This book is a detailed study of salient examples of Mexican travel writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While scholars have often explored the close relationship between European or North American travel writing and the discourse of imperialism, little has been written on how postcolonial subjects might relate to the genre. This study first traces the development of a travel-writing tradition based closely on European imperialist models in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico. It then goes on to analyse how the narrative techniques of postmodernism and the political agenda of postcolonialism might combine to help challenge the genre's imperialist tendencies in late twentieth-century works of travel writing, focusing in particular on works by writers Juan Villoro, Hector Perea and Fernando Solana Olivares.

Except for a short period after the end of the First World War and the ensuing armistice, Turkey has consistently denied that it ever employed a policy of intentional destruction of Armenians. Th e 1913-1914 census put the number of Armenians living in Turkey at close to two million. Today only a few thousand Armenians remain in the city Istanbul and none elsewhere in Turkey. Armenian sites in Turkey, including churches, have been neglected, desecrated, looted, destroyed, or requisitioned for other uses, while Armenian place names have been erased or changed.

As with the Jewish Holocaust, Armenian properties that were seized or stolen have not been restored. Sixty and ninety years after these terrible events, Jewish and Armenian victims and their heirs continue to struggle to get their properties back. Th ere has been only partial restitution in the Jewish case and virtually no restitution at all in the Armenian case.

No adequate reparation for the deeds committed against the Armenians can ever be made. But resolving claims with respect to stolen property is a symbolic gesture toward victims and their heirs. Th is is unfinished business for Jewish heirs and survivor of the Holocaust, as it is for Armenians. A Perfect Injustice is an essential contribution to understanding why the issue of stolen Armenian wealth remains unresolved after all these years--a topic addressed for the fi rst time in this volume.

This book tackles questions about the reception and production of translated and untranslated Russian theatre in post-WW2 Britain: why in British minds is Russia viewed almost as a run-of-the-mill production of a Chekhov play. Is it because Chekhov is so dominant in British theatre culture? What about all those other Russian writers? Many of them are very different from Chekhov. A key question was formulated, thanks to a review by Susannah Clapp of Turgenev's A Month in the Country: have the British staged a 'Russia of the theatrical mind'?

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 who 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.

Sports Crazy: How Sports Are Sabotaging American Schools exposes the excesses of middle and high school sports and the detrimental effects our sports obsession has on American education. Institutions are increasingly emulating college and professional sports models and losing sight of a host of educational and health goals. Steven J. Overman describes how this agenda is driven largely by partisan fans and parents of athletes who exert an inordinate influence on school priorities, and he explains how and why school administrators shockingly and consistently capitulate to these demands. The author underscores the incongruity of public schools involved in an entertainment business and the effects this diversion has on academic integrity, learning, life experience, and overall educational outcomes. Overman examines out-of-control school sports within the context of a school's educational mission and curriculum, with telling reference to impacts on physical education. He explores as well the outsized place of interscholastic sports beyond the classroom and scrutinizes the distorted relationship between intramural or recreational sports and elitist, varsity athletics. Overman's chapter on tackle football explains many reasons why this sport should be eliminated from the school extracurriculum and replaced by flag or touch football. Overman presents a brief history of interscholastic sports, and he compares and contrasts the American experience of school-sponsored sport to the European model of community-based clubs. Which approach better serves students? Overman recommends reforms in the context of a radical proposal to phase out interscholastic sports in favor of an intramural or club model. This approach would alleviate such problems as elitism and gender bias and reign in hypercompetitiveness while freeing schools to educate students rather than provide public entertainment.

