front cover of Our Own Way in This Part of the World
Our Own Way in This Part of the World
Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation
Kwasi Konadu
Duke University Press, 2019
Kofi Dᴐnkᴐ was a blacksmith and farmer, as well as an important healer, intellectual, spiritual leader, settler of disputes, and custodian of shared values for his Ghanaian community. In Our Own Way in This Part of the World Kwasi Konadu centers Dᴐnkᴐ's life story and experiences in a communography of Dᴐnkᴐ's community and nation from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth, which were shaped by historical forces from colonial Ghana's cocoa boom to decolonization and political and religious parochialism. Although Dᴐnkᴐ touched the lives of thousands of citizens and patients, neither he nor they appear in national or international archives covering the region. Yet his memory persists in his intellectual and healing legacy, and the story of his community offers a non-national, decolonized example of social organization structured around spiritual forces that serves as a powerful reminder of the importance for scholars to take their cues from the lived experiences and ideas of the people they study.
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Our People, Our Journey
The Little River Band of Ottawa Indians
James M. McClurken
Michigan State University Press, 2009

Our People, Our Journey is a landmark history of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, a Michigan tribe that has survived to the present day despite the expansionist and assimilationist policies that nearly robbed it of an identity in the late nineteenth century.
     In his thoroughly researched chronicle, McClurken documents in words and images every major lineage and family of the Little River Ottawas. He describes the Band's struggles to find land to call its own over several centuries, including the hardships that began with European exploration of what is now the upper Midwest. Although the Little River Ottawas were successful at integrating their economic and cultural practices with those of Europeans, they were forced to cede land in the face of American settlements.
     McClurken explains how the Little River Band was forced, in 1858, onto a reservation on the Pere Marquette and Manistee Rivers where they settled with a number of other Ottawa bands. However, the very treaty intended to provide the Grand River Ottawas with a permanent reservation "homeland" eventually allowed non-Indians to acquire title to nearly two-thirds of the land within the reservation by 1880.

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Our Precious Corn
Yukwanénste
Rebecca M. Webster
Michigan State University Press, 2023
For the Oneida people, yukwanénste has two meanings: our corn and our precious. Corn has walked alongside the Oneida and other Haudenosaunee people since creation, playing an integral role in their daily and ceremonial lives throughout their often turbulent history. The relationship between corn and the Oneida has changed over time, but the spirit of this important resource has remained by their side, helping them heal along the way. In Our Precious Corn: Yukwanénste, author Rebecca M. Webster (Kanyʌʔtake·lu), an Oneida woman and Indigenous corn grower, weaves together the words of explorers, military officers, and anthropologists, as well as historic and other contemporary Haudenosaunee people, to tell a story about their relationships with corn. Interviews with over fifty Oneida community members describe how the corn has made positive impacts on their lives, as well as hopeful visions for its future. As an added bonus, the book includes an appendix of different cooking and preparation methods for corn, including traditional and modern recipes.
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Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed
Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice
Shannon Elizabeth Bell
University of Illinois Press, 2013

Motivated by a deeply rooted sense of place and community, Appalachian women have long fought against the damaging effects of industrialization. In this collection of interviews, sociologist Shannon Elizabeth Bell presents the voices of twelve Central Appalachian women, environmental justice activists fighting against mountaintop removal mining and its devastating effects on public health, regional ecology, and community well-being.

 Each woman narrates her own personal story of injustice and tells how that experience led her to activism. The interviews--many of them illustrated by the women's "photostories"--describe obstacles, losses, and tragedies. But they also tell of new communities and personal transformations catalyzed through activism. Bell supplements each narrative with careful notes that aid the reader while amplifying the power and flow of the activists' stories. Bell's analysis outlines the relationship between Appalachian women's activism and the gendered responsibilities they feel within their families and communities. Ultimately, Bell argues that these women draw upon a broader "protector identity" that both encompasses and extends the identity of motherhood that has often been associated with grassroots women's activism. As protectors, the women challenge dominant Appalachian gender expectations and guard not only their families but also their homeplaces, their communities, their heritage, and the endangered mountains that surround them.

30% of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to organizations fighting for environmental justice in Central Appalachia.

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Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother
Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas
Roberto Cintli Rodríguez
University of Arizona Press, 2014
“If you want to know who you are and where you come from, follow the maíz.” That was the advice given to author Roberto Cintli Rodriguez when he was investigating the origins and migrations of Mexican peoples in the Four Corners region of the United States.

Follow it he did, and his book Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother changes the way we look at Mexican Americans. Not so much peoples created as a result of war or invasion, they are people of the corn, connected through a seven-thousand-year old maíz culture to other Indigenous inhabitants of the continent. Using corn as the framework for discussing broader issues of knowledge production and history of belonging, the author looks at how corn was included in codices and Mayan texts, how it was discussed by elders, and how it is represented in theater and stories as a way of illustrating that Mexicans and Mexican Americans share a common culture.

Rodriguez brings together scholarly and traditional (elder) knowledge about the long history of maíz/corn cultivation and culture, its roots in Mesoamerica, and its living relationship to Indigenous peoples throughout the continent, including Mexicans and Central Americans now living in the United States. The author argues that, given the restrictive immigration policies and popular resentment toward migrants, a continued connection to maíz culture challenges the social exclusion and discrimination that frames migrants as outsiders and gives them a sense of belonging not encapsulated in the idea of citizenship. The “hidden transcripts” of corn in everyday culture—art, song, stories, dance, and cuisine (maíz-based foods like the tortilla)—have nurtured, even across centuries of colonialism, the living maíz culture of ancient knowledge.
 
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Our Science, Ourselves
How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science
Christa Kuljian
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

When Christa Kuljian arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student in the fall of 1980 with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. magazine, she was concerned that the women’s movement had peaked in the previous decade. She soon learned, however, that there was a long way to go in terms of achieving equality for women and that social movements would continue to be a critical force in society. She began researching the history of science and gender biases in science, and how they intersect with race, class, and sexuality.

In Our Science, Ourselves, Kuljian tells the origin story of feminist science studies by focusing on the life histories of six key figures—Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Evelynn Hammonds, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Banu Subramaniam. These women were part of a trailblazing network of female scientists in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s who were drawn to the Boston area—to Harvard, MIT, and other universities—to study science, to network with other scientists, or to take a job. Inspired by the social and political activism of the women’s movement and organizations such as Science for the People, the Genes and Gender Collective, and the Combahee River Collective, they began to write and teach about women in science, gender and science, and sexist and racist bias and exclusion. They would lead the critiques of E. O. Wilson’s sociobiology in 1975 and Larry Summers’ comments about women in science thirty years later.

Drawing on a rich array of sources that combines published journal articles and books with archival materials and interviews with major luminaries of feminist science studies, Kuljian chronicles and celebrates the contributions that these women have made to our collective scientific knowledge and view of the world.

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Our Sisters' Keepers
Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women
Edited by Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Essays on the roles played by women in forming American attitudes about benevolence and poverty relief

American culture has long had a conflicted relationship with assistance to the poor. Cotton Mather and John Winthrop were staunch proponents of Christian charity as fundamental to colonial American society, while transcendentalists harbored deep skepticism towards benevolence in favor of Emersonian self-reliance and Thoreau’s insistence on an ascetic life. Women in the 19th century, as these essays show, approached issues of benevolence far differently than their male counterparts, consistently promoting assistance to the impoverished, in both their acts and their writings. 
 
These essays address a wide range of subjects: images of the sentimental seamstress figure in women’s fiction; Rebecca Harding Davis’s rewriting of the “industrial” novel; Sarah Orne Jewett’s place in the transcendental tradition of skepticism toward charity, and her subversion of it; the genre of the poorhouse narrative; and the philanthropic work and writings of Hull House founder Jane Addams. 
 
As the editors of Our Sisters’ Keepers argue, the vulnerable and marginal positions occupied by many women in the 19th century fostered an empathetic sensitivity in them to the plight of the poor, and their ability to act and write in advocacy of the impoverished offered a form of empowerment not otherwise available to them. The result was the reformulation of the concept of the American individual.
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Our Sisters' Promised Land
Women, Politics, and Israeli-Palestinian Coexistence
Ayala Emmett
University of Michigan Press, 2003
In this powerful and timely book, Ayala H. Emmett examines the political roles of women in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Emmett's insights come from numerous trips to the region that included in-depth interviews with many of the participants. Excerpts from the interviews give voice to the women who played vitally important yet often overlooked roles in the political transformations of the contemporary Middle East. Emmett's observations on women's actions in political venues have global implications, transcending the specific political and social contexts of the region and shedding light on both the strengths of female activism and the resistances of male political institutions.
Emmett investigates the successes and failures of women in the Israeli political landscape, particularly the harassment experienced during the leadership of Right and ultra-Right groups before the ascension to office of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Her account of women's activism in Israel provides a rich backdrop for viewing the compelling events that have taken place in the Middle East throughout the 1990s and offer insights into the future of women's political activism, both in the ever-changing Israeli political climate and in the broader world of women in politics.
"Brilliant in conception and theory, based on superb fieldwork, and clearly written for both specialist and non-specialist reader." --Maurie Sacks, Montclair State University
"A groundbreaking study. . . .Ayala Emmett brings an unusual voice of clarity into the muddled politics of the Middle East. Where most studies ignore or marginalize women's role in the peace process, Emmett highlights women as political actors and shows their capacity to bridge the chasm between two hostile peoples." --Cynthia Saltzman, Rutgers University, Camden
Ayala Emmett is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Rochester.
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Our South
Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature
Jennifer Rae Greeson
Harvard University Press, 2010

Since the birth of the nation, we have turned to stories about the American South to narrate the rapid ascendency of the United States on the world stage. The idea of a cohesive South, different from yet integral to the United States, arose with the very formation of the nation itself. Its semitropical climate, plantation production, and heterogeneous population once defined the New World from the perspective of Europe. By founding U.S. literature through opposition to the South, writers boldly asserted their nation to stand apart from the imperial world order.

Our South tracks the nation/South juxtaposition in U.S. literature from the founding to the turn of the twentieth century, through genres including travel writing, gothic and romance novels, geography textbooks, transcendentalist prose, and abolitionist address. Even as the southern states became peripheral to U.S. politics and economy, Jennifer Rae Greeson demonstrates that in literature the South remained central to the expanding and evolving idea of the nation.

