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How contemporary environmental struggles and resistance to pipeline development became populist struggles
 

Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction.

Here Bosworth argues that populism is shaped by the “affective infrastructures” emerging from shifts in regional economies, democratic public-review processes, and scientific controversies. With this lens, he investigates how these movements wax and wane, moving toward or away from other forms of environmental and political ideologies in the Upper Midwest. This lens also lets Bosworth place populist social movements in the critical geographical contexts of racial inequality, nationalist sentiments, ongoing settler colonialism, and global empire—crucial topics when grappling with the tensions embedded in our era’s immense environmental struggles.

Pipeline Populism reveals the complex role populism has played in shifting interpretations of environmental movements, democratic ideals, scientific expertise, and international geopolitics. Its rich data about these grassroots resistance struggles include intimate portraits of the emotional spaces where opposition is first formed. Probing the very limits of populism, Pipeline Populism presents essential work for an era defined by a wave of people-powered movements around the world.

Discover the stories, people, and histories behind the names on Alabama's map.

Place Names in Alabama is the first comprehensive and systematic study of the names that define Alabama's geographic landscape. In this indispensable reference work, Virginia O. Foscue examines more than 2,600 place names drawn from across the state, including counties, cities, towns, rivers, lakes, streams, mountains, and other significant geographic features. Each entry provides detailed information on location, historical development, etymology, naming history, and documented sources, creating a rich portrait of the people, cultures, and events that have shaped Alabama over time.

Drawing upon archival records, historical documents, maps, and interviews with local informants, Foscue uncovers the stories behind the names that appear on Alabama's maps. The volume reveals the influence of Native American languages, European settlement, transportation networks, natural features, political leaders, local families, and regional traditions on the state's evolving identity. By tracing how communities and landmarks acquired their names, the book illuminates broader patterns of migration, settlement, economic development, and cultural exchange throughout Alabama's history.

More than a dictionary of place names, this work offers a unique window into Alabama's social and cultural heritage. Readers discover not only the origins of familiar names but also the histories of the individuals and communities that helped build the state. Whether used as a scholarly resource, a genealogical tool, or a source of fascinating historical insights, Place Names in Alabama remains an essential guide to understanding the connections between geography, language, and history in the American South.

Valuable for historians, genealogists, geographers, librarians, educators, students, journalists, and local history enthusiasts, this landmark volume continues to serve as the definitive reference on Alabama's geographic names and the stories they preserve.

An in-depth look at how Latina/x artists transform art into activism and reclaim space in the Twin Cities

In Place-Keepers, Jessica Lopez Lyman examines how Latina/x artists in the Twin Cities navigate and challenge the region’s deep-seated racial injustices. Using “Inter-Latina movidas”—subtle yet strategic actions through which Latina/x artists forge solidarities, mobilize for justice, and reclaim space—these artists respond to systemic oppression through public performances and behind-the-scenes negotiations with the state, nonprofits, and other institutions.

Centering Latina/x women and gender nonconforming artists from Chicana/Mexicana, U.S. Central American, and Caribbean backgrounds, Place-Keepers confronts reductionist theories of Latinidad that flatten ethnic and racial identities. It demonstrates how the creative and activist practices of these cultural organizers address urgent social struggles from resisting gentrification and environmental destruction to opposing police violence. Lopez Lyman situates these efforts within the broader history of racial justice organizing in Minnesota, tracing a lineage of resistance that long precedes the 2020 Minneapolis uprising following the murder of George Floyd.

Through firsthand accounts and revealing case studies, Place-Keepers charts how these artists harness aesthetics as a tool for movement-building, strategically redistributing resources and transforming policy. Expanding the foundational concept of “movidas” in Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x studies by highlighting maneuvers of infiltration, improvisation, individual ritual, and interdependence, Lopez Lyman establishes a crucial framework for understanding art as activism.

Place-Making in Indigenous Communities in Mesoamerica and the US Southwest explores shared Indigenous place-making concepts and practices across culturally diverse regions of Mesoamerica and the US Southwest from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Drawing on multidisciplinary research approaches, the volume demonstrates how Indigenous communities create and maintain deep connections to landscapes through stories, rituals, and reciprocal relationships, stressing the dynamic nature of the place-making process.

