Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Johnson Bunche (1904-71) was one of the twentieth century’s foremost diplomats and intellectuals. In the wake of centennial celebrations of his birth, leading scholars and diplomats assess Bunche’s historical importance and enduring impact on higher education, public policy, and international politics. Their essays reveal not only the breadth of Bunche’s influence, such as his United Nations work to broker peace during times of civil war in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, but also the depth of his intellectual perspectives on race, civil rights, higher education, and international law. Probing his publications, speeches, and public policy initiatives, the volume offers telling insights into the critical roles of universities, public intellectuals, and diplomats in working together to find solutions to domestic and international problems through public and scholarly engagement. In this way, the volume highlights the very connections that Bunche exhibited as an academic, intellectual, and diplomat.

Contributors include Lorenzo DuBois Baber, John Hope Franklin, Jonathan Scott Holloway, Charles P. Henry, Ben Keppel, Beverly Lindsay, Princeton Lyman, Edwin Smith, and Hanes Walton Jr.

Reflections on the Pandemic: COVID and Social Crises in the Year Everything Changed is a collection of essays, poems, and artwork that captures the raw energy and emotion of 2020 from the perspective of the Rutgers University community. The project features work from a diverse group of Rutgers scholars, students, staff, and alumni. Reflecting on 2020 from a number of perspectives – mortality, justice, freedom, equality, democracy, family, health, love, hate, economics, history, medicine, science, social justice, the environment, art, food, sanity – the book features contributions by Evie Shockley, Joyce Carol Oates, Naomi Jackson, Ulla Berg, Grace Lynne Haynes, Jordan Casteel, and President Jonathan Holloway, among others. This book, through its rich and imaginative storytelling at the intersection of scholarly expertise and personal narrative, brings readers into the hearts and minds of not just the Rutgers community but the world.

Contributors include: Patricia Akhimie, Marc Aronson, Ulla D. Berg, Stephanie Bonne, Stephanie Boyer, Kimberly Camp, Jordan Casteel, Kelly-Jane Cotter, Mark Doty, David Dreyfus, Adrienne E. Eaton, Katherine C. Epstein, Leah Falk, Paul G. Falkowski, Rigoberto González, James Goodman, David Greenberg, Angelique Haugerud, Grace Lynne Haynes, Leslieann Hobayan, Jonathan Holloway, James W. Hughes, Naomi Jackson, Amy Jordan, Vikki Katz, Mackenzie Kean, Robert E. Kopp, Christian Lighty, Stephen Masaryk, Louis P. Masur, Revathi V. Machan, Yalidy Matos, Belinda McKeon, Susan L. Miller, Yehoshua November, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary E. O’Dowd, Katherine Ognyanova, David Orr,  Gregory Pardlo, Steve Pikiell, Teresa Politano, en Purkert, Nick Romanenko, Evie Shockley, Caridad Svich, and Didier William​.

Rutgers University has come a long way since it was granted a royal charter in 1766. As it migrated from a parsonage in Somerville, to the New Brunswick-sited Sign of the Red Lion tavern, to stately Old Queens, and expanded northward along College Avenue, it would both compete and collaborate with the city that surrounded it for room to grow.

Rutgers, Then and Now tells this story, proceeding through ten sequential development phases of College Avenue and environs campus expansion—each with its own buildings and physical layouts—that took place over the course of 250 years. It delivers stunning photographic and historic documentation of the growth of the university, showing “what it was and appeared originally” versus “what it is and looks like today.” Among other in-depth analyses, the book compares the diminutive geographic scale of today’s historical College Avenue Campus—once the entirety of Rutgers—to the much larger-sized (in acreage) Busch Campus. Replete with more than 500 images, the book also considers the Rutgers campuses that might have been, examining plans that were changed or abandoned. Shedding light on the sacrifices and gifts that transformed a small college into a vital hub for research and beloved home for students, it explores how Rutgers grew to become a world-class university.

 

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” These were the prescient words of W. E. B. Du Bois’s influential 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. The preeminent Black intellectual of his generation, Du Bois wrote about the trauma of seeing the Reconstruction era’s promise of racial equality cruelly dashed by the rise of white supremacist terror and Jim Crow laws. Yet he also argued for the value of African American cultural traditions and provided inspiration for countless civil rights leaders who followed him. Now artist Paul Peart-Smith offers the first graphic adaptation of Du Bois’s seminal work.
 
Peart-Smith’s graphic adaptation provides historical and cultural contexts that bring to life the world behind Du Bois’s words. Readers will get a deeper understanding of the cultural debates The Souls of Black Folk engaged in, with more background on figures like Booker T. Washington, the advocate of black economic uplift, and the Pan-Africanist minister Alexander Crummell. This beautifully illustrated book vividly conveys the continuing legacy of The Souls of Black Folk, effectively updating it for the era of the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter.