Search results for ""new york university press""

The Affordable Care Act’s impact on coverage, access to care, and systematic exclusion in our health care system The Affordable Care Act set off an unprecedented wave of health insurance enrollment as the most sweeping overhaul of the U.S. health insurance system since 1965. In the years since its enactment, some 20 million uninsured Americans gained access to coverage. And yet, the law remained unpopular and politically vulnerable. While the ACA extended social protections to some groups, its implementation was troubled and the act itself created new forms of exclusion. Access to affordable coverage options were highly segmented by state of residence, income, and citizenship status. Unequal Coverage documents the everyday experiences of individuals and families across the U.S. as they attempted to access coverage and care in the five years following the passage of the ACA.It argues that while the Affordable Care Act succeeded in expanding access to care, it did so unevenly, ultimately also generating inequality and stratification. The volume investigates the outcomes of the ACA in communities throughout the country and provides up-close, intimate portraits of individuals and groups trying to access and provide health care for both the newly insured and those who remain uncovered. The contributors use the ACA as a lens to examine more broadly how social welfare policies in a multiracial and multiethnic democracy purport to be inclusive while simultaneously embracing certain kinds of exclusions. Unequal Coverage concludes with an examination of the Affordable Care Act’s uncertain legacy under the new Presidential administration and considers what the future may hold for the American health care system. The book illustrates lessons learned and reveals how the law became a flashpoint for battles over inequality, fairness, and the role of government. More books on the health care debate

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Can American cities respond effectively to pressing social problems? Or, as many scholars have claimed, are urban politics so mired in stasis, gridlock and bureaucratic paralysis that dramatic policy change is impossible? Homelessness in New York City tells the remarkable story of how America’s largest city has struggled for more than thirty years to meet the crisis of modern homelessness through the landmark development, since the initiation of the Callahan v Carey litigation in 1979, of a municipal shelter system based on a court-enforced right to shelter. New York City now shelters more than 50,000 otherwise homeless people at an annual cost of more than $1 billion in the largest and most complex shelter system in the world. Establishing the right to shelter was a dramatic break with long established practice. Developing and managing the shelter system required the city to repeatedly overcome daunting challenges, from dealing with mentally ill street dwellers to confronting community opposition to shelter placement. In the course of these efforts many classic dilemmas in social policy and public administration arose. Does adequate provision for the poor create perverse incentives? Can courts manage recalcitrant bureaucracies? Is poverty rooted in economic structures or personal behavior? The tale of how five mayors—Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg and de Blasio—have wrestled with these problems is one of caution and hope: the task is difficult and success is never unqualified, but positive change is possible. Homelessness in New York City tells the remarkable story of what happened—for good and sometimes less good—when New York established the right to shelter.

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Queerness and Christianity, often depicted as mutually exclusive, both challenge received notions of the good and the natural. Nowhere is this challenge more visible than in the identities, faiths, and communities that queer Christians have long been creating. As Christians they have staked a claim for a Christianity that is true to their self-understandings. How do queer-identified persons understand their religious lives? And in what ways do the lived experiences of queer Christians respond to traditions and reshape them in contemporary practice? Queer Christianities integrates the perspectives of queer theory, religious studies, and Christian theology into a lively conversation—both transgressive and traditional—about the fundamental questions surrounding the lives of queer Christians. The volume contributes to the emerging scholarly discussion on queer religious experiences as lived both within communities of Christian confession, as well as outside of these established communities. Organized around traditional Christian states of life—celibacy, matrimony, and what is here provocatively conceptualized as promiscuity—this work reflects the ways in which queer Christians continually reconstruct and multiply the forms these states of life take. Queer Christianities challenges received ideas about sexuality and religion, yet remains true to Christian self-understandings that are open to further enquiry and to further queerness.

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He destroys in order to create. In a sweeping critique of the field, Benjamin Schreier resituates Jewish Studies in order to make room for a critical study of identity and identification. Displacing the assumption that Jewish Studies is necessarily the study of Jews, this book aims to break down the walls of the academic ghetto in which the study of Jewish American literature often seems to be contained: alienated from fields like comparative ethnicity studies, American studies, and multicultural studies; suffering from the unwillingness of Jewish Studies to accept critical literary studies as a legitimate part of its project; and so often refusing itself to engage in self-critique. The Impossible Jew interrogates how the concept of identity is critically put to work by identity-based literary study. Through readings of key authors from across the canon of Jewish American literature and culture—including Abraham Cahan, the New York Intellectuals, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Safran Foer—Benjamin Schreier shows how texts resist the historicist expectation that self-evident Jewish populations are represented in and recoverable from them. Through ornate, scabrous, funny polemics, Schreier draws the lines of relation between Jewish American literary study and American studies, multiethnic studies, critical theory, and Jewish Studies formations. He maintains that a Jewish Studies beyond ethnicity is essential for a viable future of Jewish literary study.

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Examines the efforts to bring political order to the English empire through projects of environmental improvement When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health. By initiating ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places and people in service of establishing order. Merchants, colonial officials, and members of the Royal Society encouraged royal intervention in places deemed unhealthy, unproductive, or poorly managed. Their multiple schemes reflected an enduring belief in the complex relationships between the health of individual bodies, personal and communal character, and the landscapes they inhabited. In this deeply researched work, Kate Mulry highlights a period of innovation during which officials reassessed the purpose of colonies, weighed their benefits and drawbacks, and engineered and instituted a range of activities in relation to subjects’ bodies and material environments. These wide-ranging actions offer insights about how restoration officials envisioned authority within a changing English empire. An Empire Transformed is an interdisciplinary work addressing a series of interlocking issues concerning ideas about the environment, governance, and public health in the early modern English Atlantic empire.

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A rich set of feminist perspectives on the varied and often contradictory nature of state practices, structures, and ideologies Growing socio-economic inequality and exclusion are defining features of the twenty-first century. While debates on globalization, free trade, and economic development have been linked to the paradigm of “neo-liberalism,” it does not explain all the forms of social change that have been unfolding in comparative contexts. Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State provides a timely intervention into discussions about the boundaries, practices, and nature of the post-liberalization state, suggesting that an understanding of economic policies, the corresponding rise of socio-economic inequality, and the possibilities for change requires an in-depth reconceptualization. Drawing on original field research both globally and within the United States, this volume brings together a rich set of perspectives on the varied and often contradictory nature of state practices, structures and ideologies in the post-liberalization era. The essays develop an interdisciplinary approach that treats an understanding of historically-specific forms of inequality—such as gender, race, caste, sexuality and class—as integral to, rather than as after-effects of, the policies and ideologies associated with the “neoliberal project.” The volume also tackles central questions on the restructuring of the state, the state’s power operations, the relationship between capital and the state, and its interactions with the institutions and organizational forms of civil society in the post-liberalization era. As such, Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State examines both what is distinctive about this post-liberalization state and what must be contextualized as long-standing features of modern state power. A truly international and interdisciplinary volume, Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State deepens our understanding of how policies of economic liberalization shape and produce various forms of inequality.

