UMass Press Podcast

Nicholas W. Gentile, "Enemies to Their Country: The Marblehead Addressers and Consensus in the American Revolution" (U Mass Press, 2025)

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Nicholas W. Gentile complicates our understanding of the American Revolution through a microhistory of one Massachusetts town in his new book, Enemies to Their Country: The Marblehead Addressers and Consensus in the American Revolution (U Mass Press, 2025).

In 1774, a group of elite men in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, just outside Salem, wrote an address to the royal governor thanking him for his service to the colony, even as town residents began demanding independence from Great Britain. Town meeting records reveal how the town’s patriot majority pressured the signers to withdraw their support for the governor and demanded public recantations and issued damning reports, even forcing some of the signers into exile.

Enemies to Their Country tells the story of the year following the Address, chronicling the town’s struggle to achieve consensus even as the war for American independence started. This microhistory of one vitally important town, the second largest in Massachusetts at the time, with a thriving local economy based on fishing and a robust community of religious and civically engaged citizens, complicates simplistic ideas of the American Revolution. Through compelling stories of neighboring individuals and families, many of which have not been told, it also provides an example of a politically polarized constituency struggling to find consensus at a time of great conflict.

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Gerald F. Goodwin, "Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their military experiences were shaped by the racial environment of the home front. War is often viewed as a crucible that can transform society, but American race relations proved remarkably durable.

In Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam (U Massachusetts Press, 2023), Gerald F. Goodwin examines how Black servicemen experienced and interpreted racial issues during their time in Vietnam. Drawing on more than fifty new oral interviews and significant archival research, as well as newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, and documentaries, Goodwin reveals that for many African Americans the front line and the home front were two sides of the same coin. Serving during the same period as the civil rights movement and the race riots in Chicago, Detroit, and dozens of other American cities, these men increasingly connected the racism that they encountered in the barracks and on the battlefields with the tensions and violence that were simmering back home.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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Claire Parnell, "Inequalities of Platform Publishing: The Promise and Peril of Self-Publishing in the Digital Book Era" (U Massachusetts Press, 2025

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The average reader need not go far in a bookstore before, knowingly or not, they encounter authors who started their careers by self-publishing prior to achieving commercial success. Examples include Margaret Atwood, Andy Weir, Colleen Hoover, Anna Todd, E. L. James, Scarlett St. Clair, and many more. Such stories of self-made writers are compelling and seem more attainable to others with the accessibility of modern publishing platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Wattpad, Webtoon, Radish, Inkitt, Qidian, Tapas, and Swoon Reads. However, in Inequalities of Platform Publishing: The Promise and Peril of Self-Publishing in the Digital Book Era (U Massachusetts Press, 2025) Claire Parnell uncovers in her examination of the two most popular—Amazon and Wattpad—these services in fact perpetuate systemic racial, gender, and sexual bias against authors of color and queer authors through their technological, economic, social, and cultural structures.

At a time when there is a real reckoning with the discrimination that has resulted in publishing opportunities for only relatively few privileged authors—who are often White, upper class, and male—self-publishing presents itself as an equalizer of sorts. Exploring that idea, Parnell shows that these platforms are not just intermediaries for information; they structure content and users in multiple, often inequitable, ways through their ability to set market conditions and apply algorithmic sorting. Combining original interviews, walkthrough method, metadata analysis, and more, Parnell finds that self-publishing platforms reproduce challenges for authors from marginalized communities. Far from equalizing the market, the new platforms instead frequently perpetuate the stubborn barriers to mainstream success for BIPOC and queer authors.

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Gwyneth Mellinger, "Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

“When the civil rights movement began to challenge Jim Crow laws, the white southern press reframed the coverage of racism and segregation as a debate over journalism standards. Many white southern editors, for instance, designated Black Americans as “Negro” in news stories, claiming it was necessary for accuracy and “objectivity,” even as white subjects went unlabeled. These news professionals disparaged media outlets that did not adhere to these norms, such as the Black press. In this way, the southern white press weaponized journalism standards—and particularly the idea of objectivity—to counter and discredit reporting that challenged white supremacy.

Through deep engagement with letters and other materials in numerous archives from editors, journalists, and leaders of newswire services, Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)interrogates and exposes how the white southern press used journalism standards as a professional rationalization for white supremacy and a political strategy to resist desegregation. Gwyneth Mellinger argues that white skin privilege gave these news professionals a stake in the racial status quo and was thus a conflict of interest as they defended Jim Crow. Her study includes an examination of the Southern Education Reporting Service, an objectivity project whose impartiality, she contends, instead affirmed systemic racism. In a pointed counternarrative, Mellinger highlights Black editors and academics who long criticized the supposed objectivity of the press and were consequently marginalized and often dismissed as illegitimate, fanciful, and even paranoid.

Elegant and incisive, Racializing Objectivity unequivocally demonstrates that a full telling of twentieth-century press history must reckon with the white southern press’s cooptation of objectivity and other professional standards to skew racial narratives about Black Americans, the freedom struggle, and democracy itself.”

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Jason A. Higgins, "Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (University of Mass. Press, 2024), Dr. Jason Higgins examines the connections between the military and carceral system through the stories of those most knowledgeable about it: veterans who were incarcerated after their military service. Combining a thorough historical narrative with the oral histories of veterans who had been imprisoned after their return to civilian society, Dr. Higgins shows how the so-called war on drugs and war on crime intersect with the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Through this history he shows how government policies built on racism, ableism, and patriarchy contributed to many young Americans being pushed into the military, punished during their service, and then being kicked out with no access to any type of support which then leads them into the carceral system. Dr. Higgins also tells the story of how incarcerated veterans helped organize amongst themselves leading to Veterans Treatment Courts which have helped reduce the number of veterans going into prison and also show a model for non-punitive responses to crime.

Prisoners after War has been awarded the Oral History Association's book award for 2025. It is available open access: https://uplopen.com/books/m/35...

Jason Higgins is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for Virginia Tech Publishing and Press and an Assistant Professor affiliated with the Virginia Tech University Library and the Department of History.

You can find a transcript of this interview here.

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Rob Wells, "The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When Willard M. Kiplinger launched the groundbreaking Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, he left the sidelines of traditional journalism to strike out on his own. With a specialized knowledge of finance and close connections to top Washington officials, Kiplinger was uniquely positioned to tell deeper truths about the intersections between government and business. With careful reporting and insider access, he delivered perceptive analysis and forecasts of business, economic, and political news to busy business executives, and the newsletter's readership grew exponentially over the coming decades. More than just a pioneering business journalist, Kiplinger emerged as a quiet but powerful link between the worlds of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, and used his Letter to play a little-known but influential role in the New Deal. Part journalism history, part biography, and part democratic chronicle, The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022) offers a well-written and deeply researched portrayal of how Kiplinger not only developed a widely read newsletter that launched a business publishing empire but also how he forged a new role for the journalist as political actor."

Rob Wells is is visiting associate professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

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Patrick Parr, "Malcolm Before X" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of the prison years of civil rights icon Malcolm X. The book was a Kirkus Nonfiction Book of the Year for 2024, a Spectator best book of the year, and a finalist for the 2025 ASALH book prize.

In February 1946, when 20-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler in Boston. By the time he was paroled in August 1952, he had transformed into a voracious reader, joined the Black Muslims, and was poised to become Malcolm X, one of the most prominent and important intellectuals of the civil rights era. While scholars and commentators have exhaustively detailed, analyzed, and debated Malcolm X’s post-prison life, they have not explored these six and a half transformative years in any depth.

Paying particular attention to his time in prison, Patrick Parr’s Malcolm Before X provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking examination of the first twenty-seven years of Malcolm X’s life (1925–1965). Parr traces Malcolm’s African lineage, explores his complicated childhood in the Midwest, and follows him as he moves east to live with his sister Ella in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, where he is convicted of burglary and sentenced.

Parr utilizes a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers to immerse the reader into the unique cultures—at times brutal and at times instructional—of Charlestown State Prison, the Concord Reformatory, and the Norfolk Prison Colony. It was at these institutions that Malcolm devoured books, composed poetry, boxed, debated, and joined the Nation of Islam, changing the course of his life and setting the stage for a decade of antiracist activism that would fundamentally reshape American culture.

In this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, the inspiring story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X is finally told.

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Carlene Kucharczyk, "Strange Hymn: Poems" (U Mass Press, 2025)

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

"I'll tell you everything I know. Though there might not be much to tell," confesses the speaker in Strange Hymn: Poems (U Mass Press, 2025) by Carlene Kucharczyk, in a meticulously crafted lyrical journey exploring morality and humanity. The poems here grapple with understanding physical loss: "I wanted / to know at once and definitively our animal bodies / were not all we were. It is shameful to be this fragile." They also engage with the more abstract slipping away of memory and time: "Since I was born, I have been forgetting. Forgetting what I have wanted to remember." Kucharczyk's insightful poems blur the lines between history and myth, love and grief, song and silence.
Caught between lamenting the passage of time and rejoicing in small beauties, she writes, "I tell you, I wish we could stay here longer / in this hotel of lost grandeur, this palace of interesting disarray, / and stay here with these pieces of the impersonal past / that have somehow not yet outlasted their small lights." Each moment reflects on our ephemeral lives from musings on art and nature to reflections on the self, asking "Is a mirror a sort of glass house? / And, is there a way to see ourselves besides through the glass?"
As readers traverse this collection, they learn how the body sings, the many iterations of Mary, what sirens truly think of Odysseus, how a Morning Glory unfurls, and lessons in orthodontics, but most importantly, how to live with absence. Kucharczyk is a master of manipulating time and space through her dynamic use of form, creating a narrative that begs, "After I'm gone, don't bury my body-- / Burn it, and turn it into song."

Source: Publisher

Kavya Sarathy is a Linguistics student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Marketing Intern for the University of Massachusetts Press. She is currently a political Staff Writer at The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. Kavya has always enjoyed reading, writing, and engaging with literature in any form, and is thrilled to be in conversation with these authors through the New Books Network.

