Title: Reflections on the way to the gallows: rebel women in prewar Japan
Author: Hane, Mikiso
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Japan | Women's Studies | Asian History
Publisher's Description: In this book, for the first time, we can hear the startling, moving voices of adventurous and rebellious Japanese women as they eloquently challenged the social repression of prewar Japan. The extraordinary women whose memoirs, recollections, and essays are presented here constitute a strong current . . . [more]
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Title: From catastrophe to power: Holocaust survivors and the emergence of Israel
Author: Zertal, Idith
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Judaism | History
Publisher's Description: In a book certain to generate controversy and debate, Idith Zertal boldly interprets a much revered chapter in contemporary Jewish and Zionist history: the clandestine immigration to Palestine of Jewish refugees, most of them Holocaust survivors, that was organized by Palestinian Zionists just after World War II. Events that captured the attention of the world, such as the Exodus affair in the summer 1947, are seen here in a strikingly new light.At the center of Zertal's book is the Mossad, a small, unorthodox Zionist organization whose mission beginning in 1938 was to bring Jews to Palestine in order to subvert the British quotas on Jewish immigration. From Catastrophe to Power scrutinizes the Mossad's mode of operation, its ideology and politics, its structure and history, and its collective human profile as never before.Zertal's moving story sweeps across four continents and encompasses a range of political cultures and international forces. But underneath this story another darker and more complex plot unfolds: the special encounter between the Zionist revolutionary collective and the mass of Jewish remnant after the Holocaust. According to Zertal, this psychologically painful yet politically powerful encounter was the Zionists' most effective weapon in their struggle for a sovereign Jewish state. Drawing on primary archival documents and new readings of canonical texts of the period, she analyzes this encounter from all angles - political, social, cultural, and psychological. The outcome is a gripping and troubling human story of a crucial period in Jewish and Israeli history, one that also provides a key to understanding the fundamental tensions between Israel and the Jewish communities and Israel and the world today.   [brief]
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Title: Cecil B. DeMille and American culture: the silent era 
Author: Higashi, Sumiko
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | History | Film | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture demonstrates that the director, best remembered for his overblown biblical epics, was one of the most remarkable film pioneers of the Progressive Era. In this innovative work, which integrates cultural history and cultural studies, Sumiko Higashi shows how DeMille artfully inserted cinema into genteel middle-class culture by replicating in his films such spectacles as elaborate parlor games, stage melodramas, department store displays, Orientalist world's fairs, and civic pageantry. The director not only established his signature as a film author by articulating middle-class ideology across class and ethnic lines, but by the 1920's had become a trendsetter, with set and costume designs that influenced the advertising industry to create a consumer culture based on female desire. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped material from the DeMille Archives and other collections, Higashi provides imaginative readings of DeMille's early feature films, viewing them in relation to the dynamics of social change, and she documents the extent to which the emergence of popular culture was linked to the genteel tradition.   [brief]
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Title: A nationality of her own: women, marriage, and the law of citizenship 
Author: Bredbenner, Candice Lewis 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | United States History | Women's Studies | Law | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: In 1907, the federal government declared that any American woman marrying a foreigner had to assume the nationality of her husband, and thereby denationalized thousands of American women. This highly original study follows the dramatic variations in women's nationality rights, citizenship law, and immigration policy in the United States during the late Progressive and interwar years, placing the history and impact of "derivative citizenship" within the broad context of the women's suffrage movement. Making impressive use of primary sources, and utilizing original documents from many leading women's reform organizations, government agencies, Congressional hearings, and federal litigation involving women's naturalization and expatriation, Candice Bredbenner provides a refreshing contemporary feminist perspective on key historical, political, and legal debates relating to citizenship, nationality, political empowerment, and their implications for women's legal status in the United States. This fascinating and well-constructed account contributes profoundly to an important but little-understood aspect of the women's rights movement in twentieth-century America.   [brief]
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Title: Martyred village: commemorating the 1944 massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane
Author: Farmer, Sarah Bennett
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | French Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Among German crimes of the Second World War, the Nazi massacre of 642 men, women, and children at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944, is one of the most notorious. On that Saturday afternoon, four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town in the rolling farm country of the Limousin. Soldiers marched the men to nearby barns, lined them up, and shot them. They then locked the women and children in the church, shot them, and set the building and the rest of the town on fire. Residents who had been away for the day returned to a blackened scene of horror, carnage, and devastation.In 1946 the French State expropriated and preserved the entire ruins of Oradour. The forty acres of crumbling houses, farms and shops became France's village martyr , set up as a monument to French suffering under the German occupation. Today, the village is a tourist destination, complete with maps and guidebooks.In this first full-scale study of the destruction of Oradour and its remembrance over the half century since the war, Sarah Farmer investigates the prominence of the massacre in French understanding of the national experience under German domination. Through interviews with survivors and village officials, as well as extensive archival research, she pieces together a fascinating history of both a shattering event and its memorial afterlife.Complemented by haunting photographs of the site, Farmer's eloquent dissection of France's national memory addresses the personal and private ways in which, through remembrance, people try to come to terms with enormous loss. Martyred Village will have implications for the study of the history and sociology of memory, testimonies about remembrances of war and the Holocaust, and postmodern concerns with the presentation of the past.   [brief]
