MU Libraries New Books: American History

About the new book list

"One of the 25 best holiday gift books" —New York Post

"Ecclesine's emphasis is on the people, not the street. And he's got an eye for a magazine-like, flattering beauty: Everyone glows." —Los Angeles Times

"A journey through Los Angeles in all its guises, states of mind, and urban terrains, a narrative in words and documentary photography format that is every bit as engaging as any novel . . . one of the strongest statements about man's dark fate in the West ever committed to paper." —PopMatters.com

The Kennedy assassination--24 hours after : Lyndon B. Johnson's pivotal first day as president / Steven M. Gillon. (11/11/2009)

11/11/2009

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A Look at Edward M. Kennedy Through the Years
(Click on each image below to see a larger view)

Ted Kennedy with Bobby Kennedy at the opening of the Royal Children’s Zoo (June 9, 1938)

John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Edward M. Kennedy

Ted Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in South Boston

"We hold these truths to be self-evident..." : an interdisciplinary analysis of the roots of racism and slavery in America / Kenneth N. Addison. (10/28/2009)

10/28/2009

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Call #: E184.A1 A334 2009

African women immigrants in the United States : crossing transnational borders / John A. Arthur. (10/28/2009)

10/28/2009

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African Women Immigrants in the United States depicts how immigrant women use international migration as a strategy to challenge existing patriarchal hegemonies operative both in the United States and Africa. It also weaves together the multidimensional strands of how African immigrant women shape and are shaped by the process of international migration.

Call #: E184.A24 A73 2009

Ambition and division : legacies of the George W. Bush presidency / edited by Steven E. Schier. (10/28/2009)

10/28/2009

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Review

“Rarely has a presidency been as consequential as George W. Bush's. This volume takes the reader through the dramatic and significant changes--for better or worse- America and the world went through as a consequence of the actions of the Bush administration. It is essential reading for those who wish to understand just how much changed in those turbulent years.”
—Michael A. Genovese, Loyola Marymount University

“Adds to the ever-growing jigsaw puzzle that is the Cuban-American experience . . . with verve and charm.”
—Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

The Seduction of Brazil brings greater sophistication to both Brazilian and American understanding of the forces at play during this period, and should appeal to historians as well as students of Latin America, culture, and communications.

Call #: F2510 .T69 2009

The war man : the true story of a citizen-soldier who fought from Quebec to Yorktown / Robert A. Mayers. (10/28/2009)

10/28/2009

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An Intimate Portrait of a Real Soldier of the American Revolution
In 1775, the first year of the American Revolution, Congress made an appeal for troops. The resulting army of citizen-soldiers began what for many would be more than five years of battle and deprivation. Their consolation, however, was that they would ultimately defeat the most powerful army of the age and win independence for the new country of America. John Allison, a New York farmer, answered the call to arms in 1775, joining the Continental Army's 3rd New York Infantry. Allison was surrounded by like-minded volunteers, yet all were equally unprepared for campaigning. Despite the lack of training, equipment, and clothing, Allison and the rest of his company found themselves marching toward Quebec knee-deep in snow as part of the unsuccessful American invasion of Canada.

So begins the remarkable story of the wartime experiences of a foot soldier of the American Revolution. Using letters, muster rolls, orderly books, service records, and oral family history, Robert A. Mayers reconstructs the campaign life of John Allison. What makes his life remarkable is that he participated in many key events across the colonies for the duration of the war. Allison fought at the gates of Montreal, the battle of Fort Montgomery on the Hudson--where most of his company was either killed or went missing--the decisive Sullivan-Clinton operation against the Iroquois, endured the bitter winter at Morristown, New Jersey, and helped man the frontline at the American victory at Yorktown, Virginia. During Allison's eight-year military career, he survived numerous skirmishes and battles across the colonies, was promoted to the rank of corporal, and returned home a local hero. The War Man: The True Story of a Citizen-Soldier Who Fought From Quebec to Yorktown is a unique opportunity to follow the course of the American Revolution through the eyes of a front-line volunteer.

Call #: E207.A55 M39 2009

This is what they say : a story cycle dictated in northern Alberta in 1928 / François Mandeville edited and translated from Chipewyan by Ron Scollon foreword by Robert Bringhurst. (10/28/2009)

10/28/2009

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Chipewyan is one of the many Northern Athapaskan languages spoken in Alaska and western Canada. Mandeville's story cycle is a rich picture of traditional life and thought in the Northern Athapaskan world.

Call #: E99.C59 M35 2009

We will dance our truth : Yaqui history in Yoeme performances / David Delgado Shorter. (10/28/2009)

10/28/2009

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In this innovative, performative approach to the expressive culture of the Yaqui (Yoeme) peoples of the Sonora and Arizona borderlands, David Delgado Shorter provides an altogether fresh understanding of Yoeme worldviews. Based on extensive field study, Shorter’s interpretation of the community’s ceremonies and oral traditions as forms of “historical inscription” reveals new meanings of their legends of the Talking Tree, their narrative of myth-and-history known as the Testamento, their fabled deer dances, funerary rites, and church processions.

The teenage years can be exciting for girls, as they develop into young women and anticipate their future. For some, however, this developmental stage may be tempered by increased risks for teen pregnancy, school failure, and some health problems. African American Girls: Reframing Perceptions and Changing Experiences explores not only the challenges and stressors confronting this unique population, but also the strengths and resiliencies used to meet them.

Examining prevailing trends while avoiding simplistic generalizations, the book is both descriptive (e.g., explaining similarities and differences with girls of other ethnicities and African-American boys in critical areas) and useful (e.g., providing concrete guidelines for professionals working to support prosocial development and prevent risky behaviors). This unique volume:

Addresses salient issues of self and identity.

Examines crucial domains, such as relationships, achievements and expectations, and issues that have a major impact on health and well-being.

Offers practical recommendations and resources for working with African-American girls during the period when life experiences and decisions are most likely to affect adult outcomes.

Discusses the lives of girls from diverse families, communities, and circumstances.

Explores the influences of family, peers, community, and cultural traditions.

Features sample activities for promoting positive development.

Includes quotations reflecting the perspectives of the girls in their own words.

African American Girls is an essential resource for a wide range of professionals, including clinical, child, and school psychologists, counselors, therapists, and social workers. Whether one’s specialty is prevention, intervention, education, or research, this book is a must-have volume.

