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An extraordinary illustrated biography of a Métis man and Anishinaabe woman navigating great changes in their homeland along the U.S.–Canada border in the early twentieth century

John Linklater, of Anishinaabeg, Cree, and Scottish ancestry, and his wife, Tchi-Ki-Wis, of the Lac La Croix First Nation, lived in the canoe and border country of Ontario and Minnesota from the 1870s until the 1930s. During that time, the couple experienced radical upheavals in the Quetico–Superior region, including the cutting of white and red pine forests, the creation of Indian reserves/reservations and conservation areas, and the rise of towns, tourism, and mining. With broad geographical sweep, historical significance, and biographical depth, Making the Carry tells their story, overlooked for far too long.

John Linklater, a renowned game warden and skilled woodsman, was also the bearer of traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous heritage, both of which he was deeply committed to teaching others. He was sought by professors, newspaper reporters, museum personnel, and conservationists—among them Sigurd Olson, who considered Linklater a mentor. Tchi-Ki-Wis, an extraordinary craftswoman, made a sweeping array of necessary yet beautiful objects, from sled dog harnesses to moose calls to birch bark canoes. She was an expert weaver of large Anishinaabeg cedar bark mats with complicated geometric designs, a virtually lost art.

Making the Carry traces the routes by which the couple came to live on Basswood Lake on the international border. John’s Métis ancestors with deep Hudson’s Bay Company roots originally came from Orkney Islands, Scotland, by way of Hudson Bay and Red River, or what is now Winnipeg. His family lived in Manitoba, northwest Ontario, northern Minnesota, and, in the case ofJohn and Tchi-Ki-Wis, on Isle Royale. A journey through little-known Canadian history, the book provides an intimate portrait of Métis people.

Complete with rarely seen photographs of activities from dog mushing to guiding to lumbering, as well as of many objects made by Tchi-Ki-Wis, such as canoes, moccasins, and cedar mats, Making the Carry is a window on a traditional way of life and a restoration of two fascinating Indigenous people to their rightful place in our collective past.

In 1933 American oilmen representing what later became the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) signed a concession agreement with the Saudi Arabian king granting the company sole proprietorship over the oil reserves in the country's largest province. As drilling commenced and wells proliferated, Aramco soon became a major presence in the region. In this book Chad H. Parker tells Aramco's story, showing how an American company seeking resources and profits not only contributed to Saudi “nation building” but helped define U.S. foreign policy during the early Cold War.

In the years following World War II, as Aramco expanded its role in Saudi Arabia, the idea of “modernization” emerged as a central component of American foreign policy toward newly independent states. Although the company engaged in practices supportive of U.S. goals, its own modernizing efforts tended to be pragmatic rather than policy-driven, more consistent with furthering its business interests than with validating abstract theories. Aramco built the infrastructure necessary to extract oil and also carved an American suburb out of the Arabian desert, with all the air-conditioned comforts of Western modern life. At the same time, executives cultivated powerful relationships with Saudi government officials and, to the annoyance of U.S. officials, even served the monarchy in diplomatic disputes. Before long the company became the principal American diplomatic, political, and cultural agent in the country, a role it would continue to play until 1973, when the Saudi government took over its operation.

Winner of the 2026 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize 

From the debate over affirmative action to the increasingly visible racism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have emerged as key figures in a number of contemporary social controversies. In Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, Corinne Mitsuye Sugino offers the lens of racial allegory to consider how media, institutional, and cultural narratives mobilize difference to normalize a white, Western conception of the human. Rather than focusing on a singular arena of society, Sugino considers contemporary sources across media, law, and popular culture to understand how they interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, communication, and gender and sexuality studies, Sugino argues that Asian American racialization and gendering plays a key role in shoring up abstract concepts such as “meritocracy,” “family,” “justice,” “diversity,” and “nation” in ways that naturalize hierarchy. In doing so, Making the Human grapples with anti-Asian racism’s entanglements with colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, and gendered violence.
 

A compelling union of analysis and rich storytelling, Making the Immigrant Soldier traces the complexities of serving in the military in order to pursue the American dream.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2023

Large numbers of Latino migrants began to arrive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1950s. They joined a small but established Spanish-speaking community of people from Texas, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Delia Fernández-Jones merges storytelling with historical analysis to recapture the placemaking practices that these Mexicans, Tejanos, and Puerto Ricans used to create a new home for themselves. Faced with entrenched white racism and hostility, Latinos of different backgrounds formed powerful relationships to better secure material needs like houses and jobs and to recreate community cultural practices. Their pan-Latino solidarity crossed ethnic and racial boundaries and shaped activist efforts that emphasized working within the system to advocate for social change. In time, this interethnic Latino alliance exploited cracks in both overt and structural racism and attracted white and Black partners to fight for equality in social welfare programs, policing, and education.

