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SOCIAL SCIENCE:

Ethnic Studies

Exiles at Home
Shirley Elizabeth Thompson
New Orleans has always captured our imagination as an exotic city in its racial ambiguity and pursuit of les bons temps. In tracing the experiences of creoles of color, Thompson illuminates the role ordinary Americans played in shaping an understanding of identity and belonging.
Hardcover February 2009
How Free Is Free?
Leon F. Litwack
Despite two major efforts to reconstruct race relations, injustices remain. From the height of Jim Crow to the early twenty-first century, struggles over racism persist despite court decisions and legislation. Although a painful history to confront, Litwack’s book inspires as it probes the enduring story of racial inequality and the ongoing fight for freedom in black America.
Hardcover February 2009
The Latino Education Crisis
Patricia Gándara
Frances Contreras
Drawing on both extensive demographic data and compelling case studies, this book reveals the depths of the educational crisis looming for Latino students, the nation’s largest and most rapidly growing minority group.
Hardcover January 2009
Up from History
Robert J. Norrell
This compelling biography reveals how conditions in the segregated South led Booker T. Washington to call for a less contentious path to freedom and equality. Norrell details the positive power of Washington’s vision, one that invoked hope and optimism to overcome past exploitation and present discrimination.
Hardcover January 2009
Your Spirits Walk Beside Us
Barbara Dianne Savage
Even before the emergence of the civil rights movement, African American religion and progressive politics were assumed to be inextricably intertwined. Savage counters this assumption with the story of a highly diversified religious community whose debates over engagement in the struggle for racial equality were as vigorous as they were persistent.
Hardcover November 2008
Migration Miracle
Jacqueline Maria Hagan
Migration Miracle humanizes the immigration controversy by exploring the harsh realities of the migrants’ desperate journeys. Drawing on over 300 interviews with men, women, and children, Hagan focuses on an unexplored dimension of the migration undertaking—the role of religion and faith in surviving the journey.
Hardcover November 2008
What Blood Won't Tell
Ariela J. Gross
Unearthing the legal history of racial identity, Gross’s book examines the paradoxical and often circular relationship of race and the perceived capacity for citizenship in American society.
Hardcover October 2008
Saltwater Slavery
Stephanie E. Smallwood
This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market. Saltwater Slavery is animated by deep research and gives us a graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.
Paperback September 2008
Becoming Brazuca
Edited by Clémence Jouët-Pastré
Edited by Leticia J. Braga
Brazilians in the United States are a relatively new wave of immigrants from South America. This volume offers a broad-ranging discussion of an understudied population and also brings insights into the core issues of immigration research: how immigration can complicate issues of social class, race, and ethnicity, how it intersects with the educational system, and how it fits into the assimilation paradigm.
Paperback July 2008
Americans All
Diana Selig
From the 1920s—a decade marked by racism and nativism—through World War II, hundreds of thousands of Americans took part in a vibrant campaign to overcome racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices. Progressive activists encouraged pluralism in homes, schools, and churches across the country.Selig tells the neglected story of the cultural gifts movement, which flourished between the world wars.
Hardcover June 2008
American Mediterranean
Matthew Pratt Guterl
How did slave-owning Southern planters make sense of the transformation of their world in the Civil War era Guterl shows that they looked beyond their borders for answers and examines how the Southern elite connected—by travel, print culture, even the prospect of future conquest—with the communities of New World slaveholders as they redefined their world.
Hardcover June 2008
Security in Paraguay
James L. Cavallaro
Jacob Kopas
Yukyan Lam
Timothy Mayhle
Soledad Villagra de Biedermann
The perception of rising insecurity has plagued Paraguay over the past decade as the country has continued its transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. At the same time, reforms of the penal code and the code of criminal procedure have been implemented, leading many to attribute the rising sense of insecurity to the new, rights-based approach to criminal justice. In Security in Paraguay, the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School assesses the disparity between the sensation of insecurity and actual levels of urban crime.
Paperback June 2008
Degrees of Freedom
Rebecca J. Scott
As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, they diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life and in the boundaries placed on citizenship.
Paperback April 2008
The Faithful
James M. O'Toole
Shaken by the ongoing clergy sexual abuse scandal, and challenged from within by social and theological division, Catholics in America are at a crossroads. O’Toole tells the story of this ancient church from the perspective of ordinary Americans, the lay believers who have kept their faith despite persecution from without and clergy abuse from within.
Hardcover April 2008
Violence over the Land
Ned Blackhawk
In this ambitious book that ranges across the Great Basin, Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples at the center of a dynamic story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West. Violence over the Land is a passionate reminder of the high costs that the making of American history occasioned for many indigenous peoples, written from the vantage point of an Indian scholar whose own family history is intimately bound up in its enduring legacies.
