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

cover of The Future of the South China Sea: Disputes and Negotiations

The Future of the South China Sea

Disputes and Negotiations

Jiye Kim

University of Michigan Press, 2026

For over seventy years, China has steadfastly asserted its sovereignty over the South China Sea, transforming these waters into a flashpoint of international tension and a focal point of global diplomacy. The Future of the South China Sea intricately explores China’s motivations, unveiling its ambitions in the South China Sea that are anything but static. Despite the prevailing narrative that frames China’s objectives as monolithic and unchanging, its underlying interests in the region have fluctuated in both content and urgency, driven by economic imperatives, historical legacies, domestic pressures, and broader international security concerns.

By incorporating negotiation records, such as the 1958 Declaration on China’s Territorial Sea, the 1992 ASEAN Declaration, and the 2005 Tripartite Agreement, Jiye Kim traces how China reshapes its interests into negotiation agendas, providing critical insights into the nation’s diplomacy and making a significant contribution to an existing literature on the South China Sea that has been largely dominated by analyses of great power rivalry. This book sheds light on China’s underlying interests as living and adaptable entities, providing scholars with a detailed, evidence-based understanding of the complexities that define one of the world’s most contested maritime regions.
 
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cover of The Future without a Past: The Humanities in a Technological Society

The Future without a Past

The Humanities in a Technological Society

John Paul Russo

University of Missouri Press, 2005

In The Future without a Past, John Paul Russo goes beyond currently given reasons for the decline of the humanities and searches out its root causes in the technologization of everyday life. His main premise is that we are undergoing a transformation at the hands of technological imperatives such as rationalization, universalism, monism, and autonomy. The relation between ourselves and nature has altered to such a degree that we no longer live in a natural environment but in a technological one. According to Russo, technological values have actually eroded human values instead of being “humanized” by them.
            What are the implications of this shift for the humanities, traditionally seen as safeguards of the human? Russo addresses this question by situating the decline of the humanities within the larger social and historical panorama. He explores how technological values have infiltrated the humanities to the point of weakening their instruction and undermining their force; at the same time, he shows how the humanities have confronted these trends and can continue to do so. Russo believes that if we understand how technology “works” and the nature of its powers, we will then know in which realms it must be accepted and where it should be resisted.
            Russo outlines the components of the technological system and examines their impact on the educational system. He also discusses the loss of historical memory, including the so-called loss of the self and the transformation of the library. He studies the parallels between technological and literary values in criticism and theory, concluding with an analysis of the fiction of Don DeLillo, one of the most prominent contemporary novelists. DeLillo’s exploration of technology in American life, matched by a powerful critique of it from a broadly humanistic and religious perspective, serves to summarize the themes of the book as a whole.    
            The Future without a Past will appeal to scholars and students of literary studies, intellectual and cultural history, philosophy, ethics, media studies, and American studies, as well as to general readers who are seeking deeper insights into today’s cultural debates.
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cover of The Futures of American Studies

The Futures of American Studies

Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds.

Duke University Press, 2002

Originating as a proponent of U.S. exceptionalism during the Cold War, American Studies has now reinvented itself, vigorously critiquing various kinds of critical hegemony and launching innovative interdisciplinary endeavors. The Futures of American Studies considers the field today and provides important deliberations on what it might yet become. Essays by both prominent and emerging scholars provide theoretically engaging analyses of the postnational impulse of current scholarship, the field's historical relationship to social movements, the status of theory, the state of higher education in the United States, and the impact of ethnic and gender studies on area studies. They also investigate the influence of poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, and cultural studies on U.S. nationalist—and antinationalist—discourses. No single overriding paradigm dominates the anthology. Instead, the articles enter into a lively and challenging dialogue with one another. A major assessment of the state of the field, The Futures of American Studies is necessary reading for American Studies scholars.

Contributors. Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Günter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, José Estaban Muñoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos

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cover of The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, with a New Preface

The Futurist Moment

Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, with a New Preface

Marjorie Perloff

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Marjorie Perloff's stunning book was one of the first to offer a serious and far-reaching examination of the momentous flourishing of Futurist aesthetics in the European art and literature of the early twentieth century. Offering penetrating considerations of the prose, visual art, poetry, and carefully crafted manifestos of Futurists from Russia to Italy, Perloff reveals the Moment's impulses and operations, tracing its echoes through the years to the work of "postmodern" figures like Roland Barthes. This updated edition, with its new preface, reexamines the Futurist Moment in the light of a new century, in which Futurist aesthetics seem to have steadily more to say to the present.
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cover of The GEC Research Laboratories 1919-1984

The GEC Research Laboratories 1919-1984

Robert Clayton

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1989

The Research Laboratories of the GEC were conceived in 1916, started work in 1919 and moved to their well-known buildings in Wembley in 1922.
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cover of The GREAT DEBATE ON BANKING REFORM: Nelson Aldrich and the Origins of the Fed

The GREAT DEBATE ON BANKING REFORM

Nelson Aldrich and the Origins of the Fed

Elmus Wicker

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

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cover of The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War: EISENHOWER & COLD WAR

The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War

EISENHOWER & COLD WAR

David L. Snead

The Ohio State University Press, 1998

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cover of The Galilean Economy in the Time of Jesus

The Galilean Economy in the Time of Jesus

David A. Fiensy

SBL Press, 2013

In order to provide an up-to-date report and analysis of the economic conditions of first-century C.E. Galilee, this collection surveys recent archaeological excavations (Sepphoris, Yodefat, Magdala, and Khirbet Qana) and reviews results from older excavations (Capernaum). It also offers both interpretation of the excavations for economic questions and lays out the parameters of the current debate on the standard of living of the ancient Galileans. The essays included, by archaeologists as well as biblical scholars, have been drawn from the perspective of archaeology or the social sciences. The volume thus represents a broad spectrum of views on this timely and often hotly debated issue. The contributors are Mordechai Aviam, David A. Fiensy, Ralph K. Hawkins, Sharon Lea Mattila, Tom McCollough, and Douglas Oakman.
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cover of The Galveston Era: The Texas Crescent on the Eve of Secession

The Galveston Era

The Texas Crescent on the Eve of Secession

By Earl Wesley Fornell

University of Texas Press, 1961

The "Queen City" of Texas they called her—or the "Octopus of the Gulf." Galveston from 1845 to 1860 was the center of culture in Texas—or the monster with an economic strangle hold on all Texas trade. It was a gracious city with wide paved streets, impressive buildings, and neat gardens; yet it was also a pestilence-ridden place where no sanitary code was ever enforced and where one in every two children died before reaching maturity. Its citizens, avid for culture and knowledge, attended concerts and plays in great numbers and exhibited an eager interest in science and history; yet they could not be brought to support the school system. Galveston was a city where no person in need was ever left uncared for, where the sick and needy—strangers or friends—were succoured; yet no free Negro was safe from legalized abduction and forced enslavement, and the city served as a center for the revived African slave trade.

