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862 books match the query 'Social History' and 182 start with t

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The Week the World Heard Gallaudet

Jack R. Gannon

Gallaudet University Press, 2009

In 200 full-color and black-and-white photographs, The Week the World Heard Gallaudet depicts, day by day, the Deaf President Now! Revolution at Gallaudet University as it unfolded March 6 - 13, 1988. Author Jack Gannon interviewed such main characters as Greg Hlibok, president of the student government, and Elizabeth Zinser, the University’s president for two days. I. King Jordan, Gallaudet’s first deaf president, contributed the epilogue.

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The Weight of Gold

Mining and the Environment in Ontario, Canada, 1909-1929

Mica Jorgenson

University of Nevada Press, 2023

Mining in North America has long been criticized for its impact on the natural environment. Mica Jorgenson’s The Weight of Gold explores the history of Ontario, Canada’s rise to prominence in the gold mining industry, while detailing a series of environmental crises related to extraction activities. In Ontario in 1909, the discovery of exceptionally rich hard rock gold deposits in the Abitibi region in the north precipitated industrial development modeled on precedents in Australia, South Africa, and the United States. By the late 1920s, Ontario’s mines had reached their maturity, and in 1928, Minister of Mines Charles McRae called Canada “the mineral treasure house to [the] world.”

Mining companies increasingly depended upon their ability to redistribute the burdens of mining onto surrounding communities—a strategy they continue to use today—both at home and abroad. Jorgenson connects Canadian gold mining to its international context, revealing that Ontario’s gold mines informed extractive knowledge which would go on to shape Canada’s mining industry over the next century.

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The Whiskey Rebellion

A Distilled History of an American Crisis

Brady J. Crytzer

Westholme Publishing, 2024

In March 1791 Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton shocked the western frontier when he proposed a domestic excise tax on whiskey to balance America’s national debt. The law, known colloquially as the “Whiskey Act,” disproportionately penalized farmers in the backcountry, while offering favorable tax incentives designed to protect larger distillers. Although Hamilton viewed the law as a means of both collecting revenue andforcefully imposing federal authority over the notoriously defiant frontier, settlers in Western Pennsylvania bristled at its passage. They demanded that the law be revoked or rewritten to correct its perceived the injustices, and begged their representatives to lobby Congress on their behalf.
   As the months passed however the people of Western Pennsylvania grew restless with the inadequacy of the government’s response and they soon turned to more violent means of political expression. Treasury officers across the west were targeted for their involvement in the tax collection, and they were brutally attacked by armed bands of disgruntled locals. They were tarred and feathered, burned with hot irons, and whipped; their homes were ransacked and burned. Extralegal courts were established in a direct challenge to federal authority, and the frontier slowly drifted toward a state of rebellion.
   In response President George Washington raised an army of 13,000 men, one of the largest forces he ever commanded, to suppress the rebellion. No major battle ever occurred, but weeks of arrests, illegal detentions, and civil rights violations rocked the west. The event polarized the nation, and highlighted the dramatic differences between Washington’s Federalist perspective and Jefferson’s emerging Democratic-Republican Party. Two centuries later the Whiskey Rebellion stands as the second largest domestic rebellion in American History, only outdone by the Confederate States of America in 1861.
   In The Whiskey Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis, historian Brady J. Crytzer takes the reader on a journey through Western Pennsylvania following the routes of both the rebels and the United States Army to place this important event into context for the reader. Complete with images and maps, the author illuminates what visitors can still see from the period while providing a cogent and engrossing account of this crisis unfolded and how it was resolved.

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The Wisconsin Story

150 People, Places, and Turning Points that Shaped the Badger State

Dennis McCann

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2019

The Wisconsin Story: 150 People, Places, and Turning Points that Shaped the Badger State offers readers engaging vignettes about everything Wisconsin. From portraits of significant figures like Robert and Belle La Follette, Golda Meir, and Edna Ferber, to stories of important events like the Black Hawk War, 1960s campus protests, and oleo smuggling, The Wisconsin Story takes readers on a fun and informative ride all across the Badger State. Where was Calvin Coolidge’s summer White House? What was the “anti-corset resolution?” And why was a cow named Ollie milked on an airplane? Award-winning newspaper columnist Dennis McCann’s talent for distilling complex subjects into brief stories that pack a punch makes this collection the perfect answer to the question “what makes Wisconsin, Wisconsin?”

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The World Before Racism

An Art Story

Lisa E. Farrington

The Artist Book Foundation, 2025

Utilizing works of art as a primary source, Lisa Farrington's research in The World Before Racism conclusively answers the questions: Who invented racism? When? And why?

