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29723 books about History and 1598
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29723 books about History and 1598
29723 books about History
1598 start with B start with B
1598 start with B start with B
Beyond The Mafia
Italian Americans And The Development Of Las Vegas
Alan Balboni
University of Nevada Press, 2006
When Beyond the Mafia first appeared in 1996 it was hailed as a significant contribution to the history of Las Vegas and of ethnic minorities in America. Author Alan Balboni traces the history of Italians in Las Vegas from the founding of the city in 1905, recording their activities in the fledgling settlement. As Las Vegas grew, Italian Americans participated in every aspect of the city’s society and economy, including construction, retail establishments, hotels, and—after the statewide legalization of gambling in 1931—the casino industry. Basing his research on well over a hundred interviews, as well as the records of Italian American organizations, public agencies, and other sources, Balboni has produced a sparkling and thoroughly documented account of the history of one of Las Vegas’s most progressive and productive ethnic minorities. This new paperback edition includes an afterword by the author that brings the story of Las Vegas’s Italian Americans up to the present.
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Beyond the Mask
Gordon Craig, Movement, and the Actor
Irene Eynat-Confino
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987
Eynat-Confino goes beyond the usual consideration of Craig’s purported theories of the actor, scenery, and the scene painter to get at the heart of Craig’s idea of theater.
She draws not only on the research of contemporary Craig scholars but on material hitherto unavailable—his writings and daybooks and the writings of friends. She ties Craig’s encounter with Isadora Duncan to a decisive modification in his notion of movement. To have an instrument more controllable than the actor, he invented the über-marionette, a giant puppet. Craig also invented the “Scene,” a kinetic stage, the “screens” that brought him worldwide fame were simply an adaptation of this concept.
Eynat-Confino argues that a scenario Craig wrote in 1905, here published for the first time, reveals a theosophical system like that of Blake, a system that was the main force motivating Craig’s artistic quest. In her final chapter, she carefully examines the psychological, aesthetic, and circumstantial factors that kept Craig from completing his work to bring “friendliness—humor—love—ease—peace” to the world.
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Beyond the Miracle
Inside the New South Africa
Allister Sparks
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In Beyond the Miracle, a distinguished South African journalist provides a wide-ranging and unflinching account of the first nine years of democratic government in South Africa. Covering both the new regime's proud achievements and its disappointing failures, Allister Sparks looks to South Africa's future, asking whether it can overcome its history and current global trends to create a truly nonracial, multicultural, and multiparty democracy.
Sparks sees South Africa as facing many of the same challenges as the rest of the world, especially a widening gap between rich and poor, exacerbated by the forces of globalization. While the transition government has done much to establish democracy and racial equality in a short time, as well as bring basic services such as clean water to millions who did not have them before, many blacks feel it has not done enough to redress the continuing imbalance of wealth in the country. Many whites, meanwhile, feel disempowered and confused about what role they have to play as a racial minority in a country they used to rule and regard as theirs by divine right. Sparks also covers other burning issues, such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, high crime rates, the diamond wars, the Congo conflict, and the Zimbabwean land crisis.
Writing vividly and often quite movingly, Sparks draws on his decades of journalistic experience and his recent insider access to key figures in the liberation government to take stock of where South Africa has been, where it's going, and why the rest of the world should not turn away from this country where the First and Third Worlds meet. As Sparks persuasively argues, the success of Mandela's vision of a peaceful "rainbow nation" is crucial not just for the salvation of Africa, but also for the world.
Sparks sees South Africa as facing many of the same challenges as the rest of the world, especially a widening gap between rich and poor, exacerbated by the forces of globalization. While the transition government has done much to establish democracy and racial equality in a short time, as well as bring basic services such as clean water to millions who did not have them before, many blacks feel it has not done enough to redress the continuing imbalance of wealth in the country. Many whites, meanwhile, feel disempowered and confused about what role they have to play as a racial minority in a country they used to rule and regard as theirs by divine right. Sparks also covers other burning issues, such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, high crime rates, the diamond wars, the Congo conflict, and the Zimbabwean land crisis.
Writing vividly and often quite movingly, Sparks draws on his decades of journalistic experience and his recent insider access to key figures in the liberation government to take stock of where South Africa has been, where it's going, and why the rest of the world should not turn away from this country where the First and Third Worlds meet. As Sparks persuasively argues, the success of Mandela's vision of a peaceful "rainbow nation" is crucial not just for the salvation of Africa, but also for the world.
“Sparks, a grandfather of South African journalism, has fired one of the first volleys in the 10-year assessment. . . . It is an even-handed work, almost encyclopedic in its breadth. Sparks traverses all the important political terrain.”—Mail & Guardian
“It is as good a guide to the new South Africa as any.”—Economist
“It is as good a guide to the new South Africa as any.”—Economist
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Beyond the Monastery Walls
The Ascetic Revolution in Russian Orthodox Thought, 1814–1914
Patrick Lally Michelson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
During Russia's late imperial period, Orthodox churchmen, professionally trained theologians, and an array of social commentators sought to give meaning to Russian history and its supposed backwardness. Many found that meaning in asceticism. For some, ascetic religiosity prevented Russia from achieving its historical destiny. For others, it was the means by which the Russian people would realize the kingdom of God, thereby saving Holy Russia and the world from the satanic forces of the West.
Patrick Lally Michelson's intellectual history of asceticism in Russian Orthodox thought traces the development of these competing arguments from the early nineteenth century to the early months of World War I. He demonstrates that this discourse was an imaginative interpretation of lived Orthodoxy, primarily meant to satisfy the ideological needs of Russian thinkers and Orthodox intellectuals as they responded to the socioeconomic, political, and cultural challenges of modernity.
Patrick Lally Michelson's intellectual history of asceticism in Russian Orthodox thought traces the development of these competing arguments from the early nineteenth century to the early months of World War I. He demonstrates that this discourse was an imaginative interpretation of lived Orthodoxy, primarily meant to satisfy the ideological needs of Russian thinkers and Orthodox intellectuals as they responded to the socioeconomic, political, and cultural challenges of modernity.
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Beyond the Pale
Dutch Extreme Violence in the Indonesian War of Independence, 1945-1949
On 17 August 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender, Indonesia declared its independence. The declaration was not recognized by the Netherlands, which resorted to force in its attempt to take control of the inevitable process of decolonization. This led to four years of difficult negotiations and bitter warfare.
In 2005, the Dutch government declared that the Netherlands should never have waged the war. The government’s 1969 position on the violence used by the Dutch armed forces during the war remained unchanged, however: although there had been ‘excesses’, on the whole the armed forces had behaved ‘correctly’.
As the indications of Dutch extreme violence mounted, this official position proved increasingly difficult to maintain. In 2016, the Dutch government therefore decided to fund a broad study on the dynamics of the violence. The most important conclusions are summarized in this book. The authors show that the Dutch armed forces used extreme violence on a structural basis, and that this was concealed both at the time and for many years after. All of this – like the entire colonial history – is at odds with the rose-tinted self-image of the Netherlands.
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Beyond the Public Sphere
Film and the Feminist Imaginary
María Pía Lara
Northwestern University Press, 2021
In Beyond the Public Sphere: Film and the Feminist Imaginary, the renowned philosopher and critical theorist María Pía Lara challenges the notion that the bourgeois public sphere is the most important informal institution between social and political actors and the state.
Drawing on a wide range of films—including The Milk of Sorrow, Ixcanul, Wadja, The Stone of Patience, Marnie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Talk to Her—Lara dissects cinematic images of women’s struggles and their oppression. She builds on this analysis, developing a concept of the feminist social imaginary as a broader and more complex space that provides a way of thinking through the possibilities for emancipatory social transformation in response to forms of domination perpetuated by patriarchal capitalism.
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Beyond the Pulpit
Women’s Rhetorical Roles in the Antebellum Religious Press
Lisa J. Shaver
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012
In the formative years of the Methodist Church in the United States, women played significant roles as proselytizers, organizers, lay ministers, and majority members. Although women’s participation helped the church to become the nation’s largest denomination by the mid-nineteenth century, their official roles diminished during that time. In Beyond the Pulpit, Lisa Shaver examines Methodist periodicals as a rhetorical space to which women turned to find, and make, self-meaning.
In 1818, Methodist Magazine first published “memoirs” that eulogized women as powerful witnesses for their faith on their deathbeds. As Shaver observes, it was only in death that a woman could achieve the status of minister. Another Methodist publication, the Christian Advocate, was America’s largest circulated weekly by the mid-1830s. It featured the “Ladies’ Department,” a column that reinforced the canon of women as dutiful wives, mothers, and household managers. Here, the church also affirmed women in the important rhetorical and evangelical role of domestic preacher. Outside the “Ladies Department,” women increasingly appeared in “little narratives” in which they were portrayed as models of piety and charity, benefactors, organizers, Sunday school administrators and teachers, missionaries, and ministers’ assistants. These texts cast women into nondomestic roles that were institutionally sanctioned and widely disseminated.
By 1841, the Ladies’ Repository and Gatherings of the West was engaging women in discussions of religion, politics, education, science, and a variety of intellectual debates. As Shaver posits, by providing a forum for women writers and readers, the church gave them an official rhetorical space and the license to define their own roles and spheres of influence. As such, the periodicals of the Methodist church became an important public venue in which women’s voices were heard and their identities explored.
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Beyond the Quagmire
New Interpretations of the Vietnam War
Geoffrey W. Jensen
University of North Texas Press, 2019
Beyond the Rebel Girl
Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905-1924
Heather Mayer
Oregon State University Press, 2018
More than a century after their founding in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World—or Wobblies as they are commonly known—remain a popular subject for study and discussion among students of labor history and social justice. They are often portrayed as lovable underdogs, with their songs and cartoons, generally irreverent attitude, and stalwart courage in the face of systemic persecution from vigilantes, law enforcement, and government officials.
In Beyond the Rebel Girl, historian Heather Mayer questions the well-worn vision of Wobblies as young, single, male, itinerant workers. While such workers formed a large portion of the membership, they weren’t the whole picture. In small towns across the Northwest, and in the larger cities of Seattle, Portland, and Spokane, women played an integral role in Wobbly life. Single women, but also families—husband and wife Wobbly teams—played important roles in some of the biggest fights for justice. IWW halls in these Northwest cities often functioned as community centers, with family-friendly events and entertainment.
Women were drawn to the IWW for its radical vision, inclusionary policies, birth control advocacy, and emphasis on freedom of choice in marriage. The IWW also offered women an avenue for activism that wasn’t focused primarily on the fight for suffrage. Beyond the Rebel Girl deepens our understanding of how the IWW functioned and how the union supported women in their fight for birth control, sexual emancipation, and better labor conditions, all while facing persecution at the local, state, and federal levels.
In Beyond the Rebel Girl, historian Heather Mayer questions the well-worn vision of Wobblies as young, single, male, itinerant workers. While such workers formed a large portion of the membership, they weren’t the whole picture. In small towns across the Northwest, and in the larger cities of Seattle, Portland, and Spokane, women played an integral role in Wobbly life. Single women, but also families—husband and wife Wobbly teams—played important roles in some of the biggest fights for justice. IWW halls in these Northwest cities often functioned as community centers, with family-friendly events and entertainment.
Women were drawn to the IWW for its radical vision, inclusionary policies, birth control advocacy, and emphasis on freedom of choice in marriage. The IWW also offered women an avenue for activism that wasn’t focused primarily on the fight for suffrage. Beyond the Rebel Girl deepens our understanding of how the IWW functioned and how the union supported women in their fight for birth control, sexual emancipation, and better labor conditions, all while facing persecution at the local, state, and federal levels.
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BEYOND THE REPRODUCTIVE BODY
POLITICS OF WOMEN'S HEALTH & WORK IN EARLY VICTORIAN ENGLAND
MARJORIE LEVINE-CLARK
The Ohio State University Press, 2004
Beyond the Revolution
Bolivia since 1952
James Malloy
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971
Ten original essays discuss changes in the life, politics, and culture of Bolivia since the revolution of 1952.
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Beyond the Sacred Forest
Complicating Conservation in Southeast Asia
Michael R. Dove, Percy E. Sajise, and Amity A. Doolittle, eds.
Duke University Press, 2011
Reflecting new thinking about conservation in Southeast Asia, Beyond the Sacred Forest is the product of a unique, decade-long, interdisciplinary collaboration involving research in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Scholars from these countries and the United States rethink the translation of environmental concepts between East and West, particularly ideas of nature and culture; the meaning of conservation; and the ways that conservation policy is applied and transformed in the everyday landscapes of Southeast Asia. The contributors focus more on folk, community, and vernacular conservation discourses than on those of formal institutions and the state. They reject the notion that conservation only takes place in bounded, static, otherworldly spaces such as protected areas or sacred forests. Thick with ethnographic detail, their essays move beyond the forest to agriculture and other land uses, leave behind orthodox notions of the sacred, discard outdated ideas of environmental harmony and stasis, and reject views of the environment that seek to avoid or escape politics. Natural-resource managers and policymakers who work with this more complicated vision of nature and culture are likely to enjoy more enduring success than those who simply seek to remove the influence and impact of humans from conserved landscapes. As many of the essays suggest, this requires the ability to manage contradictions, to relinquish orthodox ideas of what conservation looks like, and to practice continuously adaptive management techniques.
Contributors. Upik Djalins, Amity A. Doolittle, Michael R. Dove, Levita Duhaylungsod, Emily E. Harwell, Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, Lye Tuck-Po, Percy E. Sajise, Endah Sulistyawati, Yunita T. Winarto
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Beyond the Subtitle
Remapping European Art Cinema
Mark Betz
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Beyond the Synagogue Gallery
Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism
Karla Goldman
Harvard University Press, 2000
Beyond the Synagogue Gallery recounts the emergence of new roles for American Jewish women in public worship and synagogue life. Karla Goldman's study of changing patterns of female religiosity is a story of acculturation, of adjustments made to fit Jewish worship into American society.
Goldman focuses on the nineteenth century. This was an era in which immigrant communities strove for middle-class respectability for themselves and their religion, even while fearing a loss of traditions and identity. For acculturating Jews some practices, like the ritual bath, quickly disappeared. Women's traditional segregation from the service in screened women's galleries was gradually replaced by family pews and mixed choirs. By the end of the century, with the rising tide of Jewish immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe, the spread of women's social and religious activism within a network of organizations brought collective strength to the nation's established Jewish community. Throughout these changing times, though, Goldman notes persistent ambiguous feelings about the appropriate place of women in Judaism, even among reformers.
This account of the evolving religious identities of American Jewish women expands our understanding of women's religious roles and of the Americanization of Judaism in the nineteenth century; it makes an essential contribution to the history of religion in America.
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Beyond the Texts
An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah
William G. Dever
SBL Press, 2017
A handbook for biblical scholars and historians of the Ancient Near East
William G. Dever offers a welcome perspective on ancient Israel and Judah that prioritizes the archaeological remains to render history as it was—not as the biblical writers argue it should have been. Drawing from the most recent archaeological data as interpreted from a nontheological point of view and supplementing that data with biblical material only when it converges with the archaeological record, Dever analyzes all the evidence at hand to provide a new history of ancient Israel and Judah that is accessible to all interested readers.
Features
- A new approach to the history of ancient Israel
- Extensive bibliography
- More than eighty maps and illustrations
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Beyond the Trees
Stories of Wisconsin Forests
Candice Gaukel Andrews
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011
Nature writer Candice Andrews weaves together contemporary observations and historical reminisces in Beyond the Trees: Stories of Wisconsin Forests. Readers will journey to some of the most pristine and notable places in the Upper Midwest—Wisconsin’s state and national forests.
The diversity of landscapes evoked in Beyond the Trees is matched only by the characters who inhabit them. Traverse the footsteps of Ojibwe hunters and early explorers in the remote woods of Brule River State Forest. Trek past the remains of bygone logging and CCC camps in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. Glimpse into the world of Great Lakes shipping in Point Beach State Forest. Walk on trails named after John Muir and Increase Lapham in the Kettle Moraine State Forest, and experience urban green space at Milwaukee’s Havenwoods State Forest. From orchids to oak savanna, beaver to brook trout, and white-tailed deer to timber wolves, discover Wisconsin’s wildlife and flora and fauna. Archival images, informative sidebars, locator maps, and contact information for Wisconsin state and national forests round out this unique book.
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Beyond the Usual Beating
The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago
Andrew S. Baer
University of Chicago Press, 2020
The malign and long-lasting influence of Chicago police commander Jon Burge cannot be overestimated, particularly as fresh examples of local and national criminal-justice abuse continue to surface with dismaying frequency. Burge’s decades-long tenure on the Chicago police force was marked by racist and barbaric interrogation methods, including psychological torture, burnings, and mock executions—techniques that went far “beyond the usual beating.” After being exposed in 1989, he became a symbol of police brutality and the unequal treatment of nonwhite people, and the persistent outcry against him led to reforms such as the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois.
