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The family history of the Russells of Georgia is a saga of the Westward Movement during the middle fifty years of the nineteenth century. The "Russell boys," as prospectors and miners, moved with the frontier as it followed fresh discoveries of gold, from Georgia to California to Colorado. Then, after the interlude of the Civil War, they settled in the new territories, turning their abilities and ruggedness of character to the development of careers on other frontiers—ranching, farming, land development, medicine—in Montana, Colorado, and Texas.

Elma Dill Russell Spencer, a descendant of one of these unusual brothers, relates their story as she learned it from family tradition transmitted by Grandma Russell, from family letters, from public documents, and from historical accounts of the exciting era.

The reader of her narrative sees the evolution of Western society in the vast wasteland of mountain and prairie from the viewpoint of the people who were making history, people too engrossed in their own problems to realize the far-reaching significance of their achievement. The reader sees the struggle to wrest gold from the streams and hills with primitive tools and techniques; the development of tent villages into populous towns affording most of the comforts of the East; the evolution of a code of mining laws, of protection from violence and crime; the building of schools; the emergence of sectional problems and divided loyalties; the Civil War, mostly through noncombatants' eyes; the progressive changes in transportation, until the railroads tied the West to the East. The reader also encounters Indians, who ride in and out of these pages, and other fascinating types of characters associated with "the wild, varied, and always unpredictable" frontier.

The odyssey of the Russell brothers as they struggle home to Georgia from Union-sympathizing Denver is particularly full of action, with tense moments in the account of narrowly escaped death—at the hands of Indians, through the ravages of disease, and from the enmity of Yankee foes.

This book was originally published as Gold Country in 1958; the University of Texas Press edition was completely revised and first published in 1966.

Shortlisted for the 2026William Saroyan International Prize for Writing • Shortlisted for the Story Circle Network Gilda Prize • Winner of the Wisconsin Library Association's Literary Award for Nonfiction • Shortlisted for the Rubery Book Award • A 2025 IPPY Awards Silver Medal Winner in Autobiography/Memoir • Winner of the 2025 Friends of American Writers Adult Literature Award • A 2024 Foreword INDIES Finalist • A 2025 Sophie Brody Medal Notable Book • A Jewish Women's Archive Summer Book Club Pick

At twenty-three, Michelle Ephraim was failing at everything. The only child of reclusive Holocaust-survivor parents who were dismayed by her literary studies, she found herself dumped by her boyfriend and bombing out of graduate school. Then, one night, she crashed a Shakespeare recitation party. Loopy from vodka and never having read a single line of Shakespeare, she was transfixed. Shakespeare, she decided, was the lifeline she needed.

Green World is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of Ephraim’s quest to become a Shakespeare scholar and to find community and home. As she studies Shakespeare, Ephraim’s world uncannily begins to mirror the story of the Jewish daughter in The Merchant of Venice, and she finds herself in a Green World, an idyllic place where Shakespeare’s heroines escape their family trauma. Green World reckons with global, historical, and personal tragedy and shows how literature—comic and tragic—can help us brave every kind of anguish.

A critical history of the US dollar’s dominance in the world economy—and what has kept China’s currency from overtaking it.

The dollar is the primary currency of the world economy. With China now rivaling the United States on the world stage, a critical question hangs in the balance: will the Chinese renminbi challenge the status of the dollar and, in doing so, deprive America of its “exorbitant privilege”?

In GreenbackEmpire, Ho-fung Hung offers a powerful account of why, even as American shares of global production, ownership, and trade continue to decline, its currency has retained the support of governments and investors around the world. For six decades, Hung shows, the dominance of the dollar has rested on the security umbrella that the US offers to the world’s wealthiest countries—including oil producers. To these countries, support for the value of the dollar is tantamount to maintaining US protection. While China has become a serious geopolitical and economic rival to the US, the Chinese state’s airtight control of its financial system has delayed the free trading of the renminbi, limiting the currency’s internationalization. In short, the same strategy that engineered growth in China’s economy is restraining its currency's rise in opposition to the dollar. Hung’s Greenback Empire is an essential history of the dollar’s prowess, indispensable for understanding the future of the global monetary system.

The world runs on the U.S. dollar. From Washington to Beijing, governments, businesses, and individuals rely on the dollar to conduct commerce and invest profitably and safely—even after the global financial meltdown in 2008 revealed the potentially catastrophic cost of the dollar's hegemony. But how did the greenback achieve this planetary dominance a mere century and a half after President Lincoln issued the first currency backed only by the credit—and credibility—of the federal government?

In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power—and the enormous risks—of the dollar's worldwide reign.

Documents counterimperialism in Chilean music since the 1960s

Gringos Get Rich: Anti-Americanism in Chilean Music examines anti-Americanism in Latin America as manifested in Chilean music in recent history. From a folk-based movement in the 1960s and early 1970s to underground punk rock groups during the Pinochet regime, to socially conscious hip-hop artists of postdictatorship Chile, Chilean music has followed several left-leaning transnational musical trends to grapple with Chile’s fluctuating relationship with the United States. Eunice Rojas’s innovative analysis introduces US readers to a wide swath of Chilean musicians and their powerful protest songs and provides a representative and long view of the negative influences of the United States in Latin America.

Much of the criticism of the United States in Chile’s music centers on the perception of the United States as a heavy-handed source of capitalist imperialism that is exploitative of and threatening to Chile’s poor and working-class public and to Chilean cultural independence and integrity. Rojas incorporates Antonio Gramsci’s theories about the difficulties of struggles for cultural power within elitist capitalist systems to explore anti-Americanism and anti-capitalist music. Ultimately, Rojas shows how the music from various genres, time periods, and political systems attempts to act as a counterhegemonic alternative to Chile’s political, cultural, and economic status quo.

