In 1917, Henri Gaillard led a delegation of deaf French men to the United States for the centennial celebration of the American School for the Deaf (ASD). The oldest school for deaf students in America, ASD had been cofounded by renowned deaf French teacher Laurent Clerc, thus inspiring Gaillard’s invitation. Gaillard visited deaf people everywhere he went and recorded his impressions in a detailed journal. His essays present a sharply focused portrait of the many facets of Deaf America during a pivotal year in its history.
Gaillard crossed the Atlantic only a few weeks after the United States entered World War I. In his writings, he reports the efforts of American deaf leaders to secure employment for deaf workers to support the war effort. He also witnesses spirited speeches at the National Association of the Deaf convention decrying the replacement of sign language by oral education. Gaillard also depicts the many local institutions established by deaf Americans, such as Philadelphia’s All Souls Church, founded in 1888 by the country’s first ordained deaf pastor, and the many deaf clubs established by the first wave of deaf college graduates in their communities. His journal stands as a unique chronicle of the American Deaf community during a remarkable era of transition.
While gangs and gang culture have been around for countless centuries, The Gang is one of the first academic studies of the phenomenon. Originally published in 1927, Frederic Milton Thrasher’s magnum opus offers a profound and careful analysis of hundreds of gangs in Chicago in the early part of the twentieth century. With rich prose and an eye for detail, Thrasher looked specifically at the way in which urban geography shaped gangs, and posited the thesis that neighborhoods in flux were more likely to produce gangs. Moreover, he traced gang culture back to feudal and medieval power systems and linked tribal ethos in other societies to codes of honor and glory found in American gangs. Thrasher approaches his subject with empathy and insightfulness, and creates a multifaceted and textured portrait that still has much to offer to readers today. With handsome images that evoke the era, this unabridged edition of The Gang not only explores an important moment in the history of Chicago, but also is itself a landmark in the history of sociology and subcultural theory.
In the formative years of the Japanese labor movement after World War II, the socialist unions affiliated with the General Council of Trade Unions (the labor federation known colloquially as Sohyo) formally endorsed the principles of women’s equality in the workforce and put in place measures to promote women’s active participation in union activities. However, union leaders did not embrace the legal framework for gender equality mandated by their American occupiers; rather, they pressured thousands of women labor activists to assume supportive roles that privileged a male-centered social agenda. By the late 1950s, even Japan’s radical socialist unions had reestablished the primacy of conservative gender norms, channeling women’s labor activism to support political campaigns that advantaged a male-headed household and that relegated women’s wage-earning value to the periphery of the household economy.
By showing how unions raised the wages of male workers in part by transforming working-class women into middle-class housewives, Christopher Gerteis demonstrates that organized labor’s discourse on womanhood not only undermined women’s status within the labor movement but also prevented unions from linking with the emerging woman-led, neighborhood-centered organizations that typified social movements in the 1960s—a misstep that contributed to the decline of the socialist labor movement in subsequent decades.
One of the most momentous stories of the last century is China’s rise from a self-satisfied, anti-modern, decaying society into a global power that promises to one day rival the United States. Chiang Kai-shek, an autocratic, larger-than-life figure, dominates this story. A modernist as well as a neo-Confucianist, Chiang was a man of war who led the most ancient and populous country in the world through a quarter century of bloody revolutions, civil conflict, and wars of resistance against Japanese aggression.
In 1949, when he was defeated by Mao Zedong—his archrival for leadership of China—he fled to Taiwan, where he ruled for another twenty-five years. Playing a key role in the cold war with China, Chiang suppressed opposition with his “white terror,” controlled inflation and corruption, carried out land reform, and raised personal income, health, and educational levels on the island. Consciously or not, he set the stage for Taiwan’s evolution of a Chinese model of democratic modernization.
Drawing heavily on Chinese sources including Chiang’s diaries, The Generalissimo provides the most lively, sweeping, and objective biography yet of a man whose length of uninterrupted, active engagement at the highest levels in the march of history is excelled by few, if any, in modern history. Jay Taylor shows a man who was exceedingly ruthless and temperamental but who was also courageous and conscientious in matters of state. Revealing fascinating aspects of Chiang’s life, Taylor provides penetrating insight into the dynamics of the past that lie behind the struggle for modernity of mainland China and its relationship with Taiwan.
