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This book, encouraging more effective collaboration between professional architects and social scientists, outlines how social science research can aid the design process, detailing how physical environment relates to behavior. With a foreword by Hugh F. Cline.

Contributors:

Andrew Abbott, Daniel Breslau, Craig Calhoun, Charles Camic, Miguel A. Centeno, Patricia Hill Collins, Marjorie L. DeVault, Myra Marx Ferree, Neil Gross, Lorine A. Hughes, Michael D. Kennedy, Shamus Khan, Barbara Laslett, Patricia Lengermann, Doug McAdam, Shauna A. Morimoto, Aldon Morris, Gillian Niebrugge, Alton Phillips, James F. Short Jr., Alan Sica, James T. Sparrow, George Steinmetz, Stephen Turner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Immanuel Wallerstein, Pamela Barnhouse Walters, Howard Winant

In order to study canal irrigation in the Valley of Oaxaca, archaeologist Susan H. Lees visited more than 20 villages in the region. She interviewed residents and photographed local water systems. In this volume, Lees analyzes the relationship between water control and local and state government; compares Oaxacan irrigation with that in other regions; and assesses the role of organized labor in the establishment and maintenance of an irrigation system.

Takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mold research to meet industry needs.
 
The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies.
 
Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives.
 
Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today’s society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally. By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global—and yet more human—than the story that dominates public understanding today.
 
Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs.

Joseph Fischel’s provocative book, Sodomy’s Solicitations, builds out a politics of sexual justice that challenges state sex exceptionalism. By tracing several twenty-first century contestations around Louisiana anti-sodomy laws, Fischel examines patterns and practices of sexual injustice that are too easily eclipsed by our collective focus on marginalized identities.
 
The political stories narrated in Sodomy’s Solicitations are undoubtedly stories of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, but they are also stories of other political problems—and political possibilities. Fischel indicts U.S. sex offender regulatory regimes as state-sponsored sexual violence; offers a qualified defense for sexual expression in public; and argues that animal sexual abuse laws, with their exemptions for industrial agricultural practices, authorize the suffering they were enacted to deter. He also makes the case that laws criminalizing the exchange of sex for money are unconstitutional, and proposes that the best way to protect trans and queer children might just be to enfranchise them.

Sodomy’s Solicitations champions a right to queerness across rather than within identity formations—a right to relatively unpoliced gender, sexual, and intimate pluralism.

In the series Sexuality Studies

"Joe Wilder set the table. His struggles made it easier for me and many others."--From the Foreword by Wynton Marsalis

 

Trumpeter Joe Wilder is distinguished for his achievements in both the jazz and classical worlds. He was a founding member of the Symphony of the New World, where he played first trumpet, and he performed as lead trumpet and soloist with Lionel Hampton, Jimmy Lunceford, Dizzy Gillespie, and Count Basie.  Yet Wilder is also known as a pioneer who broke down racial barriers, the first African American to hold a principal chair in a Broadway show orchestra, and one of the first African Americans to join a network studio orchestra. 

 

In Softly, with Feeling, Edward Berger tells Wilder's remarkable story-from his growing up in working-class Philadelphia to becoming one of the first 1,000 black Marines during World War II-with tremendous feeling and extensive reminiscences by Wilder and his colleagues, including renowned Philadelphia-area musicians Jimmy Heath and Buddy DeFranco.  Berger also places Wilder's experiences within a broader context of American musical and social history.

 

Wilder's modesty and ability to perform in many musical genres may have prevented him from achieving popular recognition, but in Softly, with Feeling, his legacy and contributions to music and culture are assured. 

 

 

By landmass, Russia is the world’s largest country, due largely to centuries of military expansion, imperial rule, and colonization. As a result, it contains people of many ethnicities, nationalities, religions, and languages. Yet Russia’s non-Russian, Indigenous, and minority communities have often been marginalized by state policy and underrepresented in scholarship. Soil and Soul explores how these communities sustain distinct forms of identity and belonging not only through discourse or state institutions but also through embodied relations with land, nature, and animals. These local practices complicate and unsettle state-centered narratives of Russian cultural superiority by showing how meaning and identity are created through relationships with the nonhuman world. Drawing on decolonial, anthropological, environmental, sociological, linguistic, and geographic approaches, this volume reframes minority agency as ecosocial practice embedded in local ecologies, everyday life, and postimperial power asymmetries.

Contributors: Megan Dixon, Yana Hashamova, Kristina Kovalskaya, Jesko Schmoller, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Laura Siragusa, Zoia Tarasova, Baasanjav Terbish

Sōjiji is one of the two head temples of Sōtō Zen, the largest sect of Japanese Buddhism. The temple is steeped in centuries of culture and tradition, but it is very much rooted in the present and future, performing functions and catering to needs that reflect the changing demographic, social, and religious landscapes of contemporary Japan.

