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All societies around the world and through time value beauty highly. Tracing the evolutions of the Colombian standards of beauty since 1845, Michael Edward Stanfield explores their significance to and symbiotic relationship with violence and inequality in the country. Arguing that beauty holds not only social power but also economic and political power, he positions it as a pacific and inclusive influence in a country “ripped apart by violence, private armies, seizures of land, and abuse of governmental authority, one hoping that female beauty could save it from the ravages of the male beast.” One specific means of obscuring those harsh realities is the beauty pageant, of which Colombia has over 300 per year. Stanfield investigates the ways in which these pageants reveal the effects of European modernity and notions of ethnicity on Colombian women, and how beauty for Colombians has become an external representation of order and morality that can counter the pathological effects of violence, inequality, and exclusion in their country.

How international oil companies navigated the local, segregated landscape of north Louisiana in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In 1904, prospectors discovered oil in the rural parishes of North Louisiana just outside Shreveport. As rural cotton fields gave way to dense, industrial centers of energy extraction, migrants from across the US—and the world—rushed to take a share of the boom. The resulting boomtowns, most notoriously Oil City, quickly gained a reputation for violence, drinking, and rough living. Meanwhile, North Louisiana’s large Black population endured virulent white supremacy in the oil fields and the courtrooms to earn a piece of the boom, including one Black woman who stood to become the wealthiest oil heiress in America.

In Oil Cities, Henry Wiencek uncovers what life was like amidst the tent cities, saloons, and oil derricks of North Louisiana’s oil boomtowns, tracing the local experiences of migrants, farmers, sex workers, and politicians as they navigated dizzying changes to their communities. This first historical monograph on the region’s dramatic oil boom reveals a contested history, in which the oil industry had to adapt its labor, tools, and investments to meet North Louisiana’s unique economic, social, political, and environmental dynamics.

The Valley of South Texas is a region of puzzling contradictions. Despite a booming economy fueled by free trade and rapid population growth, the Valley typically experiences high unemployment and low per capita income. The region has the highest rate of drug seizures in the United States, yet its violent crime rate is well below national and state averages. The Valley's colonias are home to the poorest residents in the nation, but their rates of home ownership and intact two-parent families are among the highest in the country for low-income residential areas. What explains these apparently irreconcilable facts?

Since 1982, faculty and students associated with the Borderlife Research Project at the University of Texas-Pan American have interviewed thousands of Valley residents to investigate and describe the cultural and social life along the South Texas-Northern Mexico border. In this book, Borderlife researchers clarify why Valley culture presents so many apparent contradictions as they delve into issues that are "on the edge of the law"—traditional health care and other cultural beliefs and practices, displaced and undocumented workers, immigration enforcement, drug smuggling, property crime, criminal justice, and school dropout rates. The researchers' findings make it plain that while these issues present major challenges for the governments of the United States and Mexico, their effects and contradictions are especially acute on the border, where residents must daily negotiate between two very different economies; health care, school, and criminal justice systems; and worldviews.

David Grazian’s riveting tour of downtown Philadelphia and its newly bustling nightlife scene reveals the city as an urban playground where everyone dabbles in games of chance and perpetrates elaborate cons. Entertainment in the city has evolved into a professional industry replete with set designers, stage directors, and method actors whose dazzling illusions tempt even the shrewdest of customers. As entertaining and illuminating as the confessional stories it recounts, On the Make is a fascinating exposé of the smoke and mirrors employed in the city at night.

Empowering women through education has become a top priority of international development efforts. Erin MurphyGraham draws on more than a decade of qualitative research to examine the experiences of Juanita and eighteen other women who participated in the SAT program. Their narratives suggest the simple yet subtle ways education can spark the empowerment process, as well as the role of men and boys in promoting gender equality.

Drawing on indepth interviews and classroom observation in Honduras and Uganda, MurphyGraham shows the potential of the SAT program to empower women through expanded access and improved quality of secondary education in Latin America and Africa. An appendix provides samples of the classroom lessons.

The collective social history of deaf people in America has yet to be written. While scholars have focused their attention on residential schools for the deaf, leaders in the deaf community, and prominent graduates of these institutions, the lives of “ordinary” deaf individuals have been largely overlooked.

