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Aberration of Mind is a social history of suicide in the American South during the Civil War era. The book casts a wide net, focusing on Confederate soldiers and veterans and their families, and the enslaved and newly freed. The central question is, how did the Civil War and the suffering it generated shape suicidal thoughts and behavior? The author seeks to understand how the suffering experienced by southerners living in a war zone contributed to psychological distress that, in extreme cases, led southerners to contemplate or act on suicidal thoughts. The unprecedented human toll the war took on southerners created a psychological crisis that has not been fully explored. Drawing on sources like letters, diaries, military service records, coroners’ reports, and asylum patient case histories, the work recovers myriad stories, previously hidden, of individuals exhibiting suicidal activity or aberrant psychological behavior linked to the war and its aftermath. In addition to expanding our understanding of the full human costs of the Civil War, the book concludes that southerners transformed the meaning of suicide from an act of cowardice to a heroic symbol of white southern identity. The book fills a neglected niche in an otherwise crowded field of Civil War scholarship – the psychological impact of war and defeat on southerners.

This is the amazing untold story of the Los Angeles sanctuary movement’s champion, Father Luis Olivares (1934-1993), a Catholic priest and a charismatic, faith-driven leader for social justice. Beginning in 1980 and continuing for most of the decade, hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees made the hazardous journey to the United States, seeking asylum from political repression and violence in their home states. Instead of being welcomed by the “country of immigrants,” they were rebuffed by the Reagan administration, which supported the governments from which they fled. To counter this policy, a powerful sanctuary movement rose up to provide safe haven in churches and synagogues for thousands of Central American refugees. Based on previously unexplored archives and over ninety oral histories, this compelling biography traces the life of a complex and constantly evolving individual, from Olivares’ humble beginnings in San Antonio, Texas, to his close friendship with legendary civil rights leader César Chávez and his historic leadership of the United Neighborhoods Organization and the sanctuary movement.

In the late 1960s, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

To many, insane asylums are a relic of a bygone era. State governments took steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in mental hospitals, and many mental health facilities closed down. Yet, as this book reveals, the asylum did not die during deinstitutionalization. Instead, it returned in the modern prison industrial complex as the government shifted to a more punitive, institutional approach to social deviance, mental illness, and people with disabilities. Focusing on Pennsylvania, the state that ran one of the largest mental health systems in the country, the author tracks how the lack of community-based services, a fear-based politics around mental illness, and the economics of institutions meant that closing mental hospitals fed a cycle of incarceration that became an epidemic. This groundbreaking book recasts the political narrative of the late twentieth century, as the book charts how the history of asylums and prisons were inextricably intertwined. It argues that the politics of mass incarceration shaped the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals and social welfare policy, and vice versa. The book offers critical insight into how the prison took the place of the asylum and shaped the rise of the prison industrial complex and creating new forms of social marginality.

Frontiers of Science takes American scientific thought and discoveries away from the learned societies, museums, and teaching halls of the Northeast and puts the production of knowledge about the natural world in the context of competing empires and an expanding republic in the Gulf South. People often dismissed by starched northeasterners as nonintellectuals--Indian sages, African slaves, Spanish officials, Irishmen on the make, clearers of land and drivers of men--were also scientific observers, gatherers, organizers, and reporters. Skulls and stems, birds and bugs, rocks and maps, tall tales and fertile hypotheses came from them. They collected, described, and sent the objects that scientists gazed on and interpreted in polite Philadelphia. They made knowledge. This book offers a new framework for approaching American intellectual history, one that transcends political and cultural boundaries and reveals persistence across the colonial and national eras. The pursuit of knowledge in the United States did not cohere around democratic politics or the influence of liberty. It was, as in other empires, divided by multiple loyalties and identities, organized through contested hierarchies of ethnicity and place, and reliant on violence. By discovering the lost intellectual history of one region, Strang shows us how to recover a continent for science.

This book explores the diverse ways digital technology is shaping how Muslims across vast territories relate to religious authorities in fulfilling spiritual, mystical, and legalistic agendas. From social networks to websites, essential elements of religious practices and authority now have representation online. Muslims, embracing the immediacy and general accessibility of the internet, are increasingly turning to cyberspace for advice and answers to important religious questions. Online environments often challenge traditional models of authority, however. One result is the rise of digitally literate religious scholars and authorities whose influence and impact go beyond traditional boundaries of imams, mullahs, and shaikhs. The book shows how online rhetoric and social media are being used to articulate religious faith by many different kinds of Muslim organizations and individuals, from Muslim comedians and women’s rights advocates to jihad-oriented groups, such as the “Islamic State” and al-Qaeda, which relied on strategic digital media policies to augment and justify their authority and draw recruits. Hashtag Islam makes clear that understanding CIEs is crucial for the holistic interpretation of authority in contemporary Islam.

