In Blood and Boundaries, Stuart B. Schwartz takes us to late medieval Latin America to show how Spain and Portugal’s policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Rather than concentrating on the three principal divisions of colonial society—Indians, Europeans, and people of African origins—as is common in studies of these colonial societies, Schwartz examines the three minority groups of moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Muslim and Jewish converts and their descendants, he shows, posed a special problem for colonial society: they were feared and distrusted as peoples considered ethnically distinct, but at the same time their conversion to Christianity seemed to violate stable social categories and identities. This led to the creation of “cleanliness of blood” regulations that explicitly discriminated against converts. Eventually, Schwartz shows, those regulations were extended to control the subject indigenous and enslaved African populations, and over time, applied to the growing numbers of mestizos, peoples of mixed ethnic origins. Despite the efforts of civil and church and state institutions to regulate, denigrate, and exclude, members of these affected groups often found legal and practical means to ignore, circumvent, or challenge the efforts to categorize and exclude them, creating in the process the dynamic societies of Latin America that emerged in the nineteenth century.

Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany’s ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America—at the cost of African lives.

Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove “conflict diamonds” from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds—gems extracted from war zones—has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation.

In Blood and Diamonds, Press traces the interaction of the mass-market diamond and German colonial domination in Africa. Starting in the 1880s, Germans hunted for diamonds in Southwest Africa. In the decades that followed, Germans waged brutal wars to control the territory, culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples and the unearthing of vast mineral riches. Press follows the trail of the diamonds from the sands of the Namib Desert to government ministries and corporate boardrooms in Berlin and London and on to the retail counters of New York and Chicago. As Africans working in terrifying conditions extracted unprecedented supplies of diamonds, European cartels maintained the illusion that the stones were scarce, propelling the nascent US market for diamond engagement rings. Convinced by advertisers that diamonds were both valuable and romantically significant, American purchasers unwittingly funded German imperial ambitions into the era of the world wars.

Amid today’s global frenzy of mass consumption, Press’s history offers an unsettling reminder that cheap luxury often depends on an alliance between corporate power and state violence.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Algerian piracy in the Mediterranean loomed large in the American imagination. An estimated seven hundred American citizens, sailors, and naval officers were taken captive over the course of the Barbary Crises (1784–1815), and this overseas danger threatened to grow and irreparably harm the young republic.

Blood and Ink reconstructs the largely forgotten influence of these early American conflicts with North Africa on notions of publicity, print culture, and racial and national identity from independence to the Civil War. Exploring the extensive archive of texts inspired by the conflicts—from captivity narratives, novels, plays, and poems to broadsides, travel narratives, children’s literature, newspaper articles, and visual ephemera—Jacob Crane connects anxieties surrounding North African piracy and white slavery to both the development of American abolitionism and representations of transatlantic African and Jewish identities in the early national and antebellum periods.

From the center of Imperial Rome to the farthest reaches of ancient Britain, Gaul, and Spain, amphitheaters marked the landscape of the Western Roman Empire. Built to bring Roman institutions and the spectacle of Roman power to conquered peoples, many still remain as witnesses to the extent and control of the empire.

In this book, Alison Futrell explores the arena as a key social and political institution for binding Rome and its provinces. She begins with the origins of the gladiatorial contest and shows how it came to play an important role in restructuring Roman authority in the later Republic. She then traces the spread of amphitheaters across the Western Empire as a means of transmitting and maintaining Roman culture and control in the provinces.

Futrell also examines the larger implications of the arena as a venue for the ritualized mass slaughter of human beings, showing how the gladiatorial contest took on both religious and political overtones. This wide-ranging study, which draws insights from archaeology and anthropology, as well as Classics, broadens our understanding of the gladiatorial contest and its place within the highly politicized cult practice of the Roman Empire.

The story of the Minneapolis musicians who were unexpectedly summoned to re-record half of the songs on Bob Dylan's most acclaimed album

When Bob Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks in New York in September 1974, it was a great album. But it was not the album now ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the ten best of all time. “When something’s not right, it’s wrong,” as Dylan puts it in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”—and something about that original recording led him to a studio in his native Minnesota to re-record five songs, including “Idiot Wind” and “Tangled Up in Blue.” Six Minnesota musicians participated in that two-night recording session at Sound 80, bringing their unique sound to some of Dylan’s best-known songs—only to have their names left off the album and their contribution unacknowledged for more than forty years. This book tells the story of those two nights in Minneapolis, introduces the musicians who gave the album so much of its ultimate form and sound, and describes their decades-long fight for recognition.

Blood in the Tracks takes readers behind the scenes with these “mystery” Minnesota musicians: twenty-one-year-old mandolin virtuoso Peter Ostroushko; drummer Bill Berg and bass player Billy Peterson, the house rhythm section at Sound 80; progressive rock keyboardist Gregg Inhofer; guitarist Chris Weber, who owned The Podium guitar shop in Dinkytown; and Kevin Odegard, whose own career as a singer-songwriter had paralleled Dylan’s until he had to take a job as a railroad brakeman to make ends meet. Through in-depth interviews and assiduous research, Paul Metsa and Rick Shefchik trace the twists of fate that brought these musicians together and then set them on different paths in its wake: their musical experiences leading up to the December 1974 recording session, the divergent careers that followed, and the painstaking work required to finally obtain the official credit that they were due. 

