Published

In the midst of a deadly heat wave during the summer of 1834, a woman clawed her way over the wall of a Roman Catholic convent near Boston, Massachusetts and escaped to the home of a neighbor, pleading for protection. When the Bishop, Benedict Fenwick, persuaded her to return, rumors began swirling through the Yankee community and in the press that she was being held at the convent against her will, and had even been murdered. The imagined fate of the “Mysterious Lady,” as she became popularly known, ultimately led to the destruction of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts on the night of August 11, 1834, by a mob of Protestant men.

In Fire & Roses, Nancy Schultz brings alive this forgotten moment, shedding light on one of the darkest incidents of religious persecution to be recorded in the New World. It was a time when independent, educated women were feared as much as immigrants and Catholics, and anti-Papist diatribes were the stuff of bestsellers and standing-room-only lectures. This glimpse into nineteenth-century Boston and into an elite boarding school for young women, vividly dissects the period’s roiling tensions over class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and education.

Most people would feel a great loss if elephants, rhinos, or gorillas were to become extinct, but would we willingly move our families, change our means of earning a living, and disrupt our culture to prevent their extinction? People living in rural Africa are being asked to do just this by the world community. The Myth of Wild Africa explores a joint African/Western approach to conservation with the goal of returning control to the African nations.

Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Sidney Hillman Book Prize

In No Shame in My Game, Katherine Newman gives voice to a population for whom work, family, and self-esteem are top priorities despite all the factors that make earning a living next to impossible—minimum wage, lack of child care and health care, and a desperate shortage of even low-paying jobs. Most of the information we have on labor markets and the workforce naturally comes from economists or sociologists who work with large data sets. That research is crucial, especially for explaining the big picture. But it doesn’t help us understand how ordinary people in poor communities view their lives, their options, or how they put the resources together to survive, to raise their kids, to balance going to school and keeping a job. By intimately following the lives of inner-city workers and job seekers, Katherine Newman provides just that insight into the lives of the working poor.

Through observations and interviews, we come to understand not only the essential contribution that low-wage earners make to the survival of poor households, but also the ways in which these jobs affect young people’s attitudes, prospects, and self-image. Most powerfully, we listen as low-wage earners speak about their jobs, their ambitions, and their values—especially their devotion to family and belief in the work ethic.  No Shame in My Game is an incisive, lucid, and vital new contribution to the debate on poverty and work in inner-city communities.

The Web has not been hyped enough.

That’s the startling thesis of this one-of-a-kind book that’s has become a classic work of social commentary. Just as Marshall McLuhan forever altered our view of broadcast media, Weinberger shows that the new medium of the Web is not only altering social institutions such as business and government but, more important, is transforming bedrock concepts of our culture such as space, time, the public, and even reality itself.

Through stories of life on the Web, an insightful take on some familiar (and some unfamiliar) Web sites, and a wicked sense of humor, Weinberger puts the Web into the social and intellectual context we need to begin assessing its true impact on our lives. The irony, according to Weinberger, is that this new technology is more in tune with our authentic selves than is the modern world.

Funny, provocative, and ultimately hopeful, Small Pieces Loosely Joined makes us look at the Web—and at life—in a new light.

After World War II the United States faced two preeminent challenges: how to administer its responsibilities abroad as the world’s strongest power, and how to manage the rising movement at home for racial justice and civil rights. The effort to contain the growing influence of the Soviet Union resulted in the Cold War, a conflict that emphasized the American commitment to freedom. The absence of that freedom for nonwhite American citizens confronted the nation’s leaders with an embarrassing contradiction.

The Cold War and the Color Line is the first comprehensive examination of how the Cold War intersected with the final destruction of global white supremacy. Thomas Borstelmann pays close attention to the two Souths—Southern Africa and the American South—as the primary sites of white authority’s last stand. He reveals America’s efforts to contain the racial polarization that threatened to unravel the anticommunist western alliance. In so doing, he recasts the history of American race relations in its true international context, one that is meaningful and relevant for our own era of globalization.