18284 books match the query 'United States' and 902 start with b

cover of Beyond Pluralism: The Conception of Groups and Group Identities in America

Beyond Pluralism

The Conception of Groups and Group Identities in America

Edited by Wendy F. Katkin, Ned Landsman, and Andrea Tyree

University of Illinois Press, 1998

      Pluralist or multiculturalist, proudly ethnic or disappearing into the
        melting pot, people come in all persuasions. This volume attempts to bridge
        the gap that has developed between pluralists and multiculturalists, advocates
        of the academic canon and defenders of diversity, celebrants of ethnic
        heritage and critics of racial ascription. Contributors explore the nation's
        pluralistic framework as a historical creation, looking at group relations
        in the United States and how they have been conceptualized in the past.
 
[more]
cover of Beyond Pontiac's Shadow: Michilimackinac and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763

Beyond Pontiac's Shadow

Michilimackinac and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763

Keith R. Widder

Michigan State University Press, 2013

On June 2, 1763, the Ojibwe captured Michigan’s Fort Michilimackinac from the British. Ojibwe warriors from villages on Mackinac Island and along the Cheboygan River had surprised the unsuspecting garrison while playing a game of baggatiway. On the heels of the capture, Odawa from nearby L’Arbre Croche arrived to rescue British prisoners, setting into motion a complicated series of negotiations among Ojibwe, Odawa, and Menominee and other Indians from Wisconsin. Because nearly all Native people in the Michilimackinac borderland had allied themselves with the British before the attack, they refused to join the Michilimackinac Ojibwe in their effort to oust the British from the upper country; the turmoil effectively halted the fur trade. Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow examines the circumstances leading up to the attack and the course of events in the aftermath that resulted in the regarrisoning of the fort and the restoration of the fur trade. At the heart of this discussion is an analysis of French-Canadian and Indian communities at the Straits of Mackinac and throughout the pays d’en haut. An accessible guide to this important period in Michigan, American, and Canadian history, Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow sheds invaluable light on a political and cultural crisis.

[more]
cover of Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities

Beyond Preservation

Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities

Authored by Andrew Hurley

Temple University Press, 2010

Across the United States, historic preservation has become a catalyst for urban regeneration. Entrepreneurs, urban pioneers, and veteran city dwellers have refurbished thousands of dilapidated properties and put them to productive use as shops, restaurants, nightclubs, museums, and private residences. As a result, inner-cities, once disparaged as zones of poverty, crime, and decay have been re-branded as historic districts. Although these preservation initiatives, often supported by government tax incentives and rigid architectural controls, deserve credit for bringing people back to the city, raising property values, and generating tourist revenue, they have been less successful in creating stable and harmonious communities.

Beyond Preservation proposes a framework for stabilizing and strengthening inner-city neighborhoods through the public interpretation of historic landscapes. Its central argument is that inner-city communities can best turn preserved landscapes into assets by subjecting them to public interpretation at the grass-roots.  Based on an examination of successful projects in St. Louis, Missouri and other U.S. cities, Andrew Hurley demonstrates how rigorous historical analysis can help communities articulate a local identity and plan intelligently on the basis of existing cultural and social assets.    

[more]
cover of Beyond Recognition: Transgender Antidiscrimination Law, Rhetoric, and Ethical Responsibility

Beyond Recognition

Transgender Antidiscrimination Law, Rhetoric, and Ethical Responsibility

Collins, Laura Jane

University of Alabama Press, 2026

A bold and original analysis of how the complexity of legal struggles over transgender rights is shaped not only by politics but by a deeper cultural anxiety about the meaning of sex itself.

Beyond Recognition: Transgender Antidiscrimination Law, Rhetoric, and Ethical Responsibility is a timely analysis that challenges the idea of transgender antidiscrimination law as a simple matter of inclusion or exclusion. Far from treating the law as a straightforward recognition project, Laura Jane Collins employs a rhetorically responsive approach that reveals how legal systems both reflect and shape our deepest uncertainties about sex, identity, and justice.

Through close readings of Title VII case law, state-level legislation such as California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, and legislative debates surrounding bathroom access and trans rights, Collins exposes the deep-seated anxieties driving contemporary legal debates. While courts, policymakers, and advocates struggle to construct legal protections, the very act of defining sex within the law exposes law’s limitations.

Rather than condemning the law’s failures or romanticizing its liberatory potential, Collins calls for a more self-reflective, ethically engaged response. She argues that our demand for legal clarity often conceals a broader discomfort with ambiguity—and that the law’s so-called shortcomings may in fact reflect our own refusal to confront the complexity of sex as a category and system of power.

A vital contribution to scholarship in law and rhetoric, gender studies, and critical legal theory, Beyond Recognition invites a deeper reckoning with both legal frameworks and personal responsibility. It offers a compelling perspective on the evolving landscape of transgender rights and the cultural anxieties that continue to shape it.

[more]
cover of Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War

Beyond Redemption

Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War

Carole Emberton

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In the months after the end of the Civil War, there was one word on everyone’s lips: redemption. From the fiery language of Radical Republicans calling for a reconstruction of the former Confederacy to the petitions of those individuals who had worked the land as slaves to the white supremacists who would bring an end to Reconstruction in the late 1870s, this crucial concept informed the ways in which many people—both black and white, northerner and southerner—imagined the transformation of the American South.

Beyond Redemption explores how the violence of a protracted civil war shaped the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the new South. Here, Carole Emberton traces the competing meanings that redemption held for Americans as they tried to come to terms with the war and the changing social landscape. While some imagined redemption from the brutality of slavery and war, others—like the infamous Ku Klux Klan—sought political and racial redemption for their losses through violence. Beyond Redemption merges studies of race and American manhood with an analysis of post-Civil War American politics to offer unconventional and challenging insight into the violence of Reconstruction.

[more]
cover of Beyond Repair?: America's Death Penalty

Beyond Repair?

America's Death Penalty

Stephen P. Garvey, ed.

Duke University Press, 2003

Can the death penalty be administered in a just way—without executing the innocent, without regard to race, and without arbitrariness? How does capital punishment in the United States fit with international human rights law? These are among the questions that leading legal scholars and journalists explore in Beyond Repair? All new, the essays in this collection focus on the period since 1976, when the Supreme Court held that capital punishment, in and of itself, does not violate the Constitution. In addition to reflecting on the most recent developments in the law, the contributors draw on empirical research to consider connections between newly available data and modern American death penalty procedures.

A number of the essays scrutinize thinking about capital punishment. They examine why, following almost two decades of strong public support for the death penalty, public opinion in favor of it has recently begun to decline. Beyond Repair? presents some of the findings of the Capital Jury Project, a nationwide research initiative that has interviewed over one thousand people who served as jurors in capital trials. It looks at what goes through the minds of jurors asked to consider imposing the death penalty, how qualified they are to make such an important decision, and how well they understand the judge’s instructions. Contributors also investigate the risk of executing the innocent, the role that race plays in determining which defendants are sentenced to death, and the effect of expanded restrictions on access to federal appellate relief. The postscript contemplates the peculiarities of our contemporary system of capital punishment, including the alarming variance in execution rates from state to state.

Filled with current insights and analysis, Beyond Repair? will provide valuable information to attorneys, political scientists, criminologists, and all those wanting to participate knowledgeably in the debates about the death penalty in America.