Based on more than fifteen years of fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, Sōjiji: Discipline, Compassion, and Enlightenment at a Japanese Zen Temple immerses the reader in the lives and experiences of the different groups that comprise Sōjiji's contemporary religious community. Through clear and accessible prose, ethnographically-grounded analysis, and emotionally compelling stories, the reader will explore the rich pastiche of daily life and ritual activity at a major Japanese Zen temple in institutional, historical, and social context through the lived practices of its community of clergy, practitioners, parishioners, and visitors.

A collective engages and mirrors the critical need for energy justice and transformation
 

Solarities considers the possibilities of organizing societies and economies around solar energy, and the challenges of a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels. Far from presenting solarity as a utopian solution to the climate crisis, it critically examines the ambiguous potentials of solarities: plural, situated, and often contradictory. 

Here, a diverse collective of activists, scholars, and practitioners critically engage a wide range of relationships and orientations to the sun. They consider the material and infrastructural dimensions of solar power, the decolonial and feminist promises of decentralized energy, solarian relations with more-than-human kin, and the problem of oppressive and weaponized solarities. Solarities imagines—and demands— possibilities for energy justice in this transition.

Sold American is an account of the history of the federal government's relationship with Alaska's Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut peoples, from the United States' purchase of Alaska from the czar of Russia in 1867 to Alaska statehood in 1959. Don Mitchell describes how, from the arrival of Russian sea otter hunters in the Aleutian Islands in the eighteenth century to the present day, Alaska Natives have participated in the efforts of non-Natives to turn Alaska's bountiful natural resources into dollars, and documents how Alaska Natives, non-Natives, and the society they jointly forged have been changed because of it. Sold American also tells the story of how and why Congress was persuaded that Alaska Natives should be compensated for the extinguishment of their legally cognizable right (known as 'aboriginal title') to use and occupy the land on which they and their ancestors had hunted, fished, and gathered since time immemorial.

Don Mitchell's companion volume, Take My Land, Take My Life, concludes that story by describing the events that in 1971 resulted in Congress's enactment of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the most generous aboriginal land claims settlement in the nation's history. Insightful and drawn from years of painstaking research of primary source materials, Sold American and Take My Land, Take My Life are an indispensable resource for readers who are interested in the history of the nation's largest state and of the federal government's involvement with Alaska's indigenous peoples.

In Soldier’s Paradise, Samuel Fury Childs Daly tells the story of how Africa’s military dictators tried and failed to transform their societies into martial utopias. Across the continent, independence was followed by a wave of military coups and revolutions. The soldiers who led them had a vision. In Nigeria and other former British colonies, officers governed like they fought battles—to them, politics was war by other means. Civilians were subjected to military-style discipline, which was indistinguishable from tyranny. Soldiers promised law and order, and they saw judges as allies in their mission to make society more like an army. But law was not the disciplinary tool soldiers thought it was. Using legal records, archival documents, and memoirs, Daly shows how law both enabled militarism and worked against it. For Daly, the law is a place to see decolonization’s tensions and ironies—independence did not always mean liberty, and freedom had a militaristic streak. In a moment when militarism is again on the rise in Africa, Daly describes not just where it came from but why it lasted so long.

The members of the Domestic Workers United (DWU) organization—immigrant women of color employed as nannies, caregivers, and housekeepers in New York City—formed to fight for dignity and respect and to “bring meaningful change” to their work. Alana Lee Glaser examines the process of how these domestic workers organized against precarity, isolation, and exploitation to help pass the 2010 New York State Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the first labor law in the United States protecting in-home workers.
 
Solidarity & Care examines the political mobilization of diverse care workers who joined together and supported one another through education, protests, lobbying, and storytelling. Domestic work activists used narrative and emotional appeals to build a coalition of religious communities, employers of domestic workers, labor union members, and politicians to first pass and then to enforce the new law.
 
Through oral history interviews, as well as ethnographic observation during DWU meetings and protest actions, Glaser chronicles how these women fought (and continue to fight) to improve working conditions. She also illustrates how they endure racism, punitive immigration laws, on-the-job indignities, and unemployment that can result in eviction and food insecurity.
 
The lessons from Solidarity & Care along with the DWU’s precedent-setting legislative success have applications to workers across industries.
 
All royalties will go directly to the Domestic Workers United
 

Mapping the transformative effects of America’s urban solidarity economies

Solidarity economies, characterized by diverse practices of cooperation and mutual support, have long played pivotal but largely invisible roles in fostering shared survival and envisioning alternatives to racial capitalism globally and in the United States. This book maps the thriving existence of these cooperative networks in three differently sized American cities, highlighting their commitment to cooperation, democracy, and inclusion and demonstrating the desire—and the pressing need—to establish alternative foundations for social and economic justice.

