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

A Great Many Refugees: Progressive Era Assistance in the American West
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Author: Thomas A. Krainz
Author Affiliation: DePaul University
Discipline: History

Description:
In A Great Many Refugees Thomas A. Krainz examines how communities in the American West cared for refugees. The ten case studies include a range of different causes that forced people to flee, including revolution, war, genocide, environmental disaster, and economic recession. Communities tapped into their local resources to provide for refugees, and this informal welfare proved—in the short term—remarkably efficient, effective, and, at times, flexible and innovative. However, local communities simply could not sustain their widespread relief efforts for long and providing meaningful and comprehensive long-term aid proved a near-universal failure. Krainz’s examination of how Progressive Era residents cared for refugees uncovers a significant segment of welfare policies and practices that have remained largely obscured. These examples of informal, short-term assistance efforts profoundly challenge our standard depiction of local Progressive Era welfare practices as anemic and unresponsive to those in crisis.

Anti-colonial research praxis: Methods for knowledge justice
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Editor: Caroline Lenette
Editor Affiliation: University of New South Wales
Discipline: Sociology

Description:
How can anti-colonial research methodologies be transformative and achieve knowledge justice? This book brings together an eclectic group of leading scholars from around the world to share methodological knowledge grounded in First Nations and majority-world expertise and wisdom. The authors challenge western-centric and colonial approaches to knowledge production and redefine the possibilities of what we can achieve through social research. First Nations and majority-world perspectives are contextual and unique. They share a common aim of disrupting established beliefs on research methodologies and the unquestioned norms that dictate whose knowledge the academy values. The ten chapters in this edited collection describe how the authors draw on Indigenous knowledge systems, feminist frameworks, and creative methodologies as anti-colonial research praxis. The examples span several disciplines such as development studies, geography, education, sexual and reproductive health, humanitarian studies, and social work. Authors use a reflexive approach to discuss specific factors that shape how they engage in research ethically, to lead readers through a reflection on their own practices and values. The book reimagines social research using an anti-colonial lens and concludes with a collaboratively developed and co-written set of provocations for anti-colonial research praxis that situate this important work in the context of ongoing colonial violence and institutional constraints. This book is an essential guide for researchers and scholars within and beyond the academy on how anti-colonial research praxis can produce meaningful outcomes, especially in violent and troubled times. Cover art courtesy of Tawny Chatmon.

Bittersweet Sounds of Passage: Balinese Gamelan Angklung Cremation Music
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Author: Ellen Koskoff
Author Affiliation: Society for Ethnomusicology
Discipline: Music

Description:
An important presence through centuries of musical and social change, gamelan angklung is a small, four-tone bronze-keyed ensemble that remains ubiquitous at cremations in Bali. Ellen Koskoff offers a compelling portrait of these little-studied orchestras and their members: rice farmers, eatery owners, and other locals who do not see themselves as musicians or what they play as music. Koskoff examines the history, cultural significance, and musical structures of contemporary gamelan angklung cremation music through the lens of three intertwined stories.

Boston and the Making of a Global City
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Author: James C. O’Connell
Discipline: Economics

Description:
In the late twentieth century the American and global economy shifted from manufacturing toward a knowledge industry. Following an economic low point several decades earlier, the city of Boston took advantage of the new era of globalization, fueled by dramatic advances in telecommunications, computer power, and air and sea travel, as well as its own impressive intellectual capital. Boston and the Making of a Global City pulls together scholarship, media stories, personal interviews, and city planning documents to tell the story of Boston’s historical trajectory, as it quickly became a competitive global hub. Starting with its role as a colonial port and nineteenth-century maritime power, but moving quickly forward, the book describes how Boston capitalized on its strengths in higher education and such innovation sectors as life sciences, healthcare, information technology, and finance. Author James O’Connell traces the historical sweep of global flows—trade and supply chains, innovation and the dissemination of knowledge, investment, transportation, tourism, telecommunications, and immigration—that have shaped the city and region’s development. This volume also addresses the economic, social, and environmental challenges that Boston currently faces and how it is strategically positioned to confront them going forward.

