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Racializing Objectivity
How the White Southern Press Weaponized Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow
Gwyneth Mellinger
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

When the civil rights movement began to challenge Jim Crow laws, the white southern press reframed the coverage of racism and segregation as a debate over journalism standards. Many white southern editors, for instance, designated Black Americans as “Negro” in news stories, claiming it was necessary for accuracy and “objectivity,” even as white subjects went unlabeled. These news professionals disparaged media outlets that did not adhere to these norms, such as the Black press. In this way, the southern white press weaponized journalism standards—and particularly the idea of objectivity—to counter and discredit reporting that challenged white supremacy.

Through deep engagement with letters and other materials in numerous archives from editors, journalists, and leaders of newswire services, Racializing Objectivity interrogates and exposes how the white southern press used journalism standards as a professional rationalization for white supremacy and a political strategy to resist desegregation. Gwyneth Mellinger argues that white skin privilege gave these news professionals a stake in the racial status quo and was thus a conflict of interest as they defended Jim Crow. Her study includes an examination of the Southern Education Reporting Service, an objectivity project whose impartiality, she contends, instead affirmed systemic racism. In a pointed counternarrative, Mellinger highlights Black editors and academics who long criticized the supposed objectivity of the press and were consequently marginalized and often dismissed as illegitimate, fanciful, and even paranoid.

Elegant and incisive, Racializing Objectivity unequivocally demonstrates that a full telling of twentieth-century press history must reckon with the white southern press’ cooptation of objectivity and other professional standards to skew racial narratives about Black Americans, as well as northern whites and democracy itself.

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Ramparts of Resistance
Why Workers Lost Their Power, and How to Get It Back
Sheila Cohen
Pluto Press, 2006
Ramparts of Resistance examines the experience of British and U.S. workers during the last three decades to offer a broad analysis of the need for a new independent politics of trade unionism. Recent years have seen great changes in the trade union movement, from waves of strikes in the 1970s to a battery of employer and state onslaughts, culminating in the anti-union legislation of the 1980s and 1990s. Looking at grassroots labor struggles, Sheila Cohen explores issues of reformism, trade union democracy, and the political meaning of ordinary workplace resistance, and puts forward ideas for change. Ramparts of Resistance examines the failure of the union movement to rise to the neoliberal challenge and calls for a new politics of independent unionism and an explicitly class-based renewal of "workers' power." Coming at a time when union activity and membership involvement continues despite the odds, this book is an inspiring guide to the direction that unionism should take.
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A Real Van Gogh
How the Art World Struggles with Truth
Henk Tromp
Amsterdam University Press, 2010

In 1928, after eleven years of extensive research and editing, Dr. Jacob Baart de la Faille finally finished the first catalogue raisonné of Vincent van Gogh’s work. Soon after, however, de la Faille discovered that he had mistakenly listed dozens of forged works as genuine in the catalog. He quickly set out to set the record straight but was met with strong resistance from art dealers, collectors, critics, politicians, amongst others—all of whom had self-interested reasons to oppose his corrections.

            
To this day, the international art world struggles to separate the real Van Goghs from the fake. A Real Van Gogh begins with the story of de la Faille and moves into the late decades of the twentieth century, outlining the numerous clashes over the authenticity of Van Gogh’s works while simultaneously exposing the often bewildering ramifications for art critics and scholars when they bring unwelcome news.

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Recast Your City
How to Save Your Downtown with Small-Scale Manufacturing
Ilana Preuss
Island Press, 2021
Too many U.S. cities and towns have been focused on a model of economic development that relies on recruiting one big company (such as Amazon), a single industry (usually in technology), or pursuing other narrow or short-term fixes that are inequitable and unsustainable. Some cities and towns were changing, even before the historic retail collapse brought on by COVID-19. They started to shift to a new economic model that works with the community to invest in place in an inclusive and thoughtful way, with short-term wins that build momentum for long-term growth. A secret ingredient to this successful model is small-scale manufacturing.
 
