Explore the latest titles in JSTOR’s Path to Open program

Beyond Cortés and Montezuma: The Conquest of Mexico Revisited
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Editors: Vitus Huber and John F. Schwaller 
Author Affiliation: Université de Genève; State University of New York
Discipline: History

Description: 
Beyond Cortés and Montezuma sheds new light on the “Conquest” / Conquista of Mexico by focusing specifically on the Conquista and its aftermath. In conversation with Matthew Restall’s “New Conquest History” movement, these multidisciplinary contributors query the term “conquest” through a series of historical case studies that interrogate how historians, especially in non-Hispanic Europe and the US, understand and interact with this concept. Beginning with a pictographic record of the death of Cauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor, moving through the conquistador invasion, and ending with the legacy of the conquest in a discussion of the Tlaxcallans in modern Mexico, the chapters draw on and integrate interdisciplinary work by employing discussions of gender, nobility (both Native and invasive), colonial development and imperialism, and cultural erasure.

Capturing Covid: Media and the Pandemic in the Digital Era
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Author: Katherine Foss
Discipline: Communication Studies

Description:
Unlike past outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics, COVID-19 emerged in a 21st-century digital landscape of instant communication and abundant online platforms, with older models of news and entertainment media mingling with new types of citizen-produced content. In Capturing COVID, Katherine A. Foss makes sense of how this contemporary media landscape shaped the public’s knowledge and perceptions of the new pandemic. The book focuses on crucial media moments, including the initial reporting from Wuhan; news and social media content on the Diamond Princess quarantine; stories of inequality, stigma, and injustice; narratives of the vaccine rollout; and representations of pandemic life in popular culture.

Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Articulate Body
Publisher: University of Florida Press
Author: Lynn Matluck Brooks, Sariel Golomb, and Garth Grimball
Author Affiliation: Franklin & Marshall College; Princeton Writing Program
Discipline: Performing Arts

Description: 
This collection reveals how the fields of dance and science informed each other’s development and engaged with dominant European worldviews during a time of unprecedented colonial expansion.

From Rupture to Refuge: The Coordinates of Contemporary Refugee Narratives
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Author: Peter Sloan
Discipline: Population Studies

Description: 
From Rupture to Refuge is a wide-ranging study of both contemporary refugee fiction and memoir. From international best-selling novels such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner *and Christi Lefteri’s *The Beekeeper of Aleppo, to memoirs by Zoya Phan and Clemantine Wamariya, it follows refugees as they narrate their experiences and memories of homeland, war, escape, camp, and finally finding refuge. Tracing literary connections between this wide body of 21st Century writing, the book provides an overview of a genre of writing and a detailed textual analyses of thematic and poetic intersections. It also introduces the concept of ‘narrative displacement’, uncovering the ways in which refugees are discursively displaced from their own tales as well as being displaced spatially.

Human Dispersal, Human Evolution, and the Sea: The Palaeolithic Seafaring Debate
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Authors: John Cherry; Thomas Leppard
Author Affiliation: Brown University; Florida State University
Discipline: Archaeology

Description:
Human Dispersal, Human Evolution, and the Sea examines the origins and nature of Paleolithic seafaring ventures and interrogates the scholarship that already exists around the genesis of sea travel and the settling of various landmasses by early humans.

Literature and History in the Shi ji of Sima Qian
Publisher: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
Author: Ichisada Miyazaki; Translated by Joshua A. Fogel
Author Affiliation: Kyoto School; York University
Discipline: History

Description:
This volume is a translated and edited collection of studies on the Shi ji (Records of the Historian) by Sima Qian, authored by the prestigious Japanese sinologist Miyazaki Ichisada. Providing a pathbreaking analysis of the structure and formation of the Shi ji, it serves not only as an excellent introduction to Sima Qian’s masterpiece but also offers historiographical and methodological insights that will stimulate further debate and research. Miyazaki presents fascinating evidence of the role played by narrative fiction and drama in Sima Qian’s recreation of the entire length and breadth of Chinese history right up to his own time.

Mothering in the Time of Coronavirus
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Authors: Amy Lutz, Sujung (Crystal) Lee, and Baurzhan Bokayev
Discipline: Sociology

Description:
When stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic erased the division between home and school, many parents in the United States were suddenly expected to become their children’s teachers. Despite this new arrangement, older gender norms largely remained in place, and these extra child rearing responsibilities fell disproportionately on mothers. Mothering in the Time of Coronavirus explores how they juggled working, supervising at-home learning, and protecting their children’s emotional and physical health during the outbreak.

