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Public Philosophy Week 2025

03/28/2025
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March 30th through April 5th is Public Philosophy Week in Vermont and Howe Library is featuring books in our collection supporting this exciting series of discussions, talks, and more! Whether you want to prep or do further reading on any of the agenda topics, we have books for you. Check out our list below and many more books on display in the Howe Library Lobby. 
 


Cover ArtThe uncanny muse : music, art, and machines from automata to AI by Hajdu, David

An acclaimed critic, journalist, and songwriter-musician tells the story of art's relation to machines, from the Baroque period to the age of AI. What does it mean to be human in a world where machines, too, can be artists? The Uncanny Muse explores the history of automation in the arts and delves into one of the most momentous and controversial aspects of AI: artificial creativity. The adoption of technology and machinery has long transformed the world, but as the potential for artificial intelligence expands, David Hajdu examines the new, increasingly urgent questions about technology's role in culture. From the life-size mechanical doll that made headlines in Victorian London to the doll's modern AI-pop star counterpart, Hajdu traces the fascinating, varied ways in which inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes and mechanize creative production. For decades, machines and artists have engaged in expressing the human condition--along with the condition of living with machines--through player pianos, broadcasting technology, electric organs, digital movie effects, synthesizers, and motion capture. By communicating and informing human knowledge, the machines have exerted considerable influence on the history of art--and often more influence than humans have been willing to recognize. As Hajdu proclaims: "before machine learning, there was machine teaching." With thoughtful, wide-ranging, and surprising turns from Berry Gordy and George Harrison to Andy Warhol and Stevie Wonder, David Hajdu takes a novel and contrarian approach: he sees how machines through the ages have enabled creativity, not stifled it--and The Uncanny Muse sees no reason why this shouldn't be the case with AI today.
 

Cover ArtFood, ethics, and society : an introductory text with readings

Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings presents seventy-three readings that address real-world ethical issues at the forefront of the food ethics debate. Topics covered include hunger, food justice, consumer ethics, food and identity, food and religion, raising plants and animals, food workers, overconsumption, obesity, and paternalism. The selections are enhanced by chapter and reading introductions, study questions, and suggestions for further reading. Ideal for both introductory and interdisciplinary courses, Food, Ethics, and Society explains basic philosophical concepts fohttps://uvm.libapps.com/libguides/assets.php#s-lg-icon-tabler new students and forges new ground on several ethical debates.
 
 
 

Cover ArtAs if human : ethics and artificial intelligence

Intelligent machines present us every day with urgent ethical challenges. Is the facial recognition software used by an agency fair? When algorithms determine questions of justice, finance, health, and defense, are the decisions proportionate, equitable, transparent, and accountable? How do we harness this extraordinary technology to empower rather than oppress? Despite increasingly sophisticated programming, artificial intelligences share none of our essential human characteristics—sentience, physical sensation, emotional responsiveness, versatile general intelligence. However, Nigel Shadbolt and Roger Hampson argue, if we assess AI decisions, products, and calls for action as if they came from a human being, we can avert a disastrous and amoral future. The authors go beyond the headlines about rampant robots to apply established moral principles in shaping our AI future. Their new framework constitutes a how-to for building a more ethical machine intelligence.
 
 
 

Cover ArtA life in letters by Weil, Simone

A Life in Letters is an English translation of philosopher Simone Weil's letters to her parents and brother, mathematician André Weil. The letters, pulled from the original French correspondence, provide a road map to Weil's life and an unparalleled view into Weil's work and her relationship with the three people who had the greatest impact on her.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtSpeech and morality : on the metaethical implications of speaking by Cuneo, Terence

Terence Cuneo develops a novel line of argument for moral realism. The argument he defends hinges on the normative theory of speech, according to which speech acts are generated by an agent's altering her normative position with regard to her audience, gaining rights, responsibilities, and obligations of certain kinds. Some of these rights, responsibilities, and obligations, Cuneo suggests, are moral. And these moral features are best understood along realist lines, in part because they explain how it is that we can speak. If this is right, a necessary condition of being able to speak is that there are moral rights, responsibilities, and obligations of a broadly realist sort.
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtGod and meaning : new essays

Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest among analytic philosophers in the topic of life's meaning. What is striking about this surge of work is that nearly all of it is by naturalists theorizing from non-theistic starting points. This book answers the need for a theistic philosophical perspective on the meaning of life. Bringing together some of the leading thinkers in analytic philosophy of religion and theology, God and Meaning touches on important issues in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of religion, and biblical theology that intersect with life's meaning. In particular: What does the question "What is the meaning of life?" mean? How can we know if life has meaning and what that meaning is? Might God enhance life's meaningfulness in some ways but detract from it in others? Is the most meaningful life one of perfect happiness? What is the relationship between eternity and life's meaning? How does the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes illumine the topic? Should we hope that a kind of transcendent meaning exists? Presenting a state-of-the-art assessment of current philosophical positions on these and many other questions, God and Meaning is an invaluable resource for all students and scholars of the philosophy of religion.
 
 
 

Cover ArtThomas Reid on the ethical life by Cuneo, Terence

This Element presents the rudiments of Thomas Reid's agency-centered ethical theory. According to this theory, an ethical theory must address three primary questions. What is it to be an agent? What is ethical reality like, such that agents could know it? And how can agents respond to ethical reality, commit themselves to being regulated by it, and act well in doing so? Reid's answers to these questions are wide-ranging, borrowing from the rational intuitionist, sentimentalist, Aristotelian, and Protestant natural law traditions. This Element explores how Reid blends together these influences, how he might respond to concerns raised by rival traditions, and specifies what distinguishes his approach from those of other modern philosophers.
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtThe rhetoric of fascism

Few developments in contemporary politics are more striking than the frequency with which the term "fascist" is used to describe specific actors and groups. This marks a qualitative shift in our political discourse. For decades, "fascist" was an epithet used to brand one's political opponents, regardless of political ideology or governing philosophy, but most often to attack a specific individual. With the rise of extremist parties and candidates in Europe, the U.S., and around the globe, however, even mainstream political commentators have begun using the term "fascism" to describe what they see as a dangerous movement that has revived and repackaged many of the strategies long thought to have been relegated to the margins of political rhetoric. This book defines and interprets the common persuasive devices that characterize fascist discourse to understand the nature of its enduring appeal, and which has resurfaced as one of the most pressing problems of our time. A definition of fascism that guides the contributors here draws from the work of Kenneth Burke: the sustained and systematic deployment of rhetorical devices aimed at promoting the cult of irrationality by identifying both the victimhood and the inborn dignity of a newly crystalized social group, sanctioned by tradition, whose rebirth requires the spiritualization of injustice and internal and external purification through redemptive violence. This definition has much in common with established understandings of fascism, but a rhetorical approach emphasizes less how fascism manifests itself in parties, platforms, regimes, movements, and organizations, but rather on the tendencies in language itself that make these manifestations possible. Introductory chapters focus on general theories of fascism drawn from 20th-century history and theory. The remaining chapters investigate specific historical figures and their relationship to contemporary rhetorics. As indicated by their titles, each chapter focuses on defining a specific rhetorical device that seems characteristic of fascist rhetoric. This book does not promise a comprehensive inquiry into all aspects of fascism. The topics were selected by the authors based on their own expertise and because they illuminate a specific rhetorical device. A reader, by the end, should have acquired many of the conceptual critical resources by which to identify familiar fascist strategies of persuasion and propaganda.
 

