By John Baugh
University of Texas Press, 1983
In the minds of many, black street speech—the urban dialect of black Americans—bespeaks illiteracy, poverty, and ignorance. John Baugh challenges those prejudices in this brilliant new inquiry into the history, linguistic structure, and survival within white society of black street speech. In doing so, he successfully integrates a scholarly respect for black English with a humanistic approach to language differences that weds rigor of research with a keen sense of social responsibility.
Baugh's is the first book on black English that is based on a long-term study of adult speakers. Beginning in 1972, black men and women in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Austin, and Houston were repeatedly interviewed, in varied social settings, in order to determine the nature of their linguistic styles and the social circumstances where subtle changes in their speech appear. Baugh's work uncovered a far wider breadth of speaking styles among black Americans than among standard English speakers. Having detailed his findings, he explores their serious implications for the employability and education of black Americans.
Black Street Speech is a work of enduring importance for educators, linguists, sociologists, scholars of black and urban studies, and all concerned with black English and its social consequences.
Wayne C. Glasker
University of Massachusetts Press, 2002
Houston A. Baker Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Antonio Byrd
University Press of Colorado, 2025
Black Tech Ecosystems reports on a year-long ethnographic study of low-income Black adult learners attending Clearwater Academy, a nonprofit computer code bootcamp that teaches coding literacy to help end racism and poverty. While Clearwater Academy offers pathways into a lucrative career that promotes Black social mobility and a diverse tech industry, Antonio Byrd describes a more complicated story. The core challenges of weak social-support networks, embedded cultures in tech, financial strains, and racism persistently present roadblocks to Clearwater Academy’s Black adult learners’ success. However, through this experience, Black adult learners develop new knowledge and frameworks that change their relationship with coding literacy and labor. Instead of solely focusing on learning computer programming for work, Black Tech Ecosystems describes a liberatory and transformative use of computer programming that centers Black lives instead of the tech industry.
Adrianne Musu Davis
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Signithia Fordham
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Mary C. Lacity
Epic Books, 2020
Toby Miller
Temple University Press, 2012
A short, sharp, and provocative book, Blow Up the Humanities has esteemed scholar Toby Miller declaring that there are two humanities in the United States. One is the venerable, powerful humanities of private universities; the other is the humanities of state schools, which focus mainly on job prospects. There is a class division between the two—both in terms of faculty research and student background—and it must end.
Miller critically lays waste to the system. He examines scholarly publishing as well as media and cultural studies to show how to restructure the humanities by studying popular cultural phenomena, like video games. Miller ultimately insists that these two humanities must merge in order to survive and succeed in producing an aware and concerned citizenry.
Kaitlin Pericak
Temple University Press, 2025
Lynette Ford & Sherry Norfolk
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2016
The attraction of scary stories begins very early in childhood, but the fortitude to be truly scared comes later. So where are the scary stories for young children? Educators and storytellers, Ford and Norfolk deliver a silly and gently spooky collection of jumps, laughs, interactive moments, and mostly happy endings to satisfy the curious-for-creepy Pre-K through Grade 4 set. Their weirdly funny and gently scary collection of adapted folktales, original stories, and verses will delight those who enjoy being surprised more than being scared.
This book is for:
Parents, grandparents, and other mentors who work with children developmentally aged 4 to 9
Educators, librarians and others serving young listeners, who like silly and creepy stories, but may not like very scary material
Audiences ages 4-9, who like creepy but not-too-scary stories.
Twelve pen-and-ink drawings based on folktale motifs complement the fanciful tone of the book.
Vivian Gussin Paley
University of Chicago Press, 1984
Vivian Gussin Paley
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Ammons, Elizabeth
University of Iowa Press, 2010
The activist tradition in American literature has long testified to the power of words to change people and the power of people to change the world, yet in recent years many professional humanists have chosen to distract themselves with a postmodern fundamentalism of indeterminacy and instability rather than engage with social and political issues. Throughout her bold and provocative call to action, Elizabeth Ammons argues that the responsibility now facing humanists is urgent: inside and outside academic settings, they need to revive the liberal arts as a progressive cultural force that offers workable ideas and inspiration in the real-world struggle to achieve social and environmental justice.
