Department of History
Old Main 416
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR 72701
P 479-575-3001
E-mail: mmadams@uark.edu
History Spotlight
Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1838-1945
Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, Bukey's meticulous new study offers the definitive
account of juvenile crime in Nazi-era Vienna. In analyzing the records of juvenile
delinquency in Vienna during the Anschluss era, Bukey explores the impact the Juvenile Criminal Code had on the Viennese youth
who were brought before the bench for deviant behavior.
Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna addresses one key question: to what extent did Nazi rule constitute a rupture in
the Austrian juvenile justice system? Ultimately this book reveals how, despite National
Socialist institutions pervading Austrian society between 1938 and 1945, the survival
of the indigenous legal order preserved a sense of regional identity that helps to
explain the success of the Second Austrian Republic following the collapse of the
Third Reich.
The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Policy, Power, and Ideology
This collection of essays details the political life of one of the most prominent and gifted American statesmen of the twentieth century. The authors bring a fresh international perspective to their evaluation of Senator Fulbright's signature accomplishment: the impactful cultural exchange programs that bear his name. But the authors also go much further to assess the entire liberal internationalist project that Fulbright helped inspire. Fair-minded and appropriately critical, with useful insights about the racial, gendered, and class dimensions of Fulbright's ideals and actions, the book is sure to stimulate lively debate. A must-read for anyone interested in the role of ideas, culture, and domestic politics in US foreign policy.
More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic
More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic chronicles the migration of Afro-Barbadians to Liberia. In 1865, 346 Afro-Barbadians fled a failed post-emancipation Caribbean for the independent black republic of Liberia. They saw Liberia as a means of achieving their post-emancipation goals and promoting a pan-Africanist agenda while simultaneously fulfilling their 'civilizing' and 'Christianizing' duties. Through a close examination of the Afro-Barbadians, Banton provides a transatlantic approach to understanding the political and sociocultural consequences of their migration and settlement in Africa. Banton reveals how, as former British subjects, Afro-Barbadians navigated an inherent tension between ideas of pan-Africanism and colonial superiority. Upon their arrival in Liberia, an English imperial identity distinguished the Barbadians from African Americans and secured them privileges in the Republic's hierarchy above the other group. By fracturing assumptions of a homogeneous black identity, Banton ultimately demonstrates how Afro-Barbadian settlement in Liberia influenced ideas of blackness in the Atlantic World.
William Livingston's American Revolution
William Livingston's American Revolution explores how New Jersey's first governor experienced the American Revolution and managed a state government on the war's front lines. A wartime bureaucrat, Livingston played a pivotal role in a pivotal place, prosecuting the war on a daily basis for eight years. Such second-tier founding fathers as Livingston were the ones who actually administered the war and guided the day-to-day operations of revolutionary-era governments, serving as the principal conduits between the local wartime situation and the national demands placed on the states.
In the first biography of Livingston published since the 1830s, James J. Gigantino's examination is as much about the position he filled as about the man himself. The reluctant patriot and his roles as governor, member of the Continental Congress, and delegate to the Constitutional Convention quickly became one, as Livingston's distinctive personality molded his office's status and reach. A tactful politician, successful lawyer, writer, satirist, political operative, gardener, soldier, and statesman, Livingston became the longest-serving patriot governor during a brutal war that he had not originally wanted to fight or believed could be won. Through Livingston's life, Gigantino examines the complex nature of the conflict and the choice to wage it, the wartime bureaucrats charged with administering it, the constant battle over loyalty on the home front, the limits of patriot governance under fire, and the ways in which wartime experiences affected the creation of the Constitution.
Smoking under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia
Approaching tobacco from the perspective of users, producers, and objectors, Smoking under the Tsars provides an unparalleled view of Russia’s early adoption of smoking. Tricia Starks introduces us to the addictive, nicotine-soaked Russian version of the cigarette—the papirosa—and the sensory, medical, social, cultural, and gendered consequences of this unique style of tobacco use.
Starting with the papirosa’s introduction in the nineteenth century and its foundation as a cultural and imperial construct, Starks situates the cigarette’s emergence as a mass-use product of revolutionary potential. She discusses the papirosa as a moral and medical problem, tracks the ways in which it was marketed as a liberating object, and concludes that it has become a point of increasing conflict for users, reformers, and purveyors.
The heavily illustrated Smoking under the Tsars taps into bountiful material in newspapers, industry publications, etiquette manuals, propaganda posters, popular literature, memoirs, cartoons, poetry, and advertising.
Whistler's Mother: Portrait of an Extraordinary Life
Judged by the portrait Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1 (1871), painted by her son James McNeill Whistler, Anna Whistler (1804–1881) appears to have been a pious, unassuming, domestic woman. This characterization, however, is far from the whole truth. Anna was born in the slaveholding South, raised principally in Brooklyn, New York, and resided for many years in both Russia and Great Britain, and her life was filled with adventure and excitement. The authors’ unprecedented use of her private diaries and correspondence results in a crisp biographical rendering that reveals a resilient, vibrant, bright, and deeply engaged woman. In her writings, Anna made shrewd observations about the social, cultural, artistic, and political issues of her era, which was one of enormous and near-constant change. She knew and interacted with an astonishing array of people, from Russian peasants and American farmers to Robert E. Lee and Giuseppe Mazzini. She also raised one of the finest artists of the nineteenth century. As her son made his way in the art world, Anna became his unofficial agent, promoting his work, managing his finances, and advising him on the best opportunities for success. That he, in turn, should immortalize her as a global celebrity and international icon of motherhood was only appropriate.
