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One Tiny Bubble: The Story of Our Last Universal Common Ancestor
By Karen Krossing. 2022
The graves are walking: The great famine and the saga of the irish people
By John Kelly. 2012
It started in 1845 and lasted six years. Before it was over, more than one million men, women, and children…
starved to death and another million fled the country. Measured in terms of mortality, the Great Irish Potato Famine was one of the worst disasters in the nineteenth century-it claimed twice as many lives as the American Civil War. A perfect storm of bacterial infection, political greed, and religious intolerance sparked this catastrophe. But even more extraordinary than its scope were its political underpinnings, and The Graves Are Walking provides fresh material and analysis on the role that nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism played in shaping British policies and on Britain's attempt to use the famine to reshape Irish society and character.Perhaps most important, this is ultimately a story of triumph over perceived destiny: for fifty million Americans of Irish heritage, the saga of a broken people fleeing crushing starvation and remaking themselves in a new land is an inspiring story of exoneration.Based on extensive research and written with novelistic flair, The Graves Are Walking draws a portrait that is both intimate and panoramic, that captures the drama of individual lives caught up in an unimaginable tragedy, while imparting a new understanding of the famine's causes and consequencesNormal women: Nine hundred years of making history
By Philippa Gregory. 2024
"Lively, timely and gloriously energetic. Each page bursts with life, and every chapter swirls with personalities left out of traditional…
narratives of Britain's past. Philippa Gregory has produced something rare and wonderful: a genuinely new history of [Britain], with women at its beating heart." —Dan Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Plantagenets "Stunning. . . . Full of surprises. . . . A brilliant, essential read." —The Independent (UK) The #1 New York Times bestselling historical novelist delivers her magnum opus—a landmark work of feminist nonfiction that radically redefines our understanding of the extraordinary roles ordinary women played throughout British history and "should be included in every history lesson" (Glamour UK) Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that they'd evolve to become ever more inferior? These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory's Normal Women. In this ambitious and groundbreaking book, she tells the story of England over 900 years, for the very first time placing women—some fifty per cent of the population—center stage. Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory trawled through court records, newspapers, and journals to find highwaywomen and beggars, murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, female husbands and hermits. The "normal women" you will meet in these pages went to war, ploughed the fields, campaigned, wrote, and loved. They rode in jousts, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency, and built ships, corn mills and houses. They committed crimes or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things, and rioted. A lot. A landmark work of scholarship and storytelling, Normal Women chronicles centuries of social and cultural change—from 1066 to modern times—powered by the determination, persistence, and effectiveness of womenWhat impact does culture have on state-formation and public policy? How do states affect national and local cultures? How is…
the ongoing cultural turn in theory reshaping our understanding of the Western and modernizing states, long viewed as the radiant core of a universal, context-free rationality? This eagerly awaited volume brings together pioneering scholars who reexamine the sociology of the state and historical processes of state-formation in light of developments in cultural analysis. The volume first examines some of the unsatisfying ways in which cultural processes have been discussed in social science literature on the state. It demonstrates new and sophisticated approaches to understanding both the role culture plays in the formation of states and the state's influence on broad cultural developments. The book includes theoretical essays and empirical studies; the latter essays are concerned with early modern European nations, non-European countries undergoing political modernization, and twentieth-century Western nation-states. A wide range of perspectives are presented in order to delineate this emergent area of research. Together the essays constitute an agenda-setting work for the social sciences.This book gives a brief, readable description of our common Western heritage. It covers the minimum historical information that educated…
adults should know within a tightly focused narrative and interpretive structure. The joined terms "supremacies and diversities" develop major themes of conflict and creativity. "Supremacies" centers on the use of power to dominate societies, ranging from warfare to ideologies. Supremacy seeks stability, order, and incorporation. "Diversities" encompasses the creative impulse that produces new ideas, as well as people's efforts to define themselves as "different." Diversity creates change, opportunity, and individuality. These themes of historical tension and change, whether applied to political, economic, technological, social and cultural trends, offer a bridging explanatory organization. Five other topical themes regularly inform the text: technological innovation, migration and conquest, political and economic decision-making, church and state, and disputes about the meaning of life. Various "Basic Principles" present summaries of historical realities. Primary Source Projects and Sources on Families offer students the chance to evaluate differing points of view about the past. This text is less expensive, less formal, has more attitude, yet still provides all the essentials for a course on Western Civilization.Essential Readings in Social Problems
