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Madison: Portraits of Our Neighbors, a photography book and living historical document of a unique Tennessee community, is the result of an artistic partnership between internationally recognized photographer Stacie Huckeba and Madison, Tennessee, community volunteer Laura Jo Amaral. This book captures the heart of the people who contribute to the Madison community as it is today, through portraits of a range of its citizens—a world-class bass player, a nonagenarian cattle farmer, a TikTok celebrity, a singer-songwriter, a mariachi band, the personal photographer for Johnny Cash, a beloved gymnastics coach, model airplane enthusiasts, educators, a fashion designer, a puppet enthusiast, a pastor and outreach worker, and an array of artists, small business owners, farmers, and local legends. Beyond a collection of portraits, it is a testament to an enduring urban community, a celebration of the shared human experience, and a reminder to see our neighbors in their best light. Madison: Portraits of Our Neighbors invites readers to celebrate the tapestry of humanity that weaves through this distinctive neighborhood.

This book is the recipient of the 2026 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.

This second volume in the acclaimed illustrated civic history of Madison, Wisconsin, tells the story of this iconic midwestern city in the middle years of the twentieth century. Like the rest of America in this period, Madison was buffeted by a boom-and-bust economy, hot and cold wars abroad, and social and cultural changes on the homefront. Stuart D. Levitan, a mainstay of Madison media and government since 1975, offers a decade-by-decade visual and narrative account of the city’s transformation—as well as that of its major public university. Featuring hundreds of illustrations, this volume also highlights the local legends and luminaries who shaped the city, from bootleggers to world-famous architects to radicals and revolutionaries.

This engaging illustrated history, full of photographs, maps, and bird’s-eye views, captures Madison’s early history from its first days as a city to the Great Depression. Biographical vignettes tell the stories of early movers and shakers in the city. The volume includes many archival images of Madison that have never been published or have not been seen for a century or more.

This volume presents the first visual history of the people and organizations that led the fight for change during the civil rights era in Los Angeles.

During a 1963 speech to a crowd of nearly forty thousand at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the question of how Angelenos could contribute to the civil rights movement: “The most important thing that you can do is to set Los Angeles free, because you have segregation and discrimination here, and police brutality.”

Marching West illuminates the dynamic history of civil rights activism in Los Angeles and explores how the medium of photography both witnessed and advanced the fight for Black equality. Over one hundred images, some of which have never been previously published, reveal connections between the local and national movements and document the actions of Western coalitions, religious leaders, Hollywood stars, and concerned citizens. Drawn from the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), the Getty Research Institute, and other Southern California collections—including prints by Harry Adams, Howard Bingham, Charles Brittin, Joe Flowers, Vera Jackson, and Charles Williams—this unprecedented volume presents less familiar but essential stories about American progress toward social justice.

Menachem Kipnis (1878–1942) was one of the early twentieth-century’s greatest Jewish eastern European ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and photographers. He had a weekly column in the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt, retelling humorous old folk stories about the fictional Polish town of Chelm, populated exclusively by fools. At the same time, his photographs of Jewish life in eastern Europe regularly appeared in the Forverts (Forward), the most popular Yiddish daily newspaper in the United States. Now, for the first time, Kipnis’s stories and photographs are published together in a single book.

Menachem Kipnis brings these photographs and stories into dialogue with one another, bridging the Jewish communities in Poland and in America during the interwar period. This dialogue, between image and text, between European metropolis and American metropolis, captures a key historical moment when American Jews sought to imagine the lives of their coreligionists in the “Old Country” and eastern European urban Jews sought to distinguish themselves from their Jewish compatriots who were still living in the shtetl. Including an introductory essay, annotations, and an epilogue by Sheila E. Jelen, Menachem Kipnis suggests new ways of understanding both visual and literary depictions of eastern European Jewish culture between the two world wars.

WINNER, Certificate of Excellence in “Publications – Other” from the Illinois State Historical Society’s 2025 Best of Illinois History Awards!

“In the World But Not of It”

Offering a glimpse into a world largely misunderstood by mainstream society, this book documents the period of eight years that Jane Flynn practiced with Mennonites in two different Southern Illinois communities: Stonefort, and Mount Pleasant in Anna. Despite her status as an outsider, Flynn was welcomed and allowed to photograph the Mennonites in their homes, making applesauce, farming, and beekeeping.

