History

How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to emphasize pleasure, playfulness, and symbolic exchange as the essence of a vibrant consumer culture? The New York intellectuals of the 1930s rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation, of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the United States that challenged this dominant thinking. Consuming Pleasures reveals how a group of writers shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate.

Historian Daniel Horowitz traces the emergence of these new perspectives through a series of intellectual biographies. With writers and readers from the United States at the center, the story begins in Western Europe in the early 1950s and ends in the early 1970s, when American intellectuals increasingly appreciated the rich inventiveness of popular culture. Drawing on sources both familiar and newly discovered, this transnational intellectual history plays familiar works off each other in fresh ways. Among those whose work is featured are Jürgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, C. L. R. James, David Riesman and Marshall McLuhan, Richard Hoggart, members of London's Independent Group, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel, Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Susan Sontag, Reyner Banham, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

In the spring of 2007, National Geographic warned, "The oceans are in deep blue trouble. From the northernmost reaches of the Greenland Sea to the swirl of the Antarctic Circle, we are gutting our seas of fish." There were legitimate grounds for concern. After increasing more than fourfold between 1950 and 1994, the global wild fish catch reached a plateau and stagnated despite exponential growth in the fishing industry. As numerous scientific reports showed, many fish stocks around the world collapsed, creating a genuine global overfishing crisis.

Making Seafood Sustainable analyzes the ramifications of overfishing for the United States by investigating how fishers, seafood processors, retailers, government officials, and others have worked together to respond to the crisis. Historian Mansel G. Blackford examines how these players took steps to make fishing in some American waters, especially in Alaskan waters, sustainable. Critical to these efforts, Blackford argues, has been government and industry collaboration in formulating and enforcing regulations. What can be learned from these successful experiences? Are they applicable elsewhere? What are the drawbacks? Making Seafood Sustainable addresses these questions and suggests that sustainable seafood management can be made to work. The economic and social costs incurred in achieving sustainable resource usage are significant, but there are ways to mitigate them. More broadly, this study illustrates ways to manage commonly held natural resources around the world—land, water, oil, and so on—in sustainable ways.

Originally a sect within the Anglican church, Methodism blossomed into a dominant mainstream religion in America during the nineteenth century. At the beginning, though, Methodists constituted a dissenting religious group whose ideas about sexuality, marriage, and family were very different from those of their contemporaries.

Focusing on the Methodist notion of family that cut across biological ties, One Family Under God speaks to historical debates over the meaning of family and how the nuclear family model developed over the eighteenth century. Historian Anna M. Lawrence demonstrates that Methodists adopted flexible definitions of affection and allegiance and emphasized extended communal associations that enabled them to incorporate people outside the traditional boundaries of family. They used the language of romantic, ecstatic love to describe their religious feelings and the language of the nuclear family to describe their bonds to one another. In this way, early Methodism provides a useful lens for exploring eighteenth-century modes of family, love, and authority, as Methodists grappled with the limits of familial and social authority in their extended religious family.

Methodists also married and formed conjugal families within this larger spiritual framework. Evangelical modes of marriage called for careful, slow courtships, and often marriages happened later in life and produced fewer children. Religious views of the family offered alternatives to traditional coupling and marriage—through celibacy, spiritual service, and the idea of finding one's true spiritual match, which both challenged the role of parental authority within marriage-making and accelerated the turn within the larger society toward romantic marriage.

By examining the language and practice of evangelical sexuality and family, One Family Under God highlights how the Methodist movement in the eighteenth century was central to the rise of romantic marriage and the formation of the modern family.

From Privileges to Rights connects the changing fortunes of tradesmen in early New York to the emergence of a conception of subjective rights that accompanied the transition to a republican and liberal order in eighteenth-century America.

Tradesmen in New Amsterdam occupied a distinct social position and, with varying levels of success, secured privileges such as a reasonable reward and the exclusion of strangers from their commerce. The struggle to maintain these privileges figured in the transition to English rule as well as Leisler's Rebellion. Using hitherto unexamined records from the New York City Mayor's Court, Simon Middleton also demonstrates that, rather than merely mastering skilled crafts in workshops, artisans participated in whatever enterprises and markets promised profits with a minimum of risk. Bakers, butchers, and carpenters competed in a bustling urban economy knit together by credit that connected their fortunes to the Atlantic trade.

In the early eighteenth century, political and legal changes diminished earlier social distinctions and the grounds for privileges, while an increasing reliance on slave labor stigmatized menial toil. When an economic and a constitutional crisis prompted the importation of radical English republican ideas, artisans were recast artisans as virtuous male property owners whose consent was essential for legitimate government. In this way, an artisanal subject emerged that provided a constituency for the development of a populist and egalitarian republican political culture in New York City.

In this path-breaking study of the intersections between visual and literary culture, Christopher J. Lukasik explores how early Americans grappled with the relationship between appearance and social distinction in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War.

Through a wide range of evidence, including canonical and obscure novels, newspapers, periodicals, scientific and medical treatises, and plays as well as conduct manuals, portraits, silhouettes, and engravings, Discerning Characters charts the transition from the eighteenth century's emphasis on performance and manners to the search for a more reliable form of corporeal legibility in the wake of the Revolution. The emergence of physiognomy, which sought to understand a person's character based on apparently unchanging facial features, facilitated a larger shift in perception about the meanings of physical appearance and its relationship to social distinction.

The ensuing struggle between the face as a pliable medium of cultural performance and as rigid evidence of social standing, Lukasik argues, was at the center of the post-Revolutionary novel, which imagined physiognomic distinction as providing stability during a time of cultural division and political turmoil. As Lukasik shows, this tension between a model of character grounded in the fluid performances of the self and one grounded in the permanent features of the face would continue to shape not only the representation of social distinction within the novel but, more broadly, the practices of literary production and reception in nineteenth-century America across a wide range of media.

The result is a new interdisciplinary interpretation of the rise of the novel in America that reconsiders the political and social aims of the genre during the fifty years following the Revolution. In so doing, Discerning Characters powerfully rethinks how we have read—and continue to read—both novels and each other.

By the end of the Middle Ages, the ius commune—the combination of canon and Roman law—had formed the basis for all law in continental Europe, along with its patriarchal system of categorizing women. Throughout medieval Europe, women regularly found themselves in court, suing or being sued, defending themselves against criminal accusations, or prosecuting others for crimes committed against them or their families. Yet choosing to litigate entailed accepting the conceptual vocabulary of the learned law, thereby reinforcing the very legal and social notions that often subordinated them.

In The Measure of Woman Marie A. Kelleher explores the complex relationship between women and legal culture in Spain's Crown of Aragon during the late medieval period. Aragonese courts measured women according to three factors: their status in relation to men, their relative sexual respectability, and their conformity to ideas about the female sex as a whole. Yet in spite of this situation, Kelleher argues, women were able to play a crucial role in shaping their own legal identities while working within the parameters of the written law.

The Measure of Woman reveals that women were not passive recipients—or even victims—of the legal system. Rather, medieval women actively used the conceptual vocabulary of the law, engaging with patriarchal legal assumptions as part of their litigation strategies. In the process, they played an important role in the formation of a gendered legal culture that would shape the lives of women throughout Western Europe and beyond for centuries to come.

Spanning forty years, this collection of essays represents the work of a renowned teacher and scholar of the ancient Greek world. Martin Ostwald's contribution is both philological and historical: the thread that runs through all of the essays is his precise explanation, for a modern audience, of some crucial terms by which the ancient Greeks saw and lived their lives—and influenced ours. Chosen and sequenced by Ostwald, the essays demonstrate his methodology and elucidate essential aspects of ancient Greek society.

The first section plumbs the social and political terms in which the Greeks understood their lives. It examines their notion of the relation of the citizen to his community; how they conceived different kinds of political structure; what role ideology played in public life; and how differently their most powerful thinkers viewed issues of war and peace. The second section is devoted to the problem, first articulated by the Greeks, of the extent to which human life is dominated by nature (physis) and human convention (nomos), a question that remains a central concern in modern societies, even if in different guises. The third section focuses on democracy in Athens. It confronts questions of the nature of democratic rule, of financing public enterprises, of the accountability of public officials, of the conflict raised by imperial control and democratic rule, of the coexistence of "conservative" and "liberal" trends in a democratic regime, and of the relation between rhetoric and power in a democracy. The final section is a sketch of the principles on which the two greatest Greek historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, constructed their outlooks on human affairs.

Ultimately, the collection intends to make selected key concepts in ancient Greek social and political culture accessible to a lay audience. It also shows how the differences—rather than the similarities—between the ancient Greeks and us can contribute to a deeper understanding of our own time.

The Romans depicted the civil law as a body of rules crafted through communal deliberation for the purpose of self-government. Yet, as Clifford Ando demonstrates in Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition, the civil law was also an instrument of empire: many of its most characteristic features developed in response to the challenges posed when the legal system of Rome was deployed to embrace, incorporate, and govern people and cultures far afield.

Ando studies the processes through which lawyers at Rome grappled with the legal pluralism resulting from imperial conquests. He focuses primarily on the tools—most prominently analogy and fiction—used to extend the system and enable it to regulate the lives of persons far from the minds of the original legislators, and he traces the central place that philosophy of language came to occupy in Roman legal thought.

In the second part of the book Ando examines the relationship between civil, public, and international law. Despite the prominence accorded public and international law in legal theory, it was civil law that provided conceptual resources to those other fields in the Roman tradition. Ultimately it was the civil law's implication in systems of domination outside its own narrow sphere that opened the door to its own subversion. When political turmoil at Rome upended the institutions of political and legislative authority and effectively ended Roman democracy, the concepts and language that the civil law supplied to the project of Republican empire saw their meanings transformed. As a result, forms of domination once exercised by Romans over others were inscribed in the workings of law at Rome, henceforth to be exercised by the Romans over themselves.

In Dark Age Bodies Lynda L. Coon reconstructs the gender ideology of monastic masculinity through an investigation of early medieval readings of the body. Focusing on the Carolingian era, Coon evaluates the ritual and liturgical performances of monastic bodies within the imaginative landscapes of same-sex ascetic communities in northern Europe. She demonstrates how the priestly body plays a significant role in shaping major aspects of Carolingian history, such as the revival of classicism, movements for clerical reform, and church-state relations. In the political realm, Carolingian churchmen consistently exploited monastic constructions of gender to assert the power of the monastery. Stressing the superior qualities of priestly virility, clerical elites forged a model of gender that sought to feminize lay male bodies through a variety of textual, ritual, and spatial means.

Focusing on three central themes—the body, architecture, and ritual practice—the book draws from a variety of visual and textual materials, including poetry, grammar manuals, rhetorical treatises, biblical exegesis, monastic regulations, hagiographies, illuminated manuscripts, building plans, and cloister design. Interdisciplinary in scope, Dark Age Bodies brings together scholarship in architectural history and cultural anthropology with recent works in religion, classics, and gender to present a significant reconsideration of Carolingian culture.

Seeking to expand both the geographical range and the diversity of sites considered in the study of ancient Greek housing, Ancient Greek Houses and Households takes readers beyond well-established studies of the ideal classical house and now-famous structures of Athens and Olynthos.

Bradley A. Ault and Lisa C. Nevett have brought together an international team of scholars who draw upon recent approaches to the study of households developed in the fields of classical archaeology, ancient history, and anthropology. The essays cover a broad range of chronological, geographical, and social contexts and address such topics as the structure and variety of households in ancient Greece, facets of domestic industry, regional diversity in domestic organization, and status distinctions as manifested within households.

Ancient Greek Houses and Households views both Greek houses and the archeological debris found within them as a means of investigating the basic unit of Greek society: the household. Through this approach, the essays successfully point the way toward a real integration between material and textual data, between archeology and history.

Contributors include William Aylward (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Nicholas Cahill (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Manuel Fiedler (Freie Universität, Berlin), Franziska Lang (Humboldt Universität, Berlin), Monike Trümper (Universität Heidelberg), and Barbara Tsakirgis (Vanderbilt University, Nashville).

In the summer of 1790 the Italian explorer Count Paolo Andreani embarked on a journey that would take him through New York State and eastern Iroquoia. Traveling along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, Andreani kept a meticulous record of his observations and experiences in the New World. Published complete for the first time in English, the diary is of major importance to those interested in life after the American Revolution, political affairs in the New Republic, and Native American peoples.

Through Andreani's writings, we glimpse a world in cultural, economic, and political transition. An active participant in Enlightenment science, Andreani provides detailed observations of the landscape and natural history of his route. He also documents the manners and customs of the Iroquois, Shakers, and German, Dutch, and Anglo New Yorkers. Andreani was particularly interested in the Oneida and Onondaga Indians he visited, and his description of an Oneida lacrosse match accompanies the earliest known depiction of a lacrosse stick. Andreani's American letters, included here, relate his sometimes difficult but always revealing personal relationships with Washington, Jefferson, and Adams.

Prefaced by an illuminating historical and biographical introduction, Along the Hudson and Mohawk is a fascinating look at the New Republic as seen through the eyes of an observant and curious explorer.

Affective meditation on the Passion was one of the most popular literary genres of the high and later Middle Ages. Proliferating in a rich variety of forms, these lyrical, impassioned, script-like texts in Latin and the vernacular had a deceptively simple goal: to teach their readers how to feel. They were thus instrumental in shaping and sustaining the wide-scale shift in medieval Christian sensibility from fear of God to compassion for the suffering Christ.

Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion advances a new narrative for this broad cultural change and the meditative writings that both generated and reflected it. Sarah McNamer locates women as agents in the creation of the earliest and most influential texts in the genre, from John of Fécamp's Libellus to the Meditationes Vitae Christi, thus challenging current paradigms that cast the compassionate affective mode as Anselmian or Franciscan in origin. The early development of the genre in women's practices had a powerful and lasting legacy. With special attention to Middle English texts, including Nicholas Love's Mirror and a wide range of Passion lyrics and laments, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion illuminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion. To feel compassion for Christ, in the private drama of the heart that these texts stage, was to feel like a woman. This was an assumption about emotion that proved historically consequential, McNamer demonstrates, as she traces some of its legal, ethical, and social functions in late medieval England.

For the scholastic philosopher William Ockham (c. 1285-1347), there are three kinds of heresy. The first, and most unmistakable, is an outright denial of the truths of faith. Another is so obvious that a very simple person, even if illiterate, can see how it contradicts Divine Scripture. The third kind of heresy is less clear cut. It is perceptible only after long deliberation and only to individuals who are learned, and well versed in Scripture.

It is this third variety of heresy that J.M.M.H. Thijssen addresses in Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200-1400. The book documents 30 cases in which university trained scholars were condemned for disseminating allegedly erroneous opinions in their teaching or writing, and focuses particularly on four academic censures that have occupied prominent positions in the historiography of medieval philosophy.

Thijssen grants central importance to a number of questions so far neglected by historians regarding judicial procedures, the authorities supervising the orthodoxy of teaching, and the effects of condemnations on the careers of the accused. He also places still current questions regarding academic freedom and the nature of doctrinal authority into their medieval contexts.