By Yawo Bessa. 2022
This book provides students with a collection of engaging and thought-provoking articles that deepen their understanding of the topics and…
themes discussed within courses that address social issues. The anthology is organized into six distinct units. The opening unit introduces readers to the concept of the sociological imagination, which allows individuals to make connections between social structures and individual conditions to formulate social theories. In Unit 2, the readings examine the destructive nature of inequality, causes of poverty, issues related to gender inequality, and more. Unit 3 focuses on the concept of deviance and how it applies to sexuality and crime. Units 4 and 5 explore the relationship between race, ethnicity, white privilege, and social problems, and the intersection of human health and environmental problems. Dedicated readings address the social construction of race, biodiversity, and more. Unit 6, the final unit, offers readers a variety of proposed solutions for social problems with an emphasis on social movements to combat economic inequality, increasing authoritarianism, and ecological crises. Designed to stimulate critical thought, Essential Readings in Social Problems is an ideal supplementary text for courses in sociology and any other course that explores social challenges.This book investigates Afrikaner anticommunism in South Africa in the twentieth century, focusing on the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC).Following contemporary…
understandings of anticommunism as a fluid ideological stance, it demonstrates that the deeply held anticommunist convictions of ordinary twentieth-century Afrikaners is more than merely a natural result of global politics. It examines how the DRC, the institution with the widest reach and deepest influence in the everyday lives of Afrikaners, played a significant role in perpetuating an anticommunist imagination amongst twentieth-century Afrikaners. The text explores the critical role the DRC fulfilled in legitimising overt opposition to and suppression of ‘communism’ in all its perceived manifestations, including black dissent, whilst also creating an Afrikaner imagination in which the volk remained convinced of the ever- present communist threat, and of its own role as a bulwark against communism. The church’s moral standing in Afrikaner society also made it susceptible to right-wing opportunists gaining mainstream political clout, which this monograph also exposes and explains. It ultimately concludes that anticommunism functioned as a vehicle for nationalist unity (and uniformity), a paradigm for Afrikaner identity, and a legitimiser of the volk’s perceptions of its imagined moral high ground throughout the twentieth century.It will appeal to readers interested in anticommunism, Christian nationalism, right-wing networks, racism, and apartheid culture and society.A Chance Meeting: American Encounters
By Rachel Cohen. 2024
Weaving a tapestry of creativity and circumstance, this lauded chronicle of the many links and serendipitous meetings between giants of…
American culture—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein to Zora Neale Hurston to Marcel Duchamp—now includes a new afterword by the author. Rachel Cohen&’s A Chance Meeting is a dazzling group portrait that offers a striking new vision of the making and remaking of the American mind and imagination from the Civil War to the Vietnam War. How does the happenstance of daily life become history? Cohen shows us, describing a series of, now boldly, now subtly, transformative encounters between a wide and surprising range of Americans. A young Henry James has his portrait taken by the photographer Mathew Brady—Brady, who will receive Walt Whitman in his studio and depict General Grant on the battlefield. Later, W.E.B. Du Bois and his professor William James visit Helen Keller; Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz argue about photography; and Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston write a play together. Throughout, Cohen&’s narrative loops back and leaps forward with supreme agility, connecting, among others, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Beauford Delaney, James Baldwin, and Richard Avedon. In A Chance Meeting, Rachel Cohen offers an abiding account of the continuing challenges and the astonishing achievements of American life.It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic
By Jack Lowery. 2022
Shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas PrizeThe story of art collective Gran Fury—which fought back during the AIDS crisis through direct action…
and community-made propaganda—offers lessons in love and grief. In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury formed to campaign against corporate greed, government inaction, stigma, and public indifference to the epidemic. Writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury&’s art and activism from iconic images like the &“Kissing Doesn&’t Kill&” poster to the act of dropping piles of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a collective and its members, who built essential solidarities with each other and whose lives evidenced the profound trauma of enduring the AIDS crisis. Gran Fury and ACT UP&’s strategies are still used frequently by the activists leading contemporary movements. In an era when structural violence and the devastation of COVID-19 continue to target the most vulnerable, this belief in the power of public art and action persists.Histories of Solitude: Colombia, 1820s-1970s (Routledge Studies in the History of the Americas)
By Lina Britto, López-Pedreros, A. Ricardo. 2024
By combining chronological coverage, analytical breadth, and interdisciplinary approaches, these two volumes—Histories of Solitude and Histories of Perplexity—study the histories…
of Colombia over the last two centuries as illustrations of the histories of democracy across the Americas.The volumes bring together over 40 scholars based in Colombia, the United States, England, and Canada working in various disciplines to discuss how a country that has been consistently presented as a rarity in Latin America provides critical examples to re-examine major historical problems: republicanism and liberalism; export economies and agrarian modernization; populism and cultural politics of state formation; revolutionary and counterinsurgent Cold War violence; neoliberal reforms and urban development; popular mobilization and counterhegemonic public spheres; political ecologies and environmental struggles; and labors of memory and the challenge of reconciliation. Contributors are sensitive to questions of subjectivity and discourse, observant of ethnographic details and micro-politics, and attuned to macro-perspectives such as transnational and global histories.These volumes offer fresh perspectives on Colombia and will be of great value to those interested in Latin American and Caribbean history.The Gaidinliu Uprising in British India: Encountering the Millenarian
By Sajal Nag. 2024
This book studies the Gaidinliu uprising led by Rani Gaidinliu, a spiritual and political leader from Northeast India. It follows…
the journey of Gaidinliu, who was at the forefront of the revolt which turned into a political movement seeking to drive out the British from Manipur and the surrounding Naga areas. The book looks at the Gaidinliu movement as one of many tribal responses to colonial transformation, deprivation, alienation, and extreme oppression of the tribal formations in India. It also critically analyses the diverse colonial modes of tackling the different types of opposition to its rule and examines how the State devised to permanently erase the idea of rebellion from the minds of its subjects as a future strategy.A unique contribution, the book will be indispensable to political science, modern history, gender studies, subaltern studies, political theory, tribal studies, political sociology, political history, colonialism, post-colonial studies, and South Asia studies, particularly those interested in Northeast India.Police Custody in Ireland
By Yvonne Daly. 2024
Police Custody in Ireland brings together experts from policing studies, law, criminology, and psychology, to critically examine contemporary police custody…
in Ireland, what we know about it, how it operates, how it is experienced, and how it might be improved.This first-of-its-kind collection focuses exclusively on detention in Garda Síochána stations, critically examining it from human rights and best practice perspectives. It examines the physical environment of custody, police interview techniques, existing protections, rights, and entitlements, and experiences of specific communities in custody, such as children, ethnic minorities, non-English speakers, the Mincéir/Traveller community, and those with intellectual disabilities or Autism Spectrum Disorder. Police Custody in Ireland gives a snapshot of garda custody as it is now and makes important recommendations for necessary future improvements.An accessible and compelling read, this book will be of interest to those engaged in policing and criminology, as well as related areas of interest such as human rights, youth justice and disability studies.Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Film and Culture Series)
By Maggie Hennefeld. 2024
Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so…
a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy?Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorized and demonized, suppressed and exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine and culture, hysteria was an ailment that afflicted unruly women on the cusp of emotional or nervous breakdown. Cinema, Hennefeld argues, made it possible for women to laugh outrageously as never before, with irreversible social and political consequences. As female enjoyment became a surefire promise of profitability, alarmist tales of women laughing themselves to death epitomized the tension between subversive pleasure and its violent repression.Hennefeld traces the social politics of women’s laughter from the heyday of nineteenth-century sentimentalism to the collective euphoria of early film spectatorship, traversing contagious dancing outbreaks, hysteria photography, madwomen’s cackling, cinematic close-ups, and screenings of slapstick movies in mental asylums. Placing little-known silent films and an archive of remarkable, often unusual texts in conversation with affect theory, comedy studies, and feminist film theory, this book makes a timely case for the power of hysterical laughter to change the world.What roles did Americans play in the expanding global empires of the nineteenth century? Thomas M. Larkin examines the Hong…
