Books published by Ohio University Press

The abolition of the slave trade is normally understood to be the singular achievement of eighteenth-century British liberalism. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic expands both the temporal and the geographic framework in which the history of abolitionism is conceived.

Intonations tells the story of how Angola's urban residents in the late colonial period (roughly 1945-74) used music to talk back to their colonial oppressors and, more importantly, to define what it meant to be Angolan and what they hoped to gain from independence. A compilation of Angolan music is included in CD format.Marissa J. Moorman presents a social and cultural history of the relationship between Angolan culture and politics. She argues that it was in and through popular urban music, produced mainly in the musseques (urban shantytowns) of the capital city, Luanda, that Angolans forged the nation and developed expectations about nationalism. Through careful archival work and extensive interviews with musicians and those who attended performances in bars, community centers, and cinemas, Moorman explores the ways in which the urban poor imagined the nation.The spread of radio technology and the establishment of a recording industry in the early 1970s reterritorialized an urban-produced sound and cultural ethos by transporting music throughout the country. When the formerly exiled independent movements returned to Angola in 1975, they found a population receptive to their nationalist message but with different expectations about the promises of independence. In producing and consuming music, Angolans formed a new image of independence and nationalist politics.

From Jail to Jail is the political autobiography of Sutan Ibrahim gelar Tan Malaka, an enigmatic and colorful political thinker of twentieth-century Asia, who was one of the most influential figures of the Indonesian Revolution. Variously labeled a communist, Trotskyite, and nationalist, Tan Malaka managed to run afoul of nearly every political group and faction involved in the Indonesian struggle for independence. During his decades of political activity, he spent periods of exile and hiding in nearly every country in Southeast Asia. As a Marxist who was expelled from and became a bitter enemy of his country's Communist Party and as a nationalist who was imprisoned and murdered by his own government's forces as a danger to its anticolonial struggle, Tan Malaka was and continues to be soaked in contradiction and controversy.

Social scientists have long recognized many apparent contradictions in the Minangkabau. The world's largest matrilineal people, they are also strongly Islamic and, as a society, remarkably modern and outward looking.

In late 1930, on a secluded mountain overlooking the rural paddy fields of British Burma, a peasant leader named Saya San crowned himself King and inaugurated a series of uprisings that would later erupt into one of the largest anti-colonial rebellions in Southeast Asian history.

Tales of deforestation and desertification in North Africa have been told from the Roman period to the present. Such stories of environmental decline in the Maghreb are still recounted by experts and are widely accepted without question today.

Frank Waters lived for 3 years among the strange, secretive Hopi Indians of Arizona and was quickly drawn into their mythic, timeless reality. Pumpkin Seed Point is a beautifully written personal account of Waters' inner and outer experiences in the subterranean world.

The first African statesman to achieve world recognition was Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), who became president of the new Republic of Ghana in 1960. He campaigned ceaselessly for African solidarity and for the liberation of southern Africa from white settler rule.

Amy Levy has risen to prominence in recent years as one of the most innovative and perplexing writers of her generation. Embraced by feminist scholars for her radical experimentation with queer poetic voice and her witty journalistic pieces on female independence, she remains controversial for her representations of London Jewry.

Beginning with the closing decade of European colonial rule in Southeast Asia and covering the wartime Japanese empire and its postwar disintegration, "Tensions of Empire" focuses on the Japanese in Southeast Asia, Indonesians in Japan, and the legacy of the war in Southeast Asia.