Offering a unique window into the Old Colony Mennonite community in Saskatchewan, this biography of Herman D.W. Friesen reveals the life of a man who attempted to modernize his community, often in opposition to traditional religious beliefs. The story begins on the Hague-Osler Mennonite reserve in the 1910s and 20s. At this time the government was pressuring Mennonite communities to send their children to province-run schools. This set off a series of migrations, in which Mennonites left for Mexico, Central America, and other parts of Canada. During the watershed decade of the 1960s, Friesen was elected as a minister, and later as the aeltester (Bishop). Despite growing up in an environment filled with intense governmental conflict and considerable suspicion towards "the English outsiders," he did not try to organize another migration out of Saskatchewan. Instead, taking a unique approach to leadership, Friesen tried to navigate a gradual process of accommodation to the changes taking place in the province. Included in the book are Friesen's sermons, translated from German, providing a unique glimpse into the Old Colony Mennonite theology that aided him in guiding the church in a strategy of gradual cultural accommodation.

Theodore (759-826), abbot of the influential Constantinopolitan monastery of Stoudios, is celebrated as a saint by the Orthodox Church for his stalwart defense of icon veneration. Three important texts promoting the monastery and the memory of its founder are collected in The Life and Death of Theodore of Stoudios. In the Life of Theodore, Michael the Monk describes a golden age at Stoudios, as well as Theodore's often antagonistic encounters with imperial rulers. The Encyclical Letter of Naukratios, written in 826 by his successor, informed the scattered monks of their leader's death. Translation and Burial contains brief biographies of Theodore and his brother, along with an eyewitness account of their reburial at Stoudios. These works, translated into English for the first time, appear here alongside new editions of the Byzantine Greek texts.

Pervasive myths of European domination and indigenous submission in the Americas receive an overdue corrective in this far-reaching revisionary work. Despite initial upheavals caused by the European intrusion, Native people often thrived after contact, preserving their sovereignty, territory, and culture and shaping indigenous borderlands across the hemisphere. Borderlands, in this context, are spaces where diverse populations interact, cross-cultural exchanges are frequent and consequential, and no polity or community holds dominion. Within the indigenous borderlands of the Americas, as this volume shows, Native peoples exercised considerable power, often retaining control of the land, and remaining paramount agents of historical transformation after the European incursion. Conversely, European conquest and colonialism were typically slow and incomplete, as the newcomers struggled to assert their authority and implement policies designed to subjugate Native societies and change their beliefs and practices. Indigenous Borderlands covers a wide chronological and geographical span, from the sixteenth-century U.S. South to twentieth-century Bolivia, and gathers leading scholars from the United States and Latin America. Drawing on previously untapped or underutilized primary sources, the original essays in this volume document the resilience and relative success of indigenous communities commonly and wrongly thought to have been subordinated by colonial forces, or even vanished, as well as the persistence of indigenous borderlands within territories claimed by people of European descent. Indeed, numerous indigenous groups remain culturally distinct and politically autonomous. Hemispheric in its scope, unique in its approach, this work significantly recasts our understanding of the important roles played by Native agents in constructing indigenous borderlands in the era of European imperialism. Chapters 5, 6, 8, and 9 are published with generous support from the Americas Research Network.

Bringing together some of the last Holocaust survivor stories in living memory, After the Holocaust shares Jewish scholarship, activism, poetry, and personal narratives which tackle the changing face of human rights education in the 21st century. The collected voices draw on decades of research on Holocaust history to discuss education, broader human rights abuses, genocide, internment, and oppression. Advancing the dialogue between civic advocacy, public remembrance, and research, contributors discuss how the Holocaust is taught and remembered. By including additional perspectives on the context of Canadian antisemitism, the legacy of human rights abuses of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, and the internment of Japanese Canadians in World War II, After the Holocaust examines the ways the Holocaust changed thinking around human rights legislation and memorialization on a global scale. "The first- and second-generation survivor accounts are treasures-invaluable reflections that anchor this collection." - David MacDonald , author of The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation

Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 is the first multigenre study of representations of masculinity following the emergence of violent terror as a plot element in American cinema after September 11, 2001. Across a broad range of subgenres - including disaster melodrama, monster movies, postapocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and home invasion horror, action-thrillers, and frontier westerns - author Glen Donnar examines the impact of "terror-Others," from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, especially in relation to cinematic representations in earlier periods of national turmoil. Donnar demonstrates that the reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Taking up critical arguments about Hollywood's attempts to resolve male crisis through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this failure reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they are supposed to be fighting. Donnar concludes that interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nationhood continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, the volume offers an important counternarrative to this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.

