The Bentley Library Annual


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Arthur Vandenberg


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The idea that a Senator would put the greater good of the country ahead of his party seems nearly impossible to imagine in our current political climate. Originally the editor and publisher of the Grand Rapids Herald, Vandenberg was elected to the Senate in 1928, and became an outspoken opponent of the New Deal and a leader among the isolationists who resisted FDR's efforts to aid European allies at the onset of World War II. Meijer shows that Vandenberg worked closely with Democratic administrations to build the strong bipartisan consensus that established the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and NATO.













Governor of the Cordillera


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Governor of the Cordillera tells the story of an American colonial official in the Philippines who took the unpopular position of defending the rights of the Igorots, was fired in disgrace, and made a triumphal return. During the first fifteen years of colonial rule (1898–1913), a small group of Americans controlled the headhunting tribes who were wards of the nascent colonial government. These officials ignored laws, carved out fiefdoms, and brutalized (or killed) those who challenged their rule. John Early was cut from a different cloth. Battling colleagues and supervisors over their treatment of the mountain people, Early also had run-ins with lowland Filipino leaders like Manuel Quezon. Early's return as governor of the entire Cordillera was celebrated by all the tribes. In Governor of the Cordillera Shelton Woods combines biography with colonial history. He includes a discussion on the exhibition of the Igorots at the various fairs in the US and Europe, which Early tried to stop. The life of John Early is a testament to navigating political and racial divides with integrity.




Motor City Green


Book Description

Motor City Green is a history of green spaces in metropolitan Detroit from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The book focuses primarily on the history of gardens and parks in the city of Detroit and its suburbs in southeast Michigan. Cialdella argues that Detroit residents used green space to address problems created by the city’s industrial rise and decline, and racial segregation and economic inequality. As the city’s social landscape became increasingly uncontrollable, Detroiters turned to parks, gardens, yards, and other outdoor spaces to relieve the negative social and environmental consequences of industrial capitalism. Motor City Green looks to the past to demonstrate how today’s urban gardens in Detroit evolved from, but are also distinct from, other urban gardens and green spaces in the city’s past.




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