Brave New Words challenges present and future literary scholars and teachers to look beyond mere literary critique toward the concrete issue of social change and how to achieve it. Calling for a profound realignment of thought and spirit in the service of positive social change, Ammons argues for the continued importance of multiculturalism in the twenty-first century despite attacks on the concept from both right and left. Concentrating on activist U.S. writers—from ecocritics to feminists to those dedicated to exposing race and class biases, from Jim Wallis and Cornel West to Winona LaDuke and Paula Moya and many others—she calls for all humanists to link their work to the progressive literature of the last half century, to insist on activism in the service of positive change as part of their mission, and to teach the power of hope and action to their students.
As Ammons clearly demonstrates, much of American literature was written to expose injustice and motivate readers to work for social transformation. She challenges today’s academic humanists to address the issues of hope and purpose by creating a practical activist pedagogy that gives students the knowledge to connect their theoretical learning to the outside world. By relying on the transformative power of literature and replacing nihilism and powerlessness with conviction and faith, the liberal arts can offer practical, useful inspiration to everyone seeking to create a better world.
Edited by Deborah Crusan
University of Michigan Press, 2026
Writing groups often fly under the radar in academia, but they can make a big difference. Faculty are under constant pressure to publish while juggling teaching, research, and service. Add packed schedules and limited time, and writing can easily get sidelined—especially for women balancing work and family. Breaking Boundaries: How Writing Groups Fuel Women’s Academic Success explores how writing groups offer support, structure, and community to help navigate these challenges.
Whether you’re a grad student trying to finish a dissertation, a stuck faculty member, or someone newly tenured wondering what’s next—you’re in the right place. This book shares honest stories, insights, and encouragement from women who have found strength in writing together. Each chapter highlights real experiences with writing groups—what helped, what didn’t, and how these groups shaped the authors’ scholarly identities. They discuss topics such as overcoming imposter syndrome, access to writing resources, navigating the stress of tenure, making academic contributions outside traditional paths, and creating sustainable writing habits. The contributors come from diverse disciplines and deliver practical advice for making writing fit into a hectic academic life. Their message is clear: when scholars support each other in writing, they not only grow their own careers, but also become mentors, leaders, and role models in the academic world.
Andrea DeCapua and Helaine W. Marshall
University of Michigan Press, 2023
In its second edition, Breaking New Ground for SLIFE builds on its model for supporting students who are new to English and may have experienced a disruption in their schooling. The practices presented in this book emerge from the belief that education for students with limited or interrupted formal education, also known as SLIFE, should not be remedial but should build on the students’ prior learning experiences and existing areas of knowledge. This second edition has been significantly updated, informed by recent research in the field, feedback from teachers, and new scholarly treatments of the topic. Breaking New Ground for SLIFE, second edition, explores the MALP approach, highlights how technology can be incorporated into classroom activities, and includes actual MALP projects implemented by MALP-trained teachers of both young and adolescent learners. In addition, the authors provide a newly revised MALP Teacher Planning Checklist.
By reading Breaking New Ground for SLIFE, educators will:

Wendy K.Z. Anderson
Rutgers University Press, 2027
This edited collection is an interdisciplinary dialogue about how breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and healing is experienced by academic women. The contributors fostered dialogue rooted in critical, qualitative, and autoethnographic traditions about how breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and healing was experienced by a group with academic privileges, such as the ability to research and advocate for themselves. The book takes on a global perspective, incorporating pieces from medical doctors who became patients, BIPOC women, as well as scholars who identify as LBGTQIA, as they faced decisions about issues such as flat closures, fertility treatments, and being one-sided. These seventeen academic women navigated and resisted healthcare systems to develop a theory of coalitional survivorship.
