New This Month in History and Education - May 2024
Class-Conscious Coal Miners: The Emergence of a Working-Class Movement in Central Pennsylvania, by Alan J. Singer, is a multifaceted study of Pennsylvania's coal miners during the post-World War One era and is the first book in our new Labor Studies series. The series publishes books that make innovative and timely contributions to the ever growing scholarly and public conversations on the past, present, and future of work and workers.
"A fine-grained social history of the rebellious miners in Central Pennsylvania in the 1920s, Alan Singer's Class-Conscious Coal Miners brings us significant insights about radicalism and repression. Singer shows why miners have more in common with today's precarious workers, why mining communities in the coal fields were incubators for alternative views on political economy, and why they rebelled not only against coal operators but against their own union. In Singer's telling the 1920s become an incubator for the rebellious 1930s." — Rosemary Feurer, author of Radical Unionism in the Midwest 1900–1950
"Alan J. Singer has written a highly readable and original book that makes a major contribution to the history of its field and US history in general. Although a number of scholarly works exist about labor-related events that took place in central Pennsylvania during the 1920s, none do what he has done or ask the questions he has. His goal was not simply to relate detailed information but to clarify how and why existing conditions created a working-class-conscious movement that potentially challenged business unionism, the structure of the nation's coal industry, and the direction of the country." — Mildred Allen Beik, author of The Miners of Windber: The Struggles of New Immigrants for Unionization, 1890s–1930s
The Hebrew Falcon: Adya Horon and the Birth of the Canaanite Idea, by Roman Vater, is a pioneering study of a formative chapter in Middle East intellectual history, examining the historical myth that underlies the "Canaanite" brand of Israeli nationalist anti-Zionism.
"This is the best book I've read about Canaanism and its political implications for the state of Israel and the Middle East. Integrating history, archeology, politics, and political science, Vater makes Horon's often complicated ideas easy to understand without losing their nuance.”—Avi Shilon, Taub Center for Israel Studies, NYU and Tel Hai College, Israel
"The Hebrew Falcon is well-researched, well-written, clear, and accessible. Vater has created a valuable contribution to Israeli and Jewish studies and the study of nationalism." — Colin Shindler, Emeritus Professor, SOAS University of London
"This is the first full-length study of Adya Horon, who offered an interpretation of the Hebrew past that stood in contradiction to the Zionist narrative and Jewish historiography. Drawing on both primary archival sources and on secondary literature, and written in a legible, fluent, and clear style, this compelling study will surely attract a prospective readership that extends beyond those interested in Jewish and Zionist history." — David Ohana, author of The Origins of Israeli Mythology: Neither Canaanites nor Crusaders
New in our Transforming Subjects: Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Studies in Education series is When History Returns: Psychoanalytic Quests for Humane Learning, by Deborah P. Britzman, bringing together theories and cultural representations of psychosocial life to reflect on, and better understand, the challenges of learning in times of social strife.
"This book constitutes a rare combination of highly original theoretical thinking with literary style and structure. Its contribution to the field of psychoanalytic-educational research (and far beyond it) is huge. When History Returns both connects the psychoanalytic and the educational 'task'—placing the whole issue of education within a very broad context that touches on history, social thinking, dream work, and the topic of transference, among many other topics—and enacts, in its very writing, the same breadth and depth to which it points and aims. It is a theoretical-literary document that is not only rare in the intellectual challenge it offers but also rare in its beauty." — Dana Amir, author of Psychoanalysis on the Verge of Language: Clinical Cases on the Edge
Happy Reading and come back and see what's new next month!
