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The Gang as an American Enterprise
Felix M Padilla
Rutgers University Press, 1992
The Diamonds are a Chicago Street gang whose members are second-generation Puerto Rican youths. For Felix Padilla, the young men who join the Diamonds have made a logical choice. The gang is an alternative and dependable route to emotional support, self-respect, material goods, and upward mobility. Although Padilla shares the same ethnic background as the gang members and also grew up in a Chicago barrio, gaining the trust of the Diamonds was not easy. Eventually, however, he was able to get close enough to the members to interview and observe them.

Padilla shows us his decision to join the Diamonds. From early childhood, boys develop positive images of the gang. They realize that the dominant culture promises mobility, but that their paths to that mobility are blocked. By joining a gang they can creatively oppose the dominant culture. Padilla does not paint a romanticized picture of the Diamonds. Some members come to understand that when they sell drugs, they benefit the gang's leaders and suppliers more than themselves. Further, they recognize that the gang is also subject to problems of domination and inequality. Padilla shows that though the Diamonds are sometimes violent, they are not psychopaths. While we need not approve of what they do, he urges us to understand it as a rational response to the doors these young men see closed around them.
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Gangsters to Governors
The New Bosses of Gambling in America
Clary, David
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Winner of the 2018 Current Events/Social Change Book Award from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards
Winner of the 2018 Bronze Current Events Book Award from the Independent Publisher Book Awards


Generations ago, gambling in America was an illicit activity, dominated by gangsters like Benny Binion and Bugsy Siegel. Today, forty-eight out of fifty states permit some form of legal gambling, and America’s governors sit at the head of the gaming table. But have states become addicted to the revenue gambling can bring? And does the potential of increased revenue lead them to place risky bets on new casinos, lotteries, and online games?

In Gangsters to Governors, journalist David Clary investigates the pros and cons of the shift toward state-run gambling. Unearthing the sordid history of America’s gaming underground, he demonstrates the problems with prohibiting gambling while revealing how today’s governors, all competing for a piece of the action, promise their citizens payouts that are rarely delivered. 

Clary introduces us to a rogue’s gallery of colorful characters, from John “Old Smoke” Morrissey, the Irish-born gangster who built Saratoga into a gambling haven in the nineteenth century, to Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who has furiously lobbied against online betting. By exploring the controversial histories of legal and illegal gambling in America, he offers a fresh perspective on current controversies, including bans on sports and online betting. Entertaining and thought-provoking, Gangsters to Governors considers the past, present, and future of our gambling nation.  

Author's website (http://www.davidclaryauthor.com)
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Garbage in the Garden State
Jordan P. Howell
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Garbage in the Garden State is the only book to examine the history of waste management in New Jersey. The state has played a pioneering role in the overall trajectory of waste management in the US. Howell's book is unique in the way that it places the contemporary challenges of waste management into their proper historical context – for instance, why does the system for recycling seem to work so poorly? Why do we have so many landfills in New Jersey, but also simultaneously not enough landfills or incinerators? 

Howell acknowledges that New Jersey is sometimes imagined, particularly by non-New Jerseyans, as a giant garbage dump for New York and Philadelphia. But every place has had to struggle with the challenges of waste management. New Jersey's trash history is in fact more interesting and more important than most. New Jersey’s waste history includes intensive planning, deep-seated political conflict, organized crime, and literally every level of state and federal judiciary. It is a colorful history, to say the least, and one that includes a number of firsts with regard to recycling, comprehensive planning, and the challenging economics of trash.
 
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Gay TV and Straight America
Becker, Ron
Rutgers University Press, 2006

After decades of silence on the subject of homosexuality, television in the 1990s saw a striking increase in programming that incorporated and, in many cases, centered on gay material. In shows including Friends, Seinfeld, Party of Five, Homicide, Suddenly Susan, The Commish, Ellen, Will & Grace, and others, gay characters were introduced, references to homosexuality became commonplace, and issues of gay and lesbian relationships were explored, often in explicit detail.

In Gay TV and Straight America, Ron Becker draws on a wide range of political and cultural indicators to explain this sudden upsurge of gay material on prime-time network television. Bringing together analysis of relevant Supreme Court rulings, media coverage of gay rights battles, debates about multiculturalism, concerns over political correctness, and much more, Becker's assessment helps us understand how and why televised gayness was constructed by a specific culture of tastemakers during the decade.

On one hand the evidence points to network business strategies that embraced gay material as a valuable tool for targeting a quality audience of well-educated, upscale adults looking for something "edgy" to watch. But, Becker also argues that the increase of gay material in the public eye creates growing mainstream anxiety in reaction to the seemingly civil public conversation about equal rights.

In today's cultural climate where controversies rage over issues of gay marriage yet millions of viewers tune in weekly to programs like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, this book offers valuable insight to the complex condition of America's sexual politics.


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Gender and International Relations
An Introduction
Steans, Jill
Rutgers University Press, 1998

Until relatively recently, little had been written about gender issues in international relations despite the increased importance of the study of gender in other areas of the social sciences. Gender and International Relations fills that gap, providing a clear and accessible guide to the study of gender issues, feminist theories, and international relations. Steans illustrates how gender is central to nationalisms and political identity, the state, citizenship and conceptions of political community, security, and global political economy and development. Drawing on feminist scholarship from across the social sciences, she demonstrates the uses of feminism as critique. She also introduces readers to contemporary theoretical debates in international relations using concrete concerns and easily understandable issues to ground the discussion.

The book does not construct a single feminist theory of international relations nor does it advance a particular perspective of how gender can best be understood in an international or global context. Rather, the book argues that feminist theories have collectively produced insights crucial to the study of international relations and that these insights can be used to challenge conventional approaches to the discipline.

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Gender and International Relations
An Introduction
Steans, Jill
Rutgers University Press, 1998

Until relatively recently, little had been written about gender issues in international relations despite the increased importance of the study of gender in other areas of the social sciences. Gender and International Relations fills that gap, providing a clear and accessible guide to the study of gender issues, feminist theories, and international relations. Steans illustrates how gender is central to nationalisms and political identity, the state, citizenship and conceptions of political community, security, and global political economy and development. Drawing on feminist scholarship from across the social sciences, she demonstrates the uses of feminism as critique. She also introduces readers to contemporary theoretical debates in international relations using concrete concerns and easily understandable issues to ground the discussion.

The book does not construct a single feminist theory of international relations nor does it advance a particular perspective of how gender can best be understood in an international or global context. Rather, the book argues that feminist theories have collectively produced insights crucial to the study of international relations and that these insights can be used to challenge conventional approaches to the discipline.

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Gender and Planning
A Reader
Servon, Lisa J
Rutgers University Press, 2005

Increasingly, experts recognize that gender has affected urban planning and the design of the spaces where we live and work. Too often, urban and suburban spaces support stereotypically male activities and planning methodologies reflect a male-dominated society.

To document and analyze the connection between gender and planning, the editors of this volume have assembled an interdisciplinary collection of influential essays by leading scholars. Contributors point to the ubiquitous single-family home, which prevents women from sharing tasks or pooling services. Similarly, they argue that public transportation routes are usually designed for the (male) worker's commute from home to the central city, and do not help the suburban dweller running errands. In addition to these practical considerations, many contributors offer theoretical perspectives on issues such as planning discourse and the construction of concepts of rationality.

While the essays call for an awareness of gender in matters of planning, they do not over-simplify the issue by moving toward a single feminist solution. Contributors realize that not all women gravitate toward communal opportunities, that many women now share the supposedly male commute, and that considerations of race and class need to influence planning as well. Among various recommendations, contributors urge urban planners to provide opportunities that facilitate women's needs, such as childcare on the way to work and jobs that are decentralized so that women can be close to their children.

Bringing together the most important writings of the last twenty-five years, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of planning theory as well as anyone concerned with gender and diversity.

 

 

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Gender and the Civil Rights Movement
Ling, Peter J
Rutgers University Press, 2004
This collection of nine essays analyzes the people, the protests, and the incidents of the civil rights movement through the lens of gender. More than just a study of women, the book examines the ways in which assigned sexual roles and values shaped the strategy, tactics, and ideology of the movement. The essays deal with topics ranging from the Montgomery bus boycott and Rhythm and Blues to gangsta rap and contemporary fiction, from the 1950s to the 1990s. Referring to groups such as the National Council of African American Men and events such as the Million Man March, the authors address male gender identity as much as female, arguing that slave/master relations from before the Civil War continued to affect Black masculinity in the postwar battle for civil rights. Whereas feminism traditionally deals with issues of patriarchy and prescribed gender roles, this volume shows how race relations continue to complicate sex-based definitions within the civil rights movement.
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Gender and the Science of Difference
Cultural Politics of Contemporary Science and Medicine
Fisher, Jill A
Rutgers University Press, 2011

How does contemporary science contribute to our understanding about what it means to be women or men? What are the social implications of scientific claims about differences between "male" and "female" brains, hormones, and genes? How does culture influence scientific and medical research and its findings about human sexuality, especially so-called normal and deviant desires and behaviors? Gender and the Science of Difference examines how contemporary science shapes and is shaped by gender ideals and images.

Prior scholarship has illustrated how past cultures of science were infused with patriarchal norms and values that influenced the kinds of research that was conducted and the interpretation of findings about differences between men and women. This interdisciplinary volume presents empirical inquiries into today's science, including examples of gendered scientific inquiry and medical interventions and research. It analyzes how scientific and medical knowledge produces gender norms through an emphasis on sex differences, and includes both U.S. and non-U.S. cases and examples.

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Gender and Violence in Haiti
Women’s Path from Victims to Agents
Benedetta Faedi Duramy
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Women in Haiti are frequent victims of sexual violence and armed assault. Yet an astonishing proportion of these victims also act as perpetrators of violent crime, often as part of armed groups. Award-winning legal scholar Benedetta Faedi Duramy visited Haiti to discover what causes these women to act in such destructive ways and what might be done to stop this tragic cycle of violence.

Gender and Violence in Haiti is the product of more than a year of extensive firsthand observations and interviews with the women who have been caught up in the widespread violence plaguing Haiti. Drawing from the experiences of a diverse group of Haitian women, Faedi Duramy finds that both the victims and perpetrators of violence share a common sense of anger and desperation. Untangling the many factors that cause these women to commit violence, from self-defense to revenge, she identifies concrete measures that can lead them to feel vindicated and protected by their communities.

Faedi Duramy vividly conveys the horrifying conditions pervading Haiti, even before the 2010 earthquake. But Gender and Violence in Haiti also carries a message of hope—and shows what local authorities and international relief agencies can do to help the women of Haiti.
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Gender Differences in Science Careers
The Project Access Study
Sonnert, Gerhard
Rutgers University Press, 1995

What determines successful careers in the field of science? What are the early indicators of later failures. And specifically, how do women scientists' career paths differ from men's? While it is easy to theorize about these questions, those who go to the trouble of an extensive empirical study find an increasingly complex picture.

Using the largest database of its kind (699 questionnaires and 200 face-to-face conversations), the authors investigate the career paths of recipients of prestigious postdoctoral fellowships--scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. They outline a theoretical framework for understanding the causes of gender disparities among scientists, test the hypothesis of a gender- specific "glass ceiling," and provide a wealth of pertinent statistical information.

Gender Differences in Science Careers reveals that, as institutional laws changed, patterns of discrimination and exclusion become more subtle. Despite the decline of rigid gender-role socialization, many social practices persist that lead, on average and often in counterintuitive ways, to the accumulation of disadvantages for women scientists. This book is directed to scholars in the social sciences, aspiring and practicing scientists, and administrators interested in equity issues.

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Gender in Latin America
Chant, Sylvia
Rutgers University Press, 2002

In Latin America, gender is a fundamental dimension of virtually every aspect of contemporary social, economic, and political life. Gender in Latin America is a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of gender in the region at the start of the twenty-first century. The authors draw on a wide range of research, including their own field-based expertise, to illuminate the importance of diversity in gender in this region. Debunking traditional stereotypes, the book charts changes and continuities in gender roles, relations and identities associated with the growing evidence produced by feminist scholarship and activism in the continent.

Chapters are arranged around themes such as gender and poverty, gender and population, gender and health, and gender and employment. Each chapter begins with an introduction to the core issues, and debates in the relevant field in order to set specific regional experiences within their global as well as regional contexts. The authors also refer to new bodies of literature on the subject, including those on men and masculinity, fatherhood, and sexuality.

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Gender on Campus
Issues for College Women
Gmelch, Sharon B
Rutgers University Press, 1998

Gender on Campus is the first book to combine solid analyses of the broad range of gender issues for women in college with realistic approaches to heighten awareness and alleviate problems. Written for students, the book first clarifies the concept of feminism and then examines gender dynamics in a variety of settings and contexts-from the classroom to the sports field and from language to social life. Sharon Gmelch probes sexism, racism, and homophobia on campus and surveys the special issues facing diverse women students. The book also addresses issues relating to body image and sexuality. Its final chapters analyze the role gender continues to play after college-in the media, workplace, and politics.

