Results by title
28167 books match the query 'History' and 6372 start with t
The Ruins of the New Argentina
Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 EarthquakeMark A. Healey
Duke University Press, 2011
The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe
Edited by Anne J. Cruz and Mihoko Suzuki
University of Illinois Press, 2008
Drawing on early modern literature and historical documents, this study investigates the various political, discursive, and symbolic measures employed to negotiate and support female sovereignty by both early modern writers and the rulers themselves. The detailed analysis of the women's responses--or inability to respond--to these strictures underscores the relationship between early modern authors and sovereigns and the complex and vexed situation of European women rulers.
Contributors are Tracy Adams, Anne J. Cruz, Éva Deák, Mary C. Ekman, Catherine L. Howey, Elizabeth Ketner, Carole Levin, Sandra Logan, Magdalena S. Sánchez, Mihoko Suzuki, and Barbara F. Weissberger.
The Ruling Passion
British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual DesireChristopher Lane
Duke University Press, 1995
Through attentive readings of sexual and political allegory in the work of Kipling, Forster, James, Beerbohm, Firbank, and others—and deft use of psychoanalytic theory—The Ruling Passion interprets turbulent scenes of masculine identification and pleasure, power and mastery, intimacy and antagonism. By foregrounding the shattering effects of male homosexuality and interracial desire, and by insisting on the centrality of unconscious fantasy and the death drive, The Ruling Passion examines the startling recurrence of colonial failure in narratives of symbolic doubt and ontological crisis. Lane argues compellingly that Britain can progress culturally and politically only when it has relinquished its residual fantasies of global mastery.
The Rumble in the Jungle
Muhammad Ali and George Foreman on the Global StageLewis A. Erenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2019
TheRumble in the Jungle orbits around Ali and Foreman, placing them at the convergence of the American Civil Rights movement and the Great Society, the rise of Islamic and African liberation efforts, and the ongoing quest to cast off the shackles of colonialism. With his far-reaching take on sports, music, marketing, and mass communications, Erenberg shows how one boxing match became nothing less than a turning point in 1970s culture.
The Rumble of a Distant Drum
The Quapaws and Old World Newcomers, 1673–1804Morris Arnold
University of Arkansas Press, 2007
Winner of the 2001 Booker Worthen Literary Prize
Winner of the 2002 S. G. Ragsdale Award for Arkansas History
The Rumble of a Distant Drum opens in 1673 when Marquette and Jolliet sailed down the Mississippi River and found the Quapaw living in the area where the Arkansas River flowed into the Mississippi. In 1686 Henri de Tonti would found Arkansas Post in this same location. It was the first European settlement in this part of the country, established thirty years before New Orleans and eighty before St. Louis.
Morris S. Arnold draws on his many years of archival research and writing on colonial Arkansas to produce this elegant account of the cultural intersections of the French and Spanish with the native American peoples. He demonstrates that the Quapaws and Frenchmen created a highly symbiotic society in which the two disparate peoples became connected in complex and subtle ways—through intermarriage, trade, religious practice, and political/military alliances.
The Rural Face of White Supremacy
BEYOND JIM CROWMark Schultz
University of Illinois Press, 2007
The Rural Modern
Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican ChinaKate Merkel-Hess
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.
The Rural State
Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru's Central SierraJavier Puente
University of Texas Press, 2022
2023 Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize, New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS)
A study of the intersection of rural populations, state formation, and the origins of political conflict in Peru.
On the eve of the twentieth century, Peru seemed like a profitable and yet fairly unexploited country. Both foreign capitalists and local state makers envisioned how remote highland areas were essential to a sustainable national economy. Mobilizing Andean populations lay at the core of this endeavor. In his groundbreaking book, The Rural State, Javier Puente uncovers the surprising and overlooked ways that Peru’s rural communities formed the political nation-state that still exists today.
Puente documents how people living in the Peruvian central sierra in the twentieth century confronted emerging and consolidating powers of state and capital and engaged in an ongoing struggle over increasingly elusive subsistence and autonomies. Over the years, policy, politics, and social turmoil shaped the rural, mountainous regions of Peru until violent unrest, perpetrated by the Shining Path and other revolutionary groups, unveiled the extent, limits, and fractures of a century-long process of rural state formation. Examining the conflicts between one rural community and the many iterations of statehood in the central sierra of Peru, The Rural State offers a fresh perspective on how the Andes became la sierra, how pueblos became comunidades, and how indígenas became campesinos.
