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 2,041-2,080 of 2,552 items.

Into Our Own Hands

The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969–1990

Rutgers University Press

Into Our Own Hands traces the womens health care movement in the United States. Richly documented, this study is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with leading activists; documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of womens health movement organizations in the early 1990s; and ethnographic fieldwork. 

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Contemporary Physics and the Limits of Knowledge

Rutgers University Press

Introductory physics is not often a popular class among liberal arts majors. With its lively prose and analogies from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, however, Contemporary Physics and the Limits of Knowledge is guaranteed to enlighten and delight nonscience majors.

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You've Been Had!

How the Media and Environmentalists Turned America into a Nation of Hypochondriacs

Rutgers University Press

In You’ve Been Had!, Melvin Benarde aims to set the record straight and counteract the culture of complaint and worry with an unbiased account of the scientific facts — facts which suggest we are worried and frightened about the wrong things. Contrary to what the media would have us believe, he argues that the environmental factors that most adversely affect our health are those that are within our power to alter, such as smoking, diet, drugs, stress, guns speed, exercise, and basic safety precautions. Topics covered include: carcinogens and anti- carcinogens; dietary supplements and neutraceuticals; food safety, pasteurization and irradiation; genetically modified foods; microbial threats to health; hazardous and toxic waste; radiation and skin cancer; global warming; risk-taking; obesity, asthma, violence and longevity. Benarde also looks at the ways the media reports science and evidence-based medicine.

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The Newark Teacher Strikes

Hopes on the Line

Rutgers University Press

For three weeks in 1970 and for eleven weeks in 1971, the schools in Newark, New Jersey, were paralyzed as the teachers went on strike. In the wake of the 1971 strike, almost two hundred were arrested and jailed. The Newark Teachers Union said their members wanted improved education for students. The Board of Education claimed the teachers primarily desired more money. After interviewing more than fifty teachers who were on the front lines during these strikes, historian Steve Golin concludes that another, equally important agenda was on the table, and has been ignored until now. These professionals wanted power, to be allowed a voice in the educational agenda.

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Rockin' Out Of The Box

Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock

Rutgers University Press

In Rockin’ Out of the Box, Mimi Schippers, employing the crucial feminist insight that gender is a constantly shifting performance and not an essential quality related to sex, explores the gender roles, assumptions, and transgressions of the men and women involved in the alternative hard rock scene. The author focuses on this sizable section of rock music both because it is widely inclusive of men and women and because it explicitly adopted feminism as its point of departure from mainstream music. Schippers uses the innovative term gender maneuvering to explain her observations that gender and sexuality are negotiated and always changing features of social relations.

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The Freedom to Remember

Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction

Rutgers University Press

The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. The narratives at the center of this book include: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J. California Cooper’s Family, and Lorene Cary’s The Price of a Child.

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The Art of History

African American Women Artists Engage the Past

Rutgers University Press

In this lively and engaging book, Lisa Gail Collins examines the work of contemporary African American women artists. Her study comes at a time when an unprecedented number of these artists—photographers, filmmakers, painters, installation and mixed-media artists—have garnered the attention and imagination of the art-viewing public. To better understand the significance of this particular historical moment in American visual arts, Collins focuses on four problems that recur when these artists confront their histories: the documentation of truth; the status of the black female body; the relationship between art and cultural contact and change; and the relationship between art and black girlhood. 

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Strangers in the Land

Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925

Rutgers University Press

Higham's work stands as the seminal work in the history of American nativism. The work is a careful, well-documented study of nationalism and ethnic prejudice, and chronicles the power and violence of these two ideas in American society from 1860 to 1925.

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Representations of the Post/Human

Monsters, Aliens, and Others in Popular Culture

Rutgers University Press

Microchips. Genetic modification of plants. Cloning. Advances in technology promise to shape our lives more profoundly than ever before. Exciting new discoveries in reproductive, genetic, and information technologies all serve to call into question the immutability of the boundaries between humans, animals, and machines. The category of the “posthuman” reflects the implications of such new technologies on contemporary culture, especially in their capacity to reconfigure the human body and to challenge our most fundamental understandings of human nature.