Paperback April 2008
Chutes and Ladders
Katherine S. Newman
Now that the welfare system has been largely dismantled, the fate of America's poor depends on what happens to them in the low-wage labor market. In this timely volume, Katherine S. Newman explores whether the poorest families benefited from the tight labor markets and good economy in the late 1990s. More than a story of the shifting fortunes of the labor market, Chutes and Ladders asks probing questions about the motivations of low-wage workers, the dreams they have, and their understanding of the rules of the game.
Paperback April 2008
Radical Hope
Jonathan Lear
Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, said, "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened." In Jonathan Lear's view, Plenty Coups' story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one's culture might collapse? Radical Hope is a deeply moving, philosophical inquiry into a peculiar vulnerability that goes to the heart of the human condition.
Paperback April 2008
The Southern Past
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Since the Civil War whites and blacks have struggled over the meanings and uses of the Southern past. The Southern Past argues that these battles are ultimately about who has the power to determine what we remember of the past, and whether that remembrance will honor all Southerners or only select groups.
Paperback April 2008
Roots Too
Matthew Frye Jacobson
In the 1970s, white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of plucky immigrants making their way in the New World through the sweat of their brow. Although this turn to ethnicity was for many an individual search for familial and psychological identity, Roots Too establishes a broader white social and political consensus arising in response to the political language of the Civil Rights movement.
Paperback March 2008
Staging Race
Karen Sotiropoulos
Drawing extensively on black newspapers and commentary of the period, Karen Sotiropoulos shows how black performers and composers participated in a politically charged debate about the role of the expressive arts in the struggle for equality. Despite the racial violence, disenfranchisement, and the segregation of virtually all public space, they used America's new businesses of popular entertainment as vehicles for their own creativity and as spheres for political engagement.
Paperback March 2008
The Other Latinos
Edited by José Luis Falconi
Edited by José Antonio Mazzotti
Contributions by Michael Jones-Correa
Contributions by Helen B. Marrow
Contributions by Arturo Arias
Contributions by Nestor Rodriguez
Contributions by Juan Zevallos-Aguilar
Contributions by Claret Vargas
Contributions by Edmundo Paz-Soldán
Contributions by Debra Castillo
Contributions by Teresa Sales
Contributions by Maxine Margolies
Contributions by Ana Cristina Braga Martes
Contributions by Luciano Tosta
The Other Latinos addresses an important topic: the presence in the United States of Latin American and Caribbean immigrants from countries other than Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Focusing on the Andes, Central America, and Brazil, the book brings together essays by a number of accomplished scholars, hoping that this introductory work will inspire others to construct a more complete understanding of the realities of Latin American migration into the United States.
Paperback February 2008
The Reaper's Garden
Vincent Brown
What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper's Garden, Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America--and a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force.
Hardcover February 2008
Transpacific Imaginations
Yunte Huang
Transpacific Imaginations is a study of how American literature is enmeshed with the literatures of Asia. The book begins with Western encounters with the Pacific, with Huang discussing such titles as Moby Dick as Pacific works. Huang then turns to Asian American encounters with the Pacific, concentrating on the "Angel Island" poems and works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Araki Yasusada.
Hardcover February 2008
The Betrayal of Faith
Emma Anderson
Anderson uses one man's compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with traditional Native religion in colonial North America. Pastedechouan's story illuminates key struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the seventeenth-century Atlantic, even as it has a startling relevance to the contemporary encounter between native and nonnative peoples.
Hardcover October 2007
Clinging to Mammy
Micki McElya
Loving, hating, pitying, or pining for mammy became a way for Americans to make sense of shifting economic, social, and racial realities. Assertions of black contentment with servitude alleviated white fears while reinforcing racial hierarchy. McElya's stories expose the power and reach of this myth, not only in advertising, films, and literature about the South, but also in national monument proposals, child custody cases, New Negro activism, anti-lynching campaigns, and the civil rights movement.
Hardcover October 2007
Stories of Freedom in Black New York
Shane White
This book re-creates the experience of black New Yorkers as they moved from slavery to freedom. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, New York City's black community strove to realize what freedom meant, to find a new sense of itself, and, in the process, created a vibrant urban culture.
Paperback September 2007
We Who Are Dark
Tommie Shelby
We Who Are Dark provides the first extended philosophical defense of black political solidarity. Tommie Shelby argues that we can reject a biological idea of race and agree with many criticisms of identity politics yet still view black political solidarity as a needed emancipatory tool. In developing his defense of black solidarity, he draws on the history of black political thought, focusing on the canonical figures of Martin R. Delany and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Paperback September 2007