But Burge hardly developed or operated in a vacuum, as Andrew S. Baer explores to stark effect here. He identifies the darkness of the Burge era as a product of local social forces, arising from a specific milieu beyond the nationwide racialized reactionary fever of the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, the popular resistance movements that rallied in his wake actually predated Burge’s exposure but cohered with unexpected power due to the galvanizing focus on his crimes and abuses. For more than thirty years, a shifting coalition including torture survivors, their families, civil rights attorneys, and journalists helped to corroborate allegations of violence, free the wrongfully convicted, have Burge fired and incarcerated, and win passage of a municipal reparations package, among other victories. Beyond the Usual Beating reveals that though the Burge scandal underscores the relationship between personal bigotry and structural racism in the criminal justice system, it also shows how ordinary people held perpetrators accountable in the face of intransigent local power.
But Burge hardly developed or operated in a vacuum, as Andrew S. Baer explores to stark effect here. He identifies the darkness of the Burge era as a product of local social forces, arising from a specific milieu beyond the nationwide racialized reactionary fever of the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, the popular resistance movements that rallied in his wake actually predated Burge’s exposure but cohered with unexpected power due to the galvanizing focus on his crimes and abuses. For more than thirty years, a shifting coalition including torture survivors, their families, civil rights attorneys, and journalists helped to corroborate allegations of violence, free the wrongfully convicted, have Burge fired and incarcerated, and win passage of a municipal reparations package, among other victories. Beyond the Usual Beating reveals that though the Burge scandal underscores the relationship between personal bigotry and structural racism in the criminal justice system, it also shows how ordinary people held perpetrators accountable in the face of intransigent local power.
[more]
Beyond the World's End
Arts of Living at the Crossing
T. J. Demos
Duke University Press, 2020
In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises. Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms. Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.
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"Beyond This Narrow Now"
Or, Delimitations, of W. E. B. Du Bois
Nadhum Dimitri Chandler
Duke University Press, 2022
In “Beyond This Narrow Now” Nahum Dimitri Chandler shows that the premises of W. E. B. Du Bois's thinking at the turn of the twentieth century stand as fundamental references for the whole itinerary of his thought. Opening with a distinct approach to the legacy of Du Bois, Chandler proceeds through a series of close readings of Du Bois's early essays, previously unpublished or seldom studied, with discrete annotations of The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches of 1903, elucidating and elaborating basic epistemological terms of his thought. With theoretical attention to how the African American stands as an example of possibility for Du Bois and renders problematic traditional ontological thought, Chandler also proposes that Du Bois's most well-known phrase—“the problem of the color line”—sustains more conceptual depth than has yet been understood, with pertinence for our accounts of modern systems of enslavement and imperial colonialism and the incipient moments of modern capitalization. Chandler's work exemplifies a more profound engagement with Du Bois, demonstrating that he must be re-read, appreciated, and studied anew as a philosophical writer and thinker contemporary to our time.
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Beyond Timbuktu
An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa
Ousmane Oumar Kane
Harvard University Press, 2016
Renowned for its madrassas and archives of rare Arabic manuscripts, Timbuktu is famous as a great center of Muslim learning from Islam’s Golden Age. Yet Timbuktu is not unique. It was one among many scholarly centers to exist in precolonial West Africa. Beyond Timbuktu charts the rise of Muslim learning in West Africa from the beginning of Islam to the present day, examining the shifting contexts that have influenced the production and dissemination of Islamic knowledge—and shaped the sometimes conflicting interpretations of Muslim intellectuals—over the course of centuries.
Highlighting the significant breadth and versatility of the Muslim intellectual tradition in sub-Saharan Africa, Ousmane Kane corrects lingering misconceptions in both the West and the Middle East that Africa’s Muslim heritage represents a minor thread in Islam’s larger tapestry. West African Muslims have never been isolated. To the contrary, their connection with Muslims worldwide is robust and longstanding. The Sahara was not an insuperable barrier but a bridge that allowed the Arabo-Berbers of the North to sustain relations with West African Muslims through trade, diplomacy, and intellectual and spiritual exchange.
The West African tradition of Islamic learning has grown in tandem with the spread of Arabic literacy, making Arabic the most widely spoken language in Africa today. In the postcolonial period, dramatic transformations in West African education, together with the rise of media technologies and the ever-evolving public roles of African Muslim intellectuals, continue to spread knowledge of Islam throughout the continent.
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Beyond Vietnam
The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974-1990
Robert Surbrug
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
Narratives of the 1960s typically describe an ascending arc of political activism that peaked in 1968, then began a precipitous descent as the revolutionary dreams of the New Left failed to come to fruition. The May 1970 killings at Kent State often stand as an epitaph to a decade of protest, after which the principal story becomes the resurgence of the right.
In Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974–1990, Robert Surbrug challenges this prevailing paradigm by examining three protest movements that were direct descendants of Vietnam-era activism: the movement against nuclear energy; the nuclear weapons freeze movement; and the Central American solidarity movement. Drawing lessons from the successes and failures of the preceding era, these movements had a significant impact on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which itself had been undergoing major transformations in the wake of the 1960s.
By focusing on one state—Massachusetts—Surbrug is able to illuminate the interaction between the activist left and mainstream liberalism, showing how each influenced the other and how together they helped shape the politics of the 1970s and 1980s. During these years, Massachusetts emerged as a center of opposition to nuclear power, the continuing Cold War arms race, and Ronald Reagan's interventionist policies in Central America. The state's role in national policy was greatly enhanced by prominent political figures such as Senator Edward Kennedy, Speaker of the House Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, presidential candidate Governor Michael Dukakis, Vietnam veteran Senator John Kerry, and moderate Republican Silvio Conte.
What Beyond Vietnam shows is that the rise of the right in the aftermath of the 1960s was by no means a unilateral ascendancy. Instead it involved a bifurcation of American politics in which an increasingly strong conservative movement was vigorously contested by an activist left and a reinvigorated mainstream liberalism.
In Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974–1990, Robert Surbrug challenges this prevailing paradigm by examining three protest movements that were direct descendants of Vietnam-era activism: the movement against nuclear energy; the nuclear weapons freeze movement; and the Central American solidarity movement. Drawing lessons from the successes and failures of the preceding era, these movements had a significant impact on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which itself had been undergoing major transformations in the wake of the 1960s.
By focusing on one state—Massachusetts—Surbrug is able to illuminate the interaction between the activist left and mainstream liberalism, showing how each influenced the other and how together they helped shape the politics of the 1970s and 1980s. During these years, Massachusetts emerged as a center of opposition to nuclear power, the continuing Cold War arms race, and Ronald Reagan's interventionist policies in Central America. The state's role in national policy was greatly enhanced by prominent political figures such as Senator Edward Kennedy, Speaker of the House Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, presidential candidate Governor Michael Dukakis, Vietnam veteran Senator John Kerry, and moderate Republican Silvio Conte.
What Beyond Vietnam shows is that the rise of the right in the aftermath of the 1960s was by no means a unilateral ascendancy. Instead it involved a bifurcation of American politics in which an increasingly strong conservative movement was vigorously contested by an activist left and a reinvigorated mainstream liberalism.
[more]
Beyond Words
Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa
Andrew Apter
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Even within anthropology, a discipline that strives to overcome misrepresentations of peoples and cultures, colonialist depictions of the so-called Dark Continent run deep. The grand narratives, tribal tropes, distorted images, and “natural” histories that forged the foundations of discourse about Africa remain firmly entrenched. In Beyond Words, Andrew Apter explores how anthropology can come to terms with the “colonial library” and begin to develop an ethnographic practice that transcends the politics of Africa’s imperial past.
The way out of the colonial library, Apter argues, is by listening to critical discourses in Africa that reframe the social and political contexts in which they are embedded. Apter develops a model of critical agency, focusing on a variety of language genres in Africa situated in rituals that transform sociopolitical relations by self-consciously deploying the power of language itself. To break the cycle of Western illusions in discursive constructions of Africa, he shows, we must listen to African voices in ways that are culturally and locally informed. In doing so, Apter brings forth what promises to be a powerful and influential theory in contemporary anthropology.
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The Bhaikṣukī Manuscript of the Candrālaṃkāra
Study, Script Tables, and Facsimile Edition
Dragomir Dimitrov
Harvard University Press
This volume discusses the Bhaikṣukī manuscript of the Candrālaṃkāra (“Ornament of the Moon”), a commentary of the twelfth century based on the Cāndravyākaraṇa, Candragomin’s seminal Buddhist grammar of Sanskrit. The discovery of the Bhaikṣukī script and of all available written sources are described. The detailed study of this codex unicus of the Candrālaṃkāra is accompanied by a facsimile edition and extensive tables of the script, a long-felt desideratum in the field of palaeography. The Buddhist author of the commentary has been identified for the first time, and the nature of his treatise and its position in the Cāndra school of grammar have been expounded. The history of the manuscript and newly discovered traces of the Bhaikṣukī script in Tibet are discussed. This publication will serve as a prolegomenon necessary for the preparation of a critical edition of the Candrālaṃkāra, which until now was believed to have been lost irretrievably.
The Bhaikṣukī Manuscript of the Candrālaṃkāra will appeal to specialists with interests in a variety of fields such as Indian palaeography, grammar, Buddhism, history, and Indo-Tibetan studies.
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Bhaviveka and His Buddhist Opponents
Chapters 4 and 5 of the Verses on the Heart of the Middle Way (Madhyamakahrdayakarikah) with the Commentary Entitled The Flame of Reason (Tarkajvala)
Malcolm David Eckel
Harvard University Press
Bhāviveka (ca. 500–560 CE) lived at a time of unusual creativity and ferment in the history of Indian Buddhist philosophy. The Mahayana movement was emerging as a vigorous and self-conscious intellectual force, while the earlier traditions of the eighteen “schools” (nikaya) resisted the authority of the Mahayana and continued to elaborate the fundamental concepts of Buddhist thought.
Bhāviveka’s “Verses on the Heart of the Middle Way” (Madhyamakahrdayakārikā) with their commentary, known as “The Flame of Reason” (Tarkajvālā), give a unique and authoritative account of the intellectual differences that stirred the Buddhist community in this creative period.
Bhāviveka and His Buddhist Opponents gives a clear and accessible translation of Chapters 4 and 5 of this text: the chapters on the Śrāvakas, or eighteen schools, and the Yogācāra, Bhāviveka’s most important Mahayana opponents. The translation is introduced by an essay that situates Bhāviveka in the intellectual context of sixth-century India, and it is accompanied by copious notes, commenting on Bhāviveka’s sources and explaining his controversial method. The book also contains a critical edition of the Sanskrit text of Bhāviveka’s verses and the Tibetan translation of the verses and commentary.
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Bibb County, Alabama
The First Hundred Years
Rhoda C. Ellison
University of Alabama Press, 1999
This model county history chronicles one hundred years in the life of a representative Deep South county.
The history of Bibb County between 1818 and 1918 is in many ways representative of the experience of central Alabama during that period. Bibb County shares physical characteristics with the areas both to its north and to its south. In its northern section is a mineral district and in its southern valleys fertile farming country; therefore, its citizens have sometimes allied themselves with the hill counties and sometimes with their Black Belt neighbors.
Both sections of the county developed in step with the surrounding counties. Bibb's foundries were established during the same time and by the same iron masters as Shelby County, and its coal mines in the same decade as Jefferson County. Its farmers planted the same crops and faced the same problems as those in Perry, Autauga, and Tuscaloosa counties. Like Tuscaloosa, Bibb endeavored to promote river transportation for both its industrial and its agricultural products.
This carefully documented history is based on a variety of original sources, from personal letters to government records. It is generously illustrated with early maps and with old pictures of Bibb landmarks, many of which have now vanished.
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The Bible and Asia
From the Pre-Christian Era to the Postcolonial Age
R. S. Sugirtharajah
Harvard University Press, 2013
Though the Bible is a product of West Asia, its influence on Europe and the Americas has received far more attention than its complex career in the East. R. S. Sugirtharajah corrects this imbalance with an expansive new study of Asia's subversive and idiosyncratic relationship with the Bible. This is the story of missionaries, imperialists, exegetes, reformers, and nationalists who molded Biblical texts according to their own needs in order to influence religion, politics, and daily life from India to China.
When the Bible reached east and south Asia in the third century CE, its Christian scriptures already bore traces of Asian commodities and Indian moral stories. In China, the Bible merged with the teachings of Buddha and Lao Tzu to produce the Jesus Sutras. As he recounts the history of how Christianity was influenced by other Asian religions, Sugirtharajah deftly highlights the controversial issue of Buddhist and Vedic influence on Biblical religion.
Once used to justify European rule in Asia, the Bible has also served to promote the spiritual salvation of women, outcasts, and untouchables. The Bible has left a literary mark on Asia in two ways: through its influence on Asian writers and through the reinvigoration of modern Asian vernaculars when proselytizing missionaries introduced Western print culture to the East.
[more]
The Bible As It Was
James L. Kugel
Harvard University Press, 1999
This is a guide to the Hebrew Bible unlike any other. Leading us chapter by chapter through its most important stories--from the Creation and the Tree of Knowledge through the Exodus from Egypt and the journey to the Promised Land--James Kugel shows how a group of anonymous, ancient interpreters radically transformed the Bible and made it into the book that has come down to us today.
Was the snake in the Garden of Eden the devil, or the Garden itself "paradise"? Did Abraham discover monotheism, and was his son Isaac a willing martyr? Not until the ancient interpreters set to work. Poring over every little detail in the Bible's stories, prophecies, and laws, they let their own theological and imaginative inclinations radically transform the Bible's very nature. Their sometimes surprising interpretations soon became the generally accepted meaning. These interpretations, and not the mere words of the text, became the Bible in the time of Jesus and Paul or the rabbis of the Talmud.
Drawing on such sources as the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Jewish apocrypha, Hellenistic writings, long-lost retellings of Bible stories, and prayers and sermons of the early church and synagogue, Kugel reconstructs the theory and methods of interpretation at the time when the Bible was becoming the bedrock of Judaism and Christianity. Here, for the first time, we can witness all the major transformations of the text and recreate the development of the Bible "As It Was" at the start of the Common era--the Bible as we know it.
[more]
The Bible in the American Experience
Claudia Setzer
SBL Press, 2020
An interdisciplinary investigation of the Bible's place in American experience
Much has changed since the Society of Biblical Literature's Bible in American Culture series was published in the 1980s, but the influence of the Bible has not waned. In the United States, the stories, themes, and characters of the Bible continue to shape art, literature, music, politics, education, and social movements to varying degrees. In this volume, contributors highlight new approaches that move beyond simple citation of texts and explore how biblical themes infuse US culture and how this process in turn transforms biblical traditions.
Features
- An examination of changes in the production, transmission, and consumption of the Bible
- An exploration of how Bible producers disseminate US experiences to a global audience
- An assessment of the factors that produce widespread myths about and nostalgia for a more biblically grounded nation
[more]
The Bible in the Public Square
Its Enduring Influence in American Life
Mark A. Chancey
SBL Press, 2014
Explore perceptions and interpretations of scripture in American politics, identity, popular culture, and public education
Essays from the perspectives of American history, the history of ideas, film studies, visual studies, cultural studies, education, and church-state studies provide essential research for those interested in the intersection of the Bible and American culture. The contributors are Yaakov Ariel, Jacques Berlinerblau, Mark A. Chancey, Rubén Dupertuis, John Fea, Shalom Goldman, Charles C. Haynes, Carol Meyers, Eric M. Meyers, David Morgan, Adele Reinhartz, and David W. Stowe.
Features:
- Ten essays and an introduction present research from professors of biblical studies, Judaism, English, and history
- Articles relevant to scholars, students, and the general public
- Analysis of the tensions in American society regarding the Bible and its role in public life.
[more]
The Bible in the Sixteenth Century
David C. Steinmetz
Duke University Press, 1990
A distinguished group of authors here illuminate a broad spectrum of themes in the history of biblical interpretation. Originally published in 1990, these essays take as their common ground the thesis that the intellectual and religious life of the sixteenth century cannot be understood without attention to the preoccupation of sixteenth-century humanists and theologians with the interpretation of the Bible. Topics explored include Jewish exegesis and problems of Old Testament interpretation and the relationship between the Bible and social, political, and institutional history.
