Books Books Press imprint: 2592 books
People Get Ready
The Future of Jazz Is Now!
Language: English
Release Date: May 17, 2013
In People Get Ready, musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s...
Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State
The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean
Language: English
Release Date: August 5, 1998
Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State brings together new research on the social history of Central America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aviva Chomsky and Aldo A. Lauria Santiago have gathered both well-known and emerging...
The Cuba Reader
History, Culture, Politics
Language: English
Release Date: May 17, 2019
Tracking Cuban history from 1492 to the present, The Cuba Reader includes more than one hundred selections that present myriad perspectives on Cuba's history, culture, and politics. The volume foregrounds the experience of Cubans from all walks of life, including slaves, prostitutes, doctors, activists,...
Linked Labor Histories
New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2008
Exploring globalization from a labor history perspective, Aviva Chomsky provides historically grounded analyses of migration, labor-management collaboration, and the mobility of capital. She illuminates the dynamics of these movements through case studies set mostly in New England and Colombia. Taken...
Genes in Development
Re-reading the Molecular Paradigm
Language: English
Release Date: January 27, 2006
In light of scientific advances such as genomics, predictive diagnostics, genetically engineered agriculture, nuclear transfer cloning, and the manipulation of stem cells, the idea that genes carry predetermined molecular programs or blueprints is pervasive. Yet new scientific discoveries—such as...
Dancing with the Dead
Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa
Language: English
Release Date: December 12, 2008
Challenging conventional understandings of time and memory, Christopher T. Nelson examines how contemporary Okinawans have contested, appropriated, and transformed the burdens and possibilities of the past. Nelson explores the work of a circle of Okinawan storytellers, ethnographers, musicians, and...
Sessue Hayakawa
Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom
Language: English
Release Date: March 28, 2007
While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886–1973) is perhaps best known today for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned silent film star, as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas...
The New Japanese Woman
Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan
Language: English
Release Date: April 16, 2003
Presenting a vivid social history of “the new woman” who emerged in Japanese culture between the world wars, The New Japanese Woman shows how images of modern women burst into Japanese life in the midst of the urbanization, growth of the middle class, and explosion of consumerism resulting from...
Virtual Migration
The Programming of Globalization
Language: English
Release Date: April 24, 2006
Workers in India program software applications, transcribe medical dictation online, chase credit card debtors, and sell mobile phones, diet pills, and mortgages for companies based in other countries around the world. While their skills and labor migrate abroad, these workers remain Indian citizens,...
A Small World
Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day
Language: English
Release Date: March 13, 2008
Conceived in the 1960s, Walt Disney’s original plans for his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) outlined a utopian laboratory for domestic technology, where families would live, work, and play in an integrated environment. Like many of his contemporaries, Disney imagined homes...
by Ted Gioia
Language: English
Release Date: April 13, 2006
Language: English
Release Date: April 13, 2006
While the first healers were musicians who relied on rhythm and song to help cure the sick, over time Western thinkers and doctors lost touch with these traditions. In the West, for almost two millennia, the roles of the healer and the musician have been strictly separated.
Until recently,...
Odd Couples
Friendships at the Intersection of Gender and Sexual Orientation
Language: English
Release Date: April 30, 2012
Odd Couples examines friendships between gay men and straight women, and also between lesbians and straight men, and shows how these "intersectional" friendships serve as a barometer for shifting social norms, particularly regarding gender and sexual orientation. Based on author Anna Muraco's...
After Love
Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba
Language: English
Release Date: April 2, 2014
Focused on the intimate effects of large-scale economic transformations, After Love illuminates the ways that everyday efforts to imagine, resist, and enact market reforms shape sexual desires and subjectivities. Anthropologist Noelle M. Stout arrived in Havana in 2002 to study the widely publicized...
Real Pigs
Shifting Values in the Field of Local Pork
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2016
In addition to being one of the United States' largest pork producers, North Carolina is home to a developing niche market of pasture-raised pork. In Real Pigs Brad Weiss traces the desire for "authentic" local foods in the Piedmont region of central North Carolina as he follows farmers, butchers,...