28167 books match the query 'History' and 6372 start with t
Sarah Craycraft
University of Wisconsin Press, 2026
Since the collapse of socialism, Bulgaria’s population has been on the move—out of rural regions and into cities, or out of the country altogether. Yet today there is a countermovement of young, urban Bulgarians, born around 1989, seeking to repopulate rural villages and reclaim traditional Bulgarian folklife. Though many of these young Bulgarians have no direct experience with a rural lifestyle nor memories of thriving village life, their actions and movements are inspired by a nostalgic vision of the past. And so, beyond a spatial return, this rural revitalization movement speaks to visions of an alternate future, one sparked by dismay with the conditions of contemporary life.
Using ethnographic and folkloristic methods, Sarah Craycraft paints a complex, detailed picture of responses to Europeanization, carried out through neoliberal folklife projects as they collide with ongoing efforts to build a revitalized rural Bulgaria in the ruins of the past. Contextualized within a particular Southeast European nation, the study speaks to broader questions of rural revival, public-facing culture work, intergenerational folklore, and the imbrication of folklore with politics and culture.
Anu Mai Kõll
Central European University Press, 2013
Dwayne Cox
University of Alabama Press, 2016
The Village on the Plain tells the story of the founding of Auburn University as a small private college and the tumultuous history of its growth and transformation into the complex institution it is today.
Auburn University possesses a rich and storied past as well as an esprit de corps that is the envy of its rivals. Dwayne Cox’s The Village on the Plain traces the school’s history in fascinating detail from its origins as a private college through its emergence as a nationally recognized land-grant university.
Founded before the Civil War to provide a classical education, Auburn became the state’s land-grant college after the cessation of hostilities. This infused the school with a vision of the reborn South as a commercial and industrial power. By the 1880s, the applied sciences were at the core of Auburn’s growth and strength. Like most southern universities, Auburn never enjoyed financial abundance, and scarcity intensified internal debates over investments in liberal arts or science. Modest state funding for higher education also complicated Auburn’s rise. It became a source of competition with the University of Alabama. This rivalry was most intense between 1908 and 1948. The two schools did not meet on the gridiron but blocked and tackled one another in the legislature over the division of state funds.
On the idyllic plains of Lee County, Alabama, Auburn developed a unique, sometimes introspective culture, which is true of many universities founded far from urban centers. Long Auburn’s head archivist, Cox describes this culture with an insider’s insights and shows how it shaped the school's history and community.
Auburn University’s history is that of a small private college that rose to the challenges of convulsive state and national events, not only to survive but to emerge more vibrant and thriving. Offering much to students of higher education and Alabama history, as well as readers affiliated with Auburn University, The Village on the Plain tells the story of this complex and fascinating institution.

Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Melanie McMahon
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Co-Winner of the 2024 ACLA Renè Wellek Prize for Monograph
The emergence of the alphabet in ancient Greece, usually heralded as the first step in the inexorable march toward reason and progress, in fact signaled the introduction of a chance technology that hijacked the future, with devastating consequences for humanity. By investigating an array of cultural artifacts, ranging from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Oracle at Delphi to Luther's challenge to the Church, this book demonstrates how the apparently benign emergence of writing made possible far-ranging systems of organized domination and unprecedented levels of violence. The Violence of the Letter considers how a twenty-six-letter code changed the face of the world, and not always for the better.
Hernández, Marie-Theresa
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Tom Beghin
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Emily C.K. Romeo
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
Dismantling the image of the peaceful and serene colonial goodwife and countering the assumption that New England was inherently less violent than other regions of colonial America, Emily C. K. Romeo offers a revealing look at acts of violence by Anglo-American women in colonial Massachusetts, from the everyday to the extraordinary. Using Essex County as a case study, Romeo deftly utilizes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources to demonstrate that Puritan women, both “virtuous” and otherwise, learned to negotiate the shifting boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable violence in their daily lives and communities.
