During the Great Depression, the Los Angeles area was rife with radical movements. Although many observers thought their ideas unworkable, even dangerous, Southern Californians voted for them by the tens of thousands. This book asks why. To find answers, author Errol Wayne Stevens takes readers through the history of such movements as the Utopian Society, Dr. Francis Townsend's old-age revolving pension plan, Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California gubernatorial campaign, and Retirement Life Payments, known as Ham and Eggs. The book also examines the Los Angeles Communists and the free-market capitalists, both quasi-religious movements with large followings, as well as the self-help cooperatives, a spontaneous upsurge of neighbors who came together to help one another in a time of desperate need. As to these movements' extraordinary popularity, Stevens finds the standard explanations unpersuasive. He debunks the idea that naIve, unsophisticated Southern Californians, living aimless, empty lives, suffering from ennui, and longing for community, readily supported charismatic leaders who promised a way out of the Great Depression. In Stevens's telling, Southern Californians supported these movements because they spoke to their needs. Fearful or desperate, some elderly and hopeless, Angelenos cared less about the programs' feasibility than about their promise of relief. As one Ham and Eggs supporter succinctly explained: "It may be a racket and maybe it won't work more than a couple of weeks, but that will be $60 more than I ever got before for one vote." Finding parallels between past and present, readers might wonder why people remain loyal to programs that prove unrealistic, or why voters continue to support leaders who reveal, time and again, their ignorance or dishonesty. In its illumination of a troubled time in American history not so long ago, this book offers insight into our own.

Since 2004, the Baby Doll Mardi Gras tradition in New Orleans has gone from an obscure, almost forgotten practice to a flourishing cultural force. The original Baby Dolls were groups of black women, and some men, in the early Jim Crow era who adopted New Orleans street masking tradition as a unique form of fun and self-expression against a backdrop of racial discrimination. Wearing short dresses, bloomers, bonnets, and garters with money tucked tight, they strutted, sang ribald songs, chanted, and danced on Mardi Gras Day and on St. Joseph feast night. Today's Baby Dolls continue the tradition of one of the first street women's masking and marching groups in the United States. They joyfully and unabashedly defy gender roles, claiming public space and proclaiming through their performance their right to social citizenship. Essayists draw on interviews, theoretical perspectives, archival material, and historical assessments to describe women's cultural performances that take place on the streets of New Orleans. They recount the history and contemporary resurgence of the Baby Dolls while delving into the larger cultural meaning of the phenomenon. Over 140 color photographs and personal narratives of immersive experiences provide passionate testimony of the impact of the Baby Dolls on their audiences. Fifteen artists offer statements regarding their work documenting and inspired by the tradition as it stimulates their imagination to present a practice that revitalizes the spirit.

In The South Strikes Back, Hodding Carter III describes the birth of the white Citizens' Council in the Mississippi Delta and its spread throughout the South. Carter begins with a brief historical overview and traces the formation of the Council, its treatment of African Americans, and its impact on white communities, concluding with an analysis of the Council's future in Mississippi. Through economic boycott, social pressure, and political influence, the Citizens' Council was able to subdue its opponents and dominate the communities in which it operated. Carter considers trends working against the Council-the federal government's efforts to improve voting rights for African Americans, economic growth within African American communities, and especially the fact that the Citizens' Council was founded on the defense of segregation's status quo and dedicated to its preservation. As Carter writes in the final chapter, "Defense of the status quo, as history has shown often enough, is an arduous task at best. When, in a democracy such as ours, it involves the repression of a minority, it becomes an impossibility.

As the long boom of post-World War II economic expansion spread across the globe, dreams of white picket fences, democratic ideals, and endless opportunities flourished within the United States. Middle America experienced a period of affluent stability built upon a modern age of industrialization. Yet for the people of Appalachia, this new era brought economic, social, and environmental devastation, preventing many from realizing the American Dream. Some families suffered in silence; some joined a mass exodus from the mountains; while others, trapped by unemployment, poverty, illness, and injury became dependent upon welfare. As the one state most completely Appalachian, West Virginia symbolized the region's dilemma, even as it provided much of the labor and natural resources that fueled the nation's prosperity. An Appalachian Reawakening: West Virginia and the Perils of the New Machine Age, 1945-1972 recounts the difficulties the state of West Virginia faced during the post-World War II period. While documenting this turmoil, this valuable analysis also traces the efforts of the New Frontier and Great Society programs, which stimulated maximum feasible participation and lead to the ultimate rise of grass roots activities and organizations that improved life and labor in the region and undermined the notion of Appalachian fatalism.