Cover ArtThe Oxford handbook of food ethics

Academic food ethics incorporates work from philosophy but also anthropology, economics, the environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. Scholars from these fields have been producing work for decades on the food system, and on ethical, social, and policy issues connected to the food system. Yet in the last several years, there has been a notable increase in philosophical work on these issues-work that draws on multiple literatures within practical ethics, normative ethics and political philosophy. This handbook provides a sample of that philosophical work across multiple areas of food ethics: conventional agriculture and alternatives to it; animals; consumption; food justice; food politics; food workers; and, food and identity.
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtMidlife : a philosophical guide by Setiya, Kieran

How can you reconcile yourself with the lives you will never lead, with possibilities foreclosed, and with nostalgia for lost youth? How can you accept the failings of the past, the sense of futility in the tasks that consume the present, and the prospect of death that blights the future? In this self-help book with a difference, Kieran Setiya confronts the inevitable challenges of adulthood and middle age, showing how philosophy can help you thrive. You will learn why missing out might be a good thing, how options are overrated, and when you should be glad you made a mistake. You will be introduced to philosophical consolations for mortality. And you will learn what it would mean to live in the present, how it could solve your midlife crisis, and why meditation helps. Ranging from Aristotle, Schopenhauer, and John Stuart Mill to Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as drawing on Setiya's own experience, Midlife combines imaginative ideas, surprising insights, and practical advice. Writing with wisdom and wit, Setiya makes a wry but passionate case for philosophy as a guide to life.
 
 

Cover ArtThe restaurants book : ethnographies of where we eat

Is the restaurant an ideal total social phenomenon for the contemporary world? Restaurants are framed by the logic of the market, but promise experiences not of the market. Restaurants are key sites for practices of social distinction, where chefs struggle for recognition as stars and patrons insist on seeing and being seen. Restaurants define urban landscapes, reflecting and shaping the character of neighborhoods, or standing for the ethos of an entire city or nation. Whether they spread authoritarian French organizational models or the bland standardization of American fast food, restaurants have been accused of contributing to the homogenization of cultures. Yet restaurants have also played a central role in the reassertion of the local, as powerful cultural brokers and symbols for protests against a globalized food system. The Restaurants Book brings together anthropological insights into these thoroughly postmodern places.
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtCultural anthropology : asking questions about humanity by Welsch, Robert Louis; Vivanco, Luis Antonio

What is cultural anthropology, and how is it relevant in today's world? Robert L. Welsch and Luis A. Vivanco's Cultural Anthropology: Asking Questions About Humanity uses a questions-based approach to teach students how to think anthropologically, helping them view cultural issues and everyday experiences as an anthropologist might.Inspired by the common observation that 99 percent of a good answer is a good question, Cultural Anthropology: Asking Questions About Humanity combines a question-centered pedagogy with the topics typically covered in an introductory course. It emphasizes upfront what the discipline of anthropology knows and which issues are in debate, and how a cultural perspective is relevant to understanding social, political, and economic dynamics in the contemporary world. Cultural Anthropology: Asking Questions About Humanity also represents an effort to close the gap between the realities of the discipline today and traditional views that are taught at the introductory level by bringing classic anthropological examples, cases, and analyses to bear on contemporary questions.
 
 

Cover ArtPessoa : a biography by Zenith, Richard

Like Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Richard Zenith's Pessoa immortalizes the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Eighty-five years after his wrenching death in a cramped Lisbon apartment, where he left more than 25,000 manuscript sheets in a wooden trunk, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of the most enigmatic and underappreciated poets of the twentieth century. Celebrated for writing in dozens of different poetic voices, known as heteronyms, Pessoa has finally found his definitive biographer in renowned translator Richard Zenith. Setting the story of Pessoa's life against the nationalistic currents of early twentieth-century European history, Zenith charts the depths of Pessoa's explosive imagination and literary genius. Much as José Saramago brought one of Pessoa's heteronyms to life in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Zenith traces the backstories of virtually all of Pessoa's imagined personalities, demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs, or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself. Nothing less than a literary masterpiece, Zenith's monumental work confirms the power of Pessoa's words to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of modern life.
 
 
 

Cover ArtWho wrote this? : how AI and the lure of efficiency threaten human writing by Baron, Naomi S.

Would you read this book if a computer wrote it? Would you even know? And why would it matter? Today's eerily impressive artificial intelligence writing tools present us with a crucial challenge: As writers, do we unthinkingly adopt AI's time-saving advantages or do we stop to weigh what we gain and lose when heeding their siren call? To understand how AI is redefining what it means to write and think, linguist and educator Naomi Baron leads us on a journey connecting the dots between human literacy and today's technology. From nineteenth century lessons in composition, to mathematician Alan Turing's work creating a machine for deciphering war-time messages, to contemporary engines like ChatGPT, Baron gives readers a spirited overview of the emergence of both literacy and AI, and a glimpse of their possible future. As the technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and fluent, it's tempting to take the easy way out and let AI do the work for us. Baron cautions that such efficiency isn't always in our interest. As AI plies us with suggestions or full-blown text, we risk losing not just our technical skills but the power of writing as a springboard for personal reflection and unique expression. Funny, informed, and conversational, Who Wrote This? urges us as individuals and as communities to make conscious choices about the extent to which we collaborate with AI. The technology is here to stay. Baron shows us how to work with AI and how to spot where it risks diminishing the valuable cognitive and social benefits of being literate.
 

Cover ArtFundamental things : theory and applications of grounding by DeRosset, Louis

The scientific successes of the last 400 years strongly suggest a view on which things are organized into layers, with phenomena in higher layers dependent on and determined by what goes on below. Philosophers have recently explored the idea that we can make sense of this view by appeal to a relation called grounding. In Fundamental Things, Louis de Rosset develops the rudiments of a theory of grounding and applies that theory to questions concerning the contents of the layers and the relations among them. This theory specifies what grounding is and how it relates to relevant forms of explanation. It addresses arguments for skepticism about grounding and draws points of contrast between a grounding-centered approach to relative fundamentality and other approaches. DeRosset then turns to a demonstration of how the theory of grounding bears fruit in investigating questions concerning (1) how to distinguish between truths that say how objective reality is in itself, quite independently of us, and truths that do not; (2) the nature of truth; and (3) the relation between fundamental physical facts and the rich panoply of other facts that depend on and are determined by them, including facts concerning our own doings. The aim is to advance our understanding of one of the deepest and thorniest questions which the stunning scientific achievements of the last 400 years pose: how higher-level phenomena fit into an ultimately physical world.
 

Cover ArtMaking AI intelligible : philosophical foundations by Cappelen, Herman

Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? Making AI Intelligible shows that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they illustrate ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but the answers have pressing practical implications. Many important decisions about human life are now influenced by AI. In giving that power to AI, we presuppose that AIs can track features of the world that we care about (for example, creditworthiness, recidivism, cancer, and combatants). If AIs can share our concepts, that will go some way towards justifying this reliance on AI. This ground-breaking study offers insight into how to take some first steps towards achieving Interpretable AI.
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtThe line : AI and the future of personhood by Boyle, James

The line that distinguishes people from animals, systems, and things is getting harder to draw. For all the concern about AI and genetic engineering, there has been surprisingly little discussion of the possible personhood of the new entities this century will bring us: what about their claims to be inside the line, to be "us" -- not machines or animals but persons -- deserving all the moral and legal respect that any other person has by virtue of their status?
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtAI morality

A philosophical task force explores how AI is revolutionizing our lives - and what moral problems it might bring, showing us what to be wary of, and what to be hopeful for.There is no more important issue at present than artificial intelligence. AI has begun to penetrate almost every sphere of human activity. It will disrupt our lives entirely. David Edmonds brings together a team of leading philosophers to explore some of the urgent moral concerns we should have about this revolution. The chapters are rich with examples from contemporary society and imaginative projections of the future. The contributors investigate problems we're all aware of, and introduce some that will be new to many readers. They discuss self and identity, health and insurance, politics and manipulation, the environment, work, law, policing, and defence. Each of them explains the issue in a lively and illuminating way, and takes a view about how we should think and act in response. Anyone who is wondering what ethical challenges the future holds for us can start here.
 
