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Sarajevo
A Bosnian Kaleidoscope
Fran Markowitz
University of Illinois Press, 2010

This fascinating urban anthropological analysis of Sarajevo and its cultural complexities examines contemporary issues of social divisiveness, pluralism, and intergroup dynamics in the context of national identity and state formation. Rather than seeing Bosnia-Herzegovina as a volatile postsocialist society, the book presents its capital city as a vibrant yet wounded center of multicultural diversity, where citizens live in mutual recognition of difference while asserting a lifestyle that transcends boundaries of ethnicity and religion. It further illuminates how Sarajevans negotiate group identity in the tumultuous context of history, authoritarian rule, and interactions with the built environment and one another.

As she navigates the city, Fran Markowitz shares narratives of local citizenry played out against the larger dramas of nation and state building. She shows how Sarajevans' national identities have been forged in the crucible of power, culture, language, and politics. Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope acknowledges this Central European city's dramatic survival from the ravages of civil war as it advances into the present-day global arena.

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Scandinavians in Michigan
Jeffrey W. Hancks
Michigan State University Press, 2006

The Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, are commonly grouped together by their close historic, linguistic, and cultural ties. Their age-old bonds continued to flourish both during and after the period of mass immigration to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scandinavians felt comfortable with each other, a feeling forged through centuries of familiarity, and they usually chose to live in close proximity in communities throughout the Upper Midwest of the United States.
     Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century and continuing until the 1920s, hundreds of thousands left Scandinavia to begin life in the United States and Canada. Sweden had the greatest number of its citizens leave for the United States, with more than one million migrating between 1820 and 1920. Per capita, Norway was the country most affected by the exodus; more than 850,000 Norwegians sailed to America between 1820 and 1920. In fact, Norway ranks second only to Ireland in the percentage of its population leaving for the New World during the great European migration. Denmark was affected at a much lower rate, but it too lost more than 300,000 of its population to the promise of America. Once gone, the move was usually permanent; few returned to live in Scandinavia. Michigan was never the most popular destination for Scandinavian immigrants. As immigrants began arriving in the North American interior, they settled in areas to the west of Michigan, particularly in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, and North and South Dakota. Nevertheless, thousands pursued their American dream in the Great Lakes State. They settled in Detroit and played an important role in the city’s industrial boom and automotive industry. They settled in the Upper Peninsula and worked in the iron and copper mines. They settled in the northern Lower Peninsula and worked in the logging industry. Finally, they settled in the fertile areas of west Michigan and contributed to the state’s burgeoning agricultural sector. Today, a strong Scandinavian presence remains in town names like Amble, in Montcalm County, and Skandia, in Marquette County, and in local culinary delicacies like æbleskiver, in Greenville, and lutefisk, found in select grocery stores throughout the state at Christmastime.

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Scots in Michigan
Alan T. Forrester
Michigan State University Press, 2003

Scots began settling in North America in the earliest colonial days. They were heavily involved in the Great Lakes region’s major industries, as these evolved from fur trade to farming and lumbering to industry. From early settlement to the industrial revolution, Scots brought to the state a pioneer spirit and an extraordinary level of education. Though rendered almost invisible both by clustering under the umbrella of the British Commonwealth and by the fact that few Scottish traditions are considered whatsoever foreign, ethnic, or exotic, Scottish influences run deep in Michigan history and culture. From ice hockey to industry, much of what represents Michigan has roots that were embedded in Scotland. Although Alan T. Forrester notes that symbolic Scottish ethnicity—Highland Games, Scottish Festivals, and Burns Night Suppers—is practically the only obvious relic of Scottish heritage in Michigan, he illuminates how much more of this legacy is a part of this state.

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Searching for Golden Empires
Epic Cultural Collisions in Sixteenth-Century America
William K. Hartmann
University of Arizona Press, 2014
This lively book recounts the explorations of the first generations of Spanish conquistadors and their Native allies. Author William K. Hartmann brings readers along as the explorers probe from Cuba to the Aztec capital of Mexico City, and then northward through the borderlands to New Mexico, the Grand Canyon, southern California, and as far as Kansas. Characters include Hernan Cortés, the conqueror; the Aztec ruler Motezuma; Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, a famous expedition leader; fray Marcos de Niza, an explorer-priest doomed to disgrace; and Viceroy Antonio Mendoza, the king’s representative who tried to keep the explorers under control.

Recounting eyewitness experiences that the Spaniards recorded in letters and memoirs, Hartmann describes ancient lifeways from Mexico to the western United States; Aztec accounts of the conquest; discussions between Aztec priests and Spanish priests about the nature of the universe; Cortés’s lifelong relationship with his famous Native mistress, Malinche (not to mention the mysterious fate of his wife); lost explorers who wandered from Florida to Arizona; and Marcos de Niza’s controversial reports of the “Seven Cities of Cíbola.”

Searching for Golden Empires describes how, even after the conquest of Mexico, Cortés remained a “wildcat” competitor with Coronado in a race to see who could find the “next golden empire,” believed to lie in the north. It is an exciting history of the shared story of the United States and Mexico, unveiling episodes both tragic and uplifting.
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Searching for Home Abroad
Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism
Jeffrey Lesser, ed.
Duke University Press, 2003
During the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese immigrants entered Brazil by the tens of thousands. In more recent decades that flow has been reversed: more than 200,000 Japanese-Brazilians and their families have relocated to Japan. Examining these significant but rarely studied transnational movements and the experiences of Japanese-Brazilians, the essays in Searching for Home Abroad rethink complex issues of ethnicity and national identity. The contributors—who represent a number of nationalities and disciplines themselves—analyze how the original Japanese immigrants, their descendants in Brazil, and the Japanese-Brazilians in Japan sought to fit into the culture of each country while confronting both prejudice and discrimination.

