A collection of essays grappling with the many, often overlooked, forms of unfree labor in the West.

When Americans think of unfree labor-coerced, extracted from workers unable to freely enter and exit contracts-what comes to mind is Black slavery and peonage in the South. But other forms of unfree labor also built the United States. Collecting a diverse range of sharply argued historical essays, Capturing Labor shares the story of unfree labor in the Southwest, affecting mainly Indigenous people, Mexican Americans, and people of color.

In Texas and elsewhere, state agents developed various methods for directing the movement of workers, seizing their time, and controlling the products of their efforts. Case studies highlight the detention during World War I of Indigenous children and unaccompanied women, who were placed in boarding schools, fined, and obligated to work off the resulting debt. Other essays expose authorities forcing workers to break strikes and jailing Americans who supported labor uprisings in rural Mexico and the United States. Prisons and asylums supplied coerced agricultural workers and musicians who were never compensated for their labor or by the labels that took their recordings.

Editors Jessica Pliley and John Mckiernan-GonzAlez contend that unfree labor continues to shape American life, and is all around us today. Understanding its history aids us in recognizing and bringing attention to the grim realities of the present.

Through diverse case studies and perspectives, contributors reimagine education as a space of liberation, relationality and decolonial transformation. Chapters analyse pressing global issues ranging from epistemic violence to the carceral logics of schooling, while promoting Indigenous, Black and Global South epistemologies. Combining theory, activism and artistic expression, this book demonstrates that anti-colonial education is not just a critique but a call to action.

Understanding Anti-Colonial Education is a crucial resource for students and scholars across education studies who are interested in decolonial pedagogy. It is also an essential read for practitioners, policymakers and activists seeking to revolutionise educational futures.

When war came to the nation in 1861, Michiganians rallied around the Stars and Stripes and readily agreed with a veteran politician who declared, "He who is not for his country is against her." Even as the conflict grew bloody and costly, they remained committed to suppressing the rebellion. By war's end, an astonishing 50 percent of its military-age males had enlisted in the army. This Michigan Civil War chronicle is more than a story about soldiers' heroism on distant battlefields. It also includes the often-overlooked role of women-some of whom refused to stay home and went to war. Also buried in the historical record are accounts of white soldiers whose views on slavery and African Americans, especially those in uniform, were transformed. There is also a much-needed exploration of Michigan's response to the shocking assassination of a beloved president. Many a Hand captures these stories in a single volume.

Informed by Horton and Wohl's seminal article in 1956 and the research of Jung, Allport, Erikson and Tajfel, chapters explore parasocial theory in social media, fandoms, diverse populations and various media formats. Stever focuses in particular on the role of the celebrity in parasocial communication and how parasocial theory relates to social media influencers. The book investigates the potential negative sides of parasocial relationships, including anti-fandom, while also assessing the positive and personal applications of parasocial theory to people's daily lives.

Understanding Parasocial Relationships is a valuable resource for students and scholars of media, psychology, communication, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and business. Its evaluation of the psychology of audience reactions will also benefit journalists and researchers interested in media, celebrity and fandom.

A leading authority on the archaeology of Florida tells the story of the state's past as a Spanish colony

Florida is the state with the oldest recorded history of European contact, beginning with the arrival of Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon more than five centuries ago-but many people don't know the full story of Florida during this momentous time. Engagingly written and extensively illustrated, Early Spanish Florida delves into archaeological discoveries to uncover the 250-year history of Spanish colonization on the peninsula.

Judith Bense, a lifelong archaeologist and expert on Spanish Florida, traces the story from 1513 when Ponce de Leon accidentally landed on "La Florida" to 1763 when Spain lost the land to Britain after the Seven Years' War. Bense explores how the first Spanish settlers tried to colonize Florida with aims to take over the entire Southeast, encountering harsh weather, competing colonizing nations, and Native resistance. The story includes the establishment of St. Augustine in 1565, shipwrecks of early explorers and colonists, the building of Catholic missions in the 1600s, and the journeys of people of African descent escaping slavery on northern plantations.

The events in Early Spanish Florida are told from the perspectives of the intertwined groups of people whose interactions created deep cultural changes, including Spanish, Indigenous, and African communities. Filled with maps and images of artifacts, excavations, historical sites, and original documents, and featuring suggested readings and places to visit, this book offers a wealth of knowledge and sparks enduring interest in Florida's past.

