20 minute read
General Interest
THE FIGHT FOR FREE SPEECH
Ten Cases That Define Our First Amendment Freedoms IAN ROSENBERG
A user’s guide to understanding contemporary free speech issues in the United States
Americans today are confronted by a barrage of questions relating to their free speech freedoms. What are libel laws, and do they need to be changed to stop the press from lying? Does Colin Kaepernick have the right to take a knee? Can Saturday Night Live be punished for parody? While citizens are grappling with these questions, they generally have nowhere to turn to learn about the extent of their First Amendment rights. The Fight for Free Speech answers this call with an accessible, engaging user’s guide to free speech. Media lawyer Ian Rosenberg distills the spectrum of free speech law down to ten critical issues. Each chapter in this book focuses on a contemporary free speech question—from student walkouts for gun safety to Samantha Bee’s expletives, from Nazis marching in Charlottesville to the muting of adult film star Stormy Daniels—and then identifies, unpacks, and explains the key Supreme Court case that provides the answers. Together these fascinating stories create a practical framework for understanding where our free speech protections originated and how they can develop in the future. As people on all sides of the political spectrum are demanding their right to speak and be heard, The Fight for Free Speech is a handbook for combating authoritarianism, protecting our democracy, and bringing an understanding of free speech law to all.
Ian Rosenberg has over twenty years of experience as a media lawyer, and has worked as legal counsel for ABC News since 2003. A graduate of Cornell Law School, he is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, and teaches Media Law at Brooklyn College.
"The Fight for Free Speech is a wonderful guide to our free speech rights, serving as an engaging introduction for all readers, and as an illuminating source of insights even for those with expertise in First Amendment law." —Nadine Strossen, former president, ACLU, author of HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship
February 2021 320 pages • 6 x 9 Cloth • 9781479801565 • $27.95T(£21.99)
Current Affairs
Maggy Krell is an award-winning impact lawyer and currently serves as Chief Legal Counsel at Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. Maggy started her career as a prosecutor, serving as a deputy district attorney before moving up the ranks at the Attorney General’s Office, most recently as the Supervising Deputy Attorney General of the Special Prosecutions Unit. Maggy secured convictions throughout California in high-profile cases including murder, human trafficking, domestic violence, white collar crime, and mortgage fraud. Maggy’s most notable accomplishments stem from her tireless efforts to combat human trafficking and protect and empower victims.
January 2021 192 pages • 6 x 9 8 black & white illustrations Cloth • 9781479803040 • $22.95T(£17.99)
Current Affairs TAKING DOWN BACKPAGE
Fighting the World’s Largest Sex Trafficker MAGGY KRELL
Insider details from the takedown of Backpage, the world’s largest sex trafficker, by the prosecutor who led the charge
For almost a decade, Backpage.com was the world’s largest sex trafficking operation. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, in 800 cities throughout the world, Backpage ran thousands of listings advertising the sale of vulnerable young people for sex. Reaping a cut off every transaction, the owners of the website raked in millions of dollars. But many of the people in the advertisements were children, as young as 12, and forced into the commercial sex trade through fear, violence and coercion. In Taking Down Backpage, veteran California prosecutor Maggy Krell tells the story of how she and her team prevailed against this sex trafficking monolith. Beginning with her early career as a young DA, she shares the evolution of the anti-human trafficking movement. Through a fascinating combination of memoir and legal insight, Krell reveals how she and her team started with the prosecution of street pimps and ultimately ended with the takedown of the largest purveyor of human trafficking in the world. She shares powerful stories of interviews with victims, sting operations, court cases, and the personal struggles that were necessary to bring Backpage executives to justice. Finally, Krell examines the state of sex trafficking after Backpage and the crucial work that still remains. Taking Down Backpage is a gripping story of tragedy, overcoming adversity, and the pursuit of justice that gives insight into the fight against sex trafficking in the digital age.
