Social and cultural history Books

Book SynopsisExplores the complex role that Black religious leaders playor don't playin twenty-first-century racial justice effortsDr. Martin Luther King Jr. along with many of his Black religious contemporaries courageously mobilized for freedom, ushering in the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. Their efforts laid the groundwork for some of the greatest legislative changes in American history. Today, however, there is relatively limited mass mobilization led by Black religious leaders against systemic racism and racial inequality. Why don't we see more Black religious leadership in today's civil rights movements, such as Black Lives Matter?Drawing on fifty-four in-depth interviews with Black religious leaders and civic leaders in Ohio, Korie Litte Edwards and Michelle Oyakawa uncover several reasons, including a move away from engagement with independent Black-led civic groups toward white-controlled faith-based organizations, religious leaders' nostalgia for and personal links tTrade Review"An excellent analysis of how dynamics such as the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and a Black Protestant ethic shaped successful efforts by Black clergy in Ohio to get out the vote during the 2012 presidential election. The book also vividly chronicles local tensions between politics and theologies that undermined participation by many of these same leaders with activist groups like Black Lives Matter. Smart Suits, Tattered Boots is a must read for anyone interested in leadership and civic engagement among contemporary Black ministers and the processes that can foster and/or undermine such efforts." -- Sandra L. Barnes, C. V. Starr Professor of Sociology, Brown University"Featuring high quality social science research and drawing richly on a wide and appropriate range of works, Smart Suits, Tattered Boots makes an important contribution to the field." -- Michael Emerson, co-author of Blacks and Whites in Christian America: How Racial Discrimination Shapes Religious Convictions"One must go quite far back to find articles that highlight the impact of Black church leadership (or really any congregational factors) on social movements … That makes the exposure to a top-notch analysis of the kinds of religious actors that Smart Suits, Tattered Boots provides especially important." * Mobilization *

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Book SynopsisProvides a comprehensive history of Soviet Jewry during World War IIAt the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world's three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twentieth century, much less is known about the experiences of Soviet Jews. Understanding the history of Jewish communities under Soviet rule is essential to comprehending the dynamics of Jewish history in the modern world. Only a small number of scholars and the last generation of Soviet Jews who lived during this period hold a deep knowledge of this history. Jews in the Soviet Union, a new multi-volume history, is an unprecedented undertaking. Publishing over the next few years, this groundbreaking work draws on rare access to documents from the Soviet archTrade ReviewThis is an inspired and inspiring history of Soviet Jews, what they contributed, and what they suffered. A necessary book. -- Robert Service, Emeritus Professor of Russian History, St. Antony’s College, University of OxfordAuthoritative, comprehensive, impeccably researched. . . . Offers the definitive history of Jews in the Soviet Union during World War II. Compiled by an international group of distinguished scholars, this masterful work tells the story of tragedy, heroism, repression, and, ultimately, the birth of a new Soviet Jewish consciousness. -- Lynne Viola, author of Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet UkraineIt is hard to find adequate positive words for a book that tells a story of unprecedented horror. But this new synthetic history of Soviet Jewry in the years between the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the Great Fatherland War is a model of clarity and incisiveness. . . . The concise, readable text confronts head-on the controversies, the myths, and the silences, fulfilling the authors’ aim to write Soviet Jewry into both the history of the Soviet project and the history of Judaism. -- Juliane Furst, Head of Department of Communism and Society, Leibniz Centre of Contemporary History, Potsdam

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Book SynopsisOffers an analysis of Soviet Jewish society after the death of Joseph StalinAt the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world's three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twentieth century, much less is known about the experiences of Soviet Jews. Understanding the history of Jewish communities under Soviet rule is essential to comprehending the dynamics of Jewish history in the modern world. Only a small number of scholars and the last generation of Soviet Jews who lived during this period hold a deep knowledge of this history. Jews in the Soviet Union, a new multi-volume history, is an unprecedented undertaking. Publishing over the next few years, this groundbreaking work draws on rare access to documents from the SovTrade Review"Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union was a heated and complex issue in the Western press and international politics from the 1960s. Gennady Estraikh offers an informed insider’s perspective that adds a valuable new dimension." -- Sheila Fitzpatrick, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University"A deeply researched, historical account of Soviet Jewry in the years between the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953 and the Six-Day War in June 1967. First under Nikita Khrushchev and then under Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet Jews began to assert their identity as Jews and found themselves ready to campaign for their right to leave for Israel and the West. . . . An indispensable resource for anyone with an interest in the history and tragic fate of a Jewish community that had been torn asunder by the Holocaust and decades of forced assimilation and murderous repression by the Kremlin, and then learned how to challenge Bolshevik rule and be Jews again." -- Joshua Rubenstein, Harvard University

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Book SynopsisThe generational and social thinking changes that caused an unprecedented shift toward support for gay marriageHow did gay marriagesomething unimaginable two decades agocome to feel inevitable to even its staunchest opponents? Drawing on over 95 interviews with two generations of Americans, as well as historical analysis and public opinion data, Peter Hart-Brinson argues that a fundamental shift in our understanding of homosexuality sparked the generational change that fueled gay marriage's unprecedented rise. Hart-Brinson shows that the LGBTQ movement's evolution and tactical responses to oppression caused Americans to reimagine what it means to be gay and what gay marriage would mean to society at large. While older generations grew up imagining gays and lesbians in terms of their behavior, younger generations came to understand them in terms of their identity. Over time, as the older generation and their ideas slowly passed away, they were replaced by a new generational culture thatTrade Review"The book provides an interesting glimpse into [Hart-Brinson’s] 95 interview subjects’ lives, attitudes, and milieu. He also offers tables, charts, and graphs to reveal changes in public opinion over the decades." * The Gay & Lesbian Quarterly *"At the very moment attitudes toward gay marriage began to change rapidly, Peter Hart-Brinson interviewed people from multiple generations to assess the shifting meanings surrounding gay marriage. While quantitative studies allow us to track these changing attitudes in a simplistic way, most barely scratch the surface of what remains a complex issue for many. With his insightful analysis of his qualitative data, Hart-Brinson breaks through this surface and does a deep dive into the metaphors people use to think about gay marriage. In doing so, he helps us to understand why resistance to gay marriage remains steadfast, even in the face of growing consensus." -- Thomas J. Linneman,Author of Weathering Change: Gays and Lesbians, Christian Conservatives, and Everyday Hostilities"Public opinion typically changes slowly. The transformation in Americans views regarding same-sex marriage is a notable exceptionwith public opinion dramatically shifting from strong opposition to strong support in a very short period of time. How do we explain this remarkable exception? Marshalling insights from historical data, national surveys, and in-depth interviews, Peter Hart-Brinson skillfully and convincingly documents the powerful role of generations in effecting change. The Gay Marriage Generation is an important and provocative book that will encourage us to reassess our assumptions of how social change occurs." -- Brian Powell,Author of Counted Out: Same-Sex Relations and American's Definitions of Family"There is much to learn from this book and Hart-Brinson is meticulous in laying out and supporting his arguments." * Social Forces *"Will be an interesting and enlightening read for those both new and old to the topic." * American Journal of Sociology *

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Book SynopsisHighlights Bruce Lee's influence beyond martial arts and filmAn Asian and Asian American icon of unimaginable stature and influence, Bruce Lee revolutionized the martial arts by combining influences drawn from around the world. Uncommonly determined, physically gifted, and artistically brilliant, Lee rose to fame as part of a wave of transpacific globalization that bridged the nearly seven thousand miles between Hong Kong and California. Like Water unpacks Lee's global impact, linking his legendary status as a martial artist, actor, and director to his continual traversals across the newly interconnected Asia and America.Daryl Joji Maeda's multifaceted account of Bruce Lee's legacy uniquely traces how movements and migrations across the Pacific Ocean structured the cultures Bruce Lee inherited, the milieu he occupied, the martial art he developed, the films he made, and the world he left behind. A unique blend of cultural history and biography, Like Wate

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Book SynopsisContemporary accounts of urban Native identity in two pan-Indian communitiesIn the last half century, changing racial and cultural dynamics in the United States have caused an explosion in the number of people claiming to be American Indian, from just over half a million in 1960 to over three million in 2013. Additionally, seven out of ten American Indians live in or near cities, rather than in tribal communities, and that number is growing. In Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality, Michelle Jacobs examines the new reality of the American Indian urban experience. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over two and a half years, Jacobs focuses on how some individuals are invested in reclaiming Indigenous identities whereas others are more invested in relocating their sense of self to the urban environment. These groups not only apply different meanings to indigeneity, but they also develop different strategies for asserting and maintaining Native identities in an urban space inundated Trade ReviewWhy is racial formation theory insufficient to explain the complexities of urban Indigenous identity today? Sociologists have been far too slow to engage theories of settler-colonialism or to take seriously the experiences of Indigenous peoples in their own terms. Drawing on detailed interviews and observations and situating her analyses across multiple vectors of historical experience, Jacobs presents a view of the complexities of contemporary Indigenous identity that beautifully bridges key conversations in sociology and Indigenous studies. * Kari Marie Norgaard, author Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Nature Colonialism and Social Action *Jacobs writes on the erasure of Indigenous Peoples and Urban Indians from deeply informed research and personal experience that shows us how settler discourse and dominant paradigms still operate to marginalize and silence Native voices and perspectives, particularly on mascotry issues, identity claims and internal politics….Jacobs reflects the diversity of Native people and Indigenous identity issues with professional accuracy and intercultural awareness. * James V. Fenelon, author of Redskins?: Sport Mascots, Indian Nations and White Racism *Through narration and sociological analyses, Jacobs offers the reader fascinating accounts of both Indigenous memories and urban realities for Native people living in Northeast Ohio. The voices in Jacobs’ accessible and informative book speak to the importance of ancestry, spirituality, homelands, powwows, and organizations in contemporary Indigenous America which she shows in all of its complexity, contradictions, and community. * Joane Nagel, author of Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers *Jacobs (Wayne State Univ.) has written a splendid analysis of contemporary urban Indigenous and Indigenous-identifying residents in the area around Cleveland, OH, living under the conditions of white domination . . . Jacobs combines sociological categories and vignettes of over 30 people to examine the complexity of these two groups’ identities. * C. T. Vecsey, Colgate University *Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality richly documents identity formation, social boundaries, and the processes of 'making' race as they unfold in one Midwestern urban Indigenous community. The book does so with vital attention to settler colonialism’s role in forming, maintaining, and reproducing Indigenous identity. We can never discount settler colonialism’s impact on Indigenous lives, nor experiences of marginalization more generally. Jacobs opens the door for many different lines of inquiry across cultural sociology, urban studies, and race and ethnicity." * Sociology of Race and Ethnicity *

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Book SynopsisWinner, 2019 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre ResearchHonorable Mention, 2021 Errol Hill Award, given by the American Society for Theatre ResearchArgues for a conception of black cultural life that exceeds post-blackness and conditions of loss In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong'o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960's and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure.If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imaTrade ReviewBy foregrounding crucial modes of disappearance, withdrawal, obfuscation, and eclipse found across diverse examples of contemporary art, literature, and performance ... Nyong’o further renegotiates the terms of ongoing debates in literary studies, queer theory, and black thought most broadly. * LA Review of Books *To afro-fabulate is to listen to and know the ongoing history of anti-black racism, but also to rebuke it by telling another story. In showing us how artists and performers engage in this act of telling, Nyongo offers not only a compelling new way to think about works that challenge history, narrative, and truth, but also a method in which we might continue that work. * Brooklyn Rail *The imaginative power of Nyong’o’s words, his push to reimagine chronology and time through the optics of Blackness and his insistence on the intellectual stakes of Afrofabulatory ambivalence stuck with me, reminding me of the importance of the ephemeral, the everyday, and the speculative. * Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal *Tavia Nyong’o provides detailed descriptions of various performances, along with intuitive and counterintuitive insights about their creators. The book uses “interdisciplinary modes of investigation” to “aid this process of critical fabulation in a variety of ways...especially insofar as they bring into co-presence a sense of the incompossible, mingling what was with that might have been” (7). * QED *