This is a thorough evaluation of the experience shared by a crucial generation of American women, widely known but never fully understood: the progressive social reformers of the early twentieth century. Lagemann portrays five such reformers, Grace Dodge, Maud Nathan, Lillian Wald, Leonora O'Reilly, and Rose Schneiderman, all of New York. Her work breaks new ground with its analysis of the forces that shaped the development of these women, their personalities, their careers, and their consciousness.
Lagemann's concern is education--not in the limited sense of going to college, but education as a lifelong "process of interaction that changes the self." She deals with the combined influences of pedagogy--especially that of parents, vocational mentors, and colleagues--work, and feminism. Lagemann skillfully demonstrates the effects of social, cultural, economic, and intellectual currents on the education of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The relationships Lagemann shows between education and individual achievement and between education and social change create a new understanding of feminism and progressivism in the early twentieth century.
Gentlemen Bankers investigates the social and economic circles of one of America’s most renowned and influential financiers to uncover how the Morgan family’s power and prestige stemmed from its unique position within a network of local and international relationships.
At the turn of the twentieth century, private banking was a personal enterprise in which business relationships were a statement of identity and reputation. In an era when ethnic and religious differences were pronounced and anti-Semitism was prevalent, Anglo-American and German-Jewish elite bankers lived in their respective cordoned communities, seldom interacting with one another outside the business realm. Ironically, the tacit agreement to maintain separate social spheres made it easier to cooperate in purely financial matters on Wall Street. But as Susie Pak demonstrates, the Morgans’ exceptional relationship with the German-Jewish investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co., their strongest competitor and also an important collaborator, was entangled in ways that went far beyond the pursuit of mutual profitability.
Delving into the archives of many Morgan partners and legacies, Gentlemen Bankers draws on never-before published letters and testimony to tell a closely focused story of how economic and political interests intersected with personal rivalries and friendships among the Wall Street aristocracy during the first half of the twentieth century.
In 1945 the United States saw the Soviet Union as its principal ally. By 1947, it saw the Soviet Union as its principal opponent. How did this happen? Historian John Lukacs has provided an answer to this question through an exchange of letters with George F. Kennan. Their correspondence deals with the antecedents of containment between 1944 and 1946, during most of which time Kennan was at the American embassy in Moscow.
Kennan had strong opinions about America's appropriate role during and after World War II and is perhaps best known as the architect of America's containment policy. Much has been written about Kennan and containment, but relatively little is known about the events that made him compose and send the Long Telegram in 1946 that ultimately became the draft for foreign policy dealing with the Soviets in the following forty years.
These letters show Kennan's fear of the extent to which the United States misunderstood the Soviet regime. Especially in 1944, at the time of the Russians' betrayal of the Warsaw Uprising, it became evident that the Soviets were interested in establishing their rigid domination of Eastern and Central Europe and dividing the continent.
Kennan's letters to Lukacs are thorough and detailed, suggesting that the Truman administration was not in the least premature in opposing the Soviet Union. Indeed, both correspondents suggest that these decisions should have been made earlier. This series of letters will add greatly to our understanding of what preceded containment and the Cold War in 1947.
In the fading evening light of August 4, 1914, Great Britain’s H.M.S. Telconia set off on a mission to sever the five transatlantic cables linking Germany and the United States. Thus Britain launched its first attack of World War I and simultaneously commenced what became the war’s most decisive battle: the battle for American public opinion.
In this revealing study, Chad Fulwider analyzes the efforts undertaken by German organizations, including the German Foreign Ministry, to keep the United States out of the war. Utilizing archival records, newspapers, and “official” propaganda, the book also assesses the cultural impact of Germany’s political mission within the United States and comments upon the perception of American life in Europe during the early twentieth century.
Fascination with the evil of the Nazi regime has not diminished in the decades since Hitler assumed power in Germany, but the story of internal resistance to Nazism has not been as fully realized as have the innumerable tales of horror. In this compact book Peter Hoffmann examines the growing recognition by some Germans in the 1930s of the malign nature of the Nazi regime, the ways in which these people became involved in the resistance, and the views of those who staked their lives in the struggle against tyranny and murder.
