Stanford University Press

For most of their history, the people around the Persian Gulf littoral were socially intertwined and economically interdependent. But the twentieth century ushered in nationalization projects, British imperial intervention, and border regulations, all of which posed challenges to everyday mobility in this oceanic world. Those crossing the water became the primary foil for bordering spaces, restricting and regulating movement, and defining difference more generally. Belonging on Both Shores tells the story of people's struggles to move freely between Iran and the Arab shores of the Gulf as the unregulated mobility that had characterized everyday life in the nineteenth century was increasingly policed in the twentieth.   Using a wide range of Arabic, Persian, and English sources, Lindsey Stephenson demonstrates how state officials refined notions of territorial belonging against the movement of Iranians, the most visible mobile "group" in the Persian Gulf arena. Engaging migrant voices, Stephenson narrates how Iranians challenged a perceived requirement to belong to a single place and highlights the techniques these migrants employed to remain connected to both shores. Tracing the movement of Iranians across and around the Persian Gulf and investigating how the technologies of state and mobility transformed fluidity and people's understanding of movement, this book tells a new story of how the modern Gulf was formed.

A picture-rich field guide to American photography, from daguerreotype to digital. We are all photographers now, with camera phones in hand and social media accounts at the ready. And we know which pictures we like. But what makes a "good picture"? And how could anyone think those old styles were actually good? Soft-focus yearbook photos from the '80s are now hopelessly?and happily?outdated, as are the low-angle portraits fashionable in the 1940s or the blank stares of the 1840s. From portraits to products, landscapes to food pics, Good Pictures proves that the history of photography is a history of changing styles. In a series of short, engaging essays, Kim Beil uncovers the origins of fifty photographic trends and investigates their original appeal, their decline, and sometimes their reuse by later generations of photographers. Drawing on a wealth of visual material, from vintage how-to manuals to magazine articles for working photographers, this full-color book illustrates the evolution of trends with hundreds of pictures made by amateurs, artists, and commercial photographers alike. Whether for selfies or sepia tones, the rules for good pictures are always shifting, reflecting new ways of thinking about ourselves and our place in the visual world.