The International Criminal Court remains a sensitive issue in American foreign policy circles. It was agreed to at the tail end of the Clinton administration, but with serious reservations. In 2002 the Bush administration ceremoniously reversed course and unsigned the Rome Statute that had established the Court. But recent developments in Washington and elsewhere indicate that the United States may be moving toward de facto acceptance of the Court and active cooperation in its mission. In Means to an End: U.S. Interest in the International Criminal Court, Lee Feinstein and Tod Lindberg reassess the relationship of the United States and the ICC, as well as American policy toward international justice more broadly. The authors argue that the United States should actively support the ICC for the simple reason that it serves U.S. interests while being consistent with the values that America publicly espouses. The authors also show how participation could be beneficial in terms of national security and foreign policy generally, and they make the moral case for acceptance as well. They evaluate the ICC s potential to advance international justice and how American participation can improve that potential.

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Lee Feinstein, Tod Lindberg - Means to an End, U.S . Interest in the International Criminal Court (20 09).pdf

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C. Richard King - The Native American Mascot Contr oversy, A Handbook (2010).jpg

Sports mascots have been a tradition for decades. Along with the usual lions and tigers, many schools are represented by Native American images. Once considered a benign practice, numerous studies have proved just the opposite: that the use of Native American mascots in educational institutions has perpetuated a shameful history of racial insensitivity. The Native American Mascot Controversy provides an overview of the issues that have been associated with this topic for the past 40 years. The book provides a comprehensive and critical account of the issues surrounding the controversy, explicating the importance of anti-Indian racism in education and how it might be challenged. A collection of important primary documents and an extensive list of resources for further study are also included. Expounding the dangers and damages associated with their continued use, The Native American Mascot Controversy is a useful guide for anyone with an interest in race relations.

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C. Richard King - The Native American Mascot Contr oversy, A Handbook (2010).pdf

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Charles V. Willie, Richard J. Reddick - A New Look at Black Families, Sixth Edition (2010).jpg

Charles Willie and Richard Reddick's A New Look at Black Families has introduced thousands of students to the intricacies of the Black family in American society. Using a case study approach, Willie and Reddick show the varieties of the Black family experience and how those experiences vary by socioeconomic status. The sixth edition has been re-organized and updated throughout. The new Part III: Cases Against and for Black Men and Women unites two chapters from previous editions into a cohesive discussion of stereotypes and misunderstandings from both scholars and the mass media. Also, a new chapter on the Obama family offers support for cross-gender and cross-racial mentoring, and it demonstrates the value of extended family relations.

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Charles V. Willie, Richard J. Reddick - A New Look at Black Families, Sixth Edition (2010).pdf

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John R. Lott Jr. - More Guns, Less Crime, Understa nding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Third Edition (2 010).jpg

On its initial publication in 1998, John R. Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime drew both lavish praise and heated criticism. More than a decade later, it continues to play a key role in ongoing arguments over gun-control laws: despite all the attacks by gun-control advocates, no one has ever been able to refute Lott’s simple, startling conclusion that more guns mean less crime. Relying on the most rigorously comprehensive data analysis ever conducted on crime statistics and right-to-carry laws, the book directly challenges common perceptions about the relationship of guns, crime, and violence. For this third edition, Lott draws on an additional ten years of data—including provocative analysis of the effects of gun bans in Chicago and Washington, D.C—that brings the book fully up to date and further bolsters its central contention.

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James P. Lynch, Lynn A. Addington - Understanding Crime Statistics (2006).jpg

In Understanding Crime Statistics, Lynch and Addington draw on the work of leading experts on U.S. crime statistics to provide much-needed research on appropriate use of this data. Specifically, the contributors explore the issues surrounding divergence in the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which have been the two major indicators of the level and of the change in level of crime in the United States for the past 30 years. This book examines recent changes in the UCR and the NCVS and assesses the effect these have had on divergence. By focusing on divergence, the authors encourage readers to think about how these data systems filter the reality of crime. Understanding Crime Statistics builds on this discussion of divergence to explain how the two data systems can be used as they were intended - in complementary rather than competitive ways.