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Christa Kuljian, "Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When Christa Kuljian arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student in the fall of 1980 with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. magazine, she was concerned that the women's movement had peaked in the previous decade. She soon learned, however, that there was a long way to go in terms of achieving equality for women and that social movements would continue to be a critical force in society. She began researching the history of science and gender biases in science, and how they intersect with race, class, and sexuality. In Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024), Kuljian tells the origin story of feminist science studies by focusing on the life histories of six key figures--Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Evelynn Hammonds, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Banu Subramaniam. These women were part of a trailblazing network of female scientists in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s who were drawn to the Boston area--to Harvard, MIT, and other universities--to study science, to network with other scientists, or to take a job. Inspired by the social and political activism of the women's movement and organizations such as Science for the People, the Genes and Gender Collective, and the Combahee River Collective, they began to write and teach about women in science, gender and science, and sexist and racist bias and exclusion. They would lead the critiques of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology in 1975 and Larry Summers' comments about women in science thirty years later. Drawing on a rich array of sources that combines published journal articles and books with archival materials and interviews with major luminaries of feminist science studies, Kuljian chronicles and celebrates the contributions that these women have made to our collective scientific knowledge and view of the world.

Christa Kuljian grew up in the Boston area, and has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for the past thirty years. She is a science writer and the author of Sanctuary and Darwin's Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins, which was short listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction. Currently a Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits University, she is also a fellow with the Consortium for History of Science, Medicine and Technology (CHSMT) in Philadelphia.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Cynthia Blakeley, "The Innermost House: A Memoir" (Bright Leaf, 2024)

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Innermost House: A Memoir (Bright Leaf, 2024) is a stunning account of year-round life on the windswept shores of Cape Cod, threaded with meditations on memory, forgetting, and identity.

About The Innermost House, Publishers Weekly writes, “Salt air and the limits of memory animate this heartrending debut. . . . Readers will be captivated.” Shelf Awareness calls the book “Enthralling” adding that “Blakeley is an evocative writer who captures the lush beauty of a ‘half feral’ childhood spent immersed in the natural world while never losing sight of the precarity and violence that permeated it.” Foreword Reviews calls the book “a distinctive memoir with a keen sense of place and renewal.”

Raised in a nineteenth-century saltbox house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Cynthia Blakeley was both surrounded by generations of immediate and extended family and isolated by the mysteries locked inside her affectionate yet elusive mother and short-fused father. While she and her sisters and cousins roamed the Outer Cape—drinking in the dunes, swimming in kettle ponds, and dancing in Provincetown—Blakeley also turned to the inner world of her journals as she contended with her own secrets and memories.

Over-identifying with her unconventional and artistic mother, Blakeley felt certain that the key to understanding her mother’s drinking and distractions, her generosity and easy forgiveness, was the unexplained absence of two of Blakeley’s half-siblings and their connection to her mother’s unhappy first marriage. Blakeley kept her distance, however, from her disciplinarian father. Though he took his daughters sailing and clamming and beachcombing, he was the chill to their mother’s warmth, the maker, not the breaker, of rules. Slipping through these dynamics in that small house and evocative landscape, Blakeley eventually crossed the bridge and left home, only to return later in search of the family stories that would help her decode her present.

Blakeley’s captivating memoir moves fluidly through time, grappling with the question of who owns a memory or secret and how our narrative choices not only describe but also shape and change us. In this insightful and poignant account of tenacious year-rounders on Cape Cod, Blakeley contends that making sense of ourselves is a collaborative affair, one that begins with understanding those we came from.

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Tom Waidzunas et al., "Out Doing Science: LGBTQ STEM Professionals and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times" (UMass Press, 2025)

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Over the past 50 years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer professionals have organized to achieve greater inclusion into the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This inclusion, however, has come at a cost. In the 1970s, these professionals sought to radically transform STEM fields by confronting the homophobia and sexism embedded within them. Instead, these fields became more corporatized and privatized, and STEM institutions and workspaces—particularly in the spheres of government and business—became dominated by a focus on individualism, self-improvement/advancement, and meritocracy, which are hallmarks of neoliberalism. For many LGBTQ STEM professionals, inclusion now required becoming more apolitical, pro-capital, and focused on professional development.
In Out Doing Science: LGBTQ STEM Professionals and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times (University of Massachusetts Press, 2025), Dr. Tom Waidzunas, Dr. Ethan Czuy Levine, and Dr. Brandon Fairchild explore this transformation of LGBTQ STEM professionals from oppositional outsiders to assimilationist insiders. Drawing on historical archives, oral interviews, and participant observation of professional societies and workspaces, the authors interrogate the meanings of “inclusion” and why some LGBTQ STEM professionals have benefited from it more than others. They also advocate for a “queer STEM” that challenges and transforms the racism, classism, sexism, cisheterosexism, and imperialism of these fields, institutions, and workspaces. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Out Doing Science will appeal to readers interested in LGBTQ studies, and science and technology studies, as well as anyone who wants to create a more diverse and inclusive work environment.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Myra Mendible, "American War Stories: Veteran-Writers and the Politics of Memoir" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Even with the availability of new forms of storytelling, the memoir remains as one of the favored ways for combat veterans to tell their stories about war for a public eager to know. In American War Stories: Veteran-Writers and the Politics of Memoir (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), Dr. Myra Mendible examines how combat veterans use the memoir to tell their stories of war and to engage in political conversations about war itself. Using memoirs by US veterans of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Dr. Mendible shows how these "true fictions" can shape knowledge about war, how veteran-writers use the "politics of credibility," the aesthetics of war and silence, and the often-ignored political function of the war memoir.

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Michael D. Gambone, "The New Praetorians: American Veterans, Society, and Service from Vietnam to the Forever War" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Sat, 31 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Contemporary veterans belong to an exclusive American group. Celebrated by most of the country, they are nevertheless often poorly understood by the same people who applaud their service. Following the introduction of an all-volunteer force after the war in Vietnam, only a tiny fraction of Americans now join the armed services, making the contemporary soldier, and the veteran by extension, increasingly less representative of mainstream society. Veterans have come to comprise their own distinct tribe--modern praetorians, permanently set apart from society by what they have seen and experienced. In an engrossing narrative that considers the military, economic, political, and social developments affecting military service after Vietnam, Michael D. Gambone investigates how successive generations have intentionally shaped their identity as veterans. The New Praetorians: American Veterans, Society, and Service from Vietnam to the Forever War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) also highlights the impact of their homecoming, the range of educational opportunities open to veterans, the health care challenges they face, and the unique experiences of minority and women veterans. This groundbreaking study illustrates an important and often neglected group that is key to our understanding of American social history and civil-military affairs.

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Richard Buttny, "Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Richard Buttny, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. With a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, his research interests include environmental communication, discourse analysis, and intercultural communication. Richard's latest book, Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in October 2024. About the book:

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.

From my own experience reading it, I wholeheartedly agree that it is a must-read for any scholar in the field and also anyone interested in this issue. Please enjoy getting to learn more about Richard and his work in this interview.

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Aakriti Mandhwani, "Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Wed, 29 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India (U Massachusetts Press, 2024) is a timely book on the history of print culture and the creation of publics in postcolonial South Asia. During the two difficult decades immediately following the 1947 Indian Independence, a new, commercially successful print culture emerged that articulated alternatives to dominant national narratives. Through what Aakriti Mandhwani defines as middlebrow magazines--like Delhi Press's Saritā--and the first paperbacks in Hindi--Hind Pocket Books--North Indian middle classes cultivated new reading practices that allowed them to reimagine what it meant to be a citizen. Rather than focusing on individual sacrifices and contributions to national growth, this new print culture promoted personal pleasure and other narratives that enabled readers to carve roles outside of official prescriptions of nationalism, austerity, and religion. Utilizing a wealth of previously unexamined print culture materials, as well as paying careful attention to the production of commercial publishing companies and the reception of ordinary reading practices--particularly those of women--Everyday Reading offers fresh perspectives into book history, South Asian literary studies, and South Asian gender studies.

Aakriti Mandhwani is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. She is interested in book and magazine history, cultural studies, popular literature, South Asian and Hindi Literature, literary history and the history of libraries in South Asia. Her previous publications include Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity and journal articles on Hindi archives, language mixing and Hindi pulp fiction.

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Cathy Stanton, "Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Thu, 23 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

An anthropologist walks into a grocery store—no that’s not the start of a joke, that’s the true story of how Cathy Stanton came to be involved with Quabbin Harvest, a food co-op in the former mill town of Orange, Massachusetts.

Part memoir and part history, Stanton’s new book Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024) traces the struggles of one small store in one small town and uncovers the long arc of the modern industrial food system coming into being. In that system, corporate giants offer the kind of abundance, affordability, and convenience that make it all but impossible for small-scale ventures to survive, as Stanton discovered when she joined local efforts to save the nascent food co-op. Drawing on her own deep knowledge of how the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket are politically, ecologically, and economically entangled, she comes to a new understanding of why it’s so hard to effect real change in how we get our food. On the margins of the dominant system, she learns that it’s possible to keep an alternative alive by making a fierce commitment to community and stepping outside her own comfort zone as a white middle-class shopper—a core demographic of today’s locavore movement. In Orange, one of the poorest towns in one of the wealthiest U.S. states, Stanton also tracks the story of American industrial growth, abandonment, and the divisive politics of the present day. Her co-op started out in the former Minute Tapioca factory complex, now a business incubator in one of countless communities trying to anchor capital more permanently. The parallel story of the iconic Minute Tapioca brand shows the rise of mass-produced commodity foods and their role in creating a system with troubling disparities in who is able to afford fresh and healthy food.Food Margins is a complex and compelling story of a de-industrialized, rural community that is imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system. Stanton’s new book can help to fuel those conversations and actions with an insider view of the task at hand and an anthropologist’s sense of how it intersects wider struggles for equity and sustainability.

Cathy Stanton teaches Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Tufts University and lives in north-central Massachusetts, where she has been involved in local food projects for many years. She has written widely about sites of commemoration and heritage tourism, including at industrial and agricultural history sites. Website.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Matteo Pangallo and Emily B. Todd, "Teaching the History of the Book" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Tue, 07 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Edited by Matteo Pangallo and Emily Todd, Teaching the History of the Book (University of Massachusetts Press 2023) is the first collection of its kind dedicated to book history pedagogy. With original contributions from a diverse range of teachers, scholars, and practitioners in literary studies, history, book arts, library science, language studies, and archives, this volume presents a variety of methods for teaching book history both as its own subject and as an approach to other material. Each chapter describes lessons, courses, and programs centered on the latest and best ways of teaching undergraduate and graduate students.

