Old Is Gold

Anthropology has a long history of the "other," yet we can look right here at home for the strangeness we seek. We often neglect to ask the questions that reveal our own culture's underlying value and beliefs. In this volume, we bring the American...

Women from the state socialist countries in Eastern Europe--what used to be called the Second World--once dominated women's activism at the United Nations, but their contributions have been largely forgotten or deemed insignificant in comparison with those of Western feminists. In Second World, Second...

Sinclair Stories uses genealogical research as a springboard to uncover the lives and historical context of Charles Sinclair of Sinclair Bottom, Virginia (abt. 1717?-1766) and some of his descendants, in particular through the line of his son John Sinclair who was married to Rebecca...

Traveling to Unknown Places presents a compelling, incisive analysis of how French and American writers reshaped their personal and collective identities as they traveled in foreign countries after the social upheavals of the eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutions. Delving into the experiences of renowned figures like...

As Wesley C. Hogan sees it, the future of democracy belongs to young people. While today's generation of leaders confronts a daunting array of existential challenges, increasingly it is young people in the United States and around the world who are finding new ways...

Addresses the political and aesthetic evolution of African American literature and its authors during the Cold War, an era McCarthy calls "the Blue Period." In the years after World War II, to be a black writer was to face a stark predicament. The contest...

The children of an influential Ojibwe-Anglo family, Jane Johnston and her brother George were already accomplished writers when the Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft arrived in Sault Ste. Marie in 1822. Charged by Michigan's territorial governor with collecting information on Anishinaabe people, he soon...

The study of nineteenth-century American literature has long been tied up with the study of American democracy. Just as some regions in the United States are elevated to stand in for the whole nation--New England is a good example--D. Berton Emerson argues the same...

Like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Peruvian Victor Raul Haya de la Torre (1895-1979) was one of Latin America's key revolutionary leaders, well known across national boundaries. Inigo Garcia-Bryce's biography of Haya chronicles his dramatic political odyssey as founder of the highly influential American...

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug...

Country music maintains a special, decades-long relationship to American military life, but these ties didn't just happen. This readable history reveals how country music's Nashville-based business leaders on Music Row created partnerships with the Pentagon to sell their audiences on military service while selling...

A radical explication of the ways anti-Black racial oppression has infused the US government's anti-communist repression. In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans' fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what...

Bands like R.E.M., U2, Public Enemy, and Nirvana found success as darlings of college radio, but the extraordinary influence of these stations and their DJs on musical culture since the 1970s was anything but inevitable. As media deregulation and political conflict over obscenity and...

In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and...

In the early twenty-first century, comparisons between the modern civil rights movement and the movement for marriage equality reached a fever pitch. These comparisons, however, have a longer history. During the five decades after World War II, political ideas about same-sex intimacy and gender...

A wide-ranging account of the twenty-first century's fascination with the weird. Twenty-first-century fiction and theory have taken a decidedly weird turn. They both show a marked interest in the nonhuman and in the preternatural moods that the nonhuman often evokes. Writers of fiction and...

A surprising history unfolded in New Deal- and World War II-era New York City under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime. That...

Just as World War II transformed the United States into a global military and economic superpower, so too did it forge the gun country America is today. After 1945, war-ravaged European nations possessed large surpluses of mass-produced weapons, and American entrepreneurs seized the opportunity...

Paul Celan (1920-1970) is perhaps the most widely read of modern German-language poets, and yet his reputation has been constructed on a small body of primary texts. Thomas C. Connolly seeks to destabilize canonical readings of Celan's work by exploring the sous-oeuvre, the marginalized...

On September 11, 1857, a small band of Mormons led by John D. Lee massacred an emigrant train of men, women, and children heading west at Mountain Meadows, Utah. News of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, as it became known, sent shockwaves through the western...