The term racism is understood to mean that race is the principal determinant of specific human traits and capacities and that due to racial differences, one race is inherently superior to all others. Over time, racism has commonly referenced the notion that the White race is superior to all others, fostering prejudice and discrimination. In The World Before Racism: An Art Story, author and art historian Lisa Farrington meticulously examines the intersection of art, history, and race, using original works of art as primary source materials to support her premise that racism is a construct, invented in the mid-1700s, to support the financial, political, and religious structures of European colonialism.

Using art from ancient Egypt, classical Greece, and the Roman Empire, through Medieval Europe and the colonization of the New World, to the art of the present day—sources that cannot be easily altered, edited, or selectively translated—Farrington expertly examines the intricate interplay between the Black and White races, how they saw and understood each other over the centuries. The artworks serve as powerful voices, precisely conveying the artist’s intended messages. The goal of The World Before Racism is to present irrefutable evidence that the ideology of racism is unfounded, unsupported, unjustified, and destined to fade away like so many other archaic and erroneous ideas.

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The World Wide Web of Work

A History in the Making

Marcel van der Linden

University College London, 2023

A groundbreaking exploration of the core ideas and concepts of global labor history.

Global labor history is one of the fastest-growing fields of study worldwide today. This volume assembles a group of contributors from around the world to discuss the core concepts “capitalism” and “workers,” and to refine notions such as “coerced labor,” “household strategies,” and “labor markets.” It explores in new ways the connections between laborers in different parts of the world, arguing that both globalization and modern labor management originated in agriculture in the Global South and were only later introduced in Northern industrial settings. It reveals that nineteenth-century chattel slavery was frequently replaced by other forms of coerced labor, and it reconstructs the twentieth-century attempts of the International Labor Organisation to regulate work standards internationally. The book also pays attention to the relational inequality through which workers in wealthy countries benefit from the exploitation of those in poor countries. The final part addresses workers’ resistance and acquiescence: why collective actions often have unanticipated consequences, why and how workers sometimes organize massive flights from exploitation and oppression, and why proletarian revolutions took place in pre-industrial or industrializing countries but never in fully developed capitalist societies.

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The World in a Phrase

A Brief History of the Aphorism, Second Edition

James Geary

University of Chicago Press, 2025

Celebrating the short, witty, philosophical phrases known as aphorisms, this delightful history is an entertaining tour through the wisest and wittiest sayings in the world.

Aphorisms are literature’s hand luggage. Light and compact, they contain everything you need to get through a rough day at the office or a dark night of the soul. Aphorisms, the oldest written art form on the planet, have been going viral for thousands of years, delivering the short, sharp shock of old forgotten truths. Today, visual artists are mixing pithy language with compelling imagery and using social media to take the form into the future. In a world of disinformation and deepfakes, aphorisms point to the power of fresh debate over tired dogma and inconvenient truths over comfortable lies.

Starting in ancient China and ending with contemporary meme-makers and street artists, The World in A Phrase tells the story of the aphorism through brief biographies of some of its greatest practitioners: sages like Lao-tzu and the Buddha, philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, writers like George Eliot and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, humorists like Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker, activists like James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, poets like Langston Hughes and Kay Ryan, and artists like Jenny Holzer and David Byrne.

The World in A Phrase is for lovers of words and seekers of wisdom. This new edition of The New York Times bestseller features 26 additional aphorists and explores the aphorism in the age of social media, showing why these short sentences are the ultimate deep dives in an era when TL;DR has become a cultural catchphrase.

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The World of W.E.B. Du Bois

A Quotation Sourcebook

Meyer Weinberg

University of Massachusetts Press, 2012

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was one of the leading public figures of his time—an African American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, author, and editor. He organized, protested, laid out programs, petitioned, and raised questions of long-term strategy and short-term tactics. He also wrote numerous books and articles and was a commanding speaker and a prodigious correspondent.

Meyer Weinberg created The World of W.E.B. Du Bois to provide a short journey through Du Bois's views on virtually all aspects of twentieth-century life. More than one thousand quotations from his published writings and correspondence are included, arranged into twenty topical chapters. Each quotation begins with a heading designed to summarize its main theme. A subject index provides additional access to the ideas of this complex figure.

