Books

A study of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s scheme, during the mid-twentieth century, to create and reinforce a buffer zone on the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti through the establishment of state institutions and an ideological campaign against what was considered an encroaching black, inferior, and bellicose Haitian state.

A comprehensive history of “happenstance plants” in American urban environments. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the present, Falck examines the proliferation, perception, and treatment of weeds in metropolitan centers from Boston to Los Angeles.

Most narratives depict Soviet Cold War cultural activities and youth groups as drab and dreary, militant and politicized. In this study, Gleb Tsipursky challenges these stereotypes in a revealing portrayal of Soviet youth and state-sponsored popular culture. He provides a fresh and original examination of the Kremlin’s paramount effort to shape young lives, consumption, popular culture, and to build an emotional community—all against the backdrop of Cold War struggles to win hearts and minds both at home and abroad.

This book traces transformations in German views of Russia in the first half of the twentieth century, leading up to the disastrous German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. James E. Casteel shows how Russia figured in the imperial visions and utopian desires of a variety of Germans, and illuminates the ambiguous position that Russia occupied in Germans’ global imaginary as both an imperial rival and an object of German power.

City on Fire is a chronicle of progress and danger, that integrates urban environmental history with histories of technology, science, and medicine to reveal how Mexico City changed in response to the growing threat of fire in the urban center.

Castilho offers original perspectives on the political upheaval surrounding the process of slave emancipation in postcolonial Brazil. He shows how the abolition debates in Pernambuco transformed the practices of political citizenship and marked the first instance of a mass national political mobilization.

In 1937 the Soviet Union sponsored a huge celebration on the centenary of Pushkin’s death, marking the turn toward a renewed Russian nationalism that would become full-blown a few years later.This is the first study of this major cultural event, and examines Soviet representations of Pushkin’s legacy in prose, poetry, drama, theater, painting, sculpture, film, the educational system and in the political realm.

This edited volume offers new perspectives on the important work of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), one of the first Latin American writers to present an intellectual analysis of pre-Columbian history and culture and the ensuing colonial period. To the contributors, Inca Garcilaso presented an early counter-hegemonic discourse and a reframing of the history of native cultures that undermined the colonial rhetoric of his time and the geopolitical divisions it purported.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.