 

Collectively authored by four social scientists, Solidarity Cities analyzes the deeply entrenched racial and economic divides from which cooperative networks emerge as they work to provide unmet basic needs, including food security, affordable housing, access to fair credit, and employment opportunities. Examining entities such as community gardens, credit unions, cooperatives, and other forms of economic solidarity, the authors highlight how relatively small yet vital interventions into public life can expand into broader movements that help bolster the overall well-being of their surrounding communities.

 

Bringing together insights from geography, political economy, and political science with mapping and spatial analysis methodologies, surveys, and in-depth interviews, Solidarity Cities illuminates the extensive footprints of solidarity economies and the roles they play in communities. The authors show how these initiatives act as bulwarks against gentrification, exploitation, and economic exclusion, helping readers see them as part of the past, present, and future of more livable and just cities.

 

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How did the interplay between class and ethnicity play out within the working class during the Gilded Age? Richard Jules Oestreicher illuminates the immigrant communities, radical politics, worker-employer relationships, and the multiple meanings of workers' affiliations in Detroit at the end of the nineteenth century.

"For both academic analysts and political activists, this book offers useful lessons from the Polish experience with anti-politics and neocorporatism." --Political Science Quarterly Based on extensive use of primary sources, this book provides an analysis of Solidarity, from its ideological origins in the Polish "new left," through the dramatic revolutionary months of 1980-81, and up to the union's remarkable resurgence in 1988-89, when it sat down with the government to negotiate Poland's future. David Ost focuses on what Solidarity is trying to accomplish and why it is likely that the movement will succeed. He traces the conflict between the ruling Communist Party and the opposition, Solidarity's response to it, and the resulting reforms. Noting that Poland is the one country in the world where "radicals of ‘68" came to be in a position to negotiate with a government about the nature of the political system, Ost asks what Poland tells us about the possibility for realizing a "new left" theory of democracy in the modern world. As a Fulbright Fellow at Warsaw University and Polish correspondent for the weekly newspaper In These Times during the Solidarity uprising and a frequent visitor to Poland since then, David Ost has had access to a great deal of unpublished material on the labor movement. Without dwelling on the familiar history of August 1980, he offers some of the unfamiliar subtleties--such as the significance of the Szczecin as opposed to the Gdansk Accord--and shows how they shaped the budding union's understanding of the conflicts ahead. Unique in its attention to the critical, formative period following August 1980, this study is the most current and comprehensive analysis of a movement that continues to transform the nature of East European society. "In his superb book, ...political scientist David Ost chronicles the trajectory of the Polish post-war opposition from its roots in the fascist resistance up to the actions of Solidarity in 19.... [He] astutely bridges academic disciplines, interweaving social theory with intellectual and political history to explain Solidarity's raison d'etre.... In an age when definitions of left and right have become obscured, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics stands out at a creative example of left thought." --In These Times "Ost contributes not only an explication of Polish political life, but he also presents a vision of democracy applicable to the Western world as a whole." --Jewish Currents "An invaluable contribution." --Choice

In Somatic States, Franck Billé examines the conceptual link between the nation-state and the body, particularly the visceral and affective attachment to the state and the symbolic significance of its borders. Billé argues that corporeal analogies to the nation-state are not simply poetic or allegorical but reflect a genuine association of the individual body with the national outline—an identification greatly facilitated by the emergence of the national map. Billé charts the evolution of cartographic practices and the role that political maps have played in transforming notions of territorial sovereignty. He shows how states routinely and effectively mobilize corporeal narratives, such as framing territorial loss through metaphors of dismemberment and mutilation. Despite the current complexity of geopolitics and neoliberalism, Billé demonstrates that corporeality and bodily metaphors remain viscerally powerful because they offer a seemingly simple way to apprehend the abstract nature of the nation-state.

Southern writer and folklorist Kelly Kazek’s collection of eerie and enigmatic Alabama ghost stories

Dark secrets lurk beneath the sleepy surface of Alabama. Ghosts and grisly creatures haunt the towns and forests. In the great Southern ghost-story tradition, famed Alabama storyteller Kelly Kazek weaves a gothic tapestry of ten stories drawn from real people and legendary creatures, cursed places, and harrowing events.

Each story or legend takes readers to a different place in Alabama. Read about the bestial Wolf Woman who terrified Mobilians in the haunted old port city. In the northern city of Huntsville, visit the Dead Children’s Playground in gloomy Maple Hill Cemetery. In Jacksonville, feel the cold grip of the Old Mill Witch, rumored to protect the workers at the rickety cotton yarn mill. Hear about the mysterious green light that drifts along the Alabama River in the Black Belt hamlet of Gee’s Bend and learn about the role the Gee’s Bend Ferry played in the Civil Rights Movement.

