansen.

University of Illinois Press, 2010

Heide Schlüpmann's classic study of early German cinema was published in German as Unheimlichkeit des Blicks: Das Drama des Frühen deutschen Kinos in 1990. For the first time in English, this translation makes available her feminist examination of German cinema and Germany in the sociopolitical context of Wilhelmine society. By examining then-unknown pre-World War I narrative films, this study paints a picture of the conflicted early years of the German cinema. During this period cinema and film production were able to develop independently from the cultural bourgeoisie and relied on those forces excluded from high "culture": technology, business, performers, showmen, and actors. In cinema, the dime novel and kitsch were exhibited for all, and the internationalism of modernity prevailed over the prevailing nationalism of the period.

Featuring a foreword by film scholar Miriam Hansen and a new afterword by Schlüpmann, this volume performs a critical perusal of film commentary and offers an in-depth look at little-known films in early German cinema.

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cover of The Uncaring, Intricate World: A Field Diary, Zambezi Valley, 1984-1985

The Uncaring, Intricate World

A Field Diary, Zambezi Valley, 1984-1985

Pamela Reynolds

Duke University Press, 2019

In the 1950s the colonial British government in Northern and Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe) began construction on a large hydroelectric dam that created Lake Kariba and dislocated nearly 60,000 indigenous residents. Three decades later, Pamela Reynolds began fieldwork with the Tonga people to study the lasting effects of the dispossession of their land on their lives. In The Uncaring, Intricate World Reynolds shares her field diary, in which she records her efforts to study children and their labor and, by doing so, exposes the character of everyday life. More than a memoir, her diary captures the range of pleasures, difficulties, frustrations, contradictions, and grappling with ethical questions that all anthropologists experience in the field. The Uncaring, Intricate World concludes with afterwords by Jane I. Guyer and Julie Livingston, who critically reflect on its context, its meaning for today, and relevance to conducting anthropological work.
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cover of The Uncoiling Python: South African Storytellers and Resistance

The Uncoiling Python

South African Storytellers and Resistance

Harold Scheub

Ohio University Press, 2010

There are many collections of African oral traditions, but few as carefully organized as The Uncoiling Python. Harold Scheub, one of the world’s leading scholars of African oral traditions and folklore, explores the ways in which oral traditions have served to combat and subvert colonial domination in South Africa. From the time colonial forces first came to southern Africa in 1487, oral and written traditions have been a bulwark against what became 350 years of colonial rule, characterized by the racist policies of apartheid. The Uncoiling Python: South African Storytellers and Resistance is the first in-depth study of oral tradition as a means of survival.

In open insurrections and other subversive activities Africans resisted the daily humiliations of colonial rule, but perhaps the most effective and least apparent expression of subversion was through indigenous storytelling and poetic traditions. Harold Scheub has collected the stories and poetry of the Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, and Ndebele peoples to present a fascinating analysis of how the apparently harmless tellers of tales and creators of poetry acted as front-line soldiers.

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cover of The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe

The Unconverted Self

Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe

Jonathan Boyarin

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Europe’s formative encounter with its “others” is still widely assumed to have come with its discovery of the peoples of the New World. But, as Jonathan Boyarin argues, long before 1492 Christian Europe imagined itself in distinction to the Jewish difference within. The presence and image of Jews in Europe afforded the Christian majority a foil against which it could refine and maintain its own identity. In fundamental ways this experience, along with the ongoing contest between Christianity and Islam, shaped the rhetoric, attitudes, and policies of Christian colonizers in the New World.

The Unconverted Self proposes that questions of difference inside Christian Europe not only are inseparable from the painful legacy of colonialism but also reveal Christian domination to be a fragile construct. Boyarin compares the Christian efforts aimed toward European Jews and toward indigenous peoples of the New World, bringing into focus the intersection of colonial expansion with the Inquisition and adding significant nuance to the entire question of the colonial encounter.

Revealing the crucial tension between the Jews as “others within” and the Indians as “others without,” The Unconverted Self is a major reassessment of early modern European identity.

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cover of The Underharbor: Submerged Histories of Sydney

The Underharbor

Submerged Histories of Sydney

Ann Elias

University of Chicago Press, 2026

An underwater look at Sydney that surfaces new and unfamiliar histories of people, objects, spaces, and environmental and social change.

The Underharbor places the ocean at the center of a cultural history of Sydney, Australia, a place built on and around seawater, where the community is linked historically, emotionally, and psychologically to the water. Drawing on a series of vignettes that focus on Sydney’s underwater dimensions—including the harbor’s relationship to technological modernity, Indigenous ideas and practices, artistic experimentation, and scientific inquiry—Ann Elias creates a unique portrait of a city and its past. By shifting the terrestrial perspective to the subaquatic, Elias uncovers an area filled with political meaning, poetic significance, and ideological struggles.