From 1932 until the end of World War II, the Japanese established and maintained by bloody rule a puppet regime in the Chinese region of Manchuria. This region was composed of three northern provinces in China; the puppet ruler was the last Chinese Emperor, Pu Yi, and this rich industrial region was clearly coveted and managed by the Japanese as a critical element in their imperial dominion.

Yamamuro Shin'ichi's extraordinary book rereads this occupation under new light. The author shows that right-wing Japanese military and civilian groups thought of construction in this sparsely populated region as an effort to build a paradise on earth, with roots deep in Asian traditions. At the same time, Chinese and Korean populations in the region were abused by the Japanese military, and many Japanese were deliberately misinformed about what was being done in their name. Yamamuro examines the policies and events unfolding on the ground during this time. With close attention to the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans involved, and the links between the military and the home islands, he offers his own overall assessment of this distinctive instance of state-building. Making use of numerous sources in Chinese and Japanese, from legal documents and government decrees to memoirs and poetry, Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion goes beyond rhetoric to provide a unique assessment of the history of this period.

In the wake of Jerusalem's fall in 1099, the crusading armies of western Christians known as the Franks found themselves governing not only Muslims and Jews but also local Christians, whose culture and traditions were a world apart from their own. The crusader-occupied swaths of Syria and Palestine were home to many separate Christian communities: Greek and Syrian Orthodox, Armenians, and other sects with sharp doctrinal differences. How did these disparate groups live together under Frankish rule?

In The Crusades and the Christian World of the East, Christopher MacEvitt marshals an impressive array of literary, legal, artistic, and archeological evidence to demonstrate how crusader ideology and religious difference gave rise to a mode of coexistence he calls "rough tolerance." The twelfth-century Frankish rulers of the Levant and their Christian subjects were separated by language, religious practices, and beliefs. Yet western Christians showed little interest in such differences. Franks intermarried with local Christians and shared shrines and churches, but they did not hesitate to use military force against Christian communities. Rough tolerance was unlike other medieval modes of dealing with religious difference, and MacEvitt illuminates the factors that led to this striking divergence.

"It is commonplace to discuss the diversity of the Middle East in terms of Muslims, Jews, and Christians," MacEvitt writes, "yet even this simplifies its religious complexity." While most crusade history has focused on Christian-Muslim encounters, MacEvitt offers an often surprising account by examining the intersection of the Middle Eastern and Frankish Christian worlds during the century of the First Crusade.

These Potatoes Look Like Humans offers a unique understanding of the intersection between land, labour, dispossession and violence experienced by Black South Africans from the apartheid period to the present. In this ground-breaking book, Mbuso Nkosi criticises the historical framing of this debate within narrow materialist and legalistic arguments. His assertion is that, for most Black South Africans, the meaning of land cannot be separated from one’s spiritual and ancestral connection to it, and this results in him seeing the dispossession of land in South Africa with a perspective not yet explored.

Nkosi takes as his starting point the historic 1959 potato boycott in South Africa, which came about as a result of startling rumours that potatoes dug out of the soil from the farms in the Bethal district of Mpumalanga were in fact human heads. Journalists such as Ruth First and Henry Nxumalo went to Bethal to uncover these stories and revealed horrific accounts of abuse and routine killings of farmworkers by white Afrikaners. The workers were disenfranchised Black people who were forced to work on these farms for alleged ‘crimes’ against National Party state laws, such as the failure to carry passbooks.

In reading this violence from the perspectives of both the Black worker and the white farmer, Nkosi deploys the device of the eye to look at his research subjects and make sense of how the past informs the present. His argument is that the violence against Black farmworkers was not only on the exploitation of cheap labour, but also an anxiety white farmers felt about their settler-colonial appropriation of land. This anxiety, Nkosi argues, is pervasive in current heated public debates on the land question and calls for ‘land expropriation without compensation’. Furthermore, the dispossession of Black people from their land cannot be overcome until there is a recognition of the dead and restless spirits of the land, and a spiritual return to home for Black people’s ancestors. Until such time, the cycles of violence will persist.

This book will be of interest to academics and scholars working in the area of land and workers’ struggles but also to the general reader who wants to gain a deeper understanding of redress and social justice on multiple levels.

From 1211 until its loss to the Ottomans in 1669, the Greek island we know as Crete was the Venetian colony of Candia. Ruled by a paid civil service fully accountable to the Venetian Senate, Candia was distinct from nearly every other colony of the medieval period for the unprecedented degree to which the colonial power was involved in its governance.

Yet, for Sally McKee, the importance of the Cretan colony only begins with the anomalous manner of the Venetian state's rule. Uncommon Dominion tells the story of Venetian Crete, the home of two recognizably distinct ethnic communities, the Latins and the Greeks. The application of Venetian law to the colony made it possible for the colonial power to create and maintain a fiction of ethnic distinctness. The Greeks were subordinate to the Latins economically, politically, and juridically, yet within a century of Venetian colonization, the ethnic differences between Latin and Greek Cretans in daily material life were significantly blurred. Members of the groups intermarried, many of them learned each other's language, and some even chose to worship by the rites of the other's church. Holding up ample evidence of acculturation and miscegenation by the colony's inhabitants, McKee uncovers the colonial forces that promoted the persistence of ethnic labeling despite the lack of any clear demarcation between the two predominant communities. As McKee argues, the concept of ethnic identity was largely determined by gender, religion, and social status, especially by the Latin and Greek elites in their complex and frequently antagonistic social relationships.

Drawing expertly from notarial and court records, as well as legislative and literary sources, Uncommon Dominion offers a unique study of ethnicity in the medieval and early modern periods. Students and scholars in medieval, colonial, and postcolonial studies will find much of use in studying this remarkable colonial experiment.

Cappadocia had long been a marginal province in the eastern Roman empire, high on a rugged plateau in central Asia Minor and hardly influenced by classical Greek culture. But during the fourth century emperors visited repeatedly as they traveled between Constantinople and Antioch. In Cappadocia they met provincial notables and prominent churchmen, including Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus. These three Cappadocian Fathers were already competing with local landowners over the distribution of resources. As patrons representing their communities, they negotiated with provincial administrators and presented petitions to the imperial court. They also confronted emperors over Christian orthodoxy and Greek culture.

Kingdom of Snow investigates the impact of Roman rule in a remote province and the fate of Greek culture in an increasingly Christian society. The extensive writings of the Cappadocian Fathers combine to make Cappadocia one of the best-documented regions in the later Roman empire. Raymond Van Dam highlights the sometimes passionate relationships among bishops, local notables, imperial magistrates, and emperors as they struggled to gain prestige and power. In the drama of their personal confrontations they measured themselves and found their identities.

At the heart of the tumult that marked the 1960s was the unprecedented scale of student protest on university campuses around the world. Identifying themselves as the New Left, as distinguished from the Old Left socialists who engineered the historic labor protests of the 1930s, these young idealists quickly became the voice and conscience of their generation.

The People of This Generation is the first comprehensive case study of the history of the New Left in a Northeast urban environment. Paul Lyons examines how campus and community activists interacted with the urban political environment, especially the pacifist Quaker tradition and the rising ethnic populism of police chief and later mayor Frank Rizzo. Moving away from the memoirs and overviews that have dominated histories of the period, Lyons uses this detailed metropolitan study as a prism for revealing the New Left's successes and failures and for gauging how the energy generated by local activism cultivated the allegiance of countless citizens.

Lyons explores why groups dominated by the Old Left had limited success in offering inspiration to a new generation driven by the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. The number and diversity of colleges in this unique metropolitan area allow for rich comparisons of distinctly different campus cultures, and Lyons shows how both student demographics and institutional philosophies determined the pace and trajectory of radicalization. Turning his attention off campus, Lyons highlights the significance of the antiwar Philadelphia Resistance and the antiracist People for Human Rights—Philadelphia's most significant New Left organizations—revealing that the New Left was influenced by both its urban and campus milieus.

Combining in-depth archival research, rich personal anecdote, insightful treatment of the ideals that propelled student radicalism, and careful attention to the varied groups that nurtured it, The People of This Generation offers a moving history of urban America during what was perhaps the most turbulent decade in living memory.

In the first five centuries of the common era, the kiss was a distinctive and near-ubiquitous marker of Christianity. Although Christians did not invent the kiss—Jewish and pagan literature is filled with references to kisses between lovers, family members, and individuals in relationships of power and subordination—Christians kissed one another in highly specific settings and in ways that set them off from the non-Christian population.

Christians kissed each other during prayer, Eucharist, baptism, and ordination and in connection with greeting, funerals, monastic vows, and martyrdom. As Michael Philip Penn shows in Kissing Christians, this ritual kiss played a key role in defining group membership and strengthening the social bond between the communal body and its individual members.

Kissing Christians presents the first comprehensive study of the ritual kiss and how controversies surrounding it became part of larger debates regarding the internal structure of Christian communities and their relations with outsiders. Penn traces how Christian writers exalted those who kissed only fellow Christians, proclaimed that Jews did not have a kiss, prohibited exchanging the kiss with potential heretics, privileged the confessor's kiss, prohibited Christian men and women from kissing each other, and forbade laity from kissing clergy. Kissing Christians also investigates connections between kissing and group cohesion, kissing practices and purity concerns, and how Christian leaders used the motif of the kiss of Judas to examine theological notions of loyalty, unity, forgiveness, hierarchy, and subversion.

Exploring connections between bodies, power, and performance, Kissing Christians bridges the gap between cultural and liturgical approaches to antiquity. It breaks significant new ground in its application of literary and sociological theory to liturgical history and will have a profound impact on these fields.

In this study of the reciprocities binding religion, politics, law, and literature, Debora Shuger offers a profoundly new history of early modern English censorship, one that bears centrally on issues still current: the rhetoric of ideological extremism, the use of defamation to ruin political opponents, the grounding of law in theological ethics, and the terrible fragility of public spheres. Starting from the question of why no one prior to the mid-1640s argued for free speech or a free press per se, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility surveys the texts against which Tudor-Stuart censorship aimed its biggest guns, which turned out not to be principled dissent but libels, conspiracy fantasies, and hate speech. The book explores the laws that attempted to suppress such material, the cultural values that underwrote this regulation, and, finally, the very different framework of assumptions whose gradual adoption rendered censorship illegitimate.

Virtually all substantive law on language concerned defamation, regulating what one could say about other people. Hence Tudor-Stuart laws extended protection only to the person hurt by another's words, never to their speaker. In treating transgressive language as akin to battery, English law differed fundamentally from papal censorship, which construed its target as heresy. There were thus two models of censorship operative in the early modern period, both premised on religious norms, but one concerned primarily with false accusation and libel, the other with false belief and immorality. Shuger investigates the first of these models—the dominant English one—tracing its complex origins in the Roman law of iniuria through medieval theological ethics and Continental jurisprudence to its continuities and discontinuities with current U.S. law. In so doing, she enables her reader to grasp how in certain contexts censorship could be understood as safeguarding both charitable community and personal dignitary rights.

Albertanus of Brescia is an important figure in the cultural history of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. He is best known among literary scholars for the influence of his writings on Brunetto Latini, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer. In addition, his sermons have received attention as part of the history of lay confraternities and lay preaching in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. James M. Powell shows that Albertanus's contributions considerably surpass even these notable attainments.

Powell contends that Albertanus was an original social theorist who drew on his experience with religious confraternities and with the law to develop a theory of consent. Albertanus developed the idea that society rested on voluntary acceptance of a rule, much as did religious life. This acceptance laid the foundation for social cohesion and legal enforcement. Albertanus's ideas were to find great prominence in the later Middle Ages. Powell's purpose in writing Albertanus of Brescia goes beyond the study of his eponymous subject. Through Albertanus, Powell examines how major developments of the twelfth century began to find expression in the mind of an early thirteenth-century secular thinker. In Albertanus, Powell perceives an individual bringing received, bookish authority into confrontation with lived experience. To Powell, the example of Albertanus suggests a much more complex picture of medieval approaches to social theory than that previously evident in the literature.

This is the first book-length study of Albertanus and his works. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of medieval, Italian, intellectual, and literary history, and political theory.

Augustine, bishop of Hippo between 395 and 430, and his fellow bishops lived and worked through massive shifts in politics, society, and religion. Christian bishops were frequently asked to serve as intellectuals, legislators, judges, and pastors—roles and responsibilities that often conflicted with one another and made it difficult for bishops to be effective leaders. Expectations of Justice in the Age of Augustine examines these roles and the ways bishops struggled to fulfill (or failed to fulfill) them, as well as the philosophical conclusions they drew from their experience in everyday affairs, such as oath-swearing, and in the administration of penance.

Augustine and his near contemporaries were no more or less successful at handling the administration of justice than other late antique or early medieval officials. When bishops served in judicial capacities, they experienced firsthand the complex inner workings of legal procedures and social conflicts, as well as the fallibility of human communities. Bishops represented divine justice while simultaneously engaging in and even presiding over the sorts of activities that animated society—business deals, litigations, gossip, and violence—but also made justice hard to come by.

Kevin Uhalde argues that serving as judges, even informally, compelled bishops to question whether anyone could be guaranteed justice on earth, even from the leaders of the Christian church. As a result, their ideals of divine justice fundamentally changed in order to accommodate the unpleasant reality of worldly justice and its failings. This philosophical shift resonated in Christian thought and life for centuries afterward and directly affected religious life, from the performance of penance to the way people conceived of the Final Judgment.

In December 1235, Pope Gregory IX altered the mission of a crusade he had begun to preach the year before. Instead of calling for Christian magnates to go on to fight the infidel in Jerusalem, he now urged them to combat the spread of Christian heresy in Latin Greece and to defend the Latin empire of Constantinople. The Barons' Crusade, as it was named by a fourteenth-century chronicler impressed by the great number of barons who participated, would last until 1241 and would represent in many ways the high point of papal efforts to make crusading a universal Christian undertaking. This book, the first full-length treatment of the Barons' Crusade, examines the call for holy war and its consequences in Hungary, France, England, Constantinople, and the Holy Land.

In the end, Michael Lower reveals, the pope's call for unified action resulted in a range of locally determined initiatives and accommodations. In some places in Europe, the crusade unleashed violence against Jews that the pope had not sought; in others, it unleashed no violence at all. In the Levant, it even ended in peaceful negotiation between Christian and Muslim forces. Virtually everywhere, but in different ways, it altered the relations between Christians and non-Christians. By emphasizing comparative local history, The Barons' Crusade: A Call to Arms and Its Consequences brings into question the idea that crusading embodies the religious unity of medieval society and demonstrates how thoroughly crusading had been affected by the new strategic and political demands of the papacy.

Radical Pacifism in Modern America traces cycles of success and decline in the radical wing of the American peace movement, an egalitarian strain of pacifism that stood at the vanguard of antimilitarist organizing and American radical dissent from 1940 to 1970.

