A focused review of RAND Health research identified small ideas that could save the U.S. health care system $13 to $22 billion per year if successfully implemented. They include changing payment policy for emergency transport and greater use of $4 generic drugs. Small ideas do not require systemic change; thus, they may be both more feasible to operationalize and less likely to encounter stiff political and organizational resistance.

In recent decades, special effects have become a major new area of research in cinema studies. For the most part, they have been examined as spectacles or practical tools. In contrast, Special Effects and German Silent Film, foregrounds their function as an expressive device and their pivotal role in cinema's emergence as a full-fledged art. Special effects not only shaped the look of iconic films like Nosferatu (1922) or Metropolis (1927), but they are central to a comprehensive understanding of German silent film culture writ large. This book examines special effects as the embodiment of a "techno-romantic" paradigm that seeks to harness technology-the epitome of modern materialism-as a means for accessing a spiritual realm. Employed to visualize ideas and emotions in a medium-specific way, special effects thus paved the way for film art.

Over the past fifteen years in Mexico, over 450,000 people have been murdered and 110,000 more have been disappeared. In Sovereignty and Extortion, Claudio Lomnitz examines the Mexican State in relation to this extreme violence, uncovering a reality that challenges the familiar narratives of “a war on drugs” or a “failed state.” Tracing how neoliberal reforms, free trade agreements, and a burgeoning drug economy have shaped Mexico’s socio-political landscape, Lomnitz shows that the current crisis does not represent a tear in the social fabric. Rather, it reveals a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state and the economy in which traditional systems of policing, governance, and the rule of law have eroded. Lomnitz finds that power is now concentrated in the presidency and enforced through militarization, which has left the state estranged from itself and incapable of administering justice or regaining control over violence. Through this critical examination, Lomnitz offers a new theory of the state, its forms of sovereignty, and its shifting relation to capital and militarization.

This book combines the history of charitable institutions with the study of power in urban and rural spaces from the late medieval to the early modern era. Focusing on the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, the book goes beyond examining hospitals in an urban context to also consider the significant impact of charitable institutions in rural spaces. Case studies of Santa Maria della Scala's farms allow an investigation of the relationship between urban institutions and their rural properties, while looking at subject hospitals outside the Sienese state offers a glimpse into the competition for power with non-Sienese entities. As Siena's politics shifted in the sixteenth century, Santa Maria della Scala and its rural spaces became sites where power was negotiated. The book thus demonstrates how geographies of power affected the practice of charity for both urban hospitals and the rural communities they influenced.

First published in 1960, Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales remains the fundamental study of the distinctive techniques and aesthetics of oral epic poetry. Based upon pathbreaking fieldwork conducted in the 1930s and 1950s among oral epic singers of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, Lord analyzes in impressive detail the techniques of oral composition in performance. He explores the consequences of this analysis for the interpretation of numerous works of traditional verbal art, including—in addition to South Slavic epic songs—the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and the Byzantine epic Digenis Akritas. A cardinal text for the study of oral traditions, The Singer of Tales also represents an exemplary use of the comparative method in literary criticism.

This third edition offers a corrected text of the second edition and is supplemented by an open-access website (in lieu of the second edition’s CD-ROM), providing all the recordings discussed by Lord, as well as a variety of other multimedia materials.

Sounds of Ethnicity takes us into the linguistic, cultural, and geographical borderlands of German North America in the Great Lakes region between 1850 and 1914. Drawing connections between immigrant groups in Buffalo, New York, and Berlin (now Kitchener), Ontario, Barbara Lorenzkowski examines the interactions of language and music—specifically German-language education, choral groups, and music festivals—and their roles in creating both an ethnic sense of self and opportunities for cultural exchanges at the local, ethnic, and transnational levels. She exposes the tensions between the self-declared ethnic leadership that extolled the virtues of the German mother tongue as preserver of ethnic identity and gateway to scholarship and high culture, and the hybrid realities of German North America where the lives of migrants were shaped by two languages, English and German. Theirs was a song not of cultural purity, but of cultural fusion that gave meaning to the way German migrants made a home for themselves in North America.Written in lively and elegant prose, Sounds of Ethnicity is a new and exciting approach to the history of immigration and identity in North America.