Few harbors are as researched as Sydney’s, where fishing, exploration, colonialism, warfare, science, and industry all shaped cultural ideas about underwater space. Between 1850 to 1950, only a few groups of people had access to the remote underharbor: Indigenous divers and First Nations peoples, who were dispossessed by colonizers; divers working primarily to further the maritime industrialization of the growing city and to salvage objects from the harbor floor; researchers in the emerging field of marine science who dove for first-hand observation; and beachcombers, naturalists, and dredgers who got to know the underharbor by bringing it to the surface. Through press stories, models, illustrations, maps, and photographic and cinematic representations, The Underharbor reveals how these watery visions of Sydney shifted over the course of a century.

[more]
cover of The Undevelopment of Capitalism: Sectors and Markets in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany

The Undevelopment of Capitalism

Sectors and Markets in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany

Rebecca Jean Emigh

Temple University Press, 2008

The results of a decade-long research study by the author, in The Undevelopment of Capitalism Rebecca Jean Emigh argues that the expansion of the Florentine economic market in the fifteenth century helped to undo the development of markets of other economies, especially the rural economy of Tuscany, paradoxically slowing down the economic development of northern Italy overall.  This "undeveloping" process, as Emigh calls it, produced an advanced economy at the time of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, but created the conditions whereby much of this area of Europe delayed its full development into industrial capitalism by many ages, so that full-scale industrialization happened in other places first, leaving northern Italy behind.

As a lucid explanation of capitalism that turns back the clock even further on its birth, The Undevelopment of Capitalism makes a significant contribution to the studies of capitalism, historical sociology, and theories of markets as economic and cultural institutions.
[more]
cover of The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945

The Uneasy State

The United States from 1915 to 1945

Barry D. Karl

University of Chicago Press, 1983

In this major interpretive history of the reform era, Barry Karl presents an imaginative and thoughtful perspective on America's quest for political, economic, and cultural nationalism. Challenging accepted interpretations, he argues that the two world wars and the depression did not successfully unite the country so that a national managerial state could emerge as it did in other industrial nations. Karl draws on an impressive array of sources to support his position, offering insightful comments on popular culture—movies, novels, comic strips, and detective stories—and brilliant analyses of technological change and its impact.

Karl shows how Americans approached the central dilemmas of modern life, such as the clash between planned efficiency and autonomous individualism, which they managed to patch over but never fully resolve. Above all, he finds that America's commitment to the autonomous individual is both an aspiration and a curse.
[more]
cover of The Unexpected Abigail Adams: A Woman "Not Apt to be Intimidated"

The Unexpected Abigail Adams

A Woman "Not Apt to be Intimidated"

John L. Smith, Jr.

Westholme Publishing, 2026

A Wall Street Journal Spring Books 2024 Selection: “What to Read This Spring”

An Extraordinary Portrait of America’s Beloved Female Founder and First Lady
Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, was an eyewitness to America’s founding, and helped guide the new nation through her observations and advice to her famously prickly husband, who cherished her. She met many important and significant figures of the period: George Washington and his wife Martha, Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Knox, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, John Jay, Marquis de Lafayette, John Paul Jones, Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, artist Patience Wright, and even King George III and Queen Charlotte of England, as well as King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette of France. In The Unexpected Abigail Adams: A Woman “Not Apt to Be Intimidated”, writer and researcher John L. Smith, Jr., draws on more than two thousand letters of Abigail’s spanning from the 1760s to her death in 1818, interweaving Abigail’s colorful correspondence—some of which has not appeared in print before—with a contextual narrative. In this priceless documentation of one of the most important periods of world history she comments on the varied personalities she encountered and, while her husband was away from home serving in the Continental Congresses and as a diplomatic envoy in Europe, she wrote him frequently about their home in Massachusetts, their family, national and local politics, and, during the early years of the war, crucial information concerning revolutionary activities around Boston. She was an advocate for education for women, a shrewd businesswoman, and had an unrivaled political acumen. Her strength in the face of disease, loss of children, and other hardships, and her poignant, beautiful, and often philosophical commentary, advice, and predictions allow Abigail to demonstrate her fully modern sensibilities. This major biography of Abigail, the first in over ten years, is a riveting, revealing portrait of a remarkable woman that readers will find very relatable—and one that transforms how she is perceived. 
[more]
cover of The Unfinished Arab Spring: Micro-Dynamics of Revolts between Change and Continuity

The Unfinished Arab Spring

Micro-Dynamics of Revolts between Change and Continuity

Edited by Fatima El Issawi and Francesco Cavatorta

Gingko, 2020

The aim of this volume is to adopt an original analytical approach in explaining various dynamics at work behind the Arab Spring, through giving voice to local dynamics and legacies rather than concentrating on debates about paradigms. It highlights micro-perspectives of change and resistance—as well of contentious politics—that are often marginalized and left unexplored in favor of macro-analyses. First, the story of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Algeria is told through diverse and novel perspectives, looking at factors that have not yet been sufficiently underlined, but carry explanatory power for what has occurred. Second, rather than focusing on macro-comparative regional trends, the contributors to this book focus on the particularities of each country, highlighting distinctive micro-dynamics of change and continuity. The essays collected here are contributions from renowned writers and researchers from the Middle East and North Africa, along with Western experts, brought together to form a sophisticated dialogic exchange.

