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

cover of The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World

The Red Atlas

How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World

John Davies and Alexander J. Kent

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, its legacy and the accompanying Russian-American tension continues to loom large.  Russia’s access to detailed information on the United States and its allies may not seem so shocking in this day of data clouds and leaks, but long before we had satellite imagery of any neighborhood at a finger’s reach, the amount the Soviet government knew about your family’s city, street, and even your home would astonish you. Revealing how this was possible, The Red Atlas is the never-before-told story of the most comprehensive mapping endeavor in history and the surprising maps that resulted.

From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like New York, DC, and London to towns like Pontiac, MI and Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough information to create street-level maps. What they chose to include on these maps can seem obvious like locations of factories and ports, or more surprising, such as building heights, road widths, and bridge capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology, while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths and channels around rivers and harbors, could only have been gained by actual Soviet feet on the ground. The Red Atlas  includes over 350 extracts from these incredible Cold War maps, exploring their provenance and cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their makers and the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us.

A fantastic historical document of an era that sometimes seems less distant, The Red Atlas offers an uncanny view of the world through the eyes of Soviet strategists and spies.
 
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cover of The Red Coast: Radicalism and Anti-Radicalism in Southwest Washington

The Red Coast

Radicalism and Anti-Radicalism in Southwest Washington

Aaron Goings

Oregon State University Press, 2019

The Red Coast is a lively and readable informal history of the labor, left-wing, and progressive activists who lived, worked, and organized in southwest Washington State from the late nineteenth century until World War II. The book serves as a hidden history for a region frequently identified with conservatism, rescuing these working-class activists from obscurity and placing them at the center of southwest Washington's history.

With a focus on socialists, militant unionists, Wobblies, "Red" Finns, and Communists, The Red Coast covers the people, places, and events that made history-well-known events like the 1919 Armistice Day Tragedy in Centralia and the murders of labor activists William McKay and Laura Law in Aberdeen as well as lesser-known events that have been lost to posterity until now.

The Red Coast also delves deep into the lives and work of the region's anti-radical forces, examining the collective efforts of employers, news editors, and vigilantes to combat working-class organization. Topics include the Wobblies, the labor wars of the 1910s and 1930s, and the lumber and maritime industries. Labor historians, scholars, and general readers with interest in the working-class history of the Pacific Northwest will welcome this comprehensive and accessible account.
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cover of The Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation

The Red Earth

A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation

Binh Tu Tran

Ohio University Press, 1985

Phu Rieng was one of many French rubber plantations in colonial Vietnam; Tran Tu Binh was one of 17,606 laborers brought to work there in 1927, and his memoir is a straightforward, emotionally searing account of how one Vietnamese youth became involved in revolutionary politics. The connection between this early experience and later activities of the author becomes clear as we learn that Tran Tu Binh survived imprisonment on Con Son island to help engineer the general uprising in Hanoi in 1945.

The Red Earth is the first of dozens of such works by veterans of the 1924–45 struggle in Vietnam to be published in English translation. It is important reading for all those interested in the many-faceted history of modern Vietnam and of communism in the non-Western world.

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cover of The Red Hills of Florida, 1528-1865

The Red Hills of Florida, 1528-1865

Clifton Paisley

University of Alabama Press, 1989

Recent excavation of the Tallahassee area provided anthropological and archaeological evidence showing that the Red Hills of Florida were sought out by agricultural Indians long before European contact

The Red Hills section of northern Florida is composed of Leon County, where Tallahassee is located , and its neighboring counties of Gadsden and Jackson to the west and Jefferson and Madison to the east. The land is distinctive band of rolling red clay hills that extends for 150 miles along the border of Alabama and Georgia. This well-written narrative chronicles the history of the region from the time of first European contact in 1528 through the end of the Civil War, and provides a comprehensive study of this vital section of northern Florida.

Recent excavation of the Tallahassee area provided anthropological and archaeological evidence showing that the Red Hills of Florida were sought out by agricultural Indians long before European contact. DeSoto fed his army of more that 700 during the winter of 1539-40 from corn gathered within a few miles of the principal town of the Apalachee. The Spaniards who settled in the Apalachee area during the mission era depended on the corn for survival and used the Indians of the 14 Apalachee mission in a war of empire building with the English of South Carolina. Raids by these enemies wiped out the Indians of the Apalachee area and its mission in 1704.

In 1818 Andrew Jackson defeated the successors of the Apalachee in the Red Hills, the Seminoles, and after Florida became American territory in 1821, Governor Du Val planned the town of Tallahassee near the original DeSoto winter campsite. Farsighted Du Val used a site plan that provide for future expansion. Farmers were shipping cotton from the region as early as 1820, but the full development of the plantation economy had to await the removal of the Seminoles. From the 1840s through the Civil War cotton was the major crop which supported the social, political, and economic growth of this pivotal area of north Florida know as the Red Hills.
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cover of The Red Italians of Monfalcone: Everyday Fascism, Communist Horizons, and the Migration of an Italian Border Community Beyond the Iron Curtain

The Red Italians of Monfalcone

Everyday Fascism, Communist Horizons, and the Migration of an Italian Border Community Beyond the Iron Curtain

Luke Gramith

University of Wisconsin Press, 2026

Between 1946 and 1948, roughly five thousand ethnic Italians from the northern Adriatic shipbuilding town of Monfalcone relocated to the newly communist Yugoslavia. This rare case of eastward Cold War migration demonstrates how ordinary people conceived of liberation during the transitional years between World War II and the early Cold War—a time when Monfalcone was both the object of competing Italian and Yugoslav territorial claims and the subject of Anglo-American military occupation.

In The Red Italians of Monfalcone, Luke Gramith undertakes a deep and detailed analysis—based on archival sources in Italy, Slovenia, and the United States—of how the Monfalconesi came to understand Fascism and communism through everyday experience and how those emergent ideologies affected and were affected by their migration. In the course of his analysis, Gramith also examines the failure of “defascistization” and how it fueled strong (but ultimately unsuccessful) pro-Yugoslav and communist movements.

