The nineteenth-century middle-class ideal of the married woman was of a chaste and diligent wife focused on being a loving mother, with few needs or rights of her own. The modern woman, by contrast, was partner to a new model of marriage, one in which she and her husband formed a relationship based on greater sexual and psychological equality. In Making Marriage Modern, Christina Simmons narrates the development of this new companionate marriage ideal, which took hold in the early twentieth century and prevailed in American society by the 1940s.
The first challenges to public reticence to discuss sexual relations between husbands and wives came from social hygiene reformers, who advocated for a scientific but conservative sex education to combat prostitution and venereal disease. A more radical group of feminists, anarchists, and bohemians opposed the Victorian model of marriage and even the institution of marriage. Birth control advocates such as Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger openly championed women's rights to acquire and use effective contraception. The "companionate marriage" emerged from these efforts. This marital ideal was characterized by greater emotional and sexuality intimacy for both men and women, use of birth control to create smaller families, and destigmatization of divorce in cases of failed unions. Simmons examines what she calls the "flapper" marriage, in which free-spirited young wives enjoyed the early years of marriage, postponing children and domesticity. She looks at the feminist marriage in which women imagined greater equality between the sexes in domestic and paid work and sex. And she explores the African American "partnership marriage," which often included wives' employment and drew more heavily on the involvement of the community and extended family. Finally, she traces how these modern ideals of marriage were promoted in sexual advice literature and marriage manuals of the period.
Though male dominance persisted in companionate marriages, Christina Simmons shows how they called for greater independence and satisfaction for women and a new female heterosexuality. By raising women's expectations of marriage, the companionate ideal also contained within it the seeds of second-wave feminists' demands for transforming the institution into one of true equality between the sexes.

Quadratic equations, Pythagoras' theorem, imaginary numbers, and pi - you may remember studying these at school, but did anyone ever explain why? Never fear - bestselling science writer, and your new favourite maths teacher, Michael Brooks, is here to help. In The Maths That Made Us, Brooks reminds us of the wonders of numbers: how they enabled explorers to travel far across the seas and astronomers to map the heavens; how they won wars and halted the HIV epidemic; how they are responsible for the design of your home and almost everything in it, down to the smartphone in your pocket. His clear explanations of the maths that built our world, along with stories about where it came from and how it shaped human history, will engage and delight. From ancient Egyptian priests to the Apollo astronauts, and Babylonian tax collectors to juggling robots, join Brooks and his extraordinarily eccentric cast of characters in discovering how maths made us who we are today.

Capturing the Spoor describes and discusses the virtually unknown rock art of the northernmost reaches of South Africa, in the area of the Central Limpopo Basin. The title of the book comes from the belief held by some traditional Bantu-speakers that the San can ‘capture’ animal spoor and bewitch it in order to ensure hunting success. The authors use this as an analogy for understanding the behavior of people in the past through the traces they leave behind.

This book describes the work of four distinct cultural groups: the San; Khoekhoen (Khoikhoin or ‘Hottentots’), Venda and Northern Sotho, and, most recently, people of European descent. Further, it discusses the interaction and connection between the four groups. It is the first substantial body of work from South Africa to focus on an area outside the Drakensberg, which has become synonymous with ‘southern African rock art’. Although the book focuses on a specific region, it introduces anthropological information from the Cape to the greater Kalahari region. The text is interspersed with first-hand accounts of Kalahari and Okavango San beliefs and rites and discussions with traditional Bantu-speaking peoples. A distillation of 14 years of field surveying and research in the Central Limpopo Basin, it targets the general reader who would like to know more about southern Africa’s rock art traditions, but at the same time addresses many academic concerns.

A simple narrative line and copious endnotes, respectively, ensure that both ‘lay’ and academic readers will find the subject interesting. The text is abundantly illustrated with line drawings and expressed through photographs. A list of rock art sites in Limpopo that are open to the public will be included.

This is a rare publication where information that is collected is analyzed with the help of knowledge and experience accumulated by the local indigenous communities, whose have been seldom heard in this context before.

This is fundamentally a text about race and antiblack racism and their subsequent production of the problem of alienation (separation) of human beings from one another, from their bodies, and from themselves, globally, but with distinct and conscious focus on the historical context of apartheid and “post”-apartheid South Africa through the psychological lens of one of the country’s first and distinguished clinical psychologists, Noel Chabani Manganyi.

The book is a philosophically critical engagement with his work, and it constitutes, as it were, part of the author’s overarching project of attempting to reclaim and retrieve hitherto overlooked, ignored and invisibilised Black thinkers of the past and present. Although Manganyi has written over 10 books, the most important and popular being Being-Black-in-the-World (1973) and Alienation and the Body in Racist Society (1977), his ideas and work have, for one reason or another, been disregarded by mainstream South African psychology, let alone philosophy. The author foregrounds philosophy as also a culprit because Manganyi himself describes his work as that of “a psychologist who thinks and conceptualises psychological reality in a phenomenological way”.

Manganyi has the distinction of being the first Black clinical psychologist trained in South Africa as the title of his latest book, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist (2016) indicates. His body of published work reveals that from the beginning he has been involved in an attempt to contextualise his discipline, psychology, to the lived realities of his country, that is, apartheid racism and the alienation it produced on Black people. In other words, his main concern has been to utilise psychological discourse to address issues relevant to what can broadly be called “the Black lived-experience” in an antiblack racist society and their experience of the condition of alienation. As such he stood as a solitary figure whose voice was pushed to the margins of the psychological establishment, which was either silent about or complicit in the oppression of Blacks by the apartheid regime.