 
[more]
cover of The Unforgiving Coast: Maritime Disasters of the Pacific Northwest

The Unforgiving Coast

Maritime Disasters of the Pacific Northwest

David Grover

Oregon State University Press, 2002

[more]
cover of The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox

The Unhappy Medium

Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox

By Earl Wesley Fornell; Drawings by Lowell Collins

University of Texas Press, 1964

“Here, Mr. Split-Foot, do as I do!” exclaimed the child, and the spirits obeyed her command. Thus, in 1848, thirteen-year-old Margaret Fox inaugurated the age of spiritualism. Those early spirit manifestations in a humble New York farmhouse were “but the beginning of a grand seance which for the next half century was to see persons returned from the dead walking upon the earth, mingling freely with mortal Americans. Ceremonies were performed which united in wedlock the living and the dead; ghostly schoolboys returned from the land of the spirits to revisit their old schoolhouses, upsetting the dignity of earthly classrooms . . . Drivers of owl horsecars . . . were intrigued by beautiful female spirits who rode their cars at night and promptly vanished if approached for a fare.”

The colorful career of Margaret Fox, the most famous medium of the era and the “fountainhead” of the cult of spiritualism, attracted the attention of the most prominent public figures of the day. For P. T. Barnum, this phenomenon was another novelty to present to the American public. Horace Greeley took a personal interest in Margaret and her sister; he gave the movement extensive publicity. Lincoln often invited Margaret Fox and other mediums to the White House for seances, during which attempts were made to invoke the spirit of the Lincolns’ dead son. Members of Congress, judges, and intellectuals of the day were well acquainted with her and with the spiritualist movement.

The course of this spirit invasion and the many and varied means by which men communicated with dwellers of the other world are the subjects of this volume. With Margaret Fox the spirits spoke by rapping on floor and furniture. With others they communicated by writing on slates, by touching with ghostly hands, by moving furniture (one medium was so popular that his furniture followed him about like a pack of dogs). Some spirits spoke directly through the mouths of entranced mediums. And some were so bold—or so talented—that they were able to materialize in the flesh before properly receptive groups of people—and happy indeed was the devotee who received a warm embrace from a lovely young spirit lady or a handsome ghostly gentleman during such a materialization.

The spirits who thus displayed their interest in this mortal world soon came to have a considerable influence over whole segments of the American population. For some, spiritualism was a comforting means of maintaining contact with loved ones now departed. For others it was a religion, a blessed aid on the road to salvation. For still others it provided practical assistance with more earthly problems. Many found in it intriguing puzzles for scientific investigation. And for the whole country it provided a constant source of excitement, interest, and entertainment.

Written in spritely prose and permeated with a grave humor, this account of nineteenth-century spiritualism will be equally satisfying to the casual reader interested in a good story, and to the scholar seeking serious social history.

[more]
cover of The Unification Church: Studies in Contemporary Religion

The Unification Church

Studies in Contemporary Religion

Massimo Introvigne

Signature Books, 2000

 Unificationists believe in “reconciling the internal truth pursued by religion with the external truth pursued by science.” They promote anti-Communism, family values, and the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Hebrew prophets.

Where they depart from traditional Christianity is in their acceptance of the Divine Principle as a companion to the Bible and in their assertion that founder Rev. Sun Myung Moon is Lord of the Second Advent, that with his wife (together the “True Parents”), Original Sin is conquered through special blessings.

Since 1954 Unificationism has evolved toward a more normative approach to worship and lifestyle, if not belief—a point that Italian scholar Massimo Introvigne emphasizes in his balanced overview of the church’s history, doctrine, spirituality, missionary activities, and controversies. He notes that in doctrine Unificationism has moved away from mainstream churches toward increased emphasis on contact with the spirit world, numerology, and construction of a modern “Garden of Eden” in Brazil.