"This book is both a fascinating legal thriller about the power of justice and a chilling reminder of how pervasive and horrific human trafficking is. Krell weaves the story together in gripping fashion and leaves the reader with hope and inspiration." —Ashlie Bryant, co-founder and CEO of 3Strands Global Foundation
THE TRAGEDY OF HETEROSEXUALITY
JANE WARD
A troubling account of heterosexual desire in the era of #MeToo
Heterosexuality is in crisis. Reports of sexual harassment, misconduct, and rape saturate the news in the era of #MeToo. Straight men and women spend thousands of dollars every day on relationship coaches, seduction boot camps, and couple’s therapy in a search for happiness. In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Jane Ward smartly explores what, exactly, is wrong with heterosexuality in the twenty-first century, and what straight people can do to fix it for good. She shows how straight women, and to a lesser extent straight men, have tried to mend a fraught patriarchal system in which intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and mutual respect are expected to coexist alongside enduring forms of inequality, alienation, and violence in straight relationships. Ward also takes an intriguing look at the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, which markets goods and services to help heterosexual couples without addressing the root of their problems. Ultimately, she encourages straight men and women to take a page out of queer culture, reminding them “about the human capacity to desire, fuck, and show respect at the same time.”
"This book needed to be written and who better to plunge into the murky mysteries and sad dramas of heterosexuality than Jane Ward? The Tragedy of Heterosexuality offers a map of the complex and shifting landscape of heterosexual desire in the era of #MeToo, sexual harassment, and Title IX....[A]n immensely readable, fairly controversial and surely relevant book." —Jack Halberstam, author of Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire
Jane Ward is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California Riverside, where she teaches courses in feminist, queer, and heterosexuality studies. She is the author of Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men and Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations.
Also of Interest— NOT GAY
Sex between Straight White Men JANE WARD July 2015 240 pages • 6 x 9 Paper • 9781479825172 • $26.00S In Sexual Cultures
A different look at heterosexuality in the twenty-first century
September 2020 224 pages • 6 x 9 Cloth • 9781479851553 • $26.95T(£20.99) In Sexual Cultures
Cultural Studies
Miriam Udel is Associate Professor in German Studies and the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University and author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque. Jack Zipes is a preeminent fairy-tale scholar who has written, translated, and edited dozens of books including The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm and Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. He is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.
HONEY ON THE PAGE
A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature Edited and Translated by MIRIAM UDEL Foreword by JACK ZIPES Original Illustrations by PAULA COHEN
An unprecedented treasury of Yiddish children’s stories and poems enhanced with original illustrations
While there has been a recent boom in Jewish literacy and learning within the US, few resources exist to enable American Jews to experience the rich primary sources of Yiddish culture. Stepping into this void, Miriam Udel has crafted an exquisite collection: Honey on the Page offers a feast of beguiling original translations of stories and poems for children. Arranged thematically—from school days to the holidays—the book takes readers from Jewish holidays and history to folktales and fables, from stories of humanistic ethics to multi-generational family sagas. Featuring many works that are appearing in English for the first time, and written by both prominent and lesser-known authors, this anthology spans the Yiddish-speaking globe— drawing from materials published in Eastern Europe, New York, and Latin America from the 1910s, during the interwar period, and up through the 1970s. With its vast scope, Honey on the Page offers a cornucopia of delights to families, individuals and educators seeking literature that speaks to Jewish children about their religious, cultural, and ethical heritage. Complemented by whimsical, humorous illustrations by Paula Cohen, an acclaimed children’s book illustrator, Udel’s evocative translations of Yiddish stories and poetry will delight young and older readers alike.
October 2020 352 pages • 7 x 10 81 black & white illustrations Cloth • 9781479874132 • $29.95T(£23.99)
Literature
ENCHANTED NEW YORK
A Journey along Broadway through Manhattan's Magical Past KEVIN DANN
A fantastical field guide to the hidden history of New York's magical past
Manhattan has a pervasive quality of glamour—a heightened sense of personality generated by a place whose cinematic, literary, and commercial celebrity lends an aura of the fantastic to even its most commonplace locales. Enchanted New York chronicles an alternate history of this magical isle. It offers a tour along Broadway, focusing on times and places that illuminate a forgotten and sometimes hidden history of New York through site-specific stories of wizards, illuminati, fortune tellers, magicians, and more. Progressing up New York’s central thoroughfare, this guidebook to magical Manhattan offers a history you won’t find in your Lonely Planet or Fodor’s guide, tracing the arc of American technological alchemies—from Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton to the Manhattan Project—to Mesmeric physicians, to wonder–working Madame Blavatsky, and seers Helena Roerich and Alice Bailey. Harry Houdini appears and disappears, as the world’s premier stage magician’s feats of prestidigitation fade away to reveal a much more mysterious—and meaningful—marquee of magic. Unlike old-world cities, New York has no ancient monuments to mark its magical adolescence. There is no local memory embedded in the landscape of celebrated witches, warlocks, gods, or goddesses—no myths of magical metamorphoses. As we follow Kevin Dann in geographical and chronological progression up Broadway from Battery Park to Inwood, each chapter provides a surprising picture of a city whose ever-changing fortunes have always been founded on magical activity.
Kevin Dann is the author of Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau and a dozen other books of exploration. He received his PhD from Rutgers University in American and Environmental History, and has taught at Rutgers University, the University of Vermont, and the State University of New York. He leads magical bike and walking tours in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Learn more at drdann.com.
October 2020 320 pages • 6 x 9 82 black & white illustrations with 7 maps Paper • 9781479838264 • $22.50T(£17.99) Cloth • 9781479860227 • $89.00X(£74.00)
New York City Washington Mews Books
Jeanne E. Abrams is Professor at the University Libraries and the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, where she is also Director of the Rocky Mountain Jewish Historical Society, and Curator of the Beck Archives, Special Collections. She is the author of First Ladies of the Republic: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and the Creation of an Iconic American Role (2018) and Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health (2013).
A VIEW FROM ABROAD
The Story of John and Abigail Adams in Europe JEANNE E. ABRAMS
Reveals how the European travels of John and Abigail Adams helped define what it meant to be an American
From 1778 to 1788, the Founding Father and later President John Adams lived in Europe as a diplomat. Joined by his wife, Abigail, in 1784, the two shared rich encounters with famous heads of the European royal courts, including the ill-fated King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the staid British Monarchs King George III and Queen Charlotte. In this engaging narrative, A View from Abroad takes us on the first full exploration of the Adamses' lives abroad. Jeanne E. Abrams reveals how the journeys of John and Abigail Adams not only changed the course of their intellectual, political, and cultural development—transforming the couple from provincials to sophisticated world travelers—but most importantly served to strengthen their loyalty to America. Abrams shines a new light on how the Adamses and their American contemporaries set about supplanting their British origins with a new American identity. They and their fellow Americans grappled with how to reorder their society as the new nation took its place in the international transatlantic world. After just a short time abroad, Abigail maintained that, “My Heart and Soul is more American than ever. We are a family by ourselves.” The Adamses’ quest to define what it means to be an American, and the answers they discovered in their time abroad, still resonate with us to this day.
January 2021 320 pages • 6 x 9 11 black & white illustrations Cloth • 9781479802876 • $27.95T(£21.99)
History
AVIDLY READS PASSAGES
MICHELLE D. COMMANDER
What the slave ship, train, automobile, and bus can teach us about Southern Black life in America
In Avidly Reads Passages, Michelle D. Commander plies four freighted modes of travel—the slave ship, train, automobile, and bus—to map the mobility of her ancestors over the past five centuries. In the process, she refreshes the conventional American travel narrative by telling an urgent story about how history shapes what moves us, as well as what prevents so many Black Americans from moving or being moved. Anchored in her maternal kin’s long history on and alongside plantations in rural South Carolina, Commander explores her family members’ ability and inability to navigate safely through space, time, and emotion, detailing how Black lives were shaped by the actual vehicles that promised an escape from the confines of American racism, yet nearly always failed to deliver on those promises. Using personal and public archives, Avidly Reads Passages unfolds distinct histories of transatlantic slavery ships, the possibilities presented by rail lines in the Reconstruction South, the fateful legacies of school busing, and the ways that Black Americans attempted to negotiate their automobility, including through the use of road and travel compendiums such as Travelguide and The Negro Motorist Green Book. In order to understand the intricacies of slavery and its aftermath, Commander began her exploration with the hope of engaging with the difficult evidences and stubborn gaps in her family’s genealogy; what she produced is a biting and elegiac reflection on working-class life in the Black South. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal memoir and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Passages offers a unique lens through which to capture the intricacies of Black life.
Michelle D. Commander is Associate Director and Curator of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Before joining the Schomburg Center, she was an Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. A Ford Foundation and Fulbright Fellowship recipient, Commander is the author of AfroAtlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic.
February 2021 152 pages • 4.37 x 7 10 black & white illustrations Paper • 9781479806171 • $14.95T(£11.99) Cloth • 9781479806164 • $89.00X(£74.00) In Avidly Reads
Cultural Studies
Louis A. Decaro, Jr. is Associate Professor of Church History at Alliance Theological Seminary, and is the author of “Fire from the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown and Freedom’s Dawn: The Last Days of John Brown in Virginia.
THE UNTOLD STORY OF SHIELDS GREEN
The Life and Death of a Harper's Ferry Raider LOUIS A. DECARO, JR.
Explores the life of Shields Green, one of the black men who followed John Brown to Harper’s Ferry in 1859
When John Brown decided to raid the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry as the starting point of his intended liberation effort in the South, some closest to him thought it was unnecessary and dangerous. Frederick Douglass, a pioneering abolitionist, refused Brown’s invitation to join him in Virginia, believing that the raid on the armory was a suicide mission. Yet in front of Douglass, “Emperor” Shields Green, a fugitive from South Carolina, accepted John Brown’s invitation. When the raid failed, Emperor was captured with the rest of Brown’s surviving men and hanged on December 16, 1859. “Emperor” Shields Green was a critical member of John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raiders but has long been overlooked. Louis DeCaro, Jr., a veteran scholar of John Brown, presents the first effort to tell Emperor’s story based upon extensive research, restoring him to his rightful place in this fateful raid at the origin of the American Civil War. Starting from his birth in Charleston, South Carolina, Green’s life as an abolitionist freedom-fighter, whose passion for the liberation of his people outweighed self-preservation, is extensively detailed in this compact history. In The Untold Story of Shields Green, Emperor pushes back against racism and injustice and stands in his rightful place as an antislavery figure alongside Frederick Douglass and John Brown.
October 2020 240 pages • 6 x 9 14 black & white illustrations Cloth • 9781479802753 • $28.00A(£21.99)
History
THE BLACK CIVIL WAR SOLDIER
A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship DEBORAH WILLIS
A stunning collection of stoic portraits and intimate ephemera from the lives of Black Civil War soldiers
In The Black Civil War Soldier, Deborah Willis explores the crucial role of photography in (re)telling and shaping African American narratives of the Civil War, pulling from a dynamic visual archive that has largely gone unacknowledged. With over seventy images, The Black Civil War Soldier contains a huge breadth of primary and archival materials, many of which are rarely reproduced. The photographs are supplemented with handwritten captions, letters, and other personal materials; Willis not only dives into the lives of black Union soldiers, but also includes stories of other African Americans involved with the struggle—from left-behind family members to female spies. Willis thus compiles a captivating memoir of photographs and words and examines them together to address themes of love and longing; responsibility and fear; commitment and patriotism; and—most predominantly—African American resilience. The Black Civil War Soldier offers a kaleidoscopic yet intimate portrait of the African American experience, from the beginning of the Civil War to 1900. Through her multimedia analysis, Willis acutely pinpoints the importance of African American communities in the development and prosecution of the war. The book shows how photography helped construct a national vision of blackness, war, and bondage, while unearthing the hidden histories of these black Civil War soldiers. In combating the erasure of this often overlooked history, Willis asks how these images might offer a more nuanced memory of African-American participation in the Civil War, and in doing so, points to individual and collective struggles for citizenship and remembrance.
Deborah Willis is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, and Africana Studies. Willis is the author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present; Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers - 1840 to the Present; Let Your Motto be Resistance—African American Portraits; Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery with Barbara Krauthamer; and Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs. Both Envisioning Emancipation and Michelle Obama received NAACP Image Awards.
January 2021 240 pages • 7 x 10 99 black & white illustrations Cloth • 9781479809004 • $35.00A(£27.99) In NYU Series in Social and Cultural Analysis
History
Michael G. Long is the author and editor of four books on Jackie Robinson. He is Associate Professor in the Center of Global Understanding and Peacemaking at Elizabethtown College. Ken Burns is an award-winning filmmaker and director of the film Jackie Robinson, in association with Major League Baseball. Sarah Burns is the co-producer of the film Jackie Robinson, in association with Major League Baseball. Burns also wrote the text for the documentary. David McMahon is the co-producer of the film Jackie Robinson, in association with Major League Baseball. McMahon also wrote the text for the documentary.
42 TODAY
Jackie Robinson and His Legacy Edited by MICHAEL G. LONG Foreword by KEN BURNS, SARAH BURNS, and DAVID MCMAHON
Explores Jackie Robinson’s compelling and complicated legacy
Before the United States Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public schools, and before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, Jackie Robinson walked onto the diamond on April 15, 1947, as first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers, making history as the first African American to integrate Major League Baseball in the twentieth century. Today a national icon, Robinson was a complicated man who navigated an even more complicated world that both celebrated and despised him. Many are familiar with Robinson as a baseball hero. Few, however, know of the inner turmoil that came with his historic status. Featuring piercing essays from a range of distinguished sportswriters, cultural critics, and scholars, this book explores Robinson’s perspectives and legacies on civil rights, sports, faith, youth, and nonviolence, while providing rare glimpses into the struggles and strength of one of the nation’s most athletically gifted and politically significant citizens. Featuring a foreword by celebrated directors and producers Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, this volume recasts Jackie Robinson’s legacy and establishes how he set a precedent for future civil rights activism, from Black Lives Matter to Colin Kaepernick.
February 2021 256 pages • 6 x 9 12 black & white illustrations Cloth • 9781479805624 • $27.95T(£21.99)
Sports Washington Mews Books
FEAR IN OUR HEARTS
What Islamophobia Tells Us about America CALEB IYER ELFENBEIN
Argues that anti-Muslim activity reveals how fear is corroding core American values
In a 2018 national poll, over ninety percent of respondents reported that treating people equally is an essential American value. Almost eighty percent said accepting people of different racial backgrounds is very important. Yet about half of the general public reported that they doubt whether Muslims can truly dedicate themselves to American values and society. Why do many people who say they believe in equality and acceptance of those of different backgrounds also think that Muslims could be an exception to that rule? In Fear in Our Hearts, Caleb Iyer Elfenbein examines Islamophobia in the United States, positing that rather than simply being an outcome of the 9/11 attacks, anti-Muslim activity grows out of a fear of difference that has always characterized US public life. Elfenbein examines the effects of this fear on American Muslims, as well as describing how it works to shape and distort American society. Drawing on over 1,800 news reports documenting anti-Muslim activity, Elfenbein pinpoints trends, draws connections to the broader histories of immigration, identity, belonging, and citizenship in the US, and examines how Muslim communities have responded. In the face of public fear and hate, American Muslim communities have sought to develop connections with non-Muslims through unprecedented levels of community transparency, outreach, and public engagement efforts. Despite the hostile environment that has made these efforts necessary, American Muslims have faced down their own fears to offer a model for building communities and creating more welcoming conditions of public life for everyone. Arguing that anti-Muslim activity tells us as much about the state of core American values in general as it does about the particular experiences of American Muslims, this compelling look at Muslims in America offers practical ideas about how we can create a more welcoming public life for all in our everyday lives.
Caleb Iyer Elfenbein is Associate Professor in the Departments of History and Religious Studies at Grinnell College, where he is also Director of the Center for the Humanities.
January 2021 208 pages • 6 x 9 Cloth • 9781479804580 • $28.00A(£21.99) In North American Religions
