While the war on terror has been America's largest and most publicized attempt to root out foreign enemies this century, the quest to identify and destroy real or imagined threats to national security has long been a part of US history. Indeed, since the onset of the United States' overseas empire at the dawn of the twentieth century, it has ......
Infrastructure and the Making of Neoliberal Yucatan
In 2022, journalists announced the impending economic death of a small Mexican town. Piste, gateway to the famed Chichen Itza archeological site, would be circumvented by the Tren Maya commuter rail megaproject, depriving it of the promise of steady tourist traffic. Instead of ruminating with frustration, locals set to work on negotiations with ......
Infrastructure and the Making of Neoliberal Yucatan
In 2022, journalists announced the impending economic death of a small Mexican town. Piste, gateway to the famed Chichen Itza archeological site, would be circumvented by the Tren Maya commuter rail megaproject, depriving it of the promise of steady tourist traffic. Instead of ruminating with frustration, locals set to work on negotiations with ......
Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis
During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, thousands of ailing soldiers became addicted, or "enslaved," as nineteenth-century Americans phrased it. Veterans, their families, and communities struggled to cope with addiction's health and social ......
In the first narrative history in English of Mexico's contemporary press, Andrew Paxman recounts the evolution of print media between the 98 s and the present. From widespread subservience towards authority to playing a watchdog role as the country democratized, Mexico's media underwent drastic changes in its roles and functions. Paxman also ......
In the first narrative history in English of Mexico's contemporary press, Andrew Paxman recounts the evolution of print media between the 98 s and the present. From widespread subservience towards authority to playing a watchdog role as the country democratized, Mexico's media underwent drastic changes in its roles and functions. Paxman also ......
Rural America is at a crossroads: either it will manage to sustain itself long-term, or-as current trends suggest-it will continue to disappear through depopulation and urbanization. There have been calls for economic redevelopment, but even with these proposals, J. Tom Mueller argues that policymakers, politicians, and academics rarely make a ......
The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War
Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United States has come to nuclear war. That history has largely been a bilateral narrative of the US-USSR struggle for postwar domination, with Cuba as the central staging ground-a standard account that ......
Aesthetic Violence in American Literature and Art, 1945-2001
In the wake of World War II, Americans struggled to grasp the shifting scale of violence brought on by the nuclear era. To grapple with the overwhelming suffering of the sociopolitical moment, new ways of thinking about violence-as structural, systemic, and senseless-emerged. Artists and writers, however, challenged the cultural impulse to make ......