Contributors emphasize themes that crosscut Mesoamerican and Southwestern Indigenous cultures, including place-making through the (re)activation of primordial time, how people and spiritual energies embodied in geographical features of the land co-define time and space, the role of nonlocal materials and beings in establishing new—and often prestigious—place-based connections, and the impact of colonialism and neocolonialism on place-making and identity. Integrating archaeological evidence with contemporary ethnographic work, contributors explore the significance of places like Chichen Itzá's Balankanche cave as manifestations of primordial emergence sites. They also examine Hopi pilgrimages to ancestral shrines and how places such as Mirador Mountain in Chiapas, Cerro Danush in Oaxaca, and Black Mesa near San Ildefonso Pueblo continue to serve as focal points for ritual processions and community belonging.

Organized into sections emphasizing deep-time perspectives and contemporary heritage issues, Place-Making in Indigenous Communities in Mesoamerica and the US Southwest advocates for collaborative research approaches that center Indigenous voices and knowledge systems. By highlighting the deep connections between Indigenous communities and their sacred landscapes, this work brings a new perspective to ongoing conversations centered on land—one that urges engagement with Indigenous communities in a spirit of openness, collaboration, and respect.

Spring-fed creeks. Old stone houses. Cedar brakes and bleached limestone. The Hill Country holds powerful sway over the imagination of Texans. So many of us dream of having our own little place in the limestone hills. The Hill Country feels just like home, even if you've never lived there.

This beautifully written book explores what the Hill Country has meant as a homeplace to the author, his family, and longtime residents of the area, as well as to newcomers. David Syring listens to the stories that his aunts, uncles, and cousins tell about life in the Hill Country and grapples with their meaning for his own search for a place to belong. He also collects short stories focused around Honey Creek Church to consider how places become containers for memory. And he draws upon several years of living in Fredericksburg to talk about the problems and opportunities created by heritage tourism and the development of the town as a "home" for German Americans. These interconnected stories illuminate what it means to belong to a place and why the Texas Hill Country has become the spiritual, if not actual, home of many people.

A sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric

Though we live in a time when memory seems to be losing its hold on communities, memory remains central to personal, communal, and national identities. And although popular and public discourses from speeches to films invite a shared sense of the past, official sites of memory such as memorials, museums, and battlefields embody unique rhetorical principles.

Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside accident memorials that line America’s highways, memory and place have always been deeply interconnected. This book investigates the intersections of memory and place through nine original essays written by leading memory studies scholars from the fields of rhetoric, media studies, organizational communication, history, performance studies, and English. The essays address, among other subjects, the rhetorical strategies of those vying for competing visions of a 9/11 memorial at New York City’s Ground Zero; rhetorics of resistance embedded in the plans for an expansion of the National Civil Rights Museum; representations of nuclear energy—both as power source and weapon—in Cold War and post–Cold War museums; and tours and tourism as acts of performance.

By focusing on “official” places of memory, the collection causes readers to reflect on how nations and local communities remember history and on how some voices and views are legitimated and others are minimized or erased.
 

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

In 1992, Dr. Ross A. Slotten signed more death certificates in Chicago—and, by inference, the state of Illinois—than anyone else. As a family physician, he was trained to care for patients from birth to death, but when he completed his residency in 1984, he had no idea that many of his future patients would be cut down in the prime of their lives. Among those patients were friends, colleagues, and lovers, shunned by most of the medical community because they were gay and HIV positive. Slotten wasn’t an infectious disease specialist, but because of his unique position as both a gay man and a young physician, he became an unlikely pioneer, swept up in one of the worst epidemics in modern history.

Plague Years is an unprecedented first-person account of that epidemic, spanning not just the city of Chicago but four continents as well. Slotten provides an intimate yet comprehensive view of the disease’s spread alongside heartfelt portraits of his patients and his own conflicted feelings as a medical professional, drawn from more than thirty years of personal notebooks. In telling the story of someone who was as much a potential patient as a doctor, Plague Years sheds light on the darkest hours in the history of the LGBT community in ways that no previous medical memoir has.

