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As bloody wars raged in Central America during the last third of the twentieth century, hundreds of North American groups “adopted” villages in war-torn Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Unlike government-based cold war–era Sister City programs, these pairings were formed by ordinary people, often inspired by individuals displaced by US-supported counterinsurgency operations. Drawing on two decades of work with former refugees from El Salvador as well as unprecedented access to private archives and oral histories, Molly Todd’s compelling history provides the first in-depth look at “grassroots sistering.” This model of citizen diplomacy emerged in the mid-1980s out of relationships between a few repopulated villages in Chalatenango, El Salvador, and US cities. Todd shows how the leadership of Salvadorans and left-leaning activists in the US concerned with the expansion of empire as well as the evolution of human rights–related discourses and practices created a complex dynamic of cross-border activism that continues today.
During the civil war that wracked El Salvador from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, the Salvadoran military tried to stamp out dissidence and insurgency through an aggressive campaign of crop-burning, kidnapping, rape, killing, torture, and gruesome bodily mutilations. Even as human rights violations drew world attention, repression and war displaced more than a quarter of El Salvador’s population, both inside the country and beyond its borders. Beyond Displacement examines how the peasant campesinos of war-torn northern El Salvador responded to violence by taking to the hills. Molly Todd demonstrates that their flight was not hasty and chaotic, but was a deliberate strategy that grew out of a longer history of collective organization, mobilization, and self-defense.
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In Athena's Disguises, Susan Wiltshire offers a classical model of the mentor that guides us and provides opportunities for understanding and for the exchange of wisdom. This book seeks to show that a mentor is a gift who ultimately gives us ourselves.
Author and playwright Victoria Kneubuhl returns with another thoroughly entertaining, yet complex, whodunit set in 1930s Hawai`i featuring the lead characters from Murder Casts a Shadow and Murder Leaves Its Mark. The pair of unlikely sleuths—part-Hawaiian Mina Beckwith and her fiancé, part-Samoan Ned Manusia—find themselves unraveling a deadly web of espionage and murder. As the story opens, Ned is in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, where he has been sent to rescue his friend Nigel, a British spy being ruthlessly hunted by the Japanese police. The action moves to Honolulu where Mina is embroiled with a group of eccentric artists whose numbers are being depleted in a series of dramatically ...
When Todd Harris makes the move from the mean streets of Chicago to the sleepy roads of Marietta, Montana, it’s not just his career that’s changing… it’s his entire life. Going from police officer to forest ranger isn’t too much of a stretch, but getting used to how things work in a small town is. As he settles in, Todd realizes he loves the slower pace of the countryside, but then… an Olympic gold medalist comes to town and shatters his hard fought peace. But the town’s new forest ranger doesn’t like attention and he sure as hell isn’t looking for any kind of relationship with someone who does. When Molly gets lost in the woods though and Todd is the one who saves her, the spark he’s been trying to ignore smolders and ignites. It's then that he realizes there’s a lot more to Molly than ambition and public adulation. When Todd signs up for the Men of Marietta calendar shoot to raise money for Harry's House, a place for children to commemorate a fallen firefighter, Molly realizes the kind of man he is. With the shoot wrapping up, she faces a painful decision–return to her old life, or give her new life with Todd a fighting chance.
Among Nashville’s many slogans, the one that best reflects its emphasis on manners and decorum is the Nashville Way, a phrase coined by boosters to tout what they viewed as the city’s amicable race relations. Benjamin Houston offers the first scholarly book on the history of civil rights in Nashville, providing new insights and critiques of this moderate progressivism for which the city has long been credited. Civil rights leaders such as John Lewis, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and James Lawson who came into their own in Nashville were devoted to nonviolent direct action, or what Houston calls the “black Nashville Way.” Through the dramatic story of Nashville’s 1960 lunch counter sit-...
In light of new proposals to control undocumented migrants in the United States, Parcels prioritizes rural Salvadoran remembering in an effort to combat the collective amnesia that supports the logic of these historically myopic strategies. Mike Anastario investigates the social memories of individuals from a town he refers to as “El Norteño,” a rural municipality in El Salvador that was heavily impacted by the Salvadoran Civil War, which in turn fueled a mass exodus to the United States. By working with two viajeros (travelers) who exchanged encomiendas (parcels containing food, medicine, documents, photographs and letters) between those in the U.S. and El Salvador, Anastario tells the...