Results by title

Weaving insightful analysis into a collective biography of gospel icons, When Sunday Comes explores the music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves.

The 1970s in Mexico were turbulent from the start. Insurgent voices converged across cities and rural peripheries. Militant labor, urban popular sectors, and Indigenous collectives erupted in expressions of broad social exhaustion. Rebellion, rooted in the layered betrayals of the postrevolutionary state and the fractures of a deteriorating modernity under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), fermented and boiled over.

At the core of this moment, Mexican youth found their way to political-military organizations, coalescing around shared ecologies of dissent and embedded in broader currents of revolutionary struggle. When Working Class Youth Dreamt in Red reconstructs these insurgent youth cultures and guerrilla imaginaries, reorienting the historiographical lens to center radical working class youth—especially urban students—as protagonists in a wider saga of revolutionary experimentation and political rupture. 

At its conceptual core, this book offers a bold new interpretation of a turbulent moment in Mexican history. It shows how class shaped the epistemic horizons through which proletarian youth understood themselves and makes visible their role as central actors at the vanguard of a revolutionary time.

In this powerful book, Haney explores the impact of war on an American family. He skillfully weaves together those memories with his parents' wartime letters and his mother's recollections to create a unique blend of history and memoir. Through his father's letters he reveals the war's effect on a man who fought in the Battle of the Bulge with the 17th Airborne but wanted nothing more than to return home. Haney illuminates life on the home front in small-town America as well, describing how profoundly the war changed such communities.

With When Is Daddy Coming Home?, Richard Haney makes an exceptional contribution to the literature on the Greatest Generation—one that is both devastatingly personal and representative of what families all over America endured during that testing time.

A study of the evolution of American women's clothing, When the Girls Came Out to Play traces the history of modern sportswear as a universal style that broke down traditional gender roles. Patricia Warner shows how this profound cultural shift, which did not reach fruition until World War II, originated during the previous century with the gradual expansion of socially acceptable physical activity for women. Behind this development was a growing interest in sports and exercise that was further nurtured by the establishment of schools of higher education for women. The participation of women in athletic pursuits previously reserved for men began with the relatively genteel sports of croquet and tennis. With the founding of women's colleges, these “ladylike” games were supplemented by more vigorous activities and competitive team sports, from gymnastics to swimming to basketball. At first, Warner points out, women literally had nothing to wear for these activities. Whereas such fashionable attire as corsets, petticoats, hats, and gloves could be worn while playing outdoor lawn games, more strenuous athletic endeavors required less physically restrictive clothing. Even so, change came only gradually, as women's colleges, shielded from public scrutiny and prying male eyes, permitted the adoption of looser, more comfortable apparel for physical education. Many of these new outfits featured trousers, garments considered taboo for women, though they often remained hidden beneath voluminous skirts.

Over time, however, the practicality and versatility of such clothing led to social acceptance, laying the foundation for the emergence of the now ubiquitous yet distinctly American style known as sportswear. Although we take it for granted, Warner observes, this is the first time in the history of the world that such universality has existed in clothing, and it has lasted now for well over half a century—in itself a marvel, considering the speed of fashion change in an era of instant messages and images.

Recounts the hardships and joys the Kilgore family and their neighbors experienced in a close-knit southern rural community during the Great Depression

As the Great Depression tightened its grip on the world, six members of the Kilgore family were living in a cramped farmhouse in Brookwood, Alabama. Crops didn’t grow well, food was scarce, shoes were in short supply, and the few clothes they had were all hand-me-downs. The Kilgores struggled to make ends meet, cobbling together odd jobs and working the land by hand.

Despite all of this, young Aileen thought life was full of hope. She longed to hold on to it and scribbled down daily events on whatever odds and ends of paper she could find. In her new memoir, When the Wolf Camped at Our Door, Aileen Kilgore Henderson creates a vivid portrait of what life was like for so many living in the rural South during the Depression. The book begins when Aileen is ten years old and follows her into her teenage years over the course of twenty-seven episodic chapters. Drawing on her girlhood diaries and told through the charismatic voice of her younger self, Henderson’s nuanced storytelling sheds light on the common struggle for survival during a time when people were at their most vulnerable.

