History Commons^™

[Introduction To] Religion And The Medieval And Early Modern Global Marketplace, Scott Oldenburg, Kristin M.S. Bezio

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Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine the intersection, conflict, and confluence of religion and the market before 1700.

Each chapter analyzes the unique interplay of faith and economy in a different locale: Syria, Ethiopia, France, Iceland, India, Peru, and beyond. In ten case studies, specialists of archaeology, art history, social and economic history, religious studies, and critical theory address issues of secularization, tolerance, colonialism, and race with a fresh focus. They chart the tensions between religious and economic thought in specific locales or texts, the complex ways …

[Introduction To] With The Weathermen: The Personal Journal Of A Revolutionary Woman, Susan Stern, Laura Browder

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Drugs. Sex. Revolutionary violence. From its first pages, Susan Stern's memoir With the Weathermen provides a candid, first-hand look at the radical politics and the social and cultural environment of the New Left during the late 1960s.

The Weathermen--a U.S.-based, revolutionary splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society--advocated the overthrow of the government and capitalism, and toward that end, carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots throughout the United States. In With the Weathermen Stern traces her involvement with this group, and her transformation from a shy, married graduate student into a go-go dancing, street-fighting "macho mama." …

[Introduction To] South To A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, Suzanne W. Jones, Sharon Monteith

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Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth.

In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains …

[Introduction To] National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture And The Formation Of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956, David Brandenberger

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During the 1930s, Stalin and his entourage rehabilitated famous names from the Russian national past in a propaganda campaign designed to mobilize Soviet society for the coming war. Legendary heroes like Aleksandr Nevskii and epic events like the Battle of Borodino quickly eclipsed more conventional communist slogans revolving around class struggle and proletarian internationalism. In a provocative study, David Brandenberger traces this populist "national Bolshevism" into the 1950s, highlighting the catalytic effect that it had on Russian national identity formation.

Beginning with national Bolshevism's origins within Stalin's inner circle, Brandenberger next examines its projection into Soviet society through education and …

[Introduction To] Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators And American Identities, Laura Browder

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In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.

Significantly, notes …

[Introduction To] From Civilization To Segregation: Social Ideals And Social Control In Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1934, Carol Summers

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This study examines the social changes that took place in Southern Rhodesia after the arrival of the British South Africa Company in the 1890s. Summer’s work focuses on interactions among settlers, the officials of the British South America Company and the administration, missionaries, humanitarian groups in Britain, and the most vocal or noticeable groups of Africans. Through this period of military conquest and physical coercion, to the later attempts at segregationist social engineering, the ideals and justifications of Southern Rhodesians changed drastically. Native Policy, Native Education policies, and, eventually, segregationist Native Development policies changed and evolved as the white and …