A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
We Are a College at War weaves together the individual World War II experiences of students and faculty at the all-female Rockford College (now Rockford University) in Rockford, Illinois, to draw a broader picture of the role American women and college students played during this defining period in U.S. history. It uses the Rockford community’s letters, speeches, newspaper stories, and personal recollections to demonstrate how American women during the Second World War claimed the right to be everywhere—in factories and other traditionally male workplaces, and even on the front lines—and links their efforts to the rise of feminism and the fight for women’s rights in the 1960s and 1970s.
The growing recognition that ethnicity is not fixed and inherent, but elastic and constructed, fuels the essays in this collection. Regarding identity as a dynamic, on-going, formative and transformative process, We Are a People considers narrative -- the creation and maintenance of a common story -- as the keystone in building a sense of peoplehood. Myths of origin, triumph over adversity, migration, and so forth, chart a group's history, while continual additions to the larger narrative stress moving into the future as a people.
Still, there is more to our stories as individuals and groups. Most of us are aware that we take on different roles and project different aspects of ourselves depending on the situation. Some individuals who have inherited multiple group affiliations from their families view themselves not as this or that but all at once. So too with ethnic groups. The so-called hyphenated Americans are not the only people in the world to recognize or embrace their plurality. This relatively recent acknowledgment of multiplicity has potentially wide implications, destabilizing the limited (and limiting) categories inscribed in, for example, public policy and discourse on race relations.
We Are a People is a path-breaking volume, boldly illustrating how ethnic identity works in the real world.
A collection of essays about Armenian identity and belonging in the diaspora.
In the century since the Armenian Genocide, Armenian survivors and their descendants have written of a vast range of experiences using storytelling and activism, two important aspects of Armenian culture. Wrestling with questions of home and self, diasporan Armenian writers bear the burden of repeatedly telling their history, as it remains widely erased and obfuscated. Telling this history requires a tangled balance of contextualizing the past and reporting on the present, of respecting a culture even while feeling lost within it.
We Are All Armenian brings together established and emerging Armenian authors to reflect on the complications of Armenian ethnic identity today. These personal essays elevate diasporic voices that have been historically silenced inside and outside of their communities, including queer, multiracial, and multiethnic writers. The eighteen contributors to this contemporary anthology explore issues of displacement, assimilation, inheritance, and broader definitions of home. Through engaging creative nonfiction, many of them question what it is to be Armenian enough inside an often unacknowledged community.
Exploring how students develop a cultural “game of equality” that enables them to identify—across typical class and social boundaries—with their peers, the school, and the nation, Levinson considers such issues as the organizational and discursive resources that students draw on to maintain this culture. He also engages cultural studies, media studies, and globalization theory to examine the impact of television, music, and homelife on the students and thereby better comprehend—and problematize—the educational project of the state. Finding that an ethic of solidarity is sometimes used to condemn students defined as different or uncooperative and that little attention is paid to accommodating the varied backgrounds of the students—including their connection to indigenous, peasant, or working class identities—Levinson reveals that their “schooled identity” often collapses in the context of migration to the United States or economic crisis in Mexico. Finally, he extends his study to trace whether the cultural game is reinforced or eroded after graduation as well as its influence relative to the forces of family, traditional gender roles, church, and global youth culture.
We Are All Equal will be of particular interest to educators, sociologists, Latin Americanists, and anthropologists.
Contains the Bryant Spann Memorial Prize in Literature for 1997, an award-winning essay, "The Very Last Hurrah" by Eric Leif Davin
This collection of articles delves into the little-known community-based unionism of the 1930s. Worlds apart from bureaucratic business unions like the AFL-CIO, these organizations emerged from workers involved in many kinds of labor, from African American nutpickers in St. Louis to chemical and rubber workers in Akron, and from bootleg miners in Pennsylvania to tenant farmers in the Mississippi Delta.
The contributors draw on eyewitness interviews, first-person narratives, trade union documents, and other primary sources to describe experimental forms of worker activism during the period. This alternative unionism was democratic, deeply rooted in mutual aid among workers in different crafts and work sites, and politically independent. The key to it was a value system based on egalitarianism. The cry, "We are all leaders!" resonated among rank-and-file activists. Their struggle, though often overlooked by historians, has much to teach us about union organizing today.
Contributors: John Borsos, Eric Leif Davin, Elizabeth Faue, Rosemary Feurer, Janet Irons, Michael Kozura, Mark D. Naison, Peter Rachleff, and Stan Weir
The melting pot is no more. Where not very long ago we sought assimilation, we now pursue multiculturalism. Nowhere has this transformation been more evident than in the public schools, where a traditional Eurocentric curriculum has yielded to diversity--and, often, to confrontation and confusion. In a book that brings clarity and reason to this highly charged issue, Nathan Glazer explores these sweeping changes. He offers an incisive account of why we all--advocates and skeptics alike--have become multiculturalists, and what this means for national unity, civil society, and the education of our youth.
Focusing particularly on the impact in public schools, Glazer dissects the four issues uppermost in the minds of people on both sides of the multicultural fence: Whose "truth" do we recognize in the curriculum? Will an emphasis on ethnic roots undermine or strengthen our national unity in the face of international disorder? Will attention to social injustice, past and present, increase or decrease civil disharmony and strife? Does a multicultural curriculum enhance learning, by engaging students' interest and by raising students' self-esteem, or does it teach irrelevance at best and fantasy at worst?
Glazer argues cogently that multiculturalism arose from the failure of mainstream society to assimilate African Americans; anger and frustration at their continuing separation gave black Americans the impetus for rejecting traditions that excluded them. But, willingly or not, "we are all multiculturalists now," Glazer asserts, and his book gives us the clearest picture yet of what there is to know, to fear, and to ask of ourselves in this new identity.
Relating his experiences caring for endangered whales, a veterinarian and marine scientist shows we can all share in the salvation of these imperiled animals.
The image most of us have of whalers includes harpoons and intentional trauma. Yet eating commercially caught seafood leads to whales’ entanglement and slow death in rope and nets, and the global shipping routes that bring us readily available goods often lead to death by collision. We—all of us—are whalers, marine scientist and veterinarian Michael J. Moore contends. But we do not have to be.
Drawing on over forty years of fieldwork with humpback, pilot, fin, and, in particular, North Atlantic right whales—a species whose population has declined more than 20 percent since 2017—Moore takes us with him as he performs whale necropsies on animals stranded on beaches, in his independent research alongside whalers using explosive harpoons, and as he tracks injured whales to deliver sedatives. The whales’ plight is a complex, confounding, and disturbing one. We learn of existing but poorly enforced conservation laws and of perennial (and often failed) efforts to balance the push for fisheries profit versus the protection of endangered species caught by accident.
But despite these challenges, Moore’s tale is an optimistic one. He shows us how technologies for ropeless fishing and the acoustic tracking of whale migrations make a dramatic difference. And he looks ahead with hope as our growing understanding of these extraordinary creatures fuels an ever-stronger drive for change.
For more information on Moore’s book and research, please visit his webpage at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
This book focuses on the historical construction of the Hualapai Nation in the face of modern American colonialism. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and participant observation, Jeffrey Shepherd describes how thirteen bands of extended families known as The Pai confronted American colonialism and in the process recast themselves as a modern Indigenous nation.
Shepherd shows that Hualapai nation-building was a complex process shaped by band identities, competing visions of the past, creative reactions to modernity, and resistance to state power. He analyzes how the Hualapais transformed an externally imposed tribal identity through nationalist discourses of protecting aboriginal territory; and he examines how that discourse strengthened the Hualapais’ claim to land and water while simultaneously reifying a politicized version of their own history. Along the way, he sheds new light on familiar topics—Indian–white conflict, the creation of tribal government, wage labor, federal policy, and Native activism—by applying theories of race, space, historical memory, and decolonization.