Rojas’s insight is timely with recent political trends toward the right in the Americas. There is also increased interest in and acceptance of popular song lyrics as literary texts. The book will appeal to Latin Americanists, ethnomusicologists, scholars of popular culture and international relations, students, and general readers.
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A key period in the history of food cooperatives that continues to influence how we purchase organic food today

Our notions of food co-ops generally don’t include images of baseball bat–wielding activists in the aisles. But in May 1975, this was the scene as a Marxist group known as the Co-op Organization took over the People’s Warehouse, a distribution center for more than a dozen small cooperative grocery stores in the Minneapolis area. The activist group’s goal: to curtail the sale of organic food. The People’s Warehouse quickly became one of the principal fronts in the political and social battle that Craig Upright explores in Grocery Activism. The story of the fraught relationship of new-wave cooperative grocery stores to the organic food industry, this book is an instructive case study in the history of activists intervening in capitalist markets to promote social change.

Focusing on Minnesota, a state with both a long history of cooperative enterprise and the largest number of surviving independent cooperative stores, Grocery Activism looks back to the 1970s, when the mission of these organizations shifted from political activism to the promotion of natural and organic foods. Why, Upright asks, did two movements—promoting cooperative enterprise and sustainable agriculture—come together at this juncture? He analyzes the nexus of social movements and economic sociology, examining how new-wave cooperatives have pursued social change by imbuing products they sell with social values. Rather than trying to explain the success or failure of any individual cooperative, his work shows how members of this fraternity of organizations supported one another in their mutual quest to maintain fiscal solvency, promote better food-purchasing habits, support sustainable agricultural practices, and extol the virtues of cooperative organizing. A foundational chapter in the history of organic food, Grocery Activism clarifies the critical importance of this period in transforming the politics and economics of the grocery store in America.

Much has been written about the life of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), but relatively little attention has been paid to his wife, Helen Benson Garrison, and their seven children. In Growing Up Abolitionist, Garrison's public image recedes into the background and the family's private world takes center stage. 

The lives of the Garrison children were shaped within the context of the great nineteenth-century campaigns against slavery, racism, violence, war, imperialism, and the repression of women. As children, they became apprentices of these movements and grew up adoring their dissident parents. Collectively and individually, they carried on their parents' values in distinctive ways. 

Their path was not always easy. When the Civil War erupted, the entire family had to come to grips with a basic contradiction in their lives. While each member passionately yearned for the end of slavery, all but the eldest son, George, who served as an officer with the 55th Massachusetts Colored Regiment, opposed military participation. 

The Civil War years also brought four marriage partners into the Garrisons' lives-Ellen Wright, Lucy McKim, and Annie Anthony (all abolitionist daughters) and Henry Villard, a German-born journalist who later became a railroad magnate and publisher of the New York Evening Post and the Nation. 

Raised by loving parents to be political activists, the Garrison children, as adults, assumed positions as leaders or participants in those radical causes of their day that most closely reflected their upbringing: racial justice, women's rights, anti-imperialism, and peace.

Gaylon Finklea Hecker and Marianne Odom began the interviews for this book in 1981 and devoted a professional lifetime to collecting the memories of accomplished Texans to determine what, if anything, about growing up in the Lone Star State prepared them for success.

The resulting forty-seven oral history interviews begin with tales from the early 1900s, when Texas was an agrarian state, and continue through the growth of major cities and the country’s race to the moon. Interviewees recalled life in former slave colonies; on gigantic ranches, tiny farms, and sharecropper fields; and in one-horse towns and big-city neighborhoods, with relatable stories as diverse as the state’s geography.

The oldest interviewees witnessed women earning the right to vote and weathered the Great Depression. Many remembered two world wars, while others recalled the Texas City explosion of 1947 and the tornado that devastated Waco in 1953. They witnessed the advent of television and the nightly news, which helped many come to terms with the assassination of a president that took place too close to home.

Their absorbing reflections are stories of good and bad, hope and despair, poverty and wealth, depression and inspiration, which would have been different if lived anywhere but Texas.

A provocative look at America’s compulsion to consume and our obsession’s surprising—and strange—origins.

In a capitalist society, people sell their labor to purchase staples like food, shelter, and anxiety medication. That’s the equation of everyday economic life that we’ve always been told is true. Except, is it really that simple anymore? No matter how unmaterialistic you may think you are, odds are that deep within is a drive to consume because it feels good: books you won’t read, clothes you won’t like and might wear even less, a replacement phone whose novelty runs out as quickly as its upgrade hits the market. But what drives this impulse?

In Growth Machines, Mark Joseph Stelzner shows how today’s consumers are now programmed by a US economy intent on infinite growth to work for goods they’ve been convinced they need and conditioned to want. Stelzner establishes the gaps between economic thinking and economic reality, arguing that consumption is no longer just a reflection of needs, but rather, it reflects a need for transaction—in many cases, a treat we seek out because it feels good. We work not only to be able to consume the essentials for living, but also to consume for consumption's sake. Yet such consumption doesn’t make us happier. Stelzner traces this strange nature of consumption to an environmental source: an economy that demands growth. To keep its economy pumping, the US must keep Americans consuming. This makes Stelzner’s book an uncomfortable reflection on how we internalize our economy. To be an American is to consume; to consume is what makes America.