Results by title

22279 books match the query 'Social Science' and 714 start with l

Sort by

cover of Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene

Legendary

Inside the House Ballroom Scene

Gerard H. Gaskin

Duke University Press, 0

Gerard H. Gaskin's radiant color and black-and-white photographs take us inside the culture of house balls, underground events where gay and transgender men and women, mostly African American and Latino, come together to see and be seen. At balls, high-spirited late-night pageants, members of particular "houses"—the House of Blahnik, the House of Xtravaganza—"walk," competing for trophies in categories based on costume, attitude, dance moves, and "realness." In this exuberant world of artistry and self-fashioning, people often marginalized for being who they are can flaunt and celebrate their most vibrant, spectacular selves.

From the quiet backstage, to the shimmering energies of the runway. to the electricity of the crowd, Gaskin's photographs take us to the ball. Legendary, comprised of photos taken at events in the New York city area, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Washington, D.C., is a collaboration between Gaskin, a camera-laden outsider who has been attending balls for twenty years, and the house members who let him enter the intimate world of ball culture. In addition to an introduction by Deborah Willis, Legendary includes an essay, "The Queer Undercommons," by Frank Roberts.

cover of Legends of the Northern Paiute: as told by Wilson Wewa

Legends of the Northern Paiute

as told by Wilson Wewa

Wilson Wewa

Oregon State University Press, 2017

Legends of the Northern Paiute shares and preserves twenty-one original and previously unpublished Northern Paiute legends, as told by Wilson Wewa, a spiritual leader and oral historian of the Warm Springs Paiute. These legends were originally told around the fires of Paiute camps and villages during the “story-telling season” of winter in the Great Basin of the American West. They were shared with Paiute communities as a way to pass on tribal visions of the “animal people” and the “human people,” their origins and values, their spiritual and natural environment, and their culture and daily lives.

The legends in this volume were recorded, transcribed, reviewed, and edited by Wilson Wewa and James Gardner. Each legend was recorded, then read and edited out loud, to respect the creativity, warmth, and flow of Paiute storytelling. The stories selected for inclusion include familiar characters from native legends, such as Coyote, as well as intriguing characters unique to the Northern Paiute, such as the creature embodied in the Smith Rock pinnacle, now known as Monkey Face, but known to the Paiutes in Central Oregon as Nuwuzoho the Cannibal.

Wewa’s apprenticeship to Northern Paiute culture began when he was about six years old. These legends were passed on to him by his grandmother and other tribal elders. They are now made available to future generations of tribal members, and to students, scholars, and readers interested in Wewa’s fresh and authentic voice. These legends are best read and appreciated as they were told—out loud, shared with others, and delivered with all of the verve, cadence, creativity, and humor of original Paiute storytellers on those clear, cold winter nights in the high desert.

cover of Legends of the Warring States: Persuasions, Romances, and Stories from <em>Chan-kuo Ts'e</em>

Legends of the Warring States

Persuasions, Romances, and Stories from <em>Chan-kuo Ts'e</em>

J. I. Crump

University of Michigan Press, 1998

The origins of the Chan-kuo Ts’e (Intrigues of the warring states) as an entity can be traced to a palace librarian at the Han Court, Liu Hsiang (76–6 BCE), who compiled and edited the pre-Han texts (c. 300–221 BCE) into a single volume and gave the collection a name. Thereafter, surviving manuscripts show the Chan-kuo Ts’e circulated during the Later Han Dynasty. Sometime during the years of decline and following the fall of the Han Dynasty, the Chan-kuo Ts’e began to acquire the aura of a wicked book, somewhat analogous to Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince. From time to time it was seen as one of a number of books that could unlock immense power in an era characterized both by widespread illiteracy and common belief in literacy and scholarship as the best if not the only vehicle to any goal. After 400 CE, there is no record of the text until it was reconstructed by an 11th-century scholar, Tseng Kung, who formed a model for critical circulation for the next nine centuries.

This volume presents selections and commentary by the premier Western translator and interpreter of the Chan-kuo Ts'e—ninety pieces singled out for their literary sophistication and sprightliness of conception. It also features more complete warring states narratives, the “romances”—persuasions of four of the best-known figures, Fan Chü, Chang Yi, Su Ch'in, and Ch'un-shen Chün, augmented by biographical material from the Shi-chi. This reader highlights both the nature of Chan-kuo Ts'e, an important pre-Han collection, and its considerable pleasures.

cover of Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums

Legible Sovereignties

Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums

Lisa King

Oregon State University Press, 2017

An interdisciplinary work that draws on the fields of rhetorical studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, and museum studies, Legible Sovereignties considers the creation, critical reception, and adaptation of Indigenous self-representation in three diverse Indigenously oriented or owned institutions.

King tracks the exhibit spaces at the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan’s Ziibiwing Center, Haskell Indian Nation University’s Cultural Center and Museum, and the Smithsonian’s Washington, DC branch of the National Museum of the American Indian over their first ten years, from their opening until the summer of 2014. Far from formulaic, each site has developed its own rhetorical approaches to reaching its public, revealing multiple challenges and successes in making Native self-representation legible and accessible.

Through documentation and analysis of the inaugural exhibits and recent installations, interviews with curators and staff, and investigation into audience reception of these spaces, Legible Sovereignties argues that there can be no single blanket solution for effective Indigenous self-representation. Instead, Legible Sovereignties demonstrates the nuanced ways in which each site must balance its rhetorical goals and its audience's needs, as well as its material constraints and opportunities, in order to reach its visitors and have Indigenous voices heard.

cover of Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews in the San Francisco Bay Area

Legions of Boom

Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews in the San Francisco Bay Area

Oliver Wang

Duke University Press, 2015

Armed with speakers, turntables, light systems, and records, Filipino American mobile DJ crews, such as Ultimate Creations, Spintronix, and Images, Inc., rocked dance floors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s. In Legions of Boom noted music and pop culture writer and scholar Oliver Wang chronicles this remarkable scene that eventually became the cradle for turntablism. These crews, which were instrumental in helping to create and unify the Bay Area's Filipino American community, gave young men opportunities to assert their masculinity and gain social status. While crews regularly spun records for school dances, weddings, birthdays, or garage parties, the scene's centerpieces were showcases—or multi-crew performances—which drew crowds of hundreds, or even thousands. By the mid-1990s the scene was in decline, as single DJs became popular, recruitment to crews fell off, and aspiring scratch DJs branched off into their own scene. As the training ground for a generation of DJs, including DJ Q-Bert, Shortkut, and Mix Master Mike, the mobile scene left an indelible mark on its community that eventually grew to have a global impact.

cover of Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa: Human Rights, Society, and the State

Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa

Human Rights, Society, and the State

Edited by Lydia Boyd and Emily Burrill

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

In recent decades, a more formalized and forceful shift has emerged in the legislative realm when it comes to gender and sexual justice in Africa. This rigorous, timely volume brings together leading and rising scholars across disciplines to evaluate these ideological struggles and reconsider the modern history of human rights on the continent. Broad in geographic coverage and topical in scope, chapters investigate such subjects as marriage legislation in Mali, family violence experienced by West African refugees, sex education in Uganda, and statutes criminalizing homosexuality in Senegal. These case studies highlight the nuances and contradictions in the varied ways key actors make arguments for or against rights. They also explore how individual countries draft and implement laws that attempt to address the underlying problems.
Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa details how legal efforts in the continent can often be moralizing enterprises, illuminating how these processes are closely tied to notions of ethics, personhood, and citizenship. The contributors provide new appraisals of recent events, with fresh arguments about the relationships between local and global fights for rights. This interdisciplinary approach will appeal to scholars in African studies, anthropology, history, and gender studies.

cover of Legislating the French Family: Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics: 1870-1920

