History Commons^™

[Review Of] Benjamin Breen, The Age Of Intoxication: Origins Of The Global Drug Trade. Philadelphia: University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2019., Scott K. Taylor

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Forgetting And Remembering Racist Violence In Tulsa And The Great Plains, Brent M. S. Campney

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cameroon's Biya Is Africa's Oldest President: Assessing His 38 Years In Power, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Cameroon’s President Paul Biya celebrated his 88th birthday recently, making him the oldest president in Africa. He has been in power for 38 years. Birthday celebrations held across the country were met with protest by the opposition, demanding that he step down. So, how has he acquitted himself in office, and what has been his legacy for Cameroon?

How Some People Can End Up Living At Airports For Months – Even Years – At A Time, Janet R. Bednarek

History Faculty Publications

In January, local authorities arrested a 36-year-old man named Aditya Singh after he had spent three months living at Chicago’s O'Hare International Airport. Since October, he had been staying in the secure side of the airport, relying on the kindness of strangers to buy him food, sleeping in the terminals and using the many bathroom facilities. It wasn’t until an airport employee asked to see his ID that the jig was up.

Singh, however, is far from the first to pull off an extended stay. After more than two decades studying the history of airports, I’ve come across stories about …

The Frontier Demimonde: Prostitution In Early Hays City, 1867-1883, Hollie Marquess M.A.

History Faculty Publications

Hays City, Kansas, founded in 1867, became a bustling Western frontier town due to its possession of the Eastern Division terminus of the Union Pacific Railroad and its position near a military post, Fort Hays. Prostitutes, often among the first arrivals to Western frontier towns, played an integral role in the social and economic livelihood of Hays City. Sex work brought necessary commerce to the town and helped to support other aspects of Hays City nightlife like the gambling dens and saloons. Though respectable employment was largely closed to women in the West, prostitutes in Hays City maintained a mutually …

The Official Mind’S View Of Empire, In Miniature: Quantifying World Geography In Hansard’S Parliamentary Debates, Jo Guldi

History Faculty Publications

For many scholars who are not themselves historians of political thought, the major use of official records is as a benchmark for studying other kinds of development. Official records of modern political bodies are widely available in digitized form and provide one of the primary sources with which digital historians have trained their methods. This article applies the process of "reducing" textual expressions to regular form to investigate how British members of Parliament talked about empire in extremely general terms: which places did they mention, how much, and in what context. Reducing parliamentary speech to regular occurrences makes it possible …

[Review Of The Book Mao And The Sino-Soviet Split, 1959-1973: A New History, By D. Li & Y. Xia], Austin Jersild

History Faculty Publications

[Introduction] This second volume continues a tradition of productive team work, this time between Danhui Li and Yafeng Xia, who emphasize the central role and importance of China in some of the more significant strategic realignments of international history and the Cold War. The chronological dimensions of the story (1959-1973) take the reader from the Sino-Soviet split to the "quasi-alliance" that developed between the United States and China after President Richard Nixon's trip to China in February 1972 (233). The subsequent entanglement of the American and Chinese economies that developed since that time is the subject of extensive public debate …

"A Period Of Misunderstanding": Reforming Jim Crow In Richmond, Virginia, 1930-1954, Marvin T. Chiles

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Neuman, Johanna. Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought For Women’S Right To Vote, Kelly L. Marino

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Kelly L. Marino.

Neuman, J. (2019). Gilded suffragists: The New York socialites who fought for women’s right to vote. New York University Press.

President Paul Biya And Cameroon’S Anglophone Crisis: A Catalog Of Miscalculations, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

The historical literature on Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis traces its origin to the failure to implement the Foumban Constitutional Agreement. The current study adds a new perspective: Based on extensive field work in Cameroon and a variety of primary and secondary sources, this paper argues that Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis, which began in October 2016, degenerated into violence because of a catalogue of miscalculations made by President Paul Biya’s regime. It also argues that the crisis has had a devastating impact on the way of life in the Anglophone region. This paper concludes with recommendations on what needs to be done to …

"A White-And-Negro Environment Which Is Seldom Spotlighted" The Twilight Of Jim Crow In The Postwar Urban Midwest, Brent M. S. Campney

History Faculty Publications

This article investigates white-black race relations in postwar urban Kansas. Focusing on seven small and mid-sized cities, it explores how white Kansans continued to maintain discrimination, segregation, and exclusion in these years, even as they yielded slowly to the demands of civil rights activists and their supporters. Specifically, it examines the means employed by whites to assert their dominance in social interactions; to discriminate in housing, employment, and commerce; and, in some cases, to defend their all-white (or nearly all-white) municipalities, the so-called sundown towns, from any black presence at all. In addition, it briefly discusses the white backlash which …

