Browse

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.

Abortion is—and always has been—an arena for contesting power relations between women and men. When in 1973 the Supreme Court made the procedure legal throughout the United States, it seemed that women were at last able to make decisions about their own bodies. In the four decades that followed, however, abortion became ever more politicized and stigmatized. Abortion after Roe chronicles and analyzes what the new legal status and changing political environment have meant for abortion providers and their patients. This book sheds light on the little-studied experience of performing and receiving abortion care from the 1970s—a period of optimism—to the rise of the antiabortion movement and the escalation of antiabortion tactics in the 1980s to the 1990s and beyond, when violent attacks on clinics and abortion providers led to a new articulation of abortion care as moral work. More than four decades after the legalization of abortion, the abortion provider community has powerfully asserted that abortion care is a moral good.

Since the inception of the Atlantic Coast Conference, intense rivalries, legendary coaches, gifted players, and fervent fans have come to define the league's basketball history. This book traces the traditions and the dramatic changes that occurred both on and off the court during the conference's rise to a preeminent position in college basketball between 1953 and 1972. It re-creates the action of nail-biting games and the tensions of bitter recruiting battles without losing sight of the central off-court questions the league wrestled with during these two decades. As basketball became the ACC's foremost attraction, conference administrators sought to field winning teams while improving academic programs and preserving academic integrity. The ACC also adapted gradually to changes in the postwar South, including, most prominently, the struggle for racial justice during the 1960s. The book is an account of coaches' flair (and antics), players' artistry, a major point-shaving scandal, and the gradually more evenly matched struggle for dominance in one of college basketball's strongest conferences.

Roman Catholic sisters first traveled to the American West as providers of social services, education, and medical assistance. This book traces the ways in which sisters challenged and reconfigured contemporary ideas about women, work, religion, and the West; moreover, it demonstrates how religious life became a vehicle for increasing women's agency and power. Moving to the West introduced significant changes for these women, including public employment and thoroughly unconventional monastic lives. As nuns and sisters adjusted to new circumstances and immersed themselves in rugged environments, the author argues, the West shaped them; and through their labors and charities, the sisters in turn shaped the West. These female religious pioneers built institutions, brokered relationships between Indigenous peoples and encroaching settlers, and undertook varied occupations, often without organized funding or direct support from the church hierarchy. A comprehensive history of Roman Catholic nuns and sisters in the American West, the book reveals Catholic sisters as dynamic and creative architects of civic and religious institutions in western communities.

The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, the author of this book reveals, but instead a time of profound response from African American intellectuals. The book explores how the Jim Crow system triggered significant artistic and intellectual responses from African American writers, deeply marking the beginnings of literary modernism and, ultimately, notions of American modernity. In identifying the Jim Crow period with the coming of modernity, the author upsets the customary assessment of the Harlem Renaissance as the first nationally significant black arts movement, showing how artists reacted to Jim Crow with migration narratives, poetry about the black experience, black performance of popular culture forms, and more. He introduces a whole cast of characters, including understudied figures such as William Stanley Braithwaite and Fenton Johnson, and more familiar authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson. By considering the legacy of writers and artists active between the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, the author illuminates their influence on the black and white U.S. modernists who followed.

This book looks at how the lives of everyday Americans changed because of the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, the counterculture and other “revolutionary” Sixties movements. Its chapters focus on the mainstreaming of new values and ideas through television, journalism, music, and clothing.

This social and cultural history of Argentina’s “long sixties” argues that the nation’s younger generation was at the epicenter of a public struggle over democracy, authoritarianism, and revolution from the mid-twentieth century through the ruthless military dictatorship that seized power in 1976. It demonstrates how, during this period, large numbers of youths built on their history of earlier activism and pushed forward closely linked agendas of sociocultural modernization and political radicalization. Focusing also on the views of adults who assessed, and sometimes profited from, youth culture, the author analyzes countercultural formations—including rock music, sexuality, student life, and communal living experiences—and situates them in an international context. She details how, while Argentines of all ages yearned for newness and change, it was young people who championed the transformation of deep-seated traditions of social, cultural, and political life. The significance of youth was not lost on the leaders of the rising junta: people aged sixteen to thirty accounted for 70 percent of the estimated 20,000 Argentines who were “disappeared” during the regime.

The familiar story of the Civil War tells of a predominately agricultural South pitted against a rapidly industrializing North. However, this book argues that the Republican Party’s political ideology was fundamentally agrarian. Believing that small farms owned by families for generations led to a model society, Republicans supported a northern agricultural ideal in opposition to southern plantation agriculture, which destroyed the land’s productivity, required constant western expansion, and produced an elite landed gentry hostile to the Union. The book shows how agrarian republicanism shaped the debate over slavery’s expansion, spurred the creation of the Department of Agriculture and the passage of the Homestead Act, and laid the foundation for the development of the earliest nature parks.

This book traces the decline and fall of agriculture in the Confederate States of America. The backbone of the southern economy, agriculture was a source of power that southerners believed would ensure their independence. But, season by season and year by year, the book convincingly shows how the disintegration of southern agriculture led to the decline of the Confederacy's military, economic, and political power. It examines regional variations in the Eastern and Western Confederacy, linking the fates of individual crops and different modes of farming and planting to the wider story. After a dismal harvest in late 1864, southerners—faced with hunger and privation throughout the region, ransacked farms in the Shenandoah Valley, and pillaged plantations in the Carolinas and the Mississippi Delta—finally realized that their agricultural power, and their government itself, had failed. The book shows how this ultimate lost harvest had repercussions that lasted well beyond the end of the Civil War. Assessing agriculture in its economic, political, social, and environmental contexts, the book sheds new light on the fate of the Confederacy from the optimism of secession to the reality of collapse.

Most scholarship on the mass migrations of African Americans and southern whites during and after the Great Depression treats those migrations as separate phenomena, strictly divided along racial lines. This interdisciplinary work argues instead that we should understand these Depression-era migrations as interconnected responses to the capitalist collapse and political upheavals of the early twentieth century. During the 1930s and 1940s, it shows, writers and artists of both races created migration stories specifically to bolster the black–white Left alliance. Defying rigid critical categories, the author considers a wide variety of media, including literary classics by John Steinbeck and Ann Petry, “lost” novels by Sanora Babb and William Attaway, hobo novellas, images of migrant women by Dorothea Lange and Elizabeth Catlett, popular songs, and histories and ethnographies of migrant shipyard workers. This rereading and recovering of the period's literary and visual culture expands our understanding of the migration narrative by uniting the political and aesthetic goals of the black and white literary Left and illuminating the striking interrelationship between American populism and civil rights.

Whether as wine, beer, mead, or spirits, alcohol has had a constant and often controversial role in human life. This book surveys the attitudes and consumption of alcohol and examines a 9,000 year cultural and economic history, uncovering the tensions between alcoholic drinks as a nutritious and potable staple of daily diets and as an object of political and religious regulation. It argues that brewing was one of the earliest and most common forms of water purification, which further integrated alcohol into the dense population centers in Europe and the Americas. Despite this practical use, no commodity has been more regulated by governmental and religious authorities than alcohol. As a potential source of social disruption, alcohol created volatile boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable consumption, breaking through barriers of class, race, and gender. This book follows ever-changing cultural meanings of these potent potables and makes the surprising argument that fewer people are quaffing alcoholic drinks than ever before. The book examines and explains the importance and effect of alcohol's production, consumption, and meaning across the globe.

The place of women's rights in African American public culture has been an enduring question, one that has long engaged activists, commentators, and scholars. This book explores the roles black women played in their communities' social movements, and the consequences of elevating women into positions of visibility and leadership. It reveals how, through the nineteenth century, the “woman question” was at the core of movements against slavery and for civil rights. The book explains that, like white women activists, who often created their own institutions separate from men, black women often organized within already existing institutions: churches, political organizations, mutual aid societies, and schools. Covering three generations of black women activists, it demonstrates that their approach was neither unanimous nor monolithic but changed over time and took a variety of forms, from a woman's right to control her body to her right to vote.

After a decade of chasing stories around the globe, intrepid travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest followed the magnetic pull home--only to discover that her native South Texas had been radically transformed in her absence. Ravaged by drug wars and barricaded by an eighteen-foot steel wall, her ancestral land had become the nation’s foremost crossing ground for undocumented workers, many of whom perished along the way. Before Elizondo Griest moved to the New York/Canada borderlands, the frequency of these tragedies seemed like a terrible coincidence. Once she began to meet Mohawks from the Akwesasne Nation, however, she recognized striking parallels to life on the southern border. Having lost their land through devious treaties, their mother tongues at English-only schools, and their traditional occupations through capitalist ventures, Tejanos and Mohawks alike struggle under the legacy of colonialism. Toxic industries surround their neighborhoods while the U.S. Border Patrol militarizes them. Combating these forces are legions of artists and activists devoted to preserving their indigenous cultures. Complex belief systems, meanwhile, conjure miracles. In All the Agents and Saints, Elizondo Griest weaves seven years of stories into a meditation on the existential impact of international borderlines by illuminating the spaces in between.

This book analyzes representations of reading, writing, and recollecting texts – “literacy events” – in early America’s best-known literary genre. Captivity narratives reveal how colonial captives treasured the written word in order to distinguish themselves from their native captors and to affiliate with their distant cultural communities. Their narratives suggest that Indians recognized this value, sometimes with benevolence: repeatedly, they presented colonists with books. In this way and others, scriptures, saintly lives, and even Shakespeare were introduced into the diverse experiences of colonial captivity. Captivity narratives reflect lived allegories, the identification of one’s own unfolding story with the stories of others. Sources include the foundational New England narratives of Mary Rowlandson and John Williams, the French Jesuit accounts of the colonial saints Isaac Jogues and Kateri Tekakwitha, the Anglo-African John Marrant’s account of his sojourn in Cherokee territory, and the narratives of Colonel James Smith and other captives in the Great Lakes region during the late eighteenth century.

Fidel Castro described Salvador Allende's democratic election as president of Chile in 1970 as the most important revolutionary triumph in Latin America after the Cuban revolution. Yet celebrations were short lived. In Washington, the Nixon administration vowed to destroy Allende's left-wing government while Chilean opposition forces mobilized against him. The result was a battle for Chile that ended in 1973 with a right-wing military coup and a brutal dictatorship lasting nearly twenty years. This book argues that this battle was part of a dynamic inter-American Cold War struggle to determine Latin America's future, shaped more by the contest between Cuba, Chile, the United States, and Brazil than by a conflict between Moscow and Washington. Drawing on firsthand interviews and recently declassified documents from archives in North America, Europe, and South America—including Chile's Foreign Ministry Archive—the author provides a comprehensive account of Cuban involvement in Latin America in the early 1970s, Chilean foreign relations during Allende's presidency, Brazil's support for counterrevolution in the Southern Cone, and the Nixon administration's Latin American policies. The Cold War in the Americas, she reveals, is best understood as a multidimensional struggle, involving peoples and ideas from across the hemisphere.

This new cultural history of Jewish life and identity in the United States after World War II focuses on the process of upward mobility. Rachel Kranson challenges the common notion that most American Jews unambivalently celebrated their generally strong growth in economic status and social acceptance during the booming postwar era. In fact, a significant number of Jewish religious, artistic, and intellectual leaders worried about the ascent of large numbers of Jews into the American middle class. Kranson reveals that many newly-affluent, postwar Jews were deeply concerned that their lives—affected by rapidly changing political pressures, gender norms, and religious practices—were becoming dangerously disconnected from what they saw as authentic Jewish values. She uncovers how Jewish leaders continued to identify with Jewish histories of economic and social insecurity, and romanticized Jewish life in America’s immigrant slums and Europe’s impoverished shtetls. Jewish leaders, while not trying to hinder economic development, thus cemented an ongoing identification with the Jewish heritage of poverty and marginality as a crucial element in an American Jewish ethos.