Expansive and instructive, this volume introduces ways of helping students consider how texts were produced, circulated, and received, with chapters that cover effective ways to organize courses devoted to book history, classroom activities that draw on this subject in other courses, and an overview of selected print and digital tools. Contributors, many of whom are leading figures in the field, utilize their own classroom experiences to bring to life some of the rich possibilities for teaching book history in the twenty-first century.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Michael Liu, "Forever Struggle: Activism, Identity, and Survival in Boston's Chinatown, 1880-2018" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Chinatown has a long history in Boston. Though little documented, it represents the city's most sustained neighborhood effort to survive during eras of hostility and urban transformation. It has been wounded and transformed, slowly ceding ground; at the same time, its residents and organizations have gained a more prominent voice over their community's fate.

In Forever Struggle: Activism, Identity, and Survival in Boston's Chinatown, 1880-2018 (U Massachusetts Press, 2020), Michael Liu, a lifelong activist and scholar of the community, charts its journey and efforts for survival--from its emergence during a time of immigration and deep xenophobia to the highway construction and urban renewal projects that threatened the neighborhood after World War II to its more recent efforts to keep commercial developers at bay. At the ground level, Liu depicts its people, organizations, internal battles, and varied and complex strategies against land-taking by outside institutions and public authorities. The documented courage, resilience, and ingenuity of this low-income immigrant neighborhood of color have earned it a place amongst our urban narratives. Chinatown has much to teach us about neighborhood agency, the power of organizing, and the prospects of such neighborhoods in rapidly growing and changing cities.

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Matthew Dennis, "American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The gold epaulettes that George Washington wore into battle. A Union soldier's bloody shirt in the wake of the Civil War. A crushed wristwatch after the 9/11 attacks. The bullet-riddled door of the Pulse nightclub. Volatile and shape-shifting, relics have long played a role in memorializing the American past, acting as physical reminders of hard-won battles, mass tragedies, and political triumphs.

Surveying the expanse of U.S. history, American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory (U Massachusetts Press, 2023) shows how these objects have articulated glory, courage, and national greatness as well as horror, defeat, and oppression. While relics mostly signified heroism in the nation's early years, increasingly, they have acquired a new purpose--commemorating victimhood. The atrocious artifacts of lynching and the looted remains of Native American graves were later transformed into shameful things, exposing ongoing racial violence and advancing calls for equality and civil rights. Matthew Dennis pursues this history of fraught public objects and assesses the emergence of new venues of memorialization, such as virtual and digital spaces. Through it all, relics continue to fundamentally ground and shape U.S. public memory in its uncertain present and future.

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, "How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023), Jonathan D. Fitzgerald examines a mode of journalistic storytelling dating back nearly two centuries. Literary journalism arose in the decades before the U.S. Civil War alongside the era's sentimental literature. Combining fact-based reporting with the sentimentality of popular fiction, literary journalism encouraged readers to empathize with subjects by presenting more nuanced and engaging stories than typical news coverage. While women writers were central to the formation and ongoing significance of the genre, literary journalism scholarship has largely ignored their contributions. How the News Feels re-centers the work of a range of writers who were active from the 1830s until today, including Catharine Williams, Margaret Fuller, Nellie Bly, Winifred Black, Zora Neale Hurston, Joan Didion, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and Alexis Okeowo.

Offering intimate access to their subjects' thoughts, motivations, and yearnings, these journalists encouraged readers to empathize with society's outcasts, from asylum inmates and murder suspects to "fallen women" and the working poor. As this carefully researched study shows, these writers succeeded in defining and developing the genre of literary journalism, with stories that inspire action, engender empathy, and narrow the gap between writer, subject, and audience.

James Kates is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications.

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Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine et al., "When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

How do Black women in higher education create, experience, and understand joy? What sustains them? While scholars have long documented sexism, racism, and classism in the academy, one topic has been conspicuously absent from the literature--how Black women academics have found joy in the midst of adversity. Moving beyond questions of resilience, labor for others, and coping, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, Abena Ampofoa Asare, and Michelle Dionne Thompson's book When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower (U Massachusetts Press, 2023) focuses on the journeys of over thirty Black women at various stages of their careers.

Joy is a mixture of well-being, pleasure, alignment, and purpose that can be elusive for Black women scholars. With racial reckoning and a global pandemic as context, this volume brings together honest and vital essays that ponder how Black women balance fatigue and frustrations in the halls of the ivory tower, and explore where, when, and if joy enters their lives. By carefully contemplating the emotional, physical, and material consequences of their labor, this collection demonstrates that joy is a tactical and strategic component of Black women's struggle.

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Scott Kamen, "From Union Halls to the Suburbs: Americans for Democratic Action and the Transformation of Postwar Liberalism" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

For decades, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) was perhaps the most influential multi-issue organization in American liberalism. The first book-length study of the ADA since 1986, Scott Kamen’s From Union Halls to the Suburbs: Americans for Democratic Action and the Transformation of Postwar Liberalism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023) details how the ADA and its key figures, including the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, exerted their influence on critical debates in post-war liberal politics, helping to define the very essence of liberalism. Taking the ADA’s story into the 1970s and 1980s, Kamen also illustrates how the ADA profoundly shaped the New Politics movement, which upended Democratic Party politics with its challenge to the Vietnam War, demands for redistributive economic policies, and development of a far-reaching politics of race, gender, and sexuality.

By bringing the ADA and its influential public intellectuals into the story of the New Politics movement, Scott Kamen reveals how American liberalism shifted away from the working-class concerns of the New Deal era and began to cater to the interests of a new, suburban professional class. By the 1980s, many Democratic politicians, activists, and voters had embraced a neoliberal ideology that coupled socially liberal attitudes with market-based solutions, eschewing an older progressive politics steeped in labor issues. In so doing, Kamen historicizes several of the most contentious issues in contemporary Democratic politics—from neo-liberalism to identity politics—powerfully revealing how the ADA shaped some of the most critical debates in American politics today.

Scott Kamen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, Valencia Campus. He has published in the Michigan Historical Review, Peace & Change, The Sixties and the Southern Historian and received his PhD from Trinity College Dublin in 2016.

Thomas Cryer is a PhD Student in American History at University College London, where he studies race, nationhood, and memory through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin. @ThomasOCryer

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Sirpa Salenius, "An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe" (U Massachusetts Press, 2016)

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Sarah Parker Remond (1826–1894) left the free black community of Salem, Massachusetts, where she was born, to become one of the first women to travel on extensive lecture tours across the United Kingdom. Remond eventually moved to Florence, Italy, where she earned a degree at one of Europe's most prestigious medical schools. Her language skills enabled her to join elite salons in Florence and Rome, where she entertained high society with musical soirees even while maintaining connections to European emancipation movements.

Remond's extensive travels and diverse acquaintances demonstrate that the nineteenth-century grand tour of Europe was not exclusively the privilege of white intellectuals but included African American travelers, among them women. Sirpa Salenius' book An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (U Massachusetts Press, 2016), based on international archival research, tells the fascinating story of how Remond forged a radical path, establishing relationships with fellow activists, artists, and intellectuals across Europe.

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Alaina Kaus, "Fighting Over There: U.S. War Making and Contemporary Refugee Literature" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Thu, 25 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

U.S. foreign policy has long been built on a dichotomy of an irreplaceable "here" and an expendable "there." In his 2003 announcement of the military campaign in Iraq, George W. Bush declared that we would fight in the Middle East so we wouldn't have to fight "on the streets of our cities." But what do the millions of people who live over "there" have to say about U.S. interventions and the displacement they provoke?

In Fighting Over There: U.S. War Making and Contemporary Refugee Literature (U Massachusetts Press, 2023), Alaina Kaus analyzes literature by and about refugees who fled Southeast Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and the Middle East, in the wake of U.S. military occupation and economic intervention. Narratives by authors such as Lan Cao, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Demetria Martínez, Héctor Tobar, Dave Eggers, Mohsin Hamid, and Riverbend reveal contradictions in the human rights pledges that undergird U.S. foreign policy, which promote freedom while authorizing intervention and displacement, and favor market-based solutions over social justice and racial equality.

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S. L. Wisenberg, "The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to S. L. Wisenberg about her book The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home (U Massachusetts Press, 2023).

As a child, S. L. Wisenberg worried about being outside, not being able to breathe, and Nazis coming through the window of her Houston home. In this remarkable collection of essays, she recalls chasing popularity, taking a Neiman Marcus sponsored class about fashion at age eleven. She tells funny but poignant stories about her travels in Paris, Vienna, and Poland, including a numbing visit to Auschwitz. In one essay Wisenberg searches through family records and history books and conducts interviews to learn more about Selma, Alabama, where her great grandparents ended up after leaving Lithuania. In another she describes going through sorority rush when she’s twenty-nine and teaching at the university. This is a moving, sometimes hilarious exploration of love, life, history. As the reviewer in the Southern Review of Books wrote,” This luxe tapestry of stories and ideas creates a vivid image of Wisenberg as a woman, as Jewish, and as a thinker in the world…. This book is at once intellectual, deeply personal, and delightful.”

S.L. Wisenberg is the author of a fiction collection, The Sweetheart Is In; the essay collection Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions; and a chronicle, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch. She has received a Pushcart Prize, and awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Illinois Arts Council, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The former co-director of the MA/MFA program at Northwestern University, she has taught workshops and read and lectured widely. Wisenberg lives in Chicago, where she edits Another Chicago Magazine. When she's not writing, she's walking through her Chicago neighborhood, fixing a stir-fry, or collecting grocery lists that people leave behind.

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Gerald F. Goodwin, "Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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Jack Ahern, "Design with Nature on Cape Cod and the Islands" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are special places known for their distinctive flora, including pine-oak forests, sandplain grasslands, and sand dunes peppered with bearberry shrubs. Unfortunately, this unique sense of place is under threat. In recent decades, contemporary landscape practices have come to depend on environmentally stressful fertilizers and irrigation systems, replacing this sensitive ecoregion’s native flora with generic turfgrasses and popular commercial nursery trees and shrubs that could exist anywhere.

