Brian Keith Axel
Duke University Press, 2001
William Elison
University of Chicago Press, 2018

Lennox A. Mills
University of Minnesota Press, 1949
The New World of Southeast Asia was first published in 1949. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Francis Cody
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Stephen Clingman
University of Massachusetts Press, 1986
In Nadine Gordimer's view, the novel can present history as historians cannot. Moreover, this presentation is not fictional in the sense of being “untrue.” Rather, fiction deals with an area of activity usually inaccessible to the sciences of greater externally: the area in which historical process is registered as the subjective experience of individuals in society; fiction give us “history from the inside.” Gordimer's novels give us an extraordinary and unique insight into historical experience in the period in which she writes.
Saiba Varma
Duke University Press, 2020
Urvashi Butalia
Duke University Press, 2000
Michael R. Mahoney
Duke University Press, 2012
Farred, Grant
Temple University Press, 2024
Edited by Iain Darbyshire, Maha Kordofani, Imadeldin Farag, Ruba Candiga, and Helen Pickering
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2014
Vikash Yadav and Jason A. Kirk
Lever Press, 2023
Since the right-wing, Hindu-nationalist government of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power at the national level in 2014, and with its consolidation of power in the 2019 general election, India has witnessed a significant realignment of its national politics and a shift toward the right of the political spectrum. The Politics of India under Modi provides a detailed overview of India’s political trends, economic prospects, and international relations in the twenty-first century.
This book is designed as a supplement and update for existing syllabi that trace India’s political economy from the birth of the republic to the quest for economic liberalization and great power status. Undergraduates and scholars interested in India’s foreign policy and political reform will find value in this timely book.
“The subject of this book is extremely compelling and important, as well as timely. BJP rule and the Modi regime, it is now clear, represent some critical turning points in Indian politics, which have yet to be analyzed in depth academically by experts. I see this book as a key first step in this process.”
-Rina Verma Williams, School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Cincinnati
Elke Zuern
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011
The end of apartheid in South Africa broke down political barriers, extending to all races the formal rights of citizenship, including the right to participate in free elections and parliamentary democracy. But South Africa remains one of the most economically polarized nations in the world. In The Politics of Necessity Elke Zuern forcefully argues that working toward greater socio-economic equality—access to food, housing, land, jobs—is crucial to achieving a successful and sustainable democracy.
Drawing on interviews with local residents and activists in South Africa’s impoverished townships during more than a decade of dramatic political change, Zuern tracks the development of community organizing and reveals the shifting challenges faced by poor citizens. Under apartheid, township residents began organizing to press the government to address the basic material necessities of the poor and expanded their demands to include full civil and political rights. While the movement succeeded in gaining formal political rights, democratization led to a new government that instituted neo-liberal economic reforms and sought to minimize protest. In discouraging dissent and failing to reduce economic inequality, South Africa’s new democracy has continued to disempower the poor.
By comparing movements in South Africa to those in other African and Latin American states, this book identifies profound challenges to democratization. Zuern asserts the fundamental indivisibility of all human rights, showing how protest movements that call attention to socio-economic demands, though often labeled a threat to democracy, offer significant opportunities for modern democracies to evolve into systems of rule that empower all citizens.
Edited by Dudley L. Poston, Jr., and Robert H. Weller
University of Texas Press, 1981
The expression “the New South” was introduced by Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, to a New York audience in 1886; every generation of writers since has used the term. The southern population, unique in its socioeconomic and cultural characteristics, has always been a topic of major interest with U.S. demographers.
The articles in this book, the majority of which were originally presented at the Southern Regional Demographic Group meeting in 1976, deal with fertility, mortality, migration, and the factors that influence these components. A number of the contributors trace patterns of demographic change in the South showing convergence with the rest of the United States. Questions are raised about whether the convergence represents a permanent trend—possibly due to increased communication—or whether further divergence may be expected in the future.
The contributors include Dudley L. Poston, Jr., William J. Serow, Robert H. Weller, Ronald R. Rindfuss, Harry M. Rosenberg, Drusilla Burnham, David F. Sly, Omer R. Galle, Robert N. Stern, Joachim Singelmann, Susan E. Clarke, and George C. Myers.
