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Boston's weekly Gay Community News was “the center of the universe” during the late 1970s, writes Amy Hoffman in this memoir of gay liberation before AIDS, before gay weddings, and before The L Word. Provocative, informative, inspiring, and absurd, with a small circulation but a huge influence, Gay Community News produced a generation of leaders, writers, and friends. In addition to capturing the heady atmosphere of the times—the victories, controversies, and tragedies—Hoffman's memoir is also her personal story, written with wit and insight, of growing up in a political movement; of her deepening relationships with charismatic, talented, and sometimes utterly weird coworkers; and of trying to explain it all to her large Jewish family.

As Atlantic City grew to become one of the largest tourist destinations on the East Coast, it loomed ever larger in the imaginations of American writers. Generation upon generation of novelists, journalists, musicians, and poets visited Atlantic City and left with vivid impressions of its kaleidoscopic delights and its seedy underbelly.

This new reader collects all of these diverse perspectives on the city in one place, including accounts of Atlantic City by such famous visitors as Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Fanny Hurst, Arthur Conan Doyle, Damon Runyon, Langston Hughes, Elmore Leonard, and Bruce Springsteen. Arranged chronologically, the anthology traces the city’s history from its humble beginnings as a quiet health resort to its rapid ascent to the world’s playground, its gradual decline, and its hopeful if tenuous future. Together, the pieces in this collection take us inside the city’s glitz, glamor, and gambling palaces, but they also don’t shy away from its troubling histories of racial discrimination, political corruption, and urban decay. Compiling fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, newspaper stories, and magazine reports, The Atlantic City Reader presents an engaging and multifaceted portrait of this iconic resort town. 

Scientifically up-to-date and illustrated with over 240 color photos, An Atlas of Illinois Fishes is a benchmark in the study of Illinois’s ever-changing fish communities and the habitats that support them.

The term Neo-Dada surfaced in New York in the late 1950s and was used to characterize young artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns whose art appeared at odds with the serious emotional and painterly interests of the then-dominant movement, Abstract Expressionism. Neo-Dada quickly became the word of choice in the early 1960s to designate experimental art, including assemblage, performance, Pop art, and nascent forms of minimal and conceptual art.

This groundbreaking exploration of humanity’s quest to understand the cosmos spans the earliest observations of the night sky to the latest revelations from advanced space telescopes. It is about humans as much as stars, galaxies, black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. It is a book about the awe we experience in the presence of the awesome universe.

Written by an award-winning historian of astronomy and a professional astronomer specializing in galaxy formation in the early universe, this book provides a comprehensive narrative of cosmic discovery. It examines the evolution of our understanding of the universe—from the first glimpses of the stars to the recognition of the Milky Way as a spiral galaxy and the realization that our universe is filled with countless other galaxies. The book also explores the revolutionary advancements in astrophysics that have shaped our knowledge, including quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, and the study of the still mysterious dark matter and dark energy. 

Richly illustrated with remarkable images that show the scale of the universe—from the ancient sky to the ten trillion galaxies now known to exist—An Awesome Universe also addresses some of the most profound questions in science: the nature of life beyond Earth, the fate of the universe, and whether we will ever fully understand the mysteries of space-time, the Big Bang, and the possibility of a multiverse. 

This authoritative and visually captivating work offers readers a glimpse into the “Big Picture” of the cosmos, framed by the contributions of pioneering astronomers and driven by our ongoing quest for knowledge about our place in the universe. 

The story of sporting communities and individuals at the University of Westminster over 150 years is the second book to explore the institution's diverse history including its role as a pioneer of women's sports. Drawing upon the University's extensive archives this richly illustrated book celebrates its unique, ground-breaking sports heritage.

Founded in 1914 by Amy Ashwood and Marcus Garvey, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (commonly called the UNIA) grew into one of the largest social justice organizations of the twentieth century. Natanya Duncan’s collective biography explores women’s role in building the UNIA and how Ashwood’s strategy of efficient womanhood equipped them to confront political and social issues--even when it meant defying gender norms. Efficient womanhood took a three-tiered approach that asked UNIA women to seek equitable partners, take on roles as mentors, and connect resources and people to their communities and Black people at large. Strong believers in the necessity of their presence and voices, UNIA women developed leadership skills within and beyond the organization and used these skills in service to their communities.

Enlightening and in-depth, An Efficient Womanhood tells the story of the women who shaped a framework for leadership and engagement that remains a blueprint for activists today.

