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

A Degraded Caste of Society: Unequal Protection of the Law as a Badge of Slavery
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Author: Andrew T. Fede
Discipline: Law

Description:
A Degraded Caste of Society uses antebellum US appellate court options and statues to illuminate “two competing criminal law doctrines that applied” to free Black people: “equal protection and unequal protection based on perceptions of race.” These doctrines, Fede argues, “reflect the broader social conflicts between two competing legal cultures and legal consciousnesses.

Against Exclusion: Disrupting Anti-Chinese Violence in the Nineteenth Century
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Author: Audrey Wu Clark
Discipline: Asian Studies
Author Affiliations: United States Naval Academy

Description:
Against Exclusion: Disrupting Anti-Asian Violence in the Nineteenth Century traces the evolution of what we now call the model minority myth and yellow peril. Audrey Wu Clark argues that in the nineteenth century, these seemingly opposite discourses typically collapsed into one another. Although there were binary stereotypes, both centered around the characterization of Chinese people as threats to white American labor.

Before the Roads, Before the Mines: Denesułiné Memories, Narratives, and the Legacy of a Northern Hunting Society
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Author: Robert Jarvenpa
Discipline: Cultural Studies
Author Affiliations: State University of New York

Description:
In Before the Roads, Before the Mines, ethnographer Robert Jarvenpa examines how the energy and extraction industries in Canada’s subarctic north threatens destruction of traditional southern Denesułiné (also known as the Kesyehot’ine or “Poplar House People”) cultural practices, religion, land, and sovereignty near the Churchill River headwaters in northern Saskatchewan, Canada. The discovery of high-grade uranium deposits in the region during the mid-to-late 1970s ushered in an era of mining and road building that would transform the lives of the indigenous Denesułiné in dramatic ways.

Between Black and Brown: Blaxicans and Multiraciality in Comparative Historical Perspective
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Author: Rebecca Romo, G. Reginald Daniel, J Sterphone
Discipline: Cultural Studies
Author Affiliations: Santa Monica College; University of California; Wheaton College

Description:
In Between Black and Brown, Rebecca Romo, G. Reginald Daniel, and J Sterphone begin with the question: How do individuals with one African American parent and one Chicana/o/Mexican parent racially and ethnically identify? Between Black and Brown challenges the commonly held belief that all individuals with any amount of African ancestry are Black. Rather, Blaxicans embrace and live a multiracial identity of both African American and Chicana/o ancestries, histories, physical appearances, social formation, and politics through their own self-definitions.

Black Americans in Mourning:Their Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Author: Leonne Mishell Hudson
Discipline: African American Studies

Description:
Prominent black Americans such as Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Elizabeth Keckley as well as those black Americans who were unknown raised their voices to honor Abraham Lincoln after his assassination. This book will tell the story of a race of people convulsed with sorrow brought on by the awful event. This is the first book that chronicles the profound sadness of African Americans in the days and weeks after the assassination. Many of the former slaves believed that a return to the plantation was in their immediate future following the tragedy.

China’s Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Author: Thomas White
Discipline: Asian Studies
Author Affiliation: King’s College London

Description:
In recent years China has positioned itself as a champion of state-led resource conservation and sustainable development, as it seeks to combat negative ecological effects of rapid economic growth and to adapt to climate change. In the arid rangelands of Inner Mongolia, this state environmentalism has involved grassland conservation policies that target pastoralists and their animals, who are blamed for causing desertification. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork with herders and local officials in Alasha, an arid region in the far west of China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Thomas White illustrates the ways in which state environmentalism—through grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement—has transformed the lives of ethnic Mongol pastoralists and their animals.

Cookstove Chronicles: Feminist Fieldnotes on a Local Technology in India
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Author: Meena Khandelwal
Discipline: Anthropology

Description:
Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options? Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy.

Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration and the Limits of the Welfare State in France
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Authors: Elise Franklin
Discipline: History
Author Affiliation: University of Louisville

Description:
In Disintegrating Empire Elise Franklin argues that the history of postwar France is inextricable from the prolonged process of decolonization, which witnessed a transformation in the twin pillars of French society—the welfare state and conceptions of the white, nuclear family. The French immigrant regime placed disproportionate stress on the family as the incubator of integration while the institution underwent remarkable change over time.

Gender and Physics in the Academy: Theory, Policy and Practice in European Perspective
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Editor(s): Meytal Eran Jona, Pauline Leonard, Yosef Nir, Marika Taylor
Discipline: Gender Studies

Description:
This interdisciplinary collection addresses women’s under-representation in science across Europe, focusing on physics and its gender imbalance. Emphasizing social perspectives over biological explanations, it evaluates policy solutions and shares personal life stories, providing key insights into the physics world.

Five Hundred Years of LGBTQIA+ History in Western Nicaragua
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Author: Victoria González-Rivera
Discipline: Latin American Studies

Description:
This groundbreaking book reframes five hundred years of western Nicaraguan history by giving gender and sexuality the attention they deserve. Victoria González-Rivera decenters nationalist narratives of triumphant mestizaje and argues that western Nicaragua’s LGBTQIA+ history is a profoundly Indigenous one.

Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú: Contesting Tiers of Citizenship
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Author: Sylvanna M. Falcón
Discipline: Feminist & Women’s Studies
Author Affiliation: University of California

Description:
Sylvanna M. Falcon examines how local communities in Lima have formed oppositional spaces, movements, and communities to challenge a status quo that erases Perú’s history of internal violence. These counterpublics focus on human rights-oriented memory that acknowledges the legacies of racism and misogyny underlying the violence.

HIV/AIDS and the Stage: Politics and Performance in Neoliberal Times
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Author: Louisa Hann
Discipline: Cultural Studies
Author Affiliation: University of Manchester

Description:
Theater and performance have played vital political and pedagogical roles in the history of HIV/AIDS advocacy and activism in the Global North. From the shoestring dissident work of the 1980s and ‘90s to the contemporary educational plays challenging extant stigma surrounding HIV, the stage has long provided a space for identificatory community and activism.

It Started with the Hats: Exploring and Understanding the Life Experiences of Boston’s Late-1980s Gang Members
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Author: Paul F. Joyce
Discipline: Criminology & Criminal Justice

Description:
This book reconstructs the lives of thirty Black and Latino men, aged 35-54, who witnessed and led the emergence of the street gang culture in Boston in the late-1980s. Approximately 1,300 pages of transcript taken from in-depth, one-on-one, retrospective interviews detail their life experiences from childhood through adulthood.

Landscapes of Movement and Predation: Perspectives from Archaeology, History, and Anthropology
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Contributors: Brenda J. Bowser, Catherine M. Cameron
Discipline: Archaeology

Description:
Landscapes of Movement and Predation is a global study of times and places, in the colonial and precolonial eras, where people were subject to brutality, displacement, and loss of life, liberty, livelihood, and possessions. The book provides a startling new perspective on an aspect of the past that is often overlooked: the role of violence in shaping where, how, and with whom people lived.

Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Author: Benjamin Bergholtz
Discipline: Language & Literature
Author Affiliations: Louisiana Tech University

Description:
Benjamin Bergholtz argues that maximalism is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. To develop this argument, the book considers a series of massive and meandering novels that represent, formally reproduce, and ultimately invite reflection upon the effects of globalization. Considering novels that crisscross from London and Lusaka to Kingston, Kabul, and Kashmir, each chapter considers a maximalist novel that simultaneously maps and formally mimics a cornerstone of globalization

The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship between Women Teachers
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Author: Pamela VanHaitsma
Discipline: Feminist & Women’s Studies
Author Affiliations: Pennsylvania State University

Description:
The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship between Women Teachers offers a queer feminist history of rhetoric that recovers the civic contributions of women teachers in same-sex romantic friendships—advancing a theory of the erotic as rhetorical power. Extending perspectives from ancient rhetoric to nineteenth-century progressivism, from Audre Lorde’s Black lesbian feminist theory to its present-day uptakes, Pamela VanHaitsma conceives of the erotic is as an interanimation of desires that, in being passionately shared, becomes imbued with the power to forge connection and foment change.

The Life of William Collins, Poet
Publisher: Clemson University Press
Contributors: Mary Margaret Stewart, Elizabeth Lambert, Linda E. Merians
Discipline: Language & Literature

Description:
William Collins’s poetry was highly regarded by his contemporaries and by eighteenth-century literary scholars since, but what has been missing is an in-depth biographical study. Through impressive archival discoveries, Mary Margaret Stewart refutes the received portrait of Collins as an impoverished genius and presents new information about his family’s finances and wealth, which sustained him throughout his life.

Wealth, Poverty and Enduring Inequality: let’s Talk Wealtherty
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Author: Sarah Kerr
Discipline: Public Policy & Administration

Description:
The rich and the poor in the UK are subject to radically different legislative approaches. While the behaviors of the poor are relentlessly scrutinized, those of the rich are ignored or enabled. In this book, Sarah Kerr suggests that we live in a state of ‘wealtherty’, characterized by the hyper-concentration of wealth and a stark distinction between the rich and the rest. Drawing on evidence from the 1500s onwards, she reveals a long history of government scrutiny of the poor and ignorance of the rich. She contests contemporary policy and practice which disregards the enduring role of the rich in the production of poverty and poverty in the production of the rich.

Zones of Encuentro: Language and Identities in Northern New Mexico
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Author: Lillian Gorman
Discipline: American Studies
Author Affiliations: University of Arizona

Description:
Working at the intersection of Latino cultural studies and sociocultural linguistics, Lillian Gorman’s Zones of Encuentro: Language and Identities in Northern New Mexico focuses on the everyday lived language experiences of U.S. Latinos in northern New Mexico and engages with how these communities theorize about language and identity in their own lives.