After a thorough discussion of a topic, each chapter concludes with possibilities for action ("What You Can Do") as well as a selected bibliography of books, videos, and organizations that students can consult. Gender on Campus is an invaluable resource for students, parents, and administrators, as well as an excellent text for women's studies courses.

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Gender Play
Girls and Boys in School
Thorne, Barrie
Rutgers University Press, 1993
You see it in every schoolyard: the girls play only with the girls, the boys play only with the boys. Why? And what do the kids think about this? Breaking with familiar conventions for thinking about children and gender, Gender Play develops fresh insights into the everyday social worlds of kids in elementary schools in the United States. Barrie Thorne draws on her daily observations in the classroom and on the playground to show how children construct and experience gender in school. With rich detail,she looks at the "play of gender" in the organization of groups of kids and activities - activities such as "chase-and-kiss," "cooties," "goin' with" and teasing.

Thorne observes children in schools in working-class communities, emphasizing the experiences of fourth and fifth graders. Most of the children she observed were white, but a sizable minority were Latino, Chicano, or African American. Thorne argues that the organization and meaning of gender are influenced by age, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and social class, and that they shift with social context. She sees gender identity not through the lens of individual socialization or difference, but rather as a social process involving groups of children. Thorne takes us on a fascinating journey of discovery, provides new insights about children, and offers teachers practical suggestions for increasing cooperative mixed-gender interaction.
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Gender Violence in Peace and War
States of Complicity
Sanford, Victoria
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Reports from war zones often note the obscene victimization of women, who are frequently raped, tortured, beaten, and pressed into sexual servitude. Yet this reign of terror against women not only occurs during exceptional moments of social collapse, but during peacetime too. As this powerful book argues, violence against women should be understood as a systemic problem—one for which the state must be held accountable. 
 
The twelve essays in Gender Violence in Peace and War present a continuum of cases where the state enables violence against women—from state-sponsored torture to lax prosecution of sexual assault. Some contributors uncover buried histories of state violence against women throughout the twentieth century, in locations as diverse as Ireland, Indonesia, and Guatemala. Others spotlight ongoing struggles to define the state’s role in preventing gendered violence, from domestic abuse policies in the Russian Federation to anti-trafficking laws in the United States. 
 
Bringing together cutting-edge research from political science, history, gender studies, anthropology, and legal studies, this collection offers a comparative analysis of how the state facilitates, legitimates, and perpetuates gender violence worldwide. The contributors also offer vital insights into how states might adequately protect women’s rights in peacetime, as well as how to intervene when a state declares war on its female citizens.  
 
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Gender/Body/Knowledge
Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing
Jaggar, Alison M
Rutgers University Press, 1989
The essays in this interdisciplinary collection share the conviction that modern western paradigms of knowledge and reality are gender-biased. Some contributors challenge and revise western conceptions of the body as the domain of the biological and 'natural,' the enemy of reason, typically associated with women.
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Gendering Disability
Smith, Bonnie G
Rutgers University Press, 2004

Disability and gender, terms that have previously seemed so clear-cut, are becoming increasingly complex in light of new politics and scholarship. These words now suggest complicated sets of practices and ways of being.

Contributors to this innovative collection explore the intersection of gender and disability in the arts, consumer culture, healing, the personal and private realms, and the appearance of disability in the public sphere—both in public fantasies and in public activism. Beginning as separate enterprises that followed activist and scholarly paths, gender and disability studies have reached a point where they can move beyond their boundaries for a common landscape to inspire new areas of inquiry. Whether from a perspective in the humanities, social sciences, sciences, or arts, the shared subject matter of gender and disability studies—the body, social and cultural hierarchy, identity, discrimination and inequality, representation, and political activism—insistently calls for deeper conversation. This volume provides fresh findings not only about the discrimination practiced against women and people with disabilities, but also about the productive parallelism between these two categories.

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Generation at the Crossroads
Apathy and Action on the American Campus
Loeb, Paul R
Rutgers University Press, 1994

Challenging prevailing media stereotypes, Generation at the Crossroads explores the beliefs and choices of the students who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. For seven years, at over a hundred campuses in thirty states, Paul Loeb asked students about the values they held. He examines their concepts of responsibility, the links they draw between present and future, and how they view themselves in relation to the larger human community in which they live. He brings us a range of voices, from "I'm not that kind of person," to "I had to take a stand." Loeb looks at how the rest of us can serve young people as better role models, and give them courage and vision to help build a better world.

This insightful book explores the culture of withdrawal that dominated American campuses through most of the eighties. He locates its roots in historical ignorance, relentless individualism, mistrust of social movements, and a general isolation from urgent realities. He examines why a steadily increasing minority has begun to take on critical public issues, whether environmental activism, apartheid, hunger and homelessness, affordable education, or racial and sexual equity. Loeb looks at individuals who have overcome precisely the barriers he has described, and how their journeys can become models. The generational choices he explores will shape our common future.

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Genetic Witness
Science, Law, and Controversy in the Making of DNA Profiling
Jay D. Aronson
Rutgers University Press, 2007
When DNA profiling was first introduced into the American legal system in 1987, it was heralded as a technology that would revolutionize law enforcement. As an investigative tool, it has lived up to much of this hype—it is regularly used to track down unknown criminals, put murderers and rapists behind bars, and exonerate the innocent. 
   
Yet, this promise took ten turbulent years to be fulfilled.  In Genetic Witness, Jay D. Aronson uncovers the dramatic early history of DNA profiling that has been obscured by the technique’s recent success.  He demonstrates that robust quality control and quality assurance measures were initially nonexistent, interpretation of test results was based more on assumption than empirical evidence, and the technique was susceptible to error at every stage. Most of these issues came to light only through defense challenges to what prosecutors claimed to be an infallible technology.  Although this process was fraught with controversy, inefficiency, and personal antagonism, the quality of DNA evidence improved dramatically as a result. Aronson argues, however, that the dream of a perfect identification technology remains unrealized.
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Genetics and the Unsettled Past
The Collision of DNA, Race, and History
Wailoo, Keith
Rutgers University Press, 2012

Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to perform a kind of racially charged cultural work: to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the “nature” of identity in the present.

Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history.

This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines—biology, history, cultural studies, law, medicine, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology—to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book’s essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.

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Genocide as Social Practice
Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina's Military Juntas
by Daniel Feierstein, Translated by Douglas Andrew Town
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Genocide not only annihilates people but also destroys and reorganizes social relations, using terror as a method. In Genocide as Social Practice, social scientist Daniel Feierstein looks at the policies of state-sponsored repression pursued by the Argentine military dictatorship against political opponents between 1976 and 1983 and those pursued by the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945. He finds similarities, not in the extent of the horror but in terms of the goals of the perpetrators.

The Nazis resorted to ruthless methods in part to stifle dissent but even more importantly to reorganize German society into a Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community, in which racial solidarity would supposedly replace class struggle. The situation in Argentina echoes this. After seizing power in 1976, the Argentine military described its own program of forced disappearances, torture, and murder as a “process of national reorganization” aimed at remodeling society on “Western and Christian” lines.

For Feierstein, genocide can be considered a technology of power—a form of social engineering—that creates, destroys, or reorganizes relationships within a given society. It influences the ways in which different social groups construct their identity and the identity of others, thus shaping the way that groups interrelate. Feierstein establishes continuity between the “reorganizing genocide” first practiced by the Nazis in concentration camps and the more complex version—complex in terms of the symbolic and material closure of social relationships —later applied in Argentina. In conclusion, he speculates on how to construct a political culture capable of confronting and resisting these trends.

First published in Argentina, in Spanish, Genocide as Social Practice has since been translated into many languages, now including this English edition. The book provides a distinctive and valuable look at genocide through the lens of Latin America as well as Europe.

Download open access ebook here.
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Genocide Studies
Pathways Ahead
Jeffrey S. Bachman
Rutgers University Press
In recent years, the world has been shaken by numerous events that have caused and continue to cause massive human suffering, from the COVID-19 pandemic to intrastate and interstate armed conflicts. Moreover, climate change continues to plow ahead, contributing to growing tensions, population movements, and resource scarcity. Meanwhile, the methods by which groups and group life are threatened, and the means by which violence is incited and perpetrated, continue to evolve. Such divergent crises, even when they overlap or intersect, confound definition and label. This book seeks not to answer the question, "What is genocide?" but rather "What is Genocide Studies?" When Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide in 1944 he could not have foreseen what the world would look like today. Now is the time to think about current manifestations of genocide and those likely to emerge in the future.
 
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Genomic Imprinting and Kinship
Haig, David
Rutgers University Press, 2001
Until twenty years ago we had no idea which of our genes came from our father and which came from our mother. We took it for granted that our genes expressed themselves identically and that there was a 50/50 chance that they came from either parent. We also assumed that they worked in cooperation with each other. The biggest breakthrough in genetics in the past two decades has been the discovery of genomic imprinting, which allows us to trace genes to the parent of origin. David Haig has been at the forefront of theorizing these developments. He argues that these "paternally and maternally active genes" comprise less than one percent of our total gene count and are far from being cooperative. In fact, they have been shown to be in competition with one another. If Haig's theory holds true, imprinted genes exemplify an extraordinary within-individual conflict, while shaking up our fundamental ideas of what it means to be an individual. This collection of Haig's papers represents a unique comprehensive overview of the state of evolutionary biology. The pages are linked by a commentary that provides background, and brings readers up-to-date on developments that occurred after the paper's original publication. Since genomic imprinting touches on many areas in the life sciences, including evolutionary biology and developmental genetics, Haig's work is scattered through the literature. This volume brings his work together for the first time. A volume in the Rutgers Series in Human Evolution, edited by Robert Trivers. David Haig is an associate professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University.
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Gentile New York
The Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants
Ribak, Gil
Rutgers University Press, 2012

The very question of “what do Jews think about the goyim” has fascinated Jews and Gentiles, anti-Semites and philo-Semites alike. Much has been written about immigrant Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New York City, but Gil Ribak’s critical look at the origins of Jewish liberalism in America provides a more complicated and nuanced picture of the Americanization process.

Gentile New York examines these newcomers’ evolving feelings toward non-Jews through four critical decades in the American Jewish experience. Ribak considers how they perceived Gentiles in general as well as such different groups as “Yankees” (a common term for WASPs in many Yiddish sources), Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, and African Americans. As they discovered the complexity of America’s racial relations, the immigrants found themselves at odds with “white” American values or behavior and were drawn instead into cooperative relationships with other minorities. Sparked with many previously unknown anecdotes, quotations, and events, Ribak’s research relies on an impressive number of memoirs, autobiographies, novels, newspapers, and journals culled from both sides of the Atlantic.
 

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Gentrification Down the Shore
Molly Vollman Makris
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Makris and Gatta engage in a rich ethnographic investigation of Asbury Park to better understand the connection between jobs and seasonal gentrification and the experiences of longtime residents in this beach-community city. They demonstrate how the racial inequality in the founding of Asbury Park is reverberating a century later. This book tells an important and nuanced tale of gentrification using an intersectional lens to examine the history of race relations, the too often overlooked history of the postindustrial city, the role of the LGBTQ population, barriers to employment and access to amenities, and the role of developers as the city rapidly changes. Makris and Gatta draw on in-depth interviews, focus groups, ethnographic observation, as well as data analysis to tell the reader a story of life on the West Side of Asbury Park as the East Side prospers and to point to a potential path forward.
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A Geography of New Jersey
The City in the Garden
Stansfield, Charles A.
Rutgers University Press, 1998
New Jersey is "the city in the garden." It is a bundle of paradoxes - a highly industrialized state famous for its seashore and mountain resorts; a fairly conservative state politically that nonetheless pioneered state land use, zoning, and environmental protection legislation. The only state to be characterized by the U.S. Census as entirely metropolitan, New Jersey has the highest population density in the nation. It is a highly suburbanized state that remains important agriculturally, one in which both very large and very small farms continue to multiply. 
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Geography's Inner Worlds
Pervasive Themes in Contemporary American Geography
Abler, Ronald F
Rutgers University Press, 1992

Twenty-six leading American geographers meditate on the themes that unify contemporary geography. They emphasize the concepts and methods that run through all geography's sub-disciplines and give it a distinctive place among both the natural and social sciences.

Prepared under the sponsorship of the American Association of Geographers for the International Geographical Congress 1992, these insightful essays on the character of the discipline and its future will be required reading for every student of the field.

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George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art
Patten, Robert L
Rutgers University Press, 1991

"Patten consistently manages with great deftness to intertwine the personal and the historical, the strands of Cruikshank's life and those of his caricatures, illustrations, and moralities without a sign of jargon or pedantry. . . . This is a monumental life and works."--Ronald Paulson, The Johns Hopkins University

"At last, an authoritative, exhaustively researched biography of one of nineteenth-century England's greatest popular artists! It will rescue him from the biographical obscurity in which he has dwelt and inspire a fresh estimate of his achievement as a rough-and-tumble caricaturist and prolific book illustrator."--Richard D. Altick, Ohio State University

The etchings and wood engravings by George Cruikshank (1792-1878) recorded, commented on, and satirized his times to such an extent that they have been frequently used to represent the age. Cruikshank, a popular artist in the propaganda war against Napoleon, an ardent campaigner for Reform and Temperance, and the foremost illustrator of such classics as Grimms' Fairy Tales, Scott's novels, and Dickens's Oliver Twist, is known for his versatility, imagination, humor, and incisive images. His long life, marked by a ceaseless struggle to win recognition for his art, intersected with many of Britain's important political, social, and cultural leaders.

