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In the early 1900s, a handful of unconventional couples emerged within the American radical Left. In Intimate Radicals, Ashley Walters tells the story of a group of young, East European Jewish women and white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant men— such as Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and William English Walling, among other notable figures in American literature, domestic and international affairs, and early Hollywood—and how they imbued their romances with revolutionary principles. The relationships captivated the public and became a source of intrigue, largely driven by the growth of human-interest journalism. Through individual biographies, historical narrative, and literary analysis, Walters reveals the cultural and political contingencies of desire.

 As Progressive Era radicals rebelled against the constraints of an earlier era, East European Jews—and Jewish women in particular— came to embody a new cosmopolitan ideal and European revolutionary spirit. Drawing on letters, newspapers, literature, and film, Walters shows how the public reception of these patrician-immigrant relationships lent credence to a new cultural mythology of Jewish womanhood. The men’s desire for East European Jewish women, she also points out, can be viewed as a form of “radical tourism,” in which men who enjoy a degree of privilege pursue an alluring Other in the hope of obtaining a more worldly identity.

This book is published with the support of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.

Put simply, there is no text about public librarianship more rigorous or comprehensive than McCook's survey. Now, the REFORMA Lifetime Achievement Award-winning author has teamed up with noted public library scholar and advocate Bossaller to update and expand her work to incorporate the field's renewed emphasis on outcomes and transformation. This "essential tool" (Library Journal) remains the definitive handbook on this branch of the profession. It covers every aspect of the public library, from its earliest history through its current incarnation on the cutting edge of the information environment, including

• statistics, standards, planning, evaluations, and results;
• legal issues, funding, and politics;
• organization, administration, and staffing;
• all aspects of library technology, from structure and infrastructure to websites and makerspaces;
• adult services, youth services, and children's services;
• associations, state library agencies, and other professional organizations;
• global perspectives on public libraries; and
• advocacy, outreach, and human rights.

Exhaustively researched and expansive in its scope, this benchmark text continues to serve both LIS students and working professionals.

Dubbed "a peerless ambassador for public libraries, educating future professionals, current professionals in other parts of the field, and anyone else interested about the irreplaceable and irrepressible entities that are public libraries” (Library Quarterly), the newest edition of this trusted resource has been reimagined and restructured to make it even more relevant and useful. The definitive handbook on this branch of the profession, it covers every aspect of the public library, from its earliest history through its current incarnation on the cutting edge of the information environment, including

• a summary of current and historical issues in public libraries;
• a new chapter on financing which covers traditional sources, creative funding, capital campaigns, special projects, and the pros and cons of public/private partnerships;
• statistics, standards, planning, evaluations, and results;
• legal issues and politics, including how different states are set up, the role of state libraries, defining service population, and when the law and values conflict (such as union/non-union scenarios);
• updated coverage of important advocacy issues, including advocacy for access, the legal limits of advocacy, involving the community in advocacy, and communicating the effectiveness of the public library to stakeholders;
• organization, administration, and staffing, from the differences between small libraries and large systems to current issues like non-MLIS library workers and unionization;
• learning about who public libraries serve by utilizing community analysis, community needs assessments, and diversity considerations;
• adult services, youth services, children's services, and serving special populations such as older adults, adults with special needs, schools, daycares, and the incarcerated;
• library technology, from structure and infrastructure to websites and makerspaces;
• issues related to library buildings and master plans, such as gathering community input and working with an architect on library spaces and library services outside of the library;
• library associations, state library agencies, and other professional organizations;
• disaster planning and recovery from technological, ecological, and biological disasters; and
• global perspectives on public libraries.

Honorable Mention, 2025 North American Society for Sport History Book Award

On Boston Common stands a monument dedicated to the Oneida Football Club. It honors the site where, in the 1860s, sixteen boys played what was then called the “Boston game”—an early version of football in the United States. The boys were largely the sons of upper-class Boston Brahmins, and they lived through the transformative periods of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. Later as they grew old, in the 1920s, a handful of them orchestrated a series of commemorative events about their boyhood game. Benefitting from elite networks developed through the city’s social and educational institutions, including Harvard University, they donated artifacts (such as an oddly shaped, battered black ball) to museums, deposited self-penned histories into libraries and archives, and erected bronze and stone memorials, all to elevate themselves as the inventors of American football (and later, by extension, soccer). But was this origin story of what, by then, had become one of America’s favorite games as straightforward as they made it seem or a myth-making hoax?