Contributors. Irena Backus, Guy Bedouelle, Kalman P. Bland, Kenneth G. Hagen, Scott H. Hagen, Scott H. Hendrix, R. Gerald Hobbs, Jean-Claude Margolin, H. C. Erik Midelfort, Richard A. Muller, John B. Payne, David C. Steinmetz
[more]
Bible Trouble
Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship
Teresa J. Hornsby
SBL Press, 2011
The essays in Bible Trouble all engage queer theories for purposes of biblical interpretation, a rare effort to date within biblical scholarship. The title phrase “Bible Trouble” plays on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, gesturing toward a primary text for contemporary queer theory. The essays consider, among others, the Lazarus story, the Ethiopian eunuch, “gender trouble” in Judges 4 and 5, the Song of Songs, and an unorthodox coupling of the books of Samuel and the film Paris Is Burning. This volume “troubles” not only the boundaries between biblical scholarship and queer theory but also the boundaries between different frameworks currently used in the analysis of biblical literature, including sexuality, gender, race, class, history, and literature. The contributors are Ellen T. Armour, Michael Joseph Brown, Sean D. Burke, Heidi Epstein, Deryn Guest, Jione Havea, Teresa J. Hornsby, Lynn R. Huber, S. Tamar Kamionkowski, Joseph A. Marchal, Jeremy Punt, Erin Runions, Ken Stone, Gillian Townsley, Jay Twomey, and Manuel Villalobos.
[more]
Bibles
An Illustrated History from Papyrus to Print
Christopher de Hamel
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011
A unique visual history of the world’s best-selling book of all time, Bibles provides a rich snapshot of the biblical bookmaking tradition through images from fifty rare and important Bibles. As the captivating and colorful images collected here reveal, in many ways the history of the Bible mirrors the history of the book and publishing.
Presented chronologically, the Bibles provide a fascinating look into the book making techniques and characteristics of their time. From the fragile papyrus fragments of the ancient world to medieval illuminated manuscripts and glorious modern printed editions, each image is accompanied by a caption which explains its particular significance. In addition, each chapter includes a short introduction that contextualizes each book within its time period. Featuring many unusual examples—some of which have never been illustrated in print before—Bibles includes many of the great biblical texts of the Eastern and Western traditions, including the Magdalen Papyrus, the Laudian Acts, the Anglo-Saxon Exodus, St Margaret’s Gospel-book, the Douce Apocalypse, the Bible Moralisée (MS. Bodley 270b), the Kennicott Bible, the Guttenberg Bible, and the King James Bible.
Drawing exclusively from one of the finest collections of Bibles in the world, which is held at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, this book tells the remarkable story of the development of the Bible across media, language, and provenance.
[more]
Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity
An Archaeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanite
Ann E. Killebrew
SBL Press, 2005
Ancient Israel did not emerge within a vacuum but rather came to exist alongside various peoples, including Canaanites, Egyptians, and Philistines. Indeed, Israel’s very proximity to these groups has made it difficult—until now—to distinguish the archaeological traces of early Israel and other contemporary groups. Through an analysis of the results from recent excavations in light of relevant historical and later biblical texts, this book proposes that it is possible to identify these peoples and trace culturally or ethnically defined boundaries in the archaeological record. Features of late second-millennium B.C.E. culture are critically examined in their historical and biblical contexts in order to define the complex social boundaries of the early Iron Age and reconstruct the diverse material world of these four peoples. Of particular value to scholars, archaeologists, and historians, this volume will also be a standard reference and resource for students and other readers interested in the emergence of early Israel.
[more]
Biblical Porn
Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll's Evangelical Empire
Jessica Johnson
Duke University Press, 2018
Between 1996 and 2014, Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill Church multiplied from its base in Seattle into fifteen facilities spread across five states with 13,000 attendees. When it closed, the church was beset by scandal, with former attendees testifying to spiritual abuse, emotional manipulation, and financial exploitation. In Biblical Porn Jessica Johnson examines how Mars Hill's congregants became entangled in processes of religious conviction. Johnson shows how they were affectively recruited into sexualized and militarized dynamics of power through the mobilization of what she calls "biblical porn"—the affective labor of communicating, promoting, and embodying Driscoll's teaching on biblical masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, which simultaneously worked as a marketing strategy, social imaginary, and biopolitical instrument. Johnson theorizes religious conviction as a social process through which Mars Hill's congregants circulated and amplified feelings of hope, joy, shame, and paranoia as affective value that the church capitalized on to grow at all costs.
[more]
A Biblical Translation in the Making
The Evolution and Impact of Saadia Gaon’s Tafsīr
Richard C. Steiner
Harvard University Press, 2010
In his youth, R. Saadia Gaon (882–942 C.E.) dreamed of publishing a new translation of the Torah for Arabic-speaking Jews to replace the overly literal ones in vogue at the time. It would be a proper translation, conforming to the tenets of both traditional Judaism and contemporary philosophy—not to mention the canons of Arabic grammar and style. Saadia’s interest in this project was not purely academic. Rabbinic Judaism was under attack from Karaite and Muslim polemicists eager to win new converts, and Saadia felt that a new Arabic version of the Torah was needed to counter the attack. His dream was realized with the issuing of the Tafsīr, the most important Jewish Bible translation of the Middle Ages.
Richard C. Steiner traces the history of the Tafsīr—its ancient and medieval roots, its modest beginnings, its subsequent evolution, and its profound impact on the history of biblical exegesis. Among the many sources he uses to elucidate this history are two previously neglected manuscripts: a Christian Arabic translation of the Pentateuch from St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert, and a Judeo-Arabic annotated translation of Genesis from the Cairo Genizah. Steiner argues that the latter is a page from a copy of the first edition of the Tafsīr prepared while Saadia was a student in Tiberias, and the former is a copy of Hunayn b. Ishāq’s “lost” Arabic version of the Pentateuch (ninth century C.E.), containing a philosophical rendering of Genesis 1:1 adopted later by Saadia in the Tafsīr.
[more]
Bibliography of Michigan Archaeology
Alexis A. Praus
University of Michigan Press, 1964
For this volume, Alexis A. Praus compiled a bibliography of publications on Michigan archaeology. The sources listed are from public libraries and university libraries in Michigan, as well as the Chicago Public Library, the Boston Public Library, the Harvard Peabody Museum, and other collections.
[more]
Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games
International Sport's Cold War Battle with NATO
Heather L. Dichter
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
During the Cold War, political tensions associated with the division of Germany came to influence the world of competitive sport. In the 1950s, West Germany and its NATO allies refused to recognize the communist East German state and barred its national teams from sporting competitions. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 further exacerbated these pressures, with East German teams denied travel to several world championships. These tensions would only intensify in the run-up to the 1968 Olympics.
In Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games, Heather L. Dichter considers how NATO and its member states used sport as a diplomatic arena during the height of the Cold War, and how international sport responded to political interference. Drawing on archival materials from NATO, foreign ministries, domestic and international sport functionaries, and newspapers, Dichter examines controversies surrounding the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, particularly the bidding process between countries to host the events. As she demonstrates, during the Cold War sport and politics became so intertwined that they had the power to fundamentally transform each other.
In Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games, Heather L. Dichter considers how NATO and its member states used sport as a diplomatic arena during the height of the Cold War, and how international sport responded to political interference. Drawing on archival materials from NATO, foreign ministries, domestic and international sport functionaries, and newspapers, Dichter examines controversies surrounding the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, particularly the bidding process between countries to host the events. As she demonstrates, during the Cold War sport and politics became so intertwined that they had the power to fundamentally transform each other.
[more]
Big and Bright
A History of the McDonald Observatory
By David S. Evans and J. Derral Mulholland
University of Texas Press, 1986
By day, every year over 40,000 visitors pour in. Across the Rio Grande, a hundred miles away, Mexican mountaineers use the white domes as landmarks. By night, perched almost 7,000 feet above the sleeping, earthbound world, astronomers probe the secrets of the night sky. This is the University of Texas McDonald Observatory, one of the world's largest university-operated astronomical installations.
Big and Bright: A History of the McDonald Observatory is the story of a remarkable collaboration between two major universities, one a prestigious private school, the other a growing southwestern state institution. The University of Chicago had astronomers, but its Yerkes Observatory was aging and underfunded; the University of Texas had money for an observatory but no working astronomer to staff it. Out of their mutual need, they formed a thirty-year compact for a joint venture. Unusual in its day, the Yerkes-McDonald connection presaged the future. In this arrangement, one can see some of the beginnings of today's consortium "big science."
Now the McDonald Observatory's early history can be put in proper perspective. Blessed with a gifted and driving founding director, the world's (then) second-largest telescope, and an isolation that permitted it to be virtually the only major astronomical observatory that continued operations throughout World War II, the staff of McDonald Observatory helped lay the foundations of modern astrophysics during the 1940s. For over a decade after the war, a lonely mountaintop in West Texas was the mecca that drew nearly all the most important astronomers from all over the world.
Based on personal reminiscences and archival material, as well as published historical sources, Big and Bright is one of the few histories of a major observatory, unique in its focus on the human side of the story.
[more]
Big Bend National Park
Mexico, the United States, and a Borderland Ecosystem
Michael Welsh
University of Nevada Press, 2021
Known as a place of stark beauty, dramatic geographic dimension, and challenging desert terrain, Big Bend National Park is located in West Texas on the north bank of the Rio Grande, adjacent to the Mexican states of Coahuila and Chihuahua. Although a place of natural grandeur, the unique location of this 118-mile long, 1.5 million-acre corridor has led to many challenges between the United States and Mexico, two nations who share one ecosystem but inhabit different political worlds.
Big Bend National Park explores the cultural and diplomatic history of this transborder region that was designated a national park on the US side and the site of a long-hoped-for “international peace park” on the other. Michael Welsh demonstrates the challenges faced and lessons learned by both the US and Mexico as they struggled against political and environmental vicissitudes in their attempts to realize the creation of a shared frontier.
Geopolitical and environmental conflicts such as Cold War fears, immigration, the war on drugs, international water rights, and more stringent American border security measures after 9/11 all hindered relations between the two countries. But more recently, renewed cooperation and ongoing diplomatic relations have led to new developments. Mexican park personnel began assisting American officials with efforts to re-wild the American side of the river with animal species that had been eliminated, and the Obama administration relaxed some post-9/11 restrictions, allowing American visitors to cross over to the Mexican park and its nearby towns.
The ambition of developing a park for peace has yet to materialize, even as individuals and their governments continue to work toward an accord. Big Bend National Park provides a greater understanding of this complex borderland and hopes to help fulfill the aspiration of creating a shared ecosystem and the dream of a park for peace.
Big Bend National Park explores the cultural and diplomatic history of this transborder region that was designated a national park on the US side and the site of a long-hoped-for “international peace park” on the other. Michael Welsh demonstrates the challenges faced and lessons learned by both the US and Mexico as they struggled against political and environmental vicissitudes in their attempts to realize the creation of a shared frontier.
Geopolitical and environmental conflicts such as Cold War fears, immigration, the war on drugs, international water rights, and more stringent American border security measures after 9/11 all hindered relations between the two countries. But more recently, renewed cooperation and ongoing diplomatic relations have led to new developments. Mexican park personnel began assisting American officials with efforts to re-wild the American side of the river with animal species that had been eliminated, and the Obama administration relaxed some post-9/11 restrictions, allowing American visitors to cross over to the Mexican park and its nearby towns.
The ambition of developing a park for peace has yet to materialize, even as individuals and their governments continue to work toward an accord. Big Bend National Park provides a greater understanding of this complex borderland and hopes to help fulfill the aspiration of creating a shared ecosystem and the dream of a park for peace.
[more]
Big Bosses
A Working Girl’s Memoir of Jazz Age America
Althea McDowell Altemus
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Sharp, resourceful, and with a style all her own, Althea Altemus embodied the spirit of the independent working woman of the Jazz Age. In her memoir, Big Bosses, she vividly recounts her life as a secretary for prominent (but thinly disguised) employers in Chicago, Miami, and New York during the late teens and 1920s. Alongside her we rub elbows with movie stars, artists, and high-profile businessmen, and experience lavish estate parties that routinely defied the laws of Prohibition.
Beginning with her employment as a private secretary to James Deering of International Harvester, whom she describes as “probably the world’s oldest and wealthiest bachelor playboy,” Altemus tells us much about high society during the time, taking us inside Deering’s glamorous Miami estate, Vizcaya, an Italianate mansion worthy of Gatsby himself. Later, we meet her other notable employers, including Samuel Insull, president of Chicago Edison; New York banker S. W. Straus; and real estate developer Fred F. French. We cinch up our trenchcoats and head out sleuthing in Chicago, hired by the wife of a big boss to find out how he spends his evenings (with, it turns out, a mistress hidden in an apartment within his office, no less). Altemus was also a struggling single mother, a fact she had to keep secret from her employers, and she reveals the difficulties of being a working woman at the time through glimpses into women’s apartments, their friendships, and the dangers—sexual and otherwise—that she and others faced. Throughout, Altemus entertains with a tart and self-aware voice that combines the knowledge of an insider with the wit and clarity of someone on the fringe.
Anchored by extensive annotation and an afterword from historian Robin F. Bachin, which contextualizes Altemus’s narrative, Big Bosses provides a one-of-a-kind peek inside the excitement, extravagances, and the challenges of being a working woman roaring through the ’20s.
Beginning with her employment as a private secretary to James Deering of International Harvester, whom she describes as “probably the world’s oldest and wealthiest bachelor playboy,” Altemus tells us much about high society during the time, taking us inside Deering’s glamorous Miami estate, Vizcaya, an Italianate mansion worthy of Gatsby himself. Later, we meet her other notable employers, including Samuel Insull, president of Chicago Edison; New York banker S. W. Straus; and real estate developer Fred F. French. We cinch up our trenchcoats and head out sleuthing in Chicago, hired by the wife of a big boss to find out how he spends his evenings (with, it turns out, a mistress hidden in an apartment within his office, no less). Altemus was also a struggling single mother, a fact she had to keep secret from her employers, and she reveals the difficulties of being a working woman at the time through glimpses into women’s apartments, their friendships, and the dangers—sexual and otherwise—that she and others faced. Throughout, Altemus entertains with a tart and self-aware voice that combines the knowledge of an insider with the wit and clarity of someone on the fringe.
Anchored by extensive annotation and an afterword from historian Robin F. Bachin, which contextualizes Altemus’s narrative, Big Bosses provides a one-of-a-kind peek inside the excitement, extravagances, and the challenges of being a working woman roaring through the ’20s.
[more]
Big Business in China
Sino–Foreign Rivalry in the Cigarette Industry, 1890–1930
Sherman Cochran
Harvard University Press, 1980
This is the first major study in Chinese business history based largely on business's own records. It focuses on the battle for the cigarette market in early twentieth-century China between the British-American Tobacco Company, based in New York and London, and its leading Chinese rival, Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company, whose headquarters were in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
From its founding in 1902, the British-American Tobacco Company maintained a lucrative monopoly of the market until 1915, when Nanyang entered China and extended tis operations into the country's major markets despite the use of aggressive tactics against it. Both companies grew rapidly during the 1920s, and competition between them reached its peak, but by 1930 Nanyang weakened, bringing an end to serious commercial rivalry. Though less competitive, both companies continued to trade in China until their Sino-foreign rivalry ended altogether with the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.
Debate over international commercial rivalries has often been conducted broadly in terms of imperialist exploitation and economic nationalism. This study shows the usefulness and limitations of these terms for historical purposes and contributes to the separate but related debate over the significance of entrepreneurial innovation in Chinese economic history. By analyzing the foreign Chinese companies' business practices and by describing their involvement in diplomatic incidents, boycotts, strikes, student protests, relations with peasant tobacco growers, dealings with the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party, and a host of other activities, the author brings to light the roles that big businesses played not only in China's economy but also in its politics, society, and foreign affairs.
[more]
Big Business in Russia
The Putilov Company in Late Imperial Russia, 1868–1917
Jonathan A. Grant
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999
Jonathan A. Grant has written a highly original study of the Putilov works—the most famous industrial conglomerate in the Russian Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the emergence of a capitalist system in the Russian federation in the 1990s, scholarly debate over the nature of Russian capitalism has been revived, and with this study, Grant issues a major challenge to the conventional wisdom on the nature of the Russian economy in the years before the Bolshevik revolution. Grant argues that the Putilov Company, which manufactured arms for the Russian state and a wide range of heavy industrial equipment for civilian use, adopted business practices that resembled the experiences of large machinery and armaments manufacturers in Britain, France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Germany. This interpretation runs directly counter to the traditional and widely held view that Russian capitalism was shaped by the tsarist state's orders and subsidies and that the tsarist system was incompatible with the development of modern capitalism. Grant makes direct comparisons between Putilov and the famous western firm of Krupp and Vickers, illustrating similar business decisions made by both companies in terms of diversification of the product line and a penchant for private (as opposed to state) markets for primary income.
