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Obesity
Cultural and Biocultural Perspectives
Brewis, Alexandra A
Rutgers University Press, 2010
In a world now filled with more people who are overweight than underweight, public health and medical perspectives paint obesity as a catastrophic epidemic that threatens to overwhelm health systems and undermine life expectancies globally. In many societies, being obese also creates profound personal suffering because it is so culturally stigmatized. Yet despite loud messages about the health and social costs of being obese, weight gain is a seemingly universal aspect of the modern human condition.

Grounded in a holistic anthropological approach and using a range of ethnographic and ecological case studies, Obesity shows that the human tendency to become and stay fat makes perfect sense in terms of evolved human inclinations and the physical and social realities of modern life. Drawing on her own fieldwork in the rural United States, Mexico, and the Pacific Islands over the last two decades, Alexandra A. Brewis addresses such critical questions as why obesity is defined as a problem and why some groups are so much more at risk than others. She suggests innovative ways that anthropology and other social sciences can use community-based research to address the serious public health and social justice concerns provoked by the global spread of obesity.
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Obsessed
The Cultural Critic’s Life in the Kitchen
Elisabeth Bronfen
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Winner of the 2020 Gourmand Awards, Translation Section, USA

Even the most brilliant minds have to eat. And for some scholars, food preparation is more than just a chore; it’s a passion. In this unique culinary memoir and cookbook, renowned cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen tells of her lifelong love affair with cooking and demonstrates what she has learned about creating delicious home meals. She recounts her cherished food memories, from meals eaten at the family table in postwar Germany to dinner parties with friends. Yet, in a thoughtful reflection on the pleasures of cooking for one, she also reveals that some of her favorite meals have been consumed alone.
 
Though it contains more than 250 mouth-watering recipes, Obsessed is anything but a conventional cookbook. As she shares a lifetime of knowledge acquired in the kitchen, Bronfen hopes to empower both novice and experienced home chefs to improvise, giving them hints on how to tweak her recipes to their own tastes. And unlike cookbooks that assume readers have access to an unlimited pantry, this book is grounded in reality, offering practical advice about food storage and reusing leftovers. As Bronfen serves up her personal stories and her culinary wisdom, reading Obsessed is like sitting down to a home-cooked meal with a clever friend.
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Of Forests and Fields
Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest
Mario Jimenez Sifuentez
Rutgers University Press, 2016
2016 Choice Oustanding Academic Title

Just looking at the Pacific Northwest’s many verdant forests and fields, it may be hard to imagine the intense work it took to transform the region into the agricultural powerhouse it is today. Much of this labor was provided by Mexican guest workers, Tejano migrants, and undocumented immigrants, who converged on the region beginning in the mid-1940s. Of Forests and Fields tells the story of these workers, who toiled in the fields, canneries, packing sheds, and forests, turning the Pacific Northwest into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country. 
 
Employing an innovative approach that traces the intersections between Chicana/o labor and environmental history, Mario Sifuentez shows how ethnic Mexican workers responded to white communities that only welcomed them when they were economically useful, then quickly shunned them. He vividly renders the feelings of isolation and desperation that led to the formation of ethnic Mexican labor organizations like the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste (PCUN) farm workers union, which fought back against discrimination and exploitation. Of Forests and Fields not only extends the scope of Mexican labor history beyond the Southwest, it offers valuable historical precedents for understanding the struggles of immigrant and migrant laborers in our own era.  
 
Sifuentez supplements his extensive archival research with a unique set of first-hand interviews, offering new perspectives on events covered in the printed historical record. A descendent of ethnic Mexican immigrant laborers in Oregon, Sifuentez also poignantly demonstrates the links between the personal and political, as his research leads him to amazing discoveries about his own family history...
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Of Orphans and Warriors
Inventing Chinese American Culture and Identity
Chun, Gloria Heyung
Rutgers University Press, 1999

"We were as American as can be," states Jadin Wong in recalling the days when she used to dance at a San Francisco nightclub during the 1940s. Wong belonged to an all-Chinese chorus line at a time when all East Asians were called "Orientals." In this context, then, what did it mean for Wong, an American-born Chinese, to say that she thought of herself as an "American"? Of Orphans and Warriors explores the social and cultural history of largely urban, American-born Chinese from the 1930s through the 1990s, focusing primarily on those living in California. Chun thus opens a window onto the ways in which these Americans born of Chinese ancestry negotiated their identity over a half century.

Past scholarship has portrayed these individuals as desiring to assimilate into mainstream American culture, but being prevented from doing so by the immigrant parent generation. Taking a new approach, Chun uses memoirs, autobiographies, and fictional writings to unravel complex issues of ethnic identity as both culturally defined and individually negotiated. She concludes that, while indeed many Chinese Americans were caught between the lures of mainstream American culture and their parents' old-world values, this liminal position offered them unprecedented opportunities to carve out new identities for themselves from a position of strength.

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Off Limits
Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963
Marter, Joan
Rutgers University Press, 1999

Off Limits is the first examination of the Rutgers group, artists who came together on the Rutgers University, New Brunswick campus during the 1950s and revolutionized art practices and pedagogy. Based on interviews with artists, critics, and dealers from the period, the book connects the initiation of major trends such as Happenings, Pop Art, and Fluxus to the faculty, students, art curriculum, and events at the university. It is the first book to look not only at the work of individual artists, but to consider how interactions between these artists influenced their groundbreaking work.

Rutgers was clearly the place to be for experimental artists during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Allan Kaprow’s first Happening was presented at Rutgers. Roy Lichtenstein’s first Pop paintings, George Segal’s earliest figurative tableaux, Lucas Samaras’s radical exploration of media, and proto-Fluxus events by Robert Watts and George Brecht all took place on and around the campus. The innovative group rejected Abstract Expressionism for art based on the immediate experience of urban and industrial life, creating startling new artforms which remain startling and provocative.

 Led by the theoretical writings and art practice of Kaprow, the group created a New Art—art beyond the limits of the conventional and predictable, even beyond accepted notions of progressive trends. Lichtenstein recalls in an interview, “Kaprow showed us that art didn’t have to look like art.” Along with Lichtenstein, Kaprow, Segal, and Watts taught at Rutgers and challenged one another to take art “Off Limits” — beyond the limits of the conventional, the predictable — even beyond the progressive, as defined by Abstract Expressionist gesturalism. Their art incorporated the gritty environs, the technological, the everyday, making art radical, outrageous, disturbing, and humorous.

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Off the Record
The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America
Morton, David
Rutgers University Press, 1999

David L. Morton examines the process of invention, innovation, and diffusion of communications technology, using the history of sound recording as the focus. Off the Record demonstrates how the history of both the hardware and the ways people used it is essential for understanding why any particular technology became a fixture in everyday life or faded into obscurity. Morton’s approach to the topic differs from most previous works, which have examined the technology’s social impact, but not the reasons for its existence. Recording culture in America emerged, Morton writes, not through the dictates of the technology itself but in complex ways that were contingent upon the actions of users.