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cover of The Red Pavilion: A Judge Dee Mystery

The Red Pavilion

A Judge Dee Mystery

Robert van Gulik

University of Chicago Press, 1961

Three fiendish murders challenge the beloved detective Judge Dee, whom the Los Angeles Times ranked with Sherlock Holmes

A chance encounter with Autumn Moon, the most powerful courtesan on Paradise Island, leads Judge Dee to investigate three deaths. Although he finally teases the true story from a tangled history of passion and betrayal, Dee is saddened by the perversion, corruption, and waste of the world "of flowers and willows" that thrives on prostitution.
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cover of The Red Spears, 1916–1949

The Red Spears, 1916–1949

Tai Hsüan-chih; Translated by Ronald Suleski; Introduction by Elizabeth Perry

University of Michigan Press, 1981

Before Tai Hsüan-chih’s work on the Red Spear Society, the subject was a little understood movement that seemed of only passing interest to scholars of China—intriguing for its peculiar beliefs and rituals, perhaps, but hardly of central importance to modern Chinese history. Today, however, thanks in no small measure to the pioneering work of Professor Tai, the Red Spears have gained a secure niche in scholarship on modern China. Their numbers (reaching perhaps some three million participants at the height of the movement) and enduring (lasting intermittently for several decades) should stand as reason enough for the recent scholarly attention.
But the Red Spears have generated interest for other reasons as well. As research has developed into the history both of China’s traditional rural rebellions and of her Communist revolution has developed over the past few years, the Red Spears have assumed increasing significance. A movement which bore marked similarities to earlier Chinese uprisings (most notably the Boxers), the Red Spears nevertheless operated in a later period of history (right through the middle of the twentieth century) which brought them in direct contact with Communist revolutionaries. An analysis of the Red Spears thus becomes important both for what it can tell us about longstanding patterns of rural rebellion in China, and for what it suggests about the nature of Chinese revolution.
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cover of The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike

The Red Thread

The Passaic Textile Strike

Jacob A. Zumoff

Rutgers University Press, 2021

This book tells the story of 15,000 wool workers who went on strike for more than a year, defying police violence and hunger. The strikers were mainly immigrants and half were women. The Passaic textile strike, the first time that the Communist Party led a mass workers’ struggle in the United States, captured the nation’s imagination and came to symbolize the struggle of workers throughout the country when the labor movement as a whole was in decline during the conservative, pro-business 1920s. Although the strike was defeated, many of the methods and tactics of the Passaic strike presaged the struggles for industrial unions a decade later in the Great Depression.

 
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cover of The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s

The Red and the Black

American Film Noir in the 1950s

Robert Miklitsch

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Critical wisdom has it that we said a long goodbye to film noir in the 1950s. Robert Miklitsch begs to differ. Pursuing leads down the back streets and alleyways of cultural history, The Red and the Black proposes that the received rise-and-fall narrative about the genre radically undervalues the formal and thematic complexity of '50s noir and the dynamic segue it effected between the spectacular expressionism of '40s noir and early, modernist neo-noir.

Mixing scholarship with a fan's devotion to the crooked roads of critique, Miklitsch autopsies marquee films like D.O.A., Niagara, and Kiss Me Deadly plus a number of lesser-known classics. Throughout, he addresses the social and technological factors that dealt deuce after deuce to the genre--its celebrated style threatened by new media and technologies such as TV and 3-D, color and widescreen, its born losers replaced like zombies by All-American heroes, the nation rocked by the red menace and nightmares of nuclear annihilation. But against all odds, the author argues, inventive filmmakers continued to make formally daring and socially compelling pictures that remain surprisingly, startlingly alive.

Cutting-edge and entertaining, The Red and the Black reconsiders a lost period in the history of American movies.

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cover of The Rediscovery of Jewish Christianity: From Toland to Baur

The Rediscovery of Jewish Christianity

From Toland to Baur

F. Stanley Jones

SBL Press, 2012

This focused collection of essays by international scholars first uncovers the roots of the study of ancient Jewish Christianity in the Enlightenment in early eighteenth-century England, then explores why and how this rediscovery of Jewish Christianity set off the entire modern historical debate over Christian origins. Finally, it examines in detail how this critical impulse made its way to Germany, eventually to flourish in the nineteenth century under F. C. Baur and the Tübingen School. Included is a facsimile reproduction of John Toland’s seminal Nazarenus (1718), which launched the modern study of Jewish Christianity. The contributors are F. Stanley Jones, David Lincicum, Pierre Lurbe, Matt Jackson-McCabe, and Matti Myllykoski.
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cover of The Redskins Encyclopedia

The Redskins Encyclopedia

Michael Richman

Temple University Press, 2007

"Hail to the Redskins" and Redskin-mania have consumed the nation's capital since 1937, the Redskins' fist year in Washington.  And the fervor remains as strong, if not stronger, today.

Amply illustrated with 200 photos of players, coaches, and fans, The Redskins Encyclopedia recounts the franchise's first 75 seasons, reliving the great -- and not so great -- moments in the team's storied history, and the men who helped make Sundays memorable.

Fans will read about:
--Coaches like George Allen, the eccentric, passionate man who left a legacy as an NFL pioneer, and Joe Gibbs, who formed a D-Y-N-A-S-T-Y
--Players like star running back and all-time Redskins ground-gainer John Riggins, who once told Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to "loosen up, Sandy baby," and Doug Williams, the first black quarterback to win a Super Bowl and Super Bowl MVP honors
--The franchise's golden run of four Super Bowl appearances -- and three wins -- in the 1980s and early 1990s
--The legendary Redskins-Cowboys rivalry
--A year-by-year history of the team from 1932 to the present, with stats from each season
--Individual profiles of more than 100 Redskins players -- from Sammy Baugh to Darrell Green to Art Monk to Sonny Jurgensen to Charley Taylor to Joe Theismann

With an unparalleled collection of anecdotes, quotes, trivia, and hard-to-find information, The Redskins Encyclopedia is a must-have book for any fan who has ever bled burgundy and gold.

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cover of The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr: From Gentleman Bandit to Movie Star and Back Again

The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank Robber Henry Starr

From Gentleman Bandit to Movie Star and Back Again

Mark Archuleta

University of North Texas Press, 2025

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cover of The Reflective Age: Nostalgia at the End of History

The Reflective Age

Nostalgia at the End of History

Zachary Griffith

Rutgers University Press, 2026

At the end of history, nothing ever really ends. Though characterized, on one hand, by sociopolitical and economic stasis, stagnation, and decline, twenty-first century American culture has also been marked by the constant ebb and flow of preexisting artifacts and styles, so that when one fades out of fashion it is always replaced by another reiteration. Change, on the cultural level, has accelerated at an unprecedented rate, and old things are constantly returning anew. The present, in other words, promotes the feeling that nothing is changing and, simultaneously, everything is. In the midst of this paradoxical sense of constant flux and grinding stagnation, underwritten by the notion that there is no alternative to the malaise of the present, the nostalgic past emerges as the only viable refuge. The Reflective Age investigates how nostalgic American media of the 2010s and early 2020s reflects––and contributes to––these conditions, showing how the films, TV shows, music, and literature of the period illustrate a radical shift in both the role that nostalgia plays in the American cultural and political landscape as well as in nostalgia itself.
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cover of The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare

The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare

Steven Mullaney

University of Chicago Press, 2015

The crises of faith that fractured Reformation Europe also caused crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling as well as structures of belief were transformed; there was a reformation of social emotions as well as a Reformation of faith.

As Steven Mullaney shows in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—audiences as well as playwrights—reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. Examining a variety of works, from revenge plays to Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy and beyond, Mullaney explores how post-Reformation drama not only exposed these faultlines of society on stage but also provoked playgoers in the audience to acknowledge their shared differences. He demonstrates that our most lasting works of culture remain powerful largely because of their deep roots in the emotional landscape of their times.
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cover of The Reformation of the Image

The Reformation of the Image

Joseph Leo Koerner

University of Chicago Press, 2004

With his 95 Theses, Martin Luther advanced the radical notion that all Christians could enjoy a direct, personal relationship with God—shattering years of Catholic tradition and obviating the need for intermediaries like priests and saints between the individual believer and God. The text of the Bible, the Word of God itself, Luther argued, revealed the only true path to salvation—not priestly ritual and saintly iconography.

