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Winner of the ASA Race, Gender, and Class section's Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award

Winner of the ASA Racial and Ethnic Minorities section’s Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award

Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African-descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste Vaughan Curington focuses on Portugal—a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, has shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries. Many researchers focus on informal work settings, where immigrant rights are restricted and many workers are undocumented or without permanent residence status. Curington instead examines workers who have accessed citizenship or permanent residence status and also explores African women’s experiences laboring in care and service industries in the formal market, revealing how deeply colonial and intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women “hyper-invisible” and “hyper-visible” as “appropriate” workers in Lisbon.

Where Leisure Became Labor and the Parlor Became a Stage for American Middle-Class Identity.

The changing styles of middle-class home entertainments, Melanie Dawson argues, point to evolving ideas of class identity in U.S. culture. Drawing from 19th- and early-20th-century fiction, guidebooks on leisure, newspaper columns, and a polemical examination of class structures, Laboring to Play interrogates the ways that leisure performances (such as parlor games, charades, home dramas, and tableaux vivants) encouraged participants to test out the boundaries that were beginning to define middle-class lifestyles. 

From 19th-century parlor games involving grotesque physical contortions to early-20th-century recitations of an idealized past, leisure employments mediated between domestic and public spheres, individuals and class-based affiliations, and ideals of egalitarian social life and visible hierarchies based on privilege. Negotiating these paradigms, home entertainments provided their participants with unique ways of performing displays of individual ambitions within a world of polite social interaction. 

Laboring to Play deals with subjects as wide ranging as social performances, social history (etiquette and gentility), literary history, representations of childhood, and the history of the book.

This book offers a series of probing reflections on issues at the heart of recent debates in philosophy, literary theory, and intellectual history. In ten powerfully articulated essays, Richard Wolin calls into question the implied radicalism of the so-called postmodern turn, exposes the unstated agenda of neoconservative cultural theory, and provides a major reinterpretation of Walter Benjamin’s place in contemporary cultural studies. 

At the center of the book lie the peculiar and troubling affinities between two groups of cultural critics usually seen as antithetical: the radical conservative thinkers of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the French poststructuralists who came to the prominence in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprising. 

Wolin concludes the volume with a cogent reappraisal of “antihumanism” as a leitmotif of postwar French intellectual culture, along with a reassessment of the “de Man affair” and its implications for the poststructuralist interpretation of fascism. 

Lacan in Public argues that Lacan’s contributions to the theory of rhetoric are substantial and revolutionary and that rhetoric is, in fact, the central concern of Lacan’s entire body of work.

"A great read about some great ladies, Pat Majher's Ladies of the Lights pays long overdue homage to an overlooked part of Great Lakes maritime history in which a select group of stalwart women beat the odds to succeed in a field historically reserved for men."
---Terry Pepper, Executive Director of Great Lakes Lighthouse Keeper's Association

Michigan once led the country in the number of lighthouses, and they're still a central part of the mystique and colorful countryside of the state. What even the region's lighthouse enthusiasts might not know is the rich history of female lighthouse keepers in the area.

Fifty women served the sailing communities on Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior, as well as on the Detroit River, for more than 100 years. From Catherine Shook, who raised eight children while maintaining the Pointe Aux Barques light at the entrance to Saginaw Bay; to Eliza Truckey, who assumed responsibility for the lighthouse in Marquette while her husband fought for four years in the Civil War; to Elizabeth Whitney, whose combined service on Beaver Island and in Harbor Springs totaled forty-one years---the stories of Michigan's "ladies of the light" are inspiring.

This is no technical tome documenting the minutiae of Michigan's lighthouse specifications. Rather, it's a detailed, human portrait of the women who kept those lighthouses running, defying the gender expectations of their time.

Patricia Majher is Editor of Michigan History magazine, published by the Historical Society of Michigan. Prior, she was Assistant Director of the Michigan Women's Historical Center and Hall of Fame in Lansing, Michigan. In addition, she has been writing both advertising and editorial copy for almost thirty years and has been a frequent contributor to Michigan newspapers and magazines.

George Robb’s pioneering study explores the financial methods, accomplishments, and careers of three generations of women. Plumbing sources from stock brokers’ ledgers to media coverage, Robb reveals the many ways women invested their capital while exploring their differing sources of information, approaches to finance, interactions with markets, and levels of expertise. He also rediscovers the forgotten women bankers, brokers, and speculators who blazed new trails--and sparked public outcries over women’s unsuitability for the predatory rough-and-tumble of market capitalism.

