Results by title
28167 books match the query 'History' and 1118 start with w
We Were Still Ladies
Gender and Industrial Unionism in the Midwest after World War IICoreen Derifield
University of Iowa Press, 2025
How did this transition into industrial work affect a woman’s sense of self? How did this new workforce change the dynamic of families and communities? While women choosing to work outside of the home may seem to have been a mundane decision, it caused tremendous change within families and with household roles. These alterations in daily life rippled throughout midwestern culture and society, even changing the landscape of small towns into decentralized industrial centers.
We Were the People
Voices from East Germany’s Revolutionary Autumn of 1989Dirk Philipsen
Duke University Press, 1993
The drama We Were the People recreates is remarkable for its richness and complexity. Here are citizens organizing despite threats of bloody crackdowns; party functionaries desperately trying to survive as time-honored political prerogatives crumble beneath their feet; an oppressed people discovering the possibilities of power and freedom, but also the sobering strangeness of new political realities. With their success, East Germans encountered the overpowering might of thie Western neighbor--and stand perplexed before the onslaught of real estate agents, glossy consumer ads, political professionalism--and the discovery that a lifetime of social experience has suddenly lost all usable context. They became, in the words of one participant, a people "without biography."
Over all the recent events and unlikely turns recounted here, one thing remains paramount: the sweep of the initial democratic conception that animated the East German revolution. We Were the People brings this movement to life in all its drama and detail, and vividly recovers a historic moment that altered forever the shape of modern Europe.
Some Voices of the People
Bärbel Bohley/ "Mother of the Revolution"
Rainer Eppelmann/ Protestant Pastor
Klaus Kaden/ Church Emissary to the Opposition
Hans Modrow/ Former Communist Prime Minister
Ludwig Mehlhorn/ Opposition Theorist
Ingrid Köppe/ Opposition Representative
Frank Eigenfeld/ New Forum
Harald Wagner/ Democracy Now
Sebastian Pflugbeil/ Democratic Strategist
East German Workers
Cornelia Matzke/ Independent Women's Alliance
André Brie/ Party Vice-Chairman
Gerhard Ruden/ Environmental Activist
Werner Bramke/ Party Academic
We Who Love to Be Astonished
Experimental Women's Writing and Performance PoeticsLaura Hinton
University of Alabama Press, 2001
The first critical volume devoted to the full range of women's postmodern works
We Who Love to Be Astonished collects a powerful group of previously unpublished essays to fill a gap in the critical evaluation of women's contributions to postmodern experimental writing. Contributors include Alan Golding, Aldon Nielsen, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis; discussions include analyses of the work of Kathleen Fraser, Harryette Mullen, and Kathy Acker, among others. The editors take as their title a line from the work of Lyn Hejinian, one of the most respected of innovative women poets writing today.
The volume is organized into four sections: the first two seek to identify, from two different angles, the ways women of different sociocultural backgrounds are exploring their relationships to their cultures' inherited traditions; the third section investigates the issue of visuality and the problems and challenges it creates; and the fourth section expands on the role of the body as material and performance.
The collection will breach a once irreconcilable divide between those who theorize about women's writing and those who focus on formalist practice. By embracing "astonishment" as the site of formalist-feminist investigation, the editors seek to show how form configures feminist thought, and, likewise, how feminist thought informs words and letters on a page. Students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, women's writing, and late-20th-century American literature will welcome this lively discussion.
We Will Always Be Here
A Guide to Exploring and Understanding the History of LGBTQ+ Activism in WisconsinJenny Kalvaitis
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2021
We Will Always Be Here shines a light on powerful and often untold stories from Wisconsin’s history, featuring individuals across a wide spectrum of identities and from all corners of the state. The LGBTQ+ people, allies, and activists in this guide changed the world by taking steps that young people can take today—by educating themselves, telling their own stories, being true to themselves, building communities, and getting active. The aim of this celebratory book is not only to engage young people in Wisconsin’s LGBTQ+ history, but also to empower them to make positive change in the world.
We Will Secure Our Future
Empowering the Navajo NationPeterson Zah and Peter Iverson
University of Arizona Press, 2012
And so began a career that took Zah to the presidency of the Navajo Nation. His life and accomplishments have exemplified the ongoing efforts by American Indian communities to gain greater control over their lives and lands. He has made important contributions in many areas, but education has always been one of his main priorities. Perhaps no one in the Southwest has done more than Peterson Zah to increase the recruitment, retention, and graduation of American Indian students from colleges and universities.
Zah's presentations to Peter Iverson's classes at Arizona State University, employed examples drawn from his own experiences. Students praised his thoughtful, honest and direct observations. He reinforced a central theme in Iverson's classesthat Indian history encompasses triumph as well as tragedy and victory as well as victimization.
This book grew out of Iverson's determination to share Zah's insights with a wider audience. The two met every few months to consider many subjects related to Zah's life. These sessions formed the foundation for this volume.
Part autobiography, part interview, and part conversation, Zah and Iverson's account touches on a wide range of overlapping topics, but two central themes prevail: education and empowerment. We Will Secure Our Future is a fascinating look into the life of a man who became a respected visionary and passionate advocate for his people.
We are an Indian Nation
A History of the Hualapai PeopleJeffrey P. Shepherd
University of Arizona Press, 2010
This book focuses on the historical construction of the Hualapai Nation in the face of modern American colonialism. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and participant observation, Jeffrey Shepherd describes how thirteen bands of extended families known as The Pai confronted American colonialism and in the process recast themselves as a modern Indigenous nation.
