Results by title

A determined journalist’s account of rising to Pulitzer Prize–winning heights

Under the Sun: A Black Journalist’s Journey is Harold Jackson’s powerful memoir that chronicles his path from a Birmingham, Alabama, housing project in the 1950s and ’60s to becoming a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Growing up in the segregated South, Jackson didn’t see a writing career as feasible, especially with the financial struggles his family faced after his father’s death. However, his freshman English teacher’s encouragement set him on a course that would change his life.

Jackson’s journey began in high school, where he became one of the first Black students in the University of Alabama’s summer journalism workshop. It was there that he discovered his unique voice as a writer, setting the stage for a remarkable forty-five-year career as a newspaper writer and editor. Despite the pervasive racial prejudices of the time, Jackson learned to navigate the complexities of being Black in a predominantly white profession. He reflects on the duality of living as a Black person in America, a concept W. E. B. Du Bois described as “double consciousness,” and the ways journalism allowed Jackson to connect with people from all walks of life.

Through his work at prominent news venues such as the Birmingham Post-Herald, United Press International, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Birmingham News, the Baltimore Sun, and the Houston Chronicle, Jackson’s story is not just one of professional success but also of personal growth and understanding. Under the Sun is a testament to his resilience, his ability to see past racial barriers, and his unwavering commitment to giving a voice to those who need it most.

In the age of Artificial Intelligence hallucinations and slop, the need for a clear, accessible, uncluttered, and authoritative textbook is more important than ever. The fourth edition of Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation retains the informal and reader-friendly style of previous editions and has been substantively updated and rewritten to incorporate recent scholarship throughout. Language is important for a number of fields, including teaching, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The wide coverage of language structure, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, and grammar makes this book suitable for pre-service teachers, undergraduates, and graduate students who need some exposure to linguistics, but do not need highly technical training in formal linguistics.

This extensively classroom-tested book is organized for use in a semester or can be customized for shorter terms by omitting chapters after the foundational core provided by chapters 1–3. The encyclopedic nature of the book, which includes a glossary and an index, make it appropriate for self-study and any reader who is interested in the study of language.

Readers of the fourth edition of Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation will find:

• Expanded coverage of Prosody, the phonetic alphabet, African American Language, neurodiversity and language, English as a world language, and English as a lingua franca;
• New content on biolinguistics, translanguaging, enregisterment, indexicality, the semiotic turn in sociolinguistics, code-meshing, complex dynamic systems theory, and personality theory in SLA;
• A thorough overview of the basics of English grammar.

2004 — A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

From astronomy to zoology, the practice of science proceeds from scientific ways of thinking. These patterns of thought, such as defining and classifying, hypothesizing and experimenting, form the building blocks of all scientific endeavor. Understanding how they work is therefore an essential foundation for everyone involved in scientific study or teaching, from elementary school students to classroom teachers and professional scientists.

In this book, Steven Darian examines the language of science in order to analyze the patterns of thinking that underlie scientific endeavor. He draws examples from university science textbooks in a variety of disciplines, since these offer a common, even canonical, language for scientific expression. Darian identifies and focuses in depth on nine patterns—defining, classifying, using figurative language, determining cause and effect, hypothesizing, experimenting, visualizing, quantifying, and comparing—and shows how they interact in practice. He also traces how these thought modes developed historically from Pythagoras through Newton.

Since fracking emerged as a way of extracting natural gas, through intense deep drilling and the use of millions of gallons of water and chemicals to fracture shale, it has been controversial. It is perceived in different ways by different people—by some as an opportunity for increased resources and possibly jobs and other income; by others as a public health and environmental threat; and for many, an unknown. Richard Buttny, a scholar who works on rhetoric and discursive practices, read a story in his local paper in New York about hydrofracking coming to his area and had to research what it was, and what it could mean for his community. Soon he joined neighbors in fighting to have the practice banned state-wide. At the same time, he turned his scholarly eye to the messaging from both sides of the fight, using first-person accounts, interviews, and media coverage.

The activists fighting fracking won. New York is now the only state in the US with sizable deposits of natural gas that has banned hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Unfracked explains the competing rhetoric and discourses on fracking among New York-based advocates, experts, the grassroots, and political officials. Buttny examines how these positions evolved over time and how eventually the state arrived at a decision to ban this extractive technology. His accessible approach provides both a historical recounting of the key events of this seven-year conflict, along with four in-depth case studies: a grassroots citizen group, a public hearing with medical physicians, a key intergovernmental hearing, and a formal debate among experts. The result is a look at a very recent, important historical moment and a useful examination of environmental activist and fossil fuel advocate rhetoric around an issue that continues to cause debate nationwide.

