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Wide-ranging essays on cheerleading, from the pep rally to the NFL sidelines to All-Star competitions, and why it matters.

Cheer is deeply associated with a wholesome, simple Americana. Yet this often clichéd image belies its complex history and current status as a global industry made up of diverse participants and forms. Indeed, cheerleading—its culture, controversies, and evolution—has always offered a revealing lens on race, class, gender, and sexuality in American society..

Cheerleading was born in 1869 as a diversion for Ivy League men. The Cheer Reader collects fourteen wide-ranging essays on what happened next and why it matters: how cheer became feminized, sexualized, professionalized, even radicalized. Contributors examine the role of cheer in the Civil Rights Movement, a landmark student free-speech case, and the emergence of competitive-only and queer cheer teams. Other essays consider cheer’s quest for sport legitimacy, social media “cheerlebrities” and eating disorders, and the working conditions of NFL and NBA cheerleaders. Amid these tensions between empowerment and objectification, cheer is only getting more popular, with some seven million participants worldwide. The Cheer Reader is a nuanced account of the activity they share and what it means today.

A history of San Francisco that studies change in the postwar urban landscape in relation to the city's queer culture.

The City Aroused is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Damon Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organizing among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement.

Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen’s hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape.

As the lobbying arm of the civil rights movement, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR)—which has operated since the early 1950s—was instrumental in the historic legislative breakthroughs of the Second Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Lobby skillfully recounts the LCCR’s professional and grassroots lobbying that contributed to these signature civil rights policy achievements in the 1950s and ’60s.

Shamira Gelbman explains how the diversity of this interest group coalition both hindered and enabled lobbyists to generate broad-based support for reforms that often seemed risky to legislators. They coordinated their efforts by identifying common ground among member organizations, developing coalitional positions on substantive and strategic questions, and exhorting organizations to mobilize professional and grassroots lobbying resources accordingly. The result was to “speak with one booming voice” to ultimately help secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

The Civil Rights Lobby concludes by reprising key lessons from the LCCR’s organizational development and participation in civil rights policymaking. Gelbman suggests new directions for research on interest group coalitions and explores how the Leadership Conference’s experience sheds light on the politics of the Second Reconstruction.

Created in 1934, the Coit Tower murals were sponsored by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the first of the New Deal art programs. Twenty-five master artists and their assistants worked there, most of them in buon fresco, Nearly all of them drew upon the palette and style of Diego Rivera. The project boosted the careers of Victor Arnautoff, Lucien Labaudt, Bernard Zakheim, and others, but Communist symbols in a few murals sparked the first of many national controversies over New Deal art.

Sixty full-color photographs illustrate Robert Cherny’s history of the murals from their conception and completion through their evolution into a beloved San Francisco landmark. Cherny traces and critiques the treatment of the murals by art critics and historians. He also probes the legacies of Coit Tower and the PWAP before surveying San Francisco’s recent controversies over New Deal murals.

An engaging account of an artistic landmark, The Coit Tower Murals tells the full story behind a public art masterpiece.

A first-of-its-kind study of Alexander the Great that examines the diverse manifestations and pivotal role of friendship in his campaigns, decisions, and enduring legacy.

Modern scholarship has illuminated nearly every aspect of Alexander the Great’s life and campaigns––but Joseph Roisman turns to a dimension of Alexander’s world that has yet to receive sustained analysis: the structure and function of friendship in the king’s regime. In this first-of-its-kind study, The Complex Friendships of Alexander the Great explores the central role friendship played in Alexander’s social, political, and cultural world. Moving beyond utilitarian perspectives, Roisman shows that friendship with the king involved affective, noninstrumental bonds that shaped his decisions, successes, and failures.

Using Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship as a starting point, Roisman examines the making, breaking, and remaking of bonds with Macedonian companions, including his closest allies, as well as with foreigners encountered during his campaigns. The book concludes with the first comprehensive list of Alexander’s friends drawn from ancient sources. Combining meticulous scholarship with new interpretive insight, this study reevaluates how we understand Alexander the Great’s leadership, social networks, and legacy.

2026 Al Lowman Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association (TSHA)
2026 Bonney MacDonald Outstanding Book Award Winner, Center for the Study of the American West at West Texas A&M University (CSAW)

How West Texas business and culture molded the rise of conservatism in the United States.

Much of what we understand as modern American political conservatism was born in West Texas, where today it predominates. How did the people of such a vast region—larger than New England and encompassing big cities like Lubbock and Amarillo, as well as tiny towns from Anson to Dalhart—develop such a uniform political culture? And why and how did it go national?