 

Cover ArtChinese culture through legends and fiction : a guided reader by Zhang, Zhenjun

This is a collection of selected and translated Chinese legends and tales arranged under specific topics important to Chinese culture, with an introduction and reading guide for each piece. Comprised of 4 parts covering Confucian culture, Daoist culture, Buddhist culture and topics beyond the Three Teachings, the sources featured in this anthology include legends, fictional works, historical texts, as well as philosophical texts of ancient China, ranging from the Han 漢dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) to the Qing 清dynasty (1644-1911). Helping readers learn about Chinese customs, traditions, and values by immersing them in the wonderful world of traditional China, with the compelling legends and tales revealing the fascinating meshwork of Chinese culture, this book is an invaluable text for students and scholars of Chinese literature, culture and history, as well as general readers with an interest in China.
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World Press Freedom Day is May 3rd. The United Nations declared World Press Freedom Day to raise awareness of the importance of a free press and the right to freedom of expression as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This selection of books and eBooks from our collection look at freedom of press, journalistic ethics, local and global news, and the impact of “fake news” and disinformation in the digital age. For many more great titles, visit our book display at the new “News Hub” on the first floor of Howe Library. 


Cover ArtAttacks on the press : the new face of censorship by Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)

The latest, definitive assessment of the state of free press around the world Attacks on the Press is a comprehensive, annual account of press conditions worldwide, focusing this year on the new face of censorship perpetrated by governments and non-state actors. Compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the 2017 edition documents new dangers and threats to journalists and to the free and independent media. The risks are a combination of familiar censorship tactics applied in novel ways, and the exertion of pressure through unconventional means or at unprecedented levels. These censorship efforts range from withholding advertising to online trolling, website blocking to physical harassment, imprisonment to the murder of journalists. In the Americas, governments and non-state actors use new, sometimes subtle ways to limit journalists' ability to investigate wrongdoing. In Europe, authorities deploy intelligence services to intimidate the press in the name of national security. In Asia, governments block access to information online, and in some cases, punish those who manage to get around the obstacles. And throughout the world, terror groups are using the threat of targeted murder to compel journalists to refrain from covering crucial stories or otherwise self-censor. Attacks on the Press documents how these new forms of censorship are perpetrated and provides journalists with guidance on how to work around them, when possible, and how to ensure their own safety as well as the safety of their sources and people with whom they work. The book enables readers to: Examine the state of free media around the world Learn which nations violate press freedom with impunity Discover the most dangerous beats and regions Delve inside specific, increasingly complex challenges CPJ's mission is to defend the rights of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal. Attacks on the Press provides a platform for direct advocacy with governments and the diplomatic community, for giving voice to journalists globally, and for ensuring that those journalists have a seat in discussions at the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the European Union, the African Union, and others.
 

Cover ArtNews literacy now : how to "read" the news by Eisenstock, Bobbie

Real news. Fake news. Alternative Facts. We are living in the Digital Age of Disinformation where factual news, opinion and disinformation exist side-by-side in the media culture. How do we know who and what to believe? News Literacy Now introduces a new way to "read" the news. Based on the intersection of media literacy, news literacy, information and web literacy skills, this hybrid strategy adapts the media literacy framework developed by the Center for Media Literacy to analyse the nature of news, explain professional journalism practices and standards, and apply lateral reading to verify facts and empower informed participation in democracy. Written in a Q and A format from the news consumers' perspective, the book asks and answers questions to think critically about our personal news experiences, the news-gathering process, and the vital role journalism and the First Amendment play in a democracy. It connects key concepts with strategies to deconstruct misinformation and disinformation that have weaponised falsehoods and disrupted the flow of trustworthy news. Challenged by a news credibility crisis, news media literacy has never mattered more. What we need are skills to think like a journalist and search like a fact-checker. Whether you are a media literacy expert or newbie to media and news literacy, this book is essential for everyone who uses media teachers and students from middle and high school to higher ed, parents and grandparents, media and youth advocates and anyone who cares about living in a world where facts matter.
 

Cover ArtJournalism in a fractured world by Eldridge, Scott A. (Series edited by)

Journalism in a Fractured World addresses the fractured nature of journalism as it has developed online. Engaging with theories from journalism studies and politics, it bases its findings on the study of peripheral journalistic media from the US, UK, and Netherlands. It addresses the pronounced animosity that has become a feature of peripheral, political, digital news. Focusing on the metajournalistic discourses produced by peripheral actors, it develops a framework to distinguish between peripheral antagonists and agonists. Antagonists blur lines between news and politics and foment societal divisions through narratives of backlash, fragmentation, and grievance. Journalistic agonists, on the other hand, are also political and critical, but offer a constructive vision of what journalism and society can become. Journalism in a Fractured World presents theories and frameworks for engaging with these actors with a clear-eyed message about the challenges journalism faces and how we might find our way forward, even in our fractured societies.
 
 
 

Cover ArtA century of repression : the Espionage Act and freedom of the press by Engelman, Ralph

A Century of Repression offers an unprecedented and panoramic history of the use of the Espionage Act of 1917 as the most important yet least understood law threatening freedom of the press in modern American history. It details government use of the Act to control information about U.S. military and foreign policy during the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror. The Act has provided cover for the settling of political scores, illegal break-ins, and prosecutorial misconduct.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtReviving rural news : transforming the business model of community journalism in the US and beyond

Based on extensive research into weekly rural publishers and rural readers, Reviving Rural News demonstrates that a new financial approach to community journalism is urgently needed and viable. This book provides historical context for the state of local news, examines the influence of journalistic identity and boundaries that have prevented change, and offers practical guidance on how to adapt the financial strategies of weekly newspapers to the habits of modern readers. Findings are grounded in robust data collection, including surveys, focus groups, and a year-long oral history study of a small weekly newspaper group in the United States. A new model known as Press Club is presented as a template via which memberships, events, and newsletters can better engage community journalism with its audiences and create a more sustainable path for the future. Reviving Rural News will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of local, community, and rural journalism as well as practitioners looking to bring about real-world change in journalism organizations.
 
 

Cover ArtThe psychology of fake news : accepting, sharing, and correcting misinformation by Greifeneder, Rainer

This volume examines the phenomenon of fake news by bringing together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas, and explores what has become a prominent feature of public discourse since the first Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election campaign. Dealing with misinformation is important in many areas of daily life, including politics, the marketplace, health communication, journalism, education, and science. In a general climate where facts and misinformation blur, and are intentionally blurred, this book asks what determines whether people accept and share (mis)information, and what can be done to counter misinformation? All three of these aspects need to be understood in the context of online social networks, which have fundamentally changed the way information is produced, consumed, and transmitted. The contributions within this volume summarize the most up-to-date empirical findings, theories, and applications and discuss cutting-edge ideas and future directions of interventions to counter fake news. Also providing guidance on how to handle misinformation in an age of "alternative facts", this is a fascinating and vital reading for students and academics in psychology, communication, and political science and for professionals including policy makers and journalists.
 

Cover ArtThe anatomy of fake news : a critical news literacy education by Higdon, Nolan

Since the 2016 US presidential election, debates about fake news have appeared regularly in entertainment, politics, and news media. While many agree on the dangers associated with fake news, there is no consensus around the definition of the phenomenon, and its origins are loosely attributed to a variety of practices and technologies. Much of the discourse has focused on proposing solutions, with media literacy being one of the most frequently mentioned. Nolan Higdon cautions, however, that critical media literacy pedagogy will be unsuccessful without a comprehensive understanding of fake news. The Anatomy of Fake News offers the first examination of fake news for the purpose of creating effective critical news literacy. Higdon employs a critical-historical media ecosystems framework to identify the producers, themes, purposes, and influences of fake news and incorporates his findings into an invaluable fake news detection kit. This much-needed resource provides a rich history of fake news and a promising set of pedagogical strategies for mitigating its pernicious influence.
 
