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.

This definitive assessment of Cormac McCarthy's novels captures the interactions among the literary and mythic elements, the social dynamics of violence, and the natural world. Drawing on René Girard's mimetic theory, mythography, thermodynamics, and information science, Markus Wierschem identifies a literary apocalypse at the center of McCarthy's work, one that unveils another buried deep within the history, religion, and myths of American and Western culture.

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).

"Richard Gebhart traces the Atlantic-bound voyages of Great Lakes ships, recovering the voices of long-ago ship captains, along with their cargo manifests and itineraries. Drawing on research in old newspapers and maritime archives, he traces the construction of new ships and shipyards, the comings and goings and travails of the lakes' workhorses, and makes a visit to a boneyard where many ships ended their lives. Among many other lost tales, Gebhart brings back to light the rise of oil tankers, marking the great twentieth-century energy transition in shipping"--

"In A Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African Church, historian Lauren Jarvis provides a portrait of Isaiah Shembe, founder of the Nazaretha Baptist Church and one of South Africa's most famous religious figures, and in turn South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century"--

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.

"Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, nation states found new ways to assert power under the guise of public health, from closing or tightening borders to expanding the boundaries of acceptable citizen surveillance. As these controls increased in intensity, citizens' passions to cross borders seemed to grow in proportion. Pandemic Crossings explores how these processes of boundary making and crossing, often mediated by digital technology despite inequity of access, had profound and often contradictory consequences on individual lives, national politics, and US-China relations. This geographically diverse collection of studies informed by everyday, individual experiences contribute new insights to the interplay between digital technologies and state governance during the COVID-19 pandemic"--

Translated into English for the first time by leading mimetic studies scholar William A. Johnsen, The World of René Girard is a must-have for those new to and familiar with Girard's work. In these interviews, Girard discusses the flurry of intellectual activity that followed the landmark 1981 Stanford University conference, Disorder and Order. Girard also discusses Theater of Envy, his then-forthcoming book on Shakespeare and the first book written in English, as well as corrects several misunderstandings of his mimetic hypothesis.

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.

This book brings new life to the long-standing debate in the United States over whether teacher education, K-12 teaching, and the role that universities play in this work can be revolutionized so that they are less subject to self-defeating conventions and orthodoxy, to the benefit of all the nation's children. Author John Schwille reexamines the ambitious reform agenda that Michigan State University teacher education leaders brought to the national table in the 1980s and 1990s. Conveying this history through the words of the teachers and scholars responsible for it, Schwille offers valuable lessons for current education reformers.

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.

A cowritten "multigraph" that began in 2018 as a reading group, this book enacts an intimate, mutualistic spirit of shared critical inquiry and play--an exciting new way of doing-thinking-feeling rhetorical studies by six prominent scholars in rhetoric from communication and English departments alike. Assuming climates to be rhetorical and rhetoric to be climatic, A Reading Group offers a framework for making sense of rhetorical studies as they grapple with the challenges posed by antiracist, decolonial, affective, ecological, and more-than-human scholarship to a tradition with a long history of being centered around individual, usually privileged, human agents wielding language as their principal instrument.

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"--

"Cowdell shows how Girard's vision of human transformation through faith in Christ reveals a different world beyond ontological violence while preserving the divine participation that Milbank champions"--

"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"--

At the turn of the twentieth century, the white slavery panic pervaded American politics, influencing the creation of the FBI, the enactment of immigration law, and the content of international treaties. At the core of this controversy was the maintenance of white national space. In this comprehensive account of the Progressive Era's sex trafficking rhetoric, Leslie Harris demonstrates the centrality of white womanhood, as a symbolic construct, to the structure of national space and belonging.