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L’assassinat de Marx Dormoy: Enquête sur la "Cagoule"
2024Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite
Dans la nuit du 25 juillet 1941, une bombe est placée dans le lit de l’ancien ministre français de l’Intérieur Marx Dormoy, un proche de Léon Blum. En 1937, Dormoy avait mené une enquête sur la Cagoule, organisation terroriste d’extrême droite, qui cherchait à se venger. L’assassinat de Dormoy le 26 juillet a déclenché une enquête policière longue de deux ans qui permet de remonter le fil d’un complot jusqu’aux plus hautes sphères du régime de Vichy.
Basé sur l’examen de milliers de documents, cet ouvrage raconte l’enquête menée par le commissaire de police Charles Chenevier, qui se bat pour traquer les assassins de Dormoy malgré l’opposition de Vichy et des collaborationnistes pronazis à Paris.
En retraçant les divisions politiques profondes de la France, les choix faits pendant la guerre et la mémoire de l’après-guerre, les auteures analysent l’impact de l’extrémisme fasciste sur l’histoire de la France et révèlent pourquoi, après la guerre, aucun des assassins de Dormoy n’a été puni.
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William Hanson and the Texas-Mexico Border: Violence, Corruption, and the Making of the Gatekeeper State
2024John Weber
An examination of the career of Texas Ranger and immigration official William Hanson illustrating the intersections of corruption, state-building, and racial violence in early twentieth century Texas.
At the Texas-Mexico border in the 1910s and 1920s, William Hanson was a witness to, and an active agent of, history. As a Texas Ranger captain and then a top official in the Immigration Service, he helped shape how US policymakers understood the border, its residents, and the movement of goods and people across the international boundary. An associate of powerful politicians and oil company executives, he also used his positions to further his and his patrons' personal interests, financial and political, often through threats and extralegal methods.
Hanson’s career illustrates the ways in which legal exclusion, white-supremacist violence, and official corruption overlapped and were essential building blocks of a growing state presence along the border in the early twentieth century. In this book, John Weber reveals Hanson’s cynical efforts to use state and federal power to proclaim the border region inherently dangerous and traces the origins of current nativist politics that seek to demonize the border population. In doing so, he provides insight into how a minor political appointee, motivated by his own ambitions, had lasting impacts on how the border was experienced by immigrants and seen by the nation. [Amazon.com]
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The Struggle for Change: Race and the Politics of Reconciliation in Modern Richmond
2023Marvin T. Chiles
A Black-majority city with a history of the most severe segregation and inequity, Richmond is still grappling with this legacy as it moves into the twenty-first century. Marvin Chiles now offers a unique take on Richmond’s racial politics since the civil rights era by demonstrating that the city’s current racial disparities in economic mobility, housing, and public education actually represent the unintended consequences of Richmond’s racial reconciliation measures. He deftly weaves municipal politics together with grassroots efforts, examining the work and legacies of Richmond’s Black leaders, from Henry Marsh on the city council in the 1960s to Mayor Levar Stoney, to highlight the urban revitalization and public history efforts meant to overcome racial divides after Jim Crow yet which ironically reinforced racial inequality across the city. Compellingly written, this project carries both local and broader regional significance for Richmonders, Virginians, southerners, and all Americans. [From the publisher]
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The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Material Cultures
2023Irina D. Mihalache (Editor) and Elizabeth Zanoni (Editor)
Cookbooks. Menus. Ingredients. Dishes. Pots. Kitchens. Markets. Museum exhibitions. These objects, representations, and environments are part of what the volume calls the material cultures of food. The book features leading scholars, professionals, and chefs who apply a material cultural perspective to consider two relatively unexplored questions: 1) What is the material culture of food? and 2) How are frameworks, concepts, and methods of material culture used in scholarly research and professional practice?