 

Cover ArtPolitical discourse and media in times of crisis by Iordanidou, Sofia (Editor); Jebril, Nael (Editor); Takas, Emmanouil (Editor)

The changes triggered by the global financial crisis in 2008, the immigration flows and the covid-19 pandemic in contemporary societies have transformed the way individuals communicate, create content, and 'consume' publicly available information. Consequently, political, societal, and financial pressures have led to alternative forms of media practice and representations and disrupted the core relationships and dynamics between politics, journalism, and society. This edited book examines the key challenges in political discourse and journalistic practice in times of crisis. It focuses on European paradigms and links political rhetoric and media challenges with the societal, political, and financial crises from 2008 until the present.
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtThe press and democratic backsliding : how journalism has failed the public and how it can revive democracy by Johnson, Thomas J.

This edited volume explores the democratic dangers posed by a political press that emphasizes electoral competition, strategy, entertainment, and what Jay Rosen calls "savviness"--praising candidates for being politically smart rather than being honest--in its coverage of a political landscape dominated by a looming authoritarian threat. Contributors document how the American and global political press have failed to fulfill their role in elections and demonstrate how authoritarians have used and will continue to use their power in setting policy before going on to suggest and develop solutions to these problems. These proposed solutions include the adoption of democracy-focused framing, solutions journalism, and solidarity journalism, all of which emphasize the needs and issues of democratic communities over candidates' political strategy. The book's recommendations contribute to a reorientation of journalism toward democracy and truth rather than performative detachment and forced balance. Scholars of journalism, mass media, communication, and political science will find this collection to be of particular use.
 
 

Cover ArtEnemy of the people : Trump's war on the press, the New McCarthyism, and the threat to American democracy by Kalb, Marvin L.

Shortly after assuming office in January 2017, President Donald Trump accused the press of being an "enemy of the American people." Attacks on the media had been a hallmark of Trump's presidential campaign, but this charge marked a dramatic turning point: language like this ventured into dangerous territory. Twentieth-century dictators--notably, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao--had all denounced their critics, especially the press, as "enemies of the people." Their goal was to delegitimize the work of the press as "fake news" and create confusion in the public mind about what's real and what isn't; what can be trusted and what can't be. That, it seems, is also Trump's goal. In Enemy of the People, Marvin Kalb, an award-winning American journalist with more than six decades of experience both as a journalist and media observer, writes with passion about why we should fear for the future of American democracy because of the unrelenting attacks by the Trump administration on the press. As his new book shows, the press has been a bulwark in the defense of democracy. Kalb writes about Edward R. Murrow's courageous reporting on Senator Joseph McCarthy's "red scare" theatrics in the early 1950s, which led to McCarthy's demise. He reminds us of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's reporting in the early 1970s that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation. Today, because of revolutionary changes in journalism, no Murrow is ready at the battlements. Journalism has been severely weakened. Yet, without a virile, strong press, democracy is in peril. Kalb's book is a frightening indictment of President Trump's efforts to delegitimize the American press--and put the future of our democracy in question.
 

Cover ArtDemocracy's news : a primer on journalism for citizens who care about democracy by Killenberg, George M.

Since the Founding, America's faith in a democratic republic has depended on citizens who could be trusted to be communicators. Vigorous talk about equality, rights, and collaboration fueled the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution with its amendments. In a republic, the people set the terms for their lives not individually, but in community. The genius of keeping it alive exists in how everyday citizens talk and listen, write and read, for a common good. Dialogue and deliberation--rather than an accumulation of individual preferences--sustains a republic, yet a diminished and scarred institution of journalism jeopardizes citizens' access to shared and truthful information. A disturbing 'what's in it for me?' attitude has taken over many citizens, and a creeping, autocratic sense of dismissive accusation too often characterizes the political style of elected officials. The basic fuel for democracy is the willingness of informed citizens to take each other seriously as they talk about political choices. Once we begin to clam up, build walls, and dismiss each other, we unravel the threads tying us to the Founders' vision of a republic. A free press and free speech become meaningless if not supported by sustained listening to multiple positions. There are those who profit by dividing citizens into two camps: a comfortable 'us' versus a scary 'them.' They make their case with accusations and often with lies. They warp the very meaning of communication, hoping citizens never truly discover each other's humanity. Democracy's News discusses today's problems of public communication in the context of history, law, and interpersonal life. News should not be something to dread, mistrust, or shun. Aided by reliable, factual journalism, citizens can develop a community-based knowledge to cope with social issues great and small. They come to treat neighbors and strangers as more than stereotypes or opponents. They become collaborators with whom to identify and sustain a working republic where news, citizenship, and public discourse merge.
 

Cover ArtSaving the news why the Constitution calls for government action to preserve freedom of speech by Minow, Martha

As traditional for-profit news media in the United States declines in economic viability and sheer numbers of outlets and staff, what does and what should the constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press mean? The book examines the current news ecosystem in the U.S. and chronicles historical developments in government involvement in shaping the industry. It argues that initiatives by the government and by private-sector actors are not only permitted but called for as transformations in technology, economics, and communications jeopardize the production and distribution of and trust in news and the very existence of local news reporting. It presents ten proposals for change to help preserve the free press essential to our democratic society.
 
 
 

Cover ArtCensorship, digital media, and the global crackdown on freedom of expression by Nocella II, Anthony J.

Censorship, Digital Media and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression explores the rising global phenomenon of censorship across various media platforms, in schools, universities, and public spaces. It documents physical assaults, legal restrictions, and the exclusion of critical topics from public discourse. This volume analyzes contemporary censorship methods, emphasizing the anti-democratic implications and the threat to civil society, human rights, and global democracy. It delves into the dangerous consequences of suppressing dialogue, information dissemination, and educational materials, providing insight into the challenges faced by critical media literacy and activists. The book advocates for policy alternatives, including economic restructuring of media, global agreements on freedom of the press, and educational strategies to preserve global freedom of expression.
 
 
 

Cover ArtJournalistic autonomy the genealogy of a concept by Örnebring, Henrik

Winner of the 2023 AEJMC Tankard Book Award and the ICA Journalism Studies Book Award The idea that journalism should be independent is foundational to its contemporary understandings and its role in democracy. But from what, exactly, should journalism be independent? This book traces the genealogy of the idea of journalistic autonomy, from the press freedom debates of the 17th century up to the digital, networked world of the 21st. Using an eclectic and thought-provoking theoretical framework that draws upon Friedrich Nietzsche, feminist philosophy, and theoretical biology, the authors analyze the deeper meanings and uses of the terms independence and autonomy in journalism. This work tackles, in turn, questions of journalism's independence from the state, politics, the market, sources, the workplace, the audience, technology, and algorithms. Using broad historical strokes as well as detailed historical case studies, the authors argue that autonomy can only be meaningful if it has a purpose. Unfortunately, for large parts of journalism's history this purpose has been the maintenance of a societal status quo and the exclusion of large groups of the population from the democratic polity. "Independence," far from being a shining ideal to which all journalists must aspire, has instead often been used to mask the very dependencies that lie at the heart of journalism. The authors posit, however, that by learning the lessons of history and embracing a purpose fit for the needs of the 21st century world, journalism might reclaim its autonomy and redeem its exclusionary uses of independence.
 

Cover ArtBuilding back truth in an age of misinformation by Stebbins, Leslie F.

How can we build back truth online? Here's how. In this book, researcher Leslie F. Stebbins provides solutions for repairing our existing social media platforms and building better ones that prioritize value over profit, strengthen community ties, and promote access to trustworthy information. Stebbins provides a road map with six paths forward to understand how platforms are designed to exploit us, how we can learn to embrace agency in our interactions with digital spaces, how to build tools to reduce harmful practices, how platform companies can prioritize the public good, how we can repair journalism, and how to strengthen curation to promote trusted content and create new, healthier digital public squares. New, experimental models that are ethically designed to build community and promote trustworthy content are having some early successes. We know that human social networks--online and off--magnify whatever they are seeded with. They are not neutral. We also know that to repair our systems we need to repair their design. We are being joined in the fight by some of the best and brightest minds of our current generation as they flee big tech companies in search of vocations that value integrity and public values. The problem of misinformation is not insurmountable. We can fix this.
 

