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  [Description of] American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860

  Edward L. Ayers

  A revealing history of the formative period when voices of dissent and innovation defied power and created visions of America still resonant today.

  With so many of our histories falling into dour critique or blatant celebration, here is a welcome departure: a book that offers hope as well as honesty about the American past. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest. Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs. So, Lydia Maria Child condemned the racism of her fellow northerners at great personal cost. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse all charted new paths for America in the realms of art, nature, belief, and technology. It was Henry David Thoreau who, speaking of John Brown, challenged a hostile crowd "Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?"

  Through decades of award-winning scholarship on the Civil War, Edward L. Ayers has himself ventured beyond the interpretative status quo to recover the range of possibilities embedded in the past as it was lived. Here he turns that distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today.

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  [Foreward to] Public workers in service of America: a reader

  F. W. Gooding Editor and Eric S. Yellin Editor

  "From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin edit a collection of new research on this understudied workforce. Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether certain groups deserve premium pay for their irreplaceable work and sacrifices or if serving the greater good is a reward unto itself. Contributors: Eileen Boris, Cathleen D. Cahill, Frederick W. Gooding Jr., William P. Jones, Francis Ryan, Jon Shelton, Joseph E. Slater, Katherine Turk, Eric S. Yellin, and Amy Zanoni"-- Provided by publisher.

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  [Introduction to] Teaching Britain: Elementary Teachers and the State of the Everyday, 1846-1906

  Christopher Bischof

  Teaching Britain examines teachers as key agents in the production of social knowledge. Teachers claimed intimate knowledge of everyday life among the poor and working class at home and non-white subjects abroad. They mobilized their knowledge in a wide range of mediums, from accounts of local happenings in their schools’ official log books to travel narratives based on summer trips around Britain and the wider world. Teachers also obsessively narrated and reflected on their own careers. Through these stories and the work they did every day, teachers imagined and helped to enact new models of professionalism, attitudes towards poverty and social mobility, ways of thinking about race and empire, and roles for the state. As highly visible agents of the state and beneficiaries of new state-funded opportunities, teachers also represented the largesse and the reach of the liberal state—but also the limits of both.

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  [Introduction to] Stalin's Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course

  David Brandenberger and M. V. Zelenov

  The Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) defined Stalinist ideology both at home and abroad. It was quite literally the the master narrative of the USSR—a hegemonic statement on history, politics, and Marxism-Leninism that scripted Soviet society for a generation. This study exposes the enormous role that Stalin played in the development of this all-important text, as well as the unparalleled influence that he wielded over the Soviet historical imagination.

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  [Introduction to] The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America

  Edward L. Ayers

  A landmark Civil War history told from a fresh, deeply researched ground-level perspective.

  At the crux of America’s history stand two astounding events: the immediate and complete destruction of the most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, followed by a political reconstruction in which new constitutions established the fundamental rights of citizens for formerly enslaved people. Few people living in 1860 would have dared imagine either event, and yet, in retrospect, both seem to have been inevitable.

  In a beautifully crafted narrative, Edward L. Ayers restores the drama of the unexpected to the history of the Civil War. He does this by setting up at ground level in the Great Valley counties of Augusta, Virginia, and Franklin, Pennsylvania, communities that shared a prosperous landscape but were divided by the Mason-Dixon Line. From the same vantage point occupied by his unforgettable characters, Ayers captures the strategic savvy of Lee and his local lieutenants, and the clear vision of equal rights animating black troops from Pennsylvania. We see the war itself become a scourge to the Valley, its pitched battles punctuating a cycle of vicious attack and reprisal in which armies burned whole towns for retribution. In the weeks and months after emancipation, from the streets of Staunton, Virginia, we see black and white residents testing the limits of freedom as political leaders negotiate the terms of readmission to the Union.

  Ayers deftly shows throughout how the dynamics of political opposition drove these momentous events, transforming once unimaginable outcomes into fact. With analysis as powerful as its narrative, here is a landmark history of the Civil

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  [Introduction to] Natsional-Bol'shevizm: stalinskaia massovaia kul'tura i formirovanie russkogo natsional'nogo samosoznaniia, 1931-1956

  David Brandenberger

  During the 1930s, Stalin and his entourage rehabilitated famous names from the Russian national past in a propaganda campaign designed to mobilize Soviet society for the coming war. Legendary heroes like Aleksandr Nevskii and epic events like the Battle of Borodino quickly eclipsed more conventional communist slogans revolving around class struggle and proletarian internationalism. In a provocative study, David Brandenberger traces this populist "national Bolshevism" into the 1950s, highlighting the catalytic effect that it had on Russian national identity formation.

  Beginning with national Bolshevism's origins within Stalin's inner circle, Brandenberger next examines its projection into Soviet society through education and mass culture--from textbooks and belletristic literature to theater, opera, film, and the arts. Brandenberger then turns to the popular reception of this propaganda, uncovering glimpses of Stalin-era public opinion in letters, diaries, and secret police reports.

