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  Origins of People-to-People Diplomacy, U.S. and Russia, 1917-1957

  David W. McFadden

  Although there have been many studies of U.S.–Soviet diplomacy in the twentieth century, most explorations of people-to-people diplomacy begin in the 1980s and to not take into account the early contacts in the revolutionary period and 1920s. This study explores in greater depth the religious figures, radical activists, entrepreneurs, engineers, social workers, and others in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union who reached across the barriers of ideology and culture and history to forge tentative but real human connections in an attempt to further better understanding between the two countries. All of these efforts prefigured the much more heralded "citizen diplomacy" efforts of the 1980s, which helped end the Cold War.

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  In Search of the Lost Decade: Everyday Rights in Post-Dictatorship Argentina

  Jennifer Adair

  In 1983, following a military dictatorship that left thousands dead and disappeared and the economy in ruins, Raúl Alfonsín was elected president of Argentina on the strength of his pledge to prosecute the armed forces for their crimes and restore a measure of material well-being to Argentine lives. Food, housing, and full employment became the litmus tests of the new democracy. In Search of the Lost Decade reconsiders Argentina’s transition to democracy by examining the everyday meanings of rights and the lived experience of democratic return, far beyond the ballot box and corridors of power. Beginning with promises to eliminate hunger and ending with food shortages and burning supermarkets, Jennifer Adair provides an in-depth account of the Alfonsín government’s unfulfilled projects to ensure basic needs against the backdrop of a looming neoliberal world order. As it moves from the presidential palace to the streets, this original book offers a compelling reinterpretation of post-dictatorship Argentina and Latin America’s so-called lost decade.

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  A Century of Student Movements in China: The Mountain Movers, 1919–2019

  Xiaobing Li, Qiang Fang, and Danke K. Li

  Danke Li is a contributing author, "Student Movement and the End of the Civil War in the Chongqing Region," Chapter 6 pp. 119-136.

  In this book the authors offer their unique perspectives on the important roles Chinese students and intellectuals played in the shaping of the twentieth-century China. Their answers to these pivotal questions explore new nationalistic spirit, modern world-views, and willingness of self-sacrifice, which had attributed to the spontaneous actions of the students as a “New Culture” emerged during the May Fourth Movement. These articles show how China nurtured these spontaneous student movements, even though the Nationalist Party in the Republic of China and the Communist Party in the People’s Republic had exerted tight control over schools. Both governments established organizations as well as operations among students that effectively turned some of the student movements into a political instrument by the parties for their own agenda.

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  The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present

  Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

  Ever since the collapse of the Third Reich, anxieties have persisted about Nazism's revival in the form of a Fourth Reich. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reveals, for the first time, these postwar nightmares of a future that never happened and explains what they tell us about Western political, intellectual, and cultural life. He shows how postwar German history might have been very different without the fear of the Fourth Reich as a mobilizing idea to combat the right-wing forces that genuinely threatened the country's democratic order. He then explores the universalization of the Fourth Reich by left-wing radicals in the 1960s, its transformation into a source of pop culture entertainment in the 1970s, and its embrace by authoritarian populists and neo-Nazis seeking to attack the European Union since the year 2000. This is a timely analysis of a concept that is increasingly relevant in an era of surging right-wing politics.

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  Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational

  Jay Gellar, Leslie Morris, and Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

  Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is a contributing author, "Between Memory and Normalcy: Synagogue Architecture in Postwar Germany."

  Book Description: As German Jews emigrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and as exiles from Nazi Germany, they carried the traditions, culture, and particular prejudices of their home with them. At the same time, Germany—and Berlin in particular—attracted both secular and religious Jewish scholars from eastern Europe. They engaged in vital intellectual exchange with German Jewry, although their cultural and religious practices differed greatly, and they absorbed many cultural practices that they brought back to Warsaw or took with them to New York and Tel Aviv. After the Holocaust, German Jews and non-German Jews educated in Germany were forced to reevaluate their essential relationship with Germany and Germanness as well as their notions of Jewish life outside of Germany. Among the first volumes to focus on German-Jewish transnationalism, this interdisciplinary collection spans the fields of history, literature, film, theater, architecture, philosophy, and theology as it examines the lives of significant emigrants. The individuals whose stories are reevaluated include German Jews Ernst Lubitsch, David Einhorn, and Gershom Scholem, the architect Fritz Nathan and filmmaker Helmar Lerski; and eastern European Jews David Bergelson, Der Nister, Jacob Katz, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Abraham Joshua Heschel—figures not normally associated with Germany. Three-Way Street addresses the gap in the scholarly literature as it opens up critical ways of approaching Jewish culture not only in Germany, but also in other locations, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

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  Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture

  Wulf Kansteiner, Todd Presner, Claudio Fogu, and Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

  Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is a contributing author, "Deconstructivism and the Holocaust: On the Origins and Legacy of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe."