This book acknowledges that materiality is historically and culturally specific (local), but also global, as food both transcends and collapses geographical and ideological borders. Contributors capture the malleability of food, its material environments and “stuff,” and its representations in media, museums, and marketing, while following food through cycles of production, circulation, and consumption. As many of the featured authors explore, food and its many material and immaterial manifestations not only reflect social issues, but also actively produce, preserve, and disrupt identities, communities, economic systems, and everyday social practices.
The volume includes contributions from and interviews with a dynamic group of scholars, museum and information professionals, and chefs who represent diverse disciplines, such as communication studies, anthropology, history, American studies, folklore, and food studies. [From the publisher]
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The Battle of Gettysburg 1863 (2): The Second Day
2023Timothy J. Orr and Steve Noon (Illustrator)
This work provides an authoritative illustrated examination of the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, analyzing both grand strategy, and the tactical decisions of Day Two and the ensuing combat.
July 2, 1863 was the bloodiest and most complicated of the three days of the Battle of Gettysburg. On this day, the clash involved five divisions of Confederate infantry and their accompanying artillery battalions, as well as a cavalry skirmish at nearby Hunterstown. The bulk of the Union army engaged on the second day of fighting, including men from the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 11th and 12th Corps.
Assisted by superb maps and 3D diagrams, this fascinating work describes the tactical play-by-play, the customary “who did what” of the battle. Among the famous actions covered are Hunterstown and Benner's Hill, Little Round Top, Devil's Den, the Rose Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, and Culp's and Cemetery hills. The critical decisions taken on the second day are examined in detail, and why the commanders committed to them. Gettysburg was-first and foremost-a soldier's battle, full of raw emotion and high drama, and this work also examines the experience of combat as witnessed by the rank and file, bringing this to life in stunning battle scene artworks and primary accounts from common soldiers.
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The Oxford Handbook of Central American History
2022Robert H. Holden (Editor)
The Oxford Handbook of Central American History analyzes major themes in the historiography of this seven-nation region of Latin America. Individual chapters interpret the histories of each of the seven countries. Most concentrate on themes that cut across national boundaries, beginning with the history of the region's diverse natural environment, and continuing with the Indigenous peoples, the Spanish conquest and colonial rule, and the independence process. Nine chapters focus on region-wide problems that emerged with great salience after independence, including the economy, US relations, the armed forces, the Cold War, religion, and literature, among others. Together, the book's twenty-five chapters illuminate Central America's coherence as a region of Latin America while emphasizing its diversity within and across national boundaries. [From the publisher]
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Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine
2022Megan Nutzman
In the ancient Mediterranean world, individuals routinely looked for divine aid to cure physical afflictions. Contested Cures argues that the inevitability of sickness and injury made people willing to experiment with seemingly beneficial techniques, even if they originated in a foreign cultural or religious tradition. With circumstances of close cultural contacts, such as prevailed in Palestine, the setting was ripe for neighboring Jews, Samaritans, Christians, Greeks and Romans to borrow rituals perceived to be efficacious and to alter them to fit their own religious framework. As a result, they employed related means of seeking miraculous cures. The similarities of these rituals, despite changes in the identity of the divine healers that they invoked, made them the subject of polemical discourse among elite authors trying to police collective borders. Contested Cures investigates the resulting intersection of ritual healing and communal identity.
This innovative study synthesizes evidence for the full range of healing rituals that were practiced in the ancient Mediterranean world. Examining both literary and archaeological evidence, it considers ritual healing as a component of identity formation and deconstructs the artificial boundary between ‘magic’ and ‘religion’ in relation to ritual cures. [Amazon.com]
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Battle of Gettysburg 1863 (1): The First Day
2022Timothy J. Orr and Steve Noon (Illustrator)
This first volume of three discusses the tactical decisions made on day one and the ensuing combat, while also including a brief summary of the grand strategy in the Eastern Theater of the war, the conduct of the Pennsylvania Campaign from June 6 to 30, 1863, and the plight of civilians caught up in the conflict.
