Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 92 - July 2020): Growth & Reforms

Publisher : MIT

How marginalized groups use Twitter to advance counter-narratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent. The power of hashtag activism became clear in 2011, when #IranElection served as an organizing tool for Iranians protesting a disputed election and offered a global audience a front-row seat to a nascent revolution. Since then, activists have used a variety of hashtags, including #JusticeForTrayvon, #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen, and #MeToo to advocate, mobilize, and communicate. In this book, Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles explore how and why Twitter has become an important platform for historically disenfranchised populations, including Black Americans, women, and transgender people. They show how marginalized groups, long excluded from elite media spaces, have used Twitter hashtags to advance counternarratives, preempt political spin, and build diverse networks of dissent. The authors describe how such hashtags as #MeToo, #SurvivorPrivilege, and #WhyIStayed have challenged the conventional understanding of gendered violence; examine the voices and narratives of Black feminism enabled by #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, and #SayHerName; and explore the creation and use of #GirlsLikeUs, a network of transgender women. They investigate the digital signatures of the "new civil rights movement"--the online activism, storytelling, and strategy-building that set the stage for #BlackLivesMatter--and recount the spread of racial justice hashtags after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other high-profile incidents of killings by police. Finally, they consider hashtag created by allies, including #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite.

Price: $19.95
Format : eBook Available

Publisher : Chelsea Green Publishing

The inside story of the world's most fascinating and lucrative crop from gonzo journalist-turned-hemp farmer Doug Fine. Hemp, the non-psychoactive variant of cannabis (or marijuana) and one of humanity's oldest plant allies, has quietly become the fastest industry ever to generate a billion dollars of annual revenue in North America. From hemp seed to hemp fiber to the currently ubiquitous cannabinoid CBD, this resilient crop is leading the way toward a new, regenerative economy that contributes to soil and climate restoration--but only if we do it right. In American Hemp Farmer, maverick journalist and solar-powered goat herder Doug Fine gets his hands dirty with healthy soil and sticky with terpenes growing his own crop and creating his own hemp products. Fine shares his adventures and misadventures as an independent, regenerative farmer and entrepreneur, all while laying out a vision for how hemp can help right the wrongs of twentieth-century agriculture, and how you can be a part of it.

Print Price: $19.95

Publisher : John Wiley & Sons

A comprehensive history of the women's suffrage movement in the United States, from 1776 to 1965 Most suffrage histories begin in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton first publicly demanded the right to vote at the Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. And they end in 1920, when Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, removing sexual barriers to the vote. And Yet They Persisted traces agitation for the vote over two centuries, from the revolutionary era to the civil rights era, excavating one of the greatest struggles for social change in this country and restoring African American women and other women of color to its telling.  In this sweeping history, author Johanna Neuman demonstrates that American women defeated the male patriarchy only after they convinced men that it was in their interests to share political power. Reintegrating the long struggle for the women's suffrage into the metanarrative of U.S. history, Dr. Neuman sheds new light on such questions as: Why it took so long to achieve equal voting rights for women How victories in state suffrage campaigns pressured Congress to act Why African American women had to fight again for their rights in 1965 How the struggle by eight generations of female activists finally succeeded And Yet They Persisted: How American Women Won the Right to Vote his is the ideal text for college courses in women's studies and history covering the women's suffrage movement, as well as courses on American History, Political History, Progressive Era reforms, or reform movements in general. Click here to read Johanna Neuman's two-part blog post about the hidden history of Women's Suffrage as we celebrate the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment.

eBook Price: $31.99

Publisher : Columbia University Press

In the early 2000s, Chinese demand for imported commodities ballooned as the country continued its breakneck economic growth. Simultaneously, global markets in metals and fuels experienced a boom of unprecedented extent and duration. Meanwhile, resource-rich states in the Global South from Argentina to Angola began to advance a range of new development strategies, breaking away from the economic orthodoxies to which they had long appeared tied. In China's Wake reveals the surprising connections among these three phenomena. Nicholas Jepson shows how Chinese demand not only transformed commodity markets but also provided resource-rich states with the financial leeway to set their own policy agendas, insulated from the constraints and pressures of capital markets and multilateral creditors such as the International Monetary Fund. He combines analysis of China-led structural change with fine-grained detail on how the boom played out across fifteen different resource-rich countries. Jepson identifies five types of response to boom conditions among resource exporters, each one corresponding to a particular pattern of domestic social and political dynamics. Three of these represent fundamental breaks with dominant liberal orthodoxy--and would have been infeasible without spiraling Chinese demand. Jepson also examines the end of the boom and its consequences, as well as the possible implications of future China-driven upheavals. Combining a novel theoretical approach with detailed empirical analysis at national and global scales, In China's Wake is an important contribution to global political economy and international development studies.

