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

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The Contemporary History of Latin America

Tulio Halperín Donghi

Duke University Press, 1993

For a quarter of a century, Tulio Halperín Donghi's Historia Contemporánea de América Latina has been the most influential and widely read general history of Latin America in the Spanish-speaking world. Unparalleled in scope, attentive to the paradoxes of Latin American reality, and known for its fine-grained interpretation, it is now available for the first time in English. Revised and updated by the author, superbly translated, this landmark of Latin American historiography will be accessible to an entirely new readership.
Beginning with a survey of the late colonial landscape, The Contemporary History of Latin America traces the social, economic, and political development of the region to the late twentieth century, with special emphasis on the period since 1930. Chapters are organized chronologically, each beginning with a general description of social and economic developments in Latin America generally, followed by specific attention to political matters in each country. What emerges is a well-rounded and detailed picture of the forces at work throughout Latin American history.
This book will be of great interest to all those seeking a general overview of modern Latin American history, and its distinctive Latin American voice will enhance its significance for all students of Latin American history.

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The Contemporary Medieval in Practice

Claire A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing

University College London, 2019

Contemporary art can provide medievalists with innovative ways to reframe the past. Meanwhile, medievalists offer contemporary art insights into cultural works of the past that have been reworked in the present.

Speculative and nontraditional, The Contemporary Medieval in Practice adapts the conventional scholarly essay to reflect its interdisciplinary subject. Creative critical writing encourages the introduction of dialogue, poetry, and short essays within scholarly style, and this, the authors argue, makes it an ideal format for exploring innovative pathways from the contemporary to the medieval. Discussing urgent critical discourses and cultural practices, such as the study of the environment and the ethics of understanding bodies, identities, and histories, this short, accessible book focuses on early medieval British culture, or Anglo-Saxon studies, and its relation with, use of, and reworking in contemporary visual, poetic, and material culture after 1950.

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The Contest for Knowledge

Debates over Women's Learning in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Diamante Medaglia Faini, Aretafila Savini de' Rossi, and the Accademia de' Ricovrati

University of Chicago Press, 2005

At a time when women were generally excluded from scholarly discourse in the intellectual centers of Europe, four extraordinary female letterate proved their parity as they lectured in prominent scientific and literary academies and published in respected journals. During the Italian Enlightenment, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola, Diamante Medaglia Faini, and Aretafila Savini de' Rossi were afforded unprecedented deference in academic debates and epitomized the increasing ability of women to influence public discourse.

The Contest for Knowledge reveals how these four women used the methods and themes of their male counterparts to add their voices to the vigorous and prolific debate over the education of women during the eighteenth century. In the texts gathered here, the women discuss the issues they themselves thought most urgent for the equality of women in Italian society specifically and in European culture more broadly. Their thoughts on this important subject reveal how crucial the eighteenth century was in the long history of debates about women in the academy.

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The Contest for Liberty

Military Leadership in the Continental Army, 1775–1783

Seanegan P. Sculley

Westholme Publishing, 2019

Winner of the 2019 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award in Institutional History
How American Colonial Ideals Shaped Command, Discipline, and Honor in the U.S. Armed Forces
In the summer of 1775, a Virginia gentleman-planter was given command of a New England army laying siege to British-occupied Boston. With his appointment, the Continental Army was born. Yet the cultural differences between those serving in the army and their new commander-in-chief led to conflicts from the very beginning that threatened to end the Revolution before it could start. The key challenge for General George Washington was establishing the standards by which the soldiers would be led by their officers. What kind of man deserved to be an officer? Under what conditions would soldiers agree to serve? And how far could the army and its leaders go to discipline soldiers who violated those enlistment conditions? As historian Seanegan P. Sculley reveals in Contest for Liberty: Military Leadership in the Continental Army, 1775–1783, these questions could not be determined by Washington alone. His junior officers and soldiers believed that they too had a part to play in determining how and to what degree their superior officers exercised military authority and how the army would operate during the war. A cultural negotiation concerning the use of and limits to military authority was worked out between the officers and soldiers of the Continental Army; although an unknown concept at the time, it is what we call leadership today. How this army was led and how the interactions between officers and soldiers from the various states of the new nation changed their understandings of the proper exercise of military authority was finally codified in General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s The Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, first published in 1779. The result was a form of military leadership that recognized the autonomy of the individual soldiers, a changing concept of honor, and a new American tradition of military service.

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The Contest

The 1968 Election and the War for America's Soul

Michael Schumacher

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A dramatic, deeply informed account of one of the most consequential elections and periods in American history

1968—rife with riots, assassinations, anti–Vietnam War protests, and realpolitik—was one of the most tumultuous years in the twentieth century, culminating in one of the most consequential presidential elections in American history. The Contest tells the story of that contentious election and that remarkable year. Bringing a fresh perspective to events that still resonate half a century later, this book is especially timely, giving us the long view of a turning point in American culture and politics.

Author Michael Schumacher sets the stage with a deep look at the people with important roles in the unfolding drama: Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and especially Hubert H. Humphrey, whose papers and journals afford surprising new insights. Following these politicians in the lead-up to the primaries, through the chaotic conventions, and down the home stretch to the general election, The Contest combines biographical and historical details to create a narrative as intimate in human detail as it is momentous in scope and significance.

An election year when the competing forces of law and order and social justice were on the ballot, the Vietnam War divided the country, and the liberal regime begun with Franklin D. Roosevelt was on the defensive, 1968 marked a profound shift in the nation’s culture and sense of itself. Thorough in its research and spellbinding in the telling, Schumacher’s book brings sharp focus to that year and its lessons for our current critical moment in American politics.

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The Contested Crown

Repatriation Politics between Europe and Mexico

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Following conflicting desires for an Aztec crown, this book explores the possibilities of repatriation.

