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In Untangling the Intangible a diverse group of authors focuses on new and rigorous ways to approach religion, beliefs, and ideology in archaeology. Reconstructing the human experience from archaeologically recovered materials is a complex task that can only benefit by making use of all available avenues of inquiry. To that end, the authors of this volume model inclusive discussions that recognize the inherent overlap, intersectionality, and co-constitutive relationship among the widely considered “intangibles” of culture: ideas, beliefs, ideology, and religion. The material and tangible aspects of these related elements inform human behavior and should not be treated independently because they constitute different and equal parts of a cognitive mosaic that forms the basis of the human experience.

The chapters encompass an array of research topics, geographical settings (Crete, Eurasia, the eastern Mediterranean, Madagascar, Mexico, and Mongolia), and temporal periods and highlight how practices associated with religious and ideological beliefs have shaped human societies across space and time. By focusing on multiple scales of inquiry and novel ways of accessing the material expressions of cultural phenomena and addressing underrepresented themes, this book challenges existing approaches and perspectives on the topic and directs future researchers to grapple with these elements as integral to researching the past.

Emphasizing a more comprehensive study of religious and ideological aspects of material culture, Untangling the Intangible highlights the potential for a more holistic understanding of the past and for approaching the very aspects that make us human through archaeology.

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the von Bothmer Publication Fund of the Archaeological Institute of America.

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.

The Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path launched its violent campaign against the government in Peru’s Ayacucho region in 1980. When the military and counterinsurgency police forces were dispatched to oppose the insurrection, the violence quickly escalated. The peasant community of Sarhua was at the epicenter of the conflict, and this small village is the focus of Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes. There, nearly a decade after the event, Olga M. González follows the tangled thread of a public secret: the disappearance of Narciso Huicho, the man blamed for plunging Sarhua into a conflict that would sunder the community for years.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a novel use of a cycle of paintings, González examines the relationship between secrecy and memory. Her attention to the gaps and silences within both the Sarhuinos’ oral histories and the paintings reveals the pervasive reality of secrecy for people who have endured episodes of intense violence. González conveys how public secrets turn the process of unmasking into a complex mode of truth telling. Ultimately, public secrecy is an intricate way of “remembering to forget” that establishes a normative truth that makes life livable in the aftermath of a civil war.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois brilliantly details the African American experience. Yet the renowned sociologist was also an astute chronicler of white people, particularly their racism. As Unveiling the Color Line demonstrates, Du Bois’s trenchant analysis of whiteness and white supremacy began in his earliest work—his 1890 speech on Jefferson Davis—and continued in every major book he published in his more than sixty-year career, up to The Black Flame Trilogy.

Lisa J. McLeod traces the development of Du Bois’s conception of whiteness, and the racism inherent to it, as an all-encompassing problem, whether predicated on ignorance, moral failure, or the inability to recognize the humanity in other people. In clear, elegant prose, McLeod investigates Du Bois’s complex and nuanced thinking, putting his insights into dialogue with contemporary racial theorists to demonstrate his continuing value to present-day critical thought and activism.

Los Angeles's experience in managing urban growth and change

America's first truly twenty-first-century metropolis, Los Angeles is often depicted as diverse, fragmented, polarized, and ungovernable, a city without a unifying geographic center or civic culture. The sprawling evolution of the city and its infamous problems—traffic, pollution, growing inequality—are usually attributed to a Wild West version of capitalism—the triumph of an unregulated free market over comprehensive urban planning. But market choices and lack of planning did not set the terrain of Southern California: Los Angeles has been profoundly shaped by a wide range of local, state, and federal public policies and programs.

Using the U.S. wall at the border with Mexico as a focal point, two experts examine the global surge of economic and environmental refugees, presenting a new vision of the relationships between citizen and migrant in an era of “Juan Crow,” which systematically creates a perpetual undercaste.