Each of the case studies in the book emphasizes one of five aspects of the culture of recording and its relationship to new technology, at the same time telling the story of sound recording history. One of the misconceptions that Morton hopes to dispel is that the only important category of sound recording involves music. Unique in his broad-based approach to sound technology, the five case studies that Morton investigates are :     
  • The phonograph record
  • Recording in the radio business
  • The dictation machine
  • The telephone answering machine, and
  • Home taping
Readers will learn, for example, that the equipment to create the telephone answering machine has been around for a century, but that the ownership and use of answering machines was a hotly contested issue in the telephone industry at the turn of the century, hence stifling its commercial development for decades. Morton also offers fascinating insight into early radio: that, while The Amos and Andy Show initially was pre-recorded and not broadcast live, the commercial stations saw this easily distributed program as an economic threat: many non-network stations could buy the disks for easy, relatively inexpensive replaying. As a result, Amos and Andy was sold to Mutual and went live shortly afterward.
 
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Office Politics
Computers, Labor, and the Fight for Safety and Health
Mogensen, Vernon L
Rutgers University Press, 1996

The desktop computer has transformed office work. Business and social forecasters claimed that the use of video display terminals (VDTs) in the “Office of the Future” would free workers from routine tasks, giving them more time for creative work and chances for career advancement. Office Politics  argues that, for many VDT workers––most of whom are nonunionized women in low-paying, dead-end jobs––exactly the opposite has been true. VDTs have been used to routinize office tasks; export work via satellite to low-wage, nonunion offshore offices; to de-skill workers and monitor their productivity. And the nature of the work has led to widespread health and safety problems, including vision, musculoskeletal (repetitive motion), and stress-related illnesses. Many have also charged that the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) emitted by computer terminals are responsible for miscarriages, for birth defects, and for promoting cancer.           

As office workers sought to protect themselves against these new occupational health and safety problems, they found little help from organized labor, business, or the government. Office Politics  is the first book to explain why. It shows how corporate interests successfully redefined the VDT health and safety crisis as a “comfort” problem, how the government refused to collect data on the true scope of VDT-related illnesses or to regulate Information Age industries, and how labor unions ignored women workers.           

Office Politics is key reading for everyone who works at a computer. It will be of special interest to students, academics, and professionals in political science, sociology, occupational and environmental health, business, labor and management issues, women’s studies, computing, and public policy.

 

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Oh, Serafina!
A Fable of Ecology, Lunacy, and Love
Giuseppe Berto
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Heir to the FIBA button factory in Lombardy, Augustus is profiting from Italy’s postwar industrial boom. Yet the dreamy young man is far from your stereotypical industrialist. He is less interested in making money than in talking to the birds in the surrounding garden and in making love to a beautiful factory worker named Palmira. But when the money-hungry Palmira schemes to have him institutionalized, Augustus finds a new love among his fellow mental patients: flute-playing flower child Serafina. Can Augustus and Serafina find a way to break free and express their love of each other and of nature in this crazy world? 
 
Newly translated into English, Giuseppe Berto’s charming 1973 novel Oh, Serafina! was one of the first works of Italian literature to deal with ecological themes while also questioning the destructive effects of industrial capitalism, the many forms spirituality might take, and the ways our society defines madness. This translation includes a foreword from literary scholar Matteo Gilebbi that provides biographical, historical, and philosophical context for appreciating this whimsical fable of ecology, lunacy, and love. 
 
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Oil Spills
Burger, Joanna
Rutgers University Press, 1997
Oil Spills is the first book to survey the history of oil spills, the problems they create, the types of clean-ups and their efficacy, the legal, social, economic, and ecological consequences of oil spills, their long-term impacts on the wildlife and people who survive them, and the alternatives to oil and its transport. Biologist Joanna Burger writes clearly and accessibly both about the catastrophic oil spills that capture the headlines and the small chronic pipeline leaks that we rarely hear about. Oil Spills is essential reading for everyone concerned with environmental issues and energy policy.
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The Old Barn Book
A Field Guide to North American Barns & Other Farm Structures
Noble, Allen G
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Barns give character to the countryside. Their structures reflect the ethnic heritage of a region's settlers and the nature of the land itself. With The Old Barn Book, you'll be able to spot the difference between a Dutch barn and a Swedish barn, a barn for cows and a barn for tobacco. You'll find out why some barns have hipped roofs and others gables, why some have doors at the end and others have them on the side, why some are wood and some are stone, why some are round. Whether you are nostalgic for farm life or like to drive out in the country or want to join in the barn preservation movement, you will find this book an indispensable guide.
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Old Burial Grounds of New Jersey
A Guide
Janice Kohl Sarapin
Rutgers University Press, 1994
This illustrated guidebook to New Jersey's old burial grounds is unique, not just for New Jersey, but for anywhere in America. Janice Kohl Sarapin introduces you to the history and lore of old graveyards. She shows you how to read epitaphs, how to date gravestones by style, how to restore an abandoned graveyard, and how to find out the stories of the people buried there. She describes more than 120 fascinating old burial grounds throughout the state (including the cemeteries of African-Americans, Jewish communities, and other ethnic and religious groups). She provides full directions and details about what makes each one special as well as suggestions for planning your visit and for educational activities to use with children and adults.
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The Old Mine Road
Hine, C. G.
Rutgers University Press, 1963
The Old Mine Road, considered the first road in America designed for wheeled vehicles, was built three hundred years ago by Dutch settlers for access to the mines of the Minisink country. It began in Kingston, New York, wove through Sussex and Warren counties in New Jersey, and ended near the Delaware Water Gap. Many changes have taken place in these regions since C. G. Hine recorded his observations and printed The Old Mine Road for his friends in 1908. Bulldozers have obliterated much of what he saw as he took his readers along the length of the road, describing the natural beauty of the countryside and relating the history and legends linked with the road and the people who lived on its route. This new printing is a facsimile of the first 1908 edition. Henry Charlton Beck's introduction gives a publishing history of the book and provides a biographical sketch about Hine.
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Old Paint
A Medical History of Childhood Lead-Paint Poisoning in the United States to 1980
English, Peter C.
Rutgers University Press, 2001

In the early twentieth century lead had many domestic uses: in solder for cans, as a gasoline additive to prevent “knocking” in engines, in water pipes, and, most prominently, in interior paint prized for its durability and ability to hold color. Far from being the toxic hazard we recognize today, lead was a valuable commodity. However, by the end of the century, lead had largely disappeared from our environment as physicians discovered the threat it posed to children’s health and mental development.

Old Paint documents the history of lead-paint poisoning in the United States and the evolving responses of public health officials and the lead-paint industry to this hazard up to 1980, by which time lead had been banned from gasoline and paint. Peter C. English traces lead poisoning from a rare, but acute problem confined to a small group of children to the discovery by the end of the 1940s of the dangers of the crumbling lead-painted interiors of inner-city dwellings. He draws on a wide range of primary materials not only to illuminate our understanding of how this health hazard changed over time, but also to explore how diseases are constructed and evolve.