[more]
cover of The Union on Trial: The Political Journals of Judge William Barclay Napton, 1829-1883

The Union on Trial

The Political Journals of Judge William Barclay Napton, 1829-1883

Edited by Christopher Phillips & Jason L. Pendleton. Introduction by Christopher Phillips

University of Missouri Press, 2005

Spanning some fifty-four years, The Union on Trial is a fascinating look at the journals that William Barclay Napton (1808–1883), an editor, Missouri lawyer, and state supreme court judge, kept from his time as a student at Princeton to his death in Missouri. Although a northerner by birth, Napton, the owner or trustee of forty-six slaves, viewed American society through a decidedly proslavery lens.
Focusing on events between the 1850s and 1870s, especially those associated with the Civil War and Reconstruction, The Union on Trial contains Napton’s political reflections, offering thoughtful and important perspectives of an educated northern-cum-southern rightist on the key issues that turned Missouri toward the South during the Civil War era. Although Napton’s journals offer provocative insights into the process of southernization on the border, their real value lies in their author’s often penetrating analysis of the political, legal, and constitutional revolution that the Civil War generated. Yet the most obvious theme that emerges from Napton’s journals is the centrality of slavery in Missourians’ measure of themselves and the nation and, ultimately, in how border states constructed their southernness out of the tumultuous events of the era.
Napton’s impressions of the constitutional crises surrounding the Civil War and Reconstruction offer essential arguments with which to consider the magnitude of the nation’s most transforming conflict. The book also provides a revealing look at the often intensely political nature of jurists in nineteenth-century America. A lengthy introduction contextualizes Napton’s life and beliefs, assessing his transition from northerner to southerner largely as a product of his political transformation to a proslavery, states’ rights Democrat but also as a result of his marriage into a slaveholding family. Napton’s tragic Civil War experience was a watershed in his southern evolution, a process that mirrored his state’s transformation and one that, by way of memory and politics, ultimately defined both.
Students and scholars of American history, Missouri history, and the Civil War will find this volume indispensable reading.
[more]
cover of The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery

The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots

A True Story of Slavery

John Swanson Jacobs

University of Chicago Press, 2024

Lost on the other side of the world since 1855, the story of John Swanson Jacobs finally returns to America. This student edition reproduces his narrative in full and presents it on its own without any editorial or biographical apparatus.
 
For one hundred and sixty-nine years, a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs—brother of Harriet Jacobs—was buried in a pile of newspapers in Australia. Jacobs’s long-lost narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, is a startling and revolutionary discovery. A document like this—written by an ex-slave and ex-American, in language charged with all that can be said about America outside America, untampered with and unedited by white abolitionists—has never been seen before. A radical abolitionist, sailor, and miner, John Jacobs has a life story that is as global as it is American. Born into slavery, by 1855 he had fled both the South and the United States altogether, becoming a stateless citizen of the world and its waters. That year, he published his life story in an Australian newspaper, far from American power and its threats. Unsentimental and unapologetic, Jacobs radically denounced slavery and the state, calling out politicians and slaveowners by their names, critiquing America’s founding documents, and indicting all citizens who maintained the racist and intolerable status quo.
 
Reproduced in full, this narrative—which entwines with that of his sister and with the life of their friend Frederick Douglass—here opens new horizons for how we understand slavery, race, and migration, and all that they entailed in nineteenth-century America and the world at large. To truly reckon with the lives of John Jacobs is to see with new clarity that in 1776, America embarked on two experiments at once: one in democracy, the other in tyranny.
 
[more]
cover of The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography

The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots

A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography

John Swanson Jacobs

University of Chicago Press, 2024

Lost on the other side of the world since 1855, the story of John Swanson Jacobs finally returns to America. This comprehensive edition includes Jacobs's narrative in full alongside a full-length biography.
 
For one hundred and sixty-nine years, a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs—brother of Harriet Jacobs—was buried in a pile of newspapers in Australia. Jacobs’s long-lost narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, is a startling and revolutionary discovery. A document like this—written by an ex-slave and ex-American, in language charged with all that can be said about America outside America, untampered with and unedited by white abolitionists—has never been seen before. A radical abolitionist, sailor, and miner, John Jacobs has a life story that is as global as it is American. Born into slavery, by 1855, he had fled both the South and the United States altogether, becoming a stateless citizen of the world and its waters. That year, he published his life story in an Australian newspaper, far from American power and its threats. Unsentimental and unapologetic, Jacobs radically denounced slavery and the state, calling out politicians and slaveowners by their names, critiquing America’s founding documents, and indicting all citizens who maintained the racist and intolerable status quo.
 