The Ruse of Repair
US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from CritiquePatricia Stuelke
Duke University Press, 2021
The Russia Reader
History, Culture, PoliticsAdele Barker and Bruce Grant, eds.
Duke University Press, 2010
Illustrated with maps, paintings, photographs, posters, and cartoons, The Russia Reader incorporates song lyrics, jokes, anecdotes, and folktales, as well as poems, essays, and fiction by writers including Akhmatova, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Tolstoi. Transcripts from the show trials of major Party figures and an account of how staff at the Lenin Library in Moscow were instructed to interact with foreigners are among the many selections based on personal memoirs and archival materials only recently made available to the public. From a tenth-century emissary’s description of his encounters in Kyivan Rus’, to a scientist’s recollections of her life in a new research city built from scratch in Siberia during the 1950s, to a novelist’s depiction of the decadence of the “New Russians” in the 2000s, The Russia Reader is an extraordinary introduction to a vast and varied country.
The Russia That We Have Lost
Pavel Khazanov
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
Khazanov’s careful untangling of this discourse in the late Soviet period reveals a process that involved figures of all political stripes, from staunch conservatives to avowed intelligentsia liberals. Further, Khazanov shows that this process occurred not outside of or in opposition to Soviet guidance and censorship, but in mainstream Soviet culture that commanded wide audiences, especially among the Soviet middle class. Excavating the cultural logic of this newly foundational, mythic memory of a “lost Russia,” Khazanov reveals why, despite the apparently liberal achievement of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Boris Yeltsin (and later, Vladamir Putin) successfully steered Russia into oligarchy and increasing autocracy. The anti-Soviet memory of the pre-Soviet past, ironically constructed during the late socialist period, became and remains a politically salient narrative, a point of consensus that surprisingly attracts both contemporary regime loyalists and their would-be liberal opposition.
The Russian Archipelago at War Against Ukraine
Culture and Contexts 2022–2025Tomáš Glanc
Karolinum Press, 2026
The first sustained cultural analysis of Russia at war that reveals how art, artists, and institutions become actors in conflict.
This book was conceived in wartime, and war stands at its center. It proceeds through an analysis of cultural phenomena and processes that, in one way or another, originated in Russia and bear on the present situation—regardless of where their actors may now reside.
Through a series of case studies, The Russian Archipelago at War Against Ukraine traces how war has entered the realm of art—literature, the visual arts, theater, film, and beyond—and examines the ways in which culture itself becomes a participant in war. What emerges are narratives of resistance and protest, of persecution and prohibition, and emergent forms of underground, but also postures of indifference, resignation, and compliance, including overt loyalty to and support for the ideology and practice of war, its perpetrators, and its objectives.
Underlying this content is a more unsettling question: what aesthetic, cultural-political, moral, and intellectual challenges, consequences, and perhaps even fragile hopes does the horror of war contain?
The Russian Memoir
History and LiteratureBeth Holmgren
Northwestern University Press, 2007
The Ryukyu Islands
A New History from the Stone Age to the PresentGregory Smits
University of Chicago Press, 2025
The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands’ history, sea-lanes and trade patterns have connected them to the East China Sea region, giving them a unique vantage point on the region’s changes and making them a useful lens through which to view and understand those transformations. In this book, Gregory Smits marshals his expertise to canvass the environmental, political, and social history of this fascinating area, emphasizing the diversity of influences from China, Japan, and Korea that have shaped it. Smits begins by tracing the islands’ early history from the time of the oldest extant human remains, through massive inflows of settlers from Japan, until the emergence of a centralized state in the sixteenth century. He then traces the development of the Ryukyu Kingdom from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, examining its major cultural formations and the interplay of local and external influences driving its evolution. Finally, Smits ushers readers to the modern era, from the end of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879 through World War II, the era of American military control, and on to the present. He concludes with their present-day status as a tourist destination affected by ongoing geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges. Synthesizing decades of research, this book is an indispensable, comprehensive guide to the islands’ history for scholars and nonspecialists alike.