The concepts of home and diaspora are engaged and debated throughout the volume. Drawing on numerous sources—oral histories, interviews, private papers, films, myths, and music—the contributors highlight the role ethnic minorities have played in constructing Brazilian and Japanese national identities. The essayists consider the economic and emotional motivations for migration as well as a range of fascinating cultural outgrowths such as Japanese secret societies in Brazil. They explore intriguing paradoxes, including the feeling among many Japanese-Brazilians who have migrated to Japan that they are more "Brazilian" there than they were in Brazil. Searching for Home Abroad will be of great interest to scholars of immigration and ethnicity in the Americas and Asia.

Contributors. Shuhei Hosokawa, Angelo Ishi, Jeffrey Lesser, Daniel T. Linger, Koichi Mori, Joshua Hotaka Roth, Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda, Keiko Yamanaka, Karen Tei Yamashita

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See How We Roll
Enduring Exile between Desert and Urban Australia
Melinda Hinkson
Duke University Press, 2021
In See How We Roll Melinda Hinkson follows the experiences of Nungarrayi, a Warlpiri woman from the Central Australian desert, as she struggles to establish a new life for herself in the city of Adelaide. Banished from her hometown, Nungarrayi energetically navigates promises of transformation as well as sedimented racialized expectations on the urban streets. Drawing on a decades-long friendship, Hinkson explores these circumstances through Nungarrayi's relationships: those between her country and kin that sustain and confound life beyond the desert, those that regulate her marginalized citizenship, and the new friendships called out by displacement and metropolitan life. An intimate ethnography, See How We Roll provides great insight into the enduring violence of the settler colonial state while illuminating the efforts of Indigenous people to create lives of dignity and shared purpose in the face of turbulence, grief, and tightening governmental controls.
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Seed of Sarah
Memoirs of a Survivor
Judith Magyar Isaacson
University of Illinois Press, 1990
This gripping and highly acclaimed account of a young woman's experience in concentration camps now includes a final chapter, "A Time to Forgive?" detailing the author's trips back to her former forced labor camp in Germany.
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Separate Paths
Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey
Jean R. Soderlund
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey is the first cross-cultural study of European colonization in the region south of the Falls of the Delaware River (now Trenton). Lenape men and women welcomed their allies, the Swedes and Finns, to escape more rigid English regimes on the west bank of the Delaware, offering land to establish farms, share resources, and trade. In the 1670s, Quaker men and women challenged this model with strategies to acquire all Lenape territory for their own use and to sell as real estate to new immigrants. Though the Lenapes remained sovereign and “old settlers” retained their Swedish Lutheran religion and ethnic autonomy, the West Jersey proprietors had considerable success in excluding Lenapes from their land. The Friends believed God favored their endeavor with epidemics of smallpox and other European diseases that destroyed Lenape families and communities. Affluent Quakers also introduced enslavement of imported Africans and Natives—and the violence that sustained it—to a colony they had promoted with the liberal West New Jersey Concessions of 1676-77. Thus, they defied their prior experience of religious persecution and their principles of peaceful resolution of conflict, equality of everyone before God, and the golden rule to treat others as you wish to be treated. Despite mutual commitment to peace by Lenapes, old settlers, and Friends, Quaker colonization had similar results to military conquests of Natives by English in Virginia and New England, and Dutch in the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey. Still, in alliance with old settlers, Lenape communities survived in areas outside the focus of English colonization, in the Pine Barrens, upper reaches of streams, and Atlantic shore.
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Sephardim in the Americas
Studies in Culture and History
Martin A. Cohen
University of Alabama Press, 1993
Multidisciplinary essays examinig the historical and cultural history of the Sephardic experience in the Americas, from pre-expulsion Spain to the modern era, as recounted by some of the most outstanding interpreters of the field.
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Serving Our Country
Japanese American Women in the Military during World War II
Moore, Brenda L
Rutgers University Press, 2003

Following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and America's declaration of war on Japan, the U.S. War Department allowed up to five hundred second-generation, or "Nisei," Japanese American women to enlist in the Women's Army Corps and, in smaller numbers, in the Army Medical Corps.

Through in-depth interviews with surviving Nisei women who served, Brenda L. Moore provides fascinating firsthand accounts of their experiences. Interested primarily in shedding light on the experiences of Nisei women during the war, the author argues for the relevance of these experiences to larger questions of American race relations and views on gender and their intersections, particularly in the country's highly charged wartime atmosphere. Uncovering a page in American history that has been obscured, Moore adds nuance to our understanding of the situation of Japanese Americans during the war.

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Shadows of Treblinka
Miriam Kuperhand and Saul Kuperhand
University of Illinois Press, 1998
      Unique and compelling, this husband-and-wife memoir of the Holocaust
        will move and inform generations. As we lose eyewitnesses to this ultimate
        horror, the Kuperhands present us with an elegantly restrained, yet hard-hitting,
        Kaddish to Polish Jewry.
      Miriam was the daughter of a prosperous furrier; Saul was the son of
        a poor shoemaker. Miriam was sixteen when she and her brother roamed the
        wild countryside of Poland, searching for food and shelter--and for their
        parents. Saul was only a few years older when he watched the smoke rising
        from the crematoria and knew that his parents, sister, and eight brothers
        were gone forever. Miriam lived by hiding; Saul lived by escaping from
        the camp.
      The authors emphasize the essential role that Polish Christians played
        in their survival and stress that wit, courage, faith, luck, and even
        a strong will to live were worthless without their help.
      The travail of their survival is wrenching yet comforting, tragic yet
        upbeat, cinematic yet intimate. Shadows of Treblinka will haunt
        and inspire its readers.
 
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Sharing the Land, Sharing a Future
The Legacy of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
Katherine Graham
University of Manitoba Press, 2021

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Siblings of Soil
Dominicans and Haitians in the Age of Revolutions
Charlton W. Yingling
University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 Honorable Mention, Isis Duarte Book Prize, Haiti/ Dominican Republic section (LASA)

After revolutionary cooperation between Dominican and Haitian majorities produced independence across Hispaniola, Dominican elites crafted negative myths about this era that contributed to anti-Haitianism.


