How do we know reality? The prevalent theory has been that we construct knowledge upon absolute foundations, the way the Egyptians built pyramids. In recent years this foundationalist account has come under attack from a number of directions, from those who want to make epistemology a branch of cognitive science to those who reject out of hand the search for foundational certainty. Richard Foley’s book defends a modified form of foundationalism that does not depend on our having privileged access to the truth of foundational propositions.

Foley presents the idea of rational belief going back to Aristotle’s concept of rationality—as the basis for what he calls “subjective foundationalism.” Epistemological rationality is subjective for Foley because he sees the rationality of a belief as dependent on the cognitive resources and tendencies of the believer. He is able thereby to accommodate the strong “internalist” intuition telling us that whether it is rational for us to believe something depends on how that thing appears within our perspective on the world. But Foley removes a large part of the curse of subjectivism by making rationality dependent not on what the subject thinks, or is inclined to think at the moment of belief, but on what the subject would be inclined to think as a result of an ideally conducted reflection.

The foundationalists, he asserts, with their obsessive search for guarantors of truth, get the structure of epistemic rationality right but the spirit wrong. Foley gives a novel and provocative account of the nature of epistemic rationality.

Jean-Marie Morel (1728–1810), a leading French landscape designer and theorist, is now mainly remembered as the author of one of the fundamental eighteenth-century texts in the history of landscape architecture, the Théorie des jardins (1776; second edition, 1802). With his background as an engineer, Morel was instrumental in shaping the functions of landscape architecture, opening up a new professional domain by coining the term architecte-paysagiste, the precursor to the modern designation “landscape architect.”

Morel stands out among eighteenth-century theorists because of his interest in the natural processes that underlie the formation of landscape. His unique theoretical contribution was, therefore, an attempt to develop an approach to garden design grounded in the new understanding of natural processes, which brought together picturesque theory and landscape practice, taking into account a wide range of environmental factors that had an impact on the work of an architecte-paysagiste. Morel believed that an awareness of the character of each landscape was particularly important because of the emotional response that it was likely to elicit.

This translation marks the first time the 1776 edition of the Théorie des jardins is available in English.

The 1970s promised important readjustments in relations among the great powers, perhaps a reconstituted Europe and Asia, as well as a possible new role for "third world" countries. National attitudes toward the law of nations both shaped and reflected developments of this nature. As a great power, the Soviet Union was a principal actor in what transpired, but until now there has been no systematic exposition in the English language of how Soviet jurists regarded the world legal order.

The present volume, published in Moscow in 1970, is the most profound and comprehensive study of international legal theory yet produced by a Soviet jurist. Its author, who holds the Chair of International Law at Moscow State University and for many years was the legal adviser to the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is widely credited with elaborating the juridical underpinnings of peaceful coexistence in the USSR from the mid-1950s. This book, earlier versions of which have appeared in Eastern and Western Europe, contains the fullest statement of his views.

Tunkin traces the development and shaping of international law since 1917, the processes of forming and modifying international legal rules, and the nature of state responsibility under the law of nations. Of special interest to the general reader and specialist in international affairs will be Tunkin's extensive discussion of the interaction among international law, foreign policy, and diplomacy; of the legal nature of international organizations; of the principal factors at work in international politics; and of the nature of legal ties among socialist countries. The latter has been a special concern following the Czechoslovak events of 1968 and the adoption of a comprehensive program for economic integration among socialist states.

For this American edition, Tunkin has brought his book up to date and Dr. Butler has supplied an introduction, a translation note, a list of the author's publications, and a glossary of Russian international legal terms.

John Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition—justice as fairness—and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. “Each person,” writes Rawls, “possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.” Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls’s theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls’s view, much of the extensive literature on his theory refers to the original. This first edition is available for scholars and serious students of Rawls’s work.

“A milestone in political and moral philosophy, as groundbreaking as the theories of Bentham and Kant and arguably the most important and influential piece of contemporary philosophy of the last century.” —The Guardian
The principles of justice that Rawls set forth in this book are those that free and rational people would accept in an “original position” of equality. In this hypothetical situation, which corresponds to the state of nature in social contract theory, no one knows their place in society; their class or social status; their fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities—their intelligence, strength, and the like—or even their conception of the good. Deliberating behind this “veil of ignorance,” people naturally determine their proper rights and duties. Thus, as Rawls writes, “each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.”