The lower Mississippi River winds past the City of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of sand, mud, and trees called "the batture." On this remote and ignored piece of land thrives a humanity unique to the region-ramblers, artists, drinkers, fishers, rabbit hunters, dog walkers, sunset watchers, and refugees from Immigration, alimony, and other aspects of modern life.

Author Oliver A. Houck has frequented this place for the past twenty-five years. "Down on the Batture" describes a life, pastoral, at times marginal, but remarkably fecund and surprising. From this place he meditates on Louisiana, the state of the waterway, and its larger environs. He describes all the actors that have played lead roles on the edge of the mightiest river of the continent, and includes in his narrative plantations, pollution, murder, land grabs, keelboat brawlers, slave rebellions, the Corps of Engineers, and the oil industry.

Houck draws from his experience in New Orleans since the early 1970s in the practice and teaching of law. He has been a player in many of the issues he describes, although he does not undertake to argue them here. Instead, story by story, he uses the batture to explore the forces that have shaped and spell out the future of the region. The picture emerges of a place that---for all its tangle of undergrowth, drifting humanity, shifting dimensions in the rise and fall of floodwater---provides respite and sanctuary for values that are original to America and ever at risk from the homogenizing forces of civilization.

History at the intersection of healthcare, labor, and civil rights. The union of hospital workers usually referred to as the 1199 sits at the intersection of three of the most important topics in US history: organized labor, health care, and civil rights. John Hennen's book explores the union's history in Appalachia, a region that is generally associated with extractive industries but has seen health care grow as a share of the overall economy. With a multiracial, largely female, and notably militant membership, 1199 was at labor's vanguard in the 1970s, and Hennen traces its efforts in hospitals, nursing homes, and healthcare centers in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and Appalachian Ohio. He places these stories of mainly low-wage women workers within the framework of shake-ups in the late industrial and early postindustrial United States, relying in part on the words of Local 1199 workers and organizers themselves. Both a sophisticated account of an overlooked aspect of Appalachia's labor history and a key piece of context for Americans' current concern with the status of "essential workers," Hennen's book is a timely contribution to the fields of history and Appalachian studies and to the study of social movements.

People have perennially projected their fantasies onto the North as a frozen no-man's-land full of marauding Vikings or as the unspoiled landscape of a purer, more elemental form of life. Bernd Brunner recovers the encounters of adventurers with its dramatic vistas, fierce weather, exotic treasures and indigenous peoples-and with the literary sagas that seemed to offer an alternate ("whiter" and "superior") cultural origin story to those of decadent Greece or Rome, and the moralistic "Semitic" Bible. The Left has idealised Scandinavian social democracy. The Right borrows from a long history of crackpot theories of Northern origins. Nordic phenotypes characterised eugenics, which in turn influenced America's limits on immigration. The North, Brunner argues, was as much invented as discovered. A valuable contribution to intellectual history, full of vivid documentation, Extreme North is an enlightening journey through a place that is real, but also, in fascinating and very disturbing ways, imaginary.

"We did not all come back." Thus begins the rare firsthand account of the extraordinary ordeal of the Karluk, the flagship of explorer Vilhjalmar Stefansson's Arctic expedition of 1913-1916. When ice trapped the Karluk, Stefansson abandoned Captain Robert A. Bartlett and the crew-eleven of whom perished-to their fate. When the ice crushed the Karluk and sank her, Bartlett led the shipwrecked survivors safely to Wrangell Island. From there, with one Inuit companion, he journeyed across 700 miles of frozen seas and Siberian wilderness to return with rescuers. It is a feat that rivals Shackleton's own celebrated efforts to seek for the crew of the Endurance.

An important contribution to the political science and military history literature, this is the first book to present the Argentinean side of the battle for the Malvinas (Falklands) in May 1982. The author, a senior official in the Argentine Air Force who took part in the conflict himself, uses a wealth of documents, including previously unreleased British intelligence data and records of conversations between the top authorities, to construct a comprehensive account of the political and diplomatic aspects of the war, as well as the day-by-day military operations in the South Atlantic.

The author begins by examining the facts and circumstances that put Great Britain and Argentina on a collision course, paying particular attention to the points at which war could have been avoided. He goes on to provide a detailed account of events, such as the attempts by the United States to intervene, the deployment of forces, the battle of May 1, the sinking of the cruiser ARA General Belgrano and the subsequent sinking of the British destroyer HMS Sheffield, the battle of San Carlos, the fight for Darwin-Goose Green, the march to Fitz Roy and Mount Kent, and the last stand of Puerto Argentino. In addition to offering a full portrayal of the battles and conflicts themselves, Moro also provides a cogent analysis of the interaction of political and military events in modern conflict, a particularly valuable case study of U.S.-Latin American relations, and a fascinating examination of weapons systems in modern warfare. Moro takes issue with published British reports that treat the war as a discreet event that is now over, arguing that the conflict is not only still alive but also threatens both hemispheric peace and U.S. influence in Latin America.