Claiming the South as our deviant and recalcitrant “other,” Americans have projected an anti-imperial imperative of domesticating and civilizing, administering and integrating underdeveloped regions both within our borders and beyond. Our South has been a primal site for thinking about geography and power in the United States.

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Our Southern Highlanders
Introduction By George Ellison
Horace Kephart
University of Tennessee Press, 1976

No other book on the Southern Appalachians is more widely known or cited.  

"Awonderful book. I like it especially for its color and anecdotes. It is a classic, not only for its accuracy and breadth of insights into the people of the region, but because these people themselves are so interesting and strong."
—Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
[more]

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Our Universe
An Astronomer’s Guide
Jo Dunkley
Harvard University Press, 2019

A BBC Sky at Night Best Astronomy and Space Book of the Year

“[A] luminous guide to the cosmos…Jo Dunkley swoops from Earth to the observable limits, then explores stellar life cycles, dark matter, cosmic evolution and the soup-to-nuts history of the Universe.”
Nature

“A grand tour of space and time, from our nearest planetary neighbors to the edge of the observable Universe…If you feel like refreshing your background knowledge…this little gem certainly won’t disappoint.”
—Govert Schilling, BBC Sky at Night

Most of us have heard of black holes and supernovas, galaxies and the Big Bang. But few understand more than the bare facts about the universe we call home. What is really out there? How did it all begin? Where are we going?

Jo Dunkley begins in Earth’s neighborhood, explaining the nature of the Solar System, the stars in our night sky, and the Milky Way. She traces the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, past the birth of the Sun and our planets, to today and beyond. She then explains cutting-edge debates about such perplexing phenomena as the accelerating expansion of the universe and the possibility that our universe is only one of many. Our Universe conveys with authority and grace the thrill of scientific discovery and a contagious enthusiasm for the endless wonders of space-time.

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Our Vampires, Ourselves
Nina Auerbach
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Nina Auerbach shows how every age embraces the vampire it needs, and gets the vampire it deserves. Working with a wide range of texts, as well as movies and television, Auerbach locates vampires at the heart of our national experience and uses them as a lens for viewing the last two hundred years of Anglo-American cultural history.

"[Auerbach] has seen more Hammer movies than I (or the monsters) have had steaming hot diners, encountered more bloodsuckers than you could shake a stick at, even a pair of crossed sticks, such as might deter a very sophisticated ogre, a hick from the Moldavian boonies....Auerbach has dissected and deconstructed them with the tender ruthlessness of a hungry chef, with cogency and wit."—Eric Korn, Times Literary Supplement

"This seductive work offers profound insights into many of the urgent concerns of our time and forces us to confront the serious meanings that we invest, and seek, in even the shadiest manifestations of the eroticism of death."—Wendy Doniger, The Nation

"A vigorous, witty look at the undead as cultural icons."—Kirkus Review

"In case anyone should think this book is merely a boring lit-crit exposition...Auerbach sets matters straight in her very first paragraph. 'What vampires are in any given generation,' she writes, 'is a part of what I am and what my times have become. This book is a history of Anglo-American culture through its mutating vampires.'...Her book really takes off."—Maureen Duffy, New York Times Book Review
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Our Veterans
Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs
Suzane Gordon, Steve Early, and Jasper Craven
Duke University Press, 2022
In Our Veterans, Suzanne Gordon, Steve Early, and Jasper Craven explore the physical, emotional, social, economic, and psychological impact of military service and the problems that veterans face when they return to civilian life. The authors critically examine the role of advocacy organizations, philanthropies, corporations, and politicians who purport to be “pro-veteran.” They describe the ongoing debate about the cost, quality, and effectiveness of healthcare provided or outsourced by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). They also examine generational divisions and political tensions among veterans, as revealed in the tumultuous events of 2020, from Black Lives Matter protests to the Trump-Biden presidential contest. Frank and revealing, Our Veterans proposes a new agenda for veterans affairs linking service provision to veterans to the quest for broader social programs benefiting all Americans.
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Our Women Are Free
Gender and Ethnicity in the Hindukush
Wynne Maggi
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The Kalasha are a dynamic community of about three thousand people living in three tiny finger valleys near Chitral, Pakistan. A tumultuous history has left them the only remaining practitioners of cultural and religious traditions that once extended across the Hindukush into Afghanistan. The Kalasha differ in many ways from the conservative Muslim communities now surrounding them.
Yet despite their obvious religious differences with nearby communities, when asked what makes the Kalasha unique, both men and women often reply, "Our women are free" (homa istrizia azat asan). The concept that Kalasha women are "free" (azat), that they have "choice" (chit), is a topic of spirited conversation among the Kalasha. It touches at the heart of both individual women's identities and the collective identity of the community.
Our Women are Free introduces the historical and cultural landscape of the Kalasha and describes the role that "women's freedom" plays as an ethnic marker for the entire community. Throughout the narrative, Wynne Maggi stays close to conversations and events that illustrate the daily life of the community, focusing particularly on the Kalasha people's sense of humor; on the pleasure they take in work, children, ritual, and relationships; as well as on the complexity and seriousness of their social lives.
Accessible and thought-provoking, Our Women are Free will be of interest to professional anthropologists, area scholars, and other social scientists.
Wynne Maggi teaches anthropology and women's studies at the University of Colorado.
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Ours to Lose
When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City
Amy Starecheski
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Though New York’s Lower East Side today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it was for decades an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict—an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and ’80s Manhattan.
 
Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.
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OurSpace
Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture
Christine Harold
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Culture jamming is so twentieth century! What’s next?

When reporters asked about the Bush administration’s timing in making their case for the Iraq war, then Chief of Staff Andrew Card responded that “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” While surprising only in its candor, this statement signified the extent to which consumer culture has pervaded every aspect of life. For those troubled by the long reach of the marketplace, resistance can seem futile. However, a new generation of progressive activists has begun to combat the media supremacy of multinational corporations by using the very tools and techniques employed by their adversaries.

In OurSpace, Christine Harold examines the deployment and limitations of “culture jamming” by activists. These techniques defy repressive corporate culture through parodies, hoaxes, and pranks. Among the examples of sabotage she analyzes are the magazine Adbusters’s spoofs of familiar ads and the Yes Men’s impersonations of company spokespersons.While these strategies are appealing, Harold argues that they are severely limited in their ability to challenge capitalism. Indeed, many of these tactics have already been appropriated by corporate marketers to create an aura of authenticity and to sell even more products. For Harold, it is a different type of opposition that offers a genuine alternative to corporate consumerism. Exploring the revolutionary Creative Commons movement, copyleft, and open source technology, she advocates a more inclusive approach to intellectual property that invites innovation and wider participation in the creative process.From switching the digital voice boxes of Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe action figures to inserting the silhouetted image of Abu Ghraib’s iconic hooded and wired victim into Apple’s iPod ads, high-profile instances of anticorporate activism over the past decade have challenged, but not toppled, corporate media domination. OurSpace makes the case for a provocative new approach by co-opting the logic of capitalism itself.
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Out Front
Lesbians, Gays, and the Struggle for Workplace Rights, Volume 17
Patrick McCreery and Kitty Krupat, eds.
Duke University Press
The contributors to Out Front take a hard look at the emergent relationship between sexual politics and the labor movement. With a fundamental focus on the relationship between class and social identity, they explore real and potential connections between the gay rights and labor movements. Encompassing a range of political issues concerning rights and representation, the essays have been shaped by the combined influences of trade unionism and identity politics of New Left social movements.
In their examinations of worker and gay rights, the scholars, artists, and activists who speak in this volume argue that neither the labor movement nor the gay rights movement will make substantial progress without a deeper understanding of the connections between identity politics and class. Included is a major policy statement by AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney. Four other labor leaders—Bill Fletcher Jr., Yvette Hererra, Gloria Johnson, and Van Allen Sheets—discuss homophobia as “labor’s new frontier.” Nikhil Pal Singh’s conversation with lesbian activist Amber Hollibaugh and a virtuoso piece by filmmaker Tami Gold offer incisive personal histories and commentaries, which Cathy J. Cohen takes the mainstream gay and lesbian movement to task for not adequately or consistently focusing on issues of class.

Contributors. Cathy J. Cohen, Bill Fletcher Jr., Tami Gold, Yvette Herrera, Amber Hollibaugh, Gloria Johnson, Kitty Krupat, Patrick McCreery, Van Allen Sheets, Nikhal Pal Singh, John J. Sweeney

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Out in Africa
LGBT Organizing in Namibia and South Africa
Ashley Currier
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Visibility matters to activists—to their social and political relevance, their credibility, their influence. But invisibility matters, too, in times of political hostility or internal crisis. Out in Africa is the first to present an intimate look at how Namibian and South African lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) organizations have cultivated visibility and invisibility as strategies over time. As such, it reveals the complexities of the LGBT movements in both countries as these organizations make use of Western terminology and notions of identity to gain funding even as they work to counter the perception that they are “un-African.”

Different sociopolitical conditions in Namibia and South Africa affected how activists in each country campaigned for LGBT rights between 1995 and 2006. Focusing on this period, Ashley Currier shows how, in Namibia, LGBT activists struggled against ruling party leaders’ homophobic rhetoric and how, at the same time, black LGBT citizens of South Africa, though enjoying constitutional protections, greater visibility, and heightened activism, nonetheless confronted homophobic violence because of their gender and sexual nonconformity.

As it tells the story of the evolving political landscape in postapartheid Namibia and South Africa, Out in Africa situates these countries’ movements in relation to developments in pan-African LGBT organizing and offers broader insights into visibility as a social movement strategy rather than simply as a static accomplishment or outcome of political organizing.

