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The story of how a biologically driven understanding of gender and sexuality became central to US LGBTQ+ political and legal advocacy.

Across protests and courtrooms, LGBTQ+ advocates argue that sexual and gender identities are innate. Oppositely, conservatives incite panic over “groomers” and a contagious “gender ideology” that corrupts susceptible children. Yet, as this debate rages on, the history of what first compelled the hunt for homosexuality’s biological origin story may hold answers for the queer rights movement’s future.

Born This Way tells the story of how a biologically based understanding of gender and sexuality became central to LGBTQ+ advocacy. Starting in the 1950s, activists sought out mental health experts to combat the pathologizing of homosexuality. As Joanna Wuest shows, these relationships were forged in subsequent decades alongside two broader, concurrent developments: the rise of an interest-group model of rights advocacy and an explosion of biogenetic and bio-based psychological research. The result is essential reading to fully understand LGBTQ+ activism today and how clashes over science remain crucial to equal rights struggles.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

The story of how a biologically driven understanding of gender and sexuality became central to US LGBTQ+ political and legal advocacy.

Across protests and courtrooms, LGBTQ+ advocates argue that sexual and gender identities are innate. Oppositely, conservatives incite panic over “groomers” and a contagious “gender ideology” that corrupts susceptible children. Yet, as this debate rages on, the history of what first compelled the hunt for homosexuality’s biological origin story may hold answers for the queer rights movement’s future.

Born This Way tells the story of how a biologically based understanding of gender and sexuality became central to LGBTQ+ advocacy. Starting in the 1950s, activists sought out mental health experts to combat the pathologizing of homosexuality. As Joanna Wuest shows, these relationships were forged in subsequent decades alongside two broader, concurrent developments: the rise of an interest-group model of rights advocacy and an explosion of biogenetic and bio-based psychological research. The result is essential reading to fully understand LGBTQ+ activism today and how clashes over science remain crucial to equal rights struggles.

Four men played leading roles in the political drama that unfolded in South Texas during the first decades of this century:

• James B. Wells, who ruled as boss of Cameron County and served as leading conservative spokesman of the Democratic Party in Texas;
• Archer (Archie) Parr, whose ruthless tactics and misuse of public funds in Duval County established him as one of the most notoriously corrupt politicians in Texas history;
• Manuel Guerra, Mexican American rancher and merchant whose domination of Starr County mirrored the rule of his Anglo counterparts in the border region;
• John Nance Garner, who served the interests of these bosses of South Texas as he set forth on the road that would lead him to the United States vice-presidency.

Evan Anders's Boss Rule in South Texas tells the story of these men and the county rings they shaped in South Texas during the Progressive Era.

Power was the byword of the bosses of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and Anders explores the sources of that power. These politicos did not shirk from using corrupt and even violent means to attain their goals, but Anders demonstrates that their keen sensitivity to the needs of their diverse constituency was key to their long-term success. Patronage and other political services were their lifeblood, and the allies gained by these ranged from developers and businessmen to ranchers and Mexican Americans, wealthy and poor.

Besides examining the workings of the Democratic machines of four South Texas counties, Anders explores the role of the Hispanic populace in shaping the politics of the border region, the economic development of the Lower Rio Grande Valley and its political repercussions, the emergence and nature of progressive movements at both local and state levels, and the part played by the Texas Rangers in supporting bossism in South Texas.

Hailed as one of Boston’s most beloved mayors and its longest serving, Thomas Menino (1942–2014) deftly managed the city’s finances and transformed Boston into the hub of innovation that it is today. During his time in office, Boston embraced modern industrial growth and moved forward with noteworthy developments that altered neighborhoods, while also facing ongoing racial strife, challenges of unaffordable housing, and significant public union negotiations.

Mayors in modern American cities occupy unique positions as government leaders who need to remain active parts of their communities in addition to being tasked with fixing neighborhood issues, managing crises, and keeping schools and public infrastructure on course. Situating news coverage alongside interviews with the mayor and his administration, political scientist Wilbur C. Rich chronicles Menino’s time in office while also considering his personal and professional background, his larger-than-life personality, and his ambitions. Menino’s approach to these challenges and opportunities offers enduring lessons to anyone interested in urban government and political leadership.

In the late twentieth century the American and global economy shifted from manufacturing toward a knowledge industry. Following an economic low point several decades earlier, the city of Boston took advantage of the new era of globalization, fueled by dramatic advances in telecommunications, computer power, and air and sea travel, as well as its own impressive intellectual capital.

