"At its simplest, the dozens is a comic concatenation of "yo' mama" jokes. At its most complex, it is a form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. Whether considered vernacular poetry, verbal dueling, a test of street cool, or just a mess of dirt…
From the publisher. Since Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, the fate of British convicts has burned brightly in the popular imagination. Incredibly, their larger story is even more dramatic -- the saga of forgotten men and women scattered to the farthest corners of the British emp…
In the mid-20th century nations across Africa fought for their independence from colonial forces. This work probes the shifting meaning of Africa in the intellectual, political and social lives of African Americans.
We often envision the New World before the arrival of the Europeans as a land of pristine natural beauty and undisturbed environments. However, David Lentz offers an alternative view by detailing the impact of native cultures on these ecosystems prior to their contact with Europ…
Explores the persistence of African ethnic identity among the enslaved in North America, the Caribbean, and South America over four hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade. Investigates such issues as who profited from the Atlantic slave trade, how Africans were defined and na…
Of interest to professionals as well as generalists, this collection will stand as a marker of the state of Mayan studies at the turn of the 21st century and as a tribute to the remarkable personality who guided a large part of that archaeological research for more than two deca…
The conversion efforts of European Christian missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, in the Americas during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries form a single, continuous thread. From Columbus to the Puritans and beyond, Europeans arriving in the Americas virtually always incl…
Spurred by court rulings requiring states to increase public-school funding, the US spends more per student on K-12 education than almost any other country. This work traces the history of reform efforts and concludes that the principal focus of both courts and legislatures on e…
