Claudrena Harold, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942. London: Routledge, 2007. ISBN: 9780415956192. List Price: £60.00.

The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South provides the first detailed examination of the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s rise, maturation, and eventual decline in the urban South between 1918 and 1942. It examines the ways in which Southern black workers fused locally-based traditions, ideologies, and strategies of resistance with the Pan-African agenda of the UNIA to create a dynamic and multifaceted movement. A testament to the multidimensionality of black political subjectivity, Southern Garveyites fashioned a politics reflective of their international, regional, and local attachments. Moving beyond the usual focus on New York and the charismatic personality of Marcus Garvey, this book situates black workers at the center of its analysis and aims to provide a much-needed grassroots perspective on the Garvey movement. More than simply providing a regional history of one of the most important Pan-African movements of the twentieth century, the Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South demonstrates the ways in which racial, class, and spatial dynamics resulted in complex, and at times, competing articulations of black nationalism.

Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.  ISBN: 0807132489.  List Price: $18.95 (Paper)

During Reconstruction, former abolitionists in the North had a golden opportunity to pursue true racial justice and permanent reform in America. But why, after the sacrifice made by thousands of Civil War patriots to arrive at this juncture, did the moment slip away, leaving many whites throughout the North and South more racist than before? Edward J. Blum takes a fresh look at this question in Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898, where he focuses on the vital role that religion played in reunifying northern and southern whites into a racially segregated society. He tells the fascinating story of how northern Protestantism, once the catalyst for racial egalitarianism, promoted the image of a "white republic" that conflated whiteness, godliness, and nationalism. A blend of history and social science, Reforging the White Republic offers a surprising perspective on the forces of religion as well as nationalism and imperialism at a critical point in American history.

Philip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, eds., Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration, and Identity.  Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006.  ISBN: 9780774813051.  List Price: (CA) $85.00 (Hardcover)

In the decades following the Second World War, a revolutionary change took place in the Canadian national identity. The English-Canadian majority entered this period identifying themselves as British and emerged from it with a new, independent sense of themselves as purely Canadian. Assured of their unique place in the world, Canadians can now reflect on the legacies and lessons of their British colonial past.

Canada and the British World surveys Canada's national history through a British lens. In a series of essays focusing on the social, cultural, and intellectual aspects of Canadian identity over more than a century, the complex and evolving relationship between Canada and the larger British World is revealed. Examining the transition from the strong belief of nineteenth-century Canadians in the British character of their country to the realities of modern multicultural Canada, this book eschews nostalgia in its endeavour to understand the dynamic and complicated society in which Canadians did and do live.

Leslie Dawn, National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s.  Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006.  ISBN: 9780774812177.  List Price: (CA) $85.00 (Hardcover).  ISBN: 9780774812184.  List Price: (CA) $34.95 (Paper)

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Canada sought to define itself as an independent dominion with allegiance to the British Empire. The visual arts were considered central to the formation of a distinct national identity, and the Group of Seven’s landscapes became part of a larger program to unify the nation and assert its uniqueness. National Visions, National Blindness traces the development of this program and illuminates its conflicted history.

Using newly discovered archival evidence, Leslie Dawn revises common interpretations of several well-known events and rescues others from obscurity. He problematizes conventional perceptions of the Group as a national school and underscores the contradictions inherent in international exhibitions showing unpeopled landscapes alongside Northwest Coast Native arts and the "Indian" paintings of Langdon Kihn and Emily Carr. Dawn examines how this dichotomy forced a re-evaluation of the place of First Nations in both Canadian art and nationalism.

National Visions, National Blindness is an elegantly written work offering new and insightful analysis, and will be of great interest to readers and researchers of Canadian art history, First Nations art and history, tourism, cultural politics, museum studies, and ethnographic practices.

José Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945-71.  Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006.  ISBN: 9780774810883.  List Price: (CA) $85.00 (Hardcover).  ISBN: 9780774810913.  List Price: (CA) $34.95 (Paper)

In the twenty years following the Second World War, representations of national identity in anglophone Canada underwent a deep transformation. Ethnic definitions of Canadian identity gave way to a rights-based concept of citizenship. The Other Quiet Revolution traces this under-examined cultural transformation woven through key developments in the formation of Canadian nationhood, from the 1946 Citizenship Act and the 1956 Suez crisis to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963-70) and the adoption of the federal multiculturalism policy in 1971.