In The Contested Crown, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll meditates on the case of a spectacular feather headdress believed to have belonged to Montezuma, emperor of the Aztecs. This crown has long been the center of political and cultural power struggles, and it is one of the most contested museum claims between Europe and the Americas. Taken to Europe during the conquest of Mexico, it was placed at Ambras Castle, the Habsburg residence of the author’s ancestors, and is now in Vienna’s Welt Museum. Mexico has long requested to have it back, but the Welt Museum uses science to insist it is too fragile to travel.

Both the biography of a cultural object and a history of collecting and colonizing, this book offers an artist’s perspective on the creative potentials of repatriation. Carroll compares Holocaust and colonial ethical claims, and she considers relationships between indigenous people, international law and the museums that amass global treasures, the significance of copies, and how conservation science shapes collections. Illustrated with diagrams and rare archival material, this book brings together global history, European history, and material culture around this fascinating object and the debates about repatriation.

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The Context of Ancient Drama

Eric Csapo and William J. Slater

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Ancient theater has always caught contemporary interest, despite the eclectic nature of the surviving evidence. Tourists wander the remains of buildings at Epidauros and Athens, and generations of people have pondered Medea and Oedipus, yet it can be surprisingly difficult to find reliable, accessible information on these plays and their theaters. The Context of Ancient Drama remedies this situation. It provides, in modern English translation, documents that illustrate all aspects of the drama of antiquity, other than the text of the dramas themselves. For convenience the material is grouped in thematic sections, such as "music," or "judging." The illustrations give well-known examples of the kind of evidence that has survived to us. Plans of theaters are provided, to exemplify the outlines of the buildings' development, and an extensive glossary of terms offers information to the interested amateur and the theater specialist alike. The Context of Ancient Drama will be of interest to a wide spectrum of students and teachers. Theater historians, students of dramatic performance and the visual arts, and students and teachers in literature-in-translation courses will all find much that speaks to them.

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The Continental Dollar

How the American Revolution Was Financed with Paper Money

Farley Grubb

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An illuminating history of America’s original credit market.

The Continental Dollar is a revelatory history of how the fledgling United States paid for its first war. Farley Grubb upends the common telling of this story, in which the United States printed cross-colony money, called Continentals, to serve as an early fiat currency—a currency that is not tied to a commodity like gold, but rather to a legal authority. As Grubb details, the Continental was not a fiat currency, but a “zero-coupon bond”—a wholly different species of money. As bond payoffs were pushed into the future, the money’s value declined, killing the Continentals’ viability years before the Revolutionary War would officially end.

Drawing on decades of exhaustive mining of eighteenth-century records, The Continental Dollar is an essential origin story of the early American monetary system, promising to serve as the benchmark for critical work for decades to come.

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The Continuous Path

Pueblo Movement and the Archaeology of Becoming

Edited by Samuel Duwe and Robert W. Preucel

University of Arizona Press, 2019

Southwestern archaeology has long been fascinated with the scale and frequency of movement in Pueblo history, from great migrations to short-term mobility. By collaborating with Pueblo communities, archaeologists are learning that movement was—and is—much more than the result of economic opportunity or a response to social conflict. Movement is one of the fundamental concepts of Pueblo thought and is essential in shaping the identities of contemporary Pueblos.

The Continuous Path challenges archaeologists to take Pueblo notions of movement seriously by privileging Pueblo concepts of being and becoming in the interpretation of anthropological data. In this volume, archaeologists, anthropologists, and Native community members weave multiple perspectives together to write histories of particular Pueblo peoples. Within these histories are stories of the movements of people, materials, and ideas, as well as the interconnectedness of all as the Pueblo people find, leave, and return to their middle places. What results is an emphasis on historical continuities and the understanding that the same concepts of movement that guided the actions of Pueblo people in the past continue to do so into the present and the future.

Movement is a never-ending and directed journey toward an ideal existence and a continuous path of becoming. This path began as the Pueblo people emerged from the underworld and sought their middle places, and it continues today at multiple levels, integrating the people, the village, and the individual.

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The Contours of America’s Cold War

Matthew Farish

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

In The Contours of America's Cold War, Matthew Farish explores new ways of conceptualizing space as part of post-World War II American militarism. He demonstrates how the social sciences were militarized in the early Cold War period, producing spatial knowledge that was of immediate use to the state as it sought to expand its reach across the globe.

Geographic knowledge generated for the Cold War was a form of power, Farish argues, and it was given an urgency in the panels, advisory boards, and study groups established to address the challenges of an atomic world. He investigates how the scales of the city, the continent, the region, the globe, and, by extension, outer space, were brought together as strategic spaces, categories that provided a cartographic orientation for the Cold War and influenced military deployments, diplomacy, espionage, and finance.

Farish analyzes the surprising range of knowledge production involved in the project of claiming and classifying American space. Backed by military and intelligence funding, physicists and policy makers, soldiers and social scientists came together to study and shape the United States and its place in a divided world.

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The Control of the Past

Herbert Butterfield and the Pitfalls of Official History

Patrick Salmon

University of London Press, 2021

A reflection on nation-building, identity, and the stories governments tell us about ourselves.

In 1949, English historian Herbert Butterfield published “Official History: Its Pitfalls and Its Criteria,” a now-famous diatribe against the practice of publishing official history. Butterfield was one of the earliest and strongest critics of what he saw as the British government’s attempts to control the past through the writing of history. But why was Butterfield so hostile to state-sanctioned history, and why do his views still matter today?