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Theatricality of the Closet

Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan

Michelle Liu Carriger

Northwestern University Press, 2023

A richly illustrated exploration of fashion and its capacity for generating controversy and constructing social and individual identities

Clothing matters. This basic axiom is both common sense and, in another way, radical. It is from this starting point that Michelle Liu Carriger elucidates the interconnected ways in which gender, sexuality, class, and race are created by the everyday act of getting dressed. Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan examines fashion and clothing controversies of the nineteenth century, drawing on performance theory to reveal how the apparently superficial or frivolous deeply affects the creation of identity.

By interrogating a set of seemingly disparate examples from the same period but widely distant settings—Victorian Britain and Meiji-era Japan—Carriger disentangles how small, local, ordinary practices became enmeshed in a global fabric of cultural and material surfaces following the opening of trade between these nations in 1850. This richly illustrated book presents an array of media, from conservative newspapers and tabloids to ukiyo-e and early photography, that locate dress as a site where the individual and the social are interwoven, whether in the 1860s and 1870s or the twenty-first century.

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Things You Need to Hear

Collected Memories of Growing Up in Arkansas, 1890–1980

Margaret Jones Bolsterli

University of Arkansas Press, 2016

Things You Need to Hear gathers memories of Arkansans from all over the state with widely different backgrounds. In their own words, these people tell of the things they did growing up in the early twentieth century to get an education, what they ate, how they managed to get by during difficult times, how they amused themselves and earned a living, and much more. Some of Margaret Bolsterli's "informants," as she calls them, are famous (Johnny Cash, Maya Angelou, Levon Helm, Joycelyn Elders), but many more are not. Their vivid personal stories have been taken from published works and from original interviews conducted by Bolsterli. All together, these tales preserve memories of ways of life that are compelling, entertaining, and certainly well worth remembering.

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This Place of Promise

A Historian's Perspective on 200 Years of Missouri History

Gary R. Kremer

University of Missouri Press, 2023

Conceived of as a way to commemorate Missouri’s bicentennial of statehood, this unique work presents the perspective of Gary Kremer, one of the Show-Me State’s foremost historians, as he ponders why history played out as it did over the course of the two centuries since Missouri’s admittance to the Union. In the writing of what is much more than a survey history, Kremer, himself a fifth-generation Missourian, infuses the narrative with his vast knowledge and personal experiences, even as he considers what being a Missourian has meant—across the many years and to this day—to all of the state’s people, and how the forces of history—time, place, race, gender, religion, and class—shaped people and determined their opportunities and choices, in turn creating collective experiences that draw upon the past in an attempt to make sense of the present and plan for the future.

Key elements of the book include the centrality of race to the Missouri experience—from the time Missourians began to seek statehood in 1817 all the way up to the Black Lives Matter movement of the 21st century—as well as ongoing tensions created by the urban-rural divide and struggle to define the proper role of government in society.

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Thomas More's Vocation

Frank Mitjans

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

The book considers Thomas More’s early life-choices. An early letter is cited by biographers but most miss More’s reference to the market place. More’s great-grandson, Cresacre, a Londoner, understood it correctly, and that gives reason to trust him on other aspects of More’s youth. This study is based on early testimonies, those of Erasmus, Roper, Harpsfield, Stapleton and Cresacre More, as well as More’s early writings, the Pageant Verses, and his additions / omissions to the Life of Pico; evidence drawn from authors he recommended, like Hilton and Gerson; and finally, his epitaph. Attention is given to his lectures on St Augustine’s City of God, and to St John Chrysostom. It is argued More studied Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Gospel of St Matthew,/i> from a Greek manuscript. Chrysostom, in the introductory homily, spoke of the city and the market place, as the setting in which Christians practice the teaching of Christ. More practiced law and taught it. He was attracted to becoming a Christian humanist alongside Grocyn, Colet, Linacre, and Lily. With them he studied Greek, the classics and Fathers of the Church. Helped by them he became a man of prayer, aware of the need to seek holiness in the midst of the world as a layman. Faced with the dilemma of the humanist in choosing between the contemplative life of the philosopher and an active life of engagement with the world, he deliberately chose the active life in service to society, and the contemplative life of the Christian as a married man. This awareness and choice is what is called vocation, implying determination to persevere throughout life: More saw his life as a pilgrimage towards heaven as described in the last chapter focusing on More’s last work, De tristitia, tedio, pavore, et oratione christi ante captionem eius.

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Three-Way Street
Jews, Germans, and the Transnational
Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2016
As German Jews emigrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and as exiles from Nazi Germany, they carried the traditions, culture, and particular prejudices of their home with them. At the same time, Germany—and Berlin in particular—attracted both secular and religious Jewish scholars from eastern Europe. They engaged in vital intellectual exchange with German Jewry, although their cultural and religious practices differed greatly, and they absorbed many cultural practices that they brought back to Warsaw or took with them to New York and Tel Aviv. After the Holocaust, German Jews and non-German Jews educated in Germany were forced to reevaluate their essential relationship with Germany and Germanness as well as their notions of Jewish life outside of Germany.

