Results by title
28167 books match the query 'History' and 1118 start with w
White Man's Paper Trail
Grand Councils and Treaty-Making on the Central PlainsStan Hoig
University Press of Colorado, 2006
Stan Hoig shows how treaty-making - once considered a viable method of peaceably resolving conflicts - degenerated into a deeply flawed system sullied by political deceptions and broken promises.
White Man's Paper Trail illuminates the pivotal role of treaty negotiations in the buildup to the Plains Indian wars, in American Indians' loss of land and self-determination, and in Euro-American westward expansion.
White Market Drugs
Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in AmericaDavid Herzberg
University of Chicago Press, 2020
These markets are widely acknowledged but no one has explained how they became so central to the medical system in a nation famous for its “drug wars”—until now. Drawing from federal, state, industry, and medical archives alongside a wealth of published sources, Herzberg re-connects America’s divided drug history, telling the whole story for the first time. He reveals that the driving question for policymakers has never been how to prohibit the use of addictive drugs, but how to ensure their availability in medical contexts, where profitability often outweighs public safety. Access to white markets was thus a double-edged sword for socially privileged consumers, even as communities of color faced exclusion and punitive drug prohibition. To counter this no-win setup, Herzberg advocates for a consumer protection approach that robustly regulates all drug markets to minimize risks while maintaining safe, reliable access (and treatment) for people with addiction.
Accomplishing this requires rethinking a drug/medicine divide born a century ago that, unlike most policies of that racially segregated era, has somehow survived relatively unscathed into the twenty-first century.
By showing how the twenty-first-century opioid crisis is only the most recent in a long history of similar crises of addiction to pharmaceuticals, Herzberg forces us to rethink our most basic ideas about drug policy and addiction itself—ideas that have been failing us catastrophically for over a century.
White Metropolis
Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001By Michael Phillips
University of Texas Press, 2006
Winner, T. R. Fehrenbach Award, Texas Historical Commission, 2007
From the nineteenth century until today, the power brokers of Dallas have always portrayed their city as a progressive, pro-business, racially harmonious community that has avoided the racial, ethnic, and class strife that roiled other Southern cities. But does this image of Dallas match the historical reality? In this book, Michael Phillips delves deeply into Dallas's racial and religious past and uncovers a complicated history of resistance, collaboration, and assimilation between the city's African American, Mexican American, and Jewish communities and its white power elite.
Exploring more than 150 years of Dallas history, Phillips reveals how white business leaders created both a white racial identity and a Southwestern regional identity that excluded African Americans from power and required Mexican Americans and Jews to adopt Anglo-Saxon norms to achieve what limited positions of power they held. He also demonstrates how the concept of whiteness kept these groups from allying with each other, and with working- and middle-class whites, to build a greater power base and end elite control of the city. Comparing the Dallas racial experience with that of Houston and Atlanta, Phillips identifies how Dallas fits into regional patterns of race relations and illuminates the unique forces that have kept its racial history hidden until the publication of this book.
White Poplar, Black Locust
Louise Wagenknecht
Oregon State University Press, 2021
Originally published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2003, this first book in Louise Wagenknecht’s trilogy about life in the Klamath Mountains is now available through Oregon State University Press, together with Light on the Devils (2011) and Shadows on the Klamath (2021).
White Rebels in Black
German Appropriation of Black Popular CulturePriscilla Layne
University of Michigan Press, 2018
White Slave Crusades
Race, Gender, and Anti-vice Activism, 1887-1917Brian Donovan
University of Illinois Press, 2005
Focusing on the intersection of race, gender, and sex in the antiprostitution campaigns, Brian Donovan analyzes the reactions of native-born whites to new immigrant groups in Chicago, to African Americans in New York City, and to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco. Donovan shows how reformers employed white slavery narratives of sexual danger to clarify the boundaries of racial categories, allowing native-born whites to speak of a collective "us" as opposed to a "them." These stories about forced prostitution provided an emotionally powerful justification for segregation, as well as other forms of racial and sexual boundary maintenance in urban America.
White Slaves, African Masters
An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity NarrativesEdited by Paul Baepler
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Though Barbary privateers began to seize North American colonists as early as 1625, Barbary captivity narratives did not begin to flourish until after the American Revolution. During these years, stories of Barbary captivity forced the U.S. government to pay humiliating tributes to African rulers, stimulated the drive to create the U.S. Navy, and brought on America's first post-revolutionary war. These tales also were used both to justify and to vilify slavery.