This volume, the first of three to cover the battle in depth, also emphasizes the experience of combat as witnessed by the rank and file-the 'face of battle'-to borrow John Keegan's expression. Primary accounts from common soldiers remind readers that Gettysburg was-first and foremost-a soldier's battle, full of raw emotion. This superbly detailed study explores the battle chronologically; but in cases where several actions occurred simultaneously, the chapters are partitioned according to key terrain features. Among the action covered is the morning cavalry skirmish, the morning clash at the Herbst's wood lot and at the railroad cut, the afternoon clash at Oak Ridge, the afternoon fight at the Edward McPherson farm, the afternoon rout of the 11th Corps, the last stand of the 1st Corps at Seminary Ridge, the Union retreat through town, and the positions of the armies at nightfall. [Amazon.com]
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American Sports and the Great War: College, Military and Professional Athletics, 1916-1919
2021Peter C. Stewart
Drawing on newspaper accounts, college yearbooks and the recollections of veterans, this book examines the impact of World War I on sports in the U.S. As young men entered the military in large numbers, many colleges initially considered suspending athletics but soon turned to the idea of using sports to build morale and physical readiness. Recruits, mostly in their twenties, ended up playing more baseball and football than they would have in peacetime. Though most college athletes volunteered for military duty, others replaced them so that the reduction of competition was not severe. Pugilism gained participants as several million men learned how to box. [Amazon.com]
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Assassination in Vichy: Marx Dormoy and the Struggle for the Soul of France
2020Gayle Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite
During the night of 25 July 1941, assassins planted a time bomb in the bed of the former French Interior Minister, Marx Dormoy. The explosion on the following morning launched a two-year investigation that traced Dormoy’s murder to the highest echelons of the Vichy regime. Dormoy, who had led a 1937 investigation into the “Cagoule,” a violent right-wing terrorist organization, was the victim of a captivating revenge plot. Based on the meticulous examination of thousands of documents, Assassination in Vichy tells the story of Dormoy’s murder and the investigation that followed.
At the heart of this book lies a true crime that was sensational in its day. A microhistory that tells a larger and more significant story about the development of far-right political movements, domestic terrorism, and the importance of courage, Assassination in Vichy explores the impact of France’s deep political divisions, wartime choices, and post-war memory. [From the publisher]
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Leibniz Discovers Asia: Social Networking in the Republic of Letters
2019Michael C. Carhart
Who are the nations of Europe, and where did they come from? Early modern people were as curious about their origins as we are today. Lacking twenty-first-century DNA research, seventeenth-century scholars turned to language—etymology, vocabulary, and even grammatical structure—for evidence. The hope was that, in puzzling out the relationships between languages, the relationships between nations themselves would emerge, and on that basis one could determine the ancestral homeland of the nations that presently occupied Europe.
In Leibniz Discovers Asia, Michael C. Carhart explores this early modern practice by focusing on philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who developed a vast network of scholars and missionaries throughout Europe to acquire the linguistic data he needed. The success of his project was tied to the Jesuit search for an overland route to China, whose itinerary would take them through the nations from whom Leibniz wanted language samples. Drawing on Leibniz's extensive correspondence with the members of this network, Carhart gives us access to the philosopher's scintillating discussions about astronomy and mapping; ethnology and missionary work; the contest of the Asiatic empires of Muscovy, Persia, the Ottoman, and China for control of the Caucasus, the steppes, and the Far East; and above all, language, as the best indicator of the prehistoric genealogy of the myriad peoples from Central Asia to Western Europe. [From the publisher]
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Sissi’s World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth
2018Maura E. Hametz (Editor) and Heidi Schlipphacke (Editor)
Sissi's World offers a transdisciplinary approach to the study of the Habsburg Empress Elisabeth of Austria. It investigates the myths, legends, and representations across literature, art, film, and other media of one of the most popular, revered, and misunderstood female figures in European cultural history.
Sissi's World explores the cultural foundations for the endurance of the Sissi legends and the continuing fascination with the beautiful empress: a Bavarian duchess born in 1837, the longest-serving Austrian empress, and the queen of Hungary who died in 1898 at the hands of a crazed anarchist.