  Controversial insofar as Soviet social identity is commonly associated with propaganda promoting class consciousness, this study argues that Stalinist ideology was actually more Russian nationalist than it was proletarian internationalist. National Bolshevism helps to explain not only why this genre of populism survived Stalin's death in 1953, but why it continues to resonate among Russians today.

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  [Introduction to] Reasoning Against Madness: Psychiatry and the State in Rio de Janeiro, 1830-1944

  Manuella Meyer

  Reasoning against Madness: Psychiatry and the State in Rio de Janeiro, 1830-1944 examines the emergence of Brazilian psychiatry, looking at how its practitioners fashioned themselves as the key architects in the project of national regeneration. The book's narrative involves a cast of varied characters in an unstable context: psychiatrists, Catholic representatives, spiritist leaders, state officials, and the mentally ill, all caught in the shifting landscape of modern state formation. Manuella Meyer investigates the key junctures at which psychiatrists sought to establish their authority and the ways in which their adversaries challenged this authority. These moments serve as productive points from which to explore the moral and political economies of mental health, demonstrating how sociopolitical negotiations shape psychiatric professionalization. Meyer argues that the gradual adoption of punitive configurations of insanity helped sanction during a time of rapid socioeconomic, political, and cultural transformation.

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  [Introduction to] More Than Shelter: Activism and Community in San Francisco Public Housing

  Amy L. Howard

  In the popular imagination, public housing tenants are considered, at best, victims of intractable poverty and, at worst, criminals. More Than Shelter makes clear that such limited perspectives do not capture the rich reality of tenants’ active engagement in shaping public housing into communities. By looking closely at three public housing projects in San Francisco, Amy L. Howard brings to light the dramatic measures tenants have taken to create—and sustain and strengthen—communities that mattered to them.

  More Than Shelter opens with the tumultuous institutional history of the San Francisco Housing Authority, from its inception during the New Deal era, through its repeated leadership failures, to its attempts to boost its credibility in the 1990s. Howard then turns to Valencia Gardens in the Mission District; built in 1943, the project became a perpetually contested and embattled space. Within that space, tenants came together in what Howard calls affective activism—activism focused on intentional relationships and community building that served to fortify residents in the face of shared challenges. Such activism also fueled cross-sector coalition building at Ping Yuen in Chinatown, bringing tenants and organizations together to advocate for and improve public housing. The account of their experience breaks new ground in highlighting the diversity of public housing in more ways than one. The experience of North Beach Place in turn raises questions about the politics of development and redevelopment. In this case, Howard examines activism across generations—first by African Americans seeking to desegregate public housing, then by cross-racial and cross-ethnic tenant groups mobilizing to maintain public housing in the shadow of gentrification.

  Taken together, the stories Howard tells challenge assumptions about public housing and its tenants—and make way for a broader, more productive and inclusive vision of the public housing program in the United States.

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  [Introduction to] Racism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America

  Eric S. Yellin

  Between the 1880s and 1910s, thousands of African Americans passed civil service exams and became employed in the executive offices of the federal government. However, by 1920, promotions to well-paying federal jobs had nearly vanished for black workers. Eric S. Yellin argues that the Wilson administration's successful 1913 drive to segregate the federal government was a pivotal episode in the age of progressive politics. Yellin investigates how the enactment of this policy, based on Progressives' demands for whiteness in government, imposed a color line on American opportunity and implicated Washington in the economic limitation of African Americans for decades to come.

  Using vivid accounts of the struggles and protests of African American government employees, Yellin reveals the racism at the heart of the era's reform politics. He illuminates the nineteenth-century world of black professional labor and social mobility in Washington, D.C., and uncovers the Wilson administration's progressive justifications for unraveling that world. From the hopeful days following emancipation to the white-supremacist "normalcy" of the 1920s, Yellin traces the competing political ideas, politicians, and ordinary government workers who created "federal segregation."

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  [Introduction to] America's War: Talking about the Civil War and Emancipation on Their 150th Anniversaries

  Edward L. Ayers

  Edited by Edward L. Ayers, America’s War is an anthology of Civil War writing originally published between 1852 and 2008. Co-published by the American Library Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities, America’s War was created in support of a national reading and discussion program for libraries called “Let’s Talk About It: Making Sense of the American Civil War.”
  
  The selections in America’s War include works of historical fiction and interpretation, speeches, diaries, memoirs, biographies, and short stories. Together, these readings provide a glimpse of the vast sweep and profound breadth of Americans’ war among and against themselves, adding crucial voices to our understanding of the war and its meaning.