Romila Thapar
Seagull Books, 2026
Short, rigorous intervention on history-writing in public life.
How does the present reshape what a society chooses to remember as its past? Recent interpretations of India's history have replaced careful inquiry with narratives that mirror contemporary anxieties and ambitions, sidelining the evidence, debate, and plurality that once characterized India’s long intellectual tradition. At stake is a shift from understanding history as a method to treating it as a tool of identity and authority. In The Present Colonizes the Past, Romila Thapar asks: How have cultural and religious identities evolved through interaction rather than isolation? How have dissent and accommodation shaped social change? How have education and public discourse influenced what is accepted as knowledge? And, most urgently, how might weakened institutions and selective pasts redefine our heritage and citizenship?
James H. Cox
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
The forty years of American Indian literature taken up by James H. Cox—the decades between 1920 and 1960—have been called politically and intellectually moribund. On the contrary, Cox identifies a group of American Indian writers who share an interest in the revolutionary potential of the indigenous peoples of Mexico—and whose work demonstrates a surprisingly assertive literary politics in the era.
By contextualizing this group of American Indian authors in the work of their contemporaries, Cox reveals how the literary history of this period is far more rich and nuanced than is generally acknowledged. The writers he focuses on—Todd Downing (Choctaw), Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and D’Arcy McNickle (Confederated Salish and Kootenai)—are shown to be on par with writers of the preceding Progressive and the succeeding Red Power and Native American literary renaissance eras.
Arguing that American Indian literary history of this period actually coheres in exciting ways with the literature of the Native American literary renaissance, Cox repudiates the intellectual and political border that has emerged between the two eras.
B. J. Hollars
University of Alabama Press, 2018
Revisits the inspiring and heroic stories of the Freedom Riders, through their own words.
In May 1961, despite multiple Supreme Court rulings, segregation remained alive and well within the system of interstate travel. All across the American South, interstate buses as well as their travel facilities were divided racially. This blatant disregard for law and morality spurred the Congress of Racial Equality to send thirteen individuals—seven black, six white—on a harrowing bus trip throughout the South as a sign of protest.
These original riders were met with disapproval, arrests and violence along the way, but that did not stop the movement. That summer, more than four hundred Freedom Riders continued their journey—many of them concluding their ride at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm, where they endured further abuses and indignities. As a result of the riders sacrifice, by November of 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission finally put an end to interstate commerce segregation, and in the process, elevated the riders to become a source of inspiration for other civil rights campaigns such as voter registration rights and school desegregation.
While much has been written on the Freedom Rides, far less has been published about the individual riders. Join award-winning author B. J. Hollars as he sets out on his own journey to meet them, retracing the historic route and learning the stories of as many surviving riders as he could. The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders offers an intimate look into the lives and legacies of the riders. Throughout the book these civil rights veterans’ poignant, personal stories offer timely insights into America’s racial past and hopeful future.
Weaving the past with the present, Hollars aims to demystify the legendary journey, while also confronting more modern concerns related to race in America. The Road South is part memoir and part research-based journalism. It transcends the traditional textbook version of this historical journey to highlight the fascinating stories of the many riders—both black and white—who risked their lives to move the country forward.
Richard David Williams
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Shefali Chandra
Duke University Press, 2012
Pete Daniel
University of Illinois Press, 1972
Mahasweta Devi
Seagull Books, 2026
A collection of Mahasweta Devi's activist essays, reportage, and editorials on rural development and dispossession.
What do India’s poorest communities reveal about power, land, and survival? In the late 1970s, writer Mahasweta Devi shifted her focus to the lives of Adivasi (Indigenous peoples of the Indian subcontinent) and Dalit communities in eastern India, especially Bihar and West Bengal. Traveling widely and staying with the communities she wrote about, she drew on these firsthand encounters in her writing. She also edited the Bengali quarterly Bortika, making the journal a space for peasants, laborers, workers, and other marginalized groups to speak for themselves.
