Books

Tropical weather in colonial Malaya presented an unknown atmosphere that manifested in extremes and uncertainties. From 1840 to 1940, the Indigenous landscapes of Singapore and Penang Islands were altered in ways that will never be reclaimed, the natural ecology of much of the peninsula forever changed by the British colonial government. With ...

Access to educational resources has been a tool of liberation for Black Americans from the antebellum period to the present. With this book, Amber N. Wiley emphasizes the value of education as a means for social equality—Black Americans wanted the American Dream to apply to them, and equal opportunity ...

During the crucial period of its formation, the opposing forces of corruption and anticorruption shaped Venezuela’s new national state and its relationship with society. National strongman Juan Vicente Gómez, who ruled from 1908 to 1935, fastened control over key areas of the economy, extracted wealth from the Venezuelan people, and ...

Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local examines the social and rhetorical dynamics around emerging writing technologies. Carl Whithaus argues that these dynamics work across networked publics as patterns of behavior and ways of interacting through and with multimodal texts. This rhetorical analysis of the production and reception of born-digital rhetoric ...

By transporting waves of newly arrived immigrants along rail lines from both coasts, railway companies played an active role in repopulating the interior of the country. Spaces of Immigration follows the travel routes of immigrants during a foundational period of American infrastructure—from ports of arrival to train cars and ...

The Occupant is a collection of persona and prose poems that explores the “inner lives” of common household objects, along with that of “The Occupant” of the house, their human keeper. Taken together, their shifting perspectives engage questions of time, mortality, and the nature of consciousness itself, reminding readers of ...

A Territory in Conflict explores Israeli and Palestinian projects of modernization and development in the Gaza Strip, from the outset of Israel’s military occupation in 1967 to the Oslo Accords of 1993. Rather than reduce the Gaza Strip to an arena of war and violence, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat resurrects the urban and ...

Americans love sports, from neighborhood pickup basketball to the National Football League, and everything in between. While no city better demonstrates the connection between athletic games and community than Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the common association of the city’s professional sports teams with its blue-collar industrial past illustrates a white nostalgic ...

Health practitioners working in gray zones, or between official and unofficial medicines, played a fundamental role in shaping Latin America from the colonial period onward. The Gray Zones of Medicine offers a human, relatable, complex examination of the history of health and healing in Latin America across five centuries. Contributors ...

New Playlist holds a variety of poetic forms: odes, found, haiku, prose, list, collages, one-liners, sonnets, and more. With his trademark wit and inventiveness, David Trinidad “plays” with these forms as if they were toys. He creates a Wikipedia cento in which each line illustrates how little is known of ...

My Literary and Moral Meanderings was written in response to a challenge from the Dostoevsky brothers Fyodor and Mikhail; they asked Apollon Grigoryev to write an autobiography that included his childhood. The childhood autobiography was already an established genre in Russia, with writers like Leo Tolstoy and Alexander Herzen making ...

Join celebrated author and photographer Tim Palmer as he takes us down one of America’s most magnificent rivers. From the Youghiogheny’s lofty headwaters to its quiet ending only a dozen miles from Pittsburgh, the river he reveals shines with splendor and beckons to all who walk, bike, paddle, ...

Rebecca Lehmann’s The Sweating Sickness contains wide-ranging topics—the suicide of an abusive ex, parenting young children, fairy tales, reproductive rights, domestic violence, ghost stories, ancient myth—all set to the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both personal and political, these poems interrogate how we grieve, what it means ...

The Law of Truly Large Numbers is a book about coming to terms with loss and the arrival of unexpected, perhaps undeserved, love. Based on the statistical principle that in a truly large sample set anything outrageous is likely to happen, this book explores not only the outrageous things that ...

When her mother agrees to enter a Rhode Island nursing home in December of 2019, Denise Duhamel promises she’ll visit at least once a month. By March of 2020, everyone is in lockdown. The elegies in Pink Lady explore the resiliency of her elderly mother and nurses on the frontline, as ...