This important new book details how successive governments have applied a selective approach to the past in order to tell or retell Britain’s national history. Providing a unique overview of the main trends of official history in Britain since World War II, the book details how Butterfield came to suspect that the British government was trying to suppress vital documents revealing the Duke of Windsor’s dealings with Nazi Germany. This seemed to confirm his long-held belief that all governments would seek to manipulate history if they could and conceal the truth if they could not.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, official history is still being written. The Control of the Past concludes with an insider’s perspective on the many issues it faces today—on freedom of information, social media, and reengaging with our nation’s colonial legacy. Governments have recently been given many reminders that history matters, and Butterfield’s work reminds us that we must remain vigilant in monitoring how they respond to the challenge.

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The Controversy of Renaissance Art

Alexander Nagel

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Many studies have shown that images—their presence in the daily lives of the faithful, the means used to control them, and their adaptation to secular uses—were at the heart of the Reformation crisis in northern Europe. But the question as it affects the art of Italy has been raised only in highly specialized studies.

In this book, Alexander Nagel provides the first truly synthetic study of the controversies over religious images that pervaded Italian life both before and parallel to the Reformation north of the Alps. Tracing the intertwined relationship of artistic innovation and archaism, as well as the new pressures placed on the artistic media in the midst of key developments in religious iconography, The Controversy of Renaissance Art offers an important and original history of humanist thought and artistic experimentation from one of our most acclaimed historians of art.

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The Conundrum of Class

Public Discourse on the Social Order in America

Martin J. Burke

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Martin Burke traces the surprisingly complicated history of the idea of class in America from the forming of a new nation to the heart of the Gilded Age.

Surveying American political, social, and intellectual life from the late 17th to the end of the 19th century, Burke examines in detail the contested discourse about equality—the way Americans thought and wrote about class, class relations, and their meaning in society.

Burke explores a remarkable range of thought to establish the boundaries of class and the language used to describe it in the works of leading political figures, social reformers, and moral philosophers. He traces a shift from class as a legal category of ranks and orders to socio-economic divisions based on occupations and income. Throughout the century, he finds no permanent consensus about the meaning of class in America and instead describes a culture of conflicting ideas and opinions.

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The Conundrum of Russian Capitalism

The Post-Soviet Economy in the World System

Ruslan Dzarasov

Pluto Press, 2013

The Conundrum of Russian Capitalism looks at the nature of Russian capitalism following the fall of the Soviet Union, showing how the system originated in the degenerated Soviet bureaucracy and the pressures of global capital. Ruslan Dzarasov provides a detailed analysis of Russian corporate governance, labour practices and investment strategies.

By comparing the practices of Russian companies to the typical models of corporate governance and investment behaviour of big firms in the West, Dzarasov sheds light on the relationship between the core and periphery of the capitalist world-system.

This groundbreaking study shows that Russia's new capitalism is not a break with the country's Stalinist past, but in fact the continuation of that tradition.

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The Converse of the Pen

Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter

Bruce Redford

University of Chicago Press, 1987

Though historians of English literature have long labeled the eighteenth century the golden age of letter writing, few have paid more than lip service to the unique epistolary craftsmanship of the period. Bruce Redford corrects this omission with the first sustained investigation of the eighteenth-century familiar letter as a literary form in its own right. His study supplies the reader with a critical approach and biographical perspective for appreciating the genre that defined an era.

Redford examines six masters of the "talking letter": Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, William Cowper, Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole, James Boswell, and Samuel Johnson. All seek the paradoxical goal of artful spontaneity. Each exploits the distinctive resources of the eighteenth-century letter writer: a flexible conversational manner, a repertoire of literary and social allusion, a flair for dramatic impersonation. The voices of these letter writers "make distance, presence," in Samuel Richardson's phrase, by devising substitutes for gesture, vocal inflection, and physical context, turning each letter into a performance—an act. The resulting verbal constructs create a mysterious tension between the claims of fact and the possibilities of art. Redford recovers a neglected literary form and makes possible a deeper understanding of major eighteenth-century writers who devoted much of their talent and time to "the converse of the pen."

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The Convict and the Colonel

A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean

Richard Price

Duke University Press, 2006

An election day massacre in colonial Martinique. A “mad” artist who lives in a cave. A satirical wooden bust of a white colonel. The artist’s banishment to the Devil’s Island penal colony for “impertinence.” And a young anthropologist who arrives in Martinique in 1962, on the eve of massive modernization.

In a stunning combination of scholarship and storytelling, the award-winning anthropologist Richard Price draws on long-term ethnography, archival documents, cinema and street theater, and Caribbean fiction and poetry to explore how one generation’s powerful historical metaphors could so quickly become the next generation’s trivial pursuit, how memories of oppression, inequality, and struggle could so easily become replaced by nostalgia, complicity, and celebration.

“A superb callaloo of a book. . . . Richard Price has a remarkable grasp of the literatures of the Caribbean, and draws on this resource to explore the underlying insanity of the colonial experience, as well as the bewildering complexities of the postcolonial world where memory is erased or invented according to the demands of a market modernity.”—George Lamming, author of The Pleasures of Exile

“By beautifully crafting elements as disparate as biographical data, sociological studies, literary sources, and archival documents, Richard Price’s research is more fascinating than a piece of fiction.”—Maryse Condé, author of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“Price does it again. Mixing eras, genres, and voices, he carries the reader through the contradictory streams of historical consciousness in the Caribbean island of Martinique. The result is as complex and as enticing as the sea it evokes.”—Michel-Rolph Trouillot, author of Silencing the Past

“Filled with insights that are at once theoretical, methodological, and ethnographic, The Convict and the Colonel is required reading for anyone interested in colonialism, memory, and contemporary Caribbean societies.”—Jennifer Cole, American Ethnologist

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The Convolutions of Historical Politics

Alexei Miller

Central European University Press, 2012

Thirteen essays by scholars from seven countries discuss the political use and abuse of history in the recent decades with particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia as case studies), but also includes articles on Germany, Japan and Turkey, which provide a much needed comparative dimension. The main focus is on new conditions of political utilization of history in post-communist context, which is characterized by lack of censorship and political pluralism. The phenomenon of history politics became extremely visible in Central and Eastern Europe in the past decade, and remains central for political agenda in many countries of the regions. Each essay is a case study contributing to the knowledge about collective memory and political use of history, offering a new theoretical twist. The studies look at actors (from political parties to individual historians), institutions (museums, Institutes of National remembrance, special political commissions), methods, political rationale and motivations behind this phenomenon.