Gary McCulloch, Antonio Canales, and Hsiao-Yuh Ku
University College London, 2023
Jeffrey Scarborough and Raymond Ravaglia
CSLI, 2014

Elinor G. Barber, Philip G. Altbach, and Robert G. Myers
University of Chicago Press, 1984
Dominic Smith
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
Walter Benjamin reimagined through the forgotten power of radio
Philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) has long been recognized for his influence on the fields of literature, film, media studies, critical legal theory, and philosophy. Bringing fresh attention to an often-overlooked aspect of his oeuvre, Bridging Benjamin examines the dozens of radio broadcasts he produced, primarily for children, between 1927 and 1933. Delivered after the academic rejection of his notoriously complex Trauerspiel, these shows became a testing ground for Benjamin’s developing ideas and experimental pedagogy. Though they were cast off as inconsequential by both Benjamin and his contemporaries, Dominic Smith reveals the broadcasts to be a fruitful site for a novel, “derailed” interpretation of Benjamin’s larger body of work.
Reading Benjamin’s radio production as a dynamic site of philosophical experimentation, Smith uses it as a channel and amplifier for three integral but underappreciated aspects of Benjamin’s work: his philosophies of technology, place, and education. Showing how he used broadcast media to explore the increasing “virtualization” of place in networked society, Bridging Benjamin encourages an embrace of Benjamin in contrast to his divisive historical counterparts in the philosophy of technology, such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.
Interpreting Benjamin’s broadcasts as a form of peripatetic thinking—deeply embedded in place, yet mobile and mediated—Bridging Benjamin offers a compelling model for reassessing attachments to the technologies and practices shaping our contemporary worlds.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.
Rob Reich
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Bernd Reiter
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Suzanne McCray
University of Arkansas Press, 2019
James E. Rosenbaum
Russell Sage Foundation, 2017

Anne Matthews
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Gerald L. Gutek and Patricia A. Gutek
University of Alabama Press, 2016
2016 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE
The remarkable story of how Montessori education crossed the Atlantic and transformed American educational thought.
Born on the Adriatic, Montessori first entered the world stage in 1906 as the innovator of a revolutionary teaching method that creates an environment where children learn at their own pace and initiate skills like reading and writing in a spontaneous way. As her school in Rome swiftly attracted attention, curiosity, and followers, Montessori recruited disciples whom she immersed in a rigorous and detailed teacher-training regimen of her own creation.
McClure was an Irish-born media baron of America’s Gilded Age, best known as the founder and publisher of McClure’s Magazine. Against the backdrop of Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose insurgency, the brilliant and mercurial McClure used his flagship publication as a vehicle to advance Progressive Party causes. After meeting in 1910, McClure and Montessori embarked on a five-year collaboration to introduce Montessori’s innovative teaching style in the United States.
Gerald and Patricia Gutek trace the dramatic arc of the partnership between the Italian teacher and American publisher united by a vision of educational change in the United States. After her triumphal lecture tour in 1913, Montessori, secure in her trust of her American partner, gave McClure her power of attorney and returned to Italy. The surge in popularity of Montessori education in America, however, deeply concerned Montessori, who had heretofore exerted total control over her method, apparatus, schools, and teacher training. The American entrepreneurial spirit, along with a desire to disseminate the Montessori method quickly, led to major conflicts between the Italian educator and American businesspeople, particularly McClure. Feeling betrayed, Montessori ended her relationship with her erstwhile collaborator.
Gutek and Gutek describe the fascinating story of this first wave of Montessori education in the United States, which did not sustain itself during Montessori’s lifetime. It would not be until the 1950s that Montessori education was revived with the successful establishment of Montessori academies throughout the United States.

Edited by Mark Hardman, Marie Nilsberth, and Mikko Puustinen
University College London, 2026
An empirically grounded, yet theoretically sound, study of how teachers bring powerful knowledge into classrooms and develop effective thinking among their students.
Powerful knowledge equips students with the capacity to engage with systematic, disciplinary thinking, to imagine futures that are not yet conceived, and to think what is yet to be thought. Bringing Powerful Knowledge into Classrooms explores how teachers develop such knowledge in classrooms by transforming disciplinary understandings through subject teaching that responds to the educational needs of society.
