Presents the perspectives of contemporary college students on their lives and educations.

Tells the story of Poughkeepsie’s transformation from small city to urban region.

Brings a strikingly original perspective to Johnson’s life, and suggests new ways of thinking about Johnson’s part in creating a nation he did not live to see.

New York's fascinating history as presented in song.

Uses new critical approaches to demonstrate deep affinities in these vastly different filmmakers’ philosophies on film, fantasy, and reality.

Over one hundred voices recall, chronicle, and celebrate the Brooklyn of legend.

More than one hundred voices recall the "Borscht Belt" in its heyday.

Traces the rise of black participation in cyberspace.

Compelling stories and striking photographs illustrate the challenges and highlights of Latino/a life in Portland, Maine.

The story of a 17th century Mohawk woman's interaction with her land, the Jesuits, and the religion they brought.

A history of Dutch Schenectady.

Pinpoints the limits of many current globalization theories in challenging racial oppression, and argues instead for local and situated strategies for resisting racism and imperialism.

The paradoxes of the American decadent movement in the 1890s and 1920s.

Scholars engage the ideas and legacy of Cary Nelson in conversations about the corporate university, teaching, poetry, and activism.

Ecocritical takes on popular film.

Essays explore the broad cultural impact of Oprah’s Book Club.

Essays explore a wide range of contemporary feminist mothering practices.

Collection of scholarly essays on the wildly popular Comedy Central show.

Interview-based study of contemporary African American feminist men.

Explores the cultural significance of the metrosexual in sports.

Juxtaposes the meteoric rise of Barack Obama with far-reaching—and disturbing—shifts in black leadership in post–Civil Rights America.

Explores James’s concept of the individual in terms of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and religion.

Explores the theme of aesthetic agency and its potential for social and political progress.

A postmodern critique of sociology’s presuppositions.

Explores the Christian Right’s use of tailored rhetorics to advance multiple and varied antigay political projects.

A pickup basketball player looks at the pickup game as a distinctive culture using both personal experience and cultural studies theory.

Examines contemporary anxiety over the phenomenon of conspiracy theories.

Connects the American exceptionalist ethos to the violence in Vietnam and the Middle East.

Contributors explore the relationship between food and the production of ideology.

Explores the role of the literary protest essay in addressing social divisions in the United States.

Provides a fresh perspective on the undeniable relationship between education reform and democratic revitalization.

Uses satirical parodies of screenplays and political blogs to reveal the cracks in our post-9/11 American psyche.

Essays on phenomenological encounters with the world.

Critically examines the quiz show genre in American culture from the 1930s to the present.

Details the reactions of men and women serving aboard a hospital transport ship during the American Civil War.

Examines the forces that have shaped Italian American writing, from the novels of John Fante to the musings of Tony Soprano.

Examines the battle to develop the oil resources of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Investigates the changing relationship of humanities, culture, and interdisciplinarity and its impact on humanities disciplines, American culture studies, and undergraduate education.

Writings by twentieth-century imprisoned authors examining confinement, enslavement, and political organizing in prison.

Explores the role and function of the autopsy in Western culture, from Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lecture to The X-Files and CSI.

A historical romp through the fascinating subject of murder jurisprudence in the United States from the colonial period to the present, showing how changing social mores have influenced the application of murder law.

The first comprehensive survey of the work of the Uruguayan printmaker and graphic artist Rimer Cardillo, presented in both English and Spanish.

Pursues an inquiry into the cultural and linguistic dissonances that Spanish creates in the United States.

Using a life history approach, looks at what influences citizens to participate in the voluntary associations that comprise and promote civil society.

An analysis of how Oprah's Book Club has changed America's reading habits.

A history and social psychology of punk music.

A provocative analysis of current thought and discourse on multiracialism.

Interviews with prominent filmmakers, actors, and others on the art, craft, and business of moviemaking.

Explores how a pivotal event in U.S. history—the killing of nearly 300 Shoshoni men, women, and children in 1863—has been contested, forgotten, and remembered.

