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• Winner of the 2023 Michael Nelson Prize of International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST)
• Recipient of the 2022 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award
• Winner of the 2023 American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year
• Winner of the 2023 ULCC’s (Union League Club of Chicago) Outstanding Book on the History of Chicago Award
• Recipient of a 2023 Best of Illinois History Superior Achievement award from the Illinois State Historical Society
• Winner of the 2023 BAAS Book Prize (British Association for American Studies)
• Winner of a 2023 The Brinck Book Award and Lecture series (University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning)
• Honorable Mention for the 2021-22 RSAP Book Prize (Research Society for American Periodicals)

Buildings once symbolized Chicago's place as the business capital of Black America and a thriving hub for Black media. In this groundbreaking work, E. James West examines the city's Black press through its relationship with the built environment. As a house for the struggle, the buildings of publications like Ebony and the Chicago Defender embodied narratives of racial uplift and community resistance. As political hubs, gallery spaces, and public squares, they served as key sites in the ongoing Black quest for self-respect, independence, and civic identity. At the same time, factors ranging from discriminatory business practices to editorial and corporate ideology prescribed their location, use, and appearance, positioning Black press buildings as sites of both Black possibility and racial constraint.

Engaging and innovative, A House for the Struggle reconsiders the Black press's place at the crossroads where aspiration collided with life in one of America's most segregated cities.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Russia to New York, Charles Reznikoff found himself at the intersection of modernist innovation, ethnic otherness, and economic hardship. He both appreciated the modernists’ formal radicalism and critiqued their political failings—a task he accomplished by writing short lyric poems depicting the hardship and charm of urban life, as well as long poems presenting histories of horrific violence, from factory accidents to the Holocaust. But despite his contributions to American poetry, Reznikoff has remained a somewhat secondary figure, in part because his work—at times—is painful to read.

A Jewish Word or Two recasts Reznikoff ’s poetry as pleasurable and masterful even when disturbing. In their humor, their encounters with Jewish history, holiness, and identity, as well as their use of drama, horror, joy, and beauty, Reznikoff ’s poems help us celebrate what is simultaneously strange, surprising, lovely, and uncanny in our everyday lives.

On the rocky shores of Lake Superior, a piercing story of selfhood and determinism develops: is the future what we’re handed or what we make of it?

It’s 1910, and Theodulf Sauer has finally achieved a position befitting his ego: master lighthouse keeper at a newly commissioned station towering above Lake Superior. When his new wife, Willa, arrives on the first spring ferry, it’s clear her life has taken the opposite turn: after being summoned home from college to Duluth when her father dies, she and her scheming mother find themselves destitute, and Willa is rushed into this ill-suited arranged marriage before she can comprehend her fate. 

As the lighthouse station establishes, the new relationship teeters between tense and hostile, with little mutual understanding or tenderness. Willa takes solace in her learned fascination with the cosmos, especially (despite her husband’s suspicion of the event) in viewing the imminent Halley’s Comet. Under ominous night skies, Theodulf stands sentry over the lake, clinging to long-ago and faraway memories of happiness that fill him with longing and shame.

Into this impasse, a clairvoyant girl and her resolute uncle emerge from across the cove. They see through the Sauers’ thin façade and, by turns and in different ways, convey promise, sympathy, and insight that counter Willa’s despair. Armed with renewed self-determination, Willa forges a path to happiness. But before she can grasp it, tragedy comes to their remote beacon, and her future plunges toward a dark unknown. 

Set against a brooding and beautiful landscape, A Lesser Light is a story about industry and calamity, science versus superstition, inner desire countered with societal expectations—and the consequences when these forces collide in the wilderness of rapid social change.

A masterful meditation on our most mercurial and abiding of poetic forms—the long poem

For decades, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has shown readers how genres, forms, and the literal acts of writing and reception can be understood as sites of struggle. In her own words, “writing is . . . a praxis . . . in which the author disappears into a process, into a community, into discontinuities, and into a desire for discovery.” It is cause for celebration, then, that we have another work of warm, incisive, exploratory writing from DuPlessis in A Long Essay on the Long Poem.

