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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 2,401-2,440 of 2,552 items.
Ethel Rosenberg
Beyond the Myths
Rutgers University Press
Ilene Philipson's biography of Ethel Rosenberg, only the second woman in U.S. history to be executed for treason, is now available in paperback for the first time.
Reworking Modernity
Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent
By Allan Pred and Michael Watts
Rutgers University Press
Using both grand conceptualizations and grounded case studies, Allan Pred and Michael Watts look at how people cope with and give meaning to capitalism and modernity in different times and places. As capital accumulation has grown and taken new forms, it has affected technology and labor relations which in turn have affected people's daily lives. These changes have not always been either welcome or easy. Pred and Watts focus on the symbolic discontent and cultural confrontations that accompany capitalism. They depict people struggling over the meaning of change in their lives and over new relations of power.
Beyond Geography
The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness
Rutgers University Press
First published in 1980, Beyond Geography continues to influence and impress its readers. This new edition, prepared for the Columbus quincentennial, includes a new introduction by T. H. Watkins and a new preface by the author. As the public debates Columbus's legacy, it is important for us to learn of the spiritual background of European domination of the Americas, for the Europeans who conquered the Americas substituted history for myth as a way of understanding life.
Jerseyana
The Underside of New Jersey History
By Marc Mappen
Rutgers University Press
In this collection of popular monthly columns, you will meet villains like Dutch Schultz, the mobster gunned down in a Newark gangland rubout, and heroes like Minerva Miller, a black woman who fought segregation at the turn of the century. There are famous events, like the explosion of Hindenburg, and obscure ones, like the assassination of the king of Italy by an anarchist from Paterson. There are amusing stories, like a buried treasure hoax in Morristown after the Revolutionary War, bizarre stories like the fact that the discoverer of New Jersey was allegedly devoured by cannibals, and dramatic stories, like the Jersey woman who survived Indian captivity.
Feminism and American Literary History
Essays
By Nina Baym
Rutgers University Press
Bodies may be currently fashionable in social and feminist theory, but their insides are not. Biological bodies always seem to drop out of debates about the body and its importance in Western culture. They are assumed to be fixed, their workings uninteresting or irrelevant to theory. Birke argues that these static views of biology do not serve feminist politics well. As a trained biologist, she uses ideas in anatomy and physiology to develop the feminist view that the biological body is socially and culturally constructed.
Disability and the Displaced Worker
By Edward Yelin
Rutgers University Press
In this controversial new book, Yelin dispels both these views. He links the growing work disability problem to the decline of manufacturing employment which forced older workers with disabilities out of the laborforce as part of a first fired phenomenon. He further links disability to changes in all forms of work that made secure full-time employment with a wide range of benefits a thing of the past. Yelin argues that work disability policy and industrial policy must be joined to create a heightened demand for the skills and job experiences of older workers with disabilities. Employers must create work environments that provide persons with disabilities the flexlibility to fit their illnesses and work together.
African Encounters with Domesticity
Rutgers University Press
Anthropologists usually think of domesticity as the activities related to the home and the family. Such activities have complex meanings associated with the sense of space, work, gender, and power. The contributors to this interdisciplinary collection of papers examine how indigenous African notions of domesticity interact with Western notions to transform the meaning of such activities. They explore the interactions of notions of domesticity in a number of settings in the twentieth century and the kinds of personal troubles and public issues these interactions have provoked.
The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus
by his son Ferdinand
Edited by Benjamin Keen
Rutgers University Press
"The cornerstone of the history of the American continent." --Washington Irving This revised edition (originally published in 1959) of the famous biography of Columbus by his son Ferdinand was published to coincide with the Columbus quincentenary celebrations. Benjamin Keen's introduction traces the changing assessments of Columbus and his Discovery over almost five centuries, as reflected in the writings of historians, other social scientists, novelists, and poets, and shows how these assessments were influenced by varying political, social, and intellectual conditions. Keen has also revised his translation and notes to reflect new information and viewpoints. Ferdinand's book is a moving and personal document. Provoked in part by the Spanish Crown's attempts to diminish Columbus's role as discoverer, it reveals the restrained emotions of a loving son jealous of his father's honor. Ferdinand had access to all of his father's papers. At the age of thirteen, he accompanied Columbus on the last voyage and participated in many of the events he relates here. The narrative has the irrestible excitement of an adventure story: shipwreck, storms, and battles with mutineers or Indians. Ferdinand's imaginative insight into the many-faceted personality of the discoverer and his artistry with words make this biography, as Henry Vignaud has said, "the most important of our sources of information on the life of the discoverer of America." Benjamin Keen is Professor Emeritus of Latin American history at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of The Aztec Image in Western Thought (Rutgers University Press) and many other books.