Reproduced in full, this narrative—which entwines with that of his sister and with the life of their friend Frederick Douglass—here opens new horizons for how we understand slavery, race, and migration, and all that they entailed in nineteenth-century America and the world at large. The second half of the book contains a full-length, nine-generation biography of Jacobs and his family by literary historian Jonathan Schroeder. This new guide to the world of John Jacobs will transform our sense of it—and of the forces and prejudices built into the American project. To truly reckon with the lives of John Jacobs is to see with new clarity that in 1776, America embarked on two experiments at once: one in democracy, the other in tyranny.
[more]
cover of The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934

The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934

Schmidt, Hans

Rutgers University Press, 1995

"A good history of a sordid intervention that submitted a people to autocratic rule and did little for economic development." —The New York Times
"From Schmidt we get the full details . . . of the brutal racist practices inflicted on the Haitians for nearly all of the nineteen-year American presence in the country." —American Historical Review
"The only thoroughgoing study of one of the more discreditable American interventions overseas." —Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"Should become the standard work on the subject. . . .required reading for specialists in Caribbean studies and U.S.-Latin American relations." —Choice
"A valuable addition to Latin American and U.S. historiography." —Library Journal
"Schmidt sees American racism, bondholders cultures, the technocratic side of Progressivism, and the National City Bank looting of Haiti as the factors motivating Wilson's 1915 invasion....As a detailed case study in an exceptional manifestation of U. S. imperial control the book will attract a readership beyond students of Caribbean history." —Kirkus
"An important and well-documented account....an interesting case study in twentieth-century imperialism. Schmidt sees the occupation of Haiti as part of a general tendency in American foreign policy...Schmidt analyses in detail the mechanics of the invasion, and discusses the actions, attitudes, and policies of the  U.S. administration....A model of academic elegance." —Caribbean Studies
"All the more convincing because the author has used previously inaccessible archive materials." —Journal of American History
[more]
cover of The United States and Inter-American Security, 1889–1960

The United States and Inter-American Security, 1889–1960

By J. Lloyd Mecham

University of Texas Press, 1961

Of the several regional arrangements that function within the United Nations, the most elaborate in organization and function is the Organization of American States. Although the United Nations holds the primary responsibility for preserving international peace, its charter concedes virtual autonomy to regional arrangements in dealing with matters considered appropriate for regional action. This latitude stimulated a trend toward regionalism which eventually posed the important question of how to preserve legitimate regionalism like Pan-Americanism without impairing the essential overall authority of the United Nations.

Following an introductory description of all existing regional arrangements, this comprehensive case study examines every aspect of security cooperation in the Western Hemisphere in the mid-twentieth century: the historical origins and development of the inter-American system; the perfecting of the security structure; and, most important, the functioning of the system under test by controversies among the member nations, and by two world wars, the Korean emergency, and the aggressive threats of international Communism. Particular attention is given to the Cuban situation.

This volume was the first to recognize, boldly and imaginatively, the overwhelming influence wielded in the OAS by the powerful and wealthy United States. This elastic association of one Great Power and twenty small states, based on a mutuality of interests and a common devotion to the principles of civilized international behavior, can be said to have reached full maturity in 1948 with the adoption of the OAS charter, which articulated the goals toward which it had been striving for fifty-eight years: sovereign equality, nonintervention, and consultation for the peaceful solution of disputes and for hemisphere defense. Ironically, just when the Good Neighbor Policy and the rise of Hitler seemed to have cemented inter-American relations, breaks in the solidarity began to appear. World War II produced new forces destined to profoundly alter the bases and objectives of inter-American cooperation. The “be good” policy began to change to a “do good” policy, and in diplomatic discussions, economic measures began to eclipse those concerned with peril to the peace and security of the hemisphere.

[more]
cover of The United States and Mexico

The United States and Mexico

Josefina Zoraida Vazquez and Lorenzo Meyer

University of Chicago Press, 1987

Josefina Zoraida Vazquez and Lorenzo Meyer recreate, from a distinctly Mexican perspective, the dramatic story of how one country's politics, economy, and culture have been influenced by its neighbor. Throughout, the authors emphasize the predominance of the United States, the defensive position of Mexico, and the impact of the United States on internal Mexican developments.
[more]
cover of The United States and the Armenian Genocide: History, Memory, Politics

The United States and the Armenian Genocide

History, Memory, Politics

Julien Zarifian

Rutgers University Press, 2024

During the first World War, over a million Armenians were killed as Ottoman Turks embarked on a bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing. Scholars have long described these massacres as genocide, one of Hitler’s prime inspirations for the Holocaust, yet the United States did not officially recognize the Armenian Genocide until 2021. 
 
This is the first book to examine how and why the United States refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide until the early 2020s. Although the American government expressed sympathy towards the plight of the Armenians in the 1910s and 1920s, historian Julien Zarifian explores how, from the 1960s, a set of geopolitical and institutional factors soon led the United States to adopt a policy of genocide non-recognition which it would cling to for over fifty years, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. He describes the forces on each side of this issue: activists from the US Armenian diaspora and their allies, challenging Cold War statesmen worried about alienating NATO ally Turkey and dealing with a widespread American reluctance to directly confront the horrors of the past. Drawing from congressional records, rare newspapers, and interviews with lobbyists and decision-makers, he reveals how genocide recognition became such a complex, politically sensitive issue. 
[more]
cover of The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals

The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals

By Alfred E. Eckes, Jr.

