Monthly Archives: July 2026

A Grand Circuit of Iran: All 31 Provinces

Posted on July 23, 2026 by nathanalbright

Roughly 115 nights (about four months), one continuous counterclockwise loop from Tehran back to Tehran, with almost no backtracking. Best start: late August or early September. The loop is sequenced so the Zagros and northwest come in autumn, Khuzestan and … Continue reading →

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Custody Without Guardians: Child Protection in the Entertainment Industry, Examined Against the Long History of the Performer

Posted on July 23, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract A short promotional video from 2009, in which a forty-year-old music executive announces to a global audience that he has been “given custody” of a fifteen-year-old singer for a weekend of activity that “we can’t really disclose,” has been … Continue reading →

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The Unbounded League: Barriers to Stability in College Football Realignment and the Conditions Under Which a Durable Alignment Could Emerge: A White Paper

Posted on July 23, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary College football’s realignment cycle is routinely described as chaos, drama, or madness — language that treats instability as a pathology afflicting an otherwise sound structure. This paper argues the opposite. Realignment is not a disorder of the system; … Continue reading →

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The Rake, the Gentleman, and the Rake Without a Name: Self-Command and Self-Indulgence from Austen’s Regency to the Present

Posted on July 22, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract Jane Austen inherited the eighteenth-century figure of the rake and stripped him of his glamour. In Willoughby, Wickham, and Henry Crawford she drew men whose charm is a working tool, whose pleasures are purchased with other people’s ruin, and … Continue reading →

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The Human Toll of the Westport Campaign: An Estimate of Confederate Attrition During Price’s Missouri Expedition, September–December 1864

Posted on July 22, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive summary Sterling Price’s Army of Missouri entered its home state in mid-September 1864 with roughly twelve thousand men, of whom perhaps a third carried no weapon. Ten weeks and some fourteen hundred miles later, the force that re-crossed into … Continue reading →

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Paper 12 — The Late Twentieth Century and After: Exile, Gentrification, and the Contest over Memory, 1959–Present

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction This final paper carries the history of Tampa’s working people from the mid-twentieth century into the present and, in doing so, draws together the arguments of the whole series. It has four subjects, each connected to the themes developed … Continue reading →

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Paper 11 — Civil Rights and the Bulldozer: Black Freedom and the Destruction of Neighborhoods, 1945–1975

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction The postwar decades brought to Tampa two great upheavals that this paper treats together, because they were bound up with each other in the lives of the city’s working people and especially its Black community. The first was the … Continue reading →

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Paper 10 — Collapse, Depression, and War: The Unmaking of the Cigar City, 1920s–1945

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction The world that the preceding papers described—the booming cigar city, its striving immigrant families, its great mutual-aid societies, its proud and militant craftsmen, its women holding households and institutions together—did not last. Beginning in the 1920s and accelerating through … Continue reading →

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Paper 9 — Women’s Tampa: Wage-Earners, Organizers, and the Backbone of Community Life, 1880s–1940s

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction Through the eight papers of this series, women have appeared again and again at the load-bearing points of Tampa’s history—the Tocobaga women whose shellfish harvest built the middens, the frontier wives who ran the farms while the men went … Continue reading →

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Paper 8 — Vigilantes, Jim Crow, and the Color Line: Repression and Black Survival, 1880s–1930s

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction The previous paper reconsidered the cigar workers’ militancy and its costs. This one turns to the force that met that militancy—the employer-backed repression and vigilante violence that ran through Tampa’s history—and to the broader system of racial control, Jim … Continue reading →

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