Contributors. Ken Armstrong, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Stephen P. Garvey, Samuel R. Gross, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Steve Mills, William A. Schabas, Larry W. Yackle, Franklin E. Zimring

[more]
cover of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women

Beyond Respectability

The Intellectual Thought of Race Women

Brittney C. Cooper

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.
[more]
cover of Beyond Rosie: A Documentary History of Women and World War II

Beyond Rosie

A Documentary History of Women and World War II

Julia Brock

University of Arkansas Press, 2015

More so than any war in history, World War II was a woman’s war. Women, motivated by patriotism, the opportunity for new experiences, and the desire to serve, participated widely in the global conflict. Within the Allied countries, women of all ages proved to be invaluable in the fight for victory. Rosie the Riveter became the most enduring image of women’s involvement in World War II. What Rosie represented, however, is only a small portion of a complex story. As wartime production workers, enlistees in auxiliary military units, members of voluntary organizations or resistance groups, wives and mothers on the home front, journalists, and USO performers, American women found ways to challenge traditional gender roles and stereotypes.

Beyond Rosie offers readers an opportunity to see the numerous contributions they made to the fight against the Axis powers and how American women’s roles changed during the war. The primary documents (newspapers, propaganda posters, cartoons, excerpts from oral histories and memoirs, speeches, photographs, and editorials) collected here represent cultural, political, economic, and social perspectives on the diverse roles women played during World War II.
[more]
cover of Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion

Beyond Sanctuary

The Humanism of a World in Motion

Ananya Roy and Veronika Zablotsky, editors

Duke University Press, 2025

The contributors to Beyond Sanctuary examine how the liberal democracies of the West recognize and include racial others through technologies of state power that promise but rarely grant sanctuary and refuge. Conceptualized at a time of resurgent white nationalism, this volume critically interrogates not only right-wing xenophobia but also the liberal ruse of asylum and its place in Western humanism. Drawing on the liberatory histories and countercartographies of migrant movements and the intellectual traditions of the Black radical tradition, Indigenous studies, postcolonial thought, and critical refugee studies, the contributors analyze the colonial-racial logics of humanitarian reason and its carceral geographies of camps and crossings. Whether analyzing guerrilla art projects that memorialize female migrants who died crossing the US-Mexico border, schools for undocumented students, housing solidarity movements in state-run camps in Greece, or transnational struggles for abolition, this collection foregrounds ideas and practices of fugitivity and freedom that refuse and reworld the West.

Contributors. Leisy Abrego, Damon Azali-Rojas, Amy Sara Carroll, Sharad Chari, Nicholas De Genova, Ricardo Dominguez, Lorgia García-Peña, Sarah Haley, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Moon-Kie Jung, Maria Kaika, Saree Makdisi, Kyle T. Mays, Ananya Roy, Charles Sepulveda, SA Smythe, Vanessa E. Thompson, Charalampos Tsavdaroglou, João H. Costa Vargas, Rinaldo Walcott, Veronika Zablotsky, Maite Zubiaurre
[more]
cover of Beyond Segregation: Multiracial And Multiethnic Neighborhoods

Beyond Segregation

Multiracial And Multiethnic Neighborhoods

Michael T. Maly

Temple University Press, 2005

At a time when cities appear to be fragmenting mosaics of ethnic enclaves, it is reassuring to know there are still stable multicultural neighborhoods. Beyond Segregation offers a tour of some of America's best known multiethnic neighborhoods: Uptown in Chicago, Jackson Heights (Queens), and San Antonio-Fruitvale in Oakland. Readers will learn the history of the neighborhoods and develop an understanding of the people that reside in them, the reasons they stay, and the work it takes to maintain each neighborhood as an affordable, integrated place to live.
[more]
cover of Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Beyond Settler Time

Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Mark Rifkin

Duke University Press, 2017

What does it mean to say that Native peoples exist in the present?  In Beyond Settler Time Mark Rifkin investigates the dangers of seeking to include Indigenous peoples within settler temporal frameworks. Claims that Native peoples should be recognized as coeval with Euro-Americans, Rifkin argues, implicitly treat dominant non-native ideologies and institutions as the basis for defining time itself. How, though, can Native peoples be understood as dynamic and changing while also not assuming that they belong to a present inherently shared with non-natives? Drawing on physics, phenomenology, queer studies, and postcolonial theory, Rifkin develops the concept of "settler time" to address how Native peoples are both consigned to the past and inserted into the present in ways that normalize non-native histories, geographies, and expectations. Through analysis of various kinds of texts, including government documents, film, fiction, and autobiography, he explores how Native experiences of time exceed and defy such settler impositions. In underscoring the existence of multiple temporalities, Rifkin illustrates how time plays a crucial role in Indigenous peoples’ expressions of sovereignty and struggles for self-determination.
[more]
cover of Beyond Shangri-La: America and Tibet's Move into the Twenty-First Century

Beyond Shangri-La

America and Tibet's Move into the Twenty-First Century

John Kenneth Knaus

Duke University Press, 2012

Beyond Shangri-La chronicles relations between the Tibetans and the United States since 1908, when a Dalai Lama first met with U.S. representatives. What was initially a distant alliance became more intimate and entangled in the late 1950s, when the Tibetan people launched an armed resistance movement against the Chinese occupiers. The Tibetans fought to oust the Chinese and to maintain the presence of the current Dalai Lama and his direction of their country. In 1958, John Kenneth Knaus volunteered to serve in a major CIA program to support the Tibetans. For the next seven years, as an operations officer working from India, from Colorado, and from Washington, D.C., he cooperated with the Tibetan rebels as they utilized American assistance to contest Chinese domination and to attain international recognition as an independent entity.

Since the late 1950s, the rugged resolve of the Dalai Lama and his people and the growing respect for their efforts to free their homeland from Chinese occupation have made Tibet's political and cultural status a pressing issue in international affairs. So has the realization by nations, including the United States, that their geopolitical interests would best be served by the defeat of the Chinese and the achievement of Tibetan self-determination. Beyond Shangri-La provides unique insight into the efforts of the U.S. government and committed U.S. citizens to support a free Tibet.

[more]
cover of Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison: Transforming Breast Cancer Stories into Action

Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison

Transforming Breast Cancer Stories into Action

Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman

Rutgers University Press, 2004

Depending on one’s vantage point, breast cancer can be a very different experience, and indeed, a very different concern.  It is, for some, a personal struggle; for others, it is a disease posing scientific and environmental challenges; and for others it is a highly charged and politicized issue around which policy wars rage. Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison brings a unique perspective to breast cancer by recognizing the overlapping relationship of all these realities.

Drawing on the writings of Rachel Carson, Betty Ford, Rose Kushner, and Audre Lorde, this book explores the various ways in which patient-centered texts continue to leave their mark on the political realm of breast cancer and, ultimately, the disease itself. Ordered chronologically, the selections trace the progression of discussions about breast cancer from a time when the subject was kept private and silent to when it became part of public discourse. The texts included are personal accounts, written by women struggling to play an active role in their healing process and, at the same time, hoping to help others do the same. 

Knopf-Newman also shows us how these writings eventually changed public opinion and the underlying tendency to blame women for their illness. She argues that changes in medical practice and public policy are linked to textual interventions, and makes a case for the politicization of cultural studies of disease through personal and literary expression.