 

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The Olympics at the Millennium
Power, Politics, and the Games
Edited by Kay Schaffer
Rutgers University Press, 2000

The Olympics thrill the world with spectacle and drama. They also carry a cultural and social significance that goes beyond the stadium, athletes, and fans. The  Games are arenas in which individual and team athletic achievement intersect with the politics of national identity in a global context.

The Olympics at the Millennium offers groundbreaking essays that explore the cultural politics of the Games. The contributors investigate such topics as the emergence of women athletes as cultural commodities, the orchestrated spectacles of the opening and closing ceremonies, and the alternative sport culture offered via the Gay Games. Unforgettable events and decisions are discussed: Native American athlete Jim Thorpe winning—and losing—his two gold medals in 1912. Why America was one of the few countries to actually send Jewish athletes to the “Nazi Olympics.” The disqualification of champion Ewa Klobukowska from competing as a woman, due to chromosomal testing in 1967.

With the 2000 Sydney Games imminent, several essays address concerns with which every host country must contend, such as the threat of terrorism. Highlighting the difficult issues of racism and nationalism, another article explores the efforts of this country’s aboriginal people to define a role for themselves in the 2000 Games, as they struggle with ongoing discrimination. And with the world watching, Sydney faces profound pressure to implement a successful Olympics, as a matter of national pride.

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On Duty
Power, Politics, and the History of Nursing in New Jersey
Ward, Frances
Rutgers University Press, 2009
In 1886, Newark City Hospital opened a training school for nurses in New Jersey. With the dawn of a new century women began to demand rights that had been denied them, and nurses too demanded changes in health care and higher education. For the first time, On Duty offers a highly readable account of the struggle for professional autonomy by New Jersey nurses and reveals how their political and legislative battles mirrored the struggle of women throughout the country to redefine their roles in society.
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On Fashion
Benstock, Shari
Rutgers University Press, 1994

Until recently, fashion was considered the "F-word" in intellectual circles, dismissed as unworthy of serious attention. Yet no area of life, no individual moment, stands outside fashion's discourses. Intuitively, we all know that clothing is a language, incessantly communicating messages about its wearer. But who speaks this language, to whom is it addressed, what does it mean, and how are its meanings established and transformed? On Fashion explores the ways our material, political, psychological, sexual, even intellectual lives are woven into fashion's fabric.

This stimulating collection of essays explores fashion's symbolic and figurative functions in photography, cinema, and video; in consumerism, postmodernism, and feminism; in political and material culture; and in self-definition and subjectivity. They demonstrate the pervasive reach of fashion and its expressions.

This collection contains over sixty photographs and illustrations and includes essays by Barbara Brodman, Mary Ann Caws, Linda Benn DeLibero, Hlne Cixous, Diana Fuss, Cheryl Herr, Karla Jay, Deborah Jenson, Douglas Kellner, Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey, Leslie W. Rabine, Andrew Ross, Sonia Rykiel, Carol Shloss, Kaja Silverman, Maureen Turim, and Iris Marion Young.

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On Racial Icons
Blackness and the Public Imagination
Fleetwood, Nicole R
Rutgers University Press, 2015
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On the Turtle's Back
Stories the Lenape Told Their Grandchildren
Camilla Townsend
Rutgers University Press, 2023
The Lenape tribe, also known as the Delaware Nation, lived for centuries on the land that English colonists later called New Jersey. But once America gained its independence, they were forced to move further west: to Indiana, then Missouri, and finally to the territory that became Oklahoma. These reluctant migrants were not able to carry much from their ancestral homeland, but they managed to preserve the stories that had been passed down for generations. 
 
On the Turtle’s Back is the first collection of Lenape folklore, originally compiled by anthropologist M. R. Harrington over a century ago but never published until now. In it, the Delaware share their cherished tales about the world’s creation, epic heroes, and ordinary human foibles. It features stories told to Harrington by two Lenape couples, Julius and Minnie Fouts and Charles and Susan Elkhair, who sought to officially record their legends before their language and cultural traditions died out. More recent interviews with Lenape elders are also included, as their reflections on hearing these stories as children speak to the status of the tribe and its culture today. Together, they welcome you into their rich and wondrous imaginative world. 

 
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On Transits and Transitions
Trans Migrants and U.S. Immigration Law
Tristan Josephson
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Celebrations of the “transgender tipping point” in the second decade of the twenty-first century occurred at the same time of heightened debates and anxieties about immigration in the United States. On Transits and Transitions explores what the increased visibility of trans people in the public sphere means for trans migrants and provides a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse that the inclusion of transgender issues in law and policy represents the progression of legal equality for trans communities. Focusing on the intersection of immigration and trans rights, Josephson presents a careful and innovative examination of the processes by which the category of transgender is produced through and incorporated into the key areas of asylum law, marriage and immigration law, and immigration detention policies. Using mobility as a critical lens, On Transits and Transitions captures the insecurity and precarity created by U.S. immigration control and related processes of racialization to show how im/mobility conditions citizenship and national belonging for trans migrants in the United States.
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On-Demand Culture
Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies
Tryon, Chuck
Rutgers University Press, 2013
The movie industry is changing rapidly, due in part to the adoption of digital technologies. Distributors now send films to theaters electronically. Consumers can purchase or rent movies instantly online and then watch them on their high-definition televisions, their laptops, or even their cell phones. Meanwhile, social media technologies allow independent filmmakers to raise money and sell their movies directly to the public. All of these changes contribute to an “on-demand culture,” a shift that is radically altering film culture and contributing to a much more personalized viewing experience.

Chuck Tryon offers a compelling introduction to a world in which movies have become digital files. He navigates the complexities of digital delivery to show how new modes of access—online streaming services like YouTube or Netflix, digital downloads at iTunes, the popular Redbox DVD kiosks in grocery stores, and movie theaters offering digital projection of such 3-D movies as Avatar—are redefining how audiences obtain and consume motion picture entertainment. Tryon also tracks the reinvention of independent movies and film festivals by enterprising artists who have built their own fundraising and distribution models online.

Unique in its focus on the effects of digital technologies on movie distribution, On-Demand Culture offers a corrective to address the rapid changes in the film industry now that movies are available at the click of a button.
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One People, One Blood
Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism
Seeman, Don
Rutgers University Press, 2010
"Little by little, an egg will come to walk upon its own leg." Ethiopian-Israelis fondly quote this bit of Amharic folk wisdom, reflecting upon the slow, difficult history that allowed them to fulfill their destiny far from the Horn of Africa where they were born.

But today, along with those Ethiopians who have been recognized as Jews by the State of Israel, many who are called "Feres Mura," the descendants of Ethiopian Jews whose families converted to Christianity but have now reasserted their Jewish identity, still await full acceptance in Israel. Since the 1990s, they have sought homecoming through Israel's "Law of Return," but have been met with reticence and suspicion on a variety of fronts. One People, One Blood expertly documents this tenuous relationship and the challenges facing the Feres Mura.

Distilling more than ten years of ethnographic research, Don Seeman depicts the rich culture of the group, as well as their social and cultural vulnerability, and addresses the problems that arise when immigration officials, religious leaders, or academic scholars try to determine the legitimacy of Jewish identity or Jewish religious experience.

