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28250 books match the query 'HISTORY' and 6388 start with t

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The Merchant of Havana

The Jew in the Cuban Abolitionist Archive

Stephen Silverstein

Vanderbilt University Press, 2016

LAJSA Book Award Winner, 2017, Latin American Jewish Studies Association

As Cuba industrialized in the nineteenth century, an epochal realignment of the social order occurred. In this period of change, two seemingly disparate, yet nevertheless intertwined, ideological forces appeared: anti-Semitism and abolitionism. As the antislavery movement became organized in Cuba, the argument grew that Jews participated in the African slave trade and in New World slavery, and that this participation gave Jews extraordinary influence in the new Cuban economy and culture. What was remarkable about this anti-Semitism was the decidedly small Jewish population on the island in this era. This form of anti-Semitism, Silverstein reveals, sprang almost exclusively from mythological beliefs.

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The Merchant of Prato's Wife

Margherita Datini and Her World, 1360-1423

Ann Crabb

University of Michigan Press, 2015

Although the fourteenth-century Italian merchant Francesco Datini has received attention from business historians, there has previously been no full study of his wife, Margherita Datini. Drawing on a sizable trove of Margherita’s correspondence held in the Archivio di Stato di Prato, including hundreds of letters she exchanged with Francesco, Ann Crabb investigates the social and economic importance of women’s roles as wives and mothers, early modern European views on honor, and the practice of letter writing in Margherita’s world.

Margherita’s often colorful comments demonstrate her attitudes toward her rather unhappy marriage and her inability to have children, along with other aspects of her life. Her letters reveal the pride she felt in carrying out her many responsibilities as a wife and, later, a widow: in scribal letter writing, in business, in household management, and in farming. Crabb emphasizes that the role of a wife was a recognized social position, beyond her individual relations with her husband, and provided opportunities beyond what restrictive laws or restrictive views of female honor would suggest. Further, Crabb considers Margherita’s successful efforts, on her own initiative and in her late thirties, to learn to read and write at a literate level.

This book will be of interest to both scholars and general readers of women’s history. In addition, historians of early modern Italy and, more generally, of early modern Europe will find this book valuable.

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The Merits of Women

Wherein Is Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men

Moderata Fonte

University of Chicago Press, 2018

You would as well look for blood in a corpse as for the least shred of decency in a man . . .

Without help from their wives, men are just like unlit lamps . . .

Just think of them as an unreliable clock that tells you it’s ten o’clock when it’s in fact barely two . . .

A man without a woman is like a fly without a head . . .

These are but a small selection of the quips bandied about at this lively gathering of women. The broad topic at hand is the relative pros and cons of men, and the cases in point range from pick-up artists to locker-room talk, and from double standards to fragile masculinity.

Yet this dialogue unfolds not among ironically misandrist millenials venting at their local dive bar, but rather among sixteenth-century women—variously married, widowed, single, and betrothed—attending a respectable Venice garden party. Written in the early 1590s by Moderata Fonte, pseudonym of the Renaissance poet and writer Modesta Pozzo, this literary dialogue interrogates men and men’s treatment of women, and explores by contrast the virtues of singledom and female friendship. As the women diverge from their theme—discussing everything from astrology to the curative powers of plants and minerals—a remarkable group portrait of wisdom, wit, and erudition emerges.

A new introduction by translator Virginia Cox and foreword by Dacia Maraini situate The Merits of Women in its historical context, written as it was on the cusp of Shakespeare’s heyday, and straddling the centuries between the feminist works of Christine de Pizan and Mary Wollstonecraft. Elegantly presented for a general audience, this is a must-read for baby feminists and “nasty women” alike, not to mention the perfect subtle gift for any mansplaining friend who needs a refresher on the merits of women . . . and their superiority to men.

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The Mertiyo Rathors of Merto, Rajasthan

Select Translations Bearing on the History of a Rajput Family, 1462–1660, Volumes 1–2

Richard Saran and Norman P. Ziegler, translators and annotators

University of Michigan Press, 2001

The Meṛtīyo Rāṭhoṛs of Meṛto, Rājasthān is a treasure for scholars of Rajpūt history. Richard D. Saran and Norman P. Ziegler, whose contributions to Rajpūt studies are well known to specialists in the field, have given us a work of deep and exacting scholarship. It is the culmination of decades devoted to the study of Middle Marwari chronicles from Rājasthān. The sources translated here provide access to the fortunes of a branch of the Jodhpur royal family, and in doing so they illuminate the larger world of Rajpūts in the middle period.

The Meṛtīyo Rāṭhoṛs are significant for several reasons. Their story traces the emergence of a Rajpūt brotherhood into local prominence and follows the establishment of their kingdom on the eastern edge of Mārvāṛ as a defined territorial unit. The evolution of the Meṛtīyos as a brotherhood passed through several clearly defined stages, including a relationship with the house of Jodhpur that ranged from mutual support among brothers to hostility and clear separation. A study of the Meṛtīyos in this context provides a unique view of the formation of a strong and indpenedent Rajpūt cadet line, of the establishment and defense of a local territory, and of the internal relations among Rajpūt brotherhoods regarding issues of precedence, honor, patronage, and service.

The translations are accompanied by an extensive explanatory apparatus taking various forms, which includes a valuable essay on Rajput social organization, complete genealogies, and biographies of all the major personages of the chronicles.

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The Message of the City

Dawn Powell’s New York Novels, 1925–1962

Patricia E. Palermo

Ohio University Press, 2016

Dawn Powell was a gifted satirist who moved in the same circles as Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, renowned editor Maxwell Perkins, and other midcentury New York luminaries. Her many novels are typically divided into two groups: those dealing with her native Ohio and those set in New York. “From the moment she left behind her harsh upbringing in Mount Gilead, Ohio, and arrived in Manhattan, in 1918, she dove into city life with an outlander’s anthropological zeal,” reads a recent New Yorker piece about Powell, and it is those New York novels that built her reputation for scouring wit and social observation.

In this critical biography and study of the New York novels, Patricia Palermo reminds us how Powell earned a place in the national literary establishment and East Coast social scene. Though Powell’s prolific output has been out of print for most of the past few decades, a revival is under way: the Library of America, touting her as a “rediscovered American comic genius,” released her collected novels, and in 2015 she was posthumously inducted into the New York State Writer’s Hall of Fame.

Engaging and erudite, The Message of the City fills a major gap in in the story of a long-overlooked literary great. Palermo places Powell in cultural and historical context and, drawing on her diaries, reveals the real-life inspirations for some of her most delicious satire.

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The Metal Life Car

The Inventor, the Impostor, and the Business of Lifesaving

George E. Buker

University of Alabama Press, 2008

Engineering the battlefield—one armored advance at a time.