[Review Of] Maroon Nation: A History Of Revolutionary Haiti. By Johnhenry Gonzalez. Yale Agrarian Studies Series. Edited By James C. Scott. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. Xiv+302. $40.00., Jeremy D. Popkin

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Inequality, Living Standards And Growth: Two Centuries Of Economic Development In Mexico, Ingrid Bleynat, Amilcar Challú, Paul Segal

History Faculty Publications

Historical wage and incomes data are informative both as normative measures of living standards, and as indicators of patterns of economic development. We show that, given limited historical data, median incomes are most appropriate for measuring welfare and inequality, while urban unskilled wages can be used to test dualist models of development. We present a new dataset including both series in Mexico from 1800 to 2015 and find that both have historically failed to keep up with aggregate growth: per worker GDP is now over eight times higher than in the nineteenth century, while unskilled urban real wages are only …

“The Path Of Dictatorship”: The Erosion Of Democracy And Capitalism In Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico And Colombia*, James E. Sanders

History Faculty Publications

The first erosion of democracy in Latin America did not occur in the twentieth-century, but, rather, the nineteenth. I will argue that in Mexico and Colombia a vibrant, democratic political culture had emerged by the 1850s; however, by the 1870s, a political movement that united Liberals and Conservatives began to suspect that the democratic politics they had once regarded as making them modern was instead hindering their societies’ progress. Democracy was not promoting, but, rather, hindering economic progress. This essay will explore the historic relation between capitalism (as Latin America entered into a period of export-oriented capitalist growth) and democracy …

Pepito And The Last Tamalada, Manuel F. Medrano

History Faculty Publications

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience of being attending Central Jr. High School in Brownsville, Texas, U.S. of America and discovered the first facial pimple and did not know what to do with it.

Lincoln And Education, Rolando Avila, Anita Pankake

History Faculty Publications

The current norm of compulsory formal schooling includes a system in which schools teach state mandated curriculum, parents are held legally responsible to assure their children attend school until they reach a certain age, and students are confined within set class meeting times and set locations during their schooling years. The two terms, education and schooling, have been increasingly used synonymously. Our assertion here is that education is a more inclusive term than schooling. More importantly, using Abraham Lincoln as a biographical model, we argue that a good education can be achieved in different ways.

Once Upon A Time In West Chester, James Jones

History Faculty Publications

While most of my local history research has focused on industrial development and urban revitalization, this work examines a darker period in the late 1960s when West Chester underwent the kind of decline that plagued small towns all over the country. The intersection of middle class flight, youth rebellion, drug culture, racial strife and official corruption led to a murder and a series of sensational trials that revealed the limits of justice under Pennsylvania state law.

- Jim Jones

Bridging Boundaries: Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge And The International Child Welfare Movement, 1910-1948, Anya Jabour

History Faculty Publications

As a social worker and social reformer in Chicago, a policy consultant for the U.S. Children’s Bureau, and an active participant in both European and Latin American reform movements, Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge (1866-1948) was an integral part of the child welfare movement at the local, national, and international levels throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Summing up Breckinridge’s four decades of child welfare advocacy, Children’s Bureau Chief Katharine Lenroot declared, “The children of the world are richer because she lived and cared.”[i] Indeed, Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge and the international child welfare movement advanced child welfare, international cooperation, and …

Book Review: Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism And Authenticity, J. Mark Souther

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review: Border Spaces: Visualizing The U.S.-Mexico Frontera, Edited By Katherine G. Morrissey And John-Michael H. Warner., George T. Díaz

History Faculty Publications

Border Spaces offers an interdisciplinary examination of the land border between the United States and Mexico beginning with its mapping in the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Editors and contributors utilize their backgrounds in history and art history to examine issues, including the building of border fences, the management of the natural environment, and political art on the fence itself The two main questions the volume addresses are as follows: (1) "How has the land border between Mexico and the United States been represented and defined over time?" and (2) "How have state, commercial, regional, and individual interests shaped …

“‘Curating Kisumu’ And ‘Curating East Africa’: Academic Collaboration And Public Engagement In The Digital Age”, J. Mark Souther, Meshack Owino

History Faculty Publications

This essay examines the origin, permutations, potentials, challenges, and implications of two successive, collaborative public history research, teaching, and learning projects undertaken by the Department of History at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, and the Department of History and Archeology at Maseno University, Kisumu, Kenya between 2014 and 2018. The two projects explored how opportunities created by the mobile revolution in Africa could be leveraged to generate new ways of acquiring historical information and knowledge between students and faculty in universities separated by enormous distances and by disparate social, economic, and political experiences. Specifically, the projects examined how the cellphone …

Copper Stain: Asarco’S Legacy In El Paso. The Environment In Modern North America. By Elaine Hampton And Cynthia C. Ontiveros, Amy M. Hay