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Environment and Society connects the core themes of environmental studies to the urgent issues and debates of the twenty-first century. In an era marked by climate change, rapid urbanization, and resource scarcity, environmental studies has emerged as a crucial arena of study. Assembling canonical and contemporary texts, this volume presents a systematic survey of concepts and issues central to the environment in society, such as: social mobilization on behalf of environmental objectives; the relationships between human population, economic growth and stresses on the planet’s natural resources; debates about the relative effects of collective and individual action; and unequal distribution of the social costs of environmental degradation. Organized around key themes, with each section featuring questions for debate and suggestions for further reading, the book introduces students to the history of environmental studies, and demonstrates how the field’s interdisciplinary approach uniquely engages the essential issues of the present.

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A study that explores patients’ perspectives on a life-altering surgery Bariatric surgery rates around the world have increased exponentially over the past decade. In Extreme Weight Loss, anthropologists Sarah Trainer, Alexandra Brewis, and Amber Wutich provide us with an inside look at how patients experience this medical procedure, as well as its far-reaching and complex personal implications. Drawing on patient interviews, survey data, and more, Trainer, Brewis, and Wutich explore why people decide to undergo bariatric surgery, and how that decision transforms their lives. They show, in painstaking detail, how the journey to weight loss is can be at once painful and liberating, dispiriting and self-affirming. Extreme Weight Loss explores questions about which bodies are treated as though they belong in modern societies, and which bodies are treated as unwanted. It considers how people challenge and manage these unfair standards, illuminating what it means to be large-bodied in America’s diet-obsessed culture.

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A critical resource for approaching sustainability across the disciplines Sustainability and social justice remain elusive even though each is unattainable without the other. Across the industrialized West and the Global South, unsustainable practices and social inequities exacerbate one another. How do social justice and sustainability connect? What does sustainability mean and, most importantly, how can we achieve it with justice? This volume tackles these questions, placing social justice and interdisciplinary approaches at the center of efforts for a more sustainable world. Contributors present empirical case studies that illustrate how sustainability can take place without contributing to social inequality. From indigenous land rights, climate conflict, militarization and urban drought resilience, the book offers examples of ways in which sustainability and social justice strengthen one another. Through an understanding of history, diverse cultural traditions, and complexity in relation to race, class, and gender, this volume demonstrates ways in which sustainability can help to shape better and more robust solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. Blending methods from the humanities, environmental sciences and the humanistic social sciences, this book offers an essential guide for the next generation of global citizens.

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Recovering the powerful and influential contributions of women from the nation’s formative years The Political Thought of America’s Founding Feminists traces the significance of Frances Wright, Harriet Martineau, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth in shaping American political thinking. These women understood the relationship between sexism, racism, and economic inequality; yet, they are virtually unknown in American political thought because they are considered activists, not theorists. Their efforts to expand the reach of America’s founding ideals laid the groundwork not only for women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery, but for the broader expansion of civil, political, and human rights that would characterize much of the twentieth century and continues to unfold today. Drawing on a careful reading of speeches, letters and other archival sources, Lisa Pace Vetter shows the ways in which the early women’s rights movement and abolitionism were central to the development of American political thought. The Political Thought of America’s Founding Feminists demonstrates that early American political thought is incomplete without attention to these important female thinkers, and that an understanding of early American women’s movements is incomplete without considering its profound impact on political thought. A complex and thoughtful guide to the indispensable role of women in shaping the American way of life, The Political Thought of America’s Founding Feminists is essential for a comprehensive understanding of the history of American political thought.

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Winner of the 2022 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, award by by the Council of Graduate Schools Explores the role of jazz celebrities like Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams as representatives of African American religion in the twentieth century Beginning in the 1920s, the Jazz Age propelled Black swing artists into national celebrity. Many took on the role of race representatives, and were able to leverage their popularity toward achieving social progress for other African Americans. In Lift Every Voice and Swing, Vaughn A. Booker argues that with the emergence of these popular jazz figures, who came from a culture shaped by Black Protestantism, religious authority for African Americans found a place and spokespeople outside of traditional Afro-Protestant institutions and religious life. Popular Black jazz professionals—such as Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams—inherited religious authority though they were not official religious leaders. Some of these artists put forward a religious culture in the mid-twentieth century by releasing religious recordings and putting on religious concerts, and their work came to be seen as integral to the Black religious ethos. Booker documents this transformative era in religious expression, in which jazz musicians embodied religious beliefs and practices that echoed and diverged from the predominant African American religious culture. He draws on the heretofore unexamined private religious writings of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, and showcases the careers of female jazz artists alongside those of men, expanding our understanding of African American religious expression and decentering the Black church as the sole concept for understanding Black Protestant religiosity. Featuring gorgeous prose and insightful research, Lift Every Voice and Swing will change the way we understand the connections between jazz music and faith.

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The adventures of the man who created Aladdin The Book of Travels is Ḥannā Diyāb’s remarkable first-person account of his travels as a young man from his hometown of Aleppo to the court of Versailles and back again, which forever linked him to one of the most popular pieces of world literature, the Thousand and One Nights. Diyāb, a Maronite Christian, served as a guide and interpreter for the French naturalist and antiquarian Paul Lucas. Between 1706 and 1716, Diyāb and Lucas traveled through Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, Tripolitania, Tunis, Italy, and France. In Paris, Ḥannā Diyāb met Antoine Galland, who added to his wildly popular translation of the Thousand and One Nights several tales related by Diyāb, including “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” When Lucas failed to make good on his promise of a position for Diyāb at Louis XIV’s Royal Library, Diyāb returned to Aleppo. In his old age, he wrote this engaging account of his youthful adventures, from capture by pirates in the Mediterranean to quack medicine and near-death experiences. Translated into English for the first time, The Book of Travels introduces readers to the young Syrian responsible for some of the most beloved stories from the Thousand and One Nights. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

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How transnational modernity is taking shape in and in relation to Asia Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia considers the role of bodily aesthetics in the shaping of Asian modernities and the formation of the so-called “Asian Century.” S. Heijin Lee, Christina H. Moon, and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu train our eyes on sites as far-flung, varied, and intimate as Guangzhou and Los Angeles, Saigon and Seoul, New York and Toronto. They map the transregional connections, ever-evolving aspirations and sensibilities, and new worlds and life paths forged through engagements with fashion and beauty. Contributors consider American influence on plastic surgery in Korea, Vietnamese debates about “the fashionable,” and the costs and commitments demanded of those who make and wear fast fashion, from Chinese garment workers to Nepalese nail technicians in New York who are mandated to dress "fashionably." In doing so, this interdisciplinary anthology moves beyond common characterizations of Asians and the Asian diaspora as simply abject laborers or frenzied consumers, analyzing who the modern Asian subject is now: what they wear and how they work, move, eat, and shop.