Like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Peruvian Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895–1979) was one of Latin America’s key revolutionary leaders, well known across national boundaries. This political biography of Haya chronicles his dramatic odyssey as founder of the highly influential anti-imperialist American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), as a political theorist whose philosophy shifted gradually from Marxism to democracy, and as a seasoned opposition figure repeatedly jailed and exiled by his own government. A genius of political propaganda, he created a transnational party. Haya rejected foreign ideologies and identified the Mexican Revolution as a grassroots movement to be replicated throughout Latin America. While living in hiding, he organized what became Peru’s longest lasting political party. The book spotlights Haya’s devotion to forging populism as a political style applicable on both the left and the right, and to his vision of a pan-Latin American political movement. A great orator who addressed gatherings of thousands of Peruvians, Haya fired up the Aprismo movement, seeking to develop "Indo-America” by promoting the rights of the middle class, Indigenous peoples as well as laborers and women. Steering his party toward the center of the political spectrum through most of the Cold War, Haya was narrowly elected president in 1962—but he was blocked from assuming office by the military, which played on his rumored homosexuality. Even so, Haya’s forging of a uniquely Latin American political ideology makes him an enduring figure with a legacy across Latin America.

Now thoroughly updated and revised—with a new chapter on the Dreamer movement and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA)—this book offers North Carolinians a better understanding of their Latino neighbors, illuminating rather than enflaming debates on immigration. In the midst of a tumultuous political environment, North Carolina continues to feature significant in-migration of Mexicans and Latin Americans from both outside and inside the United States. Drawing on the voices of migrants as well as North Carolinians from communities affected by migration, Hannah Gill explains how larger social forces are causing demographic shifts, how the state is facing the challenges and opportunities presented by these changes, and how migrants experience the economic and social realities of their lives. Gill makes connections between our hometowns and the globalization of people, money, technology, and culture by shedding light on the many diverse North Carolina residents who are such a vital part of the state’s population but are often unrecognized in many ways. This book is essential for everyone, including students and teachers, who wants to understand what is at stake for all parties and wants to work toward solutions.

This book conducts a close, gendered reading of the modern black press to reinterpret it as a crucial tool of black men’s leadership, public voice, public image, gender and identity formation, and a space for the construction of ideas of proper masculinity that shaped the long twentieth-century black freedom struggle to promote a fight for racial justice and black manhood. Moving from the turn of the twentieth century to the rise of black radicalism, the book argues that black people’s ideas, rhetoric, and strategies for protest and racial advancement grew out of a quest for manhood led by black newspapers. Drawing on discourse theory and studies of public spheres to examine the Chicago Defender, Crisis, Negro World, Crusader, and Muhammad Speaks and their publishers during the Great Migration, New Negro era, Great Depression, civil rights movement, and urban renewal, this study engages the black press at the complex intersections of gender, ideology, race, class, identity, urbanization, the public sphere, and black institutional life. Departing from typical histories of black newspapers and black protest that examine the long roots of black political organizing, this book makes a crucial intervention by advancing how black people’s conceptions of rights and justice, and their activism in the name of both, were deeply rooted in ideas of redeeming Black men, prioritizing their plight on the agenda for racial advancement. Yet, the black press produced a highly influential discourse on black manhood that was both empowering and problematic for the long black freedom struggle.

This book examines the transformation of Machu Picchu from an obscure archaeological site into a global tourist destination and national symbol of Peru. This book illustrates how, from the very start, tourism played a central role in the modern rise of Machu Picchu. The leaders of Cusco, where Machu Picchu is located, employed tourism to argue for the importance of their region at a time when Peru’s national leaders believed that the Andean interior offered little cultural and economic opportunities. Over time, Cusco increasingly looked to tourism as a source of needed development at a time of economic crisis in Peru’s southern Andes. While Cusco was successful in making Machu Picchu into a tourist destination, this created new conflicts over control over the region’s culture and economy. In summary, this book highlights how the transnational links and actors associated with tourism allowed local leaders in Cusco and Peru’s southern Andes to create their region’s touristic narrative and economy. Often locals employed the transnational connections of the tourism economy to bypass or influence the policies of the Peruvian national state. Over time, these efforts shifted the Peruvian state to embrace Machu Picchu and Cusco’s Andean culture as national symbols. The book contributes to larger debates about nationalism in Latin America by pointing to the influence of tourism in the elevation of Machu Picchu as a national symbol of Peru. It argues that in post-colonial nations like Peru, transnational forces like tourism can play influential roles in the creation of national identity.

