Ignored Histories

How is colonial history taught in schools? And how do education systems impact power relations between Indigenous people and settlers? This book provides a unique contribution to international discussions about knowledge production and the teaching of colonial history in schools with a comparative analysis of two neighboring settler-colonial societies of the South Pacific. Angélique Stastny argues that school systems in Australia and Kanaky/New Caledonia continue to enact British/Australian and French colonialism, respectively, by leveraging historical narratives that fail to comprehend and willfully ignore the mechanisms and contemporaneity of settler colonialism. Settler regimes of ignorance are sustaining the political status quo of settler-colonial power. Stastny’s work examines this weaponization of ignorance in systems so often focused on the production of knowledge to deepen our understanding of how and why settler-colonial agendas operate in public primary and secondary schools. Ignored Histories takes the reader through the evolution of policy directives for history curricula, historiography and the narratives produced and disseminated in textbooks, and the author’s own ethnography on teachers’ actual practices and experiences. As the story unfolds, it traces the recounts of colonial wars and massacres in textbooks; presents modern accounts of the continuing marginalization—and outright exclusion—of Indigenous historians, practitioners, and knowledge from both curriculum development and pedagogy; problematizes students’ disengagement from learning about their own histories; and brings to light lingering effects of white supremacy and ways to counter them. Some history teachers, on an individual level, engage in insurgent educational strategies in an attempt to shift power relations between Indigenous people and settlers. From the interviews Stastny conducted, we learn that some of these teachers were fired; others successfully developed methods to destabilize and rethink institutional practices and effect change in the classroom. Ultimately, Stastny argues for a system-wide transformation that decolonizes history curricula and the teaching of history by prioritizing Indigenous resurgence, understandings, and knowledge; acknowledging and addressing the difficult truths of the past; and ethically shaping the stories of today.

An inspiring and surprising celebration of U.S. women's history told through Smithsonian artifacts illustrating women's participation in science, art, music, sports, fashion, business, religion, entertainment, military, politics, activism, and more. This book offers a unique, panoramic look at women's history in the United States through the lens of ordinary objects from, by, and for extraordinary women. Featuring more than 280 artifacts from 16 Smithsonian museums and archives, and more than 135 essays from 95 Smithsonian authors, this book tells women's history as only the Smithsonian can. Featured objects range from fine art to computer code, from First Ladies memorabilia to Black Lives Matter placards, and from Hopi pottery to a couch from the Oprah Winfrey show. There are familiar objects--such as the suffrage wagon used to advocate passage of the 19th Amendment and the Pussy Hat from the 2016 Women's March in DC--as well as lesser known pieces revealing untold stories. Portraits, photographs, paintings, political materials, signs, musical instruments, sports equipment, clothes, letters, ads, personal posessions, and other objects reveal the incredible stories of such amazing women as Phillis Wheatley, Julia Child, Sojourner Truth, Mary Cassatt, Madam C. J. Walker, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie Till Mobley, Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta, Phyllis Diller, Celia Cruz, Sandra Day O'Connor, Billie Jean King, Sylvia Rivera, and so many more. Together with illuminating text, these objects elevate the importance of American women in the home, workplace, government, and beyond. Published to commemorate the centennial of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, Smithsonian American Women is a deeply satisfying read and a must-have reflection on how generations of women have defined what it means to be recognized in both the nation and the world.

Presenting selected histories in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, this work discusses: political and economic issues; marriage practices, motherhood and enslavement; and religious beliefs and spiritual development. Famous women, including Hatshepsut, Hortensia, Aisha, Hildegard of Bingen and Sei Shonangan, are discussed as well as lesser known and anonymous women. Both primary and secondary source readings are included.