Passionately written and well-researched, Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison transforms how we think about breast cancer.  Rather than facilitating forums for separate discussions, this book brings conversations into dialog with each other. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with breast cancer and its history, as well as for those interested in the effect of the environment on public health and the role that literature plays in public policy and medicine. 

[more]
cover of Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration

Beyond Smoke and Mirrors

Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration

Douglas S. Massey

Russell Sage Foundation, 2002

Migration between Mexico and the United States is part of a historical process of increasing North American integration. This process acquired new momentum with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, which lowered barriers to the movement of goods, capital, services, and information. But rather than include labor in this new regime, the United States continues to resist the integration of the labor markets of the two countries. Instead of easing restrictions on Mexican labor, the United States has militarized its border and adopted restrictive new policies of immigrant disenfranchisement. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors examines the devastating impact of these immigration policies on the social and economic fabric of the Mexico and the United States, and calls for a sweeping reform of the current system. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors shows how U.S. immigration policies enacted between 1986–1996—largely for symbolic domestic political purposes—harm the interests of Mexico, the United States, and the people who migrate between them. The costs have been high. The book documents how the massive expansion of border enforcement has wasted billions of dollars and hundreds of lives, yet has not deterred increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants from heading north. The authors also show how the new policies unleashed a host of unintended consequences: a shift away from seasonal, circular migration toward permanent settlement; the creation of a black market for Mexican labor; the transformation of Mexican immigration from a regional phenomenon into a broad social movement touching every region of the country; and even the lowering of wages for legal U.S. residents. What had been a relatively open and benign labor process before 1986 was transformed into an exploitative underground system of labor coercion, one that lowered wages and working conditions of undocumented migrants, legal immigrants, and American citizens alike. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors offers specific proposals for repairing the damage. Rather than denying the reality of labor migration, the authors recommend regularizing it and working to manage it so as to promote economic development in Mexico, minimize costs and disruptions for the United States, and maximize benefits for all concerned. This book provides an essential "user's manual" for readers seeking a historical, theoretical, and substantive understanding of how U.S. policy on Mexican immigration evolved to its current dysfunctional state, as well as how it might be fixed.
[more]
cover of Beyond Sputnik: U.S. Science Policy in the Twenty-First Century

Beyond Sputnik

U.S. Science Policy in the Twenty-First Century

Homer A. Neal, Tobin L. Smith, and Jennifer B. McCormick

University of Michigan Press, 2008

Science and technology are responsible for almost every advance in our modern quality of life. Yet science isn't just about laboratories, telescopes and particle accelerators. Public policy exerts a huge impact on how the scientific community conducts its work. Beyond Sputnik is a comprehensive survey of the field for use as an introductory textbook in courses and a reference guide for legislators, scientists, journalists, and advocates seeking to understand the science policy-making process. Detailed case studies---on topics from cloning and stem cell research to homeland security and science education---offer readers the opportunity to study real instances of policymaking at work. Authors and experts Homer A. Neal, Tobin L. Smith, and Jennifer B. McCormick propose practical ways to implement sound public policy in science and technology and highlight how these policies will guide the results of scientific discovery for years to come.

Homer A. Neal is the Samuel A. Goudsmit Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Interim President Emeritus, and Vice President for Research Emeritus at the University of Michigan, and is a former member of the U.S. National Science Board.

Tobin L. Smith is Associate Vice President for Federal Relations at the Association of American Universities. He was formerly Assistant Director of the University of Michigan and MIT Washington, DC, offices.

Jennifer B. McCormick is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Ethics in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Mayo College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, and is the Associate Director of the Research Ethics Resource, part of the Mayo Clinic's NIH Clinical Translational Science Award research programs.

GO BEYOND SPUTNIK ONLINE--Visit www.science-policy.net for the latest news, teaching resources, learning guides, and internship opportunities in the 21st-Century field of science policy.

[more]
cover of Beyond Subsistence: Plains Archaeology and the Postprocessual Critique

Beyond Subsistence

Plains Archaeology and the Postprocessual Critique

Edited by Philip Duke and Michael C. Wilson

University of Alabama Press, 1995

A series of essays, written by Plains scholars of diverse research interests and backgrounds, that apply postprocessual approaches to the solution of current problems in Plains archaeology

Postprocessual archaeology is seen as a potential vehicle for integrating culture-historical, processual, and postmodernist approaches to solve specific archaeological problems.

The contributors address specific interpretive problems in all the major regions of the North American Plains, investigate different Plains societies (including hunter-gatherers and farmers and their associated archaeological records), and examine the political content of archaeology in such fields as gender studies and cultural resource management. They avoid a programmatic adherence to a single paradigm, arguing instead that a mature archaeology will use different theories, methods, and techniques to solve specific empirical problems. By avoiding excessive infatuation with the correct scientific method, this volume addresses questions that have often been categorized as beyond archaeological investigations.

[more]
cover of Beyond The Foster Care System: The Future for Teens

Beyond The Foster Care System

The Future for Teens

Betsy Krebs

Rutgers University Press, 2006

Each year tens of thousands of teenagers are released from the foster care system in the United States without high school degrees or strong family relationships. Two to four years after discharge, half of these young people still do not have either a high school diploma or equivalency degree, and fewer than ten percent enter college. Nearly a third end up on public assistance within fifteen months, and eventually more than a third will be arrested or convicted of a crime.

In this richly detailed and often surprising exploration of the foster care system, Betsy Krebs and Paul Pitcoff argue that the existing structure sets kids up to fail by inadequately preparing them for adult life. Foster care programs traditionally emphasize goals of reuniting children with family or placing children into adoptive homes. But neither of these outcomes is likely for adolescents. Krebs and Pitcoff contend that the primary goal of foster care for teenagers should be rigorous preparation for a fully productive adult life and that the standard life skills curriculum is woefully inadequate for this purpose.

The authors, who together cofounded the Youth Advocacy Center in New York City, draw on their fifteen years of experience working with teens and the foster care system to introduce new ways to teach teens to be responsible for themselves and to identify and develop their potential. They also explore what sorts of resources-legal, financial, and human-will need to come from inside and outside the system to more fully humanize the practice of foster care. Ultimately, Krebs and Pitcoff argue that change must involve the participation of caring communities of volunteers who want to see disadvantaged youth succeed as well as developing methods to empower teens to take control of their lives.

Bringing together a series of inspiring, real-life accounts, Beyond the Foster Care System introduces readers to a number of dynamic young people who have participated in the Youth Advocacy Center's programs and who have gone on to apply these lessons to other areas of life. Their stories demonstrate that more successful alternatives to the standard way of providing foster care are not only imaginable, but possible. With the practical improvements Krebs and Pitcoff outline, teens can learn the skills of effective self-advocacy, become better prepared for the transition to full independence, and avoid becoming the statistics that foster care has so often produced in the past.

[more]
cover of Beyond The Good Earth: Transnational Perspectives on Pearl S. Buck

Beyond The Good Earth

Transnational Perspectives on Pearl S. Buck

Jay Cole

West Virginia University Press, 2019

How well do we really know Pearl S. Buck? Many think of Buck solely as the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Good Earth, the novel that explained China to Americans in the 1930s. But Buck was more than a novelist and interpreter of China. As the essays in Beyond The Good Earth show, she possessed other passions and projects, some of which are just now coming into focus.