  Book Description: Depictions of the Holocaust in history, literature, and film became a focus of intense academic debate in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, with the passing of the eyewitness generation and the rise of comparative genocide studies, the Holocaust’s privileged place not only in scholarly discourse but across Western society has been called into question. Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture is a searching reappraisal of the debates and controversies that have shaped Holocaust studies over a quarter century. This landmark volume brings international scholars of the founding generation of Holocaust studies into conversation with a new generation of historians, artists, and writers who have challenged the limits of representation through their scholarly and cultural practices. Focusing on the public memorial cultures, testimonial narratives, and artifacts of cultural memory and history generated by Holocaust remembrance, the volume examines how Holocaust culture has become institutionalized, globalized, and variously contested. Organized around three interlocking themes—the stakes of narrative, the remediation of the archive, and the politics of exceptionality—the essays in this volume explore the complex ethics surrounding the discourses, artifacts, and institutions of Holocaust remembrance. From contrasting viewpoints and, in particular, from the multiple perspectives of genocide studies, the authors question if and why the Holocaust should remain the ultimate test case for ethics and a unique reference point for how we understand genocide and crimes against humanity.

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  What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism

  Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

  Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is editor and a contributing author, "What If Adolf Hitler Had Been Assassinated in 1939?"

  Book Description: What if the Exodus had never happened? What if the Jews of Spain had not been expelled in 1492? What if Eastern European Jews had never been confined to the Russian Pale of Settlement? What if Adolf Hitler had been assassinated in 1939? What if a Jewish state had been established in Uganda instead of Palestine? Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's pioneering anthology examines how these and other counterfactual questions would have affected the course of Jewish history. Featuring essays by sixteen distinguished scholars in the field of Jewish Studies, What Ifs of Jewish History is the first volume to systematically apply counterfactual reasoning to the Jewish past. Written in a variety of narrative styles, ranging from the analytical to the literary, the essays cover three thousand years of dramatic events and invite readers to indulge their imaginations and explore how the course of Jewish history might have been different.

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  The Black Panthers : portraits from an unfinished revolution

  Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams

  October 2016 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. Photojournalist Bryan Shih, who has been interviewing and taking portraits of the surviving Panthers around the country for years, has partnered with Yohuru Williams, dean and history professor at Fairfield University, to deliver the definitive celebration of the Black Panthers. Part oral history, part scrapbook, this is a beautifully produced book of forty-five black-and-white portraits of the Panthers today, alongside interviews with the surviving Panthers, archival images, Black Panther Party pamphlets and speeches, as well as essays by contributors such as Peniel Joseph, Alondra Nelson, Rhonda Williams, and other high-profile scholars to provide background and context."--Publisher description

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  Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement

  Yohuru Williams

  The Civil Rights Movement is one of the most written-about and studied topics in American history. With all the information available though, it is easy for even the most enthusiastic reader to be overwhelmed. In Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement, Yohuru Williams has synthesized the most important information about the Civil Rights Movement, and how that bled into what became the Black Power Movement. He looks at the impact of the struggle for black civil rights on housing, transportation, education, labor, and voting rights, among other topics, to show that what is traditionally seen as a movement of the 1960s really extends back to the end of Reconstruction, and up through the present day.

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  Hi Hitler! : How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture

  Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

  The Third Reich's legacy is in flux. For much of the post-war period, the Nazi era has been viewed moralistically as an exceptional period of history intrinsically different from all others. Since the turn of the millennium, however, this view has been challenged by a powerful wave of normalization. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld charts this important international trend by examining the shifting representation of the Nazi past in contemporary western intellectual and cultural life. Focusing on works of historical scholarship, popular novels, counterfactual histories, feature films, and Internet websites, he identifies notable changes in the depiction of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the figure of Adolf Hitler himself. By exploring the origins of these works and assessing the controversies they have sparked in the United States and Europe, Hi Hitler! offers a fascinating and timely analysis of the shifting status of the Nazi past in western memory. -- Publisher description.