Call #: E185.86 .B379 2009

Clark Clifford : the wise man of Washington / John Acacia. (10/21/2009)

10/21/2009

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Call #: E840.8.C55 A27 2009

Fighting for democracy : Black veterans and the struggle against white supremacy in the postwar South / Christopher S. Parker. (10/21/2009)

10/21/2009

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Doug McAdam, Stanford University )

Call #: E185.61 .P25 2009

Indian tribes of Oklahoma : a guide / Blue Clark. (10/21/2009)

10/21/2009

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Product Description

Oklahoma is home to nearly forty American Indian tribes, and it includes the largest Native population of any state. As a result, many Americans think of the state as "Indian Country." For more than half a century readers have turned to Muriel H. Wright's A Guide to the Indian Tribes of Oklahoma as the authoritative source for information on the state's Native peoples. Now Blue Clark, an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, has rendered a completely new guide that reflects the drastic transformation of Indian Country in recent years.

As a synthesis of current knowledge, this book places the state's Indians in their contemporary context as no other book has done. Solidly grounded in scholarship and Native oral tradition, it provides general readers the unique story of each tribe, from the Alabama-Quassartes to the Yuchis. Each entry contains a complete statistical and narrative summary of the tribe, encompassing everything from origin tales and archaeological research to contemporary ceremonies and tribal businesses. The entries also include tribal websites and suggested readings, along with photographs depicting prominent tribal personages, visitor sites, and accomplishments.

Call #: E78.O45 C575 2009

Inventing the job of president : leadership style from George Washington to Andrew Jackson / Fred I. Greenstein. (10/21/2009)

10/21/2009

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Call #: E185.615 .B7297 2009

The Harding affair : love and espionage during the Great War / James David Robenalt. (10/21/2009)

10/21/2009

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From Publishers Weekly

Warren Harding's philandering while in the White House has already been documented, but Cleveland litigator Robenalt reveals an earlier, perhaps more unwise love affair by the Ohio politician and then U.S. senator. More than 100 love letters reveal Harding's jealous affair with Carrie Phillips—an alleged German spy—between 1905 and 1917. As Harding's political career rose, so too did his proximity to America's eventual Great War adversaries as Phillips's extended family was tried for espionage and suspicions alighted on her. This dangerous liaison illuminates a public figure at his most intimate, human and vulnerable, jealously begging for fidelity from his mistress even as he debated in letters her vocal pro-German stance and publicly addressed the nation to decry Germany's contempt for neutral rights and horrifying disregard of the rights of humanity. The richness of previously sealed, highly personal correspondence compensates for Robenalt's abrupt meandering between the history of Harding's affair and that of the espionage trial of Phillips's in-law, Baroness Iona Zollner. However, Robenalt fails to frame the Harding affair as one with political or historical repercussions. (Sept.)
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Call #: E786 .R63 2009

The hawk and the dove : Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the history of the Cold War / Nicholas Thompson. (10/21/2009)

10/21/2009

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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn After a dinner party at his Georgetown home, Joseph Alsop, the legendary newspaper columnist, watched George F. Kennan head to his car and yelled, "You know, George, the problem with you is that you're a nineteenth century man." Kennan turned around and countered, "No, I'm an eighteenth-century man." It was hardly a charge that anyone would have lodged against Kennan's friend and longtime antagonist Paul Nitze. Alsop diagnosed Nitze's failings during a bibulous evening at Martin's Tavern in Washington: "The trouble with you, Paul, is that you're just a bureaucrat." For much of the past half-century, Kennan and Nitze formed a classic odd couple, battling over Cold War policy both while in government service and out. Kennan was a learned diplomat and historian who had witnessed Stalin's show trials and purges as a young man stationed at the Moscow embassy. He went on to draft the basis for Cold War doctrine by famously warning of Soviet intentions in his 1946 "Long Telegram," only to retreat from his prescriptions, leave government service and devote himself to warning of the perils of an arms race that threatened to obliterate the planet. Nitze was an inveterate hawk who attached great importance to the balance of nuclear firepower between the Russians and the Americans. He formulated the foundation for American nuclear strategy in the early 1950s and occupied numerous government posts for presidents from Truman to Reagan, while persistently sounding alarms about Soviet nuclear intentions and capabilities. In "The Hawk and the Dove," Nicholas Thompson, an editor at Wired magazine, skillfully contrasts Nitze and Kennan. Thompson, who is Nitze's grandson, brings a judicial impartiality to the fierce disputes that raged between the two men. Thompson has enjoyed full access to his grandfather's archival documents, but perhaps his most impressive accomplishment is to have mined Kennan's extensive diaries for new insights. In this important and astute new study, Nitze emerges as a driven patriot and Kennan as a darkly conflicted and prophetic one. Kennan boosted Nitze's government career by hiring him to join the State Department's policy planning staff during the Truman administration, but the differences between them were wide. Nitze, as Thompson notes, breezed his way through Harvard, whooping it up with fellow members of the exclusive Porcellian Club before landing a job on Wall Street; Kennan was a lonely student at Princeton, brooding about what he saw as his own deficiencies. His constant musings included some rather disdainful beliefs about Jews and blacks that Thompson carefully examines, as well as contempt for the 1960s student activists. Kennan was an elitist conservative, deeply wary of democracy itself. On the issue of nuclear weaponry, Nitze was an optimist, convinced that superior American technology and atomic firepower could save the day. Kennan was always a fatalist imbued with a melancholy sense of the unexpected catastrophes that have regularly ensued from human follies. In his 1947 "Mr. X." article in Foreign Affairs, Kennan laid out the doctrine of Soviet containment -- essentially the intellectual scaffolding of the Cold War. Then he spent the next decades disavowing his authorship of it. Thompson observes that Kennan later wrote that he felt like "one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly watches its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster." Nitze would have none of this. According to Thompson, "Nitze was in sync with the times, far more confident than Kennan in his country's ability to do good." In 1950, he presided over the drafting of Document NSC-68, which rejected Kennan's recommendation that America forswear first use of nuclear weapons; the document also called on the United States to fight communism worldwide and to invest in a massive arms buildup. Decades later, Thompson writes, Nitze crossed out a line in a student's master's thesis that argued that in NSC-68 he had advocated military containment over political means. In the late 1950s and in the '70s, Nitze warned that America was in danger of becoming the weaker combatant in the superpower contest and needed to rearm. How did it play out? The Soviet Union crumbled, and the United States emerged triumphant. But Kennan never believed that the United States had all that much to do with it. He had originally predicted that the Soviet Union would decay from within, leaving behind a handful of ideological dust. Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1977, he observed that the Soviet leaders were "ordinary" and "perhaps the most conservative ruling group to be found anywhere in the world," which meant that there was no need to go on a crusade to topple the regime; rather one could wait patiently for the denouement. It was the workhorse Nitze who had the nose for power, while the self-lacerating Kennan commented from the sidelines. Thompson perceptively writes, "Too fragile and easily hurt, he was like Chiron, the wise and immortal centaur of Greek mythology who is shot by an arrow and develops a wound that never heals." Toward the end of their lives, however, Nitze and Kennan reconciled their differences as the Cold War's end prompted Nitze to endorse the abolition of the weapons whose existence he had once done so much to promote.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Call #: E744 .T494 2009

