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Explores the history of the “science of development” during the Cold War and how experts across the social sciences tried to create the tools to address the problem of poverty across Latin America.

In the mid-twentieth century, Latin America had the world’s starkest internal inequality. In Brazil in 1960, for example, the top 10 percent took upward of 60 percent of the country’s total income, while its entire bottom half took only 10 percent. As Patrick Iber shows in Poverty of the Imagination, this problem of poverty and social inequality focused the attention of social scientists on the task of articulating a “science of development.” In the context of the Cold War, this project drew the attention of the US government and the Ford Foundation, which hoped that peaceful development would prevent revolutions.

This book examines the five central frameworks that emerged to explain poverty: from dependency theory on the Marxist left; to theories of modernization, the culture of poverty, and marginality in the center; to neoliberalism on the right. Iber shows how each rose (and fell) by connecting them to political projects such as the War on Poverty in the United States and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Through vivid portraits of key thinkers, he shows how each was shaped by the environment of the Cold War and the presence of the Ford Foundation. It is a story with surprising turns: What began for Ford as a Cold War project to support university “modernization” changed as dictatorships took control of much of the region. Then, Ford took the side of the dissidents, supporting an antipoverty agenda for the restoration of democracy. A guide to some of the most important ideas in global development and Latin American studies alike, this book also shows how scholars and institutions faced down authoritarian threats—and won.

Winner of the 2025 Oral History Association Book Award • Winner of Virginia Tech's Albert Lee Sturm Award for Faculty Excellence • Finalist for the 2026 Veterans Studies Association Distinguished Book Award • Honorable Mention, National Council on Public History Book Award

The United States has both the largest, most expensive, and most powerful military and the largest, most expensive, and most punitive carceral system in the history of the world. Since the American War in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of veterans have been incarcerated after their military service.

Identifying the previously unrecognized connections between American wars and mass incarceration, Prisoners after War reaches across lines of race, class, and gender to record the untold history of incarcerated veterans over the past six decades. Having conducted dozens of oral history interviews, Jason A. Higgins traces the lifelong effects of war, inequality, disability, and mental illness, and explores why hundreds of thousands of veterans, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, were caught up in the carceral system. This original study tells an intergenerational history of state-sanctioned violence, punishment, and inequality, but its pages also resonate with stories of survival and redemption, revealing future possibilities for reform and reparative justice.

In big cities, major museums and elite galleries tend to dominate our idea of the art world. But beyond the cultural core ruled by these moneyed institutions and their patrons are vibrant, local communities of artists and art lovers operating beneath the high-culture radar. Producing Local Color is a guided tour of three such alternative worlds that thrive in the Chicago neighborhoods of Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park.

These three neighborhoods are, respectively, historically African American, predominantly Mexican American, and proudly ethnically mixed. Drawing on her ethnographic research in each place, Diane Grams presents and analyzes the different kinds of networks of interest and support that sustain the making of art outside of the limelight. And she introduces us to the various individuals—from cutting-edge artists to collectors to municipal planners—who work together to develop their communities, honor their history, and enrich the experiences of their neighbors through art. Along with its novel insights into these little examined art worlds, Producing Local Color also provides a thought-provoking account of how urban neighborhoods change and grow.