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Rediscovering soccer's long history in the U.S. Across North America, native peoples and colonists alike played a variety of kicking games long before soccer's emergence in the late 1800s. Brian D. Bunk examines the development and social impact of these sports through the rise of professional soccer after World War I. As he shows, the various games called football gave women an outlet as athletes and encouraged men to form social bonds based on educational experience, occupation, ethnic identity, or military service. Football also followed young people to college as higher education expanded in the nineteenth century. University play, along with the arrival of immigrants from the British Isles, helped spark the creation of organized soccer in the United States—and the beautiful game's transformation into a truly international sport. A multilayered look at one game’s place in American life, From Football to Soccer refutes the notion of the U.S. as a land outside of football history.
The question of what caused the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) is the central focus of modern Spanish historiography. In Ghosts of Passion, Brian D. Bunk argues that propaganda related to the revolution of October 1934 triggered the broader conflict by accentuating existing social tensions surrounding religion and gender. Through careful analysis of the images produced in books, newspapers, posters, rallies, and meetings, Bunk contends that Spain’s civil war was not inevitable. Commemorative imagery produced after October 1934 bridged the gap between rhetoric and action by dehumanizing opponents and encouraging violent action against them. In commemorating the uprising, revolutionaries and conservatives used the same methods to promote radically different political agendas: they deployed religious imagery to characterize the political situation as a battle between good and evil, with the fate of the nation hanging in the balance, and exploited traditional gender stereotypes to portray themselves as the defenders of social order against chaos. The resulting atmosphere of polarization combined with increasing political violence to plunge the country into civil war.
Sacrifice and Modern War Writing presents the most extensive study to date of twentieth- and twenty-first-century war writing. Examining works by over 110 authors, Alex Houen surveys how war writing explores sacrifice in relation to major modern and contemporary conflicts, from the First World War to the War on Terror. Various conceptions of sacrifice are examined, including Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and secular. The discussion ranges across literary portrayals of multiple sacrificial practices, including ancient rituals of child sacrifice, martyrdom, scapegoating, and suicide bombing. Houen builds an innovative interdisciplinary approach to how war, sacrifice, and their representations in...
Hidden Out in the Open is the first English-language volume on Spanish migration to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This panoramic study covers a period defined by the crucial transformations of the Progressive Era in the United States, and by similarly momentous changes in Spain following the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy under Alfonso XII. The chapters in this volume are geographically wide-ranging, reflecting the transnational nature of the Spanish diaspora in the Americas, encompassing networks that connected Spain, Cuba, Latin American countries, the United States, and American-controlled territories in Hawai’i and Panama. The geographic d...
"Women played an integral role in the Spanish Civil War. In fact, women's participation in the anti-fascist resistance constituted one of the greatest mass political mobilizations of women in Spain's history. Milicianas provides a comprehensive picture of what life was like for the women who fought alongside their male comrades during the first year of the Spanish Civil War, focusing on how the women themselves viewed this experience. It examines the political and social forces that led to the acceptance of women into the ranks of armed combatants, and those that led to their eventual removal from the front"--Page 4 of cover.
In Prizefighting and Civilization: A Cultural History of Boxing, Race, and Masculinity in Mexico and Cuba, 1840–1940, historian David C. LaFevor traces the history of pugilism in Mexico and Cuba from its controversial beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century through its exponential rise in popularity during the early twentieth century. A divisive subculture that was both a profitable blood sport and a contentious public spectacle, boxing provides a unique vantage point from which LaFevor examines the deeper historical evolution of national identity, everyday normative concepts of masculinity and race, and an expanding and democratizing public sphere in both Mexico and Cuba, the United States’ closest Latin American neighbors. Prizefighting and Civilization explores the processes by which boxing—once considered an outlandish purveyor of low culture—evolved into a nationalized pillar of popular culture, a point of pride that transcends gender, race, and class.
Europe Since 1945: An Encyclopedia is a comprehensive reference work of some 1,700 entries in two volumes. Its scope includes all of Europe and the successor states to the former Soviet Union. The volumes provide a broad coverage of topics, with an emphasis on politics, governments, organizations, people, and events crucial to an understanding of postwar Europe. Also includes 100 maps and photos.
Founded in 1927, Romania’s Legion of the Archangel Michael was one of Europe’s largest and longest-lived fascist social movements. In Holy Legionary Youth, Roland Clark draws on oral histories, memoirs, and substantial research in the archives of the Romanian secret police to provide the most comprehensive account of the Legion in English to date. Clark approaches Romanian fascism by asking what membership in the Legion meant to young Romanian men and women. Viewing fascism "from below," as a social category that had practical consequences for those who embraced it, he shows how the personal significance of fascism emerged out of Legionaries’ interactions with each other, the state, ot...
An exploration of the Spanish colonial reaction to the threat of Napoleonic subversion A Great Fear: Luís de Onís and the Shadow War against Napoleon in Spanish America, 1808–1812 explores why Spanish Americans did not take the opportunity to seize independence in this critical period when Spain was overrun by French armies and, arguably, in its weakest state. In the first years after his appointment as Spanish ambassador to the United States, Luís de Onís claimed the heavy responsibility of defending Spanish America from the wave of French spies, subversives, and soldiers whom he believed Napoleon was sending across the Atlantic to undermine the empire. As a leading representative of ...
This is the true story behind General Alexander Orlov, the man who never was, now revealed in full for the first time: Stalinist henchman, Soviet spy, celebrated defector to the West, and central character in the greatest KGB deception ever.