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 2,341-2,370 of 2,552 items.

"Tell Me a Riddle"

Tillie Olsen

Rutgers University Press

“Tell Me a Riddle” renders an unforgettable portrait of a working class couple when the gender determined differences in their experiences of poverty and familial life give rise to bitter conflict after almost four decades of marriage.  As she dies from cancer, Eva, the protagonist, recollects a revolutionary past that both critiques and offers hope for the present.

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American Childhood

Risks and Realities

Rutgers University Press

There is a mountain of statistics gathered about our children, but it is often hard to know what the numbers mean. To show how the statistics can both disguise and highlight problems, Dona Schneider alternates a discussion of the numbers with vivid encounters with individual children and adults. This book guides us through the morass of numbers bandied about to describe the state of America's children—what the numbers tell us and what they don't—and it offers a call for action. Comprehensive in its treatment of all groups of children and accessible in style, this book is essential for anyone concerned about children in American society.

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The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934

Rutgers University Press

"An important and well-documented account....an interesting case study in twentieth-century imperialism. Schmidt sees the occupation of Haiti as part of a general tendency in American foreign policy...Schmidt analyses in detail the mechanics of the invasion, and discusses the actions, attitudes, and policies of the  U.S. administration....A model of academic elegance." —Caribbean Studies

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Sold Separately

Children and Parents in Consumer Culture

Rutgers University Press

"A radical approach to children's TV. . . . Seiter argues cogently that watching Saturday cartoons isn't a passive activity but a tool by which even the very young decode and learn about their culture, and develop creative imagination as well. Bolstered by social, political, developmental, and media research, Seiter ties middle-class aversion to children's TV and mass-market toys to an association with the 'uncontrollable consumerism'––and hence supposed moral failure––of working class members, women, and 'increasingly, children.' . . . Positive guidance for parents uncertain of the role of TV and TV toys in their children's lives."––Kirkus Reviews

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Hives of Sickness

Public Health and Epidemics in New York City

Edited by David Rosner
Rutgers University Press

An 1865 report on public health in New York painted a grim picture of "high brick blocks and closely-packed houses . . . literally hives of sickness" propagating epidemics of cholera, smallpox, typhoid, typhus, and yellow fever, which swept through the whole city. In this stimulating collection of essays, nine historians of American medicine explore New York's responses to its public health crises from colonial times to the present. The essays illustrate the relationship between the disease environment of New York and changes in housing, population, social conditions, and the success of medical science, linking such factors to New York's experiences with smallpox, polio, and AIDS. The volume is essential reading for anyone interested in American public health and the social history of New York. The contributors are Ronald Bayer, Elizabeth Blackmar, Gretchen A. Condran, Elizabeth Fee, Daniel M. Fox, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Alan M. Kraut, Judith Walzer Leavitt, and Naomi Rogers. David Rosner is a professor of history at Baruch College and The Graduate School of the City University of New York. Robert R. Macdonald is the director of the Museum of the City of New York.

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Bodies of the Text

Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance

Edited by Ellen Goellner
Rutgers University Press

Dance and literary studies have traditionally been at odds: dancers and dance critics have understood academic analysis to be overly invested in the mind at the expense of body signification; literary critics and theorists have seen dance studies as anti-theoretical, even anti-intellectual.

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Aristotle's Physics

A Guided Study

By Joe Sachs and Aristotle; Translated by Joe Sachs
Rutgers University Press

Aristotle's Physics is one of the least studied "great books"--physics has come to mean something entirely different than Aristotle's inquiry into nature, and stereotyped Medieval interpretations have buried the original text. Sach's translation is really the only one that I know of that attempts to take the reader back to the text itself. -- Leon Cass, University of Chicago

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Frauen

German Women Recall the Third Reich

Rutgers University Press

What were the women of Germany doing during the Third Reich? What were they thinking? And what do they have to say a half century later?

In Frauen we hear their voices––most for the first time. Alison Owings interviewed and here records the words of twenty-nine German women who were there: Working for the Resistance. Joining the Nazi Party. Outsmarting the Gestapo. Disliking a Jewish neighbor. Hiding a Jewish friend. Witnessing "Kristallnacht." Witnessing the firebombing of Dresden. Shooting at Allied planes. Welcoming Allied troops. Being a prisoner. And being a guard. The women recall their own and others' enthusiasm, doubt, fear, fury, cowardice, guilt, and anguish.

