Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2006

History, Geography & Area Studies, North America Top

The most comprehensive history to date of the state's struggle to desegregate its schools

CONTENTS Introduction I. SELMA: THE LAST REVOLUTION 1. Warning 2. Scouts 3. Dissent 4. Boxed In 5. Over the Bridge 6. The Call 7. Devil's Choice 8. The Ghost of Lincoln 9. Wallace and the Archbishop 10. And We Shall Overcome 11. Half-Inch Hailstones 12. Neutralize Their Anxieties 13. To Montgomery 14. The Stakes of History 15. Aftershocks 16. Bearings in a Whirlwind II. HIGH TIDE 17. Ten Feet Tall 18. Leaps of Faith 19. Gulps of Freedom 20. Fort Deposit 21. Watts and Hayneville 22. Fragile Alliance 23. Identity III. CROSSROADS IN FREEDOM AND WAR 24. Enemy Politics 25. Inside Out 26. Refugees 27. Break Points 28. Panther Ladies 29. Meredith March 30. Chicago 31. Valley Moments 32. Backlash IV. PASSION 33. Spy Visions 34. Riverside 35. Splinters 36. King's Choice 37. New Year Trials 38. Memphis 39. Requiem Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Examining the development of civil-military relations from the end of the Civil War until the start of the First World War, this volume demonstrates how the tradition of civilian control endured the military's transformation from a small, poorly funded force to a larger, prestigious international power.

A political leader's decisions can determine the fate of a nation, but whatdetermines how and why that leader makes certain choices? William H. Chafe, a distinguishedhistorian of twentieth century America, examines eight of the most significant political leadersof the modern era in order to explore the relationship between their personal patterns ofbehavior and their political decision-making process. The result is a fascinating look at howpersonal lives and political fortunes have intersected to shape America over the past fiftyyears.

A collection of sixty-two documents that convey the rich diversity of Chinese American experience, many originally written in Chinese, and most never before published.

This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus's arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on a grand scale, contrasting the worlds built by Britain and by Spain on the ruins of the civilizations they encountered and destroyed in North and South America. Elliott identifies and explains both the similarities and differences in the two empires' processes of colonization, the character of their colonial societies, their distinctive styles of imperial government, and the independence movements mounted against them. Based on wide reading in the history of the two great Atlantic civilizations, the book sets the Spanish and British colonial empires in the context of their own times and offers us insights into.phpects of this dual history that still influence the Americas.

The civil rights movement was first and foremost a struggle for racial equality, but questions of gender lay deeply embedded within this struggle. Steve Estes explores key groups, leaders, and events in the movement to understand how activists used race and manhood to articulate their visions of what American society should be. Estes demonstrates that, at crucial turning points in the movement, both segregationists and civil rights activists harnessed masculinist rhetoric, tapping into implicit assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality. Estes begins with an analysis of the role of black men in World War II and then examines the segregationists, who demonized black male sexuality and galvanized white men behind the ideal of southern honor. Later, he explores the militant new models of manhood espoused by civil rights activists and groups such as Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Panther Party. Reliance on masculinist organizing strategies had both positive and negative consequences, Estes concludes. Tracing these strategies from the integration of the U.S. military in the 1940s through the Million Man March in the 1990s, he shows that masculinism rallied men to action but left unchallenged many of the patriarchal assumptions that underlay American society.

Presenting many slaveholders as intelligent, honorable and pious men and women, this study asks how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that inflicted gross abuse on slaves. The South had formidable proslavery intellectuals who participated fully in transatlantic debates and boldly challenged an ascendant capitalist ("free-labor") society. Blending classical and Christian traditions, they forged a moral and political philosophy designed to sustain conservative principles in history, political economy, social theory, and theology, while translating them into political action.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, a host of movements struggled to make democracy and equality realities in America. A radical conception of democracy animated the movements for civil rights and black power, for peace and solidarity with the Third World, and for gender and sexual equality. From Vietnam to the war at home against African and Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans, from Women's to Gay Liberation, the New Left was the broadest-based movement for fundamental change in American history. This book synthesizes and chronicles those protests, confrontations, victories, and defeats over two decades and more. It has a much wider chronological focus than just the decade of the 1960s, and is the most inclusive and broadest ranging analytical synthesis of the New Left yet published.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: Settling In 15 CHAPTER TWO: Of Our Economic Strivings 48 CHAPTER THREE: Wars and Rumors of Wars 74 CHAPTER FOUR: And Why Not Every Man? 114 CHAPTER FIVE: Red Menace 169 CHAPTER SIX: Things Fall Apart 205 ABBREVIATIONS 257 NOTES 261 INDEX 339

This book contains nine studies by the group of "Peace Historians" who use scholarly methods to analyze the modern peace movement and its political ramifications.

