Social and Cultural History

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Hopelessly Alien

An in-depth sociological investigation of "hope" as it applies to the Italian immigrant experience in the blue-collar suburb of Chicago Heights between 1910 and 1950.

Haight-Ashbury, Psychedelics, and the Birth of Acid Rock

Illuminates the beginnings, downfall, and legacy of the acid-inspired, spontaneous, and playful approach to life and music in Haight-Ashbury from 1964–1967.

Casseroles, Can Openers, and Jell-O

An “all-you-can-eat” tour of American life in the postwar period, told through the foods we loved.

Tasting Coffee

Draws upon the situated work of professional coffee tasters in over a dozen countries to shed light on the methods we use to convert subjective experience into objective knowledge.

The Archaeology of Inequality

Brings together archaeologists, art historians, sociologists, and classicists to explore the origins and development of unequal relationships in ancient societies.

Empire News

Examines English-language Indian newspapers from the mid-nineteenth century and their role in simultaneously sustaining and probing British colonial governance.

Seeing Symphonically

Looks at how a group of aesthetically innovative independent films contested and imagined alternatives to urban planning in midcentury New York.

Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics

Uses a historical study of bookselling and readers as a way to question and rethink our understanding of the market for symbolic goods.

Black Women's Yoga History

Examines how Black women elders have managed stress, emphasizing how self-care practices have been present since at least the mid-nineteenth century, with roots in African traditions.

The Specter of Babel

Presents a new way of thinking about fundamental political concepts such as freedom, justice, and the common good.

An Unfinished Revolution

The story of the suffrage movement and the ongoing struggle for women’s rights through the lens of one family’s history.

Freedom in Laughter

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.

Bending the Arc

Inspiring collection narrating how peace activists found their calling and why the world still needs peace activism.

The Great Agrarian Conquest

Groundbreaking analysis of how colonialism created new conceptual categories and spatial forms that reshaped rural societies.

Postnormal Conservation

Explores the evolving role of botanic gardens from products and enablers of modernity and the nation-state, to their recent reinvention as institutions of environmental governance.

Essays of a Lifetime

A distillation of the historian’s finest writings on modern Indian historical themes.

Cities of Refuge

Contrasts the experiences of German Jewish refugees from the Holocaust who fled to London and New York City.

From the Streets to the State

Blends academic and activist perspectives to explore recent emancipatory struggles to win and transform state power.

Radical Imagination, Radical Humanity

Provides firsthand accounts of militant Puerto Rican activists in 1970s New York City.

Respectability on Trial

By Brian Donovan
Subjects: History

Recovers and chronicles the plights of ordinary New Yorkers that resonate with contemporary debates on rape and domestic violence.

Oklahomo

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

Regulating Desire

Examines the organized efforts to reshape the law relating to young women’s sexuality in the United States.

Stairway to Empire

The story of the Erie Canal’s completion and its place in the larger narrative of American modernity and progress.

How to Escape

Passionate and rollicking personal and intellectual essays by philosopher Crispin Sartwell.

Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws

Uses previously unstudied Coast Guard records for New York City and environs to examine the development of Rum Row and smuggling in New York City during Prohibition.

Key to the Northern Country

Offers nearly forty years of interdisciplinary scholarship on the Hudson River Valley’s role in the American Revolution.

The Untold Story of Champ

The definitive account of a Lake Champlain legend.

Letters to ONE

Collection of letters written to the first openly gay magazine in the United States.

The Federal Government and Urban Housing, Third Edition

A comprehensive history of U.S. housing policy that illuminates the political struggles that have accompanied the nation’s effort to assist those citizens who are in desperate need of decent, affordable housing.

Masked Voices

An analysis of unpublished letters to the first American gay magazine reveals the agency, adaptation, and resistance occurring in the gay community during the McCarthy era.

Blood at the Root

Examines the relationship of lynching to black and white citizenship in the 19th and 20th century U. S. through a focus on historical, visual, cultural, and literary texts.

We Used to Own the Bronx

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

White Horizon

From explorers’ accounts to boys’ adventure fiction, how Arctic exploration served as a metaphor for nation-building and empire in nineteenth-century Britain.

The New Abolitionists

Edited by Joy James
Introduction by Joy James
Subjects: History
Series: SUNY series, Philosophy and Race

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

Reinventing Government or Reinventing Ourselves

Viewing the public as owners rather than customers of government, this book argues that better performance by public agencies requires active and responsible citizens as well as efficient organizations.

The Two Milpas of Chan Kom

An ethnographic account of Chan Kom, a contemporary Maya community in Yucatan, Mexico that focuses on the social schism within the community resulting from an accelerated process of migration to Cancun, a major tourist center.

For God and Fatherland

This analysis of the crises in church-state relations in Argentina over the last 100 years shows that the constitutionally-established Catholic Church was progressively disenfranchised by various governments and responded by struggling to maintain the institution’s historic rights and privileges and to speak as the moral conscience of Argentina

Jews on the Move

Based on data from the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, the authors examine the high level of mobility among American Jews and their increasing dispersion throughout the United States, and how ...

Notes from Underground

Describes the Russian rock music counterculture and how it is changing in response to Russia's transition from a socialist to a capitalist society. It explores the lived experiences, the thoughts and feelings of the rock musicians as they meet the challenges of change.

On the Shoulders of Merchants

This book shows how the universal quantification of science resulted from the routinization of commercial practices that were familiar in scientist's daily lives. Following the work of Franz Borkenau ...

A Measure of Success

This book examines the role Protestants played in the formation of the public culture of antebellum Cleveland, a developing commercial city typical of many cities throughout the Midwest. The author analyzes ...

The Gentle General

This is the first major biography of Rose Pesotta, the organizer and vice president of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) from 1933 to 1944. After moving to the United States from ...

Abandoned Children

Edited by Rachel G. Fuchs
Introduction by Rachel G. Fuchs
Subjects: History

In nineteenth-century France, parents abandoned their children in overwhelming numbers—up to 20 percent of live births in the Parisian area. The infants were left at state-run homes and were then transferred ...