Against the backdrop of a world where hard work and harsh conditions like hunger, privation, sickness, and early death were everyday realities, Henderson’s stories are nevertheless tinged with young Aileen’s lively sense of humor and optimistic faith in people and in the promise of life despite trying circumstances. We follow her rambles in the woods, her visits with friends, a trip to a fortune teller, and a search for the Howton Horror, a mysterious monster rumored to live deep in the Alabama backwoods.
 

Where Currents Meet, Tanya Zaharchenko’s path-breaking study of literature and cultural memory, moves decisively beyond the simplistic view of a post-Soviet Ukraine divided between east and west. It positions the Ukrainian and Russian components of cultural experience in the country’s east as elements of a complex continuum. Combining insights from memory studies and border studies, Zaharchenko analyzes a generation of younger riters in the city of Kharkiv—a “doubletake generation” that came of age at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse and now revisits this experience through fiction. In the works of Serhiy Zhadan, Andreĭ Krasniashchikh, Yuri Tsaplin, Oleh Kotsarev, and others the author reveals how borderlands and frontiers, both geographical and conceptual, acquire zonal qualities of their own as these writers navigate the historical legacy they have inherited.

When Where the Wild Grape Grows was published in 2005 by the University of Massachusetts Press, it was the first book-length critical study of Dorothy West. Since then, the publication of more volumes on West and her circle testify to popular and academic interest in under-represented artists of the Harlem Renaissance, many of whom appeared first in West’s literary magazine, Challenge (1934-1937). Challenge included poems by West’s cousin Helene Johnson as well as by her friends Lucia Mae Pitts, Waring Cuney, Pauli Murray, Grace Walker, Mae Cowdery, Marcia Prendergast, and Bessie Calhoun Bird. West also published work by her romantic partner Marian Minus and by Juanita DeShields (the first Black Canadian graduate of McGill University) and the Trinidadian author Alfred Mendes. She included artwork by Mildred Jones and journalism by Eslanda Robeson and Dorothy Peterson. In addition to her editorial activities, West corresponded with important African American musicians including Maud Cuney Hare, Alberta Hunter, and Henry T. Burleigh, and with sculptors Augusta Savage and Richmond Barthé. Just as West mentored others, she was encouraged by such academic luminaries as Columbia Professors Blanche Colton Williams and Dorothy Scarborough, and by the controversial novelist Erskine Caldwell.

The new Introduction to Wild Grape will include fresh research on these individuals, many of whom formed part of West’s social and artistic circle. Lucia Pitts, for example, was a poet who served in the famous WAC (Women’s Army Corps) 6888th Battalion. The work of Marian Minus and Mae Cowdery has received critical attention recently and they also merit closer investigation. The Boston writer and musicologist Maud Cuney Hare was an artistic mentor to West; her cousin Waring Cuney was a close friend: both will receive more attention in the paperback edition. The artist Mildred Jones accompanied West and twenty other young African Americans to Russia in 1932 as participants in an ultimately aborted propaganda film on race relations in America; Jones studied with the important Russian Modernist painter Aleksandr Deyneka.

The original edition of Wild Grape cites two stories about West’s Russian experiences (penned under the pseudonym Mary Christopher in 1934), “Room in Red Square” and “Russian Correspondence,” but the volume does not include the actual stories. The stories are interesting because they shed light on West’s unrequited romance with Langston Hughes and her relationships with other members of the group, and they offer a unique perspective on daily life in the U.S.S.R. Both stories will be published in the new edition, along with a detailed discussion of new research about West’s visit to Russia.

A third uncollected story, “Cook” (1934), written by West under the pseudonym Jane Isaac will also be included. This story is extremely important to West’s oeuvre and her artistic development; it includes characters, themes, tropes, and plot lines that she expanded and developed in her two novels, The Living Is Easy (1948) and The Wedding (1995).

