Books and Chapters

Follow

• 

  Changing Cultural Landscapes of South Korea

  Niki J.P. Alsford and Nora Hui-Jung Kim

  This book provides a comprehensive exploration of the profound transformations in the cultural and physical landscapes of South Korea, with an interdisciplinary approach that draws from anthropology, sociology, and human geography. The authors delve into the dynamic interplay between tradition and modernity in a nation that has experienced rapid development, technological innovation, and significant socio-cultural changes. With contributions from experts across various fields, this book examines how South Korea’s distinctive path of modernization is reshaping both the tangible and intangible aspects of its society. Organized around four key themes—Gender and the Media Landscape, Religion and Social Movements, the Ethno-racial Landscape, and the Traditional Landscape—it presents diverse perspectives on the interconnected forces driving rapid societal change.

• 

  Proximity to Power: Rethinking Race and Place in Alexandria, Virginia

  Krystyn R. Moon

  Located just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, Alexandria, Virginia, has long held a unique sociopolitical position due to its proximity to the nation’s capital. This unexplored relationship had a profound impact on African Americans' access to schools, transportation, and other resources in comparison to other southern towns and cities. Proximity to Power examines the history of Alexandria’s African American community from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, focusing on its dynamic relationship with the federal government before, during, and after the Civil War. Krystyn R. Moon highlights the long-standing advocacy and agency of Alexandria’s Black residents, adding further nuance to our understanding of the relationship between race and place.

• 

  Ch. 32: Aeroflot Routes to Baghdad: Soviet-​Iraqi Relations during the Iran-​Iraq War (1980–​1981)

  Steven E. Harris

  This chapter appears in the book, Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History. Edited by Eileen Kane, Masha Kirasova, and Margaret Litvin.

  Chapter Summary: This chapter presents a 1982 internal report of the Soviet national airline, Aeroflot. The report shows how officials at the world’s largest airline responded to reduced demand after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), seeking to maintain the Moscow-Baghdad route that had opened in 1964. Aeroflot sought to serve the interests of the “Soviet colony” in Iraq, enhance Soviet prestige, earn hard currency, and salvage its alliances with Muslim-majority countries after invading Afghanistan in 1979. The Iraqi government, meanwhile, shaped its relationship with the Soviets by limiting Aeroflot’s operations and advantaging its own carrier, Iraqi Airways, in flying passengers and cargo on the airlines’ shared route.

• 

  Ch. 3: A Contrarian Voice: Şehzāde Ḳorḳud’s (d. 919/1513) Writings on Kalām and the Early Articulation of Ottoman Sunnism

  Nabil Al-Tikriti

  This chapter appears in the book, Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450-c. 1750. Edited by Tijana Krstic and Derin Terzioglu.

  Chapter abstract: What characterizes Ottoman Sunnism, and how did it come to be? The conventional view is that by roughly the middle of the sixteenth century the imperial elite came to adopt and promote a particular religious identity, which can be characterized by several overlapping, interrelated, and historically defined denominational (madhhab) affiliations, as well as a particular relationship with the political hierarchy. The favored denominations included Hanafi legal affiliation and Maturidi kalām orientation, accompanied by elite support for particular aspects of mystical thought and practice, a cooperative relationship between favored Sufi orders and the state, and advanced integration of the ulama into a state-supported madrasa system.1 The scholarly literature on the evolution of these markers of belonging, as well as their meaning and con- tent in an Ottoman context, has blossomed in recent years; however, much still remains to be clarified concerning the characteristics of this posited “Ottoman Sunnism” and how it came to be.

• 

  Social Problems: A Human Rights Perspective

  Eric Bonds

  Social Problems: A Human Rights Perspective, Second Edition evaluates U.S. society through an international human rights framework. The book provides a critical discussion about what rights mean, along with a sociological exploration of power and inequality to explain why human rights are so often violated or left ignored and unfulfilled in the United States.

  In each chapter, the book offers numerous policy alternatives that could provide a pathway toward the increased fulfillment of rights, while also stressing the important role that nonviolent social movements have had, and must have in the future, in achieving greater justice, dignity, well being, and environmental protection in our society.

• 

  Ch. 34: Housing Policy in the News: In Praise of Markets, Problematizing Residents in Poverty

  Leslie Martin

  This chapter appears in the book, The Routledge Companion to Media and Poverty. Edited by Sandra L. Borden.

  Chapter abstract: Housing is often described in the media as a problem to be solved, especially when housing is seen as targeted toward households in poverty. A class bias in the portrayal of housing policy makes housing people who have trouble affording rent a problem and discourages government involvement in the housing market. This problematizing of government work to assist people in poverty undermines public support for subsidized housing policies and discourages attention to the ways that middle- and upper-class households also benefit from housing policy.