Mexico today is one of the most dangerous places in the world to report the news, and Mexicans have taken to the street to defend freedom of expression. As Benjamin T. Smith demonstrates in this history of the press and civil society, the cycle of violent repression and protest over journalism is nothing new. He traces it back to the growth in newspaper production and reading publics between 1940 and 1976, when a national thirst for tabloids, crime sheets, and magazines reached far beyond the middle class. As Mexicans began to view local and national events through the prism of journalism, everyday politics changed radically. Even while lauding the liberty of the press, the state developed an arsenal of methods to control what was printed, including sophisticated spin and misdirection techniques, covert financial payments, and campaigns of threats, imprisonment, beatings, and even murder. The press was also pressured by media monopolists tacking between government demands and public expectations to maximize profits, and by coalitions of ordinary citizens demanding that local newspapers publicize stories of corruption, incompetence, and state violence. Since the Cold War, both in Mexico City and in the provinces, a robust radical journalism has posed challenges to government forces.

In this history of the black peasants of Amazonia, Oscar de la Torre focuses on the experience of African-descended people navigating the transition from slavery to freedom. He draws on social and environmental history to connect them intimately to the natural landscape and to Indigenous peoples. Relying on this world as a repository for traditions, discourses, and strategies that they retrieved especially in moments of conflict, Afro-Brazilians fought for autonomous communities and developed a vibrant ethnic identity that supported their struggles over labor, land, and citizenship. Prior to abolition, enslaved and escaped blacks found in the tropical forest a source for tools, weapons, and trade--but it was also a cultural storehouse within which they shaped their stories and records of confrontations with slaveowners and state authorities. After abolition, the black peasants' knowledge of local environments continued to be key to their aspirations, allowing them to maintain relationships with powerful patrons and to participate in the protest cycle that led Getúlio Vargas to the presidency of Brazil in 1930. In commonly referring to themselves by such names as "sons of the river," black Amazonians melded their agro-ecological traditions with their emergent identity as political stakeholders.

In 2012, Chicago’s school year began with the city’s first teachers’ strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in recent U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran Black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from Black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers’ unions and the Democratic Party. This book recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. It tells the story of Black education reformers’ community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers’ challenges to a newly assertive teachers’ union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the corporate reorganization of the public sphere during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of Black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.

During the first fifteen months of the Civil War, the policies and attitudes of Union officers toward emancipation in the western theater were, at best, inconsistent and fraught with internal strains. But after Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act in 1862, army policy became mostly consistent in its support of liberating the slaves in general, in spite of Union army officers' differences of opinion. By 1863 and the final Emancipation Proclamation, the army had transformed into the key force for instituting emancipation in the West. However, Kristopher Teters argues that the guiding principles behind this development in attitudes and policy were a result of military necessity and pragmatic strategies, rather than an effort to enact racial equality. Through extensive research in the letters and diaries of western Union officers, Teters demonstrates how practical considerations drove both the attitudes and policies of Union officers regarding emancipation. Officers primarily embraced emancipation and the use of black soldiers because they believed both policies would help them win the war and save the Union, but their views on race actually changed very little. In the end, however, despite its practical bent, Teters argues, the Union army was instrumental in bringing freedom to the slaves.

The Battle of Chickamauga was the third bloodiest of the American Civil War and the only major Confederate victory in the conflict’s western theatre. It pitted Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee against William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland and resulted in more than 34,500 casualties. In this first volume of an authoritative two-volume history of the Chickamauga Campaign, William Glenn Robertson provides a richly detailed narrative of military operations in southeastern and eastern Tennessee as two armies prepared to meet along the “River of Death.” Robertson tracks the two opposing armies from July 1863 through Bragg’s strategic decision to abandon Chattanooga on September 9. Drawing on all relevant primary and secondary sources, Robertson devotes special attention to the personalities and thinking of the opposing generals and their staffs. He also sheds new light on the role of railroads on operations in these landlocked battlegrounds, as well as the intelligence gathered and used by both sides. Delving deep into the strategic machinations, maneuvers, and smaller clashes that led to the bloody events of September 19-20, 1863, Robertson reveals that the road to Chickamauga was as consequential as the unfolding of the battle itself.

