For centuries scholars have scrutinized the cities of the Old World, poking into ruins and libraries for unwritten and written clues to origins and demise. The American cities that have played major roles in the history of the United States have also had their share of study. But only recently have historians applied systematic analysis to what is now called the Sunbelt, where half the nation's ten largest cities are located--cities that have grown astronomically since World War II.
This volume brings together the important findings of leading urban historians. Addressing a variety of...

As its name suggests, the civil rights movement is an ongoing process, and the scholars contributing to this volume offer new geographical and temporal perspectives on this crucial American experience.
As Clayborne Carson notes in the introduction, the movement involved much more than civil rights reform--it transformed African-American political and social consciousness. In this timely volume John Dittmer provides a new assessment of the effects of grass-roots activists of the movement in Mississippi from 1965 to 1968, to show what happened after the famous Freedom Summer of 1964....

Why has the American Southwest been celebrated as a place of beauty and history even as it was condemned as a place without any past or, indeed, an inhabitable present? The contributors to this volume all address how and why America's image of the Southwest has evolved.
D. W. Meinig once wrote: "The Southwest is a distinctive place to the American mind but a somewhat blurred place on American maps." Actually, it has been a somewhat blurred place even to the mind. The Southwest's physical extremes--urban and rural, tame and wild, ugly and beautiful, polluted and pure--complicate its...

Because women have always played roles crucial to the functioning of the American political system, their formal entry into electoral politics is far less unprecedented than usually thought. That underlying theme informs the findings of the six studies in this intriguing volume, which reintegrates women into nineteenth-century political theory, highlighting their participation in political life and discourse and in the negotiation of power.
In her introduction, Sarah Barringer Gordon articulates the central theme of the book: that political instability in the lives of women in the...

Creolization, the process of cultural interchange--in this case, between peoples of the continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean--is an important aspect of the American experience. Language, literature, food, dress, and social relations are all affected by the interplay of cultures. Only recently, though, have scholars fully begun to understand creolization as a mutual exchange rather than the acculturation of colonized peoples to a dominant culture.
Focusing on diverse settings and different aspects of culture, five scholars here examine the process of creolization: its origins,...

Over the course of the twentieth century, Germans from virtually all walks of life were touched by two interrelated problems: forging a sense of national community and coming to terms with widespread suffering. Arguably no country in the modern western world has been so closely associated with both inflicting and overcoming catastrophic misery in the name of national belonging as Germany.
It was within this context that the concept and ideal of Asacrifice" played a pivotal role in recent German political culture. What was seen as a noble act that carried feudal and religious connotations...

In "Traveling between Worlds, " six authors explore the connectedness between Germans and Americans in the nineteenth century and their mutual impact on transatlantic history. Despite the ocean between them, these two groups of people were linked not only by the emigration from one to the other but also by ongoing interactions, especially among their intellectuals.
Christof Mauch s introduction examines the history of the German-American exchange and of cultural exchanges in general. Focusing on various aspects of the German-American relationship, Eberhard Bruning, John T. Walker, Thomas...

The transatlantic world has had immense influence on the direction of world history. The six illuminating studies in Transatlantic History address cultural exchanges and intercontinental developments that contribute to our modern understanding of global communities.
Transatlantic history encompasses a variety of scholarly problems and approaches from multiple disciplines, and volume editors Steven G. Reinhardt and Dennis P. Reinhartz have assembled a collection of essays that reflect the diversity within the field. Introducing the book, William McNeill provides a unifying overview...

Like the rosary itself, the influence of Catholicism on the social and historical development of the American West has been both visible and hidden: visible in the effects of personal conviction on lives and communities; hidden in that the fuller context of this important American religious group has been largely marginalized or undervalued in traditional historiographic treatments of the region.

This volume, an outgrowth of the 2004 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, seeks to redress this imbalance. Editors Roberto R. Trevino and Richard Francaviglia have assembled here a variety...