Old Is Gold

Decades before Miami became Havana USA, a wave of leftist, radical, working-class women and men from prerevolutionary Cuba crossed the Florida Straits, made Ybor City the global capital of the Cuban cigar industry, and established the foundation of latinidad in the Sunshine State. Located...

In the fall of 1999, the World Trade Organization (WTO) prepared to hold its biennial Ministerial Conference in Seattle. The event culminated in five days of chaotic political protest that would later be known as the Battle in Seattle. The convergence represented the pinnacle...

Cities are nothing without the streets--the arteries through which goods, people, and ideas flow. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, the city streets are where politics begins. In Struggle for the Street, Jessica D. Klanderud documents the development of class-based visions of political, social,...

At 8:00 p.m. eastern standard time on election night 1988, NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw informed the country that they would soon know more about the outcome of "one of the longest, bloodiest presidential campaigns that anyone can remember." It was a landslide victory...

Award-winning historian Tamika Y. Nunley has unearthed the stories of enslaved Black women charged by their owners with poisoning, theft, murder, infanticide, and arson. While free Black and white people accused of capital crimes received a hearing, trial, and, if convicted, an opportunity to...

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers and powerful individuals deployed a variety of tactics to control ordinary people as they sought to secure power in and out of workplaces. In the face of worker resistance, employers and their allies collaborated to...

Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. Yet, as Maria Cristina Garcia observes in this critical history of U.S. policy on migration in the...

For eight days in March 1970, over 200,000 postal workers staged an illegal "wildcat" strike--the largest in United States history--for better wages and working conditions. Picket lines started in New York and spread across the country like wildfire. Strikers defied court injunctions, threats of...

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In...

A fresh account of the US presidential rhetoric embodied in Cold War international travel. Crowds swarm when US presidents travel abroad, though many never hear their voices. The presidential body, moving from one secured location to another, communicates as much or more to these...

Highlighting the key events, ideas, and individuals that shaped modern Europe, this lively book provides a concise history of the continent from the Enlightenment to the present day. Drawing on the enduring theme of revolution, David S. Mason explores the political, economic, and scientific...

Painters Robert Duncanson (ca. 1821-1872) and Edward Bannister (1828-1901) and sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis (ca. 1844-1907) each became accomplished African American artists. But as emerging art makers of color during the antebellum period, they experienced numerous incidents of racism that severely hampered their pursuits...

Starting in the 1950s, US physicists dominated the search for elementary particles; aided by the association of this research with national security, they held this position for decades. In an effort to maintain their hegemony and track down the elusive Higgs boson, they convinced...

MISSISSIPPI HISTORICAL SOCIETY 2023 BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD RECIPIENT From lesser-known state figures to the ancestors of Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Freeman, and James Meredith, Mississippi Zion: The Struggle for Liberation in Attala County, 1865-1915 brings the voices and experiences of everyday people to...

Does metafiction - the literary technique that forces readers to acknowledge that they are reading a work of fiction - have a hidden past? Margarita Vaysman's insightful study challenges the view of metafiction as a postmodern phenomenon and reveals that it thrived in mid-nineteenth...

Our Portion of Hell: Fayette County, Tennessee: An Oral History of the Struggle for Civil Rights offers an unrivalled account of how a rural Black community drew together to combat the immense forces aligned against them. Author Robert Hamburger first visited Fayette County as...

When late eighteenth-century New Spanish viceregal administrators installed public lamps in the streets of central Mexico City, they illuminated the bodies of Indigenous, Afro-descended, and plebeian Spanish urbanites. The urban patrolmen, known as guarda faroleros, or "lantern guards," maintained the streetlamps and attempted to...

While the legacy of Black urban rebellions during the turbulent 1960s continues to permeate throughout US histories and discourses, scholars seldom explore within scholarship examining Black Cultural Production, artist-writers of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) that addressed civil unrest, specifically riots, in their artistic...

Living-dead characters appear surprisingly often in the realist works of Balzac and Zola, and in the modern poetry of Baudelaire. In this era of industrialization and modernization, images of the living dead disrupt this state of the new and make visible the impossibility of...

Every day, in courtrooms around the United States, thousands of criminal defendants are represented by public defenders--lawyers provided by the government for those who cannot afford private counsel. Though often taken for granted, the modern American public defender has a surprisingly contentious history--one that...