Boston and the Making of a Global City pulls together scholarship, media stories, personal interviews, and city planning documents to tell the story of Boston’s historical trajectory, as it quickly became a competitive global hub. Starting with its role as a colonial port and nineteenth-century maritime power, but moving quickly forward, the book describes how Boston capitalized on its strengths in higher education and such innovation sectors as life sciences, healthcare, information technology, and finance. Author James O’Connell traces the historical sweep of global flows—trade and supply chains, innovation and the dissemination of knowledge, investment, transportation, tourism, telecommunications, and immigration—that have shaped the city and region’s development. This volume also addresses the economic, social, and environmental challenges that Boston currently faces and how it is strategically positioned to confront them going forward.

Bound Together takes a new look at twentieth-century Turkey, asking what it will take for Turkish women and men to regain their lost freedoms, and what the Turkish case means for the prospects of freedom and democracy elsewhere. Contrasting the country’s field of poetry, where secularization was the joint work of pious and nonpious people, with that of the novel, this book inquires into the nature of western-nonwestern difference.

Turkey’s poets were more fortunate than its novelists for two reasons. Poets were slightly better at developing the idea of the autonomy of art from politics. While piety was a marker of political identity everywhere, poets were better able than novelists to bracket political differences when assessing their peers as the country was bitterly polarized politically and as the century wore on. Second, and more important, poets of all stripes were more connected to each other than were novelists. Their greater ability to find and keep one another in coffeehouses and literary journals made it less likely for prospective cross-aisle partnerships to remain untested propositions.

Turkey presents a striking example of the most recent wave of global authoritarian turns. The two-decade-long transition in the country’s political system also transformed its media environment. As mainstream journalists gradually yielded their places to sycophants, much more willing to praise the government in their news, the mainstream media that once oversaw—however imperfectly—political decisions started devoting its full service to cheerleading the government. Simultaneously, a new sphere of critical journalism began to emerge, with mainstream media journalists joining their fellows in the peripheries of the media. Considering the transformation of Turkey’s news media as the decay of a democratic institution, this book asks, How does the media break down under the rule of an elected government?
 
Drawing on fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the book traces the ruling AKP’s manipulation of social divides to consolidate power and journalists’ navigation of the resulting climate of fear, hope, doubt, and anger. The book shows how Turkey’s news media surrendered its power over politics as some journalists embraced disinformation as a path to heightened status, others turned to self-censorship for protection, and still others resisted capture through continuous but fragmented efforts.
 
The book portrays journalists as central actors in media decay, while also revealing that resilience to decay emerges where rising demand for “news” meets the contentious mobilization of journalists. Although focused on Turkey, the book’s insights extend far beyond, offering urgent lessons about the future of journalism in an age of populism, polarization, and institutional erosion.

A study of Timorese communities that offers a human perspective on post-conflict reconciliation.

Violent conflict may end in a kind of peace. But reconciliation processes do not always work, let alone bring healing. How are families and communities to rebuild their lives when old divisions, pain, and memories still linger? Centering on social repair, this beautifully crafted study explores how families and communities in Timor-Leste and exile communities in Indonesia live with the enduring consequences of political violence, forced separation, and displacement after twenty-four years of Indonesian occupation.

Following relationships across borders and between generations, Boundaries of Repair shows how ruptures in kinship and community life reverberate across time and space, and even between the living and the dead. Rather than treating repair as a state-driven undertaking, the book reveals social repair as an uneven, fragile, and ongoing process, sustained through everyday care practices, memory work, emotional labor, and creative acts of negotiation in contexts marked by impunity and unresolved loss.

By foregrounding what it means to live with damage that cannot be fully repaired, the book challenges dominant assumptions about justice, healing, and closure. It offers a powerful account of how people renegotiate relationships, boundaries, and belonging amid traces of violence, contributing new insights to debates on post-conflict recovery, memory, displacement, and the limits of reconciliation.

A definitive study of the political forces that reshaped Alabama after Reconstruction.

In Bourbon Democracy in Alabama, 1874-1890, historian Johnston Allen Going offers a seminal examination of the political transformation of Alabama during the years following Reconstruction. Focusing on the rise of Bourbon Democratic leadership, Going explores how a new political elite consolidated power, reshaped state institutions, and directed Alabama's economic and social development during a pivotal period in Southern history.

Drawing on extensive historical research, the book traces the efforts of Democratic leaders to restore political control after Reconstruction while promoting policies associated with the emerging New South. Going analyzes the complex interplay of political ideology, economic modernization, class interests, and racial dynamics that influenced governance and public life between 1874 and 1890. Through detailed accounts of elections, legislative initiatives, and political struggles, the study reveals how Alabama's leaders sought to balance progress, stability, and authority in a rapidly changing society.