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  The Bishop, the Eparch and the King: Old Nubian Texts from Qasr Ibrim IV (P. QI IV)

  Giovanni Ruffini

  British excavations at Qasr Ibrim have yielded numerous written sources composed in Greek, Coptic, Old Nubian, and Arabic. However, only a small portion has been published so far, among them some sixty Old Nubian texts, both literary and documents, edited between 1988 and 1991 by Gerald Michael Browne. After the field stagnated for twenty years, Ruffini took up the task initiated by Browne and produced an edition of sixty-two further Old Nubian texts, this time only documents. Documents included in this volume supplement Ruffini's 2012 monograph (Medieval Nubia. A Social and Economic History) and provide illustration for his reconstruction of social and economic life of the Middle Nile Valley in the 12th-14th century. --Publisher's Description

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  Echoes of Chongqing: Women in Wartime China [Chinese]

  Danke K. Li

  Description from an earlier 2010 edition: University of Illinois Press

  This collection of annotated oral histories records the personal stories of twenty Chinese women who lived in the wartime capital of Chongqing during China's War of Resistance against Japan during World War II. By presenting women's remembrances of the war, this study examines the interplay between oral history and traditional historical narrative, public discourse, and private memories. The women interviewed came from differing social, economic, and educational backgrounds and experienced the war in a variety of ways, some of them active in the communist resistance and others trying to support families or pursue educations in the face of wartime upheaval. Their stories demonstrate that the War of Resistance had two faces: one presented by official propaganda and characterized by an upbeat unified front against Japan, the other a record of invisible private stories and a sobering national experience of death and suffering. The accounts of how women coped, worked, and lived during the war years in the Chongqing region recast historical understanding of the roles played by ordinary people in wartime and give women a public voice and face that, until now, have been missing from scholarship on the war.

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  Education in China: Educational History, Models, and Initiatives

  Zha Qiang and Danke K. Li

  Danke Li is a contributing author, "Education Gender Equality", p.331-339.

  Book Description: Chinese students are known worldwide for their accomplishment and ambition, and education is profoundly valued in China. But these facts do not tell the whole story. Intellectuals were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and only recently has a college education been accessible to a majority of Chinese high school graduates. Things are changing rapidly. China’s higher-education system is now the largest in the world, and the number of Chinese students in the United States is growing at twenty-five percent annually. Collaboration with Western scholars and universities is increasing. Governmental and philanthropic agencies are working to provide better education to students in the margins, including minority, poor, disabled, and rural students. This Berkshire Essentials volume, Education in China, includes contributions by seventy-four international experts on Chinese education and provides unique coverage of learning at all levels.

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  From Every Mountainside: Black Churches and the Broad Terrain of Civil Rights

  R. Drew Smith and Yohuru Williams

  Yohuru Williams is a contributing author, "Articles of Faith: the NAACP, Black Churches, and the Struggle for Black Empowerment in New Haven."

  Book description: It has become popular to confine discussion of the American civil rights movement to the mid-twentieth-century South. From Every Mountainside contains essays that refuse to bracket the quest for civil rights in this manner, treating the subject as an enduring topic yet to be worked out in American politics and society. Individual essays point to the multiple directions the quest for civil rights has taken, into the North and West, and into policy areas left unresolved since the end of the 1960s, including immigrant and gay rights, health care for the uninsured, and the persistent denials of black voting rights and school equality. In exploring these issues, the volume’s contributors shed light on distinctive regional dimensions of African American political and church life that bear in significant ways on both the mobilization of civil rights activism and the achievement of its goals.--Publisher's Description

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  Amheida I: Ostraka from Trimithis, Volume I Texts from the 2004-2007 Seasons

  Roger S. Bagnall and Giovanni Ruffini

  This volume presents 455 inscribed pottery fragments, or ostraka, found during NYU’s excavations at Amheida in the western desert of Egypt. The majority date to the Late Roman period (3rd to 4th century AD), a time of rapid social change in Egypt and the ancient Mediterranean generally. Amheida was a small administrative center, and the full publication of these brief texts illuminates the role of writing in the daily lives of its inhabitants. The subjects covered by the Amheida ostraka include the distribution of food, the administration of wells, the commercial lives of inhabitants, their education, and other aspects of life neglected in literary sources. The authors provide a full introduction to the technical aspects of terminology and chronology, while also situating this important evidence in its historical, social and regional context. -- Publisher description

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  Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America

  Richard Greenwald and Daniel Katz

  When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker threatened the collective bargaining rights of the state’s public sector employees in early 2011, the massive protests that erupted in response put the labor movement back on the nation’s front pages. It was a fleeting reminder of a not-so-distant past when the “labor question”—and the power of organized labor—was part and parcel of a century-long struggle for justice and equality in America.

