Best of
Microhistory

2019

Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food


Bob Quinn - 2019
    Little did he know, that grain would change his life. Years later, after finishing a PhD in plant biochemistry and returning to his family’s farm in Montana, Bob started experimenting with organic wheat. In the beginning, his concern wasn’t health or the environment; he just wanted to make a decent living and some chance encounters led him to organics. But as demand for organics grew, so too did Bob’s experiments. He discovered that through time-tested practices like cover cropping and crop rotation, he could produce successful yields—without pesticides. Regenerative organic farming allowed him to grow fruits and vegetables in cold, dry Montana, providing a source of local produce to families in his hometown. He even started producing his own renewable energy. And he learned that the grain he first tasted at the fair was actually a type of ancient wheat, one that was proven to lower inflammation rather than worsening it, as modern wheat does. Ultimately, Bob’s forays with organics turned into a multimillion dollar heirloom grain company, Kamut International. In Grain by Grain, Quinn and cowriter Liz Carlisle, author of Lentil Underground, show how his story can become the story of American agriculture. We don’t have to accept stagnating rural communities, degraded soil, or poor health. By following Bob’s example, we can grow a healthy future, grain by grain.

Alan Turing: A Life From Beginning to End (World War 2 Biographies Book 7)


Hourly History - 2019
     Alan Turing had a radical and ingenious mind. He is considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, and his theories on this matter range from purely mechanical to almost spiritual. During World War II, his decryption of the Nazis’ Enigma codes proved vital for the Allied victory over the Axis powers. Turing’s fingerprints are everywhere, and yet his own country for quite some time failed to acknowledge it. It wasn’t until 2009 that the then prime minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown, issued an official, posthumous apology to Alan Turing for “the appalling way he was treated.” To many, this was an admission that was far too long in coming. Inside you will read about... ✓ The Death of His First Love ✓ Turing Machines ✓ Breaking the Nazis’ Enigma Codes ✓ Conviction and Chemical Castration ✓ The Poison Apple And much more! As the chronicling of this book demonstrates, Alan Turing’s life was by no means easy; there were hardships, trials, and tribulations that would shake him to his core. But despite the tragic way his life ended by way of a poison apple, the spark ignited by Alan Turing’s short life is still something exceedingly brilliant to behold. Series Information: World War 2 Biographies Book 7

One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America


Gene Weingarten - 2019
    That day--chosen completely at random--turned out to be Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing.That Sunday between Christmas and New Year's turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, prejudice, selflessness, coincidence, and startling moments of human connection, along with evocative foreshadowing of momentous events yet to come. Lives were lost. Lives were saved. Lives were altered in overwhelming ways. Many of these events never made it into the news; they were private dramas in the lives of private people. They were utterly compelling.One Day asks and answers the question of whether there is even such a thing as "ordinary" when we are talking about how we all lurch and stumble our way through the daily, daunting challenge of being human.

Dressing Barbie: A Celebration of the Clothes That Made America's Favorite Doll and the Incredible Woman Behind Them


Carol Spencer - 2019
    For thirty-five years, Carol Spencer enjoyed an unparalleled reign as a Barbie fashion designer, creating some of Barbie’s most iconic looks from the early 1960s until the late 1990s.Barbie’s wide-ranging wardrobe—including princess gowns and daisy-print rompers, flirty sundresses and smart pantsuits— combined fashion trends and haute couture with a liberal dose of fantasy. In Dressing Barbie, the successful and prolific designer reminisces about her time at Mattel working with legendary figures such as Ruth Handler, Barbie’s creator, and Charlotte Johnson, the original Barbie designer, and talks about her best and most beloved clothing designs from each decade. But Carol’s most impressive creation is her own life. As Handler famously said, “Barbie always represented the fact that a girl has choices”—a credo Carol epitomized. In Dressing Barbie, she talks candidly about how she broke free of the constraints of the late 1950s to pursue a dazzling career and an independent life for herself.Over the course of her successful and prolific career, Carol won many accolades. She was the first designer to have her signature on the doll, the first to go on a signing tour, the first to design a limited-edition Barbie Doll for collectors, and the designer of the biggest selling Barbie of all time. Now, Carol is the first member of the inner circle to take fans behind the pink curtain, revealing the fashion world of Barbie, the quintessential California girl, as never before.