Who knew, for example, that Buck imagined and helped define multiculturalism long before it became a widely known concept? Or that she founded an adoption agency to locate homes for biracial children from Asia? Indeed, few are aware that she advocated successfully for a genocide convention after World War II and was ahead of her time in envisioning a place for human rights in American foreign policy. Buck’s literary works, often dismissed as simple portrayals of Chinese life, carried a surprising degree of innovation as she experimented with the styles and strategies of modernist artists.

In Beyond The Good Earth, scholars and writers from the United States and China explore these and other often overlooked topics from the life of Pearl S. Buck, positioning her career in the context of recent scholarship on transnational humanitarian activism, women’s rights activism, and civil rights activism.

[more]
cover of Beyond The Mafia: Italian Americans And The Development Of Las Vegas

Beyond The Mafia

Italian Americans And The Development Of Las Vegas

Alan Balboni

University of Nevada Press, 2006

When Beyond the Mafia first appeared in 1996 it was hailed as a significant contribution to the history of Las Vegas and of ethnic minorities in America. Author Alan Balboni traces the history of Italians in Las Vegas from the founding of the city in 1905, recording their activities in the fledgling settlement. As Las Vegas grew, Italian Americans participated in every aspect of the city’s society and economy, including construction, retail establishments, hotels, and—after the statewide legalization of gambling in 1931—the casino industry. Basing his research on well over a hundred interviews, as well as the records of Italian American organizations, public agencies, and other sources, Balboni has produced a sparkling and thoroughly documented account of the history of one of Las Vegas’s most progressive and productive ethnic minorities. This new paperback edition includes an afterword by the author that brings the story of Las Vegas’s Italian Americans up to the present.

[more]
cover of Beyond The Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons

Beyond The Whiteness of Whiteness

Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons

Jane Lazarre

Duke University Press, 1997

“I am Black,” Jane Lazarre’s son tells her. “I have a Jewish mother, but I am not ‘biracial.’ That term is meaningless to me.” She understands, she says—but he tells her, gently, that he doesn’t think so, that she can’t understand this completely because she is white. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is Jane Lazarre’s memoir of coming to terms with this painful truth, of learning to look into the nature of whiteness in a way that passionately informs the connections between herself and her family. A moving account of life in a biracial family, this book is a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America, the story of an education into the realities of African American culture.
Lazarre has spent over twenty-five years living in a Black American family, married to an African American man, birthing and raising two sons. A teacher of African American literature, she has been influenced by an autobiographical tradition that is characterized by a speaking out against racism and a grounding of that expression in one’s own experience—an overlapping of the stories of one’s own life and the world. Like the stories of that tradition, Lazarre’s is a recovery of memories that come together in this book with a new sense of meaning. From a crucial moment in which consciousness is transformed, to recalling and accepting the nature and realities of whiteness, each step describes an aspect of her internal and intellectual journey. Recalling events that opened her eyes to her sons’ and husband’s experience as Black Americans—an operation, turned into a horrific nightmare by a doctor’s unconscious racism or the jarring truths brought home by a visit to an exhibit on slavery at the Richmond Museum of the Confederacy—or her own revealing missteps, Lazarre describes a movement from silence to voice, to a commitment to action, and to an appreciation of the value of a fluid, even ambiguous, identity. It is a coming of age that permits a final retelling of family history and family reunion.
With her skill as a novelist and her experience as a teacher, Jane Lazarre has crafted a narrative as compelling as it is telling. It eloquently describes the author’s delight at being accepted into her husband’s family and attests to the power of motherhood. And as personal as this story is, it is a remarkably incisive account of how perceptions of racial difference lie at the heart of the history and culture of America.
[more]
cover of Beyond Tordesillas: New Approaches to Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies

Beyond Tordesillas

New Approaches to Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies

Edited by Robert Patrick Newcomb and Richard A. Gordon

The Ohio State University Press, 2017

Beyond Tordesillas: New Approaches to Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies is the first volume of its kind to be published in English. Bringing together young and established scholars, it seeks to consolidate the vital work being done on the connections between the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds on both sides of the Atlantic. The volume builds from an understanding that Iberian and Latin American cultures are inherently transoceanic—having engaged in earlier eras in parallel, and sometimes interconnected, colonization projects around the world and more recently in postcolonial evaluations of these practices and their legacies.
 
The jumping-off point for Beyond Tordesillas is the critic Jorge Schwartz’s evocative call to arms, “Down with Tordesillas!” In this groundbreaking essay, Schwartz looks to the imaginary line created by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which divided the known world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence, to stand in for generations of literary and cultural noncommunication between the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking spheres, and their attendant academic disciplines. This volume’s contributions range topically across continents, from the Iberian Peninsula to Latin American countries. They also range across genres, with studies that analyze fictional narrative, music, performance, and visual culture. Beyond Tordesillas forcefully challenges the disciplinary—and indeed, arbitrary—boundaries that for too long have separated Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian studies.
 
[more]
cover of Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974-1990

Beyond Vietnam

The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974-1990

Robert Surbrug

University of Massachusetts Press, 2009

Narratives of the 1960s typically describe an ascending arc of political activism that peaked in 1968, then began a precipitous descent as the revolutionary dreams of the New Left failed to come to fruition. The May 1970 killings at Kent State often stand as an epitaph to a decade of protest, after which the principal story becomes the resurgence of the right.

In Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974–1990, Robert Surbrug challenges this prevailing paradigm by examining three protest movements that were direct descendants of Vietnam-era activism: the movement against nuclear energy; the nuclear weapons freeze movement; and the Central American solidarity movement. Drawing lessons from the successes and failures of the preceding era, these movements had a significant impact on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which itself had been undergoing major transformations in the wake of the 1960s.

By focusing on one state—Massachusetts—Surbrug is able to illuminate the interaction between the activist left and mainstream liberalism, showing how each influenced the other and how together they helped shape the politics of the 1970s and 1980s. During these years, Massachusetts emerged as a center of opposition to nuclear power, the continuing Cold War arms race, and Ronald Reagan's interventionist policies in Central America. The state's role in national policy was greatly enhanced by prominent political figures such as Senator Edward Kennedy, Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O'Neill, presidential candidate Governor Michael Dukakis, Vietnam veteran Senator John Kerry, and moderate Republican Silvio Conte. 

What Beyond Vietnam shows is that the rise of the right in the aftermath of the 1960s was by no means a unilateral ascendancy. Instead it involved a bifurcation of American politics in which an increasingly strong conservative movement was vigorously contested by an activist left and a reinvigorated mainstream liberalism.