Incorporating the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls’s theory is as powerful today as it was when first published in 1971. For more than half a century, A Theory of Justice has been taught and debated, celebrated and translated into more than thirty languages. This revised edition includes changes, discussed in the preface, that Rawls considered to be significant, especially to the discussions of liberty and primary social goods.

Concerned primarily with oligopoly, this work includes a general study of pricing in three different markets—perfect competition, perfect monopoly, and imperfect competition. The solutions of these markets offered by Cournot, Smithies, Chamberlin, Stackelberg, Fellner, and Robinson are presented mathematically, followed by the author’s own version of the theory of rational pricing in oligopoly.

Previous authors have not allowed for all the variables arising from profit and price situations in the market. Here, more realistic assumptions and more complex analyses indicate that sellers in oligopoly situations do not always need to arrange specific agreements—hence, that “administered” pricing does not inevitably occur when the market is dominated by a few producers.

Chamberlain's classic work, now in its eighth edition, continues to influence the fundamental thinking of economists and businessmen, and for the best of reasons: It is a basic treatise in theory which, unlike traditional theories of “perfect competition,” deals with the economic world we live in, including both price and nonprice competition, oligopoly, various degrees of monopoly, “differentiated” products, advertising, etc. Its influence has spread extensively as well as intensively—to new theoretical problems, such as economic dynamics and development, and to the analysis of an increasingly wide range of the so-called “applied” fields.

In this eighth edition of The Theory of Monopolistic Competition Professor Chamberlain has added three new appendices: The Definition of Selling Costs; Numbers and Elasticities; and The Origin and Early Development of Monopolistic Competition Theory. The index has been extensively revised and expanded. In successive earlier editions the author compiled a bibliography of 1497 items. He also added a new treatment of the cost curve of the firm, discussing in particular some current misconceptions as to the role of the laws of proportions and of the divisibility of factors in relation to economics and diseconomies of scale, and advancing a broader theory which assigns to both proportions and scale their proper roles.

Karl N. Llewellyn was one of the founders and major figures of legal realism, and his many keen insights have a central place in American law and legal understanding. Key to Llewellyn’s thinking was his conception of rules, put forward in his numerous writings and most famously in his often mischaracterized declaration that they are “pretty playthings.” Previously unpublished, The Theory of Rules is the most cogent presentation of his profound and insightful thinking about the life of rules.

This book frames the development of Llewellyn’s thinking and describes the difference between what rules literally prescribe and what is actually done, with the gap explained by a complex array of practices, conventions, professional skills, and idiosyncrasies, most of which are devoted to achieving a law’s larger purpose rather than merely following the letter of a particular rule. Edited, annotated, and with an extensive analytic introduction by leading contemporary legal scholar Frederick Schauer, this rediscovered work contains material not found elsewhere in Llewellyn’s writings and will prove a valuable contribution to the existing literature on legal realism.

The first English translation of a radical and influential theory of art by a leader of Poland’s avant-garde

After World War II, socialist realism became the official state doctrine of art in Poland, with abstract works deemed counterrevolutionary and forbidden from public view. Władysław Strzemiński, a leader of the Polish constructivist avant-garde, developed a treatise of visual consciousness as a foundation for progressive art, emphasizing art’s autonomy. His application of Marxist aesthetics to the physiology of seeing is expressed in Theory of Seeing, which was published posthumously in 1958 by his students from notes collected from his lectures.

Preceding the comparable perspectives developed by Jacques Rancière, David Hockney, and John Berger, and even the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, Strzemiński’s Theory of Seeing introduces the radical and groundbreaking ideas of one of Poland’s most important artists to English-speaking audiences for the first time.

A leading psychologist explains why nearly all of us—including many of those who are persecuted and powerless—so often defend the social systems that cause misery and injustice.

Why do we so often defend the very social systems that are responsible for injustice and exploitation? In A Theory of System Justification, John Jost argues that we are motivated to defend the status quo because doing so serves fundamental psychological needs for certainty, security, and social acceptance. We want to feel good not only about ourselves and the groups to which we belong, but also about the overarching social structure in which we live, even when it hurts others and ourselves.

Jost lays out the wide range of evidence for his groundbreaking theory and examines its implications for our communities and our democracy. Drawing on twenty-five years of research, he provides an accessible account of system justification theory and its insights. System justification helps to explain deep contradictions, including the feeling among some women that they don’t deserve the same salaries as men and the tendency of some poor people to vote for policies that increase economic inequality.

