New Books This Week

It’s Tuesday which means we have new books that are officially on-sale wherever books are sold! You can also see our list of everything new this month on our Hot Off the Press page and you can sign up for our monthly eNews to get updates in your inbox about new books, news, promotions and more.

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Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt

“Elizabeth Engelhardt vividly establishes how southern boardinghouses were crucibles and the women who kept them were agents of improvisation, ingenuity, grit, and grits. Her trenchant research and reframing allow us to see these ventures, so often born from a moment of acute personal loss and economic necessity, as the loci not only of tragedy and exigency but also of bodily autonomy, self-expression, financial stability, and even freedom.”—Monique Truong, author of The Book of Salt, Bitter in the Mouth, and The Sweetest Fruits

“Carefully researched, beautifully written, and thought provoking. The heretofore unknown stories that Engelhardt narrates will propel readers to learn more about the everyday lives of boardinghouse keepers and those to whom they opened their homes. This book especially allows readers to see Black women and men as property owners, entrepreneurs, and integral to this nation’s culinary evolution.”—Psyche Williams-Forson, author of Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America

This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations by Whitney Nell Stewart

“Mining a rich array of interdisciplinary sources with sensitivity and brilliance, Stewart reshapes our understanding of ‘home’ by recovering the material worlds and emotional experiences of Black southerners who lived on plantations. Stewart’s book is a game changer for the field of American material culture studies and a must read for Black and southern history.”—Zara Anishanslin, author of Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World

“A timely and important re-examination of the meaning of home in slavery. Stewart illuminates the making of white plantation homes dependent on the labor of enslaved people and the practices through which enslaved people sought to create some domestic authority over the places they lived and buried their dead.”—Thavolia Glymph, author of The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation

Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World by Sara E. Johnson

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and UNC Press

“Encyclopédie noire is an utterly original examination of the work and impact of Moreau—and so much more. Through gorgeous prose and meticulous close readings across a vast array of sources and languages, Johnson marginalizes Moreau to create a ‘communal biography’ that centers the lived experiences of the women and men he enslaved. Moving across disciplines and methodological boundaries to breathtaking effect, Johnson illuminates how the European Enlightenment and Black Atlantic were inextricable from each other. This book will forever change the way we think about the fields of both literary studies and history. This is the book we have been waiting for.”—Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University

“In this fascinating and important book, Sara Johnson transforms our understanding of one of the most influential figures in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. . . .  Encyclopédie noire transcends biography to offer a profound meditation on the relationship between knowledge and power.”—Brett Rushforth, University of Oregon

Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class by  Aimee Loiselle

“Hollywood stands exposed as just another industry in Aimee Loiselle’s fascinating history of how a long-fought union drive turned into the lone heroine Norma Rae. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, exploring neoliberalism as both affect and structure, accounting for shifts in the global political economy, and recovering the experiences of Puerto Rican needleworkers along with southern millhands, this tour de force redefines who is the American working class. Cultural history will never be the same!”—Eileen Boris, author of Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019

“This superb book places working-class women at the center of gender and labor history. Loiselle provides fresh analysis of a fascinating body of sources, revealing a striking story of the workers too often left out of mainstream narratives and shedding new light on the production of history as contested terrain.”—Emma Amador, University of Connecticut

Precarious Constructions: Race, Class, and Urban Revitalization in Toronto by Vanessa A. Rosa

“Vanessa A. Rosa’s book makes the enlightening argument that the connections between racial and class inequalities and processes of urban revitalization in ‘marginalized’ neighborhoods are much more active and dynamic than one might initially suspect. Rosa’s conclusions about Toronto are highly relevant to urban revitalization efforts globally.”—Liette Gilbert, York University

Sound Blind: American Literature and the Politics of Transcription by Alex Benson

“Benson’s book is not only exhaustively researched and highly original, but it also offers surprising archival finds relating to its subjects. It is brimming with insights, and there is never a dull moment as the reader is carried along by the waves of observation and material.”—Julie Beth Napolin, The New School

“For Benson, attending to transcriptions—and especially botched transcriptions, revised transcriptions, inaccurate transcriptions, and even the impossibility of transcriptions—helps tell the story of the unrecorded social and cultural transactions shaping some of the period’s most pressing social issues. This is an exciting book, one that will move forward the ongoing conversation about how to conceive of and write cultural history. It is an archival marvel, managing to bring to life an ‘untranscribed’ slice of history that few of us would have noticed or even imagined existing.”—Brad Evans, Rutgers University

Surgery & Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770–1940 by Elizabeth O’Brien

“A stunning contribution to the history of gender, medicine, and race in Mexico and beyond. Elizabeth O’Brien has unearthed a wealth of original and exciting material that offers nuanced and compelling insight into the making of modern obstetrics.”—Nora Jaffary, author of Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception in Mexico, 1750–1905

“Exhaustively researched and analytically sharp, Elizabeth O’Brien’s exemplary scholarship demonstrates just how crucial the history of Mexican and Latin American surgical intervention is to our understanding of obstetric and gynecological violence. A brilliant, cogently argued book with immense contemporary relevance.”—Karin Rosemblatt, author of The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950