A rare look at the making—or remaking—of an all-time great album, and a long overdue recognition of the musicians who made it happen, Blood in the Tracks brings to life a transformative moment in the history of rock and roll, for the first time in its true context and with its complete cast of players.

This meticulously documented, deeply engaging book represents a unique approach to Utah and Latter-day Saint history, drawing on previously untapped private letters and diaries of members of the large and widely known polygamist family of the prominent Latter-day Saint leader, Heber C. Kimball.

The story includes compelling accounts of Helen Kimball Whitney, who married Joseph Smith polygamously at fourteen and became, according to Emmeline B. Wells, “one of the best known and most estimable women of the Church,” and of her son Orson F. Whitney, who forswore his embrace of reincarnation only six years before his call as an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Another daughter, Alice Kimball Smith, married a man who was tracked to a brothel and arrested for armed robbery and assault in 1883, after which Alice turned to family friend and apostle Joseph F. Smith and became his fifth wife. Heber’s son, J. Golden Kimball, one of the most beloved and colorful personalities in Mormon and Utah history, is brought to life in another sketch. The Kimballs had to navigate the ticklish business of explaining or obfuscating polygamy to disapproving family in the East, including the extended claim by Heber’s wife Christeen to her New Jersey family that she had married a Mr. Chase monogamously. Two of Heber’s sons, both stake presidents, contemplated plural marriage in the first decade of the twentieth century, well after the church publicly disavowed the practice.

Additional light is shone on the now-defunct Latter-day Saint practices of adult adoptions and speaking in tongues, Mormon-settler relations with the Utes and Pahvants, the 1856 handcart rescue, the John Hyrum Koyle “Dream Mine,” the Jackson County, Missouri, Temple Lot suit of 1892, and federal pursuit of polygamists.

The claim that Jews abducted and murdered Christian children for alleged ritual purposes or in order to consume their blood during Passover is the most extreme of all the libels that have been used to attack Jews and present them as an existential threat to Christians. From the twelfth century to the modern era, it has been a staple of extreme antisemitic discourse seeking to dehumanize Jews and rationalize anti-Jewish violence.

In the popular mind, “Ritual Murder” and “Blood Libel” have become synonymous but in medieval times they were different accusations with different origins. Why did the accusations appear in some areas and not others? What local factors contributed to accusations receiving support from some religious or lay authorities despite papal condemnation? How have modern historians and sociologists explained the phenomenon? This book offers a critical survey of the child murder libel in medieval Europe as well as an analysis of its history.

A landmark history of the antisemitic blood libel myth—how it took root in Europe, spread with the invention of the printing press, and persists today.

Accusations that Jews ritually killed Christian children emerged in the mid-twelfth century, following the death of twelve-year-old William of Norwich, England, in 1144. Later, continental Europeans added a destructive twist: Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. While charges that Jews poisoned wells and desecrated the communion host waned over the years, the blood libel survived.

Initially blood libel stories were confined to monastic chronicles and local lore. But the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century expanded the audience and crystallized the vocabulary, images, and “facts” of the blood libel, providing a lasting template for hate. Tales of Jews killing Christians—notably Simon of Trent, a toddler whose body was found under a Jewish house in 1475—were widely disseminated using the new technology. Following the paper trail across Europe, from England to Italy to Poland, Magda Teter shows how the blood libel was internalized and how Jews and Christians dealt with the repercussions.

The pattern established in early modern Europe still plays out today. In 2014 the Anti-Defamation League appealed to Facebook to take down a page titled “Jewish Ritual Murder.” The following year white supremacists gathered in England to honor Little Hugh of Lincoln as a sacrificial victim of the Jews. Based on sources in eight countries and ten languages, Blood Libel captures the long shadow of a pernicious myth.

As a minority group for most of their history, Jews were often marginalized and persecuted. Traces of their lives can be found in the archives of the dominant societies, but only as they intersected with the concerns of those in power. Just as Natalie Zemon Davis, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carlo Ginzburg, and others recovered the voices of the peasants, so, too, scholars of Jewish history and culture have productively mined these reservoirs of evidence to retrieve glimpses of the ordinary lives of Jews. Blood Libels, Hostile Archives explores what can be reclaimed about everyday lives from what can be called “hostile archives”—from archival evidence produced and collected explicitly to manufacture malicious tales and pass them as “facts.” For Jewish history, in some places, these archival sources may be the only remaining records documenting the lives of Jews there.

