Titles

A rising star of contemporary British poetry reflects on race, culture, memory, and identity in his first full-length volume Using long poems, ekphrasis, and ruptured forms, RENDANG is a startling new take on the self, and how an identity is constructed. Drawing on his Anglo-Indonesian heritage, Will Harris shows us new ways to think about the contradictions of identity and cultural memory. He creates companions that speak to us in multiple languages. They deftly ask us to consider how and what we look at, as well as what we don't...

Did you know that there are more than 90 species of rabbits, hares, and pikas, rabbits' little-known cousins? And that new species are still being found? Or that baby rabbits nurse from their mothers only once a day? How about that some people brew medicinal tea from rabbit pellets? Wildlife conservationists Susan Lumpkin and John Seidensticker have all the answers—from the mundane to the unbelievable—about the world’s leaping lagomorphs. To some, rabbits are simply a docile pet for...

The Disciples of Christ, one of the first Christian faiths to have originated in America, was established in 1832 in Lexington, Kentucky, by the union of two groups led by Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone. The modern churches resulting from the union are known collectively to religious scholars as part of the Stone-Campbell movement. If Stone and Campbell are considered the architects of the Disciples of Christ and America's first nondenominational movement, then...

In Race: The History of an Idea in the West Ivan Hannaford guides readers through a dangerous engagement with an idea that so permeates Western thinking that we expect to find it, active or dormant, as an organizing principle in all societies. But, Hannaford shows, race is not a universal idea—not even in the West. It is an idea with a definite pedigree, and Hannaford traces that confused pedigree from Hesiod to the Holocaust and beyond. Hannaford begins by examining the ideas of race supposedly...

In the southern United States, there remains a deep need among both black and white writers to examine the topic of race relations, whether they grew up during segregation or belong to the younger generation that graduated from integrated schools. In Race Mixing, Suzanne Jones offers insightful and provocative readings of contemporary novels, the work of a wide range of writers—black and white, established and emerging. Their stories explore the possibilities of cross-racial...

The history of civil rights in the United States is usually analyzed and interpreted through the lenses of modern conservatism and progressive liberalism. In Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader, author Jonathan Bean argues that the historical record does not conveniently fit into either of these categories and that knowledge of the American classical liberal tradition is required to gain a more accurate understanding of the past, present, and future of civil liberties...

Winner, 2009 Best First Book Prize, Phi Alpha Theta During the First World War, the French army deployed more than 500,000 colonial subjects to European battlefields. The struggle against a common enemy associated these soldiers with the French nation, but racial and cultural differences left them on the outside. This study investigates French conceptions of race and national identity at the time as reflected in the attitudes and policies directed toward...

A major factor leading to the U.S. financial crisis was predatory lending by large banks to underprivileged and often nonwhite borrowers. Predatory lending of subprime mortgages targeting the most economically vulnerable minority communities helped trigger the current global financial crisis. This special issue of the journal American Quarterly explores the ways in which "subprime" becomes a racial signifier in the current debate about the...

Winner, 2009 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History, The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association A microcosm of exaggerated societal extremes—poverty and wealth, vice and virtue, elitism and equality—New Orleans is a tangled web of race, cultural mores, and sexual identities. Jennifer M. Spear's examination of the dialectical relationship between politics and social practice unravels the city’s construction of race during the...

Among the most pervasive of stereotypes imposed upon southern highlanders is that they were white, opposed slavery, and supported the Union before and during the Civil War, but the historical record suggests far different realities. John C. Inscoe has spent much of his scholarly career exploring the social, economic and political significance of slavery and slaveholding in the mountain South and the complex nature of the region's wartime loyalties, and the brutal guerrilla...

The comparative presentation of the birth of metropolises like St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Kiev, Belgrade, or Athens confirms the importance of the Western model as well as the influence of international experts on city planning at the periphery of Europe. In addition, this volume presents an alternative perspective that aims to understand the genesis of Eastern European cities with a metropolitan character or metropolitan...

From the Flint water crisis to the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy, environmental threats and degradation disproportionately affect communities of color, with often dire consequences for people's lives and health. Racial Ecologies explores activist strategies and creative responses, such as those of Mexican migrant women, New Zealand Maori, and African American farmers in urban Detroit, demonstrating that people of color have always been and continue to be leaders in the fight for...

Sexual desire, often understood as personal erotic preference, is frequently seen as neutral, natural, or inevitable. Countering these commonplace assumptions, Racial Erotics shows how sexual partnering within communities of gay men is deeply embedded within larger social structures that define whiteness as desirable and normative while othering men of color. In queer erotic economies this othering may take the form of sexual rejection or fetishization of...

When Richard G. Hatcher became the first black mayor of Gary, Indiana in 1967, the response of Gary's white businessmen was to move the entire downtown to the suburbs, thereby weakening the city core. Meanwhile, white business and institutional leaders in Atlanta, Detroit, and Newark worked with black mayors heading those majority-black cities to rebuild their downtowns and neighborhoods. Why not Gary? Robert A. Catlin, who served as Mayor Hatcher's planning advisor...

On October 20, 1923, at Belmont Park in New York, Kentucky Derby champion Zev toed the starting line alongside Epsom Derby winner Papyrus, the top colt from England, to compete for a $100,000 purse. Years of Progressive reform efforts had nearly eliminated horse racing in the United States only a decade earlier. But for weeks leading up to the match race that would be officially dubbed the "International," unprecedented levels of newspaper coverage...

The Radiance of Small Things in Ron Rash's Writing examines how the poet's language bristles with a variety of carefully registered sensory perceptions detailing minute objects, some of which, Frédérique Spill argues, less poetic minds than his might consider insignificant. Through its eleven chapters, each devoted to a different book in order of publication, Spill's study shows how prone Rash is to making violence cohabit with beauty, thus imbuing the dreariest situations with...

Ten years in the making, Radiation King, the second full-length collection by poet Jason Gray, takes us to the beginning and the possible futures of the atomic world we created at the start of the twentieth century. In a time when the Cold War has heated back up, his intense lyric poems engage a past filled with Civil Defense and radioactive quack cures and a future that could bring a radioactive wasteland or limitless energy. Gray's poems explore the world from the smallest atom of hydrogen to the giant Pillars of Creation...

In Radical Arab Nationalism and Political Islam, Lahouari Addi attempts to assess the history and political legacy of radical Arab nationalism to show that it contained the seeds of its own destruction. While the revolutionary regimes promised economic and social development and sought the unity of Arab nations, they did not account for social transformations, such as freedom of speech, that would eventually lead to their decline. But while radical Arab...

A fresh look at the intellectual roots of one of the most engaging and multifaceted of America's founders. Benjamin Franklin, writes Douglas Anderson in his preface, is "no one's contemporary... Blending elements of the fifteenth-century spiritual discipline of Thomas à Kempis with the journalistic energy of Daniel Defoe, the urbane reason of Lord Shaftesbury with the scientific initiative of Thomas Edison, Franklin places exceptional demands on the historical imagination of his...

Written by both well-established and rising scholars, Radical Future Pasts seeks to open up new possibilities for theoretical inquiries and engagements with practical political struggles. Unlike conventional "state of the discipline" collections, this volume does not summarize the history of political theory. Rather than accept traditional ideas about the political past, the contributors reinterpret canonical and current texts to demonstrate fresh...