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In his novel Miriam Coffin, or The Whale-Fishermen (1834), Joseph C. Hart proclaimed that his characters were “a bold and hardy race of men,” who deserved the “expressive title of American Whale-Fishermen.” Hart was not the only American author to applaud these physical laborers as the embodiment of national manhood. Heroic portraits of whalers first appeared in American literature during the 1780s, and they proliferated across time. Writers as various as Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman celebrated the talents of the seafarers who transformed the New England whale fishery into a globally dominant industry. But these images did not go unchallenged. Alternative visions—some of which undermined the iconic status of the trade and its workers—began to proliferate. Even so, these depictions did very little to dismantle the notion that whaling men were prime exemplars of a proud American work ethic.

To explain why this industry had such a widespread and enduring impact on American literature, Jennifer Schell juxtaposes and analyzes a wide array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century whaling narratives. Drawing on various studies of masculinity, labor history, and transnationalism, Schell shows how this particular type of maritime work, and the traits and values associated with it, helped to shape the American literary, cultural, and historical imagination. In the process, she reveals the diverse, flexible, and often contradictory meanings of gender, class, and nation in nineteenth-century America.

In nineteenth-century England, sodomy was punishable by death; even an accusation could damage a man’s reputation for life. The last executions for this private, consensual act were in 1835, but the effort to change the law that allowed for those executions was intense and precarious, and not successful until 1861. In this groundbreaking book, “Beyond the Law,” noted historian Charles Upchurch pieces together fragments from history and uses a queer history methodology to recount the untold story of the political process through which the law allowing for the death penalty for sodomy was almost ended in 1841.

Upchurch recounts the legal and political efforts of reformers like Jeremy Bentham and Lord John Russell—the latter of whom argued that the death penalty for sodomy was “beyond the law and above the law.” He also reveals that a same-sex relationship linked the families of the two men responsible for co-sponsoring the key legislation. By recovering the various ethical, religious, and humanitarian arguments against punishing sodomy, “Beyond the Law” overturns longstanding assumptions of nineteenth-century British history. Upchurch demonstrates that social change came from an amalgam of reformist momentum, family affection, elitist politics, class privilege, enlightenment philosophy, and personal desires.

A little-known fact about the prominent US psychologist and educator Carl E. Seashore (1866–1949) is that he was deeply involved in the American eugenics movement. He was among the US academics to support eugenics long before German Nazis embraced it. A titan in a host of disciplines and a proponent of radical education reform, Seashore used his positional power to promote a constellation of education reforms consistent with central precepts of eugenics. Many of these reforms, including tracking, gifted and talented programs, and high-stakes standardized testing, were adopted and remain standard practice in the United States today. He promulgated the idea that musical talent is biologically inheritable, and he developed the first standardized tests of musical talent; these tests were used by early-twentieth-century researchers in their attempts to determine whether there are race differences in musical talent. Seashore’s ideas and work profoundly shaped music education’s research trajectory, as well as enduring “commonsense” beliefs about musical ability. An intersectional analysis, “Destined to Fail” focuses on the relationship between eugenics and Seashore’s views on ability, race, and gender. Koza concludes that Seashore promoted eugenics and its companion, euthenics, because he was a true believer. She also discusses the longstanding silences surrounding Seashore’s participation in eugenics. As a diagnosis and critique of the present, “Destined to Fail” identifies resemblances and connections between past and present that illustrate the continuing influence of eugenics—and the systems of reasoning that made early-twentieth-century eugenics imaginable and seem reasonable—on education discourse and practice today. It maps out discursive, citational, and funding connections between eugenicists of the early twentieth-century and contemporary White supremacists; this mapping leads to some of Donald Trump’s supporters and appointees.

Educated, white collar professional women carried the most visible banners of feminism. But working class women were a powerful force in the campaign for gender equality. Dennis A. Deslippe explores how unionized wage-earning women led the struggle to place women's employment rights on the national agenda, decisively influencing both the contemporary labor movement and second-wave feminism. 

Deslippe's account unravels a complex history of how labor leaders accommodated and resisted working women's demands for change. Through case studies of unions representing packinghouse and electrical workers, Deslippe explains why gender equality emerged as an issue in the 1960s and how the activities of wage-earning women in and outside of their unions shaped the content of the debate. He also traces the fault lines separating working-class women--who sought gender equality within the parameters of unionist principles such as seniority--from middle-class women--who sought an equal rights amendment that would guarantee an abstract equality for all women. 

