Books published by University of California Press

"This timely and well-curated book analyzes a broad range of white nationalist, nativist, and other violent authoritarian forces, demonstrating their centrality to the development of the US. Given the extraordinary events of the last five years in particular, in which white nationalist groups have emerged as a powerful force within US politics and social debates, the book could not be more urgent and necessary."--Daniel HoSang, author of A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone "A timely, important, and beautifully executed accomplishment. The uniformly high quality of the entries, the expansive scope of the histories under consideration, and the editors' success in marshaling essays that are diverse in voice and method but completely unified in spirit provide a cohesive start for civic discussion that connects the dots. Our civic life needs this, and the world would be a better place if our legislators, teachers, and journalists were to read it."--Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America "An invaluable resource for journalists, educators, policymakers, or people who simply want to understand the deep roots and wide reach of white supremacy in this country. This book is badly needed to dispel the myth that acts of racial, religious, and gender violence and hate exist in a vacuum. The authors bring their deep knowledge of white power movements to illuminate the dire threat we, as a nation, face from groups that are organized and determined to undermine the very idea of a diverse and pluralistic America."--Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Sunday "Intellectual history can move like geologic time: long periods of stasis punctuated by abrupt, dramatic change. After centuries of defense and denial, we're now living an earthshaking rush to finally grapple with white supremacy. This is the book to survey lands collapsing and new vistas rising."--Ian F. Haney López, author of Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America "A Field Guide to White Supremacy is as urgent an intervention as the problem it addresses. Incisive, erudite, and driven by a relentlessly democratic ethic, these essays are crucial to understanding a cruel, metastatic doctrine that looms among our most pressing national concerns."--Jelani Cobb, staff writer at the New Yorker and author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress

"As bright as the city of lights shines, the everyday stories and landscapes that are the basis of its grandeur are often missed by pomp and lore. This volume takes you to New York City in its most multiple and mundane glory. To know all of New York City is to venture to learn the stories of every building, every corner, every street, every brick--and this volume takes us there."--Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Associate Professor of Sociology and Latino and Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University "One can't understand New York City without understanding how protest and contention have made this city. This is more than just a fine guidebook. If you love the city as I do, reading the book will fill you with the warm pleasure and nostalgia that comes from attachment to place, to history, and to kin. So read it!"--Frances Fox Piven, author of Regulating the Poor and Poor People's Movements "The multiracial and multiethnic community struggles foregrounded by A People's Guide to New York City provide organizers and activists with context and perspectives to lift and support grassroots organizing for decades to come."--Javier Valdés, former Codirector of Make the Road New York "Excellent! This guidebook acquaints walkers in the city with the historical struggles that over centuries have shaped and reshaped Gotham. Recounting key stories of political, economic, and cultural conflict, it brings its narrative down to current social justice campaigns. Well-researched, well-written, and well-organized, it is, in my opinion, the best tour guide of New York."--Mike Wallace, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, City University of New York, and founder of the Gotham Center for New York City History

"The climate leaders profiled in this book are inspirational. Their stories reflect the diversity of California's people and landscapes and show the power of collective action to create change. They also reveal our profound connection with nature and one another and illuminate the power of nature-based solutions to address the climate crisis. Most importantly, this wonderful book reminds us of what we are capable of as individuals to improve the future of our planet and people."--Wade Crowfoot, California Secretary for Natural Resources "Climate Stewardship minces no words in describing the hazards that California is already experiencing from climate change. Through many examples, this hopeful and inspiring book shows the power of collective action to combat climate extremes and create resilient communities and ecosystems."--Claire Kremen, 2020 Laureate of the Volvo Environment Prize

"This brilliantly curated collection of translated sources will open up new and unexpected perspectives on the complexity and richness of Ottoman cultural life for students and teachers alike."--Joshua M. White, Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia

"This book is a game-changer and will set the direction of everything that will come thereafter--and all the while it reads like a novel. I could not put it down!"--Susanna Elm, Sidney H. Ehrman Professor of History and Classics, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley "The result of decades of meticulous research across a vast array of sources, including archaeology, The Rich and the Pure offers new and nuanced perspectives on Christian attitudes toward wealth--its possession, and its circulation--against the very concrete background of the societal developments in the Eastern Mediterranean from the fourth to the seventh century."--Claudia Rapp, University of Vienna and Austrian Academy of Sciences "For now, and for any foreseeable time to come, this will be 'the' book on the roots of Christian wealth and charity. I expect it will be hailed as an instant classic."--Hal Drake, University of California, Santa Barbara

"This exhibition was organized to help celebrate the sesquicentennial of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI)"--Acknowledgements.