University of Texas Press, 1979

In 1973–1974 soaring commodity prices and an oil embargo alerted Americans to the twin dangers of resource exhaustion and dependence on unreliable foreign materials suppliers. This period seemed to mark a watershed in history as the United States shifted from the era of relative resource abundance to relative materials scarcity.

Alfred E. Eckes’s comprehensive study shows that resource depletion and supply dislocations are not concerns unique to the 1970s. Since 1914, the quest for secure and stable supplies of industrial materials has been an important underlying theme of international relations and American diplomacy.

Although the United States has been blessed with a diversified materials base, it has pursued a minerals strategy designed to exploit low-cost, high-quality ores abroad. Eckes demonstrates how this policy has led to official protection for overseas private investments, involving a role for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some modern historians have neglected the importance of resources in shaping diplomacy and history. This book, based on a vast variety of unutilized archival collections and recently declassified government documents, helps to correct that imbalance. In the process it illuminates an important and still timely aspect of America’s global interests.

[more]
cover of The United States of India: Anticolonial Literature and Transnational Refraction

The United States of India

Anticolonial Literature and Transnational Refraction

Manan Desai

Temple University Press, 2020

The United States of India shows how Indian and American writers in the United States played a key role in the development of anticolonial thought in the years during and immediately following the First World War. For Indians Lajpat Rai and Dhan Gopal Mukerji, and Americans Agnes Smedley, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Katherine Mayo, the social and historical landscape of America and India acted as a reflective surface. Manan Desai considers how their interactions provided a “transnational refraction”—a political optic and discursive strategy that offered ways to imagine how American history could shed light on an anticolonial Indian future.

Desai traces how various expatriate and immigrant Indians formed political movements that rallied for American support for the cause of Indian independence. These intellectuals also developed new forms of writing about subjugation in the U.S. and India. Providing an examination of race, caste, nationhood, and empire, Desai astutely examines this network of Indian and American writers and the genres and social questions that fomented solidarity across borders.

[more]
cover of The United States of Ohio: One American State and Its Impact on the Other Forty-Nine

The United States of Ohio

One American State and Its Impact on the Other Forty-Nine

David E. Rohr

The Ohio State University Press, 2019

Electoral significance has always distinguished the small northern state sandwiched between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. Only twice since the beginning of the twentieth century has Ohio failed to pick the candidate who ultimately won the presidential election. But presidential elections are only part of the Ohio story. That’s because the state has always been an innovator, an incubator, and a bellwether for the American experience. In a unique look at Ohio, David E. Rohr chronicles key stories that come from the Buckeye State and the remarkable effect Ohio’s development has had on the larger country.
 
The United States of Ohio covers little-known facts about Ohio, such as how the state was the birthplace of both the National Football League and Major League Baseball and how it was Ohioans who led efforts toward racial integration in both sports. Readers will learn what makes the state a manufacturing and agricultural powerhouse—with both the largest tire company, Akron’s Goodyear, and the largest consumer products company, Cincinnati’s Proctor & Gamble, based there. The state grows, processes, and builds on a level that far outpaces the size of its population or expanse of its borders. And it is the birthplace of many prominent US figures—from Thomas Edison to John Glenn to Neil Armstrong. From sports to a century’s worth of entertainment superstars to aviation and space exploration, Ohio’s best have made for America’s greatest stories—all captured here in a look at the Buckeye State and its impact on the other forty-nine.
  


 
 
[more]
cover of The Unity Movement: Its Evolution and Spiritual Teachings

The Unity Movement

Its Evolution and Spiritual Teachings

Neal Vahle

Templeton Press, 2002

Prayer meetings held in 1889 in the Kansas City living room of Charles and Myrtle Fillmore were the beginning of what grew to be an international religious and educational movement. This book is an in-depth study of the people and beliefs that shaped it into one of the fastest growing movements of our time.

Neal Vahle documents the lives of the spiritual visionaries who created, organized, and led the Unity movement: Myrtle Fillmore, the 40-year-old wife and mother who was inspired by a Christian Science practitioner to cure herself of tuberculosis; Charles Fillmore, who had planned a business career but found, through study, prayer, meditation, and dream analysis, that he had another calling; H. Emily Cady, a New York City homeopathic physician whose book on Unity teachings, Lessons in Truth, was published in 1901, and has sold more than 1.6 million copies; Lowell Fillmore, eldest son of Charles and Myrtle, who clarified and popularized Unity teaching; and the other descendants of Myrtle and Charles, each of whom made immeasurable contributions.

He explores the key factors that led to the steady growth of the movement: the creation of the Unity School of Christianity; the development of Unity Village in Missouri; the evolution of "Silent Unity"; the publication program; the training of students; the development of centers and churches; and he presents and analyzes the controversies and debates within the organization. Vahle concludes the book with a look at the challenges facing the movement in the twenty-first century.