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How travelling the world allows new ways to educate children and perform family life on the move A growing number of families are selling their houses, quitting their jobs, and taking their children out of traditional school settings to educate them while traveling the globe. In The World is Our Classroom, Jennie Germann Molz explores the hopes and anxieties that drive these parents and children to leave their comfortable lives behind out of a desire to live the “good life” on the move. Drawing on interviews with parents and stories from the blogs they publish during their journeys, as well as her own experience traveling the world with her ten-year-old son, Germann Molz takes us inside a fascinating life spent on trains, boats, and planes. She shows why many parents—disillusioned with standard public schooling—believe the world is a child’s best classroom. Rebelling against convention, these parents combine technology and travel to pursue a different version of the good life, one in which parents can work remotely as “digital nomads,” participate in like-minded communities online, and expose their children to the risks, opportunities, and life lessons that the world has to offer. Ultimately, Germann Molz sheds light on the emerging phenomenon of “worldschooling,” showing that it is not just an alternative way to educate children, but an altogether new kind of mobile lifestyle. The World is Our Classroom paints an extreme portrait of twenty-first century parenting and some families’ attempts to raise global citizens prepared to thrive in the uncertain world of tomorrow.

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A new edition that brings the ways we watch and think about television up to the present We all have opinions about the television shows we watch, but television criticism is about much more than simply evaluating the merits of a particular show and deeming it “good” or “bad.” Rather, criticism uses the close examination of a television program to explore that program’s cultural significance, creative strategies, and its place in a broader social context. How to Watch Television, Second Edition brings together forty original essays—more than half of which are new to this edition—from today’s leading scholars on television culture, who write about the programs they care (and think) the most about. Each essay focuses on a single television show, demonstrating one way to read the program and, through it, our media culture. From fashioning blackness in Empire to representation in Orange is the New Black and from the role of the reboot in Gilmore Girls to the function of changing political atmospheres in Roseanne, these essays model how to practice media criticism in accessible language, providing critical insights through analysis—suggesting a way of looking at TV that students and interested viewers might emulate. The contributors discuss a wide range of television programs past and present, covering many formats and genres, spanning fiction and non-fiction, broadcast, streaming, and cable. Addressing shows from TV’s earliest days to contemporary online transformations of the medium, How to Watch Television, Second Edition is designed to engender classroom discussion among television critics of all backgrounds. To access additional essays from the first edition, visit the "links" tab at nyupress.org/9781479898817/how-to-watch-television-second-edition/.

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Tells the fascinating stories of the myriad women who shaped the early modern North American world from the colonial era through the first years of the Republic Women in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, goes beyond the familiar stories of Pocahontas or Abigail Adams, recovering the lives and experiences of lesser-known women—both ordinary and elite, enslaved and free, Indigenous and immigrant—who lived and worked in not only British mainland America, but also New Spain, New France, New Netherlands, and the West Indies. In these essays we learn about the conditions that women faced during the Salem witchcraft panic and the Spanish Inquisition in New Mexico; as indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland; caught up between warring British and Native Americans; as traders in New Netherlands and Detroit; as slave owners in Jamaica; as Loyalist women during the American Revolution; enslaved in the President’s house; and as students and educators inspired by the air of equality in the young nation. Foster showcases the latest research of junior and senior historians, drawing from recent scholarship informed by women’s and gender history—feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism. Collectively, these essays address the need for scholarship on women’s lives and experiences. Women in Early America heeds the call of feminist scholars to not merely reproduce male-centered narratives, “add women, and stir,” but to rethink master narratives themselves so that we may better understand how women and men created and developed our historical past.

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The unheard history of how race and racism are constructed from sound and maintained through the listening ear. Race is a visual phenomenon, the ability to see “difference.” At least that is what conventional wisdom has lead us to believe. Yet, The Sonic Color Line argues that American ideologies of white supremacy are just as dependent on what we hear—voices, musical taste, volume—as they are on skin color or hair texture. Reinforcing compelling new ideas about the relationship between race and sound with meticulous historical research, Jennifer Lynn Stoever helps us to better understand how sound and listening not only register the racial politics of our world, but actively produce them. Through analysis of the historical traces of sounds of African American performers, Stoever reveals a host of racialized aural representations operating at the level of the unseen—the sonic color line—and exposes the racialized listening practices she figures as “the listening ear.” Using an innovative multimedia archive spanning 100 years of American history (1845-1945) and several artistic genres—the slave narrative, opera, the novel, so-called “dialect stories,” folk and blues, early sound cinema, and radio drama—The Sonic Color Line explores how black thinkers conceived the cultural politics of listening at work during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. By amplifying Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Charles Chesnutt, The Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ann Petry, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Lena Horne as agents and theorists of sound, Stoever provides a new perspective on key canonical works in African American literary history. In the process, she radically revises the established historiography of sound studies. The Sonic Color Line sounds out how Americans have created, heard, and resisted “race,” so that we may hear our contemporary world differently.

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2017 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Jewish Literature and Linguistics Honorable Mention, 2016 Baron Book Prize presented by AAJR A monster tour of the Golem narrative across various cultural and historical landscapes In the 1910s and 1920s, a “golem cult” swept across Europe and the U.S., later surfacing in Israel. Why did this story of a powerful clay monster molded and animated by a rabbi to protect his community become so popular and pervasive? The golem has appeared in a remarkable range of popular media: from the Yiddish theater to American comic books, from German silent film to Quentin Tarantino movies. This book showcases how the golem was remolded, throughout the war-torn twentieth century, as a muscular protector, injured combatant, and even murderous avenger. This evolution of the golem narrative is made comprehensible by, and also helps us to better understand, one of the defining aspects of the last one hundred years: mass warfare and its ancillary technologies. In the twentieth century the golem became a figure of war. It represented the chaos of warfare, the automation of war technologies, and the devastation wrought upon soldiers’ bodies and psyches. Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters draws on some of the most popular and significant renditions of this story in order to unravel the paradoxical coincidence of wartime destruction and the fantasy of artificial creation. Due to its aggressive and rebellious sides, the golem became a means for reflection about how technological progress has altered human lives, as well as an avenue for experimentation with the media and art forms capable of expressing the monstrosity of war.