Since 2005, new material has been added to the West archive in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library. The section of Wild Grape devoted to West’s correspondence will include additional unpublished letters which underscore West’s dedication to African American art and culture.

The book includes the Benson-West family tree in Appendix II. Several scholars have expressed appreciation for this information which has not been published elsewhere; the chart will be updated to include the birth of several of West’s descendants.

What might a sensible community choose to do if its economy has fallen apart and becoming a ghost town is not an acceptable option? Unfortunately, answers to this question have long been measured against an implicit standard: the postwar economy of the 1950s. After showing why that economy provides an implausible standard—made possible by the lack of economic competition from the European and Asian countries, winners or losers, touched by the war—John Henry Schlegel attempts to answer the question of what to do.

While Waiting for Rain first examines the economic history of the United States as well as that of Buffalo, New York: an appropriate stand-in for any city that may have seen its economy start to fall apart in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. It makes clear that neither Buffalo nor the United States as a whole has had an economy in the sense of “a persistent market structure that is the fusion of an understanding of economic life with the patterns of behavior within the economic, political, and social institutions that enact that understanding” since both economies collapsed. Next, this book builds a plausible theory of how economic growth might take place by examining the work of the famous urbanist, Jane Jacobs, especially her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Her work, like that of many others, emphasizes the importance of innovation for economic growth, but is singular in its insistence that such innovation has to come from local resources. It can neither be bought nor given, even by well-intentioned political actors. As a result Americans generally, as well as locally, are like farmers in the midst of a drought, left to review their resources and wait. Finally, it returns to both the local Buffalo and the national economies to consider what these political units might plausibly do while waiting for an economy to emerge.

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

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.

Barack Obama has called him “one of my favorite philosophers.” John McCain wrote that he is “a paragon of clarity about the costs of a good war.” Andrew Sullivan has said, “We need Niebuhr now more than ever.” For a theologian who died in 1971, Reinhold Niebuhr is maintaining a remarkably high profile in the twenty-first century.

In Why Niebuhr Now? acclaimed historian John Patrick Diggins tackles the complicated question of why, at a time of great uncertainty about America’s proper role in the world, leading politicians and thinkers are turning to Niebuhr for answers. Diggins begins by clearly and carefully working through Niebuhr’s theology, which focuses less on God’s presence than his absence—and the ways that absence abets the all-too-human sin of pride. He then shows how that theology informed Niebuhr’s worldview, leading him to be at the same time a strong opponent of fascism and communism and a leading advocate for humility and caution in foreign policy.

Turning to the present, Diggins highlights what he argues is a misuse of Niebuhr’s legacy on both the right and the left: while neoconservatives distort Niebuhr’s arguments to support their call for an endless war on terror in the name of stopping evil, many liberal interventionists conveniently ignore Niebuhr’s fundamental doubts about power. Ultimately, Niebuhr’s greatest lesson is that, while it is our duty to struggle for good, we must at the same time be wary of hubris, remembering the limits of our understanding.

The final work from a distinguished writer who spent his entire career reflecting on America’s history and promise, Why Niebuhr Now? is a compact and perceptive book that will be the starting point for all future discussions of Niebuhr.

Why do civilians suffer most during times of violent conflict? Why are civilian fatalities as much as eight times higher, calculated globally for current conflicts, than military fatalities? In Why They Die, Daniel Rothbart and Karina V. Korostelina address these questions through a systematic study of civilian devastation in violent conflicts. Pushing aside the simplistic definition of war as a guns-and-blood battle between two militant groups, the authors investigate the identity politics underlying conflicts of many types. During a conflict, all those on the opposite side are perceived as the enemy, with little distinction between soldiers and civilians. As a result, random atrocities and systematic violence against civilian populations become acceptable.

Rothbart and Korostelina devote the first half of the book to case studies: deportation of the Crimean Tatars from the Ukraine, genocide in Rwanda, the Lebanon War, and the war in Iraq. With the second half, they present new methodological tools for understanding different types of violent conflict and discuss the implications of these tools for conflict resolution.