November 3-9 is University Press Week. This year’s theme is “Read. Think. Act.” Our mission at the University of Pittsburgh Press is to find and publish the finest scholarly titles for just this reason: We want to encourage our readers to think critically about our titles and make changes in their lives, universities, and communities. This blog post by Patricia M. DeMarco, author of Pathways To Our Sustainable Future, offers a few ways anyone can take action to become a better environmental steward. Four Ways to Be a Better Environmental Steward Patricia M. DeMarco As creatures of modern life, we…

Welcome to the University Press Week 2019 Blog Tour! University presses across the county will be sharing articles, interviews, and excerpts from titles that relate to various sub-themes of the main UP Week theme: Read. Think. Act. Today’s posts are all on “How to speak up and speak out.” Check out these posts from our university press friends: “Lewis Raven Wallace: How to Speak Up and Speak Out” by Lewis Raven Wallace, University of Chicago Press * * * “Speaking Up and Speaking Out” by Kelly Belanger, Syracuse University Press * * * “HOW TO SPEAK UP AND SPEAK OUT”…

Welcome to the University Press Week 2019 Blog Tour! University presses across the county will be sharing articles, interviews, and excerpts from titles that relate to various sub-themes of the main UP Week theme: Read. Think. Act. Today’s posts are all on “How to be a (better) global citizen.” Check out these posts from our university press friends: “How to Cope with Polarization” by Amitai Etzioni, University of Virginia Press * * * “The Impact of a Monograph: ‘A Woman without a Husband Is Like a Fish without a Bicycle’” by Nancy Wingfield, Purdue University Press * * * “#READUP on…

In Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier, author Catherine L. Newell explores what drove the United States to rapidly expand its space exploration plans—in particular, she looks at the roles of religious faith and mankind’s desire to explore new frontiers. By “recasting the space race as an inherently spiritual endeavor, Newell exposes and explains the origins of the language of ‘divine destiny’—which imbues much of the modern talk of visiting other planets today” (Publishers Weekly). One of the major players in Destined for the Stars is Chesley Bonestell (1888–1986), whose astronomical art was extremely influential…

Ilja Nieuwland is the author of American Dinosaur Abroad: A Cultural History of Carnegie’s Plaster Diplodocus. He is a historian of science–in particular paleontology–attached to the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. American Dinosaur Abroad covers the discovery in 1899 of the Diplodocus carnegii—or Dippy, as it’s known today—by a team of paleontologists sponsored by Andrew Carnegie. Then the longest and largest dinosaur on record, the Diplodocus skeleton was replicated into plaster casts that were gifted to different nations by Carnegie in the years leading up to World War I. In this largely untold history, Nieuwland…