Coffee: A Global History


Jonathan Morris - 2019
    Coffee is a global beverage: it’s grown commercially on four continents and consumed enthusiastically on all seven—and there is even an Italian espresso machine on the International Space Station. Coffee’s journey has taken it from the forests of Ethiopia to the fincas of Latin America, from Ottoman coffee houses to “Third Wave” cafés, and from the simple coffee pot to the capsule machine. In Coffee: A Global History, Jonathan Morris explains both how the world acquired a taste for this humble bean, and why the beverage tastes so differently throughout the world. Sifting through the grounds of coffee history, Morris discusses the diverse cast of caffeinated characters who drank coffee, why and where they did so, as well as how it was prepared and what it tasted like. He identifies the regions and ways in which coffee has been grown, who worked the farms and who owned them, and how the beans were processed, traded, and transported. Morris also explores the businesses behind coffee—the brokers, roasters, and machine manufacturers—and dissects the geopolitics linking producers to consumers. Written in a style as invigorating as that first cup of Java, and featuring fantastic recipes, images, stories, and surprising facts, Coffee will fascinate foodies, food historians, baristas, and the many people who regard this ancient brew as a staple of modern life.

The Unofficial Walt Disney World 1971 Companion: Stories of How the World Began


Jim Korkis - 2019
    Then a man came and said, "lo, there shall be a theme park." A few years later, swampland turned to fantasyland, as Walt Disney World arose. This is the story of how it happened.Jim Korkis, the world's premiere Disney historian, weaves a compelling, organized tale from the thousands of details, reports, and eyewitness accounts—some of them never before in print— about the early days of the most magical place on earth. As with his companion book, The Unofficial Disneyland 1955 Companion, Korkis delivers a top-down history, from the perspective of high-level Disney executives to that of front-line Disney cast members.Korkis begins with the initial surveys of the Disney World site in 1958 and takes the story through 1972, telling the complete and definitive story of how the park was designed and built, and how it was run during its first year.As Walt Disney stood on a swampy marsh in central Florida not long before his death in 1966, he did not see a wilderness, he saw a bright city of tomorrow, a towering castle, innovative hotels, and above all, families having fun in themed lands of wonder.We know how the story turned out, but now you can stand alongside Walt and experience it all over again, from the very beginning.

Beyond the Halls: An Insider's Guide to Loving Museums


Mackenzie FinkleaMackenzie Finklea - 2019
    But what attracts society to collect fine art, pottery, and other ancient artifacts?In "Beyond the Halls: An Insider’s Guide to Loving Museums" you’ll find a brief history of museums while exploring the present nature of these institutions and the thought-provoking ways to interact with them.Inside you’ll find answers to the questions:* What’s the point of museums and why do they exist?* What’s the history and how have they evolved?* What’s so cool about museums?* What makes museums more relevant and successful in the twenty-first century?There is a stigma in the world that museums are boring, dusty, and stagnant, but within these pages you’ll find games you can play with friends while inside museums. Explore the many ways that you can appreciate displays and gain more memorable, exciting experiences inside museums."Beyond the Halls" is a book that speaks to museum lovers (and haters) who are looking to discover, for the first time, the history of museums and the dynamic nature of the industry.

A History of Magic and Witchcraft: Sabbats, Satan and Superstitions in the West


Frances Timbers - 2019
    While much of our understanding is rooted in superstition and myth, the history of magic and witchcraft offers a window into the past. It illuminates the lives of ordinary people in the past and shines a light on the fascinating pop culture of the premodern world.Blowing away folkloric cobwebs, this enlightening new history dispels many of the misconceptions surrounding witchcraft and magic that we still hold today. From Ancient Greece and Rome through to the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era, historian Frances Timbers shines a light on the impact of Christianity and popular culture in the construction of the figure of the 'witch'. The development of demonology and ceremonial magic is brought together with the West's troubled past with magic and witchcraft to chart the birth of modern Wiccan and Neopagan movements in England and North America.Witchcraft is a metaphor for oppression in an age in which persecution is an everyday occurrence somewhere in the world. Fanaticism, intolerance, prejudice, authoritarianism, and religious and political ideologies are never attractive. Beware the witch hunter!