Grant has gone beyond Soviet works on the Putilov plant, examining archival documents of the company and offering critical comments on both Soviet and Western scholarship on Russian economic and social history from the perspective of this important industrial enterprise. Grant not only repeatedly demonstrates that the Putilov firm responded effectively to the changing market for its wide range of industrial products but also shows that the tsarist regime provided far more of the "systemic regularity" needed for capitalist development than generally believed. Grant's work is a significant contribution to this ongoing debate, offering a much-needed case study of Russian business history and a comparative study that extends across national boundaries. Big Business in Russia is essential reading for graduate students in Russian and European history and will also appeal to American and European business leaders eager to understand the historical background of the current economic challenges facing Russia.
Grant has gone beyond Soviet works on the Putilov plant, examining archival documents of the company and offering critical comments on both Soviet and Western scholarship on Russian economic and social history from the perspective of this important industrial enterprise. Grant not only repeatedly demonstrates that the Putilov firm responded effectively to the changing market for its wide range of industrial products but also shows that the tsarist regime provided far more of the "systemic regularity" needed for capitalist development than generally believed. Grant's work is a significant contribution to this ongoing debate, offering a much-needed case study of Russian business history and a comparative study that extends across national boundaries. Big Business in Russia is essential reading for graduate students in Russian and European history and will also appeal to American and European business leaders eager to understand the historical background of the current economic challenges facing Russia.
[more]
Big Ears
Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies
Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker, eds.
Duke University Press, 2008
In jazz circles, players and listeners with “big ears” hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at Café Society in New York during the 1930s and 1940s to interpretations of how the jazzman is represented in Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) and Michael Curtiz’s film adaptation (1950). Taken together, the essays enrich the field of jazz studies by showing how gender dynamics have shaped the production, reception, and criticism of jazz culture.
Scholars of music, ethnomusicology, American studies, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies approach the question of gender in jazz from multiple perspectives. One contributor scrutinizes the tendency of jazz historiography to treat singing as subordinate to the predominantly male domain of instrumental music, while another reflects on her doubly inappropriate position as a female trumpet player and a white jazz musician and scholar. Other essays explore the composer George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept as a critique of mid-twentieth-century discourses of embodiment, madness, and black masculinity; performances of “female hysteria” by Les Diaboliques, a feminist improvising trio; and the BBC radio broadcasts of Ivy Benson and Her Ladies’ Dance Orchestra during the Second World War. By incorporating gender analysis into jazz studies, Big Ears transforms ideas of who counts as a subject of study and even of what counts as jazz.
Contributors: Christina Baade, Jayna Brown, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hairston, Kristin McGee, Tracy McMullen, Ingrid Monson, Lara Pellegrinelli, Eric Porter, Nichole T. Rustin, Ursel Schlicht, Julie Dawn Smith, Jeffrey Taylor, Sherrie Tucker, João H. Costa Vargas
[more]
The Big Empty
The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century
R. Douglas Hurt
University of Arizona Press, 2011
The Great Plains, known for grasslands that stretch to the horizon, is a difficult region to define. Some classify it as the region beginning in the east at the ninety-eighth or one-hundredth meridian. Others identify the eastern boundary with annual precipitation lines, soil composition, or length of the grass. In The Big Empty, leading historian R. Douglas Hurt defines this region using the towns and cities—Denver, Lincoln, and Fort Worth—that made a difference in the history of the environment, politics, and agriculture of the Great Plains.
Using the voices of women homesteaders, agrarian socialists, Jewish farmers, Mexican meatpackers, New Dealers, and Native Americans, this book creates a sweeping survey of contested race relations, radical politics, and agricultural prosperity and decline during the twentieth century. This narrative shows that even though Great Plains history is fraught with personal and group tensions, violence, and distress, the twentieth century also brought about compelling social, economic, and political change.
The only book of its kind, this account will be of interest to historians studying the region and to anyone inspired by the story of the men and women who found an opportunity for a better life in the Great Plains.
Using the voices of women homesteaders, agrarian socialists, Jewish farmers, Mexican meatpackers, New Dealers, and Native Americans, this book creates a sweeping survey of contested race relations, radical politics, and agricultural prosperity and decline during the twentieth century. This narrative shows that even though Great Plains history is fraught with personal and group tensions, violence, and distress, the twentieth century also brought about compelling social, economic, and political change.
The only book of its kind, this account will be of interest to historians studying the region and to anyone inspired by the story of the men and women who found an opportunity for a better life in the Great Plains.
[more]
Big Enough to Be Inconsistent
Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race
George M. Fredrickson
Harvard University Press, 2008
“Cruel, merciful; peace-loving, a fighter; despising Negroes and letting them fight and vote; protecting slavery and freeing slaves.” Abraham Lincoln was, W. E. B. Du Bois declared, “big enough to be inconsistent.” Big enough, indeed, for every generation to have its own Lincoln—unifier or emancipator, egalitarian or racist. In an effort to reconcile these views, and to offer a more complex and nuanced account of a figure so central to American history, this book focuses on the most controversial aspect of Lincoln’s thought and politics—his attitudes and actions regarding slavery and race. Drawing attention to the limitations of Lincoln’s judgment and policies without denying his magnitude, the book provides the most comprehensive and even-handed account available of Lincoln’s contradictory treatment of black Americans in matters of slavery in the South and basic civil rights in the North.
George Fredrickson shows how Lincoln’s antislavery convictions, however genuine and strong, were held in check by an equally strong commitment to the rights of the states and the limitations of federal power. He explores how Lincoln’s beliefs about racial equality in civil rights, stirred and strengthened by the African American contribution to the northern war effort, were countered by his conservative constitutional philosophy, which left this matter to the states. The Lincoln who emerges from these pages is far more comprehensible and credible in his inconsistencies, and in the abiding beliefs and evolving principles from which they arose. Deeply principled but nonetheless flawed, all-too-human yet undeniably heroic, he is a Lincoln for all generations.
[more]
Big Game in Alaska
A History of Wildlife and People
Morgan Sherwood
University of Alaska Press, 2008
With the Klondike gold rush, a struggle erupted in Alaska between the protection of big game animals and man’s economic ambitions, a riveting story chronicled by Morgan Sherwood in Big Game in Alaska.
In concise and clear prose, Sherwood charts the history of this environmental and political conflict, examining the creation of the Alaska Game Commission in the early 1930s, the use of distorted science and menacing technologies, the antipathy of farmers and fishermen toward animals, and the prevailing belief in man’s right to shoot wild animals at will. An incisive historical study of the flawed attempts to govern big game predation, Big Game in Alaska will be essential reading for historians and environmentalists alike.
[more]
A Big History of North America
From Montezuma to Monroe
Kevin Jon Fernlund
University of Missouri Press, 2023
The special relationship between the United Kingdom, an established and secure power, and the United States, a rising one, began after the War of 1812, as the former enemies sought accommodation with, rather than the annihilation of, one another. At the same time, Mexico, also a rising power, was not so fortunate. Its relationship with Spain, an established but declining power, turned hostile with Spain’s final exit from North America after Mexico’s War of Independence, leaving its former colony isolated, internally unstable, and vulnerable to external attack. Significantly, Mexico posed little threat to its northern neighbor. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, then, the fate of North America was largely discernable.
Nevertheless, the three-century journey to get to this point had been anything but predictable. The United States’ rise as a regional power was very much conditioned by constantly shifting transcontinental, transpacific, and above all transatlantic factors, all of which influenced North America’s three interactive cultural spheres: the Indigenous, the Hispano, and the Anglo. And while the United States profoundly shaped the history of Canada and Mexico, so, too, did these two transcontinental countries likewise shape the course of U.S. history.
In this ground-breaking work, Kevin Fernlund shows us that any society’s social development is directly related to its own social power and, just as crucially, to the protective extension or destructive intrusion of the social power of other societies.
Nevertheless, the three-century journey to get to this point had been anything but predictable. The United States’ rise as a regional power was very much conditioned by constantly shifting transcontinental, transpacific, and above all transatlantic factors, all of which influenced North America’s three interactive cultural spheres: the Indigenous, the Hispano, and the Anglo. And while the United States profoundly shaped the history of Canada and Mexico, so, too, did these two transcontinental countries likewise shape the course of U.S. history.
In this ground-breaking work, Kevin Fernlund shows us that any society’s social development is directly related to its own social power and, just as crucially, to the protective extension or destructive intrusion of the social power of other societies.
[more]
Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn
The Connected Farm Buildings of New England
Thomas C. Hubka
Brandeis University Press, 2022
A classic work on farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders refreshed with a new introduction.
Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn portrays the four essential components of the stately and beautiful connected farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders that stand today as a living expression of a rural culture, offering insights into the people who made them and their agricultural way of life. A visual delight as well as an engaging tribute to our nineteenth-century forebears, this book, first published nearly forty years ago, has become one of the standard works on regional farmsteads in America. This new edition features a new preface by the author.
Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn portrays the four essential components of the stately and beautiful connected farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders that stand today as a living expression of a rural culture, offering insights into the people who made them and their agricultural way of life. A visual delight as well as an engaging tribute to our nineteenth-century forebears, this book, first published nearly forty years ago, has become one of the standard works on regional farmsteads in America. This new edition features a new preface by the author.
[more]
Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn
The Connected Farm Buildings of New England
Thomas C. Hubka
University Press of New England, 2004
“Big house, little house, back house, barn”—this rhythmic cadence was sung by nineteenth-century children as they played. It also portrays the four essential components of the farms where many of them lived. The stately and beautiful connected farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders stand today as a living expression of a rural culture, offering insights into the people who made them and their agricultural way of life. A visual delight as well as an engaging tribute to our nineteenth-century forebears, this book has become one of the standard works on regional farmsteads in America.
[more]
The Big Leagues Go to Washington
Congress and Sports Antitrust, 1951-1989
David George Surdam
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Between 1951 and 1989, Congress held a series of hearings to investigate the antitrust aspects of professional sports leagues. Among the concerns: ownership control of players, restrictions on new franchises, territorial protection, and other cartel-like behaviors.
In The Big Leagues Go to Washington, David Surdam chronicles the key issues that arose during the hearings and the ways opposing sides used economic data and theory to define what was right, what was feasible, and what was advantageous to one party or another. As Surdam shows, the hearings affected matters as fundamental to the modern game as broadcasting rights, player drafts and unions, league mergers, and the dominance of the New York Yankees. He also charts how lawmakers from the West and South pressed for the relocation of ailing franchises to their states and the ways savvy owners dodged congressional interference when they could and adapted to it when necessary.
In The Big Leagues Go to Washington, David Surdam chronicles the key issues that arose during the hearings and the ways opposing sides used economic data and theory to define what was right, what was feasible, and what was advantageous to one party or another. As Surdam shows, the hearings affected matters as fundamental to the modern game as broadcasting rights, player drafts and unions, league mergers, and the dominance of the New York Yankees. He also charts how lawmakers from the West and South pressed for the relocation of ailing franchises to their states and the ways savvy owners dodged congressional interference when they could and adapted to it when necessary.
[more]
Big Sister
Feminism, Conservatism, and Conspiracy in the Heartland
Erin M. Kempker
University of Illinois Press, 2018
The mid-Seventies represented a watershed era for feminism. A historic National Women's Conference convened in Houston in 1977. The Equal Rights Amendment inched toward passage. Conservative women in the Midwest, however, saw an event like the International Year of the Woman not as a celebration, but as part of a conspiracy that would lead to radicalism and one-world government. Erin M. Kempker delves into how conspiracy theories affected--and undermined--second wave feminism in the Midwest. Focusing on Indiana, Kempker views this phenomenon within the larger history of right-wing fears of subversion during the Cold War. Feminists and conservative women each believed they spoke in women's best interests. Though baffled by the conservative dread of "collectivism," feminists compromised by trimming radicals from their ranks. Conservative women, meanwhile, proved adept at applying old fears to new targets. Kemper's analysis places the women's opposing viewpoints side by side to unlock the differences that separated the groups, explain one to the other, and reveal feminism's fate in the Midwest.
[more]
Big Steel
The First Century of the United States Steel Corporation 1901-2001
Kenneth Warren
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001
At its formation in 1901, the United States Steel Corporation was the earth’s biggest industrial corporation, a wonder of the manufacturing world. Immediately it produced two thirds of America’s raw steel and thirty percent of the steel made worldwide. The behemoth company would go on to support the manufacturing superstructure of practically every other industry in America. It would create and sustain the economies of many industrial communities, especially Pittsburgh, employing more than a million people over the course of the century.
A hundred years later, the U.S. Steel Group of USX makes scarcely ten percent of the steel in the United States and just over one and a half percent of global output. Far from the biggest, the company is now considered the most efficient steel producer in the world. What happened between then and now, and why, is the subject of Big Steel, the first comprehensive history of the company at the center of America’s twentieth-century industrial life.
Granted privileged and unprecedented access to the U.S. Steel archives, Kenneth Warren has sifted through a long, complex business history to tell a compelling story. Its preeminent size was supposed to confer many advantages to U.S. Steel—economies of scale, monopolies of talent, etc. Yet in practice, many of those advantages proved illusory. Warren shows how, even in its early years, the company was out-maneuvered by smaller competitors and how, over the century, U.S. Steel’s share of the industry, by every measure, steadily declined.
Warren’s subtle analysis of years of internal decision making reveals that the company’s size and clumsy hierarchical structure made it uniquely difficult to direct and manage. He profiles the chairmen who grappled with this “lumbering giant,” paying particular attention to those who long ago created its enduring corporate culture—Charles M. Schwab, Elbert H. Gary, and Myron C. Taylor.
Warren points to the way U.S. Steel’s dominating size exposed it to public scrutiny and government oversight—a cautionary force. He analyzes the ways that labor relations affected company management and strategy. And he demonstrates how U.S. Steel suffered gradually, steadily, from its paradoxical ability to make high profits while failing to keep pace with the best practices. Only after the drastic pruning late in the century—when U.S. Steel reduced its capacity by two-thirds—did the company become a world leader in steel-making efficiency, rather than merely in size.
These lessons, drawn from the history of an extraordinary company, will enrich the scholarship of industry and inform the practice of business in the twenty-first century.
[more]
The Big Thicket Guidebook
Exploring the Backroads and History of Southeast Texas
Lorraine G. Bonney
University of North Texas Press, 2011
Big Thicket People
Larry Jene Fisher's Photographs of the Last Southern Frontier
By Thad Sitton and C.E. Hunt
University of Texas Press, 2008
Living off the land—hunting, fishing, and farming, along with a range of specialized crafts that provided barter or cash income—was a way of life that persisted well into the twentieth century in the Big Thicket of southeast Texas. Before this way of life ended with World War II, professional photographer Larry Jene Fisher spent a decade between the 1930s and 1940s photographing Big Thicket people living and working in the old ways. His photographs, the only known collection on this subject, constitute an irreplaceable record of lifeways that first took root in the southeastern woodlands of the colonial United States and eventually spread all across the Southern frontier.
Big Thicket People presents Fisher's photographs in suites that document a wide slice of Big Thicket life-people, dogs, camps, deer hunts, farming, syrup mills, rooter hogs and stock raising, railroad tie making, barrel stave making, chimney building, peckerwood sawmills, logging, turpentining, town life, church services and picnics, funerals and golden weddings, and dances and other amusements. Accompanying each suite of images is a cultural essay by Thad Sitton, who also introduces the book with a historical overview of life in the Big Thicket. C. E. Hunt provides an informative biography of Larry Jene Fisher.
[more]
The Big Tomorrow
Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way
Lary May
University of Chicago Press, 2000
In this daring reexamination of the connections between national politics and Hollywood movies, Lary May offers a fresh interpretation of American culture from the New Deal through the Cold War—one in which a populist, egalitarian ethos found itself eventually supplanted by a far different view of the nation.