Design with Nature on Cape Cod and the Islands (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) seeks to reverse this damaging trend by offering landscape professionals, local officials, and homeowners a sustainable approach to landscape design based on the ecoregion’s native plants and plant communities. Presenting detailed discussions of Cape Cod’s natural history, Jack Ahern focuses on the principal plant communities that define its landscape character and that are well adapted to local soils and growing conditions, including climate change. The book also includes strategies for ecological planting design and a portfolio of photographs of active ecologically designed landscapes.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Government Affairs and as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he hosts the New Books Network – Architecture podcast, is an NCARB Licensing Advisor and helps coach candidates taking the Architectural Registration Exam. btoepfer@toepferarchitecture

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Gregory Pfitzer, "'Fame Is Not Just for the Fellas': Female Renown and the Childhood of Famous Americans Series" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 04:00:00 -0000

In “Fame is Not Just for the Fellas”: Female Renown and the Childhood of Famous Americans Series (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022), Gregory Pfitzer examines the editorial and production choices surrounding the biographies of women in the popular children’s book series Childhood of Famous Americans, published between 1932 and 1958. Using conversations and disagreements among authors, editors, readers, reviewers, and sales agents at Bobbs-Merrill publishers, the book tells the story of how female subjects were chosen and what went into writing these histories for young readers of the time. Tensions between “feminism” and “femininity” reflected changing Cold War gender norms, and sources reveal ongoing negotiation of the virtues that the biographies should instill. Pfitzer illustrates how these books shaped children's thinking and historical imaginations around girlhood using tales from the past and considers the influence of the series on readers and American culture more broadly. "Fame Is Not Just for the Fellas" places the series in the context of national debates around fame, gender, historical memory, and portrayals of children and childhood for a young reading public--charged debates that continue to this day.

Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks.

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Alena Pirok, "The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg: Ghosts and Interpreting the Recreated Past" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

On any given night, hundreds of guests walk the darkened streets of Colonial Williamsburg looking for ghosts. Since the early 2000s, both the museum and private companies have facilitated these hunts, offering year-round ghost tours. Critics have called these excursions a cash grab, but in truth, ghosts and hauntings have long been at the center of the Colonial Williamsburg project.

The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg: Ghosts and Interpreting the Recreated Past (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) examines how the past comes alive at this living-history museum. In the early twentieth century, local stories about the ghosts of former residents--among them Revolutionary War soldiers and nurses, tavern owners and prominent attorneys, and enslaved African Americans--helped to turn Williamsburg into a desirable site for historical restoration. But, for much of the twentieth century, the museum tried diligently to avoid any discussion of ghosts, considering them frivolous and lowbrow. Alena Pirok explores why historic sites have begun to embrace their spectral residents in recent decades, arguing that through them, patrons experience an emotional connection to place and a palpable understanding of the past through its people.

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John M. Kinder and Jason A. Higgins, "Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Wartime military service is held up as a marker of civic duty and patriotism, yet the rewards of veteran status have never been equally distributed. Certain groups of military veterans--women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and former service members with stigmatizing conditions, "bad paper" discharges, or criminal records--have been left out of official histories, excised from national consciousness, and denied state recognition and military benefits.

Chronicling the untold stories of marginalized veterans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) uncovers the generational divides, cultural stigmas, and discriminatory policies that affected veterans during and after their military service. Together, the chapters in this collection recast veterans beyond the archetype, inspiring an innovative model for veterans studies that encourages an intersectional and interdisciplinary analysis of veterans history. In addition to contributions from the volume editors, this collection features scholarship by Barbara Gannon, Robert Jefferson, Evan P. Sullivan, Steven Rosales, Heather Marie Stur, Juan Coronado, Kara Dixon Vuic, John Worsencroft, and David Kieran.

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E. James West, "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr." (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Journalist, activist, popular historian, and public intellectual, Lerone Bennett Jr. left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American history and culture. Rooted in his role as senior editor of Ebony magazine, but stretching far beyond the boundaries of the Johnson Publishing headquarters in Chicago, Bennett’s work and activism positioned him as a prominent advocate for Black America and a scholar whose writing reached an unparalleled number of African American readers.

This critical biography—the first in-depth study of Bennett’s life—travels with him from his childhood experiences in Jim Crow Mississippi and his time at Morehouse College in Atlanta to his later participation in a dizzying range of Black intellectual and activist endeavors. Drawing extensively on Bennett’s previously inaccessible archival collections at Emory University and Chicago State, as well as interviews with close relatives, colleagues, and confidantes, Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) celebrates his enormous influence within and unique connection to African American communities across more than half a century of struggle.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history.

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Ann Marie Borys, "American Unitarian Churches: Architecture of a Democratic Religion" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Unitarian religious tradition was a product of the same eighteenth-century democratic ideals that fueled the American Revolution and informed the founding of the United States. Its liberal humanistic principles influenced institutions such as Harvard University and philosophical movements like Transcendentalism. Yet, its role in the history of American architecture is little known and studied.

In American Unitarian Churches: Architecture of a Democratic Religion (U Massachusetts Press, 2021), Ann Marie Borys argues that the progressive values and identity of the Unitarian religion are intimately intertwined with ideals of American democracy and visibly expressed in the architecture of its churches. Over time, church architecture has continued to evolve in response to developments within the faith, and many contemporary projects are built to serve religious, practical, and civic functions simultaneously. Focusing primarily on churches of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple and Louis Kahn's First Unitarian Church, Borys explores building histories, biographies of leaders, and broader sociohistorical contexts. As this essential study makes clear, to examine Unitarianism through its churches is to see American architecture anew, and to find an authentic architectural expression of American democratic identity.

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Pavla Simková, "Urban Archipelago: An Environmental History of the Boston Harbor Islands" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Boston Harbor Islands have been called Boston's "hidden shores." While some are ragged rocks teeming with coastal wildlife, such as oystercatchers and harbor seals, others resemble manicured parks or have the appearance of wooded hills rising gently out of the water. Largely ignored by historians and previously home to prisons, asylums, and sewage treatment plants, this surprisingly diverse ensemble of islands has existed quietly on the urban fringe over the last four centuries. Even their latest incarnation as a national park and recreational hub has emphasized their separation from, rather than their connection to, the city. In this book, Dr. Pavla Simková reinterprets the Boston Harbor Islands as an urban archipelago, arguing that they have been an integral part of Boston since colonial days, transformed by the city's changing values and catering to its current needs. Drawing on archival sources, historic maps and photographs, and diaries from island residents, this absorbing study attests that the harbor islands' story is central to understanding the ways in which Boston has both shaped and been shaped by its environment over time.

Simková's clear and articulate writing style is accessible to academics and the general reader alike, and the book functions almost as well as a historically-informed travelogue as it does a serious academic overview. An environmental history, this work very much focuses on the shifting landscape and every-changing relationship between the islands and the urban centre, but we cannot help but discuss the social currents that both underpinned and were subjected to these shifts. There are many more avenues worthy of future exploration, most notably, with the book beginning in the 17th Century we learn a great deal about the Boston Harbor Islands' development under European colonists and settlers and how they specifically impacted the development of the area — but much less about their earlier history under Native civilians, some of whom were forcibly relocated by settler-colonialists. As Simková herself notes, her specialisation is more contemporary, but she nonetheless touches on the issue in an earlier article for Island Studies Journal (2021).

Pavla Šimková's Urban Archipelago: An Environmental History of the Boston Harbor Islands was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2021.

Aliide Naylor is a freelance journalist, editor, translator, and the author of The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front (Bloomsbury, 2020). I traditionally focus on Russia, Northern and Eastern Europe.

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Andrew Hunt, "We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Fri, 27 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ronald Reagan’s hagiography has created an entire mythology around the 40th president of the US; anticommunism and the fight against the ‘Evil Empire’ are the central tropes of the Reagan story to this day. The culmination of this narrative arc is the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event which is still routinely attributed to Reagan and, particularly in conservative circles, and hailed as the ultimate validation of American political models and of American values.

But the historical reality of the 1980s was far from ideologically monolithic. Andrew Hunt’s We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022) paints a nuanced picture of the complex social and cultural landscape of the United States during Reagan’s two terms. The country was in turmoil, bitterly divided over the meaning of its recent past (from nostalgia for the 1950s to the trauma of the Vietnam War) and over the direction of its future. It was rocked by street protests fueled by a rebirth of activism comparable to that of the 1960s. It witnessed the rise of fringe conspiracy theories, of popular opposition to U.S. involvement in Central America, and of widespread anxieties over nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Hunt’s book captures, in fascinating detail, the enormous pushback to the anticommunist rhetoric of the Reagan regime from citizens, activists, and artists, and the role that American popular culture—from music, to television, to film— played in reflecting, and sometimes influencing, the dynamics of the age.

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy is Associate Teaching Professor of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio. Her book, Between Empire and Republic: America in the Colonial Canadian Imagination, came out in 2022. Twitter: @OanaGodyKenw. Oana’s webpage.

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Chiara Camarda et al., "The Venice Ghetto: A Memory Space That Travels" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Fri, 27 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Venice Ghetto was founded in 1516 by the Venetian government as a segregated area of the city in which Jews were compelled to live. The world's first ghetto and the origin of the English word, the term simultaneously works to mark specific places and their histories, and as a global symbol that evokes themes of identity, exile, marginalization, and segregation. To capture these multiple meanings, the editors of this volume conceptualize the ghetto as a "memory space that travels" through both time and space.

This interdisciplinary collection engages with questions about the history, conditions, and lived experience of the Venice Ghetto, including its legacy as a compulsory, segregated, and enclosed space. Contributors also consider the ghetto's influence on the figure of the Renaissance moneylender, the material culture of the ghetto archive, the urban form of North Africa's mellah and hara, and the ghetto's impact on the writings of Primo Levi and Marjorie Agosín.

