Sensational headlines have publicized the drug trafficking, brutal violence, and other organized crime elements associated with Central America's mara gangs, but there have been few clear-eyed analyses of the history, hierarchies, and future of the mara phenomenon. The first book to look specifically at the Central American gang problem by drawing on the perspectives of researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, Maras: Gang Violence and Security in Central America provides much-needed insight.

These essays trace the development of the gangs, from Mara Salvatrucha to the 18th Street Gang, in Los Angeles and their spread to El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua as the result of members' deportation to Central America; there, they account for high homicide rates and threaten the democratic stability of the region. With expertise in areas ranging from political science to law enforcement and human rights, the contributors also explore the spread of mara violence in the United States. Their findings comprise a complete documentation that spans sexualized violence, case studies of individual gangs, economic factors, varied responses to gang violence, the use of intelligence gathering, the limits of state power, and the role of policy makers.

Raising crucial questions for a wide readership, these essays are sure to spark productive international dialogues.

The American Revolutionary War began when Massachusetts militiamen and British troops clashed at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Two months later, a much larger engagement occurred at Bunker Hill in Boston. The conflict then expanded into a continent-wide war for independence from Great Britain. Or so we are taught. A closer look at events in the South in the eighteen months following Lexington and Concord tells different story. The practice of teaching the Revolutionary War as one generalized conflict between the American colonies and Great Britain assumes the South’s support for the Revolutionary War was a foregone conclusion. However, once shots were fired, it was not certain that the southern colonies would support the independence movement. What is clear is that both the fledgling American republic and the British knew that the southern colonies were critical to any successful prosecution of the war by either side.
In March to Independence: The American Revolution in the Southern Colonies, 1775–1776, historian Michael Cecere, consulting primary source documents, examines how Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia ended up supporting the colonies to the north, while East Florida remained within the British sphere. South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida all retained their royal governors through the summer of 1775, and no military engagements occurred in any of the southern colonies in the six months following the battles in Massachusetts. The situation changed significantly in the fall, however, with armed clashes in Virginia and South Carolina; by early 1776 the war had spread to all of the southern colonies except East Florida. Although their march to independence did not follow the exact route as the colonies to the north, events in the South pulled the southern colonists in the same direction, culminating with a united Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This book explores the crucial events in the southern colonies that led all but East Florida to support the American cause.
 

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) was the first national trade union for African Americans. Standard BSCP histories focus on the men who built the union. Yet the union's Ladies' Auxiliary played an essential role in shaping public debates over black manhood and unionization, setting political agendas for the black community, and crafting effective strategies to win racial and economic justice. 

Melinda Chateauvert explores the history of the Ladies' Auxiliary and the wives, daughters, and sisters of Pullman porters who made up its membership and used the union to claim respectability and citizenship. As she shows, the Auxiliary actively educated other women and children about the labor movement, staged consumer protests, and organized local and national civil rights campaigns ranging from the 1941 March on Washington to school integration to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Chateauvert also sheds light on the plight of Pullman maids, who—relegated to the Auxiliary—found their problems as working women neglected in favor of the rhetoric of racial solidarity.

A small town in the vast desert of West Texas, Marfa attracts visitors from around the world to its art foundations and galleries, film and music festivals, and design and architecture symposiums. While newcomers sometimes see it as “another Santa Fe,” long-time residents often take a bemused, even disapproving attitude toward the changes that Marfa has undergone since artist Donald Judd came to town in the 1970s and began creating spaces for his own and other artists’ work. They remember when ranching and the military formed the basis of the town’s economy, even as they acknowledge that tourist dollars are now essential to Marfa’s sustainability

Marfa tells an engaging story of how this isolated place became a beacon in the art world, like the famous Marfa Lights that draw curious spectators into the West Texas night. As Kathleen Shafer delves into the town’s early history, the impact of Donald Judd, the expansion of arts programming, and the increase in tourism, she unlocks the complex interplay between the particularities of the place, the forces of commerce and growth, the textures of local culture and tradition, and the transformative role of artists and creative work. Bookending her story between two iconic artworks—the whimsical Prada Marfa and the crass Playboy Marfa—Shafer illuminates the shifting cultural landscape of Marfa, showing why this place has become a mecca for so many and how the influx of newcomers has transformed its character.

Unemployment levels have received a great deal of attention and discussion in recent years. However, another labor category—underemployment—has virtually been ignored. Underutilized or underemployed workers are those who are experiencing inadequate hours of work, insufficient levels of income, and mismatch of occupation and skills. Marginal Workers, Marginal Jobs addresses two principal issues: how can we measure underemployment, and how can we explain its prevalence?

