Books

Co-winner, 2025 CCCC Outstanding Book Award Claims that students are too sensitive are familiar on and around college campuses. The ideas of cancel culture, safe spaces, and political correctness are used to shut down discussion and prevent students from being recognized as stakeholders in higher education and as advocates for their ...

In The Globalization of Wheat, Marci R. Baranski explores Norman Borlaug’s complicated legacy as godfather of the Green Revolution. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in fighting global hunger, Borlaug, an American agricultural scientist and plant breeder who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, left a ...

The 500 letters in this sixteenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall document the period from January 1, 1878, to December 31, 1881. They chart a defining stage in the later life and career of an aging John Tyndall with unprecedented detail. Key developments evidence the fragility of a self-fashioned Carlylean hero, one whose ...

Perched on the Eastern Continental Divide, Atlanta has always been a difficult place to manage water—and to keep its waste out of sight. Atlanta’s Water Wars follows the development of the city’s water and sewer system from the postwar push for Buford Dam and metropolitan expansion to ...

For half a century, people from Hawai’i have called Las Vegas “The Ninth Island.” First the product of relentless advertising from casinos and airlines, now a strange truth as so many have left the islands to make lives in the desert. The Ninth Island follows Yim’s family and ...

For centuries, scientists have looked to nature for models when inventing new technologies. This book shows how ideas drawn from biology have inspired new ways of making and thinking—from robots modeled on living organisms to materials that mimic natural processes. Through vivid examples from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ...

One of the longest rivers in the world, the Nile played a critical role in the development of ancient Egypt. For millennia, much of the region’s food has been cultivated in the Nile delta region, with its rich, nutrient-dense soil. Innovative irrigation methods developed by ancient Egyptians increased the ...

Colby Cotton’s haunting debut chronicles the aftermath of a childhood friend who dies by suicide and the community left in its wake. In dreamlike landscapes, Cotton estranges settings as varied as fields, rose gardens, snowy observatories, and a long line to enter the afterlife in poems that blur the ...

Revolutionary technologies—from nuclear weapons to biotechnology and artificial intelligence—have transformed not only economies but also the foundations of global politics. This book offers the first systematic and comparative study of how such disruptive innovations generate international conflict and cooperation. Drawing on over two decades of research and teaching ...

The collection draws on the genres of reportage, travelogue, family history, and a philosophical reflection on war’s ecstatic, frenzied humanity. Rather than focus on the familiar formula “war is hell,” it aims to capture a feeling of wonder at the resilience and persistence of war as a form of ...

Minnesota’s Twin Cities have long been powerful engines of change. From their origins in the early nineteenth century, the Twin Cities helped drive the dispossession of the region’s Native American peoples, turned their riverfronts into bustling industrial and commercial centers, spread streets and homes outward to the horizon, ...

“Sometimes it’s hard to know a miracle / is a miracle.” Book of Miracles, Kelle Groom’s fifth poetry collection, is devoted to seeing the miraculous in the everyday. Through anaphora and elegy, ekphrastic poems, list poems, litanies, prayers, fevers, and visions, Groom seeks commonplace or hidden miracles. These poems ...

Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature presents the experiences and voices of Black creative writers who are also teachers. The authors in this collection engage poetry, fiction, experimental literature, playwriting, and literary criticism. They provide historical and theoretical interventions and practical advice for teachers and ...

In the mid-twentieth century, popular predictions offered bold visions of what life would be like in the future. In the 1930s and 1940s, scientists and engineers predicted an imminent synthetic age unlimited by the bounds of organic materials and natural resources. After World War II, public intellectuals warned of a ...

Disciplinary Connections uncovers the intertwined origins of two fields that shaped nineteenth-century thought: history and physics. Offering the first combined perspective on their development, Sjang ten Hagen reveals a time when these disciplines were seen as parallel modes of knowledge rather than as opposites within the “sciences” and “humanities.” Focusing ...