Texas Tech University Press • University of Georgia Press • University of Nebraska Press • University of New Mexico Press • University of North Carolina Press • University of Oklahoma Press • University of the West Indies Press • University Press of kansas • 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
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As a university press, we make available works of scholarship and literature that might otherwise not be published.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
Gypsy Alibi
A Gonzo Memoir
BOB LIVINGSTON
Born in San Antonio, raised in Lubbock, Bob Livingston drank from the same water that nourished musicians like Terry Allen, Joe Ely, Lloyd Maines, Jesse Taylor, Butch Hancock, and others who were surfing the wake of Buddy Holly, Sonny Curtis, and the Crickets. He then made his way to Austin and installed himself among the progenitors of the Cosmic Cowboy movement, as bass player for The Lost Gonzo Band, musicians who played outlaw country music and broke the rules (and the laws) that didn’t suit them. After that, Livingston took his Lost Gonzo Band on the road to all corners of the earth, from India to Africa to Europe. He eventually made it back to Texas, and these days Livingston is fostering cross cultural music of all kinds. He’s produced countless albums, written more songs than he can remember, and is excited to tell you about it all in this book, the story of his fascinating life.
Singer-songwriter Bob Livingston is a folk-rock raconteur who doesn't mind being called an "entertainer." Best known as the Lost Gonzo Band bass-player and singer, he toured and recorded with visionary misfits like Jerry Jeff Walker, Murphey, the Lost Gonzo Band and Ray Wylie Hubbard. These tours earned him the honor of being appointed, “Ambassador of Goodwill,” by the State of Texas. Livingston plays over 100 shows a year: house concerts, private parties, folk clubs and festivals.
September 2025
424 pages
Memoir/Music
Rights: World
October 2025
264 pages
Memoir/Vietnam
Rights: World
A White Pebble
Madame Ngô-Đình Nhu’s Posthumous Memoir
NGÔ-ĐÌNH NHU
EDITED BY TUONG VU
No other Vietnamese family in modern time had such an intense involvement in high politics and public affairs like the Ngô-Đìnhs. Through President Ngô-Đình Diệm of the Republic of Vietnam (1955-1963), this family helped shape Vietnamese history in numerous ways. President Diệm’s rule in South Vietnam was perceived by many to be authoritarian and nepotistic, but it is important for historians and for anyone interested in Vietnamese history to learn more about his family members who played such important roles in his government. How did they see themselves, their country, and their compatriots? How did each member of the family think of others? How did they view the family’s role in history?
Sixty years after the deaths of Ngô-Đình Diệm and Ngô-Đình Nhu, English-language readers can now learn about Madame Ngô-Đình Nhu’s life from her own words as well as her and her children’s view about the role of their family in Vietnam’s history. The book also includes an essay by her two children. They played an important and controversial role in modern Vietnamese history but their personal views have not been known
Tuong Vu is Professor of Political Science, University of Oregon, where he has taught since 2008. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton University and the National University of Singapore. He is the founding director of the US-Vietnam Research Center based at the Global Studies Institute, University of Oregon. His research has focused on the comparative politics of state formation, development, and revolutions in East and Southeast Asia. He is the author and co-editor of seven books, two forthcoming books, and 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.
The Texas Mexican Plant-Based Cookbook
ADÁN MEDRANO
The Texas Mexican Plant-Based Cookbook is about the plant-based traditions and recipes of the first people to step onto the landscape that is now Texas and northeastern Mexico over 15,000 years ago. They are the ancestors of today’s indigenous Texas Mexican American community. Each of the 84 kitchen-tested recipes includes detailed cooking instructions intended for contemporary home cooks. Headnotes for each recipe explain how the dish entered the region’s culinary traditions and became integral to the culinary act of meaning-making in the community. The book provides explanations of the origins of iconic ingredients like squash, cactus, mesquite and sunflowers, as well as more recent, post-conquest, ingredients like watermelon, rice and cauliflower. Texas Mexican food is also called comida casera, home-style cooking, and its history originates in places like the Gault archaeological site with evidence that the people who lived there cooked pronghorn antelopes, turkeys, deer, rabbits, ducks, and quail. But they were also avid plant-based cooks. Ancestors ate pecans and black walnuts, along with acorns, grapes, berries, seeds and tubers. Mesquite and cactus were central to celebrations. It is these plant-based traditions, often overlooked, that this cookbook celebrates.
Adán Medrano is a Chef, Food Writer and Filmmaker. Author of Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary Heritage In Recipes – Book Of The Year Finalist by Foreword Reviews. His most recent book, Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking, is reviewed and listed by “Spruce Eats” in “The 8 Best Mexican cookbooks to read in 2021.” Both history/cookbooks are academically peer-reviewed and published by Texas Tech University Press. He is the Executive Producer, Writer of the feature film documentary, Truly Texas Mexican streaming on Amazon Prime. Medrano spent 23 years traveling and working throughout Latin America, Europe and Asia where he came to recognize the importance of food and culinary traditions in society. He returned to the US in 2010 to focus on the culinary traditions of the Mexican American community of Texas: its history, recipes, and how this singular cuisine is showing the way towards a better understanding of what it means to be “American.”
July 2025
256 pages
Cooking/Mexico
Rights: World
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
February 2026
272 pages
French History Rights: World
Black Montmartre in the Jazz Age
ROBERT TOMLINSON
In Black Montmartre in the Jazz Age, African American musicians invested the quarter, responding to a demand for American dance rhythms. Hallowed entertainment venues acquired jazz orchestras, and a plethora of clubs sprang up in the narrow streets around the rue Pigalle and the rue Fontaine, creating a jazz-fueled dance culture. On this self-contained island, far from the racist homeland, these performers established an imperfect utopia. Though faced with resistance from some of their white compatriots, American media and clubgoers, a relatively benign and tolerant French society allowed them to attain a level of social and economic achievement that would have eluded them in America.
Black Montmartre in the Jazz Age provides a focused and detailed narrative, undeveloped in previous studies, that depicts the decline of the clannish white “society dancings,” of the rue Caumartin, and the parallel rise of Black owned and managed clubs in Pigalle. If the colorful, turbulent lives of these Black expatriates seem at times the trivial chatter of gossip columns, the battles they fought and the collaborations they engaged in with white entrepreneurs constitute what Tyler Stovall called the “nation’s conflicted journey into the modern age,” conflicts not without significance for our own time and mirrored by the microcosm of Black Montmartre.
Robert Tomlinson is a Jamaican-American artist and scholar of French literature. He is a professor emeritus in the French and Italian Department at Emory University. Author of more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles in both French and English, he has also written two books, Exiles: a poem with original woodcuts and La Fête Galante: Watteau et Marivaux. He currently lives in Paris.
The Man Who Changed the World
Quaker, Abolitionist, Anti-Racist
DAVID CHANOFF
Wilberforce, Clarkson, Wesley, Britain’s great abolitionist activist Granville Sharp, along with many other of the 18th century Atlantic world’s most consequential figures, were galvanized by the moral power of Anthony Benezet, a modest Quaker teacher who never ventured more than a few miles from his home in Philadelphia. Benezet’s fingerprints are all over the extinction of the Atlantic slave trade, and the gathering strength of America’s own burgeoning abolitionist movement as well. He was a figure of global importance, “a saint,” Garry Wills called him, a great bearer to the rest of the world of the American ideals (no matter how compromised) of equality and liberty. Anthony Benezet lived, by chance, at the nexus of radical Christianity and revolutionary democracy, and he fused the power of those two streams of morality in a way that changed lives and challenged political institutions so compellingly that the world became a different place in no small part because of him.
The Man Who Changed the World will tell Benezet’s story, from his birth in 1713 during the bloody aftermath of the Camisard revolt in France to his massively attended funeral in Philadelphia a year after the end of the Revolutionary War. Chanoff intends to carve out a place for this forgotten American hero as a seminal figure among those who launched American ideals onto the world stage. Indeed, for all the magnitude of Anthony Benezet’s impact, aside from scholars of the period he is, simply, not known. He does not exist in any meaningful way in the widely read histories and biographies that define and amplify America’s historical consciousness. In the manuscript, Chanoff will tell Benezet’s story—who he was, what he did, how he did it, and why it was that William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” of Pennsylvania provided the matrix for the historic transformation he brought about. Importantly, Chanoff also sees important echoes in Benezet's life for our current times, when "Democracy and the legacy of slavery are in the news every day."
David Chanoff has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and the New Republic His sixteen books include collaborations with former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Crowe Jr., and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon.
September 2025
232 pages
Biography Rights: World
May 2025
352 pages Rights: World
December 2025
272 pages United States History 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.
Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria
How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy
BEAU CLELAND
This book aims to recenter our understanding of the Civil War by framing it as a hemispheric affair, deeply influenced by the actions of a network of private parties and minor officials in both Confederate and British territory in and around North America. John Wilkes Booth likely would not have been in a position to assassinate Abraham Lincoln without the logistical support and assistance the pro-Confederate network in Canada. That network, to which he was personally introduced in Montreal in fall 1864, was hosted and facilitated by willing colonials across the hemisphere. Many of its Confederate members arrived in British North America via a long-established transportation and communications network built around British colonies, especially Bermuda and the Bahamas, whose primary purpose was running the blockade.It is difficult to overstate how essential blockade running was for the rebellion’s survival, and it would have been impossible without the aid of sympatheticcolonials. The operations of this informal, semi-private network were of enormous consequence for the course of the war and its aftermath, and our understanding of the Civil War is incomplete without a deeper reckoning with the power and potential for chaos of these private networks imbued with the power of a state.
Beau Cleland is an assistant professor of history at the University of Calgary and a research fellow at the Centre for Military, Strategic, and Security Studies, where he teaches and researches about pirates, smugglers, raiders, and scoundrels, and how they shaped the history of the U.S., North America, and beyond. He served as artillery officer in the U.S. Army, with combat duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, and before that he played mediocre football at Georgia Tech. He lives in Calgary, Alberta with his wife and a bewildering array of children, dogs, and cats.
Conservation in Common
Managing Wildlife and Sustaining Community on Tanzania’s Maasai Steppe JUSTIN RAYCRAFT
Wildlife conservation in Tanzania is fraught with conflicts. Social scientists have demonstrated that the state, international NGOs, and private investors often play dominant roles in shaping conservation practice at the expense of rural communities. That said, not all protected areas are constitutive of fortress conservation. Conservation in Common takes up the question of how a Wildlife Management Area (WMA) in Tanzania’s Maasailand is viewed from the bottom up, by the people who are directly affected by its implementation. Through historically grounded ethnographic and quantitative methods, the book documents a discursive shift in local attitudes towards Randilen WMA in the Tarangire ecosystem—from fear and protest to widespread support. The book analyzes this process of transformation in the context of empathetic and equitable management practices, which have fostered trust between Randilen’s leadership team and community members, and uncovered common ground between conservation stakeholders. Raycraft argues that although WMAs are not fully devolved to the local level, pastoral communities can instrumentalize them to defend the things they value most: their land and livelihoods. Conservation in Common makes a much-needed intervention in the critical political ecology literature by providing the first anthropological account of a conservation area in Tanzania that serves the interests of its local community, demonstrating in the process that protecting wildlife and safeguarding human well-being are not mutually exclusive activities.
Justin Raycraft is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Lethbridge. He was the recipient of the Peter K. New Award First Prize by the Society for Applied Anthropology in 2019, and the Salisbury Award from the Canadian Anthropology Society in 2018. He has been carrying out ethnographic research on the human dimensions of conservation in Tanzania since 2014.
December 2025
232 pages
Environmental Conservation Rights: World
October 2025
Driven
A Life in Public Service and Journalism from LBJ to CNN
TOM JOHNSON
FOREWORD
BY JUDY WOODRUFF
Driven brings a seasoned perspective to today’s conversations about government, media, and the future of truth in the form of a memoir by Tom Johnson, a man who helped shape twenty-four-hour news media as we know it. Johnson’s storied career in politics and journalism spans the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, where he was privy to painful negotiations on Vietnam and notified the president that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, through the executive leadership of the LA Times and Ted Turner’s upstart, CNN. In this account, Johnson provides eyewitness accounts of Lyndon B. Johnson’s triumphs and disasters and his on-the-ground view of the magnificent achievements and significant shortfalls of late-twentieth-century American journalism. With more than eight decades behind him, Driven is not just Johnson’s look at the past, but a chance for his story to offer guidance about finding balance in an uncertain future.