The accounts collected here range from the 1798 tale of John Foss, who was ransomed by Thomas Jefferson's administration for tribute totaling a sixth of the annual federal budget, to the story of Ion Perdicaris, whose (probably staged) abduction in Tangier in 1904 prompted Theodore Roosevelt to send warships to Morocco and inspired the 1975 film The Wind and the Lion. Also included is the unusual story of Robert Adams, a light-skinned African American who was abducted by Arabs and used by them to hunt negro slaves; captured by black villagers who presumed he was white; then was sold back to a group of Arabs, from whom he was ransomed by a British diplomat.
Long out of print and never before anthologized, these fascinating tales open an entirely new chapter of early American literary history, and shed new light on the more familiar genres of Indian captivity narrative and American slave narrative.
White Southerners
Lewis M. Killian
University of Massachusetts Press, 1985
Originally published in 1970 as part of the series Ethnic Groups in Comparative Perspective, White Southerners is widely regarded as a classic in the sociology and history of the American South. In it, Lewis M. Killian, himself a white Southerner and a distinguished sociologist of race relations, advances the provocative and influential argument that white Southerners can be understood as a distinct American ethnic group, shaped by a shared regional identity, history, and culture that sets them apart from other white Americans. Drawing on decades of research into race relations and Southern society, Killian examines the formation and persistence of Southern white identity, its relationship to the broader struggles over race and civil rights, and the tensions between regional loyalty and national belonging. This revised edition includes a new preface and a substantial new concluding chapter that extends the analysis through the period from 1970 to 1984, bringing the study up to date with the transformed landscape of the post-civil rights South. Essential reading for students and scholars of American race relations, regional identity, and the sociology of ethnicity, White Southerners remains a foundational text in Southern studies.
White Violence and Black Response
From Reconstruction to MontgomeryHerbert Shapiro
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988
We are taught that America is a society based on respect for the law and orderly procedures. That the Constitution stands as a safeguard of individual freedom, and the courts and the police are supposedly established to enforce the law. When a controversial issue arises in the American fabric, it is to be resolved not in the streets but through the democratic processes of elections. Yet, for blacks these liberal values have been turned into their opposites. The courts have most often stood silent in the face of racist violence or have turned their wrath against the victims, not the perpetrators; the police have protected the mob rather than the mobbed and have often either aided the lynchers or displayed amazing inability to identify them. Where race is concerned, legislative or judicial action to deal with controversial issues has often come late and been partial in nature, while white violence has continued to terrorize black Americans without hindrance.
In White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery, Herbert Shapiro explores the depths of violence generated by white racism and the irony of the American association with violence as a behavior of black people. Citing the nation's political leadership, educational institutions, and news media as institutions that fail to educate Americans about the oppressive social conditions that have root in these criminal acts, Shapiro is able to expose the ways in which white supremacy operates within American institutions and the responses by black people in this powerful read.
White Waters and Black
Gordon MacCreagh
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin
Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to StoweJoy Jordan-Lake
Vanderbilt University Press, 2005
Whitewashing the Movies
Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film CultureDavid C Oh
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Whither China?
Intellectual Politics in Contemporary ChinaXudong Zhang, ed.
Duke University Press, 2001
The contributors to Whither China? describe how, instead of spearheading the popular-mandated and state-sanctioned project of modernization, intellectuals now find themselves caught amid rapidly changing structures of economic, social, political, and cultural relations that are both global in nature and local in an irreducibly political sense. Individual essays interrogate the space of Chinese intellectual production today, lay out the issues at stake, and cover major debates and discursive interventions from the 1990s. Those who write within the Chinese context are joined by Western observers of contemporary Chinese cultural and intellectual life. Together, these two groups undertake a truly international intellectual struggle not only to interpret but to change the world.
