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To correct the paucity of information on deaf or hard of hearing children and their parents’ experiences with early intervention services, researchers explored these relationships as part of the National Parent Project. From this investigation, Parents and Their Deaf Children details the experiences of a group of parents and their deaf children from the first identification of the latter’s hearing loss through their early years in elementary school. Renowned scholars Kathryn Meadow-Orlans, Donna Mertens, and Marilyn Sass-Lehrer reveal here for the first time the goals and expectations of the parents, the children’s achievements and troubles, and the families’ satisfaction and disappointment with health and educational systems.

       Parents and their Deaf Children stems from a nationwide survey of parents with six-to-seven-year-old deaf or hard of hearing children, followed up by interviews with 80 parents. The authors not only discuss the parents’ communication choices for their children, but also provide how parents’ experiences differ, especially for those whose children are hard of hearing, have additional conditions, or have cochlear implants. Also, one chapter is devoted to families from minority cultures. The final section of this distinctive study offers solid advice for other parents of deaf children and also the professionals who serve them.

State parks across Texas offer a world of opportunities for recreation and education. Yet few park visitors or park managers know the remarkable story of how this magnificent state park system came into being during the depths of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Drawing on archival records and examining especially the political context of the New Deal, James Wright Steely here provides the first comprehensive history of the founding and building of the Texas state park system.

Steely's history begins in the 1880s with the movement to establish parks around historical sites from the Texas Revolution. He follows the fits-and-starts progress of park development through the early 1920s, when Governor Pat Neff envisioned the kind of park system that ultimately came into being between 1933 and 1942.

During the Depression an amazing cast of personalities from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson led, followed, or obstructed the drive to create this state park system. The New Deal federal-state partnerships for depression relief gave Texas the funding and personnel to build 52 recreational parks under the direction of the National Park Service. Steely focuses in detail on the activities of the Civilian Conservation Corps, whose members built parks from Caddo Lake in the east to the first park improvements in the Big Bend out west. An appendix lists and describes all the state parks in Texas through 1945, while Steely's epilogue brings the parks' story up to the present.

Parlor Ponds: The Cultural Work of the American Home Aquarium, 1850–1970 examines the myriad cultural meanings of the American home aquarium during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and argues that the home aquarium provided its enthusiasts with a potent tool for managing the challenges of historical change, from urbanization to globalization. The tank could be a window to an alien world, a theater for domestic melodrama, or a vehicle in a fantastical undersea journey. Its residents were seen as inscrutable and wholly disposable “its,” as deeply loved and charismatic individuals, and as alter egos by aquarists themselves.

Parlor Ponds fills a gap in the growing field of animal studies by showing that the tank is an emblematic product of modernity, one using elements of exploration, technology, science, and a commitment to rigorous observation to contain anxieties spawned by industrialization, urbanization, changing gender roles, and imperial entanglements. Judith Hamera engages advertisements, images, memoirs, public aquarium programs, and enthusiast publications to show how the history of the aquarium illuminates complex cultural attitudes toward nature and domestication, science and religion, gender and alterity, and national conquest and environmental stewardship with an emphasis on the ways it illuminates American public discourse on colonial and postcolonial expansion.

The years following the Texas Revolution held even more turbulent events as diverse droves of pioneers crossed the Sabine and Red Rivers to start new lives in Texas. Early Texas society contended with religious issues, family life in a rugged environment, and the Civil War. This cultural history was clearly reflected in the life of frontier preacher Henry C. Renfro.

Migrating to Texas in 1851, Renfro enrolled in the fledgling Baylor University and became a Baptist preacher. Eventually disillusioned with Baptist orthodoxy, Renfro was disenfranchised on charges of infidelity as he embraced the ideals of the Free Thought Movement, inspired by the writings of men such as Thomas Paine, Spinoza, and Robert Ingersoll.

Renfro's Civil War experience was no less unusual. Serving as both soldier and chaplain, Renfro left a valuable legacy of insight into the conflict, captured in a wealth of correspondence that is in itself significant.