Thoughtful and detailed, "Rights, Not Roses" offers a new look at the complexities of working-class feminism.

The volume begins with a new translation of the 1945 play The Useless Mouths, written in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Other pieces were discovered after Beauvoir's death in 1986, such as the 1965 short novel "Misunderstanding in Moscow," involving an elderly French couple who confront their fears of aging. Two additional previously unknown texts include the fragmentary "Notes for a Novel," which contains the seed of what she later would call "the problem of the Other," and a lecture on postwar French theater titled Existentialist Theater. The collection notably includes the eagerly awaited translation of Beauvoir's contribution to a 1965 debate among Jean-Paul Sartre and other French writers and intellectuals, "What Can Literature Do?"

Prefaces to well-known works such as Bluebeard and Other Fairy Tales,La Bâtarde, and James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years are also available in English for the first time, alongside essays and other short articles. A landmark contribution to Beauvoir studies and French literary studies, the volume includes informative and engaging introductory essays by prominent and rising scholars.

Contributors are Meryl Altman, Elizabeth Fallaize, Alison S. Fell, Sarah Gendron, Dennis A. Gilbert, Laura Hengehold, Eleanore Holveck, Terry Keefe, J. Debbie Mann, Frederick M. Morrison, Catherine Naji, Justine Sarrot, Liz Stanley, Ursula Tidd, and Veronique Zaytzeff.

In October 1930, Macy's department store in New York City used the inexpensive book series “The Modern Library of the World's Best Books” as a loss-leader to draw customers into the store. Selling for only nine cents a copy, the small-format, modern classics attracted crowds of buyers. Businessmen, housewives, students, bohemian intellectuals, and others waited in long lines to purchase affordable hard-bound copies of works by the likes of Tolstoy, Wilde, Joyce, and Woolf. It was a significant moment in American cultural history, demonstrating that a series of books respected and praised by the nation's self-appointed arbiters of taste could attract a throng of middle-class consumers without damaging its reputation as a vehicle of “serious culture.”

The Modern Library's reputation stands in sharp contrast to that of similar publishing ventures dismissed by critics as agents of “middlebrow culture,” such as the Book of-the-Month Club. Writers for the New Republic, the Nation, and the Bookman expressed their fears that mass-production and new distribution schemes would commodify literature and deny the promise of American culture. Yet although the Modern Library offered the public a uniformly packaged, preselected set of “the World's Best Books,” it earned the praise of these self-consciously intellectual critics. 

Focusing on the Modern Library's marketing strategies, editorial decisions, and close attention to book design, Jay Satterfield explores the interwar cultural dynamics that allowed the publisher of the series to exploit the forces of mass production and treat books as commodities while still positioning the series as a revered cultural entity. So successful was this approach that the modern publishing colossus Random House was built on the reputation, methods, and profits of the Modern Library.

In her own private ways, Emily Dickinson participated in the popular entertainments of her time. On her piano, she performed popular musical numbers, many from the tradition of minstrelsy, and at theaters, she listened to famous musicians, including Jenny Lind and, likely, the Hutchinson Family Singers. In reading the Atlantic Monthly, the Springfield Republican, and Harper's, she kept up with the roiling conflicts over slavery and took in current fiction and verse. And, she enjoyed the occasional excursion to the traveling circus and appreciated the attractions of the dime museum. Whatever her aspirations were regarding participation in a public arena, the rich world of popular culture offered Dickinson a view of both the political and social struggles of her time and the amusements of her contemporaries.

“Theatricals of Day” explores how popular culture and entertainments are seen, heard, and felt in Dickinson's writing. In accessible prose, Sandra Runzo proposes that the presence of popular entertainment in Dickinson's life and work opens our eyes to new dimensions of the poems, illuminating the ways in which the poet was attentive to strife and conflict, to amusement, and to play.

How does political change take hold? In the 1850s, politicians and abolitionists despaired, complaining that the "North, the poor timid, mercenary, driveling North" offered no forceful opposition to the power of the slaveholding South. And yet, as John L. Brooke proves, the North did change. Inspired by brave fugitives who escaped slavery and the cultural craze that was Uncle Tom's Cabin, the North rose up to battle slavery, ultimately waging the bloody Civil War.