In Recast Your City: How to Save Your Downtown with Small-Scale Manufacturing, community development expert Ilana Preuss explains how local leaders can revitalize their downtowns or neighborhood main streets by bringing in and supporting small-scale manufacturing. Small-scale manufacturing businesses help create thriving places, with local business ownership opportunities and well-paying jobs that other business types can’t fulfill.
 
Preuss draws from her experience working with local governments, large and small and illuminates her recommendations with real-world examples. She details her five-step method for recasting your city using small-scale manufacturing: (1) light the spark (assess what you can build on and establish goals); (2) find and connect (get out of your comfort zone and find connectors outside of your usual circles); (3) interview (talk to people and build trust); (4) analyze (look for patterns and gaps as well as what has not been said); and (5) act (identify short-term actions to help build long-term change). This work is difficult and sometimes uncomfortable, but necessary and critical for success. Preuss supports and inspires change by drawing from her work in cities from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Columbia, Missouri, to Fremont, California.
 
In Recast Your City, Preuss shows how communities across the country can build strong local businesses through small-scale manufacturing, reinvest in their downtowns, and create inclusive economic opportunity. Preuss provides tools that local leaders in government, business, and real estate as well as entrepreneurs and advocates in every community can use.
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Reclaiming Fair Use
How to Put Balance Back in Copyright
Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In the increasingly complex and combative arena of copyright in the digital age, record companies sue college students over peer-to-peer music sharing, YouTube removes home movies because of a song playing in the background, and filmmakers are denied a distribution deal when some permissions “i” proves undottable. Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi chart a clear path through the confusion by urging a robust embrace of a principle long-embedded in copyright law, but too often poorly understood—fair use. By challenging the widely held notion that current copyright law has become unworkable and obsolete in the era of digital technologies, Reclaiming Fair Use promises to reshape the debate in both scholarly circles and the creative community.
            This indispensable guide distills the authors’ years of experience advising documentary filmmakers, English teachers, performing arts scholars, and other creative professionals into no-nonsense advice and practical examples for content producers. Reclaiming Fair Use begins by surveying the landscape of contemporary copyright law—and the dampening effect it can have on creativity—before laying out how the fair-use principle can be employed to avoid copyright violation. Finally, Aufderheide and Jaszi summarize their work with artists and professional groups to develop best practice documents for fair use and discuss fair use in an international context. Appendixes address common myths about fair use and provide a template for creating the reader’s own best practices. Reclaiming Fair Use will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the law, creativity, and the ever-broadening realm of new media.
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Reclaiming Fair Use
How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, Second Edition
Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In the increasingly complex and combative arena of copyright in the digital age, record companies sue college students over peer-to-peer music sharing, YouTube removes home movies because of a song playing in the background, and filmmakers are denied a distribution deal when a permissions i proves undottable. Analyzing the dampening effect that copyright law can have on scholarship and creativity, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi urge us to embrace in response a principle embedded in copyright law itself—fair use.
Originally published in 2011, Reclaiming Fair Use challenged the widely held notion that copyright law is obsolete in an age of digital technologies. Beginning with a survey of the contemporary landscape of copyright law, Aufderheide and Jaszi drew on their years of experience advising documentary filmmakers, English teachers, performing arts scholars, and other creative professionals to lay out in detail how the principles of fair-use can be employed to avoid copyright violation. Taking stock of the vibrant remix culture that has only burgeoned since the book’s original publication, this new edition addresses the expanded reach of fair use—tracking the Twitter hashtag #WTFU (where’s the fair use?), the maturing of the transformativeness measure in legal disputes, the ongoing fight against automatic detection software, and the progress and delays of digitization initiatives around the country.
Full of no-nonsense advice and practical examples, Reclaiming Fair Use remains essential reading for anyone interested in law, creativity, and the ever-broadening realm of new media.
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Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race
How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown
Kevin J. McMahon
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Many have questioned FDR's record on race, suggesting that he had the opportunity but not the will to advance the civil rights of African Americans. Kevin J. McMahon challenges this view, arguing instead that Roosevelt's administration played a crucial role in the Supreme Court's increasing commitment to racial equality—which culminated in its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