Cover ArtCapturing news, capturing democracy : Trump and the voice of America by Wright, Kate

The Voice of America (VOA) is the oldest and largest US government-funded international media organization. In 2020, Donald Trump nominated Michael Pack, a right-wing documentarian and close friend of Steve Bannon, to lead the US Agency for Global Media - the independent federal agency overseeing US-funded international media. During Pack's seven-month tenure, more than 30 whistleblowers filed complaints against him and a judge ruled that he had infringed journalists' constitutional right to freedom of speech. How did such a major international public service media network become intensely politicized by government allies in such a short time, despite having its editorial independence protected by law? Capturing News, Capturing Democracy puts these events in historical and international context--and develops a new analytical framework for understanding government capture and its connection to broader processes of democratic backsliding. Drawing from in-depth interviews with network managers and journalists, and analysis of private correspondence and internal documents, Kate Wright, Martin Scott, and Mel Bunce analyze how political appointees, White House officials, and right-wing media influenced VOA-- changing its reporting of the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 presidential election. The authors stress that leaving the VOA unprotected leaves it and other public media open to targeting by authoritarian leadership and poses serious risks to US democracy. Further, they offer practical recommendations for how to protect the network and other international public service media better in the future.
 
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This Women’s History Month, learn about female farmers here in Vermont and beyond. In collaboration with Fleming Museum’s Vermont Female Farmers exhibit, UVM Libraries is featuring Women in Agriculture. Explore this book display in order to learn more about the history of women farmers, their stories, and how women are leading innovation in the field of agriculture. Find these titles and more by visiting the display located in the Howe Library lobby. 
 

Vermont Female Farmers
On view February 4 – May 17, 2025, at the Fleming Museum of Art

Passion, labor, and grit abound in this striking portrait series from Vermont-based photographer JuanCarlos González. Whether capturing moments of intense concentration or joyous pride, the 45 works are an intimate look at the daily life and livelihoods of the women whose hands shape farming in Vermont.


 

Cover ArtVermont female farmers by González, JuanCarlos

This project focuses on the meaningful and impactful contributions that female farmers are making to Vermont's culture, identity, and economy yet who may be overlooked compared to their male counterparts. For Vermont Female Farmers, I visited 38 farmers and photographed them at work during their daily life on the farm. I attempt to center their livelihood, labor, and passion. Each is different and has a unique story, working with chickens, goats, cows, produce, saffron, flowers, and much more.
 
 
 

Cover ArtWomen in agriculture : professionalizing rural life in North America and Europe, 1880-1965

Women have always been skilled at feeding their families, and historians have often studied the work of rural women on farms and in their homes. However, the stories of women who worked as agricultural researchers, producers, marketers, educators, and community organizers have not been told until now. Taking readers into the rural hinterlands of the rapidly urbanizing societies of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, the essays in Women in Agriculture tell the stories of a cadre of professional women who acted to bridge the growing rift between those who grew food and those who only consumed it. The contributors to Women in Agriculture examine how rural women's expertise was disseminated and how it was received. Through these essays, readers meet subversively lunching ladies in Ontario and African American home demonstration agents in Arkansas. The rural sociologist Emily Hoag made a place for women at the US Department of Agriculture as well as in agricultural research. Canadian rural reformer Madge Watt, British radio broadcaster Mabel Webb, and US ethnobotanists Mary Warren English and Frances Densmore developed new ways to share and preserve rural women's knowledge. These and the other women profiled here updated and expanded rural women's roles in shaping their communities and the broader society. Their stories broaden and complicate the history of agriculture in North America and Western Europe.
 

Cover ArtWomen who dig : farming, feminism, and the fight to feed the world by Moyles, Trina

Weaving together the narratives of female farmers from across three continents, Women Who Dig offers a critical look at how women are responding to and increasingly rising up against the injustices of the global food system. Beautifully written with spectacular photos, it examines gender roles, access to land, domestic violence, maternal health, political and economic marginalization, and a rapidly changing climate. It also shows the power of collective action. With women from Guatemala, Nicaragua, the United States, Canada, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, and Cuba included, this book explores the ways women are responding, both individually and collectively, to the barriers they face in providing the world a healthy diet.
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtOn behalf of the family farm : Iowa farm women's activism since 1945 by Devine, Jenny Barker

In on behalf of the family farm, Jenny Baker Devine demonstrates that in an era where technology, depopulation and rapid economic change dramatically altered rural life, Midwestern women met those challenges with an activism that reflected their own feminine vision of farm life. Focusing on women in four national farm organizations in Iowa -- the Farm Bureau, the Farmers Union, the National Farmers Organization, and the Porkettes -- Devine highlights specific movements in time when farm women had to reassess their roles and strategies for preserving and improving their way of life.
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtWild mares : my lesbian back-to-the-land life by Hunter, Dianna

Dianna Hunter was a softball-loving, working-class tomboy in North Dakota, surviving the threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Mutually Assured Destruction in the shadow of a strategic air command base. Communists and antiwar hippies were the enemy, but lesbians were a threat, too: they were unhealthy, criminal, and downright insane. It took Dianna a while to figure out that she was one, a little longer to discover how she fit in with her new communities in the city and the countryside. This is her story-a frank account by turns comic and painful of a well-behaved Midwestern girl finding her way through polite denial and repression and running head-on into the eye-opening events of the 1960s and '70s before landing on a dairy farm. A bumpy route takes Dianna to the Twin Cities, then to rural Minnesota and Wisconsin as-by way of the antiwar movement, women's liberation, and a dose of lesbian feminism-she and her friends try to establish a rural utopia free of sexual oppression, violence, materialism, environmental degradation-and men. They dream big, love as they see fit, and make do until they don't. Dianna buys a dairy farm and, with it, a new set of problems thanks to the Reagan-era farm crisis. A firsthand account of the lesbian feminist movement at its inception, Wild Mares is a deeply personal, wryly wise, and always engaging view of identity politics lived and learned in real life and, literally, on the ground, flourishing in the fertile soil of a struggling dairy farm in the American heartland.
 
 

Cover ArtPig years by Gaydos, Ellyn

This captivating memoir is a "startling testimony to the glories and sorrows of raising and harvesting plants and animals" (Anthony Doerr, best-selling author of All the Light We Cannot See), as an itinerant farmhand chronicles the wonders hidden within the ever-blooming seasons of life, death, and rebirth. Pig Years catapults American nature writing into the 21st century, and has been hailed by Lydia Davis and Aimee Nezhukumatathil as "engrossing" and "a marvel." As a farmer in Upstate New York and Vermont, Ellyn Gaydos lives on the knife edge between loss and gain. Her debut memoir draws us into this precarious world, conjuring with stark simplicity the lifeblood of the farm: its livestock and stark full moons, the sharp cold days lives near to the land. Joy and tragedy are frequent bedfellows. Fields go barren and animals meet their end too soon, but then their bodies become food in a time-old human ritual. Seasonal hands are ground down by the hard work, but new relationships are formed, love blossoms and Gaydos yearns to become a mother. As winter's dark descends, Pig Years draws us into a violent and gorgeous world where pigs are star-bright symbols of hope and beauty surfaces in the furrows, the sow, even in the slaughter. In hardy, lyrical prose that recalls the agrarian writing of Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all and to reconsider what we know of survival and what saves us. Pig Years is a rapturous reckoning of love, labor, and loss within a landscape given to flux.
 

