With nearly half a million Iranian Americans living in and around Los Angeles, Southern California is home to more Iranians than anywhere outside Iran. Although many community members identify as secular, stereotypes characterize Iranian Americans, like other populations from Muslim-majority countries, as pejoratively religious and culturally ......
Since the collapse of socialism, Bulgaria's population has been on the move-out of rural regions and into cities, or out of the country altogether. Yet today there is a countermovement of young, urban Bulgarians, born after 1989, seeking to repopulate rural villages and reclaim traditional Bulgarian folklife. Though many of these young Bulgarians ......
Flexible States and Porous Boundaries in the History of Coastal West Africa
Beginning in the late fifteenth century, more than two million people were taken from areas that lay behind the Bight of Benin, enslaved, and forced into the perilous Middle Passage bound for the New World. While a vast swath of scholarly work on this region has explored the relationships among the ruling elites and overseas traders that ......
Like in other parts of the world, the protection of human rights and other practices of constitutionalism remains uneven in Malawi and Kenya. However, as Eunice N. Sahle argues in this book, from a comparative historical perspective, these countries' adoption of new transformative constitutional frameworks in 1994 and 2010, respectively, provided ......
In the 1970s, while communes bloomed like wildflowers across the land, most had no room for queer members. The so-called counterculture still clung to heterosexual norms, even as it preached freedom from traditional gender roles and the nuclear family. Juda Bennett's engrossing memoir follows his escape from suburbia into the back-to-the-land ......
Everyday Fascism, Communist Horizons, and the Migration of an Italian Border Community Beyond the Iron Curtain
Between 1946 and 1948, roughly 5,000 ethnic Italians from the northern Adriatic shipbuilding town of Monfalcone relocated to the newly communist Yugoslavia. This rare case of eastward Cold War migration demonstrates how ordinary people conceived of liberation during the transitional years between World War II and the early Cold War-a time when ......
The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys in the 1950s
Vivacious, unconventional, candid, and straight, Helen Branson operated a gay bar in Los Angeles in the 1950s-America's most anti-gay decade. After years of fending off drunken passes as an entertainer in cocktail bars, this divorced grandmother preferred the wit, variety, and fun she found among homosexual men. Enjoying their companionship and ......
In 2015, a massive avalanche descended on the small Arctic Norwegian city of Longyearbyen, Svalbard, leveling eleven houses and killing a two-year-old girl and a young father. It was a tragic natural disaster but one that was becoming increasingly and alarmingly common for citizens of Svalbard, like journalist Line Nagell YlvisAker. In her ......
Geography, Gender, and Social Networks in Jewish Resistance
On August 2, 1943, prisoners at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, located in occupied Poland, launched an uprising against their captors, during which hundreds successfully escaped while guards killed as many in the process. In this groundbreaking work, Chad S.A. Gibbs draws upon recently discovered sources and novel research methods to ......