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Out in Culture
Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture
Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty, eds.
Duke University Press, 1995
Out in Culture charts some of the ways in which lesbians, gays, and queers have understood and negotiated the pleasures and affirmations, as well as the disappointments, of mass culture. The essays collected here, combining critical and theoretical works from a cross-section of academics, journalists, and artists, demonstrate a rich variety of gay and lesbian approaches to film, television, popular music, and fashion. This wide-ranging anthology is the first to juxtapose pioneering work in gay and lesbian media criticism with recent essays in contemporary queer cultural studies.
Uniquely accessible, Out in Culture presents such popular writers as B. Ruby Rich, Essex Hemphill, and Michael Musto as well as influential critics such as Richard Dyer, Chris Straayer, and Julia Lesage, on topics ranging from the queer careers of Agnes Moorehead and Pee Wee Herman to the cultural politics of gay drag, lesbian style, the visualization of AIDS, and the black snap! queen experience. Of particular interest are two "dossiers," the first linking essays on the queer content of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, and the second on the production and reception of popular music within gay and lesbian communities. The volume concludes with an extensive bibliography—the most comprehensive currently available—of sources in gay, lesbian, and queer media criticism.
Out in Culture explores the distinctive and original ways in which gays, lesbians, and queers have experienced, appropriated, and resisted the images and artifacts of popular culture. This eclectic anthology will be of interest to a broad audience of general readers and scholars interested in gay and lesbian issues; students of film, media, gender, and cultural studies; and those interested in the emerging field of queer theory.

Contributors. Sabrina Barton, Edith Becker, Rhona J. Berenstein, Nayland Blake, Michelle Citron, Danae Clark, Corey K. Creekmur, Alexander Doty, Richard Dyer, Heather Findlay, Jan Zita Grover, Essex Hemphill, John Hepworth, Jeffrey Hilbert, Lucretia Knapp, Bruce La Bruce, Al LaValley, Julia Lesage, Michael Moon, Michael Musto, B. Ruby Rich, Marlon Riggs, Arlene Stein, Chris Straayer, Anthony Thomas, Mark Thompson, Valerie Traub, Thomas Waugh, Patricia White, Robin Wood

[more]

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Out in Force
Sexual Orientation and the Military
Edited by Gregory M. Herek, Jared B. Jobe, and Ralph M. Carney
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Can the U.S. military integrate gay personnel into its ranks and still accomplish its mission? In 1993, this question became the center of a heated debate when President Clinton attempted to lift the long-standing ban on gays in the military. This debate persists because the compromise policy "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue," faces serious legal challenges, and is likely to go to the Supreme Court before the end of the decade. Just below the surface of this debate rages a more general argument about the status of gay people in America.

Both sides base their views on assumptions about the consequences of integration. Even defenders of the ban grudgingly acknowledge that homosexuals are fully capable of serving with distinction. Few question gay service members' abilities or patriotism; justifications for the ban are now predicated on heterosexuals' negative reactions.

Out in Force refutes the notions that homosexuality is incompatible with military service and that gay personnel would undermine order and discipline. Leading social science scholars of sexual orientation and the military offer reasoned and comprehensive discussions about military organizations, human sexuality, and attitudes toward individuals and groups. They demonstrate forcefully that the debate is really about the military as an institution, and how that institution will adapt to larger social changes. The contributors show that the ban could be successfully eliminated, and set forth a program for implementation. In sorting opinion from fact, myth from reality, Out in Force stands as an invaluable guide for the military, lawmakers, and the courts as they continue to grapple with this question of institutional and societal change.
[more]

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Out in the Field
Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists
Edited by Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap
University of Illinois Press, 1996
      "Definitive and well-rounded. . . . Explores how anthropologists
        manage issues of identity and sexuality in field research and professional
        life. In an era when the field worker's positionality is critical to research
        and ethnographic writing, this insightful book has much to say to gay
        and straight researchers alike." -- Louise Lamphere, University of
        New Mexico
      "Addresses sensitive, controversial, and tabooed subjects. . . .
        Out in the Field will be read by a variety of audiences, within
        and outside of anthropology." -- Jean Jackson, Massachusetts Institute
        of Technology
      Lesbian and gay anthropologists write candidly in Out in the Field
        about their research and personal experiences in conducting fieldwork,
        about the ethical and intellectual dilemmas they face in writing about
        lesbian or gay populations, and about the impact on their careers of doing
        lesbian/gay research.
      The first volume in which lesbian and gay anthropologists discuss personal
        experiences, Out in the Field offers compelling illustrations of
        professional lives both closeted and out to colleagues and fieldwork informants.
        It also concerns aligning career goals with personal sexual preferences
        and speaks directly to issues of representation and authority currently
        being explored throughout the social sciences.
      CONTRIBUTORS: Geoffrey Burkhart, Liz Goodman, Delores M. Walters, Walter
        L. Williams, Sabine Lang, Ellen Lewin, William L. Leap, Ralph Bolton,
        Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline Davis, Will Roscoe, Esther Newton,
        Stephen O. Murray, James Wafer, Kath Weston, Sue-Ellen Jacobs
 
 
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Out In The South
edited by Carlos L. Dews and Carolyn Leste Law
Temple University Press, 2001

In this book gays and lesbians from the Deep South to East Texas and Appalachia speak from vivid personal experience and turn an analytical eye on the South and its culture. Some contributors examine the power of traditional Southern attitudes toward race and religion, and consider the "don't ask, don't tell" attitude about homosexuality in some communities (the "public secret"). Other contributors show how gay culture is thriving in the form of women's festivals, gay bars, and unusual networks like that of Asian and Pacific Islanders in Atlanta.

Out in the South is organized into sections that focus on a central metaphor of space and location. This grounds the book in the sense of the South as a special region and in the inside/outside dilemma faced by many gay and lesbian Southerners as they negotiate their place in an often-inhospitable homeland.

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Out in the Union
A Labor History of Queer America
Miriam Frank
Temple University Press, 2015

Out in the Union tells the continuous story of queer American workers from the mid-1960s through 2013. Miriam Frank shrewdly chronicles the evolution of labor politics with queer activism and identity formation, showing how unions began affirming the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender workers in the 1970s and 1980s. She documents coming out on the job and in the union as well as issues of discrimination and harassment, and the creation of alliances between unions and LGBT communities. 

 

Featuring in-depth interviews with LGBT and labor activists, Frank provides an inclusive history of the convergence of labor and LGBT interests. She carefully details how queer caucuses in local unions introduced domestic partner benefits and union-based AIDS education for health care workers-innovations that have been influential across the U.S. workforce. Out in the Union also examines organizing drives at queer workplaces, campaigns for marriage equality, and other gay civil rights issues to show the enduring power of LGBT workers. 

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Out in Theory
The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology
Edited by Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap
University of Illinois Press, 2002
A companion volume to Out in the Field, a benchmark examination of lesbian and gay experiences in anthropology, Out in Theory presents lesbian and gay anthropology as a distinct specialization and addresses the theoretical issues that define the emerging field.
This compelling collection of essays details the scholarly and personal factors that affected the emergence of lesbian and gay anthropology and speculates on the directions it will take as it continues to grow and diversify. Seeking to legitimize the field's scholarship and address issues in terminology, the essays also define the lesbian and gay anthropology's scope and subject matter and locate factors that separate it from the wider concerns of the profession.
Specific essays track the emergence of lesbian and gay studies in social and cultural anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and in various areas of anthropological activism. They also consider how feminist anthropology helped define the field and how transgendered experience, queer theory, and race and class studies are promoting new directions of inquiry within lesbian and gay anthropology.
 
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Out of Line and Offline
Queer Mobilizations in '90s Eastern India
Pawan Dhall
Seagull Books, 2020
The 1990s and early 2000s were heady days for Indian queer people and their networks as they emerged from the shadows. They grouped together to deal with covert and overt forms of stigma, discrimination, and violence in different spheres of life. Tracing the life stories of around a dozen queer individuals and their allies from eastern India, Out of Line and Offline dwells on the many ways in which queer communities were mobilized in the first decade of the movement in India, and how such mobilization affected the lives of queer people in the long run. Pawan Dhall draws on in-depth interviews, which generate compelling stories of individual lives and experiences amid a society that was slowly being pressured to change. Dhall also delves into the archives of some of the earliest queer support forums in eastern India to reveal the ways in which the movement developed and grew. A thoroughly researched and poignantly human document, this volume will find an important place in the canon of literature on queer movements across the world.
 
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Out of Many, One People
The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica
Edited by James A. Delle, Mark W. Hauser, and Douglas W. Armstrong
University of Alabama Press, 2011

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As a source of colonial wealth and a crucible for global culture, Jamaica has had a profound impact on the formation of the modern world system. From the island's economic and military importance to the colonial empires it has hosted and the multitude of ways in which diverse people from varied parts of the world have coexisted in and reacted against systems of inequality, Jamaica has long been a major focus of archaeological studies of the colonial period.
 
This volume assembles for the first time the results of nearly three decades of historical archaeology in Jamaica. Scholars present research on maritime and terrestrial archaeological sites, addressing issues such as: the early Spanish period at Seville la Nueva; the development of the first major British settlement at Port Royal; the complexities of the sugar and coffee plantation system, and the conditions prior to, and following, the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. The everyday life of African Jamaican people is examined by focusing on the development of Jamaica's internal marketing system, consumer behavior among enslaved people, iron-working and ceramic-making traditions, and the development of a sovereign Maroon society at Nanny Town.
 
Out of Many, One People paints a complex and fascinating picture of life in colonial Jamaica, and demonstrates how archaeology has contributed to heritage preservation on the island.
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Out of Nature
Why Drugs from Plants Matter to the Future of Humanity
Kara Rogers
University of Arizona Press, 2012

About half of all species under threat of extinction in the world today are plants. The loss of plant biodiversity is disturbing for many reasons, but especially because it is a reflection of the growing disconnect between humans and nature. Plants have been used for millennia in traditional systems of healing and have held a significant place in drug development for Western medicine as well. Despite the recent dominance of synthetic drug production, natural product discovery remains the backbone of drug development. As the diversity of life on Earth is depleted and increasing numbers of species become lost to extinction, we continue to lose opportunities to achieve advances in medicine.

Through stories of drug revelation in nature and forays into botany, human behavior, and conservation, Kara Rogers sheds light on the multiple ways in which humans, medicine, and plants are interconnected. With accessible and engaging writing, she explores the relationships between humans and plants, relating the stories of plant hunters of centuries past and examining the impact of human activities on the environment and the world's biodiversity. Rogers also highlights the role that plant-based products can play in encouraging conservation and protecting the heritage and knowledge of indigenous peoples.

Out of Nature provides a fresh perspective on modern drug innovation and its relationship with nature. The book delves into the complexity of biophilia—the innate human attraction to life in the natural world—and suggests that the reawakening of this drive is fundamental to expanding conservation efforts and improving medicine. Rogers's examination of plants, humans, and drug discovery also conveys a passionate optimism for the future of biodiversity and medicine. Including a collection of hand-drawn maps and plant illustrations created by the author, this well-researched narrative will inspire as well as inform.
 


