Bøger udgivet af Michigan State University Press

For several years, the armies of Napoleon III deployed some 450 Muslim Sudanese slave soldiers in Veracruz, the port of Mexico City. As in the other case of Western hemisphere military slavery, the Sudanese were imported from Africa in the hopes that they would better survive the tropical diseases that so terribly afflicted European soldiers.The mixture of cultures embodied by this event has piqued the interest of several historians, so it is by no means unknown. Hill and Hogg provide a particularly thorough account of this exotic interlude, explaining its background, looking in detail at the battle record in Mexico, and figuring out who exactly made up the battalion.

States are thought only to exercise power over the land of the living. Benjamin Ginsberg argues otherwise, exploring the state's reach into the realm of the Grim Reaper, bureaucratizing death to strengthen the state's hold on life. He notes that increasingly institutions are using the regulation of death as an essential source of power. They do this by not only threatening death to their enemies but also securing loyalty and obedience by extending citizens' lives and promising to effectuate the postmortem fulfillment of citizens' antemortem desires. The state treats the loyal dead with respect, sometimes offering them a place in the secular afterlife of honor and memory, while consigning the faithless to the void.

This definitive assessment of Cormac McCarthy's novels captures the interactions among the literary and mythic elements, the social dynamics of violence, and the natural world. Drawing on René Girard's mimetic theory, mythography, thermodynamics, and information science, Markus Wierschem identifies a literary apocalypse at the center of McCarthy's work, one that unveils another buried deep within the history, religion, and myths of American and Western culture.

Even the Least of These presents the work of a poet and a printmaker responding to the small and often overlooked moments of our daily lives and reflecting upon the significance of experience and memory. The result is a thoughtful and often joyful collection of poetry and prints that celebrate an awareness of the world around us and reflect on past experiences, lessons learned (or not).

"Richard Gebhart traces the Atlantic-bound voyages of Great Lakes ships, recovering the voices of long-ago ship captains, along with their cargo manifests and itineraries. Drawing on research in old newspapers and maritime archives, he traces the construction of new ships and shipyards, the comings and goings and travails of the lakes' workhorses, and makes a visit to a boneyard where many ships ended their lives. Among many other lost tales, Gebhart brings back to light the rise of oil tankers, marking the great twentieth-century energy transition in shipping"--

Like many American urban waterways, Ken-O-Sha has been in decline for nearly two hundred years. Once life-supporting, the waterway now known as Plaster Creek is life-threatening. In this provocative book, scholars and environmentalists Gail Gunst Heffner and David P. Warners explore the watershed's ecological, social, spiritual, and economic history to determine what caused the damage, and describe more recent efforts to repair it.

Translated into English for the first time by leading mimetic studies scholar William A. Johnsen, The World of René Girard is a must-have for those new to and familiar with Girard's work. In these interviews, Girard discusses the flurry of intellectual activity that followed the landmark 1981 Stanford University conference, Disorder and Order. Girard also discusses Theater of Envy, his then-forthcoming book on Shakespeare and the first book written in English, as well as corrects several misunderstandings of his mimetic hypothesis.

Elder provides a uniquely moving insider's perspective into the quest to protect the Great Lakes and surrounding public lands, from past battles to protect Michigan wilderness and establish the region's national lakeshores to present fights against toxic pollution and climate change. Situated within the region's broader history, Wilderness, Water, and Rust argues endless cycles of resource exploitation and boom and bust created the "rust belt" legacy, and for the Great Lakes' natural and human communities to thrive, we must imagine new ways of living in the region.

While the history of Great Lakes shipping has been discussed frequently over the years, little has been said about the factors that influenced the use, design, and evolution of the boats that made this trade possible. Sail, Steam, and Diesel: Moving Cargo on the Great Lakes provides a comprehensive overview of the development of Great Lakes ships over the past several centuries, from small birch-bark canoes originally used in the region to the massive thousand-footers of today. The author also looks at the economics of vessel operation, including the various considerations involved in expanding the scope of the shipping industry, a move that aided in catapulting America into becoming an industrial juggernaut. Although they might not realize it, millions of Americans have owed their livelihoods to the Great Lakes boats and the cargoes they carried that supported a wide range of industries, and this volume is an excellent way to recognize to what extent our lives have been affected by this region's industry.

