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51523 results in American studies

Page 2 of 2577

Proscription by Degrees
  • The Abolition of the Slave Trade to the United States
  • Kenneth Morgan
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2025
    Print publication:
    31 August 2025
  • In this book, Kenneth Morgan provides the most comprehensive account of the abolition of the slave trade to the United States since W. E. B. Du Bois's 1896 The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1970. Utilizing a wider range of resources and exploring the economic, social, moral, and political considerations, Morgan creates a multi-layered account that explains why abolition was a protracted affair that proceeded by degrees over nearly half a century. He appraises the role of abolitionist individuals, groups, and societies in bringing abolition to the forefront of public discussion across North America, and the decisive role of the US constitution and the constitutional convention that eventually led to proscription in 1808, which made abolition constitutionally possible.

Outgunned No More
  • The New Era of Firearms Industry Accountability
  • Linda S. Mullenix
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Outgunned No More comprehensively addresses the changed legal landscape under which governments and private citizens can sue the gun industry for contributing to and sustaining the gun violence epidemic in the US and Mexico. The book canvasses federal and state efforts to regulate firearms through gun control measures, arguing that these regulatory measures have proven ineffective to stem gun violence. Instead, recourse to robust consumer protection and mass tort litigation provides the best avenue for holding the firearms industry accountable. Chapters highlight three important interventions: the 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, the Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School litigation, and the recent enactment of consumer protection and public nuisance firearms statutes in nine states. These innovative statutes have created an avenue for litigation that overcomes the firearm industry's historical immunity. Outgunned No More concludes that a firearms mass tort litigation, modeled after the resolution of claims in the tobacco industry, is the best path forward.

Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • Matthew Rebhorn
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 August 2025
  • This book recovers an important set of American literary texts from the turn of the nineteenth century to the Civil War that focus on bodies that seem to have minds of their own. Artists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, Edwin Forrest, Henry Box Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Herman Melville represented the evocative expressiveness of these literary bodies. With twitches and roars, flushes and blushes, these lively literary bodies shaped the development of American Literature even as they challenged the structures of chattel slavery, market capitalism, and the patriarchy. Situated within its historical context, this new story of nineteenth-century American Literature thus reveals how American literary expression-from novels to melodramas, from panoramas to magic tricks-represented less repressive, more capacious possibilities of conscious existence, and new forms of the human for those dehumanized in the nineteenth century.

Landscapes of Genius and the Transatlantic Origins of Environmentalism
  • Nineteenth-Century British and American Literary Cultures of Nature
  • Scott Hess
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • During the nineteenth century, the idea of 'genius' became associated with natural landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic. Scott D. Hess explores how those associations defined the modern significance of nature and precipitated the emergence of National Parks and the environmental movement. William Wordsworth's identification with the English Lake District, Henry David Thoreau's with Walden, and John Muir's with Yosemite established the paradigm of the 'landscape of genius,' through which authors and landscapes entered the nature-writing canon and national high culture. The book also explores the significance of race, gender, and class for such landscapes, as evidenced in writings by African American author Frederick Douglass; American woman writer Susan Fenimore Cooper; and British laboring-class poets Robert Burns, John Clare, and Ann Yearsley. Fundamentally reshaping how we understand nineteenth-century transatlantic cultures of nature, Hess reveals the ongoing legacy of the landscape of genius for environmental politics today.

No Adult Left Behind
  • How Adult Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids
  • Vladimir Kogan
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • For decades, Americans have debated why our students consistently score lower than their peers in other developed countries. While most debates have focused on school spending, curriculum, teacher quality, and teachers' unions, No Adult Left Behind argues that local democratic control is the root of the problem. Elected school boards govern local school districts, but only adults vote in local elections – most of whom don't have children or care about academics. This leads to educational debates that are centered around issues that adults care most about, such as partisanship, identity politics, property values, and employment concerns, while the needs of students get left behind. In identifying the misalignment between the interests of school children and the political and policy agendas of the adults who control education, No Adult Left Behind stands to become a landmark study on modern education politics.

Contemporary American Fiction and Cultures of Self-Help
  • Gillian Moore
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • This is a book about the encounters that contemporary North American fiction stages with distinct strands of self-help. Its central argument is that the varied practices of ever-expanding and diversifying self-help cultures are generatively elastic sites of inspiration as well as antagonism for contemporary authors: spaces where they can explore what it means to be better on personal, ethical, and societal terms. It offers new perspectives on the work of nine very different writers by exploring how they play different forms of self-help off against one another. This book shows how in the clashes between practices ranging from commencement speeches and grassroots communitarian self-help to time-management productivity manuals, trauma recovery theories, pop-neuroscience, and makeover cultures, contemporary writers try to find ways of reimagining authority and agency beyond individualism, asking how - and if - it is possible to live and write 'better' in our compromised neoliberal world.