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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 Attic
Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England
Briann G. Greenfield
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
In this era of Antiques Roadshow and eBay, it is hard to imagine a time when Americans did not treasure the home furnishings of elite early American families. But as this book demonstrates, antiquing—particularly the practice of valuing old things for their aesthetic qualities—is a relatively recent invention whose origins can be found in the early years of the twentieth century. Although nineteenth-century Americans did appreciate heirlooms, they saw them as memory markers, tangible representations of honored ancestors or local history.

In Out of the Attic, Briann G. Greenfield traces the transformation of antiques from family keepsakes to valuable artistic objects, examining the role of collectors, dealers, and museum makers in the construction of a new tradition based on the aesthetic qualities of early American furnishings. While recognizing the significance of antiques as symbols of an enduring American culture, Greenfield also delves behind popular rhetoric to examine the development of a retail structure specifically designed to facilitate the buying and selling of old wares. With antique shops proliferating all over New England, pickers going door-to-door in search of "finds," and forgers taking illicit advantage of growing demand, antique owners and collectors found themselves trying to navigate a retail market characterized by escalating prices and high stakes purchases. In this sense, antiques functioned as more than remnants of a treasured past; they became modern consumer goods.

The book is divided into a series of case studies, each intended to illuminate some aspect of "the dynamic of consumer history." One chapter examines the role of Jewish dealers in promoting American antiques; another profiles Jessie Baker Gardner, a small-time collector and would-be museum maker from Providence, Rhode Island. Greenfield also looks at the institutionalization of antiques, with chapters focusing on Henry Flynt of Deerfield, Massachusetts, who embraced the "aestheticization of antiques" in the 1940s and 1950s, and on Smithsonian curator C. Malcolm Watkins, who challenged the decorative art market during the 1950s and 1960s by purchasing old tools and crude furniture for the nation's museum.
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Out of the Cloister
A Study of Organizational Dilemmas
By Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh
University of Texas Press, 1977

Since Vatican Council II, convent walls have crumbled. and the structures that once separated nuns from the world are gone. Out of the Cloister is an organizational analysis of the structural and ideological changes that took place in Catholic religious orders of women in the United States. Many nuns today dress in street clothes, choose their own jobs, have a degree of financial independence from the larger order, and may not be recognized by their coworkers as nuns. What might once have been defined as a "total institution" has become, within the span of a few years, a type of voluntary organization where members join together loosely to achieve a common purpose.

Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh approaches religious orders as utopian communities and examines how contact with the larger society has affected the distinctiveness and solidarity that hold such groups together. She analyzes the patterns occurring within orders with particular focus on the relationship between organizational change and membership loss. Since changes have been introduced into religious orders at different rates, and since orders vary in such characteristics as size and educational level of members, it is possible to analyze relationships between exit rates and other organizational variables. The complex interplay of education and membership loss is one of the organizational dilemmas the author examines.

Although she is no longer a part of organized religious life, Ebaugh spent ten years as a nun and during that time collected much of the data presented in this book. As a nun she also helped conduct a number of self-studies and evaluations involved with the post-Vatican II reform and renewal efforts. She is therefore in the unique position of a researcher who collected data as an insider and analyzed it as an outsider.

This book is one of the first systematic, empirical studies of religious orders in the United States and one of the few sociological investigations of convents and the changes occurring within them.

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Out of the Closets and into the Courts
Legal Opportunity Structure and Gay Rights Litigation
Ellen Ann Andersen
University of Michigan Press
Over the past 30 years, the gay rights movement has moved from the margins to the center of American politics, sparking debate from bedroom to boardroom to battlefield. Out of the Closets and into the Courts analyzes the most recent gay rights cases, and explores the complex relationship between litigation and social change. Ellen Andersen describes what happens when these cases—many overseen by the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, the nation's oldest and largest gay rights defense firm—enter the courtroom, and explains why they have met with mixed success.

Out of the Closets and into the Courts explores both the promise and the limits of using legal mobilization to effect social change. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Ellen Andersen draws on the accumulated knowledge of political science, law, and sociology to explain the origins and outcomes of gay rights litigation. The resulting book is essential reading for anyone interested in gay rights, legal change, and social movements.
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Out of the Cold
Archaeology on the Arctic Rim of North America
Owen K. Mason
University Press of Colorado, 2018
The Arctic rim of North America presents one of the most daunting environments for humans. Cold and austere, it is lacking in plants but rich in marine mammals-primarily the ringed seal, walrus, and bowhead whale. In this book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series, the authors track the history of cultural innovations in the Arctic and Subarctic for the past 12,000 years, including the development of sophisticated architecture, watercraft, fur clothing, hunting technology, and worldviews. Climate change is linked to many of the successes and failures of its inhabitants; warming or cooling periods led to periods of resource abundance or collapse, and in several instances to long-distance migrations. At its western and eastern margins, the Arctic also experienced the impact of Asian and European world systems, from that of the Norse in the East to the Russians in the Bering Strait.
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Out Of The Ordinary
Folklore and the Supernatural
Barbara Walker
Utah State University Press, 1995

This contributed volume explores the functions of belief and supernatural experience within an array of cultures, as well as the stance of academe toward the study of belief and the supernatural. The essays in this volume call into question the idea that supernatural experience is extraordinary.

Among the contributors are Shelley Adler, David Hufford, Barre Toelken, and Gillian Bennett.

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Out of the Pits
Traders and Technology from Chicago to London
Caitlin Zaloom
University of Chicago Press, 2006

From New York to Singapore, from Chicago to London, the trading floors of the world’s financial markets are icons of global capitalism. Images of them are used on the news all the time—traders burying their heads in their hands when the market is down, their arms flailing in a frenzy when fortunes are rising—to convey the current state of the economy. But these marketplaces, and the cultural life that sustains them, are dissolving into the ether of the digital age: powerful financial institutions are shutting down the trading pits, replacing face-to-face exchanges with an electronic network where traders sit, face to screen, finger to mouse, and compete in a global arena made up of digits and charts. 

Out of the Pits considers the implications of this sea change for everyone involved, from the traders and brokers to the market as a whole. Caitlin Zaloom takes us down to the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade and into a digital dealing room in the City of London. Drawing on her own firsthand experiences as a clerk and a trader and on her unusual access to these key sites of global finance, she explainshow changes at the world’s leading financial exchanges have transformed economic cultures and the craft of speculation; how people and places are responding to the digital transition; how traders are remaking themselves to compete in the contemporary marketplace; and how brokers, business managers, and software designers are collaborating to build new financial markets. 

A penetrating and richly detailed account of how cities, culture, and technology shape everyday life in the new global economy, Out of the Pits will be must reading for business buffs or anyone who has ever wondered how financial markets work.

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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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Out of the Shadows
A Biographical History of African American Athletes
David K. Wiggins
University of Arkansas Press, 2008
The original essays in this comprehensive collection examine the lives and sports of famous and not-so-famous African American male and female athletes from the nineteenth century to today. Here are twenty insightful biographies that furnish perspectives on the changing status of these athletes and how these changes mirrored the transformation of sports, American society, and civil rights legislation. Some of the athletes discussed include Marshall Taylor (bicycling), William Henry Lewis (football), Jack Johnson, Satchel Paige, Jesse Owens, Joe Lewis, Alice Coachman (track and field), Althea Gibson (tennis), Wilma Rudolph, Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Arthur Ashe, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Venus and Serena Williams.
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Out of the Woods
Seeing Nature in the Everyday
Julia Corbett
University of Nevada Press, 2018
2018 Reading the West Book Awards Nonfiction Winner

Have you ever wondered about society’s desire to cultivate the perfect lawn, why we view some animals as “good” and some as “bad,” or even thought about the bits of nature inside everyday items–toothbrushes, cell phones, and coffee mugs?  In this fresh and introspective collection of essays, Julia Corbett examines nature in our lives with all of its ironies and contradictions by seamlessly integrating personal narratives with morsels of highly digestible science and research.  Each story delves into an overlooked aspect of our relationship with nature—insects, garbage, backyards, noise, open doors, animals, and language—and how we cover our tracks.

With a keen sense of irony and humor and an awareness of the miraculous in the mundane, Julia recognizes the contradictions of contemporary life. She confronts the owner of a high-end market who insists on keeping his doors open in all temperatures. Takes us on a trip to a new mall with a replica of a trout stream that once flowed nearby.  The phrase “out of the woods” guides us through layers of meaning to a contemplation of grief, remembrance, and resilience.

Out of the Woods leads to surprising insights into the products, practices, and phrases we take for granted in our everyday encounters with nature and encourages us all to consider how we might re-value or reimagine our relationships with nature in our everyday lives.
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Out of Time
History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse
Nicholas Thomas
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Despite the enormous amount of work that has attempted to combine historical and anthropological approaches in recent years, few books have outlined the underlying premises that make integration of the two fields difficult. In Out of Time, Nicholas Thomas argues that a "historical perspective" cannot simply be added to conventional anthropology, which systematically takes ethnography "out of time." Drawing examples from the Polynesian anthropological literature, he points to discredited social evolutionary ideas that have persisted even after apparently dramatic theoretical shifts and to the need to take seriously sources that anthropologists have previously dismissed.
When it was first published in 1989, Out of Time generated much-needed discussion on the appropriate models for historical anthropology. Thomas considered that both the historical structuralism of Marshall Sahlins and neo-Marxist regional systems theory had failed to transcend crucial limitations of conventional anthropology. Yet they provided elements of a more stimulating and critical perspective, which would also take account of contemporary political developments in the Pacific region.
For this second edition, Thomas has added an afterword that reflects on the book's initial reception and brings its critique up to date. He suggests a need to historicize the professionalization of anthropology as a discipline to understand shifts in practice and the need to acknowledge the historical specificity and limits of all forms of cultural knowledge, whether "Western" or indigenous.
Out of Time will be a useful text for graduate courses in anthropology, history, and cultural studies.
"This book displays rare integrity: Thomas' intellectual stance toward the theoretical approaches of others is fully consistent with his own discursive practices." --Contemporary Pacific
Nicholas Thomas is Senior Research Fellow, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University.
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Out of Wedlock
Causes and Consequences of Nonmarital Fertility
Larry Wu
Russell Sage Foundation, 2001
Today, one third of all American babies are born to unmarried mothers—a startling statistic that has prompted national concern about the consequences for women, children, and society. Indeed, the debate about welfare and the overhaul of the federal welfare program for single mothers was partially motivated by the desire to reduce out of wedlock births. Although the proportion of births to unwed mothers has stopped climbing for the first time since the 1960s, it has not decreased, and recent trends are too complex to attribute solely to policy interventions. What are these trends and how do they differ across groups? Are they peculiar to the United States, or rooted in more widespread social forces? Do children of unmarried mothers face greater life challenges, and if so what can be done to help them? Out of Wedlock investigates these questions, marshalling sociologists, demographers, and economists to review the state of current research and to provide both empirical information and critical analyses. The conflicting data on nonmarital fertility give rise to a host of vexing theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues, some of which researchers are only beginning to address. Out of Wedlock breaks important new ground, bringing clarity to the data and examining policies that may benefit these particularly vulnerable children.
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Out of Whiteness
Color, Politics, and Culture
Vron Ware and Les Back
University of Chicago Press, 2002
What happens when people in societies stratified by race refuse to accept the privileges inherent in whiteness? What difference does it make when whites act in a manner that contradicts their designated racial identity? Out of Whiteness considers these questions and argues passionately for an imaginative and radical politics against all forms of racism.