David Lowenthal transposes present society onto that in the novel, 1984, and illustrates “how the quest for a perfect society led instead to the worst––in the course of revolting against which the true ends of life are established.” It is more than suspicion: the year 2021 is 1984. What many understand by instinct, Lowenthal here articulates in clear terms using the political prophesy of this no longer futuristic literature. To be one without truthful unity? This is the picture of human brotherhood ushering in the only thing worse than inequality––enslavement. 

There is no positive political message in 1984, argues Lowenthal, but there is positive moral message that is nearly always overlooked by commentators. “Through the movement of the novel, Orwell tries to impress on the passions, hearts and minds of his readers the most valuable lessons concerning the right and wrong way to live. With the decline of Christianity’s influence in forming the moral sense of the West and the concomitant increase in power hunger, wielding instruments born of modern enlightenment, what mankind most needed was moral guidance, conveyed not abstractly, through philosophy, but in such a way as to grip the whole soul.” 

But can Orwell be trusted as a guide to the goodness in human nature? Lowenthal says he can be, and more. He gives us a sketch of the intellectual process that compels Orwell to ultimately outgrow Marxism, his detection and rejection of totalitarian regimes (above all in Communism), and in what way the principles of liberalism of his day were given warning labels by a writer who was not a formally educated political philosopher. Laced with relativism, any current of thought that does not acknowledge the proper ends of man will be effaced by the next master of the masses. Lowenthal echoes Orwell when he says, “we have abandoned inculcating good citizenship, higher ideals and a sense of personal worth in the schools, encouraging instead an aimless low-level conformist ‘individuality’ just waiting to be harnessed together and directed. Given these conditions, can we be sure we have left the conditions to the horrors of 1984 far behind as mere fiction?”

Orwell and Lowenthal are unlikely co-collaborators, unless one perceives how much alike in their exhortations to fellow man they are. The steady tenor of their hard warning is made possible by a hope-soaked confidence that, in utter sobriety, is repulsed by anything that threatens human freedom and dignity. This book is required reading for anyone who believes in the return of socialism. Indeed, any recent university graduate should be debriefed by Lowenthal before entering the real world.  

The culmination of a seven-year project, this volume provides a complete description of American Sign Language (ASL) variation. For four decades, linguists have studied how people from varying regions and backgrounds have different ways of saying the same thing. For example, in English some people say “test,” while others say “tes’”, dropping the final “t.” Noted scholars Ceil Lucas, Robert Bayley, and Clayton Valli led a team of exceptional researchers in applying techniques for analyzing spoken language variation to ASL. Their observations at the phonological, lexical, morphological, and syntactic levels demonstrate that ASL variation correlates with many of the same driving social factors of spoken languages, including age, socioeconomic class, gender, ethnic background, region, and sexual orientation. Internal constraints that mandate variant choices for spoken languages have been compared to ASL as well, with intriguing results. Sociolinguistic Variation in American Sign Language stands alone as the new standard for students and scholars committed to this discipline.

This book is an ethnographic account of education and migration from the perspective of three groups of South Koreans in contemporary China: migrant parents, children/students, and educational agents. The book reveals how these temporary migrants make choices, plan their trajectories and engage with the authorities, both in China and South Korea. Migrant subjectivities among these groups are driven by and respond to the education-migration regimes of both the sending and receiving countries. As ‘people in between’, they occupy flexible and multiple positionalities that are transnationally distributed. However, paradoxically, they experience a juxtaposition of privilege, integration and separation, which is indicative of the Chinese style of internationalisation. The book adds weight to the argument that China is a temporary destination for foreigners and not one for long-term settlement.

Intended for the general student of the Indonesian language and the professional linguist, this short descriptive grammar is a useful guide as a well as a point of departure for more intensive study.

“There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea,” wrote Joseph Conrad. And there is certainly nothing more integral to the development of the modern world. In The Sea: A Cultural History, John Mack considers those great expanses that both unite and divide us, and the ways in which human beings interact because of the sea, from navigation to colonization to trade. Much of the world’s population lives on or near the cost, and as Mack explains, in a variety of ways, people actually inhabit the sea.

