28164 books match the query 'History' and 339 start with u

cover of U.S. Army War College: Military Education In A Democracy

U.S. Army War College

Military Education In A Democracy

Judith Hicks Stiehm

Temple University Press, 2002

We are all familiar with ROTC, West Point, and other institutions that train young men and women to be military officers. But few people know of the U.S. Army War College, where the Army's elite career officers go for advanced training in strategy, national security policy, and military-government policymaking. This book takes readers inside the U.S. Army War College to learn about the faculty, staff, administration, and curriculum.Established in 1901, the school's mission has evolved from teaching the skills of war to training officers to negotiate both the complex world of modern strategy and the civilian bureaucracy in Washington. More like a professional graduate program than an academic graduate school, much of the education takes the form of exercises and simulations.Judith Stiehm, who holds the U.S. Army Distinguished Civilian Service Medal, allows readers to judge whether the U.S. Army War College successfully prepares its students for their many roles. She is skeptical that instructors can fulfill this difficult task in an era where civilians expect our military to be invincible, to win without casualties, and to serve as peacekeepers.The Military answers to the people of the United States and it is our responsibility to know how it operates at all levels. This book is a good place to start.
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cover of U.S. Coast Survey vs. Naval Hydrographic Office: A 19th-Century Rivalry in Science and Politics

U.S. Coast Survey vs. Naval Hydrographic Office

A 19th-Century Rivalry in Science and Politics

Thomas G. Manning

University of Alabama Press, 1988

Examines a crucial phase of the relations of science and politics in the post-Civil War period
 
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cover of U.S. Foreign Policy and Peru

U.S. Foreign Policy and Peru

By Daniel A. Sharp

University of Texas Press, 1972

This book presents the first authoritative and comprehensive account of the development of the Peruvian revolution of 1968. The study resulted from a team experiment in applied political science, economics, and sociology that maintained effective communications between Peru and the United States at many levels during the difficult years following the revolution. Each chapter is the result of continuous interaction between a leading authority and the major sectors of both societies. History is here presented in its diplomatic, social, economic, and cultural context.

The Peruvian and U.S. governments helped to define the subjects of greatest interest to their respective countries, and a systematic effort was made to find the leading authorities on each issue. Since one purpose of this volume is to affect policy by identifying new alternative policies, the papers included here were prepared specifically to be of value to policy makers.

This book was produced by a citizens’ constituency on U.S. foreign policy under the auspices of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, and the Johnson Foundation.

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cover of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East: The Role of Lobbies and Special Interest Groups

U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East

The Role of Lobbies and Special Interest Groups

Janice J. Terry

Pluto Press, 2005

Millions of dollars are spent every year by companies and special interest groups attempting to influence government policy. They work behind the scenes, lobbying politicians to represent their interests. From tobacco companies, to energy companies, from anti-abortion campaigners to civil rights campaigners, the list is vast. And nowhere is their influence more keenly felt than on the issue of the Middle East.



Israel is America's key ally in the Middle East, and helps maintain U.S. dominance in the region. This book shows how pro-Israeli lobbyists and domestic interest groups have been hugely successful in creating government and financial support for Israel. By contrast, Arab-American groups and Arab governments have had less success putting forward their agencies.



Janice J. Terry shows how special interest groups work, and why certain lobbying techniques are more effective than others. She sets this within the wider cultural context, showing how the U.S. media -- and the general public -- view the Middle East.



To explain how lobbies work, Terry draws on case studies including the Sinai accords and Camp David under Presidents Ford and Carter, the Conflict between Green and Turkish lobbies over Cyprus, and the major campaign against the Arab boycott.



Making use of primary sources, and unpublished material from various presidential libraries, this is a fascinating exposé of the role that lobby groups really play in determining U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. It will be of interest to students of American politics and Middle East studies.

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cover of U.S. Women's History: Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood

U.S. Women's History

Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood

Brown, Leslie

Rutgers University Press, 2017

In the 1970s, feminist slogans proclaimed “Sisterhood is powerful,” and women’s historians searched through the historical archives to recover stories of solidarity and sisterhood. However, as feminist scholars have started taking a more intersectional approach—acknowledging that no woman is simply defined by her gender and that affiliations like race, class, and sexual identity are often equally powerful—women’s historians have begun to offer more varied and nuanced narratives.  
 
The ten original essays in U.S. Women's History represent a cross-section of current research in the field. Including work from both emerging and established scholars, this collection employs innovative approaches to study both the causes that have united American women and the conflicts that have divided them. Some essays uncover little-known aspects of women’s history, while others offer a fresh take on familiar events and figures, from Rosa Parks to Take Back the Night marches.
 
Spanning the antebellum era to the present day, these essays vividly convey the long histories and ongoing relevance of topics ranging from women’s immigration to incarceration, from acts of cross-dressing to the activism of feminist mothers. This volume thus not only untangles the threads of the sisterhood mythos, it weaves them into a multi-textured and multi-hued tapestry that reflects the breadth and diversity of U.S. women’s history.
 
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cover of U.S.- China Educational Exchange: State, Society, and Intercultural Relations, 1905-1950

U.S.- China Educational Exchange

State, Society, and Intercultural Relations, 1905-1950

Li, Hongshan

Rutgers University Press, 2007

U.S.-China relations became increasingly important and complex in the twentieth century. While economic, political, and military interactions all grew over time, the most dramatic expansion took place in educational exchange, turning it into the strongest tie between the two nations. By the end of the 1940s, tens of thousands of Chinese and American students and scholars had crisscrossed the Pacific, leaving indelible marks on both societies. Although all exchange programs were terminated during the cold war, the two nations reemerged as top partners within a decade after the reestablishment of diplomatic relations.

            Approaching U.S.-China relations from a unique and usually overlooked perspective, Hongshan Li reveals that both the drastic expansion and complete termination of educational ties between the two nations in the first half of the twentieth century were largely the results of direct and deep intervention from the American and Chinese governments. Benefiting from government support and collaboration, educational exchange succeeded in diffusing knowledge and improving mutual understanding between the two peoples across the divide of civilizations. However, the visible hand of government also proved to be most destructive to the development of healthy intercultural relations when educational interactions were treated merely as an instrument for crisis management. 

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cover of UNDER THE FLAG OF THE NATION: DIARIES AND LETTERS OF OWEN JOHNSTON HOPKINS, A YANKEE VOLUNTEER IN THE CIVIL WAR

UNDER THE FLAG OF THE NATION

DIARIES AND LETTERS OF OWEN JOHNSTON HOPKINS, A YANKEE VOLUNTEER IN THE CIVIL WAR

Owen Johnston Hopkins

The Ohio State University Press, 1998

From these diaries and letters of a soldier in the Union Army emerges a revealing portrait of their author, a man caught up in a life-and-death struggle of national import. Compiled from the diaries kept by Owen Johnston Hopkins while he was on duty with the 42nd and 182nd regiments, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and from letters to his family and friends, this book gives a clear picture of the motives, attitudes, and sentiments of a Yankee soldier during the Civil War.