Vron Ware and Les Back look at key points in recent American and British culture where the "color line" has been blurred. Through probing accounts of racial masquerades in popular literature, the growth of the white power music scene on the Internet, the meteoric rise of big band jazz during the Second World War, and the pivotal role of white session players in crafting rhythm and blues classics by black artists, Ware and Back upset the idea of race as a symbol of inherent human attributes. Their book gives us a timely reckoning of the forces that continue to make people "white," and reveals to us the polyglot potential of identities and cultures.
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Out Takes
Essays on Queer Theory and Film
Ellis Hanson, ed.
Duke University Press, 1999
This collection brings together the work of both film scholars and queer theorists to advance a more sophisticated notion of queer film criticism. While the “politics of representation” has been the focus of much previous gay and lesbian film criticism, the contributors to Out Takes employ the approaches of queer theory to move beyond conventional readings and to reexamine aspects of the cinematic gaze in relation to queer desire and spectatorship.

The essays examine a wide array of films, including Calamity Jane, Rear Window, The Hunger, Heavenly Creatures, and Bound , and discuss such figures as Doris Day, Elizabeth Taylor, and Alfred Hitchcock. Divided into three sections, the first part reconsiders the construction of masculinity and male homoerotic desire—especially with respect to the role of women—in classic cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. The second section offers a deconstructive consideration of lesbian film spectatorship and lesbian representation. Part three looks at the historical trajectory of independent queer cinema, including works by H.D., Kenneth Anger, and Derek Jarman.

By exploring new approaches to the study of sexuality in film, Out Takes will be useful to scholars in gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, and cinema studies.

Contributors. Bonnie Burns, Steven Cohan, Alexander Doty, Lee Edelman, Michelle Elleray, Jim Ellis, Ellis Hanson, D. A. Miller, Eric Savoy, Matthew Tinkcom, Amy Villarejo, Jean Walton

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Outbreak Culture
The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic
Pardis Sabeti and Lara Salahi
Harvard University Press, 2018

An award-winning genetic researcher who helped contain the Ebola outbreak and a prize-winning journalist reveal what it will take to prevent the next pandemic from spiraling out of control.

As we saw with our response to Ebola and Zika—and are seeing now with the disastrous early handling of the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak—a lack of preparedness, delays in action, and large-scale system-wide problems with the distribution of critical medical resources can result in lost lives.

Outbreak Culture examines each phase of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa—one of the largest and deadliest epidemics to date—and identifies factors that prevented key information from reaching physicians. Drawing insights from clinical workers, data collectors, organizational experts, and public health researchers, Pardis Sabeti and Lara Salahi expose a fractured system that failed to gather and share knowledge of the virus and ensure timely containment. The authors describe how much more could have been done by global medical and political organizations to safeguard the well-being of caregivers, patients, and communities affected by this devastating outbreak and they outline changes that are urgently needed to ensure a more effective coordinated response to the next epidemic.

Secrecy, competition, and poor coordination plague nearly every major public health crisis—and we are seeing their deadly consequences play out again. A work of fearless integrity and unassailable authority, Outbreak Culture seeks to change the culture of responders.

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Outcasts and Angels
The New Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature
Edna Edith Sayers
Gallaudet University Press, 2012

In 1976, Trent Batson and Eugene Bergman released their classic Angels and Outcasts: An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. In it, they featured works from the 19th and 20th centuries by well-known authors such as Charles Dickens and Eudora Welty. They also presented less-well-known deaf authors, and they prefaced each excerpt with remarks on context, societal perceptions, and the dignity due to deaf people. Since then, much has transpired, turning around the literary criticism regarding portrayals of deaf people in print. Edna Edith Sayers reflects these changes in her new collection Outcasts and Angels: The New Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature.

       Sayers mines the same literary vein as the first volume with rich new results. Her anthology also introduces rare works by early masters such as Daniel Defoe. She includes three new deaf authors, Charlotte Elizabeth, Howard T. Hofsteater, and Douglas Bullard, who offer compelling evidence of the attitudes toward deaf people current in their eras. In search of commonalities and comparisons, Sayers reveals that the defining elements of deaf literary characters are fluid and subtly different beyond the predominant dueling stereotypes of preternaturally spiritual beings and thuggish troglodytes.

       Outcasts and Angels demonstrates these subtle variations in writings by Ambrose Bierce, Isak Dinesen, Nadine Gordimer, and Flannery O’Connor. Stories by Juozas Grušas, Julian Barnes, and many other international authors broaden the scope of this updated inquiry into the deaf literary character. Sayer’s preface and closing essay bring any disparate parts together, completing Outcasts and Angels as a fitting, contemporary companion to the original classic collection.

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Outcasts from Evolution
Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859 - 1900
John S. Haller, Jr.
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

In the only book to date to explore the period between the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and the discovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s experiments in genetics, John S. Haller, Jr., shows the relationship between scientific "conviction" and public policy. He focuses on the numerous liberally educated American scientists who were caught up in the triumph of evolutionary ideas and who sought to apply those ideas to comparative morality, health, and the physiognomy of nonwhite races.

During this period, the natural and social scientists of the day not only accepted without question the genetic and cultural superiority of the Caucasian; they also asserted that the Caucasian race held a monopoly on evolutionary progress, arguing that "inferior races" were no more than evolutionary survivors doomed by their genetic legacy to remain outcasts from evolution.

Hereditarians and evolutionists believed that "less fit" human races were perishing from the rigors of civilization’s struggle and competition. Indeed, racial inferiority lay at the very foundation of the evolutionary framework and, remaining there, rose to the pinnacle of "truth" with the myth of scientific certainty.

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Outlaw Music in Russia
The Rise of an Unlikely Genre
Anastasia Gordienko
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

The Russian shanson can be heard across the country today, on radio and television shows, at mass events like political rallies, and even at the Kremlin. Yet despite its ubiquity, it has attracted almost no scholarly attention. Anastasia Gordienko provides the first full history of the shanson, from its tenuous ties to early modern criminals’ and robbers’ folk songs, through its immediate generic predecessors in the Soviet Union, to its current incarnation as the soundtrack for daily life in Russia. It is difficult to firmly define the shanson or its family of song genres, but they all have some connection, whether explicit or implicit, to the criminal underworld or to groups or activities otherwise considered subversive. Traditionally produced by and popular among criminals and other marginalized groups, and often marked by characters and themes valorizing illegal activities, the songs have undergone censorship since the early nineteenth century. Technically legal only since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the shanson is today not only broadly popular but also legitimized by Vladimir Putin’s open endorsement of the genre.


With careful research and incisive analysis, Gordienko deftly details the shanson’s history, development, and social meanings. Attempts by imperial rulers, and later by Soviet leaders, to repress the songs and the lifestyles they romanticized not only did little to discourage their popularity but occasionally helped the genre flourish. Criminals and liberal intelligentsia mingled in the Gulag system, for instance, and this contact introduced censored songs to an educated, disaffected populace that inscribed its own interpretations and became a major point of wider dissemination after the Gulag camps were closed. Gordienko also investigates the shanson as it exists in popular culture today: not divorced from its criminal undertones (or overtones) but celebrated for them. She argues that the shanson expresses fundamental themes of Russian culture, allowing for the articulation of anxieties, hopes, and dissatisfactions that are discouraged or explicitly forbidden otherwise. 
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Outlawed
Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City
Daniel M. Goldstein
Duke University Press, 2012
In Outlawed, Daniel M. Goldstein reveals how indigenous residents of marginal neighborhoods in Cochabamba, Bolivia, struggle to balance security with rights. Feeling abandoned to the crime and violence that grip their communities, they sometimes turn to vigilante practices, including lynching, to apprehend and punish suspected criminals. Goldstein describes those in this precarious position as "outlawed": not protected from crime by the law but forced to comply with legal measures in other areas of their lives, their solutions to protection criminalized while their needs for security are ignored. He chronicles the complications of the government's attempts to provide greater rights to indigenous peoples, including a new constitution that recognizes "community justice." He also examines how state definitions of indigeneity ignore the existence of marginal neighborhoods, continuing long-standing exclusionary practices. The insecurity felt by the impoverished residents of Cochabamba—and, more broadly, by the urban poor throughout Bolivia and Latin America—remains. Outlawed illuminates the complex interconnections between differing definitions of security and human rights at the local, national, and global levels.
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Outrage
The Rise of Religious Offence in Contemporary South Asia
Edited by Paul Rollier, Kathinka Frøystad, and Arild Engelsen Ruud
University College London, 2019
Whether spurred by religious images or history books, hardly a day goes by in South Asia without an accusation of blasphemy. What accounts for the sharp rise in religious offense, and why it is observable across religious and political differences?   

An interdisciplinary study of this trend, Outrage brings together researchers in anthropology, religious studies, and South Asian studies with rich experience in the varied ways religion and politics intersect in this region. Each chapter focuses on a recent case of alleged blasphemy or desecration in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, unpacking the religious sensitivities and political concerns. Collectively, the chapters explore common denominators across national and religious differences, such as the introduction of social media and smartphones, the possible political gains of initiating blasphemy accusations, and the growing self-assertion of marginal communities.
 
