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 61-90 of 2,557 items.

Frances Burney

The Life in the Works

Rutgers University Press

Treating Frances Burney (1752-1840) with the seriousness usually reserved for later novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Margaret Anne Doody combines biographical narrative with informed literary criticism as she analyzes not only Burney's published novels, but her plays, fragments of novels, poems, and other works never published. Doody also draws upon a mine of letters and diaries for detailed and sometimes surprising biographical information. Bringing a novelist's perspective to her material, in this 1989 book Doody shows an appreciation of the many dimensions of a predecessor's writings and she tells her story with force and conviction.

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Poverty and Society

The Growth of the American Welfare State in International Comparison

Rutgers University Press

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Chimes at Midnight

Orson Welles, Director

Rutgers University Press

This volume offers a complete continuity script of Chimes at Midnight (1996), including its famous battle sequence. Each shot is described in detail and is keyed to the original Shakespearian sources, thus making the volume an invaluable guide to Welles as an adaptor and creator of texts. The first complete transcription of the continuity script of Chimes is accompanied by the editor's critical introduction on Welles's transformation of Shakespeare; a special interview with Keith Baxter, one of the film's principal actors, which discusses its production history; reviews and articles; and a biographical sketch of Welles, a filmography, and a bibliography.

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Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968

The Great Refusal

Rutgers University Press

Originally published in 1982, Wini Breines's classic work now includes a new preface in which she reassesses, and for the most part affirms, her initial views of the movement. She argues that the movement remains effective in the midst of radical changes in activist movements. Breines also summarizes and evaluates the new and growing scholarship on the 1960s. Her provocative analysis of the New Left remains important today.

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Coming of Age in New Jersey

College and American Culture

Rutgers University Press

Coming of Age is about college as students really know it and--often--love it. To write this remarkable account, Michael Moffatt did what anthropologists usually do in more distant cultures: he lived among the natives. His findings are sometimes disturbing, potentially controversial, but somehow very believable. Coming of Age is a vivid slice of life of what Moffatt saw and heard in the dorms of a typical state university, Rutgers, in the 1980s. It is full of student voices: naive and worldy-wise, vulgar and polite, cynical, humorous, and sometimes even idealistic. But it is also about American culture more generally: individualism, friendship, community, bureaucracy, diversity, race, sex, gender, intellect, work, and play. As an example of an ethnography written about an anthropologist's own culture, this book is an uncommon one. As a new and revealing perspective on the much-studied American college student, it is unique.

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Dangerous by Degrees

Rutgers University Press

Dangerous by Degrees vividly describes and analyzes women's experience at Oxford shortly before and after the First World War. The Somerville experience, in its simultaneous rejection and embrace of women's traditional place, stands as a prototype of the ambivalent, confusing, and conflicted stories which the women who lived that experience subsequently tell in their fictions.

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Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy

Rutgers University Press

Penny Van Esterik takes the reader beyond the Nestle boycott and the activist campaigns against infant-formula manufacturers to the issues underlying the controversy. She shows how the controversy is embedded in the problem of urban poverty, the empowerment of women, the medicalization of infant feeding, and the commoditization of infant foods. She argues that the choice between bottle feeding and breast feeding has significant implications for developing countries. Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy raises a host of important questions: why has there been no consistent feminist position? How did infant feeding become medicalized in developing and developed countries? What mechanisms encourage the technology and taste transfer necessary for the expansion of bottle feeding?

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Unnatural Causes

The Three Leading Killer Diseases in America

Rutgers University Press

The Three Leading Killer Diseases in America.

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Women as Healers

Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Rutgers University Press

In Women as Healers, thirteen contributors explore the intersection of feminist anthropology and medical anthropology in eleven case studies of women in traditional and emergent healing roles in diverse parts of the world. In a spectrum of healing roles ranging from family healers to shamans, diviner-mediums, and midwives, women throughout the world pursue strategic ends through healing, manipulate cultural images to effect cures and explain misfortune, and shape and are shaped by the social and political contexts in which they work. 

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"The Amber Gods" and Other Stories by Harriet Prescott Spofford

Rutgers University Press

A widely held vision of nineteenth-century American women is of lives lived in naive, domestic peace— the girls of Little Women making do until father comes home from the war. Nothing could be less true of Harriet Prescott Spofford's stories. In fact, her editor at the Atlantic Monthly at first refused to believe that an unworldly woman from New England had written them. Her style, though ornate by our 20th century standards, adds to its atmosphere. 

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Daughters of Independence

Rutgers University Press

Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi explore the connection in India between gender and caste, and gender and class. They ask whether the subordination of women has diminished as India moves from a caste to a class structure, and what effect colonization had on the status of women in India. Focusing on educated, professional women, the authors look at the particular experiences of 120 women they interviewed, and also interpret the larger patterns of social relations that emerge from the interviews. These sensitive stories are told with an eloquence that is often moving and inspiring.

