The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands presented to Norman (Noam) Stillman offers a coherent and thought-provoking discussion by eminent scholars in the field of both the history and culture of the Jews in the Islamic World from pre-modern to modern times. Based on primary sources the book speaks to the resilience, flexibility, and creativity of Jewish culture in Arab lands. The volume clearly addresses the areas of research Norman Stillman himself has considerably contributed to. Research foci of the book are on the flexibility of Jewish law in real life, Jewish cultural life particularly on material and musical culture, the role of women in these different societies, antisemitism and Jewish responses to hatred against the Jews, and antisemitism from ancient martyrdom to modern political Zionism.

Followers of Muhammad b. 'Abd al-Wahhab, often considered to be Islam's Martin Luther, shaped the political and religious identity of the Saudi state while also enabling the significant worldwide expansion of Salafist Islam. Studies of the movement he inspired, however, have often been limited by scholars' insufficient access to key sources within Saudi Arabia. Nabil Mouline was granted rare interviews and admittance to important Saudi archives in preparation for this groundbreaking book, the first in-depth study of the Wahhabi religious movement from its founding to the modern day. Gleaning information from both written and oral sources and employing a multidisciplinary approach that combines history, sociology, and Islamic studies, Mouline presents a new reading of this movement that transcends the usual resort to polemics.

The cultural politics creating and consuming Latina/o mass media. Just ten years ago, discussions of Latina/o media could be safely reduced to a handful of TV channels, dominated by Univision and Telemundo. Today, dramatic changes in the global political economy have resulted in an unprecedented rise in major new media ventures for Latinos as everyone seems to want a piece of the Latina/o media market. While current scholarship on Latina/o media have mostly revolved around important issues of representation and stereotypes, this approach does not provide the entire story. In Contemporary Latina/o Media, Arlene Davila and Yeidy M. Rivero bring together an impressive range of leading scholars to move beyond analyses of media representations, going behind the scenes to explore issues of production, circulation, consumption, and political economy that affect Latina/o mass media. Working across the disciplines of Latina/o media, cultural studies, and communication, the contributors examine how Latinos are being affected both by the continued Latin Americanization of genres, products, and audiences, as well as by the whitewashing of "mainstream" Hollywood media where Latinos have been consistently bypassed. While focusing on Spanish-language television and radio, the essays also touch on the state of Latinos in prime-time television and in digital and alternative media. Using a transnational approach, the volume as a whole explores the ownership, importation, and circulation of talent and content from Latin America, placing the dynamics of the global political economy and cultural politics in the foreground of contemporary analysis of Latina/o media.

It helps to know where we came from in order to understand ourselves. We have eight branches or four generations in our family tree as far back as our great-grandparents. The author was able to trace her ancestors even further back. Though she knew a lot about her ancestors, she did not know a lot about their struggles and little about the contributions they made toward advancing the African American race. This book will be of particular interest to those who find they are connected to this family tree. For those unrelated, it will serve immensely as a blueprint for one's own ancestral journey. For others, it is simply interesting and historical and a point of reference in time. Some prominent and determined people are a part of this family tree. In addition to portraying this particular family, this book captures ancient and historical events focused particularly on the enslavement, servitude, segregation and the ultimate success of the African American people. The author's goal is to document her family history and to locate her distant relatives. Simultaneously she desires to help others in search of their past since our past is a part of who we are as a people.

A Jewish weapons manufacturer during the American Civil War, a Jewish-Canadian chair of the Metropolitan Toronto Police Board, and Jewish-Argentine guerrilla fighters-these are some of the individuals discussed in this first-of-its-kind volume. It brings together some of the best new works on armed Jews in the Americas. Links between Jews and their ties to weapons are addressed through multiple cultural, political, social, and ideological contexts, thus breaking down longstanding, stilted myths in many societies about Jews and weaponry. Anti-Semitism and Jewish self-defense, Jewish volunteers in the Spanish Civil War and in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and Jewish-American gangsters as ethnic heroes form part of the little-researched topic of Jews and arms in the Americas.

Osama bin Laden is dead but al-Qa'ida remains the CIA's 'number one threat'. With branches in strategic hotspots from Yemen and Somalia to North Africa and an increasing influence among 'home grown jihadis' in the West, journalist and al-Qa'ida expert Abdel Bari Atwan investigates how the organisation has survived all attempts to destroy it. Al-Qa'ida after bin Laden has expanded its reach by cementing new alliances and exploiting the opportunities regional turmoil affords. The Arab Spring has opened new battlegrounds for jihadists, particularly in Libya, the Sahel, Syria and Egypt. As the extremist zeal for a global caliphate shows no sign of abating, Atwan profiles the next generation of foot soldiers and leaders and explores the new methods they embrace in the pursuit of jihad in a digital age.

Yezidism is a fascinating part of the rich cultural mosaic of the Middle East. Yezidis emerged for the first time in the 12th century in the Kurdish mountains of northern Iraq. Their religion, which has become notorious for its associations with "devil worship," is in fact an intricate syncretic system of belief, incorporating elements from proto-Indo-European religions, early Persian faiths like Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, Sufism and regional paganism like Mithraism. Birgul Acikyildiz offers a comprehensive appraisal of Yezidi religion, society and culture. Written without presupposing any prior knowledge about Yezidism, and in an accessible and readable style, her book examines Yezidis not only from a religious point of view but as a historical and social phenomenon. She throws light on the origins of Yezidism, and charts its historical development -- from its beginnings to the present -- as part of the general history of the Kurds. The author describes the Yezidi belief system (which considers Melek Taus -- the "Peacock Angel" -- to be ruler of the earth) and its religious practices and observances, analyzing the most important facets of Yezidi religious art and architecture and their relationship to their neighbours throughout the Middle East. Richly illustrated, with accompanying maps, photographs and illustrations, the book will have strong appeal to all those with an interest in the culture of the Kurds, as well as the wider region.

Using examples from different historical contexts, this book examines the relationship between class, nationalism, modernity and the agrarian myth. Essentializing rural identity, traditional culture and quotidian resistance, both aristocratic/plebeian and pastoral/Darwinian forms of agrarian myth discourse inform struggles waged 'from above' and 'from below', surfacing in peasant movements, film and travel writing. Film depictions of royalty, landowner and colonizer as disempowered, 'ordinary' or well-disposed towards 'those below', whose interests they share, underwrite populism and nationalism. Although these ideologies replaced the cosmopolitanism of the Grand Tour, twentieth century travel literature continued to reflect a fear of vanishing rural 'otherness' abroad, combined with the arrival there of the mass tourist, the plebeian from home.

Now in a new format with a more current and topical focus on a country level. While the strength of the Yearbook has always been the comprehensive geographical remit, starting with volume 7 the reports primarily concentrate on more specific and topical information. The most current research available on public debates, transnational links, legal or political changes that have affected the Muslim population, and activities and initiatives of Muslim organizations from surveyed countries are available throughout the Yearbook. At the end of each country report, an annual overview of statistical and demographic data is presented in an appendix. By using a table format, up-to-date information is quickly accessible for each country. To see how these changes affect the articles, please read this sample chapter about Austria. The Yearbook of Muslims in Europe is an essential resource for analysis of Europe's dynamic Muslim populations. Featuring up-to-date research from forty-six European countries, the reports provide cumulative knowledge of on-going trends and developments around Muslims in different European countries. In addition to offering a relevant framework for original research, the Yearbook of Muslims in Europe provides an invaluable source of reference for government and NGO officials, journalists, policy-makers, and related research institutions.

In Representing the Good Neighbor, Carol A. Hess investigates the reception of Latin American art music in the US during the Pan American movement of the 1930s and 40s. An amalgamation of economic, political and cultural objectives, Pan Americanism was premised on the idea that the Americas were bound by geography, common interests, and a shared history, and stressed the psychological and spiritual bonds between the North and South. Threatened by European Fascism, the US government wholeheartedly embraced this movement as a way of recruiting Latin American countries as political partners. In a concerted effort to promote a sameness-embracing attitude between the US and Latin America, it established, in collaboration with entities such as the Pan American Union, exchange programs for US and Latin American composers as well as a series of contests, music education projects, and concerts dedicated to Latin American music. Through comparisons of the work of three of the most prominent Latin American composers of the period - Carlos Chavez, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Alberto Ginastera - Hess shows that the resulting explosion of Latin American music in the US during the 30s and 40s was accompanied by a widespread - though by no means universal - embracement by critics as an exemplar of cosmopolitan universalism. Aspects shared between the music of US composers and that of their neighbors to the south were often touted and applauded. Yet, by the end of the Cold War period, critics had reverted to viewing Latin American music through the lens of difference and exoticism. In comparing these radically different modes of reception, Hess uncovers how and why attitudes towards Latin American music shifted so dramatically during the middle of the twentieth century, and what this tells us about the ways in which the history of American music has been written. As the first book to examine in detail the critical reception of Latin American music in the United States, Representing the Good Neighbor promises to be a landmark in the field of American music studies, and will be essential reading for students and scholars of music in the US and Latin America during the twentieth-century. It will also appeal to historians studying US-Latin America relations, as well as general readers interested in the history of American music.