Despite the island’s long-simmering tensions, Dominicans and Haitians once unified Hispaniola. Based on research from over two dozen archives in multiple countries, Siblings of Soil presents the overlooked history of their shared imperial endings and national beginnings from the 1780s to 1822. Haitian revolutionaries both inspired and aided Dominican antislavery and anti-imperial movements. Ultimately, Santo Domingo's independence from Spain came in 1822 through unification with Haiti, as Dominicans embraced citizenship and emancipation. Their collaboration resulted in one of the most unique and inclusive forms of independence in the Americas.

Elite reactions to this era formed anti-Haitian narratives. Racial ideas permeated the revolution, Vodou, Catholicism, secularism, and even Deism. Some Dominicans reinforced Hispanic and Catholic traditions and cast Haitians as violent heretics who had invaded Dominican society, undermining the innovative, multicultural state. Two centuries later, distortions of their shared past of kinship have enabled generations of anti-Haitian policies, assumptions of irreconcilable differences, and human rights abuses.

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front cover of Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918
Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918
Edited by Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky
Brandeis University Press, 2014
This innovative collection of essays on the upsurge of antisemitism across Europe in the decades around 1900 shifts the focus away from intellectuals and well-known incidents to less-familiar events, actors, and locations, including smaller towns and villages. This “from below” perspective offers a new look at a much-studied phenomenon: essays link provincial violence and antisemitic politics with regional, state, and even transnational trends. Featuring a diverse array of geographies that include Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Romania, Italy, Greece, and the Russian Empire, the book demonstrates the complex interplay of many factors—economic, religious, political, and personal—that led people to attack their Jewish neighbors.
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Slim's Table
Race, Respectability, and Masculinity
Mitchell Duneier
University of Chicago Press, 1992
At the Valois "See Your Food" cafeteria on Chicago's South Side, black and white men gather over cups of coffee and steam-table food. Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist, spent four years at the Valois writing this moving profile of the black men who congregate at "Slim's Table." Praised as "a marvelous study of those who should not be forgotten" by the Wall Street Journal,Slim's Table helps demolish the narrow sociological picture of black men and simple media-reinforced stereotypes. In between is a "respectable" citizenry, too often ignored and little understood.

"Slim's Table is an astonishment. Duneier manages to fling open windows of perception into what it means to be working-class black, how a caring community can proceed from the most ordinary transactions, all the while smashing media-induced stereotypes of the races and race relations."—Citation for Chicago Sun Times Chicago Book of the Year Award

"An instant classic of ethnography that will provoke debate and provide insight for years to come."—Michael Eric Dyson, Chicago Tribune

"Mr. Duneier sees the subjects of his study as people and he sees the scale of their lives as fully human, rather than as diminished versions of grander lives lived elsewhere by people of another color. . . . A welcome antidote to trends in both journalism and sociology."—Roger Wilkins, New York Times Book Review
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The Slovak Question
A Transatlantic Perspective, 1914-1948
Michael Cude
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Winner, 2022 SSA Best Book Prize
The so-called Slovak question asked what place Slovaks held—or should have held—in the former state of Czechoslovakia. Formed in 1918 at the end of World War I from the remains of the Hungarian Empire, and reformed after ceasing to exist during World War II, the country would eventually split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the “Velvet Divorce” in 1993.

In the meantime, the minority Slovaks often clashed with the majority Czechs over their role in the nation. The Slovak Question examines this debate from a transatlantic perspective. Explored through the relationship between Slovaks, Americans of Slovak heritage, and United States and Czechoslovakian policymakers, it shows how Slovak national activism in America helped the Slovaks establish a sense of independent identity and national political assertion after World War I. It also shows how Slovak American leaders influenced US policy by conceptualizing the United States and Slovakia as natural allies due to their connections through immigration. This process played a critical role in undermining attempts to establish a united Czechoslovakian identity and instead caused a divide between the two groups, which was exploited by Nazi Germany and then by other actors during the Cold War, and proved ultimately to be insurmountable.

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Slovenes in Michigan
James E. Seelye
Michigan State University Press, 2017
The Slovenes represent a small but important microcosm of Michigan history. Thousands followed the pioneering missionary Frederic Baraga and settled in the mining regions and forests of the Upper Peninsula before many of them scattered to the auto industry of the Lower Peninsula in the early twentieth century. Everywhere they traveled and settled, they left a detectable imprint that was clearly Slovene. The first Slovene in Michigan, Bishop Frederic Baraga, traveled extensively throughout the state. In his wake, families such as the Vertins and Ruppes followed, each playing an important role in their communities. In many regions of the state, the most recognizable names, buildings, and businesses bear their names and illustrate the long-lasting influences of Slovenes on the history of Michigan. To understand the history of Slovene immigration in the Great Lakes is to better understand Michigan history.
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The Social World of Batavia
Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia
Jean Gelman Taylor
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
In the seventeenth century, the Dutch established a trading base at the Indonesian site of Jacarta. What began as a minor colonial outpost under the name Batavia would become, over the next three centuries, the flourishing economic and political nucleus of the Dutch Asian Empire. In this pioneering study, Jean Gelman Taylor offers a comprehensive analysis of Batavia’s extraordinary social world—its marriage patterns, religious and social organizations, economic interests, and sexual roles. With an emphasis on the urban ruling elite, she argues that Europeans and Asians alike were profoundly altered by their merging, resulting in a distinctive hybrid, Indo-Dutch culture.
    Original in its focus on gender and use of varied sources—travelers’ accounts, newspapers, legal codes, genealogical data, photograph albums, paintings, and ceramics—The Social World of Batavia, first published in 1983, forged new paths in the study of colonial society. In this second edition, Gelman offers a new preface as well as an additional chapter tracing the development of these themes by a new generation of scholars.
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Soloveitchik's Children
Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America
Daniel Ross Goodman
University of Alabama Press, 2023

A revealing account of the three main disciples of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, an essential figure in Orthodox Judaism in America

Orthodox Judaism is one of the fastest-growing religious communities in contemporary American life. Anyone who wishes to understand more about Judaism in America will need to consider the tenets and practices of Orthodox Judaism: who its adherents are, what they believe in, what motivates them, and to whom they turn for moral, intellectual, and spiritual guidance.