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Book SynopsisFinalist, 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for NonfictionFinalist, 2024 Writers' Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political WritingThese days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn't working for anyone, even those who appear to have it all. What is going on?In this urgent cultural diagnosis, author and activist Astra Taylor exposes how seemingly disparate crisesrising inequality and declining mental health, the ecological emergency, and the threat of authoritarianismoriginate from a social order built on insecurity. From home ownership and education to the wellness industry and policing, many of the institutions and systems that promise to make us more secure actually undermine us. Mixing social critique, memoir, history, political analysis, and philosophy, this genre-bending book rethinks both insecurity and security from the ground up. By facing our existential insecurity and embracing our vulnerability, Taylor aTrade ReviewTaylor asks us to contemplate a better world … This ethic of insecurity, collectivism and egalitarianism should be on the forefront of every educator’s mind. * Winnipeg Free Press *The ideas that Taylor puts forth are not only radical, but world changing … The Age of Insecurity is exactly the right book at exactly the right time. That time is now. * The Tyee *Taylor makes the case for clearing away capitalism’s distracting, destabilising regime; Keltner for expanding and more clearly valuing our connections to each other, to our own depths and capacities, and to the grandeur and order of the world beyond. * New Statesman *A handbook for a new way forward. * Literary Review of Canada *Astra Taylor’s The Age of Insecurity made me feel I understood something obvious that I had overlooked before ... that we on the left can (and need to) offer a different, better conception of security. * Current Affairs *

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Book SynopsisAfter the Civil War, a handful of former Confederate leaders joined forces with the Mexican emperor Maximilian von Hapsburg to colonize Mexico with former American slaveholders. Their plan was to develop commercial agriculture in the Mexican state of Coahuila under the guidance of former slaveholders with former slaves providing the bulk of the labor force. By developing these new centers of agricultural production and commercial exchange, the Mexican government hoped to open up new markets and, by extending the few existing railroads in the region, also spur further development.The Southern Exodus to Mexico considers the experiences of both white southern elites and common white and black southern farmers and laborers who moved to Mexico during this period. Todd W. Wahlstrom examines in particular how the endemic warfare, raids, and violence along the borderlands of Texas and Coahuila affected the colonization effort. Ultimately, Native groups such as the ComanTrade Review"A welcome contribution to the lately growing scholarship on the Confederate-exile experience that is excellently grounded in historiography."—Robert May, American Historical Review“A well-researched study of the people, events, and ideas surrounding Confederate migration and colonization efforts in Mexico.”—C. L. Sinclair, Choice “Should be included in any conversation about the global dimensions of southern history.”—John Mckiernan-González, Journal of Southern History"This is an important book, and it deserves a place on reading lists for graduate seminars and Civil War enthusiasts alike. Indeed, not only does Wahlstrom add a great deal to the historiographical discussion in Civil War history, but his work also serves as a significant contribution to Southern, emancipation, and borderlands history."—Matthew M. Stith, Civil War Book Review“The Southern Exodus to Mexico is an intervention in borderlands history, in black-white-Indian history, in migration history, in economic history, and in the history of national, class, and racial identities. It is also that rare and wonderful kind of historical writing: a tale of roads not taken, of dreams not quite fulfilled. Even though most of the migrants did not achieve all that they had hoped, there is much for us to learn from their ventures. Wahlstrom shows us a dynamic borderland and the peoples who traversed it.”—Paul Spickard, author of Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and IdentityTable of ContentsList of Illustrations and Tables Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War 2. White and Black Southerners Migrate to Mexico after the American Civil War 3. Southern Colonization and the Texas-Coahuila Borderlands 4. Southern Colonization and the Fall of the Mexican Empire, 1866–67 5. Southern Colonization, Railroads, and U.S. and Mexican Modernization Conclusion: Regions and Nations Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisXurt’an (the end of the world) showcases the rich storytelling traditions of the northern Lacandones of Naha’ through a collection of traditional narratives, songs, and ritual speech. Formerly isolated in the dense, tropical rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico, the Lacandon Maya constitute one of the smallest language groups in the world. Although their language remains active and alive, their traditional culture was abandoned after the death of their religious and civic leader in 1996. Lacking the traditional contexts in which the culture was transmitted, the oral traditions are quickly being forgotten. This collection includes creation myths that describe the cycle of destruction and renewal of the world, the structure of the universe, the realms of the gods and their intercessions in the affairs of their mortals, and the journey of the souls after death. It also includes work songs of Lacandon women, whose contribution to their culture has been hitherto overTrade Review"Xurt’an will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of folklore, anthropology, comparative literature, and performance studies. The scope of the oral narratives gathered here is notable, as is Cook’s discussion of some of the selections. . . . Xurt’an will certainly become a landmark in the study of Northern Lacandon Maya oral literature."—Sarah Alice Campbell, Journal of Folklore Research“This is a very valuable piece of work for folklorists and linguists and is a huge contribution to scholarship in this area. I applaud Cook for including oral traditions recorded from Lacandon women. Lacandon women are largely ignored in the Lacandon ethnographic literature and archaeology, and until now I know of no compilation of Lacandon women’s stories. This is an outstanding service to the field.”—R. Jon McGee, professor of anthropology at Texas State University“You will be quickly drawn into this presentation of language texts contributed by skilled Mayan narrators working in multiple literary genres while covering topics ranging from the earthly to the cosmological. The author’s attention to detail is unparalleled. The scope and quality of the narratives will take your breath away.”—Barry Carlson, editor of Northwest Coast Texts: Stealing LightTable of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Tables Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1. The Hach Winik ‘True People’ The Lacandones Northern Lacandon Oral Literature Part 2. Myths Birth of the Gods Bor Maʼax Hachäkyum and Akyantʼoʼ Create Their People and Kisin Creates Their Onen Bor Maʼax Hachäkyum Makes the Ants and Snakes Antonio Martinez Hachäkyum Makes the Sky Bor Maʼax Uluʼubir Baʼarkaʼan Umentik Pethaʼ ‘A Star Falls and Creates the Lagoon’ Antonio Martinez Hachäkyum yeter Tʼuup yeter Kisin ‘Hachäkyum, Tʼuup, and the Devil’ Bor Maʼax Hachäkyum yeter Tʼuup yeter Chäk Xib ‘Hachäkyum, Tʼuup, and Chäk Xib’ Bor Maʼax Hachäkyum Uxatik Ucheʼir Ukaar ‘Hachäkyum Cuts the Mortals’ Throats’ Bor Maʼax Äkicheʼex ‘Our Eyes’ Bor Maʼax Nacimiento ‘Birth’ Bor Maʼax Uyählehir Bah ‘The Mole Trapper’ Bor Maʼax Xurtʼan Uburur ‘The World Ends with the Flood’ Bor Maʼax Akyantʼoʼ No Permite Uxurtʼan ‘Akyantʼoʼ Prevents the End of the World’ Bor MaʼaxʼÄhah Antonio Martinez Kaʼwätsʼäk uhoʼor Barum yeter Kʼakʼ ‘The Two-Headed Jaguar and the Lord of Fire’ Säk Hoʼor Mensäbäk yeter Hach Winik Tukinsah ‘Mensäbäk and the Ancestor He Killed’ Kʼayum Maʼax Kakʼoch yeter Ukʼani(r) Hach Winik ‘Kakʼoch and His Human Assistant’ Bor Maʼax Akʼinchob Takes a Human Wife Antonio Martinez Part 3. Popular Stories Maya Kimin ‘The Mayan Death’ Säk Hoʼor Chäk Xok ‘The Sirens’ Bor Maʼax Nukuch Winik yeter Utiʼaʼar yeter Ahyaʼaxcheʼ ‘The Ancestor, His Son, and the Ceiba Tree’ Bor Maʼax Haayokʼ Bor Maʼax Koʼotir Kaʼan ‘The Celestial Eagle’ Bor Maʼax Uyitber ‘He at the End of the Road’ Bor Maʼax Kakʼoch yeter Uyitber ‘Kakʼoch and the Yitber’ Bor Maʼax Wantʼutʼkʼin Säk Hoʼor Pʼikbir Tsʼon yeter Kisin ‘The Rifle and Kisin’ Säk HoʼorʼAyim yetel Chem ‘The Crocodile and the Canoe’ Säk Hoʼor Ahsaay ‘The Leafcutter Ants’ Bor Maʼax Ahtʼuʼur yeter Barum ‘The Rabbit and the Puma’ Säk Hoʼor Chʼämäk yeter Chäk Barum ‘The Fox and the Puma’ Bor Maʼax Hachäkyum yeter Ahbäb ‘Hachäkyum and the Toad’ Säk Hoʼor Pekʼ yeter ʼAyim ‘The Dog and the Crocodile’ Säk Hoʼor How the Toucan Got His Red Beak Antonio Martinez Part 4. Songs Ukʼaay Barum ‘The Jaguar Song’ Antonio Martinez Ukʼaay Box ‘The Gourd Song’ Antonio Martinez Ukʼaay Käkah ‘The Cacao Song’ Juana Koh Ukʼaay Käy ‘Fish Song’ Antonio Martinez Ukʼaay tiʼ Huuchʼ ‘Song for Grinding’ Juana Koh Ukʼaay tiʼ Kʼuuch ‘Song for Spinning Thread’ Juana Koh Ukʼaay Torok ‘The Iguana Song’ Antonio Martinez Ukʼaayir Maʼax ‘Song of the Monkeys’ Antonio Martinez Ukʼaayir Tokʼ ‘Song of the Flint’ Antonio Martinez Ukʼaayir Xux ‘Song of the Yellow Jacket Wasps’ Säk Hoʼor Part 5. Ritual Speech: Invocations, Chants, and Charms Ahhoochʼ ‘The Hoochʼ’ Juana Koh Ahtsʼin ‘The Manioc’ Juana Koh An Offering Chant during the Preparation of Balcheʼ Antonio Martinez Offering under a Tree Antonio Martinez Utʼanir Baʼcheʼ ‘The Secret of the Balcheʼ’ Antonio Martinez Part 6. Descriptions of Meteorological and Astral PhenomenaʼÄxpʼäriʼ ‘The Solstice’ Antonio Martinez Luʼum Kab ‘The Rainbow Gods’ Bor Maʼax Säkber Akyum ‘Our Lord’s White Road’ Antonio Martinez Appendix 1: Lacandon Onen, Ceremonial Names, and Distribution Appendix 2: Gods and Men in Lacandon Mythology Notes References

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Book SynopsisMichael J. Blouin is Associate Professor of English and the Humanities at Milligan University, USA, where he co-founded and now directs the Honors Program. He serves as chair for Literature, Politics, and Society for the Popular Culture Association (PCA/ACA), and is the author of Stephen King and American Politics (2021) and Mass-Market Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, 1972 2017 (2018).Trade ReviewMichael Blouin has written a truly remarkable, and remarkably important, study of the American presidency here, treating major representations of the chief executive in works of fiction over nearly two centuries but looking beyond these visions as well. He takes into account the notion of ‘presidentialism’ itself, inviting us to see the office itself as a kind of necessary fiction, one that functions oddly in a supposedly democratic nation. Blouin’s book is, I think, a hugely interesting and important contribution to the aesthetics of politics, and it sheds light on how we live our corporate lives – not something one often sees in an academic study. This book deserves a wide and appreciative audience. * Jay Parini, Professor of English and Creative Writing, Middlebury College, USA, and author Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal (2016) and Borges and Me (2021) *In this wide-ranging analysis of fictional US presidents, Michael Blouin shows how literary authors—highbrow and low—have countered the gravitational force of US presidentialism. The Fictional POTUS lets readers focus and practice their desires for US democracy on historical and imagined presidents in ways that, as he urges, are good for democracy. Literary presidents serve as a 'vital catalyst that reminds readers of their dissatisfaction' with presidential failures and democratic shortcomings, letting them practice wanting more and imagining better. The fictional POTUS teaches readers that 'dissatisfaction [is] one of democracy’s greatest gifts' thus serving as a powerful corrective to the anti-democratic symbolics and practices of the US presidency. * Dana D. Nelson, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair of English and American Studies, Vanderbilt University, USA *A remarkable achievement, this investigation into Presidentialism - both as an actual figure and idea - is a more than timely reminder of the schisms that persist at the heart of American democracy. This is an important study of some of the fictions that American presidents have both engendered and capitalized on throughout history; in other words, a must read for serious students of American cultural history, literature, and politics. * Caroline Blinder, Reader in American Literature and Culture, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Moving Portraits of the President 1. James Fenimore Cooper’s Exceptional Presidents 2. George Lippard and the Gothic President 3. Williams Wells Brown and the Disembodied President 4. The President in Books for Boys 5. The President in Books for Girls 6. Hamlin Garland, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Tortured Heart of American Realism 7. Gore Vidal and the Performative Presidency 8. The Imperial Presidents of American Literature Epilogue: George Saunders and Presidential Melancholia References Index