Drawing on recent work in American Indian history and Native American studies, Shepherd shows how the Hualapai have strived to reclaim a distinct identity and culture in the face of ongoing colonialism. We Are an Indian Nation is grounded in Hualapai voices and agendas while simultaneously situating their history in the larger tapestry of Native peoples’ confrontations with colonialism and modernity.
Shirley Wilson Logan analyzes the distinctive rhetorical features in the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women, concentrating on the public discourse of club and church women from 1880 until 1900.
Logan develops each chapter in this illustrated study around a feature of public address as best exemplified in the oratory of a particular woman speaker of the era. She analyzes not only speeches but also editorials, essays, and letters.
Logan first focuses on the prophetic oratory of Maria Stewart, the first American-born black woman to speak publicly. Turning to Frances Harper, she considers speeches that argue for common interests between divergent communities. And she demonstrates that central to the antilynching rhetoric of Ida Wells is the concept of "presence," or the tactic of enhancing certain selected elements of the presentation.
In her discussion of Fannie Barrier Williams and Anna Cooper, Logan shows that when speaking to white club women and black clergymen, both Williams and Cooper employ what Kenneth Burke called identification. To analyze the rhetoric of Victoria Matthews, she applies Carolyn Miller's modification of Lloyd Bitzer's concept of the rhetorical situation.
Logan also examines the discourse of women associated with the black Baptist women's movement and those participating in college-affiliated conferences.
The book includes an appendix with little-known speeches and essays by Anna Julia Cooper, Selena Sloan Butler, Lucy Wilmot Smith, Mary V. Cook, Adella Hunt Logan, Victoria Earle Matthews, Lucy C. Laney, and Georgia Swift King.
Since the late 1940s, a violent African criminal society known as the Marashea has operated in and around South Africa’s gold mining areas. With thousands of members involved in drug smuggling, extortion, and kidnapping, the Marashea was more influential in the day-to-day lives of many black South Africans under apartheid than were agents of the state. These gangs remain active in South Africa.
In We Are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999, Gary Kynoch points to the combination of coercive force and administrative weakness that characterized the apartheid state. As long as crime and violence were contained within black townships and did not threaten adjacent white areas, township residents were largely left to fend for themselves. The Marashea’s ability to prosper during the apartheid era and its involvement in political conflict led directly to the violent crime epidemic that today plagues South Africa.
Highly readable and solidly researched, We Are Fighting the World is critical to an understanding of South African society, past and present. This pioneering study challenges previous social history research on resistance, ethnicity, urban spaces, and gender in South Africa. Kynoch’s interviews with many current and former gang members give We Are Fighting the World an energy and a realism that are unparalleled in any other published work on gang violence in southern Africa.
Responding to his brother’s plea for the sons of Maine to join the Union cause, Charles found himself a noncommissioned officer fighting in the disastrous Battle of First Bull Run. All told, Howard fought in several major battles of the Eastern Theater, including Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, and went on to participate in various military actions in the Western Theater including Sherman’s bloody Atlanta Campaign. He was wounded twice, first at the Battle of Fair Oaks and again at Fredericksburg. Yet, despite facing the worst horrors of war, Howard rarely wavered in his faith and rose steadily in rank throughout the conflict. By war’s end, he was a brevet brigadier general in command of the 128th U.S. Colored Troop Regiment.
Howard’s letters cover a wide-ranging period, from 1852 to 1908. His concern for his family is typical of a Civil War soldier, but his exceptionally firm reliance on divine providence is what makes these letters an extraordinary window into the mind of a Civil War officer. Howard’s grounded faith was often tested by the viciousness of war, and as a result his letters are rife with stirring confessions and his emotional grappling with the harsh realities he faced. Howard’s letters expose the greater theological and metaphysical dilemmas of the war faced by so many on both sides.
Changes in the global economy have real and contradictory outcomes for the everyday lives of women workers. In 2001, Nancy Plankey-Videla had a rare opportunity to witness these effects firsthand. Having secured access to one of Latin America's top producers of high-end men's suits in Mexico for participant-observer research, she labored as a machine operator for nine months on a shop floor made up, mostly, of women. The firm had recently transformed itself from traditional assembly techniques, to lean, cutting-edge, Japanese-style production methods. Lured initially into the firm by way of increased wages and benefits, workers had helped shoulder the company's increasing debts. When the company's plan for successful expansion went awry and it reneged on promises it had made to the workforce, women workers responded by walking out on strike.
Building upon in-depth interviews with over sixty workers, managers, and policy makers, Plankey-Videla documents and analyzes events leading up to the female-led factory strike and its aftermath—including harassment from managers, corrupt union officials and labor authorities, and violent governor-sanctioned police actions. We Are in This Dance Together illustrates how the women's shared identity as workers and mothers—deserving of dignity, respect, and a living wage—became the basis for radicalization and led to further civic organizing against the state, the company, and the corrupt union to demand justice.
Historian Thomas Constantine Maroukis discusses the goals, strategies, successes, and failures of the Indigenous intellectuals who came together to form the SAI. They engaged in lobbying, producing publications, informing the media, hundreds of speaking engagements, and annual conferences to argue for reform. Unfortunately, the forces of this era were against reforming federal policies: The group faced racism, a steady stream of negative stereotyping as a so-called vanishing race, and an indifferent federal bureaucracy. They were also beset by internal struggles, which weakened the organization.
This work sheds new light on the origins of modern protest in the twentieth century, and it shows how the intellectuals and activists associated with the SAI were able to bring Indian issues before the American public, challenging stereotypes and the “vanishing people” trope. Maroukis argues that that the SAI was not an assimilationist organization; they were political activists trying to free Indians from government wardship while maintaining their cultural heritage.
For We Are Not Amused, renowned English-language expert David Crystal has explored the most common pronunciation-related controversies during the reign of Queen Victoria and brought together the cartoons and articles that poked fun at them, adding insightful commentary on the context of the times. The collection brings to light a society where class distinctions ruled. Crystal explains why people felt so strongly about accents and identifies which accents were the main sources of jokes, from the dropped h’s of the Cockney working class to the upper-class tendency to drop the final g in words like “huntin’” and “fishin’.”
In this fascinating and highly entertaining book, Crystal shows that outrage over proper pronunciation is nothing new—our feelings today have their origins in the ways our Victorian predecessors thought about the subject.
Contributors. Leisy J. Abrego, Gabrielle Cabrera, Gabriela Garcia Cruz, Lucía León, Katy Joseline Maldonado Dominguez, Grecia Mondragón, Gabriela Monico, Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, Maria Liliana Ramirez, Joel Sati, Audrey Silvestre, Carolina Valdivia
Born in Trinidad and having grown up in Queens, Boyce‑Taylor creates a framework for her own experience out of the life experiences and work of beloved Black women in history. She salutes the women who have lifted her, including Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ntozake Shange, and Winnie Mandela, as well as her mother, Eugenia Boyce, and her beloved daughter‑in‑law, Deisha Head Taylor.
The poems in this collection are unapologetic, fierce, and confrontational while remaining caring and intimate. They stand strong in the face of adversity and boldly demand what is owed while still honoring and cherishing what is loved.
In presenting the case of Kaska, an endangered language in an Athabascan community in the Yukon, Barbra A. Meek asserts that language revitalization requires more than just linguistic rehabilitation; it demands a social transformation. The process must mend rips and tears in the social fabric of the language community that result from an enduring colonial history focused on termination. These “disjunctures” include government policies conflicting with community goals, widely varying teaching methods and generational viewpoints, and even clashing ideologies within the language community.