In addition to the volume editors, The Venice Ghetto: A Memory Space That Travels (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) features a foreword from James E. Young and contributions from Shaul Bassi, Murray Baumgarten, Margaux Fitoussi, Dario Miccoli, Andrea Yaakov Lattes, Federica Ruspio, Michael Shapiro, Clive Sinclair, and Emanuela Trevisan Semi.

Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe.

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Clarissa Ceglio, "A Cultural Arsenal for Democracy: The World War II Work of U.S. Museums" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In A Cultural Arsenal for Democracy: The World War II Work of US Museums (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022), Dr. Ceglio argues that attempts during the war years to fit exhibition craft to the aims of social instrumentality constitute an important but forgotten moment in the field’s debates over whether museums should take active stances on public issues or, to use current parlance, remain neutral. In the book, she investigates how many American museums saw engagement with wartime concerns as consistent with their vision of the museum as a social instrument. She examines how these museums worked to strike the right balance between education and patriotism, hoping to attain greater relevance.

Dr. Ceglio focuses on exhibitions, which unsurprisingly served as the primary vehicle through which museums, large and small, engaged their publics with wartime topics with fare ranging from displays on the cultures of Allied nations to "living maps" that charted troop movements and exhibits on war preparedness. Dr. Ceglio chronicles debates, experiments, and collaborations from the 1930s to the immediate postwar years, investigating how museums re-envisioned the exhibition as a narrative medium and attempted to reconcile their mission with new modes of storytelling. She demonstrates how what today may seem standard museum practice—that exhibitions take explicitly narrative forms appealing to the mental, emotional, and physical— was still a novel and controversial idea to museums in the 1930s and ’40s.

Research for this book drew from administrative records, correspondence, and reports held by the archives of the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the National Art Gallery, the Newark Museum, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford), among others.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Heather L. Dichter, "Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games: International Sport's Cold War Battle with NATO" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by Heather Dichter, Associate Professor of Sports History and Sports Management at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. She is also the author of Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games: International Sport’s Cold War Battle with NATO (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of the East German sporting travel ban, the NATO alliance and the competition to host the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympics, and the role of smaller NATO members in reshaping the alliance’s border and travel regulations.

In Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games, Dichter examines a little-known and understudied until now diplomatic conflict between NATO and the International Olympic Committee. In the 1950s and 1960s, NATO members struggled to balance their adherence to the Hallstein Doctrine – non-recognition of state-symbols of East Germany – with their participation in and desire to host sports mega-events. The Hallstein doctrine limited travel for East German athletes, who could only participate as members of a club or a German team, as well as banned the inclusion of the East German anthem or flag in public. The IOC’s strict claims to apoliticism and their demand that all athletes be allowed to travel to competitions made NATO’s obstruction of East German travel unpopular and untenable. In the press, NATO members pointed to the Berlin Wall as the ultimate barrier to free travel, but behind the scenes and then later in public, the alliance’s solidarity threatened to crumble as Canada, France, and the United States competed for the right to host the Olympic Games.

Although the East German travel ban featured in press commentary about the 1968 Olympics, most histories of Cold War sports overlook this crucial moment in European sport. Dichter’s work moves beyond previous histories through an extensive analysis of a wide range of archives across multiple countries, including the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, Germany and Norway. Her research includes not only newspapers, but more importantly diplomatic documents from NATO, NATO alliance members, and the IOC that enable her to better understand the diplomatic strategies pursued by the competing interests: nation-states, military alliances, sporting bodies, athletic federations and even athletes. Only through this transnational and multi-archival approach can Dichter illustrate the importance that NATO members placed on sport and explain why sport proved so difficult for them to handle despite broad agreement in other diplomatic arenas.

The Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games is a fascinating account of a largely unknown and poorly understood conflict between NATO and a range of international sporting organizations, including the International Olympic Committee. It will appeal to people interested in sport, international diplomacy, and the Cold War.

Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, out now with Manchester University Press, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter.

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Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, "The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Despite efforts to abolish slavery throughout Africa in the nineteenth century, the coercive labor systems that constitute "modern slavery" have continued to the present day. To understand why, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine explores child trafficking, pawning, and marriages in Nigeria's Bight of Biafra, and the ways in which British colonial authorities and Igbo, Ibibio, Efik, and Ijaw populations mobilized children's labor during the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources that include oral interviews, British and Nigerian archival materials, newspaper holdings, and missionary and anthropological accounts, Chapdelaine argues that slavery's endurance can only be understood when we fully examine "the social economy of a child"—the broader commercial, domestic, and reproductive contexts in which children are economic vehicles.

The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria (U Massachusetts Press, 2021) provides an invaluable investigation into the origins of modern slavery and early efforts to combat it, locating this practice in the political, social, and economic changes that occurred as a result of British colonialism and its lingering effects, which perpetuate child trafficking in Nigeria today.

Robin P. Chapdelaine is Assistant Professor of History at Duquesne University.

Thomas Zuber is a PhD Candidate in History at Columbia University.

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Mark P. Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak, "Making the Forever War: Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Making the Forever War: Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) is a timely collection of articles and essays by Marilyn B Young, edited by Mark P. Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak. In this interview, Mark Bradley joined me to discuss Marilyn Young's life and legacy, the impetus for assembling the book, and the relevance of her work in the present moment.

The late historian Marilyn B. Young, a preeminent voice on the history of U.S. military conflict, spent her career reassessing the nature of American global power, its influence on domestic culture and politics, and the consequences felt by those on the receiving end of U.S. military force. At the center of her inquiries was a seeming paradox: How can the United States stay continually at war, yet Americans pay so little attention to this militarism? Making the Forever War brings Young's articles and essays on American war together for the first time, including never before published works. Moving from the first years of the Cold War to Korea, Vietnam, and more recent "forever" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Young reveals the ways in which war became ever-present, yet more covert and abstract, particularly as aerial bombings and faceless drone strikes have attained greater strategic value. For Young, U.S. empire persisted because of, not despite, the inattention of most Americans. The collection concludes with an afterword by prominent military historian Andrew Bacevich.

Marilyn B Young (1937-2017) was a renowned historian of American foreign relations and a longtime professor of history at New York University. Her landmark book The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 remains a defining work in the field.

Mark P Bradley (interviewee and co-editor of Making the Forever War) is Bernadotte E Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of International History and the College at the University of Chicago and author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century.

Mary L Dudziak (co-editor of Making the Forever War) is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University and author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office; she has previously published on US Africa Command and the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

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Josephine Donovan, "The Lexington Six: Lesbian and Gay Resistance in 1970s America" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 04:00:00 -0000

On September 23, 1970, a group of antiwar activists staged a robbery at a bank in Massachusetts, during which a police officer was killed. While the three men who participated in the robbery were soon apprehended, two women escaped and became fugitives on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, eventually landing in a lesbian collective in Lexington, Kentucky, during the summer of 1974. In pursuit, the FBI launched a massive dragnet. Five lesbian women and one gay man ended up in jail for refusing to cooperate with federal officials, whom they saw as invading their lives and community. Dubbed the Lexington Six, the group's resistance attracted national attention, inspiring a nationwide movement in other minority communities. Like the iconic Stonewall demonstrations, this gripping story of spirited defiance has special resonance in today's America.

Drawing on transcripts of the judicial hearings, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, hundreds of pages of FBI files released to the author under the Freedom of Information Act, and interviews with many of the participants, Josephine Donovan reconstructs this fascinating, untold story. The Lexington Six: Lesbian and Gay Resistance in 1970s America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020) is a vital addition to LGBTQ, feminist, and radical American history.

Josephine Donovan is professor emerita of English at the University of Maine, Orono.

John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Website: Johnmarszalek3.com Twitter: @marsjf3

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Timothy D. Walker, "Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 09:00:00 -0000

More than 70 percent of the 103 pre-Emancipation slave narratives acknowledged using waterways as their method for escaping enslavement. However, much of the scholarship on the Underground Railroad has centered on land routes. Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) convincing asserts the role of maritime escapes as part of the Underground Railroad during the antebellum era. The ten essays in this volume bring together scholars at various stages of their careers, examines how enslaved people traveled by sea to seek freedom. This critical volume offers a new component to escape routes, recasting Underground Railroad scholarship

Readers interested in the book may use the promo code MAS022, which is good for 30 percent off the book’s cover price and free shipping when purchased through the University of Massachusetts Press website.

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Clarence Jefferson Hall Jr, "A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York’s North Country" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Since the mid-nineteenth century, Americans have known the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York as a site of industrial production, a place to heal from disease, and a sprawling outdoor playground that must be preserved in its wild state. Less well known, however, has been the area's role in hosting a network of state and federal prisons. A Prison in the Woods traces the planning, construction, and operation of penitentiaries in five Adirondack Park communities from the 1840s through the early 2000s to demonstrate that the histories of mass incarceration and environmental consciousness are interconnected.

In A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York’s North Country (U Massachusetts Press, 2020), Clarence Jefferson Hall Jr. reveals that the introduction of correctional facilities—especially in the last three decades of the twentieth century—unearthed long-standing conflicts over the proper uses of Adirondack nature, particularly since these sites have contributed to deforestation, pollution, and habitat decline, even as they've provided jobs and spurred economic growth. Additionally, prison plans have challenged individuals' commitment to environmental protection, tested the strength of environmental regulations, endangered environmental and public health, and exposed tensions around race, class, place, and belonging in the isolated prison towns of America's largest state park.

Clarence Jefferson Hall, Jr. is an assistant professor of history at Queensborough Community College.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website.

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Karen Woods Weierman, "The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston" (U Massachusetts Press, 2019)

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In 1836, an enslaved six-year-old girl named Med was brought to Boston by a woman from New Orleans who claimed her as property. Learning of the girl's arrival in the city, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) waged a legal fight to secure her freedom and affirm the free soil of Massachusetts. While Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled quite narrowly in the case that enslaved people brought to Massachusetts could not be held against their will, BFASS claimed a broad victory for the abolitionist cause, and Med was released to the care of a local institution. When she died two years later, celebration quickly turned to silence, and her story was soon forgotten. As a result, Commonwealth v. Aves is little known outside of legal scholarship. In The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), Karen Woods Weierman complicates Boston's identity as the birthplace of abolition and the cradle of liberty, and restores Med to her rightful place in antislavery history by situating her story in the context of other writings on slavery, childhood, and the law.