An environmental History of California during the Gold Rush Between 1849 and 1874 almost $1 billion in gold was mined in California. With little available capital or labor, here’s how: high-pressure water cannons washed hillsides into sluices that used mercury to trap gold but let the soil wash away; eventually more than three times the amount of earth moved to make way for the Panama Canal entered California’s rivers, leaving behind twenty tons of mercury every mile—rivers overflowed their banks and valleys were flooded, the land poisoned. In the rush to wealth, the same chain of foreseeable consequences reduced California’s forests and grasslands. Not since William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis has a historian so skillfully applied John Muir’s insight—“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe”—to the telling of the history of the American West. Beautifully told, this is western environmental history at its finest.

Why did the youthful optimism and openness of the sixties give way to Ronald Reagan and the spirit of conservative reaction--a spirit that remains ascendant today?Drawing on a wide array of sources--including tabloid journalism, popular fiction, movies, and television shows--Philip Jenkins argues that a remarkable confluence of panics, scares, and a few genuine threats created a climate of fear that led to the conservative reaction. He identifies 1975 to 1986 as the watershed years. During this time, he says, there was a sharp increase in perceived threats to our security at home and abroad. At home, America seemed to be threatened by monstrous criminals--serial killers, child abusers, Satanic cults, and predatory drug dealers, to name just a few. On the international scene, we were confronted by the Soviet Union and its evil empire, by OPEC with its stranglehold on global oil, by the Ayatollahs who made hostages of our diplomats in Iran. Increasingly, these dangers began to be described in terms of moral evil. Rejecting the radicalism of the '60s, which many saw as the source of the crisis, Americans adopted a more pessimistic interpretation of human behavior, which harked back to much older themes in American culture. This simpler but darker vision ultimately brought us Ronald Reagan and the ascendancy of the political Right, which more than two decades later shows no sign of loosening its grip.Writing in his usual crisp and witty prose, Jenkins offers a truly original and persuasive account of a period that continues to fascinate the American public. It is bound to captivate anyone who lived through this period, as well as all those who want to understand the forces that transformed--and continue to define--the American political landscape.

Jane Addams was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This masterful biography reveals her early development as a political activist and social philosopher in lively detail and with deep appreciation for motive and character. In Citizen, we observe the powerful mind of a woman encountering the radical ideas of her age, most notably the ever-changing meanings of democracy. The book covers the first half of Addams's life—the years of her becoming—from 1860 to 1899. Louise W. Knight recounts how Addams, a child of a wealthy family innbsp;rural northern Illinois, longed for a life of larger purpose. She broadened her horizons through education, reading, and travel, and, after receiving an inheritance upon her father's death, moved to Chicago in 1889 to co-found Hull House, the city's first settlement house. Citizen shows vividly what the settlement house actually was—a neighborhood center for education and social gatherings—and describes how Addams learned of the abject working conditions in American factories, the unchecked power wielded by employers, the impact of corrupt local politics on city services, and the intolerable limits placed on women by their lack of voting rights. These experiences, Knight makes clear, transformed Addams. Always a believer in democracy as an abstraction, Addams came to understand that this national ideal was also a life philosophy and a mandate for civic activism by all.nbsp; As her story unfolds, Knight astutely captures the enigmatic Addams's compassionate personality as well as her flawed human side. Written in a strong narrative voice, Citizen is an insightful portrait of the formative years of a great American leader.nbsp;

