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28250 books match the query 'History' and 6388 start with t

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Tracking the Texas Rangers

Bruce A. Glasrud

University of North Texas Press, 2013

Tracking the Texas Rangers: The Twentieth Century is an anthology of fifteen previously published articles and chapter excerpts covering key topics of the Texas Rangers during the twentieth century. The task of determining the role of the Rangers as the state evolved and what they actually accomplished for the benefit of the state is a difficult challenge. The actions of the Rangers fit no easy description. There is a dark side to the story of the Rangers; during the Mexican Revolution, for example, some murdered with impunity. Others sought to restore order in the border communities as well as in the remainder of Texas. It is not lack of interest that complicates the unveiling of the mythical force. With the possible exception of the Alamo, probably more has been written about the Texas Rangers than any other aspect of Texas history.
Tracking the Texas Rangers covers leaders such as Captains Bill McDonald, "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas, and Barry Caver, accomplished Rangers like Joaquin Jackson and Arthur Hill, and the use of Rangers in the Mexican Revolution. Chapters discuss their role in the oil fields, in riots, and in capturing outlaws. Most important, the Rangers of the twentieth century experienced changes in investigative techniques, strategy, and intelligence gathering. Tracking looks at the use of Rangers in labor disputes, in race issues, and in the Tejano civil rights movement. The selections cover critical aspects of those experiences--organization, leadership, cultural implications, rural and urban life, and violence.
In their introduction, editors Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss, Jr., discuss various themes and controversies surrounding the twentieth-century Rangers and their treatment by historians over the years. They also have added annotations to the essays to explain where new research has shed additional light on an event to update or correct the original article text.

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Tracks across Continents, Paths through History

The Economic Dynamics of Standardization in Railway Gauge

Douglas J. Puffert

University of Chicago Press, 2009

A standard track gauge—the distance between the two rails—enables connecting railway lines to exchange traffic. But despite the benefits of standardization, early North American railways used six different gauges extensively, and even today breaks of gauge at national borders and within such countries as India and Australia are expensive burdens on commerce. In Tracks across Continents, Paths through History, Douglas J. Puffert offers a global history of railway track gauge, examining early choices and the dynamic process of diversity and standardization that resulted.

Drawing on the economic theory of path dependence, and grounded in economic, technical, and institutional realities, this innovative volume traces how early historical events, and even idiosyncratic personalities, have affected choices of gauge ever since, despite changing technology and understandings of what gauge is optimal. Puffert also uses this history to develop new insights in the theory of path dependence. Tracks across Continents, Paths through History will be essential reading for anyone interested in how history and economics inform each other.

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Tracks in the Amazon

The Day-to-Day Life of the Workers on the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad

Gary Neeleman

University of Utah Press, 2014

When construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad began in 1867, Bolivia had lost its war with Chile, causing it to become landlocked and unable to ship its minerals and other products from the Pacific Coast. Since Bolivia needed to find a way to move products from the Atlantic Coast, the government decided a railroad should be built around the Madeira River—which originates in Bolivia and travels almost 2,000 miles through Brazil to the Amazon—facilitating shipment to foreign markets via the Amazonian waterway. Completion of the railroad was initially stalled by lack of funding, but the project was resurrected in the early twentieth century and completed in 1912. Intended as an integral piece of the rubber export industry, the railroad became unnecessary once the world supply of rubber moved from Brazil to Asia.

Although there have been many brief chronicles and writings about the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad over the years, most barely scratch the surface of this incredible story. Of particular import in Tracks in the Amazon are the photographs—which until now have rarely been seen—taken by Dana Merrill, a New York photographer hired to document the construction of the railroad. It also includes reproductions of the Porto Velho Marconigram, an English-language newspaper written for and by the American expatriates who lived in the construction headquarters at Porto Velho. Because this unique railroad traversed the densest tropical jungle on earth, more than 10,000 workers lost their lives laying the first five miles of track. The images and descriptions of the life of the workers on the railroad illustrate the challenges of working in the jungles—the unforgiving climate, malaria and yellow feverbearing mosquitoes, and the threat of wild animals—which made conditions for the workers next to impossible.

Finalist for the International Latino Book Awards: Best Book in Nonfiction in Portuguese.

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Tracks on the Ocean

A History of Trailblazing, Maps, and Maritime Travel

Sara Caputo

University of Chicago Press, 2024

An engaging look at ocean routes’ complicated beginnings and elusive impact.

Sara Caputo’s Tracks on the Ocean is a sweeping history of how we have understood routes of travel over the ocean and how we came to represent that movement as a cartographical line. Focusing on the representation of sea journeys in the Western world from the early sixteenth century to the present, Caputo deftly argues that the depiction of these lines is inextricable from European imperialism, the rise of modernity, and attempts at mastery over nature. Caputo recounts the history of ocean tracks through an array of lively stories and characters, from the expeditions of Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century to tracks depicted in Moby Dick and popular culture of the nineteenth century to the use of navigational techniques by the British navy. She discusses how tracks evolved from tools of surveying into tools of surveillance and, eventually, into paths of environmental calamity. The impulse to record tracks on the ocean is, Caputo argues, reflective of an ongoing desire for order, schematization, and personal visibility, as well as occupation and permanent ownership—in this case over something that is unoccupiable and impossible to truly possess. Both beautifully written and deeply researched, Tracks on the Ocean shares how the lines drawn on maps tell the audacious and often tragic and violent stories of ocean voyages.

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Tracks on the Trail

Dana Gorzelany-Mostak

University of Michigan Press, 2023

From Bill Clinton playing his saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show to Barack Obama referencing Jay-Z’s song “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” politicians have used music not only to construct their personal presidential identities but to create the broader identity of the American presidency. Through music, candidates can appear relatable, show cultural competency, communicate values and ideas, or connect with a specific constituency. On a less explicit level, episodes such as Clinton’s sax-playing and Obama’s shoulder brush operate as aural and visual articulations of race and racial identity. But why do candidates choose to engage with race in this manner? And why do supporters and detractors on YouTube and the Twittersphere similarly engage with race when they create music videos or remixes in homage to their favorite candidates?

With Barack Obama, Ben Carson, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump as case studies, Tracks on the Trail: Popular Music, Race, and the US Presidency sheds light on the factors that motivate candidates and constituents alike to articulate race through music on the campaign trail and shows how the racialization of sound intersects with other markers of difference and ultimately shapes the public discourse surrounding candidates, popular music, and the meanings attached to race in the 21st century. Gorzelany-Mostak explores musical engagement broadly, including official music in the form of candidate playlists and launch event setlists, as well as unofficial music in the form of newly composed campaign songs, mashups, parodies, and remixes.

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Trade and Privateering in Spanish Florida, 1732–1763

Joyce Elizabeth Harman, With a New Introduction by Carl E. Swanson

University of Alabama Press, 2004

A groundbreaking study of commerce, conflict, and survival in colonial Spanish Florida.

Trade and Privateering examines the illegal yet highly profitable and mutually beneficial trade between Spanish Florida and the English colonies on the eastern seaboard in the mid-18th century. In St. Augustine, the arrival of subsidies from Spain was erratic, causing shortages of food and supplies, so authorities ignored the restrictions on trade with foreign colonies and welcomed British goods. Likewise, the British colonists sought Spanish products from Florida, especially oranges.
But when England and Spain became declared enemies in the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the French and Indian Wars, this tacit trade arrangement was threatened, and the result was a rise of privateering in the region. Rather than do without Spanish goods, the English began to attack and capture Spanish vessels with their cargoes at sea. Likewise, the Spaniards resorted to privateering as a means of steadily supplying the Florida colony. Harman concludes that, both willingly and unwillingly, the English colonies helped their Spanish neighbor to sustain its position in the Southeast.

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Trade and Romance

Michael Murrin

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In Trade and Romance, Michael Murrin examines the complex relations between the expansion of trade in Asia and the production of heroic romance in Europe from the second half of the thirteenth century through the late seventeenth century. He shows how these tales of romance, ostensibly meant for the aristocracy, were important to the growing mercantile class as a way to gauge their own experiences in traveling to and trading in these exotic locales. Murrin also looks at the role that growing knowledge of geography played in the writing of the creative literature of the period, tracking how accurate, or inaccurate, these writers were in depicting far-flung destinations, from Iran and the Caspian Sea all the way to the Pacific.

With reference to an impressive range of major works in several languages—including the works of Marco Polo, Geoffrey Chaucer, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Luís de Camões, Fernão Mendes Pinto, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, and more—Murrin tracks numerous accounts by traders and merchants through the literature, first on the Silk Road, beginning in the mid-thirteenth century; then on the water route to India, Japan, and China via the Cape of Good Hope; and, finally, the overland route through Siberia to Beijing. All of these routes, originally used to exchange commodities, quickly became paths to knowledge as well, enabling information to pass, if sometimes vaguely and intermittently, between Europe and the Far East. These new tales of distant shores fired the imagination of Europe and made their way, with surprising accuracy, as Murrin shows, into the poetry of the period.

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Trade and Taboo

Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean

Sarah E. Bond

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Trade and Taboo addresses the legal, literary, social, and institutional creation of disrepute in ancient Roman society. Tracking the shifting application of stigmas of disrepute between the Republic and Late Antiquity, it follows particular groups of professionals—funeral workers, criers, tanners, mint workers, and even bakers—asking how they coped with stigmatization.

In this book, Sarah E. Bond reveals the construction and motivations for these attitudes, and to show how they created inequalities, informed institutions, and changed over time. Additionally, she shows how political and cultural shifts mutated these taboos, reshaping economic markets and altering the status of professionals at work within these markets.

Bond investigates legal stigmas in the form of infamia and other marks of legal disrepute. She expands on anthropological theories of pollution, closely studying individuals who regularly came into contact with corpses and other polluting materials, and considering communication and network formation through the disrepute attached to town criers, or praecones. Ideas of disgust and the language of invective are brought forward looking at tanners. The book closes with an exploration of caste-like systems created in the later Roman Empire. Collectively, these professionals are eloquent about economies and changes experienced within Roman society between 45 BCE and 565 CE.

Trade and Taboo will interest those studying Roman society, issues of historiographical method, and the topic of taboo in preindustrial cultures.

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Trade and Taboo

Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean

Sarah E. Bond, narrated by Lorelei King

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Trade and Taboo addresses the creation of disrepute in ancient Roman society. What made someone disreputable in the eyes of Romans and how did this effect their everyday life? The book tracks the shifting application of stigmas of disrepute between the Republican period and the later Roman empire (45 BCE - 565 CE) by following various Roman professionals. Through the lives of funeral workers, town criers, tanners, mint workers, and even bakers, Bond asks how certain tradesmen coped with stigmatization. Along the way, Trade and Taboo explores the ins and out of artisan life in antiquity, from how to hire a gravedigger to collecting urine to tan the hides that would be made into leather. Above all, the book indicates how perceptions of disreputable tradesman could change over time. Through reflecting on the language and laws that Romans used to marginalize others, the author helps us reflect on practices in today's society.

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Trading Blocs

States, Firms, and Regions in the World Economy

Kerry A. Chase

University of Michigan Press, 2005

Global commerce is rapidly organizing around regional trading blocs in North America, Western Europe, Pacific Asia, and elsewhere--with potentially dangerous consequences for the world trading system. Professor Kerry Chase examines how domestic politics has driven the emergence of these trading blocs, arguing that businesses today are more favorably inclined to global trade liberalization than in the past because recent regional trading arrangements have created opportunities to restructure manufacturing more efficiently.

Trading Blocs is the first book to systematically demonstrate the theoretical significance of economies of scale in domestic pressure for trading blocs, and thereby build on a growing research agenda in areas of political economy and domestic politics.

"Chase has written a superb book that provides us with an innovative and compelling explanation for the development of trading blocs."
--Vinod Aggarwal, Director, Berkeley APEC Study Center, University of California, Berkeley

Kerry A. Chase is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University.

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Trading Freedom

How Trade with China Defined Early America

Dael A. Norwood

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Explores the surprisingly rich early history of US-China trade and its unexpected impact on the developing republic.

The economic and geographic development of the early United States is usually thought of in trans-Atlantic terms, defined by entanglements with Europe and Africa. In Trading Freedom, Dael A. Norwood recasts these common conceptions by looking to Asia, making clear that from its earliest days, the United States has been closely intertwined with China—monetarily, politically, and psychologically.

Norwood details US trade with China from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries—a critical period in America’s self-definition as a capitalist nation—and shows how global commerce was central to the articulation of that national identity. Trading Freedom illuminates how debates over political economy and trade policy, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the looming sectional struggle over slavery were all influenced by Sino-American relations. Deftly weaving together interdisciplinary threads from the worlds of commerce, foreign policy, and immigration, Trading Freedom thoroughly dismantles the idea that American engagement with China is anything new.