Anti-Americanism and the American world order / Giacomo Chiozza. (10/14/2009)

Audience, agency and identity in Black popular culture / Shawan M. Worsley. (10/7/2009)

10/7/2009

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Call #: E185.625 .W624 2010

Cracked but not shattered : Hillary Rodham Clinton's unsuccessful campaign for the presidency / edited by Theodore F. Sheckels. (10/7/2009)

10/7/2009

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Call #: E887.C55 C73 2009

Fugitive visions : an adoptee's return to Korea / Jane Jeong Trenka. (10/7/2009)

10/7/2009

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Product Description

The powerful second memoir by the author of the widely acclaimed The Language of Blood

made in Korea > cheap goods > cheap labor > cheap womb > cheap adoption > cheap immigration > cheap immigrant > cheap yellow daughter > honorary white > almost but not quite

Whenever she speaks to a stranger in her native Korea, Jane Jeong Trenka is forced to explain what she is. Japanese? Chinese? The answer—that she was adopted from Korea as a baby and grew up in the United States—is a source of grief, pride, and confusion.

Trenka’s award-winning first book, The Language of Blood, told the story of her upbringing in a white family in rural Minnesota. Now, in this searching and provocative memoir, Trenka explores a new question: Can she make an adult life for herself in Korea? Despite numerous setbacks, Trenka resolves to learn the language and ways of her unfamiliar birth country.

In navigating the myriad contradictions and disjunctions that have made up her life, Trenka turns to the lessons from her past—in particular, the concept of dissonance and harmony learned over her years as a musician. In Fugitive Visions, named after a composition by Prokofiev, Trenka has succeeded in braiding the disparate elements of her life into a recognizable and at times heartbreaking whole.

About the Author

Jane Jeong Trenka has won numerous awards and fellowships for her writing. She is the author of The Language of Blood, called “original and beautifully written” by Publishers Weekly. She now lives in Korea.

Call #: E184.K6 T74 2009

Making American culture : a social history, 1900-1920 / Patricia Bradley. (10/7/2009)

10/7/2009

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Review

“Patricia Bradley has a unique way of looking at American media – whether it be broadcasting, vaudeville, or silent film – within a culture building context. Her forte is rejecting standard professional history and analyzing media as a cultural artifact and force intermixed with politics. Bradley examines media content and production within celebrated American values such as the entrepreneurial impulse. This book is a must read for those who want a greater understanding of culture without the usual jargon that accompanies such works. Bradley is a gifted scholar and writer.”--Jean Folkerts, Dean and Alumni Distinguished Professor, School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill

Product Description

How is culture made? In a readable style, this book argues that the development of American culture in the twentieth century was the result of a cacophony of influences with a large sociological sweep, from the role of immigrants as a new audience to the intimate circles of artists who forged connections through neighborhoods, popular pubs, and lovers—heterosexual and homosexual—all contributing to an intellectual ferment that was open to new ideas. Patricia Bradley examines how some of these forces impacted the evolution of popular cultural forms such as vaudeville, song, and early film as well as the emergence of modern art, dance, and literary productions. All off these forms were a product of their times and were fueled by the ambition of artists looking to be part of the American success story.

About the Author

Patricia Bradley has examined how ideas come to be part of national life in her far-ranging previous work as author of Slavery, Propaganda and the American Revolution, Mass Media and the Making of American Feminism 1963-1973, and Women and the Press the Struggle for Equality. Born in the United Kingdom, she was a broadcaster in her early career and later a Professor and Chair of the Department of Journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Call #: E169.1 .B785 2009

Racially writing the republic : racists, race rebels, and transformations of American identity / edited by Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris. (10/7/2009)

About the Author
Gunlog Fur is Professor of History at Vaxjo University, Sweden.

Call #: E99.D2 F87 2009

A slice of time : a Carolinas album, 1950-1990 / by Don Sturkey foreword by Dot Jackson introduction by Kays Gary. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

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Call #: F255 .S86 1990

Arrow Rock : crossroads of the Missouri frontier / by Michael Dickey. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

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Call #: F474.A77 D53 2004

Blurring the color line : the new chance for a more integrated America / Richard Alba. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

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From Publishers Weekly
According to Alba (coauthor of Remaking the American Mainstream), present-day America has arrived at a rare moment in its history, when disadvantaged minorities could alter the ethnoracial boundaries of American society through increasing diversity at its middle and upper levels. He argues that the U.S. reached similar moments as southern and eastern European, Irish and Jewish immigrants were gradually amalgamated into the mainstream and considered white. His arguments on why conditions could be ripe for a similar shift in the early 21st century are logical and well-supported. One unfortunate blind spot, however, is Alba's insistence on lumping together disadvantaged Hispanic and black minorities and failing to acknowledge that the African-American presence in the U.S. is wholly unique—for all the labor statistics he presents, he neglects to weigh the consequences of a 400-year legacy of slavery and segregation. Alba's conclusion is strongly stated and well reasoned, and but he hides in an ivory tower, neglecting to satisfyingly examine the hurdles to the education and affirmative-action reforms he so vigorously recommends. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
Blurring the Color Line offers a primer on how to make assimilation happen in the 21st century.
--Douglas S. Massey, Princeton University, editor of New Faces in New Places: The New Geography of American Immigration

Blurring the Color Line has the potential to be an instant classic. It demonstrates through a rigorous analysis of demographic, economic, and social data that the successful integration of American minority groups is very possible in the coming decades.
--Mary C. Waters, Harvard University, co-author of Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age(Harvard)

Product Description

Richard Alba argues that the social cleavages that separate Americans into distinct, unequal ethno-racial groups could narrow dramatically in the coming decades. During the mid-twentieth century, the dominant position of the United States in the postwar world economy led to a rapid expansion of education and labor opportunities. As a result of their newfound access to training and jobs, many ethnic and religious outsiders, among them Jews and Italians, finally gained full acceptance as members of the mainstream. Alba proposes that this large-scale assimilation of white ethnics was a result of “non-zero-sum mobility,” which he defines as the social ascent of members of disadvantaged groups that can take place without affecting the life chances of those who are already members of the established majority.

