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Tampa: Impressions of an Emigrant is a translation of Tampa: impresiones de emigrante written by Cuban author Wenceslao Gálvez y Delmonte, published in 1897 in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida, translated from the Spanish by Noel M. Smith. Gálvez was an early diaspora writer in the costumbrismo genre, which emphasized the depiction of everyday manners and customs of a particular social milieu. Gálvez emigrated from Havana in 1896 to escape the Cuban War of Independence and join the Cuban exile community in Tampa. Gálvez was a champion baseball player in the earliest years of Cuban baseball, a lawyer/prosecutor/judge, and journalist/author. His charming and opinionated first-person narrative is in four parts. Part 1 begins with the escalation of the Spanish war effort that prompted his sea voyage to Tampa, followed by part 2 and descriptions of Tampa’s people and activities, geography, landmarks, municipal features, and cultural pursuits. Parts 3 and 4 extensively discuss many aspects of the Cuban exile community in Ybor City and West Tampa, including the patriotic pro-independence fervor that gripped the emigrants. He names notable personages in the exile community and describes their efforts to support the war against Spain and recounts his struggles working as a door-to-door salesman and as a lector (reader) in a cigar factory. Thirty historical photographs and newspaper clippings illuminate the text.

Chesterfield Smith was one of the boldest lawyers of the twentieth century. A child of a poor, broken household but also a child of a politically connected family, Smith grew up aimless. His World War II combat experience changed him. He returned an ambitious and impatient man who had learned from the European theater what systemized hate and prejudice could do. Smith rose fast, building his small firm to a goliath, leading the Florida Bar, and masterminding the creation of a new state constitution. As president of the American Bar Association during Watergate, his was one of the earliest voices calling for Nixon to obey the law or resign. At home, Smith urged his lawyers to improve the practice of law, and the world around them, by “doing good.” Smith’s larger-than-life personality and drive to improve his surroundings irritated some and inspired many.

Tracing the development of the field of southern women’s history over the past half century, Sisterly Networks shows how pioneering feminists laid the foundation for a strong community of sister scholars and delves into the work of an organization central to this movement, the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH). Launched in 1970, the SAWH provided programming, mentoring, fundraising, and outreach efforts to support women historians working to challenge the academic establishment. In this book, leading scholars reflect on their own careers in southern history and their experiences as women historians amid this pathbreaking expansion and revitalization of the field. Their stories demonstrate how women created new archival collections, expanded historical categories to include gender and sexuality, reimagined the roles and significance of historical women, wrote pioneering monographs, and mentored future generations of African American women and other minorities who entered the academy and contributed to public discourse. Providing a lively roundtable discussion of the state of the field, contributors comment on present and future work environments and current challenges in higher education and academic publishing. They offer profound and provocative insights on the ways scholars can change the future through radically rewriting the gender biases of recorded history.

Lunar Outfitters chronicles the history of the Apollo space suit and how it was developed and produced. It focuses on the employees of ILC Industries, the maker of these lunar suits, and highlights the first engineer who saw the need for such a suit and those who came along later to advance the suit and make it the best space suit in the industry. Details and stories in the text describe many hurdles, such as the challenges this relatively small company faced in convincing NASA they were capable of fulfilling the contract. Later chapters provide technical details of the various Apollo model suits and how they were assembled, including the materials used.

This book is a comprehensive account of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and its efforts to keep alive the memory of the nation’s past. It argues that, especially prior to World War II, the DAR’s conservative white middle-class members played a vital role in private citizens’ efforts to both bolster patriotism and guard the nation’s gendered and racial boundaries through commemorative practices. The Daughters engaged in patriotic activism long believed to be the domain of men and deliberately challenged male-centered accounts of US nation-building. At the same time, however, their tales about the past helped reinforce traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, reflecting a strong-held belief that any challenge to these traditions would jeopardize the nation’s stability. In a similar fashion, the organization frequently voiced support for inclusive civic nationalism, but deliberately used memory to consolidate Anglo-Saxon whiteness and keep the nation’s racial divisions in place. By closely examining these ambiguities, this study sheds fresh light on white conservative women’s remarkable agency in US nationalism and explains the tenacity of a particular nationalist ideology that deemed ingrained gender and race hierarchies vital to America’s unity and progress.

An innovative global history of the American Civil War, Reckoning with Rebellion compares and contrasts the American experience with other civil and national conflicts that happened at nearly the same time—the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Polish Insurrection of 1863, and China’s Taiping Rebellion. Aaron Sheehan-Dean identifies surprising new connections between these historical moments across three continents. Sheehan-Dean shows that insurgents around the globe often relied on irregular warfare and were labeled as criminals, mutineers, or rebels by the dominant powers. He traces commonalities between the United States, British empire, Russian empire, and Chinese empire, all large and ambitious states willing to use violence to maintain their authority. These powers were also able to control how these conflicts were described, affecting the way foreigners perceived them and whether they decided to intercede. While the stories of these conflicts are now told separately, Sheehan-Dean argues, the participants understood them in relation to each other. When Union officials condemned secession, they pointed to the violence unleashed by the Indian Rebellion. When Confederates denounced Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant, they did so by comparing him to Tsar Alexander II. Sheehan-Dean demonstrates that the causes and issues of the Civil War were also global problems, revealing the important paradigms at work in the age of nineteenth-century nation-building.

