University of Texas Press

A history of European immigrants in Texas and how they redefined racial identity. While the creation of a Black-White racial binary was foundational to most of the United States, nineteenth-century Texas developed a unique tripartite system that acknowledged the role of individuals of Mexican ancestry in a region that was Spanish, Mexican, and an independent nation before becoming a US (and briefly Confederate) state. Yet this framework was fraught, struggling to accommodate new arrivals from beyond North America, in particular the Irish, Germans, and Czechs. Texan Crucible tells the story of these immigrants and how they became Anglo. Marian Barber reveals the ways language, religion, alcohol use, and attitudes toward slavery distinguished these newcomers to Texas from those arriving from the eastern United States and how they nevertheless created thriving, influential communities. Their status was shaped by events inside and far beyond Texas, including an 1887 prohibition fight, the Civil War, and two world wars that encouraged them to erase their distinctiveness. As segregation was formally outlawed and civil rights activism grew, understandings of race shifted, cementing these groups’ status as Anglo. Texan Crucible recovers the histories of German, Irish, and Czech immigrants and unveils the social construction of racial difference underpinning Texan identity.

The role of Bolivian mining families in revolution and politics. In 1952, Bolivia’s Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) swept into power, promising collective prosperity through class-based nationalism. The heroic symbol of the movement was the worker citizen—the formerly indigenous miner who would fuel economic development in a nationalized mining economy. The Limits of Revolution explores this history from the worker barrios of the copper mining city of Corocoro. As the state walked back its promises of worker political power at the national level, mining men and women in Corocoro struggled—through protests, court battles, and barfights—to maintain the benefits of worker citizenship locally. After the MNR fell to a military dictatorship in 1964, however, families retreated to defending the nationalized mining company against an increasingly hostile state. In this battle to keep the revolution alive, the expansive potential of worker citizenship disappeared and old racial exclusions resurfaced. Largely forgotten today, Bolivia’s experience of revolution exposes the contradictions of postcolonial nationalism and sheds light on Latin America’s transition from Cold War–era class politics to twenty-first-century Pink Tide politics.

How wheat growing, milling, and baking shaped the people and culture of North Texas. In the national imaginary, America’s amber fields of grain lie in the country’s center, but for more than a century, they also grew across one pocket of the South: North Texas. From the 1840s to the 1970s, the state's agriculture, dominated in lore by cotton in the east and livestock in the open range, was heavily invested in the cultivation, processing, sale, and consumption of wheat. Recalling a forgotten history, Rebecca Sharpless shows how the rhythms of the wheat harvest—and the evolution of the milling, distribution, and baking industries—governed daily life in what is now known as the Dallas–Forth Worth Metroplex. In the 1840s, Anglo settlers discovered that grain flourished in North Texas and quickly built an economy that included wheat in fields, mills, and kitchens. After the Civil War, hand labor gave way to mechanization, greatly increasing production. Commercial bakeries churned out novel confections, and big cities were built on the bounty of the countryside. In the second half of the twentieth century, as production moved northward, industrial milling and baking declined, but home baking boomed, flour advertising supported regional music, and wheat fortunes financed the region’s cultural life. Sharpless covers 150 years of wheat’s very human history and shows how the labor that cultivated it, the sustenance it provided, and the prosperity it generated left an indelible mark on the people and institutions of Texas.

The history of the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective, an archive dedicated to preserving Chicana feminist knowledge of the 1970s and memory work. The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed an explosion of publishing by Chicana activists as they took part in the Movimiento against oppression of ethnic Mexicans in the United States. Today, thousands of these documents, including written works and oral histories, have been assembled by the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective. Drawing on these unique resources, Fleshing the Archive traces the innovative Chicana knowledge projects of the Movimiento years. Seeking to think with the past rather than about it, MarÍa Cotera explores transgressive sites and discourses of Chicana knowledge, from poems and essays to newspapers, bibliographies, and testimonies. Often published independently and distributed by readers themselves, these works embodied a praxis of feminist and queer consciousness-raising. Observing the startling convergences between Chicana praxis of the 1970s and digital knowledge production in the present, Cotera argues that the Chicana archive enables transformative moments of recognition across time that unsettle supposedly objective accounts of history. The materials preserved by Chicana por mi Raza offer Chicana scholars a model of teaching and learning liberated from a corporate academy that is increasingly hostile to intellectual inquiry.