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Only at Comic-Con
Hollywood, Fans, and the Limits of Exclusivity
Erin Hanna
Rutgers University Press, 2020
When the San Diego Comic-Con was founded in 1970, it provided an exclusive space where fans, dealers, collectors, and industry professionals could come together to celebrate their love of comics and popular culture. In the decades since, Comic-Con has grown in size and scope, attracting hundreds of thousands of fans each summer and increased attention from the media industries, especially Hollywood, which uses the convention’s exclusivity to spread promotional hype far and wide. What made the San Diego Comic-Con a Hollywood destination? How does the industry’s presence at Comic-Con shape our ideas about what it means to be a fan? And what can this single event tell us about the relationship between media industries and their fans, past and present? Only at Comic-Con answers these questions and more as it examines the connection between exclusivity and the proliferation of media industry promotion at the longest-running comic convention in North America.
 
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An Open Secret
The History of Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Modern Bolivia
Natalie L. Kimball
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Many women throughout the world face the challenge of confronting an unexpected or an unwanted pregnancy, yet these experiences are often shrouded in silence. An Open Secret draws on personal interviews and medical records to uncover the history of women’s experiences with unwanted pregnancy and abortion in the South American country of Bolivia. This Andean nation is home to a diverse population of indigenous and mixed-race individuals who practice a range of medical traditions. Centering on the cities of La Paz and El Alto, the book explores how women decided whether to continue or terminate their pregnancies and the medical practices to which women recurred in their search for reproductive health care between the early 1950s and 2010. It demonstrates that, far from constituting private events with little impact on the public sphere, women’s intimate experiences with pregnancy contributed to changing policies and services in reproductive health in Bolivia.
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Open Your Hand
Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American
Ilana M. Blumberg
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Fifteen years into a successful career as a college professor, Ilana Blumberg encounters a crisis in the classroom that sends her back to the most basic questions about education and prompts a life-changing journey that ultimately takes her from East Lansing to Tel Aviv.  As she explores how civic and religious commitments shape the culture of her humanities classrooms, Blumberg argues that there is no education without ethics. When we know what sort of society we seek to build, our teaching practices follow.
 
In vivid classroom scenes from kindergarten through middle school to the university level, Blumberg conveys the drama of intellectual discovery as she offers novice and experienced teachers a pedagogy of writing, speaking, reading, and thinking that she links clearly to the moral and personal development of her students.
 
Writing as an observant Jew and as an American, Blumberg does not shy away from the difficult challenge of balancing identities in the twenty-first century: how to remain true to a community of origin while being a national and global citizen. As she negotiates questions of faith and citizenship in the wide range of classrooms she traverses, Blumberg reminds us that teaching - and learning - are nothing short of a moral art, and that the future of our society depends on it.
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Opportunity Denied
Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work
Branch, Enobong
Rutgers University Press, 2011

Blacks and Whites. Men and Women. Historically, each group has held very different types of jobs. The divide between these jobs was stark—clean or dirty, steady or inconsistent, skilled or unskilled. In such a rigidly segregated occupational landscape, race and gender radically limited labor opportunities, relegating Black women to the least desirable jobs. Opportunity Denied is the first comprehensive look at changes in race, gender, and women’s work across time, comparing the labor force experiences of Black women to White women, Black men and White men. Enobong Hannah Branch merges empirical data with rich historical detail, offering an original overview of the evolution of Black women’s work.

From free Black women in 1860 to Black women in 2008, the experience of discrimination in seeking and keeping a job has been determinedly constant. Branch focuses on occupational segregation before 1970 and situates the findings of contemporary studies in a broad historical context, illustrating how inequality can grow and become entrenched over time through the institution of work.

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Opting Out
Women Messing with Marriage around the World
Joanna Davidson
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Women around the world are opting out of marriage. Through nuanced ethnographic accounts of the ways that women are moving the needle on marital norms and practices, Opting Out reveals the conditions that make this widespread phenomenon possible in places where marriage has long been obligatory. Each chapter invites readers into the lives of particular women and the changing circumstances in which these lives unfold - sometimes painfully, sometimes humorously, and always unexpectedly. Taken together, the essays in this volume prompt the following questions: Why is marriage so consistently disappointing for women? When the rewards of economic stability and the social status that marriage confers are troubled, does marriage offer women anything compelling at all? Across diverse geographic contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this book offers sensitive and powerful portrayals of women as they escape or reshape marriage into a more rewarding arrangement.
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The Orchid House
Allfrey, Phyllis Shand
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Lally helps to raise three white sisters in the Orchid House on the Island of Dominica and observes as each flees to the cold northern lands of England and America only to return to their magical past and the man they love.
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An Ordinary Landscape of Violence
Women Loving Women in Guyana
Preity R. Kumar
Rutgers University Press, 2024
An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana tells a new history of queer women in postcolonial Guyana. While the country has experienced a rise in queer activism, especially toward human rights efforts, members of the Guyanese queer community have also been victims of extreme violence. This book asks how a hetero-patriarchal state shapes queer and "women-lovin’ women’s" experiences, and how such women navigate racialized, sexualized, and homophobic violence. With a unique focus on the lives of queer women in Guyana, it reveals their manifold experiences of violence, explores regional differences, and shows their complicated understanding of what exactly constitutes “rights” and the limitations of those rights in their lives. While activism against violence is crucial, this book addresses not only the violence against women, but theorizes the intimate partner violence between women, and demonstrates the ways that violence is both racialized and sexualized. 
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An Organ of Murder
Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America
Courtney E. Thompson
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Finalist for the 2022 Cheiron Book Prize​

An Organ of Murder explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing in particular on the influence of phrenology. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal within prisons and in public discourse, and sociocultural expectations about the causes of crime. The criminal was phrenology’s ideal research and demonstration subject, and the courtroom and the prison were essential spaces for the staging of scientific expertise. In particular, phrenology constructed ways of looking as well as a language for identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life.
         
 
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Organizing for Equality
The Evolution of Women's and Racial-Ethnic Organizations in America, 1955-1985
Minkoff, Debra C
Rutgers University Press, 1995

Women and racial-ethnic minorities have had long histories of mobilizing for equality in U.S. society, but recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the number and visibility of voluntary and activist organizations committed to challenging gender and racial-ethnic discrimination. What conditions have encouraged this growth? Going beyond more familiar accounts of social movement development, Debra Minkoff uses multivariate techniques to demonstrate that there is an ecology of organizational evolution that has shaped the formation and survival of national women's, African-American, Asian American, and Latino social and political organizations. Changes in the environment for action during the 1960s promoted the creation of a niche for women's and minority organizational activity, and this sector continued to expand even as the climate for social action became increasingly conservative during the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on recent advances in both social movement and organizational theory and research, Minkoff offers an organizational analysis of the evolution of the women's and racial-ethnic social change sector since the mid-1950s. She provides an original synthesis of social movement and organizational theory, and unique analysis of the development of these women's and minority organizations from the civil rights era to the present.

