July 2015 was a historic month for renewing diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. The U.S. Department of State will officially reopen its embassy in Havana, Cuba on August 14, 2015. The importance of these events can be seen in this statement from Scott Morgenstern, Director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Latin American Studies: “Signified by the July, 2015 reopening of their respective embassies, the Cold War between the United States and Cuba has begun to ease, only 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The regularizing of relations will have profound affects on…

And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry John Hoerr “A fascinating account of USX’s turnabout, during the ’70s and ’80s, from the union’s staunchest ally to its most intransigent foe, and the steelworkers’ struggle to redefine their place in a divided industry.” —New York Times Book Review “An enormous labor of love, John Hoerr’s book comprehensively chronicles a national tragedy.” —The Nation A veteran reporter on American labor, John P. Hoerr analyzes the spectacular and tragic collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s. And the Wolf Finally Came demonstrates how an obsolete and adversarial…

The latest author to answer our Q&A call is Michael David-Fox, author of the new book Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union. UPP: You’ve spent nearly two decades studying various aspects of Russian history. What intrigues you most about the region? MDF: When I first got into Russian Studies I was captivated by the nineteenth-century intelligentsia and its classic thinkers, from Herzen to Lenin. I was drawn in by the “cursed questions” about Russia and the West and the role of the revolutionary movement. The Possessed is still my favorite Dostoevsky novel. There was…

Writing against Racial Injury The Politics of Asian American Student Rhetoric Haivan V. Hoang RHETORIC/LITERACY/ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES “Hoang offers an insightful thick description of Asian American activism rhetoric at the sites of language and literacy production. It teaches us to rethink what we mean by ‘student writing’ and the ‘teaching of writing’ in light of a broad range of self-sponsored, extracurricular rhetorical acts by Asian American activists.” —Min-Zhan Lu, University of Louisville 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…

Soviet Space Mythologies Public Images, Private Memories, and the Making of a Cultural Identity Slava Gerovitch HISTORY OF SCIENCE/RUSSIAN STUDIES “Soviet Space Mythologies makes a major contribution to the history of Soviet space flight and culture. It places the story of Russian space conquest into the broader history of space flight—including references to pioneering scholars in the history of NASA. This is also the first book to focus on the professional identity of the cosmonaut and space engineer.” —Andrew Jenks, California State University, Long Beach Slava Gerovitch explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and…