But if words—not iconic images—showed the way to salvation, why didn't religious imagery during the Reformation disappear along with indulgences? The answer, according to Joseph Leo Koerner, lies in the paradoxical nature of Protestant religious imagery itself, which is at once both iconic and iconoclastic. Koerner masterfully demonstrates this point not only with a multitude of Lutheran images, many never before published, but also with a close reading of a single pivotal work—Lucas Cranach the Elder's altarpiece for the City Church in Wittenberg (Luther's parish). As Koerner shows, Cranach, breaking all the conventions of traditional Catholic iconography, created an entirely new aesthetic for the new Protestant ethos.

In the Crucifixion scene of the altarpiece, for instance, Christ is alone and stripped of all his usual attendants—no Virgin Mary, no John the Baptist, no Mary Magdalene—with nothing separating him from Luther (preaching the Word) and his parishioners. And while the Holy Spirit is nowhere to be seen—representation of the divine being impossible—it is nonetheless dramatically present as the force animating Christ's drapery. According to Koerner, it is this "iconoclash" that animates the best Reformation art.

Insightful and breathtakingly original, The Reformation of the Image compellingly shows how visual art became indispensable to a religious movement built on words.
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cover of The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain

The Refracted Muse

Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain

Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomas

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Galileo never set foot on the Iberian Peninsula, yet, as Enrique García Santo-Tomás unfolds in The Refracted Muse, the news of his work with telescopes brought him to surprising prominence—not just among Spaniards working in the developing science of optometry but among creative writers as well.
 
While Spain is often thought to have taken little notice of the Scientific Revolution, García Santo-Tomás tells a different story, one that reveals Golden Age Spanish literature to be in close dialogue with the New Science. Drawing on the work of writers such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Quevedo, he helps us trace the influence of science and discovery on the rapidly developing and highly playful genre of the novel. Indeed, García Santo-Tomás makes a strong case that the rise of the novel cannot be fully understood without taking into account its relationship to the scientific discoveries of the period.
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cover of The Regional Dynamics of Language Differentiation in Belgium: A Study in Cultural-Political Geography

The Regional Dynamics of Language Differentiation in Belgium

A Study in Cultural-Political Geography

Alexander B. Murphy

University of Chicago Press, 1988

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cover of The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy

The Regulated Economy

A Historical Approach to Political Economy

Edited by Claudia Goldin and Gary D. Libecap

University of Chicago Press, 1994

How has the United States government grown? What political and economic factors have given rise to its regulation of the economy? These eight case studies explore the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century origins of government intervention in the United States economy, focusing on the political influence of special interest groups in the development of economic regulation.

The Regulated Economy examines how constituent groups emerged and demanded government action to solve perceived economic problems, such as exorbitant railroad and utility rates, bank failure, falling agricultural prices, the immigration of low-skilled workers, workplace injury, and the financing of government. The contributors look at how preexisting policies, institutions, and market structures shaped regulatory activity; the origins of regulatory movements at the state and local levels; the effects of consensus-building on the timing and content of legislation; and how well government policies reflect constituency interests.

A wide-ranging historical view of the way interest group demands and political bargaining have influenced the growth of economic regulation in the United States, this book is important reading for economists, political scientists, and public policy experts.
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cover of The Regulatory Process: With Illustrations from Commercial Aviation

The Regulatory Process

With Illustrations from Commercial Aviation

By Emmette S. Redford

University of Texas Press, 1969

The subject of regulation is one of the most vital and troublesome in our system of government. In this detailed study of early and mid-twentieth-century regulation of commercial aviation Emmette S. Redford illustrates what happens when government regulates a particular industry.

He first sets forth the perspectives for a study of an area of regulation and develops an argument for eclectic perspectives in the study of selected systems, or universes, of social action, such as the performance of an economic function under government regulation.

These perspectives are illustrated in the following series of case studies on regulation of commercial aviation:

  1. The significance of belief patterns on the content of the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938.
  2. The role of Congress in the regulation of commercial aviation in a two-year period.
  3. The interactions of Congress, the president, and the regulated industry in strengthening safety regulation through passage of the Federal Aviation Act of 1958.
  4. The actions of the Civil Aeronautics Board on a set of complicated economic issues in the General Passenger Fare Investigation.
  5. The position of the Air Transport Association in the regulatory pattern.

In "An Essay on Evaluation" Redford summarizes what is revealed in the case studies that is significant with respect to the system of government regulation. He searches for standards for evaluating a system of social control, or for evaluating parts of it, and relates his conclusions to issues regarding the beneficence of a system of regulated private supply of a service.

The Regulatory Process is a study of interest to the aviation industry, to students of regulation of the economy, and to those who seek an understanding of social systems.

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cover of The Reincarnation of Russia: Struggling with the Legacy of Communism, 1990–1994

The Reincarnation of Russia

Struggling with the Legacy of Communism, 1990–1994

John Löwenhardt

Duke University Press, 1995

In The Reincarnation of Russia, John Löwenhardt presents the first in-depth analysis of the initial and crucial stages of Russia’s new statehood. He examines Russia’s recent turbulent history—beginning with the explosive Declaration of State Sovereignty in June 1990, through the adoption of the Yeltsin constitution in the elections of December 1993 and concluding with the early months of 1994. His analysis of Russia’s struggle with the vestige of Soviet Communism and the attempt to create a more democratic form of government offers crucial insight into one of the critical turning points in contemporary history.
Building on analysis of the failure of the Soviet system, Löwenhardt compares the emergence of Russia as a newborn state with other countries that have undergone transitions from authoritarianism toward democracy. Although it is often claimed that Russia is a unique case, the author argues that the lessons of other nations are relevant to the Russian situation. In conjunction with this comparative analysis and with consideration of the significance of the communist and Russian past, Löwenhardt discusses political and economic developments—including both foreign and domestic policy concerns—in Russia over the last four years. He provides a better understanding of the Russian condition and a guarded optimism regarding the ongoing process taking place in Russia today.
The Reincarnation of Russia will be welcomed by scholars with specialized interests in the democratization of Russia, political leaders, journalists, and general readers concerned with the global impact of Russia’s changing status.
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cover of The Reinvention of Mexico in Contemporary Spanish Travel Writing

The Reinvention of Mexico in Contemporary Spanish Travel Writing

Jane Hanley

Vanderbilt University Press, 2021

The long history of transatlantic movement in the Spanish-speaking world has had a significant impact on present-day concepts of Mexico and the implications of representing Mexico and Latin America more generally in Spain, Europe, and throughout the world. In addition to analyzing texts that have received little to no critical attention, this book examines the connections between contemporary travel, including the local dynamics of encounters and the global circulation of information, and the significant influence of the history of exchange between Spain and Mexico in the construction of existing ideas of place.