Owen Hopkins was a young man brought to maturity by the agony of war, but in spite of the horror of battle and the tedium of life in camp, he maintained a lively sense of humor and a constant devotion to the ideals for which he fought. The Civil War in these pages is a savage, vindictive conflict fought with canister, "minnie balls," grapeshot, the Enfield rifle, and the bayonet. Only seventeen when he enlisted in 1861, Hopkins was a foot soldier and a witness to the action that took place on the field of battle.

A vital part of Hopkins's life in the army was his correspondence with Julia Allison, who lived in his hometown of Bellefontaine. They began writing each other in 1863, and their friendship deepened into love. Each was a fervent patriot, and their shared devotion to their country was a significant fact of their relationship. They were married in 1865.

An epilogue tells what happened to Hopkins after June of 1865: his career, his family, and his death in 1902. Originally published in1961, this work is now available for the first time in paperback.
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cover of UNITED STATES EUROPEAN RIGHT: 1945-1955

UNITED STATES EUROPEAN RIGHT

1945-1955

DEBORAH KISATSKY

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

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cover of UNLIKELY ENTREPRENEURS: Catholic Sisters & the Hospital Marketplace, 1865–1925

UNLIKELY ENTREPRENEURS

Catholic Sisters & the Hospital Marketplace, 1865–1925

Barbra Mann Wall

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

In Unlikely Entrepreneurs, Barbra Mann Wall looks at the development of religious hospitals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the entrepreneurial influence Catholic sisters held in this process. When immigrant nuns came to the United States in the late nineteenth century, they encountered a market economy that structured the way they developed their hospitals. Sisters enthusiastically engaged in the market as entrepreneurs, but they used a set of tools and understanding that were counter to the market. Their entrepreneurship was not to expand earnings but rather to advance Catholic spirituality.

Wall places the development of Catholic hospital systems (located in Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Texas, and Utah) owned and operated by Catholic sisters within the larger social, economic, and medical history of the time. In the modern health care climate, with the influences of corporations, federal laws, spiraling costs, managed care, and medical practices that rely less on human judgments and more on technological innovations, the “modern” hospital reflects a dim memory of the past. This book will inform future debates on who will provide health care as the sisters depart, how costs will be met, who will receive care, and who will be denied access to health services.

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cover of US Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s

US Expansionism

The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s

David Healy

University of Wisconsin Press, 1976

Americans, in viewing the globe in 1897, saw a world of empires that were dynamic and fast-growing. Western powers such as Germany, France, and particularly Great Britain were making colonial imperialism fashionable, and the United States, eager to flex its muscles as an emerging world power, was swept along with the European tide. One year later, the United States had truly established itself as a contender in the global game, victorious in a war with Spain and committed to imperialism.
    In US Expansionism, David Healy examines this brief but important chapter in American history. Analyzing the various intellectual, cultural, and economic forces that engendered and shaped America’s imperialist drive, Healy also illustrates the key personalities involved, including the soon-to-be president, Theodore Roosevelt. A final section of the book examines the anti-imperialist opposition inspired by the new policy, and the ensuing debates about the proper role of American power.

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cover of US-Singapore Relations, 1965-1975: Strategic Non-alignment in the Cold War

US-Singapore Relations, 1965-1975

Strategic Non-alignment in the Cold War

Daniel Wei Boon Chua

National University of Singapore Press, 2017

During the Vietnam War, the newly-independent Singapore struck the position of being non-aligned. It maintained an anti-communist stance while, at least initially, criticizing the United States’ intervention into Vietnam. Yet Singapore might not have achieved its post-colonial success so rapidly without the support of the United States. As the war in Vietnam raged on, Singapore became a critical refueling point, also providing ship and aircraft repair for the US military. Commercial and strategic support from the United States lifted Singapore out of the economic doom predicted for the city-state after secession from Malaysia. Without this strategic and economic assistance, Singapore’s history might have been different. By considering the importance of the role of the United States in Singapore’s nation-building, this book provides an important supplement to the well-trodden narrative that attributes Singapore’s success solely to good governance.
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cover of Ubuntu: George M. Houser and the Struggle for Peace and Freedom on Two Continents

Ubuntu

George M. Houser and the Struggle for Peace and Freedom on Two Continents

Sheila D. Collins

Ohio University Press, 2020

This remarkable biography features a white American pacifist minister whose tireless work for justice and human rights helped reshape Black civil rights in the U.S. and Africa.

George M. Houser (1916–2015) was one of the most important civil rights and antiwar activists of the twentieth century. A conscientious objector during World War II, in 1942 Houser cofounded and led the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), whose embrace of nonviolent protest strategies and tactics characterized the modern American Civil Rights Movement. Beginning in the 1950s, Houser played a critical role in pan-Africanist anticolonial movements, and his more than thirty-year dedication to the cause of human rights and self-determination helped prepare the ground for the toppling of the South African apartheid regime.

Throughout his life, Houser shunned publicity, preferring to let his actions speak his faith. Sheila Collins’s well-researched biography recounts the events that informed Houser’s life of activism—from his childhood experiences as the son of missionaries in the Philippines to his early grounding in the Social Gospel and the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi. In light of the corruption the U.S. and the world face today, Houser’s story of faith and decisive action for human rights and social justice is one for our time.

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cover of Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development

Uganda Now

Between Decay and Development

Hölger Bernt Hansen

Ohio University Press, 1988

Can the revolutionary government of Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement put Uganda back on the road from decay to development?

These informed assessments put the present situation in context. The contributors assembled as Museveni’s guerrillas were launching their final bid for power. They have finalized their contributions in the light of the Museveni government’s initial period of power.

Contributions by Ugandan academics and politicians interlock with those by scholars from across the world who have a concern for Uganda. Historians examine the period of colonialism. There are political studies of the quarter century since independence. There are detailed analyses of the economic realities for the Ugandan government in the period of international debt. The central role of education in national development is given due prominence.

Ali A. Mazrui ends the book by asking ‘Is Africa Decaying?’ The editors have put the consideration of the case of Uganda’s recent history within the context of Africa’s development crisis. Uganda has presented in an aggravated form the crisis common to many other African countries: infrastructural breakdown, mounting foreign debt, military regimes and waves of refugees.