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Book SynopsisLearning to Save the World provides an innovative analysis of how individuals inhabit, refuse, and reconfigure the contours of global health.In 2001, Botswana''s government, faced with one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world, committed itself to sub-Saharan Africa''s first free public HIV treatment program. US-based private foundations and medical schools offered support to demonstrate the feasibility of public HIV treatment in Africa. Given US interest and investment in global health, this support created opportunities for US physicians and medical trainees to interact with local practitioners, treat patients, and shape health policy in Botswana.Although global health has emerged as a powerful call to planetary moral action, the nature of this exhortation remains unclear. Is global health a new movement for social justice, or is it neocolonial, creating new dependencies under the banner of humanitarianism? Betsey Behr Brada shows thatTrade ReviewMany researchers and urban policy professionals will find something of interest here.[T]his collection contains multiple insights that professionals will find useful and interesting. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Learning to Save the World 1. Saving Medication vs. Saving Children 2. How to Do Things to Children with Words 3. The Metalanguage of HIV Intervention 4. The Global Health Frontier 5. Experiencing AIDS in Africa: The Anxious Fantasies of American Medicine 6. "We Are All Just Specimens": Pedagogy as Dispossession Conclusion: Undoing Global Health

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Book SynopsisIf California were its own country, it would have the world's fifth largest immigrant population. The way these newcomers are integrated into the state will shape California's schools, workforce, businesses, public health, politics, and culture. In Immigrant California, leading experts in U.S. migration provide cutting-edge research on the incorporation of immigrants and their descendants in this bellwether state. California, unique for its diverse population, powerful economy, and progressive politics, provides important lessons for what to expect as demographic change comes to most states across the country. Contributors to this volume cover topics ranging from education systems to healthcare initiatives and unravel the sometimes-contradictory details of California's immigration history. By examining the past and present of immigration policy in California, the volume shows how a state that was once the national leader in anti-immigrant policies quickly became a standard-bearer of greater accommodation. California's successes, and its failures, provide an essential road map for the future prosperity of immigrants and natives alike.Trade Review"Throughout U.S. history, California has offered some of the most welcoming–and most xenophobic–responses to newcomers. This volume closely looks at the immigration lessons from this state, home to one of the largest immigrant populations in the world."—Kevin Johnson, Dean, University of California, Davis School of Law"How should public policies respond to immigration? This impressive, data-driven collection of research answers this pressing question with systematic analysis over time and across groups. The experts featured in this volume provide evidence-based insights and recommendations that will help lead California and the nation to a more inclusive, healthy, and prosperous shared future."—Janelle Wong, Professor of Government and Politics & American Studies, University of Maryland, College Park

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Book SynopsisTechnology is rapidly changing the way we think about money. Digital payment has been slow to take off in the United States but is displacing cash in countries as diverse as China, Kenya, and Sweden. In Reimagining Money, Sibel Kusimba describes the rise of M-Pesa, and offers a rich portrait of how this technology changes the economic and social landscape, allowing users to create webs of relationships as they exchange, pool, borrow, lend, and share digital money in user-built networks. These networks, Kusimba argues, will shape the future of financial technologies and their impact on poverty, inclusion, and empowerment. She describes how urban and transnational migrants maintain a presence in rural areas through money gifts; how families use crowdfunding software to assemble donations for emergency medical care; and how new financial groups invest in real estate and fund weddings. The author presents fascinating accounts that challenge accepted wisdom by examining the notion of money as wealth-in-people—an idea long-cultivated in sub-Saharan Africa and now brought to bear on the digital age with homegrown financial technologies such as digital money transfer, digital microloans, and crowdfunding. The book concludes by proposing a new theory of money that can be applied to designing better financial technologies in the future.Trade Review"Mobile money articulates Kenyans to multiple forms and forces of value in global and local economies. In this provocative, nuanced ethnography, Sibel Kusimba asks the question: can money be designed for the 'wealth-in-people' that sustains lives and livelihoods in an ever-more precarious world?"—William Maurer, University of California, Irvine"Kusimba provides a rich, thought-provoking narrative that vividly captures the lived experiences and contexts of the Kenyan people. Reimagining Money has huge potential in guiding studies in other fields, especially community development. This is truly a masterpiece."—Milcah Mulu-Mutuku, Egerton University"A remarkable, deeply researched book. Kusimba gifts readers with a vivid account of the world of money and technology, beautifully revealing how the everyday use, and sometimes non-use, of M-Pesa weaves monetary exchanges inside webs of relationships."—Nina Bandelj, University of California, Irvine"Reimagining Money offers a rich source of knowledge and insight on a topic that surely will gain in significance in the years ahead."—Jürgen Schraten, Finance and Society"The primary purpose of money, as Kusimba beautifully illustrates through her detailed ethnography, is to create 'wealth-in-people.' Money is but a means to build and accrue valuable relationships with others which enhance one's status and authority. The key 'resources' in life, the most valuable ones, are not minerals, technologies, or even profits; they are human relationships that be called upon and mobilized to facilitate a range of social projects and forms of assistance."—Jenny Huberman, Reviews in Anthropology"Reimagining Money: Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution is an impressive monograph. Kusimba, who hails from the United States of America (USA), migrates between her place of employment in the USA and East Africa, where she does field research and relational work. This configuration of the work–home dynamic produced useful ethnographic encounters 'in the field' with research respondents and family alike.... As such, her relations with her Kenyan kin drew her into this revolution as participant, not mere bystander."—Detlev Krige, Anthropology Southern AfricaTable of Contents1. A Central Banker Talks Money 2. Airtime Money 3. Money Leapfroggers 4. Whose Money Is This? 5. Money and Wealth-in-People 6. Hearthholds of Mobile Money 7. Distributive Labors 8. Strategic Ignorance 9. Reimagining Debt: The Rat and the Purse 10. Reimagining Giving: A Design Project 11. Designs for Wealth-in-People

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Book SynopsisWith this nuanced and interdisciplinary work, political theorist Mihaela Mihai tackles several interrelated questions: How do societies remember histories of systemic violence? Who is excluded from such histories' cast of characters? And what are the political costs of selective remembering in the present? Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not easily subsumed to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver—thematically and formally—within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice.Trade Review"Elegantly written and masterfully argued, Mihai's book contributes to debates about the critical role of art in resisting systemic violence and its political oblivion. With outstanding theoretical sophistication, exceptional interdisciplinary breadth, and remarkable empirical depth,it theorizes critical artistic practices as forms of mnemonic care for healthy hermeneutical climates. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the difficult work of resisting the mystification of the past and working toward social justice."—José Medina, Northwestern University"An eloquent and pathbreaking work of political theory that is deeply engaged with history and culture. Resolutely interdisciplinary and comparative, it provides stunningly illuminating insights into the everyday forms of complicity that prop up unjust regimes and the ordinary forms of resistance through which citizens contest domination."—Michael Rothberg, University of California, Los Angeles"Mihai once again challenges received wisdoms about the right way for nations to deal with histories of systemic violence. She makes a compelling case for messier, less triumphalist narratives of the past in favour of the ethical ambiguity of how resistance and complicity actually unfold."—Danielle Celermajer, University of Sydney"Mihaela Mihai has written a daring book that transcends disciplinary, linguistic, and national boundaries."—Catherine Guisan, Contemporary Political Theory"Mihai's book shows us how to understand action differently. In the present moment, as we struggle against the writing of political memory within enclosed perceptual experiences and hermeneutics, we might draw from Mihai's theorization of mnemonic care."—Sue Shon, Krisis: A Journal for Contemporary Philosophy"With Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care... Mihai not only offers a rich resource for scholars working on questions of complicity and implication across different fields and disciplines – from history, to sociology, to political theory and philosophy, to memory studies, and to comparative literature among others. She also lays the foundation for new and deeper critical inquiries into the ethical demands and political stakes of studying complex involvement in violence."—Sofía Forchieri, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture"In an argumentative tour de force, Mihai manages to dislocate petrified demarcation lines 'between the good and the bad, to reveal the relationality that underpins even the most exemplary practices of resistance'."—Maria Alina Asavei, The Review of PoliticsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Tracing the Double Erasure 2. The Aesthetics of Care 3. France's "Dark Years" 4. Romania's Horizons of Hope and Despair 5. The Spectrum of Apartheid in South Africa Conclusion: Heretic Visions, Responsible Futures

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Book SynopsisToday, churches, political parties, trade unions, and even national sports teams are no guarantee of social solidarity. At a time when these traditional institutions of social cohesion seem increasingly ill-equipped to defend against the disintegration of sociability, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer encourages us to reflect on the cultural and literary history of social gatherings—from the ancient Athenian symposium to its successor forms throughout Western history. From medieval troubadours to Parisian salons and beyond, Pfeiffer conceptualizes the symposium as an institution of sociability with a central societal function. As such he reinforces a programmatic theoretical move in the sociology of Georg Simmel and builds on theories of social interaction and communication characterized by Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and others. To make his argument, Pfeiffer draws on the work of a range of writers, including Dr. Samuel Johnson and Diderot, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, Dorothy Sayers, Joseph Conrad, and Stieg Larsson. Ultimately, Pfeiffer concludes that if modern societies do not find ways of reinstating elements of the Athenian symposium, especially those relating to its ritualized ease, decency and style of interaction, they will have to cope with increasing violence and decreasing social cohesion.Trade Review"Sociability and Society switches with ease and elegance between theoretical argumentation, historical narrative, and literary criticism. An intensive, interesting, and inviting book for students of European cultural history, qualitative social theory, and literature."—Rüdiger Campe, Yale University"In this important and thought-provoking book, Pfeiffer tracks the history of the social form of the symposium and its multifarious successors. His open, essayistic style perfectly suits his protean subject matter."—Peter Gilgen, Cornell UniversityTable of Contents0. Introduction 1. Conceptualizing the Symposium 2. Power and Signs of Power in the Middle Ages 3. Sociability and the Humanities 4. The Splintering of Culture: Reading versus Salon 5. Proust and Nineteenth-Century Salons 6. The Silence of Power: English Clubs or Oligarchy versus Democracy 7. A Symptomatology of Critical Shifts 8. Securing Power and Auxiliary Evidence 9. The Paradigm of Isolation and Its Consequences: Joseph Conrad 10. Beyond the Sympotic: Aesthetic Productivity and Sociable Bonding in the Detective Novel 11. Consequences and Conclusion(s): The Anthropological-Institutional Trap and the Resurrection of Literature