Winner, National Association for Ethnic Studies (NAES) Outstanding Book Award, 2017

As increasing global economic disparities, violence, and climate change provoke a rising tide of forced migration, many countries and local communities are responding by building walls—literal and metaphorical—between citizens and newcomers. Up Against the Wall: Re-imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border examines the temptation to construct such walls through a penetrating analysis of the U.S. wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as investigating the walling out of Mexicans in local communities. Calling into question the building of a wall against a friendly neighboring nation, Up Against the Wall offers an analysis of the differences between borders and boundaries. This analysis opens the way to envisioning alternatives to the stark and policed divisions that are imposed by walls of all kinds. Tracing the consequences of imperialism and colonization as citizens grapple with new migrant neighbors, the book paints compelling examples from key locales affected by the wall—Nogales, Arizona vs. Nogales, Sonora; Tijuana/San Diego; and the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. An extended case study of Santa Barbara describes the creation of an internal colony in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of Mexican land, a history that is relevant to many U.S. cities and towns.

Ranging from human rights issues in the wake of massive global migration to the role of national restorative shame in the United States for the treatment of Mexicans since 1848, the authors delve into the broad repercussions of the unjust and often tragic consequences of excluding others through walled structures along with the withholding of citizenship and full societal inclusion. Through the lens of a detailed examination of forced migration from Mexico to the United States, this transdisciplinary text, drawing on philosophy, psychology, and political theory, opens up multiple insights into how nations and communities can coexist with more justice and more compassion.

The agenda for transition after the demise of communism in the Western Balkans made the conversion of state radio and television into public service broadcasters a priority, converting mouthpieces of the regime into public forums in which various interests and standpoints could be shared and deliberated. There is general agreement that this endeavor has not been a success. Formally, the countries adopted the legal and institutional requirements of public service media according to European standards. The ruling political elites, however, retained their control over the public media by various means.

Can this trend be reversed? Instead of being marginalized or totally manipulated, can public service media become vehicles of genuine democratization? 

A comparison of public service media in seven countries (Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia) addresses these important questions.

The archaeology of four New Orleans neighborhoods that were replaced by public housing projects

Uprooted: Race, Public Housing, and the Archaeology of Four Lost New Orleans Neighborhoods uses archaeological research on four neighborhoods that were razed during the construction of public housing in World War II–era New Orleans. Although each of these neighborhoods was identified as a “slum” historically, the material record challenges the simplicity of this designation. D. Ryan Gray provides evidence of the inventiveness of former residents who were marginalized by class, color, or gender and whose everyday strategies of survival, subsistence, and spirituality challenged the city’s developing racial and social hierarchies.

These neighborhoods initially appear to have been quite distinct, ranging from the working-class Irish Channel, to the relatively affluent Creole of Color–dominated Lafitte area, to the former location of Storyville, the city’s experiment in semilegal prostitution. Archaeological and historical investigations suggest that race was the crucial factor in the areas’ selection for clearance. Each neighborhood manifested a particular perceived racial disorder, where race intersected with ethnicity, class, or gender in ways that defied the norms of Jim Crow segregation.

Gray’s research makes use of both primary documents—including census records, city directories, and even the brothel advertising guides called “Blue Books”—and archaeological data to examine what this entailed at a variety of scales, reconstructing narratives of the households and communities affected by clearance. Public housing, both in New Orleans and elsewhere, imposed a new kind of control on urban life that had the effect of making cities both more segregated and less equal. The story of the neighborhoods that were destroyed provides a reminder that their erasure was not an inevitable outcome, and that a more equitable and just city is still possible today. A critical examination of the rise of public housing helps inform the ongoing debates over its demise, especially in light of the changing face of post-Katrina New Orleans.
 

“Uprooting Racism and Racists in the United States” has become even more timely and instructive today than when James and Grace Lee Boggs first sounded the alarm in 1970. In this essay, the Boggses diagnose the “essential contradiction” of economic overdevelopment and political underdevelopment, tracing its path through key stages: how racism has been interwoven into U.S. economic development; a destructive national drive for economic growth at all costs; and how subsequent generations of Americans prioritize economics over principles—breeding a collective social irresponsibility that leaves us unable to act ethically in the face of pressing social challenges.