Among those spiritual leaders none looms larger than Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, heir to the legendary Talmudic dynasty of Brisk and a teacher and ordainer of thousands of rabbis during his time as a Talmud teacher at Yeshiva University from the Second World War until the 1980s. Soloveitchik was not only a Talmudic authority but a scholar of Western philosophy. While many books and articles have been written about Soloveitchik’s legacy and his influence on American Orthodoxy, few have looked carefully at his disciples in Torah and Talmud study, and even fewer at his disciples in Jewish thought and philosophy.

Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America is the first book to study closely three of Soloveitchik’s major disciples in Jewish thought and philosophy: Rabbis Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg, David Hartman, and Jonathan Sacks. Daniel Ross Goodman narrates how each of these three major modern Jewish thinkers learned from and adapted Soloveitchik’s teachings in their own ways, even while advancing his philosophical and theological legacy.

The story of religious life and Judaism in contemporary America is incomplete without an understanding of how three of the most consequential Jewish thinkers of this generation adapted the teachings of one of the most consequential Jewish thinkers of the previous generation. Soloveitchik’s Children tells this gripping intellectual and religious story in a learned and engaging manner, shining a light on where Jewish religious thought in the United States currently stands—and where it may be heading in future generations.

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Somalis in the Twin Cities and Columbus
Immigrant Incorporation in New Destinations
Stephanie Chambers
Temple University Press, 2017

In the early 1990s, Somali refugees arrived in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Later in the decade, an additional influx of immigrants arrived in a second destination of Columbus, Ohio. These refugees found low-skill jobs in warehouses and food processing plants and struggled as social “outsiders,” often facing discrimination based on their religious traditions, dress, and misconceptions that they are terrorists. The immigrant youth also lacked access to quality educational opportunities.

In Somalis in the Twin Cities and Columbus, Stefanie Chambers provides a cogent analysis of these refugees in Midwestern cities where new immigrant communities are growing. Her comparative study uses qualitative and quantitative data to assess the political, economic, and social variations between these urban areas. Chambers examines how culture and history influenced the incorporation of Somali immigrants in the U.S., and recommends policy changes that can advance rather than impede incorporation. 

Her robust investigation provides a better understanding of the reasons these refugees establish roots in these areas, as well as how these resettled immigrants struggle to thrive.

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A Song of Longing
AN ETHIOPIAN JOURNEY
Kay Kaufman Shelemay
University of Illinois Press, 1992
"A rich, descriptive account. . . . Shelemay presents extraordinary personal experiences that shaped her research process and make reading this text pleasurable."
-- Library Journal
 
"Highly recommended to generalists in music as well as to specialists interested in Ethiopia. . . . Also makes an excellent case study text for university-level courses examining fieldwork issues and conditions."
-- Notes
"Highly recommended for both undergraduate and graduate collections in ethnomusicology, anthropology, African, and Judaic studies."
-- Choice
 
 
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Song of Tides
Tom Joseph
University of Alabama Press, 2008
Beginning with their battle against the forces of Ponce de Leon, the Calusa Indians of southwest Florida entered a dark period of European invasion and native resistance, which changed the nature and course of life on the North American continent.
 
Song of the Tides is a work of anthropological fiction that is set during the period of the Spanish entrada into southwest Florida and their encounters with the Calusa. Relying on letters and memoirs, especially those of explorer Pedro Menendez de Aviles, shipwrecked captive Escalante Fontaneda, and the Jesuit priest Juan Rogel, Joseph has woven a tale of vivid historical detail and compelling human drama. Working with Calusa scholars, the author has created a superbly written account of the clash of two proud and dominant cultures. Told through the voice of Aesha, daughter of the great Calusa chief Caalus, as well as those of other political and spiritual leaders, the fictional narrative spans half a century of conflict with Spanish soldiers and Jesuits, infighting between bands, struggle to preserve their culture, and eventual defeat of the Spanish through wit and deceit.
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South Slavs in Michigan
Daniel Cetinich
Michigan State University Press, 2003

The South Slavs of Michigan—Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, and Bosnian Muslims—are a microcosm of the immigration waves of southern and eastern Europeans who came to the United States between 1880 and 1924. History has almost forgotten these immigrants, who were instrumental in developing the large urban centers of Michigan and the United States, and who specifically contributed to development of the auto industry and struck in 1913–1914 for better working conditions in the copper mines of the Upper Peninsula. While labor problems were the primary obstacles confronting Michigan’s South Slavs, the painful process of acculturation has since dimmed their very real accomplishments. As Daniel Cetinich shows, South Slavs helped shape both a regional and national civilization in North America with their hands, backs, feet, and the labor organizations they helped create.

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The Southern Frontier 1670-1732
Verner Crane, with a new introduction by Steven C. Hahn
University of Alabama Press, 2004

A classic resource on the struggle for dominance in southern North America during the colonial period

This volume recounts the clashes and intrigues that played out over the landscape of the Old Southwest and across six decades as the Spanish, French, British, and ultimately Americans vied for control. Rivalry began soon after initial discovery, mapping, and exploration as the world powers, particularly England and France, competed for control of the lucrative fur trade in the Mississippi valley. The French attempted to establish trade networks stretching from the Atlantic Ocean inland to the Mississippi River and northward from ports on the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River. But they found the British already entrenched there.

Verner Crane guides us through this multinational struggle and navigates the border wars and diplomatic intrigues that played crucial roles in the settlement of the South by Euro-Americans. In his new introduction, Steven Hahn places the work in the context of its time, sketches its publication history, and provides biographical information on Crane.

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Southern Heritage on Display
Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism
Edited by Celeste Ray
University of Alabama Press, 2002
How ritualized public ceremonies affirm or challenge cultural identities associated with the American South

W. J. Cash's 1941 observation that “there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them” is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its “lost cause” tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public rituals—parades, cook-offs, kinship homecomings, church assemblies, music spectacles, and material culture exhibitions—that affirm other identities. From the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Delta, from Kentucky bluegrass to Carolina piedmont, southerners celebrate in festivals that showcase their diverse cultural backgrounds and their mythic beliefs about themselves.
 