Funding for this publication was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of Florida Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A tribute to the distinguished diplomatic historian, Professor Michael Dockrill (1936-2018), this collection provides a comprehensive overview of the field of twentieth-century British foreign and defence policy. With contributions from the most esteemed academic thinkers in the field, this collection will be of great value to anyone interested in British foreign and strategic policy, whether they are a senior academic or an undergraduate researcher. In memory of the late Professor Dockrill, the essays place British foreign policy in a wide range of geographical, thematic and chronological perspectives.

Volume I examines international diplomacy in relation to the conduct of the First World War, the peace-making process that followed it, and the origins of the Second World War, mapping very closely to the interests of Professor Dockrill in the early stages of his career. Focusing on Great Power diplomacy seen through the lens of bi-lateral relations between states, the essaysexplore Britain's relations not only with European powers, but also with the United States and Japan. The views and operations of the British Foreign Office feature heavily, as do the lives and opinions of diplomats, primarily from the British Diplomatic Service, during the years 1890-1939. Analysing British strategic thinking around war and its consequences, this collection sheds light on the first steps in the evolution of international bodies built to preserve order around the world.

This book addresses the need for an exploration of indigenous knowledge of psychological healing within the context of African cultures and politics and afterlives of colonial historical harms. Taking into account the various abuses to which the discipline of psychology in Africa has been put, it focuses on closing the gap between theory and practice, and examines the manifestation of coloniality and colonialism for Africa. In this regard, it demonstrates that African psychology must be embedded within the cosmologies of Africentric and Afrocentric thought. It interrogates the area of therapeutic practice, while incorporating it an empirical context. Both researchers and practitioners interested in African psychology will find a thoughtful and scientifically -based exploration of this area.

Chapters analyze seminal findings and trace the development of key areas of social judgment research. Authors explore social judgments in various contexts, including the justice system, charitable giving, animal moral standing, and interactions with AI. This Research Handbook also looks to the future, highlighting opportunities for further investigation of understudied areas in social judgment research such as its temporal dynamics and the impact of culture.

The Research Handbook on Social Judgment is a crucial resource for students and scholars of psychology and the wider social and behavioral sciences, particularly those interested in impression formation, moral judgment, or intergroup bias. Practitioners working in communication and psychology will also benefit from its valuable insights into how, when, and why social judgments are formed.

Contributors assess how biological reasoning applies to ideas of equity, potential and governance. They identify continuities between past biological rationalities, such as eugenics, and contemporary developments including educational genomics and neuroscience. Through its chapters, the volume examines how the biological turn in education has emerged, what drives it, and what its wide-ranging consequences may be, asking whether it marks a fundamental change in thinking or a reconfiguration of established ideas. Ultimately, the book advances research in this field, providing fresh insights into how biology is becoming intertwined with education's social and political purposes.

The Biological Turn in Education Policy is a key resource for scholars and students of education policy, comparative and international education, sociology and public policy and politics. The book's analysis of the diffusion of global policy paradigms and the role of expertise and science in governance will also benefit policymakers in international organisations, national ministries and local authorities.

Assessment Tools for Successful Library Evaluations is an essential guide for professionals involved in evaluating library operations or teaching assessment methods. Contributions offer clear, detailed descriptions of key assessment and evaluation techniques, complemented by practical examples that demonstrate how these principles can be applied and adapted to any library setting.

Various performance measurement tools are evaluated, such as ethnographic techniques, focus groups, interviews, observations, surveys, and usability testing. Chapters provide examples of how librarians have used these methods, along with guidance on applying each method to assess different aspects of library operations. This helps describe the library's value and supports data-driven decision-making for strategic improvements. Examples of each assessment method are drawn from different types of libraries worldwide, including academic, public, school, government, and medical libraries.

This is a valuable resource for library managers and assessment librarians across all sectors. For those with assessment experience, it provides a quick refresher of the learning and skills related to library evaluation. For those teaching or learning about assessment as part of an MLS program, Assessment Tools for Successful Library Evaluations is a reference resource that will help instructors present methods and students to learn and apply the methods.

Volume II focuses on British foreign and strategic policy from the fall of France in 1940 to the end of the Cold War in Europe during the 1990s. The emphasis on the Cold War reflects Professor Dockrill's interests in the later part of his career. The chapters explore British imperial and post-colonial history, as well as the impact of race and religion on British foreign policy duringthe second half of the twentieth century. British relations with the United Nations are also examined through the formulation of the so-called 'Special Relationship'.

In this groundbreaking and comprehensive look at Congressional elections in pre-Jacksonian America, Jay K. Dow examines the origins of our modern electoral politics.

