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

A Methodological Study of Going to the Movies as Cultural and Societal Practice

Metropolitan Belgrade presents a socio-cultural history of the city as an entertainment mecca during the 1920s and 1930s. It unearths the ordinary and extraordinary leisure activities that captured the attention of urban residents and considers the broader role of popular culture in interwar society.

An analysis of how a decade of military rule in Venezuela produced a dominant ideology of progress so meticulously crafted that to this day audacious Modernist art and architecture and dictatorship are conflated under the term “modernity.”

Emily Pugh provides an original comparative analysis of selected works of architecture and urban planning in East and West Berlin during the “Wall era,” to reveal the importance of these structures to the formation of political, cultural, and social identities.

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.

Examines why privatization was so popular immediately after the fall of communism, and why it has failed in its intended goals of improving the economies of postcommunist countries.

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.

Intersecting Tango engages Buenos Aires during the sweeping changes of 1900-1930, to capture a culture in motion through which Buenos Aires transformed itself into a modern, cosmopolitan city. Taking the reader through a dazzling array of sites, sources, and events, Bergero conveys the city in all its complexity. Drawing on architecture and gendered spaces, photography, newspaper columns, schoolbooks, “high” and “low” literature, private letters, advertising, fashion, and popular music, she illuminates a range of urban social geographies inhabited by the city’s defining classes and groups. In mining this vast material, Bergero traces the profound change in social fabric by which these diverse identities evolved, through the processes of modernization and its many dislocations, into a new national identity capable of embodying modernity.

A Social History of Elite Spanish Loyalists and the Groups that Challenged Them in the Years Before South American Independence

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.

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.

Provides a comprehensive ethnography of writing in the Andes, and details the relationship between Andean peoples’ struggle to preserve their indigenous textual forms in the face of Western cirricula, with their struggle for land and power.

Kenneth Serbin uncovers the existence of secret talks between generals and Roman Catholic bishops at the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship. It illuminates the complicity of the Catholic Church in the military’s subversive PR campaigns, abductions, and torturings.

Susana Draper uses the phenomenon of the “opening” of prisons to begin a dialog on conceptualizations of democracy and freedom in postdictatorship Latin America. Focusing on the Southern Cone nations of Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, she examines key works in architecture, film, and literature to peel away the veiled continuity of dictatorial power structures in ensuing consumer cultures.