Bold Ideas, Essential Reading since 1936.

Rutgers University Press is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge for a wide range of readers. The Press reflects and extends the University’s core mission of research, instruction, and service. They enhance the work of their authors through exceptional publications that shape critical issues, spark debate, and enrich teaching. Core subjects include: film and media studies, sociology, anthropology, education, history, health, history of medicine, human rights, urban studies, criminal justice, Jewish studies, American studies, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, LGBTQ, Latino/a, Asian and African studies, as well as books about New York, New Jersey, and the region.

Rutgers also distributes books published by Bucknell University Press.

Showing 1,251-1,300 of 2,578 items.

Rachel Carson and Her Sisters

Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America's Environment

Rutgers University Press

 In Rachel Carson and Her Sisters, Robert K. Musil redefines the achievements and legacy of environmental pioneer and scientist Rachel Carson, linking her work to a wide network of American women activists and writers and introducing her to a new, contemporary audience.On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, Rachel Carson and Her Sisters helps underscore Carson’s enduring environmental legacy and brings to life the achievements of women writers and advocates who influenced and were influenced by her and Silent Spring.

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Salvadoran Imaginaries

Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption

Rutgers University Press

 Accessible and beautifully written, Rivas examines how El Salvador’s post-war identity has been transformed by communication technologies, journalistic narratives of migratory experiences, and the complex relationships between private and public spaces of consumption and belonging. This book shows how seemingly disparate sites of experience and representation—call centers, newspapers, shopping malls, and literature—can reveal the complicated process of a nation reinventing itself.

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Salvadoran Imaginaries

Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption

Rutgers University Press

 Accessible and beautifully written, Rivas examines how El Salvador’s post-war identity has been transformed by communication technologies, journalistic narratives of migratory experiences, and the complex relationships between private and public spaces of consumption and belonging. This book shows how seemingly disparate sites of experience and representation—call centers, newspapers, shopping malls, and literature—can reveal the complicated process of a nation reinventing itself.

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Mining Coal and Undermining Gender

Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West

Rutgers University Press

 Among the miners of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin—the largest coal-producing region in the U.S.—anthropologist Jessica Smith Rolston reveals how the mining industry, though heavily masculinized, generates new configurations of the “working family”—a kind of kinship based on the shared burdens of shift work and concerns for safety, which challenges and reproduces gender differences in everyday working and family life.

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Holocaust Memory Reframed

Museums and the Challenges of Representation

Rutgers University Press

In Holocaust Memory Reframed, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich examines Holocaust representations in three museums: Israel’s Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Germany’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. As she interprets the exhibits, Hansen-Glucklich clarifies how museums communicate Holocaust narratives within the historical and cultural contexts specific to Germany, Israel, and the United States.


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Managing Madness in the Community

The Challenge of Contemporary Mental Health Care

Rutgers University Press

 The mentally ill might not go to Shutter Island or the Cuckoo’s Nest, but that doesn’t mean they’re getting the best care they can.  With extensive, unique ethnographic research at two community-based organizations that provide the bulk of such care, Managing Madness in the Community lays bare the true nature, effects, and costs of our fragmented mental health system and provides a useful broad framework that will help researchers and policymakers understand the key forces influencing the system today.

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Cinematic Canines

Dogs and Their Work in the Fiction Film

Rutgers University Press

Dogs have been part of motion pictures since the movies began. They have been featured onscreen in various capacities, from any number of “man’s best friends” (Rin Tin Tin, Asta, Toto, Lassie, Benji, Uggie, and many, many more) to the psychotic Cujo. The contributors to Cinematic Canines take a close look at Hollywood films and beyond in order to show that the popularity of dogs on the screen cannot be separated from their increasing presence in our lives over the past century.

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Treating AIDS

Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention

Rutgers University Press

 In Treating AIDS, Thurka Sangaramoorthy examines the everyday practices of HIV/AIDS prevention in the United States from the perspective of AIDS experts and Haitian immigrants in south Florida. Using in-depth ethnographic data, she underscores the difference between the global response to this public health crisis—where everyone is implicated as a potential carrier of risk—and the uncontested existence of racial and ethnic disparities in HIV/AIDS rates, access to treatment and care, and, especially, the stigma borne by carriers of the disease.