The SBL Handbook of Style
SBL Press, 2014
The definitive source for how to write and publish in the field of biblical studies
The long-awaited second edition of the essential style manual for writing and publishing in biblical studies and related fields includes key style changes, updated and expanded abbreviation and spelling-sample lists, a list of archaeological site names, material on qur’anic sources, detailed information on citing electronic sources, and expanded guidelines for the transliteration and transcription of seventeen ancient languages.
Features:
- Expanded lists of abbreviations for use in ancient Near Eastern, biblical, and early Christian studies
- Information for transliterating seventeen ancient languages
- Exhaustive examples for citing print and electronic sources
The SPHAS
The Life and Times of Basketball's Greatest Jewish TeamAuthored by Doug Stark
Temple University Press, 2011
Founded in 1918, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association's basketball team, known as the SPHAS, was a top squad in the American Basketball League-capturing seven championships in thirteen seasons-until it disbanded in 1959. In The SPHAS, the first book to chronicle the history of this team and its numerous achievements, Douglas Stark uses rare and noteworthy images of players and memorabilia as well as interviews and anecdotes to recall how players like Inky Lautman, Cy Kaselman, and Shikey Gotthoffer fought racial stereotypes of weakness and inferiority while spreading the game's popularity. Team owner Eddie Gottlieb and Temple University coach Harry Litwack, among others profiled here, began their remarkable careers with the SPHAS.
Stark explores the significance of basketball to the Jewish community during the game's early years, when Jewish players dominated the sport and a distinct American Jewish identity was on the rise. At a time when basketball teams were split along ethnic lines, the SPHAS represented the Philadelphia Jewish community. The SPHAS is an inspiring and heartfelt tale of the team on and off the court.
The Sacking of Fallujah
A People's HistoryRoss Caputi
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
The Iraqi city of Fallujah has become an epicenter of geopolitical conflict, where foreign powers and non-state actors have repeatedly waged war in residential neighborhoods with staggering humanitarian consequences. The Sacking of Fallujah is the first comprehensive study of the three recent sieges of this city, including those by the United States in 2004 and the Iraqi-led operation to defeat ISIS in 2016.
Unlike dominant military accounts that focus on American soldiers and U.S. leaders and perpetuate the myth that the United States “liberated” the city, this book argues that Fallujah was destroyed by coalition forces, leaving public health crises, political destabilization, and mass civilian casualties in their wake. This meticulously researched account cuts through the propaganda to uncover the lived experiences of Fallujans under siege and occupation, and contextualizes these events within a broader history of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Relying on testimony from Iraqi civilians, the work of independent journalists, and documentation from human rights organizations, Ross Caputi, Richard Hil, and Donna Mulhearn place the experiences of Fallujah's residents at the center of this city's recent history.
The Sacred Calling
Four Decades of Women in the RabbinateRabbi Rebecca Einstein Schorr and Rabbi Alysa Mendelson Graf
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2016
Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies, this pioneering anthology paints an illuminating and necessary picture of the past while laying the groundwork for important work yet to be done.
Women have been rabbis for over forty years. No longer are women rabbis a unique phenomenon, rather they are part of the fabric of Jewish life. In this anthology, rabbis and scholars from across the Jewish world reflect back on the historic significance of women in the rabbinate and explore issues related to both the professional and personal lives of female rabbis. This collection examines the ways in which the reality of women in the rabbinate has impacted all aspects of Jewish life, including congregational culture, liturgical development, life cycle ritual, the Jewish healing movement, spirituality, theology, and more.
The Sacred Cause of Union
Iowa in the Civil WarThomas R. Baker
University of Iowa Press, 2016
To shed light on how individual Iowans experienced the war, the book profiles six state residents. Three were well-known. Annie Wittenmyer, a divorced woman with roots in Virginia, led the state’s efforts to ship clothing and food to the soldiers. Alexander Clark, a Muscatine businessman and the son of former slaves, eloquently championed the rights of African Americans. Cyrus Carpenter, a Pennsylvania-born land surveyor anxious to make his fortune, served in the army and then headed the state’s Radical Republican faction after the war, ultimately being elected governor.
Three never became famous. Ben Stevens, a young, unemployed carpenter, fought in an Iowa regiment at Shiloh, and then transferred to a Louisiana African American regiment so that he could lead the former slaves into battle. Farm boy Abner Dunham defended the Sunken Road at the Battle of Shiloh, before spending seven grim months in Confederate prison camps. The young Charles Musser faced pressure from his neighbors to enlist and from his parents to remain at home to work on the farm. Soon after he signed on to serve the Union, he discovered that his older brother had joined the Confederate Army. Through the letters and lives of these six Iowans, Thomas Baker shows how the Civil War transformed the state at the same time that Iowans transformed the nation.
