18284 books match the query 'United States' and 882 start with w
By Alan Lessoff
University of Texas Press, 2019
A favorite destination of visitors to the Texas coast, Corpus Christi is a midsize city that manages to be both cosmopolitan and provincial, networked and local. It is an indispensable provider of urban services to South Texas, as well as a port of international significance. Its industries and military bases and, increasingly, its coastal research institutes give it a range of connections throughout North America. Despite these advantages, however, Corpus Christi has never made it into the first rank of Texas cities, and a keen self-consciousness about the city’s subordinate position has driven debates over Corpus’s identity and prospects for decades.
In this masterful urban history—a study that will reshape the way that Texans look at all their cities—Alan Lessoff analyzes Corpus Christi’s place within Texas, the American Southwest, the western Gulf of Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands from the city’s founding in 1839 to the present. He portrays Corpus as a place where westward Anglo expansion overwhelmed the Hispanic settlement process from the south, leaving a legacy of conflicting historical narratives that colors the city’s character even now. Lessoff also explores how competing visions of the city’s identity and possibilities have played out in arenas ranging from artwork in public places to schemes to embellish, redevelop, or preserve the downtown waterfront and North Padre Island. With a deep understanding of the geographic, historical, economic, and political factors that have formed the city, Lessoff demonstrates that Corpus Christi exemplifies the tensions between regional and cosmopolitan influences that have shaped cities across the Southwest.
Donald C. Pfanz
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Kira Sanbonmatsu
University of Michigan Press, 2010
Michael C. Lens
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
James W. Graham
The Ohio State University Press, 2026
Jennifer Bess
University Press of Colorado, 2021
Don Lago
University of Nevada Press, 2017
May Jordan
University of Alabama Press, 2006
This rare find--a journal of a young backwoods woman--provides a unique picture of rural life in southwestern Alabama early in the 20th century.
"I am a little Alabama girl living on the frontier where the wild animals is plentiful," wrote May Jordan in 1912. During the hunting season her father traveled Washington County buying furs, and May--already 23--accompanied him on two of these trips, cooking meals, helping out with the business, and recording their experiences.
May's diary of these trips from December 1912 to March 1914 describes the routine of the fur trade and provides a vivid portrait of wilderness travel and social customs. Through May's eyes, readers can experience the sights and sounds of pine forests and swamps, the difficulty of wading through waist-deep mud, and the neighborliness of the people living in this isolated area. May also shares both the solace of religious faith and her love of laughter as reflected in the jokes she records.
Elisa Moore Baldwin provides an introduction that traces Jordan family history and describes economic, social, and political conditions during the period. Baldwin also includes annotations based on court records, census rolls, and other primary sources and photographs of many of the characters in May's narrative to provide a vivid picture of the times. Because few first-person accounts exist of the life of poor whites, this diary will be invaluable to students of southern and women's history; no comparable work exists for this part of Alabama during this era. May's journal takes us to another world and teaches us about the lively human spirit in the face of hardship and loneliness.
Kim Savelson
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
John W. Hevener. Foreword by Robert Gipe
University of Illinois Press, 1978
Depression-era Harlan County, Kentucky, was the site of one of the most bitter and protracted labor disputes in American history. The decade-long conflict between miners and the coal operators who adamantly resisted unionization has been immortalized in folksong by Florence Reece and Aunt Molly Jackson, contemplated in prose by Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, and long been obscured by popular myths and legends.
John W. Hevener separates the fact from the legend in his Weatherford Award-winning investigation of Harlan's civil strife, now available for the first time in paperback. In Which Side Are You On? Hevener attributes the violence–-including the deaths of thirteen union miners–-to more than just labor conflict, viewing Harlan's troubles as sectional economic conflict stemming from the county's rapid industrialization and social disorganization in the preceding decade.
Detailing the dimensions of unionization and the balance of power spawned by New Deal labor policy after government intervention, Which Side Are You On? is the definitive analysis of Harlan's bloody decade and a seminal contribution to American labor history.
John Henry Schlegel
University of Michigan Press, 2022
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.
