Here are the fascinating stories of twenty-three little-known but remarkable inhabitants of the Spanish, English, and Portuguese colonies of the New World between the 16th and the 19th centuries. Women and men of all the races and classes of colonial society may be seen here dealing creatively and pragmatically (if often not successfully) with the challenges of a harsh social environment. Such extraordinary "ordinary" people as the native priest Diego Vasicuio; the millwright Thomas Peters; the rebellious slave Gertrudis de Escobar; Squanto, the last of the Patuxets; and Micaela Angela Carillo, the pulque dealer, are presented in original essays. Works of serious scholarship, they are also written to catch the fancy and stimulate the historical imagination of readers. The stories should be of particular interest to students of the history of women, of Native Americans, and of Black people in the Americas. The Editors' introduction points out the fundamental unities in the histories of colonial societies in the Americas, and the usefulness of examining ordinary individual human experiences as a means both of testing generalizations and of raising new questions for research.

Middle Eastern societies and ordinary people's lives / Edmund Burke III and David N. Yaghoubian -- Precolonial lives -- Assaf: a peasant of Mount Lebanon / Akram F. Khater and Antoine F. Khater -- Shemsigul: a circassian slave in mid-nineteenth-century Cairo / Ehud R. Toledano -- Journeymen textile weavers in nineteenth-century Damascus: a collective / Sherry Vatter -- Ahmad: a Kuwaiti pearl diver / Nels Johnson -- Mohand N'Hamoucha: Middle Atlas Berber / Edmund Burke III -- Bibi Maryam: a Bakhtiyari tribal woman / Julie Oehler -- Colonial lives -- The Shaykh and his daughter: coping in colonial Algeria / Julia Clancy-Smith -- Izz al-Din al-Qassam: preacher and mujahid / Abdullah Schleifer -- Abu Ali al-Kilawi: a Damascus qabaday / Philip S. Khoury -- M'hamed Ali: Tunisian labor organizer / Eqbal Ahmad and Stuart Schaar -- Hagob Hagobian: an Armenian truck driver in Iran / David N. Yaghoubian -- Naji: an Iraqi country doctor / Sami Zubaida -- Post-Colonial lives -- Migdim: Egyptian bedouin matriarch / Lila Abu-Lughod -- Rostam: Qashqai rebel / Lois Beck -- An Iranian village boyhood / Mehdi Abedi and Michael M. [ths] J. Fischer -- Gulab: an Afghan schoolteacher / Ashraf Ghani -- Abu Jamal: a Palestinian urban villager / Joost Hiltermann -- Haddou: a Moroccan migrant worker / David Mcmurray -- Contemporary lives -- Nasir: Sa'idi youth between Islamism and agriculture -- Fanny colonna -- Ghada: village rebel or political protestor? / Celia Rothenberg -- Khanom gohary: Iranian community leader / Homa Hoodfar -- Nadia: mother of the believers / Baya Gacemi -- June leavitt: West Bank settler / Tamara neuman -- Talal Rizk: a Syrian engineer in the Gulf / Michael Provence.

How Native American history can guide us today: “Presents strong voices of old, old cultures bravely trying to make sense of an Earth in chaos.” —Whole Earth Written by a former Green Party vice-presidential candidate who was once listed among “America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty” by Time magazine, this thoughtful, in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community. “Moving and often beautiful prose.” —Ralph Nader “Thoroughly researched and convincingly written.” —Choice

How did Japanese companies, technology-supporting organizations, and governments reformulate organizational strategies, industrial structures, and institutions to revive Japanese high-tech industries (semiconductor, telecommunications, and biotechnology) in the 1990s? This book takes a comprehensive look at the question by integrating the fields of institutional economics and corporate strategy, an approach that will be of significant interest theoretically and empirically to scholars, professionals, and graduate students. Complex interactions among diverse technology-related actors are presented, focusing on co-evolution among market changes induced by technology innovation, macro-level institutional arrangements for innovation, and corporate strategies for survival. Insights are provided on diverse types of institutional arrangements, technology innovation policies, and management practices for companies and technology organizations.

Today, in the aftermath of UPI's tragic plummet, it is still hard to believe that a journalistic institution with a tradition of excellence so hard earned and well deserved could have been allowed to self-destruct and almost disappear. The authors- who together have a combined forty-three years of experience at UPI- tell a stunning, insiders' tale of intrigue, mismanagement, financial gymnastics, greed, and lust for power. The story, spiced with heroics and betrayals, comedy, and pathos, provides an extraordinary glimpse into how UPI was dragged from the ranks of the world's media giant. -- Book Jacket.

Chinatown has a long history in Boston. Though little documented, it represents the city's most sustained neighborhood effort to survive during eras of hostility and urban transformation. It has been wounded and transformed, slowly ceding ground; at the same time, its residents and organizations have gained a more prominent voice over their community's fate. In writing about Boston Chinatown's long history, Michael Liu, a lifelong activist and scholar of the community, charts its journey and efforts for survival -- from its emergence during a time of immigration and deep xenophobia to the highway construction and urban renewal projects that threatened the neighborhood after World War II to its more recent efforts to keep commercial developers at bay. At the ground level, Liu depicts its people, organizations, internal battles, and varied and complex strategies against land-taking by outside institutions and public authorities. The documented courage, resilience, and ingenuity of this low-income immigrant neighborhood of color have earned it a place amongst our urban narratives. Chinatown has much to teach us about neighborhood agency, the power of organizing, and the prospects of such neighborhoods in rapidly growing and changing cities.