The Sea looks at the characteristics of different seas and oceans and investigates how the sea is conceptualized in various cultures. Mack explores the diversity of maritime technologies, especially the practice of navigation and the creation of a society of the sea, which in many cultures is all-male, often cosmopolitan, and always hierarchical. He describes the cultures and the social and technical practices characteristic of seafarers, as well as their distinctive language and customs. As he shows, the separation of sea and land is evident in the use of different vocabularies on land and on sea for the same things, the change in a mariner’s behavior when on land, and in the liminal status of points uniting the two realms, like beaches and ports. Mack also explains how ships are deployed in symbolic contexts on land in ecclesiastical and public architecture. Yet despite their differences, the two realms are always in dialogue in symbolic and economic terms.

Casting a wide net, The Sea uses histories, maritime archaeology, biography, art history, and literature to provide an innovative and experiential account of the waters that define our worldly existence.

From the endless battles of sibling rivalry to the endless worries about getting indifferent students into—and then graduated from—college, raising boys is the adventure of a lifetime for any mother. Prudence Mackintosh has not only survived the adventure but has also written about it with her signature wit and style. Her essays about life with sons Jack, Drew, and William have entertained the readers of Texas Monthly and other prominent magazines for nearly three decades, offering solace to similarly beleaguered parents and a knowing chuckle to everyone who enjoys watching the real-life sitcom of a fundamentally happy, intact family.

Sneaking Out completes the story that Mackintosh began in her earlier books Thundering Sneakers and Retreads. In this collection of new and previously published essays, she recounts life with her adolescent sons as they race headlong to first jobs, first driver's licenses, first girlfriends, and first flights away from the family nest. She also follows them into the college years, when both parents and sons have to find a new balance in holding on and letting go. Along the way, she offers wise and witty reflections on being a woman at midlife, supporting her sons through the beginning of their adult lives and her parents through the end of theirs.

The peacetime aspects of the Roman army have never had their historian, Ramsay MacMullen points out. Yet these aspects of military activity became, in the period A.D. 200–400, more and more important and diverse, and drew the army and civilians closer together. The result was militarization of the empire; and, in a lively account of garrison life, army engineering, and similar subjects, MacMullen shows how the process went on. He draws on inscriptions, papyri, and literary sources, and includes relevant illustrations to accompany the discussion of military architecture, equipment, and the social standing of soldiers.

Through a rich narrative ethnography of domestic life, this book explores the philosophy of social relations among the Guna (Cuna), an Amerindian people of Panama. This intimate study brings us into the heart of the family economy, describing its nuanced interactions among coresidents through two dimensions: an aesthetic of production resting on the gendered division of labor and an ethic of affects informing the language and enactment of kinship. By exploring local techniques of nurture—child-rearing, singing, feeding, and care practices—the book shows how the Guna create kinship and inhabit gender. The acceptance the Guna show for same-sex relationships and cross-gender roles—which they accorded to the author himself—allows kinship to be both subverted and affirmed at the same time. Subverting kinship does not undermine the structure or dynamics of residential interrelations; on the contrary, it dramatically foregrounds kinship as a lived experience of reciprocal nurture, thus enabling gender to be modulated, and inhabited in multiple ways.

This is the reprint of a well-known and valuable work that has been out of print and widely sought for a number of years. A volume in the series Source Books in the History of the Sciences, it consists of selections from the writings of the great physicists from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century—such figures as Galileo and Newton, Franklin and Faraday, Rowland, Hertz, and the Curies—making available to the student in English translation their most important contributions, described in their own words, together with biographical and explanatory notes by the editor.

The poems in Oksana Maksymchuk's debut English-language collection meditate on the changing sense of reality, temporality, mortality, and intimacy in the face of a catastrophic event. While some of the poems were composed in the months preceding the full-scale invasion of the poet's homeland, others emerged in its wake. Navigating between a chronicle, a chorus, and a collage, Still City reflects the lived experiences of liminality, offering different perspectives on the war and its aftermath. The collection engages a wide range of sources, including social media posts, the news reports, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, making sense of the transformations that war affects in individuals, families, and communities. Now ecstatic, now cathartic, these poems shine a light on survival, mourning, and hope through moments of terror and awe.

