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Image one: E-book titled Children at Play: An American History - synopsis: From sociologists to psychologists and from anthropologists to social critics, writers have produced mountains of books about the meaning and importance of children's play. But what do we know about how children actually play, especially American children of the last two centuries? In this fascinating and enlightening book, Howard Chudacoff presents a history of children's play in the United States and ponders what it tells us about ourselves. Through expert investigation in primary sources, including dozens of children's diaries, hundreds of autobiographical recollections of adults, and a wealth of child-rearing manuals--along with wide-ranging reading of the work of educators, journalists, market researchers, and scholars--Chudacoff digs into the "underground" of play.
Image two: E-book titled Babysitter: An American History - synopsis: Informed by her research on the history of teenage girls’ culture, Miriam Forman-Brunell analyzes the babysitter, who has embodied adults’ fundamental apprehensions about girls’ pursuit of autonomy and empowerment. In fact, the grievances go both ways, as girls have been distressed by unsatisfactory working conditions. In her quest to gain a fuller picture of this largely unexamined cultural phenomenon, Forman-Brunell analyzes a wealth of diverse sources, such as The Baby-sitter’s Club book series, horror movies like "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," urban legends, magazines, newspapers, television shows, and more.
Image one: Art and Poetry Month
Image two: E-book titled Lockdown Cultures: The Arts and Humanities in the Year of the Pandemic, 2020-21 (2022) - synopsis: This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analyzed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past.
Image three: E-book titled Building Fires in the Snow: A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction and Poetry (2016) - synopsis: Diversity has always been central to Alaska identity, as the state’s population consists of people with many different backgrounds, viewpoints, and life experiences. This book opens a window into these diverse lives, gathering stories and poems about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer life into a brilliant, path-breaking anthology. In these pages we see the panoply of LGBTQ life in Alaska today, from the quotidian urban adventures of a family—shopping, going out, working—to intimate encounters with Alaska’s breathtaking natural beauty.
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Resources: Streaming Video
Streaming video database 1: Psychotherapy.net - Allows users to watch master therapists conducting psychotherapy sessions and over 300 training videos featuring leading practitioners in the field.
Streaming video database 2: Behavioral and Mental Health Online - Features applied training materials that help today's counseling students, faculty, and practitioners put theory into practice. The award-winning resources in the database offer more than 2,000 hours of training videos, conference sessions, and footage of actual therapy sessions.
Image one: Need data or statistics? - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Data and statistics on alcohol use; deaths and mortality; healthy aging; life expectancy; and more. - www.cdc.gov/datastatistics
Image two: Need data or statistics? - F.B.I. Uniform Crime Reporting: Data and statistics on crime in the United States; law enforcement officers killed and assaulted; hate crime statistics; cargo theft; and human trafficking. - www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr
Image three: Need data or statistics? - United States Census Bureau: Data on population, economy, education, employment, and more. - www.census.gov
Image one - E-book titled Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (2013) - synopsis: In Entertaining Elephants Susan Nance examines elephant behavior—drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications—to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. Entertaining Elephants is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather.
Image two - E-book titled Winnebago Nation: The Peculiar Place of the RV in American Culture (2014) - synopsis: In Winnebago Nation, popular critic James B. Twitchell takes a light-hearted look at the culture and industry behind the yearning to spend the night in one's car. For the young, the road trip is a coming-of-age ceremony; for those later in life, it is the realization of a lifelong desire to be spontaneous, nomadic, and free. Informed by his own experiences on the road, Twitchell recounts the RV's origins and evolution over the twentieth century; its rise, fall, and rebirth as a cultural icon; its growing mechanical complexity as it evolved from an estate wagon to a converted bus to a mobile home; and its role in bolstering and challenging conceptions of American identity.
Image three - E-book titled The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America (2019) - synopsis: In the post–World War I American climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism, Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became surprising paragons of authoritarian male power and mass appeal. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and Italy, Giorgio Bertellini’s work shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority.
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Image one: E-book titled Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory (2017) - synopsis: The 1830’s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present.
Image two: E-book titled Starring Red Wing!: The Incredible Career of Lilian M. St. Cyr, the First Native American Film Star (2019) - synopsis: Brings the exciting career, dedicated activism, and noteworthy legacy of Ho-Chunk actress Lilian Margaret St. Cyr vividly to life. Known to film audiences as “Princess Red Wing,” St. Cyr emerged as the most popular Native American actress in the pre-Hollywood and early studio-system era in the United States.
Image one: E-book titled Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore (2007) - synopsis: In Haunting Experiences, Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.
Image two: E-book titled Boo!: Culture, Experience, and the Startle Reflex (1996) - synopsis: The startle reflex provides a revealing model for examining the ways in which evolved neurophysiology shapes personal experience and patterns of recurrent social interaction. In the most diverse cultural contexts, in societies widely separated by time and space, the inescapable physiology of the reflex both shapes the experience of startle and biases the social usages to which the reflex is put. This book describes ways in which the startle reflex is experienced, culturally elaborated, and socially used in a wide variety of times and places. It offers explanations both for the patterned commonalities found across cultural settings and for the differences engendered by diverse social environments.