Entertaining and vivid with details, Ladies of the Ticker sheds light on the trailblazers who transformed Wall Street into a place for women’s work.

"A rich and detailed picture of a particular historical moment that has now passed . . . I found myself immersed in the world of the East Village theatre scene and its connections to the larger world of feminism, theatre, and politics. Davy's long-standing association with this world pays off handsomely---it is impossible to imagine that anyone could write a more informative portrait."
---Charlotte Canning, University of Texas at Austin

 "After hosting two annual international women's performance festivals in 1980 and '81, Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and comrades put on such extravaganzas as the Freudian Slip party and the Debutante Ball (a coming-out party if ever there was one) to raise the first several months' rent for a narrow vestibule on East 11th Street, where they could keep the creativity going year-round. There, on a stage no bigger than a queen-sized mattress, . . . artists honed their craft, giving birth to a celebratory feminist-and-tinsel-tinged queer aesthetic. By the mid '80s . . . the rent quadrupled, and WOW moved to a city-owned building on East 4th Street, where it has flourished ever since, presenting hundreds---if not thousands---of plays, solo shows, concerts, dance pieces, cabarets, and sundry performances that defy classification."
---Alisa Solomon, Village Voice

Out of a small, hand-to-mouth, women's theater collective called the WOW Café located on the lower east side of Manhattan, there emerged some of the most important theater troupes and performance artists of the 1980s and 1990s, including the Split Britches Company, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Carmelita Tropicana, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Deb Margolin, Reno, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver. The WOW (Women's One World) Café Theatre appeared on the cultural scene at a critical turning point in both the women's movement and feminist theory, putting a witty, hilarious, gender-bending and erotically charged aesthetic on the stage for women in general and lesbians in particular.

The storefront that became the WOW Café Theatre saw dozens of excitingly original and enormously funny performances created, performed, and turned over at lightning speed---a kind of "hit and run" theater. As the demands on the space increased, the women behind WOW organized as a collective and moved their theater to an abandoned doll factory where it continues to operate today. For three decades the WOW Café has nurtured fledgling women writers, designers, and performers who continue to create important performance work.

Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers provides a critical history of this avant-garde venture whose ongoing "system of anarchy" has been largely responsible for its thirty-year staying power, after dozens of other women's theaters have collapsed. WOW artists were creating a wholly original cultural landscape across which women could represent themselves on their own terms. Parody, cross-dressing, zany comedy, and an unbridled eroticism are hallmarks of WOW's aesthetic, combined---importantly and powerfully---with a presumptive address to the audience as if everyone onstage, in the audience, and in the world is lesbian. Author Kate Davy's extensive research included in-depth interviews with WOW veterans; newspaper reviews of the earliest productions; and rare, unpublished photographs. The book also includes a chronology of productions that have highlighted WOW's performance schedule since the early '80s. 

Kate Davy is currently Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her previous books include Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos and Richard Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.

Follow Lahore’s Orange Line metro corridor to discover the tensions between development and displacement, progress and preservation, in one of the world’s great metropolises.

Lahore is a city in constant flux, and the frictions that characterize urban life are vividly apparent along the tracks of its first metro rail corridor, opened in 2020. Lahore in Motion follows the Orange Line’s 27-kilometer path, bringing together reflections from academics, activists, artists, and architects on the ways that infrastructure shapes urban belonging. The book offers a novel methodology for assessing how this mega-project has reconfigured neighborhoods, sparked new desires for modernity, and deepened existing social differences while destabilizing others.

Each chapter unfolds through the lens of a particular metro stop, providing intimate glimpses into the frictions generated by development where connectivity and fragmentation, aspiration and dispossession collide. Engaging with broader debates on urban transformation in the Global South, Lahore in Motion goes against familiar narratives of top-down development, revealing a city animated by resistance and reinventing itself in response. An eye-opening, beautifully written work for all interested in urbanism, infrastructure, politics, and the intimate rhythms of everyday life in one of the world’s most dynamic cities.

Revolution, Republic, and Reform: The Life of a French Enlightenment Statesman in an Age of Upheaval.