McMahon shows how FDR's attempt to strengthen the presidency and undermine the power of conservative Southern Democrats dovetailed with his efforts to seek racial equality through the federal courts. By appointing a majority of rights-based liberals deferential to presidential power, Roosevelt ensured that the Supreme Court would be receptive to civil rights claims, especially when those claims had the support of the executive branch.
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The Red Atlas
How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World
John Davies and Alexander J. Kent
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, its legacy and the accompanying Russian-American tension continues to loom large.  Russia’s access to detailed information on the United States and its allies may not seem so shocking in this day of data clouds and leaks, but long before we had satellite imagery of any neighborhood at a finger’s reach, the amount the Soviet government knew about your family’s city, street, and even your home would astonish you. Revealing how this was possible, The Red Atlas is the never-before-told story of the most comprehensive mapping endeavor in history and the surprising maps that resulted.

From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like New York, DC, and London to towns like Pontiac, MI and Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough information to create street-level maps. What they chose to include on these maps can seem obvious like locations of factories and ports, or more surprising, such as building heights, road widths, and bridge capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology, while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths and channels around rivers and harbors, could only have been gained by actual Soviet feet on the ground. The Red Atlas  includes over 350 extracts from these incredible Cold War maps, exploring their provenance and cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their makers and the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us.

A fantastic historical document of an era that sometimes seems less distant, The Red Atlas offers an uncanny view of the world through the eyes of Soviet strategists and spies.
 
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Red State
An Insider's Story of How the GOP Came to Dominate Texas Politics
By Wayne Thorburn
University of Texas Press, 2014

In November 1960, the Democratic party dominated Texas. The newly elected vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was a Texan. Democrats held all thirty statewide elective positions. The state legislature had 181 Democrats and no Republicans or anyone else. Then fast forward fifty years to November 2010. Texas has not voted for a Democratic president since 1976. Every statewide elective office is held by Republicans. Representing Texas in Washington is a congressional delegation of twenty-five Republicans and nine Democrats. Republicans control the Texas Senate by a margin of nineteen to twelve and the Texas House of Representatives by 101 to 49.

Red State explores why this transformation of Texas politics took place and what these changes imply for the future. As both a political scientist and a Republican party insider, Wayne Thorburn is especially qualified to explain how a solidly one-party Democratic state has become a Republican stronghold. He analyzes a wealth of data to show how changes in the state’s demographics—including an influx of new residents, the shift from rural to urban, and the growth of the Mexican American population—have moved Texas through three stages of party competition, from two-tiered politics, to two-party competition between Democrats and Republicans, and then to the return to one-party dominance, this time by Republicans. His findings reveal that the shift from Democratic to Republican governance has been driven not by any change in Texans’ ideological perspective or public policy orientation—even when Texans were voting Democrat, conservatives outnumbered liberals or moderates—but by the Republican party’s increasing identification with conservatism since 1960.

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The Renewable Energy Alternative
How the United States and the World Can Prosper without Nuclear Energy or Coal
John O. Blackburn
Duke University Press, 1987
Energy supply problems for the long run have not been solved according to John Blackburn, and they will reappear when the present temporary glut in the oil market ends. Now is the time, Blackburn argues, to plan an orderly transition to a sustainable energy future—before another crisis looms.
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The Renewal of Generosity
Illness, Medicine, and How to Live
Arthur W. Frank
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine—generosity toward others and to themselves.

The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process.