Among the first volumes to focus on German-Jewish transnationalism, this interdisciplinary collection spans the fields of history, literature, film, theater, architecture, philosophy, and theology as it examines the lives of significant emigrants. The individuals whose stories are reevaluated include German Jews Ernst Lubitsch, David Einhorn, and Gershom Scholem, the architect Fritz Nathan and filmmaker Helmar Lerski; and eastern European Jews David Bergelson, Der Nister, Jacob Katz, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Abraham Joshua Heschel—figures not normally associated with Germany. Three-Way Street addresses the gap in the scholarly literature as it opens up critical ways of approaching Jewish culture not only in Germany, but also in other locations, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

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Thrift
A Cyclopedia
David Blankenhorn
Templeton Press, 2008

In today's consumer-driven society, extolling the virtues of thrift might seem like a quaint relic of a bygone era. Americans have embraced the ideas of easy credit, instant gratification, and spending as a tool to combat everything from recessions to the effects of natural disasters and terrorist attacks. In David Blankenhorn's new compendium, Thrift: A Cyclopedia, he reminds readers of a time when thrift was one of America's most cherished cultural values.

Gathering hundreds of quotes, sayings, proverbs, and photographs of Blankenhorn's vast personal collection of thrift memorabilia, this handsome book is a treasure trove of wisdom from around the world and throughout the ages. Readers will find insights from such varied sources as the Bible, the Qur'an, William Shakespeare, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, J. C. Penney, and Warren Buffett. Entries are serious, inspiring, occasionally humorous, and they will go a great way toward expanding the narrow perception of thrift as simple penny pinching; replacing that myopic view with one of a broader thrift—one that, as William H. Kniffen puts it, "earns largely and spends wisely" and leads to a life of independence and comfort well into old age.

Educators and parents will find ample wisdom to pass on to the next generation about the value of hard work, saving for the future, and generosity. Historians will delight in the glimpses into the U.S. thrift movement of the 1920s. Those seeking encouragement and inspiration will find much material here for reflection on the ideals of good stewardship, diligence, and sound financial planning. As our society ails from wastefulness, growing economic inequality, indebtedness, and runaway consumerism, there could be no stronger cure than this powerful little word, "thrift", which finds its root meaning in the word "thrive."

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Thrift
The History of an American Cultural Movement
Andrew L. Yarrow
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
In this lively and engaging book, Andrew L. Yarrow tells the story of a national movement that promoted an amalgam of values and practices ranging from self-control, money management, and efficiency to conservation, generosity, and planning for the future—all under the rubric of “thrift.” Emerging in tandem and in tension with the first flowerings of consumer society, the thrift movement flourished during the 1910s and 1920s and then lingered on the outskirts of American culture from the Depression to the prosperous mid-twentieth century.

The movement brought together a diverse array of social actors with widely divergent agendas—the YMCA, the Boy and Girl Scouts, temperance crusaders, and others seeking to strengthen the moral fiber of urban young men and boys in particular, and to tamp down the appeal of radicalism. It also attracted credit union and other progressive activists wanting to empower the working class economically, bankers desiring to broaden their customer base, conservationists and efficiency proponents denouncing “waste,” and government leaders, school teachers, and economists who believed that encouraging saving was in the economic interests of both individuals and the nation.

A post–World War II culture that centered on spending and pleasure made the early-twentieth-century thrift messages seem outdated. Nonetheless, echoes of thrift can be found in currently popular ideas of “sustainability,” “stewardship,” and “simplicity” and in efforts to curtail public and private debt.
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Through Deaf Eyes
A Photographic History of an American Community
Douglas Baynton
Gallaudet University Press, 2007

In 2001, the Smithsonian Institution presented the landmark photographic exhibition History Through Deaf Eyes, representing nearly 200 years of United States deaf history. Drawing heavily on the extensive archives at Gallaudet University, the curators created an exhibition that drew more than 400,000 people viewed at the Smithsonian and in 12 cities during a five-year national tour. Its popularity prompted the production of a documentary film for national broadcast on the Public Broadcasting System. Now, the photographs, quotes, and stories from this remarkable exhibit and documentary have been assembled in a book of stunning beauty and poignant images, Through Deaf Eyes: A Photographic History of an American Community.