 

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Original Buddhist Sources
A Reader
Olson, Carl
Rutgers University Press, 2005

Bringing together essential materials on the origins and development of Buddhist traditions from India, Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, and Japan, this anthology provides the broadest selection of primary source Buddhist literature available to date.

The volume is divided into two major parts: Theravada and Mahayana forms of Buddhism. The first section presents selections that explore major themes in Buddhist thought such as causality, Four Noble Truths, the doctrine of non-self, nibbana, meditation, and ethics, as well as literature about monastic life and regulations, women, and hagiography.

The second part includes selections from so-called wisdom literature and texts that represent the three major schools of Mahayana Buddhism: Pure Land, Madhyamika, and Yogacara. Selections also include sources from some of the major Chinese Buddhist schools such as Hua-yen, T'ien T'ai, Pure Land, and Ch'an. Readings by thinkers such as Tantric Buddhist reformer Tsong Khapa, Pure Land leaders Honen, Shinran, and Nichiren, as well as Zen Buddhists Dogen and Hakuin provide a perspective on regional and national traditions.

In addition to the general introduction, each major section is introduced by an essay that places the selections within the context of Buddhist history. This comprehensive reader stands on its own as an indispensable anthology of original textual sources for courses in Buddhism, while also serving as a companion volume to the text The Different Paths of Buddhism: A Narrative-Historical Introduction.

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Origins of Psychopathology
The Phylogenetic and Cultural Basis of Mental Illness
Fábrega Jr., Horacio
Rutgers University Press, 2002
What are the origins of human psychopathology? Is mental illness a relatively recent phenomenon, or has it been with us throughout evolution?

In Origins of Psychopathology, Horacio Fárega Jr. employs principles of evolutionary biology to better understand the significance of mental illness. He explores whether what psychiatry has categorized as mental disorders could have existed during earlier phases of human evolution. Fábrega approaches the prominent features of mental disorders as adaptive responses to the environment and life’s circumstances, which in turn can only be understood in the context of our evolutionary past. Taking his cue from theoretical issues raised by research into primate behavior and early hominid evolution, he poses the question: What, if any, aspects of mental illness are rooted in our evolution? Does mental illness occur in primates and other animals, and if so, what does this tell us about mental illness in human evolution? How has mental illness played an adaptive role? How has the development of language and higher cognitive functions affected characteristics of psychopathology?  Fábrega synthesizes insights from both the clinical and the evolutionary points of view. This facet of psychopathology, which involves its origins and manifestations viewed across the expanse of human evolution, has, until now, been largely neglected in psychiatric education, theory, and practice.
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The Other Air Force
U.S. Efforts to Reshape Middle Eastern Media Since 9/11
Sienkiewicz, Matt
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Winner of the 2019 Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award

As it seeks to win the hearts and minds of citizens in the Muslim world, the United States has poured millions of dollars into local television and radio programming, hoping to generate pro-American currents on Middle Eastern airwaves. However, as this fascinating new book shows, the Middle Eastern media producers who rely on these funds are hardly puppets on an American string, but instead contribute their own political and creative agendas while working within U.S. restrictions.  
 
The Other Air Force gives readers a unique inside look at television and radio production in Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, from the isolated villages of the Afghan Panjshir Valley to the congested streets of Ramallah. Communications scholar Matt Sienkiewicz explores how the U.S. takes a “soft-psy” approach to its media efforts combining “soft” methods of encouraging entertainment programming, such as adaptations of The Voice and The Apprentice with more militaristic “psy-ops” approaches to information control. Drawing from years of field research and interviews with everyone from millionaire executives to underpaid but ever resourceful cameramen, Sienkiewicz considers the perspectives of the Afghan and Palestinian media workers trying to forge viable broadcasting businesses without straying outside American-set boundaries for acceptable content.   
 
As it carefully examines the interplay of U.S. military and economic might with the capacity for local ingenuity and resistance, the book also analyzes the intriguingly complex programming that emerges from this tension. Combining eyewitness reportage with cutting-edge scholarship, The Other Air Force reveals the remarkable creative output that can emerge even from the world’s tensest conflict zones.
 
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The (Other) American Traditions
Nineteenth-Century Women Writers
Warren, Joyce W
Rutgers University Press, 1993

The American literary canon has been the subject of debate and change for at least a decade.  As women writers and writers of color are being rediscovered and acclaimed, the question of whether they are worthy of inclusion remains open.

The (Other) American Traditions
brings together for the first time in one place, essays on individual writers and traditions that begin to ask the harder questions. How do we talk about these writers once we get beyond the historical issues?  How is their work related to their male counterparts? How is it similar: how is it different? Are differences related to gender or race or class? How has the selection of books in the literary canon (Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, and James) led to a definition of the American tradition that was calculated to exclude women? Do we need a new critical vocabulary to discuss these works? Should we stop talking about a tradition and begin to talk about many traditions? How did black American women writers develop strategies for speaking out when they were doubly in jeopardy of being ignored as blacks and as women? The volume offers irrefutable proof that the writers, the critics who work on their texts, all these questions, and the expansion of the canon matter very much indeed.

Contributors: Nina Baym, Deborah Carlin, Joanne Dobson, Josephine Donovan, Judith Fetterley, Frances Smith Foster, Susan K. Harris, Karla F.C. Holloway, Paul Lauter, Diane Lichtenstein, Carla L. Peterson, Carol J. Singley, Jane Tompkins, Joyce W. Warren and Sandra A. Zagarell.

    

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The Other End of the Needle
Continuity and Change among Tattoo Workers
David C. Lane
Rutgers University Press, 2021
The Other End of the Needle demonstrates that tattooing is more complex than simply the tattoos that people wear. Using qualitative data and an accessible writing style, sociologist Dave Lane explains the complexity of tattoo work as a type of social activity. His central argument is that tattooing is a social world, where people must be socialized, manage a system of stratification, create spaces conducive for labor, develop sets of beliefs and values, struggle to retain control over their tools, and contend with changes that in turn affect their labor. Earlier research has examined tattoos and their meanings.

Yet, Lane notes, prior research has focused almost exclusively on the tattoos—the outcome of an intricate social process—and have ignored the significance of tattoo workers themselves. "Tattooists," as Lane dubs them, make decisions, but they work within a social world that constrains and shapes the outcome of their labor—the tattoo. The goal of this book is to help readers understand the world of tattoo work as an intricate and nuanced form of work. Lane ultimately asks new questions about the social processes occurring prior to the tattoo’s existence. 
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The Other Jersey Shore
Life on the Delaware River
Michael Aaron Rockland
Rutgers University Press, 2024
River otters, black bears, and red foxes drink from its clear waters. Prickly pear cacti grow from the red shale cliffs that overlook it, while on the river near Bordentown lies the archeological remnants of a sprawling estate built by the former King of Spain, Napoleon’s brother, who lived there for almost twenty years. You might imagine this magical and majestic waterway is located in some faraway land. But in fact, it’s the backbone and lifeblood of the Garden State: the Delaware River.
 
