AMERICAN STUDIES
Middlebrow Mission: Pearl S. Buck’s American China by Vanessa Kunnemann (Transcript-Verlag, distributed by Columbia University Press; 283 pages; $40). Documents how Buck, the daughter of missionaries, constructed an “American China” for her readers and negotiated her position as a cultural go-between.
The New Formula For Cool: Science, Technology, and the Popular in the American Imagination by Judith Kohlenberger (Transcript-Verlag, distributed by Columbia University Press; 345 pages; $45). Focuses on film and television in a study of cultural associations between “coolness” and realms of technology and science; topics include The Big Bang Theory, The Social Network, and Jobs.
ANTHROPOLOGY
The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism edited by Simon Coleman and Rosalind I.J. Hackett (New York University Press; 288 pages; $89 hardcover, $27 paperback). Topics include materiality and spiritual warfare in Tanzanian charismatic Christianity, and rhetoric and rituals of conversion and commitment among contemporary South Korean Evangelical women.
Between Magic and Rationality: On the Limits of Reason in the Modern World edited by Vibeke Steffen, Steffen Johncke, and Kirsten Marie Raahauge (Museum Tusculanum Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press; 380 pages; $54). Ethnographic writings that examine how different societies create and challenge the limits of reason; settings include British spiritualist meetings, dream omens in post-Soviet Krygyzstan, and British and Danish self-help groups for people who hear voices.
Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home by Anne-Maria Makhulu (Duke University Press; 228 pages; $84.95 hardcover, $23.95 paperback). An ethnographic study of squatters in the outskirts of Cape Town during and after the final years of apartheid.
Race Becomes Tomorrow: North Carolina and the Shadow of Civil Rights by Gerald M. Sider (Duke University Press; 226 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Combines scholarly and personal perspectives in a study of race and struggle in Robeson County, N.C.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Excavating Memory: Sites of Remembering and Forgetting edited by Maria Theresia Starzmann and John R. Roby (University Press of Florida; 404 pages; $100). Interdisciplinary writings that offer archaeological, historical, sociological, and other perspectives on sites and processes of memory; topics include the “forensic turn” in Spain’s collective memory.
ART AND ARCHITECTURE
Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power by Susan E. Cahan (Duke University Press; 344 pages; $34.95). Draws on internal museum documents and interviews with artists in a study of the struggles of black artists to win recognition by New York’s art world.
Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art by Delinda Collier (University of Minnesota Press; 240 pages; $87 hardcover, $25 paperback). Describes how images of Chokwe art from Paredes Pintadas da Lunda, an anthropology book published in Portuguese in 1953, came to figure in later nationalist and postcolonial art in Angola.
The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright by Neil Levine (Princeton University Press; 464 pages; $65). A study of the American architect’s engagement with the modern city and the evolving theory of urbanism.
Values in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design: Finding Center in Theory and Practice by M. Elen Deming (Louisiana State University Press; 296 pages; $30). Topics include class consciousness in Napa Valley vineyards, and the de-domestication and re-wilding of the the Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve in the Netherlands.
What Is Landscape? by John R. Stilgoe (MIT Press; 264 pages; $19.95). Topics include once-common but now-disappearing words and distinctions used to label natural and manmade surroundings.
CLASSICAL STUDIES
Masterpieces of Metonymy: From Ancient Greek Times to Now by Gregory Nagy (Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies, distributed by Harvard University Press; 284 pages; $29.95). Examines verbal and visual examples of metonymy from ancient Greek and other cultures.
COMMUNICATION
Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance by Arjun Appadurai (University of Chicago Press; 180 pages; $67.50 hardcover, $22.50 paperback). Draws on Maus, Weber, Durkheim, J.L. Austin, and other theorists in a discussion of the 2008 economic crisis as a failure of language, particularly in relation to the chain of promises created by the derivatives market.
Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade by Carly A. Kocurek (University of Minnesota Press; 244 pages; $80.50 hardcover, $22.95 paperback). Examines the association of video gaming with boys and young men since the arcade era of the 1970s.
CULTURAL STUDIES
Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference by Grace Kyunwon Hong (University of Minnesota Press; 199 pages; $87.50 hardcover, $25 paperback). Draws on literary and other realms in a discussion of “woman-of-color feminism” as a counter to the violence of neoliberalism; writers discussed include Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, and Oscar Zeta Acosta.
ECONOMICS
Collapse and Revival: Understanding Global Recessions and Recoveries by M. Ayhan Kose and Marco E. Terrones (International Monetary Fund; 272 pages; $65). Traces the global business cycle through collapses linked to recessions in 1975, 1982, 1991, and 2009.
FILM STUDIES
Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash by Joe Street (University Press of Florida; 272 pages; $74.95). Uses the film series on the maverick cop to explore San Francisco as a cultural battleground in the post-60s era.
GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES
Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies edited by Mary L. Gray, Colin R. Johnson, and Brian J. Gilley (New York University Press; 396 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Writings by historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, and others that challenge the urban emphasis in the study of queer sexualities and genders.
