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    On October 21, 1996, attorney Michael Hausfeld, with a team of lawyers, filed a class-action complaint against Union Bank of Switzerland, Swiss Bank Corporation, and Credit Suisse on behalf of Holocaust victims. The suit accused the banks of, among other things, acting as the chief financiers for Nazi Germany. Hausfeld wanted to use the suit to prove that the banks not only concealed and refused to return millions of dollars in dormant accounts, but that they acted as a conduit for looted assets and slave labor profits. Such behavior, he charged, violated the code of ethics known as customary international law. On August 12, 1998, the plaintiffs and banks reached a $1.25 billion settlement.
    Through interviews with a wide range of people involved in the case and detailed research of documents and court transcripts, Jane Schapiro shows the ways that egos, personalities, and values clash in such a complex and emotionally charged case. Inside a Class Action provides an insider’s view of a major lawsuit from its inception to its conclusion, which will appeal to anyone interested in human rights, reparations, and international law.

Where tradition meets bureaucracy—Native students redefine education on their own terms.

Inside the Eagle’s Head offers a compelling and deeply human portrait of the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI), a federally operated college serving Native American students from across the United States. In it, anthropologist Angelle Khachadoorian draws on years of teaching experience and extensive student interviews to illuminate the challenges and successes of life at SIPI. Far more than an institutional history, this book captures the voices of students navigating a complex educational landscape shaped by federal oversight, tribal identity, and personal ambition.

Through vivid metaphors—SIPI as a family, a prison, a reservation—students articulate their struggles and resilience within a system that is at once empowering and restrictive. Khachadoorian’s analysis reveals how SIPI’s hybrid nature—part community college, part BIA legacy—creates both opportunities and obstacles for its students. With empathy and insight, she explores how young Native Americans forge identity, community, and purpose in a setting few outsiders understand. Inside the Eagle’s Head is essential reading for educators, policymakers, and anyone interested in the intersection of Indigenous education, federal institutions, and student agency. It is a powerful testament to the transformative potential of listening to students’ stories.

An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson’s life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations

This first biography of the major American artist Robert Smithson, famous as the creator of the Spiral Jetty, deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Integrating extensive investigation and acuity, Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson’s story and, with it, symbolic meanings across the span of his painted and drawn images, sculptures, essays, and earthworks up to the Spiral Jetty and beyond, to the circumstances leading to what became his final work, Amarillo Ramp.

While Smithson is widely known for his monumental earthwork at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, Inside the Spiral delves into the arc of his artistic production, recognizing it as a response to his family’s history of loss, which prompted his birth and shaped his strange intelligence. Smithson configured his personal conflicts within painterly depictions of Christ’s passion, the rhetoric of science fiction, imagery from occult systems, and the impersonal posture of conceptual sculpture. Aiming to achieve renown, he veiled his personal passions and transmuted his professional persona, becoming an acclaimed innovator and fierce voice in the New York art scene.

Featuring copious illustrations never before published of early work that eluded Smithson’s destruction, as well as photographs of Smithson and his wife, the noted sculptor Nancy Holt, and recollections from nearly all those who knew him throughout his life, Inside the Spiral offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures. With great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language, this biographical analysis provides an expanded view of Smithson’s iconic art pilgrimage site and the experiences and works that brought him to its peculiar blood red water.

An incisive critique of the corporatized university, tracing the entanglement of academic missions with economic, political, and cultural systems.

Advocates of higher education have long contended that universities should operate above the crude material negotiations of economics and politics. Such arguments, ignore the historical reality that the American university system emerged through, and in service to, a capitalist political economy that unevenly combines corporate, state, and civil interests.

As the corporatization of U.S. universities becomes nearly impossible to deny, the common response from many academics has been a superior stand against the contamination of the professional ideal by tainted corporate interests. Inside the Teaching Machine proposes a correction to this view through the lens of historical materialism.

Chaput argues that the U.S. public research university has always been a vital component of the capitalist political economy. While conventional narratives of public higher education emphasize civic preparation and upward mobility, Chaput demonstrates that supposedly egalitarian policies like the Morrill Land-Grant Act and the G.I. Bill served the changing interests of capitalism much as education, creating a professional class that supports the capitalist political economy. Chaput also focuses on the relationship between American universities and globalization, showing how the trend toward professionalization contributes to the production of surplus value, and the ways that the American university model circulates outside the United States. Chaput concludes by advocating rhetorical strategies for the professional who opposes the capitalist logic of the global university system, proposing concrete options for engaging and redirecting globalization within the university system.

Winner of the 2026 Outstanding Book Award in the Monograph category from the Conference on College Composition and Communication 

Insiders, Outliers invites readers into the lives of adult HBCU students for whom college is one meaningful activity among many. Although adults over the age of twenty-four comprise a quarter of all undergraduates, they are institutionally segregated and only partially served by a US higher education system that remains organized around traditional-aged learners. Even as such students are regarded as a market for postsecondary institutions, they are routinely marginalized by institutional barriers. Students’ stories of their personal, professional, community, and academic writing experiences illuminate a critical need for more age-inclusive practices across academia. Their cases also offer new conceptual models of writing as an ethical and emotional practice that fuels changes for individuals and the people and institutions that they care about—including higher education. What adult students reveal about writing across their life domains has powerful implications for conceptualizing writing as a complex form of agency and for teaching writing across the curriculum.
 