Cover ArtEveryday sustainability : gender justice and fair trade tea in Darjeeling by Sen, Debarati

Everyday Sustainability takes readers to ground zero of market-based sustainability initiatives--Darjeeling, India--where Fair Trade ostensibly promises gender justice to minority Nepali women engaged in organic tea production. These women tea farmers and plantation workers have distinct entrepreneurial strategies and everyday practices of social justice that at times dovetail with and at other times rub against the tenets of the emerging global morality market. The author questions why women beneficiaries of transnational justice-making projects remain skeptical about the potential for economic and social empowerment through Fair Trade while simultaneously seeking to use the movement to give voice to their situated demands for mobility, economic advancement, and community level social justice.
 
 
 

Cover ArtTurn here sweet corn : organic farming works by Diffley, Atina

When the hail starts to fall, Atina Diffley doesn't compare it to golf balls. She's a farmer. It's "as big as a B-size potato." As her bombarded land turns white, she and her husband Martin huddle under a blanket and reminisce: the one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds; the eleven-inch rainfall ("that broccoli turned out gorgeous"); the hail disaster of 1977. The romance of farming washed away a long time ago, but the love? Never. In telling her story of working the land, coaxing good food from the fertile soil, Atina Diffley reminds us of an ultimate truth: we live in relationships--with the earth, plants and animals, families and communities. A memoir of making these essential relationships work in the face of challenges as natural as weather and as unnatural as corporate politics, her book is a firsthand history of getting in at the "ground level" of organic farming. One of the first certified organic produce farms in the Midwest, the Diffleys' Gardens of Eagan helped to usher in a new kind of green revolution in the heart of America's farmland, supplying their roadside stand and a growing number of local food co-ops. This is a story of a world transformed--and reclaimed--one square acre at a time. And yet, after surviving punishing storms and the devastating loss of fifth-generation Diffley family land to suburban development, the Diffleys faced the ultimate challenge: the threat of eminent domain for a crude oil pipeline proposed by one of the largest privately owned companies in the world, notorious polluters Koch Industries. As Atina Diffley tells her David-versus-Goliath tale, she gives readers everything from expert instruction in organic farming to an entrepreneur's manual on how to grow a business to a legal thriller about battling corporate arrogance to a love story about a single mother falling for a good, big-hearted man.
 

Cover ArtBeyond the kitchen table : Black women and global food systems

Over the last decade, there has been an increasing amount of scholarship focused on race and food inequity. Much of this research is focused on the United States and its densely populated urban centers. Looking deeply into Black women?s roles?economically, environmentally, and socially?in food and agriculture systems in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States, the contributors address the ways Black women, both now and in the past, have used food as a part of community building and sustenance. They also examine matrilineal food-based education; the importance of Black women?s social, cultural, and familial networks in addressing nutrition and food insecurity; the ways gender intersects with class and race globally when thinking about food; and how women-led science and technology initiatives can be used to create healthier and more just food systems. Contributors include Agnes Atia Apusigah, Neela Badrie, Kenia-Rosa Campo, Dara Cooper, Kelsey Emard, Claudia J. Ford, Hanna Garth, Shelene Gomes, Veronica Gordon, Wendy-Ann Isaac, Lydia Kwoyiga, Gloria Sanders McCutcheon, Eveline M. F. W. Sawadogo/Compaore, Ashanté M. Reese, Sakiko Shiratori, shakara tyler, and Marquitta Webb.

Cover ArtThe rise of women farmers and sustainable agriculture by Sachs, Carolyn E.

A profound shift is occurring among women working in agriculture--they are increasingly seeing themselves as farmers, not only as the wives or daughters of farmers. The authors draw on more than a decade of research to document and analyze the reasons for the transformation. As their sense of identity changes, many female farmers are challenging the sexism they face in their chosen profession. In this book, farm women in the northeastern United States describe how they got into farming and became successful entrepreneurs despite the barriers they encountered in agricultural institutions, farming communities, and even their own families. Their strategies for obtaining land and labor and developing successful businesses offer models for other aspiring farmers. Pulling down the barriers that women face requires organizations and institutions to become informed by what the authors call a feminist agrifood systems theory (FAST). This framework values women's ways of knowing and working in agriculture: emphasizing personal, economic, and environmental sustainability, creating connections through the food system, and developing networks that emphasize collaboration and peer-to-peer education. The creation and growth of a specific organization, the Pennsylvania Women's Agricultural Network, offers a blueprint for others seeking to incorporate a feminist agrifood systems approach into agricultural programming. The theory has the potential to shift how farmers, agricultural professionals, and anyone else interested in farming think about gender and sustainability, as well as to change how feminist scholars and theorists think about agriculture. 
 

Cover ArtThe Midwest farmer's daughter : in search of an American icon by Jack, Zachary Michael

The Midwest Farmer's Daughter presents the untold history and renewed cultural currency of an American icon at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the United States are woman-owned. It ranges widely from Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres to Laura Ingalls Wilder's commentaries for the Missouri Ruralist; from the critical importance of rural girls and young women to organizations such as the Farm Bureau, 4-H, and FFA to the entrepreneurial role today's female agriculturalists and sustainable farm advocates play in farmers' markets, urban farms, and community-supported agriculture.

Cover ArtPutting the barn before the house : women and family farming in early-twentieth-century New York by Osterud, Nancy Grey

Putting the Barn Before the House features the voices and viewpoints of women born before World War I who lived on family farms in south-central New York. As she did in her previous book, Bonds of Community, for an earlier period in history, Grey Osterud explores the flexible and varied ways that families shared labor and highlights the strategies of mutuality that women adopted to ensure they had a say in family decision making. Sharing and exchanging work also linked neighboring households and knit the community together. Indeed, the culture of cooperation that women espoused laid the basis for the formation of cooperatives that enabled these dairy farmers to contest the power of agribusiness and obtain better returns for their labor. Osterud recounts this story through the words of the women and men who lived it and carefully explores their views about gender, labor, and power, which offered an alternative to the ideas that prevailed in American society. Most women saw "putting the barn before the house" - investing capital and labor in productive operations rather than spending money on consumer goods or devoting time to mere housework - as a necessary and rational course for families who were determined to make a living on the land and, if possible, to pass on viable farms to the next generation. Some women preferred working outdoors to what seemed to them the thankless tasks of urban housewives, while others worked off the farm to support the family. Husbands and wives, as well as parents and children, debated what was best and negotiated over how to allocate their limited labor and capital and plan for an uncertain future. Osterud tells the story of an agricultural community in transition amid an industrializing age with care and skill.
 

Cover ArtVermont farm women by Miller, Peter

Photographs and text of farm women'dairy, pigs, sheep, goats, emus, christmas trees, horses, beef cattle, cheese who work the small farm as owners and are passionate about their responsibility to the land, the animals and their community.

Cover ArtQueen of American agriculture : a biography of Virginia Claypool Meredith by Whitford, Fred

Virginia Claypool Meredith's role in directly managing the affairs of a large and prosperous farm in east-central Indiana opened doors that were often closed to women in late nineteenth century America. Her status allowed her to campaign for the education of women, in general, and rural women, in particular. While striving to change society's expectations for women, she also gave voice to the important role of women in the home. A lifetime of dedication made Virginia Meredith "the most remarkable woman in Indiana" and the "Queen of American Agriculture." Meredith was also an integral part of the history of Purdue University. She was the first woman appointed to serve on the university's board of trustees, had a residence hall named in her honor, and worked with her adopted daughter, Mary L. Matthews, in creating the School of Home Economics, the predecessor of today's College of Consumer and Family Sciences.
 
 

Cover ArtMore than a farmer's wife : voices of American farm women, 1910-1960 by Lauters, Amy Mattson

Examining how women were presented in farming and mainstream magazines over fifty years and interviewing more than 180 women who lived on farms, Lauters reveals that, rather than being victims of patriarchy, most farm women were astute businesswomen, working as partners with their husbands and fundamental to the farming industry.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtFruits of victory : the Woman's Land Army of America in the Great War by Weiss, Elaine F.