"One of the best books ever written about the movies." —Tom Ryan, The Age
"The most exhilarating work of revisionist film history since Pauline Kael's Citizen Kane. . . . May's take on what movies once were (energizing, as opposed to enervating), and hence can become again, is enough to get you believing in them again as one of the regenerative forces America so sorely needs."—Jay Carr, Boston Globe
"A startling, revisionist history of Hollywood's impact on politics and American culture. . . . A convincing and important addition to American cultural criticism."—Publishers Weekly
"A controversial overview of 30 years of American film history; must reading for any serious student of the subject."—Choice
"A provocative social history of Hollywood's influence in American life from the 1930s to the 1950s. May argues persuasively that movies in the period offered a good deal of tough criticism of economic and social conditions in U.S. society. . . . May challenges us to engage in some serious rethinking about Hollywood's impact on American society in the middle of the twentieth century."—Robert Brent Toplin, American Historical Review
"The most exhilarating work of revisionist film history since Pauline Kael's Citizen Kane. . . . May's take on what movies once were (energizing, as opposed to enervating), and hence can become again, is enough to get you believing in them again as one of the regenerative forces America so sorely needs."—Jay Carr, Boston Globe
"A startling, revisionist history of Hollywood's impact on politics and American culture. . . . A convincing and important addition to American cultural criticism."—Publishers Weekly
"A controversial overview of 30 years of American film history; must reading for any serious student of the subject."—Choice
"A provocative social history of Hollywood's influence in American life from the 1930s to the 1950s. May argues persuasively that movies in the period offered a good deal of tough criticism of economic and social conditions in U.S. society. . . . May challenges us to engage in some serious rethinking about Hollywood's impact on American society in the middle of the twentieth century."—Robert Brent Toplin, American Historical Review
[more]
Big Water
The Making of the Borderlands Between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay
Edited by Jacob Blanc and Frederico Freitas; Foreword by Zephyr Frank
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Big Water explores four centuries of the overlapping histories of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay (the Triple Frontier), and the colonies that preceded them. Examining an important area that includes some of the first national parks established in Latin America and one of the world’s largest hydroelectric dams, this transnational approach illustrates how these three nation-states have interacted over time.
From the Jesuit reductions in the seventeenth century to the flows of capital and goods accelerated by contemporary trade agreements, the Triple Frontier region has proven fundamental to the development of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, as well as to the Southern Cone and South America itself. Although historians from each of these three countries have tended to construct narratives that stop at their respective borders, the contributors call for a reinterpretation that goes beyond the material and conceptual boundaries of the Triple Frontier. In offering a transnational approach, Big Water helps transcend nation-centered blind spots and approach new understandings of how space and society have developed throughout Latin America.
These essays complicate traditional frontier histories and balance the excessive weight previously given to empires, nations, and territorial expansion. Overcoming stagnant comparisons between national cases, the research explores regional identity beyond border and geopolitical divides. Thus, Big Water focuses on the uniquely overlapping character of the Triple Frontier and emphasizes a perspective usually left at the periphery of national histories.
Contributors
Shawn Michael Austin
Jacob Blanc
Bridget María Chesterton
Christine Folch
Zephyr Frank
Frederico Freitas
Michael Kenneth Huner
Evaldo Mendes da Silva
Eunice Sueli Nodari
Graciela Silvestri
Guillermo Wilde
Daryle Williams
From the Jesuit reductions in the seventeenth century to the flows of capital and goods accelerated by contemporary trade agreements, the Triple Frontier region has proven fundamental to the development of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, as well as to the Southern Cone and South America itself. Although historians from each of these three countries have tended to construct narratives that stop at their respective borders, the contributors call for a reinterpretation that goes beyond the material and conceptual boundaries of the Triple Frontier. In offering a transnational approach, Big Water helps transcend nation-centered blind spots and approach new understandings of how space and society have developed throughout Latin America.
These essays complicate traditional frontier histories and balance the excessive weight previously given to empires, nations, and territorial expansion. Overcoming stagnant comparisons between national cases, the research explores regional identity beyond border and geopolitical divides. Thus, Big Water focuses on the uniquely overlapping character of the Triple Frontier and emphasizes a perspective usually left at the periphery of national histories.
Contributors
Shawn Michael Austin
Jacob Blanc
Bridget María Chesterton
Christine Folch
Zephyr Frank
Frederico Freitas
Michael Kenneth Huner
Evaldo Mendes da Silva
Eunice Sueli Nodari
Graciela Silvestri
Guillermo Wilde
Daryle Williams
[more]
The Big Wild Soul of Terrence Cole
An Eclectic Collection to Honor Alaska’s Public Historian
Edited by Frank Soos and Mary Ehrlander
University of Alaska Press, 2019
This collection of essays honors beloved Alaska historian Terrence Cole upon his retirement. Contributors include former students and colleagues whose personal and professional lives he has touched deeply. The pieces range from appreciative reflections on Cole’s contributions in teaching, research, and service, to topics he encouraged his students to pursue, plus pieces he inspired directly or indirectly. It is an eclectic collection that spans the humanities and social sciences, each capturing aspects of the human experience in Alaska’s vast and variable landscape. Together the essays offer readers complementary perspectives that will delight Cole’s many fans—and gain him new ones.
[more]
Big Wonderful Thing
A History of Texas
By Stephen Harrigan
University of Texas Press, 2019
2020 Philosophical Society of Texas Nonfiction Book Prize
2019 Nonfiction Book Award Finalist, Writers’ League of Texas
2021 Citation from the San Antonio Conservation Society
"Harrigan, surveying thousands of years of history that lead to the banh mi restaurants of Houston and the juke joints of Austin, remembering the forgotten as well as the famous, delivers an exhilarating blend of the base and the ignoble, a very human story indeed. [ Big Wonderful Thing is] as good a state history as has ever been written and a must-read for Texas aficionados.”—Kirkus, Starred Review
The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world.
“I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.”
Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea.
Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes, it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.
[more]
Bigfoot
The Life and Times of a Legend
Joshua Blu Buhs
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Last August, two men in rural Georgia announced that they had killed Bigfoot. The claim drew instant, feverish attention, leading to more than 1,000 news stories worldwide—despite the fact that nearly everyone knew it was a hoax. Though Bigfoot may not exist, there’s no denying Bigfoot mania.
With Bigfoot, Joshua Blu Buhs traces the wild and wooly story of America’s favorite homegrown monster. He begins with nineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of America, treks to the Himalayas to reckon with the Abominable Snowman, then takes us to northern California in 1958, when reports of a hairy hominid loping through remote woodlands marked Bigfoot’s emergence as a modern marvel. Buhs delves deeply into the trove of lore and misinformation that has sprung up around Bigfoot in the ensuing half century. We meet charlatans, pseudo-scientists, and dedicated hunters of the beast—and with Buhs as our guide, the focus is always less on evaluating their claims than on understanding why Bigfoot has inspired all this drama and devotion in the first place. What does our fascination with this monster say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media?
Writing with a scientist’s skepticism but an enthusiast’s deep engagement, Buhs invests the story of Bigfoot with the detail and power of a novel, offering the definitive take on this elusive beast.
[more]
Bigger, Brighter, Louder
150 Years of Chicago Theater as Seen by "Chicago Tribune" Critics
Chris Jones
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The first known Chicago Tribune theater review appeared on March 25, 1853. An anonymous notice, it shared the page with two other announcements—one about a pair of thousand-pound hogs set to be slaughtered and another trumpeting the largest load of lumber ever to leave Chicago. “And thus Chicago’s priorities were starkly laid out right there on that page,” begins Chris Jones in the introduction to this eyewitness cultural history. “Hog butcher for the world and windy self-promoter, specializing in commerce-driven superlatives. The arts came a poor third. Critics, and the artists they covered, would rail against that perceived set of civic priorities for years.”
The Chicago of today, on the other hand, is regarded as one of the world’s premier cities for theater, and no one has had a more consistent front-row seat to its ascendance than the Chicago Tribune theater critics. Bigger, Brighter, Louder weaves together more than 150 years of Tribune reviews into a compelling narrative, pairing full reviews with commentary and history. With a sharp eye for telling details and a keen sense of historical context, Jones, longtime chief Tribune theater critic, takes readers through decades of highs and lows, successes and failures.
The book showcases fascinating early reviews of actors and shows that would go on to achieve phenomenal success, including a tryout of A Raisin in the Sun with newcomer Sidney Poitier and the first major review of The Producers. It also delves into the rare and the unusual, such as a previously unpublished Tennessee Williams interview and a long conversation with Edward Albee’s mother. With reviews from Claudia Cassidy, Peregine Pickle, William Leonard, and more, many never collected before, Bigger, Brighter, Louder offers a unique lasting record of an ephemeral art and a riveting look at the history behind Chicago’s rise to theatrical greatness.
The Chicago of today, on the other hand, is regarded as one of the world’s premier cities for theater, and no one has had a more consistent front-row seat to its ascendance than the Chicago Tribune theater critics. Bigger, Brighter, Louder weaves together more than 150 years of Tribune reviews into a compelling narrative, pairing full reviews with commentary and history. With a sharp eye for telling details and a keen sense of historical context, Jones, longtime chief Tribune theater critic, takes readers through decades of highs and lows, successes and failures.
The book showcases fascinating early reviews of actors and shows that would go on to achieve phenomenal success, including a tryout of A Raisin in the Sun with newcomer Sidney Poitier and the first major review of The Producers. It also delves into the rare and the unusual, such as a previously unpublished Tennessee Williams interview and a long conversation with Edward Albee’s mother. With reviews from Claudia Cassidy, Peregine Pickle, William Leonard, and more, many never collected before, Bigger, Brighter, Louder offers a unique lasting record of an ephemeral art and a riveting look at the history behind Chicago’s rise to theatrical greatness.
[more]
Bigger Than Life
The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema
Mary Ann Doane
Duke University Press, 2021
In Bigger Than Life Mary Ann Doane examines how the scalar operations of cinema, especially those of the close-up, disturb and reconfigure the spectator's sense of place, space, and orientation. Doane traces the history of scalar transformations from early cinema to the contemporary use of digital technology. In the early years of cinema, audiences regarded the monumental close-up, particularly of the face, as grotesque and often horrifying, even as it sought to expose a character's interiority through its magnification of detail and expression. Today, large-scale technologies such as IMAX and surround sound strive to dissolve the cinematic frame and invade the spectator's space, “immersing” them in image and sound. The notion of immersion, Doane contends, is symptomatic of a crisis of location in technologically mediated space and a reconceptualization of position, scale, and distance. In this way, cinematic scale and its modes of spatialization and despatialization have shaped the modern subject, interpolating them into the incessant expansion of commodification.
[more]
The Biggest Damned Hat
Tales from Alaska's Territorial Lawyers and Judges
Pamela Cravez
University of Alaska Press, 2017
Alaska history from the days before statehood is rich in stories of colorful characters—prospectors, settlers, heroes, and criminals. And right alongside them were judges and lawyers, working first to establish the rule of law in the territory, then, later, laying the groundwork for statehood.
The Biggest Damned Hat presents a fascinating collection of stories ranging from the gold rush to the 1950s. Built on interviews and oral histories from more than fifty lawyers who worked in Alaska before 1959, and buttressed by research into legal history, the book offers a brilliantly multifaceted portrait of law in the territory—from laying the groundwork for strong civil and criminal law to helping to secure mining and fishing rights to the Alaska Court-Bar fight, which pitted Alaska’s community of lawyers against its nascent Supreme Court. Bringing to life a time long past—when some of the best lawyers had little formal legal education—The Biggest Damned Hat fills in a crucial part of the story of Alaska’s history.
The Biggest Damned Hat presents a fascinating collection of stories ranging from the gold rush to the 1950s. Built on interviews and oral histories from more than fifty lawyers who worked in Alaska before 1959, and buttressed by research into legal history, the book offers a brilliantly multifaceted portrait of law in the territory—from laying the groundwork for strong civil and criminal law to helping to secure mining and fishing rights to the Alaska Court-Bar fight, which pitted Alaska’s community of lawyers against its nascent Supreme Court. Bringing to life a time long past—when some of the best lawyers had little formal legal education—The Biggest Damned Hat fills in a crucial part of the story of Alaska’s history.
[more]
Bike Boom
The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling
Carlton Reid
Island Press, 2017
Bicycling advocates envision a future in which bikes are a widespread daily form of transportation. While many global cities are seeing the number of bike commuters increase, this future is still far away; at times, urban cycling seems to be fighting for its very survival. Will we ever witness a true “bike boom” in cities? What can we learn from past successes and failures to make cycling safer, easier, and more accessible? Use of bicycles in America and Britain fell off a cliff in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to the rapid rise in car ownership. Urban planners and politicians predicted that cycling would wither to nothing, and they did their level best to bring about this extinction by catering to only motorists. But in the 1970s, something strange happened—bicycling bounced back, first in America and then in Britain.
In Bike Boom, journalist Carlton Reid uses history to shine a spotlight on the present and demonstrates how bicycling has the potential to grow even further, if the right measures are put in place by the politicians and planners of today and tomorrow. He explores the benefits and challenges of cycling, the roles of infrastructure and advocacy, and what we can learn from cities that have successfully supported and encouraged bike booms, including London; Davis, California; Montreal; Stevenage; Amsterdam; New York; and Copenhagen.
Given that today’s global bicycling “boom” has its roots in the early 1970s, Reid draws lessons from that period. At that time, the Dutch were investing in bike infrastructure and advocacy— the US and the UK had the choice to follow the Dutch example, but didn’t. Reid sets out to discover what we can learn from the history of bike “booms” in this entertaining and thought-provoking book.
In Bike Boom, journalist Carlton Reid uses history to shine a spotlight on the present and demonstrates how bicycling has the potential to grow even further, if the right measures are put in place by the politicians and planners of today and tomorrow. He explores the benefits and challenges of cycling, the roles of infrastructure and advocacy, and what we can learn from cities that have successfully supported and encouraged bike booms, including London; Davis, California; Montreal; Stevenage; Amsterdam; New York; and Copenhagen.
Given that today’s global bicycling “boom” has its roots in the early 1970s, Reid draws lessons from that period. At that time, the Dutch were investing in bike infrastructure and advocacy— the US and the UK had the choice to follow the Dutch example, but didn’t. Reid sets out to discover what we can learn from the history of bike “booms” in this entertaining and thought-provoking book.
[more]
Bike Lust
Harleys, Women, And American Society
Barbara Joans
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001
Bike Lust roars straight into the world of women bikers and offers us a ride. In this adventure story that is also an insider’s study of an American subculture, Barbara Joans enters as a passenger on the back of a bike, but soon learns to ride her own. As an anthropologist she untangles the rules, rituals, and rites of passage of the biker culture. As a new member of that culture, she struggles to overcome fear, physical weakness, and a tendency to shoot her mouth off—a tendency that very nearly gets her killed.
Bike Lust travels a landscape of contradictions. Outlaws still chase freedom on the highway, but so do thousands of riders of all classes, races, and colors. Joans introduces us to the women who ride the rear—the biker chick, the calendar slut straddling the hot engine, the back-seat Betty at the latest rally, or the underage groupie at the local run. But she also gives us the first close look at women who ride in their own right, on their own bikes, as well as a new understanding of changing world of male bikers. These are ordinary women’s lives made extraordinary, adding a dimension of courage to the sport not experienced by males, risking life and limb for a glimpse of the very edge of existence. This community of riders exists as a primal tribute to humanity's lust for freedom.
[more]
Biking through History on the Great Allegheny Passage Trail
Edward K. Muller
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
The Great Allegheny Passage Trail is a world class biking, hiking, and recreational gateway that stretches nearly 150 miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Cumberland, Maryland, where it connects with the C&O Canal Towpath to reach Washington, DC. Showcasing all the natural beauty of the region, this former Indian path, trade route, military road, railway link, and portion of the original National Road is also a journey through American history.
The book’s engaging narrative is complemented by the nature photography of Paul g Wiegman and an extensive selection of historical illustrations, all of which reveal the stunning scenery and history of the biking trail. This book captures the essence of the trail as a journey through both time and space, one that evokes all of the heritage and beauty of a region that would grow to prosper and help forge a nation.
Formerly titled An Uncommon Passage: Traveling through History on the Great Allegheny Passage Trail, this is an updated paperback version with a revised introduction and new material that includes the completed trail area in the city of Pittsburgh.
The book’s engaging narrative is complemented by the nature photography of Paul g Wiegman and an extensive selection of historical illustrations, all of which reveal the stunning scenery and history of the biking trail. This book captures the essence of the trail as a journey through both time and space, one that evokes all of the heritage and beauty of a region that would grow to prosper and help forge a nation.
Formerly titled An Uncommon Passage: Traveling through History on the Great Allegheny Passage Trail, this is an updated paperback version with a revised introduction and new material that includes the completed trail area in the city of Pittsburgh.
[more]
Bill and Hillary
The Politics of the Personal
William H. Chafe
Duke University Press, 2012
In Bill and Hillary, one of our preeminent historians, William H. Chafe, boldly argues that the trajectory of the Clintons' political lives can be understood only through the prism of their personal relationship. From the day they first met at Yale Law School, Bill and Hillary were inseparable, even though their relationship was inherently volatile. The personal dynamic between them would go on to determine their political fates. Hillary was instrumental in Bill's triumphs as Arkansas's governor, and she saved his presidential candidacy in 1992 by standing with him during the Gennifer Flowers sex scandal. He responded by delegating to her powers that no other First Lady had ever exercised. Always tempestuous, their relationship had as many lows as highs, from near divorce to stunning electoral and political successes. Chafe's penetrating insights—into subjects such as health care, Kenneth Starr, welfare reform, and the extent to which the Lewinsky scandal finally freed Hillary to become a politician in her own right—add texture and depth to our understanding of the Clintons' experience together. Bill and Hillary is the definitive account of the Clintons’ relationship and its far-reaching impact on American political life.
