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Italian anarchists compiled a formidable record of political assassinations during the 1890s: President Marie François Sadi Carnot of France was killed by Santo Caserio in 1894; Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo of Spain by Michele Angiolillo in 1897; Empress Elizabeth of Austria by Luigi Luccheni in 1898; and King Umberto I of Italy by Gaetano Bresci in 1900. No less important were the unsuccessful assassination attempts committed during the same decade: Paolo Lega against Italian Prime Minister Francesco Crispi in 1894; and Pietro Acciarito against King Umberto in 1897. This book, through a specific focus on attentats along with attempted and successful acts of political assassination, provides a full-length study of the historical, economic, social, cultural and political conditions, the social conflicts and left-wing politics along with the transnational experiences in Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland and the United States that led to Italian anarchist violence at the end of the 19^th century.

This book maps the interplay of conservative and feminist women in Indiana during the second half of the twentieth century and proposes an alternative framework for understanding the second wave feminist movement. The central theme is that rightwing women’s understanding of one-worldism--a conspiracy theory refined by grassroots anticommunists during the height of the Cold War--shaped conservative women’s response to the second wave feminist movement and circumscribed feminist activism. Over the course of the postwar era, anticommunist organizations like the Minute Women of the U.S.A., Pro America, and the John Birch Society provided a forum for rightwing women to develop their understanding of related forces pushing for a “one-world,” totalitarian supra-government, forces they described as treasonous. While communists often were lumped under the “one-worlder” category, the two were not synonymous. In literature rightwing women described a spectrum of subversion that included a fifth column but also those advocating domestic cooperation through federal regionalism, gender equality as opposed to gender difference, and internationalists advocating stronger authority for the United Nations. The book documents the work of Hoosier feminists to accomplish their goals, especially the Equal Rights Amendment, in a hostile political environment and the work of rightwing women to counter the threat of internationalism or one-worldism, culminating in a showdown at the 1977 International Women’s Year celebration.

From the softest caress to the harshest blow, touch lies at the heart of our experience of the world. Now, for the first time, this deepest of senses is the subject of an extensive historical exploration. This book fleshes out our understanding of the past with explorations of lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity. This approach to history makes it possible to foreground the tactile foundations of Western culture—the ways in which feelings shaped society. This book explores a variety of tactile realms; including the feel of the medieval city; the tactile appeal of relics; the social histories of pain, pleasure, and affection; the bonds of touch between humans and animals; the strenuous excitement of sports such as wrestling and jousting; and the sensuous attractions of consumer culture. The book delves into a range of vital issues, from the uses—and prohibitions—of touch in social interaction to the disciplining of the body by the modern state, from the changing feel of the urban landscape to the technologization of touch in modernity. Through poignant descriptions of the healing power of a medieval king's hand or the grueling conditions of a nineteenth-century prison, we find that history, far from being a dry and lifeless subject, touches us to the quick.

How do emotions change over time? When is hate honorable? What happens when “love” is translated into different languages? Such questions are now being addressed by historians who trace how emotions have been expressed and understood in different cultures throughout history. This book explores the history of feelings such as love, joy, grief, nostalgia as well as a wide range of others, bringing together the latest and most innovative scholarship on the history of the emotions. Spanning the globe from Asia and Europe to North America, the book provides a crucial overview of this emerging discipline. It reviews the field's current status and variations, addresses many of its central debates, provides models and methods, and proposes an array of possibilities for future research. Emphasizing the field's intersections with anthropology, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, data-mining, and popular culture, this ground-breaking book demonstrates the affecting potential of emotions history.

Emotional Bodies provides a theoretical framework for studying the materiality of emotions. In line with recent research in the history of emotions, cultural studies, and new materialism, this volume focuses on what emotions do. Chapters interrogate how emotions do and undo us as both individual and collective bodies. With this aim, this book proposes “emotional bodies” as a tool to understand the performativity of emotional practices as the origin of particular configurations of bodies, such as patients, criminals, medieval religious communities, revolutionary crowds and contemporary humanitarian agencies. The multidisciplinary approach of this volume, which combines a diversity of sources as well as theoretical and historiographical approaches, challenges traditional notions of the body and the emotions, demonstrating the potential of “emotional bodies” to understand past and present societies.