When did the United States become a recognizably modern republic? The traditional understanding is that elections in the Age of Jackson introduced institutionalized political parties, campaigning, partisanship, position-taking, stump speeches, high elector turnout, and other familiar features of electoral democracy. Before that, so the story goes, elections were less organized along party lines, often uncompetitive, and frequently dominated by elites rather than average citizens. The First Elections offers a compelling alternative to this interpretation of the early American republic.

Through systematic analysis of an impressive new collection of early American election returns known as A New Nation Votes, Jay K. Dow has discovered what these results tell us about the development of Congressional elections between 1796 and 1825. The so-called first party era marks the transition from a "deferential" politics in which local elites exercised great influence over elections to a more recognizably democratic politics. But the extent of this transition has been largely opaque before these new data became available. Focusing on House of Representatives as the foundational institution in national republican government, Dow uses these election returns to provide a more fine-grained picture of United States electoral development than ever seen before. In doing so, he reveals more party-centric, competitive, and developed elections than scholars have generally recognized.

The First Elections begins with the election to the Fifth Congress in 1796, the year that elections first became truly contested following the Federalist and Anti-Federalist period. It concludes with the elections to the Nineteenth Congress, which marked the start of the Jacksonian Second American Party System. Because American politics is territorial politics-in general, but especially in this era-Dow's work is organized geographically, giving due attention to how electoral democracy developed unevenly across each region of the early United States. Since the states used different methods to elect their representatives, The First Elections pays special attention to the variety of electoral systems that characterized the political mosaic of early America.

The First Elections is a groundbreaking look at what elections were like in the dawn of the new American nation.

Cultural scholar John Wills takes readers on a cultural tour of Doom Town, USA, designed to be the model 1950s American city and destroyed by an atomic bomb on live television to educate Americans on the need to prepare for possible nuclear war-but also to sell new products in the emerging postwar economic boom.

In March 1953 and May 1955, government officials-including the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), the US Department of Defense, and the Atomic Energy Commission-released nuclear bombs on two model towns at Nevada Test Site, the continental nuclear test facility during the Cold War. These so-called "Doom Towns" were designed to illustrate in the most vivid way possible what might happen to a "typical American home" caught in a Soviet atomic blast. Instead of training troops for war overseas, the Doom Towns literally brought the Cold War home.

Drawing on newspaper articles, FCDA reports, and corporate documents, John Wills brings readers into Doom Town, USA-a place where life-size mannequins of the archetypal Mr. and Mrs. America walked the streets in JCPenney clothes, drove Chrysler cars, and lived in the latest trailer homes, tailor-made to escape in the event of nuclear war. The two Doom Towns of Operation Doorstep (1953) and Operation Cue (1955) were far more than just an exercise in developing a new civilian home front. They were a media spectacle and a cultural flashpoint, attracting corporate sponsors, drawing in atomic tourists, and generating new consumer products. The atom bomb may have been bad for world peace, but it was good for business. In the excitement about these experiments, real people even volunteered to be living test subjects-but most were turned away.

Doom Town became an unusual but effective banner for corporate and consumer life in the 1950s. Doom Town was an effective simulacrum of white middle-class America, right down to the racially segregated social spaces and the hierarchical gender roles of the dummies living in their classic suburban homes. But these homegrown Hiroshimas also contributed to a broader culture of catastrophe and fear in the late 1950s. Concerns over Communist invasion, Soviet spies, and ICBM missiles coalesced in the Nevada desert, framing a national culture of anxiety. The sudden explosion of the model towns revealed the shocking fragility of postwar living, calling into question the 1950s American Dream and the survivability of American ideals. The cultural crater left by these nuclear test sites exists even today in the many movies, television shows, and video games that dwell on the existential crisis of impending apocalypse.

Doom Town, USA is an eye-opening tour guide of one of the most bizarre and uniquely American places in history.

2025 Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters

A history of racism and segregation in twentieth-century Houston and beyond.

Through the 1950s and beyond, the Supreme Court issued decisions that appeared to provide immediate civil rights protections to racial minorities as it relegated Jim Crow to the past. For black Houstonians who had been hoping and actively fighting for what they called a "raceless democracy," these postwar decades were often seen as decades of promise. In Houston and the Permanence of Segregation, David Ponton argues that these were instead "decades of capture": times in which people were captured and constrained by gender and race, by faith in the law, by antiblack violence, and even by the narrative structures of conventional histories. Bringing the insights of Black studies and Afropessimism to the field of urban history, Ponton explores how gender roles constrained thought in black freedom movements, how the "rule of law" compelled black Houstonians to view injustice as a sign of progress, and how antiblack terror undermined Houston's narrative of itself as a "heavenly" place.

