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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amigas y Amantes (Friends and Lovers) explores the experiences of sexually nonconforming Latinas in the creation and maintenance of families. It is based on forty-two in-depth enthnographic interviews with women who identify as lesbian, bisexual, or queer (LBQ) and draws from fourteen months of participant observation at LBQ Latina events that Katie L. Acosta conducted in 2007 and 2008 in a major northeast city. The book examines how LBQ Latinas manage loving relationships with the families who raised them, and with their partners, their children, and their friends.

Life on the Malecón is a narrative ethnography of the lives of street children and youth living in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and the non-governmental organizations that provide social services for them. Writing from the perspective of an anthropologist working as a street educator with a child welfare organization, Jon M. Wolseth follows the intersecting lives of children, the institutions they come into contact with, and the relationships they have with each other, their families, and organization workers.

The Glass Slipper is about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Susan Ostrov Weisser compares diverse narratives, historical and contemporary from high literature and “low” genres, discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Victorian women’s magazines, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; romantic movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories.

Traditionally, the history of the birth control movement has been told through the accounts of the leaders, organizations, and legislation that shaped the campaign. Historians have recently begun examining the cultural work of printed media, including newspapers, magazines, and novels in fostering support for the cause. This book builds upon this new scholarship on the women’s reproductive health movement to explore the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by twentieth-century birth control advocates to promote family planning in the U.S. and internationally.

This visual representation of New Mexico and its people is a fascinating study of how the region has been depicted in film from the dawn of early filmmaking and the silent era to today. Meléndez examines such films as Adventures in Kit Carson Land, The Rattlesnake, and Red Sky at Morning, among others, that have both educated and misinformed us about a state in our own midst that remains a “distant locale” to most white Americans.

Robert Samuels explains why universities cost so much and offers solutions as to how they can reduce their expenses by concentrating on their core mission of instruction and research. Not only can tuition be reduced, but public universities and colleges can be made free by allocating existing resources to provide quality undergraduate education and diminishing the amount of money spent in the areas of athletics, administration, and public research.

The essays in this unique book argue for the inclusion of race as a social construction in the design of large-scale data collection efforts and how scientists must utilize race in the context of specific research questions. This landmark collection concludes on a prescriptive note, providing an arsenal of multidisciplinary, conceptual, and methodological tools for studying race specifically within the context of health inequalities.

The essays in this unique book argue for the inclusion of race as a social construction in the design of large-scale data collection efforts and how scientists must utilize race in the context of specific research questions. This landmark collection concludes on a prescriptive note, providing an arsenal of multidisciplinary, conceptual, and methodological tools for studying race specifically within the context of health inequalities.

Killer Fatexamines how and why obesity emerged as a major public health concern and national obsession in recent years. Using primary sources and in-depth interviews, Boero enters the world of bariatric surgeries, Weight Watchers, and Overeaters Anonymous to show how common expectations of what bodies are supposed to look like help to determine what sorts of interventions and policies are considered urgent in containing this new kinds of disease.

Discipline and Indulgence demonstrates how American popular culture during the early Cold War (1947–1964), especially college football, addressed the nation’s postwar affluence and consumerism and their effects on the population by integrating men into the economy of the Cold War as workers, warriors, and consumers. It assesses the period’s institutional linkage of sport, higher education, media and militarism and finds connections of contemporary sport media to today’s War on Terror.