[more]
Bill Clinton on Stump, State, and Stage
The Rhetorical Road to the White House
Stephen A. Smith
University of Arkansas Press, 1994
These lively and penetrating essays by outstanding scholars of political communication examine President Clinton’s rhetorical work before he took the oath of office, presenting a unique perspective on the words and texts that brought him to the presidency and the dynamics of political media throughout the campaign. In these original, valuable, and deeply insightful interpretations, the success of Clinton as a public persuader and compelling orator is analyzed, as is the whole process of political communication in America at the end of the twentieth century.
[more]
Bill Giles and Baseball
John B Lord
Temple University Press, 2014
Bill Giles oversaw one of the greatest eras of winning that the Philadelphia Phillies ever enjoyed. In Bill Giles and Baseball, John Lord chronicles Giles' remarkable career--which includes 44 years with the Phillies--to provide an insider's view of the business of the sport, which takes place off the field.
Based on extensive interviews, Bill Giles and Baseball spans Giles' life from his childhood growing up in the game to the tumultuous years he spent as the president and managing partner of the Phillies. Purchasing the team in 1981, when baseball experienced its first serious labor stoppages, Giles also watched baseball add franchises, grapple with franchise fees, realign the leagues, and restructure baseball's postseason. Yet Giles, the public face of the Phillies championship teams of 1980, 1983, and 1993, is best remembered for his critical role in creating innovative TV deals, and leading the efforts to build the Phillies' beautiful new ballpark.
A book about the business of baseball as seen through the eyes of one of the architects of the game, Bill Giles and Baseball captures the spectacle of the sport through fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of our national pastime.
[more]
Billion-Dollar Fish
The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock
Kevin M. Bailey
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Alaska pollock is everywhere. If you’re eating fish but you don’t know what kind it is, it’s almost certainly pollock. Prized for its generic fish taste, pollock masquerades as crab meat in california rolls and seafood salads, and it feeds millions as fish sticks in school cafeterias and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches at McDonald’s. That ubiquity has made pollock the most lucrative fish harvest in America—the fishery in the United States alone has an annual value of over one billion dollars. But even as the money rolls in, pollock is in trouble: in the last few years, the pollock population has declined by more than half, and some scientists are predicting the fishery’s eventual collapse.
In Billion-Dollar Fish, Kevin M. Bailey combines his years of firsthand pollock research with a remarkable talent for storytelling to offer the first natural history of Alaska pollock. Crucial to understanding the pollock fishery, he shows, is recognizing what aspects of its natural history make pollock so very desirable to fish, while at the same time making it resilient, yet highly vulnerable to overfishing. Bailey delves into the science, politics, and economics surrounding Alaska pollock in the Bering Sea, detailing the development of the fishery, the various political machinations that have led to its current management, and, perhaps most important, its impending demise. He approaches his subject from multiple angles, bringing in the perspectives of fishermen, politicians, environmentalists, and biologists, and drawing on revealing interviews with players who range from Greenpeace activists to fishing industry lawyers.
Seamlessly weaving the biology and ecology of pollock with the history and politics of the fishery, as well as Bailey’s own often raucous tales about life at sea, Billion-Dollar Fish is a book for every person interested in the troubled relationship between fish and humans, from the depths of the sea to the dinner plate.
In Billion-Dollar Fish, Kevin M. Bailey combines his years of firsthand pollock research with a remarkable talent for storytelling to offer the first natural history of Alaska pollock. Crucial to understanding the pollock fishery, he shows, is recognizing what aspects of its natural history make pollock so very desirable to fish, while at the same time making it resilient, yet highly vulnerable to overfishing. Bailey delves into the science, politics, and economics surrounding Alaska pollock in the Bering Sea, detailing the development of the fishery, the various political machinations that have led to its current management, and, perhaps most important, its impending demise. He approaches his subject from multiple angles, bringing in the perspectives of fishermen, politicians, environmentalists, and biologists, and drawing on revealing interviews with players who range from Greenpeace activists to fishing industry lawyers.
Seamlessly weaving the biology and ecology of pollock with the history and politics of the fishery, as well as Bailey’s own often raucous tales about life at sea, Billion-Dollar Fish is a book for every person interested in the troubled relationship between fish and humans, from the depths of the sea to the dinner plate.
[more]
Billions for Defense
Government Finance by the Defense Plant Corporation During World War II
Gerald T. White
University of Alabama Press, 1980
A full-dress study of the Defense Plant Corporation
The Defense Plant Corporation was a significant innovative agency of the emergency government during World War II. DPC was a subsidiary of the depression-created Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which, in turn, had its origins in the War Finance Corporation of World War I. Despite its importance, DPC’s role until the present has been little studied. It invested nearly $7 billion, mainly in commercial-type, government titled industrial facilities to speed the flow of war goods. During the defense period, it was the subject of much controversy both within and outside government, but after Pearl Harbor its value was fully recognized. The bulk of its investment was in the aircraft and closely related industries. Large investments were also made in the steel and chemical industries and in pipeline transportation. A new industry, synthetic rubber, was brought from infancy to maturity. DPC brought government capital and private initiative into fruitful union, eliminating risk to the contractor with respect to the cost of the facilities and providing the contractor with the necessary production capacity to fulfill its supply contracts.
The Defense Plant Corporation was a significant innovative agency of the emergency government during World War II. DPC was a subsidiary of the depression-created Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which, in turn, had its origins in the War Finance Corporation of World War I. Despite its importance, DPC’s role until the present has been little studied. It invested nearly $7 billion, mainly in commercial-type, government titled industrial facilities to speed the flow of war goods. During the defense period, it was the subject of much controversy both within and outside government, but after Pearl Harbor its value was fully recognized. The bulk of its investment was in the aircraft and closely related industries. Large investments were also made in the steel and chemical industries and in pipeline transportation. A new industry, synthetic rubber, was brought from infancy to maturity. DPC brought government capital and private initiative into fruitful union, eliminating risk to the contractor with respect to the cost of the facilities and providing the contractor with the necessary production capacity to fulfill its supply contracts.
[more]
Billy Durant
Creator of General Motors
Lawrence R. Gustin
University of Michigan Press, 2008
Praise for the first edition:
"A fascinating book [and] a sympathetic look at the man who glued General Motors together and in the process made Flint one of the great industrial centers of America."
---Detroit Free Press
"It is refreshing to report that Billy Durant is one of the best researched books dealing with an automotive giant."
---Antique Automobile
"Billy Durant fills in a masterly way the only important void remaining concerning the work of the motorcar pioneers."
---Richard Crabb, author of Birth of a Giant: The Men and Incidents That Gave America the Motorcar
What explains Billy Durant's powerful influence on the auto industry during its early days? And why, given Durant's impact, has he been nearly forgotten for decades?
In search of answers to these questions, Lawrence Gustin interviewed Durant's widow, who provided a wealth of previously unpublished autobiographical notes, letters, and personal papers. Gustin also interviewed two of Durant's personal secretaries and others who had known and worked with the man who created General Motors. The result is the amazing account of the mastermind behind what would become, as the twentieth century progressed, the world's largest company.
[more]
Binga
The Rise and Fall of Chicago's First Black Banker
Don Hayner
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Binga is the definitive full-length biography of Jesse Binga, the first black banker in Chicago. Born into a large family in Detroit, Binga arrived in Chicago in 1892 in his late twenties with virtually nothing. Through his wits and resourcefulness, he rose to wealth and influence as a real estate broker, and in 1908 he founded the Binga Bank, the first black-owned bank in the city. But his achievements were followed by an equally notable downfall. Binga recounts this gripping story about race, history, politics, and finance.
The Black Belt, where Binga’s bank was located, was a segregated neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side—a burgeoning city within a city—and its growth can be traced through the arc of Binga’s career. He preached and embodied an American gospel of self-help and accrued wealth while expanding housing options and business opportunities for blacks. Devout Roman Catholics, he and his wife Eudora supported church activities and various cultural and artistic organizations; their annual Christmas party was the Black Belt’s social event of the year. But Binga’s success came at the price of a vicious backlash. After he moved his family into a white neighborhood in 1917, their house was bombed multiple times, his offices were attacked twice, and he became a lightning rod for the worst race riots in Chicago history, which took place in 1919. Binga persevered, but, starting with the stock market crash of October 1929, a string of reversals cost him his bank, his property, and his fortune.
A quintessentially Chicago story, Binga tells the history of racial change in one of the most segregated cities in America and how an extraordinary man stood as a symbol of hope in a community isolated by racial animosity.
[more]
The Bingo Queens of Oneida
How Two Moms Started Tribal Gaming in Wisconsin
Mike Hoeft
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2014
Before Indian casinos sprouted up around the country, a few enterprising tribes got their start in gambling by opening bingo parlors. A group of women on the Oneida Indian Reservation just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin, introduced bingo in 1976 simply to pay a few bills. Bingo not only paid the light bill at the struggling civic center but was soon financing vital health and housing services for tribal elderly and poor.
While militant Indian activists often dominated national headlines in the 1970s, these church-going Oneida women were the unsung catalysts behind bingo’s rising prominence as a sovereignty issue in the Oneida Nation. The bingo moms were just trying to take care of the kids in the community.
The Bingo Queens of Oneida: How Two Moms Started Tribal Gaming tells the story through the eyes of Sandra Ninham and Alma Webster, the Oneida women who had the idea for a bingo operation run by the tribe to benefit the entire tribe. Bingo became the tribe’s first moneymaker on a reservation where about half the population was living in poverty.
Author Mike Hoeft traces the historical struggles of the Oneida—one of six nations of the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, confederacy—from their alliance with America during the Revolutionary War to their journey to Wisconsin. He also details the lives of inspirational tribal members who worked alongside Ninham and Webster, and also those who were positively affected by their efforts.
The women-run bingo hall helped revitalize an indigenous culture on the brink of being lost. The Bingo Queens of Oneida is the story of not only how one game helped revive the Oneida economy but also how one game strengthened the Oneida community.
While militant Indian activists often dominated national headlines in the 1970s, these church-going Oneida women were the unsung catalysts behind bingo’s rising prominence as a sovereignty issue in the Oneida Nation. The bingo moms were just trying to take care of the kids in the community.
The Bingo Queens of Oneida: How Two Moms Started Tribal Gaming tells the story through the eyes of Sandra Ninham and Alma Webster, the Oneida women who had the idea for a bingo operation run by the tribe to benefit the entire tribe. Bingo became the tribe’s first moneymaker on a reservation where about half the population was living in poverty.
Author Mike Hoeft traces the historical struggles of the Oneida—one of six nations of the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, confederacy—from their alliance with America during the Revolutionary War to their journey to Wisconsin. He also details the lives of inspirational tribal members who worked alongside Ninham and Webster, and also those who were positively affected by their efforts.
The women-run bingo hall helped revitalize an indigenous culture on the brink of being lost. The Bingo Queens of Oneida is the story of not only how one game helped revive the Oneida economy but also how one game strengthened the Oneida community.
[more]
Biocultural Histories in La Florida
A Bioarchaeological Perspective
Christopher Stojanowski
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Examines the effects of the Spanish mission system on population structure and genetic variability in indigenous communities living in northern Florida and southern Georgia during the 16th and 17th centuries
This book examines the effects of the Spanish mission system on population structure and genetic variability in indigenous communities living in northern Florida and southern Georgia during the 16th and 17th centuries. Data on tooth size were collected from 26 archaeological samples representing three time periods: Late Precontact (~1200-1500), Early Mission (~1600-1650), and Late Mission (~1650-1700) and were subjected to a series of statistical tests evaluating genetic variability. Predicted changes in phenotypic population variability are related to models of group interaction, population demo-graphy, and genetic admixture as suggested by ethnohistoric and archaeological data.
Results suggest considerable differences in diachronic responses to the mission environment for each cultural province. The Apalachee demonstrate a marked increase in variability while the Guale demonstrate a decline in variability. Demographic models of population collapse are therefore inconsistent with predicted changes based on population geneticsl, and the determinants of population structure seem largely local in nature. This book highlights the specificity with which indigenous communities responded to European contact and the resulting transformations in their social worlds.
"Stojanowski's work is like man's DNA, the structure of a lifeform, but here it is the structure or glue that holds together the historic puzzle with its Apalachee, Timucua, Guale, and Spanish pieces that other scholars have been trying to put together."--Keith P. Jacobi, author of Last Rites for the Tipu Maya
[more]
The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa
David Hudson
University of Iowa Press, 2009
Iowa has been blessed with citizens of strong character who have made invaluable contributions to the state and to the nation. In the 1930s alone, such towering figures as John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Herbert Hoover hugely influenced the nation’s affairs. Iowa’s Native Americans, early explorers, inventors, farmers, scholars, baseball players, musicians, artists, writers, politicians, scientists, conservationists, preachers, educators, and activists continue to enrich our lives and inspire our imaginations.
Written by an impressive team of more than 150 scholars and writers, the readable narratives include each subject’s name, birth and death dates, place of birth, education, and career and contributions. Many of the names will be instantly recognizable to most Iowans; others are largely forgotten but deserve to be remembered. Beyond the distinctive lives and times captured in the individual biographies, readers of the dictionary will gain an appreciation for how the character of the state has been shaped by the character of the individuals who have inhabited it.
From Dudley Warren Adams, fruit grower and Grange leader, to the Younker brothers, founders of one of Iowa’s most successful department stores, The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa is peopled with the rewarding lives of more than four hundred notable citizens of the Hawkeye State. The histories contained in this essential reference work should be eagerly read by anyone who cares about Iowa and its citizens.
Entries include Cap Anson, Bix Beiderbecke, Black Hawk, Amelia Jenks Bloomer, William Carpenter, Philip Greeley Clapp, Gardner Cowles Sr., Samuel Ryan Curtis, Jay Norwood Darling, Grenville Dodge, Julien Dubuque, August S. Duesenberg, Paul Engle, Phyllis L. Propp Fowle, George Gallup, Hamlin Garland, Susan Glaspell, Josiah Grinnell, Charles Hearst, Josephine Herbst, Herbert Hoover, Inkpaduta, Louis Jolliet, MacKinlay Kantor, Keokuk, Aldo Leopold, John L. Lewis, Marquette, Elmer Maytag, Christian Metz, Bertha Shambaugh, Ruth Suckow, Billy Sunday, Henry Wallace, and Grant Wood.
Excerpt from the entry on:
Gallup, George Horace (November 19, 1901–July 26, 1984)—founder of the American Institute of Public Opinion, better known as the Gallup Poll, whose name was synonymous with public opinion polling around the world—was born in Jefferson, Iowa. . . . . A New Yorker article would later speculate that it was Gallup’s background in “utterly normal Iowa” that enabled him to find “nothing odd in the idea that one man might represent, statistically, ten thousand or more of his own kind.” . . . In 1935 Gallup partnered with Harry Anderson to found the American Institute of Public Opinion, based in Princeton, New Jersey, an opinion polling firm that included a syndicated newspaper column called “America Speaks.” The reputation of the organization was made when Gallup publicly challenged the polling techniques of The Literary Digest, the best-known political straw poll of the day. Calculating that the Digest would wrongly predict that Kansas Republican Alf Landon would win the presidential election, Gallup offered newspapers a money-back guarantee if his prediction that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would win wasn’t more accurate. Gallup believed that public opinion polls served an important function in a democracy: “If govern¬ment is supposed to be based on the will of the people, somebody ought to go and find what that will is,” Gallup explained.
Written by an impressive team of more than 150 scholars and writers, the readable narratives include each subject’s name, birth and death dates, place of birth, education, and career and contributions. Many of the names will be instantly recognizable to most Iowans; others are largely forgotten but deserve to be remembered. Beyond the distinctive lives and times captured in the individual biographies, readers of the dictionary will gain an appreciation for how the character of the state has been shaped by the character of the individuals who have inhabited it.
From Dudley Warren Adams, fruit grower and Grange leader, to the Younker brothers, founders of one of Iowa’s most successful department stores, The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa is peopled with the rewarding lives of more than four hundred notable citizens of the Hawkeye State. The histories contained in this essential reference work should be eagerly read by anyone who cares about Iowa and its citizens.
Entries include Cap Anson, Bix Beiderbecke, Black Hawk, Amelia Jenks Bloomer, William Carpenter, Philip Greeley Clapp, Gardner Cowles Sr., Samuel Ryan Curtis, Jay Norwood Darling, Grenville Dodge, Julien Dubuque, August S. Duesenberg, Paul Engle, Phyllis L. Propp Fowle, George Gallup, Hamlin Garland, Susan Glaspell, Josiah Grinnell, Charles Hearst, Josephine Herbst, Herbert Hoover, Inkpaduta, Louis Jolliet, MacKinlay Kantor, Keokuk, Aldo Leopold, John L. Lewis, Marquette, Elmer Maytag, Christian Metz, Bertha Shambaugh, Ruth Suckow, Billy Sunday, Henry Wallace, and Grant Wood.