Whiteness and American Literature
  • Edited by Jolene Hubbs
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • This volume provides an illuminating exploration of how ideas about whiteness have shaped the literature and culture of the United States. Covering nearly 250 years – from the 1790 Naturalization Act, which limited access to citizenship to immigrants who were 'free white person[s],' to the present – Whiteness and American Literature considers how a broad spectrum of novels, movies, short stories, television shows, poems, songs, and other works depict whiteness. The collection's twenty accessible and engaging chapters by renowned scholars analyze representations of whiteness in a variety of historical periods, literary genres, and aesthetic forms. Chapters also survey scholarly work at the crossroads of whiteness studies and disability studies, food studies, and other academic disciplines. Designed for scholars, students, and general readers, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the role whiteness plays in the US imagination.

The Secret Life of Copyright
  • Intellectual Property and Inequality in the Age of AI
  • John Tehranian
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • In The Secret Life of Copyright, copyright law meets Black Lives Matter and #MeToo as the book examines how copyright law unexpectedly perpetuates inequalities along racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines while undermining progress in the arts. Drawing on numerous case studies, the book argues that, despite their purported neutrality, key doctrines governing copyrights-such as authorship, derivative rights, fair use, and immunity from First Amendment scrutiny-systematically disadvantage individuals from traditionally marginalized communities. The work advocates for a more robust copyright system that better addresses egalitarian concerns and serves the interests of creativity. Given that laws regulating the use of creative content increasingly mediate participation and privilege in the digital world, The Secret Life of Copyright provides a template for a more just and equitable copyright system.

Pay Up!
  • Conservative Myths About Tax Cuts for the Rich
  • John L. Campbell
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • Since the Reagan era, conservatives in the United States have championed cutting taxes, especially for wealthy individuals and corporations, as the best way to achieve economic prosperity. In his new book, Pay Up!, John L. Campbell shows that while these claims are highly influential, they are also wrong. Using historical and cross-national evidence, the book challenges and refutes every justification conservatives have made for tax cuts – that American taxes are too high; they hurt the economy; they facilitate government waste; they constitute an unfair downward redistribution of income; and they threaten individual freedom – and conversely shows that countries can actually benefit from higher taxes, especially when tax increases fall most heavily on those most able to pay them. Through clear prose and a well-reasoned argument, Campbell's book provides an accessible, engaging, and much-needed perspective on the role of taxes in American society.

American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination
  • Aaron Nyerges
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • This new reading of American modernism examines the cartographic literature of the United States and places it in context of the state's overseas expansion. It stretches the map of US literature across an imperial archipelago of territories, bringing canonical American authors into relation with writers who are comparatively under-represented in modernist studies. The book argues that literary artists from across US dominion responded to space-dominating technologies of empire and retooled them to imagine counter-cartographies, designs that challenged the official geographies of the United States.

Ending Income Inequality
  • A Critical Approach to the Law and Economics of Redistribution
  • Matthew Dimick
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • Income inequality in America has been on the rise for decades, but policy and legal thought has yet to catch up. Both parties in the United States have been hesitant to intervene in the market to address this problem, while the income tax system has been touted as a better and more efficient way to tackle income inequality. However, the tax system itself has failed to keep pace with the widening gaps in income. Ending Income Inequality challenges arguments made by legal scholars in the field of law and economics, who have supported the tax system over redistributive legal rules. By examining specific areas of the law such as minimum wage, collective bargaining, antitrust law, intellectual property, and housing regulation, the book argues that using legal rules, in addition to income taxes, is a promising path to reverse rising inequality.

Latinx Literature in Transition, 1992–2020
  • Volume 3
  • Edited by William Orchard
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • This book chronicles important formal and theoretical innovations in Latinx literature during a period when Latinx writers received increasing acclaim while their communities became targets of rising hostility. The essays in this collection show how Latinx writers confront this contradiction by cultivating an understanding of Latinx experience in its transnational dimensions, by recovering histories that were suppressed or erased, by engaging in burgeoning decolonial projects that resist Western epistemologies, and by forming coalitions and solidarities within Latinx groups as well as with other minoritized racial and ethnic communities to challenge state violence and US imperial projects. The book highlights the increasingly important role of genre, form, and media in the contemporary Latinx literature and provides an account of how the shifting demographics and new migrations of Latinx people have not only resulted in new narratives and art but also altered and expanded how we imagine the category 'Latinx.'

August Wilson in Context
  • Edited by Khalid Y. Long, Isaiah Matthew Wooden
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • August Wilson is one of the twentieth century's most important and acclaimed playwrights. This volume demonstrates Wilson's significance to contemporary theatre, culture, and politics by providing fresh and compelling insights into his life, practices, and contributions as an artist and public intellectual. Across four thematically organized sections, contributors situate Wilson's work in his social, cultural and political contexts, examine ongoing developments in Wilson studies, explore the production contexts of his plays, and explicate his dramaturgical sensibilities and strategies. This is the authoritative guide to Wilson's career and artistic legacy for students, theatre practitioners, and general readers interested in this remarkable figure.