The Virtuous and Violent Women of Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts shows that more dramatic violence by women—including infanticide, the scalping of captors during the Indian Wars, and even witchcraft accusations—was not necessarily intended to challenge the structures of authority but often sprung from women's desire to protect property, safety, and standing for themselves and their families. The situations in which women chose to flout powerful social conventions and resort to overt violence expose the underlying, often unspoken, priorities and gendered expectations that shaped this society.
Neetu Khanna
Duke University Press, 2020
Rochelle Wright
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998
Rochelle Wright provides the first historical overview and analysis of the manner in which Jews and other ethnic outsiders have been depicted in Swedish film from 1930 to the present.
Focusing on films produced in Sweden for primarily Swedish audiences, Wright analyzes how the portrayal of the relatively small Jewish minority has evolved over the years. She compares the images of Jews in Swedish film with those of other ethnic subcultures: long-term resident communities such as tattare (‘travelers’, an indigenous pariah group often confused with gypsies), Finns, the Sami, and recent immigrant populations such as Greeks, Italians, Turks, and Yugoslavians.
Wright’s cross-disciplinary approach to interrelated issues of ethnicity and national identity enables her to take advantage of the methodologies of historians and sociologists as well as those of literary and film critics. She bases her study on a detailed analysis of the films, but, by way of comparison, she examines filmscripts and literary sources. She also consults contemporary reviews, interviews with actors and directors, and biographies and memoirs as well as critical discussion among film historians.
Wright confronts important—and exceedingly difficult—social questions. She deals head-on with xenophobia, anti-Semitism, immigration, assimilation, ethnicity, multiculturalism, and the national self-image of Swedes as reflected in their cinema. She also analyzes the manner in which Swedish film represents the persecution of Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe.
Johanna Drucker
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Theresa Brock
University of Delaware Press, 2024
Clark Colahan
University of Arizona Press, 1994
Robert Desjarlais
Duke University Press, 2025
Na'ama Klorman-Eraqi
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Edited by Diane Piccitto and Terry F. Robinson
University of Michigan Press, 2023
The Visual Life of Romantic Theater examines the dynamism and vibrancy of stage spectacle and its impact in an era of momentous social upheaval and aesthetic change. Situating theatrical production as key to understanding visuality ca. 1780-1830, this book places the stage front and center in Romantic scholarship—a field in a period long defined by its focus on poetry—by reenvisioning traditional approaches to artistic and social production. How, it asks, did dramaturgy and stagecraft influence aesthetic and sociopolitical concerns? How does a focus on visuality expand our understanding of the historical experience of theatergoing? In what ways did stage performance converge with visual culture beyond the theater? How did extra-theatrical genres engage with theatrical sight and spectacle? Finally, how does a focus on dramatic vision change the way we conceive of Romanticism itself? The volume’s essays by emerging and established scholars provide exciting and suggestive answers to these questions, along with a more capacious conception of Romantic theater as a locus of visual culture that reached well beyond playhouse walls.
Béla Zsolt Szakács
Central European University Press, 2016
Edited by Ernesto Capello and Jessica Stites Mor
University of Texas Press, 2026
A collection of essays examining the role of visual materials in shaping Latin American lives, historical thought, and worldmaking.
Historians have long valued visual media as a source of documentation and illustration. More recently, scholars have also been turning to visual media for another purpose: to directly observe historical processes. Paintings, maps, visual narratives, graffiti, photography—these objects do not simply transmit information about events; they are events. They imbue the historical change we seek to understand.
The Visual in Latin American History is a collection of essays that applies cutting-edge visual-studies methodology to the history of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Contributors focus on the visual production of postcolonial national imaginaries across Latin America—mythologies that purposely omitted Indigenous groups, African diasporic communities, and new migrants from Europe and Asia. The essays range across a vast territory, including erasure in archeology and Afro-Colombian portraiture; image making in domestic spaces and social movements; the visual vocabularies of urban planning and agrarian reform; military “performance” and anti-imperial Cold War exchanges; and humanitarian documentary along the US border.Collectively, the authors show how visual methods can radically transform our understanding of power and culture in Latin America and beyond.
