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 351-400 of 2,557 items.

Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites?

The Asian Ethnic Experience Today

Rutgers University Press

Mia Tuan examines the salience and meaning of ethnicity for later generation Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, and asks how their concepts of ethnicity differ from that of white ethnic Americans. She interviewed 95 middle-class Chinese and Japanese Californians and analyzes the importance of ethnic identities and the concept of becoming a "real" American for both Asian and white ethnics. She asks her subjects about their early memories and experiences with Chinese/Japanese culture; current lifestyle and emerging cultural practices; experiences with racism and discrimination; and  attitudes toward current Asian immigration.

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Heresy in the University

The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals

Rutgers University Press

One of the most controversial books to come out of the academy in the last fifteen years is Martin Bernal's Black Athena. It has been a true cause celebre. Afrocentrists have both praised the book and claimed that Bernal stole from the work of black scholars to create his study of the Afroasiastic roots of classical civilization. Classicists feel passionately about what they perceive as an attack from an outsider on the origins not only of ancient Greece but of their own discipline. It seems that everyone has something to say about the book; the question is how many really understand it. In Heresy in the University, Jacques Berlinerblau provides an exegesis of the contents of Black Athena, making it accessible to a wider audience. As he clarifies and restates Bernal's opus, Berlinerblau identifies Bernal's flaws in reasoning and gaps in evidence.

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Jersey Blue

Civil War Politics in New Jersey, 1854–1865

Rutgers University Press

Gillette takes a broader view of the politics of the Civil War as he touches on the economy, geography, demography, immigration, nativism, conscription, and law. The result is a pioneering history of New Jersey that deepens our understanding of the Civil War.

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Pretty in Punk

Girl's Gender Resistance in a Boy's Subculture

Rutgers University Press

Pretty in Punk takes readers into the lives of girls living on the margins of contemporary culture. Drawing on interviews with 40 girls and women between the ages of 14-37, Leblanc examines the lives of her subjects, illuminating their forms of rebellion and survival. Pretty in Punk lets readers hear the voices of these women as they describe the ways their  constructions of femininity—from black lipstick to slamdancing—allow them to reject damaging cultural messages and build strong identities. The price they pay for resisting femininity can be steep—girls tell of parental rejection, school expulsion, institutionalization,  and harassment. Leblanc illuminates punk girls’ resistance to adversity, their triumphs over tough challenges, and their work to create individual identities in a masculine world.

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They Married Adventure

The Wandering Lives of Martin and Osa Johnson

Rutgers University Press

Martin and Osa Johnson thrilled American audiences of the 1920s and 30s with their remarkable movies of far-away places, exotic peoples, and the dramatic spectacle of African wildlife. Their own lives were as exciting as the movies they made--sailing through the South Sea Islands, dodging big game at African waterholes, flying small planes over the veldt, taking millionaires on safari. Heroes to millions, Osa and Martin seemed to embody glamor, daring, and the all-American ideal of self-reliance.    

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Women and Politics in Latin America

Rutgers University Press

This book provides a comprehensive view of women's political participation in Latin America. Focusing on the latter half of the twentieth century, it examines five different arenas of action and debate: political institutions, workplaces, social movements, revolutions, and feminisms. Nikki Craske explores the ways in which women have become more effective in the public arena as the context of politics has altered.

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By Airship to the North Pole

An Archaeology of Human Exploration

Rutgers University Press

By Airship to the North Pole chronicles the adventures of Swedish engineer Salomon August Andree, who made the first failed attempt to reach the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon in 1897, and of American journalist Walter Wellman who organized and led three unsuccessful air expeditions from 1907 to 1909. 

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Thai Women in the Global Labor Force

Consuming Desires, Contested Selves

Rutgers University Press

Most research on female labor migration in Thailand focuses on that country's infamous sex industry. Mary Beth Mills offers the first extended ethnographic analysis of rural women's movement into less visible occupations, paying particular attention to the hundreds of thousands of young women who fill the factories and sweatshops of the Bangkok metropolis. Mills follows the women as they travel from the village of Baan Naa Sakae to Bangkok, where they encounter new forms of consumption, new "modern" lifestyles, and a new sense of identity. She finds this rural-urban migration is more than a simple economic activity, but rather an elaborate process of cultural change.