To frame the analysis of contemporary travel writing, author Jane Hanley examines key moments in the history of Mexican-Spanish relations, including the origins of narratives regarding Spaniards' sense of Mexico's similarity to and difference from Spain. This history underpins the discussion of the role of Spanish travelers in their encounters with Mexican peoples and places and their reflection on their own role as communicators of cultural meaning and participants in the tourist economy with its impact—both negative and positive—on places.
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cover of The Relación de Michoacán (1539-1541) and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico

The Relación de Michoacán (1539-1541) and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico

By Angélica Jimena Afanador-Pujol

University of Texas Press, 2015

Through close readings of the painted images in a major sixteenth-century illustrated manuscript, this book demonstrates the critical role that images played in ethnic identity formation and politics in colonial Mexico.

The Relación de Michoacán (1539–1541) is one of the earliest surviving illustrated manuscripts from colonial Mexico. Commissioned by the Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, the Relación was produced by a Franciscan friar together with indigenous noble informants and anonymous native artists who created its forty-four illustrations. To this day, the Relación remains the primary source for studying the pre-Columbian practices and history of the people known as Tarascans or P’urhépecha. However, much remains to be said about how the Relación’s colonial setting shaped its final form.

By looking at the Relación in its colonial context, this study reveals how it presented the indigenous collaborators a unique opportunity to shape European perceptions of them while settling conflicting agendas, outshining competing ethnic groups, and carving a place for themselves in the new colonial society. Through archival research and careful visual analysis, Angélica Afanador-Pujol provides a new and fascinating account that situates the manuscript’s images within the colonial conflicts that engulfed the indigenous collaborators. These conflicts ranged from disputes over political posts among indigenous factions to labor and land disputes against Spanish newcomers. Afanador-Pujol explores how these tensions are physically expressed in the manuscript’s production and in its many contradictions between text and images, as well as in numerous emendations to the images. By studying representations of justice, landscape, conquest narratives, and genealogy within the Relación, Afanador-Pujol clearly demonstrates the visual construction of identity, its malleability, and its political possibilities.

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cover of The Religion of Falun Gong

The Religion of Falun Gong

Benjamin Penny

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In July 1999, a mere seven years after the founding of the religious movement known as the Falun Gong, the Chinese government banned it. Falun Gong is still active in other countries, and its suppression has become a primary concern of human rights activists and is regularly discussed in dealings between the Chinese government and its Western counterparts. But while much has been written on Falun Gong’s relation to political issues, no one has analyzed in depth what its practitioners actually believe and do.

The Religion of Falun Gong remedies that omission, providing the first serious examination of Falun Gong teachings. Benjamin Penny argues that in order to understand Falun Gong, one must grasp the beliefs, practices, and texts of the movement and its founder, Li Hongzhi. Contextualizing Li’s ideas in terms of the centuries-long Chinese tradition of self-cultivation and the cultural world of 1980s and ’90s China—particularly the upwelling of biospiritual activity and the influx of translated works from the Western New Age movement—Penny shows how both have influenced Li’s writings and his broader view of the cosmos. An illuminating look at this controversial movement, The Religion of Falun Gong opens a revealing window into the nature and future of contemporary China.
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cover of The Religion of the Etruscans

The Religion of the Etruscans

Edited by Nancy Thomson de Grummond and Erika Simon

University of Texas Press, 2006

Devotion to religion was the distinguishing characteristic of the Etruscan people, the most powerful civilization of Italy in the Archaic period. From a very early date, Etruscan religion spread its influence into Roman society, especially with the practice of divination. The Etruscan priest Spurinna, to give a well-known example, warned Caesar to beware the Ides of March. Yet despite the importance of religion in Etruscan life, there are relatively few modern comprehensive studies of Etruscan religion, and none in English. This volume seeks to fill that deficiency by bringing together essays by leading scholars that collectively provide a state-of-the-art overview of religion in ancient Etruria.

The eight essays in this book cover all of the most important topics in Etruscan religion, including the Etruscan pantheon and the roles of the gods, the roles of priests and divinatory practices, votive rituals, liturgical literature, sacred spaces and temples, and burial and the afterlife. In addition to the essays, the book contains valuable supporting materials, including the first English translation of an Etruscan Brontoscopic Calendar (which guided priests in making divinations), Greek and Latin sources about Etruscan religion (in the original language and English translation), and a glossary. Nearly 150 black and white photographs and drawings illustrate surviving Etruscan artifacts and inscriptions, as well as temple floor plans and reconstructions.

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cover of The Religious Question in Modern China

The Religious Question in Modern China

Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Recent events—from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in China to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe—vividly demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. The Religious Question in Modern China highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religion has challenged and responded to secular Chinese modernity, from 1898 to the present.

Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer piece together the puzzle of religion in China not by looking separately at different religions in different contexts, but by writing a unified story of how religion has shaped, and in turn been shaped by, modern Chinese society. From Chinese medicine and the martial arts to communal temple cults and revivalist redemptive societies, the authors demonstrate that from the nineteenth century onward, as the Chinese state shifted, the religious landscape consistently resurfaced in a bewildering variety of old and new forms. The Religious Question in Modern China integrates historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives in a comprehensive overview of China’s religious history that is certain to become an indispensible reference for specialists and students alike.

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cover of The Remains of War: Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted For in Southeast Asia

The Remains of War

Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted For in Southeast Asia

Thomas M. Hawley

Duke University Press, 2005

The ongoing effort of the United States to account for its missing Vietnam War soldiers is unique. The United States requires the repatriation and positive identification of soldiers’ bodies to remove their names from the list of the missing. This quest for certainty in the form of the material, identified body marks a dramatic change from previous wars, in which circumstantial evidence often sufficed to account for missing casualties. In The Remains of War, Thomas M. Hawley considers why the body of the missing soldier came to assume such significance in the wake of the Vietnam War. Illuminating the relationship between the effort to account for missing troops and the political and cultural forces of the post-Vietnam era, Hawley argues that the body became the repository of the ambiguities and anxieties surrounding the U.S. involvement and defeat in Southeast Asia.

Hawley combines the theoretical insights of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Emmanuel Levinas with detailed research into the history of the movement to recover the remains of soldiers missing in Vietnam. He examines the practices that constitute the Defense Department’s accounting protocol: the archival research, archaeological excavation, and forensic identification of recovered remains. He considers the role of the American public and the families of missing soldiers in demanding the release of pows and encouraging the recovery of the missing; the place of the body of the Vietnam veteran within the war’s legacy; and the ways that memorials link individual bodies to the body politic. Highlighting the contradictions inherent in the recovery effort, Hawley reflects on the ethical implications of the massive endeavor of the American government and many officials in Vietnam to account for the remains of American soldiers.