The Slaves of Palamau and Other Writings brings together a representative selection from her activist prose of the 1980s and early 1990s, drawn from essays, reportage, and editorials. These pieces examine rural development; dispossession and land alienation; environmental damage; and the conditions of landless laborers, sharecroppers, bonded and contract workers, miners, and Indigenous communities, with the steady attention that also informs her fiction.
Clifton Crais and Thomas V. McClendon, eds.
Duke University Press, 2013
John Richard Dennett, with a new introduction by Caroline E. Janney
University of Alabama Press, 2010
This classic report originally appeared as a series of articles in the Nation between July 8, 1865, and April 11, 1866. Dennett traveled in seven states—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi—at the very beginning of Reconstruction. His remarkably prophetic account of the recently defeated South is a major source for the history of this transition.
Dewey W. Grantham
University of Arkansas Press, 2001
Nayanika Mookherjee
Duke University Press, 2015
John Clifford Holt, ed.
Duke University Press, 2011

Saadia Toor
Pluto Press, 2011
The State of Islam tells the story of Pakistan through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the global rise of militant Islam.
Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined ‘political’ realm, Saadia Toor highlights the significance of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period. This extra dimension allows Toor to explain how the struggle between Marxists and liberal nationalists was influenced and eventually engulfed by the agenda of the religious right.
Timely and unique, this book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the roots of modern Pakistan and the likely outcome of current power struggles in the country.
Mike Bunn
University of Alabama Press, 2025
Where nature meets history—explore Alabama’s hidden river legacy.
The Tensaw River introduces one of the American South’s richest and most fertile natural features. Author Mike Bunn is director of Historic Blakeley State Park, which is nestled in a prominent bend of the majestic Tensaw River. Reading Bunn is like sailing with a knowledgeable captain along the river’s natural and cultural byways as he offers a treasury of stories and facts that illuminate the river’s astonishing flora and fauna and the sweep of human history along the river’s ageless, meandering waterways.
Forming the eastern boundary of the expansive Mobile-Tensaw Delta, the Tensaw has had little industrial development. Left largely undisturbed, the river still flows free and bountiful into the grand estuary of Mobile Bay in ways and along vistas that would be recognizable to Native Americans centuries ago and to pioneers who arrived before Alabama became a state.
Bunn’s unforgettable stories in The Tensaw River trace the construction and occupation of the Bottle Creek site, an important mound complex built by Southeastern Native Americans a millennia ago. Nearby Blakeley is a spectral antebellum ghost town whose lost memories also tease the imagination. During the Civil War, the boom of artillery fire in the battle that sealed the fate of the city of Mobile echoed along the bends in the Tensaw.
Located near popular Gulf Coast travel destinations, the Tensaw’s forty-one-mile-long “Forgotten Cultural Heritage Corridor” is a gateway to the enchanting beauty of—and humankind’s enduring relationship to—the landscape of the American South.
Harold E. Scheub
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996
Terris, Daniel
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Mary Ingouville Burton
Ohio University Press, 2017
In 1995, South Africa’s new government set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a lynchpin of the country’s journey forward from apartheid. In contrast to the Nuremberg Trials and other retributive responses to atrocities, the TRC’s emphasis on reconciliation marked a restorative approach to addressing human rights violations and their legacies. The hearings, headed by Bishop Desmond Tutu, began in spring of 1996.
The commission was set up with three purposes: to investigate abuses, to assist victims with rehabilitation, and to consider perpetrators’ requests for amnesty. More than two decades after the first hearings, the TRC’s legacy remains mixed. Many families still do not know what became of their loved ones, and the commission came under legal challenges both from ex-president F. W. de Klerk and the African National Congress. Yet, the TRC fulfilled a vital role in the transition from apartheid to democracy, and has become a model for other countries.
This latest addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series is a trenchant look at the TRC’s entire, stunningly ambitious project. And as a longtime activist for justice in South Africa and a former commissioner of the TRC, Mary Ingouville Burton is uniquely positioned to write this complex story.