"The strength of this book . . . encompasses a broad view of history from the bottom up and deals not only with biographical background of the nonelite in labor but with insights into black, immigrant, and grassroots working-class history as well."--Choice Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

New Voyages to Carolina offers a bold new approach for understanding and telling North Carolina's history. Recognizing the need for such a fresh approach and reflecting a generation of recent scholarship, eighteen distinguished authors have sculpted a broad, inclusive narrative of the state's evolution over more than four centuries. The volume provides new lenses and provocative possibilities for reimagining the state's past. Transcending traditional markers of wars and elections, the contributors map out a new chronology encompassing geological realities; the unappreciated presence of Indians, blacks, and women; religious and cultural influences; and abiding preferences for industrial development within the limits of "progressive" politics. While challenging traditional story lines, the authors frame a candid tale of the state's development. Contributors: Dorothea V. Ames, East Carolina University Karl E. Campbell, Appalachian State University James C. Cobb, University of Georgia Peter A. Coclanis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Stephen Feeley, McDaniel College Jerry Gershenhorn, North Carolina Central University Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Yale University Patrick Huber, Missouri University of Science and Technology Charles F. Irons, Elon University David Moore, Warren Wilson College Michael Leroy Oberg, State University of New York, College at Geneseo Stanley R. Riggs, East Carolina University Richard D. Starnes, Western Carolina University Carole Watterson Troxler, Elon University Bradford J. Wood, Eastern Kentucky University Karin Zipf, East Carolina University

"We can no longer pretend we don't know about residential schools, murdered and missing Aboriginal women and 'Indian hospitals.' The only outstanding question is how we respond." —Tom Sandborn, Vancouver Sun A shocking exposé of the dark history and legacy of segregated Indigenous health care in Canada. After the publication of his critically acclaimed 2011 book Drink the Bitter Root: A Writer’s Search for Justice and Healing in Africa, author Gary Geddes turned the investigative lens on his own country, embarking on a long and difficult journey across Canada to interview Indigenous elders willing to share their experiences of segregated health care, including their treatment in the "Indian hospitals" that existed from coast to coast for over half a century. The memories recounted by these survivors—from gratuitous drug and surgical experiments to electroshock treatments intended to destroy the memory of sexual abuse—are truly harrowing, and will surely shatter any lingering illusions about the virtues or good intentions of our colonial past. Yet, this is more than just the painful history of a once-so-called vanishing people (a people who have resisted vanishing despite the best efforts of those in charge); it is a testament to survival, perseverance, and the power of memory to keep history alive and promote the idea of a more open and just future. Released to coincide with the Year of Reconciliation (2017), Medicine Unbundled is an important and timely contribution to our national narrative.

Noted historian Christine DeLucia offers a major reconsideration of the violent seventeenth-century conflict in northeastern America known as King Philip’s War, providing an alternative to Pilgrim-centric narratives that have conventionally dominated the histories of colonial New England. DeLucia grounds her study of one of the most devastating conflicts between Native Americans and European settlers in early America in five specific places that were directly affected by the crisis, spanning the Northeast as well as the Atlantic world. She examines the war’s effects on the everyday lives and collective mentalities of the region’s diverse Native and Euro-American communities over the course of several centuries, focusing on persistent struggles over land and water, sovereignty, resistance, cultural memory, and intercultural interactions. An enlightening work that draws from oral traditions, archival traces, material and visual culture, archaeology, literature, and environmental studies, this study reassesses the nature and enduring legacies of a watershed historical event.

The term ‘revolutionary’ is used liberally in histories of Indian anticolonialism, but scarcely defined. Implicitly understood, it functions as a signpost or a badge, generously conferred in hagiographies, loosely invoked in historiography, and strategically deployed in contemporary political contests. It is timely, then, to ask the question: Who counts as a ‘revolutionary’ in South Asia? How can we read ‘the revolutionary’ in Indian political formations? And what does it really mean to be ‘revolutionary’ in turbulent late colonial times? This volume takes a biographical approach to the question, by examining the life stories of a series of activists, some well known, who all defined themselves in explicitly revolutionary terms in the early twentieth century: Shyamaji Krishnavarma, V. D. Savarkar, M. K. Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru, J.P. Narayan and Hansraj Vohra. The authors interrogate the subversive lives of these figures, tracing their polyglot influences and transnational impacts, to map out the discursive travels of ‘the revolutionary’ in Indian historical and literary worlds from the early 1900s, and to indicate its reverberations in the politics of the present. This book was published as a special issue of Postcolonial Studies.