In 1918, the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France at General Pershing’s explicit request. They were masters of the latest technology: the telephone switchboard. While suffragettes picketed the White House and President Wilson struggled to persuade a segregationist Congress to give women of all races the vote, these courageous young women swore the army oath and settled into their new roles. Elizabeth Cobbs reveals the challenges they faced in a war zone where male soldiers wooed, mocked, and ultimately celebrated them.

The army discharged the last Hello Girls in 1920, the year Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. When they sailed home, they were unexpectedly dismissed without veterans’ benefits and began a sixty-year battle that a handful of survivors carried to triumph in 1979.

“What an eye-opener! Cobbs unearths the original letters and diaries of these forgotten heroines and weaves them into a fascinating narrative with energy and zest.”
—Cokie Roberts, author of Capital Dames

“This engaging history crackles with admiration for the women who served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the First World War, becoming the country’s first female soldiers.”
—New Yorker

“Utterly delightful… Cobbs very adroitly weaves the story of the Signal Corps into that larger story of American women fighting for the right to vote, but it’s the warm, fascinating job she does bringing her cast…to life that gives this book its memorable charisma… This terrific book pays them a long-warranted tribute.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“Cobbs is particularly good at spotlighting how closely the service of military women like the Hello Girls was tied to the success of the suffrage movement.”
—NPR

Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability examines the way Afrodescendant and Black communities use the land on which they live, the rule of law, and their bodies to assert their historical, ontological, and physical presence across South, Central, and North America. Their demand for the recognition of ancestral lands, responsive policies, and human rights sheds new light on their permanent yet tenuous presence throughout the region. The authors argue that by deploying a discourse of transcontinental historical continuity, Black communities assert their presence in local, national, and international political spheres. This conceptualization of hemispheric Blackness is the driving force confronting the historical loss, dismissal, and disparagement of Black lives across the Américas. Through twelve case studies that cover a wide range of locations, their work examines contemporary manifestations of sovereignty of Black body and mind, Black-Indigenous nexuses, and national revisions that challenge more than a quincentennial of denial and state unaccountability in the hemisphere.

Hend is a young Saudi Arabian woman struggling to challenge her conservative society, which is represented by various soldiers, real and metaphorical, in her life. After a failed arranged marriage to an army officer, she is determined to establish herself as a writer and make her own choices in love. Her mother, a firm supporter of their society’s traditional norms, works to block her efforts. As Hend engages with her mother, stories of her past and those of other female relatives reveal the extent of the suffering previous generations of women have endured while living in such a patriarchal society. Hend also comes to understand how such traditions have adversely affected the men in her family, including one brother who flees to the West and another who finds comradeship among the members of al-Qaeda.

Badriah Albeshr represents a growing number of women writers from the Arabian Peninsula who refuse to shy away from the taboo topics of religion and sexuality, which makes Hend and the Soldiers a valuable read for those seeking insights into the complexities surrounding these issues.

For the ancient Maya, food was both sustenance and a tool for building a complex society. This collection, the first to focus exclusively on the social uses of food in Classic Maya culture, deploys a variety of theoretical approaches to examine the meaning of food beyond diet—ritual offerings and restrictions, medicinal preparations, and the role of nostalgia around food, among other topics. For instance, how did Maya feasts build community while also reinforcing social hierarchy? What psychoactive substances were the elite Maya drinking in their caves, and why? Which dogs were good for eating, and which breeds became companions? Why did even some non-elite Maya enjoy cacao, but rarely meat? Why was meat more available for urban Maya than for those closer to hunting grounds on the fringes of cities? How did the molcajete become a vital tool and symbol in Maya gastronomy?

These chapters, written by some of the leading scholars in the field, showcase a variety of approaches and present new evidence from faunal remains, hieroglyphic texts, chemical analyses, and art. Thoughtful and revealing, Her Cup for Sweet Cacao unlocks a more comprehensive understanding of how food was instrumental to the development of ancient Maya culture.

This book is a study of the historical record of Muslim women’s property rights and equity. Based on Islamic court documents of fifteenth-century Granada—documents that show a high degree of women’s involvement—the book examines women’s legal entitlements to acquire property as well as the social and economic significance of these rights to Granada’s female population and, by extension, to women in other Islamic societies.

