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Fields of Revolution examines the second largest case of peasant land redistribution in Latin America and agrarian reform—arguably the most important policy to arise out of Bolivia’s 1952 revolution. Competing understandings of agrarian reform shaped ideas of property, productivity, welfare, and justice. Peasants embraced the nationalist slogan of “land for those who work it” and rehabilitated national union structures. Indigenous communities proclaimed instead “land to its original owners” and sought to link the ruling party discourse on nationalism with their own long-standing demands for restitution. Landowners, for their part, embraced the principle of “land for those who improve it” to protect at least portions of their former properties from expropriation. Carmen Soliz combines analysis of governmental policies and national discourse with everyday local actors’ struggles and interactions with the state to draw out the deep connections between land and people as a material reality and as the object of political contention in the period surrounding the revolution.
The Struggle for Natural Resources traces the troubled history of Bolivia's land and commodity disputes across five centuries, combining local, regional, national, and transnational scales. Enriched by the extractivism and commodity frontiers approaches to world history, the book treats Bolivia's political struggles over natural resources as long-term processes that outlast immediate political events. Exploration of the Bolivian case invites dialogue and comparison with other parts of the world, particularly regions and countries of the so-called Global South. The book begins by examining three Bolivian resources at the center of political dispute since the early colonial period, namely land...
A revealing look at how death and burial practices influence the living Dust to Dust offers a three-hundred-year history of Jewish life in New York, literally from the ground up. Taking Jewish cemeteries as its subject matter, it follows the ways that Jewish New Yorkers have planned for death and burial from their earliest arrival in New Amsterdam to the twentieth century. Allan Amanik charts a remarkable reciprocity among Jewish funerary provisions and the workings of family and communal life, tracing how financial and family concerns in death came to equal earlier priorities rooted in tradition and communal cohesion. At the same time, he shows how shifting emphases in death gave average Jewish families the ability to advocate for greater protections and entitlements such as widows’ benefits and funeral insurance. Amanik ultimately concludes that planning for life’s end helps to shape social systems in ways that often go unrecognized.
Anti-Catholicism in the Mexican Revolution, 1913–1940 examines anti-Catholic leaders and movements during the Mexican Revolution, an era that resulted in a constitution denying the Church political rights. Anti-Catholic Mexicans recognized a common enemy in a politically active Church in a predominantly Catholic nation. Many books have elucidated the popular roots and diversity of Roman Catholicism in Mexico, but the perspective of the Church’s adversaries has remained much less understood. This volume provides a fresh perspective on the violent conflict between Catholics and the revolutionary state. The zeal with which anti-Catholics pursued their goals—and the equal vigor with which Catholics defended their Church and their faith—explains why the conflict between Catholics and anti-Catholics turned violent, culminating in the Cristero Rebellion (1926–1929). Collecting essays by a team of senior scholars in history and cultural studies, the book includes chapters on anti-Catholic leaders and intellectuals, movements promoting scientific education and anti-alcohol campaigns, muralism, feminist activists, and Mormons and Mennonites.
The Turkish-language release of Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History is a politically engaged translation aimed at disrupting Turkey’s heteropatriarchal virginity codes. In Virgin Crossing Borders, Emek Ergun maps how she crafted her rendering of the text and draws on her experience and the book’s impact to investigate the interventionist power of feminist translation. Ergun’s comparative framework reveals translation’s potential to facilitate cross-border flows of feminist theories, empower feminist interventions, connect feminist activists across differences and divides, and forge transnational feminist solidarities. As she considers hopeful and woeful pictures of border crossings, Ergun invites readers to revise their views of translation’s role in transnational feminism and examine their own potential as ethically and politically responsible agents willing to search for new meanings. Sophisticated and compelling, Virgin Crossing Borders reveals translation’s vital role in exchanges of feminist theories, stories, and knowledge.
Conflicts over subterranean resources, particularly tin, oil, and natural gas, have driven Bolivian politics for nearly a century. “Resource nationalism”—the conviction that resource wealth should be used for the benefit of the “nation”—has often united otherwise disparate groups, including mineworkers, urban workers, students, war veterans, and middle-class professionals, and propelled an indigenous union leader, Evo Morales, into the presidency in 2006. Blood of the Earth reexamines the Bolivian mobilization around resource nationalism that began in the 1920s, crystallized with the 1952 revolution, and continues into the twenty-first century. Drawing on a wide array of Bolivian...
For most of the postcolonial era, the Aymara Indians of highland Bolivia were a group without representation in national politics. Believing that their cause would finally be recognized, the Aymara fought alongside the victorious liberals during the Civil War of 1899. Despite Aymara loyalty, liberals quickly moved to marginalize them after the war. In her groundbreaking study, E. Gabrielle Kuenzli revisits the events of the civil war and its aftermath to dispel popular myths about the Aymara and reveal their forgotten role in the nation-building project of modern Bolivia. Kuenzli examines documents from the famous postwar Pe–as Trial to recover Aymara testimony during what essentially beca...
300 years after it was first published, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe remains hugely influential and hotly debated. Since its initial release in 1719, discussions have surrounded the novel’s depiction of individual solitude and work, colonial and racial relations, and mankind’s relationship with the rest of the animal world. To this day, Crusoe’s depiction of self-reliance and “rugged individualism” is often idealized in economics textbooks, mainstream politics, and popular culture. But many have also criticized this approach, most notably Karl Marx, who was one of the first in decrying the efforts of classical economists to extract the “rational actor” and “marginalist calculator” from the island castaway without reference to social history. Alongside a precis with surprising revelations for those not familiar with the detail of the story, and a rich biographical sketch of its creator, Crusoe and His Consequences draws on a range of writers, including Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas, to bring the debates surrounding Defoe’s first novel vividly to life.
In 1969, Juan Velasco Alvarado’s military government began an ambitious land reform program in Peru, transferring holdings from large estates to peasant cooperatives. Fifty years later this reform remains controversial: critics claim it unjustly expropriated land and ruined the Peruvian economy, while supporters emphasize its success in addressing rural inequality and exploitation. Moving beyond agricultural policy to offer a fresh perspective on the agrarian reform, Land without Masters shows how ideological assumptions and state interventions surrounding the reform transformed Peru’s political culture and social fabric. Drawing on fieldwork in three different regions, Anna Cant shows h...
Frontiers of Citizenship is an engagingly-written, innovative history of Brazil's black and indigenous people that redefines our understanding of slavery, citizenship, and the origins of Brazil's 'racial democracy'. Through groundbreaking archival research that brings the stories of slaves, Indians, and settlers to life, Yuko Miki challenges the widespread idea that Brazilian Indians 'disappeared' during the colonial era, paving the way for the birth of Latin America's largest black nation. Focusing on the postcolonial settlement of the Atlantic frontier and Rio de Janeiro, Miki argues that the exclusion and inequality of indigenous and African-descended people became embedded in the very construction of Brazil's remarkably inclusive nationhood. She demonstrates that to understand the full scope of central themes in Latin American history - race and national identity, unequal citizenship, popular politics, and slavery and abolition - one must engage the histories of both the African diaspora and the indigenous Americas.