For centuries sailing vessels crept along the coastline, ready to flee ashore in case of danger or trouble; this worked well until weather or poor sailing drove these ships against an unforgiving coast. Saviors and salvors (often the same people) struggled to rescue both humans and cargo, often with results as tragic for them as for the sailors and passengers.

Joseph Francis (b. Boston, Massachusetts, 1801) was an inventor who also had the ability to organize a business to produce his inventions and the salesmanship to sell his products. His metal lifeboats, first used in survey expeditions in Asia Minor and Central America, came into demand among the world’s merchant marine, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Revenue Service. His corrugated “life car” was the keystone to development of the U.S. Life-Saving Service. Francis’s metal bateaux and lifeboats played an important role in the Third Seminole War in Florida. His metal pontoon army wagons served in the trans-Mississippi campaigns against the Indians.

In Europe, he was acclaimed as a genius and sold patent rights to shipyards in Liverpool and the Woolwich Arsenal in England, Le Havre seaport in France, in the free city of Hamburg, and in the Russian Empire. But while Francis was busy in Europe, Captain Douglass Ottinger, U.S. Revenue Marine Service, claimed to be the inventor of Francis’s life car and obtained support in the U.S. Congress and the Patent Office for his claim. Francis had to battle for decades to prove his rights, and Americans remained generally unfamiliar with his devices, thereby condemning Civil War armies to inferior copies while Europe was using, and acclaiming, his inventions.

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The Metal of a Thousand Uses

Mercury Mining in Arkansas, 1930-1946

Terry S. Reynolds

University of Arkansas Press, 2026

In 1930, a remote corner of southwest Arkansas witnessed the discovery of cinnabar, the ore from which mercury is extracted. Upon the arrival of “the metal of a thousand uses,” a wave of hope and ambition swept through the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains as mercury mining promised economic revival for the struggling state. Despite the known dangers of the industry, Arkansans greeted the prospect of a mercury boom with unbridled enthusiasm, seeing it as a potential solution to their economic woes amid the Great Depression.

In The Metal of a Thousand Uses: Mercury Mining in Arkansas, 1930–1946, Terry S. Reynolds charts the dramatic rise and fall of the state’s mercury mining district, from the euphoria of discovery to the logistical and financial challenges of industrialization. Drawing on deep archival research, Reynolds explores the experiences of the miners and managers whose fates became bound to the companies that sought to commercialize mercury refining in the Ouachita Mountains. The result is a vivid account of a little-known chapter in American mineral-resource history.

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The Metaphysics of Knowledge and Politics in Thomas Aquinas

Rocco Buttiglione

St. Augustine's Press, 2020

Metafisica della Conoscenza e Politica in S. Tommaso d’Aquino was originally published in Bologna in 1985 by the Centro Studi Europa Orientale. This English translation has been prepared with the explicit permission and encouragement of Buttiglione. The work grew from a series of lectures Buttiglione gave on the relationship between metaphysics, knowledge, and politics based on a critical reading of Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics and other relevant texts. His aim was to advance Thomistic thinking by incorporating the insights of modern philosophy on subjectivity and relationality.

In addition to its primary audience of philosophers, theologians, and political theorists, the book surprisingly enjoyed a wide general readership in Italy at the time of its publication. It represented an exciting attempt to harmonize medieval philosophy and the insights of personalism that had already had a deep impact on European intellectual life. Buttiglione was able to describe this attempt in a way accessible to a general readership, and in a way that confronted the political challenges Italy had been confronting for the last forty years.

Now, thirty-five years after the book’s initial publication, the conclusions Buttiglione draws from reading Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Politics––and the connections he makes between philosophy, theology, and political theory––are more relevant than ever. He argues that the traditional definition of “person” as rationalis naturae individua substantia––an individual substance or substrate (hypokeimenon) of a rational nature––“lacks that certain element that makes Augustine’s approach to personhood so appealing.” Hence Aquinas’s definition “is left wanting since it fails to elaborate on the crucial aspect of interpersonal relationship.”

The ingenuous way in which Buttiglione enlivens Thomistic political thinking with personalist philosophy helps to explain not only why free societies are more stable, tolerant, and respectful of human rights than totalitarian states, but theocratic ones as well. Only by raising the interpersonal aspects of political society to an ontological level—indeed, only by affirming and esteeming the self-transcendence of the human person as evidenced through ontological analysis—do the personal relationships that root and enliven the human person also lead to a realistic, dynamic, and convincing vision of the person’s real existence.

Buttiglione was startlingly prescient of the problems we confront at the beginning of the third millennium. This book will spark new discussions as it explains the importance of both the medieval tradition and twentieth-century personalism. The book also draws on a wide range of secondary sources unavailable to English readers that I and will have the unique ability to introduce readers to the “Italian” way of relating speculative and political philosophy in a relatively slim volume.

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The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens

Anca Rosu

University of Alabama Press, 1995

Where sound speaks louder than meaning—Stevens’s poetry as a metaphysical echo.

Wallace Stevens dedicated his poetry to challenging traditional notions about reality, truth, knowledge, and the role of language as a means of representation. Rosu demonstrates that Stevens's experimentation with sound is not only essential to his poetics but also profoundly linked to the pragmatist ideas that informed his way of thinking about language. Her readings of Stevens's poems focus on revealing the dynamic through which meaning emerges in language patterns—a dynamic she calls "images of sound."

Rosu argues that the formal aspects of poetry are deeply ingrained in cultural realities and are, in fact, generated by their context. The sound pattern pervading Stevens's poems at once addresses and violates the reader's assumptions about the functioning of language and, along with them, ideas about reality, knowledge, and subjectivity. Sound is thus the starting point of an argument concerned with Stevens's epistemology and poetics—the way his poems insist on a movement past or through a normal poetic representation of the world to gesture toward a reality that lies outside or beyond systems of representation.

The relationship between sound and meaning isolated and analyzed in The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens is firmly situated among critical debates concerning the poet's aesthetic and philosophical convictions. Rosu claims that Stevens's poetry is not ultimately about the powerlessness of language, nor is it a deconstructive enterprise of destabilizing culturally consecrated truths; rather it achieves meaning most frequently through patterns of sound. Sound helps Stevens make a deeply philosophical point in a language unavailable to philosophers.

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The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830-1930

Cityscapes, Photographs, Debates

Idurre Alonso

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021

This volume examines the unprecedented growth of several cities in Latin America from 1830 to 1930, observing how sociopolitical changes and upheavals created the conditions for the birth of the metropolis.

In the century between 1830 and 1930, following independence from Spain and Portugal, major cities in Latin America experienced large-scale growth, with the development of a new urban bourgeois elite interested in projects of modernization and rapid industrialization. At the same time, the lower classes were eradicated from old city districts and deported to the outskirts. The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930 surveys this expansion, focusing on six capital cities—Havana, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and Lima—as it examines sociopolitical histories, town planning, art and architecture, photography, and film in relation to the metropolis.