In 1924, an orphan train passed through the Midwest, and two teenagers, seeking a new life, find nothing but hardship when taken in to live on a farm in Michigan. After they are forced to flee, they are hunted by a determined police chief and the reemergent KKK. A bond of mutual trust and determination help the two orphans navigate a stark American landscape shaped by prejudice, hypocrisy, and fear.

With varying aspirations and motives for seeking new homes, migrants build communities by telling stories, engaging in social media activism, protesting in the streets, writing scholarly criticism, and using many other modes of communication. Since what it means to be a migrant differs from person to person, the contributors to this edited collection showcase numerous practices migrants adopt to communicate and connect with others as they forge their own identities in globalized yet highly nationalistic societies.

"This book turns the spotlight on thirteen women who were leaders on Mackinac Island, Michigan, in the 19th and early 20th centuries"--

This history of Ukrainian immigrants in Michigan and their American descendants examines both the choices people made and the social forces that impelled their decision to migrate and to make new homes in the state. Michigan's Ukrainians came in four waves, each unique in time and character, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing in the twenty-first. Detroit attracted many of them with the opportunities it offered in its booming automobile industry. Yet others put down roots in cities and towns across the state. Wherever they settled, they established churches and community centers and continued to practice the customs of their homeland.

The product of long-concealed FBI surveillance documents, Dangerous Friendship chronicles a history of Martin Luther King Jr. that the government kept secret from the public for years. The book tells the story of Stanley Levison, a well-known figure in the Communist Party-USA, who became one of King's closest friends and advisers, and the extent to which King, Levison, and many other freedom workers were surveilled by people at the very top of the U.S. security establishment.

This exciting compendium brings together, for the first time, some of the foremost scholars of Rene Girard's mimetic theory, with leading imitation researchers from the cognitive, developmental, and neuro sciences. These chapters explore some of the major discoveries and developments concerning the foundational, yet previously overlooked, role of imitation in human life, revealing the unique theoretical links that can now be made from the neural basis of social interaction to the structure and evolution of human culture and religion. Together, mimetic scholars and imitation researchers are on the cutting edge of some of the most important breakthroughs in understanding the distinctive human capacity for both incredible acts of empathy and compassion as well as mass antipathy and violence. As a result, this interdisciplinary volume promises to help shed light on some of the most pressing and complex questions of our contemporary world.

In a fascinating analysis of critical themes in Feodor Dostoevsky's work, Ren Girard explores the implications of the Russian author's "e;underground,"e; a site of isolation, alienation, and resentment. Brilliantly translated, this book is a testament to Girard's remarkable engagement with Dostoevsky's work, through which he discusses numerous aspects of the human condition, including desire, which Girard argues is "e;triangular"e; or "e;mimetic"e;-copied from models or mediators whose objects of desire become our own. Girard's interdisciplinary approach allows him to shed new light on religion, spirituality, and redemption in Dostoevsky's writing, culminating in a revelatory discussion of the author's spiritual understanding and personal integration. Resurrection is an essential and thought-provoking companion to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground.

Trials and Triumphs reveals the anxiety, hardship, turmoil and tragedy that women endured during the war years. It reveals the fierce loyalty and enmity that nearly severed the Union, the horror of enemy occupation, and even the desperate austerity of an itinerate refugee life. Originally published in 1992, this revised paperback edition includes a new index.

Tells the stories of the Gossard Girls, women who sewed corsets and bras at factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. Drawing on dozens of interviews with the surviving workers and their families, this book highlights the daily challenges and joys of these mostly first- and second-generation immigrant women.