By exploring Manganyi’s serious concerns about apartheid racism and its attendant devastating production of alienation among Black people, the author argues that the problem of alienation produced by continuing rampant antiblack racism (even from the hands of a Black government) constitutes itself as a lingering problem of “post”-apartheid South Africa.

The author demonstrates that apartheid and alienation are not only conceptually synonymous but experientially related because what connects antiblack racism (apartheid) and alienation is the fact of our embodied existence in the world and that Black alienation manifests itself through the body. After all, antiblack racism is predicated on bodily appearance and body differences among human beings. Manganyi himself places a high premium on the body precisely because, in his view, the Black subjects have inherited a negative sociological schema of their black bodies as a result of which most of them experience themselves as somethings or objects outside of themselves, that is.

The value of revisiting Manganyi’s contribution can be underlined by reference to imperatives posed in recent incidents of antiblack racism and contemporary approaches to race and embodiment in disciplines such as philosophy (Black existentialism), psychology, sociology, cultural studies and identity politics.

This book's focus spans a wide variety of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, political philosophy, critical race studies and post-colonialism, and therefore will be of interest to a broad cross-section of undergraduate and graduate students, scholars and activists.

This is Pompeii, as you've never seen it before.

In this revelatory history, Gabriel Zuchtriegel shares the new secrets of Pompeii. Over the last few years, a vast stretch of the city has been excavated for the first time. Now, drawing on these astonishing discoveries, The Buried City reveals the untold human stories that are at last emerging.

Pompeii is a world frozen in time. There are unmade beds, dishes left drying, tools abandoned by workmen, bodies embracing with love and fear. And alongside the remnants of everyday life, there are captivating works of art: lifelike portraits, exquisite frescos and mosaics, and the extraordinary sculpture of a sleeping boy, curled up under a blanket that's too small.

The Buried City reconstructs the catastrophe that destroyed Pompeii on 24 August 79 CE, but it also offers a behind-the-scenes tour of the city as it was before: who lived here, what mattered to them, and what happened in their final hours. It offers us a vivid sense of Pompeii's continuing relevance, and proves that ancient history is much closer to us than we think.

Before his murder at twenty-five, Tupac Shakur rose to staggering artistic heights as the pre-eminent storyteller of the 90s, building, in the process, one of the most iconic public personas of the last half century. He recorded several platinum-selling albums, starred in major films and became an activist and political hero known the world over.

In this cultural history and brilliantly researched biography, Van Nguyen reckons with Tupac's coming of age, fame and influence and how the political machinations that shaped him as a boy have since buoyed his legacy as a revolutionary following the George Floyd uprising. Words for My Comrades crucially engages with the influence of Tupac's mother, Afeni, whose role in the Black Panther Party, with its dedication to dismantling American imperialism and police brutality, informed Tupac's art. Tupac's childhood as a son of the Panthers, coupled with the influence of his militant step-father Mutulu Shakur, became his own riveting code of ethics that helped listeners reckon with America's inherent injustices.

Drawing upon conversations with the people who bore witness - from Panther veterans and other committed Marxist revolutionaries of 1970s America, to good friends and close collaborators of the rapper himself - Van Nguyen demonstrates how Tupac became one of the most enduring musical legends in hip-hop history and how intimately his name is threaded with the legacy of Black Panther politics.

Words for My Comrades is the story of how the energy of the Black political movement was subsumed by culture and how America produced, in Tupac and Afeni, two of its most iconic, enduring revolutionaries.

‘The freezing loneliness made one wish for death,’ journalist Joyce Sikakane-Rankin said of solitary confinement. With seven other women, including Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, she was held for more than a year.

This is the story of these heroic women, their refusal to testify in the ‘Trial of Twenty-Two’ in 1969, their brutal detention and how they picked up their lives afterwards. 

The Jewish community of Washington, D.C., located in the political nexus of the United States, has often enjoyed attention from people of every level of influence, including the president of the United States. On May 3, 1925, Calvin Coolidge attended the cornerstone laying ceremony of the Washington Jewish Community Center. Herbert Hoover, as a former president, was vocal in his denunciation of Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews. His voice garnered the support of many United States senators in 1943, including two from Maryland and one from Virginia. Ronald Reagan sent his personal regards to the Ohev Shalom Talmud Torah Congregation on their 100th anniversary celebration on April 10, 1986.

In explaining how developments in the Kruger National Park have been integral to the wider political and socio-economic concerns of South Africa, this text opens an alternative perspective on its history. Nature protection has evolved in response to a variety of stimuli including white self-interest, Afrikaner nationalism, ineffectual legislation, elitism, capitalism and the exploitation of Africans.

Nestled at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers in the first permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory resides one of the most dominant college baseball dynasties in the nation. The Marietta College Pioneers - known as the 'Etta Express for the way they've barreled over opponents for half a century - own a record five NCAA Division III National Championships, including 2011. Finally, the best kept secret in college sports springs to life as author Gary Caruso digs into the personalities behind this incredible success story to reveal the compelling human drama that's made Marietta College baseball a treasure all readers are sure to enjoy.

An indelible exploration of the Cultural Revolution and how it shapes China today, Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the rarely heard stories of individuals who lived through Mao's decade of madness.

More than fifty years on, the Cultural Revolution's scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence.

Red Memory explores the stories of those driven to confront the era, who fear or yearn for its return. What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?