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The University of Michigan has been at the forefront of archaeological research for more than 100 years, since 1922, when the Museum of Anthropology (now the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology) was established on the Ann Arbor campus. The goal of its curators for many decades was to create a research and teaching program that emphasized methodological rigor in the analysis of archaeological materials, attempting to solve grand questions about human behavior through fieldwork, collections, and laboratory work. About fifty years ago, the Museum's emphasis shifted to developing archaeological theory when a new generation of curators with processualist leanings made Ann Arbor a testing ground for the so-called New Archaeology.
 
Now, archaeology stands at a crossroads. Some archaeologists refer to the death of archaeological theory. Others stake out opposed camps of generalists and particularists. At U-M, as at many other universities, the past decade has seen a new commitment to collaborative archaeology, working with descendant communities and acknowledging the discipline's roots in colonialism and extraction. 
 
In 2022, to celebrate a century of existence, the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA) hosted an international conference to explore possibilities for a middle way: an archaeology for the next 100 years, combining humanistic and scientific approaches, which allows for both agents and systems, description and explanation, science and heritage. This volume is meant to be a snapshot of that conference and this moment in the development of the discipline. Included are most of the papers and posters presented, as well as photographs of the panels and the proceedings. 
 

Unraveling the twelve months that forged modern Alabama.

To understand Alabama today, it's necessary to understand what happened in 1865. In 1865 Alabama: From Civil War to Uncivil Peace Christopher McIlwain examines the end of the Civil War and the early days of Reconstruction, tracing how the action—and inaction—of leaders in the state during those twelve months shaped the decades that followed as well as state politics today. McIlwain focuses on four factors: the immediate and unconditional emancipation of enslaved people, the destruction of Alabama’s industrial economy, significant broadening of northern support for suffrage rights for freedmen, and a long scarcity of investment capital. Each element proves important to understanding aspects of Alabama today.  

Relevant events outside Alabama are woven into the narrative, including McIlwain’s controversial argument regarding the effect of Lincoln’s assassination. Most historians assume that Lincoln favored black suffrage and that he would have led the fight to impose that on the South. But he made it clear to his cabinet members that granting suffrage rights was a matter to be decided by the southern states, not the federal government. Thus, according to McIlwain, if Lincoln had lived, black suffrage would not have been the issue it became in Alabama.

In his fresh analysis of what really happened in Alabama in 1865 and why—McIlwain illuminates that Alabama's challenges were neither entirely the fault of northern or southern policies but rather the complex interaction between the two. 

As a result of a series of court cases, by the mid-1960s the U.S. post office could no longer interdict books that contained homosexuality. Gay writers were eager to take advantage of this new freedom, but the only houses poised to capitalize on the outpouring of manuscripts were “adult” paperback publishers who marketed their products with salacious covers. Gay critics, unlike their lesbian counterparts, have for the most part declined to take these works seriously, even though they cover an enormous range of genres: adventures, blue-collar and gray-flannel novels, coming-out stories, detective fiction, gothic novels, historical romances, military stories, political novels, prison fiction, romances, satires, sports stories, and spy thrillers—with far more short story collections than is generally realized. Twelve scholars have now banded together to begin a recovery of this largely forgotten explosion of gay writing that occurred in the 1960s.

Descriptions of these pulps have often been inadequate and misinforming, the result of misleading covers, unrepresentative sampling of texts, and a political blindness that refuses to grant worth to pre-Stonewall writing. This volume charts the broader implications of this state of affairs before examining some of the more significant pulp writers from the period. It brings together a diverse range of scholars, methodologies, and reading strategies. The evidence that these essays amass clearly demonstrates the significance of gay pulps for gay literary history, queer cultural studies, and book history.

1980 was a turning point in American history. When the year began, it was still very much the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, a sluggish economy marked by high inflation, and the disco still riding the airwaves. When it ended, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, inaugurating a rightward turn in American politics and culture. We still feel the effects of this tectonic shift today, as even subsequent Democratic administrations have offered neoliberal economic and social policies that owe more to Reagan than to FDR or LBJ. To understand what the American public was thinking during this pivotal year, we need to examine what they were reading, listening to, and watching.
 