Using traditional archival material and oral history sources, Marian Mollin examines how gender and race shaped and limited the political efforts of radical pacifist women and men, highlighting how activists linked pacifism to militant masculinity and privileged the priorities of its predominantly white members. In spite of the invisibility that this framework imposed on activist women, the history of this movement belies accounts that relegate women to the margins of American radicalism and mixed-sex political efforts. Motivated by a strong egalitarianism, radical pacifist women rejected separatist organizing strategies and, instead, worked alongside men at the front lines of the struggle to construct a new paradigm of social and political change. Their compelling examples of female militancy and leadership challenge the essentialist association of female pacifism with motherhood and expand the definition of political action to include women's political work in both the public and private spheres. Focusing on the vexed alliance between white peace activists and black civil rights workers, Mollin similarly details the difficulties that arose at the points where their movements overlapped and challenges the seemingly natural association between peace and civil rights.

Emphasizing the actions undertaken by militant activists, Radical Pacifism in Modern America illuminates the complex relationship between gender, race, activism, and political culture, identifying critical factors that simultaneously hindered and facilitated grassroots efforts at social and political change.

In the years between 1880 and 1915, New York City and its environs underwent a tremendous demographic transformation with the arrival of millions of European immigrants, native whites from the rural countryside, and people of African descent from both the American South and the Caribbean. While all groups faced challenges in their adjustment to the city, hardening racial prejudices set the black experience apart from that of other newcomers. Through encounters with each other, blacks and whites, both together and in opposition, forged the contours of race relations that would affect the city for decades to come.

Before Harlem reveals how black migrants and immigrants to New York entered a world far less welcoming than the one they had expected to find. White police officers, urban reformers, and neighbors faced off in a hostile environment that threatened black families in multiple ways. Unlike European immigrants, who typically struggled with low-paying jobs but who often saw their children move up the economic ladder, black people had limited employment opportunities that left them with almost no prospects of upward mobility. Their poverty and the vagaries of a restrictive job market forced unprecedented numbers of black women into the labor force, fundamentally affecting child-rearing practices and marital relationships.

Despite hostile conditions, black people nevertheless claimed New York City as their own. Within their neighborhoods and their churches, their night clubs and their fraternal organizations, they forged discrete ethnic, regional, and religious communities. Diverse in their backgrounds, languages, and customs, black New Yorkers cultivated connections to others similar to themselves, forming organizations, support networks, and bonds of friendship with former strangers. In doing so, Marcy S. Sacks argues, they established a dynamic world that eventually sparked the Harlem Renaissance. By the 1920s, Harlem had become both a tragedy and a triumph—undeniably a ghetto replete with problems of poverty, overcrowding, and crime, but also a refuge and a haven, a physical place whose very name became legendary.

In the largely forgotten craft of hairwork, practiced widely in nineteenth-century America, the hair of loved ones—living and deceased—was woven into jewelry, wall decorations, and keepsakes. Rings, bracelets, lockets, and brooches were set with metalwork or ivory and painted with rich patterns. Pocket watches hung from long, woven hair fobs. Parlor walls were decorated with elaborate wreaths made of hair fashioned into twigs and flowers, often adorned with beads or ribbons. More unusual items even included a tea set made entirely out of hair. Victorian men and women treasured hairwork not only as remembrances of loved ones and memorials of relationships but also as objects of beauty and means of personal expression.

Beginning as a trade of highly skilled craftsmen in the late eighteenth century, hairwork became tremendously popular among the middle class, and supported at its peak in the mid-nineteenth century an industry that included catalog dealers of premade pieces, standardized patterns, and how-to books for hobbyists. Advertisements, stories, and illustrations in popular publications depicted hairwork as the height of sentimental fashion.

Using a wide array of evidence drawn from poetry, fiction, diaries, letters, and, above all, examples of hairwork, Love Entwined traces the widespread and long-lived popularity of the craft and its place in the American marketplace. During a period that saw a growing mechanization of production methods, hairwork stood apart not only for being made by hand but also for using a part of the body as a material. Helen Sheumaker argues that this refiguration of a loved one's hair into a commodity created a unique meeting point between sentimentality and consumerism, intensifying the close relationship between the goods one purchased and the kind of person one wished to be.

In 1866 Patrick Manson, a young Scottish doctor fresh from medical school, left London to launch his career in China as a port surgeon for the Imperial Chinese Customs Service. For the next two decades, he served in this outpost of British power in the Far East, and extended the frontiers of British medicine. In 1899, at the twilight of his career and as the British Empire approached its zenith, he founded the London School of Tropical Medicine. For these contributions Manson would later be called the "father of British tropical medicine."

In Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease Douglas M. Haynes uses Manson's career to explore the role of British imperialism in the making of Victorian medicine and science. He challenges the categories of "home" and "empire" that have long informed accounts of British medicine and science, revealing a vastly more dynamic, dialectical relationship between the imperial metropole and periphery than has previously been recognized. Manson's decision to launch his career in China was no accident; the empire provided a critical source of career opportunities for a chronically overcrowded profession in Britain. And Manson used the London media's interest in the empire to advance his scientific agenda, including the discovery of the transmission of malaria in 1898, which he portrayed as British science.

The empire not only created a demand for practitioners but also enhanced the presence of British medicine throughout the world. Haynes documents how the empire subsidized research science at the London School of Tropical Medicine and elsewhere in Britain in the early twentieth century. By illuminating the historical enmeshment of Victorian medicine and science in Britain's imperial project, Imperial Medicine identifies the present-day privileged distribution of specialist knowledge about disease with the lingering consequences of European imperialism.

One of the great breakthroughs in Chinese studies in the early twentieth century was the archaeological identification of the earliest, fully historical dynasty of kings, the Shang (ca. 1300-1050 B.C.E.). The last fifty years have seen major advances in all areas of Chinese archaeology, but recent studies of the Shang, their ancestors, and their contemporaries have been especially rich. Since the last English-language overview of Shang civilization appeared in 1980, the pace of discovery has quickened. China in the Early Bronze Age: Shang Civilization is the first work in twenty-five years to synthesize current knowledge of the Shang for everyone interested in the origins of Chinese civilization.

China in the Early Bronze Age traces the development of early Bronze Age cultures in North and Northwestern China from about 2000 B.C.E., including the Erlitou culture (often identified with the Xia) and the Erligang culture. Robert L. Thorp introduces major sites, their architectural remains, burials, and material culture, with special attention to jades and bronze. He reviews the many discoveries near Anyang, site of two capitals of the Shang kings. In addition to the topography of these sites, Thorp discusses elite crafts and devotes a chapter to the Shang cult, its divination practices, and its rituals. The volume concludes with a survey of the late Shang world, cultures contemporary with Anyang during the late second millennium B.C.E. Fully documented with references to Chinese archaeological sources and illustrated with more than one hundred line drawings, China in the Early Bronze Age also includes informative sidebars on related topics and suggested readings.

Students of the history and archaeology of early civilizations will find China in the Early Bronze Age the most up-to-date and wide-ranging introduction to its topic now in print. Scholars in Chinese studies will use this work as a handbook and research guide. This volume makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the formative stages of Chinese culture.

Although representations of medieval Christians and Christianity are rarely subject to the same scholarly scrutiny as those of Jews and Judaism, "the Christian" is as constructed a term, category, and identity as "the Jew." Medieval Christian authors created complex notions of Christian identity through strategic use of representations of Others: idealized Jewish patriarchs or demonized contemporary Jews; Woman represented as either virgin or whore. In Western thought, the Christian was figured as spiritual and masculine, defined in opposition to the carnal, feminine, and Jewish.

Women and Jews are not simply the Other for the Christian exegetical tradition, however; they also represent sources of origin, as one cannot conceive of men without women or of Christianity without Judaism. The bifurcated representations of Woman and Jew found in the literature of the Middle Ages and beyond reflect the uneasy figurations of women and Jews as both insiders and outsiders to Christian society.

Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare provides the first extended examination of the linkages of gender and Jewish difference in late medieval and early modern English literature. Focusing on representations of Jews and women in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, selections from medieval drama, and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Lampert explores the ways in which medieval and early modern authors used strategies of opposition to—and identification with—figures of Jews and women to create individual and collective Christian identities. This book shows not only how these questions are interrelated in the texts of medieval and early modern England but how they reveal the distinct yet similarly paradoxical places held by Woman and Jew within a longer tradition of Western thought that extends to the present day.

Justinian governed the Roman empire for more than thirty-eight years, and the events of his reign were recorded by Procopius of Caesarea, secretary of the general Belisarius. Yet, significantly, Procopius composed a history, a panegyric, as well as a satire of his own times. Anthony Kaldellis here offers a new interpretation of these writings of Procopius, situating him as a major source for the sixth century and one of the great historians of antiquity and Byzantium.

Breaking from the scholarly tradition that views classicism as an affected imitation that distorted history, Kaldellis argues that Procopius was a careful student of the classics who displayed remarkable literary skill in adapting his models to the purposes of his own narratives. Classicism was a matter of structure and meaning, not just vocabulary. Through allusions Procopius revealed truths that could not be spoken openly; through anecdotes he exposed the broad themes that governed the history of his age.

Elucidating the political thought of Procopius in light of classical historiography and political theory, Kaldellis argues that he owed little to Christianity, finding instead that he rejected the belief in providence and asserted the supremacy of chance. By deliberately alluding to Plato's discussions of tyranny, Procopius developed an artful strategy of intertextuality that enabled him to comment on contemporary individuals and events. Kaldellis also uncovers links between Procopius and the philosophical dissidents of the reign of Justinian. This dimension of his writing implies that his work is worthy of esteem not only for the accuracy of its reporting but also for its cultural polemic, political dissidence, and philosophical sophistication.

Procopius of Caesarea has wide implications for the way we should read ancient historians. Its conclusions also suggest that the world of Justinian was far from monolithically Christian. Major writers of that time believed that classical texts were still the best guides for understanding history, even in the rapidly changing world of late antiquity.

Was there such a thing as a modern notion of race in the English Renaissance, and, if so, was skin color its necessary marker? In fact, early modern texts described human beings of various national origins—including English—as turning white, brown, tawny, black, green, or red for any number of reasons, from the effects of the sun's rays or imbalance of the bodily humors to sexual desire or the application of makeup. It is in this cultural environment that the seventeenth-century London Gazette used the term "black" to describe both dark-skinned African runaways and dark-haired Britons, such as Scots, who are now unquestioningly conceived of as "white."

In Shades of Difference, Sujata Iyengar explores the cultural mythologies of skin color in a period during which colonial expansion and the slave trade introduced Britons to more dark-skinned persons than at any other time in their history. Looking to texts as divergent as sixteenth-century Elizabethan erotic verse, seventeenth-century lyrics, and Restoration prose romances, Iyengar considers the construction of race during the early modern period without oversimplifying the emergence of race as a color-coded classification or a black/white opposition. Rather, "race," embodiment, and skin color are examined in their multiple contexts—historical, geographical, and literary. Iyengar engages works that have not previously been incorporated into discussions of the formation of race, such as Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis." By rethinking the emerging early modern connections between the notions of race, skin color, and gender, Shades of Difference furthers an ongoing discussion with originality and impeccable scholarship.

Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn exposes the fears expressed by elders about young people in the early American republic. Those authors, educators, and moral reformers who aspired to guide youth into respectable stations perceived new dangers in the decades following independence. Battling a range of seducers in the burgeoning marketplace of early America, from corrupt peers to licentious prostitutes, from pornographic authors to firebrand preachers, these self-proclaimed moral guardians crafted advice and institutions for youth, hoping to guide them safely away from harm and toward success. By penning didactic novels and advice books while building reform institutions and colleges, they sought to lead youth into dutiful behavior. But, thrust into the market themselves, these moral guides were forced to compromise their messages to find a popular audience. Nonetheless, their calls for order did have lasting impact. In urban centers in the Northeast, middle-class Americans became increasingly committed to their notions of chastity, piety, and hard work.

Focusing on popular publications and large urban centers, Hessinger draws a portrait of deeply troubled reformers, men and women, who worried incessantly about the vulnerability of youth to the perils of prostitution, promiscuity, misbehavior, and revolt.

Benefiting from new insights in cultural history, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn looks at the way the categories of gender, age, and class took rhetorical shape in the early republic. In trying to steer young adults away from danger, these advisors created values that came to define the emerging middle class of urban America.

In the thirty years after World War II, American intellectual and artistic life changed as dramatically as did the rest of society. Gone were the rebellious lions of modernism—Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky—and nearing exhaustion were those who took up their mantle as abstract expressionism gave way to pop art, and the barren formalism associated with the so-called high modernists wilted before the hothouse cultural brew of the 1960s. According to conventional thinking, it was around this time that postmodernism with its characteristic skepticism and relativism was born.

In Late Modernism, historian Robert Genter remaps the landscape of American modernism in the early decades of the Cold War, tracing the combative debate among artists, writers, and intellectuals over the nature of the aesthetic form in an age of mass politics and mass culture. Dispensing with traditional narratives that present this moment as marking the exhaustion of modernism, Genter argues instead that the 1950s were the apogee of the movement, as American practitioners—abstract expressionists, Beat poets, formalist critics, color-field painters, and critical theorists, among others—debated the relationship between form and content, tradition and innovation, aesthetics and politics. In this compelling work of intellectual and cultural history Genter presents an invigorated tradition of late modernism, centered on the work of Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Jasper Johns, Norman Brown, and James Baldwin, a tradition that overcame the conservative and reactionary politics of competing modernist practitioners and paved the way for the postmodern turn of the 1960s.

In late Victorian America few issues held the public's attention more closely than the allegedly unnatural family life of the urban poor. In Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, Sherri Broder brings new insight to the powerful depictions of the urban poor that circulated in newspapers and novels, public debate and private correspondence, including the irresponsible tramp, the "fallen" single mother, and the neglected child. Broder considers how these representations contributed to debates over the nature of family life and focuses on the ways different historical actors—social reformers, labor activists, and ordinary laboring people—made use of the available cultural narratives about family, gender, and sexuality to comprehend changes in turn-of-the-century America.

In the decades after the Civil War, Philadelphia was an important center of charity, child protection, and labor reform. Drawing on the rich records of the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty, Broder assesses the intentions and consequences of reform efforts devoted to women and children at the turn of the century. Her research provides an eloquent study of how the terms used by social workers and their clients to discuss the condition of poverty continue to have a profound influence on social policies and develops a complex historical perspective on how social policy and representations of poor families have been and remain mutually influential.

Much of the evidence—literary, historical, documentary, and pictorial—from ancient Athens is urban in authorship, subject matter, and intended audience. The result has been the assertion of an undifferentiated monolithic "Athenian" citizen regime as often as not identifiably urban in its lifestyle, preoccupations, and attitude. In Rural Athens Under the Democracy, however, Nicholas F. Jones undertakes the first comprehensive attempt to reconstruct on its own terms the world of rural Attica outside the walls during the "classical" fifth and fourth centuries B.C. What he finds is a distinctly nonurban (and nonurbane) order dominated by a traditional, predominantly agrarian society and culture.

