Ethnicity and Medical Care equips health professionals with the ethnographic data they need to deliver better health care within American communities of urban blacks, Chinese, Haitians, Italians, Mexicans, Navajos, and Puerto Ricans. Each chapter, dealing in turn with one of these seven American subcultures, reviews the available demographic and epidemiological data and examines sociocultural influences on each major phase of illness.

Topics range from culture-specific syndromes such as susto or “evil eye,” to concepts of disease based on blood perturbations or God's punishment, to lay-referral networks, consultation of mainstream and non-mainstream sources of medical care, and adherence to treatment regimens. But ethnic behavior often entails general styles of interaction—attitudes toward authority figures, sex-role allocations, and ways of expressing emotion and asking for help—that are carried over into the healthcare setting. Accordingly, Ethnicity and Medical Care also offers general guidelines for providing more personalized, culturally relevant care for any ethnically affiliated patient.

This is the first quantitative analysis of the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of a representative sample of Ukrainians in the United States. The studies are based on data from the 1970 U. S. population census (persons with Ukrainian mother tongue) with additional results from the 1980 census (persons of Ukrainian ancestry).

The volume consists of a selection of articles presented at a conference at Harvard University. Among the authors are such well-known demographers as Frances Kobrin, Basil Zimmer, and Charles Keely, as well as specialists on the Ukrainian-American community such as Myron Kuropas, Volodimir Bandera, and Wsevolod Isajiw.

The articles offer in-depth analyses of geographic distribution, fertility and marital status, socioeconomic characteristics, housing characteristics, and family structure. Here, for the first time, is a discussion of the present and future of Ukrainians in the United States and their role in American society that is based on solid statistical data.

In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O’Neill's plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with audiences, won him the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzer, and continue to grip theatergoers today. Now noted historian John Patrick Diggins offers a masterly biography that both traces O’Neill’s tumultuous life and explains the forceful ideas that form the heart of his unflinching works.

Diggins paints a richly detailed portrait of the playwright’s life, from his Irish roots and his early years at sea to his relationships with his troubled mother and brother. Here we see O’Neill as a young Greenwich Village radical, a ravenous autodidact who attempted to understand the disjunction between the sunny public face of American life and the rage that he knew was simmering beneath. According to Diggins, O’Neill mined this disjunction like no other American writer. His characters burn with longing for an idealized future composed of equal parts material success and individual freedom, but repeatedly they fall back to earth, pulled by the tendrils of family and the insatiability of desire. Drawing on thinkers from Emerson to Nietzsche, O’Neill viewed this endlessly frustrated desire as the problematic core of American democracy, simultaneously driving and undermining American ideals of progress, success, and individual freedom.

Melding a penetrating assessment of O’Neill’s works and thought with a sensitive re-creation of his life, Eugene O’Neill’s America offers a striking new view of America’s greatest playwright—and a new picture of American democracy itself.

Eugene Debs (1855-1926) is regarded by many as American history's premier labor advocate. He was the leader of the Socialist party, five-time Socialist candidate for president, outspoken on the rights of all workers, and a persistent defender of America's democratic traditions. 

Nick Salvatore's acclaimed biography offers a major reevaluation of Debs, the movements he launched, and his belief in American Socialism as an extension of the nation's democratic traditions. He also shows the relationship between Debs's public image and his private life as child, sibling, husband, and lover. Salvatore's Debs--weaknesses intact--emerges as a complex man, frustrated and angered by the glaring inequities of a new economic order, and willing to risk his freedom to preserve the essence of democratic society.

Stalin's death on March 6, 1953, reopened the debate within the Eisenhower administration over whether or not the United States should propose and actively promote the reunification of Germany at a summit conference. Written by an insider, this is the only published firsthand account of this foreign policy decision—a decision that illuminated the dilemmas of the Cold War at an important moment.

W. W. Rostow examines the origins of Eisenhower's "peace speech" of April 16, 1953, and of the National Security Council's debate on the German question between John Foster Dulles and presidential adviser C. D. Jackson. Jackson proposed immediate high-level diplomatic contact with the Soviet Union and the countries of Western Europe to discuss German reunification, as well as proposals for the general control of armaments and special security arrangements for Europe. Dulles, however, argued for a more reserved posture, which ruled out summitry and immediate negotiation with the Soviets. Dulles prevailed, but Eisenhower made his famous "peace speech."

