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Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism

Nan Enstad

Too often, notions of capitalist change rely on the myth of the willful entrepreneur from the global North who transforms the economy and delivers modernity—for good or ill—to the rest of the world. ... More

Too often, notions of capitalist change rely on the myth of the willful entrepreneur from the global North who transforms the economy and delivers modernity—for good or ill—to the rest of the world. Cigarettes Inc. offers an intimate cultural history that upends this story, revealing the myriad cross-cultural encounters that produced all levels of corporate life prior to World War II. In this startling new account of corporate innovation and expansion, this book uncovers a corporate network rooted in Jim Crow segregation that stretched between the United States and China. Hundreds of white southerners, bright leaf tobacco, cigarettes, and industry expertise flowed through this multinational network. Cigarettes, Inc. teems with a global cast—from Egyptian, American, and Chinese entrepreneurs to a multiracial set of farmers, merchants, factory workers, marketers, and even baseball players, jazz musicians, and sex workers. Through their stories, Cigarettes, Inc. newly accounts for the cigarette’s spectacular rise in popularity and in the process offers nothing less than a sweeping reinterpretation of the corporation and its relationship to empire.Less

Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity

Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld (eds)

The horse occupies a distinctive role in studies of animal-human relations. Horses are often identified with human capabilities, such as intelligence and emotional sensitivity, as well as abstract ... More

The horse occupies a distinctive role in studies of animal-human relations. Horses are often identified with human capabilities, such as intelligence and emotional sensitivity, as well as abstract qualities such as nobility and honor, and the horse offers a unique framework for how to think about the formation of human identity—they have long shaped human culture in real and symbolic terms. Equine Cultures explores the role and representation of horses in human culture from 1700 to the present. Most scholarship on horses as they relate to humans deals with the pre-1700 era; Equestrian Cultures places the modern period (post-1700) at the center, showing how the horse has remained central to the accelerating culture of modernity. The contributors investigate specific equine cultures—from the performance of social power and the definition of heritage in Europe, Australia, and the Americas, to explorations of the ways horses figure in distinctively modern genres of the self, such as autobiography, biography, and photographic portraiture. The chapters range across disciplines, including history, literature, art history, anthropology, museology, veterinary medicine, philosophy, and feminist theory. The chapters also range across a multitude of topics, from race horse “biographies” to herding communities to images of horses in art and photography to workhorses to horse characters in narrative, to breeding and horse trade, and much else. The collection bids fair to redefine the field of horse/animal studies and to set the agenda for future studies of human-equine relations.Less

From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame

Mark Monmonier

Brassiere Hills, Alaska. Mollys Nipple, Utah. Outhouse Draw, Nevada. In the early twentieth century, it was common for towns and geographical features to have salacious, bawdy, and even derogatory ... More

Brassiere Hills, Alaska. Mollys Nipple, Utah. Outhouse Draw, Nevada. In the early twentieth century, it was common for towns and geographical features to have salacious, bawdy, and even derogatory names. In the age before political correctness, mapmakers readily accepted any local preference for place names, prizing accurate representation over standards of decorum. Thus, summits such as Squaw Tit—which towered above valleys in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California—found their way into the cartographic annals. Later, when sanctions prohibited local use of racially, ethnically, and scatalogically offensive toponyms, town names like Jap Valley, California, were erased from the national and cultural map forever. This book probes this little-known chapter in American cartographic history by considering the intersecting efforts to computerize mapmaking, standardize geographic names, and respond to public concern over ethnically offensive appellations. Interweaving cartographic history with tales of politics and power, the author locates his story within the past and present struggles of mapmakers to create an orderly process for naming that avoids confusion, preserves history, and serves different political aims. Anchored by a diverse selection of naming controversies—in the United States, Canada, Cyprus, Israel, Palestine, and Antarctica; on the ocean floor and the surface of the moon; and in other parts of our solar system—this book richly reveals the map's role as a mediated portrait of the cultural landscape. And unlike other books that consider place names, this is the first to reflect on both the real cartographic and political imbroglios they engender.Less

The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary

Henry Rousso

In this book Rousso sets two tasks for himself: (1) to provide a history of the problem of “contemporariness” in history writing; (2) to analyze how contemporary history came to be a sub-discipline ... More

In this book Rousso sets two tasks for himself: (1) to provide a history of the problem of “contemporariness” in history writing; (2) to analyze how contemporary history came to be a sub-discipline and especially how it arose in response to catastrophes over the course of the 20th century. Above all, he is interested in how historians grapple with the problem of distance from an event even if they may have been participants. The book considers the current status of the discipline and provides an analysis of present-day societies in terms of the relations they maintain with the past, on the basis of the historiographical situation in France, Germany, and the English-speaking world. The history of the present time has come face to face with the tragedies of the 20th Century, especially World War I & II, and of the 21st. We must address history even when it reaches or exceeds the limit of the comprehensible and the acceptable. History no longer unfolds as traditions to be respected, legacies to be transmitted, knowledge to be elaborated, but rather as a constant “work” of mourning or memory. The new history of the present time is summoned to respond to the challenges of the return of the near past in a lethal form, as well as to seek atonement. Historians of the present time, sometimes against their will, have themselves become actors in a history still being made.Less