Jones relies heavily upon the relatively neglected epigraphic record from the rural countryside and villages, as well as posing new questions of the well-known urban writings of Athenian historians, essayists, and philosophers and occasionally following the lead of Hesiod's agrarian poem Works and Days. From these sources he gleans new findings regarding settlement patterns, argues for a heretofore unrecognized system of personal patronage, explores relations between villages and the town of Athens, reconstructs the "Agrarian" Dionysia in several of its more important dimensions, and contrasts the realities of rural Attic culture with their various representations in contemporary literary and philosophical writings by Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and others.

Building on Jones's previous publications on the ancient Greek city-state, Rural Athens Under the Democracy presents the first holistic examination of classical extramural Attica. He challenges the received view that ancient Athens in its heyday was marked by a uniform cultural, ideological, and conspicuously citified order and, in place of the perception of things rural as mere deficits in urbanity, proposes that we look at Attica outside the walls in its own right and in positive terms.

When Great Britain abolished slavery in 1833, sugar planters in the Caribbean found themselves facing the prospect of paying working wages to their former slaves. Cheaper labor existed elsewhere in the empire, however, and plantation owners, along with the home and colonial governments, quickly began importing the first of what would eventually be hundreds of thousands of indentured laborers from India.

Madhavi Kale draws extensively on the archival materials from the period and argues that imperial administrators sanctioned and authorized distinctly biased accounts of postemancipation labor conditions and participated in devaluing and excluding alternative accounts of slavery. As she does this she highlights the ways in which historians, by relying on these biased sources, have perpetuated the acceptance of a privileged perspective on imperial British history.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Among his many accomplishments, Benjamin Franklin was instrumental in founding the first major civilian hospital and medical school and in the American colonies. He studied the efficacy of smallpox inoculation and investigated the causes of the common cold. His inventions—including bifocal lenses and a "long arm" that extended the user's reach—made life easier for the aged and afflicted. In Doctor Franklin's Medicine, Stanley Finger uncovers the instrumental role that this scientist, inventor, publisher, and statesman played in the development of the healing arts—enhancing preventive and bedside medicine, hospital care, and even personal hygiene in ways that changed the face of medical care in both America and Europe.

As Finger shows, Franklin approached medicine in the spirit of the Enlightenment and with the mindset of an experimental natural philosopher, seeking cures for diseases and methods of alleviating symptoms of illnesses. He was one of the first people to try to use electrical shocks to help treat paralytic strokes and hysteria, and even suggested applying shocks to the head to treat depressive disorders. He also strove to topple one of the greatest fads in eighteenth-century medicine: mesmerism.

Doctor Franklin's Medicine looks at these and the many other contributions that Franklin made to the progress of medical knowledge, including a look at how Franklin approached his own chronic illnesses of painful gout and a large bladder stone. Written in accessible prose and filled with new information on the breadth of Franklin's interests and activities, Doctor Franklin's Medicine reveals the impressive medical legacy of this Founding Father.

During the 1970s and beyond, political causes both left and right—the gay rights movement, second-wave feminism, the protests against busing to desegregate schools, the tax revolt, and the anti-abortion struggle—drew inspiration from the protest movements of the 1960s. Indeed, in their enthusiasm for direct-action tactics, their use of street theater, and their engagement in grassroots organizing, activists in all these movements can be considered "children of the Sixties." Invocations of America's founding ideals of liberty and justice and other forms of patriotic protest have also featured prominently in the rhetoric and image of these movements. Appeals to the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights have been made forcefully by gay rights activists and feminists, for instance, while participants in the antibusing movement, the tax revolt, and the campaign against abortion rights have waved the American flag and claimed the support of the nation's founders.

In tracing the continuation of quintessentially "Sixties" forms of protest and ideas into the last three decades of the twentieth century, and in emphasizing their legacy for conservatives as well as those on the left, American Patriotism, American Protest shows that the activism of the civil rights, New Left, and anti-Vietnam War movements has shaped America's modern political culture in decisive ways. As well as providing a refreshing alternative to the "rise and fall" narrative through which the Sixties are often viewed, Simon Hall's focus on the shared commitment to patriotic protest among a diverse range of activists across the political spectrum also challenges claims that, in recent decades, patriotism has become the preserve of the political right. Full of original and insightful observations, and based on extensive archival research, American Patriotism, American Protest transforms our understanding of the Sixties and their aftermath.

As the Ottoman Empire advanced westward from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, humanists responded on a grand scale, leaving behind a large body of fascinating yet understudied works. These compositions included Crusade orations and histories; ethnographic, historical, and religious studies of the Turks; epic poetry; and even tracts on converting the Turks to Christianity. Most scholars have seen this vast literature as atypical of Renaissance humanism. Nancy Bisaha now offers an in-depth look at the body of Renaissance humanist works that focus not on classical or contemporary Italian subjects but on the Ottoman Empire, Islam, and the Crusades. Throughout, Bisaha probes these texts to reveal the significant role Renaissance writers played in shaping Western views of self and other.

Medieval concepts of Islam were generally informed and constrained by religious attitudes and rhetoric in which Muslims were depicted as enemies of the faith. While humanist thinkers of the Renaissance did not move entirely beyond this stance, Creating East and West argues that their understanding was considerably more complex, in that it addressed secular and cultural issues, marking a watershed between the medieval and modern. Taking a close look at a number of texts, Bisaha expands current notions of Renaissance humanism and of the history of cross-cultural perceptions. Engaging both traditional methods of intellectual history and more recent methods of cross-cultural studies, she demonstrates that modern attitudes of Western societies toward other cultures emerged not during the later period of expansion and domination but rather as a defensive intellectual reaction to a sophisticated and threatening power to the East.

In The Garden of Delights, Fiona J. Griffiths offers the first major study of the Hortus deliciarum, a magnificently illuminated manuscript of theology, biblical history, and canon law written both by and explicitly for women at the end of the twelfth century. In so doing she provides a brilliantly persuasive new reading of female monastic culture. Through careful analysis of the contents, structure, and organization of the Hortus, Griffiths argues for women's profound engagement with the spiritual and intellectual vitality of the period on a level previously thought unimaginable, overturning the assumption that women were largely excluded from the "renaissance" and "reform" of this period. As a work of scholarship that drew from a wide range of sources, both monastic and scholastic, the Hortus provides a witness to the richness of women's reading practices within the cloister, demonstrating that it was possible, even late into the twelfth century, for communities of religious women to pursue an educational program that rivaled that available to men. At the same time, the manuscript's reformist agenda reveals how women engaged the pressing spiritual questions of the day, even going so far as to criticize priests and other churchmen who fell short of their reformist ideals.

Through her wide-ranging examination of the texts and images of the Hortus, their sources, composition, and function, Griffiths offers an integrated understanding of the whole manuscript, one which highlights women's Latin learning and orthodox spirituality. The Garden of Delights contributes to some of the most urgent questions concerning medieval religious women, the interplay of gender, spirituality, and intellectual engagement, to discussions concerning women scribes and writers, women readers, female authorship and authority, and the visual culture of female communities. It will be of interest to art historians, scholars of women's and gender studies, historians of medieval religion, education, and theology, and literary scholars studying questions of female authorship and models of women's reading.

For those who ruled medieval society, the family was the crucial social unit, made up of those from whom property and authority were inherited and those to whom it passed. One's kin could be one's closest political and military allies or one's fiercest enemies. While the general term used to describe family members was consanguinei mei, "those of my blood," not all of those relations-parents, siblings, children, distant cousins, maternal relatives, paternal ancestors, and so on-counted as true family in any given time, place, or circumstance. In the early and high Middle Ages, the "family" was a very different group than it is in modern society, and the ways in which medieval men and women conceptualized and structured the family unit changed markedly over time.

Focusing on the Frankish realm between the eighth and twelfth centuries, Constance Brittain Bouchard outlines the operative definitions of "family" in this period when there existed various and flexible ways by which individuals were or were not incorporated into the family group. Even in medieval patriarchal society, women of the aristocracy, who were considered outsiders by their husbands and their husbands' siblings and elders, were never completely marginalized and paradoxically represented the very essence of "family" to their male children.

Bouchard also engages in the ongoing scholarly debate about the nobility around the year 1000, arguing that there was no clear point of transition from amorphous family units to agnatically structured kindred. Instead, she points out that great noble families always privileged the male line of descent, even if most did not establish father-son inheritance until the eleventh or twelfth century. Those of My Blood clarifies the complex meanings of medieval family structure and family consciousness and shows the many ways in which negotiations of power within the noble family can help explain early medieval politics.

What should historians do with the words of the dead? Inquisition and Power reformulates the historiography of heresy and the inquisition by focusing on depositions taken from the Cathars, a religious sect that opposed the Catholic church and took root in southern France during the twelfth century. Despite the fact that these depositions were spoken in the vernacular, but recorded in Latin in the third person and rewritten in the past tense, historians have often taken these accounts as verbatim transcriptions of personal testimony. This belief has prompted some historians, including E. Le Roy Ladurie, to go so far as to retranslate the testimonies into the first-person. These testimonies have been a long source of controversy for historians and scholars of the Middle Ages.

Arnold enters current theoretical debates about subjectivity and the nature of power to develop reading strategies that will permit a more nuanced reinterpretation of these documents of interrogation. Rather than seeking to recover the true voice of the Cathars from behind the inquisitor's framework, this book shows how the historian is better served by analyzing texts as sites of competing discourses that construct and position a variety of subjectivities. In this critically informed history, Arnold suggests that what we do with the voices of history in fact has as much to do with ourselves as with those we seek to 'rescue' from the silences of past.

Was Athens an imperialistic state, deserving all the reputation for exploitation that adjective can imply, or was the Athenian alliance, even at its most unequal, still characterized by a convergence of interests?

The Power of Money explores monetary and metrological policy at Athens as a way of discerning the character of Athenian hegemony in midfifth-century Greece. It begins with the Athenian Coinage Decree, which, after decades of scholarly attention, still presents unresolved questions for Greek historians about content, intent, date, and effect. Was the Decree an act of commercial imperialism or simply the codification of what was already current practice?

Figueira interprets the Decree as one in a series concerned with financial matters affecting the Athenian city-state and emerging from the way the collection of tribute functioned in the alliance that we call the Athenian empire. He contends that the Decree served primarily to legislate the status quo ante.

Queen María of Castile, wife of Alfonso V, "the Magnanimous," king of the Crown of Aragon, governed Catalunya in the mid-fifteenth century while her husband conquered and governed the kingdom of Naples. For twenty-six years, she maintained a royal court and council separate from and roughly equivalent to those of Alfonso in Naples. Such legitimately sanctioned political authority is remarkable given that she ruled not as queen in her own right but rather as Lieutenant-General of Catalunya with powers equivalent to the king's. María does not fit conventional images of a queen as wife and mother; indeed, she had no children and so never served as queen-regent for any royal heirs in their minorities or exercised a queen-mother's privilege to act as diplomat when arranging the marriages of her children and grandchildren. But she was clearly more than just a wife offering advice: she embodied the king's personal authority and was second only to the king himself. She was his alter ego, the other royal body fully empowered to govern. For a medieval queen, this official form of corulership, combining exalted royal status with official political appointment, was rare and striking.

The King's Other Body is both a biography of María and an analysis of her political partnership with Alfonso. María's long, busy tenure as lieutenant prompts a reconsideration of long-held notions of power, statecraft, personalities, and institutions. It is also a study of the institution of monarchy and a theoretical reconsideration of the operations of gender within it. If the practice of monarchy is conventionally understood as strictly a man's job, María's reign presents a compelling argument for a more complex model, one attentive to the dynamic relationship of queenship and kingship and the circumstances and theories that shaped the institution she inhabited.

Righteous Persecution examines the long-controversial involvement of the Order of Preachers, or Dominicans, with inquisitions into heresy in medieval Europe. From their origin in the thirteenth century, the Dominicans were devoted to a ministry of preaching, teaching, and pastoral care, to "save souls" particularly tempted by the Christian heresies popular in western Europe. Many persons then, and scholars in our own time, have asked how members of a pastoral order modeled on Christ and the apostles could engage themselves so enthusiastically in the repressive persecution that constituted heresy inquisitions: the arrest, interrogation, torture, punishment, and sometimes execution of those who deviated in belief from Roman Christianity.

Drawing on an extraordinarily wide base of ecclesiastical documents, Christine Caldwell Ames recounts how Dominican inquisitors and their supporters crafted and promoted explicitly Christian meanings for their inquisitorial persecution. Inquisitors' conviction that the sin of heresy constituted the graver danger to the Christian soul and to the church at large led to the belief that bringing the individual to repentance—even through the harshest means—was indeed a pious way to carry out their pastoral task. However, the resistance and criticism that inquisition generated in medieval communities also prompted Dominicans to consider further how this new marriage of persecution and holiness was compatible with authoritative Christian texts, exemplars, and traditions. Dominican inquisitors persecuted not despite their faith but rather because of it, as they formed a medieval Christianity that permitted—or demanded—persecution.

Righteous Persecution deviates from recent scholarship that has deemphasized religious belief as a motive for inquisition and illuminates a powerful instance of the way Christianity was itself vulnerable in a context of persecution, violence, and intolerance.

How do people, in both the past and the present, think about moments of social and political crisis, and how do they respond to them? What are the interpretive codes by which troubling events are read and given meaning, and what part do these codes play in suggesting specific strategies for coping with the world? In Past Convictions Courtney Booker attempts to answer these questions by examining the controversial divestiture and public penance of Charlemagne's son, the Emperor Louis the Pious, in 833.

Historians have customarily viewed the event as marking the beginning of the end of the Carolingian dynasty. Exploring how both contemporaries and subsequent generations thought about Louis's forfeiture of the throne, Booker contends that certain vivid ninth-century narratives reveal a close but ephemeral connection between historiography and the generic conventions of comedy and tragedy. In tracing how writers of later centuries built upon these dramatic Carolingian accounts to tell a larger story of faith, betrayal, political expediency, and decline, he explicates the ways historiography shapes our vision of the past and what we think we know about it, and the ways its interpretive models may fall short.

Uncovers how the Civil Rights Movement and Vatican II affected African American Catholics in Atlanta

The history and practices of African American Catholics has been vastly understudied, and Black Catholics are often written off as a fringe sector of the religious population. Yet, Catholics of African descent have been a part of Catholicism since the early days of European exploration into the New World.

In the Shadow of Ebenezer examines how the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Vatican Council affected African American Catholics in Atlanta, Georgia, focusing on the historic Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in the Old Fourth Ward. Our Lady of Lourdes is a neighbor of major historic Black Protestant churches in the city, including Ebenezer Baptist Church, a block away, which during the Civil Rights era was the pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. Featuring archival and oral history sources, the book examines the religious and cultural life of the parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, showing how this Black Catholic congregation fit into the overall religious ecology of the neighborhood. Examining Our Lady of Lourdes in relation to these larger Black Protestant congregations helps to illuminate whether and how they were shaped by their place at a center of the civil rights struggle, and how religious change and social change intersect.

