Longleaf International Rights Guide Fall 2024

international rightsguide

fall 2024

University of Georgia Press

University of New Mexico Press

University of Oklahoma Press

Texas Tech University Press

University of Nebraska Press

University of North Carolina Press

University Press of Kansas

University of the West Indies Press

Vanderbilt University Press

Contacts

For the sale of translation rights, please contact the following subagents:

Albania, Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia

Slovenia and Ukraine

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China and Taiwan

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South Asia

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Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and Latin America

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Turkey

NURCIHAN KESIM® LITERARY AGENCY filiz@nurcihankesim.net 90 216 511 56 86

All other territories Jennifer Schaper jennifer.schaper@duke.edu

Vanderbilt University Press

About Vanderbilt University Press

Established in 1940, Vanderbilt University Press is the principal publishing arm of one of the nation’s leading research universities. The Press’s primary mission is to select, produce, market, and disseminate scholarly publications of outstanding quality and originality. In conjunction with the long-term development of its editorial program, the Press draws on and supports the intellectual activities of the university and its faculty. Although its main emphasis falls in the area of scholarly publishing, the Press also publishes books of substance and significance that are of interest to the general public, including regional books. In this regard, the Press also supports Vanderbilt’s service and outreach to the larger local and national community.

The editorial interests of Vanderbilt University Press include most areas of the humanities and social sciences, as well as health care and education. The Press seeks intellectually provocative and socially significant works in these areas, as well as works that are interdisciplinary or that blend scholarly and practical concerns. At present, Vanderbilt publishes around twenty-five new titles each year.

vanderbiltuniversitypress.com

Subjunctive Aesthetics

Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change CAROLYN FORNOFF

Studies indicate that Mexicans are more worried about climate change than any other global issue, more anxious about natural disasters than any other quotidian threat (including crime), and that suicide rates have risen along with temperatures. These fears are grounded in reality: in the last twenty years, Mexico issued more than 2,000 extreme weather warnings linked to hydrometeorological events, and ranked in the top ten countries in terms of absolute economic losses caused by (un)natural disasters. Mexico is also one of the deadliest countries in the world for environmental activists: in 2018 alone, twenty-one defenders of the land were murdered, and many others criminalized or intimidated. Social anxiety in Mexico about ongoing and future climate change is reflected in the outpouring of eco-cultural production over the past decade, a body of work that has yet to be comprehensively studied. The exponential explosion of cultural responses to climate change is not limited to any one genre: Mexican poets like Karen Villeda and Isabel Zapata have thematized extinction, sci-fi writer Alberto Chimal recently published a dystopian young adult climate fiction, and performance artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo has created works that contest extractivism’s murderous tactics. Subjunctive Aesthetics brings together these artists and others to collate a diverse constellation of Mexican cultural responses to climate change that index the multifaceted nature of this crisis.

Carolyn Fornoff is an assistant professor of Latin American literatures and cultures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The End of Catholic Mexico

Causes and Consequences of the Mexican Reforma (1855-1861)

DAVID ALLEN GILBERT

In The End of Catholic Mexico: Causes and Consequences of the Mexican Reforma (1855-1861), historian David A. Gilbert provides a new interpretation of one of the defining events of Mexican history: the Reforma. During this period, Mexico transformed from a Catholic confessional state to a modern secular nation, sparking a three-year civil war in the process. While past accounts of the Reforma have foregrounded its class dimensions and portrayed it as a liberal triumph over conservative elites, Gilbert instead argues that the Reforma was a religious war fueled two competing interpretations of the Catholic faith. These competing interpretations, Gilbert contends, generated sharp disagreements about Mexico's future, which further polarized the country and led to a culture war centered on religion.

Gilbert's fresh account of this pivotal moment in Mexican history will be of interest to scholars of Latin American religious history, nineteenth-century church history, and U.S. historians of the antebellum republic.

February 2024

288 pages

Political Science / Imperialism Rights: World

Eyes on Amazonia

Transnational Perspectives on the Rubber Boom Frontier

JESSICA CAREY-WEBB

The Amazon extends across nine countries, encompasses forty percent of South America, and hosts four European languages and more than three hundred indigenous languages and cultures. Eyes on Amazonia: Transnational Perspectives on the Rubber Boom Frontier is a fascinating exploration how Latin American, European, and U.S. intellectuals imagined and represented the Amazon region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This multi-faceted study, which draws on a range of literary and non-literary texts and visual sources, examines the complex ways that race, gender, representation, mobility, empire, modernity, and personal identity have indelibly shaped how the region was and is seen. In doing so, the book argues that representations of the Amazon as a backward region in need of the civilizing influence of colonialism and modernization served to legitimize and justify imperial control.

Eyes on Amazonia operates in cultural geography, ecocriticism, and visual cultural analysis. The diverse and fascinating documents and images examined in Eyes on Amazonia capture the modernizing project of this region at a crucial juncture in its long history: the early twentieth century rubber boom.

Jessica Carey-Webb is an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico.

David A. Gilbert is a professor of history at Clayton State University.

Biocosmism

Vitality and the Utopian Imagination in Postrevolutionary Mexico

JORGE QUINTANA NAVARRETE

Most scholars study postrevolutionary Mexican culture as a period in which cultural production significantly shaped national identity through murals, novels, essays, and other artifacts that registered the changing political and social realities in the wake of the Revolution. In Biocosmism, Jorge Quintana Navarrete shifts the focus to examine how a group of scientists, artists, and philosophers conceived the manifold relations of the human species with cosmological forces and nonhuman entities (animals, plants, inorganic matter, celestial bodies, among others).

Drawing from recent theoretical trends in new materialisms, biopolitics, and posthumanism, this book traces for the first time the intellectual constellation of biocosmism or biocosmic thought: the study of universal life understood as the vital vibrancy that animates everything in the cosmos from inorganic matter to living organisms to outer space. It combines both analysis of unexplored areas—such as Alfonso L. Herrera’s plasmogeny—and innovative readings of canonical texts like Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica to examine how biocomism produced a wide array of utopian projects and theorizations that continue to challenge anthropocentric, biopolitical frameworks.

Jorge Quintana Navarrete is an assistant professor of Spanish at Dartmouth University.

The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things

Literature and Environmental Ethics from Latin America

MARK ANDERSON

The Rights of Nature and The Testimony of Things: Literature and Environmental Ethics from Latin America begins by analyzing the ethical debates and political contexts relating to Latin American “rights of nature” legislation and the political ontology of nonhuman political speech within a framework of intercultural and multispecies diplomacy. Anderson shows how these political ontologies work in Latin American writing on animal ethics, since animal rights are often considered the bridge between human rights and the rights of nature.

In addition to legal frameworks, Anderson looks at Latin American literary contributions and how they can complicate our understanding of the philosophy of ethics he explores in terms of human and nonhuman relation and obligation. He expands this discussion into the cosmopolitics of human-plant assemblages, which leads to a formulation of environmental ethics centered on the collective, multispecies work of maintaining environments and ecological cycles, as well as responding to the critical roles that disability and reciprocal care play within this ethics. Finally, the author analyzes the points of connection and divergences between Latin American relational ontologies and Euro-American posthumanist theories within indigenous Latin American re-modernization projects that reappropriate and repurpose ancestral practices as well as developing new technologies with the goal of forging an alternative modernity compatible with a livable future for all species.

Mark Anderson is an associate professor at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America

February 2024

244 pages

History / Social History Rights: World

June 2024

288 pages

Political Science / Public Policy / Environmental Policy Rights: World

March 2025

Rights: World

May 2025

Rights: World

Running on Hope

Female Community Health Labor in Rajasthan, India

SVEA CLOSSER AND SURENDA SINGH SHEKHAWAT

Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) visit households in the community to deliver essential health services and link community members with key health benefits. Like many other female Community Health Workers across the world, ASHAs are often portrayed by the Indian government as virtuous, passive volunteers, selflessly providing services to their neighbors. The reality is more complicated and much more interesting. Drawing on ethnographic work in Rajasthan, Closser and Shekhawat follow ASHAs through striking personal transformations. From their positions as rural daughters-in-law—a particularly low-power position in Rajasthan, where women are expected to be fully veiled and largely silent—ASHAs have, over years of work, gained unprecedented autonomy for young rural women. They have also gained a deep understanding of the exploitation involved in their low-ranking position in the health system. ASHAs earn less than $100 per month for extensive work, well below the legal minimum wage. To counter this, many ASHAs have joined unions—an endeavor that has ultimately proven disappointing: union leaders’ desires for political advancement are often at odds with ASHAs’ own needs. However, ASHAs do not have connections, money, or social power to organize eVectively on their own, without a political patron. The authors interview the women to learn about their organizing goals, their roles in their community as conduits to health education and resources, and their hopes for a better future.

Svea Closser is an associate professor in the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins University. Surendra Singh Shekhawat is an independent researcher in Jaipur, Rajasthan.

Everyday Apocalypse

Art, Empire, and the End of the World DAVID DARK

Everyday Apocalypse recovers the root meaning of the term apocalypse (revelation) to use the concept as a lens through which elements of our cultural world that often go unseen may be brought into focus. Interweaving an examination of popular culture with biblical insight and contemporary political awareness, Dark uses the concept of the apocalyptic to provoke epiphanies about the world we live in and the meaning of human experience within it. Since its original publication in 2002, the book has become a deeply influential text among two generations of intellectual evangelical Christians who find themselves at odds with their preachers over issues of politics and culture, particularly in the U.S. South. This revised edition of the book includes an extensive new introduction, updates in light of the passage of time since its publication, and new insights from the author, whose outspoken taking to task of his fellow evangelical protestants is the reason the book has gone out of print with its original publisher.

David Dark is an assistant professor of religion and the arts in the college of theology at Belmont University.

Futuring Black Lives

Independent Black Institutions and the Literary Imagination

MAISHA T. WINN

Futuring Black Lives is a historical ethnography examining Black institution builders in the late 1960s and early 1970s and their work to leverage the power of publications and the literary imagination to engage “concerned men and women” in conversations about the educational journeys and futures of Black children. While many began as reactions to anti-Blackness and American public schooling failing Black children, Independent Black Institutions (IBIs) came to be viable ecosystems anchored in a shared Black value system preparing Black children in three areas: identity, purpose, and direction. The rationale for establishing and valuing IBIs remains highly relevant, given the sociopolitical landscape of education today. In addition to persistent racial disparities in academic achievement and Black students’ highly disproportionate experiences of punishment and “discipline,” friction and legislation against critical examination of race, racism, and racist ideas in school settings are front and center, and children’s and young adult literature are under attack through censorship and outright book bans. Yet, Black institution builders left useful maps of and for the educational future/s of Black children that remain available in journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and other ephemera. Winn demonstrates how and why the historiography-grounded futuring of Black education can and should inform current pursuits of equity, justice, and liberation through education.

Maisha T. Winn is the head of the Equity in Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. She is the author of Justice on Both Sides: Toward a Restorative Justice Discourse in Schools

June 2025 Rights: World

Wild Theater

Staging the Margins of Baroque Ideology in the Spanish Comedia HARRISON MEADOWS

In Wild Theater, Harrison Meadows critically examines the genealogy of one of world literature's most well-known figures: the “Wildman.” From its earliest manifestations in works such as The Epic of Gilgamesh to more recent films like The Green Knight, the transhistorical figure of the Wildman has fascinated generations of scholars and the broader public for centuries. Despite this widespread interest, the place of the Wildman—and ideas of wildness more generally—have been underexplored in scholarship on the Spanish Baroque period. Wild Theater addresses this lacuna in scholarship by exploring the ideas of wildness in the Spanish comedia, a popular Spanish Golden Age theater genre that combined elements of tragedy and comedy. In five compelling chapters, Meadows argues that a major shift occurs during the Baroque whereby the largely positive quality of previous iterations in the genealogy of wildness take on a negative character in the cultural ethos, and that this fundamental shift was representative of the influence of Spanish colonialism on racial thinking and a larger set of changes in how early modern people viewed gender and class. In this way, the project identifies the wild figure’s dramatic roots in the carnivalesque as an indispensable point of departure to plot the trajectory of wild representation in the theater of the Hispanic Baroque. From this guiding premise, Meadows traces the carryovers, transformations, and negations of the carnivalesque into early modern dramaturgy, specifically the Spanish comedia, which are emblematic of the poetic and ideological features of the emerging commercial theater in Iberia.

Harrison Meadows is an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Haiti and the Revolution Unseen

The Persistence of the Decolonial Imagination

NATALIE MARIE LÉGER

With Haiti and the Revolution Unseen, Natalie Léger posits that non-Haitian writers of the Revolution fail to capture the richness of Haitian cultural thought or Ginen thought. She studies the “problems” that Haiti’s blackness and its dire post-revolutionary reality pose for radical decolonial thinkers, including James, Cesaire, Carpentier, and Glissant. The Haitian revolutionist literature studied in the text are awash in the non-Haitian writers' desire to identify and disidentify with Haiti and Haitians. The notion of the unseen serves, on the one hand, as a descriptive that indexes the disavowals and obfuscations derived from white supremacist knowledge practices waylaying fruitful engagements with the Haitian Revolution and Haiti. On the other, the unseen denotes the obscured persons and ideals emblematic of “other futures, of projects not realized and ideas rarely remembered” in the long Haitian revolutionary moment (1492–1820), primarily, and in the broader freedom struggles grounding the hemispheric Americas in the twentieth century. Ginen peoples were and remain powerful in Haiti. Léger showcases them as the creative agents of power that they were when discussing Saint Domingue and post-independent Haiti. This study addresses the ideational importance of the Revolution to the task of rethinking existence and does so by demonstrating how the latter has engendered artistic eVorts to write the Revolution as a new world making event with attention to the colonial encounter. The immense space Haiti holds in Caribbean imaginings of freedom and revolution makes mediating it, its Revolution, and peoples through a racist gaze that serves colonial power hugely problematic, since a denigrated Haiti yields stunted visions of the Caribbean’s future. These conditions require attention to anti-Haitianism in non-Haitian literatures of the Revolution and the way it undermines the generative manner non-Haitian writers have used Haiti to think through their past, present, and future.

Natalie M. Léger is an assistant professor of English at Temple University.

April 2025 Rights: World

July 2025

World

Camille's Lakou

A Novel

MARIE LÉTICÉE

Camille’s Lakou tells the story of Camille, a young Caribbean girl living with her single-parent mother in a 1960s urbanized zone at the edge of Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, following her through her adult life as a Caribbean migrant in Florida. The author explores neocolonial culture clash and identity conflict themes that will be familiar to readers of the Francophone Caribbean coming-of-age novel and its revisions by women writers such as Capécia, Lacrosil, Manicom, Schwarz-Bart, Condé, Pineau, and others. Léticée makes it her own by fleshing out a time and place not well-represented in Guadeloupean literature. While previous bildungsromane from the writers mentioned here typically focus on rural peasant or urban bourgeois settings, Camille’s Lakou shifts location to an impoverished urban environment. “Lakou” is translated as “courtyard” or, more colloquially, “yard.” The author explores the culture and politics of lakou society while raising the issue of how this social dynamic is transformed through the impact of globalization and dispersal into a diasporic experience outside the island milieu of Camille’s childhood. In a collaborative translation eVort between the author and Kevin Meehan, Camille’s Lakou will bring the realities and joys of Guadeloupe to an English audience for the first time.

Marie Léticée is the pen name of the multimedia, multilingual Guadeloupean writer and educator Akosua Fadhili Afrika. Her first novel, originally titled Moun Lakou, was published by Ibis Rouge Éditions, a French Guyanese press, in 2016. A sequel, Du Haut de L’Autre Bord, appeared in 2020 and charts the further development of characters introduced in Moun Lakou. Both novels are now distributed by Orphie Éditions, which acquired Ibis Rouge in 2021, and a third volume is in progress. Kevin Meehan is professor of English and Caribbean Studies at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of People Get Ready: African American and Caribbean Cultural Exchange and articles published in journals including Callaloo, Narrative, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. He and Marie Léticée have previously published their co-translations of Haitian poetry.

Black Gurl Reliable

Pedagogies of Vulnerability and Transgression

DOMINIQUE C. HILL

Black Gurl Reliable does the original work of curating Black girls’ and women’s experiences and experiential knowledge alongside sociocultural forces (schooling) while showcasing the important labor of Black Girlhood Studies. As an ethos, it devises more complex narratives of Black girlhood and Black girl education that oVer redress to inequities and hauntings of race-gender structures of dominance and see Black girls as more than what happens to their bodies or how they are seen by others. Hill solicits arts-based methods’ strength and utility in capturing identity, performance, and experimental design’s knack for ephemerality and improvisation, and Black feminism’s insistence that knowledge and possibility are produced through the body. As a means of mitigating the deleterious eVects of schooling on Black girls’ and women’s bodies and making legible the insights and knowledge produced from schooling experiences, Hill introduces the concept of Transgressngroove. This living feminist practice explores the relationships between Black girlhood, education, and the body, as researched for over a decade through workshops, consulting, classrooms, personal development, and other teaching/learning spaces.

Dominique C. Hill is an assistant professor of women’s studies at Colgate University. She is the coauthor with Darrell Callier of Who Look at Me?! Shifting the Gaze of Education through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body

Mexico Unveiled

Resisting Colonial Vices and Other Complaints

CARLOS PEREDA

Mexico Unveiled is an idiosyncratic synthesis of twentieth century Mexican philosophy that puts contemporary debates about identity politics and inclusion into a critical perspective. In three engaging essays written in an inimitable prose style, Pereda, one of Mexico’s most renowned philosophers, considers the persistent influence of Spanish colonialism on Mexican intellectual life, the politics of inclusion, and changing ideas of what it means to be Mexican. He identifies three “vices”—social habits, customs, and beliefs inherited from Spanish colonialism—that have influenced the development of Mexican national identity: subaltern fervor, craving for novelty, and nationalist zeal. These three tendencies, Pereda argues, have led Mexican intellectuals, and Mexican society more generally, to uncritically adopt a politics of exclusion and destructive nationalist attitudes. To do all of this, Pereda invites readers to follow him along as he explores an often surprising series of arguments and counterarguments. Using a strategy he calls "nomadic thinking—the act of moving beyond our cultural preconceptions and habits of thinking—he guides readers through a number of examples drawn from Mexican philosophy and culture that illustrate these tendencies. At its core, Mexico Unveiled is an accessible and entertaining introduction to the philosophical themes that have long occupied Pereda's life and work and Mexican philosophy more generally.

Carlos Pereda is professor emeritus at the Institute of Philosophical Investigations, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Noell Birondo is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas El Paso. Andres Bonilla is a graduate student at the University of El Paso.

February 2025

Rights: World

June 2025 Rights: World

University Press of Kansas

About the University Press of Kansas

The press publishes work on American politics (including the presidency, American political thought, and public policy), military history and intelligence studies, American history (especially political, cultural, intellectual, and western), environmental policy and history, American studies, film studies, law and legal history, Native American studies, and books about Kansas and the Midwest. Our books have reached a wide audience both inside and outside the academy and have been recognized for their contributions to important scholarly and public debates.

kansaspress.ku.edu

Spetsnaz

A History of the Soviet and Russian Special Forces TOR BUKKVOLL

In January 1951, Lieutenant Evgeniy Borisov was sent to the headquarters of the Soviet 5th Army in Spassk-Dalnii, a small city in the Russian Far East. Borisov was there on a secret mission. Together with his superior, Major Rusinov, his job was to establish the 91st Special Forces Company. The 91st was to be one of forty-six similar units spread out across the Soviet Union. The new forces were called “spetsnaz”—short for spetsnialnoe naznachenie, which translates to “special purpose.” In Spetsnaz, Tor Bukkvoll presents the first in-depth history of the Soviet and, later, Russian special operations forces from their establishment until today. Spetsnaz is essential reading for anyone interested in special operations forces or Russian military history.

Tor Bukkvoll is senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment in Kjeller, Norway.

Death of the Wehrmacht

The

German Campaigns of 1942

ROBERT M. CITINO

For Hitler and the German military, 1942 was a key turning point of World War II. In this major reevaluation of that crucial year, Robert Citino shows that the German army’s emerging woes were rooted as much in its addiction to the “war of movement”—attempts to smash the enemy in “short and lively” campaigns—as they were in Hitler’s deeply flawed management of the war. Building upon his widely respected critique in The German Way of War, Citino shows how the campaigns of 1942 fit within the centuries-old patterns of Prussian/ German warmaking and ultimately doomed Hitler’s expansionist ambitions. He examines every major campaign and battle in the Russian and North African theaters throughout the year to assess how a military geared to quick and decisive victories coped when the tide turned against it. Blending masterly research with a gripping narrative, Citino’s remarkable work provides a fresh and revealing look at how one of history’s most powerful armies began to founder in its quest for world domination.

Dr. Citino is an award-winning military historian and scholar who has published 11 books.