HISTORY
The Annotated Lincoln edited by Harold Holzer and Thomas A. Horrocks (Harvard University Press; 604 pages; $39.95). Annotated edition of central writings by Lincoln from 1832, and his initial campaign for Illinois assemblyman, to his final speech on Reconstruction, three days before his assassination.
The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism by Jennifer Johnson (University of Pennsylvania Press; 270 pages; $75). Examines the activities of the Algerian Red Crescent and other ways in which the FLN made care for Algerians’ health and welfare part of its anticolonial campaign against the French.
Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940-1945 by Samuel Hideo Yamashita (University Press of Kansas; 256 pages; $29.95). Draws on the wartime diaries and letters of a wide range of Japanese, including soldiers, farmers, housewives, and evacuated children.
Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles by John Mack Faragher (W.W. Norton & Company; 580 pages; $35). Describes the diverse and notably violent society of early Los Angeles, beginning in the 1830s.
Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri by Sharon Romeo (University of Georgia Press; 192 pages; $59.95). Examines the legal petitions, lawsuits, and other wartime activism of black women in St. Louis and surrounding rural areas.
Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster by Norris Hundley Jr. and Donald C. Jackson (University of California Press; 439 pages; $55). Discusses the March 12, 1928, collapse of a dam that flooded California’s Santa Clara Valley, killing more than 400 people in a disaster that ended the career of Los Angeles’s famed hydraulic engineer Mulholland (1855-1935).
Herndon on Lincoln: Letters by William H. Herndon, edited by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis (University of Illinois Press; 371 pages; $35). Edition of letters by Lincoln’s long-time law partner and later biographer.
Idea of a New General History of North America: An Account of Colonial Native Mexico by Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci, translated and edited by Stafford Poole (University of Oklahoma Press; 288 pages; $45). First English translation of writings by Benaduci (1702-53), a Spaniard with Italian origins who traveled to New Spain in 1736 and learned Nahuatl, a language he used for much of his writing.
Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago by John N. Low (Michigan State University Press; 318 pages; $29.95). Examines the distinct identity maintained by the Pokagon in their refusal of being either assimilated or marginalized.
Local Church, Global Church: Catholic Activism in Latin America from “Rerum Novarum” to Vatican II edited by Stephen J.C. Andes and Julia G. Young (Catholic University of America Press; 352 pages; $59.95). Writings on activism from the 1890s to 1962, with particular attention to Mexico.
A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America by Benjamin Looker (University of Chicago Press; 432 pages; $82.50 hardcover, $27.50 paperback). Draws on novels, radio plays, real-estate texts, children’s television, and other realms in a study of Americans’ ideas of neighborhood from World War II to the Reagan era.
New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison edited by Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears (Louisiana State University Press; 272 pages; $47). Focuses on “slave mortgaging” and other aspects of slaves’ reduction to property or capital; contested aspects of the concepts of slave community and agency; and comparative discussion of slavery in the United States and other settings.
On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics by Sheila Fitzpatrick (Princeton University Press; 440 pages; $35). Examines the loyalty, cohesiveness, and effectiveness of the men who were Stalin’s inner political and social circle.
The Prisoner of Kathmandu: Brian Hodgson in Nepal, 1820-43 by Charles Allen (University of Chicago Press; 288 pages; $35). A biography of a British diplomat turned ethnologist, natural historian, and scholar of Tibetan and Nepalese Buddhism (1801-94), who was posted to Kathmandu in 1820.
Schoolhouse Activists: African American Educators and the Long Birmingham Civil Rights Movement by Tondra L. Loder-Jackson (State University of New York Press; 252 pages; $80). Examines the at-times clandestine activism of black teachers in the Alabama city since the late 19th century.
Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity by Aleida Assmann, translated by Sarah Clift (Fordham University Press; 302 pages; $110 hardcover, $35 paperback). Translation of the German scholar’s 2006 work on tensions between how the past is recalled by individuals and societies.
Shameful Victory: The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine by John H.M. Laslett (University of Arizona Press; 218 pages; $24.95). Discusses a stadium project in the 1950s that involved the razing of one of the largest Mexican-American barrios of East Los Angeles with the (unfulfilled) promise of new public housing for its displaced residents.
Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia by David Pomfret (Stanford University Press; 416 pages; $65). Draws on previously unpublished sources in a study of childhood in colonial Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon, and Hanoi.
LAW
Law’s Mistakes edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Umphrey (University of Massachusetts Press; 178 pages;$90 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Writings on what law recognizes as mistakes, and subsequent legal responses; topics include false convictions, erroneous admission of evidence, and botched executions.
The Psychology of Tort Law by Jennifer K. Robbenault and Valerie P. Hans (New York University Press; 320 pages; $89 hardcover, $40 paperback). Examines the psychological assumptions that have shaped tort law and its interpretation; focuses on realms of health care, driving, property, and manufacturing.
LINGUISTICS
Language, Sexuality, and Power: Studies in Intersectional Sociolinguistics edited by Erez Levon and Ronald Beline Mendes (Oxford University Press; 244 pages; $99 hardcover, $39.95 paperback). Essays that offer a global perspective on phonetic variation and perceptions of sexual orientation in Caribbean Spanish.
LITERATURE
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