Johannesburg was still a brash mining town, better known for the production of wealth than knowledge, and the University of the Witwatersrand a mere ten years old when, in 1932, these ten lectures were delivered under the auspices of the University Philosophical Society. They portrayed the ideas of the university’s leading academics of the day, and the programme of lectures reveals a studied effort to introduce an element of bipartisan political representation between English and Afrikaner in South Africa by including Wits’ first principal, Jan Hofmeyr, and politician, D.F. Malan, as discussion chairs. Yet, no black intellectuals were represented and, indeed, the politics of racial segregation bursts through the text only in a few of the contributions. For the most part, race is alluded to only in passing.

As Saul Dubow explains in his new introduction to this re-issue of the lectures, Our Changing World-View</em> was an occasion for Wits’ leading faculty members to position the young university as a mature institution with a leadership role in public affairs. Above all, it was a means to project the university as a research as well as a teaching institution, led by a vigorous and ambitious cohort of liberal-minded intellectuals. That all were male and white will be immediately apparent to readers of this reissued volume. Ranging from economics, psychology, a spurious rebuttal of evolution to a substantial revisionist history and the perils of the ‘machine age’, this book is a sombre reflection of intellectual history and the academy’s role in promulgating political and social divisions in South Africa.

The History of a Crime (1877) is a book-length essay by Victor Hugo. While Hugo is famous today for his status as a leading French poet and novelist of the nineteenth century, he was also a gifted historian and memoirist who served on the National Assembly of the Second Republic. Following the coup d’état of Napoleon III in 1851, Hugo was among the insurrectionists who revolted against military forces on the streets of Paris. Despite their efforts, the coup was successful, leading to Hugo’s exile until 1870. “To outrage Right, to suppress the Assembly, to abolish the Constitution, to strangle the Republic, to overthrow the Nation, to sully the Flag, to dishonor the Army, to suborn the Clergy and the Magistracy, to succeed, to triumph, to govern, to administer, to exile, to banish, to transport, to ruin, to assassinate, to reign, with such complicities that the law at last resembles a foul bed of corruption. What! All these enormities were to be committed! And by whom?” The French Second Republic was already in danger when Napoleon III was elected President of France in 1848. A populist, he was in constant conflict with the National Assembly and, nearing the end of his term, sought to seek reelection through constitutional change. When this avenue was denied, he began preparations for Operation Rubicon, a secret plan to conduct a coup d’état with the help of the Army and other high-ranking officials. On December 2nd, 1851, the anniversary of his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte’s coronation and victory at Austerlitz, the coup took place. Hugo, a National Assembly member, took to the streets of Paris with thousands of his fellow insurrectionaries, many of whom were beaten, arrested, and murdered for their actions. Despite their efforts, the coup was successful, leading to the reestablishment of the French Empire in 1852. Hugo’s essay—part history, part memoir—is a brilliant retelling of one of democracy’s darkest moments. This edition of Victor Hugo’s The History of a Crime is a classic work of French literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

When American radio broadcasting began in the early 1920s there was a consensus among middle-class opinion makers that the airwaves must never be used for advertising. Even the national advertising industry agreed that the miraculous new medium was destined for higher cultural purposes. And yet, within a decade American broadcasting had become commercialized and has remained so ever since.

Much recent scholarship treats this unsought commercialization as a coup, imposed from above by mercenary corporations indifferent to higher public ideals. Such research has focused primarily on metropolitan stations operated by the likes of AT&T, Westinghouse, and General Electric. In American Babel, Clifford J. Doerksen provides a colorful alternative social history centered on an overlooked class of pioneer broadcaster—the independent radio stations.

Doerksen reveals that these "little" stations often commanded large and loyal working-class audiences who did not share the middle-class aversion to broadcast advertising. In urban settings, the independent stations broadcast jazz and burlesque entertainment and plugged popular songs for Tin Pan Alley publishers. In the countryside, independent stations known as "farmer stations" broadcast "hillbilly music" and old-time religion. All were unabashed in their promotional practices and paved the way toward commercialization with their innovations in programming, on-air style, advertising methods, and direct appeal to target audiences. Corporate broadcasters, who aspired to cultural gentility, were initially hostile to the populist style of the independents but ultimately followed suit in the 1930s.

Drawing on a rich array of archives and contemporary print sources, each chapter of American Babel looks at a particular station and the personalities behind the microphone. Doerksen presents this group of independents as an intensely colorful, perpetually interesting lot and weaves their stories into an expansive social and cultural narrative to explain more fully the rise of the commercial network system of the 1930s.

Day of Reckoning: Power and Accountability in Medieval France applies recent approaches to literacy, legal studies, memory, ritual, and the manorial economy to reexamine the transformation of medieval power. Highlighting the relationship of archives and power, it draws on the rich documentary sources of five of the largest Benedictine monasteries in northern France and Flanders, with comparisons to others, over a period of nearly four centuries.

The book opens up new perspectives on important problems of power, in particular the idea and practice of accountability. In a violent society, medieval lords tried to delegate power rather than share it—to get their men to prosecute justice or raise money legitimately, rather than through extortion and pillage. Robert F. Berkhofer III explains how subordinates were held accountable by abbots administering the extensive holdings of Saint-Bertin, Saint-Denis, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Saint-Père-de-Chartres, and Saint-Vaast-d'Arras. As the abbots began to discipline their agents and monitor their conduct, the "day of reckoning" took on new meaning, as customary meeting days were used to hold agents accountable. By 1200, written and unwritten techniques of rule developed in the monasteries had moved into the secular world; in these practices lay the origins of administration, bureaucratic power, and governance, all hallmarks of the modern state.

Originally published in two volumes between 1923 and 1925, Africa for Africans: Or, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey is a compilation of letters, speeches and essays by one of the Fathers of Pan-Africanism.

Hailed by Martin Luther King, Jr. as, "the first man of color. . . to make the Negro feel like he was somebody," Marcus Garvey was a polarizing yet influential figure whose legacy continues to be felt today. These philosophies, collected by Amy Jacques Garvey, his second wife and a pioneering journalist, chronicle Garvey's initial impressions and recollections of America, the formation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), his imprisonment and subsequent trial over the Black Star Line, and his scathing opinions of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Including such pieces as, "An Appeal to the Soul of White America," "The Negro's Greatest Enemy," and "Declaration of Rights of the Negroes of the World," Africa for Africans; Or, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey is an essential piece of Black history, professionally typeset and reimagined for modern readers.

Mahala's biography gives insight into the life and writing of Can Themba (1924–1967), an iconic figure of the South African literary world and Drum journalist who died in exile

This rich and absorbing biography of Can Themba, iconic Drum-era journalist and writer, is the definitive history of a larger-than-life man who died too young. Siphiwo Mahala's intensive and often fresh research features unprecedented archival access and interviews with Themba's surviving colleagues and family.

Mahala’s biography takes a critical historical approach to Themba’s life and writing, giving a picture of the whole man, from his early beginnings in Marabastad to his sombre end in exile in Swaziland. The better-known elements of his life – his political views, passion for teaching and mentoring, family life and his drinking – are woven together with an examination of his literary influences and the impact of his own writing (especially his famous short story 'The Suit') on modern African writers in turn. Mahala, a master storyteller, deftly follows the threads of Themba's dynamic life, showcasing his intellectual acumen, scholarly aptitude and wit, along with his flaws, contradictions and heartbreaks, against a backdrop of the sparkle and pathos of Sophiatown of the 1950s.

Can Themba’s successes and failures as well as his triumphs and tribulations reverberate on the pages of this long-awaited biography. The result is an authoritative and entertaining account of an often misunderstood figure in South Africa's literary canon.

A first hand account of a society mobilized from below at a critical time in its history

How the Workers’ Parliaments Saved the Cuban Revolution brings us to the heart of one of the most precarious and transformational moments in Cuba’s evolution. As the Soviet Union fell to pieces in the 1990s, Cuba managed to evade the fate of its primary trading ally. How was this possible, especially as Cuba endured relentless attacks from the capitalist behemoth directly to its north? As the GDP plunged by over a third, and the Cuban people endured brutal food shortages— a time of crisis known as the “Special Period”— the country embarked upon a remarkable collective effort to cope with its dire circumstances and escaped the starvation, disease, death, and violence that often plague poor countries facing similar conditions. Not only did Cuba manage to evade collapse, it maintained its high life expectancy, low infant mortality, and universal access to health and education, preserving many of the gains of the revolution.

At the center of this collective effort were lifelong revolutionaries like Pedro Ross, construction worker, literacy educator, and labor activist. As head of Cuba’s labor federation throughout the “Special Period,” Ross developed a nationwide series of “Labor Parliaments” which turned the country into an immense school of economics and politics. Over a 45-day span in 1993, women’s rights activists, farmers' organizations, youth movements, and academic associations came together for tens of thousands of meetings, successfully restored the production cycle, and ultimately revolutionized nearly every aspect of life in Cuba. Singularly positioned to write this seminal account of those days, Ross has given us a rare, moving, on-the-ground account of a society mobilized from below, buttressing the Revolution when it was under maximum stress.

A comprehensive history of the battle over sex education in the United States

Mid-century America had a problem talking about sex. Dr. Mary Calderone first diagnosed this condition and, in 1964, led the uphill battle to de-stigmatize sex education. Supporters hailed her as the “grandmother of modern sex education” while her detractors painted her as an “aging libertine,” but both could agree that she was quickly shaping the way sex was discussed in the classroom.

Part biography, part social history, The Transformation of American Sex Education for the first time situates Dr. Mary Calderone at the center of decades of political, cultural, and religious conflict in the fight for comprehensive sex education. Ellen S. More examines Americans’ attempts to come to terms with the vexed subject of sex education in schools from the late 1940s to the early twenty-first century. Using Mary Calderone’s life and career as a touchstone, she traces the origins of modern sex education in the United States from the work of a group of reformers who coalesced around Calderone to create the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in 1964, to the development and use of the competing approaches known as “abstinence-based” and “comprehensive” sex education from the 1980s into the twenty-first century.

A fascinating and timely read, The Transformation of American Sex Education provides a substantial contribution to the history of one of America’s most intense and protracted culture wars, and the first account of the woman who fought those battles.

Examines how Irish and Jewish Americans defined their place in a complex society.

The story of America is the story of the unlikely groups of immigrants brought together by their shared outsider status. Urban American life took much of its shape from the arrival of Irish and Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Forged in America is the story of how Irish America and Jewish America collided, cooperated, and collaborated in the cities where they made their homes, all the while shaping American identity and nationhood as we know it.

Bringing together leading scholars in their fields, this volume sheds light on the underexplored histories of Irish and Jewish collaboration. While mutual antagonism was clearly evident, so too were opportunities for cooperation, as settled Irish immigrants served to model, mentor, and mediate for Jewish newcomers. Together, the chapters in this volume draw fascinating portraits that show mutuality in action and demonstrate its cultural reverberations.

The fullest account to date of African American young people in a segregated city

Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC offers a complex narrative of the everyday lives of black young people in a racially, spatially, economically, and politically restricted Washington, DC, during the 1930s. In contrast to the ways in which young people have been portrayed by researchers, policy makers, law enforcement, and the media, Paula C. Austin draws on previously unstudied archival material to present black poor and working class young people as thinkers, theorists, critics, and commentators as they reckon with the boundaries imposed on them in a Jim Crow city that was also the American emblem of equality.

The narratives at the center of this book provide a different understanding of black urban life in the early twentieth century, showing that ordinary people were expert at navigating around the limitations imposed by the District of Columbia’s racially segregated politics. Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC is a fresh take on the New Negro movement, and a vital contribution to the history of race in America.

A classic collection of essays calling for decolonization through self-liberation

“For us,” said Amilcar Cabral, “freedom is an act of culture”—and these were not just words. Guided by the concrete realities of his people, Cabral called for a process of “re-Africanization,” a Return to the Source. As a new imperialism has taken hold the world over, many have hearkened back to Return to the Source, but this time, our source of inspiration is Cabral himself. With a system of thought rooted in an African reading of Marx, Cabral was a deep-thinking revolutionary who applied the principles of decolonization as a dialectic task, and in so doing became one of the world’s most profoundly influential and effective theoreticians of anti–imperialist struggle. Cabral and his fellow Pan-African movement leaders catalyzed and fortified a militant wave of liberation struggles beginning in Angola, moving through Cabral’s homelands of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, and culminating in Mozambique and beyond. He translated abstract theories into agile praxis and in under just ten years steered the liberation of three–quarters of the countryside of Guinea Bissau from Portuguese colonial domination.

In this new, expanded edition of Return to the Source: Selected Texts of Amilcar Cabral we have access to Cabral’s warm and humorous informal address to the Africa Information Service, and we revisit several of the principal speeches Cabral delivered during visits to the United States in the final years before his assassination in 1973, including his last written address to his people on New Year’s Eve. Return to the Source is essential reading for all who understand that the erasure of historical continuity between social movements has disrupted our ability to make the revolutionary transformation we all desperately require.

A unique historical account of poor peoples’ self-defence strategies in the face of the plunder of their lands and labor

For five centuries, the development of capitalism has been inextricably connected to the expropriation of working people from the land they depended on for subsistence. Through ruling class assaults known as enclosures or clearances, shared common land became privately-owned capital, and peasant farmers became propertyless laborers who could only survive by working for the owners of land or capital.

As Ian Angus documents in The War Against the Commons, mass opposition to dispossession has never ceased. His dramatic account provides new insights into an opposition that ranged from stubborn non-compliance to open rebellion, including eyewitness accounts of campaigns in which thousands of protestors tore down fences and restored common access to pastures and forests. Such movements, he shows, led to the Diggers’ call for a new society based on shared ownership and use of the land, an appeal that was more sophisticated and radical than anything else written before the 1800s.

Contrary to many accounts that treat the reorganization of agriculture as a purely domestic matter, Angus shows that there were close connections between the enclosures in Britain and imperial expansion. The consolidation of some of the largest estates in England and Scotland was directly financed by the forced labor of African slaves and the colonial plunder of India.

This unique historical account of ruling class robbery and poor peoples’ resistance offers answers to key questions about the history of capitalism. Was enclosure a “necessary evil” that enabled economic growth? What role did deliberate promotion of hunger play in the creation of the working class? How did Marx and Engels view the separation of workers from the land, and how does resistance to enclosure continue in the 21st century?

Reveals the historical and political significance of “The Divine Nine”—the Black Greek Letter Organizations

In 1905, Henry Arthur Callis began his studies at Cornell University. Despite their academic pedigrees, Callis and his fellow African American students were ostracized by the majority-white student body, and so in 1906, Callis and some of his peers started the first, intercollegiate Black Greek Letter Organization (BGLO), Alpha Phi Alpha.

Since their founding, BGLOs have not only served to solidify bonds among many African American college students, they have also imbued them with a sense of purpose and a commitment to racial uplift—the endeavor to help Black Americans reach socio-economic equality. A Pledge with Purpose explores the arc of these unique, important, and relevant social institutions. Gregory S. Parks and Matthew W. Hughey uncover how BGLOs were shaped by, and labored to transform, the changing social, political, and cultural landscape of Black America from the era of the Harlem Renaissance to the civil rights movement. Alpha Phi Alpha boasts such members as Thurgood Marshall, civil rights lawyer and US Supreme Court Justice, and Dr. Charles Wesley, noted historian and college president. Delta Sigma Theta members include Bethune-Cookman College founder Mary McLeod Bethune and women’s rights activist Dorothy Height. Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, who left an indelible mark on the civil rights movement, was a member of Phi Beta Sigma, while Dr. Mae Jemison, a celebrated engineer and astronaut, belonged to Alpha Kappa Alpha. Through such individuals, Parks and Hughey demonstrate the ways that BGLO members have long been at the forefront of innovation, activism, and scholarship.