The earliest postwar accounts of the resistance by survivors and witnesses were followed by a variety of investigations and evaluations. Peter Hoffrnann here presents a complete reconstruction of this baffling and intriguing story. After several decades of study of the German resistance to Nazism, he has unlocked the secrets of its inner history. Hoffmann recounts the methods of Hitler's rise to power in the tumultuous days of January and February 1933, the consolidation of his power as a result of the Röhm Massacre in 1934, and his growing criminality as evidenced by the rape of Czechoslovakia and the pogrom of 1938. The author describes the several attempts in 1938 and during the war years to dislodge Hitler from within; the desperation of the luckless opponents over the carnage of war and the mass murders that threatened to engulf them; and finally, the attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. Throughout, he probes the motives of the resisters. Some, for example, found it difficult to justify assassination, even for the purpose of bringing an end to mass killing. Hoffmann examines and discounts the accusation that the principal motive of those who resisted was to preserve their class privileges. The resisters, he concludes, acted not so much in the hope of personal gain as from a moral obligation to challenge the evils they saw before them.
The poignant story of Holocaust survivors who returned to their hometown in Poland and tried to pick up the pieces of a shattered world.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the lives of Polish Jews were marked by violence and emigration. But some of those who had survived the Nazi genocide returned to their hometowns and tried to start their lives anew. Lukasz Krzyzanowski recounts the story of this largely forgotten group of Holocaust survivors. Focusing on Radom, an industrial city about sixty miles south of Warsaw, he tells the story of what happened throughout provincial Poland as returnees faced new struggles along with massive political, social, and legal change.
Non-Jewish locals mostly viewed the survivors with contempt and hostility. Many Jews left immediately, escaping anti-Semitic violence inflicted by new communist authorities and ordinary Poles. Those who stayed created a small, isolated community. Amid the devastation of Poland, recurring violence, and bureaucratic hurdles, they tried to start over. They attempted to rebuild local Jewish life, recover their homes and workplaces, and reclaim property appropriated by non-Jewish Poles or the state. At times they turned on their own. Krzyzanowski recounts stories of Jewish gangs bent on depriving returnees of their prewar possessions and of survivors shunned for their wartime conduct.
The experiences of returning Jews provide important insights into the dynamics of post-genocide recovery. Drawing on a rare collection of documents—including the postwar Radom Jewish Committee records, which were discovered by the secret police in 1974—Ghost Citizens is the moving story of Holocaust survivors and their struggle to restore their lives in a place that was no longer home.
Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism, the first new biography in more than three decades, offers a fresh interpretation of the life and work of the famed conservationist and Progressive politician. In addition to considering Gifford Pinchot's role in the environmental movement, historian Char Miller sets forth an engaging description and analysis of the man -- his character, passions, and personality -- and the larger world through which he moved.
Char Miller begins by describing Pinchot's early years and the often overlooked influence of his family and their aspirations for him. He examines Gifford Pinchot's post-graduate education in France and his ensuing efforts in promoting the profession of forestry in the United States and in establishing and running the Forest Service. While Pinchot's twelve years as chief forester (1898-1910) are the ones most historians and biographers focus on, Char Miller also offers an extensive examination of Pinchot's post-federal career as head of The National Conservation Association and as two-term governor of Pennsylvania. In addition, he looks at Pinchot's marriage to feminist Cornelia Bryce and discusses her role in Pinchot's political radicalization throughout the 1920s and 1930s. An epilogue explores Gifford Pinchot's final years and writings.
Char Miller offers a provocative reconsideration of key events in Pinchot's life, including his relationship with friend and mentor John Muir and their famous disagreement over damming Hetch Hetchy Valley. The author brings together insights from cultural and social history and recently discovered primary sources to support a new interpretation of Pinchot -- whose activism not only helped define environmental politics in early twentieth century America but remains strikingly relevant today.
The story of globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as experienced by ordinary people in the Chinese river town of Zhenjiang.
Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered outside the city walls in the summer of 1842. Already suspicious of foreigners, locals had also heard of the suffering the British inflicted two months earlier, in Zhapu. A wave of suicides and mercy killings ensued: rather than leave their families to the invaders, hundreds of women killed themselves and their children or died at the hands of male family members. British observers decried an “Asian culture” of ritual suicide. In reality, the event was sui generis—a tragic result of colliding local and global forces in nineteenth-century China.