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cover of The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema

The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema

Kyung Hyun Kim

Duke University Press, 2004

In one of the first English-language studies of Korean cinema to date, Kyung Hyun Kim shows how the New Korean Cinema of the past quarter century has used the trope of masculinity to mirror the profound sociopolitical changes in the country. Since 1980, South Korea has transformed from an insular, authoritarian culture into a democratic and cosmopolitan society. The transition has fueled anxiety about male identity, and amid this tension, empowerment has been imagined as remasculinization. Kim argues that the brutality and violence ubiquitous in many Korean films is symptomatic of Korea’s on-going quest for modernity and a post-authoritarian identity.

Kim offers in-depth examinations of more than a dozen of the most representative films produced in Korea since 1980. In the process, he draws on the theories of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, Gilles Deleuze, Rey Chow, and Kaja Silverman to follow the historical trajectory of screen representations of Korean men from self-loathing beings who desire to be controlled to subjects who are not only self-sufficient but also capable of destroying others. He discusses a range of movies from art-house films including To the Starry Island (1993) and The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996) to higher-grossing, popular films like Whale Hunting (1984) and Shiri (1999). He considers the work of several Korean auteurs—Park Kwang-su, Jang Sun-woo, and Hong Sang-su. Kim argues that Korean cinema must begin to imagine gender relations that defy the contradictions of sexual repression in order to move beyond such binary struggles as those between the traditional and the modern, or the traumatic and the post-traumatic.

[more]
cover of The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers

The Remembered Gate

Memoirs by Alabama Writers

Jay Lamar

University of Alabama Press, 2002

Nineteen acclaimed writers reflect on the Alabama landscapes, memories, and experiences that shaped their voices.

In The Remembered Gate, nationally prominent fiction writers, essayists, and poets recall how their formative years in Alabama shaped them as people and as writers. The essays range in tone from the pained and sorrowful to the wistful and playful, in class from the privileged to the poverty-stricken, in geography from the rural to the urban, and in time from the first years of the 20th century to the height of the Civil Rights era and beyond.

In all the essays we see how the individual artists came to understand something central about themselves and their art from a changing Alabama landscape. Whether from the perspective of C. Eric Lincoln, beaten for his presumption as a young black man asking for pay for his labors, or of Judith Hillman Paterson, floundering in her unresolved relationship with her troubled family, these personal renderings are intensely realized visions of a writer's sense of being a writer and a human being. Robert Inman tells of exploring his grandmother's attic, and how the artifacts he found there fired his literary imagination. William Cobb profiles the lasting influence of the town bully, the diabolical Cletus Hickey. And in “Growing up in Alabama: A Meal in Four Courses, Beginning with Dessert,” Charles Gaines chronicles his upbringing through the metaphor of southern cooking.

What emerges overall is a complex, richly textured portrait of men and women struggling with, and within, Alabama’s economic and cultural evolution to become major voices of our time.
 

[more]
cover of The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World: Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States

The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World

Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States

Daniel J. Walkowitz

Rutgers University Press, 2018

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jewish socialist movement played a vital role in protecting workers’ rights throughout Europe and the Americas. Yet few traces of this movement or its accomplishments have been preserved or memorialized in Jewish heritage sites.
 
The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World investigates the politics of heritage tourism and collective memory. In an account that is part travelogue, part social history, and part family saga, acclaimed historian Daniel J. Walkowitz visits key Jewish museums and heritage sites from Berlin to Belgrade, from Krakow to Kiev, and from Warsaw to New York, to discover which stories of the Jewish experience are told and which are silenced. As he travels to thirteen different locations, participates in tours, displays, and public programs, and gleans insight from local historians, he juxtaposes the historical record with the stories presented in heritage tourism.  What he finds raises provocative questions about the heritage tourism industry and its role in determining how we perceive Jewish history and identity. This book offers a unique perspective on the importance of collective memory and the dangers of collective forgetting.  
[more]
cover of The Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines: Pioneer and Statesman of Early Alabama and Mississippi, 1805–1843

The Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines

Pioneer and Statesman of Early Alabama and Mississippi, 1805–1843

George Strother Gaines

University of Alabama Press, 1998

One man’s remarkable account of nation‑building, Native diplomacy, and the making of the early American South.

The Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines: Pioneer and Statesman of Early Alabama and Mississippi, 1805–1843 offers one of the most vivid, irreplaceable firsthand accounts of the American Southeast during its most transformative decades. Edited and expertly contextualized by historian James P. Pate, this volume gathers Gaines’s dictated memoirs, rare letters, early newspaper publications, oral-history interviews, and extensive editorial notes to illuminate a world on the cusp of monumental change. 

George Strother Gaines was no ordinary frontier figure. Trusted by U.S. officials and Choctaw leaders alike, he played central roles as federal factor at the Choctaw Trading House, a key intermediary during treaty negotiations, a primary organizer of the first Choctaw removal, a banker and state senator in newly formed Alabama, and later a driving force behind the Mobile & Ohio Railroad. His reminiscences reveal intimate knowledge of the region’s political development, frontier economy, Native diplomacy, and daily life. They are written in a strikingly elegant “Addisonian” style praised even in his own lifetime. 

This edition’s special features—including detailed maps, illustrations, genealogical material, and a robust scholarly introduction—make it the most comprehensive and authoritative presentation of Gaines’s writings ever published. It not only preserves his voice but situates him within the broader historical forces reshaping the Gulf South and Native nations in the nineteenth century. 

Ideal readers include: 

• Historians of Alabama, Mississippi, and the early American South 
• Scholars of Native American and Choctaw/Chickasaw history 
• Readers of frontier, antebellum, or political history 
• Genealogists and local-history enthusiasts 
• Anyone seeking an engaging, elegantly written window into the early Southeast 

This is a foundational text for understanding the region’s past—and a compelling story told by one of its most influential witnesses.

[more]
cover of The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy

The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy

Kathy Eden

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In 1345, when Petrarch recovered a lost collection of letters from Cicero to his best friend Atticus, he discovered an intimate Cicero, a man very different from either the well-known orator of the Roman forum or the measured spokesman for the ancient schools of philosophy. It was Petrarch’s encounter with this previously unknown Cicero and his letters that Kathy Eden argues fundamentally changed the way Europeans from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries were expected to read and write.

The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy explores the way ancient epistolary theory and practice were understood and imitated in the European Renaissance.Eden draws chiefly upon Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca—but also upon Plato, Demetrius, Quintilian, and many others—to show how the classical genre of the “familiar” letter emerged centuries later in the intimate styles of Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne. Along the way, she reveals how the complex concept of intimacy in the Renaissance—leveraging the legal, affective, and stylistic dimensions of its prehistory in antiquity—pervades the literary production and reception of the period and sets the course for much that is modern in the literature of subsequent centuries. Eden’s important study will interest students and scholars in a number of areas, including classical, Renaissance, and early modern studies; comparative literature; and the history of reading, rhetoric, and writing.

[more]
cover of The Renaissance Restored: Paintings Conservation and the Birth of Modern Art History in Nineteenth-Century Europe

The Renaissance Restored

Paintings Conservation and the Birth of Modern Art History in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Matthew Hayes

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021

This handsomely illustrated volume traces the intersections of art history and paintings restoration in nineteenth-century Europe.

