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Explores the intellectual history of how Americans imagined science, faith, and human improvement through the most wrenching of experiences—the deaths of children.

Offering fascinating examples from the works of diverse writers and thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Shelton Dover, Kristin Johnson traces the history of Americans’ complicated faith in science and the various triumphs and tragedies that faith has inspired. Imagining Progress reveals many of the complex factors involved in the polarized state of contemporary American attitudes toward science, scientists, public health, medicine, and science policy.

Humankind has always wrestled with the existence of suffering, how to respond to suffering, whom to care for, and in what ways. For two centuries, many American ministers, physicians, and scientists believed that an omnipotent and omniscient God created the world such that people might relieve suffering through ingenuity and learning. Others responded to the new worldview introduced by the scientific revolution as a threat to the divine order. In Imagining Progress, Johnson traces the history of Americans’ evolving relationship with science and religion at “one of its most dramatic places”—the bedsides of dying children. It’s here, in the crucible of parental despair, that she illuminates diverging assumptions about God, nature, and history.

From Cotton Mather’s campaign for smallpox inoculation to battles over teaching evolution in the 1920s, Johnson adroitly weaves an interdisciplinary history of medicine, science, theology, and activism. She follows a wide cast of characters from across theological, scientific, and political spectrums. What emerges is a kaleidoscopic portrait of diverse, often contradictory hopes and anxieties inspired by new theories of nature and human existence. Johnson also discerns a problematic pattern of invoking science both to ameliorate the suffering of some children while ignoring the suffering of others.
 

Forests have always been more than just their trees. The forests in Michigan (and similar forests in other Great Lakes states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota) played a role in the American cultural imagination from the beginnings of European settlement in the early nineteenth century to the present. Our relationships with those forests have been shaped by the cultural attitudes of the times, and people have invested in them both moral and spiritual meanings.

Author John Knott draws upon such works as Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory and Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: The Shadow of Civilization in exploring ways in which our
relationships with forests have been shaped, using Michigan---its history of settlement, popular literature, and forest management controversies---as an exemplary case. Knott looks at such well-known figures as William Bradford, James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Teddy Roosevelt; Ojibwa conceptions of the forest and natural world (including how Longfellow mythologized them); early explorer accounts; and contemporary literature set in the Upper Peninsula, including Jim Harrison's True North and Philip Caputo's Indian Country.

Two competing metaphors evolved over time, Knott shows: the forest as howling wilderness, impeding the progress of civilization and in need of subjugation, and the forest as temple or cathedral, worthy of reverence and protection. Imagining the Forestshows the origin and development of both.

A revisionist history of Method acting that connects the popular reception of “methodness” to entrenched understandings of screen performance still dominating American film discourse today.

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries.

Imagining the Method traces the primordial conditions under which the Method was conceived. It explores John Garfield's tenuous relationship with methodness due to his identity. It considers the links between John Wayne's reliance on "anti-Method" stardom and Marlon Brando and James Dean's ascribed embodiment of Method features. It dissects contemporary emphases on transformation and considers the implications of methodness in the encoding of AI performers. Altogether, Justin Rawlins offers a revisionist history of the Method that shines a light on the cultural politics of methodness and the still-dominant assumptions about race, gender, and screen actors and acting that inform how we talk about performance and performers.

Gertrude Hoffmann made her name in the early twentieth century as an imitator, copying highbrow performances staged in Europe and popularizing them for a broader American audience. Born in San Francisco, Hoffmann started working as a ballet girl in pantomime spectacles during the Gay Nineties. She performed through the heyday of vaudeville and later taught dancers and choreographed nightclub revues. After her career ended, she reflected on how vaudeville’s history was represented in film and television.

Drawn from extensive archival research, Imitation Artist shows how Hoffmann’s life intersected with those of central figures in twentieth-century popular culture and dance, including Florenz Ziegfeld, George M. Cohan, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St. Denis. Sunny Stalter-Pace discusses the ways in which Hoffmann navigated the complexities of performing gender, race, and national identity at the dawn of contemporary celebrity culture. This book is essential reading for those interested in the history of theater and dance, modernism, women’s history, and copyright.