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American Melancholy

Constructions of Depression in the Twentieth Century

Rutgers University Press

In American Melancholy, Laura D. Hirshbein traces the growth of depression as an object of medical study and as a consumer commodity and illustrates how and why depression came to be such a huge medical, social, and cultural phenomenon. This is the first book to address gender issues in the construction of depression, explores key questions of how its diagnosis was developed, how it has been used, and how we should question its application in American society.

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The Ex-Prisoner's Dilemma

How Women Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance

Rutgers University Press

Drawing on repeated interviews with forty-nine women newly released from prison, Leverentz explores the conflicting messages these women receive about who they are and who they should be—from prison staff, workers at halfway houses and drug treatment programs, family members, and friends.  These messages, she shows, shape the narratives the women create to explain their past records and guide their future behavior.

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Dream Nation

Puerto Rican Culture and the Fictions of Independence

Rutgers University Press

In this provocative new book, Maria Acosta Cruz investigates why the rhetoric of independence is so pivotal to Puerto Rican culture, despite the fact that the island’s voters have consistently rejected calls for national sovereignty. Weaving together texts from literature, history, and popular culture, Dream Nation shows how this seemingly revolutionary and populist iconography of independence has become an established orthodoxy.


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War and Disease

Biomedical Research on Malaria in the Twentieth Century

Rutgers University Press

Malaria is one of the leading killers in the world today. Though drugs against malaria have a long history, attempts to develop novel therapeutics spanned the twentieth century and continue today. In this historical study, Leo B. Slater shows the roots and branches of an enormous drug development project during World War II

A massive undertaking, the antimalarial program was to biomedical research what the Manhattan Project was to the physical sciences.

A volume in the Critical Issues in Health and Medicine series, edited by Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden.

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The History of Modern Japanese Education

Constructing the National School System, 1872-1890

Rutgers University Press

The History of Modern Japanese Education is the first account in English of the construction of a national school system in Japan, as outlined in the 1872 document, the Gakusei. 

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Saving Sickly Children

The Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909-1970

Rutgers University Press

 Known as "The Great Killer" and "The White Plague," few diseases influenced American life as much as tuberculosis. Sufferers migrated to mountain or desert climates believed to ameliorate symptoms. Architects designed homes with sleeping porches and verandas so sufferers could spend time in the open air. The disease even developed its own consumer culture complete with invalid beds, spittoons, sputum collection devices, and disinfectants. The "preventorium," an institution designed to protect children from the ravages of the disease, emerged in this era of Progressive ideals in public health. In this book, Cynthia A. Connolly provides a provocative analysis of public health and family welfare through the lens of the tuberculosis preventorium.

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Disaster!

Stories of Destruction and Death in Nineteenth-Century New Jersey

Rutgers University Press

In Disaster!, Alan A. Siegel brings readers face-to-face with twenty-eight of the deadliest natural and human-caused calamities to strike New Jersey between 1821 and 1906. Accounts of fires, steamboat explosions, shipwrecks, train wrecks, and storms are told in the words of the people who experienced the events firsthand, lending a sense of immediacy to each story. These and many other stories of forgotten acts of courage in the face of danger will make Disaster! an unforgettable read.

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Television in the Age of Radio

Modernity, Imagination, and the Making of a Medium

Rutgers University Press

Television in the Age of Radio is a unique account of how television came to be, not just from technical innovations or institutional struggles, but from cultural concerns that were central to the rise of industrial modernity. A major revision of the history of television, it provides investigations of the values of early television amateurs and enthusiasts, the passions and worries about competing technologies, and the ambitions for programming that together helped mold the medium.