The book explores two places: Trent, in northern Italy, and Sandomierz, in eastern Poland. Though hundreds of miles away, the towns have many things in common: both had been sites of anti-Jewish libels falsely accusing Jews of killing Christian children, Trent in 1475 and Sandomierz twice—in 1698 and 1710; in both, the instigators of the Jews’ persecution left unique and extensive archives, both towns have physical remnants of these deadly affairs, and, finally, neither town has an existing Jewish population. Yet, centuries later, these anti-Jewish libels have not been relegated to the past; in both towns, their legacies still reverberate today.

2009 — Runner-up, Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies

Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature examines a broad array of texts that have contributed to the formation of an indigenous strand of Chicano cultural politics. In particular, this book exposes the ethnographic and poetic discourses that shaped the aesthetics and stylistics of Chicano nationalism and Chicana feminism. Contreras offers original perspectives on writers ranging from Alurista and Gloria Anzaldúa to Lorna Dee Cervantes and Alma Luz Villanueva, effectively marking the invocation of a Chicano indigeneity whose foundations and formulations can be linked to U.S. and British modernist writing.

By highlighting intertextualities such as those between Anzaldúa and D. H. Lawrence, Contreras critiques the resilience of primitivism in the Mexican borderlands. She questions established cultural perspectives on "the native," which paradoxically challenge and reaffirm racialized representations of Indians in the Americas. In doing so, Blood Lines brings a new understanding to the contradictory and richly textured literary relationship that links the projects of European modernism and Anglo-American authors, on the one hand, and the imaginary of the post-revolutionary Mexican state and Chicano/a writers, on the other hand.

In 1976, at age twenty-five, Stephen Kinzer arrived in Nicaragua as a freelance journalist—and became a witness to history. He returned many times during the years that followed, becoming Latin America correspondent for the Boston Globe in 1981 and joining the foreign staff of the New York Times in 1983. That year he opened the New York Times Managua bureau, making that newspaper the first daily in America to maintain a full-time office in Nicaragua.

Widely considered the best-connected journalist in Central America, Kinzer personally met and interviewed people at every level of the Somoza, Sandinistas and contra hierarchies, as well as dissidents, heads of state, and countless ordinary citizens throughout the region.

Blood of Brothers is Kinzer’s dramatic story of the centuries-old power struggle that burst into the headlines in 1979 with the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. It is a vibrant portrait of the Nicaraguan people and their volcanic land, a cultural history rich in poetry and bloodshed, baseball and insurrection.

The surprising story of the wine industry’s role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire.

“We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen,” stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony’s best agricultural land and planted grapevines. Soon enough, wine was the primary export of a region whose mostly Muslim inhabitants didn’t drink alcohol.

Settlers made fortunes while drawing large numbers of Algerians into salaried work for the first time. But the success of Algerian wine resulted in friction with French producers, challenging the traditional view that imperial possessions should complement, not compete with, the metropole. By the middle of the twentieth century, amid the fight for independence, Algerians had come to see the rows of vines as an especially hated symbol of French domination. After the war, Algerians had to decide how far they would go to undo the transformations the colonists had wrought—including the world’s fourth-biggest wine industry. Owen White examines Algeria’s experiment with nationalized wine production in worker-run vineyards, the pressures that resulted in the failure of that experiment, and the eventual uprooting of most of the country’s vines.

With a special focus on individual experiences of empire, from the wealthiest Europeans to the poorest laborers in the fields, The Blood of the Colony shows the central role of wine in the economic life of French Algeria and in its settler culture. White makes clear that the industry left a long-term mark on the development of the nation.

Conflicts over subterranean resources, particularly tin, oil, and natural gas, have driven Bolivian politics for nearly a century. “Resource nationalism”—the conviction that resource wealth should be used for the benefit of the “nation”—has often united otherwise disparate groups, including mineworkers, urban workers, students, war veterans, and middle-class professionals, and propelled an indigenous union leader, Evo Morales, into the presidency in 2006. Blood of the Earth reexamines the Bolivian mobilization around resource nationalism that began in the 1920s, crystallized with the 1952 revolution, and continues into the twenty-first century.

Drawing on a wide array of Bolivian and US sources, Kevin A. Young reveals that Bolivia became a key site in a global battle among economic models, with grassroots coalitions demanding nationalist and egalitarian alternatives to market capitalism. While US-supported moderates within the revolutionary regime were able to defeat more radical forces, Young shows how the political culture of resource nationalism, though often comprising contradictory elements, constrained government actions and galvanized mobilizations against neoliberalism in later decades. His transnational and multilevel approach to the 1952 revolution illuminates the struggles among Bolivian popular sectors, government officials, and foreign powers, as well as the competing currents and visions within Bolivia’s popular political cultures. Offering a fresh appraisal of the Bolivian Revolution, resource nationalism, and the Cold War in Latin America, Blood of the Earth is an ideal case study for understanding the challenges shared by countries across the Global South.