Drawing on a vast body of letters, speeches, sermons, and oral histories that had never before been available, this chronological narrative of "The Parson's" life describes significant changes in Texas from 1850 to 1900, especially the volatile formation and growth of Baptist churches in North Central Texas. William Griggs' study yields numerous new details about the Free Thought Movement and depicts public reaction to sectarian leaders in nineteenth-century Texas.

The author also describes the developing Central Texas region known as the Cross Timbers, including the personal dynamics between a frontier family and its patriarch and encompassing such issues as property conflicts, divorce, and family reconciliation. This work unlocks an enlightening, engaging scene from Texas history.

An essential guide to how the interactions between social norms, party politics, and expressions of prejudice are driving contemporary politics.

Antiminority rhetoric in American politics has grown more overt. What were once fringe comments on Stormfront have now become typical campaign appeals from many mainstream politicians. If there was ever a doubt, this is a poignant reminder that the boundaries of what is “acceptable” and “unacceptable” to say and do are fluid and socially enforced.

In Parties and Prejudice, Maneesh Arora offers a broad framework for understanding this new political terrain. Arora argues that the interaction between social norms and party politics determines what the political consequence of prejudicial speech will be. He illuminates this nuanced relationship by showing that norms vary based on the targeted minority group and the intended audience.

Drawing on experiments, survey data, news coverage, and real-world examples, Parties and Prejudice examines the distinctive ways that egalitarian/inegalitarian norms have developed—within each party—for Black, Muslim, and LGBTQ+ Americans. It is essential reading for understanding Donald Trump’s rise to power, the modern conservative agenda (including opposition to critical race theory and transgender rights), and threats to the development of a multiracial democracy.

A close-up examination of the roots of congressional politics in nominations for the House of Representatives.

With most House seats all but guaranteed for one party in general elections, primary elections for party nominees often decide who goes to Congress. Yet primaries are notoriously difficult to study, due in part to both the variety of rules that govern them and the differences in the influence of local leaders. Based on wide-ranging evidence from field interviews to fundraising data to exit polls, Parties on the Ground overcomes these challenges to take readers under the hood for an in-depth look at the nomination process.

Although progressive reformers sought the adoption of primaries to empower voters’ control over nominations, Parties on the Ground finds that most voters pay too little attention to make use of the opportunity. Instead, the most important actors are intense policy demanders—such as interest groups and activist organizations—who supply campaign resources to some candidates and deny them to others. These groups care most about securing an agent for their own interests and values; to this end, they put serious effort into vetting candidates and often coordinate among themselves or with local parties in support of their choices. At the same time, competition between establishment and insurgent groups can be high, especially in the Republican Party. Developing a nuanced account of House nominations in today’s parties, Parties on the Ground offers a host of new insights into this understudied but significant piece of the puzzle of American politics.

An unflinching examination of the effects and boundaries of partisan animosity.

For generations, experts argued that American politics needed cohesive parties to function effectively. Now many fear that strong partisan views, particularly hostility to the opposing party, are damaging democracy. Is partisanship as dangerous as we fear it is?

To provide an answer, this book offers a nuanced evaluation of when and how partisan animosity matters in today’s highly charged, dynamic political environment, drawing on panel data from some of the most tumultuous years in recent American history, 2019 through 2021. The authors show that partisanship powerfully shapes political behaviors, but its effects are conditional, not constant. Instead, it is most powerful when politicians send clear signals and when an issue is unlikely to bring direct personal consequences. In the absence of these conditions, other factors often dominate decision-making.

The authors argue that while partisan hostility has degraded US politics—for example, politicizing previously non-political issues and undermining compromise—it is not in itself an existential threat. As their research shows, the future of American democracy depends on how politicians, more than ordinary voters, behave.

A provocative exploration of how America’s democratic crisis is rooted in a dangerous mismatch between our Constitution and today’s nationalized, partisan politics.

The ground beneath American political institutions has moved, with national politics subsuming and transforming the local. As a result, American democracy is in trouble.

In this paradigm-shifting book, political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring a sharp new perspective to today’s challenges. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape—state parties, interest groups, and media—varied locally and reinforced the nation’s stark regional diversity. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. The result is that today’s polarization is self-perpetuating—and intensifying.

