When Martin Brower moved his family from heavily Jewish Los Angeles to barely Jewish Orange County, California, in 1974, his Los Angeles friends were amazed at his bravery and his foolishness. Orange County was considered anti-Semitic and lacking in culture. However, during the years following World War II, Orange County was transformed from a small rural community with citrus groves, row crops and cattle -- first into a bedroom community for neighboring Los Angeles County and then into a dynamic urban empire. As the County's population and employment base exploded, Orange County's Jewish population grew from a small enclave of Jewish shopkeepers into a vibrant Jewish community in excess of 100,000. To the surprise of many, Orange County now boasts one of the leading centers of Jewish life in the nation, complete with 30 synagogues, a grand new Jewish Community Center, one of the nation's largest Jewish day schools and one of its finest homes for the aging. In his book "Orange County Jew: A Memoir," Brower superimposes the growth of the Jewish community over the amazing development of Orange County itself, and uses as a framework the personal story of his own 36 years as a resident of Orange County and as a player among its major real estate development companies and its entrepreneurial leaders.

This book carefully examines representative texts and events that reflect the Irish presence in American culture from the Famine to the present. A noted scholar in the field of Irish-American literature and history, Jack Morgan sets forth and analyzes a wealth of material previously unexamined with clarity and insight. Writers from Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, to Harold Frederic and Sarah Orne Jewett, are considered in terms of their engagement with and relationships to the new Irish arrivals in the nineteenth century. Through a variety of texts, lives, and events, this study unfolds a fascinating panorama of Irish-American history, culture, and popular culture.

Against a pre-Civil War backdrop of violence and antagonism, three courageous women, in different parts of the country, undertook to teach black children. Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, and Myrtilla Miner lived, respectively, in Connecticut, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.: they each found that racial prejudice is not limited by geography and that people will go to great lengths to prevent the teaching of blacks. Of the three schools they established, only one--in the nation's capitol--proved more or less permanent, but all three had a significant impact on American life. Because they chose to teach black children, Miner, Douglass, and Crandall all endured persecution and hardship. Foner and Pacheco's important biographical study portrays three women of unusual courage who deserve to take their places with the many brave women of nineteenth-century America.

Are the relationships between minority groups as significant as those between dominant and minority groups? Phillips argues that they are in this innovative analysis of the relationships between the African American and the Jewish American communities during the last one hundred years. In An Unillustrious Alliance the evolved relations between the African American and the Jewish American communities are examined historically and sociologically. The scope of the work is from 1890 through the 1980s, and the materials are organized largely into decadal periods. The key relationships examined are negotiating, bargaining, cooperating, and conflicting. Two features of Phillips' approach distinguish it from most of the traditional examinations of racial and ethnic or minority group relations. First, there is strict emphasis placed on collective behavior or action. Phillips examines the concerted group actions of these two minority communities for the attainment of their separate as well as their joint purposes. Second, the main concern is the concerted actions or alliances and coalition between two minority communities, not the relationships between a dominant and a subordinate group. Throughout the study implications are drawn for public policy studies as well as for students and scholars of American ethnic and racial studies.

This book offers the first comprehensive and in-depth exploration of the way Chinese humor fits into broader discourses on Chinese identity and modernity in an increasingly globalized world throughout the period of modern China. It brings together the expertise of scholars from a variety of disciplines - history, literature, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and the study of popular culture - to examine the many forms and modes in which political humor is expressed in modern China: films, cartoons, the visual arts, oral performances and online satire.

This volume explores Western attitudes towards the phenomenon of Easternization, drawing upon Eastern perspectives and examining the impact upon contemporary culture to argue that Easternization is another type of globalization.

After many years of publishing journalistic and scholarly articles, Gert Niers decided to break away from this format and to apply to his writing a more personal style suitable for autobiography and memoirs. Arrived at Last is the story of his life in Germany after World War Two and then in America, the country of his choice. He tells his autobiography in an uncomplicated, colloquial fashion - the way one would talk perhaps at a bar table surrounded by friends. This approach allows him to comment on many experiences and aspects of life. He also reminisces about his excursions into France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and later on about the many people he met in the German and German-Jewish community of New York City. Everything is seen from a very personal perspective, confession-style. Still the author has rendered historical facts as precisely and correctly as it was possible to him. His descriptions and conclusions are those of an experienced observer. His book is a contribution to minority and immigrant literature, but also a cultural commentary about life in Europe and the U.S.

The wide variety of reference sources include not only books and journals, but also annual reports, directories, statistics, unpublished documents, computerized data bases, authors, and organizations active in the field. Special attention is paid to sources providing information on the impact of Middle-Eastern oil-generated investment on the major economies of the Western world.

Collected in one omnibus edition are Frederick Douglass' essential writings. Included here are all three of his landmark biographies: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass; his only work of fiction, "The Heroic Slave"; as well as his magazine articles and selected public addresses. There are almost a half a million words included in this massive edition. Now, through his own words, you can truly get a sense of the man and the legend that was Frederick Douglass.

