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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies
Connecting four centuries of political, social, and religious
history with fieldwork and language documentation, A Transatlantic
History of Haitian Vodou analyzes Haitian Vodou's African origins,
transmission to Saint-Domingue, and promulgation through song in
contemporary Haiti. Split into two sections, the African chapters
focus on history, economics, and culture in Dahomey, Allada, and
Hueda while scrutinizing the role of Europeans in fomenting
tensions. The political, military, and slave trading histories of
the kingdoms in the Bight of Benin reveal the circumstances of
enslavement, including the geographies, ethnicities, languages, and
cultures of enslavers and enslaved. The study of the spirits,
rituals, structure, and music of the region's religions sheds light
on important sources for Haitian Vodou. Having royal, public, and
private expressions, Vodun spirit-based traditions served as
cultural systems that supported or contested power and enslavement.
At once suppliers and victims of the European slave trade, the
people of Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda deeply shaped the emergence of
Haiti's creolized culture. The Haitian chapters focus on Vodou's
Rada Rite (from Allada) and Gede Rite (from Abomey) through the
songs of Rasin Figuier's Vodou Lakay and Rasin Bwa Kayiman's Guede,
legendary rasin compact discs released on Jean Altidor's Miami
label, Mass Konpa Records. All the Vodou songs on the discs are
analyzed with a method dubbed "Vodou hermeneutics" that harnesses
history, religious studies, linguistics, literary criticism, and
ethnomusicology in order to advance a scholarly approach to Vodou
songs.
Herder Warfare in East Africa presents a regional analysis of the
spatial and social history of warfare among the nomadic peoples of
East Africa, covering a period of 600 years. The long duree
facilitates understanding of how warfare among pastoralist
communities in earlier centuries contributed to political, economic
and ethnic shifts across the grazing lands in East Africa. The book
discusses herder warfare from the perspective of warfare ecology,
highlighting the interrelations between environmental and cultural
causalities - including droughts, famine, floods, ritual wars,
religious wars and migrations - and the processes and consequences
of war. Regional synthesis concentrates on frontiers of conflicts
extending from the White Nile Basin in south Sudan - into the
southern savannas of East Africa, the Great East African Rift
Valley, and the northern and southern Horn of Africa - examining
historical military power shifts between diverse pastoralist
cultures. Case studies are set in the coastal hinterland of East
Africa and the Jubaland-Wajir frontiers. Warfare combined with
environmental disasters caused social-economic breakdowns and the
enslavement of defeated groups. The dynamics of herder warfare
changed after colonial entry, response to pastoralist resistance
and slave emancipation. The book is of interest to specialist and
non-specialist readers exploring pastoralism, social anthropology
and warfare and conflict studies; and is suitable for introductory
graduate courses in environmental and social history of warfare .
Very few people have lived a life comparable to that of Chickasaw
Chief George Colbert; Butch Walker tells the story of this little
known Celtic Indian man that lived a life worthy of a Hollywood
movie in Chickasaw Chief George Colbert: His Family and His
Country. This historic timepiece tells Colbert's story from a son
of a Scots father and Chickasaw mother to a decorated military
leader, successful ferry operator, plantation owner, businessman,
and Chickasaw chief. George Colbert was a relatively unknown
historical figure and decorated military hero that led the
Chickasaws through Indian removal which was one of the darkest eras
of American history. This man was trusted by the Indians, friends
to the whites, and respected by local and national figures alike,
including former presidents of the United States. Butch Walker has
diligently researched the history, family, and overall historical
significance of this Chickasaw Chief; Walker spent countless hours
researching the life and legacy of George Colbert who was half
Celtic (Scots) and half Indian (Chickasaw). George was never
defined or limited by his blood quantum; he was a proven leader of
the Chickasaw Nation. This book takes the reader from the birth of
George's father, through the time of the French-Chickasaw War,
beyond the Chickasaw Removal. The tale of the "Half-Blood Prince"
of the 17th century is for anyone wanting to increase their
knowledge of southeastern Indians, particularly the "Unconquered
Unconquerable Chickasaws." The life of George Colbert appears to be
taken right from the pages of a Hollywood script. Chickasaw Chief
George Colbert: His Family and His Country is a must read for
anyone wanting to learn more about the Chickasaw Colbert family.
In May 1933, a young man named Rudolf Schwab fled Nazi-occupied
Germany. His departure allegedly came at the insistence of a close
friend who later joined the Party. Schwab eventually arrived in
South Africa, one of the few countries left where Jews could seek
refuge, and years later, resumed a relationship in letters with the
Nazi who in many ways saved his life. From Things Lost: Forgotten
Letters and the Legacy of the Holocaust is a story of displacement,
survival, and an unlikely friendship in the wake of the Holocaust
via an extraordinary collection of letters discovered in a
forgotten trunk. Only a handful of extended Schwab family members
were alive in the war's aftermath. Dispersed across five
continents, their lives mirrored those of countless refugees who
landed in the most unlikely places. Over years in exile, a web of
communication became an alternative world for these refugees, a
place where they could remember what they had lost and rebuild
their identities anew. Among the cast of characters that historian
Shirli Gilbert came to know through the letters, one name that
appeared again and again was Karl Kipfer. He was someone with whom
Rudolf clearly got on exceedingly well-there was lots of joking,
familiarity, and sentimental reminiscing. ""That was Grandpa's best
friend growing up,"" Rudolf's grandson explained to Gilbert; ""He
was a Nazi and was the one who encouraged Rudolf to leave Germany.