In this elegant work, José Igartua analyzes editorial opinion, political rhetoric, history textbooks, and public opinion polls to show how Canada’s self-conception as a British country extended into the 1950s. In the decade that followed, however, the British definition of Canada dissolved. Struggles with bilingualism and biculturalism, as well as Quebec’s constitutional demands, helped to fashion new representations of national identity in English-speaking Canada based on the civic principle of equality.

Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin, eds., Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.  ISBN: 9780807830109.  List Price: $29.95 (Cloth)

What is Americanism? The contributors to this volume recognize Americanism in all its complexity--as an ideology, an articulation of the nation's rightful place in the world, a set of traditions, a political language, and a cultural style imbued with political meaning. In response to the pervasive vision of Americanism as a battle cry or a smug assumption, this collection of essays stirs up new questions and debates that challenge us to rethink the model currently being exported, too often by force, to the rest of the world.

Crafted by a cast of both rising and renowned intellectuals from three continents, the twelve essays in this volume are divided into two sections. The first group of essays addresses the understanding of Americanism within the United States over the past two centuries, from the early republic to the war in Iraq. The second section provides perspectives from around the world in an effort to make sense of how the national creed and its critics have shaped diplomacy, war, and global culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Approaching a controversial ideology as both scholars and citizens, many of the essayists call for a revival of the ideals of Americanism in a new progressive politics that can bring together an increasingly polarized and fragmented citizenry.

Desmond King, The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 13: 9780195306439.  List Price: $19.95

 Harry S. Truman once said, "Ours is a nation of many different groups, of different races, of different national origins." And yet, the debate over what it means--and what it takes--to be an American remains contentious. Nationalist solidarity, many claim, requires a willful blending into the assimilationist alloy of these United States. Others argue that the interests of both nation and individual are best served by allowing multiple traditions to flourish--a salad bowl of identities and allegiances, rather than a melting pot.

Tracing how Americans have confronted and relinquished, but mostly clung to group identities over the past century, Desmond King here debunks one of the guiding assumptions of American nationhood, namely that group distinction and identification would gradually dissolve over time, creating a "postethnic" nation. Over the course of the twentieth century, King shows, the divisions in American society arising from group loyalties have consistently proven themselves too strong to dissolve. For better or for worse, the often-disparaged politics of multiculturalism are here to stay, with profound implications for America's democracy. Americans have now entered a post-multiculturalist settlement in which the renewal of democracy continues to depend on groups battling it out in political trenches, yet the process is ruled by a newly invigorated and strengthened state.

But Americans' resolute embrace of their distinctive identities has ramifications not just internally and domestically but on the world stage as well. The image of one-people American nationhood so commonly projected abroad camouflages the country's sprawling, often messy diversity: a lesson that nation-builders worldwide cannot afford to ignore as they attempt to accommodate ever-evolving group needs and the demands of individuals to be treated equally.

Spanning the entire twentieth century and encompassing immigration policies, the nationalistic fallout from both world wars, the civil rights movement, and nation-building efforts in the postcolonial era, The Liberty of Strangers advances a major new interpretation of American nationalism and the future prospects for diverse democracies.

Jennifer Kramer, Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identity.  Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006.  ISBN: 9780774812276.  List Price: (CA) $85.00 (Hardcover).  ISBN: 9780774812283.  List Price: (CA) $29.95 (Paper)

Switchbacks explores how the Nuxalk of Bella Coola, British Columbia, negotiate such complex questions as: Who owns culture? How should culture be transmitted to future generations? Where does selling and buying Nuxalk art fit into attempts to regain control of heritage?

To answer these questions, Jennifer Kramer undertook participant observation at Nuxalk artists’ studios, in the Nuxalk-run band school’s cultural education classes, and during the everyday activities of Nuxalk in their homes. She charts the fluid character of tangible material culture (such as masks and other regalia) and intangible material culture (such as songs and dances) as they moved in and out of the cultural education curriculum, the Western art market, and the Western legal system. In addition, Kramer analyzes the ambivalent reactions of the Nuxalk to ownership, appropriation, and repatriation of Nuxalk culture. The Nuxalk oscillate between essential stances, a process Kramer likens to "switchbacks" on a mountain road. Through these recurrent movements they create, recreate, and validate contemporary Nuxalk identity.

Kramer demonstrates that loss of cultural objects proves that Nuxalk culture is valuable through external affirmation. In this way, the Nuxalk use their cultural patrimony to assert their collective national identity. At stake are not only definitions of alienable and inalienable property but also a unified national identity that affords the Nuxalk a strong position from whence to reclaim traditional territory and regain self-determination in British Columbia.