Image one: E-book titled Learning To Be Latino: How Colleges Shape Identity Politics (2018) - synopsis: In Learning to Be Latino, sociologist Daisy Verduzco Reyes paints a vivid picture of Latino student life at a liberal arts college, a research university, and a regional public university, outlining students’ interactions with one another, with non-Latino peers, and with faculty, administrators, and the outside community. Reyes identifies the normative institutional arrangements that shape the social relationships relevant to Latino students’ lives, including school size, the demographic profile of the student body, residential arrangements, and more. Together these characteristics create an environment for Latino students that influences how they interact, identify, and come to understand their place on campus.
Image two: E-book titled The Battle for Paradise: Surfing, Tuna, and One Town's Quest to Save a Wave (2015) - synopsis: Pavones, a town located on the southern tip of Costa Rica, is a haven for surfers, expatriates, and fishermen seeking a place to start over. Located on the Golfo Dulce (Sweet Gulf), a marine sanctuary and one of the few tropical fjords in the world, Pavones is home to a legendary surf break and a cottage fishing industry. In The Battle for Paradise, Jeremy Evans travels to Pavones to uncover the story of how this ragtag group stood up to a multinational company and how a shadowy figure from the town’s violent past became an unlikely hero.
Image one: E-book titled Liberia, South Carolina: An African American Appalachian Community (2018) - synopsis: In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small community of Liberia in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met Mable Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small African American community still living on land obtained immediately after the Civil War. This intimate history tells the story of five generations of the Owens family and their friends and neighbors, chronicling their struggles through slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the desegregation of the state.
Image two: E-book titled The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies (2014) - synopsis: This essential introduction to American Studies examines the core foundational myths which the nation is based upon and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of discovery, the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the founding fathers, and more.
Image one: E-book titled Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road (2015) - synopsis: Explores the different ways that Americans have thought about the bicycle through popular songs, merit badge pamphlets, advertising, films, newspapers, and sitcoms. Those associations shaped the actions of government and the courts when they intervened in bike policy through lawsuits, traffic control, road building, taxation, rationing, import tariffs, safety education, and bike lanes from the 1870s to the 1970s.
Image two: E-book titled Dodgerland: Decadent Los Angeles and the 1977-78 Dodgers (2016) - synopsis: Part journalism, part social history, and part straight sports writing, Dodgerland is told through the lives of four men, each representing different aspects of this L.A. story. Tom Lasorda, the vocal manager of the Dodgers, gives an up-close view of the team's struggles and triumphs; Tom Fallon, a suburban small-business owner, witnesses the Dodgers' season and the changes to California's landscape—physical, social, political, and economic; Tom Wolfe, a chronicler of California's ever-changing culture, views the events of 1977–78 from his Manhattan writer's loft; and Tom Bradley, Los Angeles's mayor and the region's most dominant political figure of the time, gives a glimpse of the wider political, demographic, and economic forces that affected the state at the time.
Image one: E-book titled Orchestrating Public Opinion: How Music Persuades in Television Political Ads for U.S. Presidential Campaigns, 1952-2016 (2018) - synopsis: Analysis of political advertising tends to give music short shrift - which flies in the face of what we know about the power of music to set a mood, affect feelings, and influence our perceptions. This book is the first to offer a detailed exploration of the role of music in US presidential campaign advertising, from Eisenhower to the present, showing that in many cases music isn't simply one element in the presentation of an ad's message - it's the dominant factor, more important than images, words, or narration.
Image two: E-book titled Detached: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia (2015) - synopsis: Detached America is the first book with a national scope to explore the design and marketing of postwar houses. James A. Jacobs shows how these houses physically document national trends in domestic space and record a remarkably uniform spatial evolution that can be traced throughout the country. This vast and long-lived collaboration between government and business—fueled by millions of homeowners—established the financial mechanisms, consumer framework, domestic ideologies, and architectural precedents that permanently altered the geographic and demographic landscape of the nation.
Image one: America - Government, History, Culture
Image two: E-book titled Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West (2011) - synopsis: The 586-square-mile Hanford compound on the Columbia River is known both for its origins as part of the Manhattan Project, which made the first atomic bombs, and for the monumental effort now under way to clean up forty-five years of waste from manufacturing plutonium for nuclear weapons. Atomic Frontier Days tells a complex story of production, community building, politics, and environmental sensibilities. In brilliantly structured parallel stories, the authors bridge the divisions that accompany the Hanford nuclear reservation's headlines and offer perspective on today's controversies.
Image three: E-book titled Woodstock Scholarship: An Interdisciplinary Annotated Bibliography (2016) - synopsis: Since August 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair looms large when recounting the history and impact of the baby boom generation and the societal upheavals of the Sixties. This interdisciplinary annotated bibliography records the details of over 400 English-language resources on the Festival, including books, chapters, articles, websites, transcriptions and videos. Divided into six main subsections―Culture & Society, History, Biography, Music, Film, Arts & Literature―for ease of consultation Woodstock Scholarship sheds light on all facets of a key happening in our collective history.