Robert Patten provides the first documentary biography of Cruikshank. In this first volume of a two-volume work, which covers the artist's Regency caricatures and early book illustrations, Patten demonstrates the ways that Cruikshank was, as his contemporaries frequently declared, the Hogarth of the nineteenth century. Having reviewed over 8,500 unpublished letters and most of Cruikshank's 12,000 or more printed images, Patten gives a thorough and reliable account of the artist's career. He puts Cruikshank's achievement into a variety of larger contexts--publishing history, political and cultural history, the traditions of figurations practiced by Cruikshank's contemporaries, and the literary and social productions of nineteenth-century Britain.

Published to coincide with the Fall 1992 bicentennial celebrations of the artist's birth, this biography provides both the general reader and the specialist with a wealth of new information conveyed in a lively, non-technical prose. Patten's book contributes to current investigation of the rich interactions between high art and low art, texts and pictures, politics and imagination.

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George Sand
Writing for Her Life
Naginski, Isabelle
Rutgers University Press, 1991
Sand was a prolific writer of nearly 60 novels who dealt with the serious issues of her time and was identified with the Romantic literary movement. Yet serious study of her works is lacking, for Sand became known more for her eccentric lifestyle and love affairs with famous contemporaries, i.e., Alfred de Musset and Frederic Chopin, than her career as a writer. Moreover, she was unique in her approach as a woman who refused to trivialize her craft because of her gender. The author of this critical study sets the record straight, belatedly bestowing upon Sand the academic acclaim that is long past due. Through extensive analysis of her principal works, she delineates her progression from mal du siecle pessimism to utopian optimism and from diagnosing society's ills to prescribing a cure for them. The author (French, Russian, and comparative literature, Tufts Univ.) has aptly illuminated Sand's unique narrative approach and has opened the door for further examination of her works.
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The George Washington Bridge
Poetry in Steel
Michael Aaron Rockland
Rutgers University Press, 2020

Since opening in 1931, the George Washington Bridge, linking New York and New Jersey, has become the busiest bridge in the world, with 103 million vehicles crossing it in 2016. Many people also consider it the most beautiful bridge in the world, yet remarkably little has been written about this majestic structure.

Intimate and engaging, this revised and expanded edition of Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB, as it is often called, that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and even post-9/11 mentalities. This new edition brings new insight since its initial publication in 2008, including a new chapter on the infamous “Bridgegate” Chris Christie-era scandal of 2013, when members of the governor's administration shut down access to the bridge, causing a major traffic jam and scandal and subsequently helping undermine Christie’s candidacy for the US presidency.

Stunning photos, from when the bridge was built in the late 1920s through the present, are a powerful complement to the bridge's history. Rockland covers the competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Readers will learn about the Swiss immigrant Othmar Ammann, an unsung hero who designed and built the GWB, and how a lack of funding during the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers, which we admire today. There are chapters discussing accidents on the bridge, such as an airplane crash landing in the westbound lanes and the sad story of suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and Rockland's personal adventures on the bridge, including scaling its massive towers on a cable.

Movies, television shows, songs, novels, countless images, and even PlayStation 2 games have aided the GWB in becoming a part of the global popular culture. This tribute will captivate residents living in the shadow of the GWB, the millions who walk, jog, bike, skate, or drive across it, as well as tourists and those who will visit it someday.

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The George Washington Bridge
Poetry in Steel
Michael Aaron Rockland
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Since opening in 1931, the George Washington Bridge, linking New York and New Jersey, has become the busiest bridge in the world, with 108 million vehicles crossing it in 2007. Many people also consider it the most beautiful bridge in the world, yet remarkably little has been written about this majestic structure.

Intimate and engaging, Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB, as it is often called, that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and even post-9/11 mentality. Stunning archival photos, from the late 1920s when the bridge was built through the present, are a powerful complement to the bridge's history. Rockland covers the competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Readers will learn about the Swiss immigrant Othmar Ammann, an unsung hero who designed and built the GWB, and how a lack of funding during the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers, which we admire today. There are chapters discussing accidents on the bridge, such as an airplane crash landing in the westbound lanes and the sad story of suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and Rockland's personal adventures on the bridge, including scaling its massive towers on a cable.

Movies, television shows, songs, novels, countless images, and even PlayStation 2 games have aided the GWB in becoming a part of the global popular culture. This tribute will captivate residents living in the shadow of the GWB, the millions who walk, jog, bike, skate, or drive across it, as well as tourists and those who will visit it some day.
  • First major book on the George Washington Bridge
  • Full of amazing facts about the GWB that will surprise even bridge historians
  • Includes over 30 spectacular illustrations, ranging from archival photographs of the building of the bridge to those that show it draped in an enormous flag after 9/11
  • Includes personal accounts of the author's adventures on the bridge
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George's Run
A Writer's Journey through the Twilight Zone
Henry Chamberlain
Rutgers University Press, 2023
George Clayton Johnson was an up-and-coming short story writer who broke into Hollywood in a big way when he co-wrote the screenplay for Ocean’s Eleven. More legendary works followed, including Logan’s Run and classic scripts for shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek. In the meantime, he forged friendships with some of the era’s most visionary science fiction writers, including Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, and Rod Serling. 
 
Later in life, Johnson befriended comics journalist and artist Henry Chamberlain, and the two had long chats about his amazing life and career. Now Chamberlain pays tribute to his late friend in the graphic novel George’s Run, which brings Johnson’s creative milieu to life in vividly illustrated color panels. The result feels less like reading a conventional biography and more like sitting in on an intimate conversation between friends as they recollect key moments in pop culture history, as well as the colorful band of writers known as the “Rat Pack of Science Fiction.” 
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The Georgia of the North
Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey
Hettie V. Williams
Rutgers University Press, 2024
The Georgia of the North is a historical narrative about Black women and the long civil rights movement in New Jersey from the Great Migration to 1954. Specifically, the critical role played by Black women in forging interracial, cross-class, and cross-gender alliances at the local and national level and their role in securing the passage of progressive civil rights legislation in the Garden State is at the core of this book. This narrative is largely defined by a central question:  How and why did New Jersey’s Black leaders, community members, and women in particular, affect major civil rights legislation, legal equality, and integration a decade before the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision? In this analysis, the history of the early Black freedom struggle in New Jersey is predicated on the argument that the Civil Rights Movement began in New Jersey, and that Black women were central actors in this struggle. 
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German Ways of War
The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War Films
Jaimey Fisher
Rutgers University Press, 2022
German Ways of War deploys theories of space, mobility, and affect to investigate how war films realize their political projects. Analyzing films across the decades, from the 1910s to 2000s, German Ways of War addresses an important lacuna in media studies: while scholars have tended to focus on the similarities between cinematic looking and weaponized targeting -- between shooting a camera and discharging a gun – this book argues that war films negotiate spaces throughout that frame their violence in ways more revealing than their battle scenes. Beyond that well-known intersection of visuality and violence, German Ways of War explores how the genre frames violence within spatio-affective operations. The production of novel spaces and evocation of new affects transform war films, including the genre’s manipulation of mobility, landscape, territory, scales, and topological networks. Such effects amount to what author Jaimey Fisher terms the films’ “affective geographies” that interweave narrative-generated affects, spatial depictions, and political processes.
 
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Germany, Propaganda and Total War, 1914-1918
Welch, David
Rutgers University Press, 2000

Adolf Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf, was scathing in his condemnation of German propaganda in the First World War, declaring that Germany had failed to recognize propaganda as a weapon of the first order. This despite the fact that propaganda had been regarded, arguably for the first time, as an intrinsic part of the war effort.

            David Welch has written the first book to fully examine German society — politics, propaganda, public opinion, and total war — in the Great War. Drawing on a wide range of sources — from posters, newspapers, journals, film, parliamentary debates, police and military reports, and private papers — Welch argues that the moral collapse of Germany was due less to the failure to disseminate propaganda than to the inability of the military authorities and the Kaiser to reinforce this propaganda, and to acknowledge the importance of public opinion in forging an effective link between leadership and the people.

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Germany's Nature
Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History
Lekan, Thomas
Rutgers University Press, 2005
Germany boasts one of the strongest environmental records in the world. The Rhine River is cleaner than it has been in decades, recycling is considered a civic duty, and German manufacturers of pollution-control technology export their products around the globe. Yet, little has been written about the country's remarkable environmental history, and even less of that research is available in English.

Now for the first time, a survey of the country's natural and cultural landscapes is available in one volume. Essays by leading scholars of history, geography, and the social sciences move beyond the Green movement to uncover the enduring yet ever-changing cultural patterns, social institutions, and geographic factors that have sustained Germany's relationship to its land.

Unlike the American environmental movement, which is still dominated by debates about wilderness conservation and the retention of untouched spaces, discussions of the German landscape have long recognized human impact as part of the "natural order." Drawing on a variety of sites as examples, including forests, waterways, the Autobahn, and natural history museums, the essays demonstrate how environmental debates in Germany have generally centered on the best ways to harmonize human priorities and organic order, rather than on attempts to reify wilderness as a place to escape from industrial society.

Germany's Nature is essential reading for students and professionals working in the fields of environmental studies, European history, and the history of science and technology.
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Get Involved!
Stories of Bahamian Civil Society
Kim Williams-Pulfer
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Philanthropy is commonly depicted as a universal practice and is either valued for supporting community transformation or critiqued for limiting social justice. However, dominant definitions and even popular connotations tend to privilege wealthy Western approaches. Using the Caribbean as a rich site of observance and concentrating on the island nation-state of The Bahamas, Get Involved! uncovers the hidden and under-documented activities of “philanthropy from below,” revealing a broader conception of philanthropy and civil society, especially within Black and other historically marginalized populations. Kim Williams-Pulfer draws on narrative analysis from enslavement to the current post-post-colonial moment, depicting the repertoires and practices of primarily Afro-Bahamians through the stories emerging from history (including the transnational observations of Zora Neale Hurston, social movements, and political and social institution building), the arts (from Junkanoo, literature, and visual practices), to the lived experiences of contemporary civil society leaders. Get Involved! shows the long history and continued significance of civil society and philanthropic engagement in The Bahamas, the circum-Caribbean, and the wider African Diaspora.

Junkanoo is the national cultural festival of The Bahamas.  It fosters a sense of community pride, identity, companionship, spirituality and unity. Watch a video about Junknoo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnMpMesNb1Q&t=14s
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Getting It, Having It, Keeping It Up
Straight Men’s Sexuality in Public and Private
Beth Montemurro
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Scholars and social critics are looking at gender and sexuality, as well as masculinity, in new ways and with more attention to the way cultural ideologies affect men’s and women’s lives. With the rise of an online “incel” (involuntarily celibate) community and the perpetration of acts of violence in their name, as well as increased awareness about the complexities of sexual interaction brought to the fore by the #metoo movement, it has become critical to discuss how men’s sexuality and masculinity are related, as well as the way men feel about the messages they get about being a man. Prior research on masculinity and masculine sexuality has examined the experiences of adolescent boys. But what happens to boys as they become men and as many move away from homo-social environments into sexual relationships? What happens when they no longer have a crowd of peers to posture or perform for? How do their sexual experiences and sexual selves change? How do they prove their masculinity in a society that demands it when they are no longer surrounded by peers? And how do they cultivate sexual selves and sexual self-confidence in a culture that expects them to always already be knowledgeable, desiring sexual subjects? In Getting It, Having It, Keeping It Up, Beth Montemurro explores the cultivation of heterosexual men’s sexual selves. Based on detailed, in-depth interviews with a large, diverse group of  heterosexual men between the ages of 20 and 68, she investigates how getting sex, having sex, and keeping up their sex lives matters to men. Ultimately, Montemurro uncovers the tension between public, cultural narratives about hetero-masculinity and men’s private, sexual selves and their intimate experiences.
 
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Girlhood
A Global History
Helgren, Jennifer
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Girlhood, interdisciplinary and global in source, scope, and methodology, examines the centrality of girlhood in shaping women's lives. Scholars study how age and gender, along with a multitude of other identities, work together to influence the historical experience.

Spanning a broad time frame from 1750 to the present, essays illuminate the various continuities and differences in girls' lives across culture and region--girls on all continents except Antarctica are represented. Case studies and essays are arranged thematically to encourage comparisons between girls' experiences in diverse locales, and to assess how girls were affected by historical developments such as colonialism, political repression, war, modernization, shifts in labor markets, migrations, and the rise of consumer culture.
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Girls in Trouble with the Law
Schaffner, Laurie
Rutgers University Press, 2006
In Girls in Trouble with the Law, sociologist Laurie Schaffner takes us inside juvenile detention centers and explores the worlds of the young women incarcerated within. Across the nation, girls of color are disproportionately represented in detention facilities, and many report having experienced physical harm and sexual assaults. For girls, the meaning of these and other factors such as the violence they experience remain undertheorized and below the radar of mainstream sociolegal scholarship. When gender is considered as an analytic category, Schaffner shows how gender is often seen through an outmoded lens.