We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-war Britain


Daniel Sonabend - 2019
    Yet in London they found a revived fascist movement inspired by Sir Oswald Mosley and stirring up agitation against Jews and communists. Many felt that the government, the police and even the Jewish Board of Deputies were ignoring the threat; so they had to take matters into their own hands, by any means necessary.Forty-three Jewish servicemen met together and set up a group that tirelessly organized, infiltrated meetings, and broke up street demonstrations to stop the rebirth of the far right. The group included returned war heroes; women who went undercover; and young Jews, such as hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, seeking adventure. From 1947, the 43 Group grew into a powerful troop that could muster hundreds of fighters turning meetings into mass street brawls at short notice.The history of the 43 Group is not just a gripping story of a forgotten moment in Britain’s postwar history; it is also a timely lesson in how to confront fascism, and how to win.

The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age


Andrew Pettegree - 2019
    Yet there is another, largely overlooked marvel in the Dutch world of the seventeenth century: books. In this fascinating account, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen show how the Dutch produced many more books than pictures and bought and owned more books per capita than any other part of Europe. Key innovations in marketing, book auctions, and newspaper advertising brought stability to a market where elsewhere publishers faced bankruptcy, and created a population uniquely well-informed and politically engaged. This book tells for the first time the remarkable story of the Dutch conquest of the European book world and shows the true extent to which these pious, prosperous, quarrelsome, and generous people were shaped by what they read.

Land of the Rising Cat: Japan’s Feline Fascination


Manami Okazaki - 2019
    But how did this cat mania start? Why does it continue to grow? And—are there really Buddhist funeral services for cats? In this lively, tip-to-tail cat compendium, Japanese culture maven Manami Okazaki shares the weird and wonderful realities of Japan’s cat shrines, temples, and festivals; interviews toy artisans, fashion designers, and even an architect; and looks at cat-centric social media, manga, and mascots. From ubiquitous manekineko dolls and Doraemon collectibles to Maro, a cosplaying Internet celebrity, every aspect of Japan’s ongoing love affair with cats springs to life. Accompanied by fun and adorable photographs, this pop culture book is the purrrfect addition to any cat-lover’s coffee table.

Soccerwomen: The Icons, Rebels, Stars, and Trailblazers Who Transformed the Beautiful Game


Gemma Clarke - 2019
    Women's soccer has come a long way. The first organized games on record -- which took place three hundred years ago in the Scottish Highlands -- were exhibition matches, where single women played against married women while available men looked on, seeking a potential mate. Today, champions like Mia Hamm, Abby Wambach, Brazil's Marta and China's Sun Wen, have inspired girls around the world to pick up the beautiful game for love of the sport. Inevitably, given the hardships and discrimination they face, women who play soccer professionally are so much more than elite athletes. They are survivors, campaigners, political advocates, feminists, LGBTQ activists, working moms, staunch opponents of racial discrimination and inspirational role models for many. Based on original interviews with over 50 current and former players and coaches, this book celebrates these remarkable women and their achievements against all odds.

Barbie Forever: Her Inspiration, History, and Legacy


Robin Gerber - 2019
    Explore how the doll came to be, what it takes to create one of her many looks, and how her legacy continues to influence the world.Since her debut in 1959, Barbie has been breaking boundaries and highlighting major moments in art, fashion, and culture. She has been an interpreter of taste and style in every historic period she has lived through and has reflected female empowerment through the more than 200 careers she has embodied. Today, an international icon, Barbie continues to spark imaginations and influence conversations around the world.Barbie Forever is a vibrant celebration for the "Barbie Girl" in all of us.

Glenn Miller: The Life and Legacy of Early 20th Century America’s Most Popular Musician


