Books

When the Apollo 11 astronauts returned from humanity’s first voyage to the moon in 1969, NASA officials advocated for more ambitious missions. But with the civil rights movement, environmental concerns, the Vietnam War, and other social crises taking up much of the public’s attention, they lacked the support to make ...

The specialization thesis—the idea that nineteenth-century science fragmented into separate forms of knowledge that led to the creation of modern disciplines—has played an integral role in the way historians have described the changing disciplinary map of nineteenth-century British science. This volume critically reevaluates this dominant narrative in the ...

The idea that a new technology could challenge human intelligence is as old as the warning from Socrates and Plato that written language eroded memory. With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence programs, we find ourselves once again debating how a new technology might influence human thought and behavior. Researchers, ...

The Argentine capital is largely perceived as a middle-class space. Yet in reality, urban poverty and precarious settlements are defining features of the city. Agnese Codebò investigates how slums have produced culture as well as their representation in literature and the visual arts from the 1950s to the present. Looking ...

Guantánamo sits at the center of two of the most vexing issues of US policy of the past century: relations with Cuba and the Global War on Terror. It is a contested, extralegal space. In A New No-Man’s-Land, Esther Whitfield explores a multilingual archive of materials produced both ...

Michele Serros (1966–2015) is widely known for her groundbreaking book Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard. Despite her status as a major figure in Chicanx literature, no scholar has written a book-length examination of her body of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—until now. Cristina Herrera, also from ...

Public health, housing, poverty, and immigration dominated social and political discourse in early twentieth-century New York, much as they do today. The Lower East Side provided an urban environment where infectious disease and other public health concerns flourished. One city block in particular, known in muckraking circles as “The Lung ...

Panama is a country whose geopolitical importance outweighs its size because of the volume of trade that passes the Central American isthmus through the canal. For nearly a century, the United States occupied and controlled the Panama Canal Zone and its shipping operations. In 1999, control was passed to Panama’s ...

Staging Buenos Aires centers theater as a source of historical inquiry to understand how nonelites experienced and shaped a city undergoing dramatic transformations. Commercial theater constituted the core of the city’s public sphere, one in which middle-class playwrights and audiences assumed the leading role. Audiences and critics often disagreed ...

Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a ...

Mal Goode (1908–1995) became network news’s first African American correspondent when ABC News hired him in 1962. Raised in Homestead and Pittsburgh, he worked in the mills, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and went on to become a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier and later for local radio. With his ...

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903–1988) was a prominent socialist, anticolonial and antiracist activist, champion of women’s rights, and advocate for the arts and crafts. Defying the borders of gender, nation, and race, her efforts spanned social movements and played a leading role in the creation of modern India and the development of ...

Rhetoric and composition scholar Donna LeCourt combines theoretical inquiry, qualitative research, and rhetorical analysis to examine what it means to write for the “public” in an age when the distinctions between public and private have eroded. Public spaces are increasingly privatized, and individual subjectivities have been reconstructed according to market ...

Ayn Rand controversially defended rational egoism, the idea that people should regard their own happiness as their highest goal. Given that numerous scholars in philosophy and psychology alike are examining the nature of human flourishing and an ethics of well-being, the time is ripe for a close examination of Rand’...

The 499 letters in the fourteenth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall cover a number of particularly intense and acrimonious disputes. More notably, this volume spans the period of the composition, delivery, and furious reaction to Tyndall’s famous—or, more accurately, infamous—Belfast Address. This prestigious lecture, which he ...