This book provides a detailed investigation of language revitalization based on more than two years of active participation in local language renewal efforts. Each chapter focuses on a different dimension, such as spelling and expertise, conversation and social status, family practices, and bureaucratic involvement in local language choices. Each situation illustrates the balance between the desire for linguistic continuity and the reality of disruption.
We Are Our Language reveals the subtle ways in which different conceptions and practices—historical, material, and interactional—can variably affect the state of an indigenous language, and it offers a critical step toward redefining success and achieving revitalization.
-Mary Szybist, author of Granted
Mountain West Poetry Series
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
The movement was met with violent repression. Participants were imprisoned, tortured, and even killed. Lynn Stephen emphasizes the crucial role of testimony in human rights work, indigenous cultural history, community and indigenous radio, and women's articulation of their rights to speak and be heard. She also explores transborder support for APPO, particularly among Oaxacan immigrants in Los Angeles. The book is supplemented by a website featuring video testimonials, pictures, documents, and a timeline of key events.
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Begin Again, a politically astute, lyrical meditation on how ordinary people can shake off their reliance on a small group of professional politicians and assume responsibility for what it takes to achieve a more just and perfect democracy.
“Like attending a jazz concert with all of one’s favorite musicians…James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Toni Morrison, and more…Glaude brilliantly takes us on an epic tour through their lives and work.”
―Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Box: Writing the Race
We are more than the circumstances of our lives, and what we do matters. In We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, one of the nation’s preeminent scholars and a New York Times bestselling author, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., makes the case that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics. Through virtuoso interpretations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker, Glaude shows how we have the power to be the heroes that our democracy so desperately requires.
Based on the Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard University, the book begins with Glaude’s unease with the Obama years. He felt then, and does even more urgently now, that the excitement around the Obama presidency constrained our politics as we turned to yet another prophet-like figure. He examines his personal history and the traditions that both shape and overwhelm his own voice.
Glaude weaves anecdotes about his evolving views on Black politics together with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, encouraging us to reflect on the lessons of these great thinkers and address imaginatively the challenges of our day in voices uniquely our own.
Narrated with passion and philosophical intensity, this book is a powerful reminder that if American democracy is to survive, we must step out from under the shadows of past giants to build a better society—one that derives its strength from the pew, not the pulpit.
We are the People analyzes the sudden growth and radicalization of the AfD, from its Euroskeptic beginnings in 2013 to its increasing extremism. Penny Bochum shows us how the leaders’ use of inflammatory, xenophobic, and even Nazi-era language mirrors that of emerging far-right forces across much of the Western world. At the same time, through a lucid examination of the group’s ideology, Bochum shows how their brand of populism is distinct and based on German experiences and history.
Women and land form the core themes of the book, which brings tribal and settler colonial narratives into comparative analysis. Divided into two parts, the first section of the work explores how settler colonizers used the printing press and boarding schools to displace Oceti Sakowin women as traditional culture keepers and culture bearers with the goal of internally and externally colonizing the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations. The second section focuses on decolonization and explores how contemporary Oceti Sakowin writers and scholars have started to reclaim Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literatures to decolonize and heal their families, communities, and nations.
The author offers an anthropological analysis of the state, social movements, and democracy as lived experiences of the poor, gendered, and racialized residents of two parishes in Caracas, Venezuela, and Afro-Venezuelan communities nearby. Ethnographic research reveals the shift in relationships of power and the evolving political practices among the Chavistas, the Chávez government, and the opposition. Examining the subjective experiences of barrio residents in everyday processes of state formation, this book provides a new perspective on the Chavistas, arguing that they are a broad-based social movement and driving force behind a revolution struggling to transfer state power to organized civil society.
Through his intense engagement with the constantly changing social, political, and economic dynamics, Valencia dramatically challenges top-down understandings of the state and power in Venezuela. He shows the unequal relationships between sectors of civil society, and he shows state formation as a process enmeshed in the struggles for social justice, demonstrating that the state is a sociopolitical entity that acts through civil society, rather than above it.
We Are the Union is grounded in on-site research and interviews and focuses on the efforts by Unionists for Democratic Change to reform unions from within. Incorporating theory and methods from the fields of organizational communication as well as labor studies, Cloud methodically uncovers and analyzes the goals, strategies, and dilemmas of the dissidents who, while wanting to uphold the ideas and ideals of the union, took up the gauntlet to make it more responsive to workers and less conciliatory toward management, especially in times of economic stress or crisis. Cloud calls for a revival of militant unionism as a response to union leaders' embracing of management and training programs that put workers in the same camp as management, arguing that reform groups should look to the emergence of powerful industrial unions in the United States for guidance on revolutionizing existing institutions and building new ones that truly accommodate workers' needs.
Meyer examines the ever-shifting ways that ethnicity, gender, class, religion, and place interacted with each other during the long temperance battle in Minnesota. Her deconstruction of Irish and German ethnic positioning with respect to temperance activism provides a rare interethnic history of the movement. At the same time, she shows how women engaged in temperance work as a way to form public identities and reforges the largely neglected, yet vital link between female temperance and suffrage activism. Relatedly, Meyer reflects on the continuities and changes between how the movement functioned to construct identity in the heartland versus the movement's more often studied roles in the East. She also gives a nuanced portrait of the culture clash between a comparatively reform-minded Minneapolis and dynamic anti-temperance forces in whiskey-soaked St. Paul--forces supported by government, community, and business institutions heavily invested in keeping the city wet.
Ghulam Bombaywala sells bagels in Houston. Demetrios dishes up pizza in Connecticut. The Wangs serve tacos in Los Angeles. How ethnicity has influenced American eating habits—and thus, the make-up and direction of the American cultural mainstream—is the story told in We Are What We Eat. It is a complex tale of ethnic mingling and borrowing, of entrepreneurship and connoisseurship, of food as a social and political symbol and weapon—and a thoroughly entertaining history of our culinary tradition of multiculturalism.
The story of successive generations of Americans experimenting with their new neighbors’ foods highlights the marketplace as an important arena for defining and expressing ethnic identities and relationships. We Are What We Eat follows the fortunes of dozens of enterprising immigrant cooks and grocers, street hawkers and restaurateurs who have cultivated and changed the tastes of native-born Americans from the seventeenth century to the present. It also tells of the mass corporate production of foods like spaghetti, bagels, corn chips, and salsa, obliterating their ethnic identities. The book draws a surprisingly peaceful picture of American ethnic relations, in which “Americanized” foods like Spaghetti-Os happily coexist with painstakingly pure ethnic dishes and creative hybrids.
Donna Gabaccia invites us to consider: If we are what we eat, who are we? Americans’ multi-ethnic eating is a constant reminder of how widespread, and mutually enjoyable, ethnic interaction has sometimes been in the United States. Amid our wrangling over immigration and tribal differences, it reveals that on a basic level, in the way we sustain life and seek pleasure, we are all multicultural.
The years following Appomattox offered the freed people numerous opportunities and challenges. Ex-slaves reconnected with relatives dispersed by the domestic slave trade and the vicissitudes of civil war. They sought their own farms and homesteads, education for their children, and legal protection from whites hostile to their new status. They negotiated labor contracts, established local communities, and, following the 1867 Reconstruction Acts, entered local, state, and national politics.
Though aided by Freedmen's Bureau agents and sympathetic whites, former slaves nevertheless faced daunting odds. Ku Klux Klansmen and others terrorized blacks who asserted themselves, many northerners lost interest in their plight, and federal officials gradually left them to their own resources. As a result, former Confederates regained control of the southern state governments following the 1876 presidential election.
We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice is a substantially revised and expanded edition of a book originally published under the title Black Voices from Reconstruction, 1865–1877.
Imbued with a sense of place, Pete Sinclair climbed mountains and rescued others trying the same. He thrived on the risky business of ascending sheer rock, of moving from one adrenaline-boosting moment to another. In this book he recounts his mountain-climbing and park ranger days from 1959 to 1970, a time some people call a golden era of climbing in America, a time when climbers knew one another and frequently gathered in Grand Teton National Park. There, Sinclair was the ranger in charge of mountain rescue, a job that, especially when it involved the North Face of Grand Teton, drew on all his young team’s climbing skills. Mixing adventure with personal reflection, Sinclair recounts expeditions taken with friends to scale mountains in Alaska, Mexico, and other parts of North America, as well as his work rescuing injured climbers in the Tetons. The book serves as a history of a past era in mountaineering as well as a meditation on what it all meant. Throughout the book, he challenges readers to consider their relationship with the western landscape. Originally published in 1993, We Aspired was a finalist for the Boardman-Tasker Award for Mountain Literature. The account of one famous rescue on the North Face of the Grand Teton is retold in The Grand Rescue, a film by independent Utah producer Jenny Wilson.
John Rybicki offers up an unafraid set of poems in this charged book of verse. We Bed Down Into Water is rich with imagery of family, love, illness, death, and, indeed, water, which seeps in throughout the pages: rivers, pools, rain, and tears. His moving stories, in both prose and verse, struggle to hang on to a vision of the world that can still allow benevolence, luck, and laughter. In this, the collection embodies a contradiction: it is a tender book of fury, a book of bleak hopefulness.
Rybicki’s work is steeped in challenge: the biological and spiritual challenge posed by his beloved’s recurrent cancer or the daily challenges of an adopted child who could be, all too easily, lost. He spins these phenomenal struggles into a lyrical book that offers hope and awakens the reader into a new way of seeing.
We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes focuses on a striking array of protest movements that took up issues such as the nuclear arms race, U.S. intervention in Central America, and American investments in South Africa. Hunt's new history of the eighties investigates how film, television, and other facets of popular culture critiqued Washington's Cold War policies and reveals that activists and cultural rebels alike posed a more meaningful challenge to the Cold War's excesses than their predecessors in the McCarthy era.
Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s whitest city,” Black residents who grew up in the neighborhoods of northeast Portland have made it their own. The district of Albina, also called “Northeast,” was their haven and a hub of Black community life. But between 1990 and 2010, Albina changed dramatically—it became majority white.
In We Belong Here, sociologist Shani Adia Evans offers an intimate look at gentrification from the inside, documenting the reactions of the residents of Albina as the racial demographics of their neighborhood shift. As white culture becomes centered in Northeast, Black residents recount their experiences with what Evans refers to as “white watching,” the questioning look on the faces of white people they encounter, which conveys an exclusionary message: “What are you doing here?” This, Evans shows, is a prime example of what she calls “white spacemaking”: the establishment of white space—spaces in which whiteness is assumed to be the norm—in formerly non-white neighborhoods. While gentrification typically describes socioeconomic changes that may have racial implications, white spacemaking allows us to understand racism as a primary mechanism of neighborhood change. We Belong Here illuminates why gentrification and white spacemaking should be examined as intersecting, but not interchangeable, processes of neighborhood change.
Over the course of American history, Jews have held many American leaders in high esteem, but they maintain a unique emotional bond with Abraham Lincoln. From the time of his presidency to the present day, American Jews have persistently viewed Lincoln as one of their own, casting him as a Jewish sojourner and, in certain respects, a Jewish role model. This pioneering compendium— The first volume of annotated documents to focus on the history of Lincoln’s image, influence, and reputation among American Jews— considers how Lincoln acquired his exceptional status and how, over the past century and a half, this fascinating relationship has evolved.
Organized into twelve chronological and thematic chapters, these little-known primary source documents—many never before published and some translated into English for the first time—consist of newspaper clippings, journal articles, letters, poems, and sermons, and provide insight into a wide variety of issues relating to Lincoln’s Jewish connection. Topics include Lincoln’s early encounters with Central European Jewish immigrants living in the Old Northwest; Lincoln’s Jewish political allies; his encounters with Jews and the Jewish community as President; Lincoln’s response to the Jewish chaplain controversy; General U. S. Grant’s General Orders No. 11 expelling “Jews, as a class” from the Military Department of Tennessee; the question of amending the U.S. Constitution to legislate the country’s so-called Christian national character; and Jewish eulogies after Lincoln’s assassination. Other chapters consider the crisis of conscience that arose when President Andrew Johnson proclaimed a national day of mourning for Lincoln on the festival of Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks), a day when Jewish law enjoins Jews to rejoice and not to mourn; Lincoln’s Jewish detractors contrasted to his boosters; how American Jews have intentionally “Judaized” Lincoln ever since his death; the leading role that American Jews have played in in crafting Lincoln’s image and in preserving his memory for the American nation; American Jewish reflections on the question “What Would Lincoln Do?”; and how Lincoln, for America’s Jewish citizenry, became the avatar of America’s highest moral aspirations.
With thoughtful chapter introductions that provide readers with a context for the annotated documents that follow, this volume provides a fascinating chronicle of American Jewry’s unfolding historical encounter with the life and symbolic image of Abraham Lincoln, shedding light on how the cultural interchange between American ideals and Jewish traditions influences the dynamics of the American Jewish experience.
Finalist, 2014 National Jewish Book Award
Finalist, 2015 Ohioana Book Award
Second place, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 2003
Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition sent out from Spain to colonize "La Florida" in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City.
The story of Cabeza de Vaca has been told many times, beginning with his own account, Relación de los naufragios, which was included and amplified in Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo y Váldez's Historia general de las Indias. Yet the route taken by Cabeza de Vaca and his companions remains the subject of enduring controversy. In this book, Alex D. Krieger correlates the accounts in these two primary sources with his own extensive knowledge of the geography, archaeology, and anthropology of southern Texas and northern Mexico to plot out stage by stage the most probable route of the 2,800-mile journey of Cabeza de Vaca.
This book consists of several parts, foremost of which is the original English version of Alex Krieger's dissertation (edited by Margery Krieger), in which he traces the route of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions from the coast of Texas to Spanish settlements in western Mexico. This document is rich in information about the native groups, vegetation, geography, and material culture that the companions encountered. Thomas R. Hester's foreword and afterword set the 1955 dissertation in the context of more recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries, some of which have supported Krieger's plot of the journey. Margery Krieger's preface explains how she prepared her late husband's work for publication. Alex Krieger's original translations of the Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo accounts round out the volume.
A who's who of Lincoln scholars explores why Lincoln considered the Union the "last best hope of earth" and how his words and deeds have continued to shape the nation through modern times. Focusing on Lincoln's view of American history and his legacy for the United States and the world, this volume demonstrates the complexity of the problems Lincoln faced and the genius of his leadership in preserving the nation while purging it of slavery.
During a one-hundred-day period in 1994, Hutus murdered between half a million and a million Tutsi in Rwanda. The numbers are staggering; the methods of killing were unspeakable. Utilizing personal interviews with trauma survivors living in Rwandan cities, towns, and dusty villages, We Cannot Forget relates what happened during this period and what their lives were like both prior to and following the genocide.
Through powerful stories that are at once memorable, disturbing, and informative, readers gain a critical sense of the tensions and violence that preceded the genocide, how it erupted and was carried out, and what these people faced in the first sixteen years following the genocide.
Green interviewed many of the activists who educated journalists, government officials, and the public about the abuses taking place under the Brazilian dictatorship. Drawing on those interviews and archival research from Brazil and the United States, he describes the creation of a network of activists with international connections, the documentation of systematic torture and repression, and the cultivation of Congressional allies and the press. Those efforts helped to expose the terror of the dictatorship and undermine U.S. support for the regime. Against the background of the political and social changes of the 1960s and 1970s, Green tells the story of a decentralized, international grassroots movement that effectively challenged U.S. foreign policy.
This story explodes the popular belief that women white-collar workers tend to reject unionization and accept a passive role in the workplace. On the contrary, the women workers of Harvard University created a powerful and unique union--one that emphasizes their own values and priorities as working women and rejects unwanted aspects of traditional unionism.
The workers involved comprise Harvard's 3,600-member "support staff," which includes secretaries, library and laboratory assistants, dental hygienists, accounting clerks, and a myriad of other office workers who keep a great university functioning. Even at prestigious private universities like Harvard and Yale, these workers--mostly women--have had to put up with exploitive management policies that denied them respect and decent wages because they were women. But the women eventually rebelled, declaring that they could not live on "prestige" alone.
Encouraged by the women's movement of the early 1970's, a group of women workers (and a few men) began what would become a 15-year struggle to organize staff employees at Harvard. The women persisted in the face of patronizing and sexist attitudes of university administrators and leaders of their own national unions. Unconscionably long legal delays foiled their efforts. But they developed innovative organizing methods, which merged feminist values with demands for union representation and a means of influencing workplace decisions.
Out of adversity came an unorthodox form of unionism embodied in the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW). Its founding was marked by an absorbing human drama that pitted unknown workers, such as Kris Rondeau, a lab assistant who came to head the union, against famous educators such as Harvard President Derek Bok and a panoply of prestigious deans. Other characters caught up in the drama included Harvard's John T. Dunlop, the nation's foremost industrial relations scholar and former U.S. Secretary of Labor. The drama was played out in innumerable hearings before the National Labor Relations Board, in the streets of Cambridge, and on the walks of historic Harvard Yard, where union members marched and sang and employed new tactics like "ballooning," designed to communicate a message of joy and liberation rather than the traditional "hate-the-boss" hostility.
John Hoerr tells this story from the perspective of both Harvard administrators and union organizers. With unusual access to its meetings, leaders, and files, he examines the unique culture of a female-led union from the inside. Photographs add to the impact of this dramatic narrative.
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In essays that explore the parallels between conversion and language acquisition, isolated liturgies, cultural inheritances, stalled initiations, disrupted storytelling, and adoption, Gee examines conversion’s grief and hope, losses and gains, hauntings and promises. We Carry Smoke and Paper is a memoir about what we owe to those who sacrifice everything for us, and it is about the many conversions in a lifetime that turn our heads via whispers and shouts, calling us to ourselves.
The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the long and bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson utilized the space program as an agent for social change, using federal equal employment opportunity laws to open workplaces at NASA and NASA contractors to African Americans while creating thousands of research and technology jobs in the Deep South to ameliorate poverty. We Could Not Fail tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of how shooting for the stars helped to overcome segregation on earth.
Richard Paul and Steven Moss profile ten pioneer African American space workers whose stories illustrate the role NASA and the space program played in promoting civil rights. They recount how these technicians, mathematicians, engineers, and an astronaut candidate surmounted barriers to move, in some cases literally, from the cotton fields to the launching pad. The authors vividly describe what it was like to be the sole African American in a NASA work group and how these brave and determined men also helped to transform Southern society by integrating colleges, patenting new inventions, holding elective office, and reviving and governing defunct towns. Adding new names to the roster of civil rights heroes and a new chapter to the story of space exploration, We Could Not Fail demonstrates how African Americans broke the color barrier by competing successfully at the highest level of American intellectual and technological achievement.
The nations of the modern Americas began as successful colonies, but not all colonies succeeded, and the margin between colonies that survived and those that failed was small. Both contribute to our understanding of the ordeals of the Europeans who first settled in the New World and of the Native Americans who had to interact with them, but with the exception of the famous lost Roanoke colony, the failed colonies of North America remain largely unknown except to specialists in colonial history. The Spanish and French repeatedly attempted to colonize parts of Georgia, Florida, and Virginia, while the Dutch, French, and English sought to establish permanent settlements along the northern waterways of the New World. The greatest problem faced by every colony was the specter of starvation. Native Americans gave food to newly arrived colonists, but such generosity could not endure. Indigenous people soon realized that colonists of every nationality were prepared to make war against Native peoples, conquer, subjugate, and even massacre whole communities unless they were cooperative and offered no resistance to the intrusion into their territory. In response, Native Americans withheld aid or resorted to retaliatory violence, dooming many European settlements.
In We Could Perceive No Sign of Them: Failed Colonies in North America, 1526–1689, historians David MacDonald and Raine Waters tell the fascinating stories of the many attempts to establish a European foothold in the New World, from the first Spanish colony in 1526 on the coast of Georgia to the final disastrous French endeavors near the arctic. Using primary source texts, the authors synthesize the shared experiences of Europeans to better understand the very fine line between success and failure and the varieties of Native American responses.
Based on interviews with grassroots organizers, former guerrillas, members of neighborhood militias, and government officials, Ciccariello-Maher presents a new history of Venezuelan political activism, one told from below. Led by leftist guerrillas, women, Afro-Venezuelans, indigenous people, and students, the social movements he discusses have been struggling against corruption and repression since 1958. Ciccariello-Maher pays particular attention to the dynamic interplay between the Chávez government, revolutionary social movements, and the Venezuelan people, recasting the Bolivarian Revolution as a long-term and multifaceted process of political transformation.
Participatory democracy calls for the creation and proliferation of practices and institutions that enable individuals and groups to better determine the conditions in which they act and relate to others. Michael Menser’s timely book We Decide! is arguably the most comprehensive treatment of participatory democracy. He explains the three waves of participatory democracy theory to show that this movement is attentive to the mechanics of contemporary political practices. Menser also outlines “maximal democracy,” his own view of participatory democracy that expands people’s abilities to shape their own lives, reduce inequality, and promote solidarity.
We Decide! draws on liberal, feminist, anarchist, and environmental justice philosophies as well as in-depth case studies of Spanish factory workers, Japanese housewives, and Brazilian socialists to show that participatory democracy actually works. Menser concludes his study by presenting a reconstructed version of the state that is shaped not by corporations but by inclusive communities driven by municipal workers, elected officials, and ordinary citizens working together. In this era of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, the participatory democracy proposed in We Decide! is more significant than ever.
Though often associated with foreigners and refugees, many Somalis have lived in Kenya for generations, in many cases since long before the founding of the country. Despite their long residency, foreign and state officials and Kenyan citizens often perceive the Somali population to be a dangerous and alien presence in the country, and charges of civil and human rights abuses have mounted against them in recent years.
In We Do Not Have Borders, Keren Weitzberg examines the historical factors that led to this state of affairs. In the process, she challenges many of the most fundamental analytical categories, such as “tribe,” “race,” and “nation,” that have traditionally shaped African historiography. Her interest in the ways in which Somali representations of the past and the present inform one another places her research at the intersection of the disciplines of history, political science, and anthropology.
Given tragic events in Kenya and the controversy surrounding al-Shabaab, We Do Not Have Borders has enormous historical and contemporary significance, and provides unique inroads into debates over globalization, African sovereignty, the resurgence of religion, and the multiple meanings of being African.
Hava Rachel Gordon compares the struggles and successes of two very different youth movements: a mostly white, middle-class youth activist network in Portland, Oregon, and a working-class network of minority youth in Oakland, California. She examines how these young activists navigate schools, families, community organizations, and the mainstream media, and employ a variety of strategies to make their voices heard on some of today's most pressing issuesùwar, school funding, the environmental crisis, the prison industrial complex, standardized testing, corporate accountability, and educational reform. We Fight to Win is one of the first books to focus on adolescence and political action and deftly explore the ways that the politics of youth activism are structured by age inequality as well as race, class, and gender.
We Fish is the tale of a father and son's shared dialogue in poetry and in prose, memoir and reflection, as they delight in their time spent fishing while considering the universal challenge of raising good children. Their story and their lesson have the power to teach today's young African American men about friendship, family, and trust; and the potential to save a generation from the dangers of the modern world and from themselves.
Spanning four generations and assessing the legacies of traumatic events (arrests, murders, suicide) that are inextricable from the racial dynamics of the small community his family called home, this gripping memoir is a heartfelt, clear-eyed, and rare chronicle of Black life in the rural Midwest. Experiencing the burden of racism among people who refused to accept that such a thing existed only made the isolation feel that much worse to Sheffield and his relatives. And yet, they overcame the obstacles and managed to persist: they got by.
In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner place popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. They explore how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. They also demonstrate that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans—black and white, Latino and Native American, men and women, officers and "grunts"—whose personal reflections drive the book's narrative. Many of the voices are those of ordinary soldiers, airmen, seamen, and marines. But there are also "solo" pieces by veterans whose writings have shaped our understanding of the war—Karl Marlantes, Alfredo Vea, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bill Ehrhart, Arthur Flowers—as well as songwriters and performers whose music influenced soldiers' lives, including Eric Burdon, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Country Joe McDonald, and John Fogerty. Together their testimony taps into memories—individual and cultural—that capture a central if often overlooked component of the American war in Vietnam.
The entertaining and inspiring story of a stubbornly independent promoter and club owner
This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus at UW–Milwaukee, booking thousands of concerts across Wisconsin and the Midwest, and opening Shank Hall, the beloved Milwaukee venue named after a club in the cult film This Is Spinal Tap.
This funny, nostalgia-inducing book details the lasting friendships Jest established over the years with John Prine, Arlo Guthrie, and Milwaukee’s own Violent Femmes, among others. It also shines a light into the seldom-seen world of music promotion, as Jest attempts to manage a turbulent band on the road, negotiates with agents, deals with fires (both real and metaphorical), struggles through a pandemic, and takes pleasure in presenting music of all kinds—from world-famous acts to up-and-coming local bands. In addition to photos of celebrated musicians, the book includes concert posters, tickets, and backstage passes documenting decades of rock, folk, and alternative shows that helped put Milwaukee on the live music map.
As the music industry has become dominated by profit-driven corporations, We Had Fun and Nobody Died chronicles the career of a one-of-a-kind independent promoter whose hardheadedness and love of music have helped him keep it real and make it in the music business for more than forty years.
Written after the country gained independence, the historical novel follows two generations of al-Tihamis, a well-to-do family residing in Fez’s ancient medina. The family members’ lives reflect the profound social changes taking place in Morocco during that time. Bridging two worlds, We Buried the Past begins during the quieter days of the late colonial period, a world of seemingly timeless tradition, in which the patriarch, al-Haj Muhammad, proudly presides over the family. Here, religion is unquestioned and permeates all aspects of daily life. But the coming upheaval and imminent social transition are reflected in al-Haj’s three sons, particularly his second son, Abderrahman, who eventually defies his father and comes to symbolize the break between the old ways and the new.
Noted for marrying classical Arabic style and European literary form, this book also offers insight into the life of Ghallab himself, who was deeply involved in the nationalist movement that led to Moroccan independence. A pioneering work, We Buried the Past beautifully characterizes an influential period in the history of Morocco.
With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith.
What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour’s analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming—and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture—and so, between our culture and others, past and present.
Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape, We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.
In George William Van Cleve’s book, we encounter a sharply divided America. The Confederation faced massive war debts with virtually no authority to compel its members to pay them. It experienced punishing trade restrictions and strong resistance to American territorial expansion from powerful European governments. Bitter sectional divisions that deadlocked the Continental Congress arose from exploding western settlement. And a deep, long-lasting recession led to sharp controversies and social unrest across the country amid roiling debates over greatly increased taxes, debt relief, and paper money. Van Cleve shows how these remarkable stresses transformed the Confederation into a stalemate government and eventually led previously conflicting states, sections, and interest groups to advocate for a union powerful enough to govern a continental empire.
Touching on the stories of a wide-ranging cast of characters—including John Adams, Patrick Henry, Daniel Shays, George Washington, and Thayendanegea—Van Cleve makes clear that it was the Confederation’s failures that created a political crisis and led to the 1787 Constitution. Clearly argued and superbly written, We Have Not a Government is a must-read history of this crucial period in our nation’s early life.
Renteria looks past the public celebrations of diversity to dive into the private tensions of a community reflecting the changing American landscape. There are culture clashes, breakdancing battles, fistfights, quinceañeras, vandalism, adventures on bicycles, and souped-up lowriders, all set to an early 2000s soundtrack. Renteria and his friends struggle to find their identities and reckon with intergenerational trauma and racism in a town trying to do the same. A humorous and poignant reflection on coming of age, We Heard It When We Were Young puts its finger on a particular cultural moment at the turn of the millennium.
Looking at their photo of railroad tracks, a group of preteen students in South Central Los Angeles see either "a way out of the ghetto," or a "dirty, bad environment." Such are the impressions expressed in the poignant "We Live in the Shadow": Inner-City Kids Tell Their Stories through Photographs.
In Elaine Bell Kaplan's perceptive book, at-risk youth were given five-dollar cameras to tell stories about their world. Their photos and stories show us their response to negative inner-city teen images. We follow them into their schools, and we hear about their creative coping strategies. While these kids see South Central as dangerous, they also see themselves as confident enough to not let the inner city take them down. They refuse to be labeled as "ghetto thugs," as outsiders sometimes do. These outsiders include police, teachers, and other groups representing the institutional voices governing their daily lives.
The kids in "We Live in the Shadow": Inner-City Kids Tell Their Stories through Photographs have developed a multilayered view of society. This impressive book gives voice to their resilience.
Item #74: Enter a lecture class in street clothes. Receive loud phone call. Shout “I NEED TO GO, THE CITY NEEDS ME!” Remove street clothes to reveal superhero apparel. Run out for the good of the land.
Item #293: Hypnotizing a chicken seems easy, but if the Wikipedia article on the practice is to be believed, debate on the optimal method is heated. Do some trials on a real chicken and submit a report . . . for science of course.
Item #234: A walking, working, people-powered but preferably wind-powered Strandbeest.
Item #188: Fattest cat. Points per pound.
The University of Chicago’s annual Scavenger Hunt (or “Scav”) is one of the most storied college traditions in America. Every year, teams of hundreds of competitors scramble over four days to complete roughly 350 challenges. The tasks range from moments of silliness to 1,000-mile road trips, and they call on participants to fully embrace the absurd. For students it is a rite of passage, and for the surrounding community it is a chance to glimpse the lighter side of a notoriously serious university.
We Made Uranium! shares the stories behind Scav, told by participants and judges from the hunt’s more than thirty-year history. The twenty-three essays range from the shockingly successful (a genuine, if minuscule, nuclear reaction created in a dorm room) to the endearing failures (it’s hard to build a carwash for a train), and all the chicken hypnotisms and permanent tattoos in between. Taken together, they show how a scavenger hunt once meant for blowing off steam before finals has grown into one of the most outrageous annual traditions at any university. The tales told here are absurd, uplifting, hilarious, and thought-provoking—and they are all one hundred percent true.
We live in the twilight of neoliberalism: the ruling classes can no longer rule as before, and ordinary people are no longer willing to be ruled in the old way. Pursued by global elites since the 1970s, neoliberalism is defined by dispossession and ever-increasing inequality. The refusal to continue to be ruled like this - "ya basta!" - appears in an arc of resistance stretching from rural India to the cities of the global North.