The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing.
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Renewing Catholic Schools
How to Regain a Catholic Vision for a Secular Age
R. Jared Staudt
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
Catholic education remains one of the most compelling expressions of the Church’s mission to form disciples. Despite decades of decline in the number of schools and students, many Catholic schools have been experiencing renewal by returning to the great legacy of the Catholic tradition. Renewing Catholic Schools offers an overview of the reasons behind this renewal and practical suggestions for administrators, clergy, teachers, and parents on how to begin the process of reinvigoration. The book begins by situating Catholic education within the Church’s mission. Fidelity to Catholic mission and identity, including a commitment to the fulness of truth, provides the fundamental mark for the true success of Catholic education. The Catholic intellectual tradition, in particular, established by figures such as Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas, can continue to direct Catholic schools, providing a depth of vision to overcome today’s educational crisis. To transcend the now dominate secular model of education, Catholic schools can align their curriculum more closely to the Catholic tradition. One touchpoint comes from Archbishop Michael Miller’s The Holy See’s Teaching on Catholic Schools, which the book explores as a source for practical guidance. It also offers a Catholic vision for curriculum, examining the full range of subjects from gymnasium, the fine arts, the liberal arts, literature, history, and catechesis, all of which lead to a well-formed graduate, inspired by beauty, attune to truth, and ordered toward the good. Finally, the book provides a practical vision for renewing the school through the formation of teachers, creation of a school community, and by offering suggestions for implementation of a stronger Catholic mission and philosophy of education. The teacher, ultimately, should strive to teach like Jesus, while the community should joyfully embody the school’s mission, making it a lived reality. The book concludes with examples of Catholic schools that have successfully undergone renewal.
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Reporting on Risk
How the Mass Media Portray Accidents, Diseases, Other Hazards
Eleanor Singer
Russell Sage Foundation, 1993
After acts of airline terrorism, air travel tends to drop dramatically—yet Americans routinely pursue the far riskier business of driving cards, where accidents resulting in death or injury are much more likely to occur. Reporting on Risk argues that this selective concern with danger is powerfully shaped by the media, whose coverage of potentially hazardous events is governed more by a need to excite the public than to inform it. Singer and Endreny survey a wide range of print and electronic media to provide an unprecedented look at how hundreds of different hazards are presented to the public—from toxic waste and food poisoning to cigarette smoking, from transportation accidents to famine, and from experimental surgery to communicable diseases. Their investigations raise thought-provoking questions about what the media tell us about modern risks, which hazards are covered and which ignored, and how the media determine when hazards should be considered risky. Are natural hazards reported differently than man-made hazards? Is greater emphasis placed on the potential benefits or the potential drawbacks of complex new technologies? Are journalists more concerned with reporting on unproven cures or informing the public about preventative measures? Do newspapers differ from magazines and television in their risk reporting practices? Reporting on Risk investigates how the media place blame for disasters, and looks at how the reporting of risks has changed in the past twenty-five years as such hazards as nuclear power, birth control methods, and industrial by-products have grown in national prominence. The authors demonstrate that the media often fail to report on risks until energized by the occurrence of some disastrous or dramatic event—the Union Carbide pesticide leak in Bhopal, the Challenger explosion, the outbreak of famine in Somalia, or the failed transplant of a baboon heart to "Baby Fae." Sustained attention to these hazards depends less on whether the underlying issues have been resolved than on whether they continue to unfold in newsworthy events. Reporting on Risk examines the accuracy and the amount of information we receive about our environment. It offers a critical perspective on how our perceptions of risk, as shaped by the media, may contribute to misguided individual and public choices for action and prevention in an increasingly complex world. The authors' probing assessment of how the media report a vast array of risks offers insights useful to journalists, policy analysts, risk specialists, legislators, and concerned citizens.
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Rewarding Work
How to Restore Participation and Self-Support to Free Enterprise, With a New Preface
Edmund S. Phelps
Harvard University Press, 1997
Since the 1970s a gulf has opened between the pay of low-paid workers and the pay of the middle class. No longer able to earn a decent wage in respectable work, many have left the labor force, and the job attachment of those remaining has weakened. For Edmund Phelps, this is a failure of political economy whose widespread effects are undermining the free-enterprise system. His solution is a graduated schedule of tax subsidies to enterprises for every low-wage worker they employ. As firms hire more of these workers, the labor market would tighten, driving up their pay levels as well as their employment.
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Rewriting
How To Do Things With Texts
Joseph Harris
Utah State University Press, 2006