A landmark contribution to both Alabama history and the broader study of the post-Reconstruction South, Bourbon Democracy in Alabama provides critical insight into the forces that shaped regional politics and helped define the course of Southern development in the late nineteenth century. Essential for understanding the origins of modern Alabama politics, this book is a valuable resource for historians, students, political scientists, genealogists, and anyone interested in Southern history and government.

In the mid-1950s, as many developing nations sought independence from colonial rule, black women in the American South and in South Africa launched parallel campaigns to end racial injustice within their respective communities. Just as the dignified obstinacy of Mrs. Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, the 20,000 South African women who marched in Pretoria a year later to protest the pass laws signaled a new wave of resistance to the system of apartheid. In both places women who had previously been consigned to subordinate roles brought fresh leadership to the struggle for political freedom and social equality. 

In this book, Pamela E. Brooks tells their story, documenting the extraordinary achievements of otherwise ordinary women. In comparing the experiences of black women activists in two different parts of the African diaspora, Brooks draws heavily on oral histories that provide clear, and often painful, insight into their backgrounds, their motives, their hopes, and their fears. We learn how black women from all walks of life—domestic and factory workers, householders, teachers, union organizers, churchwomen, clubwomen, rural and urban dwellers alike—had to overcome their class differences and work through the often difficult gender relations within their families and communities. Yet eventually they came together to forge their own political organizations, such as the Women's Political Council and the Federation of South African Women, or joined orga-nizations of women and men, such as the Montgomery Improvement Association and the African National Congress, to advance the common agenda of black liberation.By tracing the dual rise of political consciousness and activism among the black women of the U.S. South and South Africa, Brooks not only illuminates patterns that have long been overlooked but places that shared history within the context of a larger global struggle to bring an end to the vestiges of European colonialism.

Over the past two decades, corporations and other commercial entities have used strategic litigation to win more expansive First Amendment protections for commercial speech—from the regulation of advertising to the role corporate interests play in the political process, most recently debated in the Supreme Court case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Tamara R. Piety, a nationally known critic of commercial and corporate speech, argues that such an expansion of First Amendment speech rights imperils public health, safety, and welfare; the reliability of commercial and consumer information; the stability of financial markets; and the global environment. 

Beginning with an evaluation of commonly evoked philosophical justifications for freedom of expression, Piety determines that, while these are appropriate for the protection of an individual’s rights, they should not be applied too literally to commercial expression because the corporate person is not the moral equivalent of the human person. She then gathers evidence from public relations and marketing, behavioral economics, psychology, and cognitive studies to show how overly permissive extensions of First Amendment protections to commercial expression limit governmental power to address some of the major social, economic, and environmental challenges of our time.

“The timeliness of the topic and the provision of original positions are sure to make the book a valuable contribution that should draw much attention.”
—Kevin W. Saunders, Michigan State University

When the Brazilian military overthrew President João Goulart in 1964, American diplomats characterized the coup as a "100 percent Brazilian movement." It has since become apparent, largely through government documents declassified during the course of research for this book, that the United States had an invisible but pervasive part in the coup.

Relying principally on documents from the Johnson and Kennedy presidential libraries, Phyllis Parker unravels the events of the coup in fascinating detail. The evidence she presents is corroborated by interviews with key participants.

U.S. interference in the Goulart regime began when normal diplomatic pressure failed to produce the desired enthusiasm from him for the Alliance of Progress. Political and economic manipulations also proving ineffective, the United States stood ready to back a military takeover of Brazil's constitutional democracy.

U.S. operation "Brother Sam" involved shipments of petroleum, a naval task force, and tons of arms and ammunition in preparation for intervention during the 1964 coup. When the Brazilian military gained control without calling on the ready assistance, U.S. policy makers immediately accorded recognition to the new government and set in motion plans for economic support.

Between 1918 and 1961, Brazil and the USSR maintained formal diplomatic ties for only thirty-one months, at the end of World War II. Yet, despite the official distance, the USSR is the only external actor whose behavior, real or imagined, influenced the structure of the Brazilian state in the twentieth century. In Brazil and the Soviet Challenge, 1917–1947, Stanley Hilton provides the first analysis in any language of Brazilian policy toward the Soviet Union during this period.