Image one: E-book titled Understanding James Baldwin (2019) - synopsis: The Harlem-born son of a storefront preacher, James Baldwin died almost thirty years ago, but his spirit lives on in the eloquent and still-relevant musings of his novels, short stories, essays, and poems. What concerned him most—as a black man, as a gay man, as an American—were notions of isolation and disconnection at both the individual and communal level and a conviction that only in the transformative power of love could humanity find any hope of healing its spiritual and social wounds. In Understanding James Baldwin, Marc K. Dudley reveals Baldwin's career spanning the civil rights movement and beyond, writing about race, sexual identity, and gendered politics, while traveling the world to promote dialogue on those issues.
Image two: E-book titled S/he: Sex and Gender in Hispanic Cultures (2017) - synopsis: The main title, S/HE, is a nod to the arguably-gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun from the 1960s inclusive English-language movement in the United States, which was concurrent with equal rights movements in terms of race, ethnicity, sex and gender. This book focuses on sex and gender issues in the Hispanic worlds, paying homage to all who do not fit within the strict parameters of previous definitions by including broadened descriptions of identity, both biological and social, and by highlighting aspects of traditional and non-traditional lifestyles as portrayed in art and literature.
Image one: E-book titled Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements (2013) - synopsis: The Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements covers the history of this movement through a cross-referenced dictionary with entries on specific countries and regions, influential historical figures, laws that criminalized same-sex sexuality, various historical terms that have been used to refer to aspects of same-sex love, and contemporary events and legal decisions.
Image two: E-book titled Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (2017) - synopsis: Clinical Encounters in Sexuality makes an intervention into the fields of clinical psychoanalysis and sexuality studies, in an effort to think about a range of issues relating to sexuality from a clinical psychoanalytic perspective. This book concentrates on a number of concepts, such as identity, desire, pleasure, and more. The editors, Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson, have chosen queer theory, a sub-field of sexuality studies, as an interlocutor for the clinical contributors, because it is at the forefront of theoretical considerations of sexuality, as well as being both reliant upon and suspicious of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and discourse.
Image one: E-book titled The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom (2018) - synopsis: The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom explores how the fantasies of genre, marketing, and children can never fully cloak the queerness lurking within the plucky families designed for American viewers' comic delight. Queer readings of family sitcoms demolish myths of yesteryear, demonstrating the illusion of American sexual innocence in television's early programs and its lasting consequences in the nation's self-construction, as they also allow fresh insights into the ways in which more recent programs negotiate new visions of sexuality while indebted to previous narrative traditions.
Image two: E-book titled After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics (2014) - synopsis: Through its increasing entanglement with capitalism, James Penney, controversially argues that queer theory has run its course. However, the 'end of queer' should not signal the death of liberatory sexual politics; rather, it presents the occasion to rethink the relation between sexuality and politics. The book makes a critical return to Marxism and psychoanalysis, via Freud and Lacan, and conducts a critical examination of queer theory's most famous proponents, including Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Image one: E-book titled Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age (2014) - synopsis: Alan Turing is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. Best known as the genius who broke Germany's most secret codes during the war of 1939-45, Turing was also a gay man and the father of the modern computer. Here, B. Jack Copeland provides an account of Turing's life and work, exploring the key elements of his life-story in tandem with his leading ideas and contributions.
Image two: E-book titled Inscrutable Belongings: Queer Asian North American Fiction (2018) - synopsis: Despite many antagonistic forces, the examined texts' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their 'survival plots,' and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Stephen Hong Sohn calls 'inscrutable belongings.' Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma.
Image one: E-book titled Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History (2018) - synopsis: Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities.
Image two: E-book titled Transgender Lives: Complex Stories, Complex Voices (2015) - synopsis: Meet Katie, Hayden, Dean, Brooke, David, Julia, and Natasha. Each is transgender, and in this book, they share their personal stories. Through their narratives, you'll get to know and love each person for their humor, intelligence, perseverance, and passion. You'll learn how they each came to better understand, accept, and express their gender identities, and you'll follow them through the sorrows and successes of their personal journeys. Transgender Lives helps you understand what it means to be transgender in America while learning more about transgender history, the broad spectrum of transgender identities, and the transition process.
Image one: E-book titled Odd Couples: A History of Gay Marriage in Scandinavia (2011) - synopsis: Odd Couples is the first comprehensive history of registered partnership and gay marriage in Scandinavia. It traces the origins of laws which initially were extremely controversial-inside and outside the gay community-but have now gained broad popular and political support, as well as the positive effects and risks involved in state recognition of lesbian and gay couples. Through a comparison of how these laws have been received and practiced in all of the Scandinavian countries, including Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the author presents a nuanced study of a fascinating political process that began in the 1960s and continues to change the way we understand family, sexuality and nation.
Image two: E-book titled Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance, and Hope (2018) - synopsis: Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance and Hope is an outcome of a five-year international collaboration among partners that share a common legacy of British colonial laws that criminalize same-sex intimacy and gender identity/expression. The project sought to facilitate learning from each other and to create outcomes that would advance knowledge and social justice. The project was unique, combining research and writing with participatory documentary filmmaking. This visionary politics infuses the pages of the anthology.
Image one: E-book titled Derrida and Queer Theory (2017) - synopsis: This long-awaited volume of essays are compelling as they exuberantly take readers of Derrida to new, queerer heights and depths of understanding. Superbly edited and presented by Christian Hite, this book belongs in every collection of works on Derrida, deconstruction, or queer theory.
Image two: E-book titled Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism, and the Third Sex (2018) - synopsis: Ujarak, Iqallijuq, and Kupaaq were elders from the Inuit community on Igloolik Island in Nunavut. The three elders, among others, shared with Bernard Saladin d'Anglure the narratives which make up the heart of Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth. Through their words, and historical sources recorded by Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen, Saladin d'Anglure examines the Inuit notion of personhood and its relationship to cosmology and mythology. Central to these stories are womb memories, narratives of birth and reincarnation, and the concept of the third sex—an intermediate identity between male and female.
Image one: LGBTQ+ Pride Month
Image two: E-book titled Queer Festivals: Challenging Collective Identities in a Transnational Europe (2018) - synopsis: At queer festivals, activists, artists and participants come together to build new forms of sociability and practice their ideals through anti-binary and inclusive idioms of gender and sexuality. These ideals are moreover channeled through a series of organizational and cultural practices that aim at the emergence of queer as a collective identity. Through the study of festivals in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Copenhagen, and Oslo, Queer Festivals: Challenging Collective Identities in a Transnational Europe thoughtfully analyses the role of activist practices in the building of collective identities for social movement studies.
Image three: E-book titled Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (2016) - synopsis: Author Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at more than 400 American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity.
Image one: E-Book titled Tulip in the Desert: A Selection of the Poetry of Muhammad Iqbal (1999) - synopsis: Muhammad Iqbal (1877 1938) is one of the pre-eminent writers of the Indian subcontinent and the attention he has received from writers, translators and critics in western as well as Islamic countries testifies to his stature as a world literary figure. In his translation of Iqbal s poetry, Mustansir Mir seeks to convey every level of meaning and mood in the poems, while making the text as readable and idiomatic as possible.
Image two: E-Book titled Arrival Cities: Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the 20th Century (2020) - synopsis: Exile and migration played a critical role in the diffusion and development of modernism around the globe yet have long remained largely understudied phenomena within art historiography. Focusing on the intersections of exile, artistic practice and urban space, this volume brings together contributions by international researchers committed to revising the historiography of modern art. It pays particular attention to metropolitan areas that were settled by migrant artists in the first half of the 20th century. These arrival cities developed into hubs of artistic activities and transcultural contact zones where ideas circulated, collaborations emerged, and concepts developed.
Image one: E-book titled Syria's Monuments: Their Survival and Destruction (2016) - synopsis: Syria's Monuments: Their Survival and Destruction examines the fate of the various monuments in Syria (including present-day Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine/Israel) from Late Antiquity to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. It examines travellers’ accounts, mainly from the 17th to 19th centuries, which describe religious buildings and housing in numbers and quality unknown elsewhere. The book charts the reasons why monuments lived or died, varying from earthquakes and desertification to neglect and re-use, and sets the political and social context for the Empire’s transformation toward a modern state, provoked by Western trade and example.
Image two: E-book titled Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital (2017) - synopsis: Mexico City became one of the centers of architectural modernism in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Through an exploration of schools, a university campus, a government ministry, a workers' park, and houses for Diego Rivera and Luis Barragán, Kathryn O'Rourke offers a new interpretation of modern architecture in the Mexican capital, showing close links between design, evolving understandings of national architectural history, folk art, and social reform.
Image one: E-book titled The Sukkot and Simhat Torah Anthology (2018) - synopsis: The Sukkot and Simhat Torah Anthology offers new insight into the Festival of Ingathering, celebrating the harvest in the land of ancestors, and the Festival of Rejoicing in the Law, marking the new cycle of public Torah readings, by elucidating the two festivals’ background, historical development, and spiritual truths for Jews and humankind. Mining the Bible, postbiblical literature, Talmud, midrashim, prayers with commentaries, and Hasidic tales, the compendium also showcases humor, art, food, song, dance, essays, stories, and poems.
Image two: E-book titled The Arts and the Brain: Psychology and Physiology beyond Pleasure (2018) - synopsis: Combines the work of an excellent group of experts who explain evidence on the neural and biobehavioral science of the arts. Topics covered include the emergence of early art and the evolution of human culture, the interaction between cultural and biological evolutionary processes in generating artistic creation, the nature of the aesthetic experience of art, the arts as a multisensory experience, new insights from the neuroscience of dance, a systematic review of the biological impact of music, and more.
Image one: E-book titled Designing Motion: Automotive Designers, 1890-1990 (2016) - synopsis: For a long time, car design was considered to be anonymous, the designers stood in the shadow of the perception of the design, even though their designs can be found on the roads in millions. This richly illustrated book captures the origin of a profession and maps the development of car design based on a comprehensive introduction and the career biographies of over 200 selected designers who contributed to the design of cars and many different associated products in the USA, Europe, and Japan between 1900 and 2000.
Image two: E-book titled Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature (2010) - synopsis: Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature presents a broad perspective on the development and history of literature in modern China. It offers a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 300 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Chinese literature.
Image two: E-book titled Developing a Sense of Place: The Role of the Arts in Regenerating Communities (2021) - synopsis: Cultural planners, artists, and policy makers must work through the arts to create communities—and a place within them. Developing a Sense of Place brings together a series of case studies and success stories drawn from a different geographical or sociocultural contexts. Selected for their lasting effect in their local community, the case studies explore new models for opening up the relationship between universities and their surrounding regions, explicitly connecting creative, critical, and theoretical approaches to civic development.