Earl Fornell makes the charming, colorful, cosmopolitan, contradictory city of Galveston the focal point of his study of the Texas Gulf Coast on the eve of the Civil War. The years 1845-1860 were crucial for this area; during that period the economy became more and more dependent upon slave labor, and thus the stage was set for secession.

Dr. Fornell describes with clarity the interrelated events, the decisions, and the conflicts that went into the development of Galveston and the Texas Gulf Coast during these years. He portrays the people and their way of life. He introduces us to some of the notables who helped to shape the destiny of Texas: Sam Houston, the old general; Lorenzo Sherwood, the golden-tongued propounder of radical economic doctrines; Willard Richardson, Hamilton Stuart, Ferdinand Flake, and Edward Cushing, the newspapermen whose writing both reflected and guided the thought of their fellow citizens; Arthur Lynn, the British consul whose observing and compassionate nature brought him onto the stage of Galveston history with striking frequency and whose voluminous letters provide a rich source for historical details; and William Ballinger, a minor player on the stage but one whose conscience and interests mirrored those of many other thoughtful Galvestonians.

Always present, affecting and affected by virtually every aspect of life on the Coast, the slave-labor problem grew ever more acute as the expanding railroad system laid more and more of the land open for development. Dr. Fornell shows with keen insight how it eventually forced Texans into a position where conflict with the federal government was unavoidable and the decision to secede from the Union inevitable.

The late Earl W. Fornell, a native of Wisconsin, held B.A. and M.A. degrees in political science from the New School for Social Research, the M.A. degree in political history from Columbia University, and the Ph.D. degree in political history from Rice University. He taught at Columbia, Amarillo College, Rice, and Lamar State College of Technology.

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cover of The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago's Democratic Machine

The Gambler King of Clark Street

Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago's Democratic Machine

Richard C. Lindberg with a Foreword by John Miya.

Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

The Gambler King of Clark Street tells the story of a larger-than-life figure who fused Chicago’s criminal underworld with the city’s political and commercial spheres to create an urban machine built on graft, bribery, and intimidation. Lindberg vividly paints the life of the Democratic kingmaker against the wider backdrop of nineteenth-century Chicago crime and politics.

McDonald has long been cited in the published work of city historians, members of academia, and the press as the principal architect of a unified criminal enterprise that reached into the corridors of power in Chicago, Cook County, the state of Illinois, and ultimately the Oval Office. The Gambler King of Clark Street is both a major addition to Chicago’s historical literature and a revealing biography of a powerful and troubled man.

Illinois State Historical Society Scholarly Award, Certificate of Excellence, 2009
Society of Midland Authors Biography Award, 2009

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cover of The Game of Conservation: International Treaties to Protect the World’s Migratory Animals

The Game of Conservation

International Treaties to Protect the World’s Migratory Animals

Mark Cioc

Ohio University Press, 2009

The Game of Conservation is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable examination of nature protection around the world.

Twentieth-century nature conservation treaties often originated as attempts to regulate the pace of killing rather than as attempts to protect animal habitat. Some were prompted by major breakthroughs in firearm techniques, such as the invention of the elephant gun and grenade harpoons, but agricultural development was at least as important as hunting regulations in determining the fate of migratory species. The treaties had many defects, yet they also served the goal of conservation to good effect, often saving key species from complete extermination and sometimes keeping the population numbers at viable levels. It is because of these treaties that Africa is dotted with large national parks, that North America has an extensive network of bird refuges, and that there are any whales left in the oceans. All of these treaties are still in effect today, and all continue to influence nature-protection efforts around the globe.

Drawing on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, Mark Cioc shows that a handful of treaties—all designed to protect the world’s most commercially important migratory species—have largely shaped the contours of global nature conservation over the past century. The scope of the book ranges from the African savannahs and the skies of North America to the frigid waters of the Antarctic.

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cover of The Games of July: Explaining the Great War

The Games of July

Explaining the Great War

Frank C. Zagare

University of Michigan Press, 2011

"Frank C. Zagare combines a deep command of historical scholarship and the sophisticated skills of an applied game theorist to develop and test a theory of why deterrence failed, catastrophically, in July 1914. . . . Zagare concludes with sage advice on how to avoid even more cataclysmic breakdowns in a nuclear world."
---Steven J. Brams, New York University

"Zagare's deft study of the origins of the First World War using his perfect deterrence theory uncovers new insights into that signal event and shows the value of formal theory applied to historical events. A must-read for those interested in security studies."
---James D. Morrow, University of Michigan

"Through an exemplary combination of formal theory, careful qualitative analysis, and lucid prose, The Games of July delivers important and interesting answers to key questions concerning the international political causes of World War I. Its well-formed narratives and its sustained engagement with leading works in IR and diplomatic history . . . make it a rewarding read for security scholars in general and a useful teaching tool for international security courses."
---Timothy W. Crawford, Boston College

Taking advantage of recent advances in game theory and the latest historiography, Frank C. Zagare offers a new, provocative interpretation of the events that led to the outbreak of World War I. He analyzes key events from Bismarck's surprising decision in 1879 to enter into a strategic alliance with Austria-Hungary to the escalation that culminated in a full-scale global war. Zagare concludes that, while the war was most certainly unintended, it was in no sense accidental or inevitable.

The Games of July serves not only as an analytical narrative but also as a work of theoretical assessment. Standard realist and liberal explanations of the Great War are evaluated along with a collection of game-theoretic models known as perfect deterrence theory.

Frank C. Zagare is UB Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Cover illustration: Satirical Italian postcard from World War I. Used with permission from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.

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cover of The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago

The Gang

A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago

Frederic Milton Thrasher

University of Chicago Press, 1963

While gangs and gang culture have been around for countless centuries, The Gang is one of the first academic studies of the phenomenon. Originally published in 1927, Frederic Milton Thrasher’s magnum opus offers a profound and careful analysis of hundreds of gangs in Chicago in the early part of the twentieth century. With rich prose and an eye for detail, Thrasher looked specifically at the way in which urban geography shaped gangs, and posited the thesis that neighborhoods in flux were more likely to produce gangs. Moreover, he traced gang culture back to feudal and medieval power systems and linked tribal ethos in other societies to codes of honor and glory found in American gangs. Thrasher approaches his subject with empathy and insightfulness, and creates a multifaceted and textured portrait that still has much to offer to readers today. With handsome images that evoke the era, this unabridged edition of The Gang not only explores an important moment in the history of Chicago, but also is itself a landmark in the history of sociology and subcultural theory.

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cover of The Gardens of Sallust: A Changing Landscape

The Gardens of Sallust

A Changing Landscape

By Kim J. Hartswick

University of Texas Press, 2003

Pleasure gardens, or horti, offered elite citizens of ancient Rome a retreat from the noise and grime of the city, where they could take their leisure and even conduct business amid lovely landscaping, architecture, and sculpture. One of the most important and beautiful of these gardens was the horti Sallustiani, originally developed by the Roman historian Sallust at the end of the first century B.C. and later possessed and perfected by a series of Roman emperors. Though now irrevocably altered by two millennia of human history, the Gardens of Sallust endure as a memory of beauty and as a significant archaeological site, where fragments of sculpture and ruins of architecture are still being discovered.

In this ambitious work, Kim Hartswick undertakes the first comprehensive history of the Gardens of Sallust from Roman times to the present, as well as its influence on generations of scholars, intellectuals, and archaeologists. He draws from an astonishing array of sources to reconstruct the original dimensions and appearance of the gardens and the changes they have undergone at specific points in history. Hartswick thoroughly discusses the architectural features of the garden and analyzes their remains. He also studies the sculptures excavated from the gardens and discusses the subjects and uses of many outstanding examples.

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cover of The Garnsey Spring Campsite: Late Prehistoric Occupation in Southeastern New Mexico

The Garnsey Spring Campsite

Late Prehistoric Occupation in Southeastern New Mexico

William J. Parry and John D. Speth

University of Michigan Press, 1984

In 1977 and 1978, Parry and Speth excavated the Garnsey Spring site, an aboriginal campsite southeast of Roswell, New Mexico. Here they describe their fieldwork and the analysis of the artifacts found at the site, including lithics and ceramics. Pollen analysis is also included.
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cover of The Gateway to the Middle Ages: France and Britain

The Gateway to the Middle Ages

France and Britain

Eleanor Shipley Duckett

University of Michigan Press, 1988

Portrays France and Britain at the beginning of the Dark Ages
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cover of The Gateway to the Middle Ages: Italy

The Gateway to the Middle Ages

Italy

Eleanor Shipley Duckett

University of Michigan Press, 1988

Portrays the struggle to defend Italian lands against the Eastern Goths and barbarians from the North.
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cover of The Gateway to the Middle Ages: Monasticism

The Gateway to the Middle Ages

Monasticism

Eleanor Shipley Duckett

University of Michigan Press, 1988

In an era when the sounds of monasticism's interior life speak to a new generation, Eleanor Shipley Duckett offers an illuminated description of its development under such figures as Columban, "the saint afire with Irish enthusiam"; St. Benedict, greatest of the monks, who established a pattern of the religious life still vibrant to this day; and St. Gregory, Benedict's pupil and greatest of the popes, who more than any other prepared the See of Rome for its triumphant emergence in the Middle Ages.
"Professor Duckett writes a history of this period that is as full of intellectual excitement as those centuries were of military excitement." -- Christian Century
"New light on the troubled origins of the medieval spirit." --New Republic
Eleanor Shipley Duckett was Professor Emerita of Latin Languages and Literature, Smith College.
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cover of The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco

The Gateway to the Pacific

Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco

Meredith Oda

University of Chicago Press, 2018

In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco’s identity as the “Gateway to the Pacific,” using it to reimagine and rebuild the city. The city became a cosmopolitan center on account of its newfound celebration of its Japanese and other Asian American residents, its economy linked with Asia, and its favorable location for transpacific partnerships. The most conspicuous testament to San Francisco’s postwar transpacific connections is the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in the city’s redeveloped Japanese-American enclave.
           
Focusing on the development of the Center, Meredith Oda shows how this multilayered story was embedded within a larger story of the changing institutions and ideas that were shaping the city. During these formative decades, Oda argues, San Francisco’s relations with and ideas about Japan were being forged within the intimate, local sites of civic and community life. This shift took many forms, including changes in city leadership, new municipal institutions, and especially transformations in the built environment. Newly friendly relations between Japan and the United States also meant that Japanese Americans found fresh, if highly constrained, job and community prospects just as the city’s African Americans struggled against rising barriers. San Francisco’s story is an inherently local one, but it also a broader story of a city collectively, if not cooperatively, reimagining its place in a global economy.
 
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cover of The Geckos of Bellapais: Memories of Cyprus

The Geckos of Bellapais

Memories of Cyprus

Joachim Sartorius

Haus Publishing, 2013

The history of Cyprus offers a reflection of larger world history. Coveted by a succession of foreign powers, it has been repeatedly occupied: the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, crusaders, Venetians, Genoese, Ottomans, and British have all left their mark on this Mediterranean island. Alongside the Roman and early Byzantine ruins of Salamis, other impressive monuments date from the Frankish and Venetian times, including the Abbey of Bellapais; the fortified harbor of Kyrenia; the magnificent cathedrals of Nicosia; and Famagusta, the setting for Shakespeare’s Othello.

In The Geckos of Bellapais, Joachim Sartorius shares the cultures and legends, colors and lights of the Levant. He explores the island’s history—including its division after the Turkish invasion of 1974 and the difficulties that followed. A revealing exploration of Cyprus after the Turkish partition and an evocative account of one poet’s life on one of the most beautiful islands in the Mediterranean, this book belongs among the world’s best travel writing.
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cover of The Gee Years, 1990-1997: HISTORY OF THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

The Gee Years, 1990-1997

HISTORY OF THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

Malcolm S. Baroway

The Ohio State University Press, 2003

The Gee Years chronicles the tenure of E. Gordon Gee, eleventh president of The Ohio State University, from the closely held search process to his departure.