Shepherd shows that Hualapai nation-building was a complex process shaped by band identities, competing visions of the past, creative reactions to modernity, and resistance to state power. He analyzes how the Hualapais transformed an externally imposed tribal identity through nationalist discourses of protecting aboriginal territory; and he examines how that discourse strengthened the Hualapais’ claim to land and water while simultaneously reifying a politicized version of their own history. Along the way, he sheds new light on familiar topics—Indian–white conflict, the creation of tribal government, wage labor, federal policy, and Native activism—by applying theories of race, space, historical memory, and decolonization.
Drawing on recent work in American Indian history and Native American studies, Shepherd shows how the Hualapai have strived to reclaim a distinct identity and culture in the face of ongoing colonialism. We Are an Indian Nation is grounded in Hualapai voices and agendas while simultaneously situating their history in the larger tapestry of Native peoples’ confrontations with colonialism and modernity.
We'll Always Have Paris
American Tourists in France since 1930Harvey Levenstein
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Harvey Levenstein takes us back to the 1930s, when, despite the Great Depression, France continued to be the stomping ground of the social elite of the eastern seaboard. After World War II, wealthy and famous Americans returned to the country in droves, helping to revive its old image as a wellspring of sophisticated and sybaritic pleasures. At the same time, though, thanks in large part to Communist and Gaullist campaigns against U.S. power, a growing sensitivity to French anti-Americanism began to color tourists' experiences there, strengthening the negative images of the French that were already embedded in American culture. But as the century drew on, the traditional positive images were revived, as many Americans again developed an appreciation for France's cuisine, art, and urban and rustic charms.
Levenstein, in his colorful, anecdotal style, digs into personal correspondence, journalism, and popular culture to shape a story of one nation's relationship to another, giving vivid play to Americans' changing response to such things as France's reputation for sexual freedom, haute cuisine, high fashion, and racial tolerance. He puts this tumultuous coupling of France and the United States in historical perspective, arguing that while some in Congress say we may no longer have french fries, others, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, know they will always have Paris, and France, to enjoy and remember.
We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down
Memoir of a Gravedigger’s DaughterRachael Hanel
University of Minnesota Press, 2013
Rachael Hanel’s name was inscribed on a gravestone when she was eleven years old. Yet this wasn’t at all unusual in her world: her father was a gravedigger in the small Minnesota town of Waseca, and death was her family’s business. Her parents were forty-two years old and in good health when they erected their gravestone—Rachael’s name was simply a branch on the sprawling family tree etched on the back of the stone. As she puts it: I grew up in cemeteries.
And you don’t grow up in cemeteries—surrounded by headstones and stories, questions, curiosity—without becoming an adept and sensitive observer of death and loss as experienced by the people in this small town. For Rachael Hanel, wandering among tombstones, reading the names, and wondering about the townsfolk and their lives, death was, in many ways, beautiful and mysterious. Death and mourning: these she understood. But when Rachael’s father—Digger O’Dell—passes away suddenly when she is fifteen, she and her family are abruptly and harshly transformed from bystanders to participants. And for the first time, Rachael realizes that death and grief are very different.
At times heartbreaking and at others gently humorous and uplifting, We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down presents the unique, moving perspective of a gravedigger’s daughter and her lifelong relationship with death and grief. But it is also a masterful meditation on the living elements of our cemeteries: our neighbors, friends, and families—the very histories of our towns and cities—and how these things come together in the eyes of a young girl whose childhood is suffused with both death and the wonder of the living.
We're Going to Run This City
Winnipeg's Political Left after the General StrikeStefan Epp-Koop
University of Manitoba Press, 2015
We've Been Here All Along
Wisconsin's Early Gay HistoryR. Richard Wagner
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2020
In We’ve Been Here All Along, R. Richard Wagner draws on historical research and materials from his own extensive archive to uncover previously hidden stories of gay Wisconsinites. This book honors their legacy and confirms that they have been foundational to the development and evolution of the state since its earliest days
We, Too, Are Americans
African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940-54Megan Taylor Shockley
University of Illinois Press, 2003
As demands on them intensified, the women working to provide American troops with clothing, medical supplies, and other services became increasingly aware of their key role in the war effort. A considerable number of the African Americans among them began to use their indispensability to leverage demands for equal employment, welfare and citizenship benefits, fair treatment, good working conditions, and other considerations previously denied them.
Shockley shows that as these women strove to redefine citizenship, backing up their claims to equality with lawsuits, sit-ins, and other forms of activism, they were forging tools that civil rights activists would continue to use in the years to come.
We, the People
Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern EuropeDiana Mishkova
Central European University Press, 2009
Weakness of Will from Plato to the Present (Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, Volume 49)
Tobias Hoffmann
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
Wealth Woman
Kate Carmack and the Klondike Race for GoldDeb Vanasse
University of Alaska Press, 2016
In Wealth Woman, Deb Vanasse recounts Kate’s life from her early years on the frontier with George, through the history-making discovery of gold, and on to her subsequent fame, when she traveled alone down the West Coast through Washington and California, telling her story and fighting for her wealth, her family, and her reputation. Recovering the lost story of a true pioneer and a fiercely independent woman, Wealth Woman brings gold rush Alaska to life in all its drama and glory.
Wealth, Commerce, and Philosophy
Foundational Thinkers and Business EthicsEdited by Eugene Heath and Byron Kaldis
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Spanning the history of western philosophy as well as looking toward classical Chinese thought and medieval Islamic philosophy, this volume provides business ethicists a unified source of clear, accurate, and compelling accounts of how the ideas of foundational thinkers—from Aristotle to Friedrich Hayek to Amartya Sen—relate to wealth, commerce, and markets. The essays illuminate perspectives that have often been ignored or forgotten, informing discussion in fresh and often unexpected ways. In doing so, the authors not only throw into relief common misunderstandings and misappropriations often endemic to business ethics but also set forth rich moments of contention as well as novel ways of approaching complex ethical problems. Ultimately, this volume provides a bedrock of moral thought that will move business ethics beyond the ever-changing opinions of headline-driven debate.