Repairing works of art and writing about them—the practices that became art conservation and art history—share a common ancestry. By the nineteenth century the two fields had become inseparably linked. While the art historical scholarship of this period has been widely studied, its restoration practices have received less scrutiny—until now.

This book charts the intersections between art history and conservation in the treatment of Italian Renaissance paintings in nineteenth-century Europe. Initial chapters discuss the restoration of works by Giotto and Titian, framed by the contemporary scholarship of art historians such as Jacob Burckhardt, G. B. Cavalcaselle, and Joseph Crowe that was redefining the earlier age. Subsequent chapters recount how paintings conservation was integrated into museum settings. The narrative uses period texts, unpublished archival materials, and historical photographs in probing how paintings looked at a time when scholars were writing the foundational texts of art history, and how contemporary restorers were negotiating the appearances of these works. The book proposes a model for a new conservation history, object focused yet enriched by consideration of a wider cultural horizon.
[more]
cover of The Renewal of the Kibbutz: From Reform to Transformation

The Renewal of the Kibbutz

From Reform to Transformation

Russell, Raymond

Rutgers University Press, 2015

We think of the kibbutz as a place for communal living and working. Members work, reside, and eat together, and share income “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” But in the late 1980s the kibbutzim decided that they needed to change. Reforms—moderate at first—were put in place. Members could work outside of the organization, but wages went to the collective. Apartments could be expanded, but housing remained kibbutz-owned. In 1995, change accelerated. Kibbutzim began to pay salaries based on the market value of a member’s work. As a result of such changes, the “renewed” kibbutz emerged. By 2010, 75 percent of Israel’s 248 non-religious kibbutzim fit into this new category.

This book explores the waves of reforms since 1990. Looking through the lens of organizational theories that predict how open or closed a group will be to change, the authors find that less successful kibbutzim were most receptive to reform, and reforms then spread through imitation from the economically weaker kibbutzim to the strong.
[more]
cover of The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade: The Three Thought Worlds of the Iroquois and the Huron, 1609-1650

The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade

The Three Thought Worlds of the Iroquois and the Huron, 1609-1650

Roger M. Carpenter

Michigan State University Press, 2004

For three decades, Native American history has been dominated by two major themes. The first is "The Cant of Conquest," the notion that all native peoples who came into contact with Europeans suffered devastating effects due to disease, alcohol, and warfare. However, the argument can be made that in some cases native peoples controlled their own fortunes, at least for awhile. The other dominant theme is the "The Contest of Cultures," the idea that Native American history needs to be examined in the context of dealings with Europeans. Europeans changed the Americas, but this approach concerns colonialism and colonists as well as Native Americans. 
      The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade examines the changing worldviews of the Huron and the Iroquois in the first half of the seventeenth century, during a period of increasing European contact. From Samuel de Champlain’s armed encounter with the Iroquois, in 1609, to the dispersal of the Huron in the mid-seventeenth century, Carpenter’s book traces the evolving thought worlds of Iroquoian peoples.  
      The Iroquois and the Huron-peoples with an intertwined history and many cultural similarities-reacted differently to European contact. The Huron thought world began to change when the French initiated intense trade and missionary activity early in the seventeenth century. French missionary efforts resulted in a split within the Huron nation between traditionalists and Christian converts. By contrast, the Iroquois were interested primarily in trade with the newcomers. The Iroquois, like the Huron, accepted European trade goods, but unlike the Huron, they rejected European religion.  
      The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade differs from other works of Native American history on several counts. Native American historiography has not been overly comparative. This work is a comparative history of two culturally similar Native American nations. It also differs in that, rather than another history of Native-European contacts, it is an Indian-centered history.

[more]
cover of The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference

The Reorder of Things

The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference

Roderick A. Ferguson

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

In the 1960s and 1970s, minority and women students at colleges and universities across the United States organized protest movements to end racial and gender inequality on campus. African American, Chicano, Asia American, American Indian, women, and queer activists demanded the creation of departments that reflected their histories and experiences, resulting in the formation of interdisciplinary studies programs that hoped to transform both the university and the wider society beyond the campus.

In The Reorder of Things, however, Roderick A. Ferguson traces and assesses the ways in which the rise of interdisciplines—departments of race, gender, and ethnicity; fields such as queer studies—were not simply a challenge to contemporary power as manifest in academia, the state, and global capitalism but were, rather, constitutive of it. Ferguson delineates precisely how minority culture and difference as affirmed by legacies of the student movements were appropriated and institutionalized by established networks of power.

Critically examining liberationist social movements and the cultural products that have been informed by them, including works by Adrian Piper, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith, The Reorder of Things argues for the need to recognize the vulnerabilities of cultural studies to co-option by state power and to develop modes of debate and analysis that may be in the institution but are, unequivocally, not of it.

[more]
cover of The Repoliticization of the Welfare State

The Repoliticization of the Welfare State

Ian P. McManus

University of Michigan Press, 2022

The Repoliticization of the Welfare State grapples with the evolving nature of political conflict over social spending after the Great Recession. While the severity of the economic crisis encouraged strong social spending responses to protect millions of individuals, governments have faced growing pressure to reduce budgets and make deep cuts to the welfare state. Whereas conservative parties have embraced fiscal discipline and welfare state cuts, left-wing parties have turned away from austerity in favor of higher social spending. These political differences represent a return of traditional left-right beliefs over social spending and economic governance. 

This book is one of the first to systematically compare welfare state politics before and after the Great Recession, arguing that a new and lasting post-crisis dynamic has emerged where political parties once again matter for social spending. At the heart of this repoliticization are intense ideological debates over market regulation, social inequality, redistribution, and the role of the state. The book analyzes social spending dynamics for 28 countries before and after the crisis. It also includes in-depth country case studies representing five distinct welfare state types: Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, and the Czech Republic.

[more]
cover of The Reprobation of Humans and Angels: Augustinus, Tome III, Book X

The Reprobation of Humans and Angels

Augustinus, Tome III, Book X

Cornelius Jansen

Catholic University of America Press, 2026

Cornelius Jansen’s masterful Augustinus (1641) has recently been the center of renewed interest in the theological academic community. After the translation and publication of the chapter Jansen devoted in his work to the topic of predestination of human beings and angels, this is the first ever translation in the English language of the last chapter of the Augustinus, addressing the fate of the reprobates. Jansen illustrated the causes and justice of the divine decision to exclude the damned from the beatific vision by mostly drawing from Augustine’s works. The readers will find that Jansen’s treatment on the subject to be balanced and fair, tracing a middle course between the eschatological optimism of Universalism, which claims that all human beings, and possibly angels as well, will one day be restored to fellowship with God, and the exclusivist soteriology typical of some pre-Vatican II Catholic theology and Evangelicalism. This volume builds upon the translation of some of its central chapters in The Predestination of Humans and Angels, also in the Early Modern Catholic Sources series.
[more]
cover of The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America

The Republic Afloat

Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America

Matthew Taylor Raffety

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In the years before the Civil War, many Americans saw the sea as a world apart, an often violent and insular culture governed by its own definitions of honor and ruled by its own authorities. The truth, however, is that legal cases that originated at sea had a tendency to come ashore and force the national government to address questions about personal honor, dignity, the rights of labor, and the meaning and privileges of citizenship, often for the first time. By examining how and why merchant seamen and their officers came into contact with the law, Matthew Taylor Raffety exposes the complex relationship between brutal crimes committed at sea and the development of a legal consciousness within both the judiciary and among seafarers in this period.