The theory illuminates the most pressing social and political issues of our time—why has it been so hard to combat anthropogenic climate change?—as well as some of the most intimate—why do some black children prefer white dolls to black ones and why do some people stay in bad relationships? Jost’s theory has far-reaching implications, and he offers numerous insights that political activists and social justice advocates can use to promote change.

This collection examines the forces, both external and internal, that lead corporations to behave efficiently and to create wealth. Corporations vest control rights in shareholders, the author argues, because they are the constituency that bear business risk and therefore have the appropriate incentives to maximize corporate value. Assigning control to any other group would be tantamount to allowing that group to play poker with someone else's money, and would create inefficiencies. The implicit denial of this proposition is the fallacy of the so-called stakeholder theory of the corporation, which argues that corporations should be run in the interests of all stakeholders. This theory offers no account of how conflicts between different stakeholders are to be resolved, and gives managers no principle on which to base decisions, except to follow their own preferences.

In practice, shareholders delegate their control rights to a board of directors, who hire, fire, and set the compensation of the chief officers of the firm. However, because agents have different incentives than the principals they represent, they can destroy corporate value unless closely monitored. This happened in the 1960s and led to hostile takeovers in the market for corporate control in the 1970s and 1980s. The author argues that the takeover movement generated increases in corporate efficiency that exceeded $1.5 trillion and helped to lay the foundation for the great economic boom of the 1990s.

Christian Gauss Award Shortlist
Winner of the ASAP Book Prize
A Literary Hub Book of the Year

“Makes the case that the gimmick…is of tremendous critical value…Lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag’s best work.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Ngai exposes capitalism’s tricks in her mind-blowing study of the time- and labor-saving devices we call gimmicks.”
—New Statesman

“One of the most creative humanities scholars working today…My god, it’s so good.”
—Literary Hub

“Ngai is a keen analyst of overlooked or denigrated categories in art and life…Highly original.”
—4Columns

“It is undeniable that part of what makes Ngai’s analyses of aesthetic categories so appealing…is simply her capacity to speak about them brilliantly.”
—Bookforum

“A page turner.”
—American Literary History

Deeply objectionable and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention).

When we call something a gimmick, we register misgivings that suggest broader anxieties about value, money, and time, making the gimmick a hallmark of capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory.

What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Theory of the Lyric reveals the limitations of these two conceptions of the lyric—the older Romantic model and the modern conception that has come to dominate the study of poetry—both of which neglect what is most striking and compelling in the lyric and falsify the long and rich tradition of the lyric in the West. Jonathan Culler explores alternative conceptions offered by this tradition, such as public discourse made authoritative by its rhythmical structures, and he constructs a more capacious model of the lyric that will help readers appreciate its range of possibilities.

“Theory of the Lyric brings Culler’s own earlier, more scattered interventions together with an eclectic selection from others’ work in service to what he identifies as a dominant need of the critical and pedagogical present: turning readers’ attention to lyric poems as verbal events, not fictions of impersonated speech. His fine, nuanced readings of particular poems and kinds of poems are crucial to his arguments. His observations on the workings of aspects of lyric across multiple different structures are the real strength of the book. It is a work of practical criticism that opens speculative vistas for poetics but always returns to poems.”
—Elizabeth Helsinger, Critical Theory

The novel is the most important form of Western art. It aims to represent the totality of life; it is the flagship that literature sends out against the systematic thought of science and philosophy. Indebted to Lukács and Bakhtin, to Auerbach and Ian Watt, Guido Mazzoni’s Theory of the Novel breaks new ground, building a historical understanding of how the novel became the modern book of life: one of the best representations of our experience of the world.

The genre arose during a long metamorphosis of narrative forms that took place between 1550 and 1800. By the nineteenth century it had come to encompass a corpus of texts distinguished by their freedom from traditional formal boundaries and by the particularity of their narratives. Mazzoni explains that modern novels consist of stories told in any way whatsoever, by narrators who exist—like us—as contingent beings within time and space. They therefore present an interpretation, not a copy, of the world.

Novels grant new importance to the stories of ordinary men and women and allow readers to step into other lives and other versions of truth. As Theory of the Novel makes clear, this art form narrates an epoch and a society in which individual experiences do not converge but proliferate, in which the common world has fragmented into a plurality of small, local worlds, each absolute in its particularity.

