History, Americas

Through stories of remarkable people in Japanese American history, The Unknown Great illuminates the diversity of the Nikkei experience from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Acclaimed historian and journalist Greg Robinson delves into a range of themes from race and interracial relationships to sexuality, faith, and national identity. In accessible short essays drawn primarily from his newspaper columns, Robinson examines the longstanding interactions between African Americans and Japanese Americans, the history of LGBTQ+ Japanese Americans, religion in Japanese American life, mixed-race performers and political figures, and more. This collection is sure to entertain and inform readers, bringing fresh perspectives and unfamiliar stories from Japanese American history and centering the lives of unheralded figures who left their mark on American life--

When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation's triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics.

A revolutionary wellness guide rooted in Indigenous ancestral knowledge, offering wisdom for spiritual, physical, and emotional wellbeing from Native American wellness activists--

With bountiful salmon and fertile plains, the Duwamish River has drawn people to its shores over the centuries for trading, transport, and sustenance. Chief Se'alth and his allies fished and lived in villages here and white settlers established their first settlements nearby. Industrialists later straightened the river's natural turns and built factories on its banks, floating in raw materials and shipping out airplane parts, cement, and steel. Unfortunately, the very utility of the river has been its undoing, as decades of dumping led to the river being declared a Superfund cleanup site. Using previously unpublished accounts by Indigenous people and settlers, BJ Cummings's compelling narrative restores the Duwamish River to its central place in Seattle and Pacific Northwest history. Writing from the perspective of environmental justice-and herself a key figure in river restoration efforts-Cummings vividly portrays the people and conflicts that shaped the region's culture and natural environment. She conducted research with members of the Duwamish Tribe, with whom she has long worked as an advocate. Cummings shares the river's story as a call for action in aligning decisions about the river and its future with values of collaboration, respect, and justice.--

In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha expands our view beyond the accepted temporal and spatial bounds of Reconstruction, which is customarily said to have begun in 1865 with the end of the war, and to have come to a close when the 'corrupt bargain' of 1877 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in exchange for the fall of the last southern Reconstruction state governments. Sinha's startlingly original account opens in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln that triggered the secession of the Deep South states, and take us all the way to 1920 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote--and which Sinha calls the 'last Reconstruction amendment'--

Celebrated historian Barry Gough brings a defining era of Pacific Northwest history into focus in this biography of Richard Blanshard, the first governor of Vancouver Island--illuminating with intriguing detail the genesis and early days of Canada's westernmost province. Early one wintry day in March 1850, after seven weary weeks out of sight of land, a well-dressed Londoner, a bachelor aged thirty-two, stood at the ship's rail taking in the immensity of the unfolding scene. From Her Britannic Majesty's paddlewheel sloop-of-war Driver, steadily thumping forth on Imperial purpose, all that Richard Blanshard could make out to port, in reflected purple light upon the northern side, was a forested, rock-clad island rising to considerable height. Vancouver's Island they called it in those far-off days. This was his destination. Richard Blanshard was governor of the young colony for three short, unhappy years--only one and a half of which were spent in the colony itself. From the very beginning he was at odds with the vastly influential Hudson's Bay Company, run by its Chief Factor James Douglas, who succeeded Blanshard as governor of the colony of Vancouver Island and later became the first governor of the colony of British Columbia. While James Douglas is remembered, for better or worse, as a founding father of British Columbia, Richard Blanshard's name is now largely forgotten, despite his vitally important role in warning London of American cross-border aggressions, including a planned takeover of Haida Gwaii. However, his failures highlight the fascinating struggles of the time--the supreme influence of commerce, the disparity between expectations and reality, and the bewildering collision of European and Pacific Northwest culture.--