Switchbacks will appeal to scholars and students interested in questions of cultural ownership and identity in general, and in Nuxalk culture in particular.

Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, and the United States, and the Philippines.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.  ISBN: 9780807829851.  List Price: $69.95 (Cloth).  ISBN: 9780807856536.  List Price: $26.95

In 1899 the United States, having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades, U.S. imperialists justified their colonial empire by crafting novel racial ideologies adapted to new realities of collaboration and anticolonial resistance. In this pathbreaking, transnational study, Paul A. Kramer reveals how racial politics served U.S. empire, and how empire-building in turn transformed ideas of race and nation in both the United States and the Philippines.

Kramer argues that Philippine-American colonial history was characterized by struggles over sovereignty and recognition. In the wake of a racial-exterminist war, U.S. colonialists, in dialogue with Filipino elites, divided the Philippine population into "civilized" Christians and "savage" animists and Muslims. The former were subjected to a calibrated colonialism that gradually extended them self-government as they demonstrated their "capacities." The latter were governed first by Americans, then by Christian Filipinos who had proven themselves worthy of shouldering the "white man's burden." Ultimately, however, this racial vision of imperial nation-building collided with U.S. nativist efforts to insulate the United States from its colonies, even at the cost of Philippine independence. Kramer provides an innovative account of the global transformations of race and the centrality of empire to twentieth-century U.S. and Philippine histories.

Mary G. Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920-1927.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.  ISBN: 9780807830925.  List Price: $59.95 (Cloth).  ISBN: 9780807857953.  List Price: $22.50 (Paper)

The black separatist movement led by Marcus Garvey has long been viewed as a phenomenon of African American organization in the urban North. But as Mary Rolinson demonstrates, the largest number of Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) divisions and Garvey’s most devoted and loyal followers were found in the southern Black Belt. Tracing the path of organizers from northern cities to Virginia, and then from the Upper to the Deep South, Rolinson remaps the movement to include this vital but overlooked region.

Rolinson shows how Garvey’s southern constituency sprang from cities, countryside churches, and sharecropper cabins. Southern Garveyites adopted pertinent elements of the movement's ideology and developed strategies for community self-defense and self-determination. These southern African Americans maintained a spiritual attachment to their African identities and developed a fiercely racial nationalism, building on the rhetoric and experiences of black organizers from the nineteenth-century South. Garveyism provided a common bond during the upheaval of the Great Migration, Rolinson contends, and even after the UNIA had all but disappeared in the South in the 1930s, the movement's tenets of race organization, unity, and pride continued to flourish in other forms of black protest for generations.

Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.  ISBN: 9780807829288.  List Price: $34.95 (Cloth).  ISBN: 9780807855928.  List Price: $19.95 (Paper)

Historians often assert that Confederate nationalism had its origins in pre-Civil War sectional conflict with the North, reached its apex at the start of the war, and then dropped off quickly after the end of hostilities. Anne Sarah Rubin argues instead that white Southerners did not actually begin to formulate a national identity until it became evident that the Confederacy was destined to fight a lengthy war against the Union. She also demonstrates that an attachment to a symbolic or sentimental Confederacy existed independent of the political Confederacy and was therefore able to persist well after the collapse of the Confederate state. White Southerners redefined symbols and figures of the failed state as emotional touchstones and political rallying points in the struggle to retain local (and racial) control, even as former Confederates took the loyalty oath and applied for pardons in droves.

Exploring the creation, maintenance, and transformation of Confederate identity during the tumultuous years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Rubin sheds new light on the ways in which Confederates felt connected to their national creation and provides a provocative example of what happens when a nation disintegrates and leaves its people behind to forge a new identity.

Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.  ISBN: 9780807830949.  List Price: $59.95 (Cloth).  ISBN: 9780807857977.  List Price: $22.50 (Paper)

Between 1968 and 1980, fears about family deterioration and national decline were ubiquitous in American political culture. In No Direction Home, Natasha Zaretsky shows that these perceptions of decline profoundly shaped one another.

Throughout the 1970s, anxieties about the future of the nuclear family collided with anxieties about the direction of the United States in the wake of military defeat in Vietnam and in the midst of economic recession, Zaretsky explains. By exploring such themes as the controversy surrounding prisoners of war in Southeast Asia, the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-74, and debates about cultural narcissism, Zaretsky reveals that the 1970s marked a significant turning point in the history of American nationalism. After Vietnam, a wounded national identity--rooted in a collective sense of injury and fueled by images of family peril--exploded to the surface and helped set the stage for the Reagan Revolution. With an innovative analysis that integrates cultural, intellectual, and political history, No Direction Home explores the fears that not only shaped an earlier era but also have reverberated into our own time.