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Montclair Art Museum

Selected Works

Rutgers University Press

 The Montclair Art Museum — heralded by Art and Antiques as “ . . . a model of the best that America’s regional museums have to offer today” — has been a significant visual arts center for more than eighty-five years. Established in 1914 as the Garden State’s first public art museum with the vision and generosity of community leaders and pioneering collectors of American and native American Art, the Museum’s holdings have become an important cultural repository both for New Jersey and the nation. Many devotees of American art have enjoyed the Museum’s individual works at different exhibits around the country. This volume combines Native and other American art within a range of artistic media in provocative and insightful ways, and its commentaries reflect the careful scholarship and commitment to public education for which the Museum is well known.

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What Every College Student Should Know

How to Find the Best Teachers and Learn the Most from Them

Rutgers University Press

Students do months of research before choosing just the right college, but once theyre on campus, how many of them actually research the professors who are teaching their classes? To optimize your college education you need to find your schools best teachers but how? What Every College Student Should Know is a guide to discovering the best teachers at your school and learning everything you can from them. Here, the unique writing combination of a professor and a student provides you with perspectives from both sides of the equation.

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The Pursuit of Pleasure

Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London

Rutgers University Press

Illustrated with contemporary prints and drawings, The Pursuit of Pleasure is a rich analysis of public space at the birth of the modern metropolis.

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The Democracy Owners' Manual

A Practical Guide to Changing the World

Rutgers University Press

Newcomers to advocacy work will find Jim Shultz’s book an invaluable treasure chest of ideas and stimulating stories to help them tackle the issues they care about. Veterans of public advocacy and activism will find the book to be a valuable source for fresh ideas and an indispensable tool for teaching and training others in the art of social activism. The book also uniquely lends itself for university courses in political science, public administration, social work, public health, environmental studies, and other disciplines that touch on public policy and political change.

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Origins of Psychopathology

The Phylogenetic and Cultural Basis of Mental Illness

Rutgers University Press

In Origins of Psychopathology, Horacio Fábrega Jr. employs principles of evolutionary biology to better understand the significance of mental illness. He explores whether what psychiatry has categorized as mental disorders could have existed during earlier phases of human evolution.

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Governing Pleasures

Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815-1914

Rutgers University Press

How did concepts of sex & gender, race & class, home & empire develop in Victorian society? Here, Sigel charts the evolution of these ideas through the medium of pornography (PN). She details its prod'n., dist'n., & cons'n. in Great Britain between Waterloo & WWI. Sigel examines how this medium changed over time to explore key questions: How did Brit. society define PN? Who had access to it? What did people make of its ideas? And how did these messages affect sexual & social dynamics? PN offered people a way to make sense of sexuality & its relationship to the world during the transition of Brit. society from an era of radical politics to one of consumer pleasures. Illustrated with literary & visual materials drawn from public & private collections.

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Fragments of Culture

The Everyday of Modern Turkey

Rutgers University Press

Fragments of Culture explores the evolving modern daily life of Turkey. Through analyses of language, folklore, film, satirical humor, the symbolism of Islamic political mobilization, and the shifting identities of diasporic communities in Turkey and Europe, this book provides a fresh and corrective perspective to the often-skewed perceptions of Turkish culture engendered by conventional western critiques. In this volume, some of the most innovative scholars of post 1980s Turkey address the complex ways that suburbanization and the growth of a globalized middle class have altered gender and class relations, and how Turkish society is being shaped and redefined through consumption. They also explore the increasingly polarized cultural politics between secularists and Islamists, and the ways that previously repressed Islamic elements have reemerged to complicate the idea of an "authentic" Turkish identity. Contributors examine a range of issues from the adjustments to religious identity as the Islamic veil becomes marketed as a fashion item, to the media's increased attention in Turkish transsexual lifestyle, to the role of folk dance as a ritualized part of public life.

Fragments of Culture shows how attention to the minutiae of daily life can successfully unravel the complexities of a shifting society. This book makes a significant contribution to both modern Turkish studies and the scholarship on cross-cultural perspectives in Middle Eastern studies.