Karen Woods Weierman is Professor of English and the former director of the Commonwealth Honors Program at Worcester State University. She is the author of One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820–1870, published in 2005 by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick. His teaching and research interests examine eighteenth and nineteenth century African American women’s history and the history of slavery and emancipation in early America and the Atlantic world. Follow him on Twitter @Jerrad_Pacatte!

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Kimberly Mack, "Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White" (U Mass Press, 2020)

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 05:00:00 -0000

The familiar story of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for guitar virtuosity, and the violent stereotypes evoked by legendary blues "bad men" like Stagger Lee undergird the persistent racial myths surrounding "authentic" blues expression.

Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020) unpacks the figure of the American blues performer, moving from early singers such as Ma Rainey and Big Mama Thornton to contemporary musicians such as Amy Winehouse, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jack White to reveal that blues makers have long used their songs, performances, interviews, and writings to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic, and gendered oppression.

Using examples of fictional and real-life blues artists culled from popular music and literary works from writers such as Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Mack demonstrates that the stories blues musicians construct about their lives (however factually slippery) are inextricably linked to the "primary story" of the narrative blues tradition, in which autobiography fuels musicians' reclamation of power and agency.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Michael Brenes, "For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Donald Trump campaigned on a great many things in 2016, but one of the issues he used to criticize Democrats was their role in supporting sequestration and cuts to the military budget. While partisan rhetoric about the country being unsafe or the military being underfunded plays well, it obscures an important reality about the relative size of U.S. military funding. The United State spends more than the next ten leading countries combined. The Democratic Party, while often criticized as soft on defense, generally supports high military spending. This seems to contradict many statements made by politicians, and it also confounds expectations about where one might expect the Democrats’ priorities to lay. How did it get to be this way, with Democrats and Republicans supporting high military spending?

Michael Brenes’ For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy explains this contradictory history. Brenes argues that after the beginning of the Cold War, defense spending became an important part of the federal social safety net, winning over adherents from both parties who sought guaranteed employment. This blurred lines between Republicans and Democrats, instead creating a “Cold War Coalition” that was propped up by anticommunists and liberals. While occasionally challenged by progressives and the left or by libertarian-minded conservatives, this coalition has persisted to the present and explains why bipartisan support for the military-industrial complex remains so strong.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

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Lucas A. Dietrich, "Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), Lucas A. Dietrich investigates how ethnic literatures took shape in the U.S. context and how writers of color intervened in the “mainstream” writing. Interestingly, this intervention was framed through specific genres and techniques, including satire and parody towards the mainstream narratives. The book brings our attention to the most prominent ethnic writings of the second half of the nineteenth century while taking into consideration the negotiations in which both the writers and the publishers participated. What is compelling about this research is the dialogical approach that Dietrich undertakes to explore the ways in which the ethnic writers were, in fact, accepted into what could be described as the dominant mainstream writing of white writers. Writing Across the Color Line contains rich materials which demonstrate not only how the writers of color established dialogue with the leading publishing venues, but also how their works shaped the American readership of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Dietrich also offers his insights concerning the influences of the nineteenth-century ethnic writers on their counterparts of the twentieth century. In this regard, Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 is a thought-provoking commentary on multiethnic literature in the U.S.

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Chinua Thelwell, "Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) by Dr. Chinua Thelwell is a rich, well-researched, and sobering investigation of blackface minstrelsy as the “visual bedrock of a transcolonial cultural imaginary.” In tracing minstrel globalization across the Anglo-colonial and British imperial worlds beginning in the 1800s, Thelwell explores the ways that blackface minstrelsy helped to construct and maintain notions of exclusionary citizenship in racial states throughout the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific Ocean worlds.

Thelwell shows that the South African Cape Colony became the minstrel nexus of these globalizing performance circuits. Putting this history in conversation with ongoing white settler colonialism and attendant plunder, annexation, and resource extraction, Thelwell argues that minstrel performances discursively strengthened the economic, social, and political cornerstones of the South African racial state, a state that ultimately developed into an apartheid state in the twentieth century. Through archival research and close readings of cultural artifacts, Thelwell shows that minstrel performances reflected gendered and racialized white fantasies of idealized Black laborers in events that normalized practices of racially exclusionary citizenship and reinforced labor exploitation. Exporting Jim Crow also significantly investigates subversive forms of Black resistance to these anti-black racial projects. For example, Thelwell interrogates how African American minstrels and Cape Coloureds attempted to change the terms of minstrel performance by creating shows that celebrated their own cultures and broadcasted images of equal citizenship. An important and critical study, Exporting Jim Crow enriches scholarship on blackface minstrelsy, South Africa, empire and colonialism, racial capitalism, and performance studies.

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Charles Allan McCoy, "Diseased States: Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, MERS, and pandemic influenza are brutal reminders of the dangers of infectious disease. Comparing the development of disease control in Britain and the United States, from the 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia to the H1N1 panics of more recent times, Diseased States: Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States (University of Massachusetts Press) provides a blueprint for managing pandemics in the twenty-first century.

To understand why these two nations have handled contemporary disease threats in such different ways, Charles Allan McCoy examines when and how disease control measures were adopted in each country from the nineteenth century onward, which medical theory of disease was dominant at the time, and where disease control was located within the state apparatus.

Particular starting conditions put Britain and the United States on distinct trajectories of institutionalization that led to their respective systems of disease control. As McCoy shows, even the seemingly objective matter of contagion is deeply enmeshed in social and political realities, and by developing unique systems of biopower to control the spread of disease, Britain and the United States have established different approaches of exerting political control over citizens’ lives and bodies.

Charles Allan McCoy is assistant professor of sociology at the State University of New York Plattsburgh.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Thomas Bishop, "Every Home a Fortress: Cold War Fatherhood and the Family Fallout Shelter" (UMass Press, 2020)

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In Every Home a Fortress: Cold War Fatherhood and the Family Fallout Shelter (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), Thomas Bishop details the remarkable cultural history and personal stories behind an iconic figure of Cold War masculinity—the fallout shelter father, who, with spade in hand and the canned goods he has amassed, sought to save his family from atomic warfare. Putting policy documents and presidential addresses into conversation with previously unmined personal letters, diaries, local media coverage, and antinuclear ephemera, Bishop demonstrates that the nuclear crisis years of 1957 to 1963 were not just pivotal for the history of international relations but were also a transitional moment in the social histories of the white middle class and American fatherhood. During this era, public concerns surrounding civil defense shaped private family conversations, and the fallout shelter emerged as a site at which ideas of nationhood, national security, and masculinity collided with the complex reality of trying to raise and protect a family in the nuclear age.

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John L. Brooke, "'There Is a North': Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War" (U Mass Press, 2019)

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

How does political change take hold? In the 1850s, politicians and abolitionists despaired, complaining that the “North, the poor timid, mercenary, driveling North” offered no forceful opposition to the power of the slaveholding South. And yet, as John L. Brooke shows, the North did change. Inspired by brave fugitives who escaped slavery and the cultural craze that was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the North rose up to battle slavery, ultimately waging the bloody Civil War.

While Lincoln’s alleged quip about the little woman who started the big war has been oft-repeated, scholars have not fully explained the dynamics between politics and culture in the decades leading up to 1861. Rather than simply viewing the events of the 1850s through the lens of party politics, 'There Is a North': Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019) is the first book to explore how cultural action—including minstrelsy, theater, and popular literature—transformed public opinion and political structures. Taking the North’s rallying cry as his title, Brooke shows how the course of history was forever changed.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Graham Thompson, "Herman Melville: Among the Magazines" (U Massachusetts Press 2018)

Mon, 26 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

"What I feel most moved to write, that is banned―it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the otherway I cannot." Herman Melville wrote these words as he struggled to survive as a failing novelist. Between 1853 and 1856, he did write "the other way," working exclusively for magazines. He earned more money from his stories than from the combined sales of his most well known novels, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man.

In Herman Melville: Among the Magazines (University of Massachusetts Press 2018), Graham Thompson examines the author's magazine work in its original publication context, including stories that became classics, such as "Bartelby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno," alongside lesser-known work. Using a concept he calls "embedded authorship," Thompson explores what it meant to be a magazine writer in the 1850s and discovers a new Melville enmeshed with forgotten materials, editors, writers, and literary traditions. He reveals how Melville responded to the practical demands of magazine writing with dazzling displays of innovation that reinvented magazine traditions and helped create the modern short story.

Stephen Colbrook is a graduate student at University College London, where he is researching a dissertation on the interaction between HIV/AIDS and state policy-making. This work will focus on the political and policy-making side of the epidemic and aims to compare the different contexts of individual states, such as California, Florida, and New Jersey. Stephen can be contacted at stephencolbrook@gmail.com.

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Lynn Downey, "Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World" (U Massachusetts Press, 2016)

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Nearly every consumer today is familiar with the name Levi Strauss thank to the jeans that bear his name. As Lynn Downey explains in her book Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), to understand the man behind the brand requires sorting through decades of popular legends created to fill a vacuum of knowledge. Born Löb Strauß, he changed his name to Levis Strauss when he emigrated as a young man from Bavaria to the United States. Once in New York City he joined the dry goods firm established by his brothers, moving to California in 1853 to establish a branch of the firm in San Francisco. There Strauss prospered with the gold rush-era boom, becoming a leading Bay Area businessman and civic philanthropist. It was this status that led Jacob Davis, a Nevada tailor, to seek his help in patenting his design for riveted pants. Together they succeeded in establishing a patent that became the foundation for the brand known today throughout the world, thanks to Strauss’s decision to trademark the brand prior to the patent’s expiration.