In the 1970s, while politicians and activists outside prisons debated the proper response to crime, incarcerated people helped shape those debates though a broad range of remarkable political and literary writings. This book explores the forces that sparked a dramatic “prison art renaissance,” shedding light on how incarcerated people produced powerful works of writing, performance, and visual art. These included everything from George Jackson's revolutionary Soledad Brother to Miguel Pinero's acclaimed off-Broadway play and Hollywood film Short Eyes. An extraordinary range of prison programs—fine arts, theater, secondary education, and prisoner-run programs—allowed the voices of prisoners to influence the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican writers, “New Journalism,” and political theater, among the most important aesthetic contributions of the decade. By the 1980s and 1990s, prisoners' educational and artistic programs were scaled back or eliminated as the “war on crime” escalated. By then these prisoners' words had crossed over the wall, helping many Americans to rethink the meaning of the walls themselves and, ultimately, the meaning of the society that produced them.

Walt Whitman has long been regarded as the quintessential American bard, the poet who best represents all that is distinctive about life in the United States. Whitman himself encouraged this view, but he was also quick to remind his readers that he was an unlikely candidate for the office of national poet, and that his working-class upbringing and radical take on human sexuality often put him at odds with American culture. While American literary history has tended to credit Whitman with having invented the persona of the national outsider as the national bard, this book recovers three of Whitman's contemporaries who adopted similar personae: James M. Whitfield, an African American separatist and abolitionist; Eliza R. Snow, a Mormon pioneer and women's leader; and John Rollin Ridge, a Cherokee journalist and Native-rights advocate. These three poets not only provide a counterpoint to the Whitmanian persona of the outsider bard, but also reframe the criteria by which generations of scholars have characterized Whitman as America's poet.

Patterns of pearl cultivation and circulation reveal vernacular practices that shaped emerging imperial ideas about value and wealth in the early modern world. Pearls’ variability and subjective beauty posed a profound challenge to the imperial impulse to order and control, underscoring the complexity of governing subjects and objects in the early modern world. Qualitative, evaluative language would play a prominent role in crown officials’ attempts to contain and channel this complexity. The book’s title reflects the evolving significance of the term barrueca (which became “baroque” in English), a word initially employed in the Venezuelan fisheries to describe irregular pearls. Over time, this term lost its close association with the jewel but came to serve as a metaphor for irregular, unbounded expression. Pearls’ enduring importance lies less in the revenue they generated than in the conversations they prompted about the nature of value and the importance of individual skill and judgment, as well as the natural world, in its creation and husbandry. The stories generated by pearls—an unusual, organic jewel—range globally, crossing geographic and imperial boundaries as well as moving across scales, linking the bounded experiences of individuals to the expansion of imperial bureaucracies. These microhistories illuminate the connections between these small- and large-scale historical processes, revealing the connections between empire as envisioned by monarchs, enacted in law, and experienced at sea and on the ground by individuals.

Most in the United States likely associate the concept of the child bride with the mores and practices of the distant past. But Nicholas L. Syrett challenges this assumption in his sweeping and sometimes shocking history of youthful marriage in America. Focusing on young women and girls—the most common underage spouses—Syrett tracks the marital history of American minors from the colonial period to the present, chronicling the debates and moral panics related to these unions. Although the frequency of child marriages has declined since the early twentieth century, Syrett reveals that the practice was historically far more widespread in the United States than is commonly thought. It also continues to this day: current estimates indicate that 9 percent of living American women were married before turning eighteen. By examining the legal and social forces that have worked to curtail early marriage in America—including the efforts of women's rights activists, advocates for children's rights, and social workers—Syrett sheds new light on the American public's perceptions of young people marrying and the ways that individuals and communities challenged the complex legalities and cultural norms brought to the fore when underage citizens, by choice or coercion, became husband and wife.