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In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP’s increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositions and extended improvisations to fit onto a single record, ushering in a period of artistic exploration. Despite these innovations, LP production became another site of negotiating the uneven power relations of a heavily segregated music industry. Exploring how musicians, producers, and other industry professionals navigated these dynamics, Mueller contends that the practice of making LPs significantly changed how jazz was created, heard, and understood in the 1950s and beyond. By attending to the details of audio production, he reveals how Black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus worked to redefine prevailing notions of race and cultural difference within the United States. Mueller demonstrates that the LP emerges as a medium of sound and culture that maps onto the more expansive sonic terrain of Black modernity in the 1950s.

An intimate portrayal of the college experiences of queer and non-binary millennials and what they tell us about the shifting shape of desires and identities in the twenty-first century. 

College has long been considered a distinct place for self-discovery. This is particularly true when it comes to gender and sexual identities. In Queer Millennials on Campus, Leila J. Rupp draws on a host of remarkably open and honest interviews with queer women and nonbinary assigned-female-at-birth students at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The accessible narrative wends its way through their lives, from their first experiences of queer desires, through their intimacies and relationships, negotiating their identities, and coming out (or not) to friends and family members. Rupp sheds new light on the Millennial generation, who played a pivotal role in popularizing and embracing the concept of sexual fluidity, helping to challenge older notions of stable sexual and gender identities. 

Ultimately, the voices in the book argue that self-awareness about one’s desires, intimate relationships, and identities should be acknowledged and celebrated. Written with deep empathy and understanding, Queer Millennials on Campus honors queer sexual awareness and joy.

Joseph Plaster traces the emergence and impact of Vanguard, a street-based activist organization forged in mid-1960s San Francisco by an unlikely coalition of sex workers, street queens, urban ministers, young adults, and War on Poverty reformers. Facing displacement, policing, and economic exclusion in the downtown “vice” district, organizers pooled food, housing, and medical aid while staging militant street theater and protests against a social order that treated street kids as disposable. Drawing on original oral histories and a newly assembled archive, Plaster follows Vanguard from all-night cafeterias to church basements to psychedelic shops. Its organizers developed drug-safety tools and published underground magazines while using federal antipoverty resources to establish experimental drop-in and employment centers. Vanguard’s irreverent tactics and uncompromising sexual and gender visibility drew national attention, helping catalyze gay liberation and trans organizing while laying the groundwork for harm reduction and LGBTQ shelter activism. In Vanguard, Plaster recovers an electrifying history of mutual aid in action, showing how those pushed to the margins remade care, kinship, and political struggle.