  Now, on the heels of the expansive Occupy Wall Street movement and midterm election outcomes that are encouraging for the labor movement, the lessons of history are a vital handhold for the thousands of activists and citizens everywhere who sense that something has gone terribly wrong. This pithy and accessible volume provides readers with an understanding of the history that is directly relevant to the economic and political crises working people face today, and points the way to a revitalized twenty-first-century labor movement. With original contributions from leading labor historians, social critics, and activists, Labor Rising makes crucial connections between the past and present, and then looks forward, asking how we might imagine a different future for all Americans.

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  Jesuit and Feminist Education: Intersections in Teaching and Learning in the Twenty-First Century

  Elizabeth A. Petrino, Jocelyn M. Boryczka, and Jeffrey P. von Arx S.J.

  Jeffrey P. von Arx, S.J. is a contributing author, "Foreword".

  This book explores how the principles and practices of Ignatian pedagogy overlap and intersect with contemporary feminist theory in order to gain deeper insight into the complexities of today's multicultural educational contexts. Drawing on a method of inquiry that locates individual and collective standpoints in relation to social, political, and economic structures, this volume highlights points of convergence and divergence between Ignatian and feminist pedagogies to explore how educators might find strikingly similar methods that advocate common goals--including engaging with issues such as race, gender, diversity, and social justice. The contributors to this volume initiate a dynamic dialogue that will enliven our campuses for years to come.--Publisher description.

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  Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History

  Giovanni Ruffini

  Among the few surviving archaeological sites from the medieval Christian kingdom of Nubia--located in present day Sudan--Qasr Ibrim is unique in a number of ways. It is the only site in Lower Nubia that remained above water after the completion of the Aswan high dam. In addition, thanks to the aridity of the climate in the area the site is marked by extraordinary preservation of organic material, especially textual material written on papyrus, leather, and paper. Particularly rich is the textual material from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE, written in Old Nubian, the region's indigenous language. As a result, Qasr Ibrim is probably the best documented ancient and medieval site in Africa outside of Egypt and North Africa.

  Medieval Nubia will be the first book to make available this remarkable material, much of which is still unpublished. The evidence discovered reveals a more complicated picture of this community than originally thought. Previously, scholars had thought medieval Nubia had existed in relative isolation from the rest of the world and had a primitive economy. Legal documents, accounts, and letters, however, reveal a complex, monetized economy with exchange rates connected to those of the wider world. Furthermore, they reveal public festive practices, in which lavish feasting and food gifts reinforced the social prestige of the participants. These documents show medieval Nubia to have been a society combining legal elements inherited from the Greco-Roman world with indigenous African social practices. In reconstructing the social and economic life of medieval Nubia based on the Old Nubian sources from the site, as well as other previously examined materials, Giovanni R. Ruffini will correct previous assumptions and produce a new picture of Nubia, one that connects it to the wider Mediterranean economy and society of its time.

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  Black Power Beyond Borders

  Nico Slate and Yohuru Williams

  Yohuru Williams is a contributing author, “They’ve lynched our savior, Lumumba in the old fashion Southern Style: The Conscious Internationalism of American Black Nationalism”, 246-281.

  Book description: This groundbreaking volume examines the transnational dimensions of Black Power - how Black Power thinkers and activists drew on foreign movements and vice versa how individuals and groups in other parts of the world interpreted 'Black Power,' from African liberation movements to anti-caste agitation in India to indigenous protests in New Zealand. --Publisher's description

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  Dictionary of African Biography

  Henry Louis Gates Jr., Emmanuel Akyeampong, and Giovanni Ruffini

  Giovanni Ruffini is a contributing author, “Flavius Apion,” “Flavius Dioskoros,” “Bishop Georgios” and “Bishop Timotheos.”

  Book description: A major biographical dictionary covering the lives and legacies of notable African men and women from all eras and walks of life. This resource tells the full story of the African continent through the lives of its people.