[more]
cover of Beyond Winning: National Scholarship Competitions and the Student Experience

Beyond Winning

National Scholarship Competitions and the Student Experience

Suzanne McCray

University of Arkansas Press, 2005

Each year thousands of students apply for competitive national and international scholarships such as the Rhodes, Marshall, Gates Cambridge, and Fulbright. The competition for these awards is intense, and students look to scholarship advisors for support. Many universities have created an office or designated part of an office to assist these students, which has provided greater access for students who may not have applied previously or successfully. It has also increased the competition. The twelve essays in this collection from the 2003 National Association of Fellowships Advisors Conference held at the University of Denver. Essays by the heads of the Rhodes, Marshall, Gates, and Truman Scholarship foundations provide a sense of the philosophy and direction of their programs. The essays provide information on new initiatives, insights into the history and significance of the programs, and insider tips for application and interview preparation. Other essays focus on the advising and application process from successful advisors at various universities, how the U.K. higher educational system differs from that in the United States, and the key issue of ethics in the application process. All the essays demonstrate that the scholarship application experience itself is a valuable one that is more about learning and service than it is about winning.
[more]
cover of Beyond Wolves: The Politics Of Wolf Recovery And Management

Beyond Wolves

The Politics Of Wolf Recovery And Management

Martin A. Nie

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Looks at the next stages of the controversy over wolf recovery

Since 1995, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released Canadian gray wolves into Yellowstone National Park as part of its wolf recovery program, reintroduction has been widely challenged in public forums and sensationalized in the media. This conflict has pitted western ranchers and property rights activists against environmental groups, highlighting starkly contrasting political perspectives. In this informed account, Martin A. Nie examines not only the future of wolf recovery but also the issues that will define debates around the politics of wildlife management, animal rights issues, and other flash points. The result is a revelatory look at the way the democratic process works when the subject is an environmental hot-button issue.

Examining the wolf recovery program from a policy-making perspective, Nie looks at programs in Alaska, the Lake Superior region, the Northern Rockies, the Southwest, and New England and upstate New York. He analyzes the social, political, and cultural backdrop in the areas in which wolves have been reintroduced and explores such contentious issues as the role of science in public policy; the struggle between wilderness protection, resource management, and private property; and the use of stakeholders in environmental conflicts.For Nie, the debate over wolf recovery is above all a value-based political conflict that should take place in a more inclusive, participatory, and representative democratic arena. Wolves, Nie writes, are an important indicator species both biologically and politically, and in Beyond Wolves, he tells an important story of wolves and people, place and politics, that resonates far beyond the fate of America’s most misunderstood inhabitants.
[more]
cover of Beyond the Bandstand: Paul Whiteman in American Musical Culture

Beyond the Bandstand

Paul Whiteman in American Musical Culture

Edited by W. Anthony Sheppard

University of Illinois Press, 2024

The most successful bandleader of the 1920s, Paul Whiteman was an entertainment icon who played a major role in the mainstreaming of jazz. Whiteman and his band premiered Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Duke Ellington acknowledged his achievements. His astonishing ear for talent vaulted a who’s who of artists toward prominence. But Whiteman’s oversized presence eclipsed Black jazz musicians while his middlebrow music prompted later generations to jettison him from jazz history.

W. Anthony Sheppard’s collection of essays confronts the racial implications of Whiteman’s career. The contributors explore Whiteman’s broad impact on popular culture, tracking his work and influence in American marketing, animated films, the Black press, Hollywood, and the music publication industry, and following him behind the scenes with arrangers, into grand concert halls, across the Atlantic, into the courtroom, and on television.

Multifaceted and cutting-edge, Beyond the Bandstand explores the racial politics and artistic questions surrounding a controversial figure in popular music.

Contributors: Ryan Raul Bañagale, Stephanie Doktor, John Howland, Katherine M. Leo, Sarah Caissie Provost, W. Anthony Sheppard, Catherine Tackley, Elijah Wald, and Christi Jay Wells

[more]
cover of Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War

Beyond the Battlefield

Race, Memory, and the American Civil War

David W. Blight

University of Massachusetts Press, 2002

During the past decade and a half, scholars have increasingly addressed the relationship of history and memory. Among American historians, David W. Blight has been a pioneer in the field of memory studies, especially on the problems of slavery, race, and the Civil War. In this collection of essays, Blight examines the meanings embedded in the causes, course, and consequences of the Civil War, the nature of changing approaches to African American history, and the significance of race in the ways Americans, North and South, black and white, developed historical memories of the nation's most divisive event.

The book as a whole demonstrates several ways to probe the history of memory, to understand how and why groups of Americans have constructed versions of the past in the service of contemporary social needs. Topics range from the writing and thought of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois to a comparison of Abraham Lincoln and Douglass on the level of language and memory. The volume also includes a compelling study of the values of a single Union soldier, an analysis of Ken Burns's PBS series The Civil War, and a retrospective treatment of the distinguished African American historian Nathan I. Huggins.

Taken together, these lucidly written pieces offer a thoroughgoing assessment of the stakes of Civil War memory and their consequences for American race relations. Beyond the Battlefield demonstrates not only why we should preserve and study our Civil War battlefields, but also why we should lift our vision above those landscapes and ponder all the unfinished questions of healing and justice, of racial harmony and disharmony, that still bedevil our society and our historical imagination.
[more]
cover of Beyond the Betrayal: The Memoir of a World War II Japanese American Draft Resister of Conscience

Beyond the Betrayal

The Memoir of a World War II Japanese American Draft Resister of Conscience

by Yoshito Kuromiya edited by ArthurA.Hansen

University Press of Colorado, 2022

Beyond the Betrayal is a lyrically written memoir by Yoshito Kuromiya (1923–2018), a Nisei member of the Fair Play Committee (FPC), which was organized at the Heart Mountain concentration camp. The first book-length account by a Nisei World War II draft resister, this work presents an insider’s perspective on the FPC and the infamous trial condemning its members' efforts. It offers not only a beautifully written account of an important moment in US history but also a rare acknowledgment of dissension within the resistance movement, both between the young men who went to prison and their older leaders and also among the young men themselves. Kuromiya’s narrative is enriched by contributions from Frank Chin, Eric L. Muller, and Lawson Fusao Inada.
 
Of the 300 Japanese Americans who resisted the military draft on the grounds that the US government had deprived them of their fundamental rights as US citizens, Kuromiya alone has produced an autobiographical volume that explores the short- and long-term causes and consequences of this fateful wartime decision. In his exquisitely written and powerfully documented testament he speaks truth to power, making evident why he is eminently qualified to convey the plight of the Nisei draft resisters. He perceptively reframes the wartime and postwar experiences of the larger Japanese American community, commonly said to have suffered in the spirit of shikata ga nai—enduring that which cannot be changed—and emerged with dignity.
 
Beyond the Betrayal makes abundantly clear that the unjustly imprisoned Nisei could and did exercise their patriotism even when they refused to serve in the military in the name of civil liberties and social justice. Kuromiya’s account, initially privately circulated only to family and friends, is an invaluable and insightful addition to the Nikkei historical record.
 
[more]
cover of Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity In a Multicultural Context

Beyond the Binary

Reconstructing Cultural Identity In a Multicultural Context

Edited by Timothy B. Powell

Rutgers University Press, 1999

"Beyond the Binary offers a coherently presented collection of uniformly strong essays that speak to what is perhaps the most widely discussed, contested and conflicted topic in the study of US culture. It joins the growing body of work that seeks to move beyond identity politics and racial essentialism to formulate racial identity as a more complex series of social, cultural and political gestures." -Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form and Constituting Americans

Cultural studies have reached a theoretical impasse. As scholars continue to topple the previously entrenched concept of Eurocentrism, this field has fragmented into works covering many separate cultural enclaves. In the first wave of this "post-Eurocentric" scholarship, a binary model ensued, using the designations of "Self" and "Other:" i.e., black/white, gay/straight. This model, however, also has found disfavor. As a result, recent scholarship has focused on a single group studied in isolation.

What is needed is a new critical phase of reconstruction that will bring discussion of these disparate cultural enclaves back into a more organized, critical sphere. Researchers must have the necessary conceptual tools so they can study the ways in which cultures overlap, intersect, or else violently conflict with one another.

Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context addresses this theoretical impasse by proposing new critical models that fully engage the dilemmas posed by multiculturalism. Rather than becoming entangled in the polarizing rhetoric of the culture wars, these essays are firmly grounded in the lived perplexities of specific historical moments. One piece, for example, considers the cultural identity of "freaks" exhibited in P. T. Barnum's circus, the contested place of hemophiliacs within Queer Nation, and "white" working-class musicians who proudly proclaim themselves to be "black lesbians."

Beyond the Binary is meant to be read in its entirety as a many-voiced narrative dedicated to bringing the divisions within cultural studies back into contact with one another. By doing so, Powell ushers in a new era of multicultural analysis that recognizes the historical existence of racism, yet also acknowledges the dynamic fluidity of cultural identity.

[more]
cover of Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class

Beyond the Black Lady

Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class

Lisa B. Thompson

University of Illinois Press, 2012

In this book, Lisa B. Thompson explores the representation of black middle-class female sexuality by African American women authors in narrative literature, drama, film, and popular culture, showing how these depictions reclaim black female agency and illustrate the difficulties black women confront in asserting sexual agency in the public sphere. Thompson broadens the discourse around black female sexuality by offering an alternate reading of the overly determined racial and sexual script that casts the middle class "black lady" as the bastion of African American propriety. Drawing on the work of black feminist theorists, she examines symptomatic autobiographies, novels, plays, and key episodes in contemporary American popular culture, including works by Anita Hill, Judith Alexa Jackson, P. J. Gibson, Julie Dash, Kasi Lemmons, Jill Nelson, Lorene Cary, and Andrea Lee.
[more]
cover of Beyond the Black Power Salute: Athlete Activism in an Era of Change

Beyond the Black Power Salute

Athlete Activism in an Era of Change

Gregory J. Kaliss

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Unequal opportunity sparked Jim Brown’s endeavors to encourage Black development while Billie Jean King fought so that women tennis players could earn more money and enjoy greater freedom. Gregory J. Kaliss examines these events and others to guide readers through the unprecedented wave of protest that swept sports in the 1960s and 1970s. The little-known story of the University of Wyoming football players suspended for their activism highlights an analysis of protests by college athletes. The 1971 Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier clash provides a high-profile example of the Black male athlete’s effort to redefine Black masculinity. An in-depth look at the American Basketball Association reveals a league that put Black culture front and center with its style of play and shows how the ABA influenced the development of hip-hop. As Kaliss describes the breakthroughs achieved by these athletes, he also explores the barriers that remained--and in some cases remain today.
[more]
cover of Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America

Beyond the Black and White TV

Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America

Benjamin M. Han

Rutgers University Press, 2020

This is the first book that examines how “ethnic spectacle” in the form of Asian and Latin American bodies played a significant role in the cultural Cold War at three historic junctures: the Korean War in 1950, the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the statehood of Hawaii in 1959. As a means to strengthen U.S. internationalism and in an effort to combat the growing influence of communism, television variety shows, such as The Xavier Cugat Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Chevy Show, were envisioned as early forms of global television. Beyond the Black and White TV examines the intimate moments of cultural interactions between the white hosts and the ethnic guests to illustrate U.S. aspirations for global power through the medium of television. These depictions of racial harmony aimed to shape a new perception of the United States as an exemplary nation of democracy, equality, and globalism.
[more]
cover of Beyond the Booth: Merrill's Fifty Years with the Eagles

Beyond the Booth

Merrill's Fifty Years with the Eagles

Cindy Reese and Merrill Reese

Temple University Press, 2027

Merrill Reese is the longest tenured radio play-by-play announcer in the history of the NFL. He has been with the Philadelphia Eagles since 1977, covering the team’s players, coaches, and owners in locker rooms, on the sidelines, and on road trips.

Beyond the Booth is a heartfelt history of the Eagles as recounted by Reese in conversation with the interviewer who knows him best—his wife, Cindy. Reese shares his memories and recollections of the team from the Dick Vermeil years through the Nick Sirianni era. (Spoiler alert: he was no Chip Kelly fan.) Cindy draws out her husband’s observations on the authenticity of the team’s personalities and leaders and how they make it successful. Merrill also describes his relationships with his broadcast colleagues and players, including Jalen Hurts.  

With her insider perspective, Cindy knows what to ask for Merrill to share his thoughts on his connection with the fans and success as a broadcaster, such as how performing in TV commercials as a child helped him develop his keen memorization skills. (She uses flashcards to test Merrill on players.)

Reese’s passion for the game, shared by his wife, is infectious. Beyond the Booth will excite every Eagles fan. 

[more]
cover of Beyond the Checkpoint: Visual Practices in America's Global War on Terror

Beyond the Checkpoint

Visual Practices in America's Global War on Terror

Rebecca A. Adelman

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

Since the 9/11 attacks on U.S. soil, American citizenship has been redefined by the visual images associated with the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Rebecca A. Adelman contends that, in viewing images such as security footage of the 9/11 hijackers, film portrayals of the attacks and subsequent wars, memorials commemorating the attacks, and even graphics associated with increased security in airports, American citizens have been recast as militarized spectators, brought together through the production, circulation, and consumption of these visual artifacts. Beyond the Checkpoint reveals that the visual is essential to the prosecution of the GWOT domestically and abroad, and that it functions as a crucial mechanism in the ongoing formation of the U.S. state itself and an essential component of contemporary American citizenship.

Tracing the connections between citizenship and spectatorship, and moving beyond the close reading of visual representations, this book focuses on the institutions and actors that create, monitor, and regulate the visual landscape of the GWOT. Adelman looks around and through common images to follow the complex patterns of practice by which institutions and audiences engage them in various contexts. In the process, she proposes a new methodology for studying visual cultures of conflict, and related phenomena like violence, terror, and suffering that are notoriously difficult to represent.

Attending to previously unanalyzed dimensions of this conflict, this book illustrates the complexity of GWOT visual culture and the variegated experiences of citizenship that result as Americans navigate this terrain.
[more]
cover of Beyond the City and the Bridge: East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb

Beyond the City and the Bridge

East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb

Matsumoto, Noriko

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Winner of the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Author Award, Scholarly Non-fiction
Winner of the Richard P. McCormick Prize from the New Jersey Historical Association
Honorable Mention, 2019 American Sociological Association Book Award - Asia/Asian American Section


In recent decades, the American suburbs have become an important site for immigrant settlement. Beyond the City and the Bridge presents a case study of Fort Lee, Bergen County, on the west side of the George Washington Bridge connecting Manhattan and New Jersey. Since the 1970s, successive waves of immigrants from East Asia have transformed this formerly white community into one of the most diverse suburbs in the greater New York region. Fort Lee today has one of the largest concentrations of East Asians of any suburb on the East Coast, with Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans forming distinct communities while influencing the structure and everyday life of the borough. Noriko Matsumoto explores the rise of this multiethnic suburb—the complex processes of assimilation and reproduction of ethnicities, the changing social relationships, and the conditions under which such transformations have occurred.  
[more]
cover of Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963

Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain

Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963

Kate A. Baldwin

Duke University Press, 2002

Examining the significant influence of the Soviet Union on the work of four major African American authors—and on twentieth-century American debates about race—Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain remaps black modernism, revealing the importance of the Soviet experience in the formation of a black transnationalism.
Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson each lived or traveled extensively in the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1960s, and each reflected on Communism and Soviet life in works that have been largely unavailable, overlooked, or understudied. Kate A. Baldwin takes up these writings, as well as considerable material from Soviet sources—including articles in Pravda and Ogonek, political cartoons, Russian translations of unpublished manuscripts now lost, and mistranslations of major texts—to consider how these writers influenced and were influenced by both Soviet and American culture. Her work demonstrates how the construction of a new Soviet citizen attracted African Americans to the Soviet Union, where they could explore a national identity putatively free of class, gender, and racial biases. While Hughes and McKay later renounced their affiliations with the Soviet Union, Baldwin shows how, in different ways, both Hughes and McKay, as well as Du Bois and Robeson, used their encounters with the U. S. S. R. and Soviet models to rethink the exclusionary practices of citizenship and national belonging in the United States, and to move toward an internationalism that was a dynamic mix of antiracism, anticolonialism, social democracy, and international socialism.
Recovering what Baldwin terms the "Soviet archive of Black America," this book forces a rereading of some of the most important African American writers and of the transnational circuits of black modernism.
[more]
cover of Beyond the Field: How Soccer Built Community in the United States

Beyond the Field

How Soccer Built Community in the United States

Brian D. Bunk

University of Illinois Press, 2025

Played by both migrants and native-born Americans, soccer created communities across the United States. Brian D. Bunk ranges from Pawtucket to Honolulu as he illuminates the deep and diverse origins of the American sport.

Soccer took root as immigration, urbanization, and industrialization triggered immense changes across society. Matches built local pride as teams battled rival neighborhoods and towns. Teammates and supporters shared meals, raised money for fallen players, and attended each other’s weddings and funerals. If sometimes damaged by economic depression or shattered by war, clubs often bounced back to provide a steadying, resilient force in their towns. Bunk follows the story from the 1880s through World War I by profiling the struggles and joys of players while also tracing the overlooked impact of people of African, Chinese, Hawaiian, Jewish, and Filipino descent on American soccer culture.

Engaging and rich in detail, Beyond the Field draws on extensive original research to expand our idea of the people and places that formed the American game.

[more]
cover of Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing

Beyond the Frontier

The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing

David S. Brown

University of Chicago Press, 2009

As the world went to war in 1941, Time magazine founder Henry Luce coined a term for what was rapidly becoming the establishment view of America’s role in the world: the twentieth century, he argued, was the American Century. Many of the nation’s most eminent historians—nearly all of them from the East Coast—agreed with this vision and its endorsement of the vigorous use of power and persuasion to direct world affairs. But an important concentration of midwestern historians actively dissented. With Beyond the Frontier, David S. Brown tells their little-known story of opposition.

Raised in a cultural landscape that combined agrarian provincialism with reform-minded progressivism, these historians—among them Charles Beard, William Appleman Williams, and Christopher Lasch—argued strenuously against the imperial presidencies, interventionist foreign policies, and Keynesian capitalism that swiftly shaped cold war America. Casting a skeptical eye on the burgeoning military-industrial complex and its domestic counterpart, the welfare state, they warned that both components of the liberal internationalist vision jeopardized the individualistic, republican ethos that had long lain at the heart of American democracy.

Drawing on interviews, personal papers, and correspondence of the imoprtant players in the debate, Brown has written a fascinating follow-up to his critically acclaimed biography of Richard Hofstadter. Illuminating key ideas that link midwestern writers from Frederick Jackson Turner all the way to William Cronon and Thomas Frank, Beyond the Frontier is intellectual history at its best: grounded in real lives and focused on issues that remain salient—and unresolved—even today.

[more]
cover of Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915

Beyond the Gibson Girl

Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915

Martha H. Patterson

University of Illinois Press, 2005

Challenging monolithic images of the New Woman as white, well-educated, and politically progressive, this study focuses on important regional, ethnic, and sociopolitical differences in the use of the New Woman trope at the turn of the twentieth century. Using Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Girls" as a point of departure, Martha H. Patterson explores how writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Margaret Murray Washington, Sui Sin Far, Mary Johnston, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather challenged and redeployed the New Woman image in light of other “new” conceptions: the "New Negro Woman," the "New Ethics," the "New South," and the "New China."

As she appears in these writers' works, the New Woman both promises and threatens to effect sociopolitical change as a consumer, an instigator of evolutionary and economic development, and (for writers of color) an icon of successful assimilation into dominant Anglo-American culture. Examining a diverse array of cultural products, Patterson shows how the seemingly celebratory term of the New Woman becomes a trope not only of progressive reform, consumer power, transgressive femininity, modern energy, and modern cure, but also of racial and ethnic taxonomies, social Darwinist struggle, imperialist ambition, assimilationist pressures, and modern decay.

[more]
cover of Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in 1930s America

Beyond the Laboratory

Scientists as Political Activists in 1930s America

Peter J. Kuznick

University of Chicago Press, 1987

The debate over scientists' social responsibility is a topic of great controversy today. Peter J. Kuznick here traces the origin of that debate to the 1930s and places it in a context that forces a reevaluation of the relationship between science and politics in twentieth-century America. Kuznick reveals how an influential segment of the American scientific community during the Depression era underwent a profound transformation in its social values and political beliefs, replacing a once-pervasive conservatism and antipathy to political involvement with a new ethic of social reform.
[more]
cover of Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in 1930s America

Beyond the Laboratory

Scientists as Political Activists in 1930s America

Peter J. Kuznick

University of Chicago Press, 1987

The debate over scientists' social responsibility is a topic of great controversy today. Peter J. Kuznick here traces the origin of that debate to the 1930s and places it in a context that forces a reevaluation of the relationship between science and politics in twentieth-century America. Kuznick reveals how an influential segment of the American scientific community during the Depression era underwent a profound transformation in its social values and political beliefs, replacing a once-pervasive conservatism and antipathy to political involvement with a new ethic of social reform.
[more]
cover of Beyond the Latino World War II Hero: The Social and Political Legacy of a Generation

Beyond the Latino World War II Hero

The Social and Political Legacy of a Generation

Edited by Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez and Emilio Zamora

University of Texas Press, 2009

Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez 's edited volume Mexican Americans & World War II brought pivotal stories from the shadows, contributing to the growing acknowledgment of Mexican American patriotism as a meaningful force within the Greatest Generation. In this latest anthology, Rivas-Rodríguez and historian Emilio Zamora team up with scholars from various disciplines to add new insights. Beyond the Latino World War II Hero focuses on home-front issues and government relations, delving into new arenas of research and incorporating stirring oral histories.

These recollections highlight realities such as post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on veterans' families, as well as Mexican American women of this era, whose fighting spirit inspired their daughters to participate in Chicana/o activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Other topics include the importance of radio as a powerful medium during the war and postwar periods, the participation of Mexican nationals in World War II, and intergovernmental negotiations involving Mexico and Puerto Rico. Addressing the complexity of the Latino war experience, such as the tandem between the frontline and the disruption of the agricultural migrant stream on the home front, the authors and contributors unite diverse perspectives to harness the rich resources of an invaluable oral history.

[more]
cover of Beyond the Moment: Connecting Histories of Latinx Performance and Resistance

Beyond the Moment

Connecting Histories of Latinx Performance and Resistance

Irene Mata

University of Texas Press, 2026

Exploring cultural resistance by creating and archiving Latinx performance art

Performance is often seen as ephemeral, a condition that seemingly reduces its activist possibilities. After all, not everyone can take part or bear witness. Beyond the Moment shows how Latinx artists have responded with a theater of dissent that endures—performance art that also documents and can itself be archived, creating opportunities for sustained solidarity and resistance.