In Inventing the Boston Game, Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin investigate the history of the Oneida Football Club and reveal what really happened. In a compelling, well told narrative that is informed by sports history, Boston history, and the study of memory, they posit that these men engaged in self-memorialization to reinforce their elite cultural status during a period of tremendous social and economic change, and particularly increased immigration. This exploration of the Club’s history provides fascinating insight into how and why origin stories are created in the first place. 

Dolores del Río first came to Hollywood from Mexico in 1925 and within a year had become an international star for her role in Raoul Walsh's 1926 film What Price Glory. She would go on to work with Hollywood’s top directors, including John Ford and King Vidor, and star opposite such leading men as Henry Fonda, Fred Astaire, Orson Welles (with whom she had a scandalous affair), and Elvis Presley. Voted by Photoplay magazine in 1933 as having "the most perfect feminine figure in Hollywood," del Río was billed as one of cinema’s most "exotic" and "aristocratic" beauties. This image-carefully crafted by her producers, her studio publicists, and by del Río herself-reveals many fascinating insights into Hollywood’s evolving attitudes toward race and femininity.

In The Invention of Dolores del Río, Joanne Hershfield explores the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and stardom in American popular culture through the lens of del Río’s successful and unusually lengthy career, which lasted until the 1960s. Hershfield offers close readings of del Río’s films—discussing in detail the roles she played, her costumes and makeup, the music and mise-en-scène, advertising, publicity, and reviews—that provide a nuanced understanding of how Hollywood constructed del Río as an exotic commodity and blunted the inherent challenge her sexual and ethnic image posed to both prevailing standards of white femininity and widespread injunctions against miscegenation. Throughout this astute and imaginative case study, Hershfield looks at del Río’s Hollywood films in relation to shifting ideologies about nationality, gender, and race between the 1920s and 1960s, offering an important contribution to the debate surrounding Hollywood’s ability to both reflect the nation’s racial and sexual obsessions and influence its perceptions about ethnic and gender identity.

Chad Raphael's looks at the relationship between journalism and regulation during the celebrated period of muckraking that took place on American television between 1960 and 1975. Raphael offers new insights into the economic, political, and industrial forces that shaped documentaries like Harvest of Shame, Hunger in America, and Banks and the Poor while placing the investigative television documentary into its institutional, regulatory, and cultural context. Throughout, Raphael exposes the complex strands of influence used by government officials to shape--and attack--investigative reporting, and highlights how these tactics created a troubling legacy for the regulation of television news today.

Presented here for the first time is the history of Boston's evolution as a center of American money management from early settlement to the twenty-first century. Within a few decades after the Revolution, Bostonians built up an impressive mercantile and industrial economy, and used wealth accrued from the China trade, New England mills, and other ventures to establish the most important stock exchange in America. They also created the “Boston trustee,” a unique professional who managed private fortunes over generations. During the late nineteenth century, Boston financial institutions were renowned as bastions of stability and conservatism in an era of recurrent economic panics and frequent failures.

It was not until the twentieth century that Boston became better known for its role in investment management. In 1924, local financiers created the first mutual fund, an innovation almost a century in the making. After World War II, Boston originated venture capital with the founding of American Research & Development. This was soon followed by the development of private equity, the growth of the mutual fund industry, the pension “revolution” that changed and strengthened money management, the evolution in management of institutional endowments, and the rise of new family offices and hedge funds. The contributions of fiduciaries and investment managers have played an important part in the rise of the “New Boston” and made the city one of the most vibrant financial capitals in the world.

Investment Management in Boston is published in association with Massachusetts Historical Society.