Offering a critical assessment of what she describes as a gender-insensitive juvenile legal system, Schaffner makes a compelling argument that current policies do not go far enough to empower disadvantaged girls so that communities can assist them in overcoming the social limitations and gender, sexual, and racial/ethnic discrimination that continue to plague young women growing up in contemporary United States.
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Girls Who Wore Black
Women Writing the Beat Generation
Johnson, Ronna C
Rutgers University Press, 2002
What do we know about the women who played an important role in creating the literature of the Beat Generation? Until recently, very little. Studies of the movement have effaced or excluded women writers, such as Elise Cowen, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Hettie Jones, and Diane Di Prima, each one a significant figure of the postwar Beat communities. Equally free-thinking and innovative as the founding generation of men, women writers, fluent in Beat, hippie, and women's movement idioms, partook of and bridged two important countercultures of the American mid-century. Persistently foregrounding female experiences in the cold war 1950s and in the counterculture 1960s and in every decade up to the millennium, women writing Beat have brought nonconformity, skepticism, and gender dissent to postmodern culture and literary production in the United States and beyond.
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Girls Will Be Boys
Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934
Horak, Laura
Rutgers University Press, 2016
2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Finalist for 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association
Long-listed for the 2017 Best Photography Book Award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation​


Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men.
 
Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity.
 
Girls Will Be Boys excavates a rich history of gender-bending film roles, enabling readers to appreciate the wide array of masculinities that these actresses performed—from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement. Taking us on a guided tour through a treasure-trove of vintage images, Girls Will Be Boys helps us view the histories of gender, sexuality, and film through fresh eyes.   
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Glamour in a Golden Age
Movie Stars of the 1930s
McLean, Adrienne L
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Shirley Temple, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, William Powell and Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, and Gary Cooper-Glamour in a Golden Age presents original essays from eminent film scholars that analyze movie stars of the 1930s against the background of contemporary American cultural history.

Stardom is approached as an effect of, and influence on, the particular historical and industrial contexts that enabled these actors and actresses to be discovered, featured in films, publicized, and to become recognized and admired-sometimes even notorious-parts of the cultural landscape. Using archival and popular material, including fan and mass market magazines, other promotional and publicity material, and of course films themselves, contributors also discuss other artists who were incredibly popular at the time, among them Ann Harding, Ruth Chatterton, Nancy Carroll, Kay Francis, and Constance Bennett.
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The Glass Church
Robert H. Schuller, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry
Mark T. Mulder
Rutgers University Press, 2020

Robert H. Schuller’s ministry—including the architectural wonder of the Crystal Cathedral and the polished television broadcast of Hour of Power—cast a broad shadow over American Christianity. Pastors flocked to Southern California to learn Schuller’s techniques. The President of United States invited him sit prominently next to the First Lady at the State of the Union Address. Muhammad Ali asked for the pastor’s autograph. It seemed as if Schuller may have started a second Reformation. And then it all went away. As Schuller’s ministry wrestled with internal turmoil and bankruptcy, his emulators—including Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, and Joel Osteen— nurtured megachurches that seemed to sweep away the Crystal Cathedral as a relic of the twentieth century. How did it come to this?

Certainly, all churches depend on a mix of constituents, charisma, and capital, yet the size and ambition of large churches like Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral exert enormous organizational pressures to continue the flow of people committed to the congregation, to reinforce the spark of charismatic excitement generated by high-profile pastors, and to develop fresh flows of capital funding for maintenance of old projects and launching new initiatives. The constant attention to expand constituencies, boost charisma, and stimulate capital among megachurches produces an especially burdensome strain on their leaders. By orienting an approach to the collapse of the Crystal Cathedral on these three core elements—constituency, charisma, and capital—The Glass Church demonstrates how congregational fragility is greatly accentuated in larger churches, a notion we label megachurch strain, such that the threat of implosion is significantly accentuated by any failures to properly calibrate the inter-relationship among these elements.

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The Glass Slipper
Women and Love Stories
Susan Ostrov Weisser
Rutgers University Press, 2013

Why is the story of romance in books, magazines, and films still aimed at women rather than at men? Even after decades of feminism, traditional ideas and messages about romantic love still hold sway and, in our “postfeminist” age, are more popular than ever. Increasingly, we have become a culture of romance: stories of all kinds shape the terms of love. Women, in particular, love a love story.

The Glass Slipper is about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Comparing influential classics to their current counterparts, Susan Ostrov Weisser relates in highly amusing prose how these stories are shaped and defined by and for women, the main consumers of romantic texts. Following a trajectory that begins with Jane Austen and concludes with Internet dating sites, Weisser shows the many ways in which nineteenth-century views of women’s nature and the Victorian idea of romance have survived the feminist critique of the 1970s and continue in new and more ambiguous forms in today’s media, with profound implications for women.

More than a book about romance in fiction and media, The Glass Slipper illustrates how traditional stories about women’s sexuality, femininity, and romantic love have survived as seemingly protective elements in a more modern, feminist, sexually open society, confusing the picture for women themselves. Weisser compares diverse narratives—historical and contemporary from high literature and “low” genres—discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Victorian women’s magazines, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Disney movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories.

Ultimately, Weisser shows that the narrative versions of the Glass Slipper should be taken as seriously as the Glass Ceiling as we see how these representations of romantic love are meant to inform women’s beliefs and goals. In this book, Weisser’s goal is not to shatter the Glass Slipper, but to see through it.

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Global Child
Children and Families Affected by War, Displacement, and Migration
Myriam Denov
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Armed conflicts continue to wreak havoc on children and families around the world with profound effects. In 2017, 420 million children—nearly one in five—were living in conflict-affected areas, an increase in 30 million from the previous year. The recent surge in war-induced migration, referred to as a “global refugee crisis” has made migration a highly politicized issue, with refugee populations and host countries facing unique challenges. We know from research related to asylum seeking families that it is vital to think about children and families in relation to what it means to stay together, what it means for parents to be separated from their children, and the kinds of everyday tensions that emerge in living in dangerous, insecure, and precarious circumstances. In Global Child, the authors draw on what they have learned through their collaborative undertakings, and highlight the unique features of participatory, arts-based, and socio-ecological approaches to studying war-affected children and families, demonstrating the collective strength as well as the limitations and ethical implications of such research. Building on work across the Global South and the Global North, this book aims to deepen an understanding of their tri-pillared approach, and the potential of this methodology for contributing to improved practices in working with war-affected children and their families.
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Global Cinema Networks
Gorfinkel, Elena
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Global Cinema Networks investigates the evolving aesthetic forms, technological and industrial conditions, and social impacts of cinema in the twenty-first century. The collection’s esteemed contributors excavate sites of global filmmaking in an era of digital reproduction and amidst new modes of circulation and aesthetic convergence, focusing primarily on recent films made across Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Moving beyond the digital as a harbinger of transformation, the volume offers new ways of thinking about cinema networks in a historical continuum, from “international” to “world” to “transnational” to “global” frames.  
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Global Cities
Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age
Petro, Patrice
Rutgers University Press, 2003
In Global Cities, scholars from an impressive array of disciplines critique the growing body of literature on the process broadly known as "globalization." This interdisciplinary focus enables the authors to explore the complex geographies of modern cities, and offer possible strategies for reclaiming a sense of place and community in these globalized urban settings. While examining major cities including New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, and Hong Kong, contributors insist that the study of urban experiences must remain as attentive to the material effects as to the psychic and social consequences of globalization. Accordingly, essays explore the implications of global culture for architecture, cinema, and communication--but do so in a way that highlights the importance of the spaces between such metropolitan centers. These locations, the authors argue, serve as increasingly important "frontier zones," where a diverse set of actors converge and contend for power and presence. Such a perspective ultimately adds nuance and meaning to our understanding of the heterogeneous urban landscapes of these global cities. Linda Krause is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Patrice Petro is professor of film studies and director of the Center for International Education at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. A volume in the New Directions in International Studies series, edited by Patrice Petro
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Global Currents
Media and Technology Now
Oren, Tasha G
Rutgers University Press, 2004

Rhetoric about media technology tends to fall into two extreme categories: unequivocal celebration or blanket condemnation.  This is particularly true in debate over the clash of values when first world media infiltrate third world audiences.

Bringing together the best new work on contemporary media practices, technologies, and policies, the essayists in Global Currents argue that neither of these extreme views accurately represents the role of media technology today. New ways of thinking about film, television, music, and the internet demonstrate that it is not only media technologies that affect the cultures into which they are introduced—it is just as likely that the receiving culture will change the media.

Topics covered in the volume include copyright law and surveillance technology, cyber activism in the African Diaspora, transnational monopolies and local television industries, the marketing and consumption of  “global music,” “click politics” and the war on Afghanistan, the techno-politics of distance education, artificial intelligence and global legal institutions, and traveling and “squatting” in digital space. Balanced between major theoretical positions and original field research, the selections address the political and cultural meanings that surround and configure new technologies.

 

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Global Dynamics of Shi'a Marriages
Religion, Gender, and Belonging
Yafa Shanneik
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Muslim marriages have been the focus of considerable public debate in Europe and beyond, in Muslim-majority countries as well as in settings where Muslims are a minority. Most academic work has focused on how the majority Sunni Muslims conclude marriages. This volume, in contrast, focuses on Twelver Shi'a Muslims in Iran, Pakistan, Oman, Indonesia, Norway, and the Netherlands. The volume makes an original contribution to understanding the global dynamics of Shi'a marriage practices in a wide range of contexts--not only its geographical spread but also by providing a critical analysis of the socio-economic, religious, ethnic, and political discourses of each context. The book sheds light on new marriage forms presented through a bottom up approach focusing on the lived experiences of Shi'a Muslims negotiating a diverse range of relationships and forms of belonging.
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The Global Economy and Democracy in South Africa
Koelble, Thomas A.
Rutgers University Press, 1998
Democracy differs dramatically in First and Third World countries. Academic debate in the West focuses on democractic institutional arrangements and concepts such as elections, freedom of association, and freedom of speech, and little attention is paid to the content of emancipatory policy. In the Third World and especially in South Africa, emancipation and socio-economic redistribution are more important aspects in the popular perception of what democracy means than considerations of how political institutions function. These variations put regimes such as the ANC-led government on a collision course with the West.
Arguing that a consolidation of democratic institutions depends on a redistribution of resources, Thomas Koelble analyzes two crucial policy arenas-housing and education-to clarify the enormous problems facing the current South African government. For successful consolidation of institutional democracy in South Africa, Western political and financial institutions must provide support for that redistribution. Without their support, the ANC constituency's expectations that democracy will improve the quality of life will go unrealized, and the government may fail.
Koelble also posits that while the new South African constitution encompasses aspects of a consensus oriented system in terms of its federal structures and various rights to minorities, it is a system dominated by one large political party that is not constitutionally required to share power. He suggests that the ANC would have better served the cause of democracy had it included rather than excluded their opposition from political power. This majoritarian rule may deteriorate into another version of "race politics". Such race politics will have deleterious effects on both South Africa's polity and economy.
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Global Film Color
The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury
Sarah Street
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury explores color filmmaking in a variety of countries and regions including India, China, Japan, and Russia, and across Europe and Africa. Most previous accounts of color film have concentrated on early 20th century color processes and Technicolor. Far less is known about the introduction and application of color technologies in the period from the mid-1940s to the 1980s, when photochemical, “monopack” color stocks came to dominate global film markets. As Eastmancolor, Agfacolor, Fujicolor and other film stocks became broadly available and affordable, national film industries increasingly converted to color, transforming the look and feel of global cinema. Covering a broad range of perspectives, the chapters explore themes such as transnational flows, knowledge exchange and transfer, the cyclical and asymmetrical circulation of technology in a global context, as well as the accompanying transformation of color film aesthetics in the postwar decades.
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Global Health for All
Knowledge, Politics, and Practices
Jean-Paul Gaudillière
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Global Health for All trains a critical lens on global health to share the stories that global health’s practices and logics tell about 20th and 21st century configurations of science and power. An ethnography on multiple scales, the book focuses on global health’s key epistemic and therapeutic practices like localization, measurement, triage, markets, technology, care, and regulation. Its roving approach traverses policy centers, sites of intervention, and innumerable spaces in between to consider what happens when globalized logics, circulations, and actors work to imagine, modify, and manage health. By resting in these in-between places, Global Health for All simultaneously examines global health as a coherent system and as a dynamic, unpredictable collection of modular parts.
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Global Mental Health
Latin America and Spanish-Speaking Populations
Javier I Escobar
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Global Mental Health provides an outline of the field of mental health with a particular focus on Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world. The book details evidence-based approaches being implemented globally and presents ongoing state of the art research on major mental disorders taking place in Latin America, including work being done on understanding Alzheimer’s, Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, and other psychoses. While supporting the initiative for building capacity of care in low income countries, the book warns about some of the potential risks related to the abuse of psychiatry, using examples from the past, focusing on early 20th century Spain.
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Global Visions of Violence
Agency and Persecution in World Christianity
Jason Bruner
Rutgers University Press, 2023
In Global Visions of Violence, the editors and contributors argue that violence creates a lens, bridge, and method for interdisciplinary collaboration that examines Christianity worldwide in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By analyzing the myriad ways violence, persecution, and suffering impact Christians and the imagination of Christian identity globally, this interdisciplinary volume integrates the perspectives of ethicists, historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers to generate new conversations. Taken together, the chapters in this book challenge scholarship on Christian growth that has not accounted for violence while analyzing persecution narratives that can wield data toward partisan ends.  This allows Global Visions of Violence to push urgent conversations forward, giving voice to projects that illuminate wide and often hidden landscapes that have been shaped by global visions of violence, and seeking solutions that end violence and turn toward the pursuit of justice, peace, and human rights among suffering Christians. 
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Global White Supremacy
Anti-Blackness and the University as Colonizer
Christopher S. Collins
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Knowledge is more expansive than the boundaries of the Western university model and its claim to be the dominant—or only—rigorous house of knowledge. In the former colonies of Europe (e.g., South Africa, Brazil, and Oceania), the curriculum, statues, architectures, and other aspects of the university demonstrate the way in which it is a fixture in empire maintenance. The trajectory of global White supremacy is deeply historical and contemporary—it is a global, transnational, and imperial phenomenon. White supremacy is sustained through the construction of inferiority and anti-Blackness. The context, history, and perspective offered by Collins, Newman, and Jun should serve as an introduction to the disruption of the ways in which university and academic dispositions have and continue to serve as sites of colonial and White supremacist preservation—as well as sites of resistance. 
 