How much does a country's commercial policy affect its economic efficiency? How would free trade change the structure of a country’s economy and foreign trade? William Penfield Travis extends the Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory and addresses it to an empirical study of these and related questions. He argues that trade flows fail to reflect relative factor endowments because protection systematically nullifies their effects, and that therefore protection must be incorporated in any positive trade theory.

The author begins by developing a new concept—the equalization region—which he uses to reexamine the assumptions and the logic of the Heckscher-Ohlin theory and of its principal part, the factor-price equalization theorem. This analysis produces a fundamental reinterpretation of Leontief’s scarce-factor paradox, one which justifies Leontief’s work as an empirical test of trade theory under free trade which indicates its necessary modifications under protection. These modifications are then used to show that Leontief in fact measured the effects of American and foreign tariffs and other trade restriction on relative factor prices here and abroad.

To corroborate his theoretical analysis, Travis makes a detailed study of the commercial policies of five main industrial countries; he shows the common structure of protection and its systematic relationship to relative factor endowments. He shows also that protection, by distorting their relative prices, causes considerable substitution of raw materials for labor and capital inputs in manufacturing. The author concludes this important book by indicating some of the new forms which protection is taking throughout the world and by arguing that protection, past and present, is the main force preventing the spread of high living standards to the impoverished areas of the world.

Across the world anxiety, stress and depression are on the increase, a trend which looks set to continue as austerity measures bite. The official response tells people that unhappiness is just a personal problem, rather than a social one.

Written by a practising psychologist, with nearly thirty years' experience in the fields of mental health and learning disabilities, The Therapy Industry offers a concise, accessible and critical overview of the world of psychological practice in Britain and the USA. Paul Moloney argues that much therapy is geared towards compliance and acceptance of the status quo, rather than attempting to facilitate social change.

The Therapy Industry fundamentally challenges our conceptions of happiness and wellbeing. Moloney argues that therapeutic and applied psychology have little basis in science, that their benefits are highly exaggerated and they prosper because they serve the interests of power.

A pointed look at the state of tech-based mental healthcare and what we must do to change it
 

Proponents of technology trumpet it as the solution to the massive increase in the mental distress that confronts our nation. They herald the arrival of algorithms, intelligent chatbots, smartphone applications, telemental healthcare services, and more—but are these technological fixes really as good as they seem? In Therapy Tech, Emma Bedor Hiland presents the first comprehensive study of how technology has transformed mental healthcare, showing that this revolution can’t deliver what it promises.

Far from providing a solution, technological mental healthcare perpetuates preexisting disparities while relying on the same failed focus on personal responsibility that has let us down before. Through vivid, in-depth case studies, Therapy Tech reveals these problems, covering issues including psychosurveillance on websites like Facebook and 7 Cups of Tea, shortcomings of popular AI “doctors on demand” like Woebot, Wysa, and Joy, and even how therapists are being conscripted into the gig economy.

Featuring a vital coda that brings Therapy Tech up to date for the COVID era, this book is the first to give readers a large-scale analysis of mental health technologies and the cultural changes they have enabled. Both a sobering dissection of the current state of mental health and a necessary warning of where things are headed, Therapy Tech makes an important assertion about how to help those in need of mental health services today.

How does political change take hold? In the 1850s, politicians and abolitionists despaired, complaining that the "North, the poor timid, mercenary, driveling North" offered no forceful opposition to the power of the slaveholding South. And yet, as John L. Brooke proves, the North did change. Inspired by brave fugitives who escaped slavery and the cultural craze that was Uncle Tom's Cabin, the North rose up to battle slavery, ultimately waging the bloody Civil War.

While Lincoln's alleged quip about the little woman who started the big war has been oft-repeated, scholars have not fully explained the dynamics between politics and culture in the decades leading up to 1861. Rather than simply viewing the events of the 1850s through the lens of party politics, “There Is a North” is the first book to explore how cultural action—including minstrelsy, theater, and popular literature—transformed public opinion and political structures. Taking the North's rallying cry as his title, Brooke shows how the course of history was forever changed.

One ghost, infinite echoes—where memory, myth, and identity collide.