Social Movements and Solidarity Structures in Crisis-Ridden Greece explores the rich grassroots experience of social movements in Greece between 2008 and 2016. The harsh conditions of austerity triggered the rise of vibrant mobilizations that went hand-in-hand with the emergence of numerous solidarity structures, providing unofficial welfare services to the suffering population. Based on qualitative field research conducted in more than 50 social movement organizations in Greece’s two major cities, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the contentious mechanisms that led to the development of such solidarity initiatives. By analyzing the organizational structure, resources and identity of markets without middlemen, social and collective kitchens, organizations distributing food parcels, social clinics and self-managed cooperatives, this study explains the enlargement of boundaries of collective action in times of crisis.

Virginia Woolf famously began one of her greatest novels: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Of course she would: why would anyone surrender the best part of the day to someone else? Flowers grace our lives at moments of celebration and despair. “We eat, drink, sing, dance, and flirt with them,” writes Kakuzo Okakura. Flowers brighten our homes, our parties, and our rituals with incomparable notes of natural beauty, but the “nature” in these displays is tamed and conscribed. Randy Malamud seeks to understand the transplanted nature of cut flowers—of our relationship with them and the careful curation of their very existence. It is a picaresque, unpredictable ramble through the world of flowers, but also the world itself, exploring painting, murals, fashion, public art, glass flowers, pressed flowers, flowery church hats, weaponized flowers, deconstructed flowers, flower power, and much more.

This book presents a detailed study which focuses upon the Hucpoldings, an elite group in Carolingian and post-Carolingian Italy. Though the Hucpoldings have not received extensive treatment in previous Anglophone scholarship, they are a key clan in this period. Manarini’s ground-breaking study uses this kinship group to highlight and pinpoint the dramatic geopolitical changes in the kingdom of Italy across three crucial centuries. The research deals with the reconstruction of the political events of every identifiable member of the kinship, as well as the inquiry into their patrimony and their networks of relations and patronage throughout the kingdom of Italy. Finally, it examines the particular elements of the group, from which emerges a clearer picture of the nature of their power, their memory strategies and the shared perceptions and self-awareness among the group members.

As LGBTQ movements in Western Europe, North America, and other regions of the world are becoming increasingly successful at awarding LGBTQ people rights, especially institutional recognition for same-sex couples and their families, what becomes of the deeper social transformation that these movements initially aimed to achieve? The United States is in many ways a paradigmatic model for LGBTQ movements in other countries. Sexuality, Subjectivity, and LGBTQ Militancy in the United States focuses on the transformations of the US LGBTQ movement since the 1980s, highlighting the relationship between its institutionalization and the disappearance of sexuality from its most visible claims, so that its growing visibility and legitimation since the 1990s have paradoxically led to a decrease in grassroots militancy. The book examines the issue from the bottom up, identifying the links between the varying importance of sexuality as a movement theme and actors’ mobilization, and enhances the import of subjectivity in militancy. It draws attention to cultural, sometimes infrapolitical, forms of militancy that perpetuate the role of sexuality in LGBTQ militancy.

This powerful presentation of photographs of Poland from the late 1980s to the present depicts the hybridized landscape of this pivotal Eastern European nation following its entry into the European Union. A visual record of the country's transition from socialism to capitalism, it focuses on the industrial blue-collar city ofLodz—located in the heart of New Europe and home to nearly one million people. Photographer Kamil Turowski's monotones are captivating—seeming to conceal a looming threat—while Katarzyna Marciniak's accompanying text expands on the photos and the "crocodilian" texture of contemporary Eastern Europe. A walk on the wild side, Streets of Crocodiles captures viscerally the changing landscape of postsocialist Poland.

Since 1900, the science of geology has grown in a spectacular fashion. Not only have field studies been undertaken throughout vast areas of the earth’s surface previously unexplored or only superficially surveyed, but recent discoveries in physics, chemistry, and biology have provided geologists with new techniques of observation and experimentation, and radically new concepts and theories have been developed. This book presents source literature for the most important contributions to this remarkable expansion of geological knowledge. One of the world’s most distinguished geologists provides excerpts from sixty-five articles by sixty-three authors, selected with the advice of more than a score of leading scientists from all parts of the globe. Among the subjects discussed in this comprehensive volume are the constitution of the earth’s interior, the causes of earthquakes, radioactive timekeepers, the interpretation of submarine features and deep-sea cores, the origin and entrapment of petroleum, and crystal structure. Included are articles which led directly to the development of theories of paleomagnetism, metamorphism, cryopedology, and isostasy.