Geography's Inner Worlds
Pervasive Themes in Contemporary American Geography
Rutgers University Press
Twenty-six leading American geographers meditate on the themes that unify contemporary geography. They emphasize the concepts and methods that run through all geography's sub-disciplines and give it a distinctive place among both the natural and social sciences.
The Essential Margaret Fuller by Margaret Fuller
Edited by Jeffrey Steele
Rutgers University Press
The leading feminist intellectual of her day, Margaret Fuller has been remembered for her groundbreaking work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which recharted the gender roles of nineteenth-century men and women. In this new collection, the full range of her literary career is represented from her earliest poetry to her final dispatch from revolutionary Italy. For the first time, the complete texts of Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Summer on the Lakes are printed together, along with generous selections from Fuller's Dial essays, New York essays, Italian dispatches, and unpublished journals.
Sadomasochism in Everyday Life
The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness
Rutgers University Press
Lynn Chancer advances the provocative thesis that sadomasochism is far more prevalent in contemporary societies like the United States than we realize. According to Chancer, sexual sadomasochism is only the best-known manifestation of what is actually a much more broadly based social phenomenon.
Poor and Pregnant in Paris
Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century
By Rachel Fuchs
Rutgers University Press
Rachel Fuchs shows how poor urban women in Paris negotiated their environment, and in some respects helped shape it, in their attempt to cope with their problems of poverty and pregnancy. She reveals who the women were and provides insight into the nature of their work and living arrangements. With dramatic detail, and drawing on actual court testimonies, Fuchs portrays poor women's childbirth experiences, their use of charity and welfare, and their recourse to abortion and infanticide as desperate alternatives to motherhood.
Fuchs also provides a comprehensive description of philanthropic and welfare institutions and outlines the relationship between the developing welfare state and official conceptions of womanhood. She traces the evolution of a new morality among policymakers in which secular views, medical hygiene, and a new focus on the protection of children replaced religious morality as a driving force in policy formation.
Combining social, intellectual, and medical history, this study of poor mothers in nineteenth-century society illuminates both class and gender relations in Paris, and illustrates the connection between social policy and the way ordinary women lived their lives.
American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century
Edited by Cheryl Walker
Rutgers University Press
This publication marks the first time in a hundred years that a wide range of nineteenth-century American women's poetry has been accessible to the general public in a single volume. Included are the humorous parodies of Phoebe Cary and Mary Weston Fordham and the stirring abolitionist poems of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, Maria Lowell, and Rose Terry Cooke. Included, too, are haunting reflections on madness, drug use, and suicide of women whose lives, as Cheryl Walker explains, were often as melodramatic as the poems they composed and published.
Ideas in Chemistry
A History of the Science
By David Knight
Rutgers University Press
In this unconventional history of chemistry, David Knight takes the refreshing view that the science has "its glorious future behind it." Today, chemistry is primarily a service science. In its very long history, though, chemistry has taken on very different roles. It has been the esoteric preoccupation of alchemists, the source of mechanist views of matter, the cornerstone of all other sciences and medicine, an archetype of experimental science, a science of revolutions, a science that imposed order on the material world, and a partner for physics, biology, and technology.
Dirt and Disease
Polio Before FDR
By Naomi Rogers
Rutgers University Press
Dirt and Disease is a social, cultural, and medical history of the polio epidemic in the United States. Naomi Rogers focuses on the early years from 1900 to 1920, and continues the story to the present. She explores how scientists, physicians, patients, and their families explained the appearance and spread of polio and how they tried to cope with it. Rogers frames this study of polio within a set of larger questions about health and disease in twentieth-century American culture.
Bio/Pics
How Hollywood Constructed Public History
Rutgers University Press
Bio/Pics is the first comprehensive study of a once important film genre, the biographical film. Using previously unavailable archival materials from Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros., MGM, and RKO studios, as well as censorship files from the Production Code Administration, George Custen argues that, through these films, Hollywood manufactured a nearly monochromatic view of history that was systematically distorted in regard to race, gender, nationality, and profession.