Through close readings of works such as Coco Fusco’s multi-genre performance A Field Guide for Female Interrogators, Irene Mata theorizes what she calls “textual mentoring.” This method involves tracing previous moments of resistance, archiving the creative process itself, and transforming the performance into a pedagogical tool. By means of textual mentoring, a work like The Panza Monologues becomes a lesson in confronting systemic oppression through collaborative storytelling. Mata also shows how the 2012 No Papers, No Fear Ride for Justice, a multistate immigrant-rights action, relies on a vocabulary of refusal of movements of the past—like the Freedom Rides of the Civil Rights era—and continues its activism beyond its immediate performance context by digitally archiving its process. With an emphasis on intersectional critique, Beyond the Moment positions performance as a radical form of resistance that educates and inspires across generations and movements.

[more]
cover of Beyond the Quagmire: New Interpretations of the Vietnam War

Beyond the Quagmire

New Interpretations of the Vietnam War

Geoffrey W. Jensen

University of North Texas Press, 2019

[more]
cover of Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905-1924

Beyond the Rebel Girl

Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905-1924

Heather Mayer

Oregon State University Press, 2018

More than a century after their founding in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World—or Wobblies as they are commonly known—remain a popular subject for study and discussion among students of labor history and social justice. They are often portrayed as lovable underdogs, with their songs and cartoons, generally irreverent attitude, and stalwart courage in the face of systemic persecution from vigilantes, law enforcement, and government officials.

In Beyond the Rebel Girl, historian Heather Mayer questions the well-worn vision of Wobblies as young, single, male, itinerant workers. While such workers formed a large portion of the membership, they weren’t the whole picture. In small towns across the Northwest, and in the larger cities of Seattle, Portland, and Spokane, women played an integral role in Wobbly life. Single women, but also families—husband and wife Wobbly teams—played important roles in some of the biggest fights for justice. IWW halls in these Northwest cities often functioned as community centers, with family-friendly events and entertainment.

Women were drawn to the IWW for its radical vision, inclusionary policies, birth control advocacy, and emphasis on freedom of choice in marriage. The IWW also offered women an avenue for activism that wasn’t focused primarily on the fight for suffrage. Beyond the Rebel Girl deepens our understanding of how the IWW functioned and how the union supported women in their fight for birth control, sexual emancipation, and better labor conditions, all while facing persecution at the local, state, and federal levels.
[more]
cover of Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society

Beyond the Ring

The Role of Boxing in American Society

Jeffrey T. Sammons

University of Illinois Press, 1988

Primitive, dangerous, low-paying, crooked, exploitive--boxing, in all but a few cases, offered its athletes very little while taking everything. Why does boxing exist? What accounted for its decades-long popularity? What does its presence on the sport history landscape say about America? 

Jeffrey T. Sammons looks at how boxing reflected the society that fostered it at different points in history. In the time of John L. Sullivan, the sport provided an arena for testing law, order, and social growth. Jack Johnson's career reflected the racism, nationalism, and xenophobia of the Progressive era. At its popular peak in the 1920s, boxing expressed tensions as disparate as the tug-of-war between modernism and tradition and the women's rights movement. From there, Sammons traces how the sport intertwined with Nazi antisemitism, reflected the hopes of the New Deal, produced the seminal figure Joe Louis, and stood at the nexus of the union of organized crime with business and television. Finally, he shows how Muhammad Ali and reactions to him exposed the shifting tides of racial issues and American involvement in Vietnam.

[more]
cover of Beyond the Schoolhouse Gate: Free Speech and the Inculcation of Values

Beyond the Schoolhouse Gate

Free Speech and the Inculcation of Values

Robert Wheeler Lane

Temple University Press, 1995

Outstanding Academic Title, Choice, 1995 "What makes Lane's approach unique is that he weaves together different perspectives on the nature of school into a very colorful but informative and lucid tapestry that seeks the outer limits of free expression within the boundaries of the school context, always with an eye toward promoting the goal of inculcation of values, a worthy end for students and school officials alike." --Samuel M. Davis, Allen Post Professor of Law, University of Georgia *In a 1969 landmark case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the suspension of student for protesting the Vietnam War violated the First Amendment. *In 1972, the U.S. court of appeals upheld the suspension of black high school students for protesting the playing of "Dixie" at a pep rally. *In 1986, a U.S. district court ruled that the suspension of a student for directing a vulgar gesture at one of his school teachers in a fast-food restaurant was unconstitutional. On what grounds do public school students merit First Amendment protection? These three examples illustrate the broad range of litigation that has attempted to answer this question. Robert Wheeler Lane reviews the obstacles of this important issue and suggests a mix of protection and autonomy for students. Pulling together evidence about the aims of public education, the changing legal status of children, and the values underlying freedom of expression, Lane debates the relationship between constitutional litigation and the dual pursuits of academic excellence and classroom order. Ultimately, utilizing both lower court and Supreme Court decisions, he finds that independent student expression deserves considerable constitutional protection; student expression assisted by school officials (such as school-funded student newspapers) should be subject to some control; and nonstudent expression (such as a school's selection of library books) should be left largely to the school's discretion. His conclusions suggest that in forging First Amendment protection for public school students, strongly held positions need not be extreme.
[more]
cover of Beyond the Stars 4: Locales in American Popular Film

Beyond the Stars 4

Locales in American Popular Film

Paul Loukides

University of Wisconsin Press, 1990

In this volume of the Beyond the Stars series, the subject of the various individual essays are discrete conventions of movie locales, but the subject of the volume as a whole—as with the other books in the series—is the viability of film convention studies as a tool for the study of film and American culture.

[more]
cover of Beyond the Stars 5: Themes and Ideologies in American Popular Film

Beyond the Stars 5

Themes and Ideologies in American Popular Film

University of Wisconsin Press, 1990

[more]
cover of Beyond the Stars: Stock Characters in American Popular Film

Beyond the Stars

Stock Characters in American Popular Film

University of Wisconsin Press, 1990

[more]
cover of Beyond the Trees: Stories of Wisconsin Forests

Beyond the Trees

Stories of Wisconsin Forests

Candice Gaukel Andrews

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011

Nature writer Candice Andrews weaves together contemporary observations and historical reminisces in Beyond the Trees: Stories of Wisconsin Forests. Readers will journey to some of the most pristine and notable places in the Upper Midwest—Wisconsin’s state and national forests.

The diversity of landscapes evoked in Beyond the Trees is matched only by the characters who inhabit them. Traverse the footsteps of Ojibwe hunters and early explorers in the remote woods of Brule River State Forest. Trek past the remains of bygone logging and CCC camps in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. Glimpse into the world of Great Lakes shipping in Point Beach State Forest. Walk on trails named after John Muir and Increase Lapham in the Kettle Moraine State Forest, and experience urban green space at Milwaukee’s Havenwoods State Forest. From orchids to oak savanna, beaver to brook trout, and white-tailed deer to timber wolves, discover Wisconsin’s wildlife and flora and fauna. Archival images, informative sidebars, locator maps, and contact information for Wisconsin state and national forests round out this unique book.

[more]