History / General

Total 214 results found.

Transplanting Modernity?

Transplanting Modernity?

New Histories of Poverty, Development, and Environment

Calls for an Honest Reckoning of the Successes, Failures, and Unanticipated Results of International Developments

Cultivating Victory

Cultivating Victory

The Women's Land Army and the Victory Garden Movement

A compelling study of the sea change brought about in politics, society, and gender roles during World Wars I and II by campaigns to recruit Women’s Land Armies in Great Britain and the United States to cultivate victory gardens. Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant compares and contrasts the outcomes of war in both nations as seen through women’s ties to labor, agriculture, the home, and the environment. She sheds new light on the cultural legacies left by the Women’s Land Armies and their major role in shaping national and personal identities.

Nature’s Entrepot

Nature’s Entrepot

Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds

Philadelphia was one of America’s first major cities and an international seaport. Nature’s Entrepot views the planning, expansion, and sustainability of the urban environment of Philadelphia from its inception to the present.

Wealth, Waste, and Alienation

Wealth, Waste, and Alienation

Growth and Decline in the Connellsville Coke Industry
Living Language in Kazakhstan

Living Language in Kazakhstan

The Dialogic Emergence of an Ancestral Worldview

A fascinating anthropological inquiry into the deeply ingrained presence of ancestors within the cultural, political, and spiritual discourse of Kazakhs. This ancestral dialogue sustains a unifying worldview by mediating questions of faith and morality, providing role models, and offering a mechanism for socio-political critique, change, and meaning-making.

Making Citizens in Argentina

Making Citizens in Argentina

Making Citizens in Argentina charts the evolving meanings of citizenship in Argentina from the 1880s to the 1980s. Against the backdrop of immigration, science, race, sport, populist rule, and dictatorship, the contributors analyze the power of the Argentine state and other social actors to set the boundaries of citizenship.

Living with Lead

Living with Lead

An Environmental History of Idaho's Coeur D'Alenes, 1885-2011

The Coeur d’Alenes, a twenty-five by ten mile portion of the Idaho Panhandle, is home to one of the most productive mining districts in world history. Its legacy also includes environmental pollution on an epic scale. Living with Lead untangles the costs and benefits of a century of mining, milling, and smelting in a small western city and the region that surrounds it.

Bread upon the Waters

Bread upon the Waters

The St. Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703-1811

Bread upon the Waters chronicles how the unparalleled effort put into the building of a wide infrastructure to support the provisioning of the newly created but physically isolated city of St. Petersburg profoundly affected all of Russia’s economic life and, ultimately, the historical trajectory of the Russian Empire as a whole.

The Matter of Empire

The Matter of Empire

Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru

This book examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Orlando Bentancor ties the colonizers’ attempts to justify the abuses wrought on the environment and the indigenous population to their larger ideology concerning mining, science, and the empire’s rightful place in the global sphere. To Bentancor, their presuppositions were a major turning point for colonial expansion and paved the way to global mercantilism.

Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands

Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands

Migration, Environment, and Health in the Former Sudetenland

This innovative study views the aftermath of ethnic cleansing, as it examines the transformation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland from the end of the Second World War, through the Cold War, and into the twenty-first century.

Tangible Belonging

Tangible Belonging

Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary

A compelling historical and ethnographic study of the German speakers in Hungary, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. John C. Swanson’s work looks deeply into the enduring sense of tangible belonging that characterized Germanness from the perspective of rural dwellers, as well as the broader phenomenon of “minority making” in twentieth-century Europe.

When They Hid the Fire

When They Hid the Fire

A History of Electricity and Invisible Energy in America

Daniel French examines the American social perceptions of electricity as an energy technology between the mid-19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. Arguing that both technical and cultural factors played a role, French shows how electricity became an invisible and abstract form of energy in American society, leading Americans to culturally construct electricity as unlimited and environmentally inconsequential—a newfound “basic right” of life in the United States.

The Soviet Gulag

The Soviet Gulag

Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent archival revolution, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous “literary investigation” The Gulag Archipelago was the most authoritative overview of the Stalinist system of camps. This volume develops a much more thorough and nuanced understanding of the Gulag. It brings a greater awareness of the wide variety of camps, the forced labor system, and the Gulag as viewed in a global historical context, among many other topics. It also offers fascinating new interpretations of the interrelationship and importance of the Gulag to the larger Soviet political and economic system, and how they were in fact, parts of the same entity.

Despite Cultures

Despite Cultures

Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan

Despite Cultures examines the strategies and realities of the Soviet state-building project in Tajikistan during the 1920s and 1930s. As Kassymbekova reveals, the local ruling system was built upon an intricate network of individuals, whose stated loyalty to Communism was monitored through a chain of command that stretched from Moscow through Tashkent to Dushanbe/Stalinabad.

A Negotiated Landscape

A Negotiated Landscape

The Transformation of San Francisco's Waterfront since 1950

A Negotiated Landscape examines the transformation of San Francisco’s iconic waterfront from the eve of its decline in 1950 to the turn of the millennium.

Total 214 results found.