Tom Johnson served as chief executive officer of two of America’s most respected news organizations, the Los Angeles Times and CNN. After graduating from the University of Georgia, he was part of the first White House Fellows cohort and eventually became assistant press secretary under Bill Moyers, then assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson (no relation), following LBJ back to Texas after he left office. He is a recipient of the Horatio Alger award, Ten Outstanding Young Americans, Five Outstanding Young Texans, Five Outstanding Young Georgians, Walter Cronkite award for excellence in journalism, and the highest honor of the Radio and Television News Directors Association, the Paul White Award. In 2006, he received the John Gardner Legacy of Leadership Award by the White House Fellows for lifetime achievement in public service. A native of Macon, Georgia, and graduate of the University of Georgia and Harvard Business School, Johnson lives in Atlanta.
Enforcing Order on the Border
Race, Policing, and Immigration Enforcement in South Texas ERIC GAMINO
As a lifelong resident of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Eric Gamino has always been curious why some United States-born Latinos were indifferent toward Latino immigrants, especially since both groups lived within the same majority Latino-origin community—the Rio Grande Valley of Texas (RGV). Enforcing Order on the Border includes an autoethnographic examination of his life as a resident of the RGV coupled with his experience as a police officer for two different police departments in the RGV. Gamino reveals how the concept of race functions within a predominantly Latino-origin community. The findings expose the interplay between local police, federal immigration officials, and civilians regarding immigration. Enforcing Order on the Border illustrates how institutional practices such as immigration enforcement occur on the South Texas–Mexico borderlands as a form of collaborative efforts between local police and the U.S. Border Patrol from an institutional perspective. Consequently, this collaborative effort in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands creates a distinctive method of policing, which he refers to as constitution-free policing. Gamino provides further insight into how the concept of race in a predominantly Latino-origin community contextualizes intraracial/intra-ethnic relations on the South Texas–Mexico borderlands.
Eric Gamino is an associate professor of criminology and justice studies at California State University, Northridge.
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.
Ross Johnston is the Elie Wiesel Professor of Humane Letters at Eckerd College. Terri McKinney
(Choctaw) was a professor of English at Northeastern State University.
September 2025
200 pages
Human Geography
Rights: World
June 2025
240 pages
Rights: World
Carolyn
Baker
Porgy’s Ghost
The Life and Works of Dorothy Heyward and Her Contribution to an American Classic
HARLAN GREENE
Porgy's Ghost is a brief biography that illuminates Dorothy Heyward's personal and professional life. This book is based on Harlan Greene's extensive research on Heyward's archives (many of which are housed at the Addlestone), her unpublished "ghost-written" autobiography, and her obsessive introspective writing during her "mad" period. As such, Greene calls Porgy's Ghost a biographical correction to a long-standing omission of Dorothy Heyward's influence on Porgy, the novel, Porgy, the play, and Porgy and Bess, the opera. While there exist many biographies and monographs dedicated to individuals like Dorothy's husband, Dubose, the original author and librettist, the composer George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, its co-lyricist, its director, assistant director, etc., there has been one person repeatedly missing from all the narratives. And it is the only person who was connected with the project from beginning to end: Dorothy Heyward. Thus, in this important work of scholarship, Greene shines a light on a person who has for too long remained as a ghost hidden behind the shadows of the aforementioned men.
Harlan Greene retired as the Head of Special Collections at the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library and the Director of Archival Services at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. Founder of the archives at Charleston County’s Public Library, he worked in the Jewish archives and created the LGBTQ archives. Chair of Charleston’s Historical Commission, Greene is a frequent lecturer and has been interviewed on national media on various cultural topics relating to the Carolina Lowcountry. An award-winning novelist, he has also authored several nonfiction works, including Charleston: City of Memory and Mr. Skylark: John Bennett and the Charleston Renaissance (Georgia). He is the co-editor of Renaissance in Charleston: Art and Life in the Carolina Lowcountry, 1900-1940 (Georgia) and co-author of Slave Badges and the Slave-Hire System in Charleston, South Carolina, 1783-1865
April 2025
248 pages Early American Places
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.
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
Lost Synagogues of Europe
Paintings and Histories
ANDREA STRONGWATER
FOREWORD BY ISMAR SCHORSCH
This beautiful book recreates in vivid color paintings and chronicles the lifestories of nearly eighty majestic—and destroyed—European synagogues, each one a testament to the approximately 17,000 synagogues decimated during the Third Reich and early takeover of the Communist regimes. After WWII only about 3,300 buildings remained standing, and just 700+ are still in use as synagogues. This exquisite and significant work of historical preservation collects, organizes, and documents their stories. It highlights seventy-seven synagogues built from the early 1600s to 1930 and spanning sixteen European countries where destruction was rampant: Austria (6 synagogues), Belarus (3), Croatia (2), the Czech Republic (5), Estonia (1), France (2), Germany (26), Italy (1), Latvia (2), Lithuania (5), Luxembourg State (1), The Netherlands (1), Poland (15), Russia (1), Slovakia (2), and Ukraine (4). The author lovingly illustrates their exteriors and/or interiors and tells stories of their history, Jewish community, and architectural significance.
Andrea Strongwater is an author and artist whose artwork has been shown worldwide, including in the collections of the University Medical Center of Princeton, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum in Ithaca, New York, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Or Hadash Synagogue in Atlanta, and the Georges Cziffra Foundation in Senlis, France. Images from more than one hundred of her synagogue paintings have been sold as prints, postcards, and notecards at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and the Shoah Memorial in Paris.
September 2025
240 pages
Jewish History / Art and Architecture
Rights: World
June 2025
World
September 2025
205 pages
Fiction
Rights: World
90 Seconds to Midnight
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
Invitation
Stories
MI JIN KIM
In Invitation men and women try and fail to connect to the people they want to be with. They remember the first men and women who dominated their lives—parents, best friends, crushes, and cousins—and find themselves repeating old patterns. A boy shares seemingly disturbing details about his mother’s disappearance with an aloof tutor. A man stalks an ex-girlfriend but finds her missing. A woman wakes up in an empty apartment—and to every mother’s worst nightmare. When a callous young man penetrates the bell jar of an elderly couple’s quiet life, their live-in assistant learns a cruel lesson about loyalty.
Mi Jin Kim was born in Seoul and grew up in Los Angeles. A graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, her fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Quarter After Eight, and swamp pink (formerly Crazyhorse). She lives in rural South Korea with her family.
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.
March 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. standoff 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
June 2025
World
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.
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
The Earth Is Evil
STEVEN SWARBRICK
The Earth Is Evil leverages the Lacanian formula on sexuality, “there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship,” to open new conceptual space in environmental politics and theory. The basic argument is that ecotheory makes it difficult, if not impossible, to think outside the network of objects and relations. The emphasis on interconnection in ecotheory overturned problematic divides between human and nonhuman and subject and object, but this overturning has left little room for what Steven Swarbrick calls the destituent act. The Earth Is Evil calls for an ecology of negativity and draws on the senses of loss, cession, destruction, and escape that inhabit the word “destitution” while remaining fully within relation.
Steven Swarbrick (PhD, Brown University, 2016) is an associate professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. October 2025
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
Winged Witnesses
CHISOM OKAFOR
The poems are first-hand experiences of a chronically ill poet, trying hard to learn new ways of navigating time and place, after being diagnosed with a terrible heart condition. The voices in these poems have witnessed the micro-histories of the atypical body, the unusual body, the enjambed body, the chronically ill body trying to navigate space and time, love and displacement. These poems are a forcefield for questions that are at once intense and gripping: when we embody life through disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent body-minds, how do we grapple with love, time and consciousness?
Chisom Okafor, Nigerian poet and clinical nutritionist, lives in Tuscaloosa where he is studying for an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama. His poems, which speak to the geometries of bodies ravaged by disability, chronic illness, departures, trauma, and loss, also seek to adopt language as a tool for breaking stereotypes that surround the experiences of the clinically vulnerable.
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.
December 2025
150 pages
Poetry
Rights: World
December 2024
290 pages
Religion / Judaism / Ethics
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
Aliens Like Us?
An Anthropologists Field Guide to Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life
ANTHONY AVENI
In this authoritative, accessible, and at times funny and irreverent work, distinguished anthropologist Anthony Aveni speaks to the trained astrophysicist and the curious layperson alike about a simple but previously unexplored question: Why do we assume aliens, if they are really out there, behave just like us? Aveni’s newest work departs significantly from the usual scientific treatment of extraterrestrial intelligence by probing the historical and widely neglected anthropological record, which offers relevant incidents of contact among terrestrial cultures. Beginning with theories of the evolution of life and culture advocated by astrobiologists, Aliens Like Us? explores how the Western cultural imagination is influenced by ways of knowing that are deeply embedded in the minds of the questioners—for example, how we consider the ownership of property, the idea of progress, and even the way we classify things. The lessons of anthropology offer not only value structures from other cultures that differ profoundly from our own but also testify to the diverse ways in which cultures interact. Finally, on the question of potential first contact, Aveni closes with a fascinating exploration of the image of extraterrestrials in popular culture that is derived in part from the hugely influential realm of science fiction.
Anthony Aveni is the Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of Astronomy, Anthropology, and Native American Studies Emeritus at Colgate University. He has written or edited more than forty books, including Conversing with the Planets: How Science and Myth Invented the Cosmos and The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012
Cocaine
Criminals, Routes, and Markets
EDITED BY SEBASTIÁN A. CUTRONA AND JONATHAN D. ROSEN
Cocaine: Criminals, Routes, and Markets offers an unprecedented global analysis of the cocaine trade, revealing how the world’s most lucrative illicit market operates today. Unlike previous works that focus on individual countries or regions, this volume takes a global view of the cocaine supply chain, tracking the drug’s journey from coca fields in the Andes to consumers in New York, Lagos, Rotterdam, Sydney, and beyond. With contributions from leading scholars in criminology, sociology, and political science, it sheds light on the expanding networks of criminal organizations that connect producer countries in Latin America to consumer markets worldwide. The book explores the profound transformation of the cocaine market, which has shifted from being dominated by a few powerful cartels to a fragmented and highly competitive underworld. Colombian, Mexican, and Brazilian organizations have traditionally controlled the market, but new actors, including Nigerian and Albanian syndicates, have emerged as key players. From the rise of transshipment hubs in West Africa to nontraditional trafficking routes in Asia, this volume demonstrates how criminal organizations adapt to evolving market demands and law enforcement crackdowns. Just as multinational corporations streamline production, cocaine traffickers around the world manage logistics, transportation, and financial flows across continents. Yet unlike legal industries, the cocaine market thrives on secrecy, violence, and corruption, making it one of the most resilient global enterprises. By bridging theoretical frameworks from different disciplines, this volume deepens our understanding of how the global illicit economy functions. From the campesinos harvesting coca to the street dealers in Europe and the United States, the book emphasizes the interconnectedness of all actors in this lucrative, dangerous market. Furthermore, it critiques the failures of international counter-drug efforts, revealing how institutional corruption and state fragility perpetuate the trade. This book is an essential resource for policymakers, scholars, and anyone seeking to understand the complexities of the global cocaine economy.
Sebastián A. Cutrona is a senior lecturer in criminology at Liverpool Hope University. Jonathan D. Rosen is an assistant professor at New Jersey City University.
Rights: World
Driving Terror
Labor, Violence, and Justice in Cold War Argentina
KAREN ROBERT
Driving Terror tells the story of twenty-four Ford autoworkers in Argentina who were tortured and “disappeared” for their union activism in 1976, miraculously survived, and pursued a decades-long quest for truth and justice. In 2018, over four decades after their ordeal, the men won a historic human-rights case against a military commander and two retired Ford Argentina executives who were convicted of crimes against humanity.The Ford survivors’ story intertwines with the symbolic evolution of the car the men helped build at Ford: the Falcon sedan. The political polarization and violence of the Cold War era transformed the Falcon from a popular family car to a tool of state terror after the coup of 1976, when it became associated with the widespread practice of “disappearance.” Its meaning continued to evolve after the return to democracy, when artists and activists used it as a symbol of military impunity during Argentina’s long-term struggles over justice and memory.
Karen Robert is an associate professor of history at St. Thomas University, where she teaches courses on Latin American history, world history, research methods, and global automobility. She recently translated Memories of Buenos Aires: Signs of State Terrorism in Argentina, a comprehensive guide to hundreds of memory sites relating to Argentina’s last military dictatorship.