Drawing from the Getty Research Institute’s vast collection of books, prints, and photographs from this period, largely unpublished until now, this volume reveals the cities’ changes through urban panoramas, plans depicting new neighborhoods, and photographs of novel transportation systems, public amenities, civic spaces, and more. It illustrates the transformation of colonial cities into the monumental modern metropolises that, by the end of the 1920s, provided fertile ground for the emergence of today’s Latin American megalopolis.

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The Metropolitan Frontier

Cities in the Modern American West

Carl Abbott

University of Arizona Press, 1993

When the American West represented the country’s frontier, many of its cities may have seemed little more than trading centers to serve the outlying populace. Now the nation’s most open and empty region is also its most heavily urbanized, with eighty percent of Westerners living in its metropolitan areas. The process of urbanization that had already transformed the United States from a rural to an urban society between 1815 and 1930 has continued most clearly and completely in the modern West, where growth since 1940—spurred by mobilization for World War II—has constituted a distinct era in which Western cities have become national and even international pacesetters.

The Metropolitan Frontier places this last half-century of Western history in its urban context, making it the first comprehensive overview of urban growth in the region. Integrating the urban experience of all nineteen Western states, Carl Abbott ranges for evidence from Honolulu to Houston and from Fargo to Fairbanks to show how Western cities organize the region's vast spaces and connect them to the even larger sphere of the world economy. His survey moves from economic change to social and political response, examining the initial boom of the 1940s, the process of change in the following decades, and the ultimate impact of Western cities on their environments, on the Western regional character, and on national identity.

Today, a steadily decreasing number of Western workers are engaged in rural industries, but Western cities continue to grow. As ecological and social crises begin to affect those cities, Abbott’s study will prove required reading for historians, geographers, sociologists, urban planners, and all citizens concerned with America’s future.

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The Mexican American Experience in Texas

Citizenship, Segregation, and the Struggle for Equality

By Martha Menchaca

University of Texas Press, 2022

A historical overview of Mexican Americans' social and economic experiences in Texas

For hundreds of years, Mexican Americans in Texas have fought against political oppression and exclusion—in courtrooms, in schools, at the ballot box, and beyond. Through a detailed exploration of this long battle for equality, this book illuminates critical moments of both struggle and triumph in the Mexican American experience.

Martha Menchaca begins with the Spanish settlement of Texas, exploring how Mexican Americans’ racial heritage limited their incorporation into society after the territory’s annexation. She then illustrates their political struggles in the nineteenth century as they tried to assert their legal rights of citizenship and retain possession of their land, and goes on to explore their fight, in the twentieth century, against educational segregation, jury exclusion, and housing covenants. It was only in 1967, she shows, that the collective pressure placed on the state government by Mexican American and African American activists led to the beginning of desegregation. Menchaca concludes with a look at the crucial roles that Mexican Americans have played in national politics, education, philanthropy, and culture, while acknowledging the important work remaining to be done in the struggle for equality.

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The Mexican Aristocracy

An Expressive Ethnography, 1910–2000

By Hugo G. Nutini

University of Texas Press, 2004

The Mexican aristocracy today is simultaneously an anachronism and a testimony to the persistence of social institutions. Shut out from political power by the democratization movements of the twentieth century, stripped of the basis of its great wealth by land reforms in the 1930s, the aristocracy nonetheless maintains a strong sense of group identity through the deeply held belief that their ancestors were the architects and rulers of Mexico for nearly four hundred years.

This expressive ethnography describes the transformation of the Mexican aristocracy from the onset of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when the aristocracy was unquestionably Mexico's highest-ranking social class, until the end of the twentieth century, when it had almost ceased to function as a superordinate social group. Drawing on extensive interviews with group members, Nutini maps out the expressive aspects of aristocratic culture in such areas as perceptions of class and race, city and country living, education and professional occupations, political participation, religion, kinship, marriage and divorce, and social ranking. His findings explain why social elites persist even when they have lost their status as ruling and political classes and also illuminate the relationship between the aristocracy and Mexico's new political and economic plutocracy.

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The Mexican Border Cities

Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality

Daniel D. Arreola and James R. Curtis

University of Arizona Press, 1993

From Matamoros to Tijuana, Mexican border cities have long evoked for their neighbors to the north images of cheap tourist playgrounds and, more recently, industrial satellites of American industry. These sensationalized and simplified perceptions fail to convey the complexity and diversity of urban form and function—and of cultural personality—that characterize these places.

The Mexican Border Cities draws on extensive field research to examine eighteen settlements along the 2,000-mile border, ranging from towns of less than 10,000 people to dynamic metropolises of nearly a million. The authors chronicle the cities' growth and compare their urban structure, analyzing them in terms of tourist districts, commercial landscapes, residential areas, and industrial and transportation quarters.

Arreola and Curtis contend that, despite their proximity to the United States, the border cities are fundamentally Mexican places, as distinguished by their cultural landscapes, including town plan, land-use pattern, and building fabric. Their study, richly illustrated with over 75 maps and photographs, offers a provocative and insightful interpretation of the geographic anatomy and personality of these fascinating—and rapidly changing—communities.

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The Mexican Dream

Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations

J. M. G. Le Clézio

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, J. M. G. Le Clézio here conjures the consciousness of Mexico, powerfully evoking the dreams that made and unmade an ancient culture. Le Clézio’s haunting book takes us into the dream that was the religion of the Aztecs, a religion whose own apocalyptic visions anticipated the coming of the Spanish conquerors. Here the dream of the conquistadores rises before us, too, the glimmering idea of gold drawing Europe into the Mexican dream. Against the religion and thought of the Aztecs and the Tarascans and the Europeans in Mexico, Le Clézio also shows us those of the “barbarians” of the north, the nomadic Indians beyond the pale of the Aztec frontier.

Finally, Le Clézio’s book is a dream of the present, a meditation on what in Amerindian civilizations—in their language, in their way of telling tales, of wanting to survive their own destruction—moved the poet, playwright, and actor Antonin Artaud and motivates Le Clézio in this book. His own deep identification with pre-Columbian cultures, whose faith told them the wheel of time would bring their gods and their beliefs back to them, finds fitting expression in this extraordinary book, which brings the dream around.

“We are lucky to have in Le Clézio a writer of great quality who brings his particular sensibility and talent here to remind us of the very nature of the rituals and myths of the civilizations of ancient Mexico; he provides us with descriptions as precise as they are mysterious.”—Le Figaro

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The Mexican Mahjar

Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate

By Camila Pastor

University of Texas Press, 2017

Winner, Khayrallah Migration Studies Prize, Moise Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, 2018

Migration from the Middle East brought hundreds of thousands of people to the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time the Ottoman political system collapsed in 1918, over a third of the population of the Mashriq, i.e. the Levant, had made the transatlantic journey. This intense mobility was interrupted by World War I but resumed in the 1920s and continued through the late 1940s under the French Mandate. Many migrants returned to their homelands, but the rest concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Haiti, and Mexico, building transnational lives.

