Results by title

These incisive writings link the fate of the labor movement to the transformations in the shape of world capitalism, to the rise of the civil rights movement, and to the activists and intellectuals who have played such important roles. Tracing broad patterns of political thought, Lichtenstein offers important perspectives on the relationship of labor and the state, the tensions that sometimes exist between a culture of rights and the idea of solidarity, and the rise of conservatism in politics, law, and intellectual life. The volume closes with portraits of five activist intellectuals whose work has been vital to the conflicts that engage the labor movement, public policy, and political culture.

A twisting path through Austin’s underground music scene in the twentieth century’s last decade, narrated by the people who were there.

It’s 1990 in Austin, Texas. The next decade will be a tipping point in the city's metamorphosis from sleepy college town to major city. Beneath the increasingly slick exterior, though, a group of like-minded contrarians were reimagining an underground music scene. Embracing a do-it-yourself ethos, record labels emerged to release local music, zines cheered and jeered acts beneath the radar of mainstream media outlets, and upstart clubs provided a home venue for new bands to build their sound.

This vibrant scene valued expression over erudition, from the razor-sharp songcraft of Spoon to the fuzzed-out poptones of Sixteen Deluxe, and blurred the boundaries between observer and participant. Evolving in tandem with the city’s emergence on the national stage via the film Slacker and the SXSW conference and festivals, Austin’s musical underground became a spiritual crucible for the uneasy balance between commercial success and cultural authenticity, a tension that still resonates today.

The first book about Austin underground music in the ’90s, A Curious Mix of People is an oral history that tells the story of this transformative decade through the eyes of the musicians, writers, DJs, club owners, record-store employees, and other key figures who were there.

A foundational figure in modern labor history, David Montgomery both redefined and reoriented the field. This collection of Montgomery’s most important published and unpublished articles and essays draws from the historian’s entire five-decade career.

Taken together, the writings trace the development of Montgomery’s distinct voice and approach while providing a crucial window into an era that changed the ways scholars and the public understood working people’s place in American history. Three overarching themes and methods emerge from these essays: that class provided a rich reservoir of ideas and strategies for workers to build movements aimed at claiming their democratic rights; that capital endured with the power to manage the contours of economic life and the capacities of the state but that workers repeatedly and creatively mounted challenges to the terms of life and work dictated by capital; and that Montgomery’s method grounded his gritty empiricism and the conceptual richness of his analysis in the intimate social relations of production and of community, neighborhood, and family life.

The deeply personal story of a historic time in Chicago, Robert B. McKersie’s A Decisive Decade follows the unfolding action of the Civil Rights Movement as it played out in the Windy City. McKersie’s participation as a white activist for black rights offers a unique, firsthand viewpoint on the debates, boycotts, marches, and negotiations that would forever change the face of race relations in Chicago and the United States at large.

Described within are McKersie’s intimate observations on events as they developed during his participation in such historic occasions as the impassioned marches for open housing in Chicago; the campaign to end school segregation under Chicago Schools Superintendent Benjamin Willis; Operation Breadbasket’s push to develop economic opportunities for black citizens; and dialogs with corporations to provide more jobs for blacks in Chicago. In addition, McKersie provides up close and personal descriptions of the iconic Civil Rights leaders who spearheaded some of the most formative battles of Chicago’s Civil Rights movement, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Reverend Jesse Jackson, Timuel Black Jr. and W. Alvin Pitcher. The author illumines the tensions experienced by two major institutions in responding to the demands of the civil rights movement: the university and the church. Packed with historical detail and personal anecdotes of these history-making years, A Decisive Decade offers a never-before-seen perspective on one of our nation’s most tumultuous eras. 

Southwest Book of the Year Award Winner

Pubwest Book Design Award Winner

Drawing on thousands of years of foodways, Tucson cuisine blends the influences of Indigenous, Mexican, mission-era Mediterranean, and ranch-style cowboy food traditions. This book offers a food pilgrimage, where stories and recipes demonstrate why the desert city of Tucson became American’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.

Both family supper tables and the city’s trendiest restaurants feature native desert plants and innovative dishes incorporating ancient agricultural staples. Award-winning writer Carolyn Niethammer deliciously shows how the Sonoran Desert’s first farmers grew tasty crops that continue to influence Tucson menus and how the arrival of Roman Catholic missionaries, Spanish soldiers, and Chinese farmers influenced what Tucsonans ate.

White Sonora wheat, tepary beans, and criollo cattle steaks make Tucson’s cuisine unique. In A Desert Feast, you’ll see pictures of kids learning to grow food at school, and you’ll meet the farmers, small-scale food entrepreneurs, and chefs who are dedicated to growing and using heritage foods. It’s fair to say, “Tucson tastes like nowhere else.”

This volume provides the most economical and textually accurate version of Calhoun’s Disquisition available today. As a treatise, the Disquisition is one of the greatest and most enduring works of American politial thought, and a text of seminal importance to all students of American politics, history, philosophy, and law. In the Disquisition, Calhoun believed he had laid a “solid foundation for political science” through revitalizing popular rule. To complete his theoretical and practical mission, Calhoun attempts to explain the best example of the diffusion of authority and cultivation of liberty: the American Constitution. The fundamental law of the American republic provided, after all, the “interior structure” for regulating the shape and scope of government. As a guide for the states and the general government, the Constitution was also part of the “organism” that limited the centralization of authority and allowed for genuine popular rule; and it was Calhoun’s exposition of the connection between the moral demands of a properly constituted concept of popular rule and the need for practical ordering principles that is articulated in this book.