The microhistory of women’s property rights is placed in a comparative historical, social, and economic context and is examined using a theoretical framework that suggests how this book’s conclusions might coexist with the Islamic feminist discourse on the law as a patriarchal system, serving to highlight both the uniqueness and the limitations of the Islamic case. The specifics presented in the case studies reveal the broader structures, constructs, rules, conditions, factors, and paradigms that shaped women’s property rights under Islamic law. They show that women’s property rights were more than just part of a legal system; they were the product of a legal philosophy and a pervasive paradigm that made property ownership a normal construct of the Muslim woman’s legal persona and a norm of her existence.

In the late 1800s, archaeologists began discovering engraved stone plaques in Neolithic (3500-2500 BC) graves in southern Portugal and Spain. About the size of one's palm, usually made of slate, and incised with geometric or, more rarely, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic designs, these plaques have mystified generations of researchers. What do their symbols signify? How were the plaques produced? Were they worn during an individual's lifetime, or only made at the time of their death? Why, indeed, were the plaques made at all?

Employing an eclectic range of theoretical and methodological lenses, Katina Lillios surveys all that is currently known about the Iberian engraved stone plaques and advances her own carefully considered hypotheses about their manufacture and meanings. After analyzing data on the plaques' workmanship and distribution, she builds a convincing case that the majority of the Iberian plaques were genealogical records of the dead that served as durable markers of regional and local group identities. Such records, she argues, would have contributed toward legitimating and perpetuating an ideology of inherited social difference in the Iberian Late Neolithic.

When capitalism is clearly catastrophically out of control and its excesses cannot be sustained socially or ecologically, the ideas of Herbert Marcuse become as relevant as they were in the 1960s. This is the first English introduction to Marcuse to be published for decades, and deals specifically with his aesthetic theories and their relation to a critical theory of society.

Although Marcuse is best known as a critic of consumer society, epitomised in the classic One-Dimensional Man, Malcolm Miles provides an insight into how Marcuse's aesthetic theories evolved within his broader attitudes, from his anxiety at the rise of fascism in the 1930s through heady optimism of the 1960s, to acceptance in the 1970s that radical art becomes an invaluable progressive force when political change has become deadlocked.

Marcuse's aesthetics of liberation, in which art assumes a primary role in interrupting the operation of capitalism, made him a key figure for the student movement in the 1960s. As diverse forms of resistance rise once more, a new generation of students, scholars and activists will find Marcuse’s radical theory essential to their struggle.

Marriage among the Maya of Central America is a model of complementarity between a man and a woman. This union demands mutual respect and mutual service. Yet some husbands beat their wives.

In this pioneering book, Laura McClusky examines the lives of several Mopan Maya women in Belize. Using engaging ethnographic narratives and a highly accessible analysis of the lives that have unfolded before her, McClusky explores Mayan women's strategies for enduring, escaping, and avoiding abuse. Factors such as gender, age inequalities, marriage patterns, family structure, educational opportunities, and economic development all play a role in either preventing or contributing to domestic violence in the village. McClusky argues that using narrative ethnography, instead of cold statistics or dehumanized theoretical models, helps to keep the focus on people, "rehumanizing" our understanding of violence. This highly accessible book brings to the social sciences new ways of thinking about, representing, and studying abuse, marriage, death, gender roles, and violence.

A distinguished anthropologist and a creative force behind postmodern writing in his field, Vincent Crapanzano here focuses his considerable critical powers upon his own culture. In essays that question how the human sciences, particularly anthropology and psychoanalysis, articulate their fields of study, Crapanzano addresses nothing less than the enormous problem of defining the self in both its individual and collective projections.

Treating subjects as diverse as Roman carnivals and Balinese cockfights, circumcision, dreaming, and spirit possession in Morocco, transference in psychoanalysis, self-characterization in teenage girls’ gossip, Alice in Wonderland, and Jane Austen’s Emma, dialogue models in hermeneutics, and semantic vertigo in Hamlet’s Elsinore, these essays look critically at the inner workings of interpretation in human sciences and literary study. In modern Western culture’s attempts to interpret and communicate the nature of other cultures, Crapanzano finds a crippling crisis in representation. He shows how the quest for knowledge of “exotic” and “primitive” people is often confused with an unexamined need for self-definition, and he sets forth the resulting interpretive paradoxes, particularly the suppression of any awareness of the play of power and desire in such an approach. What is missing from contemporary theories of interpretation is, in Crapanzano’s account, a crucial understanding of the role context plays in any act of communication or its representation—in interpretation itself.