Image three: E-book titled Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms, 1959-1995 (2007) - synopsis: A singular and major historical view of the birth of electronic poetry. For the last five decades, poets have had a vibrant relationship with computers and digital technology. This book is a documentary study and analytic history of digital poetry that highlights its major practitioners and the ways that they have used technology to foster a new aesthetic, focusing primarily on programs and experiments produced before the emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s.
Image three: Picture of Georgia O'Keeffe with a quote from her: "Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing."
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Image one: E-book titled A History of Midwifery in the United States: The Midwife Said Fear Not (2016) - synopsis: Written by two of the profession's most prominent midwifery leaders, this authoritative history of midwifery in the United States, from the 1600s to the present, is distinguished by its vast breadth and depth. The book spans the historical evolution of midwives as respected, autonomous health care workers and midwifery as a profession, and considers the strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities for this discipline as enduring motifs throughout the text.
Image two: E-book titled Woman-priest: Tradition and Transgression in the Contemporary Roman Catholic Church (2020) - synopsis: While some Catholics and even non-Catholics today are asking if priests are necessary, especially given the ongoing sex-abuse scandal, The Roman Catholic Woman-priests (RCWP) looks to reframe and reform Roman Catholic priesthood, starting with ordained women. Woman-priest is the first academic study of the RCWP movement. As an ethnography, Woman-priest analyzes the women-priests’ actions and lived theologies in order to explore ongoing tensions in Roman Catholicism around gender and sexuality, priestly authority, and religious change.
Image one: E-book titled Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Backgrounds Issues (2020) - synopsis: This book argues that women served as leaders in a number of synagogues during the Roman and Byzantine periods. The evidence for this consists of nineteen Greek and Latin inscriptions in which women bear the titles "head of the synagogue," "leader," "elder," "mother of the synagogue" and "priestess." These inscriptions range in date from 27 B.C.E. to perhaps the sixth century C.E. and in provenance from Italy to Asia Minor, Egypt and Palestine. While new discoveries make this a growing corpus of material, a number of the inscriptions have been known to scholars for some time.
Image two: E-book titled Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (2017) - synopsis: Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a broad overview of the great diversity of feminist thought and practice in Japan from the early twentieth century to the present. Drawing on methodologies and approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, and sociology, each chapter presents the results of research based on some combination of original archival research, careful textual analysis, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation.
Image one: E-book titled Family Jigsaws: Grandmothers as the Missing Piece Shaping Bilingual Children's Learner Identities (2017) - synopsis: This exciting ethnographic study spotlights the multiple identities of three third-generation British-born Bangladeshi children in London's East End as they learn with their teachers, mothers and grandmothers. The book reveals for the first time the remarkable ability of young bilingual children to compartmentalize their learning and become flexible learners. It is the first to show how it is children's interactions with their grandmothers - who often speak no English - that most powerfully enhance and extend their educational and cultural experiences.
Image two: E-book titled After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (2015) - synopsis: Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade continues to make headlines. After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate cuts through the myths and misunderstandings to present a clear-eyed account of cultural and political responses to the landmark 1973 ruling in the decade that followed. The grassroots activists who shaped the discussion after Roe, Mary Ziegler shows, were far more fluid and diverse than the partisans dominating the debate today.
Image one: E-book titled Complicated Lives: Girls, Parents, Drugs, and Juvenile Justice (2017) - synopsis: Focuses on the lives of sixty-five drug-using girls in the juvenile justice system (living in group homes, a residential treatment center, and a youth correctional facility) who grew up in families characterized by parental drug use, violence, and child maltreatment. Vera Lopez situates girls' relationships with parents who fail to live up to idealized parenting norms and examines how these relationships change over time, and ultimately contribute to the girls' future drug use and involvement in the justice system. Lopez provides an optimistic prescription for reform and improvement of the lives of these young women and presents a number of suggestions ranging from enhanced cultural competency training for all juvenile justice professionals to developing stronger collaborations between youth and adult serving systems and agencies.
Image two: E-book titled An Extraordinary Ordinary Woman: The Journal of Phebe Orvis, 1820-1830 (2017) - synopsis: In 1820, Phebe Orvis began a journal that she faithfully kept for a decade. Richly detailed, her diary captures not only the everyday life of an ordinary woman in early nineteenth-century Vermont and New York, but also the unusual happenings of her family, neighborhood, and beyond. The journal entries trace Orvis's transition from single life to marriage and motherhood, including her time at the Middlebury Female Seminary and her observations about the changing social and economic environment of the period.
Image one: E-book titled African American Women Chemists (2011) - synopsis: In this book, Jeannette Brown, an African American woman chemist herself, will present a wide-ranging historical introduction to the relatively new presence of African American women in the field of chemistry. It will detail their struggles to obtain an education and their efforts to succeed in a field in which there were few African American men, much less African American women. The book contains sketches of the lives of African America women chemists from the earliest pioneers up until the late 1960's when the Civil Rights Acts were passed and greater career opportunities began to emerge.
