front cover of Birkenau, The Camp Of Death
Birkenau, The Camp Of Death
Marco Nahon
University of Alabama Press, 1989

front cover of Blazing Cane
Blazing Cane
Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868–1959
Gillian McGillivray
Duke University Press, 2009
Sugar was Cuba’s principal export from the late eighteenth century throughout much of the twentieth, and during that time, the majority of the island’s population depended on sugar production for its livelihood. In Blazing Cane, Gillian McGillivray examines the development of social classes linked to sugar production, and their contribution to the formation and transformation of the state, from the first Cuban Revolution for Independence in 1868 through the Cuban Revolution of 1959. She describes how cane burning became a powerful way for farmers, workers, and revolutionaries to commit sabotage, take control of the harvest season, improve working conditions, protest political repression, attack colonialism and imperialism, nationalize sugarmills, and, ultimately, acquire greater political and economic power.

Focusing on sugar communities in eastern and central Cuba, McGillivray recounts how farmers and workers pushed the Cuban government to move from exclusive to inclusive politics and back again. The revolutionary caudillo networks that formed between 1895 and 1898, the farmer alliances that coalesced in the 1920s, and the working-class groups of the 1930s affected both day-to-day local politics and larger state-building efforts. Not limiting her analysis to the island, McGillivray shows that twentieth-century Cuban history reflected broader trends in the Western Hemisphere, from modernity to popular nationalism to Cold War repression.

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Cuba
Order and Revolution
Jorge I. Domínguez
Harvard University Press, 1978

Upon publication in the late 1970s this book was the first major historical analysis of twentieth-century Cuba. Focusing on the way Cuba has been governed, and in particular on the way a changing elite has made claims to legitimate rule, it carefully examines each of Cuba’s three main political eras: the first, from Independence in 1902 to the Presidency of Gerardo Machado in 1933; the second, under Batista, from 1934 until 1958; and finally, Castro’s revolution, from 1959 to the present.

Jorge Domínguez discusses the political roles played by interest groups, mass organizations, and the military. He also investigates the impact of international affairs on Cuba and provides the first printed data on many aspects of political, economic, and social change since 1959. He deals in depth with agrarian politics and peasant protest since 1937, and his concluding chapter on Cuba’s present culture is a fascinating insight into a society which—though vitally important—remains mysterious to most readers in the United States.

Cuba’s role in international affairs is vastly greater than its size. The revolution led by Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the missile crisis in 1962, the underwriting of revolution in Latin America and recently in Africa—all these events have thrust Cuba onto the modern world stage. Anyone hoping to understand this country and its people, and above all its changing systems of government, will find this book essential.

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The Cuban Counterrevolution
Jesús Arboleya
Ohio University Press, 2000

For forty years the Cuban Revolution has been at the forefront of American public opinion, yet few are knowledgeable about the history of its enemies and the responsibility of the U.S. government in organizing and sustaining the Cuban counterrevolution. Available in English for the first time, this outstanding study by Cuban historian and former diplomat Jesús Arboleya traces the evolution of the counterrevolutionary movement from its beginnings before 1959, to its transformation into the Cuban-American groups that today dominate U.S. policy toward Cuba. Arboleya also analyzes the role played by Cuban immigrants to the U.S. and the perspectives for improvement in relations between the two nations as a result of the generational and social changes that have been occurring in the Cuban-American community.

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front cover of From a Darkened Room
From a Darkened Room
The Inman Diary
Arthur C. Inman
Harvard University Press, 1996

Only a few of us seek immortality, and fewer still by writing. But Arthur Inman challenged the odds. He calculated that if he kept a diary and spared no thoughts or actions, was entirely honest and open, and did not care about damage or harm to himself or others, he would succeed in gaining attention beyond the grave that he could not attain in life.

The diary became a many-layered and strikingly animated work of a gifted writer, by turns charming, repellent, shocking, cruel, and comical. But the diary is also an uninhibited history of his times, of his eccentricities and fantasies, of his bizarre marriage arrangements and sexual adventures. Inman’s explorations of his own troubled nature made him excessively curious about the secret lives of others. Like some ghostly doctor-priest, he chronicled their outpourings of head and heart as vividly as he did his own. The diary reads like a nonfiction novel as it moves inexorably toward disaster.

This is an abridged version of the celebrated two-volume work published by Harvard as The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession.

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front cover of Persian Diary, 1939-1941
Persian Diary, 1939-1941
Walter N. Koelz
University of Michigan Press, 1983
Naturalist and zoologist Walter Koelz traveled to Iran on a project of plant exploration (sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture) from late 1939 to early 1941. With him were three companions: Rup Chand, Wangyel, and Rinchen Gialtsen. Together they brought back 3000 seed samples, 4000 herbarium specimens, and a collection of bird skins. Koelz’s diary of that journey is presented in this volume, with an introduction by Henry T. Wright. Includes dozens of black and white photos.
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front cover of Rac(e)Ing To The Right
Rac(e)Ing To The Right
Selected Essays George S. Schuyler
George S. Schuyler
University of Tennessee Press, 2001
“Rac(e)ing to the Right is a great read and brings overdue attention to one of the most popular and controversial African American writers in history. . . . These writings reveal both the presence and the limits of conservatism in the African American intellectual tradition.”—Jeffrey A. Tucker, University of Rochester

From the 1920s to the 1970s, George S. Schuyler was one of the country’s most prolific—and controversial—observers of African American life. As journalist, socialist, novelist, right-wing conservative, and, finally, political outcast, his thought was rife with insight and contradiction. Until now, only Schuyler’s fiction has found its way back into print. Rac(e)ing to the Right is the first collection of his political and cultural criticism.