[more]
cover of The Unity of the Nations

The Unity of the Nations

Joseph Ratzinger

Catholic University of America Press, 2015

What did ancient Christians and pagans believe makes the unity of the nations? Just as he began serving as a major adviser at the Second Vatican Council in 1962, Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) studied this question in lectures delivered at Austria's University of Salzburg. These lectures, originally published in German, are now made available in English in this volume.
[more]
cover of The Universe in Thirteen Graphs: Charting Cosmic Discoveries Across Space and Time

The Universe in Thirteen Graphs

Charting Cosmic Discoveries Across Space and Time

Chris Lintott, Jeffrey Grube, and Daina Bouquin

University of Chicago Press, 2027

See the Universe as astronomers do: These thirteen graphs distill the cutting-edge discoveries of the cosmos—from planets and stars to galaxies, to ripples in spacetime itself.

From the front page of newspapers to your favorite t-shirt, the visual language of the cosmos is pervasive. Yet while you may have seen stunning images of planets, nebulae, and even the shadow of a black hole, pretty pictures alone cannot reveal the universe. Whether you’re looking for planets outside our solar system, searching for dark matter, listening for ripples in spacetime, or looking back to very early times, to truly understand the cosmos you need graphs.

In this fully illustrated and engaging book, astronomers Chris Lintott and Jeffrey Grube and data scientist Daina Bouquin focus on thirteen graphs to offer a tour of the major astronomical discoveries of the last century. Meet the HR diagram, which tells us about stellar lives; marvel at the Hubble diagram’s evidence for the expansion of the Universe; understand special relativity through Minkowski spacetime; and turn back time to the earliest visible light of the cosmic microwave background. With fascinating stories of discovery and accessible science for understanding ongoing debates, this book proves that while a picture may be worth a thousand words, a graph can show you the universe.

[more]
cover of The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace

The University Against Itself

The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace

edited by Monika Krause, Mary Nolan, Michael Palm and Andrew Ross

Temple University Press, 2008

During the last two decades, many U.S. universities have restructured themselves to operate more like corporations.  Nowhere has this process been more dramatic than at New York University, which has often been touted as an exemplar of the "corporate university."  Over the same period, an academic labor movement has arisen in response to this corporatization.  Using the unprecedented 2005 strike by the graduate student union at NYU as a springboard, The University Against Itself provides a brief history of labor organizing on American campuses, analyzes the state of academic labor today, and speculates about how the university workplace may evolve for employees.

All of the contributors were either participants in the NYU strike -- graduate students, faculty, and organizers -- or are nationally recognized as writers on academic labor.  They are deeply troubled by the ramifications of corporatizing universities.  Here they spell out their concerns, offering lessons from one historic strike as well as cautions about the future of all universities.

Contributors include: Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Bowen, Andrew Cornell, Ashley Dawson, Stephen Duncombe, Steve Fletcher, Greg Grandin, Adam Green, Kitty Krupat, Gordon Lafer, Micki McGee, Sarah Nash, Cary Nelson, Matthew Osypowski, Ed Ott, Ellen Schrecker, Susan Valentine, and the editors.
[more]
cover of The University and the People: Envisioning American Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest

The University and the People

Envisioning American Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest

Scott M. Gelber

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

The University and the People chronicles the influence of Populism—a powerful agrarian movement—on public higher education in the late nineteenth century. Revisiting this pivotal era in the history of the American state university, Scott Gelber demonstrates that Populists expressed a surprising degree of enthusiasm for institutions of higher learning. More fundamentally, he argues that the mission of the state university, as we understand it today, evolved from a fractious but productive relationship between public demands and academic authority.
    Populists attacked a variety of elites—professionals, executives, scholars—and seemed to confirm academia’s fear of anti-intellectual public oversight. The movement’s vision of the state university highlighted deep tensions in American attitudes toward meritocracy and expertise. Yet Populists also promoted state-supported higher education, with the aims of educating the sons (and sometimes daughters) of ordinary citizens, blurring status distinctions, and promoting civic engagement. Accessibility, utilitarianism, and public service were the bywords of Populist journalists, legislators, trustees, and sympathetic professors. These “academic populists” encouraged state universities to reckon with egalitarian perspectives on admissions, financial aid, curricula, and research. And despite their critiques of college “ivory towers,” Populists supported the humanities and social sciences, tolerated a degree of ideological dissent, and lobbied for record-breaking appropriations for state institutions.