Long poems, DuPlessis notes, are elusive, particularly in the slippery forms that have emerged in the postmodern mode. She cites both Nathaniel Mackey and Anne Waldman in thinking of the poem as a “box,” both in the sense of a vessel that contains and as a machine that processes, an instrument on which language is played. This study’s central attention is on the long poem as a sociocultural Book, distinctively envisioned by a range of authors.

To reckon with these shifting and evolving forms, DuPlessis works in a polyvalent mode, a hybrid of critical analysis and speculative essay. She divides the long poem and the long poets into three genres: epics, quests, and a composite she terms “assemblages.” The poets she surveys include T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., Louis Zukofsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Olson, Alice Notley, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, Robert Duncan, Kamau Brathwaite, and, finally, Mallarmé and Dante. Instead of a traditional lineage, she deliberately seeks intersecting patterns of connection between poems and projects, a nexus rather than a family tree. In doing so she navigates both some challenges of long poems and her own attempt to “essay” them. The result is a fascinating and generous work that defies categorization as anything other than essential.
 

During a distinguished military career, in which he rose to the rank of brigadier general and twice won the Medal of Honor, Frank Baldwin saw service in the Civil War, the Indian wars on the Great Plains, and the Spanish-American War. His wife, Alice Blackwood Baldwin, shared the "long march" with him, from his Plains service onward. In this first biography of the Baldwins, Robert Steinbach combines military and personal history to vividly portray a marriage that survived both the harshness of frontier army life and the restrictive Victorian concept of "separate spheres" for husband and wife.

Drawing on a wealth of diaries, letters, and other family papers, Steinbach re-creates the Baldwins' life on the Plains. Moving from post to post in Kansas, New Mexico, Montana, North Dakota, and Texas, they faced danger, excitement, separations, poverty, and many other hardships. Frequently they clashed over Alice's desire to be something more than "an ornament to society"—a wish eventually granted as Frank's long absences and chronic ill health required Allie to take responsibility for herself and their daughter.

With insights into military campaigns on the Great Plains in the years 1865–1890 and a revealing look at the human side of those campaigns, A Long March will appeal to a wide audience.

A revealing portrait of Judge James E. Horton Jr., whose quiet moral courage reshaped one of the most explosive legal battles in American history

A Man Visited by History illuminates what author Steven P. Brown calls the “last major Scottsboro trials–related subject to have eluded careful study”: the life of Judge James E. Horton Jr., the white Alabama Eighth Circuit judge who set aside an all-white jury’s guilty verdict and death sentence in the second trial of African American defendant Haywood Patterson. Of the three trial judges and more than one hundred jurors who considered the cases of the Scottsboro defendants, Horton was the only one to find that the evidence against them was virtually nonexistent. Horton was then removed from further involvement with the cases and, despite being on the fast track to political prominence before the 1933 retrial of the Scottsboro defendants, was defeated for reelection as circuit judge in 1934. His ruling in the Patterson case impacted the Scottsboro defendants’ lives and continues to affect their legacies today. 

Brown researched largely untapped resources that, for the first time, illuminate who Horton was before the Scottsboro trials, what he faced presiding over Patterson’s case, the factors that led him to overturn the jury’s verdict, and his later life raising award-winning cattle. What emerges is a remarkably consistent picture of a man who, Brown argues, for more than ninety years, sought nothing more than to do what he thought was right. Historians of the South, the early twentieth century, the law, and race relations as well as general readers will find this intimate account of the judge in the infamous trials to be riveting and instructive.
 

Demonstrates how concepts of masculinity shaped the aesthetic foundations of literary naturalism

A Man’s Game explores the development of American literary naturalism as it relates to definitions of manhood in many of the movement’s key texts and the aesthetic goals of writers such as Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, Charles Chestnutt, and James Weldon Johnson. John Dudley argues that in the climate of the late 19th century, when these authors were penning their major works, literary endeavors were widely viewed as frivolous, the work of ladies for ladies, who comprised the vast majority of the dependable reading public. Male writers such as Crane and Norris defined themselves and their work in contrast to this perception of literature. Women like Wharton, on the other hand, wrote out of a skeptical or hostile reaction to the expectations of them as woman writers.