• 

  Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture

  Will Mackintosh

  In the early nineteenth century, thanks to a booming transportation industry, Americans began to journey away from home simply for the sake of traveling, giving rise to a new cultural phenomenon —the tourist. In Selling the Sights, Will B. Mackintosh describes the origins and cultural significance of this new type of traveler and the moment in time when the emerging American market economy began to reshape the availability of geographical knowledge, the material conditions of travel, and the variety of destinations that sought to profit from visitors with money to spend. Entrepreneurs began to transform the critical steps of travel—deciding where to go and how to get there—into commodities that could be produced in volume and sold to a marketplace of consumers. The identities of Americans prosperous enough to afford such commodities were fundamentally changed as they came to define themselves through the consumption of experiences.

• 

  Ch. 2: Not Quite One of You: Testimony of a Wayward "Survivor" Sociologist

  Tracy B. Citeroni

  This chapter appears in the book, Negotiating the Emotional Challenges of Conducting Deeply Personal Research in Health. Edited by Alexandra "Xan" C.H. Nowakowski and J.E. Sumerau.

  Chapter abstract: I was exhausted, losing weight, and having back pain after driving long dis-tances during the fall semester of my first tenure-track academic job at a small liberal arts college. I would never have connected these things to conclude, or even suspect, that I had cancer. So much gets linked in retrospect after a diagnosis. That time my foot slipped off the clutch of my Honda Civic and I felt a searing pain in my left hip. The first night I woke from a deep sleep doubled over in pain with cramps in my gut. My general lack of appetite. I attributed that and the tiredness to stress at dealing with a four-course per semester teaching load and it being my first time having sole responsibility for any class. The cramps were just cramps, especially when they came around the time of my period.

• 

  Remember Little Rock

  Erin Krutko Devlin

  In Remember Little Rock, Erin Krutko Devlin explores public memories surrounding the iconic Arkansas school desegregation crisis of 1957 and shows how these memories were vigorously contested and sometimes deployed against the cause. Delving into a wide variety of sources, from memoirs to televised docudramas, commemoration ceremonies, and the creation of Little Rock High museums, Devlin reveals how many white moderates proclaimed Little Rock a victory for civil rights and educational equality even as segregation persisted. At the same time, African American activists, students, and their families asserted their own stories in the ongoing fight for racial justice.

• 

  Ch. 9: When the Local is the Global: Case Studies in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Exposition Projects

  Susan R. Fernsebner

  This chapter appears in the book, Expanding Nationalisms at World's Fairs: Identity, Diversity, and Exchange, 1851-1915. Edited by David Raizman and Ethan Robey.

  Chapter Abstract: This chapter explores the ways in which an early twentieth-century contingent of Chinese state and commercial elites, presents a Chinese nation at a series of national and international expositions held between 1904 and 1915, and discusses among diverse communities with interests in how "China" was construed at these events. It describes a sequence of Chinese exposition projects over approximately a decade at the start of the twentieth century, beginning with Chinese participation in the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase International Exposition of 1904, a project overseen by the Qing dynasty's Maritime Customs Service. China's involvement in its own national displays began in 1873, as European and American employees of the Qing Dynasty's Imperial Customs Service served as managers of Chinese presentations at the Vienna World's Fair. The position of the Chinese nation and its representation in a global arena was also threatened, a problem Chen Qi and Chen Huide framed almost poetically in an invocation of cultural icons.

• 

  Ch. 7: Ibn-i Kemal's Confessionalism and the Construction of an "Ottoman" Islam

  Nabil Al-Tikriti

  This chapter appears in the book, Living in the Ottoman Realm: Empire and Identity, 13th to 20th Centuries. Edited by Christine Isom-Verhaaren and Kent F. Schull.

  Chapter abstract: Following several decades of intellectual ferment and ideological experimentation, the Ottoman Empire faced a serious ideological challenge from an aggressive and revolutionary Safavid movement around the turn of the sixteenth century. Historians differ on the precise origin and date of this challenge, largely because no single event has come to define it. The full story of the rise of the Safavid movement is long, starting with a gradual and somewhat mysterious evolution from a quiescent local Sufi order in the early fourteenth century to a powerful revolutionary force by the middle of the fifteenth century. Two generations of Safavid-led uprisings in the 1460s and 1480s were soundly crushed by sovereign dynasties in the Caucasus. However, by the next decade, the movement rose to regional dominance as the sprawling Aqqoyunlu Empire unraveled in the wake of several violent succession struggles. Once this revolutionary Sufi movement took formal political power with its 1501 capture of Tabriz, Ottoman officials were forced to take action to counter what had by then evolved into a serious ideological threat.