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James P. Lynch, Lynn A. Addington - Understanding Crime Statistics (2006).pdf

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Teun Voeten - Tunnel People (2010).jpg

First published in the Netherlands in 1996, this book chronicles Voeten’s five-month exploration of the society that exists underneath the streets of Manhattan. Voeten, an accomplished war photographer and reporter, didn’t write about the people who lived in the tunnels under New York from the point of view of an observer. He lived in the tunnels, grew to know the people who lived there, and came to understand not just how they got there but also the society they have created. Like Jennifer Toth’s Mole People (1993) and Matthew O’Brien’s Beneath the Neon (2007), Voeten’s book captivates readers with its compassionate portraits of the people and their surroundings, while exploring the surprisingly varied reasons why these men and women wound up living just beneath the surface of the reader’s world. --David Pitt

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Teun Voeten - Tunnel People (2010).pdf

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Lisa Gitelman - Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Mach ines, Representing Technology in the Edison Era (2 000).jpg

This is a richly imaginative study of machines for writing and reading at the end of the nineteenth century in America. Its aim is to explore writing and reading as culturally contingent experiences, and at the same time to broaden our view of the relationship between technology and textuality.

At the book’s heart is the proposition that technologies of inscription are materialized theories of language. Whether they failed (like Thomas Edison’s “electric pen”) or succeeded (like typewriters), inscriptive technologies of the late nineteenth century were local, often competitive embodiments of the way people experienced writing and reading. Such a perspective cuts through the determinism of recent accounts while arguing for an interdisciplinary method for considering texts and textual production.

Starting with the cacophonous promotion of shorthand alphabets in postbellum America, the author investigates the assumptions—social, psychic, semiotic—that lie behind varying inscriptive practices. The “grooves” in the book’s title are the delicate lines recorded and played by phonographs, and readers will find in these pages a surprising and complex genealogy of the phonograph, along with new readings of the history of the typewriter and of the earliest silent films. Modern categories of authorship, representation, and readerly consumption emerge here amid the un- or sub-literary interests of patent attorneys, would-be inventors, and record producers. Modern subjectivities emerge both in ongoing social constructions of literacy and in the unruly and seemingly unrelated practices of American spiritualism, “Coon” songs, and Rube Goldberg-type romanticism.

Just as digital networks and hypertext have today made us more aware of printed books as knowledge structures, the development and dissemination of the phonograph and typewriter coincided with a transformed awareness of oral and inscribed communication. It was an awareness at once influential in the development of consumer culture, literary and artistic experiences of modernity, and the disciplinary definition of the “human” sciences, such as linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Recorded sound, typescripts, silent films, and other inscriptive media are memory devices, and in today’s terms the author offers a critical theory of ROM and RAM for the century before computers.

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Lisa Gitelman - Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Mach ines, Representing Technology in the Edison Era (2 000).pdf

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Murat Kurnaz - Guantanamo, Pięć lat z mojego życia (2008).jpg

