New This Week: January 7th
Happy New Year! It’s the first New Books Tuesday of the year and we’re excited to share new books in Carceral Studies, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, African American Studies, American Studies, and Ecology/Environmental Studies. If you want to see everything new this month, head to our Hot Off the Press page plus you can browse our new Spring/Summer 2025 catalog to see books publishing from February-July.
Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons by Brittany Friedman
“Brittany Friedman’s concept of carceral apartheid lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding racism within American prisons and the deployment of racism and empire as a governing strategy of society.”—Michael L. Walker, author of Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail
“A searing analysis of entrenched white supremacy written with unmatched clarity, urgency, and grace. This chilling account is an overdue reckoning with the pervasive racism that continues to scar our social world.”—Laurence Ralph, author of Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him
Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands by Lina-Maria Murillo
“A groundbreaking and foundational history of Mexican-origin women in the borderlands. Lina-Maria Murillo’s eloquently written and meticulously researched book brings to light this overlooked and marginalized story.”—Miroslava Chávez-García, author of Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
“Fusing feminist theory, archival sleuthing, and compelling storytelling, Lina-Maria Murillo has crafted an unparalleled history of women’s reproductive health care in the US-Mexico borderlands. By turns heartbreaking and inspiring, Fighting for Control will be discussed for decades to come.”—Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America
Box 25: Archival Secrets, Caribbean Workers, and the Panama Canal by Julie Greene
“Box 25 offers a master class on how to bring back voices from the past to reshape our understanding and provoke new insights. Julie Greene digs deep into the seemingly mundane and long-buried archive to excavate hidden treasure, just as its subjects dug down mountains to create the Panama Canal. It was thrilling to feel these workers and their world come alive again.”—Olive Senior, author of Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal
“Without pretension or jargon, Greene shows us how making good use of the documents in Box 25 required understanding geopolitical power, government personnel records, archival theory, life narratives, and community-engaged public history. A bravura performance, wrapped into an unputdownable read.”—Lara Putnam, author of Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age
The State of Conservation: Rural America and the Conservation-Industrial Complex since 1920 by Joshua Nygren
“Lucidly written and brimming with eye-popping detail, Nygren’s history delivers vital context for current debates around the US farm bill. A must-read for anyone interested in the troubled state of US agriculture.”—Tom Philpott, author of Perilous Bounty
“Brilliant. You will never look at conservation in rural America the same way again after reading this book.”—Bart Elmore, author of Country Capitalism
Music, Muscle, and Masterful Arts: Black and Indigenous Performers of the Circus Age by Sakina M. Hughes
“Hughes offers a compelling history grounded in innovative research, introducing us to African American and Native American performers most of us never knew existed and showing how their labor provided the opportunity to define their own ideas about economic freedom and citizenship.”—Angela Pulley Hudson, Texas A&M University
“Creatively using archives and blending meticulous research with wonderful storytelling, Sakina Hughes provides one of the most imaginatively written books in the field of Afro-Indigenous history. If you enjoy history, performance, and popular culture, this book is a must read!”—Kyle T. Mays, University of California, Los Angeles
An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association by Natanya Duncan
“A bold intervention in the library of works on Garveyite women, this significant collective biography adds a wealth of new information to our knowledge of how women attained, created, and exercised leadership in the world’s largest Pan-African movement. It challenges the idea that these movements were always and forever male-run and male-dominated.”—Carole Boyce Davies, author of Black Women’s Rights: Leadership and the Circularities of Power
“Natanya Duncan’s seminal work fills a major void in the UNIA’s history, bringing to the fore a new set of women who have fallen through the archival cracks and shifting the history of the movement beyond Garvey himself.”—Ula Y. Taylor, author of The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey