History / General

These multidisciplinary essays explore the cultural mediation of relationships between people and urban spaces in Latin/o America, and how these mediations shape the identities of cities and their residents.

The first publication of a reclaimed WPA project studying Pittsburgh’s black population. The book features articles on civil rights, social class, lifestyle, culture, folklore, and institutions, from colonial times through the 1930s.

In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colony’s residents followed Antonio Conselheiro, who promoted a communal existence free from taxes and oppression. Estimates of the death toll range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand. Sentencing Canudos offers an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this event. In her study, Johnson views the process of nation building and the silencing of “other” voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sert›es, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been “sentenced” to history by this work.

An international group of writers explore conceptualizations of what defined “East” and “West” in Eastern Europe, imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union. The contributors analyze the effects of transnational interactions on ideology, politics, and cultural production.

In this volume, an international group of environmental historians examine the significant ways in which humans have impacted their surroundings throughout history.

An original study examining the primacy placed on physicians and medical care to generate population growth and increase the workforce during the late eigteenth century in colonial Peru.

A study of the rise of Bolivian tin miners into a politically active labor movement during the early twentieth century, and their eventual challenge to the oligarchy controlling the nation.

Paul Stronski tells the fascinating story of Tashkent, an ethnically diverse, primarily Muslim city that became the prototype for the Soviet-era reimagining of urban centers in Central Asia. Stronski shows how Soviet officials, planners, and architects strived to integrate local ethnic traditions and socialist ideology into a newly constructed urban space and propaganda showcase.

Winner of the 2011 Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award in history and the humanities.

Other Animals examines the interaction of animals and humans in Russian literature, art, and life from the eighteenth century until the present. The chapters explore the unique nature of the Russian experience in a range of human-animal relationships through tales of cruelty, interspecies communion and compassion, and efforts to either overcome or establish the human-animal divide.

Cindy Forster’s insightful work reveals the critical role played by the rural poor in organizing and sustaining Guatemala’s national revolution of 1944-1954.

Ruthchild’s study reveals that Russian feminists were an integral force for revolution and social change, particularly during the monumental uprisings of 1905-1917. She analyzes the backgrounds, motivations, methods, activism, and organizational networks of early Russian feminists that came to challenge, and eventually bring down, the patriarchal tsarist regime.

A comprehensive literary and social history of sexual attitudes and mores in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, that reveals the complex and often contradictory impulses and ideas that permeated the culture.

Gerbi examines the fascinating reports of the first Europeans to see the Americas. These accounts provided the basis for the images of strange and new flora, fauna, and human creatures that filled European imaginations. Chapters include the writings of Columbus, Vespucci, Cortes, Verrazzano, and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. Gerbi contends that Oviedo was a major, though overlooked, authority on the culture, history, and conquest of the New World.

Rabasa offers new interpretations of the meaning of history from indigenous perspectives and develops the concept of a communal temporality that is not limited by time, but rather exists within the individual, community, and culture as a living knowledge that links both past and present. Rabasa recalls the works of Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci, and contemporary south Asian subalternists Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others. He incorporates their conceptions of communality, insurgency, resistance to hegemonic governments, and the creation of autonomous spaces as strategies employed by indigenous groups around the globe, but goes further in defining these strategies as millennial and deeply rooted in Mesoamerican antiquity.

Duhamel examines the KGB at its pinnacle of power during the anticorruption campaigns of 1982-1987, when it sought to break the Communist Party’s stranglehold on Moscow’s two largest trade organizations, which were built on a foundation of bribery and favoritism.