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Reimagines the American 19th century through a sweeping interdisciplinary engagement with oceans, genres, and time Emergent Worlds re-locates nineteenth-century America from the land to the oceans and seas that surrounded it. Edward Sugden argues that these ocean spaces existed in a unique historical fold between the transformations that inaugurated the modern era—colonialism to nationalism, mercantilism to capitalism, slavery to freedom, and deferent subject to free citizen. As travellers, workers, and writers journeyed across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Caribbean Sea, they had to adapt their political expectations to the interstitial social realities that they saw before them while also feeling their very consciousness, particularly their perception of time, mutate. These four domains—oceanic geography, historical folds, emergent politics, and dissonant times—in turn, provided the conditions for the development of three previously unnamed genres of the 1850s: the Pacific elegy, the black counterfactual, and the immigrant gothic. In telling the history of these emergent worlds and their importance to the development of the literary cultures of the US Americas, Sugden proposes narratives that alter some of the most enduring myths of the field, including the westward spread of US imperialism, the redemptionist trajectory of black historiography, and the notion that the US Americas constituted a new world. Introducing a new generic vocabulary for describing the literature of the 1850s and crossing over oceans and languages, Emergent Worlds invokes an alternative nineteenth-century America that provides nothing less than a new way to read the era.

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Illuminates how the Rastafari movement managed to evolve in the face of severe biases Misunderstood, misappropriated, belittled: though the Rastafari feature frequently in media and culture, they have most often been misrepresented, their political and religious significance minimized. But they have not been vanquished. Charles Price’s Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity reclaims the rich history of this relatively new world religion. Charting its humble and rebellious roots in Jamaica’s backcountry in the late nineteenth century to the present day, Price explains how Jamaicans’ obsession with the Rastafari wavered from campaigns of violence to appeasement and cooptation. Indeed, he argues that the Rastafari as a political, religious, and cultural movement survived the biases and violence they faced through their race consciousness and uncanny ability to ride the waves of anti-colonialism and Black Power. This social movement traveled throughout the Caribbean, Africa, Central America, and the United States, capturing the heart and imagination of much of the African diaspora. Rastafari spans the movement’s struggle for autonomy, its multiple campaigns for repatriation to Africa, and its leading role in the Black consciousness movements of the twentieth century. Not satisfied with simply narrating the past, Rastafari also takes on the challenges of gender equality and the commodification of Rastafari culture in the twenty-first century without abandoning its message of equality and empowering the downpressed. Rastafari shows how this cultural and political context helped to shape the development of a Black collective identity, demonstrating how Rastafarians confronted society-wide ridicule and oppression and emerged prouder and more united, steadfast in their conviction that they were a chosen people.

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Winner, 2019 Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice, given by the Goddard Riverside Community Center The impact of stop-and-frisk policing on a South Bronx community What’s it like to be stopped and frisked by the police while walking home from the supermarket with your young children? How does it feel to receive a phone call from your fourteen-year-old son who is in the back of a squad car because he laughed at a police officer? How does a young person of color cope with being frisked several times a week since the age of 15? These are just some of the stories in No Place on the Corner, which draws on three years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the South Bronx before and after the landmark 2013 Floyd v. City of New York decision that ruled that the NYPD’s controversial “stop and frisk” policing methods were a violation of rights. Through riveting interviews and with a humane eye, Jan Haldipur shows how a community endured this aggressive policing regime. Though the police mostly targeted younger men of color, Haldipur focuses on how everyone in the neighborhood—mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers and sisters, even the district attorney’s office—was affected by this intense policing regime and thus shows how this South Bronx community as a whole experienced this collective form of punishment. One of Haldipur’s key insights is to demonstrate how police patrols effectively cleared the streets of residents and made public spaces feel off-limits or inaccessible to the people who lived there. In this way community members lost the very ‘street corner’ culture that has been a hallmark of urban spaces. This profound social consequence of aggressive policing effectively keeps neighbors out of one another’s lives and deeply hurts a community’s sense of cohesion. No Place on the Corner makes it hard to ignore the widespread consequences of aggressive policing tactics in major cities across the United States.

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Explores the role of race and consumer culture in attracting urban congregants to an evangelical church The Urban Church Imagined illuminates the dynamics surrounding white urban evangelical congregations’ approaches to organizational vitality and diversifying membership. Many evangelical churches are moving to urban, downtown areas to build their congregations and attract younger, millennial members. The urban environment fosters two expectations. First, a deep familiarity and reverence for popular consumer culture, and second, the presence of racial diversity. Church leaders use these ideas when they imagine what a “city church” should look like, but they must balance that with what it actually takes to make this happen. In part, racial diversity is seen as key to urban churches presenting themselves as “in touch” and “authentic.” Yet, in an effort to seduce religious consumers, church leaders often and inadvertently end up reproducing racial and economic inequality, an unexpected contradiction to their goal of inclusivity. Drawing on several years of research, Jessica M. Barron and Rhys H. Williams explore the cultural contours of one such church in downtown Chicago. They show that church leaders and congregants’ understandings of the connections between race, consumer culture, and the city is a motivating factor for many members who value interracial interactions as a part of their worship experience. But these explorations often unintentionally exclude members along racial and classed lines. Indeed, religious organizations’ efforts to engage urban environments and foster integrated congregations produce complex and dynamic relationships between their racially diverse memberships and the cultivation of a safe haven in which white, middle-class leaders can feel as though they are being a positive force in the fight for religious vitality and racial diversity. The book adds to the growing constellation of studies on urban religious organizations, as well as emerging scholarship on intersectionality and congregational characteristics in American religious life. In so doing, it offers important insights into racially diverse congregations in urban areas, a growing trend among evangelical churches. This work is an important case study on the challenges faced by modern churches and urban institutions in general.

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Links film history with church history over the past century, illuminating America’s broader relationship with religious currents over time Moments of prayer have been represented in Hollywood movies since the silent era, appearing unexpectedly in films as diverse as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Frankenstein, Amistad, Easy Rider, Talladega Nights, and Alien 3, as well as in religiously inspired classics such as Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. Here, Terry Lindvall examines how films have reflected, and sometimes sought to prescribe, ideas about how one ought to pray. He surveys the landscape of those films that employ prayer in their narratives, beginning with the silent era and moving through the uplifting and inspirational movies of the Great Depression and World War II, the cynical, anti-establishment films of the 60s and 70s, and the sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters of today. Lindvall considers how the presentation of cinematic prayer varies across race, age, and gender, and places the use of prayer in film in historical context, shedding light on the religious currents at play during those time periods. God on the Big Screen demonstrates that the way prayer is presented in film during each historical period tells us a great deal about America’s broader relationship with religion.