Drawing on American, British, and German diplomatic archives and unprecedented access to official and private Brazilian records, Hilton elucidates the connection between the Brazilian elite’s perception of a communist threat and the creation of the authoritarian Estado Novo (1937–1945), the forerunner of the post-1964 national security state. He shows how the 1935 communist revolt, prepared by Comintern agents, was a pivotal event in Brazilian history, making prophets of conservative alarmists and generating irresistible pressure for an authoritarian government to contain the Soviet threat. He details the Brazilian government’s secret cooperation with the Gestapo during the 1930s and its concomitant efforts to forge an anti-Soviet front in the Southern Cone. And he uncovers an unexplored aspect of Brazil’s national security policy, namely, the attempt to build counterintelligence capabilities not only within Brazil but also in neighboring countries.

While the history of the Brazilian communist movement has been extensively studied, this is the first work to explore how images of the Soviet Union and its policies influenced the Brazilian foreign policy elite. It will be important reading for all students of twentieth-century political history.

An ethnography and media analysis of LGBT+ activism in São Paulo during Brazil’s conservative turn from 2010 to 2018.

For decades, LGBT+ activists across the globe have secured victories by persuasively articulating rights to sexual autonomy. Brazilian activists, some of the world’s most energetic, have kept pace. But since 2010, a backlash has set in, as defenders of “tradition” and “family” have countered LGBT+ rights discourses using a rights-based language of their own.

To understand this shifting ground, Joseph Jay Sosa collaborated with Brazilian LGBT+ activists, who use the language of rights while knowing that rights are not what they seem. Drawing on the symbolic and affective qualities of rights, activists mobilize slogans, bodies, and media to articulate an alternative democratic sensorium. Beyond conventional notions of rights as tools for managing the obligations of states vis-à-vis citizens, activists show how rights operate aesthetically—enjoining the public to see and feel as activists do. Sosa tracks the fate of LGBT+ rights in a growing authoritarian climate that demands “human rights for the right humans.” Interpreting conflicts between advocates and opponents over LGBT+ autonomy as not just an ideological struggle but an aesthetic one, Brazil’s Sex Wars rethinks a style of politics that seems both utterly familiar and counterintuitive.

The Brazilian Communist Party was one of the largest Communist parties in Latin America until its split and dissolution in the 1990s. Although not granted legal status as a political party of Brazil until 1985, the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB) has been tolerated by that country's regime.

Such governmental tolerance of the PCB was not always the case. In the past, the regime of Getúlio Vargas practiced savage forms of repression against Brazilian leftists, whose "Red extremism" was cited by both government leaders and the press as sufficient cause for Vargas' adoption of the most extreme measures.

Brazilian Communism, 1935–1945 is an objective and remarkably comprehensive account of the Brazilian Communist Party's struggle to survive those days of repression.

From his prison cell, PCB leader Luís Carlos Prestes guided the Party's quarreling factions. All who were associated with the Left shared a common enemy: the police, who used the most brutal forms of torture to extract information about leftist activities. Young Elza Fernandes, companion of the PCB's secretary general, was one whom the police interrogated. Suspecting that she had betrayed them, the Party itself arranged her murder.

Dulles' vivid account of this violent chapter in Latin American history is based on exclusive interviews with leading activists of the period and exhaustive research in the archives of both the PCB and the Brazilian police. The results make fascinating reading for Latin Americanists, historians of World War II, and students of international Communism alike.

Analyzing disjunctions between middle-class and working-class women's ideas of independence, Vapnek highlights the agendas for change advanced by leaders such as Jennie Collins, Leonora O'Reilly, and Helen Campbell and organizations such as the National Consumers' League, the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, and the Women's Trade Union League. Locating households as important sites of class conflict, Breadwinners recovers the class and gender politics behind the marginalization of domestic workers from labor reform while documenting the ways in which working-class women raised their voices on their own behalf.

Essays on Brexit's impact on the UK economy.

With a foreword by renowned political sociologist Katy Hayward, Brexit and the UK Constitution offers a grounded, factual, and authoritative contribution to understanding Brexit’s implications ten years on from the referendum. John Springford considers significant developments in trade, investment, the labor market and immigration, and productivity, and offers a refreshing evidence-based account of how the UK economy has changed outside the EU. Catherine Barnard and Joel Reland examine the legal and regulatory landscape post-Brexit and assess what “taking back control” has meant in practice for the United Kingdom's legal landscape. Finally, Jonathan Thomas looks at immigration since 2016, examining policy and trends since the referendum and considering the impact that Brexit has had on both immigration to, and emigration from, the United Kingdom. He focuses on what has really happened, moving beyond rhetoric and soundbites to provide an unbiased and non-partisan account.