Battle for Belorussia

The Red Army's Forgotten Campaign of October 1943 - April 1944

DAVID M. GLANTZ

David M. Glantz chronicles the Soviet Army's efforts to further exploit their post-Kursk gains and accelerate a counteroffensive that would eventually take them all the way to Berlin.

The Red Army’s Operation Bagration that liberated Belorussia in June 1944 sits like a colossus in the annals of World War II history. What is little noted in the history books, however, is that the Bagration offensive was not the Soviets’ first attempt. Battle for Belorussia tells the story of how, eight months earlier, and acting under the direction of Stalin and his Stavka, three Red Army fronts conducted multiple simultaneous and successive operations along a nearly 400-mile front in an effort to liberate Belorussia and capture Minsk, its capital city. The campaign, with over 700,000 casualties, was a Red Army failure.

Glantz describes in detail the series of offensives, with their markedly different and ultimately disappointing results, that, contrary to later accounts, effectively shifted Stalin’s focus to the Ukraine as a more manageable theater of military operations.

A retired U. S. Army colonel fluent in Russian, David M. Glantz is the author of numerous books, including The Battle for Leningrad, 1941–1944; Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War; and Red Storm over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania.

October 2007

448 pages

Military History/World War II Rights: World

November 2016

784 pages

History, Military / World War II

Rights: World

Hell in Hürtgen Forest

The Ordeal and Triumph of an American Infantry Regiment

ROBERT STERLING RUSH

Some of the most brutally intense infantry combat in World War II occurred within Germany’s Hürtgen Forest. Focusing on the bitterly fought battle between the American 22d Infantry Regiment and elements of the German LXXIV Korps around Grosshau, Rush chronicles small-unit combat at its most extreme and shows why, despite enormous losses, the Americans persevered in the Hürtgenwald “meat grinder,” a battle similar to two punchdrunk fighters staggering to survive the round. The performance of American and German forces during this harrowing eighteen days of combat was largely a product of their respective backgrounds, training, and organization. This pre-battle aspect, not normally seen in combat history, helps explain why the Americans were successful and the Germans were not.

Robert Sterling Rush, Command Sergeant Major (ret.), served in the U.S. Army at every organizational level from squad through army and as a historian at the U.S. Center of Military History.

History

World

War Underground

A History of Military Mining in Siege Warfare

EARL J. HESS

Civil War. Spring 2025

Renowned military historian Earl Hess offers the first book dedicated to the history of underground tactics and strategy in warfare from antiquity to the present. From as early as ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese warfare to the battles of World War I, military mining was an essential component of siege warfare. Armies have tunneled underneath castle walls, dug trenches across no-man’s-land, and engineered confusing defensive countermines. These tactics for assaulting enemy fortifications and positions by creating underground access have adapted to changes in warfare, technology, geography, and culture. While its use diminished after 1918, when speed and movement took precedence over capturing strongpoints, military mining remains a viable strategy still deployed to this day. Although military historians have given mining marginal treatment in virtually every study of siege warfare, it has not yet been treated with depth or comprehensiveness as a subject in its own right. In this first booklength study of the subject, renowned military historian Earl Hess now fully addresses the topic of military mining from its earliest origins to the twenty-first century.

Earl J. Hess is Stewart W. McClelland Chair in History at Lincoln Memorial University and author of many books on the

The Kremlin and the High Command

Presidential Impact on the Russian Military from Gorbachev to Putin

DALE R. HERSPRING, DAVID M. GLANTZ

Throughout its existence, the Red Army was viewed as a formidable threat. By the end of the Cold War, however, it had become the weakest link in the Soviet Union’s power structure. Always subordinate to the Communist Party, the military in 1991 suddenly found itself answering instead to the president of a democratic state. Dale Herspring closely examines how that relationship influenced the military’s viability in the new Russian Federation.

Herspring’s book is the first to assess the relationship between the Russian military and the political leadership under Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin. He depicts an outmoded and demoralized military force still struggling to free itself from Cold War paradigms, while failing to confront not only debacles in Afghanistan and Chechnya but also a rise in crime and corruption within the ranks.The Kremlin and the High Command provides the most complete analysis to date of the Russian president’s influence on the Russian officer corps, the soldiers they lead, and their army’s combat readiness. Shedding light on the chaos that has plagued the USSR and Russia over the past 25 years, it also suggests how the often fraught relationship between the president and the high command must evolve if the Russian Federation is to evolve into a truly democratic nation.

Dale R. Herspring is an Emeritus University Distinguished Professor in the Political Science Department at Kansas State University. A retired U. S. Army colonel fluent in Russian, David M. Glantz is the author of numerous books, including The Battle for Leningrad, 1941–1944; Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War, and Red Storm over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania

God's Work in Hell

Nation-Building and Counterinsurgency in Somalia, 1992-1995

JONATHAN CAROLL

God’s Work in Hell is the first multinational, multi-archival history of the military intervention in Somalia from 1992-1995, which saw the largest ever deployment of American troops to the continent of Africa, the first UN-led peace enforcement mission in history, and the most ambitious experiment in nation-building. Based on previously unstudied sources from American, United Nations, and coalition archives, God’s Work in Hell is the first scholarly work to examine the entire intervention from its early and largely successful humanitarian phase, through to the tragic Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993, made famous by the movie Black Hawk Down, and the ultimate withdrawal of UN forces in 1995. Author Jonathan Carroll provides not only a narrative course correction by dispelling several myths and misunderstandings about the intervention, but also presents a new interpretation of events, most notably by including the Somali perspective.

Jonathan Carroll is a Lecturer with the Department of History at Texas A&M University specializing in American and European military history.

October 2006

256 pages Russian History Rights: World

Spring 2025

Military History

Rights: World

A Tale of Two Fronts

A German Soldier’s Journey through World War I

HANS SCHILLER

EDITED AND

TRANSLATED BY

FREDERIC KROME, GREGORY D. LOVING, AND KARIN WAGNER

In 2013, while helping her mother, Ingrid, comb through family possessions, Karin Wagner came across a large folio handwritten in German in the back of a dresser drawer. When Karin asked her mother what the document was, Ingrid replied, “Oh, that is your grandfather’s Great War memoir.” Schiller was a seventeen-year-old student in Bromberg, Prussia, when World War I broke out in August 1914. He enlisted in the German army and was assigned to an artillery unit on the Eastern Front. From 1915 to 1917, Schiller saw action in what is now Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. After the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 and Russia’s withdrawal from the war, Schiller was transferred to the Western Front. He arrived in time for Germany’s last great offensive in the west, where the attempt to break the Allied lines included what is believed to be the single greatest artillery bombardment in human history up to that point. After the German retreat and Armistice, Schiller reentered military service in the Freikorps, German mercenary groups fighting in former German territory in Eastern Europe, where the conflict dragged on even after the Treaty of Versailles. Schiller left military service in May 1920. Hans Schiller’s Kriegserinnerungen (literally, “memories of war”) was written in 1928 and based on diaries, since lost, that Schiller kept during the war. A Tale of Two Fronts, an edition of the memoir with historical context and explanatory notes, provides a vivid first-person account of German army life during World War I. It is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the experiences of common soldiers in World War I.

Karin Wagner is CEO, founder, and executive director of the Neigh Savers Foundation, a horse rescue organization in California. Frederic Krome is professor of history, University of Cincinnati Clermont College. Gregory D. Loving is professor of philosophy, University of Cincinnati Clermont College. Brian K. Feltman is associate professor of history, Georgia Southern University, a specialist in Germany in the World War I era.

The Russian Way of War

Operational Art, 1904-1940

RICHARD W. HARRISON

Tracking both continuity and divergence between the imperial and Red armies, Harrison analyzes, on the basis of theoretical writings and battlefield performance, the development of such operationally significant phenomena as the “front” (group of armies), consecutive operations, and the deep operation, which relied upon aircraft and mechanized formations to penetrate the kind of intractable defense systems that characterized so much of World War I. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, including memoirs, theoretical works, and materials from the Russian military archives (many presented here for the first time), Harrison traces the debates within the Russian and Soviet armies that engaged such theorists as Neznamov, Svechin, Triandafillov, and Isserson. The end result is an exemplary military intellectual history that helps illuminate a critical element in the “Russian way of war.”

Richard W. Harrison is an independent researcher living in Moscow. Previously, he worked in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as an investigator with the Department of Defense’s POW/MIA office, focusing on cases from the Cold War and Korean War.

Bloody Years of "Peace"

A Global Military History of the Interwar Period

IAN JOHNSON & ROBERT CLEMM

The First World War destroyed the world that had come before. It shattered three world empires, and fueled new nationalisms and ideologies that threatened to destroy those that remained. It also left millions in its wake with military training and access to weaponry, creating networks of violence that would spread across much of the globe: Poland versus the new Soviet Russia, the Irish against their British overlords, Bolivians and Paraguayans slugging it out in the waterless plain known as the Chaco, Spaniards of various stripes slaughtering one another over the ideological and spiritual future of their country, the Italian war of annihilation in Ethiopia. War was a global phenomenon during the era. Even if your land wasn’t at war, uniformed (and violent) groups were springing up in virtually every country in the world: “paramilitaries,” we usually call them, usually known for the distinctive color of their tunics: Nazi Brown Shirts in Germany, the Orange Shirts of the Agrarian Union in Bulgaria, the Blue Shirts of Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT. Far from being a period of peace and stability, the interwar era looked and felt more like a great mobilization. Everywhere, it seemed, men and women were on the march.

Ian Ona Johnson is the P.J. Moran Professor of Military History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War Robert Clemm is a professor in the History department at The Ohio State University

Rewriting Hisstory

A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss

JEFF KISSELOF

Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was an American government official accused in 1948 of having spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. When Alger Hiss was accused by Whittaker Chambers in 1948 of being a secret Communist spy in the 1930s, the subsequent perjury trials were some of the most sensational and politically significant trials of the century. Although Hiss was convicted, he maintained his innocence until his death, and historians have taken sides ever since. In this groundbreaking and revelatory book, Jeff Kisseloff brings new perspective, evidence, and accusations to this historical controversy. Rewriting Hisstory is a firsthand account of how over fifty years, beginning when he worked for Hiss as a college student in the mid-1970s, Kisseloff was eventually able to determine the truth about Alger Hiss. With the skills of a veteran reporter and the analytical mind of a scholar, he brings to light a wealth of original material, including 150,000 pages of mostly unredacted previously unreleased FBI files—which he sued the FBI to obtain—and other documents from government and library collections around the country. An act of vindication for one of the most divisive figures in the twentieth century, Rewriting Hisstory is a thrilling political page-turner about an accused spy that is itself a work of scholarly espionage, built on decades of painstaking research. This is an iconoclastic work that should rewrite history books.

Jeff Kisseloff began his journalism career as a sportswriter and has since written two highly praised books for adults.

Spring 2024

World History Rights: World

Spring 2024

True Crime Rights: World

The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase 4 (2021-2022)

NICOLAS CARNES & LILY GOREN

Following on the success of the first volume, The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, editors Nicholas Carnes and Lilly J. Goren are back with a new volume of interdisciplinary essays exploring the political worlds within and outside of the MCU. This book tackles the sprawling narratives in what Marvel calls “Phase 4,” referring to the movies, TV shows, and related content following the Thanos storyline in Phases 1, 2, and 3, collectively known as “The Infinity Saga.” While Phase 4 featured such films as Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Blank Panther: Wakanda Forever, it was most notable for its expansion into television, with shows like WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, Hawkeye, and Moon Knight

The chapters in this latest volume about the politics of the MCU are divided into three sections. In Part One, the authors examine “on-screen politics,” looking at the explicitly political content that appears in the stories about Thor, the Eternals, She-Hulk, Spider-Man, Loki, and Captain America. Part Two looks at the politics of MCU’s fans, examining topics like political participation, partisanship, and how the Black Panther storyline reflects the Black voting base in America. Finally, Part Three explores issues surrounding representation, especially gender, race, and sexuality.

Nicholas Carnes is professor of public policy at Duke University. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University.

The United States, War, and Environment in the Recent Pacific World

ANDREW ISENBERG, BETH BAILEY, & PAUL LANDSBERG

This volume, focused on the actions of the U.S. military in the Pacific from World War II through the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam, addresses both the material and ideational consequences of those actions on Pacific environments and, in turn, the reciprocal impact of Pacific environments on military thought and action in the region. Covering 52 percent of the Earth’s surface and including 60 percent of the world’s population, this vast geographic expanse contains a range of environments, from Arctic to tropical, rainforests to tundras, volcanic islands to lush tropical “paradises,” places densely inhabited and empty of human settlement, and ocean depths to mountain heights. In these varied environments, the United States fought the major wars of the twentieth century, from World War II forward. The environmental consequences of the US military presence in the Pacific have been profound. They include the outbreak of disease (particularly malaria during World War II); the dropping of nuclear bombs on two cities in Japan in August 1945; the testing of even more powerful nuclear weapons in South Pacific islands during the Cold War; and the use of 13 million gallons of chemical defoliants in Vietnam between 1961 and 1971.

Andrew C. Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. He is a specialist in environmental history, Native American history, and the history of the North American West and its borderlands.

Spring 2025 Pacific environment Rights: World

1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times

The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times ROSS BENES

The year 1999 was a high-water mark for popular culture. According to one measure, it was the “best movie year ever.” But as journalist Ross Benes shows, the end of the ’90s was also a banner year for low culture. This was the heyday of Jerry Springer, Jenna Jameson, and Vince McMahon, among many others. Low culture had come into its own and was poised for world domination. The reverberations of this takeover continue to shape society.

During its New Year’s Eve countdown, MTV entered 1999 with Limp Bizkit covering Prince’s famous anthem to the new year. The highlights of the lowlights continued when WCW and WWE drew 35 million American viewers each week with sex appeal and stories about insurrections. Insane Clown Posse emerged from the underground with a Woodstock set and platinum records about magic and murder. Later that year, Dance Dance Revolution debuted in North America and Grand Theft Auto emerged as a major video game franchise. Beanie Babies and Pokémon so thoroughly seized the wallets and imagination of collectors that they created speculative investment bubbles that anticipated the faddish obsession over nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The trashy talk show Jerry Springer became daytime TV’s mostwatched program and grew so mainstream that Austin Powers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, The Wayans Bros., The Simpsons, and The X-Files incorporated Springer into their own plots during the late ’90s. Donald Trump even explored a potential presidential nomination with the Reform Party in 1999 and wanted his running mate to be Oprah Winfrey, whose own talk show would make Dr. Oz a household name. There are many lessons to learn from the year that low culture conquered the world. Talk shows and reality TV foreshadowed the way political movements grab power by capturing our attention. Legal and technological victories obtained by early internet pornographers show how the things people are ashamed of have the ability to influence the world.And the controversy over video game violence reveals how every generation finds new scapegoats. 1999 is not just a nostalgic look at the past. It is also a window into our contentious present.

Ross Benes is an award-winning journalist and author, whose writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vice, Nation, The Wall Street Journal, and beyond. He has also written three books, including Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold and Turned On: A Mind-Blowing Investigation into How Sex Has Shaped Our World

March 2025

280 pages

Politics / Popular Culture Rights: World

University of North Carolina Press

About University of North Carolina Press

The University of North Carolina Press, a nonprofit publisher of both scholarly and general-interest books and journals, operates simultaneously in a business environment and in the world of scholarship and ideas. The Press advances the University’s triple mission of teaching, research, and public service by publishing first-rate books and journals for students, scholars, and general readers. The Press has earned a distinguished reputation by publishing excellent work from the nation’s leading scholars, writers, and intellectuals and by presenting that work effectively to wide-ranging audiences.

Established in 1922, unc Press was the first university press in the South and one of the first in the nation. Our regional publishing program—aimed at general readers and offering engaging, authoritative work on all aspects of the region’s history and culture, its natural and built environment, its music, food, literature, geography, plant and animal life—has been widely adopted in other parts of the country. Over the years, Press books have won hundreds of prestigious awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and those of many national scholarly societies. Today, the imprint of unc Press is recognized worldwide as a mark of publishing excellence—both for what we publish and for how we publish.

uncpress.org

The Ethics of Cities

Shaping Policy for a Sustainable and Just Future

TIMOTHY BEATLEY

Ethical dilemmas and value conflicts affect cities globally, but urban leaders and citizens often avoid confronting them directly and instead view the governance of cities as primarily an administrative task or, even worse, a merely political one. Timothy Beatley challenges readers to consider the issues in our cities not simply as legal or economic problems but as moral ones, asking readers “How can a city become more ethical?” Beatley exposes, explores, and unearths the many ethical questions cities face today and touches on many topics, from privacy and crime to racism and the ethics of public space. Drawing from recent policy debates and using extensive specific examples to highlight complex ethical dilemmas, Beatley argues that cities must expand the definition of the moral community to all their citizenry.

Cities must take profound steps to address social injustice and must plan for climate change—both as moral obligations—and this approachable and readable introduction to moral philosophy, urban planning, and social justice will help new generations to grapple with these global issues.

Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning at the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia and is the author of several books, including Ethical Land Use: Principles of Policy and Planning

Remembering Conquest

Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship

OMAR VALERIO-JIMÉNEZ

Remembering Conquest analyzes the ways collective memories of the US-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles over several generations. As the first Latinx people incorporated into the nation, Mexican Americans were offered US citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war. Because the 1790 Naturalization Act declared whites solely eligible for citizenship, the treaty pronounced Mexican Americans to be legally white. While their incorporation as citizens appeared as progress towards racial justice and the electorate's diversification, their second-class citizenship demonstrated a retrenchment in racial progress. Over several generations, civil rights activists summoned conquest memories to link Mexican Americans' poverty, electoral disenfranchisement, low educational attainment, and health disparities to structural and institutional inequalities resulting from racial retrenchments. Activists also recalled the treaty's citizenship guarantees to push for property rights, protection from vigilante attacks, and educational reform.

Omar Valerio-Jiménez addresses the politics of memory by exploring how succeeding generations reinforced or modified earlier memories of conquest according to their contemporary social and political contexts. Remembering Conquest also examines collective memories in the US and Mexico to illustrate transnational influences on Mexican Americans, and to demonstrate how community and national memories can be used strategically to advance political agendas.

Omar Valerio-Jiménez is professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Truffles and Trash

Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State

KELLY ALEXANDER

On a fragile planet with a growing population, shrinking natural resources, and spreading food insecurity, food waste is a social, political, and ethical problem. In Truffles and Trash, Kelly Alexander follows collaborative, sometimes scrappy institutional and community efforts to recuperate and redistribute food waste in Brussels, Belgium. She offers a close analysis of three sites: a food bank with ties to the E.U.; a “social restaurant” serving low-cost meals made from unsellable donated food prepared and served by an emergent immigrant labor force; and, finally, a social inclusion program in an urban market with a weekly “zero food waste” pop-up café. Alexander illustrates how these efforts, in concert with innovative policy, effectively recirculate surplus discarded but edible food to new publics who can use it.

According to Alexander, the models face big challenges, including reproducing the very power dynamics across race, class, and citizenship status that they seek to circumvent. They mirror the tensions and challenges of the everyday operations of the European social welfare state, which is increasingly reliant on NGOs to meet its provisioning promises. Yet, she finds that they also successfully move the needle forward in reducing food waste across one city, providing a model for major urban centers around the world.

April 2024

368 pages

Latin American & Caribbean Studies Rights: World

Kelly Alexander is assistant professor and George B. Tindall Fellow of American Studies at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. June 2024

pages

Brown Women Have Everything

Essays on (Dis)comfort and Delight

SAYANTANI DASGUPTA

As a child growing up in New Delhi, Sayantani Dasgupta wanted to go on adventures involving shipwrecks and treasure chests. Her parents wanted her to stay in school instead. She satisfied her curiosity by drawing maps, inventing languages with friends, and reading everything: English adventures, Russian folktales, Hindi comics, Bengali ghost stories.

Brown Women Have Everything embraces the same spirit of wonder as we follow Dasgupta, now living and teaching in the United States, to cathedrals in Italy, pirate graveyards in North Carolina, hair salons in Idaho, her aunt’s kitchen in Bangladesh, graffiti-lined streets of Colombia, the hierarchical world of academia, and her marriage to a handsome Sikh. As she moves through the world, she examines issues of the body, violence, travel, and belonging with a mix of humor, joy, pride, and outrage. While the eighteen interwoven essays in this collection call out bigotry, bias, and othering, they ultimately celebrate the ties that bind our disparate, global lives together.

January 2024

304 pages

History Rights: World

The Edwin Fox

The Extraordinary Story of How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization

BOYD COTHRAN AND ADRIAN SHUBERT

It began as a small, slow, and unadorned sailing vessel—in a word, ordinary. Later, it was a weary workhorse in the age of steam. But the story of the Edwin Fox reveals how an everyday merchant ship drew together a changing world and its people in an extraordinary age of rising empires, sweeping economic transformation, and social change. This fascinating work of global history offers a vividly detailed and engaging narrative of globalization writ small, viewed from the decks and holds of a single vessel. The Edwin Fox connected the lives and histories of millions, though most never even saw it.

