Böcker utgivna av Michigan State University Press

For several years, the armies of Napoleon III deployed some 450 Muslim Sudanese slave soldiers in Veracruz, the port of Mexico City. As in the other case of Western hemisphere military slavery, the Sudanese were imported from Africa in the hopes that they would better survive the tropical diseases that so terribly afflicted European soldiers.The mixture of cultures embodied by this event has piqued the interest of several historians, so it is by no means unknown. Hill and Hogg provide a particularly thorough account of this exotic interlude, explaining its background, looking in detail at the battle record in Mexico, and figuring out who exactly made up the battalion.

States are thought only to exercise power over the land of the living. Benjamin Ginsberg argues otherwise, exploring the state's reach into the realm of the Grim Reaper, bureaucratizing death to strengthen the state's hold on life. He notes that increasingly institutions are using the regulation of death as an essential source of power. They do this by not only threatening death to their enemies but also securing loyalty and obedience by extending citizens' lives and promising to effectuate the postmortem fulfillment of citizens' antemortem desires. The state treats the loyal dead with respect, sometimes offering them a place in the secular afterlife of honor and memory, while consigning the faithless to the void.

For thousands of years, humans have categorized animals as either domestic or wild. And yet, around the world, a more nuanced relationship exists, that of commensal animals, species that have adapted to our homes, our towns, and our artificial landscapes, finding ways to gain benefit from our activities and so becoming an important part of our everyday lives. A fascinating investigation, this text draws on archaeological records to explore human-animal relations.

Even the Least of These presents the work of a poet and a printmaker responding to the small and often overlooked moments of our daily lives and reflecting upon the significance of experience and memory. The result is a thoughtful and often joyful collection of poetry and prints that celebrate an awareness of the world around us and reflect on past experiences, lessons learned (or not).

Like many American urban waterways, Ken-O-Sha has been in decline for nearly two hundred years. Once life-supporting, the waterway now known as Plaster Creek is life-threatening. In this provocative book, scholars and environmentalists Gail Gunst Heffner and David P. Warners explore the watershed's ecological, social, spiritual, and economic history to determine what caused the damage, and describe more recent efforts to repair it.

Elder provides a uniquely moving insider's perspective into the quest to protect the Great Lakes and surrounding public lands, from past battles to protect Michigan wilderness and establish the region's national lakeshores to present fights against toxic pollution and climate change. Situated within the region's broader history, Wilderness, Water, and Rust argues endless cycles of resource exploitation and boom and bust created the "rust belt" legacy, and for the Great Lakes' natural and human communities to thrive, we must imagine new ways of living in the region.

While the history of Great Lakes shipping has been discussed frequently over the years, little has been said about the factors that influenced the use, design, and evolution of the boats that made this trade possible. Sail, Steam, and Diesel: Moving Cargo on the Great Lakes provides a comprehensive overview of the development of Great Lakes ships over the past several centuries, from small birch-bark canoes originally used in the region to the massive thousand-footers of today. The author also looks at the economics of vessel operation, including the various considerations involved in expanding the scope of the shipping industry, a move that aided in catapulting America into becoming an industrial juggernaut. Although they might not realize it, millions of Americans have owed their livelihoods to the Great Lakes boats and the cargoes they carried that supported a wide range of industries, and this volume is an excellent way to recognize to what extent our lives have been affected by this region's industry.

In 1924, an orphan train passed through the Midwest, and two teenagers, seeking a new life, find nothing but hardship when taken in to live on a farm in Michigan. After they are forced to flee, they are hunted by a determined police chief and the reemergent KKK. A bond of mutual trust and determination help the two orphans navigate a stark American landscape shaped by prejudice, hypocrisy, and fear.

With varying aspirations and motives for seeking new homes, migrants build communities by telling stories, engaging in social media activism, protesting in the streets, writing scholarly criticism, and using many other modes of communication. Since what it means to be a migrant differs from person to person, the contributors to this edited collection showcase numerous practices migrants adopt to communicate and connect with others as they forge their own identities in globalized yet highly nationalistic societies.

"Hillary Clinton's Career in Speeches joins quantitative methods with close reading to analyze the rhetorical highs and lows of the most prominent political woman in U.S. history"--

"Considering how Covid amplified and conjoined pre-existing structural and social inequities in the United States, Covid And...How to do Rhetoric in a Pandemic explores how rhetoric shaped Covid's disease trajectory"--

The product of long-concealed FBI surveillance documents, Dangerous Friendship chronicles a history of Martin Luther King Jr. that the government kept secret from the public for years. The book tells the story of Stanley Levison, a well-known figure in the Communist Party-USA, who became one of King's closest friends and advisers, and the extent to which King, Levison, and many other freedom workers were surveilled by people at the very top of the U.S. security establishment.

Trials and Triumphs reveals the anxiety, hardship, turmoil and tragedy that women endured during the war years. It reveals the fierce loyalty and enmity that nearly severed the Union, the horror of enemy occupation, and even the desperate austerity of an itinerate refugee life. Originally published in 1992, this revised paperback edition includes a new index.

Tells the stories of the Gossard Girls, women who sewed corsets and bras at factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. Drawing on dozens of interviews with the surviving workers and their families, this book highlights the daily challenges and joys of these mostly first- and second-generation immigrant women.

In this rich exploration of Rene Girard's insights, his French editor and longtime collaborator Benoit Chantre brings Saint Paul's Letter to the Romans into dialogue with both Proust and Girard in order to push to its logical endpoint the idea of a back-and-forth movement from chaos to order.

The northern white-cedar's future is uncertain. Here scientists Gerald L. Storm and Laura S. Kenefic describe the threats to this modest yet essential member of its ecosystem and call on all of us to unite to help it to thrive.

In his seventh book of poems, celebrated poet Todd Davis explores the many forms of violence we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet. Here racism, climate collapse, and pandemic, as well as the very real threat of extinction are dramatized in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia.

Natascha Wodin's personal homage to her mother's life story is an important lyrical memorial for the thousands of Eastern Europeans who were forced to leave their homes and work in Germany during the war, and a moving reflection of the plight of displaced peoples throughout the ages.

A compelling collection of poems, Late Self-Portraits conveys an intimate description of lives through a collage of portraits and affliction, weaving history and the sacred, both intimate and worldly.