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The Cooking of History

How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion

Stephan Palmié

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santería and other religions related to Orisha worship—a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa—Stephan Palmié has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban religion. In The Cooking of History he provides a comprehensive analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on the cultural history of the Afro-Atlantic World.

Understood largely through its rituals and ceremonies, Santería and related religions have been a challenge for anthropologists to link to a hypothetical African past. But, Palmié argues, precisely by relying on the notion of an aboriginal African past, and by claiming to authenticate these religions via their findings, anthropologists—some of whom have converted to these religions—have exerted considerable influence upon contemporary practices. Critiquing widespread and damaging simplifications that posit religious practices as stable and self-contained, Palmié calls for a drastic new approach that properly situates cultural origins within the complex social environments and scholarly fields in which they are investigated.

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The Cool and the Crazy

Pop Fifties Cinema

Stanfield, Peter

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Explosive! Amazing! Terrifying! You won’t believe your eyes!

Such movie taglines were common in the 1950s, as Hollywood churned out a variety of low-budget pictures that were sold on the basis of their sensational content and topicality. While a few of these movies have since become canonized by film fans and critics, a number of the era’s biggest fads have now faded into obscurity. The Cool and the Crazy examines seven of these film cycles, including short-lived trends like boxing movies, war pictures, and social problem films detailing the sordid and violent life of teenagers, as well as uniquely 1950s takes on established genres like the gangster picture.

Peter Stanfield reveals how Hollywood sought to capitalize upon current events, moral panics, and popular fads, making movies that were “ripped from the headlines” on everything from the Korean War to rock and roll. As he offers careful readings of several key films, he also considers the broader historical and commercial contexts in which these films were produced, marketed, and exhibited. In the process, Stanfield uncovers surprising synergies between Hollywood and other arenas of popular culture, like the ways that the fashion trend for blue jeans influenced the 1950s Western.

Delivering sharp critical insights in jazzy, accessible prose, The Cool and the Crazy offers an appreciation of cinema as a “pop” medium, unabashedly derivative, faddish, and ephemeral. By studying these long-burst bubbles of 1950s “pop,” Stanfield reveals something new about what films do and the pleasures they provide.

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The Coolie Speaks

Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba

Lisa Yun

Temple University Press, 2009

Introducing radical counter-visions of race and slavery, and probing the legal and philosophical questions raised by indenture, The Coolie Speaks offers the first critical reading of a massive testimony case from Cuba in 1874. From this case, Yun traces the emergence of a "coolie narrative" that forms a counterpart to the "slave narrative." The written and oral testimonies of nearly 3,000 Chinese laborers in Cuba, who toiled alongside African slaves, offer a rare glimpse into the nature of bondage and the tortuous transition to freedom. Trapped in one of the last standing systems of slavery in the Americas, the Chinese described their hopes and struggles, and their unrelenting quest for freedom.

Yun argues that the testimonies from this case suggest radical critiques of the "contract" institution, the basis for free modern society. The example of Cuba, she suggests, constitutes the early experiment and forerunner of new contract slavery, in which the contract itself, taken to its extreme, was wielded as a most potent form of enslavement and complicity. Yun further considers the communal biography of a next-generation Afro-Chinese Cuban author and raises timely theoretical questions regarding race, diaspora, transnationalism, and globalization.

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The Cord Keepers

Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village

Frank Salomon

Duke University Press, 2004

None of the world’s “lost writings” have proven more perplexing than the mysterious script in which the Inka Empire kept its records. Ancient Andean peoples encoded knowledge in knotted cords of cotton or wool called khipus. In The Cord Keepers, the distinguished anthropologist Frank Salomon breaks new ground with a close ethnography of one Andean village where villagers, surprisingly, have conserved a set of these enigmatic cords to the present day. The “quipocamayos,” as the villagers call them, form a sacred patrimony. Keying his reading to the internal life of the ancient kin groups that own the khipus, Salomon suggests that the multicolored cords, with their knots and lavishly woven ornaments, did not mimic speech as most systems of writing do, but instead were anchored in nonverbal codes. The Cord Keepers makes a compelling argument for a close intrinsic link between rituals and visual-sign systems. It indicates that, while Andean graphic representation may differ radically from familiar ideas of writing, it may not lie beyond the reach of scholarly interpretation.

In 1994, Salomon witnessed the use of khipus as civic regalia on the heights of Tupicocha, in Peru’s central Huarochirí region. By observing the rich ritual surrounding them, studying the village’s written records from past centuries, and analyzing the khipus themselves, Salomon opens a fresh chapter in the quest for khipu decipherment. He draws on a decade’s field research, early colonial records, and radiocarbon and fiber analysis. Challenging the prevailing idea that the use of khipus ended under early Spanish colonial rule, Salomon reveals that these beautiful objects served, apparently as late as the early twentieth century, to document households’ contribution to their kin groups and these kin groups’ contribution to their village. The Cord Keepers is a major contribution to Andean history and, more broadly, to understandings of writing and literacy.

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The Corn Wolf

Michael Taussig

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Collecting a decade of work from iconic anthropologist and writer Michael Taussig, The Corn Wolf pinpoints a moment of intellectual development for the master stylist, exemplifying the “nervous system” approach to writing and truth that has characterized his trajectory. Pressured by the permanent state of emergency that imbues our times, this approach marries storytelling with theory, thickening spiraling analysis with ethnography and putting the study of so-called primitive societies back on the anthropological agenda as a way of better understanding the sacred in everyday life.