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Reveals how gender intersects with race, class, and sexual orientation in ways that impact the legal status and well-being of women and girls in the justice system. Women and girls’ contact with the justice system is often influenced by gender-related assumptions and stereotypes. The justice practices of the past 40 years have been largely based on conceptual principles and assumptions—including personal theories about gender—more than scientific evidence about what works to address the specific needs of women and girls in the justice system. Because of this, women and girls have limited access to equitable justice and are increasingly caught up in outdated and harmful practices, including the net of the criminal justice system. Gender, Psychology, and Justice uses psychological research to examine the experiences of women and girls involved in the justice system. Their experiences, from initial contact with justice and court officials, demonstrate how gender intersects with race, class, and sexual orientation to impact legal status and well-being. The volume also explains the role psychology can play in shaping legal policy, ranging from the areas of corrections to family court and drug court. Gender, Psychology, and Justice provides a critical analysis of girls’ and women’s experiences in the justice system. It reveals the practical implications of training and interventions grounded in psychological research, and suggests new principles for working with women and girls in legal settings.

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Honorable Mention, 2019 MLA Prize for a First Book Sole Finalist Mention for the 2018 Lora Romero First Book Prize, presented by the American Studies Association Exposes the influential work of a group of black artists to confront and refute scientific racism. Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Britt Rusert uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. Fugitive Science chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims. Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields—from astronomy to physiology—to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture. This distinct and pioneering book will spark interest from anyone wishing to learn more on race and society.

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Enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals In Archives of Flesh, Robert Reid-Pharr reveals the deep history of intellectual engagement between African America and Spain. Opening a fascinating window onto black and anti-Fascist intellectual life from 1898 through the mid-1950s, Reid-Pharr argues that key institutions of Western Humanism, including American colleges and universities, developed in intimate relation to slavery, colonization, and white supremacy. This retreat to rigidly established philosophical and critical traditions can never fully address—or even fully recognize—the deep-seated hostility to black subjectivity underlying the humanist ideal of a transcendent Manhood. Calling for a specifically anti-white supremacist reexamination of the archives of black subjectivity and resistance, Reid-Pharr enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals, including Salaria Kea, Federico Garcia Lorca, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Lynn Nottage, and Pablo Picasso. In the process Reid-Pharr takes up the “African American Spanish Archive” in order to resist the anti-corporeal, anti-black, anti-human biases that stand at the heart of Western Humanism.

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In her research with transnational Mexicans, Deborah A. Boehm has often asked individuals: if there were no barriers to your movement between Mexico and the United States, where would you choose to live? Almost always, they desire the freedom to “come and go.” Yet the barriers preventing such movement are many. Because of the United States’ rigid immigration policies, Mexican immigrants often find themselves living long distances from family members and unable to easily cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Transnational Mexicans experience what Boehm calls “intimate migrations,” flows that both shape and are structured by gendered and familial actions and interactions, but are always defined by the presence of the U.S. state. Intimate Migrations is based on over a decade of ethnographic research, focusing on Mexican immigrants with ties to a small, rural community in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí and several states in the U.S. West. By showing how intimate relations direct migration, and by looking at kin and gender relationships through the lens of illegality, Boehm sheds new light on the study of gender and kinship, as well as understandings of the state and transnational migration.

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Immigrant Faith examines trends and patterns relating to religion in the lives of immigrants. The volume moves beyond specific studies of particular faiths in particular immigrant destinations to present the religious lives of immigrants in the United States, Canada, and Europe on a broad scale. Religion is not merely one aspect among many in immigrant lives. Immigrant faith affects daily interactions, shapes the future of immigrants in their destination society, and influences society beyond the immigrants themselves. In other words, to understand immigrants, one must understand their faith. Drawing on census data and other surveys, including data sources from several countries and statistical data from thousands of immigrant interviews, the volume provides a concise overview of immigrant religion. It sheds light on whether religion shapes the choice of destination for migrants, if immigrants are more or less religious after migrating, if religious immigrants have an easier adjustment, or if religious migrants tend to fare better or worse economically than non-religious migrants. Immigrant Faith covers demographic trends from initial migration to settlement to the transmission of faith to the second generation. It offers the perfect introduction to big picture patterns of immigrant religion for scholars and students, as well as religious leaders and policy makers.

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Introduces key terms, research traditions, debates, and their histories, and offers a sense of the new frontiers and questions emerging in the field of media studies Keywords for Media Studies introduces and aims to advance the field of critical media studies by tracing, defining, and problematizing its established and emergent terminology. The book historicizes thinking about media and society, whether that means noting a long history of “new media,” or tracing how understandings of media “power” vary across time periods and knowledge formations. Bringing together an impressive group of established scholars from television studies, film studies, sound studies, games studies, and more, each of the 65 essays in the volume focuses on a critical concept, from “fan” to “industry,” and “celebrity” to “surveillance.” Keywords for Media Studies is an essential tool that introduces key terms, research traditions, debates, and their histories, and offers a sense of the new frontiers and questions emerging in the field of media studies. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.

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Examines how "Religious Nones" negotiate tensions with those who think they ought to provide their children with a religious upbringing The fastest growing religion in America is—none! One fifth of Americans now list their religion as “none,” up from only 7 percent two decades ago. Among adults under 30, those poised to be the parents of the next generation, fully one third are religiously unaffiliated. Yet these “Nones,” especially parents, still face prejudice in a culture where religion is widely seen as good for your kids. What do Nones believe, and how do they negotiate tensions with those convinced that they ought to provide their children with a religious upbringing? Drawing on survey data and in-depth personal interviews with religiously unaffiliated parents across the country, Christel Manning provides important demographic data on American “Nones” and offers critical nuance to our understanding of the term. She shows that context is crucial in understanding how those without religious ties define themselves and raise their families. Indeed, she demonstrates that Nones hold a wide variety of worldviews, ranging from deeply religious to highly secular, and transmit them in diverse ways. What ties them all together is a commitment to spiritual choice—a belief in the moral equivalence of religions and secular worldviews and in the individual’s right to choose—and it is that choice they seek to pass on to their children. The volume weaves in stories from the author’s interviews throughout, showing how non-religious parents grapple with pressure from their community and how they think about religious issues. Engagingly written and thoroughly researched, Losing Our Religion will appeal to scholars, parents, and anyone interested in understanding the changing American religious landscape.

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A critical examination of the wrongdoing underlying the 2008 financial crisis An unprecedented breakdown in the rule of law occurred in the United States after the 2008 financial collapse. Bank of America, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and other large banks settled securities fraud claims with the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to disclose the risks of subprime mortgages they sold to the investing public. But a corporation cannot commit fraud except through human beings working at and managing the firm. Rather than breaking up these powerful megabanks, essentially imposing a corporate death penalty, the government simply accepted fines that essentially punished innocent shareholders instead of senior leaders at the megabanks. It allowed the real wrongdoers to walk away from criminal responsibility. In The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty, Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez examine the best available evidence about the wrongdoing underlying the financial crisis. They reveal that the government failed to use its most powerful law enforcement tools despite overwhelming proof of wide-ranging and large-scale fraud on Wall Street before, during, and after the crisis. The pattern of criminal indulgences exposes the onset of a new degree of crony capitalism in which the most economically and political powerful can commit financial crimes of vast scale with criminal and regulatory immunity. A new economic royalty has seized the commanding heights of our economy through their control of trillions in corporate and individual wealth and their ability to dispense patronage. The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty shows that this new lawlessness poses a profound threat that urgently demands political action and proposes attainable measures to restore the rule of law in the financial sector.