Xin Zhang’s groundbreaking history examines the intense negotiations between local societies and global changes that created modern China. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world-historic political, economic, and technological developments transformed the textures of everyday life in places like Zhenjiang, a midsize river town in China’s prosperous Lower Yangzi region. Drawing on rare primary sources, including handwritten diaries and other personal writings, Zhang offers a ground-level view of globalization in the city. We see civilians coping with the traumatic international encounters of the Opium War; Zhenjiang brokers bankrolling Shanghai’s ascendance as a cosmopolitan commercial hub; and merchants shipping goods to market, for the first time, on steamships.
Far from passive recipients, the Chinese leveraged, resisted, and made change for themselves. Indeed, The Global in the Local argues that globalization is inevitably refracted through local particularities.
Global Interdependence provides a new account of world history from the end of World War II to the present, an era when transnational communities began to challenge the long domination of the nation-state. In this single-volume survey, leading scholars elucidate the political, economic, cultural, and environmental forces that have shaped the planet in the past sixty years.
Offering fresh insight into international politics since 1945, Wilfried Loth examines how miscalculations by both the United States and Soviet Union brought about a Cold War conflict that was not necessarily inevitable. Thomas Zeiler explains how American free-market principles spurred the creation of an entirely new economic order—a global system in which goods and money flowed across national borders at an unprecedented rate, fueling growth for some nations while also creating inequalities in large parts of the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. From an environmental viewpoint, John McNeill and Peter Engelke contend that humanity has entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene era, in which massive industrialization and population growth have become the most powerful influences upon global ecology. Petra Goedde analyzes how globalization has impacted indigenous cultures and questions the extent to which a generic culture has erased distinctiveness and authenticity. She shows how, paradoxically, the more cultures blended, the more diversified they became as well.
Combining these different perspectives, volume editor Akira Iriye presents a model of transnational historiography in which individuals and groups enter history not primarily as citizens of a country but as migrants, tourists, artists, and missionaries—actors who create networks that transcend traditional geopolitical boundaries.
Offering a fresh look at trade during the second industrial revolution, Global Markets Transformed describes a world of commodities on the move—wheat and rice, coffee and tobacco, oil and rubber, all jostling around the planet through a matrix of producers, processors, transporters, and buyers. Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells discuss how innovations in industrial and agricultural production, transportation, commerce, and finance transformed the world economy from 1870 to 1945.
Topik and Wells trace the evolution of global chains of commodities, from basic food staples and stimulants to strategically important industrial materials, that linked the agricultural and mineral-producing areas of Latin America, Asia, and Africa to European and North American consumers and industrialists. People living a great distance apart became economically intertwined as never before. Yet laborers and consumers at opposite ends of commodity chains remained largely invisible to one another. Affluent American automobile owners who were creating the skyrocketing demand for tires, for example, knew almost nothing about poor Brazilian tappers who sweated in the Amazon to supply the rubber necessary for their vehicles.
As commodity chains stretched out around the world, more goods were bound up in markets that benefited some countries more than others. Global Markets Transformed highlights the lessons and legacy of the early years of globalization—when the world’s population doubled, trade quadrupled, industrial output multiplied fivefold, and the gap between rich and poor regions grew ever wider.
As new networks of railways, steamships, and telegraph communications brought distant places into unprecedented proximity, previously minor discrepancies in local time-telling became a global problem. Vanessa Ogle’s chronicle of the struggle to standardize clock times and calendars from 1870 to 1950 highlights the many hurdles that proponents of uniformity faced in establishing international standards.
Time played a foundational role in nineteenth-century globalization. Growing interconnectedness prompted contemporaries to reflect on the annihilation of space and distance and to develop a global consciousness. Time—historical, evolutionary, religious, social, and legal—provided a basis for comparing the world’s nations and societies, and it established hierarchies that separated “advanced” from “backward” peoples in an age when such distinctions underwrote European imperialism.
Debates and disagreements on the varieties of time drew in a wide array of observers: German government officials, British social reformers, colonial administrators, Indian nationalists, Arab reformers, Muslim scholars, and League of Nations bureaucrats. Such exchanges often heightened national and regional disparities. The standardization of clock times therefore remained incomplete as late as the 1940s, and the sought-after unification of calendars never came to pass. The Global Transformation of Time reveals how globalization was less a relentlessly homogenizing force than a slow and uneven process of adoption and adaptation that often accentuated national differences.
