Winner of two Lambda Rising Awards This richly revealing anthology brings together for the first time the vital new scholarly studies now lifting the veil from the gay and lesbian past. Such notable researchers as John Boswell, Shari Benstock, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Jeffrey Weeks and John D’Emilio illuminate gay and lesbian life as it evolved in places as diverse as the Athens of Plato, Renaissance Italy, Victorian London, jazz Age Harlem, Revolutionary Russia, Nazi Germany, Castro’s Cuba, post-World War II San Francisco—and peoples as varied as South African black miners, American Indians, Chinese courtiers, Japanese samurai, English schoolboys and girls, and urban working women. Gender and sexuality, repression and resistance, deviance and acceptance, identity and community—all are given a context in this fascinating work. "A landmark of a book and a landmark of ideas that will shatter ignorance and delusion."—Catharine Stimpson, University Professor and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University “Ground-breaking.”—Publishers Weekly “The juxtaposition of diverse perspectives and research crossing boundaries of race, gender, culture, and time encourages a lively dialogue. Highly recommended for history collections, and especially gay studies.”—Library Journal

In this study of women from the Puritan revolution to the 1930s, the author shows how class and sex, work and family, personal life and social pressures have shaped and hindered women's struggles for equality.

A deconstruction of the modern history book as artifact, How to Read a History Book explains who writes history books, how the writers are trained, and why they write them. It also discusses genre, bias (political and otherwise) and how to read history books between the lines. Written for undergraduates, intro graduate students and anyone with an informed interest in the subject, How to Read a History Book demonstrates that, rather than being objects that fall from the sky, history books are actually socially-constructed artifacts reflecting all the contradictions of modern meritocratic capitalism.

In 1927, Oxford University Press published the first western-language translation of a collection of Tibetan funerary texts (the Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Bardo) under the title The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Since that time, the work has established a powerful hold on the western popular imagination, and is now considered a classic of spiritual literature. Over the years, The Tibetan Book of the Dead has inspired numerous commentaries, an illustrated edition, a play, a video series, and even an opera. Translators, scholars, and popular devotees of the book have claimed to explain its esoteric ideas and reveal its hidden meaning. Few, however, have uttered a word about its history. Bryan J. Cuevas seeks to fill this gap in our knowledge by offering the first comprehensive historical study of the Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Bardo, and by grounding it firmly in the context of Tibetan history and culture. He begins by discussing the many ways the texts have been understood (and misunderstood) by westerners, beginning with its first editor, the Oxford-educated anthropologist Walter Y. Evans-Wentz, and continuing through the present day. The remarkable fame of the book in the west, Cuevas argues, is strikingly disproportionate to how the original Tibetan texts were perceived in their own country. Cuevas tells the story of how The Tibetan Book of the Dead was compiled in Tibet, of the lives of those who preserved and transmitted it, and explores the history of the rituals through which the life of the dead is imagined in Tibetan society. This book provides not only a fascinating look at a popular and enduring spiritual work, but also a much-needed corrective to the proliferation of ahistorical scholarship surrounding The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries saw a period of technological, historical, and even social advancements. Men like James Hargreaves and Eli Whitney worked to make life easier for the working class, inventing machines like the spinning jenny and the cotton gin. But men weren’t the only luminaries of the Industrial Revolution: women of all ages from the joined in the revolution to further advance society. Margaret Elizabeth Knight brought paper bags to the world, and Elizabeth Magie’s interest in politics and economics gave us the much beloved game of Monopoly. And what would we do without Tabitha Babbitt’s circular saw or Josephine Cochran’s dishwasher? In today’s modern world, we often take important inventions like these for granted, but with their female inventors, we’d be living vastly different lives. A part of the Hidden in History series, “The Untold Stories of Women During the Industrial Revolution” shares the stories of women who should be remembered for their remarkable talents, ingenious inventions, and hard work, but have been previously overshadowed and forgotten to history.

Author Nelson Harris delves into the annals of history to uncover these marvelous and mostly unknown stories of the Star City of the South. How did a Roanoke neighbor's secret upend North Carolina politics and why did a weeding scandal in Big Lick make front-page headlines in New York? These questions and many more are answered in this exciting volume of hidden stories and forgotten tales from the Star City. Discover why a Roanoker was found frozen in the North Atlantic and what Mother's Day crime and trial shocked the city in 1949. Meet the Black Cardinals, a semi-pro African American baseball team that played in the 1930s and '40s, and find out how a fistfight at Shenandoah Life helped save the company.

Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.