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  Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

  William S. Kiser

  Illusions of Empire adopts a multinational view of North American borderlands and border lines, examining the ways in which Mexico's north overlapped with America's Southwest in the contexts of diplomacy, politics, economics, and military operations. Beyond these direct historical arguments, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands provide a case study for the overt and covert nature of diplomacy in regions of contested sovereignty.

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  Negotiating the Nazi Occupation of France: Gender, Power, and Memory

  Edward B. Westermann

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  The Holocaust: Remembrance, Respect, and Resilience

  Edward B. Westermann

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  The World of Education among Ethnic Mexicans in J.T. Canales's South Texas

  Philis M. Barragán Goetz and Carlos K. Blanton

  The edited collection examines violence against Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas between 1910 and 1920, perpetrated by strangers, neighbors, vigilantes, and especially law enforcement officers. It also chronicles the efforts of José Tomas Canales, who called for an investigation into the violence committed by Texas Rangers, inspiring a new era of Mexican-American civil rights activism in Texas.

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  Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany

  Edward B. Westermann

  This book reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe. The book draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated “performative masculinity,” expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. Such inebriated exhibitions extended from meetings of top Nazi officials to the rank and file, celebrating at the grave sites of their victims. The book argues that, contrary to the common misconception of the SS and police as stone-cold killers, they were, in fact, intoxicated with the act of murder itself. The book highlights the intersections of masculinity, drinking ritual, sexual violence, and mass murder to expose the role of alcohol and celebratory ritual in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Its surprising and disturbing findings offer a new perspective on the mindset, motivation, and mentality of killers as they prepared for, and participated in, mass extermination.

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  Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas

  Philis M. Barragán Goetz

  "From 1880 to 1940, ethnic Mexicans enrolled their children in both public schools and escuelitas (little schools)-"two contradictory educational traditions with mutually exclusive messages," Philis Barragán Goetz writes. Texas public school administrators believed that you could not live in the United States and be a citizen if you did not speak English and demonstrate a familiarity with the laws of the country. Mexican consuls and many upper class Mexican nationals, on the other hand, believed that "the residents of this Mexican colony had a responsibility to keep the true Mexico alive in the United States." Each side demanded that ethnic Mexicans choose the country to which they would belong, scoffing at the notion of anything in between. In this history of escuelitas in Texas, Barragán Goetz marshals deep archival and oral history research to show how, for many decades, numerous ethnic Mexicans did choose something in between, and how the escuelita model slowly transformed to meet the needs of Mexican Americans.

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  Ages of Anxiety: Historical and Transnational Perspectives on Juvenile Justice

  William S. Bush and David S. Tanenhaus

  Ages of Anxiety presents six case studies of juvenile justice policy in the twentieth century from around the world, adding context to the urgent and international conversation about youth, crime, and justice. By focusing on magistrates, social workers, probation and police officers, and youth themselves, editors William S. Bush and David S. Tanenhaus highlight the role of ordinary people as meaningful and consequential historical actors. After providing an international perspective on the social history of ideas about how children are different from adults, the contributors explain why those differences should matter for the administration of justice. They examine how reformers used the idea of modernization to build and legitimize juvenile justice systems in Europe and Mexico, and present histories of policing and punishing youth crime. Ages of Anxiety introduces a new theoretical model for interpreting historical research to demonstrate the usefulness of social histories of children and youth for policy analysis and decision-making in the twenty-first century. Shedding new light on the substantive aims of the juvenile court, the book is a historically informed perspective on the critical topic of youth, crime, and justice.

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  Coast-to-coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands

  William S. Kiser

  Analyzes the political and strategic importance of nineteenth-century New Mexico as the geographic space connecting Texas and California in terms of American imperialism, Manifest Destiny, and the sectionalism surrounding slavery debate.

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  Expeditionary Police Advising and Militarization: Building Security in a Fractured World

  Edward B. Westermann

  In the final analysis, these entries taken as a whole provide a number of insights both historical and contemporary for evaluation the challenges and opportunities associated with the organization, training, and equipping of police forces. It also offers evidence for evaluating the efficacy of such efforts specifically related to police advising in a peacetime environment and the role of police forces in wartime. Considering the contemporary global security environment, these chapters should offer a number of insights for both scholars and practitioners.

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  Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle Over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest

  William S. Kiser

  It's often taken as a simple truth that the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the United States. In the Southwest, however, two similarly coercive labor systems, debt peonage-in which a debtor negotiated a relationship of servitude, often lifelong, to a creditor-and Indian captivity, not only outlived the Civil War but prompted a new struggle to define freedom and bondage in the United States. In Borderlands of Slavery, William S. Kiser presents one of the first comprehensive histories of debt peonage and Indian captivity in the territory of New Mexico after the Civil War. It begins in the early 1700s with the development of Indian slavery through slave raiding and fictive kinship. By the early 1800s, debt peonage had emerged as a secondary form of coerced servitude in the Southwest, augmenting Indian slavery to meet increasing demand for labor. While indigenous captivity has received considerable scholarly attention, the widespread practice of debt peonage has been largely ignored. Kiser makes the case that these two intertwined systems were of not just regional but also national importance and must be understood within the context of antebellum slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Kiser argues that the struggle over Indian captivity and debt peonage in the Southwest helped both to broaden the public understanding of coerced servitude in post-Civil War America and to expand political and judicial philosophy regarding free labor in the reunified republic.

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  Circuit Riders for Mental Health: The Hogg Foundation in Twentieth-Century Texas

  William S. Bush

  Circuit Riders for Mental Health explores the transformation of popular understandings of mental health, the reform of scandal-ridden hospitals and institutions, the emergence of community mental health services, and the extension of mental health services to minority populations around the state of Texas. Author Williams S. Bush focuses especially on the years between 1940 and 1980 to demonstrate the dramatic, though sometimes halting and conflicted, progress made in Texas to provide mental health services to its people over the second half of the twentieth century. At the story's center is the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, a private-public philanthropic organization housed at the University of Texas. For the first three decades of its existence, the Hogg Foundation was the state's leading source of public information, policy reform, and professional education in mental health. Its staff and allies throughout the state described themselves as "circuit riders" as they traveled around Texas to introduce urban and rural audiences to the concept of mental health, provide consultation for all manner of social services, and sometimes intervene in thorny issues surrounding race, ethnicity, gender, class, region, and social and cultural change.

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  Their Lives, Their Wills: Women in the Borderlands, 1750-1846

  Amy M. Porter

  Examines the religion, family, economics, and material culture of women's lives in the late Spanish and Mexican colonial communities in 1750-1846 through women's wills. The wills help to explain the workings of the patriarchal system in the Spanish and Mexican borderland communities.

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  Who Gets a Childhood? Race and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-century Texas

  William S. Bush

  Using Texas as a case study for understanding change in the American juvenile justice system over the past century, the author tells the story of three cycles of scandal, reform, and retrenchment, each of which played out in ways that tended to extend the privileges of a protected childhood to white middle- and upper-class youth, while denying those protections to blacks, Latinos, and poor whites. On the forefront of both progressive and "get tough" reform campaigns, Texas has led national policy shifts in the treatment of delinquent youth to a surprising degree. Changes in the legal system have included the development of courts devoted exclusively to young offenders, the expanded legal application of psychological expertise, and the rise of the children's rights movement. At the same time, broader cultural ideas about adolescence have also changed. Yet the author demonstrates that as the notion of the teenager gained currency after World War II, white, middle-class teen criminals were increasingly depicted as suffering from curable emotional disorders even as the rate of incarceration rose sharply for black, Latino, and poor teens. He argues that despite the struggles of reformers, child advocates, parents, and youths themselves to make juvenile justice live up to its ideal of offering young people a second chance, the story of twentieth-century juvenile justice in large part boils down to the exclusion of poor and nonwhite youth from modern categories of childhood and adolescence.