Understand the complexities of the most lethal insurgent group of America's longest war-the Taliban. Battle hardened, tribally oriented, and deeply committed to its cause, the Taliban has proven itself resourceful, adaptable, and often successful. As such, the Taliban presents a counterinsurgency puzzle for which the United States has yet to identify effective military tactics, information operations, and Coalition developmental policies. Written by one of the Department of the Army's leading intelligence and military analysts on the Taliban, this book covers the group's complete history, including its formation, ideology, and political power, as well as the origins of its current conflict with the United States. The work carefully analyzes the agenda, capabilities, and support base of the Taliban; forecasts the group's likely course of action to retake Afghanistan; and details the Coalition forces' probable counterinsurgency responses. Author Mark Silinsky also reviews the successes and failures of the latest U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine to extrapolate the best strategies for future counterinsurgency campaigns. Provides insights from an author with academic training in politics and economics as well as a 30-year defense intelligence community background, including serving as an Army analyst in Afghanistan Presents information recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act Analyzes the tribal, religious, political, and international elements of the greater Taliban problem

Alfred Nobel made his name as an inventor and successful entrepreneur and left a legacy as a philanthropist and promoter of learning and social progress. The correspondence between Nobel and his Viennese mistress, Sofie Hess, shines a light on his private life and reveals a personality that differs significantly from his public image. The letters show him as a hypochondriac and workaholic and as a paranoid, jealous, and patriarchal lover. Indeed, the relationship between the aging Alfred Nobel and the carefree, spendthrift Sofie Hess will strike readers as dysfunctional and worthy of Freudian analysis. Erika Rummel's masterful translation and annotations reveal the value of the letters as commentary on 19th century social mores: the concept of honour and reputation, the life of a "kept" woman, the prevalence of antisemitism, the importance of spas as health resorts and entertainment centres, the position of single mothers, and more generally the material culture of a rich bourgeois gentleman. A Nobel Affair is the first translation into English of the complete correspondence between Alfred Nobel and Sofie Hess.

The disastrous Buffalo Creek Treaty of 1838 called for the Senecas' removal to Kansas (then part of the Indian Territory). From this low point, the Seneca Nation of Indians, which today occupies three reservations in western New York, sought to rebound. Beginning with events leading to the Seneca Revolution in 1848, which transformed the nation's government from a council of chiefs to an elected system, Laurence M. Hauptman traces Seneca history through the New Deal. Based on the author's nearly fifty years of archival research, interviews, and applied work, Coming Full Circle shows that Seneca leaders in these years learned valuable lessons and adapted to change, thereby preparing the nation to meet the challenges it would face in the post-World War II era, including major land loss and threats of termination. Instead of emphasizing American Indian decline, Hauptman stresses that the Senecas were actors in their own history and demonstrated cultural and political resilience. Both Native belief, in the form of the Good Message of Handsome Lake, and Christianity were major forces in Seneca life; women continued to play important social and economic roles despite the demise of clan matrons' right to nominate the chiefs; and Senecas became involved in national and international competition in long-distance running and in lacrosse. The Seneca Nation also achieved noteworthy political successes in this period. The Senecas resisted allotment, and thus saved their reservations from breakup and sale. They recruited powerful allies, including attorneys, congressmen, journalists, and religious leaders. They saved their Oil Spring Reservation, winning a U.S. Supreme Court case against New York State on the issue of taxation and won remuneration in their Kansas Claims case. These efforts laid the groundwork for the Senecas' postwar endeavor to seek compensation before the Indian Claims Commission and pursuit of a series of land claims and tax lawsuits against New York State.

In 2011, the Midwest suffered devastating floods. Due to the flooding, the US Army Corps of Engineers activated the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway, one of the flood prevention mechanisms of the Mississippi Rivers and Tributaries Project. This levee breach was intended to divert water in order to save the town of Cairo, Illinois, but in the process, it completely destroyed the small African American town of Pinhook, Missouri. In When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri, authors David Todd Lawrence and Elaine J. Lawless examine two conflicting narratives about the flood--one promoted by the Corps of Engineers that boasts the success of the levee breach and the flood diversion, and the other gleaned from displaced Pinhook residents, who, in oral narratives, tell a different story of neglect and indifference on the part of government officials. Receiving inadequate warning and no evacuation assistance during the breach, residents lost everything. Still after more than six years, displaced Pinhook residents have yet to receive restitution and funding for relocation and reconstruction of their town. The authors' research traces a long history of discrimination and neglect of the rights of the Pinhook community, beginning with their migration from the Deep South to southeast Missouri, through purchasing and farming the land, and up to the Birds Point levee breach nearly eighty years later. The residents' stories relate what it has been like to be dispersed in other small towns, living with relatives and friends while trying to negotiate the bureaucracy surrounding Federal Emergency Management Agency and State Emergency Management Agency assistance programs. Ultimately, the stories of displaced citizens of Pinhook reveal a strong African American community, whose bonds were developed over time and through shared traditions, a community persisting despite extremely difficult circumstances.

