Harvard University Press Blog

“Are you an American, or are you not?”

This was the question Sheriff Harry Wheeler, pictured at right courtesy of the Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum, asked Cochise County residents as he prepared to enact one of the most outrageous vigilante actions ever carried out on US soil -- the Bisbee Deportation, in which Wheeler and his fellow vigilantes kidnapped, detained, and deported 1,300 striking mine workers across the border to New Mexico with a warning not to return. This action, though manifestly illegal and declared so by a presidential commission appointed after the fact, provided a popular template for quelling labor unrest and ridding the country of "undesirables" during the decades to come.

Wheeler's choice of words provides a clue to the links between race, labor militancy and "Americanness" in the Arizona borderlands. It's the subject of Katherine Benton-Cohen's Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands, which investigates closely the meaning of race in an area whose promise of land and work drew seekers of all nationalities, creating a virtual social laboratory in which Americans worked out what it meant to be "white," and indeed what it meant to be "American."

Benton-Cohen is here on video, courtesy of Georgetown University, discussing her research both in its historical context and in terms of how we can think about the issues of race that still capture our attention today when we think about the border and who gets to be on which side of it -- who gets to be an "American." Her careful work demonstrates that the more you look at these seemingly concrete categories, the more you realize that they are in fact fluid and depend on historical contingency -- they don't just appear; they have to be worked out, and once you learn how they've been established in the past you can maybe begin to see a new way forward.

Those of you living in the borderlands may want to note that the author will be doing a few appearances during the coming weeks: May 9 at the Community Center in Cascabel, AZ; May 10 at the Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum; May 11 at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, AZ.

The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition

Mentioned today in USA Today's "Book Buzz." Mr. Toad (below) is pleased.

||| More on The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition.

To serve God and Wal-Mart

Bethany Moreton on what makes Wal-Mart unique:

Like the majority of the world’s population, but unlike most other United States citizens, Wal-Mart’s core constituency only left the agrarian economy in the third quarter of the twentieth century. The frames of reference it carried into the age of terabytes therefore sound anomalous to the representatives of industrial modernity. But as the Chicken Patrol suggests, anomaly is in the eye of the beholder. The high-tech redneck, the rustic with a Bible in one hand and a Blackberry in the other, is only paradoxical from the perspective of a stage theory of history. Innovation from the agricultural periphery only shocks if we assume that the industrial North Atlantic leads and everyone else will follow, at their own remedial pace, along the same path.

In fact, however, it is the reputed "antimodernists" who have shown a consistent talent for innovation. The rural South embraced distance commerce back when it meant mail-order catalogues and global cotton markets. Fundamentalist preachers first seized the new technology of radio and then cable television to create a congregation of the air. In the 1970s, the Moral Majority mastered computerized direct mail to remake national politics. And, indeed, one small-town retailer set the technological standard for a global economic empire. Observers who thus mistake style for substance, as the Chicken Patrollers know, reveal more about their own assumptions than about the objects of their interest. To reject Detroit as the universal telos, it turns out, is not to reject progress itself.

That's from the first chapter of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, an eye-opener of a book that goes way beyond the standard journalistic accounts of the company's rise to provide less a history of the company per se than a biography of the world that is Wal-Mart. And it's a different world than those of us on the east coast (particularly its upper geographical reaches) are used to studying. For those of you wondering just where today's service economy actually came from, you can't do much better for an explanation than this -- carefully researched and written with considerable spark.

Printing gets greener with thin ink technology

HUP has for some time been a member of the Green Press Initiative, an organization that works with publishers of all sorts to encourage the responsible use of paper with regard to its environmental impact. Along those lines, we're happy to see many of the printers we work with taking steps to alter their impact on the environment. One way of doing this is to adopt a manufacturing process called THINK™, which stands for "Thin Ink Film Technology." Printing with THINK™ allows manufacturers to avoid the use of curing devices, ovens, and blowers to help dry ink, reducing the amount of electricity used in the printing process, and reduces drastically the amounts of VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, released into the air as a byproduct of the manufacturing process.

Hamilton Printing Company in Castleton, New York (near Albany) has just adopted THINK™ technology as the basis of their printing process, and we were enthused to learn that the very first book produced using the new method was an HUP volume -- Milad Doueihi's Earthly Paradise: Myths and Philosophies, due out in June, which was printed using THINK™ on 100% recycled fiber, 30% post-consumer waste paper.