Through stark observations and visceral experiences, Blood Orchid begins Charles Bowden’s dizzying excavation of the brutal, systemic violence and corruption at the roots of American society. Like a nightmarish fever dream that turns out to be our own reality, Bowden visits dying friends in skid row apartments in Los Angeles, traverses San Francisco byways lined with clubs and joints, and roams through village bars and streets in the Sierra Madre mountains. In these wanderings resides a yearning for the understanding of past and present sins, the human penchant for warfare, abuse, and oppression, and the true war between humanity, the industrialized world, and the immense tolls of our shared land. Deeply personal, hauntingly prophetic, and bracingly sharp, the start to Bowden’s harrowed quest to unearth our ugly truths remains strikingly poignant today.

Explosive and original, Blood, Sweat, and Fear brings historical perspective to contemporary debates about North American workplace violence.

An expansive narrative of World War I’s Eastern Front challenges longstanding analytical frameworks, offering a novel and far-reaching explanation for the emergence of new nation-states from the wreckage of Europe’s land empires.

In August 1914, Germany, Austria, and Russia sent millions of soldiers hurtling toward one another across the volatile borderlands of Central Europe. The early battles produced appalling casualties but no decisive triumphs; the Great War’s Eastern Front would remain a cauldron of death and destruction for years. And unlike in western Europe, the killing would not end in 1918. With the collapse of the three empires, the front dissolved into a series of overlapping civil, international, and revolutionary wars that would continue for several years more.

The connections among prewar, wartime, and postwar events in Central Europe are so strong, argues Jesse Kauffman, that we should analyze the conflict there in new chronological terms: starting with the Russian Revolution in1905 and continuing until at least the 1921 Treaty of Riga. In particular, The Blood-Dimmed Tide shows that the emergence of sovereign nation-states in postwar Central Europe was neither the inevitable triumph of long-thwarted national ambitions nor a wholly contingent, unforeseeable outcome of the war. Rather, modern states emerged from a conscious decision taken by all the belligerents to encourage the nationalist aspirations of imperial subjects in their enemies’ territories.

Indeed, the repercussions of Central Europe’s long Great War can be felt all the way to today’s conflict in Ukraine. It might be time to retire Eric Hobsbawm’s famous notion of the “short twentieth century”—1914 to 1991—and to consider instead that the twentieth century has not yet drawn to a close.

Folklore as it comes from the mouths of living storytellers has a matchless authority and conviction. Richard Dorson, living for five months among the Indians, Finns, Canadiens, Cornishmen, lumberjacks, sailors, miners, and sagamen of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, has listened to their tales, which this book reproduces with all their native thunder and salt. With this lively evidence he proves that America still has its myth-makers and purveyors of myth, who represent, both ethnically and historically, an enormous range of traditional oral folklore.

We meet the Chippewa and Potawatomi Indians, who tell their own heroic versions of the wars with the white men, and whose chief delight is to relate the adventures of the folk hero, Winabijou. For them, as for the French-Canadians and Finns, magical beliefs have been part of their daily education and entertainment. Each group has its own version of European folk tales: the old fairy stories find new form as dragons are conquered with razors and soap, and giants talk in the idiom of the backwoods and pioneer towns.

Some of these myths center around imaginary and semi-imaginary folk heroes; others spring from local politics, and even more from local occupations. The woods tales of lumberjacks, the tragic mysteries of the mines, the weird adventures on the Lakes, each kind of tale has its representative teller. Sometimes the raconteur's most exciting fables concern his own wonderful exploits—with women, drink, and wicked employers. Rooted deep in storytelling tradition, these tales hark back to the frontier and immigrant past of an America shaped by many peoples with extraordinary experiences.

Mr. Dorson provides, in his introduction, a simple account of the idea behind the book and his methods of procuring the tales, in concise and closely written notes at the end of the book he furnishes annotations to the tales which should satisfy and stimulate every folklorist, professional or otherwise. Mr. Dorson did much of the fieldwork for this book under a Library of Congress Fellowship; he has also held a Harvard Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Faculty Study Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles traces the theatrical repertoire of a small group of white Anglo-American actresses as they reshaped the meanings of girlhood in Britain, North America, and the British West Indies during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is a study of the possibilities and the problems girl performers presented as they adopted the manners and clothing of boys, entered spaces intended for adults, and assumed characters written for men. It asks why masculine roles like Young Norval, Richard III, Little Pickle, and Shylock came to seem “normal” and “natural” for young white girls to play, and it considers how playwrights, managers, critics, and audiences sought to contain or fix the at-times dangerous plasticity they exhibited both on and off the stage.

Schweitzer analyzes the formation of a distinct repertoire for girls in the first half of the nineteenth century, which delighted in precocity and playfulness and offered up a model of girlhood that was similarly joyful and fluid. This evolving repertoire reflected shifting perspectives on girls’ place within Anglo-American society, including where and how they should behave, and which girls had the right to appear at all.

"In Williamson County some men took to violence almost as a way of life. A shocking story, well told."--New Yorker

Williamson County in southern Illinois has been the scene of almost unparalleled violence, from the Bloody Vendetta between two families in the 1870s through the Herrin Massacre of 1922, Ku Klux Klan activities that ended in fatalities, and the gang war of the 1920s between the Charlie Birger and Shelton brothers gangs. Paul Angle was fascinated by this more-than-fifty-year history, and his account of this violence has become a classic.