A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 2: The Conflicted Ozarks focuses on the long era of Civil War and Reconstruction, stretching roughly from the 1850s through the 1880s. The book begins with an analysis of slavery (the most thorough examination of the institution in the region to date) and the secession crisis. Almost half the book deals with the four years of civil warfare, including a summary of the formal, battlefield war in the Ozarks and an examination of various facets of the home front, from guerrilla fighters to the role of women. It also features the most comprehensive portrait of the long Reconstruction era in the Ozarks, including a comparison of political Reconstruction in Arkansas and Missouri as well as an extended treatment of social and economic reconstruction that chronicles railroad building, manufacturing, extractive industry, and the development of educational institutions in the postwar years. In addition to the continuation of volume 1’s argument that the story of the Ozarks is mostly an unexceptional, regional variation of the American story, volume 2 is built on the thematic concept of multiple layers of conflict in the region--divisions over slavery, wartime violence and its stubborn continuation in the Reconstruction era, and the continuing conflicted identity of the Ozarks as part southern and part midwestern, part Union and part Confederate, part modern and part backwoods.

Photography became a dominant medium in cultural life starting in the late nineteenth century. As it happened, viewers increasingly used their reactions to photographs to comment on and debate public issues as vital as war, national identity, and citizenship. This book analyzes a wealth of newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, and speeches produced by viewers in response to specific photos they encountered in public. From the portrait of a young Abraham Lincoln to images of child laborers and Depression-era hardship, the book treats the photograph as a locus for viewer engagement and constructs a history of photography's viewers that shows how Americans used words about images to participate in the politics of their day. As the book shows, encounters with photography helped viewers negotiate the emergent anxieties and crises of U.S. public life not only through persuasion but also action.

This book offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, it shows how people have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and engage with both their immediate environments and wider corporal and spiritual worlds. This broad survey demonstrates how each community or commodity possesses, or has been thought to possess, its own peculiar scent. Through the meanings associated with smells, osmologies develop—what cultural anthropologists have termed the systems that utilize smells to classify people and objects in ways that define their relations to each other and their relative values within a particular culture. European Christians, for instance, relied on their noses to differentiate Christians from heathens, whites from people of color, women from men, virgins from harlots, artisans from aristocracy, and pollution from perfume. This reliance on smell was not limited to the global North. Around the world, the book shows, people used scents to signify individual and group identity in a morally constructed universe where the good smelled pleasant and their opposites reeked. The book is a useful and entertaining look at the history of one of our most important but least-understood senses.

A hundred years and more ago, a walk down a Chicago street invited an assault on the senses. Untiring hawkers shouted from every corner. The manure from thousands of horses lay on streets pooled with molasses and puddled with kitchen grease. Odors from a river gelatinous and lumpy with all manner of foulness mingled with the all-pervading stench of the stockyard slaughterhouses. This book lets fresh air into the sensory history of Chicago in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining five case studies: the Chicago River, the Great Fire, the Pullman Strike of 1894, the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and the rise and fall of the White City amusement park. The book's vivid recounting of the smells, sound and noise, and tactile miseries of city life reveals how input from the five human senses influenced the history of class, race, and ethnicity in the city. At the same time, it transports readers to an era before modern refrigeration and sanitation, when to step outside was to be overwhelmed by the odor and roar of a great city in progress.

This narrative is about Greek immigrants to America from 1880 to 1930. Unlike previous studies focusing on immigrant communities in major cities, this is a rural study, examining the Greeks who settled in central Illinois’s small towns and opened confectioneries and soda fountains. The author’s grandfather Gus Flesor was one of these, coming to Tuscola, Illinois, in 1901 and taking over the candy shop there. Gus’s shop is still in business today, run by the author and her sister. Gus’s experience serves as a case study that informs the stories of more than 100 other Greek confectioners who settled in over forty towns in central Illinois. The author describes why the Greeks came to America and recounts the obstacles they faced after arrival and their attempts to acculturate and assimilate and become confectioners. A significant amount of the narrative recounts the ethnic and racial hostility the Greeks faced, especially from the Ku Klux Klan. But the bulk of the text is about the Greek immigrant confectioners themselves who fulfilled the American dream by settling in a new land, raising families, operating profitable businesses, and contributing to their communities. As the author’s father once observed, “It’s a good story.”