Featuring more than 200 full-color photographs, Through Deaf Eyes depicts the story of Deaf America and also affords readers the opportunity to learn about the nation’s broader history. The values and judgments of society have had an impact on the education, employment, and family life of deaf people, while historical eras often can be illuminated by examination through a Deaf lens. Photographs reveal the character of Deaf people in school settings, the workplace, during wartime, and using their cultural signature, American Sign Language. For both deaf and hearing readers, the Deaf community portrayed in Through Deaf Eyes offers a unique and fascinating perspective on the value of human difference.

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Tied to the Great Packing Machine
The Midwest and Meatpacking
Wilson J. Warren
University of Iowa Press, 2007
Ambitious in its historical scope and its broad range of topics, Tied to the Great Packing Machine tells the dramatic story of meatpacking’s enormous effects on the economics, culture, and environment of the Midwest over the past century and a half. Wilson Warren situates the history of the industry in both its urban and its rural settings—moving from the huge stockyards of Chicago and Kansas City to today’s smaller meatpacking communities—and thus presents a complete portrayal of meatpacking’s place within the larger agro-industrial landscape.
Writing from the vantage point of twenty-five years of extensive research, Warren analyzes the evolution of the packing industry from its early period, dominated by the big terminal markets, through the development of new marketing and technical innovations that transformed the ways animals were gathered, slaughtered, and processed and the final products were distributed. In addition, he concentrates on such cultural impacts as ethnic and racial variations, labor unions, gender issues, and changes in Americans’ attitudes toward the ethics of animal slaughter and patterns of meat consumption and such environmental problems as site-point pollution and microbe contamination, ending with a stimulating discussion of the future of American meatpacking.
Providing an excellent and well-referenced analysis within a regional and temporal framework that ensures a fresh perspective, Tied to the Great Packing Machine is a dynamic narrative that contributes to a fuller understanding of the historical context and contemporary concerns of an extremely important industry.
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Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages
Jacques Le Goff
University of Chicago Press, 1980
Jacques Le Goff is a prominent figure in the tradition of French medieval scholarship, profoundly influenced by the Annales school, notably, Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel, and by the ethnographers and anthropologists Mauss, Dumézil, and Lévi-Strauss. In building his argument for "another Middle Ages" (un autre moyen âge), Le Goff documents the emergence of the collective mentalité from many sources with scholarship both imaginative and exact.

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Times of Upheaval
Four Medievalists in Twentieth-Century Central Europe. Conversations with Jerzy Kloczowski, János M. Bak, František Šmahel, and Herwig Wolfram
Pavlína Rychterová
Central European University Press, 2019
The volume unites conversations with four masters of Medieval Studies from east-central Europe: János Bak from Hungary, Jerzy Kloczowski from Poland, František Šmahel from the Czech Republic, and Herwig Wolfram from Austria. The interviews, made by younger colleagues, reveal engaging life stories, with numerous observations, anecdotes and experiences. The four scholars grew up before and during the war, under Nazi occupation, emerged as young scholars in the difficult post-war period, and, for most of their careers worked in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, two of them spending most of their lifetimes under communist regimes. The conversations focus on ways in which open-minded young intellectuals became medieval historians under difficult circumstances, how they experienced the long shadows of totalitarian regimes with their acute sensitivity for historical change, and how their perceptions of the world around them reflected back on their approach to medieval history. The histories of their nations were broken, most of them ceased to exist and then were re-established during their lifetimes, came under foreign domination, were split up, or had their territories shifted. These changes affected these scholars' identities and patriotic feelings, and their present was reflected in the distant mirror of the medieval past.
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To Care for the Sick and Bury the Dead
African American Lodges and Cemeteries in Tennessee
Leigh Ann Gardner
Vanderbilt University Press, 2022
Benevolent Orders, the Sons of Ham, Prince Hall Freemasons—these and other African American lodges created a social safety net for members across Tennessee. During their heyday between 1865 and 1930, these groups provided members with numerous resources, such as sick benefits and assurance of a proper burial, opportunities for socialization and leadership, and the chance to work with local churches and schools to create better communities. Many of these groups gradually faded from existence, but their legacy endures in the form of the cemeteries the lodges left behind.

These Black cemeteries dot the Tennessee landscape, but few know their history or the societies of care they represent. To Care for the Sick and Bury the Dead is the first book-length look at these cemeteries and the lodges that fostered them.