There Is Only One Ghost in the World follows the fragmented meditations of a multilayered voice, an intimate witness to our times that delicately and bluntly reveals the best and the worst in all of us. It is a kaleidoscopic investigation into the loneliness of modern American life as well as family relationships, exploring the truths and lies that families tell one another, and why, with empathy, sorrow, and humility. We travel from the oil-slicked beaches of California and the alleys of New Orleans to the steps of the Capitol. Here: the raw nerves of gender and identity. Here: the lessons of heartbreak. Here: true myths, fake news, and old rumors. Here: the legacies of art and incisors of seasons. Incompletable Venn diagrams, sibling porn stars, addiction and climate change, shootings and stolen x-rays, the lyrics of disco and the taxonomy of slot machines, steel monoliths and 99-cent stores, last meals and unearthed mummies. There Is Only One Ghost in the World is a book about what happened just before you woke up, and what happened just after. And what happened next.
 

"How is it that there are so many lloronas?" A haunting figure of Mexican oral and literary traditions, La Llorona permeates the consciousness of her folk community. From a ghost who haunts the riverbank to a murderous mother condemned to wander the earth after killing her own children in an act of revenge or grief, the Weeping Woman has evolved within Chican@ imaginations across centuries, yet no truly comprehensive examination of her impact existed until now. Tracing La Llorona from ancient oral tradition to her appearance in contemporary material culture, There Was a Woman delves into the intriguing transformations of this provocative icon.

From La Llorona's roots in legend to the revisions of her story and her exaltation as a symbol of resistance, Domino Renee Perez illuminates her many permutations as seductress, hag, demon, or pitiful woman. Perez draws on more than two hundred artifacts to provide vivid representations of the ways in which these perceived identities are woven from abstract notions—such as morality or nationalism—and from concrete, often misunderstood concepts from advertising to television and literature. The result is a rich and intricate survey of a powerful figure who continues to be reconfigured.

A creative genius and prolific inventor, Leon Theremin almost single-handedly launched the field of electronic music in 1920. The theremin--the only musical instrument that is played without being touched--created a sensation worldwide and paved the way for the modern synthesizer. But the otherworldly sound that entranced millions was only part of Theremin's epic life. 

As a Soviet scientist, Theremin surrendered his life and work to the service of State espionage. On assignment in Depression-era America, he worked the engines of capitalist commerce while passing data on US industrial technology to the Soviet apparat. Following his sudden disappearance in 1938, Theremin vanished into the top-secret Soviet intelligence machine and was presumed dead for nearly thirty years. Using the same technology that spawned the theremin, he designed bugging devices and a host of other electronic wonders, including an early television and multimedia devices that anticipated performance art and virtual reality by decades. 

Albert Glinsky's biography places the inventor at world events stretching from the Russian Revolution through the Cold War to perestroika. Throughout, he spins whimsy and treachery into an astonishing drama of one man's hidden loyalties, mixed motivations, and irrepressibly creative spirit.

A stunning modern translation of a Buddhist classic that is also one of the oldest literary texts in the world written by women.

The Therīgāthā, composed more than two millennia ago, is an anthology of poems in the Pali language by and about the first Buddhist women. These women were therīs, the senior ones, among ordained Buddhist women, and they bore that epithet because of their religious achievements. The poems they left behind are arguably among the most ancient examples of women’s writing in the world and they are unmatched for their quality of personal expression and the extraordinary insight they offer into the lives of women in the ancient Indian past—and indeed, into the lives of women as such.

This new version of the Therīgāthā, based on a careful reassessment of the major editions of the work and printed in the Roman script common for modern editions of Pali texts, offers the most powerful and the most readable translation ever achieved in English.

All bodily activity is the result of the interplay of vastly complex physiological processes, and all of these processes depend on temperature. For insects, the struggle to keep body temperature within a suitable range for activity and competition is often a matter of life and death.

A few studies of temperature regulation in butterflies can be found dating back to the late 1800s, but only recently have scientists begun to study the phenomenon in other insects. In The Thermal Warriors Bernd Heinrich explains how, when, and in general what insects regulate their body temperature and what it means to them. As he shows us, the ingenuity of the survival strategies insects have evolved in the irreducible crucible of temperature is astonishing: from shivering and basking, the construction of turrets (certain tiger beetles), and cooling with liquid feces to stilting (some desert ants and beetles), "panting" in grasshoppers and "sweating cicada," and counter- and alternating-currents of blood flow for heat retention and heat loss.

In The Thermal Warriors Heinrich distills his great reference work, The Hot-Blooded Insects, to its essence: the most significant and fascinating stories that illustrate general principles, all conveyed in the always engaging prose we have come to expect from this author.