May 2025
208 pages
Landscape Architecture / Art / Education
Rights: World
The Design Competition in Landscape Architecture
A Guide for Schools and Firms
KATHLEEN KAMBIC AND KATYA CRAWFORD
FOREWORD BY JULIA CZERNIAK
Many internationally known landscape architects and architecture firms—including Snøhetta, BIG, Scape, and Weiss/Manfredi—have originated from design-competition wins. The Design Competition in Landscape Architecture is the first book devoted to helping professional and academic design studios comprehensively plan for successful entries. The book outlines the history and development of modern design competitions, includes interviews with world-renowned architects and designers, offers a pedagogical approach to competition studio, serves as a guide for entering design competitions, showcases award-winning designs from landscape architecture faculty and students, reflects on future directions of competitions, and provides resources for finding competitions. Lively graphics, including site plans, sketches, and color photographs, accompany the text. Crawford and Kambic’s history and analysis of the modern landscape architecture design competition shine a spotlight on the critical role these events play for practitioners, educators, and students and highlights how they shape and give identity to the cities in which we live.
Katya Crawford is a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture and Planning. Kathleen Kambic is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture and Planning.
Broken Arrow
ANGELA ALEISS
The release of Broken Arrow in 1950 represented a turning point in Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans. Film scholars have often cited director Delmer Daves’s movie as the first sound film to depict the Native American sympathetically, and it appealed to a postwar ideal of tolerance and racial equality that became prominent in later Westerns. Yet Broken Arrow certainly has its flaws: the Apache speak English, whites are cast in leading Apache roles, and Apache culture is highly romanticized. Additionally, many scholars agree that the movie lacks the polish of Daves’s later Western 3:10 to Yuma (1957), with its evocative cinematography and psychological undertones. Yet despite its inaccuracies and the many “artistic liberties” it takes, the movie contains powerful political and social statements about Hollywood and its attitude toward Indian/white relations. Broken Arrow not only probed these attitudes but firmly established Native American identity alongside that of whites and would influence a long series of films with Native heroes that followed, marking a transformation in Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans.
Angela Aleiss has been writing about Native American images in Hollywood for more than thirty years. She was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at UCLA’s Institute of American Cultures / American Indian Studies Center and was a recipient of the Canada-US Fulbright fellowship to study in residence at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies and Hollywood’s Native Americans: Stories of Identity and Resistance, and she has contributed articles to Indian Country Today, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Los Angeles Times
Delusions and Grandeur
Dreamers of the New West
MARK SUNDEEN
In these new and selected essays, Mark Sundeen recounts two decades of political activism, outdoor exploration, and empathetic curiosity. He was both witness to and active participant in pivotal cultural and political events of the new millennium, from Howard Dean’s presidential campaign to the Iraq War protests and the NoDAPL uprising in Standing Rock. But what brings these large phenomena into humanistic focus is the cast of idiosyncratic people he meets. Using first-person reportage, well-crafted storytelling, and wry, self-deprecating humor, Sundeen’s keen observations illustrate what everyday life is like for people in the contemporary American West, with all their systemic precarities and individual triumphs.
Mark Sundeen is an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Montana. He is the author of four other books about the American West, and he is a contributing editor for Outside Magazine. His work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, The Believer, and Best American Essays
Rights: World
February 2025
240 pages
American West / Essays Rights: World
Dichos en Nichos
SAGE VOGEL
ART BY JIM AND CHRISTEN VOGEL
Sage Vogel’s debut story collection invites readers into the heart of an archetypal 1950s Northern New Mexico village, where the fruit orchards, arroyo roads, adobe homes, and even pigsties hold tales of wit, romance, woe, and wisdom.Dichos en Nichos contains ten interconnected stories inspired by original dichos—pithy folk sayings and proverbs. Vogel's dichos—presented in both Spanish and English—are shared among a colorful cast of characters. Created in collaboration with each story is a nicho—an oil painting set in an antique frame—created by renowned Southwestern artists Christen Vogel and Jim Vogel. Dichos en Nichos is captivating and immersive. It invites readers to explore the heart and soul of a distinct setting in a bygone era. Through its inspired blend of vernacular language, compelling themes, and masterful artwork, this small volume will leave an enduring impression on all who enter its beautifully crafted and wholly unforgettable world.
Sage Vogel is a lifelong storyteller, a bilingual wordsmith, and the author of the magical realism epic El Ocio
February 2025
136 pages
Poetry
Rights: World
Dream of the Bird Tattoo
Poems and Sueñitos
JUAN J. MORALES
In this brilliantly rendered collection—the author’s fourth—Juan J. Morales explores love and grief after the death of his father. Morales weaves his father’s personality, his childhood in Puerto Rico, and his service in the US military with his own interest in life after death. In these poems he guides the reader through ghost hunts, conversations with mediums, a series of dreams in which he and his father work through his father’s crossing over together, and his ultimate acceptance of this monumental loss. Dream of the Bird Tattoo beautifully showcases how our loved ones continue to live on in our memories and actions.
Juan J. Morales is an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. He is the author of three other books of poetry, including The Handyman’s Guide to End Times: Poems (UNM Press). He lives in Pueblo, Colorado.
March 2025
pages New Mexico / Fiction / Short Stories / Art / Literature
Dreams in Times of War
Stories
OSWALDO ESTRADA
TRANSLATED BY
SARAH POLLACK
In twelve stories, Dreams in Times of War / Soñar en tiempos de guerra brilliantly fictionalizes the lives of Latinx immigrants in the United States. The stories explore themes of violence including toxic masculinity, domestic abuse, and (trans)gender discrimination but also the alternative communities the characters form that offer solidarity and hope. Readers will celebrate this unflinching but heartfelt look at diverse immigrant experiences in the twenty-first century United States.
Oswaldo Estrada is an award-winning author of many books including the short-story collections Luces de emergencia (Emergency Lights) and Las guerras perdidas (The Lost Wars) and the novel Tus pequeñas huellas (Footprints). He is a professor of Latin American Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sarah Pollack is a professor of Spanish and Translation Studies at CUNY–Staten Island and the Graduate Center. She has translated many other books, including Passages by Mariana Graciano and Time Without Keys: Selected Poems by Ida Vitale.
April 2025
184 pages
Fiction / Short Stories / Latina and Latino Rights: World
Frontier Justice
State, Law, and Society in Patagonia, 1880-1940
JAVIER CIKOTA
Between 1878 and 1885 Argentina militarily annexed northern Patagonia. The Argentine government sought to develop practices and institutions in the region that would turn “barbarism” into “civilization.” Using court cases to reconstruct the various partnerships between neighbors, the police, judges, and prosecutors, Cikota argues that settlers were active stakeholders in the establishment and continued functioning of the frontier state. Frontier Justice centers on an unusual cast of frontier denizens, tackling issues of gender, race, patronage, and colonialism to better understand the competing sources of legitimacy in a newly incorporated area.
Javier Cikota is an assistant professor of history at Bowdoin College.
March 2025
312 pages
Latin America / History Rights: World
Indigenous Educational Leadership Through Community-Based Knowledge and Research
ROBIN ZAPE-TAH-HOL-AH MINTHORN, SHAWN L. SECATERO, CATHERINE N. MONTOYA, AND JODI L. BURSHIA
Indigenous Educational Leadership Through Community-Based Knowledge and Research highlights the Native American Leadership in Education (NALE) heartwork. The edited collection illuminates the beauty and essence of NALE, which uniquely conceptualizes Indigenous leadership identity, philosophy, community leadership, and research in ways that have empowered students and graduates to conceptualize and live out their ancestors’ prayers and legacy. The editors provide samples of how they have achieved this through the sharing of some of the NALE graduates’ and current students’ heartwork. Collectively, the chapters provide a lens through which we can view and center Indigenous educational leadership.
Robin Zape-tah-hol-ah Minthorn is a professor in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at the University of Oklahoma. Shawn L. Secatero is an associate professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Educational Leadership, and Policy at the University of New Mexico. Catherine N. Montoya is a postdoctoral fellow in Native American Studies in the Borderlands and Ethnic Studies Department at New Mexico State University. Jodi L. Burshia is an assistant professor of Indigenous Education in the Department of Teacher Education at New Mexico Highlands University.
April 2025
132 pages
American Indians / Literature / Southwest Rights: World
Johnny Geronimo
Arts of Darkness
GARY ROBINSON
ILLUSTRATED BY DALE DEFOREST
Someone, or something, is killing the Native artists and art collectors of Santa Fe. The police are baffled by a series of brutal murders—ritual killings with all the trappings of some of the mythic monsters of the Apache origin stories, each signed with the same bloody signature: the Coyote. But where the police fail, Johnny may succeed. A hard-bitten, hard-boiled private investigator right out of the pages of Chandler or Cain, Johnny has a key advantage: as an Apache, he can go places the police can’t, and he can talk to the people the police won’t. As the owner of Eagle Eye Investigations, Johnny sets out on the trail of the Coyote, and the closer he gets, the more it becomes apparent that the hunter is also the hunted. Johnny Geronimo: Art of Darkness incorporates themes from Apache and other Indigenous traditions to tell the story of this classic antihero of Native noir.
Gary Robinson is a writer and filmmaker of Choctaw and Cherokee descent. He is the author of the “Lands of our Ancestors” series of Native American historical novels, A Native American Night Before Christmas, the YA novel Billy Buckhorn and the Book of Spells, and others. He lives in Santa Ynez, California. Dale Deforest is a member of the Diné tribe and grew up in the Four Corners area of the Navajo Nation around Shiprock and Farmington, New Mexico. Dale’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Mesa Verde's Secret Garden
A History of Managing the Backcountry and Wilderness of a National Park CHRISTOPHER BARNES
Mesa Verde’s Secret Garden is an authoritative history of the management of Mesa Verde National Park—the only congressionally designated land-based Wilderness to prohibit all recreational use, ostensibly in order to protect the park’s thousands of archaeological sites. In exploring this restriction, Barns utilizes unpublished primary sources from park archives and contextualizes them in the evolving (and often conflicting) federal and local priorities for Wilderness, conservation, and the national parks. The result of this painstaking research is a fascinating chronicle of national-park administration and development over a nearly 120year history that provides unique insights into the people and protocols that have shaped the very landscape of Mesa Verde.
Christopher Barns retired from the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center in 2015. He was the lead author of the Bureau of Land Management’s 2012 Wilderness and Wilderness Study Area policies as well as a coauthor of many reports and law journal articles on Wilderness management. In addition, he wrote and directed the film American Values: American Wilderness for PBS. He has volunteered in Mesa Verde National Park since 2017.
A Real Man Would Have a Gun
Poems
STACEY WAITE
Stacey Waite’s newest collection of poems interrogates gender, sexuality, and parenthood. From a genderqueer perspective, the poems set their unflinching gaze on the habits and impacts of masculinity. Poignant, angry, heartfelt, and at times funny, this collection asks us, again and again: What kind of world do we make with gender?
Stacey Waite is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is the author of Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing as well as several previous collections of poems, including Butch Geography and the lake has no saint.
May 2025
312 pages
Western History / Southwest / National Parks Rights: World
February 2025
88 pages
Poetry Rights: World
Off Izaak Walton Road
The Grace That Comes Through Loss
LAURA JULIER
Loss and sorrow can overwhelm even the strongest person, forcing them to reckon with their emotions whether they want to or not. In this extraordinary debut, Laura Julier recounts her reckoning, which took place in an old cabin tucked away on a hidden and forgotten gravel road along the Iowa River. In company with silence and snow, with eagles, owls, and a host of other birds, Julier finds solace and begins to emerge from the dark corners of grief. Over time, she comes to understand she cannot bury grief or turn aside from loss but must walk in its presence, awake and humble, until, at last, she finds her own wholeness within it.
Laura Julier is the former editor of Fourth Genre. She is the coeditor of Nonfiction, the Teaching of Writing, and the Influence of Richard Lloyd-Jones. She currently works as a hospital chaplain and lives in Iowa City. March 2025
pages
/ Memior
World
Rights: World
Something Out There in the Distance
GRANT FAULKNER AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY GAIL BUTENSKY
Flash-fiction master Grant Faulkner and punk photographer Gail Butensky have partnered to create this unique flash novel made up of stories to the edge-of-the-world photos by Butensky. The novel tells the story of two lovers taking a reckless, searching road trip through the American West. Dawn is a photographer, who turns her bleary eye on the land, the sky, palm trees, chlorinated pools, and dried-up golf courses to capture the unimaginable gap between breathing and dreaming that is grief. Johnny drives just to drive, running away from the end of time, or running to the end of time, looking for a home even as his restlessness overtakes him. In turns funny, poignant, and heartbreaking, this novel is big in emotions while brief in words. Somewhere Out There in the Distance belongs on the shelf of every fan of the flash form—and everyone who has wanted to get lost.
Grant Faulkner is cofounder of 100 Word Story, cofounder of the Flash Fiction Institute, and co-host of the podcast Write-minded. He is the author of several books, including The Art of Brevity (UNM Press) and All the Comfort Sin Can Provide Gail Butensky is a noted photographer whose work has been featured on numerous record covers, as well as in books and magazines. She is the author of the photography book Every Bend
The Llano County Mermaid Club
A Novel
KATHLEEN RODGERS
In the small eastern New Mexico town of Sandhill, three bookish sisters and two friends form a secret club and dream of the ocean. But betrayal and broken promises threaten to tear them apart, and a series of events leads to the death of one of the girls, a talented flutist named Melody Calloway. Forty years later an envelope of old letters and a cryptic message in an abandoned church lead her best friend, ghostwriter Marigold Hubbard, on a quest to find answers to Melody’s death, which occurred after Marigold’s dad left her mom for Melody’s mom. Emboldened by decades of unresolved anger and her mother’s belief in the power of books, Marigold returns to her hometown to confront her elderly father about his betrayal and to trace the tragic chain of events that led to Melody’s death.
Kathleen M. Rodgers is the author of four previous novels, including The Flying Cutterbucks. Rodgers was born in Clovis, New Mexico, and currently lives in north Texas.
Ore and Empire
Conquistadors to Guggenheims on the Camino Real
MARTIN STUPICH
For hundreds of years the Spanish Empire’s conscripted laborers extracted silver from hand-dug tunnels and shafts deep beneath the mountain spine of the Americas. By the late nineteenth century, mining engineers in the U.S. and in Mexico were refining not just silver ores but also lead, gold, and copper; copper was especially crucial to the looming industrial century. Not since the days when Spanish treasure galleons carried off the New World’s silver had anyone seen the sort of vast mineral wealth amassed by the “copper kings” of the Gilded Age. And first among them was the Guggenheim family, whose American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) controlled more than 80 percent of the world’s supply of silver, copper, and lead by the early twentieth century. Like the Spanish conquistadors before them, the ASARCO empire extended over 1,500 miles, from Central Mexico to Colorado. Its epicenter straddled the Mexico–Texas borderlands where the Rio Grande and the ancient Camino Real de Tierra Adentro converge at El Paso, the home of one of America’s largest smelters—and the centerpiece of Martin Stupich’s photographic journey. The hundred-acre ASARCO site was, until its 2013 demolition, more than a gritty industrial tract. For a century, the company’s health was central to El Paso’s vitality, even as Mexican American workers’ families in Smeltertown, the company barrio, died slowly under its toxic plume. In the 1970s the barrio was razed. A generation later its towering smokestacks fell, and Smeltertown’s splintered community moved on. Ore and Empire documents this storied landscape in words and images. Eighty original color photographs are complemented with illustrated essays by three renowned scholars, adding depth to an already sweeping historic panorama. Created over some fifteen years in the field, Stupich’s monumental work serves also as an homage to the unnamed thousands who lived and toiled here.
Martin Stupich is an internationally recognized photographer of industry and landscape. His photography books include Red Desert: History of a Place, with Annie Proulx; and his work is extensively covered in Through the Lens of the City: NEA Photography Surveys of the 1970s, by Mark Rice, and The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment, edited by Ann M. Wolfe, and in numerous critical essays and exhibition catalogs over his forty-year career.
Rights: World
Rights: World
That Tongue be Time
Norma
Cole and a Continuous Making
DALE M. SMITH
Originally from Canada, Norma Cole is a revered writer and visual artist who has authored and translated over thirty books and chapbooks. Though highly esteemed internationally in both visual art and poetry circles, Cole’s association with the New College of California and her influence on artists and poets has been overlooked by scholars. In That Tongue Be Time, Dale M. Smith seeks to remedy this oversight by bringing together sixteen noted scholars, editors, and poets to examine Cole’s poetry, translations, and visual art in order to place her within the larger scholarly conversation about contemporary poetry and poetics. The book also includes a number of black-and-white reproductions of Cole’s art and a contextual introduction by Smith. That Tongue Be Time provides a groundbreaking look at Norma Cole’s lasting influence on multiple generations of poets, visual artists, and scholars and should be on the shelf of anyone interested in contemporary poetry.
Dale M. Smith is a professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is author and coeditor of several other books, including An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson (UNM Press).
April 2025
320 pages
New Mexico / History / Environment
World
The Jemez Mountains
A Cultural and Natural History
THOMAS W.
SWETNAM
The Jemez Mountains are a quintessential New Mexico landscape. Pueblo, Spanish, and Anglo cultures have mixed and melded here. The rocks and trees tell stories of eruptions, lava flows, droughts, floods, forest fires, and hot springs damming a river. People tell stories of conquistadores, pueblos, and priests, of battles for land and water, of farming and sheep herding, and of raiders, rustlers, forest rangers, and hippies. For those new to the Jemez Mountains, these stories and images, told in forty brief chapters, provide an introduction to the cultural and natural history of the area. Residents and longtime aficionados of the Jemez will find both familiar and surprising stories and will gain a renewed sense of the magnificence of this place.
Thomas W. Swetnam is a Regents’ Professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, where he studied land-use history and forest and fire ecology. He lives in Jemez Springs, New Mexico.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
CHRIS YOGERST
It is arguably true that few lines of movie dialogue have had greater impact than the most famous line from John Ford’s 1962 masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “This is the West, sir. When legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Although critics of the day did not realize its magnitude, with time The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has become cemented into our popular culture. This film connects to nearly every Western before or after. Films like Ford’s own Stagecoach (1939) prints a legend of the lone heroic Westerner, while Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) unravels that legend depicting the Western hero as murderous and unheroic. Coming six years after Ford’s other great late-career masterpiece, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance may be even more archetypal of a changing West. In this first-ever book on the subject, Chris Yogerst unpacks one of the signature films of the post-classic Western period, and one of the greatest works of director John Ford and actors John Wayne, James Stewart, Lee Marvin, and Woody Strode.
Chris Yogerst is a writer, professor and film historian, whose columns can be found at The Hollywood Reporter, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Review of Books. His most recent book, The Warner Brothers, was named one of the best of 2023 by Sight and Sound magazine.
The Mountain Knows the Mountain
A Fire Watch Diary
PHILIP CONNORS
Multi-award-winning writer Philip Connors had been a fire watcher in the Gila Wilderness for fourteen straight summers when he sustained an injury and was forced to miss a year recovering. When he returned, he resolved to see the mountain with fresh eyes and to keep a detailed notebook. The result is The Mountain Knows the Mountain, a meticulously observed experience of one fire season chronicled in haibun, the centuries-old prose form dating from Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior that recounts both inner and outer journeys and incorporates traditional haiku as an occasional element of narrative counterpoint. Though only a beginner in the practice of haiku, Connors deftly weaves close observation, personal reflection, and memory with hard-won knowledge of the forest, of the mountain, and of fire. The Mountain Knows the Mountain is both mythic and immediate, a chronicle of daily events granular in their specificity but connected to larger themes of the observed world and the inner life of the observer. Connors captures the various moods of a long season on a mountain; plays with language and ways of seeing; and includes contributing perspectives from his partner, Mónica Ortiz Uribe, and his friend the late editor and publisher Bobby Byrd. Together with the author’s own simple drawings, the resulting snapshots offer incisive visions of how to be intimate with the wild.
Philip Connors has been a fire watcher in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness for twenty-three years. He is the author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, which won the 2011 National Outdoor Book Award. He is also the author of All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found and A Song for the River. He lives in southern New Mexico.
Rights: World
Rights: World
The Problem You Have
Stories
ROBERT G. MCBREARTY
The Sisyphean characters in The Problem You Have may not be pushing a giant rock up a hill, but they are unlikely to ever get where they are going. Yet despite knowing that, they push on and work with graceful resignation. In McBrearty’s newest collection, a diverse group of characters encounter turning points. A minor criminal seeking warmth on a frigid night climbs through a farmhouse window to discover more than he ever expected. A dying soldier recalls the man he left behind. In one horrible afternoon, a college professor realizes the only sanctuary is love. While some stories hold dark themes, McBrearty masterfully infuses the work with humor and compassion, rendering the characters within them relatable. Even with themes of loss or what might have been, the collection sings notes of what might yet be, for both the characters and the reader.
Robert Garner McBrearty is the author of a novella and four additional short story collections, including When I Can’t Sleep. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Pushcart Prize and the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award. April 2025
The Wounded Line
Writing Poems About Trauma
Rights: World
JEHANNE DUBROW
In this accessible and inspiring guide, acclaimed writer Jehanne Dubrow draws on how the study of trauma has defined both her creative work and her teaching. The Wounded Line, the first craft-based writing book of its kind, is grounded not only in research but also in heart, in the belief that even our deepest hurts can find a lyric form. Leading poets through a series of practical approaches to representing pain on the page, Dubrow provides readers with narrative techniques, rhetorical structures, and formal strategies that can be applied to any trauma, from the global and the historical to the intimate and the personal. The Wounded Line encourages poets at all stages to address the difficult, discomfiting questions that ache within each of us.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of creative nonfiction, including Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity (UNM Press). She is a professor of creative writing and a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas.
Waiting for Godínez
A Tragicomedy in Two Acts
DANIEL A. OLIVAS
Olivas’s extraordinary reimagining of a classic play lays bare the destructive and brutalizing effects of the United States’ anti-immigration policy on undocumented immigrants and their families. In Waiting for Godínez, the forever-waiting characters of Estragon and Vladimir are embodied in Jesús and Isabel, two Mexican friends living in the States. Each night Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents kidnap Jesús and throw him into a cage intending to deport him. But the agents forget to lock the cage, so Jesús escapes and makes his way back to Isabel as they wait for the mysterious Godínez in a city park. At one point, Isabel looks upon her exhausted friend and laments: “What harm have you done to them? You are as much of this country as you are of México. But you are not home in either place. Ni de aquí, ni de allá.”
Waiting for Godínez humanizes the plight undocumented people face in a country that both needs and disdains them. Through a darkly comic absurdist lens, it implores us to reconsider this country’s policies in light of the fact that we are all human and deserve respect and dignity as we each try to make our way in a confusing and often indifferent world.
Daniel A. Olivas is an attorney, playwright, novelist, short-story writer, poet, and book critic. He is the editor of two anthologies and the author of twelve books including Chicano Frankenstein: A Novel and How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories
We Are All Chile
Representations of Difference in Contemporary Chilean Historical Fiction KATHERINE KARR-CORNEJO
A study of the relationship between literature and the current conditions of national life, We Are All Chile explores how artistic expression reflects lived experience. The book travels through figures, symbols, and events in Chilean history from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries as represented through historical fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, an oeuvre that uses historical stories to reflect upon the challenges of Chilean society post-dictatorship. Contrasting the use of these stories with previous understanding highlights the power of legacies of the dictatorial authoritarian state, particularly as they shape possibilities for the full flourishing of people without regard for their minoritized or disadvantaged identities, such as their sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or race. This treatment of Chilean history and culture brings together literature and historiography to offer powerful interpretations of cultural narratives.
Rights: World
Katherine Karr-Cornejo is a professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. May 2025
240 pages
Literary Criticism / Latin America
Rights: World
Rights: World
Where the North Ends
A Novel
SERGIO HUGO MORENO
FOREWORD
BY FRANCISCO A. LOMELI
Aspiring writer Uriel Romero finds himself mysteriously trapped in the body of Diego, a seventeenth-century Franciscan novice accused of heresy. Unsure whether he’s in a dream, a coma, or crossing into another dimension, Uriel must navigate Diego’s fate—sent to New Mexico on a perilous mission to convert the Apaches or risk the flames of the Spanish Inquisition. As he struggles to understand his new existence, Uriel encounters a cast of colorful characters: a prophetic friar who claims to be his father, an Apache shaman guiding him through the astral plane, a talking mule yearning for the Promised Land, and Alma—his eternal love, whose tragic death still haunts him. With echoes of The Night Face Up by Julio Cortázar and The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa, this time-travel saga weaves history, mysticism, and existential mystery into a gripping tale of fate, love, and redemption. Will Uriel uncover the truth before time runs out—or is he doomed to be lost between worlds forever?
Hugo Moreno grew up in the border city of Juárez, México, and is the author of Rethinking Philosophy with Borges, Zambrano, Paz, and Plato
Airstream Country
A Geologic Journey Across the American West NEIL MATHISON
Neil Mathison and his wife, Susan, newly retired and with their son in college, embark upon a great American road trip “uncoupled from the tyranny of calendars or a specific journey.” Airstream Country recounts their travels across the western United States as they wind their way through millions of years of geological history with their Airstream in tow. Along the way they encounter upheavals and depositions, ancient seas and young mountains, and stone towers and striated canyons, which are all illuminated by Mathison’s knowledgeable commentary. Even after thousands of miles and eons of geology, their adventures are never finished, for, as Mathison writes, “We learn by travel where we ought to travel more.”
Neil Mathison is a former naval officer, nuclear engineer, expatriate businessman, and stay-at-homedad. He has published essays and short stories in the Georgia Review, the Southern Humanities Review, the Kenyon Review, and else where. His collection Volcano: An A to Z and Other Essays about Geology, Geography, and Geo-Travel in the American West won the 2016 Bauhan Publishing Monadnock Essay Collection Prize.
Women and Gardens
Obstacles and Opportunities for Women Gardeners Throughout History
JUDITH M. TAYLOR
Judith M. Taylor’s Women and Gardens highlights the depth and breadth of women’s influence on gardens and landscapes in the last two hundred years and profiles many unknown or intentionally ignored facts concerning the roles of women in gardening and their contributions to horticultural science. Divided into eight chapters, Women and Gardens explores the history of women in horticulture, landscape design, and ornamental plant breeding from the Victorian era to today.
Judith M. Taylor is the author of The Olive Tree in California: History of an Immigrant Tree; The Global Migrations of Ornamental Plants: How the World Got into Your Garden; Tangible Memories: Californians and Their Gardens, 1800–1950; and Visions of Loveliness: Great Flower Breeders of the Past
April 2025
216 pages
Gardening / History / Women / Environment
Rights: World
Wrecking Ball
Race, Friendship, God, and Football
RICK BASS
In Wrecking Ball: Race, Friendship, God, and Football, award-winning writer Rick Bass chronicles three seasons on the field with the Texas Express, a minor league, semi-professional team in the Dynamic Texas Football Association. This is unsung football. Light years from the NFL, it is nowhere near the pomp of college football, or even of Texas high school football, with its life-long fans and civic identity on the line. In the hardscrabble world of spring-season semi-pro ball, there are no fans. After a while even the players’ families avoid these games. Most of the guys are in their twenties but some are older. Every year a few get to try out for the college game, a few get scholarship money and a shot at another life. But for most, this is last-chance football. Many get hurt.
Undersized, one hundred fifty-five pounds dripping wet, and forty years past his playing career as a one-season walk-on at Utah State, Rick Bass came to Brenham, a flyspeck town outside of Houston, to write about the Express, for whom his best friend was a volunteer Trainer. But with a disastrous season unfolding, and injuries, incarcerations, and plain boredom claiming more players every week, he was induced to suit up and take the field. Suddenly the writer became part of the story, in a tale reminiscent of George Plimpton and Paper Lion—only Plimpton was not in his sixties when he made his great foray into participant-observation football. Rick’s experience on and off the field, his observations about the game, the terrible injuries, the expectations and pleasures of comradeship, the overriding influence of the coach, and about race, poverty, and, yes, god on the field, are the unforgettable subjects of Wrecking Ball
Rick Bass is a Texas native now living in Montana. Recognized by numerous Pushcart Prizes and the O. Henry Awards as well as the Texas Institute of Letters, Bass continues to publish celebrated fiction and nonfiction about the natural world and humans’ place in it.
World
Rights:
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
August 2025
368 pages
History
Rights: World
Canal Dreamers
The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions JESSICA LEPLER
Canal Dreamers tells the story of an international cast of characters whose visions of literally changing the world proved too revolutionary for the Age of Revolutions. In the early 1820s, as new American nations secured independence from Spain and new waterways intensified US expansion and British industrialization, canal dreamers—engineers, scientists, heads of state, entreprenuers, schemers, and more—planned to transform the earth by constructing a global shortcut linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. As the US celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of independence, countries and capitalists sent agents on a quest to create the world’s first waterway out of the terra incognita of Central American land, Lake Nicaragua, and a river winding through Indigenous homelands. To them, the plan appeared predestined. But their timing proved terrible. Between idea and implementation, the era’s political fluidity solidified into partisan-riven nations; a financial crisis turned capitalists toward coal and cotton. Without accurate maps or knowledge of the region’s extreme environment, dreams substituted for data.
Jessica Lepler is associate professor of history at University of New Hampshire.
Caught in the Current
Mexico's Struggle to Regulate Emigration, 1940–1980
IRVIN IBARGÜEN
Migration between United States and Mexico is often likened to the river that runs along parts of the border: a flow of immigrants, a flood of documented and undocumented workers, a dam that has broken. The scholars, journalists, novelists, and others who tell this story almost always narrate it looking from south to north, focusing on Mexicans who migrate to the US and how it deals with the influx of people crossing into its territory. Irvin Ibargüen seeks to provide a more balanced history of Mexican migration that remains centered in Mexico throughout, examining how the Mexican state attempted to manage US-bound migration with an eye to mitigating its impact on the country's economy, social order, and reputation.
Irvin Ibargüen is assistant professor of history at New York University.
City of Lyrics
Ordinary Poets and Islamicate Popular Culture in Early Modern Delhi
NATHAN L. M. TABOR
City of Lyrics is a history of mushāʿirah, today a global phenomenon with audiences in the hundreds of millions, comprising the largest platform on the planet for spoken-word poetry in any language. Nathan L. M. Tabor brings readers into the popular emergence of mushāʿirah’s among Urdu-speaking poets and patrons in 1700s Dehli. At a time of considerable upheaval in the region, scores of poets produced two-line lyric poems called ghazals that elite and commoners sang, shouted, and spat out in the loosely defined salon spaces across India’s largest metropolis. These performative settings cultivated a uniquely Islamic mode of literary consumption in which versifiers traded lyrics, satires, and songs as urban commodities crucial to instantiating hierarchy, taste, and notions of delight. Understanding the Islamic roots for circulating highly condensed and contentious literary knowledge helps us to better understand global popular culture today, which increasingly takes shape according to tastes and values from the Muslim world yet is enjoyed by wide audiences comprised of both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Nathan L. M. Tabor is assistant professor of history at Western Michigan University.
October 2025
256 pages
History
Rights: World
September 2025
336 pages
Religion Rights: World
Dictatorship Across Borders
Brazil, Chile, and the South American Cold War
MILA BURNS
Dictatorship Across Borders offers a groundbreaking perspective on the 1973 Chilean coup, highlighting Brazil's pivotal role in shaping the political landscape of South America during the Cold War. While the influence of the United States is well-documented, Mila Burns shifts the focus to interregional dynamics, arguing that Brazil was instrumental in the overthrow of President Salvador Allende and the subsequent establishment of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. Drawing on original documents, interviews, and newly accessed archives, the book reveals Brazil’s covert involvement in the coup, providing weapons, intelligence, and even torturers to anti-Allende forces. It also explores the resistance networks formed by Brazilian exiles in Chile. By focusing on Brazil’s regional interventions, Burns offers a valuable contribution to global Cold War literature that emphasizes local agency in the Cold War and presents an innovative framework for understanding Latin America's authoritarian past. This interdisciplinary approach—combining history, anthropology, and political science— makes it a vital addition to Cold War studies, reshaping how we understand power and resistance in South America.
Mila Burns is professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York.
Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless
October 2025
200 pages
Memoir
Rights: World
What Mushrooms Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival
MARIA PINTO
As a child, Maria Pinto felt a connection with the earth, specifically with fungi and their little-realized importance in the natural and the human world. Now, Pinto, along with writing and teaching, leads excursions into the woods in her home state of Massachusetts, searching for mushrooms. Rarely, Pinto argues, have we studied fungi on its own terms. Not only that, we’ve been late to the game in understanding, well, much of anything about them. In this blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and popular science, Pinto offers a probing, entertaining, and moving narrative that looks at her identity as an immigrant from Jamaica, her mental health in this hulking miasma that is late-stage capitalism, and even racialized violence propagated by the police state—all through the lens of the humble mushroom and how it seemingly connects (and connects us) to everything.
Maria Pinto is a writer, editor, and teacher.
Ongoing Return
Storytelling and Return to Lifta and Palestine
RANA BARAKAT
Lifta, Palestine, is a small village adjacent to Jerusalem. In 1948, villagers were forcibly removed from their homes as part of what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba—the “catastrophe” of Zionist settler colonialism and the violence imposed to create and maintain the state of Israel. But unlike most of the occupied territories, Lifta has been left virtually untouched since it was “depopulated.” Though Jewish settlers were temporarily housed there during the first years of the state of Israel, Israeli courts have refused to allow redevelopment, and in 2017 the village was set aside as a nature reserve. Over the years, local people and scholars alike have struggled with the paradox of remembering a moment that in both individual and collective terms was meant to erase Palestine; Lifta’s peculiar history exemplifies this struggle.
Rana Barakat is associate professor of history at Bizreit University.
Intrepid Girls
The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA
AMY ERDMAN FARRELL
For Amy Farrell, a self-described awkward child, the Girl Scouts of America (GSA) was a lifesaver, offering her a protective and enriching cocoon that gave her lifelong self-confidence. Decades later, Farrell revisits the GSA with a researcher’s critical eye and a feminist’s analysis, revealing what the organization kept outside the cocoon, and the limits of female empowerment it was willing to instill in its young members.
Starting with their origins in 1912 and ending with the present day, Farrell reveals how the Girl Scouts were active participants in many key political moments in US history, including the attempted erasure of American Indian culture through forced residential schooling, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, involvement in the anticommunist witch hunts of the Cold War Red Scare, and campaigns to keep troops segregated both before and after the Brown decision of 1954. Interrogating the strategies of racial innocence and covert feminism that allowed the organization to cloak itself from scrutiny, Farrell confronts the difficult and complex stories that make up the Girl Scouts’ history of empowerment of girls as well as its complicity in some of the darkest chapters in US history.
Amy Erdman Farrell is Ann and John Curley Chair of Liberal Arts and professor of American Studies and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College.
November 2025
224 pages
Religion
Rights: World
October 2025
320 pages
History 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.
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 Rights: 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. April 2025
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.
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.
June 2025
360 pages Biography
The Memoirs of Robert and Mabel Williams
African American Freedom, Armed Resistance, and International Solidarity
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.
Susan Juster is W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library.
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
312 pages
Religion Rights: World
June 2025
392 pages
Biography Rights: World
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
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.
Ethanol
A Hemispheric History for the Future of Biofuels
October 2025
328 pages
Cultural Studies Rights: World
JEFFREY T. MANUEL AND THOMAS D. ROGERS
Though ethanol, a liquid fuel made from agricultural byproducts, has generated controversy in recent years—good or bad for the environment? Tracing the little-known history of this promising and contentious fuel, this book reveals the transnational nature of ethanol's development by its two biggest producers, the U.S. and Brazil. By drawing the connections between the shifting fortunes of ethanol in these two countries, the book presents the first full picture of the long history of this renewable fuel that from the beginning offered an imperfect alternative to oil. Brazil patterned its mid-century development on the U.S. model, adopting an automobile- and highway-focused transportation system and a fossil fuel-intensive agricultural sector. U.S. policymakers in turn took note when Brazil responded to the 1970s oil shocks by distributing ethanol nationwide, replacing half of its gasoline consumption. In the 2000s, the nations' leaders worked together to dramatically expand ethanol production. Today, as a new generation of biofuels meant to power aviation and fight climate change again connects Brazilian and U.S. ethanol, Manuel and Rogers explain how the fuel's future, like its history, is complicated by technical, scientific, economic, and social questions—about how to calculate carbon emissions, agricultural land use, national security and sovereignty, and the balance between government regulation and market forces. Understanding the future of biofuels demands a reckoning with this extensive, shared history—a reckoning that Manuel and Rogers's far-reaching, deeply researched book brings into view.
Jeffrey T. Manuel is Professor of History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the author of Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota’s Iron Range, 1915-2000 Thomas D. Rogers is Professor of History at Emory University and the author of Agriculture’s Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil’s Green Revolution
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.
pages
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. March 2025
Between Loving and Leaving
Essays on the New Midwestern History
EDITED BY JON K. LAUCK
Long neglected by historians, the American Midwest has come to be known as the "Lost Region." But in the last decade a cadre of dedicated scholars has worked to remedy this oversight, launching new associations, conferences, and journals that have given rise to the New Midwestern History. Between Loving and Leaving reveals the depth and breadth of this revived field, showcasing its variety and reach, cultivating new approaches, and opening the way to the extraordinary range of topics embraced by a true history of the Midwest. The authors, among the most distinguished in the field, take up topics of new, renewed, and longstanding interest. They consider the Midwestern landscape, family farming, and literature and art produced by Midwesterners. Their essays explore matters of ethnicity, race, and gender, highlighting the experiences of, among others, African American Midwesterners, Latinos, Native Americans, and women. And inevitably, in a region that has produced so many activists and movements, they look at peculiarly Midwestern politics. Working the fertile territory between a deep attachment to the Midwest, with its civic and social institutions and achievements, and a flight from the familiar, the authors capture the vast and varied character of the Midwest as it is experienced, understood, and represented in art and literature—and, finally, in history.
Jon K. Lauck is the past president of the Midwestern History Association, teaches history and political science at the University of South Dakota, and is Editor-in-Chief of Middle West Review. He has authored or edited several books, including The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History; Daschle vs. Thune; Finding a New Midwestern History; and three volumes of The Plains Political Tradition.
World
September 2025
280 pages Rights: World
October 2025
192 pages
Native American Rights: World
Making Each Other Laugh
Contemporary Arapaho Storytelling
ANDREW COWELL
Native American oral storytelling traditions have been widely documented and appreciated, but they are often associated with the past, pre-contact times, and ancient legends. Less attention has been given to the way this tradition continues to exist in the present, with new stories being created to respond to the modern world. Making Each Other Laugh provides unique insight into contemporary Northern Arapaho stories, told in the Arapaho language, and into the social and cultural milieu of the stories. It also provides invaluable insight into the rich humor of modern Arapaho stories and life. These stories—from roughly the 1990s through the 2010s—are a rich source of Arapaho wisdom and values, often imparted in a singularly comical fashion. Appearing here in both Arapaho and English, they are also a virtual dictionary of the Arapaho language, featuring many rare and complex words that can only be understood in the storytelling context. This volume presents these stories in sequences, as they were actually told in social interactions among Native speakers. Structured this way, the anthology maintains the true nature of the Arapaho story sequence as a single, collaborative artistic and social performance. In critical chapters, Andrew Cowell focuses on how the stories emerge, how narrators negotiate what comes next and who will tell it, and how the genres and themes of the stories relate to each other. He also explores the ways such modern stories employ genres that have evolved from traditional models while adapting new content and styles over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Largely humorous, sometimes hilarious, often centered on encounters with Euro-American society and technology, the stories in Making Each Other Laugh bear witness to the continuing vitality of Native American oral traditions.
Andrew Cowell is Professor and Chair of Linguistics and the Department of French and Italian at the University of Colorado. He is an expert on the Arapaho language and author of numerous books and articles, including Remedies for a New West: Healing Landscapes, Histories, and Cultures (ed. with Patricia Limerick and Sharon Collinge) and The Arapaho Language (with Alonzo Moss, Sr.).
Black Wests
Reshaping Race and Place in Popular Culture
SARA GALLAGHER
The story of settlers in the American West, with its tales of cowboys, prospectors, and frontiersmen, is often overwhelmingly white. Black Wests brings to light the pivotal and largely overlooked contributions of Black Americans to the western narrative. Tracing Black Western storytelling through a range of media across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sara Gallagher offers a unique perspective on the Black Western—its history, its critical texts and moments in print and cinema, and the singular experiences of Black creators in the American West. Significantly, different media presented particular opportunities, and particular limitations, for Black creators. Gallagher explores how visual mediums, especially film, played a vital role in countering negative portrayals of Black characters in popular Western cinema. In this light, she examines the likes of Oscar Micheaux, a homesteader-turned visionary film director, and Herb Jeffries, the famed singer whose role as the Black “singing cowboy” earned him stardom in Hollywood. Her reading encompasses the well-known—like Nat Love, legendary cowboy whose life has become an enduring symbol of the Black American West; Pauline Hopkins, a journalist and novelist whose works introduced Black America to the dime Western; and the lesser known, such as Jennie Carter, a frontierswoman who wrote about her experience in California. Concluding with a nod to modern artists like Beyoncé and Lil Nas X, Black Wests illustrates how this imaginative form continues to flourish. An enlightening and entertaining journey through the history of the Black Western, Gallagher's work restores Black storytelling to its critical place in the making of the American West in popular culture.
Sara Gallagher is Professor in Liberal Studies at Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario.
July 2025
184 pages
U.S. History / Art History
Rights:World
September 2025
176 pages
Rights: World
April 2025
120 pages
Education
Rights: World
Empowered
A Woman Faculty of Color's Guide to Teaching and Thriving
CHAVELLA T. PITTMAN
Experience tells us, and studies confirm, that women faculty of color are among the most overworked, unfairly criticized, and least rewarded individuals serving higher education today. They are also the most thwarted when it comes to the basic goals of an academic career: tenure, security, and personal satisfaction. This, despite ranking as some of the most talented teachers we have: Women faculty of color disproportionately overdeliver on higher education's loftiest promise—preparing students to contribute to the world. In this book, these highly effective, overworked, underappreciated women will find expert guidance, encouragement, and practical steps to meet the outsized challenges women of color face in academia, and finally get what they've long since earned. In Empowered, Chavella T. Pittman distills decades of practice to show women faculty of color how to be unapologetically authentic in their teaching, speak up in reviews about their classroom excellence, and to offer themselves compassion. And, to recover a sense of joy in what they do. Drawing on extensive research, Pittman provides active measures for withstanding intersectional race and gender tensions, exercises to inoculate against toxic dynamics, and tools to resist being silenced and support being heard. Through these empowering strategies and exercises, women faculty of color can become the most powerful versions of themselves in their classrooms, and go on to make the most of their careers, contributions, and lives.
Chavella T. Pittman is a Professor of Sociology at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois.
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.
Michele Eodice is Professor Emeritus of Writing at the University of Oklahoma. Anne Ellen Geller is Professor of English at St. John’s University. Neal Lerner is Professor of English at Northeastern University.
Marking Native Borders
Indigenous Geography and American Empire in the Early Tennessee Country
LUCAS P. 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
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.
April 2025
328 pages
Language / Native American Rights: World
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.
Cameron Pratt (Osage Nation) currently serves as language curriculum specialist and language teacher for Daposka Ankodapi, the Osage Nation school. Stephanie Rapp (Osage) is an Osage language researcher and retired language teacher and curriculum specialist. Marcia Haag is Professor of Linguistics Emerita at the University of Oklahoma. She is the co-author of Choctaw Language and Culture: Chahta Anumpa, volumes 1 and 2. Dylan Herrick is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma and a specialist in the sound systems of lesser spoken languages.
The Purifying Knife
The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas
MICHAEL PHILLIPS AND BETSY 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.
Michael Phillips teaches history at the University of North Texas and is author of White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841–2001 Betsy Friauf is an independent scholar.
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.
June 2025
272 pages
U.S. History / History
Rights: World
March 2025
224 pages
Military History / History
Rights: World
February 2025
June 2025
296 pages
Low April Sun A
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.
Constance E. Squires is the author of Live from Medicine Park, Along the Watchtower, which won the 2012 Oklahoma Book Award, and Hit Your Brights. Her short stories have been published in The Atlantic, Guernica, The Dublin Quarterly, Shenandoah, Identity Theory, The Rolling Stone 500, and other magazines.
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.
Robert P. Wettemann, Jr. is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the United States Air Force Academy.
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 WESLEY 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
Snafu Edu
Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom
JESSAMYN NEUHAUS
No matter how skilled, thoughtful, and well-prepared professors are—or how motivated and engaged their students might be—things sometimes go wrong. In this empowering, smart, and refreshingly frank book, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers college educators a roadmap for anticipating and navigating these inevitable snafus—and keeping the course of teaching and learning on track. Clear-eyed about the rarely acknowledged foul-ups that teachers invariably confront, Snafu Edu provides evidence-based insights into why these things happen and practical, workable strategies for recognizing, responding to, repairing, and reducing them. Snafu Edu identifies five major reasons for systemic and individual snafus in the field—inequity, disconnection, distrust, failure, and fear—and shows how understanding underlying causes can help educators perceive the problem and take appropriate measures. These measures are part of a problem-solving approach that Neuhaus calls STIR: stop, think, identify, and repair. She details course design principles and pedagogical practices to reduce major teaching and learning snafus by increasing equity, building connections, fostering trust, enabling success, and increasing agency for both educators and students. Looking beyond “classroom management” and “conflict resolution,” Snafu Edu carefully and clearly grounds its lessons in the real context of education, where institutional structures, systemic injustices, individual and collective history, and the complexity of human interactions mean there will always be snafus. Like a preparedness kit for natural disasters, the book gives teachers an educational “go-bag” of insights, strategies, and practices to have at the ready when things go sideways.
Jessamyn Neuhaus is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence and Professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University. She is author of Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers and editor of Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning
July 2025
312 pages
Education / Sociology Rights: World
August 2025
408 pages
Rights: World
The Man Who Dammed Hetch Hetchy
San Francisco’s Fight for a Yosemite Water Supply
DONALD C. JACKSON
The damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park is widely seen as a watershed event in American environmental history. Passionately opposed by naturalist John Muir and his ardent supporters, the massive undertaking succeeded largely through the efforts of John R. Freeman, one of the most important, influential, and politically adroit engineers of the Progressive Era. In The Man Who Dammed Hetch Hetchy, Donald C. Jackson focuses on Freeman to offer a nuanced account of how the City of San Francisco won the right to transform the bucolic valley into a municipal water supply reservoir that, a century later, continues to serve millions of Bay Area residents. Central to Freeman's work for San Francisco from 1910 to 1913 was his design of a high-pressure aqueduct projected to deliver 400 million gallons of water per day to the Bay Area and generate more than 150,000 horsepower of electricity. Beyond crafting an extensively illustrated 421-page report detailing his design, he also worked—and succeeded—as a political advocate lobbying for Congressional approval of the project. Jackson draws on a wealth of correspondence, reports, and other documents, including Congressional records, to highlight Freeman's contention that the Hetch Hetchy project would not just provide copious quantities of water and power, but would also enhance the Sierra Nevada environment and increase tourist access to the northern reaches of the national park. His self-avowed goal was not to tear down or destroy Hetch Hetchy but to utilize the valley for the greater public good and to create a system that would serve the city for decades if not centuries to come. Portraying Freeman for the first time in all his provocative complexity, The Man Who Dammed Hetch Hetchy is at once a deeply researched, richly detailed biography and social history and a compelling reinterpretation of a pivotal moment in US environmental culture.
Donald C. Jackson, Cornelia F. Hugel Professor of History at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, is the author of Great American Bridges and Dams
The New Voice of God
Language, Worldview, and the Cherokee Bible
MARGARET BENDER AND THOMAS N. BELT
For Christian European missionaries among the Cherokees at the turn of the eighteenth century, translating the Bible meant wrestling with the extreme structural differences between Cherokee and English. The New Voice of God reveals how these linguistic differences encoded basic predispositions and orientations toward the physical, spiritual, and social worlds—and how their translation in turn encodes the profound linguistic and cultural exchange manifested in the making of the Cherokee Bible. While the introduction of Christianity shaped Cherokee communicative practices and culture, the Cherokee language also reshaped the Bible to reflect a definitive Native worldview. Focusing on three books of the Cherokee Bible—Genesis, John, and Matthew—Margaret Bender and Thomas N. Belt demonstrate how Christianity, written in and on Cherokee terms, can be uniquely and distinctly Cherokee, while remaining undeniably Christian. For example, Cherokee’s rich and complex grammar work against English’s noun-centeredness, yielding creative approximations of European objects as conditions and essences as events. Cherokee’s radically different pronoun structure includes the reader in Biblical conversation in surprising ways. The authors also explain the relevance of the Cherokee Indigenous writing system—invented by Sequoyah, a non-Christian native speaker—to the complex spiritual landscape of the nineteenth century. Their analysis suggests that the Cherokee Bible records this cross-cultural encounter at a deep philosophical level, providing evidence that microlinguistic detail powerfully and intricately reflects macrosociological phenomena. In showing how Cherokee Christians ingeniously adapted Christian practices to create unique social and spiritual identities, The New Voice of God documents how this adaptation—manifest in the translation of Christian texts into Cherokee—not only bridged two vastly different languages but also exposed deep philosophical differences, challenging Western cultural norms and reshaping spiritual discourse.
Margaret Bender is Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah’s Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life and editor of Linguistic Diversity in the South: Changing Codes, Practices, and Ideology Thomas N. Belt (Cherokee Nation) is a retired Cherokee language instructor at Western Carolina University, where he received an honorary doctorate. He is a fluent Cherokee speaker and the author of articles on Cherokee language and worldview.
July 2025
192 pages
Anthropology / Language Rights: World
July 2025
392 pages
U.S. History / Biography
Rights: World
Write Long and Beautiful Letters
The Vallejos' Californio Correspondence, 1846–1888
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
ROSE MARIE BEEBE AND ROBERT M. SENKEWICZ
The experiences of Mexicans who were living in California when it was annexed by the United States is a crucial element of the history of the American Southwest. These Californios, as they called themselves, made California diverse and multicultural from the moment it became part of the United States. The Vallejos of Sonoma were one of the most prominent of these Californio families. This volume explores the experiences of this family, using more than 180 letters that Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Francisca Benicia Carrillo de Vallejo exchanged with each other and their children between 1846 and 1888. This correspondence offers an intimate glimpse of the ways in which this family, and many Californio families from a variety of social and economic backgrounds, struggled to adapt to the political, social, and cultural changes that accompanied American annexation. They often found themselves unwelcome strangers in the land in which they had been born. They faced changing and at times conflicting demands on their public and private lives. In the face of a hostile legal system, they struggled to maintain ownership of their property, to raise their children in an environment they did not entirely understand, and to help each other maintain their dignity and social authority in a world they had not chosen. These letters demonstrate how the Vallejos and families like them, frequently ridiculed by the Anglos who entered California, nonetheless refused to be defined by these newcomers. Describing the creative manner of their resistance, these letters document a crucial aspect of the history of the Latino experience in California and in the greater American Southwest during the second half of the 19th century—with repercussions and relevance reaching into the present era.
Rose Marie Beebe is Professor Emerita of Spanish Literature at Santa Clara University. Robert M. Senkewicz is Professor Emeritus of History at Santa Clara University. Beebe and Senkewicz are the coauthors of Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary
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
The Trump Legacy
JULIA AZARI, BERT ROCKMAN, AND ANDREW RUDALEVIGE
Continuing their series of presidential assessments, The Trump Legacy gathers together an all-star list of scholars to examine the controversial and consequential presidency of Donald Trump. Divided into four sections, the book will explore Trump’s presidency in terms of the public (including polarization, race, and culture wars), national institutions, domestic and foreign policies, and the wider American political landscape.
March 2026
U.S. History 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
A Military History of Japanese American Incarceration during World War II
STEPHANIE HINNERSHITZ
Studies on Executive Order 9066 and the forced removal and detention of Japanese Americans from the West Coast during WWII abound, but there is no monograph that specifically addresses the roots of this devastating program: a military strategy developed by the Army, more specifically Lt. General John L. DeWitt and his subordinates. Military officials’ racist ideas on the Japanese American community's lack of loyalty—even among citizens—joined with DeWitt's suspicions that the West Coast was at risk of another air attack by the Japanese, resulting in the argument that removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast was a "military necessity." DeWitt suggested that expelling Japanese Americans would bolster security in the region and allow the military to focus exclusively on logistics in the Western Defense Command. He also planned that the Army would no longer be responsible for the removed Japanese Americans once they were held in the camps and overseen by a civilian agency, the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Reality, however, proved otherwise as the Army was connected to incarceration for its duration by providing security and surveillance and often going head-to-head with the WRA over the correct administration of the camps in a complex civil-military operation. DeWitt was constantly confronted with the strategic difficulties of his decision to detain Japanese Americans during a war against fascism. Reintegrating this moment into the military history of the United States during WWII offers an opportunity to assess the home front's role in military planning and defense and the accompanying effects on ideas of democracy and citizenship.
Conscription in the Global Twentieth Century
AMY J. RUTENBERG
This edited collection consists of fourteen historical essays about the uses and unintended consequences of conscription. Authors use case studies from across the twentieth century and around the world to construct arguments about how states have used or rejected systems of conscription. Together the essays clearly show that a draft is a political and social project, as well as a means of procuring military manpower. In general, policy makers try to use rhetoric that frames conscription as a unifying force and way to build national identity. But in reality, that so-called unified identity often comes at the expense of marginalized people. In all cases, there is resistance to the project of conscription. The historical essays will be bracketed by a forward and conclusion by political scientists, who will help draw lessons for the modern moment from the history that forms the bulk of the volume.
March 2026
Military History
Rights: World
March 2026
History Rights: World
Framing the First World War
Knowledge, Learning, and Military Thoughts
MICHAEL FINCH, AIMÉE FOX, AND DAVID MORGAN-OWEN, EDITORS
The character of the conflict that erupted in 1914 and became known as World War I defied the expectations of many political leaders and military analysts. Despite the mountains of books and articles published on this war, there has been surprisingly little systematic or comparative research on how military commanders and politicians framed and interpreted the conflict—or, indeed, on how they understood war itself—and how that understanding shaped their decision-making. The authors in Framing the First World War use the notion of “frames” and the concept of “framing” to enable us to engage directly with the complexity and diversity of the conflict, which was fought for different reasons and in different ways, incorporating a range of issues with implications for the conduct of the war. November 2025
April 2026
Memoir
Rights: World
Wars are fought by organizations and people who have their own visions of the world they live in and the conflict they are fighting. The contributors to Framing the First World War examine a range of such visions across different countries, different areas, and different kinds of warfare to find out how such envisioning actively shaped the way that the combatants fought.
Lulu's Life
VEDA ROGERS, EDITOR
In 1963, Veda Rogers came upon a set of diaries while helping her husband Bruce’s aunt Myrtle clean out her mother’s house in WaKeeney, KS (about 35 miles west of Hays). The diaries were from Myrtle’s mother, Louisa (Lulu), who lived on and worked a farm in Kansas the early twentieth century. Louisa Fredericka Elizabeth Ehrlichs was born in Chicago. Her parents were German immigrants. After seeing advertisements intended to attract homesteaders to western Kansas, the family moved to Collyer (not far from WaKeeney) in 1879. In 1896, Lulu married farmer Adolph Schwanbeck, and the couple had four children (Myrtle, born in 1902, was the youngest). Lulu’s Life is an edition of Lulu Schwanbeck’s diaries, chronicling living and working on a farm from 1935 to 1955. Diaries of farm women are unusual, and Lulu’s diaries give us a glimpse of what farm life was like for women at this time. In addition, Lulu’s Life is the story of triumph over adversity, as Lulu survives a terrible accident and, after her husband dies, carries on alone.
Misfire
Special Forces in Malaya
BRIAN FARRELL
In World War II, British special forces were combat units organized, trained, and specifically equipped to operate independently, for long periods of time if necessary, physically separated from the main forces in the field. Main force missions focused on defeating the main forces of the enemy: taking and holding ground, imposing control on space and people, defeating any enemy effort to seize and hold friendly ground, or destroy friendly main forces, or impose control on space and people. British Army special-forces units were usually directed to carry out two broad but often closely related missions: provide direct assistance to main force operations; harass enemy movements, lines of supply, and communications. Special forces were also frequently used to destroy specific targets, sometimes in completely independent operations with no main force in the field, and especially to act as the eyes and ears of the main force, gathering intelligence on enemy movements and or screening those of friendly forces.
In Misfire, Brian Farrell analyzes how and why the British Army developed special forces in the early years of the Second World War; what uses it made of them; the role that special and irregular forces played in defending Malaya and Singapore against Japanese invasion, from prewar preparations to capitulation in February 1942; how the use of special and irregular forces helps us better understand both the Malayan campaign and wider efforts to defend Southeast Asia; and what that campaign tells us about the evolution of such forces in the British and Empire armies.
Looking at the Malayan Campaign and the defense of Southeast Asia though the specific lenses of special and irregular forces clarifies and revises some central issues, such as rationales for prewar preparations in the theatre and land forces preparations to defend Malaya, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the forces deployed to do so. Doing this also helps us better understand the larger British Empire armies that took on this mission.
November 2025
Military History
Rights: World
March 2026 Military History
World
Narrow Passage
War, Politics, and Institutional Crisis, 1945-1952
ROD ANDREW, JR.
Narrow Passage is about the institutional survival of the Marine Corps in the period when it was dangerously close to being eliminated, absorbed into the Army, or having its main roles and missions taken away so that it became almost completely irrelevant. It’s not a story that is well known outside of the Marine Corps these days, even in academic circles, but it was an incredibly emotional issue at the time for many Americans, and one that was bitterly fought out in Washington and in the national media.
The Marine Corps fought these battles within the military and the executive branch, in Congress, and in the court of public opinion. One of its main problems was that its key enemies in the executive branch and the War Department had great power and prestige—Truman, Marshall, Eisenhower, Bradley, and others. Another severe disadvantage was that the Marines had no representation on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and had to rely on the Navy to make their case for them. The Navy at times served as a much-needed ally for the Corps, but at other times an unreliable and unvigilant one. The Corps did have some advantages. It had stalwart defenders in Congress and in the press, and it had great prestige and popularity with the public. The Marines used those advantages skillfully and aggressively.
Rod Andrew argues that it was the performance of combat Marines in Korea that ultimately saved the Corps in its political battles back home. The elite reputation that the Corps created for itself, and the affection it had garnered from the public throughout the twentieth century, would not have been possible without the valor and the victories of front-line Marines.
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.
November 2024
328 pages
History, Military / Russian and Soviet Rights: World
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
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 22nd 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.
War Underground
A History of Military Mining in Siege Warfare
EARL J. HESS
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 book-length 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 Civil War.
Spring 2025
Military History
Rights: World
The Kremlin and the High Command
Presidential Impact on the Russian Military from Gorbachev to Putin
DALE R. HERSPRING AND 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.
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
August 2025
Popular Culture Rights: World
Spring 2025
Pacific environment
Rights: World
The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Vol 2 Into
the Multiverse
NICHOLAS CARNES AND LILLY J. GOREN
The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is more political than ever. 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 Black 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.
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
Border Biomes
Ecological Imaginaries of Mexico's Boundaries EMILY VÁZQUEZ ENRÍQUEZ
What effect do heavily fortified national borders have on the natural environments that surround them? In Border Biomes, Emily Vázquez Enríquez explores this question by analyzing contemporary Mexican, Latinx, and Indigenous literature that has tried to highlight the human and ecological toll of Mexico’s borders with the United States and Guatemala. By challenging the very premise of borders as permanent, immovable boundaries, she shows how novelists and poets in Mexico and the United States have tried to represent and understand the vast social, political, and ecological harm caused by these constructions. She argues that the environmental destruction that borders create is inseparable from state-sanctioned, anti-immigrant racial violence. To do this, she structures the book around three main biomes: rivers, deserts, and forests. Within each chapter, Vázquez Enríquez considers how authors such as Dolores Dorantes, Natalie Diaz, and Tohono O’odham have drawn upon alternative Indigenous epistemologies and forms of representation to register the sweeping damage of bordering regimes on the Colorado River, the Southwest Desert, the Selva El Petén, and other biomes. By critically analyzing the work of these U.S. and Mexican writers, she contests traditional interpretations of Mexican literature as nationally bounded and instead proposes an expansive view of Mexican literature. More fundamentally, Border Biomes suggests literature's potential to create new ecological realities and challenge the naturalization of borders and the ecological violence that they provoke.
Emily Vázquez Enríquez is an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Davis.
December 2025
200 pages
Latin American Studies/Literary Studies
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 effectively 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
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.
June 2025
Education/Black Studies
Rights: World
March 2025
Theater/Spain Rights: World
November 2025
266 pages
Latin American Studies/History
Rights: World
Vida Zoo-Cial
The Buenos Aires Zoo and the Making of Argentine Society, 1875–1924
ASHLEY ELIZABETH KERR
In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, elites attempted to tackle growing poverty and crime rates with a suite of social, educational, and medical reforms, hoping to make the city and larger nation more “modern” and “progressive” on the world stage. Known as the “social question,” this turn of the century elite preoccupation with the future of the city and nation was undergirded by a larger set of social Darwinist beliefs about the biological and racial inferiority of immigrants and the working class, linking them to higher susceptibility to alcoholism, sexual deviancy, insanity, and disease. In Vida Zoo-Cial, Ashley Kerr argues that the Buenos Aires Zoo and its many animal species was a central tool in elites’ attempt to remake Argentinian society. By using the zoo’s physical spaces, programming, and advertising campaigns, elites tried to educate the masses, especially immigrants and the poor, without having to confront existing inequalities within Argentinian society. Drawing upon extensive archival research from the files of the zoo, including correspondence, municipal reports, receipts, and employment records, as well as a range of literary and popular culture, Kerr shows how elite intentions to use the zoo as a tool for social reform rarely went as planned. From attempts to enlist the zoo’s animals to demonstrate proper hygiene practices and social mores to modeling reproduction and motherhood, zoo goers and the animals they went to see often served as foils to elite plans for social reform. Through a series of “interludes” between each chapter, Kerr shows how animals like hippos and monkeys meant to model hygiene for the poor and working class ended up subverting their human keepers’ intentions by hurling or eating their own feces and refusing to be seen by eager crowds. In this way, Vida Zoo-Cial is not only a story about how the poor and working class resisted elite efforts for social reform founded upon racialized beliefs and pseudoscience, but also one that challenges readers to rethink the relationship between humans and non-humans.
Ashley Kerr is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Idaho.
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 efforts 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
Camille's Lakou
A Novel
MARIE LÉTICÉE
TRNSLATED BY KEVIN MEEHAN
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 offer 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 effects 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
TRANSLATED BY NOELL BIRONDO WITH ANDRES BONILLA
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
August 2025
242 pages
Latin American Studies/Literary Studies
Rights: World
The
Violate Man
Male/Male Rape in the American Imagination
AARON C. THOMAS
The Violate Man is about the discourse of male/male rape in American culture since the mid-1960s. Thomas analyzes film, television, and theater to indict how treatments of male/ male rape narratives have encouraged us to interpret sexual violence over the last sixty years. This discourse is productive for our thinking about the real world. The Violate Man finds that these narratives establish—and often maintain or reinforce—longstanding racialized and sexualized traditions about where male/male rape happens, who commits it, why it is committed, and which of us is vulnerable to its victimization. The most influential of these rape narratives also reinforce a complex series of masculinist assumptions that produce the male body as able-bodied, whole, and impenetrable, disallowing bodies broken by violence, sexual and otherwise, from the very category of male.
From the punchline of bro comedies to the vengeance arc of prison dramas, Thomas argues that male/male rape narratives are used by writers, filmmakers, and comedians to make sense of the changing landscape of American masculinity, and that these narratives have shifted widely since the 1960s, reflecting masculinity’s varying anxieties and concerns.
Aaron C. Thomas is an associate professor in the School of Theatre at Florida State University. He is the author of Love Is Love Is Love: Broadway Musicals and LGBTQ Politics, 2010–2020 and Sondheim and Wheeler's Sweeney Todd
Cuir Dissidence
Tracing Restorative Criticism and Breaking Bonds with the Mexican Canon FRANCESCA DENNSTEDT
In Cuir Dissidence, Francesca Dennstedt uses affect and queer feminist theory to rethink the boundaries and hierarchies of the Mexican literary canon. Steeped in ideas of male genius and intrinsic aesthetic quality, the canon has long marginalized women writers by overlooking their contributions or placing their work into literary categories that perpetuate stereotypes about femininity. In response to this history of erasure and neglect, Dennstedt shows how women writers who identify as non-heterosexual or whose work is focused on critique of heteropatriarchal power structures have challenged the very idea of the canon through affect and non-conformity. Over the course of four chapters, she examines how writers like Inés Arredondo, Rosa Maria Roffiel, and Cristina Rivera Garza employ alternative sexual intimacies, gender dissidence, collective authorship, and experimental blending of genres to actively reject the canon. In addition to these creative readings of Mexican women writers, Dennstedt centers her own affective response to these texts to further challenge the traditional boundaries of literary criticism. The book thus prompts readers to see the intellectual project of these writers as a premeditated act of rebellion, one that can help deconstruct the power structures deeply ingrained in Mexican literature written in Spanish and create a space for these voices to flourish across time.
Francesca Dennstedt is an assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky.
Zombie Thoughts and Ballet for Aliens
Two Plays for Young Audiences
JENNIFER A. KOKAI
WITH OLIVER KOKAI-MEANS AND GERARD HERNANDEZ
Zombie Thoughts addresses the topic of Generalized Anxiety Disorder set in a video game world. Co-written with a then nine-year-old Oliver Kokai-Means, the play was first commissioned and developed by small professional company Plan-B Theatre in Salt Lake City and toured to 10,232 elementary students at Title I institutions (high economic need) with the support of a grant from the NEA in 2018. The audience is introduced to the formal diagnosis and symptoms of anxiety disorders (which in kids looks like combativeness and is often misinterpreted by educators as willful disobedience), and therapeutic coping mechanisms. The play was vetted by a licensed therapist.
Ballet for Aliens was co-written with both Oliver Kokai-Means and new playwright, then twelve-year-old Gerard Hernandez, about Gerard’s experience as a youth with Crohn’s Disease. Gerard was a ballet dancer through his childhood, though his health often made this difficult, and the piece required formal ballet movement, so the production was co-created with highly regarded dance company Ballet West’s Peter Christie, their education director. A portion of this play was presented to the Utah Legislature in 2022 to argue for the importance of funding the arts in elementary schools.
Zombie Thoughts and Ballet for Aliens have gone on to be produced across the United States and internationally by school groups, universities, and professional tours of varying theatre sizes. This volume offers both plays and an introduction by Kokai and the youth playwrights, which contextualizes efforts for theatrical interventions in youth mental health.
Jennifer A. Kokai is the director of the School of Theatre and Dance at University of South Florida. Oliver Kokai-Means and Gerard Hernandez are young writers who found expression in playwriting and advocacy. They have presented on their co-created youth productions at various professional workshops and conferences nationally.
September 2025
188 pages
Drama Rights: World
August 2025
222 pages
Regional/History
Rights: World
From the Fiery Furnace to the Promise Land
Stories of a Tennessee Reconstruction Community
SERINA K. GILBERT AND LEAROTHA WILLIAMS FOREWORD BY FREDERICK MURPHY
The Promise Land community, a small village west of Nashville, Tennessee, was founded after the Civil War by people who had been enslaved at the Cumberland Iron Furnace. These early settlers, who included United States Colored Troops veterans, were able to purchase land and establish Black-owned businesses. This afforded the community a level of stability that defies conventional wisdom about the post-Reconstruction-era South.
In time the community encompassed approximately 1,000 acres with more than 50 homes, several stores, three churches, and an elementary school. But by the mid-twentieth century, the community had dwindled to just a handful of families. Now all that remains physically is a church and the old school building. But in the hearts of the descendants of those families, Promise Land remains a vital and thriving community of friends, family, and, albeit virtual, neighbors who continue to support each other.
This is the story of this town told through the memories of the people who lived there. Serina Gilbert grew up in the community and is now one of the revered storytellers and story-keepers of Promise Land. Along with historian Learotha Williams, she is sharing the history of a community that thrived and continues to thrive in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles.
A descendant of original Promise Land settlers, Serina K. Gilbert was born and raised in the community. Like many of her predecessors, she moved away after finishing high school in pursuit of a post-secondary education. Upon graduating from Tennessee State University, she moved to New York City to work for the City’s Social Services and Health Departments. From there, she moved on to Howard University in Washington, D.C. where she earned a master’s degree in social work. She enjoyed over 35 progressive and diversified years in the field of social work before retiring and returning to her home of origin. Since returning to Tennessee, she has led the efforts to preserve the history of the Promise Land Community. Learotha Williams Jr. is a professor of African American, Civil War and Reconstruction, and Public History at Tennessee State University and coordinator of the North Nashville Heritage Project. He is the co-editor of I'll Take You There: Exploring Nashville's Social Justice Sites
The Kingdom of the Poor
My Journey Home
CHARLES STROBEL
EDITED BY KATIE SEIGENTHALER AND AMY FROGGE FOREWORD BY ANN PATCHETT
As Charles Strobel, beloved Nashville priest and champion of the unhoused, reached the end of his life in 2023, he began to contemplate the last message he wanted to leave his family, friends, and community. With the help of his niece, Katie Seigenthaler, and his colleague, Amy Frogge, Strobel began to dictate The Kingdom of the Poor. He wrote, “Mark Twain, the great American folk hero and writer, has said, ‘The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.’ The following pages help to explain why I was born.” The “why” of Charlie Strobel’s life, which was devoted to helping those without support systems and homes to call their own, was a simple belief that we are all poor and we are all worthy of love. The Kingdom of the Poor is the story of the people and experiences that led him to this understanding and inspired him to live his life accordingly.
Charles Strobel (1943–2023) was the founding director of Room In The Inn, a continuum of care for unhoused people living on the streets of Nashville and beyond. A Catholic priest, Strobel was known for his innovative advocacy on behalf of human rights and economic equity, his ecumenism, and his opposition to the death penalty. He is the author of Room In The Inn: Ways Your Congregation Can Help Homeless People Katie Seigenthaler, the niece of Charles Strobel, is the coauthor with Dr. Alex Jahangir of Hot Spot: A Doctor’s Diary from the Pandemic, published in 2022 by Vanderbilt University Press. She is a managing partner with FINN Partners and a former journalist with the Chicago Tribune Amy Frogge is a long-term volunteer for Room In The Inn. She is an attorney, grant writer, former member of the Metro Nashville school board, and current member of the Nashville Symphony Choir.
September 2025
178 pages
Regional/Human Rights Rights: World
December 2025
216 pages
Latin American Studies/Anthropology Rights: World
Urban Indigenous Assemblages
Qom Mobilities and the Remaking of White Buenos Aires
ANA VIVALDI
Over the past two decades, Latin American politicians and activists have reckoned with their nations' histories of racism, forced displacement of native peoples, and inequality by embracing Indigenous communities. In Argentina—a nation long fixated on presenting itself as "white" and "European"—this shift has been dramatic. After decades of erasure and racism toward Indigenous peoples, Argentinian politicians are now presenting Indigenous groups as central to the country's culturally plural and multi-racial identity. In Urban Indigenous Assemblages: Qom Mobilities and the Remaking of White Buenos Aires, Vivaldi considers how Argentina's urban Indigenous population fits into this recent political and social movement. To do this, she focuses on how the Qom Indigenous people—whose traditional territories are in the north of Argentina—have moved to Buenos Aires, made homes in shantytowns alongside other migrants, and remade urban space by building Indigenous lives in the city. Starting from a Qom barrio in Greater Buenos Aires, Vivaldi traces how Qom peoples' travels to rural communities and movement across the city create complex networks and produce an urban life always in connection to other places. She argues that urban racialized indigeneities represent sites of contradictory relations visible and invisible to state actors and hyper-visible to development agencies, as the Qom are expected to prove their authenticity and remove themselves from important relationships with nonwhite neighbors to access rights and recognition. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork, the book's five chapters analyze the historical process that created the barrio: the constant remaking of this Indigenous space in interaction with state institutions and NGOs, the links between the barrio and the northern Argentina through travels "far out" to rural communities in the Chaco, and the expansion of "Indigenous territories" beyond bounded location.
Ana Vivaldi is an instructor in the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.
Madison
Portraits of Our Neighbors
STACIE HUCKEBA AND LAURA JO AMARAL FOREWORD BY
CARLENE CARTER
Internationally recognized photographer Stacie Huckeba and Madison, Tennessee, community volunteer Laura Jo Amaral have partnered to create a photographic art book and living historical document, Madison: Portraits of Our Neighbors. The project is generously supported by a 2024 Thrive Grant through Metro Arts: Nashville Office of Arts + Culture. Madison is historically known for its cultural diversity and rich musical history. The book features nearly 100 artists, musicians, small business owners, community leaders, city workers, eccentrics and more through intimate portraits of the individuals who live and work in Madison and the spaces that define them. The profound and engaging images were captured over the course of a year and showcase a vast spectrum of the human experience. Readers will get to know a world-class bass player, a nonagenarian cattle farmer, a TikTok celebrity, a singer/songwriter, a mariachi band, the personal photographer for Johnny Cash, a beloved gymnastics coach, model airplane enthusiasts, educators, a fashion designer, a puppet enthusiast, a pastor and outreach worker, an array of artists, small business owners, farmers, and local legends who make up this colorful neighborhood. Madisonians from vastly different backgrounds, ethnicities, and walks of life are beautifully showcased in their homes, studios, and places of business. The collection results in a “time capsule” of art as well as a historical document that captures the heart of the people who contribute to the Madison community as it is today. Beyond a collection of portraits, it's a testament to an enduring urban community, a celebration of the shared human experience, and an opportunity to see our neighbors in their best light. Madison: Portraits of Our Neighbors invites readers to celebrate the tapestry of humanity that weaves through this unique neighborhood.
Stacie Huckeba is an award-winning, internationally recognized photographer, writer, public speaker, and filmmaker. She most recently served as the Director of Photography for Dolly Parton’s New York Times bestseller Behind The Seams: My Life in Rhinestones. Her pictures have graced the cover of Marie Claire, as well as the pages of Rolling Stone, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and others. Laura Jo Amaral is a Madison, Tennessee, resident passionate about building community. A lover of books and supporter of original art, she started Lucky Jo Publishing to create beautiful art and photography books.
