Edited by Ulrich Pallua, Adrian Knapp and Andreas Exenberger
"The publications of the interdisciplinary and internationally networked Research Platform “World Order – Religion – Violence” seek to improve our understanding of the relationship between religion, politics and violence. It therefore deals especially with the return of religious themes and symbols into politics, with the analysis of the link between political theory and religion, and finally with the critical discussion of the secularization thesis. At the centre of the research are questions concerning the causes of violent conflict, the possibilities for a just world order and the conditions for peaceful coexistence on a local, regional, national and international/worldwide scale between communities in the face of divergent religious and ideological convictions. Its task is to initiate and coordinate thematically related research-efforts from various disciplinary backgrounds at the University of Innsbruck. It creates a network between departments, research-teams and single researchers working on topics of religion, politics and violence. The overall aim of the research platform World Order-Religion-Violence is to promote excellence in social and human science research on religion and politics at the University of Innsbruck and to guarantee the diffusion of this particular competence on a national and international level."
Innsbruck: innsbruck university press, 2009. 256p.
Edited by Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires
Presenting an unprecedented, integrated view of migration in North America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States over the past two centuries. Several essays discuss recent migrations from Central America as well. In the introduction, Dirk Hoerder provides a sweeping historical overview of North American societies in the Atlantic world. He also develops and advocates what he and Nora Faires call “transcultural societal studies,” an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that combines migration research across disciplines and at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. The contributors examine the movements of diverse populations across North America in relation to changing cultural, political, and economic patterns.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 458p.
Edited by John Jennings:
The cowboy, as perhaps no other figure, has captured the imagination of North Americans for over a century. Before Owen Wister's publication of The Virginian in 1902, the image of the cowboy was essentially that of the dime novel - a rough, violent, one-dimensional drifter, or the stage cowboy variety found in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show. Wister's novel was to transform, almost overnight, this image of the cowboy. Soon after its publication, Wister sent a copy, inscribed "To the hero from the author," to Everett Johnson, a cowboy from Virginia who had been a friend of Wister's in Wyoming in the 1880s. Johnson had migrated to Alberta by the 1890s, eventually settling in the Calgary area. Before his death in 1946, his daughter-in-law, Jean Johnson, transcribed Everett's stories of the old west and collected them into a manuscript, now on deposit in the Glenbow Archives. In The Cowboy Legend, John Jennings, building on Jean Johnson's work, details the evidence that Everett Johnson was the initial and prime inspiration for Wister's cowboy, and in the process shows that Johnson led a fascinating life in his own right. His memories of both the Wyoming and Alberta cattle frontiers provide insight into ranch life on both sides of the border, and the compelling parallel biographies of Johnson and Wister feature vignettes of legendary period figures such as Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, and Butch Cassidy, not to mention the best man at Johnson's wedding, Henry Longabaugh, a.k.a. the Sundance Kid. With an impressive range of scholarship and archival research, Jennings melds this realistic study of the cowboy frontier with an intriguing account of Wister's subsequent creation of the cowboy mystique, aided by two close friends and perhaps somewhat unexpected collaborators, Frederic Remington and Theodore Roosevelt. As compulsively readable as it is informative, this unique contribution to western history and literature will be welcomed by fans and scholars alike.
Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2015. 448p.
By Michael J. Perry
This forward-thinking book illustrates the complexities of the morality of human rights. Emphasising the role of human rights as the only true global political morality to arise since the Second World War, chapters explore its role as applied to often controversial issues, such as capital punishment, the exclusion of same-sex couples from civil marriage and criminal abortion bans.
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2023. 172p.
By John Ketchamand Daniel Di Martino
SSince the summer of 2022, more than 70,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City, stretching public resources to their limit. The massive influx has been particularly challenging given the city’s “right to shelter,” the result of a 1979 lawsuit, Callahan v. Carey, and corresponding consent decree, which required the city to provide immediate shelter to those who request it, regardless of the number of applicants or the availability of resources. In order to comply with this requirement, the city has housed some 40,000 migrants in shelters—which has led to an approximately 70% spike in the shelter population in a single year. NYC is currently supporting more than 170 emergency shelters and 10 additional large-scale humanitarian relief centers.