Weapons for Victory
The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years LaterRobert James Maddox
University of Missouri Press, 2004
The highly acclaimed Weapons for Victory originally appeared in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Now, in this paperback edition, Robert James Maddox provides a new introduction about the ongoing controversy related to the decision to bomb Hiroshima.
Weapons of Choice
The Development of Precision Guided MunitionsPaul G. Gillespie
University of Alabama Press, 2006
A military history study that traces the development of precision‑guided munitions from World War I through the Gulf War, examining how advances in weapons technology reshaped air power, military strategy, and U.S. national security policy.
In the United States, efforts to develop precision guided munitions—PGMs—began during the First World War and resulted in an 'aerial torpedo' by the 1920s. While World War II was dominated by large-scale strategic bombing—essentially throwing out tons of free-falling munitions in the hope they hit something important—both sides in the war worked to develop airborne munitions that could be steered toward a target. However after that war, U.S. national security policy focused on the atomic bomb, hardly a weapon that needed to be directed with accuracy.
The cost of emphasis on atomic weapons was revealed in the general unsuitability of American tactics and weapons deployment systems during the Vietnam War. Lessons learned in that conflict, coupled with rapid technological developments in aerodynamics, lasers, and solid-state electronics, brought air power dramatically closer to the "surgical strike" now seen as crucial to modern warfare. New technology created attractive choices and options for American policymakers as well as field commanders, and events in the Arab-Israeli wars, the U.S. raid on Libya, and most dramatically in the first Gulf War created an ever-increasing demand for the precision weapons.
The prospect of pinpoint delivery of weapons right to the enemy's door by speeding aircraft seems to presage war in which the messy and politically risky deployment of ground troops is unnecessary. The potential of such weapons, and their strategic limitations, made the Gulf War and Iraqi War living theater for assessing what such weapons can and cannot do and have important implications for planning for future warfare.
Weapons of the People
The Culture and Politics of Guns in Modern ChinaLei Duan
University of Michigan Press, 2027
Why did a country that once mobilized millions of armed civilians become one of the most tightly regulated gun societies in the world? Weapons of the People traces the history of private gun ownership in modern China, from the late Qing dynasty to the early People’s Republic of China. Far from being rare, firearms were once embedded in everyday life, used for self-defense, social status, and political struggle. At the same time, government policies toward civilian arms were often inconsistent. These inconsistencies extended beyond uneven enforcement to include shifting official attitudes toward unsanctioned armed groups. The Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of armed individuals and groups repeatedly adapted to changing political conditions and strategic needs.
Drawing on extensive archival research, as well as published documents, legal cases, and personal accounts, Lei Duan reconstructs the social life of firearms and their shifting political meanings across different regimes. By uncovering these patterns of diversity in firearm ownership and inconsistency in government policy, this book highlights the complex interplay between firearms, society, and the state in modern Chinese history. This study invites readers to reconsider the role of firearms in shaping China’s modern trajectory and to challenge conventional understandings of the nation’s sociopolitical landscape. Duan offers a new prism through which to examine state-society relations in modern China.
Wear Some Armor in Your Hair
Urban Renewal and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Lincoln ParkBrian Mullgardt
Southern Illinois University Press, 2024
WINNER, 2025 Illinois State Historical Society Russell P. Strange Book of the Year Award!
Police brutality, gentrification, and grassroots activism in 1960s Chicago
In August of 1968, approximately 7,000 people protested the Vietnam War against the backdrop of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This highly televised event began peacefully but quickly turned into what was later termed a “police riot.” Brian Mullgardt’s investigation of this event and the preceding tensions shines a light on the ministers, Yippies, and community members who showed up and stood together against the brutality of the police. Charting a complex social history, Wear Some Armor in Your Hair brings together Chicago history, the 1960s, and urbanization, focusing not on the national leaders, but on the grassroots activists of the time.
Beginning in 1955, two competing visions of urban renewal existed, and the groups that propounded each clashed publicly, but peacefully. One group, linked to city hall, envisioned a future Lincoln Park that paid lip service to diversity but actually included very little. The other group, the North Side Cooperative Ministry, offered a different vision of Lincoln Park that was much more diverse in terms of class and race. When the Yippies announced anti-war protests for the summer of ‘68, the North Side Cooperative Ministry played an instrumental role. Ultimately, the violence of that week altered community relations and the forces of gentrification won out.
Mullgardt’s focus on the activists and community members of Lincoln Park, a neighborhood at the nexus of national trends, broadens the scope of understanding around a pivotal and monumental chapter of our history. The story of Lincoln Park, Chicago, is in many ways the story of 1960s activism writ small, and in other ways challenges us to view national trends differently.
Weather in Texas
The Essential HandbookBy George W. Bomar
University of Texas Press, 2017
Only in Texas could a snowstorm pelt the Panhandle at the very moment abrasive dust is scouring the Permian Basin while searing heat is wilting the Winter Garden region in the south. The state’s large size and central location within North America subject it to a great variety of weather occurrences. Texas state meteorologist George W. Bomar has been observing Texas weather for nearly half a century, and in Weather in Texas, he provides the essential guide to all of the state’s weather phenomena.