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Title: Students, professors, and the state in tsarist Russia 
Author: Kassow, Samuel D
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History
Publisher's Description: Between 1899 and 1911, student strikes and demonstrations disrupted Russia's higher educational institutions. The universities marched to their own peculiar tempo, however, and it was not until the strike of 1905 that student unrest coincided with mass movements outside the academic world. Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia , the first comprehensive study of the student movement during the waning decades of tsarist rule, centers on the interplay among student protest, faculty politics, and government policy toward the universities. The author examines the changing responses of students, faculty, and government officials to the crisis of the university and the old regime, throwing new light on the chronic political and social instability of the tsarist system. Kassow's familiarity with source material and his use of narratives from participants and observers alike provide both a trenchant analysis and a lively portrait of the times. Original and incisive, this book will be welcomed not only by specialists in the Russian field, but also by anyone interested in the dynamics of student protest and the role of the intellectual in popular movements.   [brief]
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Title: Railroad crossing: Californians and the railroad, 1850-1910
Author: Deverell, William Francis
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | California and the West | United States History | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: Nothing so changed nineteenth-century America as did the railroad. Growing up together, the iron horse and the young nation developed a fast friendship. Railroad Crossing is the story of what happened to that friendship, particularly in California, and it illuminates the chaos that was industrial America from the middle of the nineteenth century through the first decade of the twentieth.Americans clamored for the progress and prosperity that railroads would surely bring, and no railroad was more crucial for California than the transcontinental line linking East to West. With Gold Rush prosperity fading, Californians looked to the railroad as the state's new savior. But social upheaval and economic disruption came down the tracks along with growth and opportunity.Analyzing the changes wrought by the railroad, William Deverell reveals the contradictory roles that technology and industrial capitalism played in the lives of Americans. That contrast was especially apparent in California, where the gigantic corporate "Octopus" - the Southern Pacific Railroad - held near-monopoly status. The state's largest employer and biggest corporation, the S.P. was a key provider of jobs and transportation - and wielder of tremendous political and financial clout.Deverell's lively study is peopled by a rich and disparate cast: railroad barons, newspaper editors, novelists, union activists, feminists, farmers, and the railroad workers themselves. Together, their lives reflect the many tensions - political, social, and economic - that accompanied the industrial transition of turn-of-the-century America.   [brief]
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Title: Conversion to Christianity: historical and anthropological perspectives on a great transformation
Author: Hefner, Robert W 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Christianity | History
Publisher's Description: One of the most striking developments in the history of modern civilizations has been the conversion of tribal peoples to more expansively organized "world" religions. There is little scholarly consensus as to why these religions have endured and why conversion to them has been so widespread. These essays explore the phenomenon of Christian conversion from this world-building perspective. Combining rich case studies with original theoretical insights, this work challenges sociologists, anthropologists and historians of religion to reassess the varieties of religious experience and the convergent processes involved in religious change.   [brief]
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Title: Politics of the womb: women, reproduction, and the state in Kenya
Author: Thomas, Lynn M
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Women's Studies | African Studies | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: In more than a metaphorical sense, the womb has proven to be an important site of political struggle in and about Africa. By examining the political significance - and complex ramifications - of reproductive controversies in twentieth-century Kenya, this book explores why and how control of female initiation, abortion, childbirth, and premarital pregnancy have been crucial to the exercise of colonial and postcolonial power. This innovative book enriches the study of gender, reproduction, sexuality, and African history by revealing how reproductive controversies challenged long-standing social hierarchies and contributed to the construction of new ones that continue to influence the fraught politics of abortion, birth control, female genital cutting, and HIV/AIDS in Africa.   [brief]
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Title: Urban revolt: ethnic politics in the nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement 