To answer the first question, Teresa Sullivan examines yardsticks in use, demonstrates their inadequacy, and develops a different measure that is easy to interpret and is usable by both demographers and economists. In answering the second, she analyzes 1960 and 1970 census data to determine the relative effects of population composition and job structure on levels of employment.

One of the important contributions of Sullivan's study is to distinguish between marginal workers and marginal jobs in explaining underutilization. Previous explanations, including the widely used dual market theory, have not stressed this analytic distinction. In addition, her work accounts separately for the various types of marginality and seeks to show the condition of workers who are marginal on more than one count—for example, those who are both young and black, or old and female.

A provocative study based on large samples of the U.S. population, this book raises important questions about a critical subject and makes a significant contribution to the theory of underutilization.

Not confessional or autobiographical, not openly political or gender-conscious: all that Marianne Moore’s poetry is not has masked what it actually is. Cristanne Miller’s aim is to lift this mask and reveal the radically oppositional, aesthetic, and political nature of the poet’s work. A new Moore emerges from Miller’s persuasive book—one whose political engagement and artistic experiments, though not cut to the fashion of her time, point the way to an ambitious new poetic.

Miller locates Moore within the historical, literary, and family environments that shaped her life and work, particularly her sense and deployment of poetic authority. She shows how feminist notions of gender prevalent during Moore’s youth are reflected in her early poetry, and tracks a shift in later poems when Moore becomes more openly didactic, more personal, and more willing to experiment with language typically regarded as feminine. Distinguishing the lack of explicit focus on gender from a lack of gender-consciousness, Miller identifies Moore as distinctly feminist in her own conception of her work, and as significantly expanding the possibilities for indirect political discourse in the lyric poem. Miller’s readings also reveal Moore’s frequent and pointed critiques of culturally determined power relationships, those involving race and nationality as well as gender.

Making new use of unpublished correspondence and employing close interpretive readings of important poems, Miller revises and expands our understanding of Marianne Moore. And her work links Moore—in her radically innovative reactions to dominant constructions of authority—with a surprisingly wide range of late twentieth-century women poets.

The United States Marine Corps has a unique culture that ensures comradery, exacting standards, and readiness to be the first to every fight. Yet even in a group that is known for innovation, culture can push leaders to fall back on ingrained preferences. Jeannie L. Johnson takes a sympathetic but critical look at the Marine Corps's long experience with counterinsurgency warfare. Which counterinsurgency lessons have been learned and retained for next time and which have been abandoned to history is a story of battlefield trial and error—but also a story of cultural collisions.

The book begins with a fascinating and penetrating look inside the culture of the Marine Corps through research in primary sources, including Marine oral histories, and interviews with Marines. Johnson explores what makes this branch of the military distinct: their identity, norms, values, and perceptual lens. She then traces the history of the Marines' counterinsurgency experience from the expeditionary missions of the early twentieth century, through the Vietnam War, and finally to the Iraq War. Her findings break new ground in strategic culture by introducing a methodology that was pioneered in the intelligence community to forecast behavior. Johnson shows that even a service as self-aware and dedicated to innovation as the Marine Corps is constrained in the lessons-learned process by its own internal predispositions, by the wider US military culture, and by national preferences. Her findings challenge the conclusions of previous counterinsurgency scholarship that ignores culture. This highly readable book reminds us of Sun Tzu's wisdom that to be successful in war, it is important to know thyself as well as the enemy. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the Marines Corps, counterinsurgency warfare, military innovation, or strategic culture.

Prescient in its analysis and rich in detail, The Mark of Slavery is a powerful addition to the intertwined histories of disability, slavery, and race.

“Essential and thoroughly engaging…Harvey Cox’s ingenious sense of how market theology has developed a scripture, a liturgy, and sophisticated apologetics allow us to see old challenges in a remarkably fresh light.”
—E. J. Dionne, Jr.

We have fallen in thrall to the theology of supply and demand. According to its acolytes, the Market is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. It can raise nations and ruin households, and comes complete with its own doctrines, prophets, and evangelical zeal. Harvey Cox brings this theology out of the shadows, demonstrating that the way the world economy operates is shaped by a global system of values that can be best understood as a religion.

Drawing on biblical sources and the work of social scientists, Cox points to many parallels between the development of Christianity and the Market economy. It is only by understanding how the Market reached its “divine” status that can we hope to restore it to its proper place as servant of humanity.

“Cox argues that…we are now imprisoned by the dictates of a false god that we ourselves have created. We need to break free and reclaim our humanity.”
—Forbes

“Cox clears the space for a new generation of Christians to begin to develop a more public and egalitarian politics.”
—The Nation

A colorful history of US research universities, and a market-based theory of their global success.