Throughout the decade of the sixties, the FBI and other elements of the government undertook a massive effort to contain the movement against the American apartheid system and the war in Vietnam. The prime focus of these increasingly repressive efforts was the young radicals of the New Left, residing in the Students for a Democratic Society. Utilizing thousands of pages of unexamined FBI files, voluminous reports from Congress, and the author’s files obtained through Freedom of Information filings, this book will tell the story of the massive repression set loose against SDS, the group’s breakup due to internecine factionalism, and how this was encouraged and amplified at every turn by secret measures deployed by the FBI.

The encounter between Native American peoples and Europeans and their descendants has marked the history of every nation in the Americas, both North and South. Lucio Mansilla's Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, published in Argentina in 1870, is one of very few works in American letters that presents a vivid, firsthand account of a noncombative encounter between Native American and European civilizations.

This volume is the first English translation of Mansilla's classic work. Long noted for its humor, adventurousness, and narrative ingenuity, the book offers penetrating insights into fundamental issues of "civilization and barbarism," immigration, ethnic and racial diversity, and land ownership and tenancy.

Mansilla alone among his contemporaries espoused open dialogue as the best approach to the "Indian problem." Although the peace accord he sought to enact with the Ranquels was summarily disregarded by the Argentine government, which slowly gravitated towards a policy of ethnic cleansing and expropriation of Indian lands, the Expedition does narrate a rehearsal for a reconciliation that in the end never took place.

Aimed at alumni and prospective students interested in the university's ongoing mission, as well as current faculty and students wishing to stay up to date on the work being done around them, An Illinois Sampler showcases the best, the most ambitious, and the most effective teaching practices developed and nurtured at one of the world's premier research universities.

Contributors are Nancy Abelmann, Flavia C. D. Andrade, Jayadev Athreya, Betty Jo Barrett, Thomas J. Bassett, Hugh Bishop, Antoinette Burton, Lauren A. Denofrio-Corrales, Lizanne DeStefano, Karen Flynn, Bruce W. Fouke, Rebecca Ginsburg, Julie Jordan Gunn, Geoffrey Herman, Laurie Johnson, Kyle T. Mays, Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, Audrey Petty, Anke Pinkert, Raymond Price, Luisa-Maria Rosu, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Carol Spindel, Mark D. Steinberg, William Sullivan, Richard I. Tapping, Bradley Tober, Agniezska Tuszynska, Bryan Wilcox, Kate Williams, Mary-Ann Winkelmes, and Yi Lu.

An Imagined America presents a historical, transnational, translingual, and decolonial perspective on questions of identity, literacy, language, culture, and citizenship. In examining a variety of English- and Arabic-language archival documents from the founding of Syrian Protestant College in 1866 (today the American University of Beirut) until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920, Lisa R. Arnold shows how transnational and translingual negotiations among faculty, students, and administrators, as well as the local and regional community, produced a tenuous and sometimes unsettling vision of America for foreigners and locals alike. As her account shows, transnational and translingual discourses provide the backdrop and motive for the assertion of coloniality in contexts of literacy education such as that of Syrian Protestant College. An Imagined America allows scholars and educators in rhetoric and writing studies, education, and related fields to consider how literacy education in English has, and often continues to, construct an imagined America that is both grounded on and reproduces colonial epistemology. Such constructions work to uphold exclusionary practices that are all too vivid in our world today.

Foreign policies and diplomatic missions, combined with military action, were the driving forces behind the growth of the early United States. In an era when the Old and New Worlds were subject to British, French, and Spanish imperial ambitions, the new republic had limited diplomatic presence and minimal public credit. It was vulnerable to hostile forces in every direction. The United States could not have survived, grown, or flourished without the adoption of prescient foreign policies, or without skillful diplomatic operations.

An Independent Empire shows how foreign policy and diplomacy constitute a truly national story, necessary for understanding the history of the United States. In this lively and well-written book, episodes in American history—such as the writing and ratification of the Constitution, Henry Clay’s advocacy of an American System, Pinckney’s Treaty with Spain, and the visionary but absurd Congress of Panama—are recast as elemental aspects of United States foreign and security policy.

An Independent Empire tells the stories of the people who defined the early history of America’s international relationships. Throughout the book are brief, entertaining vignettes of often-overlooked intellectuals, spies, diplomats, and statesmen whose actions and decisions shaped the first fifty years of the United States. More than a dozen bespoke maps illustrate that the growth of the early United States was as much a geographical as a political or military phenomenon.