Alba shows that non-zero-sum mobility could play out positively in the future as the baby-boom generation retires, opening up the higher rungs of the labor market. Because of the changing demography of the country, many fewer whites will be coming of age than will be retiring. Hence, the opportunity exists for members of other groups to move up. However, Alba cautions, this demographic shift will only benefit disadvantaged American minorities if they are provided with access to education and training. In Blurring the Color Line, Alba explores a future in which socially mobile minorities could blur stark boundaries and gain much more control over the social expression of racial differences.

About the Author
Richard D. Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Call #: E184.A1 A447 2009

Boonville : historic rivertown / preface by William Least Heat-Moon introduction by Bob Dyer photographs and text by students and faculty members of the University of Missouri School of Journalism edited and designed by Lauren Lantos. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

Call #: F474.B66 B66 1992

Cracked but not shattered : Hillary Rodham Clinton's unsuccessful campaign for the presidency / edited by Theodore F. Sheckels. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

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Call #: E887.C55 C73 2009

Down in Dixie : a documentary / by Peggy Peattie. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

Call #: F270 .P43 2003

Mapping the Americas : the transnational politics of contemporary native culture / Shari M. Huhndorf. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

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Product Description
In Mapping the Americas, Shari M. Huhndorf tracks changing conceptions of Native culture as it increasingly transcends national boundaries and takes up vital concerns such as patriarchy, labor and environmental exploitation, the emergence of pan-Native urban communities, global imperialism, and the commodification of indigenous cultures. While nationalism remains a dominant anticolonial strategy in indigenous contexts, Huhndorf examines the ways in which transnational indigenous politics have reshaped Native culture (especially novels, films, photography, and performance) in the United States and Canada since the 1980s. Mapping the Americas thus broadens the political paradigms that have dominated recent critical work in Native studies as well as the geographies that provide its focus, particularly through its engagement with the Arctic. Among the manifestations of these new tendencies in Native culture that Huhndorf presents are Igloolik Isuma Productions, the Inuit company that has produced nearly forty films, including Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner; indigenous feminist playwrights; Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead; and the multimedia artist Shelley Niro.

Huhndorf also addresses the neglect of Native America by champions of "postnationalist" American studies, which shifts attention away from ongoing colonial relationships between the United States and indigenous communities within its borders to U.S. imperial relations overseas. This is a dangerous oversight, Huhndorf argues, because this neglect risks repeating the disavowal of imperialism that the new American studies takes to task. Parallel transnational tendencies in American studies and Native American studies have thus worked at cross-purposes: as pan-tribal alliances draw attention to U.S. internal colonialism and its connections to global imperialism, American studies deflects attention from these ongoing processes of conquest. Mapping the Americas addresses this neglect by considering what happens to American studies when you put Native studies at the center.

From the Back Cover
"Among the important interventions of Mapping the Americas, which focuses our attention on the emerging international dimension of Native American studies, is Shari M. Huhndorf's crucial argument that Native American studies should be the gateway to American studies."-- Eric Cheyfitz, Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters and Director, American Indian Program, Cornell University, author of The Poetics of Imperialism

"Long before Columbus arrived, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were transnational--their migrations, trade routes, and story sharing attest to this. After Columbus, additional layers of colonial and postcolonial transnationalism complicated this process in horrifically tragic ways but also in positive expressions of hybridization and sovereignty. In clear and convincing prose, Mapping the Americas places the complex dynamics of tribal transnationalism at the forefront of Native American and American studies. Shari M. Huhndorf addresses this multilayered process from appropriately multiple angles by examining the colonization of Alaska, Inuit media, transnational feminism--including a provocative reading of Spiderwoman Theater's Sun Moon and Feather--and the transnational, transtime visual narratives of Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Huhndorf concludes with a brilliant reading of the portraits, maps, and sculpture of Shelley Niro's installation The Border--a reading that incorporates Mohawk images and the importance of women while highlighting the turn to the transnational in post-1980 indigenous politics, art, and literature."--Kenneth M. Roemer , University of Texas at Arlington, coeditor, Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature

"Mapping the Americas provides a sustained critique of the transnational political movements that have reshaped global indigenous dynamics and altered the terrain of indigenous nationalist struggles in the Americas. Huhndorf shows how the tensions between transnational and national forms of indigenous resistance doubly implicate representational practices--by concurrently shaping the meanings of culture and by threatening to undermine Native political purposes. Mapping the Americas assesses these risks to argue for the critical importance of pan-tribal affiliations and counterhegemonic indigenous practices in the global era, especially those practices that unite communities across space, time, and culture to evoke forms of oppositional consciousness. This work boldly challenges us to think beyond nationalist paradigms in order to engage with cultural practices that have sustained indigenous communities in their ongoing struggles for decolonization. It represents an outstanding contribution to the emerging field of transnational indigenous cultural studies."--Cheryl Suzack, University of Victoria

"In this wise and wide-ranging book, Shari M. Huhndorf challenges truisms about contemporary Native nationalism in the arts while remaining respectful of the ideas that she asks us to rethink. She encourages us to recognize a transnationalism that carries particular weight for feminism, for communications technologies, for the visual arts and their dialogue with literature, for urban Native communities, and for contemporary anticolonial politics and alliances. Mapping the Americas extends Huhndorf's continuing project of bringing Eskimo and Inuit studies together with American Indian studies, and in that way and many other ways it offers a model of the alliance building that it invites us to study."--Robert Dale Parker, University of Illinois, author of The Invention of Native American Literature and The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft

"Covering a wide, and initially startling, range of materials, Shari M. Huhndorf's Mapping the Americas offers a powerful and much-needed reconsideration of recent trends in Native American studies, while also posing a timely challenge to American Studies scholars whose scholarship fails to account for the place of indigenity within the national imaginaries of the United States and Canada. By ranging far afield of the standard texts of Native American studies while placing each of the works she analyzes in the larger context of European colonization of the Americas, Huhndorf has produced what is destined to be a field-changing book."--Paula M. L. Moya, Stanford University, author of Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles

About the Author
Shari M. Huhndorf is Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, also from Cornell.

Call #: E98.E85 H84 2009

Missouri roadsides : the traveler's companion / Bill Earngey. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

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Product Description
This guide is intended to help plan trips anywhere in the state of Missouri, revealing sites of interest along the way. Coverage includes: history; museums; parks; outdoor recreational pastimes and areas; special events; and geographical and architectural features.

Call #: F464.3 .E27 1995

Place, race, and story : essays on the past and future of historic preservation / Ned Kaufman. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

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Review

Ned Kaufman has been at the vanguard of historic preservation thought and activism for two decades. He has challenged preservationists to go beyond a traditional focus on beautiful buildings and become a part of a larger movement for social justice. Place, Race, and Story shows us the way by offering frameworks and case studies that both critique and provide inspiring examples of what a progressive preservation movement looks like.