Contributors. Rey Chow, Zhiyuan Cui, Michael Dutton, Gan Yang, Harry Harootunian, Peter Hitchcock, Rebecca Karl, Louisa Schein, Wang Hui, Wang Shaoguang, Xudong Zhang
Whitman among the Bohemians
Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley
University of Iowa Press, 2014
In this milieu, Whitman found sympathetic supporters of his poetic vision, professional connections, rivals, romantic partners, and close friends, and left a lasting impression on poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman, an erstwhile bohemian who later in the century emerged as a tastemaker of American poetry. Yet for many years, the bohemians associated with Pfaff’s have served merely as minor background characters in Whitman scholarship. Whitman among the Bohemians corrects that by exploring in depth the connections Whitman made at Pfaff’s and the impact they had on him, his poetry, and his career. In telling the story of these intersecting social and professional links that converged at Pfaff’s in the late 1850s and early 1860s, the essays in this volume powerfully demonstrate just how much we can learn about Whitman and his work by viewing him within the context of American bohemia.
CONTRIBUTORS: Stephanie Blalock, Ruth Bohan, Leif Eckstrom, Logan Esdale, Amanda Gailey, Karen Karbiener, Joanna Levin, Mary Loeffelholz, Eliza Richards, Ingrid Satelmajer, Robert J. Scholnick, Edward Whitley
Whitman in Poland
The Reception and Role of the American Poet in Polish National CultureMarta A. Skwara
University of Iowa Press, 2020
Poland; how and why the mid-1950s saw the greatest flourish of interest in Whitman as he was read in terms of “socialist realism” in accordance with the political indoctrination of the era; how Whitman’s image in Poland evolved from his first Polish translators and enthusiasts on through modernist poets’ responses; and how reading multiple Polish translations of the same Whitman poem by different translators allows us to see changing cultural and comparative contexts. Readers will get a full picture of how Whitman has functioned as a presence in Polish prose and poetry, and even in cinema and television.
Whitman's Drama of Consensus
Kerry C. Larson
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Whitman's Drift
Imagining Literary DistributionMatt Cohen
University of Iowa Press, 2017
Still, as the budding poet learned, books neither sell themselves nor move themselves: without an efficient set of connections to get books to readers, the democratic media-saturated future Whitman imagined would have remained warehoused. Whitman’s works sometimes ran through the “many-cylinder’d steam printing press” and were carried in bulk on “the strong and quick locomotive.” Yet during his career, his publications did not follow a progressive path toward mass production and distribution. Even at the end of his life, in the 1890s as his fame was growing, the poet was selling copies of his latest works by hand to visitors at his small house in Camden, New Jersey. Mass media and centralization were only one part of the rich media world that Whitman embraced.
Whitman’s Drift asks how the many options for distributing books and newspapers shaped the way writers wrote and readers read. Writers like Whitman spoke to the imagination inspired by media transformations by calling attention to connectedness, to how literature not only moves us emotionally, but moves around in the world among people and places. Studying that literature and how it circulated can help us understand not just how to read Whitman’s works and times, but how to understand what is happening to our imaginations now, in the midst of the twenty-first century media explosion.
Who Can Stop the Drums?
Urban Social Movements in Chávez's VenezuelaSujatha Fernandes
Duke University Press, 2010
Fernandes portrays everyday life and politics in the shantytowns of Caracas through accounts of community-based radio, barrio assemblies, and popular fiestas, and the many interviews she conducted with activists and government officials. Most of the barrio activists she presents are Chávez supporters. They see the leftist president as someone who understands their precarious lives and has made important changes to the state system to redistribute resources. Yet they must balance receiving state resources, which are necessary to fund their community-based projects, with their desire to retain a sense of agency. Fernandes locates the struggles of the urban poor within Venezuela’s transition from neoliberalism to what she calls “post-neoliberalism.” She contends that in contemporary Venezuela we find a hybrid state; while Chávez is actively challenging neoliberalism, the state remains subject to the constraints and logics of global capital.
Who Counts?
The Mathematics of Death and Life after GenocideDiane M. Nelson
Duke University Press, 2015
Who Counts?
The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary AmericaMargo Anderson
Russell Sage Foundation, 2001
Who Freed the Slaves?
The Fight over the Thirteenth AmendmentLeonard L. Richards
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The real story, however, is much more complicated—and dramatic—than that. With Who Freed the Slaves?, distinguished historian Leonard L. Richards tells the little-known story of the battle over the Thirteenth Amendment, and of James Ashley, the unsung Ohio congressman who proposed the amendment and steered it to passage. Taking readers to the floor of Congress and the back rooms where deals were made, Richards brings to life the messy process of legislation—a process made all the more complicated by the bloody war and the deep-rooted fear of black emancipation. We watch as Ashley proposes, fine-tunes, and pushes the amendment even as Lincoln drags his feet, only coming aboard and providing crucial support at the last minute. Even as emancipation became the law of the land, Richards shows, its opponents were already regrouping, beginning what would become a decades-long—and largely successful—fight to limit the amendment’s impact.
