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A pioneering look at the queer history, politics, and spaces of the Twin Cities

The Twin Cities is home to one of the largest and most vital GLBT populations in the nation—and one of the highest percentages of gay residents in the country. Drawn from the pioneering work of the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project—a collective organization of students, scholars, and activists devoted to documenting and interpreting the lives of GLBT people in Minneapolis and St. Paul—Queer Twin Cities is a uniquely critical collection of essays on Minnesota’s vibrant queer communities, past and present.

Queer Under Siege reveals that collective repression is not only a global system, but also a moral process that shapes how people tolerate (and even justify) exclusion and oppression. Baris Cayli Messina probes the question of what kind of society sustains its morality by expelling those who are already most vulnerable? and interrogates why societies continually generate the conditions that produce repression, requiring the unyielding struggle of queer people to survive.

Cayli Messina draws on archives, court records, suicide letters, and activist testimony from the around the world to develop a conceptual framework to trace this process through three interlocking forms and mechanisms: moral eviction, which defines moral repression; punitive hypervisibility, which animates political repression; and sanctioned oblivion, which consolidates epistemic repression.

Queer Under Siege shows that the criminalization of queer life is not a misfire, but an intentional and systematic action that makes disparate societies perceive social order as safe. Arguing that survival is a political act across borders and generations, Cayli Messina traces effective methods of queer activism.

How were indigenous social practices deemed queer and aberrant by colonial forces?

In Queering Colonial Natal, T.J. Tallie travels to colonial Natalestablished by the British in 1843, today South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal provinceto show how settler regimes “queered” indigenous practices. Defining them as threats to the normative order they sought to impose, they did so by delimiting Zulu polygamy; restricting alcohol access, clothing, and even friendship; and assigning only Europeans to government schools. 

Using queer and critical indigenous theory, this book critically assesses Natal (where settlers were to remain a minority) in the context of the global settler colonial project in the nineteenth century to yield a new and engaging synthesis. Tallie explores the settler colonial history of Natal’s white settlers and how they sought to establish laws and rules for both whites and Africans based on European mores of sexuality and gender. At the same time, colonial archives reveal that many African and Indian people challenged such civilizational claims. 

Ultimately Tallie argues that the violent collisions between Africans, Indians, and Europeans in Natal shaped the conceptions of race and gender that bolstered each group’s claim to authority. 

A fascinating exploration of hidden Indígena histories and silences, Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas blends scholarship with spirit practices to reimagine the root work, dis/connection to land, and the political decolonization of Xicana/x peoples.

The definitive social history of the Disciples of Christ in the 19th century

Quest for a Christian America, 1800–1865: A Social History of the Disciples of Christ, Volume 1 by David Edwin Harrell Jr. is the definitive social history of the early Disciples of Christ and the broader Restoration Movement, one of the most influential religious reform movements in nineteenth-century America. Led by visionary figures such as Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone, the movement sought to restore the practices and principles of the early Christian church while promoting unity among believers in a rapidly changing nation.

Moving beyond traditional denominational history, Harrell examines the social, cultural, and political forces that shaped the movement's development between 1800 and the Civil War. He explores how Disciples responded to major issues of the era, including economic growth, reform movements, slavery, sectional conflict, patriotism, pacifism, and the challenges posed by an increasingly modern and diverse society. Through careful analysis, Harrell demonstrates how these concerns influenced both the movement's theology and its vision for a Christian nation.

Quest for a Christian America illuminates the origins of a movement whose descendants include the modern Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Independent Christian Churches, and Churches of Christ. The book offers valuable insight into the relationship between religion, culture, and public life in nineteenth-century America.

The extent of human impact on world environments is undeniable. At scales ranging from local to global, investigations continue to demonstrate that the ecosystems to which we currently belong are structured by human behavior. Catastrophic events such as war, disaster, disease, or economic decay have, at various times throughout history, led to the human abandonment of particular environments. What happens to a human-structured environment when the manner in which people use it abruptly changes? In Questioning Rebound, authors Emily Lena Jones and Jacob L. Fisher explore the archaeological record of the Americas during the period immediately following European contact, a time when the human footprint on the land abruptly shifted. During this era of disease-driven mortality, genocide, incarceration, and forced labor of Indigenous peoples, American landscapes changed in fundamental ways, producing short-lived ecosystems that later became the basis of myths regarding the natural state of environments across the Americas.

Questioning Rebound explores the record and the causes of environmental change during the period following European contact, featuring case studies throughout the Americas. While both the record for and the apparent causes of the changes in the human footprint vary, the record of post- contact environmental change consistently reflects the impacts of past social upheaval.

Questions of Sovereignty examines the enduring struggle of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe to assert and exercise sovereignty in defense of its most sacred homeland: Pyramid Lake. At the center of this story is a century-long fight over water, law, and survival that reveals how Indigenous nations navigate a political landscape in which tribal sovereignty is both recognized and continually challenged.

Indian tribes retain inherent powers of self-governance, yet those powers are often tested when they conflict with powerful state, federal, and private interests. Using the Pyramid Lake Paiute experience as a case study, author Andrew W. Carey demonstrates how tribal sovereignty functions in practice.

At the heart of the narrative is water—the lifeblood of Pyramid Lake and the Truckee River system that feeds it. Decades of diversion and development left the lake in ecological and cultural crisis. As competing interests sought control of the region’s water, the tribe engaged in legal and political battles to secure the resources essential to its survival.

Spanning late twentieth-century litigation and negotiations into the twenty-first century, Questions of Sovereignty reveals how the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe used law, governance, and persistence to protect its homeland. In doing so, it offers a powerful example of Indigenous resilience and a deeper understanding of sovereignty as a living force shaping environmental justice and tribal self-determination.