Richard C. Lindberg
University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Chicago in the 1920s: Clark Street was the city’s last Swedetown, a narrow corridor of weather-beaten storefronts, coal yards, and taverns running along the north side of the city and the locus of Swedish community life in Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. It represented a way station for a generation of working-class immigrants escaping the hardships of the old country for the promise of a brighter new day in a halfway house of sorts, perched between the old and new lands. For Richard C. Lindberg, whose Swedish immigrant parents and grandparents settled there, it was also the staging ground for an intensely personal, multigenerational, coming-of-age drama based on the struggles of two disparate families—their dreams and their depravities, their victories and their failures.
Whiskey Breakfast is Lindberg’s captivating tale of life as a first-generation baby-boomer Swedish American, caught between the customs of a land he had never been to and the desire to conform and fit into a troubled existence, tragically scarred by alcoholism, divorce, and peer abuse. But it is also a powerful and intimate portrait of his immigrant ancestors, and especially of his father, Oscar—a contractor and master builder who helped develop Chicago’s post–World War II suburbs. A paradoxical man, known to some as a socialist, an anarchist, and a serious drinker, Oscar would carry with him to the grave a sixty-two-year-old family secret, a secret that for Lindberg lies at the very heart of the great Swedish unrest that drove his father and countless other men and women out of Sweden and onward to America.
Masterfully blending autobiography with immigrant history, Whiskey Breakfast surrounds Lindberg’s family story with Swedish cultural history and politics, as well as remarkable Chicago history and how Clark Street and Swedetown became, and in many ways remain, a center of Swedish immigrants’ social and cultural life. Far from a eulogy for an idealized past, Lindberg has crafted a moving and sobering memoir of a young man’s struggle to come to terms with his father and himself, his immigrant heritage, and his native home.
Ashley Gilbertson
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Benny Golson
Temple University Press, 2016
“One of the greatest artists our country has is Benny Golson. He is not only a great musician, but an original and fabulous composer. He is inventive and creative and his work is loved the world over. Benny is a rare, creative genius. All I would like to say is THREE CHEERS for Benny Golson!”—Tony Bennett
“Composer supreme, tenor man supreme, jazz man supreme, good guy supreme: that’s BENNY GOLSON!"—Sonny Rollins
Born during the de facto inaugural era of jazz, saxophonist Benny Golson learned his instrument and the vocabulary of jazz alongside John Coltrane while Golson was still in high school in Philadelphia. Quickly establishing himself as an iconic fixture on the jazz landscape, Golson performed with dozens of jazz greats, from Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, and Jimmy Heath to Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard, and many others. An acclaimed composer, Golson also wrote music for Hollywood films and television and composed such memorable jazz standards as “Stablemates,” “Killer Joe,” and “Whisper Not.”
An eloquent account of Golson’s exceptional life—presented episodically rather than chronologically—Whisper Not includes a dazzling collection of anecdotes, memories, experiences, and photographs that recount the successes, the inevitable failures, and the rewards of a life eternally dedicated to jazz.
Jon-Christian Suggs
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015
Philip White
University Press of New England, 2015
Naa Oyo A. Kwate
University of Minnesota Press, 2023
The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community
Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through trgeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash, Naa Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities.
Fast food has historically been tied to the country’s self-image as the land of opportunity and is marketed as one of life’s simple pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry’s core. White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black communities today. Kwate expansively charts fast food’s racial and spatial transformation and centers the cities of Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., in a national examination of the biggest brands of today, including White Castle, KFC, Burger King, McDonald’s, and more.
Deeply researched, compellingly told, and brimming with surprising details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the inequalities embedded in America’s popular national food tradition.
Ignacio M. García
University of Arizona Press, 2008
Cotten Seiler
University of Chicago Press, 2026
Fitzhugh Mullan, M.D.
University of Michigan Press, 2006
In the sixties, Fitzhugh Mullan was an activist in the civil rights struggle. While in medical school, Mullan was shocked by gaps in what the students learned, and the lack of humanity in the classroom. Later, Dr. Mullan was outraged at the conditions he discovered when he began to practice. He helped found the Student Health Organization, organized the Controversial Medical Collective at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, and struggled to offer improved medical care to those who needed it most and could afford it least.
This landmark book charts the state of medical school and practices in the 1960s and 70s. This new edition is updated with a preface in which Dr. Mullan reflects on the changes in the medical field over the last thirty-plus years.