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John Keats

Rutgers University Press

John Keats is one of the best-loved, admired, and most frequently studied Romantic poets, though he wrote only three volumes of poetry in his short life. This extraordinary biography looks at how Keats developed as a poet against the backdrop of the major events of his life. 

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Adolescence in a Moroccan Town

Rutgers University Press

Adolescence is in many ways a culturally constructed category, with different meanings for different societies. Susan Schaefer Davis and Douglas A. Davis have studied adolescence in Zawiya, a town in northern Morocco. They examine changes in views of adolescence, changes in adolescent behavior, and differences in the adolescent experiences of boys and girls over the past few decades.

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The Water We Drink

Water Quality and Its Effects on Health

Rutgers University Press

We all drink water and water-based fluids, yet most of us take water for granted. We assume that when we turn on the tap to fill our glass, bathtub, or washing machine, clean water will flow. But is it really safe? And if it is not, what can we do about it? The doctors who have written The Water We Drink provide readers with practical information on the health issues relating to water quality and suggest ways we can improve the quality and safety of our drinking water.

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A Map of Hope

Women's Writing on Human Rights—An International Literary Anthology

Rutgers University Press

A Map of Hope presents diverse women writers who have created a literature of global consciousness and justice. Their works give a face, an image, and a human dimension to the dehumanization of human rights violations. The collection allows readers to hear voices that have decided to make a difference. It goes beyond geography and ethnic groups; writers from around the globe are united by the universal dimensions of horror and deprivation, as well as the unique common struggle for justice and solidarity.

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Children in New Religions

Rutgers University Press

The contributors to this volume examine children from many different alternative religious movements worldwide, including The Family, Hare Krishna, Wiccans, and Pagans, Messianic Communities, and the Rajneesh (Osho) Movement. The essays explore two general questions: 1) What impact does the presence of children have on a new religion's lifestyle and chance of surviving into the future? 2) Is child abuse more likely to occur in unconventional religions, or are children born into them, the 'new' religions have grown up and have become an important and rapidly changing social force that we cannot reasonably dismiss or wisely ignore

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Prometheus Bedeviled

Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

Rutgers University Press

In this lucid critique, Norman Levitt examines the strained relations between science and contemporary society. For the most part, Levitt states, we idolize musicians and cheer on athletes, yet we view scientists with a mixture of awe and unease. Significantly, too, we are unsure how scientific discovery actually fits into the broader schemes of politics, and policy.  Even beyond pragmatic questions, we remain anxious about the implications of science for our basic understanding of human values and purpose.

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Retrieving Bones

Stories and Poems of the Korean War

Rutgers University Press

Many of the twelve stories and fifty poems assembled in Retrieving Bones have long been out of print and are almost impossible to find in any other source. The editors have enhanced this collection by providing maps, a chronology of the Korean War, and annotated lists of novels, works of nonfiction, and films. In a detailed introduction, Ehrhart and Jason discuss the milestones of the Korean War and place each fiction writer and poet represented into historical and literary contexts.

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What It Means To Be A Man

Reflections on Puerto Rican Masculinity

Rutgers University Press

What It Means to Be a Man begins with a discussion of machismo set in the context of the social construction of masculinity. Ramírez presents his interpretation of what it means to be a Puerto Rican man, discussing the attributes and demands of masculinity, and pointing out the ways in which strength, competition, and sexuality are joined with power and pleasure. He examines the erotic relationships between men as part of the expressions of masculinity, and analyzes how the homosexual experience reproduces the dominant masculine ideology.

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When Night Fell

An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories

Rutgers University Press

In When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories, Linda Schermer Raphael and Marc Lee Raphael have collected twenty-six short stories that tell of the human toll of the Holocaust on those who survived its horrors, as well as later generations touched by its memory. The stories are framed by discussion of the current debate about who owns the Holocaust and who is entitled to speak about it.

