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 2,311-2,340 of 2,552 items.

The Birth of Whiteness

Race and the Emergence of United States Cinema

Rutgers University Press

As indelible components of the history of the United States, race and racism have permeated nearly all aspects of life: cultural, economic, political, and social.  In this first anthology on race in early cinema, fourteen scholars examine the origins,  dynamics, and ramifications of racism and Eurocentrism and the resistance to both during the early years of American motion pictures. Any discussion of racial themes and practices in any arena inevitably begins with the definition of race. Is race an innate and biologically determined "essence" or is it a culturally constructed category? Is the question irrelevant?  Perhaps race exists as an ever-changing historical and social formation that, regardless of any standard definition, involves exploitation, degradation, and struggle. 

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Hair Raising

Beauty, Culture, and African American Women

Rutgers University Press

We all know there is a politics of skin color, but is there a politics of hair?In this book, Noliwe Rooks explores the history and politics of hair and beauty culture in African American communities from the nineteenth century to the 1990s. 

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Vitamania

Vitamins in American Culture

Rutgers University Press

Vitamania tells how and why vitamins have become so important to so many Americans. Rima Apple examines the claims and counterclaims of scientists, manufacturers, retailers, politicians, and consumers from the discovery of vitamins in the early twentieth century to the present. She reveals the complicated interests--scientific, professional, financial--that have propelled the vitamin industry and its would-be regulators. From early advertisements linking motherhood and vitamin D, to Linus Pauling's claims for vitamin C, to recent congressional debates about restricting vitamin products, Apple's insightful history shows the ambivalence of Americans toward the authority of science. She also documents how consumers have insisted on their right to make their own decisions about their health and their vitamins.

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Telling Women's Lives

The New Biography

Rutgers University Press

Placing herself in the avid reader’s chair, Linda Wagner-Martin writes about women’s biography from George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Mead, and even to Cher and Elizabeth Taylor. Along the way, she looks at dozens of other life stories, probing at the differences between biographies of men and women, prevailing stereotypes about women’s lives and roles, questions about what is public and private, and the hazy margins between autobiography, biography, and other genres. In quick paced and wide-ranging discussions, she looks at issues of authorial stance (who controls the narrative? who chooses which story to tell?), voice (is this story told in the traditional objective tone? and if it is, what effect does that telling have on our reading?), and the politics of publishing (why aren’t more books about women’s lives published? and when they are, what happens to their advertising budgets?).
Telling Women’s Lives is the first overview of the writing and the history of biographies about women. The book is a must read for anyone who loves reading biographies, particularly biographies of women.

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Delaware Diary

Episodes in the Life of a River

Rutgers University Press

Frank Dale, who has lived near the Delaware all of his life, has burrowed into old newspaper files and archives and traced down eyewitnesses of the life of the Delaware. Rivers were the highways of choice in early America, and the Delaware presented much greater challenges than the nearby Hudson. Filled with rapid, falls, and inconvenient rocks, the river refused to accommodate itself easily to the needs of commerce. The rivermen who ventured down the Delaware on massive timber rafts or Durham boats filled with iron ore earned a deserved reputation for pure ornery courage. 

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Black Film/White Money

Rutgers University Press

Why are there so few Black filmmakers who control their own work? Why are there scarcely any Black women behind the camera? What happens to Black filmmakers when they move from independent production to the mainstream? What does it mean for whites to control Black images and their distribution globally? And, was it always so? Could it be different? In this vivid portrait of their historic and present-day contributions, Jesse Rhines explores the roles African American men and women have played in the motion picture business from 1915 to the present. He illuminates his discussion by carefully linking the history of early Black filmmaking to the current success of African American filmmakers and examines how African Americans have been affected by changes that have taken place in the industry as a whole.

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A Theory of Religion

Rutgers University Press

In this unique text, Stark and Bainbridge begin with basic statements about human nature and, employing the principles of logic and philosophy, build toward increasingly complex propositions about societies and their religious institutions. They provide a rigorous yet flexible sociological theory of religion as well as a general sociological model for deriving macrolevel theory from microlevel evidence.