— Max Page, Professor of Architecture and History at the University of Massachusetts and author of The Citys End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New Yorks Destruction

Preservationists usually focus on the how; Ned Kaufman reminds us to ask why we are preserving. Then he thoughtfully answers, showing us how preservation can better connect us and our places through the shared stories in peoples lives.

— Michael Holleran, Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Bostons Changeful Times: Origins of Preservation and Planning in America

Caught up in the day-to-day struggle to keep America’s heritage intact and alive, preservationists don’t often think about our movement’s origins, milestones and philosophical underpinnings. That’s a mistake. Ned Kaufman’s thoughtful and enormously useful book reminds us of the importance of knowing how we got here – and how the journey changed us.

— Richard Moe, President, National Trust for Historic Preservation

Product Description

In Place, Race, and Story, author Ned Kaufman has collected essays dedicated to the proposition of giving the next generation of preservationists not only a foundational knowledge of the field of study, but more ideas on where they can take it. Through both big-picture essays considering preservation across time, and descriptions of work on specific sites, the essays in this collection trace the themes of place, race, and story in ways that raise questions, stimulate discussion, and offer a different perspective on these common ideas.

Including unpublished essays as well as established works by the author, Place, Race, and Story provides a new outline for a progressive preservation movement – the revitalized movement for social progress.

About the Author
Pratt Institute, USA

Call #: E159 .K38 2009

Racism without racists : color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

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Product Description
In this book, Bonilla-Silva explores with systematic interview data, the nature and components of post-civil rights racial ideology. Specifically, he documents the existence of a new suave and apparently non-racial racial ideology he labels color-blind racism. He suggests that this ideology, anchored on the decontextualized, a historical, and abstract extension of liberalism to racial matters, has become the organizational matrix, whites use to explain and account for racial matters in America.

Call #: E184.A1 B597 2006

Soho, a picture portrait / by Carl Glassman. (9/30/2009)

Review

"A complex portrayal of southern cotton planters that will revise the way many scholars interpret the political economy of slavery." -- John Majewski, University of California, Santa Barbara

"In this bold new interpretation of the contours of southern political economy between the Constitution and the Civil War, Brian Schoen skillfully embeds U.S. history in its proper international context. The Fragile Fabric of Union marks the impressive debut of an exceptional young historian." -- Peter A. Coclanis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"This fascinating and deeply researched book challenges enduring myths about the Cotton South and the roots of the Civil War. From the vantage point of global political economy, it sheds new light on how American slaveholders aggressively pursued commercial power." -- Charles Postel, Bancroft prize--winning author of The Populist Vision

Product Description

In this fresh study Brian Schoen views the Deep South and its cotton industry from a global perspective, revisiting old assumptions and providing new insights into the region, the political history of the United States, and the causes of the Civil War.

Schoen takes a unique and broad approach. Rather than seeing the Deep South and its planters as isolated from larger intellectual, economic, and political developments, he places the region firmly within them. In doing so, he demonstrates that the region's prominence within the modern world -- and not its opposition to it -- indelibly shaped Southern history.

The place of "King Cotton" in the sectional thinking and budding nationalism of the Lower South seems obvious enough, but Schoen reexamines the ever-shifting landscape of international trade from the 1780s through the eve of the Civil War. He argues that the Southern cotton trade was essential to the European economy, seemingly worth any price for Europeans to protect and maintain, and something to defend aggressively in the halls of Congress. This powerful association gave the Deep South the confidence to ultimately secede from the Union.

By integrating the history of the region with global events, Schoen reveals how white farmers, planters, and merchants created a "Cotton South," preserved its profitability for many years, and ensured its dominance in the international raw cotton markets. The story he tells reveals the opportunities and costs of cotton production for the Lower South and the United States.

About the Author

Brian Schoen is an assistant professor of history at Ohio University.

Call #: F213 .S37 2009

The texture of contact : European and Indian settler communities on the frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667-1783 / David L. Preston. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

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Review
"Preston''s astute analysis challenges our notions of the geographic and racial barriers that separated native and colonial peoples along the early American frontier. In settler communities stretching from Montreal to western Maryland, he recovers the contours of everyday contact, negotiation, and exchange among peoples from remarkably diverse backgrounds, illuminating the bonds that held them together and the conflicts that eventually drove them apart. This book is an enjoyable and rewarding read for anyone interested in the fate of the Iroquois and their neighbors in eighteenth-century America."-Timothy J. Shannon, author of Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (Timothy J. Shannon 20090804)

"Through deep research in neglected manuscripts, David Preston recovers a world where Native Americans and European colonists traded, ate, slept, drank, and fought together on intimate terms negotiated far from the prying eyes of imperial officials. Only by appreciating these dense human connections, he compellingly argues, can we understand the murderous racial hatreds that seized the region when war came in the late eighteenth century-and the enduring legacy of those hatreds for the continent's history."-Daniel K. Richter, author of Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Daniel K. Richter )

Product Description

The Texture of Contact is a landmark study of Iroquois and European communities and coexistence in eastern North America before the American Revolution. David L. Preston details the ways in which European and Iroquois settlers on the frontiers creatively adapted to each other’s presence, weaving webs of mutually beneficial social, economic, and religious relationships that sustained the peace for most of the eighteenth century.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined archival research, Preston describes everyday encounters between Europeans and Indians along the frontiers of the Iroquois Confederacy in the St. Lawrence, Mohawk, Susquehanna, and Ohio valleys. Homesteads, taverns, gristmills, churches, and markets were frequent sites of intercultural exchange and negotiation. Complex diplomatic and trading relationships developed as a result of European and Iroquois settlers bartering material goods. Innovative land-sharing arrangements included the common practice of Euroamerican farmers living as tenants of the Mohawks, sometimes for decades. This study reveals that the everyday lives of Indians and Europeans were far more complex and harmonious than past histories have suggested. Preston’s nuanced comparisons between various settlements also reveal the reasons why peace endured in the Mohawk and St. Lawrence valleys while warfare erupted in the Susquehanna and Ohio valleys.

One of the most comprehensive studies of eighteenth-century Iroquois history, The Texture of Contact broadens our understanding of eastern North America’s frontiers and the key role that the Iroquois played in shaping that world.

(20090731)

About the Author

David L. Preston is an assistant professor of history at the Citadel.