Debra A. Shattuck pulls from newspaper accounts and hard-to-find club archives to reconstruct a forgotten era in baseball history. Her fascinating social history tracks women players who organized baseball clubs for their own enjoyment and even found roster spots on men's teams. Entrepreneurs, meanwhile, packaged women's teams as entertainment, organizing leagues and barnstorming tours. If the women faced financial exploitation and indignities like playing against men in women's clothing, they and countless ballplayers like them nonetheless staked a claim to the nascent national pastime. Shattuck explores how the determination to take their turn at bat thrust female players into narratives of the women's rights movement and transformed perceptions of women's physical and mental capacity.

Vivid and eye-opening, Bloomer Girls is a first-of-its-kind portrait of America, its women, and its game.

From his film festival debut Hard Eight to ambitious studio epics Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s unique cinematic vision focuses on postmodern excess and media culture. In Blossoms and Blood, Jason Sperb studies the filmmaker’s evolving aesthetic and its historical context to argue that Anderson’s films create new, often ambivalent, narratives of American identity in a media-saturated world.

Blossoms and Blood explores Anderson’s films in relation to the aesthetic and economic shifts within the film industry and to America’s changing social and political sensibilities since the mid-1990s. Sperb provides an auteur study with important implications for film history, media studies, cultural studies, and gender studies. He charts major themes in Anderson’s work, such as stardom, self-reflexivity, and masculinity and shows how they are indicative of trends in late twentieth-century American culture. One of the first books to focus on Anderson’s work, Blossoms and Blood reveals the development of an under-studied filmmaker attuned to the contradictions of a postmodern media culture.

Reopening the canons of the Beat Generation, Blows Like a Horn traces the creative counterculture movement as it cooked in the heat of Bay Area streets and exploded into spectacles, such as the scandal of the Howl trial and the pop culture joke of beatnik caricatures. Preston Whaley shows Beat artists riding the glossy exteriors of late modernism like a wave. Participants such as Lawrence Lipton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and at great personal cost, even Jack Kerouac, defied the traditional pride of avant-garde anonymity. They were ambitious to change the culture and used mass-mediated scandal, fame, and distortion to attract knowing consumers to their poetry and prose.

Blows Like a Horn follows the Beats as they tweaked the volume of excluded American voices. It watches vernacular energies marching through Beat texts on their migration from shadowy urban corners and rural backwoods to a fertile, new hyper-reality, where they warped into stereotypes. Some audiences were fooled. Others discovered truths and were changed.

Mirroring the music of the era, the book breaks new ground in showing how jazz, much more than an ambient soundtrack, shaped the very structures of Beat art and social life. Jazz, an American hybrid—shot through with an earned-in-the-woodshed, African American style of spontaneous intelligence—also gave Beat poetry its velocity and charisma. Blows Like a Horn plumbs the actions and the art of celebrated and arcane Beat writers, from Allen Ginsberg to ruth weiss. The poetry, the music, the style—all of these helped transform U.S. culture in ways that are still with us.

Since the end of World War II the Israeli public has bitterly debated the guilt-ridden question of whether the Jewish community of Palestine really did everything in its power to rescue Jews in Nazi-occupied countries. Dina Porat gives a searching analysis of the record, basing her conclusions on archival material and other primary sources, hitherto mostly unused. She investigates how and when the Zionist leadership in Palestine fully understood that Europe's Jews were facing annihilation; what rescue plans they developed and what resources were allocated to the effort; what help they tried to get from free-world Jewry and from the British and American governments. And she looks at what went wrong—why in the end so little was done.

Porat struggles with these painful questions of accountability in the light of the Zionist enterprise, its ideologies and internal disputes. She describes the ambivalent attitude of the Zionists in Palestine, who first viewed most of the European Jews as lambs led to slaughter, compared the victims of the Holocaust unfavorably with the tough pioneers of Zion and those few in Europe who fought back, and only gradually understood that every daily struggle was a form of fighting back. Above all, the priorities of the Jewish community in Palestine reflected its overriding goal of building an independent Jewish state despite meager resources, crucial dependence on the good will of friendly powers, and a small number of survivors (instead of the millions they hoped to absorb).

The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David is an important chapter in the history of Israel and the history of World War II. And as the story of a leadership that was unable to respond adequately to a tragically urgent situation, this book focuses on questions of wide and abiding concern.

2023 Finalist, PROSE Award in Architecture and Urban Planning

A guide to water-focused and climate-resilient architectural and urban design.

Le Corbusier famously said, “A house is a machine for living in.” We now confront the litany of environmental challenges associated with the legacy of the architectural machine: a changing climate, massive species die-off, diminished air and water quality, and resource scarcities. Brook Muller offers an alternative: water-centric urban design that fosters sustainability, equity, and architectural creativity.

