The Leading Man analyzes the evolution and the significance of the interaction between Hollywood and Washington to trace the history of the cinematic presidential image. Burton W. Peretti shows that traditional practices of presidential image making go back to George Washington, and then places the fourteen presidents of the cinematic era, from Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama, at the center of the story. He demonstrates how movies have been the main force in promoting image and drama over the substance of governing.

In Learning the Hard Way, Edward W. Morris explores and analyzes detailed ethnographic data to examine the purported gender gap between boys and girls in educational achievement at two low-income high schools—one rural and predominantly white, the other urban and mostly African American. He explains how race, class, and geographic location combine to influence and complicate the construction of gender identities in high school students and affect the respective academic performance of the students he studied.

In Learning the Hard Way, Edward W. Morris explores and analyzes detailed ethnographic data to examine the purported gender gap between boys and girls in educational achievement at two low-income high schools—one rural and predominantly white, the other urban and mostly African American. He explains how race, class, and geographic location combine to influence and complicate the construction of gender identities in high school students and affect the respective academic performance of the students he studied.

Real Gangstas relies on the tradition of urban ethnography to provide a unique and intimate look at the lives of street gang members in Indianapolis, IN. For eighteen months, Timothy R. Lauger interviewed and observed a mix of fifty-five gang members, former gang members, and non-gang street offenders, many from the “Down for Whatever Boyz.” Through this research, Lauger is able to understand and explain the reasons for gang membership, including a chaotic family life, poverty, and the need for violent self-assertion in order to foster the creation of a personal identity.

Now available for the first time as a three-volume set, The New Anthology of American Poetry offers the most compelling and wide-ranging selection of poems from the nation’s beginnings to the present day. Extensive introductions, notes, and footnotes make the great poems of each period fully accessible.

Death of the Moguls is a detailed assessment of the last days of the “rulers of film” from Hollywood’s classical era. Using rare, behind-the-scenes stills, Wheeler Winston Dixon details such game-changing factors as the de Havilland decision, the Consent Decree, how the moguls dealt with their collapsing empires in the era of television, and the end of the conventional studio assembly line to create a compelling narrative of the end of the studio system at each of the Hollywood majors.

Academic Motherhood tells the story of one hundred women who are both professors and mothers and how they navigated their professional lives at different career stages. It is based on a longitudinal study that asks how women faculty on the tenure track manage work and family in their early careers when their children are under the age of five, and again in mid-career when their children are older. Policy recommendations that support faculty with children and mechanisms for problem-solving at personal, departmental, institutional, and national levels are provided.

At what moments and in what ways did Jews play a central role in American capitalism? Chosen Capital addresses this question head-on by exploring Jews’ impact on American capitalism as both its architects—through their participation in specific industries—and as its most vocal critics through their support of unionism and radical political movements. Essays are contributed by a stellar list of scholars.

Beyond Health, Beyond Choice is a multidisciplinary collection of essays written by thirty-seven contributors that examines the role of feminist theory in the promotion of breastfeeding by public health authorities. Essays are arranged thematically and consider breastfeeding in relation to health care; work and family; embodiment (specifically breastfeeding in public); economic and ethnic factors; guilt; violence; and commercialization.

The Health Care Safety Net in a Post-Reform World examines how national health care reform will impact safety net programs that serve low-income and uninsured patients. With contributions from leading health care scholars, it is the first comprehensive assessment of the safety net following enactment of national health care reform.

African American culture is often considered expressive, dramatic, and even defiant, and this matrix has dominated our understanding of black communities and texts. In The Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores how a different kind of expressiveness, from protests to readings to landmark texts, as represented in the idea of quiet could change common conceptions and provide a more nuanced view of black culture.

Newark’s Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart is one of America’s greatest cathedrals and most exceptional Gothic Revival buildings. Rising from Newark’s highest ground and visible for miles, it spectacularly evokes its historic models. Gothic Pride sets Sacred Heart in the context of American cathedral building and, blending diverse fields, accounts for the complex circumstances that produced it.

Moving Color is the first book-length study of the beginnings of color cinema. It traces the legacy of color history from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the cinema of the early twentieth century and explores the implications of this genealogy on experimental and contemporary digital cinemas.

We Are in This Dance Together uses in-depth interviews with over sixty workers, managers, and policy makers to document and analyze events leading up to the female-led factory strike in March 2001 at a high-end producer of men’s suits in Mexico and the strike’s aftermath—including harassment from managers, corrupt union officials and labor authorities, and violent governor-sanctioned police actions. It illustrates how the women’s shared identity as workers and mothers, deserving of dignity, respect, and a living wage, became the basis for radicalization and led to further civic organizing against the state, the company, and the corrupt union to demand justice.

Since its original publication in 2004, The Case That Never Dies has become the standard account of the Lindbergh Kidnapping. Now, in a new afterword, Lloyd C. Gardner presents a surprise conclusion based on recently uncovered pieces of evidence that were missing from the initial investigation as well as an evaluation of Charles Lindbergh’s role in the search for the kidnappers. Out of the controversies surrounding the actions of Colonel Lindbergh, Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the New Jersey State Police, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Gardner presents a well-reasoned argument for what happened on the night of March 1, 1932.