Contributors:
Jennifer R. Bales, Donald J. Blakeslee, Kenneth L. Kvamme, Stephen C. Lensink, Margot P. Liberty, Elizabeth P. Pauls, Donna C. Roper, Michael Scullin, W. Raymond Wood

Planning Quechua Families: Indigenous Reproduction and the Peruvian State examines how reproductive health is shaped by a history of colonial power, state intervention, and social upheaval. This ethnography is centered on the experiences of Indigenous women in the Andes. The book situates contemporary family planning within the legacy of forced sterilizations and political violence during the era of Shining Path terrorism. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Rebecca Irons brings together the perspectives of both Quechua women and the health-care workers who serve them, offering a nuanced account of how reproductive services are experienced, negotiated, and contested in rural clinics.

The book explores how reproductive health is embedded within broader processes of social change, including “Incanization,” shifting ideas of citizenship, and efforts to integrate marginalized communities into the Peruvian nation. Irons demonstrates how Indigenous understandings of kinship, health, and identity intersect with state policies and biomedical practices, revealing forms of violence that are often less visible but deeply consequential. 

By placing Indigenous reproductive experiences within a wider cultural and political context, Planning Quechua Families provides a critical perspective on how power operates through intimate aspects of life in the contemporary Andes.

An unflinching account of how city planning was deployed to enforce white supremacy in Montgomery, Alabama—the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement—and how Black activists fought back, block by neighborhood block.

At the heart of the Civil Rights Movement was a city meticulously designed to enforce inequality. In Planning White Supremacy: Civil Rights and City Planning in Montgomery, Alabama, 1920–1970, Rebecca Coleen Retzlaff traces how city officials used the tools of modern planning—zoning, infrastructure, housing codes, public investment, and highway construction—to suppress political power, economic opportunity, and spatial freedom for Black citizens.

As the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement, Montgomery became a battleground where urban planning and direct-action protest collided, shaping the city’s culture in ways that still resonate today. Retzlaff’s analysis exposes the calculated use of municipal power to control land use, displace Black communities, keep schools and neighborhoods segregated, and preserve white political dominance. By placing urban planning at the center of Montgomery’s story, this groundbreaking work reframes the movement not only as a fight for voting rights and legal equality, but as a struggle for space, housing, mobility, education, and the right to live with dignity. Retzlaff also highlights the resilience and joy of the close-knit Black neighborhoods that nurtured the civil rights activists who changed history.

Retzlaff reveals how urban planning decisions systematically targeted Black neighborhoods, reinforcing racial inequality under the guise of modernization. With historical depth and critical insight, Planning White Supremacy situates Montgomery within the broader context of American urban history—offering a vital perspective on the intersection of race, space, and power. Essential for scholars of urban planning, history, and racial justice, this book also provides urgent insight into how these legacies continue to shape cities and Black socioeconomic opportunities today.

In this ethnographic study, the author examines the policies and practices of family planning programs in Egypt to see how an elitist, Western-informed state attempts to create obliging citizens. The state sees voluntary compliance with the law for the common good as the cornerstone of modernity. Family planning programs are a training ground for the construction of self-disciplined individuals, and thus a rewarding area of study for the fate of social programs in developing countries.

Through a careful examination of state-endorsed family planning practices in urban and rural contexts, the author shows us the pervasive, high-pressure persuasion of women, who are encouraged to think as individual decision makers of their immediate families and their national interests. But what of the other forces at work in these women’s lives, binding them to their extended families and to their religious identities? And what of the laws that allow for polygamy and discriminate against women in marriage, inheritance, and as part of the workforce?

These forces operate against the received wisdom of the state. Is the Muslim community thought to end at the borders of Egypt? What about local constructions of masculinity when the state appeals to wives to decide for themselves? How does widespread labor migration to foreign countries affect attitudes toward family planning? How is female contraception viewed by the Islamic Brotherhood and other modern Muslim groups?

This book questions much that we have taken for granted and gives us grounds for reexamining our assumptions about family planning and the individual and state in developing countries such as Egypt.

2024 INAUGURAL MARY BEAUDRY BOOK AWARD FOR THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF FOOD

A synthesis of culinary practices of prehistoric Greece based on plant food ingredients

In Plant Foods of Greece, Greek archaeologist Soultana Maria Valamoti takes readers on a culinary journey, reconstructing the plant foods and culinary practices of Neolithic and Bronze Age Greece. For more than thirty years, she has been analyzing a large body of archaeobotanical data that was retrieved from nearly twenty sites in mainland Greece and the Greek islands, with an additional analysis of other sites as referenced by published colleagues. Plant foods were the main ingredients of daily meals in prehistoric Greece and most likely of special dishes prepared for feasts and rituals.