When Gee lost his beloved wife, Elizabeth, to cancer in 1991 and became a single parent, he not only carried on, he carried the university through some of its most exhilarating but contentious times. By 1996, he was so popular, private polls said he could run for Ohio governor—and win—on either ticket. When he, and his new bride Constance Bumgarner Gee, left instead for Brown University in January 1998, they left behind a stronger Ohio State and a string of stories about power brokers, politicians, and just plain Buckeyes. Populated by such figures as Les Wexner and George Voinovich, Andy Geiger and John Cooper, Bernadine Healy and John Glenn, The Gee Years is “inside baseball,” written by a member of Gee’s inner circle, his communications director. From the board room to the press box, from fundraisers to sit-ins, this is the story of a singular academic leader and more than seven years in the history of the complex university he headed.
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cover of The Gee Years, 2007–2013

The Gee Years, 2007–2013

Herbert B. Asher

The Ohio State University Press, 2022

The Gee Years, 2007–2013 chronicles E. Gordon Gee’s second tenure as president of The Ohio State University and the fourteenth in the university’s history. With previous posts at Vanderbilt, Brown, Colorado, West Virginia, and a previous term at Ohio State, Gee is the longest continually serving college president in the country. His second tenure with Ohio State boasted overall fundraising at record highs, created a $100 million fund for student scholarships, called for affordability for college education for Ohioans which helped to shift study body demographics, and led the charge for restructuring the state of Ohio’s funding of higher education. Part of Gee’s close circle, Herbert B. Asher writes from firsthand experience to relate the major events, developments, and successes of the university from Gee’s recruitment through the president’s departure. The Gee Years reflects on a leader who left an indelible impression on The Ohio State University.
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cover of The Gender of Memory: Cultures of Remembrance in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe

The Gender of Memory

Cultures of Remembrance in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe

Edited by Sylvia Paletschek and Sylvia Schraut

Campus Verlag, 2008

This volume addresses the complex relationship between memory, culture, and gender—as well as the representation of women in national memory—in several European countries. An international group of contributors explore the national allegories of memory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the relationship between violence and war in the recollections of both families and the state, and the methodological approaches that can be used to study a gendered culture of memory.
 
 
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cover of The Gender of Piety: Family, Faith, and Colonial Rule in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe

The Gender of Piety

Family, Faith, and Colonial Rule in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe

Wendy Urban-Mead

Ohio University Press, 2015

The Gender of Piety is an intimate history of the Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe, or BICC, as related through six individual life histories that extend from the early colonial years through the first decade after independence. Taken together, these six lives show how men and women of the BICC experienced and sequenced their piety in different ways. Women usually remained tied to the church throughout their lives, while men often had a more strained relationship with it. Church doctrine was not always flexible enough to accommodate expected masculine gender roles, particularly male membership in political and economic institutions or participation in important male communal practices.

The study is based on more than fifteen years of extensive oral history research supported by archival work in Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The oral accounts make it clear, official versions to the contrary, that the church was led by spiritually powerful women and that maleness and mission-church notions of piety were often incompatible.

The life-history approach illustrates how the tension of gender roles both within and without the church manifested itself in sometimes unexpected ways: for example, how a single family could produce both a legendary woman pastor credited with mediating multiple miracles and a man—her son—who joined the armed wing of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union nationalist political party and fought in Zimbabwe’s liberation war in the 1970s. Investigating the lives of men and women in equal measure, The Gender of Piety uses a gendered interpretive lens to analyze the complex relationship between the church and broader social change in this region of southern Africa.

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cover of The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces

The Gendered Pulpit

Preaching in American Protestant Spaces

Roxanne Mountford

Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

In this feminist investigation into the art of preaching—one of the oldest and least studied rhetorical traditions—Roxanne Mountford explores the relationship between bodies, space, race, and gender in rhetorical performance and American Protestant culture. Refiguring delivery and physicality as significant components of the rhetorical situation, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces examines the strategies of three contemporary women preachers who have transgressed traditions, rearranged rhetorical space, and conquered gender bias to establish greater intimacy with their congregations.

Mountford’s examinations of the rhetoric inherent in preaching manuals from 1850 to the present provide insight into how “manliness” has remained a central concept in American preaching since the mid-nineteenth century. The manuals illustrate that the character, style, method of delivery, and theological purpose of preachers focused on white men and their cultural standing, leaving contemporary women preachers searching for ways to accommodate themselves to the physicality of preaching.

Three case studies of women preachers who have succeeded or failed in rearranging rhetorical space provide the foundation for the volume. These contemporary examples have important implications for feminist theology and also reveal the importance of gender, space, and bodies to studies of rhetoric in general. Mountford explores the geographies of St. John’s Lutheran Church and the preaching of Rev. Patricia O’Connor who reformed rhetorical space through the delivery of her sermons. At Eastside United Church of Christ, Mountford shows, Rev. Barbara Hill employed narrative style and prophetic utterance in the tradition of black preaching to address gender bias and institute change in her congregation. The final case study details the experiences of Pastor Janet Moore and her struggles at Victory Hills United Methodist Church, where the fractured congregation could not be united even with Pastor Moore’s focus on theological purpose and invention strategies.

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cover of The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers: From Household and Factory to the Union Hall and Ballot Box

The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers

From Household and Factory to the Union Hall and Ballot Box

John D. French and Daniel James, eds.

Duke University Press, 1997

The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers examines the lives of Latin American women who entered factory labor in increasing numbers in the early part of the twentieth century. Emphasizing the integration of traditional labor history topics with historical accounts of gender, female subjectivity, and community, this volume focuses on the experience of working women at mid-century, especially those laboring in the urban industrial sector. In its exploration of working women’s agency and consciousness, this collection offers rich detail regarding women’s lives as daughters, housewives, mothers, factory workers, trade union leaders, and political activists.
Widely seen as a hostile sexualized space, the modern factory was considered a threat, not only to the virtue of working women, but also to the survival of the family, and thus, the future of the nation. Yet working-class women continued to labor outside the home and remained highly visible in the expanding world of modern industry. In nine essays dealing with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Guatemala, the contributors make extensive use of oral histories to describe the contradictory experiences of women whose work defied gender prescriptions but was deemed necessary by working-class families in a world of need and scarcity. The volume includes discussion of previously neglected topics such as single motherhood, women’s struggle against domestic violence, and the role of women as both desiring and desired subjects.