In this lively study of both modern film and stage productions of Shakespeare, Samuel Crowl provides fascinating insights into the ways in which these productions have been influenced by one another as well as by contemporary developments in critical approaches to Shakespeare''s plays.Crowl’s study demonstrates the surprising resonances between Roman Polanski''s 1971 film of Macbeth and Adrian Noble''s heralded recent production of the play for The Royal Shakespeare Company; argues that Orson Welles''s films of Othello and Cabins at Midnight are not only brilliant remaining of Shakespeare in another art form but make a powerful contribution to our contemporary understanding of performance as interpretation; and chronicles the impact of Peter Hall''s creation of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960 on performance approaches to Shakespeare in the past thirty years.Shakespeare Observed provides full interpretative readings of key recent Shakespeare productions in England and includes an intimate behind-the-scenes glimpse into the rehearsal process which produced Ron Daniels''s emotionally charged version of Romeo and Juliet for the RSC in 1980. The final chapter uses Kenneth Branagh''s highly successful film of Henry V as a summary example of the trends and influences Crowl''s study traces, seeing the film as gathering its interpretative energies from both Olivier''s famous film version of the play and Adrian Noble''s stage production featuring Branagh as the king.Written in a style which places a premium on capturing the vivid and often dazzling moments of stage and film performances of Shakespeare, Crowl''s study will be of interest to the avid film and theatergoer as well as to the scholar and student. Shakespeare Observed joins a growing list of recent critical works which have significantly expanded and redefined the boundaries of Shakespeare studies in our time.

"The Sheep Book offers a template for both the beginner and the old hand. Mixing theoretical, technical and practical, Parker offers a buffet of tips for any sheep producer." -Joel Salatin, author of You Can Farm

Like the ancient Roman Pantheon, the U.S. Capitol was designed by its political and aesthetic arbiters to memorialize the virtues, events, and persons most representative of the nation's ideals-an attempt to raise a particular version of the nation's founding to the level of myth.

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning's known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning's life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.Volume

This inaugural volume in the Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History is the paperback edition of Conrad Totman's widely acclaimed study of Japan's environmental policies over the centuries.Professor

Msia Kibona Clark examines some of Africa's biggest hip-hop scenes and shows how hip-hop helps us understand specifically African realities. A tribute to a genre and its artists, Hip-Hop in Africa details the spread of hip-hop culture in Africa and pushes the study of music and diaspora in critical new directions.

Intrepid young curator-turned-private eye Jenna Murphy-whom readers first met in A Head in Cambodia-goes to the tourist town of Ubud to study early twentieth-century Balinese painting. But her first discovery when she arrives in Indonesia is the speared body of expat artist Flip Hendricks.

It's a violent encounter that private investigator Andy Hayes could have done without. One minute he's finishing up some grocery shopping ahead of a custody visit with his sons. The next, he must come to the rescue of a Somali American mother and her young children as anti-immigrant bullies torment them.

Connecting Continents addresses two issues: how to promote collaborative research, and how to shape the research agenda for a region only recently attracting serious interest from historical archaeologists exploring the dynamics of migration, colonization, and cultural syncretism central to understanding human experience in the Indian Ocean basin.

Dolores Huerta Stands Strong follows Huerta's life from the mining communities of the Southwest where her father toiled, to the fields of California, to the present day. As she advocated for farmworkers, Mexican American immigrants, women, and LGBTQ population rights, Dolores earned the nation's highest honors and found her voice.

From one of the region's foremost mushroom hunters, Walter E. Sturgeon, comes a long-overdue field guide to finding and identifying the mushrooms found in the Appalachian mountains. This guide is destined to be an indispensable authority on the subject for everyone from beginning hobbyists to trained experts, throughout Appalachia and beyond.

For some, Zimbabwe's President Mugabe is a liberation hero who confronted white rule and oversaw the radical redistribution of land. For others, he is a murderous dictator who drove his country to poverty. This concise biography, in a highly successful series, reveals the complexity of the man who led Zimbabwe for its first decades of independence.

A Taste of the Hocking Hills intermingles delicious recipes with striking photographs of the Appalachian region. Chef Matt Rapposelli presents dishes by the season, noting the specialties appearing on his menus that time of year. Whether enjoying a winter evening or a summer morning, cooks will be able to bring a bit of the Hocking Hills home.

David Andrew Nichols offers a fresh history of the Lakes peoples over nearly three centuries of rapid change. As the people themselves persisted, so did their customs, religions, and control over their destinies. Accessible and creative, this book is destined to become a classroom staple for Native American history.

Weedeater picks up six years after the end of Robert Gipe's first novel, Trampoline, and continues the story of the people of Canard County, Kentucky, living through the last hurrah of the coal industry and battling with opioid abuse.