Built in Calcutta in 1853, the Edwin Fox was chartered by the British navy as a troop transport during the Crimean War. In the following decades, it was sold, recommissioned, and refitted by an increasingly far-flung constellation of militaries and merchants. It sailed to exotic ports carrying luxury goods, mundane wares, and all kinds of people: not just soldiers and officials but indentured laborers brought from China to Cuba, convicts and settlers being transported from the British Empire to western Australia and New Zealand—with dire consequences for local Indigenous peoples—and others. But the power of this story rests in the everyday ways people, nations, economies, and ideas were knitted together in this foundational era of our modern world.

Boyd Cothran is associate professor of history at York University. Adrian Shubert is professor emeritus at York University.

Sayantani Dasgupta is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Between Two Worlds

Jewish War Brides after the Holocaust

ROBIN JUDD

Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry.

Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust and married an American soldier after liberation, introduces us to the Jewish women who lived through genocide and went on to wed American, Canadian, and British military personnel after the war. She offers an intimate portrait of how these unions emerged and developed—from meeting and courtship to marriage and immigration to life in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—and shows how they helped shape the postwar world by touching thousands of lives, including those of the chaplains who officiated their weddings, the Allied authorities whose policy decisions structured the couples' fates, and the bureaucrats involved in immigration and acculturation. The stories Judd tells are at once heartbreaking and restorative, and she vividly captures how the exhilaration of the brides' early romances coexisted with survivor's guilt, grief, and apprehension at the challenges of starting a new life in a new land.

Robin Judd is associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, where she directs the Hoffman Leaders and Leadership in History Fellowship program.

Sabor Judío

The Jewish Mexican Cookbook

ILAN STAVANS AND MARGARET E. BOYLE

Cookbooks for Jewish and Mexican food are legion, but Sabor Judío is the first to celebrate the fusion of these two fascinating and beloved culinary traditions. This joyful and fully illustrated book demonstrates how cooking and eating connect the Jewish Mexican diaspora across places and generations. Featuring one hundred deeply personal recipes enjoyed by Mexican Jews around the world, the book is organized by meal—desayuno (breakfast), almuerzo (lunch), and cena (dinner)—and also includes dishes made for Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover, Hanukah, Shavuot, and other holidays. Sabor Judío isn’t only a cookbook; it is also a vibrant history of Jewish immigration to Mexico from 1492 to the present. It explains how favorite flavors and dishes evolved in Mexican and Jewish kitchens and how they fused into a distinct cuisine, mainly by the labor of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and converso women. The cookbook is the product of two award-winning, internationally known Jewish Mexican writers who spent a decade gathering recipes and personal narratives from Jewish Mexican households.

Ilan Stavans, a leading Jewish Mexican scholar and critic, is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Margaret Boyle is Director of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies at Bowdoin College.

January 2024

352 pages

Jewish Studies / Military History Rights: World

October 2024

280 pages

Cooking / Food Studies Rights: World

The Women of Rendevous

A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery

JENNY SHAW

The Women of Rendezvous is a dramatic transatlantic story about five women who birthed children by the same prominent Barbados politician and enslaver. Two of the women were his wives, two he enslaved, and one was a servant in his household. All were determined to make their way in a world that vastly and differentially circumscribed their life choices. From a Barbados plantation to the center of England’s empire in London, Hester Tomkyns, Frances Knights, Susannah Mingo, Elizabeth Ashcroft, and Dorothy Spendlove built remarkable lives for themselves and their children in spite of, not because of, the man who linked them together.

Mining seventeenth- and eighteenth-century court records, deeds, wills, church registers, and estate inventories, Jenny Shaw centers the experiences of the women and their children, intertwining the microlevel relationships of family and the macrolevel political machinations of empire to show how white supremacy and racism developed in England and the colonies. Shaw also explores England’s first slave society in North America, provides a glimpse into Black Britain long before the Windrush generation of the twentieth century, and demonstrates that England itself was a society with slaves in the early modern era.

Jenny Shaw is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama.

December 2024

424 pages

History / Atlantic World Rights: World

Captive Cosmopolitans

Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery

MARY E. HICKS

From the bustling ports of Lisbon to the coastal inlets of the Bight of Benin to the vibrant waterways of Bahia, Black mariners were integral to every space of the commercial South Atlantic. Navigating this kaleidoscopic world required a remarkable cosmopolitanism—the chameleonlike ability to adapt to new surroundings by developing sophisticated medicinal, linguistic, and navigational knowledge. Mary E. Hicks shows how Portuguese slaving ship captains harnessed and exploited this hybridity to expand their own traffic in human bondage. At the same time, she reveals how enslaved and free Black mariners capitalized on their shipboard positions and cosmopolitan expertise to participate in small-scale commodity trading on the very coasts where they themselves had been traded as commodities, reshaping societies and cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, as Hicks argues, the Bahian slave trade was ruthlessly effective because its uniquely decentralized structure so effectively incorporated the desires and financial strategies of the very people enslaved by it. Yet taking advantage of such fraught economic opportunities ultimately enabled many enslaved Black mariners to purchase their freedom. And, in some cases, they became independent transatlantic slave traders themselves.

Hicks thus explores the central paradox that defined the lives of the captive cosmopolitans and, in doing so, reveals a new history of South Atlantic slavery centered on subaltern commercial and cultural exchange.

Mary E. Hicks is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago.

In Place of Mobility

Railroads,

Rebels, and Migrants in an Argentine-Chilean Borderland

KYLE E. HARVEY

In the mid-nineteenth century, decades after independence in Latin America, borderlands presented existential challenges to consolidating nation-states. In Place of Mobility examines how and why these spaces became challenging to governments and what their meaningfulness is for our understanding of the development of a global world by examining one of those spaces: the Trans-Andean, an Argentine-Chilean borderland connected by the Andes mountains and centered on the Argentine region of Cuyo. It answers these questions by interweaving three narratives: Chilean migration to western Argentina; mountain-crossing Argentine rebels; and the formation of plans for railroads to cross the mountains.

Out of these narratives emerges a twofold argument that, on the one hand, locates the causes and stakes of foundational national conflicts in Argentina in a Pacific-facing Trans-Andean and, on the other hand, sees the Trans-Andean as part of mid-nineteenth-century globalization, thus connecting national conflicts, nonnational geographies, and globalization. As a result, this book challenges dominant narratives about social and political conflicts at this formative moment in Argentine and Latin American history while opening up discussion on the methodologies and meaningfulness of transnational, borderlands, and global histories.

Kyle E. Harvey is assistant professor of history at Western Carolina University.

Thanks to Life

A Biography of Violeta Parra

ERICKA KIM VERBA

Chilean musician and artist Violeta Parra (1917–1967) is an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe. Her music is synonymous with resistance, and it animated both the Chilean folk revival and the protest music movement Nueva Canción (New Song). Her renowned song "Gracias a la vida" has been covered countless times, including by Joan Baez, Mercedes Sosa, and Kacey Musgraves. A self-taught visual artist, Parra was the first Latin American to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts in the Louvre. In this remarkable biography, Ericka Verba traces Parra's radical life and multifaceted artistic trajectory across Latin America and Europe and on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Drawing on decades of research, Verba paints a vivid and nuanced picture of Parra's life. From her modest beginnings in southern Chile to her untimely death, Parra was an exceptionally complex and talented woman who exposed social injustice in Latin America to the world through her powerful and poignant songwriting. This examination of her creative, political, and personal life, flaws and all, illuminates the depth and agency of Parra's journey as she invented and reinvented herself in her struggle to be recognized as an artist on her own terms.

Ericka Kim Verba is professor of Latin American studies at California State University, Los Angeles.

December 2024

304 pages

History / Latin American & Caribbean Studies

Rights: World

January 2025

448 pages

Biography / Music

Rights: World

January 2025

288 pages

Biography / History / Islamic Studies

Rights: World

Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua

An Enslaved Muslim of the Black Atlantic

PAUL E. LOVEJOY AND NIELSON BEZERRA

A literate Muslim born between 1820 and 1830 in present-day Benin, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was enslaved in the interior of West Africa and forcibly moved to Brazil in 1845. He escaped from slavery when his master took him to New York City in 1847. Baquaqua then fled to Haiti where he converted to Christianity. When he eventually returned to the United States, he enrolled in New York Central College. Baquaqua published his autobiography in 1854 and traveled to Liverpool, England, with the intention of returning to Africa. He apparently achieved this goal by the early 1860s, when his paper trail disappears.

Lovejoy and Bezerra's analysis of this remarkable autobiography—the only known narrative by a former Brazilian slave—illuminates what Baquaqua's home in Africa was like, examines African slavery in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil, and offers an Atlantic perspective on resistance to slavery in the Americas in the era of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

Paul E. Lovejoy is Distinguished Research Professor and Canada Chair in African Diaspora History at York University. Nielson Rosa Bezerra is Director of Research and Pedagogical Affairs at the Heritage and Historical Reference Center of Duque de Caxias, Rio de Janeiro and at the Living Museum of São Bento.

Black Girls and How We Fail Them

ARIA S. HALLIDAY

From hip-hop moguls and talk radio to political debates and critically acclaimed films, we communicate that Black girls don’t matter and their girlhood is not safe. Alarming statistics indicate the effects of the harm Black girls face, yet Black girls’ representation still heavily relies on us seeing their abuse as an important factor in others’ growth and development. Since 2008, the growth of diverse representation in our media has coincided with a hatred of Black girls asserts Aria S. Halliday in this provocative new book.

Halliday uses her astute expertise of popular culture, feminist theory, and Black girlhood to expose how we have been complicit in depicting Black girls as unwanted and disposable, while letting them fend for themselves. Our society's inability to see or understand Black girls as girls makes us culpable in their abuse. However, we don’t have to fail them. In this ambitious book for political analysts, hip-hop lovers, pop culture junkies, and parents, Halliday provides the critical discussion we need to create a world that supports, affirms, and loves Black girls. Our future depends on it.

Aria S. Halliday is associate professor of gender and women’s studies and African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky.

The Breach

Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy

ALAN MCPHERSON

A president defying Congress. Disrespect for the law. Attacks on the press. Evasion in the courts. The privatization of war. Quid pro quos with foreign nations. The mounting dangers to American democracy have long been with us. But all these perils first emerged together during the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan-Bush era. This opaque foreign policy mess has receded from history, a minor speedbump at the triumphant end of the Cold War. With American democracy in increasing jeopardy from the inside, however, Iran-Contra must be reassessed as a major step down that dark path.

In this gripping blow-by-blow account of the 1980s efforts to trade arms with Iran illegally, fund rebels in Central America despite a congressional prohibition, and dodge political and legal consequences once the truth emerged, Alan McPherson argues for the salience of six democracy-degrading behaviors throughout the fiasco. At the time, many warned of the broad attack on democratic norms, yet no one paid a real price or learned a lesson. Those failures left the country more divided than ever before, and ill-equipped for more severe assaults to come.

352 pages

Politics / Latin American Studies

Rights: World

Cold War Asia

Unlearning Narratives, Making New Histories

EDITED BY HAJIMU MASUDA

Conventional narratives of the Cold War revolve around high-level diplomats and state leaders in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow, but this anthology challenges those narratives by revealing how ordinary people across Asia experienced the era. Heavily rooted in oral history, this study takes readers to the villages of rural Java; the jungles of northern Thailand; the indigenous tribal communities of Kerala, India; and many other places in this vast region.

The essays in this collection demonstrate how the world took shape far away from the voluminously analyzed epicenters of the Soviet Union, the United States, and China. Masuda organizes each chapter around the theme of "many Cold Wars," or, more precisely, many local and social wars that were imagined as part of the global Cold War. These histories raise fundamental questions about standard Cold War narratives, encouraging readers to rethink why the Cold War still matters.

Masuda Hajimu is associate professor of history at the National University of Singapore.

May 2025

368 pages

Cold War History

Rights: World

Alan McPherson is professor of history at Temple University and author of Ghosts of Sheridan Circle.

Dilemmas of Authenticity

The American Muslim Crisis of Faith

ZAID ADHAMI

The past two decades have witnessed pervasive anxieties in US Muslim communities around a perceived crisis of faith. As Zaid Adhami argues in this richly textured ethnography, these concerns are fundamentally about the pressures and dilemmas of authenticity—what it really means to be a Muslim. While discussions about authenticity in Islam typically focus on maintaining tradition and competing claims to "true Islam," Adhami focuses instead on the powerful idea of being true to one's own self and having genuine belief. Drawing on extensive conversations with American Muslims and careful readings of broader communal discourse, Adhami shows that this drive for personal authenticity plays out in complicated ways. It can produce deep doubt while also serving as the grounds to affirm tradition. It can converge with revivalist modes of piety, but it can also prompt emphatic challenges to communal orthodoxies.

Through vivid storytelling and sensitive analysis, Adhami illuminates why religious doubt is often a source of intense anxiety in today's world and how people maintain their faith despite such unsettling uncertainty.

April 2025

320 pages

Latin American & Caribbean Studies

World

Exceptionalism in Crisis

Faction, Anarchy, and Mexico in the US Imagination during the Civil War Era

ALYS D. BEVERTON

Before 1861, US Americans could confidently claim to belong to the New World’s "exceptional" republic, unlike other self-governing nations in the Western Hemisphere such as Mexico, which struggled with political violence and unrest. Americans used such comparisons to show themselves and the world that democracy in the United States was working as designed.

The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 exploded this illusion by showing that the United States was in fact not immune to domestic political instability. Joining a growing community of historians who study the war in a global context, Alys D. Beverton examines Mexico's place in the US imagination during the Civil War and postbellum period. Beverton reveals how pro- and antiwar Confederates and Unionists alike used Mexico's long history of political strife to alternately justify and oppose the Civil War and, after 1865, various policies aimed at reuniting the states. All used Mexico as a cautionary tale of how easily a nation could slip into anarchy in the tumultuous nineteenth century, even the so-called exceptional United States.

Alys D. Beverton is senior lecturer in American history at Oxford Brookes University.

Zaid Adhami is an assistant professor of religion at Williams College.

Landscaping Patagonia

Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina

MARÍA DE LOS ÁNGELES PICONE

In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and protect borders but also to define the physical contours of their respective nations. Chilean and Argentine authorities in particular attempted to transform northern Patagonia, a space they perceived as "desert," through a myriad of nationalizing policies, from military campaigns to hotels. Explorers, migrants, local authorities, bandits, and visitors also made sense of the nation by inhabiting the physical space of the northern Patagonian Andes. They surveyed passes, opened roads, claimed land titles, traveled miles to the nearest police station, rode miles on horseback to escape the police, and hiked the landscape.

María de los Ángeles Picone tells the story of how people living, governing, and traveling through northern Patagonia sought to construct versions of Chile and Argentina based on their ideas about geographical space in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By repositioning the analytical focus from Santiago and Buenos Aires to northern Patagonia, Picone reveals how a wide array of actors, with varying degrees of political, economic, and social power, assigned distinctive—and sometimes conflicting—meanings to space and national identity.

María de los Ángeles Picone is assistant professor of history at Boston College.

Moved by the Dead

Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil

MICHAEL AMORUSO

In the sprawling city of São Paulo, a weekly practice known as devotion to souls (devoção às almas) draws devotees to Catholic churches, cemeteries, and other sites associated with tragic or unjust deaths. The living pray and light candles for the souls of the dead, remembering events and circumstances in a rite of collective suffering. Yet contemporary devotion to souls is not confined to Catholic adherents or fixed to specific locations. The practice is also linked to popular tours of haunted sites in the city, moving within an urban environment that is routinely marked by violence and death. While based in Catholic traditions, devotion to souls is as complex and multifaceted as religion itself in Brazil, where African, Portuguese, and other cultural forms have blended and evolved over centuries.

Michael Amoruso's insightful work uses the methods of ethnography, religious studies, and urban studies to consider how devotion to souls embodies, adapts, and challenges conventional ideas of religion as tethered to specific sites and practices. Examining devotees' varied ways of ascribing meaning to their actions, Amoruso argues that devotion to souls acts as form of what he calls "mnemonic repair," tying the living to the dead in a struggle against the forces of forgetting.

Michael Amoruso is assistant professor of religious studies at Occidental College.

April 2025

208 pages

Religion Rights: World

February 2025 328 pages

Latin American Studies Rights: World

May 2025

256 pages

Sports History

Rights: World

February 2025

280 pages

Colonial History

Rights: World

Playing Through Pain

The Violent Consequences of Capitalist Sport

DANIEL SAILOFSKY

For many fans and casual observers, professional sports and violence are deeply connected. Violence on the field has real consequences for players, notably in the form of life-altering injuries from concussions. Off the field, in the last several decades scores of athletes have committed violent acts, from domestic abuse and sexual assault to animal abuse and murder. Beyond athletes, sport also serves as a site of political and structural violence, from the displacement and hyperpolicing of everyday people for mega-events to the “sportswashing” of environmentally harmful industries.

Daniel Sailofsky examines the endemic violence in professional sports and argues that— while related to masculinity, misogyny, and individual factors like alcohol consumption and gambling—it is most intimately tied to capitalism and to capitalist modes of consumption and profit. Sailofsky explains how capitalism creates the conditions for violence to thrive and uncovers how sports leaders—coaches, league officials, and team owners—obfuscate these relationships to avoid accountability. From minor league baseball exploitation to spectator hooliganism, Sailofsky shows the connections between the business of sports and violence, but also, more importantly, he imagines new forms of sport that are not places of harm.

Daniel Sailofsky is an assistant professor of kinesiology and physical education at the University of Toronto.

Saltwater

Grief in Early America

MARY EYRING

Death is easy to locate in the archives of early America. Grief is not so easily pinned down. Yet it was a near constant companion for the men and women that settled in what is now New England. Their lives were a kaleidoscope of small-scale tragedies that suffused and colored everyday experiences. This pervasive suffering was exacerbated by unfamiliar environments and exposure to the anguish of Indigenous and Black Americans, unsettling well-worn frameworks to produce new dimensions of everyday grief. Mary Eyring traces these fleeting, often mundane, glimpses of grief in the archives—a note about a sailor maimed during a whaling voyage, the hint of a miscarriage in a court record, the suggestion of domestic violence within a tract on witchcraft, a house sent up in flames at the opening of a captivity narrative—to show how the cumulative weight of grief created a persistent mood that influenced public and private affairs in sweeping ways largely unexamined by previous scholars. With piercing insights and evocative prose, Eyring follows grief across generations and oceans to reveal a language of suffering understood and shared across diverse early American communities.

Mary Eyring is associate professor of English and American studies at Brigham Young University.

Searching for Memory

Aluízio Palmar and the Shadow of Dictatorship in Brazil

JACOB BLANC

This biography of Brazilian journalist and activist Aluízio Ferreira Palmar (b. 1943) tells the remarkable story of a revolutionary who, after surviving torture as a political prisoner during his country's military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, would go on to devote his life to recovering the memory and documenting the evidence of human rights abuses in Brazil. Palmar's recounting of his life, in personal interviews with Jacob Blanc as well as from a wide array of source materials, offers a valuable window into how former activists view their place in history.

In this context, Blanc initiates the concept of "memory scripts," which illustrates how scripting and performing a memory can serve as an act of perseverance and power, important for individuals and communities seeking both to heal from and redefine trauma for future activism. Blanc's book is a singular contribution to literature on dictatorship in Brazil and across Latin America by exploring not only what happened under military rule but also the contested channels through which the memories of these intense and often traumatic events have been sustained, shaped, and retold.

Jacob Blanc is associate professor of history and international development studies at McGill University.

The Work of Empire

War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines

JUSTIN

F. JACKSON

In 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, the US Army seemed minuscule and ill-equipped for global conflict, yet its soldiers defeated Spain and pacified nationalist insurgencies in Cuba and the Philippines over the next fifteen years. Despite its lack of experience in colonial administration, the army also ruled and transformed the daily lives of the 8 million people who inhabited these tropical islands.

How did the relatively small and inexperienced army succeed in managing the day-to-day operations in its new territories? The US military depended on tens of thousands of Cubans and Filipinos to fight its wars and do the work of civil government. Whether compelled to labor for free or voluntarily working for wages, Cubans and Filipinos, suspended between civilian and soldier status, enabled US foreign rule by interpreting, guiding, building, selling sex to, and performing numerous other labors for American troops. The Work of Empire reveals how their work disrupted the islands' older political, economic, and cultural hierarchies in ways that endured in postwar and post-occupation "civilian" regimes. Justin Jackson offers new ways to understand not only the rise of US military might but also how this power influenced a globalizing imperial world.

Justin Jackson is associate professor of history at Bard College at Simon's Rock.