Source Book in Geology, 1900–1950 makes available several papers previously to be found in the libraries of only a few universities, and eight articles translated into English for the first time, of which four are by leading Soviet geologists.

To help the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) estimate the percentage of service members who experienced racial or ethnic harassment or discrimination in the past year, RAND Corporation researchers, with feedback from external experts and DoD representatives, developed a survey instrument. The authors of this report describe the instrument-development process, the instrument itself, and recommendations to support its use.

These reports, at the forefront of relativity theory when they were written, in particular the geometrical aspects of spacetime theory, were the result of the Alfred Schild Memorial Lecture Series presented at the University of Texas at Austin beginning in 1977. Each article is a self-contained summary of an important area of contemporary gravitational physics, while the book as a whole provides an overview of a wide variety of the problems of general relativity and gravitation.

Staging Buenos Aires centers theater as a source of historical inquiry to understand how nonelites experienced and shaped a city undergoing dramatic transformations. Commercial theater constituted the core of the city’s public sphere, one in which middle-class playwrights and audiences assumed the leading role. Audiences and critics often disagreed about what was “acceptable” entertainment. Playwrights used theater to promote their own ideas of sociopolitical change, creating a space for working- and middle-class audiences to identify and push back against imposed regulations and attitudes. Cultural production on the city’s stages revealed fissures and social anxieties about the expansion of the political system and of the public sphere as women became increasingly visible in urban spaces. At the same time, theater also gave structure and meaning to these rapid changes, providing the space for the city’s playwrights and complex publics to play a key role in identifying, processing, and shaping the transforming nation. Plays helped audience members work through dramatic shifts in societal norms as urbanization and industrialization resulted in the visible decline of patriarchal social structures, made most visible in the urban sphere. 

In this his latest work, Gavan McCormack argues that Abe Shinzo’s efforts to re-engineer the Japanese state may fail, but his radicalism continues to shake the country and will have consequences not easy now to predict. The significance of this book will be widely recognized, particularly by those researching contemporary world politics, international relations and the history of modern Japan. McCormack here revisits and reassesses his previous formulations of Japan as construction state (doken kokka), client state (zokkoku), constitutional pacifist state, and colonial state (especially in its relationship to Okinawa). He adds a further chapter on what he calls the ‘rampant state’, that outlines the increasingly authoritarian or ikkyo (one strong) turn of the Abe government in the fifth year of its second term. And he critically addresses the Abe agenda for constitutional revision.

Thousands of students compete each year for a relatively small number of nationally competitive awards. Though receiving an award is not in itself an end goal, it can help launch a talented and dedicated student on a career path where they address important social or political issues, assist communities in need, or pursue research questions of global significance. The potential rewards are high for students, the institutions that support them, and the communities that will benefit from their hard work.

The ninth collection of essays produced by the National Association of Fellowships Advisors, Saving the World in Five Hundred Words offers a unique set of resources for advisors negotiating the complex world of nationally competitive awards. The essays here focus on three main aspects of fellowships advising—serving students, ensuring access, and developing the profession—and range from practical advice on how to assist students with applications, to recommendations for recruiting a broad range of students more effectively, to innovative teaching and advising practices. This volume will prove invaluable to anyone who advises students through this sometimes daunting application process.
 

In The Second Battle for Africa, Erik S. McDuffie establishes the importance of the US Midwest to twentieth-century global Black history, internationalism, and radicalism. McDuffie shows how cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, as well as rural areas in the heartland, became central and enduring incubators of Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its offshoots. Throughout the region, Black thinkers, activists, and cultural workers, like the Grenada-born activist Louise Little, championed Black freedom. McDuffie explores Garveyism and its changing facets from the 1920s onwards, including the role of Black midwesterners during the emergence of fascism in the 1930s, the postwar US Black Freedom Movement and African decolonization, the rise of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X in the 1950s and 1960s, and the continuing legacy of Garvey in today’s Black Midwest. Throughout, McDuffie evaluates the possibilities, limitations, and gendered contours of Black nationalism, radicalism, and internationalism in the UNIA and Garvey-inspired movements. In so doing, he unveils new histories of Black liberation and Global Africa.