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Trading Roles

Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí

Jane E. Mangan

Duke University Press, 2005

Located in the heart of the Andes, Potosí was arguably the most important urban center in the Western Hemisphere during the colonial era. It was internationally famous for its abundant silver mines and regionally infamous for its labor draft. Set in this context of opulence and oppression associated with the silver trade, Trading Roles emphasizes daily life in the city’s streets, markets, and taverns. As Jane E. Mangan shows, food and drink transactions emerged as the most common site of interaction for Potosinos of different ethnic and class backgrounds. Within two decades of Potosí’s founding in the 1540s, the majority of the city’s inhabitants no longer produced food or alcohol for themselves; they purchased these items. Mangan presents a vibrant social history of colonial Potosí through an investigation of everyday commerce during the city’s economic heyday, between the discovery of silver in 1545 and the waning of production in the late seventeenth century.

Drawing on wills and dowries, judicial cases, town council records, and royal decrees, Mangan brings alive the bustle of trade in Potosí. She examines quotidian economic transactions in light of social custom, ethnicity, and gender, illuminating negotiations over vendor locations, kinship ties that sustained urban trade through the course of silver booms and busts, and credit practices that developed to mitigate the pressures of the market economy. Mangan argues that trade exchanges functioned as sites to negotiate identities within this colonial multiethnic society. Throughout the study, she demonstrates how women and indigenous peoples played essential roles in Potosí’s economy through the commercial transactions she describes so vividly.

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Trading Spaces

The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism

Emma Hart

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Looks at the shift from the marketplace as an actual place to a theoretical idea and how this shaped the early American economy.

When we talk about the economy, “the market” is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain’s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market’s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy.

Hart’s book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America—places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. Since those earlier conventions tended to rely on regulation more than their colonial offspring did, what emerged in early America was a less-fettered brand of capitalism. By the nineteenth century, this had evolved into a market economy that would not look too foreign to contemporary Americans. To tell this complex transnational story of how our markets came to be, Hart looks back farther than most historians of US capitalism, rooting these markets in the norms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. Perhaps most important, this is not a story of specific commodity markets over time but rather is a history of the trading spaces themselves: the physical sites in which the grubby work of commerce occurred and where the market itself was born.

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Trading Tongues

Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature

Jonathan Hsy

The Ohio State University Press, 2013

Trading Tongues offers fresh approaches to the multilingualism of major early English authors like Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Margery Kempe, and William Caxton, and lesser-known figures like French lyricist Charles d’Orléans. Juxtaposing literary works with contemporaneous Latin and French civic records, mixed-language merchant miscellanies, and bilingual phrasebooks, Jonathan Hsy illustrates how languages commingled in late medieval and early modern cities. Chaucer, a customs official for the Port of London, infused English poetry with French and Latin merchant jargon, and London merchants incorporated Latin and vernacular verse forms into trilingual account books.

Hsy examines how writers working in English, Latin, and French (and combinations thereof) theorized the rich contours of polyglot identity. In a range of genres—from multilingual lyrics, poems about urban life, and autobiographical narratives—writers found venues to consider their own linguistic capacities and to develop new modes of conceiving language contact and exchange. Interweaving close readings of medieval texts with insights from sociolinguistics and postcolonial theory, Trading Tongues not only illuminates how multilingual identities were expressed in the past; it generates new ways of thinking about cultural contact and language crossings in our own time.

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Trading in Lives?

Operations of the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee in Budapest, 1944-1945

Szabolcs Szita

Central European University Press, 2005

Set in the tumultuous moments of 1944–45 Budapest, this work discusses the operations of the Budapest Relief and Rescue Committee. Drawing out the contradictions and complexities of the mass deportations of Hungarian Jews during the final phase of World War II, Szita suggests that in the Hungarian context, a commerce in lives ensued, where prominent Zionists like Dr. Rezso Kasztner negotiated with the higher echelons of the SS, trying to garner the freedom of Hungarian Jews. Szita's portrait of the controversial Kasztner is a more sympathetic rendition of a powerful Zionist leader who was later assassinated in Israel for his dealings with Nazi leaders. Szita reveals a story of interweaving personalities and conflicts during arguably the most tragic moment in European history. The author's extensive research is a tremendous contribution to a field of study that has been much ignored by scholarship-the Hungarian holocaust and the trade in human lives.

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Trading with the Enemy

The Covert Economy During the American Civil War

Philip Leigh

Westholme Publishing, 2022

The Impact of Illicit Trade Between the North and South During the Civil War
While Confederate blockade runners famously carried the seaborne trade for the South during the American Civil War, the amount of Southern cotton exported to Europe was only half of that shipped illicitly to the North. Most went to New England textile mills where business “was better than ever,” according to textile mogul Amos Lawrence. Rhode Island senator William Sprague, a mill owner and son-in-law to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, was a member of a partnership supplying weapons to the Confederacy in exchange for cotton. The trade in contraband was not confined to New England. Union General William T. Sherman claimed Confederates were supplied with weapons from Cincinnati, while General Ulysses S. Grant captured Rebel cavalry armed with carbines purchased in Union-occupied Memphis. During the last months of the war, supplies entering the Union-controlled port of Norfolk, Virginia, were one of the principal factors enabling Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army to avoid starvation. Indeed, many of the supplies that passed through the Union blockade into the Confederacy originated in Northern states, instead of Europe as is commonly supposed. Merchants were not the only ones who profited; Union officers General Benjamin Butler and Admiral David Dixon Porter benefited from this black market. President Lincoln admitted that numerous military leaders and public officials were involved, but refused to stop the trade.
In Trading with the Enemy: The Covert Economy During the American Civil War, New York Times Disunion contributor Philip Leigh recounts the little-known story of clandestine commerce between the North and South. Cotton was so important to the Northern economy that Yankees began growing it on the captured Sea Islands of South Carolina. Soon the neutral port of Matamoras, Mexico, became a major trading center, where nearly all the munitions shipped to the port—much of it from Northern armories—went to the Confederacy. After the fall of New Orleans and Vicksburg, a frenzy of contraband-for-cotton swept across the vast trans-Mississippi Confederacy, with Northerners sometimes buying the cotton directly from the Confederate government. A fascinating study, Trading with the Enemy adds another layer to our understanding of the Civil War.

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Tradition

Edward Shils

University of Chicago Press, 1981

Tradition, by esteemed sociologist Edward Shils, was the first book to fully explore the history, significance, and future of tradition as a whole. Intent on questioning the meaning of the antitraditionalist impulse in today's society, Shils argues here that the tendency to distrust and rebel against tradition is at the heart of tradition itself; only through suspicion and defiance does tradition actually move forward. Revealing the importance of tradition to social and political institutions, technology, science, literature, religion, and scholarship, Tradition remains the definitive work on this vital element of our society.