The Gang as an American Enterprise
Rutgers University Press
The Diamonds are a Chicago Street gang whose members are second-generation Puerto Rican youths. For Felix Padilla, the young men who join the Diamonds have made a logical choice. The gang is an alternative and dependable route to emotional support, self-respect, material goods, and upward mobility. Although Padilla shares the same ethnic background as the gang members and also grew up in a Chicago barrio, gaining the trust of the Diamonds was not easy. Eventually, however, he was able to get close enough to the members to interview and observe them. In his book, he shows us his decision to join the Diamonds, but does not paint a romanticized picture.
Nameless Diseases
Rutgers University Press
Nameless Diseases is compelling reading for anyone who has ever suffered from a medical mystery or seeks to understand the limitations of medical progress. The book includes a list of organizations devoted to education the public about commonly overlooked, unrecognized, rare, or misdiagnosed diseases.
First Find Your Child a Good Mother
The Construction of Self in Two African Communities
By Paul Riesman
Rutgers University Press
Through a systematic comparison of the life circumstances, child-rearing practices, and personalities of the FulBe and their former slaves, the RiimaayBe, this book develops an alternative theory of the way personality is formed in the Fulani society of West Africa. Riesman discusses the different characters, economies, and life plans of adult men and women of both groups, focusing on their ideas about the value of relatives. He further presents detailed observations of child-rearing practices, and concludes that the FulBe and RiimaayBe do not differ in these practices.
!["Incantations" and Other Stories](/assets/51db823b/9780813518282-270112-150x200.jpg ""Incantations" and Other Stories")
"Incantations" and Other Stories
An Important New Young Voice From India
Rutgers University Press
This first collection of fiction by Anjana Appachana provides stories that are beautifully written, the characters in them carefully and respectfully drawn. All the stories are set in India, but the people in them seem somehow displaced within their own society--a society in transition but a transition that does not come fast enough to help them. Appachana manages to capture the pervasive humor, poignancy, and self-delusion of the lives of the people she observes, but she does so without seeming to pass judgments on them.
The Anthropology of Self and Behavior
Rutgers University Press
Gerald Erchak's engaging book stakes out a position in the field of psychological anthropology. He addresses himself primarily to students in the field, and also to specialists who want a clearly presented approach. He argues that culture shapes the human self and behavior, and that the self and behavior are in turn adapted to culture. After defining basic concepts and debates in the field, Erchak takes up the topics of socialization, gender, sexuality, collective behavior, national character, deviance, behavioral disorder, cognition, and emotion (This new textbook contains more material about sexuality and gender than any other such text). For Erhcak, psychocultural adaptation is basic to human life. Culture plays a central role in our behavior and survival.
Framing Disease
Studies in Cultural History
Edited by Charles E. Rosenberg
Rutgers University Press
Many diseases discussed here—endstage renal disease, rheumatic fever, parasitic infectious diseases, coronary thrombosis—came to be defined, redefined, and renamed over the course of several centuries. As these essays show, the concept of disease has also been used to frame culturally resonant behaviors: suicide, homosexuality, anorexia nervosa, chronic fatigue syndrome. Disease is also framed by public policy, as the cases of industrial disability and of forensic psychiatry demonstrate. Medical institutions, as managers of people with disease, come to have vested interests in diagnoses, as the histories of facilities to treat tuberculosis or epilepsy reveal. Ultimately, the existence and conquest of disease serves to frame a society's sense of its own "healthiness" and to give direction to social reforms.
Cape May County, New Jersey
The Making of an American Resort Community
Rutgers University Press
Cape May County, at the southern tip of New Jersey, is one of America's most vibrant seashore resorts. Jeffery Dorwart has written a history of this community from its earliest settlement as an Atlantic maritime and farming frontier to its development today as a major regional tourist attraction. Dorwart also traces the origins of the seashore resort industry through the history of the city of Cape May, with its unique architectural styles and heritage, as well as the founding of Wildwood, Ocean City, and the newer resort towns. The story of how Cape May County responded to dramatic change not only illuminates the historical development of a New Jersey seashore community but also enhances our understanding of the American experience with changing social and economic conditions.
Women, Health, and Medicine in America
A Historical Handbook
Edited by Rima Apple
Rutgers University Press
The contributors to this volume have written a synthetic overview of the history of the health experience of women in America. We see women as actors and reactors, as healers and patients, as well as objects of medical and sociological research. The contributors emphasize the theme of medicalization, that is, the increasing reach of professional medicine into areas previously considered outside the domain of medical practice.