Britain’s ‘Mr X’: Sir Frank Roberts and the making of British foreign policy, 1930-68
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Author: Jonathan Colman
Author Affiliation: University of Central Lancashire
Discipline: History

Description:
Over four decades as a diplomat, Sir Frank Roberts dealt with headline issues, including policy towards Germany during the years of appeasement, the Second World War alliance with the Soviet Union, the origins of the Cold War, NATO affairs, the Berlin and Cuban Missile Crises, European integration, and relations with the Federal Republic of Germany. Collaborating with the renowned American diplomat, George F. Kennan (the cryptonymous author ‘X’ of an influential 1947 article), his despatches from Moscow in 1946 shaped Britain’s Cold War strategy. In 1954 he played an integral part in the diplomacy behind the rearmament of the Federal Republic and her incorporation into NATO, helping to build an enduring structure of transatlantic security. Roberts’ career sheds new light on British foreign policy across an era in which Britain slipped from global pre-eminence to regional power status.

Cinematic Ethnography: Experiencing cultures through some audiovisual practices
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Author: Laurent Van Lancker
Author Affiliation: Aix-Marseille University
Discipline: Anthropology

Description:
Cinematic ethnography proposes an interdisciplinary approach to theories and practices at the intersection of art, anthropology and cinema. The book proposes a model of collective aesthetics and collaborative filmmaking, going beyond the straightforward representation of reality that is so prevalent in visual anthropology and film studies. This book explores the practices of filmmakers who utilise sensory collaborative approaches to convey diversity of knowledge. It affirms that the more we allow cinema to infuse audio-visual transmissions of reality, the more we might be able to experience the evoked reality. The book proposes a dialogic journey, inviting the reader to pause during the reading of the book to watch some of the author’s films, which exemplify the discussed theories and practices. This innovative work from a practising filmmaker and visual anthropologist invites us to rethink how our cinematic practices, rather than aiming at factual representation and description, might instead contribute to a collaborative understanding of intercultural dialogue and shared knowledge. For those interested in visual anthropology, documentary film or broader questions about the nature of art and representation, Cinematic ethnography is a thought-provoking invitation to see – and tell – things differently.

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness: An archaeological perspective on the influences of Victorian values and city-wide health in Parramatta, New South Wales
Publisher: Sydney University Press
Author: E. Jeanne Harris
Discipline: Archaeology

Description:
Dr E. Jeanne Harris explores the ways in which the colonial population of New South Wales was heavily influenced by “Victorian values”, which encouraged good health practices through a clean lifestyle. The book examines eight residential sites to understand social reforms and public health practices of the 19th century. This scholarly work provides insights into the everyday lives and societal norms of British settlers and their descendants.

Comic Fascism: Ideology, Catholicism, and Americanism in Italian Children’s Periodicals
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Author: Zane Elward
Discipline: History

Description:
Comics in Italy—produced by Fascists, conservatives, Catholics and, after WWII, youth groups on the political Left—were a part of the cultural struggle to represent distinct visions for Italian society to children in the first half of the twentieth century. During Fascist rule (1922–1945), fellow travelers in conservative and Catholic circles were often entangled with the political and cultural agenda of Mussolini’s regime. While the production of comics under Fascism was subjected to censorship, publishers and authors were left to interpret Fascist principles (themselves often vaguely defined). In Comic Fascism, Zane Elward analyzes documents from state and publisher archives, in addition to the comics themselves, to reveal tensions and commonalities between the Fascist cultural project and various sociopolitical circles. Despite real differences, this overlap between Fascism an the Catholic Church produced an image of compatibility with the regime in these comics, including comics from the United States, normalizing it to young Italian readers. After WWII, many of the values and social anxieties that entangled intellectuals with the regime persisted, and Italian comics reflected the growing tensions between the political Right and Left as Italians set out to redefine their society.