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A Naturalist Along the Jersey Shore

Rutgers University Press

Come for a journey along the Jersey shore with naturalist and ecologist Joanna Burger! In these deeply felt, closely observed personal essays, Burger invokes the intertwined lives of naturalist and wild creatures at the ever-changing edge of ocean and land. Discover with her the delicate mating dances of fiddler crabs, the dangers to piping plovers, the swarming of fish communities into the bays and estuaries, the trilling notes of Fowler's toads, and the subtle green-grays of salt marshes.

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Sixties Going on Seventies

Rutgers University Press

Nora Sayre guides us through our nation’s transformation during an explosive decade. She explores the landscapes of the era--student strikes at Harvard and Yale, anti-war veterans, John Birchers, Timothy Leary, Yippies and Aquarians, utopias gone wrong, George McGovern, Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon, George Wallace, black anger in Watts, the media at work, policemen in college, off-off Broadway, the 1972 Democratic and Republican Conventions, and the rebirth of feminism. 

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Rocking the Boat

Union Women's Voices, 1915-1975

Rutgers University Press

Rocking the Boat is a celebration of strong, committed women who helped to build the American labor movement. Through the stories of eleven women from a wide range of backgrounds, we experience the turmoil, hardships, and accomplishments of thousands of other union women activists through the period spanning the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the McCarthy era, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement. These women tell powerful stories that highlight and detail women's many roles as workers, trade unionists, and family members. They all faced difficulties in their personal lives, overcame challenges in their unions, and individually and collectively helped improve women's everyday working lives.

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What Does the Lord Require?

How American Christians Think about Economic Justice

Rutgers University Press

In this engaging and lively book, Stephen Hart paints a rich portrait of how everyday Christians connect their faith to political issues like economic equality, government intervention, and the rights of private enterprise. Drawing on interviews with forty-seven "ordinary" Christians--Roman Catholics, Evangelical and Pentecostal Protestants, mainline Protestants, and others--Hart argues that Christians do not always learn a conservative political perspective from their religion, as is often the stereotype. Rather, Christian traditions provide a reservoir of resources that supports such varied values as equality, community, individuality, and freedom. Hart profiles these individuals and allows them to explain in their own words how they use these values to formulate views on social justice issues, supporting political positions ranging from left to right. Hart also provides a new way of understanding how religion affects public discourse. This first paperback edition includes a new analysis of recent trends in religious politics, including the religious right and religiously-based movements for peace and justice.

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"Bad Girls"/"Good Girls"

Women, Sex, and Power in the Nineties

Rutgers University Press

Agents or victims, liberated or oppressed, "bad girls" or "good girls." What do these labels mean and do they further or hinder women's progress? How are today's visions of female sexuality and power like or unlike those of the past? How do younger women define feminism? Isn't the personal still political?

Dismayed by the media's tendency to reduce the feminist enterprise to labels and superstars, Donna Perry and Nan Bauer Maglin decided to find out what a diverse group of feminists think about women, sex, and power in the nineties. The result is a provocative and varied collection of twenty-four essays by second- and third-wave feminists; artists and activists; professors and graduate students; professional journalists and just-published writers; mothers and daughters. By focusing on society's construction, containment, and exploitation of female sexuality, in particular, these essays offer fresh perspectives on women's agency or lack of it.

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The Second Creation

Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics

Rutgers University Press

The Second Creation is a dramatic--and human--chronicle of scientific investigators at the last frontier of knowledge. Robert Crease and Charles Mann take the reader on a fascinating journey in search of "unification" with brilliant scientists such as Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, and many others. They provide the definitive and highly entertaining story of the development of modern physics, and the human story of the physicists who set out to find the "theory of everything." 

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The New Winter Soldiers

GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era

Rutgers University Press

Richard Moser uses interviews and personal stories of Vietnam veterans to offer a fundamentally new interpretation of the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement. Although the Vietnam War was the most important conflict of recent American history, its decisive battle was not fought in the jungles of Vietnam, or even in the streets of the United States, but rather in the hearts and minds of American soldiers. To a degree unprecedented in American history, soldiers and veterans acted to oppose the very war they waged. Tens of thousands of soldiers and veterans engaged in desperate conflicts with their superiors and opposed the war through peaceful protest, creating a mass movement of dissident organizations and underground newspapers.

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Cornerstones of Peace

Jewish Identity Politics and Democratic Theory

Rutgers University Press

In Cornerstones of Peace, Marla Brettschneider skillfully combines a lucid review of contemporary Liberal political theory and its understanding of the role of groups in the political process, a sophisticated analysis of Hobbesian philosophy, and a rich history of “alternative” Jewish activist groups like Breira and Americans for Peace Now (APN) to ask: What can we learn about identity and democratic theory from the changes that have taken place in the Jewish community?

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From Dessalines to Duvalier

Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti

Rutgers University Press

In this lively, provocative, and well-documented history, David Nicholls discusses the impact of "color" on the political relationship between the black majority and the mulatto elite during almost two hundred years of Haitian history.

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The Maltese Falcon

John Huston, director

Edited by William Luhr
Rutgers University Press

Few films have had the impact or retained the popularity of The Maltese Falcon. An unexpected hit upon its release in 1941, it helped establish the careers of John Huston and Humphrey Bogart while also helping both to transform the detective genre of movies and to create film noir. This volume includes an introduction by its editor and a shot-by-shot continuity of the film, as well as essays on its production, on literary and film traditions it drew upon, and on its reputation and influence over the last half century.

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Silent Film

Edited by Richard Able
Rutgers University Press

Silent Film offers some of the best recent essays on silent cinema, essays that cross disciplinary boundaries and break new ground in a variety of ways. Some focus on the "materiality" of early cinema: the color processes used in printing nitrate film stocks, the choreographic styles of film acting, and the wide range of sound accompaniment. Others focus on questions of periodicity and nationality: on the shift from a "cinema of attractions" to a "classical narrative cinema," on the relationship between changes in production and those in exhibition, and on the historical specificity of national cinemas. 

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Medicine and Western Civilization

Rutgers University Press

This fabulous anthology is sure to be a core text for history of medicine and social science classes in colleges across the country. In order to demonstrate how medical research has influenced Western cultural perspectives, the editors have collected original works from 61 different authors around nine major themes (among them "Anatomy and Destiny," "Psyche and Soma," and "The Construction of Pain, Suffering, and Death"). The authors range from Aristotle, the Bible, and Louis Pasteur, to Masters and Johnson, Ernest Hemingway, and Simone de Beauvoir. The primary sources selected to illustrate the themes are well chosen and contrast with each other nicely. However, the brief background material for the selections center around the authors and offer little or no discussion about the selections' relevance to the topics at hand. This book would be best read in a class or group where the texts' meaning in relation to each other can be discussed, but the book can stand alone if the reader is prepared to do some critical thinking.

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Women's Medicine

A Cross-Cultural Study of Indigenous Fertility Regulation

Edited by Lucile F Newman
Rutgers University Press

The contributions to this book ask why indigenous methods of fertility control, often of questionable effectiveness, remain in widespread use in underdeveloped and developing countries. They concentrate on the cultural factors that affect women’s decisions about their own fertility, especially in societies which offer both folk and modern methods. The contributers are Elois Ann Berlin, Eugene B. Brody, C.H. Browner, Pamela A. Hunte, Setha M. Low and Bruce C. Newman, Lucile F. Newman, Chor-Swang Ngin, and Soheir Sukkary-Stolba

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Movies & Mass Culture

Rutgers University Press

Movies and Mass Culture looks at the ways in which American identity shapes and is shaped by motion pictures. Movies serve not only as texts that document who we think we are or were, but they also reflect changes in our self-image, tracing the transformation from one kind of America to another. They assist audiences in negotiating major changes in identity, carrying them across difficult periods of cultural transition so that a more or less coherent national identity again emerges. Films thus help their viewers to span the gaps and fissures that cultural changes cause, allowing passage over any disjointedness that in some way might disrupt our sense of what we believe in as a nation. This volume examines this process, illustrating the ways in which films aided America's transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy; from a nation of producers to one of consumers; and from a community of individuals to a mass society.