Pamela Reynolds
Duke University Press, 2019
Harold Scheub
Ohio University Press, 2010
There are many collections of African oral traditions, but few as carefully organized as The Uncoiling Python. Harold Scheub, one of the world’s leading scholars of African oral traditions and folklore, explores the ways in which oral traditions have served to combat and subvert colonial domination in South Africa. From the time colonial forces first came to southern Africa in 1487, oral and written traditions have been a bulwark against what became 350 years of colonial rule, characterized by the racist policies of apartheid. The Uncoiling Python: South African Storytellers and Resistance is the first in-depth study of oral tradition as a means of survival.
In open insurrections and other subversive activities Africans resisted the daily humiliations of colonial rule, but perhaps the most effective and least apparent expression of subversion was through indigenous storytelling and poetic traditions. Harold Scheub has collected the stories and poetry of the Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, and Ndebele peoples to present a fascinating analysis of how the apparently harmless tellers of tales and creators of poetry acted as front-line soldiers.
Manan Desai
Temple University Press, 2020
The United States of India shows how Indian and American writers in the United States played a key role in the development of anticolonial thought in the years during and immediately following the First World War. For Indians Lajpat Rai and Dhan Gopal Mukerji, and Americans Agnes Smedley, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Katherine Mayo, the social and historical landscape of America and India acted as a reflective surface. Manan Desai considers how their interactions provided a “transnational refraction”—a political optic and discursive strategy that offered ways to imagine how American history could shed light on an anticolonial Indian future.
Desai traces how various expatriate and immigrant Indians formed political movements that rallied for American support for the cause of Indian independence. These intellectuals also developed new forms of writing about subjugation in the U.S. and India. Providing an examination of race, caste, nationhood, and empire, Desai astutely examines this network of Indian and American writers and the genres and social questions that fomented solidarity across borders.
Robert Oliver Mellown
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Neetu Khanna
Duke University Press, 2020
Richard K. Wolf
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Edited by Carolyn Frances Baker Lewis
University of Alabama Press, 2004
A unique guide to Florida's frontier history along Indian River.
The Winter Sailor is a historical adventure that details the yearly winter travels of Francis R. Stebbins to Florida's Indian River. Stebbins, a writer from Michigan, visited Florida in March of 1878 and became entranced by its pristine beauty. Subsequently, Stebbins and his traveling companions made annual visits to Indian River—until 1888 when tragedy struck and ended Stebbins' yearly journeys.
Being an observant traveler, Stebbins began a series of descriptive articles for his hometown newspaper that chronicled his journeys to the Indian River area. Stebbins's articles tell of his own personal experiences during his leisurely visits, which included such activities as hunting and fishing, studying the natural surroundings, and excavating Indian mounds. What Stebbins enjoyed most was sailing down the river interviewing townspeople and examining local attractions as he went. His articles also detail the lifestyle of the region, food, fashion, industry, history, environment, and changes that occurred over time. Stebbins's articles not only entertained and informed but also became a travelogue for his readers. He inspired northern travelers to go south and visit Florida, which contributed to the beginnings of large-scale tourism in the region.
The Winter Sailor combines Stebbins's 49 articles along with three by his companions, to provide an enjoyable, historical guide. Unique among 19th-century travelogues, this fascinating look into Florida's past documents a decade of change to the Indian River wilderness and becomes Stebbins's gift to the present.
Edited by Jocelyn L. Buckner
University of Alabama Press, 2026
The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference
Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference is dedicated to the growth and improvement of all forms of theatre throughout a twelve-state region encompassing Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The purposes of the conference are to unite people and organizations within the region and elsewhere who have an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. THS is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and is included in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. THS is cataloged in numerous periodical indexes and databases.
