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The forgotten air campaign that gave birth to modern air power.

A fascinating examination of the strategies and uses of air power in the First World War, Sky on Fire covers not only developments in military hardware and tactics but also how public policy and political considerations shaped the ways air power was deployed. Providing an excellent balance of data and statistics as well as human insights, Fredette’s book is essential reading for readers interested in the air power, both historically and in contemporary conflicts.
 

William Hardin Burnley (1780–1850) was the largest slave owner in Trinidad during the nineteenth century. Born in the United States to English parents, he settled on the island in 1802 and became one of its most influential citizens and a prominent agent of the British Empire. A central figure among elite and moneyed transnational slave owners, Burnley moved easily through the Atlantic world of the Caribbean, the United States, Great Britain, and Europe, and counted among his friends Alexis de Tocqueville, British politician Joseph Hume, and prime minister William Gladstone.

In this first full-length biography of Burnley, Selwyn R. Cudjoe chronicles the life of Trinidad's “founding father” and sketches the social and cultural milieu in which he lived. Reexamining the decades of transition from slavery to freedom through the lens of Burnley's life, The Slave Master of Trinidad demonstrates that the legacies of slavery persisted in the new post-emancipation society.

A deeply researched and definitive account of the climactic battle at the end of the Haitian Revolution 

Among the many rebellions against European colonial empires, the Haitian Revolution against France is among the most dramatic and complex. Having begun in 1791 as France was in the throes of its own young revolution, the conflict reached its dramatic climax when Napoleon dispatched a heavily armed expeditionary force led by his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc to re-establish slavery and the sugar economy that had so enriched France. Philippe Girard’s Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon is a deeply researched and engrossing account of this invasion and its spectacular defeat.

For this ambitious account, Philippe Girard has studied not only primary records in Haiti itself but also rare documents from nineteen public and private archives and research libraries in French, U.S., British, and Spanish collections. His more inclusive approach provides a fuller, more accurate and detailed narrative. He reveals not only key military movements, but also less-known aspects like the activities of U.S. merchants, in-fighting within Napoleon’s government, and communication between both sides and other European powers. Girard fills the work with unforgettable stories of those who led or were caught up in the war, people like poorly armed Black soldiers who ambushed Bonaparte’s columns, French child drummers, Jewish bankers in Kingston, weapon smugglers from Quaker Philadelphia, Polish artillerists, and mixed-raced people struggling to preserve their freedom against both Black and white opponents.

Transcending pat ideological and racial categories, the book brings into focus an Atlantic society at the crossroads of African and European influences, where Haitian rebels fought France while embracing its ideals.

A collection of Mahasweta Devi's activist essays, reportage, and editorials on rural development and dispossession.  

What do India’s poorest communities reveal about power, land, and survival? In the late 1970s, writer Mahasweta Devi shifted her focus to the lives of Adivasi (Indigenous peoples of the Indian subcontinent) and Dalit communities in eastern India, especially Bihar and West Bengal. Traveling widely and staying with the communities she wrote about, she drew on these firsthand encounters in her writing. She also edited the Bengali quarterly Bortika, making the journal a space for peasants, laborers, workers, and other marginalized groups to speak for themselves.

The Slaves of Palamau and Other Writings brings together a representative selection from her activist prose of the 1980s and early 1990s, drawn from essays, reportage, and editorials. These pieces examine rural development; dispossession and land alienation; environmental damage; and the conditions of landless laborers, sharecroppers, bonded and contract workers, miners, and Indigenous communities, with the steady attention that also informs her fiction.

In developing the book, Veteto and Maclin cast a wide net for divergent approaches. Food writer John Edge introduces us to Jones Bar-B-Q Diner in Marianna, Arkansas, a possibly century-old restaurant serving top-notch pork and simultaneously challenging race and class boundaries. Kristen Bradley-Shurtz explores the 150-plus-year tradition of the St. Patrick's Irish Picnic in McEwen, Tennessee. And no barbecue book would be complete without an insider's story, provided here by Jonathan Deutsch's "embedded" reporting inside a competitive barbecue team. Veteto and Maclin conclude with a glimpse into the future of barbecue culture: online, in the smoker, and fresh from the farm.

The Slaw and the Slow Cooked stands as a challenge to barbecue aficionados and a statement on the Mid-South's important place at the table. Intended for food lovers, anthropologists, and sociologists alike, The Slaw and the Slow Cooked demonstrates barbecue's status as a common language of the South.

    Today Ireland’s population is rising, immigration outpaces emigration, most families have two or at most three children, and full-time farmers are in steady decline. But the opposite was true for more than a century, from the great famine of the 1840s until the 1960s. Between 1922 and 1966—most of the first fifty years after independence—the population of Ireland was falling, in the 1950s as rapidly as in the 1880s. Mary Daly’s The Slow Failure examines not just the reasons for the decline, but the responses to it by politicians, academics, journalists, churchmen, and others who publicly agonized over their nation’s “slow failure.” Eager to reverse population decline but fearful that economic development would undermine Irish national identity, they fashioned statistical evidence to support ultimately fruitless policies to encourage large, rural farm families. Focusing on both Irish government and society, Daly places Ireland’s population history in the mainstream history of independent Ireland.
    Daly’s research reveals how pastoral visions of an ideal Ireland made it virtually impossible to reverse the fall in population. Promoting large families, for example, contributed to late marriages, actually slowing population growth further. The crucial issue of emigration failed to attract serious government attention except during World War II; successive Irish governments refused to provide welfare services for emigrants, leaving that role to the Catholic Church. Daly takes these and other elements of an often-sad story, weaving them into essential reading for understanding modern Irish history

A sophisticated analysis of an influential Indigenous political ideology.

When the political ideology known as “Indianism” developed in Bolivia in the 1960s, it was premised on a rejection of Bolivian nationalism. Over the ensuing decades, however, it underwent several mutations as it moved out of a close circle of intellectuals to grip the urban masses that brought Evo Morales—the first Indigenous president—to power in 2006.

The Social Life of Indianism offers a fresh perspective by examining Bolivian Indigenous politics through the lens of political ideology. Through an ethnographic study of Indianism in the city of El Alto, Tathagatan Ravindran shows how canonical Indianism—the original ideology that rejects Bolivia as enslaver of the Indian nation—provided philosophical ballast for exponents of a more popular folk Indianism that accommodates the Bolivian state and pursues Indigenous empowerment within it. Synthesizing approaches from several disciplines, Ravindran demonstrates how canonical Indianism was not refuted or supplanted; it refracted, in the broader public, into a new common sense. A sophisticated analysis of a complex political landscape, The Social Life of Indianism brings much-needed nuance to one of the most prominent forms of Indigenous ideology and offers a unique framework for analyzing political ideologies across the contemporary world.

"A well-conceived and well-argued book that is essential reading for those interested in the study of community building." --Journal of American History

"This study is important for both frontier and urban historians. It is well written, thoroughly documented, and illustrated in an informative manner. One may hope that future studies of other nineteenth century American towns will be completed with the competence and style of this excellent volume." --The Old Northwest

"For one who has lived in Jacksonville as I have, reading this book stirred fond memories and answered lingering questions about this town. . . . As a capsule study of an unusual Illinois community renowned for its past, Doyle's book makes for fascinating reading." --Civil War History

Marie Sumner Lott examines the music available to musical consumers in the nineteenth century, and what that music tells us about their tastes, priorities, and activities. Her social history of chamber music performance places the works of canonic composers such as Schubert, Brahms, and Dvoøák in relation to lesser-known but influential peers. The book explores the dynamic relationships among the active agents involved in the creation of Romantic music and shows how each influenced the others' choices in a rich, collaborative environment. In addition to documenting the ways companies acquired and marketed sheet music, Sumner Lott reveals how the publication and performance of chamber music differed from that of ephemeral piano and song genres or more monumental orchestral and operatic works. Several distinct niche markets existed within the audience for chamber music, and composers created new musical works for their use and enjoyment.

Insightful and groundbreaking, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music revises prevailing views of middle-class influence on nineteenth-century musical style and presents new methods for interpreting the meanings of musical works for musicians both past and present.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Argentina's Socialist Party became the largest and most effective socialist organization in Latin America. Richard J. Walter's interpretive study begins with the party's origins in the 1890s, traces its development through 1912, and then offers a comprehensive analysis of its activities and programs during the almost two decades of civilian, democratic government that ended with the military coup of 1930. His aim has been to provide a detailed case study of a Latin American political party within a specific historical context.

The work gives particular attention to the nature of party leadership, internal party organization, attempts to win the support of the Argentine working class, party activities in national elections and the National Congress, and internal disputes and divisions. In discussing these topics, Walter draws heavily on government documents, including national and municipal censuses, ministerial reports, and the Argentine Congressional Record. He also makes extensive use of national and party newspapers and journals, political memoirs, and collections of essays by party leaders.

Walter concludes that the party enjoyed relative electoral and legislative success because of efficient organization, capable leadership, and specific, well-reasoned programs. On the other hand, it failed to create a firm working-class base or to extend its influence much beyond Buenos Aires, mainly because of its inability to relate adequately to the needs of the proletariat and to the growth of nationalist sentiment. The analysis of these successes and failures also provides an important background for understanding the rise to power of Juan Perón and Peronism.