A bold and innovative social history, The Seed Is Mine concerns the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa. After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbors, employers, friends, and family - a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication - Charles van Onselen has recreated the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart.

“If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography … proves the point.” — Carmel Schrire, The Boston Globe

“An epic … [that] tells of the loss of human potential generated by a politics that surrendered generosity and openness to self-interest and bigotry. It reveals the way an ordinary man can survive with dignity in such a world.” — Vincent Crapanzano, the New York Times

“A magnificent book [with] implications beyond its modest claims … This remarkable story compels foreboding but also kindles hope, for it shows the extraordinary courage of 'ordinary' men under severe difficulties.” — Eugene Genovese, Emory University

“[Van Onselen] teases out the subtleties of the paternalistic relationships between rural whites and blacks which gave rise to real friendships but also to much betrayal, anger, and humiliation . . . It is a monumental masterpiece of research, and a poetic evocation of the human spirit to survive … ” — Linda Ensor, Business Day

Kim Jai Sook Martin entered the world in 1935, during the Japanese occupation of her native Korea. She was the second daughter of an ordinary family, born to parents who had hoped for a boy; they dressed her as one until she was three, when her brother was born. By the age of six, she had already learned the price of her fierce independence: refusing to acknowledge the Japanese flag as the Korean national flag, she was denied entrance to her first year of school.

This early conflict set Kim Jai Sook on a lifetime quest to understand her obligations to her family, her culture, her country, herself, and, ultimately, to God. Hers is a story of perseverance, turmoil, and love, as she fought to maintain balance between duty and her own desires.

She set her goals high. As the survivor of Japanese subjugation and two wars, she committed herself to living as a responsible and worthy person. As an adult, in pursuit of her deep desire to become a teacher, she left Korea and built a new life in Canada, where her father's advice on dealing with people became her guiding principles.

This is her story.

"After saying our good-byes to friends and neighbors, we all got in the cars and headed up the hill and down the road toward a future in Ohio that we hoped would be brighter," Otis Trotter writes in his affecting memoir, Keeping Heart: A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine. Organized around the life histories, medical struggles, and recollections of Trotter and his thirteen siblings, the story begins in 1914 with his parents, Joe William Trotter Sr. and Thelma Odell Foster Trotter, in rural Alabama. By telling his story alongside the experiences of his parents as well as his siblings, Otis reveals cohesion and tensions in twentieth-century African American family and community life in Alabama, West Virginia, and Ohio. This engaging chronicle illuminates the journeys not only of a black man born with heart disease in the southern Appalachian coalfields, but of his family and community. It fills an important gap in the literature on an underexamined aspect of American experience: the lives of blacks in rural Appalachia and in the nonurban endpoints of the Great Migration. Its emotional power is a testament to the importance of ordinary lives.

The defeat of George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn was big news in 1876. Newspaper coverage of the battle initiated hot debates about whether the U.S. government should change its policy toward American Indians and who was to blame for the army's loss--the latter, an argument that ignites passion to this day. In "Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud, "James E. Mueller draws on exhaustive research of period newspapers to explore press coverage of the famous battle. As he analyzes a wide range of accounts--some grim, some circumspect, some even laced with humor--Mueller offers a unique take on the dramatic events that so shook the American public.
Among the many myths surrounding the Little Bighorn is that journalists of that time were incompetent hacks who, in response to the stunning news of Custer's defeat, called for bloodthirsty revenge against the Indians and portrayed the "boy general" as a glamorous hero who had suffered a martyr's death. Mueller argues otherwise, explaining that the journalists of 1876 were not uniformly biased against the Indians, and they did a credible job of describing the battle. They reported facts as they knew them, wrote thoughtful editorials, and asked important questions.
Although not without their biases, journalists reporting on the Battle of the Little Bighorn cannot be credited--or faulted--for creating the legend of Custer's Last Stand. Indeed, as Mueller reveals, after the initial burst of attention, these journalists quickly moved on to other stories of their day. It would be art and popular culture--biographies, paintings, Wild West shows, novels, and movies--that would forever embed the Last Stand in the American psyche.