From this network of movements, new visions are emerging of a future beyond neoliberalism. We make our own History responds to these visions by reclaiming Marxism as a theory born from activist experience and practice.
This book marks a break both with established social movement theory, and with those forms of Marxism which treat the practice of social movement organising as an unproblematic process. It shows how movements can develop from local conflicts to global struggles; how neoliberalism operates as a social movement from above, and how popular struggles can create new worlds from below.
In engaging, direct prose, Jacobsen’s three-and-a-half year experience as a prisoner of war takes the reader on a brutal and harrowing march through hatred and forgiveness, fortitude and freedom. We Refused to Die is an honest memoir that shines light on one of history’s darkest moments.
In We Remain Traditional, Sylvia Chan juxtaposes the elegy, the conflict, and the brashness of a relationship that summons wild musicality in its love and frustration. Through the speaker and Adam, the beloveds offer thirty-two consolations for the gendered history of Chinese American women—a break and affirmation of their traditions. What saves these two characters is their music—a peace treaty for the book’s form or “fractured paradise,” a language that protects and protests their bodies in Oakland, California.
Marked by vulnerability and intimacy, Chan interrogates a young woman’s childhood sexual abuse. In the vein of Stacy Doris and Paul Celan, Chan asks, because she is a child of violent tradition, what is her visceral grief? This is a speaker who aspires to create universal experiences for her listeners, to transform jazz into narrative. This is a wild, beautiful, and ambitious first book: Chan refuses to apologize for the terror in her conviction and compassion. To choose a man who is behind her sexual, psychological, and political exploitation is to forgive his narcissism, aggression, and addiction. To love, simply, is to live unafraid of pushing boundaries and being happy.
As Armando Solórzano and other researchers conducted oral history interviews with Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and other Latinos throughout the state, a number of participants began giving the team photographs, some dating back to 1895, which provided an opportunity to begin reconstructing a history through pictures, as a community project. Within two years, Solórzano and his colleagues were able to create the pictorial history of Mexican-Americans and Latinos in Utah and launched their efforts as a photo-documentary exhibit. This book collects photographs to represent different historical periods and the manifold contributions of Latinos to the state of Utah.
Readers who delve into this book may see these photos as artistic expressions or artifacts of history and photographic technique. Some readers will see images of their relatives and precursors who labored to create a better life in Utah. The images evoke both nostalgia for a time gone by and the possibility of reconstructing history with a fairer premise. The book does not tell the full story of Latinos in Utah but should prove to be a catalyst, inspiring others to continue documenting and reconstructing the neglected threads of Utah’s history, making it truly the history of all of us.
Recipient of the Meritorious Book Award from the Utah Division of State History.
“We remember, we love, we grieve” is a common epitaph in this part of the world. As contemporary Russia contends with the Soviet Union’s legacy of dismantling older ways of life, the phrase ripples beyond individual loss—it encapsulates communities’ determination to preserve their customs when faced with oppression. This volume offers insight into a core cultural practice, exploring the dynamism of tradition.
Beneath today’s crisis Aronson examines our heartbreaking story: a century of catastrophic violence and the bewildering ambiguity of progress—all of which have contributed to the evaporation of social hope. As he shows, we are now in a time when hope is increasingly privatized, when—despite all the ways we are connected to each other—we are desperately alone, struggling to weather the maelstrom around us, demoralized by the cynicism that permeates our culture and politics, and burdened with finding personal solutions to social problems.
Yet, Aronson argues, even at a time when false hopes are rife, social hope still persists. Carefully exploring what we mean when we say we “hope” and teasing hope apart from its dangerously misconstrued sibling, “progress,” he locates seeds of real change. He argues that always underlying our experience—even if we completely ignore it—is the fact of our social belonging, and that this can be reactivated into a powerful collective force, an active we. He looks to various political movements, from the massive collective force of environmentalists to the movements around Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, as powerful examples of socially energized, politically determined, and actionably engaged forms of hope. Even in this age of Donald Trump, the result is an illuminating and inspiring call that anyone can clearly hear: we can still create a better future for everyone, but only if we resist false hopes and act together.
Drawing on unpublished correspondences and personal interviews with key figures in the innovative poetry and film communities, Daniel Kane’s stunningly erudite and accessible work not only provides a fresh look at avant-garde poetry and film but also encourages readers to rethink the artistic scenes of the 1960s and today. We Saw the Light will reframe the very way we talk about how film influences poetry and force us to think anew about the radical ways in which art is created and in turn influences subsequent work.
Never before have so many scholars produced so much work--and never before have they seemed to have so little to say to one another, or to the public at large. This is the dilemma of the modern university, which today sets the pattern for virtually all scholarship. In his eloquent book, David Damrosch offers a lucid, often troubling assessment of the state of scholarship in our academic institutions, a look at how these institutions acquired their present complexion, and a proposal for reforms that can promote scholarly communication and so, perhaps, broader, more relevant scholarship.
We Scholars explores an academic culture in which disciplines are vigorously isolated and then further divided into specialized fields, making for a heady mix of scholarly alienation and disciplinary territorialism, a wealth of specialized inquiry and a poverty of general discussion. This pattern, however, is not necessary and immutable; rather, it stems from decisions made a century ago, when the American university assumed its modern form. Damrosch traces the political and economic assumptions behind these decisions and reveals their persisting effects on academic structures despite dramatic changes in the larger society. We Scholars makes a compelling case for a scholarly community more reflective of and attuned to today's needs. The author's call for cooperation as the basis for intellectual endeavor, both within and outside the academy, will resonate for anyone concerned with the present complexities and future possibilities of academic work.
Originally published in 1969, Melvyn Dubofsky's We Shall Be All has remained the definitive archive-based history of the IWW. While much has been written on aspects of the IWW's history in the past three decades, nothing has duplicated or surpassed this authoritative work. The present volume, an abridged version of this labor history classic, makes the compelling story of the IWW accessible to a new generation of readers.
In its heyday, between 1905 and 1919, the IWW nourished a dream of a better America where poverty-–material and spiritual–-would be erased and where all people, regardless of nationality or color, would walk free and equal. More than half a century ago the Wobblies tried in their own ways to grapple with issues that still plague the nation in a more sophisticated and properous era. Their example has inspired radicals in America and abroad over the greater part of a century
Howard draws on FBI files, Moscow documents, and the records of the U.S. Communist Party. He surveys these black Communists addressing a wide range of vital issues such as the Great Depression, World War II, genocide and the Cold War.
We Shall Be Free! presents an important section of the African American community whose thought has been minimized, discounted, or overlooked altogether by the historical profession in general.
An illuminating account of Russia’s attempts—and failures—to achieve great power status in Asia.
Since Peter the Great, Russian leaders have been lured by opportunity to the East. Under the tsars, Russians colonized Alaska, California, and Hawaii. The Trans-Siberian Railway linked Moscow to Vladivostok. And Stalin looked to Asia as a sphere of influence, hospitable to the spread of Soviet Communism. In Asia and the Pacific lay territory, markets, security, and glory.
But all these expansionist dreams amounted to little. In We Shall Be Masters, Chris Miller explores why, arguing that Russia’s ambitions have repeatedly outstripped its capacity. With the core of the nation concentrated thousands of miles away in the European borderlands, Russia’s would-be pioneers have always struggled to project power into Asia and to maintain public and elite interest in their far-flung pursuits. Even when the wider population professed faith in Asia’s promise, few Russians were willing to pay the steep price. Among leaders, too, dreams of empire have always been tempered by fears of cost. Most of Russia’s pivots to Asia have therefore been halfhearted and fleeting.