• 

  Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire

  Allyson M. Poska

  Patagonia was never hospitable to European settlement, but between 1778 and 1784 the Spanish Crown sent more than 1,900 peasants there in a disastrous attempt to colonize the remote South American coast. The narrative begins in the Old World, tracing the colonists' journey to the port at La Coruña. There they received food, housing, and medical care as they waited for ships to take them across the Atlantic to Montevideo, a journey that included horrific storms and at leas one encounter with English corsairs. A few peasants settled temporarily at the Patagonian outposts of Fuerte del Carmen and Floridablanca. But before the last ships reached the Americas, the Crown abandoned the project owing to financial problems, disease, harsh weather, and the prospect of mutiny. The peasant colonists were resettled in new towns outside of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where they raised families, bought slaves, and gradually became integrated into colonial society. At every stage, their gendered experiences were informed by their contacts with other settlers, Indians, and Africans, as well as conservative Bourbon social policies and the complications of frontier life.

• 

  Ch 10: What to Let Go: Insights from Online Cervical Cancer Narratives

  Tracy B. Citeroni

  This chapter appears in the book, Letting Go: Feminist and Social Justice Insight and Activism. Edited by Donna King and Catherine G. Valentine.

  Chapter abstract: Cervical cancer taxes the entire embodied self. Women with cervical cancer bear tremendous bodily pain from the disease and its treatments. We confront insidious social stigmas against people with sexually transmitted viruses. In the United States, even if we are lucky enough to have adequate health insurance, we must navigate maddening health care bureaucracies. We negotiate power relationships with our biomedical providers as we seek to make informed decisions about our health care. We hope and pray to stave off mortality, at least for the moment. For as long as we “survive” we live with physical reminders of the illness.

• 

  Ch.1: The Loomis Gang’s Market Revolution

  Will Mackintosh

  The chapter appears in the book, Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America. Edited by Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Woloson.

  Chapter abstract: Just before dawn on the morning of Sunday, June 17, 1866, a mob of angry citizens gathered in the semidarkness about a mile from the Loomis farm in Sangerfield, New York. The Loomis dogs had been poisoned the night before, and the vigilantes quickly rousted the family from their beds and set fire to the house and barns. They hanged two family members from a nearby tree in order to extract confessions for a series of recent crimes; no one was killed, but the mob left in the early morning light with a Loomis son in irons, bound for the county jail. The Loomises were clearly not an ordinary farm family; this remarkable operation of “lynch law” capped a twenty-year career of large scale larceny, horse thieving, and fencing of stolen goods. Their criminal activity stretched from Pennsylvania to Ontario and from Vermont to Ohio, and made their large family conspicuously prosperous. They conducted their business proudly and publicly, and they seemed to relish their wide social and political influence. The 1866 lynching ended the family’s criminal enterprise, but not before they had achieved local, statewide, and even international fame as one of the most effective, efficient, and well organized criminal operations of the 1850s and 1860s.

• 

  Ch. 10: Women Sociologists and the Question of Inclusion in the Academy

  Kristin Marsh

  This chapter appears in the book, Disrupting the Culture of Silence: Confronting Gender Inequality and Making Change in Higher Education. Edited by Kristine De Welde and Andi Stepnick.

  Chapter abstract: While women ¹ are increasingly represented among college and university faculty, this representation is uneven among organization types, faculty ranks, and disciplines (Fox 2001; Frehill 2006; West and Curtis 2006). Further, women faculty do not seek or receive promotion to full professor at the same rates as men (Thornton 2009). But why? Existing scholarship recognizes differences in family obligations—extending beyond childcare to the care of elderly relatives or partners with health or ability challenges (Bracken, Allen, and Dean 2006; Philipsen 2008). In addition, research points to inequitable distribution of service and teaching obligations at work (Bird, Litt, and Wang 2004; Misra, Lundquist, Holmes, and Agiomavritis 2011; Winslow 2010; see also chapters 4 and 9 of this volume).

• 

  Ch. 15: The Limits of Soft Power: Why Kurdish Nationalism Failed in the French Mandate of Syria

  Laila McQuade and Nabil Al-Tikriti

  This chapter appears in the book, First World War and Its Aftermath: The Shaping of the Modern Middle East. Edited by T.G. Fraser.

  Chapter abstract: By 1943 and 1946, Lebanon and Syria, respectively, had gained their independence from the French Mandate of Syria. However, this split of the original mandatory state into two sovereign states had been mapped out well before their official independence. From the inception of the Mandate, Lebanon was to be carved from Syria for independence, due to the Maronitesʹ special relationship with France. The fate of the remaining state of Syria, though, was less concrete. France favored Syria's minorities, and the Mandate evolved in the shadow of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and his advocacy of self-determination.

• 

  Ch. 15: Contextualizing the Visual (and Virtual) Realities of Expo 2010

  Susan R. Fernsebner

  This chapter appears in the book, Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present. Edited by James A. Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew D. Johnson, and Sigrid Schmalzer.

