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All Abraham's Children: Changing Conceptions of Race and Lineage
By Armand L. Mauss, emeritus professor , sociology
This thoroughly documented study unravels various ways Mormons have constructed and negotiated their identity throughout history.
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Aloha Attire: Hawaiian Dress in the Twentieth Century
By Linda Arthur, Professor, Department of Apparel, Merchandising, Design and Textiles
From an anonymous reviewer: At long last, there's finally a book about Hawaiian clothing, including the aloha shirt, that is historically accurate. Much of what has previously been published is erroneous. Finally there's a researcher who is from Hawaii and has done some real research into a topic that is more complicated than many would understand. This book covers the clothing that has been produced in, and worn by people in Hawaii in the 19th and 20th century. In other books, women's clothing is avoided. Arthur covers it thoroughly, as she did aloha shirts. Truly a wonderful book!
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Cheerleader! An American Icon
By Natalie Guice Adams & Pamela J. Bettis, assistant professor, Teaching & Learning
From the publisher: Entertainers, sex objects, or athletes? Leaders, porn stars, or superstars? Cheerleaders, numbering 3.8 million in the United States alone, are part of everyone's school experiences and memories. Looking beyond the poms and megaphones, Cheerleader! An American Icon explores how cheerleading reflects our shifting beliefs about sports, entertainment, gender, and national identity.
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Chicana Leadership: The Frontiers Reader
Ed. by Yolanda Flores Niemann with Susan Armitage, Patricia Hart, and Karen Weathermon
This collection of inspired and thoughtful articles, originally published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies from 1980 to 1999, examines not only Chicana leadership, but also Chicana activism, history, and identity.
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Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Christianity, & Culture: Between God and an Illness
By James M. Rotholz, former faculty.
Rotholz, an international aid worker, devout Christian, and former assistant professor of anthropology at Washington State University, writes an almost day-by-day account of his and his wife's simultaneous battle with chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS). Much emphasis is placed on how the lessons of Christianity can help sufferers of disability regain dignity and self-respect.
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Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives
By Mary Blair-Loy, former professor, sociology
To be or not to be a devoted mother, corporate executive—or both? Blair-Loy examines the lifestyles of two groups of women and the decisions they made regarding the delicate balance of raising children along with—or versus—the long hours they spend behind an executive’s desk.
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Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media
Ed. by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick, Associate Professor, English
From the publisher: The emergence of new media has stimulated debate about the power of the visual to dethrone the cultural prominence of textuality and print. Some scholars celebrate the proliferation of digital images, arguing that it suggests a return to a pictorial age when knowledge was communicated through images as well as through words. Others argue that the inherent conflict between texts and images creates a battleground between the feminized, seductive power of images and the masculine rationality of the printed word. Eloquent Images suggests that these debates misunderstand the dynamic interplay that has always existed between word and image.
Arguing that the complex relationship of text and image in new media does not represent a radical rupture from the past, the book examines rhetorical and cultural uses of word and image both historically and currently. . . The essays blend theory, critique, and design practice to explore the often contradictory relations of word and image. All of them call for theoretically grounded approaches to hypermedia design.
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Goth's Dark Empire
By Carol Siegel, Professor, English and American Studies
From the publisher: In Goth's Dark Empire cultural historian Carol Siegel provides a fascinating look at Goth, a subculture among Western youth. . . The world of Goth can appear wide-ranging: from films such as Edward Scissorhands and The Crow to popular fiction such as Anne Rice's "vampire" novels to rock bands such as Nine Inch Nails. But for Siegel, Goth appears as a mode of being sexually undead—and loving it. . . In this book, Siegel tracks Goth down, reveals the sources of its darkness, and shows that Goth as a response to the modern world has not disappeared but only escaped underground.
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Gun Show Nation
by Joan Burbick, Professor of English
From the publisher: In this first-of-its-kind archaeology of America's gun culture, progressive cultural historian, critic, and gun owner Joan Burbick takes us on a journey from gun shows to NRA conventions, using firsthand observations and interviews with a wide range of gun owners and gun advocates as a jumping-off point for a fascinating exploration of the rise of the gun—from Buffalo Bill and the mythology of the frontier to Ronald Reagan, the first sitting president to address the NRA.
Gun Show Nation examines the lethal politics of gun ownership, uncovering a powerful, conservative political ideology that places the individual citizen armed with a gun at the bulwark of our democracy.
Talking directly to gun lobby strategists, Burbick reveals the pro-gun movement's deliberate effort to co-opt the language of rights from the civil rights movement to appeal to a disaffected white electorate, crafting a powerful conservative response to liberal efforts to achieve social, economic, and racial justice in the 1960s.
An illuminating examination of how guns have changed and challenged our beliefs in democracy, Gun Show Nation shows us what America looks like from the floor of a gun show.
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Mapp v. Ohio: Guarding Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures
By Carolyn Long, Associate Professor, WSU Vancouver
Carolyn Long, WSU Vancouver associate professor, follows a police raid into Ohio resident Dollree Mapp's home and then chronicles the events that led to the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling, which redefined the rights of the accused and set strict limits on how police could obtain and use evidence. Long traces the case through the legal labyrinth, discusses the controversies it created, and assesses its impact on police behavior, as well as subsequent prosecutions and convictions of the accused.
