Books published by Michigan State University Press

Trials and Triumphs reveals the anxiety, hardship, turmoil and tragedy that women endured during the war years. It reveals the fierce loyalty and enmity that nearly severed the Union, the horror of enemy occupation, and even the desperate austerity of an itinerate refugee life. Originally published in 1992, this revised paperback edition includes a new index.

In this rich exploration of Rene Girard's insights, his French editor and longtime collaborator Benoit Chantre brings Saint Paul's Letter to the Romans into dialogue with both Proust and Girard in order to push to its logical endpoint the idea of a back-and-forth movement from chaos to order.

The northern white-cedar's future is uncertain. Here scientists Gerald L. Storm and Laura S. Kenefic describe the threats to this modest yet essential member of its ecosystem and call on all of us to unite to help it to thrive.

From the day that the French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle launched the Griffin in 1679 to the 1975 sinking of the celebrated Edmund Fitzgerald, thousands of commercial ships have sailed on the vast and perilous waters of the Great Lakes. In a harbinger of things to come, on the return leg of its first trip in late summer 1679, the Griffin disappeared and has never been seen again. In the centuries since then, the records show that an alarming number of shipwrecks occurred on the Great Lakes. The fearsome wrath of the storms that brew over the Great Lakes has challenged and defeated some of the staunchest vessels constructed in the shipyards of port cities along the U.S. and Canadian lakeshores. Here Richard Gebhart tells the tales of some of these ships and their captains and crews, from their launches to their sad demises--or sometimes, their celebrated retirements. This volume is a must-read for anyone intrigued by the maritime history of the Great Lakes.

Louise Erdrich is one of the most important, prolific, and widely read contemporary Indigenous writers. Here leading scholars analyse the three critically acclaimed recent novels - The Plague of Doves, The Round House, and LaRose - that make up what has become known as Erdrich's 'justice trilogy'.

Inspired by a 1968 US Commission on Civil Rights six-day hearing in San Antonio that introduced the Mexican American people to the rest of the nation, this book is an examination of the social change of Mexican Americans of Texas over the past half century.

In 2017, Laura Apol's daughter, Hanna, took her own life. Apol had long believed in the therapeutic possibilities of writing, having conducted workshops on writing-for-healing. Yet after Hanna's death, she had her own therapeutic writing to do, turning her anguish, disbelief, and love into poems that map the first year of loss.

Why do police officers turn against the people they are hired to protect? This question seems all the more urgent in the wake of recent global protests against police brutality. Historical criminologist Paul Bleakley addresses this by examining a series of intersecting cases of police corruption in Queensland, Australia.

Providing an examination of both the challenges and importance of renewable energy, this book will be of value to anyone interested in grappling with the complexities of our ongoing efforts to eliminate fossil fuels in favour of clean renewable energy.

People avoid speaking about race in the presence of another racial group for fear of saying something wrong. This was not the situation at JB's, a Mexican cantina in one of Houston's oldest Mexican barrios. Tatcho Mindiola, a regular patron, kept notes on the racial exchanges he heard. These form the basis of this insightful volume.

The United States, the People's Republic of China, and Taiwan have danced on the knife's edge of war for more than seventy years. By mapping the history of miscommunication between the US, China, and Taiwan, this provocative study shows where and how our entwined relationships have gone wrong, clearing the way for renewed dialogue.

Presents significant new research and insights to the fast-growing scholarship on social media in China at a time when online communication is increasingly constrained by international struggles over political control and privacy issues.

Identifies the importance of studying environmental communication in, about, and with China. Organised into three sections on communicating crisis, communicating care, and environmental futurity, these essays span multimodal communication practices and methods in green public culture.

Analyses the aesthetic strategies adopted by contemporary African diasporic filmmakers to express the reconstruction of identity. Having left the continent, these filmmakers see Africa as a site of representation and cultural circulation. The diasporic experience displaces the centre and forges new syncretic identities.

Shedding new light on both well-known and less familiar films by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Abderrahmane Sissako, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Moussa Toure, Safi Faye, Cheick Doukoure, and Joseph Gai Ramaka, among others, the study asks just whose fantasy is articulated in football and African cinema.

Assembles lectures given by Pius Adesanmi that address the questions of African sovereignty in the twenty-first century. Adesanmi sought to create an African world of signification in which verbal artistry interpellates performer and audience in a heuristic process of knowledge production.

Examines the ways in which national and transnational forces have shaped the representation of race and nation in feature-length narrative fiction films in South Africa.

An in-depth look at the institutionalization of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) processes in the federal and state regulatory arenas over the past twenty-five years, this volume showcases the value of these processes and highlights the potential for their expanded application and growth.

Through readings of documented performances and major writers like Yambo Ouologuem and Amadou Hampate Ba of Mali, Ahmadou Kourouma of Ivory Coast, and Aminata Sow Fall and Boubacar Boris Diop of Senegal, this book conducts an entirely new analysis of West African oral epic and its relevance to contemporary world literature.