No Man Is An Island: Community and Commemoration on Norway’s Utoya
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Authors: Jørgen Frydnes, translated by Wendy Gabrielson
Discipline: Peace & Conflict Studies

Description:
Utøya, the Norwegian Labor Party’s summer camp for youth, a beloved place where many Norwegians learned about democratic values and processes, made lifelong friendships, and developed a vision for a just society, became mired in grief and discord. When Jørgen Watne Frydnes took on the daunting task of rebuilding the island and charting its future, he had to figure out a compassionate and just way forward. He made a radical decision: he set out to talk with each family of a murdered person, seeking to understand their needs and their hopes so that the future of the island could include their wishes and concerns. This emotionally grueling work, which was never considered in the scholarly literature on commemoration, led to a true renewal of Utøya, resulting in a meaningful memorial to those who were lost as well as beautiful surroundings for campers who come there to study democracy and peace.

On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Author: Michelle Bumatay
Discipline: African Studies

Description: 
On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power is the first book-length study in English about Black francophone cartoonists and their work. Michelle Bumatay decenters Eurocentric conceptions of francophone comic art and foregrounds the ubiquity of Western racial stereotypes encoded in mainstream French and Belgian bandes dessinées as well as the imbalance of power between the Global North and the Global South carried over from the colonial era. By examining a diversity of Black cartoonists’ aesthetic and material responses to the colonially inherited medium of bandes dessinées, she argues that their innovations constitute important reparative work that combats racial stereotypes and challenges transcolonial power imbalances.

Public Land and Democracy in America: Understanding Conflict over Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Author: Julie Brugger
Author Affiliation: University of Washington; University of Arizona
Discipline: Anthropology

Description: 
Julie Brugger explores what democracy means to ordinary Americans by analyzing conflict over public lands and the management of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. Public Land and Democracy in America brings into focus the perspectives of a variety of groups affected by conflict over the monument, including residents of adjacent communities, ranchers, federal land management agency employees, and environmentalists. In the process of following management disputes at the monument over the years, Brugger considers how conceptions of democracy have shaped and been shaped by the regional landscape and by these disputes.

Spatial Stories and Intersecting Geographies: Hong Kong, Britain, and China, 1890-1940
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Author: Klaudia Hiu Yen Lee
Author Affiliation: City University of Hong Kong
Discipline: Cultural Studies

Description: 
This book provides a fresh account of the literary and journalistic connection between Hong Kong, China, and Britain, and the different forms of literary production and cross-cultural encounters that emerged from within and across these three locales from 1890 to 1940. Through archival research of under-explored literary periodicals, newspapers, historical and biographical materials, as well as close reading of literary texts written by Hong Kong, British, and Chinese writers, it critically examines the various forms of transnational encounters, networks, and fissures in these places that were historically connected since the second half of the nineteenth century. It aims to decentre existing scholarship that tend to treat Britain and China as the major focuses of inquiry by re-directing attention to Hong Kong as a key locale when considering questions of representation, modernity, colonial and racial politics, transnational movements, and various literary and cultural responses to local and global issues. 

The Community of Nuchi Du Takara (“Life Is the Ultimate Treasure”) in Postwar Okinawa: Local Subjectivity within and against Empire
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Author: Masamichi (Marro) Inoue
Discipline: Asian Studies

Description: 
Against the background of the prolonged presence of the US military in post–World War II Okinawa, The Community of Nuchi Du Takara (“Life Is the Ultimate Treasure”) in Postwar Okinawa explores the conflict between Okinawa and the US-Japan alliance. Inoue examines how Okinawan activists, artists, writers, and others have resisted US military presence, particularly the planned construction of a new military facility in northern Okinawa. In so doing, however, Inoue also underscores something in postwar Okinawa that one fails to grasp if one approaches it solely through the lens of resistance or protest. In historically and ethnographically grappling with this “something,” he develops a local notion of nuchi du takara (“life is the ultimate treasure”) into an analytical concept. 

Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba
Publisher: University of MIchigan Press
Author: M. Myrta Leslie Santana
Discipline: Music

Description: 
Draws on years of embedded research within Cuban trans/queer communities to analyze how transformistas, or drag performers, understand their roles in the social transformation of the island.