Legislating the French Family

Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics: 1870-1920

Jean Elisabeth Pedersen

Rutgers University Press, 2003

Legislating the French Family examines family law reform in France from the foundation of the Third Republic in 1870 to the aftermath of World War I in 1920. Combining literary and historical approaches, Jean Elisabeth Pedersen provides a unique perspective on the political culture of modern France, analyzing French "problem" plays and their reception both as a measure of public opinion and as a force for social change. This new approach reveals the complex cultural narratives within, against, and in spite of which feminists, journalists, medical experts, playwrights, and politicians contended. Pedersen’s work demonstrates how republican political debates over divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, and birth control both provoked and responded to larger arguments about the meanings of French citizenship, national identity, and imperial expansion. She argues that these debates complicated the idea of French citizenship, exposed the myth of the supposedly ungendered individual citizen, and reveal to us the intricate intersections among conflicts over family law, sexual politics, class structure, religious belief, republican citizenship, national identity, and imperial policy.

cover of Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: An International Perspective

Legitimacy and Criminal Justice

An International Perspective

Tom R. Tyler

Russell Sage Foundation, 2007

The police and the courts depend on the cooperation of communities to keep order. But large numbers of urban poor distrust law enforcement officials. Legitimacy and Criminal Justice explores the reasons that legal authorities are or are not seen as legitimate and trustworthy by many citizens. Legitimacy and Criminal Justice is the first study of the perceived legitimacy of legal institutions outside the U.S. The authors investigate relations between courts, the police, and communities in the U.K., Western Europe, South Africa, Slovenia, South America, and Mexico, demonstrating the importance of social context in shaping those relations. Gorazd Meško and Goran Klemencic examine Slovenia's adoption of Western-style "community policing" during its transition to democracy. In the context of Slovenia's recent Communist past—when "community policing" entailed omnipresent social and political control—citizens regarded these efforts with great suspicion, and offered little cooperation to the police. When states fail to control crime, informal methods of law can gain legitimacy. Jennifer Johnson discusses an extra-legal policing system carried out by farmers in Guerrero, Mexico—complete with sentencing guidelines and initiatives to reintegrate offenders into the community. Feeling that federal authorities were not prosecuting the crimes that plagued their province, the citizens of Guerrero strongly supported this extra-legal arrangement, and engaged in massive protests when the central government tried to suppress it. Several of the authors examine how the perceived legitimacy of the police and courts varies across social groups. Graziella Da Silva, Ignacio Cano, and Hugo Frühling show that attitudes toward the police vary greatly across social classes in harshly unequal societies like Brazil and Chile. And many of the authors find that ethnic minorities often display greater distrust toward the police, and perceive themselves to be targets of police discrimination. Indeed, Hans-Jöerg Albrecht finds evidence of bias in arrests of the foreign born in Germany, which has fueled discontent among Berlin's Turkish youth. Sophie Body-Gendrot points out that mutual hostility between police and minority communities can lead to large-scale violence, as the Parisian banlieu riots underscored. The case studies presented in this important new book show that fostering cooperation between law enforcement and communities requires the former to pay careful attention to the needs and attitudes of the latter. Forging a new field of comparative research, Legitimacy and Criminal Justice brings to light many of the reasons the law's representatives succeed—or fail—in winning citizens' hearts and minds. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust

cover of Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations: United States and European Perspectives

Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations

United States and European Perspectives

Kenneth Prewitt

Russell Sage Foundation, 2006

Though privately controlled, foundations perform essential roles that serve society at large. They spearhead some of the world's largest and most innovative initiatives in science, health, education, and the arts, fulfilling important needs that could not be addressed adequately in the marketplace or the public sector. Still, many people have little understanding of what foundations do and how they continue to earn public endorsement. The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations provides a thorough examination of why foundations exist and the varied purposes they serve in contemporary democratic societies. The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations looks at foundations in the United States and Europe to examine their relationship to the state, the market, and civil society. Peter Frumkin argues that unlike elected officials, who must often shy away from topics that could spark political opposition, and corporate officers, who must meet bottom-line priorities, foundations can independently tackle sensitive issues of public importance. Kenneth Prewitt argues that foundations embody elements of classical liberalism, such as individual autonomy and limited government interference in private matters and achieve legitimacy by putting private wealth to work for the public good. Others argue that foundations achieve legitimacy by redistributing wealth from the pockets of rich philanthropists to the poor. But Julian Wolpert finds that foundations do not redistribute money directly to the poor as much as many people believe. Instead, many foundations focus their efforts on education, health, and scientific research, making investments that benefit society in the long-term, and focusing on farsighted issues that a myopic electorate would not have patience to permit its government to address. Originating from private fortunes but working for the public good, independently managed but subject to legal prescriptions, philanthropic foundations occupy a unique space somewhere between the public and private sectors. The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations places foundations in a broad social and historical context, improving our understanding of one of society's most influential—and least understood—organizational forms.

cover of Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology

Legitimating Life

Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology

van Wichelen, Sonja

Rutgers University Press, 2019

The phenomenon of transnational adoption is changing in the age of globalization and biotechnology. In Legitimating Life, Sonja van Wichelen boldly describes how contemporary justifications of cross-border adoption navigate between child welfare, humanitarianism, family making, capitalism, science, and health. Focusing on contemporary institutional practices of adoption in the United States and the Netherlands, she traces how professionals, bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, social workers, and experts legitimate a practice that became progressively controversial. Throughout the past few decades transnational adoption transformed from a humanitarian response to a means of making family. In this new manifestation, life becomes necessarily economized. While push and pull factors, demand and supply dynamics, and competition between agencies set the stage for the globalization of adoption, international conventions, scientific knowledge, and the language of human rights universalized the phenomenon. Van Wichelen argues that such technoscientific legitimations of a globalizing practice are rearticulating colonial logics of race and civilization. Yet, she also lets us see beyond the biopolitical project and into alternative ways of making kin.

cover of Legitimating New Religions

Legitimating New Religions

Lewis, James R

Rutgers University Press, 2003

James R. Lewis has written the first book to deal explicitly with the issue of how emerging religions legitimate themselves. He contends that a new religion has at least four different, though overlapping, areas where legitimacy is a concern: making converts, maintaining followers, shaping public opinion, and appeasing government authorities. The legitimacy that new religions seek in the public realm is primarily that of social acceptance. Mainstream society's acknowledgement of a religion as legitimate means recognizing its status as a genuine religion and thus recognizing its right to exist. Through a series of wide-ranging case studies Lewis explores the diversification of legitimation strategies of new religions as well the tactics that their critics use to de-legitimate such groups. Cases include the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, Native American prophet religions, spiritualism, the Church of Christ-Scientist, Scientology, Church of Satan, Heaven's Gate, Unitarianism, Hindu reform movements, and Soka Gakkai, a new Buddhist sect.

Since many of the issues raised with respect to newer religions can be extended to the legitimation strategies deployed by established religions, this book sheds an intriguing new light on classic questions about the origin of all religions.

cover of Leisure and Death: An Anthropological Tour of Risk, Death, and Dying

Leisure and Death

An Anthropological Tour of Risk, Death, and Dying

Adam Kaul

University Press of Colorado, 2018

This anthropological study examines the relationship between leisure and death, specifically how leisure practices are used to meditate upon—and mediate—life. Considering travelers who seek enjoyment but encounter death and dying, tourists who accidentally face their own mortality while vacationing, those who intentionally seek out pleasure activities that pertain to mortality and risk, and those who use everyday leisure practices like social media or dogwalking to cope with death, Leisure and Death delves into one of the most provocative subsets of contemporary cultural anthropology.