Tech specs on THINK™ and its environmental impact follow, for those who'd like to know:

Muslims, Christians, and cultural amnesia

I have been wanting for a long time to talk about one of the most affecting books we've published this season. Ian Almond's Two Faiths, One Banner is, on its face, a history of Muslim-Christian military alliance throughout European history. The work is deceptively simple; indeed, as Almond puts it, he's written a "somewhat primitive" book with "a very straightforward purpose: to relate a selection of moments in European history when, in the very heart of countries such as Spain, Italy, Greece and Hungary, Muslims and Christians collaborated and co-operated with one another to fight against a common enemy – often an enemy also composed of Muslims and Christians."

"Kumbaya" this is not, but nor is it (and this even more pointedly so) the vaunted "clash of civilizations" we're supposed to believe has existed since the beginning of time -- or at least the beginning of Islam. But facile narratives crumble as Almond, through a series of vignettes, exposes the historical fallacy and cultural amnesia inherent in positing a supposedly "Christian" Europe as set against a "Muslim" non-Europe.

Luckily, the Seminary Co-op blog asked our humanities editor Sharmila Sen, who acquired the book, to give a little account of Almond's work and explain how it stems from the author's own real-life experience. In the process you'll see how historical and cultural amnesia, what Almond calls a "process of forgetting," afflicts not just Western Europe, but other parts of the world where it's perceived as easier to embrace simplistic narratives, even if they lead us into moral brick walls, than to confront a complex and confusing past.

||| Sharmila Sen on Ian Almond (and Amnesia)

Paris, 1530

The city of Paris as it might have looked to a medieval pigeon. To be found, along with nine other maps and hundreds of edifying photos, in our newly-released Paris from the Ground Up, and printed there courtesy of the wonderful Harvard Map Collection at Harvard College Library. For those keeping score, this is Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg's Lvtetia vulgari nomine Paris, published in this form in 1572. Click the image for a larger version.

Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism

That's the subtitle of Michael Kimmage's new book The Conservative Turn, which tells the story of postwar America’s political evolution through an examination of the lives of these two fascinating figures, college classmates who went on to intellectual prominence, sharing the questions, crises, and challenges of their generation. Adam Kirsch's positive review in Nextbook gives a thorough accounting of the merits of Kimmage's work in this regard.

Local readers can catch Kimmage conducting a workshop on his book here at Harvard's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History on May 5 from 6-8pm.

A few more haunting portraits

A while back we previewed four portraits done by artist Robert Carter for our newly re-launched John Harvard Library series; now, Carter has updated his website with a few more of the somber, blue-grey portraits that will adorn the covers of upcoming volumes. We learn as well from Carter (see sidebar) that the series will be included in the Communication Arts Illustration Awards Annual for 2009, so congrats to Robert and we're of course thrilled to have the work be part of our series.

Below, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. looking particularly stern:

 

||| More on the John Harvard Library

Judge Posner to blog on the financial crisis at the Atlantic

A few days ago, in our post on "extreme publishing," we mentioned that the internet can take on an extra-crucial role in allowing authors to continue the story after a book is published, particularly when that story is ongoing, like the current financial crisis. Thus we're happy to announce that after we "extreme publish" Richard Posner's upcoming book detailing the causes and direction of the "descent into depression," we hope to send you over to the website of the venerable Atlantic, where Judge Posner will continue to provide analysis and commentary on the themes outlined in the book on a blog called "A Failure of Capitalism." The blog kicks off May 1, by which time you should be able to get your hands on the book. Don't just stand idly by, either; part of the blog will be devoted to answering reader-submitted questions.

||| A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression

Happy 200th, Nikolai Gogol

I'm sure if he were around, he'd find a way to make it hilarious and grotesque. Born on April 1, 1809, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol would have been 200 today. Born in the Ukraine, active in St. Petersburg, was the author of "The Overcoat," "The Nose," "Diary of a Madman," "The Inspector General," and Dead Souls, as well as "Taras Bulba" and "Viy," both scheduled for film adaptations to be released in Russia this year (NB: an early adaptation of "Viy" was for a long time one of the only horror movies produced in the old USSR) Russian or Ukrainian? It's not a moot question, especially not to those who have battled over the russocentric mythology that has dominated the Western view of Gogol. Edyta Bojanowska wrote a book for us a few years ago that complicated the picture, depicting Gogol as a writer caught between two nationalisms, engaging with each in a way that's at once more complicated and more fruitful than the conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Russian literature "came out from under Gogol's overcoat," Dostoevsky once said. Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism gets us closer to understanding how it came about that the man who birthed modern Russian literature, who gave the world the enduing symbol of Russia as a speeding carraige, full of energy and reckless potential, who has been adopted by Russians as a patron saint of literature and an ardent champion of their own nationalism, was 1) not Russian; and 2) knew that it was a little more complicated than all that.