28164 books match the query 'History' and 6372 start with t
Christopher McGrath
Haus Publishing, 2026
A history of Turin, home to Fiat, the Einaudi publishing house, and writers including Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese, and Natalia Ginzburg.
Unknown to most foreigners, as they follow each other around Florence and Siena, Rome and Venice, the Italy they see today is the result of a second renaissance. And its seat was a city they needed to discover, in all its enigmatic allure, if they were truly to understand the nation it brought into being. As Umberto Eco says, “Without Italy, Turin would have been more or less the same. But without Turin, Italy would have been very different.” This baroque jewel at the foot of the Alps provides a unique prism on the story of modern Italy: not just as a founding capital, but also in kindling a political, cultural, and economic regeneration after the tragedies of dictatorship and civil war.
Their emergence as a dynamo of national industrialization, symbolized by Fiat, had made the factories of Turin the original seat of both Italian capitalism and socialism, and, accordingly, the heart of resistance to Mussolini. After the Second World War, the city experienced parallel revivals. On the one hand, Fiat proved a foundation stone for Italy’s famous “economic miracle"; on the other, the Einaudi publishing house became a platform for the greatest local flowering of Italian culture since the days of the Medicis, not least through several of its own employees, including Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese, and Italo Calvino. These competing energies were personified by the respective enigmas who presided over these agencies of renewal, Gianni Agnelli and Giulio Einaudi.
But their rivalry also only demonstrated the polarities that have long defined this royal city of arcaded streets and squares, with its wild mountain backdrop. That contrast is expressed even by the city’s rival football teams: the seigneurial Juventus, long bankrolled by the Agnelli family, its perennial success toasted throughout the peninsula; and Torino, the fallen giants whose tragic legacy commands the underdog fidelity of local nostalgics, workers, and rebels.
Exploring the contribution of Turin to modern Italy, Chris McGrath entwines some of the nation’s most celebrated names with less familiar citizens who illuminate the gaps: from the forgotten poet who bears exquisite witness to the city’s crepuscular atmosphere at the turn of the last century, to the Torino footballer who fought with the partisans before becoming a star of neorealist cinema.
Risorgimento, resistance, reconstruction: none of these decisive phases in Italy’s modern evolution would have been the same without this unsung city.
Arin Y. Savran
University of Michigan Press, 2022
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the Kurds in the Middle East became the largest ethnic group in the region without a state of their own. Divided between Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, the Kurds have fought for their right to exist as a distinct national group, as well as for governing themselves. Turkey and the Kurdish Peace Process provides a historical and conceptual account of events in order to detail the key conditions, factors, and events that gave rise to the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) conflict in Turkey, as well as the conditions influencing the emergence, management, and collapse of the peace talks. Drawing from conflict resolution theories, this book investigates the transformation of key conflict actors and changes, over time, in their approach to the main conflict issues.
Moreover, Arin Y. Savran expands the concept of conflict transformation to encompass the ideological transformation of a movement as a result of a rigorous and deep intellectual epiphany on the part of the political leaders—a phenomenon that is unusual and little is known about, making it all the more relevant to include in future theoretical approaches in peace process studies. Methodologically, she rethinks conflict transformation/resolution approaches to focus on shifts in beliefs and relationships that occur prior to a peace process or the start of peace negotiations, when often much focus on peace processes is on the post-agreement phase. This book is among the first comprehensive, scholarly accounts to date (in the English language) that analyzes the Kurdish peace process.
Edited by M. Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balci
University of Utah Press, 2018
Utah Series in Middle East Studies
On July 15, 2016, a faction of the Turkish military attempted to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The Turkish government blamed the unsuccessful coup attempt on Gülenists, adherents of an Islamist movement led by Fethullah Gülen. They had helped elect Erdoğan and his AK Party, with the goal of bringing an ostensibly “soft” version of Islam into the secular Turkish government. In alliance with the AK Party, Gülenists steadfastly increased their representation in various government institutions, including the military, the police, and the judiciary. This volume focuses on the historical and sociopolitical contexts of the Gülen Movement’s origins and political ascendancy along with its possible role in the failed coup.
Editors Yavuz and Balcı are among the first international scholars to have studied the movement from its nascent stages in Turkey. The volume's contributors include scholars who have researched the movement in Turkey, Central Asia, and the Balkans. The result is a comprehensive, timely assessment of numerous dimensions of Gülenist activities, including its social and political networks and the institutions that supported the movement as it became a major economic and educational force in Turkey and elsewhere. This volume reflects exchanges among scholars who having studied the Gülenists, assembled to discuss how and why the movement became belligerent opponents of Erdoğan’s government, and it addresses questions such as how this major, still continuing disruption in Turkey’s politics will affect not only the future of the movement but also that of Turkey's embattled democracy as well.