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Book SynopsisWhat Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them.Trade Review"What if pornography built the body as we know it and can also help dismantle it? In What Pornography Knows, Kathleen Lubey tracks texts like a detective across centuries as they hide on secret library shelves, analyzes them with verve, and shows us, brilliantly, how pornography doesn't just celebrate endless sex but in fact constructed sex as we know it, and with more ambivalence than we'd realized. A masterful rethinking of the history of pornography."—Whitney Strub, author of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right"Kathleen Lubey's dazzling study makes available an astounding new history of pornographic narrative––or, rather, of pornographic dilation, since 'narrative' is among the categories of representation we will have to rethink in response to this landmark study, along with 'knowledge,' 'embodiment,' and 'sexuality.' This book will make a lasting impact in a number of scholarly fields––and it is sorely needed: a non-phobic, but characteristically skeptical, treatment of a pornography as a far more complex genre than hitherto perceived."—Grace Lavery, author of Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis"With analysis that is nothing short of astonishing, Lubey offers a dramatic, eloquent cultural history of pornography with an ingenious throughline in a single much-transformed text. What Pornography Knows offers significant new information about literary fields from the eighteenth century to the present and makes available new insights about the social hierarchies in which they participated."—Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago, author of Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did To Action"Lubey's greater argument, that pornography places sex in a discursive whirl that assesses how culture and sex refract each other, remains useful for porn studies and histories of erotic literature. This monograph will feel especially interesting to researchers working on porn's reception history and the intersection of eighteenth century book history with spheres of erotic production."—Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, Critical Inquiry"What Pornography Knows is a rare achievement in that it balances serious archival acumen and book history with theoretical sophistication and, in the end, a consequential presentism which left me thinking differently about a period and topic that I have long researched. It is as much a virtuoso literary history as it is a roadmap for the exciting directions that eighteenth-century scholarship can take."—Jason S. Farr, Eighteenth-Century FictionTable of ContentsIntroduction: Pornography Without Sex 1. Genital Parts: Detachable Properties in the Eighteenth Century 2. Feminist Speculations: Penetration and Protest in Pornographic Fiction 3. The Victorian Eighteenth Century: Publishing an Erotics of Inequity 4. Uncoupling: Pornography and Feminism in the Countercultural Era Coda: A Mindful Pornography

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Book SynopsisThe future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise, Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. Using a combination of participant observation, courtroom ethnography, and archival research, Loperena reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority. The book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways Black dispossession and displacement are carried forth through the conferral of individual rights and freedoms, a prerequisite for resource exploitation under contemporary capitalism. By demanding to be accounted for on their terms, Garifuna anchor Blackness to Central America—a place where Black peoples are presumed to be nonnative inhabitants—and to collective land rights. Steeped in Loperena's long-term activist engagement with Garifuna land defenders, this book is a testament to their struggle and to the promise of "another world" in which Black and Indigenous peoples thrive.Trade Review"In this careful and rich ethnography, Christopher Loperena offers an incisive study of the courageous activism by Garifuna land defenders aiming to enact alternative futures based on notions of mutuality, not appropriation."—Juliet Hooker, Brown University"The Ends of Paradise brilliantly analyzes the racial logics of on-going settler capitalist extractivism while showing the beauty and strength of the Garifuna struggle. Christopher Loperena provides a grounded look at the contemporary dilemmas facing Black and Indigenous peoples throughout much of the world."—Shannon Speed, UCLA"An illuminating analysis of Garifuna activism. Crucial for understanding how extraction, race, and activism are unfolding around the world, The Ends of Paradise is a must read."—Lynn Stephen, University of Oregon"Loperena provides a microhistory of individuals and organizations, sometimes in competition, navigating the pressures of land access and control, economic development, and cultural identity.... Recommended."—J. M. Rosenthal, CHOICE"The Ends of Paradise is a powerful history of the present, one that captures and participates in the struggle of a Black Indigenous people to maintain a degree of economic and cultural autonomy in the face of development projects that are marketed as sustainable ecotourism."—Kevin Coleman, Hispanic American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Imagining Black Indigenous Futures chapter abstractThe introduction establishes how Black and Indigenous struggles for territorial autonomy in Honduras interact with larger social and economic forces, including the global resurgence of resource extraction that is slowly eroding the customary rights of Indigenous peoples across the Americas. Although the government of Honduras has presented tourism as a sustainable alternative to extractive industries, this chapter argues that tourism is an extractivist enterprise premised on environmental dispossession and racial violence against rural communities of color. It also shows how Garifuna—a Black Indigenous people of African, Arawak, and Carib descent—fight back against the extractivist mandate of the Honduran state and multinational capital on the Caribbean Coast. 1The Extractivist Logics of Progress chapter abstractChapter 1 traces the historical genealogy of extractivism in Honduras. From the banana enclaves of the early twentieth century to sumptuous coastal tourism resorts and the contemporary bid to establish semiautonomous charter cities in purportedly unpopulated areas of the country, the state has tried to enact various visions of progress. All these visions, though, are intimately tethered to extractivism, particularly racial extractivism. 2The Garifuna Coast: The Inclusionary Politics of Expulsion chapter abstractChapter 2 analyzes how the tourism economy facilitates racialized extraction. The advent of multicultural rights unfolded alongside state programs designed to transform Garifuna people into subjects of development. But the inclusion of Black and Indigenous communities seems inseparable from the commodification of those communities; the government's policies all seem to render Garifuna lands and culture as tourism products. These policies are presented as a win-win for everyone, equally beneficial to Garifuna and working-class non-Indigenous Hondurans who remain stymied by poverty and the legacy of "underdevelopment." The only clear winner is not either one of these groups, but rather the mestizo elite. Garifuna resistance to government policies exposes the inner workings of supposedly inclusionary politics and how those efforts ultimately advance not inclusion, but racial and spatial expulsion. 3Tensions of Autonomous Blackness chapter abstractChapter 3 examines how statist development objectives seep into the lives of Garifuna in Triunfo de la Cruz, Honduras. Neoliberal economic paradigms emerged in tandem with morally saturated development discourses that tout poverty reduction, inclusion, and sustainability, and also imagine Garifuna as stakeholders with the capacity to benefit from and contribute productively to Honduras's tourism economy. Policies that promote participation in the tourism economy are entangled with contests over land and belonging. Conflicts over the fate of the community figure prominently in daily life, as community members—for and against government-sponsored development—reckon with the dispossession that inevitably come with development and debate how to negotiate with and when to protest against these forces. Garifuna land defense strategies are articulated through the practice of Black autonomy: an ethico-political proposal that refuses dominant narratives of progress and instead asserts a notion of autonomy as collective action and social good. 4Rescue the Land, Defend the Future chapter abstractChapter 4 theorizes the spatial and temporal dimensions of Garifuna political subjectivity through an analysis of the movement to recuperate or "rescue" communal lands from privatization. The chapter examines how Garifuna women lead the lucha (struggle) in defense of their territory with their bodies, and how that defense is bound up with gendered narratives of ancestrality and the praxis of territorial mothering. To live ancestrally is a way of being in relation with the land, which is crucial to Garifuna autonomy and a key feature of the struggle to contest the destination-making strategies of multinational capital on the Caribbean coast. 5The Limits of Indigeneity: Pueblo Garifuna v. Honduras chapter abstractChapter 5 examines the public hearing at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of the Garifuna Community Triunfo de la Cruz and Its Members v. Honduras. During court proceedings, Honduras's deputy attorney general argued that Garifuna should not be considered an "original people" (indigenous to Honduras) and thus Garifuna claims to national territory were not legitimate. State officials not only undermined the possibility of Black Indigeneity but also exalted the rights of officially recognized Indigenous peoples to defend mestizo property rights in the zone. This politics of (mis)recognition tethers Indigenous subjectivity to the mestizo nation-building project and ideologies of whitening. It reinforces the perception that Black people are foreigners in Honduras. The court's judgment in favor of the community established an important legal precedent for the recognition of Black territorial rights but also served to buttress state sovereignty over natural resources deemed to be of "public use." Conclusion: Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion to this book begins with the violent murder of the Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres. At the time of her death, Cáceres was leading a daring community uprising against the development of a large hydroelectric project slated to be built on the Gualcarque River in the Lenca community of Río Blanco. Her death marked the beginning of a new wave of repression against Indigenous and Black activists that reached its apex on July 18, 2020, with the kidnapping of four community leaders in Triunfo de la Cruz. This worrisome pattern demonstrates deep-seated racial animus toward Black and Indigenous peoples and the rights they fought so hard to obtain during the preceding decades. In spite of the devastating and racist violence they face, Black and Indigenous peoples continue to mobilize in defense of life. chapter abstract

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Book SynopsisThis book offers the first social and intellectual history of Dalit performance of Tamasha—a popular form of public, secular, traveling theater in Maharashtra—and places Dalit Tamasha women who represented the desire and disgust of the patriarchal society at the heart of modernization in twentieth century India. Drawing on ethnographies, films, and untapped archival materials, Shailaja Paik illuminates how Tamasha was produced and shaped through conflicts over caste, gender, sexuality, and culture. Dalit performers, activists, and leaders negotiated the violence and stigma in Tamasha as they struggled to claim manuski (human dignity) and transform themselves from ashlil (vulgar) to assli (authentic) and manus (human beings). Building on and departing from the Ambedkar-centered historiography and movement-focused approach of Dalit studies, Paik examines the ordinary and everydayness in Dalit lives. Ultimately, she demonstrates how the choices that communities make about culture speak to much larger questions about inclusion, inequality, and structures of violence of caste within Indian society, and opens up new approaches for the transformative potential of Dalit politics and the global history of gender, sexuality, and the human.Trade Review"In this brilliant original account of women in Tamasha, Shailaja Paik argues that the extractive sexual economy of caste rests on their desired as well as derided labor. Drawing on rare archival sources and careful ethnography, she calls attention to how the women negotiate stigma, especially in relation to a Dalit emancipatory politics, embarrassed by their 'sexual excess.'"—V. Geetha, author of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India"Paik not only breaks new ground but also builds a foundation. Combining ethnography, archival work, and critical readings of key thinkers, she offers a dazzling interdisciplinary exploration of how Tamasha serves as a metonym for the ways gender, caste, and power construct identity in caste-patriarchal society. This work is one of the many reasons Paik is at the forefront of Dalit feminist studies and why she is one of the most innovative historians of South Asia writing today."—Christian Lee Novetzke, University of Washington"Paik repeatedly identifies herself as a feminist Dalit and attributes this to her unprecedented anthropological access to, and understanding of, contemporary Tamasha artists. She also draws on Marathi-language lyrics, articles, advertisements, and other sources never before available in English. Recommended."—M. H. Fisher, CHOICE"While demonstrating the 'agency' of Tamashe women as a product of complex, contingent historical processes, Paik makes a significant argument about the mutually constitutive binaries of touchability/untouchability, brahmin/untouchable, ashlil/aslee, housewife/prostitute, among others. In doing so, she offers conceptual resources for Indian feminist and Dalit thought to deal with the impasse of the 'prostitute' question. Equally important, Paik develops her earlier emphasis on contingency, context and rupture of Dalit women's agency to illuminate the contingency and temporality of Ambedkar's thinking around manuski, family and caste labour and the material limits that history imposes on its actualisation."—A. Suneetha, Contributions to Indian SociologyTable of ContentsIntroduction: Performing Precarity: Sex-Gender-Caste/Ashlil-Manuski-Assli 1. Policing Dalits and Producing Tamasha in Maharashtra 2. Constructing Caste, Desire, and Danger 3. Ambedkar, Manuski, and Reconstructing Dalit Life-Worlds, 1920-1956 4. Singing Resistance and Rehumanizing Poetics-Politics, Post-1930 5. Claiming Authenticity and Becoming Marathi, Post-1960 6. Forging New Futures and Measures of Humanity Conclusion.: Queering the "Vulgar": Tamasha without Women