1980: America's Pivotal Year puts the news events of the era—everything from the Iran hostage crisis to the rise of televangelism—into conversation with the year’s popular culture. Separate chapters focus on the movies, television shows, songs, and books that Americans were talking about that year, including both the biggest hits and some notable flops that failed to capture the shifting zeitgeist. As he looks at the events that had Americans glued to their screens, from the Miracle on Ice to the mystery of Who Shot J.R., cultural historian Jim Cullen garners surprising insights about how Americans’ attitudes were changing as they entered the 1980s.

Praise for Jim Cullen's previous Rutgers University Press books:

"Informed and perceptive" —Norman Lear on Those Were the Days: Why All in the Family Still Matters

"Jim Cullen is one of the most acute cultural historians writing today." —Louis P. Masur, author of The Sum of Our Dreams on Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

"This is a terrific book, fun and learned and provocative....Cullen provides an entertaining and thoughtful account of the ways that we remember and how this is influenced and directed by what we watch." —Jerome de Groot, author of Consuming History on From Memory to History

“What the women I write about have in common is that they are all rebels with a cause, and I see myself represented in their mirror,” asserts Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Looking back across a career in which she has written novels, poems, and scholarly works about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, la Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, the murdered women of Juárez, the Salem witches, and Chicana lesbian feminists, Gaspar de Alba realized that what links these historically and socially diverse figures is that they all fall into the category of “bad women,” as defined by their place, culture, and time, and all have been punished as well as remembered for rebelling against the “frames” imposed on them by capitalist patriarchal discourses.

In [Un]Framing the “Bad Woman,” Gaspar de Alba revisits and expands several of her published articles and presents three new essays to analyze how specific brown/female bodies have been framed by racial, social, cultural, sexual, national/regional, historical, and religious discourses of identity—as well as how Chicanas can be liberated from these frames. Employing interdisciplinary methodologies of activist scholarship that draw from art, literature, history, politics, popular culture, and feminist theory, she shows how the “bad women” who interest her are transgressive bodies that refuse to cooperate with patriarchal dictates about what constitutes a “good woman” and that queer/alter the male-centric and heteronormative history, politics, and consciousness of Chicano/Mexicano culture. By “unframing” these bad women and rewriting their stories within a revolutionary frame, Gaspar de Alba offers her compañeras and fellow luchadoras empowering models of struggle, resistance, and rebirth.

The first book-length study of women's involvement in the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, ¡Chicana Power! tells the powerful story of the emergence of Chicana feminism within student and community-based organizations throughout southern California and the Southwest. As Chicanos engaged in widespread protest in their struggle for social justice, civil rights, and self-determination, women in el movimiento became increasingly militant about the gap between the rhetoric of equality and the organizational culture that suppressed women's leadership and subjected women to chauvinism, discrimination, and sexual harassment. Based on rich oral histories and extensive archival research, Maylei Blackwell analyzes the struggles over gender and sexuality within the Chicano Movement and illustrates how those struggles produced new forms of racial consciousness, gender awareness, and political identities.

¡Chicana Power! provides a critical genealogy of pioneering Chicana activist and theorist Anna NietoGomez and the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, one of the first Latina feminist organizations, who together with other Chicana activists forged an autonomous space for women's political participation and challenged the gendered confines of Chicano nationalism in the movement and in the formation of the field of Chicana studies. She uncovers the multifaceted vision of liberation that continues to reverberate today as contemporary activists, artists, and intellectuals, both grassroots and academic, struggle for, revise, and rework the political legacy of Chicana feminism.