The Republic Afloat tracks how seamen conceived of themselves as individuals and how they defined their place within the United States. Of interest to historians of labor, law, maritime culture, and national identity in the early republic, Raffety’s work reveals much about the ways that merchant seamen sought to articulate the ideals of freedom and citizenship before the courts of the land—and how they helped to shape the laws of the young republic.

[more]
cover of The Republic Estranged: Christians, Muslims, and Jews between Algeria and France, 1870-1919

The Republic Estranged

Christians, Muslims, and Jews between Algeria and France, 1870-1919

Yuval Tal

University of Chicago Press, 0

Examines how the modern French Republic came into being through state efforts to assimilate Christians, Muslims, and Jews across France and colonial Algeria.

In The Republic Estranged, Yuval Tal studies three religious communities—Christians, Muslims, and Jews—and their interactions with French settlers in colonial Algeria. While each of these groups wanted to “become French” without abandoning their communal identities, the French system had its own ideas about what kind of assimilation was possible or desirable. It welcomed Christians, excluded Muslims, and enfranchised Jews while insisting that Jews could never become as naturally French as Christians could. The result, Tal shows, was a “republican ethnic common sense” that continues to shape French politics today.

Tal argues we must understand France’s deeply entrenched anti-Muslim rhetoric as part of a larger strategy that selectively privileges Christians over and against Muslim and Jewish minorities. He focuses on a period between 1870 and 1919, in which we see how France’s supposedly universalist project of national assimilation was predicated on the notion that some ethnically and religiously defined communities were more capable of “becoming French” than others. Working with sources in Arabic, French, Spanish, and Italian, including literary, political, and legal texts, this book speaks to readers across French studies, Jewish studies, and Middle East and North African studies, showing the ongoing relevance of this important period in French history.

[more]
cover of The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression

The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean

How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression

Tariq D. Khan

University of Illinois Press, 2023

The long relationship between America’s colonizing wars and virulent anticommunism

The colonizing wars against Native Americans created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. Tariq D. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and class war as foundational aspects of capitalist domination and vital elements of the nation’s long history of internal repression and social control. Khan shows how the state wielded the tactics, weapons, myths, and ideology refined in America’s colonizing wars to repress anarchists, labor unions, and a host of others labeled as alien, multi-racial, multi-ethnic urban rabble. The ruling classes considered radicals of all stripes to be anticolonial insurgents. As Khan charts the decades of red scares that began in the 1840s, he reveals how capitalists and government used much-practiced counterinsurgency rhetoric and tactics against the movements they perceived and vilified as “anarchist.”

Original and boldly argued, The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean offers an enlightening new history with relevance for our own time.

[more]
cover of The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism

The Republic Unsettled

Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism

Mayanthi L. Fernando

Duke University Press, 2014

In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions to create novel modes of ethical and political life, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a new future for France. She also examines how the political discourses, institutions, and laws that constitute French secularism regulate Islam, transforming the Islamic tradition and what it means to be Muslim. Fernando traces how long-standing tensions within secularism and republican citizenship are displaced onto France's Muslims, who, as a result, are rendered illegitimate as political citizens and moral subjects. She argues, ultimately, that the Muslim question is as much about secularism as it is about Islam.
[more]
cover of The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America

The Republic of Color

Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America

Michael Rossi

University of Chicago Press, 2019

The Republic of Color delves deep into the history of color science in the United States to unearth its origins and examine the scope of its influence on the industrial transformation of turn-of-the-century America.
 
For a nation in the grip of profound economic, cultural, and demographic crises, the standardization of color became a means of social reform—a way of sculpting the American population into one more amenable to the needs of the emerging industrial order. Delineating color was also a way to characterize the vagaries of human nature, and to create ideal structures through which those humans would act in a newly modern American republic. Michael Rossi’s compelling history goes far beyond the culture of the visual to show readers how the control and regulation of color shaped the social contours of modern America—and redefined the way we see the world.
[more]
cover of The Republic of Football: Legends of the Texas High School Game

The Republic of Football

Legends of the Texas High School Game

Chad S. Conine

University of Texas Press, 2016

Anywhere football is played, Texas is the force to reckon with. Its powerhouse programs produce the best football players in America. In The Republic of Football, Chad S. Conine vividly captures Texas’s impact on the game with action-filled stories about legendary high school players, coaches, and teams from around the state and across seven decades.

Drawing on dozens of interviews, Conine offers rare glimpses of the early days of some of football’s biggest stars. He reveals that some players took time to achieve greatness—LaDainian Tomlinson wasn’t even the featured running back on his high school team until a breakthrough game in his senior season vaulted him to the highest level of the sport—while others, like Colt McCoy, showed their first flashes of brilliance in middle school. In telling these and many other stories of players and coaches, including Hayden Fry, Spike Dykes, Bob McQueen, Lovie Smith, Art Briles, Lawrence Elkins, Warren McVea, Ray Rhodes, Dat Nguyen, Zach Thomas, Drew Brees, and Adrian Peterson, Conine spotlights the decisive moments when players caught fire and teams such as Celina, Southlake Carroll, and Converse Judson turned into Texas dynasties. Packed with never-before-told anecdotes, as well as fresh takes on the games everyone remembers, The Republic of Football is a must-read for all fans of Friday night lights.

[more]
cover of The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music

The Republic of Love

Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music

Martin Stokes

University of Chicago Press, 2010

At the heart of The Republic of Love are the voices of three musicians—queer nightclub star Zeki Müren, arabesk originator Orhan Gencebay, and pop diva Sezen Aksu—who collectively have dominated mass media in Turkey since the early 1950s. Their fame and ubiquity have made them national icons—but, Martin Stokes here contends, they do not represent the official version of Turkish identity propagated by anthems or flags; instead they evoke a much more intimate and ambivalent conception of Turkishness.

Using these three singers as a lens, Stokes examines Turkey’s repressive politics and civil violence as well as its uncommonly vibrant public life in which music, art, literature, sports, and journalism have flourished. However, Stokes’s primary concern is how Müren, Gencebay, and Aksu’s music and careers can be understood in light of theories of cultural intimacy. In particular, he considers their contributions to the development of a Turkish concept of love, analyzing the ways these singers explore the private matters of intimacy, affection, and sentiment on the public stage.

