Runner-up, National Council on Public History Book Award, 2008 The 1930s exodus of "Okies" dispossessed by repeated droughts and failed crop prices was a relatively brief interlude in the history of migrant agricultural labor. Yet it attracted wide attention through the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and the images of Farm Security Administration photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. Ironically, their work risked sublimating the subjects—real people and actual experience—into aesthetic artifacts, icons of suffering, deprivation, and despair. Working for the Farm Security Administration in California's migrant labor camps in 1938-39, Sanora Babb, a young journalist and short story writer, together with her sister Dorothy, a gifted amateur photographer, entered the intimacy of the dispossessed farmers' lives as insiders, evidenced in the immediacy and accuracy of their writings and photos. Born in Oklahoma and raised on a dryland farm, the Babb sisters had unparalleled access to the day-by-day harsh reality of field labor and family life. This book presents a vivid, firsthand account of the Dust Bowl refugees, the migrant labor camps, and the growth of labor activism among Anglo and Mexican farm workers in California's agricultural valleys linked by the "Dirty Plate Trail" (Highway 99). It draws upon the detailed field notes that Sanora Babb wrote while in the camps, as well as on published articles and short stories about the migrant workers and an excerpt from her Dust Bowl novel, Whose Names Are Unknown. Like Sanora's writing, Dorothy's photos reveal an unmediated, personal encounter with the migrants, portraying the social and emotional realities of their actual living and working conditions, together with their efforts to organize and to seek temporary recreation. An authority in working-class literature and history, volume editor Douglas Wixson places the Babb sisters' work in relevant historical and social-political contexts, examining their role in reconfiguring the Dust Bowl exodus as a site of memory in the national consciousness. Focusing on the material conditions of everyday existence among the Dust Bowl refugees, the words and images of these two perceptive young women clearly show that, contrary to stereotype, the "Okies" were a widely diverse people, including not only Steinbeck's sharecropper "Joads" but also literate, independent farmers who, in the democracy of the FSA camps, found effective ways to rebuild lives and create communities.

In this gripping and provocative “ethnography of death,” anthropologist and MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Jason De León sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time—the human consequences of US immigration and border policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De León uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of “Prevention through Deterrence,” the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death. For two decades, systematic violence has failed to deter border crossers while successfully turning the rugged terrain of southern Arizona into a killing field. Featuring stark photography by Michael Wells, this book examines the weaponization of natural terrain as a border wall: first-person stories from survivors underscore this fundamental threat to human rights, and the very lives, of non-citizens as they are subjected to the most insidious and intangible form of American policing as institutional violence. In harrowing detail, De León chronicles the journeys of people who have made dozens of attempts to cross the border and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert. The Land of Open Graves will spark debate and controversy.

By foot, in buses, prison vans and trains, a steady stream of refugees traveled from the Greek island of Lesbos into Europe. In the autumn of 2015, award-winning writer Navid Kermani decided to accompany them on the "Balkan route." In this perceptive account from the front line of the "refugee crisis," Kermani shows how a seemingly distant world in which war and conflict rage has suddenly collided with our own. Kermani describes the situation on the Turkish west coast where thousands of refugees live in the most desperate conditions, waiting to take the perilous journey across the Mediterranean. Then, on Lesbos, he observes the culture shock amongst those who have survived the ordeal by sea. He speaks to aid workers and politicians, but most importantly of all to the refugees themselves, asking those who have come from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere what has driven them to risk everything and embark on the long and treacherous journey to Europe. With great sensitivity Kermani reveals, often through small details, the cultural and political upheaval that has caused people to uproot their lives, and at the same time shining a light on Europe's inadequate and at times openly hostile response to the refugees. Interspersed with powerful images by the acclaimed photographer Moises Saman, Upheaval is a much-needed human account of a crisis we cannot ignore.

This book is an ethnography of the people migrating through the Balkan route and the reaction of the local communities who witnessed their struggle to reach the European Union. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in North Macedonia and Serbia, it pays special attention to the "refugee crisis", that gave birth to a new border regime based on a permanent suspension of laws, normalisation of violence, and the entrapment of migrants stranded in a liminal space at the gates to the EU, neither able to go further nor back. The book will appeal to an international audience of academics of migration studies, social and political science, and the wider public interested in migration and social and political changes in Southeast Europe.

The Professional Reviewers Views on the 3-Day Journey: Blueink Review: "The aftermath of war is often measured in body counts or economic damage; however, one of war's most lasting impacts is the loss it imposed on children. Author Duk-Joong Won was just 12 years old when he was handed a small package and told to leave his mother behind, with assurance that they would be reunited in three days. He never saw her again. Three-day-Journey is a gripping memoir of grief, faith, family, and ultimately triumphant." KIRCUS REVIEW: "Arriving (at the USA) with $50 and limited command of the English language, he initially worked menial jobs, but eventually obtained a Ph.D. in economics. After decades as a successful businessman, he visited totalitarian North Korea in 1990; there, he learned that his mother and favorite sister were long dead, but managed to see his surviving siblings and say a final goodbye. Overtaken by depression back in the U.S., he changed career attending a seminary and becoming a pastor. Despite occasional language errors, this book provides a readable personal record of life in bygone Korea. It also effectively tells the story of an immigrant struggling and succeeding in the United States." Rev. Walter Chun, Ph.D.: "Three-Day-Journey is a success story motivated by a heartfelt memory of his mother, as well as a fruitful achievement of hard work in the midst of distress. All the more, this is our story, of our parents motivating us." Rev. Bill Youngblood: "What a compelling and inspiring journey! . . . . . . . . To read how you escaped the war, survived in the long journey to safety in South Korea, made it to America, managed to get a first rate education, reconnected with Insook, start and run a company, and go back home to see your family in the North and South, and finished your career as an ordained United Methodist Pastor with wonderful effectiveness in each church that you served is truly an inspiration. . . . ."