The leading figure of these projects is the corn wolf, whom Wittgenstein used in his fierce polemic on Frazer’s Golden Bough. For just as the corn wolf slips through the magic of language in fields of danger and disaster, so we are emboldened to take on the widespread culture of academic—or what he deems “agribusiness”—writing, which strips ethnography from its capacity to surprise and connect with other worlds, whether peasant farmers in Colombia, Palestinians in Israel, protestors in Zuccotti Park, or eccentric yet fundamental aspects of our condition such as animism, humming, or the acceleration of time.

A glance at the chapter titles—such as “The Stories Things Tell” or “Iconoclasm Dictionary”—along with his zany drawings, testifies to the resonant sensibility of these works, which lope like the corn wolf through the boundaries of writing and understanding.

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The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva

The 1540-1542 Route across the Southwest

Richard Flint

University Press of Colorado, 1997

The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva is an engaging record of key research by archaeologists, ethnographers, historians, and geographers concerning the first organized European entrance into what is now the American Southwest and northwestern Mexico.

In search of where the expedition went and what peoples it encountered, this volume explores the fertile valleys of Sonora, the basins and ranges of southern Arizona, the Zuni pueblos and the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, and the Llano Estacado of the Texas panhandle.

The twenty-one contributors to the volume have pursued some of the most significant lines of research in the field in the last fifty years; their techniques range from documentary analysis and recording traditional stories to detailed examination of the landscape and excavation of campsites and Indian towns. With more confidence than ever before, researchers are closing in on the route of the conquistadors.

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The Corporate Commonwealth

Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651

Henry S. Turner

University of Chicago Press, 2016

The Corporate Commonwealth traces the evolution of corporations during the English Renaissance and explores the many types of corporations that once flourished. Along the way, the book offers important insights into our own definitions of fiction, politics, and value.

Henry S. Turner uses the resources of economic and political history, literary analysis, and political philosophy to demonstrate how a number of English institutions with corporate associations—including universities, guilds, towns and cities, and religious groups—were gradually narrowed to the commercial, for-profit corporation we know today, and how the joint-stock corporation, in turn, became both a template for the modern state and a political force that the state could no longer contain. Through innovative readings of works by Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes, among others, Turner tracks the corporation from the courts to the stage, from commonwealth to colony, and from the object of utopian fiction to the subject of tragic violence. A provocative look at the corporation’s peculiar character as both an institution and a person, The Corporate Commonwealth uses the past to suggest ways in which today’s corporations might be refashioned into a source of progressive and collective public action.

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The Corporation That Changed the World

How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational

Nick Robins

Pluto Press, 2012

"A powerful analysis of the rise and fall of the British East India Company, a private company that conquered a subcontinent and subjugated an entire people."—Huw Bowen, Swansea University

"Elegantly written and sharply argued, Nick Robins' gripping account of the rise and fall of the English East India Company brings to life a crucial episode in the history of globalization."—Sankar Muthu, University of Chicago

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles, and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company's practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today, offering lessons about unfettered capitalism, corporate responsibility, and the legacy of colonialism.

The Corporation That Changed the World is the first book to reveal the Company's enduring legacy as a corporation. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance, and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall. For decades, the Company was simply too big to fail, and stock market bubbles, famines, drug-running, and even duels between rival executives are to be found in this new account.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Chronology
1 The Hidden Wound
2 The Imperious Company
3 Out of the Shadows
4 The Bengal Revolution
5 The Great East Indian Crash
6 Regulating the Company
7 Justice Will Be Done
8 The Toxic Exchange
10 The Unfettered Business
Epilogue

For Robins, the Company's story provides vital lessons on both the role of corporations in world history and the steps required to make global business accountable today.

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The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem

Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Few people thought as deeply or incisively about Germany, Jewish identity, and the Holocaust as Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. And, as this landmark volume reveals, much of that thinking was developed in dialogue, through more than two decades of correspondence.
Arendt and Scholem met in 1932 in Berlin and quickly bonded over their mutual admiration for and friendship with Walter Benjamin. They began exchanging letters in 1939, and their lively correspondence continued until 1963, when Scholem’s vehement disagreement with Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem led to a rupture that would last until Arendt’s death a dozen years later. The years of their friendship, however, yielded a remarkably rich bounty of letters: together, they try to come to terms with being both German and Jewish, the place and legacy of Germany before and after the Holocaust, the question of what it means to be Jewish in a post-Holocaust world, and more. Walter Benjamin is a constant presence, as his life and tragic death are emblematic of the very questions that preoccupied the pair. Like any collection of letters, however, the book also has its share of lighter moments: accounts of travels, gossipy dinner parties, and the quotidian details that make up life even in the shadow of war and loss.
In a world that continues to struggle with questions of nationalism, identity, and difference, Arendt and Scholem remain crucial thinkers. This volume offers us a way to see them, and the development of their thought, anew.

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The Correspondence of Johann Amerbach

Early Printing in its Social Context

Selected, Translated, Edited, and with Commentary by Barbara C. Halporn

University of Michigan Press, 2000

After Gutenberg, the book world was changed forever. Writers wanted to break into print; venture capitalists and printers wanted to make money; scholars wanted to promote their educational agendas. To be economically viable, the printed book--unlike the handmade book--required distribution to large international markets, promotion, advertising, capital, and above all, profit. In a heady atmosphere of speculation, competition, and high risk, printers set up shop and went bankrupt with dizzying rapidity. Against these odds Johann Amerbach established a successful printing-publishing firm that survived for thirty-five years. His correspondence takes the reader into that rapidly changing world.
Between 1478 and 1513 Amerbach published more than a hundred substantial works. He is best known for his monumental editions of the works of early church fathers. Crucial to his success was the information network he kept through correspondence with scholars, teachers, printers, booksellers, library curators, and other members of the literate community. The letters reveal how books were made, by whom, and for whom. The Correspondence of Johann Amerbach allows us to see the tensions in the new alliance between commerce and the republic of letters. Filling out the scene more fully, letters between the Amerbach children and their parents tell of the daily life, expectations, and aspirations of an intellectual bourgeois family at the end of the fifteenth century.
Barbara C. Halporn is Head of the Collection Development Department, Widener Library, Harvard University.

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The Correspondence of John Carroll and Charles Plowden, 1779-1816

Thomas W. Jodziewicz

Catholic University of America Press, 2025

The correspondence between Bishop John Carroll and Fr. Charles Plowden offers an “insiders’” look at the establishment of the Catholic Church in the United States and the circumstances of the project of bringing about English Catholic emancipation. Carroll was the chief architect of the former; Plowden was a spirited, and public, and published, participant in the latter. Their correspondence is filled with details about their activities, and mutual encouragement, as each of these ex-Jesuits encountered the upheavals precipitated by wars (American Revolution, French Revolution, Napoleonic); the contemporary intellectual, theological, philosophical challenges of the Enlightenment and Age of Reason; anti-Catholic (and anti-Jesuit) sentiment and prejudices; the long wait for renewal of the Society of Jesus; the situation (and prerogatives) of the papacy; and the vagaries of early modern postal service. The Carroll side of this correspondence has been printed (although not completely accurately), but the Plowden side, far more strident and provocative, has mostly been unnoticed. Plowden’s letters, and published writings, with Carroll’s comments on them all, provide significant insights into the intricacies of the English Catholic excitement, including internal tensions, accompanying the early modern crusade for religious emancipation in Britain.

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The Correspondence of Michael Faraday

1811-1831, Volume 1

Frank A.J.L. James

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1991

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was one of the most important men of science in nineteenth century Britain. His discoveries of electro-magnetic rotations (1821), and electro-magnetic induction (1831) laid the foundations of the modern electrical industry. His discovery of the magneto-optical effect and of diamagnetism (1845) led him to formulate the field theory of electro-magnetism, which forms one of the cornerstones of modern physics.

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The Correspondence of Michael Faraday

1832-1840, Volume 2

Frank A.J.L. James

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1993

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was one of the most important men of science in nineteenth century Britain. His discoveries of electromagnetic rotations (1821) and electro-magnetic induction (1831) laid the foundations of the modern electrical industry. His discovery of the magneto-optical effect and diamagnetism (1845) led him to formulate the field theory of electro-magnetism, which forms one of the cornerstones of modern physics.

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The Correspondence of Michael Faraday

1841-1848, Volume 3

Frank A.J.L. James

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1996

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The Correspondence of Michael Faraday

1849-1855, Volume 4

Frank A.J.L. James

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1999

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The Correspondence of Michael Faraday

1855-1860, Volume 5

Frank A.J.L. James

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2008

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The Correspondence of Michael Faraday

1860-1867, Volume 6

Frank A.J.L. James

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2011

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was one of the most important men of science in nineteenth century Britain. His discoveries of electro-magnetic rotations (1821) and electro-magnetic induction (1831) laid the foundations of the modern electrical industry. His discovery of the magneto-optical effect and diamagnetism (1845) led him to formulate the field theory of electro-magnetism, which forms one of the cornerstones of modern physics. These and a whole host of other fundamental discoveries in physics and chemistry, together with his lecturing at the Royal Institution, his work for the state (including Trinity House), his religious beliefs and his lack of mathematical ability, make Faraday one of the most fascinating scientific figures ever. All these aspects of his life and work and others, such as his health, are reflected in his letters which, in this final volume, cover Faraday's life to his death in August 1867. Also published here are letters that could not be dated and letters that should have been included in volumes one to five but which had not been located when those volumes were published. In total just over 80% of the letters in this volume are previously unpublished. The dominant topic of the 1860s (covered in nearly 40% of the letters) is Faraday's involvement with the lighthouse service relating in particular to his advice to Trinity House and the Board of Trade on matters such as electric light and the controversial issue of fog signals. Also detailed is the complex process by which his various posts were transferred to John Tyndall. Similar issues existed with Faraday's gradual withdrawal from his duties at the Royal Institution, including the misguided attempt to make him President. And, of course, running through many of the letters are comments on his declining health and impending death. Major correspondents include the Astronomer Royal G.B. Airy, the Secretary of Trinity House P.H. Berthon, the Birmingham glassmaker J.T. Chance, the Assistant Secretary of the Board of Trade T.H. Farrer, the German mathematician Julius Plücker, the Cambridge trained mathematical natural philosophers James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson, Faraday's colleagues at the Royal Institution Henry Bence Jones, John Tyndall and Benjamin Vincent, the Swiss chemist Christian Schoenbein and the astronomer James South.

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The Correspondence of Richard Price, Volume II

March 1778–February 1786

D. O. Thomas, ed.

Duke University Press, 1983

Perhaps best known as a political philosopher, Richard Price (1723–1791) made important contributions to British and American intellectual life in a variety of fields—philosophy, theology, mathematics, demography, probability and public finance, and private and social insurance. The second in a three-volume series edited by W. Bernard Peach and D. O. Thomas, The Correspondence of Richard Price makes available the extant copies of the correspondence to and from Price, including many published for the first time. These letters reveal Price's absorption with financial problems, his influence on the policies adopted by the British government, his defense of Newtonianism against Lord Monboddo, as well as important insights into the political and cultural life in Britain and America. Correspondents include John Adams, William Adams, J. D. van der Capellen, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Laurens, Lord Monboddo, William Pitt, Joseph Priestly, the Earl of Shelburne, Ezra Stiles, P. W. Wargentin, and Joseph Willard.

