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Winner, ASLE-UKI Critical Book Prize, 2025
Finalist, Ecocritical Book Award, 2025, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)
Longlisted, Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing, 2025

Case studies examining the archaeological record of an overlooked mineral

Salt, once a highly prized trade commodity essential for human survival, is often overlooked in research because it is invisible in the archaeological record. Salt in Eastern North America and the Caribbean: History and Archaeology brings salt back into archaeology, showing that it was valued as a dietary additive, had curative powers, and was a substance of political power and religious significance for Native Americans. Major salines were embedded in collective memories and oral traditions for thousands of years as places where physical and spiritual needs could be met. Ethnohistoric documents for many Indian cultures describe the uses of and taboos and other beliefs about salt.

The volume is organized into two parts: Salt Histories and Salt in Society. Case studies from prehistory to post-Contact and from New York to Jamaica address what techniques were used to make salt, who was responsible for producing it, how it was used, the impact it had on settlement patterns and sociopolitical complexity, and how economies of salt changed after European contact. Noted salt archaeologist Heather McKillop provides commentary to conclude the volume.
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Latinos living in the United States continue to face institutional racism and systemic oppression in many aspects of their lives. This volume focuses on discriminatory policies and practices in the health sector and reveals how they compound contemporary health inequities among Latinos. Through a combination of rigorous data analysis and personal narratives, the contributors explore critical dimensions of Latino health, including systemic disparities in healthcare access and insurance, the effects of state immigration policies on health outcomes, unique challenges facing undocumented immigrants, adolescent socio-emotional development, aging populations, Latina women’s physical and mental health, farmworker occupational hazards, and pathways toward health equity. Together, the chapters show that Latinos in the United States continue to face four fundamental barriers to health equity, namely immigrant legal status restrictions, anti-immigrant policies, inadequate quality care from healthcare systems lacking cultural competency, and limited occupational protections. This timely work provides essential evidence for policymakers, public health practitioners, and researchers seeking to understand and address persistent health disparities affecting America's largest ethnic minority population.

Winner of the 2026 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Nonfiction
Winner of the 2025 Nature and the Environment National Outdoor Book Award 

“The essential purpose of Saving the Big Sky is to inspire the reader to help conserve even more of Montana,” write Bruce Bugbee, Robert Kiesling, and John Wright in this compelling study of how six million acres of biodiverse land were conserved in Montana over the past fifty years. Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge about land stewardship has evolved and since the 1970s tribes, nonprofit organizations, land trusts, and government agencies have conserved land in many creative ways. Beautifully illustrated with more than ninety color photographs and thirty detailed maps, Saving the Big Sky showcases land conservation achievements across eight regions of the state: the Rocky Mountain Front, the Blackfoot Valley, the Greater Yellowstone, the Missoula Region, the Helena Region, Northwest Montana, the Flathead Indian Reservation, and the American Prairie.

Land protection is shown to work best when large, intact, connected landscapes can be conserved, rather than small, fragmented, isolated parcels. Conservationists have found that landowners in Montana more widely accept conservation easements and other voluntary, financially compensating tools that respect private property rights. The brilliant images and striking before-and-after maps featured here celebrate the ranches, farms, wildlife habitats, and scenic open spaces that are forever safeguarded.

In documenting conservation accomplishments and suggesting what more can be done, Saving the Big Sky invites readers to participate in conserving Montana—or whatever cherished landscape they call home.

Analyzes and compares the rapid growth of medium-sized cities.

Over the past thirty years, transnational investment, trade, and government policies have encouraged the decentralization of national economies, disrupting traditional patterns of urban and regional growth. Many smaller cities-such as Seattle, Washington; Campinas, Brazil; Oita, Japan; and Kumi, Korea-have grown markedly faster than the largest metropolitan regions. These “second tier cities” are home to specialized industrial complexes that have taken root, provided significant job growth, and attracted mobile capital and labor.

A unique and engaging account of local urban decision-making within the globalizing world

High Point, North Carolina, is known as the “Furniture Capital of the World.” Once a manufacturing stronghold, most of its furniture factories have closed over the past forty years, with production shipped off to low-wage countries. Yet as manufacturing left, the city tightened its hold on a biannual global exposition that serves as the world’s furniture fashion runway. At the High Point Market, visitors from more than one hundred nations traverse twelve million square feet of meticulous design. Downtown buildings—once courthouses, movie theaters, post offices, and gas stations—are now chic showroom spaces, even as many sit empty between each exposition.

