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Lillian Lorca de Tagle is living proof of women's progress in the twentieth century. Born into a privileged, yet circumscribed world in 1914 as the daughter of a wealthy Chilean diplomat, she became a translator and journalist at a time when few women of her class held jobs. Ordered into exile in the United States by her disapproving mother, she became a successful reporter, translator, and editor, while raising two daughters as a single working mother.

In this beautifully written memoir, de Tagle looks back over a fascinating, cosmopolitan life. She describes how her upbringing in various European capitals prepared her for a life of continual change. She remembers the restrictions that upper class Chilean society placed on women and how these ultimately propelled her to a career in the United States that included an editorship at Américas magazine and work for the State Department, as well as a series of posts with the USIA/Voice of America.

Woven throughout her memoir are vivid glimpses of family, friends, husbands, and lovers, including the artist Roberto Matta. This spicy blend of personalities, work, and culture tells a quintessential coming-of-age story of a thoroughly modern woman.

The monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, located on Boston Common, stands at a symbolic crossroads of American history. A reminder of the nation's ongoing struggle over race, it captures the Civil War's higher purpose—the end of slavery—and memorializes those black soldiers and white officers who made common cause in the service of freedom. The monument and the saga of the 54 th Massachusetts remain powerful touchstones, inspiring enduring meditations such as Robert Lowell's poem “For the Union Dead” and the popular film Glory. 

This volume brings together the best scholarship on the history of the 54th, the formation of collective memory and identity, and the ways Americans have responded to the story of the regiment and the Saint-Gaudens monument. Contributors use the historical record and popular remembrance of the 54th as a lens for examining race and community in the United States. The essays range in time from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and encompass history, literature, art, music, and popular culture.

In addition to the editors and Colin Powell, who writes about the memory and example of the 54th in his own career, contributors include Stephen Belyea, David W. Blight, Thomas Cripps, Kathryn Greenthal, James Oliver Horton, Edwin S. Redkey, Marilyn Richardson, Kirk Savage, James Smethurst, Cathy Stanton, Helen Vendler, Denise Von Glahn, and Joan Waugh.

Mary Beth Rogers has led an eventful life rooted in the weeds of Texas politics, occasionally savoring a few victories—particularly the 1990 governor’s race when, as campaign manager for Ann Richards, she did the impossible and put a Democratic woman in office. She also learned to absorb her losses—after all, she was a liberal feminist in America’s most aggressively conservative state.

Rogers’s road to a political life was complex. Candidly and vulnerably, she shares both public and private memories of how she tried to maintain a rich family life with growing children and a husband with a debilitating illness. She goes on to provide an insider’s account of her experiences as Richards’s first chief of staff while weaving her way through the highs and lows of political intrigue and legislative maneuvering.

Reflecting on her family heritage and nascent spiritual quest, Rogers discovers a reality at once sobering and invigorating: nothing is ever completely lost or completely won. It is a constant struggle to create humane public policies built on a foundation of fairness and justice—particularly in her beloved Texas.

Intellectuals “have been both rallying points and railed against in American politics, vessels of hope and targets of scorn,” writes Michael J. Brown as he invigorates a recurrent debate in American life: Are intellectual public figures essential voices of knowledge and wisdom, or out-of-touch elites? Hope and Scorn investigates the role of high-profile experts and thinkers in American life and their ever-fluctuating relationship with the political and public spheres.

From Eisenhower’s era to Obama’s, the intellectual’s role in modern democracy has been up for debate. What makes an intellectual, and who can claim that privileged title? What are intellectuals’ obligations to society, and how, if at all, are their contributions compatible with democracy? For some, intellectuals were models of civic engagement. For others, the rise of the intellectual signaled the fall of the citizen. Carrying us through six key moments in this debate, Brown expertly untangles the shifting anxieties and aspirations for democracy in America in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Hope and Scorn begins with “egghead” politicians like Adlai Stevenson; profiles scholars like Richard Hofstadter and scholars-turned-politicians like H. Stuart Hughes; and ends with the rise of public intellectuals such as bell hooks and Cornel West. In clear and unburdened prose, Brown explicates issues of power, authority, political backlash, and more. Hope and Scorn is an essential guide to American concerns about intellectuals, their myriad shortcomings, and their formidable abilities.

Why did the American heartland, once the engine of the world’s most dynamic economy, become the seedbed of its angriest politics? For more than twenty years, John Austin has pursued that question in Flint, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh—and now in Europe’s industrial regions, where many communities face the same reckoning. In Hope in the Heartlands he traces his journey from a minister’s son raised in West Virginia coal country to the man who made Flint and the industrial Midwest his adopted home. He shows how he came to see economic abandonment as the root of democratic decay—and what he and a network of like-minded leaders did about it. From coining the “Blue Economy” to championing “ally-shoring”—rebuilding supply chains across allied democracies—Austin offers a field-tested agenda for renewing left-behind regions. The stakes, he argues, could not be higher.

• how Indigenous adages can be tools for reflection and guidance in developing cultural humility;
• the experiences of two Black librarians who are using cultural humility to change the profession;
• new perspectives on core concepts of customer service;
• rethinking policies and practices in libraries both large and small;
• using cultural humility in approaching collection development and creating resource guides;
• what cultural humility can look like for a tribal librarian working in a tribal college library; and
• reflecting on cultural humility itself and where it is going.