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Clare Daniel, "Mediating Morality: The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era" (U Massachusetts Press, 2017)

Tue, 11 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Clare Daniel (she/hers)--Administrative Assistant Professor of Women’s Leadership at Tulane University--on her judicious new book Mediating Morality: The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era from University of Massachusetts Press (2017). Mediating Morality is a contemporary exploration of the construction of teen pregnancy in legal events, activism, media campaigns, television, film, and across many domains of popular-political culture since the dismantling of the welfare state, which Daniel definitively places in the year 1996. Daniel argues that these domains of public thought have merged to reconstruct teen pregnancy as a privatized and deeply personal issue of moral failure--what Daniel, following Lauren Berlant, describes as intimate citizenship--rather than symptomatic of ineffective policies that reproduce racist, classist, and sexist structures of inequality. In addition to engaging readings of popular culture texts such as the movie The Pregnancy Pact and pregnancy prevention campaigns, Mediating Morality is also closely attuned to the legal and political events since 1996 that have authorized and capitalized upon an approach to teen pregnancy that absolves the state of responsibility.

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Lessie B. Branch, “Optimism at All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama’s America” (U Massachusetts Press, 2018)

Fri, 17 Aug 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Optimism at All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama’s America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018) takes as its point of departure and central preoccupation the notion of “paradoxical ebullience,” by which author Lessie B. Branch means the optimism expressed by African Americans during the presidency of Barack Obama despite a lack of socioeconomic gains (and some notable reversals) during the same period. Branch’s argument around what she considers unwarranted optimism is premised on the idea that during the Obama era, African Americans bought into an elite discourse that was a departure from the discursive norms of the 20th-century Civil Rights movement, and whose leaders discouraged optimism. Both Branch and leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. see outsized optimism as undermining the collective action necessary for meaningful social change.

Mireille Djenno is the African Studies Librarian at Indiana University. She can be reached at mdjenno@indiana.edu

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Matthew R. Pembleton, “Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America’s Global Drug Wars” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017

Fri, 25 May 2018 10:00:00 -0000

It’s common to place the start of the War on Drugs with the Nixon or Reagan Administrations, but as Matthew Pembleton tells us, those are only phases II and III of a much longer drug war that began in the 1930s with the long-forgotten Federal Bureau of Narcotics. In his new book Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America’s Global Drug Wars (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), Matt tell us about that agency’s history, the charismatic and controversial men who led it and served as its agents around the globe, and the ways in which the current opioid epidemic echoes an enduring pattern of drug use and misuse in the U.S.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

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Sigrid Schmalzer, et. al., “Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (UMass Press, 2018)

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 10:00:00 -0000

“What is needed now is not liberal reform or withdrawal, but a radical attack, a strategy of opposition. Scientific workers must develop ways to put their skills at the service of the people and against the oppressors.” (Zimmerman, et al. 1972).

Following the 2014 conference, “Science for the People: The 1970s and Today,” Sigrid Schmalzer, Daniel Chard, and Alyssa Botelho, edited a volume of the Science for the People (SftP) movement, curating numerous documents from the group that are as relevant today as when they were published several decades ago. Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018) encapsulates the diverse themes, research, and actions of the movement, which included chapters across the US at one time. Emerging from the radical political culture of the 1960s, and predecessor group, Scientists for Social and Political Action, SftP challenged the value-neutrality of science and technology, and instead sought to democratize science by engaging with other political movements and conducting research with non-experts. While much scientific research continues to be funded by the state or by corporations, SftP provided grassroots scientific and technological assistance and education in a multitude of settings. Just to take a few examples from the volume, these efforts included research for social movements, providing electrical power for a Black Panther free medical clinic, promoting the farming technique of intercropping, as well as distributing resources, literature and education to countries such as Vietnam and Nicaragua. The direction of assistance between SftP and other groups was rarely one-sided, as SftP members absorbed knowledge from other movements and places, as documented in the China: Science Walks on Two Legs selection, wherein several SftP members visited China and learned about some of the traditional science and peasant research conducted in the nation. In addition, through working groups and publications, SftP critiqued racist and sexist science, reductionist biology, nuclear power, weapons research, commercial agriculture, US imperialism, and much more. As their many articles and actions show, SftP did more than just critique mainstream science, they attempted to provide alternatives. Finally, SftP had a formative and lasting effect on Science and Technology Studies through its various studies on the social embeddedness of science and its political uses.

Since the 2014 conference, Science for the People has been revitalized through new efforts. Check out https://scienceforthepeople.org/ to see continued and original projects.

Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. Follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek.

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Drew Lopenzina, “Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot” (U. Mass Press, 2017)

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 11:00:00 -0000

Through meticulous archival research, close readings of key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about a largely enigmatic life, Red Ink author Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of a singular Native American figure in Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017).

This “cultural biography” provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America’s early nationhood. William Apess’s life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Methodist spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the persistence of Native American presence in a time and place that was long supposed to have settled its Indian question in favor of extinction. This new biography will sit alongside Apess’s own writing as vital reading for those interested in early America and indigeneity.

Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.

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Thomas M. Grace, “Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties” (U of Massachusetts Press, 2016)

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 11:56:00 -0000

Kent State University is associated indelibly with the events of May 4, 1970, when soldiers of the Ohio National Guard shot over a dozen students, killing four of them. In Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), Thomas M. Grace, a historian who was one of the survivors of that day, sets it within the context of an emergent culture of political activism on the camps. That culture had its origins in the broader changes taking place in American society in the late 1950s, with a small but committed group of students at the rapidly expanding university protesting for civil rights for African Americans. Most of these students came from working-class backgrounds and inherited the New Deal Democratic politics of their parents, and often found themselves at odds with the more conservative town and a campus administration reluctant to court controversy. Lyndon Johnson’s decision to commit American troops to the defense of South Vietnam soon brought about a shift in the priorities of these protestors, as antiwar marches soon replaced civil rights activism as their focus. These protests evolved as the war dragged on, with Richard Nixon’s announcement on April 30, 1970 of the invasion of Cambodia sparking demonstrations that led to the destruction of the campus’s ROTC building and the dispatch of the Guard by the states governor in response. As Grace reveals, the strained emotions and frayed nerves of the participants led to a tragedy that shocked a nation and transformed permanently the lives of everyone involved.

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Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War” (U of Massachusetts Press, 2015)

Sat, 30 Apr 2016 12:53:00 -0000

From the “Ballad of the Green Berets” to “Bad Moon Rising,” the music of the Vietnam War is woven through every vets memories. Vietnam vet Doug Bradley and his fellow University of Wisconsin professor Craig Werner first intended to whittle down a list of the top 20 songs of the war, and soon realized that was an impossible errand. No Vietnam veteran is alike, and hundreds of songs held meaning for those who fought there. It was a varied soundtrack of patriotism and protests, hard rock and soul music, love songs, Dear John songs and more.

Bradley and Werner’s book We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015) blends musical and personal histories, explaining the backgrounds of specific songs and artists as well as what they meant to the Vietnam soldiers. In a conversation with Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, they discuss everything from the generational differences between Vietnam soldiers and their World War II-veteran fathers to the importance of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” written a full decade after the war ended. Hanoi Hannah, Good Morning Vietnam DJ Adrian Cronauer, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Nancy Sinatra, Country Joe McDonald and his famous F cheer all played a role in the wars musical history. Take a musical trip through this sometimes personal and often poetic book. Country Joe himself said of it, We all love popular music and we all love soldiers. All we have left is memories. Maybe there is something to learn from this book, from their experiences, from the music. God, I hope so.

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Patrick Hagopian, “American Immunity: War Crime and the Limits of International Law” (U of Massachusetts Press, 2013)

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 08:57:00 -0000

After World War II, the newly formed United Nations and what might be called a global community of nations that included the United States, worked to create a more extensive code of international law. The urge stemmed from the events of World War II, including the atrocities of the war that resulted in war crimes trials and tribunals afterward. The new effort included a move to implement new enforcement mechanisms and insure that the agreed upon international standards were upheld and violators punished. During this same period, the United States military significantly expanded its global presence. Throughout the Cold War and after, U.S. troops were stationed at bases in more countries than ever before, which each required Status of Forces Agreements laying out, among other things, jurisdiction over U.S. troops. This increased global presence also meant more American soldiers, and in some cases civilians accompanying the military for various reasons, were in the position to violate these international standards. Yet, despite a prominent role in spreading universal standards of international law, U.S. policymakers strongly resisted any compromise to U.S sovereignty in upholding these laws.

Patrick Hagopian, senior lecturer in History and American Studies at Lancaster University, has a new book, American Immunity: War Crime and the Limits of International Law (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) that looks at the relationship between the United States and war crimes jurisdictional questions. He discusses how not only did U.S. policymakers refuse to allow Americans to be prosecuted by international tribunals, but also U.S. courts failed to uphold international standards of justice. Policymakers felt that territorial and practical limitations placed acts committed abroad beyond the jurisdiction of civilian courts, while the Supreme Court decided veterans and civilians could not be court-martialed. This left a jurisdictional gap that existed for much of the postwar period. Though the My Lai massacre brought the gap into particular focus, Congress still failed to close it. This new book explains jurisdictional issues and the failure of American policymakers to adequately remedy. In this episode, we discuss the legal problem, the book’s insights as to their cause, and some of the (often failed) attempts to close the gap.

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Guy Chet, “The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856” (U of Massachusetts Press, 2014)

Mon, 22 Sep 2014 12:50:00 -0000

Guy Chet, Associate Professor of early American and military history at the University of North Texas, in his book The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) makes a well-crafted argument for the persistence of Atlantic piracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after the age of Blackbeard and Captain Kid. He asserts that piracy was not abruptly stamped out by the royal navy but remained normal rather than exceptional for a long time past the 1730s.

The end of piracy is described in the traditional historical narrative as a speedy decline due to the central state’s extension of its authority into the Atlantic frontier and its monopolization of violence. Chet, following methodology established by legal and borderland historians, critiques this assessment pointing out that frontier conditions are sustainable for long periods of time. He fleshes out through each section of his work why the monopoly on violence pronounced in statutory law was not accepted as legitimate or seen in reality in peripheral communities. Despite the central state’s use of army, navy, courts and gallows to extend authority to the frontier, Atlantic piracy waned only slowly in the face of these delegitimizing efforts.

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Colette Colligan, “A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris 1890-1960” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014)

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:31:00 -0000

From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Paris was a center for the publication of numerous English-language books, including many of a sexually explicit, pornographic nature. Colette Colligan‘s new book, A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) explores the rich and fascinating history of these “Paris editions” across seven decades of literary publishing in France, in English. Troubling too-simplistic notions of British prudishness versus French sexual liberalism and “high” versus “low” literatures, Colligan’s book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Paris’s expatriate past, a past that remains part of the city’s mythology to this day.