In the heart of the DMZ, one Marine faced the war—and the truth behind it.

Impact Zone documents Marine First Lieutenant James S. Brown's intense battle experiences, including those at Khe Sanh and Con Thien, throughout his thirteen months of service on the DMZ during 1967-68. This high-action account also reflects Brown's growing belief that the Vietnam War was mis-fought due to the unproductive political leadership of President Johnson and his administration. Brown's naiveté developed into hardening skepticism and cynicism as he faced the harsh realities of war, though he still managed to retain a sense of honor, pride, and patriotism for his country.

Impact Zone is a distinctive book on the Vietnam War because it is told from the perspective of an artilleryman, and the increasingly dangerous events gain momentum as they progress from one adventure to the next. Impact Zone is not only an important historical document of the Vietnam conflict, but also a moving record of the personal and emotional costs of war.

This provocative book begins with a question about the Vietnam War. How is it, asks Robert D. Dean, that American policymakers—men who prided themselves on “hardheaded pragmatism” and shunned “fuzzy idealism”—could have committed the nation to such a ruinous, costly, and protracted war? The answer, he argues, lies not simply in the imperatives of anticommunist ideology or in any reasonable calculation of national interest. At least as decisive in determining the form and content of American Cold War foreign policy were the common background and shared values of its makers, especially their deeply ingrained sense of upper-class masculinity.

Dean begins by examining the institutions that shaped the members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment—all-male prep schools, Ivy League universities, collegiate secret societies, and exclusive men's clubs—that instilled stoic ideals of competition, duty, and loyalty. Service in elite military units during World War II further reinforced this pattern of socialization, eventually creating an “imperial brotherhood” imbued with a common global vision. More than that, according to Dean, the commitment to tough-minded masculinity shared by these men encouraged the pursuit of policies that were aggressively interventionist abroad and intolerant of dissent at home.

Applying his gendered analysis to the McCarthy era, Dean reveals how the purge of suspected homosexuals in the State Department not only paralleled the repression of the political left, but also reflected a bitter contest for power between the foreign policy elite and provincial Congressional conservatives. He then shows how issues of manliness similarly influenced the politics and policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Just as programs like the Peace Corps were grounded in ideals of masculine heroism, decisions about intervention in Vietnam were inextricably bound up with ideas about male strength and power. In the end, Dean makes a persuasive case that these elite constructions of male identity fundamentally shaped the course of American foreign policy during the early decades of the Cold War.

Imperial Texas examines the development of Texas as a human region, from the simple outline of the Spanish colony to the complex patterns of the modern state. In this study in cultural geography set into a historical framework, D. W. Meinig discusses the "various peoples of Texas, who they are, where they came from, where they settled, and how they are proportioned one to another from place to place." After examining the historical framework, he then presents detailed analyses of the major regions of modem Texas and an over-all characterization of the state and its people. He concludes that, although Texas has never been the empire that it has sometimes been called, "nevertheless... Texas is something more than just one-fourteenth of the American area, one-twentieth of the American people, and one-fiftieth of the American union."

A new critical edition of Sutton Griggs’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century novel, which continues to shed light on understandings of Black politics.

Sutton E. Griggs’s first novel, originally published in 1899, paints a searing picture of the violent enforcement of disfranchisement and Jim Crow racial segregation. Based on events of the time, including US imperial policies, revolutionary movements, and racial protests, Imperium in Imperio introduces the fictional Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave as “future leaders of their race” and uses these characters to make sense of the violence that marked the dawn of the twentieth century. Taking on contemporary battles over separatism and integration, Griggs’s novel continues to play a crucial role in understandings of Black politics.

Edited and introduced by Tess Chakkalakal and Kenneth W. Warren, this new critical edition offers not only an incisive biographical and historical introduction to the novel and its author but also a wealth of references that make the events and characters of Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio, and its aftermath, accessible to readers today.