"Shils is a man of fabled learning, whose mind purrs powerfully like the moth at dusk. I hesitate to use the word conservative of him because it misses the central concern of his work, which is not conservatism, but the conservation of those human resources and achievements which are richest, and matter most."—David A. Martin, Times Literary Supplement

"Tradition is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject that encompasses the totality of tradition in all its multifaceted variables and functions. . . . It is a landmark analytical and theoretical sociological study that not only fills a need but also provides a basic model and impetus for further research."—H. Leon Abrams Jr., Sociology

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Tradition And Belief

Religious Writing in Late Anglo-Saxon England

Clara A. Lees

University of Minnesota Press, 1999

Looks at early religious texts and their influence on medieval literature and culture.

Looks at early religious texts and their influence on medieval literature and culture.

In this major study of Anglo-Saxon religious texts-sermons, homilies, and saints’ lives written in Old English-Clare A. Lees reveals how the invention of preaching transformed the early medieval church, and thus the culture of medieval England. By placing Anglo-Saxon prose within a social matrix, her work offers a new way of seeing medieval literature through the lens of culture.To show how the preaching mission of the later Anglo-Saxon church was constructed and received, Lees explores the emergence of preaching from the traditional structures of the early medieval church-its institutional knowledge, genres, and beliefs. Understood as a powerful rhetorical, social, and epistemological process, preaching is shown to have helped define the sociocultural concerns specific to late Anglo-Saxon England.The first detailed study of traditionality in medieval culture, Tradition and Belief is also a case study of one cultural phenomenon from the past. As such-and by concentrating on the theoretically problematic areas of history, religious belief, and aesthetics-the book contributes to debates about the evolving meaning of culture.ISBN 0-8166-3002-X Cloth £34.50 $49.95xxISBN 0-8166-3003-8 Paper £14.00 $19.95x232 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 NovemberMedieval Cultures Series, volume 19Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

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Tradition and Authenticity in the Search for Ecumenic Wisdom

Thomas Langan

University of Missouri Press, 1992

Our emerging world system is bringing the great traditions and cultures it has spawned into ever more intimate and dangerous contact. Langan argues that we must struggle toward a unity of discourse respectful of genuine experiences of varying civilizations if we are to live peacefully on one planet.

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Tradition and Innovation

English and German Studies on the Septuagint

Martin Rösel

SBL Press, 2018

Explore the opportunities and challenges of Septuagint studies

Recent research into the Septuagint has revealed numerous examples of modifications of the meaning of the Hebrew text in the course of its translation into Greek. This collection of essays by one of the leading scholars on the Septuagint shows how complex the translation of individual books was, provides reasons for differences between the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, and paves the way for a theology of the Septuagint. Articles introduce the field of Septuagint studies, the problem of the Letter of Aristeas, and the Hellenistic environment and the hermeneutics of Hellenistic Judaism.

Features:

A methodological discussion of whether and how a theology of the Septuagint can be written
Essays introducing the field of Septuagint studies and its Hellenistic environment and the hermeneutics of Hellenistic Judaism
Fifteen English and German essays covering twenty-five years of Septuagint research

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Tradition and the Rule of Faith in the Early Church

Ronnie J. Rombs

Catholic University of America Press, 2011

Tradition and the rule of faith are particularly apt themes for this collection of studies. The essays are written in honor of Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J., renowned American patristic scholar whose research and writings have focused on this particular theme.

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Tradition in Act

Development and Its Counterfeits After Newman

Reinhard Hütter

Catholic University of America Press, 2027

Tradition in Act addresses the present crisis over a proper understanding of the development of doctrine in contemporary Catholic theology and thus is a critical as well as constructive theological intervention in arguably the most central controversy in contemporary Catholic theology. The concept of “tradition in act” provides an approach that enables a recovered understanding of the development of doctrine for the theologian, and one that avoids the Scylla of antiquarianism and the Charybdis of presentism. The concept of “tradition in act” (drawing on the distinction between act and potency) is understood as the active undergoing of the continuously unfolding of the History of Salvation in the Church by way of the living paradosis of the doctrina evangelii in the Eucharistic liturgy, the life, and teaching of the Church. If doctrine is to develop at all, it must do so as the unfolding of a revelation once delivered to the apostles and entrusted to the Church as a sacred deposit. Hence it is required that subsequent formulations, however diverse in expression or circumstance, remain one with their antecedents—homogeneous with them, cognate to them in meaning and intention. This necessary continuity is identity. Without such identity, development degenerates into alteration and hence corruption; the line of transmission is broken, and the Church no longer hands on what she has herself received. The unfolding argument utilizes both the work and the approach of John Henry Newman to propose the criteria of identity of doctrine understood in terms of St Vincent of Lerins’ second rule, as presented by Newman, as constitutive of authentic development. The notion of authentic development of doctrine understood in terms of “tradition in act” offers a novel approach that avoids entirely the inherent risks in the historical consciousness of how doctrine has developed, in short, it is meant to offer an antidote to the historicism at large. Tradition in Act assays a contemporary Catholic theological articulation of the development of doctrine in the spirit of Gustav Mahler’s famous statement that “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”

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Traditional Archery from Six Continents

The Charles E. Grayson Collection

Text by Charles E. Grayson, Mary French, Michael J. O'Brien, & Photos by Daniel

University of Missouri Press, 2007

As a major hunting tool and weapon, the bow changed human history around the world, and its diverse forms reflect the cultures that adopted it. Those variations can be seen in the Charles E. Grayson Archery Collection housed at the University of Missouri–Columbia Museum of Anthropology, one of the largest and most comprehensive assemblages of archery-related materials in the world. This handsome book offers a unique look at archery as it has been practiced through the ages.

Drawing on a collection of more than five thousand bows, arrows, and associated paraphernalia, Traditional Archery from Six Continents presents color photographs and descriptions of some three hundred items—including quivers, thumb rings, and more—that represent traditional archery practices and customs from around the world. From the Chinese “monkey bow” to the English longbow, the artifacts are organized by region, taking in equipment from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and Europe used over the past five hundred years.

The book’s introduction provides an overview of traditional archery and its nomenclature, and chapter essays situate the items in their historical, cultural, and technological contexts. Plate descriptions note materials, construction methods, dimensions, and temporal and cultural affiliations. The sharp, detailed photographs will enable users to identify the geographic or cultural origins of other pieces by visual comparison. Additional illustrations show how archery equipment has been used in various settings such as hunting, warfare, and sport.

These superb representations from a masterful collection constitute a complete introduction to worldwide archery and mark the first wide-ranging survey of European and non-European archery equipment. Traditional Archery from Six Continents will be the standard reference work in the study of archery, indispensable for students of material culture or general readers interested in the history of this timeless art.