Charles River Editors - 2019
    It ought to have a personality.” – Glenn Miller Sprightly swing music spills across the dimly lit club. The grayish curtains of cigarette smoke part every once in a while to reveal a sparkling stage and tables upon tables of patrons, some incurably inebriated and others high on the fast-paced nightlife. Fabulous flappers in shimmery cocktail dresses and stylish feather headbands throw their hands up and stomp their feet to the addictive beat on the dance floor. Smartly dressed men, their hair neatly parted and slicked back, toss fistfuls of dice onto the plush green baize of the craps tables. Some hover over roulette wheels, staring intently at the spinning flashes of silver, while others finger their playing cards as they sip on tumblers of whiskey, eyeing both the river and the tower of tokens next to them. Frisky tunes, chic fashion, and American gambling are nostalgic, rose-tinted images most choose to project when visualizing the Roaring Twenties, but the other side of the coin brought an uninviting, much harsher reality that most would prefer to sweep under the rug. The first real estate bubble was on the brink of bursting, and progress was evident, but painfully slow, which gave way to yet another era of violent riots, lynchings, and other forms of oppression imposed on minorities. The Swing Era was a magical period in American history between the hedonism of the Roaring Twenties and the rebelliousness sparked by rock music beginning in the 1950s. Swing music was rooted in ragtime, blues, and jazz music that had long been popular in African American enclaves in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and New Orleans, and while musicians like Benny Goodman popularized swing music, big bands produced America’s most popular music. Though it may be hard to fathom in the wake of Elvis Presley and popular rock bands like the Beatles, the early 20th century featured a burgeoning music sales industry that was dominated in ways that nobody would ever reach again, including the Fab 4. While Elvis and the Beatles had a combined 71 Top 10 hits over their lengthy careers, Glenn Miller had 16 records reach #1, and he compiled 69 Top 10 hits, all in the span of four years before he had turned 40. Like any music pioneer, Miller and his band were often criticized for not being true to the roots of the music they performed, even as they perfected a sound that captivated the country. In short order, Miller and his music influenced legends ranging from Benny Goodman to Louis Armstrong. Miller was the most popular big band leader in the United States when he walked away from his orchestra to enlist in the U.S. Army. World War II was raging, and Miller was determined to fulfill his patriotic duty, so he assembled a military orchestra to give fellow American servicemen a little taste of the homes they were missing. While based in the United Kingdom in 1944, the military orchestra was granted clearance to perform in Paris, which had been liberated from the Nazis just months before. Miller planned his own trip across the English Channel to prepare for a few days ahead of the orchestra’s arrival. Miller’s trip had already been postponed by cold, foggy and drizzly weather, but on December 15, 1944 the pilot chose not to let similar conditions delay it again. The plane took off at about 2:00 p.m. from the airstrip at Twinwood Farm, but it never made it to Paris. As Miller himself had once prophetically put it, “I don’t know why I spend my time making plans like this….

Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys


Vincent Richard DiGirolamo - 2019
    But what do we really know about the children who hawked and delivered newspapers in American cities and towns? Who were they? What was their life like? And how important was their work to the development of a free press, the survival of poor families, and the shaping of their own attitudes, values, and beliefs?Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys offers an epic retelling of the American experience from the perspective of its most unshushable creation. It is the first book to place newsboys at the center of American history, analyzing their inseparable role as economic actors and cultural symbols in the creation of print capitalism, popular democracy, and national character. DiGirolamo's sweeping narrative traces the shifting fortunes of these "little merchants" over a century of war and peace, prosperity and depression, exploitation and reform, chronicling their exploits in every region of the country, as well as on the railroads that linked them. While the book focuses mainly on boys in the trade, it also examines the experience of girls and grown-ups, the elderly and disabled, blacks and whites, immigrants and natives.Based on a wealth of primary sources, Crying the News uncovers the existence of scores of newsboy strikes and protests. The book reveals the central role of newsboys in the development of corporate welfare schemes, scientific management practices, and employee liability laws. It argues that the newspaper industry exerted a formative yet overlooked influence on working-class youth that is essential to our understanding of American childhood, labor, journalism, and capitalism.

Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong: Unspoken but Unforgotten


Travis Shiu Ki Kong - 2019
    Illustrated with photos, letters, and other images, Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong: Unspoken but Unforgotten gives voice to the complexities of a “secretive” past with unique hardships as these men came to terms with their sexuality, adulthood, and a colonial society. The men talk with equal candour about how their sexuality remains a complication as they negotiate failing health, ageing, and their current role in society. While fascinating as life histories, these stories also add insight to the theoretical debates surrounding identity and masculinity, coming out, ageing and sexuality, and power and resistance. Confined within the heteronormative culture prescribed by government, family, and religion, these men have lived the whole of their lives struggling to find their social role, challenging the distinction between public and private, and longing for a stable homosexual relationship and a liberating homosexual space in the face of deteriorating health and a youth-obsessed gay community.

Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century


Douglas K. Miller - 2019
    At the time the program ended, many groups--from government leaders to Red Power activists--had already classified it as a failure, and scholars have subsequently positioned the program as evidence of America's enduring settler-colonial project. But Douglas K. Miller here argues that a richer story should be told--one that recognizes Indigenous mobility in terms of its benefits and not merely its costs. In their collective refusal to accept marginality and destitution on reservations, Native Americans used the urban relocation program to take greater control of their socioeconomic circumstances. Indigenous migrants also used the financial, educational, and cultural resources they found in cities to feed new expressions of Indigenous sovereignty both off and on the reservation. The dynamic histories of everyday people at the heart of this book shed new light on the adaptability of mobile Native American communities. In the end, this is a story of shared experience across tribal lines, through which Indigenous people incorporated urban life into their ideas for Indigenous futures.