The Sacred Cosmos
Theological, Philosophical, and Scientific Conversations in the Twelfth Century School of ChartresPeter Ellard
University of Scranton Press, 2007
The School of Chartres was a bold intellectual movement of the twelfth century that introduced the World Soul and the Chartrian cosmology to Christendom. In his controversial book, The Sacred Cosmos, theologian Peter Ellard analyzes the most radical aspects of Chartrian thought and traces their relation to classical and late-antique philosophers such as Boethius and Plato. In addition, Ellard investigates the Cathedral of Chartres as an important proof and example of Chartrian theology in this essential volume for anyone interested in the intersection of spirituality and philosophy.
The Sacred Image East and West
Edited by Robert Ousterhout and Leslie Brubaker
University of Illinois Press, 1995
The Sacred Landscape of the Inca
The Cusco Ceque SystemBy Brian S. Bauer
University of Texas Press, 1998
The ceque system of Cusco, the ancient capital of the Inca empire, was perhaps the most complex indigenous ritual system in the pre-Columbian Americas. From a center known as the Coricancha (Golden Enclosure) or the Temple of the Sun, a system of 328 huacas (shrines) arranged along 42 ceques (lines) radiated out toward the mountains surrounding the city. This elaborate network, maintained by ayllus (kin groups) that made offerings to the shrines in their area, organized the city both temporally and spiritually.
From 1990 to 1995, Brian Bauer directed a major project to document the ceque system of Cusco. In this book, he synthesizes extensive archaeological survey work with archival research into the Inca social groups of the Cusco region, their land holdings, and the positions of the shrines to offer a comprehensive, empirical description of the ceque system. Moving well beyond previous interpretations, Bauer constructs a convincing model of the system's physical form and its relation to the social, political, and territorial organization of Cusco.
The Sacred Meadows
A Structural Analysis of Religious Symbolism in an East African TownAbdul Hamid M. el Zein
Northwestern University Press, 1974
The Sacred Remains
Myth, History, and Polity in BelauRichard J. Parmentier
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Richard J. Parmentier employs semiotic methods to analyze both linguistic and nonlinguistic signs representing Belauan history, showing that these signs also organize social and political structures. He identifies four pervasive semiotic patterns that appear rhetorically in myths, chants, and historical narratives and graphically in the arrangement of certain classes of stones, including village boundary markers, burial platforms, exchange valuables, and monoliths found at abandoned sites in the islands.
While not neglecting historical evidence from Western sources, Parmentier contends that the history of Belau cannot be understood without taking into full account indigenous categories of space, time, and transformation and without recognizing the importance of Belauan social actions that construct, interpret, and transmit historical knowledge. Supporting his analysis of Belauan history with concrete ethnographic demonstration, Parmentier presents a work of central importance for Austronesianists, anthropologists, and historians.
The Sacrifice of Socrates
Athens, Plato, GirardWm. Blake Tyrrell
Michigan State University Press, 2012
When Athenians suffered the shame of having lost a war from their own greed and foolishness, around 404 BCE the public’s blame was directed at Socrates, a man whose unique appearance and behavior, as well as his disapproval of the democracy, made him a ready target. Socrates was subsequently put on trial and sentenced to death. However, as René Girard has pointed out, no individual can be held responsible for a communal crisis. Plato’s Apology depicts Socrates as both the bane and the cure of Greek society, while his Crito shows a sacrificial Socrates, what some might consider a pharmakos figure, the human drug through whom Plato can dispense his philosophical remedies. With tremendous insight and satisfying complexity, this book analyzes classical texts through the lens of Girard’s mimetic mechanism.
The Safford Valley Grids
Prehistoric Cultivation in the Southern Arizona DesertWilliam E. Doolittle
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Between A.D. 750 and 1385, people gathered rocks from the tops of the terraces and rearranged them in grids of varying size and shape, averaging about 4 meters to 5 meters square. The grids captured rainfall and water accumulated under the rocks forming the grids. Agave was planted among the rocks, providing a dietary supplement to the maize and beans that were irrigated on the nearby bottom land, a survival crop when the staple crops failed, and possibly a trade commodity when yields were high. Stunning photographs by Adriel Heisey convey the vastness of the grids across the landscape.