Cecil D. Aby, Comrades and Commissars: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War.  State College: Penn State Press, 2007.  ISBN-10: 0271029101.  List Price: $39.95

In the summer of 1936, Generalissimo Francisco Franco led a group of right-wing nationalists in a military attack on the Republican government of Spain—the start of what would become the Spanish Civil War. Despite U.S. laws banning participation in foreign conflicts, American volunteers began pouring into Barcelona in January 1937. The most famous of these anti-Franco groups was the band of 2,800 American fighters who called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. In Comrades and Commissars, Cecil D. Eby pushes beyond the bias that has dominated study of the Lincoln Battalion and gets to the very heart of the American experience in Spain.

Controversy has plagued the Lincoln Battalion from the very start. Were these men selfless defenders of liberty or un-American Communists? Eby has long been regarded as one of the few balanced interpreters of their history. His 1969 book, Between the Bullet and the Lie, won accolades for its rigorous and fair treatment of the Battalion. Comrades and Commissars builds upon that earlier study, incorporating a wealth of information collected over intervening decades. New oral histories, previously untranslated memoirs, and newly declassified official documents all lend even greater authority and perspective to Eby's account. Most significant is Eby's use of Lincoln Battalion archives sequestered in a Moscow storeroom for sixty years. These papers draw renewed focus on some of the most provocative questions surrounding the Battalion, including the extent to which Americans were persecuted—and even executed—by the brigade commissariat.

The Americans who served in the Lincoln Battalion were neither mythic figures nor political abstractions. Poorly trained and equipped, they committed themselves to back-to- the-wall defense of the doomed Spanish Republic. In Comrades and Commissars, we at last have the authoritative account of their experiences.

Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernandez, eds., Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War.  New York: NYU Press, 2007.  ISBN: 0814716814.  List Price: $27.00

When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, loosely affiliated groups of writers, artists, and other politically aware individuals emerged in New York City to give voice to anti-fascist sentiment by supporting the Spanish Republic. Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War examines the participation of New Yorkers in the political struggles and armed conflict that many historians consider a critical precursor to World War II. Nearly half of the 2,800 Americans who volunteered to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against Generalissimo Francisco Franco came from the New York area. Fundraising, propaganda, and deployment for anti-fascists everywhere in America were orchestrated through New York City. At the same time, powerful voices in New York expressed sympathy for the pro-fascist side.

The fighting in Spain brought to the surface the complex ideological and ethnic identities always present in New York politics. Facing Fascism examines the full range of this experience, including that of the New Yorkers who supported Franco. It addresses the role of doctors, nurses, and social workers who left New York hospitals to provide assistance to the defenders of the Spanish Republic, as well as those who remained active on the home front. The book also describes the involvement of students in the war, the key role of writers and the media, and the contributions made by members of New York's art and theater communities.

Facing Fascism also serves as the catalog to an exhibition of the same name appearing at the Museum of the City of New York in the spring of 2007. The book and exhibition both make use of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives' extensive holdings, which range from historical documents to video recordings of oral histories. Numerous other libraries, archives, museums, and private collectors have also been consulted to make this the most complete exhibition of its kind ever mounted. The exhibition will also appear in Spain.

Christopher Collins, Homeland Mythology: Biblical Narratives in American Culture.  State College: Penn State Press, 2007.  ISBN: 9780271029931.  List Price: $29.95

Since 9/11, America has presented itself to the world as a Christianist culture, no less antimodern and nostalgic for an idealized past than its Islamist foes. Their shared master-narrative might sound like this: Once upon a time, the values of the righteous community coincided with those of the state. Home and land were harmoniously united under God. But through intellectual pride (read: science) and disobedience (read: human rights), this God-blessed homeland was lost and now worth every drop of blood it takes, ours and others’, to recover.

For Americans, the prime source for this once-and-future-kingdom myth is the Bible, with its many narratives of blessings gained, lost, and regained: the garden of Eden, the covenant with Abraham, the bondage in Egypt, the exodus under Moses, the glory of David and Solomon’s realm, the coming of the promised Messiah, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven, his apocalyptic return at the end of history, and his establishment of the earthly kingdom of God. As Homeland Mythology shows, these biblical narratives have, over time, inspired a multitude of nationalist narratives, myths ingeniously spun out to justify a number of decidedly unchristian policies and institutions—from Indian genocide, the slave trade, and the exploitation of immigrant workers to Manifest Destiny, imperial expansionism, and, most recently, preemptive war.