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Book SynopsisStretching 1,200 kilometres across six countries, the colossal mountains of the Alps dominate Europe, geographically and historically. Enlightenment thinkers felt the sublime and magisterial peaks were the very embodiment of nature, Romantic poets looked to them for divine inspiration, and Victorian explorers tested their ingenuity and courage against them. Located at the crossroads between powerful states, the Alps have played a crucial role in the formation of European history, a place of intense cultural fusion as well as fierce conflict between warring nations. A diverse range of flora and fauna have made themselves at home in this harsh environment, which today welcomes over 100 million tourists a year. Leading Alpine scholar Jon Mathieu tells the story of the people who have lived in and been inspired by these mountains and valleys, from the ancient peasants of the Neolithic to the cyclists of the Tour de France. Far from being a remote and backward corner of Europe, the Alps are shown by Mathieu to have been a crucible of new ideas and technologies at the heart of the European story.Trade Review‘In the realm of Alpine history, Jon Mathieu is the leading voice – he knows the mountains as Braudel knew the sea. This compact but comprehensive overview of one of the world’s most famous mountain regions stands out for its sophistication, clarity and wry humour.’Donald Worster, author of A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir​ ‘If I could recommend only one book about the Alps, it would be this one! Jon Mathieu’s book crosses national borders and historic periods with the greatest of ease. It introduces us to cultural and ecological challenges. And – most importantly – it is a great and enjoyable read. A book full of surprises and insights and wonderful illustrations.’Christof Mauch, Director, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich ‘An engaging, rigorous overview of Alpine history from earliest times to the present. This book represents in some ways the culmination of a life’s work by Mathieu, and offers the most up-to-date account of Alpine history possible, while being at the same time accessible and enjoyable to read.’Tait Keller, Rhodes College ‘Mathieu is a leading authority on the history and culture of the Alps, and it shows.’Stewart A. Weaver, University of Rochester “Mathieu addresses the deep connection between humans and nature in the cultural landscape of the European Alps, ranging from the Mediterranean coast to Slovenia… The Alps is an indispensable book in any Alpine connoisseur’s collection.” Prof. Jörg Balsiger, University of Geneva “Mathieu’s episodic but informative narrative tacks back and forth, from the arrival of hunter-gatherers millennia ago through milestones such as the first recorded ascent of Mont Blanc, in 1786, and wolves’ resurgence in the twentieth century.”NatureTable of Contents Preface Writing a History of the Alps Personal Note and Acknowledgements List of Maps and Figures Timeline 1. The Alps in European History 2. Modern Scholars on the Alps 3. In the Beginning was Hannibal 4. Coping with Life – High and Low 5. Paths to the Nation State 6. Religious Culture, Early Science 7. The Perception of the Alps 8. Which Modernity? 9. Europeanisation and Environmentalism 10. Conclusion Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisExam board: Pearson Edexcel; OCRLevel: AS/A-levelSubject: HistoryFirst teaching: September 2015First exams: Summer 2016 (AS); Summer 2017 (A-level)Put your trust in the textbook series that has given thousands of A-level History students deeper knowledge and better grades for over 30 years.Updated to meet the demands of today's A-level specifications, this new generation of Access to History titles includes accurate exam guidance based on examiners' reports, free online activity worksheets and contextual information that underpins students' understanding of the period.- Develop strong historical knowledge: in-depth analysis of each topic is both authoritative and accessible- Build historical skills and understanding: downloadable activity worksheets can be used independently by students or edited by teachers for classwork and homework- Learn, remember and connect important events and people: an introduction to the period, summary diagrams, timelines and links to additional online resources support lessons, revision and coursework- Achieve exam success: practical advice matched to the requirements of your A-level specification incorporates the lessons learnt from previous exams- Engage with sources, interpretations and the latest historical research: students will evaluate a rich collection of visual and written materials, plus key debates that examine the views of different historians

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Book SynopsisA groundbreaking synthesis of food studies, archival theory, and early American literature There is no eating in the archive. This is not only a practical admonition to any would-be researcher but also a methodological challenge, in that there is no eating—or, at least, no food—preserved among the printed records of the early United States. Synthesizing a range of textual artifacts with accounts (both real and imagined) of foods harvested, dishes prepared, and meals consumed, An Archive of Taste reveals how a focus on eating allows us to rethink the nature and significance of aesthetics in early America, as well as of its archive.Lauren F. Klein considers eating and early American aesthetics together, reframing the philosophical work of food and its meaning for the people who prepare, serve, and consume it. She tells the story of how eating emerged as an aesthetic activity over the course of the eighteenth century and how it subsequently transformed into a means of expressing both allegiance and resistance to the dominant Enlightenment worldview. Klein offers richly layered accounts of the enslaved men and women who cooked the meals of the nation’s founders and, in doing so, directly affected the development of our national culture—from Thomas Jefferson’s emancipation agreement with his enslaved chef to Malinda Russell’s Domestic Cookbook, the first African American–authored culinary text.The first book to examine the gustatory origins of aesthetic taste in early American literature, An Archive of Taste shows how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States.Trade Review"In An Archive of Taste, Lauren F. Klein’s old-fashioned archival work and new-era computational skills grant access to subterranean literary narratives, reanimating matters hard to locate, much less taste or see. Klein’s welcome meditations on absent chefs and occluded stories bring new insights to early American literature."—Rafia Zafar, author of Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning"An Archive of Taste is a gorgeously written account of the relation between eating, the archive, and the histories of racial exclusion that shape them both. Lauren F. Klein offers a new frame for understanding the eighteenth-century category of taste, as well as a sharp exploration of the affordances and limits of digital humanities methodologies’ efforts to redress the imbrication of race and the archive."—Monique Allewaert, author of Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics "Klein’s probing, careful, self-reflective analysis becomes a model for us as readers as well, and enables us to engage in a speculative reading of a book that, no doubt, will be much-cited because it offers an inspiration and paradigm for future work."—American Literary History"Across all five chapters, Klein discerns an abundant archive of taste, even as her capacious analysis confronts that archive’s unique risks of perishability."—Early American Literature"An Archive of Taste makes an important intervention into the fields of nineteenth-century literary studies and food studies through thoughtful citational and archival practices. Importantly, it also bridges established and emergent conversations on the challenges of archival recover, typically written in analog, with digital research."—CriticismTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: No Eating in the Archive1. Taste: Eating and Aesthetics in the Early Republic2. Appetite: Eating, Embodiment, and the Tasteful Subject3. Satisfaction: Aesthetics, Speculation, and the Theory of Cookbooks4. Imagination: Food, Fiction, and the Limits of Taste5. Absence: Slavery and Silence in the Archive of EatingEpilogue: Two Portraits of TasteNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA deep dive into mid-century African American newspapers, exploring how Black pulp fiction reassembled genre formulas in the service of racial justice In recent years, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Marvel’s Black Panther, and HBO’s Watchmen have been lauded for the innovative ways they repurpose genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world—important progressive messages widely spread precisely because they are packaged in popular genres. But it turns out, such generic retooling for antiracist purposes is nothing new. As Brooks E. Hefner’s Black Pulp shows, this tradition of antiracist genre revision begins even earlier than recent studies of Black superhero comics of the 1960s have revealed. Hefner traces it back to a phenomenon that began in the 1920s, to serialized (and sometimes syndicated) genre stories written by Black authors in Black newspapers with large circulations among middle- and working-class Black readers. From the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, Hefner recovers a rich archive of African American genre fiction from the 1920s through the mid-1950s—spanning everything from romance, hero-adventure, and crime stories to westerns and science fiction. Reading these stories, Hefner explores how their authors deployed, critiqued, and reassembled genre formulas—and the pleasures they offer to readers—in the service of racial justice: to criticize Jim Crow segregation, racial capitalism, and the sexual exploitation of Black women; to imagine successful interracial romance and collective sociopolitical progress; and to cheer Black agency, even retributive violence in the face of white supremacy. These popular stories differ significantly from contemporaneous, now-canonized African American protest novels that tend to represent Jim Crow America as a deterministic machine and its Black inhabitants as doomed victims. Widely consumed but since forgotten, these genre stories—and Hefner’s incisive analysis of them—offer a more vibrant understanding of African American literary history. Trade Review "Brooks Hefner’s compelling and insightful book asks us to reconsider not only what counts as Black imaginative writing but what it means to read Black literature at all. Attending to a vast yet overlooked archive of serial genre fiction, Hefner highlights the pleasures afforded by African Americans’ engagement with popular formulas in the Black press. The result is an eye-opening account of modern literary production that centers the tastes and experiences of Black readers themselves. Beyond the predominance of the protest novel in the white imagination, Hefner reveals the narrative forms and medial formats out of which Black America’s imagined communities were built."—Kinohi Nishikawa, author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground "Black Pulp tells a much needed and long overdue literary history of the short fiction and serial narratives featured in the African American periodical press of the mid-twentieth century. As Brooks E. Hefner’s deft and compelling close readings and contextual accounts of the pulp fiction industry’s developments demonstrate, Black popular fiction’s fresh formulas offered Black readers utopian (not nihilist) visions of the justice they deserved—but were denied—in Jim Crow America. Thoroughly researched, shrewdly argued, wonderfully illustrated, and bracingly written, Black Pulp is as thrilling to read as the literature it surveys. This is a work that anyone interested in mid-century African American and American popular literature, genre criticism, and US periodical history must read."—Jacqueline Goldsby, Yale University "Beyond the invaluable historical work it performs, Black Pulp offers numerous and exciting theoretical suggestions regarding the politics of reading, the innovations of popular fiction and the huge gulf between the historical experience of readers in a given period and the retrospective constructions of literary history. It constitutes essential reading for whoever is interested in Black studies, pulp fiction or the sociology of reading, probing the limits of these intersecting fields and helping to recover the forgotten hinterlands that lie beyond them."—Journal of Social History "Hefner stitches together the seams of genre and race... Black Pulp challenges us to reimagine and expand our conceptualization of African American literary culture by adopting Black bibliographic practice that simultaneously recovers relationships between lost texts and a larger network of literary practice, even as it might redefine what we mean as Black bibliography."—Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America "A fascinating glimpse into a part of Black history that isn’t well known."—Real Change News "Black Pulp is important and valuable because of the stories Hefner chronicles and the convincing argument he makes that they are worthy of careful investigation, and that in transforming white pulp to create new imaginative worlds, they fulfill an important role by offering new possibilities for readers who have often been deprived of them even in the realm of imagination."—Los Angeles Review of Books "Hefner’s study is—from beginning to end—an absolute pleasure to read, just as it is a convincing case for the political importance of Black pleasure in reading."—Modernism/modernity "Hefner reveals the dauntless envisioning of emancipatory futures by Black writers and illustrators. "—Colors of Influence "For Hefner, recovering African American newspaper fiction is significant because it provides archival evidence of fertile genre experimentation among Black writers in the pulp era... a major achievement. Black Pulp should make it impossible for scholars of popular genre fiction to suggest that Black creators entered the field late or that antiracist approaches to genre are a new development. "—American Periodicals "Breathtakingly researched and astutely argued, Hefner shines a light on a hidden corner of Black cultural production that has remained mostly out of sight." —Modern Fiction Studies Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Signifying Genre, Articulating Race1. Beneath the Harlem Renaissance: The Rise of Black Popular Fiction2. Romancing the Race: The Politics of Black Love Stories3. News from Elsewhere: Speculative Fiction in the Black Press4. Battling White Supremacy: A Prehistory of the Black SuperheroConclusion: Writing New HistoriesNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThis new study raises fundamental questions about the nature of imaginative writing in the age of ‘England’s troubles’. Drawing energy from recent debates in Stuart history, this book looks past the traditional watersheds of Restoration and Revolution, plotting the responsiveness of seventeenth-century writers to the tremors of civil conflict and to the enduring crises and contradictions of Stuart governance. Augustine draws freely from the insights and strategies of contextual analysis, close reading, and critical theory in a bid to defamiliarise major texts of the period, from the poetry of young Milton to the brilliant works of adaptation, translation, and bricolage that characterised Dryden’s last decade. Muting the antagonisms and conflicts that have dominated previous accounts, Aesthetics of contingency thus proposes to write the literary history of this period anew.Trade Review'For a work concerned to muddy critical waters, Aesthetics of Contingency is admirably clear, and its arguments broadly convincing.'Taylor & Francis Online'Aesthetics of Contingency is admirably clear, and its arguments broadly convincing. Augustine’s study is a salutary reminder of something too often overlooked: that poets and writers did not usually consider themselves ambassadors for the ideals of whatever literary period posterity has since consigned them to – and that the contingencies of history always blind writers in any given moment to the outcomes of a future that seems to us so self-evident.' The Seventeenth Century -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: remapping early modern literature1. ‘He saw a greater Sun appear’: waiting for the apocalypse in Milton’s Poems 16452. ‘We goe to heaven against each others wills’: revising Religio Medici in the English Revolution3. ‘But Iconoclastes drawn in little’: making and unmaking a Whig Marvell4. ‘It had an odde promiscuous tone’: Lord Rochester and Restoration modernity5. ‘Transprosing and Transversing’: religion, revolution, and the end of history in Dryden’s late works6. CodaIndex