In Showroom City, John Joe Schlichtman applies an ethnographic lens to the global exposition’s relationship with High Point after it defeated rival Chicago in the 1960s and established itself as the world’s dominant furniture center. In recent decades, following trends in global finance, private equity firms were increasingly behind downtown High Point’s real estate transactions, coordinated by buyers far removed from the region. Then, in one massive transaction in 2011, a firm funded by Bain Capital purchased every major showroom building, and the majority of downtown real estate was under one owner. 

Showroom City is a story of exclusionary growth and unchecked development, of a city flailing to fill the void left by its dwindling factories. But beyond that Schlichtman engages the general lessons behind both High Point’s deindustrialization and its stunning reinvention as a furniture fashion, merchandising, and design node. With great nuance, he delves deeply to reveal how power operates locally and how citizens may affirm, exploit, influence, and resist the takeover of their community.

Rethinking life with microbes through the art of natural fermentation

Within us and around us, microbes are everywhere, constantly reshaping what it means to be human as we interact with them—sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. Singing with Invisible Worlds theorizes human–microbe relationships through a rare ethnographic account of the fermentation process at the 350-year-old Terada Honke, one of only two natural sake breweries in Japan.

Painting a vivid picture of how sake brewers collaborate with bacteria, molds, and yeasts, Maya Hey reveals that ambient microbes are not controlled but courted, cultivated, and deliberately choreographed. As the brewers adapt to shifting microbial dynamics, they engage in what Hey calls an “improvisational ethic”—a way of responding to the unknown with care and attentiveness through each phase of blooming and waning across weeks, months, and even centuries. In documenting these remarkable practices, Singing with Invisible Worlds offers an intimate, situated understanding of how we can come to know and live with microbial life, with implications for feminist theory, science and technology studies, and multispecies ethnography.

Unsettling simplistic notions of “good” or “bad” microbes, this book presents a compelling vision for planetary coexistence—one that starts not with grand solutions but with small, rhythmic acts of microscopic attunement.

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How six groundbreaking women redefined American food—what we eat, how we eat it, and why it matters.

From wartime nutrition science to modern food activism, Six Women Who Shaped What Americans Eat examines the pivotal roles six women played in rewriting the rules of American cuisine. Michelle Mart offers a rich and accessible narrative that connects dietary trends, food marketing, and public health movements to the voices of the women who helped drive them.

Part one highlights Hazel Stiebeling’s development of dietary guidelines and RDAs, Poppy Cannon’s promotion of processed foods for convenience and gourmet meals, and Julia Child’s introduction of French cuisine with an emphasis on fresh ingredients and culinary techniques. Part two shifts the focus to women who challenged the food system itself: Frances Moore Lappé’s advocacy for vegetarianism and sustainable practices, Marion Nestle’s exposure of food corporations’ manipulative practices, and Alice Waters’s emphasis on locally sourced, organic ingredients and sustainable food systems. Thoughtful and timely, this book explores how culture, politics, and personal vision collided in the kitchens and campaigns of six food pioneers—leaving a lasting imprint on what America eats today.

A critical meditation of the iconic 24-7 roadside chain and its place in the southern imaginary

Waffle House has long been touted as an icon of the American South. The restaurant’s consistent foregrounding as a resonant symbol of regional character proves relevant for understanding much about the people, events, and foodways shaping the sociopolitical contours of today’s Bible Belt. Whether approached as a comedic punchline on the Internet, television, and other popular media or elevated as a genuine touchstone of messy American modernity, Waffle House, its employees, and everyday clientele do much to transcend such one-dimensional characterizations, earning distinction in ways that regularly go unsung.

Smothered and Covered: Waffle House and the Southern Imaginary is the first book to socioculturally assess the chain within the field of contemporary food studies. In this groundbreaking work, Ty Matejowsky argues that Waffle House’s often beleaguered public persona is informed by various complexities and contradictions. Critically unpacking the iconic eatery from a less reductive perspective offers readers a more realistic and nuanced portrait of Waffle House, shedding light on how it both reflects and influences a prevailing southern imaginary—an amorphous and sometimes conflicting collection of images, ideas, attitudes, practices, linguistic accents, histories, and fantasies that frames understandings about a vibrant if also paradoxical geographic region.

Matejowsky discusses Waffle House’s roots in established southern foodways and traces the chain’s development from a lunch-counter restaurant that emerged across the South. He also considers Waffle House’s place in American and southern popular culture, highlighting its myriad depictions in music, television, film, fiction, stand-up comedy, and sports. Altogether, Matejowsky deftly and persuasively demonstrates how Waffle House serves as a microcosm of today’s South with all the accolades and criticisms this distinction entails.