These nuanced and well-developed ethnographic case studies deal with different and distinct examples of the intertwining of leisure and death. They challenge established conceptions of leisure and rethink the associations attached to the prospect of death. Chapters testify to encounters with death on a personal and scholarly level, exploring, for example, the Cliffs of Moher as not only one of the most popular tourist destinations in Ireland but one of the most well-known suicide destinations as well, and the estimated 30 million active posthumous Facebook profiles being repurposed through proxy users and transformed by continued engagement with the living. From the respectful to the fascinated, from the macabre to the morbid, contributors consider how people deliberately, or unexpectedly, negotiate the borderlands of the living.

An engaging, timely book that explores how spaces of death can be transformed into spaces of leisure, Leisure and Death makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary literature on leisure studies and dark tourism. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and laypeople interested in tourism studies, death studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, anthropology, sociology, and marketing.

Contributors: Kathleen M. Adams, Michael Arnold, Jane Desmond, Keith Egan, Maribeth Erb, James Fernandez, Martin Gibbs, Rachel Horner-Brackett, Shingo Iitaka, Tamara Kohn, Patrick Laviolette, Ruth McManus, James Meese, Bjorn Nansen, Stravoula Pipyrou, Hannah Rumble, Cyril Schafer

cover of Lend Me Your Ear

Lend Me Your Ear

Brenda Jo Brueggemann

Gallaudet University Press, 1999

The tradition of rhetoric established 2,500 years ago emphasizes the imperative of speech as a defining characteristic of reason. But in her new book Lend Me Your Ear, Brenda Jo Brueggemann exposes this tradition’s effect of disallowing deaf people human identity because of their natural silence.

Brueggemann’s assault upon this long-standing rhetorical conceit is both erudite and personal; she writes both as a scholar and as a hard-of-hearing woman. In this broadly based study, she presents a profound analysis and understanding of this rhetorical tradition’s descendent disciplines (e.g., audiology, speech/language pathology) that continue to limit deaf people. Next to this even-handed scholarship, she juxtaposes a volatile emotional counterpoint achieved through interviews with Deaf individuals who have faced rhetorically constructed restrictions, and interludes of her own poetry and memoirs.

The energized structure of Lend Me Your Ear galvanizes new thought on the rhetoric surrounding Deaf people by posing basic questions from a rhetorical context: How is deafness constructed as a disability, pathology, or culture through the institutions of literacy education and science/technology, and how do these constructions fit with those of deaf people themselves? The rhetoric of deafness as pathology is associated with the conventional medical and scientific establishments, and literacy education fosters deafness as disability, both dependent upon the premise that speech drives communication. This kinetic study demands consideration of deafness in terms of the rhetoric of Deaf culture, American Sign Language (ASL), and the political activism of Deaf people. Brueggemann argues strenuously and successfully for a reevaluation of the speech model of rhetoric in light of the singular qualities of ASL poetry, a genre that adds the dimension of space and is not disembodied. Ironically, without a word being spoken or printed, ASL poetry returns to the fading, prized oral tradition of poets such as Homer. The speech imperative in traditional rhetoric also fails to present rhetorical forms for listening, or a rhetoric of silence. These and other break-out concepts introduced in Lend Me Your Ear that will stimulate scholars and students of rhetoric, language, and Deaf studies to return to this intriguing work again and again.

cover of Leon Forrest: Introductions and Interpretations

Leon Forrest

Introductions and Interpretations

John G. Cawelti

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

The four novels of Leon Forrest are one of the major glories of contemporary African-American fiction. From the intense inwardness of There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden to the epic comedy of Divine Days, Forrest's work presents a vision of African-American culture which is unique in its complexity and depth.

cover of Les Guerilleres

Les Guerilleres

Monique Wittig. Translated from the French by David Le Vay

University of Illinois Press, 2007

One of the most widely read feminist texts of the twentieth century, and Monique Wittig’s most popular novel, Les Guérillères imagines the attack on the language and bodies of men by a tribe of warrior women. Among the women’s most powerful weapons in their assault is laughter, but they also threaten literary and linguistic customs of the patriarchal order with bullets. In this breathtakingly rapid novel first published in 1969, Wittig animates a lesbian society that invites all women to join their fight, their circle, and their community. A path-breaking novel about creating and sustaining freedom, the book derives much of its energy from its vaunting of the female body as a resource for literary invention.

cover of Lesbian & Bisexual Identities

Lesbian & Bisexual Identities

Kristin G. Esterberg

Temple University Press, 1997

This book examines the stories of lesbian and bisexual women in a Northeast community who share who they are, how they have come to see themselves as lesbian or bisexual, and what those identities mean to them. Drawing on social constructionist approaches to identity, Kristin G. Esterberg argues that identities are multiple and contingent. Created within the context of specific communities and within specific relationships, lesbian and bisexual identities are ways of sorting through experiences of desires and attractions, relationships, and politics. Their meanings change over time as women grow older and have more varied experiences, as the communities and sociopolitical worlds in which they live change, and as their life circumstances alter.

In interviews conducted over a four-year time period, women describe the lesbian community they live in; how they see its structure, its social groups, its informal rules and norms for behavior; and their places inside -- or on the margins of -- the community. Lesbian and Bisexual Identities reveals how women fall in and out of love, how they "perform" lesbian or bisexual identity through clothing, hairstyle, body language, and talk, and many other aspects typically not considered. The women present a variety of accounts. Some consider themselves "lesbian from birth" and have constructed their lives accordingly, while others have experienced significant shifts in their identities, depending on the influences of feminism, progressive politics, the visibility of the lesbian community, and other factors.

Esterberg offers vivid accounts that defy the stereotypes so commonly offered. Lesbian and Bisexual Identities not only presents women's stories in their own words, it moves beyond storytelling to understand how these accounts resonate with social science theories of identity and community.

cover of Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger between Feminist and Queer

Lesbian Death

Desire and Danger between Feminist and Queer

Mairead Sullivan

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

Engaging with fears of lesbian death to explore the value of lesbian beyond identity

The loss of lesbian spaces, as well as ideas of the lesbian as anachronistic has called into question the place of lesbian identity within our current culture. In Lesbian Death, Mairead Sullivan probes the perception that lesbian status is in retreat, exploring the political promises—and especially the failures—of lesbian feminism and its usefulness today.

Lesbian Death reads how lesbian is conceptualized in relation to death from the 1970s onward to argue that lesbian offers disruptive potential. Lesbian Death examines the rise of lesbian breast cancer activism in San Francisco in conversation with ACT UP, the lesbian separatist manifestos “The C.L.I.T. Papers,” the enduring specter of lesbian bed death, and the weaponization of lesbian identity against trans lives.

By situating the lesbian as a border figure between feminist and queer, Lesbian Death offers a fresh perspective on the value of lesbian for both feminist and queer projects, even if her value is her death.

cover of Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties

Lesbian Empire

Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties

Gay Wachman

Rutgers University Press, 2001

Gay Wachman provides a critical new reading of sexually radical fiction by British women in the years during and after the First World War. She contrasts works by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, Rose Allatini, and Evadne Price with more politically and narratively conservative novels by Radclyffe Hall and Clemence Dane. These writers, she states, formed part of an alternative modernist tradition that functioned both within and against the repressive ideology of the British Empire, using fantasy as a means of reshaping and critiquing a world fragmented by war.