Today, Houston is one of the most racially diverse cities in the United States, and at the same time it remains one of the most starkly segregated. Ponton's study demonstrates how and why segregation has become a permanent feature in our cities and offers powerful tools for imagining the world otherwise.

For William Allen White, the ideal Midwestern community was a utopian vision of what America could be: a prosperous, happy community built on equality, opportunity, and neighborly generosity. This anthology collects White's famous and obscure writings and presents him as the iconic voice of the Midwestern small town.

William Allen White, the editor of the Emporia, Kansas Gazette, was an American institution. When he died in 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt commented that America had lost one of its "wisest and most beloved editors." White understood the value of his unique brand as "The Voice of Main Street," and would often preach his vision of the kind of nation the United States ought to be. From his view in Emporia, White's imagined Midwestern town was a dream for the nation to strive toward. He saw himself as a pioneer sowing the seeds of a great harvest to come, and he believed that the small-town civilization he venerated exemplified what was best in America.

In Heartland Utopia, Charles Delgadillo and Jason Stacy have gathered nearly twenty-five years of White's fiction and nonfiction, focused on his idealized Midwestern community and how this utopian vision changed over time.

Edwin K. Broadhead challenges the traditional assumption that the meaning and identity of New Testament texts rest in the intentions of an author expressed in a foundational narrative fixed in writing. He argues that for ancient literature the decisive factor is the viability and variability of a text's tradition history, encompassing composition, preservation, transmission, editing, interpretation, memory, and performance. These developments draw intermittently and interchangeably upon oral, scribal, memorial, and performative modes and respond to the needs of communities of tradents. The author maintains that the writings of the followers of Jesus belong to this ancient, normative way of Traditionshandlung and Traditionsverhalten, making it unlikely that these writings provide unmediated access to intentions of an author.
Employing a formalistic analysis set within a history of traditions context, the author seeks to move beyond the myopic focus on written manuscript and the attachment to the image of the New Testament author as a consistent theologian and literary genius. This renewed attention to Traditionshandlung in wider literature highlights two key traits of the New Testament material. First, the New Testament appears as a collection of traditions in a wide variety of forms: oral traditions such as hymn, story, preaching, prayer; performed traditions such as worship, eucharist, baptism, blessings; and iconic traditions such as sign, symbol, icon. Secondly, because these writings were shaped over time within communities of believers and developed across generations for changing contexts, they come to us as living traditions. This metabolic quality becomes fully visible only when we look beyond the authors - beyond the vision of a personal and punctiliar production of unchanging texts.

Stealing from the Gods investigates how authors writing between the first century BCE and second century CE addressed the issue of temple robbery or sacrilegium. As a self-proclaimed empire of pious people, the Romans viewed temple robbery as deeply un-Roman and among the worst of offenses. On the other hand, given the constant financial pressures of warfare and administration, it was inevitable that the Romans would make use of the riches stored in sanctuaries. In order to resolve this dilemma, the Romans distinguished sharply between acceptable and unacceptable removals of sacred property. When those who conducted themselves as proper Romans plundered the property of the gods, their actions were for the good of the state. In contrast, the temple robber was viewed as a stranger to the norms of Roman society and an enemy of the state.

Ancient authors including Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Appian, and Pausanias present isolated, grotesque individuals whose actions have no bearing on the conduct of Romans as a whole, rendering temple robbery not a matter of collective responsibility, but of individual moral failure. By revealing how narratives of temple robbery are constructed from a literary perspective and how they inform discourses about military conquest and imperial rule, Isabel K. Koester shines a new light on how the Romans coped with the more pernicious aspects of their empire.

Borders are frequently conceived as defensive lines-rigid edges of sovereignty, fortified margins, or hotspots of conflict. This book challenges that assumption. By rethinking borders not as barriers but as dynamic spaces of encounter, it redefines the very foundations of border studies as a historical discipline.

Focusing on Europe and its colonial territories across both pre-modern and modern eras, the author demonstrates how borderlands have repeatedly served as sites of exchange, negotiation, and creativity. Far from being static peripheries, these regions have produced hybrid identities, fostered transboundary solidarities, and yielded unexpected responses in moments of crisis. Through vivid historical examples, the book shows that borders often become generative centers-places where new ideas, communities, and forms of coexistence emerge.

Clear, compelling, and rigorously researched, this book offers a crucial corrective to traditional border scholarship. It urges readers to rethink how borders have operated across history, how they have shaped human lives, and why their significance endures today. In a world that witnessed the extraordinary border closures of COVID-19, this work provides a timely and necessary opportunity to reflect anew on what borders truly mean.