Indigenous American art has a long history at the Dallas Museum of Art. The DMA, formerly the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (DMFA), first acquired early twentieth-century paintings and watercolors on paper by Indigenous North American artists in 1933. These works depicted Indigenous life and ceremonies. In 1950, human and animal ceramic effigies from Nicaragua were added, followed by two Chimú featherworks, several other pieces of ancient Andean pottery, Veracruz ceramics, and contemporary Inuit soapstone sculptures. These eclectic beginnings set the foundation for a collection that to date totals some 3,615 works of art and cultural significance and composes nearly 15 percent of the DMA's total collection. Created by Indigenous peoples from Alaska to the Andes, and with over 145 distinct cultural groups represented, the large number of objects in the collection by no means implies exhaustive coverage of the artistic accomplishments of peoples across the great geographic and socio-politically diverse expanse of the Americas. The artworks span nearly 4,500 years; the oldest artifacts in the collection are small human figurines attributed to the so-called prehistoric Valdivia culture that occupied the Pacific coastal lowlands of Ecuador from approximately 3500-1500 BCE. The DMA holds multiple works ascribed to Valdivia. The most recently created work is Multiplicity (2019), a striking gourd-shaped ceramic vessel portraying a futuristic narrative by Cochiti Pueblo artist Diego Romero. While the works in the Indigenous American collection include both ancient and contemporary examples, ancient and ancestral works predominate and are the focus of this catalogue--

This 7-part series on the Great Depression uses newsreels, archival photographs and footage, Hollywood films, and eyewitness accounts to re-create the time, from the end of the Roaring Twenties to the outbreak of the Second World War, when economic forces, political change, and social turmoil transformed the nation.

As in many American cities, inequality in Chicago and its suburbs is mappable across its neighborhoods. Anyone driving west along Chicago Avenue from downtown can tell where Austin turns into Oak Park without looking at a map. These borders are not natural, of course; they are carefully maintained through policies like zoning and school districting; some neighborhoods even annex themselves into distinct municipalities. In other words, they are all policy decisions. In Structuring Inequality, historian Tracy Steffes explores how metropolitan inequality was structured, contested, and naturalized through public policy in the Chicagoland area, especially through public education and state government. This metropolitan inequality deepened even amid civil rights mobilizations and efforts to challenge racial discrimination and promote equal opportunity. She argues that educational and metropolitan inequality were mutually constitutive: unequal schools and unequal places cocreated and reinforced one another. School districts not only reflected the characteristics and inequalities between places, but they also played an active role in shaping those communities over time. Throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, school districts defined community in part by reinforcing or undermining racial and economic segregation. Their perceived quality shaped the identity and value of the community, and schooling and its costs could drive development decisions, including what kind of property to allow and residents to attract. Decisions about school construction, student assignment, and school support were often important components of development strategy. By denaturalizing policy to explore the choices that have brought us here and looking at efforts to challenge them, this history helps us understand the inequality we live with today and inspire us to change it--

How did Puerto Rico end up in its current situation? A Spanish-speaking territory controlled by the United States and populated by the descendants of conquistadors, enslaved Africans, and indigenous inhabitants, this island (or rather archipelago) has a unique history. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo begins the book with an overview of the pre-Columbian societies and cultures that first inhabited Borikén, the indigenous name of the Puerto Rican archipelago. Though the arrival of the Spanish had a profound impact on Puerto Rico's history, he takes care to tell the story from the shore and not from the boat. The Taínos were not merely passive victims; though they were enslaved and murdered during the Conquest, they also had powerful leaders like Agueybaná II who organized the Americas' first indigenous insurrection against colonial rule in 1511. When the colonial enterprise was consolidated a few decades after the Conquest, Puerto Rico became a military outpost for the Spanish Empire. By the nineteenth century, Puerto Rico was a slave colony, and it was ruled through a combination of reform and authoritarianism. This resulted in the proliferation of unsuccessful slave revolts and, in 1868, an insurrection that declared the Republic of Puerto Rico, which only lasted 48 hours. Puerto Rico's major regime change came in 1898 with the US occupation. Though being controlled by the United States has shaped Puerto Rico's history in innumerable ways, it inadvertently fostered a sense of puertorriqueñidad (Puerto Ricanness) among the Island's inhabitants. US colonization may have involved forced Americanization, but it also provoked a multi-layered resistance to those projects, from passive disobedience to armed insurrections. The creation of the Puerto Rican Commonwealth in 1952 involved using a number of institutions to create the notion of cultural nationalism that was detached from the island's colonial status, included Puerto Ricans in the diaspora and was not contingent on obtaining national sovereignty. The last part of the book focuses on more recent developments from the neoliberal turn in the 1990s to current (and likely future) socio-economic and environmental crises--