Groundbreaking and revelatory, Making the MexiRican City details how disparate Latino communities came together to respond to social, racial, and economic challenges.

Making the Right Choice unravels the entangled relationship between marriage, morality, and the desire for modernity as it plays out in the context of middle-class status concerns and aspirations for upward social mobility within the Sinhala-Buddhist community in urban Sri Lanka. By focusing on individual life-histories spanning three generations, the book illuminates how narratives about a gendered self and narratives about modernity are mutually constituted and intrinsically tied to notions of agency. The book uncovers how "becoming modern" in urban Sri Lanka, rather than causing inter-generational conflict, is a collective aspiration realized through the efforts of bringing up educated and independent women capable of making "right" choices. The consequence of this collective investment is a feminist conundrum: agency does not denote the right to choose, but the duty to make the "right" choice; hence agency is experienced not as a sense of "freedom," but rather as a burden of responsibility.

How the cotton industry restricted sharecroppers’ access to nutritious food, a public health crisis that spurred a wave of influential and inspiring activism.

Pellagra, a nutritional deficiency disease, was once widespread in the southern United States, where it was concentrated in areas of high-yield cotton production. This wasn’t a coincidence. In the early twentieth century, pellagra was ubiquitous in regions where monocultural cotton production foreclosed cotton workers’ access to nutritious foods. Planters paid sharecroppers and millworkers in their own currency—tokens, coins, and other substitutes for money—and sold them unhealthy and overpriced food in company-owned stores. Employers kept workers poor through wage theft, predatory credit systems, and labor coercion, all of which maintained a system of food scarcity.

In Malady of Monoculture, Dana Landress reveals how the unrelenting demands of the cotton economy during the Jim Crow South created a public health crisis in the form of pellagra. She carefully details a “closed food system” that restricted workers’ diets through employer-generated currency; the use of food as an instrument of labor compulsion; manufactured debt structures; alliances between government and private industry; and restrictions on foraging, gardening, and land use. Though official public health programs framed pellagra in personal and behavioral terms, those afflicted with the illness actively challenged the closed food system through union organizing, community health care, freedom farms, and collective action lawsuits. Excavating the landmark contributions of Black nutritionists to the field of public health, Landress spotlights the many constituencies that worked tirelessly to combat hunger and foregrounds their creativity, resilience, and determination.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2024
A Spectator Best Book of the Year
Finalist for the 2025 ASALH Book Prize

Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of the prison years of civil rights icon Malcolm X. 

In February 1946, when 20-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler in Boston. By the time he was paroled in August 1952, he had transformed into a voracious reader, joined the Black Muslims, and was poised to become Malcolm X, one of the most prominent and important intellectuals of the civil rights era. While scholars and commentators have exhaustively detailed, analyzed, and debated Malcolm X’s post-prison life, they have not explored these six and a half transformative years in any depth.

Paying particular attention to his time in prison, Patrick Parr’s Malcolm Before X provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking examination of the first twenty-seven years of Malcolm X’s life (1925–1965). Parr traces Malcolm’s African lineage, explores his complicated childhood in the Midwest, and follows him as he moves east to live with his sister Ella in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, where he is convicted of burglary and sentenced.

Parr utilizes a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers to immerse the reader into the unique cultures—at times brutal and at times instructional—of Charlestown State Prison, the Concord Reformatory, and the Norfolk Prison Colony. It was at these institutions that Malcolm devoured books, composed poetry, boxed, debated, and joined the Nation of Islam, changing the course of his life and setting the stage for a decade of antiracist activism that would fundamentally reshape American culture.

In this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, the inspiring story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X is finally told. 

This poignant collection brings together powerful testimonios from Chicanx and Latinx patients, family members, caregivers, and community advocates who have faced el maldito cáncer. Authors share first-person narratives of illness, fear, love, solidarity, and resilience, illuminating how Latinx communities navigate cancer journeys within a complex and often inequitable health-care system.