Shelters and relief centers simply cannot house all the newly arrived migrants, which has forced the city to procure approximately 4,500 hotel rooms in unionized facilities,[1] often through expensive contracts that provide bonanzas to owners and the city’s hotel-worker unions. Most notably, on May 13, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the historic 1,025-room Roosevelt Hotel, located in the heart of Midtown East, would become New York City’s central migrant intake center,[2] at a reported cost of $225 million.[3] In addition to hosting hundreds of families and individuals on-site, the location will process all arriving asylum seekers and provide them with a range of city services, including government-issued ID cards, public-school and health-insurance enrollment, mental-health counseling, and more.
New York: Manhattan Institute, 2023. 19p.
By J. P. Kenyon
FROM THE PREFACE: “This book covers the history of the British Isles and its overseas possessions from the Roman conquest until 1970. The three thousand or so articles encompass domestic political and social events, foreign affairs, and major cultural and scientific developments, together with the men or women who have influenced or been influenced by the multifarious events that make up a country's history. The alpha- betical arrangement of the main body of the book is complemented by a Chronology - a year-by-year survey of events in British history and of major developments on the Continent and in America (shown in italic type).”
Hertfordshire, Wordsworth. 1992. 425p.
By Neil Hanson
FROM THE COVER: “The Confident Hope of a Miracle is a gripping account of the defeat of the Spanish Armada--the defining international event of the Elizabethan age. In 1588, determined to reclaim England for the Catholic Church, King Philip II of Spain launched a fleet of huge castle-crowned galleons that stretched for miles across the ocean. A battle-hardened Spanish Army waited in Holland, ready to crush England's barely trained conscripts, many armed only with scythes, stakes or longbows. All that stood between Spain and victory was the English Navy. But English ships, tactics, weapons and crews were much superior to those of the Armada, and the pious and ascetic Philip's "confident hope of a miracle" to give him victory was not fulfilled.
The story of the Spanish Armada is one of the great epics, with a cast of characters as rich and varied as any in history, with results that shaped Europe for centuries to come. Neil Hanson, the acclaimed author of The Great Fire of London and The Custom of the Sea, brings the story to vivid life, tracing the origins of the conflict from the Old World to the New, delineating the Armada campaign in rousing prose, and illuminating the lives of kings and popes, spymasters and assassins, military commanders and common sailors, and the ordinary men and women caught up in this great event when the fate of nations hung in the balance. Hanson also depicts the terrible fate that befell the seamen of both sides long after the decisive battles were over, and he takes a fresh, hard look at Elizabeth I, shaking the pedestal of "England's greatest ever monarch."" The Confident Hope of a Miracle is authentic and original history written with the pace and drama of a novel.”
NY. Alfred Knopf. 2005. 528p.
By S. T. Bindoff
FROM THE PROLOGUE: “The battle was over. On a stretch of high ground in the midland heart of the kingdom twenty thousand men had met in fierce, clumsy combat, and the day had ended in the decisive defeat of the stronger army. Its leader, the King, had been killed fighting heroically, and men had seen his naked corpse slung across his horse's back and borne away to an obscure grave. His captains were dead, captured, or in flight, his troops broken and demoralized. But in the victor's army all was rejoicing. In following the claimant to the throne his supporters had chosen the winning side, and when they saw the golden circlet which had fallen from the King's head placed upon their leader's, their lingering doubts fed before the conviction that God had blessed his cause, and they hailed him joyously as their sovereign.”
London. Penguin. 1969. 323p.
