On April 16, 1947, the French vessel SS Grandcamp, carrying ammonium nitrate fertilizer, exploded in the port of Texas City, just north of Galveston, Texas. Nearly 600 people died instantly and property damage reached catastrophic proportions. The Texas City disaster remains, to date, the worst industrial accident in U.S. history. Among those ......
The Spatial Politics of Idolatry and Magic in Colonial Mexico
For the Spanish colonizers of Mexico in the sixteenth century, the concept of 'excess' - even the word itself - covered a multitude of sins, including idolatry and magic. In Sins of Excess, Anderson Hagler uses the language of excess as a lens for examining how the colonizers of New Spain conflated cultural diversity into a superficially - and ......
In the half century after World War II, California's Santa Clara Valley transformed from a rolling landscape of fields and orchards into the nation's most consequential high-tech industrial corridor. How Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley and came to embody both the triumphs and the failures of a new vision of the American West is the ......
In the half century after World War II, California's Santa Clara Valley transformed from a rolling landscape of fields and orchards into the nation's most consequential high-tech industrial corridor. How Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley and came to embody both the triumphs and the failures of a new vision of the American West is the ......
Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1890-1920
Like many western boomtowns at the turn of the twentieth century, Spokane, Washington, enjoyed a lively theatrical scene, ranging from plays, concerts, and operas to salacious variety and vaudeville shows. Yet even as Spokanites took pride in their city's reputation as a "good show town," the more genteel among them worried about its "Wild West" ......
The defeat of George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn was big news in 1876. Newspaper coverage of the battle initiated hot debates about whether the U.S. government should change its policy toward American Indians and who was to blame for the army's loss-the latter, an argument that ignites passion to ......
Herbert C. Pell, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Limits of InternationalLaw
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial has become a symbol of justice, the pivotal moment when the civilized world stood up for Europe's Jews and, ultimately, for human rights. Yet the world, represented at the time by the Allied powers, almost did not stand up despite the magnitude of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. Seeking justice for the ......
Indigenous Education in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
The Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) was founded in 1709 by Scottish Lowlanders for the education of Highlanders: specifically to convert them from the Gaelic language to English, from the Episcopal faith to Presbyterianism, and from latent Jacobitism to loyalty to the crown. In a transatlantic translation of ......
Although Scots have never been an exceptionally large immigrant group in North America, their presence to the West proved significant in a variety of arenas. In this unique and engaging new book, Ferenc Morton Szasz outlines the many contributions Scots have made to the development of the region.This book illuminates the many Scottish explorers, ......