As urban development in Asia has accelerated, cities in the region have become central to skateboarding culture, livelihoods, and consumption. Asia's urban landscapes are desired for their endless supply of 'spots'. A spot is assemblage of objects, surfaces and obstacles holding the possibilities to perform skateboarding manoeuvres (tricks). Spots are not built for skateboarding; they are accidents of urban planning and commercial activity; glitches in the urban machine. Skateboarders and filmers chase these glitches searching for spots to make skate video, the currency of the industry and skateboarding's primary cultural artefact. Once captured, performances at Asia's spots circulate rapidly through digital platforms to millions of skateboarders, enrolling spots from Shenzhen, Dubai and Ramallah into an alternative cartography of the region. By focusing on this alternative way of desiring and consuming urban Asia, this book explores the ways skateboarding resets relational and comparative hierarchies of urban development within Asia and between Asia and the West.

This book is a study of heroic femininity as it appears in the epic Mahābhārata, and focuses particularly on the roles of wife, daughter-in-law, and mother, on how these women speak and on the kinship groups and varying marital systems that surround them. It portrays those qualities that cohere about women in the poem, which are particular to them and which distinguish them as women, and describes how women heroes function as crucial speakers in the generation and maintenance of cultural value and worth. This includes men who have been transformed into women and women who have been reincarnated as men. The overall method accomplishes an ethnography of text, describing a special aspect of the bronze age preliterate and premonetary world as it is represented by the actions and metaphors of Mahābhārata. References to contemporary Indian cinema and popular culture support the narrative of the book, bringing modern valence to the arguments.

Martin McGuire has written for the specialist and the concerned layman a highly original and valuable contribution to our understanding of the arms race, based upon economic theory in general and the theory of economic duopoly in particular. He calls attention to the fact that when two world powers face each other with massive allocations of resources for arms, and when each regards the other as the major, if not the sole, threat to its own security, the question of accurate information about the strength and intentions of the adversary arises for each side in many and various ways. As a result, this study is a pioneering, analytic effort to approach the value of keeping secrets from or of obtaining information about an enemy.

The author is concerned with such questions as: what is the loss in being only 50 percent confident rather than certain that the adversary doesn’t have more X missiles or missiles of yield W megatons or of accuracy C thousand feet? Should one insist on being 95 percent sure when bargaining for arms control? How can a side compensate for its uncertainty most efficiently? An understanding of these problems can not only increase our security; it may help as well to contain or control the entire two-sided race.

Stories from the Land: A Navajo Reader about Monument Valley provides a traditional Navajo view of this iconic landscape and its people. Couched in the oral tradition of the elders, the reader is invited to view their history and culture through the eyes of those born at the turn of the twentieth century before massive inroads from the dominant culture began to erode the old ways. Each chapter follows a chronological sequence beginning with the creation of the world (specifically Monument Valley), teachings about the Anasazi, then later the Long Walk Period and incarceration at Fort Sumner. Subsequent chapters discuss traditional life and values, trading posts and their ties to the community, the devastation of livestock reduction, the film industry during the John Wayne/John Ford years, Anglo induced cultural change, uranium mining, and reaction to the current explosion of tourism. All of this as seen through the eyes of the Navajo people of Monument Valley and filtered through their unique cultural perspective. For the reader interested in authentic Navajo teachings, these people’s ties to the land, and a very different view of the world and how it functions, Stories from the Land offers fascinating insight that is fast disappearing from our world.
 
