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Commemorating the Battle of Karbala, in which the Prophet Mohammad's grandson Hosayn and seventy-two of his family members and supporters were martyred in 680 CE, is the central religious observance of Shi'i Islam. Though much has been written about the rituals that reenact and venerate Karbala, until now no one has studied women's participation in these observances. This collection of original essays by a multidisciplinary team of scholars analyzes the diverse roles that women have played in the Karbala rituals, as well as the varied ways in which gender-coded symbols have been used within religious and political discourses.

The contributors to this volume consider women as participants in and observers of the Karbala rituals in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, India, Pakistan, and the United States. They find that women's experiences in the Shi'i rituals vary considerably from one community to another, based on regional customs, personal preferences, religious interpretations, popular culture, and socioeconomic background. The authors also examine the gender symbolism within the rituals, showing how it reinforces distinctions between the genders while it also highlights the centrality of women to the symbolic repertory of Shi'ism. Overall, the authors conclude that while Shi'i rituals and symbols have in some ways been used to restrict women's social roles, in other ways they have served to provide women with a sense of independence and empowerment.

A coming-of-age memoir evoking farm, mining, and small-town life in Alabama’s Tuscaloosa County as the world transitions from the Great Depression to World War II.

In the 1930s, the rural South was in the throes of the Great Depression. Farm life was monotonous and hard, but a timid yet curious teenager thought it worth recording. Aileen Kilgore Henderson kept a chronicle of her family’s daily struggles in Tuscaloosa County alongside events in the wider world she gleaned from shortwave radio and the occasional newspaper. She wrote about Howard Hughes’s round-the-world flight and her horror at the rise to power in Germany of a bizarre politician named Adolf Hitler. Henderson longed to join the vast world beyond the farm, but feared leaving the refuge of her family and beloved animals.

Yet, with her father’s encouragement, she did leave, becoming a clerk in the Kress dime store in downtown Tuscaloosa. Despite long workdays and a lengthy bus commute, she continued to record her observations and experiences in her diary, for every day at the dime store was interesting and exciting for an observant young woman who found herself considering new ideas and different points of view.

Drawing on her diary entries from the 1930s and early 1940s, Henderson recollects a time of sweeping change for Tuscaloosa and the South. The World through the Dime Store Door is a personal and engaging account of a Southern town and its environs in transition told through the eyes of a poor young woman with only a high school education but gifted with a lively mind and an openness to life.
 

The improbable and powerful true story of a single mother with prosthetics for both legs who travels the globe with her young daughter in a Land Rover.

“A harrowing memoir. . . . Readers may not want to follow in [Shinn’s] footsteps, but they will never be bored with her as a companion.” ​—Kirkus Reviews

The Wounds That Bind Us is the improbable true story of Kelley Shinn, an orphan at birth who loses her legs at the age of sixteen to a rare bacterial pathogen. She becomes an avid off-road racer and, as a single mother, attempts to drive around the globe in a Land Rover with her three-year-old daughter in tow to bring light to the plight of land mine survivors. With unflinching honesty, exceptional lyricism, and biting humor, Shinn (“that’s two Ns and no shins”) takes readers on a wild journey—literal and emotional—filled with striking characters and landscapes, heartbreaks, and hard-won insights, ultimately arriving at a place of profound redemption.

Told with the energy and intensity of the adventure story it is, this terrifically rich and nuanced examination of a life is also a careful meditation on renewal—a remapping of the world. Guided by the narrator’s keen introspection and her ability to look resolutely at harrowing sorrows and still find hope, joy, and meaning, The Wounds That Bind Us will resonate deeply, long after the last page.

Discusses the challenges and pleasures of creating a new feminism.

Young feminists have grown up with a plethora of cultural choices and images-in the distance from Gloria Steinem to Courtney Love, a chasm has been traversed and an entire history made. In Third Wave Agenda, feminists born between the years 1964 and 1973 discuss the things that matter now, both in looking back at the accomplishments and failures of the past and in planning for the challenges of the future.

The territory of Napa County, California, contains more than grapevines. The deepest roots belong to Wappo-speaking peoples, a group whose history has since been buried by the stories of Spanish colonizers, Californios (today's Latinos), African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Euro Americans. Napa's history clearly is one of co-existence; yet, its schoolbooks tell a linear story that climaxes with the arrival of Euro Americans. In "This Land was Mexican Once," Linda Heidenreich excavates Napa's subaltern voices and histories to tell a complex, textured local history with important implications for the larger American West, as well.