Writing in lively layman’s language, Bomar fully explains both how the weather works and how Texans can prepare for and stay safe during extreme weather events. He describes the forces that shape Texas weather from season to season, including the influence of tropical cyclones, frontal boundaries, El Niño, and the polar jet stream. Bomar puts specific weather events in historical context, using a ranking system to illustrate how recent droughts, snowstorms, hurricanes, flash floods, and tornadoes compare with those of previous generations. He also includes comprehensive tabulations of weather data for every area of Texas, quantifying what constitutes “normal” weather, as well as the extreme limits of variables such as low and high temperatures, rain days, snow accumulations, and earliest and latest freezes. With everything from the latest science on climate change and weather modification to dramatic stories about landmark weather events, Weather in Texas is a must-have reference for all Texans..
Weather on the Air
A History of Broadcast MeteorologyRobert Henson
American Meteorological Society, 2010
From low humor to high drama, TV weather reporting has encompassed an enormous range of styles and approaches, triggering chuckles, infuriating the masses, and at times even saving lives. In Weather on the Air,meteorologist and science journalist Robert Henson covers it all—the people, technology, science, and show business that combine to deliver the weather to the public each day.
The first comprehensive history of its kind, Weather on the Air explores the many forces that have shaped weather broadcasts over the years, including the long-term drive to professionalize weathercasting, the complex relations between government and private forecasters, and the effects of climate-change science and the Internet on today’s broadcasts. Dozens of photos and anecdotes accompany Henson’s more than two decades of research to document the evolution of weathercasts, from their primitive beginnings on the radio to the high-gloss, graphics-laden segments we watch on television every morning.
This engaging study will be an invaluable tool for students of broadcast meteorology and mass communication and an entertaining read for anyone fascinated by the public face of weather.
Weavers of Dreams, Unite!
Actors' Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century AmericaSean P. Holmes
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Weavers of Tradition and Beauty
Basketmakers of the Great BasinMary Lee Fulkerson
University of Nevada Press, 1995
Weavers of Tradition and Beauty presents new information on contemporary Native American basketry of the Great Basin, largely from the viewpoint of the weavers themselves. In collecting their stories, Kathleen Curtis and Mary Lee Fulkerson traveled throughout Nevada, never dreaming their odyssey over back-roads and to reservations would stretch into years. Finding a deep connection to the people of the sage, the authors accompanied the weavers as they gathered and prepared their special willow, dyed the bracken fern root, and wove their baskets. Baskets—and the people who weave them—have always been revered and honored by Native Americans. Fulkerson and Curtis depict, in text and full color and black and white photographs, how their art prevails—even over adverse environmental, social, and economic conditions. Today, contemporary weavers continue their work by creating baskets in the manner of their ancestors. Teaching their children and grandchildren how to weave baskets, these artisans carry on a long and strong tradition. By documenting the basketry of Nevada's native people, the authors make a significant contribution in preserving this ancient and beautiful craft. Foreword by Catherine S. Fowler.
Weaving a Future
Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean IslandElayne Zorn
University of Iowa Press, 2004
The people of Taquile Island on the Peruvian side of beautiful Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the Americas, are renowned for the hand-woven textiles that they both wear and sell to outsiders. One thousand seven hundred Quechua-speaking peasant farmers, who depend on potatoes and the fish from the lake, host the forty thousand tourists who visit their island each year. Yet only twenty-five years ago, few tourists had even heard of Taquile. In Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island, Elayne Zorn documents the remarkable transformation of the isolated rocky island into a community-controlled enterprise that now provides a model for indigenous communities worldwide.
Over the course of three decades and nearly two years living on Taquile Island, Zorn, who is trained in both the arts and anthropology, learned to weave from Taquilean women. She also learned how gender structures both the traditional lifestyles and the changes that tourism and transnationalism have brought. In her comprehensive and accessible study, she reveals how Taquileans used their isolation, landownership, and communal organizations to negotiate the pitfalls of globalization and modernization and even to benefit from tourism. This multi-sited ethnography set in Peru, Washington, D.C., and New York City shows why and how cloth remains central to Andean society and how the marketing of textiles provided the experience and money for Taquilean initiatives in controlling tourism.
The first book about tourism in South America that centers on traditional arts as well as community control, Weaving a Future will be of great interest to anthropologists and scholars and practitioners of tourism, grassroots development, and the fiber arts.
Weaving the Boundary
Karenne Wood
University of Arizona Press, 2016
This focused, accessible collection carries readers into a deep and intimate understanding of the natural world, the power of language, and the interconnectedness of life. Untold stories are revealed through documented events in various tribal histories, and indictments of destructive encounters between Western colonialism and Native peoples are juxtaposed with a lyric voice that gently insists on reweaving the past, honoring women and all life, creating a sovereign space for indigenous experience. Wood writes, “Nothing was discovered. Everything was already loved.”
Political yet universal, Weaving the Boundary tells of love and betrayal, loss and forgiveness. Wood intertwines important and otherwise untold stories and histories with a heightened sense of awareness of Native peoples’ issues and present realities.
Moving from elegy to evocations of hope and desire, the poems call for respect toward Mother Earth and feminine sensibility. One hears in this collection a longing to be carried deeper into the world, to return to tradition, to nature, to truth, to an innate belonging in the “weaving” of all life.
Web as History
Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the PresentEdited by Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder
University College London, 2017
Webbed Connectivities
The Imperial Sociology of Sex, Gender, and SexualityVrushali Patil
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
Constructing a new approach for centering empire in productions of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference
One of the oldest, most persistent issues in gender and sexuality studies is the dominance of white, northern theorizing and its consequences for what we know about sex, gender, and sexuality. There is an ongoing neglect of the significance of histories of empire and coloniality, particularly in U.S. sociology, where the United States and its theoretical productions are routinely sanitized of such histories. In Webbed Connectivities, Vrushali Patil offers a global historical sociology that reembeds the United States within histories of empire, situating the emergence of northern and U.S.-based concepts and frameworks squarely within these histories.
