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Robert H. Schuller’s ministry—including the architectural wonder of the Crystal Cathedral and the polished television broadcast of Hour of Power—cast a broad shadow over American Christianity. Pastors flocked to Southern California to learn Schuller’s techniques. The President of United States invited him sit prominently next to the First Lady at the State of the Union Address. Muhammad Ali asked for the pastor’s autograph. It seemed as if Schuller may have started a second Reformation. And then it all went away. As Schuller’s ministry wrestled with internal turmoil and bankruptcy, his emulators—including Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, and Joel Osteen— nurtured megachurches that seemed to sweep away the Crystal Cathedral as a relic of the twentieth century. How did it come to this?

Certainly, all churches depend on a mix of constituents, charisma, and capital, yet the size and ambition of large churches like Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral exert enormous organizational pressures to continue the flow of people committed to the congregation, to reinforce the spark of charismatic excitement generated by high-profile pastors, and to develop fresh flows of capital funding for maintenance of old projects and launching new initiatives. The constant attention to expand constituencies, boost charisma, and stimulate capital among megachurches produces an especially burdensome strain on their leaders. By orienting an approach to the collapse of the Crystal Cathedral on these three core elements—constituency, charisma, and capital—The Glass Church demonstrates how congregational fragility is greatly accentuated in larger churches, a notion we label megachurch strain, such that the threat of implosion is significantly accentuated by any failures to properly calibrate the inter-relationship among these elements.

Thought-provoking and original, The Global History of Black Girlhood opens up new possibilities for understanding Black girls in the past while offering useful tools for present-day Black girls eager to explore the histories of those who came before them.

Contributors: Janaé E. Bonsu, Ruth Nicole Brown, Tara Bynum, Casidy Campbell, Katherine Capshaw, Bev Palesa Ditsie, Sarah Duff, Cynthia Greenlee, Claudrena Harold, Anasa Hicks, Lindsey Jones, Phindile Kunene, Denise Oliver-Velez, Jennifer Palmer, Vanessa Plumly, Shani Roper, SA Smythe, Nastassja Swift, Dara Walker, Najya Williams, and Nazera Wright

Millions across the world face the daily challenge to find enough food to survive. Hunger is on the rise globally, with more than 1.2 billion people suffering from food insecurity. Rising prices are further restricting food access.

In this deeply informative study, Majda Bne Saad identifies the causes for global hunger embedded in the current global political and economic system and highlights the key challenges facing food deficit countries. She shows how Western countries share the blame for global hunger through their support for subsidies to agricultural production and biofuels, which have created new challenges to food security worldwide.

Bne Saad argues that, as world population rises from 7 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050, there needs to be a ‘second green revolution’ to grow more food. She looks at the factors constraining low-income nations from achieving food security and considers policies which could generate income and enhance individuals' entitlement to food.

Examines how the humanitarian order advances a message of moral triumph and care while abandoning the dispossessed

Prompted by a growing number of refugees and other displaced people, intersections of design and humanitarianism are proliferating. From the IKEA Foundation’s Better Shelter to Airbnb’s Open Homes program, the consumer economy has engaged the global refugee crisis with seemingly new tactics that normalize an institutionally sanctioned politics of evasion. Exploring “the global shelter imaginary,” this book charts the ways shelter functions as a form of rightless relief that expels recognition of the rights of the displaced and advances political paradoxes of displacement itself. 

The Spanish Empire was a complex web of places and peoples. Through an expansive range of essays that look at Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, this volume brings a broad range of regions into conversation. The contributors focus on nuanced, comparative exploration of the processes and practices of creating, maintaining, and transforming cultural place making within pluralistic Spanish colonial communities.

The Global Spanish Empire argues that patterned variability is necessary in reconstructing Indigenous cultural persistence in colonial settings. The volume’s eleven case studies include regions often neglected in the archaeology of Spanish colonialism. The time span under investigation is extensive as well, transcending the entirety of the Spanish Empire, from early impacts in West Africa to Texas during the 1800s. The contributors examine the making of a social place within a social or physical landscape. They discuss the appearance of hybrid material culture, the incorporation of foreign goods into local material traditions, the continuation of local traditions, and archaeological evidence of opportunistic social climbing. In some cases, these changes in material culture are ways to maintain aspects of traditional culture rather than signifiers of new cultural practices.

The Global Spanish Empire tackles broad questions about Indigenous cultural persistence, pluralism, and place making using a global comparative perspective grounded in the shared experience of Spanish colonialism.