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cover of Ugly Freedoms

Ugly Freedoms

Elisabeth R. Anker

Duke University Press, 2022

In Ugly Freedoms Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These “ugly freedoms” legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker’s sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism’s violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination.
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cover of Ugly Productions: An Aesthetics of Greek Drama

Ugly Productions

An Aesthetics of Greek Drama

A. C. Duncan

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Amidst a culture otherwise obsessed with beauty, the Greek theater provided a unique space for Athenians to play with ugliness—to try these anti-ideals on for size. Such imaginative play was considered dangerous by some, such as Plato, who feared its corrupting influence; others, including Aristotle, saw the theater’s provocation and release of emotions as educational and even therapeutic. Sophocles’ and Euripides’ fifth-century audiences could not help but directly confront the ugliness of their drama, but as cultural memory of embodied productions faded, an abstracted contrast emerged between beautiful tragedy and ugly comedy—a pernicious aesthetic polarization that persists to this day. A. C. Duncan’s Ugly Productions embraces the materiality of the theater, arguing that dramatic aesthetics are best understood within affective frameworks where beauty or ugliness are produced through a dynamic interplay of verbal and visual modalities. Duncan reframes the Greek concept of “the ugly” not as mere “anti-beauty,” but as an affective disposition positively associated with such painful emotions as pity, fear, grief, and abjection.

Through studies of the figures of Xerxes, Electra, Philoctetes, Ajax, Heracles, and other tragic figures, Ugly Productions offers detailed analyses of the various ways ugliness was produced in performance with each chapter serving as an in-depth guide for studying the aesthetics of these works. Duncan confronts the historical neglect of ugliness in critical discourses, calling for a revaluation of negative aesthetics and renewed interest in the uglier aspects of these canonical works of theater. 
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cover of Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform

Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform

Enrique Mayer

Duke University Press, 2009

Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform reveals the human drama behind the radical agrarian reform that unfolded in Peru during the final three decades of the twentieth century. That process began in 1969, when the left-leaning military government implemented a drastic program of land expropriation. Seized lands were turned into worker-managed cooperatives. After those cooperatives began to falter and the country returned to civilian rule in the 1980s, members distributed the land among themselves. In 1995–96, as the agrarian reform process was winding down and neoliberal policies were undoing leftist reforms, the Peruvian anthropologist Enrique Mayer traveled throughout the country, interviewing people who had lived through the most tumultuous years of agrarian reform, recording their memories and their stories. While agrarian reform caused enormous upheaval, controversy, and disappointment, it did succeed in breaking up the unjust and oppressive hacienda system. Mayer contends that the demise of that system is as important as the liberation of slaves in the Americas.

Mayer interviewed ex-landlords, land expropriators, politicians, government bureaucrats, intellectuals, peasant leaders, activists, ranchers, members of farming families, and others. Weaving their impassioned recollections with his own commentary, he offers a series of dramatic narratives, each one centered around a specific instance of land expropriation, collective enterprise, and disillusion. Although the reform began with high hopes, it was quickly complicated by difficulties including corruption, rural and urban unrest, fights over land, and delays in modernization. As he provides insight into how important historical events are remembered, Mayer re-evaluates Peru’s military government (1969–79), its audacious agrarian reform program, and what that reform meant to Peruvians from all walks of life.

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cover of Ujamaa’s Army: The Creation and Evolution of the Tanzania People's Defence Force, 1964–1979

Ujamaa’s Army

The Creation and Evolution of the Tanzania People's Defence Force, 1964–1979

Charles G. Thomas

Ohio University Press, 2024

The immediate postcolonial moment brought both promise and peril for the states of Africa and their security. The process of decolonization generated instability, and the emergent Cold War caught up the still-fragile independent states in a global ideological struggle between superpowers. While the political story of these states has been written in detail, the story of their militaries has been largely inaccessible, leaving only sketches of the coups, mutinies, and overall failures of security that outside observers could chronicle.

Ujamaa’s Army traces the evolution of the Tanzania People’s Defence Force from its inception in 1964 following the broader East African uprisings to its fully realized form on the eve of Tanzania’s 1978 conflict with Uganda. The book gathers primary interviews with key military actors within Tanzania and interweaves their narratives with archival sources to produce a detailed history of the culmination of President Julius Nyerere’s ideological project and the military leadership’s vision of a professional and effective force for guarding the nation and supporting liberation struggles across Southern Africa.

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cover of Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict

Ukraine and the Empire of Capital

From Marketisation to Armed Conflict

Yuliya Yurchenko

Pluto Press, 2017

Since 1991, nominally independent Ukraine has been in turmoil, with the Orange Revolution and the Maidan protests marking its most critical moments. Now, its borders are threatened and the civil unrest and armed conflict continue to destabilise the country. In order to understand these dramatic events, Yuliya Yurchenko looks to the country’s post-Soviet past in this ambitious analysis of contemporary Ukrainian political economy. 

Providing distinctive and unexplored reflections on the origins of the conflict, Yurchenko unpacks the four central myths that underlie Ukraine's post-Soviet reality: the myth of transition, the myth of democracy, the myth of two Ukraines, and the myth of 'the other'. In doing so, she sheds light on the current intensification of class rivalries in Ukraine, the kleptocracy, resource wars and analyses existing and potential dangers of the rightwing shift in Ukraine's polity, stressing a historic opportunity for change.

Critiquing the concept of Ukraine as ‘transition space’, she provides a sweeping analysis which includes the wider neoliberal restructuring of global political economy since the 1970s, with particular focus on Ukraine's relations with the US, the EU and Russia. This is a book for those wanting to understand the current conflict as a dangerous product of neoliberalism, of the empire of capital.
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cover of Ukraine as a Migration Nexus: Perspectives on Historical and Current Population Movements

Ukraine as a Migration Nexus

Perspectives on Historical and Current Population Movements

Oleksii Chebotarov

Central European University Press, 2025

This OER project examines Ukraine as a central hub in global migration and mobility, offering critical perspectives on both historical and contemporary population movements. The volume brings together case studies focused on the migration dynamics within Ukraine and its surrounding territories, integrating these with broader global migration processes. The authors critically engage with migration studies methodologies, offering fresh, empirical insights into issues like displacement, migration governance, and identity formation in the context of Ukraine's socio-political landscape. By combining historical narratives with modern theoretical approaches, the book explores how migration has shaped and continues to shape, the region’s cultural, political, and social fabric. It provides an innovative contribution to migration research, highlighting the intersection of mobility, belonging, and political contexts, particularly within East Central Europe. This collection challenges traditional migration frameworks and invites a reevaluation of established migration paradigms through the lens of Ukrainian lands.
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cover of Ukraine in the Crosshairs of Geopolitical Power Play

Ukraine in the Crosshairs of Geopolitical Power Play

Edited by Peter W. Schulze and Winfried Veit

Campus Verlag, 2020

An overview of both European and Russian objectives in Ukraine.