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Sex Ed

Film, Video, and the Framework of Desire

Rutgers University Press

Eberwein starts his investigation in the silent and early sound eras with educational films used both to warn audiences about venereal disease and to provide basic contraception information. World War II movies, he states, waged their own war against venereal disease-in the armed services and at home. Newer works deal with birth control and focus in particular on AIDS.

Sex Ed also highlights the classroom. Eberwein draws connections between the earliest and most recent examples of educational films as he analyzes their ideological complexity. He concludes by examining marriage-manual films of the early 1970s and very recent videos for couples and individuals seeking instruction in sexual techniques to increase pleasure.

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Jewish and Islamic Philosophy

Crosspollinations in the Classic Age

Rutgers University Press

 

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Newark's Little Italy

The Vanished First Ward

Rutgers University Press

Michael Immerso traces the history of the First Ward from the arrival of the first Italian in the 1870s until 1953 when the district was uprooted to make way for urban renewal. Richly illustrated with photographs culled from the albums and shoeboxes in the private collections of hundreds of former First Ward families from all across the United States, the book documents the evolution of the district from a small immigrant quarter into a complex Italian-American neighborhood that thrived during the first half of this century.

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The Evolution of Culture

A Historical and Scientific Overview

Rutgers University Press

The Evolution of Culture seeks to explain the origins, evolution and character of human culture, from language, art, music and ritual to the use of technology and the beginnings of social, political and economic behavior. It is concerned not only with where and when human culture evolved, but also asks how and why. The book draws together original contributions by archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists and psychologists. The contributors call into question the gulf currently separating the natural from the cultural sciences. Human capacities for culture, they argue, evolved through standard processes of natural and sexual selection, and properly be analyzed as biological adaptations. 

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The Holistic Inspiration of Physics

The Underground History of Electromagnetic Theory

Rutgers University Press

While many books have claimed parallels between modern physics and Eastern philosophy, none have dealt with the historical influences of both Chinese traditional thought and non-mechanistic, holistic western thought on the philosophies of the scientists who developed electromagnetic field theory. In The Holistic Inspirations of Physics, R. Valentine Dusek asks: to what extent is classical field theory a product of organic and holistic philosophies and frameworks?

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Titanic

Anatomy of a Blockbuster

Rutgers University Press

In 1997, James Cameron's "Titanic", became the first motion picture to earn a billion dollars worldwide. These essays ask the question: What made "Titanic" such a popular movie? Why has this film become a cultural and film phenomenon? What makes it so fascinating to the film-going public?

 

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When History Is A Nightmare

Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Rutgers University Press

Through the narratives and testimonies of Bosnian refugees who survived ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this title demonstrates how ethnic cleansing has worked its way into people's lives and memories

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Design and Feminism

Re-visioning Spaces, Places, and Everyday Things

Rutgers University Press

The distinction between the spaces considered public and private or work and home is becoming more blurred. Our streets, parks, dwellings and tools are designed to a "one-size-fits-all" standard, and the responses of the design community to meet diverse needs have been mixed at best. Design and Feminism offers feminist critiques of these inadequate design standards, and suggest ideas, projects, and programs for change.

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Recovering the Nation's Body

Cultural Memory, Medicine, and the Politics of Redemption

Rutgers University Press

Recovering the Nation’s Body is the first book to analyze the actual practices involved in procuring human tissue, and the first to examine how the German past and the unique present-day situation within the European Union are key in understanding the form that medical practices take within various contexts.

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Restoring America's Neighborhoods

How Local People Make a Difference

Rutgers University Press

What does it take to mobilize a grass-roots force dedicated to bringing new life into a decaying neighborhood? Can any one person or group successfully halt physical deterioration, drug-related crime, or the encroachment of clusters of factories, highways, and other noxious land uses? Michael Greenberg demonstrates in this book that it can and has been done against all odds.

Restoring America's Neighborhoods profiles twenty-four such cases from across the United States. 

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The Long Retreat

The Calamitous Defense of New Jersey, 1776

Rutgers University Press

On the morning of November 20, 1776, General Charles Cornwallis overran patriot positions at Fort Lee, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. The attack threw George Washington's army into turmoil. Thus began an American retreat across the state, which ended only after the battered rebels crossed the Delaware river at Trenton on December 7. It was a three-week campaign that marked the most dramatic and desperate period of the War for Independence. In The Long Retreat, Arthur Lefkowitz has written the first book-length study of this critical campaign. 