The ten essays of this cohesive, interdisciplinary collection present event-centered research from various fields of study—anthropology, geography, history, and literature—to establish a rich, complex picture of the stereotypically “Solid South.” Topics include the Mardi Gras Indian song cycle as a means of expressing African-American identity in New Orleans; powwow performances and Native American traditions in southeast North Carolina; religious healings in southern Appalachian communities; Mexican Independence Day festivals in central Florida; and, in eastern Tennessee, bonding ceremonies of melungeons who share Indian, Scots Irish, Mediterranean, and African ancestry. Seen together, these public heritage displays reveal a rich “creole” of cultures that have always been a part of southern life and that continue to affirm a flourishing regionalism.
This book will be valuable to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, American studies, and southern history; academic and public libraries; and general readers interested in the American South. It contributes a vibrant, colorful layer of understanding to the continuously emerging picture of complexity in this region historically depicted by simple stereotypes.
 
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The Sovereigns
A Jewish Family in the German Countryside
Eric Lucas
Northwestern University Press, 2001
This memoir is a moving testament to the power of family. The Lucas clan was a close-knit, successful family of rural German Jews—butchers and meat dealers—whose strength and pride was challenged by the rise of Nazism. As the family grew, so did its prosperity and power, and the sons, daughter, and their relatives became known as the Sovereigns.

But anti-Semites, under the protection of the Nazi regime, began to settle old scores, and targeted the economically successful rural Jews. New laws stripped Jewish meat dealers of their rights, and Aryan competitors eagerly forced them aside. That was only the beginning. In the Holocaust that followed, some members of the family escaped. Others did not.
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Soviet Jewry in the 1980s
The Politics of Anti-Semitism and Emigration and the Dynamics of Resettlement
Robert O. Freedman, ed.
Duke University Press, 1989
Contributors. Stephen Feinstein, Robert O. Freedman, Theodore H. Friedgut, Zvi Gitelman, Marshall I. Goldman, Sidney Heitman, William Korey, Howard Spier
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Speaking Soviet with an Accent
Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan
Ali Igmen
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012
Speaking Soviet with an Accent presents the first English-language study of Soviet culture clubs in Kyrgyzstan. These clubs profoundly influenced the future of Kyrgyz cultural identity and fostered the work of many artists, such as famed novelist Chingiz Aitmatov.

Based on extensive oral history and archival research, Ali Igmen follows the rise of culture clubs beginning in the 1920s, when they were established to inculcate Soviet ideology and create a sedentary lifestyle among the historically nomadic Kyrgyz people. These “Red clubs” are fondly remembered by locals as one of the few places where lively activities and socialization with other members of their ail (village or tribal unit) could be found.

Through lectures, readings, books, plays, concerts, operas, visual arts, and cultural Olympiads, locals were exposed to Soviet notions of modernization. But these programs also encouraged the creation of a newfound “Kyrgyzness” that preserved aspects of local traditions and celebrated the achievements of Kyrgyz citizens in the building of a new state. These ideals proved appealing to many Kyrgyz, who, for centuries, had seen riches and power in the hands of a few tribal chieftains and Russian imperialists.

This book offers new insights into the formation of modern cultural identity in Central Asia. Here, like their imperial predecessors, the Soviets sought to extend their physical borders and political influence. But Igmen also reveals the remarkable agency of the Kyrgyz people, who employed available resources to meld their own heritage with Soviet and Russian ideologies and form artistic expressions that continue to influence Kyrgyzstan today.

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The Spectacular State
Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan
Laura L. Adams
Duke University Press, 2010
Laura L. Adams offers unique insight into nation building in Central Asia during the post-Soviet era through an exploration of Uzbekistan’s production of national culture in the 1990s. As she explains, after independence the Uzbek government maintained a monopoly over ideology, exploiting the remaining Soviet institutional and cultural legacies. The state expressed national identity through tightly controlled mass spectacles, including theatrical and musical performances. Adams focuses on these events, particularly the massive outdoor concerts the government staged on the two biggest national holidays, Navro’z, the spring equinox celebration, and Independence Day. Her analysis of the content, form, and production of these ceremonies shows how Uzbekistan’s cultural and political elites engaged in a highly directed, largely successful program of nation building through culture.

Adams draws on her observations and interviews conducted with artists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats involved in the production of Uzbekistan’s national culture. These elites used globalized cultural forms such as Olympics-style spectacle to showcase local, national, and international aspects of official culture. While these state-sponsored extravaganzas were intended to be displays of Uzbekistan’s ethnic and civic national identity, Adams found that cultural renewal in the decade after Uzbekistan’s independence was not so much a rejection of Soviet power as it was a re-appropriation of Soviet methods of control and ideas about culture. The public sphere became more restricted than it had been in Soviet times, even as Soviet-era ideas about ethnic and national identity paved the way for Uzbekistan to join a more open global community.

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Sri Lanka--Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy
Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Focusing on the historical events of post-independence Sri Lanka, S. J. Tambiah analyzes the causes of the violent conflict between the majority Sinhalese Buddhists and the minority Tamils. He demonstrates that the crisis is primarily a result of recent societal stresses—educational expansions, linguistic policy, unemployment, uneven income distribution, population movements, contemporary uses of the past as religious and national ideology, and trends toward authoritarianism—rather than age-old racial and religious differences.