This book is a must-have for genealogists, historians, and family members of the people buried in these cemeteries.
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To Feast on Us as Their Prey
Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic
Rachel B. Herrmann
University of Arkansas Press, 2019

Winner, 2020 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award, Edited Volume

Long before the founding of the Jamestown, Virginia, colony and its Starving Time of 1609–1610—one of the most famous cannibalism narratives in North American colonial history—cannibalism played an important role in shaping the human relationship to food, hunger, and moral outrage. Why did colonial invaders go out of their way to accuse women of cannibalism? What challenges did Spaniards face in trying to explain Eucharist rites to Native peoples? What roles did preconceived notions about non-Europeans play in inflating accounts of cannibalism in Christopher Columbus’s reports as they moved through Italian merchant circles?

Asking questions such as these and exploring what it meant to accuse someone of eating people as well as how cannibalism rumors facilitated slavery and the rise of empires, To Feast on Us as Their Prey posits that it is impossible to separate histories of cannibalism from the role food and hunger have played in the colonization efforts that shaped our modern world.

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To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice
The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton
Hosea Easton
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999
How did racial prejudice originate and why has it been so deeply rooted in American culture? What have been the long-term effects of prejudice on the intellectual, communal, and psychological resources of African Americans? How might the nightmare of racial domination be truly brought to an end? Still pertinent today, these were among the key questions addressed more than a century and a half ago by Hosea Easton (1799–1837), an important yet long neglected activist and intellectual.

A black minister from New England, Easton rose to prominence during the 1820s and 1830s by joining in the struggle of free African Americans to resist southern slavery and secure racial equality. From this experience he developed a deep understanding of the problem of "race" in the United States and became a trenchant critic of white supremacy and its devastating consequences. This volume brings back into print the only extended writings of Easton that have survived into our time: his insightful, almost prescient A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and the Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States, first published in 1837; and his passionate 1828 Thanksgiving Day “Address.” The book also provides a biographical portrait of Easton and his family, drawn from primary documents as well as secondary sources in the areas of biography, genealogy, and social history.
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Tracks on the Ocean
A History of Trailblazing, Maps, and Maritime Travel
Sara Caputo
University of Chicago Press, 2024
An engaging look at ocean routes’ complicated beginnings and elusive impact.

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

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Transforming Places
Lessons from Appalachia
Edited by Stephen L. Fisher and Barbara Ellen Smith
University of Illinois Press, 2012

In this era of globalization's ruthless deracination, place attachments have become increasingly salient in collective mobilizations across the spectrum of politics. Like place-based activists in other resource-rich yet impoverished regions across the globe, Appalachians are contesting economic injustice, environmental degradation, and the anti-democratic power of elites. This collection of seventeen original essays by scholars and activists from a variety of backgrounds explores this wide range of oppositional politics, querying its successes, limitations, and impacts. The editors' critical introduction and conclusion integrate theories of place and space with analyses of organizations and events discussed by contributors. Transforming Places illuminates widely relevant lessons about building coalitions and movements with sufficient strength to challenge corporate-driven globalization.

Contributors are Fran Ansley, Yaira Andrea Arias Soto, Dwight B. Billings, M. Kathryn Brown, Jeannette Butterworth, Paul Castelloe, Aviva Chomsky, Dave Cooper, Walter Davis, Meredith Dean, Elizabeth C. Fine, Jenrose Fitzgerald, Doug Gamble, Nina Gregg, Edna Gulley, Molly Hemstreet, Mary Hufford, Ralph Hutchison, Donna Jones, Ann Kingsolver, Sue Ella Kobak, Jill Kriesky, Michael E. Maloney, Lisa Markowitz, Linda McKinney, Ladelle McWhorter, Marta Maria Miranda, Chad Montrie, Maureen Mullinax, Phillip J. Obermiller, Rebecca O'Doherty, Cassie Robinson Pfleger, Randal Pfleger, Anita Puckett, Katie Richards-Schuster, June Rostan, Rees Shearer, Daniel Swan, Joe Szakos, Betsy Taylor, Thomas E. Wagner, Craig White, and Ryan Wishart.

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Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish
Howard Lune
Temple University Press, 2020
In Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish, Howard Lune considers the development and mobilization of different nationalisms over 125 years of Irish diasporic history (1791–1920) and how these campaigns defined the Irish nation and Irish citizenship.

Lune takes a collective approach to exploring identity, concentrating on social identities in which organizations are the primary creative agent to understand who we are and how we come to define ourselves. As exiled Irishmen moved to the United States, they sought to create a new Irish republic following the American model. Lune traces the construction of Irish American identity through the establishment and development of Irish nationalist organizations in the United States. He looks at how networks—such as societies, clubs, and private organizations—can influence and foster diaspora, nationalism, and nationalist movements.