For over a century, cinephiles and film scholars have had to grapple with an ugly artifact that sits at the beginnings of film history. D. W. Griffith’s profoundly racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, inspired controversy and protest at its 1915 release and was defended as both a true history of Reconstruction (although it was based on fiction) and a new achievement in cinematic art. Paul McEwan examines the long and shifting history of its reception, revealing how the film became not just a cinematic landmark but also an influential force in American aesthetics and intellectual life. In every decade since 1915, filmmakers, museums, academics, programmers, and film fans have had to figure out how to deal with this troublesome object, and their choices have profoundly influenced both film culture and the notion that films can be works of art. Some critics tried to set aside the film’s racism and concentrate on the form, while others tried to relegate that racism safely to the past. McEwan argues that from the earliest film retrospectives in the 1920s to the rise of remix culture in the present day, controversies about this film and its meaning have profoundly shaped our understandings of film, race, and art.

An exploration of war, violence, and sacrifice in precolonial Maya culture and its importance in religious practices. As the Gods Kill delivers new insights into warfare, weaponry, violence, and human sacrifice among the ancient Maya. While attending to the particularity of a singular historical context, anthropologist and archaeologist Andrew Scherer also suggests that Maya practices have something to tell us about human propensities toward violence more broadly. Focusing on moral frameworks surrounding deliberate injury and killing, Scherer examines Maya justifications of violence-in particular the obligations to one another, to ancestors, and to the gods that made violence not only permissible but necessary. The analysis isolates key themes underpinning the morality of violence-including justice, vengeance, payment, and costumbre (ritual)-and explores the ethics of violent agents, including warriors, ritual specialists, and the gods. Finally, Scherer addresses motivations for warfare, including the acquisition of spoils, tribute, captives, and slaves. An interdisciplinary case study of morality in an ancient society, As the Gods Kill synthesizes scholarship on an important dimension of precolonial American culture while taking stock of its implications for the social sciences at large.

Sicily has been the fulcrum of the Mediterranean throughout history. The island's central geographical position and its status as ancient Rome's first overseas province make it key to understanding the development of the Roman Empire. Yet Sicily's crucial role in the empire has been largely overlooked by scholars of classical antiquity, apart from a small number of specialists in its archaeology and material culture. Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily offers the first comprehensive English-language overview of the history and archaeology of Roman Sicily since R. J. A. Wilson's Sicily under the Roman Empire (1990). Laura Pfuntner traces the development of cities and settlement networks in Sicily in order to understand the island's political, economic, social, and cultural role in Rome's evolving Mediterranean hegemony. She identifies and examines three main processes traceable in the archaeological record of settlement in Roman Sicily: urban disintegration, urban adaptation, and the development of alternatives to urban settlement. By expanding the scope of research on Roman Sicily beyond the bounds of the island itself, through comparative analysis of the settlement landscapes of Greece and southern Italy, and by utilizing exciting evidence from recent excavations and surveys, Pfuntner establishes a new empirical foundation for research on Roman Sicily and demonstrates the necessity of including Sicily in broader historical and archaeological studies of the Roman Empire.

A richly detailed history of daily life for colonial Spanish soldiers surviving on the eighteenth-century Texas Gulf Coast. In 1775, Spanish King Carlos III ordered the capture of American pelicans for his wildlife park in Madrid. The command went to the only Spanish fort on the Texas coast-Presidio Nuestra SeNora de Loreto de la BahÍa in present-day Goliad. But the overworked soldiers stationed at the fort had little interest indulging a king an ocean away. Their days were consumed with guarding their community against powerful Indigenous peoples and managing the demands of frontier life. The royal order went ignored. Wrangling Pelicans brings to life the world of Presidio La BahÍa’s Hispano soldiers, whose duties ranged from heated warfare to high-stakes diplomacy, while their leisure pursuits included courtship, card playing, and cockfighting. It highlights the lives of presidio women and reveals the ways the Spanish legal system was used by and against the soldiers as they continually negotiated their roles within the empire and their community. Although they were agents of the Spanish crown, soldiers at times defied their king and even their captain as they found ways to assert their autonomy. Offering a fresh perspective on colonial Texas, Wrangling Pelicans recreates the complexities of life at the empire’s edge, where survival mattered more than royal decrees.