Contributors. Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Mary Lynn Pedersen Cluff, John D. French, Daniel James, Thomas Miller Klubock, Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Mirta Zaida Lobato, Heidi Tinsman, Theresa R. Veccia, Barbara Weinstein

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cover of The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750: The English Phallus

The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750

The English Phallus

Thomas A. King

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

    Taking on nothing less than the formation of modern genders and sexualities, Thomas A. King develops a history of the political and performative struggles that produced both normative and queer masculinities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The result is a major contribution to gender studies, gay studies, and theater and performance history.
    The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750 traces the transition from a society based on alliance, which had subordinated all men, women, and boys to higher ranked males, to one founded in sexuality, through which men have embodied their claims to personal and political privacy. King proposes that the male body is a performative production marking men’s resistance to their subjection within patriarchy and sovereignty. Emphasizing that categories of gender must come under historical analysis, The Gendering of Men explores men’s particpation in an ongoing struggle for access to a universal manliness transcending other biological and social differentials.

This is volume one of two projected volumes.

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cover of The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750: Volume 2, Queer Articulations

The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750

Volume 2, Queer Articulations

Thomas A. King

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

The queer man’s mode of embodiment—his gestural and vocal style, his posture and gait, his occupation of space—remembers a political history. To gesture with the elbow held close to the body, to affect a courtly lisp, or to set an arm akimbo with the hand turned back on the hip is to cite a history in which the sovereign body became the effeminate and sodomitical and, finally, the homosexual body. In Queer Articulations, Thomas A. King argues that the Anglo-American queer body publicizes a history of resistance to the gendered terms whereby liberal subjectivities were secured in early modern England.
Arguing that queer agency preceded and enabled the formulation of queer subjectivities, Queer Articulations investigates theatricality and sodomy as performance practices foreclosed in the formation of gendered privacy and consequently available for resistant uses by male-bodied persons who have been positioned, or who have located themselves, outside the universalized public sphere of citizen-subjects. By defining queerness as the lack or failure of private pleasures, rather than an alternative pleasure or substance in its own right, eighteenth-century discourses reconfigured publicness as the mark of difference from the naturalized, private bodies of liberal subjects.
Inviting a performance-centered, interdisciplinary approach to queer/male identities, King develops a model of queerness as processual activity, situated in time and place but irreducible to the individual subject's identifications, desires, and motivations.
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cover of The Gene: From Genetics to Postgenomics

The Gene

From Genetics to Postgenomics

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Staffan Müller-Wille

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Few concepts played a more important role in twentieth-century life sciences than that of the gene. Yet at this moment, the field of genetics is undergoing radical conceptual transformation, and some scientists are questioning the very usefulness of the concept of the gene, arguing instead for more systemic perspectives.
 
The time could not be better, therefore, for Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Staffan Müller-Wille's magisterial history of the concept of the gene. Though the gene has long been the central organizing theme of biology, both conceptually and as an object of study, Rheinberger and Müller-Wille conclude that we have never even had a universally accepted, stable definition of it. Rather, the concept has been in continual flux—a state that, they contend, is typical of historically important and productive scientific concepts. It is that very openness to change and manipulation, the authors argue, that made it so useful: its very mutability enabled it to be useful while the technologies and approaches used to study and theorize about it changed dramatically.
 
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cover of The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology

The Genealogical Science

The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology

Nadia Abu El-Haj

University of Chicago Press, 2012

The Genealogical Science analyzes the scientific work and social implications of the flourishing field of genetic history. A biological discipline that relies on genetic data in order to reconstruct the geographic origins of contemporary populations—their histories of migration and genealogical connections to other present-day groups—this historical science is garnering ever more credibility and social reach, in large part due to a growing industry in ancestry testing. 
 
In this book, Nadia Abu El-Haj examines genetic history’s working assumptions about culture and nature, identity and biology, and the individual and the collective. Through the example of the study of Jewish origins, she explores novel cultural and political practices that are emerging as genetic history’s claims and “facts” circulate in the public domain and illustrates how this historical science is intrinsically entangled with cultural imaginations and political commitments.  Chronicling late-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century understandings of race, nature, and culture, she identifies continuities and shifts in scientific claims, institutional contexts, and political worlds in order to show how the meanings of biological difference have changed over time.  In so doing she gives an account of how and why it is that genetic history is so socially felicitous today and elucidates the range of understandings of the self, individual and collective, this scientific field is making possible. More specifically, through her focus on the history of projects of Jewish self-fashioning that have taken place on the terrain of the biological sciences, The Genealogical Science analyzes genetic history as the latest iteration of a cultural and political practice now over a century old. 
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cover of The Genealogical Sublime

The Genealogical Sublime

Julia Creet

University of Massachusetts Press, 2020

Since the early 2000s, genealogy has become a lucrative business, an accelerating online industry, a massive data mining project, and fodder for reality television. But the fact remains that our contemporary fascination with family history cannot be understood independently of the powerful technological tools that aid and abet in the search for traces of blood, belonging, and difference.

In The Genealogical Sublime, Julia Creet traces the histories of the largest, longest-running, most lucrative, and most rapidly growing genealogical databases to delineate a broader history of the industry. As each unique case study reveals, new database and DNA technologies enable an obsessive completeness—the desire to gather all of the world's genealogical records in the interests of life beyond death. Archival research and firsthand interviews with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officials, key industry players (including Ancestry.com founders and Family Search executives), and professional and amateur family historians round out this timely and essential study.
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cover of The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History

The Genealogy of Genealogy

Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History

Jason Ananda Josephson Storm

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A daring reassessment of the critical method that reshaped the humanities and an invitation to imagine new ways of doing history.

The genealogical method—a mode of historical analysis that shows that what looks timeless is in fact contingent, bound to shifting relations of meaning, knowledge, and power—has become the dominant paradigm of humanistic inquiry. In The Genealogy of Genealogy, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm turns this influential practice back on itself, tracing its unlikely rise through Nietzsche and Foucault and uncovering its suppressed ties to eugenics and racism. He rethinks the very stakes of critical history and proposes new tools for thinking about historical continuity, change, and difference.