Czy w walce z terroryzmem powinno się stosować tak zwane środki specjalne? Na czym one polegają? Jaką terroryści powinni ponieść karę? Czy jest różnica między walką z terroryzmem a walką z terrorystami? Skąd pewność, że ktoś jest terrorystą? Dziewiętnastoletni Murat Kurnaz, Niemiec tureckiego pochodzenia, długo nie interesował się islamem. Pracował jako ochroniarz i uczył się budować statki. Kiedyś poczuł, że chce poznać wiarę przodków, pojechał więc do Pakistanu, by studiować Koran. Gdy wracał do kraju, został aresztowany przez Pakistańczyków i sprzedany za 3000 dolarów Amerykanom. Co przemawiało przeciw niemu? Wyznanie? Atletyczna budowa? Buty do trekkingu, uznane za wojskowe? Kurnaza przewieziono do więzienia w Guantanamo, w którym spędził pięć lat. Tysiąc osiemset dni wypełnionych upokorzeniami - takimi jak kpiny z Koranu i próby uwiedzenia przez strażniczki - oraz torturami, z których najmniej wymyślne było bicie i wieszanie za ręce. Murat Kurnaz powtarza w wywiadach, że jego relacja nie ma charakteru ideologicznego, nie zwraca się przeciw narodom, religiom czy jakimkolwiek systemom wartości. Jest opowieścią o losach człowieka skrzywdzonego w imię wyższych celów. Nie daje żadnych odpowiedzi, ale pozwala postawić wiele ważnych pytań. Kiedy książka ukazała się w Niemczech, nie zabrakło głosów krytyki, podważających to świadectwo. Podkreślano, że prawdziwości relacji nie można jednoznacznie udowodnić - Kurnaz jest pierwszą osobą, która wyszła z tamtego więzienia, a jego książka to jedyna dostępna relacja o tym, co naprawdę dzieje się w Guantanamo.
"Czy można wierzyć Muratowi Kurnazowi? Wielu mu nie wierzy. Ale spisana w tej książce relacja dwudziestoczteroletniego bremeńczyka zgadza się w najdrobniejszych szczegółach z tym, co wiemy dziś o Guantanamo z raportów i dokumentów."
Der Stern

"Kurnaz wyjechał do Pakistanu w trzy tygodnie po atakach na Nowy Jork i Waszyngton, tuż przed wojną w Afganistanie. Dlaczego podróż o charakterze, jak twierdzi, edukacyjnym zaczął tak konspiracyjnie, wychodząc w noc i mgłę bez pożegnania z rodzicami; dlaczego bilety kupił przy użyciu karty kredytowej należącej do znanego islamisty - na te pytania Kurnaz nie daje przekonującej odpowiedzi. Jego opowieść, będąca muzułmańską wersją historii świętego Pawła, staje się przez to niepełna i zastanawiająca."
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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Barack Obama - Odziedziczone marzenia, Spadek po m oim ojcu (2008).jpg

Barack Obama (ur. 1961), pierwszy czarnoskóry prezydent Stanów Zjednoczonych, wybrany 4 listopada 2008 r. 44. prezydentem USA z ramienia Partii Demokratycznej.
Jest postacią nietuzinkową już choćby z racji pochodzenia - jest synem Kenijczyka i Amerykanki, córki farmera ze stanu Kansas. To pochodzenie ukształtowało jego szczególną wrażliwość i tolerancję wobec różnic rasowych, kulturowych, terytorialnych. W książce, w której opisuje swoje życie, zadaje wiele trudnych pytań - o własną tożsamość, o to, ile w nim samym zostało z marzeń jego ojca, który chciał zmieniać swoją afrykańską ojczyznę, a także o to, co trzeba zrobić, żeby pozostać wiernym sobie i swojemu systemowi wartości.

Wspomnienia napisane są obrazowym, błyskotliwym językiem, jednak w sposób daleki od egzaltacji czy sentymentalizmu. Pisząc o swoim życiu, Barack Obama nie boi się być szczery.

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Alison K. Hoagland - Army Architecture in the West (2004).jpg

During the nineteenth century, the U.S. military built numerous forts across the country as it stationed more and more troops west of the Mississippi. When most people think about military forts in the American West, they imagine imposing strongholds, meccas of defense enclosed by high, palisaded walls. This popular view, however, is far from reality.

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Alison K. Hoagland - Army Architecture in the West (2004).pdf

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Catherine M. Roach - Mother-Nature, Popular Cultur e and Environmental Ethics (2003).jpg

This brief but ambitious book explores our relationship with nature through the imagery we use when we talk about Mother Nature. Employing the critical tools of religious studies, psychology, and gender studies, Catherine M. Roach examines the various manifestations of nature as "mother" and what that idea implies for the way we approach the natural world. Part One, "Nature as Good Mother," discusses the notion that nature is, or is like, a beneficent and nurturing mother who provides and maintains life. In studying the "green" slogan "Love Your Mother," Roach questions the effects -- for women and for the environment -- of imputing female gender to nature. She asks us to look at the associations that "motherhood" and "mothering" carry within a culture still shaped by patriarchy. She notes the danger of such an apparently pro-environmental slogan if "mother" evokes the bountiful, self-sacrificing provider who herself requires no care.