Wachman places at the center of this tradition Sylvia Townsend Warner's achievement in undermining the inhibitions that faced women writing about forbidden love. She discusses Warner's use of crosswriting to transpose the otherwise unrepresentable lives of invisible lesbians into narratives about gay men, destabilizing the borders of race, class, and gender and challenging the codes of expression on which imperialist patriarchy and capitalism depended.

cover of Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s

Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s

Jed Samer

Duke University Press, 2022

In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Jed Samer explores how 1970s feminists took up the figure of the lesbian in broad attempts to reimagine gender and sexuality. Samer turns to feminist film, video, and science fiction literature, offering a historiographical concept called “lesbian potentiality”—a way of thinking beyond what the lesbian was, in favor of how the lesbian signified what could have come to be. Samer shows how the labor of feminist media workers and fans put lesbian potentiality into movement. They see lesbian potentiality in feminist prison documentaries that theorize the prison industrial complex’s racialized and gendered violence and give image to Black feminist love politics and freedom dreaming. Lesbian potentiality also circulates through the alternative spaces created by feminist science fiction and fantasy fanzines like The Witch and the Chameleon and Janus. It was here that author James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon felt free to do gender differently and inspired many others to do so in turn. Throughout, Samer embraces the perpetual reimagination of “lesbian” and the lesbian’s former futures for the sake of continued, radical world-building.

cover of Lesbian Psychologies: EXPLORATIONS AND CHALLENGES

Lesbian Psychologies

EXPLORATIONS AND CHALLENGES

Edited by the Boston Lesbian Psychologies Collective

University of Illinois Press, 1987

This bestselling pioneering anthology brings together a diverse group of twenty-six feminist writers, therapists and academics. Their work represents a beginning effort to capture the experience of contemporary American lesbians. Writing about their own lives as well as the lives of the women they have observed and counseled, the authors explore four topics central to building a lesbian psychology: identity, relationships, community, and therapy.

cover of Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation

Lesbian Rabbis

The First Generation

Rebecca T. Alpert, Sue Levi Elwell, and Shirley Idelson

Rutgers University Press, 2001

The office of rabbi is the most visible symbol of power and prestige in Jewish communities. Rabbis both interpret to their congregations the requirements of Jewish life and instruct congregants in how best to live this life.

Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation documents a monumental change in Jewish life as eighteen lesbian rabbis reflect on their experiences as trailblazers in Judaism's journey into an increasingly multicultural world. In frank and revealing essays, the contributors discuss their decisions to become rabbis and describe their experiences both at the seminaries and in their rabbinical positions. They also reflect on the dilemma whether to conceal or reveal their sexual identities to their congregants and superiors, or to serve specifically gay and lesbian congregations. The contributors consider the tensions between lesbian identity and Jewish identity, and inquire whether there are particularly "lesbian" readings of traditional texts. These essays also ask how the language of Jewish tradition touches the lives of lesbians and how lesbianism challenges traditional notions of the Jewish family.

"'Today I am completely 'out' personally and professionally, and yet I have learned that the 'coming out' process never ends. Even today, I find myself in professional situations in which yet again I must reveal that I am a lesbian, yet again I must prove myself worthy of functioning professionally in the 'straight' world. I still encounter moments of awkwardness, some hostility, and some sense of exclusion as I negotiate the pathways of my professional life."-Rabbi Leila Gal Berner, from Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation

cover of Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire

Lesbian Rule

Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire

Amy Villarejo

Duke University Press, 2003

With hair slicked back and shirt collar framing her young patrician face, Katherine Hepburn's image in the 1935 film Sylvia Scarlett was seen by many as a lesbian representation. Yet, Amy Villarejo argues, there is no final ground upon which to explain why that image of Hepburn signifies lesbian or why such a cross-dressing Hollywood fantasy edges into collective consciousness as a lesbian narrative. Investigating what allows viewers to perceive an image or narrative as "lesbian," Villarejo presents a theoretical exploration of lesbian visibility. Focusing on images of lesbians in film, she analyzes what these representations contain and their limits. She combines Marxist theories of value with poststructuralist insights to argue that lesbian visibility operates simultaneously as an achievement and a ruse, a possibility for building a new visual politics and away of rendering static and contained what lesbian might mean.

Integrating cinema studies, queer and feminist theory, and cultural studies, Villarejo illuminates the contexts within which the lesbian is rendered visible. Toward that end, she analyzes key portrayals of lesbians in public culture, particularly in documentary film. She considers a range of films—from documentaries about Cuba and lesbian pulp fiction to Exile Shanghai and The Brandon Teena Story—and, in doing so, brings to light a nuanced economy of value and desire.

cover of Lesbian Trouble: Feminism, Heterosexuality, and the French Women's Liberation Movement

Lesbian Trouble

Feminism, Heterosexuality, and the French Women's Liberation Movement

Ilana Eloit

Duke University Press, 2027

In Lesbian Trouble, Ilana Eloit uncovers the lost history of lesbian exclusion at the heart of the French Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF). Challenging decades of narratives claiming that French second-wave feminism embraced female homosexuality, Eloit demonstrates that the MLF was fundamentally inhospitable to lesbianism—and, particularly, to its lesbian cofounder Monique Wittig. Combining queer, postcolonial, and affect theories with deconstructive readings of the feminist archive and oral interviews, Eloit recovers buried controversies on lesbianism and explains the importance of Wittig’s exile to the United States in 1976 for North American queer theory. Featuring dozens of rarely seen photographs documenting lesbian activism, Eloit’s critical history traces an unexpected feminist genealogy of contemporary French conservatism that illuminates ongoing debates on gender, race, and sexuality, showing how these aspects of MLF history continue to haunt feminist and universalist politics today.

cover of Lesbians in Early Modern Spain

Lesbians in Early Modern Spain

Sherry Velasco

Vanderbilt University Press, 2011

In this first in-depth study of female homosexuality in the Spanish Empire for the period from 1500 to 1800, Velasco presents a multitude of riveting examples that reveal widespread contemporary interest in women's intimate relations with other women. Her sources include literary and historical texts featuring female homoeroticism, tracts on convent life, medical treatises, civil and Inquisitional cases, and dramas. She has also uncovered a number of revealing illustrations from the period.

The women in these accounts, stories, and cases range from internationally famous transgendered celebrities to lesbian criminals, from those suspected of "special friendships" in the convent to ordinary villagers.

Velasco argues that the diverse and recurrent representations of lesbian desire provide compelling evidence of how different groups perceived intimacy between women as more than just specific sex acts. At times these narratives describe complex personal relationships and occasionally characterize these women as being of a certain "type," suggesting an early modern precursor to what would later be recognized as divergent lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities.

cover of Lesbians on Television: New Queer Visibility & the Lesbian Normal

Lesbians on Television

New Queer Visibility & the Lesbian Normal

Kate McNicholas Smith

Intellect Books, 2020

A look at the emergence of queer women characters in popular storytelling and the wide-ranging effects of this mainstream representation.

The twenty-first century has seen LGBTQ+ rights emerge at the forefront of public discourse and national politics in ways that would once have been hard to imagine. In Lesbians on Television, Kate McNicholas Smith maps concurrent contemporary shifts in lesbian visibility within popular media, focusing on the small screens of Europe and North America. Central to these shifts has been a re-imagining of queer lives—or a “new queer visibility”—as LGBTQ+ characters have become increasingly visible within popular culture. Kate McNicholas Smith explores this increased visibility through the lens of television, and in doing so, she identifies a “new lesbian normal”—a normalization of lesbian subjects that both helps and hinders those it represents.

Structured around five central case studies of popular British and American television shows featuring lesbian, bisexual, and queer women characters—The L Word, Skins, Glee, Coronation Street, and The Fosters—the book develops a detailed analysis of the shaping of a new “lesbian normal” through representations of LGBTQ+ figures and examines their televisual representation and reception. Presenting critical queer and feminist theory alongside empirical research that includes interviews and multi-platform media analyses, McNicholas Smith works to untangle the social, political, and cultural implications of new visibility in a period of significant social change in the LGBTQ+ experience.

cover of Lesser Harms: The Morality of Risk in Medical Research

Lesser Harms

The Morality of Risk in Medical Research

Sydney A. Halpern

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Research physicians face intractable dilemmas when they consider introducing new medical procedures. Innovations carry the promise of preventing or curing life-threatening diseases, but they can also lead to injury or even death. How have clinical scientists made high-stakes decisions about undertaking human tests of new medical treatments? In Lesser Harms, Sydney Halpern explores this issue as she examines vaccine trials in America during the early and mid-twentieth century.

