scholarly journals Paper Lives of Chinese Migrants and the History of the Undocumented

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Beth Lew-Williams

Historians know a great deal more about the laws and policies that first created unauthorized status than the people who had to live within these constraints. What if we tell the history of the undocumented as a history of a people, rather than a history of a state-constructed category? Scholars have noted that unauthorized status exerts broad effects on the conditions of migrants’ everyday lives, but they have focused primarily on Latinx migrants in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The case of unauthorized migrants produced by the Chinese exclusion laws (1882–1943) demonstrates how the study of the undocumented must begin a century earlier. In order to denaturalize the conditions of the present, we must interrogate the shifting nature of undocumented life in the past.

Author(s):  
Sara M. Patterson

This book argues that as the Latter-day Saint community globalized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, its relationship to space transformed. Initially, nineteenth-century Mormons believed that they must literally gather together in their new Salt Lake Zion—their center place. They believed that Zion was a place you could point to on a map, a place you should dwell in to live a righteous life. Later Mormons had to reinterpret these central theological principles as their community spread around the globe. They began to make such claims as “We should spiritually gather together” and “Zion is wherever the people of God are.” But to say that they simply spiritualized concepts that had once been understood literally is only one piece of the puzzle. Contemporary Mormons still want to touch and to feel these principles. And so they mark and claim the landscapes of the American West with versions of their history carved in stone. They develop rituals that allow them not only to learn the history of the nineteenth-century journey West but also to engage it with all of their senses. This book examines the ways contemporary Mormons first spiritualized and then reliteralized and concretized several central theological concepts in order to emphasize and make meaningful a center place even as they become an increasingly place-less community.


Author(s):  
Jason Knight ◽  
Mohammad Gharipour

How can urban redevelopment benefit existing low-income communities? The history of urban redevelopment is one of disruption of poor communities. Renewal historically offered benefits to the place while pushing out the people. In some cases, displacement is intentional, in others it is unintentional. Often, it is the byproduct of the quest for profits. Regardless of motives, traditional communities, defined by cultural connections, are often disrupted. Disadvantaged neighborhoods include vacant units, which diminish the community and hold back investment. In the postwar period, American cities entered into a program of urban renewal. While this program cleared blight, it also drove displacement among the cities’ poorest and was particularly hard on minority populations clustered in downtown slums. The consequences of these decisions continue to play out today. Concentration of poverty is increasing and American cities are becoming more segregated. As neighborhoods improve, poorer residents are uprooted and forced into even more distressed conditions, elsewhere. This paper examines the history of events impacting urban communities. It further reviews the successes and failures of efforts to benefit low-income communities.


Author(s):  
Alfred L. Brophy

This chapter discusses the role of historical analysis in property law. The history of property has been used to offer support for property rights. Their long history makes the distribution of property look normal, indeed natural and something that cannot or should not be challenged. However, historically in the U.S there have been competing visions of property. From the Progressive era onward especially, the history of property has been used to show the unequal distribution of property and to offer an alternative vision that expands the rights of non-owners of property. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the history of opposition to feudalism and protection of the rights of non-owners was used to protect the rights of non-owners. Thus, the history of property has been a tool of judges and legislators to support property rights and it has also been, less frequently, a tool of critique.


This book is the first collection of scholarly essays on alternate history in over a decade and features contributions from a mixture of major figures and rising stars in the field of science fiction studies. Alternate history is a genre of fiction which, although connected to the genres of utopian, dystopian and science fiction, has its own rich history and lineage. With roots in the writings of ancient Rome, alternate history matured into something close to its current form in the essays and novels of the nineteenth century. In more recent years a number of highly acclaimed novels have been published as alternate histories, by authors ranging from science fiction bestsellers to Pulitzer Prize-winning literary icons. The success and popularity of the genre is reflected in its success on television with original concepts being developed alongside adaptations of iconic texts. This important collection of essays seeks to redress an imbalance between the importance and quality of alternate history texts and the available scholarship and critical readings of texts, providing chapters by both leading scholars in the field and rising stars. The chapters in this book acknowledge the long and distinctive history of the genre whilst also revelling in its vitality, adaptability, and contemporary relevance, with many of the chapters discussing late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century contemporary fiction texts which have received little or no sustained critical analysis elsewhere in print.