The contributors—ranging from students and community members to renowned scholars and artists—offer their stories through essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, bilingual chapters, and drawings. 

These testimonios honor the diverse ways Latinxs process and communicate the emotional, physical, and cultural realities of cancer. Each section is framed by a short editor introduction that highlights key themes and invites readers to reflect on the resonant insights each story brings. Across four sections—patient voices, family members, community perspectives, and closing reflections—the book reveals how individuals confront illness with courage and how families and communities create networks of care grounded in culture, love, and collective strength.

Exposing physical and emotional vulnerabilities, instances of pain, suffering, worry, and anguish, Maldito Cáncer also opens a space for healing and connection. It offers a new lens to understanding cancer through culturally informed, justice-centered narratives. These acts of testimoniando offer a gift to us: resistance, connection, and hope.

Contributors
Alfonso Aranda
Cathy Arellano
Estela Mara Bensimon
Cindy Camacho-Gutierrez
Daniela A. Carreon
Angie Chabram
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
Yvette G. Flores
Fran García Vásquez
Jennifer Gottlieb
Osa Hidalgo de la Riva
Ekta Kandhway
Skye Kelty
Jorge Antonio Losoya
Dalia Magaña
Maribel Martínez
Pedro Noguera
Lorraine Ramos
Mónica Torreiro-Casal
Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz
Patricia Zavella

Men were increasingly taking over medical duties--especially surrounding childbirth--usually left to women and, as their medical knowledge increased, they became aware of bodies and behaviors--both male and female--that transgressed gender norms. The anxieties about men who acted in ways seen as increasingly womanly (from acting effeminately to participating in homosexual activity) played out in the character of pregnant Juan Rana.

Then, Velasco turns to Hollywood and asks if we might not use the lessons of Juan Rana to help explain why contemporary America is also fascinated by the idea of male pregnancy--think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Junior--and our increasing anxiety over the changing face of masculinity in our own culture.

This first volume of Male Fantasies centers on the fantasies that preoccupied a group of men who played a crucial role in the rise of Nazism. These men were officers in the Freikorps--private, volunteer armies that roamed Germany, serving the cause of domestic repression in the aftermath of World War I. Klaus Theweleit draws upon the novels, letters, and autobiographies of these proto-fascists and their contemporaries, as well as cartoons, advertisements, engravings, and posters. He explores these sources, not to discover what their creators thought about fighting or the fatherland, but to seek out and reconstruct their images of women. He shows that the Freikorps male identity was shaped by the dread and revulsion that characterized their relations with women (real or imagined) and that this dread was, in turn, linked to the aggressive racism and anticommunism at the heart of most fascist movements.

Theweleit’s second volume, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, carries Male Fantasies from the female image to the self-image of manhood and its ritualized forms of mass behavior, culminating in warfare. It also is available from the University of Minnesota Press.

Theweleit’s project in Male Fantasies is to discover the emotional core of fascism as it was revealed in the novels and memoirs of the Freikorps, mercenary bands that fought Germany’s border disputes and put down worker revolts in the aftermath of World War I. His excavation of Freikorps literary remains (and the writings of some of their protofascist contemporaries) enabled Theweleit to reconstruct the mythical content of the fascist imagination. An integral part of Male Fantasies is Theweleit’s choice of illustrations--cartoons, advertisements, engravings, posters--that serve as an ironic commentary on the text and extend its meaning in time and space.

In this second volume of the two-volume work Theweleit discovers how the repudiation of one’s own body--and of femininity--became a psychic compulsion associating masculinity with hardness, self-denial, and destruction. We are shown how the body becomes a mechanism for eluding the dreaded liquid--the “Red Flood,” lava, mud--and the “feminine” emotions associated with it. Armored, organized by mental and physical procedures like the military drill, the male body is transformed into a “man of steel.” As Theweleit shows, only in war does this body find redemption from constraint.

The first volume of Male Fantasies, also available from the University of Minnesota Press, deals primarily with the image of women in the collective unconscious of the fascist warrior that threatens to engulf the male ego.

Mali’s history is defined by crossroads—geographic, cultural, and intellectual—linking to the Sahara and to long-standing trade routes. Francophone Malian women’s writing reflects this convergence, positioning literature as a site where diverse artistic and cultural traditions meet and evolve. In Malian Women at the Crossroads: Blending Literature and Art, writers such as Aoua Kéita, Aïcha Fofana, Adame Ba Konaré, Fatoumata Sidibé, Zakiyatou oualett Halatine, and Fadimata walett Oumar blur the boundaries between text and artistic practice, incorporating storytelling, visual arts, music, textile design, and other creative forms into their work. These interdisciplinary expressions both honor and reinterpret tradition, illuminating Mali’s cultural diversity while challenging divisions rooted in gender and ethnicity.

