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In her new book Kroski, bestselling enthusiast of makerspaces, cosplay, and geek culture in libraries, has gathered creative and crafty librarians to share their most popular Kawaii programs. Running the gamut in terms of cost and difficulty, this book’s 53 programs are sure to include many that will fit your budget, space, and skills. Just scan the estimated budget, age range, materials, equipment needs, and learning outcomes in each listing. Projects include

• keychains with felt or 3D printing;
• slime squishies;
• 3D printed animal earrings;
• hosting a stuffed animal fashion show;
• monster emoji paper bookmarks;
• origami fortune cookies;
• buttons with anime or comic book art;
• crocheted coffee cozy or puppy nose warmer;
• tiny top hats with laser-cut felt cameos; and
• how to Kawaii-ify a planner.

What’s more, the plentiful suggestions for “next projects” scattered throughout the book will help you keep the super-cute fun going!

The fabulous XIT Ranch has been celebrated in song, story, and serious history. This book of reminiscences of old XIT cowmen puts on record the everyday life of the individuals who made the ranch run. Their forthright, yet picturesque, discussion of ranching hardships and dangers dissipates Hollywood and TV glamorizing. They relate in honest cowboy language what actually happened inside the XIT's 6,000 miles of fence.

Cordia Sloan Duke, wife of an XIT division manager, Robert L. Duke, many years ago realized that only those who had experienced ranch life could depict it with deep understanding. As the young wife of a rising young ranch hand, she kept in her apron pocket a notebook and pencil, recording all manner of interesting details as they caught her attention. This diary was the nucleus for the present book. Conceiving of an account of life on the XIT as presented by XIT cowboys, Mrs. Duke set about drawing from reticent, sometimes reluctant, ranch hands the impressions of the XIT (occasionally written down by their more literate wives or daughters) which they had retained through the years. Cordia Sloan Duke and Joe B. Frantz have organized the reminiscences around key aspects of ranch life, retaining the language of the cow hands.

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.

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.

Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists who have, over these past two years, opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.

This single sentence, concluding a brief commencement address by the University of Michigan’s Faculty Senate Chair, ignited a controversy that simmered for weeks. Professor Derek Peterson had praised the work of female, Jewish, and Black activists who had fought for inclusion, ending with a shoutout to students who protested the university’s financial ties to Israel’s war on Gaza. 

Hours later, U-M President Domenico Grasso publicly apologized, calling the remarks “hurtful and insensitive.” Peterson faced a barrage of threatening hate mail, alongside demands that he be fired and the university defunded. Conversely, a chorus of passionate dissent argued that a college education should equip students for, not shield them from, sharp controversies.

This volume collects commentary from students, alumni, labor organizers, and faculty. Most, but not all, defend Peterson’s right to say what he said, reflecting on questions of academic freedom, repressive notions of what is “appropriate,” the institution’s traditions of moral courage, the danger of assuming a monolithic “Jewish community,” and the Palestine exception to free speech.
 

When J. Edgar Hoover declared Herbert Aptheker “the most dangerous Communist in the United States,” the notorious FBI director misconstrued his true significance. In this first book-length biography of Aptheker (1915–2003), Gary Murrell provides a balanced yet unflinching assessment of the controversial figure who was at once a leading historian of African America, radical political activist, literary executor of W. E. B. Du Bois, and lifelong member of the American Communist Party. Although blacklisted at U.S. universities, Aptheker published dozens of books, including the groundbreaking American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) and the monumental seven-volume Documentary History of the Negro People (1951–1994). He also edited four volumes of the correspondence and unpublished writings of Du Bois, an achievement that Eric Foner, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called “a milestone in the coming of age of Afro-American history.”

As Murrell shows, Aptheker the historian was inseparable from Aptheker the leading Communist Party intellectual, polemicist, and agitator. During the 1960s, his ability to rouse and inspire both black and white student radicals made him one of the few Old Leftists accepted by the New Left. Aptheker had joined the CPUSA during its heyday in the 1930s, convinced that only through the party's leadership could fascism be defeated and true liberation be achieved: he ended his affiliation five decades later in 1991 after the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

In an afterword, Bettina Aptheker adds to Murrell's narrative by illuminating her mother Fay's vital contributions to her father's work and by affirming the particularly devastating challenges of life in a family dedicated to radical political and social change.