While Lincoln's alleged quip about the little woman who started the big war has been oft-repeated, scholars have not fully explained the dynamics between politics and culture in the decades leading up to 1861. Rather than simply viewing the events of the 1850s through the lens of party politics, “There Is a North” is the first book to explore how cultural action—including minstrelsy, theater, and popular literature—transformed public opinion and political structures. Taking the North's rallying cry as his title, Brooke shows how the course of history was forever changed.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the Reading Revolution explores a transformation in the cultural meaning of Stowe's influential book by addressing changes in reading practices and a shift in widely shared cultural assumptions. These changes reshaped interpretive conventions and generated new meanings for Stowe's text in the wake of the Civil War.

During the 1850s, men, women, and children avidly devoured Stowe's novel. White adults wept and could not put the book down, neglecting work and other obligations to complete it. African Americans both celebrated and denounced the book. By the 1890s, readers understood Uncle Tom's Cabin in new ways. Prefaces and retrospectives celebrated Stowe's novel as a historical event that led directly to emancipation and national unity. Commentaries played down the evangelical and polemical messages of the book. 

Illustrations and children's editions projected images of entertaining and devoted servants into an open-ended future. In the course of the 1890s, Uncle Tom's Cabin became both a more viciously racialized book than it had been and a less compelling one. White readers no longer consumed the book at one sitting; Uncle Tom's Cabin was now more widely known than read. However, in the growing silence surrounding slavery at the turn of the century, Stowe's book became an increasingly important source of ideas, facts, and images that the children of ex-slaves and other free-black readers could use to make sense of their position in U.S. culture.

In this time of social crisis and revolutionary change, words have become one of the key sites of social struggle. Using a framework informed by trans studies, critical race theory, and digital media studies, #Triggered looks at the peak period of progressive social media activism in the U.S. and argues that it is primarily a struggle over whether it is safe for each of us to be ourselves, openly, publicly, proudly, and without permission from the dominant culture.

The term “triggered” and the concept of the trigger warning are just two of many emergent sites of struggle. This book provides a contextual, theoretical history to consider them alongside movements like #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #TimesUp and concepts like cultural appropriation, “cancel culture,” and safe spaces. These on- and offline struggles have transformed the way we talk, the words we use, and the dominant cultural conversation of race, gender, sexuality, police violence, trauma, and equity. And yet the status quo is still one where marginalized individuals are made to fear for their lives if they do not exhibit the appropriate care and deference. #Triggered invites readers to consider the legitimate complaints about oppressive systems underlying this social crisis, the hierarchy of traumas and subjectivity these movements are opposing, and the opportunity to develop a more open and less repressive society and culture.

Far more than a mere remembrance book about September 11, ‘I am an American’ offers precisely the kind of ground-level empathy needed to reignite a meaningful national debate about who we are and who we might become as a people and a nation.

A behind-the-scenes look at why Latinos—the largest immigrant group in the United States—make up a staggeringly low percentage of the elite US labor force.

Carla, Douglas, and Isabel each migrated to the United States from Latin American countries before they were teenagers. Each had big dreams—in medicine, business, and government—and each did what they were told to do to achieve their goals: work hard, stay in school, and follow the rules. Yet none of them reached the top of the labor market, and they are far from alone. Only one out of one hundred Latino immigrants who arrives in the United States as children will ever secure a job that requires a college degree and pays high wages. 

In 1 in 100, sociologist A. Nicole Kreisberg explains why Latinos are more likely to have difficulty finding success in the labor market. Despite increasing access to higher education, Latino immigrant youth seldom land high-paying jobs, but not because of individual failure. Instead, these slim odds are the result of immigration laws, schools, and workplaces that interact in ways that systematically disadvantage so many Latinos. Kreisberg finds that stereotypes about Latino immigrants are activated in US schools, exacerbated in US colleges, and reinforced by employers’ hiring decisions. And because most Americans cannot tell who is and who isn’t an immigrant, the stereotypes harming immigrants often spill over to the 68 million Latinos living in the United States, including those who are US citizens.

By tracing the school-to-work trajectories of child-arriving Latino immigrants and native-born Latinos, alongside the gatekeepers who structure their opportunities, 1 in 100 shows that the 99 who struggle are not the exception—they are the unfortunate norm.