April 2025

304 pages

Biography / Latin American Studies

Rights: World

May 2025

400 pages

Military History / Latin American & Caribbean History

Rights: World

The Age of the Borderlands

Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790–1850

ANDREW C. ISENBERG

Acclaimed historian Andrew C. Isenberg offers a new history of manifest destiny that breaks from triumphalist narratives of US territorial expansion. Isenberg takes readers to the contested borders of Spanish Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Minnesota at critical moments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that the architects of expansion faced significant challenges from the diverse groups of people inhabiting each region. In other words, while the manifest destiny paradigm begins with an assumption of US strength, the government and the agents it dispatched to settle and control the frontier had only a weak presence. Tracing the interconnected histories of Indians, slaves, antislavery reformers, missionaries, federal agents, and physicians, Isenberg shows that the United States was repeatedly forced to accommodate the presence of other colonial empires and powerful Indigenous societies. Anti-expansionists in the borderlands welcomed the precarity of the government's power: The land on which they dwelled was a grand laboratory where they could experiment with their alternative visions for American society. Examining the borderlands offers an understanding about the nature of the early American state— ambitiously expansionist but challenged by its native and imperial competitors.

Andrew C. Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. April 2025

The Memoirs of Robert and Mabel Williams

African American Freedom, Armed Resistance, and International Solidarity

June 2025

360 pages

Biography Rights: World

EDITED BY AKINYELE K. UMOJA, GLORIA HOUSE,

AND JOHN H. BRACEY, JR.

Born in Jim Crow–era Monroe, North Carolina, Robert F. Williams and Mabel Williams were the state's most legendary freedom fighters. Robert organized an armed paramilitary group to protect his community from the Ku Klux Klan. The Williamses’ leadership in Monroe was just the beginning of their lifelong pursuit of justice for Black people and for oppressed populations throughout the world. Their activism foreshadowed major developments including Malcolm X's advocacy of fighting oppression "by any means necessary," the emergence of the Black Panther Party, and Black solidarity with Third World liberation movements. Robert documented his experiences in Monroe in his classic 1962 book, Negroes with Guns, and completed a draft of a memoir before his death in 1996. Mabel began a memoir of her own before her death in 2014. The two are presented together in this book, offering a gripping portrait of these pioneering freedom fighters that is both deeply intimate and a fierce call to action in the ongoing fight against racial injustice.

Akinyele K. Umoja is a professor of Africana studies at Georgia State University. Gloria Aneb House is a poet, activist, and professor emerita at University of Michigan–Dearborn. John H. Bracey Jr. (d. 2023) was a professor of Afro-American studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst.

A Common Grave

Being Catholic in English America

SUSAN JUSTER

From Nevis to Newfoundland, Catholics were everywhere in English America. But often feared and distrusted, they hid in plain sight, deftly obscuring themselves from the Protestant authorities. Their strategies of concealment, deception, and misdirection frustrated colonial census takers, and their presence has likewise eluded historians of religion, who have portrayed Catholics as isolated dots in an otherwise vast Protestant expanse. Pushing against this long-standing narrative, Susan Juster provides the first comprehensive look at the lived experience of Catholics—whether Irish, African, French, or English—in colonial America. She reveals a vibrant community that, although often forced to conceal itself, maintained a rich sacramental life saturated with traditional devotional objects and structured by familiar rituals. As Juster shows, the unique pressures of colonial existence forced Catholics to adapt and transform these religious practices. By following the faithful into their homes and private chapels as they married, christened infants, buried loved ones, and prayed for their souls, Juster uncovers a confluence of European, African, and Indigenous spiritual traditions produced by American colonialism.

Juster

June 2025

312 pages

Religion Rights: World

Hubert Harrison Forbidden Genius

BRIAN KWOBA

of Black Radicalism

The significance of Hubert Henry Harrison (1883–1927)—as a journalist, activist, and educator—lies in his innovation of radical solutions to grave injustices, especially the staggering luxury for the few alongside the crushing poverty for the many in the first few decades of the twentieth century. White mob violence continually haunted African American communities, while imperial conquest and world wars wrought wanton destruction upon entire nations of people. These conditions sparked a global political awakening to which Harrison gave voice as a leading figure in cutting-edge struggles for socialism, in the free love movement, and in the Harlem Renaissance. He also played a pivotal role in the rise of Marcus Garvey and the establishment of the largest international organization of Black people in modern history. Because of his fierce and fearless radicalism, however, he has been erased from popular memory.

Hubert Harrison presents a historical restoration of Harrison's numerous intellectual and political breakthroughs. Offering a fresh interpretation of his contributions to social movements for economic, racial, and sexual liberation, Brian Kwoba's richly textured narrative highlights the startling and continued relevance of Harrison's visionary thinking across generations.

Brian Kwoba is associate professor of history at the University of Memphis.

June 2025

392 pages

Biography Rights: World

Susan

is W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library.

May 2025

Studies

No Race, No Country

The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright DEBORAH MUTNICK

No Race, No Country presents a major reconsideration of the breakthrough African American author Richard Wright’s work and life. It challenges standard evaluations of his reputation as an autodidact, his late novels, his travel books, and his political commitments after he left the Communist Party USA. Deborah Mutnick engages a wide range of Wright's work throughout his career, from the posthumously published novel The Man Who Lived Underground to the haikus he produced late in his life. The book provides a nuanced perspective on his complicated gender politics and his serious engagement with Marx's notions of historical materialism, alienation, and commodity fetishism. Adding to a small but growing number of studies of his ecological consciousness, it also examines both his closeness to nature, especially during his youth and late in life, and his early mapping of a racial geography of the "second nature" of the sociocultural world that overlaps with and transforms the natural world. Finally, it joins a recent surge in scholarship on Wright's later nonfiction as a progenitor of Black radical internationalism in the 1960s and 1970s.

May 2025

280 pages

Religion / Islamic Politics

Rights: World

Secular Sensibilities

Romance, Marriage, and Contemporary Algerian Immigration to France and Québec

JENNIFER SELBY

How do secular politics work to manage the emotional, affective, and embodied nature of religion in the public sphere? Drawing on an expansive transnational ethnography in France and Canada and assessing contemporary French and Québécois governmental legislation on secularism and immigration, Jennifer Selby considers expectations for secular bodies and sensibilities among men and women of Algerian origin. In her subjects' evocative narratives of longing and belonging, Selby charts how secular sensibilities emerge in marriage partner preferences, family relationships, rituals, dress, and more. Selby reveals how these sensibilities develop and respond to legal and other forms of state authority, with legacies of colonialism in France and Québec playing a substantial role.

In demonstrating how secularism is expressed and experienced around intimate relationships and civil marriage, Selby persuasively argues that romance is a crucial contact zone for the politics of secularism. Her study invites readers to wrestle with their own entanglements in state and cultural expectations of secular bodies and the liberal fictions of separation between the religious and public spheres.

Jennifer A. Selby is professor of religious studies and political science at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

Deborah Mutnick is professor of English at Long Island University.

Something to Do with Power

Julian Mayfield’s Journey toward a Black Radical Thought, 1948-1984

DAVID ROMINE

Unlike his more well-known contemporaries such as Malcolm X and Maya Angelou, Julian Hudson Mayfield (1928–84) has remained on the periphery of mainstream historical narratives. Yet his extensive intellectual archive has been a vital resource for historians exploring Black radicalism. By centering Mayfield's lived experiences across five decades and four continents, this book offers a unique lens into the complex intersections of Black communism, Black nationalism, and Black internationalism during the Cold War era.

Something to Do with Power highlights the importance of Mayfield's story of mutual interest and solidarity in shaping literary and political activism, offering a fresh examination of the Black left's role in American culture. His legacy as a writer, propagandist, and artist committed to resisting the domination of white supremacy underscores his significant, though underappreciated, contribution to American history.

David Romine is lecturer of history at Winston-Salem State University.

June 2025

304 pages Biography Rights: World

University of New Mexico Press

About University of New Mexico Press

Established in 1929 by the Regents of the University of New Mexico, the University of New Mexico Press ranks within the top third of publishing houses in the Association of University Presses and is the fourth largest university press west of the Rocky Mountains in publishing new titles. With over 1,200 titles currently in print and as a distributor for local and regional publishers, the Press has been an important element in enhancing the scholarly reputation and worldwide visibility of the university.

The University of New Mexico Press participates in the public mission of the University of New Mexico through a publishing program that seeks to maintain the professional excellence of American university presses in general and to present the finest national and international scholarship in the academic areas in which we publish. We produce scholarly books in the arts, humanities, and natural and social sciences—more specifically, in the areas of fine arts, Western history, Latin American studies, literature, poetry, environmental studies, archaeology, anthropology, and natural history. In recognition of the university’s educational outreach and public role, we also publish books of general interest and significance for our state and our region.

unmpress.com

Popular Politics and Protest Analysis in Latin America

MOISES ARCE AND TAKESHI WADA

The arrival of democracy and globalization was a watershed moment for Latin America. It produced a changing political and economic environment, where democracy provided challengers with expanding political opportunities but globalization precipitated economic threats to livelihoods and human welfare. This changing environment removed the state from modes of political representation, such as urban labor movements and their affiliated mass-party organizations, while unleashing more pluralistic, heterogenous, and decentralized patterns of popular representation. Reducing its role in production, the state became mostly a regulator of economic activities.

Arce and Wada's volume examines the consequences of democracy and globalization on popular protests in Latin America, theorizing a broad shift of popular politics involving reactive and proactive mobilizations. A collaboration of sixteen distinguished scholars with different specializations (economists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists) in both the Global North and South, the volume provides a unique collection of studies of protest events in ten Latin American countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela.

Moisés Arce is the Scott and Marjorie Cowen Chair in Latin American Social Sciences and Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University. Takeshi Wada is Professor in the Department of Area Studies and Director of the Latin American and Iberian Network for Academic Collaboration (LAINAC) at The University of Tokyo.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

A Classic Novel of New Mexico

WILLA CATHER

EDITED AND WITH AN

INTRODUCTION

BY RICHARD W. ETULAIN

Willa Cather is one of the greatest writers of twentieth-century American literature. Her masterwork Death Comes for the Archbishop tells the story of the French Catholic priest Jean Marie Latour, appointed to serve as the first bishop of the newly created diocese of New Mexico after the Mexican-American War. Along with his friend and vicar Joseph Vaillant, Latour makes the long journey to the newly annexed territory of New Mexico—a vast expanse that was once “the cradle of the Faith in the New World,” but where now the few priests are without guidance or discipline and where the old mission churches have fallen into ruin. Here, Latour and Vaillant encounter a completely strange and unfamiliar brand of Catholicism. But over time the two priests gradually learn to adjust to the ways of the New World Catholics and even open up their eyes to Native American religious ideas so seemingly distant from their own beliefs.

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was an American writer known for her spare, unswerving look at the American plains and west. She is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for her WWI novel One of Ours, and the author of classic novels O Pioneers! and My Antonia, in addition to her classic novel of New Mexico, Death Comes for the Archbishop

The Ultimate Protest

Malcom W. Brown, Thcih Quâng Dúc, and the News Photograph that Stunned the World

RAY E. BOOMHOWER

The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Thich Quảng Đức, and the News Photograph That Stunned the World examines how the most unlikely of war correspondents, Malcolm W. Browne, became the only Western reporter to capture Buddhist monk Thich Quảng Đức’s horrific self-immolation on June 11, 1963. Quảng Đức made his ultimate sacrifice to protest the perceived anti-Buddhist policies of the Catholic-dominated administration of South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem. The Ultimate Protest explores the background of the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam in the spring of 1963 that led to Quảng Đức’s self-sacrifice, as well as the worldwide reaction to Browne’s photograph, how it affected American policy toward Diem’s government, and the role the image played in the violent coup on November 1, 1963, that deposed Diem and led to his assassination.

The book also delves into the dynamics involved in covering the Vietnam War in the early days of the American presence and the pressures placed on the journalists—Browne and his colleague Peter Arnett from the AP, David Halberstam from the New York Times, and Neil Sheehan from United Press International—there to "get on the team" and stop raising doubts about how the war was going. Browne and Halberstam shared the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for their reporting from Vietnam.

Ray E. Boomhower is a senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press. His books include The Soldier’s Friend: A Life of Ernie Pyle; Dispatches from the Pacific: The World War II Reporting of Robert L. Sherrod; and Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam

March 2024

344 pages

Biography / Journalism / Vietnam Era

Rights: World

Embracing Autonomy

Latin American-US Relations in the Twenty-First Century GREGORY WEEKS

Too many analyses of Latin American-U.S. relations focus primarily on the U.S. perspective. Greg Weeks’ Embracing Autonomy departs from other general treatments of Latin American-U.S. relations not by putting U.S. policy aside, but by bringing in the Latin American and global contexts more closely and thus avoiding the incomplete picture provided by a narrow focus solely on the policies of the United States.

To do so, the book utilizes the concept of autonomy, which has been developed and used by Latin American analysts for decades. The core of autonomy for Latin America from the U.S. is seen in new, deeper, and more numerous relationships that do not include the United States. Broadly speaking, they can be political or economic. Political relationships include the creation and strengthening of international institutions, diplomatic initiatives, military agreements, and diplomatic summits. Economic ties include trade agreements, foreign investment, and loans. These are all things Latin American governments currently focus on, and more globally than in the past.

Gregory Weeks is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at UNC Charlotte, and Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies. For over two decades, he has published extensively on U.S.-Latin American Relations, Latin American Politics, and immigration. With Michael Allison, he is the author of U.S. and Latin American Relations, 3rd edition

March 2024

152 pages

Film / American West

Rights: World

Ride the High Country

Part of the Reel West Series

ROBERT NOTT

Director Sam Peckinpah was just starting out when he made Ride the High Country in 1962. The New York Times review referred to him as an “unknown,” though in truth he had already made a string of TV Westerns and one forgotten feature. He was a new kind of director, young, brash, and in a hurry to help the Western “grow up” by treating with adult themes. Ride the High Country was, for its time, something new and different, something a little reassuring and a little scary, a hybrid Western that let viewers know that not only was the ever-transitioning West changing, but so was the ever-transitioning Western. Stars Randolph Scott and Joel McRea were old hands at this sort of thing. Ride the High Country gave the two veteran actors one last job to do, a chance to go out with some dignity – exactly like the characters they played in the film. Just a year before the assassination of a popular president, the start of an unpopular war, and the turmoil of civil-rights protests that would upend the nation, Ride the High Country did in fact help the genre mature and adapt to the turbulent, changing times. It also launched Peckinpah’s career, and invoked all the themes honor, loyalty, and compromised ideals, the destruction of the West and its heroes, and the difficulty of doing right in an unjust world present in his later masterpiece The Wild Bunch

Robert Nott is the author of three books on Western film: The Films of Randolph Scott; Last of the Cowboy Heroes; and The Films of Budd Boetticher, all published by McFarland; and of Goin’ Crazy with Sam Peckinpah and all our Friends, co-authored with Max Evans and published by UNM Press. He has been a reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican for the last 20 years.

Women's Suffrage in the Americas

STEPHANIE MITCHELL

Women’s Suffrage in the Americas provides an outstanding analysis of the long and often drawn-out process of attaining women's suffrage in the Western Hemisphere. Due attention is given to the unevenness of the process, not only across the Americas, but within each country with respect to which groups of women (and men) were excluded as suffrage was extended—Carmen Diana Deere, co-author of Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America. The first hemispheric study to trace how women in the Americas obtained the right to vote, Women’s Suffrage in the Americas pushes back against the misconception that women’s movements originated in the United States. The volume brings Latin American voices to the forefront of English-language scholarship. Suffragists across the hemisphere worked together, formed collegial networks to support each other’s work, and fostered advances toward women gaining the vote over time and space from one country to the next. The collection as a whole suggests five models by which women in the Americas gained the right to vote: through party politics; through decree, despite delays justified by women’s supposed conservative politics; through conservative defense of traditional roles for women; and, within the context of imperialism. However, historians have traditionally failed to view this common history through a hemispheric lens. Until now.

Stephanie Mitchell is professor of history at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, co-editor, of The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910–1953

The Struggle for Natural Resources

Findings From Bolivian History

CARMEN SOLIZ AND ROSANNA BARRAGÁN

The Struggle for Natural Resources traces the troubled history of Bolivia's land and commodity disputes across five centuries, combining local, regional, national, and transnational scales. Enriched by the extractivism and commodity frontiers approaches to world history, the book treats Bolivia's political struggles over natural resources as long-term processes that outlast immediate political events. Exploration of the Bolivian case invites dialogue and comparison with other parts of the world, particularly regions and countries of the so-called Global South.

Carmen Soliz is an associate professor of History and Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Rossana Barragán is Senior Fellow Researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam (2011-2022) and Professor of CIDES-UMSA La Paz. Ph D. at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales de Paris.

May 2024

408 pages

Women's Studies / Latin America / History Rights: World

March 2024

344 pages

Latin America / History / Politics Rights: World

April 2024

216 pages

Latin America / History / Politics Rights: World

The Creation of Modern Buenos Aires

Football, Civic Associations, Barrios, and Politics, 1912-1943

JOEL HOROWITZ

The Creation of Modern Buenos Aires examines the impact of civic associations on the culture and the society of Buenos Aires and their ties to politics in the first decades of the twentieth century. The period saw the emergence of the modern political system with true appeals to the voters, tremendous urban growth, and the solidification of a barrio identity. Historian Joel Horowitz examines four types of organizations: football clubs, bibliotecas populares (popular libraries), sociedades de fomento (development societies that pushed for barrio improvements), and universidades populares (popular universities that provided practical training beyond the primary school level). All four types became important social centers and were connected to the political world. The book focuses on the period from the passage of a voting reform law in 1912, which made male citizen voting obligatory and fraud more difficult, to the military coup of 1943. The book shows how civic associations helped create the social world of the city, especially the part they played in the development of the sense of barrio. It also demonstrates how civic associations became vital links in the system of politics that emerged. Civic associations became places for politicians to build connections to different communities. However, despite being created by inhabitants to fulfill some of their needs and generally run according to rules that prescribed democratic procedures, they did not function as schools for democracy.

Joel Horowitz is Emeritus Professor of History at Saint Bonaventure University. He is the author of Argentina’s Radical Party and Popular Mobilization, 1916-1930 and Argentine Unions, the State and the Rise of Perón, 1930-1945

April 2024

384 pages

Latin America / History / Archaeology Rights: World

Indiginous Culture and Change in Guerrero, Mexico, 7000 BCE to 1600 CE IAN JACOBS

With Indigenous Cultures and Regional Change in Guerrero, Mexico, Ian Jacobs at last puts Guerrero’s history firmly on the map of Mexican archaeology and history. The book brings together a vast amount of cross-disciplinary information to understand the deep roots of the Indigenous cultures of a complex region of Mexico, and the forces that shaped the foundations of colonial Mexico there in the sixteenth century and beyond. This book is particularly significant in exploiting archaeological and Indigenous, as well as historical sources.

Ian Jacobs is the author of Ranchero Revolt: The Mexican Revolution in Guerrero

The Chilean Dictatorship Novel

Memory, Postmemory, Affect, and Emotions

HELENE WELDT-BASSON

Though the civil rights abuses by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990) were later recognized by reparations and truth commissions, the difficult emotions suffered by the victims and their families were often pushed into the background or out of the national conversation entirely. In response, novelists began writing memory of feelings experience during the dictatorship into their books. In The Chilean Dictatorship Novel, Weldt-Basson examines fifteen novels and one testimony written on the topic of dictatorship to illustrate how the Chilean narratives center on affect and emotions. Each chapter focuses on a different emotion: feelings of loss because of father abandonment and spatial injustice caused by neoliberal urbanization of Santiago; despair articulated through tragic romances and affective landscapes; left-wing nostalgia and melancholia communicated through allegory; feelings of abjection caused by torture and betrayal; and the creation of affect through violent events, aggressive child-play and sexual torture. Through a close look at the work of José Donoso, Ariel Dorfman, Diamela Eltit, Carlos Franz, and Nona Fernández, among others, Weldt-Basson effectively argues that by inspiring emotion and creating empathy within readers, the authors of these books instill a drive in the readers for ongoing social justice advocacy, thereby transforming the process of reading into a platform for future action. Weldt-Basson’s landmark study will serve as a basis for future study of Latin American literature for decades to come.

Helene Weldt-Basson is a professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at University of North Dakota. She is author or editor of seven additional books including Masquerade and Social Justice in Contemporary Latin American Fiction (UNMP).