Contributors

Stephen Acabado
Grace Barretto-Tesoro
James M. Bayman
Christine D. Beaule
Christopher R. DeCorse
Boyd M. Dixon
John G. Douglass
William R. Fowler
Martin Gibbs
Corinne L. Hofman
Hannah G. Hoover
Stacie M. King
Kevin Lane
Laura Matthew
Sandra Montón-Subías
Natalia Moragas Segura
Michelle M. Pigott
Christopher B. Rodning
David Roe
Roberto Valcárcel Rojas
Steve A. Tomka
Jorge Ulloa Hung
Juliet Wiersema

At the age of ten and without his parents, Easurk Charr, a convert to Christianity, came to Hawa'ii in 1904 to earn enough money to acquire an education and return to his native Korea as a medical missionary. The Golden Mountain is Charr's story of his early years in Korea, his migration to Hawai'i and the American mainland, and the joys and pain of his life as one of some seven thousand Koreans who migrated to the United States between 1903 and 1905. 

First published in 1961, Charr's memoir offers touching insights into the experience of early Korean immigrants. He tells eloquently of how difficult it was for him to become a naturalized citizen, even after serving in the U.S. Army. An introduction by Wayne Patterson provides a broader perspective on both Charr and the Korean immigrant experience.

This anthology argues for the serious study of the literary oeuvre of Anne Rice, a major figure in today’s popular literature. The essays assert that Rice expands the conventions of the horror genre’s formula to examine important social issues. Like a handful of authors working in this genre, Rice manipulates its otherwise predictable narrative structures so that a larger, more interesting cultural mythology can be developed. Rice searches for philosophical truth, examining themes of good and evil, the influence on people and society of both nature and nurture, and the conflict and dependence of humanism and science.

The United States government thought it could make Indians "vanish." After the Indian Wars ended in the 1880s, the government gave allotments of land to individual Native Americans in order to turn them into farmers and sent their children to boarding schools for indoctrination into the English language, Christianity, and the ways of white people. Federal officials believed that these policies would assimilate Native Americans into white society within a generation or two. But even after decades of governmental efforts to obliterate Indian culture, Native Americans refused to vanish into the mainstream, and tribal identities remained intact.

This revisionist history reveals how Native Americans' sense of identity and "peoplehood" helped them resist and eventually defeat the U.S. government's attempts to assimilate them into white society during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). Tom Holm discusses how Native Americans, though effectively colonial subjects without political power, nonetheless maintained their group identity through their native languages, religious practices, works of art, and sense of homeland and sacred history. He also describes how Euro-Americans became increasingly fascinated by and supportive of Native American culture, spirituality, and environmental consciousness. In the face of such Native resiliency and non-Native advocacy, the government's assimilation policy became irrelevant and inevitably collapsed. The great confusion in Indian affairs during the Progressive Era, Holm concludes, ultimately paved the way for Native American tribes to be recognized as nations with certain sovereign rights.

This groundbreaking historical account documents the little-known but significant conflict that erupted among Maine lobstermen in the 1950s—a pivotal clash that pitted independent small-scale fishermen against powerful dealers and federal government regulators. Written by distinguished historian Ronald P. Formisano, this work reconstructs a dramatic struggle over prices and economic power within Maine's vital lobster fishery.

Capturing the reality of the Lobster War strike and its subsequent legal proceedings, Formisano's narrative explores how independent owner-operators of the Maine lobster fishery, facing economic pressures from middlemen dealers and federal intervention, banded together in a coordinated effort to secure fair prices and maintain control over their livelihoods. 

Through meticulous historical research, Formisano illuminates the economic realities of commercial fishing, the dynamics between laborers and processors, and the role of government regulation in shaping resource management policies.The Great Lobster War serves as both a detailed historical study and an accessible story of working-class agency and collective action in the postwar era.

Where Black people live has long been an important determinant of their ability to participate in political processes. The Great Migration significantly changed the way Democratic Party elites interacted with Black communities in northern cities, Detroit, New York, and Chicago. Many white Democratic politicians came to believe the growing pool of Black voters could help them reach their electoral goals—and these politicians often changed their campaign strategies and positions to secure Black support. Furthermore, Black migrants were able to participate in politics because there were fewer barriers to Black political participations outside the South.

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party frames the Great Migration as an important economic and social event that also had serious political consequences. Keneshia Grant created one of the first listings of Black elected officials that classifies them based on their status as participants in the Great Migration. She also describes some of the policy/political concerns of the migrants. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party lays the groundwork for ways of thinking about the contemporary impact of Black migration on American politics.