Latin American history traditionally has been defined by larger-than-life heroes such as Símon Bolívar, Emiliano Zapata, and Evita Perón. Recent scholarship, however, tends to emphasize social and cultural factors rather than great leaders. In this new collection, Samuel Brunk and Ben Fallaw bring heroes back to the center of the debate, arguing that heroes not only shape history, they also "tell us a great deal about the places from which they come."

The original essays in this collection examine ten modern Latin American heroes whose charisma derived from the quality of their relationships with admirers, rather than their innate personal qualities. The rise of mass media, for instance, helped pave the way for populists such as radio actress-turned-hero Evita Perón. On the other hand, heroes who become president often watch their images crumble, as policies replace personality in the eyes of citizens. In the end, the editors argue, there is no formula for Latin American heroes, who both forge, and are forged by, unique national events. The conclusion points toward Mexico, where the peasant revolutions that elevated Miguel Hidalgo and, later, Emiliano Zapata are so revered that today's would-be heroes, such as the EZLN's Subcomandante Marcos, must link themselves to peasant mythology even when their personal roots are far from native ground. The enduring (or, in some cases, fading) influence of those discussed in this volume validates the central placement of heroes in Latin American history.

Winner of the Albert Hourani Book Award

Sufis created the most extensive Muslim revivalist network in Asia before the twentieth century, generating a vibrant Persianate literary, intellectual, and spiritual culture while tying together a politically fractured world.

In a pathbreaking work combining social history, religious studies, and anthropology, Waleed Ziad examines the development across Asia of Muslim revivalist networks from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. At the center of the story are the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufis, who inspired major reformist movements and articulated effective social responses to the fracturing of Muslim political power amid European colonialism. In a time of political upheaval, the Mujaddidis fused Persian, Arabic, Turkic, and Indic literary traditions, mystical virtuosity, popular religious practices, and urban scholasticism in a unified yet flexible expression of Islam. The Mujaddidi “Hidden Caliphate,” as it was known, brought cohesion to diverse Muslim communities from Delhi through Peshawar to the steppes of Central Asia. And the legacy of Mujaddidi Sufis continues to shape the Muslim world, as their institutional structures, pedagogies, and critiques have worked their way into leading social movements from Turkey to Indonesia, and among the Muslims of China.

By shifting attention away from court politics, colonial actors, and the standard narrative of the “Great Game,” Ziad offers a new vision of Islamic sovereignty. At the same time, he demonstrates the pivotal place of the Afghan Empire in sustaining this vast inter-Asian web of scholastic and economic exchange. Based on extensive fieldwork across Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan at madrasas, Sufi monasteries, private libraries, and archives, Hidden Caliphate reveals the long-term influence of Mujaddidi reform and revival in the eastern Muslim world, bringing together seemingly disparate social, political, and intellectual currents from the Indian Ocean to Siberia.

Current Arguments in Composition Series

The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading intervenes in the increasingly popular practice of labor-based grading by expanding the scope of this assessment practice to include students who are disabled and multiply marginalized. Through the lens of disability studies, the book critiques the assumption that labor is a neutral measure by which to assess students and explores how labor-based grading contracts put certain groups of students at a disadvantage. Ellen C. Carillo offers engagement-based grading contracts as an alternative that would provide a more equitable assessment model for students of color, those with disabilities, and students who are multiply marginalized.
 
This short book explores the history of labor-based grading contracts, reviews the scholarship on this assessment tool, highlights the ways in which it normalizes labor as an unbiased tool, and demonstrates how to extend the conversation in new and generative ways both in research and in classrooms. Carillo encourages instructors to reflect on their assessment practices by demonstrating how even assessment methods that are designed through a social-justice lens may unintentionally privilege some students over others.
 

Black ASL has long been recognized as a distinct variety of American Sign Language based on abundant anecdotal evidence. The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL, originally published in 2011, presents the first sociohistorical and linguistic study of this language variety. Based on the findings of the Black ASL Project, which undertook this unprecedented research, Hidden Treasure documents the stories and language of the African American Deaf community. With links to online supplemental video content that includes interviews with Black ASL users (formerly on DVD), this volume is a groundbreaking scholarly contribution and a powerful affirmation for Black Deaf people.