The essays gathered by Jeffrey Leak encompass three key periods of Schuyler’s development. The first section follows his literary evolution in the 1920s and 1930s, during which time he deserted the U.S. Army and briefly became a member of the Socialist Party. Part II reveals his shift toward political conservatism in response to World War II and the perceived threat of Communism. Part III covers the civil rights movement of the 1960s—an era that prompted some of his most extreme and volatile critiques of black leadership and liberal ideology. The book includes many essays that are not well known as well as pieces that have never before been published. One notable example is the first printed transcript of Schuyler’s 1961 debate on the Black Muslims with Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and C. Eric Lincoln.

Because African American experience is more often than not associated with liberalism and the left, the idea of a black conservative strikes many as an anomaly. Schuyler’s writings, however, force us to broaden and rethink our political and cultural conceptions. At times misguided, at times prophetic, his work expands our understanding of black intellectual thought in the twentieth century.

The Editor: Jeffrey B. Leak is assistant professor of African American literature at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has published articles and reviews in Callaloo, African American Review, and The Oxford Companion to African American Literature.
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Reyita
The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century
María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno
Duke University Press, 2000
María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno (1902–1997), a black woman known as “Reyita,” recounts her life in Cuba over the span of ninety years. Reyita’s voice is at once dignified, warm, defiant, strong, poetic, principled, and intelligent. Her story—as told to and recorded by her daughter Daisy Castillo—begins in Africa with her own grandmother’s abduction by slave-traders and continues through a century of experiences with prejudice, struggle, and change in Cuba for Reyita and her numerous family members.
Sensitive to and deeply knowledgeable of the systemic causes and consequences of poverty, Reyita’s testimony considers the impact of slavery on succeeding generations, her mother’s internalized racism, and Cuba’s residual discrimination. The humiliation and poverty inflicted on the black Cuban community as well as her decision to marry a white man to ensure a higher standard of living form the basis of other chapters. Reyita actively participated in the life of the community—often caring for the children of prostitutes along with her own eight children and giving herbal medicine and “spiritualist” guidance to ill or troubled neighbors. She describes her growing resistance, over five decades of marriage, to her husband’s sexism and negativity. Strong-willed and frank about her sexuality as well as her religious and political convictions, Reyita recounts joining the revolutionary movement in the face of her husband’s stern objections, a decision that added significant political purpose to her life. At book’s end, Reyita radiates gratification that her 118 descendants have many different hues of skin, enjoy a variety of professions, and—“most importantly”—are free of racial prejudice.
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front cover of Tom Ashley Sam Tom Ashley, Sam McGee, Bukka White
Tom Ashley Sam Tom Ashley, Sam McGee, Bukka White
Tennessee Traditional Singers
Thomas G. Burton
University of Tennessee Press, 1981
Based on a deep understanding of several genres of music, Burton shows the diversity of traditional music, and particularly singing styles, in the state that is the gateway for blues, country, and folk music.
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front cover of Wings over the Mexican Border
Wings over the Mexican Border
Pioneer Military Aviation in the Big Bend
By Kenneth Baxter Ragsdale
University of Texas Press, 1997

Against a backdrop of revolution, border banditry, freewheeling aerial dramatics, and World War II comes this compelling look at the rise of U.S. combat aviation at an unlikely proving ground—a remote airfield in the rugged reaches of the southwestern Texas borderlands. Here, at Elmo Johnson's Big Bend ranch, hundreds of young Army Air Corps pilots demonstrated the U.S. military's reconnaissance and emergency response capabilities and, in so doing, dramatized the changing role of the airplane as an instrument of war and peace.

Kenneth Ragsdale's gripping account not only sets the United States squarely in the forefront of aerial development but also provides a reflective look at U.S.-Mexican relations of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, particularly the tense days and aftermath of the Escobar Rebellion of 1929. He paints a vivid picture of the development of the U.S. aerial strike force; the character, ideals, and expectations of the men who would one day become combat leaders; and the high esteem in which U.S. citizens held the courageous pilots.

Particularly noteworthy is Ragsdale's portrait of Elmo Johnson, the Big Bend rancher, trader, and rural sage who emerges as the dominant figure at one of the most unusual facilities in the annals of the Air Corps. Wings over the Mexican Border tells a stirring story of the American frontier juxtaposed with the new age of aerial technology.

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front cover of Wrapped in Beauty
Wrapped in Beauty
The Koelz Collection of Kashmiri Shawls
Grace Beardsley in collaboration with Carla M. Sinopoli
University of Michigan Press, 2005
This richly illustrated volume examines the remarkable Kashmiri shawls of the Walter Koelz Collection of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. Part I presents the history, production, forms, and ornamentation of Kashmiri shawls, focusing on the impact of social contexts and the advent of the Jacquard loom on shawl development. Part II is a detailed descriptive catalogue of the shawls in the Koelz Collection. An accompanying CD-ROM includes color illustrations of the shawls in the collection as well as a transcribed manuscript by Koelz.
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