Who Freed the Slaves? is a masterwork of American history, presenting a surprising, nuanced portrayal of a crucial moment for the nation, one whose effects are still being felt today.
Who Got the Camera?
A History of Rap and RealityEric Harvey
University of Texas Press, 2021
Reality first appeared in the late 1980s—in the sense not of real life but rather of the TV entertainment genre inaugurated by shows such as Cops and America’s Most Wanted; the daytime gabfests of Geraldo, Oprah, and Donahue; and the tabloid news of A Current Affair. In a bracing work of cultural criticism, Eric Harvey argues that reality TV emerged in dialog with another kind of entertainment that served as its foil while borrowing its techniques: gangsta rap. Or, as legendary performers Ice Cube and Ice-T called it, “reality rap.”
Reality rap and reality TV were components of a cultural revolution that redefined popular entertainment as a truth-telling medium. Reality entertainment borrowed journalistic tropes but was undiluted by the caveats and context that journalism demanded. While N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” countered Cops’ vision of Black lives in America, the reality rappers who emerged in that group’s wake, such as Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur, embraced reality’s visceral tabloid sensationalism, using the media's obsession with Black criminality to collapse the distinction between image and truth. Reality TV and reality rap nurtured the world we live in now, where politics and basic facts don’t feel real until they have been translated into mass-mediated entertainment.
Who Is Mary?
Three Early Modern Women on the Idea of the Virgin MaryVittoria Colonna, Chiara Matraini, and Lucrezia Marinella
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Who Is Mary? testifies to the emotional and spiritual relationships that women had with the figure of Mary, whom they were required to emulate as the epitome of femininity. Now available for the first time in English-language translation, these writings suggest new possibilities for women in both religious and civil culture and provide a window to women’s spirituality, concerning the most important icon set before them, as wives, mothers, and Christians.
Who Is the City For?
Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in ChicagoBlair Kamin
University of Chicago Press, 2022
From his high-profile battles with Donald Trump to his insightful celebrations of Frank Lloyd Wright and front-page takedowns of Chicago mega-projects like Lincoln Yards, Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Blair Kamin has long informed and delighted readers with his illuminating commentary. Kamin’s newest collection, Who Is the City For?, does more than gather fifty-five of his most notable Chicago Tribune columns from the past decade: it pairs his words with striking new images by photographer and architecture critic Lee Bey, Kamin’s former rival at the Chicago Sun-Times. Together, they paint a revealing portrait of Chicago that reaches beyond its glamorous downtown and dramatic buildings by renowned architects like Jeanne Gang to its culturally diverse neighborhoods, including modest structures associated with storied figures from the city’s Black history, such as Emmett Till.
At the book’s heart is its expansive approach to a central concept in contemporary political and architectural discourse: equity. Kamin argues for a broad understanding of the term, one that prioritizes both the shared spaces of the public realm and the urgent need to rebuild Black and brown neighborhoods devastated by decades of discrimination and disinvestment. “At best,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “the public realm can serve as an equalizing force, a democratizing force. It can spread life’s pleasures and confer dignity, irrespective of a person’s race, income, creed, or gender. In doing so, the public realm can promote the social contract — the notion that we are more than our individual selves, that our common humanity is made manifest in common ground.” Yet the reality in Chicago, as Who Is the City For? powerfully demonstrates, often falls painfully short of that ideal.
Who Killed American Poetry?
From National Obsession to Elite PossessionKaren L. Kilcup
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century’s developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets’ class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry’s status in American culture—both in the past and present—and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry’s appeal.
Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.
Who Killed George Polk?
The Press Covers Up a Death in the FamilyElias Vlanton
Temple University Press, 1996
Just weeks after CBS correspondent George Polk was murdered in Greece in 1948, his peers created the "George Polk Award" to honor the best in American journalism. Polk would have been bitterly disappointed, however, had he known that the "best in American journalism" accepted, largely without protest, an investigation into his death in which evidence was not only ignored but manufactured to convict innocent men—an investigation in which politics played a bigger role than the truth.