The Mexican Mahjar provides the first global history of Middle Eastern migrations to Mexico. Making unprecedented use of French colonial archives and historical ethnography, Camila Pastor examines how French colonial control over Syria and Lebanon affected the migrants. Tracing issues of class, race, and gender through the decades of increased immigration to Mexico and looking at the narratives created by the Mahjaris (migrants) themselves in both their old and new homes, Pastor sheds new light on the creation of transnational networks at the intersection of Arab, French, and Mexican colonial modernisms. Revealing how migrants experienced mobility as conquest, diaspora, exile, or pilgrimage, The Mexican Mahjar tracks global history on an intimate scale.

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The Mexican Petroleum Industry in the Twentieth Century

Edited by Jonathan C. Brown and Alan Knight

University of Texas Press, 1992

Mexico's petroleum industry has come to symbolize the very sovereignty of the nation itself. Politicians criticize Pemex, the national oil company, at their peril, and President Salinas de Gortari has made clear that the free trade negotiations between Mexico and the United States will not affect Pemex's basic status as a public enterprise. How and why did the petroleum industry gain such prominence and, some might say, immunity within Mexico's political economy?

The Mexican Petroleum Industry in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jonathan C. Brown and Alan Knight, seeks to explain the impact of the oil sector on the nation's economic, political, and social development. The book is a multinational effort—one author is Australian, two British, three North American, and five Mexican. Each contributing scholar has researched and written extensively about Mexico and its oil industry.

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The Mexican Revolution in Chicago

Immigration Politics from the Early Twentieth Century to the Cold War

John H Flores

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Few realize that long before the political activism of the 1960s, there existed a broad social movement in the United States spearheaded by a generation of Mexican immigrants inspired by the revolution in their homeland. Many revolutionaries eschewed U.S. citizenship and have thus far been lost to history, though they have much to teach us about the increasingly international world of today. John H. Flores follows this revolutionary generation of Mexican immigrants and the transnational movements they created in the United States. Through a careful, detailed study of Chicagoland, the area in and around Chicago, Flores examines how competing immigrant organizations raised funds, joined labor unions and churches, engaged the Spanish-language media, and appealed in their own ways to the dignity and unity of other Mexicans. Painting portraits of liberals and radicals, who drew support from the Mexican government, and conservatives, who found a homegrown American ally in the Roman Catholic Church, Flores recovers a complex and little known political world shaped by events south of the U.S border.

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The Mexican Transpacific

Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, and Performance

Ignacio López-Calvo

Vanderbilt University Press, 2022

The Mexican Transpacific considers the influence of a Japanese ethnic background or lack thereof in the cultural production of several twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexican authors, performers, and visual artists. Despite Japanese Mexicans’ unquestionable influence on Mexico’s history and culture and the historical studies recently published on this Nikkei community, the study of its cultural production and therefore its self-definition has been, for the most part, overlooked.

This book, a continuation of author Ignacio López-Calvo’s previous research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry, focuses mostly on literature, theater, and visual arts produced by Japanese immigrants in Mexico and their descendants, rather than on the Japanese community as a mere object of study. With this interdisciplinary project, López-Calvo aims to bring to the fore this silenced community’s voice and agency to historicize its own experience.

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The Mexican War

Otis A. Singletary

University of Chicago Press, 1960

The Mexican War has long been overshadowed in the public imagination by that most popular of all American wars, the Civil War. And it has been swept under the carpet of national conscience as, at worst, a calculated land grab from a neighbor too weak to defend itself.

Otis Singletary's concise, dramatic account of the war that won the Southwest and California for the United States is designed to evoke in modern readers a fresh appreciation of one of the most colorful but neglected episodes in American military affairs—and certainly one of the most significant. Victory in this "military exercise" turned our attention to the Far West, made possible the Gold Rush of '49, and brought vast new territories and new peoples into the Union—altering the face of the nation and greatly influencing its future course.

Mr. Singletary treats the military, political, economic, and diplomatic aspects of the war. He focuses on the ways in which the Mexican War exemplified the dynamic spirit of Manifest Destiny and was a microcosm of peculiarly American—and peculiarly democratic—problems of waging war.

"All in all, this is the best short account of the Mexican War yet written."—T. Harry Williams, The Journal of Modern History

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The Mexico Reader

History, Culture, Politics

Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson, eds.

Duke University Press, 2002

The Mexico Reader is a vivid introduction to muchos Méxicos—the many Mexicos, or the many varied histories and cultures that comprise contemporary Mexico. Unparalleled in scope and written for the traveler, student, and expert alike, the collection offers a comprehensive guide to the history and culture of Mexico—including its difficult, uneven modernization; the ways the country has been profoundly shaped not only by Mexicans but also by those outside its borders; and the extraordinary economic, political, and ideological power of the Roman Catholic Church. The book looks at what underlies the chronic instability, violence, and economic turmoil that have characterized periods of Mexico’s history while it also celebrates the country’s rich cultural heritage.

A diverse collection of more than eighty selections, The Mexico Reader brings together poetry, folklore, fiction, polemics, photoessays, songs, political cartoons, memoirs, satire, and scholarly writing. Many pieces are by Mexicans, and a substantial number appear for the first time in English. Works by Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes are included along with pieces about such well-known figures as the larger-than-life revolutionary leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata; there is also a comminiqué from a more recent rebel, Subcomandante Marcos. At the same time, the book highlights the perspectives of many others—indigenous peoples, women, politicians, patriots, artists, soldiers, rebels, priests, workers, peasants, foreign diplomats, and travelers.

The Mexico Reader explores what it means to be Mexican, tracing the history of Mexico from pre-Columbian times through the country’s epic revolution (1910–17) to the present day. The materials relating to the latter half of the twentieth century focus on the contradictions and costs of postrevolutionary modernization, the rise of civil society, and the dynamic cross-cultural zone marked by the two thousand-mile Mexico-U.S. border. The editors have divided the book into several sections organized roughly in chronological order and have provided brief historical contexts for each section. They have also furnished a lengthy list of resources about Mexico, including websites and suggestions for further reading.

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The Mexico Reader

History, Culture, Politics

Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson, editors

Duke University Press, 2022

The Mexico Reader is a vivid and comprehensive guide to muchos Méxicos—the many varied histories and cultures of Mexico. Unparalleled in scope, it covers pre-Columbian times to the present, from the extraordinary power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church to Mexico’s uneven postrevolutionary modernization, from chronic economic and political instability to its rich cultural heritage. Bringing together over eighty selections that include poetry, folklore, photo essays, songs, political cartoons, memoirs, journalism, and scholarly writing, this volume highlights the voices of everyday Mexicans—indigenous peoples, artists, soldiers, priests, peasants, and workers. It also includes pieces by politicians and foreign diplomats; by literary giants Octavio Paz, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Carlos Fuentes; and by and about revolutionary leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. This revised and updated edition features new selections that address twenty-first-century developments, including the rise of narcopolitics, the economic and personal costs of the United States’ mass deportation programs, the political activism of indigenous healers and manufacturing workers, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Mexico Reader is an essential resource for travelers, students, and experts alike.