Atina Diffley
University of Minnesota Press, 2013
When the hail starts to fall, Atina Diffley doesn’t compare it to golf balls. She’s a farmer. It’s “as big as a B-size potato.” As her bombarded land turns white, she and her husband Martin huddle under a blanket and reminisce: the one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds; the eleven-inch rainfall (“that broccoli turned out gorgeous”); the hail disaster of 1977. The romance of farming washed away a long time ago, but the love? Never. In telling her story of working the land, coaxing good food from the fertile soil, Atina Diffley reminds us of an ultimate truth: we live in relationships—with the earth, plants and animals, families and communities.
A memoir of making these essential relationships work in the face of challenges as natural as weather and as unnatural as corporate politics, her book is a firsthand history of getting in at the “ground level” of organic farming. One of the first certified organic produce farms in the Midwest, the Diffleys’ Gardens of Eagan helped to usher in a new kind of green revolution in the heart of America’s farmland, supplying their roadside stand and a growing number of local food co-ops. This is a story of a world transformed—and reclaimed—one square acre at a time.
And yet, after surviving punishing storms and the devastating loss of fifth-generation Diffley family land to suburban development, the Diffleys faced the ultimate challenge: the threat of eminent domain for a crude oil pipeline proposed by one of the largest privately owned companies in the world, notorious polluters Koch Industries. As Atina Diffley tells her David-versus-Goliath tale, she gives readers everything from expert instruction in organic farming to an entrepreneur’s manual on how to grow a business to a legal thriller about battling corporate arrogance to a love story about a single mother falling for a good, big-hearted man.
By Gary Cartwright
University of Texas Press, 2000
Whether the subject is Jack Ruby, Willie Nelson, or his own leukemia-stricken son Mark, when it comes to looking at the world through another person's eyes, nobody does it better than Gary Cartwright. For over twenty-five years, readers of Texas Monthly have relied on Cartwright to tell the stories behind the headlines with pull-no-punches honesty and wry humor. His reporting has told us not just what's happened over three decades in Texas, but, more importantly, what we've become as a result.
This book collects seventeen of Cartwright's best Texas Monthly articles from the 1980s and 1990s, along with a new essay, "My Most Unforgettable Year," about the lasting legacy of the Kennedy assassination. He ranges widely in these pieces, from the reasons for his return to Texas after a New Mexican exile to profiles of Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. Along the way, he strolls through San Antonio's historic King William District; attends a Dallas Cowboys old-timers reunion and the Holyfield vs. Foreman fight; visits the front lines of Texas' new range wars; gets inside the heads of murderers, gamblers, and revolutionaries; and debunks Viagra miracles, psychic surgery, and Kennedy conspiracy theories. In Cartwright's words, these pieces all record "the renewal of my Texas-ness, a rediscovery of Texas after returning home."
Harry G. Lang
Gallaudet University Press, 2021
By Ana Carolina Castillo Crimm and Sara R. Massey
University of Texas Press, 2003
Situated in the South Texas borderlands some fifty miles west of Corpus Christi, San Diego was a thriving town already a hundred years old at the turn of the twentieth century. With a population that was 90 percent Mexican or Mexican American and 10 percent Anglo, the bicultural community was the seat of Duval County and a prosperous town of lumberyards, banks, mercantile stores, and cotton gins, which also supplied the needs of area ranchers and farmers. Though Anglos dominated its economic and political life, San Diego was culturally Mexican, and Mexican Americans as well as Anglos built successful businesses and made fortunes.
This collection of nearly one hundred photographs from the estate of amateur photographer William Hoffman captures the cosmopolitan town of San Diego at a vibrant moment in its history between 1898 and 1909. Grouped into the categories women and their jobs, local homes, men and their businesses, children at school and church, families and friends, and entertainment about town, the photos offer an immediate visual understanding of the cultural and economic life of the community, enhanced by detailed captions that identify the subjects and circumstances of the photos. An introductory historical chapter constitutes the first published history of Duval County, which was one of the most important areas of South Texas in the early twentieth century.
Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici, editors
Duke University Press, 2022
Benjamin A. Saltzman
University of Chicago Press, 2026
A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world.
Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Benjamin A. Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world, challenging us to reflect on the ways we fundamentally relate to others.
Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away sets out from five influential scenes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these scenes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others. Saltzman offers a timely critique of the privilege of turning away and of the too-easy condemnation of our tendencies to do so.
Tamara Chaplin
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Edited by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White, with a foreword by Thomas A. Desjardin
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
David Doellinger
Central European University Press, 2013
Houston A. Baker Jr.
Duke University Press, 2001
Anne Eusterschulte
Central European University Press, 2013
Earl H. Tilford
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Colin McEwan, Andrew Middleton, Caroline Cartwright, and Rebecca Stacey
Duke University Press, 2006
Illustrated with more than 160 color images, this book describes the recent scientific findings about the mosaics in detail, revealing them to be rich repositories of information about ancient Mexico. The materials used to construct the mosaics demonstrate their makers’ deep knowledge of the natural world and its resources. The effort that would have been involved in procuring the materials testifies to the mosaics’ value and significance in a society imbued with myths and religious beliefs. The British Museum’s analyses have provided evidence of the way that the materials were prepared and assembled, the tools used, and the choices that were made by artisans. In addition, by drawing on historical accounts including early codices, as well as recent archaeological discoveries, specialists have learned more about the place of the mosaics in ancient Mexican culture.
Filled with information about the religion, art, and natural and cultural history as well as the extraordinary ability of modern science to enable detailed insight into past eras, Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico offers an overview of the production, utilization, and eventual fate of these beautiful and mysterious objects.
Roy R. Manstan
Westholme Publishing, 2010
The Remarkable History and Reconstruction of the First Operational Submarine
At the onset of the American Revolution, the British expected to quell the rebellion quickly with a show of overwhelming force. In an experiment in asymmetric warfare, David Bushnell created the first submarine vessel designed specifically “for the destruction of vessels of war.” On a quiet September night in 1776, sergeant Ezra Lee maneuvered Bushnell’s strange little craft out from Manhattan and into the midst of the greatest naval fleet ever assembled in the Americas. Lee’s goal was to sink the British flagship HMS Eagle by attaching a powerful explosive to its hull. Although the mission was unsuccessful, Bushnell’s concept of submarine warfare was considered by George Washington to have been “an effort of genius.”
David Bushnell was raised in the town of Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. More than two centuries later, another Turtle would be launched into the same river within sight of Bushnell’s first forays with his vessel during the summer of 1775. Under the direction of technical arts teacher Frederic J. Frese, students at Old Saybrook High School created a working replica of Bushnell’s submarine, facilitated through an education partnership with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, where Roy R. Manstan was a mechanical engineer and Navy trained diver. With twenty-first century submariners at the helm, the Turtle replica was subjected to a series of operational tests at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut.
In Turtle: David Bushnell’s Revolutionary Vessel, the authors provide new insight into Bushnell’s “engine of devastation,” tracing the history of undersea warfare before Bushnell and the origin of the many innovations Bushnell understood would be necessary for conducting a covert submarine attack. The knowledge gained from testing the Turtle replica enabled the authors to speculate as to what America’s first submariner Ezra Lee experienced that September night and what may have caused the attack to fail.
G. Ward Hubbs
University of Alabama Press, 2019

Paolo Gerbaudo
Pluto Press, 2012
Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the 'indignados' protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest.
Gerbaudo argues that activists' use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a 'cyberspace' detached from physical reality. Instead, social media is used as part of a project of re-appropriation of public space, which involves the assembling of different groups around 'occupied' places such as Cairo’s Tahrir Square or New York’s Zuccotti Park.
An exciting and invigorating journey through the new politics of dissent, Tweets and the Streets points both to the creative possibilities and to the risks of political evanescence which new media brings to the contemporary protest experience.
Pete Fraser
St. Augustine's Press, 2023
Harley G. Shaw and Mara E. Weisenberger
University of Arizona Press, 2011
Lowell C. Bennion
University of Utah Press, 2024
Kevin P. Keefe
Michigan State University Press, 2016

Mutsuo Takahashi
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
From one of the foremost poets in contemporary Japan comes this entrancing memoir that traces a boy’s childhood and its intersection with the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. Originally published in 1970, this translation is the first available in English.