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Dust

The Archive and Cultural History

Rutgers University Press

In this witty, engaging, and challenging book, Carolyn Steedman has produced an original-and sometimes irreverent-investigation into how modern historiography has developed. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History considers our stubborn set of beliefs about an objective material world-inherited from the nineteenth century-with which modern history writing and its lack of such a belief, attempts to grapple. Drawing on her own published and unpublished writing, Carolyn Steedman has produced a sustained argument about the way in which history writing belongs to the currents of thought shaping the modern world.

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Death by Fire

Sati, Dowry Death, and Female Infanticide in Modern India

Rutgers University Press

The ancient practice of sati — the self-immolation of a woman on her husband’s funeral pyre — was outlawed by the British administration in India in 1829, and sati was widely believed to have died out. The fate of 18-year-old Roop Kanwar changed that perception. Mala Sen explores the reality of life and death for women in modern India in a study that is both illuminating and terrifying.

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Upheaval from the Abyss

Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science Revolution

Rutgers University Press

Upheaval from the Abyss spans a 130-year period, beginning with the early, backbreaking efforts to map the depths during the age of sail; continuing with improvements in research methods spurred by maritime disaster and war; and culminating in the publication of the first map of the world’s ocean floor in 1977. The author brings this tale to life by weaving through it the personalities of the scientists-explorers who struggled to see the face of the deep, and reveals not only the facts of how the ocean floor was mapped, but also the human dimensions of what the scientists experienced and felt while in the process.

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Screening Asian Americans

Edited by Peter X Feng
Rutgers University Press

This innovative essay collection explores Asian American cinematic representations historically and socially, on and off screen, as they contribute to the definition of American character. The history of Asian Americans on movie screens, as outlined in Peter X. Feng’s introduction, provides a context for the individual readings that follow. Asian American cinema is charted in its diversity, ranging across activist, documentary, experimental, and fictional modes, and encompassing a wide range of ethnicities (Filipino, Vietnamese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese). Covered in the discussion are filmmakers—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ang Lee, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Wayne Wang—and films such as The Wedding Banquet, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, and Chan is Missing.
 

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Growing Up Protestant

Parents, Children and Mainline Churches

Rutgers University Press

In this book, Margaret Lamberts Bendroth examines the lives and beliefs of white, middle-class mainline Protestants (principally northern Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Congregationalists) who are theologically moderate or liberal. Mainliners have pursued family issues for most of the twentieth century, churning out hundreds of works on Christian childrearing. Bendroth’s book explores the role of family within a religious tradition that sees itself as America’s cultural center. In this balanced analysis, the author traces the evolution of mainliners’ roles in middle-class American culture and sharpens our awareness of the ways in which the mainline Protestant experience has actually shaped and reflected the American sense of self.

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Erotic Morality

The Role of Touch in Moral Agency

Rutgers University Press

Erotic Morality examines the role of the senses and the emotions, especially touch, in moral reflection and agency. Moving from organic disorders such as autism to culturally induced feeling disorders found in dualistic philosophy, pornography, and some forms of sadomasochism, Linda Holler argues that reclaiming the sentient awareness necessary to our physical and moral well-being demands healing the places where we have become numb or hypersensitive to touch.

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Desolate Landscapes

Ice-Age Settlement in Eastern Europe

Rutgers University Press

John F. Hoffecker provides an overview of Pleistocene or Ice-Age settlement in Eastern Europe with a heavy focus on the adaptations of Neanderthals and modern humans to this harsh environmental setting. Hoffecker argues that the Eastern European record reveals a stark contrast between Neanderthals and modern humans with respect to technology and social organization, both of which are tied to the development of language and the use of symbols. Desolate Landscapes will bring readers up to date with the rich archaeological record in this significant region and its contribution to our understanding of one of our most important events in human evolution - the rise of modern humans and the extinction of the Neanderthals. 

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Controlling Corporeality

The Body and the Household in Ancient Israel

Rutgers University Press

In this beautifully written book, Jon L. Berquist guides the reader through the Hebrew Bible, examining ancient Israel’s ideas of the body, the unstable roles of gender, the deployment of sexuality, and the cultural practices of the time. Conducting his analysis with reference to contemporary theories of the body, power, and social control, Berquist offers not only a description and clarification of ancient Israelite views of the body, but also an analysis of how these views belong to the complex logic of ancient social meanings.