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The Miami Indians of Indiana

A Persistent People, 1654-1994

Stewart Rafert

Indiana Historical Society Press, 1996

Now scattered in small communities in northern Indiana, the Eastern Miami Indians, once a well-known tribe, have lived in undeserved obscurity since the 1840s. In recent years they have become more visible as they have sought restoration of treaty rights and have revitalized their culture. The post-removal history of the Indiana Miami tribe is a rich texture of social, legal, and economic history, much enhanced by folklore and a rich series of photographic images. In The Miami Indians of Indiana: A Persistent People, 1654–1994, Rafert explores the history and culture of the Miami Indians.

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The Michigan Murders

Edward Keyes

University of Michigan Press, 2010

"True crime devotees won't want to miss this one!"
---Publishers Weekly

"Very engrossing . . . in the finest you can't put it down tradition."
---Hartford Courant

"This factual account of each murder, through the conviction of the killer, has all the excitement of a first-rate work of fiction, and is told straight, without the usual sociological jargon. Keyes collaborated with Robin Moore on The French Connection; The Michigan Murders is his first solo effort, and it is a good one."
---Miami Herald

"The Michigan Murders is the ultimate True Crime classic, unfolding like great mystery fiction while still delivering the powerful charge of real life."
---Jamie Agnew, Aunt Agatha's Mystery Bookshop

With a new prologue by Mardi Link and a new epilogue by Laura James

The true story of the savage coed killings---by the boy who could have lived next door!

Southeastern Michigan was rocked in the late 1960s by the terrifying serial murders of young women, whose bodies were dumped in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. In each case, few clues were left at the scene, and six separate police agencies were unable to end the horror. Then, almost by accident, a break came. The suspect: John Norman Collins, a young, quiet, all-American boy.

Collins was caught, went to trial, and, on August 19, 1970, was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. He is now in his sixties and is serving his sentence in Marquette, Michigan.

Collins was one of the first serial killers exposed in the region, and his crimes had many in the area locking their doors for the first time. Edward Keyes's harrowing The Michigan Murders covers every step of the case. It fell out of print for more than a decade before being revived for this special edition.

Mardi Link, author of the new prologue, is the author of two regionally best-selling true crime books based in northern Michigan, When Evil Came to Good Hart and Isadore's Secret.

Laura James, author of the new epilogue, is a trial lawyer, crime historian, and true crime author who blogs about the true crime genre at her Web site CLEWS (www.laurajames.com).

Edward Keyes, now deceased, spent several years in the early 1970s investigating the Michigan murders. He also authored the works Double Dare and Cocoanut Grove. The Michigan Murders was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime in 1977.

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The Microscope and the Eye

A History of Reflections, 1740-1870

Jutta Schickore

University of Chicago Press, 2007

The microscope’s technical capabilities and uses expanded dramatically in the early nineteenth century, when it emerged as an important tool for medical education and played a key role in the development of the cell theory, among other advancements. Focusing on the decades surrounding this crucial period, Jutta Schickore weaves a fascinating story of microscopy by tracing the entwined history of the eye and the optical instrument.

Concentrating on Great Britain and the German lands—home to the period’s most significant developments in microscopy—The Microscope and the Eye examines debates about such subjects as the legitimacy of human trespassing on the microcosm and the nature of light. Schickore also explores the microscope’s role in investigations of the finer structure of the eye and the workings of nerve fibers and the microscopists’ reflections on vision, illusion, artifacts, and the merits of instruments. Fully considering the epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological implications of this centuries-old relationship, The Microscope and the Eye will be an important contribution to the history of the life sciences, vision studies, and scientific methodology.

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The Middle East Remembered

Forged Identities, Competing Narratives, Contested Spaces

Jacob Lassner

University of Michigan Press, 2000

The Middle East Remembered is the latest work from one of the most productive of Near Eastern historians, Jacob Lassner. The essays and studies that make up this book seek to provide a deep explanation for traditional Muslim and Jewish reactions to events past and present. The volume is in many senses a meditation on the art of history-writing in four crucial eras of the Near East: the founding years of the Muslim community, the generation after the Abbasid overthrow of the early Caliphate, the events leading to collapse of Caliphal governance, and the end of traditional historiographical models on the edge of modernity.
In the first of the book's three parts, Lassner examines what he calls the stratigraphy of the text--he makes sense of the unusual organization of medieval Islamic narrative. The second section investigates issues such as work on city planning and on the creation of imperial centers. The last portion studies the interplay between Jewish and Muslim memory and the trading of themes and ideas between the cultures.
Shorter studies in the volume have been revised, and the author weaves new and complementary essays around them. Earlier work has been transformed and made more available to the general public. The style is accessible, and technical and arcane usages have been kept to a minimum. Throughout there are flashes of the author's wry humor.
Jacob Lassner is Philip M. and Ethel Klutsnick Professor of Jewish Civilization, Northwestern University, and Professor of Middle East History, Tel Aviv University.

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The Middle Maccabees

Archaeology, History, and the Rise of the Hasmonean Kingdom

Andrea M. Berlin

SBL Press, 2021

A focused, interdisciplinary examination of a tumultuous, history-making era

The Middle Maccabees lays out the charged, complicated beginnings of the independent Jewish state founded in the second century BCE. Contributors offer focused analyses of the archaeological, epigraphic, numismatic, and textual evidence, framed within a wider world of conflicts between the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Seleucids of Syria, and the Romans. The result is a holistic view of the Hasmonean rise to power that acknowledges broader political developments, evolving social responses, and the particularities of local history. Contributors include Uzi ‘Ad, Donald T. Ariel, Andrea M. Berlin, Efrat Bocher, Altay Coşkun, Benedikt Eckhardt, Gerald Finkielsztejn, Christelle Fischer-Bovet, Yuval Gadot, Erich Gruen, Sylvie Honigman, Jutta Jokiranta, Paul J. Kosmin, Uzi Leibner, Catharine Lorber, Duncan E. MacRae, Dvir Raviv, Helena Roth, Débora Sandhaus, Yiftah Shalev, Nitsan Shalom, Danny Syon, Yehiel Zelinger, and Ayala Zilberstein.