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Outrageous!
The Story of Section 28 and Britain's Battle for LGBT Education
Paul Baker
Reaktion Books, 2023
Now in paperback, a personal and impassioned history of the infamous Section 28, the 1988 UK law banning the teaching “of the acceptability of homosexuality.”
 
On May 23, 1988, Paul Baker sat down with his family to eat cake on his sixteenth birthday while The Six O’Clock News played in the background. But something was not quite right. There was muffled shouting—“Stop Section 28!”—and a scuffle. The papers would announce: “Beeb Man Sits on Lesbian.”
 
The next day Section 28 passed into UK law, forbidding local authorities from teaching “of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” It would send shockwaves through British society: silencing gay pupils and teachers, while galvanizing mass protests and the formation of the LGBTQ+ rights groups OutRage! and Stonewall.
 
Outrageous! tells its story: the background to the Act, how the press fanned the flames and what politicians said during debates, how protestors fought back to bring about the repeal of the law in the 2000s, and its eventual legacy. Based on detailed research, interviews with key figures—including Ian McKellen, Michael Cashman, and Angela Mason—and personal recollection, Outrageous! is an impassioned, warm, often moving account of unthinkable prejudice enshrined within the law and of the power of community to overcome it.
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Outside the Gates of Eden
The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now
Peter Bacon Hales
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Exhilaration and anxiety, the yearning for community and the quest for identity: these shared, contradictory feelings course through Outside the Gates of Eden, Peter Bacon Hales’s ambitious and intoxicating new history of America from the atomic age to the virtual age.
           
Born under the shadow of the bomb, with little security but the cold comfort of duck-and-cover, the postwar generations lived through—and led—some of the most momentous changes in all of American history. Hales explores those decades through perceptive accounts of a succession of resonant moments, spaces, and artifacts of everyday life—drawing unexpected connections and tracing the intertwined undercurrents of promise and peril. From sharp analyses of newsreels of the first atomic bomb tests and the invention of a new ideal American life in Levittown; from the music emerging from the Brill Building and the Beach Boys, and a brilliant account of Bob Dylan’s transformations; from the painful failures of communes and the breathtaking utopian potential of the early days of the digital age, Hales reveals a nation, and a dream, in transition, as a new generation began to make its mark on the world it was inheriting.
           
Full of richly drawn set-pieces and countless stories of unforgettable moments, Outside the Gates of Eden is the most comprehensive account yet of the baby boomers, their parents, and their children, as seen through the places they built, the music and movies and shows they loved, and the battles they fought to define their nation, their culture, and their place in what remains a fragile and dangerous world.
[more]

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Outside the Hacienda Walls
The Archaeology of Plantation Peonage in Nineteenth-Century Yucatán
Allan Meyers
University of Arizona Press, 2012
The Mexican Revolution was a tumultuous struggle for social and political reform that ousted an autocrat and paved the way for a new national constitution. The conflict, however, came late to Yucatán, where a network of elite families with largely European roots held the reins of government. This privileged group reaped spectacular wealth from haciendas, cash-crop plantations tended by debt-ridden servants of Maya descent. When a revolutionary army from central Mexico finally gained a foothold in Yucatán in 1915, the local custom of agrarian servitude met its demise.

Drawing on a dozen years of archaeological and historical investigation, Allan Meyers breaks new ground in the study of Yucatán haciendas. He explores a plantation village called San Juan Bautista Tabi, which once stood at the heart of a vast sugar estate. Occupied for only a few generations, the village was abandoned during the revolutionary upheaval. Its ruins now lie within a state-owned ecological reserve.

Through oral histories, archival records, and physical remains, Meyers examines various facets of the plantation landscape. He presents original data and fresh interpretations on settlement organization, social stratification, and spatial relationships. His systematic approach to "things underfoot," small everyday objects that are now buried in the tropical forest, offers views of the hacienda experience that are often missing in official written sources. In this way, he raises the voices of rural, mostly illiterate Maya speakers who toiled as laborers. What emerges is a portrait of hacienda social life that transcends depictions gleaned from historical methods alone.

Students, researchers, and travelers to Mexico will all find something of interest in Meyers's lively presentation. Readers will see the old haciendas—once forsaken but now experiencing a rebirth as tourist destinations—in a new light. These heritage sites not only testify to social conditions that prevailed before the Mexican Revolution, but also remind us that the human geography of modern Yucatán is as much a product of plantation times as it is of more ancient periods.
 
[more]

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Outside the Paint
When Basketball Ruled at the Chinese Playground
Kathleen S. Yep
Temple University Press, 2009

Outside the Paint takes readers back to the Chinese Playground of San Francisco in the 1930s and 1940s, the only public outdoor space in Chinatown. It was a place where young Chinese American men and women developed a new approach to the game of basketbal—with fast breaks, intricate passing and aggressive defense—that was ahead of its time.

Drawing on interviews with players and coaches, Kathleen Yep recounts some surprising stories. From the success of the Hong Wah Kues, a professional barnstorming men's basketball team and the Mei Wahs, a championship women’s amateur team, to Woo Wong, the first Chinese athlete to play in Madison Square Garden, and his extraordinarily talented sister Helen Wong, who is compared to Babe Didrikson.

Outside the Paint chronicles the efforts of these highly accomplished athletes who developed a unique playing style that capitalized on their physical attributes, challenged the prevailing racial hierarchy, and enabled them, for a time, to leave the confines of their segregated world. As they learned to dribble, shoot, and steal, they made basketball a source of individual achievement and Chinese American community pride.

[more]

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Outsider Within
Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age
Faye Harrison
University of Illinois Press, 2007

Outsider Within presents an approach to critically reconstructing the anthropology discipline to better encompass issues of gender and race. Among the nine key changes to the field that Faye V. Harrison advocates are researching in an ethically and politically responsible manner, promoting greater diversity in the discipline, rethinking theory, and committing to a genuine multicultural dialogue. In drawing from materials developed during her distinguished twenty-five year career in Caribbean and African American studies, Harrison analyzes anthropology’s limits and possibilities from an African American woman’s perspective, while also recognizing similarities between peoples, despite social, cultural, and political differences. In seeking to productively engage anthropologists of diverse geographical, cultural, and national origins, Harrison challenges them to work together to transcend stark gender, racial, and national hierarchies.

[more]

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Outsiders in 19th-Century Press History
Multicultural Perspectives
Frankie Hutton
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995
This anthology of journalism history brings together essays on the early Black press, pioneer Jewish journalism, Spanish-language newspapers, Native American newspapers, woman suffrage, peace advocacy, and Chinese American and Mormon publications. It shows how marginal groups developed their own journalism to counter the prejudices and misconceptions of the white establishment press. The essays address the important questions of freedom of expression in religious matters as well as the domains of race and gender.
[more]

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Outsiders Within
Writing on Transracial Adoption
Jane Jeong Trenka
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

Confronting trauma behind the transnational adoption system—now back in print

Many adoptees are required to become people that they were never meant to be. While transracial adoption tends to be considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and economic toll on those who directly experience it. Outsiders Within is a landmark publication that carefully explores this most intimate aspect of globalization through essays, fiction, poetry, and art. Moving beyond personal narrative, transracially adopted writers from around the world tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit, what connects the countries relinquishing their children to the countries importing them, why poor families of color have their children removed rather than supported—about who, ultimately, they are. In their inquiry, the contributors unseat conventional understandings of adoption politics, reframing the controversy as a debate that encompasses human rights, peace, and reproductive justice.

Contributors: Heidi Lynn Adelsman; Ellen M. Barry; Laura Briggs, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Catherine Ceniza Choy, U of California, Berkeley; Gregory Paul Choy, U of California, Berkeley; Rachel Quy Collier; J. A. Dare; Kim Diehl; Kimberly R. Fardy; Laura Gannarelli; Shannon Gibney; Mark Hagland; Perlita Harris; Tobias Hübinette, Stockholm U; Jae Ran Kim; Anh Đào Kolbe; Mihee-Nathalie Lemoine; Beth Kyong Lo; Ron M.; Patrick McDermott, Salem State College, Massachusetts; Tracey Moffatt; Ami Inja Nafzger (aka Jin Inja); Kim Park Nelson; John Raible; Dorothy Roberts, Northwestern U; Raquel Evita Saraswati; Kirsten Hoo-Mi Sloth; Soo Na; Shandra Spears; Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark; Kekek Jason Todd Stark; Sunny Jo; Sandra White Hawk; Indigo Williams Willing; Bryan Thao Worra; Jeni C. Wright.

[more]

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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.
[more]

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Over the Edge
The Growth of Homelessness in the 1980s
Martha M. Burt
Russell Sage Foundation, 1992
Often described as an emergency, homelessness in America is becoming a chronic condition that reflects an overall decline in the nation's standard of living and the general state of the economy. This is the disturbing conclusion drawn by Martha Burt in Over the Edge, a timely book that takes a clear-eyed look at the astonishing surge in the homeless population during the 1980s. Assembling and analyzing data from 147 U.S. cities, Burt documents the increase in homelessness and proposes a comprehensive explanation of its causes, incorporating economic, personal, and policy determinants. Her unique research answers many provocative questions: Why did homelessness continue to spiral even after economic conditions improved in 1983? Why is it significantly greater in cities with both high poverty rates and high per capita income? What can be done about the problem? Burt points to the significant catalysts of homelessness—the decline of manufacturing jobs in the inner city, the increased cost of living, the tight rental housing market, diminished household income, and reductions in public benefit programs—all of which exert pressures on the more vulnerable of the extremely poor. She looks at the special problems facing the homeless, including the growing number of mentally ill and chemically dependent individuals, and explains why certain groups—minorities and low-skilled men, single men and women, and families headed by women—are at greatest risk of becoming homeless. Burt's analysis reveals that homelessness arises from no single factor, but is instead perpetuated by pivotal interactions between external social and economic conditions and personal vulnerabilities. From an understanding of these interactions, Over the Edge builds lucid, realistic recommendations for policymakers struggling to alleviate a situation of grave consequence for our entire society.
[more]

