University Of California Press: 1479 books
The Filth of Progress
Immigrants, Americans, and the Building of Canals and Railroads in the West
Language: English
Release Date: October 30, 2015
The Filth of Progress explores the untold side of a well-known American story. For more than a century, accounts of progress in the West foregrounded the technological feats performed while canals and railroads were built and lionized the capitalists who financed the projects. This book salvages...
Potosi
The Silver City That Changed the World
Language: English
Release Date: May 28, 2019
In 1545, a native Andean prospector hit pay dirt on a desolate red mountain in highland Bolivia. There followed the world's greatest silver bonanza, making the Cerro Rico or "Rich Hill" and the Imperial Villa of Potosí instant legends, famous from Istanbul to Beijing. The Cerro Rico alone...
Magnetic Mountain
Stalinism as a Civilization
Language: English
Release Date: February 27, 1997
This study is the first of its kind: a street-level inside account of what Stalinism meant to the masses of ordinary people who lived it. Stephen Kotkin was the first American in 45 years to be allowed into Magnitogorsk, a city built in response to Stalin's decision to transform the predominantly...
Zapata Lives!
Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico
Language: English
Release Date: January 2, 2002
This richly detailed study chronicles recent political events in southern Mexico, up to and including the July 2000 election of Vicente Fox. Lynn Stephen focuses on the meaning that Emiliano Zapata, the great symbol of land reform and human rights, has had and now has for rural Mexicans. Stephen documents...
by Carol Hakim
Language: English
Release Date: January 19, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: January 19, 2013
In this fascinating study, Carol Hakim presents a new and original narrative on the origins of the Lebanese national idea. Hakim’s study reconsiders conventional accounts that locate the origins of Lebanese nationalism in a distant legendary past and then trace its evolution in a linear and gradual...
Before Taliban
Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad
Language: English
Release Date: April 2, 2002
In this powerful book, David B. Edwards traces the lives of three recent Afghan leaders in Afghanistan's history--Nur Muhammad Taraki, Samiullah Safi, and Qazi Amin Waqad--to explain how the promise of progress and prosperity that animated Afghanistan in the 1960s crumbled and became the present tragedy...
The Unvarnished Truth
Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 2000
The practice of selling one's tale of woe to make a buck has long been a part of American culture. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America is a powerful cultural history of how ordinary Americans crafted and sold their stories of hardship and calamity during the nineteenth...
Another Politics
Talking across Today's Transformative Movements
Language: English
Release Date: August 15, 2014
Amidst war, economic meltdown, and ecological crisis, a "new spirit of radicalism is blooming" from New York to Cairo, according to Chris Dixon. In Another Politics, he examines the trajectory of efforts that contributed to the radicalism of Occupy Wall Street and other recent movement upsurges....
On the Line
Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South
Language: English
Release Date: December 8, 2015
"How does one put into words the rage that workers feel when supervisors threaten to replace them with workers who will not go to the bathroom in the course of a fourteen-hour day of hard labor, even if it means wetting themselves on the line?"—From the Preface
In this gutsy, eye-opening...
Barrio Dreams
Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City
Language: English
Release Date: July 2, 2004
Arlene Dávila brilliantly considers the cultural politics of urban space in this lively exploration of Puerto Rican and Latino experience in New York, the global center of culture and consumption, where Latinos are now the biggest minority group. Analyzing the simultaneous gentrification and Latinization...
by Barbara Johnson
Language: English
Release Date: February 25, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: February 25, 2010
Countering impressions of Moses reinforced by Sigmund Freud in his epoch-making Moses and Monotheism, this concise, engaging work begins with the perception that the story of Moses is at once the most nationalist and the most multicultural of all foundation narratives. Weaving together various texts—biblical...
The God Problem
Expressing Faith and Being Reasonable
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2012
The United States is one of the most highly educated societies on earth, and also one of the most religious. In The God Problem, Robert Wuthnow examines how middle class Americans juggle the seemingly paradoxical relationship between faith and reason.
Based on exceptionally rich and candid...
Uncertain Tastes
Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya
Language: English
Release Date: October 13, 2009
This richly drawn ethnography of Samburu cattle herders in northern Kenya examines the effects of an epochal shift in their basic diet-from a regimen of milk, meat, and blood to one of purchased agricultural products. In his innovative analysis, Jon Holtzman uses food as a way to contextualize and...
The Walking Whales
From Land to Water in Eight Million Years
Language: English
Release Date: November 13, 2014
Hans Thewissen, a leading researcher in the field of whale paleontology and anatomy, gives a sweeping first-person account of the discoveries that brought to light the early fossil record of whales. As evidenced in the record, whales evolved from herbivorous forest-dwelling ancestors that resembled...