On March 25, 2001, in a rare moment of public candor, George W. Bush shared a bit of his political wisdom: “You can fool some of the people all of the time—and those are the ones you have to concentrate on.” The cynical use of religion to cloak criminal behavior is always worth exposing, but why our leaders lie to us is no longer a mystery. What does remain mysterious is why so many of us are disposed to believe their lies. The unexamined issue that this book addresses is, therefore, not the mendacity of the few, but the credulity of the many.

Zoë Druick, Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film in the National Film Board.  Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007.  ISBN: 9780773531857.  List Price: (CA) $80.00 (Cloth).  ISBN: 9780773532595.  List Price: (CA) $27.95 (Paper)

The National Film Board of Canada, now in its seventh decade, is internationally acclaimed as a beacon of non-commercial filmmaking. In Projecting Canada Zoë Druick shows that the NFB, born out of a nation-building project, continues to be inextricably involved in the crises of nation, technology, and social scientific knowledge that shape the Canadian cultural landscape.

Based on newly uncovered archival information and a close reading of numerous NFB films, Projecting Canada explores the NFB's involvement with British Empire communication theory and American social science. Using a critical cultural policy studies framework, Druick develops the concept of "government realism" to describe films featuring ordinary people as representative of segments of the population. She demonstrates the close connection between NFB production policies and shifting techniques developed in relation to the evolution of social science from the 1940s to the present and argues that government policy has been the overriding factor in determining the ideology of NFB films. Projecting Canada offers a compelling new perspective on both the development of the documentary form and the role of cultural policy in creating essential spaces for aesthetic production.

Christian W. McMillen, Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.  ISBN: 9780300114607.  List Price: $38.00

In 1941, after decades of struggling to hold on to the remainder of their aboriginal home, the Hualapai Indians finally took their case to the Supreme Court—and won. The Hualapai case was the culminating event in a legal and intellectual revolution that transformed Indian law and ushered in a new way of writing Indian history that provided legal grounds for native land claims. But Making Indian Law is about more than a legal decision.  It’s the story of Hualapai activists, and eventually sympathetic lawyers, who challenged both the Santa Fe Railroad and the U.S. government to a courtroom showdown over the meaning of Indian property rights—and the Indian past.



At the heart of the Hualapai campaign to save the reservation was documenting the history of Hualapai land use. Making Indian Law showcases the central role that the Hualapai and their lawyers played in formulating new understandings of native people, their property, and their past. To this day, the impact of the Hualapai decision is felt wherever and whenever indigenous land claims are litigated throughout the world.

Alain-G. Gagnon and Raffaele Iacovino, Federalism, Citizenship, and Quebec: Debating Multinationalism.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.  ISBN: 0802092160.  List Price: (CA) $60.00

The question of multinationalism has largely been treated as an issue that needs to be ‘solved’, implying a negative but temporary situation that threatens the integrity of the political system. In Federalism, Citizenship, and Quebec, Alain-G. Gagnon and Raffaele Iacovino argue that multinationalism has been and continues to be the fundamental socio-political characteristic of the Canadian polity, and that it should guide and structure the negotiating principles and political processes upon which the institutions of federalism and citizenship are constructed.

The authors address future challenges for Canada, including the persistence of competing nationalisms, the federal compact in the global era, the impact of post-national citizenship on minority nations, and a reassessment of the relationship between citizenship and federalism. Drawing on historical accounts and contemporary critical theory, they provide an alternative picture of Quebec’s contribution, presenting a conception of Canada’s potential as an open, multinational federation committed to diverse conceptions of citizenship and a novel approach to constitutional association. In the final analysis, this study suggests a new model of federalism and citizenship that recognizes multi-nationalism as a cornerstone of belonging to Canada, for both citizens and governments of its respective political communities.

Liam Riordan, Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic.  Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.  ISBN: 9780812240016.  List Price: $49.95 (Cloth)

The richly diverse population of the mid-Atlantic region distinguished it from the homogeneity of Puritan New England and the stark differences of the plantation South that still dominate our understanding of early America. In Many Identities, One Nation, Liam Riordan explores how the American Revolution politicized religious, racial, and ethnic identities among the diverse inhabitants of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. Attending to individual experiences through a close comparative analysis, Riordan explains the transformation from British subjects to U.S. citizens in a region that included Quakers, African Americans, and Pennsylvania Germans.

