More than just gags and giggles, comedy is a powerful force, reflecting our hopes and fears, helping us understand social and political changes, and creating a shared national culture. In this book, historians from the Smithsonian Institution and National Comedy Center tell the stories of the comedians, performances, and provocations that have shaped American history.

UndocuAsians tells the timely, compelling story of the contemporary US immigrant rights movement with a focus on Asian undocumented immigrant narratives. It does so by drawing on personal reflections and research articles by self-identified undocuAsian organizers and scholars from Asian immigrant backgrounds.

UndocuAsians tells the timely, compelling story of the contemporary US immigrant rights movement with a focus on Asian undocumented immigrant narratives. It does so by drawing on personal reflections and research articles by self-identified undocuAsian organizers and scholars from Asian immigrant backgrounds.

In 1867 Kusakabe Taro, a young samurai from Fukui, Japan, began studying at Rutgers as its first foreign student. Three years later, in 1870, his former tutor, friend, and Rutgers graduate, William Elliot Griffis, left for Japan to teach English and science. Griffis and Kusakabe were a small piece of a vast transnational network of leading modernizers of Japan in the 1860s and 70s. Through contributions from scholars and archivists in the U.S., Canada, and Japan, Rutgers Meets Japan aims to reconstruct these early Rutgers-Japan connections.

This book examines how the label and identity of Down syndrome is gaining increasing cohesiveness in Jordan’s capital city of Amman. Focused on the experiences of mothers, who serve as an entry point for understanding broader family dynamics and choices, the book argues that practices and ideologies of care play a central role in making Down syndrome’s lived realities through the momentum of kinship futures.
 

Graphic War introduces graphic border poetics to the field of comics, which enables a methodological response to nationalist, empirical, and gendered ideologies. It registers a shift from the persistent Jewish identification with 20th-century oppression toward a Jewish belonging based in transnational agency and activism in the 21st Century.
 

This beautifully illustrated volume weaves together personal stories, photographs, drawings, poems of students who have experienced insecurity during childhood into a tapestry of memories about the meaning of home.

The Live-Action Animated Film looks at the history of movies that combine live action with animation to hallucinogenic effect. From Technicolor musicals and creature features to remakes, reboots, and mash-ups, this history suggests that the mixed pictures of the twentieth century paved the way for the mainstream blockbusters of the twenty-first.
 

Through Dagbaŋ epistemologies and knowledge systems, this book examines media by highlighting how African languages, cultures and traditions can shift how we think of knowledge. By focusing on Ghana, the book demonstrates the potential that African language media hold as tools of cultural and epistemological decolonization.
 

This book offers a history of the most critically-derided subgenre in American comics: the ‘bad girl’ comics of the 1990s. Situating these works in relation to the popular feminism of the period, it explores how the ‘bad girl’ anti-heroine arose, and the commercial and ideological factors that brought its rapid rise and fall.
 

All Work is Cultural Work examines how Haitian women living in diaspora find belonging through their work outside the home. Sociologist Nikita Carney uses an intersectional analysis to illuminate how the workplace serves as a central site in which Haitian women become raced, gendered, and classed within their new nations. Ultimately, Carney concludes, culture is indivisible from labor and labor from culture.

Who cares for parental caregivers? The short answer is, parenting groups do. Who Cares for Parents examines how parenting groups collectively build and contribute significant resources to form a broader care infrastructure for adult family caregivers with children. This book looks at the content of care parenting groups provide care for parents, through comparative research including mothers, fathers, and nonbinary parents. Cases include some of the most recognizable parenting groups in the United States, some with vast networks of parent members numbering in the thousands or even millions, like the Parent Teacher Association, La Leche League, and MOMS Club International. The book also examine newer and, perhaps, less well known groups like the City Dads Group, the Upper East Side (UES) Mommas, as well as smaller sets of local dads’ groups and a babysitting co-op. 

In the aftermath of the fall of Roe, this volume offers readers the opportunity to reorient scholarship and understanding about abortion, recognizing what was already true before Roe was overturned and how losing the protections of Roe forced, enabled, and perhaps even facilitated a new era of abortion. Only by understanding the historical moment when Roe fell can we anticipate what might happen next in the ongoing social and political contention over reproductive autonomy and freedom.
 
 

The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast critically examines the entanglements between Jewishness, gender, and animality in modernist Hebrew fiction. Analyzing the effeminate Jew vis-à-vis the animalized woman through cutting-edge theoretical frameworks of animal studies and posthumanism, alongside the established scholarship of Hebrew/Jewish literature and gender studies, this book innovatively revisits the Hebrew literary canon.