Excerpt from the entry on:
Gallup, George Horace (November 19, 1901–July 26, 1984)—founder of the American Institute of Public Opinion, better known as the Gallup Poll, whose name was synonymous with public opinion polling around the world—was born in Jefferson, Iowa. . . . . A New Yorker article would later speculate that it was Gallup’s background in “utterly normal Iowa” that enabled him to find “nothing odd in the idea that one man might represent, statistically, ten thousand or more of his own kind.” . . . In 1935 Gallup partnered with Harry Anderson to found the American Institute of Public Opinion, based in Princeton, New Jersey, an opinion polling firm that included a syndicated newspaper column called “America Speaks.” The reputation of the organization was made when Gallup publicly challenged the polling techniques of The Literary Digest, the best-known political straw poll of the day. Calculating that the Digest would wrongly predict that Kansas Republican Alf Landon would win the presidential election, Gallup offered newspapers a money-back guarantee if his prediction that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would win wasn’t more accurate. Gallup believed that public opinion polls served an important function in a democracy: “If govern¬ment is supposed to be based on the will of the people, somebody ought to go and find what that will is,” Gallup explained.
[more]
Biographies of Scientific Objects
Edited by Lorraine Daston
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Why does an object or phenomenon become the subject of scientific inquiry? Why do some of these objects remain provocative, while others fade from center stage? And why do objects sometimes return as the focus of research long after they were once abandoned?
Addressing such questions, Biographies of Scientific Objects is about how whole domains of phenomena—dreams, atoms, monsters, culture, society, mortality, centers of gravity, value, cytoplasmic particles, the self, tuberculosis—come into being and sometimes pass away as objects of scientific study. With examples drawn from both the natural and social sciences, and ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, this book explores the ways in which scientific objects are both real and historical. Whether discovered or invented, these objects of inquiry broaden and deepen in meaning—growing more "real"—as they become entangled in webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations. Thus their biographies will matter to anyone concerned with the formation of scientific knowledge.
Contributors are Jed Z. Buchwald, Lorraine Daston, Rivka Feldhay, Jan Goldstein, Gerard Jorland, Doris Kauffman, Bruno Latour, Theodore M. Porter, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Marshall Sahlins, and Peter Wagner.
Addressing such questions, Biographies of Scientific Objects is about how whole domains of phenomena—dreams, atoms, monsters, culture, society, mortality, centers of gravity, value, cytoplasmic particles, the self, tuberculosis—come into being and sometimes pass away as objects of scientific study. With examples drawn from both the natural and social sciences, and ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, this book explores the ways in which scientific objects are both real and historical. Whether discovered or invented, these objects of inquiry broaden and deepen in meaning—growing more "real"—as they become entangled in webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations. Thus their biographies will matter to anyone concerned with the formation of scientific knowledge.
Contributors are Jed Z. Buchwald, Lorraine Daston, Rivka Feldhay, Jan Goldstein, Gerard Jorland, Doris Kauffman, Bruno Latour, Theodore M. Porter, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Marshall Sahlins, and Peter Wagner.
[more]
Biography of a Hacienda
Work and Revolution in Rural Mexico
Elizabeth Terese Newman
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Winner, James Deetz Book Award (Society for Historical Archaeology)
Biography of a Hacienda is a many-voiced reconstruction of events leading up to the Mexican Revolution and the legacy that remains to the present day. Drawing on ethnohistorical, archaeological, and ethnographic data, Elizabeth Terese Newman creates a fascinating model of the interplay between the great events of the Revolution and the lives of everyday people.
In 1910 the Mexican Revolution erupted out of a century of tension surrounding land ownership and control over labor. During the previous century, the elite ruling classes acquired ever-increasingly large tracts of land while peasants saw their subsistence and community independence vanish. Rural working conditions became so oppressive that many resorted to armed rebellion. After the war, new efforts were made to promote agrarian reform, and many of Mexico’s rural poor were awarded the land they had farmed for generations.
Weaving together fiction, memoir, and data from her fieldwork, Newman reconstructs life at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla, a site located near a remote village in the Valley of Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico. Exploring people’s daily lives and how they affected the buildup to the Revolution and subsequent agrarian reforms, the author draws on nearly a decade of interdisciplinary study of the Hacienda Acocotla and its descendant community. Newman’s archaeological research recovered information about the lives of indigenous people living and working there in the one hundred years leading up to the Mexican Revolution.
Newman shows how women were central to starting the revolt, and she adds their voices to the master narrative. Biography of a Hacienda concludes with a thoughtful discussion of the contribution of the agrarian revolution to Mexico’s history and whether it has succeeded or simply transformed rural Mexico into a new “global hacienda system.”
Biography of a Hacienda is a many-voiced reconstruction of events leading up to the Mexican Revolution and the legacy that remains to the present day. Drawing on ethnohistorical, archaeological, and ethnographic data, Elizabeth Terese Newman creates a fascinating model of the interplay between the great events of the Revolution and the lives of everyday people.
In 1910 the Mexican Revolution erupted out of a century of tension surrounding land ownership and control over labor. During the previous century, the elite ruling classes acquired ever-increasingly large tracts of land while peasants saw their subsistence and community independence vanish. Rural working conditions became so oppressive that many resorted to armed rebellion. After the war, new efforts were made to promote agrarian reform, and many of Mexico’s rural poor were awarded the land they had farmed for generations.
Weaving together fiction, memoir, and data from her fieldwork, Newman reconstructs life at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla, a site located near a remote village in the Valley of Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico. Exploring people’s daily lives and how they affected the buildup to the Revolution and subsequent agrarian reforms, the author draws on nearly a decade of interdisciplinary study of the Hacienda Acocotla and its descendant community. Newman’s archaeological research recovered information about the lives of indigenous people living and working there in the one hundred years leading up to the Mexican Revolution.
Newman shows how women were central to starting the revolt, and she adds their voices to the master narrative. Biography of a Hacienda concludes with a thoughtful discussion of the contribution of the agrarian revolution to Mexico’s history and whether it has succeeded or simply transformed rural Mexico into a new “global hacienda system.”
[more]
Biography of a Runaway Slave
Miguel Barnet
Northwestern University Press, 2002
In this remarkable testimony, Cuban novelist and anthropologist Miguel Barnet presents the narrative of 105-year-old Esteban Montejo, who lived as a slave, as fugitive in the wilderness, and as a soldier in the Cuban War of Independence. Honest, blunt, compassionate, shrewd, and engaging, his voice provides an extraordinary insight into the African culture that took root in the Caribbean.
[more]
Biography of a Runaway Slave
Fiftieth Anniversary Edition
Miguel Barnet; Translated from the Spanish by W. Nick Hill; Introduction by William Luis
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Fiftieth Anniversary Edition
Originally published in 1966, Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave provides the written history of the life of Esteban Montejo, who lived as a slave, as a fugitive in the wilderness, and as a soldier fighting against Spain in the Cuban War of Independence. A new introduction by one of the most preeminent Afro-Hispanic scholars, William Luis, situates Barnet’s ethnographic strategy and lyrical narrative style as foundational for the tradition of testimonial fiction in Latin American literature. Barnet recorded his interviews with the 103-year-old Montejo at the onset of the Cuban Revolution. This insurgent’s history allows the reader into the folklore and cultural history of Afro-Cubans before and after the abolition of slavery. The book serves as an important contribution to the archive of black experience in Cuba and as a reminder of the many ways that the present continues to echo the past.
[more]
Biography of an Industrial Landscape
Carlsberg's Urban Spaces Retold
Svava Riesto
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Biography of an Industrial Landscape tells the story of one of the most significant urban redevelopment projects in northern Europe at the turn of the century. Examining the reinvention of the Carlsberg brewery site in Copenhagen as a city district, Svava Riesto unpacks the deeper assumptions about value that lie behind contemporary design, spatial planning and heritage practices. In particular, Riesto examines ways of valuing a vital yet seldom explicitly discussed feature of industrial landscapes: open space. Carlsberg's industrial open spaces were largely disregarded during the redevelopment, which was founded on canonical heritage thinking and ideas about urban space that were poorly equipped to include the characteristics of these spaces in the design's considerations.As a response, this account reappraises industrial open spaces. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre and biographical approaches to landscape research, the Carlsberg site's open spaces are presented anew as an interplay of materials, practices and the imagination - shaped and reshaped by water, yeast, industrial working routines and conflicting ideas about the future city.
[more]
A Biography of No Place
From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland
Kate Brown
Harvard University Press, 2004
This is a biography of a borderland between Russia and Poland, a region where, in 1925, people identified as Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians lived side by side. Over the next three decades, this mosaic of cultures was modernized and homogenized out of existence by the ruling might of the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, and finally, Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. By the 1950s, this “no place” emerged as a Ukrainian heartland, and the fertile mix of peoples that defined the region was destroyed.
Kate Brown’s study is grounded in the life of the village and shtetl, in the personalities and small histories of everyday life in this area. In impressive detail, she documents how these regimes, bureaucratically and then violently, separated, named, and regimented this intricate community into distinct ethnic groups.
Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography, and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, A Biography of No Place reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history. We are given, in short, an intimate portrait of the ethnic purification that has marked all of Europe, as well as a glimpse at the margins of twentieth-century “progress.”
[more]
Bio-Imperialism
Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility
Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Bio-Imperialism focuses on an understudied dimension of the war on terror: the fight against bioterrorism. This component of the war enlisted the biosciences and public health fields to build up the U.S. biodefense industry and U.S. global disease control. The book argues that U.S. imperial ambitions drove these shifts in focus, aided by gendered and racialized discourses on terrorism, disease, and science. These narratives helped rationalize American research expansion into dangerous germs and bioweapons in the name of biodefense and bolstered the U.S. rationale for increased interference in the disease control decisions of Global South nations. Bio-Imperialism is a sobering look at how the war on terror impacted the world in ways that we are only just starting to grapple with.
[more]
The Biological and Social Analyses of a Mississippian Cemetery from Southeast Missouri
The Turner Site, 23BU21A
Thomas K. Black, III
University of Michigan Press, 1979
The Turner site, in southeast Missouri, was a small Mississippian village that was occupied about AD 1300. Along with two nearby sites, Powers Fort and Snodgrass, it is considered to belong to the Powers Phase. In this volume, Black offers a mortuary analysis of burials found at all three sites.
[more]
Biological Individuality
Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives
Edited by Scott Lidgard and Lynn K. Nyhart
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Individuals are things that everybody knows—or thinks they do. Yet even scholars who practice or analyze the biological sciences often cannot agree on what an individual is and why. One reason for this disagreement is that the many important biological individuality concepts serve very different purposes—defining, classifying, or explaining living structure, function, interaction, persistence, or evolution. Indeed, as the contributors to Biological Individuality reveal, nature is too messy for simple definitions of this concept, organisms too quirky in the diverse ways they reproduce, function, and interact, and human ideas about individuality too fraught with philosophical and historical meaning.
Bringing together biologists, historians, and philosophers, this book provides a multifaceted exploration of biological individuality that identifies leading and less familiar perceptions of individuality both past and present, what they are good for, and in what contexts. Biological practice and theory recognize individuals at myriad levels of organization, from genes to organisms to symbiotic systems. We depend on these notions of individuality to address theoretical questions about multilevel natural selection and Darwinian fitness; to illuminate empirical questions about development, function, and ecology; to ground philosophical questions about the nature of organisms and causation; and to probe historical and cultural circumstances that resonate with parallel questions about the nature of society. Charting an interdisciplinary research agenda that broadens the frameworks in which biological individuality is discussed, this book makes clear that in the realm of the individual, there is not and should not be a direct path from biological paradigms based on model organisms through to philosophical generalization and historical reification.
Bringing together biologists, historians, and philosophers, this book provides a multifaceted exploration of biological individuality that identifies leading and less familiar perceptions of individuality both past and present, what they are good for, and in what contexts. Biological practice and theory recognize individuals at myriad levels of organization, from genes to organisms to symbiotic systems. We depend on these notions of individuality to address theoretical questions about multilevel natural selection and Darwinian fitness; to illuminate empirical questions about development, function, and ecology; to ground philosophical questions about the nature of organisms and causation; and to probe historical and cultural circumstances that resonate with parallel questions about the nature of society. Charting an interdisciplinary research agenda that broadens the frameworks in which biological individuality is discussed, this book makes clear that in the realm of the individual, there is not and should not be a direct path from biological paradigms based on model organisms through to philosophical generalization and historical reification.
[more]
Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins
Edited by Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Over the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. For example, biology has been used to justify eugenic programs, forced sterilization, human experimentation, and death camps—all in an attempt to support notions of racial superiority. By investigating the past, the contributors to Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins hope to better prepare us to discern ideological abuse of science when it occurs in the future.
Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers bring together fourteen experts to examine the varied ways science has been used and abused for nonscientific purposes from the fifteenth century to the present day. Featuring an essay on eugenics from Edward J. Larson and an examination of the progress of evolution by Michael J. Ruse, Biology and Ideology examines uses both benign and sinister, ultimately reminding us that ideological extrapolation continues today. An accessible survey, this collection will enlighten historians of science, their students, practicing scientists, and anyone interested in the relationship between science and culture.
[more]
Biology Takes Form
Animal Morphology and the German Universities, 1800-1900
Lynn K. Nyhart
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Morphology—the study of form—is often regarded as a failed science that made only limited contributions to our understanding of the living world. Challenging this view, Lynn Nyhart argues that morphology was integral to the life sciences of the nineteenth century. Biology Takes Form traces the development of morphological research in German universities and illuminates significant institutional and intellectual changes in nineteenth-century German biology.
Although there were neither professors of morphology nor a morphologists' society, morphologists achieved influence by "colonizing" niches in a variety of disciplines. Scientists in anatomy, zoology, natural history, and physiology considered their work morphological, and the term encompassed research that today might be classified as embryology, systematics, functional morphology, comparative physiology, ecology, behavior, evolutionary theory, or histology. Nyhart draws on research notes, correspondence, and other archival material to examine how these scientists responded to new ideas and to the work of colleagues. She examines the intertwined histories of morphology and the broader biological enterprise, demonstrating that the study of form was central to investigations of such issues as the relationships between an animal's structure and function, between an organism and its environment, and between living species and their ancestors.
Although there were neither professors of morphology nor a morphologists' society, morphologists achieved influence by "colonizing" niches in a variety of disciplines. Scientists in anatomy, zoology, natural history, and physiology considered their work morphological, and the term encompassed research that today might be classified as embryology, systematics, functional morphology, comparative physiology, ecology, behavior, evolutionary theory, or histology. Nyhart draws on research notes, correspondence, and other archival material to examine how these scientists responded to new ideas and to the work of colleagues. She examines the intertwined histories of morphology and the broader biological enterprise, demonstrating that the study of form was central to investigations of such issues as the relationships between an animal's structure and function, between an organism and its environment, and between living species and their ancestors.
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Bio/Pics
How Hollywood Constructed Public History
Custen, George
Rutgers University Press, 1992
"Helps us to understand how Hollywood films shaped public consciousness about the past by constructing a very specific, ideologically charged version of that past. . . . A fresh and important contribution to film history and cultural studies."--Daniel Czitrom, Mount Holyoke College
Bio/Pics is the first comprehensive study of a once important film genre, the biographical film. Using previously unavailable archival materials from Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros., MGM, and RKO studios, as well as censorship files from the Production Code Administration, George Custen argues that, through these films, Hollywood manufactured a nearly monochromatic view of history that was systematically distorted in regard to race, gender, nationality, and profession.Utilizing a carefully selected sample of over 100 films produced during the Studio Era (1927-1960), Custen maintains that the biopic constructed a Hollywood code of history out of a tightly controlled reference system, glamorizing the producers' own personal visions of what constituted a great life. Custen's examination of production practices reveals that the machinery of public history operating through these films was fueled by difference sources. His analysis of the roles played by star personae, legal considerations, censorship practices, and the producers' own ideologies brings the world of biopic alive, even into the age of the made-for-TV movie.