Long-haul trucking is linked to almost every industry in America, yet somehow the working-class drivers behind big rigs remain largely hidden from public view. Gritty, inspiring, and often devastating oral histories of gay, transsexual, and minority truck drivers allow award-winning author Anne Balay to shed new light on the harsh realities of truckers' lives behind the wheel. A licensed commercial truck driver herself, Balay discovers that, for people routinely subjected to prejudice, hatred, and violence in their hometowns and in the job market, trucking can provide an opportunity for safety, welcome isolation, and a chance to be themselves--even as the low-wage work is fraught with tightening regulations, constant surveillance, danger, and exploitation. The narratives of minority and queer truckers underscore the working-class struggle to earn a living while preserving one's safety, dignity, and selfhood. Through the voices of drivers from marginalized communities who spend eleven- to fourteen-hour days hauling America's commodities in treacherous weather and across mountain passes, Semi Queer reveals the stark differences between the trucking industry's crushing labor practices and the perseverance of its most at-risk workers.

Lisa Lindquist Dorr tells the story of the vast smuggling network that brought high-end distilled spirits and, eventually, other cargoes (including undocumented immigrants) from Great Britain and Europe through Cuba to the United States between 1920 and the end of Prohibition. Because of their proximity to liquor-exporting islands, the numerous beaches along the southern coast presented ideal landing points for smugglers and distribution points for their supply networks. From the warehouses of liquor wholesalers in Havana to the decks of rum runners to transportation networks heading northward, Dorr explores these operations, from the people who ran the trade to the determined efforts of the U.S. Coast Guard and other law enforcement agencies to stop liquor traffic on the high seas, in Cuba, and in southern communities. In the process, she shows the role smuggling played in creating a more transnational, enterprising, and modern South.

When traditionally white public schools in the South became sites of massive resistance in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, numerous white students exited the public system altogether, with parents choosing homeschooling or private segregationist academies. But some historically white elite private schools or independent schools, the most prestigious of private schools, opted to desegregate. The black students that attended these schools courageously navigated institutional and interpersonal racism but ultimately emerged as upwardly mobile leaders. Transforming the Elite tells this story. Focusing on the experiences of the first black students to desegregate Atlanta's well-known The Westminster Schools and national efforts to diversify private schools, Michelle A. Purdy combines social history with policy analysis in a dynamic narrative that expertly re-creates this overlooked history. Through gripping oral histories and rich archival research, this book showcases educational changes for black southerners during the civil rights movement including the political tensions confronted, struggles faced, and school cultures transformed during private school desegregation. This history foreshadows contemporary complexities at the heart of the black community's mixed feelings about charter schools, school choice, and education reform.

Material objects lie at the crux of understanding individual and social relationships throughout history, and the Civil War generation is no exception. Before, during, and after the war, Americans from all walks of life created, used, revered, exploited, discarded, mocked, and destroyed objects for countless reasons. These objects had symbolic significance for millions of people. The essays in this volume consider a wide range of material objects, including weapons, Revolutionary artifacts, landscapes, books, vaccine matter, human bodies, houses, clothing, and documents. Together, the contributors argue that material objects can shed new light on the social, economic, and cultural history of the conflict. This book will fundamentally reshape our understanding of the war.

A history of the Hollywood film industry as a modern system of labor, this book reveals an important untold story of an influential twentieth-century workplace. Ronny Regev argues that the Hollywood studio system institutionalized creative labor by systemizing and standardizing the work of actors, directors, writers, and cinematographers, meshing artistic sensibilities with the efficiency-minded rationale of industrial capitalism. The employees of the studios emerged as a new class: they were wage laborers with enormous salaries, artists subjected to budgets and supervision, stars bound by contracts. As such, these workers—people like Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, and Anita Loos—were the outliers in the American workforce, an extraordinary working class. Through extensive use of oral histories, personal correspondence, studio archives, and the papers of leading Hollywood luminaries as well as their less-known contemporaries, Regev demonstrates that, as part of their contribution to popular culture, Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Warner Bros., and MGM cultivated a new form of labor, one that made work seem like fantasy.