Image two: E-book titled Madame Wu Chien-Shiung: The First Lady of Physics Research (2013) - synopsis: Narrating the well-lived life of the “Chinese Madame Curie” — a recipient of the first Wolf Prize in Physics (1978), the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Princeton University, as well as the first female president of the American Physical Society — this book provides a comprehensive and honest account of the life of Dr. Wu Chien-Shiung, an outstanding and leading experimental physicist of the 20th century.
Image one: E-book titled Lady Lushes: Gender, Alcoholism, and Medicine in Modern America (2017) - synopsis: From the glamorous hard-drinking flapper of the 1920s to the disgraced and alcoholic wife and mother played by Lee Remick in the 1962 film “Days of Wine and Roses,” alcohol consumption by American women has been seen as both a prerogative and as a threat to health, happiness, and the social order. In Lady Lushes, medical historian Michelle L. McClellan traces the story of the female alcoholic from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century. She draws on a range of sources to demonstrate the persistence of the belief that alcohol use is antithetical to an idealized feminine role, particularly one that glorifies motherhood. Lady Lushes offers a fresh perspective on the importance of gender role ideology in the formation of medical knowledge and authority.
Image two: E-book titled A Medieval Woman's Companion (2016) - synopsis: Focusing on women from Western Europe between c. 300 and 1500 CE in the medieval period and richly carpeted with detail, A Medieval Woman's Companion offers a wealth of information about real medieval women who are now considered vital for understanding the Middle Ages in a full and nuanced way. Short biographies of 20 medieval women illustrate how they have anticipated and shaped current concerns, including access to education; creative emotional outlets such as art, theater, romantic fiction, and music; marriage and marital rights; fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, contraception and gynecology; sex trafficking and sexual violence; the balance of work and family; faith; and disability.
Image one: E-book titled Starring Red Wing!: The Incredible Career of Lilian M. St. Cyr, the First Native American Film Star (2019) - synopsis: The epic biography Starring Red Wing! brings the exciting career, dedicated activism, and noteworthy legacy of Ho-Chunk actress Lilian Margaret St. Cyr vividly to life. Known to film audiences as “Princess Red Wing,” St. Cyr emerged as the most popular Native American actress in the pre-Hollywood and early studio-system era in the United States, befriending and working with icons such as Mary Pickford, Jewell Carmen, Tom Mix, Max Sennett, and William Selig.
Image two: E-book titled Pythagorean Women: Their History and Writings (2013) - synopsis: Pythagorean Women provides English translations of all the earliest extant examples of literary Greek prose by Neo-pythagorean women, shedding light on their attitudes about marriage, the home, music, and the cosmos. Author Sarah B. Pomeroy sets the Pythagorean and Neo-pythagorean women vividly in their historical, ecological, and intellectual contexts, illustrated with original photographs of sites and artifacts known to these women.
Image one: E-book titled Heroines of the Qing: Exemplary Women Tell Their Stories (2016) - synopsis: Traditionally, “exemplary women” (lienu)--heroic martyrs, chaste widows, and faithful maidens, for example--were written into official dynastic histories for their unrelenting adherence to female virtue by Confucian family standards. However, despite the rich writing traditions about these women, their lives were often distorted by moral and cultural agendas. Binbin Yang, drawing on interdisciplinary sources, shows how they were able to cross boundaries that were typically closed to women--boundaries not only of gender, but also of knowledge, economic power, political engagement, and ritual and cultural authority.
Image two: E-book titled The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science (2010) - synopsis: In The Madame Curie Complex, Julie Des Jardins dismantles the myth of the lone male genius, reframing the history of science with revelations about women’s substantial contributions to the field. She explores the lives of some of the most famous female scientists, including Jane Goodall, the eminent primatologist; Rosalind Franklin, the chemist whose work anticipated the discovery of DNA’s structure; Rosalyn Yalow, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist; and, of course, Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer whose towering, mythical status has both empowered and stigmatized future generations of women considering a life in science.
Image one: E-book titled Black Women and Social Justice Education: Legacies and Lessons (2019) - synopsis: Black Women and Social Justice Education explores Black women’s experiences and expertise in teaching and learning about justice in a range of formal and informal educational settings. Linking historical accounts with groundbreaking contributions by new and rising leaders in the field, it examines, evaluates, establishes, and reinforces Black women’s commitment to social justice in education at all levels.
Image two: E-book titled Some Jewish Women in Antiquity (2020) - synopsis: This book sets out to characterize different types of Jewish women in Eretz-Israel over an extended period of more than a thousand years, from the biblical period to the time of the Mishnah and Talmud. This is a study in the comparative history of the status of women in Eretz-Israel in antiquity, and, like any comparative study, it addresses the same issues in different circumstances, contributing to the relatively new field of Jewish social history; it also furnishes additional proof, should any be necessary, of the scientific momentum to be gained by interdisciplinary study like the present combination of history and the social sciences.
Image one: E-book titled Man-Made Woman: The Dialectics of Cross-Dressing (2017) - synopsis: On July 27th, 2015, Colin Cremin overcame a lifetime of fear and repression and came to work dressed as a woman called Ciara. This book charts her personal journey as a male-to-female cross-dresser in the ever-changing world of gender politics. Interweaving the personal and the political, through discussions of fetishism, aesthetics, and popular culture, Man-Made Woman explores gender, identity and pleasure through the lenses of feminism, Marxism and psychoanalytic theory.