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Citizens of Fear

Urban Violence in Latin America

Edited by Susana Rotker
Rutgers University Press

Citizens in Latin American cities live in constant fear, amidst some of the most dangerous conditions on earth. In that vast region, 140 thousand people die violently each year, and one out of three citizens have been directly or indirectly victimized by violence. Citizens of Fear, in part, assembles survey results of social scientists who document the pervasiveness of violence. But the numbers tell only part of the story.

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Genomic Imprinting and Kinship

Rutgers University Press

Until twenty years ago we had no idea which of our genes came from our father and which came from our mother. We took it for granted that our genes expressed themselves identically and that there was a 50/50 chance that they came from either parent. We also assumed that they worked in cooperation with each other. The biggest breakthrough in genetics in the past two decades has been the discovery of genomic imprinting, which allows us to trace genes to the parent of origin. David Haig has been at the forefront of theorizing these developments. He argues that these "paternally and maternally active genes" comprise less than one percent of our total gene count and are far from being cooperative. In fact, they have been shown to be in competition with one another.

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Film and Nationalism

Edited by Alan Williams
Rutgers University Press

Film and Nationalism examines the ways in which cinema has been considered an arena of conflict and interaction between nations and nationhood. Each section of this volume explores a crucial aspect of the discussion. Is film an effective form of national propaganda? Are films losing the very notion of nationhood, in favor of a generalized, "global" cinematographic culture? What is films influence over "national character"? In addition, the volume explores the cultural and economic interactions between developed and underdeveloped countries. How have third world nations defined themselves in relation to hegemonic first world cultures, and how have their relations been changed through the dissemination of Western films? Throughout, Alan Williams chooses essays that enhance our understanding of how films help shape our sense of nationhood and self.

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Double-Take

A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology

Rutgers University Press

Brings together a comprehensive selection of texts from the Harlem Renaissance-a key period in the literary and cultural history of the United States. Offers a unique, balanced collection of writers--men and women, gay and straight, familiar and obscure. Arranged by author, rather than by genre, this anthology includes works from major Harlem Renaissance figures as well as often-overlooked essayists, poets, dramatists, and artists. Contains works from a wide variety of genres--poetry, short stories, drama, and essays, as well as biographical sketches of the authors. Includes most pieces in their entirety. Also includes artwork and illustrations, many of which are from original journals and have never before been reprinted, and song lyrics to illustrate the interrelation of various art forms.

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The Right to Die with Dignity

An Argument in Ethics, Medicine, and Law

Rutgers University Press

There are few issues more divisive than what has become known as “the right to die.” One camp upholds “death with dignity,” regarding the terminally ill as autonomous beings capable of forming their own judgment on the timing and process of dying. The other camp advocates “sanctity of life,” regarding life as intrinsically valuable, and that should be sustained as long as possible. Is there a right answer? Raphael Cohen-Almagor takes a balanced approach in analyzing this emotionally charged debate, viewing the dispute from public policy and international perspectives.

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Remaking Chinese America

Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940-1965

Rutgers University Press

In Remaking Chinese America, Xiaojian Zhao explores the myriad forces that changed and unified Chinese Americans during a key period in American history. Prior to 1940, this immigrant community was predominantly male, but between 1940 and 1965 it was transformed into a family-centered American ethnic community. Zhao pays special attention to forces both inside and outside of the country in order to explain these changing demographics. She scrutinizes the repealed exclusion laws and the immigration laws enacted after 1940. Careful attention is also paid to evolving gender roles, since women constituted the majority of newcomers, significantly changing the sex ratio of the Chinese American population.

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Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Ninteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean

Rutgers University Press

Catholicism has long been recognized as one of the major forces shaping the Hispanic Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic) during the nineteenth century, but the role of Protestantism has not been fully explored. Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean traces the emergence of Protestantism in Cuba and Puerto Rico during a crucial period of national consolidation involving both social and political struggle.

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Dreaming Equality

Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil

Rutgers University Press

Robin E. Sheriff spent twenty months in a primarily black shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, studying the inhabitants’s views of race and racism. How, she asks, do poor African Brazilians experience and interpret racism in a country where its very existence tends to be publicly denied? How is racism talked about privately in the family and publicly in the community—or is it talked about at all?