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Gender/Body/Knowledge

Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing

Rutgers University Press

The essays in this interdisciplinary collection share the conviction that modern western paradigms of knowledge and reality are gender-biased. Some contributors challenge and revise western conceptions of the body as the domain of the biological and 'natural,' the enemy of reason, typically associated with women.

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Social History of Economic Decline

Business, Politics, and Work in Trenton

Rutgers University Press

Nineteenth-century Trenton, New Jersey, was a booming commercial and manufacturing center for iron, rubber, steel cables, machine tools, and pottery. Trenton's golden age lasted until the 1920s, when many local industries were bought out by national companies. The story of the subsequent social, political, and economic decline of Trenton is also the story of twentieth-century urban America. 

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The Good Ruler

From Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon

Rutgers University Press

Which American presidents have been good? Which have been bad? Experts on the presidency have never been able to agree on their assessments. Bruce Kuklick suggests that historians and political scientists have approached the problem of defining successful leadership without adequately considering the essential factor. Instead of trying to evaluate which presidents set consistent and worthy policies and brought them to fruition, Kuklick asks us to pay more attention to how the American people feel about their presidents. The citizenry and its emotional responses are sued as the measure of a successful president, rather than the ostensibly rational appraisals of scholars.

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Scarlett's Women

Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans

Rutgers University Press

In this entertaining and informative book, Helen Taylor is the first to seek reasons for Gone With the Wind's success among viewers and readers. The author asked fans to relate their experiences with the work, to explain their fascination with the story, and describe its impact. She not only explains the enduring appeal of the work, but also identifies different kinds of response at particular historical moments (especially World War II) and through the past five decades by women of different classes, races, and generations. The result is a book that is sophisticated, accessible, and revealing. Scarlett's Women is a book for every fan, and for all students of film and popular culture.

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Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution

Rutgers University Press

Parsa's thorough explanation of the collective actions of each major group in Iran in the three decades prior to the revolution shows how a coalition of classes and groups, using mosques as safe gathering places and led by a segment of the clergy, brought down the monarch of 1979. In the years since the revolution, the conflicts that existed before the revolution seem to be reemerging, in slightly altered form. The clergy now has control, and the state has become centrally and powerfully involved in the economy of the country.

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Unequal Partnerships

The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment in Postwar America

Edited by Gregory Squires
Rutgers University Press

Gregory D. Squires and other contributors examine what has long been a highly inequitable and destructive process of urban development. They look at the political and social assumptions and interests shaping redevelopment, the social and economic costs of development for the vast majority of urban residents, and alternative approaches emerging.

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Anthropologies and Histories

Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy

Rutgers University Press

William Roseberry explores some of the cultural and political implications of an anthropological political economy. In his view, too few of these implications have been explored by authors who dismiss the very possibility of a political economic understanding of culture. Within political economy, readers are offered sophisticated treatments of uneven development, but when authors turn to culture and politics, they place contradictory social experiences within simplistic class or epochal labels. Within cultural anthropology, history is often little more than new terrain for extending anthropological practice. Roseberry places culture and history in relation to each other, in the context of a reflection on the political economy of uneven development.

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The Politics of Public Health

Rutgers University Press

In the progressive public health tradition, Meredeth Turshen criticizes conventional approaches to disease and offers an alternative framework based on the concept that health and illness are socially produced throughout the world. Using contemporary and historical accounts of great moments and great debates in public health, Turshen exposes the failure to improve health even when a specific program like smallpox vaccination succeeds. Her analyses incorporate theoretical contributions from Marxism and feminism.

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Don Siegel, director

Edited by Al LaValley
Rutgers University Press

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is a low-budget science fiction film that has become a classic. In his introduction to this volume, Al LaValley explores the politics of the original author of the magazine serial story on which the film is based, Don Siegel; and of its screenwriter, Daniel Mainwaring. For students and individual enthusiasts, the contextual materials are particularly interesting in showing how crucial the postproduction history of a film can be. 

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Natural Rebels

A Social History of Enslaved Women in Barbados

Rutgers University Press

Although we are learning a lot from historians about the lives of slaves in the United States, we still know little about slavery in the Caribbean. Hilary Beckles's book on the social, economic, and labor history of slave women in Barbados, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, is a major addition to this literature. Drawing on contemporary documents and records, newspapers, and personal correspondence, Beckles reveals how slave women were central to the plantation economy of Barbados. They had two kinds of value for sugar planters: they could work just as hard as men, and they could literally reproduce the slave class.