 

"With more than twenty books published about the Navajo people, Robert S. McPherson is one of the most prolific contemporary writers concerning their history and culture. Scouting for the Bluecoats addresses a little-known and, until now, undocumented story of an estimated five hundred Navajos employed by the United States Army, primarily in the campaigns against the Apaches between 1873 and 1886. The author takes us with these scouts as they guide U.S. soldiers into the deserts, canyons, and mountains of New Mexico, Arizona, and Northern Mexico; he also provides a solid context about the origin of the Navajos and Apaches, their intertribal conflicts, and their elements of shared culture. Once again McPherson demonstrates his skill as a master historian, his understanding of these people, and a meaningful context for this long-neglected story of warrior-soldiers whose fieldcraft and dedication proved critical in shaping relations between the military and two Indian tribes in the Southwest."
—Kent Powell, Senior historian at Utah Division of State History and editor of Utah State Historical Quarterly (retired)

"Scouting for the Bluecoats examines the important role that Navajos played in military operations during the last quarter of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Unlike the famous Navajo code talkers of World War II, little has been written about these men who served in some of the most challenging and noteworthy struggles against the Apaches. Until now, their story has been forgotten. Navajo skills in understanding and tracking a wily foe across an inhospitable landscape proved to be essential elements in ending the Apache wars. For those interested in the recruitment and deployment of the scouts, measures taken to counter enemy tactics, and the challenge of obtaining recognition for their service, this book is an invaluable source and a must-read for any serious scholar of Navajo history."
—Ronald P. Maldonado, Tribal historic preservation officer (retired), Navajo Nation

A deep dive into the significance of submarines, across everything from warfare and politics to literature and film.
 
Sub Culture explores the crucial role of the submarine in modern history, its contribution to scientific progress and maritime exploration, and how it has been portrayed in art, literature, fantasy, and film. Ranging from the American Civil War to the destruction of the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000, the book examines the submarine’s activities in the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, and in covert operations and marine exploration to the present day. Citing the submarine, particularly the nuclear submarine, as both ultimate deterrent and doomsday weapon, Sub Culture examines how its portrayal in popular culture has reinforced, and occasionally undermined, the military and political agendas of the nation-states that deploy it.

In Sanctuary, Cruz Medina presents a powerful counterstory to dominant narratives surrounding Latin American and Global South im/migration by bringing attention to the displacement of Indigenous Guatemalan Maya people who seek refuge in the United States. These migrants have exchanged gang and narcotrafficker violence for the dehumanizing and exclusionary rhetoric of US political leaders, militarized immigration enforcement, false promises of empowerment through literacy, and further displacement from gentrification. Medina combines decolonial critical race theory with autoethnography to examine white supremacist policies that impact US and transnational Indigenous populations who have been displaced by neocolonial projects of capitalism. 

Taking a Northern California community of migrants from Guatemala as a case study, Medina demonstrates the ways in which immigration policy and educational barriers exclude Indigenous migrant populations. He follows the community at the “Sanctuary”—a Spanish-speaking church in the East Bay Area that serves as a place of worship, English language instruction, and refuge for migrants. Medina assembles participant observations, interviews, surveys, and other data to provide points of entry into intersecting issues of immigration, violence, language, and property and to untangle aspects of citizenship, exclusion, and assumptions about literacy.

A collection of essays that evoke an adventurous spirit and the craving for myth, Spirit Things examines the hidden meanings of objects found on a fishing boat, as seen through the eyes of a child. Author Lara Messersmith-Glavin blends memoir, mythology, and science as she relates the uniqueness and flavor of the Alaskan experience through her memories of growing up fishing in the commercial salmon industry off Kodiak Island.
 
“Spirit things” are those mundane objects that offer new insights into the world on closer consideration—fishing nets, a favorite knife, and the bioluminescent gleam of seawater in a twilight that never truly grows dark. Spirit Things recounts stories of fishing, family, synesthesia, storytelling, gender, violence, and meaning. Each essay takes an object and follows it through histories: personal, material, and scientific, drawing together the delicate lines that link things through their making and use, their genesis and evolution, and the ways they gain significance in an individual’s life.
 
A contemplative take on everything from childcare to neurodivergence, comfort foods to outlaws, Spirit Things uses experiences from the human world and locates them on the edges of nature. Contact with wilderness, with wildness, be it twenty-foot seas in the ocean off Alaska’s coast or chairs flying through windows of a Kodiak bar, provides an entry point for meditations on the ways in which patterns, magic, and wonder overlap.
 