"In this concise, informative, lucidly written book, scrupulously documented and well indexed, [Tambiah] trains his dispassionate anthropologist's eye on the tangled roots of an urgent, present-day problem in the passionate hope that enlightenment, understanding, and a generous spirit of compromise may yet be able to prevail."—Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor

"An incredibly rich and balanced analysis of the crisis. It is exemplary in highlighting the general complexities of ethnic crises in long-lived societies carrying a burden of historical memories."—Amita Shastri, Journal of Asian Studies

"Tambiah makes an eloquent case for pluralist democracy in a country abundantly endowed with excuses to abandon such an approach to politics."—Donald L. Horowitz, New Republic
"An excellent and thought-provoking book, for anyone who cares about Sri Lanka."—Paul Sieghart, Los Angeles Times Book Review

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Stains on My Name, War in My Veins
Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle
Brackette F. Williams
Duke University Press, 1991
Burdened with a heritage of both Spanish and British colonization and imperialism, Guyana is today caught between its colonial past, its efforts to achieve the consciousness of nationhood, and the need of its diverse subgroups to maintain their own identity. Stains on My Name, War in My Veins chronicles the complex struggles of the citizens of Guyana to form a unified national culture against the pulls of ethnic, religious, and class identities.
Drawing on oral histories and a close study of daily life in rural Guyana, Brackette E. Williams examines how and why individuals and groups in their quest for recognition as a “nation” reproduce ethnic chauvinism, racial stereotyping, and religious bigotry. By placing her ethnographic study in a broader historical context, the author develops a theoretical understanding of the relations among various dimensions of personal identity in the process of nation building.
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Stalin's Railroad
Turksib and the Building of Socialism
Matthew J. Payne
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001
The Turkestano-Siberian Railroad, or Turksib, was one of the great construction projects of the Soviet Union’s First Five-Year Plan. As the major icon to ending the economic "backwardness" of the USSR’s minority republics, it stood apart from similar efforts as one of the most potent metaphors for the creation of a unified socialist nation.

Built between December 1926 and January 1931 by nearly 50,000 workers and at a cost of more 161 million rubles, Turksib embodied the Bolsheviks’ commitment to end ethnic inequality and promote cultural revolution in one the far-flung corners of the old Tsarist Empire, Kazakhstan. Trumpeted as the "forge of the Kazakh proletariat," the railroad was to create a native working class, bringing not only trains to the steppes, but also the Revolution.

In the first in-depth study of this grand project, Matthew Payne explores the transformation of its builders in Turksib’s crucible of class war, race riots, state purges, and the brutal struggle of everyday life. In the battle for the souls of the nation’s engineers, as well as the racial and ethnic conflicts that swirled, far from Moscow, around Stalin’s vast campaign of industrialization, he finds a microcosm of the early Soviet Union.
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States Of Exception
Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity
Keya Ganguly
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

Explores the conflict between capitalism and tradition in an immigrant community

A philosophical anthropology of everyday experience, this book is also a deeply informed and thought-provoking reflection on the work of cultural critique. States of Exception looks into a community of immigrants from India living in southern New Jersey—a group to whom the author, as a daughter of two of its members, enjoyed unprecedented access.

Her position allows Keya Ganguly to approach the culture of a middle-class group (albeit one that is marginalized by racial prejudice), while the group’s relatively comfortable and protected style of life offers unusual insight into the concept of the everyday and the sense in which a seemingly commonplace existence can be understood as in crisis: a state of exception. Thus, Ganguly draws on the work of the Frankfurt School, particularly Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, to explore the possibilities of a dialectical critique of the everyday—a state of exception informing ordinary yet crisis-ridden narratives of the self under late capitalism.

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Stealing the Gila
The Pima Agricultural Economy and Water Deprivation, 1848-1921
David H. DeJong
University of Arizona Press, 2009
By 1850 the Pima Indians of central Arizona had developed a strong and sustainable agricultural economy based on irrigation. As David H. DeJong demonstrates, the Pima were an economic force in the mid-nineteenth century middle Gila River valley, producing food and fiber crops for western military expeditions and immigrants. Moreover, crops from their fields provided an additional source of food for the Mexican military presidio in Tucson, as well as the U.S. mining districts centered near Prescott. For a brief period of about three decades, the Pima were on an equal economic footing with their non-Indian neighbors.

This economic vitality did not last, however. As immigrants settled upstream from the Pima villages, they deprived the Indians of the water they needed to sustain their economy. DeJong traces federal, territorial, and state policies that ignored Pima water rights even though some policies appeared to encourage Indian agriculture. This is a particularly egregious example of a common story in the West: the flagrant local rejection of Supreme Court rulings that protected Indian water rights. With plentiful maps, tables, and illustrations, DeJong demonstrates that maintaining the spreading farms and growing towns of the increasingly white population led Congress and other government agencies to willfully deny Pimas their water rights.

Had their rights been protected, DeJong argues, Pimas would have had an economy rivaling the local and national economies of the time. Instead of succeeding, the Pima were reduced to cycles of poverty, their lives destroyed by greed and disrespect for the law, as well as legal decisions made for personal gain.
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Stepping Into Zion
Hatzaad Harishon, Black Jews, and the Remaking of Jewish Identity
Janice W. Fernheimer
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Considers the question “Who is a Jew?”— a critical rhetorical issue with far-reaching consequences for Jews and non-Jews alike

Hatzaad Harishon ("The First Step") was a New York-based, multiracial Jewish organization that worked to increase recognition and legitimacy for Black Jews in the sixties and seventies. In Stepping into Zion, Janice W. Fernheimer examines the history and archives of Hatzaad Harishon to illuminate the shifting definitions and borders of Jewish identity, which have critical relevance to Jews of all traditions as well as to non-Jews.

Fernheimer focuses on a period when Jewish identity was in flux and deeply influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In 1964, white and Black Jews formed Hatzaad Harishon to foster interaction and unity between Black and white Jewish communities. They raised the question of who or what constitutes Jewishness or Jewish identity, and in searching for an answer succeeded—both historically and rhetorically—in gaining increased recognition for Black Jews. Fernheimer traces how, despite deep disagreement over definitions, members of Hatzaad Harishon were able to create common ground in a process she terms "interruptive invention": an incremental model for rhetorical success that allows different groups to begin and continue important but difficult discussions when they share little common ground or make unequal claims to institutional and discursive power, or when the nature of common ground is precisely what is at stake. Consequently, they provide a practical way out of the seemingly incommensurable stalemate incompatible worldviews present.
 