Peace in Ukraine seemed possible following Volodymyr Zelensky’s 2019 election. The new president reopened conversations with both the European Union and separatist authorities, bringing an end to the Donbass conflict in sight. Such an achievement promised revitalized talks between Europe and Russia, and so the nearly forgotten conflict returned to global prominence. Ukraine in the Crosshairs of Geopolitical Power Play analyzes why European and Russian objectives in Ukraine place daunting limits of any potential compromise.
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cover of Ukraine's Patronal Democracy and the Russian Invasion: The Russia-Ukraine War, Volume One

Ukraine's Patronal Democracy and the Russian Invasion

The Russia-Ukraine War, Volume One

Bálint Madlovics

Central European University Press, 2023

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 jeopardizes the country's independence and its chances for Western-style development. However, the heroic attitude of the Ukrainian people, combined with a solidifying national identity, makes the domestic foundations for a western turn stronger than ever. After the invasion, building strong foundations of liberal democracy will be a top priority. In addition to alleviating immediate problems, the country must also address its post-communist legacy and address the constraints of patronalism.

The authors of this edited volume, leading Ukrainian scholars supplemented by colleagues from Hungary, examine the chances of an anti-patronal transformation after the war. The book provides an overview of the development of Ukraine's political-economic system: color revolutions in 2004 and 2014 brought democratic transformation, but no change in the patronage system The result was patronal regime cycles instead of the emergence of a Western-type liberal democracy in the country. Building on the conceptual framework of the editors' The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020), the 12 chapters examine the impact of the war on patronal democracy, the relational economy, clientelist society, and the international environment in which Ukraine operates.

This collection is complemented by the book entitled Russia. Imperial Endeavor and Geopolitical Consequences.

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cover of Ukrainian Bishop, American Church

Ukrainian Bishop, American Church

Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak

Catholic University of America Press, 2018

Constantine Bohachevsky was not a typical bishop. On the eve of his unexpected nomination as bishop to the Ukrainian Catholics in America, in March 1924, the Vatican secretly whisked him from Warsaw to Rome to be ordained. He arrived in America that August to a bankrupt church and a hostile clergy. He stood his ground, and chose to live а simple missionary life. He eschewed public pomp, as did his immigrant congregations. He regularly visited his scattered churches. He fought a bitter fight for the independence of the church from outside interference – a kind of struggle between the Church and the state, absent both. He refashioned a failing immigrant church in America into a self-sustaining institution that half a century after his death could help resurrect the underground Catholic Church in Ukraine, which became the largest Eastern Catholic church today. This trailblazing biography, based on recently opened sources from the Vatican, Ukraine and the United States, brings the reader from the placid life of the married Catholic Ukrainian clergy in the Habsburg Empire to industrial America.
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cover of Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland, and Folk Imagination in the Twentieth Century

Ukrainian Otherlands

Diaspora, Homeland, and Folk Imagination in the Twentieth Century

Natalia Khanenko-Friesen

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

What happens to ethnic communities when they have two homelands to love—one real and immediate, the other distant but treasured in the heart and imagination?

Ukrainian Otherlands is an innovative exploration of modern ethnic identity, focused on diaspora/homeland understandings of each other in Ukraine and in Ukrainian ethnic communities around the globe. Exploring a rich array of folk songs, poetry and stories, trans-Atlantic correspondence, family histories, and rituals of homecoming and hosting that developed in the Ukrainian diaspora and Ukraine during the twentieth century, Natalia Khanenko-Friesen asserts that many important aspects of modern ethnic identity form, develop, and reveal themselves not only through the diaspora's continued yearning for the homeland, but also in a homeland's deeply felt connection to its diaspora. Yet, she finds each group imagines the "otherland" and ethnic identity differently, leading to misunderstandings between Ukrainians and their ethnic-Ukrainian "brothers and sisters" abroad.

An innovative exploration of the persistence of vernacular culture in the modern world, Ukrainian Otherlands, amply informed by theory and fieldwork, will appeal to those interested in folklore, ethnic and diaspora studies, modernity, migration, folk psychology, history, and cultural anthropology.

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cover of Ukrainian Witchcraft Trials: Volhynia, Podolia, and Ruthenia, 17th–18th Centuries

Ukrainian Witchcraft Trials

Volhynia, Podolia, and Ruthenia, 17th–18th Centuries

Kateryna Dysa

Central European University Press, 2020

Drawing on quantitative data drawn from a range of trials Kateryna Dysa first describes the ideological background of the tribunals based on works written by priests and theologians that reflect attitudes toward the devil and witches. The main focus of her work, however, is the process leading to witchcraft accusations. From the stories of participants of the trials she shows what led people to enunciate first suspicions then accusations of witchcraft. Finally, she presents a microhistory from one Volhynian village, comparing attitudes toward two “female crimes” in the Ukrainian courts. 

The study is based on archival research including witch trials transcripts. Dysa approaches the trials as indications of belief and practice, attempting to understand the actors involved rather than dismiss or condemn them. She takes care to situate early modern Ukrainian witchcraft and its accompanying trials in a broader European context, with comparisons to some African cases as well.

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cover of Ukrainians in Michigan

Ukrainians in Michigan

Paul M. Hedeen

Michigan State University Press, 2023

This history of Ukrainian immigrants in Michigan and their American descendants examines both the choices people made and the social forces that impelled their decisions to migrate and to make new homes in the state. Michigan’s Ukrainians came in four waves, each unique in time and character, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing in the twenty-first. Detroit attracted many of them with the opportunities it offered in its booming automobile industry. Yet others put down roots in cities and towns across the state. Wherever they settled, they established churches and community centers and continued to practice the customs of their homeland. Many Ukrainian Americans have made significant contributions to Michigan and the United States, including those who are showcased in this book. This comprehensive text also highlights cultural practices and traditional foods cherished by community members.
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cover of Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch Irish

Ulster and North America

Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch Irish

H. Tyler Blethen

University of Alabama Press, 2001

This collection of thought-provoking essays addresses the complex issues of Ulster Scots history and ethnic identity by viewing them from a transatlantic and comparative perspective.

The 11 essays in this volume, originally presented at meetings of the Ulster-American Heritage Symposium by scholars from Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and the United States, explore the nature of Scotch-Irish culture by examining values, traditions, demographics, and language. The essays also investigate the process of migration, which transmitted that culture to the New World, and the subsequent assimilation of Celtic ways into American culture.