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Investigates how the Christian fundamentalist movement brings Creationism into the mainstream through a Kentucky museum In Creating the Creation Museum, Kathleen C. Oberlin shows us how the largest Creationist organization, Answers in Genesis (AiG), built a museum—which has had over three million visitors—to make its movement mainstream. She takes us behind the scenes, vividly bringing the museum to life by detailing its infamous exhibits on human fossils, dinosaur remains, and more. Drawing on over three years of research at the Creation Museum, where she was granted rare access to AiG’s leadership, Oberlin examines how the museum convincingly reframes scientific facts, such as modeling itself on traditional natural history museums. Through a unique historical dataset of over 1,000 internal documents from creationist organizations and an analysis of media coverage, Creating the Creation Museum shows how the museum works as a site of social movement activity and a place to contest the secular mainstream. Oberlin ultimately argues that the Creation Museum has real-world consequences in today’s polarized era.

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Heartfelt personal accounts from Asian American women on their experiences with skin color bias, from being labeled “too dark” to becoming empowered to challenge beauty standards “I have a vivid memory of standing in my grandmother’s kitchen, where, by the table, she closely watched me as I played. When I finally looked up to ask why she was staring, her expression changed from that of intent observer to one of guilt and shame. . . . ‘My anak (dear child),’ she began, ‘you are so beautiful. It is a shame that you are so dark. No Filipino man will ever want to marry you.’”—“Shade of Brown,” Noelle Marie Falcis How does skin color impact the lives of Asian American women? In Whiter, thirty Asian American women provide first-hand accounts of their experiences with colorism in this collection of powerful, accessible, and brutally honest essays, edited by Nikki Khanna. Featuring contributors of many ages, nationalities, and professions, this compelling collection covers a wide range of topics, including light-skin privilege, aspirational whiteness, and anti-blackness. From skin-whitening creams to cosmetic surgery, Whiter amplifies the diverse voices of Asian American women who continue to bravely challenge the power of skin color in their own lives.

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An engaging history of the role that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin played in the origins of public health in America Before the advent of modern antibiotics, one’s life could be abruptly shattered by contagion and death, and debility from infectious diseases and epidemics was commonplace for early Americans, regardless of social status. Concerns over health affected the founding fathers and their families as it did slaves, merchants, immigrants, and everyone else in North America. As both victims of illness and national leaders, the Founders occupied a unique position regarding the development of public health in America. Revolutionary Medicine refocuses the study of the lives of George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and James and Dolley Madison away from the usual lens of politics to the unique perspective of sickness, health, and medicine in their era. For the founders, republican ideals fostered a reciprocal connection between individual health and the “health” of the nation. Studying the encounters of these American founders with illness and disease, as well as their viewpoints about good health, not only provides us with a richer and more nuanced insight into their lives, but also opens a window into the practice of medicine in the eighteenth century, which is at once intimate, personal, and first hand. Perhaps most importantly, today’s American public health initiatives have their roots in the work of America’s founders, for they recognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some new responsibilities with respect to ensuring the health and well-being of its citizenry. The state of medicine and public healthcare today is still a work in progress, but these founders played a significant role in beginning the conversation that shaped the contours of its development.

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Images of diamonds appear everywhere in American culture. And everyone who has a diamond has a story to tell about it. Our stories about diamonds not only reveal what we do with these tiny stones, but also suggest how we create value, meaning, and identity through our interactions with material culture in general. Things become meaningful through our interactions with them, but how do people go about making meaning? What can we learn from an ethnography about the production of identity, creation of kinship, and use of diamonds in understanding selves and social relationships? By what means do people positioned within a globalized political-economy and a compelling universe of advertising interact locally with these tiny polished rocks? This book draws on 12 months of fieldwork with diamond consumers in New York City as well as an analysis of the iconic De Beers campaign that promised romance, status, and glamour to anyone who bought a diamond to show that this thematic pool is just one resource among many that diamond owners draw upon to engage with their own stones. The volume highlights the important roles that memory, context, and circumstance also play in shaping how people interpret and then use objects in making personal worlds. It shows that besides operating as subjects in an ad-burdened universe, consumers are highly creative, idiosyncratic, and theatrical agents.

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What prenatal tests and down syndrome reveal about our reproductive choices When Alison Piepmeier—scholar of feminism and disability studies, and mother of Maybelle, an eight-year-old girl with Down syndrome—died of cancer in August 2016, she left behind an important unfinished manuscript about motherhood, prenatal testing, and disability. In Unexpected, George Estreich and Rachel Adams pick up where she left off, honoring the important research of their friend and colleague, as well as adding new perspectives to her work. Based on interviews with parents of children with Down syndrome, as well as women who terminated their pregnancies because their fetus was identified as having the condition, Unexpected paints an intimate, nuanced picture of reproductive choice in today’s world. Piepmeier takes us inside her own daughter’s life, showing how Down syndrome is misunderstood, stigmatized, and condemned, particularly in the context of prenatal testing. At a time when medical technology is rapidly advancing, Unexpected provides a much-needed perspective on our complex, and frequently troubling, understanding of Down syndrome.

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Reveals the mass mobilization tactics that helped free Soviet Jews and reshaped the Jewish American experience from the Johnson era through the ReaganBush yearsWhat do these things have in common? Ingrid Bergman, Passover matzoh, Banana Republic, the fitness craze, the Philadelphia Flyers, B-grade spy movies, and ten thousand Bar and Bat Mitzvah sermons? Nothing, except that social movement activists enlisted them all into the most effective human rights campaign of the Cold War.The plight of Jews in the USSR was marked by systemic antisemitism, a problem largely ignored by Western policymakers trying to improve relations with the Soviets. In the face of governmental apathy, activists in the United States hatched a bold plan: unite Jewish Americans to demand that Washington exert pressure on Moscow for change.A Cold War Exodus delves into the gripping narrative of how these men and women, through ingenuity and determination, devised mass mobilization