Author: Hirsch, Eric L 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | United States History | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Urban Revolt is a careful, incisive reexamination of the most highly mobilized urban revolutionary force in American history - the late nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement. By documenting the importance of ethnic origins in accounting for political choice, Eric L. Hirsch completely reconceptualizes the dynamics of urban social movements.Hirsch links the industrialization of Chicago to the development and maintenance of an ethnically segmented labor market. Urbanization, he argues, fostered ethnic enclaves whose inhabitants were channeled into particular kinds of jobs and excluded from others. Hirsch then demonstrates the political implications of emergent ethnic identities and communities.In the late nineteenth century, Chicagoans of German background - denied economic power by Anglo-Americans' control of craft unions and excluded from political influence by Irish-dominated political machines - formulated radical critiques of the status quo and devised innovative political strategies. In contrast, the Irish revolutionary movement in Chicago targeted the oppressive British political system; Irish activists saw no reason to overthrow a Chicago polity that brought them political and economic upward mobility. Urban Revolt gives a new perspective on revolutionary mobilization by de-emphasizing the importance of class consciousness, social disorganization, and bureaucracy. In his original and provocative focus on the importance of ethnicity in accounting for political choice, Hirsch makes a valuable contribution to the study of social movements, race, and working-class politics.   [brief]
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Title: Divine passions: the social construction of emotion in India 
Author: Lynch, Owen M 1931-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | South Asia | History
Publisher's Description: Naked holy men denying sexuality and feeling; elderly people basking in the warmth and security provided by devoted and attentive family members; fastidious priests concerned solely with rules of purity and minutiae of ritual practice; puritanical moralists concealing women and sexuality behind purdah's veils - these are familiar Western stereotypes of India. The essays in Divine Passions , however, paint other, more colorful and emotionally alive pictures of India: ecstatic religious devotees rolling in temple dust; gray-haired elders worrying about neglect and mistreatment by family members; priests pursuing a lusty, carefree ideal of the good life; and jokers reviling one another with bawdy, sexual insults at marriages.Drawing on rich ethnographic data from emotion-charged scenarios, these essays question Western academic theories of emotion, particularly those that reduce emotions to physiological sensations or to an individual's private feelings. Presenting an alternative view of emotions as culturally constructed and morally evaluative concepts grounded in the bodily self, the contributors to Divine Passions help dispel some of the West's persistent misconceptions of Indian emotional experience. Moreover, the edition as a whole argues for a new and different understanding of India based on field research and an understanding of the devotional (bhakti) tradition.   [brief]
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Title: Russia's women: accommodation, resistance, transformation
Author: Clements, Barbara Evans 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: By ignoring gender issues, historians have failed to understand how efforts to control women - and women's reactions to these efforts - have shaped political and social institutions and thus influenced the course of Russian and Soviet history. These original essays challenge a host of traditional assumptions by integrating women into the Russian past. Using recent advances in the study of gender, the family, class, and the status of women, the authors examine various roles of Russian women and offer a broad overview of a vibrant and growing field.   [brief]
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Title: Vietnam 1945: the quest for power
Author: Marr, David G
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Southeast Asia | Asian History | Politics
Publisher's Description: 1945: the most significant year in the modern history of Vietnam. One thousand years of dynastic politics and monarchist ideology came to an end. Eight decades of French rule lay shattered. Five years of Japanese military occupation ceased. Allied leaders determined that Chinese troops in the north of Indochina and British troops in the South would receive the Japanese surrender. Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with himself as president.Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews, and an examination of published memoirs and documents, David G. Marr has written a richly detailed and descriptive analysis of this crucial moment in Vietnamese history. He shows how Vietnam became a vortex of intense international and domestic competition for power, and how actions in Washington and Paris, as well as Saigon, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh's mountain headquarters, interacted and clashed, often with surprising results. Marr's book probes the ways in which war and revolution sustain each other, tracing a process that will interest political scientists and sociologists as well as historians and Southeast Asia specialists.   [brief]
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Title: Oil and revolution in Mexico 
Author: Brown, Jonathan C. (Jonathan Charles) 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Latin American History | Latin American Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Anyone contemplating the consequences of foreign investment in Latin America will profit from reading this book. As Jonathan Brown shows, the dynamic growth of the Mexican oil industry resulted from both the domination of foreign capital and Mexico's own economic restructuring, conditions similar to those under which free-market reforms are being adopted throughout the hemisphere today.Brown's research into the operations of the British and American oil companies in Mexico between 1880 and 1920 reveals their involvement in the events that led the country to revolution in 1910. He weaves a fascinating, exciting story out of the maneuverings among oil men, politicians, diplomats, and workers in a period of massive social upheaval.Oil companies brought capital, technology, and jobs to Mexico, but they also threatened its deeply rooted social heritage. Brown shows that the Mexican response to this double-edged situation was far more effective than has been recognized. Mexicans of all classes were remarkably successful in imposing their own traditions on the powerful companies.Lively, provocative but evenhanded, with darts of wry humor, this study will engage a wide variety of readers: business, economic, political, labor, and social historians and students of Latin America, foreign investment, and international relations.   [brief]