Image two: E-book titled Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era (2017) - synopsis: Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era profiles the most important figures of this cultural and intellectual movement. Highlighting the accomplishments of black women who sought to create positive change after the end of WWI, this reference work includes representatives not only from the literary scene but also activists, actresses, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, musicians, political leaders, and scholars.
Image one: E-book titled Mothers and Daughters in Nineteenth-Century America: The Biosocial Construction of Femininity (2015) - synopsis: The feminine script of early nineteenth century centered on women's role as patient, long-suffering mothers. By mid-century, however, their daughters faced a world very different in social and economic options and in the physical experiences surrounding their bodies. In this groundbreaking study, Nancy Theriot turns to social and medical history, developmental psychology, and feminist theory to explain the fundamental shift in women's concepts of femininity and gender identity during the course of the century -- from an ideal suffering womanhood to emphasis on female control of physical self.
Image two: E-book titled Toni Morrison: Forty Years in the Clearing (2012) - synopsis: Enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison’s cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades.
Image one: E-book titled Jane Austen's Women: An Introduction (2018) - synopsis: Jane Austen's Women answers these questions by exploring Austen's affirming yet challenging vision of both who her dynamic female characters are, and who they become. This important new work analyzes the heroines' relationships to body, mind, spirit, environment, and society.
Image two: E-book titled Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan (2018) - synopsis: The overwhelming majority of tea practitioners in contemporary Japan are women, but there has been little discussion on their historical role in tea culture (chanoyu). In Cultivating Femininity, Rebecca Corbett writes women back into this history and shows how tea practice for women was understood, articulated, and promoted in the Edo (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. Viewing chanoyu from the lens of feminist and gender theory, she sheds new light on tea’s undeniable influence on the formation of modern understandings of femininity in Japan.
Image one: Women's History Month
Image two: E-book titled When Women Rule the Court: Gender, Race, and Japanese American Basketball (2017) - synopsis: For nearly one hundred years, basketball has been an important part of Japanese American life. Women's basketball holds a special place in the contemporary scene of highly organized and expansive Japanese American leagues in California, in part because these leagues have produced numerous talented female players. Using data from interviews and observations, Nicole Willms explores the interplay of social forces and community dynamics that have shaped this unique context of female athletic empowerment.
Image three: E-book titled Women in Mongol Iran: The Khatuns, 1206-1335 (2017) - synopsis: This book shows the development of women's status in the Mongol Empire from its original homeland in Mongolia up to the end of the Ilkhanate of Iran in 1335. Taking a thematic approach, the chapters show a coherent progression of this development and contextualise the evolution of the role of women in medieval Mongol society.
James Baldwin quote reading, "We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist."
Image one: E-book titled The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing (2019) - synopsis: The Racial Healing Handbook offers practical tools to help you navigate daily and past experiences of racism, challenge internalized negative messages and privileges, and handle feelings of stress and shame. You'll also learn to develop a profound racial consciousness and conscientiousness and heal from grief and trauma. Most importantly, you'll discover the building blocks to creating a community of healing in a world still filled with racial microaggressions and discrimination.
Image two: E-book titled Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College (2017) - synopsis: Richard Theodore Greener (1844–1922) was a renowned black activist and scholar. In 1870, he was the first black graduate of Harvard College. During Reconstruction, he was the first black faculty member at a southern white college, the University of South Carolina. He was even the first black US diplomat to a white country, serving in Vladivostok, Russia. A notable speaker and writer for racial equality, he also served as a dean of the Howard University School of Law and as the administrative head of the Ulysses S. Grant Monument Association.
Image three: E-book titled Hashtag Identity: Hash-tagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (2019) - synopsis: Hashtag Identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world. The essays in Hashtag Identity consider topics such as the social justice movements organized through Hashtag Black Lives Matter, Hashtag Ferguson, and Hashtag Say Her Name; the controversies around Hashtag Why I Stayed and Hashtag Cancel Colbert; Twitter use in India and Africa; the integration of hashtags such as hashtag no homo and hashtag on fleek that have become part of everyday online vernacular; and other ways in which Twitter has been used by, for, and against women, people of color, LGBTQ, and Global South communities.
Image one: E-book titled African Americans and the First Amendment: The Case for Liberty and Equality (2019) - synopsis: African Americans and the First Amendment is the first book to explore in detail the relationship between African Americans and our “first freedoms,” especially freedom of speech. Timothy C. Shiell utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to demonstrate that a strong commitment to civil liberty and to racial equality are mutually supportive, as they share an opposition to orthodoxy and a commitment to greater inclusion and participation.
Shirley Chisholm quote reading: "If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair."
Image one: E-book titled Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, the Extension Service, and Rural Reform in Jim Crow Texas (2007) - synopsis: Black farmers were excluded from cooperative demonstration work in Texas until the Smith-Lever Agricultural Extension act in 1914. However, the resulting Negro Division included a complicated bureaucracy of African American agents who reported to white officials, were supervised by black administrators, and served black farmers. The now-measurable successes of these African American farmers exacerbated racial tensions and led to pressure on agents to maintain the status quo. The bureau that was meant to ensure equality instead became another tool for systematic discrimination and maintenance of the white-dominated southern landscape.
