Amigas y Amantes (Friends and Lovers) explores the experiences of sexually nonconforming Latinas in the creation and maintenance of families. It is based on forty-two in-depth enthnographic interviews with women who identify as lesbian, bisexual, or queer (LBQ) and draws from fourteen months of participant observation at LBQ Latina events that Katie L. Acosta conducted in 2007 and 2008 in a major northeast city. The book examines how LBQ Latinas manage loving relationships with the families who raised them, and with their partners, their children, and their friends.

American Dictators is the dual biography of two legendary New Jersey political bosses: Frank Hague, who intimidated presidents and wielded unchallenged power for over three decades, and Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, the inspiration for the hit HBO series, Boardwalk Empire. Packed with compelling information and written in an informal, sometimes humorous style, the book shows Hague and Johnson at the peak of their power and the strength of their political machines during the years of Prohibition and the Great Depression.

Life on the Malecón is a narrative ethnography of the lives of street children and youth living in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and the non-governmental organizations that provide social services for them. Writing from the perspective of an anthropologist working as a street educator with a child welfare organization, Jon M. Wolseth follows the intersecting lives of children, the institutions they come into contact with, and the relationships they have with each other, their families, and organization workers.

The Glass Slipper is about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Susan Ostrov Weisser compares diverse narratives, historical and contemporary from high literature and “low” genres, discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Victorian women’s magazines, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; romantic movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories.

Traditionally, the history of the birth control movement has been told through the accounts of the leaders, organizations, and legislation that shaped the campaign. Historians have recently begun examining the cultural work of printed media, including newspapers, magazines, and novels in fostering support for the cause. This book builds upon this new scholarship on the women’s reproductive health movement to explore the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by twentieth-century birth control advocates to promote family planning in the U.S. and internationally.

This visual representation of New Mexico and its people is a fascinating study of how the region has been depicted in film from the dawn of early filmmaking and the silent era to today. Meléndez examines such films as Adventures in Kit Carson Land, The Rattlesnake, and Red Sky at Morning, among others, that have both educated and misinformed us about a state in our own midst that remains a “distant locale” to most white Americans.

Robert Samuels explains why universities cost so much and offers solutions as to how they can reduce their expenses by concentrating on their core mission of instruction and research. Not only can tuition be reduced, but public universities and colleges can be made free by allocating existing resources to provide quality undergraduate education and diminishing the amount of money spent in the areas of athletics, administration, and public research.