Americans have long considered their country to be good—a nation "under God" with a profound role to play in the world. Yet nothing tests that proposition like war. Raymond Haberski argues that since 1945 the common moral assumptions expressed in an American civil religion have become increasingly defined by the nation's experience with war.
God and War traces how three great postwar “trials”—the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror—have revealed the promise and perils of an American civil religion. Throughout the Cold War, Americans combined faith in God and faith in the nation to struggle against not only communism but their own internal demons. The Vietnam War tested whether America remained a nation "under God," inspiring, somewhat ironically, an awakening among a group of religious, intellectual and political leaders to save the nation's soul. With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 behind us and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, Americans might now explore whether civil religion can exist apart from the power of war to affirm the value of the nation to its people and the world.
A master historian traces the flourishing of organized religion in Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1960s, revealing how faith adapted and thrived in the supposed capital of American secularism.
In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity’s rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community.
Yet fears of religion’s demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 1950s Manhattan was full of the sacred. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries great and small. Manhattan became a center of religious publishing and broadcasting and was home to august spiritual reformers from Reinhold Niebuhr to Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. A host of white nontraditional groups met in midtown hotels, while black worshippers gathered in Harlem’s storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped the lived religion of congregations, founded missionary societies, and, in organizations such as the Zionist Hadassah, fused spirituality and political activism. And after 1945, when Manhattan’s young families rushed to New Jersey and Long Island’s booming suburbs, they recreated the religious institutions that had shaped their youth.
God in Gotham portrays a city where people of faith engaged modernity rather than foundered in it. Far from the world of “disenchantment” that sociologist Max Weber bemoaned, modern Manhattan actually birthed an urban spiritual landscape of unparalleled breadth, suggesting that modernity enabled rather than crippled religion in America well into the 1960s.
“Are you there, God? It’s me, Manhattan…Butler…argues that far from being a Sodom on the Hudson, New York was a center of religious dynamism throughout the 20th century.”
—Wall Street Journal
“What a pleasure it is to take a tour of Manhattan’s sacred past led by one of the nation’s preeminent religious historians.”
—Christianity Today
“A masterwork by a master historian…God in Gotham should be an instant classic.”
—Jonathan D. Sarna, author of American Judaism
In Gilded Age Manhattan, religious leaders agonized over the fate of traditional faith practice amid chaotic and sometimes terrifying change. Massive immigration, urban anonymity, and the bureaucratization of modern life tore at the binding fibers of religious community.
Yet fears of the demise of religion were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism as Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries. A center of religious publishing and broadcasting, by the 1950s it was home to Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. While white spiritual seekers sometimes met in midtown hotels, black worshippers gathered in Harlem’s storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped congregations, founded missionary societies, and fused spirituality and political activism. God in Gotham portrays a city where people of faith embraced modernity and thrived.
Loathed by mainstream Southern Baptists, J. Frank Norris (1877–1952) was in many ways the Southern Baptist Convention’s first fundamentalist. Twenty-five years after its first publication, this second edition of Barry Hankins’s field-defining work God’s Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism engages new scholar- ship on American fundamentalism to reassess one of the most controversial figures in the history of American Christianity. In this completely revised edition, Hankins pens an entirely new chapter on J. Frank Norris’s murder trial, examines newly uncovered details regarding his recurrent sexual improprieties, and reconsiders his views on race in order to place J. Frank Norris, a man both despicable and captivating, among the most significant Southern fundamentalists of the twentieth century.
Norris merged a southern populist tradition with militant fundamentalism, carving out a distinctly take-no-prisoners political niche within the Baptist church that often offended his allies as much as his enemies. Indeed, Norris was about as bad as a fundamentalist could be. He resided in a world of swirling conspiracies of leftists who, he argued, intended to subvert both evangelical religion and American culture. There are times when Norris’s ego looms so large in his story that he seemed less interested in the threat these alleged conspiracies posed than in their power to keep him in the limelight. Finally, his tactics foreshadowed those employed in the fundamentalists’ tenacious takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention that would occur more than twenty years after Norris’s death.
