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 2,481-2,520 of 2,552 items.

Gender/Body/Knowledge

Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing

Rutgers University Press

The essays in this interdisciplinary collection share the conviction that modern western paradigms of knowledge and reality are gender-biased. Some contributors challenge and revise western conceptions of the body as the domain of the biological and 'natural,' the enemy of reason, typically associated with women.

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Daughters of Independence

Rutgers University Press

Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi explore the connection in India between gender and caste, and gender and class. They ask whether the subordination of women has diminished as India moves from a caste to a class structure, and what effect colonization had on the status of women in India. Focusing on educated, professional women, the authors look at the particular experiences of 120 women they interviewed, and also interpret the larger patterns of social relations that emerge from the interviews. These sensitive stories are told with an eloquence that is often moving and inspiring.

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"The Amber Gods" and Other Stories by Harriet Prescott Spofford

Rutgers University Press

A widely held vision of nineteenth-century American women is of lives lived in naive, domestic peace— the girls of Little Women making do until father comes home from the war. Nothing could be less true of Harriet Prescott Spofford's stories. In fact, her editor at the Atlantic Monthly at first refused to believe that an unworldly woman from New England had written them. Her style, though ornate by our 20th century standards, adds to its atmosphere. 

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Women as Healers

Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Rutgers University Press

In Women as Healers, thirteen contributors explore the intersection of feminist anthropology and medical anthropology in eleven case studies of women in traditional and emergent healing roles in diverse parts of the world. In a spectrum of healing roles ranging from family healers to shamans, diviner-mediums, and midwives, women throughout the world pursue strategic ends through healing, manipulate cultural images to effect cures and explain misfortune, and shape and are shaped by the social and political contexts in which they work. 

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Unnatural Causes

The Three Leading Killer Diseases in America

Rutgers University Press

The Three Leading Killer Diseases in America.

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Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy

Rutgers University Press

Penny Van Esterik takes the reader beyond the Nestle boycott and the activist campaigns against infant-formula manufacturers to the issues underlying the controversy. She shows how the controversy is embedded in the problem of urban poverty, the empowerment of women, the medicalization of infant feeding, and the commoditization of infant foods. She argues that the choice between bottle feeding and breast feeding has significant implications for developing countries. Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy raises a host of important questions: why has there been no consistent feminist position? How did infant feeding become medicalized in developing and developed countries? What mechanisms encourage the technology and taste transfer necessary for the expansion of bottle feeding?

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Dangerous by Degrees

Rutgers University Press

Dangerous by Degrees vividly describes and analyzes women's experience at Oxford shortly before and after the First World War. The Somerville experience, in its simultaneous rejection and embrace of women's traditional place, stands as a prototype of the ambivalent, confusing, and conflicted stories which the women who lived that experience subsequently tell in their fictions.

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Coming of Age in New Jersey

College and American Culture

Rutgers University Press

Coming of Age is about college as students really know it and--often--love it. To write this remarkable account, Michael Moffatt did what anthropologists usually do in more distant cultures: he lived among the natives. His findings are sometimes disturbing, potentially controversial, but somehow very believable. Coming of Age is a vivid slice of life of what Moffatt saw and heard in the dorms of a typical state university, Rutgers, in the 1980s. It is full of student voices: naive and worldy-wise, vulgar and polite, cynical, humorous, and sometimes even idealistic. But it is also about American culture more generally: individualism, friendship, community, bureaucracy, diversity, race, sex, gender, intellect, work, and play. As an example of an ethnography written about an anthropologist's own culture, this book is an uncommon one. As a new and revealing perspective on the much-studied American college student, it is unique.

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Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968

The Great Refusal

Rutgers University Press

Originally published in 1982, Wini Breines's classic work now includes a new preface in which she reassesses, and for the most part affirms, her initial views of the movement. She argues that the movement remains effective in the midst of radical changes in activist movements. Breines also summarizes and evaluates the new and growing scholarship on the 1960s. Her provocative analysis of the New Left remains important today.