eBook Price: $29.99

Publisher : Yale University Press

An ornithologist's personal look at farming practices that finds practical solutions for sustainable food production compatible with bird and wildlife conservation With predictions of a human population of more than nine billion by the middle of this century and eleven billion by 2100, we stand at a crossroads in our agricultural evolution. In this clear and engaging yet scientifically rigorous book, wildlife biologist John M. Marzluff takes a personal approach to sustainable agriculture. He travels to farms and ranches across North and Central America, including a Nebraska corn and soybean farm, California vineyards, cattle ranches in Montana, and small sustainable farms in Costa Rica, to understand the unique challenges and solutions to sustainable food production.   Agriculture and wildlife can coexist, Marzluff argues, if farmers are justly rewarded for conservation; if future technological advancements increase food production and reduce food waste; and if consumers cut back on meat consumption. Beginning with a look backward at our evolutionary history and concluding with practical solutions for change that will benefit farmers and ranchers, he provides an accessible and insightful study for the ecologically minded citizen, farmer, rancher, or conservationist.

Print Price: $28.00

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

How did the Irish stay Irish? Why are Irish and Catholic still so often synonymous in the English-speaking world? Ireland's Empire is the first book to examine the complex relationship between Irish migrants and Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century on a truly global basis. Drawing on more than 100 archives on five continents, Colin Barr traces the spread of Irish Roman Catholicism across the English-speaking world and explains how the Catholic Church became the vehicle for Irish diasporic identity in the United States, Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and India between 1829 and 1914. The world these Irish Catholic bishops, priests, nuns, and laity created endured long into the twentieth century, and its legacy is still present today.

Price: $99.99
Format : eBook Available

Publisher : Manchester University Press

This book examines the afterlife of the lollard movement, demonstrating how it was shaped and used by evangelicals and seventeenth-century Protestants. It focuses on the work of John Foxe, whose influential Acts and Monuments (1563) reoriented the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects, portraying them as Protestants' ideological forebears. It is a scholarly mainstay that Foxe edited radical lollard views to bring them in line with a mainstream monarchical church. But this book offers a strong corrective to the argument, revealing that the subversive material present in Foxe's text allowed seventeenth-century religious radicals to appropriate the lollards as historical validation of their own theological and political positions. The book argues that the same lollards who were used to strengthen the English church in the sixteenth century would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth.

Price: $120.00
Format : eBook Available

Publisher : Manchester University Press

Children around the world know that to tell how old a tree is, you count its rings. Few people, however, know that research into tree rings has also made amazing contributions to our understanding of Earth's climate history and its influences on human civilization over the past 2,000 years. In her captivating new book, Tree Story, Valerie Trouet reveals how the seemingly simple and relatively familiar concept of counting tree rings has inspired far-reaching scientific breakthroughs that illuminate the complex interactions between nature and people. Trouet, a leading tree-ring scientist, takes us out into the field, from remote African villages to radioactive Russian forests, offering readers an insider's look at tree-ring research, a discipline formally known as dendrochronology. Tracing her own professional journey while exploring dendrochronology's history and applications, Trouet describes the basics of how tell-tale tree cores are collected and dated with ring-by-ring precision, explaining the unexpected and momentous insights we've gained from the resulting samples. Blending popular science, travelogue, and cultural history, Tree Story highlights exciting findings of tree-ring research, including the fate of lost pirate treasure, successful strategies for surviving California wildfire, the secret to Genghis Khan's victories, the connection between Egyptian pharaohs and volcanoes, and even the role of olives in the fall of Rome. These fascinating tales are deftly woven together to show us how dendrochronology sheds light on global climate dynamics and uncovers the clear links between humans and our leafy neighbors. Trouet delights us with her dedication to the tangible appeal of studying trees, a discipline that has taken her to austere and beautiful landscapes around the globe and has enabled scientists to solve long-pondered mysteries of Earth and its human inhabitants.

Print Price: $27.00

Publisher : State University of New York Press

Offers an in-depth ethnography of paradigm shifts in the lifestyles and values of youth in post-growth Japan.

Print Price: $90.00

Publisher : International Publishers Company

Based upon exhaustive research in all presidential libraries from Hoover to Clinton, the voluminous archives of the African National Congress [ANC] at Fort Hare University in South Africa, along with allied archives of the NAACP, the Ford and Rockefeller fortunes, etc., this is the most comprehensive account to date of the entangled histories of apartheid and Jim Crow that culminated in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as president in Pretoria.

Print Price: $28.99