Goin' Railroading is the story of two generations of such men, four members of the Speas family who, from the open cabs of narrow-gauge steam engines, watched Colorado grow.
Sam Speas tells the story of his father, Sam Speas Sr., who left Missouri in 1883 to become an engineer in Colorado, and recounts his own experiences and those of his brothers and fellow railroaders on the Colorado and Southern Railway, from the golden era of the narrow-gauge lines in South Park to the final days of steam power on the Front Range and the coming of the diesel engine.
His stories are a profound document of a vanished way of life, a testament to the courage and tenacity of the early citizens of Colorado, and a tribute to the rough-hewn, often gallant men who took the trains through incredible, almost unbelievable, hazards. Funny, tragic, bittersweet, and poignant, Goin' Railroading is a remarkable book that brings a portion of the history and people of an earlier Colorado to vibrant life.
David Nasaw has written a sparkling social history of twentieth-century show business and of the new American public that assembled in the city's pleasure palaces, parks, theaters, nickelodeons, world's fair midways, and dance halls.
The new amusement centers welcomed women, men, and children, native-born and immigrant, rich, poor and middling. Only African Americans were excluded or segregated in the audience, though they were overrepresented in parodic form on stage. This stigmatization of the African American, Nasaw argues, was the glue that cemented an otherwise disparate audience, muting social distinctions among "whites," and creating a common national culture.
Often seen as anti-egalitarian and elitist, the country club has provoked strong responses since its initial appearance in the late 1800s. Golf, another elitist identifier, was commonly dismissed as a pseudo-sport or even unmanly. Where and how had the country club and the game of golf taken root in the United States? How had the manicured order of the golf course become a cultural site that elicited both strong loyalties and harsh criticism?
Richard J. Moss's cultural history explores the establishment of the country club as an American social institution and its inextricable connection to the ancient, imported game of golf. Moss traces the evolution of country clubs from informal groups of golf-playing friends to “country estates” in the suburbs and, eventually, into public and private daily fee courses, corporate country clubs, and gated golfing communities. As he shows, the development of these institutions reveals profound shifts in social dynamics, core American values, and attitudes toward health and sport.
The first comprehensive history of the oldest national religious Jewish women's organization in the United States
Gone to Another Meeting charts the development of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) and its impact on both the Jewish Community in the United States and American Society in general.
Founded in 1893 by Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, NCJW provided a conduit through which Jewish women’s voices could be heard and brought a Jewish voice to America’s women’s rights movement. NCJW would come to represent both the modernization and renewal of traditional Jewish womanhood. Through its emphasis on motherhood, its adoption of domestic feminism, and its efforts to carve a distinct Jewish niche in the late 19th-century Progressive social reform movement in the largely Christian world of women’s clubs, NCJW was instrumental in defining a uniquely American version of Jewish womanhood.
The “Pittsburgh Renaissance,” an urban renewal effort launched in the late 1940s, transformed the smoky rust belt city’s downtown. Working-class residents and people of color saw their neighborhoods cleared and replaced with upscale, white residents and with large corporations housed in massive skyscrapers. Pittsburgh’s Renaissance’s apparent success quickly became a model for several struggling industrial cities, including St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
In A Good Place to Do Business, Roger Biles and Mark Rose chronicle these urban “makeovers” which promised increased tourism and fashionable shopping as well as the development of sports stadiums, convention centers, downtown parks, and more. They examine the politics of these government-funded redevelopment programs and show how city politics (and policymakers) often dictated the level of success.
As city officials and business elites determined to reorganize their downtowns, a deeply racialized politics sacrificed neighborhoods and the livelihoods of those pushed out. Yet, as A Good Place to Do Business demonstrates, more often than not, costly efforts to bring about the hoped-for improvements failed to revitalize those cities, or even their downtowns.
Montserrat Roig’s first novel, Goodbye, Ramona (1972), is a powerhouse story told through the points of view of three generations of women from the same family. Opening with scenes of a pregnant woman looking for her husband after the bombing of Barcelona’s Coliseum, Goodbye, Ramona explores the role of family, women’s relationships with men, the influence the weight of history and events out of women’s control have on them, and the silence in which women live their lives. Sweeping and dynamic, the historical and social mosaic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain is seen through the lives and experiences of these female characters.