In twelve chapters that visit and revisit critical points in his boyhood, Twelve Views from the Distance presents a vanished time and place through the eyes of an accomplished poet. Recounting memories from his youth, Mutsuo Takahashi captures the full range of his internal life as a boy, shifting between his experiences and descriptions of childhood friendships, games, songs, and school. With great candor, he also discusses the budding awareness of his sexual preference for men, providing a rich exploration of one man’s early queer life in a place where modern, Western-influenced models of gay identity were still unknown.
Growing up poor in rural southwestern Japan, far from the urban life that many of his contemporaries have written about, Takahashi experienced a reality rarely portrayed in literature. In addition to his personal remembrances, the book paints a vivid portrait of rural Japan, full of oral tradition, superstition, and remnants of customs that have quickly disappeared in postwar Japan. With profuse local color and detail, he re-creates the lost world that was the setting for his beginnings as a gay man and poet.
Joel Agee
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Jeffrey L. Meikle
Temple University Press, 2001
By Peter Lev
University of Texas Press, 2013
When the Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935, the company posed little threat to industry juggernauts such as Paramount and MGM. In the years that followed however, guided by executives Darryl F. Zanuck and Spyros Skouras, it soon emerged as one of the most important studios. Though working from separate offices in New York and Los Angeles and often of two different minds, the two men navigated Twentieth Century-Fox through the trials of the World War II boom, the birth of television, the Hollywood Blacklist, and more to an era of exceptional success, which included what was then the highest grossing movie of all time, The Sound of Music.
Twentieth Century-Fox is a comprehensive examination of the studio’s transformation during the Zanuck-Skouras era. Instead of limiting his scope to the Hollywood production studio, Lev also delves into the corporate strategies, distribution models, government relations, and technological innovations that were the responsibilities of the New York headquarters. Moving chronologically, he examines the corporate history before analyzing individual films produced by Twentieth Century-Fox during that period. Drawn largely from original archival research, Twentieth Century-Fox offers not only enlightening analyses and new insights into the films and the history of the company, but also affords the reader a unique perspective from which to view the evolution of the entire film industry.
John Ramage
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005
Self-help authors like Tom Peters and Stephen Covey, who have dominated best-seller lists over the last two decades, have exercised increasing influence on political, governmental, and educational organizations. By contrast, the topic of American success books— texts that promise to help readers succeed by retrofitting their identity to meet workplace demands—has been ignored by scholars since the 1980s. John Ramage challenges the neglect of this hugely popular literature and revives a once-lively conversation among eminent critics about the social phenomenon represented in the work of Bruce Barton, Dale Carnegie, and Norman Vincent Peale, among others.
Using literary texts from Don Quixote to Catch-22 to gloss the discussion, Ramage utilizes Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory to understand symbolic acts and social issues and brings together earlier commentaries within a new critical framework. He considers the problematic and paradoxical nature of success and examines its meaning in terms of its traditional dialectic partner, happiness. A synopsis of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century forerunners prefaces this analysis in which Ramage links literary code heroes with the activities of twentieth-century business leaders to determine whether, in the search for authenticity, the heroic individual or the corporation is ultimately served.
This comprehensive study chronicles the legitimation of the success book genre, enumerates rhetorical strategies used to win over readers, and supplies the historical context that renders each book’s message timely. After considering some of the dangers of crossing disciplinary borders, as exemplified by Deborah Tannen’s work, Ramage critiques Stanley Fish’s theoretical strictures against this practice, finally summoning academic critics to action with a strong call to exert greater influence within the popular marketplace.

John W. Storey
University of North Texas Press, 2008
Sarah Neidhardt
University of Arkansas Press, 2023
"A memoir infused with both empathy and inquiry."
—Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature
“Twenty Acres is an engaging, thoughtful memoir of growing up in an off-the-grid cabin as part of the 1970s back-to-the-land movement. Sarah Neidhardt captures her subject beautifully and offers a compelling portrait of a highly specific, historically significant time and place.”
—Kate Daloz, author of We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America
Sarah Neidhardt grew up in the woods. When she was an infant, her parents left behind comfortable, urbane lives to take part in the back-to-the-land movement. They moved their young family to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks where they built a cabin, grew crops, and strove for eight years to live self-sufficiently.
In this vivid memoir Neidhardt explores her childhood in wider familial and social contexts. Drawing upon a trove of family letters and other archival material, she follows her parents’ journey from privilege to food stamps—from their formative youths, to their embrace of pioneer homemaking and rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society—and explores the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s as it was, and as she lived it.