"According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 1 percent of the world's people have been forced to flee from their homes. In this remarkable book, Nadya Hajj deploys her considerable theoretical and empirical gifts to explore how refugees maintain identity and community in the face of obstacles that most of us would find insurmountable. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding--and ameliorating--a refugee experience that is becoming distressingly common around the world."--Tarek Masoud, coauthor of The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform "With nuance, sensitivity, and fascinating connections across diverse social settings, Hajj offers an insightful blueprint for how transnational networks can motivate reciprocity to solve communal problems. Deeply moving stories and voices bring to life the adaptive resilience of Palestinian refugees and inspire us to recognize our power to be reciprocal activists, too."--Wendy Pearlman, author of We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria and Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement "Palestinian refugee communities have suffered the ravages of war, occupation, forced displacement, dispersion, and marginalization. This book offers keen and original insight into how they have used digital means to sustain family and community ties, facilitate the transfer of economic remittances, and maintain social interaction and reciprocity across the diaspora."--Rex J. Brynen, Department of Political Science, McGill University "In a field as substantive as Middle East studies, it is not easy to make a contribution that promises to stand out. This is such a book. Through her stunning ethnographic and survey research, Hajj has opened a window into a world seldom seen, providing enormous insights into the way Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the diaspora--through their use of digital technology--not only resist the destruction of their community but have found new ways of rebuilding it, ensuring its cohesion and resilience, and, in the process, opening their community to new ideas and forms of organization. Although these changes are not without costs--real and potential--they challenge us to think differently about Palestinian refugees and their unimagined (or reimagined) futures. This book not only meets that challenge but exceeds it."--Sara Roy, Harvard University "Nadya Hajj's analysis of the materiality of refugee suffering is heartbreaking; and yet, Networked Refugees strikes a profoundly hopeful message."--The Critical Refugee Studies Collective "Beautifully written, and offers an analysis that is at once intellectually novel and deeply compassionate."--Ora Szekely, Associate Professor of Political Science at Clark University

"A timely and indispensable collection of thoughtful essays exploring contemporary issues of the arid lands of the American West that should be required reading for any serious desert scholar."--Kim Stringfellow, Project Director, The Mojave Project "This fascinating volume reveals the strange history of the meanings of the desert in the American imagination, closely examining art, architecture, film, and literature. It offers a multifaceted guide to the desert's special role as a surface for the play of modern fantasies and fears."--Joshua Shannon, Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Maryland "The breadth of this volume's subjects and voices is impressive. From essays on Will Wilson's meditative photographs about environmental despoliation to declassified films of nuclear tests, passive solar heating systems, and a modernist glass home built around a massive rock, the volume challenges the pernicious myth of the unpopulated desert while also showing how that myth continues to feed cultural production and shape governmental policy."--James Glisson, Curator of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art

"This is a wonderfully readable and insightful book on a topic of enormous importance: the constitutional parameters of presidential power in the United States. Dan Farber expertly guides readers through multiple aspects of the topic, including constitutional text, methods of constitutional interpretation, and the roles played by law, politics, and history. "--Heidi Kitrosser, University of Minnesota Law School "Farber, one of our nation's preeminent constitutional scholars, offers a brilliant analysis of the constitutional limits and historical abuses of presidential power--an issue that has tested our democracy from the founding through the Trump era. Addressing such critical issues as foreign affairs, domestic policy, individual rights, and separation of powers, this is an essential work for anyone who wants to understand the central challenges to our democracy past, present, and future."--Geoffrey R. Stone, University of Chicago Law School "This book is a master class on the law and politics of presidential powers. Drawing from founding debates, modern political practice, and Supreme Court case law, Farber brings clarity to the boundaries of executive authority. Another home run for Farber."--Richard Albert, the University of Texas at Austin "Addressing our national turmoil over the nature, powers, and legitimacy of the presidency, here is an accessible, brilliant, balanced book anyone interested in these questions should want to read."--Peter L. Strauss, Columbia Law School "Refreshingly open-minded and comprehensive. Farber writes beautifully and clearly, and he meticulously presents both sides of every issue. I disagree with much of what Farber concludes, but this is a scholarly and timely book!"--Steven Gow Calabresi, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law "Is the President too powerful, or not powerful enough? Dan Farber's smart, engaging book weaves together law, politics, history, and common sense to give readers, whatever their background, a new way to think about this critical question--one that doesn't depend on whether we happen to approve of the incumbent."--David A. Strauss, University of Chicago Law School