In his concluding chapter, Rostow explores the question of whether or not anything was lost by this outcome. Was an opportunity for a united Germany forfeited when Eisenhower rejected Churchill's suggestion for a prompt summit meeting and backed Dulles against Jackson in the National Security Council meeting of March 11?

This is the third in a series of volumes by the author that probe the relationship between ideas and action in the making of major policy decisions. In this series, Rostow examines historic decision making from an insider's point of view while exploiting fully the rich documentary evidence.

Almost everyone would like to see the enactment of sound, practical measures to help disadvantaged people get off welfare and find jobs at decent wages, and over the past quarter-century federal and state governments have struggled to develop just such programs. How do we know whether they are having the hoped-for effect? How do we know whether these vast outlays of money are helping the people they are designed to reach?

All welfare and training programs have been subject to professional evaluations, including social experiments and demonstrations designed to test new ideas. This book reviews what we have discovered from past assessments and suggests how welfare and training programs should be planned for the 1990s. The authors of this volume, each a recognized expert in the evaluation of social programs, do more than summarize what we have learned so far. They clarify why the issue of the proper conduct and interpretation of evaluations has itself been a subject of continuing controversy. In part, the problem is organizational, requiring the integrated efforts of social scientists, public officials, and the professionals who execute evaluations. In addition, there is a dispute about scientific method: should evaluators try to understand the complex social processes that make programs succeed (or fail), or should they focus on inputs and outputs, treating the programs themselves as “black boxes” whose machinery remains hidden?

Evaluating Welfare and Training Programs will be important for policy researchers and evaluation professionals, social scientists concerned with evaluation methods, public officials working in social policy, and students of public policy, economics, and social work.

The New Deal is often said to represent a sea change in American constitutional history, overturning a century of precedent to permit an expanded federal government, increased regulation of the economy, and eroded property protections. John Compton offers a surprising revision of this familiar narrative, showing that nineteenth-century evangelical Protestants, not New Deal reformers, paved the way for the most important constitutional developments of the twentieth century.

Following the great religious revivals of the early 1800s, American evangelicals embarked on a crusade to eradicate immorality from national life by destroying the property that made it possible. Their cause represented a direct challenge to founding-era legal protections of sinful practices such as slavery, lottery gambling, and buying and selling liquor. Although evangelicals urged the judiciary to bend the rules of constitutional adjudication on behalf of moral reform, antebellum judges usually resisted their overtures. But after the Civil War, American jurists increasingly acquiesced in the destruction of property on moral grounds.

In the early twentieth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other critics of laissez-faire constitutionalism used the judiciary’s acceptance of evangelical moral values to demonstrate that conceptions of property rights and federalism were fluid, socially constructed, and subject to modification by democratic majorities. The result was a progressive constitutional regime—rooted in evangelical Protestantism—that would hold sway for the rest of the twentieth century.

A new history explores the commercial heart of evangelical Christianity.

American evangelicalism is big business. For decades, the world’s largest media conglomerates have sought out evangelical consumers, and evangelical books have regularly become international best sellers. In the early 2000s, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life spent ninety weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sold more than thirty million copies. But why have evangelicals achieved such remarkable commercial success?

According to Daniel Vaca, evangelicalism depends upon commercialism. Tracing the once-humble evangelical book industry’s emergence as a lucrative center of the US book trade, Vaca argues that evangelical Christianity became religiously and politically prominent through business activity. Through areas of commerce such as branding, retailing, marketing, and finance, for-profit media companies have capitalized on the expansive potential of evangelicalism for more than a century.

Rather than treat evangelicalism as a type of conservative Protestantism that market forces have commodified and corrupted, Vaca argues that evangelicalism is an expressly commercial religion. Although religious traditions seem to incorporate people who embrace distinct theological ideas and beliefs, Vaca shows, members of contemporary consumer society often participate in religious cultures by engaging commercial products and corporations. By examining the history of companies and corporate conglomerates that have produced and distributed best-selling religious books, bibles, and more, Vaca not only illustrates how evangelical ideas, identities, and alliances have developed through commercial activity but also reveals how the production of evangelical identity became a component of modern capitalism.

The surprising story of the movement to create a truly democratic foreign policy by engaging ordinary Americans in world affairs.

No major arena of US governance is more elitist than foreign policy. International relations barely surface in election campaigns, and policymakers take little input from Congress. But not all Americans set out to build a cloistered foreign policy “establishment.” For much of the twentieth century, officials, activists, and academics worked to foster an informed public that would embrace participation in foreign policy as a civic duty.