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Book SynopsisIn postwar Britain, journalists and politicians predicted that the class system would not survive a consumer culture where everyone had TVs and washing machines, and where more and more people owned their own homes. They were to be proved hopelessly wrong. Lifestyle revolution charts how class culture, rather than being destroyed by mass consumption, was remade from flat-pack furniture, Mediterranean cuisine and lifestyle magazines. Novelists, cartoonists and playwrights satirised the tastes of the emerging middle classes, while sociologists claimed that an entire population was suffering from 'status anxiety', but underneath it all, a new order was being constructed out of duvets, quiches and mayonnaise, easy chairs from Habitat, white emulsion paint and ubiquitous pine kitchen tables. More than just a world of symbolic goods, this was an intimate environment alive with new feelings and attitudes.Trade Review' What Highmore does beautifully is combine careful reading – he draws on a wealth of material, from writers including Angela Carter and Jonathan Raban – with concision and charm. In fact, one of the numerous strengths of Lifestyle Revolution is its quotes, which are well chosen and plentiful without overwhelming the text. The same could be said of its illustrations. He brings the best qualities of academic writing to a book the general reader will enjoy.'The Literary Review '...thought-provoking analysis of such a complex subject, done in such an entertaining style.' Shiny New Books 'Lifestyle revolution is a brilliant corrective to our lazy habit of condescending to the recent past by reducing it to the eccentric, the uncool and the kitsch. Through his richly evocative readings of chicken bricks, quiches, self-assembly furniture, duvets and dinghies, Ben Highmore tells the unwritten story of our collective life. Blending the personal and the political with great skill, this book is a joy to read.'Joe Moran, Professor of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University and author of Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV‘If you ever wondered how a taste for wooden floors, duvets and flat-pack furniture became widespread in British homes, this book is for you. Ben Highmore’s focus on the feelings embedded in changing tastes allows him to investigate the meanings of material culture in the making of new middle-class identities. He brings to life a world of controlled casualness and spontaneous sociability – often around a stripped pine kitchen table – that will be familiar to many readers.’Deborah Sugg Ryan, Professor of Design History and Theory at the University of Portsmouth and author of Ideal Homes: Uncovering the History and Design of the Interwar House'An engrossing social and cultural history of the rise of consumerism, and a persuasive account of how it changed us.'Alwyn Turner, author of A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction1 Taste and tastemakers 2 Instant good taste: the Habitat story3 The good life4 Colour supplement living5 Welcome to the village6 Through the plateglass window7 Status striving and other myths we live by8 But isn’t that a class thing?9 From the West Indian front room to Root10 Adrian Mole, the future of taste, and me…Index

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Book SynopsisThis book examines the impact that nostalgia has had on the Labour Party’s political development since 1951. In contrast to existing studies that have emphasised the role played by modernity, it argues that nostalgia has defined Labour’s identity and determined the party’s trajectory over time. Jobson outlines how Labour, at both an elite and a grassroots level, has been and remains heavily influenced by a nostalgic commitment to an era of heroic male industrial working-class struggle.This commitment has hindered policy discussion, determined the form that the modernisation process has taken and shaped internal conflict and cohesion. More broadly, Labour’s emotional attachment to the past has made it difficult for the party to adjust to the socioeconomic changes that have taken place in Britain. In short, nostalgia has frequently left the party out of touch with the modern world. In this way, this study offers an assessment of Labour’s failures to adapt to the changing nature and demands of post-war Britain and will be of interest to both students and academics working in the field of British political history and to those with a more general interest in Labour’s history and politics.Trade Review‘The struggle to try and get the Labour Party “face the future”, as our 1945 manifesto was titled, has — irony of ironies — its own rich history. Richard Jobson's fascinating study, Nostalgia and the post-war Labour Party, documents this thoroughly.’Bridget Phillipson MP, New Statesman‘A serious contribution to the understanding of struggles within the Labour Party [which] raises significant questions about how parties engage with their own past to their advantage and disadvantage and how the past informs and sometimes perhaps restricts current politics. Most importantly, it shows that nostalgia is not simply an issue for the right, for Brexit and Trump voters, but is a charge that the left too has to deal with.’Tobias Becker, History Workshop Journal -- .Table of Contents1 Introduction - Labour, nostalgia and 'nostalgia-identity'2 Revisionism and the battle over clause IV - 1951-633 White heat and the Labour party 1963-704 Labour's alternative economic strategy 1970-835 Reinventing the Labour party 1983-926 The New Labour era 1992-20107 Back to the past? 2010 to the present8 ConclusionBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThis ambitious and important book is a richly detailed account of the ideas and activities in the early-modern ‘secret state’ and its agencies, spies, informers and intelligencers, under the English Republic and the Cromwellian protectorate. The book investigates the meanings this early-modern Republican state acquired to express itself, by exploring its espionage actions, the moral conundrums, and the philosophical background of secret government in the era. It considers in detail the culture and language of plots, conspiracies, and intrigues and it also exposes how the intelligence activities of the Three Kingdoms began to be situated within early-modern government from the Civil Wars to the rule of Oliver Cromwell. It introduces the reader to some of the personalities who were caught up in this world of espionage, from intelligencers like Thomas Scot and John Thurloe to the men and women who became its secret agents and spies. The book includes stories of activities not just in England, but also in Ireland and Scotland, and it especially investigates intelligence and espionage during the critical periods of the British Civil Wars and the important developments which took place under the English Republic and Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. The book will appeal to historians, students, teachers, and readers who are fascinated by the secret affairs of intelligence and espionage.Table of ContentsIntroductionPart I: The background1 Themes and issues2 The secretary of state 3 The civil warsPart II: Republican espionage4 Thomas Scot and the English Republic5 John Thurloe and the Cromwellian regimeAfterwordIndex

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Book SynopsisFifty years ago Enoch Powell made national headlines with his 'Rivers of Blood' speech, warning of an immigrant invasion in the once respectable streets of Wolverhampton. This local fixation brought the Black Country town into the national spotlight, yet Powell's unstable relationship with Wolverhampton has since been overlooked. Drawing from interviews and archival material, this book offers a rich local history through which to investigate the speech, bringing to life the racialised dynamics of space during a critical moment in British history. What was going on beneath the surface in Wolverhampton and how did Powell's constituents respond to this dramatic moment? The research traces the ways in which Powell's words reinvented the town and uncovers highly contested local responses. While Powell left Wolverhampton in 1974, the book returns to the city to explore the collective memories of the speech which continue to reverberate. In a contemporary period of new crisis and national divisions, revisiting the shadow of Powell allows us to reflect on racism and resistance from 1968 to today.Trade Review‘Enoch Powell made his notorious Rivers of Blood speech in the Midland Hotel in Birmingham on 20 April, 1968. At the time he was the Conservative MP for the constituency of Wolverhampton South West. In her book In the Shadow of Enoch Powell Shirin Hirsch examines the impact of Powell’s speech in the Wolverhampton of 1968 and analyses its significance 50 years later. Hirsch draws on archival material as well as her own contemporary interviews.’Vivek Lehal, Socialist Review, Vol. 444 (March 2019)As the extensive list of secondary sources in the book’s bibliography suggests, Enoch Powellhas been the subject of considerable research. Shirin Hirsch’s short but powerful bookstands out by offering insight into the experience of those both facing and fighting theramifications of Powell’s speech and the attitudes it represented. Hirsch’s masterful commandof contemporary newspapers and oral accounts presents the reader with an excellentperception of the prevailing societal ideas.Midland History -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction1 ‘The Commonwealth is much too common for me’: another 19682 The world in Wolverhampton3 Reverberations from ‘Rivers of Blood’4 Resistance in the schools and on the buses5 ‘A monstrous reputation’: remembering Enoch PowellConclusionIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book offers an innovative account of manliness in Britain between 1760 and 1900. Using diverse textual, visual and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies –often working-class ones – and the emotions and material culture associated with them. The book analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors and blacksmiths, brave firemen and noble industrial workers. It also investigates unmanly men, such as drunkards, wife-beaters and masturbators, who elicited disgust and aversion. Unusually, Manliness in Britain runs from the eras of feeling, revolution and reform to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy and mass media, periods often dealt with separately by historians of masculinities.Trade Review'Joanne Begiato’s Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900 breaks new ground in exploring manliness in Britain as an expansive body of gendered meanings that was most fully elaborated by representatives of the middle class but was also deeply resonant with the working class. [...] Overall, this is a virtuoso deployment of three interlinked strands in the new cultural history: the somatic, the material, and the emotional. That conceptual range has made possible a book on manliness unrivaled in its contextual range and its interpretive insights.'Journal of British Studies -- .Table of ContentsMaking manliness manifest: an introduction1 Figures, faces, and desire: male bodies and manliness2 Appetites, passions, and disgust: the penalties and paradoxes of unmanliness 3 Hearts of oak: martial manliness and material culture4 Homeward bound: manliness and the home5 Brawn and bravery: glorifying the working bodyThe measure of a man: an epilogueIndex