A story of strangers in a strange land, of class, marriage, and family in a changing world, Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods is part childhood idyll, part cautionary tale. Sarah Neidhardt reveals the treasures and tolls of unconventional, pastoral lives, and her insightful reflections offer a fresh perspective on what it means to aspire to pre-industrial lifestyles in a modern world.
Sarah E. Olds
University of Nevada Press, 1978
Enrique Dussel
Duke University Press, 2008
Twenty Theses on Politics is inspired by recent political transformations in Latin America. As Dussel writes in Thesis 15, regarding the liberation praxis of social and political movements, “The winds that arrive from the South—from Nestor Kirchner, Tabaré Vásquez, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and so many others—show us that things can be changed. The people must reclaim sovereignty!” Throughout the twenty theses Dussel engages with Latin American thinkers and activists and with radical political projects such as the World Social Forum. He is also in dialogue with the ideas of Marx, Hegel, Habermas, Rawls, and Negri, offering insights into the applications and limits of their thinking in light of recent Latin American political thought and practice.
Jane Addams, with Autobiographical Notes. Introduction and Notes by James Hurt.
University of Illinois Press, 1990
Bálint Magyar
Central European University Press, 2017
William J. Edwards
University of Alabama Press, 1993
A pioneering educator's firsthand account of building opportunity and hope in Alabama's Black Belt.
Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt is one of the most important firsthand accounts of African American educational leadership and community development in the post-Reconstruction South. Originally published in 1918, this memoir by educator and institution-builder William J. Edwards documents his extraordinary efforts to create educational opportunities for Black citizens in Alabama's Black Belt during a period marked by segregation, economic hardship, and limited access to public resources.
Born in Snow Hill, Alabama, in 1869, Edwards rose from humble beginnings to attend the Tuskegee Institute under the leadership of Booker T. Washington. Inspired by Tuskegee's philosophy of education, self-reliance, and community advancement, he returned to rural Alabama determined to establish an institution that could provide both academic and practical instruction to African American students. His efforts led to the founding of the Snow Hill Institute in 1893, a school that became a vital center of learning and leadership for generations of Black Alabamians.
The memoir also offers valuable insight into the educational philosophies that shaped African American advancement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Edwards reflects on the influence of Booker T. Washington, the role of industrial and vocational education, fundraising efforts in the North, the Jeanes Fund, public-school reform, and the broader movement for racial uplift through education. His account illuminates the networks of educators, supporters, and community leaders who worked to expand opportunities for African Americans throughout the South.
At once inspirational and historically significant, Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt remains an essential source for understanding African American education, Southern race relations, and the determination of Black communities to create institutions that fostered dignity, opportunity, and progress. It stands as both a personal testament and a crucial historical document chronicling a transformative era in American history.
James L. Noles
University of Alabama Press, 2004
Edited by William Peery
University of Texas Press, 1954
This is a splendid collection of stories about Texas by Texans—stories that appeared in leading magazines in the first half of the twentieth century.
Authors in this volume:
Judith Armatta
Duke University Press, 2010
Pierre Schlag
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Finalist: 2024 Order of the Coif Book Award | March 3, 2025
The sudden emergence of the Trump nation surprised nearly everyone, including journalists, pundits, political consultants, and academics. When Trump won in 2016, his ascendancy was widely viewed as a fluke. Yet time showed it was instead the rise of a movement—angry, militant, revanchist, and unabashedly authoritarian.
How did this happen? Twilight of the American State offers a sweeping exploration of how law and legal institutions helped prepare the grounds for this rebellious movement. The controversial argument is that, viewed as a legal matter, the American state is not just a liberal democracy, as most Americans believe. Rather, the American state is composed of an uneasy and unstable combination of different versions of the state—liberal democratic, administered, neoliberal, and dissociative. Each of these versions arose through its own law and legal institutions. Each emerged at different times historically. Each was prompted by deficits in the prior versions. Each has survived displacement by succeeding versions. All remain active in the contemporary moment—creating the political-legal dysfunction America confronts today.
Pierre Schlag maps out a big picture view of the tribulations of the American state. The book abjures conventional academic frameworks, sets aside prescriptions for quick fixes, dispenses with lamentations about polarization, and bypasses historical celebrations of the American Spirit.