Drawing on sociologist Basil Bernstein’s concept of recontextualization and theories of teacher agency, this book examines how teachers navigate the boundaries between academic disciplines, school subjects, and everyday knowledge. Through empirical case studies from the UK, Finland, and Sweden, it illustrates how teachers’ decisions are shaped by national expectations, institutional frameworks, and classroom dynamics. Combining Anglophone and Nordic traditions in subject teaching with curriculum theory and classroom research, the book offers a theoretically grounded yet practical account of how teachers recontextualize knowledge. It develops new insights into teacher agency and recontextualization that are highly relevant to teacher education, curriculum design, and educational policy. By focusing on real-life teaching across a range of subjects, the book deepens our understanding of how powerful knowledge is brought into classrooms and how teachers can be supported in this vital work.
Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Brandon A. Jackson
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Nora Gross
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Ann Darby Getty
Gallaudet University Press, 2014
Richardson Dilworth
Temple University Press, 2016
Published in conjunction with Drexel University’s 125th anniversary, Building Drexel chronicles the founding of the university by Anthony J. Drexel through to the present day. The editors and contributors create a prismatic discussion of the university and its evolution.
Richly illustrated chapters cover the architectural history of notable Drexel buildings; the role of Drexel in Philadelphia’s modern history; its Greek life; sports—particularly Drexel’s history in the Big 5; and each of the university’s schools and colleges. There is a history of the medical college and law school, plus the creation of new schools such as those of biomedical engineering, science and health systems.
Building Drexel also documents the civil rights history of Drexel and its urban planning history in relation to the racially diverse Powelton Village and Mantua neighborhoods it borders. This commemorative volume shows the development of the university both in the city and in the world.
Contributors include: Lloyd Ackert, Cordelia Frances Biddle, Paula Marantz Cohen, Donna Marie De Carolis, Roger Dennis, Gloria Donnelly, Kevin D. Egan, Alissa Falcone, David Fenske, John A. Fry, Stephen F. Gambescia, Marla J. Gold, Charles Haas, Kathy Harvatt, Daniel Johnson, Jeannine Keefer, Larry Keiser, Michael Kelley, Jason Ludwig, Jonson Miller, Julie Mostov, Danuta A. Nitecki, Anthony M. Noce, Steven J. Peitzman, David Raizman, Tiago Saraiva, Amy E. Slaton, Nathaniel Stanton, Virginia Theerman, Laura Valenti, James Wolfinger, Eric A. Zillmer, and the editors.
Edited by Matthew Allen, Estela Ene, and Kyle McIntosh
University of Michigan Press, 2022
University of Illinois. Foreword by Timothy L. Killeen
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Covering completed and ongoing projects, Building Momentum offers a one- or two-page feature on each undertaking that covers its history and purpose while providing specific details about its unit, campus, architect, square footage or renovation size, budget, and LEED or other certifications. More than 100 architectural drawings and commissioned and historical photographs round out the descriptions.
Edited by Gary L. Lemons
University of Illinois Press, 2019

Ivol Spafford
University of Minnesota Press, 1943
Building a Curriculum for General Education was first published in 1943. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Joan Malczewski
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Laura Martocci
Temple University Press, 2015
Ryan J. Dippre
Utah State University Press, 2024
Elizabeth Cooper
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Stein, Donald G.
Rutgers University Press, 2004
Universities were once ivory towers where scholarship and teaching reigned supreme, or so we tell ourselves. Whether they were ever as pure as we think, it is certainly the case that they are pure no longer. Administrators look to patents as they seek money by commercializing faculty discoveries; they pour money into sports with the expectation that these spectacles will somehow bring in revenue; they sign contracts with soda and fast-food companies, legitimizing the dominance of a single brand on campus; and they charge for distance learning courses that they market widely. In this volume, edited by Donald G. Stein, university presidents and others in higher education leadership positions comment on the many connections between business and scholarship when intellectual property and learning is treated as a marketable commodity. Some contributors write about the benefits of these connections in providing much needed resources. Others emphasize that the thirst for profits may bias the type of research that is carried out and the quality of that research. They fear for the future of basic research if faculty are in search of immediate payoffs.
The majority of the contributors acknowledge that commercialization is the current reality and has progressed too far to return to the “good old days.” They propose guidelines for students and professors to govern commercial activities. Such guidelines can increase the likelihood that quality, openness, and collegiality will remain core academic values.