A compelling biography of virtuoso, baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams and how his life intersected with some of the greatest poets, writers, painters, and musicians of his time.

The first book to comprehensively examine Lou Gehrig's famous "Luckiest Man" speech.

Traces the complex and contradictory representations of Hawai’i in popular film and television programs from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Examines the ways in which post-apocalyptic films express white racial anxiety.

Fifty-one unique New York towns with great stories to tell, from L. Frank Baum's and Jello's hometowns to the birthplace of the Women's Rights Movement.

Offers a wider approach to Italian American culture, one that stresses both its material, urban components and the creativity of its formal literary codes.

The incredible, true story of the twentieth century's greatest performing sea lion and the man who trained him.

Examines how race-neutral programs and policies harm, rather than improve, the lives of blacks in the United States.

Explores how suburban space and the body are racialized in American film.

Covering rage and grief, as well as joy and fatigue, examines how Black Lives Matter activists, and the artists inspired by them, have mobilized for social justice.

Uses a cross-national comparison of Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Hong Kong to develop strategies universities should employ to strengthen democracy and resist fascism.

Engaging essays on a wide spectrum of Hollywood directors and the films they created.

Engaging look at Lower East Side writers and artists in the wake of the 1975 New York fiscal crisis.

Analyzes the dynamic period in which Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby moved African American professional stand-up comedy from the chitlin’ circuit to the mainstream.

Uses comedy skits, from Monty Python to Key and Peele, to probe how humor works.

Assesses how America's film industry remembered World War I during the interwar period.

Reveals how classic American novels embodied the tensions embedded in American views of the natural world from the Centennial until the end of the Second World War.

Investigates how musicals, war films, sex comedies, and Westerns dealt with contentious issues during a time of change in Hollywood.

Argues that first- and second-generation Jewish American writers had an ambivalent relationship with educational success.

Examines movie romance in light of our emotional bond to the actors and characters on screen.

Essays debunking the notion that contemporary America is a colorblind society.

Examines how postfeminism and postracialism intersect to perpetuate systemic injustice in the United States.

Documents the arc of the Italian American immigrant experience on both sides of the Atlantic.

How Hollywood biopics both showcase and modify various notions of what it means to be an American.

Offers an overview of Sufism in North America.

Interviews and profiles of spiritual and cultural figures influenced by Buddhism.

Uses the state of Oklahoma as a case study for how US conservatives have attempted to unqueer America since the 1950’s.

Updated version of an engaging overview of the television situation comedy.

Explores facets of North American Buddhism while taking into account the impact of globalization and increasing interconnectivity.

Food and history combine in this exploration of the Dutch influence on American holiday traditions. Includes more than one hundred easy-to-make holiday recipes.

Examines the progress of and obstacles faced by African Americans in twenty-first-century America.

Offers a critical history of the role of pain, suffering, and compassion in democratic culture.

Traces the route, history, and geography of US 20, America’s longest road.

Demonstrates how written and visual representations worked to construct definitions of ethnicity in midcentury America.

Food-based reflections on Italian food, American culture, and globalization.

Considers the legacy of Thomas Merton and his relevance for contemporary times.

Robert Baker Aitken’s correspondence with Buddhist sympathizers and solo practitioners reveals a significant, little-understood aspect of American Buddhism.

Explores how the NBA moved to govern black players and the expression of blackness after the “Palace Brawl” of 2004.

Wide ranging, interdisciplinary look at the emergence and persistence of the concept of American Exceptionalism in US culture and history.

Traces the spiritual, psychological, and intellectual evolution of one of America’s most important cultural figures.

An inside story of privilege, inherited wealth, and the bizarre values and customs of the American upper crust.

Explores a range of Buddhist perspectives in a distinctly American context.

Provides an alternative history of nutrition in the U.S. that focuses on the power of scientific language.

Philosophers and social theorists of color examine how racism can creep into defensive forms of nationalism.

Explores the arrested development of American culture.

Argues in favor of a different model of voting behavior.

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

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

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

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

Essays on phenomenological encounters with the world.

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

Explains why the American cultural obsession with enjoying ourselves actually makes it more difficult to do so.

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

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

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 is about the way that popular film brings to a "sayable" level that which haunts us in the media headlines.

Little Big Men is a study of competitive bodybuilders on the West Coast that examines the subculture from the perspective of bodybuilders' everyday activities. It offers fascinating descriptions and insightful ...

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 ...