Construction History

In The Silver Women, Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the Panama Canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans.

The European continent was devastated in the wake of World War II, and the conflict left the Soviet Union and the United States as uncontested superpowers. This ushered in over 45 years of the Cold War, and a political alignment of Western democracies against the Communist Soviet bloc that produced conflicts pitting allies on each sides fighting, even as the American and Soviet militaries never engaged each other.

Andrea Wint’s life in the small town of Port Inez, Washington, is a simple one. She works, enjoys the gorgeous view from her bay window, and visits her dad at the memory-care facility. Her father is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, but Andrea brings in one coin from his valuable collection every day—little bits of precious metals that seem to bring him back to himself, even if just for a few moments. So when Andrea’s house is burgled and the coins disappear, she’s bereft.

Blending science and technology studies, sociology, and geography with a host of archival material, in-depth interviews, and ethnographies, The Politics of Maps explores how the geographical sciences came to be entangled with the politics, territorial claim-making, and nation-state building of Israel/Palestine.

At the dawn of America's love affair with the automobile, cars and trucks leaving the nation's largest city were unceremoniously dumped out of the western end of the Holland Tunnel onto local roads wending their way through the New Jersey Meadowlands. Jersey City mayor Frank Hague, dictator of the Hudson County political machine and a national political player, was a prime mover behind the building of the country's first "superhighway", designed to connect the hub of New York City to the USA.

How do we draw the lines between "good" and "bad" neighborhoods? How do we know “ghettos”? This book questions the widely held assumption that divisions between urban areas are reflections of varying amounts of crime, deprivation, and other social, cultural, and economic problems. Using Ogden, Utah, as a case study, Pepper Glass argues that urban reputations are “moral frontiers” that uphold and create divides between who is a good and respectable - or a bad and vilified - member of a community.

Just before midnight on April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic, the largest ship in the world, hit an iceberg, starting a chain of events that would ultimately make it history's most famous, and notorious, ship. In the over-100 years since it sank on its maiden voyage, the Titanic has been the subject of endless fascination, as evidenced by the efforts to find its final resting spot, the museums full of its objects, and the countless books, documentaries, and movies made about the doomed ocean liner.