Honorable Mention, 2025 Society of Midland Authors Award in History!

Examining the case that inspired a pop culture phenomenon

In 1924 Beulah Annan was arrested and incarcerated for killing her lover, Harry Kalsted. Six weeks later, a jury acquitted her of murder. Inspired by the sordid event, trial, and acquittal, Maurine Watkins, a reporter at the time, wrote the play Chicago, a Broadway hit that was adapted several times. Through a fresh retelling of the story of Annan and of Watkins’s play, Charles H. Cosgrove provides the first critical examination of the criminal case, and an initial exploration of the era’s social assumptions that made the message of the play so plausible in its own time. His careful historical research challenges the received portrait of Annan as a killer who got away with murder, and of Watkins as a savvy cub reporter and precocious playwright.

In They Both Reached for the Gun, Charles H. Cosgrove expertly combines inquest and police records, and interviews with Annan’s relatives, to analyze the participants, the trial, and the subsequent play. Although no one will ever know what really happened in the Kenwood apartment on Chicago’s south side one hundred years ago, Cosgrove’s interrogation shows how sensationalized Watkins’s writing was. Her reporting on the Annan case perpetuated falsehoods about Annan’s so-called “confession,” and her play gave an inaccurate portrayal of Chicago’s criminal justice system. Despite Watkins’s insistence that her drama revealed the truth about its subjects without any exaggeration, her play depicted police, prosecutors, and judges as the only “good guys” in the story, ignoring those who lied, misled, and used brutal methods to obtain forced confessions.

Tension between Anglos and Tejanos has existed in the Lone Star State since the earliest settlements. Such antagonism has produced friction between the two peoples, and whites have expressed their hostility toward Mexican Americans unabashedly and at times violently.

This seminal work in the historical literature of race relations in Texas examines the attitudes of whites toward Mexicans in nineteenth-century Texas. For some, it will be disturbing reading. But its unpleasant revelations are based on extensive and thoughtful research into Texas' past. The result is important reading not merely for historians but for all who are concerned with the history of ethnic relations in our state.

They Called Them Greasers argues forcefully that many who have written about Texas's past—including such luminaries as Walter Prescott Webb, Eugene C. Barker, and Rupert N. Richardson—have exhibited, in fact and interpretation, both deficiencies of research and detectable bias when their work has dealt with Anglo-Mexican relations. De León asserts that these historians overlooled an austere Anglo moral code which saw the morality of Tejanos as "defective" and that they described without censure a society that permitted traditional violence to continue because that violence allowed Anglos to keep ethnic minorities "in their place."

De León's approach is psychohistorical. Many Anglos in nineteenth-century Texas saw Tejanos as lazy, lewd, un-American, subhuman. In De León's view, these attitudes were the product of a conviction that dark-skinned people were racially and culturally inferior, of a desire to see in others qualities that Anglos preferred not to see in themselves, and of a need to associate Mexicans with disorder so as to justify their continued subjugation.

In They Came to Nashville, Chapman records the personal stories of musicians shaping the modern history of music in Nashville, from the mouths of the musicians themselves. The trials, tribulations, and evolution of Music City are on display, as she sits down with influential figures like Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, and Miranda Lambert, and a dozen other top names, to record what brought each of them to Nashville and what inspired them to persevere. The book culminates in a hilarious and heroic attempt to find enough free time with Willie Nelson to get a proper interview. Instead, she's brought along on his raucous 2008 tour and winds up onstage in Beaumont, Texas singing "Good-Hearted Woman" with Willie.

They Came to Nashville reveals the daily struggle facing newcomers to the music business, and the promise awaiting those willing to fight for the dream.

Co-published with the Country Music Foundation Press

As the Great Depression gripped the United States in the early 1930s, the Hoover administration sought to preserve jobs for Anglo-Americans by targeting Mexicans, including long-time residents and even US citizens, for deportation. Mexicans comprised more than 46 percent of all people deported between 1930 and 1939, despite being only 1 percent of the US population. In all, about half a million people of Mexican descent were deported to Mexico, a “homeland” many of them had never seen, or returned voluntarily in fear of deportation.