In its examination of the history of these important organizations, A Pledge with Purpose serves as a critical reflection of both the collective African American racial struggle and the various strategies of Black Americans in their great—and unfinished—march toward freedom and equality.

An incisive analysis of South Africa's ANC power-as party, as government, as state

South Africa's African National Congress (ANC) is in decline, its hegemony has been weakened, its legitimacy diluted. President Cyril Ramaphosa's appointment suspended the ANC's electoral decline, it also heightened internal tensions between those who would deepen its acquired status as corrupt and captured, and those who would remodel it as redeemable. These are the incontrovertible knowns of South African politics; what will evolve from this is less certain.

In Precarious Power, renowned political scientist Susan Booysen uses in-depth research and analysis to distill that which is bound to shape South Africa's political future, Booysen focuses on contradictory party politics and internal ANC dissent that is veiled for the sake of retaining an electoral following. Also exposed is the incongruous, populist policy­making, protest politics and the use of soft law to ensure it does not alienate angry citizens, fueling further discontent and protest. The ANC's power has become exceedingly precarious. Precarious Power is the name of the political game, for the foreseeable future.

The comprehensive analysis in Precarious Power will appeal not only to political scientists and postgraduate students, but to all who take a keen interest in current affairs.

A fresh look at the how US troops played a part in the resistance of US troops to the American war in Vietnam

Even if you don't know much about the war in Vietnam, you've probably heard of "The Hanoi Hilton," or Hoa Lo Prison, where captured U.S. soldiers were held. What they did there and whether they were treated well or badly by the Vietnamese became lasting controversies. As military personnel returned from captivity in 1973, Americans became riveted by POW coming-home stories. What had gone on behind these prison walls? Along with legends of lionized heroes who endured torture rather than reveal sensitive military information, there were news leaks suggesting that others had denounced the war in return for favorable treatment. What wasn't acknowledged, however, is that U.S. troop opposition to the war was vast and reached well into Hoa Loa Prison. Half a century after the fact, Dissenting POWs emerges to recover this history, and to discover what drove the factionalism in Hoa Lo.

Looking into the underlying factional divide between pro-war “hardliners” and anti-war “dissidents” among the POWs, authors Wilber and Lembcke delve into the postwar American culture that created the myths of the Hero-POW and the dissidents blamed for the loss of the war. What they found was surprising: It wasn’t simply that some POWs were for the war and others against it, nor was it an officers-versus-enlisted-men standoff. Rather, it was the class backgrounds of the captives and their pre-captive experience that drew the lines. After the war, the hardcore hero-holdouts—like John McCain—moved on to careers in politics and business, while the dissidents faded from view as the antiwar movement, that might otherwise have championed them, disbanded. Today, Dissenting POWs is a necessary myth-buster, disabusing us of the revisionism that has replaced actual GI resistance with images of suffering POWs—ennobled victims that serve to suppress the fundamental questions of America’s drift to endless war.

This edited collection looks at ruins and vacant buildings as part of South Africa’s oppressive history of colonialism and apartheid and ways in which the past persists into the present

Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins: The Persistence of the Past in the Architecture of Apartheid interrogates how, in the era of decolonization, post-apartheid South Africa reckons with its past in order to shape its future. Architects, historians, artists, social anthropologists and urban planners seek answers in this book to complex and unsettling questions around heritage, ruins and remembrance. What do we do with hollow memorials and political architectural remnants? Which should remain, which forgotten, and which dismantled? Are these vacant buildings, cemeteries, statues, and derelict grounds able to serve as inspiration in the fight against enduring racism and social neglect? Should they become exemplary as spaces for restitution and justice? The contributors examine the influence of public memory, planning and activism on such anguished places of oppression, resistance and defiance. Their focus on visible markers in the landscape to interrogate our past will make readers reconsider these spaces, looking at their landscape and history anew.

Through a series of 14 empirically grounded chapters and 48 images, the contributors seek to understand how architecture contests or subverts these persistent conditions in order to promote social justice, land reclamation and urban rehabilitation. The decades following the dismantling of apartheid are surveyed in light of contemporary heritage projects, where building ruins and abandoned spaces are challenged and renegotiated across the country to become sites of protest, inspiration and anger.

This ground-breaking collection is an important resource for professionals, academics and activists working in South Africa today.

This edited collection gives voice to neglected public intellectuals in the arts, humanities, and journalism in South Africa who gave voice and presence to those who have been marginalized and silenced in South African history

Edward Said described a public intellectual as someone who uses accessible language to address a designated public on matters of social and political significance. The essays in Public Intellectuals in South Africa apply this interpretive prism and activist principle to a South African context and tell the stories of well-known figures as well as some that have been mostly forgotten. They include Magema Fuze, John Dube, Aggrey Klaaste, Mewa Ramgobin and Koos Roets, alongside marginalized figures such as Elijah Makiwane, Mandisi Sindo, William Pretorius and Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees.

The essays capture the thoughts and opinions of these historical figures, who the contributors argue are public intellectuals who spoke out against the corruption of power, promoted a progressive politics that challenged the colonial project and its legacies, and encouraged a sustained dissent of the political status quo. Offering fascinating accounts of the life and work of these writers, critics and activists across a range of historical contexts and disciplines, from journalism and arts criticism to history and politics, it enriches the historical record of South African public intellectual life.

This volume makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates about the value of research in the arts and humanities, and what constitutes public intellectualism in South Africa.

Reveals how the European travels of John and Abigail Adams helped define what it meant to be an American

From 1778 to 1788, the Founding Father and later President John Adams lived in Europe as a diplomat. Joined by his wife, Abigail, in 1784, the two shared rich encounters with famous heads of the European royal courts, including the ill-fated King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the staid British Monarchs King George III and Queen Charlotte.

In this engaging narrative, A View from Abroad takes us on the first full exploration of the Adams’s lives abroad. Jeanne E. Abrams reveals how the journeys of John and Abigail Adams not only changed the course of their intellectual, political, and cultural development—transforming the couple from provincials to sophisticated world travelers—but most importantly served to strengthen their loyalty to America.

Abrams shines a new light on how the Adamses and their American contemporaries set about supplanting their British origins with a new American identity. They and their fellow Americans grappled with how to reorder their society as the new nation took its place in the international transatlantic world. After just a short time abroad, Abigail maintained that, “My Heart and Soul is more American than ever. We are a family by ourselves.” The Adamses’ quest to define what it means to be an American, and the answers they discovered in their time abroad, still resonate with us to this day.

Troubling Images explores how art and visual culture helped to secure hegemonic claims to the nation-state via the construction of a unified Afrikaner imaginary

Emerging in the late nineteenth century and gaining currency in the 1930s and 1940s, Afrikaner nationalist fervour underpinned the establishment of white Afrikaner political and cultural domination during South Africa’s apartheid years. Focusing on manifestations of Afrikaner nationalism in paintings, sculptures, monuments, buildings, cartoons, photographs, illustrations and exhibitions, Troubling Images offers a critical account of the role of art and visual culture in the construction of a unified Afrikaner imaginary, which helped secure hegemonic claims to the nation-state. This insightful volume examines the implications of metaphors and styles deployed in visual culture, and considers how the design, production, collecting and commissioning of objects, images and architecture were informed by Afrikaner nationalist imperatives and ideals. While some chapters focus only on instances of adherence to Afrikaner nationalism, others consider articulations of dissent and criticism.

By ‘troubling’ these images: looking at them, teasing out their meanings, and connecting them to a political and social project that still has a major impact on the present moment, the authors engage with the ways in which an Afrikaner nationalist inheritance is understood and negotiated in contemporary South Africa. They examine the management of its material effects in contemporary art, in archives, the commemorative landscape and the built environment. Troubling Images adds to current debates about the histories and ideological underpinnings of nationalism and is particularly relevant in the current context of globalism and diaspora, resurgent nationalisms and calls for decolonisation.

The roles that Christodora House has played from 19th-century settlement house to its newest forms

Settlement house workers helped transform the lives of thousands of people despite lack of funding, the influenza epidemic of 1918, economic depressions, and two World Wars. Many of these houses still exist in the original neighborhoods where they confront the problems of today and advocate for their communities.

Christodora House, founded in 1897 as “The Young Women’s Settlement,” played an important role in the life of immigrants and other residents on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. For over 50 years, residents and volunteers at Christodora House provided classes, clubs, recreational activities, and medical and dental clinics for thousands of New Yorkers, and then continued to operate programs out of public housing and other locations for more than two decades.

The building at 143 Avenue B, now housing condominiums, has had a tumultuous history since 1948 but still stands, towering over its tenement neighborhood in the East Village. Christodora Inc. is now a nonprofit foundation with offices in Midtown Manhattan, whose staff works with underserved New Yorkers, including youth in the public school system, carrying on a long, distinguished history of service to the city and country.

The fascinating tale of how a bipartisan coalition worked successfully to lower the voting age

“Let Us Vote!” tells the story of the multifaceted endeavor to achieve youth voting rights in the United States. Over a thirty-year period starting during World War II, Americans, old and young, Democrat and Republican, in politics and culture, built a movement for the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution, which lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen in 1971. This was the last time that the United States significantly expanded voting rights.

Jennifer Frost deftly illustrates how the political and social movements of the time brought together bipartisan groups to work tirelessly in pursuit of a lower voting age. In turn, she illuminates the process of achieving political change, with the convergence of “top-down” initiatives and “bottom-up” mobilization, coalition-building, and strategic flexibility. As she traces the progress toward achieving youth suffrage throughout the ’60s, Frost reveals how this movement built upon the social justice initiatives of the decade and was deeply indebted to the fight for African American civil and voting rights.

2021 marks the fiftieth anniversary of this important constitutional amendment and comes at a time when scrutiny of both voting age and voting rights has been renewed. As the national conversation around climate crisis, gun violence, and police brutality creates a new call for a lower voting age, “Let Us Vote!” provides an essential investigation of how this massive political change occurred, and how it could be brought about again.

"What is the value of Black life in America?"

In Avidly Reads Passages, Michelle D. Commander plies four freighted modes of travel—the slave ship, train, automobile, and bus—to map the mobility of her ancestors over the past five centuries. In the process, she refreshes the conventional American travel narrative by telling an urgent story about how history shapes what moves us, as well as what prevents so many Black Americans from moving or being moved. Anchored in her maternal kin’s long history on and alongside plantations in rural South Carolina, Commander explores her family members’ ability and inability to navigate safely through space, time, and emotion, detailing how Black lives were shaped by the actual vehicles that promised an escape from the confines of American racism, yet nearly always failed to deliver on those promises. Using personal and public archives, Avidly Reads Passages unfolds distinct histories of transatlantic slavery ships, the possibilities presented by rail lines in the Reconstruction South, the fateful legacies of school busing, and the ways that Black Americans attempted to negotiate their automobility, including through the use of road and travel compendiums such as Travelguide and The Negro Motorist Green Book.

In order to understand the intricacies of slavery and its aftermath, Commander began her exploration with the hope of engaging with the difficult evidences and stubborn gaps in her family’s genealogy; what she produced is a biting and elegiac reflection on working-class life in the Black South. Commander demonstrates that the forms of intimidation, brutality, surveillance, and restriction used to control Black mobility have merely evolved since slavery, marking Black life writ large in America, with neither the passage of time nor the passage of laws assuring true and adequate racial progress. Despite this bleak observation, Commander catalogs and celebrates, through affecting stories about her beloved South Carolina community, the compelling strivings of Southern Black people to survive by holding on firmly to family, and their faith that new worlds could be imagined, created, and traveled to someday.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Passages offers a unique lens through which to capture the intricacies of Black life.

Alan G. Morris critically examines the history of evolutionary anthropology in South Africa, uncovering the often racist philosophical motivations of these physical anthropology researchers and the discipline itself

South Africa is famed for its contribution to the study of human evolution. In Bones and Bodies Alan G. Morris takes us back over the past century of anthropological discovery in South Africa and uncovers the stories of the individual scientists and how they contributed to our knowledge of the peoples of southern Africa, both ancient and modern. Not all of this history is one which we should feel comfortable with, as much of the earlier anthropological studies have been tainted with the tarred brush of race science. Morris critically examines the work of Raymond Dart, Thomas Dreyer, Matthew Drennan, and Robert Broom who all described their fossil discoveries with the mirror of racist interpretation, as well as the life and times in which they worked.

Morris also considers how modern anthropology tried to rid itself of the stigma of these early racist accounts. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ronald Singer and Phillip Tobias introduced modern methods into the discipline that jettisoned much of what the public wished to believe about race and human evolution. Modern methods in physical anthropology rely on sophisticated mathematics and molecular genetics but are difficult to translate and sometimes fail to challenge preconceived assumptions.

In an age where the authority of the expert and empirical science is questioned, this book shows the battle facing modern anthropology in how to explain science in a context that seems to be at odds with life experience. In this highly accessible insider account, Morris examines the philosophical motivations of these researchers and the discipline itself. Much of the material draws on old correspondence and interviews as well as from published resources.

A collection of essays examining cultures of consumption on the African continent

From early department stores in Cape Town to gendered histories of sartorial success in urban Togo, contestations over expense accounts at an apartheid state enterprise, elite wealth and political corruption in Angola and Zambia, the role of popular religion in the political intransigence of Jacob Zuma, funerals of big men in Cameroon, youth cultures of consumption in Niger and South Africa, queer consumption in Cape Town, middle-class food consumption in Durban and the consumption of luxury handcrafted beads, this collection of essays explores the ways in which conspicuous consumption is foregrounded in various African contexts and historical moments.

The essays in Conspicuous Consumption in Africa put Thorstein Veblen’s concept under robust critical scrutiny, delving into the pleasures, stresses and challenges of consuming in its religious, generational, gendered and racialised aspects, revealing conspicuous consumption as a layered set of practices, textures and relations. This volume shows how central and revealing conspicuous consumption can be to fathoming the history of Africa’s projects of modernity, and their global lineages and legacies. In its grounded, up-close case studies, it is likely to feed into current public debates on the nature and future of African societies – South African society in particular.

A detailed archaeological study of life in Egypt's Eastern desert during the Roman period by a leading scholar

Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert is a two-volume set collecting Hélène Cuvigny’s most important articles on Egypt’s Eastern Desert during the Roman period. The excavations she directed uncovered a wealth of material, including tens of thousands of texts written on pottery fragments (ostraca). Some are administrative texts, but many more are correspondence, both official and private, written by and to the people (mostly but not all men) who lived and worked in these remote and harsh environments, supported by an elaborate network of defense, administration, and supply that tied the entire region together. The contents of Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert have all been published earlier in peer-reviewed venues, but most appear here for the first time in English. All of the contributions have been checked or translated by the editor and brought up to date with respect to bibliography, and some have been significantly rewritten by the author, in order to take account of the enormous amount of new material discovered since the original publications. A full index makes this body of work far more accessible than it was before. This book assembles into one collection thirty years of detailed study of this material, conjuring in vivid detail the lived experience of those who inhabited these forts—often through their own expressive language—and the realia of desert geography, military life, sex, religion, quarry operations, and imperial administration in the Roman world.