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and Roy Cohn were titanic figures in midcentury America, wielding national power in government and the legal system through intimidation and insinuation. Hoover’s FBI thrived on secrecy, threats, and illegal surveillance, while McCarthy and Cohn will forever be associated with the infamous anticommunist smear campaign of the early 1950s, which culminated in McCarthy’s public disgrace during televised Senate hearings. In Gossip Men, Christopher M. Elias takes a probing look at these tarnished figures to reveal a host of startling new connections among gender, sexuality, and national security in twentieth-century American politics. Elias illustrates how these three men solidified their power through the skillful use of deliberately misleading techniques like implication, hyperbole, and photographic manipulation. Just as provocatively, he shows that the American people of the 1950s were particularly primed to accept these coded threats because they were already familiar with such tactics from widely popular gossip magazines.
By using gossip as a lens to examine profound issues of state security and institutional power, Elias thoroughly transforms our understanding of the development of modern American political culture.
Governors and the Progressive Movement is the first comprehensive overview of the Progressive movement’s unfolding at the state level, covering every state in existence at the time through the words and actions of state governors. It explores the personalities, ideas, and activities of this period’s governors, including lesser-known but important ones who deserve far more attention than they have previously been given.
During this time of greedy corporations, political bosses, corrupt legislators, and conflict along racial, class, labor/management, urban/rural, and state/local lines, debates raged over the role of government and issues involving corporate power, racism, voting rights, and gender equality—issues that still characterize American politics. Author David R. Berman describes the different roles each governor played in the unfolding of reform around these concerns in their states. He details their diverse leadership qualities, governing styles, and accomplishments, as well as the sharp regional differences in their outlooks and performance, and finds that while they were often disposed toward reform, governors held differing views on issues—and how to resolve them.
Governors and the Progressive Movement examines a time of major changes in US history using relatively rare and unexplored collections of letters, newspaper articles, and government records written by and for minority group members, labor activists, and those on both the far right and far left. By analyzing the governors of the era, Berman presents an interesting perspective on the birth and implementation of controversial reforms that have acted as cornerstones for many current political issues. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of US history, political science, public policy, and administration.
American foreign policy is the subject of extensive debate. Many look to domestic factors as the driving forces of bad policies. Benjamin Miller instead seeks to account for changes in US international strategy by developing a theory of grand strategy that captures the key security approaches available to US decision-makers in times of war and peace.
Grand Strategy from Truman to Trump makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of competing grand strategies that accounts for objectives and means of security policy. Miller puts forward a model that is widely applicable, based on empirical evidence from post-WWII to today, and shows that external factors—rather than internal concerns—are the most determinative.
Winner, Charles Hatfield Book Prize, Comic Studies Society, 2020
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2019
The history of America’s civil rights movement is marked by narratives that we hear retold again and again. This has relegated many key figures and turning points to the margins, but graphic novels and graphic memoirs present an opportunity to push against the consensus and create a more complete history. Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement showcases five vivid examples of this:
Ho Che Anderson's King (2005), which complicates the standard biography of Martin Luther King Jr.; Congressman John Lewis's three-volume memoir, March (2013–2016); Darkroom (2012), by Lila Quintero Weaver, in which the author recalls her Argentinian father’s participation in the movement and her childhood as an immigrant in the South; the bestseller The Silence of Our Friends, by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell (2012), set in Houston's Third Ward in 1967; and Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby (1995), whose protagonist is a closeted gay man involved in the movement.
In choosing these five works, Jorge Santos also explores how this medium allows readers to participate in collective memory making, and what the books reveal about the process by which history is (re)told, (re)produced, and (re)narrativized. Concluding the work is Santos’s interview with Ho Che Anderson.
Grass Roots History was first published in 1947. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The pivot of history is not the uncommon, but the usual, and the true makers of history are "the people, yes."
Theodore C. Blegen, writing with discernment and vigor, explores in his book the simple essence of grass roots history, the colors and forms and the processes of our daily life and civilization. He uses diaries and letters, songs and ballads of the immigrants and pioneers, everyday speech, and newspaper advertisements to show clearly and sharply the exciting sources of "the literature of the unlettered," to reveal the spirit of the day, and to reconstruct for the reader a segment of the American past.
