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A sweeping reconsideration of the artist we thought we knew—and the forces that obscured her legacy.

Fiercely ambitious and independent, Mary Cassatt defied expectations to become one of the most radical artists of the Impressionist movement, though she was—and remains—the least understood. Cassatt commanded and manipulated strains of old master and contemporary painting to express her female subjectivity through a brilliantly modern oeuvre on par with those of the most revered Impressionists. However, mishandled by the Parisian art establishment during her lifetime, and later by art historians and curators, she became known almost exclusively as a sentimentalizing painter of mothers and children.

How did this happen to the most aspiring, revolutionary female artist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In Cassatt Reconsidered, author Mary G. Morton probes this central question and more, demonstrating how Cassatt disturbed conventional ideals of femininity, childhood, and maternity, an uncompromising feat for which she paid dearly during her lifetime and in the annals of art historiography.

Vibrantly illustrated with more than 100 images, Cassatt Reconsidered rewards readers with a fuller understanding of an artist who stands apart for daring to express, on her own terms, the unique, intimate experiences of modern women.

In Caste War Now and Never scholar S. B. West considers Yucatán’s nineteenth-century Caste War, the longest and most violent Indigenous uprising of the Western Hemisphere, to argue that it actually never occurred.

Instead, West writes that the violent events grouped under the “Caste War” label must be understood through alternative frameworks that resist the emergent logics of race war and include related regulatory matrices like gender and land. Through this lens, the Caste War emerges as a discursive construct rooted in an anti-Indigenous archive that served the political interests of a frustrated regional elite during the rise of liberalism and nationhood. West argues that Caste War discourse unfolds as a technology that mobilized and legitimized genocidal actions against racialized rebels and inspired assimilation into hegemonic political and social structures.

In the second half of the book, West looks at the Caste War to engage its contemporary polysemic nature through close readings of Yucatec Maya texts, stories, and other forms of knowledge production. These sources reframe the Caste War as an important part of a framework of resistance that defies colonial time and reclaims narrative control of its events.

Caste War Now and Never captures how Maya communities understand the conflict as ongoing and demonstrates that although the Caste War never occurred as such, it continues to endure presently.

What happens when ancient systems of oppression travel across oceans? How do Indian diaspora communities across five nations challenge centuries-old systems of oppression while building new forms of solidarity? Caste, Country, and Creed: Struggles for Social Justice in the Contemporary Indian Diaspora takes readers inside the dynamic world of contemporary social justice activism spanning Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

This groundbreaking collection brings together the voices of artists, activists, and scholar-activists who are reshaping conversations about caste discrimination, Islamophobia, and Hindu nationalism beyond India's borders. Through intimate first-person accounts and critical reflections, contributors reveal how diaspora activists are creating powerful counter-narratives and mobilizing collective resistance across local and transnational networks.

The book documents the lived realities of organizing—the values, knowledge traditions, and pivotal moments that spark political protest. Caste, Country, and Creed shows how activists construct alternative knowledge to dissent, build solidarity, and inspire political participation. Contributors offer nuanced insights into the complex relationships and power dynamics that sustain collective action for social justice in the Indian diaspora.

For copyright reasons, this edition is not for sale in India.
 

Castle Nowhere is Constance Woolson's collection of stories set for the most part in the Great Lakes, in particular northern Lake Michigan and Lake Huron near Detroit.

Several themes inhabit Woolson's writing: an environmental consciousness and concern with landscapes; an awareness of the complexities of race; and an abidingly careful eye for the shallowness that sometimes accompanies wealth or social pretensions. She also had a unique perspective as a woman who pioneered the use of controversial subjects---such as unrequited or misplaced passion---and methods in fiction during a time that valorized domesticity.

As Margot Livesey notes in her introduction, reading about thwarted love is only one of the pleasures to be found in Castle Nowhere. "The majority of these stories are set in remote areas on the shores of Lake Michigan, which Woolson evokes with great vividness and beauty while always remaining keenly aware that beauty in no way mitigates hardship. As a writer, she was nearly always looking over her shoulder, and many, if not all, of these stories were written at a time when she no longer visited the Lake and her beloved Mackinac Island."

Contemporary readers will find a curiously modern atmosphere in Woolson's stories, as well as a distinct regional flavor in her careful renderings of the Great Lakes landscape. As such, Castle Nowhere represents a rare woman's voice in literature of its period and setting.

Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) was born in New Hampshire and moved to Cleveland shortly thereafter. She spent time on Mackinac Island, Michigan, then traveled to Florida before moving to Europe. Much of her time there was spent in Italy. She died in Venice in 1894. Novelist Margot Livesey is the author of Eva Moves the Furniture and Homework.

FINALIST FOR THE GREGORY BATESON PRIZE FROM THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

Dispelling stereotypes about garment workers in the global apparel industry

Castoffs of Capital examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention onto the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh.

Bringing a feminist labor studies lens, Castoffs of Capital foregrounds these women not only as workers but as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents. Focusing on relations among work, gender, and global capital’s targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, Karim shows how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations. She locates these women’s aspirations for the “good life” not only in material comforts but also in their longings for love and sexual fulfillment that help them momentarily forget the precarity of their existence under the shadow of capital.

Through richly detailed ethnographic studies, this innovative and beautifully written book examines the making and unmaking of these women’s wants and desires, loves and tribulations, hopes and despairs, and triumphs and struggles.

Chicano Catholicism—both as a popular religion and a foundation for community organizing—has, over the past century, inspired Chicano resistance to external forces of oppression and discrimination including from other non-Mexican Catholics and even the institutionalized church. Chicano Catholics have also used their faith to assert their particular identity and establish a kind of cultural citizenship.