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  [Introduction to] Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927-1941

  David Brandenberger

  The USSR is often regarded as the world's first propaganda state. Particularly under Stalin, politically charged rhetoric and imagery dominated the press, schools, and cultural forums from literature and cinema to the fine arts. Yet party propagandists were repeatedly frustrated in their efforts to promote a coherent sense of "Soviet" identity during the interwar years. This book investigates this failure to mobilize society along communist lines by probing the secrets of the party's ideological establishment and indoctrinational system. An exposé of systemic failure within Stalin's ideological establishment, Propaganda State in Crisis ultimately rewrites the history of Soviet indoctrination and mass mobilization between 1927 and 1941.

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  [Introduction to] Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927-1941

  David Brandenberger

  The USSR is often regarded as the world's first propaganda state. Particularly under Stalin, politically charged rhetoric and imagery dominated the press, schools, and cultural forums from literature and cinema to the fine arts. Yet party propagandists were repeatedly frustrated in their efforts to promote a coherent sense of "Soviet" identity during the interwar years. This book investigates this failure to mobilize society along communist lines by probing the secrets of the party's ideological establishment and indoctrinational system. An exposé of systemic failure within Stalin's ideological establishment, Propaganda State in Crisis ultimately rewrites the history of Soviet indoctrination and mass mobilization between 1927 and 1941.

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  [Introduction to] America on the Eve of the Civil War

  Edward L. Ayers and Carolyn R. Martin

  The scholarship and public history the sixteen historians had created over their careers made this plan seem at least feasible. Their collective body of work embraces everything from politics to literature, from industrial slavery to African American art, from women's reform efforts to racial ideologies, from military history to the history of memory. Some of them worked at museums and libraries while others taught at universities and colleges across the nations. They belonged to no particular school of interpretation, and quite a few had never met one another.

  The historians, whatever their backgrounds, shared a sense of responsibility for opening a national conversation about the causes, events, and consequences of the American Civil war on it 150th anniversary. When the Virginia Sesquicentennial Commission approached the University of Richmond to see if we might be interested in hosting the first session to wrestle with the commemoration, we jumped at the chance. The former capital of the Confederacy and a center of the internal salve trade would be a fitting place to begin the conversation about the meaning of the Civil War and the end of slavery.

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  Dnevnik istorkia S. A. Piontkovskogo

  David Brandenberger, A. L. Litvin, and A. M. Dubrovskii

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  [Introduction to] American Anthem: Modern American History

  Edward L. Ayers, Robert D. Schulzinger, Jesús F. de la Teja, and Deborah Gray White

  This Teacher's Edition of American Anthem: Modern American History covers the United States Before 1898 and with emphasis on the nation becoming a world power, the First World War, from war to peace, the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, post-war America, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, a conservative era, and into the twenty-first century.

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  [Introduction to] Political Humor Under Stalin: an Anthology of Unofficial Jokes and Anecdotes

  David Brandenberger

  Political Humor Under Stalin is an anthology of jokes, wisecracks, and satire from the Soviet 1930s and 40s that provides a glimpse of everyday dissembling and dissent in one of the modern world's most repressive societies. More than merely a joke book, it offers no less than a folkloric counter narrative to the "official" history of the USSR, as well as a ground-breaking discussion of the culture of joke-telling under Stalin.

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  [Introduction to] Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration

  Edward L. Ayers, Gary W. Gallagher, and Andrew J. Torget

  Crucible of the Civil War offers an illuminating portrait of the state’s wartime economic, political, and social institutions. Weighing in on contentious issues within established scholarship while also breaking ground in areas long neglected by scholars, the contributors examine such concerns as the war’s effect on slavery in the state, the wartime intersection of race and religion, and the development of Confederate social networks. They also shed light on topics long disputed by historians, such as Virginia’s decision to secede from the Union, the development of Confederate nationalism, and how Virginians chose to remember the war after its close.

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  [Introduction to] Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda

  David Brandenberger and Kevin M. F. Platt

  Focusing on a number of historical and literary personalities who were regarded with disdain in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution - figures such as Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov - "Epic Revisionism" tells the fascinating story of these individuals' return to canonical status during the darkest days of the Stalin era. An inherently interdisciplinary project, "Epic Revisionism" features pieces on literary and cultural history, film, opera, and theater. It pairs scholarly essays with selections from Stalin-era primary sources - newspaper articles, unpublished archival documents, short stories - to provide students and specialists with the richest possible understanding of this understudied phenomenon in modern Russian history.

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  [Introduction to] Meat Matters: Butchers, Politics, and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris

  Sydney Watts

  In eighteenth century Paris, municipal authorities, guild officers, merchant butchers, stall workers, and tripe dealers pledged to provide a steady supply of healthful meat to urban elites and the working poor. Meat Matters considers the formation of the butcher guild and family firms, debates over royal policy and regulation, and the burgeoning role of consumerism and public health. The production and consumption of meat becomes a window on important aspects of eighteenth-century culture, society, and politics, on class relations, and on economic change. Watts's examination of eighteenth-century market culture reveals why meat mattered to Parisians, as onetime subjects became citizens. Sydney Watts is Assistant Professor of history at the University of Richmond. She is currently working on the history of Lent and secular society in early modern France.