This study of not only the silence, but the silencing of Mexican American Students in one California community college holds lessons for all educators-of all students at all levels. A profoundly important book.

Courtney B. Cazden

Charles William Eliot Professor of Education (Emerita),
Harvard Graduate School of Education

Contributions by Apryl Alexander, Alisia Grace Chase, Brian Faucette, Laura E. Felschow, Lindsay Hallam, Rusty Hatchell, Dru Jeffries, Henry Jenkins, Jeffrey SJ Kirchoff, Curtis Marez, James Denis McGlynn, Brandy Monk-Payton, Chamara Moore, Drew Morton, Mark C. E. Peterson, Jayson Quearry, Zachary J. A. Rondinelli, Suzanne Scott, David Stanley, Sarah Pawlak Stanley, Tracy Vozar, and Chris Yogerst Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen fundamentally altered the perception of American comic books and remains one of the medium's greatest hits. Launched in 1986-"the year that changed comics" for most scholars in comics studies-Watchmen quickly assisted in cementing the legacy that comics were a serious form of literature no longer defined by the Comics Code era of funny animal and innocuous superhero books that appealed mainly to children. After Midnight: "Watchmen" after "Watchmen" looks specifically at the three adaptations of Moore's and Gibbons's Watchmen-Zack Snyder's Watchmen film (2009), Geoff Johns's comic book sequel Doomsday Clock (2017), and Damon Lindelof's Watchmen series on HBO (2019). Divided into three parts, the anthology considers how the sequels, especially the limited series, have prompted a reevaluation of the original text and successfully harnessed the politics of the contemporary moment into a potent relevancy. The first part considers the various texts through conceptions of adaptation, remediation, and transmedia storytelling. Part two considers the HBO series through its thematic focus on the relationship between American history and African American trauma by analyzing how the show critiques the alt-right, represents intergenerational trauma, illustrates alternative possibilities for Black representation, and complicates our understanding of how the mechanics of the show's production can complicate its politics. Finally, the book's last section considers the themes of nostalgia and trauma, both firmly rooted in the original Moore and Gibbons series, and how the sequel texts reflect and refract upon those often-intertwined phenomena.

This book is requisite reading material for any person claiming to be an educated and informed member of the global community. Our understanding in the West of the Eastern cultures, specially the different cultures involving the Muslims, is alarmingly low. The book strives to offer a view from the ground, a keyhole perspective that offers the readers a close and personal peek into some of the ethical underpinnings and the philosophical guiding parameters that inform the Muslim and the Eastern mind. There are over 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. It would be a serious intellectual fallacy to assume that they are all homogenous, or to be more preposterous, assume they are all terrorists. It is extremely tragic that it took the Iranian hostage crisis to teach us about Shia Islam and 9/11 to teach us about Wahabi Islam. Properly acquired knowledge, not just what we learn from the media, will allow us to be anticipatory and rational, rather than being reactive and emotional. For the Muslim reader, specially the children and the youth, the book strives to offer a deeper understanding of Islam, beyond the boundaries of ritual Islam into the wide open space of spiritual and intellectual Islam. To inspire them to appreciate and live up to the wonderful legacy of Islam and not to be mired down into some deviant interpretations of people, with questionable motives. The book is designed to encourage the process of tearing down walls and building bridges. We share common dreams, aspirations and challenges. We share a common globe and a common destiny. The author believes that there are no clashes of civilizations, just clashes of ignorance and misunderstanding.

Immokalee's Fields of Hope is a story of Mexican, Haitian, and Guatemalan immigrants told by a businesswoman who regained her soul through volunteering with children. With compassion and understanding, Carlene Thissen shares the personal stories the immigrants told her, framed with the political and social histories of their countries. Beginning with family memories of her own German and Irish grandparents, she captures the struggles, hopes, and dreams of people who just want to work and make a better life. Carlene offers the opportunity to stretch out and truly visualize the plights of the people being described and their motivation for coming to America. They left horrible poverty, violence, and persecution and risked everything they had to come to Immokalee in Southwest Florida as word spread across our borders that, There is work in Immokalee. More than just the vivid story of the immigrants, Carlene explains the frustrations and fears of the rural community that struggled to absorb them and the dedicated people who came to help. The immigrants' dreams of a better life and the Carlene's own journey back to the garden all began in Immokalee's Fields of Hope.

In this innovative new study, Laura Halperin examines literary representations of harm inflicted on Latinas' minds and bodies, and on the places Latinas inhabit, but she also explores how hope can be found amid so much harm. Analyzing contemporary memoirs and novels by Irene Vilar, Loida Maritza Perez, Ana Castillo, Cristina Garcia, and Julia Alvarez, she argues that the individual harm experienced by Latinas needs to be understood in relation to the collective histories of aggression against their communities.