The first comprehensive history of the movement for “citizen education in world affairs,” Every Citizen a Statesman recounts an abandoned effort to create a democratic foreign policy. Taking the lead alongside the State Department were philanthropic institutions like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and the Foreign Policy Association, a nonprofit founded in 1918. One of the first international relations think tanks, the association backed local World Affairs Councils, which organized popular discussion groups under the slogan “World Affairs Are Your Affairs.” In cities across the country, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in homes and libraries to learn and talk about pressing global issues.

But by the 1960s, officials were convinced that strategy in a nuclear world was beyond ordinary people, and foundation support for outreach withered. The local councils increasingly focused on those who were already engaged in political debate and otherwise decried supposed public apathy, becoming a force for the very elitism they set out to combat. The result, David Allen argues, was a chasm between policymakers and the public that has persisted since the Vietnam War, insulating a critical area of decisionmaking from the will of the people.

“What I done and what I been accused of covers everything, you put ’em both together.” Wyatt Moore of Caddo Lake exaggerates, but perhaps not very much. During his long life at Caddo Lake, Moore was at various times a boat operator, commercial fisherman, boat builder, farmer, fishing and hunting camp operator, guide, commercial hunter, trapper, raftsman, moonshiner, oil field worker, water well driller, and mechanical jack-of-all-trades. Still, he always found time for his lifelong study of the natural and human history of Caddo Lake. Here, in words as fresh and forceful as the day they were uttered, is his tale.

Moore, who was given the gift of a unique story to tell and great power to tell it, was the historical interpreter of his strange homeland of Caddo Lake. Twenty-three miles long, some forty thousand acres at high water, stretching across two Texas counties and one Louisiana parish, Caddo Lake’s fresh waters merge into a labyrinthine swamp punctuated by inlets, holes, and geological oddities like Goat Island, Whistleberry Slough, Whangdoodle Pass, and the Devil’s Elbow. Here among these lost reminders of steamboats and old bateau men is Moore’s world.

Born in 1901 at Karnack, Texas, Moore grew up in a time when kids wore button shoes and in a place where pigs and chickens roamed the backyard. He drank his first whiskey at age eight, gigged fish, trapped, and hunted for pearls as a boy, and grew up to an easy assurance on the lake that comes only to those long accustomed to its ways. A walking library of the history of Caddo Lake, Moore delved into almost every nook and corner of it, and wherever he went, whatever he did, he sought to learn more about his subect. Sought out by writers and journalists—among them James Michener and Bill Moyers—because of his laconic wit and remarkable command of the region’s story, Moore became known as a resource as precious as the lake itself. Moore’s story is eloquently introduced by Thad Sitton in an opening essay that chronicles the history of Caddo Lake. Striking photographs of Moore at home and at work on the lake beautifully amplify his life story, and an exuberant word-and-picture essay of Moore expertly building the traditional boat of the region, a bateau, reinforces the vivid image we have of this remarkable man.

Winner, 2023 NCA Ethnography Division Best Book Award

Wilfredo Alvarez’s Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor is an exploration into co-cultural communication practices within the workplace. Specifically, Alvarez investigates how Latin American immigrant janitors communicate from their marginalized standpoints in a predominantly White academic organization. He examines how custodial workers perceive, interpret, and thematize routine messages regarding race, ethnicity, social class, immigrant status, and occupation, and how those messages and overall communicative experiences affect both their work and personal lives.

A Latin American immigrant himself, Alvarez relates his own experiences to those of the research participants. His positionality informs and enhances his research as he demonstrates how everyday interpersonal encounters create discursive spaces that welcome or disqualify people based on symbolic and social capital. Alvarez offers valuable insights into the lived experiences of critical––but often undervalued and invisible––organizational members. Through theoretical insights and research data, he provides practical recommendations for organizational leaders to improve how they can relate to and support all stakeholders.

For decades, millions of music fans have gathered every summer in parks and fields to hear their favorite bands at festivals such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, and Glastonbury. How did these and countless other festivals across the globe evolve into glamorous pop culture events, and how are they changing our relationship to music, leisure, and public culture? In Everyone Loves Live Music, Fabian Holt looks beyond the marketing hype to show how festivals and other institutions of musical performance have evolved in recent decades, as sites that were once meaningful sources of community and culture are increasingly subsumed by corporate giants.
 