In the tumultuous year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, 29-year-old Pete O’Neal became inspired by reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and founded the Kansas City branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP). The same year, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the BPP was the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” This book is the gripping story of O’Neal, one of the influential members of the movement, who now lives in Africa—unable to return to the United States but refusing to renounce his past. Arrested in 1969 and convicted for transporting a shotgun across state lines, O’Neal was free on bail pending his appeal when Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the BPP, was assassinated by the police. O’Neal and his wife fled the U.S. for Algiers. Eventually they settled in Tanzania, where they continue the social justice work of the Panthers through community and agricultural programs and host study-abroad programs for American students. Paul Magnarella—a veteran of the United Nations Criminal Tribunals and O’Neal’s attorney during his appeals process from 1997–2001—describes his unsuccessful attempts to overturn what he argues was a wrongful conviction. He lucidly reviews the evidence of judicial errors, the prosecution’s use of a paid informant as a witness, perjury by both the prosecution’s key witness and a federal agent, as well as other constitutional violations. He demonstrates how O’Neal was denied justice during the height of the COINTELPRO assault on black activists in the U.S.

The first comprehensive examination of early American economic thought in over a generation, The Emergence of Capitalism in Early America challenges the traditional narrative that Americans were born committed to the principles of Adam Smith. Americans are shown to have developed a distinct brand of hybrid capitalism, suited to the nation’s unique political, intellectual, cultural, and economic histories. Given America’s primary position in the history of capitalism, its economists were well situated to comment on market phenomenon. Covering a broad range of the period’s economic literature and offering close analyses of the antebellum reception of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, this book rescues America’s first economists from historical neglect. In thematically organized chapters, the intellectual cultures of American protectionism and free trade are examined. Protectionism exercised enormous influence in the discourse, constituting what rightly has been called an ‘American political economy.’ Henry Carey is highlighted as the central thinker in protectionist thought, providing an economic blueprint for the nation’s future industrial and commercial supremacy. Sharp regional divisions existed among the nation’s strongest proponents of free-trade ideology, namely Calhoun, Wayland, McVickar, Vethake, Cardozo, and Cooper, as well as important theoretical distinctions with Smithian-inspired laissez-faire. In a separate chapter, American conservative economists—among others, Fitzhugh and Holmes—are positioned alongside antebellum socialists—Skidmore and Byllesby—illustrating the rather awkward ideological arrangements attendant to emergent capitalism. Finally, the tricky relationship Americans have held with financial institutions is explored. Beginning with Hamilton, this book analyzes the financial literature as Americans learned to live with arguably the most complex and misunderstood manifestation of capitalism—finance.

Should Spanish be Puerto Rico’s sole official language, or should English be a co-official language? Answers to this question are inseparable from matters of cultural pride, nationalism, and political motivations. The island’s government was declared officially bilingual soon after the Spanish-American War. Attempts to overturn the 1902 official languages law failed until 1991 when Governor Rafael Hernández-Colón signed a bill declaring Spanish the sole official language. This updated book explores the complex machinations involved in promoting competing language policies in Puerto Rico since those first salvos in the language wars were launched three decades ago. Far from an isolated controversy, the clash over official languages in this US territory is inseparable from the larger debate over the island’s status and congressional views on the nexus between the English language and American national identity. Were it to become a separate country or remain a Commonwealth, federal policymakers could afford to ignore the island’s language deliberations. Statehood is a completely different matter. Members of Congress have disparate views on whether the American federation is capable or willing to accept a new state dominated by Spanish speakers. Political operatives in San Juan and Washington continue to exploit the island’s language policy issue as a weapon promoting or sabotaging congressional support for statehood. Far from an isolated issue, the Puerto Rico language controversy has been conscripted into the larger battle over American identity. Such debates cast doubts on the country’s willingness to embrace diversity and its commitment to the sacrosanct Civic Creed.

Deadly Virtue argues that the history of the French Calvinist attempt to colonize Florida in the 1560s is key to understanding the roots of American whiteness in sixteenth-century colonialism, science, and Protestantism. The book places the history of Fort Caroline, Florida, into the context of Protestant colonialism and understandings of the body, emotion, and identity held in common by travelers throughout the early Atlantic world. Protestants envisioned finding a rich and powerful Indigenous king, converting him to Christianity, and then establishing a Protestant-Indigenous alliance to build an empire under Indigenous leadership that would compete with European monarchies. However, when the colony was wiped out by the Spanish, these Protestants took this as a condemnation from their god for this plan of collaborating with Indigenous people and developed separatist strategies for future Protestant colonial projects. By introducing the reader to the humoral model of the body, this book shows how race, gender, sexuality, and Christian morality came to intersect in modern understandings of whiteness.