"Exciting and original, this book is a significant contribution at the forefront of US history and immigration history. It examines the displacement and erasure of people of color in the nation-building project of white Americans beyond the colonial period. Using never-before-seen immigration officials' communications and correspondence, the memoirs of a physician hired on the deportation trains, employee records, train itineraries, and passenger lists, this book even opens up the experience of deportees as well as those of the middle managers and agents who made the state real."--Torrie Hester, author of Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy "This sprawling, beautifully written, and copiously researched book illuminates the experience of deportation across space and time. Organized into two cross-continental train journeys, Blue's account synthesizes world histories of revolution and economic exigency with the evolution of the deportation process. Important scholarship and great reading!"--Rachel Ida Buff, author of Immigration and the Political Economy of Home "This book describes one of the first--but little known--steps taken by the federal government to systematize the deportation of immigrants who violated the rules governing their lives and work in the United States. This first step illustrates how and on what grounds the criminalization and incarceration of immigrants began. I know of no other competing works. This is, I believe, the first study of deportation trains, and it's very important and original as such."--Donna Gabaccia, coauthor of Gender and International Migration: From the Slavery Era to the Global Age "The Deportation Express is one of the best books on the history of migration I have ever read. It is fascinating, powerful, important, and highly original. Examining more than the history of deportation, Ethan Blue uses the device of the deportation train's stops on its circular route around the United States to get at the history of race, state formation, immigration, citizenship, and sexuality in the Progressive Era."--Cindy Hahamovitch, author of No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor "A harrowing chronicle of the rise of the US deportation machine fired by Pullman car prison trains and telegraph wires that braided the continent, revealing the intimate distress of migrants from across the globe who sought to remain but instead were rounded up and expelled." -- Nayan Shah, author of Refusal to Eat, Stranger Intimacy, and Contagious Divides "This evocative story of deportation trains and some of the nearly one million people forced to board them in the early twentieth century provides a detailed account of the importance of the railroad for the emergence of the United States as a key player in the global capitalist economy. The insights gleaned from these analyses will be useful to all students and scholars of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and global migration." -- Tanya Golash-Boza, author of Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism "Ethan Blue reveals how deportation infrastructures, especially the train, enabled the conjoined growth and consolidation of the deportation state and carceral state, knitting together different scales of government and connecting vast spatial expanses. As it follows the tendrils of movement and social control, The Deportation Express brings forward the histories of the state and corporate agents who made deportations possible and the immigrants ensnared in the trains' cages and deemed undesirable for their race, political beliefs, poverty, neurodiversity, disability, and more. A stirring achievement that should be required reading." --A. Naomi Paik, author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary and Rightlessness

Includes maps of the Mississippi River valley, explanatory notes, glossary, and several documentary appendixes such as Twain's literary working notes, facsimile manuscript pages, facsimile reproductions of the author's revisions for his public reading tours, and contemporary advertisements and announcements.

Were it simply a collection of fascinating, previously unpublished folktales, Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales would merit praise and attention because of its cultural rather than political approach to Palestinian studies. But it is much more than this. By combining their respective expertise in English literature and anthropology, Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana bring to these tales an integral method of study that unites a sensitivity to language with a deep appreciation for culture.As native Palestinians, the authors are well-suited to their task. Over the course of several years they collected tales in the regions of the Galilee, Gaza, and the West Bank, determining which were the most widely known and appreciated and selecting the ones that best represented the Palestinian Arab folk narrative tradition. Great care has been taken with the translations to maintain the original flavor, humor, and cultural nuances of tales that are at once earthy and whimsical. The authors have also provided footnotes, an international typology, a comprehensive motif index, and a thorough analytic guide to parallel tales in the larger Arab tradition in folk narrative. Speak, Bird, Speak Again is an essential guide to Palestinian culture and a must for those who want to deepen their understanding of a troubled, enduring people.

"The scholarly interpretations and commentary in this volume represent some of the most prominent voices in the philological and historical study of South Asia--a galaxy of experts in literary analysis and other subfields of South Asian cultural history. This volume beautifully illuminates the generative possibilities of the intimate, context-sensitive mode of reading that David Shulman has engaged in for decades."--Davesh Soneji, Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania

"This is a book I have long been looking for. Meticulously conceived and argued, it provides the first comprehensive survey and analysis of what made a church sacred in late antiquity. It will likely become a standard reference on the topic for decades to come."--Wendy Mayer, Australian Lutheran College, University of Divinity

"Nelson provides a groundbreaking account of Brazilian theories and practices of abstraction. By detailing how the emerging museums, biennials, artists, art collectives, and art press maneuvered across the political chessboard of the mid-century, Forming Abstraction offers a major contribution to the oft misunderstood role of abstraction in the art and politics of the Cold War."--Esther Gabara, author and curator of Pop América, 1965-1975 "Nelson brings new archives, actors, and objects to light in this deeply researched study of post-war abstraction and institution building in Brazil. She reveals the political stakes of varied approaches to form, reframing the internationalism of concretismo within local debates over technology and progress, citizenship and alterity, and the nation's modernist genealogy."--Mary K. Coffey, Professor of Art History, Dartmouth College"Nelson brings a refreshing new perspective on abstract art in Brazil. Through meticulous research and rich data, she presents an innovative historical understanding of the introduction of abstractionism in Brazilian art, highlighting the cultural discourse defending abstract art and the modern institutions recently created in Brazil. A must-read for anyone interested in Brazilian modern art and art systems!"--Vera Beatriz Siqueira, Professor of Art History, Rio de Janeiro State University