Books published by publisher University of London press

“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.” That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt. But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike? Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools—schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs—as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.

Near the end of her classic wartime account, Susie King Taylor writes, "there are many people who do not know what some of the colored women did during the war." For her own part, Taylor spent four years—without pay or formal training—nursing sick and wounded members of a black regiment of Union soldiers. In addition, she worked as a camp cook, laundress, and teacher. Written from a perspective unique in the literature of the Civil War, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp not only chronicles daily life on the battlefront but also records interactions between blacks and whites, men and women, and Northerners and Southerners during and after the war.Taylor tells of being born into slavery and of learning, in secret, to read and write. She describes maturing under her wartime responsibilities and traveling with the troops in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. After the war, Taylor dedicated herself to improving the lives of black Southerners and black Union Army veterans. The final chapters of Reminiscences are filled with depictions of the racism to which these efforts often exposed her.This volume reproduces the text of the original 1902 edition. Catherine Clinton's new introduction provides historical context for the events that form the backdrop of Taylor's memoir, as well as for the problems of race and gender it illuminates.

With an eye for the illogical and a flair for the irreverent, journalist Mark Lane aims his sharp wit at one of the most intriguing duties of the Florida legislature―signing state symbols into law. In Roaring Reptiles, Bountiful Citrus, and Neon Pies, he spotlights nineteen things that have been proposed and/or appointed to officially define Florida.Lane guides readers through the often-comic historical events that led to the selection of Florida’s official fruit, tree, gem, bird, song, and other items ranging from the well known to the obscure, packing in personal stories and laugh-out-loud moments along the way. Did you know the state slogan was almost “the alligator state”? Or that a mailbox in the shape of the state marine mammal can tell you a lot about a person? Readers will also discover that the bill proposing the state soil caused a crisis in the Senate and that the state play―written in the peculiar genre of symphonic outdoor drama―puts a heroic spin on the grisly European conquest of St. Augustine.“Full of the kind of unnecessary commentary that might cause trouble,” as Lane describes it, this book is also written with affection toward the wide diversity of lives and experiences that make up the state he calls home. He shows that deciding the things that represent us at any given moment is far trickier than it appears. Especially in Florida, a state aptly symbolized by “a lot of contradictions baked into a Key lime pie.”

At last, one of the most popular books on the American West is available once again in hardcover. In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Desert Solitaire, the University of Arizona Press is pleased to publish a new edition featuring a new introduction by the author, his definitive corrections to the text, and new illustrations commissioned exclusively for this volume. Edward Abbey's account of two summers spent in southeastern Utah's canyonlands is surely one of the most enduring works of contemporary American nature writing. In it he tells of his stint as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, of his love for the natural beauty that surrounded him, and of his distaste for the modernizing improvements designed to increase visitation to the park. "I confess to being a nature lover," admits Abbey more than thirty years after his sojourn in the wilderness. "But I did not mean to be mistaken for a nature writer. I never wanted to be anything but a writer, period." First published in 1968 to "a few brief but not hostile notices," Desert Solitaire quietly sold out of its first printing but eventually developed a loyal enough following in paperback to earn Abbey the "nature writer" label he claims never to have wanted.Desert Solitaire lives on because it is a work that reflects profound love of nature and a bitter abhorrence of all that would desecrate it. "Abbey is one of our very best writers about wilderness country," observed Wallace Stegner in the Los Angeles Times Book Review; "he is also a gadfly with a stinger like a scorpion." "This book may well seem like a ride on a bucking bronco," added Edwin Way Teale in the New York Times. "It is rough, tough, combative...passionately felt, deeply poetic." But perhaps the spirit of the man, the work, and the circumstances of its writing were best summarized by Larry McMurtry in his review for the Washington Post: "Edward Abbey is the Thoreau of the American West."