An exploration of the voluntary simplicity movement including comments from simple livers and a look at class, race, and gender in this movement.

Examines the many forms of cinematic "badness" over the past one hundred years, from Nosferatu to The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Explores leadership and civic virtue in American culture.

Explores changes in American attitudes toward Italy and Italians during a crucial period of U. S. immigration history.

Sees a way out of the contentious debates over the role of religion in American public life by looking back to the ideas of John Locke and the nation's Founders.

Explores the underlying assumptions of environmental studies and the need for a new paradigm for understanding our world.

Memoir meets cultural criticism in this examination of American popular culture at the end of the century.

Examines the effects of globalization on three New York communities—Utica, Cooperstown, and Hartwick.

Studies how women in a reservation economy have creatively responded to federal policy.

Demographers explore population diversity in the United States.

Using the example of the Eastern Algonkians, this book argues that Native Americans did not convert to Christianity, but rather made sense of Christianity in their own traditional ways and for their own social purposes.

Examines the representation of women in the media.

A comprehensive look at a classic work of popular fiction and its hold on the American imagination.

Looks at changing conceptions of spinsterhood in modern American culture.

Uses classical anthropological theory to understand “intentional communities” in the United States.

Uses Michael Jordan as a vehicle for viewing the broader social, economic, political, and technological concerns that frame contemporary culture.

Examines the transformations of Italian American ethnic identity in twentieth-century Philadelphia.

Reinterprets important works of the social criticism of Emerson and Thoreau as being based in defense of community.

An unusual, deft, often piercing meditation on storytelling, ethnicity, and the Italian/American experience.

Focusing on the more than one million Jewish children and adolescents living in the United States, this book questions the future of the Jewish community's next generation.

Illustrates how some Jews have created a new, hybrid form of Judaism, merging American values and behaviors with those from historical Jewish traditions.

Documents and describes the Menominee Indians' tribal practice of sustainable environmental development.

A colorful ethnography of an Italian ladies' club, this book explores the historical and linguistic importance of the women's language and behavior.

Presents a multi-layered social history of a soldier and his Italian American family during World War II.

Explores the contradiction between the Constitution's importance as a political document with its weakness as a symbol in American popular culture.

For almost a century, writers such as Ralph Ellison, Michael Ondaatje, and Ishmael Reed have expressed an affinity for jazz, hearing the music as a model for writing. Jarrett examines their work and the work of others who have brought jazz into language, pushing "interpretation" into the realm of "invention."

Presents Thomas Merton as the quintessential American outsider who defines himself in opposition to the world and then discovers a way back into dialogue with that world and compassion for it.

Uses concepts from social theory to explore the history and future of nuclear power in the U. S. and to explore the nature of technological change in the U. S. economy.

Examines how both negative and positive stereotypes of the "Indian" have influenced the study of Native American religions.

Focuses on affirmative action and its impact on colleges and universities since its inception in 1965. Suggests different perspectives on and approaches to affirmative action and offers and presents various voices on the impact and philosophical implications of affirmative action.

Examines broad shifts in American work values from their Calvinist origins to present controversies involving work, welfare, and affirmative action.

Analyzes American Indian education in the last century and compares the tribal, mission, and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools.

This first book-length examination of the American reception of German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel explores the practical and strategic uses of Simmel's ideas.

Viewing hip-hop as the postmodern successor to African American culture's Jazz modernism, this book examines hip-hop music's role in the history of the African-American experience.

This book uses recent psychoanalytic theory to analyze the work of three contemporary scholars--Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, and Sacvan Bercovitch--while viewing their work as expressing Jewish immigrant desires for integration into American culture.

This is the first descriptive analysis of how American Indian policies are made both at the statewide and at agency levels. Pertinent to all states, the study describes New York's historic policies and ...

What forces transformed a community in which industrial workers and other citizens exercised a real measure of power over their lives into a metropolis whose inhabitants were utterly dependent on Big ...

To the Iroquois, "extending the rafters" meant adding onto the longhouse, both in the literal sense of making room for new families and in the figurative sense of adding adopted individuals or tribes ...