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Catherine M. Roach - Mother-Nature, Popular Cultur e and Environmental Ethics (2003).pdf

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Roger N. Lancaster - The Trouble with Nature, Sex in Science and Popular Culture (2003).jpg

Roger N. Lancaster provides the definitive rebuttal of evolutionary just-so stories about men, women, and the nature of desire in this spirited exposé of the heterosexual fables that pervade popular culture, from prime-time sitcoms to scientific theories about the so-called gay gene. Lancaster links the recent resurgence of biological explanations for gender norms, sexual desires, and human nature in general with the current pitched battles over sexual politics. Ideas about a "hardwired" and immutable human nature are circulating at a pivotal moment in human history, he argues, one in which dramatic changes in gender roles and an unprecedented normalization of lesbian and gay relationships are challenging received notions and commonly held convictions on every front.
The Trouble with Nature takes on major media sources--the New York Times, Newsweek--and widely ballyhooed scientific studies and ideas to show how journalists, scientists, and others invoke the rhetoric of science to support political positions in the absence of any real evidence. Lancaster also provides a novel and dramatic analysis of the social, historical, and political backdrop for changing discourses on "nature," including an incisive critique of the failures of queer theory to understand the social conflicts of the moment. By showing how reductivist explanations for sexual orientation lean on essentialist ideas about gender, Lancaster invites us to think more deeply and creatively about human acts and social relations.

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Roger N. Lancaster - The Trouble with Nature, Sex in Science and Popular Culture (2003) [PDF].rar

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Kathy Davis - Dubious Equalities and Embodied Diff erences, Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery (200 3).jpg

Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences considers how cosmetic surgery is taken up in representations of cosmetic surgery in medical discourse and in popular culture, drawing on a wide range of cultural manifestations including televised 'infotainment,' popular music, performance art, surgeon biographies, stories of patients, public debates, and medical texts. Davis critically engages with the notion of cosmetic surgery as a neutral technology and shows how it is implicated in the surgical erasure of embodied difference.

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Kathy Davis - Dubious Equalities and Embodied Diff erences, Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery (200 3).pdf

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Rachel Rubin, Jeffrey Melnick - Immigration and Am erican Popular Culture, An Introduction (2006).jpg

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

"Rachel Rubin and Jeff Melnick show us the skinny on pop's melting pot. The cauldron does not burn off immigrant character, creating American sameness, but intensifies its many tastes. Ladle after ladle of ethnic infusions go into the pot—Scarface to Gypsy Punks, pachuco zoot suiters to Ravi Shankar, Jimmy Cliff to West Side Story. They compound the terms of race and place until they reform the mainstream. And, suddenly, that old wasp canon has become just another ethnic style."
—W. T. Lhamon, Jr., author, most recently, of Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture

"A sprawling and uniquely synthetic account of the role immigrants have played as performers, entrepreneurs, and as the subjects of the mass culture industry. Brings a stunning, transnational array of immigrant cultural forms, immigration policies, and cohorts together in new and important ways."
—Rachel Ida Buff, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

How does a 'national' popular culture form and grow over time in a nation comprised of immigrants? How have immigrants used popular culture in America, and how has it used them?

Immigration and American Popular Culture looks at the relationship between American immigrants and the popular culture industry in the twentieth century. Through a series of case studies, Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick uncover how specific trends in popular culture—such as portrayals of European immigrants as gangsters in 1930s cinema, the zoot suits of the 1940s, the influence of Jamaican Americans on rap in the 1970s, and cyberpunk and Asian American zines in the1990s—have their roots in the complex socio-political nature of immigration in America.

Supplemented by a timeline of key events and extensive suggestions for further reading, Immigration and American Popular Culture offers at once a unique history of twentieth century U.S. immigration and an essential introduction to the major approaches to the study of popular culture. Melnick and Rubin go further to demonstrate how completely and complexly the processes of immigration and cultural production have been intertwined, and how we cannot understand one without the other.