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Neighborhood Recovery

Reinvestment Policy for the New Hometown

Rutgers University Press

How can we help distressed neighborhoods recover from a generation of economic loss and reposition themselves for success in today's economy? While many have proposed solutions to the problems of neighborhoods suffering from economic disinvestment, John Kromer has actually put them to work successfully as Philadelphia’s housing director. Part war story, part how-to manual, and part advocacy for more effective public policy, Neighborhood Recovery describes how a blending of public-sector leadership and community initiative can bring success to urban communities. 

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Telling is Risky Business

Mental Health Consumers Confront Stigma

Rutgers University Press

 Telling is Risky Business vividly covers topics such as isolation, rejection, discouragement, and discrimination. Consumers also offer perceptive observations of how our society depicts people with mental illness. The book ends with suggestions for strategies and coping; an invaluable section on resources available for fighting stigma guarantees its place on many bookshelves. As Laura Lee Hall writes, “This book will likely open your eyes to a topic that you probably did not understand.”

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The Victorian World Picture

Rutgers University Press

The Victorian era was a time of unprecedented population growth and massive industrialization. Darwinian theory shook people's religious beliefs and foreign competition threatened industry and agriculture. The transformation of this nineteenth-century world was overhwelming, pervading the social, cultural, intellectual, economic, and political spheres. By the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, the British were calling themselves Victorians and Prince Albert was able to proclaim, "We are living at a period of most wonderful transition." David Newsome weaves all these strands of Victorian life into a compelling evocation of the spirit of a fascinating time that laid the foundation for the modern age.

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Gone Fishin'

The 100 Best Spots in New York

Rutgers University Press

This guide covers the 100 best salt and freshwater fishing spots in New York State, from the Catskills trout streams to Lake Ontario and the Finger Lakes. The authors provide easy to follow directions and boat launch information, as well as practical hints and advice.

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No Place for a Woman

A Life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith

Rutgers University Press

No Place for a Woman is the first biography to analyze Margaret Chase Smith’s life and times by using politics and gender as the lens through which we can understand this Maine senator’s impact on American politics and American women. Sherman’s research is based upon more than one hundred hours of personal interviews with Senator Smith, and extensive research in primary and government documents, including those from the holdings of the Margaret Chase Smith Library.

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Of Orphans and Warriors

Inventing Chinese American Culture and Identity

Rutgers University Press

Of Orphans and Warriors explores the social and cultural history of largely urban, American-born Chinese from the 1930s through the 1990s, focusing primarily on those living in California. Chun thus opens a window onto the ways in which these Americans born of Chinese ancestry negotiated their identity over a half century.

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Paths Along The Hudson

A Guide to Walking and Biking

Rutgers University Press

Perls brings together the culture, history, nature, and recreational activities along the Hudson River in one convenient guide book. He not only maps out walks and bike trails, both urban and rural, but also introduces readers to the landscape, geology, history, and culture of the Hudson Valley region. Perls provides a practical and geographically comprehensive guide to exploring the area on foot and by bike. The trail routes bring readers as close to the river as possible and guides them to rewarding vistas, nature preserves, and historic landmarks. It’s a useful guide for visitors to the Hudson region and local residents as it acquaints them to the natural treasures to be found in their own backyards.

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Theorizing the City

The New Urban Anthropology Reader

Edited by Setha M. Low
Rutgers University Press

Anthropological perspectives are not often represented in urban studies, even though many anthropologists have been contributing actively to theory and research on urban poverty, racism, globalization, and architecture. The New Urban Anthropology Reader corrects this omission by presenting 12 cross-cultural case studies focusing on the analysis of space and place.

Five images of the city—the divided city, the contested city, the global city, the modernist city, and the postmodern city—serve as the framework for the selected essays. These images highlight current research trends in urban anthropology, such as poststructural studies of race, class, and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and

studies of the symbolic and social production of urban space and planning.