. . . He also later helped him to recover the family's property.""
Gilbert takes readers on a journey through a family's personal
history wherein we learn about a cynical Karl who attempts to make
amends for his ""undemocratic past,"" and a version of Rudolf who
spends hours aloof at his Johannesburg writing desk, dressed in his
Sunday finest, holding together the fragile threads of his
existence. The Schwab family's story brings us closer to grasping
the complex choices and motivations that-even in extreme
situations, or perhaps because of them-make us human. In a world of
devastation, the letters in From Things Lost act as a surrogate for
the gravestones that did not exist and funerals that were never
held. Readers of personal accounts of the Holocaust will be swept
away by this intimate story.
The history of the black lawyer in South Carolina, writes W. Lewis
Burke, is one of the most significant untold stories of the long
and troubled struggle for equal rights in the state. Beginning in
Reconstruction and continuing to the modern civil rights era, 168
black lawyers were admitted to the South Carolina bar. All for
Civil Rights is the first book-length study devoted to those
lawyers' struggles and achievements in the state that had the
largest black population in the country, by percentage, until
1930-and that was a majority black state through 1920. Examining
court processes, trials, and life stories of the lawyers, Burke
offers a comprehensive analysis of black lawyers' engagement with
the legal system. Some of that study is set in the courts and
legislative halls, for the South Carolina bar once had the highest
percentage of black lawyers of any southern state, and South
Carolina was one of only two states to ever have a black majority
legislature. However, Burke also tells who these lawyers were (some
were former slaves, while others had backgrounds in the church, the
military, or journalism); where they came from (nonnatives came
from as close as Georgia and as far away as Barbados); and how they
were educated, largely through apprenticeship. Burke argues
forcefully that from the earliest days after the Civil War to the
heyday of the modern civil rights movement, the story of the black
lawyer in South Carolina is the story of the civil rights lawyer in
the Deep South. Although All for Civil Rights focuses specifically
on South Carolinians, its argument about the legal shift in black
personhood from the slave era to the 1960s resonates throughout the
South.
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Krynki In Ruins
(Hardcover)
A Soifer; Translated by Beate Schutzmann-Krebs; Cover design or artwork by Nina Schwartz
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Historical accounts of racial discrimination in transportation have
focused until now on trains, buses, and streetcars and their
respective depots, terminals, stops, and other public
accommodations. It is essential to add airplanes and airports to
this narrative, says Anke Ortlepp. Air travel stands at the center
of the twentieth century's transportation revolution, and airports
embodied the rapidly mobilizing, increasingly prosperous, and
cosmopolitan character of the postwar United States. When
segregationists inscribed local definitions of whiteness and
blackness onto sites of interstate and even international transit,
they not only brought the incongruities of racial separation into
sharp relief but also obligated the federal government to
intervene. Ortlepp looks at African American passengers; civil
rights organizations; the federal government and judiciary; and
airport planners, architects, and managers as actors in shaping
aviation's legal, cultural, and built environments. She relates the
struggles of black travelers-to enjoy the same freedoms on the
airport grounds that they enjoyed in the aircraft cabin-in the
context of larger shifts in the postwar social, economic, and
political order. Jim Crow terminals, Ortlepp shows us, were both
spatial expressions of sweeping change and sites of confrontation
over the re-negotiation of racial identities. Hence, this new study
situates itself in the scholarly debate over the multifaceted
entanglements of "race" and "space."
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) exemplified the ideal of the
American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter,
diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African
American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously
in 1912, Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is
considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century
African American literature, and its themes and forms have been
taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole.
Johnson's novel provocatively engages with political and cultural
strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains
in print over a century after its initial publication. New
Perspectives contains fresh essays that analyze the book's
reverberations, the contexts within which it was created and
received, the aesthetic and intellectual developments of its
author, and its continuing influence on American literature and
global culture.
The familiar story of Irish migration to eighteenth and
nineteenth-century London is one of severe poverty, hardship and
marginalization. This book explores a very different set of Irish
encounters with the metropolis by reconstructing the lives,
experiences and activities of middle-class migrants. Detailed case
studies of law students, lawyers and merchants show that these more
prosperous migrants depended on Irish connections to overcome the
ordinary challenges of day-to-day life. In contrast to previous
scholarly assumptions that middle-class migrants assimilated
completely to English cultural and social norms, this book
emphasizes the possibilities rather than the limits of Irishness
and argues that Irish identity had a unique, operative value of its
own, for which there was no substitute. Guided by recent works that
stress the capacity of communities to operate across space rather
than being anchored to specific places such as the street,
neighbourhood or village, Irish London argues that the middle-class
migrant's frame of reference went far beyond the metropolis. The
three case studies in this book focus on Irish lives in the city,
but also follow migrants further afield-more specifically to
Jamaica and India- to explore what middle-class communities were,
how they worked and who belonged to them. By doing so, this study
seeks to move us towards a better understanding of what it meant to
be a middle-class Irish migrant in the global eighteenth century.
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