History / General

In this interdisciplinary and controversial work, Igal Halfin takes an original and provocative stance on Marxist theory, and attempts to break down the divisions between history, philosophy, and literary theory.

Rebecca J. Scott explores the dynamics of Cuban emancipation, arguing that slavery was not simply abolished by the metropolitan power of Spain or abandoned because of economic contradictions. Instead, she explains, slave emancipation was a prolonged, gradual and conflictive process unfolding through a series of social, legal, and economic transformations.

Models of Nature studies the early and turbulent years of the Soviet conservation movement from the October Revolution to the mid-1930s—Lenin’s rule to the rise of Stalin. This new edition includes an afterword by the author that reflects upon the study’s impact and discusses advances in the field since the book was first published.

This is the first work in English to discuss the social and political history of lawyers in a Latin American country. By exploring the lives of lawyers, Uribe-Uran is also able to focus on a general history of Latin America, while exploring key social and political changes and continuities from 1780 to 1850.

Conquering Nature, the only book-length analysis of the environmental situation in Cuba after four decades of socialist rule, is based on extensive examination of secondary sources and informed by the study of development and environmental trends in former socialist countries as well as in the developing world.

Winner of the 2002 Warren Dean Memorial Award from Environmentl History of Latin America.

A highly original study of the Putilov Works—the most famous industrial conglomerate in the Russian Empire during the late 19th century, and a major challenge to conventional wisdom on the nature of the Russian economy in the years before the Bolshevik revolution.

With unprecedented use of local and national sources, Lauria-Santiago presents a more complex portrait of El Salvador than has ever been ventured before. Using thoroughly researched regional case studies, Lauria-Santiago challenges the accepted vision of Central America in the nineteenth century and critiques the “liberal oligarchic hegemony” model of El Salvador. He reveals the existence of a diverse, commercially active peasantry that was deeply involved with local and national networks of power.

This innovative collection features studies of iconography in Mexico, telenovelas in Venezuela, drama in Chile, cinema in Brazil, comic strips and tango in Argentina, and ceramics in Peru. From the studies of these popular arts the idea of nationality in Latin America is revealed to be a problematic, divided one, worthy of further study.

In 1986, with little warning, the USX Homestead Works closed. Thousands of workers who depended on steel to survive were left without work. A Town Without Steel looks at the people of Homestead as they reinvent their views of household and work and place in this world.

In an unusually powerful book that will appeal to the general reader as well as to the specialist, Louis A. Perez, Jr., recounts the story of the critical years when Cuba won its independence from Spain only to fall in the American orbit.

Kenneth Straus contemplates the question: Was there social support for the Stalin regime among the Soviet working class during the 1930s, and if so, why? In his well-researched answer he analyzes the daily lives of Soviet workers, and compares the ideologies of western and Soviet thought.

A study of the immigrants who flocked to this Central Pennsylvania steel town in the late nineteenth century in search of employment. Comprised primarily of Southern blacks and Eastern European immigrants, they formed the lower class of this town. Analyzes the social structure and dominance of the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite.

Environmental History, formerly Environmental History Review, has helped define an entire discipline through the publication of the finest scholarship of humanists, social and natural scientists, and a variety of other professionals. Out of the Woods gathers the best of this scholarship.

From 1909-1914 the Pittsburgh Survey brought together statisticans, social workers, engineers, lawyers, physicians, economists, and city planners to study the effects of industrialization on the city of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh Surveyed examines the accuracy and the impact of the influential Pittsburgh Survey, emphasizing its role in the social reform movement of the early twentieth century.

This book is a fascinating re-creation of the lives of women in the time of great social change that followed the end of the French and Indian War in western Pennsylvania. Keeping House: Women’s Lives in Western Pennsylvania, 1790-1850, tells how the daughters, wives, and mothers who crossed the Allegheny Mountains responded and adapted to unaccustomed physical and psychological hardships as they established lives for themselves and their families in their new homes.