Kong–based Augustine Heard & Company, the most prominent American trading firm in treaty-port China, to explore the ways American elites at once made and were made by British colonial society. Following the Heard brothers throughout their firm’s rise and decline, The China Firm reveals how nineteenth-century China’s American elite adapted to colonial culture, helped entrench social and racial hierarchies, and exploited the British imperial project for their own profit as they became increasingly invested in its political affairs and commercial networks.Through the central narrative of Augustine Heard & Co., Larkin disentangles the ties that bound the United States to China and the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a vast range of archival material from Hong Kong, China, Boston, and London, he weaves the local and the global together to trace how Americans gained acceptance into and contributed to the making of colonial societies and world-spanning empires. Uncovering the transimperial lives of these American traders and the complex ways extraimperial communities interacted with British colonialism, The China Firm makes a vital contribution to global histories of nineteenth-century Asia and provides an alternative narrative of British empire.Illiberal America: A History
By Steven Hahn. 2024
If your reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol was to think, 'That’s not us,' think again:…
in Illiberal America, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian uncovers a powerful illiberalism as deep seated in the American past as the founding ideals. A storm of illiberalism, building in the United States for years, unleashed its destructive force in the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. The attack on American democracy and images of mob violence led many to recoil, thinking “That’s not us.” But now we must think again, for Steven Hahn shows in his startling new history that illiberalism has deep roots in our past. To those who believe that the ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence set us apart as a nation, Hahn shows that Americans have long been animated by competing values, equally deep-seated, in which the illiberal will of the community overrides individual rights, and often protects itself by excluding perceived threats, whether on grounds of race, religion, gender, economic status, or ideology. Driven by popular movements and implemented through courts and legislation, illiberalism is part of the American bedrock. The United States was born a republic of loosely connected states and localities that demanded control of their domestic institutions, including slavery. As white settlement expanded west and immigration exploded in eastern cities, the democracy of the 1830s fueled expulsions of Blacks, Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons, and abolitionists. After the Civil War, southern states denied new constitutional guarantees of civil rights and enforced racial exclusions in everyday life. Illiberalism was modernized during the Progressive movement through advocates of eugenics who aimed to reduce the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities as well as the poor. The turmoil of the 1960s enabled George Wallace to tap local fears of unrest and build support outside the South, a politics adopted by Richard Nixon in 1968. Today, with illiberalism shaping elections and policy debates over guns, education, and abortion, it is urgent to understand its long history, and how that history bears on the present crisis.Wilderness and the American Spirit
By Ruby McConnell. 2024
THE IDEA OF THE AMERICAN SPIRIT has always been rooted inexpansion and abundance— at great cost to the environment. Withthe…
world burning up, one can' t help but wonder: how did we gethere? Wilderness and the American Spirit traces hundreds ofyears of The United States' relationship to the environment starting fromthe initial colonization of Native American land, to the developmentof land use policies, and the creation of resource based economies.Using a lesser known alternative to the Oregon Trail— Ruby McConnelluses the Applegate Trail as a vehicle to weave exposition, history, andscience to show us how we got to where we are now and what wecan do about it.Social Alternatives in Southern Europe and Latin America: Solidarity, Mutual Aid, and Cooperation in Comparative Perspective (19th–21st Centuries) (Routledge Studies in Modern History)
By Montserrat Duch-Plana, Pons-Altés, Josep M.. 2024
This book deals with the evolution of initiatives connected to the social and solidarity economy and their political cultures and…
educational implications in the south of Europe and in Latin America.Employing a comparative perspective, the contributors present 11 studies of these trajectories in Argentina, Chile, Portugal, France, Italy, Spain, and Catalonia in order to engender familiarity with social tributary practices and projects in the Latin world. As the cyclical crises of capitalism and their resulting inequalities have created proposals of reform and brought them into action, certain shared ideological influences and policies have emerged across these societies. Faced with the interpretative schemes used for the Anglo-Saxon sphere, which have been the usual reference in international research, this volume’s geographical and cultural matrix of analysis helps fill a longstanding gap in this field.The book will be of interest to scholars, educators, and students specialising in the history and political science of the social and solidarity economy sectors, as well as professionals involved in cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and associations.Contemporanea: A Glossary for the Twenty-First Century
By Michael Marder, Giovanbattista Tusa. 2024
A groundbreaking, multidisciplinary collection that rethinks our present moment and anticipates the key concepts that will shape and direct the…