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Over the Wire and on TV
CBS and UPI in Campaign '80
Michael J. Robinson
Russell Sage Foundation, 1983
First the press became the media, and now the media have become the Imperial Media—or have they? In this timely and comprehensive analysis, Michael Robinson and Margaret Sheehan examine how the news media behaved (or misbehaved) in covering the 1980 presidential campaign. Using the media's own traditional standards as a guide, Robinson and Sheehan measure the level of objectivity, fairness, seriousness, and criticism displayed by CBS News and United Press International between January and December of 1980. Drawing on statistical analyses of almost 6,000 news stories and dozens of interviews with writers and reporters, the authors reach convincing and sometimes surprising conclusions. They demonstrate, for example, that both CBS and UPI strictly avoided subjective assessments of the candidates and their positions on the issues. Both gave the major parties remarkably equal access. But the media seem to give more negative coverage to front-runners, treating serious challengers less harshly. Perhaps the most surprising finding is that networks were not more superficial than print; CBS attended to the issues at least as often as UPI. Robinson and Sheehan find television coverage more subjective, more volatile, and substantially more negative than traditional print. But CBS behaved neither imperially nor irresponsibly in Campaign '80. The networks did, however, emulate the more highly charged journalism of the eastern elite print press. By blending the quantitative techniques of social science and the tools of Washington-based journalism, Robinson and Sheehan have produced a book that will be essential reading for students and practitioners of politics, public opinion research, journalism, and communications. Lively and readable, it should also appeal to anyone interested in the role of the news media in contemporary politics.
[more]

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Over There
Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present
Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds.
Duke University Press, 2010
Over There explores the social impact of America’s global network of more than 700 military bases. It does so by examining interactions between U.S. soldiers and members of host communities in the three locations—South Korea, Japan and Okinawa, and West Germany—where more than-two thirds of American overseas bases and troops have been concentrated for the past six decades. The essays in this collection highlight the role of cultural and racial assumptions in the maintenance of the American military base system, and the ways that civil-military relations play out locally. Describing how political, spatial, and social arrangements shape relations between American garrisons and surrounding communities, they emphasize such factors as whether military bases are located in democratic nations or in authoritarian countries where cooperation with dictatorial regimes fuels resentment; whether bases are integrated into neighboring communities or isolated and surrounded by “camp towns” wholly dependent on their business; and whether the United States sends single soldiers without families on one-year tours of duty or soldiers who bring their families and serve longer tours. Analyzing the implications of these and other situations, the contributors address U.S. military–regulated relations between GIs and local women; the roles of American women, including military wives, abroad; local resistance to the U.S. military presence; and racism, sexism, and homophobia within the U.S. military. Over There is an essential examination of the American military as a global and transnational phenomenon.

Contributors
Donna Alvah
Chris Ames
Jeff Bennett
Maria Höhn
Seungsook Moon
Christopher Nelson
Robin Riley
Michiko Takeuchi

[more]

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Overcoming Apartheid
Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation?
James L. Gibson
Russell Sage Foundation, 2004
Perhaps no country in history has so directly and thoroughly confronted its past in an effort to shape its future as has South Africa. Working from the belief that understanding the past will help build a more peaceful and democratic future, South Africa has made a concerted, institutionalized effort to come to grips with its history of apartheid through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Overcoming Apartheid, James L. Gibson provides the first systematic assessment of whether South Africa's truth and reconciliation process has been successful. Has the process allowed South Africa to let go of its painful past and move on? Or has it exacerbated racial tensions by revisiting painful human rights violations and granting amnesty to their perpetrators? Overcoming Apartheid reports on the largest and most comprehensive study of post-apartheid attitudes in South Africa to date, involving a representative sample of all major racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups. Grounding his analysis of truth in theories of collective memory, Gibson discovers that the process has been most successful in creating a common understanding of the nature of apartheid. His analysis then demonstrates how this common understanding is helping to foster reconciliation, as defined by the acceptance of basic principles of human rights and political tolerance, rejection of racial prejudice, and acceptance of the institutions of a new political order. Gibson identifies key elements in the process—such as acknowledging shared responsibility for atrocities of the past—that are essential if reconciliation is to move forward. He concludes that without the truth and reconciliation process, the prospects for a reconciled, democratic South Africa would diminish considerably. Gibson also speculates about whether the South African experience provides any lessons for other countries around the globe trying to overcome their repressive pasts. A groundbreaking work of social science research, Overcoming Apartheid is also a primer for utilizing innovative conceptual and methodological tools in analyzing truth processes throughout the world. It is sure to be a valuable resource for political scientists, social scientists, group relations theorists, and students of transitional justice and human rights.
[more]

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Overcoming the Odds
The Benefits of Completing College for Unlikely Graduates
Jennie E. Brand
Russell Sage Foundation, 2023
Each year, millions of high school students consider whether to continue their schooling and attend and complete college. Despite evidence showing that a college degree yields far-reaching benefits, critics of higher education increasingly argue that college “does not pay off” and some students - namely, disadvantaged prospective college goers - would be better served by forgoing higher education. But debates about the value of college often fail to carefully consider what is required to speak knowledgeably about the benefits –what a person’s life might look like had they not completed college, or their college counterfactual. In Overcoming the Odds sociologist Jennie E. Brand reveals the benefits of completing college by comparing life outcomes of college graduates with their college counterfactuals.  
 
Drawing on two cohorts of nationally representative data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Longitudinal Surveys program, Brand uses matching and machine learning methods to estimate the effects of college completion across students with varying likelihoods of completing four-year degrees. To illustrate her findings, Brand describes outcomes using matched vignettes of college and non-college graduates. Brand shows that four-year college completion enables graduates to increase wages and household income, while also circumventing unemployment, low-wage work, job instability, poverty, and social assistance. Completing college also increases civic engagement. Most of these benefits are larger for disadvantaged than for more advantaged students, rendering arguments that college has limited benefits for unlikely graduates as flawed. Brand concludes that greater long-term earnings, and less job instability and unemployment, and thus more tax revenue, less reliance on public assistance, and high levels of volunteering indicate that public investment in higher education for students from disadvantaged backgrounds yields far-reaching collective benefits. She asserts that it is better for our society when more people complete college.
 
Overcoming the Odds is an innovative and enlightening exploration of how college can transform lives.
 

 
[more]

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Overheating
An Anthropology of Accelerated Change
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Pluto Press, 2016
We live in a time of global crisis—or, more appropriately, crises: overlapping, interlocking global problems that are inextricably tied to modernity. Overheating offers a groundbreaking new way of looking at the problems of the Anthropocene, exploring crises of the environment, economy, and identity through an anthropological lens. Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues that while each of these crises is global in scope, they are nonetheless perceived and responded to locally—and that once we realize that, we begin to see the contradictions that abound between the standardizing forces of global capitalism and the socially embedded nature of people and local practices. Only by acknowledging the primacy of the local, Eriksen shows, can we begin to even properly understand, let alone address, these problems on a global scale.
 
[more]

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Overshoot
The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
William R. Catton, Jr.
University of Illinois Press, 1980
Our day-to-day experiences over the past decade have taught us that there must be limits to our tremendous appetite for energy, natural resources, and consumer goods. Even utility and oil companies now promote conservation in the face of demands for dwindling energy reserves. And for years some biologists have warned us of the direct correlation between scarcity and population growth. These scientists see an appalling future riding the tidal wave of a worldwide growth of population and technology.

A calm but unflinching realist, Catton suggests that we cannot stop this wave - for we have already overshot the Earth's capacity to support so huge a load. He contradicts those scientists, engineers, and technocrats who continue to write optimistically about energy alternatives. Catton asserts that the technological panaceas proposed by those who would harvest from the seas, harness the winds, and farm the deserts are ignoring the fundamental premise that "the principals of ecology apply to all living things." These principles tell us that, within a finite system, economic expansion is not irreversible and population growth cannot continue indefinitely. If we disregard these facts, our sagging American Dream will soon shatter completely.

[more]

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Ovid's "Heroides" and the Augustan Principate
Megan O. Drinkwater
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
43 BCE, the year after the assassination of Julius Caesar. While the Roman republic had seen many conflicts, it was this civil war, headed by the vengeful triumvirate of Mark Anthony, Marcus Lepidus, and Octavian, that irrevocably transformed Rome with its upheaval. What followed was years of fighting and the eventual ascendancy of Octavian, who from 27 BCE onwards would be best known as Caesar Augustus, founder of the Roman Principate.
 
It was in this era of turmoil and transformation that Ovid, the Roman poet best known for Metamorphoses, was born. The Heroides, one of his earliest and most elusive works, is not written from the first-person perspective that so often characterizes the elegiac poetry of that time but from the personae of tragic heroines of classical mythology.
 
Megan O. Drinkwater illustrates how Ovid used innovations of literary form to articulate an expression of the crisis of civic identity in Rome at a time of extreme and permanent political change. The letters are not divorced from the context of their composition but instead elucidate that context for their readers and expose how Ovid engaged in politics throughout his entire career. Their importance is as much historical as literary. Drinkwater makes a compelling case for understanding the Heroides as a testament from one of Rome’s most eloquent writers to the impact that the dramatic shift from republic to empire had on its intellectual elites.
[more]

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Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality
Clergy, African Americans, and Women United for Abolition
Jane Ann Moore and William F. Moore
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Antislavery white clergy and their congregations. Radicalized abolitionist women. African Americans committed to ending slavery through constitutional political action. These diverse groups attributed their common vision of a nation free from slavery to strong political and religious values. Owen Lovejoy’s gregarious personality, formidable oratorical talent, probing political analysis, and profound religious convictions made him the powerful leader the coalition needed.

Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality examines how these three distinct groups merged their agendas into a single antislavery, religious, political campaign for equality with Lovejoy at the helm. Combining scholarly biography, historiography, and primary source material, Jane Ann Moore and William F. Moore demonstrate Lovejoy's crucial role in nineteenth-century politics, the rise of antislavery sentiment in religious spaces, and the emerging congressional commitment to end slavery. Their compelling account explores how the immorality of slavery became a touchstone of political and religious action in the United States through the efforts of a synergetic coalition led by an essential abolitionist figure.

[more]

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The Owners of Kinship
Asymmetrical Relations in Indigenous Amazonia
Luiz Costa
HAU, 2017
The Owners of Kinship investigates how kinship in Indigenous Amazonia is derived from the asymmetrical relation between an “owner” and his or her dependents. Through a comprehensive ethnography of the Kanamari, Luiz Costa shows how this relationship is centered around the bond created between the feeder and the fed. 
 