Today, the contradiction the Boggses identified has grown more entrenched—and its consequences more destructive. “Uprooting” helps explain why millions voted for Trump in 2024 despite his demonstrated corruption, why society fails to regulate the expansion of AI and data centers, why we are unable to forestall the climate changes that scientists have long warned against, why immigrants face racist vilification, and why the federal government is intent on erasing the centrality of race to the making of the country. Ultimately, “Uprooting” offers a crucial assessment of where this contradiction began, how it shapes the nation, and where we need to go.

Battle lines have long been drawn over how food is produced, what food is made available to whom, and how best to protect consumers from risky or unhealthy food. Jeffrey Haydu resurrects the history of food reform and protest in Upsetting Food, showing how activists defined food problems, articulated solutions, and mobilized for change in the United States. 

Haydu’s sociological history starts in the 1830s with diet reformer Sylvester Graham, who blamed alcohol and store-bought bread—signs of a commercializing urban society—for poor health and moral decline. His successors at the turn of the twentieth century rallied against impure food and pushed for women to be schooled in scientific food preparation and nutrition. Decades later, in the 1960s and ’70s, a grassroots movement for organic food battled commercial food production in favor of food grown ecologically, by small farmers, and without artificial chemicals. 

Each campaign raised doubts about food safety, health, and transparency, reflecting how a capitalist system can undermine trust in food. But Haydu also considers how each movement reflects the politics, inequalities, and gender relations of its time. And he traces how outcomes of each campaign laid the groundwork for the next. The three eras thus come together as parts of a single, recurring food movement.

Upsetting Food offers readers a historical background to better understand contemporary and contentious food politics.

Traditional interpretations of the 1950s have emphasized how American anti-communists deployed censorship and the blacklist to silence dissent, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. Yet those efforts at repression did not always succeed. Throughout the early years of the Cold War, a significant number of writers and performers continued to express controversial views about international relations in Hollywood films, through the new medium of television, on the Broadway stage, and from behind the scenes.

By promoting superpower cooperation, decolonization, nuclear disarmament, and other taboo causes, dissident artists such as Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Rod Serling, Dalton Trumbo, Reginald Rose, and Paddy Chayefsky managed both to stretch the boundaries of Cold War ideology and to undermine some of its basic assumptions. Working at times under assumed names and in some cases outside the United States, they took on the role of informal diplomats who competed with Washington in representing America to the world. 

Ironically, the dissidents' international appeal eventually persuaded the U.S. foreign policy establishment that their unconventional views could be an asset in the Cold War contest for “hearts and minds,” and their artistic work an effective means to sell American values and culture abroad. By the end of the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration not only appropriated the work of these talented artists but enlisted some of them to serve as official voices of Cold War cultural diplomacy.

Urban Aloha reveals the vibrant, little-known story of Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiians) diaspora in Los Angeles, home to the largest Hawaiian community outside Hawai‘i. Moving beyond tourist clichés and the persistent myth that Hawaiian Gardens represents “the” Hawaiian enclave, author Lani Cupchoy traces how a diasporic community took root across the South Bay and San Gabriel Valley. Beginning with the peak migrations of the 1950s and 1960s, and driven by economic recession in the islands, the narrative follows families as they built new lives through civic clubs, newsletters, churches, restaurants, and backyard gatherings.

Drawing on oral histories, archival research, foodways, hula halau, and organizations such as the Hawaiian Inter-Club Council of Southern California, Urban Aloha explores how “Hawaiianness” shifts from identity to lived cultural community. Cupchoy examines how belonging is shaped not only by ancestry but by region, memory, leisure, and everyday practice. At once intimate and intellectually compelling, this book challenges manufactured fantasies of paradise and reveals a dynamic mainland community negotiating authenticity, representation, and cultural resilience. Richly researched and deeply human, Urban Aloha redefines what it means to be Hawaiian—on the continent and beyond.