The Saga of Lucien L. Nunn and Deep Springs College
L. Jackson Newell
University of Utah Press, 2025
In 1891, Nunn, working with Tesla and Westinghouse, pioneered the world’s first commercial production of high-tension alternating current (AC) for long-distance transmission—something Thomas Edison deemed dangerous and irresponsible. After creating the Telluride Power Company, Nunn constructed the state-of-the-art Olmsted Power Plant in Provo Canyon and the Ontario Power Works at Niagara Falls. To support this new technology, he developed an imaginative model of industrial training that became so compelling that he ultimately abandoned his entrepreneurial career to devote his wealth and talents to experimenting with a new model of liberal education. In 1917, Nunn founded Deep Springs College in eastern California. The school remains one of the most daring, progressive, and selective institutions of higher learning in America. Newell examines how Nunn’s radical educational ideas have survived internal and external challenges for nearly a century and explores their relevance today.
The Saga of St. Jón of Hólar
Translated by Margaret Cormack, With an Introduction byPeter Foote
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2020
This volume contains a translation of the version of the Saga of St. Jón of Hólar that is probably closest to the first Latin vita. It is only the second saga of an Icelandic episcopal saint to appear in a modern translation in the present century. The volume consists of two parts, the first comprising a general introduction and a translation by Margaret Cormack. The second part provides a detailed scholarly analysis of the manuscripts, contents, style, and literary connections of the saga by the late Peter Foote, one of the foremost scholars of Old Norse and Icelandic literature.
The Jóns saga was written in the early thirteenth century, nearly a century after the death of its protagonist, the first bishop of the diocese of Hólar in Northern Iceland. The author of the saga combined Latin learning with native folklore to produce a readable narrative that is contemporary with the earliest family and contemporary sagas. This text provides valuable insight into the religious life of ordinary Icelanders in the thirteenth century, and the introduction corrects common misconceptions about ecclesiastical history and the cult of saints in Iceland. It will be of value to scholars of medieval Icelandic literature, hagiography, and history.
The Saga of the Jomsvikings
Translated from the Old Icelandic by Lee M. Hollander
University of Texas Press, 1955
In A.D. 986, Earl Hákon, ruler of most of Norway, won a triumphant victory over an invading fleet of Danes in the great naval battle of Hjórunga Bay. Sailing under his banner were no fewer than five Icelandic skalds, the poet-historians of the Old Norse world. Two centuries later their accounts of the battle became the basis for one of the liveliest of the Icelandic sagas, with special emphasis on the doings of the Jómsvikings, the famed members of a warrior community that feared no one and dared all. In Lee M. Hollander's faithful translation, all of the unknown twelfth-century author's narrative genius and flair for dramatic situation and pungent characterization is preserved.
The Sagebrush Ocean, Tenth Anniversary Edition
A Natural History Of The Great BasinStephen Trimble
University of Nevada Press, 1999
This is the best general introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin, a place where "the desert almost seems to mirror the sky in size," where mountains hold "ravens, bristlecone pines, winter stillness—and unseen, but satisfying, the possibility of bighorn sheep." Trimble's photographs come from the backcountry of this rugged land, from months of exploring and hiking the Great Basin wilderness in all seasons; and his well-chosen words come from a rare intimacy with the West.
The Sagebrush Ocean
35th Anniversary EditionStephen Trimble
University of Nevada Press, 2026
The Sagebrush Ocean, the essential introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin Desert, returns in this richly updated 35th anniversary edition. Winner of the Ansel Adams Award for Photography and Conservation, Stephen Trimble’s authoritative voice and evocative photographs illuminate this landscape of sun-struck playas, surprising wetlands, remote canyons, and wind-swept tundra.
Today, the once-vast “sagebrush ocean” is an endangered sea, as environmental changes and human development have diminished it by half. This heartbreaking decline drives Trimble’s updated text, but he blends loss with reverence for what remains—and urgent insight into what’s at stake. Striking color photographs, many newly added, illuminate some of the continent’s most spectacular but little known scenery. For anyone curious about the Great Basin or concerned for its future, this timely edition is indispensable.