Dudley explores a number of social, historical, and cultural developments that catalyzed the masculine impulse underlying literary naturalism: the rise of spectator sports and masculine athleticism; the professional role of the journalist, adopted by many male writers, allowing them to camouflage their primary role as artist; and post-Darwinian interest in the sexual component of natural selection. A Man’s Game also explores the surprising adoption of a masculine literary naturalism by African American writers at the beginning of the 20th century, a strategy, despite naturalism's emphasis on heredity and genetic determinism, that helped define the black struggle for racial equality

Meticulous and engaging, A Matter of Moral Justice examines the role of African American and radical women activists and their collisions with labor organizing and union politics.

"With classic butch finesse---that handsome combination of vulnerability and toughness---Peggy Shaw pieces together the challenges of growing up butch in the 1950s. Shaw is an engaging performer and inspired writer."
---Gay Community News

Obie-award-winning performer and writer Peggy Shaw has been playing her gender-bending performances on Off Broadway, regional, and international stages for three decades. Co-founder of the renowned troupe Split Britches, Shaw has gone on to create memorable solo performances that mix achingly honest introspection with campy humor, reflecting on everything from her Irish-American working-class roots to her aging butch body.

This collection of Shaw's solo performance scripts evokes a 54-year-old grandmother who looks like a 35-year-old man (in her classic Menopausal Gentleman); a mother's ambivalent ministrations to a daughter she treated like a son (in the raw You're Just Like My Father); Shaw's love for her biracial grandson, for whom she models masculinity (in the musically punctuated To My Chagrin); and a mapping of her body's long, bittersweet history (in the lyrical Must: The Inside Story, a collaboration with the UK's Clod Ensemble). The book also includes a selection of Shaw's other classic monologues and an extensive introduction by Jill Dolan, Professor of English and Theater and Dance at Princeton University and the blogger behind The Feminist Spectator website.

A volume in the series Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance
Cover photos by Eva Weiss (top) and Robin Holland/robinholland.com (bottom).

A major, new, and comprehensive look at six decades of macroeconomic policies across the region

What went wrong with the economic development of Latin America over the past half-century?  Along with periods of poor economic performance, the region’s countries have been plagued by a wide variety of economic crises. This major new work brings together dozens of leading economists to explore the economic performance of the ten largest countries in South America and of Mexico. Together they advance the fundamental hypothesis that, despite different manifestations, these crises all have been the result of poorly designed or poorly implemented fiscal and monetary policies. 

Each country is treated in its own section of the book, with a lead chapter presenting a comprehensive database of the country’s fiscal, monetary, and economic data from 1960 to 2017. The chapters are drawn from one-day academic conferences—hosted in all but one case, in the focus country—with participants including noted economists and former leading policy makers. Cowritten with Nobel Prize winner Thomas J. Sargent, the editors’ introduction provides a conceptual framework for analyzing fiscal and monetary policy in countries around the world, particularly those less developed. A final chapter draws conclusions and suggests directions for further research.

A vital resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of economics and for economic researchers and policy makers, A Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America, 1960–2017 goes further than any book in stressing both the singularities and the similarities of the economic histories of Latin America’s largest countries.