Today's scientists follow federal guidelines for research on human subjects developed during the 1960s and 1970s. But long before these government regulations, medical investigators observed informal rules when conducting human research. They insisted that the dangers of natural disease should outweigh the risks of a medical intervention, and they struggled to accurately assess the relative hazards. Halpern explores this logic of risk in immunization controversies extending as far back as the eighteenth century. Then, focusing on the period between 1930 and 1960, she shows how research physicians and their sponsors debated the moral quandaries involved in moving vaccine use from the laboratory to the clinic.

This probing work vividly describes the efforts of clinical investigators to balance the benefits and dangers of untested vaccines, to respond to popular sentiment about medical hazards, and to strategically present risk laden research to sponsors and the public.

“Concise and extremely well-written. . . . A fascinating synthesis of sociology, history, and institutional theory.”—Samuel C. Blackman, Journal of the American Medical Association

cover of Lesson Plans: The Institutional Demands of Becoming a Teacher

Lesson Plans

The Institutional Demands of Becoming a Teacher

Everitt, Judson G.

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Winner of the 2019-20 Distinguished Book Award - Midwest Sociological Society

In Lesson Plans, Judson G. Everitt takes readers into the everyday worlds of teacher training, and reveals the complexities and dilemmas teacher candidates confront as they learn how to perform a job that many people assume anybody can do. Using rich qualitative data, Everitt analyzes how people make sense of their prospective jobs as teachers, and how their introduction to this profession is shaped by the institutionalized rules and practices of higher education, K-12 education, and gender. Trained to constantly adapt to various contingencies that routinely arise in schools and classrooms, teacher candidates learn that they must continually try to reconcile the competing expectations of their jobs to meet students’ needs in an era of accountability. Lesson Plans reveals how institutions shape the ways we produce teachers, and how new teachers make sense of the multiple and complicated demands they face in their efforts to educate students.

cover of Lessons and Legacies XIV: The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century; Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age

Lessons and Legacies XIV

The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century; Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age

Edited and with an introduction by Tim Cole and Simone Gigliotti

Northwestern University Press, 2021

The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age challenges a number of key themes in Holocaust studies with new research. Essays in the section “Tropes Reconsidered” reevaluate foundational concepts such as Primo Levi’s gray zone and idea of the muselmann. The chapters in “Survival Strategies and Obstructions” use digital methodologies to examine mobility and space and their relationship to hiding, resistance, and emigration. Contributors to the final section, “Digital Methods, Digital Memory,” offer critical reflections on the utility of digital methods in scholarly, pedagogic, and public engagement with the Holocaust.

Although the chapters differ markedly in their embrace or eschewal of digital methods, they share several themes: a preoccupation with the experiences of persecution, escape, and resistance at different scales (individual, group, and systemic); methodological innovation through the adoption and tracking of micro- and mezzohistories of movement and displacement; varied approaches to the practice of Saul Friedländer’s “integrated history”; the mainstreaming of oral history; and the robust application of micro- and macrolevel approaches to the geographies of the Holocaust. Taken together, these chapters incorporate gender analysis, spatial thinking, and victim agency into Holocaust studies. In so doing, they move beyond existing notions of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders to portray the Holocaust as a complex and multilayered event.

cover of Lessons from "Take Me Home, Country Roads": Identity, (Be)Longing, and Imagined Landscapes

Lessons from "Take Me Home, Country Roads"

Identity, (Be)Longing, and Imagined Landscapes

Sarah L. Morris

West Virginia University Press, 2025

You may have heard it at a football game, in an advertisement, or on the radio on a road trip far from home. You may have sung along on a rooftop in Thailand, at Oktoberfest in Belgium, or with a Japanese cover band. It may have moved you to dance at a wedding or cry at a funeral. Regardless of where it plays, the song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is ubiquitous, unmistakable, universal. Written and recorded by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert, and John Denver in 1971, the song continues to resonate across cultures and audiences, carrying meaning beyond naming and inviting transformation for a range of rhetorical purposes in nearly 300 recorded English versions and in more than 20 languages.

This book examines “Country Roads” as it illuminates a universal sense of belonging to place even as it obscures the literality of the place it names. In examining “Country Roads” as anthem, text, artifact, and rhetoric, this work untangles ideas related to place, belonging, identity, and pedagogy. Sarah L. Morris uses the Welsh term hiraeth, which is an existential longing for an idealized, sometimes imaginary home, as a governing framework for this work. She explores the song in various contexts, such as how it pertains to West Virginia geography and heritage and the diversity of these beliefs, external perceptions of the state, concepts of home and belonging, and the song as a phenomenon across different media platforms. “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” while being about West Virginia, has registered as a global phenomenon.

cover of Lessons from East Asia

Lessons from East Asia

Danny M. Leipziger, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2001

This compilation of case studies and cross-country essays focuses on the role of public policy in the experience of East Asian economies. A major theme running through the volume is regional learning and regional contagion -- the spread of that learning. Beginning with the model and experience of Japan and continuing with the impressive achievements of countries originally considered unviable in the 1950s and 1960s, like Korea and Taiwan, contributors demonstrate how regional policy lessons permeated borders easily. The 1980s brought further lessons and flows of capital to the second generation of rapid industrializers. And the 1990s have seen regional contagion benefit new aspirants like Vietnam. As the chapters cumulatively reveal, however, the transferability of lessons depends on the institutional framework in which policy is formulated, the consistency of policy, and the quality of implementation. Part 1 includes the case studies for the first generation of rapidly developing East Asian economics -- the tigers -- while Part 2 incorporates the later generation success stories -- the cubs -- plus the Philippines, a country only now beginning to show significant progress. Part 3 includes cross-country essays on public investment, foreign direct investment, and cross-country patterns that synthesize the lessons learned and propose actions for other development aspirants to pursue. The essays aim to fill two major gaps -- the paucity of country-specific work on the institutional side of development policy and the failure to explain the mixed record of industrial policies in East Asia. The volume will appeal to students, scholars, and policymakers in development economics. This title was formally part of the Studies in International Trade Policy Series, now called Studies in International Economics.

cover of Lessons from Little Rock

Lessons from Little Rock

Terrance Roberts

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2009

Sober news reports of a U.S. Army convoy rumbling across the bridge into Little Rock cannot overpower this intimate, powerful, personal account of the integration of Little Rock Central High School. Showing what it felt like to be one of those nine students who wanted only a good high school education, Roberts’s rich narrative and candid voice take readers through that rocky year, helping us realize that the historic events of the Little Rock integration crisis happened to real people—to children, parents, our fellow citizens.

cover of Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer

Lessons from Sarajevo

A War Stories Primer

Jim Hicks

University of Massachusetts Press, 2013

In today's world, our television screens are filled with scenes from countless conflicts across the globe—commanding our attention and asking us to choose sides. In this insightful and wide-ranging book, Jim Hicks treats historical representation, and even history itself, as a text, asking questions such as Who is speaking?, Who is the audience?, and What are the rules for this kind of talk? He argues that we must understand how war stories are told in order to arm ourselves against them. In a democracy, we are each responsible for policy decisions taken on our behalf. So it is imperative that we gain fluency in the diverse forms of representation (journalism, photography, fiction, memoir, comics, cinema) that bring war to us.

Hicks explores the limitations of the sentimental tradition in war representation and asks how the work of artists and writers can help us to move beyond the constraints of that tradition. Ranging from Walt Whitman's writings on the Civil War to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and focusing on the innovative and creative artistic expressions arising out of the wars of the former Yugoslavia, Hicks examines how war has been perceived, described, and interpreted. He analyzes the limitations on knowledge caused by perspective and narrative position and looks closely at the distinct yet overlapping roles of victims, observers, and aggressors. In the end, he concludes, war stories today should be valued according to the extent they make it impossible for us to see these positions as assigned in advance, and immutable.

cover of Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideophony, Dialogue, and Perspective

Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman

Ideophony, Dialogue, and Perspective

Janis B. Nuckolls

University of Arizona Press, 2010

Using the intriguing stories and words of a Quechua-speaking woman named Luisa Cadena from the Pastaza Province of Ecuador, Janis B. Nuckolls reveals a complex language system in which ideophony, dialogue, and perspective are all at the core of cultural and grammatical communications among Amazonian Quechua speakers.

This book is a fascinating look at ideophones—words that communicate succinctly through imitative sound qualities. They are at the core of Quechua speakers’ discourse—both linguistic and cultural—because they allow agency and reaction to substances and entities as well as beings. Nuckolls shows that Luisa Cadena’s utterances give every individual, major or minor, a voice in her narrative. Sometimes as subtle as a barely felt movement or unintelligible sound, the language supports an amazingly wide variety of voices.

Cadena’s narratives and commentaries on everyday events reveal that sound imitation through ideophones, representations of dialogues between humans and nonhumans, and grammatical distinctions between a speaking self and an other are all part of a language system that allows for the possibility of shared affects, intentions, moral values, and meaningful, communicative interactions between humans and nonhumans.

cover of Lessons from the Intersexed

Lessons from the Intersexed

Kessler, Suzanne J

Rutgers University Press, 1998

From the moment intersexuality-the condition of having physical gender markers (genitals, gonads, or chromosomes) that are neither clearly female nor male-is suspected and diagnosed, social institutions are mobilized in order to maintain the two seemingly objective sexual categories. Infants' bodies are altered, and what was "ambiguous" is made "normal." Kessler's interviews with pediatric surgeons and endocrinologists reveal how the intersex condition is normalized for parents and she argues that the way in which intersexuality is managed by the medical and psychological professions displays our culture's beliefs about gender and genitals.

Parents of intersexed children are rarely heard from, but in this book they provide another perspective on reasons for genital surgeries and the quality of medical and psychological management. Although physicians educate parents about how to think about their children's condition, Kessler learned from parents of intersexed children that some parents are able to accept atypical genitals. Based on analysis of the medical literature and interview with adults who had received treatment as interesexed children, Kessler proposes new approaches for physicians to use in talking with parents and children. She also evaluates the appearance of a politicized vanguard, many of who are promoting an intersexual identity, who seek to alter the way physicians respond to intersexuality.

Kessler explores the possibilities and implications of suspending a commitment to two "natural" genders and addresses gender destabilization issues arising from intersexuality. She thus compels readers to re-think the meaning of gender, genitals, and sexuality.

"This is a brave book. Kessler says things that need to be said, and she says them clearly, concisely, and with respect for the people whose lives are most affected by the questions she confronts. A must read for anyone concerned with intersex issues." --Holly Devor, author of Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality and FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society.

"While the physician's response to an infant with ambiguous genitalia has been to produce categories like the 'successful vagina' and the 'good enough penis,' Kessler takes her cues from intersexuals themselves. This book is a brilliant and long overdue call for the reevaluation of gender variability." --Judith Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity

"Fascinating in what it tells us not only about situation in which sex assignment is uncertain but about the astonishingly weak empirical foundations on which the medical orthodoxies of binary sex and gender are built. A must for anyone interested in the ways widely accepted social beliefs and scientific explanations generate and reinforce each other." --Ruth Hubbard, author of The Politics of Women's Biology and Exploding the Gene Myth

cover of Lessons in Drag: A Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties

Lessons in Drag

A Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties

Kareem Khubchandani with LaWhore Vagistan

Brandeis University Press, 2025

Scholarship and performance combine to show how drag can be a blueprint for critique, care, teaching, and worldmaking.

Lessons in Drag brings to life a vibrant and thought-provoking dialogue between scholar Kareem Khubchandani and his drag persona LaWhore Vagistan. Beginning with an intimate interview, the book unfolds in alternating chapters where the two exchange insights, stories, and critiques. Khubchandani delves into the lessons LaWhore’s drag practice offers about academia—shaping his approaches to research, teaching, and writing—while Vagistan reveals how Khubchandani’s scholarship influences her performances, inspiring her understanding of fashion, music, divas, and aunties. Together, their reflections and conversations weave a compelling tapestry of drag’s instructive power. Witty, bold, and deeply personal, Lessons in Drag is both an invitation to explore drag as a practice and a celebration of its transformative potential.

cover of Lessons in Leadership

Lessons in Leadership

Steve Adubato, PhD

Rutgers University Press, 2016

In this practical guide, Emmy Award-winning public broadcasting anchor Steve Adubato teaches readers to be self-aware, empathetic, and more effective leaders at work and at home. His powerful case studies spotlighting dozens of leaders—from Pope Francis to New Jersey governor Chris Christie—are complemented by concrete tips and tools based in real-life scenarios. With Lessons in Leadership, readers can learn to steer others through difficult economic times, to mentor rising leaders, to provide straight talk to underperforming employees, and even how to lead a company through a significant change.

cover of Lessons in Modern Hebrew: Level 1

Lessons in Modern Hebrew

Edna Amir Coffin

University of Michigan Press, 1977

A comprehensive introduction to modern Israeli Hebrew, Lessons in Modern Hebrew: Level I and Level II provide English-speaking students and well-motivated individuals with all the basic classroom tools necessary for mastery of the language. The lessons introduce the student to the core vocabulary which is then included in reading passages, conversational text, and written communication. All grammatical features of modern Hebrew are thoroughly explained and reinforced by drills and exercises. The books have been classroom-tested at the University of Michigan. Both audio-lingual and cognitive approaches are used.

cover of Lessons in Mortality: Doctors and Patients Struggling Together

Lessons in Mortality

Doctors and Patients Struggling Together

Allen B. Weisse, M.D.

University of Missouri Press, 2006

It doesn’t take a trip to the doctor to know that the bond between physicians and patients isn’t what it used to be. Specialization, rising costs, managed care, the insurance industry, the shadow of litigation—so many factors have changed what was once a traditional relationship grounded in respect and caring.

In light of the altered climate in health care, this thoughtful book deals with the way that today’s doctors and patients view themselves and one another. Allen Weisse has observed the changing medical scene during half a century of treating patients and training future physicians, and he writes frankly here about how doctors and patients have come to deal with illness in the twenty-first century.

Weisse first recalls his own brush with death as a young man diagnosed with testicular cancer—a time when one thinks of God and Death and little else. He then shares true stories of how different people have dealt with cancer, heart disease, stroke, infectious disease, AIDS, and other dire diagnoses—narratives enhanced by professional savvy and enriched by the kind of empathy that the survivor of such a calamity can provide.

Drawing from a storehouse of experiences shared by colleagues, patients, and friends, Weisse writes with passion, conviction, and clarity to encourage a renewal of the openness and trust that seem to be lacking in today’s doctor-patient relationships. These are accounts both uplifting and disturbing—some sad, others tinged with humor—intended to make doctors and patients alike come to a fuller realization that we are all together in this delicate but crucial business of staying alive.