The Sagebrush State, 3d Edition
Nevada's History, Government, and PoliticsMichael W. Bowers
University of Nevada Press, 2006
The Sagebrush State, 4th Ed
Nevada’s History, Government, and PoliticsMichael W. Bowers
University of Nevada Press, 2013
The Sagebrush State, 5th Edition
Nevada's History, Government, and PoliticsMichael W. Bowers
University of Nevada Press, 2018
This comprehensive and insightful explanation discusses how Nevada’s history has shaped its political culture, and how its government operates today. The Sagebrush State serves as a highly readable and accessible text for the study of Nevada’s political history and constitution, which is a graduation requirement at the state’s colleges and universities. The fifth edition is updated through 2017 and includes the full text of the state constitution with extensive annotations of all amendments to the original 1864 document.
The Sagebrush State, 6th Edition
Nevada's History, Government, and PoliticsMichael W. Bowers
University of Nevada Press, 2021
The Sagebrush State, 7th Edition
Nevada's History, Government, and PoliticsMichael W. Bowers
University of Nevada Press, 2025
A dynamic study of Nevada’s government and politics from the state’s inception to the present day.
Starting with Michael W. Bowers’s first edition published in 1996, this concise volume explains the unique dynamics of Nevada’s formation and its political and economic development. David F. Damore continues this legacy in the book’s seventh edition by describing how even today, Nevada is unlike the other states in its politics and culture: economically conservative and averse to strong state government, yet socially libertarian and home to widespread gaming anchored by a 24/7 industry. Nevada has the highest percentage of federally owned lands and one of the highest rates of urbanization in the United States, yet it has often been dominated by rural legislators.
This comprehensive and insightful volume examines how Nevada’s history and founding have shaped its political culture and how its government operates today. The Sagebrush State serves as a highly readable and accessible text for the study of Nevada’s political history and constitution. The seventh edition is updated through 2023 and includes the results of the 2022 elections, policies advanced during the 2023 legislative session, and Nevada’s continuing recovery from the impacts of the COVID-19 recession. The full text of the state constitution with extensive annotations of all amendments to the original 1864 document is provided as an appendix.
The Sagebrush Trail
Western Movies and Twentieth-Century AmericaRichard Aquila
University of Arizona Press, 2015
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 traces the birth and growth of Westerns from 1900 through the end of World War II. Part 2 focuses on a transitional period in Western movie history during the two decades following World War II. Finally, part 3 shows how Western movies reflected the rapid political, social, and cultural changes that transformed America in the 1960s and the last decades of the twentieth century.
The Sagebrush Trail explains how Westerns evolved throughout the twentieth century in response to changing times, and it provides new evidence and fresh interpretations about both Westerns and American history. These films offer perspectives on the past that historians might otherwise miss. They reveal how Americans reacted to political and social movements, war, and cultural change. The result is the definitive story of Western movies, which contributes to our understanding of not just movie history but also the mythic West and American history. Because of its subject matter and unique approach that blends movies and history, The Sagebrush Trail should appeal to anyone interested in Western movies, pop culture, the American West, and recent American history and culture.
The mythic West beckons but eludes. Yet glimpses of its utopian potential can always be found, even if just for a few hours in the realm of Western movies. There on the silver screen, the mythic West continues to ride tall in the saddle along a “sagebrush trail” that reveals valuable clues about American life and thought.
The Saints and the State
The Mormon Troubles in IllinoisJames Simeone
Ohio University Press, 2021
A compelling history of the 1846 Mormon expulsion from Illinois that exemplifies the limits of American democracy and religious tolerance.
When members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (known as Mormons) settled in Illinois in 1839, they had been persecuted for their beliefs from Ohio to Missouri. Illinoisans viewed themselves as religiously tolerant egalitarians and initially welcomed the Mormons to their state. However, non-Mormon locals who valued competitive individualism perceived the saints‘ western Illinois settlement, Nauvoo, as a theocracy with too much political power. Amid escalating tensions in 1844, anti-Mormon vigilantes assassinated church founder Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. Two years later, the state expelled the saints. Illinois rejected the Mormons not for their religion, but rather for their effort to create a self-governing state in Nauvoo.
Mormons put the essential aspirations of American liberal democracy to the test in Illinois. The saints’ inward group focus and their decision to live together in Nauvoo highlight the challenges strong group consciousness and attachment pose to democratic governance. The Saints and the State narrates this tragic story as an epic failure of governance and shows how the conflicting demands of fairness to the Mormons and accountability to Illinois’s majority became incompatible.