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Traditional Chinese Children’s Primers

A Sourcebook

Edited by Katherine Ngo and Kelly Ngo

Lever Press, 2025

Traditional Chinese Children’s Primers: A Sourcebook is the first anthology of traditional Chinese children’s textbooks in a European language. This selection of eleven primers, spanning over two thousand years of Chinese education history, remains well-known in East Asia and the global diaspora of Confucian-heritage cultures. These texts represent an important genre of children’s literature and education materials that were employed to teach basic vocabulary, develop cultural literacy, and start students on their journey toward greater fortunes in the imperial examinations.

The sourcebook covers texts from the second-century BCE to the late twentieth-century, and a range of subject areas, including etiquette instruction, literacy training, character education, and Confucian and Daoist thought. The Classic of Family Reverence (Xiaojing), for example, opens a window onto early Confucian thought in ancient China, while the Extended Wise Sayings (Zengguang xian wen) represents the eclectic worldviews and beliefs of the seventeenth century, and Lord Wenchang’s Essay on Quiet Merits (Wenchang dijun yinzhi wen) introduces readers to the tradition of popular morality books.

This first-of-a-kind sourcebook in English addresses a long-standing gap in the translation of primers and provides impetus for research in the development of character and virtues, comparative literature, and cross-cultural education studies.

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Traditional Navajo Teachings

Sacred Narratives and Ceremonies

Robert S. McPherson

University Press of Colorado, 2020

"The books should be required reading for anyone who comes to teach, practice medicine or work on the Navajo Nation in any capacity- as well as young Navajos who seek a deeper understanding of their culture."
—Cindy Yurth, The Navajo Times

"In Sacred Narratives and Ceremonies, the authors lay the foundation of traditional Navajo beliefs and practices. They provide an inside perspective rarely discussed by non-medicine people and share the beauty and power of a system that unites humans to the holy beings—through teachings, rituals, materials, and daily behavior. This book is pure gold. It is full of traditional wisdom available to those wanting to understand Navajo culture as seen through the eyes of its elders. I highly recommend this book as a treasure trove for the Diné people."
—Clayton Long, participant/creator of the Navajo Rosetta Stone; Bilingual Education Director (retired), San Juan School District, Utah; and curriculum developer for the Navajo Nation

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Traditional Navajo Teachings

The Earth Surface People

Robert S. McPherson

University Press of Colorado, 2020

"The Earth Surface People, the final work in this trilogy, provides teachings about Navajo life from cradleboard to grave. Central to all is achieving “Long Life, Happiness” as one moves through various stages of existence. The second half of this book examines thoughts concerning the organization of the human body, sickness, western medicine, and death, all of which are part of the Pollen Path. How one walks this trail to his or her final destination is measured by one’s ability to live through its teachings. The four sacred directions with their associated powers are essential to earth life as outlined through ceremonies and daily practices. Here, one moves on a journey from teachings of the past to issues of the present. This volume is extremely helpful for youth to understand life values and the importance of identity, as well as acting as a reminder for adults of the enabling power of traditional culture."
—Clayton Long, a participant/creator of the Navajo Rosetta Stone; Bilingual Education Director (retired), San Juan School District, Utah; and curriculum developer for the Navajo Nation.

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Traditional Navajo Teachings

The Natural World

Robert S. McPherson

University Press of Colorado, 2020

"Navajo teachings provide a classic study of a land-based religion that involves every aspect of the physical world in a spiritual universe. Nothing is too big or small—everything holds a power, provides a teaching, and responds through an inner form. Beyond the material life of daily existence, there lies a world of interconnected relations made apparent in Volume II, The Natural World. This book graphically describes elements of life rooted in the Navajo philosophy of hózhǫ́. A unified harmony results. I highly recommend this book as a study in understanding the power of relationships that populate the Diné worldview."
—Clayton Long, a participant/creator of the Navajo Rosetta Stone; Bilingual Education Director (retired), San Juan School District, Utah; and curriculum developer for the Navajo Nation.

"For days after reading The Natural World, I found myself looking at my surroundings in a different way. The vibrant spirit of the earth and every plant or animal I encountered seemed to glow through a translucent shell. I have always been a nature-lover and gotten a sense of peace from being outdoors, but since reading these beautiful Navajo teachings I am filled with a profound sense of joy and gratitude every time I walk outside."
—Cindy Yurth, The Navajo Times

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Traditions and Reminiscences of Concord, Massachusetts, 1779-1878

Edward Jarvis

University of Massachusetts Press, 1993

A statistician and pioneer in the treatment of the mentally ill, Edward Jarvis (1803–1884) decided late in life to record his recollections of Concord, Massachusetts, the town in which he was raised. Using Lemuel Shattuck's History of Concord as the springboard for his thoughts, Jarvis produced a remarkable document. Traditions and Reminiscences is encyclopedic in scope but intimate in style; it provides an astonishingly detailed account of life in early nineteenth-century Concord. Jarvis escorts us through the family home, making certain we understand the function and value of each item in the domestic scene. Then he is off to the neighbors' houses, to the schoolhouse, the church, the social clubs, the library, the post office, the town hall, and even the tavern, where he unabashedly counts patrons' drinks. Along the way we learn about neighborly cooperation—quiltings, husking bees, and barn raisings—about social manners and respectability, and about local vices. The result is a vast storehouse of information and a vivid portrait of life in an early nineteenth-century preindustrial community. The memoir also provides a first-hand witness to the crusade for moral reform that transformed mid-nineteenth-century New England.

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Traffic in Asian Women

Laura Hyan Yi Kang

Duke University Press, 2020

In Traffic in Asian Women Laura Hyun Yi Kang demonstrates that the figure of "Asian women" functions as an analytic with which to understand the emergence, decline, and permutation of U.S. power/knowledge at the nexus of capitalism, state power, global governance, and knowledge production throughout the twentieth century. Kang analyzes the establishment, suppression, forgetting, and illegibility of the Japanese military "comfort system" (1932–1945) within that broader geohistorical arc. Although many have upheld the "comfort women" case as exemplary of both the past violation and the contemporary empowerment of Asian women, Kang argues that it has profoundly destabilized the imaginary unity and conceptual demarcation of the category. Kang traces how "Asian women" have been alternately distinguished and effaced as subjects of the traffic in women, sexual slavery, and violence against women. She also explores how specific modes of redress and justice were determined by several overlapping geopolitical and economic changes ranging from U.S.-guided movements of capital across Asia and the end of the Cold War to the emergence of new media technologies that facilitated the global circulation of "comfort women" stories.

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Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake

Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa

Benjamin N. Lawrance

Ohio University Press, 2012

Women and children have been bartered, pawned, bought, and sold within and beyond Africa for longer than records have existed. This important collection examines the ways trafficking in women and children has changed from the aftermath of the “end of slavery” in Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present.