Employing the methods of social history, such as the use of digital history techniques and often-ignored sources like census records, Eric C. Nystrom and R. A. R. Edwards recover the lived experiences of everyday deaf people in late nineteenth century America. Ordinary Lives captures the stories of deaf women and men, both Black and white, describing their family lives, networks of support, educational experiences, and successes and hardships. In this pioneering “deaf social history,” Edwards and Nystrom reconstruct the biographies of a wider range of deaf individuals to tell a richer, more nuanced, and more inclusive history of the larger American deaf community.

Winner of the American Sociological Association’s Section on the Sociology of Sexualities Distinguished Book Award

Over the past 50 years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer professionals have organized to achieve greater inclusion into the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This inclusion, however, has come at a cost. In the 1970s, these professionals sought to radically transform STEM fields by confronting the homophobia and sexism embedded within them. Instead, these fields became more corporatized and privatized, and STEM institutions and workspaces—particularly in the spheres of government and business—became dominated by a focus on individualism, self-improvement/advancement, and meritocracy, which are hallmarks of neoliberalism. For many LGBTQ STEM professionals, inclusion now required becoming more apolitical, pro-capital, and focused on professional development.

In Out Doing Science, Tom Waidzunas, Ethan Czuy Levine, and Brandon Fairchild explore this transformation of LGBTQ STEM professionals from oppositional outsiders to assimilationist insiders. Drawing on historical archives, oral interviews, and participant observation of professional societies and workspaces, the authors interrogate the meanings of “inclusion” and why some LGBTQ STEM professionals have benefited from it more than others. They also advocate for a “queer STEM” that challenges and transforms the racism, classism, sexism, cisheterosexism, and imperialism of these fields, institutions, and workspaces. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Out Doing Science will appeal to readers interested in LGBTQ studies, and science and technology studies, as well as anyone who wants to create a more diverse and inclusive work environment.

Winner, A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

When the Oakland, California, school board called African American English "Ebonics" and claimed that it "is not a black dialect or any dialect of English," they reignited a debate over language, race, and culture that reaches back to the era of slavery in the United States. In this book, John Baugh, an authority on African American English, sets new parameters for the debate by dissecting and challenging many of the prevailing myths about African American language and its place in American society.

Baugh's inquiry ranges from the origins of African American English among slaves and their descendants to its recent adoption by standard English speakers of various races. Some of the topics he considers include practices and malpractices for educating language minority students, linguistic discrimination in the administration of justice, cross-cultural communication between Blacks and whites, and specific linguistic aspects of African American English. This detailed overview of the main points of debate about African American language will be important reading for both scholars and the concerned public.

Guatemala’s “Ten Years of Spring” (1944–1954) began when citizens overthrew a military dictatorship and ushered in a remarkable period of social reform. This decade of progressive policies ended abruptly when a coup d’état, backed by the United States at the urging of the United Fruit Company, deposed a democratically elected president and set the stage for a period of systematic human rights abuses that endured for generations. Presenting the research of diverse anthropologists and historians, Out of the Shadow offers a new examination of this pivotal chapter in Latin American history.

Marshaling information on regions that have been neglected by other scholars, such as coastlines dominated by people of African descent, the contributors describe an era when Guatemalan peasants, Maya and non-Maya alike, embraced change, became landowners themselves, diversified agricultural production, and fully engaged in electoral democracy. Yet this volume also sheds light on the period’s atrocities, such as the US Public Health Service’s medical experimentation on Guatemalans between 1946 and 1948. Rethinking institutional memories of the Cold War, the book concludes by considering the process of translating memory into possibility among present-day urban activists.

In 1951, Israel was a young nation surrounded by hostile neighbors. Its tenuous grip on nationhood was made slipperier still by internal tensions among the various communities that had immigrated to the new Jewish state, particularly those between the politically and socially dominant Jewish leadership hailing from Eastern Europe and the more numerous Oriental Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Into this volatile mix came Nissim Rejwan, a young Iraqi Jewish intellectual who was to become one of the country's leading public intellectuals and authors.

Beginning with Rejwan's arrival in 1951 and climaxing with the tensions preceding Israel's victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, this book colorfully chronicles Israel's internal and external struggles to become a nation, as well as the author's integration into a complex culture. Rejwan documents how the powerful East European leadership, acting as advocates of Western norms and ideals, failed to integrate Israel into the region and let the country take its place as a part of the Middle East. Rejwan's essays and occasional articles are an illuminating example of how minority groups use journalism to gain influence in a society. Finally, the letters and diary entries reproduced in Outsider in the Promised Land are full of lively, witty meditations on history, literature, philosophy, education, and art, as well as one man's personal struggle to find his place in a new nation.