Counting Like a State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 US Census
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Author: Philip Rocco
Discipline: Political Science

Description:
In Counting Like a State, Philip Rocco shows how the production of the US census now hinges crucially not only on what happens in Washington but also on a series of intergovernmental partnerships. State and local officials, though not formally responsible for census taking, figure importantly in the implementation of the decennial count. These officials are essential partners in the construction and maintenance of address lists, as well as in outreach and promotion campaigns in hard-to-count communities. The 2020 Census compounded these challenges with new crises. Intergovernmental partnerships played a key role in preventing President Trump from adding a citizenship question, as state and local officials mounted a coordinated legal counteroffensive. Many local officials also simply refused to cooperate with the Trump administration’s efforts to exclude undocumented immigrants from the apportionment count. The census also took place in the context of a global pandemic that stretched administrative resources to the breaking point. While these partnerships allowed the Census Bureau to adapt to ever-changing conditions on the ground, state and local governments also sounded the alarm when the Trump administration sought to rush the census. These efforts helped preserve the quality of the data collected in the 2020 count.

Debating Authenticity: Authorship, Aesthetics and Embodiment in Trans Media
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Author: Paige Mackintosh
Discipline: Film Studies

Description:
Debating Authenticity merges phenomenology, paratextual analysis, genre studies, cultural theory, and trans scholarship to investigate emerging debates regarding trans media’s authorship, authenticity, and aesthetics across the first two decades of the twenty-first century. By questioning how trans people, both on-and offscreen, are deployed within mainstream cultural industries as representatives of political and cultural progressiveness Paige Macintosh interrogates consultancy roles and their authorship status. Building on trans scholars’ new attention to trans aesthetics, they also consider how scholars might productively counter the charged debates currently informing trans media scholarship by reconsidering the categorisation of trans media and beginning to reroute the power of canonisation from cis industry elites to trans viewers. Looking to genre studies – particularly the intersections of gothic horror, science fiction, and spectacle-driven genres like the musical or melodrama – Macintosh outlines their own variation of trans aesthetics, one that is capable of countering trans cinemas melancholic tendencies.

Empire, Tourism, and Colonial Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka
Publisher: Leiden University Press
Author: Mikko Toivanen
Author Affiliation: Freie Universität Berlin
Discipline: Asian Studies

Description:
Step back into the mid-19th century and explore the birth of colonial tourism in the Dutch East Indies, British Ceylon, and the Straits Settlements with this insightful book. Offering a fresh reinterpretation of the era, this work critically analyses twenty influential colonial travel writings, revealing how tourism evolved into a powerful transimperial phenomenon. Through a close reading of Dutch and English travel narratives, the book uncovers how colonial tourism shaped racial stereotypes, advanced the professionalisation of colonial sciences, and embodied the ideology of modernity through new travel infrastructures. This transformation was driven by the influx of settlers, officials, and soldiers from Europe, who sought to capitalise on the rapid expansion of administrative and territorial control in these regions. Far from being frivolous, these travel writings were deeply political, reflecting the cultural reinvention of colonial life. By adopting the popular tourist tropes of middle-class Europe, these works helped legitimise imperial authority, moving away from the adventurous, exotic narratives of previous decades. Perfect for historians, cultural scholars, and those interested in colonial studies, this book offers a compelling look at how colonial tourism reshaped the empire and influenced the way Europe viewed its far-reaching territories.

Fertile expectations: The politics of involuntary childlessness in twentieth-century France
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Author: Margaret Cook Andersen
Author Affiliation: University of Tennessee
Discipline: History

Description:
An engaging history of motherhood, demography, and infertility in twentieth-century France, this book explores fraught political and cultural meanings attached to the notion of an “ideal” family size. When statistics revealed a sustained drop in France’s birthrate, pronatalist activists pushed for financial benefits, propaganda, and punitive measures to counter declining fertility. Situating infertility within this history, the author details innovations in fertility medicine, cultural awareness of artificial insemination, and changing laws on child adoption. These practices offered new ways of responding to infertility and formed part of a growing expectation of being able to control one’s fertility and family size. This book presents the political and cultural context for understanding why private questions about when to start a family, how many children to have, and how to cope with involuntary childlessness, evolved and became part of state demographic policies.