The formal abolition of the slave trade and slavery did not end the demand for servile women and children. Contemporary forms of human trafficking are deeply interwoven with their historical precursors, and scholars and activists need to be informed about the long history of trafficking in order to better assess and confront its contemporary forms. This book brings together the perspectives of leading scholars, activists, and other experts, creating a conversation that is essential for understanding the complexity of human trafficking in Africa.

Human trafficking is rapidly emerging as a core human rights issue for the twenty-first century. Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake is excellent reading for the researching, combating, and prosecuting of trafficking in women and children.

Contributors: Margaret Akullo, Jean Allain, Kevin Bales, Liza Stuart Buchbinder, Bernard K. Freamon, Susan Kreston, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Elisabeth McMahon, Carina Ray, Richard L. Roberts, Marie Rodet, Jody Sarich, and Jelmer Vos.

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Trafficking

Narcoculture in Mexico and the United States

Hector Amaya

Duke University Press, 2020

In Trafficking Hector Amaya examines how the dramatic escalation of drug violence in Mexico in 2008 prompted new forms of participation in public culture in Mexico and the United States. He contends that, by becoming a site of national and transnational debate about the role of the state, this violence altered the modes publicness could take, transforming assumptions about freedom of expression and the rules of public participation. Amaya examines the practices of narcocorrido musicians who take advantage of digital production and distribution technologies to escape Mexican censors and to share music across the US-Mexico border, as well as anonymous bloggers whose coverage of trafficking and violence from a place of relative safety made them public heroes. These new forms of being in the public sphere, Amaya demonstrates, evolved to exceed the bounds of the state and traditional media sources, signaling the inadequacy of democratic theories of freedom and publicness to understand how violence shapes public discourse.

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Tragedy Offstage

Suffering and Sympathy in Ancient Athens

By Rachel Hall Sternberg

University of Texas Press, 2006

Humane ideals were central to the image Athenians had of themselves and their city during the classical period. Tragic plays, which formed a part of civic education, often promoted pity and compassion. But it is less clear to what extent Athenians embraced such ideals in daily life. How were they expected to respond, emotionally and pragmatically, to the suffering of other people? Under what circumstances? At what risk to themselves?

In this book, Rachel Hall Sternberg draws on evidence from Greek oratory and historiography of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE to study the moral universe of the ancient Athenians: how citizens may have treated one another in times of adversity, when and how they were expected to help. She develops case studies in five spheres of everyday life: home nursing, the ransom of captives, intervention in street crimes, the long-distance transport of sick and wounded soldiers, and slave torture. Her close reading of selected narratives suggests that Athenians embraced high standards for helping behavior—at least toward relatives, friends, and some fellow citizens. Meanwhile, a subtle discourse of moral obligation strengthened the bonds that held Athenian society together, encouraging individuals to bring their personal behavior into line with the ideals of the city-state.

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Tragedy and Triumph on the Great Lakes

Richard Gebhart

Michigan State University Press, 2024

Richard Gebhart traces little-known voyages of Great Lakes ships that sailed the Atlantic beginning in the 1850s. They bore cargoes to and from the lakes and as far as Constantinople. Gebhart recovers the voices of long-ago ship captains, along with their cargo manifests and itineraries. Drawing on deep research in old newspapers and maritime archives, he traces the construction of new ships and shipyards, and the comings and goings and travails of the lakes’ workhorses. Included is a mournful visit to a boneyard where many ships’ lives ended. Among many other lost tales, Gebhart brings to light the rise of oil tankers, marking the great twentieth-century energy transition in shipping. A must-read for Great Lakes shipping fans.

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Tragic History Of The Sea

C.R. Boxer

University of Minnesota Press, 2001

Compelling stories of shipwreck, adventure, and death on the high seas, now back in print.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a time of great colonial expansion, marked by a mercantile frenzy of ships carrying merchants, aristocrats, missionaries, sailors, Inquisitors, botanists, and statesmen pursuing the spoils of empire. Among the narratives that chronicled these voyages, those of the Portuguese are unequaled. C. R. Boxer’s fascinating translations of famous Portuguese shipwreck stories detail the disasters and terrors plaguing the perilous sea trading route between Portugal and India.

In the tradition of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Defoe, and Poe, these dramatic stories of shipwreck—and those who lived to tell about it—represent existence and survival pushed to the limits. They describe disastrous turns of fate and miraculous rescues, heroism and cowardice, and offer the exhilaration and sheer emotive appeal of a tale of adventure well told. Often circulated in pamphlet form, these stories recounting the dangers and terrors of storm-tossed ocean voyages and the fate of castaways in distant lands were a popular genre, rife with compelling and often gory details. This first ever paperback edition includes a new translation of the tragic tale of Captain Manuel de Sousa Sepúlveda, shipwrecked with his family on the sands of Africa in 1552, the previous English versions of which have long been unavailable. Vividly descriptive and engrossing, these tales of selfishness, cruelty, despair, pirates, mayhem, and harrowing storms will captivate readers.

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Tragic Muse

Rachel of the Comédie-Française

Rachel M. Brownstein

Duke University Press, 1995

The great nineteenth-century tragedienne known simply as Rachel was the first dramatic actress to achieve international fame. Composing her own persona with the same brilliance and passion she demonstrated on stage, she virtually invented the role of "star." Rumors of her extravagant life offstage delighted the audiences who flocked to theaters in Boston and Paris, London and Moscow, to see her perform in the tragedies of Racine and Corneille. In Tragic Muse, Rachel M. Brownstein reveals the life of la grande Rachel and explores—at the boundary of biography, fiction, and cultural history—the connections between this self-dramatizing woman and her image.
Born to itinerant Jewish peddlers in 1821, Rachel arrived on the Paris stage at the age of fifteen. She became both a symbol of her culture’s highest art and a clue to its values and obsessions. Fascinated with all things Napoleonic, she was the mother of Napoleon’s grandson and the lover of many men connected to the emperor. Her story—the rise from humble beginnings to queen of the French state theater—echoes and parodies Napoleon’s own. She decisively controlled her career, her time, and finances despite the actions and claims of managers, suitors, and lovers. A woman of exceptional charisma, Rachel embodied contradiction and paradox. She captured the attention of her time and was memorialized in the works of Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Henry James.
Richly illustrated with portraits, photographs, and caricatures, Tragic Muse combines brilliant literary analysis and exceptional historical research. With great skill and acuity, Rachel M. Brownstein presents Rachel—her brief intense life and the image that was both self-fashioned and, outliving her, fashioned by others. First published by Knopf (1993), this book will attract a broad audience interested in matters as wide ranging as the construction of character, the cult of celebrity, women’s lives, and Jewish history. It will also be of enduring interest to readers concerned with nineteenth-century French culture, history, literature, theater, and Romanticism. Tragic Muse won the 1993 George Freedley Award presented by the Theater Library Association.