Contributors: Mark Aguiar, Princeton U; Fernando Alvarez, U of Chicago; Manuel Amador, U of Minnesota; Joao Ayres, Inter-American Development Bank; Saki Bigio, UCLA; Luigi Bocola, Stanford U; Francisco J. Buera, Washington U, St. Louis; Guillermo Calvo, Columbia U; Rodrigo Caputo, U of Santiago; Roberto Chang, Rutgers U; Carlos Javier Charotti, Central Bank of Paraguay; Simón Cueva, TNK Economics; Julián P. Díaz, Loyola U Chicago; Sebastian Edwards, UCLA; Carlos Esquivel, Rutgers U; Eduardo Fernández Arias, Peking U; Carlos Fernández Valdovinos (former Central Bank of Paraguay); Arturo José Galindo, Banco de la República, Colombia; Márcio Garcia, PUC-Rio; Felipe González Soley, U of Southampton; Diogo Guillen, PUC-Rio; Lars Peter Hansen, U of Chicago; Patrick Kehoe, Stanford U; Carlos Gustavo Machicado Salas, Bolivian Catholic U; Joaquín Marandino, U Torcuato Di Tella; Alberto Martin, U Pompeu Fabra; Cesar Martinelli, George Mason U; Felipe Meza, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México; Pablo Andrés Neumeyer, U Torcuato Di Tella; Gabriel Oddone, U de la República; Daniel Osorio, Banco de la República; José Peres Cajías, U of Barcelona; David Perez-Reyna, U de los Andes; Fabrizio Perri, Minneapolis Fed; Andrew Powell, Inter-American Development Bank; Diego Restuccia, U of Toronto; Diego Saravia, U de los Andes; Thomas J. Sargent, New York U; José A. Scheinkman, Columbia U; Teresa Ter-Minassian (formerly IMF); Marco Vega, Pontificia U Católica del Perú; Carlos Végh, Johns Hopkins U; François R. Velde, Chicago Fed; Alejandro Werner, IMF.

From precocious sportswriter to Federal Prisoner #01150-134: The intersection of sports and the revolutionary 1970s, with one ambitious young man caught in the middle

Jay Weiner was an aspiring teenage sportswriter when he met Jack Scott, the charismatic, activist journalist who would become his mentor, immersing him in the political and social issues roiling sports—and so much else—in the late 1960s and 1970s. Weiner became a zealous student of Scott, joining a new tradition of sports journalism that interrogated questions of race, power, and politics alongside the games themselves. But his blind devotion took a treacherous turn when Scott took Weiner, as a surprise for his twentieth birthday, to a secluded Pennsylvania farmhouse where heiress-turned-FBI-most-wanted Patty Hearst was hiding out with her Symbionese Liberation Army kidnappers-turned-comrades.

A More Dangerous Game is Weiner’s story of coming of age in a shocking fashion. A wild mosaic of sports, journalism, betrayal, justice, courage, and redemption, his memoir charts the meeting of sports and the radical left in the 1970s, with Weiner unwittingly caught in the middle and left behind by his mentor. In the engaged, edgy style of a seasoned sportswriter, Weiner describes the fallout after that fateful encounter with the country’s most wanted fugitives: three years of federal subpoenas, impossible decisions, and, ultimately, four months in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury.

With exhaustive background reporting, Weiner fits together the seemingly disparate pieces of his unlikely journey from young sportswriter to frightened FBI target to emboldened Federal Prisoner #01150-134. From its examination of the life and work of Jack Scott to its surprising angle on the well-chronicled saga of Patty Hearst, A More Dangerous Game is the engrossing story of a time when examining sports as a mirror of society put a writer on the cutting edge of one of the most notorious stories of a generation.

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Exploring the strategic and human dimensions of the defense of Outpost Harry.

By June 1953 the Korean War, marked at the outset by extremely fluid advances and retreats up and down the peninsula, had settled into position warfare very near the original pre-war demarcation line between North and South Korea. At this point both sides were fighting to win a peace, to achieve incremental advantages that could be translated into gains at the peace negotiations in Panmunjom. The battle at Outpost Harry devolved into hand-to-hand combat during a period of constant, intense fighting that lasted two days. The author, although seriously wounded that night, refused evacuation and remained on the hill to successfully lead his company in defense of the outpost. It wasn’t romantic; it wasn’t chivalrous; and many died or were badly wounded. Some of the survivors never fully overcame the mental and physical damage they suffered during the nightmare.

With this book, one of those scarred by that experience recounts the events of the battle and his lifelong efforts to deal with the residual horrors. The Korean Conflict may be called "the forgotten war" by some, but not by those who were on the front lines.