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Book SynopsisThrough the centre of China’s historic capital, Long Peace Street cuts a long, arrow-straight line. It divides the Forbidden City, home to generations of Chinese emperors, from Tiananmen Square, the vast granite square constructed to glorify a New China under Communist rule. To walk the street is to travel through the story of China’s recent past, wandering among its physical relics and hearing echoes of its dramas. Long Peace Street recounts a journey in modern China, a walk of twenty miles across Beijing offering a very personal encounter with the life of the capital’s streets. At the same time, it takes the reader on a journey through the city’s recent history, telling the story of how the present and future of the world’s rising superpower has been shaped by its tumultuous past, from the demise of the last imperial dynasty in 1912 through to the present day.Trade Review‘Filled with insights, observations and anecdotes, Chatwin brings to life the past – and present – of one of the world’s great cities in an account that is as thoughtful as it is informative.’Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History, Worcester College, Oxford'Bringing together past and present, personal and political, Jonathan Chatwin gives readers a thoughtful and deeply-informed account of modern China through the marvellous device of a stroll down Beijing's longest avenue - and all in lucid and compelling prose.'Rana Mitter, Director of the University China Centre, University of Oxford'Even the most dedicated flâneur has to work hard to find the charm in Chang’an Avenue, the main thoroughfare of, as Jonathan Chatwin rightly describes it, the "glorious mess of Beijing". Industrial relics, bankrupt theme parks, rabbit hutch housing, paranoid Communist Party elite boltholes and Tiananmen’s ghosts all loom large. But Chatwin walks the walk and, along the way dissects the street, its denizens and its enduring role in China’s history and collective modern traumas. 'Paul French, New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Peking and City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir'Jonathan Chatwin offers a distinctive window onto Beijing's past and present by taking readers along with him on a long trek down an important thoroughfare. An appealing mix of anecdotes from a journey and digressions backward in time make Long Peace Street a novel addition to the rich literature on China's sprawling capital.' Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, coauthor of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know'This three-dimension, moving timeline along the heart of imperial and contemporary Beijing made me want to head out the door and follow Chatwin's flaneur footsteps. "Long Peace Street" seamlessly blends history and reporting, shining a light on both the capital's neglected bookends and its dense core. I couldn't put it down.'Michael Meyer, author of The Last Days of Old Beijing, In Manchuria, and The Road to Sleeping Dragon'Long Peace Street is a brilliant achievement. To read this book is to travel with an engaging writer as he explores the China of today and the raw pathos of its past. Long Peace Street gives its readers an insight essential for a sophisticated understanding of Chinese society today.'M. A. Aldrich, author of The Search for a Vanishing Beijing: A Guide to the Capital of China through the Centuries'As a dive into Beijing’s history and an excursion through its present, Long Peace Street is entertaining, informative, well-written and companionable.'Post Magazine -- .Table of ContentsIntroductionDay one: Shougang Iron and Steel to Tiananmen1 Capital Iron and Steel – origins – the Great Leap Forward – a bad neighbour – future plans2 New suburbia – the city in history – the hutong – Shijingshan Amusement Park3 Change – ring roads and the New Beijing – Great Olympics4 Babaoshan ghosts – the cemetery – the life of Peng Dehuai – return to Hunan5 A diversion – straightness – the road as metaphor6 Military markings – Tomb of the Princess – new regime, new capital? – the Military Museum7 Diaoyutai State Guesthouse – December 1980 – ‘To Rebel is Justified’ – Chairman Mao’s dog8 Big roofs – Capital Museum – pailou – some history9 Muxidi Bridge – petitions and protests – May Fourth – Democracy Movement – 1976 – 1978 – 1989 – the aftermath10 Rainbows – walls, walls, and yet again walls – breaches – New Year’s Day in Xi’an – demolition – socialist core values11 A hungry refrain – little grey streets – reform and opening-up – state owned enterprises12 An assassination – Middle and Southern Seas – imperial pretensions – Xinhuamen – paranoia – hidden places – Mao at ZhongnanhaiDay two: Tiananmen to Sihui Dong subway station13 The middle of the Middle Kingdom – hidden tales of Tiananmen – the Great Helmsman14 A walk to Tiananmen – into the Forbidden City – intruders15 Four days in the Forbidden City16 Out of the Forbidden City – scholar trees – dislocation – destruction – impressions of Beijing – going native – Legation Street today – fireworks over Tiananmen17 The man who died twice – Wangfujing – a literary traveller – the end of the Qing – Morrison and Yuan Shikai – a sad coda – Palm Sunday in Sidmouth18 Oriental Plaza – walking in cities – the Imperial Observatory – origins of the Chinese calendar – the Jesuits – the Republican calendar – time in modern China19 Outside the wall – the Grand Canal and the eastern suburbs – 22nd August 1967 – all palaces are temporary palaces – Forsan et haec olim – red20 One city – the east is rich – weird architecture – mall life – underground21 G103 – the story of a nation – the endEpilogueIndex

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Book SynopsisThis volume offers a stimulating new perspective on the history of historical studies. Through the prism of ‘scholarly personae’, it explores why historians care about attitudes or dispositions that they consider necessary for studying the past, yet often disagree about what virtues, skills, or competencies are most important. More specifically, the volume explains why models of virtue known as ‘personae’ have always been contested, yet also can prove remarkably stable, especially with regard to their race, class, and gender assumptions. Covering historical studies across Europe, North America, Africa, and East Asia, How to be a historian will appeal not only to historians of historiography, but to all historians who occasionally wonder: What kind of a historian do I want to be?Trade Review'Historians’ identities form the subject matter of this geographically wide-ranging, well-researched and theoretically framed collection of essays.'R. C. Richardson, University of Winchester, Times Higher Education, July 2019 -- .Table of ContentsNotes on contributorsIntroduction. Scholarly personae: what they are and why theymatter – Herman Paul1 The contested persona of the historian: on the origins of apermanent conflict – Ian Hunter2 Ranke vs Schlosser: pairs of personae in nineteenth-centuryGerman historiography – Herman Paul3 Fixing genius: the Romantic man of letters in the universityera – Travis E. Ross4 Generational continuities and composite personae: Frenchhistoriography from the 1870s to the 1950s – Camille Creyghton5 Pasha and his historic harem: Edward A. Freeman, EdithThompson and the gendered personae of late-Victorianhistorians – Elise Garritzen6 Interpretative and investigative: the emergence andcharacteristics of modern scholarly personae in China,1900–30 – Q. Edward Wang7 Coalescence and conflict: historians and their personae in thePortuguese New State – António da Silva Rêgo8 The emergence of the English Marxist historian’s scholarlypersona: the English Revolution debate of 1940–41 – SinaTalachian9 Of communism, compromise and Central Europe: the scholarlypersona under authoritarianism – Monika Baár10 What is an African historian? Negotiating scholarly personae inUNESCO’s General History of Africa – Larissa Schulte Nordholt11 The finitude of personae: Bryce Lyon, François Louis Ganshofand the biography of Pirenne – Henning TrüperIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book examines the powerful influence of civil law on understandings and responses to madness in England and in New Jersey. The influence of civil law on the history of madness has not hitherto been of major academic investigation. This body of law, established and developed over a five hundred year period, greatly influenced how those from England’s propertied classes understood and responded to madness. Moreover, the civil law governing the response to madness in England was successfully exported into several of its colonies, including New Jersey. Drawing on a well-preserved and rare collection of trials in lunacy in New Jersey, this book reveals the important ties of civil law, local custom and perceptions of madness in transatlantic perspectives. This book will be highly relevant to scholars interested in law, medicine, psychiatry and madness studies, as well as contemporary issues in mental capacity and guardianship.Trade Review'James Moran has provided an important addition to the historiography of psychiatry and mental health provision in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His new book contributes significantly to shifting the historical emphasis away from asylums and towards extra-institutional approaches to the card of the insane.'Social History of Medicine'Madness on Trial, introduces a ‘treasure trove’ of an alternative archive, in the form of documents relating to civil proceedings in lunacy from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New Jersey. [it] is a welcome addition to the history of mental illness, and is a very useful and accessible work for anyone interested in mental health law and community or family practices of care.'Journal of The Historical Association'This is an excellent book: it offers a rich and deep inquiry into the legal and transatlantic histories of lunacy across place and space, also illuminating imperial legal practices around insanity. Moran’s original history provides a new set of insights into the interpretation of insanity through laws, the way law was used by different people, and the translation of imperial law into colonial contexts. This has not been achieved for the transatlantic historical site in such a deliberate and detailed way before now [...] Moran’s historical work is innovative. He makes a variety of new statements of method, purpose, evidence, and interpretation in and across legal and asylum histories. This field of madness, insanity, families, and institutions has a deep and sustained readership and continues to garner interest among students and researchers. Moran’s book also traverses multiple fields and readers, and will bring legal-historical methods and ideas to a wider audience.'Canadian Bulletin of Medical History'Madness on Trial thus offers a rich history of lunacy investigation law as well as points to new resources for scholars studying madness, mental health, and civil law in the pre-asylum era.'William J. Ryan, Journal of Early American History -- .Table of ContentsList of tablesAcknowledgments1 Introduction: civil law and madness in transatlantic context2 Suing for a lunatic: lunacy investigation law, 1320-18903 Indefinite mental states: negotiating the legal definition of madness4 Trials of madness: family struggles over property in England5 Care and protection: managing madness in England 6 Atlantic crossing: lunacy law as colonial inheritance7 Family, friends and neighbours: localizing madness in New Jersey8 Asylum in the community: managing madness in New Jersey 9 Orders in lunacy: lunacy investigation law and the asylum reconsidered10 ConclusionBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book recounts a little-known history of the estimated 2,000 babies born to black GIs and white British women in the second world war. The African-American press named these children 'brown babies'; the British called them 'half-castes'. Black GIs, in this segregated army, were forbidden to marry their white girl-friends. Nearly half of the children were given up to children's homes but few were adopted, thought 'too hard to place'. There has been minimal study of these children and the difficulties they faced, such as racism in a (then) very white Britain, lack of family or a clear identity. The book will present the stories of over fifty of these children, their stories contextualised in terms of government policy and attitudes of the time. Accessibly written, with stories both heart-breaking and uplifting, the book is illustrated throughout with photographs. -- .Trade Review'Lucy Bland's stories of Britain's Brown Babies evoke a potent mix of rage, tears, joy and thankfulness: rage at everyday racisms, both institutional and individual, tears for the cruelties suffered, joy at the love and care that some found and thankfulness that we can hear these voices.' Catherine Hall, Emerita Professor of History, UCL 'Using oral histories as well as revealing analyses of governmental policies and the politics of racially warped institutions, Lucy Bland's wonderful book lays out in no uncertain terms how the stigma of illegitimacy coupled with racism shaped the experiences of children born to white British women and African American G.I.s during and in the aftermath of World War II.' Sonya O. Rose, Professor Emerita of History, Sociology and Women's Studies, University of Michigan 'In this thoughtful and poignant work, Lucy Bland not only meticulously details the history of Britain's 'brown babies' but, by placing their voices at the very centre of her scholarship, offers invaluable fresh perspectives. Bland's compassionate and insightful foregrounding of these moving memories of racial mixing and mixedness can't be applauded strongly enough. An outstanding achievement.' Dr Chamion Caballero, Goldsmiths, University of London -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. British women meet black GIs 2. Keeping the 'brown babies' 3. 'Brown babies' relinquished: experiences of children's homes 4. Adoption, fostering and attempts to send the babies to the US 5. Secrets and lies: searching for mothers and fathers 6. After the war and beyond Appendix: the case study 'brown babies' Bibliography Index -- .