Imagine a more controversial Rosie the Riveter--a generation older and more outlandish for her time. She was the "farmerette" of the Woman's Land Army of America (WLA), doing a man's job on the home front during World War I. From 1917 to 1920 the WLA sent more than twenty thousand urban women into rural America to take over farm work after the men went off to war and food shortages threatened the nation. These women, from all social and economic strata, lived together in communal camps and did what was considered "men's work": plowing fields, driving tractors, planting, harvesting, and hauling lumber. The Land Army was a civilian enterprise organized and financed by women. It insisted on fair labor practices and pay equal to male laborers' wages for its workers and taught women not only agricultural skills but also leadership and management techniques. Despite their initial skepticism, farmers became the WLA's loudest champions, and the farmerette was celebrated as an icon of American women's patriotism and pluck.The WLA's short but spirited life foreshadowed some of the most significant social issues of the twentieth century: women's changing roles, the problem of class distinctions in a democracy, and the physiological and psychological differences between men and women. The dramatic story of the WLA is vividly retold here using long-buried archival material, allowing a fascinating chapter of America's World War I experience to be rediscovered.
 

Cover ArtWomen and sustainable agriculture : interviews with 14 agents of change by Anderson, Anna

This book looks deeply into the American food system and closely examines the need for change in the way food is grown and distributed in the United States. It is composed of twelve interviews with dynamic women who work on issues surrounding modern agriculture. These women are producers, academicians, advocates and activists. Some work in agricultural law and policy. All are devoted to changing the current system. Within a framework that offers brief overviews of the development of U.S. agriculture, the interviews allow the reader to hear firsthand what has gone wrong and what we can do about it. Part One focuses on concepts of traditional agriculture, organic growing and market viability. Part Two discusses pioneering agriculture and the process of restoring our farms to thriving habitats of biodiversity with clean water and healthy soil. Part Three considers the issues of industrial agriculture, exploring the controversy of genetically modified foods, farm foreclosures and the 2002 Farm Bill. Part Four returns us to sustainable agriculture and how we can make sustainability work for us. It includes discussions of farmers' markets, co-ops and local food systems.
 

Cover ArtLiving off the land : women farmers of today by Russell, Josephine

Based on extensive interviews with twelve varied and representative women farmers in County Kerry, Josephine Russell's text provides a unique insight into farming women of all ages and types: dairy, sheep, and organic, from the four corners and the three peninsulas of Kerry. Some remember the old life of physical work; others are as familiar with the computer as the animals. All the stories are engaging and entertaining.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtWorking the land : the stories of ranch and farm women in the modern American West by Schackel, Sandra

Helen Tiegs didn't take to driving a tractor when she became a farmer's wife, but after fifty years she considers herself the hub of the family operation. Lila Hill taught piano, then ultimately took a job off the farm to augment the family income during a period of rising costs. From Montana's cattle pastures to New Mexico's sagebrush mesas, women on today's ranches and farms have played a crucial role in a way of life that is slowly disappearing from the western landscape. Recalling her own family-farm ties, Sandra Schackel set out to learn how these women's lives have changed over the second half of the twentieth century. In Working the Land, she collects oral histories from more than forty women--in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas--recalling their experiences as ranchers and farmers in a modernizing West. Through this diverse group of women-white and Hispanic, rich and poor, ranging in age from 24 to 83--we gain a new perspective on their ties to the land. Although western ranch and farm women have often been portrayed as secondary figures who devoted themselves to housekeeping in support of their husbands' labors, Schackel's interviews reveal that these women have had a much more active role in defining what we know as the modern American West. As Schackel listened to their stories, she found several currents running through their recollections, such as the satisfaction found in living the rural lifestyle and the flexibility of gender roles. She also learned how resourceful women developed new ways to make their farms work--by including tourism, summer camps, and bed-and-breakfast operations--and how many have become activists for land-based issues. And while some like Lila made the difficult decision to work off the farm, such sacrifices have enabled families to hold onto their beloved land. Rich with memory and insight into what makes America's family farms and ranches tick, Working the Land provides a deeper understanding of the West's development over the last fifty years along with new perspectives on shifting attitudes toward women in the workforce. It is both a long-overdue documentation of the lives of hard-working farm women and a celebration of their contributions to a truly American way of life.

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Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with Howe Library. See our latest Books Spotlight for fiction, nonfiction, English, and Spanish language books featuring Hispanic and Latinx voices. Be sure to visit our display on the first floor of Howe Library for even more books!  


 

Cover ArtWild Tongues Can't Be Tamed by Saraciea J. Fennell (Editor)

In Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed, bestselling and award-winning authors as well as up-and-coming voices interrogate the different myths and stereotypes about the Latinx diaspora. These fifteen original pieces delve into everything from ghost stories and superheroes, to memories in the kitchen and travels around the world, to addiction and grief, to identity and anti-Blackness, to finding love and speaking your truth. Full of both sorrow and joy, Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed is an essential celebration of this rich and diverse community
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtThe Belly of the Whale by Claudia Prado; Rebecca Gayle Howell (Translator)

In this South American epic, poet Claudia Prado imagines her ancestors? nineteenth-century migration from the Basque Country into Argentina and, ultimately, southward into the oceanic desert. At its original publication in 2000, El interior de la ballena received Argentina's National Fund for the Arts prize, helping usher in a poetics of Patagonia. Prado's poetry honors her homeland's wide open desert and its ancient silences, offering a vision that braids intergenerational migrations into a chorus of monologues and intimate voices, all looking for home. Here speaks a woman who, against her will, is taken to that desert; here is revealed the thoughts of an orphan laborer; here, a chicken thief celebrates his sad prize. In El interior de la ballena, Prado uses her page to privilege the often unseen and unheard, composing in silence as much as sound. When read together, the poems quilt a place, time, and lineage through a story of strong women, wounded and wounding men, and a rural and unforgiving landscape from which hardscrabble labor is the origin of survival. El interior de la ballena | The belly of the whale is now rendered into English for the first time by award-winning poet and translator Rebecca Gayle Howell. In this completely bilingual edition, readers of either language can immerse themselves in Prado?s Patagonia, as well as this unique collaboration between Prado and Howell that begs us to ask if language itself is our endless migration.

 
 

Cover ArtThe Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

When celebrated writer Alma Cruz inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, she turns it into a place to bury her untold stories--literally. She creates a graveyard for manuscript drafts and revisions and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace, but they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives.
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

Cover ArtOur Migrant Souls by Héctor Tobar; Héctor Tobar

"Latino" is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino" assembles the Pulitzer Prize winner Héctor Tobar's personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to him by his Latinx students to offer a spirited rebuke to racist ideas about Latino people. Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of "Latino" as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and seeks to give voice to the angst and anger of young Latino people who have seen Latinidad transformed into hateful tropes about "illegals" and have faced insults, harassment, and division based on white insecurities and economic exploitation.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtEn el nombre de Salomé by Alvarez, Julia

En el verano de 1960, Camila Henríquez Ureña está a punto de viajar desde Poughkeepsie a Cuba para unirse a la revolución de Fidel Castro. Como hija de Solomé Ureña, la poeta revolucionaria dominicana del siglo XIX, el activismo es parte de la herencia de Camila. Sin embargo, también conoce la confusión del exilio y una dolorosa curiosidad por la madre que nunca conoció. Ahora, mientras retoma el legado de su madre, profundiza en los hechos públicos de la vida de su madre y reconstruye la historia de la Solomé privada y, por tanto, su propia historia.

translation: It the summer of 1960, Camila Henríquez Urena is about to travel from Poughkeepsie to Cuba to join Fidel Castro's revolution. As the daughter of Solomé Urena-the 19th -century revolutionary Dominicana poet-activism is part of Camila's inheritance. Yet she also knows the confusion of exile and a painful curiosity about the mother she never knew. Now, as she takes up her mother's legacy, she delves behind the public facts of her mother's life and pieces together the story of the private Solomé-and thus her own story.
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtLatinx belonging : community building and resilience in the United States by Deeb-Sossa, Natalia (Editor); Mendez, Jennifer Bickham (Editor)