Building on anthropological studies of the acquisition, distribution, and consumption of food and its role in establishing relations of asymmetrical mutuality and kinship, this book breaks theoretical ground for studies in Amazonia and beyond. By investigating how the feeding relation traverses Kanamari society—from the relation between women and the pets they raise, shaman and familiar spirit, mother and child, chiefs and followers, to those between the Brazilian state and the Kanamari—The Owners of Kinship reveals how the mutuality of kinship is determined by the asymmetry of ownership.
[more]

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Owners of the Sidewalk
Security and Survival in the Informal City
Daniel M. Goldstein
Duke University Press, 2016
Many of Bolivia's poorest and most vulnerable citizens work as vendors in the Cancha mega-market in the city of Cochabamba, where they must navigate systems of informality and illegality in order to survive. In Owners of the Sidewalk Daniel M. Goldstein examines the ways these systems correlate in the marginal spaces of the Latin American city. Collaborating with the Cancha's legal and permanent stall vendors (fijos) and its illegal and itinerant street and sidewalk vendors (ambulantes), Goldstein shows how the state's deliberate neglect and criminalization of the Cancha's poor—a practice common to neoliberal modern cities—makes the poor exploitable, governable, and consigns them to an insecure existence. Goldstein's collaborative and engaged approach to ethnographic field research also opens up critical questions about what ethical scholarship entails.
 
 
[more]

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Owning the Olympics
Narratives of the New China
Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dayan, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2008

"A major contribution to the study of global events in times of global media. Owning the Olympics tests the possibilities and limits of the concept of 'media events' by analyzing the mega-event of the information age: the Beijing Olympics. . . . A good read from cover to cover."
—Guobin Yang, Associate Professor, Asian/Middle Eastern Cultures & Sociology, Barnard College, Columbia University

From the moment they were announced, the Beijing Games were a major media event and the focus of intense scrutiny and speculation. In contrast to earlier such events, however, the Beijing Games are also unfolding in a newly volatile global media environment that is no longer monopolized by broadcast media. The dramatic expansion of media outlets and the growth of mobile communications technology have changed the nature of media events, making it significantly more difficult to regulate them or control their meaning. This volatility is reflected in the multiple, well-publicized controversies characterizing the run-up to Beijing 2008. According to many Western commentators, the People's Republic of China seized the Olympics as an opportunity to reinvent itself as the "New China"---a global leader in economics, technology, and environmental issues, with an improving human-rights record. But China's maneuverings have also been hotly contested by diverse global voices, including prominent human-rights advocates, all seeking to displace the official story of the Games.

Bringing together a distinguished group of scholars from Chinese studies, human rights, media studies, law, and other fields, Owning the Olympics reveals how multiple entities---including the Chinese Communist Party itself---seek to influence and control the narratives through which the Beijing Games will be understood.

digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

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Oxford Street, Accra
City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism
Ato Quayson
Duke University Press, 2014
In Oxford Street, Accra, Ato Quayson analyzes the dynamics of Ghana's capital city through a focus on Oxford Street, part of Accra's most vibrant and globalized commercial district. He traces the city's evolution from its settlement in the mid-seventeenth century to the present day. He combines his impressions of the sights, sounds, interactions, and distribution of space with broader dynamics, including the histories of colonial and postcolonial town planning and the marks of transnationalism evident in Accra's salsa scene, gym culture, and commercial billboards. Quayson finds that the various planning systems that have shaped the city—and had their stratifying effects intensified by the IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs of the late 1980s—prepared the way for the early-1990s transformation of a largely residential neighborhood into a kinetic shopping district. With an intense commercialism overlying, or coexisting with, stark economic inequalities, Oxford Street is a microcosm of historical and urban processes that have made Accra the variegated and contradictory metropolis that it is today.
[more]

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Oye Como Va!
Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music
Deborah Pacini Hernandez
Temple University Press, 2009

Listen Up! When the New York-born Tito Puente composed "Oye Como Va!" in the 1960s, his popular song was called "Latin" even though it was a fusion of Afro-Cuban and New York Latino musical influences. A decade later, Carlos Santana, a Mexican immigrant, blended Puente’s tune with rock and roll, which brought it to the attention of national audiences. Like Puente and Santana, Latino/a musicians have always blended musics from their homelands with other sounds in our multicultural society, challenging ideas of what "Latin" music is or ought to be. Waves of immigrants further complicate the picture as they continue to bring their distinctive musical styles to the U.S.—from merengue and bachata to cumbia and reggaeton.

In Oye Como Va!, Deborah Pacini Hernandez traces the trajectories of various U.S. Latino musical forms in a globalizing world, examining how the blending of Latin music reflects Latino/a American lives connecting across nations. Exploring the simultaneously powerful, vexing, and stimulating relationship between hybridity, music, and identity, Oye Como Va! asserts that this potent combination is a signature of the U.S. Latino/a experience.

[more]

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Oysters in the Land of Cacao
Archaeology, Material Culture, and Societies at Islas de Los Cerros and the Western Chontalpa, Tabasco, Mexico
Bradley E. Ensor
University of Arizona Press, 2020
For decades, the Chontalpa region of Tabasco, Mexico, conjured images of the possible origins of the Itzá, who migrated, conquered, or otherwise influenced much of Mesoamerica. In Oysters in the Land of Cacao, archaeologist Bradley E. Ensor provides an important resource for Mesoamerican Gulf Coast archaeology by offering a new and detailed picture of the coastal sites vital to understanding regional interactions and social dynamics.

This book synthesizes data from multiyear investigations at a coastal site complex in Tabasco—Islas de Los Cerros (ILC)—providing the first modern, systematic descriptions and analyses of material culture that challenge preconceptions while enabling new perspectives on cultural developments from the Formative to Late Classic periods through the lens of regional comparisons and contemporary theoretical trends. Ensor introduces a political ecological understanding of the environment and archaeological features, overturns a misconception that the latter were formative shell middens, provides an alternative pottery classification more appropriate for the materials and for contemporary theory, and introduces new approaches for addressing formation processes and settlement history.

Building on the empirical analyses and discussions of problems in Mesoamerican archaeology, this book contributes new approaches to practice and agency perspectives, holistically integrating intra- and interclass agency, kinship strategies, gender and age dynamics, layered cultural identities, landscapes, social memory, and foodways and feasting. Oysters in the Land of Cacao addresses issues important to coastal archaeology within and beyond Mesoamerica. It delivers an overdue regional synthesis and new observations on settlement patterns, elite power, and political economies.
[more]

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Ozark Country
Otto Ernest Rayburn
University of Arkansas Press, 2021

Published just days before America’s entry into World War II, Ozark Country is Otto Ernest Rayburn’s love letter to his adopted region. One of several chronicles of the Ozarks that garnered national attention during the Depression and war years, when many Americans craved stories about people and places seemingly untouched by the difficulties of the times, Rayburn’s colorful tour takes readers from the fictional village of Woodville into the backcountry of a region teeming with storytellers, ballad singers, superstitions, and home remedies.

Rayburn’s tales—fantastical, fun, and unapologetically romantic—portray a world that had already nearly disappeared by the time they were written. Yet Rayburn’s depiction of the Ozarks resonates with notions of the region that have persisted in the American consciousness ever since.

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The Ozarks
An American Survival of Primitive Society
Vance Randolph
University of Arkansas Press, 2017
Vance Randolph was perfectly constituted for his role as the chronicler of Ozark folkways. As a self-described “hack writer,” he was as much a figure of the margins as his chosen subjects, even as his essentially romantic identification with the region he first visited as the vacationing child of mainstream parents was encouraged by editors and tempered by his scientific training. In The Ozarks, originally published in 1931, we have Randolph’s first book-length portrait of the people he would spend the next half-century studying. The full range of Randolph’s interests—in language, in hunting and fishing, in folksongs and play parties, in moonshining—is on view in this book that made his name; forever after he was “Mr. Ozark,” the region’s preeminent expert who would, in collection after collection, enlarge and deepen his debut effort. With a new introduction by Robert Cochran, The Ozarks is the second entry in the Chronicles of the Ozarks series, a reprint series that will make available some of the Depression Era’s Ozarks books. An image shaper in its day, a cultural artifact for decades to come, this wonderful book is as entertaining as ever.
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The Ozarks
Land and Life
Milton D. Rafferty
University of Arkansas Press, 2001
The Ozark Mountains reach into Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, forming a region with great natural beauty and a distinctive cultural and historical landscape. This comprehensive volume, a fully updated edition of a beloved classic, reaches into history, anthropology, economics, and geography to explore the complex relationships between the Ozarks' people and land through times of profound change. Drawing on more than thirty years of research, field observations, and interviews, Rafferty examines this subject matter through a range of topics: the settlement patterns and material cultures of Native Americans, French, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Italians, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians in the region; population growth; the guerrilla warfare and battles of the Civil War; the cultural transformations wrought by railroads, roads, mass media, and modern communication systems; the discovery, development, and decline of the great mining districts; the various forms of agriculture and the felling of the region's vast forests; and the built landscape, from log cabins to Victorian mansions to strip malls. This new edition also explores the new and potent forces which have reshaped the region over the last twenty years: tourism and the growing service industry, suburbanization, rapid population growth and retirement living, and agribusiness. Lavishly illustrated with historic and contemporary photographs, maps, and charts.
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front cover of Ozu’s Anti-Cinema
Ozu’s Anti-Cinema
Yoshida Kiju; Translated by Daisuke Miyao & Kyoko Hirano
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Yoshida starts his award-winning Ozu’s Anti-Cinema with a story about his trip to Ozu’s deathbed. Yoshida writes that a dying Ozu whispered to him twice, as if speaking to himself, “Cinema is drama, not accident.” These cryptic last words troubled Yoshida for decades, and throughout this book he examines Ozu’s films and tries to uncover what Ozu really meant.
Ozu’s Anti-Cinema concerns Ozu’s films, but it is also Yoshida’s manifesto on films and filmmaking. In other words, this book is Yoshida’s personal journey into Ozu’s thoughts on filmmaking and, simultaneously, into his own thoughts on the nature of cinema. Every page displays the sensibility of one artist discussing another—this is probably a book that only a filmmaker could write. Within Yoshida’s luminous prose lies a finely tuned, rigorous analysis of Ozu’s films, which have rarely been engaged as closely and personally as here.
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