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  [Introduction to] What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History

  Edward L. Ayers

  The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians.
  
  Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, Ayers turns over the rich soil of Southern life to explore the sources of the nation's and his own history. The title essay, original here, distills his vast research and offers a fresh perspective on the nation's central historical event.

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  [Introduction to] American Passages: A History of the United States

  Edward L. Ayers, Lewis L. Gould, David M. Oshinsky, and Jean R. Soderlund

  American Passages places a unique emphasis on time as the defining nature of history, how events lead to other events, actions, changes, and often-unexpected outcomes. Rather than grouping facets of historical change into themes or topics, the authors offer students a complete, compelling narrative with balanced coverage of political, economic, social, cultural, military, religious, and intellectual history.

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  [Introduction to] In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863

  Edward L. Ayers

  Winner of the Bancroft Prize: Through a gripping narrative based on massive new research, a leading historian reshapes our understanding of the Civil War.

  Our standard Civil War histories tell a reassuring story of the triumph, in an inevitable conflict, of the dynamic, free-labor North over the traditional, slave-based South, vindicating the freedom principles built into the nation's foundations.
  
  But at the time, on the borderlands of Pennsylvania and Virginia, no one expected war, and no one knew how it would turn out. The one certainty was that any war between the states would be fought in their fields and streets.
  
  Edward L. Ayers gives us a different Civil War, built on an intimate scale. He charts the descent into war in the Great Valley spanning Pennsylvania and Virginia. Connected by strong ties of every kind, including the tendrils of slavery, the people of this borderland sought alternatives to secession and war. When none remained, they took up war with startling intensity. As this book relays with a vivid immediacy, it came to their doorsteps in hunger, disease, and measureless death. Ayers's Civil War emerges from the lives of everyday people as well as those who helped shape history—John Brown and Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Jackson, and Lee. His story ends with the valley ravaged, Lincoln's support fragmenting, and Confederate forces massing for a battle at Gettysburg.

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  [Introduction to] National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956

  David Brandenberger

  During the 1930s, Stalin and his entourage rehabilitated famous names from the Russian national past in a propaganda campaign designed to mobilize Soviet society for the coming war. Legendary heroes like Aleksandr Nevskii and epic events like the Battle of Borodino quickly eclipsed more conventional communist slogans revolving around class struggle and proletarian internationalism. In a provocative study, David Brandenberger traces this populist "national Bolshevism" into the 1950s, highlighting the catalytic effect that it had on Russian national identity formation.

  Beginning with national Bolshevism's origins within Stalin's inner circle, Brandenberger next examines its projection into Soviet society through education and mass culture--from textbooks and belletristic literature to theater, opera, film, and the arts. Brandenberger then turns to the popular reception of this propaganda, uncovering glimpses of Stalin-era public opinion in letters, diaries, and secret police reports.

  Controversial insofar as Soviet social identity is commonly associated with propaganda promoting class consciousness, this study argues that Stalinist ideology was actually more Russian nationalist than it was proletarian internationalist. National Bolshevism helps to explain not only why this genre of populism survived Stalin's death in 1953, but why it continues to resonate among Russians today.

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  Colonial Lessons: Africans' Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918-1940

  Carol Summers

  Studying of the meanings of education, mission identities, and cultural change in Southern Rhodesia, Summers shows how mission-educated Africans negotiated new identities for themselves and their communities within the confines of segregation. From the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the Second World War, Africans in Southern Rhodesia experienced massive changes. Colonialism was systematized, segregation grew rigid and intensive, and economic changes affected every aspect of life from assembling bridewealth to entrepreneurial opportunities. This book provides a challenging portrayal of the possibilities and limits of African agency within the colonial context.

  Mission-educated Africans who aspired to elements of European material culture experienced these transformations most directly. Individually and collectively, they met the barriers erected by an increasingly restive white settler population and Native administration. This book details the strikes organized by students and parents, struggles over curricula, efforts of African teachers to improve their professional status, and conflicts between colonial officials regarding administrative control over schools and development programs. Summers reveals the ways in which these tensions and conflicts allowed select groups of Africans to reconfigure and, to some extent, appropriate aspects of European power.

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  [Introduction to] Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War

  Edward L. Ayers

  Two communities in America's Great Valley--Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia--separated by only a few hundred miles, share much in their politics and ways of life. Yet they emerge on opposing sides of a war in which they zealously send their sons to fight and die. Here we see a Civil War that is not the inevitable conflict of rival societies, but a human drama, immediate, particular, engrossing.