Distinguished Scholar Award, American Sociological Association Criminology Section, 1987 "Miller's firsthand report of female offenders documents a picture of contemporary female criminality.... Street Woman is field research at its best. The reader will be angered and disturbed, enlightened and absorbed." --Darrell J. Steffenmeier In this rich, well-written study, Eleanor Miller analyzes the social organization of street hustling and the lives of the women involved in it. Miller views hustling as "illegal work": prostitution, fraud, forgery, embezzlement, and larceny. Using information garnered from life histories and interviews with 64 female street hustlers in Milwaukee, she vividly describes a female underclass recruited to the world of the street for a substantial period of their lives. Street Woman offers a challenging alternative to recent sociological studies that view the "women's movement" as directly linked to the increasing participation of women in property crime. Miller shows that this increase in crime is a response to sustained poverty. Thus, many sociologists are out of touch with the typical female criminal in this country on both a demographic and personal level. "Typical" female hustlers, as their own words poignantly reveal, are young, poor minority women who have limited education and skills and who also have several children of their own. They adopt characteristic interpersonal relationships and familial forms that insure their survival but which leave the youngsters at greater risk of being recruited to street life. Street Woman is a work of great importance to sociologists and criminologists alike, both in its ramifications for public policy and its explicit implications for further research. Most important, Miller's desire to render a more personal portrait, to enable us to "at least recognize the individual in the picture painted of the group," leaves the reader with haunting portrayals of the women who struggle to survive in the violent, desperate, drug-ridden world of the street. "This book deserves a large audience for it provides convincing detail on the recruitment of women to this kind of demi monde and spells out for us a far more persuasive social process than that anticipated in more abstract models. Like the best of our ethnographics research it provides both a refinement of existing theory and a descriptive document that can outlast existing theory." --Gerald D. Suttles, University of Chicago

 Rich in omega-3 fatty acids, cheap, and widely available, salmon is often listed as an essential part of any diet. A delicious and versatile fish, it can be used to make sashimi, cold smoked for lox, or shaped into a fishcake as an alternative to hamburgers. But while salmon is enjoyed all over the globe, it also swims at the center of controversy, with commercial fishing, global warming, and loss of freshwater habitats all threatening salmon populations and the ecological and health impacts of intense salmon farming under fire.

Sold American is an account of the history of the federal government's relationship with Alaska's Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut peoples, from the United States' purchase of Alaska from the czar of Russia in 1867 to Alaska statehood in 1959. Don Mitchell describes how, from the arrival of Russian sea otter hunters in the Aleutian Islands in the eighteenth century to the present day, Alaska Natives have participated in the efforts of non-Natives to turn Alaska's bountiful natural resources into dollars, and documents how Alaska Natives, non-Natives, and the society they jointly forged have been changed because of it. Sold American also tells the story of how and why Congress was persuaded that Alaska Natives should be compensated for the extinguishment of their legally cognizable right (known as 'aboriginal title') to use and occupy the land on which they and their ancestors had hunted, fished, and gathered since time immemorial.

Don Mitchell's companion volume, Take My Land, Take My Life, concludes that story by describing the events that in 1971 resulted in Congress's enactment of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the most generous aboriginal land claims settlement in the nation's history. Insightful and drawn from years of painstaking research of primary source materials, Sold American and Take My Land, Take My Life are an indispensable resource for readers who are interested in the history of the nation's largest state and of the federal government's involvement with Alaska's indigenous peoples.

Drawing extensively on Russian-language sources, a concise yet comprehensive survey of the life and work of one of classical music’s great composers.
 
Unquestionably one of the most popular composers of classical music, Sergei Rachmaninoff has not always been so admired by critics. Detractors have long perceived Rachmaninoff as part of an outdated Romantic tradition from a bygone Russian world, aloof from the modernist experimentation of more innovative contemporaries such as Igor Stravinsky.
 
In this new assessment, Rebecca Mitchell resituates Rachmaninoff in the context of his time, bringing together the composer and his music within the remarkably dynamic era in which he lived and worked. Both in Russia and later in America, Rachmaninoff and his music were profoundly modern expressions of life in tune with an uncertain world. This concise yet comprehensive biography will interest general readers as well as those more familiar with this giant of Russian classical music.