Harder than War
Catholic Peacemaking in Twentieth-Century America
Rutgers University Press
Patricia McNeal's comprehensive study of American Catholic peacemaking in the twentieth century documents the growth of pacifism and nonviolence within the American Catholic community, and assesses its impact on the church and the nation.
Calculating Visions
Kennedy, Johnson, and Civil Rights
Rutgers University Press
President Johnson would not compromise or equivocate on civil rights. John Kennedy of Massachusetts yielded to the pressure of events and became an ally of the movement, despite his fear that supporting civil rights could cost him votes in Congress and the nation. Lyndon Johnson of Texas, whom liberals loathed because he often gutted their prize legislation, became the committed champion of civil rights. Together their administrations became synonymous with the Second Reconstruction, though neither president had a prior record of strong civil rights commitment. Mark Stern explains how each man pursued power and votes, and ultimately redirected his own course of action and altered the nation's future.
The Justice Juggernaut
Fighting Street Crime, Controlling Citizens
Rutgers University Press
Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam
Short Stories by Caribbean Women
Edited by Carmen C Esteves and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
Rutgers University Press
Perhaps the most salient feature of the stories collected here is their presentation of the multiplicity of voices of Caribbean women: Parable II, No Dust is Allowed in This House, of Nuns and Punishment, Reminds us of the accomplishments of Caribbean women and promise of their writing.
The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso
Culture and History in the Upper Amazon
Rutgers University Press
In Blanca Muratorio's book, we are introduced to Rucuyaya Alonso, an elderly Quichua Indian of the Upper Ecuadorean Amazon. Alonso is a hunter, but like most Quichuas, he has done other work as well, bearing loads, panning gold, tapping rubber trees, and working for Shell Oil. He tells of his work, his hunting, his marriage, his fights, his fears, and his dreams. His story covers about a century because he incorporates the oral tradition of his father and grandfather along with his own memories. Through his life story, we learn about the social and economic life of that region.
Time and the Town
A Provincetown Chronicle
Rutgers University Press
Time and the Town was the last of Mary Heaton Vorse's books. It is about many things — a town and its people, the author, a certain kind of idyllic life. As much as anything else, it is the biography of the house Vorse bought in 1907 and lived in, off and on, for the next thirty-six years. The moods of the house mirrored her own. "Our houses," she wrote, "are our biographies, the stories of our defeats and victories."
Dharma's Daughters
Contemporary Indian Women and Hindu Culture
Rutgers University Press
Combining vivid description with thoughtful analysis, Sara Mitter reveals the condititions that shape women's lives in a traditional, patriarchal society. Mitter introduces us to diverse women who live and work in Bombay, from construction crew laborers and illiterate domestic workers who live in shanties, to well-educated, middle-class women. She also confronts the question of gender in Indian society, as she examines the influence of the Goddess mythology and the persistence of such normative models as Sita of the Ramayana in contemporary daily life. In a final section, Mitter tells of the increasing moblilization and resistance of Indian women since the 1970s. She looks at the nature of the conflicts and choices facing Indian women today, and the potential consequences for the India of tomorrow. Sara S. Mitter is an American writer based in Paris. Married to an Indian physicist, she has made many visits to India and has lived there for periods of her life.
A Cinema Without Walls
Movies and Culture after Vietnam
Rutgers University Press
"One of the sharpest and most productive analyses of our contemporaneity and the place of cinema within it and of our new historical relations as spectators to the imaginary universe on the movie screen. This is a study that will be of intense interest to film theorists and historians, cultural critics, mass media analysts, and anyone concerned with the complicated place of culture in our world today."--Dana Polan, English and Film Studies, University of Pittsburgh How have modern advertising techniques, the widespread use of VCRs, conglomerate takeovers of studios and film archives, cable TV, and media coverage of the Vietnam war changed the ways we watch movies? And how, in turn, have those different habits and patterns of viewing changed the ways in which films address their viewers? Drawing on a wide variety of American and European films and on many theoretical models, Timothy Corrigan investigates what he calls "a cinema without walls," taking a close look at particular films in order to see how we watch them differently in the post-Vietnam era. He examines cult audiences, narrative structure, genre films (road movies, in particular), and contemporary politics as they engage new models of film making and viewing. He thus provides a rare, serious attempt to deal with contemporary movies. Corrigan discusses filmmakers from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, including Martin Scorsese, Raoul Ruiz, Michael Cimino, Alexander Kluge, Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Frears, and Wim Wenders. He offers detailed analyses of films such as Platoon; Full Metal Jacket; 9-1/2 Weeks; The Singing Detective; Choose Me; After Hours; Badlands; The King of Comedy; Paris, Texas; and My Beautiful Laundrette. Orchestrating this diversity, Corrigan provides a critical basis for making sense of contemporary film culture and its major achievements. Timothy Corrigan is a professor of English and film at Temple University. He is the author of Writing about Film and New German Film: The Displaced Image, and editor of The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History.