The Other Jersey Shore takes readers on a personal tour of the New Jersey portion of the Delaware River and its surroundings. You will learn about the role that the river played in human history, including Washington’s four crossings of the Delaware during the Revolutionary War. And you will also learn about the ecological history of the river itself, once one of the most polluted waterways in the country and now one of the cleanest, providing drinking water for 17 million people. Michael Aaron Rockland, a long-time New Jersey resident, shows readers his very favorite spots along the Delaware, including the pristine waterfalls and wilderness in the Delaware Water Gap recreation area. Along the way, he shares engrossing stories and surprising facts about the river that literally defines western New Jersey. 

 
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Other People's Children
The Battle for Justice and Equality in New Jersey's Schools
Yaffe, Deborah
Rutgers University Press, 2007

Winner of the 2008 NJ Studies Academic Alliance author's award for an outstanding non-fiction work about New Jersey

In 1981, when Raymond Abbott was a twelve-year-old sixth-grader in Camden, New Jersey, poor city school districts like his spent 25 percent less per student than the state’s wealthy suburbs did. That year, Abbott became the lead plaintiff in a landmark class-action lawsuit demanding that the state provide equal funding for rich and poor schools. Over the next twenty-five years, as the non-profit law firm representing the plaintiffs won ruling after ruling from the New Jersey Supreme Court, Abbott dropped out of school, fought a cocaine addiction, and spent time in prison before turning his life around.

Raymond Abbott’s is just one of the many human stories that have too often been forgotten in the policy battles New Jersey has waged for two generations over equal funding for rich and poor schools. Other People’s Children, the first book to tell the story of this decades-long school funding battle, interweaves the public story—an account of legal and political wrangling over laws and money—with the private stories of the inner-city children who were named plaintiffs in the state’s two school funding lawsuits, Robinson v. Cahill and Abbott v. Burke. Although these cases have shaped New Jersey’s fiscal and political landscape since the 1970s, most recently in legislative arguments over tax reform, the debate has often been too abstract and technical for most citizens to understand. Written in an accessible style and based on dozens of interviews with lawyers, politicians, and the plaintiffs themselves, Other People’s Children crystallizes the arguments and clarifies the issues for general readers. 

Beyond its implications for New Jersey, this book is an important contribution to the conversations taking place in all states about the nation’s responsibility for its poor, and the role of public schools in providing equal opportunities and promising upward mobility for hard-working citizens, regardless of race or class.

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The Other Side of the Sixties
Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics
Andrew III, John A
Rutgers University Press, 1997
What were young conservatives doing in the 1960s while SDS and SNCC were working to move the political center to the left? The Other Side of the Sixties offers a gripping account of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), an organization that became a leading force in promoting conservative ideas and that helped lay the groundwork for today's conservatism. John Andrew has mined unique archival material to document YAF's efforts to form a viable organization, define a new conservatism, attack the liberal establishment, and seize control of the Republican party, all while battling voter hostility and internal factionalism. The author also uncovers the Kennedy administration's use of the IRS to subvert YAF and other right-wing organizations through tax audits and investigations. By painting a more balanced portrait of political thinking in the sixties, Andrew offers a new and much needed look at the ideological atmosphere of a vibrant decade.
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Others' Milk
The Potential of Exceptional Breastfeeding
Wilson, Kristin J.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Breastfeeding rarely conforms to the idealized Madonna-and-baby image seen in old artwork, now re-cast in celebrity breastfeeding photo spreads and pro-breastfeeding ad campaigns. The personal accounts in Others’ Milk illustrate just how messy and challenging and unpredictable it can be—an uncomfortable reality in the contemporary context of high-stakes motherhood in which “successful” breastfeeding proves one’s maternal mettle. 

Exceptional breastfeeders find creative ways to feed and care for their children—such as by inducing lactation, sharing milk, or exclusively pumping. They want to adhere to the societal ideal of giving them “the best” but sometimes have to face off with dogmatic authorities in order to do so. Kristin J. Wilson argues that while breastfeeding is never going to be the feasible choice for everyone, it should be accessible to anyone.  
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Ottoman Warfare 1500-1700
Murphey, Rhoads
Rutgers University Press, 1999
Ottoman Warfare is an impressive and original examination of the Ottoman military machine, detailing its success in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Focusing primarily on the evolution of the Ottoman military organization and its subsequent impact on Ottoman society in a period of change, the book redresses the historiographical imbalance in the existing literature, analyzing why the Ottomans were the focus of such intense military concern.Several books have been written on the fiscal, technological, tactical, and political dimensions of Ottoman military history; little has been attempted, however, to recreate or evoke the physical and psychological realities of war as experienced by Ottoman soldiers. Rhoads Murphey seeks to rectify this imbalance, favoring operational matters and providing a detailed study of a number of campaigns: we are offered, for example, vivid descriptions of life in the trenches with the diggers at Baghdad in 1638, who dug a total of five miles at 50 yards a day. Murphey's analysis does not focus on the Ottoman's success or failure in particular campaigns per se; he focuses on understanding the actual process of how the Ottoman military machine worked.This long-awaited work will become the definitive study of Ottoman warfare in the early modern period, and will be invaluable to those studying the Ottoman Empire and early modern European history in general.
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Our Aging Bodies
Merrill, Gary F
Rutgers University Press, 2015
People in developed countries are living longer and, just as the aged population around the world is steadily growing, the number of adults eighty-five and older in the United States is projected to quadruple to twenty-one million people by 2050. The aging of our population has huge implications for baby boomers and their children, and has generated a greater interest in the causes and effects of aging.

Our Aging Bodies provides a clear, scientifically based explanation of what happens to all the major organ systems and bodily processes—such as the cardiovascular and digestive systems—as people age. The first section is an overview of secondary aging—changes that occur with age that are related to disease and the environment—and include the effect of such things as diet, humor, and exercise. Readers will also learn about primary aging—intrinsic changes that occur with the aging of specific organs and body systems (including the prostate, the heart, the digestive system, and the brain). Throughout the book, Gary F. Merrill weaves in personal anecdotes and stories that help clarify and reinforce the facts and principles of the underlying scientific processes and explanations. Our Aging Bodies is accessible to a general reader interested in the aging phenomenon, or baby boomers wanting to be more informed when seeing their doctor and discussing changes to their bodies as they age.
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Our Caribbean Kin
Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles
Reyes-Santos, Alaí
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Beset by the forces of European colonialism, US imperialism, and neoliberalism, the people of the Antilles have had good reasons to band together politically and economically, yet not all Dominicans, Haitians, and Puerto Ricans have heeded the calls for collective action. So what has determined whether Antillean solidarity movements fail or succeed? In this comprehensive new study, Alaí Reyes-Santos argues that the crucial factor has been the extent to which Dominicans, Haitians, and Puerto Ricans imagine each other as kin. 

Our Caribbean Kin considers three key moments in the region’s history: the nineteenth century, when the antillanismo movement sought to throw off the yoke of colonial occupation; the 1930s, at the height of the region’s struggles with US imperialism; and the past thirty years, as neoliberal economic and social policies have encroached upon the islands. At each moment, the book demonstrates, specific tropes of brotherhood, marriage, and lineage have been mobilized to construct political kinship among Antilleans, while racist and xenophobic discourses have made it difficult for them to imagine themselves as part of one big family. 
 