In the face of a gradually emerging sense of nationalism, varied forms of personal and group identities took on heightened public significance in the Revolutionary Delaware Valley. While Quakers in Burlington, New Jersey, remained suspect after the war because of their pacifism, newly freed slaves in New Castle, Delaware, demanded full inclusion, and bilingual Pennsylvania Germans in Easton, Pennsylvania, successfully struggled to create a central place for themselves in the new nation. By placing the public contest over the proper expression of group distinctiveness in the context of local life, Riordan offers a new understanding of how cultural identity structured the early Jacksonian society of the 1820s as a culmination of the American Revolution in this region.

Chad Richardson and Rosalva Resendiz, On the Edge of the Law: Culture, Labor, and Deviance on the South Texas Border.  Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.  ISBN: 9780292713338.  List Price: $60.00 (Hardcover).  ISBN: 9780292714755.  List Price: $24.95 (Paper)

The Valley of South Texas is a region of puzzling contradictions. Despite a booming economy fueled by free trade and rapid population growth, the Valley typically experiences high unemployment and low per capita income. The region has the highest rate of drug seizures in the United States, yet its violent crime rate is well below national and state averages. The Valley's colonias are home to the poorest residents in the nation, but their rates of home ownership and intact two-parent families are among the highest in the country for low-income residential areas. What explains these apparently irreconcilable facts?

Since 1982, faculty and students associated with the Borderlife Research Project at the University of Texas-Pan American have interviewed thousands of Valley residents to investigate and describe the cultural and social life along the South Texas-Northern Mexico border. In this book, Borderlife researchers clarify why Valley culture presents so many apparent contradictions as they delve into issues that are "on the edge of the law"—traditional health care and other cultural beliefs and practices, displaced and undocumented workers, immigration enforcement, drug smuggling, property crime, criminal justice, and school dropout rates. The researchers' findings make it plain that while these issues present major challenges for the governments of the United States and Mexico, their effects and contradictions are especially acute on the border, where residents must daily negotiate between two very different economies; health care, school, and criminal justice systems; and worldviews.

Evelyn A. Schlatter, Aryan Cowboys: White Supremicists and the Search for a New Frontier, 1970-2000.  Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.  ISBN: 9780292714212.  List Price: $50.00.  ISBN: 9780292714717.  List Price: $19.95 (Paper)

During the last third of the twentieth century, white supremacists moved, both literally and in the collective imagination, from midnight rides through Mississippi to broadband-wired cabins in Montana. But while rural Montana may be on the geographical fringe of the country, white supremacist groups were not pushed there, and they are far from "fringe elements" of society, as many Americans would like to believe. Evelyn Schlatter's startling analysis describes how many of the new white supremacist groups in the West have co-opted the region's mythology and environment based on longstanding beliefs about American character and Manifest Destiny to shape an organic, home-grown movement.

Dissatisfied with the urbanized, culturally progressive coasts, disenfranchised by affirmative action and immigration, white supremacists have found new hope in the old ideal of the West as a land of opportunity waiting to be settled by self-reliant traditional families. Some even envision the region as a potential white homeland. Groups such as Aryan Nations, The Order, and Posse Comitatus use controversial issues such as affirmative action, anti-Semitism, immigration, and religion to create sympathy for their extremist views among mainstream whites—while offering a "solution" in the popular conception of the West as a place of freedom, opportunity, and escape from modern society. Aryan Cowboys exposes the exclusionist message of this "American" ideal, while documenting its dangerous appeal.

Jace Weaver, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior, American Indian Literary Nationalism.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.  ISBN: 9780826340733.  List Price: $19.95 (Paper)

Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior, assert being a "nationalist" is a legitimate perspective from which to approach Native American literature and criticism. They consider such a methodology not only defensible but also crucial to supporting Native national sovereignty and self-determination, an important goal of Native American studies, generally.

However, the authors do not believe the nationalism suggested in American Indian Literary Nationalism is the only possible approach to Native literature. Each invites Natives and non-Native allies who support tribal national sovereignty and nationalist readings of Native literature to join the discussion.

With this writing, each author acknowledges and honors the foundational contribution of Simon Ortiz in his 1981 MELUS essay, "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism." It has been over thirty-five years since academe has accepted the legitimacy of American Indian literature. Weaver, Warrior, and Womack now call for more Native voices to articulate literary criticism and for clearer thinking about what links the literature to Native communities.