By the 1890s, white Americans were avid consumers of American Indian cultures. At heavily scripted Wild West shows, Chautauquas, civic pageants, expositions, and fairs, American Indians were most often cast as victims, noble remnants of a vanishing race, or docile candidates for complete assimilation. However, as Lucy Maddox demonstrates in Citizen Indians, some prominent Indian intellectuals of the era-including Gertrude Bonnin, Charles Eastman, and Arthur C. Parker-were able to adapt and reshape the forms of public performance as one means of entering the national conversation and as a core strategy in the pantribal reform efforts that paralleled other Progressive-era reform movements. Maddox examines the work of American Indian intellectuals and reformers in the context of the Society of American Indians, which brought together educated, professional Indians in a period when the "Indian question" loomed large. These thinkers belonged to the first generation of middle-class American Indians more concerned with racial categories and civil rights than with the status of individual tribes. They confronted acute crises: the imposition of land allotments, the abrogation of the treaty process, the removal of Indian children to boarding schools, and the continuing denial of birthright citizenship to Indians that maintained their status as wards of the state. By adapting forms of public discourse and performance already familiar to white audiences, Maddox argues, American Indian reformers could more effectively pursue self-representation and political autonomy.

Comprehensive in its chronology, the works it discusses, and the commentators it critically examines,Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals tells the surprising story of Tocqueville's reception in American thought and culture from the time of his 1831 visit to the United States to the turn of the twenty-first century.

Preface Part I. A History of Irish Americans from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-first Century Introduction: The Irish as Immigrants and Ethnics 1. Irish Immigration to Colonial America 2. Irish America from the Revolution to the Famine 3. The Famine Years 4. The Turn of the Twentieth Century 5. The Twentieth Century 6. The 1960s to the Present Part II. Issues and Themes in Irish American History 1. Irish American Gender and Family 2. Irish Americans in Politics 3. Irish American Nationalism 4. Irish Americans and Race Part III. Important People, Organizations, Events, and Terms Part IV. Chronology of Irish America Part V. Bibliography

The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the UnitedStates well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends tothe rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments,A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formativeperiod for American Jews and the American left.

Florida is a story of astonishing growth, a state swelling from 500,000 residents all the outset of the 20th century to some 16 million at the end. As recently as mid-century, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Florida was the smallest state in the South. At the dawn on the millennium, it is the fourth largest in the century, a megastate that was among those introducing new words into the american vernacular: space coast, climate control, growth management, retirement community, theme park, edge cities, shopping mall, boomburbs, beach renourishment, Interstate, and Internet. "Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams attempts to understand the firestorm of change that erupted into modern Florida by examining the great social, cultural, and economic forces driving its transformation. Gary Mormino ranges far and wide across the landscape and boundaries of a place that is at once America's southermost state and the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean. From the capital, Tallahassee--"a day's walk from the Georgiaborder, to,Miami--"a city distant but tantalizingly close to Cuba and Haiti, Mormino traces the themes of Florida's transformation: the echoes of old Dixie and a vanishing Florida; land booms and tourist empires; revolutions in agriculture, technology, and demographics; the seductions of the beach and the dynamics of a graying population; and the enduring but changing meanings of a dreamstate. Beneath the iconography of popular culture is revealed a complex and complicated social framework that reflects a dizzying passage from New Spain of Old South, New South to Sunbelt.

A lively introduction to a New England observer of southern thought and custom. In this book O'Brien shows how Adams (grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams) looked at the region during various phases of his life. O'Brien explores the cultural and familial impulses behind those views and locates them in American intellectual history.

Roediger recounts how American ethnic groups that are considered white today, such as Jewish, Italian-, and Polish-Americans, once occupied a confused racial status in their new country.

The idea of covenant was at the heart of early New England society. In this important book David Weir explores the origins and development of covenant thought in America by analyzing the civil and church documents generated and signed by seventeenth-century New Englanders.

Unmatched in its breadth of study, this volume takes into account "all" of the surviving covenants in "all" of the New England colonies. This comprehensive survey of seventeenth-century covenants leads to a more complex picture of early New England commitments than portrayed in famous civil covenants like the Mayflower Compact. Weirbs work shows covenant theology being transformed into a covenantal vision for society, but also reveals the stress and strains on church and state relationships that eventually led to more secularized colonial governments in eighteenth-century New England. He concludes that New England colonial society was much more bEnglishb and much less bAmericanb than has often been thought, and that New England colonies,substantially mirrored religious and social change in Old England.

Wetherington examines the local effects of the Civil War on a section of southern Georgia, in part of the region known as Wiregrass Country. The author looks closely at the experiences of white "plain folk"--mostly yeoman farmers and craftspeople--who feared that emancipation would encourage freed slaves to move from cotton plantations into the piney woods communities they had claimed for themselves.