Inspired by the vernacular, such as the levadas of Madeira Island and both the arid and drenched places of the American West, Muller articulates a “hydro-logical” philosophy in which architects and planners begin by conceptualizing interactions between existing waterways and the spaces they intend to develop. From these interactions—and the new technologies and approaches enabling them—aesthetic, spatial, and experiential opportunities follow. Not content merely to work around sensitive ecology, Muller argues for genuinely climate-adapted urban landscapes in which buildings act as ecological infrastructure that actually improve watersheds while delivering functionality and beauty for diverse communities. Rich in images and practical examples, Blue Architecture will change the way we think about our designed world.

    Born into a life of constant financial, physical, and moral threat, Meti Birabiro takes refuge in literature and the fantastic. Blue Daughter of the Red Sea is Birabiro’s poetic account of the harsh reality of her young life spread across three continents. Her voice is a fresh mélange of child and adult perspectives, at once brutally honest and wise beyond her years. Through her journey from Ethiopia to Italy and finally to the United States, we encounter Birabiro’s relatives, friends, and enemies—relationships so intense that these people become her vampires, devils, angels, and saints. These characterizations always lead her back to the truth, helping her to decipher what is fair and good, to understand what she must cherish and what she must rage against.

No one will soon forget the image, blazed across the airwaves, of armed Korean Americans taking to the rooftops as their businesses went up in flames during the Los Angeles riots. Why Korean Americans? What stoked the wrath the riots unleashed against them? Blue Dreams is the first book to make sense of these questions, to show how Korean Americans, variously depicted as immigrant seekers after the American dream or as racist merchants exploiting African Americans, emerged at the crossroads of conflicting social reflections in the aftermath of the 1992 riots.

The situation of Los Angeles’s Korean Americans touches on some of the most vexing issues facing American society today: ethnic conflict, urban poverty, immigration, multiculturalism, and ideological polarization. Combining interviews and deft socio-historical analysis, Blue Dreams gives these problems a human face and at the same time clarifies the historical, political, and economic factors that render them so complex. In the lives and voices of Korean Americans, the authors locate a profound challenge to cherished assumptions about the United States and its minorities.

Why did Koreans come to the United States? Why did they set up shop in poor inner-city neighborhoods? Are they in conflict with African Americans? These are among the many difficult questions the authors answer as they probe the transnational roots and diversity of Los Angeles’s Korean Americans. Their work finally shows us in sharp relief and moving detail a community that, despite the blinding media focus brought to bear during the riots, has nonetheless remained largely silent and effectively invisible. An important corrective to the formulaic accounts that have pitted Korean Americans against African Americans, Blue Dreams places the Korean American story squarely at the center of national debates over race, class, culture, and community.

Blue Ice relates the tale of the University of Michigan's hockey program--from its fight to become a varsity sport in the 1920s to its 1996 and 1998 NCAA national championships.

This history of the hockey program profiles the personalities who shaped the program--athletic directors, coaches, and players. From Fielding Yost, who made the decision to build the team a rink with artificial ice before the Depression (which ensured hockey would be played during those lean years), to coaches Joseph Barss, who survived World War I and the ghastly Halifax explosion before becoming the program's first coach, to Red Berenson, who struggled to return his alma mater's hockey team to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. Players from Eddie Kahn, who scored Michigan's first goal in 1923, to Brendan Morrison, who upon winning the 1996 national championship with his goal said, "This is for all the [Michigan] guys who never had a chance to win it."

Blue Ice also explores the players' exotic backgrounds, from Calumet in the Upper Peninsula to Minnesota's Iron Range to Regina, Saskatchewan; how coach Vic Heygliger launched the NCAA tournament at the glamorous Broadmoor Hotel; and how commissioner Bill Beagan transformed the country's premier hockey conference.

In Blue Ice, fans of hockey will learn the stories behind the curse of the Boston University Terriers, the hockey team's use of the winged helmet, and the unlikely success of Ann Arbor's home-grown talent.

Unlike other sports at the collegiate level, the hockey players at Michigan haven't been motivated by fame or fortune; rather, they came to Michigan get an education and to play the game they loved.

John U. Bacon has won numerous national writing awards and now freelances for Sports Illustrated,Time,ESPN Magazine,and the New York Times, among others.

Blue Rhythm Fantasy traces the extraordinary career of arranger Chappie Willet--a collaborator of Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and many others--to revisit legendary Swing Era venues and performers from Harlem to Times Square. Wriggle's insightful music analyses of big band arranging techniques explore representations of cultural modernism, discourses on art and commercialism, conceptions of race and cultural identity, music industry marketing strategies, and stage entertainment variety genres.

Drawing on archives, obscure recordings, untapped sources in the African American press, and interviews with participants, Blue Rhythm Fantasy is a long-overdue study of the arranger during this dynamic era of American music history.

Where is the line that separates the “normal” from the “abnormal”? Liubov, a young Ukrainian woman of small nobility, struggles with this question in Lesia Ukrainka’s The Blue Rose. Living in Ukraine at the turn of the twentieth century, she finds herself outside the norms for a woman: she reads “thick books,” follows music and art, and is interested in science and psychology. She hosts a salon and challenges men in discussions about politics and culture. Liubov is also an orphan whose mother died in an asylum, and she worries about inheriting her mother’s disease as well as passing it on to future children. When Liubov falls in love with Orest, she proposes a radical solution to her dilemma: to pursue something as rare as a blue flower—“pure love” that foregoes the physical and abandons the requirement of marriage and motherhood.