What does it mean to be Latinx? This pressing question forms the core of Latinx Belonging, which brings together cutting-edge research to discuss the multilayered ways this might be answered. Latinx Belonging is anchored in the claim that Latinx people are not defined by their marginalization but should instead be understood as active participants in their communities and contributors to U.S. society. The volume's overarching analytical approach recognizes the differences, identities, and divisions among people of Latin American origin in the United States, while also attending to the power of mainstream institutions to shape their lives and identities. Contributors to this volume view "belonging" as actively produced through struggle, survival, agency, resilience, and engagement. This work positions Latinxs' struggles for recognition and inclusion as squarely located within intersecting power structures of gender, race, sexuality, and class and as shaped by state-level and transnational forces such as U.S. immigration policies and histories of colonialism. From the case of Latinxs' struggles for recognition in the arts, to queer Latinx community resilience during COVID-19 and in the wake of mass shootings, to Indigenous youth's endurance and survival as unaccompanied minors in Los Angeles, the case studies featured in this collection present a rich and textured picture of the diversity of the U.S. Latinx experience in the twenty-first century.

 
 

Cover ArtAlma and how she got her name by Martinez-Neal, Juana

When Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela asks her father why she has so many names, she hears the story of her name and learns about her grandparents.
 

Cover ArtDominicana by Cruz, Angie

Fifteen-year-old Ana Canción never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she must say yes. It doesn't matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year's Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, Ana hatches a reckless plan to escape. But at the bus terminal, she is stopped by César, Juan's free-spirited younger brother, who convinces her to stay. As the Dominican Republic slides into political turmoil, Juan returns to protect his family's assets, leaving César to take care of Ana. Suddenly, Ana is free to take English lessons at a local church, lie on the beach at Coney Island, dance with César at the Audubon Ballroom, and imagine the possibility of a different kind of life in America. When Juan returns, Ana must decide once again between her heart and her duty to her family. In bright, musical prose that reflects the energy of New York City, Dominicana is a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world.

 
 
 

Cover ArtThe five wounds : a novel by Quade, Kirstin Valdez

It's Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans. Their reunion sets her own life down a startling path. Vivid, tender, darkly funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby's first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo's mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel's mother, whom Angel isn't speaking to; and disapproving Tío Tíve, keeper of the family's history. In the absorbing, realist tradition of Elizabeth Strout and Jonathan Franzen, Kirstin Valdez Quade conjures characters that will linger long after the final page, bringing to life their struggles to parent children they may not be equipped to save.

 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtChicano-Chicana Americana : pop culture pluralism starring Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, Robert Beltran, and Lupe Ontiveros by Macias, Anthony F.

ISBN: 9780816547234
Chicano-Chicana Americana is a cultural history of Mexican Americans in film, television, and theater. Each chapter presents an in-depth case study analyzing the lives and creative careers of four underappreciated actors--Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, Robert Beltran, and Lupe Ontiveros-to answer the question: How do racially and socio-economically marginalized Latino-Latina subjects contribute to U.S. culture, beyond the black-white binary? Drawing on methods borrowed from cultural studies, Macías argues that these performers, neither assimilationists nor nationalists, expressed a dynamic, complex ethnic identity, created an alternative strategy for how Latinos and Latinas are seen in popular culture, and carved out a space for imagining a polycultural America. These artists altered cinematic representations and audience expectations of ethnic Mexicans by challenging, undermining, and surpassing stereotypes. By documenting their presence in motion picture studio-era movies, and public, network, and cable TV, Chicano-Chicana Americana demonstrates how Chicanas and Chicanos made their mark on Americana.

 

 

Cover ArtSí, se puede : the Latino heroes who changed the United States by Anta, Julio

ISBN: 9781984860910
From community activism to the halls of government, pop-culture, arts, and beyond, Latinos have shaped every aspect of American life. Nevertheless, these significant figures and their contributions are often left out of our textbooks. Sí, Se Puede, named after the "Yes, We Can" motto of the United Farm Workers, brings Latino history in the U.S. to the forefront. The book follows a group of Hispanic-Americans as they embark on an interactive museum tour to meet Latino heroes they may not have learned about in school. The high tech, immersive exhibit allows the tour group to virtually travel through time, visiting the Hispanic Union soldiers of the Civil War; marching with César Chávez and Dolores Huerta in the farmworkers struggle; going to space with Ellen Ochoa, the first Latina to leave Earth's atmosphere; meeting the youngest woman to ever serve in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and more. This ensemble of unlikely friends discover the rich history of Latinos in the United States, and gain new insights into their own American experiences.
 


 
 

Cover ArtIllustrating Spain in the US by Merino, Ana (Editor); Gonzalez-Cutre, Marta (Translator)

ISBN: 9781683965084
A combination of comics and essays sheds light on the rich but often overlooked contributions of Spanish immigrants to the political, cultural, and scientific history of the US.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtIsla to island by Castellanos, Alexis

A wordless graphic novel in which twelve-year-old Marisol must adapt to a new life [in] 1960s Brooklyn after her parents send her to the United States from Cuba to keep her safe during Castro's regime.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtFrizzy by Ortega, Claribel A.; Bousamra, Rose (Illustrator)

Marlene loves three things: art, her cool tía Ruby and hanging out with her best friend, Camilla. But according to her mother, Paola, the only things she needs to focus on are school and growing up. That means straightening her hair every weekend so she can have "presentable," "good" hair. But Marlene hates being in the salon and doesn't understand why her curls are not considered pretty by those around her. With a few hiccups, a dash of embarrassment, and the much-needed help of Camila and Tía Ruby -- she slowly starts a journey to learn to appreciate and proudly wear her curly hair.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtDesolación by Mistral, Gabriela

Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1945. Mistral has fascinated scholars, writers, and artists, who have tried to piece together the variegated layers of her persona and her "emotionally outspoken verses," as Langston Hughes described them. Sundial House's centenary edition commemorates Mistral's debut anthology, Desolación (1922), edited by Federico de Onís at Columbia University. This bilingual edition, featuring 37 poems translated by Langston Hughes, breathes new life into the Mistral's first anthology and makes available in English an intimate portrait of an ardent observer of life. Desolación is an evocative collection of poems and haunting poetic prose that explore desire, grief, motherhood, childhood, nature, and spirituality with radical sensibility.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtEl viento conoce mi nombre by Allende, Isabel

Traza el efecto dominó de la guerra y la inmigración en dos niños: Samuel, de cinco años, cuya madre lo mete en un tren Kindertransport desde la Austria ocupada por los nazis a Inglaterra en 1938, y Anita, de siete años, que aborda otro tren ocho décadas más tarde a los EE.UU., donde se separa de su madre.

translation: Traces the ripple effects of war and immigration on two children--five-year-old Samuel, whose mother puts him on a Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to England in 1938, and seven-year-old Anita, who boards another train eight decades later to the U.S., where she is separated from her mother.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtEn agosto nos vemos by García Márquez, Gabriel

Cada mes de agosto Ana Magdalena Bach toma el transbordador hasta la isla donde está enterrada su madre para visitar la tumba en la que yace. Esas visitas acaban suponiendo una irresistible invitación a convertirse en una persona distinta durante una noche al año. Escrita en el inconfundible y fascinante estilo de García Márquez, En agosto nos vemos es un canto a la vida, a la resistencia del goce pese al paso del tiempo y al deseo femenino. Un regalo inesperado de uno de los escritores más queridos de nuestra lengua.

translation: The extraordinary rediscovered novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover. Across sultry Caribbean evenings full of salsa and boleros, lotharios and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire and the fear hidden in her heart. Constantly surprising, joyously sensual, Until August is a profound meditation on freedom, regret, self-transformation, and the mysteries of love--an unexpected gift from one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.
 
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