Exploring the surprising parallels between Long Islander Billy Joel and Asbury Park, NJ native Bruce Springsteen, cultural historian Jim Cullen places their music within a longer tradition of the New York metropolitan sound. By recombining classic influences in unique ways, each man created music that appealed to wide audiences in a rapidly changing America. 

AntoloGaia offers a vivid first-hand account of the rise of the gay liberation movement in Italy, revealing how it was intimately intertwined with other forms of left-wing activism. Porpora Marcasciano conveys both the heartbreak of living through an era of institutionalized homophobia and the queer joy of encountering Italy’s unique gay and trans communities.

An Age of Accountability highlights the role of test-based accountability as a policy framework in American education. Even after very clear disappointments no other policy framework has emerged to challenge its hegemony, and many Americans continue to believe that accountability remains a vital necessity, even if educators and policy scholars disagree.

Drawing on original archival research and interviews, Peter C. Kunze offers a revisionist account of the Disney Renaissance that foregrounds the role of theatrically-trained talent in revitalizing Disney Animation. In so doing, he situates this impressive turnaround at the intersection of two dynamic entertainment industries with a long, underexamined relationships, Hollywood and Broadway.

In the United States, race and police were founded along with a capitalist economy dependent on the enslavement of workers of African descent. Race and Police builds a critical theory of American policing by analyzing a heterodox history of policing, drawn from the historiography of slavery and slave patrols. Beginning by tracing the historical origins of the police mandate in British colonial America, the book shows that the peculiar institution of racialized chattel slavery originated along with a novel, binary conception of race. On one side, for the first time Europeans from various nationalities were united in a single racial category. Inclusion in this category was necessary for citizenship. On the other, Blacks were branded as slaves, cast as social enemies, and assumed to be threats to the social order.

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.
 

Policing Victimhood analyzes semi-structured interviews with 54 service providers in the Midwestern US, a region that, though colloquially understood as “flyover country,” regularly positions itself as a leader in state-level anti-trafficking policies and collaborative networks. These frontline workers’ perceptions and narratives are informed by their interpersonal, day-to-day encounters with exploited or trafficked persons. Their insights underscore how anti-trafficking policies are put into practice and influenced by specific ideologies and stereotypes. Extending the reach of street-level bureaucracy theory to anti-trafficking initiatives, Corinne Schwarz demonstrates how frontline workers are uniquely positioned to perpetuate or radically counter punitive anti-trafficking efforts.

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.

Ideal Beauty reveals the woman behind the Garbo mystique, a tough negotiator who used her newfound power in Hollywood to develop a distinctly new feminist screen persona. Examining how she was an icon who helped to define female beauty in the twentieth century, the book also considers Garbo’s spiritual and sexual exploration away from the camera’s glare.  

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 Prism of Human Rights illustrates how women’s human rights campaigns have taken off in rural Ecuador. Drawing on two decades of research and activism, Friederic shows how the initial promises of legal empowerment often give way to self-blame, social isolation, and more extreme structural violence, and she demonstrates how one rural community is renegotiating beliefs about gender, the family, the meaning of violence, and even community development.

A tale of false accusations, social stigma, and adultery, The Outcast is an early masterwork from Nobel Prize–winning Italian author Luigi Pirandello. Combining elements of Zolaesque naturalism with emerging modernist aesthetics, the novel is notable for its deft use of irony and its resourceful and resilient heroine.