The themes presented are wide-ranging and complex. First is the dynamic nature of Ulster society in the 17th and 18th centuries and the rapid changes occurring there, especially those affecting Presbyterianism and community cohesiveness. Also examined is the experience of migration, asking such questions as who migrated and when, what their expectations were, and how closely colonial reality matched those expectations. A third theme is the development of economic strategies and community-building both in Ulster and North America, making important contributions to the "new rural history" and explaining the success of the Scotch-Irish on the American frontier. Finally, the volume addresses ethnic identity and cultural diffusion, advancing the ongoing debate initiated by Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney and elaborated on by David Hackett Fischer. Ulster and North America illustrates the value of transatlantic dialog and of comparative studies for the understanding of ethnicity and migration history.

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cover of Ultimate Americans: Point Hope Alaska: 1826-1909

Ultimate Americans

Point Hope Alaska: 1826-1909

Tom Lowenstein

University of Alaska Press, 2008

The third volume in a series on Point Hope, Alaska, Ultimate Americans examines the first encounters between the native Tikigaq people and Anglo-Americans during the nineteenth century. Tom Lowenstein investigates the interactions between Native Alaskans, commercial whalemen, and missionaries in Point Hope, charting the destabilizing elements of alcohol and disease among Native populations, as well as cultural collisions and the eventual mutual assimilation of the groups. An in-depth historical chronicle, Ultimate Americans will be invaluable reading for historians, ethnographers, and anthropologists alike.
 
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cover of Ulysses S. Grant: A Photographic History

Ulysses S. Grant

A Photographic History

James Bultema, with a Foreword by Frank J. Willilams

Southern Illinois University Press, 2022

The most photographed American of the nineteenth century
 
As Grant battled relentlessly down the Tennessee River and across Tennessee, defending Shiloh, he was followed by an enterprising group of studio photographers hoping to profit from the public’s demand for images of the rising general from the West. They never stopped because Grant never stopped. Thus far, 307 distinct photographs have been found of Ulysses S. Grant, revealing him to be the most photographed American of the nineteenth century. 
 
Readers of Ulysses S. Grant: A Photographic History travel alongside Grant through the Civil War and his two terms as president, on his unusual two-year journey around the world, and to his final days on Mount McGregor. The sheer volume of exposure shows the toll of duty, war, and command. From every angle, this collection captures Grant’s regard for soldier and family, his disregard of uniform, and his disheveled appearance that reflected his resilience. The reader will look into the eyes of a man who saw the worst and labored for the best. 
 
This curated volume opens the largest collection of Grant photos to the public for the first time. Excerpts from Grant’s personal writings divulge his candid thoughts about the people he posed with and the situations he faced around the time the photographs were taken. An extraordinary addition to Grant scholarship, Ulysses S. Grant: A Photographic History will be the photographic reference work on Grant for decades to come as the simple man from Ohio continues to astonish the world.
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cover of Umm al-Biyara: Excavations by Crystal-M. Bennett in Petra 1960-1965

Umm al-Biyara

Excavations by Crystal-M. Bennett in Petra 1960-1965

P. Bienkwoski

Council for British Research in the Levant, 2011

Umm al-Biyara, the highest mountain in Petra, southern Jordan, was the first Iron Age Edomite site to be extensively excavated. It was a domestic, unwalled site of stone-built longhouses dating to the 7th-6th centuries BCE. The stratigraphy, pottery, small finds and inscribed material, including the important bulla of Qos-Gabr, King of Edom are described, supplemented by chapters on the use of space and a landscape study of mountain-top sites in the Petra region. The later Nabataean remains on the edge of the summit indicate a major Nabataean complex of buildings, possibly a palace, which would make this the first Nabataean palace in Petra to be explicitly identified.
[more]
cover of Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare

Un-American Womanhood

Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare

Kim Nielsen

The Ohio State University Press, 2001

Un-American Womanhood studies the Red Scare of the 1920s through the lens of gender. Kim Nielsen describes the methods antifeminists used to subdue feminism and other movements they viewed as radical. By tapping into widespread anxieties about Bolshevism and the expansion of the state, antifeminist women fought against certain social welfare programs such as the Sheppard-Towner Act and the Children’s Bureau and resisted efforts to legitimize the female citizen as an autonomous political figure. The book also considers the seeming contradictions of outspoken antifeminists who broke with traditional gender norms to assume forceful and public roles in their efforts to denounce feminism.
[more]
cover of Un-American: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution

Un-American

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution

Bill V Mullen

Temple University Press, 2015

Un-American is Bill Mullen’s revisionist account of renowned author and activist W.E.B. Du Bois’s political thought toward the end of his life, a period largely dismissed and neglected by scholars. He describes Du Bois’s support for what the Communist International called “world revolution” as the primary objective of this aged radical’s activism. Du Bois was a champion of the world’s laboring millions and critic of the Cold War, a man dedicated to animating global political revolution.

Mullen argues that Du Bois believed that the Cold War stalemate could create the conditions in which the world powers could achieve not only peace but workers’ democracy. Un-American shows Du Bois to be deeply engaged in international networks and personal relationships with revolutionaries in India, China, and Africa. Mullen explores how thinkers like Karl Marx, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, and C.L.R. James helped him develop a theory of world revolution at a stage in his life when most commentators regard him as marginalized. This original political biography also challenges assessments of Du Bois as an American “race man.”

[more]
cover of Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference

Un/common Cultures

Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference

Kamala Visweswaran

Duke University Press, 2010

In Un/common Cultures, Kamala Visweswaran develops an incisive critique of the idea of culture at the heart of anthropology, describing how it lends itself to culturalist assumptions. She holds that the new culturalism—the idea that cultural differences are definitive, and thus divisive—produces a view of “uncommon cultures” defined by relations of conflict rather than forms of collaboration. The essays in Un/common Cultures straddle the line between an analysis of how racism works to form the idea of “uncommon cultures” and a reaffirmation of the possibilities of “common cultures,” those that enact new forms of solidarity in seeking common cause. Such “cultures in common” or “cultures of the common” also produce new intellectual formations that demand different analytic frames for understanding their emergence. By tracking the emergence and circulation of the culture concept in American anthropology and Indian and French sociology, Visweswaran offers an alternative to strictly disciplinary histories. She uses critical race theory to locate the intersection between ethnic/diaspora studies and area studies as a generative site for addressing the formation of culturalist discourses. In so doing, she interprets the work of social scientists and intellectuals such as Elsie Clews Parsons, Alice Fletcher, Franz Boas, Louis Dumont, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, W. E. B. Du Bois, and B. R. Ambedkar.
[more]
cover of Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Studies and the Historiography of Zionism

Unacknowledged Kinships

Postcolonial Studies and the Historiography of Zionism

Edited by Stefan Vogt, Derek Penslar, and Arieh Saposnik

Brandeis University Press, 2023

The first work to systematically investigate the potential for a dialogue between postcolonial studies and the history of Zionism.
 