Julio Galán

The Art of Performative Transgression TERESA ECKMANN

From his provincial origins in the small northern Mexico town of Múzquiz, Coahuila, to his meteoric rise in Manhattan’s East Village art scene, to having achieved international standing at the time of his early death at the age of forty-seven, Julio Galán was radically transgressive, extending contemporary Mexican painting beyond the cultural criticism of the 1980s Neo-Mexicanist tendency in order to redefine Mexican identity as gender-expansive in his art. Galán combined gender-fluid imagery, a performative persona, queer self-representation, and cross-cultural visual and textual references to create large-scale, layered, dialogical visual puzzles. Ahead of his time in the relevance of his content and imagery to the contemporary LGBTQ social movements, Galán also broke the barriers of limited Latinx (in) visibility with his participation in such exclusive platforms/arenas as the Whitney Biennial of 1995. Replete with full-color reproductions of Galán’s artwork, Teresa Eckmann’s book serves as the first English-language monograph on the artist’s life and work.

Teresa Eckmann is Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is also author of Neo-Mexicanism: Mexican Figurative Painting and Patronage in the 1980s (UNMP).

June 2024 240 pages Latin America / Literary Criticism Rights:World

May 2024

296 pages

Art History / Mexico Rights: World

September 2024

280 pages

Fiction

Rights: World

October 2024

184 pages

Fiction / Native American

Rights: World

The Half-Life of Guilt A Novel

LYNN STEGNER

In her new novel, The Half-Life of Guilt, Stegner tells the story of Clair Bugato and Mason Comstock, who journey together to the farthest reaches of Baja California, Mexico to the world’s largest saltworks, where a proposed expansion threatens the California gray whale population, only recently come back from the brink of extinction. Clair and Mason are each following their own professional work: Clair as a biologist, Mason as a photojournalist.

In the midst of an international conservation battle, they meet a mysterious son of Mexico, Rubio Cantú, who leads them to the powers that be – his own father. Their two-week journey sends Clair deep into the past where, step by step, she reviews the divergent paths that she and her near-identical twin sister have taken away from a childhood tragedy. At the same time, Mason comes to terms with his own unhappy past in Cornwall, England, and a father whose hate was stronger than his love.

While the novel’s deepest thematic currents have to do with the burden of guilt human beings so readily accept, frequently without cause, and the homesickness that only love can cure, it also considers directly the effects of human beings, a brutally copious species, on the rest of the planetary community.

Lynn Stegner ’s books include the novels, Undertow, Fata Morgana, and Because a Fire Was in My Head, winner of the Faulkner Award for Best Novel and a New York Times Editors’ Choice, as well as a volume of stories, For All the Obvious Reasons. Her novella triptych, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, was awarded a Faulkner Society’s Gold Medal. She divides her time between San Francisco and northern Vermont.

Sacred Folks

Stories: The Third Book in the Sacred Trilogy

THEODORE C. VAN ALST, JR.

Sacred Folks brings it all home in the final book of this Urban Native Chicago story cycle. Disciples, demons, gods, gangbangers, and the city itself all meet up to tell unforgettable tales across time and neighborhoods. Our guide through the trilogy, Teddy, is right in the thick of things, and recounts for us parts of the path to the end, explains how and maybe why we got here, and where we might go after all.

Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr. (enrolled member Mackinac Bands of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians) is an Active HWA member whose work has been published in Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Red Earth Review, the Journal of Working-Class Studies, Chicago Review, Apex Magazine, Electric Literature, Indian Country Today, and the Massachusetts Review, among others. He is also the author of Sacred Smokes and the editor of The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones (both from UNM Press).

Against the American Grain

A Borderlands History of Resistance

GARY PAUL NABHAN

In Against the American Grain, Gary Paul Nabhan — cultural ecologist, environmental historian, Franciscan Brother, and lyrical poet of the American Southwest — has illuminated the outlines of a history too long in the shadow. Whether they were Indigenous, LatinX, Catholic priests and nuns, Quakers, or cross-cultural chameleons, it has been the resisters, performance artists, grassroots organizers, nomads, and spiritual leaders from the desert margins of society who are constantly reshaping of faces and fabric of America. Their stories are rarely told, let alone woven into a cohesive fabric. They are the ones who have recolored and recovered the future of North America by outrageous acts of resistance against all odds.

After reading the stories of Maria de Agreda, Joaquin Murrieta, Teresita de Cábora, Coyote Iguana, Woody Guthrie, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, John Steinbeck and others, we can never think about America the same way again. In Nabhan’s magisterial, radical recounting, cross-cultural collaborations have changed the grain of American life to one that is many-colored, once again flourishing with fragrance, faith, and fecund ideas.

Gary Paul Nabhan is a Lebanese-American ecologist, agrarian activist, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, and bilingual essayist whose work has focused primarily on the arid binational Southwest. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and Utne Reader’s annual visionary award in 2011. He is the author of 32 previous books, beginning with The Desert Smells Like Rain (1982). His most recent books are Agave Spirits (2023) and The Nature of Desert Nature (2020). He divides his time between Patagonia, Arizona and Desemboque del Sur, Sonora.

Broken Boxes

A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue GINGER DUNNILL AND JOSIE LOPEZ

Few books have been published in the Southwest celebrating the intersectionality of contemporary artists. A term first coined in 1989, intersectionality studies the overlapping and intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination. Broken Boxes celebrates ten years of Ginger Dunnill’s Broken Boxes Podcast. Here are twenty-two extraordinary artists bringing the creativity of their processes and identities to life in the Albuquerque Museum’s exhibition and in this accompanying book. Broken Boxes delves deeply into the realm of intentionality, challenging not just how artists create, but why. And Broken Boxes — the podcast, the exhibition, the book — thrives on bringing artists together in dialogue with each other and with the artist’s own words. This book provides an opportunity to introduce the larger public to artists committed to creating, sustaining, and encouraging solidarity. By opening up the conversations across communities, groups, art practices, materials, and shared space, we hope to demonstrate how artists are forging new forms of action.

Ginger Dunnill is a producer, journalist, curator, community organizer and sound artist. Ginger is the founder of Broken Boxes Podcast, a decade long celebrated underground broadcasting project amplifying systemically undervalued voices in the arts. Over the past two decades Dunnill has produced numerous social engagement projects, community programs and public exhibitions globally. Josie Lopez, PhD is the Head Curator at the Albuquerque Museum, where she recently curated Journey West: Danny Lyon, The Carved Line: Block Printmaking in New Mexico, and exhibitions featuring the Museum’s art collection.

October 2024

232 pages

Biography / History / Southwest Rights:World

August 2024

240 pages

Art / Cultural Studies

Rights:World

Into the Unknown

High Adventure and Hard Lessons Exploring the World’s Great, Lost Wilderness Rivers

MICHAEL P. GHIGLIERI

People pay serious money to be guided into back-of-beyond regions lacking electricity, cell phone coverage, email, radio, roads, cars, police, or easy exits. Yet these places pose unexpected dangers. Now veteran wilderness guide Michael P. Ghiglieri takes you into the unknown—among whitewater rapids, crocodiles, hippo, gorillas, lions, and impossible waterfalls. His riveting memoir not only serves up true high adventure on a level rarely seen in print, it also presents the ecology, natural history, conservation (or the lack of it), and the exploration history of nine far flung wilderness regions of the globe.

Into the Unknown reveals what the natural world looks through a professional’s eyes during “adventure” travel when things start sliding toward the edge. This insider memoir recounts ten sagas of extreme expeditions into Earth’s most amazing wilderness regions to illustrate their realities, science, allure, history, risks to life and limb, and ultimate fates. Many of these regions have now vanished to “progress.” Others are imperiled. Only a few are protected; but all are, or were, places where exotic beauty and danger were inseparable.

Michael P. Ghiglieri has worked as professional wilderness river guide for 50 years on 40 rivers around the world. His several books include Canyon and, with Thomas M. Myers, Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon, winner of the National Outdoor Book Award.

September 2024

208 pages

Memoir / Nature / Women

Rights: World

Moonlight Elk

One Woman's

Hunt for Food and Freedom CHRISTIE GREEN

Green has the mind of a scientist and the heart of a poet. Her passion for the creatures she encounters and the land she wanders shines through every word.—Janie Chodosh, coauthor of Wild Lives: Leading Conservationists on the Animals and the Planet They Love. A woman longing for a life defined by something deeper than weekly schedules, work roles, and cultural norms, Christie Green learned to hunt elk, turkey, deer, and other animals throughout her home state of New Mexico. Layer by layer, hunt by hunt, Green peels away societal skins that adhered to a prescribed grid, a manufactured tick of time, a picture of perfection. Tracking and tracing, moving in darkness, watching, smelling, listening, and following the animals, Green sheds the burdens of her domestic self and instead witnesses the animals defying reason as they walk her into their world, ambling her along, straddling night and day, waking and sleeping. Their ways of moving and sensing, become her model. Through them, definitions of gender dissolve. Boundaries blur, and, in the process, Green eclipses western society’s definitions of her as a woman, mother, lover, and business owner in a male-dominated industry, to find independence, courage, and a profound connection to the animals and the places they call home.

Christie Green is a landscape architect, artist, clothing designer, and the sole proprietor of radicle, a design-build firm that combines landscape, art, ecology, and activism. She lives on her small homestead in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This is her first book.

September 2024

pages

A Passing West

Essays From the Borderlands

DAGOBERTO GILB

A unique, unmistakable voice in American fiction, Dagoberto Gilb is also a singular writer of personal and journalistic essays. Here, twenty years after his first essay collection, he casts a penetrating gaze upon the culture and history of the Southwest, upon Mexican American identity, and on his own family.

Throughout, Gilb has a forceful message for readers: there is a Mexican America, and its culture is the lifeblood of the Southwest region of the United States, Mexican land until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The rest of the country, Gilb declares, does not want to know or respect the long history of Mexican America. His mission is to defend and proclaim its beauty and importance.

Ranging from long-form journalistic accounts of research in Spain’s Archivo General de Indias and the culture of growing and harvesting corn in Iowa to thoughtful meditations on Mexican and Mexican American writers to detailed deconstructions of Mexican American food and the experience of teaching students confused about their own culture and identity, these sharply observed portraits are consistently thought provoking and most of all entertaining, often very funny. Parents, his youth and manhood, his new disabled life, snapshots of Mexico City and Guatemala, California and Texas—all are unforgettable thanks to Gilb’s brilliant vision and style.

Dagoberto Gilb is the author of two previous books with UNM Press, The Magic of Blood (’93), winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and the anthology Hecho en Tejas (’06), winner of the PEN/Southwest Book Award. His last essay collection, Gritos (Grove,’03), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Gilb has also been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in both The New Yorker and Harper’s, and his work has been featured in Best American Essays and O. Henry Prize Stories

A Guide to the Restaurants and Bars of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul

AIMEE MACPHERSON

The restaurants and bars featured in Aimee Macpherson’s compendium show us glimpses of Walter White’s and Jimmy McGill’s Albuquerque. From the Dog House to Savoy Bar and Grill, from Tuco’s Hideout to Los Pollos Hermanos and every pitstop in between, Macpherson takes us along as she navigates the Duke City’s dreamscape of edible artifacts that connect us to the on-screen heroes and villains we love and admire. Included among the plethora of real diners, drive-ins, and dives are “lost” locations that mark the cultural heritage of Albuquerque’s streets and acknowledge the temporary nature of film sets generally. Show by show, season by season, Macpherson reveals how restaurants and bars undergo hours of painstaking transformations before appearing on the small screen. Colorful photography and descriptions of the food and drink accompany Macpherson’s insider show analysis.

Aimee Macpherson was educated at Bedales school and Pembroke College, Oxford where she studied English Literature. She has worked in film and television production including four seasons of Better Caul Saul

October 2024

240 pages

Essays / Chicanx / American West Rights: World

September 2024

240 pages

Travel / Film and Television / Food Rights: World

Guerrero A Novel JOSÉ ÁNGEL MAÑAS

Never before published in the U.S., celebrated Spanish writer José Ángel Mañas makes his English language debut with Guerrero, based on the real-life Spanish conquistador Gonzalo Guerrero, who defied Cortez and fought against Spain with his adopted Mayan tribe. In January of 1512, a caravel set sail from Darién, Panamá, bound for Santo Domingo with a cargo of gold and Indian slaves. A fierce storm sinks the ship off Jamaica and small boatload of survivors including Gonzalo Guerrero wash up more dead than alive on a beach in Yucatán. They are immediately captured by Cocome Mayans. Some are sacrificed, and the rest enslaved. Only two survive, the young priest Jerónimo de Aguilar and the seasoned soldier, Guerrero. After two miserable years, they were redeemed by the rival and more sympathetic Tutul Xiúe Mayans. Jerónimo clung steadfast to his prayerbook and identity. Gonzalo became fascinated with Mayan culture and religion, eventually joining forces with his new Mayan family to fight against the Spanish conquest. For his crime, he was wiped from the record books of colonial Spain. Though little is known of the historical Guerrero today, in this masterful short novel he becomes a larger than life figure of resistance and honor.

José Ángel Mañas is a Spanish writer who came to fame in the 1990s with his first novel, Historias del Kronen, a finalist for the Premio Modelo Prize, and later adapted into a film by director Montxo Amendáriz. Guerrero is his first work to be published in English.

May 2024

264 pages

Fiction / Native American / Mystery

Rights: World

Panther Creek

A Novel TOM HOLM

J. D. Daugherty and Hoolie Smith return in this riveting 1928 mystery. A sadist is preying on young women, especially Native American girls. He murders them and dumps their bodies by two creeks—one near Pawnee and one near Claremore—both named Panther Creek. Hoolie, his family, and his friend John Tall Soldier have driven to Pawnee, Oklahoma, to visit the Shield Chiefs. After Mary Shield Chief goes missing, Hoolie and John find her body in the bed of Panther Creek. Hoolie’s family begin a hunt for the murderer.

Meanwhile, J. D. has a new partner in Liz Shelby, daughter of oil man Big Bill Shelby. Together they search for the missing daughter of another wealthy Tulsa family, but they soon find her body at Panther Creek near Claremore. Their cases colliding, Daughtery, Shelby, and the Smith clan find themselves up against a wily killer and running against time to bring him to justice.

Tom Holm is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and a descendent of the Muskogee Creek. He is also author of the mysteries Andarko and The Osage Rose, both featuring Daughtery and Smith.

Tales from the Sharp End

A Portrait of Chile NATASCHA SCOTT-STOKES

Tales from the Sharp End: A Portrait of Chile is based on fifteen years of living and exploring the country known as South America’s California and offers a vivid tapestry of stories ranging from history and culture to flora and fauna, woven into the author’s own tales of adventure and heartbreak.

Chile is an extraordinary 4,300km long, but never more than 350km wide, lined by the Andes Mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. So you are either heading to the mountains in the oriente (east), or towards the sea, in the poniente (west), while the Pan-American Highway gives you just two choices: up or down, north or south. Traveling along that dusty road is one of the great thrills of this part of the world, where you can reach both the driest desert on earth and impenetrable cloud forests barring the way to Patagonian ice fields. In fact, that is the true magnet of this jagged knife-edge of a country: the unique landscape born of its geography and the gorgeous plant and animal life you can find there. Few things are more thrilling than climbing the coastal mountains to see both the Andes and the Pacific Ocean at the same time, or to set eyes on the mighty River Baker churning through southern Patagonia.

Natascha Scott-Stokes’s remarkable travelogue offers both a love letter to Chile and a heartfelt lament for a country living at the sharp end of human folly and climate change.

Natascha Scott-Stokes established herself as a pioneering traveller in 1989, when she became the first woman to travel the length of the Amazon River alone, a journey recorded in her book An Amazon and a Donkey

September 2024

256 pages

Travel literature / South America Rights: World, Spanish Language Rights Excluded

University of Nebraska Press

About University of Nebraska Press

The University of Nebraska Press extends the University’s mission of teaching, research, and service by promoting, publishing, and disseminating works of intellectual and cultural significance and enduring value.

The University of Nebraska Press, founded in 1941, is the largest university press between Chicago and California. It publishes scholarly and general-interest books (with more than 5,000 titles in print and an additional 150 new titles released each year) and journals (with more than 30 different journals published each year) in topics ranging from anthropology and literary criticism to history and sports. In addition to the Nebraska imprint, the Press also publishes books under Bison Books, The Backwaters Press, and Potomac Books imprints and publishes the books of The Jewish Publication Society. The Journals division produces the publications of Nebraska Extension, a division of the University of Nebraska’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

nebraskapress.unl.edu

In Search of the Romanov's A Family's Quest to Solve One of History's Most Brutal Crimes PETER SARANDINAKI

In 1918 a famed general of the Russian White Army battled through the Red Army to save Emperor Nicholas II—but he arrived too late. The Romanovs had already been murdered. In this thrilling true-life detective story, we follow Anna, the general’s courageous young daughter, who fled across the continent and boarded a ship with her husband to escape the bloodshed. Beneath her bunk was a box, and in this box lay grisly evidence of what had become of Russia’s royal family, the Romanovs. Generations later, Anna’s grandson Peter Sarandinaki set out to finish his great-grandfather’s mission to find the Romanovs’ remains, enlisting searchers and scientists to finally piece together the answers to some of history’s most perplexing questions: What really happened to Tsar Nicholas, Empress Alexandra, and his family?

Set against the disparate backdrops of the Russian Revolution and the twenty-first century’s leading DNA laboratories, In Search of the Romanovs weaves together historical records, forensic science, and the diaries, recollections, and experiences of Sarandinaki’s own family. A riveting and deeply personal story, Sarandinaki reveals hidden truths in the legends about the murder and disappearance of Russia’s most famous royal family

Peter Sarandinaki is a retired sea captain now living in Toms River, New Jersey, with his wife. He is the great-grandson of Lieutenant General Sergey Nikolaevich Rozanov, the White Army commander in the eastern Amur region of Russia who was among the first men to enter the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where the Romanovs were murdered. Sarandinaki has worked on the Romanov case for more than thirty years.

Between the Wires

The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv WAITMAN WADE BEORN

Between the Wires tells for the first time the history of the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. Located in a city with the third-largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, Janowska remains one of the least-known sites of the Holocaust, despite being one of the deadliest. Simultaneously a prison, a slave labor camp, a transit camp to the gas chambers, and an extermination site, this hybrid camp played a complex role in the Holocaust.

Based on extensive archival research, Between the Wires explores the evolution and the connection to Lviv of this rare urban camp. Waitman Wade Beorn reveals the exceptional brutality of SS staff alongside an almost unimaginable will to survive among prisoners facing horrendous suffering, whose resistance included an armed uprising. This integrated chronicle of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders follows the history of the camp into the postwar era, including attempts to bring its criminals to justice.

Waitman Wade Beorn is an assistant professor of history at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, UK. He is the author of Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Harvard, 2014) and The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Exiles and the Jews

Literature, History, and Identity

NANCY E. BERG & MARC SAPERSTEIN

This first comprehensive anthology examining Jewish responses to exile from the biblical period to our modern day gathers texts from all genres of Jewish literary creativity to explore how the realities and interpretations of exile have shaped Judaism, Jewish politics, and individual Jewish identity for millennia. Ordered along multiple arcs—from universal to particular, collective to individual, and mythic-symbolic to prosaic everyday living—the chapters present different facets of exile: as human condition, in history and life, in holiday rituals, in language, as penance and atonement, as internalized experience, in relation to the Divine Presence, and more. By illuminating the multidimensional nature of “exile”— political, philosophical, religious, psychological, and mythological—widely divergent evaluations of Jewish life in the Diaspora emerge. The word “exile” and its Hebrew equivalent, galut, evoke darkness, bleakness—and yet the condition offers spiritual renewal and engenders great expressions of Jewish cultural creativity: the Babylonian Talmud, medieval Jewish philosophy, golden age poetry, and modern Jewish literature.

Exile and the Jews will engage students, academics, and general readers in contemplating immigration, displacement, evolving identity, and more.

Nancy E. Berg is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq and coeditor with Naomi B. Sokoloff of the National Jewish Book Award–winning What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans). Marc Saperstein served as principal and professor of Jewish history and homiletics of the Leo Baeck College, London. His dozen books include “Your Voice like a Ram’s Horn”: Themes and Texts in Traditional Jewish Preaching, a National Jewish Book Award winner in Scholarship, and Agony in the Pulpit: Jewish Preaching in Response to Nazi Persecution and Mass Murder, 1933–1945

August 2024

390 pages

Jewish History & Culture

Rights: World

April 2024

330 pages

Jewish History & Culture Rights: World

April 2024

288 pages

June 2024

322 pages

History

Pakistan and American Diplomacy

Insights from 9/11 to the Afganistan Endgame

THEODORE CRAIG

Pakistan and American Diplomacy offers an insightful, fast-moving tour through Pakistan-U.S. relations, from 9/11 to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as told from the perspective of a former U.S. diplomat who served twice in Pakistan. Ted Craig frames his narrative around the 2019 Cricket World Cup, a contest that saw Pakistan square off against key neighbors and cricketing powers Afghanistan, India, and Bangladesh, and its former colonial ruler, Britain.

