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Investigating late imperial Russian and early Soviet modernism’s reinvention of the actor

In this wide-ranging study, Alisa Ballard Lin argues that Russian theatrical theory and practice contributed to a broad pre- and postrevolutionary discourse about the mind, profoundly reshaping concepts of consciousness, perception, identity, and the constitution of the subject. Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism examines efforts in Russian theater—from around the turn of the century through the mid-1930s—to stimulate, train, imagine, and ultimately understand the actor’s, as well as the spectator’s, mind. Discussing key figures of the period, including Nikolai Evreinov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Alexander Tairov, Lin identifies an underappreciated dimension of humanism within Russian modernism: a humanism that resisted the pressures of an increasingly technologized, industrialized, and politicized modernity that challenged the place of the human within it.

The United States at the turn of the twentieth century cultivated a passion for big. It witnessed the emergence of large-scale corporate capitalism; the beginnings of American imperialism on a global stage; record-level immigration; a rapid expansion of cities; and colossal events and structures like world's fairs, amusement parks, department stores, and skyscrapers. Size began to play a key role in American identity. During this period, bigness signaled American progress.

These Days of Large Things explores the centrality of size to American culture and national identity and the preoccupation with physical stature that pervaded American thought. Clarke examines the role that body size played in racial theory and the ways in which economic changes in the nation generated conflicting attitudes toward growth and bigness. Finally, Clarke investigates the relationship between stature and gender.

These Days of Large Things brings together a remarkable range of cultural material including scientific studies, photographs, novels, cartoons, architecture, and film. As a general cultural and intellectual history of the period, this work will be of interest to students and scholars in American studies, U.S. history, American literature, and gender studies.

Michael Tavel Clarke is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Cover photograph: "New York from Its Pinnacles," Alvin Langdon Coburn (1912). Courtesy of the George Eastman House.

"A fascinating study of the American preoccupation with physical size, this book charts new paths in the history of science, culture, and the body. A must-read for anyone puzzling over why Americans today love hulking SUVs, Mcmansions, and outsized masculine bodies."
---Lois Banner, University of Southern California

"From the Gilded Age through the Twenties, Clarke shows a nation-state obsessed with sheer size, ranging from the mammoth labor union to the 'Giant Incorporated Body' of the monopoly trust. These Days of Large Things links the towering Gibson Girl with the skyscraper, the pediatric regimen with stereotypes of the Jew. Spanning anthropology, medicine, architecture, business, and labor history, Clarke provides the full anatomy of imperial America and offers a model of cultural studies at its very best."
---Cecelia Tichi, Vanderbilt University

Honorable Mention, 2025 Society of Midland Authors Award in History!

Examining the case that inspired a pop culture phenomenon

In 1924 Beulah Annan was arrested and incarcerated for killing her lover, Harry Kalsted. Six weeks later, a jury acquitted her of murder. Inspired by the sordid event, trial, and acquittal, Maurine Watkins, a reporter at the time, wrote the play Chicago, a Broadway hit that was adapted several times. Through a fresh retelling of the story of Annan and of Watkins’s play, Charles H. Cosgrove provides the first critical examination of the criminal case, and an initial exploration of the era’s social assumptions that made the message of the play so plausible in its own time. His careful historical research challenges the received portrait of Annan as a killer who got away with murder, and of Watkins as a savvy cub reporter and precocious playwright.

In They Both Reached for the Gun, Charles H. Cosgrove expertly combines inquest and police records, and interviews with Annan’s relatives, to analyze the participants, the trial, and the subsequent play. Although no one will ever know what really happened in the Kenwood apartment on Chicago’s south side one hundred years ago, Cosgrove’s interrogation shows how sensationalized Watkins’s writing was. Her reporting on the Annan case perpetuated falsehoods about Annan’s so-called “confession,” and her play gave an inaccurate portrayal of Chicago’s criminal justice system. Despite Watkins’s insistence that her drama revealed the truth about its subjects without any exaggeration, her play depicted police, prosecutors, and judges as the only “good guys” in the story, ignoring those who lied, misled, and used brutal methods to obtain forced confessions.

As the Great Depression gripped the United States in the early 1930s, the Hoover administration sought to preserve jobs for Anglo-Americans by targeting Mexicans, including long-time residents and even US citizens, for deportation. Mexicans comprised more than 46 percent of all people deported between 1930 and 1939, despite being only 1 percent of the US population. In all, about half a million people of Mexican descent were deported to Mexico, a “homeland” many of them had never seen, or returned voluntarily in fear of deportation.

They Came to Toil investigates how the news reporting of this episode in immigration history created frames for representing Mexicans and immigrants that persist to the present. Melita M. Garza sets the story in San Antonio, a city central to the formation of Mexican American identity, and contrasts how the city’s three daily newspapers covered the forced deportations of Mexicans. She shows that the Spanish-language La Prensa not surprisingly provided the fullest and most sympathetic coverage of immigration issues, while the locally owned San Antonio Express and the Hearst chain-owned San Antonio Light varied between supporting Mexican labor and demonizing it. Garza analyzes how these media narratives, particularly in the English-language press, contributed to the racial “othering” of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Adding an important new chapter to the history of the Long Civil Rights Movement, They Came to Toil brings needed historical context to immigration issues that dominate today’s headlines.

A powerful investigation into the last lynching in America and the long shadow of racial violence in the South.

Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America recounts the story of three innocent victims, all of whom suffered violent deaths through no fault of their own: Vaudine Maddox in 1933 in Tuscaloosa, Sergeant Gene Ballard in 1979 in Birmingham, and Michael Donald in 1981 in Mobile.