Reconstructing the murder, investigation, trial, and aftermath, Who Killed George Polk? offers a penetrating analysis of the willingness of the American media—including CBS and a committee of prominent journalists headed by Walter Lippmann—to accept the government's version of events despite numerous inconsistencies. The book also explores the fate of the handful of journalists who had questioned the original coverup and shows that even when additional developments turned the official version on its head, they were no longer in a position to press for a new investigation. All had become victims of anticommunist witchhunts.
Arguing that this mainstream media and the U.S. government were so blinded by cold war political considerations that they overlooked the most obvious culprits for the Polk murder, Elias Vlanton proves that Polk was likely killed neither by the communists, as originally charged, nor by corrupt Greek government officials, as claimed by a recent book and in a CBS "Sixty Minutes" broadcast. Instead, based on evidence uncovered during Vlanton's 19-year investigation, the author presents the only plausible scenario of how and why Polk was murdered.
At its core, this perceptive interrogation explores how the press served U.S. national interests at the expense of the truth and journalistic integrity.
Who Killed John Clayton?
Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861-1893Kenneth C. Barnes
Duke University Press, 1998
More than a description of this particular event, however, Who Killed John Clayton? traces patterns of political violence in this section of the South over a three-decade period. Using vivid courtroom-type detail, Barnes describes how violence was used to define and control the political system in the post-Reconstruction South and how this system in turn produced Jim Crow. Although white Unionists and freed blacks had joined under the banner of the Republican Party and gained the upper hand during Reconstruction, during these last decades of the nineteenth century conservative elites, first organized as the Ku Klux Klan and then as the revived Democratic Party, regained power—via such tactics as murdering political opponents, lynching blacks, and defrauding elections.
This important recounting of the struggle over political power will engage those interested in Southern and American history.
Who Killed Jules Crevaux?
Murder in the Bolivian ChacoIsabelle Combès
HAU, 2023
In 1882, the celebrated French explorer Jules Crevaux and his crew were killed by Indigenous people in the Bolivian Chaco, a fiercely contested region on the border between Bolivia, Argentina, and Paraguay. The event sparked an international uproar. The scene of the crime was embroiled in clashes among various Indigenous peoples, rubber tappers, and missionaries. Official investigators sent from France and competing newspapers ended up mired in a morass of equivocal, ambiguous, false, and contradictory information.
To make sense of this event, Isabelle Combès is the first researcher to consult the local archives and to include the perspective of Indigenous peoples. In search of who killed Crevaux and why, Combès unearths the power struggles and social imaginaries behind the incident and its aftermath. Readers will find not only an engrossing story in these pages but also an exemplar of historical inquiry that questions the very nature of truth-telling.
Who Paid for Modernism?
Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce and LawrenceJoyce Piell Wexler
University of Arkansas Press, 1997
Who Shall Enter Paradise?
Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890–1975Shobana Shankar
Ohio University Press, 2014
Who Tells Your Story
On the Construction of Public MemorySanford Levinson, editor
Duke University Press, 2026
Contributors: Zachary Bray, Deborah R. Gerhardt, Emily Bradley Greenfield, Randall Kennedy, Aleksandra Kuczyńska-Zonik, Larysa Kurylas, Sanford Levinson, Kimberly Probolus, Kermit Roosevelt III, Anna Saunders, Bruce Scates, Richard C. Schragger, and Agata Tatarenko
Who Were the Babylonians?
Bill T. Arnold
SBL Press, 2004
Who is Buried in Chaucer's Tomb?
Studies in the Reception of Chaucer's BookJoseph A. Dane
Michigan State University Press, 1998
Whole Faith
The Catholic Ideal of Emilia Pardo BazanDenise DuPont
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
Whoop-up Country
The Canadian-American West, 1865-1885Paul F. Sharp
University of Minnesota Press, 1955
Whoop-up Country was first published in 1955. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In the frontier days before the railroads penetrated the western plains, the Whoop-Up Trail was a high road of adventure and commerce. It led Indians, traders, and cattlemen into a great interior market stretching northward from the Missouri River in Montana to the Bow River valley in the Canadian province of Alberta. From Fort Benton on the Great Muddy to Fort Macleod on the Oldman, the trail with the rowdy name wrote its history in whisky, guns, furs, and pioneer enterprise.