There is an “unacknowledged kinship” between studies of Zionism and post-colonial studies, a kinship that deserves to be both discovered and acknowledged. Unacknowledged Kinships strives to facilitate a conversation between the historiography of Zionism and postcolonial studies by identifying and exploring possible linkages and affiliations between their subjects as well as the limits of such connections. The contributors to this volume discuss central theoretical concepts developed within the field of postcolonial studies, and they use these concepts to analyze crucial aspects of the history of Zionism while contextualizing Zionist thought, politics, and culture within colonial and postcolonial histories. This book also argues that postcolonial studies could gain from looking at the history of Zionism as an example of not only colonial domination but also the seemingly contradictory processes of national liberation and self-empowerment.
 
Unacknowledged Kinships is the first work to systematically investigate the potential for a dialogue between postcolonial studies and Zionist historiography. It is also unique in suggesting that postcolonial concepts can be applied to the history of European Zionism just as comprehensively as to the history of Zionism in Palestine and Israel or Arab countries. Most importantly, the book is an overture for a dialogue between postcolonial studies and the historiography of Zionism.
 
[more]
cover of Unaffordable: American Healthcare from Johnson to Trump

Unaffordable

American Healthcare from Johnson to Trump

Jonathan Engel

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

Written for nonexperts, this is a brisk, engaging history of American healthcare from the advent of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s to the impact of the Affordable Care Act in the 2010s. Step by step, Jonathan Engel shows how we arrived at our present convoluted situation, where generic drugs prices can jump 1,000 percent in a day and primary care physicians can lose 20 percent of their income at the stroke of a Congressional pen.

Unaffordable covers, in a conversational style punctuated by apt examples, topics ranging from health insurance, pharmaceutical pricing, and physician training to health maintenance organizations and hospital networks. Along the way, Engel introduces approaches that other nations have taken in organizing and paying for healthcare and offers insights on ethical quandaries around end-of-life decisions, neonatal care, life-sustaining treatments, and the limits of our ability to define death. While describing the political origins of many of the federal and state laws that govern our healthcare system today, he never loses sight of the impact that healthcare delivery has on our wallets and on the balance sheets of hospitals, doctors' offices, government agencies, and private companies.
[more]
cover of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions

Unbecoming Language

Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions

Annabel L. Kim

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

In Unbecoming Language, Annabel L. Kim examines a corpus of French writing against difference. Inaugurated by Nathalie Sarraute and sustained in the work of Monique Wittig and Anne Garréta, this corpus highlights three generations of the twentieth and recent twenty-first centuries and the direct chain of influence between them. Kim considers these writers, and the story of literature’s political potential, as a way of rereading and reinterpreting each writer’s individual corpus—rearticulating the strain of anti-difference feminist thought that has been largely forgotten in our (Anglo-American) histories of French feminisms.
 
Kim’s close readings ultimately enliven the current conversation in French studies by serving as a provocation to return to reading literary texts deeply and closely, without subordinating literature to a pre-existing ideological framework—to let literature speak, to let it theorize. Tracking the influence of these writers on each other, Kim provides a new, original French feminist poetics and demonstrates that Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta’s work allows for a hollowing out of difference from within, allowing writers and readers to unbecome—to break free of identity and exist as subjectivities without subjecthood. In looking at these writers together, Kim provides a defense of literature as liberatory— capable of effecting personal and political change—and gives readers an experience of literature’s revolutionary possibilities.
 
[more]
cover of Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South

Unbinding Gentility

Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South

Candace Bailey

University of Illinois Press, 2021

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022

Hearing southern women in the pauses of history

Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Candace L. Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in the women's culture of the time. Bailey pays particular attention to the space between music as an ideal accomplishment—part of how people expected women to perform gentility—and a real practice—what women actually did. At the same time, her ethnographic reading of binder’s volumes, letters and diaries, and a wealth of other archival material informs new and vital interpretations of women’s place in southern culture.

A fascinating collective portrait of women's artistic and personal lives, Unbinding Gentility challenges entrenched assumptions about nineteenth century music and the experiences of the southern women who made it.

[more]
cover of Uncanny Creatures: Doll Thinking in Modern German Culture

Uncanny Creatures

Doll Thinking in Modern German Culture

Christophe Koné

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Germany held a monopoly on the manufacture and export of bisque toy dolls in Europe before WWI. Yet, dolls’ omnipresence in the material, visual, and literary culture of the modern German-speaking world has so far not been properly addressed. In demonstrating this cultural affinity for dolls, Christophe Koné draws upon a range of stories and seminal essays on dolls, as well as toys, sculptures, paintings, and photographs. He examines how E.T.A. Hoffmann’s romantic tale The Sandman (1815) has been a major source of inspiration for German-speaking doll makers because of how it centers imagination and inventiveness. Using Hoffmann’s tale as an early example of an amalgam between doll thinking and making in German culture, Koné shows how it initiated a genealogy of doll thinkers (Freud & Jentsch), writers (Rilke), painters (Kokoschka), photographers (Bellmer), and makers (Pritzel). 

Uncanny Creatures then explores how this unusual interest in human-like figures continues a long tradition of thought devoted to conceptualizing “things,” from Immanuel Kant’s theory of the thing-in-itself to Martin Heidegger’s lecture on the thing, and Eduard Mörike or Rainer Maria Rilke’s thing-poems. Because dolls occupy a liminal space—not quite things and more than mere objects—they appear as uncanny creatures which have held a fascination for writers, thinkers, and artists alike. Uncanny Creatures moves past the Freudian discourse of fetishism to propose a new reading of doll artifacts in German culture centered on their ability to evoke a feeling of uncertainty and unsettlement in the viewer.
[more]
cover of Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Film and Television

Uncanny Fidelity

Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Film and Television

James Newlin

University of Alabama Press, 2024

How the study of Shakespeare’s legacy, specifically in film and television, can radically challenge what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean

In the field of adaptation studies today, the idea of reading an adapted text as “faithful” or “unfaithful” to its original source strikes many scholars as too simplistic, too conservative, and too moralizing. In Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First Century Film and Television, James Newlin challenges these critical orthodoxies. Instead, recognizing how a film or television series closely recalls Shakespeare’s drama encourages an interrogation of what we consider to be “Shakespeare” in the first place.