Recognizing the wide array of contexts in which Antilleans learn to affirm or deny kinship, Reyes-Santos draws from a vast archive of media, including everything from canonical novels to political tracts, historical newspapers to online forums, sociological texts to local jokes. Along the way, she uncovers the conflicts, secrets, and internal hierarchies that characterize kin relations among Antilleans, but she also discovers how they have used notions of kinship to create cohesion across differences.
 
 
 
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Our Intelligent Bodies
Gary F. Merrill
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Human intelligence isn’t just located in the brain. Our bodies are marvelously sophisticated and complex, with a variety of autonomic systems that help maintain our health without us ever having to think about them. But how exactly do all these physiological structures actually work?
 
In Our Intelligent Bodies, physiology professor Gary F. Merrill takes you on a guided tour through the human body. You’ll learn how our eyes are designed to detect unimaginably small bursts of light and how our ears contain bundles of tiny hairs, each one attuned to different sound frequencies. You’ll also discover how our hearts are smart enough to compensate for skipped beats and irregular rhythms and how our pulmonary system adjusts for low oxygen levels. You’ll even find out why the gut is sometimes called the “second brain,” its reflexes controlled by millions of neurons.   
 
Written in a fun, easy-to-comprehend style and filled with illuminating analogies, Our Intelligent Bodies also brings readers up to date on cutting-edge research into the wonders of human physiology. It will give you a new appreciation for the smart decisions our bodies are making when our brains aren’t paying attention.
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Our Marvelous Bodies
An Introduction to the Physiology of Human Health
Merrill, Gary F
Rutgers University Press, 2008

Our Marvelous Bodies offers a unique perspective on the structure, function, and care of the major systems of the human body. Unlike other texts that use a strictly scientific approach, physiologist Gary F. Merrill relays medical facts alongside personal stories that help students relate to and apply the information.

Readers learn the basics of feedback control systems, homeostasis, and physiological gradients. These principles apply to an understanding of the body’s functioning under optimal, healthy conditions, and they provide insight into states of acute and chronic illness. Separate chapters are devoted to each of the body’s systems in detail: nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, respiratory, renal, gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal, reproductive, and immune. Through a series of real-life examples, the book also shows the importance of maintaining careful medical records for health care professionals, scientists, and patients alike.

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Our Movie Heritage
McGreevey, Tom
Rutgers University Press, 1997
ÒOur Movie Heritage is both a vividly illustrated encyclopedia and a suspense story replete with heroes and heroines and an imperiled treasure of such great worth that one feels impelled to ride to its rescue.ÓÑOlivia deHavillandÒThis book reads like a suspense story. Will we care enough, it asks, to save the rest of our great movie heritage before itÕs too late?  For all of us who love the movies there can only be one answer.ÓÑFay Kanin, chair of the National Film Preservation Board

Our Movie Heritage should be read by anyone interested in motion picture history.  Without film preservation, there can be no valid film history.  Documents, autobiographies, oral histories, and secondary sources are of importance, but viewing the actual films preserved or restored to a state comparable to the way they were originally viewed is of inestimable importance.Rudy Behlmer, film historian and author of Memo from David O. Selznick

Our Movie Heritage is an enticing, up to the minute account of the complex National Film preservation effort, and should be read by anyone interested in our rich cinematic heritage.Mary Lea Bandy, chief curator, The Museum of Modern Art

 Imagine an America without any images of itself no Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz, no Orson Welles in Citizen Kane,  and no Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca.  Movies are an extraordinary personal and collective history of the American people. Unfortunately, over 90 percent of America's silent films are already lost to us, and more than half of the American feature films made before 1950 no longer exist. Whether it is a piece of cellulose nitrate exposed in 1910 or a strip of Eastman Color acetate stock produced in the 1970s all film self-destructs. Rapidly.

Our Movie Heritage is a highly readable and informative view of the world of film preservation, showing the work being done to save our national treasure trove of film history. Full of tales of discovery and rescue, the book is an urgent plea for preservation. Our Movie Heritage describes the race against time currently under way both in the public and private sectors in order to salvage what is left in vaults, theaters, and private collections. The book explains the basics of film preservation, covering the who, what, when, where, and how of the field, with top archivists and film restoration experts expressing their concerns and hopes for the future of movies. This beautifully produced book, with over one hundred pictures of top stars, directors, and film people, is itself a treasure that showcases the importance of this legacy.
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Our Town
Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia
Kirp, David L
Rutgers University Press, 1997
An account of the legal battle to open up New Jersey's suburbs to the poor, looking at the views of lawyers on both sides of the controversy. It is a case study of judicial activism and its consequences and an analysis of suburban attitudes regarding race, class and property.
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Out of Sync & Out of Work
History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture
Burges, Joel
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Out of Sync & Out of Work explores the representation of obsolescence, particularly of labor, in film and literature during a historical moment in which automation has intensified in capitalist economies. Joel Burges analyzes texts such as The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Wreck-It Ralph, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Iron Council, and examines their “means” of production. Those means include a range of subjects and narrative techniques, including the “residual means” of including classic film stills in a text, the “obstinate means” of depicting machine breaking, the “dated means” of employing the largely defunct technique of stop-motion animation, and the “obsolete” means of celebrating a labor strike. In every case, the novels and films that Burges scrutinizes call on these means to activate the reader’s/viewer’s awareness of historical time. Out of Sync & Out of Work advances its readers’ grasp of the complexities of historical time in contemporary culture, moving the study of temporality forward in film and media studies, literary studies, critical theory, and cultural critique.
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Out of the Red
My Life of Gangs, Prison, and Redemption
Christian L. Bolden
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Frank Tannenbaum Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Criminology​
Faculty Senate Award for Research from Loyola University New Orleans​

Out of the Red is one man’s pathbreaking story of how social forces and personal choices combined to deliver an unfortunate fate. After a childhood of poverty, institutional discrimination, violence, and being thrown away by the public education system, Bolden's life took him through the treacherous landscape of street gangs at the age of fourteen. The Bloods offered a sense of family, protection, excitement, and power. Incarcerated during the Texas prison boom, the teenage former gangster was thrust into a fight for survival as he navigated the perils of adult prison. As mass incarceration and prison gangs swallowed up youth like him, survival meant finding hope in a hopeless situation and carving a path to his own rehabilitation. Despite all odds, he forged a new path through education, ultimately achieving the seemingly impossible for a formerly incarcerated ex-gangbanger.
 
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The Outcast
A Novel
Luigi Pirandello
Rutgers University Press, 2023
A young wife in a nineteenth-century Sicilian village, Marta is deeply in love with her husband Rocco and pregnant with his child. But when Rocco discovers a letter written to Marta by a would-be suitor, he falsely accuses her of infidelity and banishes her from their home. Soon the whole village turns against the supposed adulteress, setting in motion a series of tragic events that culminates in the loss of Marta’s family home and business, as well as the deaths of her father and newborn child. Plunged into poverty and treated as a social leper, with practically nothing else to lose, Marta is determined to claw her way back into a society bent on excluding her. 
 
