History
Through its complex history, alcohol has served many cultural functions, often constructive ones. For centuries it has been used as a valuable economic commodity, a medicinal tool, a focus of social gatherings, and a mechanism for psychological escape.Frederick Smith identifies key themes associated with alcohol production, distribution, and consumption. He discusses industrial and home production of alcoholic beverages and both public and clandestine drinking.
Patronized by royalty between the sixth and eighth centuries, the monuments of Guatemala's ancient Maya city of Piedras Negras were carved by sculptors with remarkable skills and virtuosity. Together patrons and sculptors created monumental imagery in a manner unique within the larger history of ancient Maya art by engaging public viewers through illustrations of ceremonies focusing on family and the feminine in royal agendas. Flora Clancy's introduction contextualizes her work with other studies and lays out her methodological framework.
Since the 1997 report of investigations into the Monte Verde site in Chile, there has been a surge of interest in early habitation sites and a polarization of opinion about the antiquity of humans in the Americas. While Clovis remains the earliest undisputed cultural complex in the New World and one of the fastest and most successful diasporas in human history, many scholars argue that this culture did not enter an empty landscape.
Few periods in Japanese history are more fascinating than the seventh century. This was the period when Buddhism experienced its initial flowering in the country and the time when Asukadera, Kudara Odera, Kawaradera, and Yakushiji (the "Four Great Temples" as they were called in ancient texts) were built. Despite their enormous historical importance, these structures have received only limited attention in Western literature, primarily because they are now ruins. Focus has been placed instead on Horyuji, a beautifully preserved structure, but not a key temple of the period.
Psychiatric classifications created in one culture may not be as universal as we assume, and it is difficult to determine the validity of a classification even in the culture in which it was created. "Culture and Panic Disorder" explores how the psychiatric classification of panic disorder first emerged, how medical theories of this disorder have shifted through time, and whether or not panic disorder can actually be diagnosed across cultures.
Like the original "Harvest of Violence", published in 1988, this volume reveals how the contemporary Mayas contend with crime, political violence, internal community power struggles, and the broader impact of transnational economic and political policies in Guatemala.
In this interdisciplinary study, Faherty argues that throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Americans conceptualized their still unsettled political and social states through metaphors of home building. During this period, a pervasive concern with the design and furnishing of houses helped writers to manage previous encounters with settlements, both native and European, and to imagine and remodel a new national ideal.
During the Civil War, there were throughout the Union explosions of resistance to the war - from the deadly Draft Riots in New York City to other, less well-known outbreaks. In "Deserter Country", Robert Sandow explores one of these least-known 'inner civil wars', the widespread, sometimes violent opposition in the Appalachian lumber country of Pennsylvania.Sparsely settled, these mountains were home to divided communities that provided safe haven for opponents of the war.
This book presents a reevaluation of the objectives and actions of Tar Heel 'Reds' from the 1920s to the 1960s. Based on oral histories, archival sources, and previously unpublished documents of the Communist International, "The History of the North Carolina Communist Party" is the first comprehensive narrative account of the Tar Heel State's Communist Party during its half century of existence. Gregory S.
The collapse of the Argentine economy in 2001, involving the extraordinary default on $150 billion in debt, has been blamed variously on the failure of neoliberal policies or on the failure of the Argentine government to pursue those policies vigorously enough during the 1990s. But this is too myopic a view, Klaus Veigel contends, to provide a fully satisfactory explanation of how a country enjoying one of the highest standards of living at the end of the nineteenth century became a virtual economic basket case by the end of the twentieth.
This work is the complete narrative of Abraham Lincoln's bid for the White House from 1858 through 1860. Lincoln seemed like a long shot from the beginning - a one term congressmen, he'd never served as a judge or governor or in any statewide office, and he had lost two campaigns for the U.S. Senate. How, then, did he overcome several seemingly better-qualified candidates to ultimately defeat William Seward for his young party's nomination?
This historical account covers the 25th Regiment North Carolina Infantry Troops during the Civil War. Farmers and their sons left the mountains to enlist with the regiment organized in Asheville in August 1861 to defend their home territory. The book chronicles the unit's defensive tactics in the Carolina coastal regions and battlefield actions at Seven Days, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Plymouth and Petersburg, in addition to casualty and desertion records. More than 125 photos, illustrations, and maps are featured, as well as a complete regimental roster.
In "Lithuanians in Michigan", Marius Grazulis recounts the history of an immigrant group that has struggled to maintain its identity. Grazulis estimates that about 20 per cent of the 1.6 million Lithuanians who immigrated to the United States arrived on American shores between 1860 and 1918. While first-wave immigrants stayed mostly on the east coast, by 1920 about one-third of newly immigrated Lithuanians lived in Michigan, working in heavy industry and mining.