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Book SynopsisIn British political discourse the idea that in the 1970s trade unions 'ran the country' has become a truism, a folk mythology invoked against the twin perils of socialism and strikes. But who exactly wielded power in Britain’s workplaces and on what terms?Assembling cultures takes a fine-grained look at factory activism in the motor industry between 1945 and 1982, using car manufacturing as a key case for unpicking important narratives around affluence, declinism and class. It traces the development of the militant car worker stereotype and looks at the real social relations that lay behind car manufacturing’s reputation for conflict. In doing so, this book reveals a changing, complex world of social practices, cultural norms and shared values and expectations.From relatively meagre interwar trade union traditions, during the post-war period car workers developed shop-floor organisations of considerable authority, enabling some to make new demands of their working lives, but constraining others in their more radical political aims. Assembling cultures documents in detail a historic process where, from the 1950s, groups and individuals set about creating and reproducing collective power and asks what that meant for their lives. This is a story of workers and their place in the power relations of post-war Britain.This book will be invaluable to lecturers and students studying the history, sociology and politics of post-war Britain, particularly those with an interest in power, rationality, class, labour, gender and race. The detailed analysis of just how solidarity, organisation and collective action were generated will also prove useful to trade union activists.Trade Review'Much more could be said about a book which combines richness in detail with a compelling central argument. Saunders’ work makes a substantial contribution not just to studies of the labour movement but to contemporary British history more widely, and beyond the discipline on the importance of historicising working-class agency. It is also, ultimately, a hopeful book: it emphasises the possibilities for building new bonds of solidarity, democratic forms of organisation, and power in the workplace. All of which we will be in desperate need of in the coming years.'Contemporary British History'Saunders’ study makes important interventions in several historiographical. His approach suggests the potential of ‘new histories of both labour and political culture, histories that situate subjectivities, behaviours and attitudes within the lived experiences that people shared in the workplace’ (11), and it is very much to be hoped that other scholars take up this call. debates.'Journal of Contemporary History'Assembling Cultures, is a timely intervention. [...] A testament to the success of this book is its applicability to areas beyond industrial relations.'Twentieth Century British History'[…] an interesting account of the emergence and development of workers organisation in car assembly, developing the labour history which had been focused on the emergence of organisation and culture in mining, docks, textile mills, building sites, or other ‘traditional’ work cultures.'Journal of Labor and Society -- .Table of Contents1 Introduction – Agency and subjectivity in post-war labour militancy2 Car workers, trade union militancy and public discourse3 Organising in car factories 1945-604 The social practices and cultural norms of “fragmentation”, 1960-685 Productivity bargaining and re-making workplace trade unionism, 1968-756 Towards “Strike Free”, 1975-827 ConclusionIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book challenges the assumption – just as alive today as it was in the nineteenth century – that the political sphere was an arena of reason in which feelings had no part to play. It shows that feelings were a central, albeit contested, aspect of the political culture of the period. Radical leaders were accused of inflaming the passions; the state and its propertied supporters were charged with callousness; radicals grounded their claims to citizenship in the universalist assumption that workers had the same capacity for feeling as their social betters (denied at this time). It sheds new light on the relationship between protest movements and the state by showing how one of the central issues at stake in the conflict between radicals and their oppressors was the feelings of the propertied classes.Trade Review'This book is an intriguing journey through the emotional possibilities of radicalism and the affective context that informed the politics and activism of these figures. It is well written, showing exemplary knowledge of not one but two methodological fields, and will prove to be of utmost importance to labour historians wishing to reach for the emotions that have hitherto remained absent from their pages.'Edda Nicolson, Labour History Review, Volume 88, Number 1'This is a historian’s book, full of rich detail and context, and offers an important contribution not just to emotions history but to our understanding of radical politics'Katie Barclay, Cromohs'Roberts deserves huge credit for excavating such nuances from the mud heaped on them by Chartism’s enemies, and enriching our understanding of the words and deeds of earlier radicals.'The Journal of the Social History Society'This is an exemplary book: a model of scholarship and craft. … Roberts has done the history of emotions an enormous service. He has also set a high bar for British political historians: emotions history is not just an add-on category, but lies at the very heart of what political history is.’ Rob Boddice, Emotions: History, Culture, Society -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. William Cobbett’s anti-‘feelosofee’ 2. Richard Carlile and the embodiment of reason’s republic 3. Robert Owen, harmonic passions and the practice of happiness 4. Gothic King Dick: Richard Oastler and Tory-radical feeling 5. J.R. Stephens and the prophetic politics of the heart 6. William Lovett and the battle for asceticism in early Chartism 7. Daniel O’Connell, Feargus O’Connor and the politics of ‘anger’ Conclusion Select Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers' experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.Trade Review'It takes a fine eye and a supple mind to trace and understand the finest grains of the class and racial struggles that unfolded in colonial central Africa from their earliest manifestations in white trade unions to the Rhodesian Front’s war against the insurgent Zimbabwean liberation movements. Ginsburgh’s study, thematically rich and informed by great sensitivity to comparative issues and transdisciplinary studies, brings out every nuance of those struggles by showing how, just beneath the tectonic plates of manifest contestation swirls the hidden magma of class, gender, race and, contingently constructed, identity.'Professor Charles van Onselen, author of The Fox and the Flies and The Seed is Mine -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction1 The making of white worker identity2 The Great Depression and shifting boundaries of 'white work'3 The Second World War4 The 'multiracial' Central African Federation, 1953–63 5 White fights, white flight and the Rhodesian Front, 1962–79ConclusionSelected bibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisSettlers at the end of empire traces the development of racialised migration regimes in South Africa, Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and the United Kingdom from the Second World War to the end of apartheid in 1994. While South Africa and Rhodesia, like other settler colonies, had a long history of restricting the entry of migrants of colour, in the 1960s under existential threat and after abandoning formal ties with the Commonwealth they began to actively recruit white migrants, the majority of whom were British. At the same time, with the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, the British government began to implement restrictions aimed at slowing the migration of British subjects of colour. In all three nations, these policies were aimed at the preservation of nations imagined as white, revealing the persistence of the racial ideologies of empire across the era of decolonisation.Table of ContentsIntroduction1. ‘The height of my ambition is to be a Springbok’: Wartime travel to southern Africa, race and the discourse of opportunity2. ‘We want new settlers of British stock’: Planning for post-war migration3. ‘Immigration on a Selective Basis’: The competing imperatives of minority settler colonialism, 1945-19534. From Britons to ‘New Rhodesians’ and ‘New South Africans’: The consolidation of racial nationalism in the 1950s5. The demographic defence of the white nation, 1960-1975 6. ‘The last bastion of the British Empire’: The politics of migration in the final days of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, 1976-19947. ‘I still don’t have a country’: The southern African settler diaspora after decolonisationEpilogueSelect bibliography

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Book SynopsisWhere exactly is queer England? There has been much discussion of London as a queer city, but what about the many thousands of queer lives lived elsewhere? From Manchester's bars and nightclubs, to Brighton's seafront, the attractions of Leeds to the dockside delights of Plymouth, in Queer Beyond London two leading LGBTQ historians will take you on a journey through four cities with rich and diverse queer histories. They show how geography, size, economy, city government and local history and culture shaped LGBTQ life in these places, each city forging a vibrant queer culture of its own. Using the pioneering community histories that have been produced in each of these cities, and including the voices of queer people who have made their lives there, the book tells local stories to change our national history. -- .Trade Review‘A rich celebration of the everyday LGBTQ stories that have been shaped by - and have helped to shape - modern English urban life. Insightful, inspiring, and completely fascinating.’ Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet and The Paying Guests‘Being queer is all about change: longing for it, fighting for it - and surviving it. This brilliantly detailed tour of the last fifty years of LGBTQ+ culture and lives in four great English cities digs down through the layers of history and geography and gets to the real nuts and bolts of our experiences. A real labour of love - and quite an achievement.’ Neil Bartlett, author of Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall and Address Book‘This is a book I didn’t know we needed quite so badly! It provides a riveting account of LGBTQ+ people forging new lives, creating new communities, and navigating prejudice and discrimination. It is beautifully written, and a splendid example of how oral history enriches previously untold stories.’ Dr Clare Summerskill, academic, writer and comedian‘This book took me back to my teenage years in Brighton, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol and beyond where I sought out the bars where I could belong even though elsewhere we were illegal. A world of laughter, despair, love, openness, belonging and making whoopee.’ Michael Cashman, actor, founder member of Stonewall, and member of the House of Lords ‘History should never tell just one story, and this timely book challenges the reader to think beyond a single, London-centric timeline of queer history in England since the 1960s. A ‘must-read’ for cultural historians, queer or not.’ Jane Traies, author of The Lives of Older Lesbians: Sexuality, Identity and the Life Course, and Now You See Me: Lesbian Life Stories? ‘This book tells a fascinating and compelling story. It takes us to places we know and love, and to some we didn’t know so much about. It tells local stories, personal stories, human stories. It completes the nation’s queer jigsaw. It’s a must-read.’ Chris Smith, Britain’s first openly gay MP, former cabinet minister, and member of the House of Lords'This is a rich and thought-provoking study which provides a more nuanced and more representative history that challenges national narratives and draws our attention to how locality not only shaped queer life in the past, but also emotions, memory, and community in the present. The methodology, rigorous research, and attention to hitherto overlooked stories, people, and places that underpin this book makes it an important contribution to the field, and one that should stimulate exciting further research into Britain’s queer past beyond London.'CLAIRE MARTIN, Northern History -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction SECTION I: QUEER CITIES by Matt Cook 1. Brighton 2. Leeds 3. Manchester 4. Plymouth SECTION 2: QUEER COMPARISONS by Alison Oram 5. Movement and Migration 6. Queer Homes, Households and Families 7. Queer Uses of the Past Epilogue: The Cities Compared Select biblio Index -- .

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Book SynopsisIdeal homes investigates the tastes and aspirations of the new suburban communities that emerged in Britain following the First World War. In a period when homeownership was becoming the norm, these communities sought out varieties of architecture and design that were both nostalgic and modern, reflecting longings for ‘Old England’ on the one hand and technological convenience on the other. The book draws on exhibitions, memoirs, advertisements and films, as well as surviving examples of suburban architecture and interiors, to identify a distinctively suburban modernism, embodied by the Tudorbethan semi. Arguing that the ‘ideal’ home of the period was both a retreat from the outside world and a site of change and experimentation, it concludes by considering how such houses are lived in today. This new edition also features an introductory chapter on researching the history of your own home.Trade Review‘A wonderful tour through the interwar suburban house: from the appearance and decoration of our houses through to innovations in appliances and the creation of the modern "ideal home".’ Melanie Backe-Hansen, author of House Histories: The Secrets Behind Your Front Door'Ideal Homes is a superb evocation of interwar living as expressed in its homes and furnishings. Deborah Sugg Ryan's book skilfully interweaves social and design history and beautifully melds the academic and personal. Her exploration of “suburban modernity” and its idiosyncratic blend of tradition and novelty, home and empire, challenges the intellectual condescension of critics to find meaning and value in the lived experience of consumers and the messy, sometimes contradictory, choices they made. Along the way, it charts both the apparently rigid boundaries of gender and seemingly more fluid divisions of class. It's that rare thing – a book that will appeal to academic specialists and the general reader.'John Boughton, author of Municipal Dreams (2018)‘Deborah brings to life the history of typical 1930s British houses using stories from the archives of the real families for whom such houses were home. For anyone who wants to research the history of their own house, her new introduction gives away some key tricks of the trade.’Professor David Olusoga OBE, presenter of A House Through Time'Deborah Ryan’s fascinating new book explores the ideas and emotions that lay behind the rise of interwar suburban homes. Ryan takes a design history approach to the study of the home – exploring design, style, and objects in depth – but situates this in a broader social and cultural narrative that explains the wider social meaning of domestic space and its value for its owners.'Cultural and Social History ‘Sugg Ryan succeeds in evoking the material culture of a past era which, in certain ways, resonates strongly with our own.' Professor Penny Sparke, author of The Modern Interior and The Genius of Design 'Deborah Sugg Ryan's book begins with the personal and then develops into a fascinating and detailed study of housing design and the meanings of home in interwar Britain. These interesting intersections between the subjective, design history and a social history of the home makes for a gratifyingly fresh take on the history of housing design and domesticity during the years 1918 to 1939. The book is well-written, convincingly argued and successfully merges design history, social and gender history in what is undoubtedly an important new contribution to twentieth-century British history.'Cercles‘Grounding her discussion in the discipline of design history, Sugg Ryan explores the aspirations and tastes of new suburban communities in England during the interwar period. Four individual stories of home ownership and homemaking reveal different aspects of emotional investment in domestic design and the drive for individuality. The author investigates how the design and decoration of these domestic spaces forged gender identities and a new suburban class.'CHOICE'Deborah Sugg Ryan's book makes an important contribution to the history of design as it was experienced by lower-middle-class and middle-class consumers in Great Britain in between the two world wars. Weaving a narrative out of such varied sources as the Daily Mail's Ideal Home exhibitions, period advertisements for new housing developments, women's domestic advice literature and the individual histories captured in the Mass Observation Archive, she presents a history of the architectural style and interior design practices of new suburban developments in the 1920s and 1930s.'Journal of Design History'Throughout Ideal Homes, 1918–1930, Sugg Ryan brings together a wealth of information and ideas showing a deep knowledge of domestic design during the interwar period. Through the experiences of individual homeowners, as well as in the attention paid to specific design objects, we get a close reading of how “suburban modernism” was mediated and consumed. Sugg Ryan invites the reader to see the suburban home and its objects as an inherent part of British modernism between the World Wars, offering a core reference point for further research into the domestic interiors of interwar Britain.'Vanessa Vanden Berghe, Journal of British Studies 'With an introduction on researching your house history, the book provides a capsule of the information you need to begin metaphorically peeling back the wallpaper and uncovering the history of your (or your parents' or grandparents') interwar home.'Family Tree Magazine -- .Table of ContentsNew introduction: researching your house history1 The interwar house: ideal homes and domestic design2 Suburban: class, gender and homeownership3 Modernisms: 'good' design and 'bad' design4 Efficiency: labour-saving and the professional housewife5 Nostalgia: the Tudorbethan semi and the detritus of empire6 Afterword: modernising the interwar ideal homeIndex

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