During a family gathering, eighty-two year old Norman Cohen becomes incensed. A causal remark about his father releases long repressed memories. For the first time Norman realizes the extent of his parents’ lengthy mistreatment of himself, their oldest son. He slips into depression. To salve his anguish and eventually find redemption, he crafts with brutal honesty a memoir that his son edits. The end product is a kaleidoscope of family history reaching back to the nineteenth century immigrants who settle in a small Pennsylvania town in the low-end neighborhood of Chicken Hill. Three generations of Jewish life are vividly portrayed in this gripping narrative. Led by the family patriarch, the first generation of greenhorn immigrants launch new lives in a strange English-speaking Christian world devoid of Jewish institutions and so unlike that of the Galician shtetl. The second generation is generally successful in both business and professions with the exception of the eldest daughter and her hapless husband. Their son Norman, the first child of the third generation, puts aside his own college ambitions. He dutifully assists in the family enterprise, a shoe store. There is a Depression, after all, and family finances are tight, right? But Norman does not understand. Why does his mother treat him so poorly? What is the true basis for his quashed dreams?

During a family gathering, eighty-two year old Norman Cohen becomes incensed. A causal remark about his father releases long repressed memories. For the first time Norman realizes the extent of his parents' lengthy mistreatment of himself, their oldest son. He slips into depression. To salve his anguish and eventually find redemption, he crafts with brutal honesty a memoir that his son edits. The end product is a kaleidoscope of family history reaching back to the nineteenth century immigrants who settle in a small Pennsylvania town in the low-end neighborhood of Chicken Hill. Three generations of Jewish life are vividly portrayed in this gripping narrative. Led by the family patriarch, the first generation of greenhorn immigrants launch new lives in a strange English-speaking Christian world devoid of Jewish institutions and so unlike that of the Galician shtetl. The second generation is generally successful in both business and professions with the exception of the eldest daughter and her hapless husband. Their son Norman, the first child of the third generation, puts aside his own college ambitions. He dutifully assists in the family enterprise, a shoe store. There is a Depression, after all, and family finances are tight, right? But Norman does not understand. Why does his mother treat him so poorly? What is the true basis for his quashed dreams?

Located approximately forty miles northwest of Philadelphia, the working-class borough of Pottstown does not immediately come to mind as an influential site of the Black freedom struggle. Yet this small town in Pennsylvania served as a significant hub of interracial civil rights activism with regional as well as national impact. In The Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Matthew George Washington adds another interpretive perspective to historiography by using both the "freedom North" and the "long civil rights movement" theoretical models to frame the borough's unique history. Primary documents, including newspaper accounts, census records, oral histories, and correspondence present a vivid account of a rapidly changing town, from the dawn of its civil rights movement during World War II to the revitalization of its NAACP branch in the early 1950s and its activism throughout the 1960s. Placing special emphasis on the demographic nature of the movement, Washington explores how interracial collaboration among the working class made up the movement's critical base—and how, through it all, Black activists remained front and center. This critical examination of Pottstown illuminates the struggle for African American civil rights in one of the long-ignored urban spaces of the North, providing a rich and in-depth portrait of the Black freedom struggle of postwar America.

This revealing book presents a selection of lost articles from “Our Osage Hills,” a newspaper column by the renowned Osage writer, naturalist, and historian, John Joseph Mathews. Signed only with the initials “J.J.M.,” Mathews’s column featured regularly in the Pawhuska Daily Journal-Capital during the early 1930s. While Mathews is best known for his novel Sundown (1934), the pieces gathered in this volume reveal him to be a compelling essayist. Marked by wit and erudition, Mathews’s column not only evokes the unique beauty of the Osage prairie, but also takes on urgent political issues, such as ecological conservation and Osage sovereignty. In Our Osage Hills, Michael Snyder interweaves Mathews’s writings with original essays that illuminate their relevant historical and cultural contexts. The result isan Osage-centric chronicle of the Great Depression, a time of environmental and economic crisis for the Osage Nation and country as a whole. Drawing on new historical and biographical research, Snyder’s commentaries highlight the larger stakes of Mathews’s reflections on nature and culture and situate them within a fascinating story about Osage, Native American, and American life in the early twentieth century. In treating topics that range from sports, art, film, and literature to the realities and legacies of violence against the Osages, Snyder conveys the broad spectrum of Osage familial, social, and cultural history.

The collection of documents known as the Kaqchikel Chronicles consists of rare highland Maya texts, which trace Kaqchikel Maya history from their legendary departure from Tollan/Tula through their migrations, wars, the Spanish invasion, and the first century of Spanish colonial rule. The texts represent a variety of genres, including formal narrative, continuous year-count annals, contribution records, genealogies, and land disputes. While the Kaqchikel Chronicles have been known to scholars for many years, this volume is the first and only translation of the texts in their entirety. The book includes two collections of documents, one known as the Annals of the Kaqchikels and the other as the Xpantzay Cartulary. The translation has been prepared by leading Mesoamericanists in collaboration with Kaqchikel-speaking linguistic scholars. It features interlinear glossing, which allows readers to follow the translators in the process of rendering colonial Kaqchikel into modern English. Extensive footnoting within the text restores the depth and texture of cultural context to the Chronicles. To put the translations in context, Judith Maxwell and Robert Hill have written a full scholarly introduction that provides the first modern linguistic discussion of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic structure of sixteenth-century Kaqchikel. The translators also tell a lively story of how these texts, which derive from pre-contact indigenous pictographic and cartographic histories, came to be converted into their present form.