During World War I, the British Empire enlisted half a million young men, predominantly from the countryside of Egypt, in the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC) and put them to work handling military logistics in Europe and the Middle East. British authorities reneged on their promise not to draw Egyptians into the war, and, as Kyle Anderson shows, the ELC was seen by many in Egypt as a form of slavery. The Egyptian Labor Corps tells the forgotten story of these young men, culminating in the essential part they came to play in the 1919 Egyptian Revolution. Combining sources from archives in four countries, Anderson explores Britain's role in Egypt during this period and how the ELC came to be, as well as the experiences and hardships these men endured. As he examines the ways they coped - through music, theater, drugs, religion, strikes, and mutiny - he illustrates how Egyptian nationalists, seeing their countrymen in a state akin to slavery, began to grasp that they had been racialized as "people of color." Documenting the history of the ELC and its work during the First World War, The Egyptian Labor Corps also provides a fascinating reinterpretation of the 1919 revolution through the lens of critical race theory.

The first in-depth analysis of the films of Alexander Payne through the lenses of authorship, tourism, and leisure. With the films Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, Nebraska, and The Holdovers, Alexander Payne has carved out an unusual role in American cinema as a bankable auteur. There is something about Payne’s neurotics and searchers, his working stiffs and disillusioned idealists-something funny, moving, and filled with insight. Jason Sperb dissects Payne’s oeuvre, focusing on the director’s penchant for travel narratives. Payne’s films usually center on male protagonists discontent with the emotional and material realities of the day-to-day and seeking satisfaction in some literal or metaphorical elsewhere. But their attempts to escape wind up perpetuating, rather than alleviating, the imbalance between labor and leisure that structures modern life. In this sense, Sperb argues, Payne’s characters are akin to tourists, searching for fleeting glimpses of the fulfillment they dream about. Examining themes of masculinity, nostalgia, whiteness, and class, The Stranger from Omaha is the first auteur study devoted to Payne’s delicately balanced cinematic world. An outsider even in his own heartland, Payne proves to be an artist working at a clarifying remove-a witness to the American condition, observing from just enough distance.

An analysis of how post-9/11 war movies changed from following soldiers on specific missions to chronicling war as a day-to-day occupation. In 2003, the United States began a war in Iraq without a mission. Instead of fighting to restore peace-the traditional objective of warfare-servicemembers faced the grim reality that there was no goal. Lacking even certainty as to who was the enemy, soldiers discovered that their task was simply to survive. Mission Unaccomplished explores how Hollywood grasped the experience of Iraq from the perspective of US soldiers, reinventing the war film in the process. Historically, films such as Saving Private Ryan valorized the goals of war by chronicling missions that unambiguously contribute to the defeat of the enemy and the restoration of peace. But in The Hurt Locker, American Sniper, Green Zone, and other recent dramas, soldiers just try to outlast the chaos. Dramatizing the aimlessness of the war, events occur in random order, and soldiers have no sense of how their actions contribute to victory or peace. Looking to recent WWII movies such as Dunkirk and Hacksaw Ridge, which use this same cinematic vocabulary to position soldiering as merely a deadly job to be endured, Alan Nadel argues that the disillusionment of Iraq has influenced cinema broadly, inspiring a newly critical war film genre.