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  Nubian Voices: Studies in Christian Nubian Culture-Supplement 15

  Adam Lajtar, Jacques van der Vliet, and Giovanni Ruffini

  Giovanni Ruffini (with Adam Lajtar) is a contributing author, “Qasr Ibrim’s Last Land Sale”.

  Book description: The book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of medieval Nubian literacy. It contains eleven articles by an international group of scholars, representing different areas of language studies (Greek and Latin epigraphy, Coptology, Old Nubian studies). The articles contain both editions of new textual finds and reconsiderations of well-known sources. The chronology of the texts discussed in the book spans a few hundred years of medieval Nubian history (from the 7th until the 15th century) and their topographical distribution covers a large part of the Middle Nile Valley (from Qasr Ibrim in the north to Banganarti in the south) and beyond (northern Kordofan). The typological variety of the sources, with epitaphs, sepulchral crosses, legal documents, visitors' inscriptions, and dipinti on pottery, provides an insight into the richness of the Christian Nubian civilization.

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  Building After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and Jewish Memory since the Holocaust

  Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

  • Finalist: 2011 National Jewish Book Award (category of visual arts)

  • Finalist: 2011 Foreword Book of the Year (category of architecture)

  Book description: Since the end of World War II, Jewish architects have risen to unprecedented international prominence. Whether as modernists, postmodernists, or deconstructivists, architects such as Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Louis I. Kahn, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Meier, Moshe Safdie, Robert A.M. Stern, and Stanley Tigerman have made pivotal contributions to postwar architecture. They have also decisively shaped Jewish architectural history, as many of their designs are influenced by Jewish themes, ideas, and imagery. Building After Auschwitz is the first major study to examine the origins of this "new Jewish architecture." Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld describes this cultural development as the result of important shifts in Jewish memory and identity since the Holocaust, and cites the rise of postmodernism, multiculturalism, and Holocaust consciousness as a catalyst. In showing how Jewish architects responded to the Nazi genocide in their work, Rosenfeld's study sheds new light on the evolution of Holocaust memory.

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  A Prosopography of Byzantine Aphrodito

  Giovanni Ruffini

  This volume, which replaces Girgis's outdated prosopography from 1938, is an annotated record of every person attested in the Byzantine-era papyri from the middle Egyptian village of Aphrodito. Its papyri make Aphrodito the best attested village for this time period with implications for the study of rural life throughout Late Antiquity. For each entry, the author lists all the relevant texts and all known information about that person's social status, political position and family relations with a summary of activities for each attestation. The volume is indispensable for any scholar working with texts from Aphrodito and valuable for all concerned specifically with Egypt and more generally with rural life in Late Antiquity. -- Publisher description.

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  Monsters in the Mirror: Representations of Nazism in Post-War Popular Culture

  Maartje Abbenhuis, Sara Buttsworth, and Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

  Gavriel Rosenfeld is a contributing author, "What Ifs? of Nazism: Recent Alternate Histories of the Third Reich" pp.1-28.

  Book description: This collection provides readers with a comprehensive overview of postwar representations of Nazism in popular culture, documenting and critiquing their enormous impact and importance. More than 60 years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, the symbols, mythologies, and themes of this disturbing era still pervade popular culture. Why are the trappings of Adolf Hitler's movement so fascinating, and what do they say about our society and how it has developed since 1945? From Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator to the depiction of Nazis in the Raiders of the Lost Ark to other various literature, comic books, video games, television programs, and pop music, Nazism has maintained a constant presence in popular culture after World War II. Why are representations of Nazism—which are often used to depict the ultimate expression of human evil—so entrenched in our culture? Each chapter in this book examines this multifaceted topic from different angles, highlighting the different incidences of Nazistic representations in the post-1945 period. The diverse subject matter in this text ranges from analysis of recent allo-historical novels, to the music of the "neo-folk" movement, to fetishes and pornography. Readers will gain insight on how the imagery and symbology of Nazism in popular culture has changed over time and understand how the disconnect between representations of Nazism and the historical record have developed, particularly with regard to the genocide that resulted from Nazi politics.

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  Efficiency, equity, and Adequacy: Financial Reform of China’s Compulsory Education

  Zeng Manchao, Ding Xiaohao, and Danke K. Li

  Danke Li is a contributing author, “家庭教育决策在中国农村教育社会性别不平等中的含义” (Household Decisions on Education and Its Implications for Gender Inequality in Rural China), pp. 131-149 (in Chinese).