Call #: E99.I7 P75 2009

Trail fever : spin doctors, rented strangers, thumb wrestlers, toe suckers, grizzly bears, and other creatures on the road to the White House / by Michael Lewis. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

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Amazon.com Review
Michael Lewis, the author of Liar's Poker, which Tom Wolfe called "the funniest book on Wall Street I have ever read," now turns his eye to the peculiar method Americans use to choose their president. Beginning with the 1996 New Hampshire primary, Lewis tagged along with players both major and minor. Keeping his eyes open to the nuances of how campaigns are so carefully managed today, Lewis is able to make some insightful, damning, and often hysterically funny observations. The reporting technique is eccentric--who else would spend so much time with Morry Taylor, a rich man who ran for president in what amounted to a vanity campaign--but it works. Lewis has written a very good book that could be shelved under both humor and public affairs.

From Library Journal
Journalist Lewis's (Liar's Poker, LJ 9/1/89) chronicle of the 1996 presidential campaign examines the battle for the Republican Party nomination and the following general election. It differs from most campaign books in that its perspective is "from the bottom of the political food chain." Lewis argues that the leading candidates were so preoccupied with risk avoidance that they failed to address important concerns of the electorate. This meant that to the extent such matters were addressed at all, it was by the lesser candidates. Therefore, Lewis devotes more attention to such minor Republican candidates as Alan Keyes and Morry Taylor and to Green Party candidate Ralph Nader than to Clinton and Dole. His book is not comprehensive, but it provides a frequently humorous and occasionally insightful look into contemporary electoral politics for lay readers.?Thomas H. Ferrell, Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Tired of the conventional campaign postmortem cranked out by the likes of Elizabeth Drew or Bob Woodward? Lewis criticizes their sort of books for taking a top-down view of campaigns and politics, so he adopts a from-the-fringe perspective on the 1996 presidential extravaganza. Because the only question in doubt was who would lose to Clinton, Lewis started out following the Republicans, most closely the candidates without even the proverbial snowball's chance: Morry "the Grizz" Taylor and Alan Keyes. Something about their amateurishness (Taylor) or intense moralizing (Keyes) attracted Lewis, not to mention their disdain for hired political pros--the "rented strangers" of the subtitle. Lewis dislikes the artifice of PR-and poll-propelled politicians, and his antic journal is largely a poking at the thick protection that overlays most serious candidates, as well as a pricking of the pomposity of the bigfoot journalists who tail them. Vignettes, all telling and pointed, are the name of Lewis' game, and they unroll from Iowa to New Hampshire to San Diego to Chicago in a rich, sardonic sequence that easily makes this the most fun campaign book since Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes (1992). The innumerable acid asides give Lewis' story a delightful digging tone that captures the zaniness, phoniness, and earnestness of a process that, in the end, was a battle for 17 percent: that, believe it or not, was the percentage of all eligible voters who voted for the 1996 winner. Gilbert Taylor

From Kirkus Reviews
Bestselling author Lewis (Liar's Poker, 1989, etc.) applies his sense of humor to a subject that really needs it: the 1996 presidential campaign. To escape the boring but politically prudent staged events offered by the Clinton and Dole campaigns, Lewis focuses on the secondary players. This draws him to candidates like Morry Taylor, who responds to the challenge of hosting a reception at the Republican National Convention with a motorcycle rally featuring 7,000 Republicans on Harleys, and Alan Keyes, whose verbal virtuosity makes Lewis a (temporary) believer every time he speaks, despite suspicions that Keyes might have a screw loose somewhere. Among noncandidates there are the spin doctors and ``rented strangers''--professional campaign operatives--as well as Senator John McCain, whose ``alarming preference for the truth'' so disorients Lewis that it becomes difficult for him to function as a journalist. Please note: The purpose here is not to explain why Dole lost and Clinton won. In an era where major American presidential candidates are congenitally allergic to reality, taking them and their campaigns at face value reveals little. By setting aside the official stories concocted by rented strangers and disseminated by the mainstream press, yet avoiding the automatic cynicism of the professional critic, Lewis conveys a sense of what is really going on. His lack of enthusiasm for a campaign (Dole's) that ``plans its trips to the bathroom four days before it goes'' is easy to understand, regardless of one's politics, and his recognition that Americans' indifference to electoral politics is a sensible response to ``this crap'' is oddly optimistic: The people are sane even if our leaders are not. Written with Hunter Thompson's eye for the revealing detail but without his self-indulgence, and with Mark Russell's facility with one-liners but without his superficiality, this is a book to be enjoyed. (8 photos) (First printing of 100,000) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Description
A wickedly funny and astute chronicle of the 1996 presidential campaign--and how we go about choosing our leaders at the turn of the century. In it Michael Lewis brings to the political scene the same brilliance that distinguished his celebrated best-seller about the financial world, Liar's Poker.

Beginning with the primaries, Lewis traveled across America--a concerned citizen who happened to ride in candidates' airplanes (as well as rented cars in blinding New Hampshire blizzards) and write about their adventures. Among the contenders he observed: Pat Buchanan, a walking tour of American anger; Lamar Alexander, who appealed to people who pretend to be nice to get ahead; Steve Forbes, frozen in a smile and refusing to answer questions about his father's motorcycles; Alan Keyes, one of the great political speakers of our age, whom no one has ever heard of; Morry Taylor--"the Grizz"--the hugely successful businessman who became the refreshing embodiment of ordinary Americans' appetites and ambitions; Bob Dole, a man who set out to prove he would never be president; and Bill Clinton, the big snow goose who flew too high to be shot out of the sky.

We watch the clichés of this peculiar subculture collide with characters from the real world: a pig farmer in Iowa; an evangelical preacher in Colorado Springs; a homeless person in Manhattan; a prospective illegal immigrant in Mexico. The politicians speak and speak, often reversing positions, denying direct quotations, mastering the sound bite, dodging hard questions, wreaking havoc on the English language. Spin doctors spin. Rented strangers (campaign workers) proliferate. One particular toe sucker goes awry. Ads are honed to misrepresent and distort. Money makes the world go round.

And the citizens are left dumbfounded or cheering empty platitudes. When trail fever breaks on Election Day, half of America's eligible voters stay home.

This book offers a striking look at us and our politics and the mammoth unlikelihood of connection between the inauthentic modern candidate and the voter's passions, needs, and desires. In telling the story, Michael Lewis once again proves himself a masterful observer of the American scene.

From the Inside Flap
A wickedly funny and astute chronicle of the 1996 presidential campaign--and how we go about choosing our leaders at the turn of the century. In it Michael Lewis brings to the political scene the same brilliance that distinguished his celebrated best-seller about the financial world, Liar's Poker.