Partisan Nation offers a powerful caution. As a result of this polarization, America’s political system is distinctly and acutely vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America’s unusual Constitutional design. Combining the precision and acuity characteristic of their earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy.

In her engaging study, Passing for Perfect,erin Khuê Ninh considers the factors that drove college imposters such as Azia Kim—who pretended to be a Stanford freshman—and Jennifer Pan—who hired a hitman to kill her parents before they found out she had never received her high school diploma—to extreme lengths to appear successful. Why would someone make such an illogical choice? And how do they stage these lies so convincingly, and for so long? 

These outlier examples prompt Ninh to address the larger issue of the pressures and difficulties of striving to be model minority, where failure is too ruinous to admit. Passing for Perfect insists that being a “model minority” is not a “myth,” but coded into one’s programming as an identity—a set of convictions and aspirations, regardless of present socioeconomic status or future attainability—and that the true cost of turning children into high-achieving professionals may be higher than anyone can bear.  

Ninh’s book codifies for readers the difference between imposters who are con artists or shysters and those who don’t know how to stop passing for perfect.

Through the prism of one family's experience, this book explores questions of racial identity, religious tolerance, and black-white “passing” in America. Spanning the century from 1820 to 1920, it tells the story of Michael Morris Healy, a white Irish immigrant planter in Georgia; his African American slave Eliza Clark Healy, who was also his wife; and their nine children. Legally slaves, these brothers and sisters were smuggled north before the Civil War to be educated. In spite of the hardships imposed by American society on persons of mixed racial heritage, the Healy children achieved considerable success. Rejecting the convention that defined as black anyone with “one drop of Negro blood,” they were able to transform themselves into white Americans. 

Their unlikely ally in this transition was the Catholic church, as several of them became priests or nuns. One brother served as a bishop in Maine, another as rector of the Cathedral in Boston, and a third as president of Georgetown University. Of the two sisters who became nuns, one was appointed the superior of convents in the United States and Canada. Another brother served for twenty years as a captain in the U.S. Coast Guard, enforcing law and order in the waters off Alaska. The Healy children's transition from black to white should not have been possible according to the prevailing understandings of race, but they accomplished it with apparent ease. Relying on their abilities, and in most cases choosing celibacy, which precluded mixed-race offspring, they forged a place for themselves. They also benefited from the support of people in the church and elsewhere. Even those white Americans who knew the family's background chose to overlook their African ancestry and thereby help them to “get away” with passing. By exploring the lifelong struggles of the members of the Healy family to redefine themselves in a racially polarized society, this book makes a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the enduring dilemma of race in America.

A rare exploration of African American women athletes and national identity, Passing the Baton reveals young Black women as active agents in the remaking of what it means to be American.

The untold story of how the Chicago Symphony Orchestra forged its place among the world’s foremost performing arts institutions through 135 years of change.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra boasts a tradition and staying power that few cultural institutions can rival—a legacy that is tested each time one music director passes the conductor’s baton to another. In this first narrative account of the orchestra’s 135-year history, music critic and historian Phillip Huscher delivers a passionate description of how an upstart ensemble rose to international prominence and established itself as the premier symphony orchestra in the United States. 

With a scholar’s care for detail and a novelist’s attention to drama, Huscher invites us into the tangled machinations behind the success or failure of each chapter in the orchestra’s storied past. We see how legendary directors such as Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, and Riccardo Muti carried the orchestra to new heights of technical perfection and sonic brilliance, but also how others provoked public outcry, caved to insider hostility, or fell to cruel press. The result is a vivid portrait of an orchestra fighting to sustain its identity amid the constant contest between past and present, supporters and critics, and artistic and financial vision.

Woven into this saga are personal stories drawn from newly uncovered documents and interviews with players, conductors, and policymakers about the burden of inheritance, the price of ambition, and the yearning to forge a legacy. Taken together, this is a tale about the power of music—how it can help us navigate our lives and leave a lasting impact on the world around us.