Richard K. Wolf
University of Illinois Press, 2014

David J. Bradshaw
Ohio University Press, 1999
One of the most recurrent and controversial subjects of nineteenth–century discourse was work. Many thinkers associated work with honest pursuit of doing good, not the curse accompanying exile from Eden but rather “a great gift of God.” Sincerely undertaken work comprised a mission entailing a commitment to serve others and promote a better future for all.
Satisfaction with what work could do for individuals had its counterbalance in the anger and dismay expressed at the conditions of those whom Robert Owen, in 1817, first called the “working class.” What working–class people confronted both at the labor site and at their lodgings was construed as oppressive, and the misery of their lives became the subject of sentimental poetry, government report, popular fiction, and journalistic expose. Perhaps as heated as the discussion about conditions of lower–class workers was the conversation about separate spheres of work for men and women. This conversation, too, found its way into the literature and public discourse of the day.
In The Voice of Toil, the editors have collected the central writings from a pivotal place and time, including poems, stories, essays, and a play that reflect four prominent ways in which the subject of work was addressed: Work as Mission, Work as Opportunity, Work as Oppression, and (Separate) Spheres of Work. The resulting anthology offers a provocative text for students of nineteenth-century British literature and history and a valuable resource for scholars.
The text includes readings from John Wesley, William Blake, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale, William Morris, Joanna Baillie, Friedrich Engels, Matthew Arnold, Angela Burdett–Coutts, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Bernard Shaw and many others.
Frederick Matthew Wiseman
University Press of New England, 2001
Jo Malin
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000
Every woman autobiographer is a daughter who writes and establishes her identity through her autobiographical narrative. In The Voice of the Mother, Jo Malin argues that many twentieth-century autobiographies by women contain an intertext, an embedded narrative, which is a biography of the writer/daughter’s mother.
Analyzing this narrative practice, Malin examines ten texts by women who seem particularly compelled to tell their mothers’ stories: Virginia Woolf, Sara Suleri, Kim Chernin, Drusilla Modjeska, Joan Nestle, Carolyn Steedman, Dorothy Allison, Adrienne Rich, Cherríe Moraga, and Audre Lorde. Each author is, in fact, able to write her own autobiography only by using a narrative form that contains her mother’s story at its core. These texts raise interesting questions about autobiography as a genre and about a feminist writing practice that resists and subverts the dominant literary tradition.
Malin theorizes a hybrid form of autobiographical narrative containing an embedded narrative of the mother. The textual relationship between the two narratives is unique among texts in the auto/biographical canon. This alternative narrative practice—in which the daughter attempts to talk both to her mother and about her—is equally an autobiography and a biography rather than one or the other. The technique is marked by a breakdown of subject/object categories as well as auto/biographical dichotomies of genre. Each text contains a “self” that is more plural than singular, yet neither.
In addition to being a theoretical and textual analysis, Malin’s book is also a mother-daughter autobiography and biography itself. She shares her own story and her mother’s story as a way to connect directly with readers and as a way to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
Angela M. Keysor
University of Massachusetts Press, 2027
Revealing how people in need advocated for and negotiated their own care until the development of standardized medicine
The Voices of Need uncovers how men and women in Charlestown, Massachusetts, who turned to municipal authorities for aid, actively shaped how their need was understood and addressed. Through a close examination of Charlestown’s care networks, Angela Keysor shows how town selectmen relied on sufferers themselves to articulate what would relieve their distress, while local women—paid by town authorities—provided hands-on care in homes and neighborhoods. These networks flourished in the early and mid-eighteenth century, but their flexibility and responsiveness were increasingly strained by crisis and change. A devastating smallpox epidemic in 1763, followed by racialized debates over belonging after the legal end of enslavement in Massachusetts in 1783, exposed the limits of community-based care.