Tracing the evolution of the library as a modern institution from the late eighteenth century to the digital era, this book explores the diverse practices by which Americans have shared reading matter for instruction, edification, and pleasure. Writing from a rich variety of perspectives, the contributors raise important questions about the material forms and social shapes of American culture. What is a library? How have libraries fostered communities of readers and influenced the practice of reading in particular communities? How did the development of modern libraries alter the boundaries of individual and social experience, and define new kinds of public culture? To what extent have libraries served as commercial enterprises, as centers of power, and as places of empowerment for African Americans, women, and immigrants? Institutions of Reading offers at once a social history of literacy and leisure, an intellectual history of institutional and technological innovations that facilitated the mass distribution and consumption of printed books and periodicals, and a cultural history of the symbolic meanings and practical uses of reading in American life. In addition to the editors, contributors include Elizabeth Amann, Michael Baenen, James Green, Elizabeth McHenry, Barbara Mitchell, Christine Pawley, Janice Radway, James Raven, Karin Roffman, and Roy Rosenzweig.

An original history of music in the lives of American soldiers.
 
Since the Civil War, music has coursed through the United States military. Soldiers have sung while marching, listened to records and armed forces radio, and packed the seats at large-scale USO shows. The bugle call “reveille” has roused soldiers in the morning, and “taps” has marked the end of a long day. Whether the sounds come from brass instruments, weary and homesick singers, or a pair of heavily used earbuds, where there has been war, there has been music, too.
 
Instrument of War is a first-of-its-kind study of music in the lives of American soldiers. Although musical activity has been part of war since time immemorial, the significance of the U.S. military as a musical institution has generally gone unnoticed. Historian David Suisman traces how the U.S. military has used—and continues to use—music to train soldiers and regulate military life, and how soldiers themselves have turned to music to cope with war’s emotional and psychological realities. Opening our ears to these practices, Suisman reveals how music has enabled more than a century and a half of American war-making. Instrument of War unsettles assumptions about music as a force of uplift and beauty, demonstrating how it has also been entangled in large-scale state violence.
 
From chanting “Sound off!” in basic training to switching on a phonograph or radio or cueing up an iPod playlist during a patrol, the sound of music has long resonated in soldiers’ wartime experiences. Now we all can finally hear it.
 

The newest edition of the Intellectual Freedom Manual is more than simply an update of a foundational text that has served as a crucial resource for more than four decades. It is a living document that serves as the authoritative reference for day-to-day guidance on maintaining free and equal access to information for all people. Whether you’re developing or revising policies, on-boarding new staff or trustees, responding to challenges and controversies, or studying librarianship, you’ll find this an indispensable resource, with features such as

• ALA policy statements, approved by committees and Council, articulating core intellectual freedom principles and best practices;
• 8 new interpretations of the Library Bill of Rights, which address urgent issues like internet filtering, public performances, political activity, religion, and equity, diversity, and inclusion;
• “Issues at a Glance” sidebars which present key concepts, points of law, tips, and questions for reflection;
• expanded content about developing library policies that support intellectual freedom;
• updated information on censorship of library programs, displays, and databases;
• “Advocacy and Assistance,” a section offering concrete guidance when you’re called on to talk to the media or meet with legislators;
• Deeper Look essays which examine the laws related to library operations;
• advice on when to call the police, when not to, and how to handle personally identifiable information when they arrive; and
• an expanded glossary.

When someone faces a difficult intellectual freedom (IF) issue, they usually don’t have time to wade through dense text to find the answers they need. Designed as a real-world reference, OIF’s Intellectual Freedom Manual provides trusted, comprehensive guidance for every library worker, from the volunteer to the director, in plain language. Whether you’re developing or reviewing policies, on-boarding new staff or trustees, responding to challenges and controversies, or studying librarianship, you’ll find this a vital tool, with features such as

• contributions that center the voices of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) and LGBTQIA+ people, who are often targeted by censorship efforts;
• chapters that begin with an overview explaining the big ideas and offering reflection questions;
• an introduction to IF and why it matters, drawing on ALA's core IF documents and supported with adaptable policy worksheets;
• information and best practice guidance on key topics such as access, children and youth, censorship and internet filtering, collection development and management, copyright, meeting rooms and exhibit spaces, library programming, politics and religion, privacy, and visits and requests from law enforcement;
• stories from real people whose lives have been impacted by IF, showing how library policies shape culture, protect staff and users, and affect real people;
• concise breakdowns of IF issues from legal experts, helping you understand the laws and how they apply in real situations;
• practical advice on advocating for IF, getting help when challenges arise, lobbying, and working with your elected officials;
• a thorough index to help you quickly find the information you need; and
• a helpful glossary and selected bibliography of additional resources.

Intellectual freedom is a complex concept that democracies and free societies around the world define in different ways but always strive to uphold. And ALA has long recognized the crucial role that libraries play in protecting this right. But what does it mean in practice? How do library workers handle the ethical conundrums that often accompany the commitment to defending it? Rather than merely laying out abstract policies and best practices, this important new collection gathers real-world stories of intellectual freedom in action to illuminate the difficulties, triumphs, and occasional setbacks of advocating for free and equal access to information for all people in a shifting landscape. Offering insight to LIS students and current practitioners on how we can advance the profession of librarianship while fighting censorship and other challenges, these personal narratives explore such formidable situations as

• presenting drag queen story times in rural America;
• a Black Lives Matter “die-in” at the undergraduate library of the University of Wisconsin-Madison;
• combating censorship at a prison library;
• hosting a moderated talk about threats to modern democracy that included a neo-Nazi spokesman;
• a provocative exhibition that triggered intimidating phone calls, emails, and a threat to burn down an art library;  
• calls to eliminate non-Indigenous children’s literature from the collection of a tribal college library; and
• preserving patrons’ right to privacy in the face of an FBI subpoena.