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Tragic Rites

Narrative and Ritual in Sophoclean Drama

Adriana E. Brook

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

Presenting an innovative new reading of Sophocles' plays, Tragic Rites analyzes the poetic and narrative function of ritual in the seven extant plays of Sophocles. Adriana Brook closely examines four of them—Ajax, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus—in the context of her wide-ranging consideration of the entire Sophoclean corpus. Exploring the playwright's dramatic technique, she shows how he used elements of ritual to guide the perceptions and expectations of his fifth-century audience about plot and character.

Employing both modern ritual theory and Aristotle's Poetics, Brook exposes the deep structural analogies between ritual and narrative, the parallels between mistakes in ritual and deviations from the expected in the plot, and the relationship between ritual content and dramatic closure.

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Tragic Spirits

Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia

Manduhai Buyandelger

University of Chicago Press, 2013

The collapse of socialism at the end of the twentieth century brought devastating changes to Mongolia. Economic shock therapy—an immediate liberalization of trade and privatization of publicly owned assets—quickly led to impoverishment, especially in rural parts of the country, where Tragic Spirits takes place. Following the travels of the nomadic Buryats, Manduhai Buyandelger tells a story not only of economic devastation but also a remarkable Buryat response to it—the revival of shamanic practices after decades of socialist suppression.

Attributing their current misfortunes to returning ancestral spirits who are vengeful over being abandoned under socialism, the Buryats are now at once trying to appease their ancestors and recover the history of their people through shamanic practice. Thoroughly documenting this process, Buyandelger situates it as part of a global phenomenon, comparing the rise of shamanism in liberalized Mongolia to its similar rise in Africa and Indonesia. In doing so, she offers a sophisticated analysis of the way economics, politics, gender, and other factors influence the spirit world and the crucial workings of cultural memory.

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Trail Of Gold & Silver

D Smith

University Press of Colorado, 2009

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Trail of Footprints

A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico

By Alex Hidalgo

University of Texas Press, 2019

Trail of Footprints offers an intimate glimpse into the commission, circulation, and use of indigenous maps from colonial Mexico. A collection of sixty largely unpublished maps from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and made in the southern region of Oaxaca anchors an analysis of the way ethnically diverse societies produced knowledge in colonial settings. Mapmaking, proposes Hidalgo, formed part of an epistemological shift tied to the negotiation of land and natural resources between the region’s Spanish, Indian, and mixed-race communities. The craft of making maps drew from social memory, indigenous and European conceptions of space and ritual, and Spanish legal practices designed to adjust spatial boundaries in the New World. Indigenous mapmaking brought together a distinct coalition of social actors—Indian leaders, native towns, notaries, surveyors, judges, artisans, merchants, muleteers, collectors, and painters—who participated in the critical observation of the region’s geographic features. Demand for maps reconfigured technologies associated with the making of colorants, adhesives, and paper that drew from Indian botany and experimentation, trans-Atlantic commerce, and Iberian notarial culture. The maps in this study reflect a regional perspective associated with Oaxaca’s decentralized organization, its strategic position amidst a network of important trade routes that linked central Mexico to Central America, and the ruggedness and diversity of its physical landscape.

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Trail to Heaven

Knowledge and Narrative in a Northern Native Community

Robin Ridington

University of Iowa Press, 1992

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Trailing Clouds of Glory

Zachary Taylor's Mexican War Campaign and His Emerging Civil War Leaders

Felice Flanery Lewis

University of Alabama Press, 2010

This work is a narrative of Zachary Taylor’s Mexican War campaign, from the formation of his army in 1844 to his last battle at Buena Vista in 1847, with emphasis on the 163 men in his “Army of Occupation” who became Confederate or Union generals in the Civil War. It clarifies what being a Mexican War veteran meant in their cases, how they interacted with one another, how they performed their various duties, and how they reacted under fire. Referring to developments in Washington, D.C., and other theaters of the war, this book provides a comprehensive picture of the early years of the conflict based on army records and the letters and diaries of the participants.

Trailing Clouds of Glory is the first examination of the roles played in the Mexican War by the large number of men who served with Taylor and who would be prominent in the next war, both as volunteer and regular army officers, and it provides fresh information, even on such subjects as Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Particularly interesting for the student of the Civil War are largely unknown aspects of the Mexican War service of Daniel Harvey Hill, Braxton Bragg, and Thomas W. Sherman.

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Trails to Tiburón

The 1894 and 1895 Field Diaries of W J McGee

W. J. McGee; Transcribed by Hazel McFeely Fontana; Annotated and with an Introduction by Bernard L. Fontana

University of Arizona Press, 2000

When William John McGee set out from Washington, D.C., for the Sonoran Desert in 1894, he was inspired by a passion for adventure as much as a thirst for knowledge. McGee lived in an era when discovery was made through travel rather than study, and reputations were forged by going where no outsiders had gone before.

A self-taught scientist in the newly forming field of anthropology, McGee led two expeditions through southern Arizona and northern Sonora for the Bureau of American Ethnology. There he conducted ethnographic research among the Papagos (Tohono O'odham) and the Seris, and his subsequent publication The Seri Indians helped secure his place in the anthropological community.

McGee's complete journals of the expeditions, kept in small field notebooks and preserved in the Library of Congress, are published here for the first time. These journals contain detailed descriptions of the country and people McGee encountered and convey the adventure of traveling through wild and unfamiliar places—including a voyage to Isla Tiburón, or Shark Island, in the Gulf of California—and being plagued by foul weather, a shortage of supplies, and fear of attack from hostile Indians.

Trails to Tiburón features 57 historical photographs taken on the expedition, capturing the places McGee saw and the people he encountered. Fontana's notes to the diary provide useful botanical, geological, and ethnographic information, while his introduction places McGee and his field work in the context of late-nineteenth-century anthropology and science.

Trails to Tiburón reveals McGee's versatility as a field worker and shows his methods, often questioned today, to be the reasonable response of a man caught up in the intellectual fervor of his time. For anyone wanting to share in the spirit of adventure, these journals are a landmark in the annals of exploration.

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Training for Catastrophe

Fictions of National Security after 9/11

Lindsay Thomas

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A timely, politically savvy examination of how impossible disasters shape the very real possibilities of our world

Why would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security.