Despite the continuing fascination with “the beloved Sissi," the Habsburg empress, her impact, and legacy have received scant attention from scholars. This collection will go beyond the popular biographical accounts, recountings of her mythic beauty, and scattered studies of her well-known eccentricities to offer transdisciplinary cultural perspectives across art, film, fashion, history, literature, and media. [From the Publisher]
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Migrant Marketplaces: Food and Italians in North and South America
2018Elizabeth Zanoni
Italian immigrants to the United States and Argentina hungered for the products of home. Merchants imported Italian cheese, wine, olive oil, and other commodities to meet the demand. The two sides met in migrant marketplaces--urban spaces that linked a mobile people with mobile goods in both real and imagined ways. Elizabeth Zanoni provides a cutting-edge comparative look at Italian people and products on the move between 1880 and 1940. Concentrating on foodstuffs--a trade dominated by Italian entrepreneurs in New York and Buenos Aires --Zanoni reveals how consumption of these increasingly global imports affected consumer habits and identities and sparked changing and competing connections between gender, nationality, and ethnicity. Women in particular--by tradition tasked with buying and preparing food--had complex interactions that influenced both global trade and their community economies. Zanoni conveys the complicated and often fraught values and meanings that surrounded food, meals, and shopping. [From the publisher]
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Never Call Me a Hero: A Legendary American Dive-Bomber Pilot Remembers the Battle of Midway
2017N. Jack "Dusty" Kleiss, Timothy Orr, and Laura Orr
On the morning of June 4, 1942, high above the tiny Pacific atoll of Midway, Lt. (j.g.) "Dusty" Kleiss burst out of the clouds and piloted his SBD Dauntless into a near-vertical dive aimed at the heart of Japan’s Imperial Navy, which six months earlier had ruthlessly struck Pearl Harbor. The greatest naval battle in history raged around him, its outcome hanging in the balance as the U.S. desperately searched for its first major victory of the Second World War. Then, in a matter of seconds, Dusty Kleiss’s daring 20,000-foot dive helped forever alter the war’s trajectory....
Dusty worked on this book for years with naval historians Timothy and Laura Orr, aiming to publish Never Call Me a Hero for Midway’s seventy-fifth anniversary in June 2017. Sadly, as the book neared completion in 2016, Dusty Kleiss passed away at age 100, one of the last surviving dive-bomber pilots to have fought at Midway. And yet the publication of Never Call Me a Hero is a cause for celebration: these pages are Dusty’s remarkable legacy, providing a riveting eyewitness account of the Battle of Midway, and an inspiring testimony to the brave men who fought, died, and shaped history during those four extraordinary days in June, seventy-five years ago. [From Amazon.com]
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The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy
2017Jane T. Merritt
In The Trouble with Tea, historian Jane T. Merritt explores tea as a central component of eighteenth-century global trade and probes its connections to the politics of consumption. Arguing that tea caused trouble over the course of the eighteenth century in a number of different ways, Merritt traces the multifaceted impact of that luxury item on British imperial policy, colonial politics, and the financial structure of merchant companies. Merritt challenges the assumption among economic historians that consumer demand drove merchants to provide an ever-increasing supply of goods, thus sparking a consumer revolution in the early eighteenth century. [From the publisher]
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Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World
2016Patryk Babiracki (Editor) and Austin Jersild (Editor)
This volume examines how numerous international transfers, circulations, and exchanges shaped the world of socialism during the Cold War. Over the course of half a century, the Soviets shaped politics, values and material culture throughout the vast space of Eurasia, and foreign forces in turn often influenced Soviet policies and society. The result was the distinct and interconnected world of socialism, or the Socialist Second World. Drawing on previously unavailable archival sources and cutting-edge insights from “New Cold War” and transnational histories, the twelve contributors to this volume focus on diverse cultural and social forms of this global socialist exchange: the cults of communist leaders, literature, cinema, television, music, architecture, youth festivals, and cultural diplomacy. The book’s contributors seek to understand the forces that enabled and impeded the cultural consolidation of the Socialist Second World. The efforts of those who created this world, and the limitations on what they could do, remain key to understanding both the outcomes of the Cold War and a recent legacy that continues to shape lives, cultures and policies in post-communist states today. [From the Back Cover]