Miss Cutler & the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain

Mark Peel

Social workers produced thousands of case files about the poor during the interwar years. Analyzing almost two thousand such case files and traveling from Boston, Minneapolis, and Portland to London ... More

Social workers produced thousands of case files about the poor during the interwar years. Analyzing almost two thousand such case files and traveling from Boston, Minneapolis, and Portland to London and Melbourne, this book examines how these stories of poverty were narrated and reshaped by ethnic diversity, economic crisis, and war. Probing the similarities and differences in the ways Americans, Australians, and Britons understood and responded to poverty, the book draws a picture of social work that is based in the sometimes fraught encounters between the poor and their interpreters. It uses dramatization to bring these encounters to life—joining Miss Cutler and that resurrected horse are Miss Lindstrom and the fried potatoes and Mr. O'Neil and the seductive client—and to give these people a voice. The book is a study of charity, social work, and poverty.Less

Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection

Mark Monmonier

This book offers an account of the controversies surrounding Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator's legacy, first taking us back to 1569, when Mercator announced a clever method of portraying the ... More

This book offers an account of the controversies surrounding Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator's legacy, first taking us back to 1569, when Mercator announced a clever method of portraying the earth on a flat surface, creating the first projection to take into account the earth's roundness. Mariners benefited most from his projection, which allowed for easy navigation of the high seas with rhumb lines—clear-cut routes with a constant compass bearing—for true direction. But the projection's popularity among nineteenth-century sailors led to its overuse—often in inappropriate, non-navigational ways—for wall maps, world atlases, and geopolitical propaganda. Because it distorts the proportionate size of countries, the Mercator map was criticized for inflating Europe and North America in a promotion of colonialism. In 1974, German historian Arno Peters proffered his own map, on which countries were ostensibly drawn in true proportion to one another. In the ensuing “map wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, these dueling projections vied for public support—with varying degrees of success. The author offers interpretations of why well-intentioned clerics and development advocates rallied around the Peters projection, which flagrantly distorted the shape of Third World nations; why journalists covering the controversy ignored alternative world maps and other key issues; and how a few postmodern writers defended the Peters worldview with a self-serving overstatement of the power of maps.Less

A Violent Peace: Media, Truth, and Power at the League of Nations

Carolyn N. Biltoft

A Violent Peace argues that League of Nations offers a unique vantage point for a broader reassessment of the global links between mass media, mass markets, mass violence and the rise of totalitarian ... More

A Violent Peace argues that League of Nations offers a unique vantage point for a broader reassessment of the global links between mass media, mass markets, mass violence and the rise of totalitarian mentalities in the interwar moment. Because the organization set out to shape something called "world public opinion," its records contain traces of the informational dynamics of the "interwar crisis." By tracing questions such as artificial language, counterfeit currency, and "false news," as they passed through the League, the book observes how fraught, fragile, and politically contentious was the nature of "truth" in the age of mass media. Fusing the methods of intellectual history, cultural studies, and critical theory, A Violent Peace uses the League to rethink the ways in which global information systems helped to nurture fascist impulses between the terrors of the trenches and those of the death camps.Less

Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China

When Adolf Hitler came to power and the German army began to sweep through Europe, almost 20,000 Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai. A remarkable collection of the letters, diary entries, poems, and ... More

When Adolf Hitler came to power and the German army began to sweep through Europe, almost 20,000 Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai. A remarkable collection of the letters, diary entries, poems, and short stories composed by these refugees in the years after they landed in China, this book fills a gap in our historical understanding of what happened to so many Jews who were forced to board the first ship bound for anywhere. Once they arrived, the refugees learned to navigate the various languages, belief systems, and ethnic traditions they encountered in an already booming international city, and faced challenges within their own community based on disparities in socioeconomic status, levels of religious observance, urban or rural origin, and philosophical differences. Recovered from archives, private collections, and now-defunct newspapers, these accounts make their English-language debut in this volume.Less

Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya

Kenda Mutongi

Growing up in the Maragoli community in Kenya, the author of this book encountered a perplexing contradiction. While the young teachers at her village school railed against colonialism, many of her ... More

Growing up in the Maragoli community in Kenya, the author of this book encountered a perplexing contradiction. While the young teachers at her village school railed against colonialism, many of her elders, including her widowed mother, praised their former British masters. This book explores how both the challenges and contradictions of colonial rule and the frustrations and failures of independence shaped the lives of Maragoli widows and their complex relations with each other, their families, and the larger community. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, rates of widowhood have been remarkably high in Kenya. Yet despite their numbers, widows and their families exist at the margins of society, and their lives act as a barometer for the harsh realities of rural Kenya. The book here argues that widows survive by publicly airing their social, economic, and political problems, their “worries of the heart.” Initially aimed at the men in their community, and then their colonial rulers, this strategy changed after independence as widows increasingly invoked the language of citizenship to demand their rights from the new leaders of Kenya—leaders whose failure to meet the needs of ordinary citizens has led to deep disenchantment and altered Kenyans' view of their colonial past.Less