In her commanding debut as a playwright, Ukrainka created a deep psychological rendering of an unattainable ideal. The Blue Rose highlights themes such as women’s struggles for liberation, social progress and its reliance on science, and resistance to change in traditional societies. Written in sophisticated Ukrainian, Ukrainka’s nuanced play helped Ukrainian culture break free of the Russian imperial mold that sought to first provincialize and then erase it. Presented here in contemporary English translation, The Blue Rose illuminates Ukraine’s intellectual history and its connections with Western culture.

Bluegrass Breakdown is an expansive foray into the makings of bluegrass. More than any other book of its kind, it gets to the roots of a uniquely American music that is deeply linked to working-class ideals and romanticism. 

Robert Cantwell engages the historical background, commercial origins, internal workings, and cultural and social significance of popular, old-time music to provide a unique musicological and sociological perspective. Well-versed in the history of the tradition and equally as interested in those who listen to the music as in those who create it, Cantwell links bluegrass to its hillbilly roots in Appalachia and shows how the music was transformed by African American folk traditions, the influence of jazz, ragtime, blues, and country music, and the growth of radio and recording technology.

Rosenberg's memoir shines a light on the changing bluegrass scene of the early 1960s. Already a fan and aspiring musician, his appetite for banjo music quickly put him on the Jamboree stage. Rosenberg eventually played with Monroe and spent four months managing the Jamboree. Those heights gave him an eyewitness view of nothing less than bluegrass's emergence from the shadow of country music into its own distinct art form. As the likes of Bill Keith and Del McCoury played, Rosenberg watched Monroe begin to share a personal link to the music that tied audiences to its history and his life--and helped turn him into bluegrass's foundational figure.

An intimate look at a transformative time, Bluegrass Generation tells the inside story of how an American musical tradition came to be.

Goldsmith’s substantial introduction describes and traces the development of the music from its origins in Anglo-American folk tradition, overlaid with African American influences, to the breakout popularity of Ralph Stanley, Alison Krauss, and the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. He introduces each selection offering a wealth of additional information, making The Bluegrass Reader both enjoyable and invaluable for new fans of the music as well as for its lifetime devotees.

Naomi R Williams traces the journeys of two local activists to highlight how people can support democracy and economic freedom in the twenty-first century. In Racine, ideas of class and race shifted but remained strong. The broad-based class politics that emerged drew on racial analysis, vigilant organizing, and agile labor leadership that organized more people. Unionized workers in turn won political power while uniting to resist conservative and corporate attacks. Charting Racine’s transition, Williams breaks down how worker solidarity persevered and presents lessons that can provide valuable guidance for today’s generation of activists.

Most Americans assume that shared genes or blood relationships provide the strongest basis for family. What can adoption tell us about this widespread belief and American kinship in general? Blue-Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love examines the ways class, gender, and race shape public and private adoption in the United States. Christine Ward Gailey analyzes the controversies surrounding international, public, and transracial adoption, and how the political and economic dynamics that shape adoption policies and practices affect the lives of people in the adoption nexus: adopters, adoptees, birth parents, and agents within and across borders. Interviews with white and African-American adopters, adoption social workers, and adoption lawyers, combined with her long-term participant-observation in adoptive communities, inform her analysis of how adopters' beliefs parallel or diverge from the dominant assumptions about kinship and family. Gailey demonstrates that the ways adoptive parents speak about their children vary across hierarchies of race, class, and gender. She shows that adopters' notions about their children's backgrounds and early experiences, as well as their own "family values," influence child rearing practices. Her extensive interviews with 131 adopters reveal profoundly different practices of kinship in the United States today.

Moving beyond the ideology of "blood is thicker than water," Gailey presents a new way of viewing kinship and family formation, suitable to times of rapid social and cultural change.

The term “blues” has traditionally conveyed an image of hard-living, hard-drinking, carousing singers and musicians grinding out melancholy tunes and evil lyrics. Contesting that stereotypical notion, this study argues that spiritual values are clearly reflected in the blues’ mythologized history, folk-theological language, and philosophical speculation on the dual existence of good and evil.

By using a theomusicalogical approach, Yahya Jongintaba (formerly Jon Michael Spencer) is able to push aside accepted attitudes and present a unique study of the blues and the culture that created it. He reveals religious substance in this music’s content and language that has been gradually obscured as the blues evolved from a simple rural music following Reconstruction to its present urban form. The evidence strongly implies a fundamental religious concern for the same life issues expressed in orthodox religious music.

Spencer suggests that white blues scholars have tended to overlook the religious nature of the blues partly because they have not fully understood African-American culture. They have tended to give validity to the old southern folkloric belief that blues music was “devil’s music,” disregarding the ethos of the blues as it exists on the periphery of doctrinal Christianity where religious pondering, as well as opposition to white oppression, could be expressed behind a protective veil of music.