They Came to Toil investigates how the news reporting of this episode in immigration history created frames for representing Mexicans and immigrants that persist to the present. Melita M. Garza sets the story in San Antonio, a city central to the formation of Mexican American identity, and contrasts how the city’s three daily newspapers covered the forced deportations of Mexicans. She shows that the Spanish-language La Prensa not surprisingly provided the fullest and most sympathetic coverage of immigration issues, while the locally owned San Antonio Express and the Hearst chain-owned San Antonio Light varied between supporting Mexican labor and demonizing it. Garza analyzes how these media narratives, particularly in the English-language press, contributed to the racial “othering” of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Adding an important new chapter to the history of the Long Civil Rights Movement, They Came to Toil brings needed historical context to immigration issues that dominate today’s headlines.

They Die Strangers, a novella and thirteen short stories, is the first full-length work of the distinguished Yemeni writer Mohammad Abdul-Wali to appear in English. Abdul-Wali died tragically in an aviation accident, and his stories were collected after his death by the translators Abubaker Bagader and Deborah Akers.

Abdul-Wali was born in Ethiopia of Arab Yemeni parents. His stories, filled with nostalgia and the bitterness of exile, deal with the common experiences of Yemenis like himself who are caught between cultures by the displacements of civil war or labor migration. His characters include women left behind, children raised without fathers, and men returning home after years of absence. He explores the human condition through the eyes of the oppressed and disenfranchised and is particularly sympathetic to the plight of women.

“They Never Want to Tell You” transcends the negative metaphors and clichés of life-threatening disease to give voice to the culture of cancer and to the behavior and attitudes of those who function within that culture—as patients, medical professionals, family, and friends.

In these extraordinary narratives, children coping with cancer reveal their most personal experiences, and they speak with a candor that breaks through the cultural taboos ostensibly designed to protect us from the disease. The rich, compassionate, and honest words of these children give expression to concerns that adults who are struggling with cancer find nearly impossible to articulate. Free of social conventions and cognitive distortions, each story presents a powerful variation on the theme of survival in the face of the continuing uncertainties of life-threatening disease.

David Bearison, a developmental psychologist and psychotherapist, is keenly aware of the psychological impact of cancer on children, particularly as survival times for childhood cancers lengthen and complex treatments intensify concern about the emotional—not merely physical—well-being of children. Bearison has culled from scores of interviews the most salient moments that represent these individual children in their shared struggle with disease. In these pages the children express their wildest hopes and worst fears about cancer. They speak of the absolute necessity of full disclosure, the problems of relating to friends and family, the difficult adjustment to hair loss, their feelings of punishment, grief, and spirituality, and many other issues. In the course of these stories the children reveal not only their will to survive and their extraordinary capacity to understand themselves and their condition, but their altruistic desire to share that understanding with other children as well as with adults who have cancer. “They Never Want to Tell You” is rich and rewarding reading for cancer patients, their families, and health-care professionals alike.

Thomas P. Harrison here combines a lifelong interest in birds with a professional study of literature. This book, a study of birds as they are presented by four great English poets, inquires into the extent and sources of their knowledge of birds and analyzes the methods by which they adapted that knowledge for poetic purposes. The interrelationships of their poetry are also discussed, providing a new basis for comparison of four poets whose work is closely linked on other grounds remote from natural history.

The first chapter reviews representative figures and works of the centuries preceding the Renaissance and illustrates the medieval poetic conventions about birds that influenced the four poets. The remaining chapters treat each poet and his works in detail, comparing their use of this area of the natural world. The book concludes with an index of bird allusions in the works of the four poets, with occasional quotations illustrating the manner in which the traditional or observed habits of particular birds were put to poetic use. The book is illustrated with medieval and Renaissance illustrations of birds.

In this careful treatment of an important element of the poets’ works, Harrison has indicated the larger picture of their attitudes toward and use of the natural world about them. Accordingly, it might be said to constitute a chapter on the relationship of poetry and science at a crucial period in the history of thought.

For much of his material, Harrison journeyed to England, where, among other research activities, he visited museums of natural history and bird sanctuaries throughout the country.

Primarily intended for students of literature, They Tell of Birds will also be of interest to ornithologists in its presentation of the beliefs of antiquity and the Middle Ages about particular birds. For, as the distinguished ornithologist E. M. Nicholson has said: “We owe to poets a wealth of records of living wild birds long before scientific ornithology had started.”