Calhoun presents a theory of politics that is both original and in accord with the mainstream of the American political tradition. More than any other thinker of his period, Calhoun sought to explain the enduring qualities of American political thought in light of the troubled world of the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike other theorists who had preceded and would follow Calhoun, both American and European, he did not seek to invent a new mode of philosophical speculation or a “grand theory” for the human sciences. Instead, he attempted to offer a refinement of classical, medieval, and modern notions regarding the relationship between government and the social order. As an effort in philosophical retrenchment, the Disquisition strengthened many pre-existing conceptions regarding political liberty and popular rule within the American regime, while offering such insight with a view toward the future that awaited America. Calhoun’s attempt in the Disquisition to reconcile the good of popular rule with ethical requirements have singular relevance to the many nations in the twenty-first century now engaged, despite the ethnic animosities threatening their destruction, in building post-ideological, civilized political and social orders, especially the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Africa.

The New Deal introduced sweeping social, political, and cultural change across the United States, which Hollywood embraced enthusiastically. Then, when the heady idealism of the 1930s was replaced by the paranoia of the postwar years, Hollywood became an easy target for the anticommunists. A Divided World examines some of the important programs of the New Deal and the subsequent response of the film community—especially in relation to social welfare, women’s rights, and international affairs. The book also provides an analysis of the major works of three European directors—Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, and Fritz Lang—compared and contrasted with the products of mainstream Hollywood. This is a new interpretation of an influential period in American film history and it is sure to generate further debate and scholarship.

An overdue reassessment of one of the US Navy’s most decorated—and divisive—early commanders, whose legacy remains teetering between heroism and scandalous.

A Double-Edged Sword: The Biography of Commodore Jesse Duncan Elliott, 1782–1845 is a comprehensive and long-overdue portrait of one of the most polarizing figures in early US naval history. Written over the course of a decade and completed shortly before the author’s death, this meticulously researched biography revisits the career of a man once hailed for his military exploits—and later condemned for a myriad of personal controversies—including his perceived missteps while in command.

David F. Long traces Elliott’s rise from promising young officer to commodore, chronicling his leadership during key moments such as the capture of the brig Caledonia, the defense of Fort Erie, and his central—but contested—role in the Battle of Lake Erie. Despite notable contributions to the Navy’s early successes, including his diplomatic work and restoration of the USS Constitution, Elliott’s legacy was clouded by scandal: accusations of cowardice, a notorious duel, a contentious command style, and a drawn-out court-martial that ended his career in disgrace.

Serving as both biography and reflective historical analysis, Long paints a vivid picture of the early US Navy—its rivalries, growing pains, and evolving institutional identity. His balanced account of Elliott’s life, neither excusing his faults nor downplaying his achievements, places the commodore’s story in direct conversation with the challenges and ambitions of a rapidly expanding American maritime power. This is a must read for scholars of naval and military history, early American politics, or anyone interested in the brazen albeit controversial legacy of a forgotten national hero.

Is drunkenness a defense for murder? In the early nineteenth century, the answer was a resounding no. Intoxication was considered voluntary, and thus provided no defense. Yet as the century progressed, American courts began to extend exculpatory value to heavy drinking. The medicalization of alcohol use created new categories of mental illness which, alongside changes in the law, formed the basis for defense arguments that claimed unintended consequences and lack of criminal intent. Concurrently, advocates of prohibition cast “demon rum” and the “rum-seller” as the drunkard's accomplices in crime, mitigating offenders' actions. By the postbellum period, a backlash, led by medical professionals and an influential temperance movement, left the legacy of an unsettled legal standard.

In A Drunkard's Defense, Michele Rotunda examines a variety of court cases to explore the attitudes of nineteenth-century physicians, legal professionals, temperance advocates, and ordinary Americans toward the relationship between drunkenness, violence, and responsibility, providing broader insights into the country's complicated relationship with alcohol.

An unparalleled portrait of nineteenth-century social reform and the magnetic oratory that gave it force, told through the career of temperance advocate John B. Gough.

John B. Gough was perhaps nineteenth-century America’s most famous ex-drunkard—a man who had hit rock bottom but then found the determination to recover and preach sobriety with unusual scope and impact. Through an exploration of Gough’s life, Thomas Augst investigates a world in which a public speaker could achieve immense fame by delivering a remarkable 12,000 popular lectures over his lifetime across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Gough kept a voluminous archive of his comings and goings, day after day, speech after speech. Augst is among the first scholars to fully mine these materials, and he uses them to illuminate the redemptive power of storytelling in the lives of citizens. In the process, A Drunkard’s Story follows an itinerant journey through the cultural history of social reform. 

John Gough’s life was fascinating in its own right, but Augst’s exploration of it also opens a window onto a rich interplay among performance, autobiography, and celebrity. The ways that people flocked to hear Gough tell his tale, and the contagious enthusiasm with which he was greeted far and wide, might seem from another time—but also surprisingly contemporary in the age of the influencer.