"We have need to dig into the folk story of America if we are to bring out the pattern of American development and American culture in all its color and richness of texture and design. Grass roots history is an avenue to that 'social awareness' which the natural scientists, more boldly than the social scientists, have declared to be the most urgent and compelling need of our day."
This is the author's own statement of the significance of grass roots history.
Where Black people live has long been an important determinant of their ability to participate in political processes. The Great Migration significantly changed the way Democratic Party elites interacted with Black communities in northern cities, Detroit, New York, and Chicago. Many white Democratic politicians came to believe the growing pool of Black voters could help them reach their electoral goals—and these politicians often changed their campaign strategies and positions to secure Black support. Furthermore, Black migrants were able to participate in politics because there were fewer barriers to Black political participations outside the South.
The Great Migration and the Democratic Party frames the Great Migration as an important economic and social event that also had serious political consequences. Keneshia Grant created one of the first listings of Black elected officials that classifies them based on their status as participants in the Great Migration. She also describes some of the policy/political concerns of the migrants. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party lays the groundwork for ways of thinking about the contemporary impact of Black migration on American politics.
Just as today's observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasionis an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world.
Conservatives often point to Friedrich Hayek as the most influential defender of the free market. By examining the work of such organizations as the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international association founded by Hayek in 1947 and later led by Milton Friedman, Burgin reveals that Hayek and his colleagues were deeply conflicted about many of the enduring problems of capitalism. Far from adopting an uncompromising stance against the interventionist state, they developed a social philosophy that admitted significant constraints on the market. Postwar conservative thought was more dynamic and cosmopolitan than has previously been understood.
It was only in the 1960s and '70s that Friedman and his contemporaries developed a more strident defense of the unfettered market. Their arguments provided a rhetorical foundation for the resurgent conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and inspired much of the political and economic agenda of the United States in the ensuing decades. Burgin's brilliant inquiry uncovers both the origins of the contemporary enthusiasm for the free market and the moral quandaries it has left behind.
While the state of California remains one of the most striking and varied landscapes in the world, it has experienced monumental changes since European settlers first set foot there. The past two centuries have witnessed an ongoing struggle between environment and economy, nature and humanity that has left an indelible mark on the region.
Green Versus Gold provides a compelling look at California's environmental history from its Native American past to conflicts and movements of recent decades. Acclaimed environmental historian Carolyn Merchant has brought together a vast storehouse of primary sources and interpretive essays to create a comprehensive picture of the history of ecological and human interactions in one of the nation's most diverse and resource-rich states.
For each chapter, Merchant has selected original documents that give readers an eyewitness account of specific environments and periods, along with essays from leading historians, geographers, scientists, and other experts that provide context and analysis for the documents. In addition, she presents a list of further readings of both primary and secondary sources. Among other topics, chapters examine:
California's natural environment and Native American lands the Spanish and Russian frontiers environmental impacts of the gold rush the transformation of forests and rangelands agriculture and irrigation cities and urban issues the rise of environmental science and contemporary environmental movement.
Merchant's informed and well-chosen selections present a unique view of decades of environmental change and controversy. Historians, educators, environmentalists, writers, students, scientists, policy makers, and others will find the book an enlightening and important contribution to the debate over our nation's environmental history.
One of the most horrific innovations of the twentieth century was the deliberate strategy of total warfare--the obliteration of entire civilian populations. The first and in many ways the most striking use of this extreme measure came nearly 70 years ago when the ancient Basque hilltop town of Guernica was destroyed by the bombs of the German Condor.
Ian Patterson begins with a graphic account of what happened in Guernica on April 26, 1937, and its place in the course of the Spanish Civil War. This event focused the spotlight of media attention on the town of Guernica, and established Picasso's painting as the most famous modern image of the horrors of war. Yet Picasso's Guernica was only one of a huge number of cultural artifacts--paintings, films, novels, poems, plays--to explore the idea of indiscriminate death from the air. From the Blitz to Hiroshima to the destruction of the World Trade Center to daily carnage in Darfur and Iraq, war has been increasingly directed against civilians, who constitute an ever larger proportion of its casualties. Patterson explores how modern men and women respond to the threat of new warfare with new capacities for imagining aggression and death. An unflinching history of the locationless terror that so many people feel today, Guernica and Total War will engage anyone interested in the survival of cultures amid the disasters of war.
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