A riveting memoir of one family’s struggle under a totalitarian regime

“Mayme Sevander and Laurie Hertzel tell a poignant tale of a hidden corner of U.S. and Soviet history. Tracing the hopes and hardships of one family over two continents, They Took My Father explores the boundaries of loyalty, identity, and ideals.” —Amy Goldstein, Washington Post

Critics from three major racial/ethnic minority communities in the United States—African American, Asian American, and Latino/a American—focus on the problematic of race and ethnicity in the Bible and in contemporary biblical interpretation. With keen eyes on both ancient text and contemporary context, contributors pay close attention to how racial/ethnic dynamics intersect with other differential relations of power such as gender, class, sexuality, and colonialism. In groundbreaking interaction, they also consider their readings alongside those of other racial/ethnic minority communities. The volume includes an introduction pointing out the crucial role of this work within minority criticism by looking at its historical trajectory, critical findings, and future directions. The contributors are Cheryl B. Anderson, Francisco O. García-Treto, Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Frank M. Yamada, Gale A. Yee, Jae-Won Lee, Gay L. Byron, Fernando F. Segovia, Randall C. Bailey, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Demetrius K. Williams, Mayra Rivera Rivera, Evelyn L. Parker, and James Kyung-Jin Lee.

This novel is the first part of the Ukrainian Trilogy of Polish poet and novelist Józef Łobodowski. Written between 1955 and 1960, the action of the trilogy plays out, for the most part, in the Kuban areas of Russia. Here Ukrainian, Russian, and Cossack live alongside and interact with Tatar and Circassian; there was also a large influx of other nationalities subject to the Tsar, such as Armenians and Poles — to which latter nation belongs Staś (Stanisław), the main character of the trilogy.

The Thickets presents the reader with a vivid picture of the chaos that reigned in the former Russian Empire following the toppling and execution of the Tsar, and the fall of Kerensky’s government. Young Staś, who had studied at the local classical gymnasium, is now reduced to peddling contraband on the black market, discovers to the reader’s eyes the chaos of war and occupation in an especially visceral way.

Enigmatic for many years, cosmic rays are now known to be not rays at all, but particles, the nuclei of atoms, raining down continually on the earth, where they can be detected throughout the atmosphere and sometimes even thousands of feet underground. This book tells the long-running detective story behind the discovery and study of cosmic rays, a story that stretches from the early days of subatomic particle physics in the 1890s to the frontiers of high-energy astrophysics today.

Writing for the amateur scientist and the educated general reader, Michael Friedlander, a cosmic ray researcher, relates the history of cosmic ray science from its accidental discovery to its present status. He explains how cosmic rays are identified and how their energies are measured, then surveys current knowledge and theories of thin cosmic rain. The most thorough, up-to-date, and readable account of these intriguing phenomena, his book makes us party to the search into the nature, behavior, and origins of cosmic rays—and into the sources of their enormous energy, sometimes hundreds of millions times greater than the energy achievable in the most powerful earthbound particle accelerators. As this search led unexpectedly to the discovery of new particles such as the muon, pion, kaon, and hyperon, and as it reveals scenes of awesome violence in the cosmos and offers clues about black holes, supernovas, neutron stars, quasars, and neutrinos, we see clearly why cosmic rays remain central to an astonishingly diverse range of research studies on scales infinitesimally small and large.

Attractively illustrated, engagingly written, this is a fascinating inside look at a science at the center of our understanding of our universe.

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are often dismissed as a fringe cult for their beliefs that African Americans are descendants of the ancient Israelites and that veganism leads to immortality. But John L. Jackson questions what “fringe” means in a world where cultural practices of every stripe circulate freely on the Internet. In this poignant and sophisticated examination of the limits of ethnography, the reader is invited into the visionary, sometimes vexing world of the AHIJ. Jackson challenges what Clifford Geertz called the “thick description” of anthropological research through a multidisciplinary investigation of how the AHIJ use media and technology to define their public image in the twenty-first century.

Moving far beyond the “modest witness” of nineteenth-century scientific discourse or the “thick descriptions” of twentieth-century anthropology, Jackson insists that Geertzian thickness is an impossibility, especially in a world where the anthropologist’s subject is a self-aware subject—one who crafts his own autoethnography while critically consuming the ethnographer’s offerings. Thin Description takes as its topic a group situated along the fault lines of several diasporas—African, American, Jewish—and provides an anthropological account of how race, religion, and ethnographic representation must be understood anew in the twenty-first century lest we reenact old mistakes in the study of black humanity.