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The dramatic story of Phillis Wheatley, a free, black poet who resisted the pressures of arranged marriage, truly embodying the ideals of the American Revolution There is an uncomfortable paradox at the heart of the American Revolution: many of the men leading the war for independence were slave owners, contradicting the ideal of freedom that they claimed to represent. Meanwhile, abolitionist sentiments of the time contained contradictions as well. Abolitionists encouraged freed Christianized slaves to return to Africa. In this way, they hoped to send more missionaries to Africa in order to Christianize the continent and, at the same time, to send free blacks away from America. This tension is revealed through the dramatic story of Phillis Wheatley, an African-American poet who refused to marry a man she had never met and return with him to Africa as a missionary. She was enslaved in Africa as a child and transported to Boston, where she was sold to an evangelical family. Agreeing to the proposed marriage – arranged by Congregationalist minister Samuel Hopkins – would have echoed the social mores of the time, particularly those for enslaved black women. However, due to her prodigious talents as a poet, Wheatley won her freedom a year prior to Hopkins’ arrangement, allowing her to take her future into her own hands. G.J. Barker-Benfield considers Wheatley’s story and Hopkins’s plan in the broader context of the American Revolution. The ideals of the revolution motivated Hopkins and some of his contemporaries to propose freeing African slaves and thus address the “monstrous inconsistency” fundamental to the white slave owners leading the revolution. In so doing, they presented themselves as freedom fighters who resisted the threat of slavery at the hands of British tyranny. Wheatley challenged this inconsistency and, taking the revolutionaries’ rhetoric seriously, called for liberty for all human hearts: women’s and men’s, blacks’ and whites’.

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A history of Catholic social thought Many Americans assume that the Catholic Church is inherently conservative, based on its stances on abortion, contraception, and divorce. Yet there is a longstanding tradition of progressive Catholic movements in the United States that have addressed a variety of issues from labor, war, immigration, and environmental protection, to human rights, women’s rights, exploitive development practices, and bellicose foreign policies. These Catholic social movements have helped to shift the Church from an institution that had historically supported incumbent governments and political elites to a Church that has increasingly sided with the vulnerable and oppressed. This book provides a concise history of progressively oriented Catholic Social Thought, which conveys the Catholic Church’s position on a variety of social justice concerns. Sharon Erickson Nepstad introduces key papal encyclicals and other church documents, showing how lay Catholics in the United States have put these ideas into practice through a creative and sometimes provocative political engagement. Nepstad also explores how these progressive movements have pressured the religious hierarchy to respond to pressing social issues, such as women’s ordination, conscription, and the morality of nuclear deterrence policies. Catholic Social Activism vividly depicts how these progressive movements have helped to shape the religious landscape of the United States, and how they have provoked controversy and debate among Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

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The history of heterosexuality in North America across four centuries Heterosexuality is usually regarded as something inherently “natural”—but what is heterosexuality, and how has it taken shape across the centuries? By challenging ahistorical approaches to the heterosexual subject, Heterosexual Histories constructs a new framework for the history of heterosexuality, examining unexplored assumptions and insisting that not only sex but race, class, gender, age, and geography matter to its past. Each of the fourteen essays in this volume examines the history of heterosexuality from a different angle, seeking to study this topic in a way that recognizes plurality, divergence, and inequity. Editors Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell have formed a collection that spans four centuries, addressing the many different racial groups, geographies, and subcultures of heterosexuality in North America. The essays range across disciplines with experts from various fields examining heterosexuality from unique perspectives: a historian shows how defining heterosexuality, sex, and desire were integral to the formation of British America and the process of colonization; a legal scholar examines the connections between race, sexual citizenship, and nonmarital motherhood; a gender studies expert analyzes the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and explores the intersections of heterosexuality with shame and second-wave feminism. Together, these essays explain how differently earlier Americans understood the varieties of gender and different-sex sexuality, how heterosexuality emerged as a dominant way of describing gender, and how openly many people acknowledged and addressed heterosexuality’s fragility. By contesting presumptions of heterosexuality’s stability or consistency, Heterosexual Histories opens the historical record to interrogations of the raced, classed, and gendered varieties of heterosexuality and considers the implications of heterosexuality’s multiplicities and changes. Providing both a sweeping historical survey and concentrated case studies, Heterosexual Histories is a crucial addition to the field of sexuality studies.

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The history of recruiting citizens to spy on each other in the United States. Ever since the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden, we think about surveillance as the data-tracking digital technologies used by the likes of Google, the National Security Administration, and the military. But in reality, the state and allied institutions have a much longer history of using everyday citizens to spy and inform on their peers. Citizen Spies shows how “If You See Something, Say Something” is more than just a new homeland security program; it has been an essential civic responsibility throughout the history of the United States. From the town crier of Colonial America to the recruitment of youth through “junior police,” to the rise of Neighborhood Watch, AMBER Alerts, and Emergency 9-1-1, Joshua Reeves explores how ordinary citizens have been taught to carry out surveillance on their peers. Emphasizing the role humans play as “seeing” and “saying” subjects, he demonstrates how American society has continuously fostered cultures of vigilance, suspicion, meddling, snooping, and snitching. Tracing the evolution of police crowd-sourcing from “Hue and Cry” posters and America’s Most Wanted to police-affiliated social media, as well as the U.S.’s recurrent anxieties about political dissidents and ethnic minorities from the Red Scare to the War on Terror, Reeves teases outhow vigilance toward neighbors has long been aligned with American ideals of patriotic and moral duty. Taking the long view of the history of the citizen spy, this book offers a much-needed perspective for those interested in how we arrived at our current moment in surveillance culture and contextualizes contemporary trends in policing.

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Winner, 2022 Donald W. Light Award for Applied Medical Sociology, given by the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association Winner, 2021 Robert K. Merton Book Award, given by the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association 2021 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine Explores the social inequality of clinical drug testing and its effects on scientific results Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, and why would you choose to take part in this kind of study? This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials. This book reveals not only how social inequality fundamentally shapes these drug trials, but it also depicts the important validity concerns inherent in this mode of testing new pharmaceuticals. These highly controlled studies bear little resemblance to real-world conditions, and everyone involved is incentivized to game the system, ultimately making new drugs appear safer than they really are. Adverse Events provides an unprecedented view of the intersection of racial inequalities with pharmaceutical testing, signaling the dangers of this research enterprise to both social justice and public health.

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The story of Depo-Provera joins the national struggle over the drug's FDA approval to the state legal issues raised by its contraceptive and criminal justice uses. Depo-Provera is known as an injectable hormonal birth control method, but few are familiar with its dark and complicated history. Depo-Provera was tested on women since the mid-1960s without their informed consent until it was FDA-approved in 1992, but never FDA-approved as chemical castration for male sex offenders. Contraceptive Risk is William Green's landmark study of Depo-Provera. Based on a fascinating combination of archival materials and interviews, the book is framed as three interconnected stories told by Judith Weisz, who chaired the FDA's Public Board of Inquiry on Depo-Provera, a scientific court; by Anne MacMurdo who brought a products liability suit against Upjohn, the drug's manufacturer, for the deleterious side effects she suffered from the drug's use; and by Roger Gauntlett, an Upjohn heir who, when he was convicted of sexual assault, refused to take a dose of his family's own medicine as a probation condition. Together these three stories of Depo-Provera's convoluted fifty year odyssey call for a paradigm shift in pharmaceutical drug development. Contraceptive Risk is a thoroughly researched and engrossing approach to the scientific, political and institutional forces involved in health law and policy, as well as the multifaceted politics of measuring risk.

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Winner of the 2014 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award presented by the Association for Jewish Studies Jews have played an integral role in the history of obscenity in America. For most of the 20th century, Jewish entrepreneurs and editors led the charge against obscenity laws. Jewish lawyers battled literary censorship even when their non-Jewish counterparts refused to do so, and they won court decisions in favor of texts including Ulysses, A Howl, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Tropic of Cancer. Jewish literary critics have provided some of the most influential courtroom testimony on behalf of freedom of expression. The anti-Semitic stereotype of the lascivious Jew has made many historians hesitant to draw a direct link between Jewishness and obscenity. In Unclean Lips, Josh Lambert addresses the Jewishness of participants in obscenity controversies in the U.S. directly, exploring the transformative roles played by a host of neglected figures in the development of modern and postmodern American culture. The diversity of American Jewry means that there is no single explanation for Jews' interventions in this field. Rejecting generalizations, this book offers case studies that pair cultural histories with close readings of both contested texts and trial transcripts to reveal the ways in which specific engagements with obscenity mattered to particular American Jews at discrete historical moments. Reading American culture from Theodore Dreiser and Henry Miller to Curb Your Enthusiasm and FCC v. Fox, Unclean Lips analyzes the variable historical and cultural factors that account for the central role Jews have played in the struggles over obscenity and censorship in the modern United States.

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While it is well known that more Africans fought on behalf of the British than with the successful patriots of the American Revolution, Gerald Horne reveals in his latest work of historical recovery that after 1776, Africans and African-Americans continued to collaborate with Great Britain against the United States in battles big and small until the Civil War. Many African Americans viewed Britain, an early advocate of abolitionism and emancipator of its own slaves, as a powerful ally in their resistance to slavery in the Americas. This allegiance was far-reaching, from the Caribbean to outposts in North America to Canada. In turn, the British welcomed and actively recruited both fugitive and free African Americans, arming them and employing them in military engagements throughout the Atlantic World, as the British sought to maintain a foothold in the Americas following the Revolution. In this path-breaking book, Horne rewrites the history of slave resistance by placing it for the first time in the context of military and diplomatic wrangling between Britain and the United States. Painstakingly researched and full of revelations, Negro Comrades of the Crown is among the first book-length studies to highlight the Atlantic origins of the Civil War, and the active role played by African Americans within these external factors that led to it. Listen to a one hour special with Dr. Gerald Horne on the "Sojourner Truth" radio show.

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Analyzes the cultural attitudes, political decisions, and institutions surrounding the maintenance of armed forces throughout American history While traditionally, Americans view expensive military structure as a poor investment and a threat to liberty, they also require a guarantee of that very freedom, necessitating the employment of armed forces. Beginning with the seventeenth-century wars of the English colonies, Americans typically increased their military capabilities at the beginning of conflicts only to decrease them at the apparent conclusion of hostilities. In Drawdown: The American Way of Postwar, a stellar team of military historians argue that the United States sometimes managed effective drawdowns, sowing the seeds of future victory that Americans eventually reaped. Yet at other times, the drawing down of military capabilities undermined our readiness and flexibility, leading to more costly wars and perhaps defeat. The political choice to reduce military capabilities is influenced by Anglo-American pecuniary decisions and traditional fears of government oppression, and it has been haphazard at best throughout American history. These two factors form the basic American “liberty dilemma,” the vexed relationship between the nation and its military apparatuses from the founding of the first colonies through to present times. With the termination of large-scale operations in Iraq and the winnowing of forces in Afghanistan, the United States military once again faces a significant drawdown in standing force structure and capabilities. The political and military debate currently raging around how best to affect this force reduction continues to lack a proper historical perspective. This volume aspires to inform this dialogue. Not a traditional military history, Drawdown analyzes cultural attitudes, political decisions, and institutions surrounding the maintenance of armed forces.

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The essential guide to understanding how racism works and how racial inequality shapes black lives, ultimately offering a road-map for resistance for racial justice advocates and antiracists When #BlackLivesMatter went viral in 2013, it shed a light on the urgent, daily struggles of black Americans to combat racial injustice. The message resonated with millions across the country. Yet many of our political, social, and economic institutions are still embedded with racist policies and practices that devalue black lives. Stay Woke directly addresses these stark injustices and builds on the lessons of racial inequality and intersectionality the Black Lives Matter movement has challenged its fellow citizens to learn. In this essential primer, Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith inspire readers to address the pressing issues of racial inequality, and provide a basic toolkit that will equip readers to become knowledgeable participants in public debate, activism, and politics. This book offers a clear vision of a racially just society, and shows just how far we still need to go to achieve this reality. From activists to students to the average citizen, Stay Woke empowers all readers to work toward a better future for black Americans.

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The shocking truth about how state governments and their private industry partners are profiting from the social programs meant to support disadvantaged Americans Government aid doesn’t always go where it’s supposed to. Foster care agencies team up with companies to take disability and survivor benefits from abused and neglected children. States and their revenue consultants use illusory schemes to siphon Medicaid funds intended for children and the poor into general state coffers. Child support payments for foster children and families on public assistance are converted into government revenue. And the poverty industry keeps expanding, leaving us with nursing homes and juvenile detention centers that sedate residents to reduce costs and maximize profit, local governments buying nursing homes to take the facilities’ federal aid while the elderly languish with poor care, and counties hiring companies to mine the poor for additional funds in modern day debtor’s prisons. In The Poverty Industry, Daniel L. Hatcher shows us how state governments and their private industry partners are profiting from the social safety net, turning America’s most vulnerable populations into sources of revenue. The poverty industry is stealing billions in federal aid and other funds from impoverished families, abused and neglected children, and the disabled and elderly poor. As policy experts across the political spectrum debate how to best structure government assistance programs, a massive siphoning of the safety net is occurring behind the scenes. In the face of these abuses of power, Hatcher offers a road map for reforms to realign the practices of human service agencies with their intended purpose and to prevent the misuse of public taxpayer dollars. With more Americans than ever before seeking unemployment benefits, it is essential to remedy the nefarious practices that will impede them from receiving the full government support they are due. The Poverty Industry shows us the path to rectify this systemic inequality to ensure that government aid truly gets to those in need.

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