The Outcast is an early masterwork from Nobel Prize–winning Italian author Luigi Pirandello that combines elements of Zolaesque naturalism with emerging modernist aesthetics. This fresh English translation, the first in nearly one hundred years, showcases Pirandello’s deft play with language and his use of irony.

This book was translated thanks to a grant awarded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
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Outside the Limelight
Basketball in the Ivy League
Orton, Kathy
Rutgers University Press, 2018
The Ivy League is a place where basketball is neither a pastime nor a profession. Instead, it is a true passion among players, coaches, and committed sports enthusiasts who share in its every success and setback. Outside the Limelight is the first book to look inside Ivy League basketball and at the boundless enthusiasm that defines it.

With painstaking reportage, Kathy Orton vividly captures the internal fervor of the personalities who champion their gameùall the triumphs and disappointments of an Ivy hoop season. Scholarships for student athletes? None, and this is the only Division I conference that does not offer them. The TV spotlight? It barely shines, despite the passion, talent, and commitment of the players. Megadollar contracts from the NBA? Rarely does a player receive an offer. These age-old institutions are better known for turning out presidents, not point guards, and CEOs and captains of industry, not centers on the court.

Orton weaves together the stories of coaches and players as they move from fall practice through an entire season and ahead to the NCAA tournament. From Harvard to Penn, Princeton to Cornell and beyond, playersùperhaps more accustomed to pomp and circumstanceùface leaky gyms, endure long bus rides, rigorous courseloads, and unbearable exam schedules. Why? Just to prove they can hang with the big boys despite juggling multiple non-athletic responsibilities? Maybe. But more importantly, for the sincere love of the game.

Outside the Limelight provides frontcourt vision for college basketball fans everywhere to achieve an appreciation of this captivating conference and for diehard enthusiasts to gain greater insight into what brings Ivy League basketball to center circle.

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OutWrite
The Speeches That Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture
Julie R. Enszer
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Running from 1990 to 1999, the annual OutWrite conference played a pivotal role in shaping LGBTQ literary culture in the United States and its emerging canon. OutWrite provided a space where literary lions who had made their reputations before the gay liberation movement—like Edward Albee, John Rechy, and Samuel R. Delany—could mingle, network, and flirt with a new generation of emerging queer writers like Tony Kushner, Alison Bechdel, and Sarah Schulman. 
 
This collection gives readers a taste of this fabulous moment in LGBTQ literary history with twenty-seven of the most memorable speeches from the OutWrite conference, including both keynote addresses and panel presentations. These talks are drawn from a diverse array of contributors, including Allen Ginsberg, Judy Grahn, Essex Hemphill, Patrick Califia, Dorothy Allison, Allan Gurganus, Chrystos, John Preston, Linda Villarosa, Edmund White, and many more. 
 
OutWrite offers readers a front-row seat to the passionate debates, nascent identity politics, and provocative ideas that helped animate queer intellectual and literary culture in the 1990s. Covering everything from racial representation to sexual politics, the still-relevant topics in these talks are sure to strike a chord with today’s readers.
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Overcoming All Obstacles
The Women of the Académie Julian
Becker, Jane R
Rutgers University Press, 1999

Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Académie Julian is the first book to examine late nineteenth-century Paris's most famous training ground for the leading women artists of the period. The Académie Julian was founded in Paris in 1868, initially to prepare students for entry to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the nineteenth-century's preeminent art school. Because women could not study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts until 1897, Julian itself became an international equivalent for many of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century's most important women artists.

Not only does Overcoming All Obstacles introduce the reader to many works by women artists-both famous and lesser known-but the essays offer a cultural and historical context in which to appreciate their art. Gabriel Weisberg's essay concentrates on the rigorous training methods enforced by Rodolphe Julian and the teachers at the Academy. Jane Becker explores the competitive environment of the Julian Academy as it affected the Ukrainian painter Marie Bashkirtseff and the Swiss painter Louise-Catherine Breslau. Essays by Catherine Fehrer, the leading scholar of the Académie Julian, and Tamar Garb, an art historian who focuses on the training of women artists, give us a richer understanding of the Académie Julian's place in the sphere of art education in late nineteenth-century Paris.

Generously illustrated with both color and black-and-white images, this volume includes documentary photographs and caricatures that have never before been reproduced. The core of the book draws on the large collection of the Académie Julian Del Debbio, the Académie Julian's successor institution in Paris. This publication accompanied an exhibition organized by the Dahesh Museum in New York that opened after its exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown.  The exhibition subsequently continued to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis.

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Overcoming Hearing Aid Fears
The Road to Better Hearing
Burkey, John M.
Rutgers University Press, 2003

There are dozens of misconceptions about hearing aids:

  • “They make you look old.”
  •  “They cause ear infections.”
  • “They increase hearing loss.”
  • “I can’t afford one.” 
This misinformation impairs a person’s quality of life by discouraging them from pursuing help. Technological advances have enabled hearing aids to address a greater range of hearing losses, while making them smaller, better designed, and easier to use than those of the past. More people than ever can benefit from a hearing aid, yet of the nearly thirty million people with a hearing impairment, only about 20 percent choose to use one.

In Overcoming Hearing Aid Fears, audiologist John M. Burkey addresses common fears, concerns, and misconceptions about hearing aids to help readers decide whether these devices will prove useful. Using an informal, anecdotal style informed by years of clinical practice, Burkey provides practical information about hearing aid styles, options, and costs. His expertise and experience in caring for more than 50,000 patients will help people with hearing loss address their personal concerns. The book also helps friends and family understand why a loved one might resist getting a hearing aid, and offers tips on counseling. Audiologists will find this text an important educational tool in advising their own patients.

Approximately 10 percent of Americans (and nearly one-third of people age seventy and older) have some degree of hearing loss that, if left untreated, causes frustration, isolation, and depression. A hearing aid is a simple tool to improve careers, relationships, and self-esteem, and to provide independence and security. Overcoming Hearing Aid Fears can help readers take that first step to a better life.
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Overpotential
Fuel Cells, Futurism, and the Making of a Power Panacea
Eisler, Matthew
Rutgers University Press, 2012

It sounds so simple. Just combine oxygen and hydrogen in an electrochemical reaction that produces water and electricity, and you’ll have a clean, efficient power source. But scientists have spent decades—and billions of dollars in government and industry funding—developing the fuel cell. There have been successes and serendipitous discoveries along the way, but engineering a fuel cell that is both durable and affordable has proved extraordinarily difficult.

Overpotential charts the twists and turns in the ongoing quest to create the perfect fuel cell. By exploring the gap between the theory and practice of fuel cell power, Matthew N. Eisler opens a window into broader issues in the history of science, technology, and society after the Second World War, including the sociology of laboratory life, the relationship between academe, industry, and government in developing advanced technologies, the role of technology in environmental and pollution politics, and the rise of utopian discourse in science and engineering.

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