[more]
cover of The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS

The Republic of Therapy

Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS

Vinh-Kim Nguyen

Duke University Press, 2010

The Republic of Therapy tells the story of the global response to the HIV epidemic from the perspective of community organizers, activists, and people living with HIV in West Africa. Drawing on his experiences as a physician and anthropologist in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, Vinh-Kim Nguyen focuses on the period between 1994, when effective antiretroviral treatments for HIV were discovered, and 2000, when the global health community acknowledged a right to treatment, making the drugs more available. During the intervening years, when antiretrovirals were scarce in Africa, triage decisions were made determining who would receive lifesaving treatment. Nguyen explains how those decisions altered social relations in West Africa. In 1994, anxious to “break the silence” and “put a face to the epidemic,” international agencies unwittingly created a market in which stories about being HIV positive could be bartered for access to limited medical resources. Being able to talk about oneself became a matter of life or death. Tracing the cultural and political logic of triage back to colonial classification systems, Nguyen shows how it persists in contemporary attempts to design, fund, and implement mass treatment programs in the developing world. He argues that as an enactment of decisions about who may live, triage constitutes a partial, mobile form of sovereignty: what might be called therapeutic sovereignty.
[more]
cover of The Republican Aventine and Rome’s Social Order

The Republican Aventine and Rome’s Social Order

Lisa Marie Mignone

University of Michigan Press, 2016

The Aventine—one of Rome’s canonical seven hills—has long been identified as the city’s plebeian district, which housed the lower orders of society and served as the political headquarters, religious citadel, and social bastion of those seeking radical reform of the Republican constitution. Lisa Marie Mignone challenges the plebeian-Aventine paradigm through a multidisciplinary review of the ancient evidence, demonstrating that this construct proves to be a modern creation. Mignone uses ancient literary accounts, material evidence, and legal and semantic developments to reconstruct and reexamine the history of the Aventine Hill. Through comparative studies of premodern urban planning and development, combined with an assessment of gang violence and ancient neighborhood practices in the latter half of the first century BCE, she argues that there was no concentration of the disadvantaged in a “plebeian ghetto.” Thus residency patterns everywhere in the caput mundi, including the Aventine Hill, likely incorporated the full spectrum of Roman society.

The myth of the “plebeian Aventine” became embedded not only in classical scholarship, but also in modern political and cultural consciousness; it has even been used by modern figures to support their political agenda. Yet The Republican Aventine and Rome’s Social Order makes bold new claims regarding the urban design and social history of ancient Rome and raises a significant question about ancient urbanism and social stability more generally: Did social integration reduce violence in premodern cities and promote urban concord?
[more]
cover of The Republican Party of Texas: A Political History

The Republican Party of Texas

A Political History

By Wayne Thorburn

University of Texas Press, 2021

On July 4, 1867, a group of men assembled in Houston to establish the Republican Party of Texas. Combatting entrenched statewide support for the Democratic Party and their own internal divisions, Republicans struggled to gain a foothold in the Lone Star State, which had sided with the Confederacy and aligned with the Democratic platform. In The Republican Party of Texas, Wayne Thorburn, former executive director of the Texas GOP, chronicles over one hundred and fifty years of the defeats and victories of the party that became the dominant political force in Texas in the modern era.

Thorburn documents the organizational structure of the Texas GOP, drawing attention to prominent names, such as Harry Wurzbach and George W. Bush, alongside lesser-known community leaders who bolstered local support. The 1960s and 1970s proved a watershed era for Texas Republicans as they shored up ideological divides and elected the first Republican governor and more state senators and congressional representatives than ever before. From decisions about candidates and shifting allegiances and political stances, to race-based divisions and strategic cooperation with leaders in the Democratic Party, Thorburn unearths the development of the GOP in Texas to understand the unique Texan conservatism that prevails today.

[more]
cover of The Republicans: From Lincoln to Bush

The Republicans

From Lincoln to Bush

Robert Allen Rutland

University of Missouri Press, 1996

The Republican party has always been fascinating to those who subscribe to its principles, as well as to those who take an alternative stand on the issues. In The Republicans: From Lincoln to Bush, Robert Allen Rutland has brought a clear and concise understanding of this political party to the general reader. The book is a lucid and fast-paced overview of the Republican party from its beginnings in the 1850s through the 1994 congressional elections, which saw the Democratic domination of the House and Senate come to an abrupt end.

In a crisp, highly readable style, Rutland begins by explaining how the "obnoxious" Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 overturned the Missouri Compromise, inflamed the North, and caused the collapse of the Whig and American parties. The result was the birth of the Republican party, whose purpose was to oppose the Democrats and stop the spread of slavery. Abraham Lincoln was elected the first Republican president in 1860.

The Republicans suggests that a major shift in voting strength took place twice during the twentieth century, first in the New Deal years, and again after 1968 when the GOP made an appeal to southern voters and finally took control of the area that had previously been dominated by the Democrats. With the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as the fortieth president of the United States, the Republicans gained support from many first-time voters, middle-class whites, and labor unions-- groups not previously expected to vote Republican. In the companion volume, The Democrats: From Jefferson to Clinton, Rutland provides an honest and straightforward assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Democratic presidents. Here he presents an evenhanded look at the good and not-so-good Republicans. By skillfully using stories and anecdotes from various administrations to enliven this narrative of political history, Rutland gives Republicans and Democrats alike a deeper appreciation for the two-party system.

[more]
cover of The Reputation of the Roman Merchant

The Reputation of the Roman Merchant

Jane Sancinito

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Roman merchants, artisans, and service providers faced substantial prejudice. Contemporary authors labeled them greedy, while the Roman on the street accused merchants of lying and cheating. Legally and socially, merchants were kept at arm’s length from respectable society. Yet merchants were common figures in daily life, populating densely packed cities and traveling around the Mediterranean. The Reputation of the Roman Merchant focuses on the strategies retailers, craftsmen, and many other workers used to succeed, examining how they developed good reputations despite the stigma associated with their work. In a novel approach, blending social and economic history, The Reputation of the Roman Merchant considers how reputation worked as an informal institution, establishing and reinforcing traditional Roman norms while lowering the cost of doing business for individual workers. From histories and novels to inscriptions and art, this volume identifies common reputation strategies, explores how points of pride and personal accomplishments were shared with others, and explains responses to merchant activities on the small-scale. The book concludes that merchants invested heavily in their reputations as a way to set themselves apart from common, negative stereotypes without admitting that there was anything shameful about the work they did.
[more]
cover of The Reredos of All Souls College Oxford

The Reredos of All Souls College Oxford

Edited by Peregrine Horden

Paul Holberton Publishing, 2021

The reredos of the fifteenth-century chapel of All Souls College Oxford, with its combination of medieval niches and statuary by George Gilbert Scott, has remained one of the unsung glories of both medieval perpendicular architecture and Victorian restoration. Informed by recent scientific investigation of its stonework and its surviving medieval polychromy, this volume follows the reredos from the phases of its medieval and early Tudor construction, through its covering up with a succession of baroque and neoclassical decorative schemes, to its uncovering and restoration in the 1870s. Through a sweeping survey of the chapel’s architectural and decorative history, this book provides a novel and revealing vantage point on the artistic, cultural, and ecclesiological history of Britain across four centuries.
[more]