But, as the Whoop-Up Trail faded away with the passing of the western frontier, people forgot about its existence and its part in the building of the West. Historians have largely overlooked this colorful chapter in the story of westward migration.
Now Paul Sharp tells about the Whoop-Up country in vivid detail. By first describing the region geographically, he demonstrates an important point—that there was no natural boundary in this area between Canada and the United States. He then relates the economic, social, and political events that ultimately divided the territory between the two nations in fact as well as in name.
The volume contains an excellent account of the beginnings of the Northwest Mounted Police. It provides a fresh viewpoint on the Indian problem by considering it impartially and as a whole, without the restricting and artificial limitations of national boundaries. Told by a perceptive and forceful writer, this is the story of the creation of two societies—Canadian and American—formed under similar circumstances yet developing very different political and cultural identities.
Whose Agency
The Politics and Practice of Kenya's HIV-Prevention NGOsMegan Hershey
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
By focusing on one particular type of NGO—those organized to help prevent the spread and transmission of HIV in Kenya—Megan Hershey interrogates the ways these organizations achieve (or fail to achieve) their planned outcomes. Along the way, she examines the slippery slope that is often used to define “success” based on meeting donor-set goals versus locally identified needs. She also explores the complex network of bureaucratic requirements at both the national and local levels that affect the delicate relationships NGOs have with the state. Drawing on extensive, original quantitative and qualitative research, Whose Agency serves as a much-needed case study for understanding the strengths and shortcomings of participatory development and community engagement.
Whose America?
Culture Wars in the Public SchoolsJonathan Zimmerman
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Critical Race Theory. The 1619 Project. Mask mandates. As the headlines remind us, American public education is still wracked by culture wars. But these conflicts have shifted sharply over the past two decades, marking larger changes in the ways that Americans imagine themselves. In his 2002 book, Whose America?, Zimmerman predicted that religious differences would continue to dominate the culture wars. Twenty years after that seminal work, Zimmerman has reconsidered: arguments over what American history is, what it means, and how it is taught have exploded with special force in recent years. In this substantially expanded new edition, Zimmerman meditates on the history of the culture wars in the classroom—and on what our inability to find common ground might mean for our future.
Whose America?
Culture Wars in the Public SchoolsJonathan Zimmerman
University of Chicago Press, 2022
In this expanded edition of his 2002 book, Zimmerman surveys how battles over public education have become conflicts at the heart of American national identity.
Critical Race Theory. The 1619 Project. Mask mandates. As the headlines remind us, American public education is still wracked by culture wars. But these conflicts have shifted sharply over the past two decades, marking larger changes in the ways that Americans imagine themselves. In his 2002 book, Whose America?, Zimmerman predicted that religious differences would continue to dominate the culture wars. Twenty years after that seminal work, Zimmerman has reconsidered: arguments over what American history is, what it means, and how it is taught have exploded with special force in recent years. In this substantially expanded new edition, Zimmerman meditates on the history of the culture wars in the classroom—and on what our inability to find common ground might mean for our future.
Whose America?
U.S. Immigration Policy since 1980Edited by Maria Cristina Garcia and Maddalena Marinari
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Up-to-date yet rooted in history, Whose America? provides a sophisticated account of recent immigration policy while mapping the ideological struggle to answer an essential question: which people have the right to make America their home or refuge?
Contributors: Leisy Abrego, Carl Bon Tempo, Julio Capó, Jr., Carly Goodman, Julia Rose Kraut, Monique Laney, Carl Lindskoog, Yael Schacher, and Elliott Young
Whose Fair?
Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis ExpositionJames Gilbert
University of Chicago Press, 2009
The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair was a major event in early-twentieth-century America. Attracting millions of tourists, it exemplified the Victorian predilection for public spectacle. The Fair has long served as a touchstone for historians interested in American culture prior to World War I and has endured in the memories of generations of St. Louis residents and visitors. In Whose Fair? James Gilbert asks: what can we learn about the lived experience of fairgoers when we compare historical accounts, individual and collective memories, and artifacts from the event?
Exploring these differing, at times competing, versions of history and memory prompts Gilbert to dig through a rich trove of archival material. He examines the papers of David Francis, the Fair’s president and subsequent chief archivist; guidebooks and other official publications; the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis; diaries, oral histories, and other personal accounts; and a collection of striking photographs. From this dazzling array of sources, Gilbert paints a lively picture of how fairgoers spent their time, while also probing the ways history and memory can complement each other.