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The Globalization of Supermax Prisons
Ross, Jeffrey Ian
Rutgers University Press, 2013

2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

“Supermax” prisons, conceived by the United States in the early 1980s, are typically reserved for convicted political criminals such as terrorists and spies and for other inmates who are considered to pose a serious ongoing threat to the wider community, to the security of correctional institutions, or to the safety of other inmates. Prisoners are usually restricted to their cells for up to twenty-three hours a day and typically have minimal contact with other inmates and correctional staff. Not only does the Federal Bureau of Prisons operate one of these facilities, but almost every state has either a supermax wing or stand-alone supermax prison.

The Globalization of Supermax Prisons examines why nine advanced industrialized countries have adopted the supermax prototype, paying particular attention to the economic, social, and political processes that have affected each state. Featuring essays that look at the U.S.-run prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanemo, this collection seeks to determine if the American model is the basis for the establishment of these facilities and considers such issues as the support or opposition to the building of a supermax and why opposition efforts failed; the allegation of human rights abuses within these prisons; and the extent to which the decision to build a supermax was influenced by developments in the United States. Additionally, contributors address such domestic matters as the role of crime rates, media sensationalism, and terrorism in each country’s decision to build a supermax prison.

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Globalizing the Sacred
Religion Across the Americas
Vásquez, Manuel A
Rutgers University Press, 2003

French and German tourists join Mexican migrant workers to venerate the image of the Virgin Mary at a strip mall in Florida; Latino gang members, deported from the United States to home countries they barely know, find Jesus in transnational churches; U.S. evangelicals use electronic media to preach a “neo liberal” gospel of wealth and health to landless peasants in remote indigenous villages in Guatemala. These are just some examples of how religion in the Americas today intersects in complex ways with the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of globalization.

Drawing on case studies in the United States and Latin America, Manuel A. Vásquez and Marie Friedmann Marquardt explore the evolving roles of religion in the Americas in the face of globalization, transnational migration, the rapid growth of culture industries, the rise of computer mediated technologies, and the crisis of modernity. Combining ethnographic research in local congregations, studies of material culture and sacred space, textual analyses, and approaches to mass and electronic media, the authors challenge dominant paradigms in sociology of religion, such as the secularization and rational choice models. Further, the book offers alternative theoretical and methodological tools to understand the increasing complexity of religious life in the Americas.

By illustratingthe challenges that scholars and students must confront in order to understand the complexity of today’s religious landscape, Globalizing the Sacred makes both important theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of religion’s role in social change.

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Glory
The Gospel of Judas, A Novel
Giuseppe Berto
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Christ’s nemesis Judas Iscariot remains a shadowy figure in the four canonical gospels, which give contradictory reasons for why this rogue disciple betrays Christ. But how would Judas himself explain his motives? 
 
In Glory, Italian modernist Giuseppe Berto’s final novel, Judas finally tells his side of the story. From his perspective, Jesus is the betrayer, a would-be political activist and social reformer who fails to live up to his promises. And by fulfilling his predestined role in the drama of Christ’s death and resurrection, Judas himself is partly responsible for humanity’s salvation, enabling them to be redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice. As the novel probes into the psychological motivations behind his rejection of Jesus’ authority, Judas emerges as a compelling conflicted character, a man who seeks to have agency even when he knows his actions are being scripted by a higher power. Through Judas’s searing tortured monologues, this late masterpiece from one of Italy’s greatest writers investigates deep questions about the nature of faith, rebellion, fate, and free will. 

 

 
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God and War
American Civil Religion since 1945
Haberski, Jr., Raymond
Rutgers University Press, 2012

Americans have long considered their country to be good—a nation "under God" with a profound role to play in the world. Yet nothing tests that proposition like war. Raymond Haberski argues that since 1945 the common moral assumptions expressed in an American civil religion have become increasingly defined by the nation's experience with war. 

God and War traces how three great postwar “trials”—the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror—have revealed the promise and perils of an American civil religion. Throughout the Cold War, Americans combined faith in God and faith in the nation to struggle against not only communism but their own internal demons. The Vietnam War tested whether America remained a nation "under God," inspiring, somewhat ironically, an awakening among a group of religious, intellectual and political leaders to save the nation's soul. With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 behind us and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, Americans might now explore whether civil religion can exist apart from the power of war to affirm the value of the nation to its people and the world.

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God Gave Us The Right
Conservative Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish Women Grapple with Feminism
Manning, Christel
Rutgers University Press, 1999
What does it mean to be a religious conservative, particularly for women, in America today? While it appears that people are returning to conservative religion because they are fed up with the excesses of liberalism, including feminism, a closer look at the lives of religious conservatives reveals a more complex reality. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant communities, Christel Manning explores the diversity among women who have returned to tradition. Arguing that America has undergone profound cultural and economic changes in the last thirty years, which create tension between women's lives and traditional gender roles, she demonstrates that conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and Evangelical Protestants negotiate those tensions in different ways. Manning also shows that women in conservative religious communities share many of the same concerns as secular women.
Manning looks at how the religious communities profiled have been influenced by feminist values and describes the ways in which these women negotiate gender roles at work, religious services, and at home. She explains how they deal with the inconsistencies created by their attempts to integrate feminist and traditionalist norms. In highly accessible prose, Manning examines their attitudes towards the feminist movement, its impact on American culture, and the extent to which the women seek to resist it. God Gave Us the Right explains how these different views of feminism reflect the diverse theologies and historical experiences of the three communities.
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Godly Women
Fundamentalism and Female Power
Brasher, Brenda E
Rutgers University Press, 1997
One of Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Books of 1998

Fundamentalist women are often depicted as dedicated to furthering the goals and ideas of fundamentalist men and thus of ancillary importance to the movement as a whole. Godly Women, Brenda Brasher's groundbreaking ethnographic study, reveals the paradox that fundamentalist women can be powerful people in a religious cosmos generally understood to be organized around their disempowerment. Brasher spent six months as an active participant in two Christian fundamentalist congregations to study firsthand the power of fundamentalist women. In addition to the narrow set of religious beliefs that constitute each congregation, she discovered that gender functions as a sacred partition which literally divides the congregation in two, establishing parallel religious worlds. The first of these worlds is led by men and encompasses overall congregational life; the second is a world composed of and led solely by women. Brasher explores how and why women become involved in this highly gendered religious world by examining women's ministries, Bible study groups, and conversion narratives. She discovers that women-only activities create and sustain a parallel symbolic world within and among congregations, which improves women's ability to direct the course of their lives and empowers them in their relationships with others. The women develop intimate social networks that act as a resource for those in distress and provide the basis for political coalition when women wish to alter the patterns of congregational life. Brasher's study sheds new light on the ideas and faith experiences of fundamentalist women, revealing that the religiosity they develop is not as disempowering as one might think. Brenda Brasher is an assistant professor of religion at Mount Union College.
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Gods and Goddesses in the Garden
Greco-Roman Mythology and the Scientific Names of Plants
Bernhardt, Peter
Rutgers University Press, 2008
 Zeus, Medusa, Hercules, Aphrodite. Did you know that these and other dynamic deities, heroes, and monsters of Greek and Roman mythology live on in the names of trees and flowers? Some grow in your local woodlands or right in your own backyard garden.
 
In this delightful book, botanist Peter Bernhardt reveals the rich history and mythology that underlie the origins of many scientific plant names. Unlike other books about botanical taxonomy that take the form of heavy and intimidating lexicons, Bernhardt's account comes together in a series of interlocking stories. Each chapter opens with a short version of a classical myth, then links the tale to plant names, showing how each plant "resembles" its mythological counterpart with regard to its history, anatomy, life cycle, and conservation. You will learn, for example, that as our garden acanthus wears nasty spines along its leaf margins, it is named for the nymph who scratched the face of Apollo. The shape-shifting god, Proteus, gives his name to a whole family of shrubs and trees that produce colorful flowering branches in an astonishing number of sizes and shapes.
 
Amateur and professional gardeners, high school teachers and professors of biology, botanists and conservationists alike will appreciate this book's entertaining and informative entry to the otherwise daunting field of botanical names. Engaging, witty, and memorable, Gods and Goddesses in the Garden transcends the genre of natural history and makes taxonomy a topic equally at home in the classroom and at cocktail parties.
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God's Own Scientists
Creationists in a Secular World
Toumey, Christopher P.
Rutgers University Press, 1994
Toumey focuses the tools of his discipline on a group whose distance from the twentieth-century American mainstream is measured not in decades or miles but rather in existential understandings about reality. Toumey studies both the national scientific creationism movement and the operation of a local creationist study group in his state's Research Triangle in the mid-1980s, seeking to understand the underlying beliefs--about morality, the Bible, science itself--that modern scientific creationism embodies, as well as the reasons this "system of cultural meanings" helps many conservative Christians "make sense of the realities, anxieties, changes, and uncertainties of life in the United States in the late twentieth century." A perceptive and respectful analysis by a nonbeliever
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God's Schools
Wagner, Melinda Bollar
Rutgers University Press, 1990

Many of us assume that Christian day schools foster a strict and conservative environment that is very different from the rest of the United States. Christian educators themselves foster this view when they say that following biblical strictures requires that they not always conform to this world. Melinda Wagner goes beyond this stereotype to portray the way these schools foster American popular culture and "professional education culture" as well as "Christian culture." In her participant observation study of a variety of Christian schools (sponsored by fundamentalist, evangelical, new charismatic, Holiness, and Pentecostal Christians), Wagner describes and interprets how such compromises are made.

In American culture, children are taught to meet challenges, to compete, and are rewarded for individual achievement. Conservative Christians label this individualism as "secular humanism," and find it antithetical to their view of the self. Instead, these Christians seek a culture of love, compassion, orderliness, non-competitiveness, and separation from the material trappings of this world.

But in reality, Wager finds that the schools mix Christian values with the values of American culture. She discovers that even in Christian schools students compete fiercely and are recognized for individual achievements. Christian schools incorporate norms and strategies from mainstream American education. Alternative Christian schools are not as alternative as they could be; they are walking the Christian walk the American way.

The Christian schools serve as a case study of the process of culture building. Conservative Christians are trying to revitalize their culture. Yet all along the way, they quite consciously compromise.

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God's Schools
Choice and Compromise in American Society
Wagner, Melinda Bollar
Rutgers University Press, 1990

Many of us assume that Christian day schools foster a strict and conservative environment that is very different from the rest of the United States. Christian educators themselves foster this view when they say that following biblical strictures requires that they not always conform to this world. Melinda Wagner goes beyond this stereotype to portray the way these schools foster American popular culture and "professional education culture" as well as "Christian culture." In her participant observation study of a variety of Christian schools (sponsored by fundamentalist, evangelical, new charismatic, Holiness, and Pentecostal Christians), Wagner describes and interprets how such compromises are made.

In American culture, children are taught to meet challenges, to compete, and are rewarded for individual achievement. Conservative Christians label this individualism as "secular humanism," and find it antithetical to their view of the self. Instead, these Christians seek a culture of love, compassion, orderliness, non-competitiveness, and separation from the material trappings of this world.

But in reality, Wager finds that the schools mix Christian values with the values of American culture. She discovers that even in Christian schools students compete fiercely and are recognized for individual achievements. Christian schools incorporate norms and strategies from mainstream American education. Alternative Christian schools are not as alternative as they could be; they are walking the Christian walk the American way.

The Christian schools serve as a case study of the process of culture building. Conservative Christians are trying to revitalize their culture. Yet all along the way, they quite consciously compromise.