Heidenreich is part of a new generation of scholars who are challenging not only the old, Euro-American depiction of California, but also the linear method of historical storytelling—a method that inevitably favors the last man writing. She first maps the overlapping histories that comprise Napa's past, then examines how the current version came to dominate—or even erase—earlier events. So while history, in Heidenreich's words, may be "the stuff of nation-building," it can also be "the stuff of resistance." Chapters are interspersed with "source breaks"—raw primary sources that speak for themselves and interrupt the linear, Euro-American telling of Napa's history. Such an inclusive approach inherently acknowledges the connections Napa's peoples have to the rest of the region, for the linear history that marginalizes minorities is not unique to Napa. Latinos, for instance, have populated the American West for centuries, and are still shaping its future. In the end, "This Land was Mexican Once" is more than the story of Napa, it is a multidimensional model for reflecting a multicultural past.

A revelatory study of the overlooked ways that Franz Rosenzweig’s closest relationships with women shaped his philosophical legacy and reframed Jewish thought

Three Stars of Redemption: The Influential Women in the Life of Franz Rosenzweig by Amy Hill Shevitz offers a groundbreaking reexamination of Franz Rosenzweig, one of the most influential Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, through the lens of three pivotal women in his life. The book is a compelling study of the ways that Rosenzweig’s intellectual and emotional world were shaped by his mother, Adele Alsberg Rosenzweig, his wife, Edith Hahn Rosenzweig, and his lover Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, charting the influence those women had, by extension, on modern Jewish thought.

Rosenzweig is best known for his work of essential religious philosophy The Star of Redemption and his role in the Weimar Jewish Renaissance. Yet Shevitz reveals how the maternal, romantic, and marital relationships he maintained were not peripheral but central to his philosophical development and lived Judaism. Drawing on archival research and close readings of correspondence and historical context, Shevitz restores agency to these women, whose lives have been marginalized or misrepresented in scholarship. Adele’s bourgeois upbringing and intimate intellectual bond with her son, Edith’s independent journey into Judaism, and Margrit’s complex role as both muse and thinker are explored with nuance and depth. Shevitz challenges reductive portrayals and brings their full humanity to light. This richly contextualized study expands the understanding of Jewish cultural history, gender, and the personal dimensions of philosophical inquiry. Three Stars of Redemption is a vital contribution to Jewish studies, women’s history, and the legacy of Rosenzweig’s thought.

A valuable and enlightening resource, Through Words and Deeds offers an introduction to the many facets of Polish and Polish American womanhood.

Contributors: Laura Anker, Robert Blobaum, Anna Brzezińska, John J. Bukowczyk, Halina Filipowicz, William J. Galush, Rita Gladsky, Thaddeus V. Gromada, Bożena Karwowska, Grażyna Kozaczka, Lynn Lubamersky, Karen Majewski, Nameeta Mathur, Lori A. Matten, Jan Molenda, James S. Pula, Władysław Roczniak, and Robert Szymczak

This book is not about war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, evil, or the killing of a society. It is about a cultural heritage, something vital to a society as a society, something that was not killed in the previous war, something that is resilient. 

Through the Window brings an original perspective to folklore of Bosnians at a certain period of time and the differences and similarities of the three main ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It examines the transethnic character of cultural heritage, against divisions that dominate their tragic recent past. 

The monograph focuses in particular on customs shared by different ethnic groups, specifically elopement, and affinal visitation. The elopement is a transformative rite of passage where an unmarried girl becomes a married woman. The affinal visitation, which follows, is a confirmatory ceremony where ritualized customs between families establish in-lawships These customs reflect a transethnic heritage shared by people in Bosnia as a national group, including Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats.

A first of its kind history, To Advance the Race is an enlightening look at African American women and their multi-generational commitment to the ideal of education as a collective achievement.

Jessica Wilkerson tells their stories within the larger drama of efforts to enact change in the 1960s and 1970s. She shows white Appalachian women acting as leaders and soldiers in a grassroots war on poverty--shaping and sustaining programs, engaging in ideological debates, offering fresh visions of democratic participation, and facing personal political struggles. Their insistence that caregiving was valuable labor clashed with entrenched attitudes and rising criticisms of welfare. Their persistence, meanwhile, brought them into unlikely coalitions with black women, disabled miners, and others to fight for causes that ranged from poor people's rights to community health to unionization.

Inspiring yet sobering, To Live Here, You Have to Fight reveals Appalachian women as the indomitable caregivers of a region--and overlooked actors in the movements that defined their time.

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award

These beautifully crafted stories depict the changing relationships between black and white southerners, the impact of the civil rights movement, and the emergence of the New South.

Mary Ward Brown is a storyteller in the tradition of such powerful 20th-century writers as William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty-writers who have explored and dramatized the tension between the inherited social structure of the South and its contemporary dissolution. With Tongues of Flame, her first collection of short stories, Brown bares the awkward, sometimes hopeful, and often tragic suffering of people caught in changing times within a timeless setting.