  Chapter abstract: In the months leading up to “Expo 2010 Shanghai,” the first official world’s fair to be held in China, advertisements for the event abounded. Promotional video created under the auspices of the Chinese Communist state declared the exposition a celebration of achievements in “urban civilization,” noting the theme of the event itself as “Better City, Better Life.” State promoters promised that the Expo would display the potential for a “harmonious coexistence between humans and nature in the cities of the future. Meanwhile the official Expo mascot, a blue creature named "Haibao," promoted the coming event as a fun-filled spectacle in his own public appearances, video, and a serial television program. A Fall 2009 edition of the official Expo Shanghai Newsletter offers similar promotional rhetoric. The lead story notes that a city-wide tourism festival, “an entertainment extravaganza,” would take place in conjunction with Expo 2010, and attendees could purchase enticing multi-event ticket packages.

• 

  Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin

  Steven E. Harris

  This fascinating and deeply researched book examines how, beginning under Khrushchev in 1953, a generation of Soviet citizens moved from the overcrowded communal dwellings of the Stalin era to modern single-family apartments, later dubbed khrushchevka. Arguing that moving to a separate apartment allowed ordinary urban dwellers to experience Khrushchev’s thaw, Steven E. Harris fundamentally shifts interpretation of the thaw, conventionally understood as an elite phenomenon.

  Harris focuses on the many participants eager to benefit from and influence the new way of life embodied by the khrushchevka, its furniture, and its associated consumer goods. He examines activities of national and local politicians, planners, enterprise managers, workers, furniture designers and architects, elite organizations (centrally involved in creating cooperative housing), and ordinary urban dwellers.

• 

  Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia

  Jeffrey W. McClurken

  Take Care of the Living assesses the short- and long-term impact of the war on Confederate veteran families of all classes in Pittsylvania County and Danville, Virginia. Using letters, diaries, church minutes, and military and state records, as well as close analysis of the entire 1860 and 1870 Pittsylvania County manuscript population census, McClurken explores the consequences of the war for over three thousand Confederate soldiers and their families. The author reveals an array of strategies employed by those families to come to terms with their postwar reality, including reorganizing and reconstructing the household, turning to local churches for emotional and economic support, pleading with local elites for financial assistance or positions, sending psychologically damaged family members to a state-run asylum, and looking to the state for direct assistance in the form of replacement limbs for amputees, pensions, and even state-supported homes for old soldiers and widows.

• 

  Ch. 3: Paper Butterflies: Japanese Acrobats in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New England

  Krystyn R. Moon

  This chapter appears in: Asian Americans in New England: Culture and Community. Edited by Monica Chiu.

  Chapter abstract: In April 1867, the residents of Worcester, Massachusetts, witnessed one of the major sensations to hit the American stage that year-Maguire's Imperial Troupe of Japanese Acrobats. Its act was a series of acrobatic, juggling, and magic routines, many of which had never been seen outside of Japan. The program opened with foot juggling followed by sleight-of.hand tricks, more juggling, and aerial routines, all of which were accompanied by music and narrated by the stage manager. Several tricks were quite notable, but perhaps the most unique was what known as the butterfly trick. Developed in Osaka at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the butterfly trick consisted of making origami butterflies fly across the stage with the use of fans. At the end of the act, real butterflies-if available-were released into the audience. The two-night engagement at Mechanic's Hall in Worcester brought full houses, and the local newspaper described the acrobats as "absolutely astonishing'' and "perform[ing] with ease many things which seem to border on the impossible".

• 

  The Abolitionist Movement

  Claudine L. Ferrell

  The abolitionists of the 1830s-1850s risked physical harm and social alienation as a result of their refusal to ignore what they considered a national sin, contrary to the ideals upon which America was founded. Derived from the moral accountability called for by the Great Awakening and the Quaker religion, the abolitionist movement demanded not just the gradual dismantling of the system or a mandated political end to slavery, but an end to prejudice in the hearts of the American people. Primary documents, illustrations and biographical sketches of notable figures illuminate the conflicted struggle to end slavery in America.

• 

  Reconstruction

  Claudine L. Ferrell

  Few periods in American history have aroused as much debate as the years immediately after the Civil War, those commonly referred to simply as Reconstruction. The victorious North had to determine how to treat the vanquished South and how to make a nation whole once again. The divisive issues of freedom and civil rights became even more complex than before the War and dominated national politics. Also at stake was the balance of power among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Before it was all over, a president was impeached (though not convicted), and a rigorous plan for Reconstruction was enacted, then allowed to fade as white Southerners regained power and instituted repressive Jim Crow governments. This resource provides an overview essay on the period, six essays on various aspects of Reconstruction, a section of biographies of important players, and selected and introduced primary documents.