• Participating in a Changing Visual Information Landscape
• Perceiving Visuals as Communicating Information
• Practicing Visual Discernment and Criticality
• Pursuing Social Justice through Visual Practice

• Theory and Background
• In Instruction and Reference
• Behind the Scenes
• Beyond the Library 

2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Silver Medal in the West – Pacific Non-Fiction category

Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore brings to life the history of J. Roth / Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica, which was a microcosm of the Los Angeles Jewish community from 1966 to 1994 and one of the premier Jewish bookstores in the United States. Blending critical analysis with a personal account of growing up in his father’s bookstore, and connecting both to larger forces that helped shape Jewish and American book retailing in the twentieth-century, Laurence Roth crafts a richly felt narrative about his family’s Jewish experience in America. It is a reminder, too, that while most independent bookstores like J. Roth Bookseller disappear from history, these retailers often had outsized effects on their communities. Breaking with conventional modes of scholarship, Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore tells a unique and troubled story that rarely gets told, one that is both personal and analytical, theoretical but rooted in the everyday.

Untimely Women recovers the work of three early-twentieth-century working women, none of whom history has understood as feminists or rhetors: cinema icon and memoirist, Mae West; silent film screenwriter and novelist, Anita Loos; and journalist and mega-publisher, Marcet Haldeman-Julius. While contemporary scholarship tends to highlight and recover women who most resemble academic feminists in their uses of propositional rhetoric, Jason Barrett-Fox uses what he terms a medio-materialist historiography to emphasize the different kinds of political and ontological gender-power that emerged from the inscriptional strategies these women employed to navigate and critique male gatekeepers––from movie stars to directors to editors to abusive husbands. 

Untold Stories: Tyler Clementi’s Death and Crisis Leadership in Higher Education delves into the well-known but poorly understood death of gay first-year Rutgers student Tyler Clementi in 2010 and explains how social identities shaped the responses to his tragic death, the media firestorm, Rutgers University’s actions, and the legacy of his life and death. It offers insights for higher education crisis responders and anyone who wants to learn more about this well-known but poorly understood case.

Librarians know that information literacy is much more complex and nuanced than the basic library research skill that it's often portrayed as; in fact, as outlined by the ACRL Framework, research is a contextual activity. But the settings in which we teach often constrain our ability to take a more layered approach. This book not only shows you how to teach information literacy as something other than a basic skill, but also how to do it in whatever mode of teaching you’re most often engaged in, whether that's a credit-bearing course, a one-shot session, a tutorial, a reference desk interaction, or a library program. Taking you through each step of the research process, this book shares ideas for adding context while exploring topics such as

• how conversations about context can be integrated into lessons on common information literacy topics;
• examples of the six genres of research and suggested course outlines for each;
• ensuring that context strategies fit within the ACRL Framework;
• questions for reflection in teaching each step of the research process;
• four different roles that sources can play when researching a topic;
• helping students refine a topic that is drawing too many or too few sources;
• cultivating students to become good decision-makers for the best type of research sources to use depending on their need; and
• how to address the shortcomings of checklist tools like the CRAAP test.

Is English in Utah truly unique? If so, what makes it different? Which stereotypes about how Utahns speak are completely off base and which are accurate? To answer these questions, linguist David Eddington surveyed more than 1,700 Utahns in an effort to better understand and systematize the peculiarities of English spoken in the Beehive State. This resulting book is a sophisticated data analysis that presents results in an accessible and often humorous fashion.
 
Utah is linguistically interesting for a variety of reasons. The massive numbers of immigrants who flocked there in the first years of European settlement, its relative isolation until completion of the transcontinental railroad, and its large Latter-day Saint population signaled greater linguistic commonality than is often the case in other western states. The book argues that religious affiliation, or lack thereof, might particularly play a role in the features that make up Utah English.
 
An accessible study of dialect in Utah, this book explores how social and geographic factors influence the pronunciations and regional expressions that characterize Utah English. Reflecting years of dealing with misconceptions about dialect both in and out of the classroom, Eddington covers vocabulary, individual words, syntax, vowels, and consonants, blending a serious and sometimes humorous approach to his research.