"Like all writers, intellectuals need to say something new and say it well. But unlike many other writers, what intellectuals have to say is bound up with the books we are reading . . . and the ideas of the people we are talking with."

What are the moves that an academic writer makes? How does writing as an intellectual change the way we work from sources? In Rewriting, a textbook for the undergraduate classroom, Joseph Harris draws the college writing student away from static ideas of thesis, support, and structure, and toward a more mature and dynamic understanding. Harris wants college writers to think of intellectual writing as an adaptive and social activity, and he offers them a clear set of strategies—a set of moves—for participating in it.

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Rewriting
How to Do Things with Texts, Second Edition
Joseph Harris
Utah State University Press, 2017

“Like all writers, intellectuals need to say something new and say it well. But for intellectuals, unlike many other writers, what we have to say is bound up with the books we are reading . . . and the ideas of the people we are talking with.”

What are the moves that an academic writer makes? How does writing as an intellectual change the way we work from sources? In Rewriting, Joseph Harris draws the college writing student away from static ideas of thesis, support, and structure, and toward a more mature and dynamic understanding. Harris wants college writers to think of intellectual writing as an adaptive and social activity, and he offers them a clear set of strategies—a set of moves—for participating in it. The second edition introduces remixing as an additional signature move and is updated with new attention to digital writing, which both extends and rethinks the ideas of earlier chapters.

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The Runes of Evolution
How the Universe became Self-Aware
Simon Conway Morris
Templeton Press, 2015
How did human beings acquire imaginations that can conjure up untrue possibilities? How did the Universe become self-aware? In The Runes of Evolution, Simon Conway Morris revitalizes the study of evolution from the perspective of convergence, providing us with compelling new evidence to support the mounting scientific view that the history of life is far more predictable than once thought.
 
A leading evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge, Conway Morris came into international prominence for his work on the Cambrian explosion (especially fossils of the Burgess Shale) and evolutionary convergence, which is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.
 
In The Runes of Evolution, he illustrates how the ubiquity of convergence hints at an underlying framework whereby many outcomes, not least brains and intelligence, are virtually guaranteed on any Earth-like planet. Conway Morris also emphasizes how much of the complexity of advanced biological systems is inherent in microbial forms.
 
By casting a wider net, The Runes of Evolution explores many neglected evolutionary questions. Some are remarkably general. Why, for example, are convergences such as parasitism, carnivory, and nitrogen fixation in plants concentrated in particular taxonomic hot spots? Why do certain groups have a particular propensity to evolve toward particular states?
 
Some questions lead to unexpected evolutionary insights: If bees sleep (as they do), do they dream? Why is that insect copulating with an orchid? Why have sponges evolved a system of fiber optics? What do mantis shrimps and submarines have in common? If dinosaurs had not gone extinct what would have happened next? Will a saber-toothed cat ever re-evolve?
 
Cona Morris observes: “Even amongst the mammals, let alone the entire tree of life, humans represent one minute twig of a vast (and largely fossilized) arborescence. Every living species is a linear descendant of an immense string of now-vanished ancestors, but evolution itself is the very reverse of linear. Rather it is endlessly exploratory, probing the vast spaces of biological hyperspace. Indeed this book is a celebration of how our world is (and was) populated by a riot of forms, a coruscating tapestry of life.”
 
The Runes of Evolution is the most definitive synthesis of evolutionary convergence to be published to date.
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