Webbed Connectivities intercepts the political economy of knowledge production within the social sciences to argue for the work of centering the role of imperial hierarchies in knowledge production and circulation. Patil develops a new approach—webbed connectivities—which tracks imperial processes and impacts across borders, shifting from an emphasis on particular experiences and identities to the constitution and creation of the categories themselves.
A sociologist of feminist thought and gender and sexuality studies, Patil explores the theoretical spaces that spotlighting imperial hierarchies within knowledge production might open, including making productive and essential connections across sites of the global south and north.
Wedded to the Land?
Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in CrisisMary N. Layoun
Duke University Press, 2001
Drawing on readings of literature and of official documents and decrees, songs, poetry, cinema, public monuments, journalism, and conversations with exiles, refugees, and public officials, Layoun uses each historical incident as a means of highlighting a recurring trope within constructs of nationalism. The displacement of the Greek refugees in the 1920s calls into question the very idea of home, as well as the desire for ethnic homogeneity within nations. She reads the Cypriot coup and invasion as an illustration of the gendering of nation and how the notion of the inviolable woman came to represent sovereignity. In her third example she shows how the Palestinian and PLO expulsion from Beirut highlights the ambiguity of the borders upon which many manifestations of nationalism putatively depend. These chapters are preceded and introduced by a discussion of “culturing the nation” and closed by a consideration of citizenship and silence in which Layoun discusses rights ostensibly possessed by all members of a political community.
This book will be of interest to scholars engaged in cultural and critical theory, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history, literary studies, political science, postcolonial studies, and gender studies.
Weeping in the Playtime of Others
America’s Incarcerated Children. 2nd edition.Written by Kenneth Wooden with a foreword by Kathleen M. Heide
The Ohio State University Press, 2000
Kenneth Wooden’s Weeping in the Playtime of Others—first published in 1976 and an enduring work of investigative journalism and criminology that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize—exposes the harsh realities faced by children in the American juvenile justice system. Wooden’s extensive research and firsthand accounts highlight the systemic abuse, neglect, and violence that incarcerated youth endure. Investigative reporter Wooden journeyed across thirty states to document brutal conditions in juvenile detention centers and training schools. His work revealed in stark detail how these institutions regularly failed to provide the rehabilitation they promised, perpetuating cycles of violence and criminality, and presented a devastating picture of the detrimental effects on of solitary confinement, physical punishment, and inadequate educational and psychological support.
Wooden’s many case studies include that of a young Charles Manson, illustrating how early institutionalization can presage lifelong criminal behavior. Wooden also critiques the political and economic forces that sustain these abusive systems, calling for comprehensive reforms.
Weimar Under the Palms
Pacific Palisades, German Exiles, and the Invention of HollywoodThomas Blubacher
Brandeis University Press, 2025
In the early twentieth century, Pacific Palisades was home to America’s most modern film studio of the time as well as the proposed site of the world’s largest Christian center. But by the end of the 1920s, the Los Angeles neighborhood had become the refuge of the rich and beautiful as German and Austrian filmmakers, among them Salka and Berthold Viertel, settled there. They were soon followed by cultural and intellectual giants of the Weimar Republic who were fleeing Europe, such as Max Reinhardt, Hanns Eisler, or Max Horkheimer. These great minds turned Pacific Palisades into a “Weimar under the palm trees.” Though many were successful in exile—including Vicki Baum, Thomas Mann, and Lion Feuchtwanger—others felt as if they were in a “sun prison” far from home.
Recounting a story of glamor and great minds, Thomas Blubacher tells of the history of German-speaking exiles that is still alive there today, going on a foray through the film industry, taking us on a journey to this special place that was so recently devastated by fire. Many of the homes in this book have now gone, but Marta Feuchtwanger’s Villa Aurora and the Thomas Mann house still stand as a testament to luck, resilience, and history.
Weimar through the Lens of Gender
Prostitution Reform, Woman's Emancipation, and German Democracy, 1919-33Julia Roos
University of Michigan Press, 2010
"This book will make a valuable contribution to the field of German history, as well as the histories of gender and sexuality. The argument that Weimar feminism did bring about tangible gains for women needs to be made, and Roos has done so convincingly."
---Julia Sneeringer, Queens College
Until 1927, Germany had a system of state-regulated prostitution, under which only those prostitutes who submitted to regular health checks and numerous other restrictions on their personal freedom were tolerated by the police. Male clients of prostitutes were not subject to any controls. The decriminalization of prostitution in 1927 resulted from important postwar gains in women's rights; yet this change---while welcomed by feminists, Social Democrats, and liberals—also mobilized powerful conservative resistance. In the early 1930s, the right-wing backlash against liberal gender reforms like the 1927 prostitution law played a fateful role in the downfall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism.
Weimar through the Lens of Gender combines the political history of early twentieth-century Germany with analytical perspectives derived from the fields of gender studies and the history of sexuality. The book's argument will be of interest to a broad readership: specialists in the fields of gender studies and the history of sexuality, as well as historians and general readers interested in Weimar and Nazi Germany.
Julia Roos is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Jacket art: "Hamburg, vermutlich St. Pauli, 1920er–30er Jahre," photographer unknown, s/w-Fotografie. (Courtesy of the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte.)
Weird City
Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, TexasBy Joshua Long
University of Texas Press, 2010
Austin, Texas, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is experiencing one of the most dynamic periods in its history. Wedged between homogenizing growth and a long tradition of rebellious nonconformity, many Austinites feel that they are in the midst of a battle for the city's soul.
From this struggle, a movement has emerged as a form of resistance to the rapid urban transformation brought about in recent years: "Keep Austin Weird" originated in 2000 as a grassroots expression of place attachment and anti-commercialization. Its popularity has led to its use as a rallying cry for local business, as a rhetorical tool by city governance, and now as the unofficial civic motto for a city experiencing rapid growth and transformation.