Thomas finds fiction at work in unexpected settings, from policy documents and workplace training manuals to comics and video games. Through these texts—as well as plenty of science fiction—she examines the philosophy of preparedness, interrogating the roots of why it asks us to treat explicitly fictional events as real. Thomas connects this philosophical underpinning to how preparedness plays out in contemporary politics, emphasizing how it uses aesthetic elements like realism, genre, character, and plot to train people both to regard some disasters as normal and to ignore others.

Training for Catastrophe makes an important case for how these documents elicit consent and compliance. Thomas draws from a huge archive of texts—including a Centers for Disease Control comic about a zombie apocalypse, the work of Audre Lorde, and the political thrillers of former national security advisor Richard Clarke—to ask difficult questions about the uses and values of fiction. A major statement on how national security intrudes into questions of art and life, Training for Catastrophe is a timely intervention into how we confront disasters.

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Traitors and True Poles

Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880–1939

Karen Majewski

Ohio University Press, 2003

During Poland’s century-long partition and in the interwar period of Poland’s reemergence as a state, Polish writers on both sides of the ocean shared a preoccupation with national identity. Polish-American immigrant writers revealed their persistent, passionate engagement with these issues, as they used their work to define and consolidate an essentially transnational ethnic identity that was both tied to Poland and independent of it.

By introducing these varied and forgotten works into the scholarly discussion, Traitors and True Poles recasts the literary landscape to include the immigrant community’s own competing visions of itself. The conversation between Polonia’s creative voices illustrates how immigrants manipulated often difficult economic, social, and political realities to provide a place for and a sense of themselves. What emerges is a fuller picture of American literature, one vital to the creation of an ethnic consciousness.

This is the first extended look at Polish-language fiction written by turn-of-the-century immigrants, a forgotten body of American ethnic literature. Addressing a blind spot in our understanding of immigrant and ethnic identity and culture, Traitors and True Poles challenges perceptions of a silent and passive Polish immigration by giving back its literary voice.

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Trajectories of Empire

Transhispanic Reflections on the African Diaspora

Jerome C. Branche

Vanderbilt University Press, 2022

Trajectories of Empire extends from the beginning of the Iberian expansion of the mid-fifteenth century, through colonialism and slavery, and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Latin American republics. Its point of departure is the question of empire and its aftermath as reflected in the lives of contemporary Latin Americans of African descent and of their ancestors in the historical processes of Iberian colonial expansion, colonization, and the Atlantic slave trade.

The book’s chapters explore what Blackness means in the so-called racial democracies of Brazil and Cuba today. Among the historical narratives and themes it covers are the role of medical science in the objectification and nullification of Black female personhood during slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil; the protocols of portraiture in the colonial period that, in including enslaved individuals, pictorially highlight and freeze their supposed inferiority vis-à-vis their owners; and those aspects of discourse that promote colonial capture and oppression in terms of evangelization and the saving of souls, or simply create the discursive template as early as the fifteenth century, for their continued alienation and marginalization across generations.

Trajectories of Empire’s contributions come from the fields of literary criticism, visual culture, history, anthropology, popular culture (rap), and cultural studies. As the product of an interdisciplinary collective, this book will be of interest to scholars in Iberian or Hispanic studies, Africana studies, postcolonial studies, and transatlantic studies, as well as the general public.

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Trams or Tailfins?

Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States

Jan L. Logemann

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In the years that followed World War II, both the United States and the newly formed West German republic had an opportunity to remake their economies. Since then, much has been made of a supposed “Americanization” of European consumer societies—in Germany and elsewhere. Arguing against these foggy notions, Jan L. Logemann takes a comparative look at the development of postwar mass consumption in West Germany and the United States and the emergence of discrete consumer modernities.

In Trams or Tailfins?, Logemann explains how the decisions made at this crucial time helped to define both of these economic superpowers in the second half of the twentieth century. While Americans splurged on private cars and bought goods on credit in suburban shopping malls, Germans rebuilt public transit and developed pedestrian shopping streets in their city centers—choices that continue to shape the quality and character of life decades later. Outlining the abundant differences in the structures of consumer society, consumer habits, and the role of public consumption in these countries, Logemann reveals the many subtle ways that the spheres of government, society, and physical space define how we live.

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Trans*historicities

Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici, special issue editors

Duke University Press, 2018

This issue offers a theoretical and methodological imagining of what constitutes trans* before the advent of the terms that scholars generally look to for the formation of modern conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. What might we find if we look for trans* before trans*? While some historians have rejected the category of transgender to speak of experiences before the mid-twentieth century, others have laid claim to those living gender-non-conforming lives before our contemporary era. By using the concept of trans*historicity, this volume draws together trans* studies, historical inquiry, and queer temporality while also emphasizing the historical specificity and variability of gendered systems of embodiment in different time periods. Essay topics include a queer analysis of medieval European saints, discussions of a nineteenth-century Russian religious sect, an exploration of a third gender in early modern Japanese art, a reclamation of Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit language, and biopolitical genealogies and filmic representations of transsexuality. The issue also features a roundtable discussion on trans*historicities and an interview with the creators of the 2015 film Deseos. Critiquing both progressive teleologies and the idea of sex or gender as a timeless tradition, this issue articulates our own desires for trans history, trans*historicities, and queerly temporal forms of historical narration.

Contributors. Kadji Amin, M. W. Bychowski, Fernanda Carvajal, Howard Chiang, Leah DeVun, Julian Gill-Peterson, Jack Halberstam, Asato Ikeda, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Maya Mikdashi, Robert Mills, Carlos Motta, Marcia Ochoa, Kai Pyle, C. Riley Snorton, Zeb Tortorici, Jennifer Louise Wilson

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Trans-Indigenous

Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies

Chadwick Allen

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

What might be gained from reading Native literatures from global rather than exclusively local perspectives of Indigenous struggle? In Trans-Indigenous, Chadwick Allen proposes methodologies for a global Native literary studies based on focused comparisons of diverse texts, contexts, and traditions in order to foreground the richness of Indigenous self-representation and the complexity of Indigenous agency.

Through demonstrations of distinct forms of juxtaposition—across historical periods and geographical borders, across tribes and nations, across the Indigenous–settler binary, across genre and media—Allen reclaims aspects of the Indigenous archive from North America, Hawaii, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia that have been largely left out of the scholarly conversation. He engages systems of Indigenous aesthetics—such as the pictographic discourse of Plains Indian winter counts, the semiotics of Navajo weaving, and Maori carving traditions, as well as Indigenous technologies like large-scale North American earthworks and Polynesian ocean-voyaging waka—for the interpretation of contemporary Indigenous texts. The result is a provocative reorienting of the call for Native intellectual, artistic, and literary sovereignty that fully prioritizes the global Indigenous.

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