After being comparatively neglected for several generations, Joseph Lakanal received many posthumous honors. These memorials of esteem were the tribute of the men of the Third French Republic to an outstanding character of the First Republic, established by the National Convention in 1792.

In numerous towns and cities of France streets and boulevards were named for Lakanal, among them Paris, Tours, Toulouse, and Montpellier. Elementary schools received his name at Perigueux, Cette, Beziers. Secondary schools were named in his honor, such as the Lycee Lakanal at Paris and the College Lakanal at Beziers. At least two monuments were erected to his memory, the more imposing of which was a life-sized statue in bronze at Foix in his native Ariege. The ancient adage that a prophet is not without honor save in his own country was not true of Lakanal.

Lakanal belonged to a group of thinkers at the end of the eighteenth century known as Ideologists, a derogatory term applied to them by First Consul Bonaparte. When, during the period of the Consulate, Bonaparte had signed a Concordat with the Pope where­by Catholicism was restored to France, and when in 1802 he had sought to put into force the terms of the Concordat, he found a stumbling-block to his plans in the membership of the Class of Moral and Political Sciences of the lnstitut de France. In this group were to be found the most influential free-thinkers of the day: Lakanal, Garat, Cabanis, Volney, Ginguene, Mercier, Naigeon, Destutt de Tracy and others who had been consistently hostile to the Church, and who had become hostile to the ambition of Bonaparte.

On the political side, Lakanal was an austere democrat, and remained one all his life. Had he been willing to compromise, he would undoubtedly have gone far under Napoleon. His career is quite in contrast with that of Talleyrand, whose chameleon-like qualities enabled him to occupy high place in the Revolution, the Consulate, the Empire, the Restoration, and the more liberal gov­ernment of Louis Philippe.
 
In his profound belief in democracy and public education, and in the wide variety of his knowledge and interest in the various sciences, Lakanal is to be compared with Thomas Jefferson. The two men were of the same school of thought and possessed much in, common. In his passion for public education Lakanal may also be compared to Horace Mann.
 

Personal reflections on the natural splendors and human history of the Lake Superior shoreline

The 2,900-mile shoreline of Lake Superior offers some of the most beautiful scenery in the world: stunning juxtapositions of shape, color, and texture, from the birch and evergreen forests of Minnesota’s north shore and the maple-clad slopes of Wisconsin to Ontario’s granite outcrops and Michigan's sandstone shelves. Inhabited by hundreds of species of mammals, birds, and insects, the diverse ecosystems around Superior have also experienced human habitation for millennia.

The captivating history of the world’s largest freshwater lake.

This classic history of Lake Superior, from the earliest explorations to the explosion of industry on its shores, takes the reader on a tour from Duluth to Isle Royale, from Thunder Bay to Sault Ste. Marie, from Pictured Rocks to the Apostle Islands. Grace Lee Nute tells the fascinating stories of the Native Americans, voyageurs, missionaries, and others who created the way of life that many generations have known on the edge of this magnificent body of water.

A book for anyone who thinks they know everything there is to know about the Green Bay Packers!

Long before NFL players had teams of trainers, nutritionists, therapists, agents, and other specialists, the dynastic Green Bay Packers of the 1960s relied on a different kind of support staff: their wives. In Lambeau Ladies, mother and daughter Laura Kostelnik Biskupic and Katherine Biskupic tell the remarkable, largely untold story of the women who helped to keep the Lombardi-era Packers performing at a championship level. From preparing game-day sandwiches, nursing injuries, and reviewing game film to managing households, hosting social gatherings, and providing emotional strength to their spouses, these women were a driving force behind one of the greatest teams in football history.

Through intimate interviews and vivid storytelling, the authors bring to life the experiences of Cherry Starr, Vicky Aldridge, Barbara Gregg, Ruth Pitts, Peggy Kostelnik, and many other wives who formed deep friendships and carved out lives of meaning far from their hometowns, often in the face of social and racial barriers. With humor and candor, they describe making ends meet on modest salaries, feeding hungry young players who wandered into their kitchens, boosting their husbands’ confidence, and coming up with ingenious strategies for staying warm—and stylish—on the sidelines during Green Bay’s frigid winters.

Their stories reach far beyond football. Some of these women helped integrate Green Bay during the civil rights movement. One became one of the district’s first Black teachers; another was half of one of the NFL’s first interracial marriages. Others made contributions in their own singular ways—fostering children, launching a business and a community organization, becoming a voice in local media. And at the center of it all was Marie Lombardi, the coach’s wife and the de facto mentor of the entire wives’ cohort, whose influence extended from locker-room culture to community life.