Head in the game: Critical sociocultural analyses of sports concussion
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Authors: Stephen Townsend; Murray G. Phillips; Gary Osmond; Rebecca Olive
Author Affiliation: University of Queensland
Discipline: Sociology

Description:
Head in the Game brings together international scholars from multiple humanities, social science, and scientific disciplines to critically examine one of the most vexing issues in global sport: concussion. Head in the Game argues that science and medicine alone cannot solve the concussion crisis. Sociocultural factors must also be considered. This edited collection draws attention to the ways that social, cultural, historical, political, literary, philosophical, and legal factors have shaped the concussion crisis in sport. Head in the Game is essential reading for those who want to understand how the concussion crisis came to be and provides guidance for developing ethical and evidence-based solutions in the future.

Hill Farms: Surviving Modern Times in Early 20th Centry Vermont
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Author: Dona Brown
Discipline: Environmental Studies

Description:
There is a stubborn myth that has persisted for almost two centuries: the narrative of the abandoned farm in the rural American northeast. In Hill Farms, historian Dona Brown confronts this myth of rural decline with a focus on Jamaica, Vermont, a small town in the hills west of Brattleboro. Through this town’s history, she reveals a more complex economic and environmental narrative, a story of the continued use of traditional farm methods despite the growing power of modernization and demands for increased efficiencies. Brown examines the records of a 1930 study by the University of Vermont’s now infamous Eugenics Survey, part of a flood of problematic investigations of Vermont rural life at the time, wherein eugenicists interviewed residents in every Jamaica household about crops, incomes, and housing conditions. These researchers from various disciplines saw in Jamaica and towns like it poverty and ignorance rather than a commitment to farming as a modest but sustainable way of life. Extensive handwritten notes from the Eugenics Survey provide a remarkable glimpse into the daily lives and practices of these upland farmers, revealing the value in maintaining older, less intensive farming practices and shedding new light on the social and environmental history of the time. As debates around farming and rural life intensified during the Great Depression, advocates beyond Vermont rose to the defense of traditional farms. Though industrialized agriculture ultimately prevailed, the old farming strategies cultivated by these upcountry residents continue to attract adherents in the face of new challenges to traditional farming in our own times.

Implementing a global health programme: Smallpox and Nepal
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Author: Susan Heydon
Author Affiliation: University of Otago
Discipline: History

Description:
Worldwide eradication of the devastating viral disease of smallpox was devised as a distant global policy, but success depended on implementing a global vaccination programme within nation states. How this was achieved remains relevant and topical for responding to today’s global communicable disease challenges. The small and poor Himalayan kingdom of Nepal faced enormous geographical and infrastructure challenges if it was going to succeed in a nationwide vaccination programme. This book acknowledges the key role of the WHO but disrupts the top-down, centre-led standard narrative. Against a background of widespread internal political and social change, Nepal’s programme was expanded, effectively decentralised and a vaccination strategy introduced that aligned with people’s beliefs. Few foreign personnel were involved.

Imprisoned Parenting: The Impact of Parental Incarceration on Children’s Well-Being and Relationships
Publisher: Masaryk University Press
Edited by: Jitka Navrátilová; Pavel Navrátil
Editor Affiliation: Masaryk University
Discipline: Sociology

Description:
The book opens up the issue of parenting by those in prison. While the public focus on prisoners tends to be on guilt and punishment, this publication shows us that many of those in prison are also parents. The authors of the book not only explain the specifics of this parenting, but also seek to engage readers in protecting and supporting children who are separated from their parents as a result of their incarceration.