This volume is a comprehensive Handbook of Russian thought that provides an in-depth survey of major figures, currents, and developments in Russian intellectual history, spanning the period from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. Written by a group of distinguished scholars as well as some younger ones from Russia, Europe, the United States, and Canada, this Handbook reconstructs a vibrant picture of the intellectual and cultural life in Russia and the Soviet Union during the most buoyant period in the country's history. Contrary to the widespread view of Russian modernity as a product of intellectual borrowing and imitation, the essays collected in this volume reveal the creative spirit of Russian thought, which produced a range of original philosophical and social ideas, as well as great literature, art, and criticism. While rejecting reductive interpretations, the Handbook employs a unifying approach to its subject matter, presenting Russian thought in the context of the country's changing historical landscape. This Handbook will open up a new intellectual world to many readers and provide a secure base for its further exploration.

This book presents key works of Boris Hessen, outstanding Soviet philosopher of science, available here in English for the first time. Quality translations are accompanied by an editors' introduction and annotations. Boris Hessen is known in history of science circles for his "Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia" presented in London (1931), which inspired new approaches in the West. As a philosopher and a physicist, he was tasked with developing a Marxist approach to science in the 1920s. He studied the history of physics to clarify issues such as reductionism and causality as they applied to new developments. With the philosophers called the "Dialecticians", his debates with the opposing "Mechanists" on the issue of emergence are still worth studying and largely ignored in the many recent works on this subject. Taken as a whole, the book is a goldmine of insights into both the foundations of physics and Soviet history.

More than 14,000 New Mexicans served in uniform during World War I, and thousands more contributed to the American home front. Yet today in New Mexico, as elsewhere, the Great War and the lives it affected are scarcely remembered. Lest We Forget confronts that amnesia. The first detailed study to describe New Mexico's wartime mobilization, its soldiers' combat experiences, and its veterans' postwar lives, the book offers a poignant account of the profound changes these Americans underwent both during and after the war. By focusing on New Mexico, historian David V. Holtby underscores the challenges New Mexicans faced as they rallied support at home, served in Europe, and came home as veterans. Income disparity, gender divisions, political factionalism, and conflict between rural and urban lifeways all affected the war and its aftermath. Holtby shows how New Mexico responded to these problems even as it coped with federal action and inaction. In more than 1,500 eyewitness statements collected in Spanish and English not long after the war ended, New Mexicans described the murderous effects of shrapnel and gas warfare, the impact of the Spanish influenza, and the many other challenges they faced on the front as members of the American Expeditionary Forces. Lest We Forget recounts the background of these soldiers, but it also tells the often-overlooked story of what happened to New Mexico's veterans after the war. Theirs is a story of resilience in the face of unfulfilled government promises, economic reversals, partisan politicizing of the state's American Legion posts, and the challenges the newly created Veterans Bureau faced as it was overwhelmed by cases of shell shock (known today as PTSD). Although New Mexicans' wartime efforts were in some ways unique, their story ultimately provides a revealing glimpse of the experiences of all Americans during World War I. A timely reminder of the courage and tragedy that accompany full-scale modern warfare, Lest We Forget reminds us of the enduring legacy of a vast international conflict that had keenly felt and long-lasting repercussions back home.