Valamoti’s approach allows an exploration of culinary variability through time. The thousands of charred seeds identified from occupation debris correspond to minuscule time capsules. She is able to document changes from the cooking of the first farmers to the sophisticated cuisines of the elites who inhabited palaces in the first cities of Europe in the south of Greece during the Late Bronze Age. Along the way, she explains the complex processes for the addition of new ingredients (such as millet and olives), condiments, sweet tastes, and complex recipes. Valamoti also addresses regional variability and diversity as well as detailing experimentation and research using occasional input from ancient written sources.

Comprehensive and synthetic coverage encompasses bread/cereals, pulses, oils, fruit and nuts, fermented brews, healing foods, cooking, and identity. In addition, Valamoti offers insight into engaging in public archaeology and provides recipes that incorporate ancient plant ingredients and connect prehistory to the present in a critical way. A definitive source for a range of food scientists and scholars, it will also appeal to foodies.
 

The Indigenous Canela inhabit a vibrant multispecies community of nearly 3,000 people and over 300 types of cultivated and wild plants living together in Maranhão State in the Brazilian Cerrado (savannah), a biome threatened with deforestation and climate change. In the face of these environmental threats, Canela women and men work to maintain riverbank and forest gardens and care for their growing crops, whom they consider to be, literally, children. This nurturing, loving relationship between people and plants—which offers a thought-provoking model for supporting multispecies survival and well-being throughout the world—is the focus of Plant Kin.

Theresa L. Miller shows how kinship develops between Canela people and plants through intimate, multi-sensory, and embodied relationships. Using an approach she calls “sensory ethnobotany,” Miller explores the Canela bio-sociocultural life-world, including Canela landscape aesthetics, ethnobotanical classification, mythical storytelling, historical and modern-day gardening practices, transmission of ecological knowledge through an education of affection for plant kin, shamanic engagements with plant friends and lovers, and myriad other human-nonhuman experiences. This multispecies ethnography reveals the transformations of Canela human-environment and human-plant engagements over the past two centuries and envisions possible futures for this Indigenous multispecies community as it reckons with the rapid environmental and climatic changes facing the Brazilian Cerrado as the Anthropocene epoch unfolds.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist in History, this eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.

The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation.
 
By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery—a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South. Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture. In one part of the country, entrepreneurs envisioned fortunes to be made from “planter’s hoes” and rural women spent their days weaving “negro cloth” and assembling “slave brogans.” In another, enslaved people actively consumed textiles and tools imported from the North to contest their bondage. In between, merchants, marketers, storekeepers, and debt collectors laid claim to the profits of a thriving interregional trade.
 
Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the nineteenth century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.

First major work to deal solely with the Plaquemine societies.

Plaquemine, Louisiana, about 10 miles south of Baton Rouge on the banks of the Mississippi River, seems an unassuming southern community for which to designate an entire culture. Archaeological research conducted in the region between 1938 and 1941, however, revealed distinctive cultural materials that provided the basis for distinguishing a unique cultural manifestation in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Plaquemine was first cited in the archaeological literature by James Ford and Gordon Willey in their 1941 synthesis of eastern U.S. prehistory. 

Lower Valley researchers have subsequently grappled with where to place this culture in the local chronology based on its ceramics, earthen mounds, and habitations. Plaquemine cultural materials share some characteristics with other local cultures but differ significantly from Coles Creek and Mississippian 
cultures of the Southeast. Plaquemine has consequently received the dubious distinction of being defined by the characteristics it lacks, rather than by those it possesses. 

The current volume brings together eleven leading scholars devoted to shedding new light on Plaquemine and providing a clearer understanding of its relationship to other Native American cultures. The authors provide a thorough yet focused review of previous research, recent revelations, and directions for future research. They present pertinent new data on cultural variability and connections in the Lower Mississippi Valley and interpret the implications for similar cultures and cultural relationships. This volume finally places Plaquemine on the map, incontrovertibly demonstrating the accomplishments and importance of Plaquemine peoples in the long history of native North America.