Episodes

  • Aakriti Mandhwani, "Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

    Aakriti Mandhwani, "Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
    May 29 2024
    Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India (U Massachusetts Press, 2024) is a timely book on the history of print culture and the creation of publics in postcolonial South Asia. During the two difficult decades immediately following the 1947 Indian Independence, a new, commercially successful print culture emerged that articulated alternatives to dominant national narratives. Through what Aakriti Mandhwani defines as middlebrow magazines--like Delhi Press's Saritā--and the first paperbacks in Hindi--Hind Pocket Books--North Indian middle classes cultivated new reading practices that allowed them to reimagine what it meant to be a citizen. Rather than focusing on individual sacrifices and contributions to national growth, this new print culture promoted personal pleasure and other narratives that enabled readers to carve roles outside of official prescriptions of nationalism, austerity, and religion. Utilizing a wealth of previously unexamined print culture materials, as well as paying careful attention to the production of commercial publishing companies and the reception of ordinary reading practices--particularly those of women--Everyday Reading offers fresh perspectives into book history, South Asian literary studies, and South Asian gender studies. Aakriti Mandhwani is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. She is interested in book and magazine history, cultural studies, popular literature, South Asian and Hindi Literature, literary history and the history of libraries in South Asia. Her previous publications include Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity and journal articles on Hindi archives, language mixing and Hindi pulp fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    55 mins
  • Cathy Stanton, "Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

    Cathy Stanton, "Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
    May 23 2024
    An anthropologist walks into a grocery store—no that’s not the start of a joke, that’s the true story of how Cathy Stanton came to be involved with Quabbin Harvest, a food co-op in the former mill town of Orange, Massachusetts. Part memoir and part history, Stanton’s new book Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024) traces the struggles of one small store in one small town and uncovers the long arc of the modern industrial food system coming into being. In that system, corporate giants offer the kind of abundance, affordability, and convenience that make it all but impossible for small-scale ventures to survive, as Stanton discovered when she joined local efforts to save the nascent food co-op. Drawing on her own deep knowledge of how the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket are politically, ecologically, and economically entangled, she comes to a new understanding of why it’s so hard to effect real change in how we get our food. On the margins of the dominant system, she learns that it’s possible to keep an alternative alive by making a fierce commitment to community and stepping outside her own comfort zone as a white middle-class shopper—a core demographic of today’s locavore movement. In Orange, one of the poorest towns in one of the wealthiest U.S. states, Stanton also tracks the story of American industrial growth, abandonment, and the divisive politics of the present day. Her co-op started out in the former Minute Tapioca factory complex, now a business incubator in one of countless communities trying to anchor capital more permanently. The parallel story of the iconic Minute Tapioca brand shows the rise of mass-produced commodity foods and their role in creating a system with troubling disparities in who is able to afford fresh and healthy food.Food Margins is a complex and compelling story of a de-industrialized, rural community that is imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system. Stanton’s new book can help to fuel those conversations and actions with an insider view of the task at hand and an anthropologist’s sense of how it intersects wider struggles for equity and sustainability. Cathy Stanton teaches Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Tufts University and lives in north-central Massachusetts, where she has been involved in local food projects for many years. She has written widely about sites of commemoration and heritage tourism, including at industrial and agricultural history sites. Website. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    45 mins
  • Matteo Pangallo and Emily B. Todd, "Teaching the History of the Book" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

    Matteo Pangallo and Emily B. Todd, "Teaching the History of the Book" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
    May 7 2024
    Edited by Matteo Pangallo and Emily Todd, Teaching the History of the Book (University of Massachusetts Press 2023) is the first collection of its kind dedicated to book history pedagogy. With original contributions from a diverse range of teachers, scholars, and practitioners in literary studies, history, book arts, library science, language studies, and archives, this volume presents a variety of methods for teaching book history both as its own subject and as an approach to other material. Each chapter describes lessons, courses, and programs centered on the latest and best ways of teaching undergraduate and graduate students. Expansive and instructive, this volume introduces ways of helping students consider how texts were produced, circulated, and received, with chapters that cover effective ways to organize courses devoted to book history, classroom activities that draw on this subject in other courses, and an overview of selected print and digital tools. Contributors, many of whom are leading figures in the field, utilize their own classroom experiences to bring to life some of the rich possibilities for teaching book history in the twenty-first century. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    48 mins
  • Michael Liu, "Forever Struggle: Activism, Identity, and Survival in Boston's Chinatown, 1880-2018" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

    Michael Liu, "Forever Struggle: Activism, Identity, and Survival in Boston's Chinatown, 1880-2018" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)
    Apr 22 2024
    Chinatown has a long history in Boston. Though little documented, it represents the city's most sustained neighborhood effort to survive during eras of hostility and urban transformation. It has been wounded and transformed, slowly ceding ground; at the same time, its residents and organizations have gained a more prominent voice over their community's fate. In Forever Struggle: Activism, Identity, and Survival in Boston's Chinatown, 1880-2018 (U Massachusetts Press, 2020), Michael Liu, a lifelong activist and scholar of the community, charts its journey and efforts for survival--from its emergence during a time of immigration and deep xenophobia to the highway construction and urban renewal projects that threatened the neighborhood after World War II to its more recent efforts to keep commercial developers at bay. At the ground level, Liu depicts its people, organizations, internal battles, and varied and complex strategies against land-taking by outside institutions and public authorities. The documented courage, resilience, and ingenuity of this low-income immigrant neighborhood of color have earned it a place amongst our urban narratives. Chinatown has much to teach us about neighborhood agency, the power of organizing, and the prospects of such neighborhoods in rapidly growing and changing cities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    48 mins
  • Matthew Dennis, "American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