Examining a diverse range of cases across Europe and the United States, Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a pioneering theory of performance institutions. He explores the fascinating history of the club and the festival in San Francisco and New York, as well as a number of European cities. This book also explores the social forces shaping live music as small, independent venues become corporatized and as festivals transform to promote mainstream Anglophone culture and its consumerist trappings. The book further provides insight into the broader relationship between culture and community in the twenty-first century. An engaging read for fans, industry professionals, and scholars alike, Everyone Loves Live Music reveals how our contemporary enthusiasm for live music is more fraught than we would like to think.

2006 — Runner-up, Arab American National Museum Book Awards

The "evil" Arab has become a stock character in American popular films, playing the villain opposite American "good guys" who fight for "the American way." It's not surprising that this stereotype has entered American popular culture, given the real-world conflicts between the United States and Middle Eastern countries, particularly since the oil embargo of the 1970s and continuing through the Iranian hostage crisis, the first and second Gulf Wars, and the ongoing struggle against al-Qaeda. But when one compares the "evil" Arab of popular culture to real Arab people, the stereotype falls apart. In this thought-provoking book, Tim Jon Semmerling further dismantles the "evil" Arab stereotype by showing how American cultural fears, which stem from challenges to our national ideologies and myths, have driven us to create the "evil" Arab Other.

Semmerling bases his argument on close readings of six films (The Exorcist, Rollover, Black Sunday, Three Kings, Rules of Engagement, and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut), as well as CNN's 9/11 documentary America Remembers. Looking at their narrative structures and visual tropes, he analyzes how the films portray Arabs as threatening to subvert American "truths" and mythic tales—and how the insecurity this engenders causes Americans to project evil character and intentions on Arab peoples, landscapes, and cultures. Semmerling also demonstrates how the "evil" Arab narrative has even crept into the documentary coverage of 9/11. Overall, Semmerling's probing analysis of America's Orientalist fears exposes how the "evil" Arab of American popular film is actually an illusion that reveals more about Americans than Arabs.

"I was but a boy in my nineteenth year, and in for adventure when I started out from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, with all my worldly possessions, consisting of a few dollars in money, a change of clothes, and a gun, of course, to seek my fortune in this lazy man's paradise."

Noah Smithwick was an old man, blind and near his ninetieth year, when his daughter recorded these words. He had stayed on in "paradise"—Texas—from 1827 to 1861, when his opposition to secession took him to California. The Evolution of a State is his story of these "old Texas days."

A blacksmith and a tobacco smuggler, Noah Smithwick made weapons for the Battle of Concepción, and he fought in that battle. With Hensley's company, he chased the Mexican army south of the Rio Grande after the Battle of San Jacinto. Twice he served with the Texas Rangers. In quieter times, he was a postmaster and justice of the peace in little Webber's Prairie.

Eyewitness to so much Texas history, Smithwick recounts his life and adventures in a simple, straightforward style, with a wry sense of humor. His keen memory for detail—what the people wore, what they ate, how they worked and played— vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of the frontier.

First published in part by the Dallas Morning News, Smithwick's recollections gained such popularity that they were published in book form, as The Evolution of a State, in 1900. This new edition of a Texas classic makes widely available for the first time in many years this "best of all books dealing with life in early Texas."

What can teachers in British and American inner-city schools learn from each other about literacy training? To explore this question, Sarah Warshauer Freedman and her British colleagues set up a writing exchange that matched classes from four middle and high schools in the San Francisco Bay area with their London equivalents.

Exchanging Writing, Exchanging Cultures offers concrete lessons to school reformers, policymakers, and classroom teachers about the value and effectiveness of different approaches to teaching writing. Freedman goes beyond the specific subject matter of this study, looking anew at Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's theories of social interaction and addressing the larger questions of the relationship between culture and education.