While not quite foreseeing a return to the Norman Rockwell image of the family physician, Weisse urges the kind of care and compassion that patients often feel is lacking from their doctors, and he reassures victims of seemingly hopeless conditions that, despite the obstacles they often face, there are still health care professionals who truly have their patients’ welfare foremost in mind. Lessons in Mortality is just what the doctor ordered for a health care system in crisis: an honest look at the medical profession that encourages greater understanding on the part of both physicians and patients, reminding us that what we most need is one another.

cover of Lester Young

Lester Young

Lewis Porter

University of Michigan Press, 2005

Praise for Lester Young:

". . . a schematic of unparalleled insight and detail."
---Down Beat

"A monumental work."
---Dizzy Gillespie

". . . a major contribution to jazz scholarship . . . for its illumination of Lester Young's music and for setting the biographical record straight."
---Dan Morgenstern

Several new biographies of Lester Young have been published in the years since Lewis Porter's Lester Young first appeared, but none have supplanted or even attempted the in-depth study that Porter brings to his subject's music. With the same care and scholarship that characterized his John Coltrane, Porter analyzes the music that made Lester Young "the most original tenor sax in jazz."

In addition to helping us understand Lester Young's playing and stylistic evolution, Porter's analysis demonstrates that Young's playing at the end of his career did not mark a serious decline over his earlier style, as many critics have claimed.

cover of Let Me Live

Let Me Live

Angelo Herndon

University of Michigan Press, 2007

Let Me Live tells the remarkable story of Angelo Herndon, a coal miner who worked as a labor organizer in Alabama and Georgia in the 1930s. Herndon led a racially integrated march of the unemployed in 1932 and was subsequently arrested when Communist Party literature was found in his bedroom. His trial made only small headlines at first, but eventually an international campaign to free him emerged, thanks to the efforts of the Communist Party and of labor unions interested in protecting the right to organize in the South. Herndon was finally set free by the U.S. Supreme Court, with the help of well-known leaders including C. Vann Woodward, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Whitney North Seymour, Sr.

Written while Herndon was in prison, Let Me Live tells the story behind his arrest and his struggle through the courts. It also describes his early life as a young boy in poverty, as a laborer in the Kentucky mines, and as a construction gang worker and traces the birth and development of his passion for the Communist Party. Originally published in 1937, this is the first new edition of Let Me Live since 1969, when Howard N. Meyer rescued it from obscurity. The book features texts from the Georgia and U.S. Supreme Court decisions, the text of Herndon’s speech, and newspaper editorials from the era. A substantive and thought-provoking introduction by Marlon B. Ross of the University of Virginia sheds light on this unique story and its importance to our understanding of the intersection of race and class in America—past and present.

“A book which every thoughtful American may do well to read. It is moving and challenging as the story of one man’s life and the question of one man’s fate.”

—New York Times

cover of Let Me Take You Down: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever

Let Me Take You Down

Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever

Jonathan Cott

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

The conception, creation, recording, and significance of the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever”

John Lennon wrote “Strawberry Fields Forever” in Almería, Spain, in fall 1966, and in November, in response to that song, Paul McCartney wrote “Penny Lane” at his home in London. A culmination of what was one of the most life-altering and chaotic years in the Beatles’ career, these two songs composed the 1967 double A-side 45 rpm record that has often been called the greatest single in the history of popular music and was, according to Beatles producer George Martin, “the best record we ever made.”

In Let Me Take You Down: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, Jonathan Cott recounts the conception and creation of these songs; describes the tumultuous events and experiences that led the Beatles to call it quits as a touring band and redefine themselves solely as recording artists; and details the complex, seventy-hour recording process that produced seven minutes of indelible music. In writing about these songs, he also focuses on them as inspired artistic expressions of two unique ways of experiencing and being in the world, as Lennon takes us down to Strawberry Fields and McCartney takes us back to Penny Lane.

In order to gain new vistas and multiple perspectives on these multifaceted songs, Cott also engages in conversation with five remarkable people: media artist Laurie Anderson; guitarist Bill Frisell; actor Richard Gere; Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck; and urban planner, writer, and musician Jonathan F. P. Rose. The result is a wide-ranging, illuminating exploration of the musical, literary, psychological, cultural, and spiritual aspects of two of the most acclaimed songs in rock and roll history.

cover of Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora

Let Me Tell You Where I've Been

New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora

Persis M. Karim

University of Arkansas Press, 2006

Until recently, Iranian literature has overwhelmingly been the domain of men. But the new hybrid culture of diaspora Iranians has produced a prolific literature by women that reflects a unique perspective and voice. Let Me Tell You Where I've Been is an extensive collection of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by women whose lives have been shaped and influenced by Iran's recent history, exile, immigration and the formation of new cultural identities in the United States and Europe. These writings represent an emerging and multi-cultural female sensibility. Unlike many flat media portrayals of Iranian women—as veiled, silenced—these writers offer a complex literary view of Iranian culture and its influences. These writers interrogate, challenge, and re-define notions of home and language and their work offers readers an experience of Iranian diaspora culture. Featuring over one hundred selections (two-thirds of which have never been published before) by more than fifty contributors--including such well-known writers as Gelareh Asayesh, Tara Bahrampour, Firoozeh Dumas, Roya Hakakian and Mimi Khalvati--the collection represents a substantial diversity of voices in this multicultural community. Divided into six sections, the book's themes of exile, family, culture resistance, and love, create a rich and textured view of the Iranian diaspora. The poems, short stories, and essays are suggestive of an important conversation about Iran, Iranian culture, the Persian and English languages, and the dual identities of many of its authors. This powerful collection is a tribute to the wisdom, insight, and sensitivity of women attempting to invent and articulate a literature of in-betweenness.

cover of Let Something Good Be Said: Speeches and Writings of Frances E. Willard

Let Something Good Be Said

Speeches and Writings of Frances E. Willard

Frances E. Willard. Edited by Carolyn De Swarte Gifford and Amy R. Slagell

University of Illinois Press, 2007

The definitive collection of speeches and writings of one of America's most important social reformers

Celebrated as the most famous woman in America at the time of her death in 1898, Frances E. Willard was a leading nineteenth-century American temperance and women's rights reformer and a powerful orator. President of Evanston College for Ladies (before it merged with Northwestern University) and then professor of rhetoric and aesthetics and the first dean of women at Northwestern, Willard is best known for leading the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), America's largest women's organization. The WCTU shaped both domestic and international opinion on major political, economic, and social reform issues, including temperance, women's rights, and the rising labor movement. In what Willard regarded as her most important and far-reaching reform, she championed a new ideal of a powerful, independent womanhood and encouraged women to become active agents of social change. Willard's reputation as a powerful reformer reached its height with her election as president of the National Council of Women in 1888.

This definitive collection follows Willard's public reform career, providing primary documents as well as the historical context necessary to clearly demonstrate her skill as a speaker and writer who addressed audiences as diverse as political conventions, national women's organizations, teen girls, state legislators, church groups, and temperance advocates. Including Willard's representative speeches and published writings on everything from temperance and women's rights to the new labor movement and Christian socialism, Let Something Good Be Said is the first volume to collect the messages of one of America's most important social reformers who inspired a generation of women to activism.

cover of Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity

Let Them Eat Junk

How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity

Robert Albritton

Pluto Press, 2009

Respected economist Robert Albritton argues that the capitalist system, far from delivering on the promise of cheap, nutritious food for all, has created a world where 25% of the world population are over-fed and 25% are hungry. This malnourishment of 50% of the world's population is explained systematically, a refreshing change from accounts that focus on cultural factors and individual greed. Albritton details the economic relations and connections that have put us in a situation of simultaneous oversupply and undersupply of food.