Beginning with the primaries, Lewis traveled across America--a concerned citizen who happened to ride in candidates' airplanes (as well as rented cars in blinding New Hampshire blizzards) and write about their adventures. Among the contenders he observed: Pat Buchanan, a walking tour of American anger; Lamar Alexander, who appealed to people who pretend to be nice to get ahead; Steve Forbes, frozen in a smile and refusing to answer questions about his father's motorcycles; Alan Keyes, one of the great political speakers of our age, whom no one has ever heard of; Morry Taylor--"the Grizz"--the hugely successful businessman who became the refreshing embodiment of ordinary Americans' appetites and ambitions; Bob Dole, a man who set out to prove he would never be president; and Bill Clinton, the big snow goose who flew too high to be shot out of the sky.

We watch the clichés of this peculiar subculture collide with characters from the real world: a pig farmer in Iowa; an evangelical preacher in Colorado Springs; a homeless person in Manhattan; a prospective illegal immigrant in Mexico. The politicians speak and speak, often reversing positions, denying direct quotations, mastering the sound bite, dodging hard questions, wreaking havoc on the English language. Spin doctors spin. Rented strangers (campaign workers) proliferate. One particular toe sucker goes awry. Ads are honed to misrepresent and distort. Money makes the world go round.

And the citizens are left dumbfounded or cheering empty platitudes. When trail fever breaks on Election Day, half of America's eligible voters stay home.

This book offers a striking look at us and our politics and the mammoth unlikelihood of connection between the inauthentic modern candidate and the voter's passions, needs, and desires. In telling the story, Michael Lewis once again proves himself a masterful observer of the American scene.

About the Author
Michael Lewis pursued a career on Wall Street for several years until he left to write a book about it--Liar's Poker. He is also the author of The Money Culture. A regular columnist for The New York Times Magazine, he has been a senior editor at The New Republic, as well as the American editor of The Spectator. He grew up in New Orleans, and now lives in Cold Spring, New York.

Call #: E888 .L49 1997

Washington album : a pictorial history of the nation's capital / Bob Levey and Jane Freundel Levey. (9/30/2009)

9/30/2009

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About the Author
Bob Levey's column, "Bob Levey's Washington," which explores all aspects of life in the capital, has appeared in The Washington Post since 1981. During his 32-year career at The Post, Levey has covered presidential politics, Congress, local news and sports. In 1985,1988, 1997, Washingtonian magazine named him one of the top five columnists in the capital, and in 1999 the magazine selected him as a "Washingtonian of the Year."

Levey also has maintained careers in television, radio, and the Internet. He hosts a talk show on cable TV NewsChannel 8 and serves as a commentator for WTOP-AM and FM. In addition Levey hosts "Levey Live," an hour-long "chat show" appearing Tuesdays and Fridays on The Washington Post's Web site, washingtonpost.com.

Levey holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago.

Jane Freundel Levey is the editor of Washington History: Magazine of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., a consulting historian specializing in D.C. history and a founder of Summit Historians, a group that produces corporate histories and exhibits.

She holds a master's degree in American studies from George Washington University and a bachelor's from Wellesley College. She speaks and publishes frequently on Washington history topics.

The Levey's have two teenaged children, Emily and Alexander.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
George Washington envisioned the new capital of the United States as "The Rome of the New World," according to historian James Sterling Young. The president wanted glistening, wide boulevards. He wanted a prestigious national university. He wanted a thriving commercial center, nourished by Potomac River links to the Ohio River valley.

What the nation got instead for the first two-thirds of the 19th century was mostly a rattletrap, a muddy backwater that embarrassed visiting diplomats, stumbled commercially and failed to attract significant population or investment. "There sits the president, like a pelican in the wilderness," wrote a Philadelphia editor in 1803. As always, politics explained a great deal.

Congress had meandered to eight locations since 1774, from major cities like New York to farm villages like Lancaster, Pa. In 1790, while it was meeting in Philadelphia, former revolutionary War soldiers laid siege to its members, demanding long-delayed back pay - and sympathetic local militas did little to protect the law-makers. So Congress decided to create a permanent capital out of whole cloth, a federal enclave protected by forces without local responsibilities or ties. But where should it be built? Northerners wanted in their region, while Southerners insisted taht it be more central to their homes than the previous meeting places in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York.

Not for the last time in American government, the solution was found in a bargain over money. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton had proposed that Congress assume the states' Revolutionary War debts, a notion opposed by Southerners, who feared that it would lead to too much federal control, to an "unconstitutional seizure of state authority," as historian Kenneth R. Bowling puts it. So Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson persuaded Hamilton and James Madison, then a Virginia member of the House, to strike a deal: The Capital would be placed in the South in return for Southern support of a debt-assumption bill. The bargain worked, resulting in a capital that, unlike its European counterparts, would be orphaned from the nation's financial and cultural centers.

9/23/2009

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Product Description
Despite the popular assumption that Native American cultures in New England declined after Europeans arrived, evidence suggests that Indian communities continued to thrive alongside English colonists. In this sequel to her Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650, Kathleen J. Bragdon continues the Indian story through the end of the colonial era and documents the impact of colonization.

As she traces changes in Native social, cultural, and economic life, Bragdon explores what it meant to be Indian in colonial southern New England. Contrary to common belief, Bragdon argues, Indianness meant continuing Native lives and lifestyles, however distinct from those of the newcomers. She recreates Indian cosmology, moral values, community organization, and material culture to demonstrate that networks based on kinship, marriage, traditional residence patterns, and work all fostered a culture resistant to assimilation.

Bragdon draws on the writings and reported speech of Indians to counter what colonists claimed to be signs of assimilation. She shows that when Indians adopted English cultural forms--such as Christianity and writing--they did so on their own terms, using these alternative tools for expressing their own ideas about power and the spirit world.

Despite warfare, disease epidemics, and colonists' attempts at cultural suppression, distinctive Indian cultures persisted. Bragdon's scholarship gives us new insight into both the history of the tribes of southern New England and the nature of cultural contact.

From the Publisher
Kathleen J. Bragdon is Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and the author of Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650, winner of the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize of the American Society for Ethnohistory.

Call #: E78.N5 B732 2009

The brittle thread of life : backcountry people make a place for themselves in early America / Mark Williams. (9/23/2009)

9/23/2009

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Review
"A deeply researched, vivid and absorbing account of the truculently independent people of New England's backcountry and their place in the history of the region and the nation."-Keith Wrightson, Yale University (Keith Wrightson )

"In this finely-crafted comparative study of Granby, Connecticut, and Ashfield, Massachusetts, Mark Williams recounts the struggles of eighteenth-century settlers on the upland frontier of the Connecticut River Valley. The Brittle Thread of Life recalls classic New England town studies of the 1970s, and vividly conveys struggles over land and religion, as well as local, colony, and state-wide politics from the late seventeenth-century to the beginning of the republic."-Richard D. Brown, University of Connecticut (Richard D. Brown )

Product Description

The colonists who settled the backcountry in eighteenth-century New England were recruited from the social fringe, people who were desperate for land, autonomy, and respectability and who were willing to make a hard living in a rugged environment.