Escaping persecution from the Catholic Church in Europe, the Mennonites arrived in America in 1683, settling in what is now Pennsylvania. Today, they live in almost all 50 states, Canada, and South America. To reflect the Mennonites’ manual-labor lifestyle, Flynn processed her black-and-white photographs by hand and hand-printed them in a dark room. The imagery explores the Mennonites’ labors, leisure, and faith by documenting their homes, places of work and worship, and the Illinois Ozark landscape they inhabit.

Similar to the Amish and the Quakers, Mennonites consider the Bible the supreme authority and insist on a separation between church and state. To enact that separation, they distinguish themselves from society in speech, dress, business, recreation, education, pacifism, and by refusing to participate in politics. They believe in nonconformity to the world, discipleship, and being born again through adult baptism. With Mennonites of Southern Illinois, Jane Flynn provides representation for these closed communities and illustrates the Mennonites’ struggle to find and maintain balance between rustic and modern life while remaining faithful to their religious beliefs. 

John Fedynsky documents in narrative and photos every county courthouse of Michigan's eighty-three counties, as well as the Michigan Hall of Justice. These buildings are symbols: physically they stand, but figuratively they speak. They embody the purposes for which they were created: law, order, justice, and the promise of a better tomorrow.

Fedynsky tells the story of each building. For Michigan, the typical evolution begins in the cabin, tavern, or hotel of a prominent local settler and progresses through incarnations of simple log or wooden clapboard, and then opulent stone or brick, before the structure arrives in modern and utilitarian form. But there are myriad exceptions to this rule, and they add to the diversity of Michigan's county courthouses.

In Fedynsky's descriptions, verifiable facts and local lore weave together in dramatic tales of outrageous crime, courtroom intrigue, backroom dealing, jury determination, and judicial prerogative. Released jail inmates assist with evacuating and extinguishing a courthouse fire, residents during a natural disaster seek and find physical refuge behind the sure walls of the courthouse, and vigilant legions of homebound defenders are stationed in wartime throughout the courthouse towers scanning the skies for signs of foreign aircraft.

Then there are the homey touches that emphasize the "house" half of Michigan's courthouses: local folks dropping off plants in the courthouse atrium to use it as a winter greenhouse, cows grazing on the public square, county fairs in or near the courthouse, and locally made artwork hanging in public hallways. The courthouses bear within their walls a richness of soul endowed by the good people who make each one special.

Cover design by Heidi Dailey

Cover photos: John Fedynsky

Considering such factors as artistic intention, institutional deployment, critical interpretation, and popular reception, Alinder provides calibrated readings of the photographs from this period. She uncovers the tension between Dorothea Lange's moving and critical images of the camps and the War Relocation Authority's blindly positive captions. She also analyzes Ansel Adams's attempt to combat negative war propaganda through humanizing photographs of Japanese Americans and locates the limits of such a counternarrative in the midst of a national mobilization against Japan.

Moving Images examines the work of Japanese American photographers operating both during and after the incarceration, including Manzanar inmate Toyo Miyatake, who constructed his own camera to document the complicated realities of camp life for his fellow inmates. More recently, contemporary artists Patrick Nagatani and Masumi Hayashi have used photography to reckon with the legacy of incarceration by journeying to the camp sites and creating photographs that bridge the intergenerational divides between their parents, themselves, and their children.

Illustrated with more than forty photographs, Moving Images reveals the significance of the camera in the process of incarceration as well as the construction of race, citizenship, and patriotism in this complex historical moment.

Genderqueer and nonbinary people of color often experience increased marginalization, belonging to an ethnic group that seldom recognizes their gender identity and a queer community that subscribes to white norms. Yet for this very reason, they have a lot to teach about how racial, sexual, and gender identities intersect. Their experiences of challenging social boundaries demonstrate how queer communities can become more inclusive and how the recognition of nonbinary genders can be an anti-racist practice. 
 
My Race is My Gender is the first anthology by nonbinary writers of color to include photography and visual portraits, centering their everyday experiences of negotiating intersectional identities. While informed by queer theory and critical race theory, the authors share their personal stories in accessible language. Bringing together Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian perspectives, its six contributors present an intergenerational look at what it means to belong to marginalized queer communities in the U.S. and feel solidarity with a global majority at the same time. They also provide useful insights into how genderqueer and nonbinary activism can both energize and be fueled by such racial justice movements as Black Lives Matter.