Steve Cushing’s third volume of interviews from Blues Before Sunrise puts fans face-to-face with music legends and industry figures. The volume kicks off with a roundtable featuring drumming all-stars Earl Phillips, S.P. Leary, Odie Payne, Clifton James, and Fred Below discussing their lives and craft. Cushing segues to one-on-one interviews with Howlin’ Wolf sideman Phillips; Leary, a fellow Wolf alum and player with Sonny Boy Williamson II; Payne, known for his kick drum technique; longtime Muddy Waters drummer Willie “Big Eyes” Smith; next-generation standard bearer and session mainstay Casey Jones; and King Records house drummer Phillip Paul.

Interviews with guitarists include talks with Honeyboy Edwards, whose friendships with innumerable Chicago blues legends (and Robert Johnson) predated the Great Migration; jazz player turned bluesman Guitar Shorty; and figures like Texas native Roy Gaines, Johnny Heartsman of Oakland, and Memphis-born Floyd Murphy. A final section offers interviews with vocalists, record label founders, and other figures. Music scholar Wayne Everett Goins provides an introduction on blues history, blues style, and the careers of the featured artists.

Interviews: Joel Dorn, Honeyboy Edwards, Slim Gaillard, Roy Gaines, Johnny Heartsman, Franz Jackson, Casey Jones, S.P. Leary, Floyd Murphy, Jimmy “T-99” Nelson, Johnny Parth, Phillip Paul, Odie Payne, Earl Phillips, Art Sheridan, Guitar Shorty, Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, and Norvel Taborn

Cultivated from the fierce ideas seeded in Blood Orchid, Blues for Cannibals is an elegiac reflection on death, pain, and a wavering confidence in humanity’s own abilities for self-preservation. After years of reporting on border violence, sex crimes, and the devastation of the land, Bowden struggles to make sense of the many ways in which we destroy ourselves and whether there is any way to survive. Here he confronts a murderer facing execution, sex offenders of the most heinous crimes, a suicidal artist, a prisoner obsessed with painting portraits of presidents, and other people and places that constitute our worst impulses and our worst truths. Painful, heartbreaking, and forewarning, Bowden at once tears us apart and yearns for us to find ourselves back together again.

David Whiteis delves into how the current and upcoming Chicago blues generations carry on this legacy. Drawing on in-person interviews, Whiteis places the artists within the ongoing social and cultural reality their work reflects and helps create. Beginning with James Cotton, Eddie Shaw, and other bequeathers, he moves through an all-star council of elders like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and on to inheritors and today's heirs apparent like Ronnie Baker Brooks, Shemekia Copeland, and Nellie "Tiger" Travis.

Insightful and wide-ranging, Blues Legacy reveals a constantly adapting art form that, whatever the challenges, maintains its links to a rich musical past.

Larry Hogan is one of the most popular political figures in the United States today. The two-term Republican governor of Maryland first won his seat after upsetting a favorite of the Democratic political establishment, and then overcame the Trump-driven wave in the heartland of the #resistance to win a second term in 2018. 

Blue-State Republican is the remarkable story of how his carefully messaged, pragmatic approach to governance helped build a coalition of moderate and conservative Democrats, independents, women, college-educated and Black voters and maintained his GOP base during a time of polarization and negative partisanship. Mileah Kromer takes readers inside Maryland politics to illustrate exactly how Hogan won where Republicans lose and consider whether the un-Trump Republican offers any lessons for how the GOP can win the center-right voters who continue to make up a majority of the country.

Kromer conducts interviews with key political leaders and insiders, including Hogan himself, to explain the mechanics of his political success. She also provides a cogent analysis of public opinion polls and focus groups, ultimately showing why the success of a blue-state Republican matters outside of his home state, especially as Hogan considers a 2024 Presidential run.

Richard Alba argues that the social cleavages that separate Americans into distinct, unequal ethno-racial groups could narrow dramatically in the coming decades. During the mid-twentieth century, the dominant position of the United States in the postwar world economy led to a rapid expansion of education and labor opportunities. As a result of their newfound access to training and jobs, many ethnic and religious outsiders, among them Jews and Italians, finally gained full acceptance as members of the mainstream. Alba proposes that this large-scale assimilation of white ethnics was a result of “non-zero-sum mobility,” which he defines as the social ascent of members of disadvantaged groups that can take place without affecting the life chances of those who are already members of the established majority.

Alba shows that non-zero-sum mobility could play out positively in the future as the baby-boom generation retires, opening up the higher rungs of the labor market. Because of the changing demography of the country, many fewer whites will be coming of age than will be retiring. Hence, the opportunity exists for members of other groups to move up. However, Alba cautions, this demographic shift will only benefit disadvantaged American minorities if they are provided with access to education and training. In Blurring the Color Line, Alba explores a future in which socially mobile minorities could blur stark boundaries and gain much more control over the social expression of racial differences.