Whose India?
The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and HistoryTeresa Hubel
Duke University Press, 1996
Hubel collapses the boundary between literature and history by emphasizing the selected nature of the “facts” that comprise historical texts, and by demonstrating the historicity of fiction. In analyzing the orthodox construction of the British/Indian encounter, Hubel calls into question assumptions about the end of nationalism implicit in mainstream histories and fiction, which generally describe a battleground on which only ruling-class Indians and British meet. Marginalized texts by women, untouchables, and overt imperialists alike are, therefore, examined alongside the well-known work of figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Jawaharlal Nehru, E. M. Forster, and Mahatma Gandhi.
In Whose India? discursive ownership and resistance to ownership are mutually constructing categories. As a result, the account of Indian nationalism and British imperialism that emerges is much more complicated, multivocal, and even more contradictory than previous studies have imagined. Of interest to students and scholars engaged in literary, historical, colonial/postcolonial, subaltern, and Indian studies, Whose India? will also attract readers concerned with gender issues and the canonization of texts.
Whose Liberty is it Anyway?
Europe at the CrossroadsStefan Auer
Seagull Books, 2012
Europe's turn of fortune is humbling, humiliating and, perhaps, irreversible. What went wrong, and when? Europe's most audacious moment occurred sometime between 1989 and 1991, a brief period that encapsulated both the demise of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the bold steps forward on the path towards an 'ever-closer union' in Western Europe. Twenty years later, the dramatic failures of economic and political integration have forced Europeans to re-consider the underpinnings of their project. The economic crisis of 2010-11 also manifested itself as a crisis of European democracy. Old questions acquired new meaning: Is it possible to maintain conditions for self-government while undermining the nation-state? What are the limits of solidarity? Can Europe be truly united through its common history, or its common currency? Is further unity in Europe even desirable?
In Whose Liberty Is It Anyway? Stefan Auer exposes the limits of the current European project by interrogating some of its many incongruities, particularly when it comes to its commitment to freedom. The author argues that the calls for more European solidarity are not convincing when Europe's poor are asked to pay for the mistakes of those who are more fortunate. Europe's unity, Auer asserts, can only be maintained by accepting its limitations and by beginning to fulfill some of its many promises.
Whose National Music?
Identity, Mestizaje, and Migration in EcuadorKetty Wong
Temple University Press, 2012
Musical genres, musical instruments, and even songs can often capture the essence of a country's national character. In Whose National Music?, the first book-length study of Ecuadorian popular music, Ketty Wong explores Ecuadorians' views of their national identity in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through an examination of the music labels they use. Wong deftly addresses the notion of música nacional, an umbrella term for Ecuadorian popular songs often defined by the socio-economic, ethnic, racial, and generational background of people discussing the music.
Wong shows how the inclusion or exclusion of elite and working-class musics within the scope of música nacional articulate different social, ethnic, and racial configurations of the nation for white, mestizo, indigenous, and Afro-Ecuadorian populations.
Presenting a macropicture of what música nacional is—or should be—Whose National Music? provides a lively historical trajectory of a country's diverse musical scene.
Why Europe?
The Medieval Origins of Its Special PathMichael Mitterauer
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Why did capitalism and colonialism arise in Europe and not elsewhere? Why were parliamentarian and democratic forms of government founded there? What factors led to Europe’s unique position in shaping the world? Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, Why Europe? tackles these classic questions with illuminating results.
Michael Mitterauer traces the roots of Europe’s singularity to the medieval era, specifically to developments in agriculture. While most historians have located the beginning of Europe’s special path in the rise of state power in the modern era, Mitterauer establishes its origins in rye and oats. These new crops played a decisive role in remaking the European family, he contends, spurring the rise of individualism and softening the constraints of patriarchy. Mitterauer reaches these conclusions by comparing Europe with other cultures, especially China and the Islamic world, while surveying the most important characteristics of European society as they took shape from the decline of the Roman empire to the invention of the printing press. Along the way, Why Europe? offers up a dazzling series of novel hypotheses to explain the unique evolution of European culture.
Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals)
A HistoryKevin M. Schultz
University of Chicago Press, 2025
If there’s one thing most Americans can agree on, it’s that everyone hates white liberals. Conservatives hate them for being culturally tolerant and threatening to usher in communism. Libertarians hate them for believing in the power of the state. Socialists hate them for serving as capitalism’s beard. Even liberals hate liberals—either because they can’t manage to overcome their own prejudices, or precisely because they’re so self-hating.