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Television in the Age of Radio

Modernity, Imagination, and the Making of a Medium

Rutgers University Press

Television in the Age of Radio is a unique account of how television came to be, not just from technical innovations or institutional struggles, but from cultural concerns that were central to the rise of industrial modernity. A major revision of the history of television, it provides investigations of the values of early television amateurs and enthusiasts, the passions and worries about competing technologies, and the ambitions for programming that together helped mold the medium.

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Wired TV

Laboring Over an Interactive Future

Edited by Denise Mann
Rutgers University Press

Wired TV looks at the post–network television industry’s experiments with new forms of interactive storytelling that took place from 2005 to2010 as broadband was introduced into the majority of homes and the use of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter soared. Essays address such issues as the networks’ sporadic efforts to engage fans using transmedia storytelling, production inefficiencies, and the effect of corporate conglomeration on entrepreneurial creativity. The television franchises discussed include Lost, The Office, Entourage, and Battlestar Gallactica.

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Tainted Earth

Smelters, Public Health, and the Environment

Rutgers University Press

Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research, Tainted Earth traces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. It documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters and the long road to protecting public health and the environment.

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Tainted Earth

Smelters, Public Health, and the Environment

Rutgers University Press

Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research, Tainted Earth traces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. It documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters and the long road to protecting public health and the environment.

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Shtetl

A Vernacular Intellectual History

Rutgers University Press

By examining the meaning of shtetl, Jeffrey Shandler asks how Jewish life in provincial towns in Eastern Europe has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship. He traces the trajectory of writing about these towns, by Jews and non-Jews, residents and visitors, researchers, novelists, memoirists, journalists, and others, to demonstrate how the Yiddish word for “town” emerged as a key word in Jewish culture and Jewish studies. 

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Hollywood Exiles in Europe

The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture

Rutgers University Press

Rebecca Prime documents the untold story of the American directors, screenwriters, and actors who exiled themselves to Europe as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. During the 1950s and 1960s, these Hollywood émigrés directed, wrote, or starred in almost one hundred European productions. The book offers a compelling argument for the significance of these blacklisted expats to our understanding of postwar American and European cinema and Cold War relations.

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Faith, Family, and Filipino American Community Life

Rutgers University Press

This ground-breaking book draws upon a rich set of ethnographic and survey data, collected over a six-year period, to explore the roles that Catholicism and family play in shaping Filipino American community life. It illustrates the powerful ways these forces structure and animate not only how first-generation Filipino Americans think and feel about their community, but how they are compelled to engage it over issues deemed important to the sanctity of the family.

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Faith, Family, and Filipino American Community Life

Rutgers University Press

This ground-breaking book draws upon a rich set of ethnographic and survey data, collected over a six-year period, to explore the roles that Catholicism and family play in shaping Filipino American community life. It illustrates the powerful ways these forces structure and animate not only how first-generation Filipino Americans think and feel about their community, but how they are compelled to engage it over issues deemed important to the sanctity of the family.

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Kurdistan on the Global Stage

Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq

Rutgers University Press

Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which covers much of the area long known as Iraqi Kurdistan. One of the few scholars who has done research during the Saddam Hussein regime, King offers a sensitive interpretation of the contradiction resulting from the intersection of tradition with modernity, exploring the ways that residents connect socially through patron-client relationships and as people belonging to gendered categories.

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Kurdistan on the Global Stage

Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq

Rutgers University Press

Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which covers much of the area long known as Iraqi Kurdistan. One of the few scholars who has done research during the Saddam Hussein regime, King offers a sensitive interpretation of the contradiction resulting from the intersection of tradition with modernity, exploring the ways that residents connect socially through patron-client relationships and as people belonging to gendered categories.

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The Business of Private Medical Practice

Doctors, Specialization, and Urban Change in Philadelphia, 1900-1940

Rutgers University Press

Health care is more expensive in the United States than in other wealthy nations, and access varies significantly across space and social classes. In this case study, James A. Schafer Jr. uses the city of Philadelphia in the early twentieth-century to show that these problems reflect the informal organization of health care in a free market system in which profit and demand, rather than social welfare and public health needs, direct the distribution and cost of crucial resources.

