Luis F. B. Plascencia’s Disenchanting Citizenship explores two interrelated issues: U.S. citizenship and the Mexican migrants’ position in the United States. Through an extensive and multifaceted collection of interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, ethno-historical research, and public policy analysis, Plascencia probes the ways in which citizenship discourses are understood and taken up by individuals. The book uncovers citizenship’s root as a Janus-faced  construct that encompasses a simultaneous process of inclusion and exclusion. This notion of citizenship is mapped on to the migrant experience, arguing that the acquisition of citizenship can lead to disenchantment with the very status desired. Using the experience of Mexican migrants, Plascencia expands the understanding of the dynamics of U.S. citizenship as a form of membership and belonging.

Narrative Landmines explores how rumors fit into and extend narrative systems and ideologies, particularly in the context of terrorism, counter-terrorism, and extremist insurgencies.  Beyond face-to-face communication, this book also addresses the role of new and social media in the creation and spread of rumors. Its concern is to foster a more sophisticated understanding of how oral and digital cultures work alongside economic, diplomatic, and cultural factors that influence the struggles between states and non-state actors in the proverbial battle of hearts and minds.  By providing fresh data from Singapore, Iraq, and Indonesia, the authors make a compelling argument for understanding rumors in these contexts as “narrative IEDs”, weapons that can aid the extremist cause.

In The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking, Lisa Jarvinen focuses specifically on how Hollywood lost a lucrative international Spanish-speaking audience between 1929 and 1939, along with talent it had carefully nurtured in the United States. Employing studio records from Warner Bros., Fox Films, and United Artists, Jarvinen examines the lasting effects of the transition to sound on both Hollywood practices and cultural politics in the Spanish-speaking world. Using case studies based on archival research in the United States, Spain, and Mexico, she shows how language, as a key marker of cultural identity, led to new expectations from audiences and new possibilities for film producers.

In The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking, Lisa Jarvinen focuses specifically on how Hollywood lost a lucrative international Spanish-speaking audience between 1929 and 1939, along with talent it had carefully nurtured in the United States. Employing studio records from Warner Bros., Fox Films, and United Artists, Jarvinen examines the lasting effects of the transition to sound on both Hollywood practices and cultural politics in the Spanish-speaking world. Using case studies based on archival research in the United States, Spain, and Mexico, she shows how language, as a key marker of cultural identity, led to new expectations from audiences and new possibilities for film producers.

In Main Street and Empire, Ryan Poll argues that the small town, as evoked by the image of “Main Street,” is not a relic of the past but rather a metaphorical screen upon which the nation’s “everyday” stories and subjects are projected on both a national and global level. It brings together a wide range of literary, cultural, and political texts to examine how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century.

In Emily Dickinson in Love, John Evangelist Walsh provides the first full-length work to solve this puzzle based wholly on documented facts and the poet’s own writings. He identifies the lover as Otis Lord, a friend of the poet’s father, and portrays the broad dimensions of their clandestine thirty-year romance.

Becoming Mexipino is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California from 1900 to 1965. Rudy Guevarra traces their earliest interactions under Spanish colonialism, when they did not strongly identify as Mexican or Filipino, to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century San Diego as well as in other locales throughout California and the Pacific West Coast.

The Malthusian Moment locates the origins of modern American environmentalism in a twentieth-century revival of interest in Thomas Malthus’s theory of population growth, shedding new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the role of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the Civil Rights and women’s movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the “New Right.”

The Malthusian Moment locates the origins of modern American environmentalism in a twentieth-century revival of interest in Thomas Malthus’s theory of population growth, shedding new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the role of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the Civil Rights and women’s movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the “New Right.”

Overpotential charts the twists and turns in the ongoing quest to create the perfect fuel cell. By exploring the gap between the theory and practice of fuel cell power, Matthew N. Eisler opens a window into broader issues in the history of science, technology, and society after the Second World War, including the sociology of laboratory life, the relationship between academe, industry, and government in developing advanced technologies, the role of technology in environmental and pollution politics, and the rise of utopian discourse in science and engineering.

Many Americans were surprised following the attacks of 9/11 at how easily the United States embraced torture as well as the supposedly lesser evil of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Extraordinary rendition—sending people captured in the “war on terror” to nations long counted among the world’s worst human rights violators—hid from the public eye cruel and bloody interrogations. In Rendition to Torture, Alan W. Clarke explains how the United States adopted torture as a matter of official policy; how and why it turned to extraordinary rendition as a way to outsource more extreme, mutilating forms of torture; and outlines the steps the United States took to hide its abuses.

In the 1990s, American civil society got upended and reordered as many social, cultural, political, and economic institutions were changed forever. Pretty People examines a wide range of Hollywood icons who reflect how stardom in that decade was transformed as the nation itself, signaling significant changes to familiar ideas about gender, race, ethnicity, age, class, sexuality, and nationality.

Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano continue the standard of excellence set in Volumes I and II of this extraordinary anthology. Volume III provides the most compelling and wide-ranging selection available of American poetry from 1950 to the present. Its contents are just as diverse and multifaceted as America itself and invite readers to view the world of poetry in the larger historical context of American culture. Nearly three hundred poems allow readers to explore canonical works by such poets as Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath, as well as song lyrics from such popular musicians as Bob Dylan and Queen Latifah.

The decade from 2000 to 2009 is framed, at one end, by the traumatic catastrophe of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and, at the other, by the election of the first African-American president of the United States. In between, the U.S. and the world witnessed the rapid expansion of new media and the Internet, such natural disasters as Hurricane Katrina, uprisings around the world, and a massive meltdown of world economies. In American Cinema of the 2000s, essays from ten top film scholars examine such popular series as the groundbreaking Matrix films and the gripping adventures of former CIA covert operative Jason Bourne; new, offbeat films like Juno; and the resurgence of documentaries like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. 

In The Battle for the B’s, Blair Davis analyzes how B-films were produced, distributed, and exhibited in the 1950s and demonstrates the new possibilities that existed for low-budget filmmaking at a time when many in Hollywood abandoned the B’s. B-movies innovated such industrial components as demographic patterns and marketing approaches, created such genres as science fiction and the teen-oriented films of the early and mid fifties, and led to the emergence of “New Poverty Row,” a movement now known as underground cinema.

In Honor Bound, David Leverenz argues that in the United States, the rise and decline of white people’s racial shaming reflects the rise and decline of white honor. To explore the implications of this argument, he casts an unusually wide net, from ancient and modern cultures of honor to social,  political, and military history to American literature and popular culture.

Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial trends in genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history.  Essays by scholars across a wide range of disciplines—biology, history, cultural studies, law, medicine, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology—explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history.

The New Jew in Film is grounded in the study of over three hundred films from Hollywood and beyond. Nathan Abrams explores these new and changing depictions of Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism, providing a wider, more representative picture of this transformation. Chapters explore masculinity, femininity, passivity, agency, and religion as well as a departure into new territory—including bathrooms and food.  Abrams reveals how the representation of the Jew is used to convey confidence or anxieties about Jewish identity and history as well as questions of racial, sexual, and gender politics.