Through insightful interpretations of Hatzaad Harishon's archival materials, Fernheimer chronicles the group's successes and failures within the larger rhetorical history of conflicts that emerge when cultural identities shift or expand.
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Strangers in the Land
Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925
Higham, John
Rutgers University Press, 1988
Higham's work stands as the seminal work in the history of American nativism. The work is a careful, well-documented study of nationalism and ethnic prejudice, and chronicles the power and violence of these two ideas in American society from 1860 to 1925. He significantly moves beyond previous treatments of nativism, both in chronology and in interpretive sophistication. Higham defines nativism as a defensive type of nationalism or an intense opposition to an internal minority on the grounds of the group's foreign connections. By defining nativism as a set of attitudes or a state of mind, he sets the course for his book as tracing "trace an emotionally charged impulse" rather than "an actual social process or condition." As he argues that the ideological content of nativism remained consistent, he uses emotional intensity as a measure to trace in detail public opinion from the relative calm following the Civil War to the Johnson-Reed act of 1924 that severely limited European immigration.

Strangers in the Land is, then, a history of public opinion, whose purpose is to show how nativism evolved in society and in action. Higham seeks to explain what could inflame xenophobia and who resisted it. He saw his work as part of a renewed interest in the study of nationalism following the national upheavals in the wake of the McCarthy hearings. Surely Higham's mentor at the University of Wisconsin, intellectual historian Merle Curti, influenced Higham's approach in seeking to examine the power of nationalism as an idea. Also influential was the intellectual climate of the 1950s with its of distrust of ideology and distain of prejudice. Higham admits being repelled by the nationalist delusions of the Cold War, again helping to explain why his study concentrates on seeking some explanation for the irrational and violent outbreaks. The book thus focuses on points of conflict, "antagonisms that belong within ideologies of passionate national consciousness." For example, Higham's explains the 100 percent American movement in terms of progressive ideals and the desire of Americans to shape immigrants into a particular ideal of "Americanness" through education and assimilation. This intellectual construct eventually gave way to the racial thinking to which Higham assigns much influence in the efforts to restrict immigration. Ideology is also central to his chapter on the history of the idea of racism in which he argues that Anglo-Saxon nationalism, literary naturalism and a nascent understanding of genetics combined to bring forth arguments for immigration restriction to preserve the racial purity of the American people. Thus, key for Higham's argument is the power of ideas in shaping individual behavior and thereby shaping history.

This text is an absolute must-read for anyone seeking to understand American nativism and the darker side of nationalism.
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Street Scenes
Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924
Esther Romeyn
University of Minnesota Press, 2008
The turn of the twentieth century in New York City was characterized by radical transformation as the advent of consumer capitalism confronted established social hierarchies, culture, and conceptions of selfhood. The popular stage existed in a symbiotic relationship with the city and uniquely captured the contested terms of immigrant identity of the time.

Street Scenes focuses on the intersection of modern city life and stage performance. From street life and slumming to vaudeville and early cinema, to Yiddish theater and blackface comedy, Esther Romeyn discloses racial comedy, passing, and masquerade as gestures of cultural translation. In these performances she detects an obsession with the idea of the city as theater and the self as actor, which was fueled by the challenges that consumer capitalism presented to notions of an “authentic” self.

It was exactly this idea of “authentic” immigrant selfhood that was at stake in many performances on the popular stage, and Romeyn ultimately demonstrates how these diverse and potent immigrant works influenced the emergence of a modern metropolitan culture.
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Structures of Indifference
An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City
Mary Jane Logan McCallum
University of Manitoba Press, 2018

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Structuring Diversity
Ethnographic Perspectives on the New Immigration
Edited by Louise Lamphere
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Through ethnographic research, sociologists and anthropologists explore the interaction of America's newcomers with established residents in six cities. Their analysis highlights the importance of class and power as immigrants interact in the workplace, at home, at school, and in community organizations.


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The Struggle for Inclusion
Muslim Minorities and the Democratic Ethos
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten and Paul M. Sniderman
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The politics of inclusion is about more than hate, exclusion, and discrimination.  It is a window into the moral character of contemporary liberal democracies.  The Struggle for Inclusion introduces a new method to the study of public opinion: to probe, step by step, how far non-Muslim majorities are willing to be inclusive, where they draw the line, and why they draw it there and not elsewhere.  Those committed to liberal democratic values and their concerns are the focus, not those advocating exclusion and intolerance.
 
Notwithstanding the turbulence and violence of the last decade over issues of immigration and of Muslims in the West, the results of this study demonstrate that the largest number of citizens in contemporary liberal democracies are more open to inclusion of Muslims than has been recognized. Not less important, the book reveals limits on inclusion that follow from the friction between liberal democratic values.  This pioneering work thus brings to light both pathways to progress and polarization traps. 
 
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Studies on the Internal Diaspora of the Byzantine Empire
Hélène Ahrweiler
Harvard University Press, 1998
Although ethnicity is a modern concept and would not have been recognized by the Byzantines, throughout its history the Byzantine Empire was a multi-ethnic state. The papers in this volume examine questions of the uniformity and separateness of the various Byzantine populations and the degree and mechanisms of acculturation. The cultural uniformity that the Byzantine church and state pursued through Orthodoxy and the Greek language did not erase all distinct traits of different groups--nor was that their intention. This volume provides examples of the multiple forms of integration and resistance to integration in a society that for a long time functioned as an integral state and an articulated society that accepted diversity.
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Studying the Jew
Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany
Alan E. Steinweis
Harvard University Press, 2008

Early in his political career, Adolf Hitler declared the importance of what he called “an antisemitism of reason.” Determined not to rely solely on traditional, cruder forms of prejudice against Jews, he hoped that his exclusionary and violent policies would be legitimized by scientific scholarship. The result was a disturbing, and long-overlooked, aspect of National Socialism: Nazi Jewish Studies.