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Electronic Iran

The Cultural Politics of an Online Evolution

Rutgers University Press

Electronic Iran introduces the concept of the Iranian Internet, a framework that captures interlinked, transnational networks of virtual and offline spaces. It draws from early Internet ethnographies, accounts in media studies that highlight the continuities between old and new media, and a range of works that have made critical interventions in the field of Iranian studies to confront conventional wisdom about digital media in general, and contemporary Iranian culture and politics in particular.

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Jewish on Their Own Terms

How Intermarried Couples are Changing American Judaism

Rutgers University Press

This book provides a complex, insightful portrait of intermarried couples and the new forms of American Judaism that they are constructing. It tells the stories of intermarried couples, the rabbis and other Jewish educators who work with them, and the conflicting public conversations about intermarriage among American Jews. Ethnography is used to describe the compelling concerns of all of these parties and places their anxieties firmly within the context of American religious culture and morality.

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Borderlands Saints

Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture

Rutgers University Press

Borderlands Saints examines the rise and fall of popular saints and saint-like figures in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Focusing specifically on Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, César Chávez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Santa Muerte, the book traces the intersections of these figures, their devotees, artistic representations, and dominant institutions with an eye for the ways in which such unofficial saints mirror traditional spiritual practices and serve specific cultural needs.

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Hidden Genocides

Power, Knowledge, Memory

Rutgers University Press

Why are some cases of genocide prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? In this collection, contributors approach the question from a variety of perspectives and case studies, including the suppression of discussion about indigenous populations in the Americas and Australia, the reasons why the genocide of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks long remained out of sight, and the violence that was the precursor to and the aftermath of the Holocaust.

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Hidden Genocides

Power, Knowledge, Memory

Rutgers University Press

Why are some cases of genocide prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? In this collection, contributors approach the question from a variety of perspectives and case studies, including the suppression of discussion about indigenous populations in the Americas and Australia, the reasons why the genocide of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks long remained out of sight, and the violence that was the precursor to and the aftermath of the Holocaust.

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Look Closer

Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television

Rutgers University Press

Look Closer examines contemporary media texts that use American suburbia not just as a setting, but as a central component of narrative and thematic development. It discusses the myth of suburban perfection popularized by postwar sitcoms and advertisements and explores how the directors and producers behind today’s films and television series use the spaces of suburbia to tell stories about America as well as critique the conservative ideologies that underpin the suburban American Dream.

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Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism

Narrative Appropriation in American Literature

Rutgers University Press

This book argues that sentimentalism, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode, is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, it explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals.

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Tough on Hate?

The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes

Rutgers University Press

Tough on Hate is the first book to examine the cultural politics of hate crimes both within and beyond the law. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal interviews, unarchived documents, television news broadcasts, legislative debates, and presidential speeches, the book challenges readers to reconsider their understanding of hate crimes and raises startling questions about the trajectory of civil and minority rights.

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Tough on Hate?

The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes

Rutgers University Press

Tough on Hate is the first book to examine the cultural politics of hate crimes both within and beyond the law. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal interviews, unarchived documents, television news broadcasts, legislative debates, and presidential speeches, the book challenges readers to reconsider their understanding of hate crimes and raises startling questions about the trajectory of civil and minority rights.

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Queering Marriage

Challenging Family Formation in the United States

Rutgers University Press

In-depth interviews with participants in non-traditional families are used to argue that same-sex marriage cannot be understood as simply entrenching or contesting heterosexual privilege. Instead, Katrina Kimport contends that these new legally sanctioned relationships can both reinforce as well as disrupt the association of marriage and heterosexuality. She provides a nuanced, accessible, and theoretically grounded framework for understanding the powerful effect of heterosexual expectations on both sexual and social categories.

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Daughters and Granddaughters of Farmworkers

Emerging from the Long Shadow of Farm Labor

Rutgers University Press

The work and family lives of Mexican American women in a community near the U.S.-Mexico border in California’s Imperial County are examined. Wells provides stories of the struggles, triumphs, and everyday experiences of these women and explores the social structures that create the barriers, constraints, and opportunities that have shaped their lives. These women aspire to achieve the American Dream, but the realities of life in a rural, agricultural border community strictly limit social mobility for these descendants of immigrant farm laborers.