Along with sixteen book reviews on the latest publications from established and emerging voices in the field, this issue of Theatre History Studies contains four sections with two introductions and nine essays total. In the general section, three essays consider performance histories and reevaluations of historiographical approaches. The special section on queer historiographies responds to calls for a more expansive and inclusive understanding of trans histories and for centralizing contemporary queer performers. In part III, the Robert A. Schanke Research Award-winning paper from the 2024 MATC conference by Ali-Reza Mirsajadi addresses erasures in the theatrical archive and highlights the long legacy of queer, Southwest Asian, and North African representation in dramatic texts. Taken together, volume 44 captures how this journal serves theatre historians as scholars and laborers as they work to attend and tend to their field.
Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker
University of Iowa Press, 2005
Alistair Mutch
Aberdeen University Press, 2017
Jill E Kelly
Michigan State University Press, 2018
Jack, Malcolm
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Allister Sparks
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Sonita Sarker and Esha Niyogi De, eds.
Duke University Press, 2002
The contributors—including literary and film theorists, geographers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—show how the dominant colonial powers prefigured the ideologies of gender and sexuality that neocolonial nation-states have later refigured; investigate economic and artistic production; and explore labor, capital, and social change. The essays cover a range of locales—including Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Borneo, Indonesia, and the United States. In investigating issues of power, mobility, memory, and solidarity in recent eras of globalization, the contributors—scholars and activists from South Asia, Southeast Asia, England, Australia, Canada, and the United States—illuminate various facets of the new concept of trans-status subjects.
Trans-Status Subjects carves out a new area of inquiry at the intersection of feminisim and critical geography, as well as globalization, postcolonial, and cultural studies.
Contributors. Anannya Bhattacharjee, Esha Niyogi De, Karen Gaul, Ketu Katrak, Karen Leonard, Philippa Levine, Kathryn McMahon, Andrew McRae, Susan Morgan, Nihal Perera, Sonita Sarker, Jael Silliman, Sylvia Tiwon, Gisele Yasmeen
Bram Büscher
Duke University Press, 2013
Based on extensive research in southern Africa with the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Conservation and Development Project, Büscher explains how the successful promotion of transfrontier conservation as a "win-win" solution happens not only in spite of troubling contradictions and problems, but indeed because of them. This is what he refers to as the "politics of neoliberal conservation," which receives its strength from effectively combining strategies of consensus, antipolitics, and marketing. Drawing on long-term, multilevel ethnographic research, Büscher argues that transfrontier conservation projects are not as concerned with on-the-ground development as they are purported to be. Instead, they are reframing environmental protection and sustainable development to fit an increasingly contradictory world order.
Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde
Temple University Press, 2013
Vietnamese diasporic relations affect—and are directly affected by—events in Viet Nam. In Transnationalizing Viet Nam, Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde explores these connections, providing a nuanced understanding of this globalized community. Valverde draws on 250 interviews and almost two decades of research to show the complex relationship between Vietnamese in the diaspora and those back at the homeland.
Arguing that Vietnamese immigrant lives are inherently transnational, she shows how their acts form virtual communities via the Internet, organize social movements, exchange music and create art, find political representation, and even dissent. Valverde also exposes how generational, gender, class, and political tensions threaten to divide the ethnic community.
Transnationalizing Viet Nam paints a vivid picture of the complex political and personal allegiances that exist within Vietnamese America and shape the relations between this heterogeneous community and its country of origin.
In the series Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ
Leilah Vevaina
Duke University Press, 2023
Alec Campbell
Michigan State University Press, 2010
For 100,000 years, inhabitants of Botswana's Tsodilo Hills region left behind a record of their gathering wild foods, hunting, fishing, mining, rock painting, cattle herding, and metalworking, as well as of their participation in a coast-to-coast trade network. During the past 30 years, archaeologists, paleontologists, historians, and anthropologists have worked at Tsodilo.
Here is the Tsodilo story, the Hills' revelations brought together in one volume, beautifully illuminated by more than 150 color plates and maps. For scientists, this work brings together decades of research at a site in the Kalahari that was virtually unknown until the late 1970s. Tsodilo Hills also offers a fascinating glimpse into the history of the Kalahari Desert to the general reader, as well as an unsurpassedguide to an extraordinary world to the desert's many tourists.
G. Ward Hubbs
University of Alabama Press, 2019