History

In late November 1574, the notorious Limahong and his pirates arrived in the Philippine archipelago. Previous studies have focused on their infamous Manila raid. Cross-examining Ming Chinese and Spanish sources, the present study examines the campaign to capture them in Pangasinan in 1575, which reveals a temporary tripartite Sino–Spanish–Luzonese antipiracy alliance that is occluded in contemporary sources. This study highlights global history based on transregional linkages as embodied by Limahong’s marauding pirates who, as nonstate actors, precipitated state-to-state contact between South China and the Philippine archipelago but whose escape in August 1575 unraveled early Sino–Spanish relations.

This dissertation is a study of maritime violence and its impact on in sixteenth-century South China. It examines how the imperial state and local communities vied with smuggling traders and coastal raiders for control of littoral space. Focusing on the bordering prefectures of Zhangzhou in southern Fujian and Chaozhou in eastern Guangdong, this study illuminates complex local and global causes of and responses to maritime predation. It argues these activities were subdued not through the traditional tactics of elimination and pacification but rather by collaboration between state and society to transform continental and maritime space from sites of trading-raiding into governed territory. It reveals a process of state-building from below derived from both the centralization and localization of violence control.

During the mid-sixteenth century, the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) experienced unrest across its peripheral regions: Mongols raided in the north, indigenous peoples revolted in the southwest, and troops mutinied throughout the empire. Along the coast, maritime marauding exploded in between the late 1540s and the mid-1560s. Historians generally link the causes of the crises to contradictions between expanding global exchange, commercialization, and restrictive foreign trade policies. In turn, they argue these kinds of borderland disturbances subsided when troops were paid or restrictions on trade laxed, such as the opening of horse fairs in the north in 1571 and the authorizing of overseas trade in the south in 1567.

Contrasting the imperial experience, illicit seaborne activities in Zhangzhou-Chaozhou emerged as a point of concern earlier and lasted later. Sitting at the confluence of sea routes linking northeast and southeast Asia, this littoral locality witnessed persistent smuggling trade and coastal raiding for a century from, at least, the 1480s to the 1580s. While the Ming state repeatedly conducted domestic and overseas military campaigns and offered amnesty to trader-raiders, three factors proved crucial to ending this local coastal crisis: 1) progressively adding new county administrations, 2) reorganizing provincial maritime defenses, and 3) establishing joint-prefectural control of the offshore island Nan’ao and its adjacent waters. Furthermore, beginning in the 1570s, tax revenue from the recently legalized maritime trade was used to fund this expanding infrastructure.

By examining actions taken to eliminate seaborne bandits, this study argues during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), everyday people and foreigners played important roles in military activities. When Guangdong native Lin Feng (also known as Limahong) roamed the seas from South China to Southeast Asia in the mid-1570s, officials searched far and wide for allies to confront him. Reevaluating this period in Chinese military history from the bottom-up and outside-in shows civil officials and military officers repeatedly found fishers, traders, and sailors, along with outsiders, who were willing to collaborate against the marauders. Historical records from the late Ming and Qing periods consistently presented this cooperation as a Sinocentric and hierarchical ritual-based recruiting. In contrast to this top-down and inside-out perspective, the present research illuminates that during the early modern period, the Chinese government was growing progressively dependent on sea-going peoples to reinforce its maritime operations.

Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism David R. Swartz. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.In 1973 the Washington Post suggested that the evangelical left could "shake both political and religious life in America" (1). Ultimately, it did not. David R. Swartz's work Moral Minority explains the unfulfilled aspirations of the evangelical left while complicating deterministic narratives of an ascending religious right. In short, the author questions the inevitability of the Moral Majority's mobilizing behind conservative doctrine. Instead he offers a portrait of a movement "politically up for grabs" (2) in the postcivil rights era and, in doing so, charts how and why the evangelical left became the moral minority-rather than the majority-in an age of burgeoning conservatism.There is no historical reason why evangelicalism should identify with a single political orientation. Viewing evangelicalism as far from monolithic, Swartz argues that evangelicalism and its political machinations are and were "fundamentally fragmented" (8). Why then, he asks, has evangelicalism been so closely linked with conservative rather than progressive politics? In answering his primary research question, Swartz demonstrates that evangelicalism held more than one response to civil rights fatigue, the "liberal" Warren Court, and the various social and cultural changes of the period. Moreover, Swartz illuminates the often obscured role of the evangelical left.Much like its historical subjects, Moral Minority is also fragmented. Three distinct chronological sections follow the general arc of the movement. Each section follows specific individuals whom Swartz uses to explore broader narratives. Section One follows the emergence and politicization of American evangelicals. Carl Henry, John Alexander, and Jim Wallis help to explain the movement's evolving positions on social engagement, racial justice, and Vietnam respectively. Swartz's use of imbricated biographical portraits reveals rich, textured accounts of figures many scholars know little about. However, much like second-gene ration civil rights histories, the author risks losing the forest through the trees. Readers will come away with a nuanced understanding of select individuals as well as their intellectual, political, and spiritual development. This tells us less, though, about how the evangelical left developed nationally and globally.Section Two helps to explain the social awakening of the evangelical left through what Swartz labels as the "global reflex." Swartz shines here, rightly unpacking evangelicalism as an expression of transnational interconnected movement. The influence of evangelicals outside the United States significantly altered the course of the evangelical left and, for that matter, evangelicalism as a whole. …

Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights Christine Knauer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.While the immediate postwar moment did not mark the beginning of struggle, the aftermath of World War II did present a unique opportunity for activists of the Black Freedom Movement. A confluence of contextual realities pushed toward freedom. A new urgency surrounded race and rights-based activism with black veterans as the nexus of change. Christine Knauer seeks to better understand the role of veterans and their public image in explaining exactly how black servicemen came to be the "shock troops" of the Movement. Chronicling African American involvement in the Korean War, Knauer situates efforts toward military integration within the broader Black Freedom Movement. The battle for military integration and over the public image of African-American GIs as fighting men proved integral to furnishing racial progress. Using primary evidence from NAACP correspondence, personal papers, and civilian and military records, the author takes a refreshingly new bottomup approach. In the process, she writes previously ignored historical actors back into history, adding nuance to conceptions of a movement that was hardly monolithic in terms of strategy, rhetoric, and goals.Let Us Fight as Free Men documents the various forces advocating for military integration: civil rights organizations, an increasingly aware and organized public, a highly invested black press, and black veterans all worked towards integration-but not always in concert. In this respect, Knauer departs from the mostly top-down narratives on the subject, unpacking the myth of a monolithic movement propelled by a cadre of black leaders working cooperatively. According to Knauer, previous histories left "conflicts in the African-American community in the dark" (6). Little research has analyzed the perception of military integration in public discourse and American culture, nor does extant research emphasize the dynamic, contentious nature of African American activism. Rather than position African American rhetoric in opposition to mainstream discourse, Knauer analyzes AfricanAmerican discourse in relation to mainstream discourse regarding the specter of military integration.The first two chapters chart African-American involvement and experience in World War II. This illuminates the deeper roots and continuous struggle of African Americans throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, Knauer's work contributes to the broader goal of the publisher series, "Politics and Culture in Modern America," to "reverse the fragmentation of modern US history. …