twenty-first century.Contemporanea is a nascent lexicon for the twenty-first century edited by seasoned philosophers and authors Michael Marder and Giovanbattista Tusa. The collection showcases perspectives from a range of noteworthy thinkers in philosophy, ecology, and cultural studies, as well as artists, from across the globe, including Slavoj Zizek, Timothy Morton, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, and Vandana Shiva, who each describe what they anticipate will be the concepts shaping the trajectory of this century—everything from the world state to the nuclear taboo, automation to Teslaism, plant sexuality to arachnomancy, and ecotrauma to resonances, to name a few.This century, as the editors explain, has to date grounded itself in the debris of the preceding century, whose revolutions and struggles failed to transform our time: post-colonialism, post-fascism, and post-liberalism have morphed into neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and neofascism, often combined in a previously unimaginable mix. And, just as the political developments at the beginning of the twenty-first century revived and reshuffled those of the preceding epoch, so too have philosophical trends sought to breathe fresh life into the stillborn -isms of the past—realism, vitalism, logicism, materialism, empiricism, criticism—adding the adjective &“new&” and sometimes &“radical&” before them. To articulate a different future, another language is needed. And, to develop another language, one needs to develop fresh concepts, including the concepts proposed in this collection.ContributorsMieke Bal, Claudia Baracchi, Amanda Boetzkes, Erik Bordeleau, Anita Chari, Emanuele Coccia, Valentina Desideri, Roberto Esposito, Filipe Ferreira, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Claire Fontaine, Graham Harman, Yogi Hale Hendlin, Ranjit Hoskote, Cymene Howe, Daniel Innerarity, Joela Jacobs, Ken Kawashima, Sabu Kohso, Bogna Konior, Brandon LaBelle, Anna Longo, Artemy Magun, Michael Marder, Michael Marder, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Timothy Morton, Mycelium, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bahar Noorizadeh, Kelly Oliver, Uriel Orlow, Richard Polt, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Tomás Saraceno, Vandana Shiva, Anton Tarasyuk, Anaïs Tondeur, Giovanbattista Tusa, Sjoerd van Tuinen, Santiago Zabala, Zahi Zalloua, Slavoj ŽižekThe End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization
By Professor Martin Thomas. 2024
A capacious history of decolonization, from the decline of empires to the era of globalizationEmpires, until recently, were everywhere. They…
shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration.The End of Empires and a World Remade shows how profoundly decolonization shaped the process of globalization in the wake of empire collapse. In the second half of the twentieth century, decolonization catalyzed new international coalitions; it triggered partitions and wars; and it reshaped North-South dynamics. Globalization promised the decolonized greater access to essential resources, to wider networks of influence, and to worldwide audiences, but its neoliberal variant has reinforced economic inequalities and imperial forms of political and cultural influences. In surveying these two codependent histories across the world, from Latin America to Asia, Thomas explains why the deck was so heavily stacked against newly independent nations.Decolonization stands alongside the great world wars as the most transformative event of twentieth-century history. In The End of Empires and a World Remade, Thomas offers a masterful analysis of the greatest process of state-making (and empire-unmaking) in modern history.A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal (Histories Of Economic Life Ser. #4)
By Melissa Teixeira. 2024
How Brazil and Portugal experimented with corporatism as a &“third path&” between laissez-faire capitalism and communism Following the Great Depression,…
as the world searched for new economic models, Brazil and Portugal experimented with corporatism as a &“third path&” between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. In a corporatist society, the government vertically integrates economic and social groups into the state so that it can manage labor and economic production. In the 1930s, the dictatorships of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and António de Oliveira Salazar in the Portuguese Empire seized upon corporatist ideas to jump-start state-led economic development. In A Third Path, Melissa Teixeira examines these pivotal but still understudied initiatives.What distinguished Portuguese and Brazilian corporatism from other countries&’ experiments with the mixed economy was how Vargas and Salazar dismantled liberal democratic institutions, celebrating their efforts to limit individual freedoms and property in pursuit of economic recovery and social peace. By tracing the movement of people and ideas across the South Atlantic, Teixeira vividly shows how two countries not often studied for their economic creativity became major centers for policy experimentation. Portuguese and Brazilian officials created laws and agencies to control pricing and production, which in turn generated new social frictions and economic problems, as individuals and firms tried to evade the rules. And yet, Teixeira argues, despite the failings and frustrations of Brazil&’s and Portugal&’s corporatist experiments, the ideas and institutions tested in the 1930s and 1940s constituted a new legal and technical tool kit for the rise of economic planning, shaping how governments regulate labor and market relations to the present day.