Beginning where most histories of the Vietnam War end, Invisible Enemies examines the relationship between the United States and Vietnam following the American pullout in 1975. Drawing on a broad range of sources, from White House documents and congressional hearings to comic books and feature films, Edwin Martini shows how the United States continued to wage war on Vietnam “by other means” for another twenty-five years. In addition to imposing an extensive program of economic sanctions, the United States opposed Vietnam's membership in the United Nations, supported the Cambodians, including the Khmer Rouge, in their decade-long war with the Vietnamese, and insisted that Vietnam provide a “full accounting” of American MIAs before diplomatic relations could be established. According to Martini, such policies not only worked against some of the stated goals of U.S. foreign policy, they were also in opposition to the corporate economic interests that ultimately played a key role in normalizing relations between the two nations in the late 1990s. 

Martini reinforces his assessment of American diplomacy with an analysis of the “cultural front”—the movies, myths, memorials, and other phenomena that supported continuing hostility toward Vietnam while silencing opposing views of the war and its legacies. He thus demonstrates that the “American War on Vietnam” was as much a battle for the cultural memory of the war within the United States as it was a lengthy economic, political, and diplomatic campaign to punish a former adversary.

Transnational corporations straddle the globe, largely unseen by the public. Cargill, with its headquarters in the US, is the largest private corporation in North America, and possibly in the world. Cargill trades in food commodities and produces a great many of them: grains, flour, malt, corn, cotton, salt, vegetable oils, fruit juices, animal feeds, and meat. Among its most profitable activities is its trade in the global financial markets. There are few national economies unaffected by Cargill's activities, and few eaters in the north whose food does not pass through Cargill's hands at some point. Yet Cargill remains largely invisible to most people and accountable to no one outside the company.

This is the second edition of an explosive book that breaks the silence on the true extent of Cargill's power and influence worldwide -- its ability to shape national policies, and the implications of these strategies for all of us. Thoroughly revised and updated, Kneen's new book offers shocking new evidence of Cargill's activities since the book was first published in 1995. He examines how it has succeeded in eliminating competition by undertaking joint ventures with virtually all of its suppossed competitors. He shows how this massive corporation continues to aquire and divest, extending its grip even further in what amounts to almost total control of the global food system.

She was stabbed by her drunken husband on a storm-tossed ship in the North Atlantic. She forgave him before she died—and history never recorded her first name. Mrs. Whitlow, wife of a British soldier, is just one of the thousands of women who followed their husbands to war during the American Revolution. These women lived in the barracks and camps and endured the hardships of garrisons and campaigns in an unfamiliar and often hostile land. They faced the challenges with fortitude, proving themselves resourceful, industrious, and intrepid, but their involvement in the conflict that founded the United States has been largely lost to history. Incidents and brief mentions abound in the military writings and iconography of the era, but stories of individual lives are nearly nonexistent, which has caused this large population to be almost entirely overlooked. 

Combining archival research with deeply human storytelling, Invisible Lives: British Soldiers’ Wives in the American Revolution by Don N. Hagist brings together, for the first time, the myriad glimpses of these wives to tell the larger story of how they lived, worked, suffered, and survived as women in a foreign war. Drawing on court martial proceedings, muster rolls, marriage licenses, newspaper notices, and rare surviving letters, this meticulously researched work reconstructs the lives of women who were present in every theater of the Revolutionary War. What emerges is a portrait of remarkable resilience. These women crossed oceans, survived sieges, nursed the wounded, and raised children in the chaos of an eighteenth-century war. These many moments come together to provide a more complete and invaluable picture of British soldiers’ wives and their place in the army and the surrounding society. For readers of women’s history, military history, and the American Revolution, this is an overdue and deeply moving reckoning with the lives history had left behind.

Law and Society is a rapidly-growing interdisciplinary field that turns on its head the conventional, idealized view of the “Law” as a magisterial abstraction. Kitty Calavita’s Invitation to Law and Society brilliantly brings to life the ways in which law shapes and manifests itself in the institutions and interactions of human society, while inviting the reader into conversations that introduce the field’s dominant themes and most lively disagreements. 

Deftly interweaving scholarship with familiar personal examples, Calavita shows how scholars in the discipline are collectively engaged in a subversive exposé of law’s public mythology. While surveying prominent issues and distinctive approaches to the use of the law in everyday life, as well as its potential as a tool for social change, this volume provides a view of law that is more real but just as compelling as its mythic counterpart. In a field of inquiry that has long lacked a sophisticated yet accessible introduction to its ways of thinking, Invitation to Law and Society will serve as an engaging and indispensible guide.