In recent years, shrimpers on the Louisiana coast have faced a historically dire shrimp season, with the price of shrimp barely high enough to justify trawling. Yet, many of them wouldn't consider leaving shrimping behind, despite having transferrable skills that could land them jobs in the oil and gas industry. Since 2001, shrimpers have faced increasing challenges to their trade: an influx of shrimp from southeast Asia, several traumatic hurricane seasons, and the largest oil spill at sea in American history. In Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers, author Emma Christopher Lirette traces how Louisiana Gulf Coast shrimpers negotiate land and blood, sea and freedom, and economic security and networks of control. This book explores what ties shrimpers to their boats and nets. Despite feeling trapped by finances and circumstances, they have created a world in which they have agency. Lirette provides a richly textured view of the shrimpers of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, calling upon ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interdisciplinary scholarship, and critical theory. With evocative, lyrical prose, she argues that in persisting to trawl in places that increasingly restrict their way of life, shrimpers build fragile, quietly defiant worlds, adapting to a constantly changing environment. In these flickering worlds, shrimpers reimagine what it means to work and what it means to make a living.

The short period of time stretching from the dramatic Constitutional amendments of January 2020 to the war launched by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine in February, 2022, marked a sharp turning point in Russian history. The author explains how Russia got to that point of war. Although Putin, termed 'eternal' because of amendments that allow him to run for two more terms as president, is everywhere in it, the book is a study of Russia writ large. It features the political uproar over the Navalny opposition, the ravages of the pandemic, manifestations of climate change, and intensifying confrontations between Russia on one side, Ukraine, NATO and the US on the other. The book provides a who, what, where and when of the short but volatile period prior to the outbreak of war and offers a tentative why it happened. Discussed, too, are the highs and lows of Putin's popularity; the effectiveness, or not, of economic sanctions, and Moscow's 'pivot to the east'.

Canadians are beginning to learn about the negative effects of residential schools on Aboriginal people in Canada. More hidden in the written record, but bearing a similar powerfully destructive role, are Indian Agents, who were with very few exceptions White men who 'ruled the reserves' in Canada from the 1870s to the 1960s. This book is the first to present a discussion of Indian Agents in general. It provides an introductory look at the control Indian Agents exercised over Aboriginal communities throughout the period in question. The primary intent is to spark discussion in Indigenous studies courses. This book is built upon a discussion of the lives and impact of five Indian Agents: Hayter Reed, William Morris Graham, John McIver, William Halliday, and Fred Hall. However, the practices and views of 39 other Indian Agents are interwoven throughout the text. Although there was a readily detectable sameness in the way that Indian Agent power was imposed on Aboriginal communities based on the institutional racism of the Indian Agent System, one of the points to be made is that not all Indian Agents were the same. Some were more oppressive than others. Also frequently pointed out is the fact that Aboriginal peoples were not merely helpless victims to Indian Agent control, but resisted that control, sometimes successfully. The book concludes with a chapter comparing the Indian Agent System in Canada, with similar systems in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.

Nearly seventy years after the Civil War, Natchez, Mississippi, sold itself to Depression-era tourists as a place "Where the Old South Still Lives." Tourists flocked to view the town's decaying antebellum mansions, hoopskirted hostesses, and a pageant saturated in sentimental Lost Cause imagery. In Remembering Dixie: The Battle to Control Historical Memory in Natchez, Mississippi, 1865-1941, Susan T. Falck analyzes how the highly biased, white historical memories of what had been a wealthy southern hub originated from the experiences and hardships of the Civil War. These collective narratives eventually culminated in a heritage tourism enterprise still in business today. Additionally, the book includes new research on the African American community's robust efforts to build historical tradition, most notably, the ways in which African Americans in Natchez worked to create a distinctive postemancipation identity that challenged the dominant white structure. Using a wide range of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources-many of which have never been fully mined before-Falck reveals the ways in which black and white Natchezians of all classes, male and female, embraced, reinterpreted, and contested Lost Cause ideology. These memory-making struggles resulted in emotional, internecine conflicts that shaped the cultural character of the community and impacted the national understanding of the Old South and the Confederacy as popular culture. Natchez remains relevant today as a microcosm for our nation's modern-day struggles with Lost Cause ideology, Confederate monuments, racism, and white supremacy. Falck reveals how this remarkable story played out in one important southern community over several generations in vivid detail and richly illustrated analysis.