Unlike most ghost-story collections, Some Nightmares Are Real includes an appendix of facts, historical resources, and information about how to visit the locations. These contemporary stories embrace a beloved Southern folkloric tradition for a new generation of young readers. The tales will terrify and ensnare ghost-story lovers of all ages. So settle in, pull the covers up tight, and maybe turn on the light, because the truth is: Some Nightmares Are Real.

Digging up the eerie aftermath of America’s deadliest disasters—where ghost stories take root, history lingers in the shadows, and the past refuses to stay buried.

In this haunting follow-up to Some Nightmares Are Real: The Haunting Truth Behind Alabama’s Supernatural Tales, journalist and storyteller Kelly Kazek investigates supernatural folklore grounded in historical catastrophe. This time, she ventures far beyond Alabama, unearthing the eerie legends born from their aftermath of nine of America’s most infamous disasters. From the strangling suffocation of the Boston Molasses Flood and the terror of Galveston’s notorious Great Storm, to flames blasting from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, Some Nightmares Are True examines ghost stories that have haunted communities long after the news headlines stopped.

Each spooky story blends vivid storytelling with meticulous research, connecting real events to the ghostly lore they inspired. Kazek explores not just the moment of disaster, but how grief, resilience, and remembrance shape the way stories live on—through newspaper archives, folklore, and generations of retelling.

With both wry Southern sensibility and journalistic rigor, Kazek explores how moments of tragedy like the Dixie Tornado Outbreak in Alabama, the capsizing of the SS Eastland in Chicago, and the haunting aftermath of the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard in Nebraska leave lasting imprints on generational memory. These sites of devastation become more than historical footnotes; they transform into hallowed grounds where grief lingers, legends remain, and the line between fact and folklore dissolves.

For ghost hunters, or simply those brave enough to follow their curiosity into learning more about the stories’ historical facts, Kazek has compiled a robust appendix that provides context, source materials, and location details, making this a perfect pick to toss in the car for that late-night road trip adventure. But remember, Some Nightmares Are True.

A fierce, vibrant portrait of a newspaper that refused to go up in smoke.

From 1970 to 1978, the Bugle American wasn’t just an alternative newspaper―it was the sparkplug that propelled Milwaukee’s emergence as an influential cultural hub. With its incisive political coverage, razor-sharp cartoons, and in-depth reporting on the city’s explosive music scene, the Bugle American was a lifeline for artists, activists, and readers from Milwaukee to Madison hungry for independent journalism. 

Then, on a cold night in February 1975, everything nearly ended. A firebomb ripped through the Bugle American offices, endangering the lives of staff and burning the building to the ground. The crime was never solved. But the paper didn’t die. Supported by a stunned but determined community―and high-profile allies including Leonard Cohen and George Reedy―the Bugle American rose from the ashes to publish the very next week.

In Some Things Don’t Burn: Art, Activism, and Arson at the Bugle American, author Aurore Sibley tells the full story of this influential underground paper: its founding ideals, its creative energy, its brushes with fame, and its lasting impact. With access to rare materials and family insights―her parents met at the Bugle American, and her father served as one of its editors―Sibley layers investigative research with personal narrative, exploring how revisiting the past helped her reconcile with her father’s complicated life and death. 

Featuring dozens of photographs and illustrations, including cartoons and sketches by renowned underground artist and Bugle American co-founder Denis Kitchen, this book brings readers inside the quirky, passionate, and often chaotic world of a newsroom fighting to stay alive and independent. 

A gripping story of art, activism, community, and resilience, Some Things Don’t Burn reminds us that while buildings can be destroyed, the ideals that ignite a movement are much harder to extinguish.

A pioneering exploration of the unexamined roots and effect of racial sympathy within American politics.

There is racial inequality in America, and some people are distressed over it while others are not. This is a book about white people who feel that distress. For decades, political scientists have studied the effects of white racial prejudice, but Jennifer Chudy shows that white racial sympathy for Black Americans’ suffering is also a potent force in modern American politics. Grounded in the history of Black-white relations in America, racial sympathy is unique. It is not equivalent to a low level of racial prejudice or sympathy for other marginalized groups. Some White Folks reveals how racial sympathy shapes a significant number of white Americans’ opinions on policy areas ranging from the social welfare state to the criminal justice system. Under certain circumstances, it can also spur action—although effects on political behavior are weaker and less consistent, for reasons Chudy examines.

Drawing on diverse quantitative and qualitative evidence and integrating insights from multiple disciplines, Chudy explores the origins, importance, and complexity of racial sympathy, as well as the practical implications for political and movement leaders. A companion to the rich literature on prejudice, Some White Folks demonstrates the multifaceted role of race in American politics and public opinion.