Based exclusively on original research and sources, Mario T. García here offers the first major historical study to explore the various dimensions of the role of Catholicism in Chicano history in the twentieth century. This is also one of the first significant studies in the still limited field of Chicano religious history.

Topics range from how early Chicano Catholic intellectuals and civil rights leaders were influenced by Catholic Social Doctrine, to the role that popular religion has played in the lives of ordinary men and women in both rural and urban areas. García also examines faith-based Chicano community movements like Católicos Por La Raza in the 1960s and the Sanctuary movement in Los Angeles in the 1980s.

While Latino/a history and culture has been, for the most part, inextricably linked with the tenets and practices of Catholicism, there has been very little written, until recently, about Chicano Catholic history. García helps to fill that void and explore the impact—both positive and negative—that the Catholic experience has had on the Chicano community.

In 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina cut a deadly path along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, researchers J. Steven Picou and Keith Nicholls conducted a survey of the survivors in Louisiana and Mississippi, receiving more than twenty-five hundred responses, and followed up two years later with their than five hundred of the initial respondents. Showcasing these landmark findings, Caught in the Path of Katrina: A Survey of the Hurricane's Human Effects yields a more complete understanding of the traumas endured as a result of the Storm of the Century.

The authors report on evacuation behaviors, separations from family, damage to homes, and physical and psychological conditions among residents of seven of the parishes and counties that bore the brunt of Katrina. The findings underscore the frequently disproportionate suffering of African Americans and the agonizingly slow pace of recovery. Highlighting the lessons learned, the book offers suggestions for improved governmental emergency management techniques to increase preparedness, better mitigate storm damage, and reduce the level of trauma in future disasters. Multiple major hurricanes have unleashed their destruction in the years since Katrina, making this a crucial study whose importance only continues to grow.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book

Public rituals have always held a vital place in American culture. By far the noisiest and most popular of these to emerge in the nation's early years was Independence Day. After a decade of fitful starts, the Fourth of July eclipsed local and regional patriotic observances to become the premier “American Jubilee.” Celebrating the Fourth provides a history of this holiday and explores its role in shaping a national identity and consciousness in three cities—Boston, Charleston, and Philadelphia—during the first fifty years of the American republic. Independence Day celebrations justified, validated, and helped maintain nationalism among people unused to offering political allegiance beyond their own state borders. As the observances became increasingly popular and symbolically important, political partisans competed hotly for the right to control the meaning of the festivals.

Although Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) is widely regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century authors writing in German, her novels and stories have sometimes been viewed narrowly as portraits of women as victims. In this innovative study, Sara Lennox provides a much broader perspective on Bachmann's work, at the same time undertaking an experiment in feminist methodology. Lennox examines Bachmann's poetry and prose in historical context, arguing that the varied feminist interpretations of her writings are the result of shifts in theoretical emphases over a period of more than three decades. Lennox then places her own essays on Bachmann in similar perspective, showing how each piece reflects the historical moment in which it was written. Making use of recent interdisciplinary approaches—Foucauldian theories of sexuality, post-colonial theory, materialist feminism—she explores the extent to which each of her earlier readings was shaped by the methods employed, the questions asked, and the political issues that seemed most germane at the time. Out of this analysis comes a new understanding of the significance of Bachmann's work and new insight into the theory and practice of feminist criticism.

Chichén Itzá ("mouth of the well of the Itza") was one of the great centers of civilization in prehistoric America, serving between the eighth and twelfth centuries A.D. as a religious, economic, social, and political capital on the Yucatán Peninsula. Within the ancient city there were many natural wells or cenotes. One, within the ceremonial heart of the city, is an impressive natural feature with vertical limestone walls enclosing a deep pool of jade green water some eighty feet below ground level. This cenote, which gave the city its name, became a sacred shrine of Maya pilgrimage, described by one post-Conquest observer as similar to Jerusalem and Rome. Here, during the city's ascendancy and for centuries after its decline, the peoples of Yucatán consulted their gods and made ritual offerings of precious objects and living victims who were thought to receive prophecies.

Although the well was described by Bishop Diego de Landa in the late sixteenth century, its contents were not known until the early 1900s when revealed by the work of Edward H. Thompson. Conducting excavations for the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, Thompson recovered almost thirty thousand artifacts, most ceremonially broken and many beautifully preserved by burial in the deep silt at the bottom of the well. The materials were sent to the Peabody Museum, where they remained, unexhibited, for over seventy years.

In 1984, for the first time, nearly three hundred objects of gold, jade, copper, pottery, wood, copal, textile, and other materials from the collection were gathered into a traveling interpretive exhibition. No other archaeological exhibition had previously given this glimpse into Maya ritual life because no other collection had objects such as those found in the Sacred Cenote. Moreover, the objects from the Cenote come from throughout Mesoamerica and lower Central America, representing many artistic traditions. The exhibit and this, its accompanying catalog, marked the first time all of the different kinds of offerings have ever been displayed together, and the first time many have been published.

Essays by Gordon R. Willey and Linnea H. Wren place the Cenote of Sacrifice and the great Maya city of Chichén Itzá within the larger context of Maya archaeology and history. The catalog entries, written by Clemency Chase Coggins, describe the objects displayed in the traveling exhibition. Some entries are brief descriptive statements; others develop short scholarly themes bearing on the function and interpretation of specific objects. Coggins' introductory essay describes how the objects were collected by Thompson and how the exhibition collection has been studied to reveal the periods of Cenote ritual and the changing practices of offering to the Sacred Cenote.