This explosive book provides yet more evidence that the human cost of capitalism is much bigger than those in power will admit.

cover of Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark

Let There Be Night

Testimony on Behalf of the Dark

Paul Bogard

University of Nevada Press, 2008

The development of the modern world has brought with it rampant light pollution, destroying the ancient mystery of night and exacting a terrible price--wasted energy, damage to human health, and the sometimes fatal interruption of the life patterns of many species of wildlife. In Let There Be Night, twenty-nine writers, scientists, poets, and scholars share their personal experiences of night and help us to understand what we miss when dark skies and nocturnal wildness vanish. They also propose ways by which we might restore the beneficence of true night skies to our cities and our culture. Let There Be Night is an engaging examination, both intimate and enlightening, of a precious aspect of the natural world. The diverse voices and perceptions gathered here provide a statement of hope that he ancient magic of night can be returned to our lives.

cover of Let Us Alone: The Origins of Baltimore's Police State

Let Us Alone

The Origins of Baltimore's Police State

Michael Casiano

University of Illinois Press, 2025

By the early twentieth century, postbellum assaults on civil rights and the advent of Jim Crow expanded Baltimore’s law enforcement into a vast network designed to oppress Black people. Michael Casiano’s history charts the institutional consolidation of the city’s post–Civil War police state. Authorities in Baltimore organized and established municipal power in distinct but connected sites that included jails, areas of political and social activism, public schools, street corners, courtrooms, and homes. Casiano analyzes policing in light of two parallel and inextricable realities of the city’s governance. First, policing evolved from an inefficient and vigilante-driven system into a modern and paramilitary endeavor focused on suppressing citizens and maximizing the power, wealth, and reach of capitalists. Second, decades of racial antagonism shaped Baltimore policing into an apparatus primarily oriented around subduing Black freedom. A compelling urban history, Let Us Alone uses voices from all levels of society to examine police power, incarceration, and the perils of being Black in post–Civil War Baltimore.

cover of Lethal Decisions: The Unnecessary Deaths of Women and Children from HIV/AIDS

Lethal Decisions

The Unnecessary Deaths of Women and Children from HIV/AIDS

Arthur J. Ammann

Vanderbilt University Press, 2017

This first-person account by one of the pioneers of HIV/AIDS research chronicles the interaction among the pediatric HIV/AIDS community, regulatory bodies, governments, and activists over more than three decades. After the discovery of AIDS in a handful of infants in 1981, the next fifteen years showed remarkable scientific progress in prevention and treatment, although blood banks, drug companies, and bureaucrats were often slow to act. 1996 was a watershed year when scientific and clinical HIV experts called for treating all HIV-infected individuals with potent triple combinations of antiretroviral drugs that had been proven effective. Aggressive implementation of prevention and treatment in the United States led to marked declines in the number of HIV-related deaths, fewer new infections and hospital visits, and fewer than one hundred infants born infected each year.

Inexplicably, the World Health Organization recommended withholding treatment for the majority of HIV-infected individuals in poor countries, and clinical researchers embarked on studies to evaluate inferior treatment approaches even while the pandemic continued to claim the lives of millions of women and children. Why did it take an additional twenty years for international health organizations to recommend the treatment and prevention measures that had had such a profound impact on the pandemic in wealthy countries? The surprising answers are likely to be debated by medical historians and ethicists.

At last, in 2015, came a universal call for treating all HIV-infected individuals with triple-combination antiretroviral drugs. But this can only be accomplished if the mistakes of the past are rectified. The book ends with recommendations on how the pediatric HIV/AIDS epidemic can finally be brought to an end.

cover of Lethal Injection: Capital Punishment in Texas during the Modern Era

Lethal Injection

Capital Punishment in Texas during the Modern Era

By Jon Sorensen and Rocky LeAnn Pilgrim

University of Texas Press, 2006

Few state issues have attracted as much controversy and national attention as the application of the death penalty in Texas. In the years since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Texas has led the nation in passing death sentences and executing prisoners. The vigor with which Texas has implemented capital punishment has, however, raised more than a few questions. Why has Texas been so fervent in pursuing capital punishment? Has an aggressive death penalty produced any benefits? Have dangerous criminals been deterred? Have rights been trampled in the process and, most importantly, have innocents been executed? These important questions form the core of Lethal Injection: Capital Punishment in Texas during the Modern Era.

This book is the first comprehensive empirical study of Texas's system of capital punishment in the modern era. Jon Sorensen and Rocky Pilgrim use a wealth of information gathered from formerly confidential prisoner records and a variety of statistical sources to test and challenge traditional preconceptions concerning racial bias, deterrence, guilt, and the application of capital punishment in this state. The results of their balanced analysis may surprise many who have followed the recent debate on this important issue.

cover of Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South

Lethal Punishment

Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South

Vandiver, Margaret

Rutgers University Press, 2005

Why did some offenses in the South end in mob lynchings while similar crimes led to legal executions? Why did still other cases have nonlethal outcomes? In this well-researched and timely book, Margaret Vandiver explores the complex relationship between these two forms of lethal punishment, challenging the assumption that executions consistently grew out of-and replaced-lynchings.

Vandiver begins by examining the incidence of these practices in three culturally and geographically distinct southern regions. In rural northwest Tennessee, lynchings outnumbered legal executions by eleven to one and many African Americans were lynched for racial caste offenses rather than for actual crimes. In contrast, in Shelby County, which included the growing city of Memphis, more men were legally executed than lynched. Marion County, Florida, demonstrated a firmly entrenched tradition of lynching for sexual assault that ended in the early 1930s with three legal death sentences in quick succession.

With a critical eye to issues of location, circumstance, history, and race, Vandiver considers the ways that legal and extralegal processes imitated, influenced, and differed from each other. A series of case studies demonstrates a parallel between mock trials that were held by lynch mobs and legal trials that were rushed through the courts and followed by quick executions.

Tying her research to contemporary debates over the death penalty, Vandiver argues that modern death sentences, like lynchings of the past, continue to be influenced by factors of race and place, and sentencing is comparably erratic.

cover of Letras y Limpias: Decolonial Medicine and Holistic Healing in Mexican American Literature

Letras y Limpias

Decolonial Medicine and Holistic Healing in Mexican American Literature

Amanda Ellis

University of Arizona Press, 2021

Letras y Limpias is the first book to explore the literary significance of the figure of the curandera within Mexican American literature. Amanda Ellis traces the significance of the curandera and her evolution across a variety of genres written by leading Mexican American authors, including Américo Paredes, Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Manuel Munoz, ire’ne lara silva, and more.

Ellis explores the curandera in relationship to decoloniality, bioethics, and the topic of healing while recognizing the limitations and spiritual shortcomings of Western medicine. Ellis argues that our contemporary western health-care system does not know how to fully grapple with illnesses that patients face. Ellis reads the curandera’s perennial representation as an ongoing example of decolonial love useful for deconstructing narrow definitions of health and personhood, and for grappling with the effects of neoliberalism and colonialism on the health-care industry.

Letras y Limpias draws from Chicana feminist theory to assert the importance of the mindbodyspirit connection. Ellis conveys theoretical insights about the continual reimagining of the figure of the curandera as a watermark across Mexican American literary texts. This literary figure points to the oppressive forces that create susto and reminds us that healing work requires specific attention to colonialism, its legacy, and an intentional choice to carry forward the traditional practices rooted in curanderismo passed on from prior generations. By turning toward the figure of the curandera, readers are better poised to challenge prevailing ideas about health, and imagine ways to confront the ongoing problems that coloniality creates. Letras y Limpias shows how the figure of the curandera offers us ways to heal that have nothing to do with copays or medical professionals refusing care, and everything to do with honoring the beauty and complexity of any, every, and all humans.

Publisher Login

Readers

Browse our collection.

Publishers

See BiblioVault's publisher services.

Student Services

Files for college accessibility offices.

Search

ADVANCED SEARCH

Browse

by TOPIC by BISAC Subject by LOC Subject by AUTHOR by PUBLISHER WANDER RANDOM TOPIC ABOUT BIBLIOVAULT EBOOK FULFILLMENT CONTACT US

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Loading...