A cultural study of modern Qatar and how it navigates change and tradition

Qatar, an ambitious country in the Arabian Gulf, grabbed headlines as the first Middle Eastern nation selected to host the FIFA World Cup. As the wealthiest country in the world—and one of the fastest-growing—it is known for its capital, Doha, which boasts a striking, futuristic skyline.

In Changing Qatar, Geoff Harkness takes us beyond the headlines, providing a fresh perspective on modern-day life in the increasingly visible Gulf. Drawing on three years of immersive fieldwork and more than a hundred interviews, he describes a country in transition, one struggling to negotiate the fluid boundaries of culture, tradition, and modernity.

Harkness shows how Qataris reaffirm—and challenge—traditions in many areas of everyday life, from dating and marriage, to clothing and humor, to gender and sports. A cultural study of citizenship in modern Qatar, this book offers an illuminating portrait that cannot be found elsewhere.

An argument against the myth of "American exceptionalism"

Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire helps us to come to terms with what we have long suspected: the rise of the U.S. Empire has relied upon an almost unimaginable loss of life, from its inception during the European colonial period, to the present. And yet, in the face of a series of endless holocausts at home and abroad, the doctrine of American exceptionalism has plagued the globe for over a century.

However much the ruling class insists on U.S. superiority, we find ourselves in the midst of a sea change. Perpetual wars, deteriorating economic conditions, the resurgence of white supremacy, and the rise of the Far Right have led millions of people to abandon their illusions about this country. Never before have so many people rejected or questioned traditional platitudes about the United States.

In Endless Holocausts author David Michael Smith demolishes the myth of exceptionalism by demonstrating that manifold forms of mass death, far from being unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise benign historical record, have been indispensable in the rise of the wealthiest and most powerful imperium in the history of the world. At the same time, Smith points to an extraordinary history of resistance by Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, people in other nations brutalized by U.S. imperialism, workers, and democratic-minded people around the world determined to fight for common dignity and the sake of the greater good.

Shares the story of the revolutionary Marxist and Catholic Grace Holmes Carlson and her life-long dedication to challenging social and economic inequality

On December 8, 1941, Grace Holmes Carlson, the only female defendant among eighteen Trotskyists convicted under the Smith Act, was sentenced to sixteen months in federal prison for advocating the violent overthrow of the government. After serving a year in Alderson prison, Carlson returned to her work as an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and ran for vice president of the United States under its banner in 1948. Then, in 1952, she abruptly left the SWP and returned to the Catholic Church. With the support of the Sisters of St. Joseph, who had educated her as a child, Carlson began a new life as a professor of psychology at St. Mary’s Junior College in Minneapolis where she advocated for social justice, now as a Catholic Marxist.

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist is a historical biography that examines the story of this complicated woman in the context of her times with a specific focus on her experiences as a member of the working class, as a Catholic, and as a woman. Her story illuminates the workings of class identity within the context of various influences over the course of a lifespan. It contributes to recent historical scholarship exploring the importance of faith in workers’ lives and politics. And it uncovers both the possibilities and limitations for working-class and revolutionary Marxist women in the period between the first and second wave feminist movements. The long arc of Carlson’s life (1906–1992) ultimately reveals significant continuities in her political consciousness that transcended the shifts in her particular partisan commitments, most notably her life-long dedication to challenging the root causes of social and economic inequality. In that struggle, Carlson ultimately proved herself to be a truly fierce woman.

How American soldiers opposed and resisted the war in Vietnam

While mainstream narratives of the Vietnam War all but marginalize anti-war activity of soldiers, opposition and resistance from within the three branches of the military made a real difference to the course of America’s engagement in Vietnam. By 1968, every major peace march in the United States was led by active duty GIs and Vietnam War veterans. By 1970, thousands of active duty soldiers and marines were marching in protest in US cities. Hundreds of soldiers and marines in Vietnam were refusing to fight; tens of thousands were deserting to Canada, France and Sweden. Eventually the US Armed Forces were no longer able to sustain large-scale offensive operations and ceased to be effective. Yet this history is largely unknown and has been glossed over in much of the written and visual remembrances produced in recent years.

Waging Peace in Vietnam shows how the GI movement unfolded, from the numerous anti-war coffee houses springing up outside military bases, to the hundreds of GI newspapers giving an independent voice to active soldiers, to the stockade revolts and the strikes and near-mutinies on naval vessels and in the air force. The book presents first-hand accounts, oral histories, and a wealth of underground newspapers, posters, flyers, and photographs documenting the actions of GIs and veterans who took part in the resistance. In addition, the book features fourteen original essays by leading scholars and activists. Notable contributors include Vietnam War scholar and author, Christian Appy, and Mme Nguyen Thi Binh, who played a major role in the Paris Peace Accord.

The book originates from the exhibition Waging Peace, which has been shown in Vietnam and the University of Notre Dame, and will be touring the eastern United States in conjunction with book launches in Boston, Amherst, and New York.

The US foreign policy decisions behind six coup attempts against the Venezuelan government – and Venezuela's heightening precarity

In March 2015, President Obama initiated sanctions against Venezuela, declaring a “national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.” Each year, the US administration has repeated this claim. But, as Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur argue in their timely book, Extraordinary Threat, the opposite is true: It is the US policy of regime change in Venezuela that constitutes an “extraordinary threat” to Venezuelans. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans continue to die because of these ever-tightening US sanctions, denying people daily food, medicine, and fuel. On top of this, Venezuela has, since 2002, been subjected to repeated coup attempts by US-backed forces. In Extraordinary Threat, Emersberger and Podur tell the story of six coup attempts against Venezuela.

This book deflates the myths propagated about the Venezuelan government’s purported lack of electoral legitimacy, scant human rights, and disastrous economic development record. Contrary to accounts lobbed by the corporate media, the real target of sustained U.S. assault on Venezuela is not the country’s claimed authoritarianism or its supposed corruption. It is Chavismo, the prospect that twenty-first century socialism could be brought about through electoral and constitutional means. This is what the US empire must not allow to succeed.

A detailed archaeological study of life in Egypt's Eastern desert during the Roman period by a leading scholar

Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert is a two-volume set collecting Hélène Cuvigny’s most important articles on Egypt’s Eastern Desert during the Roman period. The excavations she directed uncovered a wealth of material, including tens of thousands of texts written on pottery fragments (ostraca). Some are administrative texts, but many more are correspondence, both official and private, written by and to the people (mostly but not all men) who lived and worked in these remote and harsh environments, supported by an elaborate network of defense, administration, and supply that tied the entire region together. The contents of Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert have all been published earlier in peer-reviewed venues, but most appear here for the first time in English. All of the contributions have been checked or translated by the editor and brought up to date with respect to bibliography, and some have been significantly rewritten by the author, in order to take account of the enormous amount of new material discovered since the original publications. A full index makes this body of work far more accessible than it was before. This book assembles into one collection thirty years of detailed study of this material, conjuring in vivid detail the lived experience of those who inhabited these forts—often through their own expressive language—and the realia of desert geography, military life, sex, religion, quarry operations, and imperial administration in the Roman world.

How Newfoundlanders became Canadians

Where Once They Stood challenges popular notions that those who voted against Confederation in 1869 and for union in 1948 were uninformed and gullible. Raymond Blake and Melvin Baker demonstrate that voters fully understood the issues at stake in both cases, and women became instrumental in determining the final outcome, voting for Canada in 1948, believing it provided the best opportunities for their children.

"A lively history of Newfoundland politics from the 1860s to the 1940s, with vigorous and persuasive arguments as to why Newfoundlanders were right to reject Confederation in 1869, and right to embrace it in 1949." —Christopher Moore, author of 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal

"Blake and Baker vigorously bring the exciting fight of ideas in Newfoundland to life. We forget how great the stakes were--nothing less than the survival, security, belonging and recognition of a people. Readers will discover how Newfoundlanders debated for four generations whether Canada was a beau risque." —Patrice Dutil, author of Prime Ministerial Power in Canada

Winner, 2020 Peter C Rollins Prize, given by the Northeast Popular & American Culture Association

Enables a reckoning with the legacy of the Forgotten War through literary and cinematic works of cultural memory

Though often considered “the forgotten war,” lost between the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, the Korean War was, as Daniel Y. Kim argues, a watershed event that fundamentally reshaped both domestic conceptions of race and the interracial dimensions of the global empire that the United States would go on to establish. He uncovers a trail of cultural artefacts that speaks to the trauma experienced by civilians during the conflict but also evokes an expansive web of complicity in the suffering that they endured.

Taking up a range of American popular media from the 1950s, Kim offers a portrait of the Korean War as it looked to Americans while they were experiencing it in real time. Kim expands this archive to read a robust host of fiction from US writers like Susan Choi, Rolando Hinojosa, Toni Morrison, and Chang-rae Lee, and the Korean author Hwang Sok-yong. The multiple and ongoing historical trajectories presented in these works testify to the resurgent afterlife of this event in US cultural memory, and of its lasting impact on multiple racialized populations, both within the US and in Korea. The Intimacies of Conflict offers a robust, multifaceted, and multidisciplinary analysis of the pivotal—but often unacknowledged—consequences of the Korean War in both domestic and transnational histories of race.

Revives the overlooked stories of pioneering women aviators, who are also featured in the forthcoming documentary film Coming Home: Fight for a Legacy


During World War II, all branches of the military had women's auxiliaries. Only the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program, however, was made up entirely of women who undertook dangerous missions more commonly associated with and desired by men.

Within military hierarchies, the World War II pilot was perceived as the most dashing and desirable of servicemen. "Flyboys" were the daring elite of the United States military. More than the WACs (Army), WAVES (Navy), SPARS (Coast Guard), or Women Marines, the WASPs directly challenged these assumptions of male supremacy in wartime culture. WASPs flew the fastest fighter planes and heaviest bombers; they test-piloted experimental models and worked in the development of weapons systems. Yet the WASPs were the only women's auxiliary within the armed services of World War II that was not militarized.

In Clipped Wings, Molly Merryman draws upon military documents—many of which weren’t declassified until the 1990s—congressional records, and interviews with the women who served as WASPs during World War II to trace the history of the over one thousand pilots who served their country as the first women to fly military planes. She examines the social pressures that culminated in their disbandment in 1944—even though a wartime need for their services still existed—and documents their struggles and eventual success, in 1977, to gain military status and receive veterans’ benefits.

In the preface to this reissued edition, Merryman reflects on the changes in women’s aviation in the past twenty years, as NASA’s new Artemis program promises to land the first female astronaut on the moon and African American and lesbian women are among the newest pilot recruits. Updating the story of the WASPs, Merryman reveals that even in the past few years there have been more battles for them to fight and more national recognition for them to receive. At its heart, the story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots is not about war or planes; it is a story about persistence and extraordinary achievement. These accomplished women pilots did more than break the barriers of flight; they established a model for equality.

Winner, 2020 Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York history

Honorable Mention, 2019 CASA Literary Prize for Studies on Latinos in the United States, given by La Casa de las Américas

The dramatic story of the origins of the Cuban community in nineteenth-century New York.

More than one hundred years before the Cuban Revolution of 1959 sparked an exodus that created today’s prominent Cuban American presence, Cubans were settling in New York City in what became largest community of Latin Americans in the nineteenth-century Northeast. This book brings this community to vivid life, tracing its formation and how it was shaped by both the sugar trade and the long struggle for independence from Spain. New York City’s refineries bought vast quantities of raw sugar from Cuba, ultimately creating an important center of commerce for Cuban émigrés as the island tumbled into the tumultuous decades that would close out the century and define Cuban nationhood and identity.

New York became the primary destination for Cuban émigrés in search of an education, opportunity, wealth, to start a new life or forget an old one, to evade royal authority, plot a revolution, experience freedom, or to buy and sell goods. While many of their stories ended tragically, others were steeped in heroism and sacrifice, and still others in opportunism and mendacity. Lisandro Pérez beautifully weaves together all these stories, showing the rise of a vibrant and influential community. Historically rich and engrossing, Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution immerses the reader in the riveting drama of Cuban New York.

Lisandro Pérez analyzes the major forces that shaped the community, but also tells the stories of individuals and families that made up the fabric of a little-known immigrant world that represents the origins of New York City's dynamic Latino presence.

Shines a light on the constitutional issues that confronted and shaped each presidency from George Washington to the Progressive Era

Drawing from the monumental The Presidents and the Constitution: A Living History, published in 2016, the nation’s foremost experts in the American presidency and the US Constitution join together to tell the intertwined stories of how the first twenty-seven distinctive American presidents have confronted and shaped the Constitution and thus defined the most powerful office in human history.

From George Washington to William Howard Taft, The Presidents and the Constitution, Volume 1 illuminates the evolving American presidency in a unique way—through the lens of the Constitution itself. Arranged chronologically by president, the book examines the constitutional issues confronting each president in the context of the personalities driving historical events.The contributors illustrate the extensive powers of the American presidency in domestic and foreign affairs, showing how they have been used by the men who were granted them, and brings to light the overarching constitutional themes that span this country’s history and tie each presidency to the other branches of government.

A detailed archaeological study of life in Egypt's Eastern desert during the Roman period by a leading scholar

Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert is a two-volume set collecting Hélène Cuvigny’s most important articles on Egypt’s Eastern Desert during the Roman period. The excavations she directed uncovered a wealth of material, including tens of thousands of texts written on pottery fragments (ostraca). Some are administrative texts, but many more are correspondence, both official and private, written by and to the people (mostly but not all men) who lived and worked in these remote and harsh environments, supported by an elaborate network of defense, administration, and supply that tied the entire region together. The contents of Rome in Egypt’s Eastern Desert have all been published earlier in peer-reviewed venues, but most appear here for the first time in English. All of the contributions have been checked or translated by the editor and brought up to date with respect to bibliography, and some have been significantly rewritten by the author, in order to take account of the enormous amount of new material discovered since the original publications. A full index makes this body of work far more accessible than it was before. This book assembles into one collection thirty years of detailed study of this material, conjuring in vivid detail the lived experience of those who inhabited these forts—often through their own expressive language—and the realia of desert geography, military life, sex, religion, quarry operations, and imperial administration in the Roman world.

First in Canada is a unique expression of the many accomplishments Indigenous Canadians have made to Canadian society. As beautiful as it is informative, this perpetual calendar is a glimpse of 10,000 years in 365 days!