Javanese Lives
Women and Men in Modern Indonesian Society
Rutgers University Press
Java is the most populous island of Indonesia, the fifth largest nation in the world. Yet despite its importance, outsiders know little about the country or its people. With the help of Indonesian students and scholars, Walter L. Williams has collected and translated the life histories of twenty-seven Javanese women and men. The people interviewed tell how they have coped with rapid social and economic change, and the transformation of their traditions. Williams has carefully selected the individuals he includes to represent a wide diversity of Java's people. We hear from fascinating men and women of various religions, from the rich and the poor, and from different ethnic backgrounds.
Imitation of Life
Douglas Sirk, Director
Edited by Lucy Fischer
Rutgers University Press
Douglas Sirk (Claus Detler Sierck) was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1900. He made nine films before fleeing Nazi Germany, eventually coming to America. His best-known films, made during the 1950s—all of them melodramas—were Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, The Tarnished Angels, Written on the Wind, and Imitation of Life (made in 1958, released in 1959). This volume includes the complete continuity script of the film, critical commentary and published reviews, interviews with the director, and a filmography and bibliography. It also includes an excellent introduction by Lucy Fischer.
Eskimo Essays
Yup'ik Lives and How We See Them
Rutgers University Press
This examination of the ideology and practice of the Yup'ik Eskimos of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta of southwestern Alaska includes traditions, ideology, relations with Christianity, warfare, use of animals, law and order, and the non-native perception of the Yup'ik way of life.
Not Yet Pregnant
Infertile Couples in Contemporary America
Rutgers University Press
Greil explores the effect that infertility has on men and women, and why men seem to accept infertility more easily than women. Women see infertility as failure, they see themselves as incomplete. Men, seeing infertility more frequently as something they cannot change, ask why worry about it? Greil also explores what effect these attitudes have on the couple's marriage, on relationships with their relatives, and with their fertile friends. Infertility is not just a medical problem, it is a personal and emotional problem that affects all other aspects of the couple's life. This is a thorough investigation of what fertility means to contemporary American couples.
The American Development of Biology
Edited by Jane Maienschein and Ronald Rainger
Rutgers University Press
The papers in this volume represent original work to celebrate the centenary of the American Society of Zoologists. They illustrate the impressive nature of historical scholarship that has subsequently focused on the development of biology in the United States.
By the Rivers of Babylon and Other Stories
By Daphne Patai
Rutgers University Press
These 11 short stories are for the most part highly moralistic, at their best arguing the strict Catholic tenets of faith; less successful are the author's anguished attempts to describe the artistic temperament. Tantalizing by the promise they show, the short narratives are unfleshed, lacking the spark of animation. As a collection, with an informative foreword by the author's close colleague, they supplement our scant knowledge of this scholar and social activist.
Science, American Style
Rutgers University Press
What is distinctive about American science?
For thirty years, Nathan Reingold has been exploring the character of science in the United States. His lively and influential essays look at the ways American science reflects our culture, history, politics, geography, and myths. He meditates on the growth of a scientific community and institutions in this country, American attitudes toward the uses of science, and the behavior of scientists and their chroniclers.
Rachel's Daughters
Newly Orthodox Jewish Women
Rutgers University Press
Debra Kaufman writes about ba'alot teshuva women who have returned to Orthodox Judaism, a form of Judaism often assumed to be oppressive to women. She addresses many of the most challenging issues of family, feminism, and gender. Why, she asks, have these women chosen an Orthodox lifestyle? What attracts young, relatively affluent, well-educated, and highly assimilated women to the most traditional, right-wing, patriarchal, and fundamentalist branch of Judaism? The answers she discovers lead her beyond an analysis of religious renewal to those issues all women and men confront in public and private life.
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