The death of Vaudine Maddox—and the lynchings that followed—serves as a cautionary tale about the violence that occurred in the same region nearly fifty-years later, highlighting the cowardice, ignorance, and happenstance that sustained a culture of racial intolerance far into the future.Nearly half a century later, after a black bank robber was acquitted for the murder of police Sergeant Gene Ballard, two Klansmen took it upon themselves to exact revenge on an innocent victim--nineteen-year-old African American Michael Donald.  Donald's murder--deemed the last lynching in America--reignited the race debate in America and culminated in a courtroom drama in which the United Klans of America were at long last put on trial. 

While tracing the relationships among these murders, B. J. Hollars's research led him deep into the heart of Alabama’s racial, political, and legal landscapes.  A work of literary journalism, Thirteen Loops  draws upon rarely examined primary sources, court documents, newspaper reports, and first-hand accounts in an effort to unravel the twisted tale of a pair of interconnected murders that forever altered United States' race relations.

The murder of thirteen women and girls in 1979 and the social movement they launched.

In four terrifying months in 1979, thirteen women and girls—twelve Black, one white—were murdered in Boston. All were found in or near Roxbury, a predominantly Black neighborhood in a city famously beset by racial strife and division. Fears of a serial killer spread within Black communities. But the authorities wouldn’t hear of it: these were just ordinary, everyday murders of unimportant people, killed by men they knew. The police said Black residents had nothing to fear—and the media implied that white people could safely ignore the carnage.

Yet Black feminists refused to accept the murders of Black women and girls. The real serial killers, they argued, were chronic racism, sexism, poverty, and domestic violence, including violence committed by Black men. Something had to be done.

Thirteen Sisters tells the gripping stories of the women who died—their lives, their brutal deaths, the attempts to solve them—and the renowned Combahee River Collective, whose activism in the wake of the murders brought national attention to the overlapping oppressions that made Black women and girls so vulnerable to violence. Historian Andrew S. Baer interviews family members and activists to introduce readers to the victims as complete people and investigate the events surrounding their deaths, unspooling a fast-paced and urgent narrative about crime, race, and marginalization. Baer also pays tribute to the Black feminists who saw the social roots of this violence and called for radical change, demands that remain all too relevant today.

Riveting, enraging, and humane, Thirteen Sisters is an indictment of the neglectful institutions that have failed Black women and a testament to the activists who transformed how we understand systemic oppression.

2005 — Best Book Translation Prize – New England Council of Latin American Studies

Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo were the two most influential and respected women writers of twentieth-century Latin America. Mistral, a plain, self-educated Chilean woman of the mountains who was a poet, journalist, and educator, became Latin America's first Nobel Laureate in 1945. Ocampo, a stunning Argentine woman of wealth, wrote hundreds of essays and founded the first-rate literary journal Sur. Though of very different backgrounds, their deep commitment to what they felt was "their" America forged a unique intellectual and emotional bond between them.

This collection of the previously unpublished correspondence between Mistral and Ocampo reveals the private side of two very public women. In these letters (as well as in essays that are included in an appendix), we see what Mistral and Ocampo thought about each other and about the intellectual and political atmosphere of their time (including the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the dictatorships of Latin America) and particularly how they negotiated the complex issues of identity, nationality, and gender within their wide-ranging cultural connections to both the Americas and Europe.

Combining memoir with oral history, creates a vivid and searing portrait of the Freedom Summer of 1965.

This Bright Light of Ours offers a tightly focused insider’s view of the community-based activism that was the heart of the civil rights movement. A celebration of grassroots heroes, this book details through first-person accounts the contributions of ordinary people who formed  the nonviolent army that won the fight for voting rights.

Combining memoir and oral history, Maria Gitin fills a vital gap in civil rights history by focusing on the neglected Freedom Summer of 1965 when hundreds of college students joined forces with local black leaders to register thousands of new black voters in the rural South. Gitin was an idealistic nineteen-year-old college freshman from a small farming community north of San Francisco who felt called to action when she saw televised images of brutal attacks on peaceful demonstrators during Bloody Sunday, in Selma, Alabama.

Atypical among white civil rights volunteers, Gitin came from a rural low-income family. She raised funds to attend an intensive orientation in Atlanta featuring now-legendary civil rights leaders. Her detailed letters include the first narrative account of this orientation and the only in-depth field report from a teenage Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project participant.

Gitin details the dangerous life of civil rights activists in Wilcox County, Alabama, where she was assigned. She tells of threats and arrests, but also of forming deep friendships and of falling in love. More than four decades later, Gitin returned to Wilcox County to revisit the people and places that she could never forget and to discover their views of the “outside agitators” who had come to their community. Through conversational interviews with more than fifty Wilcox County residents and former civil rights workers, she has created a channel for the voices of these unheralded heroes who formed the backbone of the civil rights movement.

Standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 2017, photographer William Abranowicz was struck by the weight of historical memory at this hallowed site of one of the civil rights movement's defining episodes: 1965's “Bloody Sunday,” when Alabama police officers attacked peaceful marchers. To Abranowicz’s eye, Selma seemed relatively unchanged from its apperance in the photographs Walker Evans made there in the 1930s. That, coupled with an awareness of renewed voter suppression efforts at state and federal levels, inspired Abranowicz to explore the living legacy of the civil and voting rights movement through photographing locations, landscapes, and individuals associated with the struggle, from Rosa Parks and Harry Belafonte to the barn where Emmett Till was murdered.

The result is This Far and No Further, a collection of photographs from Abranowicz's journey through the American South. Through symbolism, metaphor, and history, he unearths extraordinary stories of brutality, heroism, sacrifice, and redemption hidden within ordinary American landscapes, underscoring the crucial necessity of defending—and exercising—our right to vote at this tenuous moment for American democracy.