This book examines the contribution made by Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910) to political thought in Brazil during the Belle Epoque (1888-1910). Nabuco was once leader of the abolitionist cause in Brazil and turned his attention after the abolition of slavery in 1888 to saving the monarchy. This study traces Nabuco's views on the monarchic institution in Brazil, considering first the origins of his (liberal) monarchist beliefs and his ideas on how the institution should adapt to half the threat of republicanism before 1889. It concentrates on the first decade of the Republic and the ways in which Nabuco presented a challenge to the new regime. By examining the impact of his views on the State's domestic and international roles, the book reveals Nabuco's contribution to nation-building in late-nineteenth-century Brazil.

The ninth to the fifth centuries BCE saw a series of significant historical transformations across Cyprus, especially in the growth of towns and in developments in the countryside. In this book, Catherine Kearns argues that changing patterns of urban and rural sedentism drove social changes as diverse communities cultivated new landscape practices. Climatic changes fostered uneven relationships between people, resources like land, copper, and wood, and increasingly important places like rural sanctuaries and cemeteries. Bringing together a range of archaeological, textual, and scientific evidence, the book examines landscapes, environmental history, and rural practices to argue for their collective instrumentality in the processes driving Iron Age political formations. It suggests how rural households managed the countryside, interacted with the remains of earlier generations, and created gathering spaces alongside the development of urban authorities. Offering new insights into landscape archaeologies, Dr Kearns contributes to current debates about society's relationships with changing environments.

In 1917 it was still possible for the University of Oklahoma's annual Catalogue to include a roster of every student's name and hometown. A compact and close-knit community, those 2,500 students and their 130 professors studied and taught at a respectable (though small, relatively uncomplicated, and rather insular) regional university. During the following third of a century, the school underwent changes so profound that their cumulative effect amounted to a transformation. This second volume in David Levy's projected three-part history chronicles these changes, charting the University's course through one of the most dramatic periods in American history. Following Oklahoma's flagship school through decades that saw six U.S. presidents, eleven state governors, and five university presidents, Volume 2 of The University of Oklahoma: A History documents the institution's evolution into a complex, diverse, and multifaceted seat of learning. By 1950 enrollment had increased fivefold, and by every measure - the number of colleges and campus buildings, degrees awarded and programs offered, volumes in the library, faculty publications, out-of-state and foreign students in attendance - the University was on its way to becoming a world-class educational institution. Levy weaves together human and institutional history as he describes the school's remarkable - sometimes remarkably difficult - development in response to unprecedented factors: two world wars, the cultural shifts of the 1920s, the Great Depression, the rise of the petroleum industry, the farm crisis and Dust Bowl, the emergence of new technologies, and new political and social forces such as those promoting and resisting racial justice. National and world events, state politics, campus leadership, the ever-changing student body: in triumph and defeat, in small successes and grand accomplishments, all come to varied and vibrant life in this second installment of the definitive history of Oklahoma's storied center of learning.

In this eye-opening cultural history, Brian Tochterman examines competing narratives that shaped post-World War II New York City. As a sense of crisis rose in American cities during the 1960s and 1970s, a period defined by suburban growth and deindustrialization, no city was viewed as in its death throes more than New York. Feeding this narrative of the dying city was a wide range of representations in film, literature, and the popular press--representations that ironically would not have been produced if not for a city full of productive possibilities as well as challenges. Tochterman reveals how elite culture producers, planners and theorists, and elected officials drew on and perpetuated the fear of death to press for a new urban vision. It was this narrative of New York as the dying city, Tochterman argues, that contributed to a burgeoning and broad anti-urban political culture hostile to state intervention on behalf of cities and citizens. Ultimately, the author shows that New York's decline--and the decline of American cities in general--was in part a self-fulfilling prophecy bolstered by urban fear and the new political culture nourished by it.

A fascinating collection of thirty compelling stories about events that shaped Sin City, "It Happened in Las Vegas "describes everything from a nineteenth-century land deal that almost created two competing cities to the torrential rainstorm that flooded downtown Vegas with three inches of water.