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Chimes at Midnight

Orson Welles, Director

Rutgers University Press

This volume offers a complete continuity script of Chimes at Midnight (1996), including its famous battle sequence. Each shot is described in detail and is keyed to the original Shakespearian sources, thus making the volume an invaluable guide to Welles as an adaptor and creator of texts. The first complete transcription of the continuity script of Chimes is accompanied by the editor's critical introduction on Welles's transformation of Shakespeare; a special interview with Keith Baxter, one of the film's principal actors, which discusses its production history; reviews and articles; and a biographical sketch of Welles, a filmography, and a bibliography.

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Poverty and Society

The Growth of the American Welfare State in International Comparison

Rutgers University Press

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Frances Burney

The Life in the Works

Rutgers University Press

Treating Frances Burney (1752-1840) with the seriousness usually reserved for later novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Margaret Anne Doody combines biographical narrative with informed literary criticism as she analyzes not only Burney's published novels, but her plays, fragments of novels, poems, and other works never published. Doody also draws upon a mine of letters and diaries for detailed and sometimes surprising biographical information. Bringing a novelist's perspective to her material, in this 1989 book Doody shows an appreciation of the many dimensions of a predecessor's writings and she tells her story with force and conviction.

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One Family, Two Worlds

An Italian Family's Correspondence Across the Atlantic, 1901-1922

Edited by Samuel L. Baily
Rutgers University Press

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Bringing Up Baby

Howard Hawks, Director

Edited by Gerald Mast
Rutgers University Press

Bringing Up Baby (1938) is the essence of thirties screwball comedy. It is also quintessential Howard Hawks, treating many of the director's favorite themes, particularly the loving war between the sexes. Bringing Up Baby features Katharine Hepburn as a flaky heiress and Cary Grant as an absentminded paleontologist, roles in which they come into their own as stars and deliver particularly fine comic performances. Pauline Kael has called the film the "American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration comedy." The comparison is based on the quick repartee and witty dialogue, a hallmark of Hawks's work and well conveyed here by Gerald Mast's transcription from the screen.

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'The Lamplighter' by Maria Susanna Cummins

Edited by Nina Baym
Rutgers University Press

The Lamplighter was the first novel by twenty-seven-year-old Maria Susanna Cummins. It propelled her into a prominence that continued until her early death at the age of thirty-nine. A novel of female development, The Lamplighter is a woman's version of the quest story. Its heroine, Gerty, comes on the scene as a child abandoned in the slums of Boston. Rescued by the kindly lamplighter Trueman Flint, she learns to meet life with courage and honesty. The novel touched the hearts, validated the ideals, and assuaged the anxieties of a huge readership, and it remained continuously in print until the 1920s.

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Structural Criminology

Rutgers University Press

Focusing on a variety of criminal activities, the author applies his structural criminology to the relationships of power which operate in a range of institutional spheres. He looks at the relationship between class and criminality, showing the inadequacy of a simple causal link and discussing the prevalence of "white collar" crime. 

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Brazilian Women Speak

Contemporary Life Stories

Rutgers University Press

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Ritual Healing in Surburban America

Rutgers University Press

"One of the more provocative studies of why middle America is making increasing use of ritual healing and what that choice tells us of problems with biomedical care in technological institutions. . . . A welcome addition to anthropological studies of ritual healing in other societies, and it illuminates a huge component of our health care system that is poorly understood."--Arthur Kleinman, M.D., Harvard University "An all too rare volume, namely a scholarly work on the practice of healing in suburban or what we might call middle-class America. McGuire, perhaps uniquely, has set out the religious or 'ritual' healing beliefs and practices that are usually strictly segregated and kept apart. . . . Anyone who takes seriously the need to understand 'healing' . . . should obtain this book."--Health and Healing "The power of the book is in the larger cultural analysis it offers . . . a valuable contribution to medical sociology."--Sociological Analysis "This welcome study of nonmedical healing among upper-middle-class and middle-class persons in Essex County, New Jersey, clearly shows how individuals become attracted to and influenced by alternative healing techniques."--Choice "Develops an innovative sociological approach to the study of alternative healing practices through a methodologically sound qualitative study. . . . The high quality of research and conceptualization and the meticulous documentation of the relevant literature make [this book] essential reading for those interested in the sociology and anthropology of religion and of medicine, and in the study of health and illness in contemporary America."--Contemporary Sociology "A major contribution."--The Christian Century "The remarkable strength of this book about the exotic in the commonplace is that it demonstrates both that ritual healing is widespread in the heartland of medical technology, and that the wide variety of ritual healing practices are based on similar structures."--Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry

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Inuit Youth

Growth and Change in the Canadian Arctic

Rutgers University Press

Ethnography of Inuit adolescence describing the life of young people between the ages of 9 and 20 in the community of Holman Island, NWT. Describes the day-to-day activities of Inuit youth, their time playing sports and games, attending school, engaging in sexual play, simply "hanging out" with friends and peers

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The Hidden Hand

Or, Capitola the Madcap by E. D. E. N. Southworth

Edited by Joanne Dobson
Rutgers University Press

E.D.E.N. Southworth was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the nineteenth century and her Capitola Black, or Black Cap - a cross-dressing, adventure-seeking girl-woman - was so well-loved that the book was serialized three times between 1859 and 1888 and was dramatized in forty different versions.  There are bandits, true-loves, evil men, long-lost mothers, and sweet women friends in Capitola's future - not to mention thunder storms, kidnap attempts, and duels. The pace is fast, the action wonderfully unbelievable. This is escape literature at its nineteenth-century best, with a woman at its center who makes you feel strong, daring, and reckless.

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Aboriginal Adolescence

Rutgers University Press

This analysis of female adolescence in an Australian Aboriginal community focuses on adolescent sexual behavior, marriage, and the conflict between adult expectations and adolescent behavior in these domains.

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Black Pearls

Blues Queens of the 1920s

Rutgers University Press

Throughout the 1920s, in tents, theaters, dance halls and cabarets, and on "race" records, black American women captivated large audiences with their singing of the blues. University of Maryland professor Harrison examines the subjects and texts of their songs, the toll these performers paid for their right to be heard, and what they did to transform a folk tradition into a popular art. She describes the singing and lifestyles of Sippie Wallace, Victoria Spivey, Edith Wilson and Alberta Hunter to illustrate how they introduced a new model of the black woman: assertive and sexy, gutsy yet tender, bereft but not downtrodden, exploited but not resentful, independent yet vulnerable. The author shows that their choice of performing style, inflection, emphasis and improvisation provided a perspective and expressiveness that profoundly affected later American popular music. -- Publishers Weekly

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Hidden Arguments

Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy

Rutgers University Press

In this provocative book, Sylvia Tesh shows how "politics masquerades as science" in the debates over the causes and prevention of disease. Tesh argues that ideas about the causes of disease which dominate policy at any given time or place are rarely determined by scientific criteria alone. In a final chapter, Tesh urges scientists to incorporate egalitarian values into their search for the truth, rather than pretending science can be divorced from that political ideology.

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Alternative Alcott

Rutgers University Press

The discovery in recent years of Louisa May Alcott's pseudonymous sensation stories has made readers and scholars increasingly aware of her accomplishments beyond her most famous novel, Little Women, one of the great international best-sellers of all time. This anthology brings together for the first time a variety of Louisa May Alcott's journalistic, satiric, feminist, and sensation texts. Elaine Showalter has provided an excellent introduction and notes to the collection.

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Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard, Director

Edited by Dudley Andrew
Rutgers University Press

Breathless, a low-budget film, came to be regarded as one of the major accomplishments of the French New Wave cinema of the early sixties. It had a tremendous influence on French filmmakers and on world cinema in general. Beyond its significance in film history, it was also a film of considerable cultural impact. In Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard captured the spirit of a disillusioned generation and fashioned a style, which drew on the past, to parade that disillusionment.

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Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives

Women in Science, 1789-1979

Rutgers University Press

An international group of historians of science discuss a wide range of European and American women scientists--from early nineteenth-century English botanists to Marie Curie to the twentieth-century theoretical biologist, Dorothy Wrinch. 

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The Mirage of Health

Utopia, Progress, and Biological Change

Rutgers University Press

'Complete freedom from disease and from struggle is almost incompatible with the process of living, ' Rene Dubos asserted in this classic essay on ecology and health. All the accomplishments of science...