By separating nationalism from the physical nation, Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish uniquely captures the processes and mechanisms by which collective identities are constructed, negotiated, and disseminated. Inevitably, this work tackles the question of what it means to be Irish—to have a nationality, a community, or a shared history.
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Traveler, Scholar, Political Adventurer
A Transylvanian Baron at the Birth of Albanian Independence: The memoirs of Franz Nopcsa
Franz Nopcsa
Central European University Press, 2014
The Austro-Hungarian aristocrat of Transylvanian origin, Baron Franz Nopcsa (1877-1933), was one of the most adventuresome travelers and scholars of Southeast Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. He was also a paleontologist of renown and a noted geologist of the Balkan Peninsula : many of his assumptions have been confirmed by science. The Memoirs of this fascinating figure deal mainly with his travels in the Balkans, and specifically in the remote and wild mountains of northern Albania, in the years from 1903 to 1914. They thus cover the period of Ottoman Rule, the Balkan Wars and the outbreak of the First World War. Nopcsa was a keen adventurer who hiked through regions of northern Albania. With time, he became a leading expert in Albanian studies. He was also deeply involved in the politics of the period. In 1913, Nopcsa even offered himself as a candidate for the vacant Albanian throne. The Introduction also tells of Nopcsa's tragic death: he shot his Albanian secretary and partner before killing himself. The memoirs themselves reveal some references to his homosexuality for those who can read between the lines.
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Traveling Women
Narrative Visions of Early America
Susan Clair Imbarrato
Ohio University Press, 2006
Women’s travel narratives recording journeys north and south along the eastern seaboard and west onto the Ohio frontier enhance our historical understanding of early America. Drawing extensively from primary sources, Traveling Women documents women’s role in westward settlement and emphasizes travel as a culture-building event.

Susan Clair Imbarrato closely examines women’s accounts of their journeys from 1700 to 1830, including Sarah Kemble Knight’s well-known journal of her trip from Boston to New York in 1704 and many lesser-known accounts, such as Sarah Beavis’s 1779 journal of her travel to Ohio via Kentucky and Susan Edwards Johnson’s account or her 1801–2 journey from Connecticut to North Carolina.

In the women’s keen observations and entertaining wit, readers will find bravado mixed with hesitation, as women set forth on business, to relocate, and for pleasure. These travelers wrote compellingly of crossing rivers and mountains, facing hunger, encountering native Americans, sleeping in taverns, and confronting slavery, expressing themselves in voices that differed in sensibility from male explorers and travelers.

These accounts, as Imbarrato shows, challenge assumptions that such travel was predominately a male enterprise. In addition, Traveling Women provides a more balanced portrait of westward settlement by affirming women’s importance in the settling of early America.
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Trolls
An Unnatural History
John Lindow
Reaktion Books, 2014
Trolls lurk under bridges waiting to eat children, threaten hobbits in Middle-Earth, and invade the dungeons of Hogwarts. Often they are depicted as stupid, slow, and ugly creatures, but they also appear as comforting characters in some children’s stories or as plastic dolls with bright, fuzzy hair. Today, the name of this fantastic being from Scandinavia has found a wider reach: it is the word for the homeless in California and slang for the antagonizing and sometimes cruel people on the Internet. But how did trolls go from folktales to the World Wide Web?

To explain why trolls still hold our interest, John Lindow goes back to their first appearances in Scandinavian folklore, where they were beings in nature living beside a preindustrial society of small-scale farming and fishing. He explores reports of actual encounters with trolls—meetings others found plausible in spite of their better judgment—and follows trolls’ natural transition from folktales to other domains in popular culture. Trolls, Lindow argues, would not continue to appeal to our imaginations today if they had not made the jump to illustrations in Nordic books and Scandinavian literature and drama. From the Moomins to Brothers Grimm and Three Billy Goats Gruff to cartoons, fantasy novels, and social media, Lindow considers the panoply of trolls that surround us and their sometimes troubling connotations in the contemporary world.