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Title: The prince and the law, 1200-1600: sovereignty and rights in the western legal tradition
Author: Pennington, Kenneth
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Medieval History | Law
Publisher's Description: The power of the prince versus the rights of his subjects is one of the basic struggles in the history of law and government. In this masterful history of monarchy, conceptions of law, and due process, Kenneth Pennington addresses that struggle and opens an entirely new vista in the study of Western legal tradition.Pennington investigates legal interpretations of the monarch's power from the twelfth to the seventeenth century. Then, tracing the evolution of defendants' rights, he demonstrates that the origins of due process are not rooted in English common law as is generally assumed. It was not a sturdy Anglo-Saxon, but, most probably, a French jurist of the late thirteenth century who wrote, "A man is innocent until proven guilty."This is the first book to examine in detail the origins of our concept of due process. It also reveals a fascinating paradox: while a theory of individual rights was evolving, so, too, was the concept of the prince's "absolute power." Pennington illuminates this paradox with a clarity that will greatly interest students of political theory as well as legal historians.   [brief]
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Title: Suspended music: chime-bells in the culture of Bronze Age China
Author: Falkenhausen, Lothar von
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Music | Asian History | China | Art History
Publisher's Description: The Chinese made the world's first bronze chime-bells, which they used to perform ritual music, particularly during the Shang and Zhou dynasties (ca. 1700-221 B.C.). Lothar von Falkenhausen's rich and detailed study reconstructs how the music of these bells - the only Bronze Age instruments that can still be played - may have sounded and how it was conceptualized in theoretical terms. His analysis and discussion of the ritual, political, and technical aspects of this music provide a unique window into ancient Chinese culture.This is the first interdisciplinary perspective on recent archaeological finds that have transformed our understanding of ancient Chinese music. Of great significance to the understanding of Chinese culture in its crucial formative stage, it provides a fresh point of departure for exploring later Asian musical history and offers great possibilities for comparisons with music worldwide.   [brief]
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Title: Rickshaw Beijing: city people and politics in the 1920s
Author: Strand, David
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | Politics | Asian History | China
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Title: Sister of wisdom: St. Hildegard's theology of the feminine
Author: Newman, Barbara 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Religion | Gender Studies | Women's Studies | Intellectual History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Barbara Newman reintroduces English-speaking readers to an extraordinary and gifted figure of the twelfth-century renaissance. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was mystic and writer, musician and preacher, abbess and scientist who used symbolic theology to explore the meaning of her gender within the . . . [more]
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Title: Palestinian politics after the Oslo Accords: resuming Arab Palestine
Author: Brown, Nathan J
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: This timely and critically important work does what hostilities in the Middle East have made nearly impossible: it offers a measured, internal perspective on Palestinian politics, viewing emerging political patterns from the Palestinian point of view rather than through the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Based on groundbreaking fieldwork, interviews with Palestinian leaders, and an extensive survey of Arabic-language writings and documents, Palestinian Politics after the Oslo Accords presents the meaning of state building and self-reliance as Palestinians themselves have understood them in the years between 1993 and 2002. Nathan J. Brown focuses his work on five areas: legal development, constitution drafting, the Palestinian Legislative Council, civil society, and the effort to write a new curriculum. His book shows how Palestinians have understood efforts at building institutions as acts of resumption rather than creation - with activists and leaders seeing themselves as recovering from an interrupted past, Palestinians seeking to rejoin the Arab world by building their new institutions on Arab models, and many Palestinian reformers taking the Oslo Accords as an occasion to resume normal political life. Providing a clear and urgently needed vantage point on most of the issues of Palestinian reform and governance that have emerged in recent policy debates - issues such as corruption, constitutionalism, democracy, and rule of law - Brown's book helps to put Palestinian aspirations and accomplishments in their proper context within a long and complex history and within the larger Arab world.   [brief]
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Title: Crimes against nature: squatters, poachers, thieves, and the hidden history of American conservation 
Author: Jacoby, Karl 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | United States History | Natural History
Publisher's Description: Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on the impact that conservation in these areas had on rural people, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting and fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in these newly created parks. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these "crimes" and provides a rich portrait of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This engagingly written study demonstrates the important ways in which class has influenced environmental history.   [brief]
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