Sheldon Anderson
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
Brian L. Porto
University of Massachusetts Press, 2026
A cultural and policy history that explains why two neighboring states developed divergent attitudes toward government and culture
At first glance, New Hampshire and Vermont seem like mirror images. Separated only by the Connecticut River, the oft-termed “Twin States” share a common history, relatively small populations, and heavily mountainous and forested landscapes dotted with small towns. Yet despite their similarities, they have evolved strikingly different political cultures, with Vermont prizing cooperation and community and New Hampshire celebrating independence and freedom from government. Perhaps nowhere is this divergence in political visions more pronounced than in their respective state mottos: Vermont’s communal "Freedom and Unity" and New Hampshire’s libertarian “Live Free or Die.”
Twin States, Different Paths explores these contrasting political cultures. Brian Porto traces these differences back to the land itself: to the geology and geography that shaped early settlement, patterns of land use, and the distinct ways people built their communities. From these origins emerged two enduring civic philosophies—New Hampshire’s devotion to low taxes and limited government, and Vermont’s emphasis on equality and shared responsibility. Bringing historical and cultural analysis together with contemporary case studies, Porto examines how these traditions influence each state’s approach to today’s policy challenges, including affordable housing and public-school funding. The result is a clear, balanced portrait of how deeply rooted attitudes toward freedom, unity, and governance continue to shape public life in both states.
Written with scholarly rigor yet in an engaging and accessible style, Twin States, Different Paths fills a notable gap in the study of New England politics. It offers insights not only for scholars and students of political culture, history, and public policy, but also for general readers, policymakers, and residents who wish to understand how two neighbors—so similar in geography and spirit—continue to follow such different paths in defining the role of government and community.
Gillespie, Angus K
Rutgers University Press, 1999
A readable account of both the history of the construction of the Twin Towers and the life of the people who work there.
The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center are more than office buildings. They are symbols of America, just as the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben represent their countries. Commissioned in 1962 and completed in 1976, these edifices are still the tallest man-made structures in New York City. Indeed, the builders intended the towers to make a statement about the importance of the Port of New York and New Jersey. The complex rises like Emerald City, with fountains and sculpture from what was once a dilapidated area of half-abandoned stores.
Folklorist Angus Gillespie takes us on a tour that goes back in time and continues to the present day. He recounts the political maneuvering necessary to get the State of New Jersey to agree to situate the project at its present location. Deftly presenting portraits of the men responsible for mooring the World Trade Center at its present location, Gillespie provides ample evidence that the World Trade Center backers were “second to none in self promotion.”
Twin Towers also demonstrates how engineers prepared the site and solved complex problems (wind patterns, elevator placement, ground-water complications) in order to erect the towers, each with 110 stories. And he discusses the contrast between the architectural community’s almost universal disdain for the towers’ design and the public’s enthusiastic acceptance of the buildings as a symbol of New York.
There is more to the Twin Towers than its architecture, however. People give this complex life, purpose, vibrancy, Gillespie points out. The World Trade Center houses more than 400 businesses and organizations from some 60 different countries engaged in a broad range of international business activities. Through his numerous first-hand interviews conducted with the people who daily work there, Gillespie vividly portrays the world of bankers, shippers, freight forwarders, and traders. With skill and insight, he captures what happens during a normal 24-hour day in the Twin Towers, starting with early morning food deliveries and ending with the patrols of nighttime security guards.
Twin Towers is both a fitting tribute and careful analysis of one of the most resonating symbols in American culture.
Katherine Judith Anderson
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Lawrence Rosen
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Christopher M. Kelty
Duke University Press, 2008
Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.
Hyun Ok Park
Duke University Press, 2005
Drawing on a rich archive of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese sources, Park describes how Koreans negotiated the contradictory demands of national and colonial powers. She demonstrates that the dynamics of global capitalism led the Chinese and Japanese to pursue capitalist expansion while competing for sovereignty. Decentering the nation-state as the primary analytic rubric, her emphasis on the role of global capitalism is a major innovation for understanding nationalism, colonialism, and their immanent links in social space.
Through a regional and temporal comparison of Manchuria from the late nineteenth century until 1945, Park details how national and colonial powers enacted their claims to sovereignty through the regulation of access to land, work, and loans. She shows that among Korean migrants, the complex connections among Chinese laws, Japanese colonial policies, and Korean social practices gave rise to a form of nationalism in tension with global revolution—a nationalism that laid the foundation for what came to be regarded as North Korea’s isolationist politics.
Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov
HAU, 2017
Pierre de Vaux and Sister Perrine de Baume
Iter Press, 2022

Parker T. Hart
Duke University Press, 1990
Ronald J. Mason
University of Michigan Press, 1966