On The Wire Linda Williams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.Be it tragedy or melodrama, David Simon's The Wire (2002-2008) resonates powerfully in American culture. The five-season HBO series speaks to the issues of race, space, class, poverty, and police brutality at the forefront of national conversations spurred by the Black Lives Matter Movement. Moreover, in the aftermath of Freddie Gray and the unrest in Baltimore, Simon's in-depth portrait of the West Baltimore drug trade and those that police it is especially prescient. Simon himself has referred to his work as "institutional Greek tragedy." Scholars in the mainstream have tended to agree with him. In her work, On "The Wire," film and media scholar Linda Williams upends such consensus, arguing that The Wire is impressive melodrama rather than Greek tragedy. While both genres highlight suffering and injustice, tragedy requires an "acceptance of fate" (103). Police, dealers, and bystanders populating The Wire struggle against the intractability of institutions. All parties struggle against their proverbial fate. According to Williams, tragedy is "too inevitable" to make the "kinds of claims for justice that The Wire, as a whole, makes" (103).Williams develops her argument in three parts. First, she traces David Simon's early career as an "ethnographic" (11) journalist writing for The Baltimore Sun. With a disdain for myopic journalism with no sense of interconnectedness or nuance, Simon sought to understand how institutions limit and interact with individual agency. He developed a reputation for such abilities while writing multiplecolumn pieces on Baltimore's drug trade during the 1980s. Most notably, Simon wrote an eight-column piece on Melvin Williams, a local drug lord with considerable entrepreneurial skill. As with The Wire, Simon does not deify or condemn dealers, users, and police. Instead, he offers multiple, often conflicting, perspectives from various vectors of the drug trade. Television, Williams argues, provided Simon the perfect medium to develop both characters and the complexities of jurisprudence and urban policing, as well as the politics of the corner and the statehouse.Second, Williams addresses the relationship between the genres of tragedy and melodrama. Unlike tragedy, melodrama "always offers the contrast between how things are and how they could be, or should be" (84). The contingency of Bunny Colvin's "Hamsterdam," an informally decriminalized zone for street dealers to hawk their wares with impunity, is a good case in point. …

Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism Brett Gadsden. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.Brett Gadsden's work is designed to challenge outmoded binaries. Most prominently, Gadsden challenges the sectional binary between North and South in the black freedom struggle. Indeed, massive resistance occurred in both the North and South in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). When the Milford Board of Education admitted a small cadre of black students to the local white high school, white citizens of Delaware actively resisted such attempts. In this respect, Gadsden's work affirms what Joseph Crespino and Matthew Lassiter refer to as "the myth of southern exceptionalism." Unfortunately -as this work argues well-southern resistance to civil rights advances beyond Jim Crow was not unique or exceptional to the region.Between North and South closely examines three under treated and interrelated concepts in civil rights historiography: "civil rights liberalism, geographic sectionalism and white reaction" (3). In the process, various binaries beyond sectionalism are challenged and unpacked with aplomb: "accommodation versus agitation, desegregation versus separatism, civil rights liberalism versus black power, and integration versus community control" (6). The dynamic, adaptive nature of desegregation efforts defy such generalized categories. Civil rights organizations-grassroots activists and national branches-saw the necessity of organizational flexibility. As the contours of white resistance changed, so too did the movement.Joining the chorus of researchers re-evaluating the role of liberalism in shaping white resistance and racial reform, Gadsden helps to re-write the role of liberalism in the struggle: "this volume figures liberals and members of the Democratic Party who had been historically aligned with civil rights goals more centrally in the conservative ascendency and white backlash politics" (16). Just as liberals played a role in the "get tough" movement, they served as more than a foil to the Jim Crow South. Probing the limits of liberal consensus, readers see how politicians were increasingly pulled in two directions: one in support of the continuous march towards human rights, the other to protect what suburbanites increasingly invoked as property rights.Intended to offer a window into broader political culture in the United States, Gadsden centers his study in Delaware. Aptly chosen to illustrate the artificial dichotomy of "sectional imaginarles," Delaware is represented as a border state-or as Chancellor of the University of Delaware explained, "a northern state with a southern exposure" (12, 8). …

On The Wire Linda Williams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.Be it tragedy or melodrama, David Simon's The Wire (2002-2008) resonates powerfully in American culture. The five-season HBO series speaks to the issues of race, space, class, poverty, and police brutality at the forefront of national conversations spurred by the Black Lives Matter Movement. Moreover, in the aftermath of Freddie Gray and the unrest in Baltimore, Simon's in-depth portrait of the West Baltimore drug trade and those that police it is especially prescient. Simon himself has referred to his work as "institutional Greek tragedy." Scholars in the mainstream have tended to agree with him. In her work, On "The Wire," film and media scholar Linda Williams upends such consensus, arguing that The Wire is impressive melodrama rather than Greek tragedy. While both genres highlight suffering and injustice, tragedy requires an "acceptance of fate" (103). Police, dealers, and by...