The voices of these writers denounce the conflict that has plagued Mali for over a decade and opt instead for showcasing creativity that preserves the memory of more promising times.

While breast cancer continues to affect the lives of millions, contemporary writers and artists have responded to the ravages of the disease in creative expression. Mary K. DeShazer’s book looks specifically at breast cancer memoirs and photographic narratives, a category she refers to as mammographies, signifying both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have this disease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that breast cancer narratives of the past ten years differ from their predecessors in their bold address of previously neglected topics such as the link between cancer and environmental carcinogens, the ethics and efficacy of genetic testing and prophylactic mastectomy, and the shifting politics of prosthesis and reconstruction.

Mammographies is distinctive among studies of contemporary illness narratives in its exclusive focus on breast cancer, its analysis of both memoirs and photographic texts, its attention to hybrid and collaborative narratives, and its emphasis on ecological, genetic, transnational, queer, and anti-pink discourses. DeShazer’s methodology—best characterized as literary critical, feminist, and interdisciplinary—includes detailed interpretation of the narrative strategies, thematic contours, and visual imagery of a wide range of contemporary breast cancer memoirs and photographic anthologies. The author explores the ways in which the narratives constitute a distinctive testimonial and memorial tradition, a claim supported by close readings and theoretical analysis that demonstrates how these narratives question hegemonic cultural discourses, empower reader-viewers as empathic witnesses, and provide communal sites for mourning, resisting, and remembering.

Whether humans crossed the seas between the Old World and the New in the times before Columbus is a tantalizing question that has long excited scholarly interest and tempted imaginations the world over. From the myths of Atlantis and Mu to the more credible, perhaps, but hardly less romantic tales of Viking ships and Buddhist missionaries, people have speculated upon what is, after all, not simply a question of contact, but of the nature and growth of civilization itself.

To the specialist, it is an important question indeed. If people in the Western Hemisphere and in the Eastern Hemisphere developed their cultures more or less independently from the end of the last Ice Age until the voyages of Columbus, the remarkable similarities between New World and Old World cultures reveal something important about the evolution of culture. If, on the other hand, there were widespread or sustained contacts between the hemispheres in pre-Columbian times, these contacts represent events of vast significance to the prehistory and history of humanity.

Originally delivered at a symposium held in May 1968, during the national meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, the papers presented here, by scholars eminent in the field, offer differing points of view and considerable evidence on the pros and cons of pre-Columbian contact between the Old World and the New. Various kinds of data—archaeological, botanical, geographical, and historical—are brought to bear on the problem, with provocative and original results. Introductory and concluding remarks by the editors pull together and evaluate the evidence and suggest ground rules for future studies of this sort.

Man across the Sea provides no final answers as to whether people from Asia, Africa, or Europe visited the American Indian before Columbus. It does, however, present new evidence, suggested lines of approach, and a fresh attempt to delineate the problems involved and to establish acceptable canons of evidence for the future.

The secret history of manly eating in the Heart of Dixie

Man Food: Recipes from the Iron Trade is a flavorful tribute to Alabama’s industrial soul and culinary heart. Born from the legendary Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham—once the beating heart of the Magic City’s iron industry—this cookbook blends Southern tradition, foundry grit, and backyard hospitality into one unforgettable volume.

Collected from the pages of Pig Iron Rough Notes, a magazine once circulated among Alabama’s ironworkers, these recipes reflect the lives of men who forged metal by day and cooked with cast iron by night. Inside, you’ll find dishes like Brunswick Stew, Catfish Chowder, and Bean Hole Beans—hearty meals rooted in Alabama’s outdoors, work camps, and family kitchens.

With colorful stories, vintage illustrations, and a deep appreciation for cast-iron cooking, Man Food celebrates the “Gentlemen Cooks” of the South—men who knew that good food and good company were just as important as hard work. Whether you're a native Alabamian, a history buff, or a lover of Southern foodways, this book offers a delicious slice of Alabama culture.

Fire up your skillet, pour a cup of camp coffee, and taste the legacy of the Iron Trade—Alabama style.