[more]

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God's Waiting Room
Racial Reckoning at Life's End
Casey Golomski
Rutgers University Press, 2025
Can older racists change their tune, or will they haunt us further once they're gone? Rich in mystery and life’s lessons, God’s Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life’s End considers what matters in the end for older white adults and the younger Black nurses who care for them. An innovation in creative nonfiction, Casey Golomski’s years of immersive research at a nursing home in South Africa, thirty years after the end of apartheid, are narrated as a one-day, room-by-room tour. Told in breathtakingly intimate and witty conversations with the home’s residents and nurses, including the untold story of Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island prison nurse, readers learn how ageism, sexism, and racism intersect and impact health care both in South Africa and in the United States, as well as create conditions in which people primed to be enemies find grace despite the odds.

For copyright reasons, this edition is not available in the South African Development Community and Kenya.
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Going Viral
Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World
Schweitzer, Dahlia
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Outbreak narratives have proliferated for the past quarter century, and now they have reached epidemic proportions. From 28 Days Later to 24 to The Walking Dead, movies, TV shows, and books are filled with zombie viruses, bioengineered plagues, and disease-ravaged bands of survivors. Even news reports indulge in thrilling scenarios about potential global pandemics like SARS and Ebola. Why have outbreak narratives infected our public discourse, and how have they affected the way Americans view the world?

In Going Viral, Dahlia Schweitzer probes outbreak narratives in film, television, and a variety of other media, putting them in conversation with rhetoric from government authorities and news organizations that have capitalized on public fears about our changing world. She identifies three distinct types of outbreak narrative, each corresponding to a specific contemporary anxiety: globalization, terrorism, and the end of civilization. Schweitzer considers how these fears, stoked by both fictional outbreak narratives and official sources, have influenced the ways Americans relate to their neighbors, perceive foreigners, and regard social institutions. 

Looking at everything from I Am Legend to The X Files to World War Z, this book examines how outbreak narratives both excite and horrify us, conjuring our nightmares while letting us indulge in fantasies about fighting infected Others. Going Viral thus raises provocative questions about the cost of public paranoia and the power brokers who profit from it.  

Supplemental Study Materials for "Going Viral": 
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/going-viral-dahlia-schweitzer
Dahlia Schweitzer- Going Viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xF0V7WL9ow
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Gone Fishin'
The 100 Best Spots in New Jersey
Luftglass, Manny
Rutgers University Press, 1998

Grab your tackle and hit the road with Ron Bern and Manny Luftglass as they take you to the choicest places to fish in New York in Gone Fishin': The 100 Best Spots in New York, their follow-up to the highly successful Gone Fishin': The 100 Best Spots in New Jersey.

Truly great freshwater and saltwater fishing abounds throughout the state, from the classic Catskills trout streams to the mighty Hudson and Delaware rivers; from Lake Ontario to the Finger Lakes; from Long Island Sound to the bluewater canyons off the coast; from saltwater bays to artificial reefs; from the smaller sweetwater rivers and New York City reservoirs to surprising trout streams and bass ponds on Long Island.

Luftglass and Bern provide readers with immediately useful insights into each of the 100 best sites. They furnish easy-to-follow directions, descriptions of the body of water, boat launch information, and detailed advice on live and artificial bait, fishing methods, equipment, depths, best times of day and year, secret tips particular to each site, and even specific places to work bait or lures. Gone Fishin' also includes places that are good for children, as well as those which are handicapped accessible.

Throughout the book, Bern and Luftglass share anecdotes about their own fishing adventures and some of the big ones that didn't get away in their more than 33 years of fishing together. The information they cram into every chapter will help you find the spot, fish it more effectively, and catch more fish.

Whether you fish 150 times a year or you are planning to fish for the first time, you're sure to fall hook, line, and sinker for this entertaining and educational guide.

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Good and Bad Hair
Gaskins, Bill
Rutgers University Press, 1997

In a time when image is indeed everything, our personal appearance has a tremendous effect on nearly every aspect of our lives on a daily basis. Our choice of hairstyle can mean the difference between acceptance and rejection by groups and individuals. The choices made by African Americans are particularly charged, often affecting the wearer and the viewer in unique and sometimes life-altering ways.

Good and Bad Hair emerges out of photographer Bill Gaskins's traveling photo exhibition of the same name. The book features 60 evocative photographs of African American men, women, and children, documenting contemporary black hairstyles and their role as a feature of African American culture.

On one level, the photographs present readers with a variety of popular and personal approaches to wearing one's hair. On another level, they isolate what amounts to a bold, assertive departure from the common definition of American beauty that excludes the physical features of many people of African descent. This narrow definition of beauty has created a race-based measurement for what is considered "good" and "bad" hair. Gaskins's pictures identify African Americans from different regions of the United States who expressively symbolize their sense of self and often their sense of an African or black identity through their hair.

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Good Days, Bad Days
The Self and Chronic Illness in Time
Kathy C Charmaz
Rutgers University Press, 1993
Kathy Charmaz has written a compelling book on chronic illness and the effect it has on the self-concepts of those who suffer. It will appeal to anyone facing a long-term problem that seems beyond control. Her work is based on interviews with people suffering from such diseases as cancer, multiple sclerosis, and arthritis, and with their caregivers. Charmaz looks at how these people disclose their illness, how they experience their emotions, and how they manage daily life.

Illness provides a mirror that allows sufferers to see themselves and to become more introspective. As they struggle for control over illness and control over time, they also struggle to control the central images of the self. For example, the chronically ill may situate their self-concepts in the past, present, or future. Charmaz examines under what conditions they situate their self-concepts in each of those timeframes. People may say they live one day at a time. They may bracket certain experiences, such as a heart attack, as timemarkers or turning points in the past. Or they may look ahead to recovering their health. Or ahead to death. 

Charmaz artfully combines near jargon-free analysis with moving stories about how people have experienced illness, usually told in the sufferers' own words. She enters the world of the chronically ill, and brings us into it.

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"A Good Man is Hard to Find"
Flannery O'Connor
Asals, Frederick
Rutgers University Press, 1993

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is Flannery O'Connor's most famous and most discussed story. O'Connor herself singled it out by making it the title piece of her first collection and the story she most often chose for readings or talks to students. It is an unforgettable tale, both riveting and comic, of the confrontation of a family with violence and sudden death. More than anything else O'Connor ever wrote, this story mixes the comedy, violence, and religious concerns that characterize her fiction.

This casebook for the story includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of the author's life, the authoritative text of the story itself, comments and letters by O'Connor about the story, critical essays, and a bibliography. The critical essays span more than twenty years of commentary and suggest several approaches to the story--formalistic, thematic, deconstructionist-- all within the grasp of the undergraduate, while the introduction also points interested students toward still other resources. Useful for both beginning and advanced students, this casebook provides an in-depth introduction to one of America's most gifted modern writers.

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The Good Ruler
From Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon
Kuklick, Bruce
Rutgers University Press, 1989

Which American presidents have been good? Which have been bad? Experts on the presidency have never been able to agree on their assessments. Bruce Kuklick suggests that historians and political scientists have approached the problem of defining successful leadership without adequately considering the essential factor. Instead of trying to evaluate which presidents set consistent and worthy policies and brought them to fruition, Kuklick asks us to pay more attention to how the American people feel about their presidents. The citizenry and its emotional responses are sued as the measure of a successful president, rather than the ostensibly rational appraisals of scholars.

Applying this measure to the presidents from the Depression to Watergate, Kuklick begins by tracing the way in which Franklin Roosevelt established the parameters of the inspirational presidency and how his success shaped the study of political history. He then explores the triumphs of Eisenhower and Kennedy and contrasts these triumphs too the failures of Hoover, Truman, Johnson, and Nixon. The ability of leaders to win the respect and admiration of the citizenry is, for Kuklick, the crucial touchstone by which the success of a president is judged.

To highlight this position that is not useful for historians to justify the merits or failures of a president by pointing out what he would have done had he lived longer or in a different era, Kiklick includes and entertaining and enlightening fable, an imaginary view of historical events: Nixon is elected in 1960, giving a youthful tone to the White House until his assassination in 1967; Kennedy is elected in 1968 but resigns after he is accused of misconduct. The fable demonstrates that the specific events are less important than a president’s ability to evoke a positive emotional response from the citizenry. The Good Ruler analyzes our recent political history without partisan bias and examines the basic premises of American democratic politics.

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Good Sex
Feminist Perspectives from the World's Religions
Jung, Patricia Beattie
Rutgers University Press, 2000
What is "good sex" in the globalized world of the twenty-first century? This volume brings together essays by feminist scholars from different religions and cultures to consider how women are redefining sexuality for the common good. The essays explore sexual and social restrictions on women; religiously and socially acceptable avenues of sexual expression; constructions of sexual identities; and attitudes toward women's sexual desires. How is sexual desire constructed within specific cultural and religious contexts? What sacrifices must women make (and how do they make them) simply to have sexual lives? What options and strategies are available to women to dissolve the many restrictions imposed on their sexuality? These are some of the questions being explored.
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Gothic Pride
The Story of Building a Great Cathedral in Newark
Regan, Brian
Rutgers University Press, 2012
Newark’s Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart is one of the United States’ greatest cathedrals and most exceptional Gothic Revival buildings. Rising from Newark’s highest ground and visible for miles, it spectacularly evokes its historic models. Gothic Pride sets Sacred Heart in the context of American cathedral building and, blending diverse fields, accounts for the complex circumstances that produced it.

 Calling upon a wealth of primary sources, Brian Regan describes in a compelling narrative the cathedral’s almost century-long history. He traces the project to its origins in the late 1850s and the great expectations held by the project’s prime movers—all passionate about Gothic architecture and immensely proud of Newark—that never wavered despite numerous setbacks and challenges. Construction did not begin until 1898 and, when completed in 1954, the cathedral became New Jersey’s largest church—and the most expensive Catholic church ever built in America. During Pope John Paul II’s visit to the United States in 1995, he celebrated evening prayer at the Cathedral. On that occasion, the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart was elevated to a basilica to become the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

 Meticulously researched, Gothic Pride brings to life the people who built, contributed to, and worshipped in Sacred Heart, recalling such remarkable personalities as George Hobart Doane, Jeremiah O’Rourke, Gonippo Raggi, and Archbishop Thomas Walsh. In many ways, the cathedral’s story is a lens that lets us look at the history of Newark itself—its rise as an industrial city and its urban culture in the nineteenth century; its transformation in the twentieth century; its immigrants and the profound effects of their cultures, especially their religion, on American life; and the power of architecture to serve as a symbol of community values and pride..

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Governing Maya Communities and Lands in Belize
Indigenous Rights, Markets, and Sovereignties
Laurie Kroshus Medina
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Confronting a debt crisis, the Belizean government has strategized to maximize revenues from lands designated as state property, privatizing lands for cash crop production and granting concessions for timber and oil extraction. Meanwhile, conservation NGOs have lobbied to establish protected areas on these lands to address a global biodiversity crisis. They promoted ecotourism as a market-based mechanism to fund both conservation and debt repayment; ecotourism also became a mechanism for governing lands and people—even state actors themselves—through the market. Mopan and Q’eqchi’ Maya communities, dispossessed of lands and livelihoods through these efforts, pursued claims for Indigenous rights to their traditional lands through Inter-American and Belizean judicial systems. This book examines the interplay of conflicting forms of governance that emerged as these strategies intersected: state performances of sovereignty over lands and people, neoliberal rule through the market, and Indigenous rights-claiming, which challenged both market logics and practices of sovereignty.
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Governing Pleasures
Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815-1914
Sigel, Lisa Z.
Rutgers University Press, 2002
Governing Pleasures is a historical account of the production, distribution, and consumption of pornography in Great Britain from the early nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth. Lisa Z. Sigel examines how pornography changed over time as a cultural and symbolic object in British society, and asks: What was considered pornographic? Who looked at pornography and read it? What sorts of messages did this medium transmit to both men and women? What was its thematic content, who controlled it, and how did these messages affect sexual and social dynamics?In contrast to recent ahistorical feminist assertions that pornography necessarily teaches men how to oppress women, Sigel views the use of pornography through the lens of historical and social change. In a careful analysis, she illustrates the cultural complexities of the medium and links Victorian pornography to other arenas such as language, science, consumerism, and politics. Most importantly, the author asserts that pornography offered a way for people to make sense of sexuality and its relationship to their world.Governing Pleasures is a greatly needed examination of a neglected topic. Access to public and private collections of pornography has enabled the author to provide vivid illustrations to bolster her arguments.
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Governor Tom Kean
From the New Jersey Statehouse to the 911 Commission
Felzenberg, Alvin S
Rutgers University Press, 2006
Long before Bill Clinton spoke of "triangulation," a term that referred to a centrist governing style, prior to Tony Blair repositioning the British Labor Party midway between Thatcher conservatism and militant trade unionism, and far ahead of George W. Bush referring to his agenda as "compassionate conservatism," there was Tom Kean. From the moment of his election to the New Jersey state assembly in 1967, through his guidance of the 9/11 Commission nearly three decades later, Kean consistently displayed a knack for bipartisan leadership.

