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Approaching the period of 1880 to 1930 in American literature as one in which the processes of rethinking the past were as prevalent as wholly “new” works of art, this collection treats the century’s long turn as a site that overtly staged the tension among conflicting sets of values—those of past, present, and the imagined future. Navigating established literary modes as well as anticipatory inscriptions of the “modern,” turn-of-the-century authors continually negotiated ideological boundaries, treating the century’s long turn as a period ripe for experimentation. Essays in the collection, which range across topics such as canonicity, advice literature, Native American education, companionate marriage, turn-of-the-century feminism, dime novels, and the Harlem Renaissance, stress the hybridity born of multiple historical investments. As the authors of this collection demonstrate, the literature from the century’s turn is irreducible to the characteristics either of the nineteenth or the twentieth centuries; rather, it is literature of dual practices and multiple values that embodies elastic qualities of historical plurality – a true literature in transition.

Using evidence of historical changes in landscape, community life, and material culture from a coal mining company town in the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeast Pennsylvania, Michael Roller introduces an archaeological approach to the structural violence on workers, citizens, and consumers that developed across the twentieth century. The study begins with an analysis of a moment of explicit violence at the end of the nineteenth century, an event known as the Lattimer Massacre, in which as many as nineteen immigrant miners were shot by a posse of local businessmen. From this touchstone, material history and theoretical contexts across the twentieth century are documented in a manner both locally specific and broadly generalizable. Historical archaeology is used strategically, opportunistically, and dialectically, supported, amplified, and illuminated by archival and ethnographic research, spatial analysis, and social theory. In the process, attention is brought to contradictions, ironies, and absences in our understandings of this formative era in labor history. This study illuminates the development of systematized violence and soft forms of social control enacted by the collusion of state and capital through materialities such as infrastructure, urban redevelopment, mass consumerism, governmentality, biopolitics, and the shifting boundaries of sovereign power. Varied in its use of sources, the study returns again and again to the material life and the shifting landscapes of the company towns and shanty enclaves of the region, as well as the violence of the Massacre. This archaeology of the recent past shows us the unconscious material foundations for present social troubles.

The emergence of village-communities profoundly transformed social organization in every part of the world where such societies developed. Contributors to The Archaeology of Villages in Eastern North America employ archaeological and historical evidence to explore the development of villages among eastern North American indigenous societies of the deep and recent past. Rich data sets from archaeology and contemporary social theory are employed to document the physical attributes of villages, the structural organization and aggregation of such entities, what it means to be a villager, cosmological and ritual systems, and how villages were entangled with one another in regional networks. The result is a volume which highlights the similarities and differences in the historical trajectories of village formation and development in eastern North America, as well as the larger processes by which villages have the power to affect large-scale social transformations.

Bioarchaeology of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica presents work from both Mesoamerican-based and U.S.-based researchers who use a combination of cultural ethnohistorical, (bio)archaeological, dental, and chemical data in an interdisciplinary approach to research population history in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The goals for such a project are threefold: 1) to encourage more cross-fertilization of work between fields and subfields, in order to more appropriately address large regional questions of population history; 2) to explicitly address the theoretical and methodological challenges and rewards of interdisciplinary research; and 3) to introduce a larger audience to the state of interdisciplinary work in Mesoamerica. The volume is organized into three primary sections. First, the editors discuss the theory and methods of interdisciplinary research, with a particular focus on bioarchaeological research. Then, we present authored case studies using interdisciplinary methods to analyze the population dynamics of migration and mobility (section two) and explore reconstructions of ethnicity and social identity (section three). A concluding chapter integrates these studies and places them into a broader research framework to guide future research.

Ceramics of Ancient America analyzes ceramics specifically from ancient America to add new layers to our understanding by emphasizing new perspectives and a multidisciplinary approach from the fields of archaeology, art history, and anthropology. Scholars have studied ceramic objects in these disciplines using various methodologies. So far, however, no publication has combined these different scholarly approaches to analyze Pre-Columbian ceramics to understand aspects of many different ancient societies across the Americas. This book thus will provide a much-needed compendium, survey, and synthesis of current scholarship of New World ceramics by drawing on a combination of three different disciplines. This volume will help students and scholars alike better understand and appreciate ceramics as one of the vital forms of communication within small social units, and across cultural and political boundaries. Although three different disciplines have approached the study of ceramics using different methodologies, this book will be the first to utilize them in a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary way to contribute to a more complete picture of Pre-Columbian ceramics and their place in society. The study of ceramics has already been recognized as a fundamental tool for understanding Pre-Columbian beliefs about daily life, reconstructing social systems, and assessing inter- and intra- cultural political relationships. The contributors to this book, however, explore social implications, iconography, trade, variations of regional style, innovation, ritual, and political meanings from numerous cultures in North, Central, and South America that are relevant to the study of ceramics anywhere, but particularly in ancient America.

Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America examines and contrasts the experiences of various groups of African-American slaves who tried to escape bondage between the revolutionary era and the U.S. Civil War. Whereas much of the existing scholarship tends to focus on fugitive slaves in very localized settings (especially in communities and regions north of the Mason-Dixon line), the eleven contributions in this volume bring together the latest scholarship on runaway slaves in a diverse range of geographic settings throughout North America—from Canada to Virginia and from Mexico to the British Bahamas—providing a broader and more continental perspective on slave refugee migration. The volume innovatively distinguishes between various “spaces of freedom” to which runaway slaves fled, specifically sites of formal freedom (free-soil regions where slavery had been abolished and refugees were legally free, even if the meanings of freedom in these places were heavily contested); semi-formal freedom (free-soil regions where slavery had been abolished but asylum for runaway slaves was either denied or contested, such as the northern U.S., where state abolition laws were curtailed by federal fugitive slave laws); and informal freedom (places within the slaveholding South where runaways formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations and pass for free). This edited volume encourages scholars to reroute and reconceptualize the geography of slavery and freedom in antebellum North America.

Labor Politics in Latin America assesses the capacity of working-class organizations to represent and advance working people’s demands in the era of globalization and neoliberalism, in which capital has reasserted its power on a global scale. The book’s premise is that the longer-term sustainability of development strategies for the region is largely connected to the capacity of working-class organizations to secure a fairer distribution of the gains from growth through labor legislation reform. Its analysis suggests the need to take into consideration the wider structural changes that reconfigured the political maps of the countries examined (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela), for example, globalization and its impact on democratic transformation in the region, operating within longer time frames. It is precisely this wider structural analysis and historical narrative that allows the book’s case studies to show that, even in the uncovering of substantial variation, what becomes evident in the study of Latin America over the last three decades is the overwhelming reality that for most workers in the region, labor reform—or the lack thereof —in essence increased precarity and informality and weakened labor movements.

Bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology offer unique perspectives on studies of mass violence and present opportunities to interpret human skeletal remains in a broader cultural context. Massacres and other forms of large-scale violence have been documented in many different ancient and modern contexts. Moving the analysis from the victims to the broader political and cultural context necessitates using social theories about the nature of mass violence. Massacres can be seen as a process, that is, as the unfolding of nonrandom patterns or chains of events that precede the events and continue long after. Mass violence has a cultural logic of its own that is shaped by social and historical dynamics. Massacres can have varying aims, including subjugation or total eradication of a group based on status, ethnicity, or religion. The goal of this edited volume is to present case studies that integrate the evidence from human remains within the broader cultural and historical contexts through the utilization of social theory to provide a framework for interpretation. This volume highlights case studies of massacres across time and space that stress innovative theoretical models that help make sense of this unique form of violence. The primary focus will be on how massacres are used as a strategy of violence across time and cultural/geopolitical landscapes.

Modernist Soundscapes questions how early twentieth-century auditory technologies altered sound perception, and how these developments shaped the modernist novel. As the phonograph, telephone, talkie, and radio created new paths for connectivity and intimacy, modernist writers such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf were crafting characters intimately connected by the prosody of voice, music, and the soundscape. As headphones piped nonlocal sounds into a listener’s headspace, Jean Rhys and James Joyce were creating interior monologues that were shaped by cosmopolitan and bohemian sounds. As the phonograph and tape recorder aestheticized noise through mechanical reproduction, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett were deploying onomatopoeia and repetition to aestheticize words and make them sound out. Modernist Soundscapes encourages us to listen to these auditory narratives in order to grasp how the formal and linguistic experiments we have come to associate with modernism are partially a consequence of this historical attentiveness to sound. This heightened awareness of audition coincided with an emerging skepticism toward vision. Indeed, modernist writers turned to sound perception as a way to complicate the dominance of vision—a sensibility rooted in Greek philosophy that equated seeing with knowledge and truth. Without polarizing vision and audition, this book reveals how modernists tend to use auditory perception to connect characters, shifting the subject from a distanced, judgmental observer to a reverberating body, attuned to the moment.