This is the starting point for Kevin M. Schultz’s lively new history of white liberals in the United States. He efficiently lays out the array of objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian, and more—in a historical frame that shows how protean the concept has been throughout the past hundred years. It turns out, he declares, that how you define a “white liberal” is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your own anxieties.
Sharply assessing how decades of attacks on liberals and liberalism have steadily hollowed out the center of American political life, Schultz also explains precisely what needs to be done to avoid digging ourselves even further into the hole of polarization. The ultimate goal, he argues, is to achieve political fragmentation that will fuel the rise of a true multiparty system, where ideology will matter more, not less.
With a tight command of postwar American history and a spirited voice, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals) is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand—and envision a way forward in—the complicated landscape of American politics.
Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China
David Der-wei Wang
Brandeis University Press, 2020
Contemporary discussions of China tend to focus on politics and economics, giving Chinese culture little if any attention. Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers a corrective, revealing the crucial role that fiction plays in helping contemporary Chinese citizens understand themselves and their nation. Where history fails to address the consequences of man-made and natural atrocities, David Der-Wei Wang argues, fiction arises to bear witness to the immemorial and unforeseeable.
Beginning by examining President Xi Jinping’s call in 2013 to “tell the good China story,” Wang illuminates how contemporary Chinese cultural politics have taken a “fictional turn,” which can trace its genealogy to early modern times. He does so by addressing a series of discourses by critics within China, including Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Shen Congwen, as well as critics from the West such as Arendt, Benjamin, and Deleuze. Wang highlights the variety and vitality of fictional works from China as well as the larger Sinophone world, ranging from science fiction to political allegory, erotic escapade to utopia and dystopia. The result is an insightful account of contemporary China, one that affords countless new insights and avenues for understanding.
Why I Burned My Book
Paul Longmore
Temple University Press, 2003
Why Is English Like That?
Historical Answers to Hard ELT QuestionsNorbert Schmitt and Richard Marsden
University of Michigan Press, 2006
The book outlines the historical events that shaped English; describes how its grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation developed over time; and highlights the "quirks" and "exceptions" in English that can be explained on a historical basis. By understanding how the English of today evolved from the English of past times, both teachers and students will be more comfortable with the many conventions of the English language.
Why Is English Like That? also contains reproducible grammar and vocabulary exercises that will help teachers incorporate some of this historical knowledge into classroom activities. This book was written with English language teachers in mind, and the exercises are designed for ESL/EFL students, but it may also be used by teachers in training (L1 and L2).
Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)
Sam Wineburg
University of Chicago Press, 2018
With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? Sam Wineburg has answers, beginning with this: We definitely can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we’ve subjected students to for decades. If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we have to explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools. Historical thinking, Wineburg shows us in Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), has nothing to do with test prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments—including surveys of students, recent attempts to update history curricula, and analyses of how historians, students, and even fact checkers approach online sources—to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all learn to navigate.
It’s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair. Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way. The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands.
Why Mariah Carey Matters
Andrew Chan
University of Texas Press, 2023
The first book to critically examine the legacy of pop superstar Mariah Carey.
When it comes to Mariah Carey, star power is never in doubt. She has sold hundreds of millions of albums and cut more chart-topping hits than any other solo artist—ever. And she has that extraordinary five-octave vocal range. But there is more to her legacy than eye-popping numbers.
Why Mariah Carey Matters examines the creative evolution and complicated biography of a true diva, making the case that, despite her celebrity, Carey’s musicianship and influence are insufficiently appreciated. A pioneering songwriter and producer, Carey pairs her vocal gifts with intimate lyrics and richly layered sonic details. In the mid-1990s, she perfected a blend of pop, hip-hop, and R&B with songs such as “Fantasy” and “Honey” and drew from her turbulent life to create the introspective masterpiece Butterfly. Andrew Chan looks beyond Carey’s glamorous persona to explore her experience as a mixed-race woman in show business, her adventurous forays into house music and gospel, and her appeal to multiple generations of queer audiences. He also reckons with the transcendent ideal of the voice that Carey represents, showing how this international icon taught artists around the world to sing with soul-shaking intensity and a spirit of innovation.