University of Massachusetts Press

From its founding in 1857 until its sale by Houghton Mifflin in 1908, the Atlantic Monthly was the most respected literary periodical in the United States. This study focuses on the magazine's first...

Before the Civil War, slaveholders made themselves into the most powerful, most deeply rooted, and best organized private interest group within the United States. Not only did slavery represent the...

Inspiring debate since the early days of its publication, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (1979)...

Designed as a broad introductory survey, and written by experts in the field, this book examines the rise of American music over the past hundred years -- the period in which that music came into its...

Anarchism is generally understood as a failed ideology, a political philosophy that once may have had many followers but today attracts only cranks and eccentrics. This book argues that the decline...

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Halina Nelken was a precocious fifteen-year-old, living a middle-class life in Krakow. Like other girls her age, she recorded her personal observations and...

In 1847, in the third year of Ireland's Great Famine and the thirteenth year of their rent strike against the Crown, hundreds of tenant farmers in Ballykilcline, County Roscommon, were evicted by the...

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the number of African American undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania grew dramatically. This book describes the circumstances surrounding the...

From the marginalia of their readers to the social and cultural means of their production, books bear the imprint of our humanity. Embodying the marks, traces, and scars of colonial survival,...

Delving into the origins and development of the Library of Congress, this volume ranges from the first attempt to establish a national legislative library in 1783 to the advent of the Civil War. Carl...

Hailed as one of Boston's most beloved mayors and its longest serving, Thomas Menino (1942-2014) deftly managed the city's finances and transformed Boston into the hub of innovation that it is today...

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Conversational, irreverent, and disarmingly honest, the poems of But, She Is Also Jane follow the everyday contours of women's lives and the expectations they grapple with. As our speaker approaches...

In the rural America of the past, a woman's reputation was sometimes made by her cherry pie--or her chocolate layer cake, or her biscuits. As America modernized and as women left the home, entered...

Paul Cuffe is best understood as a member of the Black founding fathers--a group of pre-eminent African Americans who built institutions and movements during the first decades of the United States...

Inhabiting a world that offers no guarantee of any veracity, the characters in these peculiar stories are driven to and goaded by compulsive and perhaps pointless reflection. They are haunted by...

The significant archive of writing that came out of the women's liberation movement in the United States, from 1965 to 1980, speaks to the value activists placed on reading as an act that is at once...

How is contemporary public consciousness of the Holocaust shaped and communicated? How is commitment to its memory expressed and engendered? This book offers a close and critical analysis of a range...

A selection of Martin Jay's recent writings on contemporary thought and culture, this is a book about ideas that matter--and about why ideas matter. Borrowing from Flaubert's notion of a dictionary...

In these pages we meet a man, meet him as a child, an actor in training, an actor in performance. We meet a black man born in the United States in 1918 who fashioned a life for himself that kept him...

Established in 1630, Watertown was among the original six towns of Massachusetts. Its early history was marked by frequent disputes, a penchant for questioning authority, and an atmosphere of tension...

In this powerful story collection-the first such work of fiction by a woman who served in Vietnam-Susan O'Neill offers a remarkable view of the war from a female perspective. All the nurses who...

Emily Dickinson has often been pictured as a sensitive but isolated poet--someone who published very little in her lifetime and limited herself to lyrics, considered to be the kind of poems most...

This 1854 novel traces a mulatto son's quest for vengeance against his white father, a sugar planter who abandoned him and his mother. Intent on redeeming his mother's honor and outraged by the...

With the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many African Americans began calling for "a day of publick thanksgiving" to commemorate this important step toward freedom. During the...

Music can be a storehouse for emotional, social, and cultural experiences that deepen and acquire greater value over time. This is a book about a particular genre of vocal harmony music called...

The American people overwhelmingly supported the nation's entry into the Spanish-American War of 1898, which led to U.S. imperial expansion into the Caribbean and Pacific. In this book, Bonnie M...

Winner of the 2015 National Council on Public History Book Award Today well over two hundred museums focusing on African American history and culture can be found throughout the United States and...

For decades, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) exerted an outsized pull on the political stage. Formed in 1947 by anticommunist liberals such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith and historian...

This distinctive collection introduces a new type of mythmaking, daring in its marriage of fairy tale tropes with American mundanities. Conspiratorial, Goodbye, Flicker describes the interior life of...