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.
Treating AIDS
Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention
American Melancholy
Constructions of Depression in the Twentieth Century
The Ex-Prisoner's Dilemma
How Women Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance
Dream Nation
Puerto Rican Culture and the Fictions of Independence
War and Disease
Biomedical Research on Malaria in the Twentieth Century
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.
The History of Modern Japanese Education
Constructing the National School System, 1872-1890
Saving Sickly Children
The Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909-1970
Disaster!
Stories of Destruction and Death in Nineteenth-Century New Jersey
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.
Television in the Age of Radio
Modernity, Imagination, and the Making of a Medium
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.
Television in the Age of Radio
Modernity, Imagination, and the Making of a Medium
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.
Wired TV
Laboring Over an Interactive Future
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.
Tainted Earth
Smelters, Public Health, and the Environment
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.
Tainted Earth
Smelters, Public Health, and the Environment
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.
Shtetl
A Vernacular Intellectual History
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.
Hollywood Exiles in Europe
The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture
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.
Faith, Family, and Filipino American Community Life
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.
Faith, Family, and Filipino American Community Life
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.
Kurdistan on the Global Stage
Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq
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.
Kurdistan on the Global Stage
Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq
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.
The Business of Private Medical Practice
Doctors, Specialization, and Urban Change in Philadelphia, 1900-1940
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.
Electronic Iran
The Cultural Politics of an Online Evolution
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.
Jewish on Their Own Terms
How Intermarried Couples are Changing American Judaism
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.
Borderlands Saints
Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture
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.
Hidden Genocides
Power, Knowledge, Memory
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.
Hidden Genocides
Power, Knowledge, Memory
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.
Look Closer
Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television
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.
Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism
Narrative Appropriation in American Literature
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.
Tough on Hate?
The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes
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.
Tough on Hate?
The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes
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.
Queering Marriage
Challenging Family Formation in the United States
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.