By using "Keep Austin Weird" as a central focus, Joshua Long explores the links between sense of place, consumption patterns, sustainable development, and urban politics in Austin. Research on this phenomenon considers the strong influence of the "Creative Class" thesis on Smart Growth strategies, gentrification, income inequality, and social polarization made popular by the works of Richard Florida. This study is highly applicable to several emerging "Creative Cities," but holds special significance for the city considered the greatest creative success story, Austin.
Weis WM.21 Sólyom
Edwin Hoogschagen
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
The Sólyom story starts in 1927, with the Fokker C.V, of which the Hungarian Royal Airforce had acquired 76, mostly built under license by Manfred Weiss (WM). WM improved the C.V, which resulted in the WM-16, with 18 built in two variants. This WM-16 paved the way for the WM-21, of which 128 examples were built.
Welcome 2 Houston
Hip Hop Heritage in Hustle TownLangston Collin Wilkins
University of Illinois Press, 2023
A vivid journey through a southern hip hop bastion, Welcome 2 Houston offers readers an inside look at a unique musical culture.
Welcome Home, Boys!
Military Victory Parades in New York City 1899-1946Sebastian Jobs
Campus Verlag, 2012
Welcome the Hour of Conflict
William Cowan McClellan and the 9th AlabamaWilliam Cowan McClellan, edited by John C. Carter
University of Alabama Press, 2007
In the Spring of 1861, a 22-year-old Alabamian did what many of his friends and colleagues were doing—he joined the Confederate Army as a volunteer. The first of his family to enlist, William Cowan McClellan, who served as a private in the 9th Alabama Infantry regiment, wrote hundreds of letters throughout the war, often penning for friends who could not write home for themselves. In the letters collected in John C. Carter’s volume, this young soldier comments on his feelings toward his commanding officers, his attitude toward military discipline and camp life, his disdain for the western Confederate armies, and his hopes and fears for the future of the Confederacy.
McClellan’s letters also contain vivid descriptions of camp life, battles, marches, picket duty, and sickness and disease in the army. The correspondence between McClellan and his family dealt with separation due to war as well as with other wartime difficulties such as food shortages, invasion, and occupation. The letters also show the rise and fall of morale on both the home front and on the battlefield, and how they were closely intertwined.
Remarkable for their humor, literacy, and matter-of-fact banter, the letters reveal the attitude a common soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia had toward the day-to-day activity and progression of the war. John C. Carter includes helpful appendixes that list the letters chronologically and offer the regimental roster, casualty/enlistment totals, assignments, and McClellan’s personal military record.
Welcome to Capitol Hill
Fifty Years of Scandal in Tennessee PoliticsJoel Ebert and Erik Schelzig
Vanderbilt University Press, 2023
Veteran political reporters Joel Ebert and Erik Schelzig draw from interviews, archival documents, and never-before-seen federal investigative files to provide readers with a handy resource about the wrongdoings of our elected officials.
Welcome to Capitol Hill
Fifty Years of Scandal in Tennessee PoliticsJoel Ebert and Erik Schelzig
Vanderbilt University Press, 2024
Veteran political reporters Joel Ebert and Erik Schelzig draw from interviews, archival documents, and never-before-seen federal investigative files to provide readers with a handy resource about the wrongdoings of our elected officials.
Welfare Politics in Boston, 1910-1940
Susan Traverso
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
Between 1910 and 1940, Boston's growing immigrant population repeatedly clashed with the city's traditional elite over how to provide assistance to the needy. While Yankee politicians and the leaders of Protestant charities argued that relief should be delivered by private organizations, Irish politicians and officials at Catholic and Jewish charities advocated extensive public welfare programs. Competing views of gender roles further complicated these disagreements. The campaign for widows' pensions, for example, won wide popular support even as public welfare programs that would primarily benefit men-such as unemployment insurance and old age assistance-failed to gain acceptance.
In the 1920s, the debate over welfare shifted focus as prolonged periods of unemployment brought demands for aid to men who had lost their jobs, particularly those with families to support. Using the rhetoric of the Mothers' Aid campaign, Irish politicians broadened the idea of "acceptable dependency" to include men who needed jobs to provide for their own dependents. By lessening the stigma of male dependency on public welfare, these gendered arguments encouraged the expansion of public aid and set the stage for New Deal welfare programs of the 1930s. During that decade, Traverso contends, the idealized family headed by a male breadwinner became the basis for a shared vision of gender relations that mediated the political and ethnic debate over welfare policy.
Welfare for Markets
A Global History of Basic IncomeAnton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A sweeping intellectual history of the welfare state’s policy-in-waiting.
The idea of a government paying its citizens to keep them out of poverty—now known as basic income—is hardly new. Often dated as far back as ancient Rome, basic income’s modern conception truly emerged in the late nineteenth century. Yet as one of today’s most controversial proposals, it draws supporters from across the political spectrum.
In this eye-opening work, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas trace basic income from its rise in American and British policy debates following periods of economic tumult to its modern relationship with technopopulist figures in Silicon Valley. They chronicle how the idea first arose in the United States and Europe as a market-friendly alternative to the postwar welfare state and how interest in the policy has grown in the wake of the 2008 credit crisis and COVID-19 crash.
An incisive, comprehensive history, Welfare for Markets tells the story of how a fringe idea conceived in economics seminars went global, revealing the most significant shift in political culture since the end of the Cold War.