Drawing upon Sigmund Freud’s model of the uncanny—the sudden sensation of peculiar, discomforting familiarity—this book focuses on films and television series that were not marketed as adaptations of Shakespeare. Yet these works unexpectedly invoke lost, even troubling aspects of Shakespeare’s original playtexts, their performance history, or their reception. Broadening the scope of fidelity readings beyond familiar concerns like plot and language, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare’s afterlife can clarify both the historical context of his drama and its relevance for the current political moment. Engaging contemporary debates in literary and psychoanalytic theory, this book features provocative close readings of The Tempest, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale alongside recent films and television series, from art-house movies such as The Master and Manchester by the Sea to the cult favorites Brigsby Bear and Vice Principals. These works conjure widely overlooked qualities of Shakespeare’s drama by recalling the casting practices or the generic contexts of the early modern stage or by making a meaningful intervention in the plays’ critical reception. Closely examining these surprisingly faithful adaptations of Shakespeare’s drama helps us to articulate the original experience of the early modern stage and better consider its resonance in the present.

This book will benefit students and scholars of Shakespeare on film and psychoanalytic theory. Yet Uncanny Fidelity will also be of interest to scholars of performance history, source studies, and early modern discourses of race and gender—as well as anyone interested in the unexpected connections between canonical literature and contemporary culture. By examining adaptation as an instance of uncanny return, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare’s afterlife can radically challenge what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean.

 

 

[more]
cover of Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence

Uncensored

Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence

Ann Komaromi

Northwestern University Press, 2015

Literature that was self-published and informally circulated in the former Soviet Union in order to evade censorship, in addition to prosecution of its authors, came to be known as samizdat. Vasilii Aksenov, Andrei Bitov, and Venedikt Erofeev were among its most acclaimed practitioners. In her innovative study, Ann Komaromi uses their work to argue for a far more sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon of samizdat, showing how the material circumstances of its creation and dissemination exercised a profound influence on the very idea of dissidence. When a text comes to life as samizdat, it necessarily reconfigures the relationship between author and reader. Using archival research to fully illustrate samizdat’s social and historical context, Komaromi arrives at a more nuanced theoretical position that breaks down the opposition between the autonomous work of art and direct political engagement. The similarities between samizdat and digital culture give her formulation of dissident subjectivity particular contemporary relevance.
[more]
cover of Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America

Uncertain Climes

Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America

Joseph Giacomelli

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Uncertain Climes looks to the late nineteenth century to reveal how climate anxiety was a crucial element in the emergence of American modernity.

Even people who still refuse to accept the reality of human-induced climate change would have to agree that the topic has become inescapable in the United States in recent decades. But as Joseph Giacomelli shows in Uncertain Climes, this is actually nothing new: as far back as Gilded Age America, climate uncertainty has infused major debates on economic growth and national development.
 
In this ambitious examination of late-nineteenth-century understandings of climate, Giacomelli draws on the work of scientists, foresters, surveyors, and settlers to demonstrate how central the subject was to the emergence of American modernity. Amid constant concerns about volatile weather patterns and the use of natural resources, nineteenth-century Americans developed a multilayered discourse on climate and what it might mean for the nation’s future. Although climate science was still in its nascent stages during the Gilded Age, fears and hopes about climate change animated the overarching political struggles of the time, including expansion into the American West. Giacomelli makes clear that uncertainty was the common theme linking concerns about human-induced climate change with cultural worries about the sustainability of capitalist expansionism in an era remarkably similar to the United States’ unsettled present.
 
[more]
cover of Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America

Uncertain Climes

Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America

Joseph Giacomelli

University of Chicago Press, 2023

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

Uncertain Climes looks to the late nineteenth century to reveal how climate anxiety was a crucial element in the emergence of American modernity.


Even people who still refuse to accept the reality of human-induced climate change would have to agree that the topic has become inescapable in the United States in recent decades. But as Joseph Giacomelli shows in Uncertain Climes, this is actually nothing new: as far back as Gilded Age America, climate uncertainty has infused major debates on economic growth and national development.
 
In this ambitious examination of late-nineteenth-century understandings of climate, Giacomelli draws on the work of scientists, foresters, surveyors, and settlers to demonstrate how central the subject was to the emergence of American modernity. Amid constant concerns about volatile weather patterns and the use of natural resources, nineteenth-century Americans developed a multilayered discourse on climate and what it might mean for the nation’s future. Although climate science was still in its nascent stages during the Gilded Age, fears and hopes about climate change animated the overarching political struggles of the time, including expansion into the American West. Giacomelli makes clear that uncertainty was the common theme linking concerns about human-induced climate change with cultural worries about the sustainability of capitalist expansionism in an era remarkably similar to the United States’ unsettled present.
 
[more]
cover of Uncertain Dimensions: Western Overseas Empires in the Twentieth Century

Uncertain Dimensions

Western Overseas Empires in the Twentieth Century

Raymond F. Betts

University of Minnesota Press, 1985

Uncertain Dimensions was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

World War I battered the Western imperial systems and destroyed one, that of Germany, but it did not sound the death knell of an empire. The "scramble" for overseas territory ha reached a virtual conclusion shortly before the war; afterwards, the main business of empire was to ensure a pax colonia: the often contradictory goals of a stable government and economic development. It is with the years between world wars—the brief age of administrative empire — that Raymond Betts is chiefly concerned in this book. An unsettled time, when individuals coped with empire of uncertain dimensions, the interwar years nonetheless left a material legacy—railroads, motor roads, public buildings — and an ideological one—the voices of protest that led to independence after World War II.

Preeminently a cultural history of the era rather than a political narrative, Uncertain Dimensions centers upon the regions we now call the Third World—Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia—and the major colonial powers, Great Britain and France. Betts has structured this book as a group of closely linked interpretive essays, each devoted to a specific aspect of the late colonial experience: World War I and the postwar mandates, colonial administration, the European economic imperative and "technology transfer," urbanization, anti-imperial protest, and decolonization. Throughout, he draws upon the work of novelists, poets, and theoreticians—Aime Cesaire, Claude McKay, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and many others—and recognizes the deep irony at the heart of modern imperialism: that contact between Western and Third worlds was mostly confined to two minorities, the alien European and the socially uprooted African or Asian.

[more]
cover of Uncharted Territory: The American Catholic Church at the United Nations, 1946-1972

Uncharted Territory

The American Catholic Church at the United Nations, 1946-1972

Joseph S. Rossi S.J.