Mark Williams’ microhistorical approach gives voice to the settlers, proprietors, and officials of the small colonial settlements that became Granby, Connecticut, and Ashfield, Massachusetts. These people—often disrespectful, disorderly, presumptuous, insistent, and defiant—were drawn to the ideology of the Revolution in the 1760s and 1770s that stressed equality, independence, and property rights. The backcountry settlers pushed the emerging nation’s political culture in a more radical direction than many of their leaders or the Founding Fathers preferred and helped put a democratic imprint on the new nation. This accessibly written book will resonate with all those interested in the social and political relationships of early America.

About the Author

Mark Williams teaches history at the Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut.

Call #: F104.G65 W549 2009

To ask for an equal chance : African Americans in the Great Depression / Cheryl Lynn Greenberg. (9/23/2009)

9/23/2009

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Review
Drawing upon both a wealth of existing scholarship and selected primary documents, this book offers a new synthesis of African American life during the Great Depression. It also provides a useful text for a variety of African American and U.S. History courses on this turbulent decade in the nation's history. --Joe W. Trotter, Carnegie Mellon University

This well-researched, insightful book includes photographs that enhance a sense of the times and the growing activism that eventually led to the civil rights movement. --Booklist, August 2009

Review
Concise, engaging, deeply grounded in the scholarly literature, and fully accessible to a general readership, To Ask for an Equal Chance provides a compelling account of the economic hardship and racial discrimination that defined the experience of African Americans in the Great Depression. Cheryl Greenberg shows persuasively both the transforming impact and the fundamental limitations of the New Deal's record on race, and she argues provocatively that subsequent civil rights protest was fueled in part by the community action, political organizing, and expansion of economic and educational opportunities among blacks in the 1930s.

About the Author
Cheryl Lynn Greenberg is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. She is the author of several books, including, most recently, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century.

Call #: E185.6 .G79 2009

Toward Filipino self-determination : beyond transnational globalization / E. San Juan Jr. (9/23/2009)

9/23/2009

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Product Description
Examines the project of Filipino self-determination in the context of capitalist globalization.

From the Back Cover
Granted formal independence in 1946, the Philippines serves as a battleground between the neoliberal project of capitalist globalization and the enduring aspiration of Filipinos for national self-determination. More than ten million Filipino workers--over one-tenth of the country's total population--work as contract workers in all parts of the world. How did this "model" colony of the United States devolve into an impoverished, war-torn neocolonial hinterland, a provider of cheap labor and raw materials for the rest of the world? In Toward Filipino Self-Determination, E. San Juan Jr. explores the historical, cultural, and political formation of the Filipino diaspora. By focusing on the work of significant Filipino intellectuals and activists, including Carlos Bulosan and Philip Vera Cruz, as well as the issues of gender and language for workers in the United States, San Juan provides a historical-materialist reading of social practices, discourses, and institutions that explain the contradictions characterizing Filipino life in both the United States and in the Philippines.

About the Author
E. San Juan Jr. is Director of the Philippines Cultural Center in Storrs, Connecticut. He is the author of more than sixty books, including Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, also published by SUNY Press;From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino Experience in the United States; and In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern World.

Call #: E184.F4 S28 2009

Veiled brightness : a history of ancient Maya color / Stephen Houston ... [et al.]. (9/23/2009)

9/23/2009

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Product Description

Color is an integral part of human experience, so common as to be overlooked or treated as unimportant. Yet color is both unavoidable and varied. Each culture classifies, understands, and uses it in different and often surprising ways, posing particular challenges to those who study color from long-ago times and places far distant. Veiled Brightness reconstructs what color meant to the ancient Maya, a set of linked peoples and societies who flourished in and around the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and Central America. By using insights from archaeology, linguistics, art history, and conservation, the book charts over two millennia of color use in a region celebrated for its aesthetic refinement and high degree of craftsmanship.

The authors open with a survey of approaches to color perception, looking at Aristotelian color theory, recent discoveries in neurophysiology, and anthropological research on color. Maya color terminology receives new attention here, clarifying not just basic color terms, but also the extensional or associated meanings that enriched ancient Maya perception of color. The materials and technologies of Maya color production are assembled in one place as never before, providing an invaluable reference for future research.

From these investigations, the authors demonstrate that Maya use of color changed over time, through a sequence of historical and artistic developments that drove the elaboration of new pigments and coloristic effects. These findings open fresh avenues for investigation of ancient Maya aesthetics and worldview and provide a model for how to study the meaning and making of color in other ancient civilizations.

About the Author
STEPHEN HOUSTON serves as Paul Dupee Family Professor of Social Science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

CLAUDIA BRITTENHAM holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University and is now a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan.

CASSANDRA MESICK is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Brown University.

ALEXANDRE TOKOVININE is Research Associate, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

Call #: F1435.1.Y89 V45 2009

W.E.B. Du Bois and the sociological imagination : a reader, 1897-1914 / Robert A. Wortham, editor. (9/23/2009)

9/23/2009

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Review
A marvelous collection of texts that showcase the wide variety of Du Bois' sociological imagination. While there are other collections of Du Bois' sociological writings, none of them offer the rich historical background provided here. --Edward J. Blum, author of W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet

Product Description
Introducing and presenting thirty core texts from the sociological writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Worthams unique reader highlights Du Bois as a multifaceted researcher and thinker who, by attempting to approach African American social life from every angle, became a pioneer in American sociology. As this astute reader demonstrates, in addition to his profound contributions to our understanding of racial inequality in the United States, Du Bois made momentous advances in the areas of research methods, social problems, community studies, population studies, the sociology of religion, and crime and deviance. When sociology appeared to be heading toward a deductive methodology, Du Bois presented a strong argument for inductive methods, advocating for the use of a more interdisciplinary approach. Eventually, combining sociological perspectives with those of history and anthropology, he developed his landmark approach: methodological triangulation. In this long-overdue volume, Wortham showcases the enormous influence of Du Boiss wide-ranging sociological imagination. Organized into four major partsThe Scientific Study of Society and Social Problems, Social Structure and Social Processes, Dimensions of Inequality, and Social Dynamicsthe reader concludes with a complete biography of Du Bois early sociological works.

About the Author
Robert A. Wortham is Professor of Sociology, North Carolina Central University. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Call #: E185.86 .W433 2009