Well Satisfied with My Position
The Civil War Journal of Spencer BonsallEdited by Michael A. Flannery and Katherine H. Oomens
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
Well Satisfied with My Position offers a first-person account of army life during the Civil War’s Peninsula Campaign and Battle of Fredericksburg. Spencer Bonsall, who joined the 81st Pennsylvania Infantry as a hospital steward, kept a journal from March 1862 until March 1863, when he abruptly ceased writing. Editors Michael A. Flannery and Katherine H. Oomens place his experiences in the context of the field of Civil War medicine and continue his story in an epilogue.
Trained as a druggist when he was in his early twenties, Bonsall traveled the world, spent eight years on a tea plantation in India, and settled in Philadelphia, where he worked in the city surveyor’s office. But in March 1862, when he was in his mid-forties, the lure of serving his country on the battlefield led Bonsall to join the 81st Pennsylvania Infantry as a hospital steward.
Bonsall enjoyed his life with the Union army at first, comparing bivouacking in the woods to merely picnicking on a grand scale. “We are about as jolly a set of old bachelors as can be found in Virginia,” Bonsall wrote. But his first taste of the aftermath of battle at Fair Oaks and the Seven Days’ Battles in Virginia changed his mind about the joys of soldiering—though he never lost his zeal for the Union cause.
Bonsall details the camp life of a soldier from firsthand experience, outlines the engagements of the 81st, and traces the Battle of Fredericksburg and the Peninsula Campaign. He records facts not available elsewhere about camp conditions, attitudes toward Union generals and Confederate soldiers, and troop movements.
From the end of June to late October 1862, Bonsall’s illness kept him from writing in his journal. He picked up the record again in December 1862, just before the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in which the Union suffered a staggering 10,200 casualties and the 81st Pennsylvania lost more than half its men. He vividly describes the bloody aftermath. Bonsall’s horse was shot out from underneath him at the battle of Gettysburg, injuring him seriously and ending his military career. Although he was listed as “sick in hospital” on the regiment’s muster rolls, he was labeled a deserter in the U.S. Army records. Indeed, after recovery from his injuries, Bonsall walked away from the army to resume life in Philadelphia with his wife and child.
Published for the first time, Bonsall’s journal offers an unusually personal glimpse into the circumstances and motives of a man physically ruined by the war. Seventeen illustrations, including some drawn by Bonsall himself, help bring this narrative to life.
Well Worth Saving
How the New Deal Safeguarded Home OwnershipPrice Fishback, Jonathan Rose, and Kenneth Snowden
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Well Worth Saving tells the story of the disastrous housing market during the Great Depression and the extent to which an immensely popular New Deal relief program, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), was able to stem foreclosures by buying distressed mortgages from lenders and refinancing them. Drawing on historical records and modern statistical tools, Price Fishback, Jonathan Rose, and Kenneth Snowden investigate important unanswered questions to provide an unparalleled view of the mortgage loan industry throughout the 1920s and early ’30s. Combining this with the stories of those involved, the book offers a clear understanding of the HOLC within the context of the housing market in which it operated, including an examination of how the incentives and behaviors at play throughout the crisis influenced the effectiveness of policy.
More than eighty years after the start of the Great Depression, when politicians have called for similar programs to quell the current mortgage crisis, this accessible account of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation holds invaluable lessons for our own time.
Well-Kept Ruins
Hélène Cixous
Seagull Books, 2022
In the Lower Saxony region of northwestern Germany sits the city of Osnabrück. This is where, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing the Thirty Years’ War and one of the most calamitous periods of European history to an end. But the city was later to witness another calamity.
Today, as one walks through Old Synagogue Street in a rich neighborhood of Osnabrück, one might miss noticing a pile of pale stones held together by chicken wire that sits between two fashionable homes. These are the well-kept ruins from behind which stares a gaping space—a place of memory and oblivion. Four polished plaques tell the tale of the horror-filled night of November 9, 1938—today known as Kristallnacht—when the synagogue that had stood on this spot was desecrated, looted, set on fire, and eventually demolished by Hitler’s forces. On the same day, ninety parishioners were imprisoned by the Gestapo and eventually sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Osnabrück was also home to Eve Klein, a member of the city’s early-twentieth-century Jewish community and the mother of author Hélène Cixous. In Well-Kept Ruins, Cixous returns to the historic city in 2019 and reflects on the remains of the synagogue that “express the life lost, the life kept.” Walking the streets of the city, plumbing the depths of the past along with her own family’s history, looking deep into the future, and punctuating her poetic prose with haunting photographs, Cixous explores the ruins at the heart of humanity. Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, Well-Kept Ruins is a genre-defying and timely reflection of the contemporary human condition.
Well-Tempered Women
Nineteenth-Century Temperance RhetoricCarol Mattingly
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000
In this richly illustrated study, Carol Mattingly examines the rhetoric of the temperance movement, the largest political movement of women in the nineteenth century.
Tapping previously unexplored sources, Mattingly uncovers new voices and different perspectives, thus greatly expanding our knowledge of temperance women in particular and of nineteenth-century women and women's rhetoric in general. Her scope is broad: she looks at temperance fiction, newspaper accounts of meetings and speeches, autobiographical and biographical accounts, and minutes of national and state temperance meetings.
The women's temperance movement was first and foremost an effort by women to improve the lives of women. Twentieth-centuty scholars often dismiss temperance women as conservative and complicit in their own oppression. As Mattingly demonstrate, however, the opposite is true: temperance women made purposeful rhetorical choices in their efforts to improve the lives of women. They carefully considered the life circumstances of all women and sought to raise consciousness and achieve reform in an effective manner. And they were effective, gaining legal, political, and social improvements for women as they became the most influential and most successful group of women reformers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Mattingly finds that, for a large number of women who were unhappy with their status in the nineteenth century, the temperance movement provided an avenue for change. Examining the choices these women made in their efforts to better conditions for women, Mattingly looks first at oral rhetoric among nineteenth-century temperance women. She examines the early temperance speeches of activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who later chose to concentrate their effort in the suffrage organizations, and those who continued to work on behalf of women primarily through the temperance topic, such as Amelia Bloomer and Clarina Howard Nichols. Finally, she examines the rhetoric of members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union—the largest organization of women in the nineteenth century.
