Books

This edited volume shows how the function of sport as a historical and cultural marker is particularly relevant in Latin America. From the late nineteenth century to the present, the contributors reveal how sport opens a wide window into local, regional, and national histories. The essays examine the role of sport as a political vehicle, in claims to citizenship, as a source of community and ethnic pride, as a symbol of masculinity or feminism, as allegorical performance, and in many other purposes.

The first comprehensive study of Scheibler, it includes 125 historic and contemporary photographs and drawings, all of Scheibler’s known projects—including many not recorded in any other published source—and a selected bibliography.

The name Black Hawk permeates the built environment in the upper Midwestern United States. It has been appropriated for everything from fitness clubs to used car dealerships. Re-Collecting Black Hawk examines the phenomena of this appropriation in the physical landscape, and the deeply rooted sentiments it evokes among Native Americans and descendants of European settlers. Nearly 170 original photographs are presented and juxtaposed with texts that reveal and complicate the significance of the imagery. Contributors include tribal officials, scholars, activists, and others.

Winner, 2016 Historia Nova Book Prize for best book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History

Crossing Borders deconstructs contemporary theories of Soviet history from the revolution through the Stalin period, and offers new interpretations based on a transnational perspective. To Michael David-Fox, Soviet history was shaped by interactions across its borders. By reexamining conceptions of modernity, ideology, and cultural transformation, he challenges the polarizing camps of Soviet exceptionalism and shared modernity and instead strives for a theoretical and empirical middle ground as the basis for a creative and richly textured analysis.

Russia today represents one of the major examples of the phenomenon of “electoral authoritarianism,” characterized by adopting the trappings of democratic institutions (such as elections, political parties, and a legislature) and enlisting the service of the country’s essentially authoritarian rulers. Why and how has the electoral authoritarian regime been consolidated in Russia? What are the mechanisms of its maintenance, and what is its likely future course? This book attempts to answer these basic questions.

This book analyzes the origins and development of Eurasianism, an intellectual movement that proclaimed the existence of Eurasia, a separate civilization coinciding with the former Russian Empire. The essays explore the historical roots, the heyday of the movement in the 1920s, and the afterlife of the movement in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.

The first comprehensive chronology of philosophical anecdotes, from antiquity to the current era. Rescher introduces the major thinkers, texts, and historical periods of Western philosophy, recounting many of the stories philosophers have used over time to engage with issues of philosophical concern: questions of meaning, truth, knowledge, value, action, and ethics. Rescher’s anecdotes touch on a wide range of themes—from logic to epistemology, ethics to metaphysics.

Winner, 2016 ALA-Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Hedrick illuminates how discourses of Americanization, ethnicity, gender, class, and commodification shape the genre of “chica lit,” popular fiction written by Latina authors with Latina characters. Looking at chica lit’s market-driven representations of difference, poverty, and Americanization, Hedrick shows how this writing functions within the larger arena of struggles over popular representation of Latinas and Chicanas.

Soviet Space Mythologies explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and cultural context, giving particular attention to the two professional groups—space engineers and cosmonauts—who secretly built and publicly represented the program. Drawing on recent scholarship on memory and identity formation, this book shows how both the myths of Soviet official history and privately circulating counter-myths have served as instruments of collective memory and professional identity.

Bringing together language and literacy studies, Asian American history and rhetoric, and critical race theory, Hoang uses historiography and ethnography to explore the politics of Asian American language and literacy education: the growth of Asian American student organizations and self-sponsored writing; the ways language served as thinly veiled trope for race in the influential Lau v. Nichols; the inheritance of a rhetoric of injury on college campuses; and activist rhetorical strategies that rearticulate Asian American racial identity.

This pioneering study, prepared by the officially sanctioned Polish-Russian Group on Difficult Matters, is a comprehensive effort to document and fully disclose the major conflicts and interrelations between the two nations from 1918 to 2008. This is the English translation of this major study, which has received acclaim for its Polish and Russian editions. The chapters offer parallel histories by prominent Polish and Russian scholars who recount each country’s version of the event in question. Among the topics discussed are the 1920 Polish-Russian war, the origins of World War II and the notorious Hitler-Stalin pact, the infamously shrouded Katyn massacre, the communization of Poland, Cold War relations, the Solidarity movement and martial law, and the renewed relations of contemporary Poland and Russia.

Winner of the 2016 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets

Emanuel’s version of a “new and selected poems” turns convention on its head. She ignores chronology, placing new poems beside old, mixing middle and early poems with recent work, and liberating all her poems from the restraints of their particular histories, both aesthetic and autobiographical.

Interstate is a collection of lyrical poems in four sections that concentrate thematically on animals, love and sex, compassion, and loss.

Winner of the 2014 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

Winner of the 2106 Society of Midland Authors Literary Award (poetry category)

Karankawa is a collection that explores some of the ways in which we (re)construct our personal histories. Rich in family narratives, myths, and creation stories, these are poems that investigate passage—dying, coming out, transforming, being born—as well as the gaps that also reside in our stories, for, as Rocha suggests, the opportunity to create myths is provided by great silences.

Winner of the 2014 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry PrizeWinner of the 2017 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers AwardWinner, 2016 BCALA Literary Award, Poetry CategoryFinalist, 2015 NAACP Image Awards, poetry category

Wild Hundreds is a long love song to Chicago. The book celebrates the people, culture, and places often left out of the civic discourse and the travel guides. Wild Hundreds is a book that displays the beauty of black survival and mourns the tragedy of black death.