Informative, innovative, and inspirational, First in Canada will take readers through one calendar year of Aboriginal history, providing visuals and details of past and contemporary achievements and challenges of First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples in Canada. It will appeal to those interested in Canadian history, to high school and university students, and to researchers looking to initiate projects on Aboriginal topics. Attractive and functional, this personal schedule book contains beautiful aboriginal works of art and will serve as a ready reminder of the importance of First Peoples to the ongoing cultural dynamic in Canada. Carefully researched by Jonathan Anuik, First in Canada is the first of its kind.

The dramatic story of the United States’ destruction of a free and independent community of fugitive slaves in Spanish Florida

In the aftermath of the War of 1812, Major General Andrew Jackson ordered a joint United States army-navy expedition into Spanish Florida to destroy a free and independent community of fugitive slaves. The result was the Battle of Negro Fort, a brutal conflict among hundreds of American troops, Indian warriors, and black rebels that culminated in the death or re-enslavement of nearly all of the fort’s inhabitants. By eliminating this refuge for fugitive slaves, the United States government closed an escape valve that African Americans had utilized for generations. At the same time, it intensified the subjugation of southern Native Americans, including the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles. Still, the battle was significant for another reason as well.

During its existence, Negro Fort was a powerful symbol of black freedom that subverted the racist foundations of an expanding American slave society. Its destruction reinforced the nation’s growing commitment to slavery, while illuminating the extent to which ambivalence over the institution had disappeared since the nation’s founding. Indeed, four decades after declaring that all men were created equal, the United States destroyed a fugitive slave community in a foreign territory for the first and only time in its history, which accelerated America’s transformation into a white republic. The Battle of Negro Fort places the violent expansion of slavery where it belongs, at the center of the history of the early American republic.

Were indigenous Americans descendants of the lost tribes of Israel?

From the moment Europeans realized Columbus had landed in a place unknown to them in 1492, they began speculating about how the Americas and their inhabitants fit into the Bible. For many, the most compelling explanation was the Hebraic Indian theory, which proposed that indigenous Americans were the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. For its proponents, the theory neatly explained why this giant land and its inhabitants were not mentioned in the Biblical record.

In Old Canaan in a New World, Elizabeth Fenton shows that though the Hebraic Indian theory may seem far-fetched today, it had a great deal of currency and significant influence over a very long period of American history. Indeed, at different times the idea that indigenous Americans were descended from the lost tribes of Israel was taken up to support political and religious positions on diverse issues including Christian millennialism, national expansion, trade policies, Jewish rights, sovereignty in the Americas, and scientific exploration.

Through analysis of a wide collection of writings—from religious texts to novels—Fenton sheds light on a rarely explored but important part of religious discourse in early America. As the Hebraic Indian theory evolved over the course of two centuries, it revealed how religious belief and national interest intersected in early American history.

A politician's journey to bring home Mahatma Gandhi's teachings home to South Africa in the wake of WWII

In November 1949, Davidson Don Tengo (D.D.T.) Jabavu, the South African politician, Methodist lay preacher and retired professor of African languages and Latin at Fort Hare University in the Eastern Cape, set out on a four-month trip to attend the World Pacifist Meeting in India. The conference brought together delegates from over thirty countries to reflect on how Mahatma Gandhi’s life and teachings could inform pacifist work in the post-World War II era.

Jabavu wrote an isiXhosa account of his journey up the east coast of Africa and to different parts of India which was first published in 1951 by Lovedale Press. His narrative contains wide-ranging reflections on the fauna and flora of the changing landscape, on intriguing social interactions during his travels, and on the conference itself, where he considered what lessons Gandhian principles might yield for oppressed South Africans engaged in struggles for freedom and dignity. He incorporates accounts of chance meetings with important figures of post-independence India and of the anti-colonial struggle in East Africa, as well as with members of the American civil rights movement. His commentary on non-violent resistance, and on the dangers of nationalism when coupled with militarism and racism, enriches the existing archive of intellectual and political exchange between Africa and India from a black South African perspective.

This new edition includes Jabavu’s travelogue in the original isiXhosa, with an English translation by the late anthropologist Cecil Wele Manona. Tina Steiner’s introductory chapter examines the networks of international solidarity and friendship that Jabavu helped to strengthen in the course of his travels. A chapter by Mhlobo W. Jadezweni, whose updating of the original isiXhosa orthography has made Jabavu’s text accessible to new generations of readers, considers the richness of Jabavu’s isiXhosa style as a contribution to the archive of great African-language literature. Catherine Higgs provides biographical sketches of D.D.T. Jabavu and Cecil Wele Manona which situate this travelogue within the broader context of their lives. Evan M. Mwangi’s Afterword is a reflection on the historical and political significance of making African-language texts available to readers across Africa.

On May 25, 2012, President Obama announced that the United States would spend the next thirteen years – through November 11, 2025 – commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, and the American soldiers, “more than 58,000 patriots,” who died in Vietnam. The fact that at least 2.1 million Vietnamese – soldiers, parents, grandparents, children – also died in that war will be largely unknown and entirely uncommemorated. And U.S. history barely stops to record the millions of Vietnamese who lived on after being displaced, tortured, maimed, raped, or born with birth defects, the result of devastating chemicals wreaked on the land by the U.S. military. The reason for this appalling disconnect of consciousness lies in an unremitting public relations campaign waged by top American politicians, military leaders, business people, and scholars who have spent the last sixty years justifying the U.S. presence in Vietnam. It is a campaign of patriotic conceit superbly chronicled by John Marciano in The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?.

A devastating follow-up to Marciano’s 1979 classic Teaching the Vietnam War (written with William L. Griffen), Marciano’s book seeks not to commemorate the Vietnam War, but to stop the ongoing U.S. war on actual history. Marciano reveals the grandiose flag-waving that stems from the “Noble Cause principle,” the notion that America is “chosen by God” to bring democracy to the world. Marciano writes of the Noble Cause being invoked unsparingly by presidents – from Jimmy Carter, in his observation that, regarding Vietnam, “the destruction was mutual,” to Barack Obama, who continues the flow of romantic media propaganda: “The United States of America … will remain the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known.”

The result is critical writing and teaching at its best. This book will find a home in classrooms where teachers seek to do more than repeat the trite glorifications of U.S. empire. It will provide students everywhere with insights that can prepare them to change the world.

The eighteen articles selected for this third volume all focus on the agricultural history of the Canadian Plains. Early First Nations practices are examined, as are subsequent evolutions in farming, ranching, and marketing.

The articles cover a wide range of topics: First Nations’ agricultural practices; agriculture during the fur trade era; the history of ranching and the industry’s evolution as fenced-in farm settlements supplanted the open range; the wheat boom at the turn of the twentieth century, which led the Prairie Provinces to become known as the “breadbasket of the world”; mechanization and other adaptations to dryland farming; how Prairie cattle and crops were transported and marketed abroad; and the emergence of farmers’ organizations who fought for fair prices for their products.

A comprehensive history of the National Civil Liberties Bureau's role in the anti-war movement during the First World War

World War I, given all the rousing “Over-There” songs and in-the-trenches films it inspired, was, at its outset, surprisingly unpopular with the American public. As opposition increased, Woodrow Wilson’s presidential administration became intent on stifling antiwar dissent. Wilson effectively silenced the National Civil Liberties Bureau, forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union. Presidential candidate Eugene Debs was jailed, and Deb’s Socialist Party became a prime target of surveillance operations, both covert and overt. Drastic as these measures were, more draconian measures were to come.

In his absorbing new book, Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I, Eric Chester reveals that out of this turmoil came a heated public discussion on the theory of civil liberties – the basic freedoms that are, theoretically, untouchable by any of the three branches of the U.S. government. The famous “clear and present danger” argument of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the “balance of conflicting interest” theory of law professor Zechariah Chafee, for example, evolved to provide a rationale for courts to act as a limited restraint on autocratic actions of the government. But Chester goes further, to examine an alternative theory: civil liberties exist as absolute rights, rather than being dependent on the specific circumstances of each case. Over the years, the debate about the right to dissent has intensified and become more necessary. This fascinating book explains why, a century after the First World War – and in the era of Trump – we need to know about this.

The hopeful promise of a life in Canada and why Americans feel the urge to escape there

When it became clear that Donald Trump would become the new US president on election night in 2016, the website for Citizenship and Immigration Canada crashed. It was overwhelmed by Americans afraid that the United States would once again enter a period of intolerance and military aggression. In American Refugees, Rita Deverell shows that from the Revolutionary War to the Underground Railroad through to McCarthyism and Vietnam, Americans have fled to Canada in times of crisis. Many still flee. All have sought better lives, while helping to shape Canada into the country it is today.

Examines the critical role of urban taverns in the social and political life of colonial and revolutionary America

From exclusive “city taverns” to seedy “disorderly houses,” urban taverns were wholly engrained in the diverse web of British American life. By the mid-eighteenth century, urban taverns emerged as the most popular, numerous, and accessible public spaces in British America. These shared spaces, which hosted individuals from a broad swath of socioeconomic backgrounds, eliminated the notion of “civilized” and “wild” individuals, and dismayed the elite colonists who hoped to impose a British-style social order upon their local community. More importantly, urban taverns served as critical arenas through which diverse colonists engaged in an ongoing act of societal negotiation.

Inn Civility exhibits how colonists’ struggles to emulate their British homeland ultimately impelled the creation of an American republic. This unique insight demonstrates the messy, often contradictory nature of British American society building. In striving to create a monarchical society based upon tenets of civility, order, and liberty, colonists inadvertently created a political society that the founders would rely upon for their visions of a republican America. The elitist colonists’ futile efforts at realizing a civil society are crucial for understanding America’s controversial beginnings and the fitful development of American republicanism.

The fourth volume in the Amheida series, ‘Ain el-Gedida: 2006-2008 Excavations of a Late Antique Site in Egypt's Western Desert (Amheida IV) presents the systematic record and interpretation of the archaeological evidence from the excavations at ‘Ain el-Gedida, a fourth-century rural settlement in Egypt's Dakleh Oasis uniquely important for the study of early Egyptian Christianity and previously known only from written sources.

Nicola Aravecchia (Washington University), the Deputy Field Director of NYU's Amheida Excavations, offers a history of the site and its excavations, followed by an integrated topographical and archaeological interpretation of the site and its significance for the history of Christianity in Egypt. In the second half of the volume a team of international experts presents catalogs and interpretations of the archaeological finds, including ceramics (Delphine Dixneuf, CRNS), coins (David M. Ratzan, NYU), ostraca and graffiti (Roger S. Bagnall, NYU and Dorota Dzierzbicka, University of Warsaw), small finds (Dorota Dzierzbicka, University of Warsaw), and zooarcheological remains (Pamela J. Crabtree, NYU and Douglas Campana).

The eight-decade story of a New York neighborhood

In 1940, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company opened a planned community in the East Bronx, New York. A model of what the neighborhood would become was first displayed to an excited public at the 1939 World’s Fair. Parkchester was celebrated as a “city within a city,” offering many of the attractions and comforts of suburbia, but without the transportation issues that plagued commuters who trekked into New York City every day. This new neighborhood initially constituted a desirable alternative to inner city neighborhoods for white ethnic groups with the means to leave their Depression-era homes. In this bucolic environment within Gotham, the Irish and Italian Catholics, white Protestants and Jews lived together rather harmoniously.

In Parkchester, Jeffrey S. Gurock explains how and why a “get along” spirit prevailed in Parkchester and marked a turning point in ethnic relations in the city.

Gurock is also attuned to, and documents fully, the egregious side to the neighborhood’s early history. Until the late 1960s, Parkchester was off-limits to African Americans and Latinos. He is also sensitive to the processes of integration that took place once the community was opened to all and explains why transition was made without significant turmoil and violence that marked integration in other parts of the city. This eight decade history takes Parkchester’s tale up to the present day and indicates that while the neighborhood is today predominantly African American and Latino, and home to immigrants from all over the world, the spirit of conviviality still prevails on its East Bronx streets.

As a child of Parkchester himself, Gurock couples his critical expertise as leading scholar of New York City’s history with an insider’s insight in producing a thoughtful, nuanced understanding of ethnic and race relations in the city.

An expanded edition of the leading text on military history and the role of culture on the battlefield

Ideas matter in warfare. Guns may kill, but ideas determine when, where, and how they are used. Traditionally, military historians attempted to explain the ideas behind warfare in strictly rational terms, but over the past few decades, a stronger focus has been placed on how societies conceptualize war, weapons, violence, and military service, to determine how culture informs the battlefield.

Warfare and Culture in World History, Second Edition, is a collection of some of the most compelling recent efforts to analyze warfare through a cultural lens. These curated essays draw on, and aggressively expand, traditional scholarship on war and society through sophisticated cultural analysis. Chapters range from an organizational analysis of American Civil War field armies, to an exploration of military culture in late Republican Rome, to debates within Ming Chinese officialdom over extermination versus pacification.

In addition to a revised and expanded introduction, the second edition of Warfare and Culture in World History now adds new chapters on the role of herding in shaping Mongol strategies, Spanish military culture and its effects on the conquest of the New World, and the blending of German and East African military cultures among the Africans who served in the German colonial army. This volume provides a full range of case studies of how culture, whether societal, strategic, organizational, or military, could shape not only military institutions but also actual battlefield choices.

Winner, 2019 Anna Julia Cooper and C.L.R. James Award, given by the National Council for Black Studies

Finalist, 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, given by the African American Intellectual History Society

Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, given by the History of Education Society

The inspiring story of the black students, faculty, and administrators who forever changed America’s leading educational institutions and paved the way for social justice and racial progress


The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are American stalwarts that have profoundly influenced history and culture by producing the nation’s and the world’s leaders. The few black students who attended Ivy League schools in the decades following WWII not only went on to greatly influence black America and the nation in general, but unquestionably awakened these most traditional and selective of American spaces. In the twentieth century, black youth were in the vanguard of the black freedom movement and educational reform.

Upending the Ivory Tower illuminates how the Black Power movement, which was borne out of an effort to edify the most disfranchised of the black masses, also took root in the hallowed halls of America’s most esteemed institutions of higher education. Between the close of WWII and 1975, the civil rights and Black Power movements transformed the demographics and operation of the Ivy League on and off campus. As desegregators and racial pioneers, black students, staff, and faculty used their status in the black intelligentsia to enhance their predominantly white institutions while advancing black freedom. Although they were often marginalized because of their race and class, the newcomers altered educational policies and inserted blackness into the curricula and culture of the unabashedly exclusive and starkly white schools.

This book attempts to complete the narrative of higher education history, while adding a much needed nuance to the history of the Black Power movement. It tells the stories of those students, professors, staff, and administrators who pushed for change at the risk of losing what privilege they had. Putting their status, and sometimes even their lives, in jeopardy, black activists negotiated, protested, and demonstrated to create opportunities for the generations that followed. The enrichments these change agents made endure in the diversity initiatives and activism surrounding issues of race that exist in the modern Ivy League.

Upending the Ivory Tower not only informs the civil rights and Black Power movements of the postwar era but also provides critical context for the Black Lives Matter movement that is growing in the streets and on campuses throughout the country today. As higher education continues to be a catalyst for change, there is no one better to inform today’s activists than those who transformed our country’s past and paved the way for its future.