The Saints of Progress
A History of Coffee, Migration, and Costa Rican National IdentityCarmen Kordick
University of Alabama Press, 2019
The Saints of Progress: A History of Coffee, Migration, and Costa Rican National Identity chronicles the development of the Tarrazú Valley, a historically remote—although internationally celebrated—coffee-growing region. Carmen Kordick’s work traces the development of this region from the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century to consider the nation-building process from the margins, while also questioning traditional scholarly works that have reproduced, rather than deconstructed, Costa Rica’s exceptionalist national mythology, which hail Costa Rica as Central America’s “white,” democratic, nonviolent, and egalitarian republic.
In this compelling political, economic, and lived history, Kordick suggests that Costa Rica’s exceptionalist and egalitarian mythology emerged during the Cold War, as revolution, civil war, military dictatorship, and state violence plagued much of Central America. From the vantage point of Costa Rica’s premier coffee-producing region, she examines local, national, and transnational processes. This deeply textured narrative details the inauguration of coffee capitalism, which heightened existing class divisions; a successful armed revolt against the national government, which forged the current political regime; and the onset of massive out-migration to the United States.
Kordick’s research incorporates more than one hundred oral histories and thousands of archival sources gathered in both Costa Rica and the United States to produce a human history of Costa Rica’s past. Her work on the recent past profiles the experiences of migrants in the United States, mostly in New Jersey, where many undocumented Costa Ricans find low-paid work in the restaurant and landscaping sectors. The result is a fine-grained examination of Tarrazú’s development from the 1820s to the present that reshapes traditional understandings of Costa Rica and its national past.
The Salem Clique
Oregon's Founding BrothersBarbara S. Mahoney
Oregon State University Press, 2017
While not in agreement with some of the more extreme contemporary accusations against the Clique, many historians have concluded that its members were vicious men who were able, because of their command of the Democratic party, to impose their hegemony on the Oregon Territory’s inhabitants. Other scholars have seen them as merely another instance of the contentious politics of the period.
Although the Salem Clique has been given considerable prominence in nearly every account of Oregon’s Territorial period, there has not been a detailed study of its role until now. What sort of people were these men? What was their impact on the issues, events, and movements of the period? What role did they play in the years after Oregon became a state? In The Salem Clique, Historian Barbara Mahoney sets out to answer these and many other questions in this comprehensive and deeply researched history.
The Saloon and the Mission
Addiction, Conversion, and the Politics of Redemption in American CultureEoin F. Cannon
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
In this book Eoin Cannon illuminates the role that sobriety movements have played in placing notions of personal and societal redemption at the heart of modern American culture. He argues against the dominant scholarly perception that recovery narratives are private and apolitical, showing that in fact the genre's conventions turn private experience to public political purpose. His analysis ranges from neglected social reformer Helen Stuart Campbell's embrace of the "gospel rescue missions" of postbellum New York City to William James's use of recovery stories to consider the regenerative capabilities of the mind, to writers such as Upton Sinclair and Djuna Barnes, who used this narrative form in much different ways.
Cannon argues that rather than isolating recovery from these realms of wider application, the New Deal–era Alcoholics Anonymous refitted the "drunkard's conversion" as a model of selfhood for the liberal era, allowing for a spiritual redemption story that could accommodate a variety of identities and compulsions. He concludes by considering how contemporary recovery narratives represent both a crisis in liberal democracy and a potential for redemptive social progress.
The Saloon
Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880-1920Perry R. Duis
University of Illinois Press, 1983
The Salvager
The Life of Captain Tom Reid on the Great LakesMary Frances Doner
University of Minnesota Press, 2017
First published in 1958, The Salvager is both a narrative history of Great Lakes shipping disasters of 1880–1950 and the life story of Captain Thomas Reid, who operated one of the region’s largest salvaging companies during that era.
The treacherous shoals, unpredictable storms, and sub-zero temperatures of the Great Lakes have always posed special hazards to mariners—particularly before the advent of modern navigational technologies—and offered ample opportunity for an enterprising sailor to build a salvage business up from nothing. Designing much of his equipment himself and honing a keen eye for the risks and rewards of various catastrophes, Captain Reid rose from humble beginnings and developed salvaging into a science. Using the actual records of the Reid Wrecking and Towing Company as well as Reid’s personal logs and letters, Mary Frances Doner deftly tells the stories not only of the maritime disasters and the wrecking adventures that followed, but also of those waiting back on shore for their loved ones to return.