Fitzhugh Mullan is Murdock Head Professor of Medicine and Health Policy at George Washington University. He worked at the U.S. Public Health Service where he attained the rank of Assistant Surgeon General (1991-1996). Dr. Mullan is the co-founder of the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship and the author of numerous books, including Plagues and Politics: The Story of the United States Public Health Service, and his most recent book, Narrative Matters: The Power of the Personal Essay in Health Policy.
Daiva Markelis
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Her parents never really explained what a D.P. was. Years later Daiva Markelis learned that “displaced person” was the designation bestowed upon European refugees like her mom and dad who fled communist Lithuania after the war. Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, though, Markelis had only heard the name T.P., since her folks pronounced the D as a T: “In first grade we had learned about the Plains Indians, who had lived in tent-like dwellings made of wood and buffalo skin called teepees. In my childish confusion, I thought that perhaps my parents weren’t Lithuanian at all, but Cherokee. I went around telling people that I was the child of teepees.” So begins this touching and affectionate memoir about growing up as a daughter of Lithuanian immigrants.
Markelis was raised during the 1960s and 1970s in a household where Lithuanian was the first language. White Field, Black Sheep derives much of its charm from this collision of old world and new: a tough but cultured generation that can’t quite understand the ways of America and a younger one weaned on Barbie dolls and The Brady Bunch, Hostess cupcakes and comic books, The Monkees and Captain Kangaroo. Throughout, Markelis recalls the amusing contortions of language and identity that animated her childhood. She also humorously recollects the touchstones of her youth, from her First Communion to her first game of Twister. Ultimately, she revisits the troubles that surfaced in the wake of her assimilation into American culture: the constricting expectations of her family and community, her problems with alcoholism and depression, and her sometimes contentious but always loving relationship with her mother.
Deftly recreating the emotional world of adolescence, but overlaying it with the hard-won understanding of adulthood, White Field, Black Sheep is a poignant and moving memoir—a lively tale of this Lithuanian-American life.
Cabrera, Nolan L
Rutgers University Press, 2019
By Emmette S. Redford; and Richard T. McCulley
University of Texas Press, 1986
The relation of White House assistants to the president, their appropriate role in the governmental process, and the most effective means for organizing and managing the White House have been subjects of both public concern and academic dispute. White House Operations addresses these and related questions by providing the first thorough analysis of how the thirty-sixth president managed his staff. By grounding their study in original documents from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, the authors lift the veil of secrecy that clouds the inner workings of the White House. The result is an insightful elaboration of the complex, extensive, and diverse roles of White House aides—and av fascinating look at such key White House figures as McGeorge Bundy, Joseph Califano, Bill Moyers, George Reedy, Walt Rostow, Lawrence O’Brien, and Johnson himself.
This exploration of Johnson’s highly personalized White House operations provides far-reaching implications for the nature of effective presidential management. The comprehensive analysis of the range of work done under Johnson and the unique nature of White House assistance leads the authors to a strong and vigorous assertion for a positive role for the White House staff that clashes sharply with the thrust of many recommendations for reorganizing the presidency. Redford and McCulley convincingly demonstrate that management of the White House staff and other parts of the president’s advisory system will remain crucial for successful presidential performance.
The book is the fifth volume in a series designed to provide a comprehensive administrative history of the Johnson presidency. The book will be of interest to the informed general reader, presidential scholars, political scientists, U.S. historians, and students of public management and will be an important addition to academic library collections.
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1970
Stan Hoig
University Press of Colorado, 2006
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.
David Herzberg
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Cooper Thompson, Emmett Schaefer, and Harry Brod
Duke University Press, 2003
Ranging in age from twenty-six to eighty-six, the men whose stories are presented here include some of the elder statesmen of antiracism work as well as members of the newest generation of activists. They come from across the United States—from Denver, Nashville, and San Jose; rural North Carolina, Detroit, and Seattle. Some are straight; some are gay. A few—such as historian Herbert Aptheker, singer/songwriter Si Kahn, Stetson Kennedy (a Klan infiltrator in the 1940s), and Richard Lapchick (active in organizing the sports community against apartheid)—are relatively well known; most are not. Among them are academics, ministers, police officers, firefighters, teachers, journalists, union leaders, and full-time community organizers. They work with Latinos and African-, Asian-, and Native-Americans. Many ground their work in spiritual commitments. Their inspiring personal narratives—whether about researching right-wing groups, organizing Central American immigrants, or serving as pastor of an interracial congregation—connect these men with one another and with their allies in the fight against racism in the United States.