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Why We Harm

Rutgers University Press

This timely book scrutinizes accounts of acts as diverse as genocide, environmental degradation, war, torture, terrorism, homicide, rape, and meat-eating in order to develop an original theoretical framework with which to consider harmful actions and their causes. Chapter by chapter, it examines statements made by perpetrators of a wide variety of harmful actions, identifying the logics they share that motivate, legitimize, and sustain them and mapping out strategies for reducing harm.

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Black Resonance

Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature

Rutgers University Press

Black Resonance analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. The book focuses on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s; each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice.

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Classrooms and Clinics

Urban Schools and the Protection and Promotion of Child Health, 1870-1930

Rutgers University Press

Classrooms and Clinics is the first book-length assessment of the development of public school health policies from the late nineteenth century through the early years of the Great Depression. Richard A. Meckel examines the efforts of early twentieth-century child health care advocates and reformers to utilize urban schools to deliver health care services to socioeconomically disadvantaged and medically underserved children in the primary grades to improve children’s health and thereby improve their academic performance.

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Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream

Shaping America's Immigration Story

Rutgers University Press

This collection presents eleven original essays by historians whose own ethnic backgrounds shaped the choices they have made about their research and writing as scholars. These authors, historians of American immigration and ethnicity, revisited family and personal experiences and reflect on how their lives helped shape their later scholarly pursuits. They address issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and assimilation in academia, in the discipline of history, and in society at large.

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Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream

Shaping America's Immigration Story

Rutgers University Press

This collection presents eleven original essays by historians whose own ethnic backgrounds shaped the choices they have made about their research and writing as scholars. These authors, historians of American immigration and ethnicity, revisited family and personal experiences and reflect on how their lives helped shape their later scholarly pursuits. They address issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and assimilation in academia, in the discipline of history, and in society at large.

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When Sex Changed

Birth Control Politics and Literature between the World Wars

Rutgers University Press

When Sex Changed analyzes the ways literary texts responded to the political, economic, sexual, and social values put forward by the birth control movements of the 1910s to the 1930s in the United States and Great Britain. The book compares disparate responses to the birth control controversy, from early skepticism by mainstream feminists, to concerns about the movement’s race and class implications, to enthusiastic speculation about contraception’s political implications.

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Amigas y Amantes

Sexually Nonconforming Latinas Negotiate Family

Rutgers University Press

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.

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Life on the Malecón

Children and Youth on the Streets of Santo Domingo

Rutgers University Press

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.

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The Glass Slipper

Women and Love Stories

Rutgers University Press

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.

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The Star of Bethlehem

The Legacy of the Magi

Rutgers University Press

For years, scientists have looked, with little success, to astronomical records for an explanation of the magical star that guided the Magi to Christ’s manger. Molnar argues in his book that the Star of Bethlehem was not a star at all, but rather a regal portent centering around the planet Jupiter that was eclipsed by the moon. He bases this theory on the actual beliefs of astrologers, such as the Magi, who lived around the time of Christ. Using clues from astronomy, astrology, and history, Molnar has created a provocative, fascinating theory on the Christmas Star., weaving together an intriguing scientific detective story which resolves one of the world’s greatest mysteries: The Star of Bethlehem at the birth of Christ.

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Asbestos and Fire

Technological Tradeoffs and the Body at Risk

Rutgers University Press

This thought-provoking and controversial book challenges the recent vilification of asbestos by providing a historical perspective on Americans' changing perceptions about risk. Rachel Maines suggests that the very success of asbestos and other fire-prevention technologies in containing deadly blazes has led to a sort of historical amnesia about the very risks they were supposed to reduce. Asbestos and Fire is an important contribution to a larger debate that considers how the risks of technological solutions should be evaluated.

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Broadcasting Birth Control

Mass Media and Family Planning

Rutgers University Press

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.

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