Though satellites are now used by a wide array of entertainment, communications, and information technologies, from radio stations to GPS devices, the business of making, launching, and maintaining satellites is still shrouded in mystery. Down to Earth presents the first comprehensive overview of the geopolitical maneuvers, financial investments, scientific innovations, and ideological struggles that take place behind the scenes of this fascinating industry.

Luis F. B. Plascencia’s Disenchanting Citizenship explores two interrelated issues: U.S. citizenship and the Mexican migrants’ position in the United States. Through an extensive and multifaceted collection of interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, ethno-historical research, and public policy analysis, Plascencia probes the ways in which citizenship discourses are understood and taken up by individuals. The book uncovers citizenship’s root as a Janus-faced  construct that encompasses a simultaneous process of inclusion and exclusion. This notion of citizenship is mapped on to the migrant experience, arguing that the acquisition of citizenship can lead to disenchantment with the very status desired. Using the experience of Mexican migrants, Plascencia expands the understanding of the dynamics of U.S. citizenship as a form of membership and belonging.

Narrative Landmines explores how rumors fit into and extend narrative systems and ideologies, particularly in the context of terrorism, counter-terrorism, and extremist insurgencies.  Beyond face-to-face communication, this book also addresses the role of new and social media in the creation and spread of rumors. Its concern is to foster a more sophisticated understanding of how oral and digital cultures work alongside economic, diplomatic, and cultural factors that influence the struggles between states and non-state actors in the proverbial battle of hearts and minds.  By providing fresh data from Singapore, Iraq, and Indonesia, the authors make a compelling argument for understanding rumors in these contexts as “narrative IEDs”, weapons that can aid the extremist cause.

In The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking, Lisa Jarvinen focuses specifically on how Hollywood lost a lucrative international Spanish-speaking audience between 1929 and 1939, along with talent it had carefully nurtured in the United States. Employing studio records from Warner Bros., Fox Films, and United Artists, Jarvinen examines the lasting effects of the transition to sound on both Hollywood practices and cultural politics in the Spanish-speaking world. Using case studies based on archival research in the United States, Spain, and Mexico, she shows how language, as a key marker of cultural identity, led to new expectations from audiences and new possibilities for film producers.

In The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking, Lisa Jarvinen focuses specifically on how Hollywood lost a lucrative international Spanish-speaking audience between 1929 and 1939, along with talent it had carefully nurtured in the United States. Employing studio records from Warner Bros., Fox Films, and United Artists, Jarvinen examines the lasting effects of the transition to sound on both Hollywood practices and cultural politics in the Spanish-speaking world. Using case studies based on archival research in the United States, Spain, and Mexico, she shows how language, as a key marker of cultural identity, led to new expectations from audiences and new possibilities for film producers.

In Emily Dickinson in Love, John Evangelist Walsh provides the first full-length work to solve this puzzle based wholly on documented facts and the poet’s own writings. He identifies the lover as Otis Lord, a friend of the poet’s father, and portrays the broad dimensions of their clandestine thirty-year romance.

Becoming Mexipino is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California from 1900 to 1965. Rudy Guevarra traces their earliest interactions under Spanish colonialism, when they did not strongly identify as Mexican or Filipino, to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century San Diego as well as in other locales throughout California and the Pacific West Coast.

The Malthusian Moment locates the origins of modern American environmentalism in a twentieth-century revival of interest in Thomas Malthus’s theory of population growth, shedding new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the role of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the Civil Rights and women’s movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the “New Right.”

The Malthusian Moment locates the origins of modern American environmentalism in a twentieth-century revival of interest in Thomas Malthus’s theory of population growth, shedding new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the role of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the Civil Rights and women’s movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the “New Right.”

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

In the 1990s, American civil society got upended and reordered as many social, cultural, political, and economic institutions were changed forever. Pretty People examines a wide range of Hollywood icons who reflect how stardom in that decade was transformed as the nation itself, signaling significant changes to familiar ideas about gender, race, ethnicity, age, class, sexuality, and nationality.

Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano continue the standard of excellence set in Volumes I and II of this extraordinary anthology. Volume III provides the most compelling and wide-ranging selection available of American poetry from 1950 to the present. Its contents are just as diverse and multifaceted as America itself and invite readers to view the world of poetry in the larger historical context of American culture. Nearly three hundred poems allow readers to explore canonical works by such poets as Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath, as well as song lyrics from such popular musicians as Bob Dylan and Queen Latifah.

In The Battle for the B’s, Blair Davis analyzes how B-films were produced, distributed, and exhibited in the 1950s and demonstrates the new possibilities that existed for low-budget filmmaking at a time when many in Hollywood abandoned the B’s. B-movies innovated such industrial components as demographic patterns and marketing approaches, created such genres as science fiction and the teen-oriented films of the early and mid fifties, and led to the emergence of “New Poverty Row,” a movement now known as underground cinema.