This paperback edition includes an updated foreword by Glenn B. Anderson, a new preface that reflects on the impact of this research, and an expanded list of references and resources on Black ASL.

The supplemental video content is available online at the Gallaudet University Press YouTube Channel. Under Playlists, click “The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Companion Video to the Book.” The original Black ASL Project research videos are also available. 

Featured in the film Signing Black in America: The Story of Black ASL, produced by The Language and Life Project at North Carolina State University (Dr. Walt Wolfram, Executive Producer). Look for it on PBS.

The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of modern racial consciousness in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. A Hideous Monster of the Mind reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural relativism, cultural pluralism, and latter-day Afrocentrism.

From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of cotton culture, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith, but also the first self-consciously "black" African-American writers. These various thinkers transformed late-eighteenth-century European environmentalist "natural history" into race theories that combined culture and biology and set the terms for later controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human differences.

In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion "race" caused for thinkers black and white, A Hideous Monster of the Mind offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern American racial thought.

In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are.

For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms—Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow—enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America—housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy—now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. A growing chasm between “serious” and “popular,” between “high” and “low” culture came to dominate America’s expressive arts.

“If there is a tragedy in this development,” Lawrence Levine comments, “it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period—and many have still not regained—their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.”

In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.

In The Highest Glass Ceiling, best-selling historian Ellen Fitzpatrick tells the story of three remarkable women who set their sights on the American presidency. Victoria Woodhull (1872), Margaret Chase Smith (1964), and Shirley Chisholm (1972) each challenged persistent barriers confronted by women presidential candidates. Their quest illuminates today’s political landscape, showing that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign belongs to a much longer, arduous, and dramatic journey.

The tale begins during Reconstruction when the radical Woodhull became the first woman to seek the presidency. Although women could not yet vote, Woodhull boldly staked her claim to the White House, believing she might thereby advance women’s equality. Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith came into political office through the “widow’s mandate.” Among the most admired women in public life when she launched her 1964 campaign, she soon confronted prejudice that she was too old (at 66) and too female to be a creditable presidential candidate. She nonetheless became the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for President by a major party. Democratic Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm ignored what some openly described as the twin disqualifications of race and gender in her spirited 1972 presidential campaign. She ran all the way to the Democratic convention, inspiring diverse followers and angering opponents, including members of the Nixon administration who sought to derail her candidacy.

As The Highest Glass Ceiling reveals, women’s pursuit of the Oval Office, then and now, has involved myriad forms of influence, opposition, and intrigue.

The everyday lives of indigenous and Spanish families in the countryside, a previously under-explored segment of Mexican cultural history, are now illuminated through the vivid narratives presented in Hijos del Pueblo ("offspring of the village"). Drawing on neglected civil and criminal judicial records from the Toluca region, Deborah Kanter revives the voices of native women and men, their Spanish neighbors, muleteers, and hacienda peons to showcase their struggles in an era of crisis and uncertainty (1730-1850).

Engaging and meaningful biographies of indigenous villagers, female and male, illustrate that no scholar can understand the history of Mexican communities without taking gender seriously. In legal interactions native plaintiffs and Spanish jurists confronted essential questions of identity and hegemony. At once an insightful consideration of individual experiences and sweeping paternalistic power constructs, Hijos del Pueblo contributes important new findings to the realm of gender studies and the evolution of Latin America.

J. Blake Perkins searches for the roots of rural defiance in the Ozarks--and discovers how it changed over time. Eschewing generalities, Perkins focuses on the experiences and attitudes of rural people themselves as they interacted with government from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century.He uncovers the reasons local disputes and uneven access to government power fostered markedly different reactions by hill people as time went by. Resistance in the earlier period sprang from upland small farmers' conflicts with capitalist elites who held the local levers of federal power. But as industry and agribusiness displaced family farms after World War II, a conservative cohort of town business elites, local political officials, and midwestern immigrants arose from the region's new low-wage, union-averse economy. As Perkins argues, this modern antigovernment conservatism bore little resemblance to the backcountry populism of an earlier age but had much in common with the movement elsewhere.