American education has its share of problems, but it excels in at least one area: university-based research. That’s why American universities have produced more Nobel Prize winners than those of the next twenty-nine countries combined. Economist Miguel Urquiola argues that the principal source of this triumph is a free-market approach to higher education.

Until the late nineteenth century, research at American universities was largely an afterthought, suffering for the same reason that it now prospers: the free market permits institutional self-rule. Most universities exploited that flexibility to provide what well-heeled families and church benefactors wanted. They taught denominationally appropriate materials and produced the next generation of regional elites, no matter the students’—or their instructors’—competence. These schools were nothing like the German universities that led the world in research and advanced training. The American system only began to shift when certain universities, free to change their business model, realized there was demand in the industrial economy for students who were taught by experts and sorted by talent rather than breeding. Cornell and Johns Hopkins led the way, followed by Harvard, Columbia, and a few dozen others that remain centers of research. By the 1920s the United States was well on its way to producing the best university research.

Free markets are not the solution for all educational problems. Urquiola explains why they are less successful at the primary and secondary level, areas in which the United States often lags. But the entrepreneurial spirit has certainly been the key to American leadership in the research sector that is so crucial to economic success.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
A Smithsonian Book of the Year
A New York Review of Books “Best of 2020” Selection
A New York Times Best Art Book of the Year
An Art Newspaper Book of the Year

A powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America’s prison system.

More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America’s prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them.

Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author’s own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. The impact of their art, Fleetwood observes, can be felt far beyond prison walls. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art.

As the movement to transform the country’s criminal justice system grows, art provides the imprisoned with a political voice. Their works testify to the economic and racial injustices that underpin American punishment and offer a new vision of freedom for the twenty-first century.

Written over a hundred-year period, the letters of Zenas Bartlett and his family and friends capture the vitality that marked the expansion and development of Texas during the nineteenth century. Warm, humorous, and illuminating, these letters and other papers record the changes in a family and in a region as bustling towns replaced clusters of log cabins and the hardships of the frontier were gradually mellowed by the luxuries of settled life.

The earliest letters describe the adventures of young Zenas Bartlett, who left his home in Maine and traveled first to Alabama and then to camps of the California Gold Rush. A new venture brought him to Marlin, Texas, in 1854. The transformation of a wilderness area into a prosperous community is the unifying theme of the rest of the collection.

Churchill Jones, Bartlett’s future father-in-law, writes about his struggles to establish a cotton plantation at the Falls of the Brazos River. Zenas’ antebellum letters perceptively reveal the poignancy of his partner’s death and the joys of his own fulfilling marriage.

John Watkins, an associate in Bartlett’s store, expresses the pride, loyalty, and eventual disillusionment of a soldier in the Civil War. Zenas’ correspondence with his family in the East describes the privations endured by Marlin during Reconstruction.

Beguiling Mollie Dickson’s schoolgirl journal and the letters of Zenas’ large family depict happier times during the eighties and nineties. The last letters were written by Lottie Barnes, a former servant who recalls the tranquil years following the turn of the century. An epilogue brings the story to conclusion, and selections from the author’s delightful collection of family photographs illustrate the book.

Frank Calvert Oltorf was reared on the “Marlin Compound,” the home where members of this singular family lived or visited and where many of the manuscripts included in this book were found. His comments bind the letters in a narrative of pioneering, which is also a humorous and human family history.

Interpretive social science and literary analysis converge in this absorbing book. It is a psychosocial drama in three acts, featuring three very different confrontations between nineteenth-century Americans and the natives of the Marquesas Islands. The Americans, in seeking to come to terms with the Marquesans, found their own cultural identity challenged; they were compelled, under conditions of extreme psychic stress, to discover what it meant to them to be civilized.

The protagonists are the Reverend William Alexander, who led a mission to the Marquesas to rescue the islanders from sin and savagery through the word of God; Captain David Porter, a rationalist intent upon civilizing the natives by educating them; and Herman Melville, seaman, who was held captive for a time by the Typees. The Calvinist, rationalist, and romantic preconceptions of the three were shaken by their experiences in the alien environment of Polynesia. Only Melville, however, came to investigate the civilized identity itself as a source of these shared consternations. T. Walter Herbert offers a fresh perspective on Melville's Typee by considering it in the context of the earlier encounters, and by drawing, as he does throughout, on the insights of cultural anthropology.

Widely praised as the best available study of its kind, Marriage and Divorce, in a new, revised edition, incorporates recent statistics to bring its treatment up to date. This book is replete with information about factors affecting the stability of marriage, the decision to marry or to divorce, and differences in marriage and divorce patterns among various socioeconomic classes and races. There are, in addition, chapters on people who never marry, on the relationship of marital status and health, on family composition and living arrangements, and on work experience and income of married persons. The new, concluding chapter focuses on developments in the turbulent decade of the sixties and early seventies.