Studying the Jew investigates the careers of a few dozen German scholars who forged an interdisciplinary field, drawing upon studies in anthropology, biology, religion, history, and the social sciences to create a comprehensive portrait of the Jew—one with devastating consequences. Working within the universities and research institutions of the Third Reich, these men fabricated an elaborate empirical basis for Nazi antisemitic policies. They supported the Nazi campaign against Jews by defining them as racially alien, morally corrupt, and inherently criminal.

In a chilling story of academics who perverted their talents and distorted their research in support of persecution and genocide, Studying the Jew explores the intersection of ideology and scholarship, the state and the university, the intellectual and his motivations, to provide a new appreciation of the use and abuse of learning and the horrors perpetrated in the name of reason.

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The Subtenant / To Outwit God
Hanna Krall
Northwestern University Press, 1992
This volume presents two works by acclaimed Polish journalist Hanna Krall: The Subtenant, a semi-autobiographical novel, and To Outwit God, a remarkable interview with Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The Subtenant explores the troubled and ever-shifting relationships between Poles and Jews, beginning with the author's concealment as a child during the Nazi years and ending in 1981 when martial law was declared in Poland. In To Outwit God, Edelman's words assault conventional assumptions about heroes and heroism, taking in his time not only in the Warsaw Ghetto but his careers as a physician and a Solidarity activist. Taken together, the two works form a powerful memoir of Jewish survival, a meditation on Polish-Jewish relations, and a commentary on the forces that have produced modern Polish opposition movements.
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Suburban Sahibs
Kalita, S. Mitra
Rutgers University Press, 2003
From movie theaters showing the songs and gyrations of “Bollywood” to valedictorians named Patel and Shah, signs are everywhere that Middlesex County, New Jersey is home to one of the largest Indian populations in the world outside India. By tracing the migration of three families, this book delves into how immigration has altered the American suburb, and how the suburb, in turn, has altered the immigrant.               

In this updated edition, journalist S. Mitra Kalita shows that although the reception from long-time residents has not been entirely welcoming, Indians have come to achieve economic success and their desire for political and social parity continues to grow stronger. She traces the evolution of the suburb from a destination for new arrivals to a launching pad for them.               

In the late nineteenth century, tourists descended upon Edison to gawk at its Christmas lights displays. Today, thousands of Indians from all over the United States arrive in the same bedroom community to celebrate their own festivals of lights and colors. Suburban Sahibs attempts to answer the question of how and why they arrived, and offers a window into what America has become: a nation of suburbs as well as a nation of immigrants.
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Surviving the Slaughter
The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire
Marie Beatrice Umutesi; Foreword by Catharine Newbury
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Though the world was stunned by the horrific massacres of Tutsi by the Hutu majority in Rwanda beginning in April 1994, there has been little coverage of the reprisals that occurred after the Tutsi gained political power. During this time hundreds of thousands of Hutu were systematically hunted and killed.

Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire is the eyewitness account of Marie Béatrice Umutesi. She tells of life in the refugee camps in Zaire and her flight across 2000 kilometers on foot. During this forced march, far from the world’s cameras, many Hutu refugees were trampled and murdered. Others died from hunger, exhaustion, and sickness, or simply vanished, ignored by the international community and betrayed by humanitarian organizations. Amidst this brutality, day-to-day suffering, and desperate survival, Umutesi managed to organize the camps to improve the quality of life for women and children.

In this first-hand account of inexplicable brutality, day-to-day suffering, and survival, Marie Béatrice Umutesi sheds light on a backlash of violence that targeted the Hutu refugees of Rwanda after the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1994.  Umutesi’s documentation of the flight and terror of these years provides the world a veritable account of a history that is still widely unknown. After translations from its original French into three other languages, this important book is available in English for the first time. It is more than a testimony to the lives and humanity lost; it is a call for those politicians, military personnel, and humanitarian organizations responsible for the atrocious crimes—and the devastating silence—to be held accountable.

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Swiss in Wisconsin
Frederick Hale
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2007
As the Föhn blew the first breaths of spring into the Alps in March 1845, two Swiss men embarked on a circuitous voyage that took them from the impoverished canton of Glarus in eastern Switzerland to the hills of southern Wisconsin. Their mission: to select and purchase a tract of land to which the Swiss government could dispatch part of its excess population. With subscriptions from prospective emigrants totaling about $2,600, Nicholas Dürst and Fridolin Streiff ultimately purchased 1,280 acres of timber and prospective farmland in Green County—land fellow immigrants declared “beautiful beyond expectation,” offering “excellent timber, good soil, fine springs, and a stream filled with fish.” Thus began the colony at New Glarus, Wisconsin, perhaps the most distinctively Swiss settlement in the United States. A mere five years later, Wisconsin boasted 1,224 of the nation’s 13,358 Swiss immigrants.

In this concise introduction to the state’s Swiss settlers, Frederick Hale traces the catalysts for Swiss emigration, their difficult journeys, and their adjustments to life on Wisconsin soil. Updates for this expanded edition include additional historic photographs and the selected writings of John Luchsinger, who settled at the Swiss colony at New Glarus, in 1856.
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Syrian and Lebanese Patricios in São Paulo
From the Levant to Brazil
Oswaldo Truzzi. Translated by Ramon J. Stern
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Syrian and Lebanese immigrants to Brazil chose to settle in urban areas, a marked contrast to many other migrant groups. In São Paulo, these newcomers embraced new lives as merchants, shopkeepers, and industrialists, making them a dominant force in the city's business sector.

Oswaldo Truzzi's original work on these so-called patrícios changed the face of Brazilian studies. Now available in an English translation, Truzzi's pioneering book identifies the complex social paths blazed by Syrian and Lebanese immigrants and their descendants from the 1890s to the 1960s. He considers their relationships to other groups within São Paulo's kaleidoscopic mix of cultures. He also reveals the differences--real and perceived--between Syrians and Lebanese in terms of religious and ethnic affinities and in the economic sphere. Finally, he compares the two groups with their counterparts in the United States and looks at the wave of Lebanese Muslims to São Paulo that began in the 1960s.

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