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Applying the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework—a social constructivist model of online learning comprised of cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence—to writing studies, this book investigates peer review in hybrid and online first-year writing courses. The authors draw on both theory and disciplinary practices to analyze multi-institutional case studies, interviews, and artifacts, offering scholarship that is both data-driven and pedagogically pragmatic. The results of their analysis present a pragmatic and pedagogically sound approach to navigating the complicated task of designing and facilitating courses that incorporate collaborative activities such as peer review.

“After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric.” The Conflagration of Community challenges Theodor Adorno’s famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. J. Hillis Miller masterfully considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake.

One woman’s quest for a great bagel becomes a poignant pursuit of culture and belonging.
Bagels have always been Jen Rubin’s cultural comfort food. Born and raised in New York City, she grew up on family gatherings anchored by sprawling bagel spreads. But after moving to Wisconsin thirty years ago, she struggled to maintain ties to her Jewish heritage—including a bagel worthy of her New York upbringing. When her mother’s death leads her to revisit her roots, Rubin embarks on a deeply personal mission: to discover whether the Midwest can produce a quality, authentic bagel. What begins as a search for comfort and connection becomes an enlightening exploration of food, identity, and belonging.
In The Great Midwest Bagel Quest, Rubin visits Chicago and St. Louis, Detroit and Ann Arbor, the Twin Cities, and Madison and Milwaukee—with a couple of side trips to New York City—sampling dozens of bagels, meeting artisan bakers, and exploring the histories of Jewish communities across the region. Along the way, she challenges the assumption that the Midwest has never produced truly authentic bagels.
Blending memoir, culinary history, travel narrative, and cultural reporting, Rubin uncovers a rich but overlooked bagel tradition while reflecting on her own complicated relationship with home. As she traces the evolution of the bagel from Jewish immigrant staple to mass-market commodity to the innovative artisanal varieties being produced today, she begins to see an evolution in her own relationship to her Jewish and familial traditions.
Warm, witty, and illuminating, The Great Midwest Bagel Quest is a fresh contribution to food writing that will appeal to readers of culinary history, immigrant history, and memoir. Most of all, it is a celebration of how food creates and sustains community—and how the search for the perfect bagel can lead us back to our true selves.

The most important national commemoration of the twentieth century, the 1976 bicentennial celebration gave rise to a broad-ranging debate over how the American Revolution should be remembered and represented. Federal planners seeking an uncritical glorification of the nation's founding came up against an array of constituencies with other interests and objectives. Inspired by the “new social history” that looked at the past “from the bottom up,” Americans who had previously been disenfranchised by traditional national narratives—African Americans, women, American Indians, workers, young people—demanded a voice and representation in the planning. Local communities, similarly suspicious of federal direction, sought control over their own bicentennial events. Corporate representatives promoted an approach that championed the convergence of patriotism and private enterprise, while commercial interests applied the marketing techniques of an expanding consumerism to hawk every imaginable kind of patriotic souvenir to all of these groups.

The end result of these competing efforts, Tammy S. Gordon shows, was a national celebration that reflected some common themes, including a mistrust of federal power, an embrace of decentralized authority, and a new cultural emphasis on the importance of the self. The American Revolution Bicentennial can thus be seen as both a product of the social and political changes of the 1960s and a harbinger of things to come. After 1976, the postwar myth of a consensus view of American history came to an end, ensuring that future national commemorations would continue to be contested.

 Taking to heart Thomas Heywood’s claim that plays “persuade men to humanity and good life, instruct them in civility and good manners, showing them the fruits of honesty, and the end of villainy,” Mark Bayer’s captivating new study argues that the early modern London theatre was an important community institution whose influence extended far beyond its economic, religious, educational, and entertainment contributions. Bayer concentrates not on the theatres where Shakespeare’s plays were performed but on two important amphitheatres, the Fortune and the Red Bull, that offer a more nuanced picture of the Jacobean playgoing industry. By looking at these playhouses, the plays they staged, their audiences, and the communities they served, he explores the local dimensions of playgoing. 

The large number of Vietnamese refugees that resettled in the United States since the fall of Saigon have become America’s fastest growing immigrant group. Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies traces the ideologies, networks, and cultural sensibilities that have long influenced and continue to transform social, political, and economic developments in Vietnam and the U.S.

Moving beyond existing approaches, the editors and contributors to this volume—the first to craft a working framework for researching, teaching, and learning about this dynamic community—present a new Vietnamese American historiography that began in South Vietnam. They provide deep-dive explorations into community development, political activism, civic participation and engagement, as well as entrepreneurial endeavors. Chapters offer new concepts and epistemological approaches to how legacy and memory is nurtured, produced and circulated in the Vietnamese diaspora.

Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies seeks to better understand the rapidly changing landscape of Vietnamese American diaspora.

Contributors: Duyen Bui, Christian Collet, Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox, Elwing Suong Gonzalez, Tuan Hoang, Jennifer A. Huynh, Y Thien Nguyen, Nguyen Vu Hoang, Van Nguyen-Marshall, Thien-Huong Ninh, Hai-Dang Phan, Ivan V. Small, Quan Tue Tran, Thuy Vo Dang, and the editors