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Aftershocks of the New

Feminism and Film History

Rutgers University Press

The beginning of this century has brought with it a host of assumptions about the newness of our technologies, globalized economies, and transnational media practices. Our own time is a period marked by experiences of fragmentation, sensation, and shock. The essays here are joined by a common concern to chart another side to modernity—precisely after the shock of the new—when the new ceases to be shocking, and when the extraordinary and the sensational become linked to the boring and the everyday. Patrice Petro explores how the mechanisms of modernism, German cinema, and feminist film theory have evolved, and she discusses the directions in which they are headed.

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The Black Press

New Literary and Historical Essays

Edited by Todd Vogel
Rutgers University Press

The Black Press progresses chronologically from slavery to the impact and implications of the Internet to reveal how the press’s content and its very form changed with evolving historical and cultural conditions in America. The first papers fought for rights for free blacks in the North. The early twentieth-century black press sought to define itself and its community amidst American modernism. Writers in the 1960s took on the task of defining revolution in that decade’s ferment. It was not been until the mid-twentieth century that African American cultural study began to achieve intellectual respectability.

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Greetings from New Jersey

A Postcard Tour of the Garden State

Rutgers University Press

Greetings from New Jersey is the first book to look back at the postcards that have played a part in New Jerseys travel industry. Helen-Chantal Pike organizes her book by the states six official tourism regions¾ Gateway, Skylands, the Delaware River, the Southern Shore, Greater Atlantic City, and the Shore. Through her section introductions and lengthy captions, she offers a lively history of each region in general and each postcard in particular. Her final chapter describes the history of postcard use from 1893, and details the different collectible genres of postcards. Loaded with full-color reproductions of vintage postcards, Greetings from New Jersey will interest all residents, visitors, and historians.

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American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences

Styles of Affiliation

Rutgers University Press

During the nineteenth century, the content and institutional organization of the sciences evolved dramatically, altering the public's understanding of knowledge. As science grew in importance, many women of letters tried to incorporate it into a female worldview. Nina Baym explores the responses to science displayed in a range of writings by American women. Conceding that they could not become scientists, women insisted, however, that they were capable of understanding science and participating in its discourse. They used their access to publishing to advocate the study and transmission of scientific information to the general public.

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Women, Gender, and Human Rights

A Global Perspective

Rutgers University Press

Women, Gender, and Human Rights is the first collection of essays that encompass a global perspective on women and a wide range of issues, including political and domestic violence, education, literacy, and reproductive rights. Most of the articles were written expressly for this volume by internationally known experts in the fields of government, bioethics, medicine, public affairs, literature, history, anthropology, law, and psychology.

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The Evolution Wars

A Guide to the Debates

Rutgers University Press

The Evolution Wars draws on history, science, and philosophy to examine the development of evolutionary thought through the past two and a half centuries. It focuses on the debates that have engaged, divided, and ultimately provoked scientists to ponder the origins of organisms—including humankind—paying regard to the nineteenth-century clash over the nature of classification and debates about the fossil record, genetics, and human nature. Much attention is paid to external factors and the underlying motives of scientists.

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Some of Us

Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era

Rutgers University Press

Some of Us is a collection of memoirs by nine Chinese women who grew up during the Mao era. All hail from urban backgrounds and all have obtained their Ph.D.s in the United States; thus, their memories are informed by intellectual training and insights that only distance can allow. Each of the chapters—arranged by the age of the author—is crafted by a writer who reflects back to that time in a more nuanced manner than has been possible for Western observers. The authors attend to gender in a way that male writers have barely noticed and reflect on their lives in the United States.

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Old Paint

A Medical History of Childhood Lead-Paint Poisoning in the United States to 1980

Rutgers University Press

Old Paint documents the history of lead-paint poisoning in the United States and the evolving responses of public health officials and the lead-paint industry to this hazard up to 1980, by which time lead had been banned from gasoline and paint. Peter C. English traces lead poisoning from a rare, but acute problem confined to a small group of children to the discovery by the end of the 1940s of the dangers of the crumbling lead-painted interiors of inner-city dwellings. He draws on a wide range of primary materials not only to illuminate our understanding of how this health hazard changed over time, but also to explore how diseases are constructed and evolve.

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