Provocative and timely, The Genealogy of Genealogy offers both a diagnosis and a vision, challenging scholars across the humanities and social sciences to rethink how we write history and whether our most trusted methods are fit for the futures we seek to build.
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cover of The General Textile Strike of 1934: From Maine to Alabama

The General Textile Strike of 1934

From Maine to Alabama

John A. Salmond

University of Missouri Press, 2002

In January 1933, the United Textile Workers of America was in danger of collapse. Its membership was no larger than 15,000; its attempts to organize southern workers had failed disastrously; and it was constantly under attack from rival organizations. Yet, barely eighteen months later, with 300,000 dues-paying members, with newly established or revived branches covering southern cotton textile workers, as well as northern woolen and worsted workers, silk and jacquard weavers, dyers and finishers, even rayon workers, and with locals in 208 cities, towns, and mill villages, the UTW was about to embark on what one historian has termed “the greatest single industrial conflict in the history of American labor.” The General Textile Strike of 1934 is the story of that conflict.
The few historians who have concerned themselves at all with the 1934 textile strike have all concentrated on its southern aspect, presenting it as a southern event, a cotton textile event. No one argues that the South and cotton were not crucial to the strike’s story. It was cotton mill workers’ anger over the broken promises of the National Industrial Recovery Act that had forced a reluctant UTW leadership into supporting a strike vote. No industry leader was more devious in his dealings with the UTW leaders than George Sloan, the chair of the Cotton Code Authority and head of the Cotton Textile Institute. Nevertheless, the 1934 strike was a nationwide one, involving hundreds of thousands of silk, woolen, and rayon workers, all represented by the UTW and mostly living in states outside the South. Moreover, Peter Van Horn and Arthur Besse, head of the Silk and Woolen Code Authorities, respectively, lost little to Sloan in their intransigence toward labor’s demands. And, though the great transfer of the cotton industry from New England to the South was almost complete, there were still little pockets left in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine.
In The General Textile Strike of 1934, John Salmond tells everyone’s story. Looking at the strike from a national and an industrywide perspective, Salmond explains why workers were willing to risk protesting and describes the differences and similarities between southern and northern workers. Setting the strike within a New Deal context and focusing on its impact on the future of labor relations in the industry and on the lives of those who participated in it, The General Textile Strike of 1934 fills an important gap in American labor history.
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cover of The Genesis Quest: The Geniuses and Eccentrics on a Journey to Uncover the Origin of Life on Earth

The Genesis Quest

The Geniuses and Eccentrics on a Journey to Uncover the Origin of Life on Earth

Michael Marshall

University of Chicago Press, 2020

From the primordial soup to meteorite impact zones, the Manhattan Project to the latest research, this book is the first full history of the scientists who strive to explain the genesis of life.

How did life begin? Why are we here? These are some of the most profound questions we can ask.
 
For almost a century, a small band of eccentric scientists has struggled to answer these questions and explain one of the greatest mysteries of all: how and why life began on Earth. There are many different proposals, and each idea has attracted passionate believers who promote it with an almost religious fervor, as well as detractors who reject it with equal passion.
 
But the quest to unravel life’s genesis is not just a story of big ideas. It is also a compelling human story, rich in personalities, conflicts, and surprising twists and turns. Along the way, the journey takes in some of the greatest discoveries in modern biology, from evolution and cells to DNA and life’s family tree. It is also a search whose end may finally be in sight.
 
In The Genesis Quest, Michael Marshall shows how the quest to understand life’s beginning is also a journey to discover the true nature of life, and by extension our place in the universe.
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cover of The Genesis of Missouri: From Wilderness Outpost to Statehood

The Genesis of Missouri

From Wilderness Outpost to Statehood

William E. Foley

University of Missouri Press, 1989

The story of the blending of diverse cultures in a land rich in resources and beauty is an extraordinary one. In this account, the pioneer hunters, trappers, and traders who roamed the Ozark hills and the boatmen who traded on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers take their place beside the small coterie of St. Louisans whose wealth and influence enabled them to dominate the region politically and economically. Especially appealing for many readers will be the attention Foley gives to common Missourians, to the status of women and blacks, and to Indian-white relations.

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cover of The Genesis of Reno: The History of the Riverside Hotel and the Virginia Street Bridge

The Genesis of Reno

The History of the Riverside Hotel and the Virginia Street Bridge

Jack Harpster

University of Nevada Press, 2016

Over 157 years ago—before there was a Reno, Nevada; before there was a state of Nevada; and even before there was a Nevada Territory—there was a bridge over the Truckee River at a narrow, deeply rutted cattle and wagon trail that would one day become Virginia Street. There was also a small rustic inn and tavern occupying a plot of ground at the southern end of the log-and-timber bridge, catering to thirsty cowboys, drovers, and miners. The inn and the bridge were the first two structures in what would one day be a bustling metropolitan area, and to this day they still form the nucleus of the city. The Genesis of Reno traces their history up to the present day. The 111 year-old concrete bridge that was replaced in 2016 by a magnificent new structure was honored for its longevity and unique character with placement on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
 
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cover of The Genius of American Politics

The Genius of American Politics

Daniel J. Boorstin

University of Chicago Press, 1958

How much of our political tradition can be absorbed and used by other peoples? Daniel Boorstin's answer to this question has been chosen by the Carnegie Corporation of New York for representation in American Panorama as one of the 350 books, old and new, most descriptive of life in the United States. He describes the uniqueness of American thought and explains, after a close look at the American past, why we have not produced and are not likely to produce grand political theories or successful propaganda. He also suggests what our attitudes must be toward ourselves and other countries if we are to preserve our institutions and help others to improve theirs.

". . . a fresh and, on the whole, valid interpretation of American political life."—Reinhold Niebuhr, New Leader
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cover of The Genius of Place: The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic

The Genius of Place

The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic

Christopher C. Apap

University of New Hampshire Press, 2019

The Genius of Place examines how, after the War of 1812, concerns about the scale of the nation resulted in a fundamental reorientation of American identity away from the Atlantic or global ties that held sway in the early republic and toward more localized forms of identification. Instead of addressing the sweep of the nation, American authors, artists, geographers, and politicians shifted from the larger reach of the globe to the more manageable scope of the local and sectional. Paradoxically, that local representation became the primary mode through which early Americans construed their emerging national identity. This newfound cultural obsession with locality impacted the literary consolidation and representation of key American imagined places—New England, the plantation, the West—in the decades between 1816 and 1836.

Apap's examination of the intersections between local and national representations and exploration of the myths of space and place that shaped U.S. identity through the nineteenth century will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary readership.

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cover of The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie

The Gentle Art of Murder

The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie

Earl F. Bargainnier

University of Wisconsin Press, 1980

This study of the technique of Agatha Christie’s detective fiction—sixty-seven novels and over one hundred short stories—is the first extensive analysis of her accomplishment as a writer. Earl F. Bargannier demonstrates that Christie thoroughly understood the conventions of her genre and, with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, was able to develop for more than fifty years surprising variations within those conventions.
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cover of The Gentleman from Ohio

The Gentleman from Ohio

Louis Stokes with David Chanoff with a foreword by Congressman John Lewis

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

Louis Stokes was a giant in Ohio politics and one of the most significant figures in the U.S. Congress in recent times. When he arrived in the House of Representatives as a freshman in 1969, there were only six African Americans serving. By the time he retired thirty years later, he had chaired the House Special Committee on the Kennedy and King assassinations, the House Ethics Committee during Abscam, and the House Intelligence Committee during Iran-Contra; he was also a senior member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.
 
Prior to Louis Stokes’s tenure in Congress he served for many years as a criminal defense lawyer and chairman of the Cleveland NAACP Legal Redress Committee. Among the Supreme Court Cases he argued, the Terry “Stop and Frisk” case is regarded as one of the twenty-five most significant cases in the court’s history. The Gentleman from Ohio chronicles this and other momentous events in the life and legacy of Ohio’s first black representative—a man who, whether in law or politics, continually fought for the principles he believed in and helped lead the way for African Americans in the world of mainstream American politics.
 
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cover of The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood

The Genuine Article

Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood

Paul Gilmore

Duke University Press, 2001

In The Genuine Article Paul Gilmore examines the interdependence of literary and mass culture at a crucial moment in US history. Demonstrating from a new perspective the centrality of race to the construction of white manhood across class lines, Gilmore argues that in the years before the Civil War, as literature increasingly became another commodity in the capitalist cultural marketplace, American authors appropriated middle-brow and racially loaded cultural forms to bolster their masculinity.

From characters in Indian melodramas and minstrel shows to exhibits in popular museums and daguerrotype galleries, primitive racialized figures circulated as “the genuine article” of manliness in the antebellum United States. Gilmore argues that these figures were manipulated, translated, and adopted not only by canonical authors such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, and Melville but also by African American and Native American writers like William Wells Brown and Okah Tubbee. By examining how these cultural notions of race played out in literary texts and helped to construct authorship as a masculine profession, Gilmore makes a unique contribution to theories of class formation in nineteenth-century America.

The Genuine Article will enrich students and scholars of American studies, gender studies, literature, history, sociology, anthropology, popular culture, and race.
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cover of The Geoarchaeology of a Terraced Landscape: From Aztec Matlatzinco to Modern Calixtlahuaca

The Geoarchaeology of a Terraced Landscape

From Aztec Matlatzinco to Modern Calixtlahuaca

Aleksander Borejsza, Isabel Rodríguez López, Charles D. Frederick, and Michael E. Smith

University of Utah Press, 2021

The toil of several million peasant farmers in Aztec Mexico transformed lakebeds and mountainsides into a checkerboard of highly productive fields. This book charts the changing fortunes of one Aztec settlement and its terraced landscapes from the twelfth to the twenty-first century. It also follows the progress and missteps of a team of archaeologists as they pieced together this story.

Working at a settlement in the Toluca Valley of central Mexico, the authors used fieldwalking, excavation, soil and artifact analyses, maps, aerial photos, land deeds, and litigation records to reconstruct the changing landscape through time. Exploiting the methodologies and techniques of several disciplines, they bring context to eight centuries of the region’s agrarian history, exploring the effects of the Aztec and Spanish Empires, reform, and revolution on the physical shape of the Mexican countryside and the livelihoods of its people. Accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike, this well-illustrated and well-organized volume provides a step-by-step guide that can be applied to the study of terraced landscapes anywhere in the world.
 
The four authors share an interest in terraced landscapes and have worked together and on their own on a variety of archaeological projects in Mesoamerica, the Mediterranean, Poland, and the United Kingdom.
 
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cover of The Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary

The Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary

Randolph L. Braham, Foreword by Elie Wiesel

Northwestern University Press, 2013

Winner of the 2013 National Jewish Book Award

The illustrated three-volume Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary is a definitive, authoritative, and magisterial resource, thorough and exhaustive. It documents and chronicles the wartime fate of the Jewish communities in that country where virulent antisemitism is anything but dead, even today. With scores of detailed maps and hundreds of photographs, this reference work is organized alphabetically by county, each prefaced with a map and a con­textual history describing its Jewish population up to and into 1944.

Entries track the demographic, cultural, and religious changes in even the smallest communities where Jews lived before their marginalization, dispossession, ghettoization, and, finally, deportation to labor and death camps. The encyclope­dia endows scholars and lay researchers with both panoramic and microscopic views of the virtually last-minute destruction of most of the Jews of Hungary, until then the last sizable sur­viving Jewish community in occupied Europe.

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cover of The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950

The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950

Susan Schulten

University of Chicago Press, 2001

In this rich and fascinating history, Susan Schulten tells a story of Americans beginning to see the world around them, tracing U.S. attitudes toward world geography from the end of nineteenth-century exploration to the explosion of geographic interest before the dawn of the Cold War. Focusing her examination on four influential institutions—maps and atlases, the National Geographic Society, the American university, and public schools—Schulten provides an engaging study of geography, cartography, and their place in popular culture, politics, and education.
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cover of The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space

The Geographies of Social Movements

Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space

Ulrich Oslender

Duke University Press, 2016

In The Geographies of Social Movements Ulrich Oslender proposes a critical place perspective to examine the activism of black communities in the lowland rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast region. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in and around the town of Guapi, Oslender examines how the work of local community councils, which have organized around newly granted ethnic and land rights since the early 1990s, is anchored to space and place. Exploring how residents' social relationships are entangled with the region's rivers, streams, swamps, rain, and tides, Oslender argues that this "aquatic space"—his conceptualization of the mutually constitutive relationships between people and their rain forest environment—provides a local epistemology that has shaped the political process. Oslender demonstrates that social mobilization among Colombia's Pacific Coast black communities is best understood as emerging out of their place-based identity and environmental imaginaries. He argues that the critical place perspective proposed accounts more fully for the multiple, multiscalar, rooted, and networked experiences within social movements.
 
