California Press: 1495 books
Shaped by the West, Volume 2
A History of North America from 1850
Language: English
Release Date: September 11, 2018
Shaped by the West is a two-volume primary source reader that rewrites the history of the United States through a western lens. America’s expansion west was the driving force for issues of democracy, politics, race, freedom, and property. William Deverell and Anne F. Hyde provide a nuanced look...
Lavender and Red
Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left
Language: English
Release Date: October 4, 2016
LGBT activism is often imagined as a self-contained struggle, inspired by but set apart from other social movements. *Lavender and Red *recounts a far different story: a history of queer radicals who understood their sexual liberation as intertwined with solidarity against imperialism, war, and...
Charros
How Mexican Cowboys Are Remapping Race and American Identity
Language: English
Release Date: June 4, 2019
In the American imagination, no figure is more central to national identity and the nation’s origin story than the cowboy. Yet the Americans and Europeans who settled the U.S. West learned virtually everything they knew about ranching from the indigenous and Mexican horsemen who already inhabited...
Against Humanity
Lessons from the Lord's Resistance Army
Language: English
Release Date: February 2, 2018
“Gunya is a woman in her late twenties. Soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) abducted her when she was eleven years old and forcefully conscripted her into the rebel ranks. Gunya spent a little over a decade with the rebels before deserting. While there, she gave birth to a son with Onen,...
Seeing
How Light Tells Us About the World
Language: English
Release Date: September 12, 2017
Written by one of the pioneers in visual perception, *Seeing *provides an overview of the basics of sight, from the anatomy of the eye, to optical illusions, to the way neural systems process visual signs. To help readers better appreciate the most-used of our five senses, Tom Cornsweet describes...
by Philippe Bourgois, Jeffrey Schonberg
Language: English
Release Date: May 29, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: May 29, 2009
This powerful work of gonzo journalism, predating the widespread acknowledgement of the opioid epidemic as such, immerses the reader in the world of homelessness and drug and alcohol abuse in the contemporary United States. For over a decade Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed a social network...
Bishops in Flight
Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity
Language: English
Release Date: April 23, 2019
A free open access ebook is upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.
Flight during times of persecution has a long and fraught history in early Christianity. In the third century, bishops who fled were considered cowards or, worse yet, heretics. On the face, flight meant denial of...
Motherload
Making It All Better in Insecure Times
Language: English
Release Date: September 5, 2014
In a time of economic anxiety, fear of terrorism, and marital uncertainty, insecurity has become a big part of life for many American mothers. With bases of security far from guaranteed, mothers are often seeking something they can count on. In this beautifully written and accessible book, Ana Villalobos...
Tasting French Terroir
The History of an Idea
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2015
This book explores the origins and significance of the French concept of terroir, demonstrating that the way the French eat their food and drink their wine today derives from a cultural mythology that developed between the Renaissance and the Revolution. Through close readings and an examination of...
Hurt
Chronicles of the Drug War Generation
Language: English
Release Date: November 7, 2017
*Hurt: Chronicles of the Drug War Generation *weaves engaging first-person accounts of the lives of baby boomer drug users, including author Miriam Boeri’s first-hand knowledge as the sister of a heroin addict. The compelling stories are set in historical context, from the cultural influence of...
Jailcare
Finding the Safety Net for Women behind Bars
Language: English
Release Date: May 23, 2017
Thousands of pregnant women pass through our nation’s jails every year. What happens to them as they carry their pregnancies in a space of punishment? In this time when the public safety net is frayed, incarceration has become a central and racialized strategy for managing the poor. Using her ethnographic...
The Scholar Denied
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology
Language: English
Release Date: August 27, 2015
In this groundbreaking book, Aldon D. Morris’s ambition is truly monumental: to help rewrite the history of sociology and to acknowledge the primacy of W. E. B. Du Bois’s work in the founding of the discipline. Calling into question the prevailing narrative of how sociology developed, Morris,...
The Twilight of Cutting
African Activism and Life after NGOs
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2016
The last three decades have witnessed a proliferation of nongovernmental organizations engaging in new campaigns to end the practice of female genital cutting across Africa. These campaigns have in turn spurred new institutions, discourses, and political projects, bringing about unexpected social...
Emergence and Collapse of Early Villages
Models of Central Mesa Verde Archaeology
Language: English
Release Date: April 10, 2012
Ancestral Pueblo farmers encountered the deep, well watered, and productive soils of the central Mesa Verde region of Southwest Colorado around A.D. 600, and within two centuries built some of the largest villages known up to that time in the U.S. Southwest. But one hundred years later, those villages...