[more]
The Biopolitics of Feeling
Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century
Kyla Schuller
Duke University Press, 2018
In The Biopolitics of Feeling Kyla Schuller unearths the forgotten, multiethnic sciences of impressibility—the capacity to be transformed by one's environment and experiences—to uncover how biopower developed in the United States. Schuller challenges prevalent interpretations of biopower and literary cultures to reveal how biopower emerged within the discourses and practices of sentimentalism. Through analyses of evolutionary theories, gynecological sciences, abolitionist poetry and other literary texts, feminist tracts, child welfare reforms, and black uplift movements, Schuller excavates a vast apparatus that regulated the capacity of sensory and emotional feeling in an attempt to shape the evolution of the national population. Her historical and theoretical work exposes the overlooked role of sex difference in population management and the optimization of life, illuminating how models of binary sex function as one of the key mechanisms of racializing power. Schuller thereby overturns long-accepted frameworks of the nature of race and sex difference, offers key corrective insights to modern debates surrounding the equation of racism with determinism and the liberatory potential of ideas about the plasticity of the body, and reframes contemporary notions of sentiment, affect, sexuality, evolution, and heredity.
[more]
Biotechnology and Society
An Introduction
Hallam Stevens
University of Chicago Press, 2016
With Biotechnology and Society, Hallam Stevens offers an up-to-date primer to help us understand the interactions of biotechnology and society and the debates, controversies, fears, and hopes that have shaped how we think about bodies, organisms, and life in the twenty-first century. Stevens addresses such topics as genetically modified foods, cloning, and stem cells; genetic testing and the potential for discrimination; fears of (and, in some cases, hopes for) designer babies; personal genomics; biosecurity; and biotech art. Taken as a whole, the book presents a clear, authoritative picture of the relationship between biotechnology and society today, and how our conceptions (and misconceptions) of it could shape future developments. It is an essential volume for students and scholars working with biotechnology, while still being accessible to the general reader interested in the truth behind breathless media accounts about biotech’s promise and perils.
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Biotic Borders
Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890–1950
Jeannie N. Shinozuka
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A rich and eye-opening history of the mutual constitution of race and species in modern America.
In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" when nursery stock and other agricultural products shipped from Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Over the next fifty years, these crossings transformed conceptions of race and migration, played a central role in the establishment of the US empire and its government agencies, and shaped the fields of horticulture, invasion biology, entomology, and plant pathology. In Biotic Borders, Jeannie N. Shinozuka uncovers the emergence of biological nativism that fueled American imperialism and spurred anti-Asian racism that remains with us today.
Shinozuka provides an eye-opening look at biotic exchanges that not only altered the lives of Japanese in America but transformed American society more broadly. She shows how the modern fixation on panic about foreign species created a linguistic and conceptual arsenal for anti-immigration movements that flourished in the early twentieth century. Xenophobia inspired concerns about biodiversity, prompting new categories of “native” and “invasive” species that defined groups as bio-invasions to be regulated—or annihilated. By highlighting these connections, Shinozuka shows us that this story cannot be told about humans alone—the plants and animals that crossed with them were central to Japanese American and Asian American history. The rise of economic entomology and plant pathology in concert with public health and anti-immigration movements demonstrate these entangled histories of xenophobia, racism, and species invasions.
In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" when nursery stock and other agricultural products shipped from Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Over the next fifty years, these crossings transformed conceptions of race and migration, played a central role in the establishment of the US empire and its government agencies, and shaped the fields of horticulture, invasion biology, entomology, and plant pathology. In Biotic Borders, Jeannie N. Shinozuka uncovers the emergence of biological nativism that fueled American imperialism and spurred anti-Asian racism that remains with us today.
Shinozuka provides an eye-opening look at biotic exchanges that not only altered the lives of Japanese in America but transformed American society more broadly. She shows how the modern fixation on panic about foreign species created a linguistic and conceptual arsenal for anti-immigration movements that flourished in the early twentieth century. Xenophobia inspired concerns about biodiversity, prompting new categories of “native” and “invasive” species that defined groups as bio-invasions to be regulated—or annihilated. By highlighting these connections, Shinozuka shows us that this story cannot be told about humans alone—the plants and animals that crossed with them were central to Japanese American and Asian American history. The rise of economic entomology and plant pathology in concert with public health and anti-immigration movements demonstrate these entangled histories of xenophobia, racism, and species invasions.
[more]
Bird Relics
Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau
Branka Arsić
Harvard University Press, 2016
Birds were never far from Thoreau’s mind. They wing their way through his writing just as they did through his cabin on Walden Pond, summoned or dismissed at whim by his whistles. Emblematic of life, death, and nature’s endless capacity for renewal, birds offer passage into the loftiest currents of Thoreau’s thought. What Branka Arsić finds there is a theory of vitalism that Thoreau developed in response to his brother’s death. Through grieving, Thoreau came to see life as a generative force into which everything dissolves. Death is not an annulment of life but the means of its transformation and reemergence.
Bird Relics traces Thoreau’s evolving thoughts through his investigation of Greek philosophy and the influence of a group of Harvard vitalists who resisted the ideas of the naturalist Louis Agassiz. It takes into account materials often overlooked by critics: his Indian Notebooks and unpublished bird notebooks; his calendars that rewrite how we tell time; his charts of falling leaves, through which he develops a complex theory of decay; and his obsession with vegetal pathology, which inspires a novel understanding of the relationship between disease and health.
Arsić’s radical reinterpretation of Thoreau’s life philosophy gives new meaning to some of his more idiosyncratic habits, such as writing obituaries for people he did not know and frequenting estate sales, and raises important questions about the ethics of Thoreau’s practice of appropriating the losses of others as if they were his own.
[more]
Bird Strike
The Crash of the Boston Electra
Michael N. Kalafatas
Brandeis University Press, 2010
On a warm and golden afternoon, October 4, 1960, a Lockheed Electra jet turboprop carrying 72 souls took off from Logan Airport. Seconds later, the plane slammed into a flock of 10,000 starlings, and abruptly plummeted into Winthrop Harbor. The collision took 62 lives and gave rise to the largest rescue mobilization in Boston’s history, which included civilians in addition to police, firefighters, skindivers, and Navy and Coast Guard air-sea rescue teams. Largely because of the quick action and good seamanship of Winthrop citizens, many of them boys in small boats, ten passengers survived what the Civil Aeronautics Board termed “a non-survivable crash.” Using firsthand interviews with survivors of the crash, rescuers, divers, aeronautics experts, and ornithologists, as well as a wide range of primary source material, Kalafatas foregrounds the story of the crash and its aftermath to anchor a broader inquiry into developments in the aeronautics industry, the increase in the number of big birds in the skies of North America, and the increasing danger of “bird strikes.” Along the way he looks into interesting historical sidelights such as the creation of Logan Airport, the transformation of Boston’s industrial base to new technologies, and the nature of journalistic investigations in the early 1960s. The book is a rare instance when an author can simultaneously write about a fascinating historical event and a clear and present danger today. Kalafatas calls for and itemizes solutions that protect both birds and the traveling public.
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The Birdman of Koshkonong
The Life of Naturalist Thure Kumlien
Martha Bergland
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2021
Thure Kumlien was one of Wisconsin’s earliest Swedish settlers and an accomplished ornithologist, botanist, and naturalist in the mid-1800s, though his name is not well known today. He settled on the shore of Lake Koshkonong in 1843 and soon began sending bird specimens to museums and collectors in Europe and the eastern United States, including the Smithsonian. Later, he prepared natural history exhibits for the newly established University of Wisconsin and became the first curator and third employee of the new Milwaukee Public Museum.
For all of his achievements, Kumlien never gained the widespread notoriety of Wisconsin naturalists John Muir, Increase Lapham, or Aldo Leopold. Kumlien did his work behind the scenes, content to spend his days in the marshes and swamps rather than in the public eye. He once wrote that he was not “cut out for pretensions and show in the world.” Yet, his detailed observations of Wisconsin’s natural world—including the impact of early agriculture on the environment—were hugely important to the fields of ornithology and botany. As this carefully researched and lovingly rendered biography proves, Thure Kumlien deserves to be remembered as one of Wisconsin’s most influential naturalists.
For all of his achievements, Kumlien never gained the widespread notoriety of Wisconsin naturalists John Muir, Increase Lapham, or Aldo Leopold. Kumlien did his work behind the scenes, content to spend his days in the marshes and swamps rather than in the public eye. He once wrote that he was not “cut out for pretensions and show in the world.” Yet, his detailed observations of Wisconsin’s natural world—including the impact of early agriculture on the environment—were hugely important to the fields of ornithology and botany. As this carefully researched and lovingly rendered biography proves, Thure Kumlien deserves to be remembered as one of Wisconsin’s most influential naturalists.
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Birds and Feathers in the Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerican World
Allison Caplan and Lisa Sousa, special issue editors
Duke University Press
This issue reconstructs the integrated roles of real and symbolic birds and their feathers in ancient and colonial Mesoamerican and trans-Atlantic societies. The contributors—who include biologists, historians, and art historians—combine ethnohistoric methodologies with the physical sciences to analyze pictorial and native-language sources, archival documents, chronicles, feather artworks, and specimens in natural history collections. Contributors explore the semiotics of feathers, highly valued as part of local and imperial economies, in ritual regalia and featherworks. The issue also sheds light on how the shipment of indigenous featherworks and actual birds—both living and stuffed—brought American birds and indigenous knowledge of them into contact with Europe. By foregrounding indigenous knowledge and value systems, the contributors reexamine the significance of birds and feathers in constructions of the natural world, philosophy and religion, society and economics, and artistic practice.
Contributors: Allison Caplan, Martha Few, León García Garagarza, James Maley, John McCormack, Iris Montero Sobrevilla, Lisa Sousa
Contributors: Allison Caplan, Martha Few, León García Garagarza, James Maley, John McCormack, Iris Montero Sobrevilla, Lisa Sousa
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Birds of the Sun
Macaws and People in the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest
Edited by Christopher W. Schwartz, Stephen Plog, and Patricia A. Gilman
University of Arizona Press, 2022
Scarlet macaws are native to tropical forests ranging from the Gulf Coast and southern regions of Mexico to Bolivia, but they are present at numerous archaeological sites in the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest. Although these birds have been noted and marveled at through the decades, new syntheses of early excavations, new analytical methods, and new approaches to understanding the past now allow us to explore the significance and distribution of scarlet macaws to a degree that was previously impossible.
Birds of the Sun explores the many aspects of macaws, especially scarlet macaws, that have made them important to Native peoples living in this region for thousands of years. Leading experts discuss the significance of these birds, including perspectives from a Zuni author, a cultural anthropologist specializing in historic Pueblo societies, and archaeologists who have studied pre-Hispanic societies in Mesoamerica and the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest. Chapters examine the highly variable distribution and frequency of macaws in the past, their presence on rock art and kiva murals, the human experience of living with and transporting macaws, macaw biology and life history, and what skeletal remains suggest about the health of macaws in the past. Experts provide an extensive, region-by-region analysis, from early to late periods, of what we know about the presence, health, and depositional contexts of macaws and parrots, with specific case studies from the Hohokam, Chaco, Mimbres, Mogollon Highlands, Northern Sinagua, and Casas Grandes regions, where these birds are most abundant.
The expertise offered in this stunning new volume, which includes eight full color pages, will lay the groundwork for future research for years to come.
Contributors
Katelyn J. Bishop
Patricia L. Crown
Samantha Fladd
Randee Fladeboe
Patricia A. Gilman
Thomas Kelley Harper
Michelle Hegmon
Douglas J. Kennett
Patrick D. Lyons
Charmion R. McKusick
Ben A. Nelson
Stephen Plog
José Luis Punzo Díaz
Polly Schaafsma
Christopher W. Schwartz
Octavius Seowtewa
Christine R. Szuter
Kelley L. M. Taylor
Michael E. Whalen
Peter M. Whiteley
[more]
Birkenau, The Camp Of Death
Marco Nahon
University of Alabama Press, 1989
Birmingham's Rabbi
Morris Newfield and Alabama, 1895-1940
Mark Cowett
University of Alabama Press, 1986
Rabbi Morris Newfield led Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham from 1895-1940 and was counted among the most influential religious and social leaders of that city
American Jewish history has been criticized for its parochial nature because it has consisted largely of chronicles of American Jewish life and has often failed to explore the relationship between Jews and other ethnic groups in America.
Rabbi Morris Newfield led Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham from 1895-1940 and was counted among the most influential religious and social leaders of that city. Cowett chronicles Newfield’s career and uses it as a vehicle to explore the nature of ethnic leadership in America. In doing so he explores the conflicts with which Newfield struggled to help Jews maintain a sense of religious identity in a predominately Southern Christian environment. Newfield’s career also portrays the struggle of social welfare efforts in Alabama during the Progressive Era. He recognized the need for Jews to develop bonds with other American ethnic groups. Cowett portrays him as a mediator between not only Jew and Christian but also black and white, labor and capital, liberal and conservative—in short, within the full spectrum of political and social exchange in an industrial-based New south city.
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Birth Figures
Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body
Rebecca Whiteley
University of Chicago Press, 2023
The first full study of “birth figures” and their place in early modern knowledge-making.
Birth figures are printed images of the pregnant womb, always shown in series, that depict the variety of ways in which a fetus can present for birth. Historian Rebecca Whiteley coined the term and here offers the first systematic analysis of the images’ creation, use, and impact. Whiteley reveals their origins in ancient medicine and explores their inclusion in many medieval gynecological manuscripts, focusing on their explosion in printed midwifery and surgical books in Western Europe from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. During this period, birth figures formed a key part of the visual culture of medicine and midwifery and were widely produced. They reflected and shaped how the pregnant body was known and treated. And by providing crucial bodily knowledge to midwives and surgeons, birth figures were also deeply entangled with wider cultural preoccupations with generation and creativity, female power and agency, knowledge and its dissemination, and even the condition of the human in the universe.
Birth Figures studies how different kinds of people understood childbirth and engaged with midwifery manuals, from learned physicians to midwives to illiterate listeners. Rich and detailed, this vital history reveals the importance of birth figures in how midwifery was practiced and in how people, both medical professionals and lay readers, envisioned and understood the mysterious state of pregnancy.
Birth figures are printed images of the pregnant womb, always shown in series, that depict the variety of ways in which a fetus can present for birth. Historian Rebecca Whiteley coined the term and here offers the first systematic analysis of the images’ creation, use, and impact. Whiteley reveals their origins in ancient medicine and explores their inclusion in many medieval gynecological manuscripts, focusing on their explosion in printed midwifery and surgical books in Western Europe from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. During this period, birth figures formed a key part of the visual culture of medicine and midwifery and were widely produced. They reflected and shaped how the pregnant body was known and treated. And by providing crucial bodily knowledge to midwives and surgeons, birth figures were also deeply entangled with wider cultural preoccupations with generation and creativity, female power and agency, knowledge and its dissemination, and even the condition of the human in the universe.
Birth Figures studies how different kinds of people understood childbirth and engaged with midwifery manuals, from learned physicians to midwives to illiterate listeners. Rich and detailed, this vital history reveals the importance of birth figures in how midwifery was practiced and in how people, both medical professionals and lay readers, envisioned and understood the mysterious state of pregnancy.
[more]
Birth of a National Park
Great Smoky Mountains
Carlos C. Campbell
University of Tennessee Press, 1993
Annually millions of people admire the Great Smoky Mountains National Park's primeval beauty - towering peaks, sparkling cascades, virgin forests, and remarkable variety of wildflowers and shrubs. One of the nation's most popular national parks did not just "come to be" a logical and natural development on federally-owned land. Instead, it was the first national park to be acquired from private owners and given by the people to the federal government. Establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park climaxed an unprecedented crusade that is a story of almost fanatic dedication to a cause, as well as one of frustration, despair, political bias, and even physical violence.
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Birth of a Salesman
The Transformation of Selling in America
Walter A. Friedman
Harvard University Press, 2005
In this entertaining and informative book, Walter Friedman chronicles the remarkable metamorphosis of the American salesman from itinerant amateur to trained expert. From the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, the development of sales management transformed an economy populated by peddlers and canvassers to one driven by professional salesmen and executives.
From book agents flogging Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs to John H. Patterson's famous pyramid strategy at National Cash Register to the determined efforts by Ford and Chevrolet to craft surefire sales pitches for their dealers, selling evolved from an art to a science. "Salesmanship" as a term and a concept arose around the turn of the century, paralleling the new science of mass production. Managers assembled professional forces of neat responsible salesmen who were presented as hardworking pillars of society, no longer the butt of endless "traveling salesmen" jokes. People became prospects; their homes became territories. As an NCR representative said, the modern salesman "let the light of reason into dark places." The study of selling itself became an industry, producing academic disciplines devoted to marketing, consumer behavior, and industrial psychology. At Carnegie Mellon's Bureau of Salesmanship Research, Walter Dill Scott studied the characteristics of successful salesmen and ways to motivate consumers to buy.
Full of engaging portraits and illuminating insights, Birth of a Salesman is a singular contribution that offers a clear understanding of the transformation of salesmanship in modern America.
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