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Gilded Age, Norfolk, Virginia: Tidewater Wealth, Industry and Propriety
2015Jaclyn Spainhour
Norfolk's rise as a premier seaport brought with it an increase in power, wealth and industry in the nineteenth century. Local prominent families lived in exquisitely crafted homes and owned flourishing local businesses. Cobblestone lined the Freemason District and downtown streets. The area's elite participated in numerous social clubs, religious groups and philanthropic organizations. One family, the Hunters, lived so luxuriously that they became one of the most fashionable families in the city. Join author Jaclyn Spainhour as she explores Norfolk's social customs, cosmopolitan soirées and more that truly embodied the Gilded Age. [From Amazon.com]
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Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860-1913 The Breakdown of a Moral Order
2015Jelmer Vos
This richly documented account of the arrival of rubber traders, new Christian missionaries, and the Portuguese colonial state in the Kongo realm is told from the perspective of the kingdom’s inhabitants. Jelmer Vos shows that both Africans and Europeans were able to forward differing social, political, and economic agendas as Kongo’s sacred city of São Salvador became a vital site for the expansion of European imperialism in Central Africa. Kongo people, he argues, built on the kingdom’s long familiarity with Atlantic commerce and cultures to become avid intermediaries in a new system of colonial trade and mission schools.
Vos underlines that Kongo’s incorporation in the European state system also had tragic consequences, including the undermining of local African structures of authority—on which the colonial system actually depended. Kongo in the Age of Empire carefully documents the involvement of Kongo’s royal court in the exercise of Portuguese rule in northern Angola and the ways that Kongo citizens experienced colonial rule as an increasingly illegitimate extension of royal power. [From the publisher]
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From South Texas to the Nation: The Exploitation of Mexican Labor in the Twentieth Century
2015John Weber
In the early years of the twentieth century, newcomer farmers and migrant Mexicans forged a new world in South Texas. In just a decade, this vast region, previously considered too isolated and desolate for large-scale agriculture, became one of the United States' most lucrative farming regions and one of its worst places to work. By encouraging mass migration from Mexico, paying low wages, selectively enforcing immigration restrictions, toppling older political arrangements, and periodically immobilizing the workforce, growers created a system of labor controls unique in its levels of exploitation.
Ethnic Mexican residents of South Texas fought back by organizing and by leaving, migrating to destinations around the United States where employers eagerly hired them--and continued to exploit them. In From South Texas to the Nation, John Weber reinterprets the United States' record on human and labor rights. This important book illuminates the way in which South Texas pioneered the low-wage, insecure, migration-dependent labor system on which so many industries continue to depend. [From Amazon.com]
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The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History
2014Austin Jersild
In 1950 the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance to foster cultural and technological cooperation between the Soviet bloc and the PRC. While this treaty was intended as a break with the colonial past, Austin Jersild argues that the alliance ultimately failed because the enduring problem of Russian imperialism led to Chinese frustration with the Soviets.
Jersild zeros in on the ground-level experiences of the socialist bloc advisers in China, who were involved in everything from the development of university curricula, the exploration for oil, and railway construction to piano lessons. Their goal was to reproduce a Chinese administrative elite in their own image that could serve as a valuable ally in the Soviet bloc's struggle against the United States. Interestingly, the USSR's allies in Central Europe were as frustrated by the "great power chauvinism" of the Soviet Union as was China. By exposing this aspect of the story, Jersild shows how the alliance, and finally the split, had a true international dimension. [Amazon.com]
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An American Diplomat in Bolshevik Russia: DeWitt Clinton Poole
2014Lorraine M. Lees (Editor) and William S. Rodner (Editor)
Diplomat DeWitt Clinton Poole arrived for a new job at the United States consulate office in Moscow in September 1917, just two months before the Bolshevik Revolution. In the final year of World War I, as Russians were withdrawing and Americans were joining the war, Poole found himself in the midst of political turmoil in Russia. U.S. relations with the newly declared Soviet Union rapidly deteriorated as civil war erupted and as Allied forces intervened in northern Russia and Siberia. Thirty-five years later, in the climate of the Cold War, Poole recounted his experiences as a witness to that era in a series of interviews.