Mattingly then turns to the rhetoric from perspectives outside those of mainstream, middle-class women. She focuses on racial conflicts and alliances as an increasingly diverse membership threatened the unity and harmony in the WCTU. Her primary source for this discussion is contemporary newspaper accounts of temperance speeches.
Fiction by temperance writers also proves to be a fertile source for Mattingly's investigation. Insisting on greater equality between men and women, this fiction candidly portrayed injustice toward women. Through the temperance issue, Mattingly discovers, women could broach otherwise clandestine topics openly. She also finds that many of the concerns of nineteenth-century temperance women are remarkably similar to concerns of today’s feminists.
Wellington Koo
ChinaJonathan Clements
Haus Publishing, 2010
Wellsprings
A Natural History of Bottled Spring WatersChapelle, Francis H.
Rutgers University Press, 2005
As Francis H. Chapelle reveals in this delightful and informative volume, a complex story of geology, hydrology, and history lies behind every bottle of spring water. The book chronicles the history of the bottled water industry in America from its beginnings in Europe hundreds of years ago to the present day. Subsequent chapters describe the chemical characteristics that make some waters desirable, and provide an overview of the geologic circumstances that produce them. Wellsprings explains how these geologic conditions vary throughout the country, and how this affects the kinds and quality of bottled water that are available. Finally, Chapelle shows how the bottled water industry uses this natural history, together with the perceived health benefits of spring waters, to market their products.
Accessibly written and well illustrated, Wellsprings is both a revealing account and a user’s guide to natural spring waters. Regardless of your drinking preference, this timely exploration will make your next drink of water refreshingly informed.
Welsh in Wisconsin
Phillips G. Davies
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2006
Between 1840 and 1890, many Welsh looked to Wisconsin for relief where they could purchase inexpensive, productive land. With large Welsh landowners controlling most of the arable land in Wales and Corn Laws, which prohibited importation of cheap food, domestic food prices increased dramatically and left the typical tenant-farming family with fields full of grain but empty cupboards. Once in Wisconsin, the newcomers kept to themselves, maintained their native language and national traditions and worshipped together in close-knit communities.
This addition to the People of Wisconsin series weaves period letters from the Owen family and Private John Jones, who served in the Union army in the Civil War, into the narration. Welsh in Wisconsin also contains anecdotes from early immigrant life and photographs depicting Welsh churches in Wisconsin.
Wend Your Way
A Guide To Sites Along The Iowa Mormon TrailL. Matthew Chatterley
University of Iowa Press, 2007
Wend Your Way: A Guide to Sites Along the Mormon Trail tells the story of this great movement through Iowa. Tracing the trail from east to west through 12 counties the guide includes:
• Mormon Trail history for each county•Directs visitors to the 27 interpretive roadside panels that were constructed on the trail by U.S. National Park Service and Iowa Mormon Trails Association
•Reproduces the poignant illustrations that author L. Matthew Chatterley drew for these wayside exhibits
•Provides a map and directions by county to guide travelers to the route of the Mormon Trail, sites of Mormon camps and settlements and the interpretive roadside panels
•Lists other locations in southern Iowa that visitors will want to explore
Wendell Castle Remastered
Wendell Castle
The Artist Book Foundation, 2015
Wendell Castle (1932–2018), master furniture maker, designer, sculptor, and educator, was in the sixth decade of his extraordinary creativity when an emblematic exhibition of his signature works was mounted by the Museum of Art and Design in 2016. It blended the artist's seminal works with his latest collection, produced with digital technology. In part a self-reflection, this eponymous, full-color companion book examines some of Castle's historically representative works as well as significant contemporary furniture pieces, continuing his highly respected and acclaimed sculptural/functional dialogue. Castle, ever the innovator, was remarkable for his openness to new technologies; he not only embraced an initially complex practice but has "remastered" it. His vast oeuvre represents a prodigious lifework that began in 1958 and aligns with the development of the American art furniture movement.
The solo exhibition was a somewhat self-reflective examination of his early ground-breaking works that tested the boundaries of traditional furniture making by presenting his later innovations using new digital technologies such as 3D scanning and modeling, and computer-controlled milling—a digital "remastering" of his immense oeuvre. Unique perspectives on the master's work are presented by informative essays by authors well-versed on Castle's celebrated career.
Wendell Castle
A Catalogue Raisonné, 1958–2012Wendell Castle
The Artist Book Foundation, 2014
Sculptor and furniture designer Wendell Castle (1932–2018) carved a distinct path in furniture making over nearly six decades of a distinguished career, and this long-awaited recording of his oeuvre, Wendell Castle: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1958–2012, beautifully presents the extraordinary scope of his artistry and craftsmanship. The voluminous accounting of his works, beginning with Castle's earliest, mid-century works through to his unabashed experiments with unconventional materials (gel-coated fiberglass and metallic automobile paint) and his latest signature wood laminations, is comprehensive and detailed. Three essays of varying perpectives introduce the catalogue raisonné followed by an extensive accounting of his enormous oeuvre, his exhibitions, numerous awards, and the collections of his works, as well as a substantive bibliography.
With his organic and whimsical approach to his various mediums, Castle seamlessly merged sculpture and design into one discipline, obscuring the distinction between the two. He invented the technique of carving stacked laminations of wood, and his later explorations into the qualities of fiberglass as a sculptural medium are unparalleled.