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The Correspondence of Richard Price, Volume III

February 1786–February 1791

William Bernard Peach, editor

Duke University Press, 1983

This third and final volume in the series completes the known extant correspondence of Richard Price (1723-1791). Perhaps best known as a political philosopher, Price made significant contributions to Anglo-American intellectual life in the late eighteenth century in a variety of fields. This remarkable collection of letters, most previously unpublished, is impressive for the breadth of topics covered--religion, theology, politics, education, liberty, finance, demography, and insurance.
Price's correspondence with Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Rush, and other Americans concern the issues of slavery, the rebellion in Massachusetts, use of paper money, opposition to the establishment of religion, and the status of the federal government. Letters to Priestly, Lansdowne, and others in Britain are about science and technology, the crisis in the United Provinces, armed neutrality, the national debt, revolution, religious sects, and foreign relations. In his correspondence with French leaders following the fall of the Bastille, particularly with le Duc del la Rochefoucauld, Price expresses his high hopes for the growth of civil and religious freedom in France.
Indispensable for an understanding of the work of one of the best known and most distinguished Welshmen of the eighteenth century, this book—and the series—will also be of interest to those who study the history of ideas.

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The Correspondence of Theodoret of Cyrus

The Collectio Sirmondiana, Volume 4

John F. Theodoret of Cyrus

Catholic University of America Press, 2025

Volumes 4 and 5 of the Library of Early Christianity, The Correspondence of Theodoret of Cyrus: The Collectio Sirmondiana, present a text and translation of the largest of three collections of Theodoret’s letters that have come down to us (first edited by the Jesuit father Jacques Sirmond, Paris 1642). Though pastor of the remote see of Cyrus in Syria, Theodoret was one of the major teachers of the eastern Christian church of the late fourth and early fifth century. These 147 letters place before us the myriad concerns, both spiritual and secular, of a late-antique bishop: Theodoret expounds theological and moral issues for fellow churchmen, begs imperial officials for tax relief for local landowners, provides for the sustenance and safety of refugees from the Vandal war in Africa, thanks a friend for a gift of wine. The edition of the Greek text is the work of John Petruccione. A textual introduction explains the relationships among the manuscripts, and the critical notes the choices made where the text is uncertain. The historical / theological introduction is the work of István Pásztori-Kupán, one of the foremost expositors of the thought of Theodoret and of his Antiochene predecessors and contemporaries. Two maps locate for the reader the place names mentioned in the letters, and three indices (a Scriptural Index, General Index, and Index of Modern Authors) complement the notes attached to the text and translation.

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The Correspondence of Theodoret of Cyrus

The Collectio Sirmondiana, Volume 5

John F. Theodoret of Cyrus

Catholic University of America Press, 2025

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The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, Volume I

Selections, 1877–1934

W.E.B. Du Bois

University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

Scholar, author, editor, teacher, reformer, and civil rights leader, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was a major figure in American life and one of the earliest proponents of equality for Black Americans. He was a founder and leader of the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the Pan-African Movement; a progenitor of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance; an advocate of anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, unionism, and equality for women; and a champion of the rights of oppressed people around the world.

The three-volume Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois offers a unique perspective on Du Bois's experiences and views. In recognition of the significance of the Correspondence, the final volume was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review.

Herbert Aptheker has provided an introduction and notes to each volume, illuminating the circumstances and identifying the personalities involved in the correspondence. A long time friend and colleague of Du Bois, Aptheker is a well-known historian of the African American experience. In 1939 and again in 1969, he won the history award given by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Among his most prominent works are American Negro Slave Revolts and the three-volume Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States.

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The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, Volume II

Selections, 1934–1944

W.E.B. Du Bois

University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

Scholar, author, editor, teacher, reformer, and civil rights leader, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was a major figure in American life and one of the earliest proponents of equality for black Americans. He was a founder and leader of the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the Pan-African Movement; a progenitor of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance; an advocate of anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, unionism, and equality for women; and a champion of the rights of oppressed people around the world.

The three-volume Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois offers a unique perspective on Du Bois's experiences and views. In recognition of the significance of the Correspondence, the final volume was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review.

Herbert Aptheker has provided an introduction and notes to each volume, illuminating the circumstances and identifying the personalities involved in the correspondence. A long time friend and colleague of Du Bois, Aptheker is a well-known historian of the African American experience. In 1939 and again in 1969, he won the history award given by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Among his most prominent works are American Negro Slave Revolts and the three-volume Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States.

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The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, Volume III

Selections, 1944–1963

W.E.B. Du Bois

University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

Scholar, author, editor, teacher, reformer, and civil rights leader, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was a major figure in American life and one of the earliest proponents of equality for black Americans. He was a founder and leader of the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the Pan-African Movement; a progenitor of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance; an advocate of anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, unionism, and equality for women; and a champion of the rights of oppressed people around the world.

The three-volume Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois offers a unique perspective on Du Bois's experiences and views. In recognition of the significance of the Correspondence, the final volume was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review.

Herbert Aptheker has provided an introduction and notes to each volume, illuminating the circumstances and identifying the personalities involved in the correspondence. A long time friend and colleague of Du Bois, Aptheker is a well-known historian of the African American experience. In 1939 and again in 1969, he won the history award given by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Among his most prominent works are American Negro Slave Revolts and the three-volume Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States.