Today the Kremlin talks up the importance of “strategic partnership” with Xi Jinping’s China, and Vladimir Putin’s government is at pains to emphasize Russian activities across Eurasia. But while distance is covered with relative ease in the age of air travel and digital communication, the East remains far off in the ways that matter most. Miller finds that Russia’s Asian dreams are still restrained by the country’s firm rooting in Europe.
“Miller’s terrific book reminds that Russia made moves toward the East five hundred years ago, and explains why ignoring the Russian factor in Asian geopolitics today would be a big mistake.”
—Michael McFaul, author of From Cold War to Hot Peace
“Miller presents a Russia little known in the West: a Eurasian power that treats its eastern calling as seriously as it does its western one. Exceptionally well written and argued, We Shall Be Masters helps us understand Russia on its own terms and offers historical insight into the future of its relations with China, its main rival and occasional ally.”
—Serhii Plokhy, author of The Gates of Europe
“Challenges the conventional view that [Russia] has enduring interests in the Far East…For Russia, Miller argues, Asia has been a land of unfulfilled promises.”
—Foreign Affairs
“Captures the immensity, complexity, and importance of Russia’s eastern borderlands through the eyes of its explorers…Comprehensive and fluidly written.”
—Publishers Weekly
Ever since Peter the Great, Russian leaders have been lured by the promise of the East. But from the tsars to Stalin and beyond, Russia’s ambitions have repeatedly outstripped its capacity. In We Shall Be Masters, Chris Miller explores why these expansionist dreams so often ended in disappointment. With the heart of the nation in the European borderlands, Russia’s would-be pioneers struggled to maintain public interest in their far-flung pursuits. But its leaders never stopped setting their sights on the riches of the East. Today, as Vladimir Putin seeks to cement his strategic partnership with Xi Jinping’s China, the East remains as elusive and attractive to Russia as ever—and is likely to be as unattainable.
Suicide is a quintessentially individual act, yet one with unexpectedly broad social implications. Though seen today as a private phenomenon, in the uncertain aftermath of the American Revolution this personal act seemed to many to be a public threat that held no less than the fate of the fledgling Republic in its grip.
Salacious novelists and eager newspapermen broadcast images of a young nation rapidly destroying itself. Parents, physicians, ministers, and magistrates debated the meaning of self-destruction and whether it could (or should) be prevented. Jailers and justice officials rushed to thwart condemned prisoners who made halters from bedsheets, while abolitionists used slave suicides as testimony to both the ravages of the peculiar institution and the humanity of its victims. Struggling to create a viable political community out of extraordinary national turmoil, these interest groups invoked self-murder as a means to confront the most consequential questions facing the newly united states: What is the appropriate balance between individual liberty and social order? Who owns the self? And how far should the control of the state (or the church, or a husband, or a master) extend over the individual?
With visceral prose and an abundance of evocative primary sources, Richard Bell lays bare the ways in which self-destruction in early America was perceived as a transgressive challenge to embodied authority, a portent of both danger and possibility. His unique study of suicide between the Revolution and Reconstruction uncovers what was at stake—personally and politically—in the nation’s fraught first decades.
In We Shall Bear Witness, editors Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly assemble moving personal accounts from those who have endured persecution, imprisonment, and torture; meditations on experiences of injustice and protest by creative writers and filmmakers; and innovative research on ways that digital media, commodification, and geopolitics are shaping what is possible to hear and say. The book’s primary sections—testimony, recognition, representation, and justice—evoke the key stages in turning experience into a human rights life story and attend to such diverse and varied arts as autobiography, documentary film, report, oral history, blog, and verbatim theater. The result is a groundbreaking book that sensitively examines how life and rights narratives have become so powerfully entwined. Also included is an innovative guide to teaching human rights and life narrative in the classroom.
In 1922, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a leader of the Zionist movement, established the Jewish Institute of Religion (JIR), a nondenominational rabbinical seminary in New York City. Having already founded the thriving Free Synagogue movement and the American Jewish Congress, he intended to revolutionize American liberal Judaism. Wise believed mainstream American Jewish institutions had become outdated, and he championed a progressive Jewish nationalism that would fight alongside America’s leading proponents of social and economic justice.
We Shall Build Anew tells the little-known story of how Wise changed the trajectory of American Judaism for the next century. Through JIR, he trained a new cadre of young rabbis who shared his outlook, charged them with invigorating and reshaping Jewish life, and launched them into positions of leadership across the country. While Wise earned the ire of many mainstream Jewish leaders through his disregard for denominational distinctions, JIR became home to faculty and students of widely divergent religious and political viewpoints.
We Shall Build Anew is the first book dedicated exclusively to the history of the Jewish Institute of Religion. The story of Wise’s vision for American liberal Judaism is now more important than ever. As American Jewry becomes increasingly polarized around debates concerning religious doctrine as well as Zionism and Israel, the JIR model offers hope that progressives and conservatives, Zionists and non-Zionists, and Jews representing the full spectrum of religious life cannot only coexist but also work together in the name of a vibrant Judaism and a just and peaceful world.
The activist anthem “We Shall Not Be Moved” expresses resolve in the face of adversity; it helps members of social movements persevere in their struggles to build a better world. The exact origins of the song are unknown, but it appears to have begun as a Protestant revival song sung by rural whites and African slaves in the southeastern United States in the early nineteenth century. The song was subsequently adopted by U.S. labor and civil rights activists, students and workers opposing the Franco dictatorship in Spain, and by Chilean supporters of that country’s socialist government in the early 1970s.
In his fascinating biography, We Shall Not Be Moved, David Spener details the history and the role the song has played in each of the movements in which it has been sung. He analyzes its dissemination, function, and meaning through a number of different sociological and anthropological lenses to explore how songs can serve as an invaluable resource to participants in movements for social change.
Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for.
It is within this context that We Stay the Same grounds questions of hope for transformative economic change within Lavongai assessments of the inequitable relationships between global processes of resource development and the local lives that have become increasingly defined by the necessities and failures of these processes.
Written in a clear and relatable style for students, We Stay the Same combines ethnographic and ecological research to show how the Lavongai continue to survive and make meaningful lives in a situation where their own hopes for a better future have often been used against them as a mechanism of a more distantly profitable dispossession.
An adroit collection of essays exposing the constitution for what it really is – a rulebook to protect capitalism for the elites.
Written by 55 of the richest white men of early America, and signed by only 39 of them, the constitution is the sacred text of American nationalism. Popular perceptions of it are mired in idolatry, myth, and misinformation - many Americans have opinions on the constitution but have no idea what’s in it.
The misplaced faith of social movements in the constitution as a framework for achieving justice actually obstructs social change - incessant lengthy election cycles, staggered terms, and legislative sessions have kept social movements trapped in a redundant loop. This stymies progress on issues like labor rights, public health, and climate change, projecting the American people and the rest of the world towards destruction.
Robert Ovetz’s reading of the constitution shows that the system isn’t broken. Far from it. It works as it was designed.
In a new preface to this foundational book on the American jury, Jeffrey Abramson responds to his critics, defends his views on the jury as an embodiment of deliberative democracy in action, and reflects on recent jury trials and reforms.
Praise for the previous edition:
“Power to the persuasive! That’s the message of Jeffrey Abramson’s incisive, thoroughly researched, demanding book about the role of the jury in American democracy…At a rare moment when the media have whetted the public appetite for commentary about the jury, of all things, a fresh, substantial [book] has come along.”—Washington Post Book World
“Anyone tempted to ridicule juries…should read Jeffrey Abramson’s profound and eloquent defense of the American jury system…Mr. Abramson has faith in juries because they are a form of democratic justice. He describes in fascinating detail how democracy in America has developed over the years in tandem with the jury system.”—The Economist
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