    Matthew Dennis, "American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
    Dec 10 2023
    The gold epaulettes that George Washington wore into battle. A Union soldier's bloody shirt in the wake of the Civil War. A crushed wristwatch after the 9/11 attacks. The bullet-riddled door of the Pulse nightclub. Volatile and shape-shifting, relics have long played a role in memorializing the American past, acting as physical reminders of hard-won battles, mass tragedies, and political triumphs. Surveying the expanse of U.S. history, American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory (U Massachusetts Press, 2023) shows how these objects have articulated glory, courage, and national greatness as well as horror, defeat, and oppression. While relics mostly signified heroism in the nation's early years, increasingly, they have acquired a new purpose--commemorating victimhood. The atrocious artifacts of lynching and the looted remains of Native American graves were later transformed into shameful things, exposing ongoing racial violence and advancing calls for equality and civil rights. Matthew Dennis pursues this history of fraught public objects and assesses the emergence of new venues of memorialization, such as virtual and digital spaces. Through it all, relics continue to fundamentally ground and shape U.S. public memory in its uncertain present and future. Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    53 mins
  • Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, "How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

    Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, "How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
    Dec 4 2023
    In How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023), Jonathan D. Fitzgerald examines a mode of journalistic storytelling dating back nearly two centuries. Literary journalism arose in the decades before the U.S. Civil War alongside the era's sentimental literature. Combining fact-based reporting with the sentimentality of popular fiction, literary journalism encouraged readers to empathize with subjects by presenting more nuanced and engaging stories than typical news coverage. While women writers were central to the formation and ongoing significance of the genre, literary journalism scholarship has largely ignored their contributions. How the News Feels re-centers the work of a range of writers who were active from the 1830s until today, including Catharine Williams, Margaret Fuller, Nellie Bly, Winifred Black, Zora Neale Hurston, Joan Didion, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and Alexis Okeowo. Offering intimate access to their subjects' thoughts, motivations, and yearnings, these journalists encouraged readers to empathize with society's outcasts, from asylum inmates and murder suspects to "fallen women" and the working poor. As this carefully researched study shows, these writers succeeded in defining and developing the genre of literary journalism, with stories that inspire action, engender empathy, and narrow the gap between writer, subject, and audience. James Kates is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 mins
  • Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine et al., "When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

    Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine et al., "When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
    Nov 23 2023
    How do Black women in higher education create, experience, and understand joy? What sustains them? While scholars have long documented sexism, racism, and classism in the academy, one topic has been conspicuously absent from the literature--how Black women academics have found joy in the midst of adversity. Moving beyond questions of resilience, labor for others, and coping, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, Abena Ampofoa Asare, and Michelle Dionne Thompson's book When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower (U Massachusetts Press, 2023) focuses on the journeys of over thirty Black women at various stages of their careers. Joy is a mixture of well-being, pleasure, alignment, and purpose that can be elusive for Black women scholars. With racial reckoning and a global pandemic as context, this volume brings together honest and vital essays that ponder how Black women balance fatigue and frustrations in the halls of the ivory tower, and explore where, when, and if joy enters their lives. By carefully contemplating the emotional, physical, and material consequences of their labor, this collection demonstrates that joy is a tactical and strategic component of Black women's struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    42 mins
  • Scott Kamen, "From Union Halls to the Suburbs: Americans for Democratic Action and the Transformation of Postwar Liberalism" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

    Scott Kamen, "From Union Halls to the Suburbs: Americans for Democratic Action and the Transformation of Postwar Liberalism" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
    Oct 25 2023
    For decades, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) was perhaps the most influential multi-issue organization in American liberalism. The first book-length study of the ADA since 1986, Scott Kamen’s From Union Halls to the Suburbs: Americans for Democratic Action and the Transformation of Postwar Liberalism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023) details how the ADA and its key figures, including the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, exerted their influence on critical debates in post-war liberal politics, helping to define the very essence of liberalism. Taking the ADA’s story into the 1970s and 1980s, Kamen also illustrates how the ADA profoundly shaped the New Politics movement, which upended Democratic Party politics with its challenge to the Vietnam War, demands for redistributive economic policies, and development of a far-reaching politics of race, gender, and sexuality. By bringing the ADA and its influential public intellectuals into the story of the New Politics movement, Scott Kamen reveals how American liberalism shifted away from the working-class concerns of the New Deal era and began to cater to the interests of a new, suburban professional class. By the 1980s, many Democratic politicians, activists, and voters had embraced a neoliberal ideology that coupled socially liberal attitudes with market-based solutions, eschewing an older progressive politics steeped in labor issues. In so doing, Kamen historicizes several of the most contentious issues in contemporary Democratic politics—from neo-liberalism to identity politics—powerfully revealing how the ADA shaped some of the most critical debates in American politics today. Scott Kamen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, Valencia Campus. He has published in the Michigan Historical Review, Peace & Change, The Sixties and the Southern Historian and received his PhD from Trinity College Dublin in 2016. Thomas Cryer is a PhD Student in American History at University College London, where he studies race, nationhood, and memory through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin. @ThomasOCryer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 4 mins