...revisit the people and places and deepen your enjoyment of the sublime BBC tv series "Wayfaring Stranger" ...in these pages revisit people and places you loved in the BBC tv series "Wayfaring Stranger" ... by the authors as featured in the acclaimed BBC tv series "Wayfaring Stranger" Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a steady stream of Scots migrated to Ulster and eventually onward across the Atlantic to resettle in the United States. Many of these Scots-Irish immigrants made their way into the mountains of the southern Appalachian region. They brought with them a wealth of traditional ballads and tunes from the British Isles and Ireland, a carrying stream that merged with sounds and songs of English, German, Welsh, African American, French, and Cherokee origin. Their enduring legacy of music flows today from Appalachia back to Ireland and Scotland and around the globe. In Wayfaring Strangers, Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr guide readers on a musical voyage across oceans, linking people and songs through centuries of adaptation and change. From ancient ballads at the heart of the tradition to instruments that express this dynamic music, Ritchie and Orr chronicle the details of an epic journey.

The International Joint Commission oversees and protects the shared waters of Canada and the United States. Created by the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, it is one of the world's oldest international environmental bodies. A pioneering piece of transborder water governance, the IJC has been integral to the modern Canada-United States relationship. This is the definitive history of the International Joint Commission. Separating myth from reality and uncovering the historical evolution of the IJC from its inception to its present, this collection features an impressive interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners. Examining the many aspects of border waters from east to west The First Century of the International Joint Commission traces the three major periods of the IJC, detailing its early focus on water flow, its middle period of growth and increasing politicization, and its modern emphasis on ecosystems. Informative, detailed, and fascinating, The First Century of the International Joint Commission is essential reading for academics, contemporary policy makers, governments, and all those interested in sustainability, climate change, pollution, and resiliency along the Canada-US Border.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, over twenty different American Indian tribal groups inhabited present-day Mississippi. Today, Mississippi is home to only one tribe, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. In Mississippi's American Indians, author James F. Barnett Jr. explores the historical forces and processes that led to this sweeping change in the diversity of the state's native peoples. The book begins with a chapter on Mississippi's approximately 12,000-year prehistory, from early hunter-gatherer societies through the powerful mound building civilizations encountered by the first European expeditions. With the coming of the Spanish, French, and English to the New World, native societies in the Mississippi region connected with the Atlantic market economy, a source for guns, blankets, and many other trade items. Europeans offered these trade materials in exchange for Indian slaves and deerskins, currencies that radically altered the relationships between tribal groups. Smallpox and other diseases followed along the trading paths. Colonial competition between the French and English helped to spark the Natchez rebellion, the Chickasaw-French wars, the Choctaw civil war, and a half-century of client warfare between the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 forced Mississippi's pro-French tribes to move west of the Mississippi River. The Diaspora included the Tunicas, Houmas, Pascagoulas, Biloxis, and a portion of the Choctaw confederacy. In the early nineteenth century, Mississippi's remaining Choctaws and Chickasaws faced a series of treaties with the United States government that ended in destitution and removal. Despite the intense pressures of European invasion, the Mississippi tribes survived by adapting and contributing to their rapidly evolving world.

Working Class Radicals: The Socialist Party in West Virginia, 1898-1920 examines the rise and fall of organized socialism in West Virginia through an exploration of the demographics of membership, oral interview material gathered in the 1960s from party members, and the collapse of the party in the wake of the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek coal-mining strike of 1912. The first local branch of the West Virginia Socialist Party was established in Wheeling in 1901 and by 1914 several thousand West Virginians were dues-paying members of local branches. By 1910 local Socialists began to elect candidates to office and in 1912 more than 15,000 West Virginian voters cast their ballots for Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. The progress that West Virginia socialists achieved on the electoral front was a reflection of the party's strategy of increasing class-consciousness by working with existing unions to build the power of the labor movement. The party appealed to a fairly broad cross section of wage earners and its steady growth also owed much to the fact that many members of the middle class were attracted to the cause. Several factors combined to send the party into rapid decline, most importantly deep fissures between class and craft factions of the party and 1915 legislation making third party political participation difficult. Working Class Radicals offers insight into the various internal and external forces that doomed the party and serves as a cautionary tale to contemporary political leaders and organizers.