Seventy-Five Years Ago, the Last American Soldier Who Paid the Ultimate Price for Desertion
A New Edition of the Acclaimed Investigative Story 

In August 1944, a drab convoy of raw recruits destined to join the 28th Division lumbered along a windy French road strewn with dead animals, shattered bodies, and burning equipment. One of those draftees was 24-year-old Eddie Slovik, a petty thief from Detroit who had spent his youth in and out of reform schools. Eddie's luck had recently changed, however, with a steady factory job and marriage to a beautiful girl who gave Eddie hope and security for the first time in his life. But their honeymoon—like that of many other wartime newlyweds—was interrupted by the call to service. The convoy came under intense artillery fire, and in the confusion Slovik became separated from his unit. He joined a Canadian outfit and traveled with them before finally reporting to the 28th Division. He carried a rifle but no ammunition. He was assigned to a platoon but walked away. Refusing to kill, Slovik was arrested, court martialed, and condemned to death. Hundreds of soldiers were tried for desertion during World War II and sentenced to die, but only Eddie Slovik paid the price, supposedly as a deterrent, yet word of the nature of his death was never officially released to the public.

In The Execution of Private Slovik, considered to be among the best investigative books ever written, journalist and author William Bradford Huie reconstructs this entire story with the full cooperation of the U.S. Army in order to find out what made Eddie Slovik an unlikely pacifist and why the affair was covered up. Through interviews with those who knew him and the hundreds of letters to his wife, the author reveals a hard luck depression-era kid who when faced with the reality of war realized that he simply could not kill another human being. Throughout, Huie reveals how Eddie Slovik's death has much to tell us about life and duty to one's country. This edition marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the sentence being carried out, contains a new introduction by the author's daughter.

Praise for The Execution of Private Slovik:

"In the hands of an expert, who writes both passionately and with an almost transparent effort to be fair to all concerned, the story raises questions to which our wisest leaders still lack satisfying answers."
—New York Times

"A remarkable story reported by a master."—W. E. B. Griffin 

"Recommended reading for all military historians."—Military Affairs

"Tremendously moving."—The Atlantic

"It is very likely that William Bradford Huie's The Execution of Private Slovikwill long survive the official histories of World War II. It is a big book and Mr. Huie deserves some sort of rich reward for this unburying of an incident of the war which must disturb us all. For Slovik was more than a 'coward.' He not only did not want to die but he did not want to kill, and one must look far in literature for a figure so moving as Private Slovik wandering about Europe not with bullets in his cartridge belt but with writing paper. The question is not 'How might we improve military procedures?' The question is, 'What has happened to love in our world when he who would rather love than kill must die?'"—from a letter to the New York Times

A quiet revolution came to corporate America during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Large shareholders—pension funds, insurance companies, money manages, and commercial banks—exercised new-found muscle, pressuring senior managers to improve disappointing financial results by reshaping their organization. Michael Useem reveals how those investor pressures have transformed the inside structures of many corporations, better aligning them with shareholder interest.

Useem draws on numerous sources, including interviews with senior managers and intensive studies of seven large corporations representing a range of restructuring experiences and industries—including pharmaceuticals, transportation, chemicals, retailing, electronics, and financial services. He shows that organizational changes have affected many areas of corporate life: headquarters staffs have been reduced authority has filtered down to operating units, and compensation has become more closely tied to performance. Change also extends to corporate governance, where managers have fought back by seeking legal safeguards against takeovers and by staggering board terms. They’ve also put significant resources into building more effective relations with shareholders.

As Useem demonstrates, this revolution has reached beyond the corporation, influencing American politics and law. As increasing ownership concentration has caused companies to focus more attention on shareholders, corporate political agendas have shifted from fighting government regulation to resisting shareholder intrusion.

Should laws apply equally to everyone, or should some individuals and organizations be granted exemptions because of conflicting religious or moral convictions? In recent years, this question has become intensely controversial in America. The Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage, in particular, has provoked barbed debates about legal exemptions. At the core of these debates lies the question of whether basic values of equality and nondiscrimination are at odds with the right to live according to one’s religious beliefs.

In Exemptions: Necessary, Justified, or Misguided? Kent Greenawalt draws on his extensive expertise to place same-sex marriage and other controversies within a broader context. Avoiding oversimplification and reflecting a balanced consideration of competing claims and harms, he offers a useful overview of various types of exemptions and the factors that we should take into account when determining the justice of a particular exemption.

Through a close study of several cases, from doctors who will not perform abortions to institutions that do not pay taxes, Greenawalt demonstrates how to weigh competing values without losing sight of practical considerations like the difficulty of implementing a specific law. This thoughtful guide to exemptions will prove an invaluable resource as America struggles to come to terms with Obergefell v. Hodges, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and similar controversies. Exemptions shows how to reach the most just and desirable legal conclusions by respecting those who wish to live according to different fundamental values.