Image two: E-book titled African American Women Chemists (2011) - synopsis: In this book, Jeannette Brown, an African American woman chemist herself, will present a wide-ranging historical introduction to the relatively new presence of African American women in the field of chemistry. It will detail their struggles to obtain an education and their efforts to succeed in a field in which there were few African American men, much less African American women. The book contains sketches of the lives of African America women chemists from the earliest pioneers up until the late 1960's when the Civil Rights Acts were passed and greater career opportunities began to emerge.
Image one: E-book titled Frederick Douglass Classics: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage and My Freedom - synopsis: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a dramatic autobiography of the early life of an American slave, first published in 1845 when Douglass had just achieved his freedom. Its shocking first-hand account of the horrors of slavery became an international bestseller. His eloquence led Frederick Douglass to become the first great African-American leader in the United States. My Bondage and My Freedom is Frederick Douglass' second autobiography. First published in 1855-at the height of Douglass's involvement in the abolitionist movement-his narrative describes the steps that had led him to the forefront of the struggle for racial justice.
Image two: E-book titled The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas (2012) - synopsis: In The Worlds of Langston Hughes, Vera Kutzinski contends that, for writers who are part of the African diaspora, translation is more than just a literary practice: it is a fact of life and a way of thinking. Focusing on Hughes's autobiographies, translations of his poetry, his own translations, and the political lyrics that brought him to the attention of the infamous McCarthy Committee, she shows that translating and being translated—and often mistranslated—are as vital to Hughes's own poetics as they are to understanding the historical network of cultural relations known as literary modernism.
Image one: E-book titled Walking Harlem: The Ultimate Guide to the Cultural Capital of Black America (2018) - synopsis: With its rich cultural history and many landmark buildings, Harlem is not just one of New York’s most distinctive neighborhoods; it’s also one of the most walkable. This illustrated guide takes readers on five separate walking tours of Harlem, covering ninety-one different historical sites. Alongside major tourist destinations like the Apollo Theater and the Abyssinian Baptist Church, longtime Harlem resident Karen Taborn includes little-known local secrets like Jazz Age speakeasies, literati, political and arts community locales. Drawing from rare historical archives, she also provides plenty of interesting background information on each location.
Image one: E-book titled Black Hunger: Soul Food and America (2004) - synopsis: Black Hunger focuses on debates over soul food since the 1960s to illuminate a complex web of political, economic, religious, sexual, and racial tensions between whites and blacks and within the black community itself. Doris Witt draws on vaudeville, literature, film, visual art, and cookbooks to explore how food has been used both to perpetuate and to challenge racial stereotypes.
Image two: E-book titled The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (2014) - synopsis: Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975) was one of the most significant and controversial black leaders of the twentieth century. His followers called him the Messenger of Allah, while his critics labeled him a teacher of hate. Southern by birth, Muhammad moved north, eventually serving as the influential head of the Nation of Islam for over forty years. Claude Clegg III not only chronicles Muhammad's life, but also examines the history of American black nationalists and the relationship between Islam and the African American experience.
Image one: E-book titled Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe (2014) - synopsis: In 1953, Josephine Baker did something completely unexpected and, in the context of racially sensitive times, outrageous. Adopting twelve children from around the globe, she transformed her estate into a theme park, complete with rides, hotels, a collective farm, and singing and dancing. The main attraction was her Rainbow Tribe, the family of the future, which showcased children of all skin colors, nations, and religions living together in harmony. Alerting readers to some of the contradictions at the heart of the Rainbow Tribe project—its undertow of child exploitation and megalomania in particular—Guterl concludes that Baker was a serious and determined activist who believed she could make a positive difference.
Image two: E-book titled Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain Future of Youth Work (2019) - synopsis: Approximately 2.4 million Black youth participate in after-school programs, which offer a range of support, including academic tutoring, college preparation, political identity development, cultural and emotional support, and even a space to develop strategies and tools for organizing and activism. In Reclaiming Community, Bianca Baldridge tells the story of one such community-based program, Educational Excellence (EE), shining a light on both the invaluable role youth workers play in these spaces, and the precarious context in which such programs now exist.
Image one: E-book titled After Katrina: Race, Neoliberalism, and the End of the American Century (2018) - synopsis: Suggests that New Orleans has been reimagined as a laboratory for a racialized neoliberalism, and as such might be seen as a terminus of the American dream. This US disaster zone has unveiled a network of social and environmental crises that demonstrate that prospects of social mobility have dwindled as environmental degradation and coastal erosion emerge as major threats not just to the quality of life but to the possibility of life in coastal communities across America and the world. And yet After Katrina also suggests that New Orleans culture offers a way of thinking about the United States in terms that transcend the binary of national renewal or declension. The post-Hurricane city thus emerges as a flashpoint for reflecting on the contemporary United States.
Image two: E-book titled Black Women and Social Justice Education: Legacies and Lessons (2019) - synopsis: Black Women and Social Justice Education explores Black women’s experiences and expertise in teaching and learning about justice in a range of formal and informal educational settings. Linking historical accounts with groundbreaking contributions by new and rising leaders in the field, it examines, evaluates, establishes, and reinforces Black women’s commitment to social justice in education at all levels.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the grandmother of rock and roll, quote reading, "All this new stuff they call rock and roll, why, I've been playing that stuff for years now."