Catholic University of America Press, 2006

Uncharted Territory chronicles the groundbreaking attempt by the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) to mold the United Nations in the image of a Catholic world order through the NCWC Office for UN Affairs.
[more]
cover of Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity

Uncivil Rights

Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity

Jonna Perrillo

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Almost fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, a wealth of research shows that minority students continue to receive an unequal education. At the heart of this inequality is a complex and often conflicted relationship between teachers and civil rights activists, examined fully for the first time in Jonna Perrillo’s Uncivil Rights, which traces the tensions between the two groups in New York City from the Great Depression to the present.
While movements for teachers’ rights and civil rights were not always in conflict, Perrillo uncovers the ways they have become so, brought about both by teachers who have come to see civil rights efforts as detracting from or competing with their own goals and by civil rights activists whose aims have de-professionalized the role of the educator. Focusing in particular on unionized teachers, Perrillo finds a new vantage point from which to examine the relationship between school and community, showing how in this struggle, educators, activists, and especially our students have lost out. 
[more]
cover of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution

Hochman Barbara

University of Massachusetts Press, 2011

[more]
cover of Uncomfortable Television

Uncomfortable Television

Hunter Hargraves

Duke University Press, 2023

From The Wire to Intervention to Girls, postmillennial American television has dazzled audiences with novelistic seriality and cinematic aesthetics. Yet this television is also more perverse: it bombards audiences with misogynistic and racialized violence, graphic sex, substance abuse, unlikeable protagonists, and the extraordinary exploitation of ordinary people. In Uncomfortable Television, Hunter Hargraves examines how television makes its audiences find pleasure through feeling disturbed. He shows that this turn to discomfort realigns collective definitions of family and pleasure with the values of neoliberal culture. In viscerally violent dramas, cringeworthy ironic comedies, and trashy reality programs alike, televisual unease trains audiences to survive under late capitalism, which demands that individuals accept a certain amount of discomfort, dread, and irritation into their everyday lives. By highlighting how discomfort has been central to the reorganization and legitimization of television as an art form, Hargraves demonstrates television’s role in assimilating viewers into worlds marked by precarity, perversity, and crisis.
[more]
cover of Uncommon Threads: Ohio's Art Quilt Revolution

Uncommon Threads

Ohio's Art Quilt Revolution

Gayle A. Pritchard

Ohio University Press, 2006

Ohio’s long quiltmaking heritage prepared the wayfor the contemporary “pioneer” artists of the 1970s and 1980s, who, through individual vision and dedication, have created a new art form and added a new chapter to quilt history. Uncommon Threads: Ohio’s Art Quilt Revolution reveals for the first time the remarkable role Ohio artists, curators, institutions, and organizations have played in the evolution of today’s internationalart quilt movement.

Against the backdrop of America’s counterculture and civil rights movements, author Gayle A. Pritchard’s compelling narrative threads its way through the emergence of the art quilt, from artists working in isolation to the explosive “big bang” of the first Quilt National and its inevitable reverberations. Pritchard provides a fascinating and personal glimpse into the private world of these unique artists through in-depth interviews, rare photographs, and abundant quilt illustrations.

As Uncommon Threads demonstrates, the art quilt movement could not have occurred without Ohio’s unparalleled contribution. Quilt lovers around theworld will relish discovering this tale of the uncommon energy, vision, creativity, and devotion to self-expression that truly made a quilt revolution.
[more]
cover of Uncommon Vernacular: The Early Houses of Jefferson County, West Virginia, 1735-1835

Uncommon Vernacular

The Early Houses of Jefferson County, West Virginia, 1735-1835

John C. Allen, Jr.

West Virginia University Press, 2011

Within the picturesque borders of Jefferson County, West Virginia remain the vestiges of a history filled with Civil War battles and political rebellion. Yet also woven into the historical landscapeof this small county nestled within the Shenandoah Valley is an unusual collection of historic homes. 
 
In this fascinating architectural exploration, John C. Allen, Jr. details his expansive seven-year survey of Jefferson County’s historic residences. By focusing on dwellings built from the mid-eighteenth century to the arrival of the railroad and canal in 1835, Allen unfolds the unique story of this area’s early building traditions and architectural innovations. The 250 buildings included in this work—from the plantation homes of the Washington family to the log houses of yeomen farmers—reveal the unique development of this region, as Allen categorizes structures and establishes patterns of construction, plan, and style.

Allen’s refreshing perspective illuminates the vibrant vernacular architecture of Jefferson County, connecting the housing of this area to the rich history of the Shenandoah Valley. Varying features of house siting, plan types, construction techniques, building materials, outbuildings, and exterior and interior detailing illustrate the blending of German, Scots-Irish, English, and African cultures into a distinct, regional style.
 
Adorned with over seven hundred stylish photographs by Walter Smalling and elegant drawings, floor plans, and maps by Andrew Lewis, Uncommon Vernacular explores and preserves this historic area’s rich architectural heritage.
[more]
cover of Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing

Uncommon Women

Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing

Laura Laffrado

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

Uncommon Women discusses provocative, highly readable, nineteenth-century American texts that complicate notions of self-writing and female agency. This feminist study considers the generic forms, language, and illustrations of a group of complex and often daring texts, including Sarah Kemble Knight’s unconventional travel Journal (1825); Fanny Fern’s controversial newspaper essays (1851–72); Civil War nurse Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863); and cross-dressed soldier’s S. Emma E. Edmonds’s Nurseand Spy in the Union Army (1865), along with later women’s war reminiscences. The study concludes with a fresh reading of neglected aspects of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the primary Black female autobiographical text of the century, which fundamentally displays what whiteness enabled.
 
Uncommon Women reveals attempts of white middle-class women to both violate and align themselves with gendered assumptions. In doing so, it makes visible the ways in which these texts disputed restrictive female constructions, tested boundaries of race and class, and anticipated reaction to their disruptive discourses. The resulting conflicted self-representations illuminate the vexed contours of women’s autobiography.
This study’s findings make plain the impact of white/male discourses of gender on women’s self-narrativeand illustrate how unconventional women were pressured to embrace domesticity, heterosexuality, marriage, motherhood, and political passivity.
 
 
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cover of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties

Unconscious Dominions

Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties

Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, and Richard C. Keller, eds.

Duke University Press, 2011

By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European and North American ideas about the colonial world and the character and potential of native cultures. Psychoanalytic discourse, from Freud’s description of female sexuality as a “dark continent” to his conceptualization of primitive societies and the origins of civilization, became inextricable from the ideologies underlying European expansionism. But as it was adapted in the colonies and then the postcolonies, psychoanalysis proved surprisingly useful for theorizing anticolonialism and postcolonial trauma.

Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is colonial and psychoanalytic, but, until now, this intersection has scarcely been explored, much less examined in comparative perspective. Taking on that project, Unconscious Dominions assembles essays based on research in Australia, Brazil, France, Haiti, and Indonesia, as well as India, North Africa, and West Africa. Even as they reveal the modern psychoanalytic subject as constitutively colonial, they shed new light on how that subject went global: how people around the world came to recognize the hybrid configuration of unconscious, ego, and superego in themselves and others.

Contributors
Warwick Anderson
Alice Bullard
John Cash
Joy Damousi
Didier Fassin
Christiane Hartnack
Deborah Jenson
Richard C. Keller
Ranjana Khanna
Mariano Plotkin
Hans Pols

[more]