Most communists, as any plains state patriot would have told you in the 1950s, lived in Los Angeles or New York City, not Minot, North Dakota. The Cold War as it played out across the Great Plains was not the Cold War of the American cities and coasts. Nor was it tempered much by midwestern isolationism, as common wisdom has it. In this book, David W. Mills offers an enlightening look at what most of the heartland was up to while America was united in its war on Reds. Cold War in a Cold Land adopts a regional perspective to develop a new understanding of a critical chapter in the nation’s history. Marx himself had no hope that landholding farmers would rise up as communist revolutionaries. So it should come as no surprise that in places like South Dakota, where 70 percent of the population owned land and worked for themselves, people didn’t take the threat of internal subversion very seriously. Mills plumbs the historical record to show how residents of the plains states—while deeply patriotic and supportive of the nation’s foreign policy—responded less than enthusiastically to national anticommunist programs. Only South Dakota, for example, adopted a loyalty oath, and it was fervently opposed throughout the state. Only Montana, prodded by one state legislator, formed an investigation committee—one that never investigated anyone and was quickly disbanded. Plains state people were, however, “highly churched” and enthusiastically embraced federal attempts to use religion as a bulwark against atheistic communist ideology. Even more enthusiastic was the Great Plains response to the military buildup that accompanied Cold War politics, as the construction of airbases and missile fields brought untold economic benefits to the region. A much-needed, nuanced account of how average citizens in middle America experienced Cold War politics and policies, Cold War in a Cold Land is a significant addition to the history of both the Cold War and the Great Plains.

Beloved by generations of readers for the books that inspired the popular television series Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder was the mother of Rose Wilder Lane, famous in the 1920s and '30s and now being rediscovered as the author of such novels as Free Land and Old Home Town. It was Rose who encouraged Laura to begin her writing career when she was in her sixties. William T. Anderson has brought together dozens of their autobiographical writings from old newspapers and magazines, and has included some material never before published, in A Little House Sampler. Arranged chronologically, with introductions by Anderson, these articles, short stories, essays, and poems tell the story of Laura's life from her pioneer girlhood in Wisconsin to her old age, when admirers beat a path to the door of her Missouri farmhouse. Rose's life unfolds in these pages as she describes her early memories of Dakota Territory, her departure from the family farm in the Ozarks to pursue a big-city career, and her later literary use of the old home place. As the generations pass in the Sampler, the topics change from log cabins to English-style Ozark cottages, from covered wagons to Buicks, from feeding chickens to writing for the Country Gentleman — but always they reveal the individual viewpoints of two strong-minded, high-spirited women.

Major Richard J. "Dick" Meadows is renowned in military circles as a key figure in the development of the U.S. Army Special Operations. A highly decorated war veteran of the engagements in Korea and Vietnam, Meadows was instrumental in the founding of the U.S. Delta Force and hostage rescue force. Although he officially retired in 1977, Meadows could never leave the army behind, and he went undercover in the clandestine operations to free American hostages from Iran in 1980.The Quiet Professional: Major Richard J. Meadows of the U.S. Army Special Forces is the only biography of this exemplary soldier's life. Military historian Alan Hoe offers unique insight into Meadows, having served alongside him in 1960. The Quiet Professional is an insider's account that gives a human face to U.S. military strategy during the cold war. Major Meadows often claimed that he never achieved anything significant; The Quiet Professional proves otherwise, showcasing one of the great military minds of twentieth-century America.

The Thousand-Mile War, a powerful story of the battles of the United States and Japan on the bitter rim of the North Pacific, has been acclaimed as one of the great accounts of World War II. Brian Garfield, a novelist and screenwriter whose works have sold some 20 million copies, was searching for a new subject when he came upon the story of this "forgotten war" in Alaska. He found the history of the brave men who had served in the Aleutians so compelling and so little known that he wrote the first full-length history of the Aleutian campaign, and the book remains a favorite among Alaskans.The war in the Aleutians was fought in some of the worst climatic conditions on earth for men, ships, and airplanes. The sea was rough, the islands craggy and unwelcoming, and enemy number one was always the weather--the savage wind, fog, and rain of the Aleutian chain. The fog seemed to reach even into the minds of the military commanders on both sides, as they directed men into situations that so often had tragic results. Frustrating, befuddling, and still the subject of debate, the Aleutian campaign nevertheless marked an important turn of the war in favor of the United States.Now, half a century after the war ended, more of the fog has been lifted. In the updated University of Alaska Press edition, Garfield supplements his original account, which was drawn from statistics, personal interviews, letters, and diaries, with more recently declassified photographs and many more illustrations.