Taking readers into Norwegian music and film and even Yahoo Finance chat rooms, Trolls is a fun and fascinating book about these strange creatures.
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Truth-Spots
How Places Make People Believe
Thomas F. Gieryn
University of Chicago Press, 2018
We may not realize it, but truth and place are inextricably linked. For ancient Greeks, temples and statues clustered on the side of Mount Parnassus affirmed their belief that predictions from the oracle at Delphi were accurate. The trust we have in Thoreau’s wisdom depends in part on how skillfully he made Walden Pond into a perfect place for discerning timeless truths about the universe. Courthouses and laboratories are designed and built to exacting specifications so that their architectural conditions legitimate the rendering of justice and discovery of natural fact. The on-site commemoration of the struggle for civil rights—Seneca, Selma, and Stonewall—reminds people of slow but significant political progress and of unfinished business. What do all these places have in common? Thomas F. Gieryn calls these locations “truth-spots,” places that lend credibility to beliefs and claims about natural and social reality, about the past and future, and about identity and the transcendent.

In Truth-Spots, Gieryn gives readers an elegant, rigorous rendering of the provenance of ideas, uncovering the geographic location where they are found or made, a spot built up with material stuff and endowed with cultural meaning and value. These kinds of places—including botanical gardens, naturalists’ field-sites, Henry Ford’s open-air historical museum, and churches and chapels along the pilgrimage way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain—would seem at first to have little in common. But each is a truth-spot, a place that makes people believe. Truth may well be the daughter of time, Gieryn argues, but it is also the son of place.
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Trying Home
The Rise and Fall of an Anarchist Utopia on Puget Sound
Justin Wadland
Oregon State University Press, 2014

The true story of an anarchist colony on a remote Puget Sound peninsula, Trying Home traces the history of Home, Washington, from its founding in 1896 to its dissolution amid bitter infighting in 1921.

As a practical experiment in anarchism, Home offered its participants a rare degree of freedom and tolerance in the Gilded Age, but the community also became notorious to the outside world for its open rejection of contemporary values. Using a series of linked narratives, Trying Home reveals the stories of the iconoclastic individuals who lived in Home, among them Lois Waisbrooker, an advocate of women’s rights and free love, who was arrested for her writings after the assassination of President McKinley; Jay Fox, editor of The Agitator, who defended his right to free speech all the way to the Supreme Court; and Donald Vose, a young man who grew up in Home and turned spy for a detective agency.

Justin Wadland weaves his own discovery of Home—and his own reflections on the concept of home—into the story, setting the book apart from a conventional history. After discovering the newspapers published in the colony, Wadland ventures beyond the documents to explore the landscape, travelling by boat along the steamer route most visitors once took to the settlement. He visits Home to talk with people who live there now.

Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Trying Home will fascinate scholars and general readers alike, especially those interested in the history of the Pacific Northwest, utopian communities, and anarchism.

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Turn on the Words!
Deaf Audiences, Captions, and the Long Struggle for Access
Harry G. Lang
Gallaudet University Press, 2021
The story of how captioning came into the lives of deaf and hard of hearing people has not been told with any detail, though captions are one of the greatest technological advancements in the effort to improve access to films, television, and other video content for both deaf and hearing audiences. In Turn on the Words!, Harry G. Lang documents the struggles and strategies over nearly a century to make spoken communication accessible through the use of captioning technology.

Lang describes the legislation, programs, and people who contributed great ingenuity and passion over decades to realize widespread access to captions, one breakthrough at a time. He also chronicles the resistance to captioned films from Hollywood studios and others, and the Deaf and hearing activists who championed the right to access. Deaf, hard of hearing, disabled, and English-as-a-second-language audiences now experience improved access to the educational, occupational, and cultural benefits of film and television programming. The struggle continues as deaf audiences advocate for equal access in a variety of settings such as movie theaters and online video-sharing platforms. This is a history of technological innovation, as well as a testament to the contributions of the Deaf community to the benefit of society as a whole.

This book has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this book do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Twelve Twenty-Five
The Life and Times of a Steam Locomotive
Kevin P. Keefe
Michigan State University Press, 2016
The against-all-odds story of a World War II–era steam locomotive and the determination of two generations of volunteers to keep it running comes alive in Twelve Twenty-Five: The Life and Times of a Steam Locomotive.

Pere Marquette 1225 was built in 1941 at the peak of steam locomotive development. The narrative traces the 1225’s regular freight service in Michigan, its unlikely salvation from the scrapyard for preservation at Michigan State University, and the subsequent work to bring it back to steam, first by a student club and later by a railroad museum. Milestones along the way include 1225’s retirement in 1951, its donation to MSU in 1957, its return to steam in 1988, a successful career hauling tens of thousands of excursion riders, and its starring role in the 2004 movie The Polar Express. The massive infrastructure that supported American steam locomotives in their heyday disappeared long ago, forcing 1225’s faithful to make their own spare parts, learn ancient railroad skills, and interpret the entire effort for the public. As such, the continuing career of 1225 is a triumph of historic preservation.

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