Jeff Roche finds answers in the history of what he calls cowboy conservatism. Political power players matter in this story, but so do football coaches, newspaper editors, and a breakfast cereal tycoon who founded a capitalist utopia. The Conservative Frontier follows these and other figures as they promoted an ideology grounded in the entrepreneurial and proto-libertarian attitudes of nineteenth-century Texas ranchers, including a fierce devotion to both individualism and small-town notions of community responsibility. This political sensibility was in turn popularized by its association with the mythology and iconography of the cowboy as imagined in twentieth-century mass media. By the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan, Roche shows, it was clear that the cowboy conservatism of West Texas had set the stage for the emergence of the New Right—the more professionalized and tech-savvy operation that dominated national conservative politics for the next quarter century.

Public protests are a vital tool for asserting grievances and creating temporary, yet tangible, communities as the world becomes more democratic and urban in the twenty-first century. While the political and social aspects of protest have been extensively studied, little attention has been paid to the physical spaces in which protests happen. Yet place is a crucial aspect of protests, influencing the dynamics and engagement patterns among participants. In The Design of Protest, Tali Hatuka offers the first extensive discussion of the act of protest as a design: that is, a planned event in a space whose physical geometry and symbolic meaning are used and appropriated by its organizers, who aim to challenge socio-spatial distance between political institutions and the people they should serve.

Presenting case studies from around the world, including Tiananmen Square in Beijing; the National Mall in Washington, DC; Rabin Square in Tel Aviv; and the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Hatuka identifies three major dimensions of public protests: the process of planning the protest in a particular place; the choice of spatial choreography of the event, including the value and meaning of specific tactics; and the challenges of performing contemporary protests in public space in a fragmented, complex, and conflicted world. Numerous photographs, detailed diagrams, and plans complement the case studies, which draw upon interviews with city officials, urban planners, and protesters themselves.

Winner of the Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize from the Human Sexuality and Anthropology Interest Group (HSAIG)

The Divine Institution provides an account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-civil rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics.

This tradition inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explaining all social problems as a failure of the individual to achieve the strong gender and sexual identities that ground the nuclear family. The consequences of this theology are both personal suffering for individuals who cannot measure up to prescribed gender and sexual roles, and political support for conservative government policies. Exposure to experiences that undermine the idea that an emphasis on the family is the solution to all social problems is causing a younger generation of white evangelicals to shift away from this narrow theological emphasis and toward a more social justice-oriented theology. The material and political effects of this shift remain to be seen.

An intellectual history of architectural modernism for an age of rising global inequality and environmental crisis.

The Earth That Modernism Built traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. Kenny Cupers argues that to understand how the earth became an object of design, we need to radically shift the terms of analysis. Rather than describing how new design ideas and practices traveled and transformed people and places across the globe, this book interrogates the politics of life and earth underpinning this process. It demonstrates how approaches to modern housing, landscape design, and infrastructure planning are indebted to an understanding of planetary and human ecology fueled by settler colonialism and imperial ambition.

Cupers draws from both canonical and unknown sources and archives in Germany, Namibia, and Poland to situate Wilhelmine and Weimar design projects in an expansive discourse about the relationship between soil, settlement, and race. This reframing reveals connections between colonial officials planning agricultural hinterlands, garden designers proselytizing geopolitical theory, soil researchers turning to folklore, and Bauhaus architects designing modern communities according to functionalist principles. Ultimately, The Earth That Modernism Built shows how the conviction that we can design our way out of environmental crisis is bound to exploitative and divisive ways of inhabiting the earth.

The Ecosystem Approach in Anthropology serves as a foundational methodology guide for modern ecological and environmental anthropology. The book advocates for a rigorous, integrative approach to studying human societies by framing them as deeply interconnected components of larger biological ecosystems. Moran gathers a diverse cohort of leading researchers to demonstrate how abstract ecosystem concepts can be translated into concrete, empirical field practices across varying environments, ranging from tropical rainforests to arid landscapes. By bridging the gap between cultural anthropology and natural sciences like ecology, soil science, and demography, the volume offers critical frameworks for quantifying energy flows, resource consumption, and human-environmental feedback loops, making it an indispensable resource for analyzing complex social-ecological systems and anthropogenic environmental changes.

Globalisation has created an interconnected world, but has not diminished violence, militarism and inequality. The Economics of Killing describes how the power of global elites, entrenched under globalisation, has created a deadly cycle of violence.

In this groundbreaking work, Vijay Mehta shows how attempts at peaceful national development are routinely blocked by Western powers. He locates the 2008 financial crisis in US attempts to block China's model of development. He shows how Europe and the US conspire with regional dictators to prevent countries from developing advanced industries, and how this system has fed terrorism.

Mehta argues that a different world is possible, based on policies of disarmament, demilitarisation and sustainable development. This original and thought-provoking book will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the consequences of endless war fuelled by the West.