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.