By 2000, Lawrence, Massachusetts, became New England's first Latino-majority city, and Latinos-mainly Dominicans and Puerto Ricans-currently make up nearly three-quarters of its population. Like many industrial cities, Lawrence entered a downward economic spiral in the decades after World War II due to deindustrialization and suburbanization. Latino immigration in the late twentieth century brought new life to the struggling city, but settling in Lawrence was fraught with challenges. Facing hostility from their neighbors, exclusion from local governance, inadequate city services, and limited job prospects, Latinos fought and organized for the right to make a home in the city. In this book, Llana Barber interweaves the histories of U.S. urban crisis and imperial migration from Latin America. Pushed to migrate by political and economic circumstances shaped by the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, poor and working-class Latinos then had to reckon with the segregation, joblessness, disinvestment, and profound stigma that plagued cities during the crisis era, particularly in the Rust Belt. For many Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, there was no ""American Dream"" awaiting them in Lawrence; instead, Latinos struggled to build lives for themselves in the ruins of industrial America.

In his captivating study of faith and class, John Hayes examines the ways folk religion in the early twentieth century allowed the South's poor - both white and black - to listen, borrow, and learn from each other about what it meant to live as Christians in a world of severe struggle. Beneath the well-documented religious forms of the New South, people caught in the region's poverty crafted a distinct folk Christianity that spoke from the margins of capitalist development, giving voice to modern phenomena like alienation and disenchantment. Through haunting songs of Death, mystical tales of conversion, grassroots sacramental displays, and an ethic of neighborliness, impoverished folk Christians looked for the sacred in their midst and affirmed the value of this life in this world. From Tom Watson and W. E. B. Du Bois over a century ago to political commentators today, many have ruminated on how despite material commonalities, the poor of the South have been perennially divided by racism. Through his excavation of a folk Christianity of the poor, which fused strands of African and European tradition into a new synthesis, John Hayes recovers a historically contingent moment of interracial exchange generated in hardship.

Essays by the foremost labor historian of the Black experience in the Appalachian coalfields.This collection brings together nearly three decades of research on the African American experience, class, and race relations in the Appalachian coal industry. It shows how, with deep roots in the antebellum era of chattel slavery, West Virginia's Black working class gradually picked up steam during the emancipation years following the Civil War and dramatically expanded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From there, African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry highlights the decline of the region's Black industrial proletariat under the impact of rapid technological, social, and political changes following World War II. It underscores how all miners suffered unemployment and outmigration from the region as global transformations took their toll on the coal industry, but emphasizes the disproportionately painful impact of declining bituminous coal production on African American workers, their families, and their communities. Joe Trotter not only reiterates the contributions of proletarianization to our knowledge of US labor and working-class history but also draws attention to the gender limits of studies of Black life that focus on class formation, while calling for new transnational perspectives on the subject. Equally important, this volume illuminates the intellectual journey of a noted labor historian with deep family roots in the southern Appalachian coalfields.

Deze nieuwe beschrijving van het wordingsproces van de Indonesische staat gaat ervan uit, dat die staat zijn ontstaan niet alleen dankt aan de nationale vrijheidsbeweging maar ook aan de Nederlandse heerschappij waar die beweging zich tegen keerde. Daarom gaat het boek uitdrukkelijk in op voornaamste ontwikkelingen van het door Nederland in de kolonie Nederlands-Indie gevoerde beleid. Hier sluiten hoofdstukken op aan over de Indonesische nationale beweging en over de Japanse bezetting van de kolonie in 1942-1945. Die bezetting maakte de weg vrij voor de proclamatie van de Indonesische onafhankelijkheid en de stichting van de Republiek Indonesie in augustus 1945. Het daarop ontbrande conflict tussen deze Republiek en Nederland kwam in 1949 tot een onvolledige oplossing, waarna het geschil over West-Irian nog tot een dertien jaar durende nasleep leidde. Meer dan de helft van het boek is gewijd aan een kroniek van dit conflict en zijn nasleep. Daarbij gaat ook ruime aandacht uit naar denkbeelden en sentimenten die het beleid hebben beinvloed.

Although much has been written about Columbus's life in Italy and Spain, little has been written about his formative years in Portugal. This work is the first book-length analysis of Columbus's stay in Portugal and Madeira from 1476 to 1485 and his later experiences in the Portuguese islands of the Azores and the Madeiras. The work stresses the influence the Portuguese had in educating Columbus about the sea, and it depicts his famous voyage to the New World as a logical sequence of the pioneering voyages of the Portuguese in the North Atlantic and along the West Coast of Africa. The work attempts to sort legend from fact and debunks the many myths about Columbus's stays on the island of Madeira.