[more]
cover of The University in the Twenty-first Century: Teaching the New Enlightenment in the Digital Age

The University in the Twenty-first Century

Teaching the New Enlightenment in the Digital Age

Hannes Klöpper

Central European University Press, 2016

This volume addresses the broad spectrum of challenges confronting the university of the 21st century. Elkana and Klöpper place special emphasis on the questions regarding the very idea and purposes of universities, especially as viewed through curriculum—what is taught—and pedagogy—how it is taught. The ideas recommended here for reform concern especially undergraduate or Bachelor degree programs in all areas of study, from the humanities and social sciences to the natural sciences, the technical fields, law, medicine, and other professions. The core thesis of this book rests on the emergence of a 'New Enlightenment', which requires a revolution in curriculum and teaching in order to translate the academic philosophy of global contextualism into universal practice or application. The university is asked to revamp teaching in order to foster critical thinking that would serve students their entire lives. This book calls for universities to become truly integrated rather than remaining collections of autonomous agencies more committed to competition among themselves than cooperation in the larger interest of learning.
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cover of The University of Alabama: A Guide to the Campus and Its Architecture

The University of Alabama

A Guide to the Campus and Its Architecture

Robert Oliver Mellown

University of Alabama Press, 2013

The University of Alabama: A Guide to the Campusand Its Architecture is a richly illustrated guidebook to the architecture and development of the University of Alabama’s campus as it has evolved over the last two centuries.

In 1988 the University of Alabama Press published Robert Oliver Mellown’s The University of Alabama: A Guide to the Campus, a culmination of a decade’s worth of research into both the facts and the legends surrounding the architecture, history, and traditions of the Capstone.

Over twenty years later, this new guide brings to light the numerous additions, expansions, and renovations the university has undergone on its spacious grounds in Tuscaloosa. In addition to updated sections devoted to the university’s historic landmarks—such as Foster Auditorium, where “the stand in the schoolhouse door” occurred; Denny Chimes,where the handprints and footprints of famous Tide athletes are memorialized in concrete; and the Gorgas House, which with stood the destruction of Union troops at the end of the Civil War—new sections account for the acquisition of Bryce Hospital’s campus, the expansions at Bryant-Denny Stadium to accommodate the growing Crimson Tide fan base, and the burgeoning student recreation facilities, playing fields, and residential communities.

Chapters are arranged into various campus tours for walking or driving—Antebellum, Victorian, Early Twentieth-Century, East Quad, West Quad, Science and Engineering Corridor, Student Life, Bryce, Medical, Southeast, Athletics, and Off Campus. Alumni, prospective students and their parents, new faculty, out-of-state visitors, and foreign dignitaries will all welcome this useful, compact, and colorful guide to one of the most beautiful campuses in the country.
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cover of The University of Arizona: A History in 100 Stories

The University of Arizona

A History in 100 Stories

Gregory McNamee

University of Arizona Press, 2024

Southwest Books of the Year Top Pick

The University of Arizona: A History in 100 Stories is a celebration of the people, ideas, inventions, teaching, and structures that have been part of the school’s evolution from a small land-grant institution to an internationally renowned research institution. Drawing on half a century of connection with the University of Arizona as a student, staff member, and faculty member, Gregory McNamee presents a history through the lens of a hundred subjects.

That story begins in 1885, with the establishment of the school, which quickly proved itself to be a powerhouse in its foundational “four pillars”: agriculture and earth sciences, followed by astronomy and anthropology. In the years following World War II, those four pillars became ever more important to the University, even as countless other fields of study gained prominence: optical sciences, women’s studies, the humanities, mathematics, and more. This phenomenal institution has as its setting the Sonoran Desert, and, closer to home, to a built environment that is widely considered among the most scenic in the country, from the Historic District with its buildings that are more than a century old to the latest steel-and-glass constructions on the edges of the ever-expanding campus.

McNamee relates this history in an entertaining manner, peppering discussion of serious intellectual and institutional themes with lighter moments—the origins of the university's rivalry with Arizona State, the ghosts that are said to lurk about campus, and more. Wildcats everywhere will delight in McNamee’s celebration of the people, places, learning, books, and pastimes that have distinguished our school.
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cover of The University of Arkansas Razorback Band: A History, 1874-2004

The University of Arkansas Razorback Band

A History, 1874-2004

T.T. Tyler Thompson

University of Arkansas Press, 2004

From the small Cadet Band that supported the school’s military department to the “best in sight and sound” Marching Razorbacks that are a staple of the university’s athletic program, the band has provided the soundtrack to the University of Arkansas.

The rich history of the Razorback Band has spanned almost the entire existence of the University of Arkansas. This book documents the distinguished 130-year history of the band from its humble beginnings in 1874 as an adjunct to the military cadet squad to the major college organization that it is today. Both as a supporting player of the military and ROTC programs and of the athletic department, the Razorback Band has provided the spirited musical excitement required through the years, as well as performing concerts on its own for an appreciative student body and community audience with the Concert Band and Wind Ensemble. Add to that the parallel story of the evolution of an exciting basketball and volleyball spirit band—the Hogwild Band—and you have in this lavishly illustrated book the first-ever history of the music makers of the University of Arkansas.

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