2020 ◽  

This collective monograph is a comprehensive study of the causes, evolution and outcomes of complex processes in the contemporary history of the countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe, and aims in particular to identify common and special characteristics in their socio-economic and political development. The authors base their work on documentary evidence; both published and unpublished archival materials reveal the specifics of the development of the political landscapes in these countries. They highlight models combining both European and nationally oriented (and even nationalist) components of the political spheres of particular countries; identify markers which allow the stage of completion (or incompletion) of the establishment of a new political system to be estimated; and present analyses of the processes of internal political struggle, which has often taken on ruthless forms. The analysis of regional and country-specific documentary materials illustrates that the gap in the development of the region with “old Europe” in general has not yet been overcome: in the post-Socialist period, the situation of the region being “ownerless” and “abandoned”, characteristic of the period between the two world wars, is reoccurring. The authors conclude that during the period from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries, the region was quite clearly divided into two parts: Central (the Visegrad Four) and South-Eastern (the Balkans) Europe. The authors explore the prevailing trends in the political development of Hungary and Poland related to the leadership of nationally and religiously oriented parties; in the Czech Republic and Slovakia the pendulum-like change in power of the left and right-wing parties; and in Bulgaria and Romania the domestic political processes permanently in crisis. The authors pay special attention to the contradictory nature of the political evolution of the states that emerged in the space of the former Yugoslavia. For the first time, Greece and Turkey are included in the context of a regional-wide study. The contributors present optimal or resembling transformational models, which can serve as a prototype for shaping the political landscape of other countries in the world. The monograph substantiates the urgency of the new approach needed to study the history and current state of the region and its countries, taking into account the challenges of the time, which require strengthening national and state identity. The research also offered prognostic characteristics of transformational changes in the region, the Visegrad Four, and the Balkans.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Thomas Albert Howard

This chapter begins with discussion of the three organizations drawn from numerous comparable ones established in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the interfaith center of New York, the Interreligious Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID). The chapter seeks to understand where interreligious dialogue came from and where is it headed. It also evaluates its broader historical, social, and ethical significance. The chapter hazards answers to these questions through an inquiry into several major turning points in the history of interreligious dialogue, for even as many today extol, practice, theorize, and/or theologize about interreligious dialogue, few have attended carefully to its genesis and past. The chapter takes the premodern world as a starting point, where it examines several harbingers of interreligious dialogue. Canvassing the premodern world for harbingers helps us to see that while contemporary interfaith dialogue is in some respects a novelty, it is nonetheless not altogether discontinuous with the past. Ultimately, the chapter recognizes the distinction between interfaith dialogue and interfaith social action.


Author(s):  
Santana Khanikar

This chapter discusses conflict and violence in Lakhipathar, over a period of two decades, drawing on oral histories from the people of Lakhipathar. Listening to the narratives of past sufferings here has worked not merely a tool to know what happened to the narrators in the past but it also gives a key to analyse why and how they live in the present. Apart from offering evidence towards the larger argument of the work, this part of the book has also aimed towards opening a conversation on some buried and forgotten moments in the history of the Indian state that resemble what could be called an Agambenian ‘state of exception’. The dense narratives give a picture of the collaboration and deceit, revenge and violence, suspicion and fear in war-torn Lakhipathar and how the common people negotiated their ways through these.


Heritage ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 587-605
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Loughmiller-Cardinal ◽  
J. Scott Cardinal

Archaeologists have likely collected, as a conservative estimate, billions of artifacts over the course of the history of fieldwork. We have classified chronologies and typologies of these, based on various formal and physical characteristics or ethno-historically known analogues, to give structure to our interpretations of the people that used them. The simple truth, nonetheless, is that we do not actually know how they were used or their intended purpose. We only make inferences—i.e., educated guesses based on the available evidence as we understand it—regarding their functions in the past and the historical behaviors they reflect. Since those inferences are so fundamental to the interpretations of archaeological materials, and the archaeological project as a whole, the way we understand materiality can significantly bias the stories we construct of the past. Recent work demonstrated seemingly contradictory evidence between attributed purpose or function versus confirmed use, however, which suggested that a basic premise of those inferences did not empirically hold to be true. In each case, the apparent contradiction was resolved by reassessing what use, purpose, and function truly mean and whether certain long-established functional categories of artifacts were in fact classifying by function. The resulting triangulation, presented here, narrows the scope on such implicit biases by addressing both empirical and conceptual aspects of artifacts. In anchoring each aspect of evaluation to an empirical body of data, we back ourselves away from our assumptions and interpretations so as to let the artifacts speak for themselves.


Tempo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (289) ◽  
pp. 30-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hunter Coblentz

AbstractThis article serves as an introduction to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century musical practices that have made use of glass instruments and objects. Emphasis is placed on those practices that use glass in a raw, acoustic manner, and those that take advantage of the precision with which glass can be tuned. First, a general history of glass music is presented, followed by an overview of the physical and acoustic aspects pertaining to the material that are relevant to those composers wishing to integrate glass into their works. Finally, the composers, performers and instrument builders who have made significant use of glass in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are surveyed.


Author(s):  
Christopher Sellers

The changing ways in which human surroundings interact with human bodies have yielded some of the field's most innovative scholarship. These developments reflect trends in health and medicine from the late twentieth into the early twenty-first centuries. This article concentrates on a few representative areas where this intermeshing of socio-cultural with Hippocratic history has proven especially fruitful. It begins with the changing consideration of industrial health history. It discusses that fuller range of social and political contexts and contingencies have shaped the recognition and control of the industrial hazards and have brought new depth and realism to our understanding of the health history of industrial workplaces. The assertions and conclusions about worker influence on the outcome of struggles over occupational health have helped generate greater interest in just how workers themselves perceived and experienced these ailments.


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