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In this groundbreaking study, William Luis analyzes the most salient and representative narrative and poetic works of the newest literary movement to emerge in Spanish American and U.S. literatures. The book is divided into three sections, each focused on representative Puerto Rican American, Cuban American, and Dominican American authors. Luis traces the writers' origins and influences from the nineteenth century to the present, focusing especially on the contemporary works of Oscar Hijuelos, Julia Alvarez, Cristina Garcia, and Piri Thomas, among others. While engaging in close readings of the texts, Luis places them in a broader social, historical, political, and racial perspective to expose the tension between text and context.

As a group, Latino Caribbeans write an ethnic literature in English that is born of their struggle to forge an identity separate from both the influences of their parents' culture and those of the United States. For these writers, their parents' country of origin is a distant memory. They have developed a culture of resistance and a language that mediates between their parents' identity and the culture that they themselves live in.

Latino Caribbeans are engaged in a metaphorical dance with Anglo Americans as the dominant culture. Just as that dance represents a coming together of separate influences to make a unique art form, so do both Hispanic and North American cultures combine to bring a new literature into being. This new body of literature helps us to understand not only the adjustments Latino Caribbean cultures have had to make within the larger U.S. environment but also how the dominant culture has been affected by their presence.

In 1960, University of Illinois professor Leo Koch wrote a public letter condoning premarital sex. He was fired. Four years later, a professor named Revilo Oliver made white supremacist remarks and claimed there was a massive communist conspiracy. He kept his job.

Matthew Ehrlich revisits the Koch and Oliver cases to look at free speech, the legacy of the 1960s, and debates over sex and politics on campus. The different treatment of the two men marked a fundamental shift in the understanding of academic freedom. Their cases also embodied the stark divide over beliefs and values--a divide that remains today. Ehrlich delves into the issues behind these academic controversies and places the events in the context of a time rarely associated with dissent, but in fact a harbinger of the social and political upheavals to come.

An enlightening and entertaining history, Dangerous Ideas on Campus illuminates how the university became a battleground for debating America's hot-button issues.

Damon foregrounds a number of modern American poets work and lives in order to argue that the American avant-garde is located in the experimental literary works of social "outsiders." Discussed is the work of Black/Jewish surrealist street poet Bob Kaufman, Boston-Brahmin Robert Lowell and three teenaged women writing from a South Boston housing project, pre-Stonewall gay poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and Jewish lesbian-in-exile Gertrude Stein.

A Latina girl’s journey through the shadows of the civil rights era.

Darkroom is a deeply moving graphic memoir that chronicles Lila Quintero Weaver’s experience growing up as an Argentine immigrant in 1960s Alabama during the height of the civil rights movement. Through striking black-and-white illustrations and heartfelt narrative, Weaver explores the complexities of race, identity, and belonging in a society divided by segregation. Neither Black nor White, her family occupies a unique position that offers a powerful lens on the struggles for justice and equality. This coming-of-age story blends personal history with pivotal social change, inviting readers to reflect on themes of immigration, cultural assimilation, and moral courage. Darkroom is both an intimate portrait and a universal tale of resilience, making it an essential read for those interested in civil rights, memoirs, and graphic storytelling.

Darwin’s Footprint examines the impact of Darwinism in Greece, investigating how it has shaped Greece in terms of its cultural and intellectual history, and in particular its literature.

The book demonstrates that in the late 19th to early 20th centuries Darwinism and associated science strongly influenced celebrated Greek literary writers and other influential intellectuals, which fueled debate in various areas such as ‘man’s place in nature’, eugenics, the nature-nurture controversy, religion, as well as class, race and gender.

In addition, the study reveals that many of these individuals were also considering alternative approaches to these issues based on Darwinian and associated biological post-Darwinian ideas. Their concerns included the Greek “race” or nation, its culture, language and identity; also politics and gender equality.

Zarimis’s monograph devotes considerable space to Xenopoulos (1867-1951), notable novelist, journalist and playwright.

Dash of Pepper!: The Depression, The Hobo, and the 1931 World Series is the first book about the 1931 World Series and its unlikely star, Johnnie Leonard Roosevelt “Pepper” Martin. Born in Oklahoma in 1904, Martin grew up in poverty, performing farm labor with his family and attending school only sporadically (he was eventually expelled for his lack of shoes). Local sandlots served as his introduction to baseball, bringing him into an unpretentious world of hand-me-down leather, battered balls bursting at the seams, and boyhood. He was immediately hooked.

Martin spent his adolescence working a variety of odd jobs and playing for even odder baseball teams before making a living as a player for the East Texas League beginning in 1925, the owner of which sold him to the St. Louis Cardinals later that year. Martin played for the Cardinals’ minor league affiliates for the next two years, all while continuing his boyhood habit of “hoboing” freight trains to travel to games. Promoted to the major leagues in 1927, Martin was sent back down to the minors two years later, making his return to the Big Leagues in 1931 and soon thereafter emerging as the star of that year’s World Series. Historians still credit Martin, with his .500 batting average, 4 doubles, 1 home run, and 5 RBIs, for the Cardinals’ taking the championship. 

Author Justin Wingerter documents the words of reporters from every state who told of a Depression-weary nation enthralled by the self-described hobo with endless hustle — “Don’t say Pepper, say STAR,” wrote The St. Louis Star (a play on its motto, “Don’t say ‘paper,’ say STAR”) after the Cardinals’ Game Three win. As Wingerter argues, Martin became a symbol of the forgotten man at a time when his fellow Americans needed a hero. His performance in the 1931 Series was followed obsessively by farmers, businesspeople, industrial workers, and even inmates, all of whom found in Martin a source of solace in a time of widespread misery. As one sportswriter opined in Waterloo, Iowa, “The Pepper Martins have a way of making us forget it all.” 

In Dash of Pepper!, Wingerter explores the 1931 World Series in the context of the era’s national mood, populating the book’s pages with a host of colorful characters reaching far beyond Martin: One-Eyed Connelly, the famed gatecrasher who eventually met his match; the masked assailants of the St. Louis Milk War, a violent labor action that shared the city’s frontpages with the Series; banking regulators rushing to save deposits at Philadelphia’s Franklin Trust, and more.

With Dash of Pepper!, Wingerter makes an original contribution to the field, its focus on American society making it particularly valuable to lovers of United States history in addition to baseball fans.

An eye-opening story of the people who make the census, the United States’ largest and most consequential dataset, and the growing threats to their crucial work. 

By many measures, the US census is the government’s largest non-wartime operation, and one of the world’s oldest and biggest data-making endeavors. The 2020 census required more than a decade of planning and technical work—not to mention managing nearly a quarter of a million temporary workers simultaneously—to collect data about the American public. That data was then processed to count each of 331,449,281 residents once—and only once—and in the right place. The operation is also one of the country’s most consequential. Census data determine how political power and federal funding are allocated. Census data make politics, and consequently, politics make census data. In this urgent book, danah boyd explores what it took for the Census Bureau to make the 2020 census, amidst a global pandemic and natural disasters, and while navigating political forces that constrained the budget, micro-managed the schedule, and attacked statisticians’ methods. 

With rare insider access to the Census Bureau, boyd observed and interviewed hundreds of government civil servants who made the 2020 census. By documenting the perspectives of government workers, Data Are Made, Not Found provides a rare glimpse into what it takes to make democracy’s data. Each chapter reveals a different challenge—ranging from the last-minute fights about a citizenship question to the not-so-helpful help of well-intended stakeholders to avoid undercounts—and shows how civil servants responded to each problem, controversy, and hurdle. Boyd shows how many of the challenges that the Census Bureau faced in 2020 resulted from decades of political operatives, data users, and various stakeholders playing what boyd calls “Jenga politics,” weakening the administrative state for short-term political gains by removing support and adding more requirements. 

Civil servants saved the 2020 census, but future censuses—and other data-making efforts related to elections, health, and the economy—are precarious. Boyd’s message is clear and compelling: protecting democracy means protecting the people and institutions that produce this data.

Bolin was appointed to New York City's domestic relations court in 1939 for the first of four ten-year terms. When she retired in 1978, her career had extended well beyond the courtroom. Drawing on archival materials as well as a meeting with Bolin in 2002, historian Jacqueline A. McLeod reveals how Bolin parlayed her judicial position to impact significant reforms of the legal and social service system in New York.

Beginning with Bolin's childhood and educational experiences at Wellesley and Yale, Daughter of the Empire State chronicles Bolin's relatively quick rise through the ranks of a profession that routinely excluded both women and African Americans. Deftly situating Bolin's experiences within the history of black women lawyers and the historical context of high-achieving black New Englanders, McLeod offers a multi-layered analysis of black women's professionalization in a segregated America.

Linking Bolin's activist leanings and integrationist zeal to her involvement in the NAACP, McLeod analyzes Bolin's involvement at the local level as well as her tenure on the organization's national board of directors. An outspoken critic of the discriminatory practices of New York City's probation department and juvenile placement facilities, Bolin also co-founded, with Eleanor Roosevelt, the Wiltwyck School for boys in upstate New York and campaigned to transform the Domestic Relations Court with her judicial colleagues. McLeod's careful and highly readable account of these accomplishments inscribes Bolin onto the roster of important social reformers and early civil rights trailblazers.

• The increase in events across the US, incorporating media coverage and financial aspects,
• Recent political movements expressed in contemporary Day of the Dead celebrations, including #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo
• Greater media coverage and online presence of the celebration in blogs, websites, and streaming video
• Día de los Muertos themes and iconography in video games and films 
• The proliferation of commercialized merchandise such as home goods, apparel, face paints and jewelry at mainstream big box and web retailers, as well as the widespread proliferation of calavera-themed decorations and costumes for Halloween
• 24 new full color illustrations