After the American Revolution, rising numbers of aid requests prompted town officials to reorganize care through a contract system in which paid caregivers attended to multiple dependents at once. As care became centralized and standardized, the space for individuals to define their own needs—and to influence how those needs were met—steadily narrowed. By 1819, with the founding of Massachusetts General Hospital, sufferers were fully redefined as patients, expected to submit to professional authority rather than participate in decisions about their own care.
Tracing this transition from negotiated assistance to institutional medicine, The Voices of Need illuminates a largely forgotten history of agency among the poor and infirm. In doing so, Keysor challenges conventional narratives of early American health care and shows how the rise of standardized medicine fundamentally reshaped the meaning of need, care, and authority.
William L. Fox
University of Nevada Press, 2005
David T. Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alexander Tabarrok, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
José Eustasio Rivera
Duke University Press, 2018
Howard Gillman
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Lily Ross Taylor
University of Michigan Press, 2013
William C. Whittle
University of Alabama Press, 2005
The only Confederate ship to circumnavigate the globe
The Confederate cruiser Shenandoah was the last of a group of commerce raiders deployed to prey on Union merchant ships. Ordered to the Pacific Ocean to “greatly damage and disperse” the Yankee whaling fleet in those waters, the Shenandoah’s successful pursuit of her quarry compared favorably with the exploits of the more celebrated Alabama and Florida but has never been as well known because it coincided with the war’s end and the Confederacy’s downfall. It was, however, one of the best documented naval expeditions—from England to the Indian Ocean, Australia and the South Pacific, the Bering Sea, San Francisco, and finally to port in Liverpool—during the Civil War.
The ship’s log and Captain James Waddell’s notes are well preserved, and a number of the Shenandoah’s officers kept detailed journals of the entire voyage. One of the most significant journals, by Lieutenant William Whittle, is presented here, with annotations from other journals, the official records and logs, and newspaper accounts of the Shenandoah’s activities, together bringing to life the history of this remarkable voyage.
Harvey H. Jackson, III
University of Alabama Press, 2000
A fascinating time capsule, this classic guide captures Alabama at a critical moment in its history between the Great Depression and World War II and its aftermath.
The WPA guide to Alabama provides a unique snapshot of 1930s Alabama life and culture. Like the other state guides in the WPA's American Guide Series, it features essays on history, economy, people, folkways, education, and other characteristics of the state, as well as general information about the towns and cities. Fifteen suggested automobile tours encourage visitors and residents to explore every corner of the state, from the Gulf Coast to the Black Belt and the Tennessee Valley, from bayous to farmlands to mountain gorges.
When it was first published in 1941, the guide went far to dispel the myth of an Alabama consisting only of cotton fields, magnolias, and plantation houses by highlighting the vibrant university life in Tuscaloosa, the modern industrial activity in Birmingham, the informality of politics in Montgomery, the cultural diversity in Alabama's port city, Mobile, and the small town life in Huntsville before it became home to the space industry. The book includes a calendar of annual events, census data, and a wealth of information useful to the traveling public of the time and enlightening to readers today. The guide lists radio stations, buses, railroads, and highways as they existed before the advent of television, interstates, and malls.
Harvey Jackson's fascinating introduction assesses the guide as a historical document and recounts the involved and sometimes controversial process by which it was researched and written. Project directors struggled to make the guide palatable to its public while still addressing such issues as poverty and race relations and recognizing the state's diversity and its rich folk culture. The result makes for compelling reading for general readers and historians alike.
Joseph Frazier Federal Writers Project
University of Iowa Press, 1938
Work Projects Work Projects Administration
University of Arizona Press, 1994
Amy M. Tyson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
Peter Lewis Allen
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Peter W. Sinnema
Ohio University Press, 2006
Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England’s response to the duke’s death.
The Wake of Wellington considers Wellington’s spectacular funeral pageant in the fall of 1852—an unprecedented event that attracted one and a half million spectators to London—as a threshold event against which the life of the soldier-hero and High Tory statesman could be re-viewed and represented.