Mapp was a poor but proud black woman who defied a predominantly white police force by challenging the legality of its search-and-seizure methods. Her case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, remains hotly debated and highly controversial today.
This book is part of the Landmark Law Cases and American Society series.
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Media Images and Representations
By C. Richard King, Associate Professor, Comparative Ethnic Studies
This book explores media coverage of Native Americans: in print and television journalism, in films and television, in Native American media outlets, and on the Internet. It also examines use of Native Americans as mascots. Grade level 9-12.
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New Millennial Sexstyles
By Carol Siegel, Professor, English and American Studies
From the publisher: New Millennial Sexstyles questions the twin feminist orthodoxies that the 1960s sexual revolution failed women and that the sexual attitudes most prominent in current youth cultures are deplorably regressive. Comparing the American sexscape she inhabits to the vision of contemporary culture produced by feminist theorists, Carol Siegel considers whether the sexual revolution may have succeeded, but in ways not recognized by current academic studies of gender and sexuality.
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Religion, Dress and the Body
By Linda Arthur, Professor, Department of Apparel, Merchandising, Design and Textiles
From the publisher: This book investigates dress in American religious communities as a vital component of the social control of cultures, and also examines how people express themselves despite religious constraints. Gender issues feature prominently since the control of female sexuality within religious communities is a matter of vital concern to members. Drawing on rich ethnographic case studies, this wide-ranging and interdisciplinary book represents a major contribution to the study of both religion and dress.
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Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa
By Peter Chilson, associate professor, English.
For a year, Chilson traveled this desert country by automobile, detouring occasionally into Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast, in order to tell the story of West African road culture. The road in Africa, says Chilson, is more than a direction or a path to take. Once you've booked passage and taken your seat, the road becomes the center of your life. Hurtling along at 80 miles an hour in a bush taxi equipped with bald tires, no windows, and sometimes no doors, travelers realize that they've surrendered everything.
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Rodeo Queens and the American Dream
By Joan Burbick, professor, English
Whether we meet them in a pasture, at a burger joint, or in a comfortable kitchen, the women in Joan Burbick’s Rodeo Queens and the American Dream take us beyond the dust and glitter of the rodeo that for one season made them royal.
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The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle
By T.V. Reed, Professor of English
From the publisher: The first broad overview of social movements and the distinctive cultural forms that express and helped shape them, The Art of Protest shows the vital importance of these movements to American culture. In comparative accounts of movements beginning with the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and running through the Internet-driven movement for global justice . . . , T. V. Reed enriches our understanding of protest and its cultural expression. . . Throughout, Reed employs the concept of culture in three interrelated ways: by examining social movements as sub- or countercultures; by looking at poetry, painting, music, murals, film, and fiction in and around social movements; and by considering the ways in which the cultural texts generated by resistance movements have reshaped the contours of the wider American culture.
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The Private, the Public, and the Published: Reconciling Private Lives and Public Rhetoric
Ed. by Barbara Couture, former dean, College of Liberal Arts
From the publisher: The multiple ways in which we now see public intrusion into private lives (security cameras, electronic access to personal data, "wanding" at the airport), as well as private self-exposure in public forums (cell phones, web cams, "reality" TV), demand understanding. The essays collected here unfold the changing distinctions between "private" and "public," explore the various practices of private and public expression, and argue that they must be addressed in the college writing, rhetoric, and communication classroom. Scholars must work to create the conditions in public—in classrooms and meeting rooms, in Congress and international forums—that respect and defend the ethical treatment of private lives.
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Undressing Religion: Commitment and Conversion from a Cross-Cultural Perspective
Edited by Linda Arthur, Professor, Department of Apparel, Merchandising, Design and Textiles
From the publisher: From Islam to Confucianism to Voodoo, dress plays a pivotal role in religious expression. This book investigates how dress symbolically evidences both religious and social systems across a wide range of cultures—from Africa and South America to Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Caribbean. Members of each ethno-religious group actively construct their own lives, and use dress symbolically. A central tenet for many of these groups is that the soul is visually manifested on the body through dress. Drawing on rich ethnographic case studies, this wide-ranging and interdisciplinary volume represents a major contribution to the study of both religion and dress.
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With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830
By LeRoy Ashby, Professor of History
With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830 explores over 15 decades of popular culture, from its modest beginnings starting with the penny presses of the 1830s, to our contemporary obsession with the World Wide Web. LeRoy Ashby argues that, despite current trends which are ignorant of historical origins, the history of entertainment and popular culture warrants critical attention and is in fact just as interesting and entertaining as the pop culture from which it is derived. Encompassing a variety of forms of entertainment including music, sports, radio, movies, television, and the Internet, Ashby's comprehensive and readable account of each decade from the 1830s onward renders the work accessible and appealing to both scholars and amateur pop culture junkies alike.
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