Let the dead speak: Spiritualism in Australia
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Author: Andrew Singleton; Matt Tomlinson
Author Affiliations: Australian National University; Deakin University
Discipline: Sociology

Description:
This book explores the historical and social dynamics of Spiritualism – a religious movement associated in the popular imagination with nineteenth-century parlour séances and ghost photography. It continues to be practised actively today in Australia, the UK, and USA. The authors draw on their deep fieldwork, interviews, and archival research to analyse Spiritualism’s resilience and the enduring popular appeal of mediumship. There are three key contributions of the book: the first is that the scholarly study of “belief” should be rehabilitated. The authors propose a model of belief as a dialogue between claims to truth and commitments to institutions supporting those claims. The second is women’s agency in Spiritualism. From the movement’s beginnings, strong female leaders have decisively shaped its religious and political profile. The third is the need to analyse Australian Spiritualism as a distinct variant of a transnational Anglophone family of ritual practice.

Reforming Community: Music, Religious Change, and English Identity in Mid-Tudor London
Publisher: Clemson University Press
Author: Anne Heminger
Discipline: Music

Description:
The religious reforms of the mid-sixteenth century raised important questions about what it meant to be English in the Tudor period—after all, the medieval liturgy had been one of the few constants for English people of all ages and classes for centuries. Reforming Community examines the key role religious music played in the formation of English identity in the nation’s capital as the governments of Edward VI and Mary I imposed competing religious agendas on a populace whose members held a plurality of views about reform. The book begins by examining the relationship between the “official” liturgical policies of Edward VI and Mary I and the practices of London’s parish churches, demonstrating that those across the confessional spectrum relied on links to the Henrician past to redefine their worship spaces. In the public sphere, however, supporters of the Edwardine and Marian governments sometimes differed; though both turned to the new genre of godly ballads, the former shaped discourses around Englishness and religion by promoting scripture-based song, while the latter relied heavily on public processions to reinforce an explicitly Catholic identity. Confession Carried Aloft thus argues that in using specific music to assert confessional preferences, Londoners sought to forge their own understanding of their identities separate from Catholic (and Protestant) Europe.

Slavery’s Medicine: Illness and Labor in the British Plantation Caribbean
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Author: Claire E. Gherini
Discipline: African American Studies

Description:
This book relates a new labor history of plantation medicine that exposes the power struggles between enslavers and the enslaved in the eighteenth-century British plantation Caribbean, shedding new light on the process of medical knowledge-making. Claire Gherini shows that much of the knowledge that propelled colonial empires was not generated by experts who rationalized and naturalized a racialized labor system in printed tomes but was rather developed in local terrains by middling sorts—overseers, enslaved hospital attendants, and plantation surgeons— in conflicts with patients and with one another.

Success at a Price: Women of Color Students at A White University
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Author: Lisa C. Huebner; Samantha Jeune; Odette Kolenky
Author Affiliations: West Chester University; George Washington University; Temple University
Discipline: Sociology

Description:
What invisible barriers do Black and other self-identifying women of color students face while thriving on a college campus that excludes them? How do these experiences challenge and transform meanings of diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially as they relate to student success? In this three-year ethnographic study of women of color undergraduate students, Lisa C. Huebner, Samantha Jeune, and Odette Kolenky found that while thriving, women of color students suffered what they describe as “a daily normal” of harassment and erasure. At the same time, however, they excelled, often graduating with many academic and cocurricular achievements. Celebrated by the university as successful students but also ignored by it, they felt alone, deceived, and exploited by the very university system that was dedicated to helping them. This book offers a rare glimpse into the successes we take for granted. Centering the voices of women of color students, this book offers a new story of how successful women of color overcome barriers no one else seems to see and, through their experiences and insights, offers recommendations to all of us who care about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The Age of Sex: Custom, Law, and Ritual in Twentieth-Century East Africa
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Author: Corrie Decker
Author Affiliation: University of California
Discipline: African Studies