On March 17, 2015, tens of thousands of Mexican farmworkers went on strike in San Quintin, Baja California, to protest horrible working conditions on the farms that produce most of the fresh fruits and vegetables you consume. Calling themselves the “slaves of the twenty-first century,” these mostly Indigenous men, women, and children rose up in defiance of the conditions of modern slavery, forced labor, sexual harassment, and “hunger wages.” This ethnography provides an in-depth look into how Indigenous farmworkers organize in the fields and their communities to improve wages and working conditions.

Since the strike, the farmworkers have organized a union to fight for justice in the fields. In this work, author James Daria accompanies these farmworkers as they struggle for dignity. Daria also charts the tensions inside the farmworker movement as women struggle to gain greater power in the home as well as at work. In an era of complex global integration, Daria shows us how what we eat is tied to the suffering of those who produce our food. 

This book highlights and centers the Indigenous workers who struggle for justice in a global food system that connects us all. 

Although investigations of Hispanic popular culture were approached for decades as part of folklore studies, in recent years scholarly explorations—of lucha libre, telenovelas, comic strips, comedy, baseball, the novela rosa and the detective novel, sci-fi, even advertising—have multiplied. What has been lacking is an overarching canvas that offers context for these studies, focusing on the crucial, framing questions: What is Hispanic pop culture? How does it change over time and from region to region? What is the relationship between highbrow and popular culture in the Hispanic world? Does it make sense to approach the whole Hispanic world as homogenized when understanding Hispanic popular culture? What are the differences between nations, classes, ethnic groups, religious communities, and so on? And what distinguishes Hispanic popular culture in the United States?

In ¡Muy Pop!, Ilan Stavans and Frederick Luis Aldama carry on a sustained, free-flowing, book-length conversation about these questions and more, concentrating on a wide range of pop manifestations and analyzing them at length. In addition to making Hispanic popular culture visible to the first-time reader, ¡Muy Pop! sheds new light on the making and consuming of Hispanic pop culture for academics, specialists, and mainstream critics.

¿Y Yo También? brings together a diverse range of Latina voices to address the under-representation of Latinx voices in the #MeToo movement and discussions of sexual violence. Through scholarly analysis of literature, media, podcasting, film, art, and testimonio alongside memoir, poetry, a short play, and personal essays, the authors address varied Latina experiences of sexual assault and harassment. These authors grapple with these traumas alongside their intersectional contexts, including U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico, race, sexuality, indigeneity, religion, the publication landscape, and more. Ultimately, each contribution sheds light on the lack of scholarly and media attention to the realities of Latinas and sexual assault but also chart pathways toward individual and community healing. This is a volume that is intellectually rigorous yet deeply accessible—suited for academics, college-level students, creatives, performers, practitioners, activists, and general readers alike.

In “These Are Our Roots”,  Allen J. Christenson translates and analyzes historical documents composed by Tamub’ and Ilokab’ nobles of the K’iche’ Maya, who ruled much of the Guatemalan highlands until their lands were invaded by Spanish conquistadors in 1524. Complete original English translations of three Tamub’ texts and a new translation of the “Title of the Ilokab’” reveal how K’iche’ nobility strategically appropriated Christian elements from Dominican missionary texts while maintaining their Indigenous worldview. These documents served multiple purposes: legally establishing land rights, asserting nobility status, preserving cultural identity, and claiming religious legitimacy by positioning themselves as descendants of biblical figures—a sophisticated response to Spanish colonization that balanced accommodation and resistance through literacy, which had become a crucial tool for Indigenous elites navigating the colonial system.

The Tamub’ and Ilokab’ branches of the K’iche’ people have generally been overshadowed by their well-known Kaweq brethren, who wrote such literature masterpieces as the Popol Vuh and the Title of Totonicapán. But it is the voices relegated to the shadows of history that share views of events from different perspectives and whisper about what really happened behind the scenes—family jealousies, political rivalries, and delicious gossip about the great and the good who tend to focus on their own self-aggrandizing stories. “These Are Our Roots” is a valuable scholarly contribution to Maya studies and ethnohistory that makes these important primary sources more accessible to students and scholars.