In this first political biography of one of the nation's most popular and successful governors, Alvin S. Felzenberg tells the story of a remarkable career that culminated in an unexpected and crucial contribution to the country-chairmanship of the 9/11 Commission. Felzenberg describes how, early in his political career, Kean worked to transform New Jersey's legislature in the aftermath of court rulings that mandated redistricting in accordance with the "one man, one vote" principle. He discusses Kean's efforts to relieve the urban crisis that followed in the wake of the 1967 Newark riots. He relates how Kean was able to use the New Jersey governorship-purportedly the strongest in the country-to transform a so-called "rust belt" state into a leader in education, environmental responsibility, and economic growth.

Kean's successes in these and other areas caused leaders outside New Jersey to follow in his path. Together with his fellow governors, Kean forged a national consensus on domestic policy between Democratic congresses and Republican presidents, in the process winning for himself a leadership role in his own party. Kean's story serves as an uncommon case of how a Republican loyal to the historic roots and principles of his party can not only win election in a "blue state" but effectively govern it.

Starting from the example the governor set on the state level, Felzenberg's account traces Kean's career to positions of trusted authority on the national stage. After several years of advising presidents, Kean was appointed chairman of the 9/11 Commission. In this role, he made the bipartisan, Congressionally mandated commission one of the most successful in American history.

Drawing on interviews with Kean as well as with state and national leaders, including former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton and former New York City mayor Ed Koch, Felzenberg not only provides a marvelous biography, but also offers a unique look at American politics during the last four decades of the twentieth century.


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The Governors of New Jersey
Biographical Essays
Birkner, Michael J
Rutgers University Press, 2014

Rogues, aristocrats, and a future U.S. president. These and other governors are portrayed in this revised and updated edition of the classic reference work on the chief executives of New Jersey. Editors Michael J. Birkner, Donald Linky, and Peter Mickulas present new essays on the governors of the last three decades—Brendan T. Byrne, Thomas Kean, James Florio, Christine Todd Whitman, Donald DiFrancesco, James McGreevey, Richard Codey, and Jon Corzine. The essays included in the original edition are amended, edited, and corrected as necessary in light of new and relevant scholarship.

The authors of each governor’s life story represent a roster of such notable scholars as Larry Gerlach, Stanley Katz, Arthur Link, and Clement Price, as well as many other experts on New Jersey history and politics. As a result, this revised edition is a thorough and current reference work on the New Jersey governorship—one of the strongest in the nation.

Also of Interest:
New Jersey Politics and Government
The Suburbs Come of Age
Fourth Edition
Barbara G. Salmore with Stephen A. Salmore
978-0-8135-6139-4   paper   $34.95
A volume in the Rivergate Regionals Collection

Me, Governor?
My Life in the Rough-and-Tumble World of New Jersey Politics
Richard J. Codey
978-0-8135-5045-9   cloth   $24.95

The Life and Times of Richard J. Hughes
The Politics of Civility
John B. Wefing
978-0-8135-4641-4   cloth   $32.50

Governor Tom Kean
From the New Jersey Statehouse to the 911 Commission
Alvin S. Felzenberg
978-0-8135-3799-3   cloth   $29.95



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The Grand Gennaro
Belluscio, Steven
Rutgers University Press, 2009
An illiterate Calabrian in southern Italy owes money to his church and mayor. He skips town for the bustling streets of New York. Meeting an old friend, a fellow immigrant, he thanks him for help getting settled, and then steals his money. With a new parcel of wealth, he materializes from a small-time laborer into a big-time entrepreneur, soon becoming the tyrant of the local Italian American community. By pluck, luck, and unscrupulous business practices, this cunning character "makes America." There are riches, pleasure, and the beautiful Carmela. Then trouble. Comeuppance. Ambush. Revenge.Twenty-first century popular culture? Not at all.

The Grand Gennaro, a riveting saga set at the turn of the last century in Italian American Harlem, reflects on how youthful acts of cruelty and desperation follow many to the grave. A classic in the truest sense, this operatic narrative is alive once again, addressing the question: How does one become an "American"?

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Grandmotherhood
The Evolutionary Significance of the Second Half of Female Life
Voland, Eckart
Rutgers University Press, 2014

By the year 2030, the average life expectancy of women in industrialized countries could reach ninety—exceeding that of men by about ten years. At the present time, postmenopausal women represent more than fifteen percent of the world’s population and this figure is likely to grow.

From an evolutionary perspective, these demographic numbers pose some intriguing questions. Darwinian theory holds that a successful life is measured in terms of reproduction. How is it, then, that a woman’s lifespan can greatly exceed her childbearing and childrearing years? Is this phenomenon simply a byproduct of improved standards of living, or do older women—grandmothers in particular—play a measurable role in increasing their family members’ biological success?

Until now, these questions have not been examined in a thorough and comprehensive manner. Bringing togethertheoretical and empirical work byinternationally recognized scholars in anthropology, psychology, ethnography, and the social sciences, Grandmotherhood explores the evolutionary purpose and possibilities of female post-generative life. Students and scholars of human evolution, anthropology, and even gerontology will look to this volume as a major contribution to the current literature in evolutionary studies.

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Gray Love
Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60
nan Bauer-Maglin
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Gray Love narrates stories about the most common themes – searching for and (perhaps) finding love. Forty-five men and women between ages 60 and 94 from diverse backgrounds talk about dating, starting or ending a relationship, embracing life alone or enjoying a partnered one. The longing for connection as old age encroaches is palpable here, with more and more senior singles searching online. Those who find new partners explore issues that most relationships encounter at any age, as well as some that are unique to elder relationships. These include having had previous partners and a complicated and deep personal history; family and friends’ reactions to an older person’s dating; alternative models to marriage (such as sharing space or living apart); having more than one partner at the same time; one’s aging body, appearance, and sexuality; and the pressure of time and the specter of illness and death.
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Gray Matters
Finding Meaning in the Stories of Later Life
Ellyn Lem
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Winner of the 2021 Excellence in Research and Scholarly Activity Award from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Finalist for the 2021 American Book Fest Best Book Awards


Aging is one of the most compelling issues today, with record numbers of seniors over sixty-five worldwide. Gray Matters: Finding Meaning in the Stories of Later Life examines a diverse array of cultural works including films, literature, and even art that represent this time of life, often made by people who are seniors themselves. These works, focusing on important topics such as housing, memory loss, and intimacy, are analyzed in dialogue with recent research to explore how “stories” illuminate the dynamics of growing old by blending fact with imagination. Gray Matters also incorporates the life experiences of seniors gathered from over two hundred in-depth surveys with a range of questions on growing old, not often included in other age studies works. Combining cultural texts, gerontology research, and observations from older adults will give all readers a fuller picture of the struggles and pleasures of aging and avoids over-simplified representations of the process as all negative or positive. 
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The Great American Road Trip
U.S. 1, Maine to Florida
Genovese, Peter
Rutgers University Press, 1999

Take an unforgettable road trip down one of America’s most fascinating highways, U.S.

On what highway can you find the headquarters of the FBI, Dow Jones Interactive, and the National Enquirer? What road is home to the Bronx Zoo, the Okefenokee Swamp, and Flipper? On the side of what freeway can you find the Super Duper Weenie Wagon, Larry’s Redneck Bar, and the Big Chicken Barn? Peter Genovese found them all, along with about a million other fascinating and bizarre attractions, on U.S. 1, ‘the best damn highway in America,” as he calls it. Join him for the road trip of a lifetime The Great American Road Trip: A Journey Down U.S. 1.

U.S. 1 may not be America’s scenic highway, but it’s certainly the most colorful. It runs through Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Miami, in addition to Caribou, Maine, Quonochontaug, Rhode Island, and Alma, Georgia. It zig-zags along the wild and beautiful Maine coast and soars over the Atlantic Ocean as the Overseas Highway, one of the most spectacular stretches of road anywhere. The Star-Spangled Banner is on U.S. 1. Madonna lived on U.S. 1 (until she sold her house to Rosie O'Donnell). U.S. 1 is Main Street and the Miracle Mile, two-lane blacktop and six-lane expressway, straight as an arrow in some places and twistier than a Philadelphia soft pretzel in others.

 Genovese spent two years on U.S. 1, talking to everyone from doughnut makers, dolphin trainers, and swamp guides to real Miami vice cops and the keeper of the national parasite collection. His resulting book is the most complete portrait of an American highway ever written. With his unerring eye for detail, sense of humor, and understanding of human nature, Genovese takes readers on a sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always illuminating 2,450-mile journey from Fort Kent, Maine to Key West, Florida.

 Ride along with Genovese and grab a drink at the Last Resort Bar or the Last Chance Saloon, then pick up a paperback at the Banned Bookstore. Visit Oscar, the biggest gator in the Okefenokee Swamp, have dinner at Hog Heaven, and take in a Portland Seadogs baseball game. Tour a Budweiser brewery and go into the pit at a NASCAR race. Looking for someplace to stay? How about the world’s only underwater hotel, the Jules’ Undersea Lodge, or in a cabin made entirely from one pine tree at the Maine Idyll Motor Court? If it’s culture you seek, the highway boasts dozens of museums. While you may have heard of the Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of American Art, how about the Blacks in Wax Museum, Tragedy in the United States Museum, and the Mushroom Museum? There’s something for everyone on U.S. 1, and Genovese has written about it all in The Great American Road Trip.

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The Great Disappearing Act
Germans in New York City, 1880-1930
Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Where did all the Germans go? How does a community of several hundred thousand people become invisible within a generation?

This study examines these questions in relation to the German immigrant community in New York City between 1880-1930, and seeks to understand how German-American New Yorkers assimilated into the larger American society in the early twentieth century.
By the turn of the twentieth century, New York City was one of the largest German-speaking cities in the world and was home to the largest German community in the United States. This community was socio-economically diverse and increasingly geographically dispersed, as upwardly mobile second and third generation German Americans began moving out of the Lower East Side, the location of America’s first Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), uptown to Yorkville and other neighborhoods. New York’s German American community was already in transition, geographically, socio-economically, and culturally, when the anti-German/One Hundred Percent Americanism of World War I erupted in 1917.

This book examines the structure of New York City’s German community in terms of its maturity, geographic dispersal from the Lower East Side to other neighborhoods, and its ultimate assimilation to the point of invisibility in the 1920s. It argues that when confronted with the anti-German feelings of World War I, German immigrants and German Americans hid their culture – especially their language and their institutions – behind closed doors and sought to make themselves invisible while still existing as a German community.
But becoming invisible did not mean being absorbed into an Anglo-American English-speaking culture and society. Instead, German Americans adopted visible behaviors of a new, more pluralistic American culture that they themselves had helped to create, although by no means dominated. Just as the meaning of “German” changed in this period, so did the meaning of “American” change as well, due to nearly 100 years of German immigration.
 
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Great Dishes from New Jersey's Favorite Restaurants
Caparulo, Vicki J.
Rutgers University Press, 2003
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Great Houses and Gardens of New Jersey
Seebohm, Caroline
Rutgers University Press, 2003
Author Caroline Seebohm and photographer Peter C. Cook bring readers an exclusive look at some of New Jersey's most magnificent private homes and gardens. From a centuries-old farm to modern glass houses, from woodlands planted with native plants to formal French and English-style gardens, the book celebrates the rich diversity of architectural and gardening styles found in the state. More than 200 gorgeous color photographs, accompanied by inspired accounts, celebrate the beauty of New Jersey homes and gardens.

New Jersey is called the Garden State with good reason- some of the nation's most strikingly beautiful homes and gardens can be found within its borders. Caroline Seebohm and Peter C. Cook have captured them gloriously in Great Houses and Gardens of New Jersey.

No other book has so beautifully presented the architectural story of the state, stunningly documented in more than 200 color photographs- from a centuries-old farm to modern glass houses, from woodlands planted with native plants to formal French and English-style gardens. Each house and garden is privately owned, and many have never before been photographed. Readers are given an exclusive peek at some of New Jersey's greatest treasures.

Seebohm and Cook take us on a private tour of a pre-revolutionary Dutch farmhouse that could have sprung from the coast of Devon in England; a brick-patterned house that vividly expresses the originality and exuberance of the region's early builders and craftsmen; a collection of native stone buildings reminiscent of Bucks County, Pennsylvania; and an Arts and Crafts house with contributions by New Jersey's innovative Gustav Stickley. The twentieth century is equally well represented with works by masters such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, and Richard Meier.

The book showcases gardens of dazzling splendor and variety- woodlands ablaze with native azaleas and dogwoods; a charming sunken garden by well-known English garden designer Penelope Hobhouse; a stunning water garden on the Navesink River; a tiny formal garden surrounded by a picket fence in Somerset County; a garden in Alpine carpeted with bluebells in the spring, scented with roses in the summer, and with orchids on display all year round.
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The Great Industrial War
Framing Class Conflict in the Media, 1865-1950
Rondinone, Troy
Rutgers University Press, 2011
The Great Industrial War, a comprehensive assessment of how class has been interpreted by the media in American history, documents the rise and fall of a frightening concept: industrial war. Moving beyond the standard account of labor conflict as struggles between workers and management, Troy Rondinone asks why Americans viewed big strikes as "battles" in "irrepressible conflict" between the armies of capital and laborùa terrifying clash between workers, strikebreakers, police, and soldiers.