Here we meet such memorable characters as a dying black woman who seeks the advice of a now-alcoholic white doctor whom she knew in better years; a young woman, jilted at the altar, driven crazy by an illuminated cross erected by the church opposite her house; and a 95-year-old woman buying a tombstone for her long-deceased husband only to discover that he had been adulterous throughout their marriage. Brown constructs her characters in a disarmingly plain style while breathing life into them with compassion and honesty as they confront the large moments of their lives.

First published by E. P. Dutton in 1986 to immediate critical acclaim, Tongues of Flame won the 1987 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. The judges commended Brown for "seeing life whole, without prejudice, without sentimentality, without histrionics. Her voice may be quiet-sometimes she speaks in a whisper-but her words are, nevertheless, always forceful, clear, and ultimately lasting." With this new publication of Tongues of Flame and its inclusion in the University of Alabama Press's Deep South Books series, a whole new generation of readers may once more discover Mary Ward Brown's profound stories of pain, loss, and hope.

An in-depth, perceptive account of the unconventional life of the Moomins’ beloved creator, now available in the United States

Tove Jansson achieved fame as the creator of the Moomins, beloved by generations of readers around the world. Remarkably, the Moomins were only part of the prodigious creative output of this Finnish-Swedish writer and artist. Jansson’s work also includes short stories and five novels for adults, as well as paintings, murals, and book illustrations. In this acclaimed biography, Boel Westin relies on numerous conversations with Jansson and unprecedented access to her journals, letters, and personal archives to present an engrossing and comprehensive review of the life and world of Scandinavia’s best-loved author.

As Westin’s meticulous research makes clear, Jansson’s artistic and literary works reflected what was most important to her: the love of family and nature and the desire to pursue her art. Guided by her personal motto, “Love and work,” Jansson seized both with uncompromising joy. And while her romantic relationships with men proved unfulfilling, she found those with women—especially with her longtime partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä—both grounding and inspiring.

Westin weaves together the many threads of Jansson’s rich, complex life: an education interrupted to help her family; the bleak war years and her emergence as a painter; the decades of Moominmania across books, newspaper comic strips, merchandise, and adaptations; her later fictions, including her popular The Summer Book; and her time with Pietilä on the solitary island of Klovharu. Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words offers fans and admirers around the world the most complete portrait of the writer Philip Pullman described as “a genius, a woman of profound wisdom and great artistry.”

This unique interdisciplinary essay collection offers a fresh perspective on the active involvement of American women authors in the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. Internationally diverse contributors explore topics ranging from women's social and political mobility to their authorship and activism. While a number of essays focus on such well-known writers as Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, other, perhaps lesser-known authors are also included, such as E. D. E. N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Peabody, Jeannette Hart, and Laura Richards.

These essays show the spectrum of interests and activities in which nineteenth-century women were involved as they moved, geographically and metaphorically, toward gaining their independence and the right to control their lives. Traveling far and wide—to Italy, France, Great Britain, and the Bahamas—these writers came into contact with realities far different from their own. On topics ranging from homeopathy and literary endeavors to politics and revolution, they conversed with others, reaching and inspiring transnational audiences with their words and deeds, and creating a space for self-expression in the rapidly changing transatlantic world.

Journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women’s rights advocate, Margaret Fuller was America’s first major female intellectual. Throughout much of the late-19th and 20th centuries, however, critics and scholars largely saw her as a minor figure in the transcendentalist movement with which she is associated, and her work was considered secondary to that of male figures like Emerson and Hawthorne. While her biography—including her marriage to an Italian noble and her dramatic death in a shipwreck—was often the focus, her skill as a writer was generally overlooked, and her intellectual development largely ignored. 

In the early 1980s, David M. Robinson was one of the first scholars to publish an article that focused on Fuller’s mind and art. Now Transcendent Woman completes and extends this early work. Outlining the development of her philosophy, which Robinson defines as a “purpose-oriented form of thinking, tailored to the commitment and assets of each individual,” he traces Fuller’s intellectual journey, first in relation to her family and the people around her in New England and later in her travels in the midwestern United States and, more importantly, through Europe and her residency in Italy. He focuses first and foremost on what Fuller was reading (Goethe was key), what she was thinking as revealed in her letters and journals, and what she was writing, including seminal works such as Summer on the Lakes and Woman in the Nineteenth Century as well as lesser-known essays, translations, and short stories. Drawing extensively on primary sources, Robinson charts Fuller’s development and achievement as an original thinker and fearless advocate of democracy.