Selected Chapters:

Theorizing the City: An Introduction by Setha M. Low

Part I. The Divided City

The Changing Significance of Race and Class in an African American Community, Steven Gregory

Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation by Teresa P. R. Caldeira

Part II. The Contested City

Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and Social Construction of Public Space in Costa Rica, Setha M. Low

Part III. The Global City

Wholesale Sushi: Culture and Commodity in Tokyo’s Tsukiki Market, Ted Bestor

Part IV. The Modernist City

The Modernist City and the Death of the Street by James Holston

Part V. The Postmodern City

Spatial Discourse and Social Boundaries: Re-imagining the Toronto Waterfront by Matthew Cooper

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A Particular Place

Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb

Rutgers University Press

Focusing on how the religious congregations (all Protestant) of a particular town adapted to a rapid influx of newcomers, this book makes a significant contribution to sociological literature, in an interesting narrative style. . . . Eiesland’s work is the perfect complement to that of other major contributors in the field, such as Robert Wuthnow, Wade Clark Roof, William McKinney, David A. Rootzen, Jackson Carroll, and Nancy T. Ammerman.

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Controlling Hollywood

Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era

Rutgers University Press

Controlling Hollywood features ten innovative and accessible essays that examine some of the major turning points, crises, and contradictions affecting the making and showing of Hollywood movies from the 1910s through the early 1970s. The articles included here examine landmark legal cases; various self-regulating agencies and systems in the film industry (from the National Board of Review to the ratings system); and, external to Hollywood, the religious and social interest groups and government bodies that took a strong interest in film entertainment over the decades.

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Elder Law in New Jersey

Finding Solutions for Legal Problems

Rutgers University Press

One in five New Jersey residents is over 65 and the state's legal and healthcare systems are becoming ever more complex. This guide explains in layman's terms seniors' rights and helps them take full advantage of available assistance and services. Useful contact addresses are also provided.

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Living Between Danger and Love

The Limits of Choice

Rutgers University Press

Andrea O'Donnell did not fit what criminal justice experts call the "victim profile." The twenty-seven-year old women's studies major at San Diego State University was the director of the campus Women's Resource Center and a self-defense instructor. Nevertheless, in the early morning hours of November 5, 1994, she was brutally murdered. Her decomposed body was discovered in the apartment that she shared with her boyfriend, Andres English-Howard. In August 1995, he was convicted of first-degree murder. The night before he was scheduled to appear in court for sentencing, English-Howard hanged himself in his jail cell.

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Off the Record

The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America

Rutgers University Press

David L. Morton examines the process of invention, innovation, and diffusion of communications technology, using the history of sound recording as the focus. Off the Record demonstrates how the history of both the hardware and the ways people used it is essential for understanding why any particular technology became a fixture in everyday life or faded into obscurity. Morton’s approach to the topic differs from most previous works, which have examined the technology’s social impact, but not the reasons for its existence. Recording culture in America emerged, Morton writes, not through the dictates of the technology itself but in complex ways that were contingent upon the actions of users.

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Reckless Legislation

How Legislators Ignore the Consitution

Rutgers University Press

Reckless Legislation examines legislative consideration and avoidance of issues of constitutionality through a number of examples: the regulation of the Internet by Congress and two state legislatures; the reliance by legislatures of Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and Tennessee on “experts” to justify passage of unconstitutional laws; the repeated passage of unconstitutional laws in New York and Missouri relating, respectively, to religion and abortion to wear down the courts and the opposition; and the efforts by Congress to reverse Supreme Court decisions believed by it to be incorrect or harmful.

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Emergence of Life on Earth

A Historical and Scientific Overview

Rutgers University Press

How did life emerge on Earth? Is there life on other worlds? These questions, until recently confined to the pages of speculative essays and tabloid headlines, are now the subject of legitimate scientific research. This book presents a unique perspective--a combined historical, scientific, and philosophical analysis, which does justice to the complex nature of the subject.

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Feminism and the Biological Body

Rutgers University Press

As a trained biologist, Lynda Birke was frustrated by the gap between feminist cultural analysis and her own scientific background. In this book, she seeks to bridge this gap using ideas in anatomy and physiology to develop the feminist view that the biological body is socially and culturally constructed. Birke rejects the assumption that bodily function is somehow fixed and unchanging, claiming that biology offers more than just a deterministic narrative of how nature works. Feminism and the Biological Body brings natural science and feminist theory together and suggests that we need a new politics that includes, rather than denies, our flesh.