Features

Up-to-date, generously illustrated essays analyzing the relevant archaeological remains
A revised understanding of how local and imperial histories overlapped and intersected
New analysis of the book of 1 Maccabees as a tool of Hasmonean strategic interest

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The Midwestern Pastoral

Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland

William Barillas

Ohio University Press, 2006

The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience. It is exemplified in the poetry, fiction, and essays of writers who express an informed love of the nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest. Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists—Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison—in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, and others. For these writers, the aim of writing is not merely intellectual and aesthetic, but democratic and ecological. In depicting and promoting commitment to local communities, human and natural, they express their love for, their understanding of, and their sense of place in the American Midwest. Students and serious readers, as well as scholars in the growing field of literature and the environment, will appreciate this study of writers who counter alienation and materialism in modern society.

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The Mighty WMMR

An Oral History of Philadelphia's Rock Radio Revolution

Erin Riley

Temple University Press, 2026

In the early 1980s, the scrappy radio station 93.3 WMMR was on the verge of a major takeover of the Philadelphia airwaves. Erin Riley, who had her finger on the pulse of new artists like Bon Jovi, whose music would define a generation, was hired as the station’s Music Director in 1983.

The Mighty WMMR is Riley’s affectionate and nostalgic oral history of the station’s early years, especially its 1980s heyday, covering everything from the pioneering influence of The Marconi Experiment and the success of The Morning Zoo to how WMMR broke artists like Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and local favorites The Hooters onto the national scene. Featuring anecdotes and memories by beloved on-air personalities including John DeBella, Pierre Robert, and Michael Tearson, Riley chronicles the memorable songs and musicians; concerts, contests, and clubs; and the live broadcasts that marked the height of an unforgettable era in Philadelphia radio.

Riley breezily captures the station’s impact on listeners, which made WMMR a perfect storm of the times, the culture, and the counterculture. The Mighty WMMR is a captivating look back at Philadelphia’s rock history and the station that shaped a city and a generation.

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The Migrant Image

The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis

T. J. Demos

Duke University Press, 2013

In The Migrant Image T. J. Demos examines the ways contemporary artists have reinvented documentary practices in their representations of mobile lives: refugees, migrants, the stateless, and the politically dispossessed. He presents a sophisticated analysis of how artists from the United States, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East depict the often ignored effects of globalization and the ways their works connect viewers to the lived experiences of political and economic crisis. Demos investigates the cinematic approaches Steve McQueen, the Otolith Group, and Hito Steyerl employ to blur the real and imaginary in their films confronting geopolitical conflicts between North and South. He analyzes how Emily Jacir and Ahlam Shibli use blurs, lacuna, and blind spots in their photographs, performances, and conceptual strategies to directly address the dire circumstances of dislocated Palestinian people. He discusses the disparate interventions of Walid Raad in Lebanon, Ursula Biemann in North Africa, and Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri in the United States, and traces how their works offer images of conflict as much as a conflict of images. Throughout Demos shows the ways these artists creatively propose new possibilities for a politics of equality, social justice, and historical consciousness from within the aesthetic domain.

[more]

The Militant South, 1800-1861

John Hope Franklin

University of Illinois Press, 2002

In The Militant South, 1800-1861, John Hope Franklin identifies the factors and causes of the South's festering propensity for aggression that contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.

Franklin asserts that the South was dominated by militant white men who resorted to violence in the face of social, personal, or political conflict. Fueled by their defense of slavery and a persistent desire to keep the North out of their affairs, Southerners adopted a vicious bellicosity that intensified as war drew nearer.

Drawing from Southern newspapers, government archives, memoirs, letters, and firsthand accounts, Franklin masterfully details the sources and consequences of antebellum aggression in the South. First published in 1956, this classic volume is an enduring and impeccably researched contribution to Southern history. This paperback edition features a new preface in which the author discusses controversial responses to the book.

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The Militarization of Indian Country

Winona LaDuke

Michigan State University Press, 2013

When it became public that Osama bin Laden’s death was announced with the phrase “Geronimo, EKIA!” many Native people, including Geronimo’s descendants, were insulted to discover that the name of a Native patriot was used as a code name for a world-class terrorist. Geronimo descendant Harlyn Geronimo explained, “Obviously to equate Geronimo with Osama bin Laden is an unpardonable slander of Native America and its most famous leader.” The Militarization of Indian Country illuminates the historical context of these negative stereotypes, the long political and economic relationship between the military and Native America, and the environmental and social consequences. This book addresses the impact that the U.S. military has had on Native peoples, lands, and cultures. From the use of Native names to the outright poisoning of Native peoples for testing, the U.S. military’s exploitation of Indian country is unparalleled and ongoing.

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The Military and Politics in Postauthoritarian Chile

Gregory Weeks

University of Alabama Press, 2003

"The Military and Politics in Post-Authoritarian Chile should be read by everyone concerned with the relation between democracy and the armed forces. It is a well-researched, well-written volume that should prove both interesting and useful to scholars and students alike." —Perspectives on Politics

Why have political leaders of developing and authoritarian nations run into so many obstacles as they attempt to establish civilian supremacy over armed forces in the democratization of their countries? This is the question Gregory Weeks poses in his study of Chile from 1990 onward. He explains how the Chilean military has maintained a high level of political influence in the tumultuous aftermath of dictatorial rule by Army General Augusto Pinochet, thus confounding a smooth transition to civilian authority.

Even after the reins of power were officially handed over in 1990, Pinochet continued as commander in chief of the army until 1998, when he took a lifetime seat in the Senate and led the military’s efforts to retain its legal and constitutional prerogatives while limiting civilian oversight of military affairs. This assertion of guardianship by the military has produced a political tug-of-war between it and civilian authorities the two contenders for political primacy in Chile. In addition to recounting the historical background of this situation, Weeks’s study examines where conflict between these two contenders has been most productive and accord has been highest. His findings suggest that formal contacts, conducted through formal institutions, have been the most conducive to civil supremacy and, therefore, the consolidation of democracy.

Based on interviews, government documents, military journals, newspapers, and other archival sources, The Military and Politics in Postauthoritarian Chile describes how presidents, military officers, members of Congress, and judges have interacted since the end of the military regime. With implications for conflict resolution studies, this book will be valuable for Chileanists and policymakers and analysts of Latin American regimes, as well as academic libraries, military historians, social scientists, and students and scholars of Latin American history and politics.

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The Military and the Press

An Uneasy Truce

Michael Sweeney

Northwestern University Press, 2006

Because news is a weapon of war--affecting public opinion, troop morale, even strategy--for more than a century America's wartime officials have sought to control or influence the press, most recently by "embedding" reporters within military units in Iraq. This second front, where press freedom and military imperatives often do battle, is the territory explored in The Military and the Press, a history of how press-military relations have evolved during the twentieth and twenty-first century in response to the demands of politics, economics, technology, and legal and social forces.