The book includes discussion of the cultural, legal, and commercial sides of this story, as well as closer textual analyses of some key examples of “degraded” and high modernist literature. In its chapters, readers will be introduced to characters and works that may not be so well known, including the British expatriate publisher Charles Carrington (whose publishing credits include Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1908). In addition to illuminating the lives of lesser known figures and texts, A Publisher’s Paradise also situates the history of “dirty books” published in the French capital to literary legends Sylvia Beach (the owner of the Parisian landmark English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Co. and publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922) and Vladimir Nabokov (whose novel Lolita was first published by Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press in Paris in 1955). The book will be a rewarding read to anyone interested in the histories of publishing, pornography, and/or Parisian cultural life.

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Dan Kennedy, “The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age” (UMass Press, 2013)

Wed, 29 May 2013 14:05:00 -0000

Dan Kennedy envisioned a massive book project, a big-picture investigation into current issues facing journalism and media. Instead he found everything he needed in New Haven, Conn., inside the small but productive office of the New Haven Independent.

In The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), Kennedy, assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, researches models of journalism that engage public conversation while producing indispensable local news coverage. Although Kennedy’s work includes insight into numerous organizations, the book focuses primarily on the Independent, a non-profit institution in the historical town of New Haven that includes the New Haven Register, a publication that dates back more than two centuries

Through interviews and research, Kennedy shows that local journalism in the 21st Century can survive and thrive so long as those within an organization are willing to put in the work and develop an understanding of the new tenets of journalism: social engagement, deep community focus, and evolving revenue models

“What you want is sustainability,” Kennedy says. “On the other hand, the New Haven Register traces its roots to Benjamin Franklin in the 1760s. I don’t think that anybody is going to achieve that kind of sustainability anymore, and I’m not even sure it’s desirable. I think we’re going to see things come and go.”

The Wired City is food for the civic minded and news junkies alike. It’s an important work that begins a sketch of what local journalism can and should be.

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John Bloom, “There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010)

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:09:00 -0000

Howard Cosell was fond of saying that American television in the 1970s was dominated by three C’s, representing each of the broadcast networks: revered CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, NBC’s late-night talk show host Johnny Carson, and Cosell himself, the marquee sports announcer for the ABC network. Cosell was known for an inflated sense of self-importance, but in this claim he was accurate. From his interviews of Muhammad Ali on Wide World of Sports in the Sixties, through his 13-year tenure in the broadcast booth of Monday Night Football, Cosell came to be the most prominent personality in sports television and one of the most recognizable figures–certainly, the most recognized voice–in all of American popular culture.

Throughout his career, Cosell aspired to be more like the trusted journalist Cronkite than the entertainer Carson. And one of the main points of historian John Bloom’s biography, There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), is that Cosell was an innovative, probing, and fearless reporter. Cosell defended Ali when the boxer was stripped of his heavyweight title. He spoke on behalf of Tommie Smith and John Carlos when they were sent home after their protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. And he denounced boxing and refused to work in the sport again, after announcing the horribly one-sided Holmes-Cobb championship fight in 1982.

At the same time, Cosell recognized that sports was entertainment. He played his role for laughs in the Woody Allen film Bananas and on the made-for-TV “athletic competitions” of lesser actors and actresses. But as his fame peaked, Cosell’s stated opinion of sports turned sharply and dismissively critical. The broadcaster always felt himself an outsider in the world of sports, a characteristic that Bloom attributes to Cosell’s Jewish background. And as a trained attorney, Cosell felt himself intellectually superior to the jocks and shills, as he called them. He gained wealth and fame through sports, but he came to see himself as bigger than sports. In that sense, Cosell can be seen not only as a legendary figure, but also as a tragic one.

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Allen Guttmann, “Sports and American Art from Benjamin West to Andy Warhol” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011)

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:37:00 -0000

When I was a kid, I used to pore over an illustrated history of American sports that I had received as a birthday gift. The oversized, hardcover book featured some of the iconic images of 20th-century sports: Lou Gehrig standing humbly at home plate on his day of tribute, teammates...

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Miriam Thaggert, “Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010)

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:46:00 -0000

Miriam Thaggert’s study Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), is an exceptional contribution to the discussion of both modernism and the the period of intense African American artistic production known as the Harlem Renaissance. Black Modernism is particularly invaluable because it explores the techniques, devices, and politics of blackness as both a cultural and literary concept, even as it examines modernism in the same way. It is a well-written and meticulously researched study.

The University of Massachusetts Press’s website explains that “Thaggert identifies and analyzes an early form of black American modernism characterized by a heightened level of experimentation with visual and verbal techniques for narrating and representing blackness. The work of the writers and artists under discussion reflects the creative tension between the intangibility of some forms of black expression, such as spirituals, and the materiality of the body evoked by other representations of blackness, such as “Negro” dialect.”

I am especially enthralled with Thaggert’s deft analyses of James Weldon Johnson’s famous introductions to his volumes on African American poetry and African American spirituals. She handles the cross influences between black and white writers of the early period of the Harlem Renaissance with insight and respect. This undeniable academic study can easily be handled by educated critics, working outside of university environments. It also offers a heuristic investigation for those within the academy.

Thaggert is a careful and intelligent writer, and she brings her fresh perspective alive in our hour-long discussion. Please listen in.

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UMass Press Podcast

Nicholas W. Gentile, "Enemies to Their Country: The Marblehead Addressers and Consensus in the American Revolution" (U Mass Press, 2025)

Gerald F. Goodwin, "Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Claire Parnell, "Inequalities of Platform Publishing: The Promise and Peril of Self-Publishing in the Digital Book Era" (U ﻿Massachusetts Press, 2025

Gwyneth Mellinger, "Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Jason A. Higgins, "Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Rob Wells, "The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Patrick Parr, "Malcolm Before X" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Carlene Kucharczyk, "Strange Hymn: ﻿﻿Poems" (U Mass Press, 2025)

Christa Kuljian, "Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Cynthia Blakeley, "The Innermost House: A Memoir" (Bright Leaf, 2024)

Tom Waidzunas et al., "Out Doing Science: LGBTQ STEM Professionals and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times" (UMass Press, 2025)

Myra Mendible, "American War Stories: Veteran-Writers and the Politics of Memoir" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Michael D. Gambone, "The New Praetorians: American Veterans, Society, and Service from Vietnam to the Forever War" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Richard Buttny, "Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Aakriti Mandhwani, "Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Cathy Stanton, "Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Matteo Pangallo and Emily B. Todd, "Teaching the History of the Book" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Michael Liu, "Forever Struggle: Activism, Identity, and Survival in Boston's Chinatown, 1880-2018" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Matthew Dennis, "American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, "How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine et al., "When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Scott Kamen, "From Union Halls to the Suburbs: Americans for Democratic Action and the Transformation of Postwar Liberalism" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Sirpa Salenius, "An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe" (U Massachusetts Press, 2016)

Alaina Kaus, "Fighting Over There: U.S. War Making and Contemporary Refugee Literature" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

S. L. Wisenberg, "The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Gerald F. Goodwin, "Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Jack Ahern, "Design with Nature on Cape Cod and the Islands" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Gregory Pfitzer, "'Fame Is Not Just for the Fellas': Female Renown and the Childhood of Famous Americans Series" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Alena Pirok, "The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg: Ghosts and Interpreting the Recreated Past" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

John M. Kinder and Jason A. Higgins, "Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

E. James West, "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr." (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Ann Marie Borys, "American Unitarian Churches: Architecture of a Democratic Religion" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Pavla Simková, "Urban Archipelago: An Environmental History of the Boston Harbor Islands" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Andrew Hunt, "We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Chiara Camarda et al., "The Venice Ghetto: A Memory Space That Travels" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Clarissa Ceglio, "A Cultural Arsenal for Democracy: The World War II Work of U.S. Museums" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Heather L. Dichter, "Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games: International Sport's Cold War Battle with NATO" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, "The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Mark P. Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak, "Making the Forever War: Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Josephine Donovan, "The Lexington Six: Lesbian and Gay Resistance in 1970s America" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Timothy D. Walker, "Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Clarence Jefferson Hall Jr, "A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York’s North Country" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Karen Woods Weierman, "The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston" (U Massachusetts Press, 2019)

Kimberly Mack, "Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White" (U Mass Press, 2020)

Michael Brenes, "For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Lucas A. Dietrich, "Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Chinua Thelwell, "Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Charles Allan McCoy, "Diseased States: Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Thomas Bishop, "Every Home a Fortress: Cold War Fatherhood and the Family Fallout Shelter" (UMass Press, 2020)

John L. Brooke, "'There Is a North': Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War" (U Mass Press, 2019)

Graham Thompson, "Herman Melville: Among the Magazines" (U Massachusetts Press 2018)

Lynn Downey, "Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World" (U Massachusetts Press, 2016)

Clare Daniel, "Mediating Morality: The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era" (U Massachusetts Press, 2017)

Lessie B. Branch, “Optimism at All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama’s America” (U Massachusetts Press, 2018)

Matthew R. Pembleton, “Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America’s Global Drug Wars” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017

Sigrid Schmalzer, et. al., “Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (UMass Press, 2018)

Drew Lopenzina, “Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot” (U. Mass Press, 2017)

Thomas M. Grace, “Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties” (U of Massachusetts Press, 2016)

Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War” (U of Massachusetts Press, 2015)

Patrick Hagopian, “American Immunity: War Crime and the Limits of International Law” (U of Massachusetts Press, 2013)

Guy Chet, “The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856” (U of Massachusetts Press, 2014)

Colette Colligan, “A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris 1890-1960” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014)

Dan Kennedy, “The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age” (UMass Press, 2013)

John Bloom, “There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010)

Allen Guttmann, “Sports and American Art from Benjamin West to Andy Warhol” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011)

Miriam Thaggert, “Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010)

Claire Parnell, "Inequalities of Platform Publishing: The Promise and Peril of Self-Publishing in the Digital Book Era" (U Massachusetts Press, 2025

Carlene Kucharczyk, "Strange Hymn: Poems" (U Mass Press, 2025)