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Rachel Rubin, Jeffrey Melnick - Immigration and Am erican Popular Culture, An Introduction (2006).pdf

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Deborah Digges - The Stardust Lounge, Stories from a Boy's Adolescence (2002).jpeg

"Thanks for a wonderful childhood!" Stephen Digges tells his mother as he hugs her goodbye in front of his New York City college dorm, and it's a measure of just how persuasive and potent her account of his difficult adolescence is that we know exactly what he means. At 13, Stephen was running away, stealing his mother's car, carrying guns, doing drugs, and getting into trouble with the law and in school. Already divorced from Stephen's father, Digges saw her son's problems break up her second marriage and heard society, her family, and her neighbors tell her she was too easy on her son, that fatherless boys needed "tough love" and discipline. But Digges had the courage to listen to a highly unconventional therapist who urged her, "Join him in his anger at life.... Don't educate him about what he should have done. Let him figure it out." Together with Digges's foster son (an African American teen thrown out of his home after a stint in juvenile detention), they create a bohemian household. Three dogs (one of them epileptic) "sleep on the beds no questions asked"; Stephen does his homework with a pet mouse named Frederick in his pocket; there are swarms of kittens "leaping in and out of the windows"; and the pizza delivery for dinner may be interrupted by "phone calls from teachers, more often the cops." Go figure: creative, anti-authoritarian Stephen acquires a sense of responsibility and ambition in this offbeat atmosphere. His mother's surprisingly funny, unsentimentally tender memoir reminds us that there are no rules about raising children, just countless perils and boundless possibilities.

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E.B. Sledge - With the Old Breed, At Peleliu and O kinawa (2007).jpg

In The Wall Street Journal, Victor Davis Hanson named With the Old Breed one of the top five books on epic twentieth-century battles. Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitive oral history, The Good War. Now E. B. Sledge’s acclaimed first-person account of fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa returns to thrill, edify, and inspire a new generation.

An Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of such heroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene B. Sledge became part of the war’s famous 1st Marine Division–3d Battalion, 5th Marines. Even after intense training, he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu, where “the world was a nightmare of flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets.” By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled with fear but no longer with panic.

Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Here, too, is the story of how he learned to hate and kill–and came to love–his fellow man.

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Jeffrey A. Brown - Black Superheroes, Milestone Co mics, and Their Fans (2000).jpg

Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans gives an answer that goes far beyond "tights and capes," an answer that lies within the mission Milestone Media, Inc., assumed in comic book culture. Milestone was the brainchild of four young black creators who wanted to part from the mainstream and do their stories their own way. This history of Milestone, a "creator-owned" publishing company, tells how success came to these mavericks in the 1990s and how comics culture was expanded and enriched as fans were captivated by this new genre.

Milestone focused on the African American heroes in a town called Dakota. Quite soon these black action comics took a firm position in the controversies of race, gender, and corporate identity in contemporary America. Characters battled supervillains and sometimes even clashed with more widely known superheroes. Front covers of Milestone comics often bore confrontational slogans like "Hardware: A Cog in the Corporate Machine is About to Strip Some Gears."

Milestone's creators aimed for exceptional stories that addressed racial issues without alienating readers. Some competitors, however, accused their comics of not being black enough or of merely marketing Superman in black face. Some felt that the stories were too black, but a large cluster of readers applauded these new superheroes for fostering African American pride and identity. Milestone came to represent an alternative model of black heroism and, for a host of admirers, the ideal of masculinity.

Black Superheroes gives details about the founding of Milestone and reports on the secure niche its work and its image achieved in the marketplace. Tracing the company's history and discussing its creators, their works, and the fans, this book gauges Milestone alongside other black comic book publishers, mainstream publishers, and the history of costumed characters.

Jeffrey A. Brown is an assistant professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University. He has been published in Screen, Cinema Journal, African American Review, Journal of Popular Culture, Discourse, and Journal of Popular Film and Television.

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