Craig provides perceptive analysis of Pakistan’s diplomacy since its independence in 1947, shedding light on the country’s contemporary relations with the United States, China, India, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan. With insights from the field and from Washington, Craig reflects on the chain of policy decisions that led to the fall of the Kabul government in 2021 and offers a sober and balanced view of the consequences of that policy failure. Drawing on his post–Cold War diplomatic career, Craig presents U.S.-Pakistan policy in the context of an American experiment in promoting democracy while combating terrorism.

Currently serving again in South Asia as a counterterrorism program advisor, Ted Craig retired from the U.S. Foreign Service after twenty-nine years and two tours in Islamabad, Pakistan, the second as political counselor. He also served three tours in Latin America and held policy jobs related to peace and security, environmental diplomacy, and human rights.

Maricas

Queer

Culture and State Violence in Argentina and Spain, 1942-1982

JAVIER FERNÁNDEZ-GALEANO

In Maricas Javier Fernández-Galeano traces the erotic lives and legal battles of Argentine and Spanish gender- and sexually nonconforming people who carved out their own spaces in metropolitan and rural cultures between the 1940s and the 1980s. In both countries, agents of the state, judiciary, and medical communities employed “social danger” theory to measure individuals’ latent criminality, conflating sexual and gender nonconformity with legal transgression. The first English-language monograph on the history of twentieth-century state policies and queer cultures in Argentina and Spain, Maricas demonstrates the many ways queer communities and individuals in Argentina and Spain fought against violence, rejected pathologization, and contested imposed, denigrating categorization.

Javier Fernández-Galeano is a Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the University of València.

An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods

Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript

SHARONAH ESTHER FREDRICK

An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods is the first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochiri Manuscript of Peru’s lower Andean regions. The rebellious tone of both epics illuminates a heretofore overlooked aspect in Latin American Indigenous colonial writing: the sense of political injustice and spiritual sedition directed equally at European-imposed religious practice and at aspects of Indigenous belief. The link between spirituality and political upheaval in Native colonial writing has not been sufficiently explored until this work.

Sharonah Esther Fredrick applies a multidisciplinary approach that utilizes history, literature, archaeology, and anthropology in equal measure to situate the Mayan and Andean narratives within the paradigms of their developing civilizations. By demonstrating the power of Native American philosophy within the context of the conquest of Latin America, Fredrick illuminates the profound spiritual dissension and radically conflicting ideologies of the Mesoamerican and Andean worlds before and after the Spanish conquest.

Sharonah Esther Fredrick teaches in the College of Charleston’s Department of Hispanic Studies. She is the Colonial Americas editor for Routledge Resources Online—The Renaissance World

The Triumph of Life

A Narrative Theology of Judiasm

RABBI IRVING GREENBERG

The Triumph of Life is Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s magnum opus—a narrative of the relationship between God and humanity as expressed in the Jewish journey through modernity, the Holocaust, the creation of Israel, and the birth of Judaism’s next era.

Greenberg describes Judaism’s utopian vision of a world created by a God who loves life, who invites humans to live on the side of life and enables the forces of life to triumph over death. The Bible proclaims our mission of tikkun olam, repairing the world, such that every human image of God is sustained in the fullness of our dignity. To achieve this ideal, Judaism offers the method of covenant—realistic, personal, incremental—a partnership between God and humanity across generations in which human beings grow ever more responsible for world repair.

Greenberg calls on us to redirect humanity’s unprecedented power in modernity to overcome poverty, oppression, inequality, sickness, and war. The work of covenant requires an ethic of power—one that advances life collaboratively and at a human pace—so that the Jewish people and all humanity can bring the world toward the triumph of life.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg is a preeminent Jewish thinker, theologian, activist, president of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life, and senior scholar in residence at Hadar. He is the author of five books, including For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity (JPS, 2004).

August 2024

368 pages

Native American & Indigenous Studies

Rights: World

August 2024

400 pages

Jewish History & Culture Rights: World

July 2024

306 pages

Western Fiction

Rights: World

Mary's Place A

Novel

CHARLOTTE HINGER

Iron and Mary Barrett’s farming family is rural royalty, their success symbolized by a magnificent three-story house, Mary’s Place. Years in the building, the house is a testament to Mary’s grit and organizational abilities. But when bank examiners apply new ratings for agricultural loans in the 1980s, the family’s belief that its prosperity is a natural outcome of hard work is sent reeling.

Bank president J.C. Espy had never done anything crooked in his life until the FDIC changed the rules for agricultural loans. After becoming desperate to save his hundred-year-old bank, he worries that his resulting choice will cause his friend Iron to lose his land. Frantically J.C. works to convince Iron he will lose everything if he doesn’t comply with the new standards. In the meantime, both Iron and J.C. must negotiate with sons who have contempt for their fathers’ old-fashioned values. While Iron agonizes, Mary maneuvers to keep the family together and save the farm.

Mary’s Place is an unforgettable tribute to the rural families who weathered one of the worst agricultural disasters in American history.

Charlotte Hinger is the award-winning author of a number of historical and mystery novels, including The Healer’s Daughter and Come Spring, as well as the nonfiction book Nicodemus: Post-Reconstruction Politics and Racial Justice in Western Kansas.

An Endangered Species

A Novel FRANCES WASHBURN

Tom Warder, born on the Pine Ridge Reservation, works at the LaCreek refuge, which hosts the nation’s last remaining trumpeter swans. The refuge manager assigns Tom, who owns land adjacent to the refuge, to be the swans’ day-to-day caretaker. Tom’s land isn’t productive enough to make a sole living from it, so he leases grazing rights to white rancher Bart Johnson.

Bart has fallen into debt and is unable to pay the lease he owes not only on Tom’s land but also on land he leases from other Native landowners. As he sinks into debt his wife, Betty, becomes more extravagant and resistant to pleas for economy, while their son, Brian, becomes fascinated with hunting and begins stalking the trumpeter swans for the thrill of killing one. As his finances and his family fall apart, Bart takes to drinking. Meanwhile Tom’s wife, Anna, and three daughters struggle to make ends meet, though their eldest daughter, Bit, who often assists her father in the care of the swans, is bright and determined to become something. Where Bit is the hope of her family, Brian is the disaster of his.

An Endangered Species is a tale of two families, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, bound to circumstances largely beyond their control, and struggling to survive on the upper Great Plains during the 1960s.

Frances Washburn (Lakota) is emerita professor of American Indian studies and English at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Elsie’s Business (Nebraska, 2006), Sacred White Turkey (Nebraska, 2010), and The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band

Spaces of Treblinka

Retracing a Death Camp

JACOB FLAWS

Spaces of Treblinka utilizes testimonies, oral histories, and recollections from Jewish, German, and Polish witnesses to create a holistic representation of the Treblinka death camp during its operation. This narrative rejects the historical misconception that Treblinka was an isolated Nazi extermination camp with few witnesses and fewer survivors. Rather than the secret, sanitized site of industrial killing Treblinka was intended to be, Jacob Flaws argues, Treblinka’s mass murder was well known to the nearby townspeople who experienced the sights, sounds, smells, people, bodies, and train cars the camp ejected into the surrounding world.

Through spatial reality, Flaws portrays the conceptions, fantasies, ideological assumptions, and memories of Treblinka from witnesses in the camp and surrounding towns. To do so he identifies six key spaces that once composed the historical site of Treblinka: the ideological space, the behavioral space, the space of life and death, the interactional space, the sensory space, and the extended space. By examining these spaces Flaws reveals that there were more witnesses to Treblinka than previously realized, as the transnational groups near and within the camp overlapped and interacted. Spaces of Treblinka provides a staggering and profound reassessment of the relationship between knowing and not knowing and asks us to confront the timely warning that we, in our modern, interconnected world, can all become witnesses.

Jacob Flaws (PhD, University of Colorado-Boulder, 2020) is a Lecturer at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. His work has been published in The Journal of Holocaust Research.

Making Space

Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon MELISSA K. BYRNES

Since the 2005 urban protests in France, public debate has often centered on questions of how the country has managed its relationship with its North African citizens and residents. In Making Space Melissa K. Byrnes considers how four French suburbs near Paris and Lyon reacted to rapidly growing populations of North Africans, especially Algerians before, during, and after the Algerian War. In particular, Byrnes investigates what motivated local actors such as municipal officials, regional authorities, employers, and others to become involved in debates over migrants’ rights and welfare, and the wide variety of strategies community leaders developed in response to the migrants’ presence. An examination of the ways local policies and attitudes formed and re-formed communities offers a deeper understanding of the decisions that led to the current tensions in French society and questions about France’s ability—and will—to fulfill the promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity for all of its citizens. Byrnes uses local experiences to contradict a version of French migration history that reads the urban unrest of recent years as preordained.

Melissa K. Byrnes is a professor of modern European and world history at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

January 2024

250 pages

History / Europe / France

Rights: World

November 2023

Yochanan's Gamble

Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life

RABBI MARC KATZ

Some two thousand years ago, as the story goes, a rabbi named Yochanan makes the epitome of pragmatic gambles—wagering the entire fate of the Jewish people. In dialogue with the soon-to-be Roman emperor Vespasian, Yochanan tacitly acknowledges the Romans’ planned destruction of Jerusalem in return for a plot of land in a town called Yavneh. There, after the razing of Jerusalem, Jews will join with their teacher to reenvision a new Judaism—one not based on Temple rites but on real life in exile—laying the groundwork for today’s vibrant Judaism.

In Rabbi Marc Katz’s novel examination, pragmatism is itself an authentic Jewish strategy for addressing moral questions. The rabbis of the Talmud model the process by demonstrating how to think situationally, weigh competing values, and make hard compromises. Leading rabbis ask, “What will work?” alongside “What is right?” They birth a malleable and nuanced system of law (halakhah) that is faithful to their received tradition and to the people and circumstances before them.

By investigating how the rabbis navigate their own ethical challenges—determining truth, upholding compromise, convincing others, keeping peace with neighbors, avoiding infighting, weighing sinning in hopes of promoting a greater good—Yochanan’s Gamble forges a new Jewish path forward for resolving moral conundrums in our day.

Rabbi Marc Katz is the rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is the author of The Heart of Loneliness: How Jewish Wisdom Can Help You Cope and Find Comfort, a National Jewish Book Award Finalist.

September 2024

Fiction / Animals

Rights: World

The Scent of Distant Family

A Novel

SID SIBO

Set against the backdrop of a remote location in the throes of rapid development, Nik Delaney leaves a respected career in wildlife biology to return home to Wyoming. In the Rocky Mountain winter, every relationship Nik has wears even thinner as she cares for her aging father, faces a crumbling marriage, and parents Finn, the son of her antagonistic brother. Then Zolo, her foster dog, runs away. Nik’s search for Zolo in the vast and unforgiving landscape introduces her to the eccentric residents of the high sagebrush, including a rancher trying to run an ecolodge in oil country and a displaced herd of wild mustangs led by a mare called Tess. Zolo and Tess learn to rely on each other to thrive, but even with her father’s life at stake, Nik resists relying on the desert’s scattered community. This story of loyalty and deception in western Wyoming expands our sense of who we choose to consider family.

sid sibo (MFA, University of Maine, 2019) is a former Wyoming Humanities Council Board member, library outreach coordinator and current creative author. After years of volunteering in animal rescue, she founded a local shelter where she now resides in western Wyoming. She has earned the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award, and some of her previous work has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2022. Her literary publications include Orca, Cutthroat, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Evocations, Fourth River, and others.

Nazis at the Watercooler War

Criminals in Postwar Germany

TERRENCE C. PETTY

After World War II, when a new German democracy was born in the western region of the vanquished Third Reich, tens of thousands of civil servants were hired to work for newly formed government agencies to get the new republic quickly on its feet. But there was an enormous flaw in the plan: no serious vetting system was put in place to keep war criminals out of government positions.

Ex-Nazis—people who had been involved in mass murder, drafting antisemitic laws, and the persecution of Hitler’s opponents, as well as other depravities—resumed their careers without consequence in the newly created Federal Republic of Germany. Former Nazis who had established an early foothold in postwar government agencies helped each other get government work by writing letters of recommendation called Persilscheine. These “Persil Certificates,” named after a popular detergent, made an ex-Nazi’s recorded past just as clean as fresh laundry, and a whole generation of German government officials with Nazi pasts was never brought to account. Nazis at the Watercooler illuminates the network of ex–Third Reich loyalists and the U.S. government’s complicity that enabled this mass impunity.

Tererrence C. Petty (BA, University of Vermont, 1974) was an Associated Press journalist for thirty-five years. He was based in Bonn between 1987-1997, where he covered German and European affairs, traveling between West and East Germany during the Cold War. During the late 1980s and 1990s, from the pro-democracy movement and reunification to neo-Nazi violence and the fiftieth-anniversary cermonies at Dachau and Buchenwald, he filed extensively from the country. From 1999 to 2017, he managed the AP's news operation in Oregon. Before joining the AP, Petty worked for newspapers in Vermont and upstate New York.

Thanks for This Riot

Stories

JANELLE BASSETT

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prarie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Thanks for This Riot explores the limits of kindness, the weight of being needed, and the fear of being misunderstood. A group counselor is taunted by a truth-divining piano bench, a voice actor shouts her abortion at the state capitol, a tired caregiver tangles with a pair of stand-up comics, a small-town newspaper office shelters an otherworldly tattletale, a backwoods acupuncturist leans on her least-exciting offspring, a girl in a strapless bra takes a vengeful go-kart ride, and a woman gets surgery to lower her expectations (she thinks it went “okay”). Grouped by types of riot—external riots, internal riots, and laugh riots—Thanks for This Riot is a poignant and mordantly funny collection with a distinctly feminist viewpoint.

Janelle Bassett 's writing appears or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, New Delta Review, Smokelong Quarterly, American Literary Review, The Offing, Washington Square Review, Wigleaf, and Best Microfiction 2023 She lives in St. Louis and is a fiction editor at Split Lip Magazine.

September 2024

Fiction / Short Stories / Feminist

Rights: World

November 2024 History / Wars & Conflicts / WWII Rights: World

The Spring Before Obergefell A

Novel

BEN GROSSBERG

It’s not easy for anyone to find love, let alone a middle-aged gay man in small-town America. Mike Breck works multiple part-time jobs and bickers constantly with his father, an angry conservative who moved in after Mike’s mother died. When he’s not working or avoiding his father, Mike burns time on hookup apps, not looking for anything more. Then he meets a local guy, Dave, just as lonely as he is, and starts to think that maybe he doesn’t have to be alone. Mike falls hard, and in a moment of intimacy, his pent-up hopes for a relationship rush out, leading him to look more honestly at himself and his future.

Winner of the James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel, Ben Grossberg’s The Spring before Obergefell is about real guys who have real problems, yet still manage to find connection. Funny, serious, meditative, and hopeful, The Spring before Obergefell is a romance—but not a fairytale.

Ben Grossberg is a professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Hartford. He is the author of four full-length books of poetry, My Husband Would (University of Tampa, 2020), Space Traveler (University of Tampa, 2014), Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath (Ashland Poetry Press, 2007), and Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa, 2009).

90 Seconds to Midnight

June 2025

Rights: World rights, exc AU and New Zealand

A Hiroshima Survivor's Nuclear Odyssey CHARLOTTE DECROES JACOBS

90 Seconds to Midnight tells the gripping and thought-provoking story of Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow, a thirteen-year-old girl living in Hiroshima in 1945, when the city was annihilated by an atomic bomb. Struggling with grief and anger, Thurlow set out to warn the world about the horrors of a nuclear attack in a crusade that has lasted seven decades.

In 2015 Thurlow sparked a rallying cry for activists when she proclaimed at the United Nations, “Humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.” With that, she shifted the global discussion from nuclear deterrence to humanitarian consequences, the key in crafting the landmark Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Regarded as the conscience of the antinuclear movement, Thurlow accepted the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. With the fate of humanity at stake and with the resolve of her samurai ancestors, Thurlow challenged leaders of the nuclear-armed states. On January 22, 2021, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons went into effect, banning nuclear weapons under international law.

Critical historical events need a personal narrative, and Thurlow is such a storyteller for Hiroshima. 90 Seconds to Midnight recounts Thurlow’s ascent from the netherworld where she saw, heard, and smelled death and her relentless efforts to protect the world from an unspeakable fate. Knowing she would have to live with those nightmares, Thurlow turned them into a force to impel people across the globe to learn from Hiroshima, to admit that yes, it could happen again—and then to take action.

Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs is a professor of medicine emerita at Stanford University. She is the author of two critically acclaimed books, Jonas Salk: A Life and Henry Kaplan and the Story of Hodgkin’s Disease

Into the Void

Adventures of the Spacewalkers

JOHN YOUSKAUKAS AND MELVIN CROFT FOREWORD BY JERRY ROSS

People have been fascinated with astronauts and spaceflight since well before the first peopled launches in 1961, when Yuri Gagarin, Alan Shepard, and John Glenn became household names. But when Ed White, clad in his gleaming space suit with the large American flag on his left shoulder, eased himself outside his Gemini IV spacecraft in 1965, Americans had a new hero. They also learned a new acronym: EVA, short for extravehicular activity, more commonly known as “spacewalking.”

Though few understood the tremendous risks White was taking in his twenty-two-minute spacewalk, Americans watched with immense pride and patriotism as White, tethered to the Gemini IV, propelled himself around the spacecraft with a pressurized oxygen-fueled zip gun. But White’s struggle to fit his space-suited body back inside the claustrophobic Gemini spacecraft and close the hatch confirmed what NASA should have known: spacewalking wasn’t easy.

More than fifty years and hundreds of spacewalks later, the art of EVA has evolved. The first spacewalks, preparation for walking on the moon, intended to prove that humans could function in raw space inside their own miniature spacecraft—a spacesuit. After the end of the lunar program, both the Americans and Soviets turned their focus to long-duration flights on space stations in low Earth orbit, and spacewalks were crucial to the success of these missions. The construction of the International Space Station—the most sophisticated spacecraft to date—required hundreds of hours of work by spacewalkers from many countries.

In Into the Void John Youskauskas and Melvin Croft tell the unique story of those who have ventured outside the spacecraft into the void of space as humans set our sights on the moon, Mars, and beyond.

John Youskauskas is a commercial pilot for a major fractional jet operator with more than thirty years of experience in flight operations, aviation safety, and maintenance. Melvin Croft has more than forty years of experience as a professional geologist and is a longtime supporter of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. Youskauskas and Croft are coauthors of Come Fly with Us: NASA’s Payload Specialist Program (Nebraska, 2024) and contributors to Footprints in the Dust: The Epic Voyages of Apollo, 1969–1975 (Nebraska, 2010). Jerry Ross is a former NASA astronaut who flew on seven space shuttle missions. He is the author of Spacewalker: My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA’s Record-Setting Frequent Flyer

May 2025

376 pages

Rights: World

April 2025

Rights: World

June 2025 Rights: World

Crisis and Crossfire

The United States and the Middle East Since 1945

New Edition

PETER L. HAHN

Crisis and Crossfire traces the origins of the contemporary challenges facing the United States in the Middle East by analyzing the broad contours of U.S. policy in the region since the government’s first involvement there in the 1940s. Peter L. Hahn evaluates U.S. policy in the context of such global phenomena as the Cold War and the multipolar international order that emerged in the early 2000s. He explains how the United States has tried, with varying degrees of success, to curtail, modify, and channel Arab and Iranian nationalist movements to serve U.S. interests. Crisis and Crossfire examines the U.S. approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict through eight decades, exploring the interstate wars of the 1940s–1980s, the quests to make peace in the 1970s–2010s, and the enduring strife between Israel and Palestine. Hahn details how the United States has assumed growing responsibility for regional stability and security in the Middle East since World War II, culminating in involvement in the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait and the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. This new edition provides an objective explanation of the Israeli-Palestinian Gaza War; the U.S. stand-off with Iran; the proxy wars in Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, and Syria; the threat of terrorism; and related topics.

Peter L. Hahn is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at the Ohio State University. He is the author of seven books on the history of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, including Missions Accomplished? The United States and Iraq since World War I

James Cowles Prichard of the Red Lodge

A Life of Science during the Age of Improvement

MARGARET M. CRUMP

In James Cowles Prichard of the Red Lodge Margaret M. Crump offers the first in-depth biography of the Welsh medical doctor, natural historian, and anti-phrenology anthropologist James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848). An intellectual giant in the developing human sciences and a pioneering psychiatric theorist before psychiatry was a discipline, he became one of Europe’s leading anthropologists from 1800 to 1848. With evocative detail, Crump draws readers into the social and cultural milieu of early nineteenth-century Bristol, a world of pre-scientific medicine and the emerging fields of anthropology and psychiatry.Prichard defied the rising tide of scientific racism then festering in the academic halls of Europe and the United States. His influential publications on neurological and psychological conditions called for the humane care and treatment of the mentally ill and mentally disabled and advocated for their civil liberties. Born into changing, challenging times, during a revolution in British culture and at the threshold of modern science, Prichard fully embodied the age of improvement.

Margaret M. Crump is an independent scholar in nineteenth-century British intellectual and cultural history and has worked as an arts educator at Bristol Polytechnic University.

Victory in Shanghai

A Korean American Family’s Journey to the CIA and the Army Special Forces ROBERT S. KIM

Victory in Shanghai tells the long-hidden story of a family from Korea that struggled for three decades to become Americans and ultimately fought their way to the United States through heroic actions with the U.S. Army during World War II. Among the first families from Korea to migrate to the United States in the early twentieth century, the Kim family was forced into exile in Shanghai in the mid-1920s after a new U.S. immigration law in 1924 that excluded Asians. Two decades later, the family’s four sons—raised as Americans in the expatriate community of Shanghai—voluntarily stepped forward during World War II to defend the nation they considered theirs.

From both sides of the Pacific, the Kim brothers served in uniform with the U.S. Army and in the underground U.S. intelligence network in Shanghai. At the end of the war the eldest son led the liberation of seven thousand American and Allied civilians held in Japanese internment camps in Shanghai. His actions and the support of the leading generals of the U.S. Army in China led to three special acts of Congress that granted him U.S. citizenship and admitted the entire Kim family into the United States. Four Kim brothers became some of the earliest intelligence officers of the nascent U.S. intelligence community, and three of them ascended to leadership positions in the CIA and the Army Special Forces.

Victory in Shanghai tells two intertwined American origin stories: a Korean family’s struggle to become Americans during the World War II era and the contributions of Korean Americans to the creation of modern U.S. intelligence and special operation.

Robert S. Kim (unrelated to the Kim family in this book) is a lawyer and author who served in the war in Iraq as the deputy treasury attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and worked for the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Victory in Shanghai is his third book related to World War II.

June 2025 Rights: World

March 2025 Rights: World

Blue Helmet

My Year as a UN Peacekeeper in South Sudan

EDWARD H. CARPENTER

Blue Helmet: My Year as a UN Peacekeeper in South Sudan tells the story of a country, a conflict, and the institution of peacekeeping through the eyes of a senior American military officer working on the ground in one of the most dangerous countries on the planet. South Sudan is rich in natural resources, and its fertile soil could make it the breadbasket of East Africa. Yet it remains the poorest and most corrupt country in the region, plagued by disease, famine, and ethnic strife. Abductions, sexual violence, death, and displacement affect tens of thousands of people each year.

Edward H. Carpenter pulls the reader into his world, allowing them to experience the powerful, poignant realities of being a peacekeeper in South Sudan. In the process, the author reveals how the United Nations really conducts its missions: what it tolerates and how it often falls short of achieving the aims of its charter—equal rights, justice, and economic advancement for all people, with the use of armed forces limited to serving those common interests by keeping the peace and preventing the scourge of war. It is a story that is eye-opening, unsettling, and always compelling.

Global leaders may fairly claim that they have done everything they can to help South Sudan help itself: they’ve dispatched thousands of peacekeepers and provided billions of dollars in aid. So why is the UN still struggling to fulfill its mandate to protect civilians and safeguard the delivery of humanitarian assistance? What could be done better? Bringing the reader to the forefront of action, Blue Helmet answers these questions and raises others about how modern peacekeeping missions are organized and overseen, shedding light on some of the contradictions at the heart of peacekeeping.

Edward H. Carpenter is a retired lieutenant colonel, a veteran of America’s “Long Wars,” who served in the army and Marines for a total of twenty-nine years, from Afghanistan to Japan, Indonesia to Saudi Arabia. He has written for the Washington Post and is the author of Steven Pressfield’s “The Warrior Ethos”: One Marine Officer’s Critique and Counterpoint. Carpenter is the founder of the nonprofit organization World Without War, to which he has donated his royalties from this book.

University of Georgia Press

About University of Georgia Press

Since its founding in 1938, the primary mission of the University of Georgia Press has been to support and enhance the University’s place as a major research institution by publishing outstanding works of scholarship and literature by scholars and writers throughout the world.

The University of Georgia Press is the oldest and largest book publisher in the state. We currently publish 60–70 new books a year and have a long history of publishing significant scholarship (in fields such as Atlantic World and American history, American literature, African American studies, American studies, Southern studies, environmental studies, geography, urban studies, international affairs, and security studies), creative and literary works in conjunction with major literary competitions and series, and books about the state and the region for general readers.

ugapress.org

Lived Resistance against the War on Palestinian Children

HEIDI MORRISON, EDITOR

Despite the increasing volume of scholarship that shows children as political actors, prior to this book, a cohesive framework was lacking that would more fully examine and express children’s relationship with political power. Rather than simply hitching children’s resistance to standard theories of resistance, Heidi Morrison seeks to meet children on their own terms.

Through the case study of Palestinian children, Contributors theorize children’s resistance as an embodied experience called lived resistance. A critical aspect of the study of lived resistance is not just documenting what children do but specifically how scholars approach the topic of children’s resistance. With Lived Resistance against the War on Palestinian Children, the authors account for the vessel (i.e., the physical body) through which their resistance generates and operates.

The diverse group of chapter authors examine Palestinian children’s art and media, imprisonment, parenting, bereavement, neoliberalism, refugee camps, and protest movements as aspects of their collective and individual political power. Through these outlets, the book shows consistencies and contends that these children’s relationship to political power operates from an inclusive model of citizenship and is social-justice oriented, symbolically oriented, and contingently based.

Heidi Morrison is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Lacrosse. She is author or editor of five books, including Inner Wounds: Oral Histories of Palestinian Children’s Trauma and the Second Intifada; Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt; and A Cultural History of Youth

August 2024

352 pages Children, Youth, and War Ser. Rights: World

May 2024 248 pages

Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Ser. Rights: World

Cultivating Socialism

Venezuela, ALBA, and the Politics of Food Sovereignty

ROWAN LUBBOCK

Launched in 2004, the Latin American regional institution of ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra: Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) sought to overcome the historical legacies of neo-colonial domination by consecrating the values of cooperation, inclusive development, and popular power. As part of a region-wide effort among states and social movements to break the socio-ecologically destructive effects of capitalist agriculture, the elevation of food sovereignty—based on the protections of rural livelihoods, land redistribution and sustainable agricultural production (agroecology)— became a cornerstone of ALBA’s development policy. And yet, these regional aspirations barely saw the light of day, while Venezuela experienced the worst food crisis in its history. How did this come to pass? Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, where the majority of ALBA’s food policies reside, Cultivating Socialism provides the first in-depth study of the ways in which peasants, workers and states attempted to redress the inequities of commercialised agriculture, and the limits and contradictions encountered on the road to a regional food sovereignty regime.

Rowan Lubbock is Lecturer in International Political Economy of Development at the Queen Mary University of London.

Best Copy Available

A True Crime Memoir

September 2024

240 pages

True Crime

Rights: World

JAY BARON NICORVO

In the winter of 1984, Sharon Nicorvo was violently raped while delivering pizza to the barracks at Fort Monmouth Army Base in New Jersey. At that time, her seven-year-old son Jay was being subjected to repeated and secret sexual abuse by his babysitter. Best Copy Available delves into these devastating events and their aftermath. Thirty years later, Nicorvo received a photocopy of the criminal investigation report generated from that brutal night, which offers a primer to better understand certain assumptions. About class and race. Sex and violence. Crime and punishment. Low and high culture. Sanity, madness, and masculinity. And the facsimile nature of the truth.

Jay Baron Nicorvo is the author of the novel The Standard Grand and a poetry collection, Deadbeat. His nonfiction has twice been named "Notable" in Best American Essays. Nocorvo's writing has been featured on NPR and PBS NewsHour. He's served as an editor at PEN America, the literary magazine of the PEN American Center, and at Ploughshares. He lives with his wife, Thisbe Nissen, their son, a couple of cats, a dog, and a dozen chickens on a defunct farm outside of Battle Creek, Michigan. Find Jay at nicorvo.net

Kill Your Masters

Run the Jewels and the World That Made Them

JAAP VAN DER DOELEN

In Kill Your Masters, Dutch music journalist Jaap van der Doelen tells the story of two rappers in the twiligh of their careers who suddenly find themselves ascending to the heights of pop culture icons while fighting for change in a world about to fall prey to fascism. "It shouldn't have happened," van der Doelen writies. "Hiphop has long been considered a young man's game...and yet two rappers well into their forties have managed to find cross-generational success." This book starts with the stories of how Killer Mike and El-p got their starts as solo artists (in Atlanta and Brooklyn, respectively) and culminates with "Holy Calamavote" in October 2020—a live televised event where Run the Jewels performed their fourth album in its entirety in an effort to motivate as many people as possible to register to vote in the 2020 presidential elections. Van der Doelen relies on multiple interviews he has conducted with RTJ along with conversations Mike and Jamie have had with other music journalists over the years.

Jaap van der Doelen is a journalist whose writing regularly appears in Mass Appeal, Complex, DJBooth, Passion of the Weiss, SAM (Street and More), and Hiphop in je Smoel. He also reports on culture and sports in Dutch newspapers like Algemeen Dagblad, Eindhovens Dagblad, and Brabants Daglad

The Mosquito Confederation

A Borderlands History of Colonial Central America

DANIEL MENDIOLA

Relying on extensive new archival discoveries, The Mosquito Confederation demonstrates that the rise and decline of the Mosquito confederation was not merely a footnote in Central American history, nor was the confederation relegated to the margins of the colonial world. Indeed, the Mosquito were protagonists in shaping the region's complex history, and the confederation's expansionist geopolitical program represented a "conquest" in its own right. In describing these processes, Mendiola excavates the roles of diverse peoples in Central America's Caribbean borderlands.

Daniel Mendiola is an assistant professor of history at Vassar College.

December 2024

264 pages

Music of the American South Rights: World

April 2025

248 pages

Early American Places Rights: World

May 2025

352 pages

June 2025

240 pages

Rights: World

A Pirate's Life No More

The Pardoned Pirates of the Bahamas

STEVEN C. HAHN

In 1718, the British crown in the Bahamas pardoned 209 mariners accused of piracy. In A Pirate's Life No More, Steven C . Hahn explores the lives of these mariners. By focusing holistically on pirates, the book reclaims their humanity, connects the story of piracy at sea with the land-based communities that sometimes supported it, and illuminates the entangled histories of far-flung places in the Atlantic world. This study reveals that, for most individuals, forays into piracy were fleeting and opportunistic. Moreover, class, age, and regional divisions beset the pirate community, thereby precluding adherence to any single ideology justifying their actions. The pardon was most attractive to mariners possessing greater social and economic capital, which explains why so many of them were able to return to their homes and quickly return to honest maritime work.

Steven C. Hahn is a professor of history at St. Olaf College. His previous work has focused on the Muskogee (Creek) Nation and the southern British colonies. He is the author of two books, The Invention of the Creek Nation (2004), The Life and Times of Mary Musgrove (2012), and his recent publications include “The Atlantic Odyssey of Richard Tookerman: Gentleman of South Carolina, Pirate of Jamaica, and Litigant before the King’s Bench” (Early American Studies, 2017). Dr. Hahn lives in Northfield, Minnesota.

Living Indigenous Feminism

Stories of Contemporary Native American Women

CAROLYN ROSS JOHNSTON AND TERRI MCKINNEY BAKER

Living Indigenous Feminism is a bricolage of historical research and historiography, poetry, interviews, biographies, memoirs, and stories–both traditional and modern. What we found is that these indigenous women have been “living feminism” in ways that shed new light on these histories, while showing how their lives and visions can offer fresh guidance for turbulent present and the shared future we are making now.This book features Native women including Cherokee, Choctaw, Comanche, Seminole, Seneca, Iroquois, Navajo, Salish and Kootenai, Kiowa, Muscogee, Creek, Yankton Dakota Sioux, Fort Sill Apache, Cheyenne, Red Lake Ojibwe, Ho-C hunk, Seneca,Tonawanda Band, Standing Rock Sioux, Lakota Sioux, Blackfeet, Laguna Pueblo, and San Ildefonso Pueblo. Indigenous women, the authors contend, have always lived a pattern of gender power and balance. Thus, indigenous feminism is traditional, and at the same time, a source of fresh insights about how we can sustain balanced, inclusive, meaningful living through times of challenge and change like those we live in now.

Although traditional academic scholarship is an individualistic and solitary venture, theirs is relational and organic, with each other, with the living Indigenous women who shared their stories with them, and with the Indigenous women who lived before them, whom we met on the of scattered historical records, within which their lives have left the traces we bring together here.

Carolyn Ross Johnston is the Elie Wiesel Professor of Humane Letters at Eckerd College.

Texas Tech University Press

About Texas Tech University Press

Texas Tech University Press (TTU Press) has been the book publishing arm of Texas Tech University since 1971 and a member of the Association of American University Presses since 1987. The mission of TTU Press is to disseminate the fruits of original research by publishing rigorously peer-reviewed works that compel scholarly exchange and that entertain and enlighten the university’s broadest constituency throughout the state, the nation, and the world. TTU Press publishes 15-20 new titles each year and has approximately 450 titles in print. In addition to a diverse list of nonfiction titles focused on the history and culture of Texas, the Great Plains, and the American West, the Press publishes in the areas of natural history, border studies, and peace and conflict studies. Additionally, the Press publishes select titles in literary genres ranging from biography and memoir to young adult and children’s titles. It also publishes the annual winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Competition in Poetry.

As a university press, we make available works of scholarship and literature that might otherwise not be published. We have a large list in topics showcasing and investigating West Texas, a historically underserved region. Our imprint extends the reach of Texas Tech University both nationally and globally. We promote books and literary culture in our Lubbock community through author events and outreach engagement opportunities.

ttupress.com

Going to Seed

Essays on Idleness, Nature, and Sustainable Work

KATE J. NEVILLE

An abandoned place, a disheveled person, a shabby or deteriorating state: we describe such ruin colloquially as “going to seed.” But gardeners will protest: going to seed as idle? No, plants are sending out compressed packets filled with the energy needed to sow new life. A pause from flowering gives a chance for the seeds to form. In a time of urgent environmental change, of pressing social injustice, and of ever-advancing technologies and global connections, we often respond with acceleration—a speeding up and scaling up of our strategies to counter the damage and destruction around us. But what if we take the seeds as a starting point: what might we learn about work, sustainability, and relationships on this beleaguered planet if we slowed down, stepped back, and held off?

Going to Seed explores questions of idleness, considering the labor both of humans and of the myriad other inhabitants of the world. Drawing on science, literature, poetry, and personal observation, these winding and sometimes playful essays pay attention to the exertions and activities of the other-than-human lives that are usually excluded from our built and settled spaces, asking whose work and what kinds of work might be needed for a more just future for all.

Kate Neville is an associate professor in Political Science and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto, where she studies global energy and resource politics and community resistance. When not in Toronto, Kate can be found in a cabin in northern British Columbia, on the territory of the Taku River Tlingit First Nation.

May 2024

256 pages

Nonfiction / Nature

Rights: World

January 2024

216 pages

Fiction / Black Experience / Queer Experience Rights: World

The Birthright of Sons

JEFFREY SPIVEY

The Birthright of Sons is a collection of stories centered around the experiences of marginalized people, namely Black and LGBTQ+ men. Though the stories borrow elements from various genres (horror, suspense, romance, magical realism, etc.), they’re linked by an exploration of identity and the ways personhood is shaped through interactions with the people, places, and belief systems around us.

Underpinning the project is a core belief—self-definition is fluid, but conflict arises because society often fails to keep pace with personal evolution. In each of these stories, the protagonists grapple with their understanding of who they are, who and how they love, and what’s ultimately most important to them. In almost every case, however, the quest to know or protect oneself is challenged by an external force, resulting in violence, crisis, or confusion, among other outcomes.

The Birthright of Sons colors in “the other” as three-dimensional, by highlighting the unique obstacles that marginalized people face while simultaneously centering their humanity and unearthing universal struggles and commonalities. Be it experiencing a sexual awakening, contemplating the cumulative effects of racial tension in the workplace, or searching desperately for a moment of peace in the attention economy, the collection amplifies underrepresented voices in a playful and contemporary way, elevating, critiquing, and confronting its characters.

Through a mix of heart, dark humor, and social observation, The Birthright of Sons ponders the power of difference in a world defined by rigid definitions, ideological silos, and an unwillingness to change.

Jefferey Spivey is a Des Moines, Iowa-based writer and editor. His short stories have appeared (or will soon appear) in A Gathering of the Tribes, The Evergreen Review, Typehouse, Flying Island, decomp, and Las Positas College’s Havik anthology. He’s also a 2022 de Groot Foundation “Courage To Write” grant recipient.

A Dream in Which I am Playing with Bees

Poems

R.K. FAUTH

A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees is a collection of poems made of natural imagery, queer metaphors, personal observations, and historical circumstances surrounding honeybees. In the aftermath of a fictional bee extinction, these poems are presented to the post-bee reader as “artifacts.” These are poems in hindsight.

Playing with Bees positions poetry in hindsight to contemplate poetry’s “natural” inclinations towards building alternative worlds through earthbound metaphors. Whether in a line or an entire premise, none of the poems could think, speak, or see in the same way if bees—and the relations they make possible—suddenly disappeared. Like any natural resource, the bee is a wellspring of possibility. Essential. Fragile. Causal. And like any animal, the pollinating bee has enabled a diverse phylum of phrases and myths that humans trade to express our most hard-to-name feelings.

What changes about our imaginations after a peg in the environment is removed? What could disappear from our minds, our fantasies, and our self-descriptors, if nature is no longer a mirror?

Consider a museum of language. As artifacts, these poems are the residue of a dead species—but they are also the offshoots of a playful, abundant, delicate ecosystem. Playing with Bees covets what’s left. At the bottom of everything, we find the fragments an ecologically intact dream; an apocalypse in reverse.

RK Fauth is a poet whose writing has appeared in POETRY, The Rising Phoenix Review, Blue Unicor n, Dream of the River: an LGBTQ+ Anthology, The NonBinary Review, The Fulbright Korea Infusion, and elsewhere. From 2019–2022, RK ran the award-winning public humanities project, “Unprecedented,” which circulated Black Plague–era erasure poems between strangers. She earned an M.A. at Georgetown University, where she also served as a Poetry Fellow at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. RK lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, with her fiancé and their two dogs.

January 2024

96 pages

Poetry / Nature Rights: World

The University of Oklahoma Press

About the University of Oklahoma Press

During its more than ninety years of continuous operation, the University of Oklahoma Press has gained international recognition as an outstanding publisher of scholarly literature. It was the first university press established in the Southwest, and the fourth in the western half of the country.

Building on the foundation laid by our previous directors, OU Press continues its dedication to the publication of outstanding scholarly works. The major goal of the Press is to strengthen its position as a preeminent publisher of books about the American West and Native Americans, while expanding its program in other scholarly disciplines, including classical studies, military history, political science, and natural science. oupress.com

We Shook Up the World

The Spiritual Rebellion of Muhammad Ali and George Harrison TRACY DAUGHERTY

George Harrison met Muhammad Ali in 1964, when both men were on the cusp of worldwide fame. Ten years later, the two men simultaneously staged comebacks, demonstrating just how much they embodied the promises and perils of their era. We Shook Up the World is the story of these two larger-than-life figures at a momentous time. A unique blend of biography and cultural history, this book goes to the very heart of the zeitgeist that each man inhabited and reinvented in profound and enduring ways.

In 1974, deep in the Pennsylvania woods, thirty-two-year-old Muhammad Ali was seeking renewal, training to regain his heavyweight boxing title, and exploring questions about his politics, his career, and his life. Meanwhile, George Harrison was thirty-one years old. With the Beatles disbanded, his marriage ending, and the loss of his mother still fresh, he traveled to India to revitalize his faith, energy, and musical spirit, seeking renewal at the Hindu holy city of Varanasi. In contemplating how these two complex figures managed to carry the cultural rebelliousness and spiritual yearning of the 1960s into a new era of cataclysmic political, economic, and social change, We Shook Up the World offers an intimate perspective on two outsize figures in the world’s cultural history, and a new understanding of their unique contributions to the consciousness of their time and ours.

Tracy Daugherty is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emeritus, at Oregon State University. He has written biographies of Joan Didion, Joseph Heller, and Donald Barthelme, as well as five novels, six short story collections, a book of personal essays, and a collection of essays on literature and writing.

The Monarch Butterfly Migration

Its Rise and Fall

MONIKA MAECKLE

Each fall, millions of monarch butterflies migrate from Canada to Mexico. Their incredible journey—nearly 3,000 miles long—takes them through Oklahoma, Texas, and other US states, where butterfly devotees eagerly await their arrival. The monarch migration is a brilliant demonstration of nature’s ingenuity, but the delicate creatures face many perils, and the number of migrating monarchs is declining sharply. This compelling book weaves natural history, science, and personal experience to explore the rise and fall of one of nature’s most spectacular phenomena. The book also focuses a wider lens on the effects of climate change and the tensions between advocacy and scientific accuracy. In addition to calling for environmental sustainability, this book reminds each of us to notice—and never take for granted—the natural wonders in our own backyards.

Monika Maeckle is founder and writer for the Texas Butterfly Ranch website and founder and director of San Antonio’s Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival.

August 2024

232 pages

Rights: World

A Pedagogy of Kindness

Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed CATHERINE J. DENIAL

Academia is not, by and large, a kind place. Individualism and competition are what count. But without kindness at its core, Catherine Denial suggests, higher education fails students and instructors—and its mission—in critical ways. Part manifesto, part teaching memoir, part how-to guide, A Pedagogy of Kindness urges higher education to get aggressive about instituting kindness, which Denial distinguishes from niceness. Having suffered beneath the weight of just “getting along,” instructors need to shift every part of what they do to prioritizing care and compassion—for students as well as for themselves. A Pedagogy of Kindness articulates a fresh vision for teaching, one that focuses on ensuring justice, believing people, and believing in people. Offering evidence-based insights and drawing from her own rich experiences as a professor, Denial offers practical tips for reshaping syllabi, assessing student performance, and creating trust and belonging in the classroom. Her suggestions for concrete, scalable actions outline nothing less than a transformational discipline—one in which, together, we create bright new spaces, rooted in compassion, in which all engaged in teaching and learning might thrive.

Catherine J. Denial is Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College. A regular speaker and consultant on teaching and learning, she is also the author of Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country. Find her online at www.catherinedenial.org.

July 2024

168 pages

Rights: World

Who is a Worthy Mother

An Intimate History of Adoption

REBECCA WELLINGTON

Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington’s timely—and deeply researched—account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States’ adoption industry. The history of adoption is rarely told from an adoptee’s perspective. Wellington remedies this gap by framing the chronicle of adoption in America using her own life story. She describes growing up in a family with which she had no biological connection, giving birth to her own biological children, and then enduring the death of her sister, who was also adopted. As she reckons with the pain and unanswered questions of her own experience, she explores broader issues surrounding adoption, including changing legal policies, sterilization and compulsory relinquishment programs, forced assimilation of babies of color and Indigenous babies adopted into white families, and other liabilities affecting women, mothers, and children.

Writer, historian, and educator Rebecca C. Wellington teaches at the University of Puget Sound.

Fighting from Above

A Combat History of the US Air Force BRIAN LASLIE

The story of the United States Air Force (USAF) stretches back to aerial operations prior to the First World War—well before the USAF became a separate service—and looks forward to a new era of airpower in space. Fighting from Above presents a concise account of this expansive history, offering a new perspective on how the air forces of the United States created an independent way of warfare over time.

From the earliest battles of the USAF’s predecessor organizations to its modern incarnation, Brian D. Laslie identifies four distinct and observable ways of war that developed over four distinct epochs. Beginning with the development of early air power (1906–1941), he highlights the creation of roles and missions, with bombardment theory and practice ascendant. An era of strategic dominance (1942–1975) followed in which the ideas of strategic bombardment ruled the air force; when such notions were unceremoniously proven false during the Vietnam-era conflicts, a period of tactical ascendancy (1975–2019) began. Finally, Laslie considers the current environment, where much of the story of the USAF remains unwritten as it grapples with the prospects and challenges posed by drones and the U.S. Space Force.

While detailing combat operations, Fighting from Above also pays close attention to technology, politics, rivalries, logistics, policy, organization, equipping, and training. Thorough, concise, and innovative in its approach, it is an authoritative, exceptionally readable history of the development of American airpower.

Brian D. Laslie is the Command Historian at the United States Air Force Academy. He is the author of three books, including Air Power’s Lost Cause: The American Air Wars of Vietnam

Euripides' Hippolytus

A Commentary for Students

HANNA M. ROISMAN

Euripides’ Hippolytus is a fascinating play about passion, innocence, rejection, betrayal, and the tragic breakdown of a family. This commentary, designed for intermediate and advanced students of ancient Greek, helps readers understand and fully appreciate this classic tragedy in all its rich complexity. The volume is the first commentary on the play to appear in print since 1996, and it is the most student-friendly guide to Hippolytus currently available.

To make the play accessible to students who are tackling it for the first time, this book features the Greek text in sections followed immediately by detailed line-by-line notes. By explaining various points of vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and content, these notes allow students to read the play on their own without resorting frequently to dictionaries or other outside aids. The volume also includes the complete, uninterrupted text of the play. In her wide-ranging introduction to the book, Hanna M. Roisman discusses the play’s mythological background and relevant aspects of Greek tragedy and performance. In addition, she explains the literary devices Euripides employs, as well as meter, prosody, and lexicality.

Comprehensive in scope, this commentary concludes with a detailed glossary; a line-by-line index of grammatical, syntactical, literary, and rhetorical figures; a list of irregular verbs; and a select bibliography.

Hanna M. Roisman is Arnold Bernhard Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Emerita, at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, is the author of Loyalty in Early Greek Epic and Tragedy and Nothing Is As It Seems: The Tragedy of the Implicit in Euripides' Hippolytus

Peyote Politics

The Making of the Native American Church

LISA D. BARNETT

A history of the rise of Peyotism and the Native American Church from the 1880s to the 1930s, Barnett’s work details the reshaping of Peyotists’ identity as “Native” and “American” and establishing their place in the American political and legal systems. Barnett describes the strategies of resistance that Peyotists employed against opponents of their religious practice, including incorporating in 1918 as the Native American Church. In doing so, they secured their religious freedom but also formed a new, hybrid cultural sense of “Native American” that emphasized the reality of honoring both Native identity and American identity on the path to citizenship status. Through their tireless efforts to protect their religion within the legal and political system, these Native Americans, many of whom were not yet American citizens, proved to be the true proponents of the constitutional idea of religious freedom.

Lisa D. Barnett is Assistant Professor of American Religious History at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

May 2024

300 pages

Classical Studies Rights: World

May 2025

248 pages

Native American / History Rights: World

March 2025

280 pages

Education Rights: World

April 2025

120 pages

Education Rights: World

The Opposite of Cheating

Learning with Integrity in the Age of AI

TRICIA BERTRAM GALLANT AND DAVID RETTINGER

In these days of an ever-expanding internet, generative AI, and term paper mills, students may find it too easy and tempting not to cheat, and teachers may think they can’t keep up. What’s needed, and what Tricia Bertram Gallant and David Rettinger offer in this timely book, is a new approach—one that works with the realities of the twenty-first century, not just to protect academic integrity but also to maximize opportunities for students to learn. The Opposite of Cheating presents a positive, forward-looking, research-backed vision for what classroom integrity can look like in the GenAI era, both in cyberspace and on campus. Bertram Gallant and Rettinger provide practical suggestions to help faculty revise the conversation around integrity, refocus classes and students on learning, reconsider the structure and goals of assessment, and generally reframe our response to cheating. At the core of this strategy is a call for teachers, academic staff, institutional leaders, and administrators to rethink how we “show up” for students, and to reinforce and fully support quality teaching, learning, and assessment.

Tricia Bertram Gallant is Director of Academic Integrity and Triton Testing at the University of California, San Diego.; David A. Rettinger is Applied Professor and Undergraduate Program Director in Psychology at the University of Tulsa.

Making Writing Meaningful

A Guide for Higher Education

MICHELE A. EODICE, ANNE ELLEN GELLER, AND NEAL LERNER

It seems obvious: students will have more meaningful writing experiences if we offer more opportunities for their writing to be meaningful for them. But what does that mean? What makes writing meaningful for students? What, really, makes students want to write? The authors of this practical little book asked precisely that, and the answers they gathered from students across disciplines, majors, and institutions over several years inform their advice in Making Writing Meaningful: A Guide for Higher Education

K. Erickson

Christine

is Associate Professor Emerita of History at Purdue University Fort Wayne.

Marking Native Borders

Indigenous Geography and American Empire in the Early Tennessee Country LUCAS KELLEY

Since time immemorial, Native peoples’ understandings of space and territory have defined the landscape of the Tennessee Country—the region drained by the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi rivers and their tributaries. Marking Native Borders challenges the narrative of inevitable U.S. expansion by exploring how Cherokees and Chickasaws used these notions of space and territory in new and different ways to counter the encroachment of white settlers and land speculators in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

When settlers began to trudge over the Appalachian Mountains, intent on making new homes on Native land, Cherokees and Chickasaws fortified their territories by creating clear borders around their nations. They further defended their permanent, inherent right to these bordered spaces by combining Indigenous ideas of communal land use with aspects of European property law. The Cherokees and Chickasaws, however, did not always agree on how to maintain control of their lands, and Lucas P. Kelley’s comparison of their differing strategies provides a nuanced, more accurate picture of Native peoples’ lived experiences in this turbulent time and place. He also describes how white settlers and speculators, in turn, revised their own strategies for expansion in response to the Cherokees’ and Chickasaws’ success in defending their national lands.

Lucas P. Kelley is Assistant Professor of History at Valparaiso University.

A Military History of the New World Disorder, 1989–2022 JONATHAN M. HOUSE

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 freed the world of the political and military perils and imperatives of the Cold War. But it also introduced a whole new constellation of risks and challenges, as Jonathan M. House brings into sharp relief in A Military History of the New World Disorder, 1989–2022, the third and final volume in his comprehensive trilogy of military developments around the globe since the Second World War. Focusing largely but not exclusively on the US, House surveys subsequent developments in military strategy and operations—the processes by which politicians and military leaders of the major powers designed, organized, resourced, and then employed military forces to conduct or deter conflicts. His overview ranges from conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan to American interventions in Panama, Somalia, former Yugoslavia, and Haiti; Israel vs. Hezbollah in Lebanon; and the resurgence of the Russian military in Syria, Georgia, and Ukraine. Throughout, House provides a compelling analysis of recent military developments, including the strengths and weaknesses of employing precision-guided munitions, counter-insurgency techniques, and other controversial methods of current warfare. His work reveals the complex relationship between national political decisions to commit armed forces to conflicts and the results on the battlefield—and offers a timely perspective on military power and practice in the current day.

Jonathan M. House is an American military historian and author. He is a professor emeritus of military history at the United States Army Command and General Staff College.

May 2025

384 pages

Military Histoy / World History Rights: World

May 2025

248 pages

Native American / U.S. History Rights: World

LUCAS P. KELLEY

Rights: World

March 2025

224 pages

Military History / History Rights: World

Cherokee Nation Citizenship

A Political History

AARON KUSHNER

For the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, citizenship is an active way of life. In this, Aaron Kushner contends, it differs from the general American understanding of citizenship as a statement. Cherokee Nation Citizenship is Kushner’s exploration of legal citizenship in the Cherokee Nation, how the law has developed and changed over time, and what lessons this living idea and its history hold for Americans, Native and non-Native alike.The Cherokee Nation’s understanding of citizenship is complex, encompassing legal entitlements and privileges but also notions of identity, belonging, and cultural practice.The author's account documents major shifts in the Cherokee Nation’s articulation of citizenship—changes introduced by the 1866 treaty that followed the Civil War, the allotment era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the Nation’s new constitution in the 1970s. The idea of Gadugi, which translates as “coordinated work for the common good,” is a foundational thread running through this history—an element that has helped the Cherokee Nation sustain itself, Kushner suggests, and that embodies a sense of responsibility and resilience that non-Native Americans can learn from.

Aaron Kushner is the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Assistant Teaching Professor at Arizona State University.

Quartermasters of Conquest

The Mexican-American War and the Making of South Texas CHRIS MENKING

The Mexican-American War, 1846–1848, resulted in the largest militaristic land acquisition in American history. It also shaped the distribution of power and wealth in South Texas in profound ways that still resonate throughout the region’s political and economic landscape. The US Army Quartermaster Department oversaw the logistical war effort, which continued to operate a new chain of forts and depots along the southern and western boundary with territories controlled by Native Americans after the war ended. In Quartermasters of Conquest Menking explores the Quartermaster Department’s critical but generally unappreciated functions—its wartime support of three separate armies in the field and its long-term, consequential operations in the decade after the war.Combining analysis of wartime logistics with insight into the divergent military and social histories of the lower Rio Grande borderland, Quartermasters of Conquest demonstrates the lasting influence of the Quartermaster Department on South Texas.

Chris Menking is a history professor at Tarrant County College.

The Purifying Knife

The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas

MICHAEL PHILLIPS AND ELIZABETH FRIAUF

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, 32 US states passed laws allowing involuntary sterilization on those deemed biologically “unfit”: convicted criminals, the disabled, the poor, and people of color. Texas, despite a history of violent racism, was not one of them. In The Purifying Knife, Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf explore this curious instance of the Lone Star State’s exceptionalism. The first history of the eugenics movement in Texas, it is a narrative that intersects with debates over race, immigration, abortion, the role of women in society, homosexuality, medical ethics, and the politics of disability in the state—debates resonating today in Texas and beyond. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Americans embraced eugenics. Yet the Texas legislature ultimately rejected nine of ten laws advocated by the state’s eugenicists and their predecessors. Phillips and Friauf trace this unlikely resistance to a variety of influences: wealthy cotton growers concerned that the anti-immigrant politics of the eugenics movement would deprive them of a source of easily exploitable labor; a populist distrust of higher education and the academic elites who enthusiastically supported the eugenics movement; and the forces of anti-Darwinist fundamentalism and pre-millennial dispensationalism in the 1920s, among others. The Purifying Knife also details how eugenical ideas survived long past their decline in the 1940s and have entered a disturbing afterlife in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Phillips and Friauf’s work offers insight into the history of the LGBTQ community, abortion, and immigration policies in Texas, and persuasively argues that the long arc of eugenics history has helped shaped contemporary politics in the Lone Star State.

Osage Language and Lifeways

CAMERON

PRATT, STEPHANIE

RAPP, MARCIA HAAG, AND DYLAN HERRICK

The Osage language is a vital part of Osage identity. The language suffered rapid decline during the twentieth century, but the Osage people are taking significant steps to revitalize its use. To that end, this volume—the first ever introductory Osage grammar textbook—is a much-needed resource for students, teachers, scholars, and anyone wishing to learn how to speak and write Osage. Written collectively by bilingual Osage speakers and linguists, Osage Language and Lifeways offers both clear grammatical instruction and valuable cultural information. As the authors explain in their introduction, the Osage language, a Dhegiha language within the Siouan language family, is highly complex. Drawing on their Native language expertise and classroom experience, the authors clarify elements of Osage grammar that are entirely different from English grammar or other European languages. An important contribution to the study of indigenous languages, Osage Language and Lifeways opens a new pathway for Osages to learn and practice the language of their ancestors and ensure its continuity for future generations.

June 2025

272 pages

U.S. History / History Rights: World

April 2025

328 pages

Language / Native American Rights: World

February 2025

262 pages Fiction / Literature Rights: World

Low April Sun

CONSTANCE E. SQUIRES

On the morning of April 19, 1995, Delaney Travis steps into the Social Security office in Oklahoma City to obtain an ID for her new job. Moments later, an explosion shatters the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building into rubble. Her boyfriend Keith and half-sister Edie are left to assume the worst—that Delaney perished in the bombing, despite definitive proof. Twenty years later, now married and bonded by the tragedy, Edie and Keith’s lives are upended when they begin to receive mysterious Facebook messages from someone claiming to be Delaney. Desperate for closure, the couple embarks on separate journeys, each aiming for an artists’ community in New Mexico that may hold answers. Alongside their quest is August, a recovering alcoholic with a haunting connection to the bombing. Raised in the separatist compound of Elohim City, August harbors secrets about Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the attack, and his own possible involvement in the tragedy. When his path crosses with Edie, he must choose whether to tell anyone about his past. In their quest for answers, Edie, Keith, and August seek to understand how the shadows of the past continue to darken the present, as the ground beneath them threatens to give way once again.

June 2025

296 pages Rights: World

Rhino Tanks and Sticky Bombs

GI Ingenuity in World War II

ROBERT P. WETTEMANN

Coming of age during the Great Depression, the American boys who fought in World War II had, through necessity, developed a unique brand of technological resourcefulness. This proficiency, Robert Wettemann contends, provided GIs with another weapon in a distinctly American way of war. Rhino Tanks and Sticky Bombs is Wettemann’s eminently readable account of how this hard-won “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” mentality was critical to America’s success, giving servicemen the know-how and can-do spirit to creatively engineer solutions to wartime problems. Seamlessly blending social, military, intellectual, and technological history, Rhino Tanks and Sticky Bombs weaves an engaging narrative about the roots of American ingenuity during WWII—and makes a compelling case for a specific instance of American distinctiveness that proved crucial to Allied victory.

Sooner Doughboys Write Home

The University of Oklahoma and World War I

DAVID W. LEVY

Days before the armistice was signed ending World War I, Stratton D. Brooks, third president of the University of Oklahoma, sent a letter to every student, former student, and faculty member serving in the armed forces. He had a request: would each man write a letter in reply, describing his experiences and impressions during his wartime service? Dozens of them responded in late 1918 and early 1919. Now, more than a century later, historian David W. Levy has selected and annotated fifty-three of these letters.

Most of these young men, or “doughboys” as they were called, came from small Oklahoma towns and farms. Suddenly thrust into strange and often dangerous circumstances after the United States entered the war in 1917, they betray in their letters an appealing innocence of this wider world. For some of them, it is a world of dreary inactivity and boredom, punctuated by moments of breathtaking violence and danger. Others marvel at sights in Paris and in Germany. Although these Sooner doughboys, as Levy acknowledges, were not “ordinary,” given their privileged status as college students, they observed the war from the field and not from some more remote vantage point. This is a unique chronicle of war and rememberance, from the eyes of everyday men in history.

David W. Levy is retired as the Irene and Julian J. Rothbaum Professor of Modern American History and David Ross Boyd Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Herbert Croly of the New Republic: The Life and Thought of an American Progressive and Mark Twain: The Divided Mind of America’s Best-Loved Writer and coeditor of seven volumes of the letters of Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis.

American Indians in U.S. History

Third Edition

ROGER L. NICHOLS

This concise survey, tracing the experiences of American Indians from their origins to the present, has proven its value to both students and general readers in the two decades since its first publication. This third edition, drawing on the most recent research, adds information about Indian social, economic, political, and cultural issues in the twenty-first century, including tribal sovereignty, the Keystone XL Pipeline, and the controversial legacy of Indian boarding schools.

The author traces tribal experiences through four eras: indigenous America prior to the European invasions; the colonial period; the emergence of the United States as the dominant power in North America and its subsequent invasion of Indian lands; and the years from 1900 to the present. Useful features include brief biographies of important Native figures, an updated chronology, and suggested readings for each period of the past four hundred years. Nichols uses both Euro-American sources and tribal stories to illuminate the problems Indian people and their leaders have dealt with in every generation.

Roger L. Nichols is Professor of History at the University of Arizona. During his long career, he has published many works on Native American history. His list of titles includes Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), and American Indians in U.S. History (OUP, 2003).

February 2025

264 pages

History / U.S. History

Rights: World

March 2025 304 pages Native American / U.S. History Rights: World

Hero of Fort Sumter

The Extraordinary Life of Robert Anderson

JOHN W. MOODY

As the commander of the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in the fateful early hours of April 12, 1861, Robert Anderson (1805–71) played a critical role in the unfolding of the Civil War. Although his leadership and his courage under fire catapulted him into national recognition, the attack on Fort Sumter was just one chapter in Anderson’s story. That story, told here in full for the first time, offers a unique lens on the development of the US military and the country itself before and during the Civil War.

Anderson’s family, harking back to the nation’s founding, included William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) and Chief Justice John Marshal. His father crossed the Delaware with George Washington. And among his acquaintances were presidents ranging from the aged John Adams to seven-year-old Theodore Roosevelt. Historian Wesley Moody charts Robert Anderson’s path from an upbringing on the Kentucky frontier to a West Point education and a military career that saw him fighting in nearly every American conflict from the Black Hawk War to the Civil War—catching malaria fighting the Seminoles, taking several bullets while serving in Mexico, writing the textbook for field artillery used by both Union and Confederate forces, mentoring William Tecumseh Sherman.

Central to Anderson’s story was his deft and decisive handling of the Fort Sumter crisis. Had Major Anderson been the aggressor, as many of his command urged, President Abraham Lincoln would have been unable to rally the Northern states to war. Had Anderson handed his command over to the Confederate troops, a demoralized North would have offered little resistance to secession. To understand this pivotal moment in U.S. history, one has to understand the man at its center; and to understand that man and his masterful performance under extraordinary pressure, one can do no better than to read Moody’s thoroughly absorbing, richly detailed biography.

Wesley Moody is Professor of History at Florida State College at Jacksonville. He is the author or editor of several books on the Civil War, including Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and Civil War History