Sociologists, psychologists, marriage counselors, and practitioners in the medical and health fields as well as demographers will find this study invaluable, as will students in these and related areas.

With roller coaster changes in marriage and divorce rates apparently leveling off in the 1980s, Andrew Cherlin feels that the time is right for an overall assessment of marital trends. His graceful and informal book surveys and explains the latest research on marriage, divorce, and remarriage since World War II.

Cherlin presents the facts about family change over the past thirty-five years and examines the reasons for the trends that emerge. He views the 1950s, when Americans were marrying and having children early and divorcing infrequently, as the aberration, and he discusses why this period was unusual. He also explores the causes and consequences of the dramatic changes since 1960—increases in divorce, remarriage, and cohabitation, decreases in fertility—that are altering the very definition of the family in our society. He concludes with a discussion of the increasing differences in the marital patterns of black and white families over the past few decades.

Susan Staves’s venture in feminist critical legal history is a comprehensive account of the changing laws governing married women’s property and a critical analysis of those laws and the ideology behind them. Staves offers an argument differing sharply from conventional appraisals of rule change as “progress.” She shows that, although there was a brief period in the mid-eighteenth century when contract law was applied to women’s rights to own and dispose of property, the results were socially intolerable, and the courts soon retreated to the older patriarchal structures that deprived married women of full ownership of property.

These patriarchal structures had always functioned to facilitate the transmission of significant property from male to male. Entitlements of women were designed to provide them with subsistence for themselves and minor children dependent upon them and to prevent their becoming an expense to the community. In examining several species of married women’s property—dower, jointure, pin money, and separate maintenance allowances—Staves shows that, despite the supposed importance of the of precedent in the legal system, judges had considerable room to maneuver and acted on their own ideological biases.

This story is packed with human interest and illustrative anecdote. Staves uses vivid examples from literature of the times, including plays such as Vanbrugh’s Relapse, Congreve’s Way of the World, and Sheridan’s School for Scandal, and novels like Tom Jones and Pride and Prejudice. Her book will interest a diverse audience of historians, legal scholars, students of eighteenth-century culture and literature, and general readers concerned with women’s issues.

Martín Ramírez, a Mexican migrant worker and psychiatric patient without formal artistic training, has been hailed by leading New York art critics as one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. His work has been exhibited alongside masters such as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró. A landmark exhibition of Ramírez’s work at the American Folk Art Museum in 2007 broke attendance records and garnered praise from major media, including the New York Times, New Yorker, and Village Voice.

Martín Ramírez offers the first sustained look at the life and critical reception of this acclaimed artist. Víctor Espinosa challenges the stereotype of outsider art as an indecipherable enigma by delving into Ramírez’s biography and showing how he transformed memories of his life in Mexico, as well as his experiences of displacement and seclusion in the United States, into powerful works of art. Espinosa then traces the reception of Ramírez’s work, from its first anonymous showings in the 1950s to contemporary exhibitions and individual works that have sold for as much as a half-million dollars. This eloquently told story reveals how Ramírez’s three-decades-long incarceration in California psychiatric institutions and his classification as “chronic paranoid schizophrenic” stigmatized yet also protected what his hands produced. Stripping off the labels “psychotic artist” and “outsider master,” Martín Ramírez demonstrates that his drawings are not passive manifestations of mental illness. Although he drew while confined as a psychiatric patient, the formal elements and content of Ramírez’s artwork are shaped by his experiences of cultural and physical displacement.

Educating and uniting the players as a workforce, Miller embarked on a long campaign to win the concessions that defined his legacy: decent workplace conditions, a pension system, outside mediation of player grievances and salary disputes, a system of profit sharing, and the long-sought dismantling of the reserve clause that opened the door to free agency. Through it all, allies and adversaries alike praised Miller's hardnosed attitude, work ethic, and honesty.

Comprehensive and illuminating, Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary tells the inside story of a time of change in sports and labor relations, and of the contentious process that gave athletes in baseball and across the sporting world a powerful voice in their own games.

In Masking Inequality with Good Intentions, Heather M. Falconer examines the impact of systemic bias on disciplinary discourse acquisition and identity development by asking “How do the norms and expectations of higher education and STEM, specifically, impact the development of scientific identity and discursive skill?” and “What role do societal markers like race and gender play in the negotiation of identity in STEM learning environments?”

Drawing on the experiences and writings of six students from historically underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, each participating in an undergraduate research program, Falconer discusses how programmatic and pedagogical choices can work to either further marginalize students and disrupt their writing and identity development as scientists or create counterspaces—spaces where students can thrive and push back against dominant, oppressive forces. Practical applications for pedagogy, curriculum, and program design are included.