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7 books match the query 'Continent'

cover of Across the Continent: The Union Pacific Photographs of Andrew Joseph Russell

Across the Continent

The Union Pacific Photographs of Andrew Joseph Russell

Daniel Davis

University of Utah Press, 2018


Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society. Affiliated with the Utah Division of State History, Utah Department of Heritage & Arts

Andrew J. Russell is primarily known as the man who photographed the famous “East and West Shaking Hands” image of the Golden Spike ceremony on May 10, 1869. He also took nearly one thousand other images that document almost every aspect of the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad. Across the Continent is the most detailed study to date of the life and work of an often-overlooked but prolific artist who contributed immensely not only to documentation of the railroad but also to the nation’s visualization of the American West and, earlier, the Civil War.
 
The central focus in the book is on the large body of work Russell produced primarily to satisfy the needs of the Union Pacific. Daniel Davis posits that this set of Russell’s photos is best understood not through one or a handful of individual images, but as a photographic archive. Taken as a whole, that archive shows that Russell intended for viewers never to forget who built the Union Pacific. His images celebrate working people—masons working on bridge foundations, freighters and their wagons, surveyors with their transits, engine crews posed on their engines, as well as tracklayers, laborers, cooks, machinists, carpenters, graders, teamsters, and clerks pushing paper.
 
Russell contributed to a golden age of Western photography that visually introduced the American West to the nation, changing its public image from that of a Great American Desert to a place of apparently unlimited economic potential.
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cover of Africa Every Day: Fun, Leisure, and Expressive Culture on the Continent

Africa Every Day

Fun, Leisure, and Expressive Culture on the Continent

Oluwakemi M. Balogun

Ohio University Press, 2019

Africa Every Day presents an exuberant, thoughtful, and necessary counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis in introductory African studies classes on war, poverty, corruption, disease, and human rights violations on the continent. These challenges are real and deserve sustained attention, but this volume shows that adverse conditions do not prevent people from making music, falling in love, playing sports, participating in festivals, writing blogs, telling jokes, making videos, playing games, eating delicious food, and finding pleasure in their daily lives. Across seven sections—Celebrations and Rites of Passage; Socializing and Friendship; Love, Sex, and Marriage; Sports and Recreation; Performance, Language, and Creativity; Technology and Media; and Labor and Livelihoods—the accessible, multidisciplinary essays in Africa Every Day address these creative and dynamic elements of daily life, without romanticizing them. Ultimately, the book shows that forms of leisure and popular culture in Africa are best discussed in terms of indigenization, adaptation, and appropriation rather than the static binary of European/foreign/global and African. Most of all, it invites readers to reflect on the crucial similarities, rather than the differences, between their lives and those of their African counterparts. Contributors: Hadeer Aboelnagah, Issahaku Adam, Joseph Osuolale Ayodokun, Victoria Abiola Ayodokun, Omotoyosi Babalola, Martha Bannikov, Mokaya Bosire, Emily Callaci, Deborah Durham, Birgit Englert, Laura Fair, John Fenn, Lara Rosenoff Gauvin, Michael Gennaro, Lisa Gilman, Charlotte Grabli, Joshua Grace, Dorothy L. Hodgson, Akwasi Kumi-Kyereme, Prince F. M. Lamba, Cheikh Tidiane Lo, Bill McCoy, Nginjai Paul Moreto, Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, James Nindi, Erin Nourse, Eric Debrah Otchere, Alex Perullo, Daniel Jordan Smith, Maya Smith, Steven Van Wolputte, and Scott M. Youngstedt.
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cover of Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America

Conversion of a Continent

Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America

Steigenga, Timothy

Rutgers University Press, 2007

A massive religious transformation has unfolded over the past forty years in Latin America and the Caribbean. In a region where the Catholic Church could once claim a near monopoly of adherents, religious pluralism has fundamentally altered the social and religious landscape. 

Conversion of a Continent brings together twelve original essays that document and explore competing explanations for how and why conversion has occurred. Contributors draw on various insights from social movement theory to religious studies to help outline its impact on national attitudes and activities, gender relations, identity politics, and reverse waves of missions from Latin America aimed at the American immigrant community. 