Placed within the context of the past decade's war on terror and emergent Latino migrant movement, Reform without Justice addresses the issue of state violence against migrants in the United States. It questions what forces are driving draconian migration control policies and why it is that, despite its success in mobilizing millions, the Latino migrant movement and its allies have not been able to more successfully defend the rights of migrants. Gonzales argues that the contemporary Latino migrant movement and its allies face a dynamic form of political power that he terms "anti-migrant hegemony". This type of political power is exerted in multiple sites of power from Congress, to think tanks, talk shows and local government institutions, through which a rhetorically race neutral and common sense public policy discourse is deployed to criminalize migrants. Most insidiously anti-migrant hegemony allows for large sectors of "pro-immigrant" groups to concede to coercive immigration enforcement measures such as a militarized border wall and the expansion of immigration policing in local communities in exchange for so-called Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Given this reality, Gonzales sustains that most efforts to advance immigration reform will fail to provide justice for migrants. This is because proposed reform measures ignore the neoliberal policies driving migration and reinforce the structures of state violence used against migrants to the detriment of democracy for all. Reform without Justice concludes by discussing how Latino migrant activists - especially youth - and their allies can change this reality and help democratize the United States.

Refugees from the violence of wars and the brutality of famished lives have knocked on other people's doors since the beginning of time. For the people behind the doors, these uninvited guests were always strangers, and strangers tend to generate fear and anxiety precisely because they are unknown. Today we find ourselves confronted with an extreme form of this historical dynamic, as our TV screens and newspapers are filled with accounts of a 'migration crisis', ostensibly overwhelming Europe and portending the collapse of our way of life. This anxious debate has given rise to a veritable 'moral panic' - a feeling of fear spreading among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society. In this short book Zygmunt Bauman analyses the origins, contours and impact of this moral panic - he dissects, in short, the present-day migration panic. He shows how politicians have exploited fears and anxieties that have become widespread, especially among those who have already lost so much - the disinherited and the poor. But he argues that the policy of mutual separation, of building walls rather than bridges, is misguided. It may bring some short-term reassurance but it is doomed to fail in the long run. We are faced with a crisis of humanity, and the only exit from this crisis is to recognize our growing interdependence as a species and to find new ways to live together in solidarity and cooperation, amidst strangers who may hold opinions and preferences different from our own.

This volume covers Engineer operations in support of the U.S. Army in the war against Japan. The story begins with the defense build-up in 1939 and ends with the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship Missouri on 2 September 1945. Geographically, Engineer operations extended from the Panama Canal to India and from Alaska to Australia, in actual or potential areas of conflict. The author has attempted not only to depict various types of Engineer operations but also to indicate how Engineer work helped implement Allied strategy. Included are discussions of the Engineer position in the command structure and a general account of both Engineer combat and service missions within a given theater. -- From the Preface.

The Lisbon Route tells of the extraordinary World War II transformation of Portugal's tranquil port city into the great escape hatch of Nazi Europe. Royalty, celebrities, diplomats, fleeing troops, and ordinary citizens desperately slogged their way across France and Spain to reach the neutral nation. As well as offering freedom from war, Lisbon provided spies, smugglers, relief workers, military figures, and adventurers with an avenue into the conflict and its opportunities. Yet an ever-present shadow behind the gaiety was the fragile nature of Portuguese neutrality.

"Throughout the book, the passions and sincerity of animal advocates are captured with immense respect…the story becomes unstoppable." — Animal Legal Defense Fund The Tourist Trail is at once a romance, an adventure story, an environmental polemic, and a keen study of just how animalistic humans are. —Phoebe Literary Journal The Tourist Trail will challenge your perceptions of villains and innocent victims, and make you question whose side you’re on as each character grapples with his or her own authenticity, with what’s worth fighting for, and faces the realization that no matter how fast you run, you can never escape from yourself. — IndieReader Throughout the book, the passions and sincerity of animal advocates are captured with immense respect…the story becomes unstoppable. — Animal Legal Defense Fund Biologist Angela Haynes is accustomed to dark, lonely nights as one of the few humans at a penguin research station in Patagonia. She has grown used to the cries of penguins before dawn, to meager supplies and housing, to spending most of her days in one of the most remote regions on earth. What she isn’t used to is strange men washing ashore, which happens one day on her watch. The man won’t tell her his name or where he came from, but Angela, who has a soft spot for strays, tends to him, if for no other reason than to protect her birds and her work. When she later learns why he goes by an alias, why he is a refugee from the law, and why he is a man without a port, she begins to fall in love—and embarks on a journey that takes her deep into Antarctic waters, and even deeper into the emotional territory she thought she’d left behind. Against the backdrop of the Southern Ocean, The Tourist Trail weaves together the stories of Angela as well as FBI agent Robert Porter, dispatched on a mission that unearths a past he would rather keep buried; and Ethan Downes, a computer tech whose love for a passionate animal rights activist draws him into a dangerous mission.