Results by title

5 books match the query 'Rumor'

cover of A Rumor of Revolt: The "Great Negro Plot" in Colonial New York

A Rumor of Revolt

The "Great Negro Plot" in Colonial New York

T. J. Davis

University of Massachusetts Press, 1990

This groundbreaking historical examination analyzes the 1741 New York Conspiracy trials: a pivotal moment in colonial American history when the city's legal system prosecuted an alleged slave conspiracy with severe and controversial consequences. Thomas J. Davis meticulously reconstructs the trials and executions that resulted from this supposed uprising, providing crucial insights into the intersection of race, ethnicity, legal practice, and social control in colonial New York.

During the spring and summer of 1741, New York authorities conducted dramatic trials in response to fears of a coordinated slave rebellion. Between May 11 and August 29, 1741, the city executed 35 individuals: thirteen Black men were burned at the stake, seventeen Black men were hanged, and two white men and two white women were also executed. These brutal punishments reflected the city's intense fear and the racialized nature of colonial justice.

Davis's analysis examines the primary source material to investigate what this historical episode reveals about colonial New York's racial hierarchies, ethnic tensions, and legal systems. The work scrutinizes the trials themselves, asking critical questions: Was there truly a conspiracy, or was the event primarily a product of hysteria and rumor? How did racial prejudices, economic anxieties, and the structure of colonial authority shape legal proceedings?

Beyond the courtroom drama, Davis explores the broader implications of these trials for understanding slavery in northern colonies, where enslaved people were not as visible but equally integral to colonial society. The book demonstrates how fear, whether grounded in reality or stoked by rumor, could mobilize entire communities and transform legal systems into instruments of racialized control. This work has become essential reading for understanding how colonial societies constructed narratives of racial threat and employed legal mechanisms to enforce racial subordination.

[more]
cover of Narrative Landmines: Rumors, Islamist Extremism, and the Struggle for Strategic Influence

Narrative Landmines

Rumors, Islamist Extremism, and the Struggle for Strategic Influence

Bernardi, Daniel Leonard

Rutgers University Press, 2012

Islamic extremism is the dominant security concern of many contemporary governments, spanning the industrialized West to the developing world. Narrative Landmines explores how rumors fit into and extend narrative systems and ideologies, particularly in the context of terrorism, counter-terrorism, and extremist insurgencies. Its concern is to foster a more sophisticated understanding of how oral and digital cultures work alongside economic, diplomatic, and cultural factors that influence the struggles between states and non-state actors in the proverbial battle of hearts and minds. Beyond face-to-face communication, the authors also address the role of new and social media in the creation and spread of rumors.

 As narrative forms, rumors are suitable to a wide range of political expression, from citizens, insurgents, and governments alike, and in places as distinct as Singapore, Iraq, and Indonesia—the case studies presented for analysis. The authors make a compelling argument for understanding rumors in these contexts as “narrative IEDs,” low-cost, low-tech weapons that can successfully counter such elaborate and expansive government initiatives as outreach campaigns or strategic communication efforts. While not exactly the same as the advanced technological systems or Improvised Explosive Devices to which they are metaphorically related, narrative IEDs nevertheless operate as weapons that can aid the extremist cause.

[more]
cover of Rumor: Poems

Rumor

Poems

Pimone Triplett

Northwestern University Press, 2009

In Rumor, her third collection of poems, Pimone Triplett summons diverse Eastern and Western influences to reckon the public and private costs of the overwhelming glut of "intelligence," or information, that we face in contemporary life. Triplett relays the voices, both personal and distant, that too often are only partially heard. The most difficult realities of family life are chronicled in "Family Spirits, with Voice of One Child Miscarried," in which Triplett uses free verse that incorporates the traditional Thai verse form of khap yanii.

Over the course of the book, she explores how a child grows from a hint, a rumor, to a full force of intelligence and knowing. "Motherland" and "Last Wave" amplify voices, respectively, of exploited children in the brutal Thai sex trade and the victims in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The fragmentary nature of rumor, whether in the form of tabloid gossip or in the spread of partial knowledge, has consequence on a personal and even a world historical scale in Triplett's powerful poems.


[more]
cover of The Sex Thieves: The Anthropology of a Rumor

The Sex Thieves

The Anthropology of a Rumor

Julien Bonhomme

HAU, 2016

While working in Africa, anthropologist Julien Bonhomme encountered an astonishing phenomenon: people being accused of stealing or shrinking the genitals of strangers on the simple occasion of a handshake on the street. As he soon discovered, these accusations can have dramatic outcomes: the “sex thieves” are often targeted by large crowds and publicly lynched. Moreover, such rumors are an extremely widespread practice, having affected almost half of the African continent since the 1970s. In this book, Bonhomme examines the story of the “penis snatcher,” asking larger questions about how to account for such a phenomenon—unique in its spatial and temporal scale—without falling prey to the cliché of Africa as an exotic other.

Bonhomme argues that the public belief in sex thieves cannot be considered a superstition or form of mass hysteria. Rather, he brings to light multiple factors that explain the rumor’s success and shows how the cultural dynamic can operate on a vast scale. Analyzing the rumor on both transnational and local levels, he demonstrates how it arises from the ambiguities and dangers of anonymity, and thus that it reveals an occult flipside to everyday social interaction. Altogether, this book provides both richly ethnographic and theoretical understandings of urban sociality and the dynamics of human communication in contemporary Africa and beyond.
 
[more]
cover of The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War

The Young Descartes

Nobility, Rumor, and War

Harold J. Cook

University of Chicago Press, 2018

René Descartes is best known as the man who coined the phrase “I think, therefore I am.”  But though he is remembered most as a thinker, Descartes, the man, was no disembodied mind, theorizing at great remove from the worldly affairs and concerns of his time. Far from it. As a young nobleman, Descartes was a soldier and courtier who took part in some of the greatest events of his generation—a man who would not seem out of place in the pages of The Three Musketeers.

In The Young Descartes, Harold J. Cook tells the story of a man who did not set out to become an author or philosopher—Descartes began publishing only after the age of forty. Rather, for years he traveled throughout Europe in diplomacy and at war. He was present at the opening events of the Thirty Years' War in Central Europe and Northern Italy, and was also later involved in struggles within France. Enduring exile, scandals, and courtly intrigue, on his journeys Descartes associated with many of the most innovative free thinkers and poets of his day, as well as great noblemen, noblewomen, and charismatic religious reformers. In his personal life, he expressed love for men as well as women and was accused of libertinism by his adversaries.

These early years on the move, in touch with powerful people and great events, and his experiences with military engineering and philosophical materialism all shaped the thinker and philosopher Descartes became in exile, where he would begin to write and publish, with purpose. But though it is these writings that made ultimately made him famous, The Young Descartes shows that this story of his early life and the tumultuous times that molded him is sure to spark a reappraisal of his philosophy and legacy.
[more]