[more]

The Corrigible and the Incorrigible

Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany

Greg Eghigian

University of Michigan Press, 2015

The Corrigible and the Incorrigible explores the surprising history of efforts aimed at rehabilitating convicts in 20th-century Germany, efforts founded not out of an unbridled optimism about the capacity of people to change, but arising from a chronic anxiety about the potential threats posed by others. Since the 1970s, criminal justice systems on both sides of the Atlantic have increasingly emphasized security, surveillance, and atonement, an approach that contrasts with earlier efforts aimed at scientifically understanding, therapeutically correcting, and socially reintegrating convicts. And while a distinction is often drawn between American and European ways of punishment, the contrast reinforces the longstanding impression that modern punishment has played out as a choice between punitive retribution and correctional rehabilitation. Focusing on developments in nazi, East, and West Germany, The Corrigible and the Incorrigible shows that rehabilitation was considered an extension of, rather than a counterweight to, the hardline emphasis on punishment and security by providing the means to divide those incarcerated into those capable of reform and the irredeemable.

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The Cosmopolitan Lyceum

Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America

Tom F. Wright

University of Massachusetts Press, 2013

From the 1830s to the 1900s, a circuit of lecture halls known as the “lyceum movement” flourished across the United States. At its peak, up to a million people a week regularly attended talks in local venues, captivated by the words of visiting orators who spoke on an extensive range of topics. The movement was a major intellectual and cultural force of this nation-building period, forming the creative environment of writers and public figures such as Frederic Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Anna Dickinson, and Mark Twain.

The phenomenon of the lyceum has commonly been characterized as inward looking and nationalistic. Yet as this collection of essays reveals, nineteenth-century audiences were fascinated by information from around the globe, and lecturers frequently spoke to their fellow Americans of their connection to the world beyond the nation and helped them understand “exotic” ways of life. Never simple in its engagement with cosmopolitan ideas, the lyceum provided a powerful public encounter with international currents and crosscurrents, foreshadowing the problems and paradoxes that continue to resonate in our globalized world.

This book offers a major reassessment of this important cultural phenomenon, bringing together diverse scholars from history, rhetoric, and literary studies. The twelve essays use a range of approaches, cover a wide chronological timespan, and discuss a variety of performers both famous and obscure. In addition to the volume editor, contributors include Robert Arbour, Thomas Augst, Susan Branson, Virginia Garnett, Peter Gibian, Sara Lampert, Angela Ray, Evan Roberts, Paul Stob, Mary Zboray, and Ronald Zboray.

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The Cosmos Revealed

Precontact Mississippian Rock Art at Painted Bluff, Alabama

By Jan F. Simek, Erin E. Dunsmore, Johannes Loubser, and Sierra M. Bow

University of Alabama Press, 2021

The definitive rock art book on Painted Bluff, Alabama and the visual language of a Native American cosmos.

Boasting more than 130 paintings and engravings, Painted Bluff is perhaps the most elaborate prehistoric pictograph site east of the Mississippi River. Positioned at several levels on a dramatic sandstone cliff along the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, the spectacular paintings and engravings depict mythical creatures, dancing humans, and mystical portals. The Cosmos Revealed: Precontact Mississippian Rock Art at Painted Bluff, Alabama is the first complete documentation of one of the most important archaeological sites in eastern North America. Through art, the site materializes a model or “cosmogram” of the Mississippian Native American view of the universe, offering connections between the visible and invisible worlds for Native spiritual leaders and other visitors.

Discovered by Euro-Americans in the early 1800s, the site became known as “Painted Bluff” because of its pictographs, but inexplicably it has only recently been subjected to the intensive archaeological study it deserves. Under the auspices of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the authors of this volume have documented and assessed the site since 2005, and efforts have been made to reverse some of the vandalism that has occurred over many decades and to stabilize natural degradation of the cliff and its artwork.

Including more than one hundred remarkable prehistoric paintings on the cliff face that have been recorded, mapped, and photographed, this book synthesizes the research done on Painted Bluff to date and documents the entire site. Richly illustrated chapters cover the historical background, geology and archaeology, documentation methods, types of rock art, stratigraphy, paint recipes, TVA management, graffiti removal, and a summary that broadly synthesizes the meaning, timeframe, artistry, organization, conceptual boundaries, and the cosmos revealed. This groundbreaking study features 113 color photographs and a complete catalog of the pictographs and petroglyphs at the site.

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The Costa Rica Reader

History, Culture, Politics

Steven Palmer and Iván Molina, editors

Duke University Press, 2004

Long characterized as an exceptional country within Latin America, Costa Rica has been hailed as a democratic oasis in a continent scorched by dictatorship and revolution; the ecological mecca of a biosphere laid waste by deforestation and urban blight; and an egalitarian, middle-class society blissfully immune to the violent class and racial conflicts that have haunted the region. Arguing that conceptions of Costa Rica as a happy anomaly downplay its rich heritage and diverse population, The Costa Rica Reader brings together texts and artwork that reveal the complexity of the country’s past and present. It characterizes Costa Rica as a site of alternatives and possibilities that undermine stereotypes about the region’s history and challenge the idea that current dilemmas facing Latin America are inevitable or insoluble.

This essential introduction to Costa Rica includes more than fifty texts related to the country’s history, culture, politics, and natural environment. Most of these newspaper accounts, histories, petitions, memoirs, poems, and essays are written by Costa Ricans. Many appear here in English for the first time. The authors are men and women, young and old, scholars, farmers, workers, and activists. The Costa Rica Reader presents a panoply of voices: eloquent working-class raconteurs from San José’s poorest barrios, English-speaking Afro-Antilleans of the Limón province, Nicaraguan immigrants, factory workers, dissident members of the intelligentsia, and indigenous people struggling to preserve their culture. With more than forty images, the collection showcases sculptures, photographs, maps, cartoons, and fliers. From the time before the arrival of the Spanish, through the rise of the coffee plantations and the Civil War of 1948, up to participation in today’s globalized world, Costa Rica’s remarkable history comes alive. The Costa Rica Reader is a necessary resource for scholars, students, and travelers alike.

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