Unlike other studies on religious conversion, this volume pays close attention to who converts, under what circumstances, the meaning of conversion to the individual, and how the change affects converts’ beliefs and actions. The thematic focus makes this volume important to students and scholars in both religious studies and Latin American studies.
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cover of Dreams of a Continent: Artists' Solidarity with Central America

Dreams of a Continent

Artists' Solidarity with Central America

Erina Duganne

University of Texas Press, 2026

A biography of Artists Call, an influential 1980s artist group that protested US intervention in Latin America.

The 1980s saw the flourishing of neoliberalism in all realms of culture. In the fine arts, libertarian individualism, media sensationalism, and profit motive converged in million-dollar auctions—and a widespread insistence that activism had no place in the arts. Yet even some participants of this elite New York art world resisted. Dreams of a Continent tells the forgotten story of a diverse collective that defied culture-industry norms by condemning Reagan-era imperialism in Latin America while building transnational solidarity.

Drawing on fresh archival discoveries, Erina Duganne reconstructs the political imagination of Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. A network with more than a thousand members in New York City, Artists Call produced thirty-one exhibitions in its brief life, along with poetry readings and performances that brought together US and Latin American cultural workers in support of self-determination throughout the hemisphere. This richly illustrated volume shows how the aesthetics of Artists Call emphasized historical contingency in order to envision radically alternative futures. In the process, its activism fostered a global community that overcame stark North-South power imbalances.

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cover of Illinois: Crossroads of a Continent

Illinois

Crossroads of a Continent

Lois A. Carrier

University of Illinois Press, 1993

With a major port on the Great Lakes, an extensive network of railroads and canals, and a river system including the Mississippi, the Illinois, and the Ohio, Illinois has long played a critical role in linking East Coast industrial cities, the agricultural heartland, and the Gulf Coast.

Writing in a fast-paced, down-to-earth style, Lois Carrier introduces a host of innovations and innovators associated with Illinois: Jane Addams and Louis Armstrong, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walt Disney, Cracker Jack and the Ferris wheel. From the Cahokia Mounds to Chicago, Illinois: Crossroads of a Continent provides a panoramic history for students and general readers.

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cover of Schools and Universities on the Continent: The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold

Schools and Universities on the Continent

The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold; Edited by R. H. Super

University of Michigan Press, 1964

This description of European higher education is unequaled for its clarity and comprehensiveness. Today, 100 years later, Matthew Arnold's observations are as timely as when first written. Inspector of schools as well as a poet and critic, Arnold watched democracy breed self-satisfied Philistines and realized that not all the liberty and industry in the world could ensure the rule of right reason. In 1865 he left England to investigate higher education in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. In this volume Arnold traces the growth of schools and universities on the continent, examines the role of government in their development, and argues for organized public education and state schools in England. Included are the 1868 and 1882 Prefaces to Schools and Universities on the Continent, a newly discovered essay entitled "German and English Universities," and three letters written to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. This book makes clear the goals and achievements of European higher education and their relation to 19th-century and modern standards of learning.
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cover of The Continent of Everything and Practically Nothing

The Continent of Everything and Practically Nothing

Sami Tchak

Seagull Books, 2026

A Togolese novel that delivers a rich, intimate portrait of a scholar whose life is inextricably bound to Africa.

For the French ethnologist Maurice Boyer, Africa isn't just a place; it’s a mirage, an enigma, a mirror reflecting his desires and doubts. The fieldwork he undertook in Tèdi, Togo, where he lived for years among the Tem people and tried to understand their customs and rituals, has left him with questions that have lingered: Who was a friend and who was a foe? Which stories were true and which were illusions? As decades pass and the roles of Aurélie, his wife, and Safi, his former student, begin to shift, Boyer finds himself wrestling not only with his own choices but with the legacy of knowledge itself.

Through the lens of this profound postcolonial quest, Sami Tchak explores Africa’s rich, complex reality through this intimate story of a scholar reconsidering his own understanding of culture, ethnology, and history. The Continent of Everything and Practically Nothing asks whether assembling more data can truly capture the complexity of a continent, and explores how academic ambition, history, and emotion shape how we understand the world, and how we live in it.

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