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The First World War and Popular Cinema

1914 to the Present

Edited by Michael Paris
Rutgers University Press

The First World War and Popular Cinema provides fresh insight into the role of film as an historical and cultural tool. Through a comparative approach, essays by contributors from Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States enrich our understanding of cinematic depictions of the Great War in particular and combat in general. New historical research on both the uses of propaganda and the development of national cinemas make this collection one of the first to show the ways in which film history can contribute to our study of national histories. 

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A Guide to New Jersey's Revolutionary War Trail

for Families and History Buffs

Rutgers University Press

Hit the road with journalist Mark DiIonno as he takes you on a tour of New Jersey’s extraordinary Revolutionary War history. Listing more than 350 historic sites throughout the state, DiIonno has compiled the most complete guide ever to the Revolutionary War in the Garden State. 

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Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century

Rutgers University Press

"Intellectually broad and carefully grounded in fundamental issues affecting the time, role, and place of the academy in society, this collection explores the ways in which art and tradition are either maintained or rearticulated late in the Victorian Era. Art and the Academy forges a distinctive new way to look at the broad range of academic creativity against a complex network of changing social patterns." -Gabriel P. Weisberg, department of art history, University of Minnesota

Throughout the nineteenth century, academies functioned as the main venues for the teaching, promotion, and display of art. Contemporary scholars have, for the most part, denigrated academic art, calling it formulaic, unoriginal, and repetitious. The contributors to Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century challenge this entrenched notion and consider how academies worldwide have represented an important system of artistic preservation and transmission. Their essays eschew easy binaries that have reigned in academia for over half a century and that simply oppose the avant-garde to academism.

The essayists uncover the institutional structures and artistic practices of academies in England, France, Germany, and Brazil. Investigating artistic protocols across national and cultural boundaries, the scholars examine the relationship between artistic training and cultural identity. Their essays provide new insights into the ways in which institutions of art helped shape the nineteenth century's view of itself as an age of civilization amidst the turmoil of rapid social and cultural change. With an engaging mix of works by leading scholars, Art and the Academy will be essential reading for anyone interested in the artistic, cultural, and social history of the nineteenth century.

Rafael Cardoso Denis is adjunct professor (visiting) at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro). Colin Trodd is senior lecturer in art history at the University of Sunderland.

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Film Adaptation

Edited by James Naremore
Rutgers University Press

Some of the earliest feature films were derived from classic literature. Even today, most of the movies we see are adaptations of one kind or another. People who have never read Jane Austen can see her characters on the screen; but filmgoers can also see material taken from theater, television, comic books, and every other medium.

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Health Work with the Poor

A Practical Guide

Rutgers University Press

Christie W. Kiefer vividly brings home the meaning of poverty in people's lives as he examines both their access to-and their lack of- health care. Health Work with the Poor offers both health workers and activists a wealth of practical information on advocacy for the poor. Discussion questions at the end of each chapter and appendices on Internet resources for the study of poverty and on a proposed government program instruct teachers how to foster social awareness among their students. This book is both a valuable resource for courses on poverty and health and an indispensable manual for anyone who works with the poor.

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Medicalized Motherhood

Perspectives from the Lives of African-American and Jewish Women

Rutgers University Press

The 1946 publication of Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care signaled the pervasive influence of expert 'medicalized motherhood' in mid-twentieth-century America. Throughout the previous two decades, pediatricians and women's magazines alike advised mothers of the importance of physicians' guidance for the everyday care of their children, and Spock's book popularized this advice, particularly among white, middle-class women. When Jacquelyn S. Litt interviewed African-American and Jewish women who raised their children in the 1930s and 1940s, she found that these women responded to experts' advice in ways uniquely shaped by their ethnicity, race, and class. Litt's book is enriched with many narratives from the mothers themselves. Both the women's voices and her acute sociological research bring to light how medicalized motherhood, while not the single cause of difference and inequality among the women, was a site where they were produced.

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