All authors’ royalties go directly to fund antiracist work. To read excerpts from the book, please visit http://www.whitemenchallengingracism.com/
By 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.
Edited by Lisa A. Long
Rutgers University Press, 2005
What makes someone an authority? What makes one person's knowledge more credible than another's? In the ongoing debates over racial authenticity, some attest that we can know each other's experiences simply because we are all "human," while others assume a more skeptical stance, insisting that racial differences create unbridgeable gaps in knowledge.
Bringing new perspectives to these perennial debates, the essays in this collection explore the many difficulties created by the fact that white scholars greatly outnumber black scholars in the study and teaching of African American literature. Contributors, including some of the most prominent theorists in the field as well as younger scholars, examine who is speaking, what is being spoken and what is not, and why framing African American literature in terms of an exclusive black/white racial divide is problematic and limiting.
In highlighting the "whiteness" of some African Americanists, the collection does not imply that the teaching or understanding of black literature by white scholars is definitively impossible. Indeed such work is not only possible, but imperative. Instead, the essays aim to open a much needed public conversation about the real and pressing challenges that white scholars face in this type of work, as well as the implications of how these challenges are met.
Brian Donovan
University of Illinois Press, 2005
Edited by Paul Baepler
University of Chicago Press, 1999
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.
Herbert 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.
Ruth Frankenberg
University of Minnesota Press, 1993
American Sociological Association’s Jessie Bernard Book Award winner
Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights’s Outstanding Book Award winner
Nicholas Carnes
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Marcus Bell
Duke University Press, 2021
Joy Jordan-Lake
Vanderbilt University Press, 2005
David C Oh
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Andrew Zimbalist
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Greg J. Duncan
Russell Sage Foundation, 2012
Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley
University of Iowa Press, 2014
Joann P. Krieg
University of Iowa Press, 2000
Though Walt Whitman created no Irish characters in his early works of fiction, he did include the Irish as part of the democratic portrait of America that he drew in Leaves of Grass. He could hardly have done otherwise. In 1855, when the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published, the Irish made up one of the largest immigrant populations in New York City and, as such, maintained a cultural identity of their own. All of this “Irishness” swirled about Whitman as he trod the streets of his Mannahatta, ultimately becoming part of him and his poetry. As members of the working class, famous authors, or close friends, the Irish left their mark on Whitman the man and poet. In Whitman and the Irish, Joann Krieg convincingly establishes their importance within the larger framework of Whitman studies.
Focusing on geography rather than biography, Krieg traces Whitman's encounters with cities where the Irish formed a large portion of the population—New York City, Boston, Camden, and Dublin—or where, as in the case of Washington, D.C., he had exceptionally close Irish friends. She also provides a brief yet important historical summary of Ireland and its relationship with America.
Whitman and the Irish does more than examine Whitman's Irish friends and acquaintances: it adds a valuable dimension to our understanding of his personal world and explores a number of vital questions in social and cultural history. Krieg places Whitman in relation to the emerging labor culture of ante-bellum New York, reveals the relationship between Whitman's cultural nationalism and the Irish nationalism of the late nineteenth century, and reflects upon Whitman's involvement with the Union cause and that of Irish American soldiers.

Kerry C. Larson
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Matt Cohen
University of Iowa Press, 2017

Edited by Charles T. Clotfelter
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Julia T. Wood
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994
At a time when studies suggest the average American woman spends seventeen years caring for children and eighteen years caring for aging parents, Julia T. Wood examines how culture creates and sustains our definitions of caring, determines who cares along gender lines, and assigns the diminished value that caring has in our society.
Wood argues that America’s expanding need for caring is currently being met at an unacceptably high cost to caregivers. It is time, she believes, to examine caregiving roles and the personal, political, and social issues that surround the question of who cares. Caring must be recognized and promoted as an activity that commands the respect and participation of all members of our society—men and women alike.
Only by implementing changes in the basic fabric of American culture, affecting both the structure and the policies of our society and government, can we, Wood concludes, carve out a system of caring that will recognize caring as everyone’s responsibility.
Margo Anderson
Russell Sage Foundation, 2001
Benjamin I. Page
University of Chicago Press, 1996