Alison Owings, in her pursuit of such memories, was invited into the homes of these women. Because she is neither Jewish nor German, and because she speaks fluent colloquial German, many of the women she interviewed felt comfortable enough with her to unlock the past. What they have to say will surprise Americans, just as they surprised the women themselves.

Not since Marcel Ophuls's controversial film The Sorrow and the Pity have we been on such intimate terms with "the enemy." In this case, the story is that of the women, those who did not make policy but were forced to participate in its effects and to witness its results. What they did and did not do is not just a reflection on them and their country––it also leads us to question what actions we might have taken in their place. The interviews do not allow for easy, smug answers.


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Future Perfect

American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology

Rutgers University Press

This selection of unusual storeis by important American writers-Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Bellamy and Twain-and by less well-known tellers such as Ambrose Bierce, S. Weir Mitchell and Fitz-James O'Brien, challenges the commonly held belief that science fiction is a twenthiethcentury phenomenon, or that it began with Jule Verne and H,. G. Wells. Here are tales of marvelous inventions, automanta, biolgocial and psychological experiments, utopias, extra-sensory perception and time and space travel. Many of them have been out of print since before World War I, but they remain high in intrinsic interest of the general reader and for the specialist.

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Viewing Positions

Ways of Seeing Film

Edited by Linda Williams
Rutgers University Press

The essays in this volume represent some of the best new thinking about the crucial relations between visual representation in film and human subjectivity. No amount of empirical research into the sociology of actual audiences will displace the desire to speculate about the effects of visual culture, and especially moving images, on viewing subjects. These notions of spectatorship, however hypothetical, become extremely compelling metaphors for the workings of vision within the institution of cinema. Viewing Positions examines the tradition of a centered, unitary, distanced, and objectifying spectator's gaze; investigates the period when film spectatorship as an idea began; and analyses gender- and sexuality-based challenges to the homogeneous classical theory of spectatorship. It makes available critical understandings of spectatorship that have, until now, largely eluded cinema studies.

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Liberating Memory

Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness

Edited by Janet Zandy
Rutgers University Press

This is a book about working-class identity, consciousness, and self-determination. It offers an alternative to middle-class assimilation and working-class amnesia. The twenty-five contributors use memory--both personal and collective--to show the relationship between the uncertain economic rhythms of working-class life and the possibilities for cultural and political agency. Manual labor and intellectual work are connected in these multicultural autobiographies of writers, educators, artists, political activists, musicians, and photographers and in the cultural work--the poems, stories, photographs, lectures, music--they produce. The consciousness that is revealed in this book makes evident the value of class identity to collective, democratic struggle. 

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Babies In Bottles

Rutgers University Press

There is a forgotten history to our current debates over reproductive technology - one interweaving literature and science, profoundly gendered, filled with choices and struggles. We pay a price when we accept modern reproductive technology as a scientific breakthrough without a past. Babies in Bottles retrieves some of that history by analyzing the literary and popular science writings of Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, Charlotte Haldane, Aldous Huxley, and Naomi Mitchison - writings that include representations of reproductive technology from babies in bottles to surrogate mothers.

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Race

Rutgers University Press

 Drawing on anthropology, history, sociology, ethnic studies, and women's studies, this volume explores the role of race in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. The contributors show how racial ideologies intersect with gender, class, nation and sexuality in the formation of complex social identities and hierarchies. The essays address such topics as race and Egyptian nationalism, the construction of “whiteness” in the United States, and the transformation of racial categories in post-colonial Haiti. They demonstrate how social elites and members of subordinated groups construct and rework racial meanings and identities within the context of global political, economic, and cultural change. Race provides a comprehensive and empirically grounded survey of contemporary theoretical approaches to studying the complex interplay of race, power, and identity.

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'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'

Joyce Carol Oates

Rutgers University Press

Joyce Carol Oates’s prize-winning story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” takes up troubling subjects that continue to occupy her in her fiction: the romantic longings and limited options of adolescent women; the tensions between mothers and daughters; the sexual victimization of women; and the American obsession with violence.  Inspired by a magazine story about a serial killer, its remarkable portrait of the dreamy teenager Connie has made it a feminist classic.  Connie’s life anticipates the emergence of American society from the social innocence of the fifties into the harsher contemporary realities of war, random violence, and crime. 

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The Lindbergh Case

A Story of Two Lives

Rutgers University Press

"If I had only one book to read on the Lindbergh case I should . . . choose Fisher's. It is balanced, impartial, and contains much material not to be found elsewhere."--Francis Russell, The New York Review of Books "Fisher . . . goes against the revisionist tide and argues strongly--and persuasively--for Hauptmann's guilt . . . a compelling book."--Patrick Reardon, Chicago Tribune "A good real-life crime yarn."--Kirkus Reviews "A riveting book."--Harry Sayen, The Times, Trenton "A real detective story."--Sylvia Sachs, The Pittsburgh Press "One cannot help getting caught up in the search for the child, then in the search for justice. These events resonate more than 50 years after they occurred."--John Katzenback, The New York Times Book Review "Fisher thoroughly covers the case, from the night the baby was taken from his home in Hopewell, NJ, on March 1, 1932, to Hauptmann's execution on April 3, 1936 . . . a convincing case."--Publishers Weekly "A grimly fascinating account of the kidnapping and murder of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., son of the world-famous aviator."--The Columbus Dispatch "A richly detailed, engrossing, and well-written history of the kidnapping saga. . . . may well become the definitive work on the subject."

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The Cinema of Isolation

A History of Physical Disability in the Movies

Rutgers University Press

Filmmakers have often encouraged us to regard people with physical disabilities in terms of pity, awe, humor, or fear as "Others" who somehow deserve to be isolated from the rest of society. In this first history of the portrayal of physical disability in the movies, Martin Norden examines hundreds of Hollywood movies (and notable international ones), finds their place within mainstream society, and uncovers the movie industry's practices for maintaining the status quo--keeping people with disabilities dependent and "in their place."

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Plant Communities of New Jersey

A Study in Landscape Diversity

Rutgers University Press

From the ridgetops of the north to the Pinelands of the south, New Jersey’s natural areas display an astonishing variety of plant life. This book--a completely revised edition of the classic Vegetation of New Jersey--enables readers to understand why the vegetation of New Jersey is what it is today and what it may become. Scientifically accurate yet written in a lively style, Plant Communities of New Jersey belongs on the bookshelf of every New Jerseyan who cares about the environment.

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Old Burial Grounds of New Jersey

A Guide

Rutgers University Press

This illustrated guidebook to New Jersey's old burial grounds is unique, not just for New Jersey, but for anywhere in America. Janice Kohl Sarapin introduces you to the history and lore of old graveyards. 

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Looking for God in the Suburbs

The Religion of the American Dream and its Critics, 1945-1965

Rutgers University Press

In the 1950s, 99 percent of adult Americans said they believed in God. How, James Hudnut-Beumler asks, did this consensus about religion turn into the confrontational debates over religion in the 1960s? Although most Americans continued to live and worship as before, a significant number of young people followed the critics' call for a faith that led to social action, but they turned away from organized religion and toward the counterculture of the sixties. The critics of the 1950s deserve credit for asking questions about the value of religion as it was being practiced and the responsibilities of the affluent to the poor—and for putting these issues on the social and cultural agenda of the next generation.

                        

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Storefront Revolution

Food Co-ops and the Counterculture

Rutgers University Press

In the 1960s, the cooperative networks of food stores, restaurants, bakeries, bookstores, and housing alternatives were part counterculture, part social experiment, part economic utopia, and part revolutionary political statement. The co-ops gave activists a place where they could both express themselves and accomplish at least some small-scale changes. But these activists could not always agree among themselves on their goals.

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The 1937 Newark Bears

A Baseball Legend

Rutgers University Press

Here is the fascinating account, rich in nostalgia, of the greatest minor league team in the history of baseball. Ronald Mayer recounts the wonderful early years of the Newark Bears when millionaire beer baron Jacob Ruppert, owner of the New York Yankees, purchased the team from the newspaper publisher Paul Block in 1931. Mayer traces the Bears' exciting first five seasons under Ruppert and the building of a farm system that eventually produced the great Yankee dynasty. These colorful early seasons were sprinkled with some of the great names of the American pastime: Ed Barrow, Paul Kritchell, Al Mamaux, Red Rolfe, Babe Ruth, Shag Shaughnessey, Bob Shawkey, and George Weiss.

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Tales of a Low-Rent Birder

Rutgers University Press
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Everyday Use

Alice Walker

Rutgers University Press

Alice Walker's early story "Everyday Use" has remained a cornerstone of her work. Her use of quilting as a metaphor for the creative legacy that African Americans inherited from their maternal ancestors changed the way we defined art, women's culture, and African American lives. By putting African American women's voices at the center of the narrative for the first time, "Everyday Use" anticipated the focus of an entire generation of black women writers.

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Seeing Through The Media

The Persian Gulf War

Rutgers University Press

An eye-opening look at the effect of the media on public perception of The Persian Gulf War

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Murdered in Jersey

Expanded Edition

Rutgers University Press

The Lindbergh kidnapping, the Dutch Schultz murder, the Hurricane Carter case, the Edgard Smith affair involving William F. Buckley, Jr., the slaying of the List family, the shooting of Trooper Philip Lamonaco, the contract killing of Maria Marshall, and the kidnapping and murder of Exxon executive Sidney Reso-all America followed with fascination these terrible crimes committed in New Jersey. These famous New Jersey cases--and fifty-two others, all front-page news in their day--are presented colorfully and concisely in Gerald Tomlinson's Murdered in Jersey, an illustrated look at homicide in the Garden State. For all true crime buffs in and out of New Jersey.

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Mexican Workers and the American Dream

Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939

Rutgers University Press

Earlier in this century, over one million Mexican immigrants moved to the United States, attracted by the prospect of work in California's fields. The Mexican farmworkers were tolerated by Americans as long as there was enough work to go around. During the Great Depression, though, white Americans demanded that Mexican workers and their families return to Mexico. In the 1930s, the federal government and county relief agencies forced the repatriation of half a million Mexicans--and some Mexican Americans as well. Camille Guerin-Gonzales tells the story of their migration, their years here, and of the repatriation program--one of the largest mass removal operations ever sanctioned by the U.S. government. She exposes the powers arrayed against Mexicans as well as the patterns of Mexican resistance, and she maps out constructions of national and ethnic identity across the contested terrain of the American Dream.

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Fear Of Math

How to Get Over It and Get on With Your Life!

Rutgers University Press

The author offers a host of methods, drawn from many cultures, for tackling real-world math problems and explodes the myth that women and minorities are not good at math.

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Other Worlds Than This

Translated by Rachel Hadas
Rutgers University Press

Good translators must somehow avoid the dangers of mere literalism on the one hand and creative embellishments on the other. Hadas has succeeded admirably by offering rhythmical and accurate translations of a wide variety of texts by Tibullus, Seneca, Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, LaForgue, Valery, and the modern Greek poet Konstantine Karyotakis, among others. Nostalgia, ennui, melancholy, and grief are the dominant tones of these poems, which speak poignantly of love lost and the inexorable passage of time. Hadas often finds a contemporary phrase to formulate an older writer's meaning. Thus, Tibullus can say that love protects him from "the switchblade knife" while LaForgue is "suddenly zapped by lightning." Some readers may miss the presence of en face texts in the original languages, but the author's assertion that she did this work purely "for the pleasure" is apparent throughout. Recommended for larger collections.
- Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.

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'Seventeen Syllables'

Hisaye Yamamoto

Edited by King-Kok Cheung
Rutgers University Press

Hisaye Yamamoto's often reprinted tale of a naive American daughter and her Japanese mother captures the essence the cultural and generational conflicts so common among immigrants and their American-born children. On the surface, "Seventeen Syllables" is the story of Rosie and her preoccupation with adolescent life. Between the lines, however, lurks the tragedy of her mother, who is trapped in a marriage of desperation. Tome's deep absorption in writing haiku causes a rift with her husband, which escalates to a tragic event that changes Rosie's life forever.

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Sandino's Daughters Revisited

Feminism in Nicaragua

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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