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Mothers and Daughters of Invention

Notes for a Revised History of Technology

Rutgers University Press

Written in an engaging and accessible style, this first broadly focused compensatory history of technology not only includes women's contributions but begins the long-overdue task of redefining technology and significant technology and to value these contributions correctly. Stanley traces women's inventions in five vital areas of technology worldwide--agriculture, medicine, reproduction, machines, and computers--from prehistory (or origin) forward, profiling hundreds of women, both famous and obscure. The author does not ignore theory. She contributes a paradigm for male takeovers of technologies originated by women.

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Masterpiece Theatre

An Academic Melodrama

Rutgers University Press

Masterpiece Theatre is the latest--and funniest--round in the culture wars. No member of Modern Language Association, lover of literature and literacy, cultural pundit, or talking head should be without a copy.

  

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Disease and Class

Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society

Rutgers University Press

Until a decade ago, the conquest of tuberculosis seemed one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. The resurgence of TB in the wake of AIDS has to be understood, Georgina Feldberg argues, in the context of decisions the U.S. Public Health Service made, beginning in the 1930s, to prevent TB through improved hygiene and long-term treatment with medications, rather than program of BCG vaccination that Canada and many other countries adopted. Feldberg's aim is not to judge which was the right choice, but to explain why the U.S. rejected the vaccine and the consequences of that choice. 

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Who Succeeds in Science?

The Gender Dilemma

Rutgers University Press

This highly readable analysis of the gender dimension in scientific careers––and its clear-headed advice––will be of great interest to everyone considering a career in science as well as to teachers, parents, and active scientists. Academics in sociology of science and gender studies as well as decision-makers in the areas of human resources and science policy will also welcome its discussions of general issues and policy recommendations.

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Sandino's Daughters

Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle

Rutgers University Press

Sandino's Daughters, Margaret Randall's conversations with Nicaraguan women in their struggle against the dictator Somoza in 1979, brought the lives of a group of extraordinary female revolutionaries to the American and world public. The book remains a landmark. Now, a decade later, Randall returns to interview many of the same women and others. In Sandino's Daughters Revisited, they speak of their lives during and since the Sandinista administration, the ways in which the revolution made them strong––and also held them back. Ironically, the 1990 defeat of the Sandinistas at the ballot box has given Sandinista women greater freedom to express their feelings and ideas. 

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Power and Everyday Life

The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Rutgers University Press

This important new work is a study of the everyday lives of the inhabitants of São Paulo in the nineteenth century. Full of vivid detail, the book concentrates on the lives of working women--black, white, Indian, mulatta, free, freed, and slaves, and their struggles to survive.

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Nursing Wounds

Nurse Practitioners, Doctors, Women Patients, and the Negotiation of Meaning

Rutgers University Press

Nursing Wounds takes us into the examining rooms of nurse practitioners and doctors to listen to how health care professionals and women patients communicate. The nurse practitioners, unlike the doctors, go beyond the medical problem to ask about the social context of the patients' lives. In these exchanges the doctors insist on reinforcing both their professional status and dominant cultural assumptions about women. While the nurse practitioners sometimes do this, they also distance themselves from their professional identities, respond to their patients woman to woman, and undermine traditional understandings about gender arrangements.These differences have important consequences for the delivery of health care.       

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School Talk

Gender and Adolescent Culture

Rutgers University Press

Donna Eder is Professor of Sociology at Indiana University. She has written numerous journal articles and book chapters in the areas of gender, schooling, and women's culture. Her current research involves in-depth interviews with storytellers from different cultures to better understand the role of storytelling in teaching about social differences and social dynamics.Eder has a deep interest in the sociology of education—and in community. Her first major research study of adolescent peer culture, SCHOOL TALK: GENDER AND ADOLESCENT CULTURE, led to her creating a service project in the Bloomington schools, Kids Against Cruel Treatment in Schools. KACTIS became an essential part of her first service-learning course, Social Context of Schooling. 

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The Myth of Scientific Literacy

Rutgers University Press

Shamos advocates instead a practical science education curriculum that grants the impossibility of every American learning enough science to make independent judgments about major scientific issues. Rather than giving children the heavy diet of scientific terms and facts they now get, he would emphasize: an appreciation of science as an ongoing cultural enterprise;  an awareness of technology's impact on one's personal health, safety, and surroundings; and the need to use experts wisely in resolving science/society issues.

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