Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged american history

Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America

Sara Dubow navigates the complexities of an impassioned and divisive issue in Ourselves Unborn. She takes a calculated historical look at how Americans have interpreted the fetus and pregnancy throughout ever-shifting political realities. Her thesis: Americans have cast their social and cultural anxieties onto the fetus, which often results in abortion-related policies that serve ulterior motives.

The Girls’ History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century

The Girls’ History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century is an anthology of influential essays written by top scholars that have defined the field of American girls’ history and culture over the last thirty years.

Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities

I learned a lot about Black Greek-letter organizations while reading Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities, specifically about the title sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA).

The American Way to Change: How National Service and Volunteers Are Transforming America

Mom. Apple pie. Service. In The American Way to Change, Shirley Sagawa convincingly argues that volunteering is both deeply rooted in American history, as well as a creative solution to modern societal challenges. Sagawa argues that service can be used to impact many entrenched social ills, including an ineffective public education system, an aging population with fewer family support systems, environmental degradation, and poverty.

Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century

Female hands are all over America's landscape; you just need to know where to look for them. In Unbounded Practice, author Thaisa Way can direct your eye. Look to the Memorial Quadrangle at Yale, the grounds of Princeton, or a number of botanical gardens and astronomical observatories to see the legacy of Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959).

500 Years of Indigenous Resistance

We are all familiar with the smiling happy portrayals of pilgrims sitting down to dinner with Native Americans, or perhaps the slightly more critical viewpoint from many of our high school history books of the Indigenous people being simply helpless victims to European colonization.

Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England

That the past is never past is nowhere more apparent than in recent debates over efforts to celebrate “Confederate History Month.” Happily, critics responded to the omission of slavery and the suffering it wrought from the latest official commemorations, still and perhaps forevermore marinated in the intoxicating rhetorical liquor of the “Lost Cause.” And so the sobering scholarship of archival scholars such as Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck, drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal records, family papers, genealogical studies, and often on the recorded words of enslaved peopl

Incivilities

With her first collection of poetry, Incivilities, literature and theory professor-turned-poet Barbara Claire Freeman excavates the vagaries of an American narrative—“how it became, what it began,” as one of her poems says. Like men counting bodies on a battlefield, exploding the absurd order of the data they have collected, Freeman’s poems rebel against the aftermath of the atrocities (the title puts it mildly) they insist on recognizing.

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

Oh, Gail Collins, you had me at New York Times columnist. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived away from New York for so long now and have to read it online most of the year, but holding printed and bound words from a witty Times writer in a book that I can dip into for a few minutes, or a hour, whenever I like is brainy self-indulgence that I can say yes to. My mother grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and I’ve always had a thing for vintage and retro pop culture. If this is you, too, you’ll quickly find yourself on board as well, Times fetish or no.

Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality

Valerie Rohy’s exploration of the efforts to define both queer and Black identities and their subsequent intersections is as interesting as it is illuminating, as presented in Anachronism and Its Others, whether it is a discussion of the temporal implications of Frederick Douglass’ thought presented in his autobiography or demystifying the nebulous concepts of "queer time." _[Anachronism and Its Others](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1438428650?ie=UTF8&tag=f

The Cuban Revolution (1959-2009): Relations with Spain, the European Union, and the United States

Joaquín Roy’s study is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive attempt to define Cuba’s relationship to the Western World (Europe and the U.S.) in the past fifty years. There is no question of its timely publication—to coincide with the fifty year anniversary of the Cuban Revolution (1959-2009).

Science on the Home Front: American Women Scientists in World War II

Science on the Home Front is an introduction to the lives and tasks of specific women scientists involved in the war effort, from Marie Curie to Margaret Mead. These women come from a variety of backgrounds and pursuits in science. A professor, Jack focuses on the fields of psychology, anthropology, physics and nutrition to elaborate on the women involved who played a specific role in the war.

Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel

In this superb book, Edlie Wong analyzes the territorialization of freedom and slavery in the antebellum Atlantic.

Feisty First Ladies and Other Unforgettable White House Women

If the front book cover of Jacqueline Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Laura Bush, and Nancy Reagan in silver one-pieces doing the cancan is the craziest thing you have ever seen, wait until you open the book. In Feisty First Ladies and Other Unforgettable White House Women, Autumn Stephens reveals stories about the United States First Ladies that you never learned in history class.

The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal

Mark Ribowsky did not interview singer Diana Ross or Berry Gordy, the founder and iron-fisted ruler of Motown Records, for this unauthorized look at The Supremes’ rise and fall.

Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth Century America

Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America explores the complex relationship between American social activism and literature in the nineteenth century. At times symbiotic, at times turbulent, this relationship was formed both by the power of literature and by the hopes and dreams of American social reformers for their country.

Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South

Hannah Rosen's Terror in the Heart of Freedom is an essential historical document. This text is a detailed analysis of the connection between gendered rhetoric, sexual violence, and the oppression and resistance of freed people during the reconstruction era.

Lucky Billy: A Novel about Billy The Kid

Anything that the imagination can concoct in the way of murders and desperate deeds may be heard upon the streets now in regard to Billy The Kid, but getting at the truth of the many rumors is another thing altogether. -- The Daily New Mexican, May 5, 1881 Billy they don’t want you to be so free. -- Bob Dylan I: Backstory Billy The Kid earned his renown in the Lincoln County War (1878-1881), a mercantile conflict that tore apart New Mexico.

American Studies (Volume 48, Number 2): Homosexuals in Unexpected Places?

In this special issue of American Studies, the editors promise a review that will challenge the preconceived notions of “metronormativity” in the LGBT community. From Dartmouth in the 1920s, to the work camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), to the eroticization of the rural male in the work of a visual artist, to Small Town USA, the gays are everywhere. What is surprising about this is that we’re supposed to find this surprising. In the introduction to this issue, Colin R.
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