Latinx Literature in Transition, 1444–1886
  • Volume 1
  • Edited by Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez, Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • This volume illuminates and gives voice to actors, objects, events, and processes from the early 1400s to the late 1800s and thinks about how they may relate to Latinx expressive literatures and cultures, challenging common paradigms that think of the field as resolutely modern. Drawing on a diverse range of expertise from scholars from around the globe and examining objects ranging from chronicles, histories, letters, journalism, poetry, talismans, performances, and comix, the volume engages with counternarratives and multifaceted contexts that address intersections of race, gender, class, and other social and political locations. The volume significantly contributes to methodological debates around Latina/o/x studies, offering in-depth and multiple explorations of how to imagine the field's complex evolution. It is an indispensable resource for those seeking to broaden their scholarly understanding of Latinx identity and literature, providing fresh insights and critical perspectives that will enrich academic discussions and research in this field.

Steering the Senate
  • The Emergence of Party Organization and Leadership, 1789–2024
  • Gerald Gamm, Steven S. Smith
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • The Senate majority and minority leaders stand at the pinnacle of American national government – as important to Congress as the speaker of the House. However, the invention of Senate floor leadership has, until now, been entirely unknown. Providing a sweeping account of the emergence of party organization and leadership in the US Senate, Steering the Senate is the first-ever study to examine the development of the Senate's main governing institutions. It argues that three forces – party competition, intraparty factionalism, and entrepreneurship – have driven innovation in the Senate. The book details how the position of floor leader was invented in 1890 and then strengthened through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on the full history of the Senate, this book immediately becomes the authoritative source for understanding the institutional development of the Senate – uncovering the origins of the Senate party caucuses, steering committees, and floor leadership.

Gift and Grit
  • Race, Sports, and the Construction of Social Debt
  • Joseph Darda
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • In 1998, Bill Clinton hosted a town hall on race and sports. 'If you've got a special gift,' the president said of athletes, 'you owe more back.' Gift and Grit shows how the sports industry has incubated racial ideas about advantage and social debt since the civil rights era by sorting athletes into two broad categories. The gifted athlete received something for nothing, we're told, and owes the team, the fan, the city, God, nation. The gritty athlete received nothing and owes no one. The distinction between gift and grit is racial, but also, Joseph Darda reveals, racializing: It has structured new racial categories and redrawn racial lines. Sports, built on an image of fairness, inform how we talk about advantage and deservedness in other domains, including immigration, crime, education, and labor. Gift and Grit tells the stories of Roger Bannister, Roberto Clemente, Martina Navratilova, Florence Griffith Joyner, and LeBron James – and the story their stories tell about the shifting meaning of race in America.

Funding White Supremacy
  • Federal Wealth Policies and the Modern Racial Wealth Gap
  • Robert B. Williams
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • In Funding White Supremacy, Robert B. Williams shows how current federal policies have perpetuated and expanded the racial wealth gap in the United States. Through the lens of stratification economics, Williams explores how twelve tax expenditures buried in the federal tax code shower over $1 trillion annually to mostly wealthy, white households, while federal estate and gift taxes have been systematically dismantled. The book reveals how these policies originated in a period of overt racial oppression and have evolved in the modern, post-Civil Rights era, not only contributing to the expanding racial wealth gaps over the last fifty years but how they have also fostered the growth of white wealth at the expense of Black wealth. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand how federal policies contribute to the vast and expanding racial wealth gap at the core of the American system of white supremacy.
Rebel Governance in the Age of Climate Change

Rebel Governance in the Age of Climate Change

Race and the Law in the United States
  • A Contemporary Perspective
  • Michelle D. Deardorff
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    05 June 2025
  • This text explores how the legal history and judicial decisions of the United States contribute to the dynamic societal debates Americans are having around race today. It pairs historical cases and primary sources with contextual commentary to ensure students comprehend how decisions from the past deeply impact the laws they have inherited, as well as shape contemporary issues and political movements. This framework also highlights the distinctive characteristics of the various time periods and how they connect to other eras to provide students with a full appreciation of the events and environments influencing cases. Written in an accessible and engaging style, it avoids the traditional focus of many caselaw books and instead promotes a sound understanding of the legal concepts and dynamics that inform current discussions of racial identities, challenging the usual development of doctrinal law and court decisions defining race. An Instructor Manual is available online, with additional teaching resources and assessment materials for each chapter, to foster meaningful class discussions about future choices and how to pursue a more equal nation.
Elitism versus Populism

Elitism versus Populism
  • Experiments on the Dual Threat to American Democracy
  • Curtis Bram
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • Critics of populism and advocates of elitist democracy often place greater confidence in political elites than in the general public. However, this trust may be misplaced. In five experiments with local politicians, state legislators, and members of the public, the author finds a similar willingness across all groups to entrench their party's power when given the opportunity – a self-serving majoritarianism that transcends partisan lines. This tendency is strongest among committed ideologues, politicians running in highly competitive districts, and those who perceive opponents as especially threatening. Local elected officials even appear more focused on securing their party's next presidential victory than on opposing bans against their political rivals. These findings challenge the conventional mass/elite dichotomy, revealing little differences in undemocratic attitudes. Safeguarding democracy likely requires shifting focus from those individual attitudes to strengthening institutional restraints against majority abuses. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Page 2 of 2577