Examining how the mainstream press along with the writings of a select group of influential reformers and politicians framed strike news, Rondinone argues that the Civil War, coming on the cusp of a revolution in industrial productivity, offered a gruesome, indelible model for national conflict. He follows the heated discourse on class war through the nineteenth century until its general dissipation in the mid-twentieth century. Incorporating labor history, cultural studies, linguistic anthropology, and sociology, The Great Industrial War explores the influence of historical experience on popular perceptions of social order and class conflict and provides a reinterpretation of the origins and meaning of the Taft-Hartley Act and the industrial relations regime it supported.

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The Great White Way
Race and the Broadway Musical
Warren Hoffman
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Broadway musicals are one of America’s most beloved art forms and play to millions of people each year. But what do these shows, which are often thought to be just frothy entertainment, really have to say about our country and who we are as a nation?

Now in a new second edition, The Great White Way is the first book to reveal the racial politics, content, and subtexts that have haunted musicals for almost one hundred years from Show Boat (1927) to Hamilton (2015). This revised edition includes a new introduction and conclusion, updated chapters, as well as a brand-new chapter that looks at the blockbuster musicals The Book of Mormon and Hamilton.

Musicals mirror their time periods and reflect the political and social issues of their day. Warren Hoffman investigates the thematic content of the Broadway musical and considers how musicals work on a structural level, allowing them to simultaneously present and hide their racial agendas in plain view of their audiences. While the musical is informed by the cultural contributions of African Americans and Jewish immigrants, Hoffman argues that ultimately the history of the American musical is the history of white identity in the United States.

Presented chronologically, The Great White Way shows how perceptions of race altered over time and how musicals dealt with those changes. Hoffman focuses first on shows leading up to and comprising the Golden Age of Broadway (1927–1960s), then turns his attention to the revivals and nostalgic vehicles that defined the final quarter of the twentieth century. He offers entirely new and surprising takes on shows from the American musical canon—Show Boat (1927), Oklahoma! (1943), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), The Music Man (1957), West Side Story (1957), A Chorus Line (1975), and 42nd Street (1980), among others. In addition to a new chapter on Hamilton and The Book of Mormon, this revised edition brings The Great White Way fully into the twenty-first century with an examination of jukebox musicals and the role of off-Broadway and regional theaters in the development of the American musical.

New archival research on the creators who produced and wrote these shows, including Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and Edward Kleban, will have theater fans and scholars rethinking forever how they view this popular American entertainment.

 
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The Great White Way
Race and the Broadway Musical
Hoffman, Warren
Rutgers University Press, 2014

Broadway musicals are one of America’s most beloved art forms and play to millions of people each year. But what do these shows, which are often thought to be just frothy entertainment, really have to say about our country and who we are as a nation?

The Great White Way is the first book to reveal the racial politics, content, and subtexts that have haunted musicals for almost one hundred years from Show Boat (1927) to The Scottsboro Boys (2011). Musicals mirror their time periods and reflect the political and social issues of their day. Warren Hoffman investigates the thematic content of the Broadway musical and considers how musicals work on a structural level, allowing them to simultaneously present and hide their racial agendas in plain view of their audiences. While the musical is informed by the cultural contributions of African Americans and Jewish immigrants, Hoffman argues that ultimately the history of the American musical is the history of white identity in the United States.

Presented chronologically, The Great White Way shows how perceptions of race altered over time and how musicals dealt with those changes. Hoffman focuses first on shows leading up to and comprising the Golden Age of Broadway (1927–1960s), then turns his attention to the revivals and nostalgic vehicles that defined the final quarter of the twentieth century. He offers entirely new and surprising takes on shows from the American musical canon—Show Boat (1927), Oklahoma! (1943), Annie Get YourGun (1946), The Music Man (1957), West Side Story (1957), A Chorus Line (1975), and 42nd Street (1980), among others.

New archival research on the creators who produced and wrote these shows, including Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and Edward Kleban, will have theater fans and scholars rethinking forever how they view this popular American entertainment.

[more]

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The Greatest Ballpark Ever
Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers
McGee, Bob
Rutgers University Press, 2005
Generations after its demise, Ebbets Field remains the single most colorful and enduring image of a baseball park, with a treasured niche in the game's legacy and the American imagination.

In this lively story of sports, politics, and the talented, hilarious, and charming characters associated with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Bob McGee chronicles the ballpark's vibrant history from the drawing board to the wrecking ball, beginning with Charley Ebbets and the heralded opening in 1913, on through the eras that followed. McGee weaves a story about how Ebbets Field's architectural details, notable flaws, and striking facade brought Brooklyn and its team together in ways that allowed each to define the other.

Drawing on original interviews and letters, as well as published and archival sources, The Greatest Ballpark Ever explores the struggle of Charley Ebbets to build Ebbets Field, the days of Wilbert Robinson's early pennant winners, the eras of the Daffiness Boys, Larry MacPhail, and Branch Rickey, the tumultuous field leadership of Leo the Lip, the fiery triumph of Jackie Robinson, the golden days of the Boys of Summer, and Walter O'Malley's ignominious departure.

With humor and passion, The Greatest Ballpark Ever lets readers relive a day in the raucous ballpark with its quirky angles and its bent right-field wall, with the characters and events that have become part of the nation's folklore.
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Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam
Short Stories by Caribbean Women
Esteves, Carmen C
Rutgers University Press, 1991
This collection of short stories features moving tales from the rich Caribbean oral tradition, stories that question women's traditional roles, present women's perspectives on the history of Caribbean slavery and colonialism, and convey the beautiful cadences of the language of Caribbean women. It offers the general reader a broad selection of the themes, styles, and techniques characteristic of contemporary women's fiction in the Caribbean. There are twenty-seven enjoyable and vibrant tales in this anthology, some of them originally written in English, others in French, Dutch, and Spanish. There are writers from Guadeloupe, Dominica, Jamaica, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Antigua, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Surinam. Along with stories by well-known writers such as Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Maryse Conde, and Rosario Ferre, the anthology also includes first-rate stories by lesser-known but equally talented writers. The collection also contains a critical introduction, biographical notes, and a bibliography.
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Green Planet
How Plants Keep the Earth Alive
Rice, Stanley A
Rutgers University Press, 2012
2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Plants are not just a pretty part of the landscape; they keep the entire planet, with all of its human and nonhuman inhabitants, alive. Stanley Rice documents the many ways in which plants do this by making oxygen, regulating the greenhouse effect, controlling floods, and producing all the food in the world. Plants also create natural habitats for all organisms in the world. With illustrations and clear writing for non-specialists, Green Planet helps general readers realize that if we are to rescue the Earth from environmental disaster, we must protect wild plants.

Beginning with an overview of how human civilization has altered the face of the Earth, particularly by the destruction of forests, the book details the startling consequences of these actions. Rice provides compelling reasons for government officials, economic leaders, and the public to support efforts to save threatened and endangered plants. Global campaigns to solve environmental problems with plants, such as the development of green roofs and the Green Belt Movementùa women's organization in Kenya that empowers communities worldwide to protect the environmentùshow readers that efforts to save wild plants can be successful and beneficial to the economic well-being of nations.

Through current scientific evidence, readers see that plants are vital to the ecological health of our planet and understand what can be done to lead to a betterùand greenerùfuture

Benefits of plants:

  • Help modulate greenhouse gases
  • Produce almost all oxygen in the air
  • Create cool shade that reduces energy costs
  • Prevent floods, droughts, and soil erosion
  • Produce all of the food in the world
  • Create and preserve soil
  • Create natural habitats
  • Heal the landscape after natural and human disasters
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Gregor Mendel's Experiments on Plant Hybrids
Corcos, Alain F
Rutgers University Press, 1993
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Grieving Pregnancy
Memorializing Loss in Japanese Buddhism and American Catholicism
Maureen L. Walsh
Rutgers University Press, 2024
In Grieving Pregnancy: Memorializing Loss in Japanese Buddhism and American Catholicism, Maureen L. Walsh compares how the two religious traditions respond ritually and discursively to miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion experiences marked by grief for the women involved. The experience of pregnancy loss has always been a part of women’s lives, yet only recently has it garnered attention from religious leaders and scholars commensurate with its prevalence. This book examines pregnancy loss as a theological problem for both Buddhism and Catholicism and analyzes the rites and memorials that have developed to address it, such as Japanese Buddhist mizuko kuyō (water children rites) and emergent American Catholic memorial practices focused on pregnancy loss. These parallel practices have emerged within distinct religious landscapes—a fact reflected in their forms and purposes—and when considered together, they raise questions of keen interest to theological and religious studies about the goals of religious practice and the imagination of human life at its earliest stages.
 
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The Grind
Black Women and Survival in the Inner City
McCurn, Alexis S
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Few scholars have explored the collective experiences of women living in the inner city and the innovative strategies they develop to navigate daily life in this setting. The Grind illustrates the lived experiences of poor African American women and the creative strategies they develop to manage these events and survive in a community commonly exposed to violence.
 
Alexis S. McCurn draws on nearly two years of naturalistic field research among adolescents and adults in Oakland, California to provide an ethnographic account of how black women accomplish the routine tasks necessary for basic survival in poor inner-city neighborhoods and how the intersections of race, gender, and class shape how black women interact with others in public. This book makes the case that the daily consequences of racialized poverty in the lives of African Americans cannot be fully understood without accounting for the personal and collective experiences of poor black women. 
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Growing American Rubber
Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security
Finlay, Mark R
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Growing American Rubber explores America's quest during tense decades of the twentieth century to identify a viable source of domestic rubber. Straddling international revolutions and world wars, this unique and well-researched history chronicles efforts of leaders in business, science, and government to sever American dependence on foreign suppliers. Mark Finlay plots out intersecting networks of actors including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, prominent botanists, interned Japanese Americans, Haitian peasants, and ordinary citizensùall of whom contributed to this search for economic self-sufficiency. Challenging once-familiar boundaries between agriculture and industry and field and laboratory, Finlay also identifies an era in which perceived boundaries between natural and synthetic came under review.

Although synthetic rubber emerged from World War II as one solution, the issue of ever-diminishing natural resources and the question of how to meet twenty-first-century consumer, military, and business demands lingers today.

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Growing American Rubber
Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security
Finlay, Mark R
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Growing American Rubber explores America's quest during tense decades of the twentieth century to identify a viable source of domestic rubber. Straddling international revolutions and world wars, this unique and well-researched history chronicles efforts of leaders in business, science, and government to sever American dependence on foreign suppliers. Mark Finlay plots out intersecting networks of actors including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, prominent botanists, interned Japanese Americans, Haitian peasants, and ordinary citizensùall of whom contributed to this search for economic self-sufficiency. Challenging once-familiar boundaries between agriculture and industry and field and laboratory, Finlay also identifies an era in which perceived boundaries between natural and synthetic came under review.

Although synthetic rubber emerged from World War II as one solution, the issue of ever-diminishing natural resources and the question of how to meet twenty-first-century consumer, military, and business demands lingers today.

[more]

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Growing Gardens, Building Power
Food Justice and Urban Agriculture in Brooklyn
Justin Sean Myers
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Across the United States marginalized communities are organizing to address social, economic, and environmental inequities through building community food systems rooted in the principles of social justice.  But how exactly are communities doing this work, why are residents tackling these issues through food, what are their successes, and what barriers are they encountering?  This book dives into the heart of the food justice movement through an exploration of East New York Farms! (ENYF!), one of the oldest food justice organizations in Brooklyn, and one that emerged from a bottom-up asset-oriented development model.  It details the food inequities the community faces and what produced them, how and why residents mobilized to turn vacant land into community gardens, and the struggles the organization has encountered as they worked to feed residents through urban farms and farmers markets.  This book also discusses how through the politics of food justice, ENYF! has challenged the growth-oriented development politics of City Hall, opposed the neoliberalization of food politics, navigated the funding constraints of philanthropy and the welfare state, and opposed the entrance of a Walmart into their community.  Through telling this story, Growing Gardens, Building Power offers insights into how the food justice movement is challenging the major structures and institutions that seek to curtail the transformative power of the food justice movement and its efforts to build a more just and sustainable world.
 
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Growing Girls
The Natural Origins of Girls' Organizations in America
Miller, Susan A
Rutgers University Press, 2007
In the early years of the twentieth century, Americans began to recognize adolescence as a developmental phase distinct from both childhood and adulthood. This awareness, however, came fraught with anxiety about the debilitating effects of modern life on adolescents of both sexes. For boys, competitive sports as well as "primitive" outdoor activities offered by fledging organizations such as the Boy Scouts would enable them to combat the effeminacy of an overly civilized society. But for girls, the remedy wasn't quite so clear.

Surprisingly, the "girl problem"?a crisis caused by the transition from a sheltered, family-centered Victorian childhood to modern adolescence where self-control and a strong democratic spirit were required of reliable citizens?was also solved by way of traditionally masculine, adventurous, outdoor activities, as practiced by the Girl Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and many other similar organizations.

Susan A. Miller explores these girls' organizations that sprung up in the first half of the twentieth century from a socio-historical perspective, showing how the notions of uniform identity, civic duty, "primitive domesticity," and fitness shaped the formation of the modern girl.

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