History Faculty Publications

The term “obligated exposure” represents one of the most useful and terrible concepts offered in Elaine Hampton’s and Cynthia C. Ontiveros’s Copper Stain. It embodies the idea that the (mostly) men who worked at the El Paso, Texas ASARCO copper smelting plant and the surrounding community acquiesced to the toxic chemicals produced in order to gain “economic resources” (p. 129). Based on sixty-five interviews (only one woman), the story offers a searing and horrific study of highly risky work conditions that included dangerous machinery, molten fire, and hazardous chemicals. It suggests that place (border) and region (the West) play …

Between Ausländer And Almancı: The Transnational History Of Turkish-German Migration, Michelle Lynn Kahn

History Faculty Publications

Although he had anticipated feeling happy in his homeland, Erdem was “shocked” to find himself the target of discrimination when he visited Turkey in 1991. A second-generation Turkish migrant born and raised in West Germany, the longhaired 21-year-old who played in a garage band called Apocalyptica stuck out from the local Turks. “You can’t imagine how crazy these people were,” he recalled. “They had an olfactory sense. They could smell that I was from Germany.” Twice, this prejudice turned to violence. Erdem was “lynched,” in his words, once at a discotheque and once while strolling along the sea- side. In …

Cameroon’S Relations Toward Nigeria: A Foreign Policy Of Pragmatism, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Existing literature argues that the tactics of Cameroon foreign policy have been conservative, weak and timid. This study refutes that perspective. Based on extensive and previously unused primary sources obtained from Cameroon’s Ministry of External Relations and from the nation’s archives in Buea and Yaoundé, this study argues that Cameroon’s foreign policy was neither timid nor makeshift. Its strategy was one of pragmatism. By examining the nation’s policy toward Nigeria in the reunification of Cameroon, the Nigerian civil war, the Bakassi Peninsula crisis and Boko Haram, the study maintains that, while the nation’s policy was cautious, its leaders focused on …

Review Of Women In Texas History, By Angela Boswell, Linda English

History Faculty Publications

Angela Boswell’s Women in Texas History is a narrative account of Texas history told through the experiences of women, spanning from the prehistoric period to Senator Wendy Davis’s marathon filibuster for reproductive rights on the floor of the Texas legislature in 2013. Throughout the book, Boswell’s gendered focus intersects with racial, ethnic, and class categories of analysis, providing an ambitious and highly inclusive examination of the state’s history. [End Page 130] On this approach, Boswell notes that “this book pays special attention to the differences in the lived experiences of Native Americans, Tejanas, African Americans, Anglos, Germans, and Asians. Other …

Experiences Of Teaching In Transition: The Move Online, Spring 2020, Matt Schumann

History Faculty Publications

Anyone who experienced the transition to online course delivery in Spring 2020 probably had an opinion on it. Twenty-nine respondents completed this 20-minute survey on technical, emotional, pedagogical, and administrative aspects of the transition, including both faculty and students. The data gathered here offers an enduring testimony of their lived experience, and may inform a variety of pedagogical research.

Sicily Before The Greeks. The Interaction With Aegean And The Levant In The Pre-Colonial Era, Davide Tanasi

History Faculty Publications

The relationship between Sicily and the eastern Mediterranean – namely Aegean, Cyprus and the Levant – represents one of the most intriguing facets of the prehistory of the island. The frequent and periodical contact with foreign cultures were a trigger for a gradual process of socio-political evolution of the indigenous community. Such relationship, already in inception during the Neolithic and the Copper Age, grew into a cultural phenomenon ruled by complex dynamics and multiple variables that ranged from the Mid-3rd to the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. In over 1,500 years, a very large quantity of Aegean and Levantine …

The Yellow Emperor’S Inner Transmission Of Acupuncture By Zhenhai Yang (Review), David Luesink

History Faculty Publications

Review of The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Transmission of Acupuncture.

ISBN: 9789882371132

Green Spots In The Heart Of Town’: Planning And Contesting The Nation’S Widest Streets In Georgia’S Fall Line Cities, J. Mark Souther

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

After The Deluge: Central American Historiography At Low Tide, Robert H. Holden

History Faculty Publications

This essay reviews the following works:

Centroamérica: Filibusteros, estados, imperios y memorias. By Víctor Hugo Acuña. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Costa Rica, 2014. Pp. xv + 151. $5.99 paperback. ISBN: 9789968684408.

I Ask for Justice: Maya Women, Dictators, and Crime in Guatemala, 1898–1944. By David Carey Jr. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Pp. xxv + 335. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780292748682.

A Camera in the Garden of Eden: The Self-Forging of a Banana Republic. By Kevin Coleman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 312. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477308554.

Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in …