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.
Killing with Kindness
Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs
Set in Haiti following the 2004 coup and enhanced by research carried out after the 2010 earthquake, Killing with Kindness analyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and their relationships with local communities. It offers rich ethnographic comparisons of two Haitian women’s NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention and examines participation and autonomy as well as donor policies that inhibit these goals.
Killing with Kindness
Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs
Set in Haiti following the 2004 coup and enhanced by research carried out after the 2010 earthquake, Killing with Kindness analyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and their relationships with local communities. It offers rich ethnographic comparisons of two Haitian women’s NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention and examines participation and autonomy as well as donor policies that inhibit these goals.
The Leading Man
Hollywood and the Presidential Image
The Leading Man analyzes the evolution and the significance of the interaction between Hollywood and Washington to trace the history of the cinematic presidential image. Burton W. Peretti shows that traditional practices of presidential image making go back to George Washington, and then places the fourteen presidents of the cinematic era, from Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama, at the center of the story. He demonstrates how movies have been the main force in promoting image and drama over the substance of governing.
Learning the Hard Way
Masculinity, Place, and the Gender Gap in Education
In Learning the Hard Way, Edward W. Morris explores and analyzes detailed ethnographic data to examine the purported gender gap between boys and girls in educational achievement at two low-income high schools—one rural and predominantly white, the other urban and mostly African American. He explains how race, class, and geographic location combine to influence and complicate the construction of gender identities in high school students and affect the respective academic performance of the students he studied.
Learning the Hard Way
Masculinity, Place, and the Gender Gap in Education
In Learning the Hard Way, Edward W. Morris explores and analyzes detailed ethnographic data to examine the purported gender gap between boys and girls in educational achievement at two low-income high schools—one rural and predominantly white, the other urban and mostly African American. He explains how race, class, and geographic location combine to influence and complicate the construction of gender identities in high school students and affect the respective academic performance of the students he studied.
Real Gangstas
Legitimacy, Reputation, and Violence in the Intergang Environment
Real Gangstas relies on the tradition of urban ethnography to provide a unique and intimate look at the lives of street gang members in Indianapolis, IN. For eighteen months, Timothy R. Lauger interviewed and observed a mix of fifty-five gang members, former gang members, and non-gang street offenders, many from the “Down for Whatever Boyz.” Through this research, Lauger is able to understand and explain the reasons for gang membership, including a chaotic family life, poverty, and the need for violent self-assertion in order to foster the creation of a personal identity.
The New Anthology of American Poetry
Beginnings to the Present
Now available for the first time as a three-volume set, The New Anthology of American Poetry offers the most compelling and wide-ranging selection of poems from the nation’s beginnings to the present day. Extensive introductions, notes, and footnotes make the great poems of each period fully accessible.
Reading Embodied Citizenship
Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic
Death of the Moguls
The End of Classical Hollywood
Death of the Moguls is a detailed assessment of the last days of the “rulers of film” from Hollywood’s classical era. Using rare, behind-the-scenes stills, Wheeler Winston Dixon details such game-changing factors as the de Havilland decision, the Consent Decree, how the moguls dealt with their collapsing empires in the era of television, and the end of the conventional studio assembly line to create a compelling narrative of the end of the studio system at each of the Hollywood majors.
Academic Motherhood
How Faculty Manage Work and Family
Academic Motherhood tells the story of one hundred women who are both professors and mothers and how they navigated their professional lives at different career stages. It is based on a longitudinal study that asks how women faculty on the tenure track manage work and family in their early careers when their children are under the age of five, and again in mid-career when their children are older. Policy recommendations that support faculty with children and mechanisms for problem-solving at personal, departmental, institutional, and national levels are provided.
Chosen Capital
The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism
At what moments and in what ways did Jews play a central role in American capitalism? Chosen Capital addresses this question head-on by exploring Jews’ impact on American capitalism as both its architects—through their participation in specific industries—and as its most vocal critics through their support of unionism and radical political movements. Essays are contributed by a stellar list of scholars.
Beyond Health, Beyond Choice
Breastfeeding Constraints and Realities
Beyond Health, Beyond Choice is a multidisciplinary collection of essays written by thirty-seven contributors that examines the role of feminist theory in the promotion of breastfeeding by public health authorities. Essays are arranged thematically and consider breastfeeding in relation to health care; work and family; embodiment (specifically breastfeeding in public); economic and ethnic factors; guilt; violence; and commercialization.
The Health Care Safety Net in a Post-Reform World
The Health Care Safety Net in a Post-Reform World examines how national health care reform will impact safety net programs that serve low-income and uninsured patients. With contributions from leading health care scholars, it is the first comprehensive assessment of the safety net following enactment of national health care reform.
The Sovereignty of Quiet
Beyond Resistance in Black Culture
African American culture is often considered expressive, dramatic, and even defiant, and this matrix has dominated our understanding of black communities and texts. In The Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores how a different kind of expressiveness, from protests to readings to landmark texts, as represented in the idea of quiet could change common conceptions and provide a more nuanced view of black culture.
Moving Color
Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism
Moving Color is the first book-length study of the beginnings of color cinema. It traces the legacy of color history from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the cinema of the early twentieth century and explores the implications of this genealogy on experimental and contemporary digital cinemas.
We Are in This Dance Together
Gender, Power, and Globalization at a Mexican Garment Firm
We Are in This Dance Together uses in-depth interviews with over sixty workers, managers, and policy makers to document and analyze events leading up to the female-led factory strike in March 2001 at a high-end producer of men’s suits in Mexico and the strike’s aftermath—including harassment from managers, corrupt union officials and labor authorities, and violent governor-sanctioned police actions. It illustrates how the women’s shared identity as workers and mothers, deserving of dignity, respect, and a living wage, became the basis for radicalization and led to further civic organizing against the state, the company, and the corrupt union to demand justice.
Treacherous Texts
An Anthology of U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946
The Case That Never Dies
The Lindbergh Kidnapping
Since its original publication in 2004, The Case That Never Dies has become the standard account of the Lindbergh Kidnapping. Now, in a new afterword, Lloyd C. Gardner presents a surprise conclusion based on recently uncovered pieces of evidence that were missing from the initial investigation as well as an evaluation of Charles Lindbergh’s role in the search for the kidnappers. Out of the controversies surrounding the actions of Colonel Lindbergh, Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the New Jersey State Police, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Gardner presents a well-reasoned argument for what happened on the night of March 1, 1932.
The End of American Lynching
The End of American Lynching questions how we think about the dynamics of lynching, what lynchings mean to the society in which they occur, how lynching is defined, and the circumstances that lead to lynching. Ashraf H. A. Rushday looks at three lynchings over the course of the twentieth century—one in Coatesville, Pennsylvania in 1911, one in Marion, Indiana in 1930, and one in Jasper, Texas in 1998—to see how Americans developed two distinct ways of thinking and talking about this act before and after the 1930s.
Down to Earth
Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures
Though satellites are now used by a wide array of entertainment, communications, and information technologies, from radio stations to GPS devices, the business of making, launching, and maintaining satellites is still shrouded in mystery. Down to Earth presents the first comprehensive overview of the geopolitical maneuvers, financial investments, scientific innovations, and ideological struggles that take place behind the scenes of this fascinating industry.