Lambeau Ladies paints a rich portrait of midcentury Green Bay—a place where championship football, small-town rhythms, and national social change converged—and reveals how the Packers’ dynasty was shaped as much in living rooms, kitchens, and carpool lanes as on the frozen turf of Lambeau Field.

Warm, funny, and deeply inspiring, Lambeau Ladies celebrates the extraordinary women who helped build a dynasty—and, in the process, changed their town, their team, and each other.

Geographer Jack Ives moved to Canada in 1954, and soon after he played an instrumental role in the establishment of the McGill Sub-Arctic Research Laboratory in central Labrador-Ungava. This fascinating account of his fifty-plus years living and working in the arctic is simultaneously a light-hearted, winning memoir and a call to action on the issues of environmental awareness and conservation that are inextricably intertwined with life in the north. Mixing personal impressions of key figures of the postwar scientific boom with the intellectual drama of field research, The Land Beyond is a memorable depiction of a life in science.

Carried out by the government of the shah between 1962 and 1971, the Iranian land reform was one of the most ambitious such undertakings in modern Middle Eastern history. Yet, beneath apparent statistical success, the actual accomplishments of the program, in terms of positive benefits for the peasantry, were negligible. Later, the resulting widespread discontent of thousands of Iranian villagers would contribute to the shah's downfall.

In the first major study of the effects of this widely publicized program, Eric Hooglund's analysis demonstrates that the primary motives behind the land reform were political. Attempting to supplant the near-absolute authority of the landlord class over the countryside, the central government hoped to extend its own authority throughout rural Iran. While the Pahlavi government accomplished this goal, its failure to implement effective structural reform proved to be a long-term liability.

Hooglund, who conducted field research in rural Iran throughout the 1970s and who witnessed the unfolding of the revolution from a small village, provides a careful description of the development of the land reform and of its effects on the main groups involved: landlords, peasants, local officials, merchants, and brokers. He shows how the continuing poverty in the countryside forced the migration of thousands of peasants to the cities, resulting in serious shortages of agricultural workers and an oversupply of unskilled urban labor. When the shah's government was faced with mass opposition in the cities in 1978, not only did a disillusioned rural population fail to support the regime, but thousands of villagers participated in the protests that hastened the collapse of the monarchy.

“It shall be the chosen land, perpetual sunshine shall kiss its trees and vines, and, being storied in luscious fruits and compressed into ruddy wine, will be sent to the four points of the compass to gladden the hearts of all mankind . . . They will breathe the pure and bracing air, bask in the healing sunshine, drink the invigorating wine, and eat the life prolonging fruit.” —from a brochure advertising the Staked Plains from the Missouri Pacific Railway Company, 1889

Land of Bright Promise is a fascinating exploration of the multitude of land promotions and types of advertising that attracted more than 175,000 settlers to the Panhandle–South Plains area of Texas from the late years of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twentieth. Shunned by settlers for decades because of its popular but forbidding image as a desert filled with desperados, savage Indians, and solitary ranchers, the region was seen as an agricultural and cultural wasteland. The territory, consequently, was among the last to be settled in the United States.

But from 1890 to 1917, land companies and agents competed to attract new settlers to the plains. To this end, the combined efforts of local residents, ranchers and landowners, railroads, and professional real estate agents were utilized. Through brochures, lectures, articles, letters, fairs, and excursion trips, midwestern farmers were encouraged to find new homes on what was once feared as the “Great American Desert.” And successful indeed were these efforts: from 13,787 in 1890, the population grew to 193,371 in 1920, with a corresponding increase in the amount of farms and farm acreage.

The book looks at the imagination, enthusiasm, and determination of land promoters as they approached their task, including their special advertisements and displays to show the potential of the area. Treating the important roles of the cattlemen, the railroads, the professional land companies, and local boosters, Land of Bright Promise also focuses on the intentions and expectations of the settlers themselves. Of special interest are the fifteen historical photographs and reproductions of promotional pieces from the era used to spur the land boom. What emerges is an engaging look at a critical period in the development of the Texas Panhandle and an overview of the shift from cattle to agriculture as the primary industry in the area.