By Alison Weir
FROM THE PREFACE: “This was never meant to be a political biography, nor did I intend to write a social history of the times. My aim has always been to write a history of Elizabeth's personal life within the framework of her reign, drawing on her own extensive literary remains, as well as those of her contemporaries. The manuscript was originally entitled The Private Life of Elizabeth I, but it very soon became apparent that Elizabeth's 'private' life was a very public one indeed, hence the change of title. Nor is it possible to write a personal history of her without encompassing the political and social events that made up the fabric of her life. What I have tried to do, therefore, is weave into the narrative enough about them to make sense of the story, and emphasise Elizabeth's reaction to them, showing how she influenced the history of her time.”
New York. Ballantine. 1998. 566p.
BY J.Steven Watson
FROM THE COVER: This new account attempts to weave a consecutive story political, social, anomic and cultural history, making clear their interaction upon each other. In dealing with subjects as diverse as the loss of Amerrica, the winning of supremacy in Indla, the political ideas of Bute, North, and Pitt, with local government and economic changes, as well as with that transformation of men's attitude to life known as Romanticism, it offers an dependent interpretation which takes count of a great body of research upon both sides of the Atlantic.
London. Oxford At The Clarendon Press 1960. 663p.
By J. H. Plumb
FROM CHAPTER 1: “England in 1714 was a land of hamlets and villages: its towns, such as it had, were on the coast. In Lancashire, the West Riding, and West Midlands towns of some size and substance were beginning to grow, but the majority of the population was still in the south and still rural. Estimates of population vary because the evidence is unreliable. Until the last decades of the century, it is largely a matter of intelligent guesswork. The population was probably, in 1714, about five and a half millions, and from 1714 to 1742, after an initial spurt, there was only avery small increase, but there were important changes in its distribution; East Anglia had a declining population; the West Country and South and East Midlands werefairly static, so was the East Ridinga n d all of the north but Tyneside, West Riding, and South Lan- cashire, where the increase was marked; so, too, was the increase in the West Midlands. Surrey and Middlesex grew with London, whose rapid expansion of the lateseventeenth century was maintained.”
London. Pelican. 1955. 220p.
By Bob Woodward And Scott Armstrong
FROM THE COVER: “"A provocative book about a hallowed institution, the U.S. Supreme Court. . .. It is the most comprehensive inside story ever written of the most important court in the world. For this reason alone it is required reading." Business Week
"It is to the credit of Woodward and Armstrong that they were willing and able to shatter this conspiracy of silence. It is certainly in the highest tradition of investigative journalism to expose the realities of institutions that affect our lives as greatly as the Supreme Court does." SaturdayReview
NY. Avon Books. 1979. 562p.
By John Ketchamand Daniel Di Martino
Since the summer of 2022, more than 70,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City, stretching public resources to their limit. The massive influx has been particularly challenging given the city’s “right to shelter,” the result of a 1979 lawsuit, Callahan v. Carey, and corresponding consent decree, which required the city to provide immediate shelter to those who request it, regardless of the number of applicants or the availability of resources. In order to comply with this requirement, the city has housed some 40,000 migrants in shelters—which has led to an approximately 70% spike in the shelter population in a single year. NYC is currently supporting more than 170 emergency shelters and 10 additional large-scale humanitarian relief centers.
Shelters and relief centers simply cannot house all the newly arrived migrants, which has forced the city to procure approximately 4,500 hotel rooms in unionized facilities,[1] often through expensive contracts that provide bonanzas to owners and the city’s hotel-worker unions. Most notably, on May 13, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the historic 1,025-room Roosevelt Hotel, located in the heart of Midtown East, would become New York City’s central migrant intake center,[2] at a reported cost of $225 million.[3] In addition to hosting hundreds of families and individuals on-site, the location will process all arriving asylum seekers and provide them with a range of city services, including government-issued ID cards, public-school and health-insurance enrollment, mental-health counseling, and more.
New York: Manhattan Institute, 2023. 19p.
By Alexander Betts
Such threats as environmental change, food insecurity, and generalized violence force massive numbers of people to flee states that are unable or unwilling to ensure their basic rights, as do conditions in failed and fragile states that make possible human rights deprivations. Because these reasons do not meet the legal understanding of persecution, the victims of these circumstances are not usually recognized as "refugees," preventing current institutions from ensuring their protection. In this book, Alexander Betts develops the concept of "survival migration" to highlight the crisis in which these people find themselves.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Pres, 2013. 255p.