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Arms, Country, and Class

The Philadelphia Militia and the Lower Sort during the American Revolution

Rutgers University Press

In 1949 and 1950, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled many left-wing unions, representing 750,000 workers, because they were supposedly Communist-dominated. This collection of previously unpublished essays explores the history of those eleven left-led unions. Some essays consider specific aspects of several unions--the Longshoremen, the United Electricians (UE), the Fur Workers, and the Food and Tobacco Workers--while others take up the impact of the federal government's and the Catholic church's anticommunism upon the unions as a whole.

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Health Services Privatization in Industrial Societies

Rutgers University Press

This book looks at the theory and practice of privatization of health services internationally. The contributors argue that the restructuring of health care systems affects local communities in markedly uneven ways. Ultimately, they conclude, conflicts arising from economic and geographic inequities implicit in privatization will limit the degree to which any government can dismantle its health care services.

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Owning Scientific and Technical Information

Value and Ethical Issues

Rutgers University Press

In recent years, scientific discoveries and new technologies - as well as new, intricate relationships among academic researchers, government, and private industry - have begun to pose a whole range of novel problems in intellectual property rights. Should computer software be patented or copyrighted? How can ownership of plant varieties, genetically engineered organisms, and their products be protected? Should body parts and cell lines derived from them be patented? What is the impact of changes in intellectual property rights on the process of scientific research and development? The fifteen essays in this volume provide a solid foundation for any discussion of these issues. They survey the current intellectual property system in the U.S., describe several important historical precedents, explore ongoing controversies in computer science and biotechnology, and offer critiques of leading moral and legal theories about ownership of knowledge. This book is invaluable for anyone who has to deal with questions of intellectual property in theory or in everyday practice.

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Wild Women in the Whirlwind

Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance

Rutgers University Press

Wild Women in the Whirlwind is the first book to explore the literary and cultural traditions of these writers and to locate their work within the history of black women - a history rich but neglected which the contributors illuminate with moving brilliance.

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The Delaware Indians

A History

Rutgers University Press

 In the seventeenth century white explorers and settlers encountered a tribe of Indians calling themselves Lenni Lenape along the Delaware River and its tributaries in New Jersey, Delaware, eastern Pennsylvania, and southeastern New York. Today communities of their descendants, known as Delawares, are found in Oklahoma, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Ontario, and individuals of Delaware ancestry are mingled with the white populations in many other states. The Delaware Indians is the first comprehensive account of what happened to the main body of the Delaware Nation over the past three centuries.

C. A. Weslager puts into perspective the important events in United States history in which the Delawares participated and he adds new information about the Delawares. He bridges the gap between history and ethnology by analyzing the reasons why the Delawares were repeatedly victimized by the white man.

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The Politics of Women's Biology

Rutgers University Press

For a range of historical and contemporary issues in eugenics, human evolution, and procreative technology, Ruth Hubbard explains why scientific descriptions and choices should not generalize human, or female, attributes without acknowledging the realities of people's lives. Sophisticated in its analysis, yet not at all technical in its exposition, this book will find a wide readership among feminists, the general public, and the scientific community.

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It Seemed Like Nothing Happened

America in the 1970s

Rutgers University Press

In this unique, comprehensive history of the 1970s, we learn about international developments: the war in Cambodia, Nixon's trip to China, the oil embargo and resulting gas shortage, the Mayaquez incident, the Camp David accords, the Iranian capture of the U.S. embassy and the taking of hostages, the ill-fated rescue mission. All this signaled a decline in American power and influence. We also learn about domestic politics: Kent State, the Pentagon Papers, Haynsworth and Carswell, the Eagleton affair, the rise of ticket splitting, inflation, recession, unemployment, Watergate, Agnew's resignation, the Saturday night massacre, Nixon's resignation, the pardon for draft evaders, Proposition 13, the politicization of organized religion, the conservative shift in the Democratic Party, and the Reagan electoral landslide. Carroll reminds us of tragedies and occasional moments of levity, bringing up the names Patricia Hearst, George Jackson and Angela Davis, Wilbur Mills and the Argentina Firecracker, Wayne Hays and Elizabeth Ray, Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone.

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Suburban Lives

Rutgers University Press

Focusing on a variety of criminal activities, the author applies his structural criminology to the relationships of power which operate in a range of institutional spheres. He looks at the relationship between class and criminality, showing the inadequacy of a simple causal link and discussing the prevalence of "white collar" crime.

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Divorce Talk

Women and Men Make Sense of Personal Relationships

Rutgers University Press

Taking a new look at divorce in America, Catherine Reissman shows how divorce is socially shared, and how it takes crucially different forms for women and men. Drawing on interviews with adults who are divorcing, she treats their accounts as texts to be interpreted, as templates for understanding contemporary beliefs about personal relationships.

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