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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue -- 1. "To Maintain His Authority": The Settlement Era -- 2. "When a Man Stoops to Strike a Woman": The 1890s -- 3. "His Face Is Weak and Sensual": Portland and the Whipping Post Law -- 4. "To Use His Muscle on Her": 1920-1945 -- 5. "We Found That We Were Not Alone": The Years after World War II -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Quantitative Measures -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Index

Preface : 'Africa in my head' -- 'Brightest Africa' in the early twentieth century -- Post-war America and the 'new Africa' -- From political to personal : white and black America confront a transformed continent -- Gendered American quests in 'timeless Africa' -- Africa cosmopolitan in the new millennium -- Conclusion : the in between.

Environmental movements have produced some impressive results, including cleaner air and the preservation of selected species and places. But movements that challenged western prosperity and comfort seldom made much progress, and many radical environmentalists have been unabashed utopianists. In this short guide, Peterson del Mar untangles this paradox by showing how prosperity is essential to environmentalism. Industrialisation made conservation sensible, but also drove people to look for meaning in nature even as they consumed its products more relentlessly. Hence Englandled the wa.

This book traces the movement from mutualism to individualism in the context of American family life. Throughout American history, families survived or even flourished during colonization, the Revolution, slavery, the industrial revolution, immigration, and economic upheaval because reliance on others was patently necessary. But in the past century, unprecedented prosperity both freed Americans from mutual dependence and created a culture devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and individual fulfilment. This shift from obligation to freedom has turned the maintenance of durable, rewarding families

This book traces the movement from mutualism to individualism in the context of American family life. Throughout American history, families survived or even flourished during colonization, the Revolution, slavery, the industrial revolution, immigration, and economic upheaval because reliance on others was patently necessary. But in the past century, unprecedented prosperity both freed Americans from mutual dependence and created a culture devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and individual fulfilment. This shift from obligation to freedom has turned the maintenance of durable, rewarding families into a countercultural act, one that requires a conscious decision to qualify the American commitment to freedom.

The word "violence" conjures up images of terrorism, bombings, and lynchings. Beaten down is concerned with more prosaic acts of physical force--a husband slapping his wife, a parent taking a birch branch to a child, a pair of drunken friends squaring off to establish who is the "better man." David Peterson del Mar accounts for the social relations of power that lie behind this intimate form of violence, this "white noise" that has always been with us, humming quietly between more explosive acts of violence. Broad in its chronological and cultural sweep, Beaten down examines interpersonal violence in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia beginning with Native American cultures before colonization and continuing into the mid-twentieth century. The author has drawn on a vast array of vivid sources, including newspaper accounts, autobiographies, novels, oral histories, historical and ethnographic publications, and hundreds of detailed court cases to account for not only the relative frequency of different forms of violence, but also the shifting definitions and perceptions of what constitutes violence. This is a thoughtful and probing account of how and why people have hit each other and the manner in which opinion makers and ordinary citizens have censured, defended, or celebrated such acts. His conclusions have important implications for an understanding of violence and perceptions of violence in contemporary society