The Ottoman "Wild West": The Balkan Frontier in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
In the late fifteenth century, the north-eastern Balkans were under-populated and under-institutionalized. Yet, by the end of the following century, the regions of Deliorman and Gerlovo were home to one of the largest Muslim populations in southeast Europe. Nikolay Antov sheds fresh light on the mechanics of Islamization along the Ottoman frontier, and presents an instructive case study of the 'indigenization' of Islam – the process through which Islam, in its diverse doctrinal and socio-cultural manifestations, became part of a distinct regional landscape. Simultaneously, Antov uses a wide array of administrative, narrative-literary, and legal sources, exploring the perspectives of both the imperial center and regional actors in urban, rural, and nomadic settings, to trace the transformation of the Ottoman polity from a frontier principality into a centralized empire. Contributing to the further understanding of Balkan Islam, state formation and empire building, this unique text will appeal to those studying Ottoman, Balkan, and Islamic world history.
What the Doctor Overheard: Dr. Leopold Müller's Account of Music in Early Meiji Japan
Despite their significance, the writings on Japanese music by Prussian medical scientist and physician Leopold Müller, published in Yokohama in a series from 1874 to1876, have been nearly forgotten and marginalized even in historical research on the courtly gagaku traditions they focus upon. This study with full translation into both English and Japanese illuminates and reassesses Müller’s pioneering contribution. It situates the essay-series historically in the light of an important line of thought about the evolution of ancient gagaku that arose only in the mid-twentieth century, as well as more widely for nearer their actual publication in relation to the emerging scientifically based 19th-century European scholarly discourse of “other” musics. It reveals the author, founder of the Medical Academy in Tokyo and personal physician to the Meiji Emperor, as an important man of his day both in Japan and back at home. And it proposes that, with the recent rise of interest in the medical humanities and a musicological call for embracing the cognitive-scientific along with the historical and ethnographical, Müller’s firsthand observations of a foreign music made from the practical body-orientated approach and ethnographic pen of a medical scientist ought also find new resonance nowadays.
Following the Ball: The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949-1975
With Following the Ball, Todd Cleveland incorporates labor, sport, diasporic, and imperial history to examine the extraordinary experiences of African football players from Portugal’s African colonies as they relocated to the metropole from 1949 until the conclusion of the colonial era in 1975. The backdrop was Portugal’s increasingly embattled Estado Novo regime, and its attendant use of the players as propaganda to communicate the supposed unity of the metropole and the colonies.Cleveland zeroes in on the ways that players, such as the great Eusébio, creatively exploited opportunities generated by shifts in the political and occupational landscapes in the waning decades of Portugal’s empire. Drawing on interviews with the players themselves, he shows how they often assumed roles as social and cultural intermediaries and counters reductive histories that have depicted footballers as mere colonial pawns.
To reconstruct these players’ transnational histories, the narrative traces their lives from the informal soccer spaces in colonial Africa to the manicured pitches of Europe, while simultaneously focusing on their off-the-field challenges and successes. By examining this multi-continental space in a single analytical field, the book unearths structural and experiential consistencies and contrasts, and illuminates the components and processes of empire.
Death in the City: Suicide and the Social Imaginary in Modern Mexico
At the turn of the twentieth century, many observers considered suicide to be a worldwide social problem that had reached epidemic proportions. In Mexico City, violent deaths in public spaces were commonplace in a city undergoing rapid modernization. Crime rates mounted, corpses piled up in the morgue, and the media reported on sensational cases of murder and suicide. More troublesome still, a compelling death wish appeared to grip women and youth. Drawing on a range of sources from judicial records to the popular press, Death in the City investigates the cultural meanings of self-destruction in modern Mexico. Sloan examines responses to suicide and death and disproves the long-held belief that Mexicans possess a cavalier attitude toward suffering.
Diodorus Siculus and the World of the Late Roman Republic
In Diodorus Siculus and the World of the Late Roman Republic, Charles E. Muntz offers a fresh look at one of the most neglected historians of the ancient world, and recovers Diodorus’s originality and importance as a witness to a profoundly tumultuous period in antiquity. Muntz analyzes the first three books of Diodorus’s Bibliotheke, some of the most varied and eclectic material in his work, in which Diodorus reveals through the history, myths, and customs of the “barbarians” the secrets of successful states and rulers, and contributes to the debates surrounding the transition from Republic to Empire. Muntz establishes just how linked the “barbarians” of the Bibliotheke are to the actors of the crumbling Republic, and demonstrates that through the medium of the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Indians, and others Diodorus engages with the major issues and intellectual disputes of his time, including the origins of civilization, the propriety of ruler-cult, the benefits of monarchy, and the relationship between myth and history. Diodorus has many similarities with other authors writing on these topics, including Cicero, Lucretius, Varro, Sallust, and Livy but, as Muntz argues, engaging with such controversial issues, even indirectly, could be especially dangerous for a Greek provincial such as Diodorus. Indeed, for these reasons he may never have completed or fully published the Bibliotheke in his lifetime. Through his careful and precise investigations, Muntz demonstrates Diodorus’s historical context at its full size and scope.
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