Author Michael S. Sweeney takes a chronological approach, considering freedoms and restraints such as the First Amendment, court decisions, and government and military directives that have affected the press during World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the more recent conflicts. He explores the ongoing themes of wartime censorship and propaganda, as well as operational security in the battle zone. In chapters addressing the recent shift in military strategy in dealing with the press, Sweeney discusses new forms of control--from embedding journalists and discouraging unaccredited "unilaterals" to developing the news agenda through a barrage of briefings, sound bites, and visuals and appeals to patriotism that border on domestic propaganda. With profiles of a few specific journalists--from Richard Harding Davis covering the Spanish-American War to Christiane Amanpour reporting from the conflicts in Bosnia and Iraq--this deft blend of journalistic history and analysis should serve as a call-to-arms to a public not always well served by a military-press standoff.

[more]

The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism

Grant Underwood

University of Illinois Press, 1994

The most detailed study yet of early Mormon thought about the "end times," The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism shows how early LDS interpretation of the Bible and the Book of Mormon affected, and was affected by, Mormon millennial doctrines. Grant Underwood provides the first comprehensive linkage of the history of early Mormonism and millennial thought, reassessing Mormonism's relationship to the dominant culture and placing Mormon millennial thought in the broader context of Judeo-Christian ideas about the end of the world.

"A model of first-rate scholarship and balanced interpretation; it has much to say not only to those interested in Mormon history but also to anyone seeking to understand the role of millenarian ideas in the American experience." -- Michael Barkun, Journal of American History
"No serious student of early Mormon history should fail to read this book." -- L. B. Tipson, Choice
"A signal contribution to Mormon studies. Anyone who wishes to explore the core of the Mormon identity in the nineteenth century will have to come to terms with this book." -- Richard T. Hughes, author of Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America

[more]

The Milwaukee Road

Its First Hundred Years

August Derleth

University of Iowa Press, 2002

From its incorporation in 1847 in Wisconsin Territory to its first run in 1851—twenty miles between Milwaukee and Waukesha—to its later position of far-flung power, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul &Pacific Railroad Company had a vivid history. By 1948, the Milwaukee Road had more than 40,000 employees and maintained more than 10,000 miles of line in twelve states from Indiana to Washington.

Also in 1948, August Derleth's popular and well-crafted corporate history celebrated the strength and status of this mighty carrier. On February 19, 1985, the railroad became a subsidiary of Soo Line Corporation and its identity vanished overnight. Nonetheless, it remains a romantic memory, and Derleth's book remains the only complete history of this innovative and dynamic railroad.

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The Mind and Art of Victorian England

Josef L. Altholz, Editor

University of Minnesota Press, 1976

The Mind and Art of Victorian England was first published in 1976. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In a series of ten essays and a generous selection of illustrations, many in color, this volume depicts and assesses the mind and art of Victorian England. Multidisciplinary in approach, the essays deal with a variety of aspects in the history of the Victorian age.

Professor Altholz, the volume editor, writes: "It was an age not of revolution but of reform; political reform which admitted first the middle and then the working classes to the dominant share of the suffrage; economic and social reforms which proclaimed the triumph of laissez-faire while laying the foundations of the welfare state; moral reforms attempted if not achieved through education and religious revival; aesthetic reforms proposed if not achieved and, even in their failure, adding to the richness and diversity of Victorian England. It was an age whose problems cried out for reform; and, despite the prevailing complacency, virtually all the great Victorians were critics of their age. Their criticisms were diverse and often mutually incompatible, with each other -- and their public -- but they shared a high seriousness which gave character and substance to the flowering of their culture. Such was the Victorian age: the high-water mark of English history, the maturation of British culture, and the seedbed of our problems and our discontents."

The illustrations include color reproductions of some of the works discussed by Melvin Waldfogel in his essay "Narrative Painting," and a selection of architectural engravings and photographs.

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The Mind of the Middle Ages

An Historical Survey

Frederick B. Artz

University of Chicago Press, 1980

"This is the third edition of a near standard survey of the intellectual life of the age of faith. Artz on the arts, as on philosophy, politics and other aspects of culture, makes lively and informative reading."—The Washington Post

[more]

The Mind of the Slave

The Limits of Ownership in Roman Law and Society

Nicole J. Giannella

University of Michigan Press, 2026

The Mind of the Slave untangles the double nature of slaves as property and as human beings under the law in the Roman world. As human beings, slaves had free will and legally recognized autonomy while acting for their owner. Although their autonomy was fundamental to the Roman economy, it had the potential to lead to insecurity in the day-to-day experiences of the owner and enslaved person. Will an enslaved agent decide to act in the best interest of their owner? To sell their secrets? To run away? These moments of insecurity are the subject of this book; they reveal an owner’s struggle to know the mind of the slave and to reconcile ownership over a reasoning, emotional, and purposive human being. Nicole J. Giannella argues that this reliance on the mind of the slave reveals fault lines in the ownership of the enslaved. This is where we can glimpse beyond the trappings of law and see the need for negotiation, incentives, and ultimately, the trust that the owner puts in their slave.

In order to place Roman jurists in conversation with both technical and literary sources, Giannella grounds this study in philology and argues that conceptions of the mind of the slave were at the heart of legal and cultural debates about the nature of slavery and ownership. It also contributes to a wider debate about selfhood and autonomy, since philosophers often used the figure of the slave as a representation of humanity as its limits.

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The Mine Next Door

Turning Points in Corporate Social Responsibility Communicative Practice

Amy O'Connor

University of Michigan Press, 2026

The Mine Next Door peels back the veneer of corporate public relations to expose the jagged edges that define the boundaries of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Minnesota’s Iron Range. With five years of ethnographic and archival research, Amy O’Connor was able to interview over seventy people, including miners, retired miners, community members, elected officials, and representatives from Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. In addition to illuminating the everyday lives of Minnesota’s taconite miners and community members, she compares the corporate narratives of CSR with these lived experiences to reveal how CSR boundaries are co-constructed, contested, and consequential.

In this rare ethnographic account of iron ore mining in the United States, O’Connor shows how turning points—whether macrolevel (e.g., capitalism, governmental policy, and regulation) or microlevel (e.g., miner experiences, local culture, company proclivities)—create CSR communicative practice boundaries that are influenced by culture, history, and geography. The permanence and precariousness of the mining industry offers a unique opportunity to show how corporations, workers, and communities both collaborate and clash. The Mine Next Door argues that to understand CSR communicative practices, we must move beyond the staid, homogeneous CSR reports and glossy public relations documents to reveal the messy and contradictory moments of decision wherein corporations and communities determine where a company has power and responsibility.

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The Ming Dynasty

Its Origins and Evolving Institutions

Charles O. Hucker

University of Michigan Press, 1978

In the latter half of the fourteenth century, at one end of the Eurasian continent, the stage was not yet set for the emergence of modern nation-states. At the other end, the Chinese drove out their Mongol overlords, inaugurated a new native dynasty called Ming (1368–1644), and reasserted the mastery of their national destiny. It was a dramatic era of change, the full significance of which can only be perceived retrospectively.