The Samaritan Pentateuch
An Introduction to Its Origin, History, and Significance for Biblical StudiRobert T. Anderson
SBL Press, 2012
The Samuel Gompers Papers, Volume 13
Cumulative IndexSamuel Gompers, Edited by Peter J. Albert and Grace Palladino
University of Illinois Press, 2013
The San Antonio Missions and their System of Land Tenure
By Félix D. Almaráz, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 1989
San Antonio, Texas, is unique among North American cities in having five former Spanish missions: San Antonio de Valero (The Alamo; founded in 1718), San José y San Miguel de Aguayo (1720), Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña (1731), San Juan Capistrano (1731), and San Francisco de la Espada (1731). These missions attract a good deal of popular interest but, until this book, they had received surprisingly little scholarly study. The San Antonio Missions and Their System of Land Tenure, a winner in the Presidio La Bahía Award competition, looks at one previously unexamined aspect of mission history—the changes in landownership as the missions passed from sacred to secular owners in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Drawing on exhaustive research in San Antonio and Bexar County archives, Félix Almaráz has reconstructed the land tenure system that began with the Spaniards' jurisprudential right of discovery and progressed through colonial development, culminating with ownership of the mission properties under successive civic jurisdictions (independent Mexico, Republic of Texas, State of Texas, Bexar County, and City of San Antonio). Several broad questions served as focus points for the research. What were the legal bases for the Franciscan missions as instruments of the Spanish Empire? What was the extent of the initial land grants at the time of their establishment in the eighteenth century? How were the missions' agricultural and pastoral lands configured? And, finally, what impact has urbanization had upon the former Franciscan foundations?
The findings in this study will be valuable for scholars of Texas borderlands and Hispanic New World history. Additionally, genealogists and people with roots in the San Antonio missions area may find useful clues to family history in this extensive study of landownership along the banks of the Río San Antonio.
The San Carlos Indian Cattle Industry
Harry T. Getty
University of Arizona Press, 1963
The San Francisco Civic Center
A History of the Design, Controversies, and Realization of a City Beautiful MasterpieceJames Haas
University of Nevada Press, 2019
In The San Francisco Civic Center, James Haas tells the complete story of San Francisco’s Civic Center and how it became one of the most complete developments envisioned by any American city. Originally planned and designed by John Galen Howard in 1912, the San Francisco Civic Center is considered in both design and materials one of the finest achievements of the American reformist City Beautiful movement, an urban design movement that began more than a century ago.
Haas meticulously unravels the Civic Center’s story of perseverance and dysfunction, providing an understanding and appreciation of this local and national treasure. He discusses why the Civic Center was built, how it became central to the urban planning initiatives of San Francisco in the early twentieth century, and how the site held onto its founders’ vision despite heated public debates about its function and achievement. He also delves into the vision for the future and related national trends in city planning and the architectural and art movements that influenced those trends.
Riddled with inspiration and leadership as well as controversy, The San Francisco Civic Center, much like the complex itself, is a stunning manifestation of the confident spirit of one of America’s most dynamic and creative cities.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe Reader
Susan Vaneta Mason, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2005
It is also a history of the company that was the theater of the counterculture movement in the 1960s and that, against all odds, has managed to survive the often hostile economic climate for the arts in the United States. The plays selected are diverse, representing some of the Troupe's finest shows, and the book's illustrations capture some of the Troupe's most memorable moments.
These hilarious, edgy, and imaginative scripts are accompanied by insightful commentary by theater historian and critic Susan Vaneta Mason, who has been following the Troupe for more than three decades. The Mime Troupe Reader will engage and entertain a wide range of audiences, not only general readers but also those interested in the history of American social protest, the counterculture of the 1960s-particularly the San Francisco scene-and the evolution of contemporary political theater. It will also appeal to the legions of Troupe fans who return every year to see them stand up against another social or corporate Goliath.
The San Luis Valley
Sand Dunes and Sandhill CranesText by Susan J. Tweit; Photographs by Glenn Oakley
University of Arizona Press, 2005