The American mustang—wild, wind-tossed, and thundering across the open West—might have vanished into myth if not for Velma Bronn Johnston. A shy woman who was left with physical effects from a childhood battle with polio, Johnston was living a quiet life on a struggling ranch near Reno, Nevada, when she discovered wild horses being brutally transported to slaughter. Outraged, she reported it—only to be offered a permit allowing her to do the same horrific deed. But instead of backing down, Johnston took a stand.

Her refusal to profit from cruelty launched her into a firestorm of activism, upending her life. Laughed at, threatened, and dismissed, she pressed on. When a rival mocked her as “Wild Horse Annie,” she seized the name as a badge of honor and purpose. Embracing her new identity, she began to raid illegal holding pens under the cover of darkness, captivated the media, and became the voice of a movement. Her biggest allies? Schoolchildren across America, whose letter-writing campaign swept the country. 

Johnston’s commitment to these majestic animals was finally recognized in 1971 when Congress unanimously passed legislation to protect the nation’s wild horses—an enduring victory for one determined woman and the animals she refused to abandon.

Award-winning author Terri Farley presents the captivating story of Horse Girl, revealing Velma Bronn Johnston in a new light through family photos and journal entries never before published. Farley’s storytelling brings Johnston’s unwavering courage into the spotlight, revealing a woman determined to protect the wild mustang—no matter the cost.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Young Man from Atlanta and Academy Awards for the screen adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird and the original screenplay Tender Mercies, as well as the recipient of an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of The Trip to Bountiful and the William Inge Lifetime Achievement Award, Horton Foote is one of America's most respected writers for stage and screen. The deep compassion he shows for his characters, the moral vision that infuses his social commentary, and the kindness and humanity that Foote himself radiates have also made him one of our most revered artists—the father-figure who understands our longings for home, for human connections, and for certainty in a world largely bereft of these.

This literary biography thoroughly investigates how Horton Foote's life and worldview have shaped his works for stage, television, and film. Tracing the whole trajectory of Foote's career from his small-town Texas upbringing to the present day, Charles Watson demonstrates that Foote has created a fully imagined mythical world from the materials supplied by his own and his family's and friends' lives in Wharton, Texas, in the early twentieth century. Devoting attention to each of Foote's major works in turn, he shows how this world took shape in Foote's writing for the New York stage, Golden Age television, Hollywood films, and in his nine-play masterpiece, The Orphan's Home Cycle. Throughout, Watson's focus on Foote as a master playwright and his extensive use of the dramatist's unpublished correspondence make this literary biography required reading for all who admire the work of Horton Foote.

Contributors: Ausettua Amor Amenkum, Abby Carlozzo, Steven Cornelius, Yvonne Daniel, Charles “Chuck” Davis, Esailama G. A. Diouf, Indira Etwaroo, Habib Iddrisu, Julie B. Johnson, C. Kemal Nance, Halifu Osumare, Amaniyea Payne, William Serrano-Franklin, and Kariamu Welsh

How the market that made the American Dream was made—and what that history tells us about its future and fluctuations.

When Americans poured into cities and suburbs during the twentieth century, they needed capital to build and own homes. The market that emerged did more than merely provide it: the American mortgage market became the consequential, if occasionally misunderstood, cornerstone of the US financial system.

House Money traces the history of the growth and occasional collapse of the American mortgage market over the last 150 years. Jonathan Rose and Kenneth Snowden show how three major housing-related crises (of the 1930s, 1980s, and 2000s) were not just cyclical events nor bubbles. Rather, they were episodes in a common pattern: shocks produced when the availability of capital in the market was eclipsed by the risk the market took on. Rose and Snowden chart the macro factors that produced these capital/risk asymmetries, showing that in all three crises, the macroeconomic trends—not just bubbles, not banker avarice—conspired to create a downturn despite federal and private safeguards. This illustrates Rose and Snowden’s core principle: housing markets can (and often, must) shoulder considerable risk. When the capital behind that risk evaporates, trouble becomes more likely.

Mining more than a century of economic history, Rose and Snowden show how the institutions and practices in the American mortgage market reflect the push-pulls of its past—both the private innovations and the government interventions. House Money reveals the great risk undertaken in service to American homeownership—and the perennial question of what happens when that risk goes wrong.

Explores the connection between baseball card collecting and nostalgia among men of the baby boom.

Baseball card collecting carries with it images of idealized boyhoods in the sprawling American suburbs of the postwar era. Yet in the past twenty years, it has grown from a pastime for children to a big-money pursuit taken seriously by adults. In A House of Cards, John Bloom uses interviews with collectors, dealers, and hobbyists as well as analysis of the baseball card industry and extensive firsthand observations to ask what this hobby tells us about nostalgia, work, play, masculinity, and race and gender relations among collectors.

Historic houses adorned with plaques populate New England like nowhere else in the country. These plaques note the construction year and original owner of the house, but they tell nothing about the rich lives of the people who lived there. In House Stories, Beth Luey takes readers on a virtual walking tour of several historic houses in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, a small New England coastal town, inviting us in to learn each house's secrets.

Through letters and diaries, church and business records, newspaper accounts, legal documents, and the recollections of neighbors who knew them, Luey introduces the diverse cast of historical characters who lived in these houses at various times from 1800 to the 2000s, including a Japanese castaway and his rescuer, a self-made millionaire, a seagoing adventurer, a religious pioneer, and an entrepreneurial immigrant. All of the houses are still standing and all but a lighthouse are still called home. In House Stories, Luey asks readers to join her as she considers the multiple meanings of “home” for these people and their families.