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La Strada

Federico Fellini, Director

Rutgers University Press

The performances by Giulietta Masina as the waif Gelsomina, Richard Basehart as the fool, and Anthony Quinn as the strongman Zampano, have been acclaimed for their power and sometimes ridiculed for their sentimentality. The debates over what these characters and the story represent, and the position of the film within the neorealist genre, continue today. This translation and critical edition of the continuity script for "La Strada" is a guide to the film. The notes to the shooting script enable the reader to reconstruct some of Fellini's changes while shooting the film. The edition also contains an introduction, which analyzes the work's place in film history and provides a number of articles on the film's production. Fellini's most interviews and statements on "La Strada" are included as well.

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Bible Believers

Fundamentalists in the Modern World

Rutgers University Press

Examines the daily life of the congregation of a Fundamentalist church in a suburb in the Northeast.

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To Be A Slave in Brazil

1550-1888

Rutgers University Press

This book places the slave in the center of the history not simply as a type of labor, but as an actor whose culture, actions and decisions influenced the operation of the system. It is written with verve and grace for a general readership.

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Papers of William Livingston

Papers of William Livingston, vol. 4

Rutgers University Press
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Madwives

Schizophrenic Women in the 1950s

Rutgers University Press
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American Mainline Religion

Its Changing Shape and Future

Rutgers University Press

American Mainline Religion provides a new "mapping" of the families of American religion and the underlying social, cultural, and demographic forces that will reshape American religion in the century to come. Going beyond the headlines in daily newspapers, Roof and McKinney document the decline of the Protestant establishment, the rise of a more assimilated and public-minded Roman Catholicism, the place of black Protestantism and Judaism, and the resurgence of conservative Protestantism as a religious and cultural force.

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Hope Leslie

Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts

Rutgers University Press

Hope Leslie (1827), set in the seventeenth-century New England, is a novel that forced readers to confront the consequences of the Puritans’ subjugation and displacement of the indigenous Indian population at a time when contemporaries were demanding still more land from the Cherokees, the Chickasaws, and the Choctaws.

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Stories from the Country of Lost Borders by Mary Austin

Edited by Marjorie Pryse
Rutgers University Press

Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain (1903) and Lost Borders (1909), both set in the California desert, make intimate connections between animals, people, and the land they inhabit. For Austin, the two indispensable conditions of her fiction were that the region must enter the story "as another character, as the instigator of plot," and that the story must reflect "the essential qualities of the land."

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Culture Builders

A Historical Anthropology of Middle Class Life

Rutgers University Press

Culture Builders deals primarily with the ways in which ideas about the good and proper life are anchored in the trivialities and routines of everyday life: in the sharing of a meal, in holiday-making, and in the upbringing of children.   .

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The White Plague

Tuberculosis, Man and Society

By Jean Dubos; Foreword by David Mechanic; Introduction by Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz
Rutgers University Press

DuBos et. al. examine the social aspects of the TB epidemic, along with some of the biological factors. They show how TB was romaticized, how it was portrayed as a demon coming to rob the healthy of life, and how it sparked scientific invention - in particular the stethescope. The introduction is wonderful as it lays out the basic parts of the book.

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Rashomon

Akira Kurosawa, Director

Edited by Donald Richie
Rutgers University Press

The sixth title in the Rutgers Film in Print Series and the first Japanese film, this volume brings together for the first time the full continuity script of Rashomon; an introductory essay by Donald Richie; the Akutagawa stories upon which the film is based; critical reviews and commentaries on the film; a filmography; and a bibliography. 

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George Overbury 'Pop' Hart

His Life and Art

Rutgers University Press

"[One] of the leading realist painters of the period to make his home... [in the Fort Lee area]... was George Overbury "Pop" Hart. Within a realistic, sometimes reportorial style, Hart was perhaps America's finest watercolorist, investigating life all over the world... as well as different parts of the United States - in a dashing style combining brilliant draftsmanship with broad, free-flowing washes of color."
-- William H. Gerdts, Painting and Sculpture in New Jersey

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History of the Byzantine State

Rutgers University Press

Succinctly traces the Byzantine Empire's thousand-year course with emphasis on political development and social, aesthetic, economic and ecclesiastical factors

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