Edited by Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Vinh Nguyen
This Handbook presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives, broadly defined. Interrogating who can be considered a refugee and what constitutes a narrative, the thirty-eight chapters included in this collection encompass a range of forcibly displaced subjects, a mix of geographical and historical contexts, and a variety of storytelling modalities. Analyzing novels, poetry, memoirs, comics, films, photography, music, social media, data, graffiti, letters, reports, eco-design, video games, archival remnants, and ethnography, the individual chapters counter dominant representations of refugees as voiceless victims. Addressing key characteristics and thematics of refugee narratives, this Handbook examines how refugee cultural productions are shaped by and in turn shape socio-political landscapes. It will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners committed to engaging refugee narratives in the contemporary moment.
London; New York: Routledge, 2023. 528p.
Edited by Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch
Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959 offers a new history of Europe’s mid-20th century as seen through its recurrent refugee crises. By bringing together in one volume recent research on a range of different contexts of groups of refugees and refugee policy, it sheds light on the common assumptions that underpinned the history of refugees throughout the period under review. The essays foreground the period between the end of the First World War, which inaugurated a series of new international structures to deal with displaced populations, and the late 1950s, when Europe's home-grown refugee problems had supposedly been ‘solved’ and attention shifted from the identification of an exclusively European refugee problem to a global one. Borrowing from E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, first published in 1939, the editors of this volume test the idea that the two post-war eras could be represented as a single crisis of a European-dominated international order of nation states in the face of successive refugee crises which were both the direct consequence of that system and a challenge to it. Each of the chapters reflects on the utility and limitations of this notion of a ‘forty years’ crisis’ for understanding the development of specific national and international responses to refugees in the mid-20th century. Contributors to the volume also provide alternative readings of the history of an international refugee regime, in which the non-European and colonial world are assigned a central role in the narrative.
London; New York : Bloomsburgy Academic, 2017. 269p.
By Adele Valeria Messina
Filled with new elements that challenge common scholarly theses, this book acquaints the reader with the “Jewish problem” of sociology and provides what this academic discipline urgently needs: a one-volume history of the Sociology of the Holocaust. The story of why and how sociologists as well as the schools of sociological thought came to confront the Holocaust has never been entirely told. The volume offers original insights on the nature of American sociology with implications for the post-Holocaust sociology development.
Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017. 498p.
By Cesraéa Rumpf
Recovering Identity examines a critical tension in criminalized women’s identity work. Through in-depth qualitative and photo-elicitation interviews, Cesraéa Rumpf shows how formerly incarcerated women engaged recovery and faith-based discourses to craft rehabilitated identities, defined in opposition to past identities as “criminal-addicts.” While these discourses made it possible for women to carve out spaces of personal protection, growth, and joy, they also promoted individualistic understandings of criminalization and the violence and dehumanization that followed. Honoring criminalized women’s stories of personal transformation, Rumpf nevertheless strongly critiques institutions’ promotion of narratives that impose lifelong moral judgment while detracting attention from the structural forces of racism, sexism, and poverty that contribute to women’s vulnerability to violence.
Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023. 234p
By David Thomson
FROM THE PREFACE: “This book is not an attempt to write what is often called a 'general' or 'undifferentiated' history ofnineteenth-century England. Still less is it intended as yet another 'text-book' on nineteenth-century England. These tasks have been well performed already. In conformity with the taste and tendency of our times I have tried rather to describe, and as far as possible to explain, the major social changes which the people of England experienced during that remarkable century between 1815 and 1914 which might well be called 'the Great Peace'. In making this attempt we have to draw upon political, economic, intellectual, diplomatic, and any other sort of 'differentiated' or 'specialized' history available to us…”
London. Penguin. 1955. 256p.