In 1972 David Paul Bayles left the suburbs of Los Angeles for a summer job as a logger. Then, instead of heading off to photography school in the fall as planned, he stayed. Four years later, celebrating the end of his last day of logging with his crewmates over a few beers, the woods boss toasted him: “We wish you well in photo school and please don’t forget us dirty old loggers.”  

Bayles didn’t. A decade later he returned to the forests of the northern Sierras, Mount Shasta, and Redwood coast regions to create a photo exhibition that traveled through California and Oregon. In 2004 he expanded the project, focusing on how northern California’s logging industry had changed and altered the lives and culture of the men with whom he’d spent long days working in forests, men who worked with their hands and intuition. He discovered that with the increased industrialization of the forest and the arrival of machine-oriented tree felling, work that had relied on experience in meeting challenges, on camaraderie and trust, was in danger of becoming more like a robotically-operated assembly line. As one logger told Bayles, “They’re taking the Paul Bunyan out of logging.”  

There’s a poignancy to these portraits and the stories they tell of changing times, hard times, and the humor found in between the dire risks loggers encounter every day. Bayles’ photographs and oral histories introduce us to men who love the forests in which they’ve spent, and sometimes risked, or lost, their lives. Many lament the unnecessary loss of trees and the advent of practices favoring quick profits over safety and sustainability. Bayles’ work is a testament and tribute to a fast-disappearing chapter of American woodsmen, one that may soon be forgotten.

Power and Identity at the Margins of the Ancient Near East rethinks the dichotomy between antiquated terms such as “core” and “periphery,” explores lived realities in the margins of central authority, and centers those margins as places of resistance and power in their own right.
 

This book highlights the modernity of Polish Jewish culture through its literature, poetry, film, cabaret, theater, architecture, the visual arts, and music in urban centers large and small. The contributors expertly reassert the belonging of Jews in Polish lands and showcase the multivalent texture of Polish Jewish cultural production before World War II.
 

As the U.S. population ages, and as health care needs become more complex, demand for paid care workers in home and institutional settings has increased. Migrants Who Care draws attention to the reserve of immigrant labor that is called upon to meet this need, telling the little-known story of a group of English-speaking West African immigrants who have become central to the U.S. health and long-term care systems.

Chinese Marriages in Transition documents the nuanced and multidirectional nature of the transformations in Chinese marriage, gender roles, and family. Using complex and large-scale historical national data as well as comprehensive data from multiple countries, Xiaoling Shu and Jingjing Chen demonstrate that Chinese new familism consists of values both old and new.

The first book to critically examine the legacy of pop superstar Mariah Carey,

Essays on the rise of community-focused art projects and anti-monuments in Mexico since the 1980s.

This book tells the story of how Lacandón Maya families have adapted to the contemporary world while applying their ancestral knowledge to create an ecologically sustainable future in Mexico’s largest remaining tropical rainforest.

A powerful history of the first nonviolent civil disobedience campaign along Mississippi’s beaches

Interviews with the founder of Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine and coproducer of ZAP Comix who is known for his underground comix cartoons and oil paintings

Two decades of interviews with the visionary filmmaker of such successful films as The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Unbreakable

One writer’s odyssey through Louisiana folklore and history as he searches for the true meaning of home

A sounding of a profound, lasting imprint on intellectual history

A collection of essays that offers an intimate view of Larry McMurtry, America’s preeminent western novelist, through the eyes of a pantheon of writers he helped shape through his work over the course of his unparalleled literary life

Scholarly and activist perspectives on identities often overlooked in the study of geography: youth and age.