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cover of The Geography of Hate: The Great Migration through Small-Town America

The Geography of Hate

The Great Migration through Small-Town America

Jennifer Sdunzik

University of Illinois Press, 2023

The uncomfortable truths that shaped small communities in the midwest

During the Great Migration, Black Americans sought new lives in midwestern small towns only to confront the pervasive efforts of white residents determined to maintain their area’s preferred cultural and racial identity. Jennifer Sdunzik explores this widespread phenomenon by examining how it played out in one midwestern community. Sdunzik merges state and communal histories, interviews and analyses of population data, and spatial and ethnographic materials to create a rich public history that reclaims Black contributions and history. She also explores the conscious and unconscious white actions that all but erased Black Americans--and the terror and exclusion used against them--from the history of many midwestern communities.

An innovative challenge to myth and perceived wisdom, The Geography of Hate reveals the socioeconomic, political, and cultural forces that prevailed in midwestern towns and helps explain the systemic racism and endemic nativism that remain entrenched in American life.

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cover of The Geography of Manitoba: Its Land and its People

The Geography of Manitoba

Its Land and its People

John Welsted

University of Manitoba Press, 1996

Manitoba is more than one of Canada's three prairie provinces. Encompassing 649,950 square kilometres, its territory ranges from Canadian Shield to grassland, parkland, and subarctic tundra. Its physical geography has been shaped by ice-age glaciers, while its human geography reflects the influences of its various inhabitants, from the First Nations who began arriving over 9,000 years ago, to its most recent immigrants. This fascinating range of geographical elements has given Manitoba a distinct identity and makes it a unique area for study. Geography of Manitoba is the first comprehensive guide to all aspects of the human and physical geography of this unique province. Representing the work of 47 scholars, and illustrated with over 200 maps, diagrams, and photographs, it is divided into four main sections, covering the major areas of the province's geography: Physical Background; People and Settlements; Resources and Industry; and Recreation.As well as studying historical developments, the contributors to Geography of Manitoba analyse recent political and economic events in the province, including the effect of federal and provincial elections and international trade agreements. They also comment on future prospects for the province, considering areas as diverse as resource management and climatic trends.
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cover of The Geography of Wisconsin

The Geography of Wisconsin

John A. Cross and Kazimierz J. Zaniewski

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

This accessible survey of Wisconsin geography is sure to delight scholars, students, and enthusiasts alike. A beautiful array of nearly 250 photographs and easy-to-read maps illustrate key geographical concepts and structures, such as:
  • physical features: bedrock geology, glaciation, landforms, soils, climate, and vegetation 
  • cultural landscapes: population density, ethnic populations, demographics, and political affiliations
  • economic activity: agriculture, forestry, mining, manufacturing, transportation, recreation, and tourism
Aware that geography is shaped as much by settlement patterns and people as by geology and weather, John A. Cross and Kazimierz J. Zaniewski have created an up-to-date and authoritative overview of the Dairy State's lands and life. The Geography of Wisconsin will remain a valuable reference for decades to come.
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cover of The George Washington Bridge: Poetry in Steel

The George Washington Bridge

Poetry in Steel

Michael Aaron Rockland

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Since opening in 1931, the George Washington Bridge, linking New York and New Jersey, has become the busiest bridge in the world, with 108 million vehicles crossing it in 2007. Many people also consider it the most beautiful bridge in the world, yet remarkably little has been written about this majestic structure.

Intimate and engaging, Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB, as it is often called, that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and even post-9/11 mentality. Stunning archival photos, from the late 1920s when the bridge was built through the present, are a powerful complement to the bridge's history. Rockland covers the competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Readers will learn about the Swiss immigrant Othmar Ammann, an unsung hero who designed and built the GWB, and how a lack of funding during the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers, which we admire today. There are chapters discussing accidents on the bridge, such as an airplane crash landing in the westbound lanes and the sad story of suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and Rockland's personal adventures on the bridge, including scaling its massive towers on a cable.

Movies, television shows, songs, novels, countless images, and even PlayStation 2 games have aided the GWB in becoming a part of the global popular culture. This tribute will captivate residents living in the shadow of the GWB, the millions who walk, jog, bike, skate, or drive across it, as well as tourists and those who will visit it some day.
  • First major book on the George Washington Bridge
  • Full of amazing facts about the GWB that will surprise even bridge historians
  • Includes over 30 spectacular illustrations, ranging from archival photographs of the building of the bridge to those that show it draped in an enormous flag after 9/11
  • Includes personal accounts of the author's adventures on the bridge
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cover of The George Washington Bridge: Poetry in Steel

The George Washington Bridge

Poetry in Steel

Michael Aaron Rockland

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Since opening in 1931, the George Washington Bridge, linking New York and New Jersey, has become the busiest bridge in the world, with 103 million vehicles crossing it in 2016. Many people also consider it the most beautiful bridge in the world, yet remarkably little has been written about this majestic structure.

Intimate and engaging, this revised and expanded edition of Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB, as it is often called, that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and even post-9/11 mentalities. This new edition brings new insight since its initial publication in 2008, including a new chapter on the infamous “Bridgegate” Chris Christie-era scandal of 2013, when members of the governor's administration shut down access to the bridge, causing a major traffic jam and scandal and subsequently helping undermine Christie’s candidacy for the US presidency.

Stunning photos, from when the bridge was built in the late 1920s through the present, are a powerful complement to the bridge's history. Rockland covers the competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Readers will learn about the Swiss immigrant Othmar Ammann, an unsung hero who designed and built the GWB, and how a lack of funding during the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers, which we admire today. There are chapters discussing accidents on the bridge, such as an airplane crash landing in the westbound lanes and the sad story of suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and Rockland's personal adventures on the bridge, including scaling its massive towers on a cable.

Movies, television shows, songs, novels, countless images, and even PlayStation 2 games have aided the GWB in becoming a part of the global popular culture. This tribute will captivate residents living in the shadow of the GWB, the millions who walk, jog, bike, skate, or drive across it, as well as tourists and those who will visit it someday.

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[more]