With the establishment of the Ming dynasty, a major historical tension rose into prominence between more absolutist and less absolutist modes of rulership. This produced a distinctive style of rule that modern students have come to call Ming despotism. It proved a capriciously absolutist pattern for Chinese government into our own time. [1, 2 ,3]

[more]

The Minjung Art Movement

Decolonization and Democracy in South Korea

Sohl Lee

Duke University Press, 2026

Emerging as multifaceted cultural activism, the minjung (people’s) art movement defined the aesthetics of the pro-democracy movements in the 1970s and 1980s in South Korea. Tracing minjung art’s history and legacy, Sohl Lee explores how artists associated with the movement mobilized images, print, and performance to build movement publics and reimagine sovereignty. Hundreds of artists questioned the underlying assumptions of liberal democracies and the art-making practices of the global Cold War. Their decolonial critiques of international modernism were inseparable from reimagining democracy and refiguring the relationship between art and democracy. Recuperating overlooked performance-oriented practices and the protest aesthetics that helped usher in parliamentary democracy in 1987, Lee shows that South Korea’s globalization in the 1990s and its rise as cultural soft power in the new millennium cannot be understood apart from a pro-democracy culture that was both political and popular.

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The Minor Intimacies of Race

Asian Publics in North America

Christine Kim

University of Illinois Press, 2016

An attempt to put an Asian woman on Canada's $100 bill in 2012 unleashed enormous controversy. The racism and xenophobia that answered this symbolic move toward inclusiveness revealed the nation's trumpeted commitment to multiculturalism as a lie. It also showed how multiple minor publics as well as the dominant public responded to the ongoing issue of race in Canada. In this new study, Christine Kim delves into the ways cultural conversations minimize race's relevance even as violent expressions and structural forms of racism continue to occur. Kim turns to literary texts, artistic works, and media debates to highlight the struggles of minor publics with social intimacy. Her insightful engagement with everyday conversations as well as artistic expressions that invoke the figure of the Asian allows Kim to reveal the affective dimensions of racialized publics. It also extends ongoing critical conversations within Asian Canadian and Asian American studies about Orientalism, diasporic memory, racialized citizenship, and migration and human rights.

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The Miracle of Immortality

What Follows This Earthly Life?

Gerhard Cardinal Muller

Catholic University of America Press, 2026

In The Miracle of Immortality, Gerhard Cardinal Müller tackles some of the great mysteries of human life and hope. The former prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is not content merely to present Catholic doctrine on the afterlife and the last things, although his reflections are always rooted in the teachings and traditions of the Church. Rather, he invites readers to walk with him by the restless sea of human learning, a sea formed by man’s unquenchable thirst for something or someone greater than man himself, by his desire to know the beginning and the end. One who accepts the invitation finds himself in conversation with a mentor whose mind is suffused with scripture and very much sharpened by it. Cherished assumptions are queried or quietly corrected. Slowly but surely he is confronted with the miracle of immortality, without which true happiness is impossible. Cardinal Müller demonstrates in this book that it is entirely possible, and eminently rational, to believe in the miracle of immortality; indeed, that it is ultimately not rational not to believe. The Miracle of Immortality is a work of penetrating theological insight set, chiaroscuro-like, against the darkness of modern and postmodern skepticism. It is at once poetical in spirit and profoundly catechetical in substance, for Müller understands that Christian eschatology cannot be elucidated properly without proclaiming the whole counsel of God. The miracle in question is a miracle for the whole person, accomplished by way of what Paul calls adoption; that is, filiation to the eternal Father through the incarnate Son, effected by the limitless power of the Holy Spirit. It is a miracle that perfects the divine work of creation.

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The Miracle of the Kent

A Tale of Courage, Faith, and Fire

Nicholas Tracy

Westholme Publishing, 2008

An Extraordinary Rescue and One of the Greatest Human Interest Stories of All Time

“A naturally gripping adventure tale.”—Publishers Weekly
“Powerful and intensely focused.”—Booklist
“Tracy's satisfying narrative constitutes the first modern account. A finely detailed maritime history.”—Kirkus Reviews

In 1825, the Kent, an East Indiaman, set sail from England for India with a crew and nearly 600 men, women, and children on board. North of Spain, the ship was slammed by a ferocious gale, and while a sailor was inspecting the hold for damage, his lantern ignited a cask of spirits. A fire quickly erupted, and even with the desperate expedient of opening hatches and flooding the ship, the fire burned out of control. As night wore on, the ship became an inferno, with the flames moving toward stores of gunpowder. At this point, everyone on board knew that they would perish, and they began preparing for their ghastly deaths. Despite the raging tempest a sailor climbed one last time to the top of the Kent’s mainmast and—miraculously—a sail was sighted on the horizon. It was the Cambria, a small brig on its way to Mexico. The Cambriaspied the burning Kentand through determination and dogged seamanship in towering seas, the little brig closed the doomed vessel. Launching their boats, the Kent’s and Cambria’s crews were able to transfer nearly all of the children, women, and men to the brig and pull away before the Kent exploded. Dangerously overloaded, the Cambriamade the Cornish coast three days later.
In The Miracle of the Kent: A Tale of Courage, Faith, and Fire, award-winning historian Nicholas Tracy reconstructs this extraordinary tale through records left by the participants, revealing how those aboard the Kent faced their deaths, and their reactions to being offered a second chance. The story of the Kentis both a page-turning adventure and an inspirational homage to the capacity of the human spirit.

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The Miracles of St. John of Capistran

Stanko Andric

Central European University Press, 2000

Religious history and, in particular, the history of the cult of saints and their miracles has recently become one of the most popular fields of historical investigation. Together with continuing interest in the related ecclesiastic motivations and the well organized craft of hagiography, this new interest might be explained by the marvellously rich details of thousands of witness accounts testifying to the miraculous help they received from the saint in times of desparate need. These accounts provide an unparalleled insight into the history of everyday life and into the various hardships, illnesses, hopes dreams and anxieties during the late medieval and early modern period.

Only two records exist on the history of the medieval Hungarian kingdom- the thirteenth century canonization trial of St. Margaret of Hungary and the miracle collections promoting the canonization of St. John of Capistran, the victorious Crusader at Belgrade in 1456, who died thereafter in Ilok (a city located on the periphery of western Christianity in Croatia). Based on a careful study of the widely scattered manuscripts on Capistranean miracles and with the help of a microscopic philological analysis, the author has managed to reconstruct, for the first time, one of the most complex miracle collections in the history of medieval hagiography.

Covering the recording of the first miracle series by the urban notaries of Ilok, the local hagiographer of Ilok Franciscans (John Geszti), the vicar general of the Hungarian province (Stephen Varsányi), and a number of subsequent editions and amplifications of this material recycling into the canonization campaign of St. John of Capistran and the miracles he himself recorded, The Miracles of St. John of Capistran, is an outstanding debut by a representative of a new generation of Central European medievalists.

[more]