On a cold January morning in 1986, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger, despite warnings against doing so by many individuals, including Allan McDonald. The fiery destruction of Challenger on live television moments after launch remains an indelible image in the nation’s collective memory. In Truth, Lies, and O-Rings, McDonald, a skilled engineer and executive, relives the tragedy from where he stood at Launch Control Center. As he fought to draw attention to the real reasons behind the disaster, he was the only one targeted for retribution by both NASA and his employer, Morton Thiokol, Inc., makers of the shuttle's solid rocket boosters. In this whistle-blowing yet rigorous and fair-minded book, McDonald, with the assistance of internationally distinguished aerospace historian James R. Hansen, addresses all of the factors that led to the accident, some of which were never included in NASA's Failure Team report submitted to the Presidential Commission.Truth, Lies, and O-Rings is the first look at the Challenger tragedy and its aftermath from someone who was on the inside, recognized the potential disaster, and tried to prevent it. It also addresses the early warnings of very severe debris issues from the first two post-Challenger flights, which ultimately resulted in the loss of Columbia some fifteen years later.

Herping is the observation of amphibians and reptiles for recreation or for the production of citizen science―the cold-blooded equivalent of birding. The Field Herping Guide: Finding Amphibians and Reptiles in the Wild is the first book to explore the fun and fascinating world of observing herpetofauna across North America. The natural world holds an amazing diversity of herps, some as close as our own backyards. This guidebook is geared toward new field herpers and uses proven methods from professional herpetologists Mike Pingleton and Joshua Holbrook.The guide addresses basic questions new field herpers have about amphibians and reptiles: What do I need to know about their biology? Where do I look for them, and when? These topics are covered in a straightforward manner, with images, a glossary of essential terms, personal anecdotes, and informational vignettes that support the subject material.TOPICS COVERED INCLUDE: Getting Started Understanding Herp Behavior Finding Herps Catching and Handling Herps Safety in the Field Ethics and Etiquette, Rights and Responsibilities Classification, Taxonomy, and Species Identification Citizen Science and Data Collection Herp Photography Social Aspects of Field Herping A History of Field Herping

"Here at last is an accurate and enjoyable rendering of Lu Xun's fiction in an American English idiom that masterfully captures the sardonic wit, melancholy pathos, and ironic vision of China's first truly modern writer." -Michael S. Duke, University of British ColumbiaThe inventor of the modern Chinese short story, Lu Xun is universally regarded as twentieth century China’s greatest writer. This long awaited volume presents new translations of all Lu Xun’s stories, including his first, “Remembrances of the Past,” written in classical Chinese. These new renderings faithfully convey both the brilliant style and the pungent expression for which Lu Xun is famous.Also included are a substantial introduction by the translator and sufficient annotation to make the stories fully accessible, enabling readers approaching Lu Xun for the first time to appreciate why these stories occupy a permanent place not only in Chinese literature but in world literature as well.

In 1940, for the first time since America’s founding, a sitting president sought a third term in office. But this was only one remarkable aspect of that year’s election, which was, as John Jeffries makes clear in his new book, one of the most interesting and important elections in American history.Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court had failed; in the wake of a recent recession, his New Deal had hardened support and opposition among both parties; and the German advance across Europe, along with Japanese aggression in Asia, was stirring fierce debate over America’s role in the world. Adding to the moment of profound uncertainty was FDR’s procrastination over whether to run again. Jeffries explores how these tensions played out and what they meant, not just for the presidential election but also for domestic politics and policy generally, and for state and local contests. In the context of the Roosevelt Coalition and the New Deal party system, he parses the debates and struggles within both the Democratic and Republican parties as Roosevelt deliberated over running and Wendell Wilkie, a businessman from Indiana and New York City, got the nod from Republicans over a field including the rising moderate Thomas E. Dewey, the conservative Michigan senator Arthur Vandenburg, and the isolationist Ohio senator Robert Taft.A Third Term for FDR reveals how domestic policy more than international events influenced Roosevelt’s decision to run and his victory in November. A detailed analysis of the results offers insights into the impact of the year’s events on voting, and into the election’s long-term implications and ramifications—many of which continue to this day.