Books

An original examination of legislative clashes over the singular issue of the glass house boys, who performed menial tasks, received low wages, and had little to say on their own behalf while toiling in glass bottle plants. Flannery reveals the many societal, economic, and political factors at work that allowed for the perpetuation of child labor in this industry and region.

The first English-language account of the changing role of children in the Russian workforce, from the onset of industrialization until the Communist Revolution of 1917, and an examination of the laws that would establish children’s labor rights.

Bethlehem Steel presents an original and compelling history of a leading American company, examining the numerous factors contributing to the growth of this titan and those that eventually felled it—along with many of its competitors in the U.S. steel industry.

Choice 1990 Outstanding Academic Book, Shadow of the Mills focuses on the private side of industrialization, on how the mills structured the everyday existence of the women, men, and children who lived in their shadows. Through imaginative use of census data, the records of municipal, charitable, and fraternal organizations, and the voices of workers themselves in local newspapers, S.J. Kleinberg builds a detailed picture of the working-class life cycle: marital relationships, the interaction between parents and children, the education and employment prospects of the young, and the lives if the elderly.

Acting as an important historical archive for the Jews of Eastern Europe, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture examines the progress of Yiddish culture from its origins in Tsarist and inter-war Poland to its apex with the founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in 1925.

Sidney Weintraub examines the current relationship of Mexico and the United States as one of sustained dependence and dominance. The chapters examine the consequences of this imbalance in six major policy areas: trade; investment and finance; narcotics; energy; migration; and the border.

Maria Bucur explores the interactions between the science of eugenics and modernization efforts in Romania between World Wars I and II.

When Hegel described the Americas as an inferior continent, he was repeating a contention that inspired one of the most passionate debates of modern times. This thesis drew heated responses from politicians, philosophers, publicists, and patriots on both sides of the Atlantic. The ensuing polemic reached its apex in the late eighteenth century and is far from extinct today. The Dispute of the New World is the definitive study of this debate.

Race and Renaissance presents the first history of African American life in Pittsburgh after World War II. It examines the origins and significance of the second Great Migration, the persistence of Jim Crow into the postwar years, the second ghetto, the contemporary urban crisis, the civil rights and Black Power movements, and the Million Man and Million Woman marches, among other topics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.