Description:
The Age of Sex traces evolving cultural assumptions about race, sex, puberty, and chronological age in twentieth-century East Africa. Colonial ethnographic studies of rites of passage celebrating social maturity reduced these customs to “puberty rites” fixated on sexual transformation, ushering in what Corrie Decker calls the “age of sex.” The age of sex was presumed to be the moment when a “girl” became a “woman” capable of sexual intercourse, marked by menarche, and when a “boy” became a “man” imbued with the right to have sex, marked by circumcision, the ritual endurance of pain in proving manhood. These stereotypes, in turn, influenced how colonial and postcolonial court officials decided age-of-consent cases. Court rituals symbolically transformed girls into women by proving their sexual maturity, and they transformed boys into men by subjecting them to the painful ordeal of corporal punishment. Ultimately, both officials and young people took advantage of the incongruencies between puberty rites and chronological age standards in East Africa. This book offers a unique cultural history by analyzing childhood and sexuality together and by tracing to subtle but significant ways that ethnography resurfaced in everyday legal practices.

The Jacobites and the Grand Tour: Educational travel and small-states’ diplomacy
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Author: Jérémy Filet
Author Affiliation: Manchester Metropolitan University
Discipline: History

Description:
In the first monograph to fully examine the intersecting networks of Jacobites and travellers to the continent, Filet considers how small states used official diplomacy and deployed soft power – embodied by educational academies – to achieve foreign policy goals. This work uses little-known archival materials to explain how and why certain small states secretly supported the Jacobite cause during the crucial years surrounding the 1715 rising, while others stayed out of Jacobite affairs.At the same time, the book demonstrates how early modern small states sought to cultivate good relations with Britain by attracting travellers as part of a wider trend of ensuring connections with future diplomats or politicians in case a Stuart restoration never came.This publication therefore brings together a study of Britain, small states, Jacobitism, and educational travel, in its nexus at continental academies.

The Legacy of Ron Gonnella: Scottish Fiddler, 1930–1994
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
Author: Jane Blair MacMorran
Discipline: Music

Description:
This biography of Ron Gonnella includes a discography of his extensive recordings and provides an in-depth analysis of his contributions to Scottish fiddling, along with an analysis of his role in reviving interest in and establishing performance standards for the instrument in the United States. Rather than presenting a typical musicological analysis of Gonnella’s performances or musical scores, MacMorran examines Gonnella’s body of work in the cultural context of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in a career that paralleled yet was far removed from the folk music revival and other shifts in popular music. In doing so, MacMorran seeks to recover the work of a noted fiddler who has been overlooked in the larger pantheon of music history.

The Single Life: Unpatriarchal Manhoods in English Renaissance Literature
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Author: Jordan Windholz
Discipline: Gender Studies

Description:
The Single Life examines five types of never-married men in English Renaissance literature and provides new ways to think about histories of marriage, patriarchy, manhood, sexuality, and gender.It argues that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature actively constructs the single life as a site of intense scrutiny where early modern patriarchal ideology maps the limits of manhood and where alternative forms of manhood come to test the limits of patriarchy. In the course of doing so, the book develops a typology of single men as queerly chaste youths, journeymen bachelors, entrepreneurial gallants, enervated scholars, and eroticized eunuchs. Each chapter relates these types of single men to overlooked histories of sexuality, labor, political economy, affect, and gendered embodiment.

Writing Contested Illness: Experimentation in Contemporary Women’s Life Writing
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Author: Chloe Green
Discipline: Language & Literature

Description:
Intervening in the gnarled lineage of gender, genre and medicine, Writing Contested Illness investigates how uncertainty, doubt and dismissal, the key features of medical contestation, are mediated and transformed in women’s experimental illness narratives. It discusses how a range of autobiographical experimentation in emerging and increasingly common subgenres like autofiction, autotheory, experimental memoir and the lyric essay, are creating productive new avenues for contested illnesses to be represented. These illnesses, which range in this book across hysteria, eating disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and chronic Lyme disease, have been subject to constrictive medical practices, rendering the conditions illegitimate, under-studied and under-diagnosed.