Canvassing a profuse and dramatically proliferating Wellingtoniana, Sinnema examines the various assumptions behind, and implications of, the Times’s celebrated claim that the Irish-born Wellington “was the very type and model of an Englishman.” The dead duke, as Sinnema demonstrates, was repeatedly caught up in interpretive practices that stressed the quasi-symbolic relations between hero and nation.
The Wake of Wellington provides a unique view of how in death Wellington and his career were promoted as the consummation of a national destiny intimately bound up with Englishness itself, and with what it meant to be English at midcentury.

A.W. Plumstead, Editor
University of Minnesota Press, 1968
The Wall and the Garden was first published in 1968. 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.
The election day sermon in colonial New England was an annual, formal address by a minister of the gospel to the newly assembled legislature of the colony. The tradition began in the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1634, and it continued, in Boston, for 250 years. In this volume, Professor Plumstead presents a collection of nine of the Massachusetts election sermons, chosen from among the surviving Massachusetts sermons which were printed between 1661 and 1775. They are not chosen as representative but, rather, as the best, judged on a basis of literary excellence and ideas and points of style relevant to later developments in American literature and history. There are changes in style and theme in the 105 years between the first and the last selection, and, in his brief introduction to each of the sermons, the editor discusses these changes and the sermon's relationship to the tradition as a whole.
In a general introduction, Professor Plumstead provides background information about the history and significance of the election sermons. As he makes clear, the election sermon tradition offers a vantage point for seeing both continuity and change in colonial intellectual history. The sermons in this collection will complement colonial studies by bringing the reader close to the spirit of the times.
The title of the volume, The Wall and the Garden, derives from the frequent use by colonial preachers of the metaphors of the garden and the wall to describe the colonies and their spiritual enemies.
Edited by Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Rebecca Zorach
Northwestern University Press, 2017
André Malraux
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Helen Waddell
University of Michigan Press, 1990
Erin Graff Zivin
Duke University Press, 2008
In her readings of Spanish American and Brazilian fiction, Graff Zivin highlights inventions of Jewishness in which the concept is constructed as a rhetorical device. She argues that Jewishness functions as a wandering signifier that while not wholly empty, can be infused with meaning based on the demands of the textual project in question. Just as Jews in Latin America possess distinct histories relative to their European and North American counterparts, they also occupy different symbolic spaces in the cultural landscape. Graff Zivin suggests that in Latin American fiction, anxiety, desire, paranoia, attraction, and repulsion toward Jewishness are always either in tension with or representative of larger attitudes toward otherness, whether racial, sexual, religious, national, economic, or metaphysical. She concludes The Wandering Signifier with an inquiry into whether it is possible to ethically represent the other within the literary text, or whether the act of representation necessarily involves the objectification of the other.
Timothy Fay
University of Iowa Press, 2023

Peter Shaw
University of Iowa Press, 1989
Marianna Torgovnick
University of Chicago Press, 2005
by Vladimir Dedijer
University of Michigan Press, 1990
by Vladimir Dedijer
University of Michigan Press, 1990
by Vladimir Dedijer
University of Michigan Press, 1990
Danny Hoffman
Duke University Press, 2011
Hoffman argues that in contemporary West Africa, space, sociality, and life itself are organized around making young men available for all manner of dangerous work. Drawing on his ethnographic research over the past nine years, as well as the anthropology of violence, interdisciplinary security studies, and contemporary critical theory, he maintains that the mobilization of West African men exemplifies a global trend in the outsourcing of warfare and security operations. A similar dynamic underlies the political economy of violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a growing number of postcolonial spaces. An experienced photojournalist, Hoffman integrates more than fifty of his photographs of young West Africans into The War Machines.
Michael B. Gross
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Mark K. Christ
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
Herbert Charles O'Neill
Westholme Publishing, 2012