Historians Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner introduce and annotate Poole's recollections, which give a fresh, firsthand perspective on monumental events in world history and reveal the important impact DeWitt Clinton Poole (1885–1952) had on U.S.–Soviet relations. He was active in implementing U.S. policy, negotiating with the Bolshevik authorities, and supervising American intelligence operations that gathered information about conditions throughout Russia, especially monitoring anti-Bolshevik elements and areas of German influence. Departing Moscow in late 1918 via Petrograd, he was assigned to the port of Archangel, then occupied by Allied and American forces, and left Russia in June 1919. [Amazon.com]
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The Japanese Submarine Force and World War II
2013Carl Boyd and Akihiko Yoshida
When first published in 1995, this book was hailed as an absolutely indispensable contribution to the history of the Pacific War. Drawing heavily from Japanese sources and American wartime intercepts of secret Japanese radio messages, a noted American naval historian and a Japanese mariner painstakingly record and evaluate a diverse array of material about Japan ‘s submarines in World War II.
The study begins with the development of the first Japanese 103-ton Holland-type submergible craft in 1905 and continues through the 1945 surrender of the largest submarine in the world at the time, the 5300-ton I-400 class that carried three airplanes. Submarine weapons, equipment, personnel, and shore support systems are discussed first in the context of Japanese naval preparations for war and later during the war. Both successes and missed opportunities are analyzed in operations ranging from the California coast through the Pacific and Indian Oceans to the coast of German-occupied France. Appendixes include lists of Japanese submarine losses and the biographies of key Japanese submarine officers. Rare illustrations and specifically commissioned operational maps enhance the text. [From the publisher]
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Fisheries Management in a Historical Perspective
2013Ingo Heidbrink (Editor) and Matthew McCarthy (Editor)
This book brings together revised and extended versions of selected papers given at the 2009 conference of the North Atlantic Fisheries History Association (NAFHA) hosted by the Department of History at ODU. Like previous volumes in the Studia Atlantica series, the book includes articles by scholars new to the field as well as by renowned fisheries scientists and historians. While the majority of contributions focus on the history of fisheries management, other articles deal with the social history of the North Atlantic fisheries as well as the future of fisheries history research.
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Contemporary Latin America 1970 to the Present
2013Robert H. Holden and Rina Villars
Contemporary Latin America presents the epochal political, economic, social, and cultural changes in Latin America over the last 40 years and comprehensively examines their impact on life in the region, and beyond. [From Amazon.com]
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Leisure and Cultural Conflict in Twentieth-Century Britain
2012Brett Bebber (Editor)
This collection of essays addresses research trends in the history of British leisure while also presenting a wide range of articles on cultural conflict and leisure in the twentieth century. It includes innovative research on a number of topics, including television, cinema, the circus, women's leisure, dance, football and drug culture. It provides an excellent entry to leisure studies and history, while addressing the contributions of other disciplines and exploring key historiographical trends. The chapters aim to emphasize contextualization to build studies of leisure into broader discussions of social and cultural change in twentieth-century Britain, as well as key moments and transitions in the 'society of leisure'. Three broad topics structure the collection; cultural contestation and social conflict in leisure, regulation and standardization, and national identity embodied in leisure and popular culture. The book will be useful to students and educators of twentieth-century and British history, as it offers accessible and topical studies that pique historical curiosity. In addition, historians, sociologists and cultural analysts of the twentieth century will find it essential for understanding pleasure and recreation in twentieth-century British society. [From Amazon.com]
A gallery of books by faculty from the Department of History, College of Arts & Letters, Old Dominion University.
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