A new collection of essays grappling with identity and memory, from a master of the form. The author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Gates of the Alamo, the sweeping Texas history Big Wonderful Thing, and decades of incisive journalism, Stephen Harrigan is an adept writer skilled in crafting memorable characters. From this singular voice now comes a collection of essays tackling the most personal, and yet most expansive, themes of all: identity, memory, and time itself. An Anchor in the Sea of Time unfolds individual stories but also a larger narrative about the development and distortions of history. In one essay, a painting on his grandparents’ wall is seared in Harrigan’s young mind. In another, a group trip to Vietnam stirs up a sobering confrontation with class privilege among Americans who fought there and others, like Harrigan, who did their best not to. The award-winning essay “Off Course” reflects on the father Harrigan never met. And Harrigan’s reporting about the Karankawas, an Indigenous group from the Texas coast once thought to be extinct, takes readers deep into the recesses of collective forgetting and offers glimpses of the possibility of recovery. A vivid encounter with lost selves, vanished worlds, and futures yet unrealized, An Anchor in the Sea of Time is perhaps the most personal book yet from this beloved writer.

A study of the Christ of Ixmiquilpan, a historically beloved religious icon from sixteenth-century Mexico, and its evolving cultural importance. The life-sized crucifix known as the Christ of Ixmiquilpan (also the Senor de Santa Teresa) was one of the most important artworks in colonial Mexico. The statue began as an ordinary devotional image, but in 1621 devotees witnessed it undergo a miraculous renovation that gave it a supernatural beauty. Over the next two and half centuries, its perceived power increased until it was surpassed in importance only by the Virgin of Guadalupe. Despite its historical significance, the Christ of Ixmiquilpan’s history has yet to be fully told. Derek Burdette brings the miraculous crucifix out of the shadows and explores its instrumental role in shaping the devotional culture of New Spain. Following the arc of the statue’s life, he chronicles the story of the statue’s creation, miraculous renovation, and subsequent veneration at the heart of Mexico City. He also reveals how colonial politics were woven into the statue’s life from the very start. Reconstructing the history of a key artwork, Miraculous Celebrity sheds new light on the intersection of art, faith, and politics in the Spanish colonial world.

Honorable Mention, Hamid Naficy Iranian Studies Book Award from the Association of Iranian Studies In the aftermath of the seventh-century Islamic conquest of Iran, Zoroastrians departed for India. Known as the Parsis, they slowly lost contact with their ancestral land until the nineteenth century, when steam-powered sea travel, the increased circulation of Zoroastrian-themed books, and the philanthropic efforts of Parsi benefactors sparked a new era of interaction between the two groups. Tracing the cultural and intellectual exchange between Iranian nationalists and the Parsi community during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Exile and the Nation shows how this interchange led to the collective reimagining of Parsi and Iranian national identity-and the influence of antiquity on modern Iranian nationalism, which previously rested solely on European forms of thought. Iranian nationalism, Afshin Marashi argues, was also the byproduct of the complex history resulting from the demise of the early modern Persianate cultural system, as well as one of the many cultural heterodoxies produced within the Indian Ocean world. Crossing the boundaries of numerous fields of study, this book reframes Iranian nationalism within the context of the connected, transnational, and global history of the modern era.

A history of the PurÉpecha people's survival amid environmental and political changes. Landscapes are more than geological formations; they are living records of human struggles. Landscaping Indigenous Mexico unearths the history of JuÁtarhu, an Indigenous landscape shaped and nurtured by the PurÉpecha-a formidable Mesoamerican people whose power once rivaled that of the Aztecs. Although cataclysmic changes came with European contact and colonization, JuÁtarhu’s enduring agroecology continued to sustain local life through centuries of challenges. Contesting essentialist narratives of Indigenous penury, PÉrez Montesinos shows how PurÉpechas thrived after Mexican independence in 1821, using JuÁtarhu’s diverse agroecology to negotiate continued autonomy amid waves of national economic and political upheaval. After 1870, however, autonomy waned under the pressure of land privatization policies, state intervention, and industrial logging. On the eve of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, PurÉpechas stood at a critical juncture: Would the Indigenous landscape endure or succumb? Offering a fresh perspective on a seemingly well-worn subject, PÉrez Montesinos argues that MichoacÁn, long considered a peripheral revolutionary region, saw one of the era’s most radical events: the destruction of the liberal order and the timber capitalism of JuÁtarhu.