A personal journey through the ever-changing natural and cultural history of Lake Superior’s South Shore

Lake Superior’s South Shore is as malleable as it is enduring, its red sandstone cliffs, clay bluffs, and golden sand beaches reshaped by winds and water from season to season—and sometimes from one hour to the next. Generations of people have inhabited the South Shore, harvesting the forests and fish, mining copper, altering the land for pleasure and profit, for better or worse. In Impermanence, author Sue Leaf explores the natural and human histories that make the South Shore what it is, from the gritty port city of Superior, Wisconsin, to the shipping locks at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. 

For Leaf, what began as a bicycling adventure on the coast of Lake Superior in 1977 turned into a lifelong connection with the area, and her experience, not least as owner of a rustic cabin on a rapidly eroding lakeside cliff, imbues these essays with a passionate sense of place and an abiding curiosity about its past and precarious future. As waves slowly consume the shoreline where her family has spent countless summers, Leaf is forced to confront the complexity of loving a place that all too quickly is being reclaimed by the great lake.

Impermanence is a journey through the South Shore’s story, from the early days of the Anishinaabe and fur traders through the heyday of commercial fishing, lumber camps, and copper mining on the Keweenaw Peninsula to the awakening of the Northland to the perils and consequences of plundering its natural splendor. Noting the geological, ecological, and cultural features of each stop on her tour along the South Shore, Leaf writes about the restoration of the heavily touristed Apostle Islands National Lakeshore to its pristine conditions, even as Lake Superior maintains its allure for ice fishers, kayakers, and long-distance swimmers. She describes efforts to protect the endangered piping plover and to preserve the diverse sand dunes on the Michigan coast, and she observes the slough that supports rare intact wild rice beds central to Anishinaabe culture.

Part memoir, part travelogue, part natural and cultural history, Leaf’s love letter to Lake Superior’s South Shore is an invitation to see this liminal world in all its seasons and guises, to appreciate its ageless, ever-changing wonders and intimate charms.

An original transatlantic history of the invention of the corrections profession and of ensuing debates about punishment’s purposes and prisoners’ rights.

Impermissible Punishments explores the history of punishment inside prisons and how governments grappled with obligations to justify the punishments they impose. Legal scholar Judith Resnik charts the creation of the corrections profession and weaves together the stories of people who made rules for prisons and the stories of those living under the resulting regimes.

Resnik maps three centuries of shifting ideas, norms, and legal standards aiming to draw lines between permissible and impermissible punishments. Her account documents the impact of World War II, the United Nations, the US Civil Rights movement, and the pioneering prisoners who insisted that law should protect their individual dignity. Taking us to the present, Resnik analyzes the expansion of imprisonment, the inability of public and private prisons to provide safe housing, and the impact of abolition politics.

Exploring the interdependency of people in and out of prisons, Impermissible Punishments examines what governments committed to equality owe to the people they detain and argues that many contemporary forms of punishment need to end.

Implementing City Sustainability examines the structures and processes that city governments employ to pursue environmental, social, and economic well-being within their communities. As American cities adopt sustainability objectives, they are faced with the need to overcome fuzzy-boundary, coordination, and collective action challenges to achieve successful implementation.

Sustainability goals often do not fit neatly into traditional city government structures, which tend to be organized around specific functional responsibilities, such as planning, public works, parks and recreation, and community development. The authors advance a theory of Functional Collective Action and apply it to local sustainability to explain how cities can—and in some cases do—organize to successfully administer changes to achieve complex objectives that transcend these organizational separations. Implementing City Sustainability uses a mixed-method research design and original data to provide a national overview of cities’ sustainability arrangements, as well as eight city case studies highlighting different means of organizing to achieve functional collective action.

By focusing not just on what cities are doing to further sustainability, but also on how they are doing it, the authors show how administrative structure enables—or inhibits—cities to overcome functional divides and achieve successful outcomes.