Books By Newest

Freedom and Confinement is a powerful, book-length conversation between poets Elizabeth Gordon McKim and Etheridge Knight, recorded in 1990 as Knight was dying of cancer. The interview traces Knight’s life from his childhood in Paducah, Kentucky, to his time in the Army and his injury in Korea, to his drug ...

Foreword by José CasanovaAsian Catholicism and the Remaking of Contemporary Families attends to the ways in which Asian Catholics navigate and negotiate the ethical ideals, normative discourses, and devotional practices of their religion as they construct and reconstruct their understandings of the family in contemporary society. In addition to family ...

The words teachers write on student work have the power to help students think critically and to hone and project their voices with confidence. They also have the power to shut students down. These words may affect student identity, motivation, and improvement of writing skills. Research suggests that many of ...

American Workman presents a comprehensive, novel reassessment of the life and work of one of America’s most influential self-taught artists, John Kane. With a full account of Kane’s life as a working man, including his time as a steelworker, coal miner, street paver, and commercial painter in and ...

Mass media in the late nineteenth century was full of news from Mars. In the wake of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 discovery of enigmatic dark, straight lines on the red planet, astronomers and the public at large vigorously debated the possibility that it might be inhabited. As rivalling scientific practitioners looked ...

Cinema can both reflect the world as it is and offer escape from it. In Modernity at the Movies, Camila Gatica Mizala explores the ideas of reflection versus escapism and examines how modes of understanding the current moment emerged through the practice of going to the movies in Santiago and ...

Over the past 250 years, energy transitions have occurred repeatedly—the rise of coal in the nineteenth century, the explosion of oil in the twentieth century, the nuclear utopianism of the 1950s and 1960s. These transitions have been as revolutionary as any political or economic upheaval, and they required changes in ...

The Dictator Dilemma tells the story of US bilateral relations with the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989). Tyvela focuses on how and why that diplomatic relationship changed during the Cold War from cooperation, based on mutual opposition to communism, to conflict, based on clashing expectations concerning democratic reforms and human rights. The ...

Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes ...

Petrograd, the imperial capital and the urban stage upon which virtually the entire Russian Revolution was enacted, in 1919 struggled through a year of civil war, hunger, social upheaval, and political and economic challenges. Based on exhaustive research in previously closed Russian archives, Alexander Rabinowitch authoritatively presents an in depth look ...

The development of the global illicit drug trade has posed significant challenges to democracy throughout Latin America. Scenes of violence and disorder linked to organized crime and the “war on drugs” are imprinted in the popular consciousness. The case of Bolivia, though, shows that the dominant narrative wasn’t the ...

Finalist for the 2026 ASALH Book AwardFinalist for the 2026 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in the Social SciencesShortlisted for 2026 MAAH Stone Book AwardAccess 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 ...

Around the turn of the century, a wave of leftist governments spread across Latin America. Paul W. Posner revisits this movement and diagnoses the reasons for its failure to achieve traditional leftist goals, such as reducing inequality, increasing inclusion of marginalized groups, and strengthening social solidarity. He investigates two sets ...

Despite the precariousness of an oil-based economy and the government’s professed concern about climate change, a failure of imagination regarding alternatives continues to trap Venezuela in an oil-fueled status quo. Elizabeth Barrios examines the ideologies that helped normalize oil production in Venezuela, which further made oil-led development appear to ...

In the early twentieth century, the Ford Motor Company built an industrial empire with massive factory complexes and associated infrastructures. Henry Ford’s 1915 plan to decentralize industrial manufacturing relied on moving key technical processes closer to sites of resource extraction while distributing elements of production. In Fordism and the City, ...