The Jews’ Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America


David S. Koffman - 2019
    These two groups’ exchanges were numerous and diverse, proving at times harmonious when Jews’ and Natives people’s economic and social interests aligned, but discordant and fraught at other times. American Jews could be as exploitative of Native cultural, social, and political issues as other American settlers, and historian David Koffman argues that these interactions both unsettle and historicize the often triumphant consensus history of American Jewish life. Focusing on the ways Jewish class mobility and civic belonging were wrapped up in the dynamics of power and myth making that so severely impacted Native Americans, this books is provocative and timely, the first history to critically analyze Jewish participation in, and Jews’ grappling with the legacies of Native American history and the colonial project upon which America rests.

Straying from Honor: Untold Stories from Guantanamo


Peter Jan Honigsberg - 2019
    Forty-one prisoners remained. Many of them have been tortured, and they will likely die there without receiving a trial.Through the stories Honigsberg captures, he introduces readers to an unforgettable cast of characters. There is Ayub Muhammed, who was kidnapped and sold to the American military as a "Taliban operative" at the age of sixteen. Brandon Neely, a prison guard who processed the first group of suspected operatives to arrive in Cuba. Matt Diaz, a Navy whistleblower who covertly released the names of 500 detainees by sending them in a greeting card to a lawyer in New York. Carol Rosenberg, a journalist who has committed the past ten years of her career to documenting life at Guantanamo. And many, many more, including Damien Corsetti, an interrogator who came to be known as the "King of Torture."In startling, aching prose, Straying from Honor shines a light on these untold stories, and through them, provides a powerful testament to the consequences of unchecked state power.

Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food


Benjamin R. Cohen - 2019
    Cohen uses the pure food crusades at the turn of the twentieth century to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods in the United States. In the latter nineteenth century, extraordinary changes in food and agriculture gave rise to new tensions in the ways people understood, obtained, trusted, and ate their food. This was the Era of Adulteration, and its concerns have carried forward to today: How could you tell the food you bought was the food you thought you bought? Could something manufactured still be pure? Is it okay to manipulate nature far enough to produce new foods but not so far that you question its safety and health? How do you know where the line is? And who decides?   In Pure Adulteration, Benjamin R. Cohen uses the pure food crusades to provide a captivating window onto the origins of manufactured foods and the perceived problems they wrought. Cohen follows farmers, manufacturers, grocers, hucksters, housewives, politicians, and scientific analysts as they struggled to demarcate and patrol the ever-contingent, always contested border between purity and adulteration, and as, at the end of the nineteenth century, the very notion of a pure food changed.   In the end, there is (and was) no natural, prehuman distinction between pure and adulterated to uncover and enforce; we have to decide. Today’s world is different from that of our nineteenth-century forebears in many ways, but the challenge of policing the difference between acceptable and unacceptable practices remains central to daily decisions about the foods we eat, how we produce them, and what choices we make when buying them.

Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America


Jim Auchmutey - 2019
    The story of barbecue touches almost every aspect of our history. It involves indigenous culture, the colonial era, slavery, the Civil War, the settling of the West, the coming of immigrants, the Great Migration, the rise of the automobile, the expansion of suburbia, the rejiggering of gender roles. It encompasses every region and demographic group. It is entwined with our politics and tangled up with our race relations.Jim Auchmutey follows the delicious and contentious history of barbecue in America from the ox roast that celebrated the groundbreaking for the U.S. Capitol building to the first barbecue launched into space almost two hundred years later. The narrative covers the golden age of political barbecues, the evolution of the barbecue restaurant, the development of backyard cooking, and the recent rediscovery of traditional barbecue craft. Along the way, Auchmutey considers the mystique of barbecue sauces, the spectacle of barbecue contests, the global influences on American barbecue, the roles of race and gender in barbecue culture, and the many ways barbecue has been portrayed in our art and literature. It's a spicy story that involves noted Americans from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama.

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies


Leslie HarrisSven Beckert - 2019
    Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post-Civil War era to the present day.The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery's influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.